HomeMy WebLinkAbout2019-04-09Meridian City Council Workshop April 9, 2019.
A Meeting of the Meridian City Council was called to order at 3:00 p.m., Tuesday, April
9, 2019, by Mayor Tammy de Weerd.
Members Present: Tammy de Weerd, Joe Borton, Luke Cavener, Ty Palmer, Genesis
Milam, Anne Little Roberts and Treg Bernt.
Also present: C.Jay Coles, Bill Nary, Chris Johnson, Caleb Hood, Warren Stewart, Jeff
Lavey, Joe Bongiorno, Todd Lavoie, Dave Tiede and Dean Willis.
Item 1: Roll-call Attendance:
Roll call.
X__ Anne Little Roberts X _ _Joe Borton
X__ Ty Palmer X__ Treg Bernt
__X___Genesis Milam __X___Lucas Cavener
__X_ Mayor Tammy de Weerd
De Weerd: I'd like to welcome all of you to our -- our workshop. It is April 9th. It is 3:00
o'clock. We will start with roll call attendance, Mr. Clerk.
Item 2: Pledge of Allegiance
De Weerd: Item No. 2 is -- is adoption -- is adoption of the agenda -- it's the Pledge of
Allegiance. If you will all rise and join us in the pledge.
(Pledge of allegiance recited.)
Item 3: Adoption of Agenda
De Weerd: Okay. Item 3 is the adoption of the agenda.
Borton: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Borton.
Borton: There are no changes, so I move that we adopt the agenda as published.
Cavener: 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: ALL AYES.
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Item 4: Proclamation
A. Week of the Young Child
De Weerd: Item is a proclamation. I will move to the podium and I will ask if Allison Maier
and Brandi Nyhof will join me at the podium. Okay. So -- I don't want to blow you out of
here. We will go ahead and read this proclamation and, then, I will ask Brandi to make a
few remarks. So, whereas today's library -- this is the wrong one. It is National Library
month at the end of the week, but I will pull up our young -- young child -- sorry, I know
they handed it to me and I wasn't -- well, I might ask if you will make a few remarks ahead
of the proclamation.
Nyhof: Thank you for letting us come and recognizing the importance of care for our
youngest children. It's a really important week and really helps build awareness. We
appreciate it.
De Weerd: Okay. And I apologize and we will get you the official one shortly after this.
Okay? Whereas the City of Meridian in conjunction with the Idaho Association for the
Education of Young Children and the National Association for the Education of Young
Children, NAEYC, are celebrating the Week of the Young Child and whereas these
organizations are working to promote and inspire high quality early childhood experiences
for our state's youngest citizens that can provide a foundation of learning success for
children in Meridian and whereas teachers and others who work with or on behalf of young
children from birth through age eight make a difference in these lives and deserves thanks
and recognition and whereas public policy supporting early learning for all are critical to
young children's futures and to the prosperity of our society and whereas this is a time to
recognize the importance of children's earliest years in shaping their development and to
recommit ourselves to ensuring that each and every child experiences the type of early
environment at home, at childcare, at school and in the community that will promote early
learning, therefore, I, Mayor Tammy de Weerd, do hereby proclaim April 8th through the
12th as the Week of the Young Child in the City of Meridian and I encourage all of our
citizens to work to support the efforts of the Idaho Association of Education of Young
Children and the National Association for the Education of Young Children here in our
community and invest in childhood education in our community and I thank you for joining
us today and for the work you do on behalf of our young children. Meridian is a community
filled with families with children of all ages and those young children do need to be well
cared for, because that does form their early learning habits. So, thank you and we will
get you a copy of the official proclamation. Thank you.
Item 5: Consent Agenda
A. Approve Minutes of March 5, 2019 City Council Special
Meeting
B. Approve Minutes of March 19, 2019 City Council Special
Meeting
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C. Release of Temporary Construction Easement for Timberline
Sub
D. Release of Water and Sewer Easement for Timberline Sub
E. Timberline Subdivision Phase 1 Final Plat Sanitary Sewer
Easement
F. Timberline Subdivision Phase 1 Final Plat Sanitary Sewer &
Water Main Easement
G. Timberline Subdivision Phase 1 Final Plat Sanitary Sewer &
Water Main Easement #2
H. Waiver of Contingency Related to Purchase and Sale
Agreement for 615 NW 3rd St.
I. Fire Hose Testing Service Agreement with Firemark Equipment
Testing Services
J. Addendum to Development Agreement for Eagle Commons at
Overland MDA-H-2019-0016 with James L. Kissler, LLC located
north of E. Overland Rd. and east of S. Eagle Rd., in the SW
114 of Section 16, Township 3N., Range 1 E
K. Development Agreement for Linder Village (H-2017-0088) with
Lynx Investments, LLLP (Owner), C. C. P.D., Inc. (Owner), High
Desert Development, Inc. and DMG Real Estate Partners, LLC
(Developers) located at the southeast corner of N. Linder Road
and W. Chinden Blvd. at 1225 W. Chinden Blvd.
L. AP Invoices for Payment 03/29/ 19 - $ 105, 378.86
M. AP Invoices for Payment 04/ 10/ 19 - $ 353, 409.42
De Weerd: Okay. Item 5 is the Consent Agenda.
Borton: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Borton.
Borton: I move we approve the Consent Agenda as published, for the Mayor to sign and
the Clerk to attest.
Cavener: Second.
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De Weerd: I have a motion and a second to approve the Consent Agenda. Mr. Clerk, will
you call roll.
Roll call: Borton, yea; Milam, yea; Cavener, yea; Palmer, yea; Little Roberts, yea; Bernt,
yea.
De Weerd: All ayes. Motion carried.
MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES.
Item 6: Items Moved From the Consent Agenda
De Weerd: There were no items moved from the Consent Agenda.
Item 7: Department Reports
A. Finance Annual Department Report
De Weerd: So, we will move right into Department Reports. Today we will have reports
from three of our admin departments and we will start with our Finance Department.
Lavoie: Good afternoon, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council. Appreciate you
allowing us to present to you our annual update for you guys. So, today we are going to
present to you the Finance Department -- who we are, what we do for the city and the
citizens, the expectations we put on ourselves from a customer service standpoint. We
are going to touch on a few successes over the last 12 months since we last stood in front
of you. We are going to give you a glimpse of some of the projects that we are working
on for the next few years and, then, last stand for any questions. So, with that, who we
are. I get the, I guess, honor to -- you have 18 proud strong financial representatives in
your Finance Department to start out. Every day they show up to work, they take a lot of
pride in what they do and you have allowed us to establish the team that we have and for
that we say thank you and I can promise you that we take everything we do very seriously
in the Finance Department, with the end game to deliver to you and the citizens a clean
audit every single year. The team is set forth with four divisions as displayed. At the very
bottom you will see we have a vacancy. We had the opportunity this last two months to
promote two individuals within our team to other positions. So, again, a great opportunity
that we had, we took advantage of, and with that we have Amie Rose. She left the
accounts payable accountant position and moved to the payroll accountant position and,
then, during the same time we had Eunice Otero, who was our administrative assistant,
she took and accepted the daunting task of being our accounts payable accountant. So,
with that we add those two great promotions, which leaves open an admin assistant
position, which is at the bottom of our slide, as a vacancy. I can give you an update that
Laura Lee in HR is helping us schedule our interviews at this time. So, hopefully, by the
month of May we will have a full staff again and we will be ready to service the citizens
with a full whole team, but before we leave this slide there is one new team member that
I have not had the honor to introduce to you, too, since last year. I believe she is still --
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she was here earlier. So, she's going to go back to her -- but she still -- Megan. She
joined our team last June. She is part of the utility billing team, so she helps with
managing the 36,000 customers that we have here in the city. So, we appreciate Megan
joining us. She brings an incredible personality, super positive, and all this new cookie
and decorating and cake making, we can thank her for bringing that to the team. So,
again, great addition to the team, so I just wanted to introduce you to Megan, our latest
addition to our team. And next year I will introduce you to our admin assistant. So, again,
that is who we are. With that this is what we do for our customers. This is a general list.
Our customers are in there, but you Council members, all of our departments, staff and
employees, our business partners in the community and also our citizens. We must be
able to deliver a high professional level of financial services to all our customers, which
can vary from simple requests to very complex dynamic requests. We as a team must
be able to provide all the information in a professional manner that is adaptive and flexible
to the ever changing growing environment that we have today. The Finance Department
strives to deliver a high level of customer service, all while meeting the strict federal and
state and city guidelines. We try to do this to make sure we maintain the transparency,
the accountability, and, of course, at the end of the day deliver a clean audit for us to
report to you. I will go over some of the jobs of our divisions quickly, starting from the left.
We will start with the utility billing division. Karie Glenn is our utility billing manager. She
is -- and -- and the team are in charge of managing a little over 36,000 customers on a
daily basis. As you know we have grown just a little bit and the plats continue to show up
and we are approving them, so, again, we will be at 40,000 before we know it, people.
Our job is to make sure the billings are done accurately on a monthly basis. We need to
make sure that our cash receiving is collected timely and accurate. Last year the team
collected a little over 23 million dollars on behalf of the Enterprise Fund for the water and
sewer sales. We make sure that the utility accounts are managed correctly and, then, at
the end of the day always customer relations and customer services. That's the number
one thing we always have to do. Utility billing, the team that's here provide the customers
with information, assistance with any and all questions on a daily basis. The team works
with the water team and the sewer team to make sure all the billings are correct, but they
also have to work with the third-party trash administrator Republic Services, so they also
have that layer of responsibility to make sure that the information collected from their
department is within our monthly invoices as well. So, again, on a daily basis the utility
billing is there to inform, educate, and support all of our customers every day. The next
section you will see a division is the procurement division. Keith Watts is our manager of
the purchasing division. Him and Sandra, a team of two, they are in charge of managing
and looking over all contracts which cover the needs of the city. For them they have the
responsibility to understand the state code, the city code, and also the federal code for
procurement rules and laws. Their primary goal is to make sure they keep us out of
trouble. That -- that is a daunting task. Since 2006 we have added 240 employees.
