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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2014-06-10E IDIAN,- CITY COUNCIL WORKSHOP DAHO MEETING AGENDA City Council Chambers 33 East Broadway Avenue Meridian, Idaho Tuesday, June 10, 2014 at 3:00 PM 1. Roll -Call Attendance X David Zaremba X Joe Borton X Charlie Rountree X Keith Bird O Genesis Milam X Luke Cavener X Mayor Tammy de Weerd 2. Pledge of Allegiance 3. Adoption of the Agenda Adopted 4. Consent Agenda Approved (Pg 2-3) A. Approve Minutes of May 22, 2014 City Council Special Joint Meeting B. Paramount Subdivision No. 24 Recreational Pathway Easement C. Professional Services Agreement with Kings of Swing for Musical Talent for Concerts on Broadway for a Not -to -Exceed Amount of $1,800.00 D. CableONE Movie Night in Meridian 2014 Single -Night Sponsorship Agreement Between Biolife Plasma Service and the City of Meridian for a Not -to -Exceed Amount of $350.00 E. Legal Department: Budget Amendment for Legal Services F. Temporary Water Main Easement for Locust Grove Waterline Extension, Blackrock to Reflection Ridge G. Permanent Water Main Easement for Locust Grove Waterline Extension, Blackrock to Reflection Ridge H. Award of Bid and Authorization for the Purchasing Manager to Issue and Sign a Purchase Order to CESCO, Inc. for a 2014 John Deere 310SK Backhoe Loader for the Not -To -Exceed Amount of $94,381.00 Meridian City Council Meeting Agenda — Tuesday, June 10, 2014 Page 1 of 3 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. I. Approval of Award of Request for Proposal and Agreement to Tonka Water for the "Well 19 Iron and Manganese Removal Equipment" Purchase Project J. Development Agreement for Approval: AZ 13-015 TM Creek by SCS Brighton, LLC Located Southeast Corner of W. Franklin Road and S. Ten Mile Road Request: Annexation and Zoning of 45.34 Acres of Land with C- G (34.82 acres), R-40 (3.94 Acres) and TN -C (5.58 Acres) Zoning Districts K. Recreational Pathway Easement for Fall Creek Subdivision 5. Items Moved From Consent Agenda A. Amended onto the Agenda: City Scholarship Presentation (Pg 3-4) 6. Department Reports A. Parks and Recreation Department: Strategic Plan Update (Pg 4-18) B. Parks and Recreation Department: Storey Dog Park Update Motion passed to move forward with Option A with Conditions (Pg 18-35) C. Mayor's Office: Results of the City Survey (Pg 35-43) D. City of Meridian Strategic Plan Budget Amendment for the Not -to -Exceed Amount of $53,250.00 Approved (Pg 43-46) E. City Clerk's Office: Resolution No. 14-995: A Resolution Adopting the Meridian Historic Preservation Plan Approved (Pg 46-47) F. Public Works Department: Utility Rates Discussion (Pg 47-72) 7. Ordinances A. An Ordinance (AZ 13-015 — TM Creek) For Annexation And Rezone Of A Parcel Of Land Located Being A Portion Of NW 1/40f Section 14, Township 3 North, Range 1 West, Boise Meridian; Establishing And Determining The Land Use Zoning Classification Of Said Lands From RUT To C -G (General Retail And Service Commercial District); TN -C (Traditional Neighborhood Center); And R-40 (High Density Residential District) In The Meridian City Code; And Providing An Effective Date Approved (Pg 72-73) 8. Future Meeting Topics A. Discussion Regarding July 1St, 2014 Quorum There is a quorum (Pg 73-74) Meridian City Council Meeting Agenda — Tuesday, June 10, 2014 Page 2 of 3 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. Adjourned at 7:17 p.m. Meridian City Council Meeting Agenda — Tuesday, June 10, 2014 Page 3 of 3 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 City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 A meeting of the Meridian City Council was called to order at 3:00 p.m., Tuesday, June 10, 2014, by President Charlie Rountree. Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, David Zaremba, Charlie Rountree, Keith Bird, Joe Borton and Luke Cavener. Members Absent: Genesis Milam. Others Present: Bill Nary, Jaycee Holman, Bruce Chatterton, Tom Barry, Warren Stewart, Jeff Lavey, Mark Niemeyer, Steve Siddoway, and Dean Willis. Item 1: Roll -call Attendance: Roll call. X David Zaremba X Joe Borton X Charlie Rountree X Keith Bird Genesis Milam X Luke Cavener X Mayor Tammy de Weerd De Weerd: Well, we will go ahead and get this meeting going. Thank you for joining us. We always appreciate having people here -- certainly citizens. I see a couple of our parks commissioners. Welcome. So, for the record it is Tuesday, June 10th. It's 3:00 p.m. I will start with roll call attendance, Madam Clerk. Item 2: Pledge of Allegiance De Weerd: Okay. Item No. 2 is the 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: Okay. Item No. 3 is adoption of the agenda. Rountree: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: I have an addition for Item 5 to include the scholarship presentation and an Item 6-E, resolution number is 14-995, and with those, Madam Mayor, I move that we approve the agenda. Bird: Second. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 2 of 74 De Weerd: I have a motion and a second approve the agenda as amended. All those in favor say aye. All ayes. Motion carried. MOTION CARRIED: FIVE AYES. ONE ABSENT. Item 4: Consent Agenda A. Approve Minutes of May 22, 2014 City Council Special Joint Meeting B. Paramount Subdivision No. 24 Recreational Pathway Easement C. Professional Services Agreement with Kings of Swing for Musical Talent for Concerts on Broadway for a Not -to -Exceed Amount of $1,800.00 D. CableONE Movie Night in Meridian 2014 Single -Night Sponsorship Agreement Between Biolife Plasma Service and the City of Meridian for a Not -to -Exceed Amount of $350.00 E. Legal Department: Budget Amendment for Legal Services F. Temporary Water Main Easement for Locust Grove Waterline Extension, Blackrock to Reflection Ridge G. Permanent Water Main Easement for Locust Grove Waterline Extension, Blackrock to Reflection Ridge H. Award of Bid and Authorization for the Purchasing Manager to Issue and Sign a Purchase Order to CESCO, Inc. for a 2014 John Deere 310SK Backhoe Loader for the Not -To -Exceed Amount of $94,381.00 Approval of Award of Request for Proposal and Agreement to Tonka Water for the "Well 19 Iron and Manganese Removal Equipment' Purchase Project J. Development Agreement for Approval: AZ 13-015 TM Creek by SCS Brighton, LLC Located Southeast Corner of W. Franklin Road and S. Ten Mile Road Request: Annexation and Zoning of 45.34 Acres of Land with C -G (34.82 acres), R-40 (3.94 Acres) and TN -C (5.58 Acres) Zoning Districts K. Recreational Pathway Easement for Fall Creek Subdivision Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 3 of 74 De Weerd: Item 4 is our Consent Agenda. Rountree: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: I move that we approve the Consent Agenda as published, authorize the clerk to attest and the Mayor to sign. 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, yea; Zaremba, yea; Borton, yea; Milam, absent; Cavener, yea. De Weerd: All ayes. Motion carried. MOTION CARRIED: FIVE AYES. ONE ABSENT. Item 5: Items Moved From Consent Agenda A. Amended onto the Agenda: City Scholarship Presentation De Weerd: Okay. Last week we awarded three of the four of our scholarships and tonight -- or this afternoon we will award the fourth one. Certainly this award winner -- it falls a little closer to home, because she has done some volunteering in our office and just to note that when our -- our teens apply for the scholarship everything is redacted and so we do have a panel that rates every single one of the applicants and we are just really thrilled to have Emily Jane here with us tonight -- or today. We are always doing this at night, so for forgive me. I'm going to say night all the time. But let me just tell you a little bit about Emily Jane. She's graduating from home school and she has had a dream of being an author. She's been very active with the city, both as a volunteer in the Mayor's office, as well as a member of MYAC. In MYAC she was involved with the community service subcommittee and participated in several events and projects, such as Rake Up Meridian and the recent dance off in support of the American Heart Association. Emily has also been active in the community by volunteering at her church, serving meals to community, being a leader for vacation bible school and serving as a youth delegate to the Episcopal diocese of Idaho. Or Diocese of Idaho. Sorry about that. Emily plans to attend the College of Idaho in the fall and she will be pursuing her dream in creative writing. So, I will ask Ken and Emily Jane to come up and I would like to congratulate you. As I told our other award winners or scholarship winners, we know that you're ready for this next stage to go out and spread your wings and we wish you great success, but we do hope always that you will call Meridian home Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 4 of 74 -- now I get emotional -- and just ask that as you start your career and start your family that you will remember your home and come home and raise your family and have your career here. We need talent like yours. We know that you're already vested in our community and for that we will be very -- forever grateful. So, thank you so much. Congratulations. Jane: I just want to say thank you to Mayor Tammy for starting MYAC and I have enjoyed doing it this year, it's really helped me flourish and discover some passions in my community and I wanted to say thank you to Ken for letting me come work in the Mayor's office with him, it was a really good experience, and I will remember it for the rest of my life. So, thank you guys. De Weerd: You know, we get really -- we get a nice closeness with our youth council members and it's always really difficult saying goodbye to them. This class was more involved than ever and it wasn't just a few that was so obvious in the past, it was almost every member and that was really exciting to see and to see them excel and just for the record Emily Jane -- she volunteered in our office and she put in a lot of hours and working for Ken -- I mean can you imagine, he just drove her into the dirt with -- I mean he's a slave driver. Okay. Thank you for joining us and Emily Jane, you do not have to stay for the entire program. Item 6: Department Reports A. Parks and Recreation Department: Strategic Plan Update De Weerd: Okay Item 6-A is under our Parks and Recreation Department. We will have their strategic plan update and I will turn this over to our director Steve Siddoway. Siddoway: Thank you, Madam Mayor, Members of the City Council. We are pleased before you -- to be before you today, give you our strategic focus presentation for 2014. Hear from each of the departments every month at these workshops and we are excited to tell you some of our story. We hope you come away from today with of some of our recent accomplishments, challenges and what we hope to do coming in the future. We hope that you are proud of the things that we are doing with the resources that you give us and to that end we are going to report to you today on some of those things that we are doing. Past years I have stood up here and given you that presentation in full, but today following the lead of some of the other departments it seemed to go well with, we are going to invite others up to the podium and let you see the faces behind many of these great projects and programs. Our presentation to you today is in these four parts. I will lead off with the department overview. We will, then, talk about what's going on with parks and pathways and, then, lead into recreation and what's happening on the recreation side of parks and recreation and, then, we will take a look into the future together. First I will start off with the department overview and just a little bit about staffing. We have 23 year around staff currently. Seasonal staff 48. That is when we are fully staffed. Right now we have a total of 69 employees. There are only -- 23 of them are year around. Nineteen of them are grounds keepers, 18 of them are camp Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 5 of 74 counselors, six of them are scorekeepers in our scorekeeper -- in our sports program. Two seasonal office assistants and one splash pad attendant. We scaled that back from past years thanks to the improvements that have been made with the UV improvements that we will talk about down the road in future slides. But on top of that all of our recreation programs for the activity guide are with independent contractors. Those vary by which season we are in, but approximately 34 plus or minus independent contractors help us to put on our activity guide programs and I wanted to point out some recent key staffing changes. Ali Aldape, she's in the top right picture there, sits at our front counter. She's not here today. She's at a family reunion and hope she's having a great time. But she was a greet addition to our team when Janice left and sits at our front desk there. Shelly Houston came to us from the Mayor's office. We already had a marketing coordinator position drafted up and ready to present as an enhancement to you this year and through a great bit of luck we were able to make that transition this spring and welcome Shelly to our -- to our team as part of the parks and recreation team and it's been a great addition for us. Frank Keeney is Groundskeeper 1. Again, not a new position, but the replacement when we lost Spence Shivers. But those are the key staffing changes over the past year since we were before you last. We -- here is some numbers. We currently have 240 acres of developed park land. Most of which are in the combination of regional and community parks. Those are the biggest ones, like Settlers and Kleiner would be the regional ones. Community ones would be places like Tulley and Heroes and Bear Creek. But in addition we have got 40 acres of neighborhood parks and seven acres in our other -- our special use parks, things like Generations Plaza and others. We have 38 acres of other landscape maintenance on 37 different sites that we maintain mostly by contract. Our current park level of service to the citizens is right at three acres per thousand and separate from that we currently own 141 acres of undeveloped park land. Most of that is sitting in south Meridian in 77 acres down there. The Borup property. William Watson, which is a neighborhood park, and the portion of Storey Park that we are going to be talking about to you for a future dog park. If all of that were developed today we would increase our level of service for our existing population to 4.6 acres per thousand. But we know as we develop that land over the years we will also be growing in population. So, if you look at the 2040 population with all of that developed we would be at 2.4. So, we know we need to keep growing the parks system as the population continues to grow. Our goal for -- has been four acres per thousand since I have been here and we are going to look at those goals as part of the upcoming park system master plan. Pathway numbers. We have about 14 -- just over 14 miles of pathways out there today. A little less than eight miles of that is actually in the parks, so things like the Bud Porter are in the next line, part of that 6.4. A still mostly disconnected system, but we are trying very hard to connect that with the Five Mile Creek pathway spine being a high priority, which you will hear about later. A little bit about growth. I picked 2007 for a couple of reasons. One it's when I came on as the interim parks director and, two, it is the year that we added our very first admin person and you will see with the budget request coming we want to make our current seasonal admin position a full time. Since our first one was added in 2007 when Janice came on, you can see some of the growth there between that year and this past year. Shelter reservations 482 compared to over a thousand. Activity guide enrollments, 1,849 compared to 3,340. 1 don't need to read the whole thing to you, but all of those Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 6 of 74 numbers add up to that line on the parks and recreation revenue also has gone up from 218,000 in 2007 to 470,000 in this past year. Just the phone calls alone I thought was an interesting statistic. Over 2,500 calls came in and out last month just through the shore telephone system. That's over 114 a week and that doesn't include all the ones that come and go from -- from these, which I think probably the majority of my calls are probably made to and from, but lots of activity at the front desk. With that I think I'm ready to turn over the reins and let you hear more of the specifics. With that as a general overview of some of the growth that we have experienced I will turn the time over to Mike Barton, park superintendent. De Weerd: Thanks, Steve. Barton: Good afternoon, Mayor and Council Members. Appreciate the opportunity to update you on some of the parks activities and some of the projects we are working on. I'd like to start off with Kleiner Park. We have -- now we have a couple of seasons under our belt that the park is growing, the trees are looking fantastic. The park is being discovered. The use out there is just tremendous. Some of the -- some of the recent additions to the park -- we have added charcoal grills for people to use free of charge. Our geese management this winter was highly successful. We started a program where we contracted with a service provider to run dogs in the park and chase and actually became -- we have fielded calls from other cities and agencies that were impressed on -- on how we managed that. We had a regional meeting that we hosted U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Fish and Game, city officials from Eagle, Boise, Nampa -- we tried to get together and develop more of a regional solution to this problem. We did -- from that meeting we developed more questions than answers and it's our intention to go back this winter, get back to the table with U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Fish and Game, some of our agency partners and develop more of a comprehensive strategy as opposed to just pushing geese from one -- one park or one business to another. That's where we are headed with that. In the interim until we can develop a more comprehensive strategy we are going to continue to chase geese. We have had many many compliments from citizens that use the park, they were just amazed at how clean it was last winter, as opposed to the winter before, so very successful. Coming up, of course, is Gene Kleiner Day, big event in Kleiner Park. We received an Idaho Recreation Parks Association Outstanding Facility Park Award and an Idaho -Montana Association of Landscape -- Landscape Architects General Design Merit Award. In addition to that in partnership with the police department -- we appreciate their efforts on the park ambassador program. We started that in Kleiner Park last year where we had citizens on patrol to act as buddy educators and ambassadors, keep an eye on the park, especially after hours when our staff isn't there. Had a lot of interest, had a lot of success, people loved it. This year we have expanded it to other parks. We took a vehicle that was going to be surplused and put magnetic signs on it, so the park ambassadors can move from Kleiner Park over to Settlers Park. It is a golf cart that the police department purchased there. They make rounds there. They travel to other sites where we don't have continual staff there, so a really successful program. This year we applied for an Association of Idaho Cities award and received that award that will be presented at the upcoming conference. One of the main projects right now that we Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 7 of 74 have underway is the Settlers Village Square phase two, the tennis facility, the completion of that area of Settlers Park. Progress has been a little bit slower than we thought. We had some significant delays that last fall they missed a pave date by four days, so the gravel pads sat over the winter and the soil underneath became saturated. So, this spring on half of that it was -- it was a complete redo. Throughout the process the contractor has had excellent attitude. The quality that they have done to date has been outstanding. The redo on these pads are at no cost to the city. The project is now back on track. I hear we have a pave date for the remaining two pads of next Wednesday. So, once we get that asphalt down they can move forward with concrete flatwork, fencing, landscaping, all the other items that are in part of this park design. The parking lot. They are going to pretty much work their way out to the street, finish it up. There is a -- there is about a 30 day cure time before they can put any coatings on the tennis courts, so if they were to pave all the other amenities that need to go in we are looking at an August, early September completion date, but take that with a grain of salt. They have been moving slow. But I am pleased to report that we are on budget. The quality is outstanding. The contractor's attitude is just spectacular. So, this project is moving forward. In addition to those items, at Settlers Park we added charcoal grills. We did some improvements to the roundabout a MYB, Meridian Youth Baseball park and drop off. If you remember a year and a half or two years ago the horseshoe club came in and asked if they could name the horseshoe courts after Don Titcomb, who was instrumental in the design and the horseshoe club and so the memorial horseshoe courts are now officially named. Back to the tennis facility. We did receive two different grants to apply towards the project. We received a thousand dollar grant from the Idaho Tennis Association and also a 7,500 grant from the United States Tennis Association that will be used to offset some of the cost of some shade elements that are going in. Other accomplishments for this year. Split corridor landscape project that went in last fall. The Generations Plaza water feature upgrade that increased sanitation and public safety. We are also working on a well for the 77 acre property. I hear that our water right transfer went through and it's just a formality of getting it in the mail at this point. We have a contractor. It's been bid. We have a contractor, we are going to give them notice to proceed and we are on their schedule for mid July. So, that project will be progressing a little bit later this summer. With that I'm going to turn time over to Elroy Huff, our city arborist. Thank you. Huff: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, thanks for the opportunity to spend just a minute or two with you today. As you can see on this slide this kind of gives you an overview of the work that's being done on downtown trees since about 2002. As of this year we will have 33 left to do after we are done with this project and with all the new boxes added with construction over the years, there is potential for about 152 of these boxes, depending on any other development or construction that might be driven to make -- or to build some more of them, but of the existing 96 we should be done in about five years. Next slide, please. Under urban forestry we still are active in the Tree City USA, making sure that we are -- that we have that. This will be our 12th year as a tree city. Did receive an Arbor Day grant this year and had our Arbor Day celebration. Under strategic tree planting initiative -- hard one to say. This year this is the first time we have done this. It's the second year in conjunction with Idaho Power that they have Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 8 of 74 provided -- Idaho Power has provided trees to the community. He held that at Kleiner Park this year and there were 140 people that picked up trees this year. There were 128 of them that were Meridian residents that picked up trees and received 213 new trees into the Meridian area. In the Boise valley there were 634 participants and we gave out overall 1,058 trees. So, this will be held again in Meridian next year. It gets a little bigger every time. We will see how it goes. But I think we are looking at probably giving away double as what we did this year. We worked on what we could handle this year and that works by people registering ahead of time and when they do they go online and do that and they have an opportunity to find out going online where they should plant their trees for future shade, so when they go home they already know where they are going to be and where they are supposed to plant them at. So, those are the things that I'm involved in and still working a tree inventory and planting trees and stuff every day. Thank you very much. And Jay Gibbons is up. Gibbons: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, pleasure to be here. So, just an update on our -- the city's pathway program. Currently underway is Five Mile Creek pathway. Segment E runs from Linder to Ten Mile. I can say that paving is underway. It started this morning. Will be done tomorrow afternoon with that section. We coordinated with ACHD to pave across their -- their maintenance road to connect to the sidewalk near the intersection of Linder and Ustick. So, that's another 2,700 lineal feel of pathway to add to our inventory. This past year during this year we implemented a pathway distance signage program and we installed the initial ones in -- along the Bud Porter pathway from Meridian to Linder. These -- they are thermal plastic markers that you -- you melt onto the pathway itself. It notes every tenth of a mile measured from the center line of Meridian Road to Linder. So, there is 11 of them on that pathway. And moving forward we also have an agreement with ACHD, so that in instances where our -- there is a disconnect and you have to go on the sidewalk or the roadway to get to the next segment of pathway -- for instance, along East James Court -- we have an agreement with ACHD to allow us to place them on the sidewalks as well. So, that will help connect our pathway -- multi -use pathways together, link them, for instance, from -- from Tulley Park up Segment E at Linder and Ustick and vice -versa, we can go east down to North Lakes Place and Fairview. That's a pretty fair distance through -- almost three miles of pathway at this point taking -- connecting using that program. Also I am working with the Community Development Department to manage a project to improve -- or add sidewalks along Idaho Avenue from Meridian west to just past 4th Street, utilizing a CDBG grant. It will be a fall project. We are in the process of getting a task order for -- to have survey and design work done. Be working with the neighbors and homeowners to establish locations. It will all be within existing right of way. However, there are currently landscape improvements and irrigation improvements in front of some of the homes that we really need buy -in from those homeowners for the sidewalk location itself, but currently there are no sidewalks in many places, so we are going to -- we are going to have sidewalks and good for kids getting to school and to downtown. Some of the other projects that I'm involved in that involve the parks in my title is in this past -- this past winter we opened a series of improvements in 8th Street Park. There is now a restroom and an updated new playground and the playground is -- the old one used to sit right off of the -- the parking area -- separated from the parking area with a Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 9 of 74 fence. We are able to move it back. You can see in the -- in the site plan there, we moved the playground back away from the parking lot and so there is actually good visual sequence from the playground back to the restroom and vice -versa, so that folks with their kids at the playground -- Johnny has got to go use the restroom, she can sit with the other child and still see the restroom doors. Right