All right.

Well, good evening, and welcome to uh the Columbia City Council meeting.

It's May 4th, 2026.

Um we will I'm gonna ask everyone to please rise and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the United States of America.

And to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, individual liberty, and justice for all.

All right, Sheila, we please call roll.

Miss Buffalo here.

Miss Carroll.

Here.

Miss Elwood?

Here.

Ms.

Sample?

Here.

Mr.

Foster.

Here.

Miss Hartman?

Here.

Miss Peters.

Here.

All right.

Well, welcome to Columbia City Council meeting.

If this is your first council meeting, I do a quick overview of our agenda.

If you have our on your agenda before you items that are currently listed under the consent agenda, unless there's an adjustment to that part of the agenda.

There's not normally a presentation on those items, and there's not normally public comment.

For items listed under introduction and first read that have an asterisk, they would go on consent agenda at the next meeting.

I say this to say because we have multiple opportunities for people to speak at Columbia City Council meetings.

At the end under general comments.

I asked that in public hearings.

I asked that if you were commenting during a public hearing, old business or new business, you keep your comments to the legislation we're discussing.

Because at the end of the meeting, the general comments, you can say whatever we want for three minutes, like respectfully so, please.

If we represent an organization or a group that's affected by the legislation, we do that so that people have multiple they have multiple top two opportunities to speak, but that also we're not here until Tuesday.

We ask for people to respect one another.

We can debate ideas and issues, but please do not attack people, and that incre that includes city staff.

I asked for people to avoid demonstrations that might intimidate their neighbors from speaking at city council meetings.

We want this to be an open space for everyone to be comfortable.

Disruptions would be addressed with a warning, and if necessary, removal and recess.

When you do come up to make public comments, I ask that you state your name and your ward or your address.

That's really for our minutes, so we can make sure we have the right name associated with the public comments.

And that's it on the public comment parts.

All right, so moving on to our agenda.

The first item we have is approval of our previous minutes.

So I'll make a motion to approve the April 20th, 2026 special and regular meeting minutes.

Do I have a second?

Second.

Signed by Nick Foster.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

All right.

Next to our agenda, we have a few items of adjustment on our agenda that's this evening.

Uh so first off, um, I'll be introducing resolution 9625 to tonight's agenda.

That's in order to discuss the calling of a special election in August.

In case it's type of 9626.

9626.

You're right, we're not going back in time for this.

Uh so explain so resolution 9626 will be added to tonight's agenda uh in order to discuss the calling of a special election uh in August to fill the remainder of the term for a soon-to-be Ward 4 vacancy.

This would go under new business.

Uh and I believe Councilmember uh Carroll is indicating plans to remove Bill 9726 from the consent agenda.

So this would go to old business.

Councilmember Peters uh has plans to remove Bill 1012 from the consent agenda.

This will go to old business, but we do have a request to table the vote till June 15th.

So you don't have to speak tonight if you don't want to, if you're here for that item and you don't want to stay that late, you can come because we will not do a vote on that one until June 16th.

Um and then Councilmember Sample, uh June 5.

What did I say?

It's the third Monday in June is when we are meeting, June 15th, thank you.

Um you would think this is my first meeting.

No.

Uh so and then council member sample uh plans to remove Bill 11826 from the consent agenda, and this would go on the old business.

Are there any other changes to the agenda?

Okay.

Uh I'll make a motion uh to approve the agenda with Bill 9726, Bill 101 26, and Bill 11826 be moved to old business and the addition of resolution 9625 to the agenda under new business.

If I wrote it, it is, but I'm never blaming Sheila.

All right.

Uh do I have a second?

Second.

All right.

All those in favor as the agenda as amended say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

All right, thank you.

All right, so up first, our special items.

Uh we have our recognition of our 2026 OSHAR Civic Academy participants.

So this year we've had the opportunity to host our civic academy through MU's extension, OSHAR's Lifelong Learning for the second time.

So OSHA at Mizzou is more of one than 120 OSHAR lifelong learning institutes on university campuses across the count the country.

These institutes provide an array of non-credit courses and activities specifically developed for adults aged 50 and older with a love of learning.

So we're excited to collaborate with the staff at OSHA on this.

These participants got to tour city facilities, hear from city leadership across multiple departments, and learn about the impact local government has on their lives each day.

It's our hope that by completing the program you've learned more about your local government, what we do and why we're behind it, and I appreciated hearing some of that feedback.

They all loved get it going up in the fire truck ladder.

So I'm gonna invite I'm uh call your names and invite you up to the podium uh to get your pictures.

So come up this way.

And I might have some that aren't here, because I understand.

So up first I have for Tony Lynn Allen.

Tony, come up, congratulations.

Thank you.

Next, I've got Ann Campbell.

I don't know what we're gonna do.

Next, we've got Beverly McCain.

McLean, sorry.