That's 240 more people that procure on behalf of the city. So, that's continuous education,
training and making sure that we all understand what our recruitment rights and laws are,
so that we do keep ourselves out of trouble. Over the next few months you will hear some
updates from Keith and Sandra. They are embarking on a new venture with all these
additional employees and the growth, but we haven't -- we want to use technology. This
fiscal year you gave us funding for procurement software. So, there now we are starting
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that task to start working on implementing a new software program that will help us
improve efficiencies, not only for us, but for the customers, internal and external. We are
open to use the technology to prevent us from adding more staff. Even though we are
adding more employees our goal is to use technology to prevent from adding staff within
the department. The next division is the accounting division, Reta Cunningham oversees
the accounting division. They are in charge of payroll, accounts payable, general
accounting, audit reporting. She has a team of five that works on that team. The
accounting division is here to provide customers with information, financial guidance,
professional customer service, continual training as we saw, since we have added a few
employees, so we have to make sure we are always training our employees. And, then,
help on all financial transactions that come through. The team is dedicated to meeting all
these requirements for not only the state, the federal, but also our own internal policies to
make sure that we are what -- that we are always in compliance and transparent. The
team manages to work hard with the city finances and, then, as I mentioned always to
provide you with a clean budget every single year. Sorry I'm going through this pretty
quick. The last, but not least, is our budget division. Jenny Fields manages the budget
division. Her and Brad having a large responsibility of facilitating the annual budget. You
guys have gone through a few of these. We are in the thick of it all right now, so she has
a daunting task of collecting, communicating, gathering all the data from you, from the
departments, and presenting the data to the Mayor, so in the month of June we can
present to you, Council, and the citizens a balanced budget. You know, she has to do all
this, her and Brad, all while still maintaining -- or keeping in compliance with the state and
federal and the accounting rules that we must follow. So, that is a quick snapshot of what
we do. This slide here shows some of the professional services that we have provided
to our customers over the last 12 months. So, many of the projects are driven by the
ability of our own internal staff to provide internal audit services, to provide efficiency
analysis and to the accountability and transparency to only -- not to -- not only to you, but
also to our citizens and our customers. Starting from the top we had a rate model
analysis. Brad is leading this project. He is working with all the departments to develop
an approach to establishing all rates and fees that will be transparent and accountable
and the methodologies will be similar in approach. We feel that this step will allow us to
meet our accountability and transparency goals that we have internally. School resource
officers. Karen Wooddell works with Scott Colaianni and Shawn Harper in the police
department annually. They have conducted analysis on the school resource officer costs,
so they can work with the school district, so that we can communicate to them what the
costs are. Again, this meets our accountability and transparency goals. Animal control
-- in-house animal control that is. The project was requested of us to conduct a cost
analysis of what it would cost for the citizen bringing in-house animal control back to the
city. Brad worked with Tracy over at the PD to facilitate this study. Again we felt that this
met our accountability needs for the citizens and you guys. Vehicle maintenance facility.
Jenny works with Stacy and the Public Works team annually on this. We update our
facility maintenance model. We do this, so that we can answer the question when do we
bring in house vehicle maintenance to the City of Meridian. So, we have done this for
four years. We will do this every single year. Again, we feel that this meets our account
-- accountability requirements for you as a Finance Department. Contract services or
discrepancies. Keith Watts works with Clint Dolsby and Dale Bolthouse in the Public
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Works team to oversee it and review all the contracts going on currently at the treatment
plant construction. There is a lot of contracts in place. So, the three of them are
constantly reviewing the contracts to make sure that we are always in compliance with
the rules set out in the contract themselves. Again, that meets our accountability and
transparency goal. And the last one is process improvements. Brad worked with Vincent
and Keith to review AIA agreements to determine the efficiencies of these agreements
and we felt that this project met our accountability, transparency and efficiency initiatives
within the Finance Department. So, those are just some of the professional services that
we provided the city over the last 12 months. Expectations of us -- or from us even. With
the services defined and now you know who we are, the Finance Department is
committed to providing financial guidance, training, internal audit and customer service to
all of our customers every day. As I mentioned, our commitment to you guys is at the
highest level. We take a lot of pride in what we do and we understand the responsibility
that we have to not only you, but to the 115,000 customers or citizens that we have. It is
our responsibility. We have a budget of, you know, 150 expenses, we have a revenue
source of, you know, 120, so there we have a responsible budget of, you know, to 270 --
270 million dollars that we have to be responsible for and we take a lot of pride in making
sure we are accurate with that. We believe as we exceed our customers' expectations
we will be able to deliver to you guys an annual clean audit. I did deliver the audit to you
guys in February. Again, with great honor and pride we are happy to say that we did
deliver to you guys another clean audit, which goes not only to you guys, but all the
citizens -- or city employees for that fiscal year. The annual audit is something we look
forward to. I know it's crazy to say, but we actually look forward to an audit every year.
It's a great learning opportunity for us. We learn from our failures. We learn from our
successes. We digest the information so going forward we know that we are going in the
right direction. We take the information, we learn from it, we identify our gaps, we identify
our issues, we identify our problems and we make the fixes in a timely and accurate
manner. So, we look forward to the annual audit. We are glad it's behind us for at least
ten months, but, again, it's a great learning opportunity, we enjoy the report card and just
like in school if we got A's on a report card we are pretty stoked and this last year we gave
you guys A's on the report card, so, again, that is the expectations from us. Hopefully
you see us delivering these expectations. We are going to hold ourselves as high as
possible and continue to improve every single year. So, with that successes. Again,
these are some of the successes we have achieved over the last 12 months since I last
stood in front of you. Customer service improvements. Utility billing. This one seems
pretty simple, but it did a lot. Property managers -- I know Genesis is a property manager.
We have renters of the property. We have the property owners. We have property
management. We used to require all these individuals that come into the city and fill out
forms and get it notarized and bring in driver's licenses. We put these inconveniences on
our customers. Why do they need to drive in here and do this. Working with the Legal
Department we had determined and were able to establish online forums that met our
legal requirements that allowed all those customers to deliver all the documents needed
to the City of Meridian electronically. Right now we are looking at 80 percent of all
documents collected for this one particular matter are now coming in this electric --
electronic form. So, only 20 percent now of our customers are still driving in and coming
in with a piece of paper. Our goal is to get a hundred percent, but a simple little tool,
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simple little chance, removed the inconvenience of all those customers having to drive in
just to fill out a form, get it notarized with a driver's license. So, again, simple successes
like that we are striving for. Front office remodel. If you have been over to the department
you have seen the new front office. We think it's more efficient and effective for our
departments and our citizens. Fuel card program. We have heard great things from our
city staff. What this did was remove all receipts. No more receipts collections for anybody
filling up their cars. They used to have to bring in their receipts. We eliminated that one
hundred percent. Opengov platform. We have been successful with the transparency
platform for our citizens. We are now bringing that in house. We are training our
employees to access the financial data on their mobile apps, mobile phones, mobile
devices. We are trying to get them -- their data at their fingertips. So, again, that is a
transition that we are working on. Priority based budgeting. Something we have been
working on. Brad's on final stage of this. He should be done by the end of April. Final
department is in the queue. So, we will be able to present you the very first time all the
programs and activities that we provide all of our citizens and all of customers here at the
City of Meridian with a cost associated to every single program. So, it's pretty cool. We
will be able to establish and deliver that to you soon. Next one is purchasing state law.
This one is pretty cool. Keith Watts, our procurement manager, for the second time in
three years I think, he has been successful as a subject matter expert to stand in front of
the house at the state capitol and get procurement law changed. It's a big daunting task,
but he has become a procurement subject matter expert in the state. He has now
successfully passed two bills at the state level that not only helps us at the city, but all of
our fellow agencies everywhere to allow procurement to occur -- to occur more seamless,
more easily and more efficient. So, again, that's a cool one to have. And the last, but not
least, again, we had a clean audit for '18, so big kudos to the city.
De Weerd: You guys are awesome.
Lavoie: Next one is the road ahead. So, those are successes and these are the items
for the next 24 months or so. So, these next two slides -- hopefully you will see a theme.
They are related to improving our customers' experience with us. However, our ultimate
goal is to make their jobs easier, make their jobs more efficient, allow them more time to
work on other aspects of their jobs. Some of these requests will have budgetary items of
a request to you. Two of them will be presented in fiscal 2022 to the Mayor. A lot of these
projects are going to be developed in -- in house. So, you have a talented staff of
employees that can develop a lot of software for us in house and we have the
professionals in house that can develop a lot of these efficiencies and changes without
having to go out for consultants. So, our ultimate goal here is to improve efficiency,
approve the effectiveness, reduce the cost by programming inside -- in house and, then,
at the end of the day reducing the cost and time spent on doing laborious jobs. Customer
service. We are going to continue to do that process improvements. You have heard it.
We are going that direction. We are going to update our city policies. Again, utility billing
paperless movement. Department process documentation. We are documenting what
we do in house. Cost of government. Just mention to you what we are doing with the
priority based budgeting and that project and, then, city cell phone analysis. Again, we
have had a request to look at AT&T, so we are going to look at AT&T and see what they
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can provide our public safety units for First Net usage, so we are analyzing that.
Purchasing bid software. You heard me mention that. Keith and Sandra are going to be
running hard with that. Credit card system improvements. We are going to be changing
our credit cards. We are going to utilize technology. We are going to, hopefully, eliminate
many receipts. We are going to utilize the software to be more efficient for our customers.
Travel authorization, contract management, those are both in-house projects that will
eliminate paper and develop electronic based workflow management. Budget software.
That will be a request I have to the Mayor this fiscal year. So, you may or may not see
that, but, again, our goal is to get budget software so we can eliminate the manual process
there. Purchasing handbook. Easy reference guide for our customers. City fee database
and time card improvements, again, both in-house developed items to eliminate the waste
and improve our efficiencies and, then, opengov dashboards, there will be another budget
request for fiscal 2020 I'm submitting that's going to improve upon our current dashboard
or usage of opengov, allowing all of our customers to have information at their fingertips.
So, with that none of the successes are possible without the other 17 -- yeah, I get to take
some of the credit, but all the credit goes to those guys. They are the ones that are doing
all the work. They are the ones that deserve all the credit. So, without them it wouldn't
happen. So, I get the honor of saying, you know, I get to tell you guys thank you to -- you
know, on behalf of them, thank you to them for what they do. Some of them take a lot of
punches. They don't deal with some of the nicest customers at times, internal, external,
but again -- so, they do take some punches and some kicks, but, again, at the end they
keep a positive attitude. They deliver. So, they are the ones that deserve all the success.
So, again, thank you to them. Again, thank you to you guys for allowing us to have the
team. With that stand for any questions.
De Weerd: Thank you, Todd.
Bernt: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Bernt.
Bernt: Job well done. Appreciate it. You guys you do a great job. Your team does a
great job. I want to throw a little love to Keith. Good job, Keith. We spoke at the -- at the
groundbreaking ceremony of Station 6 and he informed me about this legislation he has
been working on and was highly impressed, so keep up the good work, man. Not only
does that, Keith, we are -- benefit our city and our municipality, but municipalities
throughout the state. So, thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Milam: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mrs. Milam.
Milam: This -- maybe it wasn't quite enough, but -- no. Great presentation, Todd. And
thank you to the whole team back there and the ones that couldn't -- can't be in here right
now, you have a fantastic department, they are always just there to please. But I just
have to say I was able to use the landlord directive last week online and it was fantastic.
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Lavoie: Awesome.
Milam: Coming in here and having something notarized every time somebody moves just
was a miserable task. So, long time coming and well done and I really appreciate it from
a personal level.
Lavoie: Perfect. Thank you.
