Will the city recorder please call the role?

Counselor Duggar.

Councillor Hartmeyer Prigg.

Here.

Councilor Hassan.

Here.

Counselor Kimmy.

Councilor Teeter.

Councilor Tifnon.

Here.

Mayor Beatty.

Here.

Okay, as a reminder, this is a special session of the city council, so we're not taking public comment this evening.

With that, I'm going to turn it over to our assistant city manager.

I'm just going to turn it over to the city manager.

Whatever.

I'll answer to either.

All right.

Good evening.

I'm Elizabeth Coffey and I'm the interim slash assistant city manager.

And I'm joined here today by Dan Weinhammer, the other assistant city manager, as well as members of our executive leadership team and some staff subject matter experts to talk a little bit about fiscal sustainability and specifically our efforts to really evaluate our services.

So I'll apologize in advance, I have some allergies this season, so you may hear me have to clear my throat or my voice kind of get a little scratchy.

So bear with me.

So tonight we're going to go over why service evaluation matters, so why we have chosen to do this exercise as part of our fiscal sustainability action plan.

We will go over the services evaluation overview.

We'll talk about some key takeaways that apply to pretty much all of the departments that we evaluated.

And then we'll take some time to go over services review a little bit more in depth.

So we've grouped departments together and we'll share some key takeaways that are specific to those services.

We'll pause for five minutes after each service area for a quick five-minute question and answer period.

So if there's something that comes up for you right away, you'll have a chance to ask that.

But if we run out of time in those five minutes before we move on to the next service, don't worry, just write your questions down and we'll we have a question and answer period at the end.

So our goals for this meeting by the end of the meeting, our hope is that council would be informed about the city, the services the city offers and the choices that can be made as we move forward with fiscal sustainability work.

We hope that you have the opportunity to ask questions and we'd love to hear your feedback around next steps.

In terms of that feedback, we're curious if there's any topics or services that you would like to do a deeper dive into at a future council work session.

I do want to be respectful of your time when we're when I'm scheduling special work sessions like this.

So I will be listening for consensus for at least four counselors that are interested in doing that deep dive into any particular topic before we move forward.

So moving on to why does service evaluation matters?

So I'll back up uh real quick just in case there's anybody listening tonight that's not aware, but council has a fiscal sustainability action plan that they've been working on for the past several years, and we recently updated that plan, and there's a number of short-term actions that we're working on that will uh hopefully guide us towards future financial stability.

Many of them are related to revenues, but there are some related to expenses, such as the soft hiring freeze that you see here on the screen, for example, uh, where we are being strategic about what vacant positions that we fill.

Um and what we're talking about tonight is really service evaluation, and that is taking a close look at all of our services, what's the level of service being offered, and what would be the impact if we reduce that service further because we've made a number of actions over the last several years to reduce our expenses and cut staff positions, as you see here on the screen.

And those have had a number of impacts to date.

Um we have reduced our proactive uh police bike team, we have eliminated dedicated mental health response team resource, we've reduced our community organization grants that we offer.

We've have reduced hours at Murray Shoals Library Branch, and we have overall slower response and project completion time due to reduced staff capacity citywide.

Lots of other things that I could list.

For example, uh code compliance lost a position, and that means we're able to be less proactive.

Um, and we case closures take longer, especially during the busy summer season.

And so to make additional reductions, which is something that's part of our fiscal sustainability plan, there will be impacts to the way that we deliver service and the level of service that we're able to offer.

So we want council and the community to be able to better understand those impacts.

So before we dive into the services evaluation itself, next slide, please, we'll talk a little bit about how services are funded.

And so you can see here on the screen a graph from fiscal year 25-26, all of the funds that we have in the city and in our in Bureau.

And the graph is very small on the screen, and that's okay because what I want you to take away from this slide is that we have a number of different funds here in the city, 30 plus different funds.

And the funds do contain the expenses for a particular program as well as any revenue that offsets those expenses.

And you can see that we spend quite a lot of time talking about the general fund, and that makes up about a quarter of all of the funds that we have here in the city.

And when we look at how services are funded, they can be funded in a couple of different ways.

Funds can send money to other funds to pay for services.

And as the mayor likes to say, she loves money that is comes from other people, and so we do have grants that we seek to offset the cost of services.

We have IGAs that can bring in revenue and fines and fees.

And then the way that services are funds funded depends on the service itself.

So direct services are services that are charged to the fund that they reside in.

And so an example of this would be our police services.

Those reside 100% in our general fund.

The expenses that they take up are in our general fund, and then the revenue that they help generate also goes into our general fund.

We also have what we call cost allocated services, and those are services where the cost is divided between the funds that use the service.

And so easy example of this is that all departments use payroll, and so all departments are charged for that service.

And so, for example, our building fund, those employees require a paycheck, and so they would make a transfer into our general fund to fund payroll services.

All right, so now we'll do an overview of this services evaluation exercise.

And so what we did in this exercise is we took the matrix of general fund services, so those services that reside in the general fund as well as those services that financially have an impact on the general fund.

And last year in April of 2025, we came to council in a special work session to talk a little bit about what those services do and what they offer both internally and externally.

And through this services evaluation exercise, we added some more content to that particular spreadsheet.

And we evaluated four main buckets of questions and information for each service.

And so, first we looked at what choices do we have around this service, and we categorize services based on that choice.

So some services are mandated by federal or state laws.

Some services are mandated locally, either by the city charter or our code, IGAs, collective bargaining agreements, and so we could change those services, but that would require us to take some level of action.

And then we looked at is this a service that's operationally necessary?

So again, payroll being a good example.

Can we function without this service?

No, we cannot.

And then any services that do not fall into any of those three categories, we labeled discretionary.

The second bucket of information that we prepared for each service is we looked at the service funding.

And so we looked at the impact on the general fund.

As I mentioned, some funds live in the general fund and others are allocated across funds citywide.

So there is a column in your spreadsheet that indicates whether or not the service is 100% general funded or whether it's allocated or it has other offsetting revenue.

And we looked at are there external funding sources, and if so, what's the risk that those funding sources could be eliminated?

The third component that we evaluated had to do with service delivery.

And so we evaluated does the service contribute directly to a city council priority.

We looked at is the service provided by another source.

So example is the service provided by one of the districts that reside here in Beaverton.

We analyze the level of service compared to industry standards or peers, and then we looked at are there alternative delivery models or efficiencies.

And then excuse me, finally, we looked at the impact.

Does this investment provide improved efficiency?

Who are the recipients of this service?

We looked at the impact to other departments.

And then finally, we looked at what would happen if this service was reduced, and if and then what would be the impact if the service was eliminated.

So there were some key takeaways that were common across most of the departments that we looked at after we went through this exercise.

And the first takeaway is that 67% of staff time is spent on either mandated or operationally necessary services.

So you can see here in the chart, the yellow represents discretionary services.

The bright blue are the mandated local services, kind of the deeper blue or the state federal mandated, and then that kind of real bright blue on the right are the operational necessities.

And then the second takeaway is that those discretionary services are the services that logically one might look to first when we're making reductions.

But it's important to understand that they do have significant impact both to the community and internally to the organization.

And so this is a very short list of examples, so it's by no means comprehensive, but an example of some of the community impacts of those discretionary services are business retention recruitment, public arts program, live ability programs like sidewalk repair, graffiti, shopping cart removal, our bike team, and even things like criminal and drug and gun investigations are technically not mandated.

And so you can see this discretionary category is pretty wide ranging.

There are also significant organizational impacts because our services are really interconnected.

And so if you make reductions in police, for example, that impacts our municipal courts and vice versa.

Police and livability are really intertwined.

Community and development and our public works teams rely heavily on one another, and then our internal support services are relied on by all of our departments.

And we'll talk more about this as we get into department takeaways.

The third key takeaway is that additional reductions do put the level of service to the community at risk.

And so one of the questions that came up for us when we were doing this exercise as a leadership team is what is the level of service that's acceptable to Beaverton?

That's probably a conversation that's worth having.

Many of the services that we offer are comparable to other cities or industry standards.

And so when we look at reductions, we run the risk of having a reduced level of service, and is that something that is acceptable, or is that something that we want to preserve depending upon the service?

And so if you look at one example, we have two staff that work on graffiti removal programs.

So if you were to reduce just one staff, that would reduce our graffiti tag removal from 300 per year to about 150 per year.

So relatively small reduction in the context of our overall 16 million dollar general fund deficit, but potentially a pretty big impact.

And those are things that need to be considered as we move forward.

Some reductions may increase the cost or the risk or result in inefficiency.

And so one example that came to light through this exercise is that our IT department is one of the departments that we have here in the city that doesn't have any administrative support that's dedicated to it.

And so we do have a manager position that's overseeing copier leases and purchase orders, which they're perfectly capable of doing, but their time would be better spent elsewhere, and that's not the most cost-effective way of providing that administratively necessary service.

And then the final kind of takeaway in this area is that position reductions do impact multiple services.

So when you are looking through kind of the spreadsheet that goes along with this agenda item, you will have noticed that for some staff it might say, or for some services, it might say 0.25 FTE or 0.5 FTE.

And that means, of course, that there is no dedicated full-time staff person working to deliver that service.

They might be only spending a portion of their time on that service.

And so what that means is that many staff are working on multiple services, and so cutting one position can mean that it will impact multiple services.

There's some layers of complication to this that can occur when staff are working on a mix of mandatory and discretionary services.

So making a reduction to that staff position doesn't mean we can stop doing the mandatory work.

That has to shift to other staff.

So it can have a cascading effect through the organization.

One example that we'll talk a little bit more about later, reducing detectives in police shifts the burden of that work to patrol because we do still have to investigate what is reported on.

We don't necessarily have to investigate using a specialized resource like a detective, but that will result in increased workload from for our patrol and may incur over time due to capacity impacts.

And so the last three takeaways were maybe a little bit more on the negative side, but this one is a more positive one that we do know that efficiencies are possible with the goal of improved and enhanced services.

Looking through this exercise, I don't know that I see efficiencies really eliminating the need for a staff person, but certainly we could improve or enhance our services, or we could free up capacity for staff to maybe be able to work on additional projects.

And so we've certainly done a lot of work around this to date.

We've worked doing organizational assessments on our boards and commission support, our human resources department, IT, repo graphics, and communication, and just a couple of examples of some of the results from that.