Beverly's not here.

Okay, we'll hold on to hers.

No, she's hiding.

No.

Sydney McClard.

Scott Orr.

I didn't see Scott.

Okay.

Michelle Peterson.

These are real people, I promise.

I saw them in the class.

Lisa Petty.

There we go.

Congratulations.

Yeah, I'm sorry, you guys get to see how cold it is in City Hall.

Uh Susan Phillips.

Robert Pinkowski.

Let's see, Peter.

Keith Polit.

Let's see, Keith.

Lenora Smith.

Jan Tucker.

I was like, you're the last two.

Oh, I'm so glad you liked it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sure.

Hi.

It is.

I'm gonna take these and come back.

So please join me in another round of applause for our graduates, both in attendance and here.

So with this graduating class, we've graduated 170 community members, have gone through our Civic Academy program.

So if you know anyone interested in this, it is a great experience of understanding how city government works and the breadth of everything that city employees do.

So be on the lookout for our next program this fall and reach out to the city manager's office.

So thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

All right.

Moving on, we have no appointments to boards and commissions.

As a reminder, uh current vacancies on city boards and commissions uh are open until 5 p.m.

on Friday.

So if you're interested in serving the city, I encourage you to check out those and apply before Friday.

All right, so scheduled public comment.

Members of the public can contact the city manager's office by 5 p.m.

Excuse me, on the Monday prior, one week prior to the tonight's council meeting to schedule a five-minute uh public comment.

Uh scheduled public comment cannot be on items that are on that same night's agenda.

And of note, it's been of typical practice of city council to ask for additional follow-up of questions asked tonight of staff at the end of the meeting if warranton.

Tonight we have three scheduled public comments.

So I'd first like to ask Richard Harris to please come forward to speak.

Oh, here we go.

I don't know.

Council members.

If I may inform you, Mr.

Harris has been detained.

But we do have briefing materials for you.

Esteemed members of the Columbia City Council.

I am Commander Vexcord of the Galactic Empire's Regional Compliance Division.

I bring greetings from Governor Tarkin and the sources of the Empire's continued interest in your local governance.

I am here today to support the defunding of the community, so-called community media center.

On thousands of worlds upon this galaxy, we have learned a valuable lesson.

There's no such thing as a community media center.

There are only imperial approved production facilities and rebel hideouts.

People from different neighborhoods, different backgrounds, different economic classics, all gathering in one unsupervised location, with access to cameras, microphones, and editing software.

Do you know what this does to proper social stratification?

Huh?

Do you see the problem?

This is what the Empire calls a third space.

And council members, third space or where rebel alliances are born.

Do you really want a physical location where anyone can show up and receive non-empire unsupervised services?

When you give voice to the underserved in a physical space, they can freely enter, you are essentially saying that economic levers are unjust.

This is not how we want to maintain order.

They claim that it helps people find jobs in the media industry.

But here's what they're not telling you.

These are exactly the skills that make for rebel propagandists and sympathizers.

Oh, in fact.

Let me make this simple.

I call upon all here that support the Empire's position.

Rise now and demonstrate your loyalty.

Oh, yes, good.

The Empire thanks you for your uh impressive show of support.

And now, because the Empire believes in the theater of democracy, and because Governor Talkin finds it amusing.

Anyone who thinks that unauthorized gathering spaces and unsupervised media equipment are somehow good for Columbia.

Stand if you think your voice matters.

This is uh this is not.

The Empire does not acknowledge this as valid.

You are all on a list.

A very long list.

This changes nothing.

The Empire's position is unchanged.

We have protocols.

We have procedures.

We have storm troopers.

We have stormtroopers.

This briefing is over.

Thank you.

I'd like to now ask Marcus Richardson, please for the more learning.

Sorry, you don't have walk-up music.

That is definitely a tough act to follow.

Okay.

All right, so good evening, Council.

My name is Mark Switcherson, uh Ward 1, also President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, uh Columbia chapter here in Columbia, Missouri.

Uh also representative of the NAACP as well, too.

So I serve on their executive board.

Today uh we want to I want to talk about uh African American home homeownership here in Columbia.

We were talking about economics back in November when I presented to you all and we vowed to be back to keep this in the forefront because we don't want this forgotten.

So Columbia, Missouri is often celebrated as a prosperous top 10 college town.

But that prosperity is built on a foundation of systematic exclusion.

Today we are facing an economic chokehold where the racial wealth and home ownership gaps are not just persisting, they are widening.

To understand why black households in Columbia earn nearly $34,000 less than their neighbors, we have to first look at the intentional destruction of black wealth 60 years ago.

We can look at the bitter end of the sharp end.

In the 1950s and 60s, Columbia utilized the Federal Housing Act to implement urban renewal.

They targeted the sharpening, a vibrant self-sustaining black business district in at Fifth and Walnut.

