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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2007 05-22 Pre Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting May 22. 2007 The Meridian City Pre-Council meeting was called to order at 6:30 P,M. on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 by Vice-President Councilman Charlie Rountree_ Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, Keith Bird, David Zaremba, Charlie Rountree and Joe Borton. Staff Present: Ted Baird, Anna Canning, Pete Frame, Bill Musser and Will Berg. Item 1. Roll-call Attendance: Roll call. X David Zaremba X Charlie Rountree X o Joe Borton X Keith Bird Mayor Tammy de Weerd Item 2. Adoption of the Agenda: Bird: Mr. Vice-President. Rountree: Mr. Bird. Bird: I move we adopt the agenda as published. Zaremba: Second. Rountree: It has been moved and seconded to adopt the agenda. All those in favor say aye. THREE AYES. ONE ABSENT. MOTION CARRIED. Item 3. Update from Boise City on Prosecution Services Contract: Rountree: This is an update of the Boise City Prosecution Services Contract and Kerrie Coliani will start this off and it is yours. Coliani: Good evening Madame Mayor, Council Members. If anybody has forgotten me, Kerrie Coliani, Boise City Attorney. We are here as you all know to present the 2008 Meridian Prosecution Contract. We have had a fantastic 2006. We achieved many successes, but the first thing I want to say before we get into all of the details is that we appreciate this contract. We have never and will never take it for granted. We think we work very well with the Chief, Command Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting May 22, 2007 Page 2 of 9 Staff, Lieutenants, Sergeants and one Sergeant in particular, Chief. But the relationship has grown in size, strength and it is not one just of a professional nature; at this point we have a personal relationship with MPD that goes right down to the officer on the street level. We are very proud of that. We are very proud of our training program, not to mention the prosecution piece and public records that we do, the requests and we will get in and talk about some of those in detail, some of those other things. But, we are really looking forward to the coming year under this contract and for a number of reasons. I have a little surprise tonight that I will talk to you about the end of the presentation, but we intend Mayor and Council Members to enhance our service this coming year. We are in the middle of some things that we are about ready to close on that will help us in the prosecution of your misdemeanor infraction and code enforcement cases. Not just the City of Boise, but you all will benefit and Chief and his folks will benefit from that as well. I would like to introduce very quickly the folks that are here with me tonight. Chief Deputy, Steve Rutherford and the Chief of our Public Safety Division, Allison Tate. Allison will talk to you first about some of the support that we provide to Meridian Police Department and the prosecution services, so without further ado, Allison. Tate: Madame Mayor and Members of the Council briefly I had the public safety division, which means that one of my jobs was to provide legal advice to Police Departments, both Boise Police Department and the Meridian Police Department. Generally speaking, of course, the core duty that we provide to you or the core function that we provide to you is the prosecution of your misdemeanors and your infractions. In 2006 there were 6,965 cases. There are projected to be 8,564 for 2007. So as you hire more officers and they get more productive, a lot more cases are coming our way keeping us busy. We are also trying a lot more cases. This last quarter we tripled the number of jury trials that our attorneys tried from the year before and the year before that. So we are trying both in court trials, trials in front of a judge and then trials to a jury; we are trying many, many more cases. It is good experience for our prosecutors. It is good experience for the officers and it allows us to more aggressively prosecute the cases when our attorneys are good trial attorneys. Finally we provide civil advice to the Meridian Police Department. We continue to have an onsite police advisor two days a week out in Meridian. We also have an on call prosecutor or several on call prosecutors that at all time they have access to a pager number to call a prosecutor and then cell phone numbers for me and several people on my division so they can at any time get a hold of one of us. Sometimes they shop a little bit. Sometimes we find out that they have called three of us in a row to see if we will say the same thing. We try to touch bases with each other. It happened recently. We will call Allison she will let us do it. So, we are fine that they call a few of us, but that is a great service that we provide. We review the ever increasing number of public record's request that come through the Police Department. Citizens that want information about their own cases want information about their neighbor's cases; want information about cases that are just of interest to them that they have read about in the paper. Some of those Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting May 22, 2007 Page 3 of 9 are large cases to review. Many are very small. We also review property dispositions; specifically dispositions of weapons because based on federal law there are things that we need to look for before we can return a weapon to a person. Finally and most importantly to me, we provide training to the Meridian Police Department. Dear to my heart is what I continue to do for Meridian even though I am not on site out here any more. This year we did live K-9 training scenarios, ran all of the patrol officers through that. We used real drugs and all of the dogs and had everyone come in. We had traffic stops set up in the bays. We had a little motel room set up In the kennel. The K-9 training facility and half of our staff were playing as actors and it was great. It was very much more hands on. The officers had to come in and tell us what they