Our HR team is now piloting the business partner model where we have HR staff that are going out a couple times a week to different departments and embedding themselves in the department so they can learn more about how the department operates and try to help provide increased service to them.

We have increased team training for that team, and then generally through some of these assessments, we've had new staff roles that have come out where we've better been better aligning kind of the task to talent.

We have some efficiency efforts that are continuing to be underway.

We have a municipal courts case management assessment that we'll talk more about later on in this presentation.

Our IT department continues to work hard to transition to kind of off-the-shelf products away from those kind of custom in-house software applications, which will be more efficient and effective in the long run.

And then identified in this exercise, we've really taken an overall look at the administrative support that we have available and identified that that's perhaps not evenly distributed throughout the organization, and we should really look at how we're offering that service.

One caveat around efficiencies is that sometimes we have to pause and take a minute and go slow before we can go fast.

We may have to delay projects or services when staff pause to reform their processes.

A good example of that is our finance department has worked hard over the last year to really map out every single one of their processes as we work on getting better technology in place for those systems, and that's sometimes resulted in a little bit of delay of their work.

One of the challenges that we do face as we work on efficiencies is that departments have often cut funding for proactive studies and projects.

And then another one is that initial investment can be required, and technology is a great example of this.

Sometimes we need to invest in technology to be more efficient, and that is very challenging in this budget environment, but the long-term cost can be significant.

Next slide, please.

Alright, so we're going to transition to talk a little bit about departments.

I'm going to take a quick sip of my tea.

And we're going to kick it off with our police department.

So our police department has about 180 staff.

And as you can see here on the screen, about 71% of their time is spent on mandated services.

They have a 48.5 million dollar budget in the general fund.

They do have some grants and IGAs that offset some of the cost of their service delivery.

And you can see examples of that here on the screen.

And then together with the municipal court, they do help generate some revenue around photo radar fines, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in just a minute, as well as alarm permit fees.

So that's just an overview of kind of where our police department is at.

And then some key takeaways for our police department.

As I noted on the previous slide, most of the department's resources are spent on mandated services.

You can see a portion are in the federal and state area, records, training, professional standards, and then the local area as well, patrol, emergency management, et cetera.

And so to provide some context around these mandated services, this level of service is really standard for most services.

And so the good news is that there weren't services marked as below standard.

We do have one service that is above industry standard, and that's our patrol.

And so if you look nationally, we have better response times than the national average.

So they are trying to be effective and efficient with their staff time.

And then the impact of this service is extremely important.

It's really significant impact on the overall livability of the community.

And then their work is really interconnected.

And so reductions to discretionary services really do impact those mandatory services.

And so I mentioned before we have detectives that technically are discretionary services, and they investigate crimes that our patrol officers who are providing a mandatory service report on.

So without those detectives, those crimes still need to be resolved, and that work would shift to the patrol team who doesn't have the benefit of that specialized training.

And that could potentially also impact our overall emergency response time when more workload is added.

So the second takeaway is that discretionary services offered by our police department really are subject to high community demand and are considered typically part of a modern full service police department.

And so a couple of examples of some services that qualify as discretionary under this exercise.

Our criminal investigations division, they handle an average of 450 serious person and property crimes per year, 17% of which involve children.

Our bike team, which does proactive patrols around downtown and connects houseless individuals and others with resources, has made 200 plus contacts in the last year.

They provide safety and connection at farmers markets, night markets, and other events that are attended by thousands of residents and provide a way for the community to connect with police officers in a more accessible setting.

And then they have specialized resources that are only staffed by one FTE each.

And so examples are violence reduction program, we have a family violence reduction program, and then victim services program, and those are pretty difficult to reduce since they're just staffed with one FTE each.

And so reductions mean that we're looking at elimination or significant dialing back of that program.

And then it's important to note that while only 29% of police staff time is spent on discretionary services, it's important in providing efficiencies in how we deliver service.

And so that specialized training that detectives have just to use that example again, can result in faster resolution for our criminal investigations.

Those 14 detectives in our criminal investigations team handle approximately 32 cases per year, and those can take anywhere from 30 to 300 days to investigate, depending on the complexity of the case.

And so reductions to that service is an example would increase that workload for detectives and slow resolution or elimination, as we mentioned, would shift it to our patrol.

And then another efficiency is that proactive policing approach is able to put out those little fires before they become larger issues, and our bike team is a great example of that.

So our third takeaway is that the proactive police work that we offer has significant impact on the other services that we provide here at the city.

And so I'm sure that there are other examples that I could have put on this slide, but the ones that I did put are really our community, our code compliance team relies on our police department to help them with abandoned vehicles, for example.

Our homeless outreach team certainly relies on our police department to be partners in problem solving and having a coordinated response.

Our municipal courts rely heavily on our police department for a number of different issues.

Custody transport, courtroom security, criminal and traffic court and photo uh enforcement, um, photo radar enforcement, which has that revenue impact.

Um our graffiti removal team relies on police to identify known taggers.

Um our events team relies on these services to create traffic plans and provide safety and security for their events.

Um our cleanup program, uh, which tackles shopping cart removal and homeless encampment cleanup also relies on police services.

Um, economic development um team has cited that um the feedback they've gotten from businesses is that safe cities really attract that business investment.

So they rely on police services as well.

And then our library um coordinates with police on uh homeless response and gen general safety issues.

Um so with that, we're gonna go ahead and just pause for a few minutes and just see if you have any um questions related to um police services that you'd like to ask.

And um, I'd like to phone a friend and see if uh Chief Jepson uh could come up here and help me answer those questions.

And we're gonna set a 20-minute timer on this, or is that including your presentation?

Five minutes?

Five minutes.

Are you setting the timer?

Okay.

I like it when you're meeting mommy and I'm nice, mommy.

So that works out well.

Counselor Duggar.

Uh Thanks for this.

Um question and maybe this might actually be Elizabeth, because this is uh this is a question ultimately I have not unique to the police for everyone, right?

I see the term mandated services.

I understand what that means.

What I don't know is for a mandated service, is our current service level mandated, right?

So if we have 15 uh one one that pops into mind, and please don't answer this question about them because it's not actually about them, but like was police records, right?

I think I'm going off memory was like 15 or 20 FTEs, it's a mandated service from the state.

Are 15 employees mandated from the state, right?

Like that's the question I have.

Like, what is the minimum level?

What is the ideal level and where are we at?

Like those are the kind of questions I have around mandated versus discretionary, because that's a really big gap to me in my brain.

Yeah, and so when you look at the spreadsheet, um we have that level of service column that I think will probably get you towards answering that question.

And so um generally speaking, there's not uh I would say generally, there could be exceptions to this.

Generally speaking, there's not a requirement to have a specific number of staff.

There are some services like facilities comes to mind, facilities management, where the best practice is to have a certain number of staff per square foot of the building to maintain it.

Um so that level of service is gonna tell you kind of where are we at when we look at um best practices and what other cities are offering.

Um and then the other kind of piece of information that can help answer that question is you know, looking at that column on the spreadsheet that talks about what would be the impact of the reduction to this service.

And so we could potentially reduce mandated services in some instances, but the impact um should be spelled out in that spreadsheet.

So it's very much dependent upon the service.

Yeah, I saw the um, I mean, I mean I saw the service impact.

Like it doesn't really quantify to me what the number is, right?

Like because when I see that I see and and again, I'm just I pulled up the police records and it and it just says 15 FDs, so I was actually remembering that correctly, but it doesn't tell me what the minimum amount that we could get by with.

And I don't know if we know that.

That sounds like a lot of analysis, right?

Like I don't even know if we could ever get there.

I think that's related to service deliverables.

So records is a good example because the police department's 24-7, and our records division has to be staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

So that's related to the service that we're providing with 24-7 police services, having a comparable records division that can be open 24-7 alongside our police officers.

Let me follow that up then it.

It's mandated that we have a service 24-7, or is mandated that we have a service?

No, it's not mandated either way.

It's just I'm trying to answer it in the way of because we are a 24-hour seven-day a week service, and we staff our records to match that to be able to do the work within that bubble, if you will.

Okay.

I think it makes sense.

I just don't know what the impact would be if the records weren't 24-7.

And again, not a question, but but that that sort of thing.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you.

On the slide where the overview slide, um, I was curious in the there's the but like 48.5 million of the budget is covered.

It's grants and IGA offsets as well as revenue generated.

Can you remind us what the percentage of that part of the like how much of the police budget is this percent?

Yeah, thank you.

I don't know that I have the specific percentage, you know, off the top of my head.

Um I would say that it is um relatively small when you look at the 48.5 million.

Um but again, I'd have to get back to you with the exact percentage on that.

Okay, thank you.

Tivnon this is a question that's going to apply to multiple departments, but since you went first, I'll ask it here.

Uh knowing that we're even having this conversation means that we're heading into a space where we're gonna have some really hard trade-offs to make.

And either that work just goes away or it gets picked up by someone else, like you were saying earlier, maybe there's another um jurisdictional partner that is providing something similar.

If it doesn't, it just goes into the void, and then what?

And what comes to mind for me is cert and having this emergency response team that we knew needed to be stood up.

We didn't have the funding to have a whole bunch of FTEs serving in these roles in the case of an emergency.

It made sense to have volunteers that were trained and um basically imbued with with some wherewithal and direction to go out and do the work.

Is is that a model that we can apply to things like graffiti cleanup or shopping carts?

Or it's just something I I don't know if there's an answer to that yet, if it's been looked into, I'll grab that in a second.

Um but it it seems like an it's just a current kind of running through my head as we're having these conversations of how do we pull some people into the commons of taking care of our city.

Thank you.

Um and and just tee that up.

But if you have any thoughts on that, if it's problematic on the two that I mentioned, um if if there's maybe a there.

Uh Chief, I don't know if you have a specific comment about certender role in that, but um I we have been looking at our volunteer program uh for that kind of very reason.

You know, how can we make our volunt city-wide volunteer program more effective and really kind of you know use that energy that we have from those um residents that want to be involved?

Um and I don't know that we have specifics about kind of how they could be leveled up to help with some of these things.

Um so I think it's probably not a super simple answer because it would depend on what service we want them to assist with.

I I just to tack on to that.

I one, I should have said first and foremost, thank you for pulling all of this together for tonight.

Um to everybody.

And maybe that's something there could just be a running list of um part of the continuing analysis of what are the types of things that are a little bit lighter of a lip that don't need specialized training that just need all hands on deck.