It wasn't a slum, it was a hub of doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs.

The city used intimate domain to demolish over 300 structures while owners were paid for their land, they were never compensated for their goodwill, which is their business and those who who attend who come and frequent their businesses.

Their customer base and community ties were lost.

Families were moved from home from own homes and public rentals like the Stuart Parker apartments.

This forced transition from home ownership to rental dependencies, effectively killing generational wealth for hundreds of Columbia families.

If we fast forward to the day, the data from 2019 and 21 reports show the long-term scores of that displacement from 60 years ago.

Black households in Columbia now face a 22,000 to 34,000 income gap compared to white and aging households.

This gap has actually increased by over 11,000 in the last five years prior.

Black residents make up only a fraction of the population here in Columbia, but they represent 36 percent of the city's poverty and a staggering 44 percent of its child poverty.

The legacy of the 1960s lives in our housing stats.

Black home ownership in Columbia says just at 24 percent, while white homeownership is at 60 percent.

We have traded a community of owners for a community of rent burden attendance, or tenants, excuse me.

We cannot talk about housing without talking about jobs.

Our largest local institutions are failing to reflect our community.

The University of Missouri employs only about 4% of black staff missing its own representation targets of 10 percent.

The City of Columbia itself reports only 3 percent black representation in its workforce, and without access to high-paying livable wage jobs at the major employers, the dream of home ownership remains a mathematical impossibility for most.

So what is the solution?

We must move beyond revolving door job fairs that offer low-wage service.

First, we need to unify a strand between City Council, major employers, and organizations like ours at the SCLC to prioritize livable wage job training.

Second, we must treat the housing crisis as an economic crisis.

We need to expand down payment assistance and hold banks accountable for their lending records.

The second largest ethnic group in Columbia should not be at the bottom of every economic chart.

Closing the gap isn't just about social justice, it's about restoring the economic validity that has been taken from this community decades ago.

It is time for us to move from reports to results.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Marcus.

Next, I'd like to ask Tracy Wilson Cleekamp to come forward to speak.

Recently, you should have received a prepared historical narrative and an executive summary to formally document our concerns about the strategic weaponization of the procedures for the property at 200 North Garth.

The recent handling of Dr.

L.

R.

Muscallister's former home, a significant site on the African American Heritage Trail, represents a modern chapter in urban removal and deliberate unprocessed designed to shield a pre-existing demolition agenda agenda from public scrutiny.

The City of Columbia's handling of 200 North Garth is not a new failure, but the latest, most blatant chapter in the strategic weaponization of procedure where administrative expediency actively subverts its own commissioned historical research and municipal policy.

By using the consent agenda to both approve the acquisition, that was R 6025 last May for a demolition-based roundabout and the subsequent lease, R 7326, the city circumvented public oversight, failing its duty of competent care to historically marginalized communities.

This political maneuvering rendered its own historic survey of Garth Sedition 2006, which warned against demolition and declared the area highly eligible for historic preservation.

The official subsequent admissions of flawed process and lessons learned are insufficient and represent a kind of retroactive remorse that seeks to mask a long strategy of urban renewal and historical erasure.

Ultimately, this case demonstrates how procedural tactics, even when later acknowledged as failures, can be weaponized to prioritize municipal infrastructure goals over the clear preservation of African American heritage.

To rectify this lack of accountability, Race Matters Friends demands an immediate creation of a comprehensive, publicly accessible acres housing stock inventory and map with GIS layers.

Since 2002, we have requested this GIS-based tool to visualize available homes, vacancy rates, and utility infrastructure.

The city claims that such data is too costly to compile or pose as a security risk or unacceptable with the city's continuing map rapid growth.

Without this data, every municipal decision regarding black historic spaces and affordable housing remains a matter of deep suspicion.

And we call upon you to do repair here to restart this process with full transparency, like we did with Douglas Park, and commit to data-driven governance for housing equity.

I want to say just a little bit in closing about the consent calendar.

I've been watching this for a long time, and I asked this question of the city manager's office, and I do really appreciate that the city manager was honest and said there was not a public process.

But we weren't offered in a repair, and I think that's what's on the table.

But the other repair is we need to define what's routine and mundane, right?

So we have a definition of what's a family on the agenda tonight.

That is not routine and mundane.

If we have something about Hinks and Creek and abatement that's real tied to a federal problem that we have with our streams, that's not routine and mundane.

We need to talk about that.

If we're extending large contracts for the airport, it shouldn't be on the consent calendar.

So I think that somehow the console needs to make a direct the city manager's office to be really clear about what the definition of what routine and mundane is.

Otherwise, you guys are getting tricked and not realizing that, oh, we voted on something like last May, where the property was sold for a dollar, and then this year, where we give in a contract with somebody, uh Love Columbia, under the lore that it's about Dr.

L.R.

McAllister, whose name is not mentioned in any of the documents.

