HomeMy WebLinkAbout2016-06-07 BudgetBUDGET WORKSHOP AGENDA
City Council Chambers
33 East Broadway Avenue
Meridian, Idaho
Tuesday, June 7, 2016 at 1:00 PM
1. Roll -Call Attendance
_ Anne Little Roberts Arrived at 1:35 PM X Joe Borton
Ty Palmer X Keith Bird
Genesis Milam X Luke Cavener
® Mayor Tammy de Weerd®
2. Adoption of the Agenda Adopted
3. City of Meridian FY2017 Budget Presentation Workshop
Recessed from 3:00 i
Adjourned •
Meridian City Council Meeting Agenda Tuesday, June 7, 2016 — Page 1 of 1
All materials presented at public meetings shall become property of the City of Meridian.
Anyone desiring accommodation for disabilities related to documents and/or hearing,
please contact the City Clerk's Office at 888-4433 at least 48 hours prior to the public meeting.
Meridian City Council - Budget Workshop June 7, 2016
A Budget Workshop meeting of the Meridian City Council was called to order at
1:00 p.m., Tuesday, June 7, 2016, by Mayor Tammy de Weerd.
Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, Keith Bird, Genesis Milam, Ty
Palmer, Luke Cavener, Joe Borton and Anne Little Roberts
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
_X Mayor Tammy de Weerd
De Weerd: Okay. I will go ahead and start our special meeting. For the record it
is a budget workshop. It's Tuesday, June 7th. It's 1:00 o'clock. Can you hear
us? Well, regardless. It is Tuesday. It is the 7th of June and it is a few minutes
after 1:00. We will start with roll call attendance and I -- I will do it if you would
like me to, Madam Clerk.
Item 2: Adoption of the Agenda
De Weerd: Item 2 is adoption of the agenda.
Bird: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Bird.
Bird: I move we adopt the agenda as published.
Borton: Second.
De Weerd: I have a motion and a second to adopt the agenda as published. All
those in favor say aye. All ayes. Motion carried.
MOTION CARRIED: FIVE AYES. ONE ABSENT.
Item 3: City of Meridian FY2017 Budget Presentation Workshop
De Weerd: Item 3 is our budget presentation workshop. So, we will start with
Todd giving an overview of the materials that you have in front of you and, then,
will kick us off with our budget presentation.
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 2 of 72
Lavoie: Thank you, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council. First off we want to
thank you for attending today's meeting. Again, you know you have busy work
schedules and, again, we appreciate your time here. The first thing we want to
bring to your attention is -- everybody receive the itinerary for today and
tomorrow that's been presented to you? You have also been presented with
some amended documents that we would like for you to acknowledge and put
into your budget workbook. I'm going to hand this off to Jenny, she's going to --
she's going to hold your hand and tell you where the documents go and, then,
after that we will jump into the first presentation of the day.
Fields: Okay. Mayor and Members of the Council, we have in front of you what's
changed since I delivered the budget binder book. First item is the General Fund
budget summary sheet that you will find in your tab under summary tab and the
old one you can rip and replace or write old over it. The new is right in front of
you called FY-17 General Fund Budget Request Summary.
Borton: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Borton:
Borton: Real quick, what changed on it? I have marked up the old one.
Fields: Yeah. So, what's changed is City Hall -- the replacement -- part of the
replacement, 12,486 dollars has been removed from their building maintenance
replacement request. The other item is under Other Government and this -- the
removal of 44,930 -- 4,934 dollars under old city hall building replacement, that
has been removed. Also under Council's budget, the iPad replacement of 800
dollars has been removed. That's what changed in the summary sheet.
Borton: Thank you.
Fields: You're welcome. The next item is the unfunded enhancements and
replacements. That you will find under your supporting document tab, as well as
the new replacement sheet that's also under supporting document tab.
De Weerd: This is just to reemphasize that we need a different sound system in
Council Chambers. So, just make sure -- so, by doing that you need to make
sure that you have the microphone right in front of you. Right?
Fields: Do you guys have any more questions? Okay.
Lavoie: All right. So, thank you, Jenny. So, those are the changes that we have
established since May 31st when we delivered the book to you. What we will do
is we will go ahead and start off with the first presentation of the day on the
agenda and what I will do is I will present to you what our goal is for the next two
days. Again, our goal is to make the next two days informative and productive
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 3 of 72
for the Council. Again, our agenda for -- my agenda for my presentation is we
are going to present the fiscal year 2017 budget process overview. We are going
to discuss how we got here today and what will be presented to you over the next
two days. We will discuss what is needed as a Council between today and July
20th. We will provide an overview of the fiscal year 2017 Mayor's budget
proposal, which has been presented to you in the budget book and, then, finally,
we will present to you some property tax considerations that we presented during
our budget roadshow in April. So, fiscal year 2017 budget process overview.
How did we get here today? In February the Finance Department delivered the
first budget draft to all the departments for the base budget discussions. Then
during March, if you remember, the Mayor, the departments, the Finance
Department, and Council, we all met in the Mayor's conference room all
throughout March and discussed the base budget detail reports in detail for every
line item for each department. As we discussed those base budget line items,
we determined what was established for the departments for the current level of
service and the cost for those current levels of service. When we left those
meetings as a group we decided that those departments budgets were sound
and fundable at that moment in time. In April we presented to you what we
called the budget roadshow. We discussed the compensation for the city. We
discussed the benefits of the city, what we are facing and we also discussed the
property tax calculations and the three percent allowable calculation discussion
as well. So, this here is a -- just a snapshot of all the items that we have
accomplished. Again, I don't expect you to see this, but I just want to show you,
the staff, the Council, the Mayor, everybody's put in a lot of time to get to where
we are. Again, this just shows you all the accomplishments that we as a city
have established to get to where we are today. So, I wanted to take the time
here to say thank you to the Mayor, to the departments, department directors and
staff, and thank the Council members. Thank Jenny and the rest of the Finance
team for all the time, the effort, the help and the work that we have put in to
getting to where we are today. It's definitely a team effort. It takes everybody to
get this budget where it's at and we are proud to say we have a balanced budget
presented to you, Council, as of today. So, now that we know how we got here,
let's see what will be presented to you over the next two days. The departments
will be presenting what they have accomplished with their budget dollars
provided to them this fiscal year, a term that we are calling budget dollars at
work. The departments will also acknowledge their accomplishments achieved
over the past few years. You will also hear from the departments discussing their
perspective on the enhancements that have been presented to you in the budget
book as is and, then, the departments will also give you a sneak peek on what
we are calling the road ahead. The expenses that we are going to be presenting
to you for the next few years. Over the next two days you will see that the
General Fund and Enterprise Fund. We will present 77 enhancements to you.
Again, all those enhancements are provided to you in a book. You will also hear
a term called funded and unfunded. Right now the budget as presented to you
has all funded enhancements and so a balanced budget, but there is also a list of
enhancements that we are calling unfunded. Jenny mentioned that report to you
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 4 of 72
a little bit earlier. You did a supplement on that. It's the unfunded list. Right
now it's about two million dollars and we will discuss that a little bit more in detail.
What we will not discuss in detail will be the base budgets, the line items. We
discussed those during March in all of our meetings. So, again, we will most
likely be skipping those items unless you have an item of concern, we will
discuss it, but for the most part we will not discuss individual line items in detail
during the next two days. So, again, the unfunded list. This is what -- this was
provided to you by Jenny a few minutes ago. This represents the items that were
presented to the Mayor for her consideration for her budget, but did not make it
into the final budget due to funding again. So, these items are still outstanding,
looking for funding. If we don't fund them this year, then, most likely they will be
presented to you in following years for consideration. So, as you can see there is
about two million dollars outstanding in what we call the unfunded list. So, as we
continue the budget process overview, we need to let you know what we expect
from you between today and July 20th. We as the staff members are here to
answer any questions. We are here to clarify any inquiries that you have and we
are asking you to work amongst us and yourselves to get those answers, to get
those clarifications between now and July 20th. On July 20th we will have our
third workshop and at that workshop we want to leave that workshop with a
balanced fiscal year '17 -- 2017 budget. So, again, we have 40 some odd days
between now and then to engage us, to work with us and to make sure that we
get all the answers that you need, so that you're comfortable with the 2017
budget at the end of July 20th. So, that was the process that we got to today.
These are the big -- this is here -- this here is the budget proposal that you have
been presented in book form on May 31st. As you requested we presented and
developed a balanced budget with the zero percent allowable tax. Also, as you
recommended, we presented this budget with a three percent merit market for
wages. So, right now for the total city we are looking at a 91.6 million dollar
budget. Right now that's up 16.7 percent year over year as of today. Our total
base budget is at 54 million dollars. That's up 7.3 percent year over year as of
today. Now, the base budget is a number that we really want to -- we focus on in
Finance, because that's your current level of service cost. When we made the
marks we determined what the cost was for current level of service and we went
through all the line items. This year determined the current level of cost for the
city is 54 million dollars right now. We really want to focus -- we focus on that,
because that's our ongoing needs for the city. So, with that we have ongoing
needs from a revenue standpoint. So, with this increase we will need to increase
our revenue streams in other avenues. So, property tax, three percent allowable,
we need to take into consideration if we continue to increase the base budget for
the current level of service. So, this year breaks down the 91 million into our two
major funding groups, General Fund and Enterprise Fund. Again, the numbers
are represented there. Again, we are -- Finance we focus on the base budget,
because that's our ongoing base needs. Next year it will most likely be that
number or a little bit higher. So, with that we will most li kely need a little bit more
revenue tax. So, again, we just want to make sure that we understand if this
goes up we have to look at revenue sources as well. So, property tax
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 5 of 72
considerations. We presented these next few slides to you in April during our
roadshow, so this is kind of a recap of what we presented to you. So, again,
property tax considerations. We just want to bring it back to you, so we can
show you why we believe we need to exercise the need for a three percent
property tax. Compensation. We need to be able to fund a competitive
compensation plan for the city staff members. We need to provide our
employees with a viable benefit plan while maintaining -- while managing the
rising cost of healthcare with the changing laws that affordable c are -- Affordable
Care Act. Our capital improvement plan . Again, you saw the unfunded report.
That's just a small piece of -- of the CIP, but the CIP currently is not fiscally
constrained on a five year or ten year level. Later on I will kind of show you
some of the items on the 2018 list that explains why we are looking at
consideration for the three percent allowable. So, stayi ng at the current level of
service. Again, as inflations go up, cost of doing business goes up, utilities go
up, we need to be able to make sure we can replace the assets that prior Council
have approved, that we need to replace them and maintain them. A nd, then, we
need to make sure that we can also maintain the current level of service that we
have established as of today. So, the city is growing. I'm not telling you anything
new here. What we have here is a graph of populati on versus city staff. Please
look at 2006, it says 66,000 was our population. Today we are about 95. It's
crazy to think, but it's almost 30,000 people that we have added to the city or also
known as a 43 percent increase. So, as we continue to grow our city and our
community, Public Works Department, Parks Department, public safety, city
admin, all these departments are going to be stretched to maintain their current
level of service as -- if we continue to grow at this pace. So, again, not to tell you
anything new, but, again, the city is growing and as the city grows, unfortunately,
costs kind of grows as well to maintain that level of service. So, again, these
numbers and stats are provided to you on a monthly basis from the Community
Development Division. Again, nothing new here. You know, we are growing.
We are booming. We are still seeing a steady pace of permits being pulled and
according to the analysts right now we are looking at about another 24 months of
this decent pace. So, again, we are going to be pushed to continue to deliver
this level of service as it is -- as it is today. So, as we continue to grow, you
know, we are going to have to look at our revenue sources and, you know,
change them accordingly. So, other property tax considerations. You know, as I
presented in April we have the intergovernmental cost burden potentially. The
courthouse decision ruling. You know, what's that going to do to us? What's that
going to -- how does that impact our property taxes. Don't know until we get the
ruling and the decision. Road cost share programs. Both Ada County and ITD,
as they continue to develop their roads are looking for road cost share from the
city, so we are going to have to fund those up front rather than in arrears. We
have federal and state mandates, property value assignments. As the state
continues to change the way they value rural versus urban and, then, property
tax exemptions. Those all impact the revenue sources that we gain -- or we
gather from the property tax values. If we wish to f und reserve funds, the public
safety funds, the capital improvement fund, the replacement fund, again, these
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 6 of 72
are all impacts to why we need to consider taking the three percent if we wish to
fund these reserves. So, all these items have an impact on how we spend our
property tax dollars going forward. With proper planning and management of the
property tax dollars we will succeed in meeting the city's strategic goal of being
the west's premier city -- community to live, work, and raise a family. So, all
these items are taken into consideration when we are developing these annual
budgets. So, you have heard me talk about why we need to take three percent.
This should look familiar to you. This is a -- this was presented in April, so as a
disclaimer, as I stated in April, these numbers are estimates and they are subject
to change and they are no guarantee on the amount of property taxes one would
pay. So, if you remember, there are four components to the property tax
calculation. The base property taxes, three percent or the allowable increase,
the new construction, and annexation. The base property tax is a fixed number
that we determine -- that is determined by Ada County from the prior year, so we
don't change that. New construction, annexation, again is provided to us by Ada
County. The allowable is the item that we get to adjust accordingly. As we
presented in April, if we were to maximize the three percent it would increase our
revenue source by 781,000 dollars. Now, we took this down to a what will Joe
pay -- for Councilman Palmer. So, for every one hundred thousand dollars of
value we estimate about $9.78 annually that person or Joe would pay in
increased property taxes if we took the three percent allowable. Maybe a
different way of looking at it, it would be two coffees at Dutch Bros. on an annual
basis to contain and maintain the current level of service that we are providing to
the citizens today. So, we also presented to you in April the impact for not taking
the three percent property tax consideration. Again, as the base property taxes
are calculated those were provided to us by Ada County and we do not adjust
those -- or we do not have the ability to adjust the base. That is provided to us
by the county. So, if we do not include -- if we do not increase the allowable, the
base will stay at that number with the addition of the annexation and the new
construction. So, if we forego the 781,000 in 2017 you would not have the 781 in
'18, '19 and '20 and so forth. So, as quick math for five years, if we did not take
the 781 that would equate to 3.9 million dollars not able to fund future projects
and future levels of service. So, as I mentioned, I would up some 2018 items for
funding needs for general property tax. As you can see, thes e items did not
make the '17, they will be '18 or '19. Home court funding. We are going to need
additional 200,000 for us to run the home court building. Police staffing. We are
going to need in excess of 600,000 to maintain the current level of service.
Station number six is coming on board in 2018 as planned and we are going to
need the 1.3 million for staffing alone just for that. We have some
communication fiber network improvements to connect to Ada County, 330 for
that. We have a network update and some computer storage replacements,
totaling a little over 500 grand for those two. And just like this year's asset
replacement, a little over a million dollars next year as well for that. So, if you
quickly flip that, it's almost four million dollars alone just in '18 of General Fund
property tax needs. So, again, another -- another reason why we are promoting
considering the three percent allowable to help us with '18, '19 and '20. So, with
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 7 of 72
that -- as you can see the city has grown. With growth comes cost of doing
business. We believe over the next two days you will hear from all the
departments that the city development and population growth is creating higher
demands. We are up for the challenge with the proper tools to create the west's
premier city. So, with that I stand for -- I guess sit for any questions before we
move onto the Enterprise Fund and the next part of the presentation schedule.
De Weerd: Thank you, Todd. Council, any questions at this point?
Cavener: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Cavener.
Cavener: Madam Mayor, question for either you or Todd. If you could maybe
provide us a little bit of background on the decision making process for the
unfunded enhancements versus the funded enhancements, what that process
looks like?
De Weerd: Yes. I will go through our process. We sit down after we know what
our base budget amounts are and our projected revenues and look at -- I first go
through and look at -- we had over 90 enhancement requests at that time and I
talked with each of the departments and get additional information on it. I believe
that each department also talks with their Council liaisons about what those
enhancements might be and, then, I put those in a priority. We bring it to the
directors meeting and each department presents their enhancement request and
we prioritize it and look at how it fell in my initial review and I think that I had a
little bit of a gap that we were able to, then, use the director's feedback to
prioritize in a couple of different enhancements and, then, I go over it with Todd
one more time and Jenny and that proposal is in front of you. But we -- we told
you that as you requested you wanted a balanced budget without the three
percent and that's why you have unfunded enhancement s. Those will be yours
to -- you can look at those and say, well, I think this is a higher priority than
something that's in the proposed budget or you can also look at incrementally we
can tell you what you can add based on one, two or three percent.
Cavener: Madam Mayor, additional question if I can. Todd, where we have a
new council member here and I think for me it's always a good refresher -- what
are you looking for from us coming out of these first two days?
Lavoie: Madam Mayor, Councilman Cavener, what we are looking for is -- we as
a department want to provide you with the information that you need so that on
July 20th you guys were comfortable with accepting and adopting and approving
the fiscal year 2017 budget. At the end of the day the ultimate authority and
responsibility falls on the Council from the budget perspective. So, we want to
make sure you guys are comfortable and knowledgeable of the information that
has been proposed to you. For the next two days we are going to present to you
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 8 of 72
a lot of information, both visually and on paper. We would like you to engage us
for the next -- between now and July 20th -- even during these two meetings you
can engage us, ask us questions, request clarifications. We have up until July
20th to get you those answers, so if we can't get you the answers today or
tomorrow, we will get you those answers between now and July 20th. So,
engage us, request clarification, request information, we can work with you, work
amongst yourselves. That's what we are looking for you -- from you is input,
feedback and a dialogue so we can make sure that everybody is comfortable by
the end of July 20th with the budget that we propose to the citizens.
Cavener: Thank you.
De Weerd: And, Councilman Cavener, I think that it's also important to note
there will be some areas that numbers don't need to be firmed up and that's
going to be in the recommendation for the market slash merit increase. We have
based it on what the current numbers are. We still have some a dditional
numbers that come in June that we will be able to measure, too. So, this is our --
our best estimate at this time. There is still a few moving parts that could
possibly change that we will bring back in July and give you an update on that.
But it gives you an opportunity to really digest it, ask some additional questions.
We will also be in the subsequent weeks bringing additional information like our
prosecution contract, they will be coming and talking about that and so it just
gives you information so you can start looking at it and absorbing.
Cavener: Thank you.
De Weerd: It's a lot of information. And as you can see we have been working
on it since February. We want you to have that same amount of time to digest it.
Borton: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Borton.
Borton: Just a comment to Finance and all the directors. One of the things that
was done, among others, really, really well this year was we don't have a lot of
last-minute changes and that's not easy to do I'm sure. But when we got the
book and we all spent time going through it, it was much easier to be prepared
for today without a whole bunch of additions and I know there may be things that
people want to add late, but that has been a challenge in yea rs prior, so however
that was fixed is fantastic and it makes it a lot easier to get through this today.
De Weerd: Mr. Borton, I appreciate that and I think it's also important and one
thing I didn't note in that vetting process from when initially the enhancements
were put in, is they are vetted to the strategic plan that the Council adopted and
we look at that in terms of making sure we continue down the path that -- of the
direction that collectively has been decided that we were going -- moving towards
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 9 of 72
or maintaining in many cases and so I think that's also helped Mr. Borton in
making sure that we are solid in -- our crystal ball was dusted off and polished up
and you have our best guess at this time. Okay. Anything further? If not, we will
roll right into our next item. Enterprise Fund. You're on your own, Tom. You
saw everyone hoping up and saying yep. I hear that there is a request for
theatrics next year and we can -- we can do that, Mr. Borton.
Palmer: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Palmer.
Palmer: Madam Mayor, someone -- a friend of mine that's watching online, he
suggests that we wear funny hats, because he's bored, so maybe we could look
into that for --
De Weerd: I don't even know how to respond to that. I've had a couple of things
come to mind and I thought, no, that's not appropriate. Mr. Barry, the show is
yours.
