We're gonna go ahead and call our January 20th, 2026 Columbia City Council's pre-council to order.

We have a few things on tonight's agenda.

Up for up first is four presentations from our labor group presentations, and then we'll get into the community survey results.

I'll make note that often we um usually try to have time to go to closed session because of the timing this year.

Um most likely we do uh require any closed session for the labor group presentation, it'll be at the February 2nd uh pre-council, which that will happen.

So make sure when asking questions to my council or for council members to staff that we make sure not to violate any sort of personnel rules, and I'll look to you, Kathy, to tell us if we're going into that that space.

Um all right, so Kathy Baker, I'm gonna turn this over to you, and you will tell us who is presenting and when.

That's good.

Good evening, uh council and mayor.

We as you said we have four of our five labor groups that have asked yes in a microphone, or is it too hard?

No, it's not hard.

I think we have to all right.

As the mayor indicated, we have four of our five labor groups that have asked to present tonight.

Our first group is local 955, and they're gonna be um represented by Scotty Johnson.

I'm gonna keep it pretty short and sweet.

You can pick it up, Eric.

You can take it out of the stand, all the things.

Right.

You have to hold this really close to your mouth.

I'm keeping it pretty short and sweet today.

Um we don't have a slideshow.

Um I've got papers here.

Do you want to look at some down?

Thank you.

Um we're seeking pay grade adjustments for union eligible positions, including the two transit water distribution workers, implementing a $19 an hour minimum wage for representative positions.

Uh attendance policy revisions.

We found that in uh several different departments that they're vastly different attendance policies.

So we'd like to have some more uniform.

Uh cost living adjustments to the step scales, extension of the step scale to the maximum of the biggest.

Um adjustments to policies relating to DOT F and CSA compliance physicals and drug testings.

Uh cost living adjustments to holiday pay, stamina pay, all other ad phase and allowances.

And we'd like to get finding arbitration to discipline procedures and overall agreements procedure.

Anyone have any questions for Scotty?

Yeah, Nick, uh, use microphone, please.

Oh, thank you.

Uh hey Scotty, thanks.

Uh that's short and sweet.

Not a lot of specificity here, but I'm wondering if there's more specificity in your conversations with uh city admin.

We will, yeah, we will get into more specific uh details in pretty negotiations.

Um I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the um attendance policies and what it looks like when it's different across divisions.

Yeah, so um what we found is that there are some divisions that you know they don't really need discipline.

They as far as attendance goes, they uh there's really no some we haven't found a policy in some divisions, but then other divisions like transit we found that they've got very strict policies and are getting discipline more often for attending visualizing whatnot.

So we like to make it more uniform so we all have a fair policy.

Other questions first.

Um I have to have one remind us this year.

Is it um is it wave adjustments and then any open-ended items?

What is in this year's?

Okay, all right.

And are these items currently on your or all within your open-ended items?

Uh yes.

Yeah.

All right, well, thanks, guys.

Thank you.

You can just hand that to cats if you want.

Okay, our next group is local 1055, and Zach Clivet is here to present.

I think that got you set up right.

All right.

I hate holding a microphone talk, uh, but I'll do my best.

Thank you.

Um I guess I should also warn you all that there's a camera too, because you don't want to put your butt towards it.

Please don't.

I mean, I never mind any exactly.

So uh I'm gonna go through uh these are all of our open items uh this year.

I don't have to talk about a pension.

We've kind of got a little delay on that because uh some revenue stuff.

So uh we've worked together with the administration to get that in the right place, and and I'm comfortable with where it's at, even though it's an open item.

You guys saw our contract.

Feels like it was just yesterday that you were approving our contract because it almost was yesterday.

Um so this year uh we're gonna work uh focused on our financial issues.

Um I'll go through them here in a second, but based salaries, uh, some of our ad pays, as Scotty mentioned, uh, meal allowance, ad pays, incentive pays, and then uh this post employment retirement or retirement health insurance program.

I brought it up last year.

We kind of put a delay on it during negotiations, and uh we have meetings scheduled with Kathy and with some of the outside providers, uh the administration to see what that could look like moving forward.

So we are working on that.

We're all in a good space with that.

Um compensation uh again, we we we are satisfied with the way that our pay plan is set up.

Um we continue to make some progress, making adjustments year after year after year, and I'll commend the administration that for you know now a significant amount of time we have made significant adjustments.

Umflation rates, consumer price index, consumer buying power, all those things continue to play into what we're trying to accomplish here and make sure that our employees can stay ahead of the curve, that they can make a good living living that they can live on here in Columbia as they move through their career, um, but they're also rewarded for their service too.

Uh, we don't want just to stay uh paced with inflation, and I'll talk more about that in just a second.

Uh so the CPI over the last year was about three percent.

Uh you guys may have seen this chart.

Uh, this was provided to us by the city.

Um, this is the uh inflation rates and uh pay adjustments over the last uh several years from 2015.

Um when I did this, I used the 2019 25.

If you look on there, you can see in 2019 is when we really started uh to use a percentage-based adjustment year after year.

Before that, we had some you know quarter cent raises, the thousand dollars over over pay periods, and then the 45 cent raises.

Uh so I use that 2019 to 2025 uh time frame when we've really been focused on uh these percentages.

But uh basically what we find is that even by this chart, uh the total inflation rate during that time period was 23.1 and this raises that we've been given uh equal about 22.1%.

So we're about a percent behind what the inflation rate is, meaning our members are taking home less money today than they were six years ago.

Um and that that gap widens when you actually pull the data.

This is from uh the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Uh, during that same same time period, it shows uh cumulative inflation rate of 25.7, not 23.1, and our salary increases were still at that 22.1 percent.

So using this data, we're still three percent, three or more percent behind inflation rates.

Our members are making less money uh while we've been making these adjustments.

We continue to fall behind.

So uh we've got to work on this, we've got to stay ahead of this.

But the big um the big thing that I want to point out is that pacing inflation is not a period, it's zero, it's net zero.

If uh the cost uh inflation rates are 2.5 percent, and you give a 2.5% raise, you're at net zero.

Um, and our members aren't getting ahead by the doing that.

Uh they stay right stagnant where they're at.

So um, we're gonna ask for uh step adjustments like we always do, um, and then uh adjust our steps for the economic conditions, and at some point, uh hopefully through this year and over the next couple years, we can catch up with this inflation rate, and we can actually get our members ahead.

Our step adjustments should be similar to uh annual raise for service.

So you're you get your step every year that you serve for the city, and our across the border economic adjustments should be that inflation rate, and that's how our members continue to move ahead.

Uh, and that's how these uh plans are designed to work.

Uh on our ad pays, uh, we'll be asking again for uh specialty team pay, hazmat technical rescue and water rescue.

We've identified that there's a substantial amount of work and now have an operations or special operations uh group that has put together a really detailed plan on what our special operations look like.

We're asking more of those employees that are serving on these teams every single day, um including special operations and and water rescue is a big one.

Obviously, we've coming out of uh the water rescue that happened up on Bayer Creek.

Um, and and we're putting a lot of emphasis and a lot of work on these employees, um, and they need to be paid and compensated for that.

Um, and then uh increase to our current ad pay for paramedics as we're getting ready to work into a trial period for an ALS program, um, which is advanced life support, we're gonna be asking more of those paramedics that are serving on the streets while they're working.

We're gonna be asking more of those paramedics that are serving on the streets while they're working.

So they there will need to be uh salary adjustments for that because we are asking a substantially a substantial amount of more work from them.

Our meal allowance, we haven't had adjustments since the 2017 contract cycle.

Um if you just take a look back at those CPI numbers, you can tell that uh there's been a substantial change to what uh the cost of goods are.

Um, and so we need to adjust that.

And uh what we would like to see is an automatic adjustment tied with those CPI rates moving forward into the future.

Uh it's just a simple calculation, it's it's easy to keep up with, and we can just make it happen every year.

Uh, and then the last thing is the retirement health insurance program.

Uh, this is the exact same slide that you guys saw before.

Um, I didn't even change it.

Um, what we want to do is uh create uh basically an HSA style or some sort of savings account for employees that they can use their sick leave buyback time annually.

