The Clearwater City Council held a special work session on August 11, 2026, to review the proposed FY2026/2027 budget, receive updates on staffing and artificial intelligence, and discuss a contingency plan for potential state legislation that could significantly reduce property tax revenue. No final votes were taken; the session was primarily informational and deliberative.
This time we'll call to order the special city council work session to the Clearwater City Council for August eleventh, twenty twenty-six. And we'll move to item two point one of the agenda, and I'll call the city manager to present. So HR took a slightly different approach with this year's staffing report and compared to last year's. So for consistency, HR adapted and aligned this year's report to a fiscal year framework. And because the date and methodology changes, you may notice some of the figures are slightly different from past years. Vacancy turnover separations, reason for separations, internal advancement and hiring, and then all of this should provide a broad overall staffing picture. Okay, so with that, we'll get right into it. So in going back and looking at it at an over a year standpoint, um, what we can see is that from FY23, we've got a relatively stable full-time baseline for our vacancies, fluctuating anywhere from eleven point three to eleven point two. The part-time tells a little bit of a different story. That looks a lot more volatile, but what I would like to point out is that it's a matter of proportion. So we have 81 part-time permanent positions, which represent about 45.62 FTEs. So just the slightest fluctuation can cause the change. So that brings us to our turnover rate. What we can see over the past two years and trending into this year is that we're maintaining a single digit turnover rate, which is really phenomenal in comparison to years past. So although that 5.6 looks really spectacular, again, it is just a point in time through August. We do still have to finish out the rest of the fiscal year. But I would say that the direction that we're trending in is very encouraging. So this is the one slide where we continued with the previous methodology of the reports that were brought before you. So pay has continued to decline as a cited reason for resignation. So it was 9% in 2024, 7% in 2025, and now we're showing 6% is the reason that it's being cited for an employee voluntarily leaving. Something for HR to take a look at, these are things to be mindful of. Other than compensation still matters, but employees are citing pay as a less frequent reason as why they're leaving. And so there's been a lot of effort and emphasis on providing an internal promotional framework. And going back to what I was talking about in the vacancy rate with the part-timers, you can see the change here. There's just very few movements in the part-time permanent arena. We have a lot of variable positions in the temporary space, but as far as the part-time goes, you can see we've hired four permanent part-timers this year. But we can also see that the hiring has declined, which is another area that points to our stabilization of vacancies. So overall, I would say that our staffing is the overall staffing picture is one of greater stability than one than in years past. We definitely still have some areas that need attention. And again, just to remind you the goal of refining this report was not necessarily to produce cleaner numbers, but just to give a consistent baseline that we can use to identify trends and make better workforce decisions. And I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you for a good report. Move to agenda item 2.2. Yes, I would like to call out Dan, our IT director. He's going to give council an update on our AI and technology for us. A little pre-planning goes a long way. Good afternoon, Mayor, Council members, and city manager. I was asked to just give a brief update of how we're using artificial intelligence within the organization now and how it's informing our path forward as we go into potentially leaner times. Just for clarity, I want to give a definition of what artificial intelligence is. We're going to use IBM's definition as an early early pioneer. It's the use of software technology that enables computers or machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, and creativity. If it's able to perform these functions with human input, it's referred to as generative, so prompting something to produce an output. If it can do these things autonomously, it's the terminator or Sunny and i robot. It's referred to as a gentic, so it's its own conscious being. Currently, our use of AI really falls into three main categories. It's provided us a huge amount of benefit in cybersecurity and network administration. So user management and threat identification. The other area is customer service and engagement, so we have AI agents on the website. We're introducing call agents and utility customer service this year. And also able to track issues with our C click fix, so we can we can keep an eye on those things.