now we also -- for this year we have a Community Development Block Grant to install a picnic shelter that is in between a series of existing large trees between -- and located between the restroom and the playground itself. That's on order. That will be here -- it ships the 18th of July, so that will be installed in August. And, then, we will have all these new facilities and amenities within 8th Street Park, which is not a big park, but it didn't have a lot going for it in the first place, so now it's actually quite conducive to family play and inviting to the neighbors to actually spend some time in the park. And, then, the major accomplishment at Storey Park of things to come -- we are no longer in dutch with the Land and Water Conversation Fund and -- De Weerd: What's wrong with the Dutch? Gibbons: What's wrong with the Dutch. Rountree: I don't know. You tell us. Gibbons: We have solved that problem. De Weerd: Nothing wrong with the Dutch Gibbons: My apologies. De Weerd: Sorry, Jay. Gibbons: Over the course of the last -- the last two or three years we have worked heavily with the Meridian Dairy Board and the speedway to accomplish a land swap and the official conversion -- Land and Water Conservation Fund conversion to address the municipal well that was drilled within Storey Park many years ago and as a part of that land swap we were able to give a piece of Storey Park proper to the Dairy Board for use by the speedway behind the pits and in return we get a commercial lot that fronts Watertower that will allow us to push the parking and access through the park and we will have two means of access between Franklin and Watertower and that will set us up to develop the rest of Storey Park. Part of it has been undeveloped many years. So, we can clean that up and as you can see there are plans in the works to utilize that area as a future dog park and you will be hearing more about that particular project in just a little bit as part of the regular Council agenda. And the last thing I want to talk about today is some of the things that we have accomplished in the past year. We had a consultant update all of our park site plans and the emphasis was we have had a few of the newer parks that have a nice site plan that illustrates what's within the park, what's planned for the park. Some of them didn't have any plans at all and it was a hodgepodge of different graphic styles, some just hand drawn, some computer Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 10 of 74 rendered, some of them just line drawings and so we hired a consultant to turn around and update all of our park site plans so they all have the same graphic style and we have a very nice layout. Each layout -- each cite has as a section with four or five photos of -- activities are happening within the park itself. The site plan overlaid with the -- with the aerial photo so you can really get a context of what the -- how the park fits within the community. We also worked very diligently with the Parks Commission over the past two years to get some park dedication plaques. The photo, of course, is the one -- it's for Kleiner Park from year before last. But next week we should receive from -- back from the foundry out in Melba the 12 new dedication plaques, which are, basically, 12 by 18, much smaller than the photo from Kleiner, but they will be located in each of our existing parks, contain a lot of information and important people. So, that was a long time coming, but we are there now. We are currently working on stalling a restroom at Centennial Park over the course the spring prior to irrigation season. We did get -- accomplish getting a sewer connection from -- into the park itself. So, now it's a matter of -- we will get the restroom ordered and that should arrive sometime in August as well. So, it will be a quick turnaround on that. And, then, we are also -- as you are aware, we got a grant through Compass and ITD last year for a -- a Rail With Trail arterial crossing study. So, we -- the city and the consultant that we selected signed a contract early in the year expecting that we would accomplish that study by this point in time. However, we ran into a snag. I can say that we do have a contract with ITD and the consultant that will be before you -- it's a three-way contract anyways. That will be before you next week, so -- on Council agenda and that is scheduled to be completed with the stakeholders and -- and lots of folks involved in that to come up with ways to cross -- safe ways to cross -- a pathway across these seven arterials within the city and the city's area of city impact and that -- the completion date of that project is the 28th of November. So, with that we have -- we have come a long ways. Some things happen faster than others, but a lot of things have fallen into place for these things to actually happen, so -- with that I will turn the time over to our recreation folks. De Weerd: Hi. Colin. Moss: Hello. Thank you, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council. So, I'm going to kick off the recreation departments and -- the recreation division and, you know, the theme between the three of us is going to be that there is just a lot of fun things to do in Meridian. We have grown a lot over the last few years and the number of people participating in all those fun things has grown right with them. So, I'm going to start off with special events. You know, we have several of our own special events -- Unplug and Be Outside Week is in its third year this year. Cable One Movie Night in Meridian -- we just started this last Friday. It's hard to believe, but we are in our eighth season of movie night. We have shown almost -- we are getting up to almost a hundred movies that we have shown outdoors and that doesn't -- that doesn't even include the cancellations that we have had due to weather. So, movie night has been a lot of fun over the time. We are really excited about the new season this year. The Barn Sour coming up later this year. Independence Day celebration. Kleiner Park Live is a new event that we are starting this year in partnership with Sona Productions. We are very excited to get this -- to get this event going. It's going to be a six week concert series Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 11 of 74 out at the band shell at Kleiner Park. We just actually found out today what the lineup of bands is going to be and so that will be up on our website very soon. Shelly has been doing a great job helping me put together fliers and we are going to start marketing it heavily here pretty soon. We have the community block party and, then, we also have a new disk golf -- disk golf tournament that we are going to be hosting at Kleiner Park that we are going to set up a temporary disk golf course out at the park. So, we are very excited to have all of these -- you know, all of our events that have been coming back year after year, but, you know, in addition to the events that we host, you know, and, then, also Dairy Days has been here for, obviously, a very long time, there is really a growing contingency of events that are hosted by outside organizations that we are -- we are very proud to have in our parks and it's -- you know, it makes -- it makes the city -- you know, the residents that live here know it's a quality of life thing when people have so many things that they can do on a regular basis, events like the Meridian Kiwanis Wing Off. The KTSY Parktacular. The Meridian Summer Arts Festival. The Goldie Locks Ride. These are events that have been coming back year after year to Meridian because of the parks that we have to offer to them and it's just -- it's a great thing that we can offer those types of events to -- to our residents. So, we are very pleased to have events like that and, like I said, there is a growing number. We have already hosted new events this year that we are hoping are going to turn into those annual events, like the food truck rally, the Capital Christian Easter Egg Hunt and the Treasure Valley Kite Festival, among others that are still on the schedule for this -- for this calendar year. The growth in events has been -- has been incredible. Last year we had, you know, 43 temporary use permits that were submitted to be in parks and at that time that was the biggest number we had ever had. You know, the biggest number before that was 37, 38, which was the year before. This year it says here 54, but even since this slide was created there has been two more and so actually have 56 events on the calendar so far this year and in the -- you know, in the middle of the year, June, July, August, is really our wheelhouse for events and, you know, I have got a staff that I like to keep track of called event days and as you can see events days on there, well -- so temporary use permit is just -- it's a single permit. Like for movie night I submit one event -- one temporary use permit, but it's a 12 -- it's a 12 week event. There is 12 days. And so that would count for 12 event days. So, it gives a better picture of how many things are actually going on on a regular basis. Well, this year in June, July, and August, there are 59 event days over that 92 day period, which comes to about an event every 1.6 days happening in Meridian. Obviously, many of those overlap days that are going on at the same time. Most of them are happening on weekends, but there is an incredible amount of things happening this summer for people to go out and spend time with their families. None of those weekends are more evident than coming up here during Dairy Days when we have Dairy Days at Storey Park, we have the Meridian Youth Baseball Dairy Days tournament going on, which regularly brings in 90 or so teams into the valley. The Boise Breakout lacrosse tournament has also become one of those annual events there at Heroes Park and bring in 30 -- 30 or 40 teams from out of state. Movie night will be that Friday. The Meridian Kiwanis Wing Off will be that Saturday at Kleiner Park and, then, the KTSY Parktacular is that Sunday at Settlers Park and so -- I mean there is no shortage of things to do, particularly in June in Meridian. So, we are very very pleased with all the events that are taking place. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 12 of 74 Christmas in Meridian in one that I did not mention in the previous slide, because we felt that it was -- it was worthy of its own slide, just -- there was so much work that was put in by the Christmas in Meridian committee to get this event up and running and we are really hoping that it's going to be a new Christmas tradition in Meridian. The committee has already met twice and we are already talking about, you know, what went right, what went wrong this year, you know, we are -- we are well aware that there was plenty of both and there is lots of lessons learned about that what happened that first year, so we are very excited to bring it back in 2014 and for many many years to come and so, you know -- and what we are hoping is not -- you know, bring back the parade, of course, the tree lighting ceremony, the winterland festival, the business decorating contest. The symphony -- we would love for the symphony to be a part of the event and eventually what we are hoping to make it is kind of a dairy days like event where there is several things going on throughout the week and where different organizations are hosting different events through the week, so that, you know, families can take their pick of what's going on during that week. That's kind of the vision for Christmas in Meridian. And, then, finally, volunteers is another thing that has been -- has been going really well in Meridian. Obviously, with Kleiner Park there has been a lot of tree planting opportunities and Eagle Scout opportunities. So, in 2013 we just about made it to 4,000 total volunteer hours and according to the typical value of a volunteer hour that savings to the city is over 60,000 dollars. So, we are very pleased to be able to host these volunteer projects. We have Eagle Scouts. We have regular, you know, just like Boy Scouts or Cub Scout groups. We have churches. And, you know, any number of different kinds of groups that will come through and want to have service projects and we do our best to accommodate everybody. We have had several, you know, painting projects and there is just lots of things that can get done with volunteers that free up our staff to get other work done. So, we are very fortunate to have the service -minded community that we have that they can -- they can dedicate this many hours to our community. So, that's all that I have, so I'm going to turn it over now to Garrett to talk about adult sports. Thank you. White: Madam Mayor and Council, thanks for having us today. Much appreciated. Get into adult sports. Some of the programs that we have, obviously, are basketball, dodge ball, flag football, softball and volleyball that were existing. Some of the new things that we have done this last year was add a spring men's basketball league, which started in February, ran through the first week of April. We also started new programs -- such as the co-ed flag football league, where you have noncontact passing only, so it allows us to be creative in that and get co-eds involved in it as well, not just always a men's sport. Some of the things that we have added to our program from last year at the end of the fall season, it was traditionally always an eight game regular season and, then, that was it. So, what we have done is we have bumped the price a little bit to help pay for these, but we added a single elimination end -of -season tournament to that to allow teams to really feel like they were part of the league and it went to a playoff system. Another thing we have added last year -- last year was the first year we had this is just based on the number of teams that we have in volleyball and volleyball is one of our most popular sports, one of our biggest sports as you guys know with the gym space and things like that. So, we are trying to be creative in ways to keep doing volleyball, keep, you know, Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 13 of 74 servicing these teams. So, we created an outdoor volleyball league, which is held on the courts there. So, that was successful last year. We had 30 teams. First year we run it, so it was great and it actually starts tonight this year. So, overall with the adult sports programs we are just trying to be creative with the facilities we currently have in adding programs that help service the public here and Meridian residents, so going -- and the tournaments, I almost forgot that. Some of the tournaments we host just in teams of -- obviously, you guys all know about the holiday classic volleyball tournament that we helped raise funds for the Kiwanis Hope Tree program. So, last year -- we started that thing three years ago now and every year we average anywhere about 2,000 dollars to help with the Kiwanis Hope Tree. It's all based on how many teams we get registered for the tournament and sponsors and things like that, but overall it's been a huge success. Last year was the first year we actually did this. It was a 24 hour softball tournament for men at Storey Park and literally the games ran through the middle of the night, 3:00 a.m. games, 4:00 a.m. games, things like that. And it was a huge success. I'm already getting people asking about it this year. New teams are interested in it this year, as well as the 16 that were in it last year. The biggest tournament that we host is over Memorial weekend. The girls fast pitch tournament. There is several different divisions -- there is four different divisions, a 12-1.1, 14 and 16- U and 18-U divisions. This tournament seems to grow every year. Three years ago. Three years ago when we kind of got it handed to us or helped partner with Judy Crandall and Mountain View High School is -- started with 27 teams three years ago, then, it went to 30 and, then, last year -- last month we had 41 teams in that. So, it just keeps growing. In that tournament we actually had five teams that come from out of state -- or out of the valley to come and participate in a tournament and it just keeps growing every year with the tournaments. All that kind of equals into some of the sports teams and numbers, as you will see here on the next slide. These are just the teams and so you can see the upward trend that we have going with teams. Some of them are new programs, trying to be creative, like I said, with the -- or the current facilities that we have, but the trend keeps going up obviously in 2013 and 2014 we haven't quite finished with the softball, flag football and dodge ball programs, but we are anticipating that we will, obviously, beat the number of teams we had last year just with the growth that we had and those include the tournament teams that we have. If you include the tournament teams we have, we have over 500 teams that we oversee throughout the year, if you add the tournament teams just in the volleyball tournament, girls fast pitch tournament and the other tournaments. So, we are over 500 in that aspect of that. When it comes to teams it also turns into games, how many games do I schedule throughout the season -- throughout the year and it turns out to be just over 11 games per night on average. That's year around, Monday through Friday, on that. So, it turns out there is a lot of things happening every night throughout the year in games. Moving on to another thing by the numbers. It's also the usage. As you can see the trend kind of keeps going up and it kind of, you know, flat lined there. Reason being is literally turned things away or we capped it at a hundred in the spring and 90 in the fall. Last year you will see the number of unused was at 77 and if you remember it was a pretty dry season, so we didn't have rain outs. I think we had one rain out and most -- I think three games were only rained out, the rest of them got in. So, a lot of those spaces would be open for rain outs. Otherwise, things just keep being pushed back, back, back Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 14 of 74 and with no lights in the fields it makes it difficult to get all the games in, so that's why we have the number there. That was like that because of the dry -- dry year last year. Again, on the gym space and gym usage throughout the year, as you guys all know, we are looking for gym space and a lot of people are looking for gym space and we are looking into partnerships and things like that. You can see that the -- again, the trend there that we are constantly growing. We added a little bit more gym space last year and we were able to create a spring basketball program mainly because we were able to get into gyms -- we added Meridian Academy last year to our school district agreement and Cole Valley actually had an extra date come open to where we actually were able to get it in the spring an extra one compared to normal. So, use the gym space, we advertised for adult basketball program and got 20 teams and were able to fill the gym space. But you also see that some -- sometimes we struggle or I struggle with my adult sports program is I don't really advertise, because we don't have enough room for the teams that we do advertise. So, right now that's where we are at and with the gym space and things I think that's all I really have. Moving on, go the classes and camps, but overall thank you guys for listening and at this time I will turn it over to Patrick with the classes and camps. Dilley: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, thank you again for your time today and letting us all talk. We appreciate it very much. I just want to run down about classes and camps over the past year, echoing what Colin and Garrett have said. There is a lot of fun things to do in Meridian and we keep increasing it and trying to meet the needs of the population growth as well. So, we have some of our old favorites as usual. Our marshal arts, our yoga, our fitness groups, zumba, things like that that are trending and very attractive to people to come down and meet a group of like minded people from other members of the community that will meet at the community center and have a workout and we -- we also added a few things this year to our summer activity guide at least right now. There is where we have -- we changed kind of the name of our senior whitewater rafting trips to kind of trending in the field recreation these days is 50 and active and so anybody who is over 50, they want to get together and go whitewater rafting or go kayaking we also added a family adventure for kayaking and a womens only to compliment our program from last summer. Those should be fun this summer and myself or one of our rec staff will escort the individuals going whitewater rafting. We also have a professional guide that comes with us, so that's a good fund day of the summer for one of us every once in awhile and what I also wanted to point out in this, we have all of our -- there is some new programs, as I just said, that we added and, then, we have -- this is where summer camps, summer camps just started this week, so I have one foot out there and one foot in here, so we have our staff all out in school at Sienna and Prospect that has really enhanced our summer camp programs and our offerings due to the school district agreement that we were able to secure and with your blessing and so we -- we have locations, we have some day camps and at Sienna and Prospect and we have an art camp and our outdoor adventure camp meets at Prospect Elementary as well. We have our sports camp in Chateau Park and Heroes Park alternating over the course of the summer and, then, in Kleiner Park we have -- through a contracted instructor we have some musical theater programs. This year they are doing -- or this week they are doing Beauty and the Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 15 of 74 Beast, so -- performance on Friday. I will be there. I think. Or Shelly will be there. I know I'm going to Newsies, which is next week, so I will be at that one. Another thing that I want to point out with our summer camp programs -- and this was a suggestion from you, I believe, Madam Mayor, to get involved with the library district in my first summer here, which is two years ago, so -- or after my first summer and, then, so this last year we kind of implemented their reading program into our summer camps and so all of the kids in our parks and rec day camps participating in the Meridian Library District's summer reading program and earning points and reading as many hours and books as they can to get prizes and things like that. There is a little incentive there, but -- and the library district also comes out and does programs with us once a week at each camp and they have some of their -- their staff come out and, then, we definitely go on a field trip to the library so the kids can understand each summer what their library can offer them, so we are definitely proud of that partnership and it's been very beneficial for both of us. Let's see. So, just some activity guide enrollments by the year. It's definitely been increasing and, you know, due to the population and also just identifying some needs of, you know, what's been very popular and which classes are maxing out and which we need more of and, then, I definitely attribute the increase in enrollments to identifying those needs within the fall and the spring and our community center itself is just for -- to throw some numbers at you again -- I know we have been doing that all day, but it's scheduled about 40 to 50 hours a week in the fall and in the spring and there is about 400 to 450 visitors each week. So, that comes through the doors of the Meridian Community Center. That's adult enrollments, youth enrollments and, then, if you include at least one parent for each -- or guarding for each child. So, there is that many people walking through the door every week and we are glad to have the space and it's definitely getting its money's worth, so it's -- it's quite packed each -- every week, so just wanted to point that out. And, then, moving on here to Teen Activity Council. Obviously, part of the Mayor's Youth Advisory Council and as the Mayor said, prior when Emily Jane was getting her award, everything is kind of -- all the kids are really kind of involved in every subcommittee now and so we just had such a great year with MYAC this year and the amount of dedication the kids had this year. Our high school students in Meridian were -- were just amazing and we had kids dancing at the trunker treat, which was -- which was really great. That pizza costume was really awesome. I don't know if everybody can see that. But the trunker treat this year was a new program and me and Ken just said, hey, why don't we do this -- we have always kind of looked for a Halloween event to do and I don't know if any of you were able to make it out there. I know I saw Councilman Cavener and Madam Mayor and Bill out there and we -- it was just -- there was -- there was kids dancing all over the plaza and there were -- we had about 70 businesses come out -- local businesses come out and provide candy and pass out some advertising materials to parents, but -- to support the event and we shut down Broadway out here and it was just a -- just a really -- really great event that I was happy to be a part of, but also happy that our students planned for the community. Ignite Youth is one of my favorite every year where kids can -- we basically give the teenagers the stage to say anything they want to about the world and -- as they see it and so we had over 30 applications this year and we could only take 12 kids to actually give a presentation. So, along with that the TAC planned some other fun activities and this year we did some fun stuff. We went roller skating and went to Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 16 of 74 Steelheads games and went snowboarding and just providing safe, fun activities for teens to be able to enjoy with their friends. The electronic activity guide. So, what I wanted to touch base on with this is we have really been -- especially now with the addition of Shelly -- which we really really enjoy having Shelly with us and it definitely helps us as a recreation unit definitely and as a whole -- department as a whole really become more cohesive in being able to kind of get everything on the same page, so that it's -- it's all interactive with our websites and being able to get that out there in the media through social media and being able to market all of our programs together. The electronic activity guide has really proved useful in the fact that you can take our paper activity guide, put it in a pdf and, then, just put links all over it. So, if anybody opens the activity guide and they want to enroll in yoga class they can click a button and it's one click away and they can enroll in that and with the way of the world it's necessary and what's also great about the activity guide it gives us the opportunity to if they see an event that they can click on that event and Colin has created an event page for that event. I have created a page for our summer camps. Garrett's created a page for all of our adult sports leagues. So, anything that they want to click in this is pretty much clickable and it will take them to a page that is specific to whichever information they want to access and there is also a page to click to see how are commissioners are and a link to click to see who our staff is and so it's as transparent as it possibly can be for the public is what we like to do, so -- and this is really becoming a useful tool for us and for access and it's probably cut down on a few phone calls to the office. So, with that I think we will move to looking into the future and will give it back to Steve to take it on home. De Weerd: Take it on home, Steve. Siddoway: I'm here to wrap it