That is called testimonial injustice.

That's misrepresentation or erasure on purpose.

That is foul.

So not only do we need to understand what's routine and mundane.

If we're going to invoke black heritage, if we're going to invoke black people while we're playing the game of erasure, you should expect us to be very upset.

Because it's not just about black historic sites.

It'll it makes it so that if we don't have the right tools, we can't make smart decisions, not only about affordable housing, but also our infrastructure.

These all, these things all matter.

And if we're not smart about the decisions, everybody pays the price.

But the people on the bottom, it's worse.

Thanks.

Thank you, Tracy.

All right, moving on in our agenda.

Uh we have uh two public hearings this evening.

So I'll ask Sheila to please read public hearing 1426.

Public hearing 1426 is the proposed replacement and improvement of storm drainage infrastructure along portions of Braymore Road, Highland Drive, Summit Road, and Fairview Road.

Do we have a staff report?

Good evening, yes.

Aaron Keys, Utilities Director.

I have with me tonight, Tom Rotterman, the assistant director for sewer and stormwater.

This is the public hearing for the proposed construction of stormwater improvements on Braymore Road, Highland Drive, Summit Road, and South Fairview Road, known as the Braymore Road Stormwater Improvement Project.

As shown on the project graphic, this project would include construction of additional stormwater inlets and pipes to alleviate known drainage issues in the area.

Construction will include approximately 890 feet of new stormwater pipe and 12 new or replaced stormwater storm structures.

In addition, the project is proposed to rehabilitate approximately 660 linear feet of existing stormwater pipe and three existing stormwater inlets on Fairview Road.

That's what's shown in red in this graphic.

A curb bump out is being considered on Summit Road at Fairview, which would allow improvements to be made to the nearby stormwater inlet, but it it would narrow the width of summit road pavement at the intersection.

And this has been discussed with public works.

An IP meeting was held on April 15, 2025.

Four owners of the property adjacent to the project attended and all indicated they were in favor of the project.

All affected property owners have been contacted and staff have not been made aware of any opposition to the project.

The cost estimate for this project is $2,150,000 to be paid from stormwater utility funds.

If council directs staff to move forward with the final design for the Braymore Road stormwater improvement project, the next step in the public improvement process is for easement areas to be described.

Staff will then return to council with an ordinance to acquire those easements.

With that, I am willing to attempt to answer any questions.

Are there any questions from the council of staff?

Yeah, Nick.

Erin, I'm glad to see this.

I mean, this is a well-known problem in that area.

And in fact, I wonder, and I apologize I didn't get this question to you beforehand, but similar issues are uh are known in other parts of this neighborhood.

Are are there plans to address stormwater issues in some of the other parts of this neighborhood adjacent to Fairview and Broadway in that general vicinity?

I guess you'd need to be a little more specific.

So this goes up Highland and along Braymore.

So this project is focused in that area.

I do know that that entire uh Leewood subdivision has some other uh issues that we're aware of.

Uh, that's what I mean.

Some of those areas, in that the priority on those is not as high as the priority is uh for this particular project, but we do have we do know that they exist and they're in our our future capital improvements list.

And you mentioned public works, I know um Shana might look to you that there will be will there be some repairs that will be uh done also in some of the roadways and that kind of thing.

I know that that that might have been following what happens with storm water addressing stormwater.

Or am I misremembering mill and overlay or they'll we try to coordinate and they were gonna hold off on any mill and overlay until this project probably gets done.

Okay.

Thanks.

Any other questions for staff?

All right, I'll go ahead and open up the public hearing.

Does anybody from the public wish to speak on 1426, the Braymore Road Stormwater Improvement Project?

I have nothing to say for or against this project, but I'm noticing that you have this map that outlines these uh stormwater needs, and we need to be able to see something like that with this citywide that shows the age of the housing stock, what kind of housing it is, and where it's at, how many vacancies, et cetera, et cetera.

So if you can do that, you can visualize in GSIS layer so that we can have a conversation about the whole neighborhood that's having issues with their stormwater, not just this one.

Would anybody else from the public wish to speak about the Braymore Road stormwater improvement project?

Yes, Renee Carter, second ward.

And you know, I agree that you need to do this, but I've been noticing more since I come to council meetings, which may be good for you or bad for you, that we have a lot of areas that have these issues down on Creasy Springs and Brown School, not Brown School Road.

Yeah, Brown School Road, which may or may not be inside the city.

Is that we need to be addressing this issues as we expand and have more impervious surfaces, we're going to run into this problem more and more.

Thank you.

Would anyone else from the public wish to speak on the Braymore Road Stormwater Improvement Project?

All right.

I'll go ahead and close the public hearing.

Uh any additional questions from council or comments from council.

No excited to see this.

Uh and I think we have a you kind of have an ongoing list of projects that you're working on.

