HomeMy WebLinkAbout2012-01-10~~E IDIAN
CITY COUNCIL REGULAR
MEETING AGENDA
Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 3:00 PM
1. Roll-Call Attendance
X David Zaremba X Brad Hoaglun
O Charlie Rountree X Keith Bird
X Mayor Tammy de Weerd
2. Pledge of Allegiance
3. Adoption of the Agenda Adopted
4. Consent Agenda Approved
A. Approve Minutes of January 3, 2012 City Council Regular
Meeting
B. Acceptance Agreement: Display of Artwork of Les Herman in
Initial Point Gallery from November 2 to November 30, 2012
5. Community Items/Presentations
A. Public Launch of Meridian Community Recycling Fund
(Pg 2-6)
6. Items Moved From Consent Agenda
7. Department Reports
A. City Council: City Council Department Liaison Appointments
(P9 ~)
B. Legal/Human Resources/ Information Technology Department:
Strategic Plan Update (Pg 8-25)
C. Legal Department: Proposed Franchise Renewal with Cable
One Approved (Pg 25-28)
Meridian City Council Meeting Agenda -Tuesday, January 10, 2012 Page 1 of 2
All materials presented at public meetings shall become property of the City of Meridian.
Anyone desiring accommodation for disabilities related to documents and/or hearing,
please contact the City Clerk's Office at 888-4433 at least 48 hours prior to the public meeting.
D. Planning Department: Transportation Update on Projects,
Priorities and Studies -Includes Discussions on Planned
Improvements to the Eagle Road/Fairview Intersection,
Intersection Improvements Along the U.S. 20/26 Corridor, and
Other Transportation-Related News (Pg 29-41)
E. Planning Department: Ten Mile Annexation Status Report
(Pg 41-42)
F. Legal Department & Clerks Office: Discussion on Phase I
Update to the City of Meridian Records Retention Schedule
(Pg 42-46)
G. Mayor's Office: Resolution No. 12-831: A Resolution of the
Mayor and the City Council of the City of Meridian Appointing
Lisa Keyes to seat 8 of the Meridian Development Corporation
(Pg 46-47) Approved
8. Future Meeting Topics
9. Other Items
A. Executive Session Per Idaho State Code 67-2345 (1)(c)(f) - (c)
To Conduct Deliberations Concerning Labor Negotiations or to
Acquire an Interest in Real Property, Which is Not Owned By a
Public Agency; and (f) To Consider and Advise its Legal
Representatives in Pending Litigation Amended onto the
agenda: (d) To Consider Records That Are Exempt From
Disclosure as Provided in Chapter 3, Title 9, Idaho Code
Into Executive Session at 5:21 p.m.
Out of Executive Session at 7:01 p.m.
Adjourned at 7:01 p.m.
Meridian City Council Meeting Agenda -Tuesday, January 10, 2012 Page 2 of 2
All materials presented at public meetings shall become property of the City of Meridian.
Anyone desiring accommodation for disabilities related to documents and/or hearing,
please contact the City Clerk's Office at 888-4433 at least 48 hours prior to the public meeting.
Meridian Citv Council Januarv 10, 2012
A meeting of the Meridian City Council was called to order at 3:00 p.m., Tuesday,
January 10, 2012, by Mayor Tammy de Weerd.
Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, David Zaremba, Keith Bird, and Brad
Hoaglun.
Members Absent: Charlie Rountree.
Others Present: Bill Nary, Jaycee Holman, Pete Friedman, Jamie Leslie, Mollie
Mangerich, Emily Kane.
Item 1: Roll-call Attendance:
Roll call.
X David Zaremba X Brad Hoaglun
O Charlie Rountree X Keith Bird
X Mayor Tammy de Weerd
De Weerd: I'd like to welcome you to our City Council meeting. We appreciate all of
you joining us. For the record it is Tuesday, January 10th. It's 3:00 o'clock in the
afternoon. We will start with roll call attendance, Madam Clerk.
Item 2: Pledge of Allegiance
De Weerd: Thank you. Item No. 2 is our Pledge of Allegiance. If you will all rise and
join us in the pledge to our flag.
(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: Item to note under Department Reports, 7-G, that resolution number is 12-
831. And also on Item 9-A, the Executive Session, we want to add Subsection (d). So,
our Executive Session will be per Idaho State Code 67-2345(1)(c), (1)(d), and (1)(f).
And we would like to amend that. So, with that, Madam Mayor, I move adoption of the
agenda as amended.
Bird: Second
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 2 of 48
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: THREE AYES. ONE ABSENT.
Item 4: Consent Agenda
A. Approve Minutes of January 3, 2012 City Council Regular
Meeting
B. Acceptance Agreement: Display of Artwork of Les Herman in
Initial Point Gallery from November 2 to November 30, 2012
De Weerd: Our next item is our Consent Agenda.
Hoaglun: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Hoaglun..
Hoaglun: I move approval of the Consent Agenda and the Mayor to sign and the Clerk
to attest.
Bird: Second.
De Weerd: I have a motion and a second to approve the Consent Agenda. Madam
Clerk, will you call roll.
Roll-Call: Bird, yea; Rountree, absent; Zaremba, yea; Hoaglun, yea.
De Weerd: All ayes.
MOTION CARRIED: THREE AYES. ONE ABSENT.
Item 5: Community Items/Presentations
A. Public Launch of Meridian Community Recycling Fund
De Weerd: Item No. 5 under our Community Items/Presentations. I imagine I'm turning
this over to Mollie.
Mangerich: Good afternoon, Madam Mayor. Members of the Council. I'm here
representing the Solid Waste Advisory Commission today to you seek your approval
and comments and suggestions. We are ready to launch to the public the availability of
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 3 of 48
community recycling funds for projects and to receive applications during the next
month and a half. We are fortunate that we have been, since May 2011 and December
2011, we have collected over 4,000 tons of residential recyclables from curb side here
in Meridian. Those 4,000 tons have garnered us 134,000 dollars, of which the city's
revenue portion of that has been 76,000 dollars. As an agreement within the criterion
program establishment of the community recycling fund by the SWAC, we have
available today 38,000 -- a little bit over -- available to the community by which they
could apply applications for -- for projects that are related to waste reduction, recycling,
public education, public education materials, construction projects that would include
incorporation of materials that are secondary in nature. Recycled wood. Recycled
lumber, plastics et cetera. So, we wanted to run by you guys our press release and
who we are targeting within our community to get the word out and seek suggestions,
advise, and a nod and we will do so. It is our goal to have prepared a press release and
work with Robert Simison in the Mayor's office to get a press release out by February
1st and utilize the various capabilities of media we have within the city, our city's
website, the SSC newsletter, our employee newsletter and also our city newsletter and
we have coordinated timing so that we could enter into all of those publications to allow
our citizens to know that we have we limited funding available. Our IT Department has
graciously provided us a dedicated a-mail line that myself, Andrea Pogue, and one of
our other commission members, Keri Glenn, will team up and help preserve and provide
technical assistance and answer questions to our public who may call in who may be
interested in this, if not this year, the next year. Our project this year are particular in
schools within the City of Meridian and I have contacted our Meridian Chamber of
Commerce and have been invited to an upcoming luncheon to talk to them about it and
also be utilized in any of their e-newsletter and/or website, as we would like business
participation to be included within this. So, I list for you our targets and the media
utilized and that's my last slide. So, we have done a lot of discussion. It's been a really
positive experience for all the advisory commission members. We feel fortunate to be in
this position. We are also believe that we are far better prepared and organized as to
how to administer this program than perhaps we have been in the past in terms of
increased accountability and, then, transparency. Not only to our internal leadership,
but to our public as well.
De Weerd: Thank you, Mollie. Any questions from Council?
Bird: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Bird.
Bird: Just a comment that I'm so glad that we are able to do this again, because while
we have really stepped up the applications and stuff this time around and we were kind
of lackadaisical on a couple before, we still did a lot of help and -- to the community and
-- and I'm so thankful that we are able to do that and I hope that we will be able to
continue to do this and do it right. We will. We will. It will work out.
Mangerich: Okay. Well, thank you.
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 4 of 48
De Weerd: I think it's important to note this is a commodities market and so, you know,
it's very unpredictable and when the commodities have a market it's certainly something
that we can do. So, I -- I believe we need to set realistic expectations to the process
and the availability of funds, so that as -- if we go through a market like we have and are
coming out of, that people know that that money will not always be there, it is cyclical.
Also if you go to the chamber I think it will be important to note some of the projects that
have been funded and the community benefits that have resulted and what we are
doing as far as the process and the transparency and accountability different than what
we did then. You know, how the program has evolved, because certainly that's what
these kind of programs really do, they evolve as they become more popular. We put
stronger processes and place and it's -- it's all part of growing something that's of
benefit to our community.
Mangerich: It truly has.
Hoaglun: Madam Mayor?
Zaremba: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Hoaglun.
Hoaglun: Just appreciate this, Mollie, and looking forward. I think this is going to be a
great program and continue to help build this community in different ways. I just wanted
to know if you could walk me through the process a little bit. If a school comes in with
an application -- let's say they want 20,000 and a business comes in and they have got
a project that 25,000, we don't have enough money for both, what would happen? What
does the committee do?
Mangerich: During the application opening period the three members whom I spoke to
about, Andrea, Keri and I, will review applications and make sure that they all meet that
criteria. In those cases where somebody might be lacking information we will assist
them should they want to pursue clearing up their application. At that point, obviously,
some of our dollar values may have changed and, if anything, maybe have increased
and we will -- we have a special meeting of our Solid Waste Advisory Commission to
discuss the elements and benefits of the application and make a decision tree as to how
we would allocate those funds and they are limited funds with 38,000 being available
and we would go through that process and come up with a decision. We would also talk
with the applications if there was the ability for them to perhaps wheel back a portion of
their element and receive funding on the three-quarters of their application that maybe
appropriate to work with them as well. So, we want to be very technical assistance
oriented, but also very realistic in the limited numbers that are available to our
community this first year out.
Hoaglun: Madam Mayor, to follow up. Is there any criteria where a nonprofit is -- gets
more points, if you will, in the consideration versus a for profit? If a business says, oh,
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 5 of 46
we want to use this recycling material in this building that we are building and want to
sell versus the -- take the school again and we want to include recycling material in this
sort of project, is that a consideration or how does that work?
Mangerich: The applicant targets are not weighted by what -- the stakeholder group
that they come from.
Hoaglun: Okay.
Mangerich: However, there is a tiered approach to the funding. Projects submitted with
a value up to and including 5,000 dollars, there is no match needed. However, this
program runs strictly as a reimbursement program. So, people have to consider that
they have to be able to come up front, buy materials, and, then, get reimbursed upon
submission of receipts of that. Now, applications that may be coming in greater than
5,000 dollars, there is a 50 percent match. That match is consists of either materials --
not labor -- and/or funding themselves. So, is a commitment to add to this pool of
available funding. Also in the event if there were to be any construction to be occurring
as a result of this award of money, they have to go through our building services and we
will take them through the process and fees will need to be paid on those.
Hoaglun: Great. Sounds good. Sounds like the committee. has thought it through and
put together a good program. It's not free money. I mean they have got to -- they have
got to have some skin in the game and make sure it's going to be a good solid project,
so that sounds great. Thank you.
Mangerich: We hope to come back to you, you know, within -- by the end of the fiscal
year and have some positive stories and a good PowerPoint presentation for you.
De Weerd: When I think what we have seen in part of the projects in the past, they
have to have a community benefit and that is an element in that.
Bird: We have got a match and it's worked out
De Weerd: Uh-huh. So -- Mr. Zaremba.
Zaremba: Just kind of a side thought here. Actually, I'm thrilled by not only the
opportunity, but the whole way this is going. I mean in -- in recollection when we went
to the commingled residential curb side collection of recyclables we thought that that
was probably going to operate at a loss and at the moment, since it's not operating at a
loss, that's wonderful. Just a suggestion for the SWAC commission, maybe to discuss
at some point. I know there is ups and downs. It's a commodity market, but if there is
any thought that this trend might continue, that it doesn't operate at a loss. I know I
have had business people tell me they would recycle if it did not cost them extra to have
a recycling bin. If I'm understanding correctly, SSC charges the normal charge for
picking up refuse, but different than the residential service where now nobody pays
extra for recycling they, at least -- the businesses at least have to pay extra to have a
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 6 of 4B
recyclable bin separate from their own and if we continue to have income, if there would
be a way to cover that cost, so that businesses could recycle free the same as homes
do, it's the two benefits. We are not putting more stuff into the land fill and we would
have more stuff to recycle if it's actually making money and I just want to throw that out
there for SWAC to consider at some time, would there be a way to eliminate the
residential -- the business recycling bin fee.
Mangerich: Absolutely. I will carry that forward as a feature agenda item four our
discussion.
Zaremba: Thank you.
Bird: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Bird.
Bird: Just a second thought here. We -- the biggest thanks need to go to SSC for this
program. As a private -- as a private company they certainly -- and in their contract
certainly don't have to give this money back to the citizens of the city. So, the big thank
you is not only to SWAC, the committee, but also the SSC for doing this for us so. I'm
very happy to be associated with SSC for what they do as a community.
Mangerich: I heartily agree with you, as well as you -- as our other commissioners and
might I add to that point of generosity of their own giving this up freely, volunteering this
aspect of partnership back to our community, that also in the event -- when the event
occurs that markets would take a tumble and we would go into the negative value on
the commodities that we are collecting curb side, that SSC will cover that cost and it will
not be accrued to the city, nor our rate payers. So, it is an extraordinary gesture on
their part and I think solidifies what -- how fortunate we are in our area to have this
particular partner.