I'm sure there's people in the community that would love to help, maybe starting with our boards and commissions.

And Counselor Tivnon will be asking people to do that.

So counselor Hussan.

Yeah, I actually to sort of I mean, I'm like, I have my own questions, and then I have what I'm hearing.

Um I think kind of backing into some of what you're saying, like I'm looking at you know, takeaway number two, and I'm going, are there other ways to do this work?

Um, and that's not a dig on anyone or anyone who's doing this work, and I'll just preface right now.

I want to thank staff and everyone who has brought us here to this moment.

Going through these documents over the last 72 hours has been like the love of my life and also very just like deep, deep.

And I will apologize now.

I have a sick kid, so I won't be able to stay here, but I'm gonna try to engage online uh when I have to go.

But I think my comment or question, or if you have thoughts is for example, when I hear the criminal investigations that if we take that away, part of me is wondering one, are we mandated at what are the mandates around those investigations?

I'm thinking of counselor Duggar's question around like do we have to have someone at the 365 247?

And then I just think of like the bike team and some of these other things.

Are there other ways for us to still provide those services and still be successful and provide support for our community?

I'll try to answer that.

Um, some of the things that you see on the list from takeaway two, I would say no, you can't, because they're sworn trained police officers that do the functions that that you're talking about as it relates to criminal investigation, and in order to do that work, you actually have to be a certified police officer.

So I would say no to that.

Um I do sense that there's opportunities always to look at what we would call alternative response models.

Um, but you're really just trading one resource for another, and it's still at the expense of the city.

So it's just really how you want to tailor that resource.

Um so most of the examples on that slide are related to sworn certified police officers.

Um I hope that answered that.

It does.

And I am I don't want to do this in this deep dive, so maybe this is a later deep dive, but like when we're doing investigations, like what are the levels of crime that need to be investigated versus don't?

And we just got the five minutes so go ahead.

I and I think that's one of those questions that can be very uh hard to answer because there's so many investigations our detectives work that are mandated, uh especially child-related cases.

Um it's hard to kind of untangle that.

Okay.

I think I would just say like this is one I would like to deep dive into the future, not because I am critical, but I want to learn more as someone who's gonna be a steward of tax dollars.

So thank you.

I'll wrap up this section uh so we can move on.

I I think one of the things I'm interested in is us comparable to Gresham and Hillsborough as we're going into this conversation.

Um Hillsboro is a population size similar to Beaverton and has a has a department much bigger, and they also have a lot more industrial space that requires less policing.

So we're very population based uh in a very short environment.

So I'm interested in that in our as we're heading into the budget conversation, because I think we always will start getting a trail of emails about how we overspend for police compared to our size when we look at the budget, but when you take into account we're not a full service city, and the general fund is also not housing fire, it's also not housing parks.

I think we need to understand that as a city council because I've had a many of a conversations over the last 13 or 14 years around how many cops per thousand people, but I want to I'm interested in the number a little bit differently for our size.

So I'm interested in that.

Um I think when I uh you know, crime and what level needs to be investigated.

I I would be interested in what the state mandate.

I mean, you guys have investigated crimes that have been committed against me as an elected official, other elected officials on this board.

I'm sure that's not mandatory or a level of service, and so we are a number in this as well, um, as these crimes are highly uh specific.

So I it would be interested in the kinds of crime they're doing as well uh for our future conversation.

But thank you for joining us this evening, and I will turn it back over to the city manager.

All right, uh thank you, Chief and Deputy Chief.

We may call you up again at the end for more questions, but appreciate it.

So we'll move on to our municipal court overview for in the next slide, please.

So our municipal court has 22.8 staff similar to police.

They spend 71% of their time on mandated services.

They have a $6.6 million program budget.

And they bring in they have grants that fund their services, and then they also generate revenue.

And so if you look at the revenue they generate in the grants, they have a general impact and general fund impact of about 1.9 million dollars after those offsetting revenue is applied.

Um this fiscal year, and we're estimating our actuals to come in about 2.2 million dollars.

So we're bringing in significantly more fines than we had anticipated.

We do have a new revenue to come.

We have a new photo reinforcement camera scheduled for a TV highway in this spring of 2026, and we'll talk a little bit more about that at a later slide.

So there are three key takeaways for our municipal court that we teased out through this exercise.

Um the first is that our municipal court really impacts public safety by reducing repeat offenses.

And so reducing recidivism, which is a criminal justice term for the rate that individuals re-offend, is a key goal for the court.

And they do that by educating participants and addressing the underlying root causes that lead to those offenses to support long-term behavior change and an increase in public safety.

And so they have a couple different ways that they do that.

One is through their traffic court services, and so that includes their traffic school, their youth driver program, uh seat built safety, distracted driving, et cetera.

And they promote safe driving habits and compliance with traffic laws and allow individuals with a traffic violation to take an education program instead of a conviction.

One of them is called Be Sober, and that's designed to treat individuals whose drinking and drug use is beyond their control, but they continue to drive motor vehicles.

And so, in exchange for remaining out of jail, um participants agree to pretty strict conditions, uh including regular reports to court, uh, communication with a case manager, uh, sobriety tests, um committing to alcoholics anonymous, um, etc.

And so that program is 57% grant uh funded and has a general fund impact of around 320,000.

90% of the participants in that program are not reconvicted within three years of graduation, and that's a significantly better rate than the national average.

Um, and then it's worth noting that there is no DUII treatment court at the uh Washington County um circuit court, and generally speaking, misdemeanors are not prioritized at circuit court, and that means that the high-risk, high-need defendants that we see in this program would have increased recidivism because they are not getting the targeted treatment that they clinically need to stop committing DUIIs.

So that's one of the key reasons that we offer this specialty program.

Um our other specialty uh program is our behavioral health program.

Um that provides opportunities for people with mental illness to stabilize, um, to engage in treatment and take advantage of services and opportunities to promote their own recovery.

That program is almost 100% grant funded, and 92% of those participants are not reconvicted within three years of graduation.

Um those lower re-offense rates are not only great for those participants, but they're also great for the overall safety of the community, and um help reduce those police calls for service when there aren't repeated offenses.

Uh some general kind of stats about the court impact.

They uh see about 1,700 criminal misdemeanor cases annually.

Um they handle 30,000 traffic violation cases annually.

Uh 200 individuals annually receive mental health assistance annually through the mental health clinicians, and then 15 individuals generally graduate annually from the Be Sober program.

So the second key takeaway really has to do with there have been questions, you know, over the years about you know, should we provide a municipal court?

Are we required to?

And when we look at who else is providing court services, there is, you know, a circuit court in Washington County that does provide those services.

And so when we look through this exercise, we were really looking at kind of why do we provide that municipal court service?

What are the advantages to doing that and what would happen if that service was reduced or eliminated?

And really what we came to is that there's significant benefits in that local control of that service, and then as well as the access for community members, and that really drives our decision to offer those court services.

And so it's definitely convenient for residents.

They would need to travel to Hillsboro for Washington County Circuit Court if we did not have this local court.

And then beyond convenience, it does create an access issue for those defendants and victims who do not have access to transportation or who may be limited in the time that they can take away from work or their family commitments.

And then we are able to reduce overtime costs through this program.

Police would have to travel to Hillsboro to that circuit or justice court for trials.

And our court works closely with the Beaverton Police Department to schedule trials to reduce police overtime.

Circuit and justice courts would not do this, which would lead to increased overtime for court appearances.

And then without the safety programs that we have in place, defendants are more likely to request trials, which means more officers would need to be in court.

So this reduces officer time away from their normal duties.

Since the safety programs are less expensive than the presumptive fine.

And so and then dismissals can favorably impact defendants' insurance rates as well.

In addition, the courts provide access to mental health services as well as alcohol and substance abuse disorder treatment, which is not always offered through other courts.

And then finally, local control.

Kind of bringing in those that are new to the profession under the supervision of an experienced attorney, and they get the chance to have experience, and we are able to work through our backlog and get those attorneys appointed.

And then the final takeaway really has to do with the fact that our court services are evolving, and you may not really see as much of this information in the spreadsheet.

But I noted that we do have a new photo enforcement camera installation scheduled, we're hoping for May, new speed and red light cameras on TV Highway.

That intersection is very high volume.

There are currently 11,500 potential speeding violations there weekly.

We don't have data on the red light violations.

Of course, those will go down once the camera is installed, and that is the goal of the program is to promote safety and reduce those violations.

But we do anticipate next fiscal year, we could see a potential minimum 1.3 million dollars in additional fines from that intersection.

That will be offset a little bit by some increased staffing needs from courts and police, depending upon the volume of citations that come in.

We do have two additional cameras planned in the next few years, one which will be in a school zone.

So we are starting to get more revenue in from this photo enforcement program, which is helping offset the expenses.

And then finally, we do have efficiencies underway.

I mentioned earlier we have a grant-funded assessment of the municipal court, and that's looking at how we manage cases, and it's also looking at our technology, and that report is nearly complete.

Um, some real initial findings are that um our operations generally need modernization.

Uh, we need to establish metrics, uh, better scheduling and online services.

Uh, we need to evaluate our staffing rules, assignments, and workload to more effectively tackle um the cases that we're handling.

Um the report also suggests that we explore additional diversion or restorative justice programs.

And we are uh working with the Center for Mediation and Dialogue in City Attorney's Office on a grant funded program that um is exploring how we might be able to um to work on that to increase victim and community satisfaction, promote meaningful accountability for dependent defendants and reduce recidivism through best practice principles.

And then the report also notes we need to continue to evaluate the public defender pilot and future options for avoiding that shortage of court appointed attorneys.

With that, I'm gonna pause to see if there's any questions about the municipal court, and again, we've got about five minutes scheduled for that before we transition.

And I would ask that um our court administrator, um, Katrina and our judge, uh Judge Britton come up to help me answer questions.

Your time can't start until they sit down.

So we'll go ahead and uh let uh counselor Hartmeyer Prague get the first question out before the timer.

Yes.

Okay.

I was curious how much the new cameras cost, and can we expedite the purchase and installation of them faster than in the next few years?

That's might be a chief question that would be a police.

They implement the photo radar program.

Hey, cheese.

Okay, my question was how much do the photo like how much do the new cameras cost?

And can we expedite the purchase and installation?

It says that over the next few years that we would be implementing more, but what's concerning or not concerning, I see like one of the things that councils talked a lot about is that like we bear the burden of the services, you know, when non-beavertonians, like you know, we we read the burden of it all.