would do in a particular circumstance and we had a wonderful time with it. Finally, we have just started doing some training scenarios at briefings - briefing training and so they are meant to be little like three minute pieces of legal information that we do at each patrol briefing with the idea that maybe giving them smaller pieces of information at one time; it makes it easier to digest, otherwise we do these day long trainings and it just kind of a lot of information. So we are sending our prosecutors to the briefings and they discuss little cases, little updates and I think that has been successful. I think that will be a good program for us to continue. It continues to be a pleasure to work with you and all of the officers and unless there are any questions, I am going to hand it over to Steve Rutherford for the heavy lifting. Rountree: Any questions Council? Bird: I have none. Rountree: Thank you Allison. Rutherford: Madame Mayor and Members of the Council, Steve Rutherford, Chief Deputy City Attorney, former Meridian City Prosecutor. I have some information - De Weerd: Does that mean traitor? Rountree: Thank you Steve. Politics are in his future. Rutherford: I handed you a facts sheet. Just information that isn't necessarily something you need for tonight, but something you can have a look at. I am here to talk numbers. Interesting when you have a lawyer talking numbers, but just to give you a little history, but in 2006 with the Victim Witness component, the contract was just about $240,000, just a little over. In 2007 you will recall that we transitioned away from a victim witness provided by us and put that into the Chief's hands and so the contract that we are existing under currently is $200,196. This year our proposed amount of the contract is $241,380. It is a 20 percent increase over the current amount. I have got reasons for that and at any Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting May 22, 2007 Page 4 of 9 time if you feel like you need clarification or you want to ask questions, feel free and I will do my best. There are reasons and the reasons are myriad. One of them is in front of you here. The case filings are up. Again, projections are going to be somewhere between eight and nine thousand cases. That results in additional work for our prosecutors. As you hire officers and I put those numbers on the sheet as you continue to hire officers those folks are busy and productive arrest citations and the like go up and that leads to those increased case numbers. We really keep a bead on how many cases per prosecutor we have per month and how many cases per support staff member we have per month. We have got a study from 1999 that tells us when the numbers start to creep over 300 and especially when they start to get up in towards the 400 per prosecutor that we have got a problem; that things start to fall through cracks and in cases like domestic batteries and DUl's, you don't want those cases falling through the cracks or not getting the attention they deserve. So we keep a really close eye on that. We have done a pretty good job on our prosecutors, although they are starting to creep up a little bit. That is probably more associated with the Boise City increases than with your increases. So you don't anticipate lawyers on the back of this new contract that will go forward next year. The part we neglected for some period of time is our support staff. We operate in three divisions that have criminal responsibilities and when we started this contract some years ago, each division had two criminal judges associated with it. So we had six courtrooms and each of the divisions had three support staff and they handled the criminal cases with various two judges and then the associated civil work with the other things we did; the Public Works, the Planning and Zoning and those kinds and we kind of split those up. Well the trial court administrator in response to increasing caseloads has changed - five years ago they changed the way they schedule things and now they have added judges. So we have gone from six to eight very quickly and there is actually a ninth now that is doing what was supposed to be part time, a couple days a week and now its three and one half days of work. So effectively for us it is four days a week, which leads to increased numbers of lawyers in court. In fact, the perfect storm happens every Monday when 12 of our 18 criminal prosecutors and sometimes up to 15 depending on what kind of hearing they are set - 15 of our criminal prosecutors are in court and we basically have about 18 prosecutors that are dedicated to criminal stuff and they are in court at anyone time and that is a huge - when you only have got three prosecutors and given the offices 29 lawyers, there are other things that come up, people go on vacation - you know 12 to 15 lawyers in court at anyone time is a substantial burden. We are currently in negotiations with the trial court administrator to try some other things. In fact in one instance, we just took a trip to Idaho Falls to look at their system. Instead of sending one prosecutor over like we do with 60 pre-trials for a day, so 60 different misdemeanor cases for pre-trial for the day and settlement conferences, they set 120 over there and they shovel a lot more through. So we are looking at some potential option to do that. Quite frankly, we can't have one prosecutor handling 120 cases, so what it would mean is we would send two prosecutors. So again the resource required would go up. We would hope that would translate into less Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting May 22, 2007 Page 5 of 9 days of work. So we are working with them to try and refine and really kind of other than just throwing judges, maybe we look at some process improvements that don't require us to hire more prosecutors, maybe there is a better way to do business. So we are engaged with them. In addition the City of Boise just did a market adjustment for wages city wide, everybody from our contract janitors up through Chief Deputy kind of positions, lead supervisors like myself and adjusted everybody