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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2016-03-08Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 A meeting of the Meridian City Council was called to order at 3:01 p.m., Tuesday, March 8, 2016, by Council President Keith Bird. Members Present: Keith Bird, Joe Borton, Genesis Milam , Luke Cavener, Ty Palmer and Anne Little-Roberts. Absent: Mayor Tammy de Weerd. Others Present: Bill Nary, Jaycee Holman, Caleb Hood, Warren Stewart, Kyle Radek, Jamie Leslie, Perry Palmer, Brian McClure and Dean Willis. Item 1: Roll-call Attendance: Roll call. X Anne Little Roberts X_ Joe Borton X__ Ty Palmer X_ Keith Bird __X__ Genesis Milam __X__ Lucas Cavener __ Mayor Tammy de Weerd Bird: Welcome everybody. I will call this City Council workshop to order. It's 3:01. And roll call attendance, Madam Clerk. Item 2: Pledge of Allegiance Bird: Thank you. Now, if everybody would rise we will pledge allegiance. (Pledge of Allegiance recited.) Item 3: Adoption of the Agenda Bird: Okay. Next order of business is the agenda. Option of the agenda. Borton: Mr. President? Bird: Mr. Borton. Borton: On Item 4-M the resolution number is 16-1123. Item 4-N is resolution 16-1124. The ordinance on Item 8-A is Ordinance No. 16-1674. And the Executive Session on Item 10 is 74 -- Idaho Code Section 74-206(1)(f). And with that I would move to adopt the agenda as published. Milam: Second. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 2 of 55 Bird: We have got a motion and a second to adopt the agenda as published. All in favor say aye. Any opposed? Ayes have it. MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES. Item 4: Consent Agenda A. Approve Minutes of February 9, 2016 City Council Workshop Meeting B. Approve Minutes of February 9, 2016 City Council MDC Joint Meeting C. Approve Minutes of February 16, 2016 City Council PreCouncil Meeting D. Approve Minutes of February 16, 2016 City Council Meeting E. Approve Minutes of February 23, 2016 City Council Meeting F. Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law for Edgehill Subdivision by JUB Engineers, Inc. (H-2015-0005) Located at 1393 & 1405 W. Victory Road Request: Annexation and Zoning of 40.19 Acres of Land with an R-4 Zoning District AND Preliminary Plat Approval Consisting of 116 Building Lots and 7 Common Lots on 40.19 Acres of Land in an R-4 Zoning District G. Final Order for Centrepoint Subdivision No. 2 (H-2016-0011) by Jonathan Seel Located West Side of N. Eagle Road, Approximately 1/4 Mile North of E. Ustick Road. Request: Approval for a Two (2) Year Time Extension to Obtain the City Engineer's Signature on the Final Plat H. Final Order for Southridge No. 2 (H-2016-007) by Corey Barton Homes, Inc. Located South of W. Overland Road on the West Side of S. Linder Road Request: Final Plat Approval Consisting of Forty-Eight (48) Single Family Residential Lots and Fourteen (14) Common Lots on 15.01 Acres of Land in the R-8 and R-4 Zoning Districts I. Final Order for Sundial Circle Subdivision (H-2016-0003) by Red Oak Development, LLC Located 2250 W. Whitelaw Drive Request: Final Plat Approval Consisting of Eleven (11) Single Family Residential Lots and One (1) Common Lot on Approximately 2.54 Acres in the R-4 Zoning District Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 3 of 55 J. Development Agreement for Creason Creek (AZ 15-009) with CS2, LLC Located Near Southeast Corner of N. Linder Road and W. Ustick Road Request: Annexation and Zoning of 16.08 Acre of Land from the RUT Zoning District to the R-8 Zoning District K. Agreement For Use Of Kleiner Park For Special Event - Capital Community Egg Hunt on March 26, 2016 L. Purchase Order approval for the purchase of a Jacobsen R311T Wide Area Mower from RMT Equipment and Authorization for the Purchasing Manager to Sign the Purchase Order for the Not -to- Exceed amount of $54,939.00. M. Resolution No. 16-1123: A Resolution Ratifying an Emergency Expenditure Necessary to Perform Road Repair Work to Safeguard Life, Health and Property Following a Sewer Rupture; Authorizing the Expenditure of Public Money to Safeguard Life, Health and Property; and Providing an Effective Date. N. Resolution No. 16-1124: A Resolution of the Mayor and City Council of the City of Meridian Authorizing the City Clerk to Destroy Certain Semi-Permanent and Transitory Records of the Finance Department; and Providing an Effective Date. Bird: Consent Agenda. Item No. 4. Borton: Mr. President? Bird; Mr. Borton. Borton; I would move that we approve the Consent Agenda -- items listed on Item 4, noting the two resolution numbers added to 4 -M and 4-N and for the President to sign and the Clerk the attest. Milam: Second. Bird: We have got a motion and a second to accept agenda -- the Consent Agenda as published. Madam Clerk. Roll Call: Bird, yea; Borton, yea; Milam, yea; Cavener, yea; Palmer, yea; Little Roberts, yea. MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES. Item 5: Community Items/Presentations Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 4 of 55 A. Audit Presentation Bird: Okay. Community Items and Presentations. A is the audit presentation. Mr. Todd Lavoie, would you like to start that off? Lavoie: Mr. President, Council Members, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to present to you the fiscal year 2015 City of Meridian audit report. Today we have Kevin Smith, the audit partner for our audit firm Eide Bailly. They conduct our annual audit for us and he will present to you the report to you and the findings -- or not the findings. Sorry. The result. Sorry. Before we get t o Kevin I get the honor of giving many things to the accounting staff behind us. Again, without them led by Rita Cunningham, our controller, who does the audit. She re presents our audit lead for the team. She conducts the audit for us. She orchestrates the needs. She leads us. She tells us what to do. And year over year we have had a clean audit and, again, many thanks to her for leading us in the right direction and, again, all the time that the audit -- the accounting staff has put together to get to where we need to be and get all the department staff, they work with the City of Meridian Finance Department, accounting department, to get the documents where they need to be. So, without everybody we could not get a clean audit, which is a great thing. So, again, I just wanted to give thanks to you guys and thanks to the staff and special thanks to the accounting team for all the time and efforts and the headaches that they go through on an annual basis, but with that I'm proud to say the City of Meridian has a clean audit again and with that I will introduce Kevin Smith, th e audit partner, for Eide Bailly and he will present the audit report to you. Bird: Thank you, Todd. Smith: Thank you, Members of the Council. Bird: Would you state your name, please. Smith: Kevin Smith. Audit partner with Eide Bailly. Bird: Thank you. Smith: It's a pleasure to be here again this year to give you the audit results of September 30th, 2015, and I concur with the comments that Todd has just made regarding the staff and working with them. Very well prepared and we appreciate that. First of all, as Todd stated, we did have a clean opinion -- issued an unmodified or a clean opinion this year and also issued a report related to the internal controls and if we had any comments or findings they would be included in that -- in that report and in that letter and we did not have any -- any management comments. A couple of items that I'd like to point out that are a little bit different this year than have been in the past -- past year. There was a new pronouncement this year that had an effect on your financial statement and it's referred to as the GASB No. 68 and it is the -- entails the bringing on the pension liabilities from PERSI and -- and that's not just the City of Meridian, that's every governmental entity across the United States that had to implement that. Some states were in better shape Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 5 of 55 than others and some have a liability, some have an asset, just depending on which state you reside in and some liabilities are much larger than others and so their liability is, of course, the unfunded portion of the state PERSI plan and you -- in your case you had -- you brought on a liability of approximately 12 million dollars and that goes forward . And keep in mind as that becomes funded from a state level you're not going to be required to pay that 12 million dollars, it's just a ruling amount that -- that will -- in the end will basically zero out. But it does have an effect on your financial statements and we did what's called a prior period of adjustment to bring that on, so it affected the beginning net asset -- beginning net position, your fund balance and, then, we will roll it forward that way and it added about three pages of disclosure to your financial statements and keep in mind those -- those amounts that are reported are provided by an actuary and we rely on them to, you know, provide those -- those amounts that occur -- that are in your financial statement and the disclosure for those amounts. Another item was bringing on the -- the Meridian Heights and that also required a prior period adjustment to bring those assets on at about three million dollars of assets that were brought on to your -- to your books and you will also see that reflected in the back of the financial statement. Another item of significance that you did not require -- you were not required to have a single audit this year, which, you know, is the compliance with your federal money. You did not meet that threshold, the 500,000 dollars in one given year and, then, the good news is next year that the requirement -- that threshold increased to 750,000. So, depending on the projects and the amount of federal funds that you receive, you may not meet that again, but we will, obviously, be in contact with -- with Rita and those involved in the federal funds to monitor that during the year to see if you will meet that requirement again. Something that's coming -- a new pronouncement that's coming our way is referred to as GASB-72 and that's fair value pronouncement and we will get you more information and I know Rita is going to attend a webinar that's coming up this month related to that and how that will affect your financial statement most specifically related to your investments and fair value -- market and fair value of those investments. A couple of other items. You know, as I looked -- we looked at the budget and, obviously, you know, you were under budget, which is always good. That means that, you know, the fiscal responsibility that you have to monitor that budget to -- first of all, to adopt that budget and, then, monitor that budget as the year goes and make some adjustments in that a nd, you know, in both the revenues and expenses, you know, you have -- you're under budget in both those areas, so I commend you for that -- that fiscal responsibility that you take. There are some, you know, projects that occurred this past year and I know there is some projects that are planned and part of that is the reason of having a fund balance where you have the, you know, ability to have some of those projects -- especially in your Enterprise Fund of the water and sewer and those will continue as you have to upgrade those -- those systems as the community continues to grow and this past year there was about 15 and a half million dollars spent on, you know, some of the upgrades and some of those systems. I know there is about that much planned again this coming year. And, then, even in the General Fund there was -- there was about five million dollars spent in capital improvements of, you know, different areas and so that's, you know, spending some of that money that you have reserved and put away. Your fund balance -- you are in a great position. Right now you have nonspendable of about 800,000 dollars, which that is, you know, some of the prepaid expenses that you have already spent and not available to Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 6 of 55 you. Restricted is about 16 million dolla rs and, then, assigned approximately three million dollars and, then, unassigned you have about 19 million dollars. However, that 19 million dollars -- the ten million has been set aside as a safe harbor, you know, by resolution, you know, from Council to have about ten million dollar safe harbor balance. So, that leaves about nine million dollars available to be spent and with that do you have any questions or comments? I will, again, you know, echo the things that Todd commented on. You know, management has always been very, very prepared and they work with us closely during the year, if there is things that come up. We did receive, you know, questions and comments from Rita early on in the year regarding GASB 68 and I will -- would like to note also of all the governmental entities that we audit, there has only been two that has fully implemented GASB 68 and the City of Meridian is one of those. The rest them they have relied on us to implement those and get the proper disclosure and the City of Meridian accounting department is one that implemented it fully and they are responsible for the entire financial statement. They -- they write the entire thing, including, obviously, the MDNA, but also the footnote disclosure and those new pronouncements and the prior period adjustments that we just talked about. So, that's rare and unusual, but we appreciate it when they can do that. So, that gives you an idea that -- you know, the type of, you know, accounting department that you're working with. Any questions? Bird: Any questions for Kevin? Well, Kevin, it's been 18 years I think that you have been down here and got us lined out and that first year was -- we hadn't had an audit for four or five years had we, Rita? And you guys come in and did a great job as usual and I know we got a first class department down there and that helps you , but you also laid it out in the early years so we knew what to do and we appreciate it. Thank you very much. Smith: Thank you. B. Historic Preservation Commission Annual Update Bird: Okay. The Historic Preservation Commission annual update. Mr. Johnston, you and Hillary. Johnston: My name is Blaine Johnston, I'm president of the Meridian Historic Preservation Commission. I'd like to thank the Council for this opportunity to summarize what HPC has done this past year. In May of 2015 Lila Hill graciously presented Settlers Make The Desert Bloom to a crowd of 24 participants for preservation month. This presentation was recorded and can be used again in the future. Jacy Jones also made a voice-over movie of this presentation that uses the full PowerPoint slides as a primary visual base. At the same event we launched the second phase of the walking tour to promote Historic Preservation Month. The Historic Preservation Commission was honored with an Orchid award from Preservation Idaho regards to completion of this project. Jacy Jones, Deputy City Clerk, put in countless hours to make the walking tour a success. We estimate that in the last year well over 900 tour brochures had been used by members of our community. We expect this number to increase since the May 2015 launch of phase two of the walking tour. Nick Faris in IT ran some analytics for our history webpage hosted by the city's website and informed us that over the last year our history Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 7 of 55 pages have had nearly 4,000 page views total and that almost 3,000 of those were unique page views. Jacy Jones worked diligently with ACHD, property owners, and Trademark Signs to get the historic markers installed in front of properties listed on the walking tour. Third graders from West Ada learned about Meridian's history through a field trip that includes a portion of the walking tour and a tour through Meridian City Hall. Support from Barbara Hatch has reduced the number of city staff who guide these by recruiting volunteers who can help lead the school groups. After being insp ired by volunteer tour guides, Gary and Darlene Stites, pictured here. The Commission has agreed to buy some props to support other guides and inspire the kids to learn about history. Jacy Jones serves as the city coordinator for the third grade tours, working with the West Ada, Friends of Pinetree school, tour schools, Cascade Transportation and city staff to help out the tour dates and times to insure seamless tours for the kids in our community. Ms. Jones has collected some statistics from the 2014-2015 school year. These numbers include tours offered to 15 schools, 55 classes, 340 current volunteers and over 1,200 students. W e have seen that many of these students who get to participate in the field trip love the opportunity to engage and often invite their parents back to Meridian's downtown core to show them what they have learned. In June the commission lost a beloved commissioner and community member, Dr. Thomas Hammond. Dr. Tom's passing had a major impact throughout Meridian as a whole. Rich Nesbitt discontinued his service on the commission and HPC has welcomed aboard three new commissioners by the end of 2015. Dawn Cronk was brought in in April. Robert Mortensen came aboard in September. And Josh Evarts joined in October. Each of these commissioners bring exceptional strength to the HPC with their varied occupations and background and history research. HPC is enjoying momentum in conversations that come with the addition of these new commissioners. HPC commissioners helped unveil a time capsule during the park and rec's Fourth of July event. Lila Hill reported that the time capsule was constructed by Doug Rutan and his father. The public enjoyed having a chance to view the contents of the time capsule and the commissioners enjoyed taking part in this public event. Reports were that children thought -- thought what Meridian would look like in 2015. There were newspaper articles, artifacts. One person stated that there would even be a McDonald's in Meridian. There was a centennial issue of the Statesman, yearbook, and a hard copy of Lila Hill and Glenn Davidson's book They Came To Build A Community. Commissioner Rich Nesbitt and Bill Nary worked together to create a course for continuing education units for Meridian's teachers. These credits are available through Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa. Curriculum includes Meridian's early history, irrigation history, volunteerism, guided tours, and teacher collaboration. The course highlights the settlers who moved to the area in response to the Homestead Act of 1862 and discussed Meridian's history as a farming and dairy community. Mr. Nary worked closely with NAU and the course teachers to establish the curriculum. Both Mr. Nesbitt and Mr. Nary were able to work to secure multiple field trip tours for the course attendees and together with Jacy Jones the group set up a number of additional volunteers to come in and speak about the class on Meridian's history. Thanks to those who put in time to help develop the course. Lila Hill. Bruce Chatterton. Ken Corder. Hans Bruijn. Rob McCarvel. Dan Basalone. Josh Zamzow. Linda Eggers. And Clint Jackson. And special thanks to our instructors Amy Birch and Linda Belthoff. About seven teachers participated in the course, which was less than expected. The Historic Preservation Commission Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 8 of 55 received great feedback from both the attendees and guest speakers and tour guides. The improvements that HPC discussed as options that the course could be held at a more conducive time for the teachers, with a little more closely -- with pushing the course as an option for educators in the West Ada School District with curriculum officials and we could advertise the course for a longer time period. This year instead of attending the National Conference for Historic Preservation Path Forward in Washington DC., HPC decided their needs could be to met by sending a commissioner to the Idaho Heritage Conference in Moscow, Idaho. The decision not only saved the commission money, over 1,500 dollars, but it also led to wonderful opportunities for HPC to connect and network with local agencies. Two city staff Hillary Bodner and Bill Nary also attended this conference and three as a group were able to cover many of the sessions that overlapped time frames and take part in various tours and activities offered. The attending representative saw a powerful opportunity and need for HPC to hold a workshop session to insure that the commissioners are familiar with our current historic preservation plan and make sure that the initiatives that they set are within -- that they set within the next few years are in line with the city's vision. This workshop took place in early December. One key result of this special HPC meeting is the creation of a public workshop that will be hosted by the HPC commission. First installment of this workshop will be hosted Josh Evarts on April 12th. The workshop, A Valued Model of Historic Preservation in Meridian, will take place here in Meridian City Hall and attendees will be advised to continue their conversations about the preservation in Meridian by walking to the Heritage Work and the Vault, Josh's recently renovated building on Idaho Avenue. I'd like to thank you for your continued support. I'd like to thank Ms. Bodner and Mr. Nary and Ms. Jones for all the help that they have given us and I'm happy to answer any questions. Bird: Any questions for Mr. Johnston? Thank you, Blaine, very much for all your service and pass it on to all your people. Johnston: I will do that. Bird: We appreciate what you do. Cavener: You're doing a great job. Johnston: Thank you very much. C. Parks and Recreation Commission Annual Update Bird: You're doing a great job. Appreciate that. Thank you very much. Okay. Parks and Recreation Commission annual report. Mr. Steele. Steele: Good afternoon. Creg Steele. Meridian Parks and Rec Commission president. Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen of the Council, it is my pleasure and honor to present our achievements for this last year. It was quite a busy year. We started out with trying to get a new parks and rec comprehensive plan and that is done and you guys have been, you know, briefed and you were shown the new plans and all of that. I'm not going to Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 9 of 55 spend a lot of time on that. The other thing that went along kind of with that is we have a couple of large sites that we are looking at site plans and developing, you know, those in the future. One of the other great things that happened this last year was the dog park opening last August and we have multiple little events and stuff there and it's just been a great amenity to our park system, you know, and, again, one of the things that Meridian should be proud of is that it's always first rate top class parks that we have here and that's something to be proud of . The other one of the large things that we as a c ommission concentrate on are our pathways and getting a pathway system to connect through the city and be another great amenity for the city and in doing so we have concentrated on the Bud Porter as being that spine in giving us that access and hopefully by the end of this year we will have the construction either set up or done to where using sidewalks and pathways you can get from Heroes Park all the way to the fire station on Eagle Road and that, in itself, is awesome and a previous section of that would be pathway using the Bud Porter -- the pathway in front of Bridge Tower clear over using James Court to the Hastings and across the street there at the light. So, we have a light crossing, which also was very helpful in getting across Fairview with all of its traffic. One of the other things that as a commission we have tried to do with the pathways is reach out to other cities around us, because, as you know, Meridian sits in the middle and the pathway system also isn't as good as if you get to the end of the city and it stops. So, we have really tried to reach out and communicate and work with the other cities, so that if you're going from Meridian to Nampa or Boise or Eagle that the pathway continues on and so it becomes even -- just a lot better system and in doing that we have had other councils -- or not -- other commissions and parks directors in and presented to us on their plans and where their pathways are going, so that, again, we can match those up and make sure that it's a great system all the way around. Another thing that we have done this past year is tried to enhance our tools that we have to reach out to the community through Z cards, the maps for system. The other thing is, of course, social media and the internet and websites here with the city. Along with that, you know, we as a commission, we like to be out and involved, so as a commission we have tried to step up and make sure that throughout the year all of the different events and stuff, that we have one or two commissioners at least at all of these events. So, that's been a very good thing. You know, some of the other things, too, that with this year as you can see we have gone through the Comprehensive Plan and things are changing. We have got some parks -- some very nice parks, both neighborhood parks and commu nity parks, that are on the horizon. So, we as a commission have changed up what we are doing and how we are doing it. We have -- in your packets you had a list of all of our goals and those things. Well, we have changed our sub committee structure to adjust for that. So, instead of having the liaison parks amenity -- amenities and signage and pathway group and, then, the special events, we have changed that up to have pathways and its own sub committee. The amenities as it's own. And, then, the other group resident liaison, they just kind of call themselves the marketing group, to just get the word out and help where ever they can. So, those are all really good changes in the future and I'm sure this -- over this next year as we bring these other parks on and we talk about those, that that will become more and more of an effort for them to stay on top of it and keep going and that's kind it for me. If you don't have any -- if you have any questions I would be more than happy to answer them. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 10 of 55 Bird: Thank you, Creg. Steele: All right. Bird: Thank you and all of your people. We appreciate all the hard work you do. We do. We seriously do. Milam: Mr. President? Bird: Mrs. Milam. Milam: I actually do have a question for you, Creg. You guys are doing a great job. I love our parks. Steele: Thank you. Milam: I recently have had a concerned citizen regarding dogs off leashes in -- not in the dog park, other parks, and I was wondering if there is anything that you can do to increase the awareness of dogs that are supposed to be on leashes or is there any way to enforce any kind of penalty on those who choose not to follow the rules? Steele: Well, you know, we just went through a couple years ago and re did all of our rules and, you know, city code and stuff for the parks and , you know, there are some things in there that law enforcement has some tools that they have. On the other side of that, it was such a -- having the dog park not be available was one of those things where we -- we actually set up some off-hour, off-leash times in some of the other parks to kind of give it some relief and, hopefully, as we move forward having the dog park available, if we don't do that, they will -- they will figure out that, okay, that's no longer ha ppening and I think some education, if we can find a way to get the word out, saying, you know, we do have a dog park and please -- you know, if you want your dog off leash, please, go to the dog park. It's a great dog park. And so, hopefully some of that stuff can just -- just get the word out. Milam: Thank you. Borton: Mr. President? Bird: Mr. Borton. Borton: Creg, just a public thank you to you and the commission. The parks master plan that was adopted, the update is phenomenal. A lot of work went into it and your commission played a huge role in making that happen and that's not easy. There was a lot of meetings. You highlighted briefly in your report that it truly was a huge endeavor. The commission did a lot of work in making that a success. So, thank you and to all of them. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 11 of 55 Steele: Thank you. Bird: Thank you, Creg, very much. Steele: All right. Thank you. D. Solid Waste Advisory Commission Annual Update E. Solid Waste Advisory Commission FY15 Residential Recycling Program Conditions Report Bird: Okay. Mr. Cory. The Solid Waste Advisory Commission annual update. And with Council's permission we will just go on into Item E also, the recycling program, while he's up here. Cory: My name is Steve Cory. I'm the chairman of the Solid Waste Advisory Commission. Mr. President, Members of the Council, thank you for this opportunity for me to be able to update you on our activities this last year. I want to recognize that there are a number of our -- our members that have joined me this afternoon. Cheryl Caldwell. Nancy Mann, Andrea Pogue and Previously Karie Glenn, are all here. I also have representatives from Republic Services and from Western Recycling should questions come up and that we need to look into . First item I would like to go ahead and highlight is throughout the years SWAC was fully staffed with five citizen commissioners and one youth commissioner and three staff commissioners and our two ex-officio members. There was some turnover. One of our commissioners, Jeff Townsend, decided not to seek reappointment. Our youth commissioner graduated and one of our staff commissioner left for a position with the state. You were -- you filled all those positions almost immediately and we had new members that came in almost seamlessly. Newly appointed Commissioners Walters and Pepin came in immediately and were very active and energetic in the activities and Commissioners Caldwell and Cory were reappointed and have been very active. The next item I want to highlight is our community recycling fund program. We began this last year with a balance in that program of one thousand -- a little over 1,150 dollars. We went ahead and had one project, which we reviewed and recommended to you and you approved to put a bench into the bark park and throughout the year there was no in flow to that fund, because of recycling revenues, something I will cover in the next item on the -- the city's agenda. As a result of that at the end of the year the fund balance was $178.84. The next item in the report is a major activity that we had last year of the sub committee that looked into the -- the community recycling fund program and so I'm going to cover that in the next item separately, because of the extent of its findings. Next, this last year the county started a solid waste advisory committee and in its formation they chose me to be their chairman and we have been able to develop a inter-relationship between municipalities here in the county to go ahead and work with the county on operation of the landfill and to discuss issues -- these same issues that we are going to be talking about here and how they are playing out in the other communities. So, there has been quite an interrelationship developing and quite bit of cooperation. I want to go ahead and review the annual rate adjustment. This last year SWAC reviewed Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 12 of 55 and recommended to City Council approval of the -- of Republic's proposed FY-16 annual rate adjustment report. Rate adjustment for both commercial and residential services included contractual CTI adjustments and adjustments due to change in law for fuel tax increase. We also had to recommend residential rates being impacted by shifting the funding of residential -- well, shifting the expenditures for the household hazardous waste program from being in the recycling revenues over to ratepayers because of a lack of funds in recycling. Over the course of the year we had a number of service improvements and items that were brought before our commission. Collection routes were reviewed and staff Commissioner Pogue and representatives from Republic Services and the Mayor's office successfully resolved issues at Harvest Church. SWAC had a number of citizens -- well, had citizens speak to the body regarding some suggestions for improving customer service and we were able to avail the use of services of Commissioners Mangerich, Pogue and Glenn to work with the citizens to improve the residential curb side recycling services chart, which has been by the customer service representatives at Republic to be able to answer when people call in to ask about what services are available. We have worked with code enforcement to address you haul complaints. We have developed a rate comparison chart with the other municipalities, so that, again, when questions are brought before -- to Republic Services for services that a person that's receiving that call can actually address how there is a difference in the services that we have contracted with Republic for versus what Boise or some other city has contracted for. And we have addressed a number of container standards and miscellaneous issues throughout the year, including early morning noise related to collection services, service and rate concerns and related issues with the annexing of the Kentucky Ridge and Meridian Heights Subdivisions and addressing various inquiries from people who were interested in you hauling. Throughout the year there were numerous presentations to the commission. They are listed -- itemized in the report. I'm not going to highlight those here. I do want to go ahead and go through the upcoming commission business, in case there is any of these items that you would like advise us on in an advanced way. We will be concluding the review of the -- well, we have concluded review of the residential recycling program and we will present the report in the next item on this agenda. We will be implementing program improvements related to the city's residential recycling program based on consideration of this -- of these -- of this presentation. We'd like to go ahead and enter into a forward looking process -- a five year strategic plan for solid waste management to kind of look at the problems that we see coming up and try to be able to get on top of them before they occur here. We will -- we actually have reviewed the solid waste ordinance in relationship to penalties this last meeting and found that it was appropriate the way it stood. We will continue monitoring glass recycling and composting. Both of those are -- well, the glass recycling is a voluntary effort and the program hasn't developed enough for us to be able to recommend anything at this point, but yard composting is a subscription service at this time. We will continue to participate in the solid waste advisory committee for the county. We will be attending quarterly Ada County hazardous waste program meetings. We will provide training for -- with Republic Services and staff commissioners to assist code enforcement officers on solid waste ordinance issues and we still look for every opportunity to expand our participation by our youth commissioner. So, in conclusion, this has been a productive year for SWAC and we continue to gain experience and appreciate -- appreciation of the many challenges facing Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 13 of 55 solid waste and recycling initiatives industry. Are commitment to steadfast -- our commitment is steadfast to the many challenges facing the solid waste and recycling industries. Our -- sorry about that. Lost my place. Our commitment is steadfast to work in partnership with Republic Services to identify and recommend to you, the Mayor and to yourselves, improvements for physically sound trash recycling services and programs that benefit both Meridian residential and commercial customers and we look forward to even greater productivity in the year to come. With that I would stand for questions on the annual report. Bird: Council, any questions on the annual report before he starts into the recycling? Borton: Mr. President? Bird: Mr. Borton. Borton: Steve, is there an organization that's going to be helping structure the five year master plan that you're going to be taking on or are you going to do that internal? Cory: You know, I think we are going to do it internally. We will have -- we are going to probably pick it up this month or next month to discuss it. I guess I would say we are a volunteer organization and at this particular point we are going to be bringing our volunteer efforts to this activity to go ahead and put it tog ether. I guess when we get into it, if it starts to look like it's a very valuable process, we may be back to discuss things with you, but at this point I think what we want to do is to do our best effort based on our volunteer efforts. Borton: Okay. Thanks. Bird: Any other questions? Steven, go ahead and go into your recycling. Cory: Okay. So, a majority of the members of our commission were on a sub committee that went ahead and picked up the issue of the community recycling fund program in the fact that it had not been having any fund in flows. This has generated a -- this residential recycling program conditions report, which I will go through at this point. How do I advance the slides? Holman: Should be in the lower left corner and tap it with the pen. Cory: The program has been characterized -- recycling in Meridian has been characterized in three phases. We started recycling back in October 2000. It was launched by resolution of the City Council. This was a time when we had blue bins out on the counter -- on the curb sides and the ratepayers went ahead and sorted out their materials into different bags or items and put them in the blue bins. At this time SSC contracted with Western Recycling for the delivery of those recycled materials to mills. During that time period through July 2010 we achieved about 40 percent participation in the households. The initial portion of this SSC went ahead and surveyed the members of Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 14 of 55 our community who said that they would be willing to go ahead and pay for recyclable materials to be collected and so SSC initiated a fee of two and a half dollars per household per month for collection of the recycled materials. Because of the extensive growth in Meridian during that time period, the amount of money collected from that rose from 36 -- 360,000 dollars up to about a million dollars that were -- that was specifically for collection of recycled materials. During that time period bailing material and getting it delivered to the mills cost about 55,000 dollars at the start and ended up at about 113,000 dollars. Commodity prices during that time easily covered all of those costs, roughly maybe bringing back 500,000 dollars and allowing for the coverage of the processing costs, household hazardous waste activities, and returning enough to allow the community recycling fund to receive about 100,000 a year. By the middle of that the market started to sour and we were not getting the in flow to the fund. So, in 2010, second phase started for a number of reasons. We wanted to go ahead and automate the process and develop a single can commingle stream. That activity was launched by resolution of City Council in 2010. The contracting with Western Recycling to go ahead and process and deliver the materials continued. By virtue of that change to the single stream, participation jumped way up and, you know, we were seeing about 85 percent participation of households in recycled -- and collecting recycled materials. Based on CPI adjustments, the amount of money collected per household rose from two and a half up to about 336 per month. So, that the collection costs rose from a million to about a million one hundred fifty thousand. But during that time period, based on various economic issues, we saw the processing -- well, at the start of this we were actually having a net profit from the sale of the commodities, minus the cost to get them delivered of 24,000 dollars. By the end of that time period we were losing 62,000 dollars, which was covered in the ratepayer costs or subsidized by Republic Services. Phase three saw changes over at the material recovery center facility. This is actually something from the EPA that kind of identifies what a materials recovery center is. Basically materials come in one side and they are sorted out, so that the individual streams can be sold at a higher rate than the combined materials would be, separating out plastics, cans, paper, all the fiber activities, those are activities that we do here in this valley. Obviously, if someone were taking all of the trash we would have the opportunity for composting and other activities. It was under this time frame that we started the sub committee to look at the fund and it was quite a very advanced time at that particular point. A number of activities were occurring coincidentally. China created something along that they referred to as the Green Fence. They, basically, were looking at the materials that were shipped over there and decided they didn't want as much trash involved with the recycled materials that they were taking and increased the standards that they were enforcing, such that if you had too much contamination in the material they would refuse the delivery and whoever had shipped it over would be stuck trying to find a ship to bring it back and that's a very difficult activity. We also had a number of port strikes that occurred and so movement of this material internationally completely shut down. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and their materials started to come back throughout the intermountain area and the number of mills that we had available to us to be able to deliver materials reduce d significantly. The price of oil dropped significantly to the point where -- similar to glass where it's cheaper to go ahead and get new sand to go ahead and make glass, rather than to recycle glass. Plastics also were in the same situation where it was cheaper to make plastics with oil Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 15 of 55 rather than to go ahead and recycle plastic materials. All of those activities have bro ught a number of municipalities into looking at their recycle -- recycling programs. So, all these were external to Meridian. And during this time period, then, we went to a point where the Western Recycling -- the materials recycling -- the materials facility was taking a single stream and in an automated fashion unmingling the material, which was very good at that particular point, because being able to deliver the -- the streams of just cans and paper and such made it so that we got a lot more from the mills. But, of course, that automation process required significantly more expensive activities and just to go ahead highlight that time period, we are still running about just 86 percent participation. The collecting costs about a million one hundred seventy-five thousand, but the net for processing the materials was 81,700 loss, which was less than what it would have been if we had continued the single stream process. So, just to go ahead and put a fine point on the collection costs, obviously, the majority of this is the expansion of Meridian. The routes that are necessary for collection of the recycled materials grow and the costs track the amount that the ratepayers were putting in pretty consistently -- the ratepayers are highly invested in the collection of recyclable materials at this point. We still -- well, we still have the external issues that are coming in adding to that cost on the processing to -- and so the -- the conclusions the report had was, first off, that participation has showed s teady increase during all these phases, running at about 85 percent participation and costs have grown pretty extensively through that time period. Going forward means that there is not much more gain in volume. As far as incremental efforts with Meridia n, if we go ahead and do certain activities and have a limited amount of growth on this, we are not going to change things very much in terms of the fact that we have more expenses than we get back from the mills. On the other hand, if something were to happen at the county level and there was a huge increase, a lot of the costs that we have in the processing were fixed and so the -- there is possibility that if there was a huge increase in the material, you might be able to get the costs in line. But that's something that we are dependent on the county and the county is discussing activities of a countywide education process to try to increase the amount of recycled materials that are collected. We are going to -- those discussions those are occurring at this particular point, so I will have to keep you informed as to how those develop. Other ones -- we really want to point out the fact that we had not really had a good documented history of the recycling program here in the city and as a baseline for understanding where we are at has been a very valuable process and as painful as it was shifting the hazardous waste program costs from the recycling side over to the ratepayer, has bought us some time for the recycling program to hopefully see some return to markets for commodities in the years. And we are seeing benefits already from the project that we -- from this report was realized right off the bat that the trash -- the residual material that the -- because of them are -- the roof was having -- should be charged at a different rate. That was reduced. And so similar activities to that have occurred affecting our costs. We found that a lot of the other things that we suggested -- the time wasn't right to go ahead and bring those forward at this point. For example, like I said, the county seems very active on a countywide activity for educating people on recyclable materials and so we need to wait a see how that plays out and as far as some of the other recommendations in the subcommittee's report, we think those need to wait and, then, the respective stakeholders need to develop buy in from the -- all the Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 16 of 55 stakeholders and bring those up individually to you if we are going to pursue them. And with that I will stand for questions on the subcommittee report. Bird: Council, any questions for Steve on the recycling? Milam: Mr. President? Bird: Mrs. Milam. Milam: Great report, Steve. Thank you very much. I just mainly have a comment. I think it's pretty phenomenal that we went from 40 percent recycling to 85 percent recycling in a period of ten years and I'm all about recycling. So, you know, keep up the good work on that and did you say that the county was going to do education regarding contamination of recycling or just to get people more -- to get more people recycling? Cory: Thank you, Councilwoman. Yes. The county received a report from a year ago on the waste that's being delivered up to the landfill and found that for the amount of material that's collected for recyclables there is an equal amount that's still in the trash going up there to the landfill and so the county has, in the interest in telling people what can be recycled and how to keep it clean, so that it doesn't cost so much to go ahead and process it, just as much as each of the municipalities do and so at the January meeting we talked about some kind of a program -- cooperative program and there was universal agreement by all the municipalities, the counties, and the companies that are involved in the activities here and so at this meeting in April we are going to start discussing the details of an education process that would be addressing those two aspects, contamination and trying to increase participation. To go ahead and add a little bit of details, not only did we jump from -- well, as a result of jumping from 40 percent to 85 percent participation at that particular point, we went from 2,000 tons of recycled materials collected to 4,000 tons collected. So, indeed, people find the ability to use this single stream combined process for delivering their recyclables much more convenient and that in itself doubled the amount of material that we have been able to divert, so -- Milam: Thank you. Mr. President, one more comment. I just wanted to thank your team for all of the efforts that has gone into this, because I know how much it has been and you have all done a really, really fabulous job. Thank you. Bird: Anything else? Cavener: Mr. President -- or Mr. Chairman? Bird: Mr. Cavener. Cavener: Steve, this report that was put together, there is a lot of data in there and I appreciate the significant amount of information that's in there. A couple points of clarification I'm hoping you can provide . If I'm not mistaken, Republic collects all the trash and recycling in Ada and Canyon at this point; is that correct? Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 17 of 55 Cory: It's not complete. Kuna does it's own collection and has its own service, but -- and I should say but excluding that -- okay. Okay. So, unincorporated Canyon county is also separate. Otherwise, yes. Cavener: Great. The report that you provided to us, who was the group that put that together? Was that -- was that SWAC? Was that a report that Republic put together? Where did -- who worked on all this data point? Cory: It was done by the members of the commission. A sub committee of members of the commission with significant input from Republic Services and from Western Recycling and various stakeholders throughout the valley. Cavener: Mr. Chair, a couple other questions? Bird: Yes, Mr. Cavener. Cavener: One of the pieces that was pretty startling for me was our significantly high percentage of dirt or stuff or that shouldn't be in our recycling and I'm curious did -- was there any perspective or suggestions as to what needs to occur to get that number down? I know that you cite in here Seattle is like at five percent and we are at 14 percent. I'm just -- I'm curious as to what we need to be doing as a community to get our numbers better. Cory: And the answer is is that we need to be a little bit more diligent in what we actually put in the cans, you know, that -- what we rinse as far as rinsing our plastic bottles, rinsing our tin cans and such. When we got a pizza box, taking out the liner that's got the cheese or whatever on it and various other activities. As it turns out, part of this is film and other plastic that can go ahead and get entangled in the automated process for splitting out the process. So, not using plastic bags, not using -- not putting the six pack ring holders into the -- all that needs to occur and we feel it's, basically, something that we have not communicated well to the citizen and the ratepayers and this is a county wide issue. So, that's why we think generating a countywide program, because all of the recycling is going through the Western Recycling and improving that countywide is a very good activity. We understand that we will probably have the same message , but there will probably be a different way that it's presented in the communities. Boise seems to feel that they get a great deal of benefit by having little snippets before films at the theaters, they do a lot with their Twitter feed and push activities . We, ourselves and Eagle and I think Kuna feel that they do better with billing inserts and something like that would be posted up and could easily be a webpage either on the cities or with Republic Services to -- but the message is going to be consistent regardless of which way it's being communicated , it's just that it will probably be a little different how it's presented throughout the county. Cavener: Mr. Chairman, one more -- Bird: Go ahead. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 18 of 55 Cavener: Steve, you indicated the countywide buy in and I'm hoping maybe you could expand on that a little bit more as far as what is it that you're really looking for from -- from stakeholders to, quote, unquote, buy in? Cory: Well, what I -- I think what I was referring to is the fact that there is a lot of things that we need to do for our recycling stream countywide that we need to go ahead and get involved in this education process, having a cleaner stream that's being delivered, but above and beyond that there is a lot of minor activities, too, that -- that we need to work with. For example, anecdotally, businesses want to keep their break rooms clean for their employees and so in their cases if they are going to set up a recycling area there, they want to go ahead and use a plastic bag to go ahead and catch anything that might go in there -- that's still in the bottom of the pop bottle or something else, but somehow when that gets delivered we need to not have that plastic bag available. There are a wide swath of options. There is a -- a process for opening bags and getting the material out versus the concept of maybe there is a different way to collect those materials, but not have dirty bottles or whatever else within the break room area. You know, we need to work with the stakeholders on those issues to find out which is more acceptable and have some kind of a uniform recommendation to people and there is a number of little activities like that, like break room setup. Cavener: Okay. Thank you. Bird: Any other questions? Steve, thank you very much and go back to your -- your partners and tell them -- thank them very much for all the work -- hard work you guys do. Cory: I will do that. Bird: Thank you very much. Cory: Thank you so much. F. Valley Regional Transit 2016 Service Change Proposal Bird: Okay. Valley Regional Transit 2016 service change proposal. Margaret, are you -- state your name, please. Havey: Good afternoon, Council members. May name is Margaret Havey. I am a service planner for Valley Regional Transit. We are here to talk to you today and update you about some of the service changes that we are looking for the inter-county fixed line system. The origin of this project was -- we really needed to restructure our routes in Canyon county and all of our inter-county routes start out of Canyon county. So, we decided to look at each system and see how we could more effectively use our resources and also update our routes with the new developments that have happened in the areas. We are assuming with all of these scenarios that we are using the same amount of resources, the same amount of buses, same contributions from all of the stakeholders in there. Today I'm just here to give you an update on what our group has put together for Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 19 of 55 the proposals and how this is going to unfold over the next year. Right now our current conditions are for Canyon county local services we have five local fixed routes and those run Monday through Friday and we have inter-county service that runs Monday through Friday on five routes. Most of them travel through Meridian and stop in Meridian, but there are also some other ones that either express pass to or go on Highway 44. So, the main issue that we are trying to address with these scenarios is on time performance of the routes. There is limited resources that we do have in order to operate them. There is limited frequency in the neighborhoods and on the inter-county routes. In the midday there -- it can be a couple hours between an inter-county bus and in Canyon county we have duplication of service on Nampa -Caldwell Boulevard. This is our current system map. You might have seen it before, but it shows all the different route options that people have in order to get around between -- in the region on the western half. To develop these scenarios we had stakeholder interviews, both the public and private entities. We interviewed large employers like Blue Cross of Idaho here in Meridian and also Scentsy. Meridian Development Corporation, city planners and I think all in all about 20 stakeholder interviews. We also put together a technical committee with city and county staff. We had Meridian planning staff who attended to look at some of the performance data on the routes to see how we can rearrange things and, then, we also took some -- some rough suggestions from our operations staff. They are the ones that deal with our customers and, obviously, know where they want to go and how they need to get there. So, our five inter-county routes are the 40, the Nampa-Meridian express right now and the 42, Nampa-Meridian limited stop. We also have a Caldwell express that stops just in Caldwell and, then, bypasses Meridian. We have Highway 44 express that goes through Middleton, Star, Eagle and into Boise that way. And, then, we have BSU express that goes between the CWI campus in Nampa and it goes straight to the BSU campus and that's designed for students. And as I stated earlier, one of the things that we are trying to address right now is the limited midday service as most of the people who ride these are professionals, commuters, who use this to get to their jobs in the downtown core in Boise and if they need to get a bus back they might be out of luck for -- for a couple of hours if they need to. So, we were trying to address that in thinking how we can even out that service span. Thanks. So, in case you haven't seen a map of the 40 Nampa-Meridian express, it's our most popular inter-county route. Right now it starts at the Happy Day transit center, it goes through Nampa, stops at CWI. It has two sets of stops in Meridian. One is the Ten Mile -- the new Ten Mile and Overland park and ride and, then, one at -- in front of the Lowe's and Wahooz on Overland Road and, then, it gets -- and then it expresses into Boise. Those are pretty popular stops on the route. I would say we have -- we have some stop usage information. I would say it's about 20 percent of the total route ridership is from those Meridian stops. The route 42, the more limited stop options -- this is not an express bus by any means. It makes quite a few stops throughout the City of Meridian. This is from our realtime bus locator, which you can view, but the little blue dots are the current stops and we are also looking at the routing of these buses through Meridian in this process. So, when I talk about these inter-county scenarios, right now we are just looking at the routing and the route structure in how it would serve people. Once we get a little bit more direction on these -- because we have a couple different scenarios, just two for the inter-county, but we have a couple more for the Canyon county service. That's when we will start putting together the schedules and the Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 20 of 55 actual corridors and path that the bus takes, but right now we are looking at the pros and cons of each of these scenarios. This first one combines all of the inter-county routes, except for the one that goes on Highway 44. So, the 40, the 42, the 43 and the 45 and it would have one consistent route, so there would be more trips to choose from. But there are tradeoffs, obviously. People who ride from Caldwell would need to transfer at the Happy Day transit center or somewhere else down along the line in order to catch an inter-county bus and it would make more stops for them. For the City of Meridian this would use the resources that we use for the 42, which is the one that goes through the business park over here. The tradeoff would be that there would be more express trips that stop in Meridian. The second route structure that we are looking at is a hybrid between that extreme of combining all the routes and what our current service is. So, in this one route 42 would stay mostly as is. We would reroute it to try to serve a few more destinations in Meridian based on recent develops in major employers, but the express inter-county service would start in Caldwell just in the peak periods and, then, go all the way to BSU along the current route 40 routing. Just in the midday there would be a little -- we would have -- we would do our best to stretch that -- those resources so there would be at least every hour service on the inter-county, which there isn't now. But that would go between Nampa and downtown Boise. Right now we are about halfway through our public outreach in trying to reach out to our riders and talking to some stakeholders about what their ideas are, how we can improve our service. We put up a webpage, so if you want more details or a map that you can blow up and look at, it's on valleyride.org. We have the online survey and information in English and Spanish. Last week we had three open houses slash public hearings, which were fairly well attended. We had some -- some good testimony from current riders -- the inter-county riders are very -- very dedicated and opinionated and -- but it's great to put a face to the people who actually ride our buses. So, we have had, you know, the e-mail blast display ads and this week we are doing a round of city council presentations to keep you up to date on what we are considering doing. This comment period closes on March 13th, which is this Sunday and that's a public comment period just for general comments about these route structures. The more expanded project scheduled is once we have these initial comments we are going to put them all together in a summary report for the Valley Regional Transit board and they will give us some direction on which scenarios we should develop further based on what our resources are. We will do some more public outreach after that to determine which -- what trip -- what times and what stops work better for people and so we will really be able to hone in on that sort of -- those sort of details afterwards. And even these changes, if there are any to the inter-county would be implemented this August. And that's all I have right now, but I will be glad to stand for any questions. Bird: Any questions, Council, for Margaret? Cavener: Mr. Chair? Bird: Mr. Cavener. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 21 of 55 Cavener: Can you share with us what the feedba ck has been from the public outreach thus far, what are -- where each route kind of ranked thus far from the public and what are some of the reoccurring comments that you're hearing? Havey: Sure. Thank you, Councilman Cavener. We have gotten a pretty good response so far, about 170 people have filled out the survey. I don't know, probably another 70 e-mail comments and for the inter-county service the vast majority of people like the service how it is. It's -- change is hard and so they are used to -- used to the trips how they are structured now. It's a little hard for our current riders to react when they don't know what the exact schedule would be, so it's been interesting explaining to people how we are just looking at the route structure right now and, then, we will have schedules to present to them. We do hear quite a bit that they -- they do like the tradeoff of having midday service, but the people who live in Caldwell do not like the idea of their bus stopping more often, because right now they have a really great express where it just gets right on the freeway. So, it's a tradeoff for sure. Cavener: One additional follow up then if I can. Bird: Yes, Mr. Cavener. Cavener: I assume one of the reasons behind kind of modifying these routes is to try and grow ridership. Havey: Uh-huh. Cavener: And so my question is do you -- have you been able to articulate what you would hope to grow ridership by, recognizing that there is some people that you would most likely maybe lose if there is a change? Havey: Right. Councilman Cavener, we are -- so, since we are using the existing number or resources that we have -- and that means that it would be the same number of trips, they just might be reconfigured, it might be kind of a wash. We have such a limited system that doing trip modeling, like forecasting, isn't really feasible with such -- the small amount that we have. Depending on -- we have been working with Kittleson and Associates to do some of the data analysis and they did some preliminary ridership forecasts. I don't think I have that with me right now. Because, obviously, there is -- it might be a wash of more people would ride if it's more consistent, but, then, some people might not ride, because it's less direct. Bird: Any other questions? Thank you very much, Margaret. Havey: Thank you for having me. Bird: We appreciate it. Thank you. Hood: Mr. President? Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 22 of 55 Bird: Yes. Hood: Before -- before you move onto the next, I just want to -- because the transportation commission heard a very similar presentation yesterday and they made a motion and a soft recommendation, it was a little bit painful, but they did and so I thought I would share some of the dialogue from them and they asked me to forward on a soft recommendation to you all. Bird: Sure. Hood: They actually preferred route two, but as Councilman Cavener pointed out, that was -- again, the soft part of that is not knowing ridership, not knowing some of the feedback from stakeholders, just on the face of things, they tended to like two, because it was kind of the best of both worlds. You increase frequency, but you st ill came into Meridian a little bit and, you know, went up the Franklin corridor and kind of hit some of those -- it wasn't just a park and ride service. So, again, it wasn't anything where they were like absolutely scenario two, but -- so I just thought I would put that out there for you all again, since they made that motion yesterday, so -- and, then, maybe just one more clarification yesterday. They kind of did that, because we had heard from Rhonda that you all wanted something from the city to support this. Has that changed in the past 24 hours? Are you not -- the way I heard your presentation you weren't asking the Council to endorse anything, so just wanted to clarify that. Havey: Sure. Right now we are looking for feedback, but it is information. If the Council has a strong opinion about how they would like the transit service to be, you would certainly be welcome to make those comments to the Valley Regional Transit board. That meeting is August 4th. So, sorry, not August 4th. April 4th. Bird: Anybody got a strong opinion, other than what our transportation commission and Luke? My opinion is two is probably the best. The more we can get through -- the more stops we can get through Meridian the better off it is, but, you know, is it going to work. Cavener: Mr. Chairman? Bird: Yes. Cavener: I will just -- since you asked for an opinion I will offer mine and, again, to no one's surprise it may be an unpopular opinion, but my thoughts are that we don't make a change without some type of demonstratable plan that it's going to grow ridership. I know that's something that VRT is always working on and I applaud you for innovative ways to try and find new ideas to increase ridership. I think all three scenarios don't really hurt Meridian that much, but as someone who is not an avid bus rider I don't -- I struggle with saying one option is better than the other. If what is currently existing is working for our riders, I would -- I would be cautious about changing that. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 23 of 55 Palmer: Mr. President? Bird: Mr. Palmer. Palmer: Mr. President and Councilman Cavener, if you think you had an unpopular opinion, mine is I want as few bus stops in Meridian as possible. So, that's all I have to say on that for right now. Bird: Okay. Anybody else got an opinion? Thank you, Margaret. Appreciate that. Havey: Thank you. Item 6: Items Moved From the Consent Agenda Bird: Council, didn't have anything moved from the Consent item. Item 5: Community Items/Presentations A. Audit Presentation Bird: But before we go into Department Reports, if -- with your permission I'd like to go back to 5-A. I think we need a motion to bring the audit forward in a resolution to accept the audit. All these years, 18 years, I have probably been th e one that made that motion and sitting here I forgot about it, so I apologize. Am I not right, Mr. Nary? Nary: Mr. Bird, that would probably be the most appropriate way, then, we will bring it back. Bird: That's what I -- so, I would entertain on -- go back to 5-A and entertain a motion to accept the presentation of the financial audit and have Mr. Nary bring it forward with a resolution next week. Cavener: So moved. Milam: Second. Bird: We got a motion and a second. Madam Mayor -- or Madam -- I'm sorry. Holman: I like that. Bird: Madam Clerk. Roll Call: Bird, yea; Borton, yea; Milam, yea; Cavener, yea; Palmer, yea; Little Roberts, yea. MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 24 of 55 Bird: Thank you guys for my stupidity there. Cavener: Not stupidity. Item 7: Department Reports A. Mayor's Office Strategic Update Bird: Okay. Department Reports. Mr. Robert. Simison: Thank you, Council President Bird, Members of the Council. And today you're going to hear the Mayor's strategic plan update, which will also include the communications update from Kaycee here in a few minutes and I appreciate the Mayor allowing me to do this in her absence, which is, you know, the first time I have done it in this fashion, so -- so, I will go ahead and begin and we will go from there. So, for those that are -- may be watching at home -- I know you all know this, but sometimes it's a good reminder just to realize that the Mayor is the CEO of the city. The City Council is the legislative body of the organization and also the Mayor is the one who is the public face of community. In the Mayor's office we do strive to work on the vision for the city and if you can remember that was updated during the strategic planning process last year, so we try to strive to insure that by 2035 Meridian will be the west's premier community in which to live, work and raise a family. Same concept is there that's been there before, just some minor modifications to the wording. With that first it's always nice to let people know about changes in the departments. Danyele Jansen Van Beek joined the office last year just right after we did our strategic presentation, so she officially hasn't been introduced. We knew C.J. was leaving, but we didn't know who was going to be rep lacing him at that time and Danyele has stepped in to do that. For those of you who haven't had the opportunity to meet Danyele, she is our office assistant -- administrative assistant and she joined us from the Canyon county assessor's office last year. She's recently moved further out to the county. They are now out near New Plymouth and Emmett area. Her husband is -- raises cattle and she does the business side of the operation, so they need some land to -- to do that work, but she's dedicated to driving over an hour into the office each day and is generally the very first person in the office every day, so she's dedicated and committed. The things that she does -- she works with Brenda on economic development issues, scheduling businesses, special projects. Was part of the Meridian Business Day, representative from the city's side of it. And, then, she's also involved in a lot of the youth items that we currently do. The Mayor's book club she's there to assist in that. She's been helping get the Meridian Youth Farmers Market going, especially with her ag background that's been a real asset. And you will see the nuts down in the picture, she kind of -- last year we took on some efforts to enhance our appreciation of our volunteers. So, that was one of the items that she came up with was, you know, letting our volunteers know that we are nuts about them. So, we welcome her to the office, even though she's now been here for just over a year. This last year, honestly, we received some accolades. We all know about the 24/7. We have heard about that one. American we also received three recognitions this last year from community organizations, so we just wanted to take Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 25 of 55 time to recognize her efforts and the acknowledgement that received from the com munity about what she is doing every day out there that people are taking notice of. Just want to focus real quick on a couple of large accomplishments this year. I titled these city wide accomplishments, because they really, you know, went beyond the work of the people in our office. It took the whole city team efforts, all the departments involved. Obviously, on the strategic plan. I worked more on that personally than probably any other item this last year. Done a lot of the coordination working with the directors in the various departments to bring that forward to you all last year with the approval on January this last year and, then, the website. You know, we started and stopped that a couple times as we had some turnover in our communications manager position, but once Kaycee came on she was able to move that project forward. Again she will talk a little bit more about that when she comes up and speaks. But those were a couple of the big things that we were proud to move forward in this last year. So, this just gives you an idea about some of the things that we do in the office. Events. Coffee with the Mayor. Town halls. Faith leader luncheon. State of the City. Those type of things. Proclamations. You hear about many of those here that come before the city and as we continue to have more sports teams -- I don't know if everyone saw, Ambrose won their first state title in basketball this year. So, I imagine we will have a proclamation coming from -- before you in a couple weeks for them at that point in time. Thirty-one commission appointments made. That number is -- as we have made changes you recall Mr. Nary brought forward the changes to how we are appointing people. We are opening that up each time, instead of just asking them if they want to serve, we are asking the community members of they would also like to serve. That's going to take on a lot more effort, because the Mayor does make sure that she interviews everyone who applies for that, as well as with the chair of the co mmission, but that's the commission appointments we did last year, meeting with the Mayor, took on -- and, then, the volunteer MYAC hours. I know you hear a lot about MYAC. I'm not really going to talk about MYAC today. Ken's not here. He's off in D.C. with them, but that's the volunteer hours that they put in in the last year. Again, just some examples of some of the things occurring in the Mayor's office. The business events. Those are ribbon cuttings. Those are the Mayor going out and visiting wi th businesses. HOA meetings that Ken attends. Faith visits the Mayor and Ken does. And, then, our constituent contacts that we were able to easily identify last year. There is many more that aren't captured, whether they come in over social media, Nextdoor -- also it's a very -- these are the ones that -- typically e-mails. And you see a fair amount of these as well through the -- that contact the Mayor and City Council. I'm going to talk about that a little bit more when we get further in, but I just wanted to give you an idea about this work in this last year. So, a couple of -- a couple of items to highlight. New special events that we have worked on this last year. I know you're -- I have already mentioned the things we already do, but the youth farmer's market, that was something new that's occurred last year. We had 12 youth vendors. A band. Three hundred people from the community attended roughly. We had partnership with the Meridian Library District. The Boise Co-op. The community garden reps. It was successful. We do have things lined up to move forward with the full season this year of a youth farmers market. As of right now we currently have a half dozen approved vendors for that to participate with the goal being 25. We are looking at a June 25 start date, which is a Saturday during Dairy Days and it will run through September from 9:00 o'clock to noon. So , we are excited about that. Also on here we Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 26 of 55 had the Meridian interchange ribbon cutting event. We were proud to help make that happen this year, working with the chamber, Roaring Springs, AECOM, who is a new Meridian business. David Butzier, who many of you know, we worked -- we put that event together to do their ribbon cutting, so that was always nice to be able to help out with that. And, then, the other one, Do The Right. You have all heard about this. You have seen the videos. You know, last year we were able to do about 5,500 post-it notes out into the community, worked with the city chamber, Ben's Bells, The Village , West Ada School District. Put out 5,000 of these stickers into the community. We want -- you know, we are doing it again for 2016. We have added this year KTVB as a media partner on it. We also brought on KTSY as a radio partner and The Village will be taking a more active role in this year's event. So, more will come on that. You will see that from the kids and in various ways moving forward, but these are -- two of these -- one of these was a special item, two of these would be ongoing that we will be engaged with from our office in one fashion or another moving forward. I will also highlight two new programs that we started this last year. The Mayor's senior advisory board. Again, you heard about them at the State of the City, but so far to date they have put in 195 volunteer hours. They have done events such as a safe driving class, two CPR classes, trunker treat, the State of the City. They are currently working on the resource guide, which is a CDBG program -- CDBG funded project. They will make that available to members of the community. When we originally signed them up it was for a two year stint and so they are coming up on one year. So, this group of roughly 15 individuals will have another year before we go out and either -- to reappoint them or look for new people to get involved. But it's been a great group so far. They are meeting a lot more frequently than we thought that they would be. They are really focusing on doing things that are impacting the seniors and one of the things when we started this group we thought they would be looking at city services and giving feedback and guidance on what services -- what they think about the city services and how they impact seniors. They really haven't gotten into that yet. I would as sume that at some point in time we would start to hear some feedback and guidance from them about how they feel about the city services, but right now they have been content on just serving and that's really where they have been focused, so we are not goin g to fault them if that's where they want to put their time and energy into things. Also this last year we started Mayor Tammy's walking club. We kicked this off last spring. We did a pilot program with the schools, which I think that most of you are fa miliar with, but we did it at five schools. Mayor Tammy has committed to going out and walking with the students and this really was a result of the Blue Cross initiative where they last -- sometimes trying to get the dates right. I think it was last Oct ober they did the Mayor's walking club challenge, which really got the Mayor engaged. We took this to the next step and started working with five schools to see if they wanted to do it. The Mayor would agree to go out and walk with the schools and those schools would, basically, be in a competition within their school to see which class or which -- could do the most walking. So, it's not against other schools, but it's encouraging them to be competitive with one another. We started in earnest and a full year this year. We now have 12 schools participating -- 12 elementary schools participating in Meridian with 6,900 students. So far they have walked 57,758 miles. The sponsors for the program -- we have Primary Health, Boise Co-op, and the money that the Mayor won from the Mayor's walking challenge that she did through Blue Cross of Idaho and Fleet Feet, while not a dollar sponsor, is looking at being involved in Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 27 of 55 helping make these events special for the kids. So, the Mayor will be going out and doing walking during the month -- right after spring break through the end of the year, you know, so if you ever see her running late from coming into the budget meetings that you guys will be doing, there is a chance she's just coming back from walking with one of the schools. So, that's been really exciting and I wanted to say thanks to Danyele for really helping get that program going, working with the schools and the partners through that process. So, looking back, last year when I came before you I highlighted these were the items that we would be focusing on listening tours, Do The Right, Youth Farmer's Market, Mayor's walking club for kids, High Five grant canopy, department training, customer service, strategic plan implementation. We were able to hit m ost of those. We really didn't get around on the department customer service like I had hoped to do, but through some of the actions with the directors, talking about the CARE values and internal and external customer service I see that being something we really try to focus on in this next year, just meeting the expectations about what the departments have for engaging with customers and hearing back from them. I'm still going to touch on that. I guess I will just move right into that component moving f orward, because it really -- part of the -- the thing about the constituents. I mentioned earlier 188 constituent inquiries this last year. Customer service. One of the things that has always been a challenge in the Mayor's office is keeping track in a meaningful way of those that contact the office. Tracking it from when it came in to when it gets routed to being closed. While, true, the city's investment in Accella and with the wide work of Kristi that she's been doing up there in that department, we are going to be exploring using Accella for a CRM customer relationship manager system. While Accella has a module that could be purchased, we believe that we can modify some of the other ones that are already in place, either using the building services or code enforcement, using some of those that are in -- in place to create a CRM system that will really allow us to better track . What we have being trying to use is called Business Contact Manager, which is the Microsoft Outlook add -on, which, basically, just crashes and freezes your Outlook consistently and can make it difficult. If you ever want to hear frustration, spend ten minutes with Peggy talking about what it does to her computer by trying to do that. I mean Excel Spreadsheet you could do it, but it's really not what you're talking about in order to do that, so we are hopeful that -- I think this is part of the city's vision when they looked at Accella many years ago, because the reality is is that if we do this right and you start looking at stuff -- what we often see at the Mayor's office and why this really matters -- we get the calls after they have called billing and we get the calls after they have called building, after they have called the police department, and typically, you know, at least a third of our calls are from people who have already tried someplace else. Well, if we can get the other departments to start utilizing the system, going back to the training, logging the information when they make the contact, we can see it as well and it will help us