Barry: Thank you, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, it's my pleasure to
present to you the fiscal year 2017 Public Works Department Budget. We have a
lot to share with you in the next two and a half hours and we hope that the
presentation that we have for you is both educational, informative, and provides
some context in regards to the request that we were making. We will just go
ahead and jump right into it. I would say that two and a half hours is a long
period of time. If you folks need to come up for air somewhere in the
presentation or take a bio break or any of those types of things, just let us know
and we will be happy to stop and you can use our services right here that we
provide for you at City Hall. So, good opportunity to kind of get the touch point
that we're looking for here. All right. So, we will go ahead and start right off. I
want to provide you a brief department overview as we move forward, put some
context together in regards to what we do in Public Works. We have requested
this year the largest budget that the Department of Public Works in the city's
history has ever put forward. We are not necessarily proud of that, but I think as
we go through the presentation you will begin to understand why that is. Now,
this is something that has been forecasted for a number of years and this trend is
likely to continue for the next year or two, after which we become a less
expensive operation going forward and a lot of that will be shared with you as we
go throughout the presentation. A couple of interesting perspectives to keep in
mind here. There is 99 employees operating in the Public Works Department,
together with a combined level of service or experience of 600 years in the
department, so with all of our staff together we have 600 years of service that's
being provided to the city so far. We have a 94 percent retention rate and a four
percent vacancy rate currently the department, among the lowest that we have
had since I've been with the city. We have about seven major divisions. I won't
go through each of those. Infrastructure wise we have over 500 miles of water
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 10 of 72
lines, about 440 miles of sewer lines, six miles of recycled water lines and/or
5,000 street lights that we own and operate. So, customers served we have
close to 31,500 water accounts, a little bit less for sewer, and currently we have
73 active projects that we are moving in the -- in the department forward. We will
talk a little bit about department highlights. Go ahead and jump into this. We
continue to be an award-winning department. We have won several awards this
year and wanted to recognize the staff who have contributed also to -- to that
piece, as well as some employee recognition component. So, we did win an
exceptional performance award in adversity from the American Public Works
Association, Rocky Mountain Chapter, for our work on abating the Meridian
Heights Water and Sewer District's public health emergency. This was not
anything that we caused, it's something that we stepped in and helped to
alleviate. We also won an award in the technical and management innovation
area for our work in developing and leading the leadership development progr am
in the department. As a matter of fact, this got great Kudos at the Rocky
Mountain Chapter for being one of the most forward reaching, forward thinking
programs that public works departments have been developed -- or has been
developed for public works departments and that's according to the American
Public Works Association president himself. So, we appreciate that recognition.
Some employees that we want to highlight really quickly. Sean Grover --
De Weerd: So, Tom?
Barry: Yes, ma'am.
De Weerd: Every once in a while you need to take a breath in case there is a
question. But I know you're on a timeline and you have to --
Barry: You gave us two and a half hours.
De Weerd: -- talk as fast as possible. I thought your exceptional performance in
adversity was how you dealt with NPDES permit and the EPA, so --
Barry: We should get one of those as well.
De Weerd: We will give that to you ourselves.
Barry: Thank you. We will take it. Under employee recognition, I wanted to
recognize a couple of the staff. We do try to get these out to you so that you
know kind of who the movers and shakers are in our organization. We thought
now was a nice time to do that as well. So, Sean Grover, received the
Southwestern Idaho Operations Section, a Collections Operator of the Year
Award. The Lab Operator of the Year award for the same organization was
received by Travis Kissire. Travis went on to compete at the state level and also
won the Laboratory Analyst of the Year for the state of Idaho. So, we have some
pretty high caliber folks working for us in our department. We are very pleased
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 11 of 72
with their accomplishments. I also wanted to let you know that Brad Stanley and
Murray Jones have just been recently certified as public works inspectors under
the American Public Works Association. They are two of three statewide certified
-- or obtaining the certification. While I think they also -- was a graduate of the
Water Environment Federation Water Leadership In stitute -- Leadership Institute.
This year we had 12 graduates from our award-winning leadership development
program and we had five wastewater staff that also upgraded their licenses
above what was required for their position. So, lots to celebrate in the
department with regard to awards. I want to touch base on some of the
highlights in the department. We have presented to you in this fashion for a
number of years. This is the modified balanced scorecard. What this allows us
to do is to communicate a lot of information in really five simple categories. The
financial, customer, operations, employee and strategy sections. So, we kind of
combined our highlights into each of those. There is a lot of information in the
next one or two -- actually, two to three slides here. I don't know that I'm going to
read it all, but I have memorialized it in the presentation, which you have access
to, and I encourage you to go through that. Maybe a couple of highlights that we
can touch on here under the financial. We have expanded our rate model from a
five year projection to a ten year projection. That's giving us a farther reach into
understanding what the future challenges are and how we might need to make
adjustments today to mitigate or minimize those -- those potential challenges.
We did leave the city's McGladrey Audit Action Plan with both the development
and implementation of the improvements that came from the audit. We did
modify the equivalent residential unit calculations for the multi-family sector of the
department and we implemented and updated water and sewer assessment fees
just recently as well that went into effect in June I believe. In operations we have
completed about 90 percent of the design for the plant capacity expansion
project. This is a tremendous project. You will hear a little bit more about that as
we present to you today, but, essentially, we will be adding another five million
gallons of treatment capacity to the wastewater treatment plant here in the not-
too-distant future. We also completed the construction of the Wastewater
Resource Recovery Facility maintenance shop. We've been involved, as you
recognized, Mayor, and I appreciate it, in tremendous work regarding the update
of our National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit, administered
under the EPA. Potentially soon to be administered under the state of Idaho if
primacy moves forward. We have made some improvements in SCADA, both in
operations, water sampling. We are a hundred percent compliant. We also
finished the -- and implemented the engineering project management database
program, which allows us to be a little bit more efficient in moving forward
projects -- engineering projects for the department. Strategically we have been
involved in a number of different strategies -- activities. We helped lead the city's
strategic plan development. We have updated our departments 2010, 2015
strategic plan. We are also putting the finishing touches on our Public Works
tactical plan for 2016 to 2021, which closely aligns and is supported fully -- or it
supports, rather, I should say, the citywide strategic plan and we've also
developed infrastructure plans for the South Meridian annexation, which we
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 12 of 72
talked with you about over the last six to 12 months as well. From a customer
standpoint we have been continuing with improving water quality for drinking
water by putting in water treatment facilities around the city. We continue to
maintain over 231,000 square feet of building space with our building
maintenance staff. We have also coordinated the expansion of services in south
Meridian based on the strategy that we developed and that's having a big impact
in the southern area of our town growing. From an employee standpoint we have
developed and instituted formal on boarding and recognition of reward programs.
We have updated SOP and checklists. We have a lot more work to do there, but
we certainly made good progress. We have enhanced employee training,
access and incentives for training and we have continued to focus on
empowering our staff at all levels in regard to decision making, being good
stewards and so on. That's helped I think, along with a number of other ac tivities
to elevate morale and improve employee engagement in our department. You
might recall back to the city service -- or the city survey, our department had the
highest engagement levels on that survey of any department in the city, which we
are pretty proud of. Okay. So, here is the budget dollars at work. This is where
it gets a little unwieldy. We tried to condense and compress this information
down to get through it rather quickly. You might recall being about half of the
enhancements -- our department being about half of the enhancements for the
entire city and being asked to look at last year's or this current fiscal year's
enhancements and also next year's fiscal enhancements, we have about 80 of
these things to get through. So, we will try to do it efficiently here. But to give
you an update overall on what we are currently working on -- we have 34
enhancements that we asked for in this fiscal year. Twenty-five of them are in
progress, about six of them are completed, and three have not been started. So,
from a capital standpoint -- I'll get into the specifics here fairly shortly. We are
actually making quite a bit of progress in regards to what you authorized us to
work on from a capital construction standpoint. In operations and personnel we
are a little bit over halfway of the fiscal year and you see, likewise, we are a little
over halfway in regards to our expanding the personnel, operations, and
maintenance budget for the department as well. Right now we are running about
a 90 percent execution rate. Keeping in mind that most of our work really occurs
in the summertime period. So, they is still a little bit more -- we tend to have a
little bit more higher expenses in the summertime period than we do over the
wintertime period. These are the existing fiscal year '16 enhancements. Just on
the list here, to give you an idea -- I'm not going to go through every single one
and explain them. I just wanted to give you an idea, sort of. These are the water
enhancements that we are currently in progress on. You can see we are making
good progress, you know, between 60 and 75, 80 percent of these projects are --
on the list are pretty well done, including replacements, new lines, wells, SCADA,
a number of different projects. If we move forward and look at the in-progress
projects from a capital standpoint for wastewater, we -- we are making, again,
good progress. A couple projects, you know, we have a certain amount of staff
and we have to take the higher priority projects or those that are most
opportunistic or require some sort of logistical sequencing first, so you will see
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 13 of 72
some projects are a little bit more -- or a little bit more closer to completion than
others. This is a continuation of that list. What you will notice immediately is
that, you know, there is more wastewater capital projects than there are water
capital projects and that was intended and you will see that again in today's
requests moving forward in our budget. These are the projects that we have
completed so far and we can put it behind us and this list is growing almost
weekly as we move those projects that are in process to completion and , as you
know, we give you a status update report every year, that the engineers come
and talk with you about how they have performed and what projects have been
closed out. We call it a project close-out report. So, you will expect to get
additional information on this year's fiscal enhancement -- or fiscal year's
enhancements at that time. There is three projects that I mentioned that we did
not complete and did not start and are not intending to start. Two of those
projects were moved into existing projects. Seems to be -- seems to make more
sense for us to not isolate the specific projects, particularly the phosphorus
removal optimization project, and the BNR or biological nutrient removal carbon
distribution projects, those projects were, essentially, rolled into the capacity
expansion project and upgrades at the wastewater treatment facility. The
surface water sampling station was the last remaining of those three that has not
been started and we feel strongly that we do not want to invest in the sampling
station improvements until we know exactly what the -- the new wastewater
discharge permit is going to look like. We're not certain if we have to do
continuous sampling, if it needs to be -- if it can be automated, if it's grab
sampling, composites, whatever it is, we just want to make sure that we don't
spend any money putting a sampling station in until we know exactly what's
required. So, that project has intentionally been held off and it looks like , quite
frankly, we probably won't even begin that project in this fiscal year, we will
probably be carrying that money forward and you'll probably hear more about
that as we get through this fiscal year. All right. So, that deals predominately
with the enhancements that we had for fiscal year '16. I will pause for just a
moment, ask if you have any questions in regard to any of those projects or if you
would like to continue forward on our budget development approach and our
fiscal year '17 projects. All right. Thank you. So, sometimes -- this is kind of a
nice graphic we thought about in the department. You know, sometimes it's not
easy putting budgets together. There is a lot that goes into them, but at the e nd
of the day they're beautiful things, because they allow us clarity in what it is we
need to do and sort of , essentially, put together contracts for us in regards to
making commitments to you in regard to what it is that we suggest that needs to
be done and, more importantly, what really needs to be done from a community
service level standpoint. So, I wanted to share with you kind of how we put the
budget together in Public Works. It's not unlike the rest of the city. We have a lot
of people involved and I want to thank all the folks who are on this list and there
are many, many who are in the audience today and back at their desks in Public
Works who had some sort of insights or influence in our budget and I want to
thank them all. We have a tremendous staff in the department and they do a
really good job. Take this line of work and all of their work very, very seriously.
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 14 of 72
So, we appreciate their contribution. Really, some of the folks that probably
deserve a lot of recognition -- not just the executive team and the Mayor, but the
Finance team has done an outstanding job this year, have been working very
collaboratively with us. I appreciate Todd's leadership and also the support of his
staff and I also want to thank Alex Freitag and also Susie Deardorff for their
significant contributions in helping put this presentation together and running a lot
of the data behind it. Okay. So, there are some differences between the
General Fund and Enterprise Fund. Sometimes we forget that and other times
maybe it's not quite so obvious. So, I thought I would refresh this slide and give
you some perspective in regard to the differences and similarities between the
General Fund and the Enterprise Fund. The Enterprise Fund is a monopolistic
business. It is sanctioned and governed, but it is a monopolistic business and we
run it as a business. The General Fund is also run much like a business, but it is
-- instead of getting its revenue from sales of service, it gets its revenues, as you
know, for property taxes, sales taxes and other sources. The revenues that we
predominately get in the Enterprise Fund come from sale of service. Water and
sewer sales and service. We also get significant revenues in the form of user
fees. These are connection fees when a developer connects to our system they
owe us a connection charge. We get reimbursement and we also get money
from the garbage administration fee Revenue , so our utility billing folks bill the
Republic Services trash in our bill and we get revenue from that . So, we --
sometimes it will be a donated capital and, then, also interest earnings, which
have been modest or you could say a pittance recently, are also where we can
get revenue from. So, where does this -- where does this money go? It has to
be exclusively used in Enterprise Fund activities, programs, project, services,
plans, all of those sorts of things. So, we are not allowed to commingle the
funds. So, that's where we keep the funds in the Enterprise Fund and so this
allows us some purity regard to being able to model and project impacts
associated through our organization going forward and we have been very
successful doing that and I think, as you either may realize or soon to realize
hopefully in this presentation. There is a lot of things that influence the
development of our budget and we have kind of listed a few up here. Obviously,
growth has a huge impact on our budget. Regulations drive our budget and what
we have to do. The master plans, the Public Works strategic plan, our facility
plan -- the list goes on and on. We have a number of inputs that we incorporate
into the development of our budget and so we balance these inputs and prioritize
them. I want to share with you here is how we prioritize and here is sort of what
we look at when we put our budget together. First of all, we want to make sure
that we meet all current regulatory and safety requirements. We don't want
anyone going to jail and we don't want anyone getting hurt as they run our
operation, so that's very important to us. We want to make sure that we preserve
our product and service quality area and delivery -- delivery methods and levels.
We want to also make sure that infrastructure is adequately protected and
maintained. What we put in the ground we've already made the investment , we
need to make sure that we continue to keep that investment functional . We also
want to improve our utilization of technological resources . We have seen
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 15 of 72
enormous gains in the Public Works area in regards to SCADA and telemetry
systems, automation, asset management -- you name it and those -- those
equate to efficiencies for operation, which equate to cost-saving. So, that's
important for us. We also want to preserve staff training and improve workforce
development opportunities. One of the biggest crises in Public Works
organizations across this country, according to the American Public Works
Association, is not just an aging workforce, but also the fact that fewer and fewer
folks are entering this line of work. So, we feel strategically one of the best
opportunities we have as a department to counter some of those trends is to
encourage and incentivize and nurture the staff that we already have working for
us. Now, there is a flip side to that. City of Nampa can tell you all well that there
is a flip side to that. When you increase the competencies, the skills and abilities
of your staff members, they become more marketable and as they become more
marketable they get offered opportunities outside our organization. So, that's
something that we have to counter, which drives market compensation. So,
that's a big challenge for us and you'll see a little bit more about that later in the
presentation. We also want to make sure that if we do any expansions in the
department from an infrastructure standpoint that they are measured, as much as
we can make them be measured and that, essentially, they are in the best
interest of the community. We don't want to be putting infrastructure in that we
don't need or that we don't want. We also want to place a priority on our needs,
conserve resources, and, as I mentioned before, empower our budget stewards,
because those people at the lower end s of our organization that are doing the
good work really know where the best savings are in the organization and we
want them to be helping us along the way to find those savings and incorporate
them in our budgets going forward. So, what's the outcome of all of this? Well,
for the Department our proposed budget that we presented -- that we are
presenting to you today is consistent with the rate model projections. That's in
alignment with that, so that's good news. We are also continuing to use the pay
go strategy. That is pay-as-you-go strategy, which means we don't have any
debt. We don't require any debt in the foreseeable future, at least based on our
ten year projection, at this point in time, unless things change, and, you know,
what does that mean? I don't know. It sort of depends. We don't have any
intentions of having to go into debt , but what that does mean is that you go
through these periods or these cycles where you save a lot of money, you build
up your funds and, then, you spend them down and what you'll notice in our --
and I will have a slide detailing this later in the presentation -- what you notice is
that right now the Public Works Department is spending more on paper than we
are actually taking in and that was projected and we have the reserves in place
to cover those. So, we are borrowing against our savings that we utilized under
the pay go strategy and the General Fund does the same thing. We also use
just-in-time capital financing approach. This approach allows us to better
leverage our dollars on a year-by-year basis for capital projects. We
accommodate impending regulatory requirements in this budget. It sets us up
over the next few years for those regulatory requirements. We also incorporate
strategies to managing growth and the last point I wanted to make here is that we
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 16 of 72
are reliant in our budget on what we call a responsive management approach ,
which is consistent with best available information. So, what that means is, you
know, you don't know what you don't know until you know it. So, we are asked to
put a budget together today off of the best information we have today, but I can
tell you in six months it will be wrong and I will tell you in ten months it will
probably be wrong more. So, we have to make adjustments along the way and I
will talk to you about how that works as we go forward and the Mayor has already
alluded to this earlier as we opened up by saying there is additional information
that we need to gain or gather. Business processes don't always match budget
process. So, we will talk about that a little bit more later. Okay. This is what our
budget looks like from last year to this year. Last year we had a budget
approaching almost 35 million dollars. This year the budget is approaching
almost 49 million dollars. That's as expected. Don't be alarmed. We are in the
middle of one of the biggest growth spurts that we've seen in quite some time
and capacity expansion at the wastewater treatment plant is very expensive, so
are the levels that we are adding and the tens of miles of water and sewer lines
and so on and so forth. One of the things I wanted to point out here, though, is
that most of the growth in our budget is capital project related. So, this is first
temporary if you will. We expect to see a surge as we have been in capital
project spending and, then, in about three years we expect, based on our
modelling, for that surge to subside. What you will notice here, which is kin d of
good news, is that, essentially, our operations component, what we call POM,
that stands for personnel operations and maintenance, is growing pretty slowly.
We are proud of that. What you will notice in the yellow pie here, difference in
enhancements from the -- or, excuse me, the difference from the replacements
-- difference in replacement from the yellow slide -- or the yellow pie, rather, is
simply an administrative or financial moving of replacements from enhancements
to replacements as they are really replacements. So, no real change there. So,
before we get into the enhancements I wanted to give you a little background on
how we set it up, just so that you can understand what we are really presenting
to you today.
Borton: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Borton.
Borton: Sorry to interrupt --
Barry: Yes, sir.
Borton: -- but you lost me on the last comment --
Barry: Yes, sir.
Borton: -- about replacements as -- replacements not as enhancements, but as
replacements.
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 17 of 72
Barry: Fantastic. Let me try to clarify. So, if you look at the pie to the left, you
will notice that the 136,950 dollars of replace -- of little replacements there, that's
the little yellow pie, is pretty small compared to the one on the right-hand side.
Actually, that's not true. Most of the replacements on the pie to the left are buried
inside the green section of the pie meaning in the past the Finance Department
has required us to put replacements in as enhancements and we have argued for
years -- as a matter of fact, Mr. Zaremba, bless his heart, would tell you -- every
year he brought up the fact that, well, doggone it, if this is a replacement why isn't
it in a replacement fund and not in an enhancement fund. So, the Finance
Department worked with us -- and I think they did this across the board in city --
to put replacements as replacements, not as enhancements. So, hopefully, that
helps.
Borton: Perfect.
Barry: Okay. So, understanding what we are presenting to you, there is a lot of
information on these slides, so I want to make sure that we just don't gloss over
it. The staff are going to present you very uniform -- we used a template through
all of our presentations, so that you know exactly what the information is that we
are trying to present to you. So, this is the template that we use. In the upper
left we are going to have the priority number of the enhancement for the division
presenting. We will also have the enhancement title. We will have the cost for
you of that particular enhancement. We will also include whether or not this was
a multi-year project and if it is you will see that it's a year X of a year Y project.
You will see that in the upper left of every one of these as well. Then you will get
the enhancement description. You will also get the objective number. Now, what
this means is these objective numbers are numbers that tie to our city or
department planning documents. We were asked to align our enhancements
with our strategic and planning document. So, you will see those numbers up
there. We won't be explaining all the numbers to you. If you would like to know
what the numbers correlate to we are happy to share our strategic plan,
comprehensive plan, and other guiding documents, which will help you to support
these enhancements. You will see a little button up in the upper right as well.
Yes, that enhancement is a regulatorily driven enhancement in the wastewater
area. This is for National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permitting
reasons. You won't see these in water. This is -- we just kind of reserve that for
wastewater projects. Then you will see this little arrow thing here. It either goes
up or it goes right and this is our attempt to communicate to you whether or not
that enhancement maintains an existing level of service or if, in fact, it improves
or increases the level of service. So, you will see that as well. And, then, finally,
at the bottom of each of the enhancements, if it is a multi-year project you will get
the dollar amount year by year, both past, current and future. So, with that I will
stop for questions, because we are ready to dive right into the wastewater
division. So, if you want to flip to your books that's the first area that we are
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 18 of 72
going to go to and with that, if there is no questions, we will go ahead and move
straight forward to wastewater.
De Weerd: Any questions from Council at this time?
Bird: I have none.
McVey: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, thank you so much for your
time today. I think most of you know us, but myself, Laurelei McVey, I'm the
wastewater resource recovery facilities superintendent and Clint Dolsby is the
assistant city engineer on the wastewater side. So, we will be presenting the
wastewater enhancements to you today and today we have 12 enhancements to
present to you for a total of about 24 million dollars.