Milam: Thank you.
Cavener: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Cavener.
Cavener: Todd, appreciate the presentation. One thing I think that you didn't include that
I'm especially appreciative of -- I think that all City Council is, is how quickly you and your
staff respond to the questions that we formulate. Sometimes they are off the wall and are
-- typically come from a question from a constituent or someone in the community that we
don't have the answer to and often time is of the essence and I just appreciate how quickly
both you and all of your -- your fellow department leads respond not just to the person
who asked, but to all of Council. It's a great opportunity for us to learn from each other
and appreciate how quickly you turn those things around and I will just echo just the
culture of service that is in your department. Council, I'm fortunate right now to be the
liaison to the Finance Department and just the positive energy that you get when you walk
into the Finance Department is awesome and I get that sometimes when people are
showing up there they are not always having their best day, but it's going to be really hard
to not leave with a smile on their face based on the great level of service that your
employees provide. So, I appreciate that as a citizen.
Lavoie: Thank you very much for the good words again. That's -- I agree it's awesome
to go around and show up every single day to work. I mean it's a cool team to work with.
They are the ones who make it fun. So, again, I appreciate the good word.
De Weerd: Any questions for Todd or any of his team? Certainly we have a lot to be
proud of with the clean audit and the accountability and transparency that you and your
team work so hard at, ask a lot of questions. I'm sure every department is looking forward
to not having to save receipts. It's been tremendous on the gas aspect. What a great
change and improvement that has been. So, I -- and your 101 training classes. With --
with the amount of employees that -- that come online and -- and need to know what are
the rules and -- and that sort of thing, what you and your team have done in going out,
training them, to answer questions and making sure everyone's on the same sheet is
tremendous. So, thank you to the Finance team. Thank you for being here and for all
your hard work. It's -- it's noticed.
Lavoie: Thank you very much.
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B. Information Technology Annual Department Report
De Weerd: Thank you. Okay. We heard a lot during that presentation about IT and some
of the -- the improvements they make and so I will turn this over to our IT director Dave.
Tiede: Madam Mayor, Members -- Members of the Council, thank you for having me.
And, of course, technology problems happen right before the IT folks get up, so -- TV is
not working right now. They are working? Great.
De Weerd: It is all in the timing. Murphy's law, so --
Tiede: Well, I am happy to be here and happy to be in front of you today. To get started,
I will be going along the same lines that Todd -- as Todd did with our agenda. So, to start
off we are going to talk about who we are. I did have a mission and vision statement up
here, just because we developed this recently with our team and we are pretty proud of
it. So, you're -- you're welcome to read those. This is our team. Just in random order.
They are the folks that deal with everything that comes up here in the city. Every piece
of technology you deal with -- or that we deal with, that we work with, that we interact with
across the board, this is the team that supports it. So, pretty proud of them and they do
an excellent job. Next slide. And this is -- I'm going to talk about what we do. So, I'm
going to try not to get into a lot of detail here, because I don't want to bore you with the
details, but we have a service desk team and that team deals with technical support. So,
my computer is broken. Hey, I need it fixed. All the way to we have a fire engine in the
field that needs connectivity and needs to be able to access the CAD system for
emergency response. We also deal with procurement. So, all technology in the city goes
through the IT Department for purchasing and also asset management. So, we keep
track of that as well. We also provision all the technology. So, we deploy it. We configure
it. We set it up. And, then, of course, support it afterwards. And, then, last, but not least,
our Service S Team deals with audio and visual support. So, things such as this room.
Our software engineering team are the folks behind the scenes that create new software
products. So, they are constantly developing new software and those software requests
come from everywhere across the city from the other departments. We also do web
development. So, we maintain the website, but also add new features to it and make it
responsive, so that it works on mobile devices, things like that. We do integrations with
other systems. So, just because you get a new piece of software doesn't mean that it
talks with any other -- every other piece of software you have and that is important to
having a streamlined functional municipal government. So, that is a big component that
we do and we do it really really well. We also handle data migration for systems when
we bring in new systems. As an example I actually have one on my slide deck here later
that we will be doing. We do data analysis and reporting. So, we help with a lot of
departments as they come up with needs. Our utility billing system. Hey, look, they have
a need to report annually for audit purposes, we help with those reports. And, then, we
also do a lot of automation with -- in our software engineering team, so -- we have our
GIS services group and we do mapping, which sounds simple, but it's not. We do
mapping -- not only paper maps, but we do analytics off that mapping. We do real time
vehicle tracking. We do other GIS data development. There is GIS analysis that we do
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for departments. We help with Fire and Police for their analysis. We help some with
Community Development and Public Works with some of their analysis needs. So, across
the board our GIS services team does a great job with supporting all those needs. Our
infrastructure team handles servers, storage, network connectivity across the board.
Fiber. Application hosting. So, basically, any piece of software that runs on a server or
has a back end they are the ones that manage that and support it and, then, they also
handle IT security for all those various services. And, then, our business analysis and
project management group is pretty much one employee, plus me part time a little bit,
and we do project management for large projects -- large software projects throughout
the city, but also business analysis for software projects as they come up. So, that
represents pretty much in a general sense what we do for the city and the citizens.
De Weerd: I will say that you are the kings and queens of acronyms and foreign
languages.
Tiede: We are.
De Weerd: If you ever want to learn a lot of new words and have no idea what they are
talking about, go to a staff meeting.
Tiede: Very true. I actually went over this presentation briefly with my wife last night and
asked her what do you think and she said it was great, except for I didn't understand
anything you just said and I'm like I was trying to make it easy to understand. So, I wanted
to cover some numbers. This is data that you get in quarterly dashboards that the Mayor's
office sends out to Mayor, Council, and the director team. This shows the last couple of
years for phone calls, ticket requests, number of devices that we support and users and
as you can see we have seen an upward trend. We have little spikes and valleys here or
there, but we are continually seeing things go up. For instance, phone calls, you see we
were under 6,000 in Q1 of fiscal year 2017 and this last quarter we were just over 8,000.
So, ironically, we have been able to do that with the technology that we have. We have
been able to support it and not add additional staff to manage that. So, that -- that's one
of the things that I will mention. With these types of numbers we are able to not only
identify problem areas, but also find resolution for those and find opportunities for training
or educating or finding fixes that apply across the board, rather than trying to deal with
issues as they come up individually. So, that's one nice thing about the matrix that we do
gather. Another nice thing is it's good transparency for our customers. Right now Mayor
and Council and directors get this, but it's something that I would like to extend out --
dashboards out to the rest of the city, so they can see where we spend our time and
where the needs of their departments are the most. One example of an efficiency that
we gained out of these types of matrix this last year was actually password -- a password
reset tool that we ended up purchasing. So, we found we had lots of people getting locked
out of their accounts, especially after hours or when off site remotely and that would stop
them from doing work and that was really a problem when it came to our emergency
services folks, police specifically was getting locked out more regularly of their computer
and when their computer goes down the car goes down. They get a different car, which
as you can imagine leads to problems ; right? There is only so many vehicles. So, we
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extended this tool to them to allow them to reset their own password securely and that
has decreased a lot of those -- not only calls for us, but also downtime for -- for our
customers. So, again, some -- some of the things that we can do with this type of
information. A few more matrix that we are looking at adding over the next year include
a backlog of how many things we have kind of in our list of products to do and also
customer service type needs. Our response and resolution times, those are typical things
you see in the service desk. So, how quickly do we get back to a customer when they
reach out to us and how quickly do we provide resolution and, then, customer satisfaction
ratings, which we do currently capture, but we don't have quite the information level that
we are hoping for to put those into matrix. So, on to successes. So, this is just a brief list
of a handful of successes we have had over last year that I'm going to go into a little bit
more detail about, but, hopefully, not bore you too much with a lot of detail. So, first I will
mention is our records management system for police called ITM RMS -- or ITS RMS,
which you have probably heard a little bit about recently. Our software engineering
manager even got an award from the police department for this product. So, this product
has actually went live the beginning of this year, which was pretty cool, but it creates many
efficiencies for our customers, in this case the police department, because everything that
our officers are doing report wise come over right into the system for which, then, can be
used for police to report back to the state and federal to meet their requirements. There
is real time feedback on this reporting tool, which is great because, if there is problems
they can find out about it near immediate. One cool thing that was brought up -- brought
to our attention recently is they submitted the last three months of data and there was
zero errors in that and that's the first time that's ever happened. So, pretty cool. Definitely
shows that our software engineers know what they are doing and know how to develop
our product correctly, which is pretty cool. Another thing that I would like to highlight is
developing this in house versus buying a solution off the shelf resulted not only in
significant savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars for the city, but also created many,
many efficiencies for the department and are things that they wouldn't have got with an
off-the-shelf product. So, that's pretty cool and it's -- it's nice to be able to develop
software tailored to the needs of a specific department or group of individuals, rather than
finding something that's supposed to be a one size fits all and really isn't. So, that's one
of the benefits of developing software that we do and that's why we encourage it, so --
De Weerd: And, Dave, I think, too, when you have the software packages that are -- that
we try and fit in our system you sometimes spend more time trying to fit it into our system
than if you would have developed it yourself.
Tiede: Absolutely.
De Weerd: And we do have a couple of examples of that, don't we? But I think that your
team and what they have been able to do has just been phenomenal.
Tiede: Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate those kind words.
Bernt: Madam Mayor?
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De Weerd: Mr. Bernt.
Bernt: I don't -- I don't mean to interrupt, but Mike Tanner; right? The gentleman who
was the who received the award? Just want to get on the record that -- that he received
the reward -- or award from the police department at the ceremony, so good job, Mike.
De Weerd: A chief's citation ; right?
Bernt: Accommodation.
De Weerd: Accommodation. Oh, a citation. That's probably not the best thing; r ight?
Well, I can tell you the chief doesn't carry citations, so, you know. Sorry, chief.
Lavey: We are all good.
Tiede: Another success that I wanted to mention was we were able to roll out a new
platform for web mapping for GIS, which has been pretty cool and beneficial to our
customers, not only internal and external. A couple examples. We worked with Public
Works to develop a streetlight outage reporting system, which is all GS centric, so you
can go onto a map, find the streetlight that, you know, you determine has a problem and
report it and it gets back to the staff that actually deal with those issues, which is fantastic.
And, then, we also worked with Community Development to produce many web based
mapping applications that are out there, including the Comprehensive Plan and things of
that nature, so that citizens have that information at their fingertips. There is no need for
them to come in here to get paper maps or request electronic maps, they can get those
at their fingertips, which, in turn, will also free up resources internally, so that we can work
on things rather than responding to customer requests for the information, because they
have it, which is really cool. I wanted to highlight -- I mentioned the next one here -- next
success was we did work with Community Development and a partner to implement our
phase one of our plenary software, which is called Project Docs. That is currently in use
internally only and by contractors to do plan review, which was a needed component for
bringing Community Development staff in house. So, pretty cool. We are working on
phase two and I will mention that in the next -- in the next couple slides a little bit more.