Um they get to make the choice of again we're kind of working on what those details can look like, but the ideal setup is they get to make a choice whether they want to put the money into this account or take cash home.

Uh, this usually comes late in November, so if some people want to take that home by Christmas presents, that's fine.

If not, they can put the money in here.

It's it builds throughout time, and then um when they retire, they would have uh an account set up that they could use for those post uh post-retirement health care costs.

Um you go get eyeglasses if you need contacts or or several doctors' visits.

Um, like I said, we're working on that.

Um we got a meeting scheduled nationwide uh here in February, and and I look forward to seeing this come to fruition.

I think it'll be good not just for our members, but for potentially all city employees.

Again, uh, I can't ever calculate this outright.

Uh, this is just a rough estimate.

Um point three million over two years.

Um, ad pay will depend on what the negotiations look like.

Our other benefits will come out of the negotiations.

I can't give you a real great estimate.

I can put in numbers into a computer and make it give me numbers back, um, but that's all gonna be skewed and it adjusts up and down all throughout our time.

Um, and just my final thoughts, like they always are.

We want to make sure we take care of our employees uh with fair compensation that uh matches economic conditions, create innovative ways to enhance our uh employment and work together.

Um I really genuinely believe we've done a lot better job of working together collectively with all parts of the administration and council over the last few years.

So I really appreciate that.

Uh negotiations are never easy, they're tough, and I'm not I'm not easy to deal with all the time.

So I appreciate those guys that sit in the room with me.

Uh but uh thank you.

If you have questions, I'll happy to answer.

Questions for Sach.

I guess one question can tell us again what is the meal allowance, and like is that I knew you guys have three refrigerators in the houses.

Is that basically y'all going out and buying the food for it?

Or what is that?

Yes, we get right by ordinance, we get um 1460.

I can't remember exactly the number, 14 or 16 dollars per ship that we work.

Half of it's paid in uh October, beginning of the fiscal year.

The other half is paid in April based on the number of ships you've worked.

So yeah, it is reduced if you take time off and things like that.

Um, and it's per ship, and uh yeah, that that that pays us for the cost of going to the grocery store, buying our our supplies, whatever we do, we can use it or whatever.

So um it does pay us for those new allowances, and I think it's available to other employees that are more than 12-hour employees.

It's different, yeah.

Here's just 14.

14, yeah.

14 hours, I think.

So but it is an ordinance and it is eligible.

Other employees are eligible for it if their ships are longer than X amount of hours.

So it's not just fire against that.

Okay, I just want to clarify that one.

Okay.

Any other things?

All right, thank you, Zach.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Sorry, yeah.

No, it's fine.

All right, our next group is CPLA and Lieutenant Derek Morris here to present.

Thank you.

Uh, I'm also gonna keep this short and sleep.

We also don't have a presentation.

Uh, this year is a contract year, though, so we did want to discuss what we're hoping to get from our future negotiations this year.

Uh, first, we want to make sure that we address recruitment and retention.

Uh, while this was a like 2025 was a decent year as far as getting the applicants for the lieutenant position.

Uh, we want to make sure that in the future we make sure that there's continuous applicants as we go along.

Uh, the first thing we're gonna talk about is just making sure our compensation as far as within the department is at least somewhere around the where it needs to be.

Um, currently our sergeants uh more than half are making more than what the lieutenants are just by signing up for overtime retailers.

We want to make sure that our compensation is while not impossible for a sergeant to make, is somewhat difficult.

We also want to make sure that our leave is addressed.

So one of the things we would like to see is our vacation the accrual limit removed.

We want to make sure that our city holidays, we often are required to work on every city holiday.

We want to have some form of compensation for going in to work on those city holidays.

Right now it's there is not any compensation for us working on city holidays.

And then we want to make sure that even after we are gone, uh, we have some kind of security.

So we want to make sure that our retirement has some security in there.

We want to possibly evaluate the feasible feasibility of a service credit purchase of having the option to purchase and to retire earlier, and possibly post-employment health care plans to incentivize career line judgment as well as succession planning.

Our second goal is leadership development and succession planning, as I said before.

First, we want to maybe consider a standardized training plan for all new lieutenants, or anyone that hasn't would have one yet.

And we also want to make sure that the job description that we currently have that we are actually able to do.

We want to discuss and define what exactly we're going to be doing while we're on it.

And that's our third goal is organizational efficiency and accountability.

We want to be able to review and update our job descriptions to make sure that it aligns with the current operational needs.

And we want to make sure that whenever we have a decision to the needs we made, that we have the trust to be able to make it.

That includes going back to the training as well as other payments.

That's all I have.

Questions for Derek.

Yeah, done.

When you mentioned not being able to do everything that's in your current job description, is it due to a lack of personnel training or just an outdated job description that maybe it's no longer applicable?

I believe it depends, like I don't want to air too much dirty laundry.

Uh, but a lot of the responsibilities that we could have are taken by the higher command staff.

So things that we should we should be able to do as commanders are our bosses are taking those and they're doing it themselves.

Thank you.

Um just a quick clarification.

Um, when you're talking about accountability under the leadership development, can you expand on that?

Yeah, so in order for us, like we want to do good at our jobs, right?

Like that's that's what we want to do.

Uh, for us to be able to feel like we're doing good at our jobs, we need to know what our jobs are, and we have to be trained to do it correctly.

Uh so right now we have an idea of what our jobs are, and it depends on where you are and who your supervisor is does it, right?

But we want to be able to do well.

So we want the training and the clarification to know this is what you're going to do and here's how you're going to do it.

Any other questions for Dave?

Yeah, just a little follow-up.

I know uh just a little follow-up on that.

It sounds like if I understood what you were saying, that you're looking for this training that would serve you now, but would also prepare you for advancement as as well.

Yeah, right, to move into command staff, for instance.

Yes, yeah, okay.

Any other questions?

All right, thank you, Derek.

Appreciate it.

Our next group is the Columbia Police Officers Association and Dog Neavers here.

That's present.

Good evening.

I'm here on behalf of the Columbia Police Officers Association.

Give you just a brief summary of what we hope to accomplish during this year's collective bargaining with the city.

As we've said for several years, this is a goal we share with the city, and that is that CPOA really wants to be able to attract, wants the city to be able to attract and retain only the best and the brightest for Columbia policing.

And it seems like we're doing a great job at attracting, and we need to work on some retaining from our perspective.

To that end, our primary goal that we've been talking with you for years about is to establish a pay step plan.

And that pay step plan would ensure that we have competitive wages at all steps, and that we would automatically progress.

Then are we keeping up with inflation?

And so a pay step plan that rewards tenure applies automatic increases through the steps, separate and apart from any cost of living or CPI based uh pay adjustments that would be across the board.

Um I wanted to mention is that in the last 90 days, we've lost 14 officers due to resignations, not due to retirements.

And I know that I might be off on the numbers, but that's the best we have.

I know these numbers are always a little bit of a moving target for this.

What's impactful here is that that's you know, nearing 10% of the sworn workforce in 90 days.

So the need to retain cannot be overstated the importance of retention of the of some of the folks with some of these 14.

We had people with 10 years on, and we had people someone who was a sergeant, and so that um that's not common, and so we really should be asking ourselves how can we do a better job of retaining this experience.

Uh we also have as one of our goals uh fixing our pension, enhancing restoring it, fixing it, funding it, whatever word we want to use, as and we hope to be able to work with the city on that.

I know you guys are well aware of that issue.

Um, or two, depending on how you look at it, issues that we are bringing to the table this year, and really asking city if they're willing to bargain with us on, has to do with the overall employee investigation discipline and appeal processes, and part of you know what we've been asking for for many years is the ability to appeal ultimate decisions of discipline to some outside entity of some sort, someone who doesn't have any skin in the game, someone that doesn't have any uh political will at stake locally, someone who will truly look at the facts of the incident, the rules, the policies, the law that applies, and render a truly fair and neutral and unbiased decision.

That's something that our officers are very passionate about.

The other subpart to this issue that we're requesting bargaining on has to do with the overall investigation and discipline process, not just the not just binding arbitration at the end.