De Weerd: And I think that point kind of answers maybe why the practicality of covering
the recycling for the business because of the ebbs and flows in the market, the cost
structure would have to ebb and flow as well and it's not just practical. So, it's really
difficult to manage that and I'm sure our -- our utility billing could probably tell you that
would just be a nightmare trying to figure out when it's up what we should -- then we
don't charge, when it's down we do charge and if you have ever had acommodity -- if
you have ever been in the commodity market it's changes daily. So, I don't know how
practical that is. This seems more clean cut and predictable. So, I know they have
looked at that. So, that might help you with not expecting an answer in the near term.
Thank you, Mollie.
Mangerich: Thank you very much. We will move forward on this and we will report
back in several months.
Item 6: Items Moved From Consent Agenda
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 7 of 48
De Weerd: Thank you. There were no items moved from the Consent Agenda.
Item 7: Department Reports
A. City Council: City Council Department Liaison Appointments
De Weerd: So, we will move to Item 7-A and I will turn this over to our Council
President Mr. Hoaglun.
Hoaglun: Well, Madam Mayor, I have handed out to you, the Council members and
clerk, the new liaison appointments for this coming year and we -- for Councilman
Zaremba, he will be handling the Community Development Planning and Zoning
Building and Development Services and with the merger of that -- the changes that are
taking place with Public Works, he's also assigned Public Works. So, he will be doing
those two areas and that way it would be one point of contact for anything the Council
needs to know and he could -- he can be the troubleshooter on that, so appreciate him
doing that. For Councilman Bird, the Fire Department and Parks and Recreation for this
coming year. For Councilman Rountree -- he kind of gets what's left over. He went on
vacation, so he's stuck. He gets Legal, HR and IT, and the police.
De Weerd: He's stuck with the police.
Hoaglun: He's stuck with the police. And, then, for Council President, as I guess is
tradition, Finance slash Utility Billing and the Mayor, Clerk and Economic Development.
So, I will be handing those and planning on looking forward to those Friday morning
meetings to set agendas and whatnot. So, moving forward with that. So, that's what we
have for 2012. So, I didn't hear any groans out there from any of the city employees, so
they are all happy with who their liaison is for this year.
De Weerd: That's very good. You have managed miracles then. Are you going to
maintain the assignments to VRT, COMPASS, Air Quality Board, and all of the rest?
Hoaglun: And, again, Councilman Rountree not available to discuss that, I think there is
a willingness by everyone to stay with where they are. If there is not, please, let me
know, but I think we are pretty well set. We do need to discuss the liaison to the senior
center, that is something that we probably want to have a liaison to and that's something
I'm willing to take on if needed, so --
De Weerd: Okay. Very good. Thank you. Any questions or comments from Council?
Zaremba: Just a comment that I, of course, would be happy with any department, but
I'm appreciating being trusted with the departments that are having some transition. I
will try and do my best.
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 8 of 48
B. LegallHuman Resources/ Information Technology Department:
Strategic Plan Update
De Weerd: Thank you. I'm sure you will. Okay. Item 7-B is our Legal, HR, City
Attorney strategic report. I will turn this over to Mr. Nary.
Nary: Thank you, Madam Mayor. Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, as we get
that rolling up, I guess I have an opportunity to introduce everybody. As I said kind of
facetiously, but not completely, before the meeting, if you have any computer problems I
guarantee we can probably take care of it today. I think we enough of our folks in here
we can probably fix whatever you need. This is an opportunity we get annually to
update you a little bit on what we have been doing and update a little bit where we are
going and that's really the exciting part is where we are going, but before we start, you
know, this -- as you can see we are a pretty diverse group in our department and behind
me in the -- to the right of the Council chambers is the majority of our staff from both
HR, IT and the legal staff for the city and you have an incredibly talented group of
people and I have the privilege of leading that department, but you have an incredibly
talented group of people to head those up and I guarantee you you're not going to find
that quality of personnel anywhere in the state, the county, or other cities to the degree
you have here in Meridian. I like to toot our horn a lot when I can and I will tell you there
isn't a whole lot of things that I don't think the. people ..behind me can't do and the
citizens of our community I think benefit from that daily. I don't think a lot of times it gets
recognized, because as we sometimes jokingly say in our staff meetings, people don't
really pay much attention until it doesn't work. You know, nobody cares much about
your computer until it doesn't work. Nobody calls us up very often and say, boy, that
was a great contract you guys wrote last week unless it doesn't work. Nobody really
calls us up and a tells us what we have done unless it doesn't work. But the reality is is
most of the time everything works and it does because of the folks behind me. This --
this is a group effort with putting our strategic update together for you and they all
deserve the credit and I just get to be the guy standing up here and tell it to you. But
every one of those people back there really are the ones that make it work every day.
De Weerd: Bill, I will tell you that when it doesn't work they get a lot of recognition,
because we are so appreciative that happens so infrequently. So, even if we don't
express it certainly when it doesn't work it underscores how much you are appreciated.
So, to each and every one of you I hope you know that. And, yes, you're not reminded
it often enough, but you are appreciated.
Nary: Thank you, Madam Mayor. We appreciate that very much. So, let's talk a little
bit about putting the pieces together and what we do as a department. So, we talked
about this as a group and what do we? You know, most of our -- most of our customers
aren't the people out in the community first. Most of our customers are people in side
the city. Most of our -- I said yesterday of our staff meeting, I don't think IT probably
gets a lot of calls from outside the city unless it's a wrong number, because most of their
customers the people that are here on a daily basis.
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 9 of 46
De Weerd: Or a vendor.
Nary: Or a vendor. but our job is to keep the city out of trouble. I mean that's what we
do and it doesn't matter whether we talk about HR or it doesn't matter if we are talking
about risk management, it doesn't matter if we are talking about the legal department, it
doesn't matter if we are talking about IT. Our job is to keep the city out of trouble. Our
job is preventative maintenance to make sure things work as often as we need it,
whenever we need it, and if there is a down time, which occasionally we have, then, that
it's very minimal. But we anticipate the needs of the city, that we can be forward
thinking, because, again, most of the things -- especially in the technology arena, most
of the folks that we work with aren't very adept with the technology that's coming or
what can be done, that's our responsibility to help them anticipate their needs, find out
what their problems are, help solve that. Provide a consistent quality of service on a
daily basis. To be fast and reliable. Again, whether it's a legal issue, whether it's a
personnel issue, whether it's an IT issue, you want a fast reliable response. You don't
necessarily want us to get back to you next week or a month from now. You really want
it to work five minutes ago. You really want an answer in about ten minutes. We can't
always give you a ten minute answer, but we try to do it as often as we can. Again,
meeting the needs of our customers is something that we as a department consider our
main calling and that's what we do. So, we try to exemplify -- and you will hear a lot
more about this, but we have.. been talking internally with.. the Mayor -and. with the
directors about the Meridian way and what that means and what are we talking about
and really trying to do these things or some of the things that we talk about as how we
do things in Meridian that maybe isn't the same at other places. It may not be the same
experience that we get with another public agency or even a some private entities and
we try to be different, we try to be responsive and we try to solve the problem as quickly
and as reliably as we can. Here is our organizational structure. You have seen it
before. We have had some small changes this year with IT now with Mike and David
taking on their roles and responsibilities of supervising both the infrastructure support
side of our system, as well as our software engineering. And, again, we have an
incredibly diversely talented group of people that I can't emphasize enough. I probably
at sometimes overemphasize the fact that I think they can do whatever you need and I
haven't been proven wrong very often that they can't and I think it doesn't matter
whether we are talking about IT or legal or HR, I think most of the staff that we have can
do whatever it takes and whatever needs to get done. So, let's talk about some of the
specifics. Okay? So, we will talk first about on the IT side, okay? The incident tracking
system, you have heard of it before, we have written it in-house. Mike Tanner was the
leader of that. It's now working both now with our police department and has been for
awhile, but now it's also shared with Boise Police and Ada County Sheriff. This is -- this
allows them to then be able to track all of these things in real-time and be paperless.
They are currently running it as a test to make sure all three of the agencies can interact
with one another, that they can, then, process paper through -- or process reports
through this system and not create all this paper and have this real-time type of
conversation and there is another slide about that in a second. But, basically, allow this
tracking to save ink, paper, time, storage space, all of these things by sharing with these
other agencies and the City of Meridian being the leader in this particular area, is very
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 10 of 48
unique for us and very unique for our city to be the people-that really are the go to and
that they are finding in other cities -- and we talked about this I think last year, they
looked at other entities or other ways of getting this work done and found they couldn't
find something better than what we could provide them. The incident tracking system,
again, allows areal-time communication. That's something that's, again, not been done
around here and that's really a great innovation that we are really proud of as an entity
to have. IT support. Fulfilled over 4,000 support requests. That's not a typo. You
divide that out by your normal work year, that's a lot every, every day and many of
those, if not all of those, are handled within the time period of expectation that we have
provided to customer, we get another employee, another department. Some of them
are long-term projects, some of them are short-term projects. Some of them get done
quickly, faster than what our requirements are ourselves, sometimes they are done
even -- even quicker than the customers is even asking for. We try to maintain those
service level goals, so that we can again provide the quickest, fastest responsive
service to meet the needs of our different departments. Overall we have had great
customer feedback because of it. We have had some very smooth transition with new
employees. As you can see there is some new face around the table back there -- or in
the chairs back there. We have had some additions that have been great assets to us
and in bringing those on, both with Mike and David's leadership in IT, we have been
able to assimilate them into our work group. It's been, again, a great transition and now
we have time to start looking ahead and where we go. What kind .of training can we
provide to the city, to the different departments. We had done that when we first moved
in here and now we can have the time and opportunity to bring that back online and get
some training opportunities for Office 2007 and IT, how to deal with other IT issues,
phone system, other types of training. We have a training facility upstairs on the third
floor that we can use to its fullest potential and that's a great opportunity for both our
staff to provide that, as well as the city employees to receive it at, again, a very afford
able cost to the city. E-ticketing. This is something we are very excited about in IT.
This will reduce manual entry. This is a copy of how many tickets -- this is probably -- is
this daily? Weekend. Okay. So, this is a weekend amount of tickets that get issued by
police department. Every one of those to date have to be entered by hand into our
system. We have people that that's all they have time to do is enter citations into the
system. This will reduce storage space by having this e-ticketing, it will reduce the
manual entry, which, of course, reduces errors, reduces the copying costs, increases
the office -- office efficiency for it. This is a great invocation for the city. This is
something, again, we are very excited about. We hope to have it up and running by the
summer of this year. This is, again, a great addition to the service level that we can
provide the police department. With the incident tracking system in this I think our
police department is second to none in being able to do their work in a most efficient
manner, again, less errors, less storage, less time, much more efficient, again, greater
benefit to our taxpayers.
Leslie: Hey, Bill, can I add something real quick?
Nary: Yes, sir.
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 11 of 48
Leslie: We just got notification today from the Department of Highway Safety, based off
the involvement from our IT Department -- I don't think you have gotten the letter yet,
because I just got it a little bit ago. We had a 15 percent match on that grant to develop
e-ticket in our city and they are going to waive that 15 percent based off the cost
savings from the IT Department.
De Weerd: Wow.
Bird: Great.
De Weerd: Congratulations.
Bird: Yeah.
Nary: Again, it's a very exciting opportunity. It really is. Again, stretching -- both
stretching the value that we try to bring to our citizens by the staff that we have and,
again, providing a greater efficiency for the police department and a greater opportunity
for the city to really be the leader in these areas. Accela. It's not a word that everybody
is comfortable with. You know, we have been talking about Accela for awhile. Rob
Sosnowski is in the back and Rob's been a great leader in getting this rolled out to the
department, but now. it's .part of .how we do ..our. business and it's -- it's still in the
evolution state, it's still an ongoing project, but we are slowly getting out to every
department as it's intended. The electronic permitting is getting done, allowing citizens
to have access, to have at least information out there on the Internet that they can
access and see where their projects are, allows for staff the ability to review and mark
up documents directly in Accela. Those are additions that, again, we thought this
product would be a great value to both the citizens and our employees and we are
seeing that and with Rob's help in leading this project we are really seeing it now
becoming part of the culture of how we do business. And, again, being a greater value
and efficiency is always a plus. GIS. There is another project that's been ongoing for
awhile. We have had GIS in the city, as all of you know, for awhile as a Public Works
function and, then, we have slowly but surely been moving that into a citywide function
and that implementation is still ongoing. Right now Matt is our GIS -- one of our GIS
programmers. Matt's been working in our hundred percent addressing to make sure all
of the addressing -- you know, it's one of those projects -- you know, addressing I think
for the average for the average citizen seems like nothing; right? Because you know
your address. It's not a big deal. Everybody kind of gets that. Our address in the city --
we are looking to make sure that we have one source that's accurate for all addresses,
so that we when use GIS we are clearly identifying the parcels and the locations
specifically on the map of where they belong. We have many streets that have the
same names, but have streets, avenues, circles, courts, drives, that have numbers that
sometimes the street name is spelled out, sometimes the street name has a direction on
it, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it says said North 8th, sometimes it 8th.