We have been working to continue to develop our cyber security program and that will --
that's a continued effort that will go on forever and if we -- if we stop, then, we are going
to be in trouble. But a few of the improvements we have made this last year -- our
endpoint protection improvements, so that our endpoints are protected against malware,
we have stepped up our security awareness training a little bit. We have not only
extended it to more individuals, but also we have -- with our fishing testing that we are
doing there is remedial -- a little mini remedial training that kind of informs people, hey,
look, if you clicked on something. This is what it looks like and this is why you shouldn't
have clicked on it. So, again, more education awareness and, then, we have revamped
our patch management, which is an important part of cyber security, just because if you
look at anything in the news as far as data breaches or whatnot, it was always -- almost
always related back to some vulnerability that was identified and not patched by
somebody, which is not a place we want to be and so we have made sure that we have
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upped our game on that and, then, we have also revamped our multi-factor
authentication, which is a new tool that we have introduced and rolled out to about half of
the people that use it. We still have a little more to go. Next success that I want to
mention is our website migration. If you have been on the website in the last 18 months
you will notice it's a lot faster, which is great. We have also made strides in accessibility
and if you're aware of ADA requirements, there is actually accessibility requirements for
websites and so we have made many strides there in making sure our website is more
accessible. Still have more work to do, but we have taken it a long way so far. We have
introduced a new platform to allow people to edit content, which is a better platform than
what we had before, which was great. And, then, also we encrypt our -- all of our web
traffic now. Before we were just encrypting the things that would have sensitive
information, but now we do it across the board, just as a standard practice that you will
see more and more websites doing. If you got Google, you know, it's -- it's encrypted
even, so -- the next project -- or success that I want to mention was a comprehensive
financial plan software that we worked with our finance team to develop. This was,
obviously, based on their requirements, but we are the ones that kind of put the framework
together on the back end and through this process we enabled -- or provided citywide
tools that are available to all of our customers internally, so that you can submit and track
yearly enhancement and other financial -- financial requests. The tool provides
versioning. It allows views to previous -- previous years and has automated functions to
allow them to produce reports that will actually be used as part of budget enhancements
for the upcoming budget year, which is pretty cool. So, this created many efficiencies for
the departments involved in creating the comprehensive financial plan, but even more
efficiencies for the finance team, because a lot of the manual processes that they had to
do with spreadsheets have been removed, because it's all part of the system now, which
is cool. The next area I wanted to mention was communications infrastructure. So, this
is kind of twofold. First of all, we have been enhancing our redundancy for our fiber
infrastructure where we can and we have been doing that through partnerships with Ada
County Highway District and our Public Works Department, coordinating with them on
opportunities to get conduit in there and getting fiber in the ground while projects -- while
roads are open, rather than trying to do it after the fact. That cost savings is just huge.
So, it makes sense. We are increasing redundancy in places where we have struggled
before, so that when -- when something goes down we have a backup and that's
automated, which is great and I will get into a little more detail on that. We also this last
year almost wrapped up -- at this point I think we will be done by the end of the month.
We went through and revamped most of our network equipment at all city facilities, which
a couple of cool things there. First of all, we are anticipating spending about a half million
dollars. We end up doing it for a quarter of that, because of the approach we took in
doing a hybrid of two different types of -- or manufacturers of equipment, which if you talk
to most -- most third-party consulting companies that normally do this wouldn't
recommend that, but we felt pretty strong about it that it was the right direction to go. So,
yielded a lot of savings there. We also ended up doing all that work in house, which,
again, reduced the amount of cost that we would have to spend on that by tens of
thousands of dollars. We are pretty happy with that result. We have also recently tested
that and found that the redundancy that we have in place is phenomenal. It's light years
ahead of where we were and ahead of where a lot of organizations are, so we are pretty
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happy with where -- where we are at from a network standpoint. And I did want to
mention, because I think it's pretty cool, another success which was -- we got our
computer replacements deployed this year in record time. We are done with them. We
did it in just over three months, which was phenomenal. We had about a hundred
machines to deploy out to our end users. We also did that with very minimal interruption
and disruption to our customers. So, kudos to our service S team for that. They did an
excellent job and I really appreciate all that they did to support that. Next slide is just a
few more successes that we have had this year. I could make this list huge if I wanted
to, but the print gets really small and I don't want to be called the Finance Department, so
-- anyway, we have been busy and we will continue to be busy. There is always -- not
only things that we need to do practically, backlog of those, but we always have our
customers that we are taking care of and trying to create efficiencies for and provide
solutions for around technology. So, just a few items there. The road ahead. I have a
few in progress projects that I want to talk about briefly. The first one is Project Docs
phase two, which I mentioned what we are doing with what we -- what we have been able
to do so far, which is enabled plan review for our internal customers, Community
Development. Next phase is going to bring tighter integration between that system and
our land development system Accella. So, that way there is duplicate entry that will be
minimized and -- or completely removed in some cases, which is awesome. That will
create a lot of efficiencies for Community Development staff. It will also be enabling online
electronic submittals for everything across the board that Community Development deals
with. So, that's pretty cool. Cameron will, of course, get that out to the development
community and make sure that they are aware of that coming. He's already started those
communication efforts. But we are pretty excited that we have been able to take things
this far and as quickly as we have been able to as well. As part of that we are -- we are
revamping our citizen access portal on the Accella site, because that is where people will
be applying for not only their -- their small permits, but also the large commercial projects
and other things. That's the front end for that. Another thing we have coming up while in
progress is our server migrations. We have -- due to support being -- running out of time,
basically, for the current operating system we are running on our servers, we have to
revamp everything and touch them all. That's been going on for probably about eight,
nine months and we will continue going through the -- the end of this -- the end of this
current year, so -- calendar year. So, that's a big effort and it's been going really well so
far. We have data migration coming up for ITM ITS RMS, which is a big undertaking
analysis. Another project on its own in addition to ITDS RMS. If you ever look at any big
software project, data migration is always a huge chunk of money and it is very very
complex and we have folks that are really good at doing it and, quite honestly, I think that
all of these big software companies would love to steal them, because they are better
than most of the talent they have. So, we are working on redesigning our intranet. That's
a portal where employees can get to the information for various needs throughout the city.
So, that's coming up. And, then, we are working with the HR Department on a recruitment
app. So, say I have a vacant position that I need to fill, all the way to, okay, the employee
is hired and in the system and ready to get to work. So, that's been a really good effort
so far with our HR Department and I would like to mention that that's something that we
have been able to use some of the Peak tools that we learned and it's proved really
beneficial. We went through our process -- process mapping exercise with them and it
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was there were so many light bulb moments during those discussions, it was great. So,
I think at the end of the day their customers will be very pleased with what they have been
working to develop with us. So, a few upcoming projects that we have in the next year
are a file sharing solution. I'm sure all of you are familiar with Dropbox or other things like
-- like that to use to share files. We have a need here in the city to have a solution like
that as well. So, we will be looking at OneDrive. Then we are working on a web
application firewall, which is part of our cyber security program and I won't get into details
on that, but, basically, protects against malicious attacks against web applications,
website, things like that. We are rolling out Windows 10 updates. Thanks to something
I will be talking about a little bit later called software as a service, many software vendors
out there are accelerating their timelines for releasing new software and that also means
that they are accelerating their timelines for ending support for that software as well, which
means we have to be a little more agile in keeping up with those updates. So, that's one
of the efforts that we have going on -- or coming up. And, then, we will be continuing with
our communications infrastructure. We have some good opportunities working with
ACHD, partnering with them to get things in the ground to add some redundancy, but also
we are hoping to partner on some of those opportunities in the future as well. So, we are
excited about that. And many more that I want to go into, but lots going on. I wanted to
talk briefly about some of our budget requests. I'm not going to get into details on figures
or anything, but these are a few of the budget requests that we are submitting to the
Mayor that she asked that I bring up today. Windows 10 upgrade. I just mentioned
Windows 10 updates. We also have an upgrade, because we have many Windows 7
machines and they still need upgraded to Windows 10. We have a handful of
infrastructure upgrades we will be looking at this next year, so our network infrastructure
is in a great place, but there is a couple deficiencies that we would like to address, so we
need some more equipment there. Our main hosting location for all of our applications
throughout the city is running tight on resources, so we need to add some ram to that.
And, then, we also -- all these are directly related to some of these successes that I
mentioned, which is kind of ironic, but our GIS platform we need to add some resources
to that as well, which involves software licensing and that is because we are doing more
with web mapping for the most part. That's the main reason why we need it. Enterprise
content management is an enhancement that we will be asking for, which is basically
allowing more electronic document management throughout the city, but also automating
some on the retention side. I'm sure you heard a lot about records retention. This will
allow us to automate part of that, which would be great, but also allow us to bring
efficiencies to departments through the use of workflow and electronic forms. Things that
were paper will be able to go electronic and, then, also have -- be routed to people
appropriately for signatures, reviews, whatever. So, that's going to be a really cool one
and I'm sure you will hear a lot more detail when we get to a bunch of workshops, because
we are excited about that one. And, then, the next one that I have, which is a new position
where we would like to add another software engineer. On the right side of your screen
there you will see our backlog of software engineering projects that we have right now
and with current resources and workload that will take us about four years to get through
-- get through and at this point we feel like that's probably not a real reasonable timeline
for most of our internal customers. When we don't get to those types of projects they
either find solutions or just continue to work -- you know, find other solutions that, A, don't
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work as well ; B, are more costly or, C, they end up just dealing with it and, unfortunately,
with inefficient processes a lot of the times that means asking for more of other types of
resources. So, we are hopeful that that will -- or we -- we know that will provide many
benefits to our customers and so that's why it's on there as a request. I would like to
mention to you that the first two items on there are just one time costs. The next two will
have ongoing costs. But, obviously, the position is the biggest ongoing cost. The
enterprise content management system will start out small and, then, potentially grow
over time. One thing that I wanted to mention to you was this term that you probably
heard a lot, the cloud, or as a service. It's going to affect the city more and more, so I just
want to take a minute and talk to you about what it means, pros and cons, and what does
it mean for the city. So, most commonly we have seen up until this point in the city
software as a service, which, basically, means instead of buying a product you're paying
a subscription for a product ; right? And a lot of times that means it's hosted in the cloud
versus hosting it on your site and dealing with it there. There are many other types of
services in the technology field. Another one that's popular is infrastructure service. We
talked about that briefly a couple of years ago when we were looking at replacing some
of our backend server and storage infrastructure and we looked at options, such as
Microsoft De Jure or Amazon Web Services as options and found that they were costly
-- way more costly than if we continued to do what we have been doing. So, the reason
why this is making such a huge impact in the world is, A, this list of pros that we have
down here, which you should be able to see on your screen, it faster to implement. It's
-- a lot of times there is less dependency on internal IT resources. Upgrades are
completed for you, so you don't have to worry about doing them. There is lower up front
-- up front costs because its operating expenditures versus capital expenditures and,
then, it's easier to scale, because it's built in the cloud ; right? So, those compute
resources are already there and able to scale easier in some cases. Some of the cons
are customization is limited. You lose control over data and issues. So, if you're relying
on provider for everything. You rely on them for support as well and if you -- if they can't
figure it out or can't get to it, then, you're stuck with that. You have less control over
upgrades, which, quite honestly, has pros and cons on its own, but one of the cons is if
they upgrade something and it breaks you're stuck -- you're stuck with it until they fix it,
which we have seen happen with actually one of the systems that we have internally. It's
offered as a cloud option as well and they upgrade it a couple times a month and it
regularly breaks for all their customers that use that and ours continues to work, which is
great. Generally there is a -- a much higher total cost of ownership. So, again, I
mentioned that operating expenditures, you're talking about monthly or annual costs that
are lower than maybe your upfront purchase of an on-premise solution, but over the long
run of a five or ten year period it ends up being substantially more and that's one of the
reasons why these companies have shifted that direction. It's a business model decision.