Um, part of the impetus for this request is that we it became obvious that the citizens police review board doesn't have we'll say rules of conduct or uh rules that would prevent um bias, and that started a re reignited or continued a conversation or concerns that our members have that there's a potential that some point in the future or some point in the past, someone might sit on that board who has some demonstrated bias, and we just came to a point to realize, and I don't know to what extent council was aware of, but there was an issue that we expressed some concerns, uh, and there's no point in getting into the details of that issue, but just suffice it to say that it became apparent that there were no there were no citywide the same rules that apply to city employees or city staff with regard to social media use or with regard to uh we'll say being bias-free or not expressing bias publicly at least.

Uh to our understanding, if there's nothing like that that applies to that particular uh board.

That conversation grew into hey, how else could we improve this process for the community for the citizenry, for the officers and for the agency and for the city alike?

And we would just this year ask for the opportunity to collaborate with city staff and try to brainstorm ways that that process overall can be improved.

Because I think if you asked anyone involved at any level of that process, they would probably express some frustration and express that it's not working as well as it could or should that is all I have.

Questions for Don?

Yeah, other Don of the 14 officers had left in the last 90 days that you referenced.

Was there a single reason across the majority of those?

I'm not I know they all didn't leave for the same reason, but was there a single issue across that you could say covered 10 of the 14 or whatever?

I'm sorry, sir.

I don't have that information.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, Vera with the pension restoration and enhancement.

Uh, do you have any guiding goals with that, or is that more of a ready to sit at the table and talk about it?

Uh I mean, we've we've they've been in discussions with city staff kind of informally for a few years, trying to figure out how we can fund it.

You know, I think minimally our perspective is we need to fund what the city's already committed to, you know.

In in from our perspective, though, we can point to a time before 2012 when we did not have the retention problem we do, and a lot of that data correlates with the 20-year retirement, and so you know, assuming the actuaries could work out the detail, which we don't I don't have that information or that capacity, that would be our overall goal would be if there was any way that we could restore the 20-year retirement, I think we'd get rid of a lot of the retention problem we have.

If that ends up not being feasible, which is entirely possible, we would look for any enhancements that would help us attract and retain the city's not unwilling or unable to do that.

We at least want it fully funded, you know, what we've already committed to do for our employees.

I hope that answers your question.

That was perfect, thank you.

I was gonna ask you in your um reviews of other police departments.

How many would you say are on have continued on with sort of like 20 year because it uh less and less?

Yeah, I I was just thinking about that.

Just um, right?

Yes.

Okay, a lot less than used to be.

Yeah, but we have to ask ourselves as a city and as a community do we want to be like everybody else, or do we actually want to retract and retain the best in private?

No, I think we look at police officers here.

Any other questions for Don?

Um, and honor minus yours is yours a contract renegotiation, or is this a wage opener and then open items?

A wage opener with open items, and we asked to bargain on what we show here as like the last two.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks, Tom.

Yes, thank you.

And then Kathy, that's the end of our ones.

And we have a fifth, but isn't that they not request time to that is correct?

The water and white association did not request to present tonight.

Okay, all right.

Um, council, before we move on to the things, are there any things not related to actually getting to the negotiation?

So you want to have staff be looking into or have questions for done.

Just for clarification, the police lieutenants.

That is that the only one that's a full contract this this year.

That is correct.

Okay, thank you.

All right, seeing nothing, we'll go on to then.

And so again, the reminder the intent is um at our February 2nd meeting have council deems, and we can kind of touch base with that after that.

There's the conversation about and potentially add on part of our closed items for um February 2nd.

Great.

Carlin, and I can go to you or Carol Rhodes.

Yeah, here.

If we wanted to have on that is that better, take this one.

Okay, this one's got a green license of time.

So it's much better.

Okay, if we wanted to have closed conversation on February 2nd, how do we what's the process for getting that?

I think so.

Basically, right now, if the thought is that yes, we'll want some clarifying things.

Um staff will just put it on for the agenda.

Is that the thought?

I I would like to have that on the agenda.

Yeah.

So do Carly, did you get that?

All right, so yeah, it'll be on for part of our February 2nd.

I've got it.

Do we do have a question about that?

Because I think the thought is the for a second that's a state of the courts and also gives you time to have closer with the municipal judge.

Can we meet 30 minutes earlier?

To kind of have a close edition conversation.

4:30 is I I work.

Okay.

Um is there another way?

We can try to just squeeze it in.

I just want to make sure that we keep some capital.

Yeah, so right.

I think I want to say last year we didn't take the full close time with capitalists.

I think um for this, this is kind of like we don't get into as many of the nuts and bolts during the closed session for this, but I don't imagine it taking longer than 30 minutes.

Kathy did it because it normally correct.

No, it depends on how many questions the council has.

So yeah.

So staff is prepared with the information.

Even for closed, yeah.

Yeah, you're just sending in a question.

Not for answer beforehand, but answer at this time.

I wanna be supportive of that request.

I I would like to see us be able to go ahead and do that.

And I think if we had that in 10, we could do it within the time.

So it's provided.

I would agree.

Yeah, I think we can manage it within the time department.

Um but you said you have another closed item.

We do.

So that's that's gonna add to the different time.

Oh, but that's okay.

So maybe we'll do that last.

And that way we don't get to this.

Okay, all right.

All right, Carol Rhodes.

I'm taking this over to you.

Hi.

Um I have the pleasure of are the microphones like just not loud enough?

They're really quite.

Can you hold them very close to your lips?

Can you hear me now?

It's better.

Okay.

So I have the pleasure of introducing Robert Heacot.

Robert is with ETC Institute.

And as you will recall, ETC has been conducting the community survey for the City of Columbia for as long as I can remember for several years.

Um, and so he is going to um run through the the survey findings with council.

Um, everyone should have received a copy of the presentation of Robert's presentation tonight.

Um, a summary of the 2025 community survey key findings, and then a staff presentation that will follow Robert's presentation.

And in addition, uh, I'm gonna pass out a word cloud, and this represents the um community comments from question 36, uh, which was do you have any other comments or suggestions you would like to share with the City of Columbia about our services?

And because that was not included in tonight's presentation, I will pass that out to council.

And Carol, quick class clarification because the presentation wasn't um added to the agenda later on.

Will it be a part of like an attachment to the minutes or something so that people later on can see it from the website?

Is that something that can be done, Stacy?

Maybe we don't have to answer that, but if we could look into making that possible, I think it'd be okay.

Good evening, Madam Mayor, members of the council.

My name is Robert Haycock.

It's very nice to see you again.

Uh as Carol said, ETC has been conducting like uh community surveys, satisfaction surveys for quite a while.

We had a little bit of a break and then came back last year.

You remember those results were not exactly where the city wanted to be, but tonight I want to make sure I'm not gonna bury the lead, uh, which really is your staff and you clearly taken those survey results from a year ago seriously of the 89 metrics that we measured in this survey.

80 of them either stayed the same or improved.

Only nine went down, and even those did not go down very much, but you had 80 of the 89 metrics that we measure stayed the same or improved.

With that, I'll jump in here.

This is a footprint for some of you who may not be familiar with ETC.

This gives you some idea of the footprint that we've had.

Uh we're one of the nation's largest market research companies for governmental entities.

So quick uh overview of the agenda that we're gonna follow.

Again, I know you're a little bit short on time, so I'm gonna go quickly.

So I'm going to go quickly.

If you find something that you want to jump in and have a question or need to stop me to clarify, please do so.

Otherwise, I'm going to move pretty quickly for your sake so you can move on.

Purpose, we know that a lot of uh there's several different reasons, and you can see some of them that we list here to compare the city's performance with other cities to help determine priorities for your community and also to objectively assess through a statistically valid survey where your citizens really are in terms of their opinions of the job the city is doing.

Our methodology we administered it online and by mail, and I would say online, we had I think 55% of the responses were online and 45% were by mail.

We had a goal of 800 completed surveys with a minimum of 100 surveys from each council district.

We met that goal, and a total of 804 surveys were completed.

That produced a 95% uh level of confidence with a margin of error plus or minus 3.4 percent.

That is a really tight margin of error normally when we do it.

The standard is 5%.

So we should have confidence in terms of the numbers that we're providing.

This is a map that just shows you a disbursement map of where the respondents came from, so you can kind of get a feel for that.