Sometimes it's say North Eighth spelled out, sometimes it says North 8th without it
spelled out. So, we want to get that consistency across the board, so that we can have
one system that can drive all of these different issues, but we feel the benefit that GIS
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January 10, 2012
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can be, then, for police, fire, Public Works, all the various departments in being able to
have one central source. So, the GIS system, again, if it's ongoing, we can help
eliminate the duplications that exist, it could help correct names that are incorrect. We
have had avenues and streets that have changed over the years that, again, haven't
been updated in the system. There is misspellings. There is some -- some of them
aren't the right places. The parcel numbers don't match. All of these things are part of
our GIS project and, again, we are very excited to have this in place and it's an ongoing
thing. it's certainly a huge undertaking by our staff, but it's going to be well worth it in
the end. I mean I think it's going to be a great value and we can, then, move that GIS
forward as we have been discussing for a number of years to be able to make sure that
we get the value of what we wanted out of that and our citizens will gain that value as
well when they have their contacts with us.
De Weerd: Bill?
Nary: Yes, Mayor.
De Weerd: I think the Council knows Rob, but I don't know if they know Matt.
Nary: Oh. This is Matt. Matt's our newest GIS person. Our newest GIS programmer.
And Matt's been with us for two months.
De Weerd: Welcome, Matt.
Nary: Thank you, Madam Mayor. Next, emergency communication. We have been
updating our emergency communication plans with Ada county. Basically trying to work
together to create at countywide plan that will be of value to our city, updating that plan
for future communication needs, creating different platforms for that. Again, those are
goals to find a hardware and software communication platform for the agencies to be
able to work together, to be able to communicate together. This will allow them, again,
more efficiency and lower cost, providing greater service to our community and, then,
the service level agreement will, then, have a working agreement between the agencies
to make sure we are meeting their needs, as well as they are meeting ours and having
this communication dialogue between them. Now we are in the process of looking at
equipment and testing and selecting equipment, so that, again, we have a much better
cohesive communication between us and Ada county and emergency needs. That sort
of plays right into the next issue, which is continuity planning. We have been working
with them on updating the equipment and the sequel server for that a-mail and those
types of things, as well as we are in the process, as all of you know, working our COOP
plan, our Continuing Operations Plan through -- the Fire Department is sort of leading
that task, but all the departments that are involved with emergency services and
emergency communications are working together and this communication or connection
with Ada county will be of great value when we -- as we develop our COOP plan
together. City network. This is a connection by fiber to the city -- to Boise. We have
implemented a fiber connection to Boise for sharing of data. This is -- this is what was
put in when we did the instant tracking system in connecting that to Boise. The record
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
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manifest system is now being used by police, is also using this system. We have also
created links through GPS to be able to use that as well in case the fiber for some
reason wouldn't be accessible, so we have redundancy, which as you know in the IT
business that's a critical component is making sure it can be done in more than one
way. They have new a firewall in place because of that. Our phone system and police,
of course, is now on the same system as City Hall, which is a great edition I think for the
police department. Eventually we would like to be able to connect all the city that way
as much as possible. But also there is upgrades to our remote sites as well and, then,
that, of course, will, then, play into creating better connection between our SKADA
system, our parks network system, which connects all of our different parks together,
the lights, the restrooms, those types of things, as well as having a network plan. So,
again, looking forward for the city in the IT arena, we have tried very hard to look at
those long-term values that we need to have in being able to connect all the different
entities are the different facilities of the city and being able to make sure they can
communicate with one another, both internally and, then, of course, externally in
expensive operations, emergency management, those types of things.
De Weerd: Bill, before you have moved on. Do you want -- we have a lot of new faces
in IT, so would you care to take a moment?
Nary: Sure. Absolutely. I'm going to .start here on the end. I will start with Mike
Tanner. Mike is our a software engineering manager. I know most of you know Mike,
have seen Mike before. Matt is next to him. Matt's our GIS person. He's been with us.
There is Chad Neal. Chad now is our -- I forget the title now. System admin position.
Again, part of our restructured organization -- or restructure. Crystal is -- Crystal
Ritchie, is right there. And Crystal is our new help desk person. And Summer is right
behind Chad. Summer is also -- she's our part-time software engineering person.
There is Jamie and Jamie's title I forget as well. Computer specialist. Jamie Bean
moved from our help desk into that roll this year. Nick Ferris is here. Nick is our GIS
person -- or, excuse mere, Nick is software engineering person. Sorry. And, then,
behind him is Rob Sosnowski. Rob has been heading up our Accela project. And,
then, David Teed is in the very back row and David is in charge of management of the
systems side of our network.
Zaremba: Madam Mayor?
Nary: So, thank you, Madam Mayor, for giving me time to do that
De Weerd: Thank you.
Zaremba: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba.
Zaremba: It is nice to meet all of the new IT people that I haven't. I would just comment
that sort of an honorary IT person, Robyn Jack in the Public Works Department has
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January 10, 2012
Page 14 of 48
been very involved in GIS and I'm sure she's relieved to have people now who can help
take some of the city load off of her.
Nary: Yes. Absolutely. Robyn and Doug have both been instrumental in helping move
the GIS program forward in the Public Works arena and they work certainly closely with
IT and so it has been a great partnership and working relationship between the two.
Zaremba: I would just call -- I'm not as familiar with Doug, but I certainly would call
Robyn an honorary member of the IT group.
Nary: I appreciate that.
De Weerd: And I know our departments are thrilled to have Matt on board.
Nary: Yes.
De Weerd: GIS is a growing tool for all of our departments and so I'm sure they keep
you more than busy.
Nary: I haven't seen Matt away from his cubicle very much, except for a staff meeting
and lunch, but that's about it. So, yeah, I think Matt's been pretty business since he got
here. So, let's move onto the legal side. We probably -- again, a lot of things that we do
in the legal arena that you may or may not see on a daily basis, may not even see or
realize that it's getting done, because our intent is to get it done so that you don't have
to worry about it. You don't have to concern yourself with it. So, obviously, we have
provided a lot of support to both your -- to the Council, as well as the various
commissions in reviewing the different agenda -- management items, a lot of the things
that over the years, especially for Councilman Bird who has been here a long time, we
have evolved our agenda over time, so that when things are on that agenda you know
they have been reviewed by the various departments that need to review it before you
have to approve it. We have a system in place with the clerk's office, so that it all gets
done and the sign-offs occur at the appropriate time. So, again, you don't have to be
concerned about it, it is getting done. The different commissions we also provide
support. We have legal support at all of our commissions, as well as our impact fee
committee. They attend the meetings. They provide whatever trainings are necessary.
Administrative support, provide all the contract review and document drafting, so any
issues that come out of -- whether it's the Solid Waste Commission, whether it's the
Traffic Safety, whether it's Historic Preservation Commission, we have legal support to
provide whatever they need, whether it's contracts, whether it's an RFP for some type of
professional services or whatever, we have legal support to provide all of that for those
various commissions. You probably noticed last week we had a number of contracts on
there for the Arts Commission. Emily Kane -- our legal staff I think you all know,
because they have all been here since -- almost as long as I have. Emily Kane is back
there. Ted Baird and Michelle Albertson -- again, all -- and Andrea Pogue is the only
that wasn't able to be here today. But we provide legal support to all of those -- all of
those contracts and everything that you see here generally are going to be prepared by
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 15 of 48
us or have been reviewed by us and these are the various commissions that we have
with the city. So, the next step we are looking at -- again, we try to do updated
commissioner training as we evolve commissioners and have some transition of
commissioners. We provide the trainings so they understand the roll of commissioners,
as well as how the meetings are run, what the requirements under the state code are.
We are working on a handbook for them, so that they have something to take away that
they could have. We constantly are looking at updating antiquated city ordinances. We
have ordinances that are out of date, either have -- have duties or responsibilities for
various departments or various personnel that don't exist anymore or need to be
updated and brought forward and so we are constantly looking at that. On the impact
fee side, again, looking at the methodology, we had that done by a consultant a number
of years ago. Want to make sure we are always keeping current, matching up with what
the state law allows, as well as what we can do in regards to impact fees. Service to
the Mayor's office. Again, we provide assistance for their -- for the outreach, whether
it's with the broadcast or print media. We have provide advice regarding the websites,
community calendar, Facebook posts. We do get a lot of calls. Obviously that's a new
area of the law for everyone and so we are constantly sort of monitoring how other
cases and other communities are dealing with this and how courts have addressed that
type of communication from a governmental level. We do, of course, research as
needed. We provide whatever advice or memorandums as necessary and, of course,
we assist .the ,other departments in preparing for Council meetings... We have weekly
Council meetings. You know, I think what most people don't realize is that we meet to
death for every single meeting you have. So, we meet three times for one meeting of
yours. And that's to make sure that, again, when it gets in front of you all the bugs have
been worked out. Now, it's not flawless, because I know occasionally we have a few
bugs here, too. But we try to make sure that we iron out as many of them as we can
beforehand and with the department's help we have been able to create a very good
communication system, so that we meet, you know, weekly -- usually once or twice in
making sure whatever is necessary, whatever documents you need, whatever has to be
get signed gets signed, whatever memorandum they are looking for gets prepared, gets
sent, gets delivered. If there is something related to an executive session, if there is a
document, we make sure it all gets done and we help coordinate with the department. It
wouldn't work without the help and the support of the other departments and so we
really are grateful to the cohesiveness and teamwork that we have in the city that,
again, is not common, you know, that Meridian way really permeates a lot of what we do
and it's not common in a lot of cities to have that level of cooperation and teamwork, not
just internally in one department, but among the departments and that really is what you
might think makes Meridian unique in compared to other communities. I did miss one
thing on the service to the Mayor's office, too, was we are looking at a social media
policy. We want to bring something back to you that, again, I don't think we are going to
go get fully vetted with courts for awhile in social media, but we want to make sure we
are at least hitting what courts have addressed in our concerns, so we are working
together with other departments and the Mayor's office specifically to sort of craft that
and that's still in process, but you should be seeing that sometime in the next few
months. Service to the clerk's office. We have public records requests, which have
boomed. They have absolutely boomed in the last couple years. I mean there was a
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January 10, 2012
Page 16 of 46
change in the law last year, but I don't know if that spurred it or it's just as we have
grown it's spurred it, I'm not sure the interest, but there is a lot of work and support. The
clerk's office just does a tremendous job in meeting the needs of the public and the
requests that come in in getting the information out to departments, getting information
back and getting it turned around timely. The support we can help provide them is we
are -- for lack of a better term, when you run it by your attorney in the public records
arena, that's your get out of jail free card. So, then, you don't have to go to jail and as
you have always heard me say, the attorneys never go to jail. So, that's your
opportunity to make sure we have scrubbed it and met all the requirements of the
statute and so we do provide very timely, very quick response, because the statute
requires it.
De Weerd: Thank you. We appreciate that.
Holman: Madam Mayor? I'd like to add that we did almost 300 last year. We were two
shy of 300. We were tempted to just send just bogus ones to Jacy Jones, because she
really wanted to hit 300, so --
De Weerd: And were they more in depth? I guess I seem to recall someone
mentioning that the amount of research time and the number of pages did increase,
though.
Holman: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, yes, a lot of them -- I think a
substantial amount of them have to do with a lot of old properties that have changed
hands multiple times and there was questions and, I don't know, just research wanting
information on a lot of old properties or different developments, which requires a decent
amount of research and that's just one small slice of the pie. We get a lot of requests
from people who want like building plans for their home, but the attention to detail that
we pay to all of these requests in really researching through all the documents and
along with legal looking everything over with a fine tooth comb and the departments all
respond very quickly, we have a really good system going. But it requires multiple eyes
on just one request.
Nary: And, again, it's another testament to teamwork, you know, between both our
office and the clerk's office and, again, I think as Jaycee Holman said, the other
departments. I mean it's not your -- it's not your grandma's public records law anymore.
It's not like you can just come up and get one piece of paper and open a drawer and
copy it and hand it to somebody any longer. There is lots of records. And we do get
people that don't understand -- when you say any and all, any and all might be any and
all. I mean that's a lot. And so it may take time to either understand what they are
really seeking, so that we make sure we are meeting what their needs are and that we
can, then, sign the appropriate and right documents they are looking for. That takes
some time. And, again, one of the things to do is in the past for a lot of folks it really
was very, very simple. Well, it's not that simple anymore and we want to make sure he
departments understand that, because there is liability that is -- potentially exists for not
doing it properly and that's part of the education. And, again, I think our departments
Meridian Cily Council
January 10, 2012
Page 17 of 48
have been so cooperative that it really has worked pretty nicely in conjunction with the
coordination the clerk's office does. But it has been a very positive experience, but it is
a and it's a lot that we didn't necessarily anticipate was going to be how it is, but it has
worked out fairly well. So, we are looking at, you know, some provision of the records,
retention schedule. Actually, Emily is going to take about record retention is in a little
bit. We have license application review, so, again, we use Accela for all the various
licenses that come through. We have -- so, we are looking at overhauling that. We are
looking at revising the policy. You will be seeing that both today and in the future.
Finance department. Bankruptcy. This is one of these things, you know, up until about
2008 we didn't do a lot of bankruptcies. We didn't deal with a lot of bankruptcies. And
since 2008 we deal with a lot of it and we had no system in place. Andrea Pogue really
took that on and we assigned that to her back in 2008 and she's really helped with
finance in trying to create a system to deal with all of these foreclosures and we have
got these -- and more than anything I think what the issue becomes in the bankruptcy
arena is there is a lot of set of rules that are wholly different than other courts and there
is a lot of penalties that go with those. So, when you violate the bankruptcy rules they
don't just scold you, they fine you. And so you have to be sure as an entity, as a
creditor, that you're meeting whatever the bankruptcy requirements are and the rules
are. And so Andrea helped with finance and utility billing in making sure we are meeting
whatever those requirements are, monitoring those cases. We have currently a case
out in Delaware, we. probably -- you .might recall we talked about a few months ago.