not always have to recreate the wheel of Peggy going and documenting and, then, sending it out to everybody else and they saying, well, we already had that conversation with that person. So, hopefully, we can work as a city in our process for that and also just help us keep track a little bit better when people are talking in various places about different things as a specific address, you know, it will help us. So, that's one of the things that we are looking at doing this next year. You can see a lot of the other things on here. Chinden Boulevard, US 20 -26. You have heard the Mayor talk about that as a priority. My time table and Caleb's time is spent Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 28 of 55 on that. Really, the strategic plan, that's -- you know, since it's been implemented I know we have been looking at what that will mean in terms of budget enhancements for this next year. The Mayor's office will meet -- get together in a couple of weeks, we will sit down and we will say what does that specifically mean to our depa rtment as well. Right now if you look at the strategic plan there is 18 total items which are assigned to the Mayor's office lead in that. I will tell you with a staff of four, including the Mayor, that's not a lot of people to do 18 -- be the lead on 18 items. Most of those are -- at least half of them are city wide initiatives that you have to have someone as the lead, so the Mayor's office was placed on that. I'm not expecting to be the lead on all those, but some of them are not and so we will sit down and we will figure out where -- who in our office can take on what responsibilities and -- as it relates to that. We have 18 items. Eight are high, six are medium, four are low. We also -- we are going to look at what -- see what they are pursuing options related to funding for needed schools. Growth is an issue. Our community has said it's an issue. Schools are an issue. Bonds. Levies. So, we are going to continue that conversation. I have heard a rumor that there may be an interim committee being formed this year by the legislature to look at school funding and they expect to be two years, which is a great possibility. I haven't heard that confirmed from a legislator. I got that second hand. But just the fact that it came up in a social se tting I was pleased to hear that that might be the possibility, because I have wanted to have some of the legislators, beside Senator Winder, looking at this issue with us from around the state. The seniors are going to be looking at the -- developing the resource guide as we talked about and on here you see the Welcome to Meridian signs. We have two that are hopefully going to be built this year. We have two the developers are doing. We have two that the city is looking at doing. One of them we almost got the agreement finalized with St. Luke's. So, that one we hope to move forward, we are trying to get a second one as well on Eagle Road there that -- when you head south on Eagle Road at the same location, we would like to do them both at the same time to try to get some cost savings with the sign companies and other people's time and involvement, but I imagine we will see an enhancement next year for additional one to two signs in the community to continue that process moving forward. So, with that that's where we are. I want to thank Peggy and Danyele for coming down here. Ken and the Mayor, if they are watching in Washington DC -- I doubt that they are, but just in case they might be. But I'm here to stand for questions before we turn this over to -- and I just want to say actually one more thing that I skipped over earlier. One of the things I would like to point out that -- what you may or may not realize is how much of the things that we do are actually funded by members of the community and, you know, I know the State of the City we took a real opportunity to thank all of our businesses who support and sponsor that. You heard me talk about the walking club, folks who sponsor that. You know, many of you go to the faith leaders luncheon that is sponsored by members of the community, FSA donates the food each year. Our book club is done by sponsors from the business community. MYAC is back in DC right now. A majority, if not all of that will be funded by members of our business community through their fundraising efforts through -- both from the project that they did, as well as their Ball at the Hall and the other things that they do to raise funds. So, a lot of what you heard about -- and even the youth farmers market, that was money from the Blue Cross of Idaho foundation grant and we receive 20,000 more when they close that out that they have provided to us that we will have a discussion about again Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 29 of 55 when we get away for our retreat to see if there is ways we can put that towards healthy initiatives, but a lot of what we do is funded by members of the business community and citizens. So, I just want to take this time to recognize them and let you be aware of that aspect and with that you will see four budget amendments from me here in the n ext probably month or so for all the funds that have come in for all of those items to help insure that they are paid for appropriately. So, you don't have an audit finding, so -- and with that I will stand for any questions before Kaycee -- turning this over to Kaycee. Bird: Council, any questions for Mr. Simison? Milam: Thank you, Robert. Bird: Thank you, Robert, for all you do. Emery: Good afternoon, Council. Thanks for this time before you. I'm going to give you a highlight of communications over the past year and my goals for the next year. My presentation was 30 slides and we have cut it down to 16. So, for the first time in my life I made notes, instead of -- so usually I like to talk off the cuff. So, I will try to stick to the notes, so I stick to time and be respectful of our time here and don't take the next hour going over all our communications stuff we did in 2015. So, our goals in 2015 that I discussed with you last year were to build awareness and increase external reach and I'm going to go through the ways that we achieve these goals in more detail in the following slides, but I just wanted to give you an overview on this slide. To do that we increased our presence on social media. Most of our staff doubled on all social m edia channels. We launched Welcome to Meridian, the video for new residents. We launched utility billing inserts and updated the website. To increase internal reach, that was another one of our goals. We added employees to the newsletter and press release mailing list and began sending weekly video updates -- our TWIM updates to employees and to protect the brand and keep our message consistent we developed social media best practices for the city. Implemented a set process for departments and how they can include the communication manager in their review and that's gone really well. All right. So, I will try and speak to -- I'm going to have a lot of numbers on these pages. I got a little carried away with the matrix. I'm not going to go over all of them, but I can e-mail you this presentation after I'm done. So, our goal for 2015 were to increase Facebook likes to 5,000. Last I checked we were just about 3,700. So, we did not achieve our goal, but I'm still going to raise our goal for 2016 and that's at 7,000. Our reach is right about 1,600 and I'm going to take that above what my goal was for 2015 and shoot for 2,500 in 2016. Why Facebook is so important is because it reaches so many demographics. It's the one social media channel where you're reaching the most ages. These numbers I'm showing you to are just for the Meridian City Hall page. We have the 21 Facebook pages that are connected to the city, so I didn't go through and get you all of those numbers. Mind you when I first got this job my jaw dropped when I heard that we had 21 pages for our city. But a lot of those are parks and the reason we do that is people tab a park and, then, you have more control over what they say on that park page, instead of having other people create a Kle iner Park page. So, it makes a lot of sense, but it does sound like a lot of pages. And also on this reach -- reach is how many people are seeing our posts, so a lot of times that's even Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 30 of 55 more important than our -- our likes and that's on a daily reach. So, we are reaching about 1,600 people on average each day with our posts. Let's see if this video is going to play, because I wanted to show you that video is king on social media, so we have actually been uploading This Week In Meridian directly to Face book. We upload it to YouTube, to share on Twitter and, then, it goes directly to Facebook and it's averaging about 100 views, which is great. And, then, I wanted to highlight so I -- this is -- I'm going -- I'm branching out from the Meridian City Hall page, because the number one post of the year, surprisingly, came from the Meridian Fire Department and it reached over half a million people, 36,000 views, 118 shares, and the chief -- they post so many educational videos all the time and the chief and I were just blown away that this is the video -- let's see if it plays. Well, I don't know if it's going to play, but -- oh, it's going. I just got impatient. Well, anyway, a video of dancing stuff animals was the video -- the top video of the year at their white elephant Christmas party. So, basically, at that point I just threw out the social medial best practices and said I don't get it. I don't know. No. Just kidding. But you can see we do get engagement on our -- on our posts. So, let's take a look at Twitter. Our goal was to increase our followers to 5,000. We did meet our goal at 5,100 and our goal for 2016 is 7,000. So, when I talk about doubling your stats, I show those down there with impressions and what an impression means is a Tweet has been delivered to the Twitter stream. Twitter is a really good place for us to drive our messaging with businesses and the media. So, that's a really important place for us to be. YouTube is one where we went from -- we were -- I wanted to increase the average views of This Week In Meridian to -- up to a hundred and we now are getting 139. Our most popular Christmas TWIM where we told people where to go see Christmas lights, that was 228 views and that doesn't account for the views we got on Facebook . These are the views from our website and from YouTube. And, then, in 2016 I'd like to see that go up to 200 average views. So, these are just some more stats where you can see we more than doubled our views and our watch time and, then, the top five videos might interest you. The iClick was number one. Do The Right. Welcome To Meridian. That's the first one we put up. We actually added another one and I will talk to you -- but with the number one statistic. I will talk to you about that later. B ut those views are actually higher when you combine the two. Cable One Movie Night . Thanks to those who participate in that. You got a lot of views. And budget workshop , which was a little surprising to me, but that takes us -- oops. I missed one. I went too fast. But that takes us right into our next slide where we talk about live streams. We have really tried to bolster our live streams, because we want to make it so that if people are at home they can be part of this process. So, we have gone from -- on City Council meetings we have gone from averaging about 11 views during the Council stream -- I'd still like to shoot for 25 next year. And, then, post meeting we getting about 62 average views and I'd like to shoot for 85 average views on that. This down here just shows you some other things we streamed. We did move our stream off of where we had it onto YouTube this year and that's so that more people could watch it on their mobile devices. The old streams service we utilized you could only watch it if you had a desktop or a Windows phone. So, that made it a lot more -- it made it just a lot easier for people to log in and they can watch it right on their phone, which I have done before. So, you can see the budget workshops have quite a few views and Robert asked me -- he said where do those numbers come from? Well, I was like, yeah, a lot came from the employees, but, still, that shows that we are serving -- we are serving the public Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 31 of 55 by putting these on the live stream. So, they have that option. And, then, real quick LinkedIn. We have 440 followers. Didn't quite make our 500 goal, but I'm shooting for 600. We are posting job postings on there and different -- we posted the Welcome To Meridian video, because people may not know we have got residents there, businesses there that may not know the services we offer to them. On Nextdoor -- this is Ken's and he has done a fantastic job. This is a real -- Nextdoor is really popular. A lot of people are on Nextdoor in Meridian. Nine thousand, two hundred and seventy-seven households and, then, 105 neighborhoods launched. So, really good effort by Ken on that one. And half the households in Meridian, that's our goal for next year. So, the 13 to 14 thousand. And we can do it. People love Nextdoor. So, we launched Welcome To Meridian. We completed Welcome To Meridian videos. One was with the overview with the Mayor. You guys saw that one in the testimonial video. We utilize the videos in multiple arenas, on the website, at the State of the City, social media, and the feedback has been very positive. In fact, you can look at the testimonial video there where the Welcome To Meridian video had 617 combined video reviews. The testimonial video was one of the top Facebook posts on our page , over 37,000 people reached. Fourteen thousand views and 123 shares. So, with that we thought, well, this is something people really want to see and so it played right into the pilot program we ran with Welcome To Meridian and we developed -- we had the thumb drive sent to new residents. These are brand new residents. Not people who moved within the city. And they receive many items on that thumb drive to help them get acclimated with the city, including the Welcome To Meridian video. I had so many people come up and tell me who saw that video that they didn't realize some of the services we offered. So, it really has educated a lot of our current residents and our new residents. So, obviously, we are going to be hoping to put the -- continue this program. It supports the initiative of responsive government and in 2016 we hope to gather more feedback from people who receive the thumb drive. Okay. We also launched Utility Billing inserts. This is just one more way we can reach our audiences, because we have some who aren't online at all. Aren't receiving e -mails, so we have to -- we have to reach our audiences where ever we can. And this has been great. It's gone out -- it goes out quarterly. Our first one went out in October and we also post i t to the website and share it on social media. So, we are getting it out there in a lot of different ways. The City of Meridian website. This is the big one. This was a huge endeavor. We deployed it in early September, so just past our goal of August, and you can see the page views are up and our goal for 2016 is 30,000 per week. But our website gets a lot of traffic. The page views were up 2.9 percent in 2015 and unique page views, which means they are -- it's a different user, that was up 3.66 perc ent. So, our redesign -- and just so you all know -- didn't just include the look, we also made the site more mobile friendly and simplified the menu, creating greater consistency and making it easier to locate information on our page. We learned a lot in the redesign process when the changes that were proposed could not be implemented with our CMS, so there was a lot of learning curves during that process. And this is the number one place where we are seeing people get information according to the staff . But we are limited in what we can do with our current users. So, we have developed a best practices for those -- for the updated site and I believe the site would look better as a whole and be more functional for all if we did have a dedicated employee focused on it. So, I think that there is a lot of growth that we can -- a lot of room to grow in our website. It is redesigned. It does work great, but there Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 32 of 55 is a lot that we can do with it from here as well. And just so you know, we have had two cities reach out to us asking us who designed our website. So, I think we did something good. We have increased the employee reach. Again, we are sending This Week In Meridian video updates and those are getting more views. Press releases and also the e- newsletter. So, press release is, by the way, really important. If we are letting the media know what's going on, we have to be letting our employees knows what's going on. So, I think that one was a really important add. The e-newsletter stats, while I'm talking about employees I want to just give you an overall -- our campaigns average -- we send that out every other week and it's an 18.4 percent open and industry average is 15 percent, so we are doing okay on that. I still have a goal of 22 percent fo r next year. Now, if you look just at employees -- I just pulled them. Their average is about 92 open out of the 323 employees we have on there, so that's a 28 percent open rate. So, I'd like to increase that to 35 percent, just so that we know we are keeping employees in the know. All right. I probably better make sure I'm sticking to my notes here. Okay. Looking ahead to 2016. I have already begun meeting regularly with directors in order to make sure I'm supporting their initiatives and that I'm covering all of their announcements that they have and that I can take a more proactive approach to communication and maybe things that have slipped through the cracks in the past. So, those monthly meetings have been very helpful. And some they are qua rterly, just because of the department, they don't have a lot of communication updates, but it's been fantastic. We are also trying to work on building community through our communication this year , I call it The Year of Connecting. We launched Ask Mayor Tammy on social media. So, the first Wednesday of every month we have Ask Mayor Tammy on Facebook. And, then, we have also launched Ask Mayor Tammy on the Mayor's office home page. We got this idea from Fire. They launched Ask The Chief. It was doing really great. We launched Ask Mayor Tammy. We have gotten three e-mails in the week and a half since we launched it. So, clearly people had questions for Mayor Tammy and they are liking that link, because it's -- it must be easy for them to find. We put it on the home page of the Mayor's office. So, my big goal for building community is to launch hashtag mymeridian. It's a campaign designed to showcase what it is that makes Meridian the number one place to live in America. It also will help with that initiative of being a more responsive government. It will help us see what it is that makes this community mymeridian for people here. So, I got the idea from hashtag idahome that you see all over social media and I thought why not start asking the community to show us their -- share their pictures and their videos on social media with the hashtag mymeridian and we want to see what your Meridian looks like. It's dancing in Kleiner Park in hashtag mymeridian or a hashtag mymeridian looks like this. So, the goal is to build community, build engagement on social media and learn more about what is important to our residents, which I think is always important. We want to know what's important to them and so I'm really excited about this one and hashtags ar e just -- has proven to be really effective for us. Do The Right. That was one that really took off and we were able to search the hashtag Do The Right and see how many people participated in that event. It was really phenomenal. So, that's all I have. Do you have any questions? Bird: Any questions, Council? Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 33 of 55 Cavener: Mr. Chairman? Bird: Mr. Cavener. Cavener: Kaycee, really fantastic. I -- I will really appreciate you brought last year's goals and shown benchmarks against them. I think that a lot of people come and give presentations to us could take a page out of your book and so true success based on what they told us they were going to do last year. So, thank you for that. A couple questions for you. One, when you talked about daily reach on social media, is that total number of eyeballs that have seen something that you have created, is that what you're referring to as daily reach? Emery: Yeah. So, that's taking all of -- so, I'm posting about at least one a day, sometimes two a day. So, taking those and that's the average of how many timelines or -- or people that have come to the page. It includes all of that. How many people have seen that post. Cavener: Are you utilizing paid postings? I know that it's a challenge for organi zations to be brought to the forefront, so is that a resource that you're using and do you anticipate that's going to be part of your plan moving forward? Emery: Very good question, Councilman Cavener. Thank you for asking. Yes, I really think it's going to be part of my plan moving forward and something that you will probably see when I talk to you about my budget. With the new algorithm that Facebook has it's very hard for businesses now to be seen on timelines. And where I have done three sponsored posts now and the one post I'm doing right now we went from 3,300 to almost -- we are almost to 3,800 in five days. So, that's a huge jump and to me that's money well spent, because it's giving -- it's making it that much easier for us to communicate with our residents and so I really do think it's important, especially with the new algorithm. Cavener: Great. Just one comment, please, Mr. Chairman. Bird: Yes. Cavener: The move from the city's website to YouTube for the live streams was a great decision. I think that is great. It makes it easier I think for our public to engage in that process. It makes it easier for me to want to watch it and see where I screwed up in the meeting. So, thank you for doing that. And, then, just I would love -- and maybe all the Council would love to see one of these flash drives that we are providing to our new residents, so if you just put them in each of our mail box, I know that I would like to see some of the information that we are sending out to the publi c. Emery: That's a fantastic idea. We are going to update them, so do you want the one we already sent or the one we are going to update and send out? Cavener: Both. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 34 of 55 Emery: Both. Okay. Cavener: Yeah. I'd like to see what we are sending out cur rently and, then, when it's updated provide us that. And you could just upload the files. Emery: Yeah. No. That -- Cavener: We don't need a flash drive, but it would be great to see what you're -- Emery: Oh, I want you to see the flash drive, too. It looks great. Cavener: Okay. Emery: And on the YouTube, I don't necessarily see that as a long term solution for us, just because it is -- we don't have a lot of control over a -- over that ownership of the videos on there. So, I did look at something with the clerk's office that I hope to look at further and what it does is it's a streaming -- it streams your videos on mobile -- it's got great mobile capabilities, but it also categorizes your meeting. So, when you go to the agenda you can click on the video for that item. Milam: Oh, nice. Emery: So, anyway, that's a story to be continued. Cavener: Sure. Emery: But, yes, more mobile friendly is the -- Cavener: Great. Emery: -- first key. Cavener: Thank you. I appreciate it. Bird: Any other questions? Palmer: Mr. President? Bird: Mr. Palmer. Palmer: Thank you so much for your emphasis on social media. Back in the day when I made my living on social media I had met with Luke and the Mayor and was really tryin g to help the city get to the point that you're getting us there now, so thank you. Emery: All right. Well, thank you. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 35 of 55 Bird: Any other questions or statements? Borton: Mr. President? Bird: Mr. Borton. Borton: Kaycee, there is an additional goal, perhaps, to add to your list. There is efforts now to try and utilize, on a platform such as opengov, to incorporate some -- some financial data, modeling, and citizen based and employee based inquiries on all of our financial data -- Emery: Uh-huh. Borton: -- that would be incorporated into our website to make it truly functionable and usable and acceptable. Those discussions would be going on throughout the spring and the summer. Is there room for that within your communications plan to incorpor ate communicating our financial data to our citizens in that much more usable format? Emery: Good question, Councilman Borton. I'm actually in those meetings, so it is part of my plan to make sure -- especially because I get media calls and when -- and I'm not a financial person, so I want to be able to direct them to where they can find the answer or be able to find the answer myself. So, it's a really important thing to me. It's really in line with all the transparency that we need to provide. Borton: Okay. Emery: Yeah. Definitely. Borton: In the goal there? Emery: Yeah. I need to add it for sure. Bird: Thank you, Kaycee. Thank you, Robert. Emery: Thank you. B. Community Development: Review and Approve List of Priority Roadway, Intersection and Community Programs Projects for 2016 Bird: Caleb, are you up next? Hood: Yes, Mr. President, Members of the Council. This presentation for some of you will be new or newer and for some of you it's going to be -- you're going to get tired of this again. But I'm going to try to find that sweet spot of, you know, giving you -- everyone Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 36 of 55 enough information as a refresher and hopefully for those of you that haven't heard the spiel before, you know, it's enough that you're comfortable with some of the discussion and what I'm asking you to do today and in the next -- over the next week or two. So, annually the city prepares a transportation priority list for the transportation agencies to consider in their programming and budget process. Our process is to have the Meridian Transportation Commission start that -- kick that off and compile a list of priorities for you all then to consider and endorse as we send that forward to the ACHD and Idaho Transportation Department. So, ACHD sends the Mayor a letter about two months ago asking for any projects we want them to consider in their 2017 to 2021 integrated five year work plan by April 1st. So, again, we have less than a month to finalize these lists and get it over to ACHD. On the agenda it says to review and approve the list today. I'm just going to kind of set the stage, get you oriented and, again, kind of your discretion. If you want to do it in a week or two weeks, it's kind of up to you. I looked at the agenda in Agenda Manager. Next week looks better as far as the volume of things on the agenda than two weeks, but your call, however long you want to kind of digest this. During the February and March Meridian Transportation Commission meetings they did review this information and just yesterday formalized a recommendation for you all to consider. So, I will get that to you here in a second. The clerk just handed out kind of your take home -- your homework for you to consider. I will run through the items in that packet, as well as a couple of things that I didn't print out for you, but I do want you to -- to be aware of and I can share it with you if you'd like. I just kind of want to go through ACHD's process to some degree. I'm not going to get into all of the detail s they do as they program, but the long story short is for roadways and intersection prioritization they have a -- a fairly detailed programming methodology that's based on cost benefit and so they have got -- this is a spreadsheet that shows the top projects in Ada County. So, this isn't just Meridian projects, so this is countywide and the far right-hand column is their adjusted cost benefit ratio. So, the higher the number the more bang for the buck you get, basically, with these projects. So, that's -- here is everything that they consider. I'm not going to go through everything, but I will just point out a few things. So, cost, obviously, we are going to do cost benefit analysis so you know how much the project is generally going to cost. Safety. Congestion. Those are biggies. Those are the two main ones. Safety and congestion. So, in the next handout that I will go through is the level of service map and that really goes to your congestion. The level of service. And, again, I will touch on that a little bit more, but you can equate this column to the col ors you will see on the level of service map and the safety is what it is, it's crashes and there is -- they assign a different dollar amount to -- if it's property damage only versus a fatality. I mean there is a scale of cost to society for those types of crashes and so, again, depending on what the situation is there. The other -- a couple of things I just want to point out. In their prior programming -- it's a little bit kind of -- ACHD technical. Again, most of the heavy lifting is done with safety and congestion. Makes sense. They will also consider, though -- and this is where we come in -- support points. So, this is where we get bonus points, if you will, up to ten points. So, our top ten projects are the most important projects that we want to influence the back end and the cost benefit, you're really looking at your top ten to 15 projects. Those are the ones that ACHD really cares about. So, I guess -- I bring that up just to say, you know, we have got 60 some projects, let's not meddle around with the 40s and 50s. I mean if there is something in there you want to move to the top 15, that's okay . Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 37 of 55 Or set it up -- top 20 even, but probably don't want to spend a whole bunch of time there talking about the difference between 38 and 39, you know. So -- and, then, they have some other things -- previous investment points. This kind of goes to corridors and I will touch about -- talk about that a little bit, too, or if they have i nvested in the corridor, Ustick. Ten Mile, those types of things, within the city limits or on the outskirts. So, just other -- other things, if you will, that are considered in their programming criteria. So, I didn't give you this in you packet, but I did just want to make you aware of -- of their project and when it says in the spreadsheet that I will show you, you know, ranked 24 out of 68 or however many they have. Seventy-eight. That that's what we are talking about. How is it scored at ACHD. So, that's kind of the order of that. Here is the level of service map that I -- that I referenced. In this one it is pretty easy to understand -- I mean red is bad, green is good and, then, you know, think of it as a scale -- a rainbow type of a scale. Orange is pretty darn bad. Yellow you're, you know, getting kind of -- not that great. Green is good. It's free flowing. So, if you look at the -- the legend a little bit more. Level of service A, B or C is free flowing traffic, basically. You will make it through a signal progression. You know, there may be other cars on the road, you can drive the speed limit, maybe even five over, you know, those types of things. So, there is really no issue. When you start to get into the D and E, again, you're looking at congestion. You may even have to wait for a light cycle, you don't make it through the first time. You're stopped, you got to make it through F. There is significant delay. So, again, it's not a report card, but it kind of is like a report card. So, the red -- the darker the color on that spectrum the worse -- the worse the functionality. So, that -- just kind of remember that as we go along here. So, that's -- again -- and that's one of the key drivers in how ACHD picks projects. How ar e vehicles moving? What's the volume to capacity ratio? What's the level or service. How are they moving. And, then, what you have also in your packet that -- again, your take-home packet is the -- the draft recommendation from the transportation commi ssion. So, before we get into the roadways and intersections list, I just kind of want to set the stage a little bit more. There will be two lists that I'm asking you to review. The first one, again, is kind of a biggie, it's roadways and intersections. It's really everything I just talked about. And, then, we have a second list of priorities and that's what they call community programs projects. Basically sidewalks, bikes, other modes. It's not meant for cars or trucks. It's for people that are trying to walk by -- get to school, those types of projects. So, sidewalk projects, crosswalks, HAWK signals, they are even getting into some things like shared lane markings, which are the sharrows and those types of things that you will see on Main Street here that, you know, encourages, you know, bicycles to ride in lane. Way finding signage with some of the green signs that say, you know, City Hall quarter mile this way or this park half a mile straight ahead. So, if you are on a bike you kind of can orient yourself. Turn here if you want to get to Storey Park or go straight if you're trying to get to the post office. That type of way finding signage can also be included in community programs. So, it's not just -- you know, basic infrastructure, it can also be other amenities that kind of make it more attractive for other modes to use that infrastructure. So, I just kind of wanted to orient you all with the two lists and with that being said I think let's just kind of dive in. So, what you will see on the draft list you have in front of you and that's on the screen there are -- we didn't reinvent the wheel and we usually don't every year. We start with what we did last year. Not a whole lot changes in 12 months. So, we used a baseline. What we did last year and what you can see in the second column, then, is last Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 38 of 55 year's rank. So, you can see at the end of the year where did this score -- where did we have it last year and, then, what's proposed this year. So, you can see, you know, not too far into that. We do get a couple few that moved down a couple here and this one there that moved up. But for the most part you won't see a whole bunch of, you know, big leaps and falls and things like that, unless something is either under construction or o n the 90 day big list or if it's a new project that's been brought to my attention. And speaking of that, I was just saying earlier how we shouldn't, you know, mess around in the 30s and 40s probably too much. But new projects -- I have this stuck at the bottom. So, if there are one of those that you say, you know, what this should start out kind of in the middle of the pack or even higher or whatever, we probably need to have that, but I don't -- I didn't -- just as a default anything new just goes to the end of the list. If you're new to the game you start at the back. So, if there is anything there you think we should start, you know, anywhere else, let me know that, too, but -- and some of these I have included not -- some of them I have included, because their level of service is starting to kind of slip a little bit. Some of them -- a couple of them I have added just so we can continue to track over the years. They may be okay now, but just to make sure that they are on our list to continue to watch and monitor, because I could see them fairly rapidly falling to a level -- they may be C now, but we are seeing a lot of activity in these areas and so to just kind of track those intersections -- it looks okay right now, but in 12 months maybe it does n't look as nice. So, again, I'm not advocating necessarily for any of those to move up any higher, but I just call that to your attention. And, then, also, just to orient you a little bit more on the spreadsheet that you have there. The first -- there are several columns are essentially in between -- so, the first column on the left is ours. That's what we get to play with. We get to rank the projects. And the last column is ours. We can kind of better explain why the project, why we think it's a good project, you know, what we are asking them to do, essentially. So, any other, you know, scope or again why we think this is a good project. Also just to clarify, since it came up yesterday and I didn't get a chance to correct it since last night, but when I call it a high priority corridor, that is as determined by ACHD commission. Doesn't necessarily mean that this Council has said it's a high priority corridor, that means something in the ACHD world. So, again, for Meridian that is a -- excuse me -- Ten Mile, Ustick, and Franklin, they have all said -- and back to that spreadsheet. I'm not going to go there, but that previous investment column, there is a thought there is once we identify these priority corridors, let's make sure we don't leave a gap in that, let's keep working on it until we get it done from A to B and so those few corridors get kind of some bonus points, because there is a regional significance if you will for them. So, again, that's just what that means in that far right-hand column. And JSD number two is Joint School District No. 2. I think everything else you should probably be able to understand if I did anything shorthand, but if not let me know. A couple of other things to call out before I open up the dialogue for whatev er you want to talk about today on this. I would like to just open this up for -- again, we don't have to discuss it now, but I want to call to your attention a couple of corridors and a couple of intersections and I want to start at Fairview and Locust Grove. So, the Fairview corridor over the past several years now has had some studies at ACHD, has taken on access management plan, corridor preservation, and really hasn't gotten any consensus from the business owners or the city on what should we do with Fairview and so just -- that's sort of just been put to the side right now and nothing's really happening that's much different. We are still trying to Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 39 of 55 implement access management policies, so we don't have 99 curb cuts every mile, but there isn't an adopted access management plan or corridor plan or anything like that official. But what is official is in ACHD's CIP right now they envision Fairview to be seven lanes wide from Boise through to Meridian Road, but really the Linder Road. It's not in CIP to Linder, but they envision seven lanes on Fairview-Cherry. So, that's something where the past Council has kind of had mixed -- again, no votes, no official stance, but it's been a mixed bag. Some, you know, okay, preserve, but not so keen on maybe building seven lanes. The reason I bring that up is because one of our higher projects there, project number six, if you look at the description it's widen the intersection to nine lanes on Fairview and seven lanes on Locust Grove. So, that's because they are anticipating seven lanes coming from Eagle down Fairview to Locust Grove. My two cents at least for that mile, seven lanes probably makes sense. We almost have seven lanes already as you leave Eagle Road and head west up to about Hickory it's already seven lanes wide and you have done -- ACHD has done a pretty good job, along with the city, of preserving the right of way needed to continue that and that's where you have a high volume is that mile segment and my opinion there is still a question there from a city standpoint do we believe that should be seven lanes coming into our downtown and to the next mile up to Meridian and Fairview. That I'm kind of riding the fence on, because I don't know -- and points further west. So, I just bring that up, becau se there could be dialogue there to be had if you all want to engage with ACHD and say, you know what, we want -- we understand seven lanes, you need that to accommodate traffic, but we don't think that's good for our community for other reasons. We think that may be bad for business or safety and people crossing three lanes to turn left, we are concerned about -- whatever those other concerns may be. So, I just call that out that that's in the CIP now and that intersection ranks fairly high and if they did the west leg of that intersection as a nine lane wide, I mean you're going to get the same thing, it's going to be really wide on that -- on that side. So, there is a Walgreens store and it uses Walgreens on the north and Barger Mattson is on the south. So, that's the intersection there. So, just along those same lines, then, the northern leg -- so, Locust Grove is planned to taper then from five lanes in the next mile from Fairview to Locust Grove -- or Fairview to Ustick, but only three lanes, then, up to Chinden. So, the next two miles it's only right now planned to be a three lane facility. I'm going to kind of put the other hat on and now go, okay, that's -- right now the traffic modeling says you don't need that, because there is not a lot of development in those two miles and the traffic patterns don't call for that even into the future. I don't know that it takes much imagination, though, to envision Eagle becoming worse and people already use Locust Grove as an alternate route to Eagle Road and particularly during the -- the peak times could be a mess. Again, the tradeoff there is you are starting to get established neighborhoods and what -- do we want to buy landscape buffers so