Dolsby: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, the first enhancement we are
bringing before you today is for the Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility
capacity upgrades project. So, a little background on this project. We have a
limited amount of capacity remaining at the Wastewater Resource Recovery
Facility, approximately a million and a half gallons per day, and each year with
the recent growth uptick we are estimating we are consuming about -- on the
order of about 500,000 gallons per year of capacity at the plant , which doesn't
leave us a lot of time and that's why this enhancement has risen to the top and
has become such a priority for us. So, also Idaho Department of Environmental
Quality has a standard that specifies the design of upgrades to the plant must be
started when the plant reaches 80 percent of design capacity of treatment, which
we met that by starting design a little over a year ago. So, the Wastewater
Resource Recovery Facility capacity upgrade project started late last fiscal year,
currently in final design. Tom mentioned it just hit 90 percent. We are heading
quickly towards a hundred percent design on that project. It will construct two
new primary clarifiers, which are those little green tanks up in the top of that
photo, up on the top left; four new aeration basins, which are the little blue tanks
there and two new secondary clarifiers which are the orange tanks there at the
bottom of that photo, which will bring our plant capacity to 15 million gallons per
day, while keeping in mind the NPDES permit requirements, which means that
we are upgrading that for capacity, but we are also upgrading it to meet our new
permit requirements or at least keeping those in mind , so we are setting
ourselves up for that. So, this NPDES driven enhancement funds the third year
of the four year project for the Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility capacity
upgrades and it supports two of our Public Works strategic objectives. It's
currently in final design, on tract to bid for construction in September of this year
and construction is planned to begin early next fiscal year and will run through
FY-18.
De Weerd: The WWTP is easier or Wastewater Treatment Plant than WRRF or
Wastewater Recovery --
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 19 of 72
Dolsby: Resource Recovery Facility.
De Weerd: Or whatever. I still lose on that, but --
Bird: They had to change, because it's --
Dolsby: Yeah. We have got the name out in front of it now, so -- the next
enhancement is the Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility headworks
upgrades with odor control. So, the current headworks is shown on these two
photos and I know the photo on the right isn't the most pleasant one to look at,
but these show the headworks in its current location. This project is designed
and construction of a new headworks pump station, which was part of the
existing headworks and this new pump station is going to be located near the
existing digesters and one of the new -- one of the existing primary clarifiers.
Another part of this project is to build a new headworks, which will be -- let me go
back one slide. It will be located in -- on the west side of the plant. It's kind of
hard to see, but it's near the top -- near the center there is that red box, that's
where we are going to locate the new headworks facility. So, the new headworks
will be housed in the building with odor control and existing headworks shown in
the -- on these photos will be abandoned . So, this enhancement funds the third
year of the four year project to upgrade the head works at the W astewater
Resource Recovery Facility, which supports two of our Public Works strategic
objectives. The headworks facility has been one of the largest and continues to
be one of the largest sources of odor at the facility. So, by putting a building over
the new headworks facility we are going to control those odors, which should
reduce the overall -- or will reduce the overall odor coming from the facility. So,
this project will be constructed over an 18 month window and will increase the
firm capacity headworks and provide better screening upstream of future nutrient
removal processes. The next enhancement is for the Wastewater Resource
Recovery Facility facility plan update. So, a facility plan is required to be
developed and updated every five years for every wastewater treatment plant by
the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality standards. The last update we
had was in 2012. So, we are due for an update. Additionally, as part of our
compliance schedule with the EPA in our opinion permit, the city is required to
update the facility plan within two years of the permit issuance , which -- and the
permit issuance is expected likely in the late fall or winter of this year . So, this
enhancement will address both of those requirements and it will provide an
update to the Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility plan. Also supports three
of our Public Works strategic objectives. Low nitrogen limits and phosphorus
limits in the new permit have really also precipitated the need to update this -- the
2012 Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility plan.
McVey: All right. Enhancement number four is for p lant PLC replacements. It's
the third year of a three year project and supports four of our strategic initiatives.
You might ask what the PLC is. A PLC is a programmable logic controller. So,
essentially, it's the -- the brains of the treatment plant. So, it runs and controls all
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 20 of 72
of the equipment and alarms. So, our old PLCs at the facility were out of date
and were no longer serviceable by the manufacturer. So, what that means is if
one of them were to fail we would be in a bad way really quick , because those
are the pieces of equipment that control the plant equipment . So, we have 21
PLCs at the plant and this fiscal year FY-17 project would complete the upgrade
of all of those. With this project we will ensure reliable and serviceable
equipment. All right. Enhancement number five is a SCADA control and
telemetry upgrade. So, this is the fifth year of a six year project and also
supports four of our strategic objectives. So, we just talked about the PLCs kind
of being the brains of the plant. SCADA is the front facing interface between the
equipment and the operator. So, what SCADA allows us to do is it allows us to
control equipment, respond to alarms and collect permit required data. So, we
have SCADA at both the plant and the lift station. So, this enhancement would
provide the necessary upgrades for the improved consistency, operability and
security of our SCADA system. All right. Enhancement number six is for the
Boise River pump station and seal water upgrades. So, this is a single year
project and supports two of our strategic objectives . So, this is kind of a two-part
project. The first part is to repair and upgrade the Boise River pump station. So,
this is a structure at the plant that was built in the '70s. It's one of the original
structures at the plant and today it serves several purposes. So, it feeds our
reclaimed water system. It also feeds our nonpotable water system, which is
used for flushing, spraying, and maintaining equipment on the plant and it can
also feed the Boise River outfall. So, although we don't discharge to the Boise
River outflow, we maintain that as a strategic initiative in the department and the
reason we do that is that EPA does not grant new NPDES outfalls. Very rarely.
So, it's a real benefit to the city to have both of those out falls. So, this building
serves all -- those three functions and you can see the pictures on the slide are
from that building and we have some significant structural damage and we even
had an electrical fire in there last year. So, this enhancement would repair and
upgrade this building. The second part of this enhancement -- we have an
opportunity to put two projects together and achieve some benefits. So, the plant
seal water system is used to lubricate mechanical seals on equipment throughout
the plant. So, if the seal water system goes down we can lose or damage critical
pieces of equipment at the plant. The seal water system currently runs off of city
potable water and it is currently undersized and oftentimes unreliable. So, by
combining these two projects together into a single building we can improve
reliability and also achieved water conservation . All right. Enhancement number
seven is for a collection equipment facility. This is, again, a single year project
and supports four strategic initiatives. So, you guys know the city is invested in
acquiring four large vehicles that are used to maintain and clean the sewer
system. So, these vehicles have sensitive electronic and hydraulic components
that are sensitive to extreme heat and cold. So, by storing these vehicles indoors
we can extend and protect the life of these important critical vehicles. So, we
originally had a 1.3 million dollar facility planned for these vehicles. It was
included in the CIP and the rate model. However, with careful planning and use
of an existing structure at the plant, we can avoid the expenditure of almost a
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 21 of 72
million dollars by doing this project. It's an ideal location at the front of the plant.
It is near the RV dump and also near the -- what used to be the dog pound. So,
what this project would do is it would be a minor remodel of the building that was
vacated by the police department and it would construct another similar metal
building next door to it and we could have all four of our large vehicles at the front
of the plant, which is really important that these vehicles are not traveling and
navigating through the rest of the treatment plant and it also is a wise
expenditure of the city's investment in these vehicles and, then, this project would
also allow us to save almost a million dollars.
Dolsby: This next enhancement, number eight, is for sewer line extensions. This
is an enhancement that we bring before you every year. It's to fund the building
and improvement of infrastructure in the sewer collection system. A lot of times
these projects are done in conjunction with ACHD road widening projects. It also
funds other sewer line extensions as well in the collection system. The notable
projects and really the one that's causing this enhancement to probably look a lot
larger than you typically see if you have seen this enhancement before, is the
South Meridian trunk sewer project. That's taken the majority of this funding.
The other project that would take up the rest of it is the ACHD's Ustick Road
widening project between Linder and Locust Grove.
McVey: Enhancement number nine is for a wastewater collection system
rehabilitation program software. So, this is a single year project and supports
two of our strategic objectives. So, this is a software program that will take our
GIS data and it will also take our data that we have collected using the CCTV
vans and it will create a data driven prioritized replacement program plan for all
of the sewer lines in the city. It will rank the lines based on things like likelihood
of failure. So, age or the material that it's made out of or we can also rate it on
things like consequence of failure. So, is it by a creek? Does it serve a school?
Does it serve a hospital? And we can also add external data like, ACHD
projects. So what this will let us do is effectively plan, budget, and forecast and
put together our annual sewer replacement plans in a really smart way using the
data that we already have. Enhancement number ten is for the Wastewater
Resource Recovery Facility safety upgrades. This is the third year of a four year
project and it supports two of our strategic objectives. So, obviously, safety is the
number one priority at the wastewater treatment plant and each year we continue
to do upgrades that improve safety for our employees. So, this year's
enhancement will fund several projects, including railing, fall protection, and
emergency egress improvements. Enhancement number 11 is for the North
Black Cat lift station gas service upgrade. So, this is another single year project
and supports two of our strategic objectives. So, when North Black Cat lift
station was built, it was kind of out in the middle of nowhere. Now you know
growth has exploded in that area of Meridian and as a result of that it's brought
natural gas lines closer. So, when this lift station was originally built it didn't
make sense to bring natural gas in. So, we installed propane. So, currently we
spend 18,000 dollars a year on propane to heat this lift station and with the
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 22 of 72
natural gas service line we expect to only pay 3,800 dollars per year for the
natural gas and so this would be a positive return on investment in less than four
years. And enhancement number 12 is Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility
underground power line. So, this is one of the enhancements that the Mayor
mentioned we are waiting on a few details, so I will talk a little bit more about
that. But this is a single year project. However, the cost of the project is spread
out over multiple years and this supports three strategic objectives. So, over the
past two years the wastewater plant has had three major power outages and all
of those power outages were caused by failure on the overhead line , caused by
different things, wind, weather, birds, construction workers -- anyways, when our
overhead power lines go out our emergency generators cannot run. So,
essentially, we are just stuck without any power and the flow keeps coming . So,
you will see our -- on the left-hand side here is our influent and during one of the
power outages, when we can't run any of the equ ipment, the flow doesn't stop.
So, this instance actually resulted in an SSO, because we could not get the
power back up and restored. So, it's really a scary spot to be in when you can't
control any of the equipment at the plant or run any of the equipment. So, we've
been working with Idaho Power to come up with a solution to improve the
reliability and security of the overhead lines of the plant and to do that we would
like, to move all of the overhead lines underground. So, most of this cost is
spread out over our monthly facility charge . So, the install of all the new power
lines would be amortized over a 31 year period. This is the standard way that
Idaho Power finances and completes projects. And, then, there would be an
additional one time upfront cost for the removal of the old overhead lines. So, we
are currently working with Idaho Power to get to a final cost estimate on that and
would hope to have that by the final budget presentation.
De Weerd: Council, is your preference to ask questions between the -- the
different divisions or at the very end? Okay. Any question s for wastewater?
Cavener: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Cavener.
Cavener: One question. And maybe this is a question that could be answered in
our July session related to Item 12 with burying the lines. Was Idaho Power able
to provide you with cost with paying for it all up front versus amortizing it over
three decades?
McVey: Councilman Cavener, that is a great question that we asked and the
answer is, no, they will not do that. That is their standard form of financing.
De Weerd: Any other questions?
Cavener: Madam Mayor?
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 23 of 72
De Weerd: Mr. Cavener.
Cavener: One more. Number six. On the slide you indicated there was some
-- some fire damage that part of this enhancement will take care of. Maybe some
clarification that -- maybe right or wrong -- I would make an assumption that's
covered by insurance. Is there a reason why we are using an enhancement to
cover costs related to fire damage rather than other financial means?
McVey: Councilman Cavener, so the -- the part that actually got damaged was
not the building, it was the electrical panel. So, that's something that our
maintenance staff could repair in house.
Cavener: Madam Mayor, one more additional question. On number seven
related to the garages, you had indicated that the vehicles are prone to extreme
heat and extreme cold temperatures. I was hoping that you would extrapolate
that a little bit more. What -- what is defined as extreme and how long is that
occurring at that facility?
McVey: Councilman Cavener, so extreme heat and cold would be, you know,
when we drop below freezing or above probably 90 degrees . So, these -- this
equipment has electronic components on it and they also have water on it, so if
we leave them outside say in the winter they will freeze every single night and it
will damage the equipment and in the summer if we were to leave them outside -
- so, obviously, they work out in the city and the heat and cold, but occasionally
when it is too hot or too cold we cannot take this equipment out into the city ,
because the equipment simply won't function at those temperatures.
Cavener: Follow up? Is that ten percent of the year, five percent of the year, 15
percent of the year? Just base estimate how frequently is that occurring?
McVey: Well, Councilman Cavener, that's -- I'm not sure I can estimate that off
the top of my head, but we can definitely get that information back to you.
Cavener: I would appreciate that.
McVey: Okay.
De Weerd: Okay. Any other questions? Okay. Dennis.
Teller: Okay. Well, good afternoon, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council.
Thank you for your time today. As wastewater said earlier, we kind of want to
take this chance to sit back and introduce ourselves. My name is Dennis Teller,
I'm the water superintendent. This is Kyle Radek, who is our assistant city
engineer for the water side. Sorry. And today we are going to be going over 14
enhancements for your consideration. The requested water division budget this
year totals 5.4 million dollars and is primarily focused on labor resources, SCADA
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 24 of 72
system upgrades, which thank you Laurelei and Clint for explaining the SCADA
and DLCs. Our distribution system improvements and new water supply
treatment projects are necessary to improve our operations to keep up with
growing demand and service needs. So, before I get into this year's
enhancements, I'd kind of like to speak about the city's growth. We have talked a
little bit about that earlier, about growth is impacting us and the concerns
associated with it in regards to our water distribution system. Why are we on the
screen? Oh. I see. Never mind. Apologize. Over the past ten years the size of
our water system has increased substantially. We have added 158 miles of
water line, now totaling 516. We have seen a 44 percent increase in our -- in our
water distribution size. Our water services have also increased during this time
by 7,347 accounts and growing. We added 64 accounts just last week. This is a
30 percent increase. So, approximately, we have gone from 23,000 accounts ten
years ago to almost 32,000 now. Our fire hydrants and valves have increased
almost 17 percent. We have added almost 2,700 units, totaling 19,153 right now
that we are currently overseeing and maintaining. And, additionally, due to
growth track backflow prevention assemblies within the city has increased by 62
percent. We have gone from a little over 6,000 backflow assemblies to al most
10,000 at this particular point. During this time our complexity has also
increased. We have added technology such as SCADA to help with our controls
and got set for regulatory needs. Water treatment technologies have also been
introduced improving our water quality, but these have added more complex
sampling and regulatory needs as well. And, additionally, our system expansion
has created operational challenges trying to maintain pressure and flow
throughout the system as it continues to grow. As we grow we are just really
concerned on how we are going to keep up with maintaining our public health
and safety. We need to make sure that our water system is operational and
reliable, for readiness for emergency responders and things of that nature. We
also want to keep the motivation up and avoid staff burnout from the overall daily
work with them. So, during this time of growth we have made some excellent
use of our current resources to keep costs low and our services up and
technology has played a great role in helping us to do this and, for example, like I
said, we have added some things like SCADA to our operations that greatly help
and reduce the need for us to physically go out and maintain our well s. It does a
lot of remote stuff for us. We have switched from walking and manually reading
our meters to an automated drive by system. This has greatly reduced our costs
in reading meters and improved our accuracy for our billing needs. And we have
utilized automatic fire hydrant and valve operation equipment to kind of ease the
strain on staff and expedite the speed at which we can get through the
maintenance of these assets. The results of these efforts can kind of be seen in
the top screen. It shows that we managed to keep our costs per ca pita relatively
low during the time period, even with the rising cost of inflation. On the flip side
we have also incorporated many improvements and efficiencies with great
results. We are not finding ourselves quite behind on one of the -- basically in
several areas due to maximizing our most important resource and that is our
staff. The lower graph shows the number of FTEs that we currently have
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 25 of 72
compared to service connections and how we stack up against some of our
neighboring and like size water comm unities. Fiscally it shows our ability to do
more with less, but it also explains why we are kind of feeling the strain on our
programs and our personnel. As shown here the FTEs to service connection, the
average is about 821 across the board. We are currently at 1,430 and we are,
basically, almost twice as lean as our other purveyors. This ratio we fear is going
to continue to increase if we don't add any additional staff and this is what our
first three enhancements are going to focus on. So, enhancements one through
three are request for additional staffing and they support seven strategic
objectives. Enhancement number one is for a cost connection control inspector
one. This enhancement will add one FTE to assist in the operation, maintenance
and compliance with the city's backflow prevention program, a routine and
proactive and site surveying as is required to insure compliance with backflow
testing assemblies and as a critical component the city's legal responsibility,
protect the water distribution system of public health and their safety. As I stated
earlier, in the past ten years our backflow assemblies have increase by 62
percent and our survey program we currently have an 88 percent gap in
proactively going out and surveying commercial and residential properties for
dual connections and backflow assembly installation. This is a huge vulnerability
and a risk to our customers if contaminations were to ever occur. Currently there
is only one FTE assigned to overlook and oversee this program. Enhancement
number two is for a meter technician two. This is to add one FTE to assist in the
operation, maintenance of the city's meter installation, maintenance and
replacement program. Their primary duty are going to support of basically our
routine maintenance, installation, and testing of our water meters to insure
timeliness and accuracy in our utility billing and monitoring of our water loss.
With service connections increasing over 30 percent over the last ten years, we
have increased, like I said, earlier 7,000 plus service connections. These all
require meter reading on a monthly basis and maintenance on a routine basis .
Our meters -- and, basically, meters in the industry are operated by batteries and
they become less accurate with time and age. They require replacement every
15 years just basically due to their power and their physical ability demand. In
order for us to maintain a 15 year replacement schedule we are required to
change out 2,085 meters, that's today's current customer base, in order to
maintain the schedule and keep them replaced. On top of that also are new
meter installs, we average always a thousand new meters on an annual basis.
This is cutting into our time for our replacement program. We spend more time
installing new meters, basically, than replacing and repairing the ones that we
have and as the backflow prevention program there is only one FTE assigned to
this program as well. Our third enhancement is for a water operator two, to add
one additional FTE to assist in the operation and maintenance of the city's water
distribution system. This position is essentially requested to address the
concerns of our streets. As our city continues to grow it's getting more and more
populated and more and more congested with traffic, making it much, much more
dangerous for our operators to be out in the middle of the street working. This is
going to address that by allowing and giving them the ability to have two
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 26 of 72
operators there to perform these activities. Our fire hydrant and valve
maintenance programs right now are currently 64 percent behind and they are
increasing. We need to make sure that these assets are maintained and verified
operational for emergency responders. We want to make sure that our fire
hydrants and valves are all open and operational for emergency events. And
over the past five years we have seen an increase in these assets over 17
percent, as I stated earlier. Another thing that you might recall, we have an
initiative right now to replace all of the valves within the large -- over 35 mile an
hour streets with plastic nonpop lids. We have done some of that, but currently
we do not have the resources just keeping up with the new assets that are being
installed to replace these at a rate. So, this is a -- a concern for us for at least
public safety on our traffic. For these particular programs we have only two FTEs
assigned, one for the valves and one for the hydrants, so this would add one that
would help with both. Adding these two positions will keep us at a level,
basically, that our service customers currently rely on. We aren't able to -- if we
were unable to have their staff ing resources the current gaps in our programs will
continue to increase. Some examples of this would be possible slower response
times, decreased accuracies in our data, increased risk to the city and our
customers for contamination events and it subjects our staff to unsafe working
conditions in these types of streets. One thing to note with the current growth
and rate of the city is, as was mentioned earlier, we are going to require
additional staff in the future to keep up with these services if we do continue to
grow at the rate that we are.
De Weerd: Dennis, before you move on, I think it's important that you explain the
water meter operator. You changed it, so I don't have it in front of me, but --
Teller: I'm sorry.
De Weerd: -- but they do water meters or valves and fire hydrants. On the
valves it's important to have two at the -- the location for safety reasons; correct?
Teller: Correct.
De Weerd: Can you perhaps explain that a little bit more?
Teller: On the valves?
De Weerd: Just why it's important in the safety aspect of the workers to have
that second person to insure that safety aspect.
