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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2010 09-14 WorkshopMeridian Citv Council Workshop Meeting __ September 14, 2010. A Council meeting of the Meridian City Council was called to order at 6:08 p.m., Tuesday, September 14, 2010, by Mayor Tammy de Weerd. Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, President David Zaremba, Charlie Rountree, Keith Bird, and Brad Hoaglun. Others Present: Bill Nary, Jaycee Holman, Anna Canning, Caleb Hood, Scott Colaianni, Mark Niemeyer, Jeff Lavey, Tom Barry, Warren Stewart, Tim Curns, and Dean Willis. Item 1: Roll-call Attendance: Roll call. X David Zaremba X Brad Hoaglun X Charlie Rountree X Keith Bird X Mayor Tammy de Weerd de Weerd: We will go ahead and start tonight's meeting. Thank you for joining us this evening. It's nice to see a group of people in those chairs. So, thank you. For the record, it is Tuesday, September 14th. It's eight minutes after 6:00. We will start tonight's meeting with roll call attendance. Item 2: Pledge of Allegiance de Weerd: Item No. 2 is our Pledge of Allegiance. If you will all rise and join us in the pledge. (Pledge of Allegiance recited.) Item 3: Adoption of the Agenda de Weerd: Item No. 3 is adoption of the agenda. Hoaglun: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Hoaglun. Hoaglun: A couple things on the agenda before we adopt it. Under 4-M, this is the Consent Agenda, that resolution number is 10-741. Also under Item 5, Community Items slash Presentations, we would like to move 7-J, the Public Works update on the back flow prevention, move it to the first -- make it 5-A, if you will, and the Lakeview Golf Course update will be following that. And with those changes, Madam Mayor, I move adoption of tonight's agenda. Rountree: Second. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 2 of 102 Zaremba: Second. de Weerd: I have a motion and a second to adopt the agenda as amended. All those in favor say aye. All ayes. Motion carried. MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES. Item 4: Consent Agenda A. Professional Services Agreement With Gabriel Bishop for Construction of an Additional Two Art Display Cases for Initial Point Gallery for aNot-to-Exceed Amount of $1,600.00 B. Art Purchasing Agreement with Mark Manwaring for Purchase of "Pathways Series No. 1"for Art in Public Spaces for a Notto-Exceed Amount of $1,500.00 C. Agreement for Independent Contractor Services with Staker & Parson Companies DBA Idaho Sand and Gravel for Waste Water Treatment Plant Northside Paving Project Construction for aNot-To-Exceed Amount of $103,485.00 D. Agreement for Independent Contractor Services with Cascade Pipeline Corporation for Carlton Avenue Water Line Replacement Construction for aNot-To-Exceed Amount of $118,059.00 E. Interface Agency Agreement Between Ada County & City of Meridian for Access to Certain County Computerized Records F. Agreement Between Ada County and the City of Meridian for Use of Self-Service Fuel Island G. Interagency Agreement with Ada County Highway District for Roadway Construction and Sewer/Water Line Replacements at the McMillan Road and Locust Grove Road Project H. Ground Lease Agreement for Meridian Senior Center at Kleiner Memorial Park I. First Addendum to Original Agreement Dated August 14, 2008 between the City of Meridian and the Meridian Police Activities League (MPAL) for Development and Joint Use of Heroes Park J. Water Main Easement for Larkspur Subdivision Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 3 of 102 K. Easement for Idaho Power to Gain Access to Underground Electric Lines and the Transformer They Installed as a Part of the Reclaimed Water Booster Station and Reservoir Project L. Sanitary Sewer and Water Main Easement for Oakcreek Subdivision M. Resolution No. 10-741: A Resolution for the Adoption of Meridian Information Technology Policies de Weerd: Item 4 is our Consent Agenda. Hoaglun: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Hoaglun. Hoaglun: As I noted under the Consent Agenda, 4-M is resolution number 10-741 and with that I move approval of the Consent Agenda and the Mayor to sign and the Clerk to attest. Zaremba: Second. de Weerd: I have a motion and a second to approve the Consent Agenda with the stated resolution number. If is there no discussion, Madam Clerk, will you call roll. Roll-Call: Bird, yea; Rountree, yea; Zaremba, yea; Hoaglun, yea. de Weerd: All ayes. Motion carried. MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES. de Weerd: Under five, Community Items/Presentations. I will turn this over to Mr. Barry. We have our Public Works backflow prevention update. Barry: Madam Mayor, I just wanted to inform you with this change we are unable to give this presentation at the current moment. Mr. Dees is caught in traffic. He's got the presentation, so if we could delay it just a few more items in the agenda, we will be prepared here in about ten minutes to give the presentation. So, I apologize for the inconvenience, but we don't have that currently in our possession at this time. We got through to 5-A pretty quick, so - Item 7: Department Reports D. Legal Department: Updated Draft and Continued Discussion on Board of Adjustment Ordinance Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 4 of 102 de Weerd: We did. We are efficient, Mr. Barry. Well, let's see. Since I don't see the chief here, I'm sure he thought he was a little bit further down on the agenda as well. will go ahead and take chair's privilege and move to 7-D under our Legal Department and we can have a quick discussion about the board of adjustments ordinance. Nary: Thank you, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council. In your packets is a proposed ordinance labeled the board of adjustment. We had a previous discussion about this a couple of months ago at a workshop. Basically, the intent is to take what was currently under our city code as referred to as the board of appraisers. And the board of appraisers right now only hears disputes over people's water bills on what the -- on the billing, not on whether it's shut off, and the desire here was to create a board with a different makeup of individuals, but it would hear, essentially, anything that we could locate in the city code that a person could appeal ultimately to the Council, we would have this board as the interim step and, then, the Council would still be an appellate body, but instead of appealing it to have a brand new hearing, the Council would only, basically, review the record of what was presented to, basically, assure that the board follow whatever evidence was in front of it, had enough information in front of it to be able to make the decision that it did and it would require the posting of some -- of, basically, whatever the requirement they were supposed to pay. But we -- the last time we talked about it we really had the board of appraisers current charge, which was the water disputes, as well as shut-offs. We have added -- since, then, there is another area in the code where you can dispute whether or not you can have service, there is a provision that the utility billing could deny service if you have an outstanding bill, if they get denied and they want to appeal that, they could appeal that to this board. Most of the other stuff is pretty standard language, but those are the things that have been added since you have seen this previously. I think that's the only -- only change from previous. So, if you have specific questions or concerns, otherwise, we can put it on a future agenda for approval, if that's your desire. de Weerd: Thank you, Mr. Nary. Council, any questions? Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: I may have misunderstood, but did you say that they would be the appellate body for all state code -- all city codes or just things relating to water? Nary: Things related to -- essentially to the water services -- Zaremba: And billing services. Nary: And billings, yes. Zaremba: Okay. So, not Planning and Zoning and -- Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 5 of 102 Nary: No. Zaremba: Okay. Thank you. de Weerd: Council, any further questions? Hoaglun: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Hoaglun. Hoaglun: And, Mr. Nary, I want to be certain. So, when -- if they take something to the board of adjustment and they are not satisfied with the decision, they can appeal that decision to the City Council and could you explain, once again -- I want to be sure understand that, what -- is it just the facts of that issue or -- Nary: Council Member Hoaglun, what the -- what the current ordinance -- the way the current -- this current ordinance is drafted, the person can appeal, but they have got a couple of things they are going to have to do to do that. One, they are going to have to post the amount of money that they were required to pay. So, for example, it was a dispute over their water bill -- over the amount of water they are charged for, they are going to have to post whatever the board requires them to pay, if it's all of it, part of it, or whatever, the amount that's settled by the board, they have to post that amount to be able to appeal. Then, the appeal by the Council, rather than a new hearing, the appeal by the Council is to review the material and the information that was presented to the board and for the Council to be assured that the board based it on the evidence that was -- based in front of them, based on what the city code requires, but not to have a brand new hearing. We felt it -- right now the board of appraisers, the way it's set up, it's the final decision maker, it doesn't even have the ability to appeal to the Council. We felt an appeal to the Council makes sense, but -- but not to have a brand new hearing and of that, but, really, for the Council simply to review the information that was presented, what the city code is, what the facts that were presented by -- to the board and, then, the Council could decide that the board either acted within the scope of the ordinance. If not, the Council can adjust it. Hoaglun: Follow-up, Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Yes. Hoaglun: Mr. Nary, then, does that person have -- will he be addressing the Council and, then, saying why he felt that they still dispute the finding of the board; is that -- Nary: Yes. Hoaglun: Okay. Nary: Yes, they can still do that. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 6 of 102 Hoaglun: Okay. Nary: And to answer Council Member Zaremba's question earlier, basically, in 9-1-17 it lists the specific things that can -- that can be heard by the board of adjustments and that's water user accounts or statements, permits, related to that, shut-off services, assessment fees, monthly service charges -- so everything, really, related to water and the billing. Zaremba: Thank you. I was just clarifying, because your verbal statement sounded much more broad than that. Nary: Oh. Sorry. Zaremba: Thank you. de Weerd: Anything further? Rountree: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: Bill, do you need a motion to advance this or just -- Nary: I don't need a motion currently. If your desire is we can put it on a future agenda for your approval. Rountree: That would be my desire. Nary: Okay. Bird: Be mine. Hoaglun: Same here. Nary: Thank you. Zaremba: Thank you. Item 5: Community Items/Presentations A. Lakeview Golf Course Update With Erik Oass de Weerd: Okay. Seeing that Lakeview Golf Course is present in full, I will go ahead and move to Item 5-A under Community Items/Presentation and we will hear Lakeview Golf Course update right now and welcome Erik and his team. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 7 of 102 Oaas: Madam Mayor, City Council, Erik -- I'm Erik Oaas, 314 West Front, Boise, Idaho. And I'd like to introduce Jerry Breaux and Clint Travis with Raven Golf Services, who will get to in -- in my presentation for all of those who do not know why they are here. Lakeview Golf Course -- we appreciate you inviting us to speak with you tonight. This -- this is sort of our annual update to City Council and the City of Meridian with regard to the golf course and where things are at and where things are going. So, if we have it on the first -- on the screen here is -- I guess I will just tell you to advance or -- Canning: You can do it up there if you want or I can do it for you. Oaas: Oh, can I? Oh. Okay. Just -- okay. So, Lakeview Golf Course, a work in progress or a labor of love. A lot of times we ask ourselves that very question, because there are days that we -- we fully understand that it is a work in progress, but there are other days that you say, you know, if you don't love this game, if you don't love this sport, if you don't love the -- you know, the game of golf, then -- then you're barking up the wrong tree. What have you done in the last five years. Well, we can go through this pretty quickly, but, obviously, we rebuilt the clubhouse into a nice friendly bar and restaurant. We constructed a maintenance building. As you know, there were three greens, one, six and seven that were entirely reconstructed and we are very -- very proud of the way they turned out. We have also made a number of modifications on a number of the holes with regard to the traps. Expanded the lakes in a couple of cases. And our most recent change is cleaning up the area around the number one tee and converting that into -- to a professional tee box that will only be used in very a limited number of circumstances. So, what are the operational changes that we have made this year'? Well, one of the biggest and most important I think is that in the past Dick Davis has been here and made the report to you with regard to the golf course, but Dick Davis at this point is no longer involved in the ownership of the Lakeview Meridian Investors, which is the lessor of the golf course with the City of Meridian. All financial reporting is handled by an outside firm as of January 1st, 2010, and we are very pleased with the level of controls and operational efficiencies that we are in the process of working on and establishing. Second and probably equally important is that we hired Raven Golf Services, who is an extremely well respected, well renowned golf course management company here in -- based here in Boise and they manage courses throughout all of southern and even over into eastern Idaho and I'd -- I'd like to introduce Jerry Breaux and Clint Travis and I will ask them to speak with you about, you know, sort of their perception of the golf course and some of the things that they see and , then, I will continue on with my presentation. So, Jerry or Clint. Breaux: Thank you. Well, I -- we went to work for Erik and Steve in April and it was not without its challenges. There were significant changes that needed to be made and we just jumped right in and tried to tackle as many issues as we could and we have -- we have tried to survive with Erik and it's been -- it's been atough -- tough little test, but we think the golf course is -- you know, the golf course has gotten better through -- since we got there and we haven't been able to make too many changes. Changes cost money and one of the things that the golf course doesn't have right now is a lot of extra Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 8 of 102 money. We have tried to -- tried to streamline the employees. Unfortunately, we couldn't keep all the employees that were there when we got there. We did keep quite a few of them. I can't remember how many, but we did keep quite a few of them. But we hired a couple other people. We have the first lady golf professional in Idaho that's our head professional, Kali Quick. Rich Rush, who actually worked for Clint at Hillcrest Country Club for a few years was already the golf course superintendent and he does a wonderful job. So, he kind of took over -- or continued those reigns. So, it -- it's had its challenges, but it's been -- it's been very interesting for us and we certainly enjoy it out there. So, I'll let my partner Clint Travis add some stuff. Travis: Well, I think the two things that jump out to me at Lakeview is just that. I think the staff is excellent. I mean I think that we -- the vast majority of the staff stayed in place. We instituted a few operational changes, trying to get a little more efficient and -- but that's there right now we -- I think we are extremely proud of them and it's just a very hard working group. I mean you can always get better and I know they are always trying to be and we are trying to make them better as well. But we think the staff is just a home run and the other thing that really struck me is just the clientele. You know, there is a real sense of ownership with the clientele out there. I mean our customers really feel like they are a part of Lakeview and that's one thing I think that stuck out the first day is there is definitely a sense of ownership here and that was -- you know, that was nice. I mean we are glad that -- there was a tournament last week where, you know, they raised a significant amount of money to put into the golf course and you don't always see that. So, yeah, there is a lot of enthusiasm at Lakeview and that's pretty contagious. So, I think that's the two things that really jumped out at me is the staff and the customers. Oaas: Thank you, Jerry and Clint. We -- in the presentation I will open it up for questions and answers and you can direct questions to me or either of these two fine gentlemen. I will just say one -- one other thing with regard to Raven and I am extremely impressed with their professionalism, I'm impressed with their work ethic and I'm impressed with the quality of people and the way that they manage their company and the way that they are managing this asset of the City of Meridian, I think we all can be very proud of what they are doing and I'm extremely impressed with them. What are our current challenges? Well, as we all know, golf course play across the valley and nationally has declined this year due to the -- this year and to some extent last year due to the state of the economy. Secondly, we have some -- what I would classify as legacy financial issues with regard to, you know, some of the past operational issues that took place at the golf course before we were heavily involved that we are working to recover from, but suffice it to say that they are significant and we are working our way through them. Third, the irrigation system inadequacy I think continues to cause operational problems. We are getting overwatering in some spots and we continue to fight with dry spots and have to hand water those areas. As we all know, we have talked about before, the cost to place the irrigation system is estimated at somewhere between a half million to a million. And, then, finally, the cart paths right now are in just a significant state of disrepair, which is -- which causes a number of problems, in addition to wear and tear on the equipment, it always causes people to avoid driving on the cart paths, Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 9 of 102 which causes, you know, more problems with maintaining the turf, et cetera. Current -- what are our current opportunities? Well, what I see is probably the most significant asset and opportunity with the golf course is the loyalty of the golfers who golf at Lakeview. I have had an opportunity this year to spend a considerable amount of time getting to know people. Probably things that I should have done in a much greater way over the last five years, but -- but I will say that -- that the -- that the loyalty and the interest level of the people who golf at Lakeview is absolutely incredible. This past week alone, as Jerry Breaux mentioned, the men's -women's association conducted a fundraising -- or a course improvement tournament and raised over five thousand dollars that will go directly back into the golf course and we will talk a little bit more about where that money is going to go. Second major opportunity areas is, of course, maintenance. Now -- and I underline here it's excellent and I mean that most definitely. We -- we have undergone some significant cost reductions in the labor maintenance area and I would suffice it to say that -- that it's -- even though the -- the number of employees that we have working there is down, the -- certainly the maintenance level and the course condition we believe are excellent. We have -- and we have already fertilized the course once this season. Additional opportunities the golf course has. The equipment -- there are a number of equipment leases that are nearing completion, which is good and bad, but the good part of it is that those payments are going away, the bad part is that, you know, there is a fair amount of that equipment that's -- you know, that's seen better days. And, then, final opportunity that I see in the future is -- is working with the City of Meridian to use its -- or a portion of its reclaimed water, I'm sure you are all well aware of how much water your wastewater treatment plant generates on a regular basis and the fact that -- that -- that there is an excess amount of this, we think the golf course is just an absolutely perfect user of reclaimed water and not only here, but that's happening all over the country. The challenge for us is -- is how do we fund -- you know, in the golf course how do we fund the cost to implement this system and we have got some ideas and we will be continuing to work on that and talk to you more about that later. The next area is what are our capital improvements plan. I mean we have an obligation, as you know through our lease with the City of Meridian, to continually provide capital improvement for the golf course and, you know, we are pleased with -- very pleased with -- with what we have done so far, but, you know, to be absolutely brutally honest in light of the economic conditions and challenges from a -- from afinancial standpoint, it's extremely difficult for us to -- for us to maintain the kind of capital improvements plan that we had been working on on the golf course over the last five years, because as -- you know, as Clint Travis said, you know, the dollars just aren't there and -- and I -- from our perspective, what we would like to do is -- is as -- as your stewards of this incredible asset we would like to propose and we are -- we are not looking for an answer this evening, but -- but we would like to propose that -- that the -- that we enter into a -- some discussions about a way of deferring the lease payments for a five year period and with -- with several conditions. First, that you need to be comfortable that we are continuing to maintain the golf course to a very high standard, that the -- that it's being -- maintenance is being taken care of, fertilization, water and those -- you know, those basic aspects. But the level of -- the standard of excellence think that we have -- we have established for the golf course, you as the owners are certainly going to be -- want to be assured that it's going to continue. Second, that we Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 10 of 102 would commit to fertilize the golf course at least -- at least once a year. We really would like to -- to work to get that second fertilization in in the fall before things go dormant. Third, we would like to commit to you that all the cart paths will be repaired, you know, prior to the end of next -- next year. The dollars that were -- that were raised through the capital course improvement tournament this week will go directly into this -- this critical key -- this key critical area and I think we are all -- we, as the -- we as the lessor, all of the people who golf there, are -- are very much in support of that. That is the number one issue. And, then, four, that we would propose to you that -- that we would maintain to come before you on an annual basis and go through where the course is, where things are going, and make sure that you, as the owners of the golf course, are comfortable with its direction. Before -- before lopen -- open it up for questions and comments, I just on behalf of -- of the golf course, all of its patrons and employees, the contractors, suppliers, and owners, we thank you, City Council and Madam Mayor, for your support of this -- what we consider to be a wonderful community asset. We believe that we -- we have done some very good things for you in the last five years and we mostly certainly want to see this continue, in spite of the fact that the economy right now is -- is making it tougher to do on the timeline that we had originally established. With that I will open it up for questions. de Weerd: Thank you. Council, questions? Rountree: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: I will start with the first one I have on my list here. Erik, what do you see happening with the fees and the fee structure? Oaas: Avery good question, Council Rountree. We believe that there were some -- some mistakes made with pricing with regard to some special promotional programs that were instituted last year -- not in just last year, but the prior couple of years. We are in the process of reevaluating all of those. We believe that there is some changes that need to be made to both the special promotional passes, but also we believe that we want to take a look at -- at the green fees in general and in some cases we think they might need to come up a little bit, in others we believe they might need to come down. So, overall we are -- we are evaluating everything. We are not planning -- I guess the -- without -- until we really get into the detail there and really figure out how this needs to happen, I would tell you that we have no intention whatsoever of making any -- any kind of substantial increases. It just is not warranted. Rountree: You mentioned equipment leases. What equipment is that? Oaas: The equipment leases that I'm referring to are for mowers, for trimming equipment, for golf carts and any of the ancillary -- generally the ancillary equipment involved in maintaining the golf course. Not -- I guess I would differentiate that from the restaurant, clubhouse activities. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 11 of 102 Rountree: Okay. What -- what's the future of the clubhouse activities? Status quo or are you looking at what you have got and going to be making changes? What's going to happen there? Oaas: Councilman Rountree, the -- with regard -- with regard to the clubhouse activities, we believe that -- that there is -- it's very interesting in that -- in that the Lakeview clientele -- this is a -- this is a family and people like coming there and socializing. They like coming there and getting a reasonably priced meal and it's not a typical fast food type restaurant that you're in and you're out. People are -- people are coming there and patronizing the facility, because -- because of its atmosphere. We have no intention whatsoever to change that atmosphere. That's what makes Lakeview successful. That doesn't necessarily mean that -- that -- and we already have made a number of changes with regard to -- to the menu and -- in terms of -- of being, I guess, more fiscally responsible in terms of food management, but, overall, we intend to keep the restaurant open. We intend to keep the -- you know, the bar open and we intend most definitely to the keep the same kind of atmosphere, but there will continue to be tweaks in -- in terms of what works and what doesn't work. Rountree: You have asked in the capital improvements area for the city to step back, if you will. You mentioned a couple things, primarily maintenance activities. I would point you to Exhibit F of the current lease and there is a number of things that I don't know, necessarily, are going on that -- that have been committed to. You only addressed one of those and that was the fertilization of the fairways. The lease maintenance schedule indicates that that would be done three times a year, you're only suggesting one time a year. Are there other changes that would occur to Exhibit F? It's fairly expensive and it's quite a checklist, so -- Oaas: Councilman Rountree, I -- yes. To answer your question directly I think that there -- in light of -- of where things are at from an economic standpoint, I do -- I do think we need to go through that in detail and -- rather than -- rather than arbitrarily tell you, you know, right here and now what needs to be changed, I would like to talk -- consult with the experts here standing behind me and, you know, come back to you, as we discussed the -- you know, the overall proposal, I'm more than willing to take that as an action item and -- because, again, I don't expect the decisions to be made here this evening. Rountree: Well, I would suggest that that -- that's going to have to be done. However we move forward with the lease we have to get the lease in line with what's possible out there. We can't -- we can't have the document this way or if we keep it this way, then, we got to figure out how to step up and accomplish it. I don't recall, but I don't know that the lease has ever been changed with Dick as the signatory and I think that needs to be taken care of. There is also the issue of the fees that you brought up. In addition to the fee -- the lease fee, there is also the irrigation fee that's been in arrears that's been sent -- billed to the city and sent to the leasee I don't see any of that being addressed in your comments. There are a number of things that need to be worked through, Erik, and Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 12 of 102 certainly we all want to have a successful golf course and there is a number of us up here, as well as I see a number of folks in the audience, that have an investment in the golf course as well. So, we need to sit down and we need to work through the language of the lease and if changes need to be made, then, we need to do that in the proper process. I appreciate your comments and I think you -- you have dealt yourself a really bad hand. I think I already told you that once. But we will work through it -- at least I'm willing to work through it and see where we can go with this. But there is just a number of things that -- they are my expectations because they are contractually in this lease between the city and you and if they just, quite frankly, can't be accomplished, let's talk about it and let's get it aired and move on. Oaas: Councilman Rountree, we appreciate your comments and, you know, you -- I guess I would propose that -- that we establish whether there is -- there is someone for the City Council that wants to sit down with regard to -- or with Ted Baird and myself and, you know, we -- I'm more than willing to do that. I think that might make the most sense. Bird: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: Excuse me. I agree with everything Charlie has said and I'd like to add that maybe the lease agreement needs to be updated and when we put expectations out there and they are public -- they are public knowledge and stuff, the patrons expect them to be done and they are not getting done, you know, I think that's something that maybe there was too many expectations. Maybe not enough. Maybe not the right way. And, Erik, how long is your agreement with Raven right now? Oaas: Councilman Bird, it is an annually renewable agreement. Bird: Okay. Just for one year, then? Oaas: Yes. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: I, too, appreciate the previous questions that have been asked and your answers. To pursue one of them a little farther, you have mentioned that you were thinking of asking that the annual fees be waived for an additional five years and that the capital improvements program be -- I forget the word. Probably waived. I just want to clarify that one. The expectations that were in the current lease, a number of things were supposed to have happened by now, some which have not. Are you asking that you have another five years the complete them or are you asking not to do any of them and start them again five years from now? Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 13 of 102 Oaas: Council Zaremba, I thank you for your question. I believe that -- that it's sort of a combination of both. I think -- I think to Councilman Rountree's point I think we need to go through the whole list and determine what it is -- what it is on that list that really should be maintained on an ongoing basis and what we need to continue to work on and what on that list makes more sense to look at a deferral. So, it's -- it's probably a combination of both and to the tell you that -- that we are looking to waive everything for five years is -- is not accurate. That's not what we are asking for. We are just asking to go back and reset the expectations, you know, in a manner that -- that makes sense given the current circumstances. Zaremba: Thank you. de Weerd: Well, Council, what I would like to recommend is taking off what Councilman Rountree and Erik have kind of stated somewhat, I would suggest convening a focus group to review the current lease, what is being done, what isn't being done, put together priorities on some of the attachments to the lease in regards to Exhibit D and F and I would suggest that it would be Ted from our legal department, Councilman Rountree representing the City Council -- Rountree: Thank you, Mayor. de Weerd: I love to assign Mr. Rountree. Steve from our parks department, since they do have some responsibility to the annual review and a citizen or neighbor from the golf course that lives in that vicinity to have maybe the eyes on the course and have the citizen perspective to that. Does that seem feasible to Council? That way we can air everything and when it has got back to City Council there can be a recommendation that is put together collectively. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: And if you can't agree we will know what those areas of disagreement are. Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: That sounds good to me and I appreciate you offering Councilman Rountree to be the Council's representative. I was going to suggest -- Rountree: You're a sweetheart, David. Zaremba: I was going to suggest, as you did, that there be a citizen representative or two, but I was going to -- let me just ask should that be somebody who holds an annual pass at the golf course, probably, so that they are somewhat familiar with the operations and not just a random citizen? de Weerd: I, actually, didn't have anyone in mind. I wasn't going to delegate out in our -- our admirers out in the audience, but I thought we would probably get maybe a Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 14 of 102 recommendation or a volunteer. I'm sure we can come up with someone collectively. If not, I'm willing to assign. Rountree: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: I'd just suggest that possibly expanding the group a bit more. I think David's suggestion in terms of somebody who is invested in the the golf course on an annual basis, a season pass holder, might be a good representative. I would think a president of one of the homeowner's associations that abuts the golf course would be another addition and I know we don't want to get these things too big, but at this point we aren't terribly large in size and I would also like to suggest that someone from Public Works, because we do have an irrigation and we do have vision for use of reclaimed water out at the golf course at some point in time and it's not too early now to start talking about it. Rich is over there shaking his head, so -- and I'm not sure it's going to be Rich, but somebody over there. de Weerd: We are willing to assign. And I -- we would like to take public comment. know there is a number of citizens that are here to listen to this and I would invite comment as well. So, perhaps we could call you back up and get your thoughts and responses at the tail end of that. Oaas: Madam Mayor, just -- maybe just a point of understanding or clarification in my own mind. I just want to make sure that from an expectation standpoint that we are -- that, again, we are all very very clear. As the -- as the lessor of your asset we have -- you know, we have no problem at all taking guidance and input from you as the owner in terms of decision making with regard to the golf course and, you know, we need to be a little careful about -- about sort of making this a -- a -- I'm just a little concerned about where the authority -- or who has the authority with regard to this focus group. Is it -- is it an informative focus group to just gather ideas? Because from a legal perspective we have some very -- very specific legal obligations that it's important that I work with the legal staff one on one and I'm a little concerned about -- about throwing everything in the mix here where it just really doesn't -- doesn't make sense. de Weerd: Well, I will be frank. We have an agreement and it's legally bound. It is a public asset and so the public's involvement is, to me, mandatory and so because think it's important to have the city -- the stake holders and certainly the -- the owners of the lease, I think it's important to work in collaboration and find where there is common ground to looking at some flexibility with the lease and what you presented today and wanting to come and ask to be deferred or -- or forgiven. I'm not sure what. But I think it's fair to have that conversation with stake holders at the table. At this point you have a lease that you're legally bound to and it looks 'like some of that is not being adhered to. So, those are discussions that we need to have and I would rather do it in the spirit of collaboration that -- instead of this is what you're legally bound to. We all understand the economic situation out there. We all understand the asset that it is. And we all Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 15 of 102 understand the improvements that have been made. I think we all have the end goal as similar and I think it will be a civil discussion. Oaas: Madam Mayor, I appreciate that and I -- I think that -- that all of the patrons here would be the first to tell you that I sit down with -- with these folks on a regular basis and there is a real spirit of collaboration. So, all I'm saying is I have no problem with the collaborative aspect of a focus group. With regard to the decisions that are involved in our obligations under the lease, that's between the city and us. de Weerd: That's correct. But, again, I will say this is a public asset and so involving stake holders is the right thing in my opinion and I think the dialogue is important. In the end it's your -- your decision and it's the City Council's decision. So, we will invite the public comment and, then, I will ask for wrap up remarks. Oaas: Okay. Thank you. de Weerd: Thank you. Hoaglun: Madam Mayor, just to clarify for public comment, they heard that, you know, you like to appoint people. Now, you're not going to hold it against them if they really make good comments that they might get appointed. Just to clarify. de Weerd: I won't make any promises. Certainly we want to hear from you and if there is members of the public who would like to make any comments or suggest questions, we will certainly like to hear from you. Yes, sir. Yes, please. And for the public record if you will just state your name and address. Jones: I'm Richard Jones and I live in James Place in Meridian. Do you want the address? de Weerd: Yes, please. Jones: 4487 West Bunker Lane. de Weerd: Thank you. Jones: And this has very little to do with it, but I happen to be on the homeowners board at James Place and I will volunteer somebody's name. Larry Freeman. He is the president of the homeowners association. He's a very active golfer at Lakeview. He's very professional and it would be a real asset to the community and I -- I'm not going to make any comments. As a golfer out there I have seen what's happened to the golf course and I think the Mayor's idea is great to have other input, because at this point we all know it's been run I think very mediocre and I'm being kind when I say that. But think Larry Freeman would be a name to be considered. He has also helped the community -- the homeowners association out there with their organization, so he's Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 16 of 102 done a lot for that community. Plus he and his wife both are very active golfers there. And I thank you very much. de Weerd: Thank you, Mr. Jones. Any other comment? Yes, sir. If you will, please, state your name and address for the record. Shane: My name is Jim Shane. I live at 4153 West Harbor Point Drive. de Weerd: Thank you. Shane: Basically right on the first tee. I think that the residents who live on the course recognize the improvements and the efforts that are being made and understand the economy, as has already been said here. But the thing that concerns me about the presentation also asking for a five year release of any responsibility for payments to the city or any improvements, faced with the fact that there is already a bunch of improvements that haven't been done. What I would suggest is that we look at maybe one year reviews and consider situations where at the end of each year we can look at a P&L statement or look and see what -- there is a lot of gossip going around among the people that live at the course and play their regularly, as I and my family -- I have got a brother that lives on the 6th Fairway, a brother that lives on the 8th Fairview and we are at the clubhouse all the time and we are -- in the tournaments -- we played in the course improvement tournament, so we talked to a lot of the other people that live there and the sort of gossip going around is that a lot of the money that was put into the golf course at the first part of the year when it was the former management group with Erik, specifically in the promotional cards that are referred to, did not ever get into the coffers of the course and however that happened, if it did happen, you know, it's none of our business, but what I would ask is if the number of people who played on those cards would have paid and they had the revenue, would they be profitable now and if that level of play continues next year would they be here standing asking for this release of responsibility for making the improvements or doing the things that are on the lease. So, I think that there is some things that should be reviewed relative to where did the money go or if it's gone would they have made a profit with the play level at which level it is now, because I think the fact that the money is gone is not the responsibility of the people who play the game, it's the responsibility of the management team at the time when the money was brought in. I don't know where it went, but it's gone. So, I think there is some -- some looks at can the course be profitable at the current play level and does it warrant a full five year release of responsibility of anymore improvements. de Weerd: And, Mr. Shane, I appreciate your statements. I will say that -- that as Mr. Oaas pointed out, there -- there is a contract between the leasor and the leasee and there are things that the city is privy to and I think a lot of that is confidential, but I agree that -- and that is why I have recommended some neighbors or citizens to be part of this, because as we move forward it's going to be important that we are all on the same page and we can't go back, but we can certainly look at today and moving forward and that's important. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 17 of 102 Shane: I agree. All of the things that may or may not have happened and whether it's gossip or truth, nobody needs to know or it's not for us to know the problem, but the point is if, in fact, the level of play at the current level of play the course can be profitable, then, it wouldn't warrant a five year release of responsibility to do anymore improvements and if the fact that they are financially strapped now goes beyond the fact that there is a slow down because of the economy, is because some of the money was lost through other reasons, then, I think that that -- that request has to be reviewed on that light. de Weerd: Thank you. Shane: Thank you. de Weerd: Additional comments? We appreciate the neighbors interest. Yes, Mr. Borton. Thank you for volunteering. If there is no further questions, then -- and, certainly, I know we are -- many of us are neighbors, so if you have questions don't hesitate to ask and we will post on our website who this focus group would be, so you also have a point of contact to bring your questions, concerns, or suggestions to and Mr. Oaas or Jerry or Clint, if you'd like to make final comments I'd invite you up. And if in case anyone was wondering, my pool is private, it's not the public course's pool. Since someone asked me that boldly earlier. But, yeah, maybe I'll have a pool party. That's for Mr. Borton. Thank you, Erik. Oaas: Madam Mayor, City Council, we really appreciate you letting us appear before you tonight and talk about the issues of the golf course and we look forward to continuing these discussions. Thank you. de Weerd: Thank you. We appreciate you being here this evening and, Council, I don't know how you want to go about -- there is a couple of volunteers or names. I would like to know if you'd like to make a decision tonight or we can take it under advisement and discuss it at our next meeting. Rountree: Madam Mayor, it's great that we have volunteers. I would suggest that you give it a few more days and see who else might be interested and, then, figure out some lottery system to pick between the two who have already volunteered to take the two spots. de Weerd: I think one was volunteered. Rountree: Yeah. Yeah. We would want to hear from the individual. de Weerd: So, I guess I would put that out to the neighbors. If you have an interest in volunteering or, who knows, you might be volunteered like Mr. Jones volunteered Mr. Freeman, certainly please let us know and we are easy to reach. You can go onto our website or pick up the phone, either way is -- works fine. Let us know if you have an Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 18 of 102 interest in serving and we will -- we will tell you who those slots will be assigned to and certainly appreciate Jerry, Clint, and Erik for your presence here tonight as well. Oaas: Thank you. Item 7: Department Reports J. Public Works: Backflow Prevention Update de Weerd: Thank you. And thank you to the neighbors. Okay. With that said we will move to the next community item presentation, which was moved forward from 7-J under Public Works, backflow prevention update, and I will turn this over to Mr. Dees. Dees: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, we will wait a second until they get the computer up. At the onset -- there it is. At the onset I want to says thanks again to the folks from the homeowners associations. We had another meeting and they did turn up and gave us some great suggestions on several -- several items. Some of them are here this evening. I certainly want to -- I appreciate them coming to talk to us and entering into a dialogue with this -- with this situation. de Weerd: Can you hear? Dees: No? de Weerd: No. Dees: Maybe if I got closer to it. How is that? Sorry. de Weerd: Thank you, Rich. Dees: Okay. Is that better? We are going to talk about the same things that we did a few weeks ago. It's -- we brought it back to you was the water quality presentation about backflow prevention. Tom, your clicker is not -- oh, I have to turn it on. Sorry. Technology. There we go. This is the same goals we had last time, the same goals that we showed you a few weeks ago. We want to provide clean, safe drinking water to our citizens. That's the short -- the long and the short of it. Our reimbursement recommendation was on the 14th, 8/14,2010. We broke the presentation out into two sections, as you recall. First of all, the backflow reimbursement program -- our recommendations on 8/14/2010, we recommended that they be ended and that we recommended also that we hold a public hearing to talk about the reimbursement program, especially with the folks who are the backflow -- backflow preventer providers, if you will, the testers. Regarding dual connections, our goals were certainly to reduce the probability of introducing constituents into our system that cause water borne illness. That was a big deal for us. We want to keep our water as clean and as pristine as we possibly possibly can and we think dual connections areaway into our system, which we would like to eliminate. These were our recommendations on August the 10th. We Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 19 of 102 wanted to initiate a campaign to describe our program to all our customers, conditionally grandfather some homes built prior to August of 2010. Provide a six month grace period. Those not opting in at the grace period will be required to remove their connections and enforce the annual testing requirements at the owners expense. And except for the grandfathered homes, enforce our ordinances. So, this is what happened on August 10th. This is a quick recap. Continuing, we wanted to send out annual testing reminder notices to all owners of known assemblies, work with the Ada county folks to implement our ordinances on new homes that are constructed and consider a due on sale lien to reduce the number of dual connections over time. Consider assisting with removals of registered dual connects and, if grandfathered, all dual connect systems must have an RP device installed. We want to -- like to reallocate whatever funds we had from that -- from the pool, the 300,000 dollar pool to do testing to do enforcement programs and, then, certainly other things associated with the water utility. We did have an HOA in 2010. We reviewed a refined set of recommendations and we received -- it says here many suggestions. I also had the opportunity to talk to Councilman about the issue and I thank you for that very much, sir. And we -- we think we have got a little more refined set of recommendations to bring to you this evening. These are the revised recommendations. First of all, we still want to eliminate the testing reimbursement program. We want the testing repair cost to be borne by the homeowners, if there is any of those devices left and there will still be devices left that are legitimate and need to be installed. They need to be -- that testing and repair needs to be borne by the homeowner. We want to follow through on our previous understanding that failure to test equals water service termination. We do not want to fund single point connections -- connection installation. The single point after all is still a dual connection and there is no return on investment or benefit to the city. In fact, this is one of the issues that you will see later on in my presentation that is contentious and we have disagreement on. Continuing with our revised recommendations, we want to remove all the known dual connections under an amnesty program. The city will pay up to a maximum amount per dual connection. That maximum amount depends on an opinion of how much it should be. We believe it should be half of what we thought that it would cost to remove the dual connection, which was 300 dollars. The homeowners association folks, as you will hear, want us to pay for everything. The whole -- whatever it costs to remove the dual connection, they would like us to pay for that. We had some estimates done. We got an estimate back of 300 dollars to remove a typical dual connection. That didn't account for those that are underneath some elaborate landscaping or cement or something like that. The homeowners association folks helped us out, they went out and we appreciate this, by the way. They got a couple more estimates. Theirs were anywhere from 200 to 250 dollars to do the same sort of thing. So, the range is between 200 and 300 dollars to remove a typical, if you will, dual connection system. We want to provide for an opt in period. We wouldn't like to take it past a year. Six months would be better, but we wouldn't like to take it past one year to get people to opt into the system so we can remove those connections. We would like to shut off the water after the opt in period is expired and reallocate the testing dollars to pay for the dual connection removal. We'd like to return the remainder of the dollars to the fund balance. Certainly, we would like to inspect all removals to make sure they are appropriately removed. We would like to initiate a wide spread education program. In Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 20 of 102 fact, the homeowners association has helped us out with that, they rather insisted we do so and we agree that that needs to be done. Here are some of the HOA recommendations and the folks from -- from Meridian Greens are here this evening, believe. The folks from the HOA association would like us to pay for the entire amount of the dual connection removal, including the cost for non-typical dual connection installations. In the case of where they are underneath cement this could run a few thousand dollars. Some of the HOAs would like us to the pay for a single point installation. Others say, no, it's not fiscally responsible to do so, don't do it. So, there is a little disagreement on should we do it or should we not do a single point installation. We don't think that we should. If a cap must be imposed it should be at least 500 dollars, instead of the 150 that we propose, they say if you got to put a cap on, put it at 500 dollars so you can cover the cost of all the -- all the removals. Continuing along the -- would like a wide spread education program and they gave us several suggestions. HOA newsletters, which was a great suggestion, in order to contact the folks in the subdivision about what's going on. Certainly next time you have a town meeting, Your Honor, they would like us to maybe take five minutes and explain the situation to those folks at a town meeting. Do some radio spots was one of their suggestions. Excuse me. Certainly use the city wide website and put an insert into the bills. As was pointed out last time, sometimes you put an insert in the bills and immediately things get separated as soon as they hit the front door. So, the other -- the top couple two, three, though, were pretty -- are pretty robust and they should contact -- should be able to get to everybody. These are some of the comments that the folks from the HOA gave us. They were disappointed that the grandfathering provision was not continued, because we are now recommending removing the dual connections there is no need for the grandfathering provision. In fact, we don't think it should be grandfathered, we'd like to get the dual connections out of the system as soon as we can. They would also like to have a due on sale clause, so that when the homes are sold, the due on sale clause, if you still had one of these devices installed, at that point in time they would have to be removed before the house sale could be consummated. They did emphasize that we need a thorough education program. We absolutely agree with that. We need to get out -- get the word out and talk to just about everybody we can. Those are my comments for this evening. We have some recommendations in front of you. Basically, it's -- we recommend the 150 dollar limit be put on the removal for dual connections. We recommend a time certain to have that all taken care of and we recommend, essentially, that we eliminate the reimbursement and testing program in its entirety, using the funds that we have set aside for that for next year to fund the removal of the backflow assemblies. I'll stand for any questions now. de Weerd: Thank you. Council, questions? Rountree: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: Rich, we have had -- now it's two sets of recommendations. Some way or another we need to meld those together and get something prepared, so we can take it Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 21 of 102 to a public hearing -- through a public hearing process. I would, again, like the update of your Powerpoint, so I can compare the two and see what's been added and what's been deleted and -- Dees: I'll send this latest Powerpoint to you. Rountree: Yes. Dees: Absolutely. Rountree: Question comes to mind. Initially we were talking about eliminating the funding of the testing program and that fund would go towards enforcement and that sort of thing. Now, we are looking at least the money for a year or two going to the elimination of dual connections. My question is -- and I still have this question about incentives and I know you say turn your water off as an incentive enough. Usually is after it happens once, but usually takes once, sometimes two or three times to get the message through. But -- and this is a subjective response on your part. Will the 200 -- or the 300,000 dollars that ultimately go towards enforcement yield the 86 percent compliance we currently have toward getting these backflow devices tested and operating efficiently or, if not, what of kind reduction in that percentage do we see and how do we weigh the difference? Dees: Madam Mayor and Councilman Rountree, can I guarantee you that we will get at least 86 percent compliance? The answer is no. I can't do that. Don't know what it will be. I do know that United Water is getting about 60 to 70 percent compliance with no incentive program whatsoever. So, it will be between 60 and 85 -- or 80, whatever we said last time. I think it was 85. Rountree: Eighty-six. Dees: Eighty-six percent. So, it would be between 60 and 86 percent is what we would get, I would imagine. Absolutely cannot guarantee you we will get a higher amount or -- Idon't know that we will get a lower amount, because we do have all the folks listed to get that 85 percent in our database and we will be sending the reminder letters, plus we will be out there -- you know, if they don't get it tested we will say, okay, we are going to have to turn your water off if you don't get your -- your backflow system tested. So, there will be that incentive, if you will, and at least we will have some known quantities out there where -- as we didn't have that two years ago, three years ago, we do have that now. Rountree: So, what is the cost of enforcement for the 8,600 plus that we have the names and addresses for and -- that program is going to cost some money. It's going to take people, it's going to take equipment, it's going to take systems. Dees: Indeed it will, Councilman Rountree. It won't cost -- actually, it won't cost us any more than we are paying right now, because we are -- right now we are sending out the Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 22 of 102 reminder letters as it is. It will just require us to go out and turn the water off. I guess that's not true, then, we will have an expense to go out and turn the water off until they comply. And we will know if they comply when they send back the -- the receipt saying that, yes, my system was tested. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Rountree. I mean, sorry, Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: Thank you. I would comment that that becomes a smaller and smaller universe. As we eliminate these systems there are fewer people who will need to be tested. Rountree: No. Zaremba: Isn't that correct? Dees: Councilman Zaremba, yes, the universe for dual connected systems should shrink if we do what we say we are going to do. We will still need to have a testing program, because there are those folks, like me, for example, that don't have pressurized irrigation. I have an assembly in my backyard that I use for normal irrigation using city water and it still needed to be tested annually. So, those folks will still need to have annual testing done on their devices and if I don't pay for my testing, would fully expect one of our folks, bless them, to come out and turn my water off. So, the number would be shrinking, however, because to take the number of dual connection off you're taking a couple hundred devices out of the system right away. Did that answer your question? I'm sorry, Idon't -- Zaremba: It does. Thank you. And I also have another question and that would be on the -- on the due on sale program that the homeowners are suggesting, I don't have a dual connection, but I do know I plan to live in my house for as long as I live. So, if the point of this program is to get dual connections removed, we could be stretching that out for 20 years or more if we are doing a due on sale. There is some people that live in a house their grandfather built. Dees: Madam Mayor, Mr. Zaremba, indeed, that's the reason we took the due on sale out of this latest set of recommendations and we recommended that the dual connections be removed now within this -- this period of time, this grace period of time. We -- that way we get them out of the system, there is no need to worry about are we going to catch this on a due on sale or not or someone is going to live there for the next 50 years and whatever it's going to be we will just never get it out of the system. This way it gets out of the system and we clean up the -- clean up the -- our total system. de Weerd: Other questions for staff at this time? Bird: I have none. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 23 of 102 de Weerd: Okay. Dees: Madam Mayor -- Madam Mayor, just to run the numbers a little bit, I ran the numbers on what it would cost us to remove all the dual connected systems. Iran it 250 and at 300 dollars. Two hundred and fifty connections -- two hundred fifty connections and three hundred connections, it's alittle -- a little fuzzy to know how -- exactly how many are out there. Some of them are hidden from us. Some of the homeowners have told us people are not showing you where they are. They are not going to tell you. So, we are going to have to kind of be a detective to find some of those. But if there is 250 connections out -- dual connections out there and we pay the 300 dollars it's a 75,000 dollar hit if you will, or a 75,000 dollar bill to us. If there were -- excuse me -- 250 connections and we pay 500 dollars -- to have a maximum of 500 dollars to have it removed, that's 125,000 dollars. So, the range is anywhere from about 75,000 -- it's 150, I'm sorry, I didn't tell you that one -- 150 dollars, if we paid that much money it was 37,500. So, our range is between 37,500 and 125,000 to remove the dual connections, depending upon how -- how you would like us to go. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: That does bring up another question. I would guess there are areas in the city before subdivisions became popular where you would be dealing with individual homeowners, but in some areas -- and I know in my subdivision we have a single point connection, we all use it. Some of the earlier subdivisions are the -- are where you find nonsingle point and each house has their own. If you know of a subdivision and you have three quarters of the homes in that subdivision on your list, wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that the other quarter probably has the same system and do we have a way of inspecting without their inviting us in? Dees: Councilman Zaremba, yes and no. Sort of depends. That's a phrase that you use, Mr. Nary, a lot. Nary: I love it. Zaremba: A legal term. Dees: It's a legal term I do believe, yes. It depends. It depends. Some subdivisions were built in phases and some phases had pressurized irrigation and some didn't. Some put them in and some didn't. Those phases that had the pressurized irrigation, some homeowners put those dual connections -- dual connections in, others did not. So, you can't assume that on the phase where there is pressurized irrigation and there is dual connections, that all those guys have a dual connection, but, then, we would have to check. The problem is is many of these dual -- backflow systems are behind fences and it's a little tough for our folks to act like Kilroy sometimes, you know, peeking Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 24 of 102 over fences to find out if the -- if the backflow system is there. If they are in the front pretty easy. But when there are fences around it gets alittle -- a little more difficult. So, in answer to your question it really does depend on the subdivision. Zaremba: Okay. Dees: We did have two homeowners association folks that couldn't be here this evening. One of them has got the flu. He was -- and I just want to express his -- his sentiment -- or their sentiments, they did send an a-mail --one of them sent an a-mail to us. The one that can't be here because of the flu was against doing single point connections. The other gentleman who couldn't be here this evening says he supports what we are -- we are recommending with 150 dollars and, oh, by the way, he also does not want to pay for a single point connection, nor does he want us to pay for a single point connection. One homeowners association said it would fiscally irresponsible for them to do that, why would it be responsible for us as a city to do that as well? So, I want to make sure that Iwas -- expressed what their sentiments were as well. de Weerd: For the record, you want to enter their name and subdivision? Dees: I can. The name of the gentleman who did not want the single point connection, -- and supported our 150 dollar program was Tim Foster and the other gentleman who said it would be fiscally irresponsible to do single point connections was Mike Ball of Sportsman's Point. Tim Foster is Bittercreek. Bittercreek Subdivision. de Weerd: And Mr. Ball was here at the last presentation. Dees: He was, Your Honor. He could not be here because of illness. de Weerd: Okay. Thank you. We will ask for public comment and, then, invite you back up. Thank you. Is there any public comment? Yes, sir. Watson: Hi, Mayor and City Council. I'm Victor Watson and I live in Meridian Greens Subdivision and I'm a spokesperson for our subdivision. There are a number of things that were on the -- on the slide that we saw that we agree with many of those. We even agree with the issue of a single connection. We don't think that's a good idea. However, had two -- two points I'd like to deal with. One, let me take a few moments to briefly recount the history that brings us to this point, then, I'd like to make a few salient points in reference to this issue of connections. Last June -- this last June or early July the Meridian Greens Homeowners became aware of the intent of the city to enforce a there to for unknown and unenforced ordinance. We became aware of the proposal through a poorly worded threatening letter from the water department and through personal information coming to us from -- from residents who had had water staff come to their doors and tell them that these connections had to be removed. In about mid July several of us individually, myself, Jim Rosetti, not -- there was another person I think, met with water department staff Tracy Ballentine, cordial meeting again to -- to become better informed about the intentions and we offered some suggestions back Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 25 of 102 and forth, we felt good about that meeting. That was meeting one. On July 28th several of the people from Meridian Greens Subdivision, myself, was there, Jim Rosetti -- or not Jim Rosetti -- who else was there? Darrell McRoberts, sorry, was there. And we met with the Mayor and with two of the staff members from Public Works, Tom Barry and Richard Dees. A good open discussion. We felt if there was information that was shared back and forth, some that we didn't have, some that -- that the department didn't have in that particular meeting and the Mayor asked us to, then, be prepared to attend the -- the coming City Council meeting. On August the 9th Richard Dees invited ourselves and other members of subdivisions to meet with him and people from the city. We did that. We had a great discussion we thought. We believe that the city staff and Richard were generally interested in getting information from us, sharing information back and forth. There were a number of suggestions that were submitted. No promises were made on either side from anybody, but, apparently, the discussions and suggestions that we made were well received. Then -- that was meeting three. Then, on August the 10th there was a City Council meeting, you recall, of course, and we made our -- our presentation to include -- to include a consideration of temporary waiver for existing certified backflow devices until the home is sold. That's a big issue for us. We left that Council meeting believing that we had made a reasonable presentation. We left that meeting believing that it was well received, information again was shared and, then, we were invited to return again to this meeting this evening and, again, where discussion would occur and that was, then, the fourth meeting. Then, on September the 9th subdivision reps were again invited to attend another pre-Council meeting for more discussion. As always it was a cordial meeting. We had some -- some discussion back and forth, but -- but between August the 10th and September the 9th something dramatically changed. That's our perception. Something dramatically changed. This was not really a give and take meeting. We offered some -- some ideas about how to instruct, how to get information out, but we believe that the reason for that meeting was to inform us what would be presented here, so that -- so that we wouldn't be surprised and if there would not be high consternation on our part when we were presented this information. We discovered, then, that a major provision was taken off the table. We were told at the direction of the Mayor that -- that provision being the sale or removal or sale of the house, that that was taken off the table -- de Weerd: By me? Watson: That's what we were told. de Weerd: Oh. Watson: That's what we were told, Mayor. And, then, at the end of the meeting, as Richard pointed out, each of the subdivision people did, for the record, say that we were disappointed in -- in some of the outcome of that meeting. So, here we are five meetings preceding this one, we agreed that meetings should take place, that discussion should take place, that it can be productive and it is productive. We agree that there has to be some give and take. We -- you take, we take. We agree with that. However, let me submit eight points relative to this particular issue.. Number one. At Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 26 of 102 the August 10 meeting Mr. Rountree expressed an intent to have a zero percent risk in cross-contamination -- cross-connection contamination. At our May -- at our September 9 meeting we were informed by Richard Dees and the city attorney that Mr. Rountree was adamant about enforcing the ordinance. The truth is that for this particular situation elimination of risk is difficult at best. A zero percent risk would require that the city shut off all of the water and make sure that every resident receives certified bottled water and that we use it. According to the water department's web page it says that residents receive, quote, high quality water one hundred percent of the time. It would seem, then, that the zero risk is already being met. We would like to see if there has been a risk assessment of the effects of implementing the proposals on the city. Number two. It's our view that the city is generally operating on guesswork. For years the city required inspections of backflow preventors, yet there are no records to support what was done, who was paid, and what people actually participated. We understand this is hearsay, but we have been told that one backflow preventor was told by a city worker that the backflow preventor was not -- that person doing the inspections was not charging enough. The numbers provided to you and provided to us are only good estimates based on spotty statistics at best and are pure speculation at the worst. At the meeting with Richard and the staff numbers came up and we agreed that -- well, why don't we pick another number. Well, let's pick another number. It's spotty at best. Number three. The evidence of contamination, other than the one high profile case which took place in another water district and it was due to a -- a contractor installation. Except for that one, the evidence supports the effectiveness and the efficiency of installed and inspected backflow preventers -- prevention devices. I hesitate on this one, because it's -- I just hesitate and you will see why. Water department staff make different deals without the knowledge of the Public Work Department. I don't mean under the table deals, but they make different deals with the different homeowners as to what type of abatement should take place. We don't think that that's right by itself. In fact, the methodology of abatement differs from staff to staff depending with whom one speaks concerning that abatement procedure. Additionally, we just discovered at the end of the meeting this last week that there is, in fact, an additional fail safe system, if you will. We didn't know this. As it turns out, we had been told that at the water meters at our homes on the -- on the city side of the water meter there is a check valve which would prevent any flow back into the city system. Consequently, it strikes us that there are at least three checks at the places where there are certified inspected backflow prevention devices. We wonder how much risk is remaining in an issue where, first, no negative instances have occurred and when the city had -- according to Public Works people, have installed a check device to prevent something coming out, I could pour a quart of E.Coli into the city's feed system in my yard and it would not go anywhere except into my house. We suggest that adopting the draconian approach proposed by Public Works only serves to encourage more bootleg connections and they are out there. And to punish those who operated in good faith to insure clean water -- and that's what we want to do is insure clean water. Finally, we think it's time for a public education campaign to be implemented to include town hall meetings and the inclusion of the public media and, of course, additional request the original proposals to be considered again. That is the -- the change at sale of home. We are not the problem here. Thank you. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 27 of 102 de Weerd: Council, any questions? Rountree: I have a comment about what was suggested I said and what I really said, but other than, no. de Weerd: Well, we will look forward to staff comments on some of the remarks by Victor as well. Thank you Watson: Thank you. de Weerd: Any further comment? We understood you were sick this evening. Well, cover your mouth. You still do need to -- yes. It's nice having you here. Ball: Thank you. Madam Mayor, Councilmen, after further thinking -- de Weerd: If you could state your -- Ball: Oh. Mike Ball. Sportsman's Point. I'm sorry. de Weerd: Thank you, Mike. Ball: Mike Ball, Sportsman's Point. After further thinking after the meeting last Thursday and a lot of deep thinking -- and not to ambush the other subdivisions here, to me any risk is too great and the good faith argument that has been presented that in good faith they were doing everything they were supposed to do -- well, they knew the law was wrong and they knew it was wrong to have the dual connects, why were they still doing it? To me that's not good faith. The fact of it allowed in the ordinance for a subdivision to have a dual connect is ludicrous to me, because of the basic fact that have had eight inch water lines with 45 horses of pumps -- do you realize what that can back into the water system if I have a dual connect that breaks? So, you just -- it's looking at all these things going, you know, any risk is too great and this is the water that I get up and drink my coffee of it every day of the week and to me it's just too great a risk to assume. And any good thinking man would know that it's just not fair for a few to endanger a lot. Even though they are doing everything right, it's still that one time that it happens that it could affect us all, so -- and that's all I have to say. Thank you. de Weerd: Thank you. Any further comment? Okay. Well, I would invite comment from the Public Works Department. Dees: Madam Mayor, Members -- de Weerd: If you stand between them. Dees: Between them. How is that? Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 28 of 102 de Weerd: Yes. Dees: Is that better? Okay. Madam Mayor and Members of the Council, first of all, want to thank Mr. Ball for coming. Sick man. Are you okay? One comment just to start with. The cost of enforcement -- I believe, Councilman Rountree, you asked about cost of enforcement and how much that -- that's actually covered right now in our turn on and turn off fees. So, that if someone's got their water turned off for some sort of noncompliance there is a fee tagged onto that that was to charge them to turn it back on again and that covers our costs to go out to the house to actually make that turn on or turn off. As far as the Mayor making the comments or we said the Mayor made a comment, I don't remember that, Madam Mayor. It may have happened, but I don't remember it. Sorry. So, if it happened I do not remember someone saying that you said that they said that we said. de Weerd: Well, I certainly don't remember the comment either. So, I was interested in hearing that. Dees: Check valves. Check valves are interesting. There is, indeed, a check valve. It's in the setter. A setter is a device that has a meter between it. The setter is also -- there is a valve right on top of the setter that turns the water on and off -- if we wanted to turn the water off your house we would go to that -- to that device and right underneath it is a little check valve that's there to keep a backup from happening. However, that check valve is not checked annually, it's check one time by the manufacturer when it's put onto the setter and that's it. It is not an approved backflow assembly system. Yes, it does offer a modicum of protection, but certainly it's not recommended by any manufacturer of any backflow system at all that that would prevent E.Coli or anything else from going back into the water supply, so that we can't depend on that check valve. Yes, it's there and, yes, it does offer a limited amount of protection, but it's not the be all and end all of protection systems. And as far as making deals with homeowners -- we don't make deals. I think I know what he's talking about. We had a new employee who went out to a gentleman's house in Meridian Greens and they removed -- the gentleman removed his backflow assembly and he had attached a spigot to the input line coming out to the input line, so he could get water to his front yard I suppose. I have never been there, so I don't know. And there was nothing on it and when asked our employee said, you know what, you need to put something on that to prevent backflow from happening if you have a hose laying on the ground or something like that. So, he asked the gentleman to put on the same kind of protection that you have most assuredly on your homes right now. It's alittle -- on every -- on every hose bib there is a little backflow device attached to that and that's what he asked them to put on. And we absolutely don't make deals for people, we -- we want to get the dual connections out of the system. And other than that, we do appreciate the homeowners associations. We did take a lot of their suggestions and the reason we changed our minds, because, quite frankly, after we analyzed it the -- over the weeks that -- between the two Council meetings, we determined that getting the backflow -- the dual connections out of the system was the vest thing for us. Having them even in the system, as you said, Councilman Zaremba, it could have been for 50 years and we Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 29 of 102 need to reduce that number to as low as we can and the only way to do that is take them out and we were offering up a way to pay for that to get those out of the system. Thank you. I'll stand for questions. de Weerd: Council, any questions? Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: I don't know what the expense would be, but would it be possible to equip the meters with a backflow device that served the purpose, but, then, would that mean inspecting every meter every year? Dees: Yes, sir. Zaremba: That doesn't sound good. Dees: Madam Mayor -- that would -- it would mean a test every year. That's the only way you can assure that the assembly is -- has continued operation. That would be extremely expensive. Those assemblies -- they are not cheap. Possible, yes. Hoaglun: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Hoaglun. Hoaglun: Question for Rich. On -- where landscape or building that has occurred over backflow preventors where they can't be tested, that sort of thing, what is the likelihood of being able to put in another backflow preventor somewhere else in the system to accomplish the same thing that can be tested? Do you have any estimate on -- on how many homes that we can't get to or is that kind of a number that we know they are out there, it's just we know here and there that we can't get to them, but no hard -- no hard number? Dees: Madam Mayor, Councilman Hoaglun, are you speaking of dual connected systems -- they are dual connected now and that have a backflow preventor in it today, but would make it be very difficult to remove because of the concrete or the -- Hoaglun: Correct. Dees: You're suggesting that we just leave it there and put a backflow assembly in there and test it? Hoaglun: I'm saying is that possible? I'm not an engineer, so I don't know if that's -- that's doable, so -- Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 30 of 102 Dees: Certainly is possible. That's what you have right now. You have got backflow assemblies that are connected -- dual connected right now -- in fact, that's the problem. They come like out of a piece of -- there is a concrete slab or something around it and, then, the backflow assembly comes out and it goes back down again. And that's the one that's hard to move, because you have to dig down and cap it off. So, could you leave that backflow assembly there? Certainly. But, then, we are back to the grandfather provision, so that takes us back just kind of where we are right now. Hoaglun: Okay. Thanks. de Weerd: Further questions? Okay. Council, what is your direction? I know that Councilman Rountree had noted he would like to look at the two presentations, review future -- or past meeting minutes to look at discussions and -- Rountree: Madam Mayor, my immediate desire is to do that and also to direct staff not to wear the neighbors out. I mean give them a break. Let's put something together and if we are going to move forward with it, we will have a public hearing on it. And if we choose not to move forward with it, choose likewise. Bird: Madam Mayor, I agree with Mr. Rountree. He said it much nicer than I would. de Weerd: In looking at next meeting, it's rather full. Mr. Barry, Mr. Dees, does this look -- first meeting in October to bring a recommendation to Council for a public hearing and certainly we will want to get information out to the neighborhoods on what the specific recommendation would be, so they can be prepared for their -- their testimony to City Council for them to make a decision. Barry: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Yes. Barry: Just as a point of clarification, are you requesting that recommendation in a formal document, such as revisions to an ordinance or are you just requesting it as the recommendation with regard to what's been discussed to date? Because the noticing and the work behind the scenes that would have to occur with legal to get it in ordinance format for the public hearing could take us a little bit more time between now and October. de Weerd: I guess the question would be to Mr. Nary. A lot of this is enforcement of a current ordinance. Nary: Correct. de Weerd: I don't know what you're asking about changing, but this recommendation would be to Council is to how to move forward in enforcing a current ordinance and their -- the process. It would be more procedural. Mr. Nary. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 31 of 102 Nary: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, I guess what I'm hearing is that -- I think what I guess I have been hearing is that what Public Works is wanting to do is bring your proposal that may, then, become part of an ordinance and so I think we don't need to craft an ordinance for October 5th, I think we need direction from the Council as to where you would like our ordinance to go and what recommendations are from Public Works and, then, take public input on that recommendation and, then, direct staff to, then, create either an amendment to your ordinance or not. So, I don't -- I think you could probably have that on October 5th with Public Works, but that -- the only issue -- or Iguess concern -- or I guess not concern. The only issue Ihave -- when you use the public hearing it has a specific connotation. How do you want this noticed? This is not something that normally would be a public hearing, but you're wanting people to have -- to come up -- de Weerd: Public comment. Nary: Right. And you want people to have an opportunity to get here. I don't know if we can send mailed notices in that quick a time period or something like that. Or if you're just wanting, basically, your agenda notice to be adequate that any of these homeowners associations have been informed, they have attended, so I certainly think they are getting the message out there. But I just didn't want to get caught up in providing noticing to people or advertising noticing and that type of thing when you're really going to be, basically, I think, commenting on a memorandum from Public Works and allowing the public to comment on that. de Weerd: I would believe, unless Council sees it differently, that we would continue to work through the homeowners associations and requesting that they get it out to their neighbors and the other fashions that -- you know, to me there is also going to be those that have been notified that the issue has been brought to Public Works' attention. Those citizens who have gone ahead and changed their at their own cost, I think there is some notice responsibility to them, but, Council, do you have any further direction on who else -- how you would like to have this noticed? Hoaglun: Madam Mayor, I think if -- the parties have been established that we have been working with and I think we know who they are, that if we are going to have a discussion say October 5th on this, that's ultimately decided that they would be notified, it would be on the agenda and they can, you know -- I don't know if that would be a public hearing or just an opportunity to hear the Council discuss the direction we would like to see a future ordinance go. But I think we know who the parties are and are easy to contact and move forward in that fashion, but what form that takes and when we do that I think is still to be determined. de Weerd: Okay. Any other comments? Bird: Madam Mayor? Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 32 of 102 de Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: Now, your intention is to take public comment in the public forum that night; am not right? Like we do with the grants if they come. Which we never have. If they want to come and testify they can. It's not a public hearing, but it's a comment period. Okay. That's what I understood. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: And just for the sake of options to bring back -- and I don't know if I mentioned this when the neighbors first brought this to our attention, but on the air quality board during the idea of how to implement phase one of vapor recovery, the idea was from -- during rule making is to offer the incentive to do the improvements to the gas stations with cash back or money to help fund the needed adjustments to -- to their program and it sunsetted at a certain time that if you were to do it within a certain time frame you could qualify for the reimbursement or -- or for the up to amount and after that you had a certain time to do it, then, at your own expense, but it did give a date certain that the improvements needed to be on and it might help a little bit with the grandfather, but, again, it's what you bring back to Council and what the different options are. Hoaglun: And, Madam Mayor, just for Public Works -- Water Department folks, any of those ideas that have been discussed, whether you think they are a good idea or not, it would be helpful to have those listed, even though we are comparing the -- your Powerpoint presentations of first group of ideas, then, new recommendations, but any of those ideas, you know, I have got notes and different things, but it would be helpful to have those listed in case I have missed anything or didn't take a note on a particular thing. So, that would be helpful. Thanks. de Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: Madam Mayor, even though we are going the direction of this not being an official public hearing on a new ordinance, can we include a review of the old ordinance during the discussion? de Weerd: Uh-huh. Zaremba: Okay. de Weerd: That would be appropriate. Zaremba: Okay. Thank you. Okay. So, we will set this for the first Tuesday in October -- if I can turn the page. Nary: October 5th. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 33 of 102 de Weerd: Thank you. Which is October 5th. And I still haven't turned the page, so -- we will set it for public comment. We will hope -- can you have your recommendations and that summary as suggested by Mr. Hoaglun at least a week prior? Dees: Madam Mayor, Members of the -- yes, we can. You want that included with the latest slide show or -- I can copy out a slide show right away and then -- de Weerd: Yeah. And you should get that out right away and we will have that on our website -- the recommendations or you can call the city from the neighbors and get that from us. Okay? Dees: Thank you, Madam Mayor. Hoaglun: Madam Mayor, I just want to note -- I see Former Senator Ipsen out there and and Senator McRoberts and one of the good things about being on City Council, senators, is the fact that we can stretch this thing out, we don't have three months to solve it, as you folks had to do when you were in the legislature. So, we can take a little more time, we don't have to nail it down right away. So, we will try to get this right. de Weerd: I don't know if they see that as a good thing or not. Hoaglun: We are trying to make it right, so that's what we do. Item 6: Items Moved From Consent Agenda de Weerd: Thank you for being here. I guess the next item -- there were no items moved from the Consent Agenda. Item 7: Department Reports B. Legal Department: Discussion on Dog at Large Ordinance de Weerd: The next item is the strategic plan. We have a number of employees here, but I do know that we do have a citizen as well here for Item 7-B and we may want to take care of that item first. But for the sake of our employees, I would like to introduce them, so if they don't have a roll and they should like to go home, they can do so. So, Council, if I could, I would like to introduce staff from the city clerk's office, as well as from the Mayor's office and, then, those that don't have speaking parts, if you don't want to wait around you're more than welcome to leave. So, we have Nancy Radford in the back. And I'm just going to name them as I know them. I won't give you nicknames, but just first names. Nancy, Sheree, Jacy, and Machelle all from the clerk's office. Thank you for being here. From the Mayor's office we have Shelly and Peggy and I know saw Luke and our newest member is C.Jay, who is sitting there nicely in the suit and tie. told him that he had set a new standard for our office. We have suit or tie in church, but sometimes not always a jacket. So, C.Jay, it's nice to see you here and he's been a welcome addition to our team. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 34 of 102 de Weerd: So, with that said, Council, if you don't mind, I will move to 7-B under the Legal Department. Since we have been jumping all over our agenda tonight, I will move to 7-B, unless someone objects. Seeing none, we will ask for Chief Lavey and our city attorney Bill Nary's comments. Nary: Thank you, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council. I guess I'll start. In your packets this came from my staff. Created a table with ten cities, including ours, and how they handle dog at large offenses. This originated -- we had a citizen that sent an e-mail, both to our office, as well as the Mayor's office and I think to the Council Member's concern regarding the fact that it's a misdemeanor offense and that a misdemeanor could carry some significant impacts to him or to other people in the future, including potential fines that a judge could impose. So, in looking at various cities -- so, the idea was to come to you tonight and get direction as to if you want to seek us to prepare a change to our ordinance and, if so, what would you like that to look like. The city of Boise recently changed their -- their dog at large offenses to treat them like they were parking tickets and what they do there is they hold "the ticket -- when you receive a parking ticket in the city of Boise you -- or now a dog at large citation, you receive a citation from the city and you can pay it directly to the city without it going to court, so you don't have court costs attached to it and they have set fines for it. I think the first offense is 25 dollars, the second offense is 50 dollars and after that it becomes a misdemeanor and it's sent to court. So, they track it internally. You can pay it there directly to the city and it doesn't ever go to the court until you have a third offense. If you don't come in within a -- I think it's 14 days, then, you -- then, your citation becomes a complaint, it goes to the court, and you have to deal with it their at the court. Your option -- your option to have the lessor penalty is gone when you don't pay it. We can do that. I haven't discussed it with the chief, but we can certainly craft an ordinance and we will have to, I guess, decide in vetting that out is where would the people pay it, how would we receive it, how would we track it, what -- how much time is that going to take of personnel. The city of Boise already has a system set up for that, we don't. We don't do anything like that currently. City of Coeur d'Alene it's just an infraction. There it's a one hundred dollar fine. The city of Eagle, it's the similar system as Boise, where they are allowed to pay the first couple and, then, it, basically, never goes beyond those types of offenses, unless you don't show up and, then, they send it to court. The city of Garden City it's an infraction with a hundred dollar fine. The city of Mountain Home it's an infraction with a hundred dollar fine. The city of Nampa it's just a misdemeanor and a similar setup of what we have currently for Meridian. In Pocatello it's an infraction with a hundred dollar fine. Sun Valley it's a misdemeanor, it's just the same misdemeanor type of offense that we have. City of Twin Falls it's an infraction with a hundred dollar fine. So, the problem -- the problem that can occur, so that you're aware of -- under the -- under the Idaho Code there is no mechanism for enforcement of an infraction that is not a traffic offense. So, what you have to do is if you're going to make it an infraction, then, you have to create another law that makes it a city misdemeanor to violate -- or to not report an infraction. So, when a person does not appear on the infraction and you have to charge them with that crime to get them to come to court, because there is no other tool for the court to enforce, you can't issue an arrest warrant or get somebody to Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 35 of 102 court on an infraction and most of the traffic -- most of the infractions in the state of Idaho are all traffic related, so when you don't appear in court or respond to the infraction, they suspend your driver's license. Can't do that with a dog at large citation. So, you have to create .another code to do that. The other -- the only other issue that comes up on rare occasions, but comes up occasionally, is the matter of restitution. Sometimes when dogs get loose at large they cause damage and with that they -- with a misdemeanor offense you can at least seek restitution from the court. The court can order to pay for whatever the damage the dog may have caused. The infraction does not allow for that. So, the person -- if they had damage from a dog and you only had an infraction offense for it, they can't receive restitution for it, they would have to sue them in small claims for the damages. You could, if you wished, create an infraction offense for the dog being at large and a misdemeanor offense for a dog that's at large that causes damage and, then, you could handle it that way. So, you have a couple of different options if you want to change from the current setup. The current setup is -- I looked at the existing ordinance. When they recodified the City Code -- I think it was in 1999 for some of it -- this was an existing ordinance that's existed for 50 years or more. So, it's not uncommon. Cities in the last few years, probably based on the same concerns that were raised by the citizen that wrote to us, had looked at other alternative ways to do this, so that's -- that's what we found in Idaho. So, your option is an infraction and we can do some other things to make sure that either restitution could get paid if necessary and create another ordinance that makes it a crime to not appear on a city infraction, so that you can -- it will have some way to hold people accountable, or we could look at this other method that other cities have been doing, allowing, essentially, a payable offense that you could come into the city to pay for. If you don't, then, it gets sent to court. It's just a misdemeanor like it still currently is. You're, basically, creating two layers of -- of events that people can come in and pay it, it just requires some time for us to figure out, again, how it gets paid, where it gets paid at, who is going to verify if it's the first offense, the second offense, the third offense, how are we going to do that. Do you pay the police department or the city clerk's office or where? So -- so, we need a little bit of time to do that, but we didn't do that up before today, because we wanted to make sure we had your clear direction on what you wanted us to do before we did all of that other leg work. So, I think that's it from my end. I don't know if the chief has some other comments as well. de Weerd: Thank you, Bill. Chief? Lavey: Madam Mayor, Council, I brought this in front of legal a couple weeks ago, because it's in my opinion that there are dog ordinances that do not belong handled in the courts. We are busy enough in the court system, we don't need to be clogging up the court system for a -- for anymore cases, especially dog at large cases. Today we are only talking about dog at large, but there is also some other -- other dog ordinances that we probably need to take a look at, too. One is an unlicensed dog, which also is a misdemeanor. One of the things that brought this all up was an increase in enforcement on behalf of the police department animal control and a lot of that was brought on by some discussions over the last several months with unlicensed dogs and other areas, such as the dog park and that thing. With our increased enforcement we Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 36 of 102 also have an increase in complaints from the citizens and they were not wanting to plead guilty to a dog at large ticket, because it's maximum six months in jail, thousand dollar fine, or in some cases three months in jail, three hundred dollar fine. Now, that is the maximum and I'm not aware of anybody that has received that, but that's terrifying to someone that might have made a simple mistake. The other thing is is that some of these people have gone on for 40, 50, 60 years, never broken a violation or at least never been caught at one and didn't want to plead to a misdemeanor now for a dog at large and so speaking with Mr. Nary trying to come up with what's the best answer, one of the things that we face in the city is that occasionally we have an unfortunate incident where a dog might get out through an act of nature, neighborhood kids, or something else might let the dog out. If that person is -- that person's dog is located, dog at large, and a citation is issued, that person is facing a misdemeanor and it really wasn't their intent for that dog to get out. So, we need to have some sort of mechanism where we can -- we can take care of cases like that. I would propose that we come up with some sort of system that offers a tiered approach for those people that have those unfortunate or accidental or one time events in their life with their loose dogs, that they face some sort of infraction. I would say that whether it's -- the first one's an infraction or first two are an infraction and, then, for those repeat offenders it turns into a misdemeanor. Now, logistically, I don't know how we are going to work that. That's what we pay the attorneys for and they can write law. But that is my proposal and I will stand for any questions if Council or the Mayor have any. de Weerd: Council, any questions? And certainly I think the chief and our attorney described how it was brought to our attention anyway. Who would have thought a dog at large was a misdemeanor. I didn't know that until the first phone call or, actually, it was a conversation rather than a phone call, so -- and, then, we learned that the unlicensed dogs was also a misdemeanor and certainly we would like to clean that up as we address this one, too. So, any questions for the chief? Bird: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: Chief, how many citations, estimate, do you think we write in a year on dog at large? Lavey: Right now because it's a misdemeanor it's very low. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: My next comment was actually going to answer that question. A report that we got recently from the Boise city attorney's office who handles our prosecutions under contract to the City of Meridian, says that during the four months April 1 through July 31 of this year -- I won't read them all, but I will read the two before and the two after. The Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 37 of 102 attorney's office handled 97 inattentive driving, 93 speeding, 82 dog at large and 69 DUIs, 70 domestic battery. Now, I agree that dog at large probably shouldn't be in that list. Those other ones I would want people to be prosecuted seriously for. I would agree that dog at large should not be a misdemeanor, but we are -- in that four month period that's one a day for our animal control officer. So, where Iwas -- where I was going to go with that statistic was even though I'm in favor of saying, okay, this ought to be an infraction, I think the fine ought to be something that covers the cost of our animal control officer and my question to the chief was going to be where would that fine be? Lavey: There is a proposal in there what the fine would be. I don't recall what -- there is several ordinances we have -- are going to come in front of you today and, then, next week, too. So, I don't recall what that is, but I thought it was like 75 dollars, plus costs. would say that you need to look at the figures prior to those four months, though, because, like I said before, is we just recently increased our enforcement of that and that's where we started getting the complaints. I do not know what those figures are, but I have been putting pressure on our animal control to increase the enforcement, rather than just tell these people to stop it, because we weren't getting compliance and so I don't have those figures in front of you, but we could sure supply those. Nary: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Nary. Nary: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, I also handed out to you for -- I guess fortuitously the newspaper to the east for an article today about their increased enforcement in the city of Boise and the impact it's had. They have a larger number of citations than they had previously, because they are taking a more proactive enforcement. But, again, it's -- it's not problematic to do that. It can made some sense. Like I said, I think the only real issue is -- is that time going to get absorbed by current staff and how much time is that going to take. I don't really know. I mean I have no idea. When I read that article today it does concern me that it's going to monopolize a lot of time, but we won't know it until we do it. I think that approach of -- I think the approach of -- of allowing for one or two that could be done -- paid, essentially, internally first before it gets sent to court makes some sense. Some of the cities -- the infraction code -- and maybe the reason they have chosen to do that -- the maximum you can fine them is a hundred dollars and the cities that we found just -- it's a hundred dollars. Now, Iwould -- I would hesitate to guess that a lot of people that don't get fined a hundred dollars today for their dog at large and we change it to an infraction to fine them a hundred dollars every time, probably wouldn't like that much better either. So, I don't have a magic answer for it, but I mean we can certainly work with the police department and finance to figure out a method on who we could do payable offenses here and whether or not they could be done at the police, because somebody has to verify whether this is the first or second offense, like some of these other cities do and that work is probably going to have to be done at the police department and not here at City Hall. So, we can work with the police and see if that's something we can -- we can try that, bring back a proposal to you with an ordinance amendment, probably within, Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 38 of 102 oh, I would say a month we could probably bring back an amendment to the ordinance if that's your direction and, like I said, we will work out the details of payments and all that with police and finance. de Weerd: Well -- and what I think is important is an interim plan. I mean as I understand it now -- and, again, I'm surprised I didn't get called sooner -- is you have a dog at large and so you get a misdemeanor there. Your dog is unlicensed, so there is a second misdemeanor. Then, you have to get it spade or neutered before you can remove it from the shelter and you're -- you're adding up some pretty hefty bills there for your animal who might have just slipped out underneath your fence or -- and I know that's still the homeowner's responsibility, but that's quite severe. So, if we can also have an interim plan as well, so everyone is consistent, we know what we will be doing in the interim. Lavey: You know, Madam Mayor and Council, one last comment, too, is -- is the -- the agency to the east, one of the things that they are facing is that their fine is so low it's kind of like the seat belt ticket, it's worth it, I'll just -- I'll continue to commit this violation until it adds up, because it's only a 25 dollar fine. I do think it needs to be significant. can tell you that I do not want to write the City of Meridian a ticket for a hundred a pop and if I find that I'm doing it a couple different times, I would probably listen, too. But if it's 25 dollars, you know, it may be a risk to somebody to do that, so I do believe that if we do go this route it has to be a high enough penalty that it's going to affect you in some way, because the whole idea is to change behavior and change it from comitting that infracting, whether it's -- or infraction or misdemeanor, so -- it does have to be high enough -- it doesn't have to be as painful as the state I came from where it's four and five hundred dollars, but it needs to get their attention. But Ishould -- I do believe it should be tiered in some manner. Hoaglun: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Hoaglun. Hoaglun: Yeah. I was going to point out that most of the dog owners are responsible, but there are times -- just had a deal here a few months ago, I think it was late this spring where I'm out working in the yard on the weekend and all of sudden these two strange dogs show up in my yard. I have a lab, so they came over to -- I'm like, whoa, where did these two dogs come from? And I got the young one to come to me and, fortunately, they had their tags and everything, I was able to call, and they are out looking for their dogs. The kids had left the gate open and off they went and, you know, they pull in the pickup truck and the kids are crying, because their dogs left and they were responsible for it and, you know, happy ending for all and I think, okay, if that animal control happened to be coming along at that time, they need to be picked up, taken care of, there needs to be a fine, that's -- accidents happen and I guess it's setting that level, but at the same time I want to put the hammer down on people who aren't responsible, who let it happen time and time again and we do have to say, you know, enough is enough and not make like the article said, eh, you know, I can afford that, so Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 39 of 102 want my dog off the leash, let it run, do its thing -- I don't want that. You know, I -- I guess, you know, I do like the tiered approach. I guess it's a matter of how we are going to handle that, but at the end I think if it's three strikes and you're out, you're going to court, it's a misdemeanor and it's going to be a hefty fine, I'm fine with that. But the first time it might be higher than 25 dollars, maybe it's 50 dollars for the first time, second time a hundred dollars and, then, from there we can go up even further. But having it as an infraction I think those first two times, but I do have a question for you on that. Is there a period of time where let's say to use that family as an example, it happened, the animal control picked them up and there is a period three or four years that go by, nothing happens, and all of a sudden the dog gets -- the young one now is older and it happens to get out again and it gets picked up. Is there a statute of limitations, if you will, on the frequency -- and, again, I think that gets back to Bill and the tracking and how do we -- how do we handle that. But I'm interested in your thoughts on that. If it happens within a year, well, certainly you'd think, but, you know, if it's four or five years, are we keeping track that long? Nary: Madam Mayor? Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, not to jump in front of the chief, but the way the -- the way the city of Boise's ordinance is, is they track it by calendar year. The records of what's been in court is -- is easy to track, because those last forever. What's going to be more difficult is creating a tracking system for ones that don't get to court. So, the ones where you have came in and paid and your -- and say it's 50 dollars for what kind of stuck in my mind -- so, you came in and paid over the counter, we have to track that, because the court system isn't going to track in for us, so we will have to track that internally. So, that's what I think we have to solve, so that we would know over at least the course of the calendar year is this the person's first offense, because the offense -- and the other thing -- and I know this probably sounds silly to all of you, but the offense has to be to whoever is related to the dog, because what we used to have happen in Boise many times was husband got ticket one, wife got ticket two, husband gets ticket three, because they want to avoid paying accelerated penalties. To set your mind maybe a little bit at ease, I understand it's a misdemeanor and everybody can have a different opinion of how that may impact their life or not. have been doing this a long time, never has anybody ever come and said I didn't get a job, I couldn't get a license, I couldn't get anything, because I had a dog ticket I would think for 25 years someone would have said something. So, I don't think the impact is great, but I think there is better ways to do it and I think that's what we are really trying to get to. Most of the fines in court are between 50 to 75 dollars, unless they have been there before, and that's through the court's records. So, what I want to do is I want to make sure, too -- and I don't know what -- where Boise City came up with these amounts, but what I don't want is our third offense where we believe this person has been through the system twice, now they go to court, and we would think they should be impacted greater and the court, then, fines them 50 dollars, because that's the first time they came there. So, we want to make sure there is some clarity to the court that, you know, there is some expectation already and the judge has discretion, it's whatever the judge wants to do, but we want to make sure that there is some impact, so -- Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 40 of 102 de Weerd: Council, we have a long agenda ahead of us and at the rate we are going we are going to be here until early morning hours. Rountree: Getting to be dog years. de Weerd: Yeah. Zaremba: May I ask one more question on that? de Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: And that is our current process. I assume we learn about this, because the animal control was called and they went out and picked up a dog and now we have the dog in the shelter. How do they handle it if the dog's not licensed or not spade as was mentioned before, do they actually collect the money? Lavey: Madam Mayor, Councilman Zaremba, no. The money is collected at the police department, so you would have to pay that at the police department and get a receipt and, then, provide it to the animal shelter. Zaremba: Okay. So, there is a system for money changing hands. Lavey: Correct. Well -- and -- and I respect the Mayor's comments on the long agenda. Two additional comments. One is we are in the process of upgrading our -- going to a new record system. Our current record system could keep track of that, but our knew record system I believe is even better. We can verify that. And, then, too, although I'm not aware of anybody that's lost -- lost a job opportunity, over my career here at Meridian we have had to arrest numerous people for dog at large tickets, because they didn't take care of them, so you have to get physically arrested, handcuffed, taken to the county jail and, then, you bond out for dog at large and I don't think that that's appropriate. And with that I'm done. de Weerd: I agree. And there might be a member of the public who would like to comment, so it's -- Lavey: I'll get out of the way. de Weerd: Good evening. If you will, please, state our name and address for the record. Miles: My name is Brianna Miles. Do you want me to just go by myself? de Weerd: Uh-huh. With your address, please. Miles: 2643 North Tricia Way. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 41 of 102 de Weerd: Thank you. Miles: First of all, I'd like to thank you, Madam Mayor, and the rest of the Council Members for giving me this opportunity to come up here and speak. First of all, my mother and I are here because we are in support of change of this ordinance. We were personally affected by the broad spectrum of this ordinance, seeing as earlier this year my dog escaped from the neighbor's yard, who we were paying to watch while we were on vacation. The neighbor -- somehow the dog got out of her yard. We were informed when -- as soon as we got cell phone coverage, that our dog had been lost. We contacted local animal shelters. We were informed that the dog was at the shelter. The following morning we went to pick up the dog and seeing as I was the person that went to pick up the dog, though the dog is, actually, my mom's physical property, I received a misdemeanor dog at large ticket, as well as a misdemeanor dog without a license. We have recently moved to Meridian from Nampa. We moved in April, so it had been about a month since we moved. We hadn't gotten down to getting a license, so I was in a bit of a state of crises, seeings I had two misdemeanors on my record that were possible of being charged and I have never been pulled over, I have never had anything like that happen, so I was very nervous and I just wanted to clarify my reason in coming up here isn't to defend my personal case, it's the fact that this could happen to anybody is really disconcerting. Additionally, I feel that there is two things that are wrong with the ordinance. First of all, it's a bit too broad. In speaking with the staff at the shelter, they informed me that there have been situations where a neighbor had been out of town and their dog had gotten out somehow and a family friend had gone to pick up the dog and that family friend was tacked with a misdemeanor charge, even though they were not involved and it wasn't even their dog. Additionally, it concerns me that this charge is a misdemeanor, which happens to be the same charge for animal cruelty and I just find it a little bit of a discrepancy that for abusing an animal you can get the same charge as your dog running away from home, which is oftentimes by mistake. I know in my case it was. Additionally, what concerns me is that if I do happen to get this on my record I could be at risk -- I'm a student at Boise State, if I have scholarships they might look at my record, see I have a misdemeanor, not looking deeper into it and just ixnay me from receiving any further scholarship. Like was mentioned before, employment opportunities could be at risk and having been a former employee of an animal clinic that would have definitely have been looked into, seeing as it involved animals. So, I won't take up much more of your time because I know you're busy, but, at any rate, that's just my two cents on the matter. de Weerd: I appreciate your comments. Miles: Thank you. Crane: My name is Karen Crane. 2643 North Tricia Way, Meridian. And my daughter, essentially, said it all, I just have a few comments from the parental point. I'm very proud of my daughter, she worked very hard, she is terrified of getting a ticket and -- you know, for speeding and, then, when this happened it's just been very traumatic on our whole family. She didn't mention that the dog is about a three and a half pound Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 42 of 102 Chihuahua. It shakes when you look at it twice. Far from a threatening creature. And having just moved here we were not in an environment she felt comfortable in, she didn't really know the people that were watching her, so when the door opened just a sneak she bolted, just ran like wild fire. My daughter was ticketed with two misdemeanors, which have caused me a lot of alarm. We talked to the court and was actually recommended by one of the Ada county clerks to retain counsel, which we have had to do, we have had to hire an attorney to fight this. It's scheduled for pretrial conference early October and trial in November and I have just been shocked at my welcome to Meridian, Idaho, with something like that. We were here a few weeks and, wow, we are hiring an attorney already. So, anyway, I just really encourage reform of this ordinance and I'm very excited that the police chief is on board for that, that really gives me a sense of encouragement. Thank you very much. de Weerd: Thank you. Thank you for being here this evening. Yes. Josephson: Madam Mayor -- de Weerd: Good evening. Josephson: -- my name is Mark Josephson, I'm at 1841 East Sergio Court. I'd like to bring a couple things to the attention of the staff and the City Council, please. One is the breadth of this. It's not just running at large, as the chief said, it's not just not having a license, it's also a dog barking. A female that's not caged while it's in heat. It's a -- there is a number of different areas that need to be looked at that I think we can probably agree are not necessarily at the level of DUIs and at the level of spousal abuse. Having more than three dogs is a misdemeanor in this case. One of the things that Council brought up that there is no way to track it. I believe we have are already discovered that there is a current system for tracking according to City Code 628, impounding a dog there is first, second, and third infraction, there has to be a method to be able to enforce that code. So, if it's already there we can use it. The other issue wanted to bring up about damage. There is also a city code involving damage to property. It's 6217. So, a lot of the issues that we have, a lot of the difficulties have already been fixed, they are already there, I would propose that we move quickly, so the ladies and myself can stand before a judge in a couple of weeks and tell them that it's no longer a misdemeanor in this city, do you really want to pursue this. Thank you for your time. de Weerd: And, certainly, I think you will have a good indication as Council gives direction to our city attorney's office and our police department on how to move forward, so you can bring that with you. Council, discussion? Oh, yes. Sorry, Brian. Come on forward. Zaremba: Okay. I'll wait. Good evening. Draper: Thank you, Madam Mayor and City Council. My name is Brian Draper. I live at 1996 Kristen Way. I'm a member of the dog park task force and a long time Meridian Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 43 of 102 resident and also a mailman. So, I -- I know a little bit about dogs and when they get loose and that kind of thing and they do a lot and a lot of times when the wind blows real hard, well, the gate's open and that's when I find the dogs running out on my route. You know, the people usually aren't home to put them back in. One of the things that the chief talked about was the fact that it's a misdemeanor to not have your dog licensed and the Council and Madam Mayor will recall back in May Ishowed agraph -- the dog park task force showed you a graph that showed that only about 3,000 dogs out of a possible 18,000 in Meridian are licensed at this time and so that means 80 percent of the dog owners in Meridian are committing a misdemeanor tonight. There is -- at the time you asked us to kind of look outside of the box and look at things and there is a program out of Fremont, California, and they have got a website and they show it and they got an enforcement policy that makes it an administrative fine, instead of a court fine, to have a dog not licensed and, then, they have -- they set up a -- it takes a little bit of software and some volunteers and staff work and you get -- once you get it set up and it's set up by using -- having a city ordinance for a veterinarian's report all rabies vaccination and, then, you have the name of the owner and the name of the dog and, then, the owners are given 60 days to get a license. And, then, if they fail to do so, then, you do a progressive fine with them. So, I'd recommend anyone involved with this look at that -- that website and see how they did that. It was Fremont, California, and it -- they seem to have a good program that really helps. de Weerd: Well -- and I think your point on that burden of proof, I think that the city clerk's office, our police department, our volunteers, have to prove that every single year is ludicrous and there has to be a way that we can record that and, yes, I did say that on the public record. So, to make it easier for those that want to license their dog and do the right thing is to show that proof of spade or neutered once and they shouldn't have to do it every year, so I guess as we look into record keeping and that sort of thing to, please, look at that as well. Draper: We definitely need a database where you can send out a renewal form, instead of just -- you know, what's going to happen this year again, like every year prior, in November I'll get a paper inside my city bill, with a bunch of other papers that says I need to license my dog this year and that's why we have such low compliance on it, because that's all we do to insure the people license their dogs. So, we need to do a little bit more, I think, and that would increase funds that would make it -- you know, I have paid for dog licenses since 1972 -- not the same dog, but -- but, anyway, all my fees have gone for enforcement against people that aren't following the rules. I followed the rules and all my money is just going for that and I'd like to see it where we are bringing the funds into where we could do other things. de Weerd: Thank you. Draper: Thank you for your time. de Weerd: Thank you. So, Council, how would you like to move forward with this? Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 44 of 102 Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: I think I would like to see a new ordinance that gives a tiered approach, starting with an infraction, backed by -- if there is no response, maybe a misdemeanor, but two infractions and the third one is a misdemeanor, those -- I mean that kind of approach. I would like to see the fine based on what it costs us to administer it closer to the hundred dollars than the 25 dollars, probably. And I would follow that with a question. For the people who have already gotten tickets and have a court date, can we notify the court that we are working on decriminalizing this or does that have any effect on previous tickets? Nary: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, Council Member Zaremba, I mean we wouldn't notify the court, we would notify the prosecuting agency and it's really up to the prosecutor as to whether or not they want to continue that, ask to continue it or what they want to do. We would just notify them that we are revisiting our ordinance and looking at making a change. The other suggestion I would make -- and I'm going to verify this with Boise city, but I think the system -- I think the -- the system of, basically, allowing payment initially to the city directly without it going to court for one or two offenses, but if the person doesn't appear even in the first offense, sending it to the court is a better tracking system than creating another ordinance or another law that they have violated and, then, sending it back. So, I think that's the model we will probably use, but I will notify the prosecuting agency tomorrow that -- where we are going, it's up to them as to what they choose to do with those cases. I don't know how many are still active or pending. There are, obviously, two, but I don't know how many others besides that. But I will notify them first thing in the morning. Hoaglun: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Hoaglun. Hoaglun: I agree with Councilman Zaremba and what Bill Nary just mentioned about -- we do need to have something there that if people aren't going to be responsible and pay that first fine -- you know, we have Brianna taking the fall for her mother, of course, you know, and she doesn't pay, you know, somebody's going to -- they are going to .have to come and do that, but -- and make sure that gets paid. So, if we have to do that as a misdemeanor to follow up to enforce that first and second payment, I'm good with that, and having that tiered approach I think works -- will -- can work, in my mind. de Weerd: I'm afraid my daughter would have let my dog stay there until I went to get them out, so I admire that. Any other comments from Council? Is this the direction that we want to move towards? Okay. Rountree: Move towards getting to pay for itself. We are talking about personal property and people's responsibilities. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 45 of 102 de Weerd: Okay. Well, we -- you have your direction. Okay. Thank you. And thank you for joining us. A. Mayor's Office: Strategic Plan Update de Weerd: Okay. Item 7-A is the Mayor's office strategic plan and, Council, you will hear this report. You know, these workshops were always put together for these strategic presentations and somehow, you know, two hours -- two and a half hours into our meeting we are getting to one of the main events and I'm not saying that just because it's the Mayor's office, but I can tell you that every single department puts a great deal of thought and time into these presentations and -- and so you will hear it, because I get to convene the meeting anyway. So, I'm going to go on the other side and if you noticed Robert is not with us tonight. He is in the hospital at this point. His wife is one month early and so their contractions have slowed and there is no baby expected this evening, but you just never know. Babies are going to come when they want to. So, Mr. President, I will turn this over to you while I go to the podium. Zaremba: Thank you. Okay. The next item on our somewhat scrambled agenda is the report from the Mayor's office and we have that in the competent hands of the Mayor. de Weerd: Well, City Council and staff, guests, we are very honored to be here in front of you to discuss our city clerk and Mayor's office strategic plan, accomplishments, and kind of where we are going in moving forward. What we will not be including is the economic development. For the most part is you will be getting a strategic update next month that will cover that aspect. You probably have seen the vision and mission. There is still discussion about what is a vision and what is a mission and it's 50-50 at this time, so what you see is what you get and you have seen it often, probably every single month. It's my pleasure to introduce you to some of our accomplishments in the clerk's office and the Mayor's office and in particular what we are doing in meeting our city's core values of CARE. The definition is we provide our best for the community we serve, we will provide quality service to customers, and positive development of our staff that promotes and expects accountability, respect, and excellence. And these are some of the things that we do in our offices to show that we care. Customer service. Again, the description is we will respond to customers in a genuine, positive, and timely manner and our actions will be solutions oriented, where staff meets and exceeds expectations by listening to customers and following through on their concerns. This is a list of some of those different areas that we do in our customer service and we believe we are customer service leaders in this city, among those in the state, where we have a initial response within 24 or 48 hours. We coordinate with all our departments as we usually fill those calls, e-mails, or et cetera, and we have to get them out to the departments that it relates to. Customer concerns are routed to those appropriate people and, then, we track that through the access database to see how they are responded and make sure that there is follow up. We bring to -- we bring the City Hall to the public beyond our walls through our town hall meetings, Coffee With The Mayor, and various community events. We are the point of contact for the media. We utilize Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 46 of 102 our website and multimedia tools, like the video, RSS feeds, blogs, social media platforms, through Facebook and Twitter and we will take great pride in giving proper notice of all public meetings, utilizing our reader board, display cabinets, website, a-mail list and RSS feeds and I will commend Sheree in the clerk's office for how she displays these on our -- in our lobby for the public as they are going through, she takes great time and pride in how that is displayed and, again, those are ways that we brand our city, it shows a great deal of customer service and customer care. Accountability. There you have a lot of numbers. This shows the busyness of these two offices in fielding phone calls, public record requests, room reservations, et cetera. They do understand in the definition of accountability, we understand our role in the organizational team, know our jobs and accept that each of us is responsible for our own work, choices, and actions. These are just great examples of what work we do in the Mayor and city clerk's offices to step up to our roll and the accountability. Respect. We will be trustworthy and courteous. We honor and accept people with diverse opinions and backgrounds. We deal with a number of customers and each of those are respected for their difference scenarios, situations, and why they are coming to the city. They are treated as individuals and we assist them to the best of our ability. We do take the time to celebrate accomplishments of our staff and our citizens, because we think that that is one of our greatest roles in respecting what our citizens and our employees do for the livability of our community. Excellence. This summer we have had a great deal of recognition for excellence with the Association of Idaho Cities awards, the different magazines that have also recognized our city as good for families, good to live in and that we have civic citizens that step up and stand to be counted. We do have another great announcement on September 21st and we will this keep you wondering, because we have -- we have been told we can't tell anyone. But we did have to put it on here, just so you knew we had an announcement to make on the 21st. We also used printed materials and events to, again, promote our community and what we have branded ourselves as that premier place to live, work, and raise a family. Some of those events are the State of the City, MYAC's fundraisers that raised 4,000 dollars for the Food Bank. The Chinese cultural event and many others. This all relates to CARE. Customer service, of accountability, respect, excellence and they show that we do care. We provide our best for the community that we serve, providing quality service to our customers and the positive development of our staff. Values that certainly promotes these core values. The CARE values are reinforced through activities that you see in front of you and lead to the success our city among all of our city departments in achieving those excellence awards. Meridian is a premier place. These are our focus areas and initiatives and you will see this graphic in every department, thanks to Anna. And it guides our strategies, our activities, and our related efforts. That first one is economic excellence and you will notice that each of us have different strategies and initiatives that support each of these focus areas. To be a prosperous community we feel that you must have strong and diverse businesses. You will receive an update next month, as I mentioned, from Brenda on the strategic plan, our workforce development, and our business enterprise corridor, among others. It's important for us to be active and engaged with the business community through relationship building with our businesses, through visits, welcoming new businesses, streamlining processes, hosting business events, such Meridian Business Day, which is coming up on September 30th. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 47 of 102 And those are the built for business pieces. The design for living for economic excellence is relationships with our homeowners associations and we feel that those are vital and that's why we use our town hall meetings and we also believe that we do that through timely and relevant topics, using the web, Facebook, and Twitter. Strategic growth. These are different points of our strategic plans and initiatives and they are offered through exploring different programs and I think you will hear from Jaycee on what their office has done and looking at expanding our services and being that one stop shop and perhaps at some point offering passports. How they handle their business registration on alternative payment options for licenses -- licenses -- that's easy for me to say. I'm trying to speed through this and I'm not a fast talker. Number two is pursuing our federal grants and program opportunities, working with our other departments and looking at critical infrastructure needs. Building those congressional relationships and being -- communicating with them, looking at participating with our legis -- yeah, we have a real tough one in one of the offices. Participating with legislative transportation groups and other relevant agencies and organizations. Looking at infrastructure, as you no doubt have heard me say over and over again, like the Meridian interchange rebuild, Rails For Trails and partnerships such as that which you will hear soon with the Ada County Fueling Station. That last point is more in long range planning. How we work with our neighboring city planning areas, our business enterprise corridors and the capital improvement plan. Services that meet demands. Looking at areas such as a future post office. Having one in our community has certain been cause of concern for some of our citizens. We still continue to explore that. During the economy times it's probably not a reality, but it has not dropped off our radar. Website improvements, identifying realtime issues and working with various departments on issues like Spice or texting while driving and also responding with the appropriate support to program enhancements and ordinance changes, such as the automated trash pickup. Those are what keeps us busy. We also have relevant office programming through Meridian's Promise, MYAC, and the Faith Ambassadors Council. Program and fees schedules that are evaluated. Records retentions that are looking for updates and internal policies, improvements through operational meetings with our directors. Organizational excellence. Right now we are looking at 360 feedback evaluation and looking at how we can enhance those internal employee surveys. We are looking as senior management at team building and also at understanding how each of us operate, communicate, and interface with each other. It also included our PADS and working with the HR department on training plans and opportunities for our employees. We also have internal and external communications through different publications and our media relations, as well as promoting community through awards and recognition and our customer comment cards and the appropriate follow up. Stewardship of the public trust. We stepped out by I know in the Mayor's office by maintaining or reducing budget for FY-11. Our city clerk's office had a slight increase, but that was due to a particular enhancement. Our target fund neutral- programming through the State of the City and Taste of Meridian, Meridian's Promise and the Mayor's CEO Book Club, looking at our relationships with city, county, and state and federal officials and also in developing that system for providing consistent, understandable, accurate and complete information regarding city records and access to city information. Ordinances certainly affect this area with agendas, public records, publications and Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 48 of 102 responding to meet state requirements. Moving forward, I will turn this over to Luke, who is stepping in for Robert and -- Luke. Cavener: Thank you, Madam Mayor, Mr. President, Members of Council, as the Mayor said, I will be trying to fill in a little bit for Robert as, obviously, he is away. The next part of this presentation is really to talk about moving forward, what we are doing and where we are going to be going. This will provide an update on the programs we offer and some of the major initiatives that we are looking at moving forward. The first one is the Mayor's Youth Advisory Council. They are an amazing organization. They had their first meeting last night. We had a little over 50 attendees, a lot of new faces and a lot of returning faces. They have three subcommittees. The community, they continue to do a variety of different events, public service events in the community, looking to continue their partnership with Rake Up Meridian. Their first service project will actually be this Saturday, so a weekend, they will be volunteering at the community block party. Government affairs subcommittee will continue to remain active, there is a variety of different issues discussed at the legislature, including texting while driving. The Teen Activities Council, which was brand new last year, will be returning again this year, providing a monthly event for teens in our community. I think we will see their -- their main focus will be on leadership and media. We have really found last year that there is a lot of tech sawiness amongst this generation and they really want to do a variety of different projects and the youth council wants to be a place where they have that opportunity. We are going to be partnering with the Meridian Chamber for an event the end of October called Mad City Money where we provide that leadership training element where the youth will be learning strong financial skills to -- that they will be able to use their entire life. We are also really excited to explore the opportunity with police and fire for a mini version of the public safety academy that will really be designed for our youth and a quick really exciting story. There was a student that was involved in youth council that graduated last year and did the police ride along this fall. It also happened to be the same day that the gentleman in the Bermuda shorts decided to rob the Bank of AmErika at the Albertson's and I got a phone call from Devon that day thanking me for the most amazing experience of his life and that he's really decided to get involved in law enforce and come back to Meridian and I said, you know, the gentleman in the Bermuda shorts is the -- I guess maybe the one you should be thanking and, of course, our police department for -- for taking him out. I didn't mean it so much like that. Another organization that I have spoken to you time and time again is the Mayor's Faith Ambassador. They have really done a lot in our .community over the past six months. One of their big projects that they focus a lot on I Heart Meridian, which is really a people first approach to service projects where other organizations they were going to paint with a brush, so we are going to paint the town or do a Rake Up Meridian. I Heart Meridian is finding what are those individual needs within our community and how can they be addressed to just provide meal services for neighborhoods and apartment complexes, where others did service projects, like yard maintenance, school supply driver, and cleaning up our schools. It was a huge success. A lot of them are really looking forward to continuing those relationships. It wasn't a one and done, if they want to continue to build a relationship with those people in the neighborhood and be impactful in their life. Really, this project came about Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 49 of 102 through a partnership with Capital Christian and Pastor Mark Thornton, who is really the driving force behind I Heart Meridian and in a Faith Ambassador's meeting one of the people that was in attendance said wouldn't it be great if we could have a community wide block party. And I said, yeah, that would be great and this was in June or July and they said we'd like do it in September and, okay, let's make this happen and what's been really great is our community has really come out to support this event as a free family friendly even that will be happening this Saturday on September 18th. Project Filter has stepped up to be the title sponsor and we have received a lot of -- a strong response from impact radio and BOB FM is going to be promoting this and all of their radio stations and it's going to be a great event for people to come out to a free barbecue, Cheerleaders is going to be cooking up a bunch of food and it's going to be a great way to end the summer at Settlers Park. Also it will be the last day of the splash pad, so we expect to have a lot of people come out for that. And now I will turn it over to Shelly Houston who will share with you some information about Meridian's Promise. Houston: I'm Shelly from the Mayor's office. I'd like to think if the city were an apartment store, I work in the toy department, because I get to do a lot of special event planning and especially I get to work with the younger children here in town. So, I really enjoy that. As part of my duties I coordinate Meridian's Promise and that's an alliance of local businesses, churches, schools, individuals, service clubs, groups of people and individuals that care about kids and together as a group we agree that there are agreed promises that our community must absolutely keep to every child in order to give them a good start in life and those five promises are caring adults, safe places, a healthy start and future, marketable skills and opportunities to give back and so everything we do is kind of focused on fulfilling those promises to youth and we have various service projects and family friendly activities throughout the year that align with the various projects. Free family fishing day is an example of kind of our new signature project that's really been successful after two years. We also have job fairs, Old Town community cleanup and we are also looking at new projects, such as something called lights on after school where we want to have like a resource fair to show parents and care takers all the possible activities youngsters could participate in after school, whether it's, you know, dance studios or karate lessons, arts and crafts, any type of -- you know, tutoring services, all those types of things that maybe don't come to the top of mind. So, that's something we are looking into. We currently have 64 Promise partners. These are dues paying people that, like I say, adhere to our five promises and we are going to be having a big membership recruitment campaign soon to even add more partners. We are in good shape moneywise. Membership dues are only 50 dollars and revenues exceed expenses. The other program that I'm really excited to coordinate is the Mayor's and CEO's kids book club and we are able to serve 90 children in grades three, four, and five and many of them probably don't own their own books, but through sponsors that pay a fee and agreed to be reader leaders, along with the Mayor, we are able to hold monthly book club meetings and children receive beautiful hard cover books, not like those little cheesy paperbacks when we were kids. Remember the weekly reader. I remember ordering those books. These are beautiful hard cover books that they can really keep and save and maybe share with siblings. So, as the students go through the book club they will be building their own little library. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 50 of 102 Again, it's very much a financially sound program. Our sponsors this year, we are thankful that Bank of the Cascades, CH2M Hill, Micro 100 Tools, Blue Cross of Idaho, United Heritage, St. Luke's, Citicard, and Cable One. Those are nothing to be sneezed at. Those are our main players here in the Treasure Valley and we are proud they are participating. So, all is well in the toy department. Jaycee Holman, you're up. Holman: First of all, I'd like thank to my staff for sticking around this long. I owe them bagels. And I'd also like to thank them, because I truly mean it when I say they really make me look good. When I go on vacation I actually miss coming to work and seeing them every day. And there is probably not a lot of jobs that you can say that. So, I think what probably best encompasses what we do is our mission statement. It really summarizes very well in one paragraph everything that happens in the clerk's office. We are definitely not the toy department. The office of the city clerk maintains the integrity of the city through the legislative process, administrative and technical support, dissemination of accurate information and archiving official documents. The office provides support and administrative services to the Mayor and City Council. All operating departments and the public, while maintaining for the city an essential formal link with citizens, area businesses, other jurisdictions and a wide variety of public agencies. I think we are a central communications conduit oftentimes from the City Council to the public and from the public back to the City Council. People come into us for all types of information. I don't want to go through everything we do, because it's probably not quite as glamorous as some other departments, but one of the major projects that I was tasked with when I took over the city clerk's office over two years ago was to first get a handle all on of our records, which through my staff and myself we have really made a lot of progress in the last two and a half years. The other major project that I was supposed to tackle -- and I believe it was, actually, even brought up in my interview process, was the records retention policy and rewriting or working with legal to rewrite a policy that is actually more easily used by the other departments or easily interpreted I guess. In August of 2007 you adopted Resolution 07-573, which, actually, adopted a formal records retention schedule for us. At the time what we had was a template from the association of Idaho Cities and we adopted their template, which did a good job of encompassing all of the records that -- that we have to keep according to state statute and the length of time we keep those records. What was adopted was done more in a paragraph form and so it's a little bit difficult to use it as a -- I guess a usable document to find whatever type of records you have and how long you retain it and when you can get rid of it. Other departments usually call me asking -- I read the policy and, then, I call legal. So, what I proposed was working in conjunction with the legal department with Andrea and with Emily and we have been working on converting it from a paragraph form to actually more of a table. So, any department -- each department would have their own kind of alphabetical table of their records and be able to just go down the list and see what they have got. So, we have been going department by department working through rewriting this and working with key players in each of the city departments to come up with an all-encompassing document. So, we are done finalizing ITM planning and we are about halfway through with development services and hope to move through all the other departments and present City Council with a revised or an amended records retention policy next summer. The other part that Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 51 of 102 we have spent an awful lot of time doing permitting and licensing. While the economy has seen a downturn and probably less business in certain areas of what we do, we have gotten a lot busier with licenses and permits as people look for different ways to make money, different ways to promote their businesses. We do a total of around nine types of licenses and several of those have different subcategories. We see increases in -- a lot of increases in our massage therapy license, increased by 140 percent. Mobile sales units increased by 50 percent or 56 percent. Mainly what we have seen as the temporary use permits have really increased from 19 permits last year to 97 this year. Now, the temporary use permits are the ones that take the most amount of time. Our average or what we believe our average is right now is two to two and a half hours of our staff time. That doesn't include the staff time of the other departments. So, we have just had an awful lot of temporary use permits, promotional sales unit permits, citizens use permits and we anticipate -- I just happened to be thinking a couple of weeks ago when I saw the events going on in some of the bigger parks in Boise -- when Kleiner Park comes online it's definitely going to increase significantly staff time, not just in our department, also parks department and all the departments that are sign off on these temporary use permits. Nancy Radford in our office is also working on putting together a letter to make businesses more aware of the temporary use permit ordinance, because a lot of times they put on events for promotional sales units and they don't know that they are supposed to actually have a permit for that through our office and, you know, one of the major points of the temporary use permit in getting it is a lot of life safety stuff that goes on. So, police and fire have an opportunity to take a look at what's happening and have their input. So, the current licensing employee is Nancy Radford, she handles all of them. I will stay that we have had Machelle Hill and Nancy -- or, I'm sorry, Sheree Finche step in and help her. This year she was pretty overwhelmed and so we had to actually off load mobile sales units and massage therapy licenses, temporarily to Machelle while we were going through all annual beer, wine, and liquor licensing renewals and the fireworks. So, right now that's working, because Machelle's job is primarily dealing with Planning and Zoning and packets and everything to do with planning projects. That won't always be the case and so we have looked at other ways to add additional revenue stream, because we know we are going to need to have another licensing person at some point in the future, it's just a matter of time. Passport services is something that would probably be a good addition to the city clerk's office, simply because Ada county quit taking passports and right now citizens of Meridian or west Boise or any of those areas want to get passports they have to go down to the post office, that's their one location, or I believe Canyon County Courthouse you can get them there, too. So, I do believe it would be a good thing to add for our citizens. I would envision a lot of people using that. What I'm going to be doing, too -- when we put together our fee schedule for temporary use permits and all these different types of permits, it really was spearheaded by Emily in the legal department at that time, it was a couple of years ago and she put together -- got all the departments together and they estimated their time for different permits and, then, we came up with this fee. We are going to be looking at that again, because now we have a lot more experience with especially temporary uses, to see if we are actually charging the correct fee for that as -- we just need to reassess everybody's time and that includes looking at all the licenses and permits, the room reservations, because we also handle all of those, too, Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 52 of 102 and that has become pretty well apart-time job for Sheree. So, our department is definitely -- I always make a joke that I think I was on the job two weeks and I was still scared to sit up front and they were talking about this temporary use stuff and Robert volunteered that the clerks would do the temporary use permits and I thought, oh, that would be fine. Well, he got me. So, anyways -- yes. So, I'm hoping to review all of those fees and permits and come up with an idea and any of the possible changes and bring that back to Council in November, so -- are there any questions that you might have for me on anything that the clerks office does? Because it's awfully exciting. No? Okay. Thank you. Zaremba: Gentlemen, any questions? No? Thank you. Cavener: Thanks, Jaycee. Now I'd like to talk to you a little bit about our outreach plan, which is another area of focus in the Mayor's office and it is a campaign to communicate information regarding the actions and activities from the city to our citizens and ultimately what that boils down to is that's the city's ability to tell our story to our community. We have developed an internal and an external plan that would allow us to also foster better communication amongst our fellow staff. Our website continues to be the gateway of our services. In the Mayor's office we sometimes refer to it as the mother ship, because we constantly use our -- all of our external processes to bring people back there. In looking at numbers, since June 3rd we have actually had 82,181 views on meridiancity.org. That's from 37,143 unique visitors. So, in the past three months we have had, you know, almost 38,000 unique people coming to our site to use it for a variety of different services. A lot of people don't know this, we have over 5,500 unique pages of content on our website each, you know, serve a different individual that's looking for a unique piece of information. We continue to use our website to send out our publications with the city news on the annual report. Our community calendar is one of our most visited parts of our website where people wanted to know what's going on in Meridian. We have added some new components to our website. You have heard before about our use of social media, Facebook and Twitter. This summer we began a new program called This Week In Meridian that I will share with you a little bit here in a moment. What we really have tried to do in the Mayor's office is continue to use traditional outreach methods. So, sending our press releases, coordinating with the Statesman, doing things that have kind of been the tried and true ways of getting our story out. In addition, we have used a lot of new methods, such as department blogs, our RSS feeds, social networks, our video and pod casting and what we have seen as a lot of -- a lot of communities across the state have taken notice of what Meridian is doing and saying, wow, Meridian has been really successful with Facebook and they have been really successful with Twitter, so they adopt something like that. What I think where Meridian really succeeded, we do that in addition to what I think are the best methods of communicating with our community and that's face to face and other means of communicating face to face communication by using social networking, we haven't done that. We continue to have our town hall meetings, we continue to have our Coffee With The Mayor, which are a great opportunity for the public to interact with the city. This Week In Meridian video is a one and a half to three minute snapshot of what's going on in our community it's on our city website, it's put on Facebook and we use Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 53 of 102 different people from within the city, a new department is represented every week to share that information. So, we really accomplish two things, we share the information with the community and we also expose the community to different faces within our city departments. Some faces are more popular than others. I think my video was probably the lowest viewed. I think we had like only 120, as opposed to 300 when the Mayor's on, so I guess I have a face for radio, as I think what I have learned from that. We continually look at our external outreach plan. Currently there are some videos that were produced by CGI. Those videos will disappear in February of 2011, they will be replaced with some of the videos that were shown at the State of the City address, as well as some additional videos that we are in the process of producing that focus on transportation, education, and helping people in the environment, like the This Week In Meridian continues to be one of our most popular sections of our website and on Facebook. This week we will be shooting a pilot episode for a TV show on TVC TV called Celebrate Meridian. It will be a monthly show that highlights things that are going on in the community, staring our Mayor. We are really excited to go down this road and find another unique way to speak to the community. We have discussed -- or Robert had discussed with you the webcast -- initial webcasting of City Council meetings. In addition, some of our other departments are looking at producing training videos, such as our police department, fire, and human resources. There has been some ideas and some excitement from Public Works to create some informational videos as well. The internal outreach plan is really a unique way to have all the different players within different departments of the city work together to make sure that we are sending out the same message. We have established an outreach committee, which will contain the primary public contact individuals for each of the departments. We meet every other week to coordinate items of a citywide interest and I think this will be a great way to make sure that the left hand is always still talking to the right hand. As our community grows people are in the know about different things and it's a great way for us to be able to share information. We are in the process of putting together a city survey. We are continuing to move forward with that plan. In fact, a vendor that will be administering the survey was selected yesterday. The survey will be completed this fall and the results of that survey will be presented to Council in November. One of the key components is to provide a mechanism for the citizens to really have input on the key measures and issues that are going on in our community. Relating to the webcasting of City Council meetings, really what's great about webcasting is it really brings greater transparency to the public, it opens up the ability to do this with other meetings, other commissions, community events, et cetera. It's also a value added service, both for our citizens and for our staff. In fact, I think that if -- if we had this up now Robert would probably be watching this meeting from St. Luke's, pacing back and forth, making sure that we are hitting every point. Funds currently exist in the fiscal year'12 budget for this project, as well as the fire department video conferencing project. It goes hand in hand with the -- with the energy efficiency goals that have been established through the Idaho Power grant. We have done a lot of research as it pertains to webcasting and we have been able to learn a lot of information from what other communities have done. Boise on one hand spent a ton of money, over 100,000 dollars. They had a funding mechanism in place through the franchise with Cable One. ACRD went the other route and spent roughly 15 to 20 thousand dollars and what they learned is that they wished Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 54 of 102 that they would have spent a little bit more and had technology that would have been able to last them a lot longer than what they initially thought it would. Eagle has recently experimented with webcasting. They plugged a video line into the Internet. It worked well for some, for others it didn't. If you were looking to see video it wasn't really happening. The audio stream did come through and they were using that as a test pilot to explore their ways of webcasting city council meetings. The proposal that Robert has talked to you a little bit about is what -- what pieces of equipment would be necessary to do webcasting. We are proposing that we do three cameras, one behind Council and two midway back. We'd remove the camera in the back wall and provide that to the fire department for their video conferencing project. We would need one camera controller to control the cameras. Obviously, the installation cost. What's great about this is we initially thought that to do a project like this would require a video server. We have worked with IT and have determined that there wouldn't be any need for a server to continue with this project. All video that we shoot we would save online for three months, maybe longer, depending on the size of the files. There are, obviously, some options that we can look at as far as if you wanted to do less cameras. We would be looking at a cost of about 6,000 dollars, plus the installation for three cameras, 4,700 dollars for two cameras, 3,400 dollars for one camera and zero dollars if we just use the existing camera that's in place. In order to get the video that is -- that is going on in this room we require a piece of equipment called a tricaster. The tricaster enables the showing of information to be presented at City Council. This piece of technology is utilized by ACHD and a variety of local high schools. It's also a piece of technology that was recommended to us by Treasure Valley Community TV. They have a variety of different models that range from 9,000 to 25,000 dollars. ACHD uses their model called the broadcaster, it's a 12,000 dollar version. Again, they have had some lessons learned that they wish they would have went for the 15,000 dollar model, which is a TCX-300 and that's the model, actually, that we are recommending that we go with for a variety of different reasons. It's important as departments are looking to create educational and training videos. This piece of technology would assist with that. We could, actually, also use it to webcast events like the state of the city. It's a portable unit that fits in a backpack and we could take it with to do a variety of different events. Other recommendations would include replacing some of our microphones to push to talk. Fewer live mikes would improve the overall system, the performance and the sound. Each mike has a fixed cost for replacement of 261 dollars and what we would actually recommend is replacing the nine dias mikes at a cost of 2,349 dollars. We could replace all of mikes for a little over 4,000 as well. And Ithink -- I tried to throw a lot of information at you guys very fast, I apologize for that. In the interest of time I wanted to get it all out. And I could stand for questions or I can sit down, if you have questions for the Mayor or for Shelly. Zaremba: Gentlemen, any questions? Rountree: I don't have any. Bird: I don't have any. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 55 of 102 Zaremba: Very thorough. Thank you. Cavener: Excellent. de Weerd: Well, Council, we appreciate this opportunity to present in front of you and I would like to thank our staff. You know, I don't think anyone would argue with me in saying they make us all look good and -- and that means not only myself and the City Council, but our entire city. And so my thanks to the Mayor's office staff, clerks office staff, and certainly I am always thanking the rest of them. Thank you. Zaremba: Thank you. Bird: Mr. President, I would second that. C. Legal Department: Discussion on Texting While Driving Ordinance Zaremba: All right. While the Mayor is making her way back up here, let's go ahead with Item C, Legal Department, discussion on texting while driving. And police. Nary: Thank you, Mr. President, Members of the Council. You have in your packet a proposed ordinance for your review. I believe -- let me look real quickly. As you well know, we had a number of discussions last legislative session. The Mayor's Youth Advisory Council had taken on a project to attempt to pass a statewide code that would prohibit texting while driving. I think it got down to the last day of the legislature and they didn't have enough time to vote on it due to some other reasons, but they did an excellent job of putting together a state code and getting it through both the Senate's committee and as well as the Senate as a whole, as well as the House committee to the House floor. Not wanting to simply wait for the legislature to see whether or not this was something that gets on their radar screen again, we were asked to craft a texting ordinance. I'm sure Chief Lavey has input as well, but it's a fairly straight forward ordinance, it really is just to remove the section of our City Code that doesn't apply any longer and inserts this particular offense in there. It's very similar to what was brought about last year by the Mayor's Youth Advisory Council. It does exempt law enforcement and emergency personnel, so that there isn't -- part of them doing their job requires an act that's similar to texting, but it's not like using a hand held device, it's not quite the same thing and we certainly don't want to impact law enforcement with this. I think -- if I look real quickly on your packet, I think you just have the ordinance itself. I do have copies of -- city of Twin Falls passed an ordinance about a month ago, maybe even six weeks ago prohibiting texting while driving as well and it's actually for the use of wireless communicating devices. I also have a copy of the state code if you would like some time. I know we have run long tonight, so if you'd like some time to digest this, as well as you would like me to follow up with the Twin Falls ordinance or the state code that was proposed last year, I can provide those to you. Bird: Madam Mayor? Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 56 of 102 de Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: Bill, so I don't have to read through the whole thing, this -- this -- you say does not include the police officers or safety people that are -- regarding texting and on cell phones and stuff? Nary: Right. Yes, Council Member Bird, it does exempt the law enforcement, fire, emergency personnel. de Weerd: Although, Mr. Bird, I guess I will say that at the operational meetings the directors have been talking about a citywide internal policy about texting while driving and cell phone use and I certainly know that -- that the chief has strong opinions -- probably either chief -- both chiefs or whatever -- that they may care to comment, but, you know, I know I have heard our deputy chief of police talk about you better be pulled over when you are on that phone or texting, so there is -- Bird: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Yes. Bird: And that is my point right there and that is one of the reasons that it didn't get through the legislature is because it's kind of like the old adage if you're -- there are not too many public here, so I can say it. de Weerd: It's on the public record, though. Bird: Yeah. I don't care. It's on the -- it's like the old adage if you're a police officer and you sit in a bar the night before and drink with a guy and, then, the next night pick him up for DUI, I can assure you that -- that while they are very competent drivers and stuff, they can be distracted also with the texting and -- I don't know how they do it, the texting part. I don't text, so I don't have any idea how they even -- how you even think you could text and drive, but I guess we got kids and everybody else that can. We can't, that's why we have got a few people six feet under, but I -- I have a real problem if we don't include it with everybody and I mean I know there is times within emergency services that they have to. Now, in a fire truck I don't believe the driver probably has anything to do with the radio, other than the fact that he's got his headset on and he's got a guy next to him. Well, a police officer don't have that luxury of having somebody sitting beside him taking care of all that stuff, so I have got a real concern about where to draw the line. de Weerd: Would either of you like to comment? Lavey: Madam Mayor, Council, I do have strong opinions about the other chief. But I don't believe that's what we are talking about. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 57 of 102 de Weerd: I don't think I asked you that. I said would you care to comment. Lavey: I have a few comments I'd just like to state on the record and we are just soliciting some feedback from Council at this time. But the state focus was on inattentive driving and it being a primary offense and it did fail the legislature due to a whole bunch of issues, not just the one. Bird: I realize that. Lavey: And the inattentive code doesn't work by itself. It's harder to prove in the court system. It requires a lot more -- it requires a lot more work. And there is a defense where someone may say, well, I can do both, I can actually text and I can drive and don't believe that, but if -- if that's -- if that's their defense and they can do both, then, it would not be inattentive driving. Texting has been shown to be as bad as drinking and driving. I suppose we could argue on whether it's one times as bad or four times as bad or six times as bad, but it has been shown to be as bad as drinking and driving. One of our talking points was we need to intervene before the driving becomes deadly. It already has become deadly. We have already had that unfortunate incident here in Meridian. We are looking at drafting a city ordinance, which is an infraction, not a misdemeanor, based on this same sort of concept we were discussing on the dog at large ordinance, a tiered approach, whereas, it would be an infraction for first or possibly second penalties -- excuse me -- violations and, then, the third time it would be a misdemeanor. There is a clause in there that says -- excludes law enforcement and emergency vehicles. We did not ask for that to be put in there and we do not have a problem removing that, because I do not believe that our officers, nor our public safety personnel, should be texting while driving. Period. It does go further into the cell phone use and there is a training aspect on that, but as far as texting while driving, there is no business for them to do that behind the wheel. If they are going to be doing that, they need to be stopped. So, we are not opposed to having that removed. There is a clause in there that talks about not applying to phone calls. That -- although I -- I support that as well, I do believe that we are taking on a bigger project if we try to approach that as well. And it's police department's opinion that it's the best way to educate to enforce and to prosecute offenders. And with that I would turn it over to the fire chief if he may have some comments. Niemeyer: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, first off, if you need anybody for Chief Lavey's 360 feedback evaluation, I'd be happy to participate in that, if you're looking for anybody. de Weerd: I don't know if you will show up on his list, but you might show up on mine. Lavey: It will be on a list. Niemeyer: I support exactly what Chief Lavey just talked about and, Councilman Bird, you are correct, in our fire engines it's a little bit different scenario, because we do have a captain that's responsible for data terminal and the communications of the vehicle and Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 58 of 102 because he is not driving he can take a phone call, but we have educated our captains to take that phone call only if it's pertinent to the call itself. With respect to our chief officers, they are in a very similar situation as a police officer in they are a one person in a vehicle driving by themselves, so they don't have that second person to be watching for traffic. So, we absolutely support removing that language to where we fall under the same regulations as other city employees. I think we do need to identify responding in afire engine in that description I gave previously. I don't support texting while going to that, that's not something we do anyway on a regular basis. Certainly there are times where you get information going to a call that you need that information, but with our chief officers the direction I have given them if it's that big of a deal, pull over, stop, take the information and, then, continue. Most of the time they will wait to get to the scene and, then, take that phone call from dispatch if they have to. So, we want to certainly keep our folks safe and part of that is having policies and regulations that do that. Bird: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: Yeah. And I'm a hundred percent for this -- for this draft ordinance, but I think you got to -- you got to be point, I mean our police officers that worked in -- from '98 to 2001 -- 2001, they could text, do anything, because they had to listen to about four microphones in their ears when they were on duty in those days. So, those older guys could do it, but I think the newer ones probably can't. Anyway, I believe that it's something we should bring forward. Where we draw the line, Chief Lavey and Chief Niemeyer are on board with what I would think would be right and I'm in favor of going forward with it. Hoaglun: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Hoaglun. Hoaglun: A couple questions for Mr. Nary. Bill, the first line texting while driving a moving motor vehicle shall be prohibited. Moving motor vehicle, if a vehicle is stopped at an intersection, there is a red light and they respond to a text, is that a moving motor vehicle, even though it's stopped? Nary: Council Member Hoaglun, no, it's not. Hoaglun: It's. not a moving motor vehicle, even though the engines going and when the light changes they proceed -- okay. I just wanted to be sure about that. Nary: Yes. Hoaglun: The next paragraph, texting as it's used in this section shall be defined as engaging in the review preparation and/or transmission of a typed message -- on and on. My wife text me that, oh, can you stop and get some milk on your way home. If Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 59 of 102 whip that out, it buzzes, I look at it, oh, she wants me to get milk, I set it down, review in that case would mean I was texting while I'm driving; correct? Nary: That's what the definition -- it's meant to deal with the distraction that's caused by that. Obviously, receiving a text message you can't control that, but reviewing it while you're driving in a moving motor vehicle certainly does cause the same type of distraction that is -- probably a little less than typing a message out with your finger, but, still, it's -- it was meant to address that, yes. Hoaglun: But to review it at the -- stopped at the light, I review it, oh, I respond real quick, yeah, I will take care of that, the light turns and off I go, I set it down, then, there is no violation. Nary: No. Correct. Hoaglun: Okay. Thank you. Lavey: Madam Mayor, Mr. Hoaglun -- and this is for Mr. Nary, too. I believe that maybe we should write it vehicle in motion, because that's what we are getting at is when the vehicle is actually in motion. So, if it's stopped at a stop light, stopped at a red light or something like that, you're not creating the same sort of hazards as you would if the vehicle is in motion. de Weerd: Unless you're stopped five minutes at a stop sign and they are not moving because they are still texting. Lavey: Now that's inattentive driving. de Weerd: That's where the horn comes in. Bird: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Yes, Mr. Bird. Bird: For my clarification, if you're -- if you're in a driving lane, even though you're stopped at a stop light or a stop sign, aren't you still in a movable vehicle -- a moving vehicle? Lavey: As the codes have been written on texting, they allow it to be done while the vehicle is currently stopped. I guess a definition of that would be the vehicle is lawfully standing at that time, it's not in motion. Bird: Even though it's in an active lane? Lavey: But that's purely your preference. If you want to be more specific and you cannot do it at all when you're behind the wheel, we can sure entertain that. It's really Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 60 of 102 your preference. We were just trying to be a little bit more lenient and allow people to do that at some times. Bird: What can you defend, Bill? That's what I need. I mean I don't want to get something out there that -- that is -- you know, we can't defend, that's just thrown out there. Nary: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, Council Member Bird, from a -- from a legal standpoint -- any one of them are defendable. Prosecutionwise it's always going to be a challenge. I think the thought process when we went through this last year with the legislature was there is some logic to folks saying I'm sitting at a light and I looked at my phone and, you know, I saw that I was supposed to pick up milk, I didn't do anything. looked at it. I'm sitting at the light, it's not really that much of a risk to anybody. So, trying to figure out what makes the most sense for people, lawfully you could certainly, as the chief said, if you wanted to prohibit any use of a device -- I mean we have included in here that if you have a hands free device, a voice activated device, that's fine. There are certainly studies that say even talking on the phone while you're driving can be a distraction to people. So, it really just depends on what level of degree and where do you want to start. I think by prohibiting it while the vehicle is in motion at least is a little bit more clearly defined than if the vehicle is on. You know, right now in the state of Idaho DUI -- if the car is on that's a DUI. It doesn't have to be moving, it just has to be on, so -- but there the risk is that you have got a drunk person behind the wheel that could put the car in motion and so that's a little bit more concerning. We didn't want to deal with people that are stopped at a light and that, technically, they are not DUI anymore. That doesn't make any sense. But here we are talking about an act that I guess arguably could be done safely when the vehicle is on, but not in motion. But, again, it really is your folks preference on how you would like that to be. Bird: If the chief feels safe with it, I don't have have no problem with it. I just wanted to make sure we was clear that we wouldn't be having a bunch of problems when we cited people. Nary: I certainly think we can delete the provisions that exempts law enforcement. think what was -- what was discussed at the legislative level was a concern by -- by some law enforcement agencies that the definition of texting would impact their ability to use the mobile data terminal in the vehicle that they have to use while they are driving, they have to -- they have to sometimes do it while they are driving and Idon't -- I mean, really, we have tried to focus on hand-held devices, these are not -- those are not hand- held devices, they are generally mounted in the vehicles, they are not -- they are not something they carry on their lap, so I don't see it really impacting law enforcement and certainly as Chief Niemeyer said, not -- it wouldn't impact the fire use at all. We could certainly take it out as an exemption, because I agree with Council Member Rountree, that sometimes those exemptions for ourselves are what irritate people more than anything, so -- Zaremba: Madam mayor? Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 61 of 102 de Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: One similar. Do -- I guess they are not ours, they are the county's, but do the ambulances have a second person in the front, so that the driver doesn't have to be using the equipment? Niemeyer: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, Councilman Zaremba, they do, they have two people in each ambulance and they actually have their cell phones in the back in the patient compartment and use them exclusively for calling the hospitals. So, they don't even use them. Zaremba: Okay. Thank you. Hoaglun: Madam Mayor, just a comment further, I think allowing people to text or e- mail, whatever when the vehicle is stopped at a light, I mean you can see it when I'm on Eagle Road in the morning and you hit the red light, you know you have got 90 seconds and, then, you kind of look around and you see everybody in their Blackberry prayer, you know, and it's -- and, then, the light turns on off everyone goes. So, it's -- it's something that people do and most responsible people will not text when you drive, because you cannot do both and I won't do it, but the light turns red, yeah, I'll take a look and see who is texting me or e-mailing me and respond quickly if I have to. So, beyond that Ithink -- I think we can make that -- make that work. de Weerd: Okay. Council, then, do you want to move forward? What's the next step on this? Bird: I do. Rountree: Madam Mayor, I'd like to see comparison with the ones that have already been enacted. Twin Falls I think is one of them. To make sure we haven't missed something or they might have had a phrase termed better than we did or --Ithink there is advantages of having similarities, particularly as you get into difficulty prosecuting these, at least you're going to have some uniformity in the legal decisions and my belief is that if the state actually does something, the state law will supercede this, but if there is something in ours that isn't picked up in the state law, do we, then, have two sets of ordinances and/or statute that citations can be issued under and do we want to put ourselves in that situation? Nary: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, Councilman Member Rountree, potentially you could have a city infraction that is different than the state code, it just depends on what the state code, it just depends on what the state code language is and -- I mean we can revisit that if that's the case. I think we have tried to mirror the state at how we looked at it last year, but I mean that's -- potentially cities can have their own infractions that are -- that are not covered by the state code, but it's just going to depend on what it says. In Twin Falls I will provide you this in written form. In Twin Falls, Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 62 of 102 basically, it is for -- it says no person shall operate a motor vehicle while using an electronic, wireless communication device to write, send or read text-based communication. It appears in my reading of this it does not matter if the vehicle is in motion, it just matters if you're in it, so -- which, again, I don't how -- how their enforcement's been -- I don't know. Rountree: That's fine. Let's move it out. Nary: Okay. Rountree: See where it goes. de Weerd: Okay. Lavey: Madam Mayor, Council, one last thing on that. When I was talking to the Boise prosecutors today on another ordinance we are going to propose soon, the Spice ordinance, we talked about putting a sunset clause in there that, if, in fact, the state does develop a law, that ours would go away, so that's a possibility. But I don't know the legal term on that. The other thing is is that if, in fact, we did have a state code and we did go into the misdemeanor portion of it, we would definitely be training our officers to go to the state code, because, then, they will be picked up by the county and not by the city, so those are a couple thoughts as well. de Weerd: So, I guess is to move this forward and as we bring it on for public hearing to have the comparisons to existing. I think Twin Falls is the only one in the state of Idaho, that we may need to look outside the state for a couple of other examples. Lavey: Sandpoint, Idaho, one another one. de Weerd: Oh. Okay. Bird: I was going to say, Sandpoint has one, too, I think. E. Planning Department: Transportation Priorities, Transportation Studies and Transportation Projects Overview - Includes a Discussion on Future Roadway and Pedestrian Projects for the City; an Update on the Airport-Overland Alignment Study; and an Update on Construction Projects de Weerd: Okay. Thank you. The next item is -- I guess it doesn't say this, but all things transportation, since that is your -- your branding there, Caleb. Hood: Thank you, Madam Mayor. I will take that as an introduction and we can all go home like you did for the rest of the staff. No. I do have some -- some things to run through with you. I won't touch on all things transportation this time, realize that we are already at a late hour and we still have a few items to get through, but priority projects. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 63 of 102 So, we are approaching the fall and during the August 5th Transportation Task Force meeting, took this same discussion to the task force. They haven't formalized their recommendation to the Council yet, but they do have some draft recommendations that I want to run by you, see if you have any input back to them. We are going to meet again on Thursday to finalize that recommendation and, then, I will bring it back to you for the final time on the 28th of this month, so I will be back in a couple of weeks. We do need to have the Council endorse a list of community programs projects prioritized and completed and over to ACRD by October 1. So, we have got a few days. Again, will here on the 28th again and I we will send it over to ACHD by the 1st. And, then, roadways and intersections we have a little bit longer. We have until the first part of November to get COMPASS our list of -- and ACHD our list of roadway intersection priorities. So, I'm going to do community programs first. I don't anticipate that taking too much time. Just a quick refresher. They are, essentially, safe routes to school projects. I mean there is a heavy emphasis on those, but they are not of safe routes to school. The reason -- main reason they are not all safe routes to school is Meridian School District does not have a safe routes map, so they can -- you can call them and they can tell you the best route for your kid to get to school, but there is not a map that says this is a designated safe route to school. We are working with them on coming up with such a map to strengthen our applications. There has been some change over there. We were working with Leann Carlson and she retired this off season or off school year and we are going to try to light that fire again. Again, at ACRD the community program application offered each community an opportunity to address, one, the improvements, particularity those that provide pedestrian and bicycle safety, mobility, and connectivity. So, that's kind of a -- the overarching statement. In 2009 Matt and I submitted 19 community programs applications to ACHD. There was six segments of the city's pathway network that we didn't submit applications for, so we had a list of 25 projects. Eight of the city's top ten projects are scheduled for construction in the next few years at ACHD and most of the rest of those, so 11 more are -- have been scoped by ACHD, so they kind of know what they are looking at costs and construction and easements or right of way they may need and are also anticipated to make it into programming. Now, not all of them. There is a small table in there that has an update, but most of them are moving forward and they didn't hit the -- a stumbling block where it was either too expensive or they knew that they couldn't overcome moving a power line or something that would be hundreds of thousands of dollars to move. So, again, we had a good list of projects. They are looking for more. They have been charged through the vehicle registration fees and five percent of their budget on these types of projects, so they need more projects of this variety to construct, so they are moving forward. So, I won't spend too much time. The task force did have one or our priority projects from last year they want to move down or off the list. It already been scoped by ACHD and, then, they had a list of new projects. For the sake of time I will assume you all have went through the memo on the one, two, three, four, five six, seven -- seven projects. There was another one that came to my attention, Linder at Divide Creek, there is a gap between the new Walgreens, a Brighton's project, and the high school, small outparcel there, a gap in the sidewalk, so we are going to add that to the list, potentially, of next year that we ask ACRD to put it in. It's only about a 200 foot gap in the sidewalk on the east side of the roadway. And, then, in addition to that, there were Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 64 of 102 the six projects -- pathway projects that I mentioned earlier. One of those is actually one of the new projects this year, the Five Mile Creek pathway, which there will be a public information meeting tomorrow evening to talk about -- sorry, Mayor? de Weerd: Caleb, I guess on that one with came through for Brighton, that we we mac improvement -- Brighton, I thought we -- when that project to a condition -- I know it was an off-site Hood: It's off sight. I will look into if that was in the DA or something, we can see if it was a requirement. de Weerd: I -- it seems like it was. Hood: Okay. And maybe it's phased in later or something. I don't know. I can look into that, but -- de Weerd: If you can look into it. Hood: Sure. de Weerd: Because we have been trying to catch those and using the opportunity of annexation to make sure we have that connectivity, because I hate thinking of kids walking on the shoulder or -- kids will be kids and we have been trying to do something about those when we can. Hood: Yeah. I will look into that and if that's a requirement of the developer, again, I will -- we will -- I will see what that says as far as phasing that in when that needs to be constructed. de Weerd: Yeah. Or during the discussion at Council, because I -- my memory is not the best, but I know Mr. Bird's is. Hood: We will look into that one. And, then, the other ones that we -- that I proposed to submit applications to ACHD this year, in addition to those ones that are in the memo and the one I just mentioned, potentially, would be two of the other six that were on our list last year for the city's pathway projects. A lot of times these don't score well at ACHD, they are not in the right of way, they aren't sidewalks, they don't care about them. Now, they may provide some safe routes benefit, but they really don't have the authority. There are two segments there, though, that I want to highlight. I mentioned -- you may not have heard rne, but the Five Mile Creek pathway segment on Pine is one that we would like to have -- there is a public information meeting tomorrow night, but we'd like to continue that once you get from Fairview to Pine along Pine. So, that's one of the requests that we would -- we are prepared to put into ACHD this year. We may look at doing a joint venture again using some CDBG funds or something for design of they can do construction or some partnership like that. Those are two of the Ridenbaugh pathway, Eagle Road crossing. I believe it was Councilman Zaremba Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 65 of 102 brought it up, last year when this project -- we were doing an update, the pedestrian crossing of Eagle Road at the Ridenbaugh, that part of the pathway network, that is something I think that will score fairly well in this process. It costs -- depending on what the scope is, if it's a bridge over Eagle road it may be cost prohibitive to do, but in pavement flash or something with that project, I think we will put that just to hammer that point home that we need a safe route -- safe way across Eagle Road there at the Ridenbaugh, because our pathway network connects on either side. And, then, the other one would be the Five Mile Creek pathway up north of Albertson's there at James Court. So, there is sidewalk there, but it's sidewalk that according to our pathway plan should be wider and there is a gap further back kind of behind Albertson's that ties in all the way back down to Fairview through Fairview Lakes and all the way back through and, then, Bud Porter starts on the other side of the Fairview. So, that would -- and the crossing there at Fairview as well would be included in that application. So, those are the ones that I would propose and we will talk about it probably briefly at the task force, since we kind of already vetted some of these through, but -- Hoaglun: Madam Mayor? Hood: -- those are the projects for this year that we are looking at. Hoaglun: On that one, Caleb, I remember doing a pathways tour here a couple years ago and right there at James Court they would have to remove some trees and the ten foot walk would would put it right up against the apartment almost. There was some talk maybe striping in the street for bikes and, then, using the path. Would there be some flexibility in that? I know they want ten foot, but there were some areas that didn't look like you could get ten foot. Hood: Madam Mayor, Councilman Hoaglun, the beauty of this community program's list is we don't have to tell them what all the parameters are how to design it. We can just say here is our -- here is what we would like to do, get people from A to B, generally with a ten foot wide pathway, but they go out there and scope those and they say, boy, there is mature trees out there and we don't want to buy those from the property owner, we want to try to retain them, so we work with them on getting something that may not be the ideal that's called for in the plan, but something that still works for people using that -- that stretch of pathway. So, right now we are just trying to get on the radar. They do all that leg work with -- well, we can't do that, but we could do this, does that work for you guys or is it -- you know, can we come to some mutually agreed upon solution. Hoaglun: Got it. Thank you. Hood: So, any questions or further comments on the community programs stuff? So, that leaves about ten projects that we will submit new applications for this year. So, these, like I mentioned, we don't necessarily have to prioritize these. We certainly can. But they want more projects, so it is a pretty safe bet that if we send them projects, they will work it through their system, get them scoped, and some of them may not end up getting constructed for the -- for whatever reason. Cost, generally, but -- but I think they Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 66 of 102 can -- they can hammer through probably a have another bite in a couple of weeks, something else that comes up. lot of these, so -- any comments? You will too, if you review this and you have got Rountree: It looks like a good list to me. de Weerd: These are great. Hood: So, I'm going to move into roadways and intersections and I won't spend too much time tonight, just because of the hour, but I mentioned at a later hour a few months ago that the CICAC was working on some new standards for ACRD in their five year work program and I mentioned in the memo, too, that I would spend some time going through the new cost benefit base prioritization process. I guess that I would propose kind of here on the fly is to send you an electronic version of a memo that ACHD staff put together for their commission outlining how their staff is proposing it to them and I won't try to go through them too much tonight, just to say that, again, it's cost benefit based and the two things that they are -- it's primarily based on are safety and congestion. That's what the ACHD commission told their staff was, these are the two most important things to people traversing the roads, safety and congestion. Anything you can do to improve those two things -- they didn't tell them exactly which one was more important or less important. There is some mathematical things in this memo that you can look at and you can see a comment if you want on what's right and wrong with some of their methodology, but we think it's a pretty good system. Still in draft form. We are tweaking it a little bit, but we think it's a lot better than what they have got in place now to say this project should move into our programming. It's pretty -- pretty sound stuff. de Weerd: Caleb, if you would just print it out and for -- for each and put it in the boxes. Hood: Absolutely. de Weerd: I assume preferred. Zaremba: I appreciate that, but complicated things with small print sometimes I don't see well on my monitor at home. de Weerd: Yeah. Hood: I'll print that out and I'll tell you what I will also do, I have got -- I have got a list that shows -- they have a ran the draft program, what it would look at using their new criteria and I will print this off for you, too, on 11 by 17. It's adraft -- de Weerd: That's great. Hood: -- so, take it with a grain of salt, but it shows you where all of our -- where all of our projects would score in the prioritization process using these new criteria. So, it Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 67 of 102 shows you what -- how they are doing it and, then, what comes out the other side. Again, it's a draft, but that kind of gives you a flavor and this is my marked up version, so I will give you a new one, but I went through and said our project -- our number one would score is a 15 as far as -- on the new system. I will put another note in there, though, ACHD staff has taken a pretty hard stance -- it says if we have already got it in our program, we are not likely to move -- with a construction year, we are not likely to move it out. So, even if it's a bad project for safety and the congestion, if they have already invested any staff time or bought right of way or anything like that for a project, they are going to move forward with it. We don't necessarily at these CICAC level agree with that wholeheartedly, there may be some bad projects that why do you swallow the whole thing. If you know it's a bad project, you may have to eat some of that staff time and that you have already invested. But, anyways, I won't spend too much time with that, but just you know, if it's got a construction year on it, it's probably likely to get constructed sometime. Now, it may be delayed, but -- so, now, to the meat of the discussion tonight. So, you have roadway and intersection priority lists. Again, they are draft from the Transport Task Force, but they did move some things around and I guess what I would like to do from you -- I'm prepared to tonight, if you would like -- we can see how our discussion goes. I can recall Matt doing this a couple few years ago and he was frantically trying to write everyone's number one through five priorities down. So, I do have a list here and I'm willing to do that if you have projects that you want to move up or down, we can maybe start with the discussion, see if there is some consensus, if not, I'm willing to take your top 10 roadways and intersections, divided by five, and tell you here is where this project scores out across the way. So, if you don't mind, Madam Mayor, Ithink -- if there are any comments on what we have here, but it's, essentially, what we did last year. There was some tweaking. There may be some more by the task force, but, essentially, it's what we -- we looked at last year and sent over to ACHD for our priority list. One more comment, I guess, before I take your comments. Fairview Avenue, Meridian to Locust Grove, Fairview, Locust Grove to Eagle and, Fairview, Linder to Meridian -- the Fairview corridor, basically, is part of what ACHD is studying right now -- moving slowly, but still under study. That has been delayed for the center median improvements to construction in 2014. So, it says 2013 in here, but it is in 2014 as far as the current five year work plan goes. So, ACRD staff asked me to clarify that for you all, so -- that was my error in the memo. There are a couple of new projects, too, but, again, I will -- I will stand for any comments you have on the -- there were 35 roadways and 16 intersections. Two new roadways added to the list and one new intersection added. A summary of any changes in the transportation recommendation is in the far right-hand column, too, so you can see what's changed since last year. de Weerd: Council, any questions or comments? As mentioned, this isn't your last shot at it. Hood: And, Madam Mayor, while you all are still looking at the list pondering, I -- I have a couple of additional things I would like to discuss with the task force even on Thursday, just, again, kind of soaking all this in and maybe where we -- a couple of our projects could score better. I don't think it's going to be a drastic change to anything in Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 68 of 102 our top ten roadways, ten intersection projects. I mean if they are pretty -- pretty solid projects. I don't see anything coming way up to the top or anything falling way down to the bottom. The East 3rd connection was the one that fell the furthest. That was based on previous action by the Council this year saying it's going to be developer driven. It doesn't score well at ACHD. So, I guess I will highlight that one. The new one that is a new project, as you can see number 12, Locust Grove, Fairview to Ustick, that one is a pretty good project that I can't believe we missed before that one. It, actually, does pretty well looking at the safety and congestion criteria, too, so -- de Weerd: You know, I guess, Caleb, depending on what the county does with the Fred Meyer, I am concerned about Linder Road in the north and once those improvements are in and you get more traffic on Linder, you can get to McMillan, but McMillan to Ustick is -- well, we know that anything is going to be a problem, but -- you know, it concerns me to see it moved down four spots and it's -- it's way out there. Hood: I guess, Madam Mayor, just looking at the projects that -- Ustick, I mean that was just -- that's why it moved down was we moved to Ustick corridor up. That just seemed to be -- when you weigh them against each other, the Ustick corridor just seemed to be a bigger need than Linder and that's why it moved down those spots. So, I'm not saying that's not a needed project, but that's some of what we did was -- de Weerd: Yeah. Hood: -- you weigh the corridors and look at Ustick so -- Hoaglun: And I guess, Madam Mayor and Caleb, what happened -- and it makes sense, because Ustick is -- there is more traffic right now, but if you have development occur, something comes in, a project like that, we can talk to ACHD and say, you know, look, we really need to shift this now. This is a -- I mean nothing stays the same, so -- Hood: Every year. I will be back next year doing the same thing. Hoaglun: I did have a question on ITD projects. I noticed earlier reading through that -- the Transportation Task Force recommending moving that 20-26 project to number two and, then, flipping Linder Road overpass and it talked about widen 20-26. Was that just -- it's primarily right now just right-of-way preservation, is that what they were doing? Hood: Madam Mayor, Councilman Hoaglun, yeah, at the state that's where they are at. The overall goal, then, would be to widen it. So, it would be the ZO-26 corridor. I mean to shorten that. So -- Hoaglun: Okay. For the near term, as opposed to -- Hood: Right. Just as a priority project for -- yeah. I'm not saying we envision it being widened next year. Since you went there -- I was going to kind of do that after roadways and intersections with ACHD, but we can certainly roll ITD into this Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 69 of 102 discussion, but thank you for bringing that up. So, one -- one of the changes that the Transportation Task Force did recommend is flip flopping the Linder Road overpass with 20-26. So -- Hoaglun: What was their -- what was their basis for doing that, do you recall? Hood: Councilman Zaremba, do recall -- it was -- I mean just a priority. I mean just an overall -- again, like the Ustick-Linder thing, just something where it seems to be getting -- I think they looked at some of what Locust Grove overpass has done for the community could see some of that benefit there. 20-26 just seemed like -- I think it seemed like a massive thing for somebody to swallow. You look at, you know, State Highway 16 and all these state projects and you're -- we can only do one or two of them, if any, and, then, we have three or four that we are asking for. So, it was -- I don't want to put words in any of the members' mouths, but there was some consensus, at least, by the group to do that. It wasn't unanimous, but there was some consensus to move those. But, again, the final call rests with you all. So, we can flip flop those back, so -- Hoaglun: And number one, Meridian Road interchange rebuild, of course, that's I think going to remain number one. Just to comment, today I was in Meridian for a lunch meeting, coming from the south side of the city, coming to City Hall, and someone was walking with traffic on the interchange. I mean we had to drive out of our way, you know, make room for that person to walk. I mean truly is a safety issue and that needs to remain number one and -- and I know we are all on the same -- same song for that one, so -- anyway, it just was very evident when you have to pass somebody and that's the only way for them to get -- if they have to walk from the south side to the north side, unless they are walking down to Locust Grove. de Weerd: Well, I did make a comment to Senator Crapo thanking him for the letter that they all signed and with the note that Meridian interchange rebuild was number one on their list and they said, yeah, who wrote that letter? But I did thank him, so reinforcing. Hoaglun: I appreciate that. de Weerd: Any other comments from Council? Rountree: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: A project that's out there -- and I don't know when it's going to happen, but it could happen sometime in the next two to three years, the state project of -- initial project on Highway 16 extension. They fully envision on putting a new bridge across and dumping all the traffic on Chinden. I don't see anything real soon happening on Black Cat or happening on some stretches of Ten Mile or happening -- anything happening on McDermott and the rest of that project is not funded in any way, shape, or Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 70 of 102 form and it's a big project to get it done. I think we need to start thinking about the reality of that, because as soon as that traffic gets on Chinden you know where it's going to go. It's coming through the west end of town and it's going to be on Franklin or it's going to figure out how to get across onto Overland, all headed to the interstate and none of those roads west of Ten Mile are even contemplated for signals, let alone on McDermott with four way stops on some of those cross streets. To me I think we are -- we will have a mess on the western side of our city when that happens. It wasn't addressed at all in the study, other than they believe the traffic model tells them that it's not going to be an issue. I don't believe that. I think it will be an issue, because those roads out there are rural roads, several of them much like what Eagle Road was a few years ago and now look what we have with one of the biggest, widest, expansive payment we have in the state in terms of an urban highway, non-access control. So, the committee needs to be thinking about that. None of the traffic analysis take that into consideration. It's, well, you know, it's -- it could happen, but we are not factoring -- we are not factoring any of that in and that's going to happen without a new house being built in our community or Eagle or Caldwell or Nampa or Emmett or anyplace in between. So, we need to figure out how we can manipulate the schedule, so we can get that in there in a hurry, if, in fact, that project comes to fruition. It is a GARVEE project, it could be funded, and I think there is a desire to do it. Hood: At least the 20-26 across the river. Rountree: Yeah. Yeah. And that's where it will stop. Hood: Yeah. de Weerd: And it's no different than Three Cities river crossing and the whole concern there is what do you do with the traffic once you get them over the river. Well, it's a little bit better than Three Cities, but -- Bird: I was going to say -- Rountree: The concept's a lot better. de Weerd: Sorry. Bird: Yeah. de Weerd: I did back up before anyone said. Hood: Madam Mayor, Councilman Rountree, I mean to -- we can certainly start to look at those at the task force level. You know, I look at some of these other projects that are on here, though, and you go that's a current need. Rountree: Yeah. We have got to handle those. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 71 of 102 Hood: Yeah. And just to be quite frank, I mean like community programs, our top ten or 15 do pretty well in ACRD. You get down to 17, 20, 25, you're just not making the cut. So, we can look at adding them to list, moving them up as appropriate, it's just wholesale adding, you know, west Meridian to the program is going to -- it's going to be at the cost of something else. So, what I would like to do, unless there is any other questions, though, because that transitions nicely in to my next point potentially, de Weerd: That's going to be south Meridian, too. I mean just everywhere. Hood: Yeah. de Weerd: You might just add a footnote, Caleb, and just, you know, with the progress of GARVEE and the Highway 16, you know, the city does have concern with how the connection will work. Rountree: I guess my last comment on the list that Isee -- and I will have others, but the immediate comment is I don't know why we are including Chinden projects on here. ACHD is -- I don't think they are going to fund them. The state's already into them about three and a half million bucks that they haven't been paid by the state. I don't think they are going to have anymore of those kinds of partnerships with the state. Hood: That's actually -- Councilman Rountree, I'm glad you brought that up, because that's, actually, one of the things I'm going to take to the task force regarding the intersections. Our number three and four are Ten Mile -Chinden and Ten Mile -Victory and I would propose to move those down with eight, nine, ten, right now, which is Chinden -Meridian, Chinden -Locust Grove, all the other Chinden intersections, out of our top five, because those ones do get bonus points at ACRD. Not that they are not important, but that's something I think the task force needs to talk about a little bit more is ACHD's really kind of drawing that line saying we -- we have done an intersection, the state needs to step up. They don't score well. This handout that I'm going to give you, they don't score well at ACRD. Yeah, they are congested, there may be some safety issues, but there is other factors that factor into those and they don't care for them either. So, that's actually something I'm going to talk about with the task force, so -- but thank you for bringing that up, so -- Hoaglun: Caleb, Madam Mayor, you said Ten Mile and Chinden, correct, as one of them? Hood: Ten Mile -Chinden, Ten Mile -Victory. And we had this discussion last year about the whole Ten Mile corridor up to Chinden being important and it is, but when you talk about ACRD projects and what they are going to spend the money on, Ten Mile - Chinden just -- isn't going to score real high. Hoaglun: But it -- once the Ten Mile interchange opens and traffic is going -- you know it's just one of those things, we are going to have it jammed up right there at Ten Mile, people trying to turn left and 20-26 is just going, so -- Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 72 of 102 Hood: And the other one, just to go to the other side, Ten Mile -Victory, it's number four. Important, yes, you are going to run into the same -- it's going to be a bottleneck, but if you're looking at, again, weighing it against current needs, that's a future need and that intersection -- improving that intersection is going to help a community to the south more than it's going to help are residents. So, just something that I think we need to have some dialogue, not -- again, not that it's not important, but you look at a McMillan - Locust Grove or a Locust Grove -Ustick and how important those are and the impacts they could have being constructed sooner than later, I think are greater. But that's something -- if you have any comments I'll certainly take them now, too, but that's something that I just want to have a little bit of dialogue with the task force is moving number three and four intersections down and moving number five intersection up and maybe Meridian -Ustick, too, actually. It looks pretty -- pretty good in some of the technical stuff using this new programming to maybe slide it back up a little bit and get a fully improved intersection, but -- splitting hairs with some of these. I mean it's hard -- subjective. What's more important than an another a lot of times, so -- de Weerd: Okay. Hood: So, I am trying to be succinct in this, but there is a lot to get through. But I am going to jump to interim intersections, because I think that may be a way that we can tackle some of these needs as well. Earlier this year the Mayor sent a letter over to Jay, the director -- Jay Sweitzer over at ACRD asking him to look at some interim intersections. ACHD responded. You have that in your memo. I'm not going to go through all of it. I do want to call out, though, the third intersection out of the four that we asked them to look at for temporary interim improvements is Locust Grove and Victory and I will just pull out one sentence from the letter. It says: An effort will be made to fit this intersection into the ACRD 2011 budget as funding and staff workload permit. Again, without getting into all the details, they realize the need there, particularly at that intersection now. Some of these other ones they said, yeah, in a few years we need to look at that again. We can see that need coming, but right now it's not bad enough where we are going to spend that. But Locust Grove -Victory, something they are going to try to work into their program as soon as possible. So, if there are any other questions or correspondences -- Terry Little and his staff did a good job, I thought, of explaining this and doing the analysis. They probably spent more time than what expected on it, but they did a lot of work looking at those four intersections. And envision we will probably have more of those requests and we will probably ask them to do some more intersections here in the near future, because for a pretty small investment, relatively speaking, than some of the other projects, you can get. a huge benefit from doing intersections. You can get a ten or 12 or 15 year life span out of some of these that are two way or four way stop controlled. So, anyways, that's another -- another topic, another day. Airport -Overland study. I do have some information for you on that project. I just put a couple of snippets in the memo, so there is a study underway looking at connecting the Nampa Airport with Overland Road at Ten Mile, where it currently ends at Ten Mile Road. So, an extension through -- into Canyon county, two miles in Ada county. The preliminary alignments and alternatives, the Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 73 of 102 evaluation criteria, design criteria, just the public outreach on this, that, hey, this is going on, there is a public information meeting scheduled for October 14th beginning at 5:30. I think it was from 5:30 to 7:00 or 7:30 at Gateway Center. So, that's at Garrity and 1084, the JC Penneys, there is some vacant retail spaces in there. So, I think -- I think it was just north of JC Penneys, if anybody is interested. But there are some preliminary alignments that are out there. Some assumptions have been made about what this corridor -- how it will function as an arterial, across-section, essentially, with bike lanes and sidewalks and those types of things. But, again, Councilman Zaremba, I think, is on the policy team or a subcommittee of this working group and I think has -- has some of this information, but I thought I would just bring you all up -- quickly up to speed on this study. So, more to come on that. You're certainly invited to that. Again, I may put some handouts in your inbox, just so you have some more information on it. But ACHD -- from ACHD's point and perspective, they are looking to at least preserve an alignment, get something studied and this is where it's going to go, they are not saying they are going to move it right into construction after the study is done, but preserve an alignment and probably have it be development driven, you know, those are all in the county on that side of the roadway, so we can put it -- get this study done, incorporate it into our comp plan, development comes in, we get the roadway in. So, if there aren't any questions about that or comments, I will move onto the next one. Brighton access. Center medians. This is a follow-up discussion as well or presentation, I guess. You may recall in January -- or February, March Brighton and HGR came, presented an access plan for the 40 or so acres they have on the southeast corner of Franklin and Ten Mile. Did a PowerPoint presentation, had some simulation stuff going on. We sent a letter over ACHD saying, hey, can you evaluate these access points, it looks like they are -- they need these access points for the development they are proposing. The city looked at that, the land uses that were assumed for that and said, yeah, that's consistent with the Ten Miles specific area plan, if that's the intensity -- excuse me. If that's the intensity that they propose, ACHD, we need to know if these accesses conform to all safety and all your standards and everything. So, anyway, ACHD looked at them, they approved them, the access points with some slight modifications. They had some -- a couple of, you know, radii that had a change and locations that changed slightly. But we did -- I did want to let the Council know that Brighton and ACHD were able to influence ITD and their contractor doing the design to get -- change the medians and put these accesses in with ITD's project. So, there wasn't that feedback loop. I guess in my mind I expected Brighton or somebody to come back and say here is what ACHD said and here is my development application to the City of Meridian that has these land uses. That didn't happen. So, there are some assumptions being made and some good faith, I guess, steps that, at least from my perspective saying, okay, you can have the break in the median and your access is here, but the land uses should probably look like what you conceptually showed to us to justify those accesses. So, instead of having one continuous about 1,100 foot long median between Franklin and I- 84, the median is now two shorter pieces with a break in the middle for a full access driveway and, then, to accommodate the turning lanes it narrows down quite a bit, too. So, it's about eight feet -- seven or eight feet inside there and so you got shrubs -- there is a number of trees planned for those medians, but certainly the landscaped area has been- significantly reduced. I didn't calculate it out, but the -- the area to be landscaped Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 74 of 102 has been reduced, so -- anyways, that's just my report back to you, if you will. Again, I have details, I have plans showing before and after from Vance Henry that show the changes in the medians, but I just wanted to let you all know if you have any concerns with how that all went down -- I don't know what I can do at this point, but I will see what can do, so -- that is the second to the last thing. I have just a handout. The last thing in your memo you can't read, so I'm going to hand out the last page of the packet. We don't need to discuss it tonight, but I just thought Iwould -- I got it printed now or else I would put it in your box, so -- Bird: Thanks, Caleb. de Weerd: Can't read it on this either. Bird: I was going to say, it don't look much better than what it does on the screen. You guys got to realize we are getting older. It's getting harder to read. de Weerd: Speak for yourself. Hood: So, Madam Mayor, again, on that -- there is not a lot to report. Everything is moving -- moving ahead. There are a couple of projects that are in yellow, meaning they have some issues to work through, but nothing is being halted. So, that's just a status report on ACRD projects, so -- unless there are any questions or comments, I will let the next person go. de Weerd: I'm sure they're just very eager to as well. Council, any questions? Bird: I have none. Zaremba: Thank you. Hood: Thank you. See you in a couple of weeks. de Weerd: Thank you, Caleb. Rountree: Thanks. de Weerd: Okay. Our next item is our police department. Lavey: Thank you, Madam Mayor, Council. I'm sure you're probably tired of hearing from me by now, but this item will be fairly quick. I'm here to discuss a donation of a vehicle to the city of Bonners Ferry. I will tell you right now that it's already been done and I will explain to you why. It was a 2003 Expedition that had approximately 83,000 miles on it. It spent three years in patrol and it spent an additional four years assigned to an SRO. It's in extremely poor condition. It has a cracked engine block. It has water in the spark plug housing. It barely ran. That's the mechanical side of it. And, then, for the comfort side of it, it actually had no cooling system. It had powertrain problems. It Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 75 of 102 had missing door handles, a broken driver's seat, and wire hanging out of the interior. It had no value to the auction. de Weerd: So, did you donate it with -- with pride? Lavey: No. We stripped it, so it didn't say City of Meridian on the side. de Weerd: Thank you. Zaremba: Did we pay them to take it? Lavey: That's where it gets me to -- we could actually dispose of it through a junkyard, but we would have had to pay to have it towed and the only value that this vehicle had is if they parted it out. Now, the city of Bonners Ferry is going to use it for a training vehicle and canine. I do not know if they are going to put decoys in it, put other finds in it, or if they think that they can get it running, but more power to them. One of the things that had transpired was an -- an error in our system in how we do things and this came in front of me on June 7th and I signed it and the finance director signed it on June 10th and, then, it went to the Mayor for the Mayor's approval and a person in the finance department, then, gave our staff clearance to go ahead and get rid of the vehicle, not knowing that it went -- needed to go to Council. So, what I have asked finance to do is update the form, so there is some sort of notation on here that it's been sent to Council, it's been approved by Council, it's been denied by Council, so we -- we know that. So, to clear up audit problems, I am in front of you here today to say that we screwed up, I'm here to fix it. Holman: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, Matt Parsons came to me, because sign off on the titles and hand them out, and he explained to me what was happening and it never crossed my mind that -- so, now there is a check in place in the clerk's office also, so anything -- we have discussions about being donated, I will make sure that happens first. Lavey: For the record, the clerk screwed up and we are here to fix it. Hoaglun: Madam Mayor, seeing that they are here to beg forgiveness, as opposed to asking permission, a quick question. How does that vehicle .get up to Bonners Ferry? Rountree: It's already there. Lavey: I have no idea, but it's already there. Hoaglun: It was not at our cost? Lavey: No. Hoaglun: Okay. Great. Thank you. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 76 of 102 de Weerd: Or -- there is no liability for it; right? Lavey: No. As soon as -- we have already -- we have already disposed of it properly and the -- the issue came up when it finally went to legal to actually transfer the title. But we, actually, had to come in front of Council to let them know what's going on, but there is no liability on our part. The only liability that I foresee if we don't have the paper trail through an audit process, then, we would have to explain where the heck the vehicle went. Rountree: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: I move that we approve the donation of the 2003 meridian Police Department vehicle to the city of Bonners Ferry. Bird: Second. de Weerd: I have a motion and a second to approve the donation. If there is no discussion, Madam Clerk, will you, please, call role. Roll-Call: Bird, yea; Rountree, yea; Zaremba, yea; Hoaglun, yea. de Weerd: All ayes. Motion carried. MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES. de Weerd: Thank you. Rountree: You're off the hook. G. Public Works: Discussion Continued from August 10, 2010: Update on Meridian and Main Split Corridor Phase II de Weerd: Okay. Our next item is Public Works and, Tim, I think you're up. Curns: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, just coming back to you on an item here. Last month we had an update for you on split corridor phase two and we had the PM in here from ACHD on that project and, then, as you may remember, at the end of that we had a proposal for you regarding some bike lanes and bike routes on Main Street and shared that information with you all and was asked if the Council could have a little bit more time to digest that. So, I am back now a month later and I'd like to say in the meantime I also took this item to MDC's board meeting and kind of shared that with them to get some additional information and so just real quick I wanted to touch on a couple things and, then, see how everything sits. Let's see. If this will cooperate. So, Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 77 of 102 just real quick I will go over the proposal I had before and address a few issues that were brought to my attention there and a proposal for alternative to -- for you to consider and, then, just see how that sits. So, the proposal I brought before you, that was developed by staff, we felt that addressed both kinds of users that we would expect for the Main Street corridor, both hardcore and casual users. I think we determined that that was the most direct route. We only wanted to detour people when essential and that it was also in accordance with ACHD's roadways to bikeways plan. So, real quick, that was the plan -- or, excuse me, the proposal that I brought before you there, with the addition of the bike lanes and bike route and, then, I also threw some pictures in here just to help you distinguish between the two. Bike route is, essentially, signing and perhaps stenciling as you see in the top picture, just to give bicyclists and motorists an idea that they will be sharing the lane and, then, the bike route -- or, excuse me, bike lane below it actually dedicated right of way for bicycles only. So, one of the -- perhaps misunderstood this at the previous Council meeting. There was a question about where folks go when they get down Main Street and towards that crossover area, which presents to us a couple of problems, one being the contra flow issue, which is the bicyclist headed south on Main and hitting the people coming north on the one way section of Main Street before it diverges into that crossover and the other is at Ada Street where it intersects with the crossover -- I believe that was what the question got at last time, which was are folks actually able to go through that and the answer to that in short is a, no, ACHD is -- there is no crosswalks or anything across that on Ada, just because that's a curve and they have concerns with folks crossing in that curve. So, anyone coming south on Main Street, if they want to go west on Franklin, they need to take the sidewalk all the way down, ride on the sidewalk down to Franklin or divert over ahead of time perhaps up at Broadway. One of the other issues that was brought up both at Council and at MDC board was some concern about folks crossing Fairview and Cherry at the north end of the project, which, as you can see in this rendering of what that intersection will look like, is a lot larger than it currently is and certainly is not the ideal situation for folks crossing, both bicyclists and pedestrians, and I guess as far as that goes something could occur, come along in the long term that perhaps takes folks over to that area coming back -- but in the short term there isn't anything other than the crosswalks there, which is what folks would have to use to cross. And, then, of course, ACRD does update those crossings times to take into account the fact that this is a lot longer distance for people to get across and so something that came -- has come up in both discussions and that's parking in the previous proposal -- and maybe I will go back here afew -- oops. You can see that the original proposal was to stripe bike lane between Broadway and Ada, which is, actually, the only place that it -- you can put that in and the concern there is that we would have to remove parking and given that that is a short section and ACHD -- in some conversations with ACHD, they are comfortable with the idea of folks riding -- sharing lanes in that section as the split corridor will take a lot of traffic off of Main Street. I just thought I would throw out there that, certainly, one alternative to that is to just have a bike route on the entire length from Ada north, which means we preserve the on-street parking, but we are taking steps to enhance the visibility for the bicyclists using that section. So, that's all I really have. If there is any questions regarding either of these or anything else I have talked about or perhaps anything I have missed, I will stand for any questions. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 78 of 102 de Weerd: Council, any questions? Rountree: Madam Mayor, I don't have any questions. Tim and I have had this discussion. I feel it's inappropriate to sign a bike route into that grinder at Main and Meridian on Fairview and Cherry Lane, when we have an opportunity to take them to 8th and over to 2nd or 3rd or 5th even and get them dialed into lights and riding on streets that have existing bike paths on them. I think the fewer people and the fewer bikes that we keep -- that we keep out of that area, the better it's going to operate. It's not going to operate well in all and if they have to increase the signal times for the pedestrians to get across to eight lanes, which they will have to, and they will have to be timed and you will probably need a stopwatch to get across, further compound the operation of that intersection -- of those two intersections. I just don't think it's a -- don't think it's a wise service to anybody but a hardcore cyclist. That's just my opinion. Curns: Councilman Rountree, that's -- Rountree: And I have expressed that to Tim. Curns: Absolutely. And for the benefit of everyone here, too, this is -- the bike routes really are more for the -- to give more visibility to those hardcore cyclists, because they are going to take whatever route they are either comfortable with or as more direct or both. So, we just wanted to find something that gave them enhanced variability in that section, because we expect people to use it no matter if we put a route sign there or not and I would agree that it's certainly not an ideal situation at the north end there and, luckily folks do have the option of deterring down Pine and over to 8th, which has bike lanes and crossing Fairview at that -- or, excuse me, Cherry at that point. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: This is not an immediate suggestion, but there is a GIS effort going on in the city as well and I wonder at some time if we could produce a bicyclist map. I know we are producing parkways maps and -- pathways maps I mean and stuff, but I wonder if we could produce one that would be usable to the bicyclists? Curns: Councilman Zaremba, you mean for -- to hand out to folks? Zaremba: Yeah. Curns: Yeah. Zaremba: Maybe leave them around at the bike shops in town and suggest where we think the bike lanes -- where they should be attracted to ride. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 79 of 102 Curns: That's certainly a possibility and we have that information as you mentioned, a lot of that in the GIS in terms of what's out there right now on the ground. de Weerd: You know -- and, Tim, I guess that's what I find the most difficult about this is we are looking at a peace in isolation. We don't really know how it connects with just what we have in front of us and an once they get through this, then, what? And I don't know how many of them will actually go down to 8th Street or -- or those that want to go east -- we are assuming -- I don't know where these people would be going if they use Main Street anyway. So, what is the timing on this? Curns: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, the idea for this was with split corridor phase two there weren't any improvements for the bicyclists, so we were looking at finding something to run concurrent with that project, since there really isn't a time in the near future we expect to see any improvements in downtown for bicyclists. So, that was the idea behind this was a project that addresses -- and you can see the shortcomings of the split corridor project, something that runs alongside of it and certainly in the future Meridian Road north from Cherry and Fairview is -- it's in ACHD's CIP to be widened and have bike lanes on it, but it's not in the five year work plan, so, you're absolutely right, there is -- there is some missing connections here. We have partial connection to the south with the pathway that was already installed from Franklin and down, but there is certainly more pieces of the puzzle that will need to come in later. Hoaglun: Yeah. Madam Mayor and Tim, we really don't know what it looks like and, you know, if you're at Storey Park and on a bicycle and you want to get to the north side of town, you know, you're going down Franklin or Pine or even Washington to 8th and, then, heading north or you're going up 3rd Street to one -- the thing I see when we get that Five Mile Creek pathway completed at Pine, you take that pathway, you go up 3rd, take a right on Pine, and, then, zip up the pathway, cross at the Phillips 66 station, and head off to the Bud Porter and you're cruising as far as you want to go to the north side of town on that pathway into some wider streets. But they are going to find the route that they want to take and feel most comfortable with. So, yeah, if we say this is it, that may not be it, so that's -- that's the tough part about this. This is a crystal ball exercise and sometimes it's a little murky. Curns: Councilman Hoaglun, that's exactly right. It's a little bit difficult to predict where folks are going to go and so this effort was more of just, well, we will take our best stab at it and -- and this certainly doesn't keep us from asking ACHD for improvements as we go down the road in other areas if we see a need there. Hood: Madam Mayor, if I may real quick, de Weerd: Like where did that come from? Hood: Just to -- just to follow up on some of this discussion, because it was one of the things that was in the memo, but I didn't touch on. Tim has got the ped signal shown on Franklin across from Storey Park and 3rd Street. That is on the request list for Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 80 of 102 community programs, so we may not know where people -- how they are going to go after they get across Franklin, but that is one of the places we envision people to cross, just because of all the other stuff that's going on over there, so -- and associated with that would be the striping of the bike route on 3rd and, then, over on Ada, just because that's outside of the scope of split corridor phase two. So, some of this is in split corridor phase two, but some of it could be a separate project at ACRD for a community program. So, I just want to kind of draw those lines for you a little bit of split corridor phase two is really Main Street, the ped signal, the walk signal at Storey Park and 3rd Street and striping bike routes is a separate project, potentially. Curns: So, at the current time we haven't made that official -- this official request to ACRD for any of this. They, especially because of the possible effects to parking, wanted us to make sure that the Council was comfortable with that or see if they had any alternative suggestions. Bird: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: As far as parking, I don't want to lose a single spot on-street parking. Hoaglun: And, Madam Mayor, to add to that, I agree, I think that's a better way of doing it. If that's where it goes, going with the -- not lane, but the access route, yes, is a good way to do that. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Yes, Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: I agree that it would be difficult to lose parking spaces, but just tying in another conversation from another committee, when the split corridor crossover goes in, there will be a triangle of -- of land between the railroad and the crossover that -- it escaped me. The public transportation agency. de Weerd: VRT. Zaremba: VRT. Thank you. I'm a member of it and it just skipped my mind. Anyhow, they are looking at that for a bus center and, actually, amulti-modal center and that would not need on-street parking next to if it there. So, that's somewhere off in the future. But just to throw into whether or not we could give up parking along that piece, I think that would be okay. Rountree: Nothing there anyway. Zaremba: Actually, I don't think there is any parking there now, is there? Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 81 of 102 Curns: On Main Street? Zaremba: I'm visualizing in front of where Meridian Automotive is now and -- Curns: Currently you can park there. It's not exactly signed as parking. You can park there. Zaremba: I have never seen anybody park there. Curns: That was part of the -- Zaremba: Yeah. Curns: Right. de Weerd: So, Council, any direction? Zaremba: Seems okay to me. One man's opinion. Hoaglun: Yeah. As a route and, then, if parking is something -- on-street parking is not an issue, we can always change it to a lane, but I think that's agood -- good way to go right now and, then, we will just have to see how things develop as we go along. de Weerd: So, I have -- Rountree: Two and two. de Weerd: Two and two? I say do it, if I get to break a -- no tie. Hoaglun: You mean the purple plan? de Weerd: Yes. Rountree: The purple plan. Hoaglun: The purple plan. de Weerd: Purple plan. Rountree: It's just signs, anyway. Yeah. de Weerd: It's just painting on the street. Curns: Signs and paint. de Weerd: Yeah. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 82 of 102 Hoaglun: I'm for the purple plan. de Weerd: Okay. Curns: Okay. Thank you very much. I think I may have the next item here as well, so - H. Public Works: Update on Memorandum of Understanding with Ada County Highway District de Weerd: Okay. And the next item is the memorandum of understanding with ACHD, which is Item 7-H. Curns: So, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, over the last say about nine months Public Works staff has been working with ACRD staff to kind of work through some issues that have come up during our construction processes and so having resolved most of those issues, we decided that a good way to kind of finalize the decisions that were made would be to produce an MOU, just so that both sides going forward, as folks changeover and whatnot and memories aren't so good, that the decisions that were made are written down and so we have drafted that MOU and we are still working with ACHD, but we wanted to come back and -- on a couple of the items there that we felt that -- we wanted to make sure you kind of knew some of the possibilities that could occur there and get some input on those before we go back to ACRD and work to finalize that MOU, so -- and you have that -- I believe you have the draft MOU there before you. Only two issues I'm really going to touch on. If there is something else in there that you would like to discuss, feel free to bring that up. The two issues -- the first one is relocations of city facilities, water and sewer lines, when ACHD does roadwork. The question had come up does the city necessarily have to move water and sewer when ACHD does a road project and there is a conflict that occurs perhaps with their -- frequently with their storm drains and as there is a lot of cost associated with us moving those facilities around when they do a road project and ACHD provided us in our meeting with some -- kind of a summary of state statute and some case law that pertained to utilities and the rights of way and we kind of took that information on to Ted Baird, our legal counsel, who looked through those for us and, basically, came to the conclusion that ACHD's current policy, which is if we need you to move it, you're going to need to move it, is supported certainly by state statute, although some of the case law is really more pertaining to .private utilities and the rights of way, which they are in the business of making money, so it makes more sense to them if they were -- public utilities are a little bit different. But, at any rate, we -- having that information, we -- as the MOU is drafted now, we, basically, then, decided that the best route to go is just to work -- set up some procedures to help us minimize those conflicts in the future, so that we are not spending as much time and effort on them and just to note that we do work very diligently when we get projects in from ACHD and review those plans, to see if there is any way that we can minimize conflicts, but just for a little bit of information, the cost last year associated with those kind of relocations was in the Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 83 of 102 neighborhood of about 25,000 dollars. This year it looks like perhaps maybe about 30,000 dollars. So, it's a little chunk of change that we spend on those and we just wanted to let you know that that's kind of where we have landed with it and certainly there is -- we could push that a little bit more with the highway district, although as mentioned before the state statutes are -- certainly can support that policy for utilities in the rights of way. de Weerd: Mr. Nary, I guess I would have a question. When Mr. Baird looked at that, can you tell me in the -- not in the utilities that would be other -- other types, but when cities go and do that that they have their own road departments, who are they charging those improvements to? Are they charging it to their enterprise fund for the utilities or are they charging it against their road dollars? Nary: Madam Mayor, I don't know the answer to that question. I certainly can find that out, but Idon't -- I don't know that today. de Weerd: I think that might help us in this -- we can't really -- like was pointed out, we can't compare it to the for profits, but certainly we wouldn't be reinventing anything if we could see how it's handled through a typical, ordinary cost for a city that has both the utilities and the highways or roads and how they charge it out. Nary: I'll find out that answer. de Weerd: Okay. Barry: Madam Mayor, I would also, if I may, like to express additional concern associated with this in principle. You know, we are members of the Utility Coordination Council, and place our utilities in the rights of way in the proper locations that are designated for us and agreed upon and so from a principle standpoint, since we have installed our utilities correctly in the correct locations and end up having -- you know, after paid -- after paying for those utilities, having to, then, relocate those utilities, which isn't a concern for us, we are happy to relocate the utilities, the concern is the cost, who bears the cost. Why should our ratepayers paid twice for the same infrastructure is really the concern here, when the -- when the county highway district is the one precipitating the improvements. That's what at basis is the concern here and certainly Tim's work and along with Ted and others, have suggested that there might be statutes that support the requirements, but when we are in the position of deeding over right of way left and right from developments and giving those over to the highway district for them to, then, turnaround and require us at our cost to move utilities that were agreed upon in these corridors, seems a little bit troubling for us. So, one of the things we wanted to do is provided some preliminary research and information that we found on the topic and get your sentiments as it relates to that in principle and if the Council is happy with the way things have gone in the past for us on this issue and want us to just, you know, continue the course that we have in the past held, that's certainly fine. If, alternatively, you would like us to spend more time on this particular issue, we are happy to do that as well. But we are at the point where we wanted to at least bring that Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 84 of 102 particular issue to your attention, maybe offer up a couple of opportunities for maybe you to work with the commission or have us take a different course of action or whatnot, but we definitely wanted to bring it to your attention as a concern of ours. de Weerd: Thoughts from Council? Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: I agree with not having our ratepayers charged twice for the same infrastructure, just because somebody else decided it needed to move. I'm -- I think that's in the right thought. de Weerd: Our ratepayers are going to .pay twice regardless, whether it's through ACHD or the city. Zaremba: That's true. de Weerd: I guess I'm more interested in the legalities or what -- what is allowed. Any other thoughts? Rountree: Well, you can keep beating your head against the wall and see if you get differing results, but I'm not sure you're going to change anybody's mind. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: This is kind of a side issue, but does this also address -- what was the issue, maybe a year and a half ago, something like that, Ustick and -- Curns: Linder? Zaremba: -- Linder when on a weekend they discovered they needed to move a water pipe, some contact mechanism, an approval mechanism? Curns: Councilman Zaremba, actually, that's one of the items that we wanted to formalize in this MOU and that is under item number five, emergency or unplanned alterations of city utilities, just to make that clear that the water -- especially the water infrastructure is very important, that nobody other than -- someone certified from the city is touching that and that we know that it's being altered. Rountree: They can't anyway by state statute. Curns: Right. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 85 of 102 Zaremba: But they did. Rountree: They may have done it, but it was illegal and needs to be pointed out. de Weerd: I think it was pointed out. Rountree: Yeah. Barry: Absolutely it was. de Weerd: You know, again, I will go back on the ratepayers paying twice. I would like to see how they are charging it across this state to see if it is a legitimate road expense and that sets precedence and I guess it would support an argument or not. So, I think we need to kind of have something that backs up what our argument would be if we can make it. Barry: And, Madam Mayor, if I may, the fact that -- you know, your comment on the ratepayers paying twice for an infrastructure, I'm not sure if that's actually the case, particularly since the improvements to these intersections and the relocations required because of these improvements are largely impact fee related from ACHD. Our ratepayers would not be paying those, it would be new development paying those impact fees. So, I'm not certain that -- I mean certainly there is a case to say, well, somebody is paying twice, perhaps, but in this case our ratepayers are paying for the services they already have, as opposed to new infrastructure being put in or having to be relocated because of new development associated with ACHD infrastructure financed through impact fees. de Weerd: Well -- and, again, I don't know if that's a qualified, cost. Those impact fees for ACHD -- they have some odd formulas to it and, you know, existing asphalt, even if your base was not in correctly, it does not qualify. There is a lot of weird stuff. So, guess just -- I think it needs a little bit more research on it and, then, it gets back to the whole discussion we have about fees in general to public agencies and if we don't get charged impact fees on ACHD's side, that is a significant savings to the city, you know, are we kind of splitting hairs and that's -- we just need a little bit more information before we go down that road and that's -- that's all I'm saying. I understand the principle of it and maybe some additional information can at least get us some discussion on placing it in a more permanent spot, because it could be either of our dollars at risk, instead of not thinking it well through on the highway district's side as we look at more permanent easements and how we can drive that discussion. I don't know yet, Tom. I do understand what you're talking about. I am just as concerned about this as you are, but I think we need a little backup as well. Barry: Uh-huh. We would be happy to grab that information for you, Madam Mayor and Council. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 86 of 102 Curns: Anything else on that particular item or -- de Weerd: No. Curns: Okay. Moving onto the second one here. And kind of related to that is collaring water valves and I brought a picture real quick here just to make it easy to understand what we're talking about. Hoaglun: Is that what they refer to, Madam Mayor, and Tom, as potholing of utilities? Barry: No. Hoaglun: Okay. Just checking. de Weerd: So, what is potholing of utilities? Barry: So, Madam Mayor, potholing of utilities is where you -- you can use a couple different techniques, but, essentially, it's alocation -- it's a physical location, usually by air knife techniques, meaning that you will drill down into the -- through the asphalt into the soil and try to identify physically the locations of pipes under the ground as a location procedure for identifying utilities in certain areas. That's what potholing is generally referring to. Sometimes those potholes can be very large, sometimes very small, but generally that's -- that's what's referred to. Hoaglun: And, Madam Mayor and Tom, has any of this been discussed with ACHD staff? Where are you in this whole process on this MOU? Barry: Right. I know that staff have been meeting with ACRD to talk about these particular issues. There is still some disagreement on some of the fundamentals in the MOU, which is why certainly we wanted to make you aware that we are having dialog. It's been fairly productive dialogue, as I understand. I have not been at the table, but staffs reports back have suggested that ACHD is open to talking about these issues and while there may not be fundamental agreement on all issues, we wanted to see if we couldn't move forward in formalizing some very loose understandings and get to better agreements with regard to the way each agency works and coordinates together. So, that's just one of the endeavors that Tim is on with regard to this memorandum of understanding, so -- Curns: We finally have the picture up here, so that what you see just to the right there and that's actually a sewer manhole. The concrete that rings that is the collar and you'll see those in the road when you're driving around, both on the manholes and on a water valve and so when ACHD does an overlay project, of which we have very many this year, and the road elevation is changing with that, those scholars are broken out and, then, the manholes and the water valves are re-adjusted to that new grade, so that it makes it smooth and, then, the concrete is poured around the outside of it. So, related to the previous item I mention with relocation of utilities, the current practice at ACHD is Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 87 of 102 that they pick up the tab and include in their overlay project the collaring and the adjustments to the manholes, our manholes, but not for our water valves and so that struck us as being a little bit odd and we had some discussions with them about that as kind of these -- seemed odd that if they are doing an overlay project and we are not even involved in any way, doing any kind of utility work, why would we -- first of all, why would we be paying for something that's required for the overlay and, second of all, why would they just do one and not the other? And so as it turns out in brief, it's not actually their policy to pay for the sewer manholes, it's just something that came about through some issues that they had with the different sewer districts in the area and once they kind of extended that practice when they had to extend it to everybody else. So, that's how this came about and we asked them if perhaps they could consider picking up the tab for the concrete and the adjustments for our water valves, so that it's all in one project and the costs are all born in that project and they agreed -- have agreed so far to take that to their commission for discussion and the reason that I bring this to you is that they had mentioned to us that there is that possibility, because the sewer manholes are not in their current policy, there is a possibility the commission would say why are we paying for these in the first place, we are not going to pay for any of it, so we might end up worse off than where we started and so as it relates to that first item, they kind of invoked that reference to state statute and that this is an adjustment of facilities, it's not theirs, it's ours in their right of away and so we should bear the cost for those. And as with the other relocations, it's not a huge cost, but this year we stand to spend about 14,000 dollars just on readjusting these. So, it's a small chunk of change. So, we just wanted to bring that to you, just to let you know what that risk is if we -- if we do take that forward to the commission. de Weerd: Tim, I guess United Water, are they dealing with the same costs then? Curns: United Water, Madam Mayor, is a little bit different of a situation. These concrete rings are arequirement -- or I should say they are in the ISPWC, which is the state standards that all the public works agencies use. United Water, being a private utility, they can kind of use whatever standards they want to use, so they don't actually do this. They do pay the cost to come out and readjust things to make sure they are flush with the new road surface level, but they don't to the new concrete -- actual concrete part of it. de Weerd: Who does? Curns: It's actually not done it all. If you drive into the city of Boise where -- United Water's area, you will see that the water valves are there, but there is no concrete ring around them, so they're -- they're not paying that cost. They are paying the cost to readjust it to the correct grade that the overlay is causing. Hoaglun: Madam Mayor. I don't know how much -- if we lose out and they go, well, you want us to pay for that, gee, we shouldn't even be doing the sewers, you know, what's that cost to us? Do we -- do we know what that cost would be? Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 88 of 102 Curns: I haven't actually calculated it out, Councilman Hoaglun, but we have roughly the same -- well, I'm going to say we probably have about the same amount of manholes as we do water valves in the roadways, so it would be somewhat in the same magnitude of cost as what I -- Hoaglun: But, Madam Mayor and Tim, are the manhole covers bigger than the water valves? Curns: Yes. Hoaglun: Okay. Curns: Well, they -- depending on the size of the valves cluster, yes. Hoaglun: Yeah. I guess the thinking is, okay, do we -- do we just keep paying the 14,000 average and just let sleeping dogs lie in this case and -- or maybe we can get both, but I don't know, if I'm a betting man, you know, they're -- they are looking ways to cut some of their cost. I don't know. That's -- that's a hard one. de Weerd: Or as Council Rountree pointed out to me, you just have asphalt around them. I was envisioning holes. Hoaglun: But as I understand, the state requires -- the Idaho State Public Works Manual standards, whatever, I think Warren will enlighten us here -- Stewart: Maybe just a little bit. Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, the ISPWC is the standard that everybody uses. It doesn't mean we have to use that. We are entitled as a city to adopt a different standard. I'm somewhat familiar with what United Water does. United Water doesn't collar, but they use a different manhole riser and a different lid and when they get done with an overlay, they take a crowbar out there and they chip it out until they can get underneath their lid and pop it off. It's not pretty. And it's probably not -- you know, it works for them, they use it, but I have seen both, used both. wouldn't necessarily say that that's a standard that we want to adopt as a city. So, collaring has its advantages. One of the things that I think Tim may be planning on mentioning is the fact that we are looking at the possibility of other technologies for manholes or for valve collaring that would not be concrete. There is some new technologies out there. We haven't -- we are actually planning on running a test on one of them to see if it's something that's feasible, but it's really premature to say that at this point. So, that would potentially save us -- if it looks like it's going to work, it would potentially save us some money, but what we are really looking at right now is that it seems sort of odd, we have raised the question with ACHD, where did this hole standard come from, why do you pay for manhole collars and not the valves and on an overlay project where we are not even involved in any way, it would seem a lot simpler if we could include both. They were opened to the idea, but, then, came back and said, you know what, we sort of looked into it, found out that we really didn't get this officially done with the manholes in the risk that we are going to run and if we run it all back in Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 89 of 102 front of our folks, they could say, well, we really don't want to do either one. So, what we are really asking you is we could push the issue with them and they are willing to do it, their staff is willing to take it, but there is a risk. de Weerd: Pandora's box. Stewart: Could be. de Weerd: I bet it will. I don't think there is any could about it, personally. Rountree: Careful what you ask for. de Weerd: Yeah. And in this case I think the likelihood is greater that we will end up paying for both. Stewart: It is definitely a possibility. It's just one of those things that as we were working through these issues with ACHD staff, asking them questions, trying to find out more information, you know, we sorted it out and we wee like, okay, it's an issue we could take up and we could sort of find a resolution to it and maybe it's worth the effort and maybe it isn't. So, we wanted to find out if it's something you felt like was worth pushing. Barry: And, Madam Mayor, we are no different than ACRD in trying to reduce our costs in this economy as well. Obviously, we found two areas where we thought we could save on the order of around 50,000 dollars a year for projects initiated by another agency, but, yes, there are risks associated with that and that's why we are here to entertain those, the discussion with you regarding those risks. So, we are bearing the costs now. Who knows what those costs might be in the future and if we might be able to get a positive change. We're not certain. Rountree: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: Well, you know, the subject is being openly discussed in a public meeting and I know that some folks at the executive level at ACHD actually read our minutes, because I have had my words repeated back to me before and that's fine. So, my guess is if -- if what we fear is going to happen if we ask the question, it's going to happen anyway, I believe, because they will read this dialogue and will say, uh, maybe there is a way for us to save 50,000 dollars on a project. But just on the remote chance that they don't read our text, maybe we don't ask and see what happens. de Weerd: You know -- and, again, I would go back to my -- my comment on the other topic is if it has been a typical road expense for the cities that have both roads, utilities, I think that, again, goes to an argument either direction. So, I would like to know that as well. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 90 of 102 Stewart: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, we certainly can look into that. The one thing that hasn't changed, Council members, really, is the premise behind -- or the reason behind why ACHD first started collaring the manholes. That would be the only driver that might cause them -- even if they read this, they might say, well, we're going to leave that sleeping dog lie, because the reason they started doing it in the first place still exists and so they would have to address that. How are they going to deal with that problem if they go back and don't collar. It doesn't have to do with Meridian, but it has to do with other entities, so -- just looking to determine whether we need to push the issue or whether we should just say, okay, now we understand, we will leave it be. de Weerd: I guess I would like the answer first, then, let's let Council earn their dollars. Make the decision. Bird: It's your dollars, our pennies. de Weerd: So, Council, what would you like to do on this one? It seems to me that this is all part of the -- the first. piece that Tim talked about and you can wrap it up in that discussion. I don't know that you necessarily need to split it out and push the topic. If we're going to push the whole idea of utilities in the right of way, incorporate it in that dialogue and that discussion. de Weerd: So, first find out how it's typically paid for? Rountree: Yeah. de Weerd: Okay. Stewart: And, then, sort of an all or nothing approach, is that -- Rountree: Yeah. de Weerd: Okay. Curns: Thank you very much. I. Public Works: Strategic Plan Update de Weerd: Thank you. Okay. Item 7-I. Mr. Barry. Barry: Okay. Seeing that we're going on 11:15, you will be happy to know that I have only a short one hour presentation, so I will go ahead and just jump right into this and -- Bird: That would be short. Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 91 of 102 Barry: No. We have a short presentation for you this evening. You have seen many times and for many months now our strategic plan and so I wanted to come back before you this evening and share with you a little bit about what we have done since we last talked with you about our strategic plan, which you now have again and to empathize some of the -- recognize some of the comments first that the Council -- and concerns, rather, that the Council expressed and also take this opportunity to, hopefully, build credibility and confidence in our understanding of those and, hopefully, show that we have embraced the majority of those suggestions and comments and want to entertain certainly at the end any additional questions or comments you might have. Just really quickly, you know the strategic leadership team. Most of them are -- or a good chunk of them are still here despite the hour, but I do want to recognize them, because this is as much their work as it is mine, so you see their names here. I won't go through the list, but I know many of you know them by name. In any event, I want to go through and recap where we left off. As you may know, we presented the plan on July 13th originally to the City Council. Council provided a bunch of comments, questions, concerns, thoughts, those sorts of things for us to consider as a strategic leadership team and, then, asked for some time to go through the document in more detail and to also acquire some additional information. We solicited additional comments and questions, concerns, thoughts, insights from the Council between July 13th and August 13th, then, our strategic leadership team met on the 16th of August to go through those comments and make formal responses. de Weerd: I just wondered how you were doing that. I didn't see you pushing the little thing and -- Barry: I have a magic flipper here, so -- in any event, the discussion at the strategic leadership team on the 16th included our Council liaison, we appreciate having Councilman Zaremba attend that meeting as well and we revised our plan and presented that in your mailboxes on August 31st. With that you know that we included all the comments that we received, at least up to that point in time, along with responses and a revised copy of the strategic plan. So, that's, essentially, kind of where it leads us up to where we are today. For the benefit of all the Council and the public and so one and so forth, we wanted to just make sure everyone knew that we did receive 23 comments during our review period and the comments were -- had similar themes to them, which we wanted to go through. One of the themes was the implications of the strategic objectives. and how they related to funding both in the short term and long- term. What the integration of the strategic objectives would look like with the annual budget, our work plans, the CIP, Council focus area and priorities. How does all of that relate and I will get to that in just a minute in more detail. Another theme was the scope of some of the objectives. There was thought that some of these objectives should really be expanded to enterprisewide or citywide initiatives. Additional thoughts included the clarification or the need to clarify roles and responsibilities of Public Works regarding certain objectives and, then, suggestions were also made to either delete or modify specific objections or text or thoughts contained within the document. So, what we did as a strategic leadership team is we took these comments and we tried to, on these themes, identify what was really behind the concerns of the City Council and we Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 92 of 102 got specific comments, which were very helpful, but we also wanted to just sort of give back to you our affirmations as it relates to the strategic plan, sort of our guarantees, if you will, our promise back to the Council, because we think that's important that you know we understand your concern and that we want to embrace them. The first thing -- orfirst affirmation is that we -- we -- we want everyone to know that the strategic plan is not only aligned with, but it's built on the very foundation of the City Council's focus areas and priorities. So, we feel fundamentally it is in complete alignment with where the Council has chosen those focal areas and objectives or priorities. Secondarily, Public Works recognizes that the approval of the plan itself does not represent approval of the -- or, excuse me, let me rephrase this. I'm skipping ahead. Public Works recognizes that approval of the plan represents approval of a direction for the department and not the financials for each and every initiative in and of themselves. Which leads me to the next point, which is that we do not assume that support for any particular strategic objective necessarily translates to funding of that objective and as we have mentioned in our plan and in the diagrams associated with our plan, we know that those objectives, whether they be projects, initiatives, tasks or so on and so forth, we have to come back before the Council for financing and that that would be the opportunity to provide staff the input as to whether or not Council saw the validity of any one of those objectives moving forward. We also want to affirm that we will come back to the Mayor and the City Council for periodic updates with regard to progress on any of our strategic objectives or, alternatively, changes to the strategic plan and so any significant change that occurs, whether that change is precipitated by a change in leadership at the department level or a change in leadership at the Council or mayoral levels, we want to make sure that whatever the Council's strategic plan -- or strategic focal areas are, that they are in alignment with our strategic plan and each comports, so that we are all moving in the same desired direction. Also, we will endeavor to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate all of our strategic objectives consistent with Meridian's CARE values, which is why you know our CARE -- the CARE values have been incorporated into our strategic plan, meaning that we will be working with other departments, other divisions, to the highest degree that we can in order to further those objectives that might be important to Public Works, but might also have relevance to other divisions and departments citywide. And, finally, the adaptive management is really the process that we are embracing throughout the entire document that will allow us to continue to refine and progress the initiatives as they have been reported and also to identify new initiatives and the appropriateness of existing initiatives as to being continued in their inclusion or, alternatively, being dropped from the plan, as they may not make sense with time. So, with that, those affirmations, we want to just quickly say, well, what's been done, what have we done in the last couple of months. I have provided you a much more detailed synopsis of how we change the strategic plan and so I won't go through this in detail, but, essentially, we changed a bunch of stuff in the introductory text to try to clarify some of the themes that we saw the Council's concern were centered around. Additionally, we modified or clarified the intent of several of the strategic objectives and we added or removed a few of the activities under the strategic objectives when it seemed appropriate based on the Council comments. We have also reprioritized, retitled, renumbered the placement of a couple of different strategic objectives and we tried to clarify those roles and responsibilities and also demonstrate Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 93 of 102 increased coordination of several of the strategic objectives when they involve divisions and departments beyond Public Works. So, the strategic plan document in its revised form is still pretty impressive. It's a 56 page document, which includes 75 strategic objectives for the department. We had all eight contributing divisions help put the documentation together. The time horizon, as you know, is a five year horizon and each objective supports at least one or more of the Council's focal areas. Again, if we couldn't make a connection with what was important to the Council in the identification of their strategic focal areas, we didn't include it on the plan. So, now I wanted to provide a graphic that sort of takes visually what I'm suggesting as it relates to the importance of this plan and also recognizes that there are a lot of other components to this plan and how do they all fit together and how do they fit together with the budget. That was one of the questions of the Council and so as you know we have a vision for our department and that vision is -- has been circulated through the Council several times and the vision is, essentially, a target for us. It is a point where we put our sites on and we pull the trigger. What we are talking about now is we have got our sites set, but we need to pull the trigger and how does that -- when we pull the trigger what does that mean with regard to all of the other types of plans, whether they be work plans, strategic plans, capital plans, master plans, how does that all work together? And the way it works together is simply -- de Weerd: It's too late for that graphic. Barry: I know. It might be a little confusing for you, but it will settle down in a moment. The idea here is that our strategic plans, our CIP and our master plans, our work plans, all overlap and they are all contained within our vision and they are all controlled by the budget. We can't do work plans without the appropriate financial approvals, we can do strategic plans or objectives, we can't do CIP or master plans. All of them are controlled by the budget. So, we want to give peace of mind that we understand budget limitations are fundamental as it relates to the approval of any individual objective. What we are asking tonight for is simply the approval of a direction. A direction that we have been very specific in and have developed a series of tasks, actions, strategies, performance measures, and objectives to achieve. So, that's really what we are talking about. I don't need to go over these focal areas, because you developed them, so you know them. But, as you know, they are adopted by our strategic plan by inclusion. The same thing is true for our vision statement. Our vision statement is far reaching, it challenges us to the year 2030, and the first five years are included in the strategic plan that we presented to you. The CARE values, the way by which we are going to do the work is also included. It's not important to us to solely have what should we do, but we also want to do how we should be doing it. Quality customer service, accountability, respect, excellence, all of that's import in the way we carry out our strategic plan. So, those are being adopted by reference and inclusion into the document as well. You know that fundamentally in Public Works we have taken a very data driven approach to the way we do things and we figured the more that we correct and study and find, the greater knowledge that we're going to have about what we do and about what we should do and with that knowledge comes greater understanding and with understanding becomes additional insight and it's the insight that we are after, because the insight helps us to Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 94 of 102 visualize what it is we need to do. So, it's a long step to get to visualizing what we want to do and that visualization will change as our insight, our understanding, our knowledge and. certainly the data that we acquire changes as well. But once we visualize, now we have the important role of making sure that we collaborate with one other that we create responses to change, that we communicate those responses, that we inspire one another to do better always, that we complete what we say we are going to start out with. Ultimately we evaluate the completion of the work to make sure it meets the performance measures we have set for ourselves and that we contemplate whether not the desired outcomes met our goals and we repeat the cycle over and over again. Again with data being the fundamental contributor to what we do as a department. So, you've seen this slide as well. I won't spend a lot of time on it, but one thing you know is -- or should know or we wanted to reinforce is that the document is a living document. It is a document that is subject to change and continual growth and we will have to be diligent about making sure it's up to date, refined, and communicate that with the City Council. We also want to make sure that department staff have opportunities to reflect on our accomplishments and adjust through adaptive management to meet the new challenges that come forward that we may know about and many that we do not. Finally, adaptive management is going to be that process, as I mentioned, to where we will try to aspire to achieve the goals and objectives for our department and modify them to meet the current reality. Lastly, strategic planning, as you may know, is one of the most important responsibilities of the leadership of any organization. It's the activity that ensures that a clear vision is developed for the organization, that appropriate strategic objectives are developed to achieve that vision, that appropriate resource deployment decisions are made to achieve the strategic objective and, finally, that measures are put into place that insure attainment of those objectives within the specified time frames. This Public Works strategic plan will serve as a roadmap for our departmental success. It will also serve as a tool to communicate the department's intentions to the community, focus the direction of our financial resources and employees and insure that our short- term goals and objectives are met in a timely fashion to insure attainment of our overall departmental vision. With the strategic plan we are guiding our organization to a destination that has been chartered by the City Council. We are directing our staff talents and energy to accomplish a larger and more important purpose. We are focusing our time and resources on those things that will make the biggest impact in our community and we are moving our organization to one rooted in exceptional service, innovation, and aspiration. And it's for all of these reasons and so many more that asked and stand here before you and ask for your adoption of our five year strategic plan and with that I will stop and take questions and I have some staff here well if you have questions for them. So, thank you for your time and consideration. de Weerd: Thank you, Tom. Council, questions? Rountree: Madam Mayor, it's not a question. Did receive the blow-by-blow account of what the changes were and the memo. I got my review document back. I started going through the memo and my review document and the revised document and about three pages none of it was jiving, so it clicked that, well, nothing's been done. So, I went through two tests, picked two obvious changes that are stated have been made, went to Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 95 of 102 those pages, looked at those pages -- I have a copy of the original document. So, don't have a revised document to review. I would like one. I'm not ready to -- to cast opinion at this point. What I read in the blow by blow account makes sense, but haven't seen it in context with all the other changes, so I would like to see it that way before I take action. And I apologize for not making that comment sooner, but it was like the middle of this weekend that I looked at it and it wouldn't have done you a heck of a lot of good to get my comments on Sunday afternoon. So, anyway -- Barry: I understand., Mr. Rountree, and I apologize for that. I'm not certain what -- Rountree: I'm not sure what happened. Barry: -- what happened there either. I guess I would ask the rest of the Council if their books are as you have described as well. Rountree: And I would direct them to page 20 and it's an obvious change that they made on -- on BO-8 and it makes reverence to eliminate unnecessary vehicles, which they say in their comments they eliminated, but on my page 20 it's still there, so -- that was the one that confirmed that I think I got the original document back. That was my test. Barry: Well, I appreciate the -- you looking at that in detail. I'm looking at mine as well, too. Rountree: Page 20 of 56. Barry: Yeah. Under activities. Yeah. I have the -- evidently, the same copy that you have, which does not show that change, so I'm assuming Council -- Rountree: No. And further reading I got the same kind of thing. So, I'd just like to see it all in context, all the changes, so I can read it and make sure that it makes sense. Barry: Absolutely. That's completely reasonable and I, again, apologize for that. I will make sure that we get you a revised copy with that. Now, we did not do it in red line, that's where we had the extensive cover sheet, because -- Rountree: You did it in blue line. Zaremba: Actually, I was the one that suggest that they not do the red line, so I may be at fault for -- Bird: No, you're not. Barry: Not at all. We -- it's our error, Mr. Zaremba, in that evidently we did not print out the -- the right copy. It looks like we printed out the original and changed that out with the original that you had. I mean that's what it appears at least at this point in time. So, Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 96 of 102 that's a snafu on our side. So, I apologize for that and cannot expect for you to adopt this at this point in time, obviously. So, what we will do is get you a revised copy -- Rountree: Great. Barry: -- that comports with the revisions and I guess we will be seeing you again. Hoaglun: Madam Mayor and Tom, if you could, on things like DS-5 where we had talked about this was the evaluated business license, slash registration program for the City of Meridian and Council said, you know, delete this objective. If you -- on some of those areas where we said delete, if you could make note that -- in red or someplace that this was one of the objectives -- in blue you talk about you want to retain that. Barry: Correct. Hoaglun: You know, it's here and if we were to adopt this, well, it's there, we just adopted it, complete strategy to evaluate a business license and I don't think that's -- it wasn't my intention that we were going to do that and you make a case, well, we have to understand the merits of it and do the study and, then, we can bring the proposal -- I'm not ready to go there. So, why waste the time to do the study if I'm not going to go there and I think the other Council Members, from what I heard from that meeting, weren't going to go there, so let's not waste staff time to do that and -- make the argument, but -- so some things like that where we said get rid of it -- you can make your argument, make your case, but kind of show that, you know, this is one that may be deleted if -- Barry: I understand what you're saying, Mr. Hoaglun. I'm trying to devise a way that would be productive in your review that would show that. I guess we thought we did that in the blue line document where -- Hoaglun: It did work. It did work. Yeah. Barry: I just don't know how -- Hoaglun: Yeah. I was doing the same thing as Councilman Rountree, trying to figure out, okay, and go back to DS-5 and keep that, okay, it's all in there. Same thing. It was -- some of these things weren't quite matching up. Yet some of them where, you know, -- where you recommend -- continue its inclusion within the strategic plan and you did -- you talked about in the blue areas you made some modifications. Well, I didn't quite -- when (read it, okay, was that modified compared to what I read before and (couldn't -- couldn't tell, so -- Barry: Right. And, evidently, you know, as we have discovered this evening together, the document is not -- it's not the revised document that we had intended for you to receive, so -- Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 97 of 102 Holman: Okay. Barry: -- that does make it difficult. Hoaglun: If there is a way to figure that out, you know, whatever makes it easier for everybody, it's a good thing. Barry: Okay. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? de Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: If I may discuss the specific issue that I think it was just mentioned, we have had discussion with economic development and I think the fire department and perhaps that clerk's department, that we should be exploring business licenses in the city, which is -- if I'm understanding what Mr. Hoaglun just said -- and perhaps Mr. Rountree, they are wanting to eliminate the exploration of business licenses or just don't think that Public Works should be doing it, somebody else should be doing it? I'm in favor of exploring the business licenses. I have to say that. Whoever does it. Bird: Madam Mayor? Zaremba: And it's very typical. I mean I had a business in another city and we paid according to how many employees. I had less than five and paid I think it was 385 a year for my business license. de Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: I am not in favor of a business license at all and I believe that our fire department, since we have got afull-time inspector and stuff, does a pretty good job of telling us what's in the businesses and really and truthfully in emergencies they are usually the ones that are called out, they are the ones I would want to know what is in each business and stuff is our first responders, so -- and as far as a business license, I have went down that route in 1964, '65 in Boise and it lasted six months. They are a pain in the you know what. So, that's mine, David, on that. I think that through the inspections that we are covering and stuff, I think that we know what businesses are out there and what's in the businesses and I am quite sure that if one of our fire inspectors found something that they thought would be harmful to the Public Works, they would certainly relay the message and --- because it's to their benefit. de Weerd: You know, I guess there is maybe a question out there for our fire chief, but this discussion has been had a number of times at the directors level and I think Public Works at this point, because it has a significant impact on their environmental program, is just trying to take the lead -- take the lead for the discussion and it's a continued and it's an ongoing discussion, not just with the environmental group, but with the fire Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 98 of 102 department, with economic development and I think our -- clerk's office and -- I think we have had some interest almost at every level in the departments and I think what you have in the strategic plan with Public Works is someone was taking the lead and convening the other departments to have a more in depth and focused discussion about it. It's -- I don't think it's existed as long as the split corridor discussion has, but it certainly has been probably discussed as often as it has. And I think the last discussion we had with City Council on that was there continues to be concern in some of the regulatory and department's that deal was whatever is in the buildings or being flushed from the buildings or -- you know, I think there is a number of descriptive words for it, but it's because of the significance, it has not gone away -- that the need for the information hasn't gone away. And, again, I say that I think Public Works is just trying to attempt to lead the discussion and that's what you're getting in the strategic plan. So, I think we can bring this back and have that dialog again in the interim. We can put it on a director's meeting and, you know, maybe see how we can help support this strategy in this book as well, because I know they had a number of discussions at their level, we can probably add to that discussion as well. Barry: Yeah. It was interesting, Madam Mayor, one of our discussions as a strategic leadership team reflecting on this particular objective was that it struck us as interesting that we would require a license for a pet in this community, but we would not require a license for a business that can pose a lot more danger than the pet and that it's a misdemeanor if you don't get licensed -- you don't get your pet licensed. It just doesn't comport with us. So, we wanted to look at the pros and the cons of the business license, in addition for all the other reasons that you have described. Environmental, health and safety, security, public safety, you name it. So, it seemed prudent for us to at least have a look where we can definitively say here is the information, it makes complete sense, here is the information, it makes absolutely no sense. You, as a Council, get to choose what you would like to do. If the majority of the Council would like for us not to take that on -- I mean we will take that -- we will take that direction as well, but -- de Weerd: But I do think that Mr. Bird raises a point. As the fire department has gotten more on top of these -- going in, evaluating the businesses, part of that discussion and why I think the strategic piece in this plan is even more important, is to see how maybe we could even do it without the business license and just to have those discussions and how we can better communicate among our different departments of people that do go out on site, whether it's the environmental team, whether it's the fire inspectors, whether it's on a business visit with our economic development or what have you, maybe that's not the end goal is the license itself, is to achieve the objective of knowing what is in our community, what's going into our systems, and what those potential hazards are. And maybe it is even better tracking the numbers of businesses in our community and knowing if we are having growth or if we are not or what have you, so -- and it's a discussion point and we will try and flush that out between now and then as well. Bird: Madam Mayor, could lask aquestion -- Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 99 of 102 de Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: -- and maybe somebody can tell me for sure, but as I recall when we -- if we handle -- and at times we did handle some -- our wholesale manufacturing company did handle some chemicals and stuff and we -- not only the people working on it had to be licensed, but we also had to get a license through -- I don't know which government, but it was -- it was in our business hanging on the wall that we handled a certain deal. de Weerd: Probably the Secretary of State. Bird: Is that still -- is that still applicable where you could call EPA or DEQ or whoever might have it? I can't remember who used to issue it. Do you know? de Weerd: You need to -- Bird: Yeah. Come up here. I'm -- I'm trying to remember who issued them to us. MangErikh: Under the federal law, Mayor and Council Members, there are health and safety requirements imposed by OSHA on hazardous waste generators -- Bird: Yeah. We know that. MangErikh: -- and, then, there are also federal DOT hazardous waste requirements as to separation of hazardous constituents, storage, retention on site, how they're handled and disposed of. So, what you are referring to was probably a material safety data sheet. That gave you health and safety information about the product that you were using within your processing. Bird: We had to do that on every job for every piece of caulking you took to the job and everything else. But we actually -- with certain chemicals that we had within the production of our facility over there, we actually had a license that was on the wall about this high, that was issued by somebody. I don't know who. I will find out. MangErikh: Yeah. Good question. Thank you. Bird: And it was probably before OSHA was ever dreamed of. I just was wondering on that, because that -- you know -- Zaremba: Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Bird: I have none. Zaremba: I would just like to say, I appreciated being included in the strategic leadership meeting where you were going through and I felt the strength of thinking and thought process and forward looking in the room was impressive and Ijust -- as a plan - - to have a strategic plan in the first place and the way I describe it, when you first came Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 100 of 102 to the department it was in firefighting mode and I think this activity is a huge step in getting your department out of firefighting mode and the forward looking I really appreciate. So, we may need to tweak it a little bit again, but on the whole I want to thank everybody for their effort in it. Barry: Thank you, Councilman. Appreciate that. Zaremba: And the Mayor has returned, so I will turn it back over to her. de Weerd: Any other questions or comments? I'm sorry. Sitting from 6:00 o'clock I just had to leave. Bird: You're not the only one, so let's hurry up. Rountree: I will get copies of the -- Barry: Absolutely. Yes, sir. Rountree: Thank you. Barry: Thank you. I'm sorry about that. I think I do have the next item. de Weerd: Yes. Well, we have are ready done the backflow prevention update. I know. So, 7-K. K. Public Works Department: Approval of Additional Reimbursement for Employee Crystal Green's Tuition Expenses For aNot-to-Exceed Amount of $500.00 Barry: So, this item should only take about 45 minutes. No. Actually, it's -- Bird: That short? Barry: Yeah. Zaremba: I vote yes. We're done. Barry: It's actually very very short. We are just here before you, because City Council or -- or, excuse me, city policy 5.4 requires us to come before you with this request. Essentially, it's a tuition reimbursement for Crystal Green in the amount of 500 dollars. We have previously authorized reimbursement up to the thousand dollar limit under this policy for this fiscal year and there is this last request for this fiscal year of 500 dollars. It's related to her secondary degree, her master's degree. She's our laboratory technician out at the wastewater treatment plant, has showed great promise and initiative with our department. We don't make -- actually, I have never made a request of this kind before, so it's pretty unusual for our department. We have the money in our Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 101 of 102 training fund, which is what's required under the policy. What we are asking tonight is for your favorable consideration to allow us to reimburse her the 500 dollars for her tuition for the period that's been included. Hoaglun: Madam Mayor, a quick question for HR director, Mr. Nary. Does this run through your shop or does each department handle -- handle these tuition -- I don't think have been in Council when has come before us, so I'm just kind of curious how the process works. Nary: Sure. Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, under the city policy employees can receive as a benefit up to 500 dollars per semester or a thousand dollars per fiscal year for education reimbursement and it's at the director and department's approvals that the schooling -- and there is some other things about passing the class and stuff, but, basically, the schooling matches what the department approves as -- as education. To exceed that thousand dollars, then, it's required that it comes out of the department's training fund. So, the first thousand dollars comes out of a fund that's administered by our department, so it does come to us, we review it, make sure it complies with the policy and, then, approve it and, then, to exceed that thousand dollars, then, requires that it has Council approval to use their training funds. Instead of, basically, sending this employee to training, they are sending them to school. Hoaglun: Thank you. de Weerd: Okay. Anything -- any other questions? Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: I didn't have a question, but I'll make a motion. de Weerd: I know. Zaremba: Madam Mayor, I move we approve Item K. Hoaglun: Second. Bird: Second. de Weerd: I have a motion and a second. Roll call, please. Roll-Call: Bird, yea; Rountree, yea; Zaremba, yea; Hoaglun, yea. de Weerd: All Ayes. Motion carried. MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES. de Weerd: We are at the end of our agenda. Lieutenant, I would ask that you bring our thanks back for the Recovery Day Breakfast this morning. It was an amazing program and our compliments to staff that put it on. Certainly it was very impactful. Appreciate Meridian City Council Workshop September 14, 2010 Page 102 of 102 Councilman Rountree being there. And I would also like to remind Council of Coffee With The Mayor on September 28th. It's at Wahooz from 8:00 to 9 30 and we're not doing laser tag or any -- well, I don't know. We will see what kind of mischief you can -- you can have or create. So, anyway, with that I would entertain a motion to adjourn. Rountree: So moved. Bird. Second. de Weerd: All those in favor say aye. All ayes. MOTION CARRIED: ALL AYES. MEETING ADJOURNED AT 11:45 P.M. (AUDIO RECORDING ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) MAYOR MY de WE ATTEST EH DATE APPROVED '~ '. TFO CITY CLERK $~ - ~ ~~~' ~~ ~. ,, ,~~' ac ~,~ ` \~~. ~~~~rrrrr~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~