That's through DBSI's bankruptcy that comes out of Delaware. They have hundreds of
people around the country. We are a small fish in that pond, but we still have to be a
part of it. So, Andrea has been working with our outside counsel just monitoring that
case and making sure the city's needs are getting met. If there is money to be had
there, which at the end of the day most bankruptcies there is not, we are making sure
we are at least following up on that and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.
So, it has been a great exercise in creating some process that didn't exist and things
that are really necessary to do and it's just been a good opportunity for Andrea to really
grab something around and I think it's been a great asset to the city. And, again, we
had 75 cases in 2011, 222 cases since August 2008. That's a huge number, like I said,
compared to what we had previously. Board of adjustment. This was to the get the
Mayor -- I mean this was the chain for awards and appraisers. I felt a little bad --
De Weerd: By the end.
Nary: I will admit I felt a little bad. I did -- I did talk -- one of our very good public
minded servants of our community, Tom Stower, I talked him into being on the board of
adjustments by saying we never have these. These never happen. We haven't had
one in a couple years, Tom, so we -- it would meet once, that will plenty. So, we have
had five last year. We might have a couple more this year. We seem to have a few
more than we thought. But I think one of the things that we have learned is it provides a
great avenue for the public. At least they get a chance to get heard. Now, we haven't
given a lot of relief to people, but when we have at least explained it -- and I think all of
you understand that from your positions as well, when you can explain to people why,
they may not always agree with you, but they don't have a whole lot of argument that
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 18 of 48
you didn't give them an opportunity to be heard and if you can't do what they'd like to
do, because an ordinance prohibits it, the statutes prohibit it, orjust in the bigger picture
of policy it really doesn't seem fair or reasonable to do that, most of the people tend to
walk away and are understanding of it and they may not like it, but they at least
appreciate the opportunity to get heard. So, I do feel bad for Tom, but he has been a
great -- he's the chair, he is -- and those of you that know Tom he's a very straight
forward, straight shooter, he will tell you what he thinks, he's been a great asset on that,
because a lot of times folks don't necessarily want to hear from myself or Mr. Barry,
because they think we are just staff, but to hear another citizen say I don't buy that or
that doesn't make sense to me, makes sense to them and I think that's agood --that's a
good avenue for folks to have. So, it has been agood --agood tool. One of the things
that we are looking at with that is being able to maybe bring back some history this year
to say we think either the board's role needs to be expanded or the board needs to be
defined a little differently and we, hopefully, now with the number of cases we have
some data to provide you a better information or feedback about how it works.
Purchasing support and guidance as well. Again, we provide a lot of assistance as we
can to purchasing. Obviously, it's a huge area of liability and concern when you don't
do it right. We do provide that level of support to make sure we are meeting the
statutory needs that are there, as well as making sure we are updating our contracts
and our agreements, as well as whatever city codes are related to the budget, to
.finance, to the CFO .position .here. Police Department and code enforcement. Precious
metal dealers task forces. That was no big deal, right? That was nothing. No --
nobody had an issue with that until we had one meeting and, then, we had a lot of
people that had an issue with it. So, we did provide some support to the police
department, trying to make sure we at least heard what everybody's concerns were and
tried to match those concerns, as well as the law enforcement concerns to creating an
ordinance and as you recall when we came back with that we didn't have a whole lot of
input then. Now, they may have been tired, but I really think they at least felt they got
heard and that was the point, that we at least heard what they were and took -- you
know, there were some legitimate concerns that were raised that made their way into
the ultimate final ordinance that came forward. There were concerns at how it would
impact business and that it wasn't necessarily law enforcement meted in the way it was
originally crafted and we crafted something else to meet those needs. So, again, I think
we are a city that, you know, tries very hard to listen to the concerns of the community
and try to address both the greater good of our community, as well as the individual
concerns that are raised and precious metals and the support we try to provide the
police department and code enforcement I think was just an example of that in this last
year. Again, various ordinance updates, smoking in parks -- I read in the paper that
Boise -- it sounded like they invited this. We have been doing this since last summer I
think is when we put this on the books. Yet nobody seemed to notice, but we helped
with the police department in crafting that and the parks director trying to figure out with
your direction how to make that work for our community and putting that in place.
Essentially, with open containers, we just passed that last week. Again, precious
metals as I have talked about. Trying to -- again to address the needs as they come
and provide that legal support to be able to make sure the ordinances are going to be
supportable, are going to be constitutional, and are going to be upheld if we get
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 19 of 48
challenged. And UDC and code enforcement, again, we have put a lot of time and
effort into that, because, you know, we are impacting businesses or we are impacting
residents in how they want to do their business, in trying to balance those needs
between people that want to do whatever they want to do regardless of what the rules
are or the standards that have created as a community in trying to get them to
understand this is why we have these rules and this is why these standards exist, this is
why we do this, because, again, we are trying to enforce it for the greater good. So, I
think our -- our legal side is making sure, again, we are looking at compliance. The law
got changed last year, for example, and we are talking about towing as one of them.
The law got changed. We have to create some knew process to assist that and we
have provided that level of assistance to the police department to do that. So, the open
container update has been done. We are looking at some other updates in regards to
animal control, nuisance, parking noise code. There is a lot of things -- again, water
and addressing code. We have had issue with that. Plumbing code updates per Idaho
Code changes. So, again, we are looking at a variety of different areas that we can
provide some assistance to UDC and to the code enforcement, so we have a consistent
ordinance across the board and also eliminate conflicts. We occasionally find conflicts
between an existing code and maybe a UDC code in making sure we can either fix one,
tweak the other, or get rid of one or the other or however it needs to do to make sure we
don't have inconsistencies in our code. The Fire Department. Again, public records
request, we get lots of requests for the Fire Department, lots of fire calls, medicaLcalls
responses from both insurance companies, people that were injured. We get a lot of
those. So, we provide that support for public records requests. And, then, they have
ten zillion old records and so they have been -- Emily and Andrea have been working
closely with them, Judy and Hannah, to make sure we identify again what do we have,
what do we need to keep, what do we not need to keep, and what's the format that we
need to keep these in. You know, again, we -- w have a pretty good size building, but
eventually we would stuff it full of paper if we didn't necessarily do this exercise to make
sure we keep what we have and don't keep everything forever. Some of the things you
will be seeing is a false alarm code for postal and looking at that. We have a lot of false
alarms that we have gone to and want to make sure we are addressing that properly, so
our citizens aren't the ones paying the cost of all these things. We are going to be
reevaluating our fireworks, open burning type of ordinance that we have. We have a
dispatch contract that we have updated. We have a medical records standard contract
that we update. Those are things that are pretty routine for us, .but, again, those are
things that we try to do so that you don't have to be concerned with and, again, the
business can get done without too much additional effort on everyone's part. Parks
Department. Again, we have property acquisitions. We had a tax deed strip. You may
recall earlier last year. We had a little strip of property that was adjacent to the Borup
property that we bought through a tax deed process to again clear up any -- any
misunderstandings of where the property boundaries are for that piece, so when we do
development it. We did help with the maintenance shop and the purchase of that site.
We review all the pathway easements. We review lease agreements. Contracts. Emily
used -- we had some issues at the Gordon Harris Park with Nampa-Meridian. That got
resolved. We have had leases with the Lion's Club rodeo. So, varieties of different
things. We have leases that go with the farms, the farming that's going on at both the
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 20 of 48
Lake Hazel parcel, as well as the Borup property. We had the different leases for the
Kleiner Park senior center, as well as the Rock of Honor. So, those are the things that
we just do on a daily routine basis, as well as now, again, looking at our partnership
policy and working with the Parks Department in creating both a cleaner policy in
regards to partnerships, as well as updating the park's code. I know this is Tom Barrian
proportions, but I just wanted you to know how many we do.
De Weerd: My mind must have said that out loud.
Nary: you could have. I didn't bring a video. I didn't have a song and dance or
anything. So, anyway, Public Works -- you know, again, we talked about easements a
lot with them. We have Idaho -- we have updates to our various industrial codes.
Inspectors contracts, we do those. Hook up. Street light reimbursement agreements.
We have had those over the last year last -- in the last few. Help review and implement
the back flow testing process that has been a successful process. We worked with
Public Works on getting that put together. Again, legally putting the right documents
together for them. Interagency agreements with ACHD and, of course, the warranty
surety was probably our bigger project last year in working directly with Public Works
and putting that together with purchasing Public Works, the various entities and legal
putting that ordinance in place, as well as the policy and, then, of course, carrying that
out in this next year. .Planning Department. Again, we provide support for. the. UDC.
We serve on the streetscape, a community character committee, as well as CDBG
support. Again -- and pre-meeting issue analysis, that's both with Council meetings, as
well as Planning and Zoning meetings. We provide some support for those as well.
Again, we will be working on the streetscape and sidewalks licensing agreement with
ACHD. That's kind of already in process now. Citywide. Again, we have had the task
with Access Idaho for Accela. We have the agreement with economic developments for
the -- economic development for the mobile app and, then, of course, now we are
looking for user agreements with the -- the ITS system with IT or, excuse me, the Police
Department and, then, also interagency GIS records retention agreement with the other
agencies as well. And, of course, other citywide issues. Again, we constantly have
property issues, acquisitions, leases, production, so a lot of real general stuff that,
again, most of you probably didn't realize what we were doing or that we did those types
of things, providing that level of support. We are also looking at revising our contracts,
because we have had different issues of little pieces of our contracts that we like or
don't like and, then, we want to improve, so we have been working on that issue as well.
Almost done. Human resources. We had 40 -- almost 4,900 applications for positions
last year. We processed all of those through HR, but we also had great assistance from
many of the departments. Some of the departments I think the winner was Mr. Barry's
administrative assistant position, we had 948 applications.
De Weerd: Wow.
Bird: Are you serious?
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 21 of 48
Nary: John McCormick was of great assistance, so I'm going to give credit to John, too.
John was a great help in helping us process all those applications. In the back Idon't --
oh, there -- Erin Lammers. Erin Mattamuro and Crystal Ritchie are in back row. Erin
Lammers handles all of our benefits, concerns, and questions that we have. Erin
Mattamuro assists a lot with the recruiting, as well as the interview process and, of
course, Crystal is HR manager and helps with all these various aspects of HR and we
had at least 372 hours of interviews that we participated in. We had about 65 days -- 64
and a half days of job postings to new employee start date. Some of those, of course,
were extended by the volume that we had, so some of them did take a little bit longer,
but the average was 64 -- about 65 days from date of job posting until they started.
Next thing we are looking at is whether seasonal employment would be best done as
we out sourced that through an agency. Other cities have been doing it. So, we are
going to explore that this year and see if that's a viable option for us. Okay. What am I
doing wrong? Okay. Now I'm stuck.
De Weerd: The help desk. All right.
Nary: Since you have it in front of you, I will explain -- I will go through them as we get
to the next slide for everybody else. Next one we will talk about is the Youth Force Life
Skills program. We are very proud of that from Human Resources this last year. We
had 20 applications.. We had 16 people apply.. Fifteen ended participating.. in the
program. We had 1,521 hours -- almost 22 hours of work by high school students
providing assistance to both five departments and several divisions within those
departments. Again, we had -- at a cost of a little under 12,000 dollars we will provide a
great assistance both for the community providing this opportunity for these high school
kids, so that they had a real life experience in applying for a job. They went through the
application interview process to come through here and many of them -- and I have
come and talked to you about it before, we really found that a great opportunity that they
never would have. They wouldn't get that at a fast food restaurant, they wouldn't get
that necessarily in a lot of jobs that teenagers are applying for in our community and,
again, they have a hard time sometimes finding opportunities for teenagers. So, it was
a great program. We really were excited about it. Our next up for that is we would like
to look at possibly making that a year around program. So, we are looking at costs, we
are looking at the .needs, and hopefully we will be able to bring that back to you within
the next few months with either a budget amendment or a budget enhancement for next
fiscal year to bring that forward. We think it was a great asset to our departments and I
think our departments would support that. Next we will talk a little bit about Wellness
Works. We talked about our wellness program before. We have had it in place for a
number of years, but really over the last couple of years -- last couple of years we have
really seen a growth in that. People have really been paying more attention to their
personal health and we have provided opportunity for them that I think has been a great
value. We had 132 employees enrolled in last fiscal year. We have a 156 employees
enrolled this fiscal year. Last year we had 83 people participate in the health screening.
That's the blood draw that we do. And both takes you -- besides the blood draw as well,
it does your weight -- a weight management as part of it. This year we had 174 people
participate in that. So, we have seen a great increase in that of people wanting to
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
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change their life and change their culture and it changed the culture of our work force
and we think that's been a great asset and a great tool for our employees to participate
in. We are very proud of that. We can with the data that we have, we found our
employees in general are doing pretty well, but there are areas of concern. We were
very low on hypertension, which for a national average the hypertension in -- the
national average is 32 percent of the people in this country have hypertension to some
degree. We had nine percent of our employees at that. So, our folks don't experience
that particular type of health concern. But we have others that -- and this is one that's
kind of hard -- it's kind of hard to make people understand. The numbers that they use
to determine what's overweight or obese in the general population is very inflated from
what the average person might think is obese or overweight. So, it is a little bit -- a little
bit misleading. Thank you. A little bit misleading I think for some. You say that 70
percent of our employees are in that range. There is many employees that I honestly
would tell you if you saw them you would have a hard time believing they were
overweight or obese. But there are people at least that now are aware that they are at
least in a risk area and that they need to address that in some fashion. Now, whether
it's just simply eating better and exercising more or whether it's something .more
significant, we have the opportunity and tools to provide that for them, so that they can,
whether it's through education or whether it's through fitness classes, whether it's
through just their own personal workout, there is ways for them to address those that
didn't exist before. The one that's probably more concerning is that we have a.little bit
higher elevated blood pressure. So, not necessarily to the area of hypertension, but at
least an area that now, again, they have brought it to their attention and they can
address it. Again, that's a great opportunity -- a great thing for the employees, but also
it provides us the ability to manage our medical costs to some degree and our medical
benefits, because, again, if we make people more aware and educate them better, they
are going to use better tools to address their health concerns. That's really important.