Teller: Okay. Madam Mayor, the reason that we -- we require the second
person is with traffic now at the speeds that they are traveling, most of our major
arterials are four lane roads, so in order for us to operate our valves the majority
of them are located within the lane of traffic, so when we park to maintain a valve
-- I will go back to a picture right there at the -- at the bottom of that, he is facing
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 27 of 72
traffic with the value machine and if someone were to swerve to avoid him, the
next person would be right there and not have that warning. So, our basic
mandatory thing that we do to operate and maintain these are we have two
vehicles, we have one that's basically a pilot car behind that is setting up traffic
cones and traffic safety apparatuses to divert traffic and prevent people from
coming up on these workers unannounced.
De Weerd: I thought that that was important to note.
Teller: It is. Madam Mayor, thank you.
Bird: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Bird.
Bird: While we are doing this, Dennis, explain to -- to us adding these three
boots on the ground is the first extra employees -- the boots on the ground that
you have had since we probably were -- had 20 customers -- or 20,000 service
and now we have got 33 service -- isn't that about right?
Teller: Correct.
Bird: And this is the first boots that we been able to hire?
Teller: Madam Mayor, Councilman Bird, over the last ten years, depending on
the different charts and graphs that you look at, this is within one or two FTEs
over the last ten years that they have been added, so -- yeah. Okay.
Enhancement number four is for 300,000 dollars and supports six strategic
objectives. This is the second year of a three year project for the final phase of
our SCADA system upgrades, as Laurelei explained earlier about SCADA.
Basically under the direction of our SCADA master plan this enhancement will
focus primarily on upgrading our PLCs. In the past previous years we have been
upgrading the PLCs at our well houses. We are finishing our final one actually
this year, but this is going to address our 26 pressure reducing stations now,
along with programming and control upgrades necessary to incorporate these
into our SCADA system. These sites control our water distribution between our
five different zones. The city is broken up into five different zones. We monitor
and maintain pressures and flows between these and these PLCs actually
monitor this and control this information for us. Currently there are nine CRBs
that are being upgraded this year and this was approxim ately -- we will take care
of another five in this next year. Our SCADA project upgrades over the past four
or five years has greatly enhanced our controls and brought critical data and
flexibility to our system. It's amazing our new system that's so much more
information that we have ever had before. Not completing this upgrade would
definitely negatively impact the work done to date and the ability to bring back the
information we need for regulatory standards. Okay. So, enhancement number
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 28 of 72
five and it's for 100,000 dollars and this supports three strategic objectives. It's
the second year of a five year project to design and implement needed security
improvements at the water system well houses and our admin facility. A little bit
of history. Security needs have been handled in the Water Division on kind of an
as-need basis. As we see a need we have been coming in and asking for it. But
a few years ago it was felt that a complete survey evaluation of our facilities was
required, so we kind of took a step back to kind of identify all the vulnerabilities at
once, you know, help standardize our designs and tried to get them protected as
quickly as we possibly can, knowing what we do. A good example here. You
can kind of see these are blurry, but this is Well No. 18. It's over at -- at Locust
Grove and Ustick and this is in the middle of an HOA. As you can see there is no
fencing around the building. It's kind of been one of their -- their open space
areas to kind of part of a park. Here is Well 19. This is a new facility constructed
at Ustick and Ten Mile. This is actually our newest treatment facility. It has the
new standards of our fencing, which was identified in the vulnerability study, as
well as our locking and warning signs to keep people out. That is something to
mention. Actually, several months ago this site at Well 18 was compromised by
one of the local homeowners. They mistook this building as their irrigation well
and wanted to shut the power off, so they could do some work and actually were
able to go over and disconnect our power source. They didn't cause any
damage, but this is the one good example of why we want to make sure that we
can identify these facilities and keep people from -- from accessing them.
Borton: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Borton.
Borton: Real quick. Dennis, on this slide if the concer ns are as weighty as you
say, why would we wait and spread out the improvements over four years?
Teller: Madam Mayor, Councilman Borton, we have done this just on the fact of
just the sheer size of what we need to do we -- it requires a lot of planning and
forethought in upgrading these sites. They are -- most of our well sites are
buried deep within subdivisions, so we have been working with HOAs with time
to make sure that we are building something that is aesthetically pleasing to
them, as well as functional for us.
Borton: Okay.
Teller: Yeah. Okay. The outcome with this vulnerability assessment, we sat
down with Homeland Security and we, basically, developed a plan, which I have
kind of spoke about, but what we were going to start from -- and have already
started to do, is that add site fencing, things like motion detectors, building
access and border security. Our admin office currently -- I'd say probably 30
percent of our storage building at our admin office acts as a security border for
our facility, which is not a good thing. We need to make sure that we have got
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 29 of 72
fencing around it as well. On electronic door access, so we can know who and
when people are in or out of the building to make sure that they are locked and
secured and, of course, security signage. Not continuing with this security
improvement plan will definitely leave our sites vulnerable to security breaches
and leave us vulnerable to potential damages.
Radek: Madam Mayor, Council Members, Enhancement No. 6 is Well 15
reconstruction for 100,000 dollars, year one of the two-year project, which
supports four strategic objectives. Well 15 is one of our most productive wells in
the system since 1994. When it was constructed it pumped more than five billion
gallons of water into the system. However, there are two concerns with it.
Number one is that the water quality has degraded such that the Water Division
doesn't want to pump it. Mostly hydrogen sulfide and Manganese. And the
second concern is it was constructed with older materials -- or constructed with
different kinds of materials that we don't use anymore and it is reaching the end
of its service life. The well casing is approaching corrosive break through. So,
the project is a two phase project over two years, first to top off a sand filter pack
and abandon the lower screened intervals, which would result in improved water
quality and, then, after that first phase we would test the water quality and make
sure we have got the water quality where we want it and , then, we would line the
existing casing this next fiscal year and, then, extend the service life of that well
by 25 to 50 years. Enhancement No. 7 is water main extensions similar to the
sewer main extensions. This is an enhancement we see every year a nd similar
to sewer main extensions it's significant, 2.2 million dollars, supporting one
strategic objective. It funds design and construction of water line extension
project to expand and improve the distribution, many of which are in -- including
ACHD projects and just like the sewer main extensions, one of the major projects
where -- we are doing this following year is the ACHD Ustick Road widening
project from Locust Grove to Linder. The other two significant water main
extension projects will be the Locust Grove and the Lake Hazel water main
extension, which is the south Meridian project and the Amity Road and Linder
Road project, also south Meridian. Enhancements 8 to 10 are all wells at
different stages of their project life. As these wells provide the next drinking
water source to the city, they are a three year project life in general and they
include a test well, production well, and pumping facility. Well 29 is the first well
in pressure zone one of the distribution system and it is in year four of four. We
hoped that last year would be finishing year three of three, but the project was
delayed. Year four of four and the 400,000 dollars requested will fund -- provide
the remaining funds needed for the pumping facility next year. Well 30 is in year
three of three and 650,000 dollars is being requested for the pumping facilities for
that well next year, which is in Reflection Ridge. That well just completed the
supply well days ago. We are hoping to get chemistry back in a couple of weeks
for the supply well and since I forgot to mention Well 29, the production well is
underway and drilling -- the surface seal is in place and drilling of the main bore
will start Monday. And Well 32, our last project on this slide, is in -- currently in
year one and this enhancement is 400,000 dollars for year two of the three year
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 30 of 72
project, which is the supply well and currently the test well has just been
completed out there and we should be taking samples for chemistry next week to
find out what -- what the supply is at Well 32, which is in the Biltmore
Subdivision, will look like and these enhancements all support four strategic
objectives and I think that's all I need to say about those. Enhancement No. 11 is
Well 22 water treatment. We have just completed -- we have completed two
water treatment facilities in pressure zone two. With the completion of Well 27
this summer we will have completed all the water treatment facilities we need to
supply maximum daily demand in pressure zone two. Well 22 water treatment at
a cost of 800,000 dollars provides the year one financing for the first water
treatment facility in pressure zone three, supporting two strategic objectives.
This is a particularly important location as it is the -- the only supply in the
southwest portion of pressure zone three and consequently since it doesn't -- it
doesn't get pumped very often, it results in -- in us losing a little pressure and
wasting quite a bit of energy to get water from the other side of pressure zone
three supply, the customers in this part of the pressure zone. So, this project will
have a great impact on our ability to supply clean, safe water efficiently and
including the Roaring Springs, which is also in that -- in that area.
Teller: Okay. Enhancement No. 12 is 420,000 dollars and it supports three
strategic objectives and it's to fund the purchase of two critical pieces of
equipment for a water divisions maintenance and repair section. Having this
equipment available will provide faster response times, better customer service,
and shorter outage times for routine emergency maintenance and repair
activities. The first piece of equipment that we are asking for is a f irst response
trailer. This is a trailer that's going to be loaded with critical first-response pieces
of equipment, traffic control, parts, sump pump, those types of things. The
second is a loader slash lift that will assist in moving heavy materials around and
loading and unloading the dump trucks. As the city expands and our
infrastructure ages, the need for these resources are required to operate and
maintain the water system in its current level. As I said earlier, we currently have
516 miles of lines and we have a little over 30,000 assets when you start talking
about fire hydrants, valves, water services, blow offs -- there is a lot of
infrastructure out there that needs to be maintained . I know that our water
system -- it seems like it's relatively new, within the last 20 or 25 years, but we
are starting to see increases in failures. Over the past ten years there has just
been several a year that we can count, basically, on our hands and toes, but in
the last year we had over 88 failures. In the last two years we've had over 15
mainline failures that we have had to handle i n house and requires equipment to
be able to do it safely and effectively. Some of those big ones you guys might
recall would be Franklin. We had a large main break that took off most of the
road and closed it down for quite a while. Our crews handled that within four
hours and got it up and running. So, kudos to them and all the work they have
been doing on getting this program up on its feet. Some of the benefits of these -
- of these two pieces of equipment is -- like I said earlier, they are going to
decrease our response times. They are going to provide critical emergency
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 31 of 72
equipment. The first time we roll out, so there is no need to shuffle vehicles and
staff back and forth to get this equipment on site, like we do now. It's going to
increase our safety when we are handling heavy materials and also the efficiency
of handling heavy materials as well. It's going to eliminate especially the need to
transport the backhoe that we -- we replaced a couple years ago back and forth
from job sites across town to load and unload heavy parts and materials and --
and dirt and other supplies that we get from and to these jobs. Payback on this
equipment is going to be realized within three years and without these -- without
these purchases and if we keep up to the current roads that we have with our
system, our current services are going to start to degrade without the -- the ability
to have this equipment on site and available when we need it. Enhance No. 13 is
for 30,000 dollars. It's year one of two and it supports one strategic objective. It
is going to support the Water Division safety improvements . Basically it's going
to be and have been identified by our new safety coordinator. This is a practical
approach to better protect our staff, our contracts, and our public around our
utility facilities. As you know safety is job one and it's something that we take
very seriously. Some of the things that we have identified that you can kind of
see in the picture, this is actually -- we have talked about PRVs. They are like --
there is 26 of them all over town. You don't know them. When you walk by them
they just look like hatches or manholes, but these particular vaults can be very
deep. They require ladders, fall protection, like you see here, so you don't
accidentally fall in. Some of the inventory improvements on our shelving, we
want to make sure that that's safe when you're in and around inventory and,
then, also some of our ladders on our reservoirs and some of our buildings, we
want to make sure that we have adequate protection on those as well. This
enhancement basically is not funded under the improvements that we have
already identified or need to -- need to these facilities and we just want to make
sure that we can provide as much as possible for our staff. And enhancement
number 14 is in the amount of 60,000 dollars and it supports four strategic
objectives and it's for the purchase of property needed for the Well 9
reconstruction project. This project is actually year two of four and there is a
couple years in delay here, because we -- we realize that this well does need to
be replaced, but not yet at this moment, so we are definitely preparing what we
need to do to make sure that we can replace this well . A little history on Well No.
9. It was constructed in 1977, so it's one of our oldest wells in the city and it's
one of our best wells, so we definitely want to make sure that we keep that. This
enhancement is to basically look at the property to the north -- if you can see
where this property is, it's off of Franklin just a little bit to the north. It's kind of in
an industrial area. It's vacant property here. We want to see if we can expand to
the north. A recent evaluation last year basically concluded that we need to get a
little bit more property in order to replace the well at this location and make sure
that we have the proper spacing for the new regulations behind in the new well.
If we do not fund this enhancement we are going to have to look elsewhere,
which is really an unfortunate situation. We want to make sure that we can keep
this location. It's in a good area for this zone and we have good water quality. If
we relocated to another area it's going to cost us more money for a test well to
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 32 of 72
find out what the aquifer is underneath that. With this existing well and a known
water quality, we will be able to replace this at a much lower cost without needing
those extra facilities. So, with that I thank you. That was our enhancements.
Are there any questions?
De Weerd: Thank you, Dennis. Any questions from Council?
Borton: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Borton.
Borton: Same question on the water facility safety upgrades. Is there a reason
that those costs are spread out over the next four years versus doing it all at
once?
Teller: Madam Mayor, Councilman Borton, we have got -- we have some --
shown in the slides some enhancement improvements that we know need to be
taken care of now and that's what this will cover. We do have this as year one of
two, because we do have a new safety coordinator on board that wil l be going
through and evaluating in much more closer detail on some of the safety
improvements that we need, so we want to make sure that we have the funding
available to do those upgrades when identified.
Borton: Madam Mayor? The -- if I'm looking at the right one -- was that number
13? It shows an expectation of additional funding each year for the next five
years of 25,000 through fiscal year 2021, which is different than the slide. So,
that was -- my question is if it's truly over five years?
Teller: Madam Mayor, Councilman Borton, just -- and my understanding this was
a two-year project. That's what we were shooting for.
Borton: Thirty this year, 25 in '18 and, then, this fiscal year '19, '20, '21 are not
anticipated?
Teller: Not anticipated.
Lavoie: Madam Mayor, Councilman Borton, Dennis, it looked like the document
that we may have provided you in your books does show the 25 grand every
single year, so it looks like that is in error compared to what the proposal here is.
So, please, I guess adjust or disregard that. Let's go with what Dennis is stating,
that it is a two year project, not the five year cost that we provided. So, we
apologize about that.
De Weerd: Any other questions from Council?
Milam: Madam Mayor?
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 33 of 72
De Weerd: Mrs. Milam.
Milam: I guess -- my question is regarding the -- priority number one. This
inspector, is he -- or she -- does this person -- I'm still trying to in my mind -- we
were talking about backflow systems; right? So, we have 10,000 backflow
system. They are required to be inspected every year and certification sent in.
So, is this person going to be doing inspections or are they going to be just
checking off to make sure that the inspections were properly sent in?
Teller: Madam Mayor, Council Woman Milam, what this person will be doing --
we are not -- we are not responsible to test the actual assemblies. They are
privately owned assemblies that we are required to make sure that they are
tested. So, this person will be monitoring and maintaining the database for the
testing. So, we -- we actually send out reminders. Kind of -- if you kind of
imagine it's like our billing system, we just deal with -- with tests instead of
money, so we want to make sure that -- that our customers are notified that they
either need a back flow assembly, which they have been doing surveys to
identify if they do or don't. Then they will also be following up to make sure that
the customers are notified when these tests are due and make sure that these
tests are received and input into the system and rescheduled for next year.
Milam: Madam Mayor, follow up?
De Weerd: Uh-huh.
Milam: So, basically, this is an administrative job?
Teller: It's a field position with -- it's a combination of administrative and field
position. They do physical field surveys on-site with customers and they do
administrative work, making sure that the input and data that we received on the
test is in the system and correct.
Milam: And this is a secondary position?
Teller: This is a second -- this is an additional cross-connection inspector. We
have one cross-connection inspector two that handles all these 9,000 -- almost
10,000 accounts.
Milam: Okay.
De Weerd: Mr. Cavener.
Cavener: Madam Mayor. Maybe a question for Finance. Related to the -- the
three positions, on our sheets I'm noticing a couple different colors of numbers,
some lighter blues, and will you just provide me some clarification if that's just a
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 34 of 72
-- a printer malfunction or is it supposed to designate something that we need to
be aware?
De Weerd: That was another test to see if you were paying attention.
Cavener: Well, then, we all passed, because I'm sure we all noticed that; right?
Lavoie: Madam Mayor, Councilman Cavener, so what you're looking at on -- if
we are looking at the very first name, you will see some light bluish shaded
colors. What that represents is those are numbers that Finance input after we
received the document from the department. So, it kind of notate s the audit trail
or change trail, so if it's black that means that's what we received, we didn't
change, but if it's that light blue that's something we have adjusted accordingly.
Cavener: Great. Thank you.
Bird: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Bird.
Bird: Yeah. I need to go back to -- on your Wastewater Resource Recovery
Facility capacity, you have got 11,335,000 under predesign and the total -- the
total thing is 30 -- well, what, 34 million and we are spending 11 million for
predesign?
Dolsby: Madam Mayor, Council Member Bird, the design of the project -- total
design cost is 3.187 million that is -- the budget that's approved for -- to date, we
have that 444,699 that was -- that was '15 and another 2.9 this year, that's the
total design cost and, then, the '17 cost of 11.335, plus the 18 of 16.79 is the
construction cost of the project.
Bird: 3.1 million total?
Dolsby: 3.187. Yes. Correct.
Bird: Okay. Why is this under predesign, all 11 million of it?
Lavoie: Madam Mayor, Councilman Bird, I can go ahead and clarify that. What
you're looking at, Mr. Bird, is the GL description that we are utilizing for this large
project. So, this is a large project. We have decided to work with the
engineering division to put all the monies into what we call the predesign function
for the city and, then, as they complete and design their functions we will
reallocate those monies according to the specific projects. So, we needed a
holding -- kind of a holding pen for the 11 million dollars. So, we selected to use
predesign until Warren and his staff actually have the final defined numbers and,
then, we will move the money out of that predesign into headworks or clarifiers.
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 35 of 72
So, right now it's just kind of a holding place, so we can bu dget 11 million dollars
for the city.
Bird: I guess if you can put 11 million dollars in a holding place that's fine with
me.
De Weerd: It's not miscellaneous.
Bird: It's not miscellaneous, but I will tell you what, to me that has been on Tom
for -- and Warren for years about the percent we are paying for design and stuff
and I look at this, I'm going, man, when we had our pre-deal, Warren and Tom
never said a word about this much design and I'm going -- if somebody in the
public looked at this and it says pre-design and we got a total package of 34
million and you have got 11 million up here and probably the three on top of
that --
Stewart: Madam Mayor? So, Councilman Bird, I appreciate that. I think there is
a couple things to keep in mind, maybe to elaborate a little bit on what Todd said.
Yeah. So, the total cost of this -- the design for this is -- it's going to be around
ten percent, which is a very realistic number for the overall cost of the design for
this type of a project. In addition to that, one of the things that we are trying to
get a better handle on is the ability to actually track the exact cost of each asset,
so that we can depreciate it over time. We don't know at this stage of the game
what percentage of the capacity project is going to be clarifier number one and
what's going to be clarifier number two. So, we put this in this bigger pot of
money, knowing that the overall cost is going to be 11 -- well, actually, total cost
37 million dollars and if we get this into construction and we are able to identify
the cost for each one of these various components, then, we can allocate that to
the appropriate location, so that those costs for a clarifier or for an aeration basin
can be tracked independently. So, that's kind of what it's about.
Bird: Madam Mayor, follow up. And, Warren, I agree with you and as we
discussed before when we do our close out from that one, the design or
consultant cost is going to be part of the cost out, which it hasn't been in the past,
so I appreciate that, but I just wanted to clarify that. I thought it was wrong, but I
-- but you got that before. Thank you.
De Weerd: Okay. Any further questions for Warren?
Cavener: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Or wastewater. Mr. Cavener.
Cavener: Question on Enhancement No. 12, equipment trailer, the front-end
loader. A couple of questions related to this. I guess the first one -- and maybe I
just don't recall this. I have always remembered that when departments have
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 36 of 72
brought enhancements for a piece of equipment, they have brought
enhancements for each individual piece of equipment and so I'm just trying to
understand why we are doing an enhancement for two pieces of equipment, if
you can explain that to me.
Teller: Madam Mayor, Councilman Cavener, we just combined these -- these
basically two enhancements into one as critical equipment for our maintenance
division, since it was for one particular section of our department we wanted to
just combine them into this one and make it one package.
Cavener: Madam Mayor, follow up. Can you -- I appreciate the mind set to save
costs. I think that's the right move and I'm grateful that our departments are
looking at that. Can you articulate what our real costs, then, have been on -- on
the loader -- if we haven't rented a trailer of any sort -- I guess I'm just trying to
wrap my head -- this 35,000 dollars in annual rental cost and I'm just trying to
figure out when you say we are going to bring this -- we are going to recoup our
investment in three years, that's just related to the loader?