We'll get into some uh demographic because we we notice here you see both new and long-term residents were well represented.

Robert, I'm gonna quick point of clarification.

Uh two points.

One, are we going to ask you questions while you go along, or would you like to save them for the end?

Whatever you're whatever you prefer.

I think I'll try allowed occasional, but I'll encourage us to understand how many slides do you have?

I have quite a few.

Yeah, so to be conscious over that, I think just one if you could go back.

Uh a question that we hear a lot, uh maybe one more, maybe the a question that we heard a lot, and it'd be great if you had to clarify this right now.

You said that 55% of the respondents were people who did it online.

Correct.

Now, those were ones that people received the letter, filled up the link, and their address matched the one you mailed to, or just went to that first hyperlink and they were in the city of Columbia.

No, this is four people that were part of the random sample that we sent out.

Okay.

So we sent thousands out and got 804 responses, and those respondents could fill out the hard paper copy or go online.

Correct.

And so anyone that had the link but didn't maybe receive the paper, their results would not be in these databases.

They would not be included because we're looking at a random sample for a statistical validity, that's why.

Okay.

Because a lot of us saw the link out shared in the wild, and we didn't know what happened to those numbers.

And I'm aware of that.

We looked into it, it was about 20 or so that would fall into that category.

Try try not to have any, but um, if we had 50 or more, we would have had a separate report for you.

Okay.

That would have delineated what that group said.

Otherwise, it gets confusing if you're get five people or something that are responding to a question.

It may kind of skew the interpretation of the way to view the data.

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Oh, yeah, beer.

Yeah.

So to clarify, you only received about 20 people who were answering from the link that they saw on social media.

If they if that were not part of the random sample.

Okay, and you that random sample was validated by the address list that you sent out to you.

Yes.

Okay.

It certainly had more than 20 people claiming that they had taken it on social media.

So that is very interesting.

Well, they could have, but if they had already received a survey, I don't know if those are ones that had not received a survey, but if they had received the survey, they would have been part of the random sample.

And it's everything we do is address-based.

So we know who responded, we know how many times they responded, we know if they were inside the city limits of Columbia or not.

Sometimes when you do social media ads, they really have been effective for us because they remind people to do that.

You can imagine you get home, get your mail, you leave it downstairs, you glance at it.

Later when you're scrolling through your phone at night, you you uh you say an ad pops up, and you're like, Oh, yeah, I have to take that.

Right, or you got the letter and recycled it and didn't fill it out, like some people I know.

Sure.

Sure.

So you did uh please use the microphone.

So you had a social media ad in addition to the ones that are sent out.

Um is that ad um released on social media?

Is do you have geofencing?

Do you know or or is it blanket an ad to the full public that anyone can take, but you're only going to use the ones that you already sent out?

Essentially, yes.

I mean, it's there's not a you're not able to target a specific area at least for um Facebook ads, yeah.

But some of the other social media, I'm not sure.

TikTok, we're just starting to get into Instagram, but we put the word out for that more as a reminder for those people that received it.

Yes.

Um, if we had a standard number, like I said before, if we had 50 or more, then we would compile a separate tabulation to say what those what the opinion would have group was.

And so you only got 20 who either responded to the ad or got a link that was circulated by a member of the public.

Yeah, it was a that were not part of the random sample.

It was in the in the neighborhood of 20.

We had about 40 overall that we were not able to accept either for that reason or because they were uh not from within the city limits of of Columbia, or they had duplicates.

Sometimes a husband and wife were both trying to fill it out, and we only allow one per household, one response.

So if you had 40, and some were for the reason that they weren't addressed, and some were outside those city limits.

Were the ones outside the city limits?

Both categories.

Did you track how many?

Because presumably, if they're outside of the city limits, they didn't get the link.

We had a number that were submitted, and and then we have to go through a process of reviewing the data for quality assurance, and one of those quality assurance steps is to make sure that we're actually reflecting people who live in have their household address in Colombia, not Kingdom City or some other town nearby.

Um, but within Columbia.

So I guess I'm feeling confident in this and something how so many slides, but do you have a follow-up?

No, I want to know what bucket it falls into.

So which layer did you evaluate first?

So when you say that there's 20 that got the link but weren't included, is that bucket evaluated first or after weeding out ones that are density limits, right?

Because that gives us an idea how many.

There were a total of about 40, and so it was pretty evenly split.

I don't know the methodology of which group they cleared out first.

But they were both cleared out.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

To be as accurate as possible.

Thank you.

Okay.

And this is something if this is a point of concern, some certainly something we can talk with your staff about for next year's survey, presuming you want to do that.

We could have a number of renewal periods in our contract if the city wants to pursue it.

Um, we'd be happy to further that discussion.

Thank you.

Welcome.

So we're gonna go through these demographics.

You you have them in front of you and kind of judge, but we wanted to make sure when we that the through the responses, for example, that both new and long-term residents were well represented, all age groups were well represented.

Then we get into satisfaction with quality of life and city services.

Most of the slides that you see here, you're gonna find that the dark blue is going to be excellent or very satisfied in some cases.

Um the light blue is good, the gray is neutral, and you see low average and um low average and poor in the salmon colored uh as well.

So you can see at the top you had as a place to work, you had 69% that said it was either excellent or good.

Down at the bottom, you had overall value received for city taxes and fees uh at about 38%.

But you do notice throughout that a number of cases where people are neutral, and this is something I mentioned last time.

Uh, instead of focusing on just the people who are really dissatisfied with a certain issue, uh, we have found that through uh more public information and outreach and that sort of thing, letting the people know uh what the city is doing on certain issues, but you can reach some of those neutral people better and move those to the more satisfied columns.

I have a quick question about the methodology on kind of this section of the report, so either slide is fine.

Um so it says that you exclude the respondents who say they don't know.

I was wondering if you have an idea of how many respondents that is, if it kind of varies by question, because then only seeing the percentage rather than the raw numbers, it can be hard to compare them to each other if we're getting different amounts of don't know's on different questions.

Well, certainly people are gonna potentially answer don't know on some questions and that they do know or have an opinion on others.

I I will tell you primarily the reason we do that is so that we can benchmark effectively if we didn't have that, then we wouldn't be able to compare the data effectively to other communities, which is part of what you hire us to do.

So what do you do you have an idea of if it was obviously you know someone's gonna know a lot about our parts and rec and not a lot about our solid waste, and someone else is gonna know a ton about our solid waste and nothing about parts and rec.

Does it kind of equal out the don't know's overall, or do you know if there were any questions where we happened to have a ton of don't know's that got filtered out?

I don't have that information, at least not not with me.

That's something we want to discuss, we can look at, but primarily if you have a lot of people who don't who say they don't know, then why would you want them to have to pick um you know one of these five options?

So that's part of the reason why we allow them to do it, but we don't include them when we're reporting it because you really want to get feedback from those people who have had some experience or some knowledge but they feel comfortable rating that particular service.

Does that make sense?

Daniel Henry.

Did you have a hit your hand up, Allah?

I did, but you were before me.

So mine real quick, maybe speed this along.

You've been doing your company's been doing this for how long?

You mean overall we've been in business since 1982?

Okay, so and I'm guessing that excluding the don't know's is part of your standard methodology that has worked for us and the numerous other cities that you've done.

So I think if I don't think we've got time to get into the weeds of your methodology on all of these slides.

So I've me for one, I'm going to accept that your methodology since it's been used for a number of years is effective.

Yeah, Matt, are you a question?

Yeah, I just have a small ask.

Um, would you be able to forward the slide the same figure with the don't know's back in?

Um my rationale here is it it answers two different questions, right?

We want to know how many people had a strong opinion.

If the vast majority of respondents say I don't know, that changes how I view the data.

However, this as a standalone figure is also useful to me for all the reasons you described.

Um, if you have access, I'm not sure if we can, but it's something I'll follow up with Stacey or Carol and uh try to provide to you.

I will caution that adding the don't know's is going to dilute all of these categories, so it's going to draw those away from it.

And in terms of making a comparison, um, you know, to other communities, we don't want to get into that situation of trying to, you know, some have don't know's, some don't have don't know's, and as this gentleman was speaking to, is kind of the methodology and the approach to taken.