Five percent of our employees indicated they were smokers. That's one of our main
initiatives this year is to get smoking cessation going in the departments that really need
it, so that we can really get rid of smoking as much as we can.
Bird: So we can go to zero percent.
Nary: Zero percent would be perfect to me. I would agree.
Bird: And they'd all feel better.
Nary: These were our benefits for this last year. This is a slide you have seen. This is
just one that we did at our -- our budget. What I wanted to tell you that -- what we are
next looking at is revising our health plan, looking at a partial self-funding option, what
that would do is help -- or help slow down our increases, help manage our costs as we
move into the national healthcare initiative in 2014. We are going to have to manage
our healthcare differently than we did before and we think as a city we need to be in
front of that, so we want to make sure that we are addressing those needs now or at
least evaluating those needs now. Last piece. Risk management. We have a training
program that's currently ongoing with -- that's sponsored by ICRMP. All the
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January 10, 2012
Page 23 of 48
departments have been informed of it. All of them have even started on it. It's an online
university that ICRMP sponsored. The employees will be taking classes online in
regards to defensive driving, as well as harassment in the workplace. The supervisor
will have an additional class in relation to supervisors in dealing with harassment in the
workplace. This will provide a couple things. One, ICRMP will give us a discount on
our premium if we have -- we want a hundred percent employee participation to get that
discount. But also it provides a training tool and a training opportunity at no cost to us in
an area of compliance that we need to have. So, it's a great value to us and we think
it's a great value to employees. Employees -- I haven't had a lot of push back or
negative response and employers are able to print their certificates to show they have
completed the class and if you walk around City Hall you may notice a few of those
certificates sitting on people's cubicles or on their -- or on their walls. We had 30 tort
claims filed. What we did is we tried to narrow down your tort claims just so you were
aware of -- I mean tort -- we have lots of different types of claims, but these are the tort
claims that were filled against the city. So, not things where we ran into somebody's
mailbox or something where we ran a car into a curb or where we thought we may have
caused something and nobody actually filed a claim, but these are actual claims filed
against us. The tort claim number has gone up slightly. I don't have a trend analysis as
to why that is. Most of them are fairly small types of claims. We, obviously, have a few
large ones, but most of them are fairly small types of claims. A worker comp one,
though,_is probably more encouraging. -It's gone down.. And not only gone down in
number, but gone down in cost, and that's -- that's something that the directors have
gotten -- made a part of our meetings quarterly. We discussed it. So, that the
departments understand where are those cost coming from. What exactly can we do to
help curb some of those costs for the city, because, again, we are the one paying it, so
we want to make sure that we are -- if we have got training issues we need to address,
then, we can. If there is safety issues we need, we can address that and the
departments have taken it on themselves to address the safety concerns both at the
treatment plant and fire and wastewater and water and police, they have been
addressing those safety issues and that's a lot of where the workers comp issues have
come from us is just safety issues where people are not thinking of it, not being aware
of it, not being educated on it and they have taken it on themselves to be able to do that
and lower our costs. So, our next up for that is to create better tracking system.
Bird: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Bird.
Bird: Bill, on the workmen's comp, what kind of injuries are we getting? Knee? Back?
What seems to be the majority?
Nary: I would have to probably -- I would say probably back is most common, but it
really depends. It's really more the type of -- of circumstances we are involved in. The
simplest way I can define it is, for example, in the fire department a number of the
injuries we have are out in the field and they are types of injuries that probably are not
going to be avoided very often, because you're lifting a patient out of a car that's in a
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 24 of 48
canal. Well, you can only do it so many ways, so you're going to end up with a situation
where you may end up having a minor injury. Because of their general physical health,
it's an injury that's recoverable within a reasonable period of time. Police, on the other
hand, don't have a lot of in-the-field injuries, but they have a lot in the training area. So,
they have a lot of training that they do and sometimes they will get some -- again minor
stuff. So, those are things that as they become more aware of where their -- their trend
is, they can address that by the departments. But we haven't had -- I haven't had
anything I can say, Councilman Bird, that is more -- very specific or targets, like we are
not doing certain things properly, we are not training properly, we are lifting improperly,
those kind of things. We have been -- like I said, we have lowered both our number and
our costs significantly over the last three years.
Bird: And 31 claims in -- with our number of employees is unreal
Nary: Yeah.
Bird: It's a very good -- very, very good.
Zaremba: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Yes, Mr. Zaremba.
Zaremba: On that same subject, as we get more and more people who are either
becoming desk workers or a bigger portion of their work involves sitting at a computer,
are we emphasizing purchase of ergonomic type equipment, keyboards, chairs -- I
mean -- seats, that kind of stuff when -- when equipment is needed?
Nary: We do. And we can work with the State Insurance Fund, Councilmember
Zaremba, to address those types of ergonomic needs. We haven't had that really as an
emphasis and Ithink -- I think we are probably going to have -- for that exact reason
that you have raised. We are probably going to have to look at that more in the future in
how we are purchase equipment, purchase furniture, and those type of things to deal
with those type of ergonomic issues. We haven't had it become an issue to date. We
haven't had lots of carpal tunnels and those kind of things, but warning signs that you
need to be more aware of that, but I think you're right, as our work force evolves that's
probably going to be an area that we are going to have to look at, otherwise, that 31
number is going to start creeping up the other way.
Zaremba: Thank you.
Nary: So, that's our last slide. That's what we do. Like I said, I know it seems a little
long, but I wanted you to know the variety of things that you probably, again, you know
somebody is doing it, I'm sure most of you didn't -- weren't thinking nobody did that. I
don't know that you know who was doing it. I want you to know that our department
tries to play a roll in all those various areas, so that, again, you don't have to. You don't
have to worry about it, you don't have to ask did somebody look at this, did someone
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 25 of 48
review it. You know there is a process in place, there is a system in place, there is
checks and balances that exist in our city to make sure that those issues get addressed
and get dealt with before you even have to concern yourself with it, so that you can deal
with the policy issues, so you can deal with the costs of those different things and you
don't have to deal with the routine issues of process and those kinds of stuff. So, I just
wanted you to -- I know it was a fairly lengthy presentation, but I wanted you to see the
variety of things that, again, you may not have known that we were doing. So, again, I
appreciate the opportunity to present this to you. I will certainly stand here for any
questions. Again, I appreciate all that you folks to do to support our department. Again,
I'm always amazed daily at the talent of the people that we have and I'm privileged to be
the leader of that group and happy to be here.
De Weerd: Thank you, Bill. Council, any follow-up questions?
Zaremba: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba.
Zaremba: I would just comment as you pointed out, much of this -- much of what your
departments and your people do is in support of other people in their efforts, including
the Mayor and the.City. Council, and I would just like to respond back that the caliber of
people that you have and the caliber of work that they turn out allows us to trust them
very strongly. When we get advice from you and your people, we know that it's been
very thoroughly thought out, that everything that could be thought of has been thought
of and I know I, for one, appreciate the support that we get from you and all of your
three different staffs.
Nary: Thank you, Councilman Zaremba.
De Weerd: Anything further?
Nary: Okay. Thank you.
C. Legal Department: Proposed Franchise Renewal with Cable
One
De Weerd: Well, thank you, Bill, and your staff. We greatly appreciate all your efforts
on behalf of the city. Okay. Our next item is also the Legal Department and it's
regarding our franchise fee.
Nary: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council --
De Weerd: I was hoping it was Ted.
Nary: Well, it can be Ted.
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 26 of 48
De Weerd: No. Sorry, Bill. I'm kidding.
Nary: The cable franchise agreement with Cable One -- and we have -- is it's Sal
Brunella? Sal Brunella is here, he's the Cable One general manager. He has been
working with Ted directly on renewing our franchise agreement. We are ready to bring
it forward. Basically, the -- and Sal at Cable One has been great to work with over the
last few months in trying to that iron out whatever details and concerns that we have
had and so basically what we would like to bring back in front of you is a 15 year
franchise agreement. It would be retroactive July. That's when the last one expired.
So, everything stays status quote since July of 2011 as we have negotiated the terms
for this agreement going forward. The franchise fee would be the same, so that hasn't
changed, going forward for the next 15 years. But there is an opportunity for a reopener
to have that discussion. I think it's five years? Is that right, Ted? Yeah. And, then, also
for pay channels. That's another thing that's of real concern, of real value that we think
at some point in the future we will be for the city is to have the public access educational
governmental channel for people to have and -- but it takes some start up and it takes
some time to put that into place. So, Cable One was able to work that into this
agreement to provide a reopener to address those. I have a spreadsheet for you. I
should have passed that out first. And, then, of course, we would continue with the --
continue with the services that they have been providing to us and to the community
since they have been in place, so -- and Sal is here to answer any questions for Cable
One if you have any question and if -- if the Council is comfortable we can bring this
back in a few weeks, as we need to bring back an agreement in ordinance form for your
approval.
Bird: Madam Mayor?
Nary: If you would like some time to think about you certainly have that opportunity as
well.
Bird: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Yes, Mr. Bird.
Bird: BiII, I really don't need any time to think about it. I'm very agreeable. I got one
question. Seeing how it is not a fund balance contract, we can legitimate -- legally as a
Council enter into a 15 year contract right?
Nary: Yes.
Bird: Because it has nothing to do with fund balance. Right? We can? We are not
obligating the next Council.
Nary: Correct.
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 27 of 48
Bird: Okay. That's all. That was my only question. I think it's great. I think they have
been very, very good franchise partners.
De Weerd: Council, any other -- any questions or comments? Sal, would you like to
make any comment? You will have to make it up here.
Brunella: Okay.
De Weerd: If you will, please, state your name.
Brunella: Sal Brunella. I'm the general manager of Cable One. And, Madam Mayor
and Council Members, it's been a pleasure to work with your attorneys and staff. It's
been very easy to talk to them and to hear their ideas and to work towards giving you
what we would like to give you, which is the best service possible.
De Weerd: Thank you. And I know we have our parks director sitting in the audience
and we have Cable One Movie Night and I will tell you that has been such a popular
program in our city, it's been such a positive partnership and that has been appreciated,
the varying relationships that we have had with you and your organization. It's been
great.
Brunella: Thank you.
De Weerd: Any other comments from Council? Any questions?
Zaremba: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Yes, Mr. Zaremba.
Zaremba: Does this need to come back to us or is it a form that we can approve
tonight? Today? You said you were going to bring it back in a couple of weeks with
something final
Nary: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, Council Member Zaremba, it has to be
passed in an ordinance.
Zaremba: Okay.
Nary: So, we will have to bring it back.
Zaremba: All right.
Bird: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Bird?
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 28 of 48
Bird: If we will no more discussion I would move that we approve the franchise renewal
with cable one and for the attorney to draw up an ordinance and bring it back within the
next few weeks.
Zaremba: Second
De Weerd: Okay. Mr. Nary, what kind of time frame are we looking at?
Nary: Two weeks?
Brunella: It can happen as soon as you want it or as long as you want it. I mean we
can do it -- two weeks is fine if that's what's good for you.
De Weerd: Okay. Two weeks it is.
Holman: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Yes.
Holman: And, Mr. Nary, I have an agreement here. Is this an agreement that's ready to
be signed and we could have him sign it while he's here? Would that be easier?
Brunella: I'm not the person who signs it.
Holman: Okay. Thank you.
Brunella: Sure.
De Weerd: Okay. So, we will put this out in two weeks.
Nary: Yes.
De Weerd: Okay. Sal, we appreciate you joining us today.
Brunella: Thank you very much.
De Weerd: And so glad that you had the opportunity to listen to Mr. Nary's presentation.
We do have a motion on the floor. Any discussion? Madam Clerk, will you call roll.
Roll-Call: Bird, yea; Rountree, absent; Zaremba, yea; Hoaglun, yea.
De Weerd: All ayes. Motion carried.
MOTION CARRIED: THREE AYES. ONE ABSENT.
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 29 of 48
D. Planning Department: Transportation Update on Projects,
Priorities and Studies -Includes Discussions on Planned
Improvements to the Eagle Road/Fairview Intersection,
Intersection Improvements Along the U.S. 20126 Corridor, and
Other Transportation-Related News
De Weerd: This will be on your agenda, then, hopeful in two weeks. Okay. Item 7-D is
our Planning Department and I will turn this over to Caleb.
Hood: Thank you, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council. It's that time of the month
again to talk to you all things transportation. This time I have brought Tim Curns, he's
got a couple of items at the end of my presentation that he's going to you discuss with
you all. Before I get into some of the things that were in the Council's packet for this
meeting, I did want to introduce, I guess is the right term, Justin Lucas from the Ada
County Highway District, drew the short straw and he will be our liaison for this year, so
instead of Gary Inselman and Christy Little, who were kind of trading off being our
liaisons, Justin will be here regularly for Council meeting. So, just wanted to introduce
him in that capacity, so -- moving on then. I trust you all have had a chance to look at
and, hopefully, review the memo that I prepared for today's meeting. I do, as is
standard practice now, just highlight some of things in there, I'm not going to read the
memo to you, but I do want to fill in some of the gaps that maybe were there, beginning
with some projects that are slated for construction this calendar year. The first one is
Ten Mile and Ustick intersection, Bill Nary and myself met with the project manager AI
Bush and legal staff, Steve Price, last week, received the -- a draft of a cost share
permit that they are going to be asking us to sign. We are currently reviewing that. We
do plan on having that on next week's agenda for Council consideration and potential
signing. So, again, that is a '12 construction project and they had asked us to review
and. sign that by the first part of February anyways. So, that's a quick update there.