up. What an amazing team. And one person who hasn't had any slides to present -- but, Rachel, will you stand up for a second. We need to acknowledge Rachel who helped all of us put all of these slides together. Thank you. Other things that we are working on include the Rail With Trail project. We have a roll in the Meridian Road interchange landscaping project. We are actively working on partnerships with both the Boys and Girls Club and the YMCA. We also have several ACHD cost share projects that have either landscaping or interim treatments along them that we help to coordinate and we are -- have hands in all of those with this relatively small staff. A couple of accomplishments -- additional that I thought -- that didn't fit in elsewhere that I wanted to note. A major update to the parks code and want to acknowledge Bill's team with legal in helping us to do that and the partnership policy that came through the parks and rec commission through the Council and that we are now actively using with potential partners like the YMCA and the Boys and Girls Club. Probably the main thing that we have coming that I want to make sure is on your radar is in that upper left, the Comprehensive Park and Recreation System Plan. You helped us budget for an update to that plan. The request for proposals for that project is out currently. We held our pre -proposal conference for it last week. Proposals are due at the end of this month. We will be doing selections through -- in the month of July and we hope to be under contract for that project in August with a big kick off early this fall. So, we expect a lot of activity and public outreach and updating our plans and goals as Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 17 of 74 part of that. We will be doing master plans for the three sites, including the Borup property, the Aldape property, and south Meridian. We are also going to be working on plans for two feature neighborhood parks, including William Watson and the one in Bellano Creek. As you saw I think just two weeks ago, we do have a CDBG request in for some community center fagade improvements that we hope to do at the community center in downtown next year. We have two commissioners here today and Phil Liddell and Kent Goldthorpe, will you, please, stand. Our commission makes a great contribution and behind all of these activities that you see and hear from staff is a team of nine -- two of our nine citizen volunteers who help us and I want to personally thank you and the rest of our parks and recreation commissioners who help to make our activities a success and advise us along the way. You can see their 2014 priorities. President Stoll was in front of you earlier this year presenting those, so I don't need to regurgitate them, but I wanted to just make sure they were in front of you and let you know that they are actively working on them. That concludes our presentation. Maybe just in closing I'd just mention that we do have Gene Kleiner Day this Saturday. The City Council passed the ordinance for that last year. We are celebrating it this weekend at 6:00 p.m. with a free concert in the Kleiner Park band shell with the Meridian symphony orchestra, the cost of which is paid for through the Mayor's State of the City address proceeds and we are very excited to have that as another part of our program. So, thank you very much and I will stand for any questions. De Weerd: Thank you, Steve. And I would just note that at the Coffee with the Mayor this morning -- and appreciate Councilman Cavener joining us -- but it was very well attended and hands down that was the largest comment that we received is what an asset that park has been to our community, to this region. Your parks staff continues to just take such great pride in that gift that we received and it's actually something that you and I have sat with Mr. Kleiner and guaranteed we would take care of it just as he had hoped we would and your staff just continues to do that. Recently we saw a letter to the editor about Settlers Park and condition there. I know I have gone to your staff meetings and have given kudos to your staff for what they do, the pride they take in our parks and parks give communities their -- their identity, they help brand us and we just appreciate what you and your team do to continue to keep that bar high on our quality of life and how popular our parks are. Siddoway: Thank you. De Weerd: Council, any questions? Bird: I have none. De Weerd: No? Bird: Very good. De Weerd: Very thorough. We appreciate our two commissioners for being here with us and, staff, thank you again for all you do to make this a great place to live. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 18 of 74 Siddoway: Thank you very much. B. Parks and Recreation Department: Storey Dog Park Update De Weerd: We just heard from the department of fun. Okay. Item 6-B is also under our Parks and Recreation Department. We will hear about the Storey -- Storey Park dog park -- Rountree Bark Park -- Bird: Rountree Bark Park. Barton: So, we are looking for a name. De Weerd: We have a name. Bird: That's the name. De Weerd: We have been calling it the Rountree Bark Park I think for -- how many years, Mr. Rountree? Barton: Madam Mayor, Council, thanks for the opportunity to give you an date on our plans for a dog park. As you remember we were before you on the -- at the November 19th City Council meeting. At that time we had -- were asking for direction on what site to locate this amenity. We had the Lanark site, the Borup-Bottles property on Cherry Lane and, then, also the Storey Park site. At that meeting we were given direction to locate our next dog park at the Storey Park site. As Jay mentioned to you a few minutes earlier we are pleased to announce that we recorded title on the piece of property and we feel now we have the green light as far as property ownership is concerned and part of our discussion today is asking your direction for level of effort and, of course, budget. We have three different selections that -- or three different concepts that I'd like to review that -- we have been behind the scenes waiting for this property to close and been behind the scenes developing these concepts with a consultant and going through that process. So, with that said I guess we will jump into kind of the nuts and bolts of what we are thinking of developing and, you know, feel free to stop me at anytime and ask questions. Like I said, we have three concepts developed. If you -- if you take the major differences between each one -- and we can just draw a line through this and the concept for -- for each one in the main area of the park is consistent between A, B and C. The difference between A and B is the parking area here and, then, Option C does not have any reconfiguring of the existing park parking lot. So, just to get into kind of the nuts and bolts of the park as we see it, there is a driveway connection with parking out to Watertower Road. There would be an entry plaza in that location with a restroom. It will be a single occupancy men's and women's restroom. As you leave that spot there is -- there is two different areas, one for small dogs, one for large dogs. And because dog parks are kind of -- they really take a lot of wear and tear and a lot of abuse, we have tried to kind of think ahead and try to counteract some of those challenges by -- by creating a hierarchy of surfacing. As you Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 19 of 74 go through the gate there would be an area that would have artificial grass in it similar to the rec grass that's at Settlers Park tennis complex and, then, as you transition out from that there would be a gravel area depicted by this gray material, this gray shading right here. There is a strong desire to have natural grass in dog parks and we recognize that by including some natural grass areas. But these natural grass areas would be towards the rear of the park. So, during times where there is inclement weather, frozen soils, wet conditions, or even during periods where the grass is simply worn out and it needs some turf rehab, by locating that towards the back of the park we can fence this off, maintain access all the way around it, maintain still a pretty good size area for people to come and enjoy. One of the one -- one of the challenges that we have with -- with this location is just the interface between the softball field and the dog park. De Weerd: They can chase balls. I mean -- Barton: And I -- and I agree that the chasing part is good. It's the -- it's the getting hit part that's probably bad, so -- and especially for parked cars. Along this edge right here and, then, down this entire side where the daycare is, we see a solid vinyl fence and, then, the perimeter of the softball field requires a netting system that would be similar to what you would see on a golf course driving range. Not that tight of mesh, but little bit, you know, open three -by -three squares to catch softballs. So, I think we have -- we have kind of thought about that and, you know, we are trying to maximize the entire area. We had one concept that had this setback here and it just kind of became -- we were really eating up a lot of space in the dog park. I mean we want to get as much as we can. Right now this plan has almost two and a half acres between the small dog and the large dog area and that's over and above any parking requirements and landscape setbacks from Watertower Road. So, with that we can move to Option B and Option B has the dog park itself, the layout, the restroom and the surfacing is identical Option A. The only difference is with Option B is it does not have this part of the existing park parking lot reconfigured and one of the things we like about this is that we would take the drive aisle and shift the drive aisle to this side of the existing restroom and through. It does two things. The first thing is there is a traffic calming aspect to that configuration and, then, it also -- it creates an opportunity to connect the existing restroom to the park, where park users, if you're at this picnic shelter right here you don't have to cross a drive aisle to use the restroom. That seems to be one of the major complaints with that. We even locate some temporary restroom facilities down here, because people just don't like to cross the drive aisle. So, Option B does not have the reconfiguration of the existing park parking lot. Everything else is completely identical. Option C has no -- just reconfiguring the existing park parking lot and it has -- it has a drive aisle, but there is no parking associated with that drive aisle. It's just a through way. It is -- we see Option A as providing the best service in regards to the dog park amenities, the traffic calming aspects, the -- the park parking -- the additional -- the additional parking in the park, which is in a great demand during softball games and also events in Storey Park. Of course, you know, with -- with those additions, then, there is -- there is additional cost involved. And I think right there I will stop and answer any questions that you might have. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 20 of 74 De Weerd: Council, any questions? Cavener: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Cavener. Cavener: Mike, you may have touched on this, but I may have missed it. With Option A how many new parking spots would be created? Barton: Madam Mayor, Councilman Cavener, there is roughly 125 parking places with Option A. Cavener: And with Option -- follow up, Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Uh-huh. Cavener: And with Option B and C? Barton: Seventy-five. Barton: B has the same number. C has 75. Cavener: Okay. De Weerd: Mike, with Option A how many are lost with the reconfiguration up by the softball field? Barton: There is a -- Madam Mayor, great question. There is a -- there would be a loss of approximately ten spots right here and possibly a couple on this end, because this -- this would be the dumpster enclosure located right here, but there is about ten spots lost. De Weerd: Have you looked at maybe doing kind of a mix between Option A and C where you still do the redo of the existing restroom and parking lot, not doing the parking in the drive aisle in between the connecting finger and, then, doing the parking below? Barton: So, Madam Mayor, I think if I understand correctly is -- De Weerd: It's not doing the pavement and the parking spots. Barton: A pathway to connect down here? De Weerd: Well, you would still do the drive aisle, you just wouldn't have the parking. Barton: And that particular one is Option C. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 21 of 74 De Weerd: Yeah. But Option C doesn't do any redo in the -- that's in the existing parking area. Bird: The existing restroom and -- De Weerd: Yeah. Making that safer. You take this and, then, you plug in the north end of Option A. Barton: Correct. We haven't explored that. I don't know if we alter the existing parking lot to ship the drive aisle to this side over here and that goes through full -- full review and permitting, if that would meet fire code for turnaround, because there is -- unless these radius -- they would meet -- but that's just a challenge that we could explore. We would have to see. De Weerd: I must not be clear, because I'm still saying connect -- connect that parking lot -- yeah. Thank you for my interpreter there. Appreciate that. Barton: I apologize for not understanding. So, we could look at that. This -- the reconfiguration of this parking lot -- I mean if we start talking about budget and, you know, what implications there are, it's about 100,000 dollars to refigure that existing parking lot. So, I don't know at that point are we approaching the -- are we getting to the point of adding more parking or not, I -- we can certainly look at that. De Weerd: And last question is the restroom, is that restroom being designed similar to the restroom that was in 8th Street Park? Barton: It is. De Weerd: Okay. Perfect. Okay. Any other questions? Zaremba: I would just comment that I lean towards putting as much parking in there as we can and I -- and at the point where we are doing the initial project that's the cheapest time ever to put it in, as opposed to deciding later that we should have put it in and adding it, but I -- I lean towards Option A. I think changing the pattern in that section that's on the north end of what we are looking at is a good idea, both for traffic calming and for access to that restroom, but I also support doing the -- and adding all the parking that we can add and I'm glad this is moving forward regardless of what we do. De Weerd: Mike, what was the budget amendment? Wasn't it 1.5? Barton: So, if this -- if it's Council's desire to move this project forward in this fiscal year, we would come forward with a budget amendment at the next Council meeting for 1.559 million dollars to move this forward in this fiscal year, plus operating costs of another 24,000 dollars and those operating costs are for parking lot maintenance, grounds maintenance, Idaho Power, turf rehab, equipment maintenance, seasonal staffing, so -- Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 22 of 74 and that's part of the discussion if it's -- if this is a budget enhancement -- I think we are looking for two things today. We are looking for clear direction on -- on, you know, level of effort and, then, also timing and if -- if it's your desire to move this forward as soon as possible it would require a budget amendment and if that's the case we are prepared to move forward and break ground sometime late summer, early fall. Siddoway: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, I think the quick answer to that is -- so the 1.5 million dollars is the place holder amount that we have in the CIP. The budget amendment itself has not been done yet and will be crafted after your direction today. De Weerd: Okay. So, Steve, as I understood it, there would be some money that was saved from a Storey Park enhancement; is that correct? Siddoway: I don't know about saved. We would be advancing the funds and maybe what you're thinking of is that 22 percent of those funds are eligible for impact fees, so they wouldn't hit the General Fund. So, 22 percent of whatever the amount is would be impact fee eligible and the remainder would be from the General Fund. De Weerd: Okay. But just -- Council, you will hear in less than a month that we are quickly depleting our capital improvement fund balance. So, the closer you can get to our placeholder the better. We do not have unlimited funds. So, if you keep an eye to meeting the needs that you anticipate -- I think extra parking would be nice. Has it been needed? Not necessarily. If you ask the speedway it is. But for our park projects it hasn't necessarily been. We are adding the 75 spots that come with the -- the dog park and so just looking to see if we can balance all the wants and needs, but focus on the needs first. I don't want to be the wet blanket, but -- Borton: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Yes, Mr. Borton. I think that was you Borton: My voice is squawky. I guess a couple of thoughts. Your comments on the Option A -C blend and the reason behind it, it does make -- make some sense. I know it's not one that's necessarily presented. If I recall right, the northern portion of Option A with the -- the resign with the restroom, with a cost of about 100,000 dollars, is a cost that would be incurred to accomplish that whether it's done in conjunction with the entire project or approximately if it were to be done, you know, a year later if it was decided to be added on. There wasn't any -- other than the design documents, any real unique savings specific to that portion of the project doing it now was there? Barton: Madam Mayor, Councilman Berton -- and that -- that is -- you're asking about the new restroom? Borton: Correct. The northern portion and the redesign of the -- Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 23 of 74 Barton: Yeah. There are some economies of scale. Could be done later. Borton: Madam Mayor? The economy for -- I think it was design cost and there was some phasing, but it wasn't as though you were trying to capture a huge opportunity that only existed when you -- Barton: No. Borton: Okay. And the other question is whether or not this project needed to be done with a budget amendment in this year's budget versus budgeted in what we are going to be working on for the next year and the next month. Barton: Madam Mayor and Councilman Borton, if it's just timing -- if it's -- if it's not moved forward with a budget amendment and we go through the normal budget process to receive funding October 1 st, we will -- we will be too late to start it this year. So, we will, then, be breaking ground next march'ish. So, if it's -- De Weerd: And I guess just to answer that, as we closed the PD dog park that was when we had the discussion, Council, the -- what we were telling our dog park patrons that we were trying to fast track this to get it open as soon as we could, but we had to do it right and so I just wanted to make it clear that when we had this conversation with Council earlier we did get the nod to be able to share that with the dog park people that did come and were concerned that they wouldn't have a place to go for -- and they wanted to get an estimate of when we would have it open. So, I guess it was always anticipated that we would be coming with the budget amendment and getting this going as quickly as possible. I guess what we did anticipate were some of the hurdles that we had to -- to clear before we got to this point. Bird: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: I agree with everything you say, except we didn't tell the people we were going to put 1.6 million dollars into a dog park. We agreed to get one built, but we did not realize that it was going to be to this degree of dollar volume and whether it's right, wrong, or indifferent, I -- pretty expensive for a dog park. De Weerd: Well, I will say the place holder in the capital improvement plan that has been in front of all of you hasn't changed, that -- you're right, it wasn't 1.6, it has been 1.5, so -- Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: I just would comment that the alternatives are to put the dog park someplace else, which probably would have been more expensive and there would still be a cost to develop this even if we made a ball field out of it. The cost of putting in the through drive and the parking would exist no matter what you put there, whether it's a ball park or a dog park or even open grass with some chairs. So, some of this cost -- if we are Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 24 of 74 going to develop it at all doesn't go away. I mean the difference between doing something else on this property and still having a to do a dog park somewhere else would put it way over the amount that we are looking at now in my opinion. Rountree: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: My recollection of all of this is that at one point in time there was an agreement made between the dog park people, the city, and the police department to utilize the canine operation on a temporary basis for a dog park, which we did. Which became pretty much a permanent operation. In the meantime, the dog supporting patrons organized and put together a group to raise funds for a dog park that was scoped and thought to be in the Borup property at some point in time in the future. Now we have gone from that to having the police department expand on their property, on their facility, to eliminate the dog park and an indication that we are going to create another dog park and I agree with Councilman Bird, we didn't put a number on it and there may be a place holder in the budget, but there is a lot of place holders in the budget that in my opinion, as we go through the next budget process, there may be some place holders that are eliminated. I can't agree with spending 1.6 million dollars on a dog park as a need for the city, particularly with the partnership that we were told existed that was going to help raise funds to do this that we are apparently just going to blow off. Now, the last I heard they hadn't done much in terms of raising funds, but the partnerships we have had in the past they haven't necessarily completely paid for projects, but they have been significant contributors in getting them done. So, I just -- I think this is a lovely concept, I think it's probably -- gets into the wants area, as opposed to the need. It might be something that we ultimately have with that piece of property, but I -- if we are going to consider that kind of an expense I think it needs to be considered in total as we look at our budget and what our true needs are and I guess what I'm saying this is -- this is really low on my priority list for the need for the city in terms of budget considerations right now and that's where I am, that's where I have always been. Nothing new to anybody. De Weerd: No, but I guess it was three and a half years ago we saw the true number anticipated of dog owners in our community and this -- they have as much opportunity or I guess right to expect a park that -- to be used by what's important to them and that is their dogs and to many dog owners their dogs are their kids and they don't have kids. So, the youth sport facilities that we spend millions of dollars in, that doesn't speak to them. A dog park does. We have talked about how we can make this something that will be an asset to those citizens that this is a priority to at the most affordable cost and we have had many conversations about do you really need to a restroom down there when you have one not too far and so we have tried to be cost conscious about that. There is no doubt there is a need for a dog park and a place in our community to run dogs and -- and that's why we moved forward with this conversation to begin with and spent a lot of time and resources bringing these options back to this Council. I don't know if developing, as Councilman Zaremba put -- developing this piece, whether it's for Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 25 of 74 a dog park or anything else, that the price would be that different, because there are elements to it that you have to have in that drive aisle and the parking is one of the largest costs to this to begin with. So, I don't know what -- what we can do any different, but I will tell you that there are many dog owners that look at the money we put into a tennis facility and would argue the same thing. So, we don't want to go down there. We are trying to offer a park system that meets our citizens' interests and their -- what they have expressed as needs and this has been a need that's been identified for a number of years and so I don't know how else to answer to that. Bird: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: I -- while I agree that we need a dog park I don't know as we need to spend this. And when you compare this to recreation, there is no comparison. Recreation brings revenue in. I don't know as a dog park ever brought a penny in. So, we don't want to go that route of comparing what -- what's good for one part of the community and what's not. All my concern is is 1.6 million for a dog park that -- I mean I don't think dogs care whether they run on grass, gravel or weeds. None of mine ever did. But while I'd like to see this in, right now I think there is other priorities in the city that could use the money more than that. Cavener: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Cavener. Cavener: I guess the point of view that I would share is that we have -- we have dog owners now that we are serving less than we were six months ago. We had a dog park facility and we are expanding the police department to meet our community's needs and we made a commitment to our citizens that we are going to provide a facility for them and for us to sit here now and say, well, maybe not, when the place holder, whether we agree with it or not, has been in place and we made -- and we have asked staff, based on that, to come up with a plan, they have met with construction agencies who have validated the plan and this is the cost to build this facility and I'm frustrated now that we are saying, oh, this may be something that we don't want to do and I think if I was a dog owner in Meridian I would be frustrated as well. De Weerd: In particular that we are having the conversation now, rather than when we first started the conversation when we moved forward with the training facility for the police department. Barton: Madam Mayor, Council, if I might add that, you know, this concept and level of effort -- part of it was hatched from the dog park users group, those -- the citizens group that frequented the other dog park and these are not the same folks that tried the original fundraising, but there is a very passionate group of people there that would like to see this -- this get built at this site and, you know, when we approached them and, Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 26 of 74 you know, sort of talking about a dog park, some of these ideas, you know, the surfacing and layout and small dog, large dog, and different fencing and stuff, these are ideas that were hatched from this citizen's group and just dog parks on a whole are not for dogs, they are for people and it's a social event for -- where people -- different dog owners can come and congregate in a space and, you know, meet each other and talk to each other. There is a real sense of pride and community with -- with these people and that's their way of socializing like it is people that go to their son's little league game or daughter's basketball game. It's the same kind of thing. It's just -- it's different because there is dogs there, but it's really a social gathering place for people and that's what we are trying to create and we are trying to keep this -- this gathering place as durable and as nice and as sustainable as possible. We visited other dog parks and they are -- if they are not put together correctly they deteriorate, they are muddy and rusted and it's just not a good reflection on the community's parks department and level of effort with that kind of a facility. So, just some of the background of where we have been with this. We have presented different ideas to our parks and recreation commission, they have -- they have been behind this plan as well, so we think we have done kind of enough out reach and communicated with the folks that this would serve that it's kind of a little bit of background behind how we got to this point. Bird: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: Mike, do you have any idea how many people use the dog park? Barton: Councilman Bird -- or Madam Mayor, Councilman Bird, I -- I don't have -- I know that the dog park that was removed at the police department was approximately a third of an acre and it was -- it was very popular and I know just driving by -- I didn't really do head counts and numbers and stuff like that, but I could say that it was very very popular and, you know, with that it was -- it was at times muddy and we had sand -- dumped sand in there to counteract some of that. It was -- there weren't many amenities. There was no shade. There was drinking water that was accessible seasonally. There was a restroom there and it's been our experience that if -- if you have a facility or amenity that is -- that you can be proud of that people are going to frequent that and I know that I have talked to people that say, well, you know, my friends don't go there, because it's crowded or there was no separation between large dogs and small dogs and some of the typical layout and amenities that most good dog parks have didn't exist at the old one. So, just back to the -- kind of that background in how we got to this point, we -- we put our ear to the ground and listened to what the community was telling us and just tried to come up with a concept and a plan for this site that would serve that group. Bird: You would be safe to say that average of 15 to 20 dogs a day use that? I mean I drove by quite a few times and sometimes there wasn't any dogs in it, but other times there would be five or ten dogs in it. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 27 of 74 Holman: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Yes. Holman: I think I can answer part of that question. I used to live right by the dog park and utilized it a lot and I would say probably one time that I was there I was the only person there and that's because it was freezing outside. Sometimes -- there would be an average of -- between five and ten people, sometimes up to 20, 25, which was too much for that small space, so we weren't there, but I mean I do have a little bit of knowledge, because we used it quite a bit. De Weerd: The chief probably could tell you how many different cars were -- when their parking lot was full I always thought it was something going on in the police department and it wasn't, it was -- it was the dog park. So, I think there was a lot of use. It all depended on the time of the day and the temperature outside. Barton: And Madam Mayor and -- kind of along those same lines, is that we know we have a growing population and we don't want to -- we don't want to do something and find out that it's too small or in the wrong location, it's under serving the community and that we feel that this site will serve the dog community very nicely for years and years to come. Bird: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Bird? Bird: Mike -- and I -- I for one don't want to do something that we have to remodel or something later down the road. I just have a real problem with 1.6 million dollars for -- I mean I realize we get the parking and stuff we -- we probably need it. The drive through is nice, changing the north end up there. But I would be interested if we go ahead with this. I'd like a head count and I'd also like to know how many are Meridian citizens and how many are not Meridian citizens. I think you're going to be surprised. De Weerd: We can't do a head count anymore. We have no place to count heads. I can tell you what we did in our survey that showed there was a large number of dog owners -- I have a dog, I would not go to a dog park, because I walk around my block, but as Mike has pointed out, there is a socialization, just like mothers that take their kids to a playground, they like that socialization. We have a number of different specialized parks in the skate park and the tennis facilities and the horseshoe facilities and this is not unique, it's answering another set of users that have an interest, a need, and have expressed their desire and we have, in turn, expressed the commitment to bringing this to our community. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 28 of 74 Zaremba: I'm not looking at both pages right at the moment, but my interpretation is that the difference in cost between A and C, about 170,000 dollars or so and even if you took C and tried to go bare bones on that you might get to a point where the difference between the two was 200,000 dollars let's say. I think the question is if we are going to do this at all are we going to do it to be perpetually useful or -- and are we going to include some of the things that probably need to be done eventually anyhow? I think when we have made the connection to Watertower Street that we do not currently have for the rest of Storey Park, we are going to discover that this traffic calming issue is going to need to be done. The 170,000 dollars to do that and all of the parking along that connecting section -- I agree that's -- 1.6 million dollars is a lot of money, but I don't think we end up saving by cutting those pieces out and I guess what sits in the back of my mind is I think about doing this right or doing it -- or having to redo things later as we discovery we didn't do enough or whether we even want to do it. I don't notice that the general citizens walks their human children by my yard to poop in my yard, but I don't want to compliment -- I don't want to contemplate what would happen with a bunch of angry dog owners. I think even though we called it an experiment to put a bark park in the police facility, the general citizens don't think of it as an experiment anymore and I hear from a lot of people that keep saying, okay, you took the dog park away, now what are you going to do. I feel we need to do it and even the difference, 170,000 dollars, that's not pocket change, I don't carry that much money around and it is a significant thing to think about, but the cost of doing it all at once in my thinking is cheaper than putting parts of it off and I think we have had that experience in other things that we have done. I guess I'm repeating myself, but I'm in favor of doing it and I'm in favor of Option A. Borton: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Borton. Borton: I think the parks department has done a great job designing these options and it sounds like providing the feedback that, quite frankly we have asked. I'm supportive of the idea behind Option C. I'm not supportive of a budget amendment right now. I think it's a great idea, but it's all relative to the laundry list of other needs and wants the city has. I can't get my head around 1.3 or 1.6 being appropriate unless I see it in the context of other expenditures that we have got to fund and all the other departments and I don't think a budget amendment does that for me. It delays it a year and I understand that, but it also provides some time, if there is the dog group or -- I don't know what the right term is for the large demand or organized folks who -- who would use this to -- whether they participate more formally in our partnership agreement and cooperate in some funding effort or maybe not -- provide some opportunity for that group to speak up or if they can't, then, so be it. At least that's where I'm leaning. If it delays it, it delays it. I think -- I have used the dog park by the police station, which was borderline terrible just because it wasn't a lot to go from. So, if it's not used a lot it's probably because of that. I think this would be extremely popular. You would have a lot of first time users and it would be a wonderful amenity to the city, but for me I got to look Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 29 of 74 at 1.3 or 1.6 in relation to the other 1.3 and 1.6 expenditures that we have got and see where it ranks, so -- De Weerd: Well, I sure wish we would have had this conversation when we came through with a budget amendment for a training center that was well within -- well outside of what we anticipated the cost for. This is what has been in the plan -- not over about, but -- and, again, it's been a community promise. This Council -- and yeah, not the new Council Members, but this promise was made to our community by, one, putting it on there; two, when we decided to close our current facility and reiterate our commitment to making sure that it happened, that is why we have been working diligently to close the deal on the Storey Park's land swap with the speedway and all of that. So, this is not new. This is in our CIP and we discussed it even then. I just find this has been a moving target in citing the CIP and not even having much of a discussion on a budget amendment on something that came in well over what we anticipated, but didn't have any problem doing that. So, I guess it's going to be hard, because I take all the phone calls and certainly be more than happy to give them to you. But why a tennis player or a skater or Adventure Island Playground for that matter or any playground or walking path has a higher priority than this dog park when we have a high number of owners in our community that have dogs and have expressed a desire that this is also something that they would like. Bird: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: Back up, Tammy, and I know you don't believe that -- what you just said about the Adventure Island stuff. You want to remember, every one of those things you just mentioned we had partners that come in with some money or are paying it back. De Weerd: And the tennis association did not do what they said they would. Bird: The tennis thing -- De Weerd: We haven't made an issue on it. Bird: But let's don't -- let's don't compare. We are talking about a dog park. De Weerd: We are talking about a special use park. Bird: We are talking about a dog park that's -- that's first class and I don't think there is a councilman sitting on here -- particularly two of us that sat here a long time that had ever asked to short change something when it's been needed and you don't compare this to the safety building. That's for public safety. This -- this has nothing to do with the safety of dogs or anything else. It's a nice deal. But what -- what would it -- well, I better shut up before I put my foot in my mouth. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 30 of 74 De Weerd: Or I start talking about costs and we can go there if you really want me to. Bird: You and I could sit here all day and argue the -- De Weerd: And I know who would win. Bird: I don't know if -- I better shut up. De Weerd: Okay. So, no Council action. What -- what would you like staff to do at this point? Staff has come back to you, because this is what we have asked them to do. Now. what do we want to do? Bird: Well, it's a dog park update. What -- what do they want us to do. Do they want us to pass a budget amendment or tell them to go bring one next week? De Weerd: Mr. Bird, I think what we need is a preferred option and so they know what steps are needed next. I guess if any. Barton: Correct. And, Madam Mayor, Councilman Bird, we are -- we are looking for clear direction on -- on an option. Is it one of these options or is it another -- a different option and, then, clear direction on timing. Would you like this to be started this fiscal year or is it a next year project as it goes through the budget process? So, two things. We are -- we will respond to your direction. De Weerd: Mike, just one more question I guess on the parking. Is -- what is the parking need out there? Is there a need for the additional -- so, one option has 75, the other option has 125. Is there a need for 50 additional parking spots? Barton: Madam Mayor, during the summer it's -- with softball and baseball and the pool going and -- and, then, with dog park people added into that, we are short parking -- park parking right now. There are people that use the picnic shelter that drop their things off and they go park somewhere off site. We have had complaints from the commercial center to the east that people are parking there after hours and they are cutting through, which if we do this, we fence that -- and, in fact, part of the -- one of the discussions we had with one of those property owners to sign the fourth amendment to the CC&Rs to -- so this is an allowed use -- is they said, hey, you know, it sounds great to me, I will sign it, but you have -- you have got to do something to prevent people from parking in my parking lot to access the park. I'm concerned for the liability standpoint -- whether that exists or not I don't know, but there was concern from the neighbors with a lack of parking on our -- on our side. De Weerd: So, the cost of this is not totally for a dog park, it's to complete a number of needs in an existing park that falls short of -- of parking access, safety, and a number of other things? Barton: Correct. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 31 of 74 De Weerd: Okay. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: Just one additional comment about the parking and my experience is not that I have gone to tournaments and stuff, but I have gone to the annual city chamber of commerce softball games several times and even though there is a very small attendance at that and probably not full team membership, the parking that's available is completely taken. So, you know, I can imagine if -- if the adult leagues are putting on a tournament there, we would be very short of parking and the additional parking that you're talking about may not be enough. The issue about the fellow that needs the fence to keep public parking out of his private property, that doesn't make any difference whether it's a dog park or another ball field or even the existing situation without anything added at this end, we need to resolve that and I have said it before, I support putting in all the parking we can put in there and some of it's from my own experience, which is limited. Borton: Mr. President? Rountree: Mr. Borton. Borton: The abbreviated version of my earlier comments is I would support Option C and have Option C be brought back through with the budget process. That answers the option and the timing from my perspective. Rountree: Is that a motion? Borton: It can be. I will make that a motion and see what happens. Rountree: Then it's been moved to indicate a preference for Option C and to have the option run through budget process for funding. Is there a second? Is there a substitute motion? Zaremba: Mr. President? Rountree: Is there another motion? Zaremba: Mr. President, I would make a motion that we support Option A and that we try to get this moving this year, which means it would have to be a budget amendment. Cavener: I will second that. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 32 of 74 Rountree: Moved and seconded to move forward with Option A and have a budget amendment considered for that option. Could I have a roll call vote? Roll Call: Bird, nay; Rountree, nay; Zaremba, yea; Borton, nay; Milam, absent; Cavener, yea. MOTION FAILED: TWO AYES. THREE NAYS. ONE ABSENT. Rountree: Okay. Madam Mayor, there has been two motions made, one was Option C moving it through the budget process, the other -- and it was not seconded. The other option was move with Option A and have it be funded through a budget amendment. It was seconded and it was voted and it did not pass. So, that's where we are. De Weerd: Should have waited longer. Rountree: Now that you're back, I will see if I can float one. Madam Mayor, I move that we move forward with Option A, that it go through the budget process and, then, in Option A that the project be evaluated into two separate phases. The first phase would be the dog park portion off of Watertower and the second phase be the additional funding for parking, the interconnection through the park, and the modification for restroom facility in Storey Park. Borton: Second De Weerd: Okay. I have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Bird: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: I agree wholeheartedly with that motion, but I -- I don't like it phased, because I think you -- you're going to be paying 1.8 instead of 1.6 if you phase it and I believe that if you put the dog park in you're going to need -- you're going to need that parking -- the more parking, but I would -- I will support it and, then, we can discuss it when it comes up, but -- De Weerd: Any further discussion? Cavener: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Cavener. Cavener: I agree with the -- with the option, I think it's the right decision, I just -- I'm concerned about what we are going to do for our dog park patrons for what would ultimately be another year in this long process. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 33 of 74 De Weerd: And, Mr. Cavener, I agree with you, because this is not consistent with what we have discussed in these meetings. So, any further discussion? Madam Clerk, will you call roll. Roll Call: Bird, yea; Rountree, yea; Zaremba, nay; Borton, yea; Milam, absent; Cavener, nay. De Weerd: The ayes pass. MOTION CARRIED: THREE AYES. TWO NAYS. ONE ABSENT. De Weerd: So, I guess I would ask our Parks Department as you look at the phasing to do it separately, but also any cost savings by doing it together and so that we have that information as part of the budget process. Rountree: I agree. De Weerd: And we will give you modified -- a modification in your budget book to put this in and you will see a little bit different summary than -- than you had, but it should still be balanced. Okay. Cavener: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Cavener. Cavener: Quick question and, then, you can provide the feedback. Can we ask staff to come back with a recommendation for a temporary dog park facility then during this time? Is that something we can ask them to do? De Weerd: Mr. Cavener, I think when we looked at a temporary earlier it was -- it was kind of money out the window. If you put a temporary together you're -- it's just kind of money that you can never recoup. Cavener: Fair enough. De Weerd: So, we did consider that, because we were concerned about the time element. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: I do think it would be fair to ask the dog owners and dog advocates if they can provide a portion of this cost in partnership in donations and have them take the lead in seeing if there might be donations in kind or donations of money that could be used to diminish part of this budget amount. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 34 of 74 De Weerd: If I recall, ad nauseum they tried to raise money. They were at every community event and they could get signatures by the hundreds, but to get a dollar -- it's just not this -- there is no grants out there similar to what some of our partners have been able to do is bring in grants. There is no organizations, you know, that -- that they can go -- there is no obvious associations like our youth organizations or other athletic organizations have and I -- that's the problem that they have run into. Zaremba: Madam Mayor, I -- I may not be remembering this correctly, but my thinking was that when the Nampa dog park was being put together the citizens took the lead to go to businesses asking for donations. I may be wrong about that and maybe I should -- Mike probably knows a lot more about that than I do, but I thought there was participation on the part of the dog owners. Barton: There was. Their heart's were in it, but they are not fundraisers and I know with our own dog park task force that was up and running for over a year that their fundraising -- outcome of their fundraising was a thousand dollars and 500 came from Brian Draper, who was the lead, so it -- Zaremba: Not real productive I take it. Barton: Not real productive. I think we might have used that much staff time managing the task force. Zaremba: Yeah. De Weerd: More than -- Zaremba: I can see that. De Weerd: Anything you want to add, Steve? Siddoway: Madam Mayor, I think the -- the talents of a group like that are in advising on policy issues similar to the commission in that as we deal with user conflicts or ideas for, you know, naming rights, things like that, the dog park task force type group -- their talents are really best used there. Having worked with the original dog park task force for a number of years -- Mike's right, they are not fundraisers, but they are passionate and great at advising us on a policy level. Yeah. De Weerd: Thank you. Barton: Appreciate your time. Thank you De Weerd: Okay. Rountree: I will give up my naming rights to anybody. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 35 of 74 Bird: I was going to say, the naming rights stay. Zaremba: How much would you pay to not have your name on it? Rountree: Well, I'm considering that. Siddoway: Madam Mayor, I can't speak to all of the efforts that were done with the Nampa dog park, but I know one of their ongoing ones is they -- they have signs with naming rights for each of the shelters and, then, we are in -- I think those are -- I don't know if it's annual or bi-annual basis, but they are switched out -- you buy the rights to have their name on the sign next to a shelter for a certain period of time and, then, it's sold again. So, you know, that's something we have on our radar for the shelters that we have here, but we want to get those shelters in place to, you know, get those commitments. C. Mayor's Office: Results of the City Survey De Weerd: Thank you, Steve. Okay. Robert. Item 8, the results of the city survey. Simison: Thank you, Madam Mayor and Members of the Council. I'm going to go ahead and kick it off just real quick and, then, I'm going to invite Jason Morado up here from the ETC Institute, which is the group that actually administered our city survey to kind of walk through the results. If you recall we did our first city survey back in 2010. That was really kind of the start of this process, gave us a little bit of a baseline from that survey. We went through that survey when we selected a different company than the one that did our first survey and tried to keep the spirit of the questions that were there to continue with that baseline, but did take out some of the questions, which may have been point -in -time questions or that might align more with this group's way of asking questions. So, I know you haven't seen the results. I actually got the last piece from ETC today of the survey, so you're going to hear the results today. I plan on following up with a complete copy of the survey that you should get in the next couple days. I will print it out and put it on your desks for review and based upon what you hear today and your review I will take back any comments from you and, then, we will bring back a final survey for you to adopt here in a couple weeks after you have had a chance to review and look at the data yourself. So, with that I will invite Jason up from ETC for his presentation and, then, we can both be available for any questions you have at the end of that, so -- De Weerd: Thank you. Good evening. It is evening now. Morado: Yes. De Weerd: Qualifies as evening. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 36 of 74 Morado: That's okay. Well, my name is Jason Morado. I work for ETC Institute and we are a market research company based out of Olathe, Kansas, which is a suburb of Kansas City and we specialize in doing citizen surveys for government organizations. So, say I'm going to go through the result of the citizen survey we conducted this past spring -- okay. Anyway. Here is a brief overview I will be going over. First the survey purpose and methodology. Bottom line up front -- just an up front quick overview of the survey results, then, we will go through some major survey findings, summary and conclusion and at the end I will take questions if there are any. And if you have questions throughout the presentation go ahead and jump in. I mentioned I work for ETC Institute. We are a national leader in market research for local government organizations. You can see here are just some of the areas where we have conducted surveys. We have done surveys in more than 700 cities in 49 states since 2006. So, there is a number of reasons to do a survey like this. One reason is to objectively assess how satisfied residents are with the delivery of city services. It's also to gather statistically valid input from residents to help set priorities for the city and also to compare Meridian's performance with other communities across the U.S. Some methodology. This was a seven page survey, which is typical length for us. Most of our surveys are six to seven pages. We administered the survey by a combination of mail, phone, and online through randomly selected households throughout the city and the way this worked is we mailed the survey to 2,500 households throughout the city and with the mailed survey they received a letter that just gave them an overview of the survey and on there they had the opportunity to go online and fill out a survey if they prefer that method. And, then, about a week after we mail out the survey we did follow- up phone calls to households that received the survey in the mail to encourage them to fill out the survey and at that time they also could do the survey over the phone if they preferred. The survey took about 15 to 20 minutes to complete. Our goal was to receive 500 completed surveys and we exceeded that with 514 surveys completed. And the overall survey results had a confidence level of 95 percent for a margin of error of plus or minus 4.3 percent. Borton: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Borton. Borton: What's confidence level? What do you mean by that? Morado: Generally what that means is if you did the survey a hundred times with different groups of people, 95 out of those 100 times the results would be plus or minus 4.3 percent of these results. Bird: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: How many did you mail out? Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 37 of 74 Morado: Twenty-five hundred households. Bird: I'm sorry, I missed that. Morado: Yeah. That's okay. Bird: And we got -- we got 514 back in? Morado: Right. Right. Bird: So, 25 percent? Morado: Yeah. Right. So, here is a map of the city. De Weerd: Actually, 20. Morado: So, you can see the -- your red dots, those are the households that filled out a survey. So, we had a really good distribution throughout the city. So, here is an overview of the survey results. Residents had a very positive perception of the city. A couple examples of that. Ninety-three percent feel Meridian is an excellent or a good place to raise a family. Ninety-one percent rated Meridian as an excellent or good place to live. Meridian is also setting the standard for service delivery among other U.S. cities. Later on I will go through some benchmarking slides so you will see how the city compares to the national average and the northwest regional average. But just a quick overview. The city rated 19 percent higher than the national average and 21 percent higher than the northwest region in the overall quality of city services delivered. The city also rated above the national average in 49 out of the 54 areas that were compared and they rated significantly above the national average in 34 of those areas. And by significant we mean the difference of five percent or more. And planning and zoning and traffic enforcement should be high priorities over the next two years. So, our first major finding -- the residents have a positive perception of the city. On this question we asked the residents to rate various items that influence their perception of Meridian. You can see the solid blue -- the darker blue were those rated excellent, lighter blue is good, white is overage and red is poor. And you can see there is a lot more blue than there is red, so that's obviously what you want. In particular on the top -- the top couple items. I mentioned these already. Over 90 percent of residents feel Meridian is an excellent or a good place to live and also to raise a family. And here we asked residents how well the city and its partners are meeting expectations of residents related to quality of life and here is a darker blue is greatly exceeds expectations. Lighter blue is exceeds. White is neutral and red is does not meet expectations. You see really high ratings here as well. Each of these four areas over three-fourths of respondents rated them as exceeding their expectations and all of them less than five percent said they said meets their expectations. So, here is a map of the city again and the purpose here was to see if there were major differences in survey results among four areas of the city and the four areas are central Meridian, northeast, northwest, and south. And what we did is we took the mean rating for each of those four areas and, Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 38 of 74 then, we shaded that area the appropriate color. So, you see here throughout the entire city -- and this slide is based on the overall quality of city services provided. For this question the entire city indicated that it exceeds their expectations. And this map is based on the overall quality of life in the city. And, again, the results are really positive. Well, you notice here in south Meridian residents feel like the overall quality of life greatly exceeds their expectations and, then, the other three areas that exceed -- just exceed their expectations. This map is based on the overall quality of customer service received from city employees and just like the previous one, the results are really good overall, particularly in south Meridian. The residents there indicated that they greatly exceed their expectations. This one is based on Meridian as a place to live. This was really impressive. Throughout the entire city -- all parts of the city residents thought that Meridian was an excellent place to live. This one was based on the statement -- residents were asked how much they agree that the city is headed in the right direction and you can see in all parts of the city residents agree that the city is headed in the right direction. And this one is based on the value received for city tax dollars and fees and, once again, throughout all parts of the city residents feel like they are getting their money's worth for the value received for the city tax dollars and fees. So, the next finding is based on community profiles and what we did here is we did some cross - tabular analysis on demographic questions just to get a better understanding of what some of the characteristics are for residents who have the most positive and, then, the most negative perceptions for different items. So, this one is based on the overall quality of city services provided. So, the characteristic -- demographic characteristics for residents who have the most positive perception of the overall quality of city services are female, over page 65, live in south Meridian, lived in the city for six to ten years, and has a household income of 75 to 99 thousand. Now, the characteristics for residents with the most negative perception -- now, keep in mind there are not a lot of -- the results overall were very positive, so there is not a big sample size for negative perception, but for the most negative was male, age 55 to 64, live in central Meridian, lived in the city for over 20 years and the household income is 100 to 150 thousand. This one is based on the overall quality of life in the city. Again, the most positive female, more so than male, under age 35, again live in south Meridian. Lived in the city less than five years and household income of 35 to 50 thousand. Again the most negative, male, age 55 to 64, live in central meridian, lived in the city of 16 to 20 years and a household income of under 35,000. This one is based on the value received for city tax dollars and fees. Female once again. And this one over age 65. Lived in north Meridian. Lived in the city for six to ten years. And household income of 50 to 75 thousand. And, then, for residents with the most negative perception, their characteristics, male, age 45 to 54, live in central Meridian, lived in the city for 16 to 20 years and, then, household income of under 35,000. And, then, the last one we will go through -- the statement that the city is headed in the right direction. The ones who feel the most positive -- once again, female, under age 35. This one lives in northeast Meridian. Lived in the city for six to ten years. A household income of 50 to 75 thousand. And, then, most negative male, age 45 to 54, live in central Meridian, lived in the city of over 20 years and a household income of 35 to 50 thousand. So, the next finding is that the City of Meridian is setting the standard for service delivery among U.S. cities. Next we go to some benchmarking slides. So, now we will go through Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 39 of 74 those. What we did is we compared results for the City of Meridian to the northwest region average and the U.S. average and the source of these results is the ETC conducts a survey every year, a citizen survey, and nationwide the survey is of 4,000 residents and they were asked a number of questions that we ask in our typical community surveys, so the results for the U.S. average are based on that survey and the results for the northwest average with the same, but of citizens who live in the northwest region, a total of eight states, and there is about 415 residents that make up that portion. Now would be -- the blue arrow indicates that the results for Meridian are significantly higher than the U.S. average. By significant we mean five percent or more. And, then, a red arrow is significantly lower than the U.S. average. So, you can see here Meridian -- you rated above the U.S. average in all 13 of these city services, but significantly above the U.S. average in nine out of 13. So, really really positive results here. This is the same type of slide. This one is based on items that influence perceptions of the city. All five areas Meridian rated significantly above the U.S. average. This one is for items related to the quality of life in the city. Rates significantly above the average of two of the areas. The one in particular that we looked at when we do the survey is the overall quality of city services provided, because a lot of these are more specific items, but that one is just an overall view of how the city is delivering services and that's the one I mentioned earlier where the city ranks 21 percent above the northwest region average, 19 percent above the U.S. average. This is on parks and recreation. Rated significantly above the U.S. average in five out of these seven areas and particularly much higher in quality athletic fields and number of city parks. This is the one area that was a little below the northwest region. Rating of road -related accidents in the community and this is common for communities that are quickly growing, measure traffic flow and congestion, as with street lighting on arterial roads. Here we have one on communication services. Really good ratings again. In particular, the one on the bottom there, Meridian rated 19 percent above the northwest region in public involvement on local decision making, 11 percent above the national average in public involvement and decision making. This one is for public safety services. Again, really positive results overall. Ahead of the U.S. average -- significantly ahead of the U.S. average in six of the areas. In particular, really good ratings for a couple of the -- as it relates to the police, quality of local police protection, police response time, 911 emergencies. And here we have the one for enforcement of codes and ordinances, just a couple here, but significantly above the national average for all three. In the next finding, planning and zoning and traffic enforcement should be high priorities over the next two years. Now, this is -- this is the -- we call this the important satisfaction rating. This is a tool that we use to help set priorities and this table is really a combination of two questions on the survey. First we had a list of city services and we asked residents to rate how satisfied they are with each of these services and as a follow up we asked which three of these services should be most important to emphasize over the next to years and the areas that you really want to focus on are those that received high importance ratings, but at the same time low satisfaction ratings. So, you can see the results for those two questions. The most important percentage -- that's the percent who indicate that service as one of the three that's most important to focus on for the next two years and you can see how they rank. And, then, satisfaction percentage, that's the percent you are very or somewhat satisfied with each of these services and Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 40 of 74 you can see how those rank. So, by far the top priorities are planning and zoning services. That ranks first in terms of the most important and, then, last in terms of satisfaction ranking. The second priority is traffic enforcement and that's significantly below the top priority, but that one you can see is like fourth in terms of importance, 11th in satisfaction. So, those are the top two priorities. But programs for youth and communications are not far behind traffic enforcement as the third and fourth top priorities. This slide is really a different way to look at the same type of information. It's also based on the same two questions. Here we apply the points on a matrix and so if you look at the far right those are the items that are the most important and as you go left they get less and less important and if you start at the top those are the items that received the highest satisfaction ratings. As you move down they get less -- lower and lower. So, the items in the bottom right-hand corner in that quadrant, those are the ones that received high importance and low satisfaction ratings. So, you can see the four that are in there, the ones we just talked about. Now, the reason planning and zoning services and traffic enforcement were the two we pointed to you, even though programs for youth and communications are in that quadrant, they are both close to being in other quadrants, so they are still important, but they rank third and fourth in importance as to priorities. Now, some other survey findings. We asked residents where they currently get information about Meridian's services and programs. Over 50 percent said from fliers and utility bills, 50 percent from the television and news, 42 percent from the website and also from the newspaper. Those were by far the top four ways that residents get information about city services and programs. We asked residents if anyone in the household has visited a city park. Eight -two percent said they have personally visited a city and three percent said a member of the household has, and 15 percent said no. Our company does a lot of parks and recreation surveys, so I'm -- and we have data for that, too, and the national average is about 72, 73 percent. So, these are really positive ratings for park usage as well. Here we asked residents what they would prefer to see emphasized in a parks system. Fifty-three percent chose the development of large, regional or community parks and, then, 41 percent said the development of more neighborhood parks. We asked residents if they visited downtown at least once in the past year. Eighty-five percent said they have. And of those 85 percent who have visited downtown in the last year, over three-fourths visited for leisure, 36 percent for business, 33 percent for shopping. So, leisure is by far the top reason residents have visited downtown in the past year. And, then, of those who visited downtown in the past year you see that 59 percent are either very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their overall experience, compared to only 13 percent who were either somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. It's almost a five -one ratio satisfied versus dissatisfied. So, then, just a summary -- summary and conclusions. As we mentioned, residents have a very positive perception of the city. We listed a couple of examples earlier. Meridian is setting the standard for service delivery among U.S. cities. You saw how positive the results are compared to the northwest region and also to the national results. And, then, the top priorities over the next two years should be planning and zoning and traffic enforcement. So, with that are there any questions? De Weerd: Council, any questions? Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 41 of 74 Bird: I don't have any. Nice report. Rountree: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: What was the definition utilized for planning and zoning services? Or was it just like how do you feel about planning and zoning services? Morado: It was just planning and zoning. The way they were listed on that chart is how they were listed on the survey. Rountree: Okay. Cavener: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Cavener. Cavener: The city conducted a city wide survey a few years ago. Were you the same organization that conducted that survey? Morado: No. That was a different -- different company. Cavener: Quick follow up? Who was in charge of drafting the questions? Was that something your agency provided or was that something that the staff worked with you on? How were those questions conceived? Morado: Yeah. We worked with city staff on that. I believe we used the survey last time as a starting point, but, then, made some changes from there. We recommended some changes and just worked back and forth with city staff on that. Cavener: Thank you. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: I guess my question would go to interpretation. We have a couple of things that in my mind conflict. One is our police department and services are rated very high, but, then, we say we have a problem with traffic enforcement and I'm wondering if there is any way that the respondents could have only focused on the word traffic, which we do have a problem with, or would they have focused on enforcement, which to me is a police department issue -- Morado: Right. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 42 of 74 Zaremba: -- not a traffic issue and might they have misinterpreted that question to be about traffic in general, which we do have a problem with? Morado: Right. I would take that more to mean traffic. We also asked a question on the survey -- this was an open-ended question -- it said what is the single most important thing the city should be focused on and the two things that showed up there were planning and zoning and growth and, then, traffic. So, I would definitely think traffic is what they were thinking with that question. Rountree: Interesting. De Weerd: See, Mr. Zaremba, I thought you would note the question we had about public transportation. Zaremba: I noticed what I think was his second slide, the very bottom line -- Morado: Right. Zaremba: -- the very worst service I did -- I did notice that that was about transportation as well. Morado: Right. Yeah. That was providing -- yeah -- opportunities other than driving. That was definitely the lowest rated, yeah, by a wide margin really. De Weerd: It's the only one we had a lot of red in. Morado: Right. Simison: If I could just add to that, because you will see the results when you see the full survey. I think it's also the area that citizens have requested the most resources be put into as well. So, you're only seeing half of that answer. There is another corresponding to that when you see the full results, but I think you will all find interesting when it comes to public transportation. De Weerd: Okay. Any other questions? Bird: I have none. Morado: Thank you. De Weerd: Thank you so much. Rountree: Good stuff. De Weerd: Although I think we just went down a notch when they find out we are doing the dog park in a timely fashion. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 43 of 74 Rountree: I didn't see dog park on there anywhere. Bird: I don't think it had anything about a dog park in there. D. City of Meridian Strategic Plan Budget Amendment for the Not - to -Exceed Amount of $53,250.00 De Weerd: Okay. We will move on to our strategic plan budget amendment. So, the answer is no. Niemeyer: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, I hesitantly come to the podium with a budget amendment. However, I do have the full support of Stacy and the department directors, so I'm hoping that's enough ammunition behind me to have it considered. As you know I came before you about four months ago after a director's get together in which we identified a need for a city-wide strategic plan, so the departments had an understanding of the overall strategy of the city to, then, build their plans to. Back when I presented that to you there was interest in pursuing this. We had an educated guess on a budget of 150,000. After that meeting with you the team that was working on this, Bruce Chatterton, Tom Barry, myself, and the Mayor, got together to identify the key components that we were looking for in such a plan and, then, I was instructed to work with Finance on developing an RFP, so I worked with Keith Watts on that. One of the concerns that I continue to have on this is a RFP process. Having first- hand knowledge of this you tend to get a lot of out-of-state companies that apply for the development of that plan and I think it's important also to recognize we want somebody that has knowledge of our geography and our culture and our city. During that discussion Finance recommended we look into a professional services agreement with somebody local that had a better feel for what we do here in Meridian and knows the layout of the land. Ironically, at the same time I was working with Phil Eastman on some strategic planning for the EMS joint powers agreement, so that began the discussion with the group. They were tasked with bringing this forward to you. There is local experience with Phil. Boise has experience with Phil Eastman in the development of their plan. Actually, the redevelopment. I need to categorize that correctly. Boise when they started their strategic planning process did go RFP, had a company from Washington come in, left, and they were left with a plan that they had no idea how to implement and move forward on. So, Boise did end up hiring Phil as part of that -- that restructuring of their plan. We did get a proposal from Phil. We tweaked it a little bit, met with him, and came two a proposal that we are comfortable with as a group. We took that to the directors, reviewed it with the department directors, they all gave the thumbs up on it. It has a plan that meets our needs. It has three components. One is the development of the strategic plan itself, the second is developing the capabilities of the leadership team to effectively execute it. That's the kind of change management process that we all talked about. And Stacy was very comfortable that within this plan there will be a business component, so we can evaluate needs, wants, and cost, which is something we want to develop as well. One of the things that we liked about our meeting with Phil -- he has done this enough, he said the reason plans fail is that you try Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 44 of 74 and do too much right out of the chute. In other words, you tackle way too much and you can't achieve it, so you need to make sure the plan is achievable. I think he has articulated that in his proposal and, lastly, given the discussion on finance, the cost to the city is 53,250, which is about a third of what we had planned on. Again, still very comfortable with what is in the proposal to move the city forward with a good plan. So, with that I would stand for any questions. De Weerd: Thank you, Mark. Council, any questions? Zaremba: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: Just on the very last page of his proposal he mentions a couple costs -- potential costs that are not included in that figure and the amendment is for a not to exceed amount. Meeting rooms and planning sessions we probably can do with very little cost, but if there are lodging and transportation and meal costs on his part or the -- the providers of the education that's going to happen here, that would be above and beyond the 53,250. Do we need to account for that? Niemeyer: Councilman Zaremba, that is a good question. We evaluated that. The meeting, obviously, we can take care of. Because Phil is local there is no travel. He has lodging. So, we were comfortable with meeting the proposed amount as far as what we are bringing forward in the amendment. Zaremba: Okay. Thank you Rountree: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: Looking at the budget and the detail, it looks like it's well thought out. I guess the last item on the budget is 16,000 dollars for deliverables. In our age of paperless and the idea that a lot of these plans just end up gathering dust on shelf, it seems to me that we just get either a CD or a thumb drive with it on it and dispense with the 16,000 dollar expense of printed copies, unless everybody feels that they have to have one of these as a paperweight somewhere. I'd rather have it -- I'd rather have it as a thumb drive or on my PC that I can pull and sort and read. Niemeyer: Councilman Rountree, I can -- I can somewhat answer your question and somewhat not. I don't know out of the 16,000 what constitutes the hardbound copies, but the 16,000 includes the updated half day sessions to detail the actions, et cetera, et cetera. So, I would agree, I think -- Rountree: And what portion of that is deliverable. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 45 of 74 Niemeyer: Yes. Rountree: Just a thought. De Weerd: Anything further? Okay. If there is no further questions for Mark, there is an item in front of you. Rountree: Is this your lead? De Weerd: Uh? Rountree: Is this your lead? It's coming out of your -- Bird: The budget amendment. Rountree: -- budget amendment. De Weerd: It is a -- we had it budgeted. Niemeyer: It's a budget amendment. We didn't have it budgeted for the -- De Weerd: Yeah. We were going to come back with the amount. Rountree: Okay. De Weerd: So, yeah. Rountree: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Yes, Mr. Rountree. Rountree: I move that we approve the strategic plan budget amendment in an amount not to exceed 53,250 dollars with the consideration of reducing that amount potentially by eliminating printed documentation. Zaremba: Second. De Weerd: I have a motion and a second. Just for clarification, we can bring back what -- a definition of what that is. Rountree: Okay. That's fine. De Weerd: Any discussion? Okay. Madam Clerk, will you call roll. Roll Call: Bird, yea; Rountree, yea; Zaremba, yea; Borton, yea; Milam, absent; Cavener, yea. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 46 of 74 De Weerd: All ayes. Motion carried. MOTION CARRIED: FIVE AYES. ONE ABSENT. Niemeyer: We will get started on it. E. City Clerk's Office: Resolution No. 14-995: A Resolution Adopting the Meridian Historic Preservation Plan De Weerd: Thank you. Okay. Item No. 6-E is a Resolution 14-995 and it's a resolution adopting the Meridian Historical Preservation Plan. This -- Rountree: Jacy is going to do it. De Weerd: Jacy Jones. Jones: Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak with you today. On May 8th the Historic Preservation Commission adopted the historic preservation plan that you have in your packets. It's a five year plan that provides focus and goals for the Historic Preservation Commission and that will help guide us into the foreseeable future. This city's comprehensive plan notes the importance of preserving some of Meridian's small town character and charm while looking to progress as a community. The goals of the preservation plan mirror the goals of the comprehensive plan, so that the two documents can work in partnership. A few of the goals listed in the plan include continuing to identify structures of historic significance for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places and promoting public awareness by improving preservation education for various audiences. The plan also provides a comprehensive list of all structures in Meridian's area of impact that have previously been surveyed. These surveys are available in full on file with the Idaho State Historic Preservation Office. Interagency cooperation is crucial to historic preservation and as the commission moves forward we will continue to share our work with the state historic preservation offices, so that all agencies have access to consistent information. Our hope today is that you will adopt the preservation plan and, then, I will provide a completed copy of that document to the Community Development Department, so they can integrate that with the city's Comprehensive Plan update in April of next year. So, thank you for your continued support and I will stand for questions. De Weerd: Thank you. Any questions from Council? Bird: I have none. De Weerd: And, Jacy, just would like to congratulate you on the kickoff of the downtown history walk -- historical walk. It was a great turnout. It was a nice event and Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 47 of 74 I think people were very excited about the -- the potential and excited about the opportunity to bring other people down to learn more about Meridian. Jones: Thank you. I appreciate that. It was a really fun event and we have got it set for AIC actually next week. So, if you are looking for a mobile tour to go on next Thursday, AIC will host it and you can come -- you will meet at the center and, then, ride on the van and have Lila give you a little fun kind of colorful Meridian history and, then, we can do the walking tour and you can get a ride back to the center. So, if you are available next Thursday take that tour, it will be fun. De Weerd: And, Council, I think that the Association of Idaho Cities -- what excited them about adding this to their program is that this is easily replicated in other communities and could be something that AIC could promote in getting to know the history of many of the communities within our -- our great state and at minimal cost. So, this -- they excitedly embraced to be a showcase of a best practice that they would like to see others replicate. So, congratulations. Jones: Thank you De Weerd: Okay. Do I have a motion? Borton: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Borton. Borton: I would move that we approve Resolution 14-995 adoption the Meridian Historic Preservation Plan. Rountree: Second. De Weerd: I have a motion and a second to approve Item 6-E. Any discussion from Council? Madam Clerk. Roll Call: Bird, yea; Rountree, yea; Zaremba, yea; Borton, yea; Milam, absent; Cavener, yea. De Weerd: All ayes. Motion carried. MOTION CARRIED: FIVE AYES. ONE ABSENT. F. Public Works Department: Utility Rates Discussion De Weerd: Item 6-F is our Public Works Department. There is only 200. Rountree: Just 200? Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 48 of 74 Barry: I thought we stopped talking about that a long time ago. All right. De Weerd: Yeah. I banned that. Barry: Yeah. And you're the biggest offender, actually. Okay. Here we go. De Weerd: I will note that for evaluation. Barry: I know. Rountree: Start by taking your foot out of your mouth. Barry: I figured I would be in your office tomorrow at 8:00. All right. Thank you and good afternoon. We are here to talk to you about our annual wastewater and water rate update. We have quite a bit of information to get through tonight, so let's talk a little bit about the agenda here. First we are going to talk a little bit about the Enterprise Fund. Amber Christofferson, who I will introduce in just a moment, is going to walk you through the first couple of agenda items here where we will talk about the fund and a little bit of perspective on the fund and mostly for the new Council Members and the viewing public at home and, of course, in our audience here. We will enlighten them as to the differences and the similarities between the Enterprise Fund and General Fund. We will talk a little bit about the rate model, its importance, its influence and its use in the Public Works Department. And, then, we will have to look good and long at how we are going to move through this NPDES or National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permit, challenge that we have discussed about two months ago. So, we will look at the Enterprise Fund and have a look at the impacts of that on the fund and make some analyses and ultimately some recommendations for future considerations and modifications to rates in other areas in order to keep the fund healthy. After that we will open it up for discussion. So, without further adieu I want to thank the staff who have been so instrumental in helping to put this together and churn the data. As you know this is -- I get the privilege of presenting and Amber will as well tonight, but the reality is there is a lot of work that goes into this kind of analysis and it's not just the Public Works Department, it's across departments, including the Finance Department and others. So, I want to thank the Finance staff, our water operations staff, our wastewater operating staff, Public Works engineering and, of course, Public Works administration and business operation. There is a lot of people who have put a lot of time into this. So, with that I will turn it over the Amber, who is going to make her debut in front of City Council today and she's very excited to do so. So, thank you, Amber. Christofferson: Thank you. Madam Mayor and Members of Council, thank you for having me here. Give you a brief overview of the fund and when I say brief I really mean brief. I have 15 slides and Tom took three of them, so it's a good start. The Enterprise Fund is utilized by all Public Works Department land development and MUBs and you have a consistent revenue stream and specific uses for revenue, both of which I will explain next. There are various funding sources for the Enterprise Fund, which include things such as investment interest -- I'm sorry, I changed that and it did not Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 49 of 74 change. Investment interest, Republic Services, rate payers and development -- developers and contractors. The revenue comes to us in the forms of base fees through the rate payers, assessments through the contractors and developers, interest income, donated capital, cash admin fees through our franchising service with Republic Services, as well as miscellaneous, which includes review fees, service fees and meter sales. The outlay for Enterprise Fund includes environmental public -- or environmental programs and public outreach, infrastructure, which is our biggest outlay, as well as Public Works admin, engineering, operations, expenses, which includes land development and MUBs expenses also and inter -fund transfers to the General Fund. Water and sewer are the biggest contributors to revenue for the Enterprise Fund and you can see with our accounts how we -- we have a gradual growth that we can rely on that growth year to year. We have had a three percent on average growth from 2007 on. This shows consistent growth and indicates a very predictable growth pattern which leads to greater fund stability. This is a picture of our title fund revenue. As you can see the growth and development provides most of the revenue for the Enterprise Fund and that would be the green and the red pieces of the bar chart here that you can see, except Todd may not be able to. De Weerd: Yeah. He only reads small. Small print. Christofferson: Yeah. Water and sewer sales account for approximately 80 percent of the overall budgeted revenue, investments, or connection fees account for 16 percent of the overall budgeted revenue. And you will see a drop in the year for 2007 to 2009 in the revenue and that accounts for the downturn in the economy and the reduction in assessments due to the reduction in development and what you don't see here in this chart is donated capital, which actually amounts to about 51 million over the course of nine years, which is not a financial burden for us construction wise, however, it becomes a burden for use when the donated capital is turned over for us to maintain and operate. So, how do we spend our money? Over a nine year period the fund has been proportionately shared across personnel and operating capital outlay. Personnel and operating expenses has been rather consistent every year, lending further to the fund stability I mentioned earlier. Over the course of nine years each one of these accounts for about 45 million dollars and that's over an average of nine years. And this is from 2005 to 2013. So, how does the rate model fit into all of this? So, we take the input from all of the Enterprise Fund, we take the revenue, we take the expenditures and all of that and we put it into the rate model. We use budgetary figures and, then, we load them in the rate model to determine our cash position and if we need any rate adjustment. And so we -- with the rate model process we start the review process in October with the CIP where we enter the CIP into the rate model, as well as the budgets and the budget numbers are entered into the rate model and the assumptions and, then, we chew those numbers up in January when the budget numbers are audited and come back and so they are firm numbers. Then we run various scenarios and do sensitivity analysis to test the assumptions. And, then, we do a final review with Public Works operations and engineering departments and Finance and other stakeholders to validate our results. So, we have had a bit of a rate model evolution, which I'm not sure how many know kind of the iterations we have gone through with the rate model, but we Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 50 of 74 started initially with cash forecasting for this and that included inflation and growth rates and, then, we did multiple scenarios to be analyzed, which allowed us to make informed decisions about our financial position, which lent to increased predictability and also it minimized the impact of the Enterprise Fund by helping us mitigate unpredictable expenses. And, then, we did version two, which was fine tune to better accuracy and that's when the execution rate was introduced and we did -- we had more defined sections and this led to even better accuracy. And, then, finally, to help with analysis and ease, because it's kind of a last data driven dependent process that's a bit time consuming. So, I did individual data entry paths, which were easier to keep track of, segregated the enhancements out so we could look at them in a different perspective and this contributed to better control and improved data integrity and also improved confidence in the rate model. And, then, finally, the last one -- let me go back. Sorry. This is actually this year we expanded the projections ten years and that's a big deal for us, because we needed to do that for the purpose of integrating all of the NPDES permit inclusions as far as requirements that we needed, so we wanted to know over the ten years that we are intending for the permits. So, we consolidated totals and streamlined that whole model. So, the rate model we know is a very valuable tool to develop -- or to determine our cash position. It's met its purpose over the last several years, however, as the city continues to grow our needs continue to grow and we are requiring a more sophisticated system. We are still feeling confident in what we use and what we are using to project what we need, however, as we continue down the road with the NPDES permit and all of that we feel like it would be better for us to look toward a more sophisticated system, which is why you guys will see an enhancement in a workshop to look at that financial planning option, so -- so, the current rate model projection. The current rate model projection we have certain inputs, which is operating reserve we always have in there and that's to cover operational expenses, which right now for the Enterprise Fund it's about 5.7 million dollars. We also have the emergency reserve, which is five million dollars. We set aside three million dollars for wastewater and two million dollars for water. We also include inflationary and growth rate, plus a budget execution rate. The assumptions that have had put into the rate model as follows: We have the population growth factor at two percent, personnel cost factor at three percent, construction cost inflator at three percent and the operational cost factor at 2.25 percent based on the consumer price index and, then, operational expenses are in line with the projected execution rates and our expectations and construction execution rates will also meet expectations. So, finally we get to the modeling results of the rate model. So, in the model we split the total fund between water and wastewater for ease, but also because that -- those are key to our expenditures, as well as our revenue intake. We account for Public Works admin, MUBs, land development and environmental, we split those costs across water and wastewater. As you can see in the chart here we have got the blue line that's running across that is our water fund balance and we are running fairly consistent. So, our revenue is meeting our operational needs or our capital needs as well. However, the picture is definitely different for wastewater, which is the green line we are looking at. We are taking that big dip, but this includes the NPDES permit and requirements for capital, those type of expenses and you can see the black line, which is the ending balances tracking with the wastewater and fund balance, because it has a heavier weight to it. We modeled the rate model more aggressive execution rates Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 51 of 74 for operating and personnel and for those who haven't heard of the execution rates -- and what I mean by that is at the top where it says scenario, we are running the rate model a hundred percent revenue, so what we are saying is the rate model is planning on receiving the full amount that we budgeted for revenue and such as personnel, we are saying we are going to expend 95 percent of what we have budgeted for personnel. So, operating we are planning on expending a hundred percent of our budget and 90 percent for our capital budget. With all this taken into account you can see that we have modeled -- that what we have modeled by 2008 we have become intolerant and that's the bottom line here, the black line. So, by 2018, I'm sorry, we are down 5.4 million. This is modeling, of course, so it's projections. However, this is pretty consistent with what we see because of the permit requirements and so if all things remain even, assumptions and that sort of thing, and we were not to do anything but business as usual, this would be our cash position after we have the NPDES permit requirements going through our cycle. So, unless you guys have any other questions I am going to turn this over to Tom so he can explain the challenges. De Weerd: Well, he let you deliver the bad news, uh? Nice. Any questions for Amber from the Council? Bird: I have none. De Weerd: Okay. Thank you, Amber. Barry: How did you like that? You caught on that I made her deliver the bad news and, actually, there is more bad news, so we are going to share it. Okay. So -- I'm just going to get loaded here, because we are going to go -- can you back out of that? Okay. So, the bad news. Right? Who do we have to thank for the bad news? Well, there it is on your screen. It's the Environmental Protection Agency, who has decided that they want to take the lower Boise River watershed and institute ultra low phosphorus regulations. Nutrients are certainly a water quality problem in and around the country. However, the Boise River has been targeted now for ultra low phosphorus reconciliation and so, essentially, the way that the EPA administers these types of regulations is through the Clean Water Act and the Clean Water Act -- I'm frozen up here, by the way. So -- I'm still frozen. There we go. All right. So, the Clean Water Act in 1972 requires discharge permits for point source dischargers and later one point dischargers as well. We operate, obviously, a wastewater treatment plant, which is a point discharge and so we are required to have our discharges permitted under the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System program. EPA Region Ten has primacy for the state of Idaho and, therefore, issues these permits. The Department of Environmental Quality certifies the permits and also certifies the compliance schedules under which permits will be adhered to. These permits dictate required water quality standards that must be met during the period that the period -- that the permit is issued. At this point in time we have been in close conversation with both EPA Region Ten, as well as DEQ staff and we believe strongly that we will be allowed two permit cycles, each lasting five years, in theory, to comply with these NPDES low phosphorus limits and that's an assumption that we are going to carry on throughout this presentation. Okay. One moment, please. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 52 of 74 Are we broken? All right. Love this technology stuff. All right. So -- okay. So, the NPDES program is, essentially, as I mentioned, the program that is under the Clean Water Act that EPA administers in order to issue these permits. But what it really means to us, of course, is a lot of money. So, the program itself is costly for a number of different reasons, because the challenges associated with getting to the ultra low phosphorus limits are typically capital intensive and those capital intensive costs are extremely expensive, because getting the limit of technology that are, essentially, being required of us to accommodate ultra low phosphorus is not only burdensome operationally and on a personnel standpoint, but also very intensive capitally -- on a capital standpoint. There we go. This is the cost implication I shared with you back in April of this year and, essentially, at that point in time we had been estimating a dollar range of about 125 million to 190 million dollars. The majority of those costs being capital costs and of the capital 88 percent of those costs being capital, of that 54 percent being related to water quality improvements, 28 percent being related to capacity improvements and, then, 18 percent related to reliability. The remaining 12 percent of the cost to comply with the NPDES permits. This is over a ten year period. The new permit that's already been issued to us in draft form, the preliminary draft, shows about two percent of the total cost coming in the form of studies and five percent of the cost in staffing and in five of the cost in operations and maintenance. Of course, building additional infrastructure will require additional staff and also additional money from an operating standpoint to continue to operate. So, this is what those projects look like over time, essentially. The period between 2013 and 2015 it's anticipated that about 20 projects will be worked on that will help us comply with the NPDES permit requirement, ranging anywhere from 17 to 21 million dollars in cost. 2015 to 2018 we will have 16 projects ranging from 56 to 87 million dollars in cost and, finally, in the 2018 to 2022 we will have nine projects. Not as many projects, but certainly some of the largest cost projects or large cost projects, between 50 million and 82 million in the overall cost range. So, that total brings us to about 45 projects and that's where we got that range back in April of 2000 -- or, excuse me, April of this year, where we got a range from 125,000 -- or, excuse me, 125 million to 190 million dollars. Now, what we have done since then is tried to take an opportunity to refine our numbers, because those estimates that were provided to us in April we felt the cost range was really too large. A hundred and twenty-five to 190 million is a pretty wide gap. So, we wanted to put a finer point on those particular numbers and when we did that what we ended up with is coming up to 170 million dollars as the total cost for what we believe today to be the NPDES permit challenge. We will go onto the next one, if you can. So, how are we going to finance this 170 million dollars? The reality is that we are going to need to look at a number of different ways in order for us to come up with the funds of 170 million dollars and the time period in which we have to come up with those funds. So, we revised the cost estimates and prioritize the projects and included capital, personnel, operations, and maintenance -- as I mentioned we come up with 170 million dollar NPDES challenge, and we have a timeline under which we are going to have to accommodate these projects and these permit requirements. First of all, we are in that permit negotiation period with this -- with the -- and it's not quite a formal, we are in discussions I should say, with the EPA at this point in time and DEQ. We don't know how long this is going to last until we get to our final permit. You know, the EPA give us Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 53 of 74 estimates and we have not been able to have any of those estimates come to fruition as they have given them to us and so the reality is although they indicate that they would like to have our final permit issued by October of this year, based on where we are in the process we don't have any confidence that that's going to be the case. The good news is that the longer they delay the more time we will have to save up for these challenges that we are speaking to this evening. But when that final draft comes out there will be a 30 day comment period and, then, after that there will be an opportunity for the EPA to make modifications to the final draft permit and, then, it will be issued and once it's issued it will go into binding effect. Now, the city will have an opportunity to appeal if it feels the need to appeal. That creates a whole other process and delays or lengthens out the process as well. Alternatively, there could be an environmental group or some other interested group that appeals our permit as well and that would -- if that was to be the case the same type of process would ensue. But once we get to a final permit and once we get issuance, we will have ten years, we believe -- that's what DEQ and EPA seem to be in agreement on -- and that's what the city of Boise got and that's what it looks like the city of Nampa and the city of Caldwell will get as well, ten years to comply. We really don't have ten years to figure it all out. We have less than that, because if you have backed up the time and say that I need between -- I'm going to be building projects -- we are going to be building a department project starting at zero time frame -- actually, we are doing it already and by the time you get to the eighth year we will need to have all the money necessary in order to continue to construct in the -- through the eighth and into the ninth year, so we want all projects to be done by the ninth year, so that everything is wrapped up and we can try the system out between the ninth and tenth year, because we don't get a pass if everything comes together on the tenth year and, then, we put everything into operation working together and we haven't worked out the bugs and we start to exceed or violate the permit. So, we are backing this up to make sure that we have a debugging or optimization time period between the ninth year and the tenth year, which means we have to finish construction by the ninth year, which means we have to start construction as late as the eighth year, which means if we are going to pay for that construction we only have eight years to raise the funds. That's the challenge that we have. So, moving forward, as I mentioned the challenge is 170 million dollars and what we have done is we have looked closely at the ways in which we can finance this particular challenge and the good news is that the majority of this challenge we believe, based on the methodology I'm going to walk you through here in just a moment, we believe that we can actually close this financing challenge much more narrowly than what we are proposing here. So, currently we have 73.5 million dollars of projects financed over the next ten years, which is great news. So, that means we project in our model the 170 millions dollars in challenges that we have got from the NPDES compliance, 73.50 million of those -- of the dollars of those projects have already been accounted for. So, we can just take that off, because we don't need that funding, the funding has already been projected inside the model. So, that leaves us with an unfunded gap now of 96.6 million dollars. Well, if we continue to look at ways that we can finance this particular gap, one of the ways we are going to do that is we are going to look at utilizing the undesignated or unbalance, which we have anticipated to be about 24.7 million dollars. Now, as you know several years ago we set up a regulatory reserve and that regulatory reserve, in addition to a more quickly Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 54 of 74 rebound in growth, had added to our fund balance. We would like to be able to use that fund balance to finance, in part, this particular challenge. So, if that's the case we reduce the gap to now 71.8 million from the original 170 million. So, if we continue down this track we say what else on the horizon could impact or influence where we are going to be financially. We know that, essentially, growth has returned to the city of Meridian and we know -- you know, as Amber did the analysis that growth has actually always on average for the last seven to eight years been at about three percent per year. So, if we project out that continued growth over the next eight years at three percent, utility sales for both water and sewer services will grow by an additional 24 million dollars over that eight year period. So, that -- if that's the case, then, we can close this gap to now only 47.8 million dollars. But it stands to reason that if we are going to see additional account growth that the way that the account growth is going to occur is by the connection to our system, so it's growth; right? We are going to have more growth connecting to the system and they are going to have to pay assessment fees for both water and sewer. So, if you project that into the future over the next eight years how much would assessment fee revenue also contribute to closing this gap and we have estimated that to be about 6.4 million dollars as well. What that leaves now is from the original 170 million a gap of about 41.4 million and now it gets tough, because we have to do something in order to close this gap. In fact, we have to do several things and that's what we are here to talk about tonight. We have a proposal for you to consider a number of different things that will ultimately help close this particular gap. The first one is -- Borton: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Sorry. Mr. Borton. Borton: Tom, can you go back one slide real quick? Sorry about that. Barry: There you go. Borton: Tom, the use of fund balance of 24.7 -- Barry: Uh-huh. Borton: -- is that today's figure or is that what you believe the available fund balance will be in seven years when you need it? Barry: Yeah. The fund balance is based on end of '14, so what we are anticipating is by end of '14 we should be able to have those funds. Now, the reality here is we are not going to be writing one check for 24.7 million dollars and handing it over at one point in time. We will, as we have done with other use of fund balances, be using portions of that fund balance over time. So, in that way it's somewhat conservative, because what we are saying is at a point in time, but the reality is it's our growth and if some of these other functions that we make are more conservative than reality, then, we should have a larger fund which might help us to more aggressively close that gap. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 55 of 74 Borton: Okay. Barry: Does that make sense? Borton: Yes. Barry: Good. At least we hope so. So, going forward we have this unfunded gap, 41 million dollars. What are we going to -- what do we do? We can't, obviously, have this gap, we have got to do something. So, we have four things for you to consider tonight. The first one is modify the sewer connection fee -- and I will talk about each of these more specifically. Modify the rates, consider a surcharge, and, then, also investigate fee leveling in the utilities. We will talk first about modifying the sewer connection fees. What we are talking about here, if you accept the proposal, would add nine million dollars to the -- to the end of fund balance over an eight year period if we elevate the connection fees for sewer. Now, as you know, when people hook up to the water system or they hook up to the sewer system, they pay connection fees -- we will go to the next slide, please. And those connection fees are, essentially, their buy in to the system. It's a one-time fee. Once they are connected you don't pay it again. The reality is that when you look at our fees they have not been raised since 2007 and I want to talk a little bit about that, because for sewer when we do the projections for this modeling we are not able to get the current sewer assessment fee to cover the future costs that are going to be largely capacity driven in not only the permit, but also just as it relates to growth. So, a substantial portion of this NPDES cost is capacity and it's largely growth dominated. So, the sewer assessment, as I mentioned, is unable to meet this. So, we need to make a modification to it. If we increase sewer assessment or the connection fee for sewer only by 750 dollars per connection or per permit, what that would do is it would elevate our revenue over the eight year period by nine million dollars and that's based on about 120 connections per month throughout the year. The current sewer connection rate or fee is 2,749 dollars. The proposed sewer connection rate with the additional 750 would be 3,499. 