They were finding that we sell a product once, we expect the customers to come back in
three years to buy it again or buy an upgrade and they use it for ten years and we aren't
making profit at that point, so they have shifted to this model, because it's more
sustainable from a business standpoint ; right? But at the end of the day it means more
cost for their customers. And, then, integration is limited in many cases. So, the reason
why I wanted to bring this up is because this is the trend of where everything is going right
now with technology and at some point it's something that the city is going to have to bite
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off more and more of and that means more cost for us and these are ongoing annual
costs typically. So, it affects our regular operating budget. It's not going to be something
that we can say, like we did this year, hey, Microsoft Office, we can do Office 365 or we
can do -- purchase office one time and, then, upgrade it again in five or six years. It will
be we have no choice but to buy that Office 365 that's -- you know, overall the total cost
of ownership is three to four times as much. Right now we have some flexibility and we
have some options, but I think in three to five years we won't have those options and you
will see these costs continue to rise and it will be outside of our control to do anything
about. So, just want you to be aware of that and know, because we are always all dealing
with the same funding sources that we have and at the end of the day these are tools that
these -- you know, every department in the city uses to do their job more effectively and
it's not something that we can just part with, so --
De Weerd: And, Dave, I think it's important to note that you and your team are constantly
doing cost benefit analysis to see -- to address some of these very things.
Tiede: Absolutely. We do it on a regular basis. We do it when a new project comes up,
when a department says, hey, we are looking at this piece of software, we weigh the
options as far as hosting it on premise versus looking at a cloud option, but we also weigh
the option of what does it look like to develop the software ourselves and what efficiencies
could they gain out of that versus buying something that maybe doesn't fit their business
practices, you know, specifically. So, that being said, I stand for any questions.
De Weerd: Council, any questions? No. I just want to, again, congratulate on the
computer roll out. Note that you said ITS RMS like it was a real word and that Huckstep
rewrite sounds like Dubstep or something like that. So, it is a feedback I give them when
I go to staff meetings.
Tiede: That is an important part of payroll, which everyone at the city really appreciates.
De Weerd: If there is nothing further, thank you so --
Cavener: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Yes, Mr. Cavener.
Cavener: -- I will just add -- kind of similar to -- to Finance. I had the fortunate distinction
to kind of see the customer service side of IT. As a former employee, now as a Council
Member and, Dave, again, just to -- I know this is not a surprise to you or your -- your
teammates, but the level of service that you provide to our internal customers has just
remarkably improved year over year. I hear it from our employees. I hear from our
managers. I hear from the directors. I see it. It's really well appreciated and because of
the high level of customer support I think that you provide to our internal customers, they,
then, in turn can provide a great level of support to our -- our citizens and I just want to
say thanks. It's -- it's well noticed and very very appreciated.
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Tiede: Council Member Cavener, thank you for the kind words. I do agree, our team
does an excellent job with customer service. I feel like it's something that's near and dear
to all of us and that rather than just being technology gurus, we actually -- we care about
our customers and we want them to have solutions that make their lives easier and so it's
pretty cool working for a team like that and I -- I give kudos and props to them, so --
De Weerd: Well -- and I think that the commendation that you got from the chief -- or a
citation -- and I just want to say a citation is gallantry -- it's about gallantry. Stand up.
Good work. So, just saying. That and it's your team are team players and because they
have a lot of that project management experience and linear thinking, that you are solution
oriented and you -- you make great teams, whether it was with the Police Department or
as you noted Project Docs on the second phase of that, that in and of itself -- what you
did in -- in going in and evaluating it from the very beginning, see how it was supposed to
work, check your customer needs and -- and what the end result was needed to look like,
those are things that go on in the background that a lot of us don't ever see, but I know
you and your team spend a lot of time on the front end of it understanding the why, so we
really do avoid some of the pitfalls as we start to roll it out and see what it is and implement
it. It's -- it's noted on that as well.
Tiede: Well, thank you.
De Weerd: So, thank you to you and your team.
Tiede: Thank you.
C. City Clerk' s Office Annual Department Report
De Weerd: Okay. Thanks, Dave. And this last department report was very well timed.
Either that or our city clerk timed it. So, his --
Coles: I'm never that clever, Madam Mayor.
De Weerd: So, ten minutes ; right?
Coles: Ten minutes. Are we starting the clock now? Madam Mayor, Members of the
Council, it's my pleasure to submit to you this year's City Clerk's Office department report.
You will notice the theme I think is similar with mine, as with Todd's and Dave's. So, the
roadmap will be very familiar to you and I have the pleasure of bringing home the
department reports.
De Weerd: And the theme about customer service ; right?
Coles: Absolutely. Quick snapshot here of the clerk's office. I think you all know who we
are. I think we have some here today with us. So, thank you for joining us today.
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De Weerd: I would claim them, Brad, if I were you. And a slight overview again of what
we do similar to the previous reports that you just saw. I'm not going to go through all
these. I think most of you know, essentially, the services that we provide to you as the
Council, to the departments within the city, and also our citizens that we interact with every
day. But this is just a quick snapshot, an overview of those services that we do provide.
So, by the numbers. So, here is some things that we can track in our office that we can
deliver to you. Again, I'm not going to go through all of those. A couple, though, that I
wanted to highlight you will see with green text next to them and arrows going up. So,
notices mailed in public records requests. So, about 19 percent increase in notices mailed
for land use public hearings that come in front of the Planning and Zoning Commission
and the City Council. I expect that number to continue to increase as subdivisions
continue to develop and more property owners move to the City of Meridian. So, we will
continue I think to see that number increase year over year. And public records requests,
about a 50 percent increase year over year from 2017 to 2018. So, again, more -- more
citizens are moving to the City of Meridian, we have more interested citizens in the -- in
the workings and happenings of our government, they are submitting requests for
information and so 454 is the number that just came through our office that we helped
facilitate. A 50 percent increase. The last number that I want to draw your attention to is
the last one, which is items considered by the Council. So, this is something that we
actually have not reported on previously to the Council, but with our current agenda
software we are able to track this number now. So, that number represents 1,100
individual items that showed up on a Council agenda last year. That's 1,100 items that
our office had to -- to vet and then -- and process, that Legal had to look over and make
sure it was appropriate. Many of those items were financial, so Finance had to, you know,
get in the game there. Contracts. Agreements. Resolutions. Ordinances. Those are --
that number represents all of those things in 2018 that the Council had to consider. Some
of those, of course, being consent items, but, again, each one of those consent items has
to go through the workflow to get on the agenda. So, I just wanted to point that out to you
that each week it is a significant amount of work to get to you the information you need,
the memos, those agreements, those contracts in order to make your decision week after
week.
Palmer: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Palmer.
Palmer: Madam Mayor, C.Jay, does that -- or is that 1,100 individual items or does that
include the 450 that we continued?
Coles: That's -- 1,100 individual items.
Palmer: Wow. So, it was more like 650. Five hundred and 50 -- 1,550. Sorry.
Coles: Yeah.
Palmer: Math is hard.
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Coles: So, moving on from the numbers. Again, following similar format. 2018
successes. So, we have the numbers, which are kind of task oriented. These are more
project oriented, which our department was involved in. That first one, early voting at City
Hall, we continue a tremendous relationship with the Ada county elections office for early
voting. We are their second most visited early voting location. The only one to beat us
is their headquarters on Benjamin. So, they are the only site that receives more visitors
and casts more votes during early voting than our site does. So, it's a tremendous
relationship that we have with them. That last sub bullet there under early voting,
expanded Saturday voting hours, that was something that last year Ada county wanted
to explore, instead of just the Monday through Friday, having Saturday open as well for
people to come and cast their votes and that was very successful with them and so they
want to see that continue, they want to continue the Saturday voting hours for those
individuals that can't make it Monday through Friday, that they have the weekend to also
cast their vote. So, I think we will continue that as well. Novus Agenda, the City Council
has been receiving their agenda and their packet through this software for almost two
years -- not quite a full two years, but almost. So, we wanted to, then, roll it out now to
the rest of our commissions that have public meetings to make it consistent for those
individuals that are accessing public information. So, this past year the Arts Commission
and the Historical Preservation Commission began using Novus Agenda to make their
agendas and their packets and I think that's been very successful for those commissions.
We have the Transportation Commission and the Parks and Recreation Commission and
they will show up on another slide here in just a moment, but they have just started using,
within the last couple of months, Novus Agenda and once we get all the bugs worked out
with them we will then move on to our final commission, which is the Solid Waste Advisory
Commission and have them utilizing Novus as well. So, we want, again, citizens that are
accessing the information to access it consistently across all of our public meetings. The
online signup for public testimony, it seems kind of like old hat, because we have talked
about it a lot, but it only happened in the last year that we began using the iPads in the
back of the room for individuals to sign up to testify in front of Council and also including
that within the agenda packet, so the citizens can sign up before they come to the
meeting. We think that has been successful. We have heard positive comments from
citizens that have been able to do that. I think we have also reduced the line, if there is
a very -- if there is a project where there is a lot of interest and there was a line out the
door to sign one piece of paper to sign up, having two iPads that can access multiple
hearings on that same meeting, I think we have reduced the amount of people waiting to
have to sign up to testify in front of Council. And, then, consolidate all meeting agendas
on a single page. So, previously we have, what, nine commissions almost, so we had to
go to different pages on our website to access those agendas. So, we decided let's take
all of that agenda information, consolidate it on a single page, so that the interested
citizens can access the Council agenda and, then, they see there is a Planning and
Zoning Commission meeting later that week, then, they access that agenda. The Arts
Commission meeting later that week, access that agenda, instead of having to navigate
to different pages on the website. So, it's all on a single page, all of our public meeting
information. And included in that is the QR code. So, on the back table we have cards
that have a QR code that individuals can scan to access the agendas page. So, if there
is a meeting where hard copies of the agenda are missing, because there is so many
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people here, someone with a smart device can pick up that card and access the agenda
or they can take it with them and, again, they are -- they are out and about, I wonder what
City Council is considering this week, they can pull up that agenda on their smart device
if they so choose to do that. Continuing the successes. Public hearing notices online.