Uh, I would say we do our very best to capture the true feelings of residence, and that's why we work hard on how we're framing the questions with your staff, etc.

I think I understand, and I can accept that it doesn't work as a comparison with that in there.

Okay, well, thank you.

I don't know how many of these you want to go through.

Uh the particulars you kind of see here.

We asked major city services that should receive the most emphasis over the next two years.

They could have more than one response.

Uh, in fact, here we have three choices.

Um, first choice, second choice, third choice, and you can see the ones that came up on top was the quality of police and fire was number one overall, and including the one the people's the majority of people that had first choice, uh, quality of streets, quality of city solid waste services at the bottom, um, in terms of maintenance of city buildings, quality of customer service.

You'll see actually, I believe the city is doing quite well in terms of customer service, so it speaks highly that that's not something where people are clamoring for uh more emphasis.

And that doesn't mean priority, that means emphasis, correct?

Yes, it's it's where they think um the city should place its which area should receive the most emphasis.

However, that's defined.

Some people might take that to be funding, and other people might uh take that to be other types of responses.

Well, I I had this kind of question really on a number of the items when I was going through, but for instance, on quality of cities solid waste services.

In my mind, that raises the question about which part of our services are they talking about.

For instance, there's a good bit in the comments about recycling.

Not as much, in fact, I don't know if I saw a single one about roll cards, but uh so in the in determining how we see that and how we interpret it.

Do you have any guidance about that?

Well, we try to be as specific as we can with staff.

Um, I mean, you'll see later uh satisfaction with maintenance of streets.

Very frequently people say, Oh, now are those state streets, are they county streets or are they city streets?

And you know, we work to try to ferret that out.

So I would say if that's something that we want to look at the next survey, maybe we break that into two components.

We don't want to add too much to your survey because your survey is already pretty pretty long, um, and people are sensitive to the length of surveys, but um, definitely if there's a way to better describe the service that we're talking about, we will work with your staff to do that.

Yeah, great.

Yeah, Jackie, can you grab the microphone?

I'm sorry.

And so everything's super nosy on this.

This is interesting.

This leads a lot of our discussion.

So, Robert.

I'm I'm happy to answer your question right now.

My iPad is updated, so I can't access anything right now.

Um what dates?

What was the date range for people to photo sound?

Um, I believe we had it at the beginning of it.

I mean, I think it was October, November in that time period.

Just wondering because I'm thinking about different community events that happened around that time period that would influence some of these responses.

Yeah, and some sometimes the timing can influence items like snow removal satisfaction, things like that, if it's fresh in your mind for sure.

Uh it says, okay, and also I'll note I just in open after whole one, don't know's and raw data at the end of the full report.

So for those of you who asked for that information, it's in there.

Um, and then in it says at the beginning of the report in October and November 2025 is when the survey was okay.

Ready to move on?

Yeah, sideways that should receive the most emphasis over the next two years again.

Increased number of police, maintenance improvement of sidewalks and streets.

Um, they ranked the highest, but you can see clearly in terms of first choice, increasing the number of police and increasing quality and quantity of housing options uh were the highest level for first choice.

We have satisfaction with customer service from city employees, and really these are you'll see when we get into the benchmarks, these are very positive numbers overall.

Uh, these don't happen positive.

Uh customer service, it doesn't happen on its own, it's a reflection of your hiring practices, it's a question of your emphasis that your staff is skipping in you as city council in terms of what should be important and how you treat your citizens, obviously, is very important.

You had 70 percent um that were very satisfied or satisfied with the courtesy which you were treated.

Again, 23 percent that said they were neutral.

Um see down at the bottom, timeliness of city employees resolving your issue, uh a little less than that, 61 percent, but still more than half that were satisfied or very satisfied.

We asked about satisfaction with public safety, and you can see at the top when we're talking about the City of Columbia Fire Department, almost no dissatisfaction uh with that, how quickly the fire department responds and effectiveness of fire prevention safety programs, all rank very high.

Uh, interesting the city's efforts to prevent crime, clearly that's an area of concern for the citizens.

Uh 51% said that they were dissatisfied, and only 30 percent said they were satisfied or very satisfied.

And you can look at these different categories.

Um, again, what I will say is that some of them are a matter of what type of information are you putting out, and I I when some of the topics come up with clients that aren't necessarily ranked that favorably towards the city.

I will I will caution people that it's a lot of times it it's because they're lacking information, but maybe it needs to be a point of emphasis in your city communications uh to residents or or other methods that you have to get the word out about what you're actually doing to prevent crime.

We asked about satisfaction with city maintenance and public works issues again, maintenance of city buildings, maintenance of street signs, traffic signs, tree trimming, all of those ranked pretty highly with uh less than 20 percent dissatisfaction.

You do get down again this maintenance of city streets, you know, 53.

I'm sorry, uh about 58 percent total that were either very satisfied, satisfied, or neutral.

Uh condition of sidewalks, about a third, 35% said that they were very satisfied or satisfied.

A lot of folks in that neutral category, and again, if if you have a plan to address streets, sometimes you know that's hard to get that word out to let people know.

There are different methods, and we've talked with your staff before.

I think last year we talked about it a little bit.

There are things that you're already doing uh to communicate what type of plans you have to maintain the streets, and you know, a lot of times it's just letting people know that yes, we're aware that your your street needs to be overlaid, or that improvement that area needs improvement.

Uh, but if we have to, you know, we have to balance our schedule with that satisfaction with parks and recreation.

You can see here the city scored very well.

Um you do have 42% that's in the neutral as far as city youth and team programs that may be a reflection of people that have not used them, or um, they're not overly familiar with that.

But at the top, the number of walking and biking trails, only four percent indicated that they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied.

Now we want to get into the topic of how your community compares to other communities.

And here we're rating the quality of life and perception of the city of Columbia versus what we call the Plains region.

It's north.

I I don't know, name all the city, all the states that's north and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, um, I think down to Arkansas, and over to Illinois, I believe is part of that too.

You can see um we have a blue arrow for those areas where you're you're higher than the other areas by more than the margin of error as a place to work, as a place to live, as a place to raise a family, all very positive.

Uh, you do get down to the overall appearance of the city.

Um, Columbia's in blue, I should have said, and then the hash kind of red color is the plains region in the US.

Um overall value for taxes and and fees.

You remember we showed that earlier, and it was pretty low in terms of satisfaction.

But if you put it in context, everybody's is pretty low.

So you're not doing that poorly.

You're you're in line with the the region in terms of satisfaction, and then really that's just telling the story.

How are you using the tax dollars effectively?

You see the ones that you scored very highly on compared to the others.

I mean 72% satisfaction with the quality of city parks and recreation program facilities compared to 55% and 48% for the the other uh benchmarks.

So you're doing really well in that area.

Uh quality of cities electric services uh again is one of those when you're 12% higher than the region, and uh another six percent higher than the US uh region, that's impressive.

A lot of these are very good.

Uh, you do get kind of brought down more into the pack more closer to the others.

Uh, quality of city streets again is one where you're a six percent lower than the other averages.

Uh sit enforcement of city codes and ordinances below the the plains region, but um not that far behind the US.

So you kind of see where you score high and where maybe some points of emphasis or at least conversations might be helpful to have what's behind those numbers.

Public safety service uh again, public safety quality of the fire department, how quickly all the fire fire prevention safety programs you scored very well if you look at that.

Um, for example, how quickly the fire department responds, 83.4 percent satisfaction compared to 64 and 66.

So obviously, you're doing some things right, the the uh public is recognizing that.

Um, how quickly the police respond, some of the visibility in police neighborhoods, these are some of the areas that score lower that we saw earlier, and obviously the lowest is at the bottom with the city's efforts to prevent crime.

Quite frankly, it's not always intuitive whether or not the public knows what you're doing to prevent crime, they're reacting to crime, and presumably you're not doing very much related to prevention.

So maybe the message uh might be how do we project outward that we really do care about preventing crime, and these are the methods that we're taking.

Uh, these are the improvements that we've made in those areas.

That's a clear message you can see uh from those bottom three areas where discussion both internally and probably externally with the community are more.

