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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2002 07-16 BudgetMeridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 The special budget workshop of the Meridian City Council was called to order at 8:05 A.M. on July 16, 2002, by Mayor Robert Corrie. Members Present: Tammy de Weerd, Keith Bird, and Bill Nary. Members Absent: Cherie McCandless. Staff Present: Bill Nichols, Gary Smith, Janice Smith, Reta Cunningham, Shari Stiles, Pauline Skeggs, Mike Worley, Stacy Kilchenmann, Ken Bowers and Will Berg. Roll Call: X Tammy deWeerd X Cherie McCandless X Bill Nary X Keith Bird X Mayor Robert Corrie Corrie: We’ll open this special Council meeting for Tuesday, July 16th , 2002 at 8:05 and Wednesday, July 17th , 2002 to have the budget presentations by the different departments. We’ll have roll call now, Mr. Berg, please. Thank you. Stacy. Presentation/Discussion of Proposed Budget by Departments: Introduction: Stacy Kilchenmann. Kilchenmann: Mayor and members of the Council, welcome to the 2003 budget development session. It’s hard to believe it’s already a year since we were last doing this but it is. I’m just going to briefly do a little overview of what we’re going to do today and then we’ll turn it over to the Police Department to do our first budget presentation. Basically, I just want to talk a little bit about the budget process. I think you’re familiar with it but just to refresh everyone’s memory. The first step, the first thing we did, was we developed the base again like we did last year. We felt last year this would probably be a two-year process to iron out all of the kinks. I think this will be the final year that we will go line by line and actually change any base numbers. I just wanted to call your attention to, in your budget manuals, the goldenrod sheets that you had. Those were— they’re titled budget base. Those kind of outline what the base is and how we got there. We used prior two years. On your sheet, you’ll only see FY 2001 actual. What we did, lineup 2002 actual to look at the line items to make sure that they were adequate. Then, you have a column that says FY 2003 adjustments. In that column, we removed any one-time items from the prior year, which were mostly capital outlay type items and then we may have made adjustments where the departments requested we decrease a line item and increase another line item and in some cases, we actually increased the line item. For example, for Police because of their new building. We changed some numbers for Parks because of the addition of land. We changed some numbers for increase like fertilizer costs, etc. So, we ended up with the 2003 budget total. I did want to tell you for personnel cost, the way we arrived at that is that used the actual pay now and we increased it by a total amount of 2/5%, which Pauline will talk to you about tomorrow. Then, for insurance, we did that a little differently, a little more specifically Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 than we have in the past. We went through every employees insurance and took the actual and increased it by 32%. Our insurance representative gave us the 32% increase number and he also felt that in 2004, insurance is going to increase even more dramatically. We had some extremely high claims this year that really shot our insurance up. By doing it that way, by just taking the actual times 32%, we should have adequate funding for the upcoming year and not have to worry about that. We’ll also have a few months at the lower rate. So, that’s how we handled the personnel. Once we had developed the base and gone through the departments and worked on that, or at the same time, the departments were working on developing their enhancements. They started that process in February. We handed out the budget development manual and they went to work on that. So, what they’ll be talking about to you today primarily about are their enhancements, their rational, why they’re asking for those and tying those into the Strategic Plan and most importantly, answering your questions about those enhancements and how they tie into the Strategic Plan. I hope you’ll take an opportunity to really get all your questions answered. At the same time they were working on their enhancements, they were developing their capital replacements. I just wanted to quickly review our definition of replacement capital outlay. What that should be is replacing an item that is worn out or obsolete. We actually want to end up with the same number of items that we started with before we replace them. De Weerd: That’s things and not people, right? Kilchenmann: Things. Items. Yes, items. Well, you know, we could apply that to people and start replacing some worn out people. For this year, we just did capital outlay. For example, if we have two cars after we get done with the replacement, we should end up with two cars. Now, we went through and changed some computer numbers. We want to start developing standards so everybody throughout the City is replacing computers for, you know, standardizing that so we pretty much used the number of $1,500. There were some cases where, for example, Public Works, they need a lot more power. They have different requirements and their computer replacement will be a little higher. If an item has a significant increase in cost or quality, that should actually be an enhancement. We had the Police with their move and so forth, they had some changes in their replacement capital outlay that didn’t get in before the manual went out so right when I finish, Reta will give you their new request and they’ll address that in their presentation. Okay, before we start, I just want to review the revenue projection just briefly. I’m not going to go through that detailed manual that I gave you. I just want to hit some high points. The reason is that we changed the way we do the revenue and we’re in the process of changing it. In the past, we’ve basically looked at history and kind of said, well, it’s increased this percent every year so we’re going to increase it this percent. That actually comes out to be quite accurate. I don’t think we’ve had too many problems with it. The limiting factor in doing it that way is it’s hard to project beyond the next year and we need to get to the point where we’re projecting several years into the future. So, what we did this year is we tried to find some correlating factors or some other data that we could tie into the revenue projection. That also allows us, if we do it in this manner, when revenue bases change, we kind of can use some modeling and trend analysis to predict. For example, Public Works changed the way sewer and water revenue is calculated. So, you really can’t just use history to look at that anymore. In your revenue manual, you’ll notice, a couple Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 of factors that were used were housing starts and State economic forecast because it looks like we can use their data that they have a whole team of economic analysts working on. We can correlate that and use that for some of our projections. Okay. I’m going to start with the Enterprise Fund first because that’s the good news. Basically, we’re talking about Water and the Wastewater Treatment Plant. There’s two components of revenue when we look at the Enterprise Fund. There’s usage fees that are used for operation and maintenance of the existing structure and then we have the fees that are used to increase the capacity or service area and there are three types of fees. The assessment fees, trunk line fees, which are being used and will probably used more in the future in latecomer’s fees. The water usage charged, they changed the rate calculation effective July 2002 so we don’t have any actual history to use to project that. It’s made up of two items. There’s the base, the fixed administrative charge and then a volume charge, which is a direct cost of providing the service and commercial buildings will use the same base that residential buildings use. In order to figure out what the revenue would be, Brad used a modeling approach where he took actual data from 2002 and he applied the new rates to it. Then, I used an account trend analysis based on housing starts and so forth and applied it to that model to get what the revenue would be. The revenue will actually decrease in 2003 and that was what Brad had planned to happen because he felt that the water could actually go down. The sewer is the opposite. It will actually increase in 2003, which was Brad’s intent because he felt that the sewer was not high enough to support the growth in the plant and so forth. It’s similar to the water, the two components of the base and the volume charge and the change in the commercial. If we look at just the usage sales, that’s probably what they will look like. You’ll see water will start to go down. Sewer will start to go up. As a whole, with the increase in the number of accounts, it’ll trend—it’ll just a steady upward trend. Assessment fees are increasing. That’s the fee when they hook up at the building permit level. Those pretty much increase. It’s just a steady increase as housing starts increase. The commercial is much more difficult to project so for this year we just used a flat-line increase because it just depends on big projects and so forth. Big projects will spike it up and some years, there aren’t big projects and it stays fairly flat. Latecomer’s revenue is revenue that we have not budgeted for in the past. This is money we get when builders and developers come later and connect to a line that the City has already paid to put in. As you can see, it changes dramatically, depending on when the agreements are finalized. So, for 2003, I just put in $100,000 because the agreements are finalized so long after the actual project is done that it’s hard to project but I think we’re going to get a little more on top of those and maybe get a little more accurate number. So, if you look at utility revenue for a whole or as a total, it basically remains about the same. Actual will probably be a little higher because latecomer’s revenue will probably be greater that we’ve projected. Special Services, which the Building Department at Planning and Zoning, Building Department revenue is increases pretty, on a pretty much of a 10% per year. It’s pretty consistent. That one spike you see is because of a large commercial building project. P & Z revenue should increase because of the increases in FY—the rate increases this year and actually, we’ve seen an increase quite a bit this year over what we budgeted. Then, the general fund. About half of our general fund is property tax. That is the number that we really concentrate on when projecting general fund revenue. As we all know, there’s the 3% limit because of the prior year tax. Our revenue actually increases more than 3% and that’s because of new construction and annexation. If we take an average, if we Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 average those numbers out, over the past five years it’s increased about 14%. That’s a pretty safe area we can look at for projecting. One thing that we’ll have to look at in the future, that I’ll start looking at as soon as we’re through this budget year, is the impact of the MDC or the Meridian Development Corporation on our future tax increases as we start projecting further in the future. I gave you a handout that was in your revenue manual but because of my extremely poor word processing skills, the table got chopped off in your manual. Next year I’m going to just have somebody else do that but it’s just a table that shows you market values, what percent of our property tax increase is due to increases in market values, annexations and so forth. If we look into the future and look at use and market rate analysis or market increase analysis, we can see that our levy rate is decreasing. I can’t see the specific numbers very well but I think you can follow the line and what we have to look at in the future. All other general fund revenue, that other half of general fund revenue, pretty much stays at a flat line. We can’t look for any significant decreases there. The State revenue sharing, school reimbursements, rural fire reimbursements and park impact fees. In conclusion, on your desk you’ll find the FY 2003, the most recent one with the budget money available for program enhancements for each that you can kind of refer to during the budget presentations and so forth. You also have 2002 just for comparison. One thing that I think is important to note when you look at these charts, when you look at the red bar, which is the base, whenever something is approved that is permanent, especially positions, when you add positions, that base takes up more and more of the bar. That means that there will be less and less of the blue or the discretionary revenue available in future years. So, that’s something I think that we really have to keep in mind because we don’t have a significant way to increase our revenue, especially for the general fund. De Weerd: Stacy, can you do that? Show a trend over the last five years on how that gap has been narrowed. Kilchenmann: I can do that. Yes. De Weerd: That would be real helpful. Kilchenmann: No, I can’t do it because we didn’t have—well, maybe I—we didn’t have a budget base in the past but we can do it just using the total expenditures. We could do it. De Weerd: That would be good. Kilchenmann: Okay. I think we already have it. Sounds like we already have it so we could do that. De Weerd: It’s not in our book though, right? Kilchenmann: No. De Weerd: I didn’t see it. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Kilchenmann: Are there any questions? Corrie: Stacy, one of the things I’d like for you to really watch pretty close is the assessor’s value of property in the City. Boise went back and looked at it and they found about a $200,000 discrepancy. So, just kind of keep an eye on that. Kilchenmann: Yes. In fact, Janice attended a workshop on how to audit that. We won’t be able to do it as thoroughly as Boise does because of the staff size but we will work out something. We can maybe even work with them because when they find errors, that helps us. Corrie: Okay. Thank you. Kilchenmann: If there are no more questions, Reta has a few sheets to add to your book and she’ll come and do that and we’ll turn it over to the Police Department. De Weerd: Well, isn’t this supposed to be like developers, if they give us stuff late, we don’t consider it? Bird: We just throw it away, don’t we? Corrie: This is money for us now. Kilchenmann: This has actually been drawn. De Weerd: Okay. Bird: We’ll put it right in there. Corrie: I thought they would have to explain (inaudible). (inaudible) De Weerd: Hey, Bill? Did you try Cherie? Bird: She said she wouldn’t make it. Nary: Oh, really. Bird: When I talked to her, she said she thought she could but she’s got some relatives or something in. De Weerd: I saw her just yesterday. Corrie: Oh, Bill, that was for the meeting tonight but she’s going to be here. Yes. She may have thought it starts at 9:30. Bird: She might have read the other— Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Corrie: I talked to her yesterday. Nary: It’s because the liaison is from Hawaii. Bird: Why have we got this kind of a— Nary: This liaison is from Hawaii. Bird: Okay. That’s what they’re getting all them pictures of. De Weerd: He’s already groveling. Worley: We did have one request to put ocean front property as an enhancement. Nary: I said it was because your liaison was from Hawaii. You wanted to make it very synergy. Worley: Make you feel part of it here. Okay. Are you all ready? Corrie: Yes. Go ahead. POLICE DEPARTMENT Worley: All right. I want to start off by commenting that this is kind of a special day. One year ago today, the third Tuesday in July in this chamber, this Council confirmed the Mayor’s appointment of me as the Chief. So, we got at least one year of official recognition anyway, even though I didn’t actually start until September. During that year, ten months, we’ve worked together and with your help we’ve done quite a bit with the Police Department. We managed to add some additional people to the street without increasing the budget, at least in the current year, by adding some non-sworn positions, taking sworn officers that were doing administrative type duties and putting them out on the street doing street police work. That effort will continue. We’ve also managed to add some vehicles by adjusting our priorities from last year and you will note I think in your budget book that in some of our capital replacement we have, I think, finances note, there’s a couple of vehicles that were in there that were also slated for replacement last year. We actually brought those up because of some adjustments in priorities last year, which we had discussed at our various meetings in the meantime. With that, I want to start off by saying I appreciate the support that you’ve given us so far and will now present our budget request and proposal for the New Year. I want to start off with just some brief comments about capital replacement and vehicles. What you see up in front of you are some odometers from vehicles that are slated to be replaced. These photographs were taken yesterday. These are very current numbers as far as the mileage that is run up on some of our vehicles. When we get up in that kind of mileage, folks, we’re really starting to incur a lot of maintenance problems. We’re starting to see, even if we don’t have expensive maintenance, we are seeing a lot of down time just ferrying the cars to the shops to be repaired, to be looked at and that sort of thing. From a capital improvement standpoint, one of the things that we had Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 asked is that the Council consider a policy of replacement of marked patrol cars when the vehicle reaches 85,000 miles. This is recommended by the Michigan State Police, which is probably the premier agency of testing police cars around the country. Virtually, every police agency in the country looks to Michigan State Police for guidance in selecting and utilization of patrol cars. As a rule of thumb in patrol cars, because as you all know, they sit and idle for long periods of time, as a rule of thumb, there’s about three times the number of engine miles, if you will, on a patrol car engine as is actually on the odometer. So, when you see a car up there with 124,000 miles on it, that car probably has in the neighborhood of 375,000 miles on the engine. In following up on a suggestion by Councilman Bird, all of the new patrol cars, starting with the ones we purchased this year, do have hour meters installed on the engines. So, we’ll be able to get a very accurate picture in the future of exactly what kind of wear we’re getting on the engines of the cars. We’d like you to consider this replacement. Boise, as a comparison, Boise rotates theirs at 80,000 and have for several years. Also, in your packet as far as capital replacement, is a replacement of firearms. Our officers currently carry as many as six different types of firearms. Many of these are personally owned. This was a budgetary savings kind of thing in the past to have officers buy their own gun as opposed to incurring a City cost to do that. As with many things in that type of realm, it’s really a false economy. There are issues related to maintenance, even though they’re personally owned. If they’re used on duty, we have an obligation to maintain them, which means that our armors have to know how to fix a lot of different kinds of guns. We also have to buy ammunition for several different types. That doesn’t mean we have to buy six different types of ammunition but we’re buying more than one, which means we don’t realize some of the bulk savings that we could get if we were only buying one type of ammunition. In your budget packet, you have an estimated cost from us of $18,000 and I think Finance came up with $17,900. Both very, very close. This is to exchange current firearms that we have issued, going to the Glock Model 40, which is becoming very common and it’s a very good weapon and equipping all of our current officers with the Glock 40. Yes, this is something that we could do in a phased approach but, frankly, it would cost us more to do that because we’re realizing some savings from the manufacturer as far as purchase of a large number of weapons and they’re also taking all of our current Smith and Wessons in exchange. That provides a benefit to us, in that we are not putting our firearms out on the open market, selling them to dealers and that sort of thing. I’m sure many of you have heard the horror stories of the police department selling or losing a firearm and then having it turn up later used in a crime. So, we would just as soon that the dealerships take those and, of course, they don’t put them back out on the street because it’s the competitor. That’s all of my comments about capital equipment. I think that everything else is pretty well addressed in the presentation from Finance and in your book. De Weerd: What a nice building. Worley: It really is. We are extremely happy with this building and thank you very much. As we’ve said in some of our other presentations, the Council and the Mayor are really to be commended for putting together a project that allows us expansion and growth. So many government projects, as many of you know, the buildings are overcrowded the day you move into them. This is definitely a well designed, well Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 thought out plan that will last us quite a ways into the future. It really does handle our capital facilities needs for several years to come. Our primary capital needs in the next few years anyway, will be primarily in terms of rolling stock cars. One of the facets, though, of moving into a new building, particularly this one, it’s about five times the size of our current one, is that there is some increased costs in operating the building, such things as cost of heat and to cool the building. Two weeks ago, this Council approved a little over $2,200 a month contract for janitorial service. That’s up from $840 a month in our former building. So, we can expect to see those kinds of increases. So, our number one enhancement request is $105,000 to support the addition operation costs of the new building. This is our best estimate based on discussions with Idaho Power, with Intermountain Gas and other folks who can give us their best estimate of what it will be but we’re just going to have to take a year or two to see what the actual operating costs are. We’re also asking that—we do have some remaining funds from the building itself. At this point, we don’t know exactly how much that is. There are still some issues to be resolved. The largest expense yet to be resolved has to do with the drainage water storage, which was not constructed according to code. Particularly, in front of the building and does present some other problems that concern me, even beyond that. We’re looking at actually doing some underground storage of drainage water for those particular front areas of the building. So, we don’t know how much that’s going to be yet but we do ask that you re-budget any remaining capital. We have some areas of the building, particularly the second floor conference room, meeting room, which has no furniture in it. When we budgeted it originally, we were pretty light on the budget for such things as furnishings so we’ve completely furnished the public meeting room on the first floor but the second floor has nothing in it and there are some other areas that we think it would be helpful to furnish. Also, the second floor meeting room has the capability of audio/visual equipment but there’s none installed there at the time so we would like to continue that to bring the building up to full usefulness. Our second enhancement issue has to do with the evidence room and our evidence processing, in general. Last year, the Council approved a part-time evidence technician person, primarily to relieve the detective that was working part-time at evidence and get him back on the street. We attempted during the course of this year to fill that position. The evidence technician takes some skills as it was originally envisioned is pretty much a cataloger of evidence but it does require courtroom testimony. It requires some knowledge of the chain of custody and those kinds of things. We went through several applicants and actually did complete backgrounds on three and were unsuccessful at filling that position in that manner. We began to discuss ways to better address that issue and particularly in light of that new building. If you notice the picture in the upper right hand corner, we have a very well stocked forensic lab with the fume hoods, which are actually quite state-of-the-art equipment but we really don’t have anybody on board that can operate those. We are the only city in the immediate area that does not use civilians, at this point, for crime scene processing. We still have officers doing it, as seen in the picture on the left. This is another way that we can, although it doesn’t actually return an officer to the street as dramatically as replacing a detective who was working as an evidence technician, it does save some time to be able to have someone who not only can catalog evidence but can actually process it. I don’t know what I just did. So, what we’re requesting and through the graces of the support of Councilman Nary, our liaison and the Mayor, we actually have advertised and have successfully selected a full-time evidence technician who also has extensive crime scene Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 background. The individual’s name is Cindy Hill. She is without a doubt one of the best fingerprint experts in the state and arguably the best. We’re very fortunate to be able to attract her and to be able to use her to help process crime scenes but that will also— her continuation with us will depend upon the approval of this position. The little video clip that you see there was taken from the Discovery Channel where Cindy was featured in the Discovery Channel’s program, New Detectives, for work on the Kuzman Jeff homicide in Boise. The figure that you have in your budget book is probably about $52,000 that was originally submitted as a full-time position but we had neglected to note that you had already approved a part-time position. This is not in addition to the part-time position. This is a roll up of that position to a full-time. So, the figure that you see here represents the other half time plus the benefit package. For those of you who may have been out in the last couple of years, traffic is an issue in Meridian. We continue—yes, in Meridian. Just an interesting note, the photograph in the upper right, that picture was taken at 3:40 in the afternoon. So, it’s not just an issue of 8:00 and 5:00 traffic anymore. So, our third enhancement priority is three additional personnel and the associated equipment to be assigned a patrol with a traffic emphasis. As you know, we do have two officers on the street now who are assigned a motorcycle patrol but unfortunately with the call loads, very often they are pulled off of traffic enforcement kinds of things to assist on regular patrol calls. This would allow either of those two individuals and an additional person to focus strictly on traffic issues. There are three impacts of traffic. Education, enforcement and engineering. Enforcement, obviously, writing tickets, being out there calming traffic with police presence. The education, we don’t do particularly well and that’s getting out with the public and explaining some of the problem areas and situations that we have. The engineering, although that is the province of the Ada County Highway District and Idaho Transportation Department, we feel that we may have at least a little bit better impact with those folks if we can present real world scenarios from people who are actually out there dealing with the issues. When we talk about staffing, there’s a formula I think all of you are familiar with, officers per thousand population. We need x number of police officers in Meridian because some other city has that numbers, that ratio of police officers. The Council, the Mayor, and I have talked about this extensively over the last year and we’re all in agreement that that’s not a very good measure. For me to reasonably bring to you a proposal for new officers, in the long term, based on some objective measure, we have to weigh—a way to objectively look at that and the objective uses is best defined as analysis of our actual call patterns, our actual workload, what the officers in Meridian, Idaho are actually doing but that doesn’t come by itself. So, our fourth priority is a crime analyst. This is a non-sworn position who would actually look at our workload, our crime patterns, our traffic patterns and not only help us project need for additional staffing but also on a daily basis, would provide information to officers of where the problems are that they can specifically address. If we have a burglary problem in the northwest area of the City, sergeants can concentrate their resources there rather than just people going out and randomly driving around, hoping they run across something. That does require some analysis and presentation. Some of you have probably seen the program, The District, on Saturday night and the Comstat Program, which started in New York City. That’s just a very high tech version of what we’re talking about here. It can be done a little cheaper but it is a very useful tool to deployment of personnel. When we started talking about the new building, I made a commitment to you that we would have the records desk open from 7:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. to better serve the public. In our old Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 building we were closing at 5:00. That has been accomplished but with a supervisor and three records clerks, we’re right on the cusp of being able to fully staff that. It’s fine as long as everybody is there but if somebody takes time off, then the coverage becomes more of a challenge. We also, as you’re aware, are moving into cataloging our records on laserfiche, which does take a considerable amount of time to input those records as well. So, our number five priority is an entry level records clerk to support, augment the current staff in records. Priority number six is an issue of somewhat schematics but there are some other specific areas to address too. Meridian currently has, within our pay scale, a detective rank. It is an actual rank, an actual pay grade that falls between police officer and sergeant. If somebody has moved into detectives, they are automatically given a pay raise. Now what that means, in the reverse, is that for someone to voluntarily leave detectives or to be removed if they’re just not quite doing the job, it can mean a pay cut. We are always dealing with pay issues when in fact detectives in most areas, other than Meridian and New York City, is just an assignment. It’s another assignment like traffic, like canine, any thing else. What we are proposing here is keeping the position, the pay grade that we already have, but converting it to a corporal rank. All of the current detectives would be grandfathered in from a pay protection standpoint. The $18,000 that you see in the enhancement would be for a promotion. This would be a tested promotion of six individuals in the patrol division. Those people would be assistant patrol supervisors. The reason for six is there are six sergeants in patrol. Right now, if a sergeant is absent from his shift for whatever reason, vacation, sick or whatever, the senior officer on that shift and when we say senior officer, that’s based on longevity, longest time with the Department, automatically moves up to be the acting supervisor. That is not necessarily the best choice. We have one individual who was a sergeant at one time asked to step down because he didn’t really want that responsibility but because of his seniority, he is constantly placed in an acting supervisor’s role. We have several other people, younger members of the Department who are interested in moving in the supervisory track. So, one of the reasons that we are putting this forward is professional development to allow those individuals an opportunity to have some increase because we do have a limited number of sergeant supervisory positions but also give them the opportunity to develop their expertise as leaders in a support our junior capacity. Meridian is growing a bit. You’ve all seen these projects come before you from Ten Mile, McMillan, Victory, the new school. We’re growing, basically, in all four directions from the City. So, the remaining three priorities all address growth issues. This particular priority is billed as an additional criminal investigator. It’s actually the move of an individual from patrol assignment to CID. The logic behind this is, right now we have a contract with the Meridian School District to provide school resource officers. They pay half of the cost of those officers. A large amount of crime that we encounter is juvenile related. We have—and some of it is very serious. Child abuse, those kinds of things. Right now, those cases are investigated by anyone of the school resource officers, which takes them away from their primary duty, which is education, positive contact with youth in the schools. This proposal brings forth an individual who would be assigned as a criminal investigator with emphasis on investigating juvenile related major crime, to take that out of the hands of school resource officers and keep them in the schools. Regress just a minute to the capital improvement plan. To a patrol officer, the car is their office. That’s where they spend the day. We have a beautiful new building and that has features in it such as some of the patrol writing rooms that serve the patrol officers but their primary Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 duty is out on the street in the car. For that reason, we would like the Council, ask that you adopt a policy as well that a car be added to patrol for every three officers that are hired, just as a matter of course. That’s what we consider to be a minimum number of vehicles available to the officers on the street. Our number eight priority addresses additional officers for patrol. Priorities eight and nine are tied together. ***End of Side One*** Worley: --a year here. That includes one car. This is to augment the regular patrol force. Right now, when we’re fully up to staff and we’re not at this point, but when we’re fully up to staff, our patrol operation has a sergeant and four officers, which today in Meridian, that is adequate to cover our patrol shifts. We do, once in a while, pull our traffic people off for assisting with calls as we mentioned earlier but it get us by at this point. Once again, when we are shorthanded, when people take time off or when they’re in court, those kinds of things, the situation can get precarious rather quickly. Last Friday, Sergeant Coliani started the day with one person being off. For a fair amount of the day, the patrol staffing on the street was Sergeant Coliani and our newest police officer because the other people on the team were in court for the full day. What we’re addressing here is just the staffing to help insure that we have adequate coverage, given the fact that people do take vacations, are off and going to court is part of the job here. Priority number nine, everything is the same. This is for three quarters of a year. You’ll notice, we did put the half year enhancement ahead of the three quarter year and that was strictly a financial decision that if you approve eight but not nine, if it is a little bit of a cost savings rather than in reverse. Finally, I’ve included this as a special request as opposed to an enhancement priority. A few months ago, Mayor Corrie received a call from Donna Williamson, who is the Administrative Judge, expressing a concern that we’re not doing a very good job at collecting the fines that are actually levied by the court. Mayor, I didn’t remember the exact figures but, as I recall, it was about 35%. Garden City has similar success or a lack thereof. Conversely, both Boise and Ada County collect in the neighborhood of 90% of the fines that are levied. The difference that we see is that both of those agencies have an employee, a court liaison officer, who is actually assigned in the court to follow up and be sure that those fines are paid, that people who enter into fine agreements do make their payments and that sort of thing. This is not something that prosecutors can do. They’re too busy prosecuting cases, preparing cases to be chasing after people whether or not they’ve paid the fines so we certainly can do it with other types of people. You’ll notice that this is put forth as a shared contract. What we have done is approach the city of Garden City and they are actually putting in their budget a full-time position as a Court Liaison Officer. They will cover the salary and the benefits of that position and our commitment to them if they would do that is that we would pay half of the salary. We would have one person who would work for both of us at the Ada County Courthouse. For budgetary purposes, we show $14,000 in cost up there but, in reality, if we’re only collecting 35% of our revenues, which I think this year—Stacy can correct me—I think is $171,000. Something like that. If that’s 35% of what’s out there, what would we see in income if it was 90%. So, in reality, we’d submit to you that that $14,000 is really a no-cost item. Now, for those of you who haven’t been adding in your head as all of these numbers have been flashing past—Mr. Nary has but—oh, well, you Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 rounded. Our total enhancements, including the (inaudible) operations adjustment, come to $847,000 request for this year. I would stand for any questions. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Chief, on the crime analysis position, I certainly see the need from the material and our discussions. I wondered, is there any opportunity or any ability in the community to contract for that type of position? I don’t know whether or not there’s that extra piece out there in that kind of capacity but I didn’t know if that’s been explored. Worley: Mr. Nary, no, we really haven’t. There may be some opportunities that way and, frankly, both Boise City and Ada County do have crime analysis units within their agencies. Part of the challenge is just getting information to them on a timely basis. Information from our reports from our calls and, of course, the calls for service themselves are logged through Ada County dispatch, generally. The other information that we would have in our records would have to be conveyed in some manner but it’s something that we could look at. Corrie: Any other questions of the Chief? Bird: I have none. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: You have possibility—or you’re requesting a possible at six months time, nine new employees to put on the street. Is that correct? Worley: That’s correct. De Weerd: You have three full-time, two or three six month and three nine months. Worley: That’s correct. De Weerd: But your full-time is a higher priority than the part-time was? Worley: Yes, because the three full-time positions are specifically designated to address traffic issues, which we feel is one of the highest priorities. That’s also reflected in the Strategic Plan that that’s one of our highest priorities is to address traffic issues in the city. De Weerd: So, in light of your request, all ten of them, how many new personnel are you asking to add? This is kind of a base budget question because these will be ongoing expenses and not just a one time. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Worley: The special item number ten, if you will, is actually not our employee so we wouldn’t be adding that. That $14,000 is a contract fee, which we pay to the city of Garden City. We would actually be adding nine and a half positions if everything was approved. That’s the—correction, ten and a half positions. That’s nine police officer positions, although those are not full-time equivalents over the course of the year. The crime analyst, which is a full-time and the half-time position, which is a roll up from an already approved position, which is in the current base budget. De Weerd: And a records clerk so eleven and a half. Worley: Excuse me. Eleven and a half, yes. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Chief, I think on the Garden City contract thing, I think—I can’t see a reason not to do that. I mean, it makes total sense to me. I guess my thought is more from a, maybe it’s schematics, but it appears to me that this is a contract and a program that we would want to essentially pilot that this works. That this really is basically returning back the $14,000, if not more, evaluating that in a year and see how we’re doing that and I’m assuming that’s what your intent was but I guess I’m more hung up on the name that we’re going to make sure that we reevaluate that on a yearly basis that we look at are we really collecting that back because I agree with you. I think if we do that, we really should collect back the cost of that contract, if not above that. I just want to make sure that how the program is started that we are making that kind of an analysis each year, that this contract is worth keeping up with and all that. Worley: Mr. Nary, that would be the intent. Actually, for it to be judged a success, it would have to return much more because if it only returned the $14,000, what’s the point. Nary: You wouldn’t gain anything. Absolutely. Otherwise, I don’t see any reason not to do something like that. It makes sense. I know the court system has increased a tremendous amount of misdemeanor supervise probation, which is another way that helps collect that revenue but if they’re still only getting around 35%, they’ve had that program in place for a year and a half, two years now and they’re still at 35%, then I think this is a fairly inexpensive way to see if we can capture some of that lost revenue. Worley: That call from Judge Williamson was three months ago, Mayor. Within the last two or three months. Corrie: Yes. It’s very important that we have somebody out there when they come out of that courtroom they can go up to and make the arrangements because, right now, they’re walking away. Trying to find them is very difficult. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: That fine collection officer I think will more than pay for himself if he picks up—if he picks up 25%, he’s paid for himself and added quite a bit of revenue to the department. If he goes to 90%, he’s really done a job of collection. If you’re only getting 35% right now, that’s a joke. So, I think that would be a no brainer, to add that because they’ll definitely pay for themselves and add revenue to the City. Worley: Just looking at what we have now, if we’re collecting 35% and that’s $171,000, if we increase that to even 70%, that’s another $171,000 in revenue. Bird: That’s right. If he goes to 45%, he’s paid for himself and then some. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: Rather than beating a dead horse, I agree with everything that’s been said on number ten. I do have questions on the criminal investigation, the promotion. Are you including a car in that? Worley: Yes. De Weerd: For $20,500? Worley: Actually, Mrs. De Weerd, that figure—the figure includes the move to a detective rank and a vehicle. Now, if the Council was to accept the prior proposal, which was to convert the detective rant to corporal, my intention would be then that people who move into detectives do not automatically get a pay raise. That becomes a tested rank, as it is in virtually every other agency around us. So, if the corporal rank conversion is approved, that cost of that additional detective actually goes down by about $6,000. De Weerd: Okay. Then, the number three with the three traffic personnel. That’s in keeping with your proposed new policy of the new patrol car for every three officers? Worley: Yes. There is a car included in that. De Weerd: And the $54,671, is that what a current car costs? Worley: No. One thing I might mention on the car, where Captain Musser is getting the exact figures on that breakdown. One of the things that you’ll see in your budget book is we’re talking about capital replacement of five patrol cars at $149,500. In the past, the Police Department has come to you with a flat $40,000 per patrol car, which those five cars would have then been a request for $200,000. What we have done is do a car by car analysis of what equipment is in the cars that we’re planning on getting rid of, what can actually be converted and used in another car. Such things as radios. Sometimes the cages don’t fit even in the same make of car. When you change years, Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 the cage in the back doesn’t fit. But things like light bars, if they’re still serviceable, a light bar can be moved. So, if you look in the actual breakdown of the cars, you’ll see that the only time we’re putting in $40,000 for a new patrol car is when we’re adding a car to the fleet which would have to be totally outfitted. Any of the replacement vehicles, the cost that you’ll see in your breakdowns, you’ll see that they vary by several thousand dollars one direction or another and they’re all in the $30,000 range and that’s simply because of being able to reuse equipment on existing cars. Mrs. De Weerd, your question was about $54,000 in which item? De Weerd: Item number three in the one-time expenses. Musser: Mr. Mayor and Councilwoman De Weerd and members of the Council. If I understand your question right, you’re asking about the capital outlay specifically for enhancement number three. De Weerd: Yes. Musser: On that, we have $40,000 projected for one new patrol car with total new equipment and accessories installed on that and then there’s an additional breakout of $4,500 for a lydar speed detection device. This is a laser activated speed indicator. It’s not the traditional radar. This one uses a projected light beam of infrared light and it’s much more accurate. That’s why we’d like to have it. The other thing it’ll help us with on this traffic program as well, is the lydar is also capable of doing ranging and taking measurements at accident scenes, which we’re getting much more in the way of serious accidents here in town and we need to have a little bit more accurate measurement when we’re putting the sketch materials together on vehicle placements and that type of thing. De Weerd: Okay. Thank you. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: Chief, I didn’t maybe understand you. If item number six, the corporal designation addition at $18,474, if that’s approved then number seven goes away except for the— basically, $8,000 or $9,000 goes away? The 25 for the car stays or— Worley: Mr. Mayor. Mr. Bird, item number seven would actually be reduced to just the cost of the additional unmarked car. Bird: That’s what I thought. Worley: The cost of—what’s billed into item number seven now is actually also the salary increase to move a patrol officer to a detective. However, if number six is approved, then we would immediately with the next detective move, it would just be a lateral transfer for a police officer if they happen to have tested for corporal and were a corporal, then they would carry that salary with them into detectives so it wouldn’t be an Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 increase. If it was a patrol officer that tested and was successful into that position as our last detective position was a patrol officer, then they would just laterally move at their current salary. Bird: And you would need one vehicle. Worley: We’d still need the vehicle for the detective to be able to get around and do follow-up investigations. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: On that Chief, there’s an overtime calculation. Wouldn’t there still be overtime for the investigator? So, that particular number wouldn’t drop out even though they were already a current employee, if we took off number six. Worley: Mr. Mayor. Mr. Nary. There would be some component of that but, certainly, the patrol officer gets some overtime too and if we’re not increasing his salary, then he’s incurring overtime at his current pay rate, not at an increased pay rate. Nary: I see. So, that number was based on the increase pay. Worley: Yes. Nary: I got it. Chief, one other thing. On the corporal designation, what I thought I heard you say was that the corporal was to be essentially like the acting field commander in the absence of the sergeant. Worley: Correct. That’s one of the functions. Nary: Okay. So, when a corporal then wants to move to detective, would he maintain that rank? Since, now there is no function at detectives for a corporal and now we’d have to promote another person to corporal to fill that role. How would that work? Worley: We wouldn’t have to promote him. Actually, what we’re—we would have an overage of corporals, if you will, initially because what we’re doing is converting the current detectives to a corporal designation, which would mean if they decided—if a current detective decided to move back to patrol, he would move as a corporal and not have to make the choice of going back to patrol and losing money. So, we would actually have an overage but it’s something that is really unavoidable as far as the salary equity of the people that are already in that position. We feel that there would be, in general, the rotations would keep us pretty static as far as the number in patrol. There is a potential, yes, that a corporal could move from patrol into detectives and we might be one short corporals on a patrol team. We would not make a promotion and— in other words, there’s not a fixed number in patrol. It’s one of those things that just will take some time to evolve into a— Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nary: So, it wouldn’t be required that every team has to have a corporal on it so if you were one short or they’d have to druther for so that you’d disperse (inaudible) it didn’t have to work out that way. Worley: It doesn’t have to. That would be one that we would—I think we’d really work with our people on it and see just how much they wanted to take advantage of the opportunities because certainly, if you had two or three corporals on one team, that somewhat defeats the purpose for those individuals. Nary: Thank you. Corrie: I want to make sure everybody has time for any questions. If you feel that you’ve had enough time or enough questions, we can move on but I don’t want to hurry anybody on this process. You just kind of let me know. De Weerd: I’m fine. Bird: I’m fine, too. I think he’s done a great job. Corrie: All right. Good. Okay. Thank you, Chief. Worley: Thank you. De Weerd: I really like the pictures, especially of the odometers. That was very moving. Worley: Well, I was trying to make up for the lack of pictures of the building. Bird: Why don’t you come out and take a picture of my odometer? Maybe I can convince my wife to get a new pick-up. Worley: We could at least support you in that. Bird: Did you guys realize that the front page of the Idaho Business News has that picture? Idaho Construction, I mean. Idaho Construction paper. Our Police station. Worley: No, I was not aware of that. Bird: I’ll try to bring you in a copy. Worley: Thank you. Kilchenmann: Mr. Mayor, we could probably take a ten-minute break now while Fire gets set up. There’s refreshments in the back and coffee in the break room. Corrie: Okay. Thank you. We’ll get another cup of coffee and head to the backroom. RECESS Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Corrie: The next one is the presentation and discussion with the budget for the Fire Department. Chief Bowers. FIRE DEPARTMENT Bowers: Good morning, Mayor and City Council members. What you see on the screen there for a power point is what you’re going to get. I’m sorry, we’ve had so many fires. We’ve had so many bad accidents the last two weeks that we just did not get time to put a presentation together. We will do it later, if you want. Anytime we’ll do that. The Rural Commissioners—I want to apologize to the Rural Commissioners. They were not able to be here today so if there are any questions that you need to find out from the Rural Commissioners, if you would relay that to Tammy, because possibly Tammy and myself and Rich Green will meet tomorrow morning if there’s any questions. So, make sure you present them to Tammy. What an exciting time to be in the Meridian Fire Department. Growth, new stations, population boom, hiring people, new trucks, new tenders. It’s a very exciting time to be involved with the City. Most of that’s been because of the backing and the support from the City Council and the Mayor, right along with the Rural Commissioners. Some of our activities this last year, basically as Stacy and Reta call it, dollars at work. We’ve put on a new fire engine and got it up and running. Put it on first out. We put on a new tender in the area. We’ve promoted captains this last year and promoted a driver. We opened up fire station number two on Ten Mile. We donated some of our old fire trucks and equipment to other departments through the State. We participated in the John Luthy study and planning. We initiated a Capital Improvement Plan, which as you know has been very aggressive after looking at it. We hired a new training officer and moved the training officer that we had into a Fire Marshall’s position. We had a very successful salmon barbeque as an association. As association, they were able to purchase two thermal imaging equipments. They’re the equipment that we see through the smoke. Also, they were able to purchase a new defib for one of the trucks. Every year, we have to test every section of hose that we have so instead of using our engines; they were able to purchase hose testing equipment. So, through the association has helped us out tremendously. To get right into our enhancements, our number one enhancement is a fire station. Number three. As we turned this in to Stacy, we did not have a location at that time that we were going to place it. It was either going to be north or south. We didn’t know at that time. So, that’s the reason why in number one it talks about address or location unknown. With an addition of a station in the area, because of the growth, as you know, more homes coming in, more subdivisions, more commercial is coming in. We do need to add another fire station. As you can see in the enhancements, we have some very fresh numbers from Station Two that we were able to put down. Power, gas, basically, vehicle maintenance out of the station, a station maintenance, furniture and equipment, telephones, irrigation tax. So, basically, we’ve got some very fresh numbers that we’re able to work from. Also, in the enhancements, Stacy and Reta have put in the part that the Rural Fire will be participating or purchasing. As we go through these, you will see on the bottom line, Rural Fire payment of building or Rural Fire percent 26% of cost, with the Rural Fire purchasing the building at seven, around $735,000. The final costs have not come out from the Rural and the City yet of who will pay for the furniture or the extra stuff that goes into a building. To my knowledge, after talking to Rich Green the Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 other night, that even the Rural Fire was going to pay for the furniture, the workout equipment and everything that goes into the station. At this time, basically, the City’s part of a new fire station would be right around $147,000. To go on to enhancement number two. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: I don’t mean to interrupt, Kenny, but could I ask about number one just quickly? Bowers: Yes. Nary: I’ve been looking at enhancement number one and it has architectural $75,000? Bowers: Yes. Nary: I don’t understand what that is. Bowers: Basically, what that is, is if we have to go out and get a new firm to go through all of the plans, all of the blueprints, that that’s probably what it would cost. What we would like to do is be able to go back to the same architect that we’ve had in the past and be able to use the plans that we already have and it should not cost that much at all. Nary: But the Rural isn’t going to pay for that? They’re not going to pay for that as a design of the building? Bowers: They will be paying their percent of the building. Nary: They’re just paying a percent of that. Bowers: Yes. Their 26%. Nary: So, the $735,000 is just construction costs? Bowers: Yes. Nary: Okay. All right. Sorry to interrupt. Bowers: For the building itself, Bill. Nary: Okay. Great. Thank you. Bowers: Enhancement number two. Nine full-time firefighters, entry level firefighters, basically. As we open up a fire station, we will need to staff it with manpower. Excuse me. Person power. People power. I’ve got to be a little careful there. This would be for a five-month budget. We would not start building the fire station until March or April. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 We just don’t want to go through the wintertime again like we did with station two. Starting a fire station in March or April, that would put it towards the latter part of the budget period. Bringing on the new firefighters and intro firefighters, we would put them right into a two-month academy. That is starting them from scratch. It’s basically how to pull hose, how to load hose, how to climb a ladder, how to put on an SCBA, how to put on your turnouts and it gets a little bit more intact there. This would part of our strategy planning also. It kind of all works together with the fire station and the people. We do not go by the one firefighter per thousand population, either. It’s just, basically, we go by how many calls we go on, in what area do we go on, do we go on residential, do we go on commercials. So, this is basically how we count our people or how we get our numbers. This price here of $205,000, includes turnouts, all of their equipment, the wild land gear fighting grass fires, radios, physicals and their SCBA tanks and masks. The Rural will be paying their 26% of the nine firefighters. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: Kenny, have we determined that it is 26%? Bowers: Yes. De Weerd: Okay. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Chief, on the personnel costs, I noted in here that is says it’s to begin May 1st so we wouldn’t be funding those positions until May 1st is what you’re proposing? If they’re at a two-month academy, they wouldn’t actually be available until July 1st ? Is that when the proposed station is to be opened? July 1st ? Bowers: July, August, somewhere around in that area, yes. Nary: Now, are these personnel—this is just my own ignorance. How do we acquire these applicants? Is there a testing procedure or process that they’re on a waiting list of some sort? Bowers: What we would do, we have to advertise for that position. They have to have a firefighter one certification. They already have to have EMT medical training. Then we take them through a written test. The ones that pass the written test, then we take them on to do the physical agility test. Climbing a hose, pulling hose—excuse me, climbing a ladder, pulling hose, pulling a dummy. After everybody passes the physical test, then we do a face-to-face, question and answer type of deal. Nary: Okay. Now, do—I don’t know what are—do we have a measurable washout rate. I mean, are we—if we put nine new people on May 1st , put them in this academy, do we Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 know that one or two of those people may washout so that will delay that? I don’t know how that works for you. Bowers: Knock on wood, in the past we have never had anybody quit. I believe Boise had one that quit and went on to another department and worked. Nary: I didn’t think it was common but I was just curious. Bowers: Not very often. Once they get on, they pretty well go through the academy. Nary: Great. Thank you. Bowers: Okay. Any other questions then on intro firefighters? De Weerd: Kenny, just one. With adding these introductory firefighters, you have also figured in the cost of promotion of the existing firefighters into the driver and captain? Bowers: Exactly. That has been—that was added in, yes. De Weerd: I just wanted that clarified. Bowers: Yes. Because we knew we had to—we would be promoting three captains and three drivers. So, yes, we did add that in. Corrie: Kenny, in that same line of questioning, when you put that third station on, would you foresee lowering the overtime basis of others coming in, captains and that, to cover stations and that or— Bowers: To be quite honest with you, Mayor and City Council, I don’t think it will lower it that much for the third station. I really don’t because we still need to be promoting captains and drivers so you’ll still have a captain or driver that is taking vacation or sick. At this time, we are starting our programs that we will—our officer programs in training that will allow the drivers to step up to the captain’s position when a captain is gone. Probably by the end of next year, we will be able to start moving them up. That third station, probably, I don’t think will cut the overtime down for filling a position. Now, it possibly will cut the overtime down for call back because we wouldn’t be calling these people back as much with three fire stations because you’ll probably just send possibly two fire stations on a call, you’ll still have the third station to pick a back-to-back or a third or a fourth call that comes in. I can’t give you any figures right off the top of how much it would cut call back. It will not cut any overtime for step up or fill in. Corrie: So, we’re looking at four or five stations to accomplish that later. Okay. Thank you. McCandless: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. McCandless. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 McCandless: Kenny, my own stupidity, but I notice here you have uniform allowance at applicable and also education reimbursement. Don’t you anticipate any cost for nine firefighters? Bowers: The educational part of it is already in our base fee. It’s already in the base budget. Uniform allowance, I am sorry, I can’t tell you where Stacy put that in at. Excuse me. It’s in the enhancement number one for the station. She put that in the enhancement. McCandless: Oh, okay. Bowers: Yes. Clothing. Under operation expense. I’m sorry about that. McCandless: Thank you. Bowers: Thank you, Reta. Corrie: Kenny, does that mean that once they get their uniform, they’re not going to get another $600 on top of that again? Bowers: No. What happens is that $650 that they get will be for one year. One year. They won’t get it—if they start January 1, they won’t get another uniform allowance until January 1 of the next year. It’s one year. Corrie: Thank you. Bowers: It has helped us out, as you know, we’ve hired three new firemen this year. It has helped us out with the firefighter end of it when somebody wants to take off for vacation or take on a school or if they’re sick or anything, the three that we’ve hired, the intro firefighters that we’ve hired this year, they were able to fill in at the firefighter intro level so that worked out very good for us this year. We haven’t had to pay any vacation time or any sick time or any school time on that so that’s worked out very good for us. Enhancement number three. This is a captain inspector position that we have put in. What this position will be doing is helping with the building and the business inspection end of it, addressing fire prevention questions, either in the field or in the office on a daily basis. Also, this person will be a firefighter that we can pull in— ***End of Side Two*** Bowers: --investigator and when he takes on vacation, sometimes we have to call in the State or other departments and as the other departments, their fire marshals are getting ready to retire and the State might not be replacing that position for awhile. We need to get another person that knows about fire investigation. That would give us, with two people, we would be able to have a fire investigator available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. This person also would be—let me back up just a little bit. The Federals have mandated us that we have to have a certain number of people on a fire scene and we have to have a safety officer on the scene. Of course, that’s unfunded by Federal, of course. This person would be put in that position on fire calls. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 He would be into the safety position. What that is, is just looking out for wall collapse, a building collapse, a roof collapse, somebody that has put a ladder against a building or something and for some reason the ladder has gotten moved. Just, basically, safety is what this person would do also on the fire scene. The operating expenses, of course, would be for turnout equipment, wild land equipment, physicals and we wouldn’t have to buy quite as many code books because Joe already has those books but sometimes there are new updated code books that we would be able to purchase. Building code, fire code books, investigation books. The Rural Fire would be able to put in their 26% of this position. We would use a vehicle that we already have. We would not be purchasing a new vehicle for this person at this time. We have a four-wheel drive rig that we could use for this position. The City’s portion of this would be $59,500. Enhancement number four. This would be an office assistant part-time, four hours a day to help answer phone calls, to do filing of projects that has come in from the City or from the Rural area, to assist the administrative secretary, also to help Deputy Chief Silva. I wasn’t quite sure. I’ve never had a part-time position so I wasn’t quite sure on the salary so I just kind of checked with Pauline and Reta on what the other part-time in the City was. The Rural would pay their 26%. In the future, we were also thinking about trying to extend our hours covering lunchtime. Extending our hours may be a little longer at night or maybe opening up in the morning a little earlier for the stuff so this position might be able to help us out on that. We’re averaging right now about 73 phone calls a day that our administrative secretary takes now. With four lines coming in, that’s keeping her pretty busy. Enhancement number five, basically, is capital outlay equipment. This is the equipment that we will need to run the daily operations, basically, of the Fire Department. Some new equipment that we will be purchasing for all of the trucks we have now and for the new truck that’s coming in. Air packs, air bottles, chain saw, new hose, radios, new nozzles. The City’s budget on that would be $46,600. The Rural would be paying their 26% of that. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Chief, I’m a little curious and it’s probably my own ignorance as to how this works but this is your number five priority but didn’t we already buy this engine? So, we have to buy all of this stuff, don’t we? If we don’t buy this stuff, we can’t operate the engine. Bowers: A lot of this stuff is to be put on other trucks also. Nary: Oh, okay. Bowers: Storage—not storage, but spare hose and stuff like that. We don’t have any spare hose at this time. So, yes, that is partially—part of this will go on the new truck that’s coming in but most of it is to have in our other stations. Nary: Okay. All right. Thank you. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: Chief, what pagers—how many pagers are we buying or renting or doing whatever we do? Bowers: What they are, Mr. Bird and City Council members, these are Motorola pagers that have to be set up through dispatch themselves. We just can’t go down and buy the regular pagers. They cost right around $400 apiece, Keith. Bird: You answered my question. Nine firefighters. Boy, that’s a lot of money for nine pagers. Bowers: What we’re trying to do, Keith, is the dispatch in Boise now is switching over to text pagers. Boise Fire has got them now testing them and they’ve had them for about a year. So, that’s probably what we’re going to go to. They’ll cost $200 apiece for in the future. Yes, you can almost get a radio for—a talking radio for the same price as a pager nowadays. A radio is $700. Bird: Yes, your radio isn’t that much more. Bowers: And a pager is $400. Corrie: Kenny? Bowers: Yes, Mayor. Corrie: I have a real quick question. Under operating expenses, you have 800 feet of five-inch hose and 600 feet of two and a half hose and then down below capital outlay, you have one and one and three quarter hose. What is the difference between operating and capital in this basis here? Bowers: Really nothing. I had just started out from the top there and listed everything and that’s what it was. Corrie: Oh, okay. Bowers: There isn’t any difference between operation and capital that I know of, Stacy. Oh, the dollar amount too. She put a lot of the dollar amounts in there but I just started at the top and listed them all the way through there because I know I didn’t have enough room for everything. Corrie: Okay, that’s fine. I thought that was but I wanted to make sure. Thank you, Kenny. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 De Weerd: Kenny, is any of this what has been requested in that grant that you applied for? Bowers: Yes. Exactly. Some of this, like the air packs and the air bottles, we put in for a grant on that to replace all of our air bottles and packs that we have now but we don’t know for sure when we will know on that. Probably October or November is when they will tell us if we get the grant so we really don’t know if we’re going to get that grant or not. De Weerd: But, there is a match required so that’s why you put money in. Either way, we’ll need the money. Bowers: Exactly. There is a percent, 20%, 10%, whatever it comes out to be that we will still have to help out with that grant money. De Weerd: I think it was 20%, wasn’t it, Joe? It was 15% but we upped it to 20%. Bowers: We decided to go with the 20% because we thought it would possibly help us get that grant money better if we would put in more percent in it. Silva: By increasing our participation in that grant, we increased the likelihood of being allocated that grant. So, if there is a partnership constructed by increasing incentives, on behalf of the Federal government to support our organization, it’s a partnership and they are willing to do partnerships. De Weerd: Well, just to clarify that. We did increase it the 20% to increase the actuality of us receiving the grant but, also, this is the last year we’ll be able to apply for that kind of match because of our population figures. Next year, if we apply for the same grant, the match is going to be—what is it, 30 or 35%? It’s more because of the numbers. Bowers: 30% and then the next year it goes 40%. De Weerd: Yes. I just wanted to give you that clarity. Bowers: But, you are correct. Some of these things that—these parts and pieces that we’ve been wanting to purchase, we also applied for the grant. You are exactly right. Thank you for bringing that up. Request number six, then, is for Opticom. As Police were so kind to put up a picture there of traffic, you’ve seen the traffic, Opticom is a device that is put on the intersection traffic light to—when we are running code, we will get a green light and the other three intersections coming in will get a red light. We have budgeted for South 1st and Corporate, which now will be called South Main and Corporate. South Meridian and Corporate, I-84 and the eastbound off-ramp, which they are starting to do here in the next few months, and Overland and Locust Grove. We believe with the traffic, the school that’s coming in that area, the businesses, that that will be our next place that we’re going to need to get a green light because the traffic will be so heavy. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: Kenny, if we put it in as they’re putting it up, don’t we save quite a bit of money than if we have to come back in and redo everything? Bowers: Exactly. If we know about it and we let Ada County know that we want Opticom in this location, we would still have to buy the device but they would put it up for us. Now, State is doing it a little different. I haven’t heard back from them on the I- 84 one yet. Since we got into it so late, I’m not sure if we’re going to have to pay around $500 to $600 to have it installed or not. I’m not sure yet on that. But, yes, there’s a savings by doing it when the arms go up. The only time that would not affect is if there’s like an old intersection like at Overland and Eagle Road. If we want Opticom put on there or on Linder and Chinden, we have to hire somebody to go out and put that on because the arms are already existing. Bird: Thank you. Corrie: Who pays for that, Kenny? Did you say ACHD or Ada County, if we do it ahead of time? Bowers: Usually, ACHD will pay to have that put up there after we have bought the device. Yes. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Chief, did I hear you say the one on the off-ramp now because I think they’re supposed to have that installed before September? We don’t have any money now to be able to purchase an Opticom for that now and put it up with the device? Bowers: What I’m going to have to do is, I turned in this budget before I realized what they were going to do, when they were going to do it out there. I do have some monies left over in my capital outlay right now to pay for that. I had talked to them as of last week and they still are thinking that possibly the arms won’t go up until October. That was the electricians that were pulling the wire. So, I don’t know where they’re at on that project. Nary: Chief, on the other thing, I noticed none of these intersections—Eagle Road. Do we have Opticoms on Eagle Road or is it ITD doesn’t want those types of things there? I didn’t know. Bowers: We have Opticom on Eagle Road. As a matter of fact, we have Opticom on every light in our area except Overland and Eagle, Chinden and Linder, and then, the two that the school put up that nobody knew they were going in at Linder and Chateau and Cherry Lane past Ten Mile. Those two there. So, those four are the ones in the Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 City that we do not have lights on. Everything else, we do have Opticom on. Yes. These are new. These are going in new, basically. Nary: I’m curious on the intersection there at Overland and Eagle with those bigger developments going in there and houses and traffic and all. Did you just not think that that one, at least at this juncture, that the level of traffic there is significant enough to need that? Bowers: It will be probably in our next budget period. We don’t have that many calls yet out in that area to do that but we will. You’re exactly right. As soon as those businesses go in, we will have to do that. If I find the money like I said in my capital outlay this year to do I-84, well, Eagle and Overland could step in here then and take over that place, if possible. Corrie: Kenny, do all of the ambulances have this on their ambulance? Bowers: Mayor Corrie and City Council members, I cannot tell you for a fact that every ambulance has it but I do know that some of them do. The reason why I do know that some of them do is because the one at St. Luke’s on Eagle Road, they have it because Opticom let’s them come out of the hospital. I do know some of them have it but I cannot tell you, Mayor, if all of them have it. Corrie: Okay. Thank you. Just looking for revenue. Bowers: Enhancement number seven is, basically, bringing on five or six part-time on- call people. Oh, excuse me. Opticom. Rural will pay their 26% on Opticom also. Part- time, on-call people. As some of you have probably realized, we’ve had some retirements. One has been on the Fire Department 34 years and has retired. One has been on the Department for 22 years and retired. The other one has been on for 20 years and has retired. Some of them have moved out of our district. We are right now down to ten volunteer part-time on-call people. We would like to boost that up to five or six more. There are a couple of reasons why we still want to use part-timers. Number one is, when we bring them on the part-time area, they work out with the full-time people. They train on Tuesday nights. We get to see how well they work with people, how well they work with our people and how well they do on the fire end and the medical end of it. When we get to the point that we want to hire more full-time people, we, basically, already know what their experiences are and what their attitudes are. That helps out quite a bit. Also, there are still some people, in this day and age—is that how you say that? Day of age? Age of day? Whatever—that still want to volunteer. Still want to volunteer and do their time in this area. So, that is very nice to be able to see but then you have the people that want to get their foot into the door and start out on part-time and get the training and then get hired on somewhere as a full-time person. That’s some of the reasons we use part-time people. Also, we use them on our fire calls, on our grass calls. We have grass fire calls. We have to pull these people in to help us. We don’t have enough full-time people on a structure fire so our part-time people come in and either go to the fire to help out or stay at the station and cover other calls that come in. The Rural is able to put their 26% in that. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: Hey, Kenny, on the three men that retired with over 20 years involvement in the Fire Department, I think it would be very appropriate to recognize them at City Council at one of our meetings and maybe present them something. I’m sure the Department has already done that but can you arrange that to happen at one of our meetings? Work with the Mayor on getting it on the agenda? Him and Will? Bowers: Yes. We have already acknowledged one of those people that retired. The other two were after our Christmas dinner that we always have that we give the people their plaques and stuff. The two of them, we are going to do at our Christmas party also, but we can sure bring them in front of the Council and have the Mayor give them a little certificate or something like that and acknowledge them because that’s a lot of years to be put in. De Weerd: That is a lot of years and I think it would be very worthwhile to recognize them for their service. Bowers: A lot of birthdays missed. A lot of anniversaries missed. A lot of suppers missed. So, yes, you are exactly right. If everything that we’ve asked for, for the basic budget and the enhancements, are approved, we’ve figured out that the Rural percent of 26% would bring in right around $540,000. Somewhere in that area will be the Rural’s percent of the budget. Our total enhancements, that we would like to have approved, is $541,000. That is—are you okay? That is the City’s part. $541,000. You take our budget from last year and take the budget that we have proposed to you guys, it’s a 7% increase. Of course, it would be much higher if the City had to purchase that fire station number three, which we will have to purchase sometime in the future. Many years from now there probably will not be a dollar exchange. There will be a service exchange, probably, is what will happen with the Rural. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Chief, on your enhancements, did you say $541,000? Bowers: $541,000. I think that’s what the first page says, Bill. Nary: I’m looking at it—I guess the number I’m seeing is $501,000. Bird: Yes. De Weerd: He’s just trying to get another $40,000. Bowers: Police decided to give me some. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 De Weerd: That’s awful nice of you, captain. Bowers: Excuse me. You are right. $501,000. You are right. I was trying something there. De Weerd: He seems so innocent, doesn’t he? Bowers: Yes. I didn’t realize Bill was checking so close. Sorry about that. Nary: So, now that you’ve already saved us $40,000— Bowers: --where do we start again, huh? It’s a pretty aggressive budget. We realize that. Tammy has kind of worked out, also, to work this with the Rural Commissioners, also. I’m sure there will be other questions. Corrie: Kenny, I have a question on this captain inspector. You said they would be used as a safety officer whenever you had major fires and that. Are they being called back if they’re not on duty at that point so they would be the safety officer? So, how does that work? You’ve got one officer for 24 hours safety job. Bowers: We would put them on a rotating basis. Possibly, one week you would be on- call and you would be off the next week. Is that what you’re— Corrie: Yes. You said he would be a safety officer on all fires. Bowers: Not all fires, no. I’m sorry. Not all fires. I’m sorry. Corrie: All right. Okay. De Weerd: This would be an administrative job, too. Correct? Not a union job? Bowers: No. We have not discussed about it being an administrative job. The last we had talked about it, it could be within the union’s position. It could be. Corrie: It costs more money that way. They’re called up, called back or called in, they’re on overtime, captain’s overtime. Bowers: Yes. Exactly. We did salary him out as a captain. He would get the same salary as a regular captain. That’s what they’ve done in Boise and Nampa and Caldwell. Your inspectors are captain positions. Corrie: So, when he’s on duty, he’s a captain and there will be two captains at a fire then, if he’s on duty. Bowers: Yes. Corrie: I see. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: I guess, Kenny, is it a practical way if there was a concern about that. I mean, obviously, the only other option would be to make that position a Deputy Chief, which would make it a non-union position and would perform some administrative functions as well. It wouldn’t have, necessarily, the same call back provisions as union but, obviously, there’s a higher base rate to pay that. Correct? Bowers: I think it would probably come out the same, probably, either way but the reason why we do it is a captain’s position is that the other departments around us do the same thing. They call them captain inspector so we didn’t really think we needed to vary from that or— Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: On the same line, Kenneth, this inspector, is he going to be doing the new building inspections or is he going to be doing the existing building inspections or the yearly inspections in the existing buildings for compliance with fire extinguishers and stuff like this? What will his role actually be? Bowers: Mayor Corrie and City Councilman, Mr. Bird. He would be doing probably all three of those things that you had just mentioned. When Joe is gone and there are new buildings that come in, he would be able to pull the slack there. Most of his stuff probably would be the buildings that are already existing, that he would be going out and taking care of the businesses that are built. We’ve kind of have an ownership in that building from when we build until infinitely. I mean, just as far as it goes out. He will kind of be in charge of making sure these buildings get inspected. Corrie: Who’s doing that now, Kenny? Bowers: All of us. The engine crew is doing it. Joe is doing it. Myself, I’m doing it. Once in a while, we have to pull in a State person to do it if Joe is gone. Corrie: So, essentially, he is doing a lot of what Joe is doing now, right? I mean, he’d help Joe. Bowers: Yes. Corrie: My question then would be, being in a captain’s position, there’s a very good possibility of doing the same work that Joe is and he’s making more money. (inaudible) call back. I was thinking that it’s unfair to Joe and it doesn’t sound right. Bowers: Yes. You’re exactly right. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Corrie: Okay. Bird: Because I don’t believe you have a captain that made that amount, that least amount. Also, Kenneth, isn’t it the practice of fire districts engine companies to go and inspect the existing buildings to make sure that they’re up to code and stuff so that they get familiar with the building in case there is a fire? Bowers: Exactly. Exactly. At daycares, we do a lot of daycares. We do motels, the hotels, the senior citizens complexes. That’s what taking the engine company’s time is to do those. Schools and—rarely, we haven’t had time to go out and do just a regular Taco Time or McDonald’s or things like that. We just haven’t had time to do those because we’re doing the schools and motels and senior citizen complexes and daycares and stuff. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: Kenny, I think it would probably helpful to give—I know in the justification, it gives just minimal reasons why you’re requesting this position but maybe you want to go a little bit more into depth on—we added the Deputy Chief for training last year and how the responsibilities and time pressures on these two positions that have been added over the last couple of years, why this new position is warranted. Bowers: Exactly. Thank you. I’ll have Deputy Chief Silva discuss that. He has discussed that in length before. Silva: Honorable Mayor and Councilperson De Weerd. In response to that, we’ve had that same staffing level for about 25 years since Skip Voss originally joined the Fire Department. The reason we’re coming—we had requested this position last year. However, that was not one of the positions we were able to get included in our organization. We’ve put, as a City, a number of projects in the pipeline and as we put those projects, Planning and Zoning issues, in the pipeline, those buildings are now coming up to fruition. I’ll give you a case in point, is a complexity of issues that revolved around Michael’s Manufacturing, a very large building with a lot of complex processes and storage, haz-mat and so forth. Those type of projects take much longer than your typical office building to sort out in terms of their code compliance issues. One of the important things to consider if this position were funded is that we want to cut down our operational costs. We achieve that by having good interaction between operations and fire prevention. A case in point is when we have a large soundings at the hospital, which is very disruptive to what they’re doing in the business portion of the hospital as well as the traditional hospital setting that we just added out there, we want to evaluate what has set a given alarm off to whether it’s an environmental issue that has set the alarm off or it’s some other issue. We want to route out and identify those problems to prevent that particular alarm from reoccurring. There’s also, in the county, a number of Planning and Zoning issues that come before us. They’re not even—that don’t even come before Council for consideration. There are a lot of projects that are just in the feasibility stage where a developer will come in and want to discuss the fire code issues Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 at a given building or associated with a given project that he’s proposing to put in town. In a lot of cases, those projects don’t become reality. However, they’ve consumed a fair amount of staff time to evaluate. As the Chief had touched on, we do have a couple of pending retirements in organizations that assist us with fire investigations. The concern is that when those folks retire and that experience base has left the fire service in this area because of cooperative agreements that exist, it will be slow to—we will be in a recovery mode and it will be some time before we have the investigative ability that we currently have. The other thing that was touched on, is having fire engine or companies do go out and do inspections. We need to be able to provide follow-up on issues that companies cannot resolve because they’re a little more complex. They’ll come across a finding that takes a little bit longer to sort out in terms of the fire code implications. So, those are just a couple of things in addition to the vacation relief and the continuity of the field services for fire prevention that we want to be able to provide. Obviously, we’ve geared up other City departments to handle the development that we’re anticipating with the 12 square miles of not only residential, but a lot of intense commercial development that will probably have quite a ramification in terms of our workload in the Fire Prevention Bureau. Those are just a few of the reasons that this position is very important to get funded in this current year in this request. De Weerd: Joe, you might also go into a little bit more—we’ve had the fire inspector position for a number of years but with the commercial applications, there are new time constraints and you might give an example of a commercial building and how many times you go out and inspect and those kinds of issues of why this requires a lot more time than it has in the past. Silva: Currently, what we try to do is, do a site inspection and develop a relationship with that builder out there or that project manager. That assures us that, in the early stages of the project, that we have a water supply available and also that we have access to the site. Those things need to be monitored on an on-going basis due to the fact that we get a change in conditions as a result of a lot of inclement weather that may change the access to the site or timelines on the connection to the water lines and the operational readiness of the fire hydrants on the site. There needs to be a couple of in- progress inspections. There are a lot of things that are concealed behind walls. The ceilings, that if we don’t get out there when those areas are exposed and available for inspection, just like the Building Department, I mean, they go out but they’re looking at a different set of things than we are. We need to be able to evaluate those things when they’re open and exposed for us to evaluate. So, that becomes the second and third inspection. Typically, we have a final inspection that goes over all of the operational readiness of all of the fire protection systems that are in that building and sometimes those items may not all have been completed and it requires an additional follow-up. There could be anywhere from four to five inspections on any given building. Ponderosa Elementary, the Meridian Police Building, Mountain View High School, Michael’s as it starts to come out of the ground will be just a few of those that will require numerous inspections to insure quality on behalf of the owner as that project goes downstream. As the Fire Chief relayed, we do take ownership in that building from now to infinity. So, we have a vested interest because we’re going to put our personnel in that building under fire conditions. We want to be assured that every fire protection, code required fire protection appliance is operational and those fire Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 protection systems are in place. Those are the things we believe are in the best interest of the owner and the future occupants of that building. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: Joe, how many times will you sign off on an inspection like Mountain View High School? Silva: Because of the timeline of that particular project, different parts of that project hit different stages of requiring an inspection at different times. Say for example, one end of the project we’re looking at one penetrations or side access issues and then we’ll be out on a subsequent because of the timing because they’re going through that because that’s a very large building, it’s in different phases and different phases of completion that require different in-progress inspections. I think I saw you out there. You were making a contact with the project manager out there. That was just one of five in- progress fire inspections, roughly, that I’ve already completed out there or that I’ve had assistance from one of the company members to assist me with evaluating the fire penetrations, space of the fire sprinkler heads and those things that once the ceiling tiles go up, you really can’t see very well. Bird: Also, Joe, do we, the Meridian Fire Department check the sprinkler system drawings, shop drawings for buildings that require sprinkler systems, which most commercial do now? Do we do the check on them or is that done by State? Silva: Councilman Bird and Honorable Mayor. Currently, that’s handled by the State. That is another position that will have an experience of changing of the guard within the next three years. We’re anticipating that the current State Inspector will be retiring. The implications of that are that he does the plan review and a rough-in inspection and almost final inspection. Typically, his punch list on his final inspection is referred to the local department. In this case, Meridian Fire, for follow-up. What we would propose if we get this position granted is we take on that function. The reason is, is that we could charge a fee that would be consistent or slightly (inaudible) what the State currently offers. However, we would provide the full follow-up on the quality of the inspection. Not only the plan review but the quality of the installation to insure that met the minimal requirements required by the, in this case, the National Fire Protection Association’s guidelines for sprinkler installations. Bird: Do other municipalities have their own fire sprinkler checkers and stuff? Doesn’t the State do—to my knowledge, everybody in the valley the State does Boise’s, Nampa’s, Caldwell’s don’t they? Silva: Councilman Bird. Honorable Mayor. Currently, Boise City does their own plan review and field inspection of fire sprinkler systems as does Nampa. We would, because of the frequency in which we are getting sprinkler buildings, we feel that’s a cornerstone to providing a safe environment for the building owner and the occupants. What we would like to do is explore the possibility through the fee structure of doing that Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 in-house as a way to provide better follow through and follow-up on the fire sprinkler inspection because we’re not getting that final check-off on the final. That being deferred to the local department for follow-up. We could provide that additional inspection and insure a quality installation per the standard. That’s what we’re interested in doing. If you really evaluate the number of sprinkler buildings in this jurisdiction, we have a real obligation to provide quality assurance on behalf of our customers. De Weerd: One last area that this position would allow the Fire Department to kind of expand in, per your strategic plan, is prevention and free up some time to dedicate more efforts towards prevention as well. Did you want to say anything on that? Silva: Part of the current trend across the nation is being more pro-active in terms of public education and that would be just one thing that we would like to encourage and deliver that service to our customers. Being a pro-active community also carries itself across fire prevention issues and those are relationships with our business community and with assurance that they are meeting minimum fire safety standards. That’s one thing that we’re not—we identify certain target hazards that we do go out and do fire prevention inspections but we would like to broaden that to insure that we have a fire safe community, both in our commercial buildings where we have increasingly more complex processes and storage of hazardous materials and flammable liquids, flammable materials. They’re causing more of a concern for our Fire Department. De Weerd: Well, a case in point, the fires that you had in June were all preventative type of issues, were they not? Silva: Case in point was the office building on Overland was subject to a wiring issue. It was a temporary wiring, extension cord that had been pinched and it caused a subsequent fire. The fire at the Waste Disposal was a result of careless weed burning that got up adjacent to the building. That would be an education issue. The third fire we had at Acorn Storage was a result of careless discarding of a cigarette. Those are just some examples of some things that could have possibly been prevented. Easily, probably one out of those three, if not two out of the three. The cigarette being the most difficult to come to grips with from a prevention standpoint. If we can increase our public education and our inspection programs even in our office buildings with adequate follow-up by fire prevention, if we can support the field inspection by the companies then we can deliver a more enhanced service, a broad enhanced service in terms of fire prevention at no additional cost, except for this position. De Weerd: Okay, I’m done coaching. Silva: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nary: Joe, I was just curious on your thoughts, as well. It appears to me, from what you said, that there’s organizationally quite a bit of responsibility and work that can be delegated to this position to really make it a significant factor in the department. I guess my thought is, why not have that as a Deputy Chief position rather than as a Captain Fire Inspector. I understand the other agencies— ***End of Side Three*** Nary: --but, is that the only reason? Silva: That would be a question that, obviously, we’d have to have a little time to reflect on. We hadn’t considered that possibility. Nary: I’m not trying to reorganize your department from over here. I’m just thinking, as an opportunity, you know, the pay isn’t significantly different. In fact, it’s probably better budgetary-wise from our standpoint with it as a Deputy Chief position. I guess my perspective is organizationally. Can you find that to fit in the scheme of your department that way? I guess it’s something to think about. Silva: Councilman Nary and Honorable Mayor, again, we had not evaluated that as a possibility. We would probably have to take some time to analyze the implications of that and how we would share that workload. One thing I can say, is that the administrative workload, just administration involved in a very rapidly growing department in a very rapidly growing community, you know, there’s a fair amount of administrative workload, i.e. the grant application, the strategic planning issues, increasingly more complex budgeting process, managing projects that come down the road, i.e. the possible construction of Station #3, the acquisition and placing in service of new fire apparatus. Those all become increasingly more, there’s more administrative issues associated with getting those projects completed. So, to say that there is an administrative workload that probably would warrant that, you know, it should be evaluated, whether or not that’s feasible for us to do, whether or not that’s the direction we want to go. Previously, it’s not been considered part of what our near term organizational structure would look like. Nary: Because I think I heard you say that structure you have, other than Deputy Chief Johnson’s position being added on, it’s been the same for 25 years? So, not—that opportunity to rethink that I guess. Bowers: Also, Mayor Corrie and City Council, Deputy Chief Silva, through Tammy and Chairman Rich Green from the Rural, is working out a fee schedule to possibly pay for this position, paying for the plans, the blueprints, going out and doing extra building inspections, doing different things that we can charge for or we should be charging for. We don’t have any figures put together of how much that would cost or bring us in because it changes from month to month. That’s one thing that we’re working on right now and it’s looking—Mayor Corrie’s got a copy of it too, so it’s looking very good. It’s looking very good. De Weerd: I have nothing more. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nary: Nothing more for me. Corrie: Okay. All right. Anything else, Kenny? Bowers: Thank you very much. I appreciate the time this morning. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: I guess just to—Kenny briefly touched on it but just to remind—the commitment from the Rural Commission has really allowed us this step up on Station #3 and I know we had met jointly with them and pretty much relayed our commitment to making sure that happens. So, this budget reflects those conversations and we’re anxious to get it started. Bowers: Ditto. Corrie: Okay. Bowers: Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed the power point because that was— De Weerd: Oh, that was impressive, Kenny. Corrie: You just lost a fire truck but other than that— Kilchenmann: Mr. Mayor, we need—since it’s a little faster than anticipated, we adjusted the schedule a bit. We’re going to have—Shari is our budget star from Planning and Zoning because she didn’t want to increase her base. She has no enhancements and she’s only asking for one replacement vehicle so we’re going to deviate from the general fund a bit and let Shari have her three minutes in the sun. We have Parks here. We drug them in from the field to go early so they will follow immediately after Shari. De Weerd: I was looking forward to a long break. Corrie: No such luck. PLANNING AND ZONING Stiles: Mr. Mayor and Council. I appreciate being here today and able to go over the one item that we’re requesting is a replacement for a vehicle that has over 100,000 miles. It’s not very reliable and it’s taking more maintenance than it would be worth to keep it so we would like to put that up for auction and get a new replacement vehicle at $15,000. You have in your packets our budget dollars at work, what we’ve accomplished this year. If you have any questions on those, I’d be happy to answer them. We have realized a significant increase in our revenues due to the increased Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 filing fees. As of June, we have received $142,581.85. This is up from the budgeted amount of $78,000. We expect that to continue as long as development within our area of impact occurs within the City limits and not through Ada County. That’s it. If you have questions, I’d be happy to answer them. Corrie: Shari, can you use one of those old police cars, since it has less mileage? Sorry. I just had to ask. Stiles: That’s all we’ve ever had. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Mrs. Stiles, I was curious on the base budget on, I guess, these goldenrod sheets. There’s a couple of items that I was a little curious about. There’s a line in it for Commissioner Council liaison of $2,000. What is that for? Stiles: Commissioner went for—it goes for the dinners at Christmas time and the turkeys. This year, some was also spent for Keven Shreeve to attend the AIC Conference in Pocatello. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: That also is to use at the P & Z Commission’s discretion if they want training. They could also ask a consultant to come in and talk with them about specific ordinance issues. You know, they can use that. They have the discretion to use that in whatever way they see fit. Nary: Are they told that? De Weerd: Commissioner Borup knows. I don’t know if he’s told his whole commission. I think that’s what they did. They all decided that Keven Shreeve could go to this AIC Conference. Nary: In the contract that Legal Service cost, Mrs. Stiles, that’s for the attorney that attends the meetings and prepares recommendations? Is that what that’s for? Stiles: Yes. Also, to work on some of the code enforcement issues and the, you know, lawsuits, I guess. Nary: So, that pays for the District Court appeals? That comes out of this line? Stiles: I’m not sure if that’s under their base fee or if they charge extra for that. I thought it was included. I didn’t think they got additional money for those appeals. Do they? Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nary: Yes, they do. De Weerd: So, these are basically for the findings and— Nary: --recommendations and appearances. De Weerd: Recommendations and just being at P & Z? Stiles: Sitting at the meetings. Well, also, for Bill Nichols. We do consult with him frequently on issues. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Mr. Mayor. Mrs. Stiles, on the other thing I was curious. On the strategic planning and I don’t have the book here in front of me, but since you haven’t asked for any enhancements, are—why is that? We have the strategic plan that we’ve initiated with a lot of different benchmarks of providing enhanced service but yet, in your budget you’re not asking any. Why is that? Stiles: We think we can handle a lot of that in house. We do have $25,000 budgeted for contracted services that we could get help with some of the ordinances but we feel we have a good handle on and that there’s plenty available that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel on a lot of those issues. Nary: $25,000 for—that’s for professional services? Is that the one you’re talking about? Stiles: Yes. Nary: What is that for? Stiles: It would be for contracts if we need help on a specific project or specific projects. This year, we’ll use it for—this past year we’ll be using for Sherri McKibbon, who’s doing the downtown design standards in conjunction with the Meridian Development Corporation. That’s roughly $13,000. We paid $1,500—we had to pay an additional $1,500 to Dale Rosebrock to update the census figures on the Comprehensive Plan. Items such as that, that we may need some outside expertise. Nary: Like that $13,000, that’s in addition to the $40,000 that MDC is asking the City to contribute as well? Stiles: Yes. That was this last year. That came out of this last year’s budget. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 De Weerd: That’s not in this budget request. That was the current budget year. But, you’ve hired a consultant to help with definitions and there’s a number of ordinance updates of the Comprehensive Plan in the to-do list. It will be used. If it’s not more. Nary: I don’t disagree that it will be used. I’m curious as to why you wouldn’t want a staff person instead of contracting that out, a staff person to do that. Stiles: We don’t have anywhere to put them if we did get a staff person. Nary: So, it’s a space issue. Stiles: To have a full-time person, yes. I think it’s more effective to have an outside contracted person. You can hire somebody for $25,000 for a full-time person with benefits. Nary: So, you think $25,000 will cover the cost of all the—if the ordinances that need to be implemented in light of the Comprehensive Plan? Do you think those will all get taken care of? Stiles: They’re not going to be taken care of in a year. I mean, we have some immediate action items but it’s going to take several years, you know, two or three years to—we can’t get it all done at once but we’re certainly working on them. Nary: Okay. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: I had a question. You decreased your seminars training request. Oh, no, you increased. Okay. Good for you. I thought you decreased it. Stiles: I kind of got confused between what travel and meetings and seminars and training were. We might combine those slightly. I mean, we’d have to use money from one or the other but I didn’t realize a lot of the conferences we’re going to was coming all out of travel and meetings. Corrie: I think that’s done by accounting in a way to justify where it comes out of. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: On this line item here for printing, binding and engraving, what is that for? Stiles: Comprehensive Plan books, Zoning Ordinances, any pamphlets we might develop that we need special—maps are pretty expensive. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: I think next year, Shari, you should have a bunch of enhancement requests because we never go through these on any of the other departments. Unless you don’t have an enhancement, it’s the only question. Stiles: I got in trouble for going through every line item last year. I did what I was asked to this year and I’m getting caught on every single line item. Nary: No. The reason I asked is because the line item is $7,500 and the actual is $1,600 and so that’s $6,000 so I’m curious what’s its for. If we’re not using it, why are we budgeting for it? There aren’t enhancements, which I think that’s lacking in here and so that’s the reason for the question. I’m not trying to be picky but if we’re not using it, what are we budgeting it for? If we are not enhancing the process that we have, are we going to meet all those things? Are we going to be here a year from now saying we haven’t gotten any of these Comprehensive Plan ordinances done because we don’t have other ordinances done that we’re still been waiting on? So, that’s why I’m asking the question. I’m not trying to be picky. I’m trying to look at what we’re spending our money on and we’re not spending it on enhancing the program that’s there. Stiles: These figures are only based on through April, the projections for the year. I don’t spend a set amount each month, an equal percentage of my budget each month, you know. We try to be conservative in case of something out of the ordinary that comes up during the year. You will—as far as the Comprehensive Plan, that’s going to be very costly to reproduce that and we intended to have that done as a many, many copies of that made. It’s going to be very expensive. Much more expensive than the previous one because of some of the color photos and—we’ve kind of just been doing 10 or 20 here and there just to try to keep up with the requests and not to have a lot on hand. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: I guess I agree with Councilman Nary on—with the—I do understand with the printing and binding that, once the new Comp Plan is adopted, this budget will be used. With the to-do list that’s in the new Comprehensive Plan, there’s going to be a lot of work needed and, you know, maybe some better utilization in the legal services that you could reallocate that to personnel that can do recommendations from P & Z and you can use some of that money to fund a new position that can help with the recommendations. They can do the staff reports and free up your other staff time to start working on ordinance work that is going to be needed because of the new Comprehensive Plan. Had you kind of looked at that kind of approach, Shari, or is that something that your department could utilize? Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Stiles: We don’t have anyplace to put any staff person. We did have an extra room. It’s totally filled with storage. I don’t know—I don’t think even City Hall any space to put that. De Weerd: We could rent storage. Stiles: Yes. We need it but it’s storage that we also need to consult on a daily basis. We never get rid of a project. De Weerd: I just hate to hear we don’t hire staff that is desperately needed to progress a plan in lieu of storage. So, you know, there must be some way we could sit down and look at that or you and the Mayor can find a solution to that. Shari, I guess my question is, if you had the space, could that be a benefit to your department in meeting some of—even your strategic plan, there’s a lot of ambitious things that your department would like to do. Would that help with your already overloaded staff achieve some of those goals? Stiles: Well, you can always put more staff on anything that will help. I think we’re doing a pretty good job right now. I’ve got a great staff. They work hard. They’re keeping up with the latest trends. We’re not reinventing the wheel. We do look at sources throughout the State and throughout the nation on getting these ordinances. A lot of them don’t happen overnight. I know you talked about changes to the sign ordinance and the landscape ordinance. We’re making lists of things that we need to change. We don’t want to change every single little item that might come up. We want to be able to make a substantial change to deal with the problems at one time if we can or as many as we can. It’s always going to be something that we need to work on. Recommendations, you know, if we got a hearing officer, that would probably help us more than anything rather than have somebody do the findings. A hearing officer could also help with findings but I don’t necessarily think a hearing officer even has to be a staff member. I mean, it could be a consultant. It’s worked very well for other jurisdictions and that would probably be more of a help to us than anything else. We have a lot of counter work. You can’t just have somebody come in off the street and immediately be able to help those people at the counter. De Weerd: Is there a budget amount that a hearing officer would need? Stiles: I haven’t researched it. I don’t know. It depends on what the Council would want to consider to be handled by a hearing officer. But, those will also take ordinance changes. I know we’ve talked a lot about it before. I just don’t know which direction you want to go. Corrie: Let me ask you. If I’m hearing you correctly, you say you don’t need another staff person, a planner or what have you and that you don’t have the space anyway to put them there if you did? Stiles: We could use an additional staff member. However, we do not have a place to put them. We could use an outside consultant to do some of those things. That’s why I Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 put the $25,000 back in there just for a consultant because it’s not somebody that you’re having to add that also creates additional time on my part to have to supervise. Corrie: We could find space at $50.00 a month for space if we need personnel. I don’t want to use space as an excuse for not having other personnel in there. I don’t think the Council does either. I just want to make sure I’m not hearing you wrong here. Stiles: For $50.00 a month you can find some space? About three square feet? Corrie: I can find enough space to do that, yes. Probably in the same building you’re at. I can’t say that for sure because I haven’t looked at it but I know there’s some space around there. Okay. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: I guess I would like to—if Shari, you could—I know this is short notice but if you could find out anything by tomorrow on a hearing officer and what kind of cost would be associated with that, I’d be interested in hearing what that would be because I do know you’ve mentioned it before and I do believe it was in your strategic plan. So, I would—if you think you could get that information together, I would like to see what that cost would be. Stiles: I could just find out what other jurisdictions paid in their last budget year for it. De Weerd: That would be a great start. Stiles: Boise City I believe has a hearing officer. Is it just one? Nary: Yes. Stiles: Caldwell uses Jerome Mapp as their hearing officer. Canyon County, I believe uses Jerome. I could ask him what his fees have been for the last year from Canyon County. De Weerd: I think it would be very helpful. Stiles: That doesn’t take up any office space and they don’t necessarily even have to be—don’t have no benefits to pay, necessarily. They’re really a private contractor. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: But, on top of that though, I think you need to think of what it would take to get that implemented and is a contract person going to be able to do that in a fairly short order of time. So, would you need a half-time planner or another planner and how that Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 gets budgeted. I mean, we’ll figure out but on whether or not implementing those things because there is a tremendous amount of time and I think every one of us has heard it, I wouldn’t say every week, but quite often as to how busy your staff is. I think they are very busy and I think they do a very good job but I have a hard time sitting here thinking that another person couldn’t alleviate some of that workload but yet accomplish some of the things that your staff just doesn’t have the time today to do. So, even implementing a hearing examiner, I think, when you do that, you’re going to have to change ordinances and change processes to do that. That’s going to take a person to help get that done. Whether it’s going to take a quarter of somebody you have now or a half- time of somebody you have now, you’re going to need a half-time or a full-time of somebody as a Planner One to pick up that difference. I think that would enhance the service we can provide to the community and I don’t think—again, I know there would be an expense and we’d have to figure out how to fund that but I think those would be enhancements that would be beneficial. Stiles: Okay, if you want to give me more money for another employee, that would be great. I just—where a physically site then would be an issue. De Weerd: Well, could we ask that we have at least a rough estimate tomorrow and maybe work with Reta and Pauline just to throw some numbers together? It’s very unusual, Shari, that we add money to these budgets but, you know, I’d certainly be interested in seeing what those numbers would be and just take a good look at them. Stiles: Well, we just did hire the Planner One recently. We’ve got a full-time administrative assistant now on board. She’s very organized. She’s a great addition to our team over there. Sonya’s picked up a lot of the slack that was there and is very meticulous in the review of the applications so, hopefully, we won’t have some of the problems we’ve had in the past. David has been given the brunt of the workload lately because things get shifted to him. I would like to see the Meridian Development Corporation get an employee in the not too distant future because I pledged that 20% of Steve’s time but I think considerably more time is being spent than eight hours a week. De Weerd: So, it sounds like you can use more help. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: I believe with Steve’s time, Shari, and I agreed when you did that but his primary job is for the City of Meridian, not for the Meridian Development Corporation. That has got to take priority. I agree with you. I know he’s spending way, way more time with MDC than he is with Meridian City. That has got to— De Weerd: (inaudible) Bird: Well, you’ve got to worry about what’s going on now. De Weerd: Okay. Sorry, I don’t have anything else. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Corrie: Okay. Any other questions? All right, Shari, if you could work on that between now and 9:00 in the morning— Stiles: I don’t think I’ll get it done by 9:00 in the morning but tomorrow. I need to get ready for tonight today. Corrie: We’ll give you until 9:30. Okay. We are going to go through Parks now? Bird: Yes. Let’s go for it. Corrie: Okay. De Weerd: I need a break. Corrie: Parks and Rec, do you want a small break or do you want to start right in? De Weerd: Why don’t we take a short break. Five minutes. Corrie: Five minutes. We’ll be back here at 15 after 11:00. RECESS Corrie: --close off at about quarter or ten to 12:00 and then we can all go over to the Chamber for lunch and come back and start them again. That will give us a chance to go over there and see— (inaudible amongst Council) Corrie: Okay, Tom, we’ll give you until ten to 12:00 and then we’ll recess and have lunch and come back after that about 1:00. Kuntz: Are you thinking that we’ll need to come back? Corrie: I don’t know. If you get it done, that’s fine. If you don’t, you still have that opportunity. De Weerd: It’s supposed to for after lunch in case anyone had wanted to come. Corrie: Yes. There’s a Parks and Rec department after lunch so it might be a good idea to just kind of reiterate what you had before. All right, Tom. PARKS AND RECREATION DEPARTMENT Kuntz: Okay. Mayor and Council. I have staff with me today. Elroy Huff, our park superintendent, to my left and our new recreation superintendent, Lisa Ariola, who was at the picnic last week and then Diane Stewart, our office manager, is also with us if everyone has not met these people. I brought them here to talk to you today. It Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 appears that the format is primarily focused on enhancements. If that’s the Council’s pleasure, we’ll go ahead and start into that. Is there any need to go over budget dollars at work, Mayor? De Weerd: I think that’s nice. Well, a brief overview. Kuntz: Okay. Is sitting down appropriate or do you want me at the podium. De Weerd: We want you to stand up. Kuntz: Okay. Bird: Go to the podium so we can hear you. De Weerd: Everyone else did. Kuntz: Okay. If you feel like we need additional staff, we would certainly be willing to accept that person. De Weerd: Don’t worry, Tom. Kuntz: Okay. De Weerd: We read your report. Your master plan. Kuntz: All right. Reading from the budget dollars at work for the department, and this is based on June of 2001 to May of this year, our increase in our recreation programs almost doubled. We don’t think we’re going to achieve that status this year because we had a recreation superintendent leave us and we had about a two to three month period of time when we didn’t have a person staffing that position full-time. Our adult softball teams almost tripled in size from 12 to 32 teams and I believe this summer we have 28 so we’re down a little bit this summer in softball. The picnic shelter reservations continue to be popular, especially with the addition of the small shelter at Tulley Park, which is about half the cost of the large shelter. It’s become very popular and then, of course, adding shelters at the large park this year, which will be online next summer. It will increase shelter reservations. Very popular. We are in the process of increasing our park land from approximately 37 to 87 acres and actually, I think in our budget request we’re actually saying 90 acres. Under operations, I’ll just highlight a few of those things. We distribute a total of 4,200 recreation brochures and that’s three times a year. Fall and then we do a spring, a winter one and then a spring summer one combined. We spend a lot of time during the holiday season decorating Main Street. I don’t know if Council was aware of that but staff comes in on Sunday morning early and decorates Main Street as well as decorating Generations Plaza and finding and cutting down and deliver the annual Christmas tree. They seem to get bigger every year but it’s kind of a nice annual event. We are continuing and strengthening our relationship with partnering with the downtown Business Merchant’s Association and the Chamber of Commerce in working on different events during the year, especially the Scarecrow Festival. Part of it was moved to Storey Park for the first time this year and they were Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 real happy with that situation and want to continue that. The big thing that we’re working on now trying to get finished up, of course, is getting our impact fees increased along with our action plan adopted by the Council so that we can have that as our blueprint for future growth. Capital improvements projects, many of those that you’ll see coming online in the next 60 to 90 days. We’ll be opening up Bear Creek Park the 25th of this month. We opened the new playground equipment at Storey Park last month. We will be opening Chateau Park in August and we’ll be opening the Skate Park in September. We had a construction meeting out there yesterday and I will be getting the City Council and the Parks Commission a timeline for the Skate Park so you can visually see where we’re going to be but we’ll be finished up by the end of August. The contractors assured me. Then, of course, our big project at the Settler’s Park, Phase One of that. A lot of the utilities are all in the ground now. The irrigation pond you folks saw during the tour is in place and the landscapers are out there now, busy getting all the systems underground so we plant seed in September. With that, I will move to enhancements. If you don’t mind, I’ll let staff speak from the table if that’s okay. We’ve kind of assigned these to different people who are most knowledgeable in the area. The first request is for an additional full-time Groundskeeper One. With that, I’ll call on our superintendent, Elroy Huff. Huff: Mr. Mayor, I’m assuming you all have those in front of you. I’m just basically what I’m doing there, in a nutshell, I’m just keeping up with the expanded acreage that we have coming up for the next season in conjunction with the figure of about 15 acres per individual full-time employee. When we get to that 90 acre point, that’s kind of where we’re going to need to be. We have a lot of amenities in these new parks and different things that we put into those to meet the demand of the public and those just take a lot more maintenance and a lot more time. That’s why it is the way it is. Any specific questions, I’ll answer them for you. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: I guess, doing the math, if you have five staff members, you have 18 acres per staff? Is that correct? Kuntz: That’s correct. De Weerd: Once those 90 acres are brought in? Okay. Kuntz: Just two other quick comments on that page. One is we’re going to be maintaining the Police grounds and I think our superintendent is estimating that’s going to take us about one person. Do you want to comment on that? Huff: Yes. I forgot that. We know just looking at that roughly at this point, when we take that on that some days we’re going to be two people three or four hours in there and then depending on what the load is, some days we’ll be in there for eight hours so you can see that’s going to change things each week quite a little bit, not to mention the rest of the acres. That’s just part of the pie there. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: Elroy, does that include the five acres, basically, that is not under development too? Are you taking care of that? The stuff that’s west of the ditch? Huff: The Chief and I have discussed that five acres just very briefly. We haven’t gotten any further into that. I don’t— Bird: How many hours are you estimating a week to maintain the Police station proper? The utilities or the grounds and stuff within the fenced in parking area. Huff: I would say that the Police station is probably going to be about eight hours in a weeks time. Bird: Eight hours a week? Huff: Eight hours a week just the Police station. That’s, you know, as long as everything goes good, I think that’s where we’ll be. Bird: What are the maintenance hours a week on Generations Plaza? Huff: Oh, that’s probably a couple of hours, depending on mowing and other things that we’re doing. It goes up and down a little bit depending on what kind of problems we have with fountain and things like that. We’re going to rewrite some of our maintenance schedule on that a little bit and turn that up a little bit more now that we have—it’s become a real focal point now. We’ve got things going there every Tuesday night and things like that so we’re going to have to push that maintenance cycle up to a little more specific than it has been. The rest of it as far as that is just the amount of added acreage in park land between the three new parks we have coming on. Especially, with the acreage we have out at Settler’s and then what we may add to that during construction and add additional parking lot and different things like that. It just kind of snowballs on you. Bird: Elroy, when do you—out at Settler’s, when do you plan on having to start your maintenance? I know that will start a long time before it’s opened to the public but when do you plan on—what timeframe do you think you will be starting your maintenance? Huff: I think under the contract, Mr. Bird, that will be after the turf is up and the grass has been mowed a certain number of times and then we’ll take it over from there. I expect that we’ll actually pick that up in probably the end of October. So, then we’ll be able to kind of slide past some of that stuff until spring but when we get to spring time, we’ll get— Bird: So, it won’t be this fiscal year that we will take over the maintenance of that park? Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Huff: All three of them, yes. Bird: Okay. Huff: Well, two of this year and that one will still be under construction but yes, we’ll have it all in the spring. Bird: But you will have the first phase of Settler’s to maintain and that’s—what is that, about 20 or 25 acres? Huff: 20 to 25, yes. With pathway and parking and, you know, various things. I know we’ve got a lake and we’ve got a fancy irrigation system and all that but it takes a good little while to, you know, even after you have those work on all that stuff, you’ve got to learn how that system works. It’s going to take some extra time on my shoulders learning that and teaching the guys. Bird: And this—we’re going to try to minimize our labor through our sprinkler system, as you stated last Tuesday night, but that isn’t on board yet. It isn’t there yet. Huff: Right. When it’s—that’s a good system. I think it will run out really nice and I think we’re going to have some limited use out there for awhile as the park builds and more people come in, then you’ll have a certain amount of labor intensity that comes along with that. Like the first year or so, we’ll probably get by okay and then we’ll see how it goes from there. Bird: Thank you. Kuntz: The last item I was going to just add is we have stressed our staff to the limit with the construction projects that we have taken on this year. We really want to get back next year to a maintenance mode to where we can maintain the parks at a higher level than they were maintained this year. It ranges from things where there’s too many weeds for my liking. The grass isn’t as green as maybe it should be because we haven’t gotten into fertilizing because some of those things got let go because of the construction projects. With this new position and the additional acreage, our focus really is going to be on, you know, upping our maintenance level. Especially, like Elroy said, at the highly visible areas like Generations Plaza, the north curb as you come into town, the islands we take care of as you come in off of the freeway, and in addition, the two fire stations. We take care of those two fire stations. I don’t know if the Council is aware of that. Of course, the third one, we’ll be maintaining that. After meeting out there at the Police site, I think there’s a lot more work than I imagined. Especially, with the drainage pit swells and the steepness of those. We want it looking top notch out there. Thank you. The second item—I guess I’d like to back up for just a minute and let you know that these were prioritized by the Parks Commission and so they are listed in this order at their request. The second item is the land acquisition. What we’re proposing here is we’ll be purchasing six acres this year. The legal descriptions from W. H. Pacific are due to us by the end of next week. I’ve talked to our City Attorney about drafting up a purchase agreement so we’ll be purchasing that hopefully within the Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 next 30 days. Then, we’re proposing the $181,000 would be to purchase an additional 12 acres sometime during the fall season after the new fiscal year starts. Then, finish purchasing the additional 11 acres the fall of 2003. Partially, the reason we’re suggesting this timeline is one, financial impact to the entire City budget and the Parks budget. Two is, after discussing this with the Meridian Youth Baseball program, it will give them sufficient time to raise funds, get their master plan done, get some construction drawings in place so they could actually physically start breaking ground and building their site then in the spring of 2004. I would stand for any questions on this. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: I guess that’s the timeline that when we talked about the Borup property and purchasing it, that was kind of the timeline that we discussed. It doesn’t make sense to deviate from it. That was the commitment we made at the time. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Tom, I was just a little curious. In your base budget, there isn’t any line item for just general land acquisition? That hasn’t been a normal budget request for every land acquisition? We seem to have to find the money for it. I was just curious, is that just something that just hasn’t been done previously? Kuntz: Councilman Nary, Council and Mayor. This fiscal year that we’re in now is the first year that we really, in my mind since I’ve been here, actually budgeted money. The $100,000 for land. What we’ve tried to do in the past and we were trying to be fiscally responsible this year, is leverage impact fees in exchange for property with future developments. The only thing that scares me a little bit is we need a 20-acre site out in the Tuscany area. I guess I’m sort of banking on the fact that no other developments are going to come in this year and if I can get through this year acquiring the land up in the Lochsa Falls area and then come back to you next with possibly asking for some funds for acquisition, if I can show that we’re not going to leverage impact fees, that’s my plan. Number three is also mine. In the Ada County Highway District hearings for Settler’s Park, they were requiring us to build a sidewalk along Ustick Road as part of Phase One. We convinced them that it was really not necessary since there won’t be any use of that area in Phase One. They agreed with us but they did put a stipulation that we would have a sidewalk along Ustick Road running east west built by April of 2003. This is that request. The dollar amount comes from the land group who did the design on Phase One. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 De Weerd: Was that the staff or the Commission that put that stipulation on there? Kuntz: The Commission, Council member De Weerd. De Weerd: Do they require that of residential developments if you’re not going to develop in that area that you put in— ***End of Side Four*** Kuntz: --a plat, one plat, that you have to provide sidewalk on all sides of the development. That’s what I was told. De Weerd: Wow. I haven’t seen that in the City. Bird: I was going to say. Is that a new one? When did they pass that? De Weerd: I like that policy. Kuntz: I understand and we didn’t think it was fair at all and that’s why we went to them. Corrie: So that’s going to be a new requirement for them? Kuntz: I understood it to be an existing requirement. Bird: I think it’s just for the City of Meridian. De Weerd: Well, Mr. Mayor, is there a way between now and tomorrow we can confirm that with their director that this is actually a requirement, even in light of not developing towards Ustick. I’d like to see it in writing. This is a pretty substantial amount and for not gaining any park land at all, it seem ludicrous at this time. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: I agree with Councilwoman De Weerd. I think that this is something that—we are not developing the Ustick side of that park. This $131,000 can fund a lot of other stuff this next year for us that we could certainly use to a better advantage, I believe, than some sidewalks going along. Not that they don’t need sidewalks but at this point, we don’t encourage people to come in on the Ustick way, do we? Kuntz: Councilman Bird, we don’t now. The only—and I certainly agree with both of your comments, you know, if Sundance is building across the street, then theoretically they should have to put sidewalk along Ustick and Meridian Road if their theory holds true with what they’re telling us. My only concern would be that if Adventure Island Playground gets built starting in the spring of 2003 and if we’re able to reach an agreement with the PAL program to expand additional acreage, again to be built in Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 2003, I’m a little hesitant to maybe pull it out completely but it just seems a little strong to make it a requirement by April of 2003. It seems a little harsh to me. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: Tom, even if those agreements come forward, I know that Adventure Land in the fiscal year of 2003, wouldn’t even be close to having anything in like that. I don’t know about PAL and how soon they could get that up but I’m sure it would be a year before you get that grass and everything done in there to where they could work on it. I agree. We need it through there and I see where you’re coming from but I also can think of where $131,000 would put in some, definitely put in some enhancements that we could use immediately for the public. I think it’s like Mrs. De Weerd said, I think we need to see what ACHD, if this is going to be their policy. I guess if it’s going to be their policy, we’re stuck with it. Nary: Madam President? De Weerd: Yes, Mr. Nary. Nary: Tom, I’m curious. I know we’ve had some savings from the budgeted amount for the initial development at Settler’s Park. Has that already been used on other projects or is there some savings there that can offset some of this? Either this amount as it’s directed related to Settler’s or some of the other ones? I was going to ask about some of the other smaller projects. Kuntz: Councilman Nary, the money that we hope to be carrying over out of Settler’s this year is earmarked for the restroom facility. Now, is it all earmarked? We haven’t really crunched numbers recently. I probably would be safe to say that there would be some additional carryover funds that probably could be applied to this but I’ve got a change order for the second phase of that first parking lot that I’m going to be bringing to you next week. I will crunch the numbers before then to show you how this would all lay out but there would be some savings. Nary: Even if it can’t offset this one, I was wondering if some of the other enhancements you’ve asked for are, obviously, a little smaller dollar amounts. Some of those could get funded out of that. Kuntz: That’s a possibility. Mayor, just so I can comment on Council member Bird’s suggestions. I think Adventure Island, they’re planning to really start building Phase One of that in the spring of 2003 but the first parking lot we’re building now would suffice, you know, for parking and, you know, to access that area. PAL, I’m not sure where that’s going at this point. So, to delay the sidewalk on Ustick Road, you know, I don’t think is out of the question at all and staff would sure support the Mayor and Council finding out why this is a requirement for us and not for other developers. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Corrie: Yes. I’ll call Jay between now and when we come up again. I don’t know whether he can make a decision if the Commission said that they had to do it. I don’t know whether he’s going to be able to (inaudible) yes, you don’t have to do it. The Council said so. But, I’ll find out here and see what can be done, hopefully, by tomorrow if we can get them back together. I don’t know but we’ll give it a shot. Kuntz: Okay. Number four. You want to quit about ten til, Mayor? Is that correct? Corrie: That’s fine. De Weerd: Now is a good breaking time. Corrie: Yes. Let’s take a break and we can come back at 1:00 or close thereafter and we’ll go over to the Chamber and I’ll see if I can’t give Jay a call here. RECESS Corrie: Okay. You’re on record now. Kuntz: Okay. Mayor and Council, item number four under enhancements is the Chateau playground equipment and Elroy Huff will comment on that. Huff: Mayor and Council. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Okay. This is the Chateau Park playground and I think when you were on the tour the other night, you were able to see that we have that area prepped and ready for playground equipment. We have downsized that from, I think the original drawing to make sure that we put some equipment in there that has things to do on it but kind of reflects the size of park that is. I think there’s one four bay swing in there with some toddler swing and then there’s just a little bit smaller playground than what we usually put in the bigger ones that we have at Tulley or Storey. This is a smaller unit than that. I think we’ve got $38,000 in there so by the time you get swings and playground and the softball material, which runs $5,000 or $6,000 just to fill that up for protection and stuff, that’s around the figure that will come out. With the installation of the playground, that usually $5,000 or $6,000 for that plus you can get $20,000 in your playground and things like that but it’ll run somewhere in that neighborhood. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Elroy, I’m sure everyone knows that this park is very near and dear to me but on this $18,000 from SSC, is that in addition to the $38,000 or is that part of the $38,000? Kuntz: Commissioner Nary, that would be revenue that would offset that $38,000. Nary: So, $38,000 is the total cost of putting in that playground. But it’s smaller than the original concept drawing that were distributed to the public as to what was going to be there? Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Kuntz: Commissioner Nary, no, it’s the same size. It’s just a smaller size than we put in our community parks because it’s a neighborhood park. It’s the same equipment that was shown in the master plan. Nary: Okay. Thank you. Huff: That’s all I mean. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: I apologize for coming in at the tail end of this presentation. Is this a fall price so you’re getting a bigger bang for the buck? Kind of like last year, we got it half price or 40% off or—this $38,000. Is it full price? Is it half price? Is it what? Kuntz: Council member De Weerd, it is—what we normally get is our discount, which is about a 30% discount. It’s not figured at 50% because there’s no guarantee that they’ll have that same sale again this fall but we will certainly take advantage of that if that opportunity presents itself. De Weerd: Well, I know you and your staff are very frugal and you will keep an eye on that, right? Kuntz: Definitely. That’s a number one priority. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Yes, Mr. Nary. Nary: Just one other question, Tom. When would the installation of this be? Kuntz: It would proceed early spring. De Weerd: After the fall sale. Kuntz: We would order the equipment once the fall sale is on. Normally, we have it delivered in December or January. Our installer likes to install it as soon as he can in the spring. February, hopefully. Nary: Thank you. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 De Weerd: Just one more question. Tom, this is playground equipment and underlayment? Kuntz: Correct. De Weerd: And you’re not going to use the wood chips like the new elementary school did, that caught on fire? Kuntz: Council member De Weerd, this price includes installation of equipment, installation and the wood fiber that goes underneath the playground equipment. Corrie: Just have a little fireworks. Okay. De Weerd: Then, you have to outlaw kids. Corrie: Well, we can do that too. Don’t print that. Kuntz: Mayor? Actually, if you visit that site, you’ll notice that the wood chips, really, only the top half-inch is charred. The wood chips, surprisingly, did not burn any depth. Corrie: Thank you, Tom. Any other questions? Bird: I have none. Corrie: Okay. Thank you. Kuntz: Item number five is a request for acquisition of a computer network server. Without reading word for word, items one, two, and three, we currently have a software system that handles all of our registration for recreation programs. Phone registrations, walk-in registrations, all of them are done on a software program. Unfortunately, that company went out of business about two years ago and so we’re currently operating without any kind of a backup system, once this system crashes. We’ve had it go down once and our IT Technician was able to patch it back together. It cuts our labor costs by more than half so we’re not doing it manually. We are able to print off reports to see where we are as far as dollars and registration numbers and those types of things. This day and age, it’s essential to have a computerized registration program. Item number three, on this page, the last sentence, what we’re requesting this year is the network server at a cost of $12,000 with the understanding that we will come back to you next year for an upgrade in our software at a cost of $15,000. So, the entire package is about $27,000 and that is installed. To be real frank with you, if there was funding available this year, we would certainly choose to do it all at one time because we have no way of taking care of our software if it does go down and if our technician can’t patch it back together. We’re very dependent upon it for all of our registration programs. I don’t know if Lisa wants to add anything to that. She’s only been here about a week so that’s a fair question but I want to give her a chance to say something. Ariola: Thank you, Tom, but I think you’re handling it. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Tom, have you had any discussions with Finance? I don’t know how much overlap there is but there was a question about the IT Coordinator that that’s one of the enhancements the Finance Department is asking for. At least, in reading, I assume that was kind of a City wide look at how our systems are being done and doing that? Is there any relationship between that position and what you’re asking for for the server? They just spent $12,000 on a system that our IT—if we decide to fund this IT Coordinator, doesn’t work and isn’t compatible with the rest of the City? Kilchenmann: Mr. Mayor and Councilman Nary. We were—our grand plan would be that actually the implementation could be done by the person that would be on staff so it would reduce the cost of implementation. I think this part of the request is just for the hardware, the server itself. Then, hopefully, the additional money he was talking about would be taken care of because he could just do it in-house and wouldn’t need to contract for that. Nary: I guess my question was that are we looking at that in stages? I was just anticipating that if we decide that this IT Coordinator would be a good idea and something to fund, that the IT Coordinator would say that that system that they’re using really is not the best system going forward. Maybe there’s something else that’s available in the marketplace that might be better. So, instead of spending $12,000 now, maybe we look at funding that in April, after we’ve had some opportunity to determine if something else is available. Again, I was concerned that, as Tom was saying, that it may not fit the need even in October. I was just trying to balance between the two because I’d certainly want to give that person the ability to look at City-wide to say what’s the best machines we should buy, what’s the best program we should buy and maybe not fund something like that all in October but look at seeing whether or not there’s a marketplace thing out there that might be better. Kilchenmann: That would be a good idea. We could certainly postpone that until, hopefully, that person was on staff in the fall. Nary: Thank you. Kuntz: Mr. Mayor, I just wanted to comment, follow-up that our current IT Consultant has been involved with this process in selecting, you know, the networking has been intricately involved as well as the Finance Department because we certainly don’t want to invest in something that’s not going to fit with everything else or be antiquated. Item number six is a piece of parks maintenance equipment. I’ll let Elroy comment on this. Huff: Mayor and Council, item number six is an addition to our skidsteer. It is a cab for protection. Part of the reason we have this is here is, historically, we have really done winter-time work kind of in Tulley Park, a little bit at Storey and it relates a little bit to what kind of weather we might actually get but by the time this year is over, we’re going to be looking at in actual park footage, in the 6.8 to 7 acres of actual park range from Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 about one and a half. So, we’re going to change a lot and what that’s going to do, I’m not hiring that out to anyone else or anything like that, not to mention the sidewalk and the pathways that I have there. So, when you gain that much footage, the amount of time that you put a person on that skidsteer in the winter, it is my own personal experience that staying warm on that is pretty much impossible after a certain number of times. You have to get off and warm up again so that’s not overly productive. I think the pathway is going to approach—by the time we’re done with all the pathways and the parks we have (inaudible) finish construction, we’re going to be in the 3.5 mile range of path as well as we are in the three mile range of sidewalk. What you gain in that is, in the winter we have more people in this community and they’re using these more and more so that puts us into the range of having a 24-hour period to get some of those things cleaned off and if you clean them off good and you get at it quick, they clean up real nice. Otherwise, you end up with some slick spots and stuff that stay there and it becomes more of a safety issue. That makes us have to put out a little more snow melt and other things that we really don’t prefer to buy if we don’t have to. The draw back is if you put the cab on and the heater to help out in the winter, then you, unfortunately, have to air condition it in the summer because you can’t shut it up because you get way too hot because of the heat off of the engine in the summertime. When we run that in the summer, it just depends on the kind of situations we get in. With this construction we’re in, it seems like we’re always having to go back and do some things or some other little projects that we get into and sometimes that whole deal gets really, really dirty. I have my guys coming off there and they are really dirty. You don’t have to mask them up and do everything but it’s not good to see them coming off of there looking like that. The wintertime thing, I can tell how much that’s going to be enhanced and it’ll depend on how many times we have to go out and take care of that. We use some other stuff too. We’ll use more manpower with some other stuff in the smaller areas but I can see that being very valuable but I do have a concern about how long we have to stay out there open on that the way the air flow comes across those skids. It can get really cold. That’s the reason I’m bringing that up here. I think it’s a viable thing. It something we couldn’t get on there when we first bought it. I see the use of that increasing dramatically over the next few years, especially this coming winter. That’s kind of where I’m at with that. I’ll certainly entertain any comment. Bird: I have none. Kuntz: Item number seven is Bear Creek Park restroom and basketball court. The basketball court will be offset by matching funds by the developer. We’re hoping that the MAA provides and Council member Bird provides the basket, basket skin. The restroom cost is taken from Tulley Park, which is also an 18 acre park. If this were to be delayed another year, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. We could get away with porta-potties but we will be moving the adult softball program out to that site extensively next year, starting next spring, and possibly this fall. I’ll stand for any questions on item number seven. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Bird: Tom, two questions. I see where there’s 1,750 square feet in the restrooms, which that figures out to about $77 a square foot, which isn’t bad. How much concrete is being poured on this $22,000 basketball court, the thickness and the square footage of the concrete? Kuntz: Council member Bird, the past courts we poured are 50 by 100 by 4 inches. Bird: Okay. I, for one, hate to see a park open up permanent restrooms. I think everybody knows how I feel on porta-potties for a permanent site. Corrie: Any other comments or questions? Okay. Kuntz: Item number eight is Storey Park redevelopment Phase Two. It really involves creating additional parking area there. We will take out the existing metal playground equipment to the east of the swimming pool. It’s in the sand area right now. That road will be aligned to the west slightly and then there will be parking created along the Legion outfield fence as well as along the east side of the swimming pool. Then, we’re hoping to work with Western Ada. We’ve had a follow-up meeting with them to see about putting some additional parking along the southern boundary of the park and the pool area there. These costs come from the land group. Item number nine, our last enhancement request is for Adventure Island Playground for $50,000 that would be used for development of on-site sidewalks and actually the hardscape around the playground. We have $50,000 in this years budget that was obligated for the playground equipment and we’ll be carrying that forward to next spring. We’d like to put another $50,000 with it to take care of the hardscape. The overall project cost exceeds $1 million. We are currently applying for a Land and Water Conservation Grant for $200,000 as well as the Foundation is actively recruiting corporate sponsors and donations. I know that Council member De Weerd is on that committee and she might be able to—I don’t know if she’s got any more current information than I do on their fundraising. It’s a large project that’s going to be one of the first of it’s kind in the State. It’s a combination playground for all ability levels but also has some real special interest areas. A music area, a climbing area, sand play type of an area, and then, of course, the zero depth water feature. You can all see how popular Generations Plaza is and this will be four times the size of that so, hopefully, we can channel some of that water use out to our new park. I’ll stand for any questions on this site. Corrie: Questions? Comments? Okay. Thank you, Tom. Okay. I believe that the next one would be Public Works. Kilchenmann: We’re going to move out of the general fund into the enterprise fund so it’ll be all of Public Works. PUBLIC WORKS Corrie: All set, Gary. Smith: Am I on? Okay. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and Council members. Good afternoon. It is our pleasure to present Public Works Department budget for FY 2003 to you this Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 afternoon. I’ve separated a presentation of the budget into respective superintendents and our City Engineer. Brad Watson will be presenting a review of our past years accomplishments. Rick Clinton, our water superintendent, will be presenting the Water Department enhancements for FY 2003. John Shawcroft, Wastewater superintendent, will present the enhancements for Wastewater Treatment Plant for FY 2003 and I will review the engineering enhancements for FY 2003. At this point, it’s my pleasure to hand out to you a booklet that will allow you to follow along with our accomplishments this past year and also the enhancements for all of the divisions of the Public Works Department. Brad Watson will run through the department highlights for this past year, FY 2002. Brad. Watson: Thank you, Gary. Thank you, Mayor and Council members. I’ve got a lot of ground to cover here. I know you’ve been here all day. We’ll go through it quickly and just kind of hit the highpoints. If you want me to slow down or describe something a little more, please just stop me. De Weerd: Nice logo. Bird: Nice logo. Watson: Did you guys see the whole animated thing? De Weerd: No. Kilchenmann: Do it over again. Now listen closely. Bird: Holy toledo. Watson: Isn’t that cool? I did that on the weekend. Bird: That’s okay, Brad. We don’t care. That’s neat. Watson: The first part of this is—it just kind of comes out of our strategic plan that the various departments of Public Works did earlier this year. We have 60 employees over four different divisions. Actually, five if you count the contract building inspectors. The Engineering, Wastewater, Water and Billing Departments. This was the overall mission statement of those divisions. This comes mostly from the Engineering Department but the Water and Wastewater are pretty similar. Highlighted activities, these are just statistics. They’re also in the budget dollar at work sheets that you have in your binders. It looks like we’re at a higher pace of building than we were a year ago through the first nine months of the fiscal year. I did notice in the Statesman today that they said building rates were dismal in Ada County. They obviously didn’t survey Meridian in that article. I think they were quoting Boise City and Ada County. Bird: I think it was Ada—I don’t think they included Meridian or Kuna or Eagle. Watson: Right. That was my interpretation. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Bird: It was outside Boise City and Boise was down. Way down. Watson: But if you look at just the single-family residential, we’re 20% ahead of last year. Commercials are 50% nearly, ahead of last year. Overall, it’s still about 20%. In the Engineering Department, some of the highlighted activities are Plan Review of 28 new subdivisions representing 1,000 lots, 12 commercial subs. The main thing that you’ll probably be interested in is more plan review process improvement. One of the things that have sped up a lot of the very small projects is that we qualified for what DEQ calls a Review Waiver so that we don’t have to run some of these projects through them. That’s helped out a lot of these little guys like the Wendy’s project, for example. The Water Department, just a few of their highlighted activities. They achieved 100% operator certification this past year. They expanded their line-flushing program to reduce the number of brown water calls. Some of the construction projects, they completed Well 21, Well 22, and 23 is getting fairly close to complete. We’ve started 24. There’s a variety of waterline projects. The Utility Billing Service, a couple of the main things that they’ve implemented over the last year is they began radio dispatching on turn-off day from here, which has evidently improved the efficiency and timeliness of those significantly. I think they had maybe a rough beginning month but it seems to be working very well from what I hear. They’ve also implemented some new turn-off procedures or they’re trying to. I think you’ve had at least an initial look at those and they’re pending your approval. On the Wastewater side of things, these may not sound like much or they may sound foreign to you but the Wastewater Department underwent a—I think it was two years, wasn’t it? Two years of ambient water quality monitoring in the Boise River and Five Mile Creek every single month. A lot of those—they had report every single month. A lot of those were daily monitoring practices that they had to do. They completed that. That was required by the discharge permit that was issued in 2000. They finally completed that in April. Some of the construction projects that the lab, there’s a couple of smaller projects there, the UV Basin outfall. It’s about a $700,000 or $800,000 project. That’s going extremely well. Ahead of schedule and under budget. There’s a couple of other projects out at the plant that are under design right now. The White Trunk is well on its way. The South Slough is still on schedule to be bid and constructed this winter. These next couple of pages, as I explained to someone yesterday, sometimes we don’t know if we explain very well what we do on a day-to-day basis. These next couple of slides are intended to show you sort of the four major work areas that we’re involved in. The first one is guiding and assisting commercial and residential development. That’s probably the most high profile one that you hear about from the developers that come in and talk to you. The second is, obviously, the operation maintenance of what we do have. The third and some of these are pretty high visibility projects. They’re expansion of the systems. The fourth and potentially the most time consuming is just helping existing customers. In each of those four main work areas, all five of these divisions are constantly coordinating. The following slide shows the flow chart, if you will, of what happens and which department is involved in each one of the major steps. The conception is the stuff that you rarely hear about. I was talking to Joe Silva a week or so ago and for every project that ultimately reaches Council for approval, there’s probably another two or three that we’ve at least looked at and discussed with the consultant and they either just have no interest in it or it can’t be done or they simply go away. That takes a lot of time. The planning or pre-ap meetings where the consultant comes in to see what they need to do Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 to meet our needs. Third, plan review. Fourth, construction. Fifth, when something is finally complete and in operation. The second major work area is just the operation and maintenance. What I’ve listed here are mostly just maintenance projects. It’s sort of hard to take a picture of what operation is. I could go out and take pictures of the operators turning valves and spraying down the clarifiers but that’s what they do every day. There’s a lot of maintenance that goes on. These are really time consuming projects. The one that we’re really focused on right now is the optimization of the pumping system and distribution system through our telemetry system. The telemetry system is a computer based control system that goes out to all of the wells. You’ll hear a little bit more about that later. The third major work area, obviously, is the system expansion examples. You do hear a lot about these. These are the big construction projects. Those are pretty self-explanatory. They take up a lot of time. Fourth. Each one of these I say they take up a lot of time but they do. This one takes up more time than you can imagine. Each one of the departments has sort of an area of responsibility on these customer calls, whether it’s location of water and sewer. If somebody has a house that’s in the County, they want to come in and hook up to the water and sewer. We spend a lot of time helping them locate where that is. Obviously, from time to time we get sewer backups. Wastewater is called out on those. The brown water and pressure problems I think are diminishing but they’re still present. The water department handles a lot of those. Billing questions, problems, the billing service and lastly the building permit process and requirements. That comes through our office and the building official. So, those are kind of the four major work areas that we’re looking at. The next few slides just kind of show what has happened as far as development over the last year. The next slide is a graph that I’ve sort of alluded to in the speaking of the Statesman article today. This shows our historical building permit activity. The blue is single-family residential permits per month. The candy-striped columns are commercial permits per month. Take those over to the right axis. As you can see, we’re on a pretty good pace that we haven’t really seen since—1998 was up a little about 80 permits per month but we’re creeping right back up there to the 95 to 96 rates. We included this picture. It’s just kind of amazing to see what happens in a year. I tried to take these pictures from the very same point, although I couldn’t because there’s now a house in the way. This is just another example of some more subdivision development. Autumn Fair has grown like a weed, I guess you could say. Bridgetower, I drove through that just this morning and I was really amazed to see how many houses are out there now. Blackstone, Coral Creek, formally English Gardens, is filling up at least on the north side and Blackstone. Silverstone, I wanted to include this one. I tried to do the same comparison from a year ago. The pictures are from the same point but they’re far away that it’s hard to tell the enormity, I guess, of what has gone on out there in the last year. I don’t claim that we’re responsible for it or anything but, as I’ve mentioned to some you before, this project was just a unique animal. It constantly changed throughout the review process and even during the construction project and it’s still changing even now. We learned a lot from that project. In addition to what you’ve seen so far, these are the other pending projects that we’ve been working on with the engineering developer. If you add up all of those acres and those lots, it’s overwhelming. There’s over, I think nearly over a 1,000 acres just in the ones that I listed. I ran out of room and some of the projects don’t have names and those are just the ones that getting close to being submitted I think. The Meridian School District, I couldn’t pinpoint one spot. They’re in every week or every two weeks looking at Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 another piece of ground. You know, about six months ago, they never asked us where sewer was or where water is but, by God, they’re coordinating with us now. Anytime they look at a property, Wendal is on the phone or dropping by. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Brad, where’s Coral Creek? Where is that? De Weerd: That’s what we were just— Nary: Blackstone and Coral Creek? Watson: They’re part of what was English Gardens. They’re south of Cherry Lane. Black Cat and Cherry Lane. De Weerd: You mean McFadden actually let go of property. Bird: This isn’t the same McFadden. De Weerd: Oh. Bird: This is another family. De Weerd: Oh, I mean, even so. Watson: I’m not sure it’s actually tied up yet. I’ll try to step through these fairly quickly. You’ve all at least heard of these before. One of the main things that we’ve been doing at the Wastewater Plant is updating and installing a new telemetry system that ties all the processes throughout the plant into a central computer for monitoring purposes. This will, in the end, eventually help them become a lot more efficient. We are proposing a second phase to this telemetry system and you’ll see that in the enhancements and John will describe that a little bit more. This is the one that’s currently under construction by Turnkey. It’s going very well. ***End of Side Five*** Watson: This is the one that you’re probably the most interested in, at this point. The White Trunk is well under way. It’s over 17,000 feet of pipe. I don’t know if you’ve driven down Linder in the last month but just to see that mountain of pipe out there is kind of cool. Bird: Is that all of it, Brad? Watson: No. That’s not even all of it. Bird: I didn’t think that was that much pipe but there’s a lot of it there. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Watson: There really is. This is just another picture looking towards Ten Mile Road. Bird: Brad, what type of pipe is that? 48, 60 or what? Watson: Right there, that’s 24. Bird: What’s that on Linder? Is that 24? Watson: Yes. Most of it’s 24. There’s a little bit of 18 in the bunks there. Bird: And the slough will be bigger than 24? Watson: No. The south slough? Bird: No. I mean, I’m sorry. On the White Trunk. Watson: No. The White Trunk where it takes off on Ten Mile Road, it begins as 24 and goes down to 18. Yes. This is a somewhat poor picture. This picture was taken from Overland Road. You can see the Ten Mile overpass on the left. I-84 is sort of in the middle of the screen. We’re proposing, in one of the Wastewater enhancements, beginning design and easement acquisition of part of the Black Cat Trunk that is north of I-84 and this was just sort of to show that we’ve gotten through a very, very, very initial phase of that project. There’s a lot more to come. On the Water side of things, again, we have the telemetry system. This has proved to be extremely beneficial just in the short time that we’ve had it. What you see there is a picture of the computer screen taken at the Water Department. It has every well on it. It lists if it’s on or off, the rate it’s pumping, pressures, you have the reservoirs on the right that shows their levels. It’s also capable of sending alarms and dialing the on-call operators during the off hours. This is a really sort of an advanced system. Again, we’ve gotten a long ways through this project but in the water enhancements, you’ll see that we’re proposing to finish off that project and Rick will be able to describe that a little bit more. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Brad, is the order of these projects up here different than the ones in the book? Is this just priority that’s listed in the book? The Department’s priority and you’re just using examples? Watson: These are examples of what occurred last year, this past year. Nary: Oh. Watson: We haven’t really gotten to the enhancements yet. Nary: Oh, okay. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Watson: I’m sorry. Nary: That’s all right. Watson: Some of these projects, I know you probably don’t see them very often and if you do, you probably don’t recognize them. This looks insignificant, that pipe sticking up out of the ground. That’s probably $150,000 worth of work, that pipe sticking there. That will become the future Well 23 pump house. That was taken about six weeks ago. The next slide shows a picture taken about two weeks ago. It will look much better than now when it’s done. We’ve worked with the Silverstone developer to include his architectural covenants, I guess you would call them. The Watertower recoating project is proceeding quite well. We also completed in-house, Rick’s crew completed in-house, hard piping of the overflow from the water tank to Eight Mile Creek. As you may remember, we’ve had a couple of flooding incidences at that location. That won’t happen any more. Well 24 in Tumble Creek is being drilled. We’ll have another one of those expensive pipes sticking up out of the ground. We haven’t completed the pump house yet or even initiated that because our model is showing it’s not needed yet but we went ahead and drilled the hole because the houses are quickly being built around it. We thought it would be better to get in there and drill it before we had neighbors. Again, that’s a completed wellhead in Tumble Creek Subdivision. This slide here just shows some of the other major work efforts that you may never see. Well, you will never see anything in the ground because of them. Some of the things that we have done and are doing, as you know, we did the review and inspection fee for Public Works and updated the water and sewer rates, stormwater management ordinance. We’ve been working on standard specifications and details, continually streamlining plan review checklists and process on the assessment and system development fees updates are in progress. These last few are things associated with increasing Federal and State regulatory requirements. We have a source water assessment draft that was done by DEQ that we’re reviewing and preparing comment on. United Water has filed a future water rights application that Gary is spending a lot of time on. De Weerd: How’s that going, Brad? Watson: The United Water? I really don’t know. Gary’s given the charge. It sounds like there’s a huge quantity of review to be done. Smith: Mayor Corrie, Council member De Weerd, and Council members. We’ve got a meeting tomorrow with the United Water representatives and their attorney. We, being the City of Caldwell Public Works Director, our hydro-geologist, Ed Squires and myself and we’re going to discuss in a more informal setting than what was existing at the time that the protest was filed, just what this IMAP does mean to the City of Meridian and how it impacts our existing water rights. I’m hopeful that out of that meeting will come a better understanding of what they’re trying to do and a better understanding for them of our concerns. De Weerd: Thank you. Will you keep us updated? Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Smith: Yes. Watson: The last thing listed on there is something that just came up this spring. Whether it’s good or bad, I can’t say right now but EPA mandated—Congress actually mandated, through EPA to have each public water system throughout the country doing vulnerability analysis and emergency response plan, largely as a result of last September. So, we will be working on that over the next year or two. Those are just a few of the non-infrastructure things that we’ve been working on. This is kind of where I go out of script and Gary cringes. I was just taking some notes before we got up here. In the six years that I’ve been here—I’ll back up a little bit. When I came here, the Wastewater Plant was on the fringe. It violated discharge permit monthly. Yes, pretty much monthly. We’ve double the size of that thing. We’ve had increasing discharge requirements. We’ve added 10 to 15 miles of sewer every year. We, being the development community too. On the Water side, we’ve added eight wells. I think we had nine when I got here. Six? Something like that. We’re so high in the numbers now that we’re having a hard time keeping track of which one is which. In fact, two hours ago we had to discuss which one was which. We’ve also added 10 to 15 miles of water every year. We’ve got a reservoir. We have (inaudible). We have new drinking water rules. We have stricter discharge permits. What’s kind of amazing is, we’ve done this without using any State money, any Federal money, it’s all come from us. Gary doesn’t like to blow his own horn very much but he has really led us through this. So, it’s just kind of his pat on the back. Smith: Thank you, Brad. I really appreciate the comments. I need to say, though, with all sincerity, that I wouldn’t be standing here today if it weren’t for my staff or our Water superintendent, our Wastewater superintendent, our City Engineer and all the staff that helps each one of those departments and for you, Mayor and Council, because your support has been paramount in our ability to accomplish what we have accomplished. I just can’t emphasize that enough because all of the years that I’ve been here at the City of Meridian, it’s been the same every year. It’s been the support of you that has allowed us to move forward, that has kept our morale up and even when our daubers down, whatever that means, we were able to pick up and keep going. So, thanks to you for that. Now, I’d like to have Rick Clinton come forward and go through his enhancements for the Water Department. Rick, as you know, is our Water Superintendent. He’s been doing a great job in that position. Rick. WATER DEPARTMENT Clinton: Thank you, Gary. Mayor and Council members, it’s an honor to stand here and go through these enhancements today. Enhancement number one is our most important request. It’s a request for a new well tech position. It’s the only additional personnel that the Water Department is asking for this year. One thing that merits mentioning is that if we’re successful in this request, our intent is to split the well tech portion of an existing job description from the water quality end of things. We currently have, kind of on a crises management mode, had to bring a water operator in to start assisting us because the workload on our current water quality specialist was overwhelming to the point that Chip’s analysis was that if we didn’t get him some help that he was probably going to get burned out and quit on us. So, the sum total at this Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 point in time is $69,253 for this one position. Enhancement number two is the construction of Well 24. The total amount of this is $80,000. We requested most of the funds for this last year. We’ve experienced some additional costs that we weren’t able to predict last year, installation of an overflow line, some landscaping, the purchase of an additional lot next to the well lot. On the advice of our hydrologist, we may need some extra room there so Gary’s in the process of negotiating to purchase that lot adjacent to the well lot. De Weerd: Rick, where is the location of this one? What’s the location on that well? Clinton: Councilwoman De Weerd, that’s in Tumble Creek Subdivision off of Linder. Enhancement number three is the construction of Well 26. It’s a total of $350,000. Well 26 is the Touchmark well, formerly known as the Bew’s well. This includes an over—I’m sorry, I got off of the line here—land acquisition, a building, well installation. This has a unique chemistry to it that’s going to require a mixing and a booster out of the mixing tank to boost it into the distribution system. Well number 25, the sum total is $300,000 on the request. This was the one that we had some discussion on just a little bit ago about where we were placing it. I think to some extent, our water model currently is assisting us in the strategy to place these wells where we need them. I think that’s very beneficial to us. We’re requesting $300,000. We are carrying forward $200,000 from last year that was originally budgeted in FY 2002. This appears to be going, it looks like, in Tuscany Lakes Subdivision. Enhancement number five is consulting fees. $50,000 of this is for water rights acquisition that we’re hoping that our hydrologist has the time to work on. In addition to the $50,000, this is an adventure, a cooperative attempt by both Water and Wastewater to fund a safety manual to provide our staff with a manual that advises them of procedures of both the Water and Wastewater. John will talk a little bit more about this when he gets here with his enhancement number eight. The sum total of the Water Department’s request is $85,000. Moving on the enhancement number six, its distribution map books for our vehicles. This to provide maps in all of the fleet vehicles out in the field so that they can accurately identify the location of water lines on site as needed. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: That being an enhancement, I think that would be operational. It would be about a mandatory item that you would want in here. I mean, this would be just like carrying a tool with you to have these books and stuff. I think that would be an operational. Maybe not but I don’t see it as—I think it’s a necessity, not an enhancement. Clinton: The only thing is, I don’t know that we actually have an operational line item anymore in our budget. Bird: That’s not part of equipment? It’s not part of equipment? Clinton: I think we have 500 or 1,000 in— Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Bird: Yes. (inaudible) line to it. Okay. Clinton: Moving on to enhancement number seven, water line extensions. There’s a total of $600,000 requested. This is in addition to the carry forward from FY 2002. This is just mainly to be prepared wherever the growth occurs for us to get the water mains in the ground as needed. Moving on to enhancement request number eight, chemistry analysis for wells. There’s a total of $20,000 requested. That’s for 10 wells in the amount of $2,000 per well. We currently have 10 wells. I believe 1997 is the last water chemistry that we currently have on it. We constantly, when I send out the annual water quality report, get phone calls from individuals wondering why we don’t have more current test results. So, this is an attempt to get some of that updated. Enhancement number nine, Well 27 construction. Well 27 is partial construction for $200,000. We’re thinking, at this point in time, it probably will go in Bridgetower. Enhancement number ten is some additional telemetry upgrade. I think Brad demonstrated earlier in the presentation some of benefits of the telemetry. One thing we’ve recently been able to do is through DSL line, Public Works is now able to access real-time data from the Water Department computers. That’s very, very beneficial and we look forward to being able to continue our upgrades to the telemetry system. The final enhancement is a request for some dig-line software that would allow us to retrieve our dig-line tickets by e-mail. It’s a request for $1,000. This includes IT time. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Rick, there’s a couple of items, I guess I was just curious. The consulting enhancement and then I think to follow up on what Council member Mr. Bird said about the map system. Is it just a lack of an identifiable line item to put those in? I mean, some of the other departments have consultants as a line item that they use as a regular part of their base budget and yours just doesn’t? Is that the reason? Clinton: I may need some assistance from Stacy on this but I believe that when she started this process, we had a base budget of $25,000 in consulting. I believe that I will continue to have that base budget of $25,000 each year and these enhancements are additions to that $25,000. Nary: And then, like on the map ones, I noticed there’s a line item that talked about equipment and well supplies and things like that. I mean, that’s not what that is? It doesn’t go with that? Cunningham: It’s something we hadn’t purchased in the past as far as map books. This is a one-time purchase and so we would have to increase his budget base by another $2,000. So, he was given the choice to either put it in that line item adjustment or have an enhancement. We just chose to put it in the enhancement. Nary: Okay. What about the consulting thing? Is that the same reason? Cunningham: Yes. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nary: Okay. Thank you. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: While you’re up there, isn’t testing—you know, he’s asking for the ten wells to be tested. Isn’t that part of a—I mean, isn’t that a line item to keep those reports and stuff tested? That isn’t really an enhancement. That’s kind of a necessity to meet his qualifications that he has to file yearly. Cunningham: This is something, Keith, that we could schedule in once we get, you know—I think you’re working on that trying to come up with a testing schedule. Currently, this was a one-time fee that we don’t have in the past. Right? Clinton: Right. Even though I think Gary has kind of indicated that he feels like probably every three years, we should be doing this chemistry analysis. If we could figure out a way to get this included in our base budget, that would be beneficial to us and I do think that— Bird: I’m not countering anything but, Reta, shouldn’t like this be right in your operating expenses. I mean, if you’ve got 26 wells and you need to do one every three years or something, you can put enough on where you’re doing eight or ten wells a year. Isn’t that kind of operating expenses? I mean, its not that—he doesn’t have the option of not turning these tests in. I mean, it’s a mandatory to operate. You’ve got to maintain your wells. Cunningham: We can start doing that, Keith. We can start putting it in the operating. A nice thing too, about him putting it in enhancement, we don’t want it forgotten. You know, three years down the road, oh, yes, we forgot to put in that operational cost for the testing. Bird: That’s a good idea. Yes. Cunningham: So, the nice thing is, is when they put it in as enhancement, it brings it forward and we make sure we get it in the budget. Bird: Okay. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Rick, again, I’m not sure if you know. I was looking in the line items and there is a line for contracted legal services for the Water Department. What are these contracted legal services for? Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Cunningham: I can help with that. Clinton: I was going to say, that I’ll have to lean on Reta for that one. Cunningham: What we did was, we took—actually, White Peterson asked about and they sent us details of what all of their legal services. They tell us if they’re working in the P & Z or for Civil, Water, for Wastewater. We took that three months and we broke it down and figured out what percent they were in each one of our areas. So, we split up some legal services accordingly. We have a big percent is prosecution. Then we take the other percent and break it up between Water, Sewer, P & Z and general fund. Nary: So, this is like a charge back where they’ve said this was work that was done for the Water Department. You took that percentage and that’s what that number comes from? Cunningham: That’s right. I have a breakdown on that if you guys want to see that. Nary: Okay. Clinton: Are there any other questions on the Water Department enhancements? Bird: I have none. Clinton: Thank you very much for your time. Corrie: Thank you. Smith: Aren’t you doing MUBS? MUBS Clinton: Oh, I’m sorry. Brad is correct. I am doing MUBS. I need to get in my book here in the right place for that. The MUBS has two enhancement requests this year. Enhancement number one is for a direct pay module. If I understand it correctly, this is a software purchase from Casselle. It will allow us an opportunity to start offering direct pay, which seems to be requested frequently from our customers. The total amount of this request is $2,500. I believe in addition to that, we’ll need to work with legal just a little bit and I’ve got some preliminary correspondence from Mr. Nichols on what we need to do to present this to Council at a future date. Enhancement number two is replacement of the front counter. I may need to, if Stacy is available, bring her up here a little bit. The primary concern about the issue in this is additional security for MUBS. Stacy, do you have any input? I had thought in our preliminary discussions that Leslie had indicated that she had received some endorsement from you on providing this front counter. For the record, Stacy says she thinks it’s a good idea. As you know, we’ve attempted numerous things to try and curtail, what I have as security concerns with upset customers that are coming in on turn-off day. A few of the measures we have taken is we’ve tried to split the list into two Wednesdays. My thought process in that is that perhaps instead of having such a mob of people in the front area, that by reducing Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 that number and splitting it up into two turn-off days, we have a few less people standing at the front counter trying to pay. When there’s a mob, they tend to rally with one another and the animosity increases. We’ve tried a security guard that was rather unsuccessful. We’re also attempting or have a desire to put in a video monitoring system that may curtail some of the harassment of the customers towards our staff when they’re paying their water bill. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: I know this isn’t the only fix either, Rick, but has there been—I notice there’s a line item for training. There is a lot of training in dealing with hostile people and aggressive people. Have they done a lot of that as well? Clinton: To answer that question, Councilman Nary, no, I don’t believe we have but that is a good idea. Howard: We have all been to conflict management classes. Clinton: Leslie says we’ve been to conflict management classes. Leslie, is there anything else that you feel like you need to add to this? Howard: Yes. Mayor and Council, I feel with this new counter being put in, if you’ll look at the diagrams that we had Trout Architectures draw up for us, it’s, for a lack of words, a two bay workstation where on turn-off day, we would have two people up there taking payments versus one. If someone had a billing problem that they wanted to address with us, we would be able to help the people that just want to drop their payments off and leave, where a more time-consuming customer, they could be dealt with and wouldn’t be holding up the line to get help. I think it will just make it more efficient in the whole scheme of things in the office environment. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: How does United Water do it? Is it something like that? How do they deal with the same problem? I’m assuming they have thousands of more people that are angry with them. Howard: I’ve never been to United Water. Clinton: Councilman Nary, one of the things that I’ve been advised that United Water does, is that they turn-off every day of the month. Nary: So, they really spread it out, all of the angry people. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Clinton: If I understand correctly, they have staff that do nothing but turn-off, whereas we pretty much try to do it all in those two Wednesdays. I can see some benefits if we could eventually get into a process where we turned off daily. De Weerd: Then you have a daily threat. Clinton: Yes. And hazard pay for those individuals that we’re turning off and those representatives at the front counter. Correct. Are there any other questions? De Weerd: No. That looks good. Clinton: Thank you very much for your time. Smith: Thank you, Rick. Now, I’d like to have John Shawcroft, our Wastewater superintendent come forward and present the enhancements for the Wastewater Department. WASTEWATER TREATMENT PLANT Shawcroft: Thank you, Gary. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. It’s good to see you again. The Wastewater Department, basically, exists in order to serve the City of Meridian, as it says there, to protect public health, downstream users and the environment. We work within a lot of guidelines that the EPA gives us and also in conjunction with the DEQ. Where we try to go with this is to be as cost effective as we can and keep as much in-house to get the job done. Enhancement number one is just a lot of miscellaneous equipment that we need to just function day-to-day. Such things as computers, two of those. We’ve got a line locater, some microfilm reader, and that type of thing. Sampling equipment. This is just to support the MPDES requirement that’s upcoming, well, it’s actually here, but some of the implementation of some of the line items that are in that and also for some of our staff. The big one in here, I guess, would be this E-coli testing, which is starting up. We have to have that in and being done by, I believe it’s a year, before the end of permit. End of permit is November 2004. We’re looking to start that up. Instead of doing a list of enhancements for all of that equipment, I just put it all on one enhancement and threw it at you. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: Mr. Shawcroft, what is Gantry crane? Shawcroft: Very good question. I almost thought about addressing that, Councilman Bird. What that is, is we have a mechanical building and inside the mechanical building we have a pit. It’s about four feet deep. We have four big pumps in that and if we’ve got to pull one, up until now, well, in fact even right now, we have to put that on rollers and try to get it up the stairs and out the door so that we can pick it up and move it. So, a Gantry crane does, especially, a portable one, you can set it up over that equipment and pick it up and set it on the four feet up above on the floor to where you can get a Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 hold of it. It’s a back-saver for the mechanics. Any other questions on one? Enhancement number two is Wastewater thickener project. (Dissolved Air Flotation Thickener Project) This project is currently under design. It was, we thought, funded totally last year but the engineers, when the design was nearing the 90% base, indicated that we were, in fact, short. So, it’s on hold until we get the full funding. In fact, enhancement number three is the same way. It is a pre-design for capital projects currently underway and this is to fund the shortfall. Enhancement number four is Boise River outfall repair. Meridian has two outfalls. One goes to Five Mile Creek and the other one goes to the Boise River. Due to the amount of construction that was going on down Ten Mile, we fired up the Boise River alcohol pumps and found a couple of leaks, which we promptly fixed but we also found that the defusers that are underneath the Linder bridge were non-functional. We could pump but we didn’t have anywhere to pump it to. So, in order to maintain the outfall, we—I believe it was Keller Engineers we have working on it and I asked them what do you think it’s going to cost. They gave me a number. That’s what that number is but I think we’re looking at some options that will be considerably less money. NPDS permit requires that we keep that functional so that’s where that money is aimed. Enhancement number five is the Wastewater Treatment Plant operation and maintenance manuals. With every project that we get and every piece of equipment, we receive a technical manual. That technical manual includes things like what part, how to tear it down, and some very, very basic operational information. What it does not do is tell you how does this piece of equipment fit into the overall system. How do you operate it in conjunction with that system. One of the problems that we have without an owner manual is, when we get a new operator, we’re trying to train this operator, currently all we can do is say take this stack of technical manuals and start reading. It’s a very poor way to train. What this is intended to do is, to take all of the information in those manuals, put it on a CD so an operator can slide it in a computer then click on a pump and it’ll tell them where that pump is operated from, what it does for the system, what is the maintenance schedule for it, if it goes, what do you do. It’ll walk you right through it. I believe this is also going to go on for the Water Department. Is that correct? Is that the manual they were talking about? I was wrong. First time today. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Yes. Bird: This disc will give you how to turn on and start up and all that stuff right on the disc there so you never have to leave your computer? It will detail the whole thing for you. Shawcroft: Well, it will tell you how to do it. In here also is a telemetry enhancement. The telemetry enhancement is actually the control portion of that, that says they can get on the computer and tell these pumps when to ramp up and when to ramp down to maintain a certain flow rate. It doesn’t—the telemetry won’t tell them how—what is this doing for my system. Say you take a clarifier and these O & M manuals will actually break it down. It’ll show you the parts and the pieces and how does this thing function within the system. In fact, on a stand-alone basis, it’ll show you all the parts, where the Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 bearings are, and the whole nine yards. Even though they are related, they’re definitely not the same thing. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: John, in the enhancement sheet, it says the price estimate is per phone from Brown and Caldwell Engineering. Is that for the phone enhancement on the other enhancement or is that— Shawcroft: Councilman Nary, no, that is a misprint. Thank you very much. Nary: So, the price estimate is correct? Shawcroft: Yes, and I probably misprinted it, if the truth be known. Yes. I may have done a cut and paste and missed it. Nary: That’s okay. I just wanted to make sure the number was the right number. Shawcroft: Yes. The number is correct. DEQ, in fact, does require us to have a maintenance manual or an O & M manual and in the past, I have attempted to maintain that but what I have found is with Meridian growing as fast as it is and yours truly no longer being an actual operator, I’m not so sure that what I would actually write would be accurate. I don’t do that for a living anymore. It becomes problematic and it really should be written by an engineer who has the overall knowledge of what that system is supposed to do and knows how to put that on a disc on the computer. It’s a very specialized thing. De Weerd: And very well written, I might add. Shawcroft: Thank you. I appreciate that. De Weerd: No. His justification. Shawcroft: It was pretty easy once you start tying it to strategic planning. Enhancement number six is the actual phone system upgrade. The Wastewater Treatment plant has a Lucent system. In recent months—before here a year ago, we would have had to replace the whole system. As of six months, in fact, very recently maybe as much as four months ago, the system is no upgradeable. Instead of trying to find a whole new system, we just want to upgrade the existing system and retain it and do a little computer linkage. I need to get a phone out at the solids handling building and some methodology of alerting the operators that they have a phone call at night. They get into some of these high noise areas and the phone rings and they don’t get an answer. That makes a person very unhappy customers at four in the morning when they’re, you know, backing up. Whether that be a flashing light or what, I don’t know. We certainly need to investigate it and make it as low cost as possible. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nary: Couldn’t they just put phones that have forwarding capabilities, like a cord to a cell phone? Shawcroft: They do. They currently carry a cell phone. They, at times, cannot hear that cell phone even though it’s on their hip and it vibrates. We’ve had missed phone calls. Not a very good public relations thing there. The enhancement number seven is a centrate basin. What the centrate basin would do is, we currently run thermophilic digesters. We then thicken the solids that are in it and then we take that waste strain, which is the liquid portion and put it into our drain beds currently and then run it back through the night to keep the loading down on the Wastewater plant. What we’re finding is that as our loadings increase, our ability to control the feedback has diminished. We currently do not have an ammonia load limit to any of our outfalls. We used to but we were doing such a good job that they took it off of our permit. We will get that back if we can’t control it. De Weerd: That’s great. Shawcroft: Yes. This is to make sure that when we take that liquid portion, feed it back to the plant, we are not overloading that system. De Weerd: I’m sure your neighbors appreciate that too. Shawcroft: I’m sure they might. I’ve heard a discouraging word from one or two of them on occasion. Enhancement number eight is a safety consultant. This is one that is in conjunction with the Water Department and Public Works. It is to insure or at least take look at how the City approaches its safety issues. Such things as confined space entry, try and lower the number of time-loss accidents that are occurring at the Wastewater plant and the Water Department and probably Public Works. Just get us a good feel for where we’re at and where we need to go. Number nine is digester piping modifications. This is strictly an operational thing. We were looking and one thing we did not get when we built that new digester is a methane gas alarm. Since methane gas is explosive, we probably should pay attention to see if we have a leak on occasion. Right now, we don’t have that capability. This would add it and it would also—one of the things that we had not anticipated when we built the thermophilic digesters was the amount of water vapor that we would get off of that gas system coming off there. We did have water removal equipment but it’s overwhelmed and this is to add some additional and get that as dry as we can get it before we send it through our burning equipment. Right now, we heat those thermophilic digesters with methane and it saves the City about $4,000 a month by not burning natural gas. If we can keep it dry, the drier the better. Ten is the telemetry system. Here again, as I alluded to earlier, this is to take the existing system, which is mainly (inaudible) monitoring system and add some control features and make it a little more efficient. Eleven is the Black Cat Trunk and lift station that Brad had alluded to. Number twelve is our Wastewater Treatment Plant landscape phase three, which is the final, I guess you’d say, grass strip to the south of the entryway. We’ve done the northern part last year. We did the central part this year and that’s the final phase. One thing that we try to do is to keep a very clean and appealing plant and it’s been an ongoing work for the last ten years, started by my predecessor, Earl Ward. We’ve just continued. I believe that’s all of the enhancements. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Corrie: Any questions or comments? Bird: I have none. Shawcroft: Thank you very much. Bird: Thank you, John. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: You know, I think during testimony received this last year that concerns the area around the Wastewater Treatment Plant, we’ve seen how important the perception is of that landscaping and how that really does clean up the image. So, it— ***End of Side Six*** PUBLIC WORKS Smith: --system. Enhancement number two is the EPA phase two stormwater permit application. This is really a partnership that we will begin with the Highway District, with irrigation districts and with others that are concerned with handling of stormwater. Enhancement number three, miscellaneous technology needs. This is a compellation of some miscellaneous technology equipment that we need to continue to do the work that we do. There’s a half dozen items there. I think they’re all pretty self-explanatory from the personal PDA for a staff engineer, remote access computer software, auto-cad subscription for our six current licenses, hand-held GPS unit, which will be part of helping us with establishing of our GIS, a 21 inch monitor for our mapping technician, which allows him to better manipulate the mapping requirements for our sewer and water system without incurring any excessive amounts of headaches from looking at the monitor and then project managing scheduling software. Enhancement number four, we’ve got a 1988 Buick LaSabre that is in need of some repair. It’s really a pretty good vehicle. It doesn’t get used a lot but it is in good condition and we need to do some front-end work in order to maintain that condition. Enhancement number five is a new vehicle. With the increase in staff, we need another vehicle. We find ourselves, more often than not, without a vehicle and so myself or Brad will need to use personal vehicles to attend a meeting with our staff out in the field more and more. Brad and I have encouraged our technicians to get out into the field and observe the projects that are coming before you for approval or coming into the City for review of the plan, development plans, to go out into the field and look at the project before the development. It helps them in the review of their plans. This vehicle is proposed as a four-wheel drive vehicle just to allow us to access inclement areas, if need be. Enhancement number six is addition of a new staff engineer. Our present staff engineer is very capable, in fact, outstandingly capable, but I don’t want to press the issue and have a little burnout go on here. He’s got a lot of projects that he’s managing and so the primary emphasis for this individual would be to help manage project control on our Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Public Works projects that are underway. This would range from inspection of the projects or construction observation, I should say, to handling the paperwork that comes in on the projects. Enhancement number seven is for microfilming. We started microfilming, I think it was two years ago, for our records. We continue to do that process. This would be an extension of that. We’re getting closer but we still have a ways to go. We’ve been microfilming files, 8 ½ by 11 files, and we’re wanting to move into microfilming of some of our mapping. Right now, we have our one remaining vacant office tied up with plan storage and we need to get that taken care of. In fact, we’re going to have to move those out of there even before they’re microfilmed, assuming that we get approval on our staff engineer position. The last item is that we need some bookshelves installed in the engineering area. We just have run out of space for handling our reference material. That’s a list of the enhancements for the engineering division of the Public Works Department. Do you have any questions that I could answer for you? De Weerd: I have none. Bird: I have none, Mayor. Corrie: Thank you, Gary. Smith: Thank you, Mr. Mayor and Council members. Brad’s putting up some information of just what our Public Works vision is. Our continued residential and commercial growth, creating greater demands, our expectations for expanded services, our expectations for better, more accessible information, more complex regulatory compliance. In that regard, we will continue to operate in a progressive, productive and professional manner to meet growing expectation for services, stricter regulatory environment, and demand for better and more accessible information. We believe in this community. We do. Can we go back? We believe in this community. We embrace the opportunity to serve and protect the public trust. We hold ourselves to high standards of fiscal responsibility, personal integrity, honesty and fairness. We thank you for your continued support over the last year and we look forward to another busy and exciting year. Once again, I extend my sincere thanks to you and to Public Works staff, Engineering, Wastewater, Water Department, MUBS, everyone. We really appreciate it. And Accounting. I’m sorry. A little prompting from the background. I do want to say, too, before I have to sit down, the length of time that I’ve been here, I’ve seen the City of Meridian evolve from, as you’ve all heard before, a sleepy little bird, more or less, to a very busy and thriving city. In that evolution, I’ve seen people come to work for us that have brought great talents and great abilities and are doing a wonderful job. Our finance director being one of them. She’s pushing me. De Weerd: Let me see the finger behind your back. Smith: Yes. Correct. Anyway, it’s been an exciting time and I think that we are at a position where we are because of your staff, all the way around. I appreciate being a member. Thank you. Bird: We agree wholeheartedly, Gary. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Corrie: Thank you very much. Thank you to you and your staff. Good job. Thank you. Kilchenmann: Mr. Mayor and members of Council. I think that was an excellent job. They really did a good job of tying the strategic plan into their enhancements. I do appreciate working with Public Works. It’s really enjoyable. We have scheduled Administration for in the morning but I think we have ample time just to go ahead and get through it because it’s not very long. If you want to take maybe a ten minute break while we set up again, I think we have all of the administrative people here and ready to go, if that would be agreeable. Corrie: We’ll be back at five after 3:00. RECESS Corrie: All right. Stacy. FINANCE DEPARTMENT Kilchenmann: Mayor and members of Council. We saved the best for last, the Administrative budget enhancement requests and your accomplishments. When we speak of administration, we include the following departments in administration. The Mayor, the Council, other government, which includes legal, the Finance Department, Human Resources and the City Clerk’s Department. We included all of those different departments and individuals under the broad umbrella of administration. You’ve heard today all of the requests and different departments talk about people they want to add and the sizes of their departments and so forth. It’s important to remember that when we add in the outlining or the direct cost, we also impact the administration, who provide the support for all those departments and all those people. We wanted to talk a little about the impact that the rest of the City’s operations have on those people that work within City Hall. In Human Resources, it’s kind of interesting just to look at some of the things that that department has done this year. They processed 30 new hires. They reviewed almost 1,500 applications. This is just year-to-date. The year is not finished. They placed 53 job advertisements, processed 28 internal job actions, administered a drug and alcohol testing for 186 full and part-time employees, processed almost 600 employee changes, held open enrollment and information sessions for all of the employees for insurance, 401K and PERSI. Those are just kind of routine operations. In addition, they’ve completed several special projects. One huge project is the standard operating policy and procedure manual, sexual harassment training. They conduct salary surveys for not only existing classes, but all of the positions and new positions that were presented to you today that they have reviewed and conducted salary surveys for. They re-class and re-factor new and then re-class position descriptions. They process worker’s comp, disability, and family medical leave. They have a new process for that. They updated the affirmative action plan and then created and revised all of the HR forms. The Finance Department has processed, year-to-date, 9,000 vendor invoices, prepared over 2,000 payroll checks and 3,900 payable checks, tracked 2,700 lines of asset inventory, entered 2,500 cash receipts, invoiced 200 receivable transactions and completed some special projects such as the revenue Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 manual, a purchasing policy, put together the monthly financial statement package and written a budget development manual. The City Clerk, and this again, is just a nine month workload, has processed 147 land-use applications, processed 174 licenses and permits, taken minutes for meetings, agenda, and notices for 108 different types of activities, then 29 ordinances, 7 resolutions, 2 judicial reviews, 22 formal research requests and processed 14 tort claims. In addition, their special projects, which are big, paper heavy special projects, general election for two Council seats. Isn’t that with like Will? Special election for the mill levy adjustment, a huge project were the lap tops for the Mayor and the Council and the paperless meeting packets, combined with the document imaging and record retention retrieval process. That really, again, is a huge project. Then, they conduct the annual facilities safety inspection. I’ll go first and then Pauline, Will, and Bill will also talk to you. The first and only enhancement request for accounting is the information technology coordinator. If you remember, when we did the City-wide strategic plan, our strategic plan challenge number seven was that the City and the surrounding area has experienced rapid growth with corresponding growth in the number of services and employees who are dependent on computers and information systems. This growing demand has outpaced the City’s ability to meet new service demands and incorporate efficiencies available through technology. Adequate planning and even a moderate budget allocation would address adequate technology to meet this challenge. So, the goal that went along with challenge number seven was to increase City-wide system compatibility and data sharing capabilities, increase the overall efficiency and effectiveness of City government, employees and services, increase system and data security, increase public usability and relevance of the web page, another electronically produced information, and increase purchasing efficiencies and cost savings through electronic technology. So, we feel that we can address this challenge number seven by adding a position that would be called an IT Coordinator. Some of the responsibilities and functions, and in your manual is a job description for this position, but just to highlight some of those functions would be planning and development of telecommunication systems and budgets. I think, as you review the City-wide and all the computer requests that have been turned in, you can see how nice it would be to have one person responsible for those and have those presented to you by one person as a packet City-wide. They will monitor and approve contracts with software and hardware vendors and work with users to develop contract specifications and evaluate responses. I think this would kind of go along with the question that Councilman Nary asked about the Parks recreation system. Is this the best system? Is this the direction we want to go? Have we included all of our needs in the contract and then, to make sure that the contractor follows up and is responsive to the City? Then, day-to-day assistance with hardware and software problems. That’s just somebody that’s available to take care of if the printers not working, e-mail problems, etc. Responsible for information system security, internal controls and backup. I can’t stress how important this is and what a big hole we have in that area right now. Just for example, something that’s fresh in our minds, Rick’s telemetry system that he was talking about, that system right now really doesn’t have adequate security or control. That’s something that if that was tampered with could really create a large amount of damage. Responsible for hardware and software system license. Once again, that’s something critical that we need to track and have another responsibility of one person. Then, finally, responsible for maintaining and updating the City web page. So, this person would make sure that all of the departments have their, for example, for us, Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 make sure we have our financial statements updated, etc. The very, very good news with this is that it’s only a moderate budget increase. The impact to the general fund is only $3,000. The impact to the special services fund is actually a negative $10,000 and the impact to the enterprise fund is $23,300. So, because we are able to transfer existing contract money and still leave operating money available for the departments for their software upgrades and licenses and so forth, we impact the City overall only $16,300. That’s a very special budget day price. That we’re giving today. Our green light special. Blue light special. Bird: That’s for this year or next year? Kilchenmann: Next year. 2003. Bird: So, we can come in and ask for three more of them. Kilchenmann: No. To address that question of asking for three more of them— De Weerd: At least he’s predictable. Kilchenmann: Yes. We have talked extensively with our contractor that we have currently. He actually did, and I think I’ve included it, what percent of time that he would spend on what area. He keeps a log of the time and exactly what he does. He printed it out and we reviewed it for the time that he’s been doing this service. He felt that one person would be more than adequate for several years for the City. There are a few items that we would contract out. Some of the work on the Lennox server that Public Works has is very specialized. We may need to contract that out. If we did some major server work, we might have to contract for an additional person. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: Stacy, what are we actually spending now for our IT service? Would this—as I understand it, the Police have their own IT contract that they have do and you’re just telling us that we’d have to hire outside people probably to do Public Works stuff, their system. What is our contract running now and how many hours is our IT person spending on this system a week? Kilchenmann: Mr. Mayor and Councilman Bird, the Lennox server—actually, the same contractor is doing all of our departments. The only thing that when the Police moved their server—they bought a bigger server and then they moved the server. In order to get it done over the week-end, he did contract with another hardware person to assist him over the week-end. The Public Works Lennox server, they actually—one contractor tried to—Reta can probably answer better than I can so I’ll let her finish it. Cunningham: We had one contractor come in and bring up the Lennox server. When we switched to the new contractor, Public Works was experiencing lots of problems, especially with their PT Win Software, which a building permit software, and they found Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 out that it was not compatible with the Lennox software or with that BM Ware, so we had to switch back. We actually had to pay for this new contractor to come in and bring us back to the Windows 2000, which actually cost the City about an extra $4,000. Bird: How much? Cunningham: $4,000. We’re trying, isn’t that right Mayor, to get that back out of the previous contractor. Corrie: That’s correct. Bird: What is our IT service under contract running per fiscal year? $10,000, $5,000, $150,000? Cunningham: Keith, we actually have $126,900 that’s in the current budget year. Bird: $126,900. How much do we have to use? Cunningham: I can go run a report. I can’t come up off the top of my head with a number for you. Bird: No. No. I mean, have we approximately used 60%, 70%? What is their average hours a week that’s spent? Cunningham: Keith, in some of the departments, we’ve actually gone over the budget and in other departments, you know, they’re still well under. You look at like the Water Department, they’re spending a lot more on IT than they were in past years. Rick has come in there and he’s wanting, you know, a certain level of service plus he’s trying to get that new system up and going. He’s looking at security. He’s bringing up a DSL. He’s needing them on IT support. Bird: But, if you hire an IT person, you’re still some of the security and some of that kind of stuff is going to have to be done by an outside contractor. Cunningham: I don’t think so, Keith. I think that we could someone in here that can do that security. We definitely, with the previous contractor, we didn’t have the security that we needed to have at the City. They assured us that everything was in place. I witnessed, I saw, they brought me in and said, Reta, this is what kind of holes you have with a new contractor. I think when you’ve got an employee, they’re looking for the best interest of the City and also, you’ve got to remember that they’re going to be under Finance and Finance, I think, is conservative. We don’t come to you guys asking for a lot of new people. You know, we make do. I really believe that we need this. I see a lot of stuff out there that tells me we need this. We’ve got people buying different types of machines in different areas of the City. We have them buying, you know, the flat screens, you know, buying stuff that is totally unnecessary. Then, we have, in accounting, we’re using our machines to up to 83%. Even the IT says, he’s going, you know, you should switch some of your machines from this department to this Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 department and better use of our resources. You know, some of the things he can’t suggest, not being an employee. Bird: No. I understand. But, your idea of having this person would control all of the computer buying throughout the City so that we don’t have 60 different types of computers and they don’t interact or do this kind of stuff. You’re foreseeing this gentleman do this or woman doing this. Cunningham: Absolutely. That’s the way we would like to see it. Bird: You foresee her working under the financial, treasurer, and financial officer’s department. Cunningham: Yes. That’s where the position is wanted. Bird: And you promise me that you won’t be back in for three years, at least, asking for any more. Cunningham: I promise you. We won’t. Bird: I don’t want to have to worry— Cunningham: Write that down. 2005. We won’t be coming back. Bird: Thank you, guys, very much. You had $126,000 budgeted last year. Cunningham: Yes. Bird: You’ve probably will use about 60% of it. I mean, his or her salary isn’t going to be the only thing we spend. We’ve still got parts and stuff, which these people have to do. Cunningham: Yes. We’re still leaving $75,000 in-- Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: One of the concerns I have, though, is in our purchasing policy, it leaves that level of discretion currently to the departments to decide what programs to buy, what computers to buy and all those things. I assume part of this, you’d have to revise that as well so that all of that information or that purchasing would go through the IT person. Is that right? Cunningham: Yes. Nary: Okay. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Corrie: To answer that from the Mayor’s standpoint, we need a central source. I tried to keep it all together and it got to be an impossibility. We’ve got people scattered everywhere. Plus my job and everything else. The computer was not my number one problem and it got back to the point that they were just moving everywhere and trying to get it under one thing. I wasn’t too convinced of an IT earlier. I was like Keith. I had some problems with that. That’s been cleared up and, as far as I’m concerned, I think it’s money well spent for us to have it under one and have that responsibility for that one person. Bird: Mayor, I agree with you. Corrie: I understand what you’re saying. Bird: I just have to go back to the record of, you know, if you hire one one year and two the next. De Weerd: What record? We don’t have a record. We have no people. Bird: No. I mean other departments. Nary: Well, Mrs. De Weerd, the other thing I would say, and I’ve had a couple of e- mails with Stacy awhile back about purchasing in general. This is a step to maybe at some point in the future looking at (inaudible) not another person, necessarily, but at least it’s a duty for somebody to be that purchasing agent. Bird: I agree with you 100% there. Nary: That way, it’s more centralized and it isn’t everybody buying six different things. Bird: I agree with you. De Weerd: Or really expensive computers when they don’t even need that speed for word processing. Nary: Right. Exactly. De Weerd: Okay. We all agree Kilchenmann: Okay. Just one final thing on computers. The finance—our capital outlay replacement request. We are asking to replace four of our computers. I’m also going to include a Human Resources computer in this. The justification for that is that we have four Micron 1999, 350 megahertz accounting computers. We are probably some of the heaviest application users in the City. Just as an example of some software that the City was looking at, we got—our IT person loaded some software that measures how much free space is available and the application use and so forth. The City is currently purchasing computers that have an equivalent of 2,000 megahertz. These computers are operating on 350. He suggested that we take those accounting computers that we have now and they could be used for somebody that’s just doing Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 word processing. The report that he ran on free space available and the number of crashes, the Human Resource computer is absolutely the very worst computer in the entire City. It crashes continually and she only has 17% space available. She is on her computer constantly. The other four accounting computers are up there. The other computer in administration that we’re asking to replace is the Mayor’s assistant. She has only got 41% available. So, those computers are the worst computers in the City and have the least amount of space available. I actually have that report that lists all of the computers but I didn’t think you’d probably want to see them but most of the others are in the upper 80’s. That’s just to explain why we’re asking to—we thought about asking to replace just two. The problem is that all four of them were purchased at the same time. Pauline’s, I don’t know where she got that. Oh, at the same time, that she inherited it. The Mayor’s too. Okay. The next area is other government. I put together the enhancement request for each of these but I’m not necessarily the expert on them. The first one is Meridian Development Corporation. Actually, I believe that Jim Johnson was going to come and talk about that so maybe we could just leave that one until tomorrow at 9:30 and let him. That would be the only remaining presentation we have, is for him to talk about the detail that backs that one up. The second one is the Victim Witness Coordinator. Bill Nichols is here and he’ll talk to you about that one. Nichols: Mayor and members of the Council. Thank you for the opportunity to address you on this issue. This is the earliest we’ve addressed any issue pertaining to the retainer in the years that Dwight Peterson has had the contract in terms of any issues, dollar-wise or otherwise. I would like to first thank you for the opportunity to represent the City in our different capacities. I think I’ve expressed to each of you or to the group as a whole how much I appreciate the ability to render services to the City and I consider it dynamic and good legal work and I appreciate the ability to do so. Please accept my thanks for having the opportunity to work with you. In regards to the Victim Witness Coordinator position, let me review what we do staffing-wise right now. We have two prosecutor positions in Meridian. One that Larry Moore was in. We have moved Nick Wollen into that full-time. We have Pam Tarlow and Nick Wollen doing prosecution for the City of Meridian. We have two support staff people, full-time support staff people. We have Christy Stottlemeyer and Wendy Blythe. Wendy has been with us for quite awhile and she started out as a prosecution support person and then, incorporated into some of her duties, victim witness issues. The victim witness coordinator is an outgrowth of a constitutional amendment that was passed in 1994, which is found in Article 1, Section 22 of the Idaho Constitution. The victim witness coordinator’s position is basically mandated by that constitutional provision, which says that victims are entitle to certain rights in the criminal justice system. They’re entitle to get notice of hearings, sentencings, release of offenders and different items associated with that. Where we see it most critical is in domestic violence cases. Victim witness coordinators go to court with victims. They help them find counseling. They do a lot of different things. Wendy Blythe has been doing that, in addition to her other duties. We’re seeing an increased need for this so we’ve asked that the retainer be increased by $32,000 so that we could have a full-time victim witness coordinator who would also do some prosecution support when the victim witness coordination is not critical or needed. So that, essentially, would be another support staff person. So, we would ask you to consider that request. I’ll answer any questions you have. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Mr. Nichols, what’s the $32,000? Where’s the number? Nichols: The $32,000 is based upon what we estimated we would pay the person plus benefits and some equipment. There’s no profit and overhead built into the number. Nary: Chief Worley, this morning, had presented a—one of the enhancements for him was a contract with Garden City for the fine enforcement. Did your firm explore contracting with, say Garden City, to share the services or would the City of Boise, who already has five victim witness coordinators, to share the service rather than having to stand a lone person doing that? Nichols: Councilman Nary, Mayor, members of the Council. First, with regard to the Police Department request on a fine enforcement officer, we initiated that issue. Our office did. We didn’t care if it was in our budget or the Police Department budget. There was already some talk about Meridian and Garden City sharing that fine enforcement officer position so it made sense to us to have that in the Police Department budget. That was an enhancement that was added on late in their presentation or the preparation of their presentation. With regard to asking Boise City or Garden City, no we didn’t. The reason that we didn’t is, I guess you could say it was my decision to not do that because we didn’t see us as a private law firm contracting with a public entity for a portion of a position. If the City wants to fund this as a City employee or a reimbursement type thing with Garden City or Boise City, I’m not opposed to that. We just see a need for the position. So, we got the number based upon what we felt we would pay the person plus benefits and equipment. Nary: So, would it be fair to say, from the last thing you just said, would your firm and you identify that this particular need is an enhancement the City could use, whether it’s funded through your firm at this dollar amount or sought through a contract with one of the other agencies that already have that level of service. It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter to Dwight Peterson. I mean, if we want to contract with the City of Boise’s police victim witness program, the City of Boise could do that. It doesn’t make any difference as long as we get the service going. Nichols: Councilman Nary, Mayor and members of the Council. I think you know that these people work with the prosecutors and that’s a critical part of it. Again, I didn’t put any profit and overhead in this position. If the $32,000 can be used to contract with another agency to provide those services to victims and witnesses in Meridian cases, that’s okay by me. Nary: Does this $32,000 figure include training? (inaudible) and organizations and those kinds of things? Nichols: Councilman Nary, Mayor and members of the Council. We’ve factored in some training plus part of our thought was we would probably move Wendy Blythe into Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 that position. She’s already done training. She went to the three days in June conference. She’s done some training for Victim Witness Coordinator. She’s attended inter-agency meetings. So, she’s done a lot of that already. Part of that was, we already have done some training within the context to the existing retainer. Yes. You could say it was inclusive. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: I just have one more question, Mr. Nichols. On the enhancement sheet, when it talks about major objectives, it says that this position would seek innovative means to balance preventative programs, would control criminal investigations service response activities, to create a stronger environment for preventing crime before it occurs or escalates in the City. How do you see this position doing that? Nichols: Councilman Nary, Mayor and members of the Council. The Victim Witness Coordinator also coordinates with the Prosecution and with the Police Department in terms of, are there some preventative programs, are there some training type things. I think part of what you see in your enhancement, though, came out of some stuff that Wendy Blythe provided to the Finance Director that was pulled from some other agencies. I’d have to get her in here and have her explain to you how that part of it would work. Nary: Do you think there’s a conflict or at least a potential conflict in having your firm, and I don’t know who the intended supervisor is supposed to be, yourself or Mr. Nye or someone, but for them all working for the same firm, I mean, I guess I see—sometimes there’s a problem in what victim witness coordinators objectives are versus what the prosecutor’s objectives are. If they all have the same supervisor, sometimes there’s a conflict or at least there’s an appearance of conflict between these parties. I don’t know—how are you folks anticipating dealing with that kind of thing? Nichols: Councilman Nary, Mayor and members of the Council. In the work that Wendy Blythe has done with our office, the issue of a conflict hasn’t come up. It doesn’t mean there isn’t the potential for one and, obviously, Boise City is going to see a whole lot more cases than we do. Perhaps you have some personal experience with that but we haven’t seen the conflict issues come up in terms of what a prosecutor wants to do and what the victim wants to do. I don’t know if you mean in terms of the victim wanting a particular sentence and the prosecutors think something else is appropriate. We haven’t seen those types of issues. At least, not that I’m aware of. I think they’re a pretty vocal bunch and if Wendy was upset at one of the prosecutors over an issue with a sentencing recommendation or something like that, I think I would have heard it. Nary: Okay. Thank you. Corrie: Any other questions? Bird: I have none. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nichols: Mr. Mayor and members of the Council, if I can just one final thing. It doesn’t really have to do with an enhancement but I would just like to again thank the Council and remind them that it is a firm that you’ve hired to do this work and I’d just kind of run through, just briefly, some of the other lawyers that you may or may not have seen do some of the work for you. Terry White has provided us some background information. A lot of times, if an issue comes up, I can go to him and it shortcuts a lot of the research because of his extensive background in municipal government. Chris Nye had done the judicial review litigation for the City. He’s done some litigation issues pertaining to construction on the Wastewater issue on the possible eminent domain of a sewer easement. He’s done those for the City of Nampa and he helped Public Works with that. He also is overseeing prosecution. Sam Johnson helped Public Works on a litigation issue. He’s also covered Council for me when I was ill and gone. Julie Fisher has helped Human Resources. She’s also a water rights person that assist Public Works with water rights issues. Nick Wollen has worked also with P & Z and we’re trying to do better with those recommendations and those issues. Last year, Kevin Denney did the judicial confirmation on the new Police building. Just a reminder that I may be the only face that you see but I’m not the only person behind the contract. Again, we appreciate the work. We enjoy doing it. If you have any other questions, I’d be glad to answer them. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Mr. Nichols, on the contract currently through the Planning and Zoning, I noted in the stuff and I asked Mrs. Stiles this morning, is about $90,000. Is that, basically, for the attendance of the attorney at the meetings and the preparation of recommendations? Is that what that covers? Nichols: Mr. Nary, Mayor and members of the Council. We don’t, internally, break out the dollars. We try to figure out how to staff everything and it fluctuates from time to time. The $90,000 does not just include the attendance of the lawyer at the meetings, preparation of recommendations, preparation of findings. There are other parts of the Planning and Zoning, such as ordinance revision, ordinance review. There’s also matters pertaining to, you have a development, you have an issue with the developer, we get a call from the Public Works department or the Planning and Zoning department, how do you handle this particular issue. There’s advice pertaining to those issues that all go into that Planning and Zoning department representation. In all honesty, a good portion of my time is spent dealing with Planning and Zoning issues. That’s true. Some of that has to do with preparation of the findings. Nary: So, some of—so that $90,000, some of that money is billed as your time in preparing the findings that we decide on? Nichols: Yes. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nary: So, the $390,000 that’s in the general Mayor and Council administrative budget—how do you decide which one goes in which pot? Nichols: Councilman Nary, Mayor and members of the Council. We haven’t, again, I think that’s an issue for your Finance Director in terms of how the pot is divided up amongst those items. When the contract initially started, it started at, I believe, a certain price per month or may even have started out on an hourly basis. I wasn’t here then. Then, we entered into a contract with the City. We would provide X services for a set dollar per month and we provided those services. Then, the contract has been adjusted through the years. Nary: So, when you assess—there’s a certain dollar amount that’s paid to your firm per month, correct? Nichols: Yes. Nary: How do you assess that you’ve hit that number or exceeded that number or does it make no difference? Does it make any difference at all? Nichols: Councilman Nary, Mayor and members of the Council. We try to review the total hours that lawyers spend on Meridian matters as a total amount. We don’t ask the prosecutors to log their time the way we do civil lawyers. We don’t have them, you know, whether they work eight hours or ten hours in a day. We judge what they do based upon what we see, which is, we know when they start work and we know when they go home and we know what they’re doing. We don’t ask them to log time or punch cards or that sort of thing. We look at, basically, primarily I guess you’d say, we look at the lawyers that put in time on the civil side and what else they do besides what they do on the civil side. Nary: So, do you assess by rate about how much per hour your time is versus Mr. Wollen’s time versus Miss Tarlow’s time? Is that how you do it? Nichols: Well— Nary: --how do they come to $40,000 unless there’s some relationship to rate of pay that someone is getting paid? That’s how you came up with $32,000. I don’t understand. Nichols: Councilman Nary, Mayor and members of the Council. I can’t tell you how the initial $33,000 number came up. It’s $40,000 now. It was initially $33,000. I can tell you that the increase from 33 to 36 had to do with increase in the amount of prosecution had to do with additional staff people and had to do with building in some time that was available for civil code enforcement. That’s how that additional $6,000 a month got built in. Plus, there was additional time of mine. We went from two meetings a month to four meetings a month. We went from 33 to 39. In this last year, we only increased $1,000 a month. That didn’t really cover just the percentage increase as in salary for those that were working on the contract. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nary: So, it’s just a blended rate of all of the attorneys and all of the staff in that $40,000 figure. That’s not related to how many hours of time we have. If we use your firm for 50 hours in the month or use it for 500 hours in the month, it’s the same. Nichols: Exactly. Nary: And you don’t account for it back to the City by hour, by work product, by time that the staff spent preparing documents, none of that? Nichols: Councilman Nary— ***End of Side Seven*** Nichols: --we have provided to the Finance Department an accounting and detail of hours spent on the civil side but not on the criminal side. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: I recall, Mr. Nary, that when we originally, at $33,000 and don’t ask me how we came up with that and there is some extra if they do civil at a certain amount per hour, which they have to account for that but that was a blank contract that they were not required to turn their hours in or anything like that. It was just something that we felt that we were saving the City, at that point, a pretty substantial amount of money in the legal department and getting it done in a very accurate time because of the assets that they had. That’s the way it come up and then each year it’s raised a little as the cost of living went up and stuff like that for them. That’s how it started, Bill. Corrie: Yes. And any litigations above and beyond what was there, was charged. Yes. Nichols: Mr. Mayor and members of the Council. Just to emphasize, though, I believe that the judicial review at the District Court level is included in the retainer. I think. I believe that it’s only when it goes on appeal, that it’s outside. I could be wrong. Bird: You’re right. Corrie: That’s correct. Bird: I think that’s the contract, isn’t it, that it has to be appealed or something like that? The standard procedure is part of your contract, isn’t it, Mr. Nichols? Nichols: Councilman Bird, Mayor and members of the Council. That’s my understanding of the contract, so that when somebody files a judicial review at the District Court level, that’s all included in the retainer. Bird: That’s mine, too. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nichols: Thank you. Kilchenmann: The next item in other government is a maintenance person. This actually originated from the Police Department so I’m going to say what Mike told me to say. With the new building, there’s a great deal more equipment to take care of and operating systems to take care of. He does not feel that he has staff available to take of those. For example, he said in the old building, they had two HVAC systems and the new building, they have 19 HVAC systems. He said this year it probably is not as crucial because a lot of those items are under warranty but in the future he feels that it will be an issue. He said he didn’t think that he could keep a full-time person busy so the idea came to pass that it would be a maintenance person for the general fund as a whole but it would be under the direction of Gary because he would probably be the person that would be the most qualified to manage and supervise that person. If there’s any questions, maybe the Mayor and Will could help me answer them. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: I think Chief Worley was right. He’s got a year’s warranty on all of his equipment out there, unless it’s an act of God or abuse. I don’t know as a maintenance person on the way we’re scattered around and stuff at this point is going to be that beneficial, in my mind, for the simple fact that you’re not going to find a person that can do HVAC, electrical, doorknobs, all that stuff in one person. All you’re basically doing is getting a guy that’s going to coordinate with a sub so Will won’t have to, that’s going to call the repair people. That’s going to happen at each building. I mean, you know, he’s going to have separate deals. I think this is something, if and when we do get a new City Hall with much more space, that you would look at getting. Kilchenmann: I agree. Corrie: Will, just off the top of your head, how much do you think you spend on maintenance people that come around doing different things that— Berg: I’m inclined to agree with Keith but I just— Corrie: --Do you have any idea? It’s pretty short notice of asking that question. Okay. You answered. I don’t know myself. Bird: Do you really think, at this point, that it’s necessary? We’ve got so many different buildings and many different systems in our locking and stuff that you’re not going to find one person for that kind of a cost. So, you’re going to, basically, just have some guy running around being— Kilchenmann: --making phone calls. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Bird: --hiring subs or professionals to come and do each deal. Now, once we get into a big building like the City of Boise or Ada County Courthouse, yes, you can get a guy that’s capable of doing that kind of stuff and he’s in one location. Corrie: I think we need to probably keep an eye on some of the cost and see where it’s coming in and find out for sure. I think it’s less than $41,000, though. Bird: Yes, I do too. Kilchenmann: The last two items represent substantial increase in dues, a request for increase in dues. The Treasure Valley Transit, they want to—let’s see—they’re requesting a 50% match for Federal transit administration funds. What they want to do is increase the service to the full-day route and I think I included their letter or quoted from their letter, in their enhancement request. The second one is for the ACHD shuttle bus. They’re just saying that it costs $19,000 a day to operate the shuttle and they’re asking for various cities to foot more of the bill. We included in your manual just a list of all the dues we pay into the different transportation programs. I’m not extremely familiar with all of the differences in each of those. Maybe Will or somebody is more familiar with how they operate and if they overlap each other. De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: Why aren’t they here making this presentation? I don’t even know what our ridership is, what the need for the increase is. Is it they’re asking Meridian to support Caldwell, who pays $3,000? You know, this tells me nothing. Especially, in our budget year where we are looking at tremendous cuts from these requests that are very legitimate requests. I want to support mass transit but how can we make decisions with these numbers when we don’t know what the ridership is, what is prompting them to increase service. You know, have they lost Federal funds and they’re asking cities to make up for it. In the past, we’ve had them come to us and give us an overview and that sort of thing but this really doesn’t tell me anything other than they want more money. I don’t know if that means more service to our citizens or not or if I’m just making up for what Canyon County can’t support. I know this isn’t on your shoulders, Stacy, but I can’t do anything with this information. I can say we’re committed to it, we could continue to do what we’ve done in the past but for additional money requests, I would like to know why other than they have a shortfall. Kilchenmann: Mayor and members of the Council. I think that the Treasure Valley Transit just want an increased number of routes. I’m not sure about the other one. I agree with you. I think maybe we need to have—we pay dues to so many programs, maybe we should have presentations by all of them and figure out which ones we think are important or which ones you think are important to support. I don’t think we’d be able to continue to support all of them on an increasing dues levels. Corrie: I think it would be a good idea, Stacy, to get a hold of Valley Ride, with Randy or Kelly, and have them come in and talk to the Council. Part of it is 23A-46, particularly, Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 above 16. The 17-5 and 12-5 is staying from last year the same this year but there was quite an increase in Valley Ride. (inaudible) to us and see what that is because that, and we might even have Treasure Valley Transportation come in and explain why it’s staying the same because that’s the mid-day express. It’s the same as it was last year. Kilchenmann: Okay. We can do that. So, that concludes other government. Now, I will turn it over to Pauline for Human Resources. HUMAN RESOURCES Skeggs: Council members and Mayor, I want to give you a quick overview of the budget dollars at work. In your book, it only had information on six months. That’s why Reta handed you the handout. That gives you—I went back and put in all of the information to bring you up to date on stuff that HR has done. The information, basically, it’s really hard to quantify Human Resources because, you know, it depends on the employees demands, challenges, relations and issues done on a day to day basis. Therefore, the information listed, only list those records that we maintain. Of course, most of it is self-explanatory. However, you need to understand that there are several steps that go into each of these processes. Bill Nary, Councilman Nary, having an HR background, probably is the only one that understands what I’m talking about. An example would be, take the first one, a new hire. There’s several steps in hiring a new employee. It just doesn’t mean, okay, we get a new hire and then we’re done. Basically, it starts with a staffing requisition. You know, after we get the staffing requisition, I review it against the budget to make sure that they have the money, make sure that the position is justified. Once I do that and approve it, I send it to the Mayor for approval. After it gets approved, then, basically what we do is, we prepare the job advertisement that gets sent out to the Department Heads to review. They review it, make some corrections to it and then what we do is, we place it in various newspapers, publications, unemployment offices, it may be at schools, you know, it depends on the position. From there, we prepare the internal job posting. After we do the internal job posting and after the position closes, that’s when I go and I review all the job applications that we’ve received. I compare it with the job descriptions. This year, so far, I’ve reviewed 1,478. From those qualified applicants, those are the ones that I send to the Department Head for review and then the Department Head will determine who they want to interview from those qualified applications. Either HR or the Department Heads can set up the interview. We kind of leave it up to the department to do that. Also, once the applicant is chosen, then either my department, myself, or the Department Head will call the references on the individual. I have a standard form if the Department Head does it that they utilize for that. Then, from that, well, actually set up the interviews and then from the interviews, we call the references and then when we make an offer, either HR makes an offer or the Department Head makes an offer. If the Department Head makes an offer, I follow up, of course, with an acceptance letter and I contact the individuals and let them know that the position is contingent on them going through a criminal background check if they’re in a safety sensitive position or if they’re not, then have to go through the drug and alcohol and drug test. So, I set up an appointment with the new applicant to come in and basically go over those drug and alcohol policy with them and have them sign the consent form and then, at that point, I send them down for that alcohol and drug testing. If they’re in a safety sensitive Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 position, at that point, we do the fingerprints and then we send the fingerprints to the State Police and then they send it to the FBI. Normally, it takes about six weeks for us to receive it back. That’s why the offer of employment is contingent on them completing the criminal background check. The Police, however, handle the Law Enforcement applicants. They do the criminal background check for that. Once that’s completed, the Department Head completes the personnel action request form, which I review and then after I review it against the budget, I sent it to the Mayor for signature. Then, of course, on the first day of employment, HR handles the orientation to explain the policy and benefits. Then, of course, all of the paperwork flow comes back to HR and there’s several processes that we have to do after we receive the paperwork back, like processing all of their health insurance, setting them up on payroll, putting them in our access data bases. There’s a lot of processes that go in place. So, when you look at the listing it just, you know, to look at it you’re like okay 30 new hires, that’s not a whole lot but there’s a lot of processes that beyond each of these processes that are listed there. On the other area of the budget dollars are the time spent on special projects. Basically, I put together a training book and a video on sexual harassment for new hires, implemented a City-wide alcohol and drug testing program and trained employees and supervisors, finalized the policy and procedure manual, participated and initiated several salary surveys to use in updating the compensation program, wrote and revised job descriptions, processed and reviewed workers comp claims, short-term disability, long-term disability claims, revised and created family medical leave forms and processed requests, I had updated the Affirmative Action program, investigated harassment and discrimination complaints. I assisted department heads and supervisors with performance issues and documentation, handled several employee relation issues and problems and again, of course, wrote the strategic plan that was put in for the HR under the City’s strategic plan. I’d just like to say to, also, I work with the Legal Department a lot at Bill’s office, Julie Fisher, the labor attorney. She was instrumental with me in helping me. She reviewed the policy and procedure manual. And, also, she helps me on several issues when it comes to harassment complaints and stuff. I work with her on that. They’ve really been instrumental in my department in that area and I really appreciate Julie for that. Now, what I want to do is, I just want to move on to my enhancement request. That’s for an HR Analyst. I’d just like to say, Council members and Mayor, as the City grows and you approve new positions in other departments, it puts more stress and a burden on my department with only two employees being able to handle all the services expected. HR provides services to all City employees, applicants, City officials and the public. Since I only have clerical support, currently, I have to handle all the non-HR clerical functions on my own. This has caused me to be reactive instead of pro-active. I don’t have the time to consider the future needs of the City when all my time is spent on the day-to-day issues. Therefore, if I had assistance with the technical aspects of HR, that would free my time up to work as a strategic partner to help the City achieve its goals, mission goals and objectives set down in our strategic plan. Also, as part of the strategic plan set for the HR functions, this would help me meet those goals and objectives and that’s where area of a new position that I need assistance in. I know, right now, my clerical support, she does a good job of the clerical support functions but she doesn’t have the HR expertise to help with the technical background that I need in the areas of recruitment, job analysis, policies and procedures, investigations, employee relations, workers compensation and benefits. She’s not able to answer technical questions related to HR Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 issues, research or develop program and procedures. Individuals and employees sometimes have to wait for answers and questions to their problems, which, basically, will promote, you know, they get frustrated. It promotes inefficiency and in some cases, anger. It also makes it difficult for me to be out of the office. That leads up to my first request here for a job analyst. As you can see, rapid growth of the City’s employee base has created enormous demands in services provided by the HR for recruitment, benefits, compensation, workers comp, employee relations, training, policies and procedures. It also, under the strategic plan, challenge number three, that was put that Council had felt was actually high priority. The challenge in that area—let me switch. I don’t know if that’s the right one. Yes. Under challenge number three, as the City grows, the quality of its programs and services will even be more dependent on the employees. The City has no formal training in development process in place and the lack of standard training in development process wastes departmental resources, reduces employees effectiveness and reduces the City’s ability to provide continued and improved service. Basically, historically, there’s been no concentrated effort in the area to develop employees. With an increase to staff, that will help my department meet the goals outlined in the strategic plan, not only in challenge number three but in the HR strategic plan as itself. Some of the goals that are set for my area is to increase efficiency in all departments, to increase knowledge and skills and abilities of all employees to professional development, which will maintain a highly qualified workforce, to increase the level of quality of customer service and communication skills among department management and employees, to increase communication and collaboration on HR issues, to increase availability of HR information to City employees and applicants, more specifically, on the web site where we can put information on there regarding benefits, compensation, recruitment, policies and procedures. It’ll also help to increase the form of amount of organized recruitment selection, retention, promotion and career development. I think it continues on. It’ll also help to reduce the time staff spends answering redundant questions on medical, dental, benefit questions, if we had information on our web page. But, we currently just don’t have the time to spend to put that information on our web page. The duties of the analyst and the responsibilities, basically, some of the duties will be able to assist me with the planning development, coordinating a City-wide employee training and development program, to develop plans for recruitment, drafting the job announcements, advertisements, to review job applications, to assist departments with interview and oral boards. Right now, if a department wants me to sit on an oral board and help them with interviews, it depend on if I’m available. Sometimes, they’re left to have to do it on their own because I’m stuck with maybe an employee relation problem and I have to devote my time to that. Even though I initially had said I would sit on the oral board, I’m not able to. So, having a technical support staff person available that would be able to fill in when I’m not available, you know, is needed. This person also would be responsible for conducting new hire orientation, exit interviews, employment verification and reference checks. Also, will help update the affirmative action program. They’ll assist with development of Human Resources and policies and procedures. This year in developing the policy and procedure book, I basically had to write them on my own. So, a lot of time was spent, you know, doing that. They’ll also help with internal employee relation issues and explain the mechanics of the employee grievance procedure. They’ll help with counseling employees and supervisors regarding HR policies and procedures. They’ll also help discrimination and harassment complaints and they’re going to handle any Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 State and Federal employment law postings that we have to maintain as laws change. We need to make sure that all City locations have updated postings. They’ll also assist with updating standard forms, creating forms, communication information that goes out to employees and then they will also help regarding benefit issues. Bottom line, basically, the financial impact of the new position. Since the dollar amount is shared with the enterprise fund, the enterprise fund would be responsible for $27,302. The impact to the general fund would be $27,302 plus a one-time for $3,200, which includes—it’s for computer and office furniture. The total City impact would be $57, 804. That’s actually—the impact is based on the mid-point of the salary range so that will probably be less. It depends on the person that is hired, how much experience they have. Are there any questions? Corrie: I have one. Where are you going to put that if you get that? Skeggs: We’ll figure out something, whether we have to put a partition up. I’m not like Shari and didn’t ask because I don’t have no where to put them. If I have to, I’ll put them in my office and share an office with them. Corrie: Okay. Because mine is getting pretty crowded. Skeggs: Yes. We’re going to kick you out and send you over to the Police Department. Bird: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Bird. Bird: Since we’ve started the HR department, how many employees has the City grown by, non-Department Heads? Skeggs: Probably, since we’ve implemented, it’s going on three years, I would say we started off with maybe a little over 100. We’re up to 186 and that does include—we do do services for the volunteers as well. We handle paperwork, process for them and we handle recruitment and stuff for them too, so this does include. But right now, we have 186 full-time and part-time employees on the payroll, not including the City officials. Bird: So, you think three years ago we had about 100? Skeggs: Yes. Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: I know this isn’t really our discussion time, but how many investigations have you had to be involved with so far, Pauline, for like discrimination claims and sexual discrimination, harassment, and those types of things? Skeggs: I would say about six, year-to-date. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Nary: Six this year? Skeggs: Yes. Nary: Okay. Skeggs: So far. In the nine-month period. Nary: How much time does that take for each one of them? Skeggs: Oh, it depends on the individuals, the number of employees that I have to interview. Just last week, I had—there was an employee relation problems in three different departments on the same day and it took me two days to talk to all of the employees and I’m still gathering information that I’m going to submit to Legal for review. So, it depends on the situation. We, oh, let’s see, a while ago, I had to interview about 16 employees in one department. It took me over a week because their schedules fluctuate. You know, they have different work schedules. So, to be able to meet with each of those employees, it took me about a week to gather all the information I needed for that. So, it depends. Nary: Okay. When you’ve had those situations arise and some action gets taken, someone gets disciplined or terminated or whatever, something like that, do you have the time and opportunity to go back to those departments and do some follow up to deal with that? Skeggs: Yes. We do follow up. Nary: That can take up a lot of time as well? Skeggs: Yes. That’s part of it as well. Nary: Thank you. Corrie: Any other questions? Skeggs: Any more questions? Bird: No. I have none. Corrie: Thank you, Pauline. Skeggs: Okay. Also, in the book, you have our letter. I’m just going to kind of move on to the cost of living and merit proposal. You were given a letter in your book in regards to that. I’m proposing a 2.5% COLA and that’s based on the western region CPI and also, I was just involved in a survey with Canyon County, Ada County and several cities, Boise, Nampa, Caldwell, Lewiston, Coeur d lane. Several cities participated in the survey. From the outcome of that survey, the average for a cost of living that they’re Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 proposing is two to three percent. Also, based on the survey, other cities are proposing a three to five percent for performance. I’m recommending a 4% pool of money be put into the budget for next year performance program for non-sworn officers. Giving the 4% would keep our program in line with the matrix set up since the salary increases are based on mid-point of the salary range. That, basically, would give the average increase of 3%. The breakdown for the ratings are as follows. An individual that was rated a 3 to 3.9, would be eligible for 3%. If they were rated a 4 to 4.9, they would get 4%. If they received a perfect score, which is all fives, they would receive a 5%. Based on the history, most employees received the average pay increase. Last year, there may have been a handful of employees that received a 4 to 4.9 and nobody got a 5 last year. Our salary range is spread over 35% from the entry to the maximum. So, it takes a lot of years from the entry to reach the maximum of the salary range. So, giving an average increase of 3% per year will get the employee to the mid-point in five years. That’s 15%. Then, to the maximum by 11 years with the additional 20%, which brings you to the 35% spread. So, what I’m trying to do is just keep them in line with the program that we set up. Of course, employees that perform at a higher level because it’s a performance based program, will get a little bit higher increase. The step program for sworn officers, that would only shift their ranges with the cost of living increase because the matrix, as far as the merit part, is already built into their program. So, there’s no change for the merit portion of their program. Are there any questions? Nary: Mr. Mayor? Corrie: Mr. Nary. Nary: Pauline, when was the last time the matrix was adjusted for market? Skeggs: Last year. Nary: Last year. Skeggs: Yes. We adjust it every year, based on the cost of living. Nary: Okay. But, the cost of living is different than the market. Certain positions have a higher market value than others— Skeggs: We do that on an ongoing basis. So, I’ve done several positions this year. We look at if they’re hard to recruit, then we need to go back out and see, you know, do some surveys on that. We did several positions this year in our Water Department, Wastewater, Administration, that we hadn’t done previous years. Then, we look at those positions that we hadn’t done as well. So, that’s done on an ongoing basis. Nary: Okay. Corrie: Any questions? De Weerd: Mr. Mayor? Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Corrie: Mrs. De Weerd. De Weerd: Does this increase include the cost of living increase plus a performance increase? Skeggs: Yes. A cost of living increase is separate. It’s separate from the merit increase. De Weerd: Okay. But, that’s already in the base budget, the cost of living? Skeggs: Yes. They’ve added it already. Any more questions? Bird: I have none. Corrie: Okay. Thank you. Kilchenmann: Finally, last but not least, is Will and the City Clerk’s office. CITY CLERK Bird: More handouts? De Weerd: Who’s great idea was it to continue? Bird: We won’t be here very long tomorrow. Berg: Thank you, Mayor and members of the Council. First, I want to just address a couple of items on the dues, the section that Stacy mentioned. If you notice on that sheet, that she spelled out item-by-item the dues and the programs that we committed to and some of them are not increased and some of the dues, such as COMPASS and AIC are increased. I’m sure you understand those things. Some of the things that are kind of a mystery is the Valley Ride that we committed our $16,500 plus and all of the sudden, now our dues are $23,800. We need to maybe find out why the increase or what the board’s decision on increasing those dues are. De Weerd: Do you know what that is about? Corrie: The only thing I can think of is it’s an increase in services to the City of Meridian, where they’re coming from and averaging. Treasure Valley Transit, I don’t quite understand that one. They got $110,000 and they got a 50% match and we’re doing it. So, I don’t quite understand that. I think as far as the other is, it’s just a quesstimate on my side, but I think it’s increased services. De Weerd: But, Valley Ride, aren’t they just VIATRAN? Corrie: Yes. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Berg: That’s their new name, yes. Valley Ride. I will call Kelly and see if I can get an itemized list of what the other contributors or due or members are paying and their increase because maybe it is just a portion. De Weerd: That was a huge increase. The other ones are population based and they only increased less than $2,000. Berg: Well, I think the other ones are—well, the other transit programs are ridership or service based. I think that Valley Ride membership is population based but I don’t know that. (inaudible) Berg: If you can look up on the board and read those brilliant numbers, are they in red? Is that why they’re—those show some of the increases, which are not in your book. I can see now that the shuttle bus program wants to increase substantially plus the mid- day express, which is the Treasure Valley Transit. The Valley Ride is still the 23. So, I think those are the three that we’re kind of concerned about. Some of the things like the ACHD shuttle thing, we’ve committed to the $17,500. I think that was for a couple of years. With the increase, I’m sure they want more money and I think you have that letter. That doesn’t necessarily mean that if we have the money that we’re going to give it to them. We’ll get you a copy of that so you can take it home. Mayor, if you— De Weerd: You know, what gets me is that Ada County Highway District is the transportation authority for Ada County. Cities don’t get grants or money for mass transit. What are they doing asking us to increase our percentage without knowing if it’s increasing our ridership or availability or— Berg: Mayor and members of Council. We’ll try and call them and see if we can get some information first thing in the morning to at least fax what other people are contributing or what the dues requests are from others. De Weerd: What the increase is about. Corrie: Maybe they can ride the bus over here and help us. Berg: Or walk across the street. Okay. I don’t know if you know anything about my department but if you have any questions, just ask me. I saved mine for last. I don’t know why. The last straw. I’m the most important. Thank you. I only have one enhancement and I hope you can look and see what this budget dollars at work. I tried to give you a little bit of variety of what kind of goes or is processed through our office. You can see that, if Shari could give me some of her money, I’d take it for a position because even though they get the applications for land use projects, we process them. So, anything that’s sometimes impacted by other departments also impacts our department. So, it’s kind of a trickle down effect. Just so you can see that it does impact us, we are doing more licensing. The minutes issue, I just wanted to point out, that we had 35 City Council regular meetings and we had 36 special meetings. Even though we’ve tried to stop some of our workload by hiring somebody to do the Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 transcription, we are still doing minutes. Just so you know, our work doesn’t stop just because we decided to do some other changes. It seems like we always keep growing in the amount of minutes that we do. Nary: Will, could I just ask a question on that issue. We had talked briefly at the last Council meeting that the cost of that transcription and I don’t know how significant the cost savings would be but my recollection was you said we essentially pay Mr. Willis an appearance fee as well as per page. Is that correct? Berg: That’s correct. The contract is per appearance, $50.00 plus $5.00 per page. Nary: The only thing I guess I was curious on the cost factor is that the minutes that we have a necessity for, whether it be an appeal to the District Court so we want to have the minutes for our transcript or the minutes from Planning and Zoning meetings that we need for preparation of recommendations, if we really need that. Those types of things can be done faster if he wasn’t also taking minutes of everything else that gets talked about that has nothing to do with the public hearing. Do you know what I’m saying? Sometimes we may spend an hour to two hours in our meeting on materials that are not vital that it be taken down word for word because we don’t need it unless we need it at some point in the future. We don’t have to have it tomorrow or in two days or whatever as we do the public hearing minutes. I’m just kind of curious as to whether or not that’s something that could be looked at. Again, it may not be a significant savings but it may be an enhancement of turn around time if he’s only having to prepare minutes of 50 pages rather than 300 pages of which 200 of it is not necessary. Berg: Mr. Mayor and members of the Council and Councilman Nary. That’s correct. It’s a very logical reason maybe to have him here only for a short time. We tried to do that with the arrangement of our meetings by having them the first and third of land use issues. I think the whole idea of implementing this was to get the information to the attorney in a short period of time so that he could turn around and do the findings or recommendations right away. Thus, our staff could review them and thus you could have a very good document to review. Nary: I just see that we have numerous meetings but we have a fairly lengthy agenda prior to the public hearing that it’s not necessary for Mr. Willis to take minutes of. I mean, the recording is adequate and they can be transcribed at any time probably cheaper than what it costs to have him do it or at least at no different cost but at least he would only be doing what we need that quick turn around time on and maybe there would be an expense that we could be saving. I don’t know. I know the City of Boise doesn’t do transcribe minutes of every single word that’s said at the Council. It has to have a transcribable record that doesn’t have to be transcribed. I think the recording is probably adequate for sometimes three quarters of our meetings and that might be at least, again, an enhancement of turn around time and maybe a slight savings of cost. Just something to look at. Corrie: Well, something that the Council might look at is just have a public hearing from 7:00 to 9:00 and that’s it, that’s all the time you have to have him. So, if you get 7:00 to 9:00, you have all your public hearings, if you don’t have by that time, you switch the Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 next time and keep moving. So, you have two hours of recorded time and the rest of it on the transcript with your recording. That’s something we can look at too. That could be an expense cut there. Berg: Thank you. Mr. Mayor, you’re correct. If we could say when we’re going to have the public hearings, we could probably get him here but on the same token, we wouldn’t want him to waste an evening and be here at 7:00 and the public hearings don’t get started until 9:00. I’m sure his time is valuable to him too. The other thing is that I know that the attorney uses the minutes to deal with the final plat requirements, which in making those orders of decisions, I think some issues have been very important to have those minutes to do those. You’re correct. We could maybe look at some things of saving that way. We are going to have to look at some things because to have minutes from four meetings are going to be a little bit different than just two. Okay. So, to come back to my one and only enhancement, is for a Department Specialist, which some of you may have seen this last year. We’ve had a very unique situation in my department, to say the least, and I think we’ve tried to keep it band-aided up and we’ve been meeting our deadlines and fulfilling the immediate obligations but not saying we are fulfilling all that we need to. We are putting together things that we need to have for Council meetings and P & Z meetings and other meetings but we still need to do some record retention, (inaudible) imaging and things we have not gotten to because of short staff. Which brings up another thing, that I will need to hire probably a temp, if we do not get this Department Specialist approved, some time in February, March or April of this coming year. De Weerd: How come? Who’s pregnant? Nary: Sharon. Berg: Well, I’ve only got one more left. So there are some concerns that way. Nary: Will, have you looked at cost or feasibility of doing digital recordings? Storage space would be easier but I don’t know what the cost of equipment like that would be. Berg: Councilman Nary, Mayor and members of Council. I’m going to a regional conference on Friday in Ogden, Utah that does some different types of things with recording and one of them is digital recording. So, I’m going to examine that and see what efficiency and the cost is. That is an avenue. Like I said, my department doesn’t do just minutes. We have to do the other things and, unfortunately, our door is open so when somebody calls, we answer. Just to kind of get back to maybe another little thing. If there’s a hostile person in somebody’s department, that doesn’t mean that our door is automatically shut. Unfortunately, down the hall, anybody can pound on anybody’s desk or whatever it may be. We get other things that we have to deal with on a day-to day basis. I’m sure you can read my request number one form just as well as I can read it off to you. If you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them. Corrie: Okay. Thank you, Will. Meridian City Council Special Budget Workshop July 16, 2002 Kilchenmann: Mr. Mayor and members of the Council. Thank you very much for your time and patience. I know this is going to be a very long day for you. We’ll meet tomorrow at 9:30 and get our pencils out and start crunching some numbers. I believe lunch will be provided tomorrow. We’ll have a working lunch. Just what you needed. To sit in your chairs a little bit longer. Thank you. Corrie: It’s certainly a lot better than it was five years ago. McCandless: Oh, boy, I’ll say. Bird: We shouldn’t have to be here too long. We don’t have too much money left. Corrie: I’ll entertain a motion to close the meeting for today on the budget. Nary: So moved. Bird: Second. Corrie: Okay. Motion made and second. All those in favor say aye. All ayes. MOTION CARRIED MEETING ADJOURNED AT 4:35 P.M. (TAPE ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) APPROVED: / / ROBERT CORRIE, MAYOR DATE ATTESTED: WILLIAM G. BERG, JR., CITY CLERK