Teller: Madam Mayor, Councilman Cavener, that is related, actually, to both
pieces of equipment. Primarily to the loader. Current rental cost for a piece of
equipment -- actually, smaller than the size we are requesting -- is almost 3,000
dollars a month.
Cavener: Okay.
De Weerd: Follow up. And I guess just for -- I need some clarification on -- on
request number six on the back, it says that we only spent 31,000 in rentals over
five years versus 35,000 dollars annually. I'm just trying to figure out which
number is correct. That 80,000 dollars, 100,000 dollar difference.
Teller: Madam Mayor, Councilman Cavener, the actual correct number would be
31,000 annually.
Cavener: Okay.
Teller: Yes.
Cavener: Great. Thank you.
Teller: Okay.
De Weerd: Okay. Any further questions?
Barry: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, I will pause for just a moment
before we continue and ask if you feel like you need to take a break. We don't
have too much left, but I would say we probably have maybe a good 40 minutes
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 37 of 72
or so, possibly, so -- maybe a little longer. Depends on what you would like to
do.
De Weerd: I think a break would be good. Okay. We will reconvene in 15
minutes.
(Recess: 3:00 p.m. to 3:21 p.m.)
De Weerd: Okay. I will go ahead and get the meeting started back up. And we
will begin with building maintenance in Public Works.
Teller: Madam Mayor, I'd like to kind of go back to one of the questions asked
earlier with Councilman Milam about cross-connection.
De Weerd: Okay.
Teller: I just want to make sure that -- that Council understands what the position
is. It's kind of one of those unseen, unheard of the positions that I got to give you
a little bit more detail on and our cross-connection control is -- it's a very
important program for our city. It's kind of not really the right time of year,
because we are right in the middle of testing and making sure that they are all
tested within the city. But it's kind of like code enforcement, I guess, for our
water system. What these cross-connection inspectors do -- their main duties
are to go out and survey properties -- we are targeting a five-year survey cycle.
So, if you can imagine if we have 10,000 of these locations that we have to go to,
these are both commercial and private locations . We go out and we look at the
premises and we inspect them for -- for hazards and potential hazards that they
could have and some examples of these could be dental office that have
equipment and stuff that are hooked up to the water system . People that have
private photography studios. Churches that have baptismal pools. Anything that
you could have a hose or some kind of a connection -- connected to our potable
water system that could get either pushed back or sucked back into our -- our
water distribution lines. Another thing that they are also out there looking for
that's kind of unique to the area is dual connections . Not a lot of areas in the
country have an actual pressurized ultimate source of water that they use for
irrigation. This water is unregulated. It's not treated. If that were to be
connected to our system and pushed back, which it very easily can -- most of the
irrigation lines within the city run at a much higher pressure than our distribution
system, so if we had one of these lines connected to our lines or if we had an
assembly -- backflow assembly connected to your lines that was not working or
improperly installed, that water could go right back into our lines and feed -- it
would, basically, slow our wells down and recover that water with irrigation water.
So, the cross-connection general inspector we have currently, as we have only
had one FTE assigned to this program since its inception, so they have been
trying to handle from year one to, you know, what we said ten years ago about
6,000 accounts, that's -- that's a large amount to try to make sure that you're
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 38 of 72
serving on a -- on a five-year cycle, making sure that tests are sent out --notices
are sent out, tests are received, the data is correct, everything is updated and
since then we have added another three to four thousand assemblies to track on
top of that. They also are working with Community Development hand in hand
with all new development that goes in. So, they are actually going and
performing plan reviews for all new construction and tenant improvements. So,
when you have a commercial building that -- a bookstore goes out and a dental
office goes in, we make sure that we have the -- the proper backflow prevention
built into the design on that and they also follow up to make sure that it is
installed properly after it is constructed. So, this additional cross-connection
inspector will be assisting the current inspector with these field duties and, like I
mentioned before, there are administrative duties. It's just like code enforcement,
they have got to go out, they have got to inspect, they have got to make sure that
things are done properly, but they have also got to make sure that things are
done on the backside properly, so that we maintain an accurate database and we
can protect our system the best we possibly can. So, I hope that kind of explains
what the cross-connection program is and what these positions are and why they
are so valuable to us. They definitely are the eyes and ears making sure that our
system is protected from anything that has happened or that can happen in the
future.
De Weerd: Thanks.
Milam: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Yes, Mrs. Milam.
Milam: Thank you for the clarification. That did help a lot. I'm just picturing them
keeping a database of cross-connections and why do we need two people to do
that. So, I really appreciate the additional information. What percentage of time
would you say they are out in the field?
Teller: Madam Mayor, Council Woman Milam, the percentage that they are out
in the field -- during the winter months -- another thing to explain about our
backflow prevention program is they are all tested and they are all operational
during -- the majority of them through the irrigation season. So, basically, from
March, April in through September that is when we are the busiest. That is a lot
of investigations, follow up with customer issues, finding the problems that we
have. So, it's probably 50 percent to 75 percent during that time. In the
wintertime it's mostly in the field surveying. That's when it's our slow time. We
have the ability to go out and do commercial buildings. They don't run a -- on a
calendar of a season, so a lot of their stuff is inside and protected. A lot of the
irrigation accounts are not. So, they are four seasonal. We spend a lot more
time surveying and in the field in the wintertime.
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 39 of 72
De Weerd: Thank you. Appreciate the clarification. Okay. I will turn it over the
building maintenance and Public Works lumped together.
Barry: All right. Madam Mayor, thank you. Max Jensen and I will be presenting
the few enhancements we have for the building maintenance and Public Works
components of our organization and up first we actually have building
maintenance enhancements, followed by the Public Works one. Max will talk to
you about the two City Hall Plaza and parking building maintenance items and,
then, I will address the market analysis and the Idaho Power It Starts At Home
animation. So, with that I will turn it over to Max for building maintenance.
De Weerd: And where do you want them to turn in their binders?
Barry: Public Works. Okay. I'm not really sure. I thought it was Public Works.
Where is it, Todd?
Lavoie: City Hall.
Barry: City Hall.
De Weerd: That was a test.
Barry: That's right, we launched -- you did it with the General Fund. I guess I
failed miserably on that one. I apologize.
De Weerd: Okay. Max, go ahead.
Jensen: Good afternoon, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council. So, for those
of you that don't know me, my name is Max Jensen, I'm the manager of the
capital projects and facilities division of Public Works. I have two budget
enhancements to present to you for today. The very first one here -- in 2015 the
Department of Justice assessed the City Hall campus for compliance with the
ADA standards. Two noncompliances were documented and a pending
settlement agreement and that was shared with City Council last year. The first
of the two is at the amphitheater. Two designated wheelchair spaces are
supposed to be provided in the front row. The current configuration is a
continuous chair seating and does not allow for the wheelchairs in the front row.
So, this first enhancement is for removing two areas of the existing seating and
constructing two designated wheelchair spaces in the front row. Those spaces
are --
De Weerd: And even if we don't agree with it we still have to do it; right?
Jensen: For compliance, yes.
De Weerd: Just clarifying.
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 40 of 72
Jensen: And for the second one, it's at the City Hall campus parking. The east
parking lot needs -- needs to have the corrected ADA designation parking sign
stall installed at the correct height. The current one is not the correct sign and it's
installed at the incorrect height, of course. The Broadway Avenue parking needs
another ADA designated parking stall, a designation parking sign and ADA
accessibility ramp. So, this second enhancement is for addressing the east
parking lot sign, marking the additional required parking stall on Broadway with
paint and sign and cutting out a portion of the sidewalk and replacing it with an
ADA accessibility ramp. The one that's in the picture.
De Weerd: That's not legal?
Jensen: What's that?
De Weerd: So, the sign there is not legal?
Jensen: This picture I took over at the Meridian Police Department Public Safety
Training Center.
De Weerd: Oh. So, that one is legal.
Jensen: Right.
De Weerd: Okay.
Jensen: So, we need to add a sign. We need to add the paint. The aisle and
cut off concrete to have the slope.
De Weerd: Thank you, Max. Council, any questions?
Bird: No.
De Weerd: That has no comment.
Bird: Madam Mayor. Max, on your building maintenance I see you got 63,000 --
or 64,000 in there and what is -- what is that covering? Is that going to fix the fly
situation up in our -- off the roof there and our barrel?
Jensen: Madam Mayor and Councilman Bird, what you're looking at is a
bookkeeping error. So, the 12,000 that was in there before the fly is -- is actually
going to be taken out of there and struck out, so what it's going to be is 52,000.
De Weerd: So, Mr. --
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 41 of 72
Jensen: Yeah. So, it's -- probably taken out and installed, it's going to be
51,343.
Lavoie: Madam Mayor, Councilman Bird, Max, just to give you an update, the
items that we provided you earlier this morning -- that Jenny provided you with
changes, there is a 12,000 dollar change for the City Hall function. That's what
you're referring to. We provided you the top level summary sheets. We did not
go in and provide you with the 5-D part, we were trying to limit the amount of
documents we provided during that time period. So, what you're doing --
Bird: That's my fault for not looking at the right place.
De Weerd: Well -- so, if you will just note under replacement building
maintenance would be 63,000 minus 12,000.
Bird: Yeah. Be down 51 something.
Lavoie: Correct. Right.
Jensen: 51,343.
Bird: Thank you.
Jensen: You're welcome.
De Weerd: And we didn't think getting rid of flies was worth 12,000 dollars. So,
we bought some fly swatters. Actually, we went to a conference and got them
free. Okay. Tom.
Barry: All right. Thank you. I will just move this along here. So, next we have
two enhancements in the Public Works Department. This will be in the Public
Works section of your budget document.
Bird: Are you sure?
Barry: I'm pretty darn sure this time. All right. First we will start with the market
analysis. So, the Public Works Department and the Human Resources
Department have been working together for a few months and both in
conjunction with our Mayor and the Public Works liaison to talk about challenges
that have continued to mount in regards to filling key positions in the Public
Works Department, particularly in the engineering section. We have been
running a vacancy rate for the last year in the engineering section of about 30
percent. If the -- about ten staff there, have been down three positions. We just
filled recently, after a long delay, the project manager position. I don't know if --
Jared was here earlier. It looks like he -- there he is. There is our newest project
manager for the department. Thank you, Jared. He comes to us from the city of
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 42 of 72
Caldwell. So, we are grateful that he's joined us. And that leaves two positions
still available and we are having a heck of a time recruiting engineering level
positions. This has been a trend that has occurred for quite some time . So, we
started some dialogue with the help of the Human Resources Department to do
an initial check with other jurisdictions locally on how their experiences were
going and we found, actually, the very same situation Nampa, Boise, Caldwell
and the like. We even noticed this is the case in United Water, which is now
Suez. So, we have tried to evaluate what the issues are in and around the
vacancies and also the time it's taken to fill vacancies and the compensation
levels that people are having to move towards in order to acquir e talent in
organization and it's all pointing to, essentially, a project that we have been
underway for maybe two to three months now on with Human Resources, which
is a market analysis for those critical positions. Preliminary data from the market
analysis shows that while in many cases we are in alignment in some areas of
the organization, there are several key positions that we are not aligned from a
market standpoint and that is not only the case with Meridian Public Works , that
is the case with several of the jurisdictions locally. So, with the help of the
Finance Department we've been doing a market analysis that they have been
utilizing their resources for and we are grateful to. We initially -- when we put this
enhancement together over a month or so ago, month and a half or so ago, we
had to take a guess as to what we thought maybe the full impact might be on
some sort of market analysis number. I'm happy to say that the preliminary data
we have received back shows that 225,000 that's being requested here is far
above what we believe we need. Preliminary data suggests that we should be
able to make adjustments based on the market analysis results that would come
in less than half of this number. So, that's a good -- that's the good news story. I
do want to make a statement in regard to this enhancement in that I don't believe
that we should be considering this as an enhancement. I would much prefer to
see this as an amendment to our budget and the reason that is is because we --
once we find the data out, which we are -- we have got the data back, we are just
churning the data and making it presentable and getting ready to walk it through
the appropriate vetting and approval processes. I don't think it's fair to ask our
staff to wait five months for an increase that they have coming to them based on
the market analysis. That is not in accordance with compensation policy, nor is it
in accordance with the Department of Labor standards for the state of Idaho. So,
my preference would be to pull this enhancement and with your approval come
forward to you with an amendment of an amount about half of what's being
requested here. As a placeholder in that amendment we feel strongly with the
Human Resources staff that we won't need more than that and, then, they allow
for that process to move forward and for the amendm ent to take effect once the
data has been substantiated. We strongly believe that we can have all of that
work done before the end of this fiscal year, so looking at the amendment
process such that -- and recognizing that it ends in June -- no additional
amendments are allowed after June, we feel like we can move forward with an
amendment here in the next couple weeks and take care of this business
probably in July or so, if not sooner. So, what we did do, however, is we placed it
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 43 of 72
in there as an enhancement just as a placeholder in the event -- because we
weren't clear on what the timelines were going to be when we undertook the
project and now that we have the data back we feel like we can move forward
more quickly than we had anticipated. So, the good news is we think it's going to
be less than half and I don't know if it's good or bad news , but we would also like
to ask for your concurrence in taking this out of our budget as an enhancement
and putting half of it in as an amendment for this fiscal year to take effect as soon
as you authorize that information. So, I will pause for a moment of time. I can
imagine you probably have several questions about this, so before we move
forward I will give you a moment to ask questions.
De Weerd: Well, Tom, I think that when it's finalized it will come for discussion in
front of Council.
Barry: Uh-huh. Yes, ma'am.
De Weerd: So, probably more important to talk about it then.
Barry: Okay.
Bird: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Bird.
Bird: I think -- though I think Tom is right, we need to figure out whether are we
going to leave the enhancement in are we going to take it out?
De Weerd: Council, if -- once we do a market analysis and we find that we are
severely out of line -- out of market, there is a requirement or a duty to bring it
into line. So, it would have to come back as a budget amendment and we will
work with Finance and HR when those numbers are finalized.
Barry: Thank you, Madam Mayor. Okay. The next enhancement is a little more
light-hearted. We have an opportunity here to partner with the Idaho Power to
extend the It Starts At Home video series. You may have seen one of these
shows. This is an award-winning series that has been developed to showcase
and educate the public in regard to our water system, our wastewater system
and also Republic Services partnered with us on the last one to highlight garbage
and trash removal under the theme that, you know, all of these services really
touch people in their home, meaning it starts at home. So, I was approached by
Idaho Power staff a month or two ago, maybe a little longer than that, to inquire
as to moving forward on this series and including an electrical component. This
was something that was in the plan years ago -- I should say maybe two years
ago, but was dropped for a couple different reasons. The opportunity has
resurfaced. Idaho Power has actually repackaged their approach and has also
suggested that they could contribute much more to the project in and around
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 44 of 72
their in-kind contribution. So, come to find out that Idaho Power has quite an
extensive capability in regard to video editing and also development of videos.
You may have seen some of their recent videos on their Centennial in the series
that they put together on that. So, the project that's being contemplated now
comes at a significant discount compared to overall cost of these things in the
past, because Idaho Power is generously donating a lot of B roll or what we call
background footage. They will be donating studio time. They can be doing
voiceovers, video editing, and those types of things. So, they are interested in
doing a video -- very similar to what we are talking about to serve all of their
customers and so they have said, well, we will let you use all of that information
and we will even let you tailor it to Meridian residents, but you will have to pay for
that component. So, that's what this 17,000 dollars is, is to kind of tailor a
segment of the program to Meridian customers where we think we can talk about
things like electrical use at the treatment plant, conservation approaches and
policies that the City of Meridian is utilizing, the energy efficiency at City Hall, the
police station, a number of different things. The best news here is that this
conceivably would cost us nothing, because we do apply for grants or incentives,
if you will, from Idaho Power from time to time for projects that meet their
conservation strategies, and this 17,000 that's being identified here is actually a
redeployment of those incentive funds that we expect to receive on a project
coming due here pretty quick. So, this is actually, we would suggest, a no net
increase -- or, actually, a no cost project for Meridian ratepayers, since we will
just be reprogramming the Idaho Power money that we would be getting back as
an incentive to do this project. So, we are pretty excited about that, both in cost
and also in the way we finance it. So, that is all we had for Public Works Division
of the Public Works Department.
De Weerd: Council, any questions on this last content?
Cavener: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Cavener.
Cavener: Tom, maybe you can go back through slide number two related to the
video package. Why should we bring this in as an enhancement if you anticipate
grant funding coming for this, that we don't just do it as an amendment once you
receive your grant funding?
Barry: Well, certainly, Mr. Cavener, we could do tha t. The idea behind the
project was to shore up funding to give Idaho Power essentially the go ahead for
them to approve -- for them to put into their budget and approve money for their
budget or essentially staff resources to work on the project with us. So, it's,
essentially, more a good-faith gesture. We could certainly wait until we have
incentive monies and, then, redeploy that through an amendment later. That
would work just fine and, then, we could give the Idaho Power staff, you know,
some sense that the Council is supportive of it, we are just going to do it in a
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 45 of 72
different way. I think that would be totally fine to do it that way as well . We
typically include them as enhancements, because you folks tend to like to know
what's on the horizon for us and where we are going to spend our money and
what projects we are working on. So, that's why it made it into the budget.
De Weerd: Well -- and we need spending authority, so we've done this in our
Police Department with the grants that we anticipate and that that money would
only be spent if the grant was received. Anything further?
Palmer: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Palmer.
Palmer: So, is that known that it would only happen if the grant is received?
Barry: Madam Mayor, Councilman Palmer, it's -- I want to make clear it's not a
grant. It's a reimbursement -- it's not even a reimbursement, it is an incentive
that comes back to us in the form of a rebate when we comply with their energy
conservation initiatives in the rebate program that they offer. So, it's not a -- it's
not a grant. I know it sort of sounds like a grant, but technically it's not. We
intend to receive those monies and use those monies for this project and that's
the budget authority we are asking for. If that doesn't come we would not likely
move forward on this project, unless you provided approval through the
Enterprise Fund to move forward.
De Weerd: So, I think what the question is is that you can put parameters that if
the rebate is not received the spending authority is not granted.
Cavener: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Cavener.
Cavener: Understanding that it's a rebate, Tom, can you provide some
explanation to Council about what other types of projects those rebate dollars
could be used for?
Barry: Uh-huh.
Cavener: And maybe -- I think we have used those dollars on other projects here
at City Hall in the past, maybe for every Council Member to share what some of
those have been.
Barry: Sure. So, my understanding of the rebate p rogram is that there is no
strings attached to it. Much like the hundred thousand we got back for City Hall,
we are able to deploy that to any number of things. I think -- I think the City
Council used partly of some of it for art and partly some of it for other energy
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 46 of 72
efficiency projects I think at the police station. Typically what we would like to do
is keep that funding in a -- in a mechanism that is what it was intended or what it
was received for. So, some sort of energy conservation type of program or
project. Essentially, when we did our turbo blowers we used variable frequency
drives at the wastewater treatment plant for the turbo blowers and we got a big --
we were eligible for incentive there. Those monies come back to us and could
be redeployed to offset really anything. The budget cost, if we want to say, oh,
well, that just lowers our cost by X dollars or could be used for education
outreach, environmental programs as some of the dollars have been used for or
can be just returned to the ending fund balance and not used at. Maybe for
future offsetting of other projects or just to build a fund. So, really, there is no
strings attached to it. We would like to redeploy it to, you know, sort of -- use the
money for the same reason we received the money, which is for energy
efficiency and in this case to reach out to the public about things that they can do
at home and things that we are doing in Meridian to help conserve money. The
wastewater treatment plant, for example -- or Wastewater Resource Recovery
Facility, is the largest consumer of electrical power in the entire city and we have
been doing quite a bit out there to curb those costs and we think that there is
some good stories there the public can learn from and I think even businesses
can learn from as well. So, again, that's the reason we think there is good benefit
to putting this to this type of work and not just to showcase what we are doing,
but also give ideas on what folks can do at home and to also allow Idaho Power
to reach out to their consortium as well, which happens to be our ratepayers as
well.
De Weerd: Mr. Cavener, in the past to the rebates I'm aware of they have gone
back into the General Fund. The monies or rebate we got with City Hall, Council
at that time wanted it to be used exactly for the reason we got the rebate . It went
into incentives for energy, small business start-ups that were energy related and
because the public art piece had reusable and energy-efficient -- certain
qualifiers to it, they put it into public art. So, it's been themed, the money that I
know of, and rebates have been used for the purpose they were received for and
I think this is consistent with that. Any other questions? Okay.
Stewart: Okay. Madam, Members of the Council -- I think everybody knows me.
Warren Stewart. I'm the city engineer. Austin Petersen is our utility and
streetlight coordinator and he is -- was gracious enough to let me come and
make this presentation --
De Weerd: How very gracious.