So, everything that we publish in the newspaper or send out via postcard for land use
hearings we publish that on our website and it creates a calendar of sorts, a hearing
calendar of sorts for the next four to six weeks. The legislature for the last couple of years
has toyed with the idea of moving away from printing notices in the newspaper and going
online. They haven't quite pulled the trigger on that yet, but we are ready when they do,
because we are already doing it. And, again, the interested citizen that wants to know
what is that calendar the next four to six weeks for hearings, they can go to our website
and they can see all of that listed. Development application transmittals. Again, this is
something that was really easy to do, but I think it's been a significant step and that is all
of our agency partners, ACHD, the school district, the irrigation districts, COMPASS, as
soon as there is a complete application with the city and our office receives that for a land
use hearing, we transmit that information out to our agency partners, so they have an
opportunity to comment. We were doing that manually within Outlook group in our
Outlook e-mail system and we would have to add individuals, delete individuals as people
change positions in these different agencies. We also had an element of interested
citizens that wanted to know when do applications come to the city, what's upcoming and
they want an opportunity to see what it is and perhaps provide comment. So, with the
help of IT they have an e-mail generation system, so we moved our development
application transmittals to that system, so now anyone with a valid ID, Joe Q citizen, they
want to know when the city receives a complete application and the hearing process is
going to start, input your e-mail, every time we receive an application it now transmits to
those interested citizens and to our agency partners all at the same time. So, there is no
head start for one or the other, everyone's receiving that information at the same time.
This year we continued our Allumbaugh House support. The board of directors for
Allumbaugh House meets monthly here at City Hall in the conference room behind you
and we provide the statutory public meeting management for that group, posting their
meeting, recording their meeting and their minutes and so we provide that support once
a month to that group. The Board of Adjustment, our office is involved from start to finish
with Board of Adjustment from receiving the hearing request to, then, finishing out the
decision. Last year in 2018 and we had two Board of Adjustment requests. The previous
year we had seven. So far in 2019 we have two. So, there is no trend, there is no -- you
don't know if it's going to be more or less, but we do provide and we work with the Legal
Department on providing support all throughout that entire process. Dog license
postcards for renewals. We target those individuals that have a four legged family
member and their tag is going to expire, we send out a postcard reminder to say time to
renew and renew that tag and so it's kind of like the DMV, right, when your tag is about to
expire you get that notice in the mail to renew. So, we found this program to be very
successful, instead of just a blanket reminding all 30,000 utility accounts whether or not
you have a dog you would have received that reminder, that's the way we used to do it,
but now we target to remind those that actually have a pet that it's time to renew. That's
with the online renewals. We use -- we just started doing this. We use our third party
credit card processor. They built a custom form for us, very easy. You receive that
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postcard in the mail, you go onto our website, 30 seconds later it's been renewed. You
don't have to mail it to us, you don't have to go to your vet, you don't have to physically
come to our office, so we are trying to reduce the number of traffic visits to our office.
Again, if you want to come visit us we will happily accept your visit, but if you don't want
to come see us and you still want to renew, you now have that opportunity to do so.
De Weerd: C.Jay, maybe a suggestion and it just occurred to me while you're talking
about it, is in that reminder if you can ask it their -- their animal had passed away the year
before to let you know, so we can remove them, because I know after Sasha died I got
the renewal notice and -- and I -- I should have let you know, so at least you don't get
those constant reminders.
Coles: Certainly. Madam Mayor, we have had that very conversation in our office and if
that isn't yet happening I know that on future runs of the postcard we will have a little
disclaimer about that.
De Weerd: Awesome. And -- and with our veterinarian offices, too. If they can just
remove it, so you never even see it.
Coles: Never see it. That's -- and, last, we had the opportunity to participate in Peak
training and we have seen a couple of easy successes from that. One actually was that
development application transmittal. It was just a new way of thinking how do we do that
and that came out of -- out of Peak to go, how can we make this process easier. Another
is with the partnership of Community Development, they have a warranty surety program
when development is -- is occurring. There is a warranty surety process to make sure
that certain improvements happen with that development and that's what the surety
covers. That process included Community Development, our office, sometimes Finance
and hard copies of paper walking around the building getting different signatures and,
then, ultimately ending up in our office to hang on to for two years, do nothing with, and,
then, when it was time to release we would get another memo -- hardcopy memo, walk
down to our office saying, okay, you can now release this surety that we never participated
in in any part of that program. So, work with Community Development to say do we need
to be walking these around, does it have to hang out in our office for two years until it gets
released and, sure enough, the answer is, no, that's just kind of how we have always
done it. So, we decided we can make this easier for everybody, you can hang onto those,
we don't need to participate in that process and so now the land development support
specialist is happy, she doesn't have to be creating all of these memos that just get tossed
in the recycling bin, she doesn't have to walk around the building getting different
signatures just to end up in our office. Most of that is handled now, just out of Community
Development. So, what does the road ahead look like for the City Clerk's office in 2019?
First is alcohol license renewals online. So, again, that -- taking that dog license renewal
model, working with our third-party vendor that processes our credit cards to make a
simple form for business customers that already have an alcohol license to simply renew
online, instead of having to come physically to our office and start that process. Again, if
they want to we will gladly welcome them, but if they don't want to we want to provide an
easy way for them to do that. So, that is currently in process. The idea is to look at each
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of our applications individually and say how can we make this easy for people to conduct
their business with our office online if they don't want to come visit us or if they don't have
the time to come visit us. The document and process automation. Dave talked about it
briefly with his road ahead. The ECM, the Enterprise Content Management I think is what
that stands for. We currently have a product where we house a lot of our electronic data
and our documents and we want to participate to increase that capability, especially with
that workflow component. Again, it's not taking hard copies of pieces of paper around the
building, but how do we engage our business partners, particularly internally, with getting
sign offs that are required without having to get a physical signature if that's not necessary.
So, we have been working with IT on that project. They are the lead, we are giving them
support on that -- on that project, but we will be participating heavily as that continues to
-- to roll out. The commission and committees portal. So, this is an enhancement that
has been submitted to the Mayor for potential consideration in this year's budget. So, we
have several commissions. On those commissions we have somewhere between five
and nine members on each commission. Each of those members that are on that
commission they had to apply, they had to go through that appointment process, there
was a resolution that went with their appointment and, then, ultimately if they step off,
then, someone is replacing that, that's happening all over again. We have contact
information, so we can contact our various commissioners for various different reasons
and purposes and, then, we have that historical data from when the commission began
to now. All of that is tracked manually on a spreadsheet with nine different tabs and we
have to spend time going through each of those tabs, updating the information, tracking
attendance for different purposes at those commissions, because our ordinance requires
certain amount of attendance at commission meetings if you're a commissioner. Again,
all manually tracked. This commissions and committees portal is a piece of software that
has been developed by the same people that developed the Novus Agenda. So, a vendor
that we already have. It automates most of that process from application through the
commissioner stepping off. It attracts demographics, attracts attendance, so that we can
make informed decisions about the commissioners that are being appointed and, then,
obviously, have that historical data, so that we can pull information from 20 years ago to
say did this person serve on this commission, how long were they on this commission if
we are doing some sort of, you know, celebration or something like that. So, this is an
enhancement, again, that's been submitted. We do think it would reduce significant staff
time in manually entering information into a spreadsheet and we do think that that would
be, again, a worthwhile investment for our office and, then, a worthwhile investment for
the Council to have some of that information at your fingertips when and if you need to
ask us those questions. The dog license event. If this Council recalls, two years ago our
office hosted a dog license event at the Storey Bark Park. It was very successful beyond
anything that we thought it would be and so we have been in conversation with the Parks
Department, who hosts many events throughout the year on how can we incorporate
perhaps a dog license element or a dog element. There is a specific event that we are
kind of targeting with them to bring in a lot of different dog elements that we can, then,
participate and have a dog license element there with all the different dog features. So,
stay tuned for -- for that later this year. Like I said, Novus Agenda, Parks and Rec
Commission, Transportation Commission, they just started using that and so we are
working out I think some of the kinks there, but look forward to their success using this
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software for agenda management and, then, rolling that out again with our final
commission. Vehicle sharing program or otherwise known as e-scooters and e-bikes.
We were heavily involved in that process up to the creation of the RFP. I know that
process is now happening. We are out of it a little bit until that concludes and, then,
whatever way, shape or form our office is asked to participate and as that moves forward
I'm sure that we will do that. Vehicle immobilization, booting, this Council just passed that
ordinance, so we are in the process of creating the applications and, then, working
through the workflows that would be required to get those drivers licensed properly, which
is June 1 is the deadline for that. And, then, the big one, city general elections, an odd
year, so the city is having an election. There will be four of these seats that will be listed
on that ballot, so our office will be heavily involved in that come election time. And, then,
I always like to end on a positive. The CARE values and the Meridian Way. These
represent actual comments that our office has received about the work that we do. I'm
not going to read them to you, you can read them right there. But this is to say that the
staff in the City Clerk's office is committed to the Meridian Way, is committed to the CARE
values, is committed to serving the citizens of Meridian and they know who they serve.
They know who they work for. They know that it is the 110,000 citizens of the city that
they work for and they strive every day to do right by them and I'm proud to be associated
with them, I'm proud of the work every day that they do for all of their customers internally
and externally. And before I go to the next slide, I'm going to take a little bit of a personal
liberty, because I want to thank all of you, because all of you are the Meridian Way. For
the last almost three years I have held this position and it's been my honor and my
privilege to be the city's clerk. Thanks to you I was able to do that. For almost nine years
I have walked into this building, worked for three different departments, started in the
Mayor's Office, went to Community Development and now in this position. The citizens
of Meridian are lucky to have the seven of you leading, to have the 500 plus full-time
employees that work here that are all dedicated. They all know, like I said just a second
ago, who their boss is, it's the 110,000 outside of this building. But I want to thank you.
It's been my honor and my privilege to hold this position to work with all of you week in
and week out, to work with the six other members of the City Clerk's Office and the work
that they do. Thank you. And with that -- we try to do this and not do that and I will stand
for any questions.
De Weerd: Thank you, C.Jay. And -- and I know we can save it for later this week, but
you have -- you have been an exemplary employee and leader and I have enjoyed seeing
you rise through the ranks and spread your wings and I -- I have said this to you in private
and I want to say more, but thank you for your presentation. Thank you and your team
for being the example of the Meridian Way and we say that every year, because you are
and we appreciate it. You are the first face that many of our citizens see when they walk
in the door and that can be either a positive experience or a negative one and you make
it a positive one. So, thank you. Council, any questions?