We looked at uh public works, uh, maintenance of city buildings again, maintenance of street signs rated high above the uh the other averages, maintenance of city streets again was uh fairly low, about 14% below the region in terms of maintenance of city streets.

I'm gonna talk about some trends since 2024.

I didn't want to bury bury the lead since I let I led with this.

I won't spend a lot of time on it, but I do want to point out.

No, I think you can stay on this slide for how long.

I mean, this is really an incredible turnaround in just one year.

If you stop and think about it, it obviously your staff and you have made a point of emphasis.

Uh, the quality of police department improved 14.3 percent in one year.

Feeling of safety in the neighborhoods at night again improved 13.5 percent.

These are really unheard of.

We normally don't see uh this type of turnaround in some of the numbers uh in that short period of time.

Even on uh we've remembered how low on the previous slides efforts to prevent crime was.

We thought it was really low compared to your benchmarks, but you've improved 12% in one year.

So you're whatever you're starting to do, do more of that probably and continue to move things in the right direction.

We did have nine areas uh that were either stayed the same or were decreased.

And you can see again the the bottom line.

Uh really the only two that were over your margin of error would have been snow removal and quality of cities solid waste services.

Trends in terms of quality of outdoor athletic fields down.

I guess these are some more from the uh the decrease slightly.

Well, maybe that's a repeat, I'm not sure why that's there.

Priorities for investment.

So one of the things we do is we look at the data in different ways, and this is something that sets ETC apart.

We create something called an important satisfaction index.

If you asked me, you gave me a list of 12 items for parks, and you said how satisfied are you with the dog park?

I might say, I had a horrible experience at dog park last time with there, my dog got chased by the big dogs, it was awful.

I hated it.

Uh I'm really dissatisfied with the city's dog park.

But if you correlate that also with the you know what what should be a priority for investment, I might say, Well, no, I don't think you should spend another dime on the dog park.

I I know I'm dissatisfied, but I don't think I want to fund on youth athletic programs or ball fields or something like that.

So that's that's really the purpose of this and what happens when you do that.

Um this is the quality of uh city streets and quality of police and fire services are top priorities.

So again, even though the fire department rated very well and the previous slides that we saw again, what these numbers can tell you is that um sometimes the citizens just want you to maintain the things you're doing that are good.

It's not all about chasing you know areas that are struggling in performance, but you have the opportunity to identify um some services that need they're happy with and they just want to maintain that.

Look at public safety priorities, city's effort to prevent crime was first in terms of so you can see in terms of importance and then satisfaction that it produces the number at the end, and and you can see very clearly those are the two highest priorities in terms of what the what the public is viewing when they rate the satisfaction with the uh the police department services.

Doesn't mean these other areas high priorities or medium priorities aren't things you should focus on.

Uh, sometimes some of those are easier to knock off, and and maybe you want to um prioritize some of those uh along with the ones that are take longer to resolve or to move.

Uh again, uh preventing crime is a big issue, it is even though you improved it 12% this last year in terms of satisfaction, is clearly a very high priority to the public.

We also looked at street and sidewalk repair.

I'm not gonna uh look at all of those, but you can see which ones we'd kind of talked about them a little bit before, but this just reinforces that.

I'm sorry, I I know you now you like to try to make a stay on time.

Um so most important.

I don't, I guess this one seems a little bit off to me.

So most important rank I feel for the last few slides, the priority area and the satisfaction rank have almost been flipped, especially for those top three.

And it seems odd to me.

It looks more like we're repeating the the same column lines.

Um there, yeah, if you wouldn't mind because on most of these uh high priority, most rank one and two at the top, and then on your next one.

Um, my high priority according to this more important rank, maintenance of city buildings was number one, but I don't think that was number one anywhere else on your slides.

Where did we see maintenance of buildings?

Yeah, I think identically, I'm sorry.

It almost looks like the column.

I think this is inverting the satisfaction because this is saying what do the citizens say these should be our priorities.

So satisfaction with low, it's going to be high on a priority list too.

Yes, I'm looking two columns over where it says most important rate.

And I don't think I saw in any other slides that maintenance of city buildings was number one on the most important rate.

I saw maintenance of city streets is number one.

So I'm just wondering if the column might be off.

Um, because it looks like it's copying the satisfaction.

I think it could be, Mayor.

Let me that's a very good point.

I'll take that back to the street.

Just because I because I was like, I see.

I see what you're saying now, and I totally agree with you.

It's probably an error there that uh my bad.

Yeah, okay.

Some sometimes things happen, and I'll I'll see that's addressed, and we can issue a revised.

If there are other concerns like that that you find, like errors in the report, you know, you can consider this a draft, and we can make the final report to your staff once we have those items.

So if there's anything else to that's why we're glad, it's just yeah, you're right.

It mirrors the satisfaction rate.

Yeah, this one's right, yeah.

And parks of recreation again, uh, nothing on the very high priority because they're very satisfied with what you're doing, but they do have uh some areas that are high relatively high priority again.

Other findings.

So we asked some different questions, Taylor made to um to your community.

We asked what are the preferred methods of communication to receive information from the city.

It might be a surprise, but email uh rank uh at the top, and again, people could give two choices here first and second choice, and you can kind of see the majority of people in terms of the first choice was emails, social media and direct mailers, followed by the city's newsletter and the city's website, newspapers, radio, and temporary signage rank very low in terms of preferred methods of communication.

What factors contribute most to your trust in our local government?

Transparency and accountability uh ranked at the top, and followed by effective communication and responsiveness.

Really that's probably just a sign that it would be recommended to have discussions about what it what do we think the public really means by those.

It's it's it's difficult to just say, oh, we know exactly what they meant by transparency.

Um, but it's clearly important to it, and it and it doesn't necessarily um this doesn't necessarily mean that they are happy or unhappy with the level of transparency, just that you know you can be very transparent, they could be happy with it, but they're saying the most important thing for trust is transparency.

That if I have a concern about something that I'm able to dig into the city's website or staff will talk to me about what's going on.

So that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a problem with the transparency or accountability, just that these are the factors that are the most important.

We have safe safety issues that should receive the most emphasis over the next two years, and in this one we had three choices.

Uh clearly gun violence and juveniles being involved in criminal activity and violent crimes ranked at the high, followed by drugs.

The others were 22% or less.

We asked, do you think the city of Columbia has enough police officers and firefighters?

69% said no.

13% said yes, and 18% said they don't know.

That one we included that don't know us.

We're not benchmarked.

Would you support the city pursuing additional tax to increase the number of police officers and firefighters in the city of Columbia?

Uh 55% said yes, 15% said I don't know, and uh 30% said it would not support an additional tax.

Regardless of that, I would caution that you know you don't want to make any conclusions based on one serve one question in a survey, but it does give you some feedback at least a little bit of where the public is.

So we have summary here, and I'll let you read through those.

I don't know that it would be that helpful.

Um other than I I know that there are a number of categories we say on there that you're significantly higher than the Plains region in the US.

Um people most satisfied with parks and recreation fire, some of those items.

Satisfaction 80 of the 89 areas assessed, they're stayed the same or improved.

The largest one was the quality of the police department, which was improved 14.3 percent.

With that, I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Sorry that it took a little longer than I'd hoped.

You're good.

And and just to clarify with this can be with Carol or with Carlin, I believe we also have some staff slides to also show to kind of staff's response to this.

So we will have time for that as well.

Um, council.

So questions for Robert on the survey results or maybe how we compare to other communities.

I spend more time with it.

It's a lot to digest.

I appreciate um you allowing us to ask a lot of those questions early on, because we were seeing a lot of this chatter online, and we were like, well, it is do I trust this?

So I appreciate you diving into what happens with it.

Yeah, it's easier to address it when it's fresh in your mind and you're looking at the slide.

So I appreciate the the questions and and even finding errors or potential issues.

That's important.

We need that feedback.

And I'll remind all of us that yes, in the survey um report um at the end is also all the respondents um as well as our like the percentages that were the do not know or don't know um as well as some of those ones.

Um like if it says uh they didn't they didn't respond on some of it, so I appreciate that level of detail.

I haven't had time to get in.

Fair.

I do have a question.