Are those available on the website?

You're kind of like capital.

Currently, capital improvement plan, the you know the next five years, uh the years after that aren't on the website, but happy to provide those if anybody requested.

Thank you.

Um I'll make a motion to proceed with the final design of the proposed Braymore Road Storm Drainage Improvement Project.

Do I have a second?

Second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

All right.

Moving up, our next is public hearing 1526.

Sheila, will you please read?

Public hearing 1526 is the proposed construction of fire station number five located on the east side of Hector Place and south of RIA Street.

Do we have a staff report?

Yes.

Uh good evening.

My name is Shane Creech, and I'm the public works director.

Uh Brian Schaefer, who's the fire chief, is with me tonight.

Uh this project would construct a new fire station on the existing fire station number five site located at the intersection of Ballinger Lane and RIA Street.

The existing fire station will remain in operation during construction.

The original station was built in the 70s and doesn't meet the modern needs of the fire department.

The existing fire station is also dealt with some structural issues over the year, years due to ground settlement.

The currently relocated community garden will be recreated to the south, the site following construction activities.

The new fire station will include adequate space for modern staff and includes individual sleeping areas, gender specific restrooms, room for training activities, and modernized separation between personnel and contaminants.

An interested parties meeting was held on March 18th, 2026.

No comments from the public have been received either from the meeting or the city's Be Heard website.

The estimated cost of the project is five million dollars and will be funded by the city's capital improvement sales tax.

The fire chief and I are happy to answer any questions you might have.

Any questions from council to staff?

I had a couple.

Oh yeah.

Well, I was gonna say I had a couple.

Um just the question on you know, we're rebuilding, and I had asked this before about say, but we are rebuilding because we had structural failures because of settlement.

What are we doing to to mitigate that with the new building?

Sure.

Um we had pretty extensive um geotechnical work done.

Most of it appears just to be general settlement, and what you'll often hear of often hear us talk about is just boom counting clay.

Um we don't have the greatest soils in the world for for that sort of thing.

Um so we've got better information than we've ever had to um to design the foundation for this new this new building.

And the crews will operate, you said out of the existing until the new one is is that correct?

Yes, ma'am.

So there will be no disruption in service.

Station five will stay in service until the new station five is constructed and they'll switch over.

Except for I-70 disruption, but there's always construction.

Betsy, you had your hand up.

Um to do this now.

Yeah, I know you said it wasn't the capital improvement.

But we have the funding to do that.

And how is does that affect Fire Station 10?

Interim Fire Station 10 is opening and in less than three weeks in your neighborhood.

And um the permanent station 10 will be talking about in subsequent uh agenda item.

Okay, thank you.

Christina, did you have your hand up?

Yeah.

Um what year did you say the original building was built?

1971, I believe.

Is there any concern of um environmental issues that could happen when that rebuild or tear down takes place?

Not that we're aware of.

Has there been any testing for that?

Um as far as the demo of the existing structure, not it not as of yet.

It would be something that we would do as part of the demolition of that at that time, though.

Thanks.

Any other questions from council?

I'll go ahead and open up the public hearing.

Would anyone from the public wish to speak on um the proposed reconstruction of fire station five?

Good evening, council members.

My name is Samantha Jones.

I'm from the first ward.

I'm also a member of Intact.

And I like the idea of doing the fire station number five.

However, the capital gains tax that they're talking about is a one percent sales tax increase on Colombians.

And that is also part of the public safety, as far as I understood it to be.

That's part of the next agenda I think.

Sorry, you can come back.

It's right, we'll come back to that one.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Would anyone from the public wish to speak on the proposed uh construction of fire station number five?

Seeing none, I'll go ahead and close the public hearing.

Uh all right.

I'll make uh does there any council comments or questions come up to this?

Appreciate it.

Oh, do you yeah?

I would just encourage um there to be an environmental assessment with the age of the building.

All right.

Common practice for for the city for us any time we do a demo, it's goes through an exhaustive process.

But we have people living there now, so that won't occur until after we vacate the building.

All right.

I'll make a motion to proceed with the reconstruction of fire station number five at the intersection of Ballinger Lane and Rhea Street.

Do I have a second?

I'll second.

Segue by Jackie.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

All right.

Moving on in the agenda.

Um up first we have uh Bill 11926.

Sheila, will you please read Bill 11926?

Yes.

Stuck to my last one.

Council Bill 11926 is an ordinance calling a special election in the City of Columbia, Missouri to be held on Tuesday, August 4, 2026 on the question whether to impose an additional sales tax of 1 percent for the purpose of improving city public safety services.

Directing notification of the election authority, describing the form of the notice of election, and fixing the time when this ordinance shall become effective.

Second reading.

Do we have a staff report?

Yes.

Mayor, members of the city council, I'm Matthew Lou, the Director of Finance.