Milam: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mrs. Milam.
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Milam: So, you make us cry and, then, ask if we have any questions. So, I'm not going
to get sentimental, because I will start crying again. But I do have a question about your
presentation. Your event with parks and the dogs, are you trying -- going to possibly
include the chipping component that we discussed on that?
Coles: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, Council Member Milam, possibly. The
details have not been worked out exactly what we are going to do, how we are going to
do it, but that is on the whiteboard at the moment.
Milam: Okay. Thanks. Thank you. Great presentation. A lot of work and thanks to your
team.
Borton: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Borton.
Borton: Take the other side. I have found C.Jay to be difficult and argumentative.
Coles: Absolutely.
Borton: Short tempered. Just really a challenge. Difficult to work with. I have to tease,
so --
Coles: Please do.
Borton: But -- but I will rad you on the side, but I will say on the record that it's a blessing
for Lane county to have you and you're going to be wildly successful, but I am hopeful
one day I will get to vote for you in public service, because you are a servant to the core
and I just hope I get that chance.
Coles: Thank you.
De Weerd: Me, too. And I hope you continue to wear blue and orange and not yellow
and green. Anything further? Yes, Mr. Bernt.
Bernt: C.Jay, Mr. Clerk, it's going to be different looking down and not seeing you. It's
going to be different. We spoke at lunch and so these are big -- big things are coming
your way no doubt. I believe that -- I have always believed that good things happen to
good people and you're one of the best and you have an extraordinarily bright future. So
good luck. Don't be a stranger.
Coles: I won't.
De Weerd: Okay.
Coles: Thank you, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council.
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Item 9: Ordinances [Action Items]
B. Ordinance No. 19-1821: An Ordinance (H-2017-0088 — Linder
Village) For Annexation Of Portion Of The Midway Place
Subdivision, Recorded In Book 1 Of Plats At Page 33 Of The
Ada County Records Within The North % Of Northwest 1/ 4 Of
Section 25, Township 4 North, Range 1 West, Boise Meridian,
Ada County, Idaho, As Described In Attachment " A" And
Annexing Certain Lands And Territory, Situated In Ada County,
Idaho, And Adjacent And Contiguous To The Corporate Limits
Of The City Of Meridian As Requested By The City Of
Meridian; Establishing And Determining The Land Use Zoning
Classification Of 81. 509 Acres Of Land From RUT To C-C
Community Business)(63.796 Acres) And R-8 ( Medium Density
Residential)(17.713 Acres) Zoning District In The Meridian City
Code; Providing That Copies Of This Ordinance Shall Be Filed
With The Ada County Assessor, The Ada County Recorder,
And The Idaho State Tax Commission, As Required By Law;
And Providing For A Sum mary Of The Ordinance; And
Providing For A Waiver Of The Reading Rules; And Providing
An Effective Date.
De Weerd: Thank you, C.Jay, and thank you to your team. Okay. I just noticed and
wondered why the heck we had some people in our audience and so, Council, I would
ask if we could move Item 9-B before our Action Items under eight, so we can address
that business item. Any concerns? Okay. Mr. Clerk, will you, please, read Ordinance
19-1821 under 9-B.
Johnson: Thank you, Madam Mayor. Ordinance No. 19-1821, an ordinance, H-2017-
0088, Linder Village, for annexation of a portion of the Midway Place Subdivision,
recorded in Book 1 of Plats at page 33 of the Ada county records within the North 1/2 of
the Northwest 1/4 of Section 25, Township 4 North, Range 1 West, Boise meridian, Ada
county, Idaho, as described in Attachment "A" and annexing certain lands and territory,
situated in Ada county, Idaho, and adjacent and contiguous to the corporate limits of the
City of Meridian as requested by the City of Meridian ; establishing and determining the
land use zoning classification of 81.509 acres of land from RUT to C-C, community
business, 63.796 acres and R-8, medium density residential, 17.713, acres, zoning
district in the Meridian City Code ; providing that copies of this ordinance shall be filed with
the Ada County Assessor, the Ada County Recorder, and the Idaho State Tax
Commission , as required by law; and providing for a summary of the ordinance; and
providing for a waiver of the reading rules; and providing an effective date.
De Weerd: Thank you, Mr. Clerk. Council, you have heard this read by title. Is there
anyone who would like to hear it read in its entirety? I'm sure it's a really interesting.
Milam: Madam Mayor?
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De Weerd: Mrs. Milam.
Milam: I move that we approve Ordinance No. 19-1821 with suspension of rules.
Cavener: Second.
De Weerd: I have a motion and a second to approve Item 9-B. If there is no discussion,
Mr. Clerk.
Roll call: Borton, absent; Milam, yea; Cavener, yea; Palmer, yea; Little Roberts, yea;
Bernt, yea.
De Weerd: All ayes. Let the record note that Mr. Borton did step out of the room for that
vote to be consistent with previous recusing himself.
MOTION CARRIED: FIVE AYES. ONE ABSENT.
De Weerd: So thank you. We appreciate -- I knew you were here to find out what we
have been doing in the city ; right? You need to say it in the record. I did have to ask you
a question ; right?
Howell: You did. Madam Mayor, Ken Howell. 877 West Main, Suite 1000, Boise. I did
have to say that it was actually very fascinating, because as one of the customers of your
IT Department and of your City Clerk's office in terms of accessing the information and
material on behalf of clients that make application, Meridian does have one of the best
systems in the state. I swear there are still some counties that are doing this by quill pen
and papyrus and your system really really works well. So, I commend you and the City
Council and your staff for the work that they have done and so I really found the
presentations kind of interesting, so -- but thank you for advancing us on the agenda.
De Weerd: Thank you. And we find it really interesting as well, so -- thank you for your
kind words.
Milam: You don't have to leave just because we did the ordinance.
Item 8: Action Items
A. Resolution No. 19-2139: A Resolution Appointing Abbey
Hutchins as Youth Commissioner to the Parks and Recreation
Commission
De Weerd: But you can. Okay. Action Items. 8-A is Resolution 19-2139. This resolution
does appoint Abby Hutchins as the youth commissioner to the Meridian Parks and
Recreation Commission. Abby has been in front of you on occasion as a member of the
Mayor's Youth Advisory Council and with -- we had some attendance issues with our youth
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member on the parks commission and Abby had interest and asked to be considered. I
would answer any questions you might have.
Milam: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mrs. Milam.
Milam: Doesn't look like we got any questions, so I move that we approve resolution
number 19-2139 appointing Abby Hutchins as youth commission to the parks and rec
commission.
Cavener: Second.
De Weerd: I have a motion and a second to approve the resolution 19-2139. Mr. Clerk,
will you call roll.
Roll call: Borton, yea; Milam, yea; Cavener, yea; Palmer, yea; Little Roberts, yea; Bernt,
yea.
De Weerd: All ayes. Motion carried.
MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES.
B. Amendment No. 1 to Oaks Lift Station and Pressure Sewer
Reimbursement Agreement for Infrastructure Enhancement
Pursuant to Meridian City Code Section 8-6-5
De Weerd: Item 8-B is amendment number one to the Oaks lift station and pressure
sewer reimbursement agreement and I will turn this over to Warren.
Stewart: Thank you, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council. So, you may recall a few
years ago we did a reimbursement agreement for the Oaks lift station with Coleman
Homes and in that reimbursement agreement we had identified a -- what we call a service
benefit area or, in other words, an area which that lift station would serve and the
properties within that service benefit area where the ones that would be responsible to
pay for or to help reimburse Coleman for the investment that they had made in the lift
station. With the last master plan that we did for the sewer system we made some minor
modifications and changes to some of the properties that were along the boundaries of
those service areas. We think they are improvements to the long term plan as far as our
sewer master plan is concerned, but in order to make that consistent or make the service
benefit area consistent with our new master plan we needed to do an amendment to this
agreement. So, we have done an amendment to the agreement. The most significant
piece of that is just to change the map that's associated with that, that identifies which
properties are a part of that and which ones aren't. There were a few other minor
modifications. Probably the only other one that's of any significance is at this point there
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have been no properties that have come in and asked for use of that. Now, the school
district will. Some of the other places out there will, but none of them have at this point.
So, Coleman asked that if the ten year, essentially, period, which they are eligible for a
reimbursement agreement could be renewed to start now, they could -- you know, they
have that option at the end of the term anyway, but they just basically said if we are going
to redo this or do an amendment that's one of the things they asked for. We thought we
had that signed agreement back to you. They actually signed the agreement at one point,
but we decided to make some changes in order to better accommodate commercial
developments that might occur out there and they have agreed to that. Talked to their
attorney, thought we might have a copy of that agreement here. We don't, but they have
indicated that they are fine with it and they will be getting it. So, we are asking for,
essentially, your approval for that agreement, so that we can get that process done. We
would like to do it today, because we want to get this adjustment done before the school
district comes in and asks for a reimbursement agreement for the pump upgrades, which
they will be doing as part of the new school that they are putting out there. So, with that
I will stand for any questions.
De Weerd: Thank you, Warren. Council, any questions?
Little Roberts: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mrs. Little Roberts.
Little Roberts: Madam Mayor. If there are no questions, I move that we approve
amendment number one to the Oaks lift station and pressure sewer reimbursement
agreement.
Milam: Second.
De Weerd: I have a motion and a second to approve the request under Item 8-B. Any
questions? Mr. Clerk.
Roll call: Borton, yea; Milam, yea; Cavener, yea; Palmer, yea; Little Roberts, yea; Bernt,
yea.
De Weerd: All ayes.
MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES.
C. Public Works: Budget Amendment for Well 28 Water Treatment
Not to Exceed 225,000
De Weerd: Thank you, Warren. Also under Public Works we have an amendment for
Well 28 and I will turn this to Warren.
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Stewart: Thank you, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council. So, this item -- as you may
recall, we have been for the last several years in a process of putting in iron and
manganese filtration systems at various wells across the city that have high levels of iron
and manganese in them, which, basically, causes customer concerns. It discolors the
water and it causes taste and odor problems, makes these wells difficult to us. We get
customer complaints when we do and we have been out there diligently trying to
strategically take the wells that are -- are the most significant offenders and put treatment
systems on them. One of those wells is Well 28, which is out on Taconic out near
BlackRock and this is the -- the most recent well. We have been going through the
process of designing and procurement of the filtration equipment and now we are at the
final stage where we need to construct the building and the fill -- install the filtration
equipment and get that well up and running. This particular project is similar to other ones
that we have done. We utilized -- in preparation for the budget for this project we,
essentially, used a lot of the information we gleaned from previous projects. In fact, the
contractor, which is the low bidder for this project, is the same low bid contractor which
did Well 22 over in Bear Creek Park. But, as you know, the construction boom is -- is
occurring and the bottom line is the bids came in higher than we anticipated and in order
to go ahead and fund this project and complete it this fiscal year as we have planned it's
going to take some additional money and so, essentially, we are here today to ask you
for the additional money that we -- we need in order to award the bid for this -- to the
contractor to complete the well treatment project at Well 28. And with that I will stand for
any questions.