we can move more cars or we just say, you know what, we realize this is going to not be a good situation for commuters, for a couple hours of the day, but we have made that choice that says, you know what, commuters, if you are going to choose this we think it's more important for community character and neighborhood viability with children trying to get to school and whatever else that we are going to constrain -- we want this constrained. So, it's both -- in the CIP at ACHD there is both those segments north on Locust Grove, as well as south of Victory. So, they are kind of -- you know, the end points of Locust Grove in our community are planned to taper down to three. Again, just a little bit of perspective Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 40 of 55 and history on the Council, at least as long as I have been doing transportation liaison as its relationship with the Council, generally a five lane arterial has kind of been the standard. I mean we basically have said every mile we would like to -- five lanes unless otherwise you can't do five lanes and a good example of why you couldn't do it is -- McMillan is an example of why. McMillan is only planned for three la nes at ACHD because you have got the Lemp Canal on one side, you have got the really big Idaho Power poles on the other side and if you wanted to widen that thing out to five lanes, you have got some major cost to do that. And so I haven't heard past councils say, you know what, it should be five lanes anyways. We could do it, but your -- it's -- your cost to effort ratio is going to go way down, because it's very expensive. But there are a couple of others that, you know, again -- and, again, I don't know if this is -- is the thought of everybody, but five lane arterial is kind of the standard practice. I will just also note just sort of in passing that Overland Road is also planned for seven lanes in the CIP. So, Overland, Fairview -- right now in Meridian those are the seven lane arterials and, again, we have those few segments of three lane arterial -- Victory. I'm sorry. Victory is also a three lane arterial for some segments in the CIP. Just to kind of bring those to your attention, look for that in the project description. Widened to five lanes. Widened to seven lanes. Widened -- you know. So, I just kind of call it out to you. Not all roadways are created equal and if you have seen one of those you're like why are we planning for this to be only three lanes or why are we planning it to be seven? Why shouldn't it just be a standard five lane roadway. Let's talk about that. So, I think that's -- that's pretty much it as far as background. Now, as far as significant -- so, the significant changes that I want to call out -- and you can kind of see them on your spreadsheet on your own time, but last year projects three and four you will notice are missing here. Those are Ten Mile Road projects. It's the last two miles of Ten Mile Road from Chinden to Ustick. Yesterday at the transportation commission essentially that -- that motion, recommendation was based on the level of service map, so let me go back there. If you look at the last two miles of -- of Ten Mile right now it's functioning pretty well. Said, you know what, we have other issues on Locust Grove that are failing right now, why is this a top five project and I tried to explain to them why, that we want to finish that corridor, so we aren't trying to catch up, we are trying to be a little proactive in this, the State Highway 16 connection to Chinden and the fairly new interchange still at Ten Mile. But that -- just to call it out to your attention. They moved that down, because it seems to be functioning fairly well and it is. So, that just -- again, just to kind of call that to your attention. That historically past Council has said let's finish this corridor. Let's make that a high priority project. And, again, to kind of keep those -- those couple of segments of Locust Grove that I was just talking about -- so, Locust Grove between Fairview and McMillan and then -- Fairview to Ustick and Ustick to McMillan on Locust Grove in the top 15. And, then, there were a couple projects on McMillan that also moved up. See if I can find those relatively quickly here. So, this one here -- so, basically, it's two segments of McMillan -- you know what, let me go back to level of service real quick. There is a couple of segme nts on McMillan -- so, between Linder and Meridian and Meridian and Locust Grove that as you can see again they are not doing so well. So, those moved up three, four, five slots. I can't remember now. You can see that on your spreadsheet, but the transp ortation commission said, you know what, we should -- these are top -- these weren't top 20 consideration type projects. So, they moved those up and the ones that kind of got Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 41 of 55 replaced were the Franklin Road -- the Franklin-Black Cat intersection -- sorry. I'm off the file. Franklin-Black Cat intersection and, then, widening of Franklin between Black Cat and Ten Mile. I encouraged that from them as sort of my recommendation. I mean they wanted to move McMillan up and I said, well, if you want to -- we got to get something out of the top 15, then, if you want those in. Those are federal aid projects that are going to move forward probably regardless of what we say. The ball is rolling on that. Design is done. They are using federal dollars that's in -- long range transportation plan funds are there. So, I don't think -- and we didn't take it off the list, it just moved out of the top 20. So, it's not like it's -- we are saying don't do it, we are just saying it's not a top priority project for us, so -- and the reason that's a priority project for the region, just a little bit more background on it. If there is an incident on the interstate, Franklin Road is your detour route. So, they want to have Franklin -- well, the service map looks great and that's fine, but when there is an incident on the interstate and get people off at Ten Mile Road and have to use that as a detour route, you want to make sure you can accommodate those cars, because it's the de facto interstate. So, anyways, that's -- I think on roadway projects -- and, again, I'm not expecting -- if you have any comments now we can take them. I'm just really trying to get you comfortable, so you can do your homework and if you have any comments or things you want me to look into the next week or two, we can do that. But that's the roadways and intersections kind of background information and I would stand for any questions or comments at this point in time. Milam: Mr. President? Bird: Any questions? Milam: I do. Bird: Mrs. Milam. Milam: Caleb, so as far as these colors go, do you know -- and I see they correspond with the letter grade, but when and how they came up with these? These are -- some of these roads I travel regularly and I completely disagree. Hood: Mr. President? Councilwoman Milam, I can explain it, but Justin can do a lot better job of explaining it than I can. Lucas: Mr. Mayor, Members of the Council, Justin Lucas, Ada County Highway District. Business address is 3775 Adams Street, Garden City, Idaho. So, this -- what you're looking at is a peak hour level of service map and we use the p.m. peak, which is the 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. time frame and so that's the -- and the grade is based on actual counts that are taken and the counts are, then, compared to the number of lanes available for travel and so there is thresholds and once those thresholds are crossed the -- that's how the grade is established. For example, if you have a five lane roadway, let's just say, you know, in that peak hour you can expect to get, you know, 500 cars through that lane of traffic times the different -- the amount of lanes and when you go -- and 500 is -- if you can Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 42 of 55 do 500 you're a B. If you get to 700 you're a C, if you get to 800 you're at D, and so forth. And so that's the basic way it's calculated. Is it a perfect system? No. Are you going to periodically experience delays that are, you know, on green -- in green areas that -- that you think, well, I experienced delay here. Sure. It's very possible that -- and why that happens is because, you know, traffic flows in all different directions and maybe there was a detour route or a construction project that's pushing people that way one day. It's -- it's a large system and so this is our best way we can to try and -- at least in a snapshot show how it's operating, but I can -- that's kind of how we do it and I can certainly answer questions about any specifics that you might have. Milam: Mr. President? The specific segment that I'm -- that I travel daily that -- the traffic backs up on Meridian Road between Fairview and Ustick, all the way from Fairview to Ustick and it -- I mean it's several lights that you have to sit through. For me to get from here to home, which is about two miles away, three miles away, two and a half, during p.m. traffic is about 30 minutes. Lucas: So, in that specific situation what you -- you have a -- I would say that intersection there of Meridian and Ustick is what's causing most of the -- of the issue and you can see that's shown operation I believe at a level of service E, which is close to failing and that project is scheduled and so the segments what's happening is -- there is two different things there. The segment has a threshold and sometimes the segment may show us doing okay, but the intersection is what's causing the problem and so that's -- the count if you're just -- you know, you see the tube counters going across there, it's counting the amount of cars and going that seems okay. But, then, it doesn't -- it's just a counter. It can't recognize that the intersection is clogging everything up and that's why that many cars can only get through there. And so, fortunately, that project is -- I believe scheduled for construction pretty soon here. Hood: 2019 or 2020. Milam: A long ways away. Lucas: Well -- Hood: It's in design right now. Lucas: Yeah. There is the time frame of -- in my world I will tell you that's pretty darn quick. But I understand for the daily driver that is -- that is an issue. But as you know there is -- that project is being combined with the two road segments. So, we are actually building the intersection and the two Ustick segments all at the same time. Hood: I'm sorry, I misspoke. I thought you were talking about the Meridian Road segment. Justin is more -- that is -- yeah, the intersection and the mile is this summer is what is anticipated -- Lucas: Yeah. That's -- Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 43 of 55 Hood: Meridian is what I was referring to when I said 2019 or 2020. Milam: And it shows it yellow, which would -- I'm like -- at least should be orange, so -- Lucas: Well -- and, you know, it's possible, but it's just a matter of how counts are done and things like that. But I hope that helps answer the question. You know, these are -- Milam: And maybe the intersection will help. Lucas: I think it will. That intersection we have seen, at least historically, when we are able to do an intersection project it can relieve quite a bit of congestion, because if you get right turn lanes and double lefts in there, man, you can move a lot more cars through the intersection, because you get everybody who is turning out of the way. So, that's the concept behind it. Milam: Thank you. Bird: Any other questions for Justin? Cavener: Mr. President? Question either for Justin or Caleb. When we look at these how do -- I mean there is some -- there is some streets in here that part are in Boise, part are in Meridian. As far as our preference on those, do these -- do those preferences need to be ranked in conjunction with the city of Boise? I mean how does -- how does something like that work? Hood: Mr. President, Councilman Cavener, I'm just going through the list and, really, on the north side of the freeway we are in pretty good shape really. I mean Fairview being the exception if you want to go to seven lanes. We would need to coordinate with them. But, again, in front of The Village you have it. Cavener: Sure. Hood: And that's pretty much Meridian -- where Meridian ends. So, I don't know that we need to coordinate much there with them. Historically we haven't coordinated all that much as far as segments and this process. We do coordinate with them on the corridor and corridor planning, so Emerald, Pine, Executive, you know, Fairview Avenue, you know, we do some -- we talk that way, but we haven't -- through ACHD's programming and prioritization process, if we both said, you know what, Overland -- and even that is not a very good example. I guess the first one would be Victory. You know, we would coordinate with them potentially and if they said, yeah, you know, a section of that is in Meridian, would you give us 20 points, Justin, if it was number one in each city? I don't know. I think it's capped at ten, so -- they do list it, though, on their -- on their projects, you know, B slash M, Boise and Meridian, and both are on the project team, so Ustick Road when that's widened, someone representing Boise is there, I'm there and it's a different need. But we haven't gotten to that for prioritization. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 44 of 55 Cavener: Okay. Lucas: And I can just add, there is a -- you know, ACHD is the common point between the two agencies and the staff that works on creating this plan does coordinate directly with each community and if there is an issue that arises where a city is prioritizing something that's way out of whack with another, we could rate that -- Cavener: Okay. Lucas: -- and say what is the right way to go about doing this. Cavener: Thank you. Bird: Any other questions? Thank you. Just a statement regarding that, Luke. That's why it's nice to have one highway district in a county, instead of seven or 11 like Canyon county does. You -- you drive to one corner and it's nice and, then, you got potholes the next one. Cavener: Don't disagree. Bird: So -- Caleb, I take it you would like us to look this over and come back by at least the 22nd with some ideas so we can get that letter to them by April 1st, because we will not be meeting the 29th, so -- Hood: Is the 22nd -- yeah. Bird: I would say we'd have to do that the 22nd. Is that okay, Council? Cavener: Yep. Bird: Okay. Get your comments into Caleb and we will come back with a plan the 22nd. Hood: Mr. President? Before I move on, just a couple more things. I just want to -- you have it here, but I want to touch on community programs just really quickly. Before I go there, I would just -- my -- you can do it however you want. Level of service. Look at the spreadsheet. Look at the information. ACHD asked for j ust -- it's the I drive this, it should be higher. You don't need to worry so much about the numbers, they do -- they worry about the numbers. What do we want to have -- play politics here a little bit. What do you want to see as -- are important projects for our community, so -- now, community programs. From last year again same -- same story. We used 2015 as a baseline for drafting 2016. Really, the only changes you're over are -- again, some are roadways -- near the back are new projects from community members that have e-mailed or called me or the Mayor's office and I add them to the list or I found out about it through the school district or somebody else. So, if you look at projects number 33 through 42, those are new. So, if you think those should be somewhere else on the list, please, give some Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 45 of 55 numbers and we can move them up or down or whatever. Again, the other changes are -- they are under construction or were built this last year. I proposed we move them off the list and the commission yesterday made one change to projects number -- what are shown as 26 and 27. Those were previously 15 and 16. Other than that it's pretty much the same list that we saw last year. With that, Mr. President, thank you. Bird: Thank you, Caleb, very much. Next one. Review and approve. Brian, I think that's you or is that Caleb, too? Hood: That was the one we just did. So, we are on C. C. Community Development: Blackrock Subdivision, ACHD and City Property Annexations Bird: Oh, I'm sorry. The Blackrock Subdivision and that's CaIeb. I'm one behind. McClure: Mr. President, thank you. I'm here this afternoon, this evening, to briefly bring Council up to date on the city initiated annexation project. This is for your information with no request, but I would, of course, be happy to take any comments or requests as part of this. So, last year City Council approved a small budget for a city initiated annexation project. Part of this was a request for staff to reduce and prevent enclaves within the city and the other was to close the loop on a 2005 agreement . That agreement allowed the Blackrock Subdivision in south Meridian to develop in the county with city services. Staff is proposing three property types for this annexation project. This includes a number of ACHD sites throughout Meridian. A city-owned property that's not within the city. And, then, of course, the Blackrock Subdivision. This is a category B annexation. All these properties are contiguous and either have or expected to provide consent. Currently ACHD is having that conversation currently and has not gotten back to us quite yet. The city property, of course, once we annex it that is adjacent to Heroes Park. It has a pathway on it. And, then, the Blackrock Subdivision consented through development with city services has a recorded agreement consenting to annexation, was noted in their CC&Rs and was recorded with each parcel in the subdivision. So, next steps for this. We are going to have legal descriptions created for these, which we have to have as part of the staff report. We will hold an open house with the Blackrock property owners. That's tentatively scheduled for May 23rd. We will prepare a staff report and formal application for the formal public hearing and, then, potentially next year we will look at some additional map cleanups, things like the Idaho Power property there surrounded by city, but aren't part of the city. Lastly, I have provided a handout to you all and it has a timeline schedule on it. I do have some images for each of these properties if you're interested, but, otherwise, I would be happy to stand for questions or any comments. Bird: Council, any questions or comments regarding this for Brian? Go forward, Brian. McClure: Thank you. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 46 of 55 D. Community Development: Letter Requesting Joint Meeting With the Ada County Board of Commissioners Bird: Thank you. Okay. The letter. Is that you again, Caleb? Hood: Yes, it is. Mr. President. So, not much has changed. If you will recall about a month ago I was before you and we pushed out the potential signature of the letter to ask for a meeting with the Board of Ada County Commissioners. You all on your schedule should have April 6th in the afternoon kind of penciled in for that meeting. If we send this letter, that would somewhat officially, you know, trigger that 30 day meeting and, again, we are right in that time frame now, so if you're so inclined. I have not heard any proposed changes to the letter since you all saw it last month, so I guess I would just stand for -- at your direction and if you want to sign the letter I do have a signature sheet here that we can -- we can route this evening. If you still want to wait we can do that, too. So, Mr. President, that's my update. Bird: Council, what's your pleasure? Do you want to go forward with it? Let's sign the letter and get it sent? That would be my preference. Joe? Cavener: Pass it around. Borton: I had -- Mr. President? Bird: Yes. Borton: I had raised some question on the letter -- at least the contents at least for discussion. I'm just trying to find the language that I would ask Caleb about. Hood: So, Mr. President, while Mr. Borton is looking -- Bird: Yes. Hood: -- for more specifics, we did talk about impact fees a little bit and that element potentially being discussed with them. I did -- I kind of deflected that question over to our legal team and said, hey, can you look at this and the language in the letter. They were comfortable with -- with just kind of leaving it pretty high level at this point for the letter. I would advise that if we do have that meeting that we probably have just an internal meeting between now and then, maybe at your next workshop or something to just sort of make sure we are all on the same page or at least understand the point of this meeting and can -- you know, what are we asking them potentially to do with impact fees or not and -- or do we want to just do that -- you know, not knowing how you all think about that together or not or is it parks, but not police, or is it police and fire, but not parks or -- so -- and I really am ignorant and don't even know how to go about really finding about a lot of information about how -- it's allowed in state code or how that works. I had heard that the city of Boise had or has historically had the county collect a parks impact fee for them, but how that's structured and the accounting and all that, I don't know how that works. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 47 of 55 Bird: Mr. Nary, have you got any status on that? Nary: Mr. President, Members of the Council, I mean it is really -- and I think Caleb hit it on the head. I mean we really left it in the discussion for the elected s to talk about for -- because it really is a direction from the commissioners to their staff and the same -- they certainly raised their concerns as to why they don't prefer to collect these fees. They -- fire is probably the one that they are the least concerned about. But the reality is this is future growth. That's the purpose of these fees is to deal with the growth that occurs both within the city limits and outside the city limits that our future city -- going to be future city residents. So, I mean I think we want to leave it to you folks and really see where they go. We have had plenty of discussions at the staff level regarding these type of fees and why they choose to do what they do. So, we have left it for you folks to see how the commissioners -- since there is different people since we have had this di scussion a number of years ago, there may be a different perspective. Bird: Joe. Borton: Mr. President. The impart fee language I don't see in the letter. Bird: It is. It's down right towards -- the next to the last paragraph -- next to the last paragraph. Hood: Again, it's very high level. It doesn't get into a lot of details. Borton: Okay. So, that language I don't have any problem with being in the letter. I may have concern that -- whether the city could, even if it -- or should even if it could. Bird: I agree with you. Borton: Or have the -- request the county to collect the impact fees. The other -- I know it's a -- it's a discussional meeting. There is a sentence -- and I understand the intent of it in the third paragraph that says Meridian would like all commercial development applications proposed on the property contiguous to seek approval from the city. I don't know how you can do that, one, but I think truly it's just to have us talk about that concept. Because really at the meeting -- or we come into the meeting making that overt request that we now as a city want to be the land use approving agency for a county application? Understanding that it's adjacent and may become city, is that what we are asking with tha t sentence? Hood: Mr. President, you all are the policy makers, so that's up to you. If you want my opinion, yes, we are asking that. This is eligible for annexation by state code. It's within our area of impact, why shouldn't they be annexed and dev elop within the City of Meridian? Why should the county be the lead agency if, in fact, they are eligible for annexation? Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 48 of 55 Borton: Mr. President? Bird: Mr. Borton. Borton: And the reason for the concern is if I'm the property owner and I simply say I don't want to, whether it's good planning to be in the city or not, I want to go through the county and that's my choice. I don't want to annex. If the property owner wants to go that route, that's where I -- I understand the discussion. It would be an interesting discussion. I'm not so sure how the city truly has a proper role in kind of dictating the county's land use process. I understand the planning intent. But if the private property owner doesn't want to, then, it remains still county ground, obviously. But it's still worthy of discussion. I just thought that that sentence -- Hood: And, again, that's up to you if you want to -- Borton: -- a really strong position that we have determined we want to do that. Hood: I will just -- if I may -- and I won't advocate for the city anymore, Mr. President and Councilman Borton. There is a line there. I think from my perspective what I see is we do get projects -- and not every day, but they are out there that aren't in alignment with our Comprehensive Plan and county properties that are developed and, then, they don't come into the city, maybe ever, and we end up with Swiss cheese and it's not -- it prohibits the orderly development of our city, because now we can't get to the other side of t hat property and someone that maybe wants and needs our services now is blocked, because somebody that was eligible didn't take advantage, if you will , of coming into the city and, again, they develop at a more rural level of development than urban level o f development that is on the other side of them. So, that's just my -- and, again, I'm not -- it's your guys' call. I'm just -- from my perspective as staff, we get these outliers that are like why do we have these continuous landscape buffers and all of a sudden you have got nothing in front of that property. Well, they developed in the county. Borton: Caleb -- Mr. President. Bird: Go ahead, Mr. Borton. Borton: Caleb, I appreciate the perspective and do understand. I -- maybe it's a discussion for another day. Legally -- Mr. Nary can provide input if that's even an option. Can a -- can a city control and direct and approve a land use application that's not within its boundaries? It seems to be that's what it's effectively asking them. We would approve property that is not coming to the city. Nary: Mr. President, Members of the Council, Council Member Borton, I guess that's not the way I understood that request. The request is to direct them back to the city. We are not going to have you develop in the county. You're in the city's area of impact, you're within their Comprehensive Plan, you need to go to them. If they won't accept you -- Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 49 of 55 Borton: Okay. Nary: -- then you can come back to us and maybe I can -- but that was my understanding of where we were going, because, you're right, we can't direct property that's not within the city, but we are asking the county to direct them back to us. Borton: Okay. Hood: If I can just clarify to make sure we are still speaking the same language. If they wouldn't accept an application to development commercially on property that's eligible for annexation in Meridian without coming to Meridian first to say have you applied to the City of Meridian? Has the City of Meridian said, no, you bette r go develop in the county or something. That's, essentially, what the request is. Bird: Okay. I misunderstood it, too. Okay. Any other deals? Shall we get the thing signed tonight and get it sent? Are you okay with it now? Everybody? Go ahead, let's get the letter done, then, and get her taken care of. E. Public Works: City Code Update - Winter Average Application to Commercial Accounts Bird: Okay. Public Works. City code update. Is that you, Kyle? Radek: Yes, sir. Bird: Good man. Radek: Wow, that's not the way it showed up on -- Mr. President, Council Members. This is a -- kind of a continuation of a report I brought to you -- Bird: Name. Radek: Oh. Kyle Radek. Assistant city engineer. I brought you a report about three and a half months ago and this is a continuation -- basically said, yeah, go do some more work on it, come back to us. So, I'm going to -- the objective of what I want to present today is to maintain fair billing for water and sewer services and my agenda is I'm going to review the current sewer billing practices, residential versus commercial, and, then, I'm going to review the problems I presented to you three and a half months ago. A couple of you weren't part of the Council at that time and may or may not have been in the audience and -- anyway. And, then, I'm going to tell you what the proposed code update is. So, for residents in your -- you probably all are aware of this, but for our residents we use a winter average calculation to determine what sewer you're going to pay -- you're going to pay a maximum of in the summertime, so between November and March the average use during that time puts a cap on the sewer -- on the amount that is used to calculate the sewer bill for the rest of the -- rest of the year. And for commercial we don't do that. The code says we can't do that. So, for commercial accounts, except for where we make Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 50 of 55 exceptions, the commercial accounts pay all year for whatever -- according to what -- what they are consuming in whatever month. So, unlike a -- unlike a residential account, who may use twice as much water in the summertime and only pay for that base rate that they are -- they are consuming in the wintertime -- are you going to help me out there? Are you trying? Yeah. The commercial account user is paying based on their water consumption all year -- all year long. So, the problem we run into sometimes is that some commercial accounts really have the same use pattern as residential. In fact, some commercial accounts are in buildings that used to be residences, especially in downtown. So, they start watering lawn in the summertime using city water, they use more water, so it's appropriate and fair to bill them using that winter average and that's what we have been doing. Only found out recently that our city code doesn't allow us to do that. So, the solution to that problem is simply to update our code to allow applicable commercial accounts to bill using that winter average and we have about a hundred accounts right now where we say, yeah, put them on a winter average and so we can -- we cannot be billing them for sewer they are not using. So, that's our first recommendation. And when I came to you three and a half months ago I had a -- I had a different recommendation on this problem, too, and we have since changed. That's pretty much my fault. I had a good -- I thought I had a good recommendation and I'm going to explain why it turns out that it's probably not the best thing. So, the second problem is we have a lot of accounts that have things like cooling towers, pools, fountains like you see at The Village, and those are -- we call those consumptive uses and that water doesn't go down the sewer either. That water evaporates into the air. So, when we ha ve that -- and they are commercial accounts, so they are getting billed according to the water that goes in. Now, the water goes in and it doesn't all go down the sewer, some of it goes into the air and they don't get kind of credit for that. So, the current practice to -- to account for that problem is to provide an opportunity for them to proof that they have consumptive use and they can do that either by putting out a new city service out there and saying, okay, I'm going to establish a new city service that's only going to my -- to my sprinkler or it's only going to my pool or it's only going to my water feature and so all the water that goes there we are not going to charge sewer on. And the other alternative is they can track the consumptive use on a private meter on their side and they can request a billing adjustment, so -- and that's the most common with our -- we have cooling towers for commercial users and they have meters on their side anyway, so they -- and they -- they are constantly maintaining those cooling towers, so they have good records of what water went into the cooling tower. So, it's appropriate and works very well that they can submit a billing adjustment request to us every year and say, hey, this year we evaporated 300,000 gallon s of water and we want the money that you charged us for sewer back on those 300,000 gallons and that works. I previously -- three and a half months ago our proposed solution was that the city required new commercial buildings to provide those separate se rvices for those consumptive uses and we went back and workshopped that a little and I will take the blame for that, because -- because Karie and I looked at that, we do the billing adjustment requests. It's a little bit of a headache for us, and the pros of doing that we see right here, we get more accurate billing and it will get automatically more accurate . We wouldn't have the administrative burden of doing billing adjustments. So, we thought, well, that's good. We workshopped this a little further and looked at the cost of -- of the consumer, the developer doing the initial plumbing upgrade to account for the different uses and Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 51 of 55 found that the payback on say if we had -- we had two examples, like an apartment complex with a pool would -- would get a benefit in sewer billing each year of about 150 bucks if they put a separate meter on that pool. But the meter for that pool -- two inch meter costs them 3,000 bucks to put in and there is some more plumbing involved. So, the payback on the -- the pool is about 24 years and in that 24 years the operating costs for the customer and for water operations has increased, too, because we got another meter out there. So -- so, that kind of took the benefits away and resolved us to we think the better solution -- and the other issue is that the winter average solution we just talked about may solve many of those -- those problems with the -- with the consumptive uses. You know, if we can put them on a winter average and they are only using their fountain in the summertime, then, it's going to wash out and is going to be fair billing without having to track things separate. So, the current proposed solution after the workshop is -- is not to change the code about the separate service requirement. However, what we would like to do is include in our design standards the -- just to bring it up for the design for somebody who is designing a campus or a building, say, hey, look, you should consider and evaluate the benefits of whether you ought to have a separate service or not and leave it up to the consumer and the developer of whether they want to bear the cost up front or in the rear trying to get an adjust ment request. And so the code change that Andrea helped us with, I believe you have in your packets the draft of the entire code. If not I have got a copy of it. This is the basic language here that says for commercial accounts they may be eligible for the winter average sewer fee calculation if it's appropriate and the people that are going to determine whethe r it's appropriate or not are to be designated by the director and depending on what your comments are here and your direction, Mike Pepin has a -- a possible code change coming up for this same section regarding the equivalent residential unit calculation s and if Council wanted to move forward with this proposed change we would say we would like to wait until Mike comes forward with -- with that other section change, which is probably going to happen in the next few weeks and we would do them both together . So, unless you need some more information or would like some more time to read that and, then, I don't know if I got any nods showing that you had that in your packet or not -- Bird: We do. Radek: -- that draft. Okay. Happy to stand for any questions you might have. Bird: Council, any questions for Kyle or comments? Radek: I know it's one of the more exciting topics you have heard about tonight, so -- Bird: Well, Kyle, my two cents worth is if Mike's going to bring another change in, I'd just as soon we look at both of them at the same time and if you would ask Mike and yourself to get -- get us out the copies at least a week ahead of time, so we will have time to read them over and be halfway knowledgeable by the time we come and discuss it and, then, we won't have to wait three or four weeks to pass them. Radek: Mr. President, absolutely. Okay. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 52 of 55 Bird: That would be my preference. Council? Cavener: Great. Mr. President, I would echo that. A question if I may. Bird: Yes, Mr. Cavener. Cavener: Kyle, ballpark for a commercial entity to establish a new city service, what -- in your proposal, I mean what -- what's a ballpark cost on something like that? Radek: Mr. President, Council Member Cavener, in our example with the pool, a two inch -- two inch commercial meter construction, you're looking at about 3,000 bucks and, then, whatever plumbing it takes. Cavener: Sure. Radek: So, depending on whether you have got to plumb all the way to a cooling tower or you're going to a pool, you could be talking about hundreds to thousands there. So, in our example we had a -- I think it was 3,000 for the two inch service and, then, we added maybe 500 more for plumbing to the pool, so -- so, it's -- it's probably across the board, but that is just an example. Cavener: Fair enough. Thank you. Bird: Any other comments? Thank you, Kyle. Radek: Thank you. Item 8: Ordinances A. Ordinance No. 16-1674: An Ordinance of the City of Meridian Granting Annexation and Zoning for a Parcel Located in Government Lot 4 of Section 1, Township 3 North, Range 1 West, Boise, Ada County, Idaho, Which contains 15.75 acres Known as Creason Creek (AZ 15-009) Generally Located Near the Southeast Corner of N. Linder Road and W. Ustick Road, Meridian, Idaho; and Providing an Effective Date Bird: Okay. That brings us to 8-A, the ordinance. If you would, Madam Clerk, please, read that by title only. Holman: Thank you, President Bird. Now that I have been demoted b ack to clerk. Bird: I almost said it again, so you weren’t. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 53 of 55 Holman: City of Meridian Ordinance No. 16-1674: An Ordinance AZ 15-009, Creason Creak, for annexation and rezone of a parcel located in Government Lot 4, Section 1, Township 3 North, Range 1 West, Boise meridian, Ada County, Idaho, as described in Attachment A and annexing certain lands and territories situated in Ada County, Idaho, and adjacent and contiguous to the corporate limits of the City of Meridian, as requested by the City of Meridian, establishing and determining the land use zoning classification of said lands from RUT to R-8, Medium High Density Residential District, in the Meridian City Code, providing that copies of this ordinance shall be filed with the Ada County assessor, the Ada County recorder, and the Idaho State Tax Commission, as required by law, and providing for a summary of the ordinance and providing for a waiver of the reading rule and providing an effective date. Bird: I don't think anybody wants to read this -- or hear this in its entirety, as was only read by -- anybody want it read in its entirety? Council, I would entertain a motion. Milam: Mr. President? Bird: Mrs. Milam. Milam: I move that we approve Ordinance No. 16-1674 with suspension of rules. Cavener: Second. Bird: Council, you have heard Ordinance 16-1674 please vote, Madam Clerk. Roll Call: Bird, yea; Borton, yea; Milam, yea; Cavener, yea; Palmer, yea; Little Roberts, yea. MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES. Item 9: Future Meeting Topics Bird: Any future topics, Council, that you can think of? Cavener: Mr. President? Not necessarily a topic, but I know that we don't have it on our agenda, some department updates, so if I may, I just would like to remind everyone that we have been advised to participate in the Speed of Trust workshop put on by Human Resources and the Fire Department. I would encourage you to fill out your -- your surveys and answer them honestly with as much detail as possible and that we should be expecting some requests from some of the area directors. I encourage you to send the request to all the directors as well so we have full participation. Item 10: Executive Session as per Idaho State Code 74-206(f) – To Consider and Advise Its Legal Representatives in Pending Litigation Bird: Thank you. Hearing no other comments, Item No. 10 is Executive Session. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 54 of 55 Milam: Mr. President? Bird: Mrs. Milam. Milam: I move that we go into Executive Session as per Idaho State Code 74-206(1)(f). Borton: Second. Bird: Madam Clerk. Roll Call: Bird, yea; Borton, yea; Milam, yea; Cavener, yea; Palmer, yea; Little Roberts, yea. MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES. EXECUTIVE SESSION: (6:04 p.m. to 6:26 p.m.) Bird: Council, I would entertain a motion to come out of Executi ve Session. Milam: So moved. Cavener: Second. Bird: All in favor? MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES. Bird: I would entertain a motion to adjourn. Milam: So moved. Cavener: Second. Bird: All in favor? MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES. Bird: We are adjourned. MEETING ADJOURNED AT 6:26 P.M. Meridian City Council Workshop March 8, 2016 Page 55 of 55 (AUDIO RECORDING ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) PRESID T EITH BIRD ATTEST: rl,D JAYCEE QDLIVIAN, CITY CLERKS - J G. !' p