Uh this is a demographic question, and it's the number of years lived in Columbia.

I'm wondering if this is representative of other comparable communities as well.

It struck me that 31 plus years, 34% of those who responded.

Seems a large number, so I'm and I'm I'm not surprised by it.

Uh people have a tendency to live here for a long time.

Uh how did that unusual?

Um what impact does it have?

I would I would say it does vary somewhat, but you have a lot of institutions that would draw people to live here for a long period of time.

You also have a quality of life of the options of your trails and those sort of things that are very attractive to people.

So you put them together, that's gonna drive uh longevity in terms of uh people wanting to work and live and stay in Columbia.

I don't know that I have a I mean it's hard to tell.

I I would tell us would just say that it it's case by case, um, but definitely I think it's a sign of people that they they like their city um and they're they're engaged, um, and they've live here a long time.

So I would say probably a little bit more than I would normally see, but not a not a ton more.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, checking since you asked your corrections, uh there's a title on page II.

Oh, okay.

So just that way, it's um instead of fire, you have dire.

Oh, so I'm looking at Stacey, she's gonna make sure I murdered on that.

Uh and then oh, sorry, yes.

Um, so I also had a question.

I know that in the survey, and I've not delved into the the results and the the raw data numbers myself.

I know that in the survey implement there were instrument, there were also questions about transportation.

Um I don't know that I noticed transportation on the slides, but maybe that's just because it didn't pop up to the highest priority on some of those lists.

Was transportation represented yeah, we I I should caution that you know the I think the report was 130 pages long or something of that nature, and so when you're doing a what's hopefully a half hour presentation, you you have to make some choices of what to you know what to emphasize and what not to.

Um so our approach is we we kind of take our best guess at it and we share it with your staff, and if there's feedback or strong feedback, you know, and we can certainly um draw that out, but I I believe there were other questions that addressed that.

We just didn't have them in the presentation.

Thanks, Robert.

Um and I might just have a uh best practice wonder for you.

The City of Columbia has not conducted a survey since 2019.

I mean, we did last year's, but then we hadn't conducted since 2019.

Um, do you find it worthy or not worthy to include any of those?

Because we we had been doing it sometimes every year, sometimes every other, sometimes every three.

But I know that there were some differences in the questions, but some of the questions are the same.

Is it useful for us at all to include any of those as far as trends, or is it not the best idea since it was such a large gap between the one?

I I don't think it necessarily hurts, but it's something and frankly, we just thought the emphasis needed to be on or you know, immediacy.

You know, you look at where people were a year ago, maybe very different than where they were you know five, six, eight, ten years ago.

We can do that.

We can just blaming on that because this has been a hot topic of conversation for the last 13 months about the results of the 24 survey.

I was just wondering for your um expertise, your you know, the knowledge of looking at other cities as they've been doing kind of benchmarks and trends, whether or not it would be useful for us, not just for this presentation, but also just to be mindful over that.

Now that that was also pre-pandemic, and so I think there's a another sort of wrench thrown into that story.

Any other questions for Robert before we do a staff?

Yeah, I have another demographic question.

Um sorry.

I have another demographic question.

Um, I'm looking at the slide which best describes your household.

68% report that they own a single family home, and then 18% rent a single family home and 12% rent multifamily unit unit.

Um it doesn't seem like that matches our census data very closely to me.

And and I'm wondering, is that is that a result of respondents, or if any effort is taken to I don't know.

I'm sorry, which slide were you looking at?

Oh, sorry, I'm in the report.

Oh, question 30.

Page 42.

Yeah, the report is page 42.

Oh, yeah, it is page 42.

The page numbers don't have to be able to do that.

Page 40 page numbers.

Page 42.

Page 42 of the report.

But it's not on a slide.

No, it wasn't part of the presentation.

Um that's something I can look at.

I can tell you that when we when we create the sample on the front end, that's something that we really pay attention to and make sure that it's matching up as much as possible.

And then as we get the responses, if they're if we're off significantly, we do try to compensate for that in some ways.

Um I don't believe we had to do it for Columbia in the past, but for other clients, sometimes you wait, you add weight to certain responses because they're underrepresenting.

There's a whole science of how you do this, but yeah, I don't believe we had to do that.

And I to my knowledge, we were in keeping with the census, which is something I can look at.

Appreciate that.

Thank you.

Any other questions for Robert?

Appreciate your partnership over the last years.

Really do uh value the in the insight that it gives to us.

So thank you.

You're welcome.

And I might also say um this last year we also did a survey for your utilities as well.

So thank you for your time and and all the questions.

I really appreciate the thoughtful uh questions that you had.

It really I think sends a message to me and to others that you care about you know getting things right and and really want to understand uh what your residents are are seeking from their government.

So thank you.

Thank you, Melbourne.

All right, Carol, is this you or department we need this?

All right, department.

Thank you.

Okay.

Okay, yeah, all right.

Thank you, Carol.

You're welcome.

Robert, thank you for that great presentation.

Yep.

Oh, it's hate this thing.

It's it's been uh interesting when you look at where we were at in 2024 when we first received the survey, especially compared to the previous survey of 2019.

It really showed that our residents were really dissatisfied with the things we were doing.

Uh once you don't know that no staff took that serious, and we really tried to look at what people were saying, what people were concerned about, and tried to properly address that.

I think the survey numbers showing some of the things we approved on, shows that we were listening and people are seeing those results.

Staff is here, so if there's questions for particular staff members, they can kind of respond to those and hopefully we'll kind of go through here.

So we when we looked at our key things, what we noticed they were homelessness, uh public safety crime prevention, veteran code enforcement, sidewalks and streets.

These are very similar to the same issues that we saw last year from some of our residents' concerns.

And so what staff wanted to do is kind of show what some of our ongoing efforts were.

So the things that we improved on or took on initiatives from 2024, and then what are some of the things we're gonna continue to work on?

And so for homelessness, so the health department that supervisor, community health worker, and public safety justice coordinator.

Uh we increased the overnight warming and cooling at both both of our and uh with you sorry, it won't be our United Methodist Church used utilized attorney report.

A part of that was we realized that we need to overflow from what we were doing at Raddy at the Ashley Street.

Uh we implemented the right home program.

I think that's very new.

What's they do that?

Sorry, five people so far.

So and that's been around for about two months.

Yeah.

And so people are taking advantage of it, but it's really getting it out so agency know that it's available.

Uh we released a 2024 State of Homeless report.

Uh we've been into a contract with the company to provide unhoused encampment cleanup services, and we've added two additional officers to the homeless outreach team, and that they went into effect on 2026.

Also, what are gonna be some of our recommendations for staff?

You know, we want to pursue a five-year strategic plan to better align resources.

I my hope is that Rebecca would give a presentation next meeting.

Next meeting to discuss what she would like to look at in that strategic plan.

Then also we evaluate opportunities to add public restrooms to areas where those facilities are lacking.

I know there was a request to look at the downtown area, and so that we do have we'll have a actually there's a report on this agenda to discuss that.

I have to ask you not to move the cursor, it's making me kind of go crazy.

I'm sorry.

I'm like watching it, I guess.

I'm a cat.

Sorry.

All right, so uh recruitment of public safety officers.

Uh so 2025 recruited 39 police department, CPD officers, and 33 uh Columbia Fire Department officers.

Ongoing professional development, so 40 of our fire department captains have completed officers development academy.

Uh utilizing our academy, we're addressing professional development with incumbent officers and our command staff the PERF, which is public police executive research forum for senior management institute.

So all our assistance are going through that program.

Uh we've implemented the flock license late reader, uh, axon in our cars, we've shifted park ranges to smorn officers.

Uh, we've improved the camera system and the lighting in our park.

Now, this is one that I think is interesting because people talked about what are we doing about traffic enforcement.

In 2025, we made 18,000 stops.

That doesn't mean we wrote 18,000 tickets, but our officers are responding, we are making those traffic stops compared to 2024 when we did 11,000 stops, and in 2023 when we get only did 3,000.

And so, as we've added our staff, we're able to be responsive to some of the concerns that our residents are having.

Uh, we've increased the number of sworn officers.

So, whatever our recommendations of increase the number of sworn officers to support community policing, crime provisions, and officer wellness.