Stewart: -- on streetlights. So, I'm going to talk to you a little bit our streetlight
enhancement, which is, of course, a General Fund enhancement. Typically and
historically we have -- we have requested 50,000 dollars a year to do streetlight
projects within the city project. Those streetlight projects -- projects have
focused in two areas. One within safe walking routes to school -- in other words,
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 47 of 72
enhancing lighting on routes that kids take to get to school, as well as putting
streetlights in areas that may deter crime. So, we have focus primarily on those
things historically and it's been 50,000 dollars. You'll notice that this is
significantly higher this year. There is embedded in this 150,000 dollars -- it's the
same 50,000 dollars that we generally ask for to do those same types of projects.
In this particular one there is 20 -- or there is 30,000 dollars which will install
streetlights that are in the same types of areas. In other words, a safe walking
routes to school, dark intersections, school bus stops and so forth. So, there is
30,000 dollars which is set aside for that, which is consistent with what we have
done historically. There's another 20,000 portion of this, which is, essentially, the
city's match for a grant that we jointly applied with ACHD for and we received to
do -- it was a local highway safety improvement grant that basically -- in
conjunction with ACHD will pay for street lighting along Cherry Lane between
Meridian Road and Linder, which also happens to be a significant walking route
to school. There is many kids that walk that route. But our particular portion of
that grant is 20,000 dollars. ACHD has paid 75,000 dollars for the design out of
their pocket. They will also be contributing another 18,000 dollars towards the
construction. The estimated cost for those lights is about 312,000 dollars. So,
for our 20,000 investment will be getting about 412,000 dollars in value, not
including the 75,000 dollars in design work that ACHD has already paid for. So, I
think that's a pretty significant return on our investment. The final 100,000 dollars
is -- well, you may remember -- some of you -- in 2013 we came to the City
Council, city staff did, and -- to talk to them about -- to talk to Council about doing
street lighting along the roadway improvements to Settlers Park when it -- ACHD
did the Ustick Road project. There was some question at the time as to whether
the city -- we had actually received questions from outside -- whether the city was
going to follow its own policies for street lighting and put streetlights along that
corridor and so we brought that question to the Council and the Council direction
is, yes, you should go ahead and include that street lighting, so that it is
consistent with what we would require private sector developers to do. So, we
went forward at that point and worked with ACHD to get that included in the
design for the improvements to help with the Ustick Road improvements . ACHD
has -- is going to pay for all of the conduit. They are also going to pay for the
streetlights at the intersections, as well as the intersection approaches. But the
city will be paying for the balance of the street along that corridor. So, that's the
other hundred thousand dollars. It's not necessarily typical what we would
normally come back with, but we were directed by Council a few years ago to
include it in that project and with that I will stand for any questions.
De Weerd: Any questions? Okay. Thank you, Stewart. Tell Austin you did a
good job filling in for him.
Barry: Madam Mayor, to finish out our presentation, you have heard about all the
enhancements we are requesting in regard to the fiscal year '17 budget. We
have been asked also -- all the other departments have been -- to talk about
future challenges briefly and put in context sort of what we should expect in the
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 48 of 72
next fiscal year, perhaps those thereafter. So, I wanted to talk briefly about our
enhancements -- in particular for the operational variability that is inherent in this
process and in two different contexts. First, business and budget cycles and,
second, we are in a mid-course correction. So, first, I wanted to present this
graph to you. This is a graph borrowed from just classic statistical process
control diagrams and this, essentially, talks about estimate variance when we put
together projects and, you know, on the left-hand side of the axis there is the
estimated variance, on the bottom is time, and greater uncertainty occurs earlier
in time, whereas you have less uncertainty later in time. So, typically the high --
or the two yellow bars there represent the high estimate and the law estimate
when we are putting a project together. The bars -- or the red arrows in between
the high and low estimates are, essentially, variance or the amount of variance in
our estimates. So, when we put a project together typically the concept stage
where we are conceiving the project, trying to figure out what the -- what the
criteria -- success criteria are, what we are going to have to actually do, that
happens earlier in and, of course, variance tends to be fairly high. As we move
forward into design of the project we get more information and we are able to firm
up the actual estimate until finally we get to a point where we are able to create a
bid and we get the information back from the bid and that's where we get th e
actual cost. Now, this all makes sense to everybody I'm sure. However,
sometimes we are criticized for creating situations -- or maybe not creating, but
for the reality of situations whereby amendments are needed along the way,
because the budget process that we are involved in right now doesn't necessarily
coincide with this business process for generating project estimates . So, for
example, right now for some of our projects we are giving you estimates that are
in this range, because we are pretty early in the project concept stage, where in
other -- some of our other projects we are a little further along in the design
stage, so we can give you a little better accurate
-- accuracy in regards to the budget. So, we don't really know until we get to the
bid what the actual cost of the project is going to be. And typically we do fairly
well, but on occasion, you know, we are either under and in some cases even
over. So, that's why amendments sometimes factor in and that's what I was
referring to earlier in the presentation about this sort of -- this flexible budget
approach that we rely on as we move through the fiscal year to compensate for
those types of variances. The second thing that we also wanted to point out is,
essentially, course corrections or mid-course corrections and I have mentioned to
you this when we talked to you about the sewer cleaning truck. When we put our
budgets together -- for example, let's take a budget in fiscal year 2012. That
budget gets put together in 2011, just like today's budget -- or I should say fiscal
year '17's budget being put together while we are in fiscal year '16, but I got to
rely on earlier data. So, we take projections based upon past trends and
sometimes as we move forward in time those trends either increase or decrease.
This is actual data that shows required corrections that we have to take in the
development of our budget. For example, the capacity expansion project at the
Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility has been moved up, because growth
has accelerated beyond our initial projection. So, we have increased the number
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 49 of 72
of wells that we are planning to add to the city's well field and the like. So, we
just wanted to keep that sort of in context as we go. We don't have a crystal ball
and we don't have all the answers today. This is a constant process and
sometimes these processes are juxtaposed to one another and sometimes they
conflict with one another. So, let's get to department challenges. We have three
main areas that we are -- we can categorize our department challenges kind of
going forward. The first is in maintaining levels of service. The second is sort of
accommodating new regulations and the last is growth. So, when you look at all
of these together, they drive our cost of doing business, every one of these, both
independently and collectively. So, let's look at them just very quickly
independently. I cannot operate this department in fiscal year '17 and do all the
same things I did this year at the same cost . I can't do it. There is no way to do
it. I have electricity that increases. I have chemical costs that increase. We
have natural gas and fuels that increase . Labor increases. Equipment and
materials -- and the list goes on. In fact, the CPI tracks this stuff and this is the
CPI actual numbers on inflation. These are national numbers. They're not Idaho
numbers. And you can see they vary, you know, by year, depending upon
economic conditions and whatnot. But cumulatively over the last nine years
there has been a 16 percent increase in the cost of doing business just on the
CPI nationally. Now, if you look at this in the construction field and you use the
ENR, what's called the Engineering News Record numbers for the construction
cost indices, you see that the number is much higher for the same time period.
It's almost 26 percent. Ten percent higher. That has a lot to do with labor
availability, cost of materials and supplies and those sorts of things. So, our cost
of doing business rise simply by doing the same thing next year that we did this
year. Now, we also have increases to service levels. Some of these are directed
by the City Council. City Council has asked us to extend services to south
Meridian and those services are going to cost us eight million dollars to do. We
have water treatment for brown water. We were directed to improve water
treatment for our water system and those water systems add additional cost to
our -- to our overall budget. Odor controls, the Wastewater Resource Recovery
Facility are also service level increases that we have to accommodate. So, the
two together compound one another. From a regulatory standpoint the
regulations do not stop. This is -- these are like waves on an ocean. Every
single wave crashes is -- seems like a new regulation for us and these add
enormously -- and particularly at the wastewater treatment facility it adds
enormously to our cost, requiring us to increase staff, upgrades to the equipment,
upgrades to our processes and I have got some examples here. Just in this new
permit that we are going to receive we have to sample four times more often than
we have been in the past. So, instead of 1,000 samples we have to take a
month, we have to take 4,000. We have four -- or we have four currently in our
permit effluent limits. We will have 14. So, they almost -- almost quadrupled.
The number of reports and plans that we have to file increases by sevenfold and
we're going to be going and monitoring and measuring performance down to the
parts per trillion basis, instead of part per million bases. All these impacts cost us
money, whether it's advancing the technology to meet these requirements,
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 50 of 72
increasing the number of projects to have the technology, increasing number of
staff to run those -- that technology and those equipment and processes and,
then, overall increased personnel, operations and maintenance costs
accordingly. The third leg is growth and growth is a big driver for us in our
budget as well. I think you have seen this slide before. On the left side we have
a map of the U.S. This is something we looked at last year that the -- United Van
Lines put this migration study together and in their study they found that the state
of Idaho is blue here, along with some of the other blue states -- all the blue
states identified here are states that people --
De Weerd: We are not a blue state.
Bird: We are not a blue state.
Barry: Well, I don't know if United Van Lines knew that or not when the put the
graphic together, but they have actually recolored that for you. Anyway, the dark
-- what do we call that? Dark --
De Weerd: The dark gray.
Barry: Navy. Yes. Navy color. Are all the states people are moving to. Idaho
happens to be the fourth most desirable state in the entire nation right now.
That's where people are moving, according to United Van Lines who did the
study. And I'm sorry we don't have a lot of people in the room. You can't see on
this right-hand side the two population numbers here, but this shows t he Idaho
population change year by year and this shows the City of Meridian and you can
see while they both go up, the City of Meridian significantly outpacing Idaho's
growth, but that's nothing new to you. I thought this would be kind of fun for you
to see, kind of what this means. So, in 1920 this is what the town looked like ten
years after incorporation. Less than -- about a third of a square mile. By 1990 it
looked like this. In the year 2000 it looked like that. Then between 2000 and
2010 it grew significantly and, then, 2015 it looked like this and, then, with the
latest annexations and projects, we have added significantly more area. So, the
town is growing like crazy. But sometimes we don't realize until we look at things
like this as to how significant that is. When you go back -- I mean let's just go
back to 2000. So, 16 years imagine the water and sewer infrastructure and
sewer and water lines and wells and lift stations, all that has to be added to the
city in order to accommodate this growth and the same is true in the General
Fund service area. We have to add additional police officers, additional
firefighters. We are covering more area. We have got more to do. So, that
increases, essentially, the cost of doing business as well. These are the actual
numbers. You have seen this before, so I won't dwell on this. But we continue to
see a rise in both commercial and residential development and it doesn't look like
it's going to stop. Mr. Lavoie had mentioned that -- at least for another two years
we are going to be in this -- in this boat based on projections. So, what does that
mean? Let's sort of give some statistics here. Idaho is the 12th fastest growing
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 51 of 72
state in the nation. There are 20,000 cities in the United States. We are number
nine when it comes to pace of growth right now. Meridian has been the fastest
growing city in Idaho for two decades straight. Between 1990 and 2000 our
population tripled and, then, it doubled again between 2000 and 2008. We don't
have the latest numbers. What does this mean in Public Works? That means
we are struggling in Public Works. I may be quite frank with you. We have a lot
of infrastructure, a lot of things to do in a very short period of time. We're adding
infrastructure, equipment, materials and supplies, human resources, and all of
this means that our growth is occurring in the form of expenses in our budget.
So, the budget process is a fantastic process, because it really is a process
whereby we are making and meeting and managing commitments. So, we make
commitments to the City Council that we can provide the type of services that
you made commitments to the community each time you approve a subdivision.
So, it's all about us working together to meet those commitments. Just to give
you a sense, about -- for the last 12 to 18 months there has been an average of
about 130 ERU permit, equivalent residential units that are permitted per month.
That means based upon our census numbers we are adding roughly about 3 75
people to this community every month or about 4,500 people per year. We are
adding a thousand accounts every year in the department as well. So, what
does this mean? If we just look in the last two years for the Department of Public
Works we have had to add in a two-year time frame 46 miles of water lines, 406
fire hydrants, four wells, 53 miles of sewer line. This is enormous. So, it stands
to reason that we are going to have increased budgets and we are going to have
a need for increased staff. There is no way around it. We cannot maintain the
service level and grow the way we are growing in addition to trying to maintain
service levels without growth and meeting regulatory requirements. This is what
the forecast looks like for the department moving forward. Over the next ten
years we believe that we are probably going to be in at about 375 million dollars.
Two hundred of that will be capital projects and 175 of that will be personnel,
operations and maintenance. So, from the capital side about 50 percent of it will
be growth related capital, 12 percent will be replacements and 38 percent will be
upgrades. Largely regulatory driven. The developers pay all of the growth
related components. That's why we model and we adjust the hook up charges or
the assessments. The ratepayers pay for everything else. So, 275 million
dollars of ongoing operations, maintenance, and regulatory compliance
components. But there is good news. As our budgets increase year over year
and they will continue to increase year over year, so does our revenue. As we
add new people to the city they pay connection charges and they are paying their
fair share of the rate. What our job is to do is to make sure that we balance the
receipt of revenues against the expenditures and budgets and what I'm here to
say is that we seem to be doing a pretty good job of that. We have stabilized the
fund and we do see -- while this graph shows that we are spending more
currently and have been for the last few years, that was forecasted. We are able
to weather that, because we are spending ending fund balances that were saved
up during the time where we didn't have a lot of growth and we didn't have a lot
of folks being added to the community. The next couple of years beyond fiscal
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 52 of 72
year '17 looks like we get back to a point where revenues and expenses come
back into alignment and stabilize and that's what we are excited about. So, we
are managing through a bit of a hump, a bit of an expense hump right now, but
that doesn't mean that we are going to return to budgets from a personnel,
operations and maintenance standpoint to budgets we have today. So, again, as
I mentioned, cost of service continues to rise no matter what. So, specifically in
our department here is the challenges we are going to be looking for over this
next year or two. We are going to continue to add water treatment facilities. Our
maintenance programs continue to have to grow, thus, the enhancements that
have been requested today. SCADA complexity. While it's wonderful to have
SCADA, which is, again, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition technology,
it's complex stuff and -- and it's getting more complex. But that's going to
continue. Aging plant infrastructure, as well as repair costs -- the treatment plant
was built in 1976 and it's been under construction ever since, mostly due to
growth expansion, and so there is a lot of new components. But there is a lot
that still needs to be upgraded and Laurelei spoke to some of those projects
earlier. Increasing operational costs we have mentioned already and, then, the
need to determine the future or reuse. This is something that we will have to
bring back to you as a separate discussion, but our reclaimed water program is
something that we need to talk about, because the new permit kind of changes
the game in regard to how valuable that program there may or may not be. From
a growth perspective we are going to continue to add new wells and storage
facilities. New water and sewer lines. We have this capacity expansion I talked
to you about. Again, this will all increase maintenance and operation costs and
also staff requirements. On a regulatory standpoint we have the unregulated
contaminant monitoring rule number four, which is UCMR-4 coming in fiscal year
'18. This is going to require us to sample for things that aren't yet regulated , but
the EPA would like to have regulated , so we have to develop data on that and,
guess what, that stuff can cost us tens of thousands to over 100,000 dollars.
That's big money to -- to sample. Lead and copper rules, as well as the revised
total coliform rules -- there is additional tweaks going on in those areas that
increase our operating costs, particularly from a sampling and inspection
standpoint. The new NPDES permit -- we have already talked long and hard
about that, so you know there is a big cost coming associated with that. And,
then, 24 hour staffing is going to also be required for the new permit limits in
certain areas of the wastewater division. That's going to increase our operating
expenses. And, then, again, as we talked about reclaimed water or the reuse --
well, we also want to talk to you about the reuse permit which is coming up for --
is coming due for the reappropriation, if you will. All right. So, this is what it
means financially, kind of moving forward. Essentially, we expect to continue to
increase our capital spending probably about four or five percent next -- from
fiscal year '17 to fiscal year '18. The operations an d maintenance will probably
increase by another three percent from fiscal year '17 to '18 and, then, personnel
increase about five percent with the addition of about four to six additional staff in
fiscal year '18 budget. So, you're not surprised about that. Now, that always
leads to the next question. You know, how are we going to pay for all of this
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 53 of 72
stuff; right? Well, we continue to model this and we continue to come back to
you every year and share with you the results of those models and tell you how
we are adjusting or making adjustments to both projects from a timing standpoint,
the addition of staff, all the way down to operational changes that we are making,
try to improve efficiencies and those type of things. So, we will continue to do
that. But right now the forecast that we have in the model for the next ten years
looks pretty good. It looks pretty stable. So, that's good news as well. So, I just
want to put that in context for you and with that we are, essentially, done with our
presentation and we will stand for any questions that you might have. Just lastly
I do want to thank both Kyle and Dennis and Max and Warren and Laurelei and
Clint for co-presenting with me today. I think they did a fabulous job and I
appreciate all of your preparation time and experience in sharing that with the
Council today. So, with that we will stand for questions.
De Weerd: Council, any questions?
Bird: I have none.
Borton: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Borton.
Borton: I do. And it's maybe something that -- to chew on between now and July
20th. Excellent presentation and data. One of the larger things that jumped out
in reviewing of the material is the -- and you described the reason why, but use of
the existing fund balance to fund a lot of the capital expenditures for this coming
fiscal year. It showed the use of just a little over 18 million of the fund balance,
leaving a projected balance of just over 14 million. When I look at that figure in
conjunction with next year's expected cap ital outlay for the Wastewater Resource
Recovery Facility upgrades, six -- almost 17 million dollars, it appears as though
the entire available fund balance after reserves is to be allocated next year; is
that correct?
Barry: So -- Madam Mayor, Councilman Borton, it certainly appears that way.
Now, what isn't included in the numbers that you have is next year's revenues.
So, we will get all of next year's revenue that will add to that and offset. So -- and
that's what the model does is it takes in those revenues, it adds an inflationary
factor to -- and a growth factor and these other sorts of things. So, to get into the
specifics of the model it could take us some time and I would be happy to meet
with you separately and go through those, but suffice it to say that the model
does reach out ten years and it incorporates all of that information and does
project the ending fund balance and shows that with reserves as capable of
sustaining the short-term expenses and then -- and, in fact, I kind of don't want
today this, but maybe I will give you a little hope, we are hopeful that if we can
get through this swing, we may be able to reduce the EPA surcharge that we put
in place a few years ago earlier than we had thought. So, that's what we are kind
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 54 of 72
of keeping our eye on at this point in time. I would say there is no reason to
worry at this point in time, based upon our analysis so far.
Borton: Madam Mayor, kind of tied to that is -- there was some discussion about
the way the General Fund can allocate reserves towards repair and replacement,
depreciation, capital improvement, planned expenditures. Is there -- is there
room for that concept -- not today I understand, into the forecast for the
Enterprise Fund as well? So, when we are looking at those reserves that are --
we call them unallocated reserves, really, they are. Is that concept being
followed?
Lavoie: Madam Mayor, Councilman Borton, to answer your question, the answer
is yes. We can incorporate the same philosophies to both the Ge neral Fund and
the Enterprise Fund and we are continually discussing those avenues to plan for
the future and develop for the future. So, I think over the next many months you
will hear more dialogue from the Mayor, from Finance and the supporting
departments on this concept of developing reserve funds for the city's future.
Borton: Okay.
Barry: Madam Mayor, if I could just add to that. It's a fantastic question,
Councilman Borton and our rate model already incorporates that philosophy. So,
you can see our replacements and our repair projects are already separated out
that way. We just haven't done it through the city's financial process, if you will.
So, we are modeling that way and we are kind of -- kind of working together with
the Finance Department to get the General Fund and the Enterprise Fund to take
that step together. So, hopefully that helps.
De Weerd: Okay. Any further questions? Thank you, Public Works.
Barry: Thank you.
De Weerd: We appreciate your being here and each of your presentations. Up
next is our Police Department. Okay. We will go ahead and continue with our
Police Department budget presentation and I will turn it over to Chief Lavey.
Lavey: Madam Mayor, Council, thank you for the opportunity to speak toda y.