Pine-Linder intersection, the bid opening for that project was this past week. The
apparent low bidder was Nampa Paving at 1.57 million, which is less than the
engineer's estimates for that project. That low bid they do expect to have on next
week's commission agenda for approval and, then, notice to proceed probably
sometime in February for that -- for that intersection project. Along those same lines,
Ustick, Duane to Campton, that -- that bid opening was the day before the one I just
mentioned. The apparent low bidder for that is Central Paving and that came in about
300,000 dollars less than the engineer's estimate on that project, so 3.6 was the
apparent low bid amount and like the other one, that one should be on next week's
commission agenda for approval and issuance of notice to proceed. Next just working
down the memo on page two. Last month we sent -- Council President at the time
Zaremba signed a letter to ACHD regarding Draft A of the five year work plan. Draft B
has since been released. I haven't had a chance to review that. Do have some
analysis, not a whole bunch of comments, maybe one question for you here. But just
kind of working through that schedule. The city does have until February 1st to submit
any comments should we choose on Draft B and I will run through some of the chances
here in just a minute. The adoption hearing right now is scheduled for February 22nd.
So, we got -- we do have a few weeks anyways. There were some pretty substantial
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 30 of 48
changes between Draft A and Draft B. Most of them I think are pretty positive. The two
-- our two main requests in the letter in that I referenced before regarding Draft A were
considered and changed. Fairview access management had moved up a little bit
anyways. It was in '13, '14 or'14, '15, and is now in '16, which is a slight deviation from
what Draft A had, although still a delay from what's currently on the books and, then, the
other request that we have is at Franklin, Ten Mile to Linder, a done as soon as
possible. You may recall that project was a 2012 project, but did slip a little. It was
listed as a contingency project and did slip. They had it penciled in in the '14. Well,
they were able to sneak it back into '13, but it is, again, listed as a contingency project
for this -- this upcoming -- the next budget year or next fiscal year, but that is
encouraging at least that it is -- it is coming back to -- closer to a nearer construction
year. Ten Mile, Cherry to Ustick project, is -- no change there. It is slipping one year
from what was currently adopted, but there is no change from Draft A and what we
talked about last month when I was here. The Ustick, Locust Grove to Leslie project,
has kind of been all over the place and where it landed in Draft B is actually three years
of ahead of what was in Draft A. So, it was in 2017, they are moving it all the way up to
2014. A lot of that has to do with, one, some cost savings that they think they are going
to realize in 2014 from some pretty big projects. I just mentioned to you some projects
that are still coming in under engineer's estimate, so they think that, hopefully, will
continue into 2014 and some other cost savings with some design and stuff that -- some
design work. The. other thing why 2014 works for that ..Ustick, Locust Grove to .Leslie
project is the McMillan-Eagle intersection is going to be constructed in '15, so you don't
want to have Ustick under construction at the same time you have McMillan under
construction. So, you have to synchronize those, so you're not sending people on a
detour that also has a detour. So, that is part of the reason for -- for being advanced
into 2014. So, the -- the one project that slipped is Ustick and Meridian and I -- slipped
probably isn't the right word to use there, but some of the federal funding is
programmed out in another year, excuse me, so it is now -- the Ustick and Meridian
intersection is out in the PD, just because that's where the federal funds are and that's a
federal aid project, so -- but that is a change from Draft A. So, I think I have highlighted
the main changes from Draft A to Draft B that I was hoping to go call out for you. I
guess my question, then, is do you think it appropriate to draft another -- another letter
to them on Draft B -- them being the ACHD commission -- on Draft B and, if so, some
direction on what the -- what that letter would say or tone of that letter would be
appreciated. So, I guess I will pause if you have any thoughts on that at this point. And
if you don't have enough information and want to talk about this again, again, we have
until February 1 to actually send that letter to them, but some direction on what your
thoughts are moving forward would be appreciated.
De Weerd: Thank you. Council, any thoughts on that?
Zaremba: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba.
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 31 of 48
Zaremba: I would say first how much I constantly appreciate that you absorb all of this
information and bring it to us in a format that we can understand it. It sounds to me like
Draft B is closer to what Meridian needs than Draft A was and I -- if we had a letter to
them I would include that thought, that we appreciate them considering the city's input
and making some adjustments. I guess the only thing that stands out to me is the
Franklin, Ten Mile to Linder, is that one of the ones that you mentioned?
Hood: Correct.
Zaremba: But I'm not sure I would make an issue out of that. So, I don't know whether
we need to write a letter to them or not. Anybody else have an opinion?
De Weerd: Council, any other thoughts?
Bird: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Bird.
Bird: I agree with Councilman Zaremba, that I like B better and I don't see any reason
to have a fight over that Franklin. That deal. I'm sure as soon as -- and if the economy
turns around they. get more money in, .more stuff going, that they will --.they will move
up. They have always worked very good with us and -- so, if -- if the Mayor feels we
need a letter sent in I have no problem with it, but Ilike -- I like B better. I think they -- I
think they have already looked at it and tried to help us to the best they could. That
would be my only comment.
Zaremba: I --just to say again, I have no problem sending a letter that says nothing
more than thank you. I think the relationship between ourselves and ACHD and --
including the staffs, is very productive and I wouldn't mind if we sent a letter that said
something like that. Short and sweet.
Hood: Okay. Okay. Thank you. The other thing before I pass the baton to Tim would
just be another project that I have spoken to you previously about and that is the single
lane roundabout at Eagle and Amity, which came out of nowhere, cost about 1.3 million
dollars this fiscal year and it's being designed in-house by ACHD staff and is at 95
percent. Staff has, you know, questioned the -- the need -- the importance of this
project. It's pretty clear to me at this point that it is a -- pet project may be a little strong,
but it is something that they are pretty intent on doing their first --designing and building
their first roundabout, putting their stamp on roundabouts if you will. So, I just wanted to
again call that out. It's moving forward. I have kind of asked, you know, staff how
come, but that's basically as far as I have taken it. So, I just wanted to -- to just let you
know that's kind of where it's at and -- and where it stands today and see if there is
something else that I should be doing. But that's --that's where it's at at this point. So, I
don't know if there is any comments on that or not, but I just wanted to, again, let you
know that that's coming and that project will also be in '12. So, I mentioned three others
previously that are in '12 and that one is moving forward in '12, too.
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
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De Weerd: I guess, Caleb, I will just make mention of the Amity roundabout. It is kind
of a pilot project to demonstrate how roundabouts work. We are going to be the
community that hosts the first roundabout of significant size. I know we have one out on
Pine that doesn't have all legs connected to it yet, so you don't see the true value, but
the -- I think the staff and the commission have been interested in getting a project
underway and this seemed the most appropriate location that qualified and so they
realize it wasn't driven from our community, they didn't want it to impact our priority list,
but they did want to move forward on it. I will also at least note there is grave concerns
about the lighting near Linder and Pine. There was a student that was hit there
recently. It wasn't necessary because of lighting. I think the lighting -- the time of day
was such that that wasn't a consideration in this accident, but it has been noted on a
number of occasions the safety concerns from parents, students, and businesses in that
area. So, if that can be located into. There is a couple of streets that are not aligned
straight, there is kind of a jog, and, again, there has been an expression of concern
because of the lighting along that corridor and the amount of students that are on foot in
that area.
Hood: Yeah. And, Madam Mayor, I will look into that. I think probably the appropriate
-- and I can't remember if it was one Mr. Nary's slide or not, but the Traffic Safety
Commission, but I'm contact John Lawson at ACHD, ask him to look into .that. I
understand that accident that you referred to was actually on the Pine leg of -- on that
across from the high school.
Bird: It was.
Hood: I have also talked to folks that are on the Linder side. There is a subdivision
that's in a similar boat where they were in between Pine and it's out of direction to go up
to Cherry to cross, you know, there is crosswalks in that whole area. So, I would
have --
De Weerd: And that's the section I was talking about
Hood: Yeah. And I have had requests there to also look at a crossing east-west of
Linder, but this accident was a Pine, north-south. So, I will have them look at -- you
know, ask them, anyways, to look at that, see if there is an opportunity to be -- you
know, offsets to put something in there, lighting, those types of things and I think we will
probably ask the Traffic Safety Commission to follow that thought through and see what
a recommendation would be on any improvements, so --
De Weerd: Okay. Thank you.
Hood: And, then, Tim. So, thank you.
Curns: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council --
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January 10, 2012
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De Weerd: Tim.
Curns: Hello. Madam Mayor, on that topic as well, we do have funds programmed for
this fiscal year to kind of tag onto the tail end of ACHD's intersection widening project
and that will install lighting on Linder between Cherry and Pine and, hopefully, if funds
are available, go as far south as we can from there. So, that's -- that section we have
on the radar and, then, as Caleb mentioned, we will -- at the Traffic Safety Commission
we will look up Pine as well.
De Weerd: Thank you. And it was primarily on the Linder leg of -- near that
intersection.
Curns: Okay.
De Weerd: You got it covered.
Curns: The topic that I wanted to talk -- well, I have got a couple topics here for you this
evening. The first one being the intersection of Fairview Avenue and Eagle Road. I
have been working the past couple months with the design engineers who are working
on the Meridian Town Center development there at the northeast corner of the
.intersection. Been .mainly working with. them on how to integrate lighting into their
roadway design, since they are doing a substantial amount of roadway improvements in
this area. In the process of working with them on this project there is some off site
improvements that are adjacent improvements, really, mainly the widening and
improvement of the Fairview-Eagle intersection to include new through lanes and to
remove the free right turn lanes on all four corners, which I'm sure makes PD very
happy, because I know we have a lot of accidents there. In reviewing the design for this
area I happened to notice that the south leg of the Eagle intersection there, which is on
the left side of your page, is the only one of the four corners that after that free right turn
gets removed does not have a dedicated right turn that requires you to come to a
complete stop first. Included in the design if you will notice the other three corners have
right turn lanes included. I have inquired to ITD staff who are working on this project as
to why that wasn't included in the project and it sounds like at this point the reason is the
available right of way that's out there right now doesn't allow for a dedicated right turn
lane as the other legs of the intersection have. However, they are not really in a
position right now where they want to have to condemn to gain that property for the right
turn lane, which is a landscape buffer and drainage facility, if you're familiar with that
corner of the intersection. So, at this point their feedback was it's not going to probably
happen with this project and as this last design iteration came through, which is what I
have for you right here, it's apparent that that is, in fact, not going to be included in the
design. So, this was a little bit concerning given that this is one of the highest accident
rate intersections, very high volume, high speed and -- so, I have also consulted with
Meridian police department on this and the officers that spend a lot of time out there on
Eagle road attending to the traffic issues and this is -- this lack of turn lane is also very
concerning for them from a safety standpoint and from -- from where I sit, too, to kind of
render that new third northbound lane pretty ineffective when you consider that the
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
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amount of people that turn off of Eagle Road onto Fairview that would be using that in
the peak hours is about 300 vehicles, which is the same amount of vehicles that's filling
up those two left turn bays to go the other direction on Fairview. So, a significant
amount of traffic and so at this point I wanted to bring that to your attention and at this
point I don't really have much further. I can go with the staff level at ITD with addressing
this issue. I'm going to pause here and see if the Council has anything they can advise
me on in this.
De Weerd: Council, any comments?
Hoaglun: Madam Mayor. Tim, just to be certain, then, they don't have the funds or just
don't want to go through the -- to acquire that right of way, to move that retention pond
back -- is that -- is that where their concern is?
De Weerd: If I might, I have -- when we first started talking about this area and when
Center Cal first initiated discussions with the city and their proposal in using STAR to
build the improvements needed on Eagle Road from I-84 to the north part of their
property, we did an evaluation on the road width and they tried to keep it within the
footprint for some reason and that was -- that was an ITD directive. I think Center Cal
would have done what they needed to do, because the safety of that road certainly
affects .the viability of their project, but ITD was only interested primarily in the right of
way that they currently had marked out. DBSI, who has the Meridian Crossing project,
has not been an eager participant in this whole project and ITD is under the realization if
this right-hand turn lane were to be part of this road improvement they would have to go
through the condemnation process and I don't think there is much of an appetite at the
state level for doing that. So, I will -- I will give the nonpolitical answer or the political
answer. I'm not sure what that qualifies, but probably something that Tim wasn't going
to go into.
Curns: Madam Mayor, that's -- your synopsis is pretty much my understanding of the
situation.
Zaremba: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba.
Zaremba: Am I interpreting correctly that northbound Eagle only has two lanes?
Curns: Councilman Zaremba, that's the right side of --
Zaremba: Two through lanes I mean.
Curns: Yeah. The right side of your screen where it actually says Eagle Road, that that
is the southbound Eagle direction, which has iwo through lanes. I'm sorry, the --
Zaremba: North is to my right?
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January 10, 2012
Page 35 of 48
Curns: North is to your right.
Zaremba: Oh. Okay. All right. So, back to that same question, then. So, southbound
on Eagle Road they only have two lanes.
Curns: Correct.