Well, the red light cameras, if you're speeding or you run a red light, like we that doesn't care where you live, it's that you drove through our town, right?

So I guess I'm curious, like seeing like how effective this is, and we heard about like the incredibly efficient staff the other night, right?

Of of how we handle this.

So I'm like just curious about that program.

Like it seems like it's very effective at deterring, but also like there is a revenue impact there.

Yeah, and the a lot of the time that we've been waiting to get those two intersections up and running has been uh delayed because of things like ODOT approvals and things of that nature.

So we're supposed to be going live with that last intersection, like in the next month.

Okay.

That's I mean, that's the one here that's coming up soon, but it does say we have more planned in the next three years.

So I'm just asking if we can we do that faster.

Is there opportunity for that?

We can we can answer the question later.

I'm I just see an opportunity.

Yeah, the the vendor absolutely knows that that's our desire and will work with us to to get that going.

I think or we're trying to step into it because of of the volume of work that it will create and the capacity that we would have on the other side of it, and we have to be able to figure out what that's actually gonna look like.

So, yeah.

Um, I'll just I'll tap on to that because I'm old enough to remember all of the vans that we used to have and the revenue and the revenue tanking because the quality of the vendor we chose and 50% of the tickets that were being shot were not legible.

And I'll also remind the council that the GR team it took us two cycles in the legislature to get the mid-block cameras um allowed for us to do this, and so this has been quite an all-team effort to get it.

So I just want to echo counselor Hartmeyer Priggs because this is a great example of um the revenue is gonna be shown in the courts, but there's gonna be some absorption in the police department when we had the vans.

We used to have to have members sitting in them that that came out of their budget but was awarded to you, you know, the court side.

So I think sometimes it's easy.

The police don't see the revenue, so they're not as motivated as they might be if the revenue was turned to them.

And so maybe we need to incentivize a little bit that some of the revenue is captured in the police budget and the courts to be able to move this along because there is a workload that comes from both sides, but it wasn't that long ago in history that the courts were a revenue generator.

And so, and even when I do the back of the napkin math with adding the 1.3 potential that's coming, that's $3.5 million of revenue from tickets for a $5.5 million budget, and that's not including grants.

So the delta is not very big here of what it's costing us to run the court.

And that wasn't a question that was just my TED talk on the courts.

Counselor Husson if you could share with me examples of the different types of miss misdemeanors and traffic violations that come through our court for the public that would be fabulous.

Counselor Hassan we um I would say the most common traffic citation would be speeding and failure to obey a traffic control device.

So running red lights or turning without coming to a complete stop by far is the most common on the criminal side theft in the second degree is our number one and driving under the influence of intoxicants and then um criminal trespass and and thefts in the third degree I'd say we're probably would be the top five just off the top of my head so what we call livability crimes.

Okay.

And I know that Elizabeth shared kind of like the overlap and some thoughts I would love to hear your perspective because I do hear from folks who talk about the duplication of courts and I I don't know that I agree.

I would just love to hear your perspective for the record um I would absolutely say that there would be a decline in access to justice if this goes away individuals often particularly on the criminal cases do not have access to transportation they do not have funds to get to Hillsboro there are no embedded clinicians at the courthouse there's no treatment programs to address root cause issues and I think that the repeat arrest release from jail rearrested cycle that we're trying to address with our treatment programs and just our criminal court overall is really going to be profound and then on the on the violation side of things my understanding is most circuit courts don't have things like the traffic school the safety school they just you know they have other more serious cases that they need to prioritize and it really is just you go you pay your fine and you're done and so I think when we talk about public safety and what are the best ways to address public safety we're in a much better position to implement the programs than these alternatives thank you.

Counselor Duggar correct that one of the perhaps the biggest uh expenditure in the materials and services is the public defenders service that we're purchasing is that correct I don't have it in front of me I think for our material and services portion that is definitely one of the biggest and what is like what's the next step on the pilot right like we were told that that was going to save money so help us understand the context of what that number will be and when it will be so I think you're referring to the in-house public defender program that we initially had budgeted we did not actually implement that program due to budget concerns so there will be an investment that's required um in the initial couple of years if we were to implement that program and we would likely need to continue with some of the contract work that we're doing while we evaluate how we handle that initially and so we have tabled that program for now it has been identified as something we need to continue looking into as part of the assessment and but that's not currently in the budget and so the biggest expenditure in the budget of the court is really the staff which is going to be the same for um kind of each department that you um that you see um and we do have staff working on multiple programs um in the court so it's a little bit difficult to kind of pull out they don't have a lot of materials and services in their budget it's really probably that court uh appointed attorney contract um that is um that largest um bucket yeah I pulled up the 2018 because that was my first year on budget committee way before council and it's gone up but it hasn't gone up as much as you would think since then not nearly as much as personnel services so so thank you.

They're suggesting that maybe we take a quick break if that's amenable while they double check and maybe see if our feed has been restored.

Oh, I'm actually going to turn it over to my colleague and switch it up a little bit.

So I'm going to turn it to Deanne.

Hello.

Sorry that the camera came back on for our viewing audience for this portion.

But we're going to cover community developments, try to do it justice at the level that my colleague, the interim city manager, has done it with my audience here as well.

Okay, thank you.

We're just not used to you talking, so this is quite a surprise to us.

Please go on.

We're just trying to make you uncomfortable.

Appreciate it.

All of it.

So community development is actually split across a number of uh funding sources.

So the portion that you see on the slide is um is the total staff, the 57 and three-quarters uh more or less uh total staff that is actually general fund.

Um but the there are additional uh folks who are uh supported by a building um by Bureau and other funds.

Um overall a $13 and a half million dollar general fund budget, uh, but obviously, like I said, there are more uh staff and other funds.

Um we'll just say as well that community development has been reduced uh in the last three years, probably about 15 to 18 percent overall in terms of staffing.

Um and that had been semi-intentional, I suppose.

You can go to the next slide, um, in the sense that uh some projects had ended, uh, that we were also looking at uh right-sizing staffing levels and um and uh essentially addressing some of the council priorities that were uh still underway.

So I'm gonna go back to the slides here and uh takeaway number one, which is uh really the idea that council and I would argue maybe community priorities are uh dictating and and driving discretionary services.

So uh the discretionary service examples, uh things like sideware uh sidewalk repair grants, which are something that our code compliance group uh helps with.

Those are oversubscribed every year and uh very popular.

Um I think you know the sidewalks are the responsibility of the the uh abutting property owner to uh maintain and replace um graffiti removal casework.

So uh that's something that code compliance also does that then works with public works across uh the the aisle, as it were, across uh essentially as far as replacement of the or sorry, removal of the graffiti.

Um the building uh business license uh renewal uh is something that code also assists other departments.

So the this is a finance function that code is out and about.

They're able to knock on doors and follow up on uh businesses that have not uh renewed their business license.

Uh so it's uh an expansion of service for the finance department where we wouldn't uh or don't hire additional staff to go out and do that function.

Um within economic development and some of the other functions in uh community development.

We have uh business retention and recruitment, obviously a big priority for council for the community and as far as amenities and and uh the the vibe as it were for Beaverton.

Um affordable housing program support, uh arts program was recently moved into community development over the last couple of years, and so uh the arts and events coordination is something that is discretionary but very important to the community, as you can see in our impact.

The 1700 folks who annually attend 10 tiny dances, which is just one of our uh annual events uh that the city puts on.

Um other impacts that are uh are felt or seen uh from the discretionary services are the um arts at the RECER and along the public arts across the the downtown across the community as well.

Um the essentially uh contact with businesses, so things that aren't seen but are felt, I think, in the sense that the Mike and his team, uh Bill Berg and uh Jose, they go out and talk to businesses all the time.

We might be able to assist them with and how to connect them with one another and with other support.

And finally, one of the things that ACDEV has also worked on is child care for businesses, sort of that idea of filling in gaps that helps to retain and support businesses and the business community, the climate that we have, making sure that folks can have their children taken care of during the day and sort of have one less barrier to going to work and to being able to uh thrive in our community.

One of the things I think to also mention as we've been in reduction mode, like I mentioned, um are some of the things that you know are discretionary that are maybe shrinking and or becoming harder to fill.

Um, so things that we we come into challenge with was already mentioned by Elizabeth, the code compliance losing an employee.

There's there's fewer of them, and we've had to shift to be more reactive rather than proactive in doing code compliance cases.

And that's felt, I think when you get emails, letters, calls from uh from folks who are uh concerned with a neighbor and or with the look and feel of something in the community.

Uh there's safety issues, whether it's sidewalk or trees or things of that nature that code compliance is walking is working on that are impediments to uh getting around our community and or uh detractors to our community.

And so when we lose staff, we lose capacity on those kinds of things.

Um we can go to the next slide.

Um other takeaways uh combined two and three on one slide here to be efficient.

Um so we've got uh really the idea of uh uh right sizing our revenue.

These services do generate revenue.

We have uh mandated services that we provide through current planning and through a lot of the site development, other things that that we do to make sure that the community is safe.

Uh the building department is not general funded, but you know, similarly uh funded by fees.

Um those are things that we have the ability to adjust, uh, but the community feels when we do that, and we tend to have you know some pushback from time to time uh when we're trying to balance the uh building new housing or you know, making the community affordable and still being able to uh perform the services that are safety-oriented services, regulatory services.

Um I think the the sec the second point here, the third point overall, um, that there are operational ripple effects like was mentioned for the previous two services we spoke about.

Um, that within uh community development, there's a huge connection, especially lately over the last maybe five years, with Infor being uh permitting system that was being set up and then uh trying to make sure that it's working, right?

You know, any new system, any new computer system, you're gonna have to write size and do continual uh evaluation of those systems.

So you're working closely with ITS everything these days, whether it's code or uh community development related or arguably it feels like many other services, the um systems are geographic based, so GIS services is super important and a big partner for community development for public works.

Um public works itself is obviously uh a uh big partner when it comes to uh inspection to coordination and uh making sure that the projects that are uh proposed by community members are being done effectively and that there's oversight of some of the larger um projects that are maybe being done uh by larger developers, some of the infrastructure projects and things like that.

Um city attorney, we can't do anything without the city attorney.

That's why he's sitting next to me.

And um, you know, I think that that's a key piece for community development and some of the bigger deals that we do, right?