We have uh Jim McDonald here, the assistant director of finance.

And we're going to talk a little bit about the sales tax, the proposed sales tax.

So some of our discussion points uh this evening will be the general fund outlook.

We will look at the revenue outlook, and then additional general and general sales and use tax, and then we'll take a look at additional uh.

I'm sorry, they got on there twice somehow.

But then we will look at uh how that sales and use tax, the priorities, how they'll be spent.

So first we'll go through the uh general fund breakdown.

So uh public safety makes up nearly 50 percent or roughly 66 million of the general fund budget.

This is followed by health and environment uh 25 million, and so what's included in health and environment is the health department, community development, housing and neighborhood development, uh and a few smaller departments.

Uh and then next after that will be public works at about 17 million dollars.

So looking at the FTE count uh in the general fund, public safety makes up over half of the general fund employees uh at five 458 full-time equivalents or FTEs, and that's followed by the health health and environment and then general admin.

At any time if you all have questions, please stop.

So here we break out the full-time equivalence for police department uh by sworn officers and civilians.

So we currently have 185 sworn officer positions.

Uh this is down from last year due to the 11 airport officers transitioning to safety officers at the airport.

For fire, uh we have 176 firefighters and nine civilians currently uh as of fiscal year 2026.

So here's a look at the total budgets for police and fire.

So this is broken out by salaries and benefits and other expenditures.

As you can see, the salaries and benefits make up the lion's share of the budget at about 85 percent, uh, leaving that other 15 percent for things outside of salary benefits.

So equipment different things like that.

All right, so I'm gonna go over the revenue outlook.

Um that's the next few slides.

So on this slide, we got uh general fund and revenues and expenditures.

So this is kind of a projection of well, it's got actuals for uh a couple years and then projections from 26 all the way through 2030.

Um it kind of breaks down each different kind of working division within the general fund.

Public safety is the red one and the biggest component of that uh in 2024.

We're projecting that to get up to about 70 million by 2030.

And that's kind of just with uh our service level staying at the same, not really growing FTEs or adding new uh fire stations.

Um the line, the yellow line is the revenue line, and um it is starting to dip below expenditures in 2026, and can it can you continues to hover below expenditures?

So if we were to continue on this trend, we would have to keep uh tapping into our reserves in order to keep uh funding levels where they are.

Um I would just I do just want to say that in 2025 we had a uh abnormal year with revenues where we had some uh set I had the settlement for from CenturyLink and a couple other one time one-time revenues that made our revenue really high.

And so we really would not expect uh in a normal year to jump from 23 million dollars to 140, 123 million to 144 million.

And so for 26, we are projecting that to be lower.

All right.

So here's kind of a breakdown of all the revenues that make up the general fund.

Um really just pointing out that sales and use tax make up just a little under 30 percent of that.

So that's by far our biggest revenue source for the general fund, and the one that really drives our forecasting for the general fund.

And then here's kind of a breakdown of where we expect our sales taxes to land uh for FY26.

So a general fund is about 50 percent of the sales tax we collect, the one one percent of it.

Uh we're thinking we're gonna get about 32.3 million in sales and five point three million in uh use tax, and then uh capital improvements, park sales, and transportation will make up the other half of that amount, bringing the 63 million total that we expect in sales, and the 10.7 in use tax.

Here's kind of a comparison of our sales tax rate compared to the other 10 most populated cities within uh Missouri.

Uh the City of Columbia falls towards the bottom of that, with the city portion being two percent and our total sales tax at seven nine seven five.

And this is kind of a breakdown of our uh current sales tax.

So uh the state gets the lion's share of our sales tax at 4.23 percent, county gets 175, and then that two percent gets broken up into those uh four four brackets.

General uh general city one cent, uh transportation fifty fifty, uh parks and uh capital improvement twenty-five.

So this is a line graph that kind of charts the year to date, year over year change in our sales and use tax.

So what this is kind of showing is the fluctuation of our of our uh sales tax.

Uh we we continue to see year over year growth from what this chart is showing in in 2011 until about 2019, but the growth is uh slowing down.

And then after COVID, we got this huge explosion in growth from 2020 all the way to 2024.

And then in 2025, we finally saw our sales tax dip below 2024 levels.

Uh we are projecting that this big boom is over.

We're not expecting to see growth like that again.

What we are expecting to see going forward is about small growth of maybe one to one and a half, possibly two percent at the most.

Oh, yes.

What models or information are you using to predict that?

So the boom versus predicting not a boom?

Yeah.

So we look at like uh me uh Moody's analytics, that's so that's kind of who we get our economic data from.

And they project roughly about two to two and a half percent growth.

We kind of put a range in there because sales tax fluctuates so wildly year to year that we don't want to just kind of assume that top uh top amounts we kind of put it in about one and a half percent kind of flu.