1 want to put this in perspective for you a little bit. So, to do that -- as I mentioned before, we did not have -- well, here is the regional fee comparison. We are second lowest of the nine regional cities in and around the Treasure Valley. Our rate is 2,749. Caldwell 1,969. Below us. Nampa is 2,888, so they are ahead of us. And Boise Ada County, Eagle, Garden City, Star, Kuna -- as a matter of fact, the regional Treasure Valley average for sewer connection charges is 3,848 dollars. Our rate or our fee is only 2,749. If we were to raise the fee, like 750 dollars, that proposed fee would still -- it would only take us from the second lowest to the third lowest and it would be well under the regional average. So, we are below market considerably as it relates to our sewer connection fee and, therefore, we think that there is a good case to be made to elevate the sewer assessment fee, particularly not just because of the marketability, but also -- or the market rate, but also because of the -- and more importantly because of the NPDES and growth -related challenges that our experienced and the inability for the current assessment to accommodate those expenses. One other thing that I would like to point out is the engineering news record statistics that show the construction cost indices over time, Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 56 of 74 these are roughly equitable to inflation rate for construction. Well, the inflation rates in construction since 2007 when we last rated the assessment rates cumulatively equate to 19.2 percent and we have not raised those rates, again as I mentioned, since 2007, so, therefore, we have lost ground on the construction cost index as well to also give some additional perspective. But even -- even if we were to do this, raise the connection fee for sewer only by 750 dollars, we close that 41 million dollar gap by only nine million. So, we have to do more. And so I want to talk with you about the other recommendations that we have here as well, which is to entertain an inflationary rate increase for both water and sewer. To do this what we would be talking about here is increasing the water rate and the wastewater rates by two percent -- an inflationary increase of two percent. That would be both to the base rate, as well as the usage rate. That would add a $1.19 to the average total monthly bill for our average user and that would generate over eight years 3.8 million dollars. It's not a ton, it's an inflationary increase and, again, that's still not enough. So, we have to do more. And the next recommendation is to consider a surcharge on the wastewater portion of the rates and before I get to that, this is the inflation rate data back from 2010, again, keeping in mind, that the utility rates have not been raised since 2010 cumulatively the inflation rate is 7.6 percent, we are recommending two percent at this point in time. So, now I will move to the surcharge. If we instituted an EPA surcharge for the wastewater component to it, accelerate some revenue collection to help address this particular challenge. Based on the surcharge recommendation that we are going to make here, we could generate an additional 15.4 million dollars and so the way that we get there is, essentially, by adding a ten percent surcharge to the average wastewater utility bill per month. So, what that means is the average bill right now is about $37.10 or something to that effect. So, ten percent of that would be $3.71. That would be added on top of the monthly bill and that would generate 15.4 million dollars over a ten year period. The reason we have decided to not try to attempt to increase our revenue solely through inflationary rates is because when we get to the end of this time period, this ten year time period, the collection of revenues is so aggressive, because we are not going to have the type of spending we are talking about after this ten year period, that, essentially, we are overgenerating revenue in the fund. So, what we are recommending here is taken a modest inflationary increase and as it relates to rates institute a surcharge that sunsets in ten years. What that does is allows us to finance the challenge for that ten year period and, then, when that ten year period and all the expenses associated with that ten year period expire, so does the surcharge. That way we don't overgenerate revenues and don't overburden our ratepayers. So, that's the thinking behind instituting a surcharge and placing the majority of the expense from a ratepayer standpoint in the form of a sunsetting surcharge. As I mentioned to you earlier, we believe based on talking with staff and the building department or development -- Community Development, as well as Finance staff and Public Works staff, that there is an opportunity to look at how fees are levied across the utilities and in particular we have some information that suggests that customer classes that would mean say industrial versus commercial versus multi -family versus single family, those customer classes might not be as consistent as we would like in the way that they are paying for hook up charges and a couple of examples that have come up in our research have indicated that there might be an opportunity if we study this further to do what we call fee leveling. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 57 of 74 That means making sure that we have equity across all of these customer classes. We think -- and this is a bit of a guess at the moment, we think that if we -- if our hunch is correct, that we might be able to generate about 500,000 dollars each year over the next eight years for a total of about four million dollars of new revenue, based upon this opportunity to inequities if you will in where we have utility connections, without having to raise fees or rates, at least that's the hope at this point in time. This is a little bit of a wild card, because we don't quite know if and how much there might be from an equity standpoint available to post as revenue and, quite frankly, when you look at those types of things you do run the risk of finding out that in certain areas maybe you have charged too much and you need to bring those fees down and it can have an adverse effect. So, we don't really know at this time. But with everything that I have said, essentially what this does is it brings the unfunded gap down to 9.3 million and at this point in time I don't have any further recommendations as to how to close that gap, but I do have some thoughts for you. We are comfortable at the moment, based on where we are, looking ten years -- at the start of the ten year period, we are comfortable leaving that gap temporarily as it stands, because of some influencers that I wanted to chat with you about and their impact on the revenue, as well as the overall funding for the utility. Before I do that this is what, essentially, the pie chart looks like now. The 170 million dollars has been all -- and, again, we have got assumptions in here and we will talk about those assumptions and the risks associated with some of those functions and the variability. But, essentially, we boil all of that down to a gap of 9.3 million through a number of different approaches and also assumptions. So, let's talk about the risks associated with this particular approach. Well, first of all, we -- this approach requires that we rely on information that the EPA and DEQ are telling us that we will have ten years to comply. If they tell us we have five years to comply, the problem is entirely different. If they tell us we have 12 years to comply, 15 years to comply, we have a different -- we have a different challenge, a different scenario to run, but at this point in time we are pretty darn sure that we will have a ten year compliance period. This approach also, essentially, leans heavily on our history, which is that continued growth is going to occur and we are going to earmark that continued growth to help us out of this -- out of this challenge. But it's also predicated on continued usage amounts. We also are wanting to make sure that -- or we are relying that essentially people are going to use the same amount of water and same amount of wastewater services. If all of a sudden we have a decrease in the amount of water that's being used and, therefore, a resulting decrease in the amount of sewage that's used, our revenues go down, the gap gets bigger. If, on the alternative water rates -- well, water usage goes up and sewer usage goes up, we close the gap more quickly. That's largely dependent -- particularly in water, it's based on climate, right? If we have a wet shoulder, it's rainy, we sell less water, we sell less water, we get less revenue, we get less revenue the gap expands. The opposite is true as well. So, we are going to have to -- I mean there is some risk associated with this approach. We also are saying that this approach relies on the similar delinquency rate that we currently have. We have a certain number of people that are delinquent on their accounts, they don't pay, we turn them off, so on and so forth, so we are anticipating that the delinquency rate would be roughly the same. If the delinquency rate goes way up, of course, the revenues come way down, expenses to go after them go way up, I mean you can see the gap gets bigger and vice -versa. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 58 of 74 Depreciation expense. You know, we have been talking about depreciation on and off for years. We have the good fortune of being a young city for the most part and that the majority of our infrastructure has been installed since 1990. The majority of the infrastructure typically would have between a 20 and a 50 -- maybe a 75 year life span, so the good news is, you know, we have got some time to deal with the depreciation issue, but this scenario does not account for any kind of aggressive depreciation savings or earmarking or even for that matter -- I mean it doesn't take care of the responsibilities we would have now for replacements, but it doesn't set up a program that would allow for funding the big bubble. As you know, that big bubble starts in 1990 and it continues and we are going to have a whole lot of infrastructure that's going to have to be replaced in a very short order. We are, essentially, going to reconstruct all of the infrastructure that was put in in the city between 1990 and 2008 over that same time period. The challenge for us is that all that was given to us -- mostly given to us by developers, but we have to finance its replacement at some point in the future. We don't have that money available at this point in time. So, we are going to continue to delay the depreciation expense challenge to work through the CPA challenge. We have to be comfortable with that. And, lastly, this assumption relies that the recommendations that we are making this evening are going to be instituted and instituted immediately. If we delay on instituting any of the recommendations we have talked about, the gap just continues to slowly grow and that's a danger, because as that gap grows we have to take more drastic measures to close it, because we are on a time frame here. We have a timeline and that timeline is something that will be legally enforceable under the Clean Water Act and come with severe penalties if we don't comply with the compliance schedule that will be issued to us. Some other influencers, however, maybe on the more positive side that we want to talk about, is permit renewal delays. All right. It's no mystery that the EPA was supposed to update our permit in 2004. It is now 2014. Ten years late. What happens if the first permit cycle, which is five years, comes and the EPA decides it wants to take two or three years before it will renew to the second permit. What happens to the compliance schedule and what happens to the permit -- we are not really sure. But it's a wild card; right? Maybe there will be extensions given, as has been the case in the past. Administrative extensions to prior permits. And so the second level or the second wave or rejection in phosphorus and other constituent requirements might be delayed and if it were delayed, you know, that might give us an opportunity to have a few more years, however long that delay is, to save up and continue to better finance that. Also, reduce technology costs. The technology that we are going to be incorporating at some level into the wastewater treatment plan is expensive technology, but by the time we incorporate it, which might be six or seven years down the road, those technology costs might come down a little bit and if they do come down a little bit, say for example nine million dollars over 170 million dollars, we close the gap. But if they don't, well, we don't close the gap. Project synergies and timing. We are going to try to pick projects that accomplish like killing two birds with one stone, right? If I can get a project that handles two or three different problems all at once for a reduced cost, that synergy -- that project synergy may also help to reduce the cost. In addition, the timing of projects, where we place certain types of projects has everything to do with how we can fund them and where those funds are going to be pulled from. And so if we can take some big projects and move them or Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 59 of 74 scatter them in a certain way, we might be able to finance under this pay-as-you-go scenario that we are talking about more easily. And, then, lastly, we are investigating -- you guys approved a consultant contract for evaluating trading and offsets. Actually didn't approve the contract, you approved the budget amendment for it a couple weeks ago. That's important work, because if we can trade or offset the improvements we have already made at the wastewater treatment plan, we can significantly -- potentially significantly reduce the investments that will be required from a capital construction standpoint going forward. So, we are looking for low hanging fruit with the study and we hope that study comes back and says these are some areas that you can trade these big expensive capital projects for the same benefit for these inexpensive best management practices. That's the whole goal behind offsets and trading. So, there is a lot of influencers here. There is a lot of risks still in the approach that we have taken. We think we are pretty conservative and based on what we know if we take the actions that are being recommended tonight, we believe that we close that gap significantly, we will have to revisit with you in ways that we can continue to close the gap and update the financial information to find out if that gap is going to close itself by accelerated growth or some of these other influences or if it's going to expand based upon some assumptions that just, essentially, don't prove -- prove out. So, those are risks and influencers. Let's go to the next one. The -- the impacts, essentially, on the community, on the utilities, the developers, I wanted to summarize real quickly with you. To the development community we are asking for a 750 dollar per sewer connection increase and that's in the form of a sewer assessment fee. Okay? To the community, in summary, we are asking that we increase the base and usage rates for water and sewer by two percent. Here is the impact. The water base rate would go from 5.38 to 5.49. That's an increase of 11 cents per month. The water usage rate will go from $1.86 to $1.90, which is an increase of four cents per thousand gallons per month. Wastewater base rate would go from 8.48 to 8.65, which is a 17 cent increase per month and the wastewater usage rate goes from 5.43 to 5.54 which is an 11 cent per thousand gallons per month. So, the total impact on the current bill, then, would look like this: Currently the average bill for water is about $22.29. The proposal would elevate that bill to $22.74, which would be an increase on a monthly basis of 45 cents. Wastewater, average bill is $37.10. Proposed bill would be $37.84, increasing the average monthly bill of about 74 cents. Add those together you get the total from the inflationary increase which is $1.19 per month for the average sewer and water user. Then if you institute the EPA surcharge, which is about ten percent, you would add another $3.71 per month, for a total increase to the monthly bill of $4.90. So, that would be the total impact to -- at this point in time the total impact to our average water and wastewater user will be $4.90, which helps us to close this gap. Let's talk about the impact on the pump, because if we were to do this -- what would it do to the fund. We have talked about there is still a remaining gap. I want to show you the picture that Amber put up, which shows the fund with no -- we take no action, essentially, we have a couple of challenges here. First of all, we, essentially, become insolvent according to this model, between somewhere -- somewhere between 2017 and 2018 and the severity of the insolvency is almost 50 million dollars at its worst. If we institute the changes that we are talking about right now a couple things happen. First of all -- can you go to the next slide? Thank you. So, with the adjustments we get this kind of a Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 60 of 74 picture and two important things happen. First of all, insolvency is pushed off, according to the model, until around 2021. So, we get four more years of cushion; right? And the impact or severity of the insolvencies is only about 11 million dollars at that point in time. So, not only do you lessen the severity, which also pushes out the time frame. What this all means is that, essentially, if we were to do everything I have just talked about and implemented everything we just talked about today and every -- all the assumptions and all -- everything stayed exactly the way it was, it still wouldn't be enough. We would still have to do something. But the good news is we don't have to do it today. We don't have to do it tomorrow. Might not have to do it next year. But we will have to do it at some point in time. The key to rate setting and fees and those types of things is to institute changes as soon as you can to maximize the compounding effect of those to minimize the overall impact on the community long term and that's really the goal here. So, we are looking at a situation where time is on our side, growth is way up there right now. We don't want to wait around for increasing any connections fee -- fees for six, eight, ten months when growth may or may -- but come back down, we want to capture the environment that we have right now and utilize it to our benefit and doing so minimizes, as I mentioned before, the impact with the entire community. So -- go to the next slide if you would. That is, essentially, how we intend to approach this particular challenge at this time with the information we have. I want to mention that this situation could be a whole lot worse for us. And 170 million dollars does not account for the improvements that have already been made at the wastewater treatment plant. Had they not been made we would be having to make those during the same period. So, some of the forethought, some of the modeling, some of the planning, the upgrades that we have done at the wastewater treatment plant, have all benefitted us and have positioned us in -- in a situation that could have been otherwise a lot worse for our community. We been positioning ourselves for this particular day. Remember in 2009 and 2010 we went through a pretty exhaustive rate analysis and modeling and we increased rates in both of those years. We were slated to increase the rates again for that third year. If you might recall, it was a three year option. We decided, based on the information at that point in time, not to take the third increase, because, quite frankly, EPA was a lot further away at that point in time and we didn't feel like it was -- it was prudent, based on that information, to institute that third increase. So, that's good news. Right. The challenges now -- we have got to -- we have got to address this financial challenge and it's got to be addressed and the sooner the better. So, that's kind of the point here. Now, essentially, the recommendations, in summary, as I mentioned, two percent inflationary increase, develop an ordinance, implement that immediately. Implement the ten percent EPA surcharge immediately, because it's over five percent we are probably going to have to have a public hearing, so we need to get on that, get the public hearing started, shop that around, but as soon as we can get that hearing set up, set up the ordinance, implement that as soon as possible. Additionally, implement the sewer connection fee increase of 750 dollars per sewer connection. At this point in time we didn't mess with water. We are not -- it's not a challenge for us at this point. It's not where our focus or time and attention is at this point in time. We probably should look at increasing the water connection charge, but at this point in time we have left that to the side, dealing strictly with wastewater, since this is largely a wastewater dominated problem. But hold a -- meet with developers and builders to discuss the sewer Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 61 of 74 assessment increase, the needs, walk them through this particular slideshow and, then, essentially, hold the public hearing as soon as possible and implement that as soon as possible. And, then, finally, do some fee leveling analysis. We want to audit the water - wastewater connection fees. We review, assess and make recommendations on what can be done there if anything and -- and, then, report back to you on what we found. So, those are the recommendations and next steps. Now, the reality is in Public Works we always have Plan B and that Plan B for us, essentially, would be to go after a revenue bond. So, in the event that we cannot finance the gap, we can pull the parachute out and go after a revenue bond. Now, nobody wants to do that, I understand that, it's not something that's been in our nature and we have taken a lot of pride in being able to finance our challenges very responsibly, as we have in the past and we know, however, that this challenge is probably the biggest challenge we have ever experienced in the utility in its history -- or at least one of them and we have to overcome it. We think we have found a way to continue the pay as you go model that we have embraced and utilized and has been very -- and it's been very successful with, but the reality is in the event we cannot pay as we go for this particular challenge, we would have an option to go after a bond. The good news is that that bond is not 170 million, it's not 90 million, it's 65 million, it's probably not -- based upon your direction, it probably won't even be the 41 million dollar gap. It might only be nine, which is the current gap that we are projecting, to maybe 15 to maybe 30 and my guess is that as we refine -- continue to refine numbers and we continue to learn more and the EPA continues to delay and growth continues to go up, my hope is that the gap will close itself over time. So, that is the reason we are comfortable with having a nine million dollar gap at this point in time, because we think we have got time on our side and there is a lot of influencers that may help close that gap, because we are being pretty conservative in this approach. But it's pretty conceivable to close a nine million dollar gap with the assumptions, it's not conceivable to close a 40 of 50 million dollar gap. So, we feel very strongly we have to do something, we have made that recommendation this evening for your consideration and with that I will stop and open it up for questions and discussion. De Weerd: Thank you, Tom. Council, questions? Bird: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: Tom, how many accounts right now are you assessing? Barry: Right now there is about 29,375 accounts. Bird: And we are -- you're planning for eight years or ten years three percent increase each year? Barry: Three percent increase in growth, is that what your question is? In growth over an eight year period. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 62 of 74 Bird: Over eight years. That's what I thought. Barry: Yeah. Because we have to have the funding by the eighth year. Bird: Because we were doing -- yeah. We were doing ten years some and eight years. Barry: Right. Ten years for the surcharge, eight years for the connection fee. Bird: Thank. Barry: Now, the connection fee is not a surcharge, that connection fee would stay in place conceivably going forward. Bird: Thank you. Rountree: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: Tom, you talked about the revenue bonds. Certainly that's not where we want to go, but in terms of discussing this with the public and as we go through the hearing, I think that's something we need to explore to explain that, yes, we have the power to do that, particularly in this case as an emergency or whatnot to do it, but there is -- you know, there is a debt service there and what does it cost you ultimately versus what you're talking about is planning for the future incrementally and hoping that the future will close some of the gap that's still there. So, I think we need to flush that part out and it doesn't have to be worst case, you don't have to bond for 170 million, but you need find a number in there of what we would have to bond for, what's the debt service and what do you ultimately end up looking at your bill for debt service for a bond, because it's going to be more, no matter how you cut it if you're paying interest on that bond it's going to be more. The other thing -- and I don't know if this is even worth exploring with somebody who has got more financial backing than I do, but you mentioned a very interesting word and it's compounding and it's -- it's the secrete to being able to retire, but I think it's potentially the secrete of being able to utilize this pay as you go and put in that gap closure of interest earned. The problem is, as we all know, when you get .01 percent interest on -- I don't care how much money you have got, you don't earn any money on an annual basis, but is there a potential with -- with EPA to -- or some other avenue to invest in something that yields much better than what you can get on the common market, such as T bills and that sort of thing, which are -- it's not great, but it's better than what we are going to see in a long time in this ten year period I think and utilize the interest earned in that venue towards closing the gap or even reducing the amount of potential pay as you go you might have to do. Barry: I don't know if there is -- to me this is not isolated to the City of Meridian. Is there a way for multiple communities or maybe the state of Idaho to create some kind of an Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 63 of 74 investment fund that would yield something more than a tenth of a percent or even a way you can get a quarter of a percent return on a couple of million bucks, which is crazy, but that's the world we live in. Are those things out there? Is that something worth investigating? I don't know. Barry: Councilman Rountree, Madam Mayor, Members of the Council, I appreciate very much the -- the comments that you have made. I wanted to clarify something before I answer your question. The compounding that I was referring to was -- Rountree: I understand. I understand. Okay. I understand that part. Barry: Okay. Perfect. Rountree: But it made me think of compounding and how you make money. Barry: Right. Okay. Good. We did not include any kind of interest earnings or compounding or any of that in our scenario. I mean you're right, .1 percent -- I mean even on 30 million dollars -- I'd take it, but it's not going to -- Rountree: No. Barry: -- it's not going to solve this problem. I'm not familiar with any type of program that you're talking about for better interest returns, but we can certainly look into it. I know our finance director is probably more aware of those types of opportunities than say I would be or my staff. It's something we could look into, but at this point in time I'm not aware of anything like that. I don't know, for example, if we need to be paying slightly more and there is certain types of investments and we could -- and there is certain investments we are not allowed to invest in -- Rountree: I understand. Barry: -- because of the risks, so it sort of depends and I guess we would have to look into that more. Rountree: It would be interesting if the federal government, knowing that they have unfunded this mandate, would create such a structure that we could earn a reasonable interest rate on monies paid up front to cover these costs and help -- as opposed to the grant program that got us into this treatment plant at a point in time in the past. Barry: Right. Exactly. Which is now all but dried up. Rountree: It's all gone. De Weerd: That would be proactive. Barry: Uh-huh. Right. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 64 of 74 Zaremba: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: On that last subject I don't know if it would be relevant, but Idaho -- the state of Idaho does have a thing called the Local Government Investment Pool -- Rountree: And they lost ten million. Zaremba: -- but I think generally it matches the market or meets the market and it might be worth consulting and they have some very strict rules about safety and -- that would meet any rules that the city would have. Local LGIP -- Local Government Investment Pool. Barry: Thank you, Mr. Zaremba. I'm not aware of that program or have any information on it, so it would be worth looking into. Thank you. Zaremba: And also, Madam Mayor, if I may. A number of the things that you have suggested are -- to me show forward thinking, but let me just -- on the two percent inflationary increase are you thinking that's one time or is that every year? Barry: At this point in time, Councilman Zaremba, it's only been programmed once. So, it is a one time two percent inflationary increase at this point in time and what that does for the water utility is it corrects a slight -- it's quite deficit spending, but it corrects the revenues in water just fine and in wastewater when we come out of the ten year period it sets wastewater up for a nice steady recovery, which is why we don't think we need a huge inflationary increase. I think going forward, if we have to make additional adjustments my recommendation would likely be, based on what I know at this point in time, provided we don't have huge inflation going on over the next several years and stay the same, would be to go back to the surcharge and increase that. So, ten percent is the surcharge today. If it's not enough maybe that goes from ten to 15 percent. So, we add five more percent to that surcharge. The goal is at the end of a period it goes away, we don't have to ask for any additional funds in that form of revenue and we have restabilized the utility going forward. So, that's, again, why we did not want to put a lot of the revenue requirement if you will, on an indefinite inflationary increase, instead put it into a short term surcharge that can go away and, then, relieve our citizens of the obligation and burden -- financial burden associated with the challenge. Zaremba: So, your answer actually led into my next question, which is about the surcharge. I know on a number of my bills -- phone bill for certain and probably some of the others, there is a line that says regulatory surcharge or some other wording, but it relates it to specifically that kind of thing. So, it is something that people are knowledgeable and accustomed to. I guess my concern -- I know it's more palatable to have a sunset on it, but my concern is that we may continue to have more regulatory issues and, of course, even if we put a sunset on it it can be renewed if it needs to or as Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 65 of 74 you said it can be adjusted as we go along, but -- my phone bill certainly doesn't indicate that its going to sunset any of those things and I'm concerned that ten years from now the landscape from EPA may be even tighter. So, I don't know, it might make sense to put the sunset on it now, but I wonder whether that's going to be sustainable. Barry: I appreciate your comments, Councilman Zaremba, and I would suggest that everything you said is quite possible. You know, these regulations are only going to get more and more stringent for us. While we don't see anything on the immediate horizon, which would be ten or 15 years, that looks anything near like this type of challenge, we do know that there are other concerns like endocrine disruptors or microconstituents or other sorts of things in which -- De Weerd: Odor. Barry: Pardon me? De Weerd: Odor. Barry: -- that might need to be addressed. You would reserve the right to extend at anytime that surcharge. If you decided in one ordinance to sunset it on a certain day and as we get closer to that day you want to amend that ordinance -- and a future council wants to amend the -- the ordinance, they could amend the ordinance. If you wanted to let it drop off and, then, institute some sort of regulatory reserve surcharge to save up for the next challenge, you could do that as well. You reserve all of those rights. I think at this point in time, based on what we know and in particular in enlightening the community on the approach that we are taking, it makes sense to have a ten year surcharge and be clear with the community that funds that, that that's our intention that we only intend at this point in time to burden them for the minimal amount of time that it's going to take us to get through this period and I would feel personally good about that, so people would know we weren't trying to, you know, over ask, if you will, on the revenue side after the challenge has been completed. Zaremba: Madam Mayor? One other if I may and it's a little different direction. You have not talked about reclaimed water, which, of course, helps us offset some of the requirements, but also our current uses of reclaimed water are landscape application. You know, parks and other stuff. And they are uses that don't end up back in the sewer system currently. There are plenty of other places around the country that use reclaimed water in toilets, in some applications where -- it's not drinking water, but where it does end up back in the sewer system and are we likely to every be so pressured or have our population grow so much that we can't keep up with the potable water and we need to start having construction use reclaimed water and toilets and in other places, in which case it would end up in the sewer. And that's a long question, I don't know if it's understandable, but is there a question there I guess? Could we ever change how we use reclaimed water and have it become an issue? Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 66 of 74 Barry: Another good question or series of questions there. Let me try to enlighten you as quickly as I can on reclaimed water, because there are a lot of opportunities and still some challenges with it. You're correct, that we use reclaimed water predominately to satisfy irrigation demands, which are seasonal. So, we have a six month period which we are currently applying, you know, anywhere from 650 to 800 thousand gallons per day of reclaimed water. Now, that's a very small percentage of the seven million gallons that, you know, about -- that we have wastewater each day that we treat. So, there is the first challenge is there is not enough demand on the reclaimed water side. The second challenge is the EPA's new permit in the discussion today are suggesting that they want year around limits to phosphorus and so if they require year around limits to phosphorus -- let's say the reclaimed water program was up and running and every ounce of water that went through that treatment plant during the summertime I could divert out of the creek and put onto -- put into other uses, whether those be irrigation, construction, watering, fire suppression, car washes, cooling towers, all these things that are permitted, toilets, those kinds of things, some of which those uses are currently being used in Meridian under our current program. If I was able to do that, but I still had a year around phosphorus limit, what do I do when reclaimed water demands -- particularly since they are irrigation dominated -- slough off in the wintertime, but I still have to meet this phosphorus limit. So, now I got to look for some other solution in the wintertime. That is a scenario we are working up right now. As a matter of fact, we are so disgruntled and frustrated with the EPA that we'd like to get completely out of the creek if we could and one of the ways to do that is to have a wintertime solution and that solution that we are investigating at this point in time is called direct infiltration or aquifer recharge. So, essentially, the idea there is that if we could take the water that we currently discharge to the creek, redirect it and put it into hydraulically suppressed or groundwater suppressed areas and we could get rid of it without having it enter waters of the U.S. and, therefore, not having to comply with the Clean Water Act. We would have to comply with a whole host of other permits, but those would be largely DEQ permits at that point in time. The city of Nampa has investigated that. We have done some preliminary studies on as well. We have found some areas in southwest Meridian where that might be possible for us. Now the challenge is, okay, if it's going to cost me 50 million dollars to fully establish the reclaimed water program and it's going to cost me 110 million dollars to do this infiltration, now I have got two different programs, two different permits, two different operations that I'm going to have to staff and everything at a capital cost of let's say in that particular example 160 million, is it better to just go ahead and put one solution that gets the full -- you know, the full compliance solution that we are after. These are all the complexities of what to do, right, and that's why when you look at the overall challenge financially that we are up against, there is a significant portion of cost associated with studies, because we make the wrong decision, you know, we spend tens of millions either backing ourself out of that or putting in a redundant system or doing something else. So, right now it's pretty critical for us to make those types of analyses and to make sure that the solutions that we are going to deploy are the right and the most cost effective solutions and that they not only satisfy today's challenges, but they will satisfy challenges that we see for the next 20 or 30 years, if not more. So, I don't know if I have answered your question. I have probably given you as convoluted a response as I could there, but, essentially, Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 67 of 74 reclaimed water could be an opportunity for us at this point in time without knowing what the future for year around phosphorus limits looks like, we have kind of paused on expanding that program at this point in time. De Weerd: Mr. Bird? Bird: Yeah. Tom, as far as for me -- I know you're not going to believe this, get your program together and -- as you presented it I don't care -- I know some of them you don't have to have a public hearing on, but I think for the benefit of the rate payers it would be nice to have it all -- do all of it under a public hearing and let's get it going and, you know, hopefully, if people have a real problem with it they will come out and testify or -- you know, one way or the other, but let's get it going. I think that -- I'm not scared in ten years of the nine million, I think we will make that up, if growth stays like it is. If we have another 2006 and past we might not, in the same token we have to cut back ourselves. Anyway, that's my recommendation. Get the thing and let's get going. Barry: Thank you. De Weerd: I think it might take a little bit more time, because I -- as we just had the city survey and people would like to get their information -- and I don't get that at all, but -- in their utility bill, so we will need to put information in the utility bill about public hearings and printing information about what we are facing. But we probably should put together a public relations or a communications -- a communications plan on how we can inform our citizens of -- of what's being proposed and how we can give them an opportunity to input, because that's another thing that the city survey did show is we do ask our citizens and we need to continue to do so. Mr. Rountree. Rountree: Madam Mayor, my comment is probably along those same lines. We don't know for sure the timing of this permit, so it's hard to say we are going to do this and pull the trigger for something that's been looking at us for the last ten, 12, nine years, whatever and having the public say why are you doing it, it's taken this long, is it ever going to happen. So, I think we have to have a better handle on the timing of the permit, but I agree with what's been said, I think we need to have a public information plan that starts educating the public that this is the predicament that we are in and we are moving towards a permit that could very well cost this kind of money and here are the potential strategies to accommodate that through a series of newsletters or whatnot and utility bills -- it seems like that's the appropriate place and certainly some information on the website as well and so people don't get hit with this -- well, there is going to be people that are going to get hit with it anyway, because they don't follow this stuff, but at least do a professional effort in getting the information out and, then, the potential solutions and the potential impacts and, then, you get it into the public hearing process, so we can move forward. But to me the critical piece is when are we going to get that permit and I know that's a crystal ball deal, but it's probably sooner than later at this point, after the wait we have had. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 68 of 74 Barry: Right. And, Councilman Bird, if it's any consolation the -- or, excuse me, Councilman Rountree -- Rountree: That's okay, that's a compliment. Barry: If there is any consolation the reality is we have our permit, we have a draft of it, and we have never been in this position before. We have never had anything to talk about, we have never had anything in writing, we have never had a compliance schedule that we have worked up that DEQ has been meeting with us about and EPA. So, we have never been further along than we are right now. You know, I would almost -- I'm not a betting man, but I mean I would venture to wage a bet that it's not going to be October like they said it's going to be this year. But could it be December or January of next year, could it be February, could it be March -- it's going to be some time I strongly believe in the next six to eight -- six to 12 months. Rountree: Just knowing that we have a draft is a step that the public -- they don't know the process to have gotten to that point, but we were talking about something that we haven't had as a draft. It's a potential. Barry: Yeah. Rountree: Highly likely, but it hasn't -- the hammer hasn't dropped yet. Barry: No, it hasn't. They have been cocked and they are ready to go, so -- Rountree: Yeah. Barry: -- the sooner we start -- you know, it's kind of a race. If we can legally jump the start we get a competitive advantage. Rountree: We can legally do it, but I don't know that you're going to like the flack. Barry: That's true. That's true. Very good points, though. Thank you. De Weerd: He doesn't get it, we do. Or I do. Rountree: We all do. We are all going to end up paying for this, so -- Bird: I was going to say, we are all paying for it. Borton: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Borton. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 69 of 74 Borton: Tom, can you remind us when you would expect the results from the trades and offset study that we just funded? Because that might impact the -- the nut that we are trying to cover. Barry: It might. The reality is we probably won't have that report finalized until probably December, maybe January of next year. So, it will certainly influence where we are at. I don't know that it will solve the challenge or how much of the challenge it might solve, but, you know, our commitment to the City Council has been to come every year and disclose our modeling and projection with you and it's not like if we do these things we have talked about and go through this public hearing process and those sorts of things that you won't ever see us on this topic again. We will be right back here another year and we would have that information and a whole lot of other assumptions that have been all updated, we would give you another projection, we tell you if we are tracking right, if we -- if we can reduce the surcharge or if we need to increase the surcharge, any of those types of things, all of that would be reevaluated and will continue to be reevaluated through this entire process on an annual basis. That's our commitment to the City Council at this point and, quite frankly, if you want it more frequently than that. Be a lot of work, but we could do that, so -- De Weerd: Anything else? So, next steps. Barry: My recommendation for next steps would be for us to go and sit with the BCA and the developers council and some prominent developers and talk with them immediately about the 750 dollar amount. The information I showed you on the regional benchmark comes straight from the BCA, so the BCA already knows that we are the second lowest. Don't know how much of an objection they will have with the -- barring the situation we have got, as well as the market analysis that they have done themselves, but we think that that process should happen right away. We will start working up materials for the utility bill inserts. What I'd like to do is sit down with staff and try to develop a project schedule by which we could reasonably anticipate communications that would be satisfactory to attempting to educate the public on these issues and, then, lead them to a series of public hearings, ultimately concluding with actions that you deem fit to take, so my goal would be to go through that process as quickly as possible. It's going to be a lot of work, particularly if we front load a lot of this communication and that kind of stuff, we don't have communication people in our office. I understand we are going to have somebody come on board in a couple weeks in the Mayor's office that we might be able to utilize, but the reality is that communication piece could take, you know, four to six weeks just to -- just to develop and vet and the reality is if we are going to put it in the utility bill we are three weeks from each billing prior to that as well. So, we bill on the 5th and the 20th, so if it takes of four to six weeks to develop the material and, then, three weeks to cycle into each of the bills we are another six weeks out at that point in time, so you're now 12 weeks and, then, you're talking more time to, you know, try to anticipate when this public hearing is going to be and get that scheduled and noticed and, then, go through the public hearing process, as you know will probably be every other week for three weeks with a notice -- I mean you're probably -- Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 70 of 74 De Weerd: Well, Tom, I think you're going to have two different information and communication plans. Your first is your assessment fee and moving forward with meeting with the developers council and the BCA is -- is the first step. So, you may want to just have two separate plans, one on the assessment, one on the surcharge slash rate increase and they will have different time schedules and probably different information pieces, but I you can't make -- take shortcuts on informing our public and making sure they have they have the opportunity to -- to give input -- or at least understand what we are faced with. Barry: Right. And the intent, hopefully, you have heard, was not to short circuit the importance of -- De Weerd: Well, it's going to take time. Barry: It will take time. Exactly. But we are talking -- I mean if I understood Mr. Bird's request to run everything through one public hearing together. Bird: If you don't have -- no. Excuse me, Madam -- no, Tom, that will be fine if you have to do it. I think Mayor just hit upon it. Your first thing is your 750 dollars that you need to get going. And that's where you have got to go talk to the developers and the BCA and all that stuff and get that going. You can bring that forward as a public hearing, then, we will do the rest afterwards. Barry: Okay. Bird: The $4.71 a month increase in the bill, while it would be nice, can weight, but I think the 750 is going to -- and it's probably going to be your biggest kickback. So, I think -- no, I did say that, but if we -- if we need to -- after these others go forward I think we can do it. Barry: Why don't we do this: Let myself and the staff and Finance and -- when is the communication -- the 21 st did we say? De Weerd: The 23rd. Barry: 23rd. De Weerd: First day. Barry: First day. Maybe we hit them up on this. We come back with a plan and we -- I think the BCA meets the first of the month anyways and so we are -- we are not going to be -- be able to meet with them in advance of their meeting. Although we can start shopping this to developers, but if we can work a communication plan and project schedule and bring that back to you and so at least you're aware of what we are Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 71 of 74 intending and also can have influence over that and, then, we can implement accordingly. Does that sound acceptable? De Weerd: Uh-huh. Barry: Okay. We will do that. Wish I had better news, but it could be worse. Bird: Thanks, Tom. Barry: Thank you. I appreciate your time and attention on this. Bird: And Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: And publically, Tom, thank you and your staff, everybody within your department, for the great Public Works Week that you guys put on. The tour and the thing out here was absolutely fantastic. Thank you very much. Barry: Thank you, Councilman Bird. I appreciate that. De Weerd: Thank you. Can you introduce some of the new faces you have out there? Bird: I was going to say, I only know two of them. Barry: Would you like an introduction? De Weerd: I think you should introduce your team, yes. Barry: Okay. Well, on the left Steve is not in our department, but we sure like him. Bird: We know him. Barry: He's a good guy. Actually, then, going to the right. Dale Bolthouse is our new utility operations manager. Actually retitled deputy director of utility operation. Behind him is Mollie Mangerich. You know her. She's the environmental division manager. Forward of her and to the right of Dale -- actually to the left of Dale, but to your right, we call it stage left -- we have Tracy Crane. In front of him Amber Christofferson, who gave the presentation, our utility analyst. Brian McClure is with the water division. He is our water operations maintenance fleet and, then, Mike Pepin is our business operations manager. He's taking over for John, who moved into the deputy director position as you know sometime ago. So -- and, then, Warren, our engineering manager and Susie our administrative assistant. Todd is not part of the -- Todd's not part of the department, but he's certainly part of the team; right? And he's looking sharp over there. You can see he didn't want to sit with the team, but that's okay. We won't hold that against him. And, then, we love Frank, right? And these guys over here and -- Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 72 of 74 De Weerd: Thank you. We know the rest. Barry: All right. Item 7: Ordinances A. An Ordinance (AZ 13-015 — TM Creek) For Annexation And Rezone Of A Parcel Of Land Located Being A Portion Of NW 1/4 Of Section 14, Township 3 North, Range 1 West, Boise Meridian; Establishing And Determining The Land Use Zoning Classification Of Said Lands From RUT To C -G (General Retail And Service Commercial District); TN -C (Traditional Neighborhood Center); And R-40 (High Density Residential District) In The Meridian City Code; And Providing An Effective Date De Weerd: Okay. Thank you. Item No. 7-A is Ordinance 14-1615. Madam Clerk, will you, please, read this ordinance by title only. Holman: Thank you, Madam Mayor. City of Meridian Ordinance No. 14-1615, an Ordinance AZ 13-015, TM Creek for annexation and rezone of a parcel of land located -- being a portion of northwest one quarter of Section 14, Township 3 North, Range 1 West, Boise meridian, Ada County, Idaho, as described in Attachment "A" and annexing certain lands and territory, situated in Ada County, Idaho, and adjacent and contiguous to the corporate limits of the City of Meridian as requested by the City of Meridian; establishing and determining the land use zoning classification of said lands from RUT to C -G (General Retail and Service Commercial District); TN -C (Traditional Neighborhood Center); and R-40 (High Density Residential District) in the Meridian City Code; providing that copies of this ordinance shall be filed with the Ada County assessor, the Ada County recorder, and the Idaho State Tax Commission, as required by law; and providing for a summary of the ordinance; and providing for a waiver of the reading rules; and providing an effective date. De Weerd: I don't see anyone in the audience who would like to hear it read in its entirety, so, Council, do I have a motion? Bird: Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Bird. Bird: I move we approve Ordinance No. 14-1615 with suspension of rules. Cavener: Second. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 73 of 74 De Weerd: I have a motion and a second to approve Item 7-A. Madam Clerk, will you call roll. Roll Call: Bird, yea; Rountree, yea; Zaremba, yea; Borton, yea; Milam, absent; Cavener, yea. De Weerd: All ayes. Motion carried. MOTION CARRIED: FIVE AYES. ONE ABSENT. Item 8: Future Meeting Topics A. Discussion Regarding July 1st, 2014 Quorum De Weerd: Item 8 is any topics for future agenda items. Bird: We got something on there about July 1 st. Do you have that? De Weerd: Oh. Do we have a quorum on July 1 st? It's a great day. It's my birthday. Zaremba: Happy birthday. De Weerd: My birthday. Zaremba: I'm certainly available. I expect to be here. Rountree: I will be here. De Weerd: Okay. We have a quorum with four. Zaremba: Okay. Madam Mayor? De Weerd: Mr. Zaremba. Zaremba: On a similar subject, we have been invited on a Public Works tour on June the 17th from 3:00 to 5:00. 1 wonder if there is a quorum issue there? Does it need to be noticed? Rountree: We have already discussed that. It's not for additional information or decision. I mean it's just for -- it's a show me trip. Zaremba: Okay. So, it doesn't need to be noticed. Rountree: We reached that conclusion last Friday. Zaremba: Okay. Meridian City Council Workshop June 10, 2014 Page 74 of 74 De Weerd: It doesn't need to be noticed, but there can be, you know, information. Rountree: Yeah. Just informational. Zaremba: Okay. Works for me. De Weerd: Okay. Good. Remember the celebration in the park on Saturday evening and the Association of Idaho Cities is next week and we will have an event, AIC dinner in the park at Kleiner Park and The Village is -- is putting some things together to showcase The Village and the relationship between the park, The Village and the city and with that I would entertain a motion to adjourn. Bird: So moved. Rountree: Second. De Weerd: All those in favor say aye. All ayes. MOTION CARRIED: FIVE AYES. ONE ABSENT. MEETING ADJOURNED AT 7:17 P.M. (AUDIO RECORDING ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) 1 `7 / 1 5 /Qo). MAYO TMY DeWEERD DATE APPROVED ATTEST:00 01 � 1y JAYJCe4i0VMAN, CITY CLE City o► E IOIANI IDAHO �CIO SEAL IV the TRS