De Weerd: Thank you, Warren. Council, any questions? Mrs. Little Roberts.
Little Roberts: Madam Mayor, seeing no questions, I move that we approve the budget
amendment for Well 28 not to exceed 225,000 dollars.
Cavener: Second.
Bernt: Second.
De Weerd: Okay. I have a motion and a second. Chris, in those cases you just choose.
Any discussion? Okay. Mr. Clerk.
Roll call: Borton, yea; Milam, yea; Cavener, yea; Palmer, yea; Little Roberts, yea; Bernt,
yea.
De Weerd: All ayes. Thank you.
MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES.
D. Public Works: Award of Bid and Approval of Contract to
Irminger Construction for the "Well 28 Water Treatment
Facility" Construction Project for a Not-To-Exceed Amount of
$944,519.00
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De Weerd: And I assume you are the next item as well.
Stewart: I am the next item as well. Thank you. So, this is, basically, the award of the
contract to the contractor for the work to finish off Well 28 treatment. We couldn't award
the contract until we had the amendment. So, now that we have the amendment we are
seeking approval of the contract and I will stand for questions.
De Weerd: Hearing none, Mrs. Little Roberts.
Little Roberts: Madam Mayor, I move that we approve the award of the bid and approval
of the contract for Well 28 treatment facility, not to exceed 944,519 dollars.
Milam: Second.
De Weerd: Okay. I have a motion to approve Item 8-D. Mr. Clerk, will you call roll.
Roll call: Borton, yea; Milam, yea; Cavener, yea; Palmer, yea; Little Roberts, yea; Bernt,
yea.
De Weerd: All ayes.
MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES.
Stewart: Thank you.
De Weerd: Thank you, Warren.
Bongiorno: Warren, do you want to do this one?
E. Fire Department: Budget Amendment for Recalled Automated
External Defibrillators Not to Exceed $14,526
De Weerd: Okay. Item 8-E is under our Fire Department and since Warren does not
want to do that I will turn this to Joe.
Bongiorno: I can ask J.D. to come up and do it. So, what you have before you is a budget
amendment. We found out through our AED vendor that we have nine AEDs in our
possession that have been subject to recall. I did go through and look at the procedures
for the recall if they were to fail. It's very lengthy and I don't think the standard lay person
would understand what they need to do, especially when there is a person dying in front
of them. So, J.D. did talk with Council and they recommended just replacing them. So,
what you have in front of you is a budget amendment to replace the nine AEDs at 14,526
dollars. They will give us a reimbursement for the units that we send back to them. So,
the amendment request is for 13,401 dollars.
De Weerd: Thank you, Joe. Council, any question?
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Milam: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mrs. Milam.
Milam: So, what are they reimbursing us for?
Bongiorno: Just sending back the -- the bad units.
Milam: How much do they --
Bongiorno: J.D., was it 125 dollars?
Milam: Just for the shipping and what about the -- the defective units? Why are they not
giving us credit for the -- for the --
Bongiorno: That's the credit we are getting is for the defective units.
Milam: A hundred dollars?
Bongiorno: It's 125?
Hendrick: Yeah. It's -- it's kind of a -- it's an interesting situation. Phillips, who is a large
AED manufacturer, they have chosen to have a class one recall and in the recall they say
that they will reimburse up to 125 dollars for our specific units that we have. Don't
understand that, but they are also having some other issues with cardiac monitors and
replacement of those, so --
Milam: And Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mrs. Milam.
Milam: I guess it's two fold, but -- well, how long have we had the units and are we
purchasing the units we are getting from the same company?
De Weerd: No.
Hendrick: No. We have had --
Milam: They looked different in the budget --
Hendrick: Correct. We have had the units since City Hall was built -- I guess '08. My
guess would we that time frame.
Bongiorno: It's 11 years old.
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Hendrick: Yeah. We would choose to move to Zoll, which is currently the -- the
manufacturer that we have throughout the city. There are four Phillips AEDs in City Hall,
one in water and one in wastewater and, then, we have had three that have been sitting
as backups in fire admin.
Milam: And those are necessary, the backup ones?
Bongiorno: Those are actually going to be given out. One is going to PD, one is going
to one of our fire guys, our new ops -- or logistics chief and the third one -- I think that one
is our spare just in case.
Milam: So, even though we don't really use six we are replacing nine?
Bongiorno: Correct. We have -- we are going to be using eight of them and we will have
one spare.
Milam: Thank you.
De Weerd: And I think there was just one or two more years left to when they were going
to be replaced -- needed to be replaced.
Bongiorno: Yeah.
De Weerd: Yeah, it's -- and I think a lot of our conversation is if we know that there is a
possible defect, there is a recall and something happened, it's best to replace them.
Bongiorno: Exactly. Yeah. For life safety Legal said just replace them.
De Weerd: Absolutely. Any further questions?
Little Roberts: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mrs. Little Roberts.
Little Roberts: Madam Mayor. I move that we approve the budget amendment for fire for
the recalled AEDs not to exceed 14,526.
Milam: Second.
De Weerd: I have a motion and a second. Mr. Clerk, will you call roll.
Roll call: Borton, yea; Milam, yea; Cavener, yea; Palmer, yea; Little Roberts, yea; Bernt,
yea.
De Weerd: All ayes.
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MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES.
F. Appointment of Chris Johnson as Interim City Clerk
De Weerd: Item 8-F is the appointment of Chris Johnson as the interim city clerk. As we
all are aware we are losing our appointed city clerk and we -- I ask that you approve our
-- our deputy clerk Chris Johnson as the interim as we go through the search process.
Milam: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Cavener.
Cavener: Unless there is any comments -- I don't see anybody piping up. I move that
we appoint Chris Johnson as the interim city clerk effective 5:00 p.m., Friday, April 12th.
Milam: Second.
De Weerd: I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Mr. Clerk, will you call roll.
Roll call: Borton, yea; Milam, yea; Cavener, yea; Palmer, yea; Little Roberts, yea; Bernt,
yea.
De Weerd: All ayes. Motion carried.
MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES.
Item 9: Ordinances [Action Items]
A. First Reading of Ordinance No. 19- 1822: An Ordinance
Amending Title 1, Chapter 7, Section 5, Paragraph (A) (2) Of
The Meridian City Code, Regarding Days And Time Of The City
Council Work Sessions And Regular Meetings; And Providing
An Effective Date.
De Weerd: Thank you so much, Council. Item 9-A is Ordinance 19-1822. Mr. Clerk, will
you, please, read this by title.
Johnson: Thank you, Madam Mayor. Ordinance No. 19-1820, an ordinance amending
Title 1, Chapter 7, Section 5, Paragraph A-2 of the Meridian City Code regarding days
and time of the City Council work sessions and regular meetings and providing an
effective date.
De Weerd: You have heard this read by title. Council, if there is no questions, I would
entertain a motion. First reading? So -- oh. In two weeks. Okay. We will put this on our
next agenda. Thank you.
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Item 10: Future Meeting Topics
De Weerd: Item 10 is our Future Meeting Topics. Is there is nothing under that, there are
a couple of events that are going on in the community, also listed in the Community
Calendar. We have our Hands Only CPR on April 10th from 2:00 to 2:45 at the Public
Safety Training Center. The Idaho Fish and Game fishing trailer event is at Settlers Park
from 4:00 to 8:00 on Wednesday, April 10th. We have our volunteer appreciation
luncheon and that is this Thursday, April 11th, at 11:00 a.m. We would love to have you
join us. And, finally, the MS walk this Saturday in Kleiner Park. Registration is at 9:00
and the walk begins at 10:00.
De Weerd: With that, if there is nothing further, I would entertain a motion to adjourn into
Executive Session.
Milam: Madam Mayor, before we do that --
De Weerd: Mrs. Milam.
Milam: Since this is a workshop and we didn't really do department reports, I just wanted
to remind everybody -- or let you know, if it's not already on your calendar, Friday -- did
you mention the Arbor Day? Arbor Day tree planting at Peregrine Elementary School at
1:30.
Cavener: With the tree guy.
Milam: The tree guy?
Cavener: Yeah. Johnny Appleseed guy.
Milam: Right. He is going to be there, so -- it starts inside the gym and then -- and, then,
the ceremony will take place outside.
Milam: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Cavener.
Cavener: I just wanted to thank Mr. Coles for a great three years as our city clerk. I have
been real fortunate, Madam Mayor, to have C.Jay be a coworker and a friend and a peer
and I'm really going to miss him and I just think to echo Council Member Borton's
comments, you know, C.Jay I'm sure growing up would be asked a lot is Brent Coles your
dad and I think what we are really going to see is a lot of people are going to start asking
Brent Coles if C.Jay is his son. And -- and I'm just -- I'm proud to know you. I'm proud to
call you a friend and really best of luck in your next chapter.
De Weerd: Hear. Hear. And that's also on Friday.
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Cavener: Bring your Dr. Peppers.
Item 11: Executive Session
A. Executive Session Per Idaho State Code 74-206(1)(d): To
Consider Records That Are Exempt From Disclosure As
Provided In Chapter 1, Title 74, Idaho Code; 74 -206(1)(f): To
Communicate With Legal Counsel For The Public Agency To
Discuss The Legal Ramifications Of And Legal Options For
Pending Litigation, Or Controversies Not Yet Being Litigated
But Imminently Likely To Be Litigated; And 74 -206(1)(i): To
Engage In Communications With A Representative Of The
Public Agency's Risk Manager Or Insurance Provider To
Discuss The Adjustment Of A Pending Claim Or Prevention
Of A Claim Imminently Likely To Be Filed .
De Weerd: Okay. Item 11-A is Executive Session. Do I have a motion?
Borton: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Borton.
Borton: I move we go into Executive Session pursuant to Idaho State Code 74-
206(1)(d),(f) and(i).
Cavener: Second.
De Weerd: I have a motion and a second to adjourn into Executive Session. Mr. Clerk,
will you call roll.
Roll call: Borton, yea; Milam, yea; Cavener, yea; Palmer, yea; Little Roberts, yea; Bernt,
yea.
De Weerd: All ayes.
MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES.
EXECUTIVE SESSION: (4:56 p.m. to 6:26 p.m.)
De Weerd: Okay. I would entertain a motion to come out of Executive Session.
Borton: Motion to come out of Executive Session.
Cavener: Second.
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De Weerd: I have a motion and a second to come out of Executive Session. All those in
favor say aye. All ayes.
MOTION CARRIED: ALLAYES.
De Weerd: Do I have a motion to adjourn?
Borton: I move we adjourn.
Palme: Second.
De Weerd: All those in favor.
MOTION CARRIED: ALLAYES.
MEETING ADJOURNED AT 6:27 P.M.
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