We've got big contracts and a lot of uh the ongoing influence from the state, uh, a lot of complex uh regulatory schemes to understand to maybe push back against.

Um, and there are or is a need to continually work on uh on those kinds of items with the city attorney.

We also uh try to get to writing code from time to time when we have capacity, and so the ability to work on code with the attorney's office to um essentially work through any deals on uh acquisition, which does come to Bureau from time to time, um, occasionally to council, but generally to Bureau these days, uh, those are deals we're working through the attorneys as well.

And finally, uh police for uh the parking compliance in particular, that is something that we work on from the code uh perspective often.

That's uh a frequent issue in in neighborhoods and something where we work partner with them to remove vehicles uh when that's been cited by code compliance officers.

Um so the annual impact, um, a lot of good statistics.

Um, I actually I'm gonna let you read those and maybe speak a little bit off uh the slide.

Um, you know, just about some of the general um complexity, I suppose, of the work.

You know, we're we're being squeezed in general when it comes to state mandates, as I said before.

So our current planning becomes a reactive is generally maybe reactive in the sense of like knowing what is coming forward from a developer, being able to uh you know dialogue and discuss to try to get a better project project or product.

Uh long range planning though, those projects are a lot of what I spoke about in the first takeaway, I think those discretionary items that really are um the quote unquote sexy things that we'd like to get to and like to do more more of, and they have a huge impact on our community.

Um we're not as able to get to them.

What uh the planning team often does is try to have staff do both current planning and long-range planning, so you're not maybe pigeonholed in one and you get a growth across uh your career or preparing you for other options in your career, perhaps.

But um in doing that, we have less time because of state mandate, because of fewer staff to do these long-range projects and give them the service that they actually need.

So that that is it's a drag, right?

Unfortunately, we're not able to do the things that maybe are more impactful long range and long term for the community.

Um I think the other thing is you know, thinking about uh the development division, which is often uh associated with Bureau, there's still a lot of oversight of uh some of the assets that we have trying to provide that we were using the general fund in the past to provide grants to uh building improvements, um trying to make sure that we were thinking consciously about the downtown busin building stock and making sure that it was as good as it could possibly be, and we've lost that capacity through uh some budget reductions, and so thinking about things that are are valuable and that could be um impactful to the long-term health of the downtown.

It's unfortunate that you know, as things get squeezed out, as we we really do narrow to what is most impactful and and what we can afford to do, we're losing some of that flexibility.

I think I'm gonna leave it there.

I'm assuming I might be at my time uh timekeeper.

Um but uh if there are questions, um I think that is the moment.

And maybe Andy, if you want to come up.

Uh counselor Hartmeyer, Brig.

Thank you, Dan.

Thank you, Andy.

Um I was thinking that maybe just like I need some sort of like helpful visual.

Um I really appreciate that every single one it told us like what's the program budget, but then we kind of saw different visuals of like maybe where there were some other offset, right?

So with fees with with you know ticket revenue with like building permit, right?

So I see like on the second page that there's oh, if we recover about 3.5 of the 13.5.

But I'm wondering if like I'm trying to kind of do some math that I'm having a hard time doing.

But you know, like I it's kind of making me think of the question that you were asking, Mayor, about um there's like the baseline cost of all these services.

There's these different revenue buckets that are kind of helping offset it and like almost like what is that gap there?

Um to help us really understand, like I mean, I think this one I I had to come back to takeaway number one where it says council priorities drive discretionary services in this space.

But then I look at the examples, and yeah, they're tied to all of our priorities and there are things that we like really value, right?

Good governance.

Like we want to make sure we have sidewalk repair grants because the the property owner is responsible, but that can be a big burden to them, right?

But there's then that kind of like overall benefit to the community by us offering that thing.

So I'm trying to just I know it's not as simple as the math, but I do think maybe like almost like a summary view of like what is that cost, what is that revenue offsetting or the grant offsetting?

So we can almost kind of see that like I think it would help me understand what are we what's what are we actually working with in this particular space.

So I guess that's kind of a general question, but it just I kind of felt it more when I got to this one.

Are you saying the um via specific projects kind of thing versus or specific areas or the area?

So like in CDD, if we have this 13.5 million and we recover 3.5 from fees, uh, or you know, whatever it is.

And so in that case, like the difference between like whatever the revenue is, and and that is then the policy decision, right?

Where we're saying, hey, that investment in that thing.

Right, is what is what we're saying as a council, our budget dollar should go to because this brings so much other value, right?

the um the specific projects kind of thing versus or specific areas or the area so like in cdd if we have this 13.5 million and we recover 3.5 from fees uh or you know whatever it is and so in that case like the difference between like whatever the revenue is and and that is then the policy decision right where we're saying hey that investment in that thing right is what is what we're saying as a council our budget dollar should go to because this brings so much other value right this brings so much value so much community benefit right um so more just like trying to have an understanding of like there are kind of different buckets of money that may help in different of these funds what's the kind of gap I guess that we have right and it's not because we have to make it up it's more of just like I guess for me it's almost a little bit of true cost maybe right I was gonna I want to add on to what you're saying because I think the the council directive has been really clear it's cost recovery and I think CDD has the most opportunity of any division we have to help us with cost recovery.

I think about e zones which are a very effective tool I visit them I voted for them for us our e zones work really well I tell people that all the time they create living wage jobs compared to cities around us but does the ramp up need to be 10 years if if I can think about veneer veneer would have invested in our like they would have been guessed likely without the e zone it was a great tool but like do they need a 10 year abatement when we brought in the Peter core that property it was different when we brought them in they were coming into the city we gave them a 10 year abatement on property taxes.

But we're talking about the general fund which is every Beaver 10 resident is paying into the fund they're not getting equalized services out of this area.

And so I think what the council's directive has been is like move towards cost recovery when we saw the fee study we know we're not charging full fees yet and so it's hard for us to make business decision when I feel like the council has given direction has been clear about what our values are vis-a-um the the values behind us.

And so this division having that big of a gap between fees brought in because it is a service agency and how much is left like help us out with a plan of how you're gonna get there.

I mean parking is a great example of that we talked about cost recovery and the permits and we still haven't seen it and so how much is being subsidized to run CDD when a large majority economic development is not a core service.

It's a a necessary service I talk about it all the time or I mean it's not a mandated service.

And so when we're gonna be asked to make very hard decisions in six weeks from now and the council's already given direction on cost recovery and we've already talked about this it's it's just a challenging position.

So I think the counselor Hartmeyer prick's questions in the court it's very obvious for us to see the the gap difference between what revenue is coming in and what's coming out it's harder for us here because it's so layered and I think we need a more in-depth look at this in particular Counselor Duggar.

Yeah in general how are the FTE uh estimates calculated is that just a best guesstimate yeah I think they were pretty uh rough based on you know information uh the folks had I mean I'm not sure if there was a more scientific uh approach I mean I think this process um no I I don't want to be like like when I saw the sidewalk grant program for instance love the program but point two FTE that's 400 hours a year to initiate eight sidewalk grants that's 50 hours I mean I'm just doing the rough math and so I my guess is that's probably a wrong estimate or that's an incredibly inefficient program one or the other right my guess is it's just a bad estimate like we like oh I spend you know a quarter of my time a fifth of my time but like that makes me just a little nervous about some of the other estimates particularly when they when it's like cross program you know I'm I'm trying to because we're gonna have cuts right like and trying to minimize those on the most impactful things and so just a general question on like is it a best guesstimate or like I think generally we tried to have staff you know estimate the how they spend their time I think if we went into more depth which you know would be a couple years down the line I would think as we evolve this program or this approach uh we might use different data but at this point it was you know kind of that estimate of of how do you spend your time so maybe view them as accurate but not precise.

Yeah is that yeah I think a general approximation but okay I think there's arguably more to some of the sidewalk or programs as well right like so just the it there are there's time spent on each one that kind of does or can drag out because they are essentially contracting back and forth with uh the replacement and the the actual doing the the construction there but each one is a small construction construction job so there is some hand holding involved.

Yeah it may not be point two or whatever right but yeah but okay thank you.

Um I see the numbers, discretionary 14.3.

And when you said council priorities drive discretion discretionary services, so we occupy 14.3 FTEs of C C C D C D.

I wouldn't say it's exactly a one-to-one for council priorities and discretionary.

I think it's uh the what has been the pattern for much longer than the last few years, I would say for the last decade maybe, uh, is essentially trying to be as responsive to what is you know opine from the dais and create a program or create you know something that can implement that.

And so it uh you know it there's a a good amount of those programs there, but it's not exactly all of them.

So and then uh can you explain to me what average time spent at each discretionary service is point five of a position.

I I really doesn't I don't know what that really means.

I mean I think that was uh I think that was math uh and you know essentially looking at it, you know, objectively saying that you know there aren't you know it's not like there's one person doing each one, it's they're doing multiple programs.

That's ideally at least what they're doing is is we're sp having our our staff do more than one thing.

I I I get that.

It's just uh as Consul Duggar was saying, when four 14.3 is a huge number compared, you know, it's 25% of the entire staff doing discretionary work.

That's council priority.

I I really don't see how that works.

And the most of the work is done by public works in some other places.

So what does uh staff do?

Just assess and tell other people what to do.

Um I'm not sure it's quite that clean.

Um I think that there's collaboration for some of the programs between public works and CDD or or other departments.

I I don't think it's quite you know a directive of other people, but um some of the programs, you know, thinking about like grant programs or you know, sort of economic development programs, there isn't necessarily like a go out and and do something per se in the sense of like constructing, it's more going out and building relationships and spending your time trying to then leverage those relationships and the information.

Um I'm assuming I don't know, do you want to speak to other specific programs or yeah?

I mean, public arts is a good example.

That's three FTEs that it's it's not mandated, but it's it's a value of the the community.

So things like that, other plans or programs, there may be long-range plans that are um yeah, you know some of those are mandated, some of them are also aspirational that we know we need to target.

You know, there's a there's a segment of the community, or there's um like in the case of economic development, oftentimes it's um you know, trying to implement a strategic plan, not mandated by by any level of government except you know, us wanting to kind of have some sort of direction in North Star to follow, and oftentimes those are.

I mean, I don't know if the exact right verbiage would be mandated by council priorities, but it's trying to be responsive to the the values that are reflected in the council priorities.

Um I appreciate that maybe uh look into a little deeper, but I just want to get a picture of how this thing works.