across the board. So our starting salaries for Attorney I, which was in the mid forties, now is at fifty. We think that is a lot closer to market and then the (inaudible) cities, regional (inaudible) cities as well as local - Ada Counties, the Attorney Generals of the world - so in the two attorney's that we have associated with this contract, we bumped their salary and that is reflected in the bid for this year as well. Really again, what we are doing with the contract for Meridian this year is we are going to - right now your contract is associated with two prosecutors and a half time legal secretary. To get us where we need to be, our office has determined that we need to hire another secretary and we need to bump the secretary that is associated with this contract to full time. So what we have done on this contract is added a half time secretary, which would make the existing part time a full time. That is basically the reason for the bump because there is an associated indirect cost that are associated with Human Resource stuff, the computers and that type of stuff. A couple quick things that I want to give you information about so you know what is coming down the road from - these are things that our office is looking at in terms of things that we have to plan for in the future. It is somewhat the basis for our request and our numbers this time. Again, case load for prosecutor, case load for support staff is high based on rules of discovery, other things that we have to turn cases around fairly quickly when those numbers get too high, those numbers start to suffer and we get in trouble with the court if we start dragging on filing briefs, filing discovery. Again that trial court administrator, we are working with them. Hopefully we can find some solution, but ultimately they are looking at a whole host of cases that they have got to figure out how to get through before the six month speedy trial time runs and if a misdemeanor case runs longer than six months, the judge has to dismiss that case. A person has a right to a trial within those six months. In some cases we get pretty close and when somebody walks in and says I want my court date, I want a trial - there are cases where it is really close when they set them just because they have that many cases. So again, we are working with them on a solution for that. Finally I want to tell you something that we are kind of excited about. On one hand, I am up here complaining if you will about or at least apprising you that reality of a whole host of court rooms to occupy and trying to do that and trying to shoehorn all these cases with our existing resources and get them done_ Our Mayor and our City Council, not unlike yourselves are really interested in livability issues or interested in making sure that code enforcement cases get dealt with constructively and quickly because they lead to significant neighborhood problems. One edge of that are dog citations; the barking dogs, the vicious dogs and those types of cases. I am currently working with the trial coordinator administrator and some of our Planning and Zoning folks to establish a livability court. A livability court really Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting May 22, 2007 Page 6 of 9 would be a court that for folks only on cases that involve code enforcement. So we get a judge that has those cases. Right now they go to all the judges and none of the judges like them. They all think this sounds civil to me, what am I doing here? De Weerd: I am glad you defined that. I was going to ask you what timely meant about code enforcement and court. Rutherford: And it is difficult because when a case goes to criminal court, Madame Mayor, you are exactly right people think it is going to happen now and the criminal court isn't necessarily fast, but part of that is because we mainstream these things and put them in there and we have gotten - the pre-trials that I was talking about where a prosecutor goes over 60 files and they have about this much time to deal with all of those cases. So when you want a neighbor there, who is living with this problem next door and when you have the person there who is causing the problem, you don't have a good time to talk and get things sorted out and you can slap the person with a $300 fine; that doesn't fix the neighborhood problem. Those things persist. So the idea would be get a judge that has some subject matter expertise, the judge we've identified is a visiting judge from Mountain Home that used to work with the City Attorney's Office, understands code enforcement issues and that judge would - it would be a little more mediation, a little more where we could sit down with the affected parties in the neighborhood and the defendant in the case; barking dogs is a perfect example. First time barking dog case, you want the person to know what the problem is. You want the person to make the problem stop and give them solutions other than just getting rid of the dog. There are all kinds of programs where folks can go rent or buy bark collars; humane ones that emit an ammonia when the dog barks. There are other solutions. There are some classes that these people teach that the Humane Society can hook you up with. So ideally one of those first situations you say here are your options. We are going to hold this criminal case right here for you. We are going to give you six weeks. Go get a bark collar. Go take that class. Go figure something out. Your neighbor is going to come back in six weeks and we are all going to come back and if you haven't taken care of the problem, you plead guilty and pay a fine and be on probation or you can have your trial. We are hoping that that will lead to some more constructive lasting solutions other than when people leave the courthouse with a $75 fine on a barking dog ticket, the neighbor is unhappy because they think I came in for this and that guy got a $75 fine? And this guy is not happy because he had to pay a $75 fine and nobody leaves happy. So the idea is to try to work to solution. There are going to be those cases that don't work out. But the idea is to get