We want to reinstitute the downtown unit.

Uh, we want to improve safety and meetings and roadways, improve sight lines and visibility along the park trails, and enhance park signage to facilitate clear and timely reporting or suspicious of illegal activity.

And this was this is what we talked about is kind of kind of putting a QR code or some type of process where if someone sees something in the park, they can report it immediately.

Uh litter control, so addressing code enforcement.

And so we've had our code forficers that have 4,782 code enforcement cases, which is a 12% increase.

Um we've implemented dumpster day, and we have a special dock that's focused on properties within significant housing violations.

We continue to promote implementation of uh volunteer cleanup um staff augmenting for park shelter cleanup, so that's just adding additional staff to make sure that we're making sure that we're being responsible to clean our parks and clean our shelters.

Uh we purchased an additional street sweeper, and we added one code enforcement officer that will help with uh property maintenance, remote compliance, and residential property management.

So, some of the uh ongoing recommendations to create a park and trails maintenance operation plan and create a staff, a litter control for first priority routes.

So we kind of talked about this a little bit last year.

Uh just change here, so if there's additional questions about what that looks like and kind of speak on that.

Just as a quick note, a question question that we had last year, because a lot of times those were state roads.

Yes.

So I don't know if any more of a conversation has had with MODAT since then and what that might look like.

Yes, they're not doing anything.

That's a yes and no.

I think uh we we we have had those conversations with Modot.

We do know that Modot, like a lot of organizations, have that lack of that resource, and so they've pulled away from some of their maintenance.

Now, I think when we look at mowing, they mow maybe once or twice a year as opposed to something that's ongoing.

So, one of the things we talked about when we talked about the enhancements to 70 is that we know that we'll have to take on some of those maintenance.

Yeah, yeah, just a quick question.

I know you're pushing through a ton of information here.

Will we get these slides?

They were emailed out to us at home.

I had not seen pain.

Yeah, we were still putting this together at 12 o'clock today.

Well, they look great.

They were so some of our ongoing efforts.

Uh, so city council increased the funding for public works payment from 3.3 million to 5.3 million.

So we have invested in our streets.

Uh majority of the city sidewalks are responsible to the adjacent property owners, so that is something that knows a concern.

Well, we do have the 50-50 cost share program to help less net burden for residents who have to make those improvements.

And so that that's that's our presentation.

I think it's kind of if there's questions particularly staff members, uh, they're all here and we can kind of talk on it.

I know one of the things we one of the things that were highlighted, uh, was about city streets, and I think Robert kind of touched on that a little bit, is a lot of our streets, especially the streets that people complain about, or usually aren't our streets.

Most of the time they're MODOS, uh, some of them are the county, and so it's having residents understand which streets are our priority, which streets are we're working on.

Uh the sidewalks kind of touched on that a little bit.

The refuse service was down, but I want to believe that that's because of what happened with the MERF and that we had to suspend recycling.

Uh this the snow removal, I think a lot of that was about the snow removal has been a concern for residents for a while, but a lot of it was also because of the response to the ice storm.

But one of the things that there is an anecdote that I like to for Shane to share about our efforts for snow removal and what's happened.

And so Shane.

So uh one question that I was asked was how our current staffing compares and we add lane miles, obviously.

Um the staffing keep up with that, and in 2005, we had 1,091 lane miles and 43 employees.

So that's about a little bit more than 25 lane lane miles per employee in 2025.

We had 1,465 lane miles and 45 employees.

So we've had two employees in 20 years, and so that um employee per lane model was about 32 and a half.

So obviously, you can't change that back to 25 overnight.

But um, if you look at that in terms of there was a decision made that we wanted it to be back closer to 25, you're looking at about 14 employees, and I need a snow cloud for every two employees.

Are there any additional questions for staff?

Does council have any questions for staff?

Yeah, that's it.

Um mainly my questions for you to Carla, and I guess all the staff looking at the current survey, are there things that you're going to change or things that you're gonna recommend changing, or is the plan just to can continue what we're doing and try and get better with this?

So, like where do you see it moving forward?

Yeah, so there's there are recommendations that we have that we're looking at trying to move forward, but also it's kind of maintaining some of the things we're doing.

Like when we talk about public safety, one of the things we know is that in order to really actualize the things that people are looking for, we're gonna need to add staff.

Uh I think we're with the with the academy and with our ability to recruit, hopefully, we'll see that downtown unit come back, but that's only one aspect of the total totality of all the things we need to do.

And so it's really looking at the things that we can work on.

I think with uh public health, you know, it's really looking at a strategic plan to help us really address homelessness.

We've done a lot and we've invest a lot, but uh, we need to do a better job of coordinating our efforts, but also the efforts of a lot of the community groups that are working in that same space.

So, how do we deal something that will allow us to all streamline what we're doing and have that one voice that talks about what Columbia efforts are?

Are there questions for the current and our staff?

Dakota, I do want to um talk a little bit about how this also then influences as has departments pulled out their fiscal year 27 budget.

Oh, absolutely.

And so I mean that that's exactly so.

When we look at our recommendations, it's adding those things that we that we know are things that we need to work on to say that we can actually that cost.

So when we talk about the uh clean up litter control for those priority routes, so what is that staffing gonna look like and what are the equipment that the staff will need?

And so it's developing a plan that we can bring forward into the budget process when we talk about staffing.

What are those staffing numbers that we need to look at and what's that cost?

So we can talk about during the budget process.

And so this will help us formulate what we're gonna kind of present to the council as we look at our budget.

Anything else for staff on this one?

No, all right.

Well, the ground I appreciate this.

Um, is there anything else for the good of the order?

Did you have time anything on the agenda that's there anything on the agenda that you want to ask your question now?

I I will I will say that um it's been recommended if those who if it does seem like it's going to go late to the night, those two reports that have been requested to potentially be tabled.

Um, my suggestion is that potentially the February 16th meeting doesn't have a lot of reports on it, so it could be on that one if you are amenable to that one.

Okay, and I can either make the motion at the earliest part when we're doing the agenda, or we can just make note of it and then make them official tabling at the time of if you want to give a preference in the other way.

I think I would make it at the beginning because those who might be sitting around waiting for the conversation on those reports will know that we're moving those to the 16th.

So as a reminder, it was reports five and six that was on the communications for capital improvement projects, as well as the feedback from update from the mayor's task force community about it from 2014.

Yeah, fair.

Yeah.

Um I don't know the proper way to do this.

I'm very interested in the pieces about transportation from the community survey.

Um and perhaps it is back in that data that I haven't had a chance to really dig into.

I I haven't in my initial read, I haven't seen a comparison of Columbia's ratings for transportation to other communities, like we saw in the PowerPoint today.

And I was wondering if that is not in the report, is that something that we could ask them to add on?

Is that within our contract that we have the ability to do?

Like the next survey.

I was wondering if they could provide that to us.

We can we can see if they're those comparisons are there and we can see if they can add it.

So we can just talk to Robert.

And so we'll have that conversation.

I don't think it is a priority high enough that if they're like, oh yeah, this would you know increase what we're paying on the contract, but if it's something they can throw towards us quickly.

You're saying transportation, but do you mean transit?

Like do you mean bus system or do you mean transportation?

The the heading they have over it is transportation.

Um, and it it was questions about is this the ease of travel from your home to work and school availability of public transportation, availability.

Okay, so it's question 21, Stacey in the survey instrument tool, and to see whether or not we see what it's in comparison to the US and the plain states.

Yep.

Okay.

Any other questions?

Whether it's on the survey or anything else on the agenda.

Okay, seeing um none.

I I guess well, one is Robert still here.

You run away.

No, he's like hiding at the back.

Sorry.

Quick question, uh, just a clarification on the open comments that are in the space.

Are those anyone who filled it out?

Are those also from the statistically significant ones?

Or is it anyone who filled out the survey?

Like those 40 were thrown out and like none of their data is anywhere in here, or is it potentially in?

I I honestly I don't know.

That might be good to look into, just based on the 40 that were in there and the number of comments we have.

My guess would be the term.

Okay, thank you.

Just having that question answered would be good.

All right.

If there's nothing else, I'll go ahead and adjourn us at 6:30.