Zaremba: Through lanes
Curns: Correct. The explanation I have at this time from the ITD staff is that the
improvements that are coming through the agreement that was with STARS -- based on
the STARS legislation to make improvements to Eagle Road, the first phase of this
project does what you see here and, then, there is to be another phase down the road
as the funds come in through the STARS -- with the STARS legislation that allows to
phase more improvements, mainly a third southbound lane on Eagle Road.
Hoaglun: Madam Mayor?
Zaremba: Okay.
De Weerd: Mr. Hoaglun.
Hoaglun: I was just -- you know, as we move left to right, going from south to north on
Eagle Road, I see the two left turn lanes and, then, the three -- three lanes that are
going through taking out the right turn lane and I guess I just want to understand the
safety considerations, if Lieutenant could kind of fill us in, if you have got some ideas,
what -- what does that do to traffic flow without having a turn lane that used to be there,
no longer there, what are the implications with that?
Leslie: Madam Mayor, Council, Tim's correct in the sense that the free flowing right
turns that came off of that road before are probably the primarily location for our
crashes. When a vehicle stops the vehicle behind them is looking to see if traffic is free
and runs into the vehicle that's already stopped, because traffic is in its way. So, that is
probably a high percentage of our crashes are because of the free flowing. The down
side to it is the free flowing sometimes reduces congestion. So, it's kind of a trade off
there. Most of those crashes are on those corners in this intersection are in that free
flowing corner. What Tim's talking about on this northbound side is there is three lanes
over here that are -- if I understand that correctly, Tim, there is three lanes that are
traveling northbound on Eagle, so if you're on Eagle crossing Fairview there is three
lanes going northbound. Unlike the other intersections where the far right lane is a
dedicated right only lane, this lane you can either make aright-hand turn or go straight.
Let me give you the traffic numbers on the right-hand side lane that are similar to the
two turn lanes going westbound on -- on Fairview from Eagle. My guess is -- I haven't
seen the numbers completely, but my guess is that's because those turn lanes are
shorter, there is less car storage space, whereas this far -- this far right-hand has the
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
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entire road of Eagle to back up traffic on. It will probably create a little bit more
congestion, because 300 cars during those peak times is pretty heavy, but it's all
straight lines stopping, not as dangerous as a car being stopped in the corner and the
guy's looking back to try to make sure if it's free to go. Does that make sense?
Hoaglun: Yes.
De Weerd: Yes, because we have been behind those cars that don't know how to
merge.
Bird: Yeah.
De Weerd: It's a zipper
Leslie: I think the other thing, too, that will help -- that' will help a little bit is typically the
light timing has a greater flowing going north-south than it will on a turn lane only lane. I
would hope that would flow pretty -- it's going to create a little bit of congestion. It would
be better ideally -- it would be a right-hand turn lane like all the rest of them. That's how
we really prefer it to be, but the intersection also appears to be more -- more accessible
to pedestrian traffic. With the Center Cal project we are probably going to see a little bit
more people crossing the street there than we .have in the past and by taking that free
flow right turn out it eliminates what you have in the north where you have to cross one
street and, then, sit in an island and, then, cross another street. So, that -- that's a trade
off as well, especially with bikes and pedestrians, so --
De Weerd: So, it's kind of a trade.
Curns: So, as PD as noted, those free rights are really not -- were causing a lot of
problems and so it's just this one intersection that -- or this one corner, excuse me, the
southeast corner where instead of having a spot where people can get out of the free
flowing 50 -- well, signed 50 mile an hour traffic to make a right turn, now they are
sharing that with-- right turns are sharing it with the through traffic, so statistically that
increases your chance of a rear-end collision, which was kind of the reason why we
were getting away from those free right turns. So, the concern there is two fold. Is rear
end collisions at a fairly high speed and also the fact that there was right turns there
really hampering the ability of people to move through the intersection who are going
through on Eagle Road, which was kind of, in the first place, the point of having that
new third lane was to get people through the intersection.
Hoaglun: Yeah. Madam Mayor. What I -- in my mind what I visualize, then, if they
leave it as -- as it is, as they flow from left to right on our screen heading north and
leave it as it is, if they want to go to Center Cal, some people will be turning right on
Fairview heading east, others will go straight, some folks after a while will figure this out,
they will choose the middle lane for those cars, because there will be a lot of cars
turning right, rush hour, but, then, if cars are going straight, you're in the middle lane
trying to get over so, then, you can turn right into Center Cal, so on that north side of
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2072
Page 37 of 48
Fairview now you got people trying to jockey back around to -- whereas if you had that
right turn lane you could be in that center lane, move through, slide to do right without
other cars potentially coming forward from that right lane. So it's -- it's always
interesting out there, so four corners of the intersection, we have three rights and one
wrong; is that right?
Curns: That's one way to put it.
Leslie: Tim, how far is the first entrance into Center Cal on the east side of the road?
Curns: Going northbound on a Eagle Road?
Leslie: Yeah.
Curns: That's about a -- excuse me. It's about an eighth of a mile to a right-in -- first
right-in, right-out. So, it's not far after.
Bird: Eighth of a mile.
Curns: Eighth of a mile.
Bird: Uh-huh.
Hoaglun: Well, I think staff has recommended -- our option was to write a letter to ITD
saying take another look at that. I don't have a problem with that. It may not do any
good. It sounds like they are set and the property owner on that corner doesn't want to
play, probably won't go anywhere, but --
De Weerd: All right. I guess we could see if DBSI and -- and the Center Cal would sit
down with -- with us and talk about our concerns and see if we could get some you
collaboration in moving that forward.
Hoaglun: That's a possibility. I wouldn't mind giving it a try.
De Weerd: Okay.
Hoaglun: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
De Weerd: Okay. Certainly my office can work to coordinate such a meeting.
Curns: Thank you.
Bird: I think sooner the better, because -- before it gets laid out. I see problems north
of it, too, where your -- where you've got the eighth mile up there, you have got that right
in and right out and you're trying to merge traffic together from -- from Fairview and that
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
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coming in, I see some problems there. I think -- I think somebody needs to really sit
down and take if a hard --another hard look at this intersection.
De Weerd: I guess, Tim, if you would be willing to talk to ITD staff and say that the city
is going to try and arranged such a meeting and if they would like to be there at the
time, if they think that that is not appropriate, that they would like to just hear what the
results of such a meeting is and, then, get involved, if that's favorable. I don't know.
But at least let staff know that we would like to work towards bringing the parties to the
table, because this is a concern.
Curns: I will do that, Madam Mayor.
De Weerd: Okay.
Curns: All right. Onto another topic about turn bays. Last spring ITD District Three
invited the city to participate in an open house where they kind of explained how the
state transportation improvement plan goes together and the budgetary constraints that
go along with that and at the end of that meeting we had some conversations with ITD
staff about improvement from the city and it was suggested to the city that if we had any
ideas for improvement of things we would like to see on the state system, that our ones
.that they could fit into their safety or maintenance umbrellas, .which are primarily what
their plan includes, cause no dollar improvements, that they wanted to hear about more
of those. So, in kind of looking at the state system that passes through Meridian,
Highway 20-26 or Chinden Boulevard is the only one of those roads that has not been
improved from a two lane cross-section and so as a result we see very high congestion
and a lot of rear-end collisions on this roadway and so the idea came about that
possibly it would be a good idea to see if some right-turn lanes could be added at the
major intersections in the north Meridian area that would help facilitate some of the flow
of traffic and maybe reduce the amount of rear-end collisions, since doing something
like this, adding a turn lane to some of it's relatively very inexpensive compared to most
of other projects that ITD rolls out. So, in having some conversations with the Traffic
Safety Commission, we kind of tossed these different intersections around, we looked at
all the different ones across the north Meridian area and Linder has already seen full
improvement or almost full improvements and so the other intersection we kind of boiled
down to really seeing a need was the intersection at Ten Mile Road, which had a picture
on here and, then, the intersection of Meridian Road and North Locust Grove Road.
These locations have right of way available for improvements, which I have highlighted
there in the big red box. So, the land exists, there is nothing in it that would need to be
moved, except possibly moving signal poles at two of those three intersections and all
three of these intersections the right turns are heavy enough to where, based on
national standard and the standards that ITD uses, it warrants having a right turn lane
and it would be of a great benefit to the through traffic and the right turn traffic. So, the
Traffic Safety Commission recommended that I bring this information to the City Council
and they felt it was worthy of possibly sending on a request to ITD to say, hey, if you
have got some funds left at the end of your budget year or you can work it in during a
Meridian Ciiy Council
January 10, 2012
Page 39 of 48
maintenance project or safety improvement project, then, this is something that we
would like to see done.
De Weerd: So, Tim or Caleb, is -- would this qualify for maintenance or is this
something that COMPASS would generally look at an end of the year sweep type of a
recommendation?
Hood: Right. Madam Mayor, we had a brief discussion at traffic safety about that and I
think this is something that wouldn't have to go through the STIP process, they are
pretty minor and could either go under safety or maintenance and operation type things.
As Tim mentioned they made us have some -- called leftover money, but they may have
some money just in their -- their maintenance program that they can just allocate to this
without having it be a listed project. Without getting into too many details, they group
the projects now and, basically, it's a big pot of money that they can draw from and they
don't have to list projects if they are, you know, within certain thresholds and meet
different criteria. So, I think we could just request it not have to go through all of the
programming things that COMPASS -- if we requested them all in one year, then, it
would probably be one project and be a listed project with a key number, but I think if
we just asked them, hey, as funds become available can you hit these intersections and
add turn lanes -- I mean I think they would be open and we could bypass a lot of that
red tape.
De Weerd: And, Council, I know Tim does have a draft letter prepared if that is the
direction you would like to go.
Zaremba: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba.
Zaremba: Just by instinct I agree with all you of this, but I wonder if since the Meridian
-- I mean since the Ten Mile interchange has opened has ACHD done any new traffic
counts on Ten Mile just south of Chinden and would that be good supporting evidence
to supply?
Curns: Councilman Zaremba, we actually -- when we went to -- to ITD and ACHD to
get the counts for these different intersections to see if they would -- these
improvements would be warranted the Ten Mile count was previous to the interchange
opening, so ACHD was nice enough to go out and do a count for us and give us
updated numbers out there and so there certainly is a pick up in number of people
turning there and so that helps -- it's definitely to the threshold where it would be of
benefit to have a turn lane.
Zaremba: Thank you.
Curns: Uh-huh.
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 40 of 48
Hoaglun: Madam Mayor, I do support sending a letter for this. I think this is something
that is a low cost, but highly useful venture if they could do that. Could we go back to
the Ten Mile one real quick?
De Weerd: Before you move on, does it make sense to request on that Ten Mile an
acceleration lane? To just extend that, then, to the east side of Ten Mile as well and
have an acceleration --
Curns: Madam Mayor, that's not something we really contemplated, but it certainly
wouldn't hurt to look at.
De Weerd: With the up tick in the amount of traffic and with the speed of that road --
certainly not during rush hour, but -- there is no speed on that road. But it is a busy
highway and that -- it's pretty dark in that area, too. So, just -- just a question.
Hoaglun: And, Madam Mayor, my comment -- I like that idea, but my comment was I
notice when I had to use it when Linder was undergoing construction, you get one
vehicle turning left going west on Chinden and you get five, six cars turning right, that
one car, even though there is no traffic coming from the west and cars coming from the
east, everybody sits there waiting -- unless they pull clear out, everybody that wants to
go right cannot move until that one car has to move and we could have cleared that by
not having a left turn lane and that might be more of an ACHD thing right there. But
with people taking that interchange and coming out and, then, heading to Star and
going that direction or where ever they go, a left turn lane there would really be useful.
Curns: Councilman Hoaglun, actually, the next traffic safety meeting is next week --
next week and we will have both ITD representatives and ACHD representatives at that
meeting. So, I think maybe before we get to the point of doing something on this one
we will throw those -- these new ideas out to the group while we have representatives
there, since as you noted the south lane there would be more of an ACHD
responsibility. And, then, also on the Mayor's comment about it being dark out there,
we are already looking with ACHD at getting some illumination out there as well, since
it's getting to be a busier intersection.
Hoaglun: And, Madam Mayor, I just think with Justin here first meeting he really wants
to impress us and he will get it all done.
Curns: He got can do attitude. All right. Well, that's all I have on these.
De Weerd: Okay. Very good. Any further questions for Tim?
Bird: I have none.
De Weerd: Well, we appreciate you both getting out in front of this and how you work
with both of our transportation agencies. It's greatly appreciated.
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 41 of 48
Curns: Thank you, Madam Mayor.
E. Planning Department: Ten Mile Annexation Status Report
De Weerd: Thank you. Okay. Our next item is also under the Planning Department
with the Ten Mile annexation status report.
Friedman: Thank you, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council. I will be brief. As you
know, Council originally had the hearing on the annexation request on December 6th. It
was, then, continued to December 20th. At that time we talked to Council and talked
about the development of development agreement conditions. We are working on
those. Council did continue the meeting until next Tuesday, the 17th. So, by, you
know, normal packet days at the end of this week we will have a rather detailed memo
and suggested conditions for a development agreement ready for your perusal and
consideration. Because there are three separate property owners there ultimately -- if
this annexation goes forward will be three separate development agreements. I can say
at least from our perspective in terms of what we are working on, two of those three
development agreements will be pretty concise and not a lot of meat to them. Even a
portion of one of the larger parcels, the Janicek parcel, part of the development
agreement conditions for that would be pretty -- again, pretty concise. The larger piece,
the one that's been requested for.the C-C zoning, we are developing the language in
there so that kind of looking at what the C-C zoning allows, but looking at the intent of
the plan and trying to tailor it so that there are conditions in there that kind of try to
protect the integrity of that plan and incorporate it, realizing that there is kind of a
disconnect between at least the requested zoning and what the plan contemplates. So,
I'm just finishing the -- I pretty much finished most of my wordsmithing. Since Sonya will
be the lead on this, I have given it off to her, asked her to kind of see if I have missed
anything, make it look pretty and get it back to you and get it out for your consideration
next week.