code enforcement cases where we can give them some actual attention as opposed to just shoving them through with every DUI, domestic battery, driving without a license. So I am currently in negotiations with the trial court administrator and I am hoping that we have some news on that by fall, but my attention with your permission and this City Attorney's permission is to shove Meridian Code Enforcement and dog cases in there as well. I think it will be Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting May 22, 2007 Page 7 of 9 meaningful. Otherwise unless there are questions, I am going to turn it over to Kerrie for the close. Rountree: Any questions Council? Bird: I have none. Rountree: Thank you, Steve. Coliani: Madame Mayor, Council Members I made a promise at the beginning of this when I told you that I was going to un-wrap a surprise and tell you about our service enhancement we intend to provide this coming year. We are in the final stages of negotiating and talking to two vendors about a case management system that will track, provide statistics, reports, show trends in the prosecution of your cases, not just the City of Boise's but yours as well. These folks that we are talking to and one we saw a presentation of today are the top of this industry and when you have the number of citations, filings, the code enforcement and all of that when you consider the number somewhere in the order of 110,000 over the last few years we want a system, we need a system that takes care of your business as well as the City of Boise's. I think we will be on the cutting edge of that when we get this system in place. We will be making that selection within the week, actually within the week and moving forward with contract negotiations and installing the system. So think about that when we think about the entire scope of this contract and the other services that we are providing. Let me say this in closing we all know in this day and age that there is some acrimony between government agencies that we see from time to time. Maybe it is a lot more than we would like, but I would tell you this particular contract is a shining example of two governments working together, the City of Boise and the City of Meridian. In fact, I would say this is one of the great success stories under governmental relations in the State of Idaho. We intend to make that case from here on out as long as you policy fit to allow us to have this contract. Thank you very much for time, I appreciate it. Chief, thank you. I will see you all soon. Rountree: Any questions? Mayor? De Weerd: Yes. Well I was hoping that part of your big surprise included tracking of restitution and who is paying. Does it? Coliani: Madame Mayor, Council Members these systems include that. We are down to the final two vendors and they look a little different, a little different software approach, but all of that is in these packages. More than we can talk to you about tonight, there is so much that these systems provide in tracking cases at every level. It is almost overwhelming. We are just looking at the different versions, of course it is price dependent, but we can certainly get those things squared away and be able to track these things for future. Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting May 22, 2007 Page 8 of 9 Tate: On restitution because that had not been originally part of the services we provided, we had been just kind of doing enough in keeping up with everyone. I assigned that this last year to my screening secretary Andrea Dietrich, who loves doing restitution because she loves sending those letters and calling people and that is just her style, so actually Meridian restitution is in much better shape than it had been before we got it and in the years previous that we have had the contract and it is in a whole different situation and she is sitting in on all of the presentations from the vendors on case management and one of the things I know that she has been asking a lot of questions on is what additional software or what programs does it come with so she can do a better job on Meridian restitutio n. De Weerd: Just a follow up. Rountree: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: So will it inter-communicate with the county system? Tate: That certainly is our hope and that is one thing that we are looking for in the vendors is being able to work with AS 400 in the county system. I mean it is the hardest thing about picking these vendors, but that is our hope. Rutherford: Madame Mayor, Council Members these two vendors that we are talking to tell us that they do this all over the country and we see that. We see the examples of them dealing with city attorney offices, who have to talk to AS 400 systems that are county based. So they are not rookies at this. It is not their first rodeo. We are confident that we will be able to accomplish that as well. What we will be able to bring back to you in coming years is a report card on how we are doing because we will be able to look at the numbers at that level. De Weerd: That is exciting. Rountree: Thank you. Are there any other questions? Bird: I have none. Thanks very much. Rountree: Kerrie, Steve, Allison thank you for your time and your presentation and we will certainly factor that information in our budgeting process. Mr. Clerk is there anything further that we need? That concludes our agenda for the Pre- Council this evening. I would entertain a motion to close the meeting. Zaremba: So moved. Bird: Second. Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting May 22, 2007 Page 9 of 9 Rountree: It has been moved and seconded to close the Pre-Council meeting. All those in favor. THREE AYES. ONE ABSENT. MOTION CARRIED. MEETING ADJOURNED AT 7:00 P.M. (TAPE ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) APPROVED: rdaULMR D, MAYOR , / 1'1/ p7 DATE APPROVED \ 111..1 III "" ':~~ \ O~,_~~':(~~;,i;:~;;::;">,>:~, ~::- 0" ',rp'fi'OFli.1>" '..~" <;- ;- ~' i~?\)'~ '1"'~"'~ ~'" I - uJ51~. ..I ~ ;;CL ~~) 2 \- '1/) ~r l'A1: ." .f>.l -::"""/ "-MJ1 ..r"\~ ................. // ~. .- '\V ", ,11/! _-'-"UNT'l. "" 111/ I"~ 111111111111"