Yeah, thanks.

Yeah, sure.

All right.

Okay.

Well, wanna point out what I think you're hearing from the council is we would like precise information to make budgetary decisions on.

And it's it's challenging for if I may to to your the conversation earlier about um discretionary general fund revenue.

It all general fund revenue is discretionary.

So if if our permitting, we bring in three million dollars, that does not mean it's for CDD.

It's all discretionary dollars.

So building fund, for instance, is an enterprise fund.

Those permit and fee revenue comes in, that's the fund building fund operations.

Our other functions are not like that.

Um utility utilities or enterprise funds directed to that.

So these are the big policy conversations.

Site development is 100%, cost recovery, planning went up to 75%, and there are good reasons for that because with long-range activities, you don't want you know what you don't want everything to be 100%, and not every planning project goes through.

So it's sort of a it's it's a sort of a subsidy for the community to increase development too.

So I just I just want to put some of those things out there as well.

Um the same with the enterprise zone.

Some of those fees are dictated by the state on the ORS as well.

So thank you.

Okay.

Um so I guess now we're gonna potentially we'll see, turn and burn a little bit.

Uh public works.

We're gonna talk about next slide the uh the overview, which is uh general fund only, the asterisk uh on there uh really focused on uh cleanup program, which had been initiated under a metro grant and was successful in addressing downtown uh specifically, I think, but it ended up being a lot of the city uh some of the graffiti removal, some uh removal of items left by our neighbors experiencing homelessness, um, other items uh in the community doing general cleanup, um fleets, uh facilities and landscape, which is uh kind of a combined uh division now, and then engineering management.

So it's not necessarily the uh breadth of the entire program, nor is it the breadth of the entire public works department.

A lot of those funds are uh generated for utilities and for through rates and other things, so that this is just the general fund portion.

So there are 33.9 total staff, uh 96% of the time that they spend is on mandated or operational, operationally necessary uh services.

So essentially looking at the way that we allocate, for instance, fleet and facilities.

Um they are allocated like we mentioned before.

Um essentially, the there are certain programs that are allocated across the entire organization because we all use them, and or most of us use them, all departments generally uh are using a fleet vehicle of some kind.

Uh everybody is uh in a facility or another.

Um it's 14.7 million dollars, um, and again, a lot of this is allocated.

Um we can go to the next slide.

Um generally uh some takeaways, uh again, pretty small sample of public works, but um these services uh are very very visible.

So uh they're essentially uh things that uh may not be mandated in terms of the utility side of things uh that people would notice if they didn't work, but uh thinking about graffiti removal, mowing and landscaping of facilities and and uh some of the medians in the build in the uh city, shopping cart removal and cleanup and uh the flower baskets, uh everyone's favorite.

Um I know it's on there for my edification, but those flower baskets are awesome, and people always compliment us, and they're a natural traffic calming mechanism, so we should put them in another category.

Okay.

I think there's there can be some strong opinions about flower baskets, I know from the back of the room as well.

But um I think they are beloved, and you know, they're something that we definitely spend a good amount of time and resource on.

Um they are things though that are noticed, right?

So traffic calming or not, right?

Like people notice the flowers, they're beautiful.

Some may have differing opinions about that, but they're beautiful and um do provide an aesthetic benefit to the community, um, as does graffiti removal, right?

So, like thinking about how we collaborate with the police and with other uh partners in the community to create a better and more um comfortable, I guess, community.

Um is the loss of strategic capacity, and this is something we've felt uh thinking about facilities in particular, um, you know, just thinking about space analysis and long-term uh maintenance strategies, things that we uh need to be on top of.

And I know we did bring the facility master plan through uh council and are trying to implement that.

It's challenging though to think about how do we uh how do we implement it in a resource-constrained environment.

How do we do that while we're then juggling their the staff on multiple other things, which now does include um kind of the leasing of other uh rental units in this building, or um I think they're soon to take on some of the rental responsibilities, they're in the process of finalizing a hire to uh coordinate with Bureau on uh property management between city assets and bureau assets.

It's a great efficiency and it's a great story between those two functions, but um also just uh changes workloads and and really does change the focus uh of intensity of the work, right?

Where at least needs to get uh you know, you work it out in the moment, uh you generally have an idea of how long it's gonna last, but sometimes it's uh it doesn't go as long as you thought, all those kinds of things.

Um it does result in in a reactivity uh that we are trying to keep up and or plan for things.

Uh roof replacements are a big fun project that are coming uh soon to a roof near you.

This building, uh Beaverton building and the public works uh operations yard are both scheduled for roof replacements here shortly, and those projects take quite a while to plan because uh in part the budget cycle, you know, we get our our funding in uh June and uh or July, and we are trying to plan for something that needs to be warm weather for this this climate, right?

And so trying to think about how do we do that.

It's been a bit of a labor of love to kind of figure out how to split the the approval and actually get the work done, but uh something that is important.

Um lastly the um citywide operational ripple effects.

Um this is one where you know public works collaborates when we're thinking about uh the cleanup team in particular with um some of the uh folks who are doing code compliance with the police department with um uh you know the folks doing our homeless programs.

Uh so essentially trying to coordinate across multiple uh departments to make sure that we have a resource that it needs to be timely.

And you know, when we have a mess, we we'd like it cleaned up, especially when it's in our downtown.

Um the deferred maintenance, you know, today is is costly tomorrow, and we've been very intentional about trying to prioritize some things and and defer continue to defer other things.

We'll say historically um for much longer than I've been in with the city, but um the city is not necessarily paid for the unsexy things like building maintenance and uh some of the infrastructure that we need.

Um and I would say that's true of IT as well, but it's felt in this department when you think about uh maintaining buildings or or thinking about purchasing or or setting up even funding aside for acquiring some of the the uh purchase of buildings that we have in the facility master plan.

It's challenging to do those those things reactively because there's no land maybe for an operations yard.

There's um you know, time has passed and and the costs have gone up for all kinds of other things.

Um the last part here is that uh there are critical services that our employees expect and and should be entitled to when they come to work for us.

It's a it's a quality of life issue and a retention issue for us that we have maintained buildings.

Um this department or or this section of the public works department maintains security janitorial, which is uh also I'm sure a very fun topic for the council when we have to bring it to you.

But um there are other contracts that is maintained through facilities as well that uh create quality of life for our uh employees and for visitors to the buildings.

Um the stats are there uh in terms of the amount of graffiti tags removed and hours spent on shopping cart removal.

Um kind of blown away, honestly, at the hours spent on shopping cart removal.

Um but I will say right now at least we are staffed below standard.

I think we had talked about that before, and Travis was nice enough to provide us with numbers around the um the industry standard for facility maintenance.

It's one FTE per 50,000 square feet.

We're uh City of Beaverton standard is one per uh 75,000.

And so we uh we have our employees running well and and they work well together.

Um, but there's a lot uh there's a lot in in essentially a 50% addition to your workload, right?

So it does create uh a slow uh or can create a slow response to some issues, right?

They do have to prioritize, uh have to react to what's in front of them in some cases as well.

Again, what we talked about of uh deferring some bigger projects.

Um I think that's probably enough on public works.

I have more, but uh if there are questions, Kimmy.

Just the quick one.

Uh on the slide it says 33.9 total staff.

But on the on our sheet, it's got 22.5.

That's uh 10 people difference.

Which page is it?

That's just facilities.

Can you hear me now?

Yeah.

22.5 is in facilities, and the remainder are in uh admin and in uh the um fleet.

Well, plus admin and fleet then 30.

Okay.

All right.

That's why.

Sorry about that.

I will say one of the number one complaints I got when I was a city counselor was shopping carts.

And so we went through quite an evolution.

He's laughing because he's had phone calls from me directly on the shopping cart issues.

So uh it is such a huge problem, and uh stores are required to like pick them up themselves.

And so I, you know, looking at, you know, obviously we had to aggressively start doing it.

It was really bad.

Like beavers had nothing on shopping cart dams that were around the city.

But now that we're in a pretty good place, like what's our expectation of stores that are contract like they're supposed to go pick up their own shopping carts.

Yeah, working good.

Um, it's a really good question.

And it's something that we continue to look at and work through.

Um our team uh moves the shopping carts to a central location and then the stores can pick them up from there.

I mean, maybe we need to look at a fee.

We can definitely look into a fee.

I mean, uh it will take us some time to work with our colleagues and and that sort of thing.

But I think that's a good thing.

Oh, Dan, I know.

But you high like you highlighted shopping carts in your presentation.

So don't not expect the council to react to we have all this FTE picking up shopping carts.

My point being the state requires them to pick up their own carts, and if we're doing it and they want them back, maybe we need to think about a thing.

Ransom ransom, whatever you want to call it, hostage, shopping cart race, id a rod, whatever we need to do.

I I do think we did some initial looking into that a while back, and I'll I'll dig through and see.

There was some um business pushback on it.

I I'm shocked to hear that.

Yes.

Uh we have a pre, you know, maybe there's a state representative in the room in the future that wants to do a build to benefit cities.

And shopping carts.

So big shopping is gonna hear it from here.

Shopping cart, like your own kid.

Um but I I would say, you know, uh kudos to public works.

I mean, the the large majority of emails I get are often addressed by public works.

The issues of livability, whether it's shopping carts, graffiti, sidewalks.

Um, you know, I was just visiting the springs on Hart and uh Hall last week, and they were talking to us about how they're basically stranded in the building because the sidewalk across the street is in disrepair.

And we know the sidewalk is the homeowner's responsibility, but we don't do a lot of education.

I've I've walked every street of Beaverton.

I think the only other person to do that is Counselor Hartmeyer Prigg.

Um sidewalks are a huge issue for us and they're a huge source of complaints, but I also think we need to do a bit of a job educating people that it's their responsibility.

A lot of times when I'm knocking on doors and talking to people and they complain about the sidewalk, I have to then immediately remind them it is their own responsibility to address the sidewalk, which is challenging.

So I just also want us as we're looking at all of this, what is our communication plan to the public?

Because so many of these services we're doing are actually required to be done by businesses, being required to be done by homeowners, and we do a lot of them because it impacts livability.

But we're thinking about a fee for homeowners, and we're thinking about how we're gonna raise revenue.

And so, how do we equally share some of these responsibilities and to kind of go back to Counselor Tibnon's original um point on the board today was how how do we get people more involved in the city they live?