So that gives us some uh fluctuations when uh recessions hit or bad economic times hit where they aren't uh meeting expectation levels.

And that's kind of what this slide, this next slide here is gonna talk about.

Thanks.

Yeah.

So I kind of talked about this slide already, but this is kind of our sales tax forecast.

So the kind of the upper one is the uh that two percent growth, the middle one is like the one, one and a half percent growth, and the bottom line, that black line is kind of like the stagnant growth.

So that's kind of the range we expect our sales tax to kind of move within over the next uh five years.

So currently we're looking we're trending more on the low end.

Um that's kind of what we're expecting, but we're still we're still I think for 2027, we're looking at growth maybe around one and a half percent.

And this is just kind of a history of how our sales and use tax has performed over the past uh decade or so.

So about 2010 we were getting about 40 million dollars worth of sales tax.

It got up to about 50 million by like 2020, and then you can see it expanded greatly the 2022 lines when we when uh use tax was implemented.

But from 24 to 25, you can see it actually decrease, and we're expecting like we just kind of talked about that one and a half percent growth kind of going forward from here on out.

And a lot of this growth uh had to do with inflation and then the the money, the the influx of money that was put into the system by COVID and or CARES Act uh and then uh ARPA.

So it's something that is not normal within the time period.

But wait, hold on.

I do have a question.

Okay, Christina.

Newbie here.

Right.

Um you said that it has to do with that.

Um but that wouldn't be sales tax, right?

So are we sales tax and use tax history by fiscal years being shown here?

And you're saying that actually includes the ARPA and the carers funds.

Yes.

So the influx of money from ARP and CARES was given directly to individuals in most cases.

We're talking about like the uh government stimulus that uh people got like the the checks people got directly into their own.

And ARPA went directly to people.

Yeah, well, we were using that as kind of a blanket term for all government stimulus that got injected into the economy during that period, so is kind of what we're talking about.

Not the ARPA money specifically that we got was not included in this.

It's just the money that everybody got.

There was a great deal of spending that occurred because of that.

Okay.

And then we're gonna do that.

Yeah.

So what we got as a city isn't what you're shown here.

Yeah.

All right.

And then so kind of here is our current sales and use tax forecast.

So as you can see, what we have here is just kind of a steady uh growth of about one and one to one and a half percent over the next uh five years.

So you can see we're projecting combined to be a little over uh 70 percent or 70 million, excuse me, and by 20 thirty-one, maybe getting close to 80 million.

So uh again, just slow growth in our sales and use tax.

So here's some of the what we're looking at for the proposed one percent sales and use tax.

Oh the additional general sales and use tax uh we would place in a dedicated uh public safety account or public safety fund.

We're we're anticipating approximately uh 38 million for that tax.

Um and that will be used to provide revenues uh for the operations and capital improvements of public safety departments.

Um then we would need a vote of the public to move this forward.

Oh, yes, Christina.

Um it says dedicated public safety tax.

Please tell us what that means and how is that different than um the other taxes that we would uh see separated out?

Uh this so this is a general sales tax.

It was a general fund sales tax is a way that we would approach it uh because we have an additional one percent that could be uh levy for general fund, but what we would do is dedicate it for public safety and take that one percent and put it into its own fund.

Uh usually funds are set up with some sort of um funding mechanism that is specifically for it, and that's how we would use that public safety money.

And and how is it different than um like say the parks one that we see or uh capital improvements?

Like why is that considered different?

Does that make sense?

Like so it's it's different than the gener the uh sorry, go ahead.

I think you're gonna answer the question.

So the part parks sales tax is a park sales tax.

Right.

Uh this would be a general fund sales tax that will be dedicated to public safety.

So that that's sort of the difference.

It's just a portion of the general revenue.

Right.

It's what's allowed in our general obligation.

So the city has that the ability to go for that additional one percent.

And so this would dedicate that one percent to public safety.

And so the ordinance that will enact it that would go to the voters to vote on will say that this fund is to get it purely for police fire, and that's for staffing, equipment, and facilities.

And so that's your control.

So the control is set forth by the statute that will allow us to actually go for the voters.

And isn't that the same thing as the park sales tax?

I mean, I realize there are different sons.

But I mean, so the the difference is the difference is the fire state allocation, it calls for a parks dedicated sales tax.

This is taking our general obligation in the city deciding to take that general obligation to dedicate it purely for public safety.

Because the city can only ask for up to two.

So much general revenue fund or something like that, right?

Yes.

And for and so if we went for a one through for just public safety without going through this general part, we'd actually have to go to the state and the state legislature would have to give us permission in order to do that.

Okay.

This is taking our own obligation and saying we will dedicate it for this particular purpose.

Thank you.

Yeah, Valerie.

My correct an understanding that most other peer cities like us have dedicated funds for public safety.

And are theirs set up similarly to this?

I would say there's I wouldn't say all.

I think different cities are have approached it differently.