This is a little unique for us, because we always seem to go last and going first
under the General Fund is different for us. A couple things. I heard Councilman
Borton say I would hate to follow that last presentation. Really , the last few
slides Mr. Barry justified what we are going to ask for today. So, really, I think
our slides are just going to compliment what he had already said. In fact, I would
probably just submit handwritten right away and that would suffice. I also worry
sometimes that -- I like to do things a little more simpler and so comparing my
slides to his is often not fair, but I think you will see this year that some of our
slides have a lot of data on them and because of that I have simplified the
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 55 of 72
presentation I'm going to give today and hope that we can go fairly quickly to get
to the point of discussion at the end. And, then, I also have a -- a couple of
handouts for you that I would hope that you take back, process, look through
them, and ask questions -- hopefully before July 20th, but if not on July 20th. So,
we have a lot of data. The other thing is is I heard Councilman Palmer say
something about a friend watching online and think you all should wear funny
hats and I looked in my office for a funny hat and I really did n't have one and at
the time he said that there was only two people watching, so I figured it was
either me and that person, but I have a hat for you, but, in fairness, we only had
one, so I didn't bring it, so --
Palmer: And he was in Cleveland, so --
Lavey: I want to talk about the budget dollars at work and what we basically did
is went back and looked at some of the things that we presented to Council last
year and I really want to talk about what we did with those dollars. As you recall
we were in a -- a pretty lengthy construction phase for not only the training
center, but the department remodel. Both of those are complete. They were
complete under budget by about 360,000 dollars, so that's always nice. That
money went back into the General Fund. However, we did use some of that
money to offset some of the other projects -- other repairs around the facility,
rather than bringing up enhancements this year. The fleet coordinator position --
this person has been fired. It's -- we hired her from Fairly Reliable Bob's. She
was the service manager for Fairly Reliable Bob's. She had been there for many,
many, many years. First week she was on the job she already submitted to
Chevrolet for reimbursements for repairs that we paid for that we shouldn't have
paid for, because of recalls. She has proven herself already and what's unique
about this -- because we are going to talk about it later on, is that she is a civilian
position and she took over a role that was currently -- or was previously done by
a sworn position. We took that sworn position, reallocated that within our office
of professional responsibility and we now have a civilian not only doing the patrol
cars, she's doing the entire fleet for the department, so it's gone quite well. We
have added smart phones to the patrol officers. Gives them the ability to contact
our citizens -- stay in contact with our citizens on cases. We added a motor
officer position. This was a grant position, so we are in year two of -- of the grant
position. It will run out after FY-17 I believe. In FY-18 we have to cover all costs
for that.
De Weerd: And, chief, is that a tiered contribution? So, 75 percent, 50 percent,
25 or --
Lavey: Madam Mayor, Council, it was a little bit more unique this year -- or this
last year, because it is a tiered position, but because of the one grant we
submitted failed, the state went and grabbed other funds, so I think it was n't quite
75, 25, 50, 50 like it was. I don't know what those breakdown s are. It is tiered,
but not in those same figures that we are often familiar with, because it's state
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 56 of 72
grant monies, not federal grant. We added two additional patrol officers and we
added an executive assistant to our nonsworn staff and I'm happy to say that we
have had the ability to reach our deadlines with Finance, because there was
quite -- quite often we were not meeting those deadlines with a lot of all our -- our
bills and other things and I think our command staff will testify to you that the
person that we have in charge of the finances now is quite demanding on
invoices and when to submit them, so -- been quite successful. These are the
successes that we really want to talk about. We hear this every single week. We
celebrate this every single week. But this is the thing that we need to remind
ourself. This is why we do what we do. We are the best place to live in the
United States. I heard that in Tom's presentation. I'm reminding you again. You
will probably see it again and again and again. We are the best place in the
United States to live. When we often see those comments, whether it's USA
Today or the Wall Street or some other public safety publication, they are always
citing low crime rate, public safety, and, again, Kudos for Parks for the reason
why this is a great place. The other thing is I would like to celebrate -- and I
would like to have Lieutenant Colaianni briefly explain what it is for some of the
other Council members, but we just went through our reaccreditation for the
Idaho Chiefs of Police and what's unique about that is that when we -- three
years ago when we submitted our request to be accredited, we were the 14th city
in the state to be accredited in the entire 88 cities within the state of Idaho. They
told us that we would have that accreditation for five years and, then, they
changed the rules to three and so Lieutenant Colaianni has had to work diligently
two years ahead of time to try to get us reaccredited and it presented a challenge
with the -- the building remodel, because in the building remodel we made
changes to evidence, changes to protocol and it really -- it created a -- some
work for him. So, I would like for him to just briefly touch on what it really means
to be accredited with the Idaho Chief of Police Association.
Colaianni: I'm always brief. You should -- not really, but -- Madam Mayor,
Council Members. Yeah. Thanks, chief. Ninety-four areas is what the ICOPA
standards come in and evaluate within our department. Ninety-four areas --
everything from how we process new hires, the procedures we have in place for
use of force, pursuits. How we handle evidence. How we handle discipline
internally. How we are accountable to the public. How we are accountable for
our dollars. Our public outreach program. Ninety-four areas they come in and
evaluate every three years and it's a daunting task, because you have to have
these programs not only in place, but you have to show where you are ac tually
doing them. You just can't throw something in the file and say we do community
policing. It goes beyond that. They want to see what we are doing and how
often we do it. You can't just say, well, we book our evidence this way. They go
into the vault, they audit it, they grab items off the shelf and they make us
produce where they were at, that they were booked correctly. They make us
show our use of force reports, our complaint process -- everything. It's very, very
involved and we did really well. Probably one of the best in the state by their
comments and it all ties in with the policy manual that we developed a few years
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 57 of 72
ago through Lexipol. It all comes together to professionalize the department,
you bring in a camera program, we are accountable, we are transparent and it
worked out very well for us and so it's a big -- it's a tremendous hat off to you
guys for supporting us in those area s, because it does take money and it does
take time, but it pays dividends in the professionalism of our department.
Lavey: Thanks, Scott. I would also like to give Kudos to the -- the entire
command staff for making that possible and also to Terry De ardon. Terry is an
attorney that contracts with the city through the city of Boise . Terry has an
amount of time built into our policy manual , into our policy for our body-worn
camera program, our entire department, he has invested his lifeblood into what
we do and it's been a -- a major part of why we are successful and I bring that up,
because two hours ago I just got some news that was going to be upsetting, is
that Terry has put in his two weeks notice and it had been my desire to bring him
on as in-house counsel for the Police Department for several years and it just
really didn't jive with our budget and the timing and Sheriff Bartlett has hired him
as an associate legal counsel. Starting in two weeks. So, that was a little
frustrating that I got that news, but big Kudos to -- to Terry and the command
staff for making that possible. And, then, I also just want to thank our entire
command -- I mean our entire patrol -- not even our patrol staff -- our entire
department staff for really believing in the city and believing in our mission and
doing what they do to make our -- our city a safe city. It does not go unnoticed.
De Weerd: As you can tell.
Lavey: We look at it as we are investing in our future. We have great pride in
what we do, but we also want to make sure that this is the best place that we
possibly can for our youth, for our kids, for my kids and we need to continue to
celebrate those successes of being one of the safest. But that's the good news.
Well, the bad is next. That's all right. I jumped ahead. These are some of the
quality of life factors that we do enjoy. We are the best city in the U.S. Safest
city in Idaho. Second safest city in Idaho. We are not the first. We are not the
safest city. So, I guess it gives us something to strive for. I will tell you under
last year's staff we were the third safest city and now we are back to the second
safest city. So, we are progressing forwards, but I just don't know how to kick
Rexburg out of the way, because Rexburg is the -- is the safest city in the state of
Idaho. But I think second is not -- it's not number one, but second is pretty darn
good. You hear Tom mention that we are the fastest growing city in the state of
Idaho and we are the ninth fastest growing city in the United States. I say that,
because as we grow it puts greater demand on the services that we provide.
Public safety must grow to maintain or improve our current level of service and
the exceptional quality of life that we enjoy and the low crime rate that we enjoy
doesn't just happen and if we value what we have, we have to do everything in
our power to hold onto, if not improve, what we have for th e future. And I say
that, because I have asked our staff to do some crazy things. I have asked them
to do more with less. I have asked them to look at every single efficiencies within
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 58 of 72
our department and make changes to what we do to try to maintain that level of
service. We have taken the fleet coordinator position and made it civilian and put
the sworn back in. We have a -- as we talked about our enhancements today,
we have a proposal that would take a sworn position and put it back in patrol and
add a civilian in. We have actually looked at our task force. We have removed a
person from our task force, because we didn't think we were getting our money's
worth. We looked at our other task forces and say are we getting our money's
worth in this task force and the answer is yes. The sad thing is is I'm coming to
the point where I have to ask what are we willing to give up, because we just
can't maintain that level anymore without adding staff. And, really, our
presentation today is mainly going to focus on stats and I'm going to share some
stats with you, some brief stats and, then, I will give you some -- some additional
stuff to chew on as we leave today. Early today in Todd's presentation he gave
you a chart that showed, you know, the level of employees and the level of
citizens. A graph. But this one is specific to police and you're going to notice
that there is a bigger gap than there was on general employees. But -- oh, I
jumped ahead. Sorry. We will get to that in just a second. I felt tha t you needed
to know the makeup of the department currently before we jumped into staffing
and this is our current makeup. We are broke into four divisions. Administration.
Patrol. Community Service. Investigation. We currently have 97 sworn officers
and we have 24.5 nonsworn. That .5 is a part-time position in MADC. And, then,
these are the enhancements we are going to talk about. I just have it listed here
in narrative form right now, just so you have them on your mind as I talk about
the rest of the presentation and, then, we will discuss them toward the end. We
are asking for four more patrol officers. We are asking for a code enforcement
supervisor that would be a civilian position. It's currently being supervised by a
sworn position. We are asking for a records retention analyst. We are asking for
a school resource officer. We will have more on that at the end of the
presentation as well. We have some CID vehicles. We are requesting a data
records. And, then, you have heard the presentation on the cradle point data
connections for the cars. This would complete the rest of the fleet. We looked at
several different factors as we go through staffing needs. We look at all our
different measurables. We looked at the -- our performance indicators, such as
our call to service. We look at staffing projections that we have -- we had over
the years with what we think we are going to need based upon the growth of the
city. We looked at the benchmarks for the local agencies, as well as we are a
member of the benchmark cities in the United States. We have 25 like -size
departments, so we can look and see what they do in a whole bunch of different
areas. You will find that when I -- my presentation today is only going to talk
about the local agencies. However, I put all the stats in a binder I'm going to give
you today that covers the benchmarks across the United States. We looked --
for the call to service we looked at our current staffing levels, we looked at the
building permit growth here in the city and we looked at the geographical growth
of the city. Tom has already provided you some of those slides. You kind of
have an idea what they look like. I have a cover slide that really kind of tells the
same thing, but it's -- it's used differently, so it kind of gives you a chance to
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 59 of 72
look at it in a different -- different way. There is a graphic by itself. There is your
level of population versus the level of staffing as a police department. So, what I
would ask you to do is look at this draft today, go back and look at our budget
summary and the charts listed on the police department and, then, go back and
look at the staffing levels for the entire city. Do that within the next 42 days I
think it is, it will help with what we are proposing. We talked about -- I thought I
changed that. It's not really an audit. We actually did a full detail study -- an
internal study for staffing levels, looking at all those factors that we have just
mentioned and we gave the presentation to the Mayor, community resources, to
Finance sometime in April and they already have a copy of this presentation. I
have an electronic version for the clerk's office and, then, I'm going to hand out a
hard copy version for each staff member. So, I can do that now so you have
them.
De Weerd: Don't give it to them yet.
Lavey: I know, because they are going to thumb through it. It won't make any
sense right now what I'm talking about. Just take it. Don't look through it now,
because what I give you in this presentation doesn't match with what's in there.
And I will tell you that after the -- the staffing study it was quite alarming that
based upon our current levels of service, our growth of our city, both in
geographical layout and in population growth at seven percent, it says that we
need nine additional officers to continue the level of service that we currently
provide and I realize that our revenues are only so much and that there is not a
lot of money to go around to fund the entire city, so I said everybody is going to
go crazy if I ask for nine additional officers and, then, the other thing was, as I
said, that maybe we need to have a third party look at this and look at our staffing
needs. They will look at our staffing model, to look at is there diff erent staffing
models out there that we could do things differently. Is -- is our called for service
in our geographical layout justifying the request that we made. Is nine realistic.
Is it unrealistic. Should it be more. I will caution you that when outside parties
look at this, the number is -- is often more than less and so I think our -- our at
nine is probably more conservative. But our current plan is in October, a s we
have already identified, a consultant that can actually do this external staff study
for us, because we need to have a long term plan for staffing for this city for us to
survive and maintain the same or greater level of service that our citizens expect.
This is just some of the slides here and you will see these slides in your
presentation today and it really just gives you a -- an idea of what our -- our
neighbors are doing or what stats our neighbors are facing and it gives -- not just
our neighbors, but like size cities. Twin Falls and Idaho Falls or the Pocatello
Police Department. And so you will see in the -- in the presentation I gave you I
just handed out to you the total calls for service, the public initiated, the officer
initiated, the number of officers, the number of nonsworn employees, population
levels, officers per citizen, citizens per officer, calls for service per officer, calls for
service per 1,000 citizens in the squares of the city. I don't know what the magic
number is to say we need this many officers because of this. And, hopefully, th at
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 60 of 72
this external study can actually say, well, you can use this to add your number of
officers. I know that we have said in the past that we don't have the same crime
levels as other cities and so we don't need as many officers and I will give you
something to -- to think about. It's for a simple -- and they are never simple,
because they are always ugly, but for a simple domestic violence, verbal in
nature, two officers could probably handle that call. For a crash, which Meridian
has a few, oftentimes it takes five officers. So, it takes more officers to handle a
car crash than it does to handle a verbal domestic violence and I will tell you that
we have had 350 additional car crashes over this last year. I'm only going to
touch on this briefly and, then, ask you to -- to review it later on, but I mentioned
performance indicators and these are some of the performance indicators I
talked about. You're going to see a level of -- of benchmarks over last time and
you can kind of judge, are we increasing, are we decreasing and I will tell you
that there is going to be some things we are going to find on here where our
crime is decreasing, while crime is decreasing because of proactive policing, but
we are getting to the point where we are doing more reactive policing, because
we are responding to more 911 calls than we are officer initiated calls. So, it's --
it's -- it's kind of crazy. And these are just some of those other performance
indicators and this is a snapshot of 2016. We are definitely trendi ng up, which is
scary. I will give one caveat to this is that you're going to see some figures
where 911 calls are increased by like 300 percent. Well, some of the challenges
that we have had is that we have transitioned from an old CAD system to a new
CAD system and they are not separating them out like they used to. They used
to have 911 calls and, then, officer initiated calls, telephone calls, and CAD has
not been able to separate those out as much as we would like. So, the broad
numbers are correct, but the percentages might be off slightly and I apologize for
that. That's out of my control, but I know that our analyst staff and Mike Tanner
are working with Ada County to try to rectify that. And these are some of the top
crash locations you're going to see on there. I know some of the benchmarks
that we provide you is -- is top crime we deal with, top crash locations we deal
with. Response times. And this is just a chart of what we already have seen.
This is -- I have already really kind of covered this, but this is a snapshot of those
last three slides. The executive summary of you will. We are trending up. Our
911 calls are up. Our response times have increased in two areas, not three,
and we separate our response times to priority ones, priority twos, and priority
threes. Priority there are 911, I need help, I need help now. And we are getting
there pretty quick. But our priority ones and our priority twos -- our priority ones
are report calls. Our priority twos are -- you know, maybe a noise complaint or
suspicious person complaint, something that's urgent , not an emergency. We
are trending up quite a bit on our response times, which they I believe I have a
slight rise. If not they are within that report I just gave you. Our arrest s are up,
both in felonies and misdemeanors. Our crashes have increased, except for
fatalities, which, knock on wood, cross your fingers, we haven't had any this year.
We had one last year. So, I can say we have a hundred percent improvement,
but we are talking one. So, we are a success. These are some of the calls for
service I talked about and I really -- I guess I said 300 percent. I should have
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 61 of 72
said 367 percent increase in 911 calls. I don't buy that, you know, and that's
where I talked about there is problems with the -- the CAD being able to
differentiate between the numbers. But you can see with an overall of 17 percent
increase in -- in report that we have been taking. This was the alarming part and
this was really why we need additional support staff. I asked for our records staff
aren't keeping track of figures as far as walk-in traffic, the number of times the
phone rings, the number of times people come to the cou nter and those were -- if
you haven't received them yet, they were supplied to you in those quarterly
benchmarks. But we don't have a lot of training data to go on, so I asked them to
tell me what the percent of increase was for public records requests over last
year and at first they told me 30 percent and I said I want to see the raw
numbers. I shouldn't ask that question, because these are the raw numbers for
just this year that we are processing for public records requests, 1,356 for the
first quarter, 1,281 for the second quarter. We have had a total of 2,637 public
records request for that six months. I will tell you that's more than the entire city
did for the year, which is averaging about 525 per month. Now, the alarming
thing I had was -- and I asked the question with the attorneys was it is because of
body worn cameras and it's not. Body worn cameras the public records request
had a decrease at first and, then, they kind of trend off and I asked is it because
of the public views of government, the transparency and they said, no, really,
what it is is insurance companies. That's our biggest requester for our data is
insurance companies. As our city gets bigger, we add more people, you get
more requests for those reports. We have a few graphs that we have -- because
I was competing with Tom, so I had to make it pretty.
De Weerd: I'm sure you didn't.
Lavey: No. I can't -- I can't take credit for them, but I will tell you that the person
responsible is in the room, but she will kill me if I identify her.
De Weerd: Well, we all knew who it was.
Lavey: So, if there is anything wrong with them -- we have gone through these.
These are just some of the benchmarks for you to look at as far as citizens per
officers for like size cities. You can see 941 citizens per every Meridian police
officer and used to -- thought it would be a good idea to say, well, how many
does Boise have? How many does Idaho Falls have? How many does Twin
Falls? How many does Garden City have ? There is the numbers. I will tell you
that the only person worse off than us is Twin Falls and the deputy chief usually
has a comment for that. Would you like to repeat that?
Basterrechea: Well, I grew up there and if you follow the crime rate I think it's a
pretty good correlation. There is a lot of violent crime in that area.
Lavey: So, the other thing that we had mentioned to the Mayor is that every time
Lieutenant Colaianni gets on the planning discussions about future -- future
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 62 of 72
growth, future development to come into the city and when we look at them we
just point out, well, beware of this, watch the lighting here, this access here. We
don't really talk about the impact that it has upon us and our ability to serve and
so every week when you approve something you probably don't see what
happens behind the scenes and so this is a really kind of the behind the picture --
is we had a 16 percent increase over '14 and '15 and, then, '16 we have a 25
percent increase in building permits in this city and when we look at this, we
haven't seen growth like this since 2008 and we are really close to trending
where were at in 2004 and as you heard Mr. Lavoie mention that we are looking
at another year or two of growth facing us, I suspect, but I don't have a crystal
ball, that we are going to be in that 2004 figure very soon. This is another slide
that I would like to just really call your attention to the right -hand part of the slide
and this is also in your book, so -- I know it's hard to read up there, but this gives
you an idea of how many single family homes that we are building in Meridian,
how many multiple f amily homes were built in Meridian. Our commercial building
in Meridian and how we are surpassing the largest city in the state of Idaho and
those figures are really telling about how fast we are growing. So, let's talk about
some response factors. I did this about three weeks ago and I -- I just did it
again today driving around, before we came into this presentation, the city and
Tom's slides really illustrated it well. Almost I'm jealous, they were better than
mine, about where -- it started out small and how we have grown. But as our city
grows we have to get from one end of the city to the other end of the city and,
then, have resources on that end of the city if something happens somewhere it
takes me longer to get there. What really floored me is I heard on the air the
other day officers being dispatched to Chinden and McDermott and I said why
the heck are we going out there. Because we have now annexed the southeast
corner of Chinden and McDermott. I have pictures of the stop sign at McDermott
and McMillan saying welcome to the City of Meridian.
De Weerd: You mean we moved our signs? Awesome.
Lavey: It is a weekly thing, yes. We -- we have grown and so what I did is I
timed it, just normal driving, it took me 25 minutes to get from that edge of the
city to the police station and that's not during commute time. So, your priority
ones and your priority are not lights and siren calls, they are urgent calls or
nonpriority calls and that's really justifying why our response times are
increasing, because we aren't driving with lights and sirens, we are not getting
there as quickly and as safely as we possibly can. It's putting a major burden on
our responses. So, I don't recall if they will have it in the slides, but I will tell you
it is in your book on the response times. I have shared them in the benchmark
and I have shared them, I believe, in your presentation you will have today. But
as the city grows we need to strategically place officers within the B areas of the
city and I just don't have enough officers for that to happen right now. This is --
so, my slide is not quite as impactful as Tom's was, but you will see on this graph
the size of the city limits in 2010, how many square miles it was. You will see the
size of the city in 2015 and the amount of square miles that we have increased.