And I think that this is a great conversation for us to keep having.

Counselor Teeter, getting on the board, go.

So I wrote down this question I was comment before the mayor mentioned it.

Uh but mine was also about shopping carts and an interest in having those businesses that lose track of their carts, have a better way to actually keep those on site.

Uh there are ways that businesses can do that, whether it's locking mechanisms on the wheels if they go a certain distance away or um other things like that.

So I would be interested in something like that.

A quarter of an FTE is a lot when we're looking at the cuts to the bone that we're trying to make.

And you know, when I lived in Germany, you had to put a euro in the shopping cart.

It was really motivating to take it back.

So that the their destiny is in their own hands if they don't want to pay to get them back.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, so uh looking at time and we probably need to move quicker.

So um library uh think uh I'm gonna try to do my best here.

It's a new one for me, but um working to get to know the library.

Um 55.18 uh total staff in the general fund, 84% of that is spent on mandated services.

Um budget, and that is uh split between the club the cooperative uh 55% from the county IGA and then 42% from the general fund.

Uh that contribution is a little over five million dollars.

Um additionally, there are uh some grants, fines.

I don't do we do fines, we do fines.

Little fines.

Uh friends of the library uh and and other things to bridge.

Um the library takeaways, um the mandatory versus discretionary.

So the idea that the IGA requires a specific amount of uh hours of operation, 45 um evenings and other services uh that uh will require us to uh to expend uh an amount on staff and other resources to make sure that we uh are open.

Um discretionary services are loved by the community, the makerspace, early literacy um and outreach, uh, but those are also services that are most vulnerable when it comes to making cuts.

And so um thinking again about um you know where is where is the flexibility in the budget?

It's uh uh those council discretionary community discretionary items.

Um structural services, uh the structure of the library services is likely going to need to be discussed in the near future um just based on budget pressures and um it's challenging conversation, uh not a popular one, but um we'll the library's been working through a strategic plan that you'll see uh come forward here very shortly to the council for discussion and some information, but the strategic planning is really focused on how to maximize the operational uh aspects of the library, right, to prioritize and to help them uh the library leadership make decisions.

So um a lot of feedback was gathered, and hopefully that it will help in making some of those uh really tough decisions, but um just offering the prop programmatic things are probably not gonna get us there when it comes to the library budget.

And then finally, the interwoven staff workload adds complexity, and that is arguably true across a lot of our functions that we've already spoken about and probably the ones that we're gonna finish up on as well.

Uh the library uh has a lot of uh staff who are blended across multiple responsibilities within the library.

They're they are cross-trained and are uh uh doing services that make it really challenging to reduce staff because you can't necessarily reduce a staff member and have uh a direct impact, it is diffused impact, and so multiple programs would be affected or multiple activities would be affected by staff reductions.

And I don't know if Kim, if you want to come up and correct me on anything, but uh I'll leave for uh lack of time uh you to read the annual impact.

Um I think questions prompt that questions?

Counselor Teter And your reference to the strategic plan.

I'm just checking when is that coming?

Is that coming before our budget conversation this spring?

All of us are ready to answer that question.

Um yes, we actually are having council briefings in April about the library strategic plan, and that will be coming to you um in May.

Councilor Duggar I'm going off memory, but I believe the county told us not long ago that the centralization of services was gonna result in a lot of efficiencies and presumably the number of FTEs.

Can you kind of is that realized in this number?

I'm assuming no.

And then what does that look like from a go uh go forward?

So centralization is uh beginning now, so there we've already centralized interlibrary loan.

So the next process is to centralize collections.

So that's physical print collections.

That probably won't include all collections like library things and some specialized collections.

So they're really scoping the project out now.

It will save some staff time, but we've already reduced a lot of staff that um so we've realized some of that FTE reduction already.

I think also in your spreadsheet um around the library, you'll see some notes of areas where we don't anticipate staff positions continuing due to centralization of services.

I would also add we've been working with our finance team to forecast out the financial situation of the library, and we've already built in those savings for the reduction of those positions into our financial forecast, and the library still faces a significant financial deficit even with the reduction of those positions.

Do we know if the central cooperative is going to be hiring?

Like is as they consolidate, is that a pathway for some of our affected employees?

They they they have um they have budgeted to hire some uh for some positions.

It's not I think it's like um, you know, six FTE, so it's not uh it wouldn't give everybody who is maybe losing their role a position throughout the cooperative.

But one of the things that they um if you are qualified for the position, if you meet minimum qualifications and you work within the cooperative, you will get an interview.

I think this is probably gonna be our hardest conversation.

And I mean, Elizabeth and I spent uh 0.25 of our FTE this year on, and that is an accurate reflection, uh, talking budget.

And I in uh it's because we love it so much.

I mean, you see me in the library three or four times a week.

Not only am I there with my children, I'm there for meetings, it's our third space, it's one of the few free places in the city people could go.

We've done everything humanly possible to fortify the city's budget around it, but the the reality is is that the co-op is only paying for 50%.

We prioritize our union staff by paying a living wage compared to nonprofit libraries in the system.

Um we provide services beyond our service boundaries with our bookmobile.

You know, when I worked at Virginia Garcia, it was books in languages of the patients we saw, it's in preschools, it's story time.

I tell this story all the time about when COVID, my three-year-old daughter felt like the librarians were her best friends, and when we got to go meet them after COVID and they came back to work, it was like meeting movie stars.

Like our library and our library and staff make Beaverton better.

They make the lives of our community better.

And so I'm interested in the strategic plan.

I'm not interested in the tough conversations we're gonna have, and and we need to really push on the co-op to look at libraries like ours that are the number one producing in the state.

Um, and they provide services far beyond checking out books.

And I'm I'm continually disappointed by the outcome of that negotiation, but it wasn't for a lack of the city trying.

Um but this upcoming conversation is gonna be tough, and and I know that.

And so we're interested in the strategic plan and the leadership Kim has brought um to the co-op, and we're still in negotiation right now of the IGA, so just negotiate like our future depends on it.

You have the city council and the mayor behind you as you guys are entering those negotiations with the county.

And this would be a good time for the city counselors to reach out to the county commissioners while the IGA is open and remind them how important these services are to our community.

Thank you for joining us.

Okay, uh the next group of programs is what we're calling the city manager's office external programs, and that is inclusive of uh community services, which provides our response to homelessness, um sustainability and recycling, Office of Equity and Inclusion, Center for Mediation and Dialogue, Events and Neighborhoods.

Um this one uh is 18.75 total staff, 48% of it, their time is spent on mandated services.

The budget is approximately 5.3 million.

Um there definitely are grants and uh other uh arrangements that are helping to defer or defray some of the costs for related programming and and other things in the space.

So homeless uh programming is supported with uh an ongoing allocation of SHS supportive housing services funding.

Um recycling receives grants from Metro and uh is was in sometimes able to receive some federal funding uh when there were was such a thing.

Um the Center for Mediation and Dialogue is also funded by grants and fees, and we are looking to right-size some of those.

Next slide slide.

Um so the takeaways for this area, uh some programs are primarily providing mandatory services, the sustainability recycling and community services and homelessness are examples of that.

They're essentially uh our requirements from the state about our recycling.

There are some uh locally, I think I would say that in terms of sustainability and um our response to homelessness is a combination, I guess.

Uh we were trying to work collaboratively with uh Washington County and other partners, uh Metro and uh the program the way that it's designed gives us a voice and make sure that those uh are responsive to Beaverton's needs, those programs.

Um the uh programs are also uh partially funded, like I said, uh with outside funds, so OPM, other people's money.

Um, uh the question still remains for this area as well.

What's the right service level for Beaverton?

Discretionary services do provide value.

Um it does make it challenging though to reduce or to write size the service level uh because they are visible uh services and and community uh consumed services or or things that help uh create quality of life.

Um an example of that mediation, uh we often tag the mediation program for all kinds of things, but um they do eviction prevention um support of uh restorative justice and other uh programs they also facilitate from time to time for uh things here, and they do provide a good amount of training to the community as well.

Um get is obviously beloved event that is put on here, and you know, uh one of many that the events team is responsible for and that do create uh the vibe, right?

Create a community that we're all proud to be in.

And then uh the neighborhood association or NAC uh program support is key to making sure that our neighbors have a voice in their government.

So the third uh takeaway the uh there's a potential to recoup some but not all of certain program costs.

And again, we're reviewing the uh uh cost recovery.

Uh it's not quite as as clear, I don't think, in terms of uh the mandate for CDD as uh is in this area, but thinking about Center for Mediation Dialogue and some of the trainings we provide, how to get to a closer to market uh level um because we are the the game in the county, not just in town for that service.

And so, how do we leverage that without necessarily squeezing the market so cl so tightly that we don't get the amount of training uh and interest that we've had in the past?

Events we've talked about and will likely bring to the council this year some proposals around how to start our our way towards um cost for events or event participation, um, you know, just trying to recoup some of the cost of what are obviously amazing events that we put on, but can be quite expensive events that we put on as well.

So thinking about how to balance those things, and then um we continue to talk to the county about the the collaboration we have on supportive housing and whether we can get more.

Um so that's definitely something on the table.

Uh we have ideas about other programs that we might be able to uh get more of an allocation for because we see the county moving from a model where they're building the infrastructure for the homeless response in the county to ri really needing to operate and uh uh operationalize it over the next whatever the lifetime of SHS is.

And so as we shift or they shift into a more programmatic response, we're thinking that there is some opportunity there as well to get a little bit more uh of the annual dollars from them.

So we will we will have our hand up.

I think that's it.

Um I think there's no one to pull up here, so if you have questions for either Elizabeth or I can keep going.

Oh, I had to find out which button to push over here.

Uh under the events section, uh you mentioned it just briefly kind of high level.

Uh it says what's the ability for us to have an external or another funding source for events?

And I'm thinking of things like sponsorships, but it says uh it's not available under the current structure.

Is that kind of what you're talking about?

Like, are we not able to bring in sponsorships for some of our bigger events because we're a city government?

Or like what is it, what does that mean?

Yeah, we don't have a mechanism right now.

I mean, I think we need to look through the legality of some of that and and how that might work, um, but also think about the mechanisms like what are we comfortable with when it comes to sponsorships and um you know, you arguably can lose some of the identity of an event, and so we want to make sure that we're thoughtful about how we would proceed.

But we've talked about sponsorships, we've talked about you know, kind of fees for entry, um, a little bit more skin in the game for the vendors who participate in our events regularly, um, things like that.