De Weerd: Thank you. Council, any questions?
Zaremba: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba.
Zaremba: You know I'm going to ask. Any chance of getting a plat or a concept plan?
Friedman: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council. Yes, one of the suggested
conditions of -- well, I can't answer the question about whether you will get a plat or a
concept plan. However, one of the conditions that we will propose to you is that prior to
any development on the site that that developer will have to come back with a specific
development plan and, then, under that condition I have highlighted a number of kind of
like menu of things that that plan should incorporate and that's why I have been having
to kind of go into the plan and, then, compare the intent of the plan to the allowances of
the C-C zoning district and, then, tailor that accordingly. I think I, without going into
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January 10, 2012
Page 42 of 48
detail, can say one of the things I looked at -- there will be some restrictions on a few
uses, because there is a few uses in the C-C zone that are not contemplated in the
plan. There is some dimensional criteria that the C-C would allow greater allowances
that weren't contemplated again in that particular area. So, there is at least a
recommendation to Council for disagreement with conditions that -- you know, we are
not nailing it down too much, but these are things that should be incorporated in a plan,
but as to the timing of a concept plan or the submittal of a concept plan, I leave that to
Council's discretion.
Zaremba: Thank you.
De Weerd: Okay. Anything further?
Bird: Not at this time.
De Weerd: Thank you, Pete.
Friedman: You're welcome.
F. Legal Department & Clerks Office: Discussion on Phase I
Update to the City of Meridian Records Retention Schedule
De Weerd: Okay. Item 7-F, our legal and clerk's office.
Kane: Thank you. Madam Mayor, Members of City Council, I am Emily Kane, I'm a
deputy city attorney in the legal department and I'm here representing the team that has
been working to revise and update the records retention policy for the City of Meridian.
That team includes Jaycee Holman, your city clerk, and assistant city attorney Andrea
Pogue. So, I'd like to provide a quick overview of that effort and the document before
you today. First I wanted to briefly mention why does records retention matter. Oh. I
will let you kind of pick your favorite of the number of reasons -- good reasons to have a
usable and updated records retention policy, but of most interest to the legal department
certainly is the last one, which that the law requires us to. We do have a records
retention policy. It was adopted in August of 1997. For one reason or another, though,
the City of Meridian policy is identical to the Association of Idaho City's model policy and
we are finding after a few years of using it that a customized policy would really better
serve the needs of the public and better fit the operational needs of the city. So, our
goal is to update the schedule by providing a comprehensive list of records that are
actually created or retained by city department. Establish retention periods that are
appropriate and actually make sense for each record and each department using that
record. We determine that by looking at how long that record -- or any given record is
useful to the department or to the public. We look at if there is a specific law that
requires us to keep a record for a certain amount of time, whether we have the physical
and technological space and capability to retain a record or if there are limitations on
that. So, we think this would not only create transparency for the public, but it will
provide guidance internally for employees regarding how to handle those records. As
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January 10, 2012
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you're probably aware, the definition of a public record is very broad. It's all writings and
documents the city uses or has. Some are physical, some are digital, and some are
both. And, of course, we are getting more and more digital records and, of course,
almost any physical record can also be transformed into a digital record, so that
increases the volume and kind of magnifies the issues that we are dealing with. Our
approach to revising and customizing a schedule has been to meet with each
department and working with them to describe what we are doing, our goals and where
we are trying to go. We create a list of the records each department maintains and we
hope identify how long that department needs that record or wants to keep each record.
So, some of the challenges we have been facing are just the volume. There is a lot of
records that have build up over the years, partly because there are a number of
permanent record categories in our current policy that don't necessarily need to be
there. There is some logistical issues, several -- there are several copies of the same
record, several versions. There are transitory records attached to permanent records,
so the transitory record kind of survived longer than it needs to. Records are
maintained with aging technology and in some cases we are not actually sure what we
have, because we have big boxes of stuff. So, going through those boxes has been a
challenged as well. We have divided this effort into two phases to kind of take a few
bites at the elephant. So, we are done with the fire department, HR IT, legal, Mayor,
Parks and Rec, Planning and the Building and Development Services Division of Public
.Works, so these are. within the draft that you see before you. We put a date at the top.
of each department's schedule, so we would know when revised them. So, these
contain a date of January 2012. There are a few that aren't done yet, including Clerks,
Finance, Police and a number of divisions of Public Works. So, that's coming up next. I
did migrate the current record retention schedule for each of these departments into the
draft that you see before you and I put a date of I think August 2007 on those. So, we
still have, of course, a records retention policy for these departments, but it will be
updated as phase two. This is a timeline and I will now read this entire thing to you. I'm
just kidding. I just put that there so that you could see that we have a plan. The
highlights of this plan are there are four -- we have four kind of goal dates for the
remaining departments. Public Works is definitely the biggest one. They have a lot of
records, which I think is pretty typical for any city. But on October 2nd we would like to
come back to you with an updated draft, a resolution to talk about what we have -- what
we have done since then and, hopefully, let you know that we are done. So, in the
immediate future I'd like to ask you to, please, review the draft that you have before you
and look at the ones in particular that we updated and over the next couple of weeks if
you see anything you would like to change, please, let me or Andreas or Jaycee know.
We can make those changes and I propose that we bring this back in two weeks with
the first of the two resolutions to get these updates in place.
De Weerd: Thank you, Emily.
Kane: You're welcome.
De Weerd: Any questions from Council?
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 44 of 48
Zaremba: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba.
Zaremba: I understand the importance of doing this and I'm glad that it's moving
forward forthwith. That's great. I have a question about mechanics and that is at some
point you say, okay, this item or document needs to be kept for ten years. When we get
to that ten years from now what is the tickler or the alert that says, okay, we don't need
this anymore. Is there --
Holman: Madam Mayor?
Zaremba: -- is there some way to identify what goes ten years from now?
De Weerd: Yes, Madam Clerk.
Holman: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, Councilman Zaremba, that is the
most important step that's going to happen once we have a good records retention
policy, I guess a usable one in place. The Clerk's office will be keeping track -- doing
two those things. Once ayear -- starting annually -- it may become as we continue to
grow something that happens twice a year.. We will. send out e-mail.. reminders to the
departments ahead of time, probably towards of the end of the year, saying these are
the records that not only can you purge, but you have to purge this year and we will
compile a resolution that we will bring before the Council that will be all of the city's
records that within our current retention policy have to be destroyed that year, so --
because the flip side of this records retention policy isn't we say would we keep it for ten
years and, then, well, we don't really get around to destroying it until a couple years
after that, we can't do that, because we have a retention policy that says we will destroy
it at ten years and we get a public records request and I go back to the retention policy
or whomever and say, no, those are destroyed, we don't have them, we deny a public
records request when, in all actuality, we still have it beyond the records retention date.
We can't operate like that. We need to always know at anytime what records we
currently have. So, we also have to follow it to the letter, which will be my office making
sure that everyone is doing that and providing that guidance.
Zaremba: Thank you
Hoaglun: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Hoaglun.
Hoaglun: Question about technology. It so happened I was at the state archives last
week and it is interesting, they retain county records and, of course, some other state
records and I got to see some disks that some county somewhere decided they were
going to put their records on at some point in time for something, I can't remember what,
but there is no -- the technology is long gone on how to play these LP like disks that --
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 45 of 48
De Weerd: Tracks?
Hoaglun: Yeah. That they were like LPs, but they are a lot thicker. And so -- and
gathering that information is difficult. So, it's retained, but it can't be recreated or
reproduced. So, what's the thinking on the technology? How -- because it does evolve
as we talked about eight tracks, that's a good example. What 's the plan to either stay
current or use a simple technology? Where are they going with that?
Kane: Uh-huh. Madam Mayor, Councilman Hoaglun, that's -- we have ran into that
ourselves. We maintain a number of our building department records on microfilm and
do not, in fact, have a usable machine on which to view those films. So, just in the last
ten years, maybe 15 or 20, we have run into that, too, where you can't look at a record,
because the technology used to do that is outmoded. So, to the extent that we have
permanent records that we need to presence that are on microfilm or even CDs or hard
drives, we need to make sure that we migrate that to the next generation of technology.
In some cases it's kind of looking like that might be paper, because it's always there.
We have paper records from the 1800s. But to the extent that we do have records
digitally only and if those records need to survive, the hardware that's used to look at
them, we need to migrate those over to the next -- the next available method of keeping
those records.. That's one reason that we did building and development services first is
because some of those records we need to get rid of them, because they are -- we can't
look at them anyway. It's almost as though we don't have them. So, to -- to indicate on
our records retention policy that we do have them, that we can look at them, is
misleading. So, we need to kind of phase those out. I think that's a problem that faces
a lot of -- a lot of cities, especially as we look at digitizing a lot of our records and 1 think
we need to be judicious in digitizing records that we wanted to keep for a long, long
time.
Hoaglun: That is a problem. It sounds like you guys are at least trying to plan for it, so I
appreciate that. Just to mention, the one really cool thing I saw out there, besides some
discharge documents signed by Abraham Lincoln, which was really cool, but the state
constitution. It's still on paper. The original.
Bird: Yeah.
Kane: Wow.
Hoaglun: So, that was pretty amazing to see that, so --
Kane: Wow. I'd Like see it myself.
Hoaglun: Now, all we need to do is get the big fancy leather books that they all had. It
would be rather expensive nowadays.
De Weerd: Any other questions?
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 46 of 46
Bird: I have none.
De Weerd: We know this has been a mammoth project and certainly appreciate the
diligence, your attention to detail, and maybe the tenacity to continue on, so thank you.
Holman: Madam Mayor? We call our first meeting shock and awe normally with each
department and, then, we move on from there.
Kane: It is overwhelming. It's been a really good team. We work really well, so --
De Weerd: Well, thank you.
Kane: -- I think we are on track. Thank you.
G. Mayor's Office: Resolution No. 12-831: A Resolution of the
Mayor and the City Council of the City of Meridian Appointing
Lisa Keyes to seat 8 of the Meridian Development Corporation
De Weerd: Okay. I had hoped that my appointment for the Meridian Development
Corporation might.be here by now, but in front you, Council, you do have under Item
7-G a resolution 12-831. It is for the appointment of Lisa Keyes to Seat 8 of the
Meridian Development Corporation. Her appointment -- this appointment would expire,
then, in September of 2014. I would entertain any questions and if there aren't any, a
motion to approve.
Hoaglun: Madam Mayor?
De Weerd: Mr. Hoaglun.
Hoaglun: I move approval of resolution number 12-831, appointing Lisa Keys to Seat 8
of the Meridian Development Corporation.
Zaremba: Second
De Weerd: I have a motion and a second to approve this item, 7-G. Council, I will also
say that the chair and I interviewed six candidates. We had more in applications and it's
pretty exciting to see the level of interest and we are working with each of those that
had indicated an interest to get them involved in one way or another. So, it's great to
see a community that has citizens that step up and want to be involved in the future of
their community. So, Madam Clerk, will you, please, call roll on this item.
Roll-Call: Bird, yea; Rountree, absent; Zaremba, yea; Hoaglun, yea.
De Weerd: All ayes. Motion carried.
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 47 of 48
MOTION CARRIED: THREE AYES. ONE ABSENT.
Item 8: Future Meeting Topics
De Weerd: Council, are there any items under Item 8 for future meeting topics?
Bird: I have none.
Zaremba: I have none.
Item 9: Other Items
A. Executive Session Per Idaho State Code 67-2345 (1)(c)(f) - (c)
To Conduct Deliberations Concerning Labor Negotiations or to
Acquire an Interest in Real Property, Which is Not Owned By a
Public Agency; and (f) To Consider and Advise its Legal
Representatives in Pending Litigation Amended onto the
agenda: (d) To Consider Records That Are Exempt From
Disclosure as Provided in Chapter 3, Title 9, Idaho Code
De Weerd: Okay. I will move, then, to Item No. 9, Executive Session per Idaho State
Code 67-2345(1)(c) and (f).
Bird: And (1)(d).
De Weerd: And (d).
Bird: So moved.
Zaremba: Second.
De Weerd: I have a motion and a second to adjourn into Executive Session. Madam
Clerk, will you, please, call roll.
Roll-Call: Bird, yea; Rountree, absent; Zaremba, yea; Hoaglun, yea.
De Weerd: All ayes.
MOTION CARRIED: THREE AYES. ONE ABSENT.
EXECUTIVE SESSION: (5:21 p.m. to 7:01 p.m.)
Bird: I move we come out of Executive Session.
Zaremba: Second
Meridian City Council
January 10, 2012
Page 48 of 48
Hoaglun: Second.
De Weerd: All those in favor say aye. All ayes. Motion carried.
MOTION CARRIED: THREE AYES. ONE ABSENT.
De Weerd: Could I have a motion to adjourn?
Bird: I move we adjourn.
Zaremba: Second.
De Weerd: All those in favor? All ayes.
MOTION CARRIED: THREE AYES. ONE ABSENT.
MEETING ADJOURNED AT 7:01 P.M.
(AUDIO RECORDING ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS)
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