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 63 of 72
You will see the area in green, which is the planned area of annexation to the
south of us and someone said, well, there is houses out there, so it's not really
that big of a deal and we -- once that's annexed the sheriff's office no longer
services it, so any cow in the road, any shooting complaint, any noise complaint,
any car crash, any illegal dumping, anything that you can think of that someone
is driving by and -- and commits a crime in that area, a Meridian police officer has
to respond to it and as we get that far south -- that's south of Amity -- actually,
there is another subdivision just south of there that we are talking about annexing
right now and that's Black Rock, which is almost t o Columbia. When the officers
are down there and something else happens in the city it takes them a long time
to get to that other call. We talked about what's the number of officers that you
need -- we have got 97 officers. Well, we do. But those 97 officers are -- make
up both Tracy and I as command, they make up our supervisors, they make up
our detectives, they make up our school resource officer. They make up our
impact team. They make up our traffic team and when you pull all those
specialties in, you have 46 officers that are patrolling the city at any given time
and this is -- you can look at this later, but this just gives you a breakdown of how
many officers per square mile are covering the city at any one time. Here is
another chart that's coming up that -- this compares us to the other -- our other
like neighbors as far as how we compare to how they compare on officers per
thousand. This other chart that's going to come up is taken by COMPASS
figures and part of it is population and sometimes the COMPASS figures don't
coincide with the U.S. census takers. Although I saw where the latest figures
that were released by the U.S. Census were really close, if not the closest they
have ever been to the COMPASS projection. But if we use the current staffing
model that we have and the projections that we are facing and there is no reason
to doubt that we are going to face them -- all right, Sarah, my slide is smaller, I
can't even read it. Yeah.
De Weerd: Just remember, you have 20 minutes left to speak.
Lavey: Oh.
De Weerd: Trying to keep you on schedule.
Lavey: I will just -- this is in your presentation. I will tell you that the projection is
-- for 2015 was 91,310 population, which is what Census came back with, giving
you 97 officers. The projection that is coming up for next year in growth
projections, we need an additional nine officers. In 2020, based upon your
population figures, they are estimating 208,754. I don't know if we will be there.
It's scary if we are. Okay. I tried to speed it up and get more staff in here. Okay.
Go through this real fast. This is still in the CIP. I know we are going to have the
CIP discussion later on, but completion of the training complex at substation and
fire station six, I'm still debating on whether we need to do that or not, but it's in
there. A substation in The Village. I will tell you that based upon the level of
activity we have and Kleiner Park and in The Village, we need to have a
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 64 of 72
substation there. We don't have time today to talk about the amount of activity
and crime that we are dealing with in there, but we will have that for you. We do
share it with Mr. Siddoway and the Parks Department every week and it was very
alarming to him about how much time is spent out there. So, we value that park.
We value that --
De Weerd: He moved the three, so --
Lavey: They did move the -- oh, I didn't even see you there, Steve. We valued
the center out there. They are growing another -- what was that, a hundred --
one million -- a hundred million -- a hundred million for the next -- that's only
another hundred million out there, so -- and that's still on this side of Eagle. So,
we need to look at -- at a substation out there. This is just a picture of your
master plan, including scenario village, the training, facility and the shooting
range. Unfunded enhancements. You have heard that before in the
presentations. As we build up our staffing we must build up our supervision, the
span and control cannot get so out of whack, but we also must also remember
that we need support staff, because as of -- as we add more patrol staff and
officers, they better make more work for the support staff as well. So, you are
going to see two patrol corporals, two patrol sergeants that are on the unfunded
list. I will tell you that there is still a need for two additional patrol lieutenants.
We do not have the 24 hour coverage, seven days a week, out there. There is a
-- oh. So, I mentioned two patrol sergeants and I wanted to talk about that. If
you approve the code enforcement supervisor I'm going to take that sworn
position, put them on the road, and that request will only be one patrol sergeant.
But if you do not approve that -- that code enforcement supervisor -- and I have
to keep supervising it the way I do, you will need to have two patrol sergeants. A
records remodel -- that 6,500 dollars, it probably shouldn't even be on there. We
probably should have funded it some other way. We talked about using some of
the -- the dollars of savings from the planter project we are going to -- to do it, we
just don't want to commit to it yet, because we don't know what the bid is going to
come back in as, so we are trying to fund that in another way, but it's on there,
because it's currently unfunded. And, then, to the new dispatch center, as you
know, they are building a dispatch center in Meridian and we need to have a data
connection to it. We do have a data connection through a roundabout way,
which has multiple failure points, so this is something that we will need, but it's
something that's coming out. These are your enhancements we talked about. I
put them in the narrative form, because you can't really read this, but I'm going to
show you -- this is in your -- this is in your book, because that's why I show this to
you, but I want to go back with it. This is where we are at for our enhancement
request for FY-17 and with that -- oh, let me explain -- I think I have done a good
job explaining patrol officers, the code enforcement supervisor, the records
retention analyst. This person will be dealing with our public records requests,
our video camera, body worn cameras. I want to share a -- a fax that I just got
this morning. We are coming up on a full year of our bo dy worn camera
deployment -- full deployment. We have Clouded over 51,200 videos, which is
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 65 of 72
6.3 terabytes. That's about 4,266 videos a month and we are pulling in about
142 videos a day. I will tell you that we have an auto tagging program that we
are -- well, it's about 90.4 successful --
De Weerd: You get a chance at the end of the discussion. How many videos
since they started?
Lavey: A lot. I went really, really quickly. School resource officer. The school
district put in a request for two SROs. They wanted one for the new middle
school and, then, one as a rover. We told them how much it was going to cost
them. They choked and they asked for one. I will tell you that Lieutenant
Colaianni and Karen in the Finance Department have worked fo r the last six or
seven months to come up with a financial structure that makes sense to us what
we are charging the school district. I will tell you that we pay approximately a
million dollars a year to fund the SRO program and the school district has put in
about a quarter of that and I told you that we were trying to come up with every
way possible to make this the most efficient and that I didn't feel that I could
request more officers if we weren't doing everything in our power to try to get as
much revenue as we could. I absolutely support the SRO program. It's
invaluable. We saw what happens when the school district cut it back before. I
think it would be a huge mistake, but we have nine SROs in the school s, we
need nine bodies on the road and if the school district is not paying their fair
share, then, those are nine bodies I could use on the road. I'm not suggesting
we do that, so what I said was let's come up with a funding structure that makes
sense to us. We adopted the same funding structure that Ada County has. We
presented that to the school and it was a major surprise to them, but I will say
that they accepted it. They are pulling their fair share for the Victory Middle
School. They are covering nine months fully loaded of that person while they are
in the school and, then, we are going back to the table in -- this fall to say, okay,
how are you going to make up the difference for what you're paying versus what
you should be paying? We have -- they had a placeholder there, they were
going through their own struggles there, so we told them that we would meet
them again in the fall to discuss about how to pay back. Really, it rests with
Mayor and Council of what you feel, how rapidly we should get that money back.
I would probably suggest that we have Karen give a presentation later on in
Finance what they really need, but it's hundreds of thousands of dollars that we
believe that the school district should be paying for their fair share of the SRO at
the school. CID vehicles. Let's go real quick. I talked about pulling a task for
members out of the CEA, prescription meds program. We weren't getting our
money's worth. While that person was there DA supplied a car. Now that they
are back here DA doesn't supply that car, so I have a detective who doesn't have
a car. The second -- it's two vehicles. The second vehicle we actually take a
patrol officer, we assign them temporarily up into the impact team. What that
does is that provides another body in that impact team. It provides a level of
experience to that patrol officer. While they are there they don't have a vehicle,
but what makes this so important is that when that officer leaves the impact team
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 66 of 72
and goes back on patrol, they take some of those experiences and those
investigative skills they have learned to share with the other patrol staff and,
then, we take another and put them up in detectives. That person does not have
a car. And, then, the data clerk position and, then, the cradle point connection
for the -- the rest of the policemen. The last thing I will say is I have a few copies
here that I'm going to
-- I will share with you. I will tell you it's on KIVI Channel 6 website today, but it
talks about the rural west residents choose lower taxes over law enforcement
and it's really, really alarming of the impact that it faces on our citizens. It's
really, really nice to have low taxes. I'm one that believes in it wholeheartedly,
but there comes a point where there is a price to be paid and so the question I
have to ask you today is what are you willing to give up, because I can't go on
and provide the same level of service without additional staffing. And with that I
stand for questions. I have the command staff here that can answer any specific
area that I might have not covered well enough and we are within our allotted
time.
Bird: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Bird.
Bird: Chief, I see you're needing one more SRO officer, but have you -- how are
you replacing Mike at the middle school?
Lavey: So, we will have -- we, actually, have two SROs that are leaving us. We
have one leaving us on Friday and I would remind you that his retirement party is
here at City Hall at 8:00 p.m., so if you could make it that would be just great.
And, then, we have Earl Scharff, who is leaving at the end of the summer, who
currently is the SRO out at Renaissance. Both of those will be replaced with
currently patrol staff and, then, we will office -- we will open their positions for
entry level officers or --
Bird: That's what the four -- excuse me, Mayor. That's what I mean. You don't --
you're still going to be down two patrol officers even getting these four. You're
only getting two additional.
Lavey: No. No. These are four additional bodies that will be alloca ted to that.
Bird: To the patrol.
Lavey: To the patrol. Yes.
Bird: But you're losing two to go to SRO.
Lavey: But we will hire them, because you have already approved those over the
years, so we will hire those bodies.
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 67 of 72
Bird: Oh, they are existing.
Lavey: Yes.
Bird: Oh. Okay.
Lavey: So, we are currently in the process of backgrounding people to fill open
positions or soon to be open positions.
Bird: Due to retirement. Okay.
De Weerd: Council, other questions?
Cavener: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Cavener.
Cavener: Jeff, I appreciate the in-depth nature talking kind of from a 30,000 foot
view. There is a -- I think it's worth celebrating, but I'm hoping maybe you would
take a couple minutes to talk about and maybe you can share that background of
how you and the departments really been able to reduce calls for service while
we have seen all of this growth.
Lavey: So, I don't know if it's really reason to celebrate or not, because if you
see the trend, you see the numbers go up, you see the numbers go down and I
did mention about proactive versus reactive policing and so as our officers are
responding to calls that the citizens provide -- or call in on, they don't have time
to go out there and do the proactive policing. Unfortunately, one of the many,
many calls that we deal with are mental health type calls that takes many, many,
many hours of time. For traffic crashes. So, we're having our officer time more
focused on dealing with those calls than going out and doing the proactive stuff
and so you're seeing numbers drop, but you're not -- I don't know if they are
really correlating with what's really happening with this.
Cavener: Madam Mayor, follow up.
De Weerd: Uh-huh.
Cavener: Could you articulate a little bit what some of those proactive things are
and how much into an officer's shift is being spent on average on proactive?
Lavey: Madam Mayor, Councilman Cavener, yes, there is several different areas
that -- that we cover. One is our UI enforcement. If you recall -- I think we are in
the second year of that now, of the UI grant, where we have had a grant that
covers two officers. We have actually seen a 400 percent increase in DUIs in
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 68 of 72
Meridian. That's kind of alarming in that did DUIs really go up that much and the
answer is, no, they are just now being caught. So , proactive policing in regards
to looking for DUI specifics, we have our impact team that actually does -- Sarah
does crime analysis for them and tracks patterns and you recall the -- try not to
get too much a -- you recall the recent rash of burglaries that we had, we sta rted
following predicted patterns and we deployed officers into those areas and we
caught the burglars. That's the proactive policing we are talking about. There
can be types of calls that come in that the Mayor's office or the chief's office will
get repeated calls on and I call them my -- like, you know, my pain type calls,
because they are just -- they just need to stop and I will put our proactive policing
team on it, say go solve it and oftentimes its solved through arrest or drugs --
drug arrests and that sort of thing. Scott would always want me to -- to remind
you of this. We have -- we have two full-time bike patrol officers ride -- either ride
their bikes or they will throw their bikes on the back of an SUV and drive out to a
substation and ride --
De Weerd: If you hadn't I was going to.
Lavey: Yes. And, then, in the summertime if you have -- some of our SROs that
we have that aren't covering the schools, we put some in detectives, some in
patrol, some work in specialty areas. Officer Gomez was -- was busting people
yesterday at Roaring Springs, because he knew the kids and they were doing
things they weren't supposed to and, then, we have officers that work bike patrol,
patrol our city, patrol our parks, movie night, that sort of thing. Those were some
of the types of proactive policing that we do.
De Weerd: I would say that Stephanie and -- and the increase you have seen in
the neighborhood watch and her prevention program would also fall under that --
Lavey: Madam Mayor, I would -- I would -- I would ditto that. I had seen the
numbers. I do not know what they were, but every time we -- we do National
Night Out we have a list of homeowners associations that -- that participate and
once Stephanie came on board the amount of homeowner associations that have
connected with the city has increased tremendously. It was -- it was -- it's a
blow-you-away number and I don't want to say what that is, because I don't recall
what it was, but it was definitely noticeable. And so that type of positive outreach
as well. And, then, Kendall, too, and the -- the Meridian Anti-Drug Coalition and
what she does and the prevention stuff that she does -- and I know this doesn't
go quite with what you were asking, but I just want to mention this today is our
drug take-back program. I walked into work this morning at 7:30 and I come
through the lobby and I see them hauling three cases of boxes out of drugs and
this was filled just from Friday to Tuesday.
De Weerd: So, I think we need to name it after Lieutenant Overton, but maybe
that would be awkward.
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 69 of 72
Basterrechea: The Overtone Drug Takeback.
Lavey: Only for him.
Basterrechea: Councilman Cavener, I think the question that you were asking --
do we know the percentage of time that it's been on the proactive type of things
and that's what this study -- the staff study that's coming up this coming budget
year is what we are going to try and find out, is there a hard number on how
much time you spent allocated, how much time spent on reacting.
De Weerd: You asked that another enhancement request was the priorities in
government. That's going to be able to answe r to where staff resources are
being spent and how -- what -- what the impact is of that. Council, any other
questions? All right. You know, I think that the -- the impact to all of your
programs, but also in having the public safety training center, the attention that
the command staff spends on hiring the right people that -- that match the culture
of our police department all lends to it and would like to extend my appreciate to
each of you in the role that you play in continuing to insure that we are a safe
community. That means a lot. As I knocked on doors last fall -- and I'm sure Mr.
Palmer saw that as well -- people take great pride in feeling safe in their
neighborhood. Having a safe community is of upmost import and appreciate
what you do.
Lavey: Thank you.
De Weerd: Okay. Thanks, chief. Thank you all. Now, we have -- oh. We have
the attorney.
(Recording blank for 3 1/2 minutes.)
Nary: -- he's not the only attorney that works with our Police Department, but he
has certainly been the lead person we have worked with the closest over the last
number of years. It's a -- it's a big loss to the city of Boise and it is a big loss for
us as well. But the -- for those that don't know, the prosecution and police
services contract has been with the city of Boise since 2002. It's been a good
partnership with the city. We have had different city attorneys, but they have still
maintained that partnership with us. There are slight increases annually based
on, essentially, their budgetary impacts and their changes. The contract
includes, essentially, the equivalent of two full-time prosecutors, a one and a
quarter full-time support staff, a police advisory team of three attorneys that come
out to our Police Department three half days per week and as well as 24/7
access to their on-call team. We could not reproduce this for what they charge
us for and it is a great service to us and -- and it's not just the cost, because,
again, the quality of service is really the expectation that you all have, as well as
your public has that they get quality advice , quality service, responsiveness, all of
those things -- and the chief talked briefly about the public records and we will
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 70 of 72
get to that in a second. Those are the things that we have received in this
contractual relationship that has made it very valuable to the city. The costs are
kind of hard to read. That's why I sent paper copies around. You can see there
was one jump in one year on the costs that were significant. They did,
essentially, a major readjustment to their compensation program in the city of
Boise a number of years ago, so you will see on that paper there is one year
there was a fairly big jump. Otherwise, again, they have been fairly modest,
again, based upon their changes and their compensation and benefit program to
the city of Boise. But they have all been somewhere in the three to five percent
annual increase. And so the cost is still very affordable to us to maintain that. I
won't belabor the statistics. The chief talked about some of this a little bit, but
this is the amount of services for prosecution cases that we have had for the city
of Boise, the number of offenses that have come in. Cases and chargers are two
different things, but they are generally related, because one individual case may
have multiple charges that get disposed of, so that's why that second number is
larger. But you can see as the volume just continues to increase it becomes a
very -- a very difficult caseload to manage and having a team like the city of
Boise that's already there -- they have actually now branched out and are doing
prosecution for the city of Garden City as well, because they are getting more
efficient because they are already at the court house. These are the types of
offenses. A little hard to read on the screen, but it's in front of you. This is
different types of offenses that we have that come from Meridian Police over to
the city of Boise. These are the charges that get disposed. So, again, just a little
more detail for you as well. Again, the -- the legal advisors that are on site I think
most of our officers and the command staff will tell you are a great tool and an
asset to have, because they are approachable, they are responsive, they are
able to meet with both officers and our victim-witness coordinators, so that we
know where the cases are, what the status is, how to make sure that the cases
are being handled and if there is contact that needs to be made or there has to
be communication with the victim, that it gets done. So, it's a great -- a great
service that we receive and we certainly are appreciative of that and I intended to
have them come in two weeks to do an on-site presentation from them, so that
you can kind of get a little more of the detail. Today I just wanted to give you the
highlights of what this does and, again, what the long-term look at this is. Again,
the large volume of requests -- as the chief told you in his presentation, that
public records requests are overwhelming. I mean the amount that we have are
huge and some are -- some are very routine and some are very complex and all
of them have to be reviewed by an attorney in some form or another, at least in
the sense that if it's a routine request we have a protocol that exists. If it fits that
protocol they can process the request. It's very minimal oversight. Some are not
so routine, takes some time. This is just the police side. This is not the ones that
we would process in the clerk's office that our other legal staff reviews, but just
the police ones and you can see, again, the numbers are very large. There is
legal update training. And, again, we got great training for our officers from this
service and this contract and it is consistent through the valley. That's the other
additional value that I think we receive is our officers get training. They gear it
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 71 of 72
towards our command staff and our policies, as the chief told you earlier . Terry
was instrumental in helping get our police policy manual up and running. But
because Boise does it for the Boise officers, as well as our officers, and now they
also do training for other agencies as well, like Eagle and for Garden City, you
get a consistency across the valley of how these are being -- how things are
administered, how cases are involved, how arrests are made, what the current
state of the law is. I think it's a great valuable tool. And, again, the 24 hours in
contact, again, there is no way to know on a given day when that 's necessary
and having that capability to have that on -call service that's responsive and quick
and able to get a warrant if it's needed, able to get advice on what to do, is a
great tool and a great asset to our department. Those are all the slides I had,
since I really wanted to just highlight that one contract . The question always gets
asked is when do we need to change and every year the chief and I evaluate that
situation and it has been affordable and great service and to me that's -- that's
what you're looking for in a contract of service. If you don't get good service, it
doesn't matter how cheap it is. If it's so expensive that it's just not practical no
matter how good it is, then, you have to reevaluate. We look at it annually as to
what's the greatest value for the city. Today with the courthouse downtown,
where it belongs, that's probably the best place to have prosecution services,
because they are three blocks away, not nine miles away. If that maintains the
same I would think the prosecution services should remain the same. Right now
the cost of this police advising it has been very consistent and very reasonable to
us. It's been less than 100,000 dollars of the total contract, so it's much more
affordable than having on-site personnel. When that number gets higher or our
needs get greater, then, I think the chief and I will be the first ones coming to you
saying we need to make a change and here is why. Today we don't have that.
Today we have gotten great service. I anticipate the people -- they have done a
great job there with his service in bringing up newer people and training them, so
it isn't just totally relying on Terry or it isn't just totally relying on one person.
Again, Terry has been a great asset, because it's just his nature, but they have
done a good job of bringing on the newer people to get them trained , so they can
provide us seamless service and I anticipate that's going to continue and I guess
in a couple weeks we will hear from them directly. So, do you have any
other questions.
De Weerd: Thank you, Bill. Council, any questions?
Bird: No. Thank you very much.
De Weerd: Okay. I would entertain a motion to close the public hearing --
Bird: So moved.
De Weerd: -- for the special workshop.
Bird: So moved.
Meridian City Council Budget Workshop
June 7, 2016
Page 72 of 72
Milam: Second.
De Weerd: All those in favor say aye. All ayes.
MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES.
MEETING ADJOURNED AT 7:43 P.M.
(AUDIO RECORDING ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS)
MAYOR T/�� DE WEERD
ATTEST: /
OLMAN, CITY CL
/GO�Q�RATEOq,1
(O� .r
jDlA
°4HN
SEAL °
D TE APPROVED
W / ::�/: //_
TE APPROVED