So thinking about how to get our get it that in front of you all to make some decisions about the long-term future, probably with a ramp up of how we would implement something.

Okay, thanks.

Yep.

Can I jump in with a quick question?

Please, you were talking a little bit about the center of mediation and dialogue.

Have we leveraged that group when it comes to anything related to policing, or are those more separated?

Um I don't know that I would say that we've uh leverage them for policing per se or for those kinds of things.

But they're working with courts on restorative justice, and so um it's more in uh that response to uh to crime rather than necessarily like you know, in an intervention mindset, I suppose.

That's that seems to be the way that there are they're working right now.

Okay, so like police and to court then to restorative justice with with with potentially centered mediation and dialogue.

Yeah, I think that's the model at the moment.

Thanks.

Council Becker?

Yeah, just more of a comment.

Yeah just more of a comment uh last year so it's been a while but I was talking with a tiger city counselor and I think they would love to start a um equity program but they can't afford a uh an FTE for themselves nor do they think they have a use case for that.

And so I it just made my brain um curious that like are there some smaller cities that might want to buy some of these service if we have extra capacity and and can we look at that revenue model as a potential way to shore up some of our FTEs not necessarily on that program specifically with some of these is external programs I think about sustainability like stuff like that maybe that there's something we could protect our people there.

Yeah I think you're talking about insourcing which for government nerds is like super fun to think about it it is challenging really because that piece of the ownership for you know how we're gonna serve someone else's community and stuff like that but I think the other question is capacity.

So it could be something where we get or can fund an additional staff member because we've got that contract but I think we've got to be thoughtful about like is there the market for it but it's worth exploring for sure.

Thanks okay the last one I think support services um so the this is included inclusive of uh a lot of the um the fishbowls fishbowl as I like to call them the uh internal services so the finance department ITS uh city attorneys HR uh also the city recorder and community engagement and communications um these are uh there's a lot there's a lot of them uh 87 almost 88 uh staff members uh 58 percent of that is uh mandated or and or operationally necessary services um many of these services are you can't necessarily charge a fee except to yourself for and so there's not really an option for a revenue um but uh we do that we we do essentially um uh uh have them blended across uh the the funding stream at least blended across multiple departments and so the 25.3 is uh uh offset or a little bit offset so that it is sometimes a pass through general fund and or allocated from some of the other funds that are uh consuming those services those internal services um takeaways for this uh support services area uh mandatory services are high risk to reduce um because things that uh we do in this area really uh risk avoidance uh risk mitigation um you know so thinking about keeping us out of lawsuits um or maybe in lawsuits if they're good ones um the um ability to uh think about cybersecurity or you know our systems in general the IT infrastructure that we need to operate more efficiently um the as well um you know just generally thinking about you know compliance when it comes to employee issues or comes to financial issues making sure that we're actually keeping up with expected uh law changes and or just good practices to support our employees um further reductions number two re create uh operational fragility um and really thinking about that in the sense that a lot of these programs are thinly supported already um there's a lot of uh individual experts not a lot of cross training because we don't necessarily have the capacity in many of these areas to do that and so um reductions is really challenging um reductions also are provide a risk to the organization and to um to all of us in the sense of like there's additional costs maybe if we don't do something correctly the first time um speed of government which I I think the mayor likes to talk about often is intentional to avoid some of those risks um but that is it is a risk uh as well when we're thinking about uh some of these internal services in general how they operate now um number three the the internal services are citywide force multipliers and so um thinking about them uh you know in one hand uh they help us uh to do work right they they help us to to focus on the things that we are all expert in because they are expert in those things right they are expert in uh finance IT HR and that helps us focus on what's important uh to us right there that's what's important to them helping us do what's important to us and so um it's able we're able to do more things when we see reductions or when we see a drawdown or a vacancy in some of these departments we then are taking on more of those responsibilities in operational departments which can degrade the quality of a service or the speed of service in those operational departments.

Um I think uh number four, I've more or less already touched on it, I guess, in that sense that you know cuts are a risk to other departments, and that's that's kind of what we're talking about is this idea of shifting tasks and um you know, there it creates risk when you have me doing HR, you know.

So um just not a good thing.

And Patricia would she's already saying that's a terrible idea.

So um, you know, I think that's the other piece is making sure we're doing things in the right space with the right people who are expert in those those things, and I think that's it.

Counselor Tivnon.

Go ahead and put this back down to fall again.

Um this isn't a question for support services, just in general as we're closing things out.

Um we postponed the levy for good reasons or the the levy ask for good reasons.

And I'm already thinking through the messaging on this because we have really difficult decisions ahead.

And I'm thinking about this as like turning the burners down.

You don't want it to go to where the pilot light goes out on any one of across the board.

Uh the nothing on here is easy.

But the the burners are gonna go down across and and part of the ask for the levy is so that we can turn those burners back up.

Is that part of the messaging here?

Because I think that I don't wanna ever see the hanging baskets go away.

But there's going to have to be visual impacts that people can see to let them really understand where we're at as a city.

And it's just it's something that I feel like we're gonna have to start learning the message to people as they're feeling the pinches, we're gonna have to message it to staff, we're gonna have to be all hands on deck, not only through this budgeting process, but also in how we're positioning ourselves to be successful in giving that levy passed.

Cause uh there's no other option.

So it's just throwing that out there.

Well, my preference has been, and I I have said it so many times, and I'm sure you guys can understand and say it as well is like we're not communicating the value of the city now.

So to have something instantly go away and then try to communicate why we need to bring it back, we need to be talking to people about the hanging baskets.

We need to be talking to people about what our urban serv forestry service does and what that means and how it saves money to have our own, you know, uh certified arborists on our team.

We have to talk about the non-sexy things.

We get really wrapped up in the things that are right in front of our face.

Um, why we remove bath like shopping carts, why we haven't two FTE that remove graffiti because we've had so much.

We're so we're really good at doing the work in the city.

I will say that.

I would say when I go to door to door, people really like living here, to have it instantly taken away with not understanding why it was there to begin with, I think is gonna be too hard of a challenge.

Like when you're running for office, trying to convince someone to vote and then vote for you is one too many things.

And so, how do we get how do we not have 47 things we're trying to communicate at once?

I think is the real solution here.

That's my own um perception on talking to voters and being in the community.

I think if we instantly start removing things without a lot of understanding why, it's gonna be very difficult.

Counselor Hartmeyer, Prague.

Um I think that you know, I think at our last work session, we were talking about our poll results, and our poll poll results were telling us that the community thinks we're doing great.

And I think you're right, Counselor Tipnon.

Like they I think they do need to see some of these visual changes for them to understand, like staff is going to heroics to pull it off.

So, yeah, it would be a shock.

But like, would that tell the story?

Um I also don't want to see the hanging baskets go away, but it's actually a very visible thing that people would notice.

That's gone now, just like we notice when our roads are less smooth.

Um I don't know.

I don't know.

I mean, how do you how do we tell people our city's working so hard despite the fact that we've made cuts after cuts after cuts, and you haven't noticed the service impact.

Like I think that we I think that staff has done an incredible job of compensating and like picking up the workload over these years of cuts after cuts that I don't know that there's any more soft blow, right?

Like I I think that there's a bit of like it's just gonna there's gonna be a difference.

I I mean I think that we've talked about it's gonna be hard, like it's gonna be hard.

Like, and I I mean as much as the baskets are beautiful, like I think it has to come off the list.

Like, yes, it's beautiful, it's a livability thing, but I would much rather do graffiti cleanup than keep the baskets up, right?

Like we're talking about what are the trade-offs of the livability things that we have to deal with, and it's a very visible example, right?

So I think maybe I'm seeing it a different way, Mayor, that it's more of like the absence of some of the things may help tell our story in a better way.

Um people will notice it.

But we're not telling the story, period.

So, do you want our story to be to our voters in the absence when we've not even tried to explain why we're doing the things we're doing?

And I know we're we're harping on the baskets, they're my beloved baskets after all, but they're already paid for for this year and they're already up.

So by the time someone will see it, it's gonna be past the hard budget conversations.

But how do you how do you tell the story of staff staff did this?

Like staff did it despite, right?

Like, I don't know, like essentially we've told the story that we can make do in this constrained environment.

That's what that's the story we told by delivering services in a constrained environment.

And so now that's why we're having this great conversation is the services have to be reduced.

Like there's no other, there's nowhere else to go now.

Um, and so maybe it's not the baskets, but like there will be things that have to reduce or go away, like there's no other choice, right?

And it will just be gone.

Maybe there is a phased approach to some of the things, and maybe that's a like maybe that's a mitigation option that we have.

But I um I guess I guess I don't know how to tell the story enter the way at this point because I think the story has been Beaverton has been pulling this off despite these really hard economic situation, like despite this constrained budget.

I I was once in a budget meeting similar to this, spent five hours and came up with very little cuts because everything was essential.

I just wanted to remind myself and including all the council that we have sixty million dollar budget shortfall that's gonna hit our face next year.

Uh Levy.

If it passes, so looking at ten that we have to come up with by next year.

So I just want to keep that tell myself, right?

It's gonna be hard, hard, really hard decisions.

So um and then obviously we have to communicate before we start cutting and sort of school away.

And there's gotta be a narrative and storytelling plan before we start taking actions, which is summer.

So it's so we have to really work on it.

That's I just want to remind myself and everybody that all right.

Well, this was uh thank you for this overview.

Um, we started talking about the the framework for this work session ahead of uh the budget and the levy and where we're talking about because I think it's also a good one 101.

Uh I hope our budget um want to send this recording to our budget committee members as well, uh, so they have an understanding of kind of as we're starting to work through these next phases.

So with that, I will thank you for your good work.

And if there's no other questions or wrap up, I think we are good for this evening.

I think uh Mike would just mention that we do have a work session uh that we're hoping to have in the fall to do a deeper dive into municipal court.

I know that's been an ask, and we've been kind of waiting until the new cameras are up and running so we can evaluate those.

Um, but if there's other deep dives that folks want to request, um I'll be looking for direction from the majority of council.

If there's nothing that immediately comes tonight uh to mind tonight, that's totally fine, but the offer's open.

Yeah, I I think we're we have a lot to consider over the next six weeks um ahead of the budget.

So I think and I I think the offer after budget is probably gonna be more important than now.

So all right, with that, we are adjourned.