Some have gone through the state legislature to get permission, some have used their own general obligation, some have used property tax.

So there's different mechanisms to get there.

I think there's a slide that we kind of talk about those that have that type of funding.

Yeah.

I believe we have a breakdown, yes.

So we're we're going the right of dedication for a general tax as opposed to asking the state legislator for permission in this case.

Thanks, that helps.

Uh so I know that we typically spend or I know that in this last budget we had a spend of 60 million for public safety.

Can you tell us if this were to pass with the 38 million?

Um how much are we planning to spend from non-dedicated general fund to supplement that?

And what would that look like for future years?

Yeah, so uh we would obligate well, we would dedicate around 60 million uh to this fund uh to help sort of jumpstart it and get it going.

And then year after year after that, uh we would have to we would basically do it like we do with the park sales tax, where we kind of we look at it and decide if there's uh more of an obligation that we need to consider.

Maybe it could be more, if it's less, maybe it could be less.

Um but we that's basically the the thought process behind it.

Yeah.

And ultimately those decisions uh year to year are what come to us during the annual budget process.

Um and and have public input year to year.

That is correct.

Do you have any figure as to what kind of the trajectory of our um public safety spending over past several years has been?

Yeah, I think we kind of show that previous slides.

I think it showed by 2030 70 million if no staffing levels increase.

That's correct.

The estimated 70 million to go towards police and fire.

But I don't know if how far back on that slide you went.

I don't think that's we went 24 was when we started on that slide, and we went all the way to 31.

We obviously have years prior to that.

We just that would be tough to fit on one graph, but we could we could provide that information if we needed to.

Yeah, that would be helpful.

I think I'm looking at like I'm I'm particularly interested in past years, so maybe asking a slightly different question than what we saw in that graph.

Um and I don't have access to this um presentation that I know of.

Was that emailed separately?

Email separately.

That's the same as that.

Okay.

Sorry.

Is there a way we can attach this to a future agenda or to the meetings for the public since we only have it in our email?

Thanks.

So basically we were at about uh 40 million in combined police and fire in 2019, and then 26 uh we were at 66, almost 67 million dollars for combined police and fire.

Christina, did you have a follow-up?

Yeah, it kind of goes back to the separation of funds and how that works.

What are the risk of having it as a dedicated general fund versus asking like if we only are allowed a certain amount of taxes out of that general fund, what is the risk of deciding to put it towards this versus putting it as its own dedicated fund?

Does that make sense?

Well, I think the biggest risk is that you've locked in your general fund to that obligation.

And so you don't have the capacity to grow it.

At least through this process.

Okay.

All right.

Next slide.

So here's what it would look like uh with that additional sales tax.

So again, there's a uh $66 million for uh the general sales tax with that 1% dedicated public safety.

Uh so we would look we would be looking at a total of sales tax for the city somewhere around 97 million and use taxes somewhere around 17 million, 16.7.

This is what uh your sales tax rate would look like in comparison to the other most popular cities in the state.

Uh it would bring us to 8.975 uh with that 3 percent city portion.

So we'll be in fourth place and we're the fourth most popular city as well, even though St.

Joe is on here and they're quite a bit higher.

Yeah, Christina.

Sorry.

Every slide.

Um so with that, um St.

Louis, St.

Joseph, Kings City, they're all, you know, pretty big cities.

And we have uh more rural community around us that will come in to, you know, shop for us.

What is you considered what that impact looks like from people shopping or choosing to go, say if they live in Ashland, uh they choose to go to Jeff City rather than come to Columbia to spend money?

Sorry, I know that's a question that's probably more detailed.

Yeah, well, I mean, we I think we may have the capability to look at something like that, but we haven't.

Uh just just for the fact that now, uh, especially in in the climate we're at now with with uh gas prices being so high that it would sort of negate uh traveling to go somewhere else to uh buy something that may be a cent or a half cent cheaper.

And I I think that's one of the things we faced already with just the the generation of now online sales, and so the the importance of the use tax actually helped build bridge that gap.

Because what we saw is that our general uh sales revenue was starting to decline because a lot of people were shopping online as opposed to coming into town to shop.

And so the use taxes help subside that.

But I think we've already seen that a lot of what used to be where people would come to Columbia to shop, we've seen a lot more people not do that.

And so that is a factor that we deal with and that we look at.

And I think you have a chart on right now, the current people who are coming in coming up?

Yeah.

Okay.

So here's the breakdown, just a pie chart, different visual of what that would look like with the city at 3 percent broken out general uh public safety, transportation, parks, and capital improvement.

Uh just another visual of that and sort of a projection out uh to the year 2031, what the total sales and use tax would look like.

So we would anticipate uh 27 being uh it it wouldn't be enacted until January of of 27, and so that year is not as high uh revenue-wise as the rest, but then 28 would start your full year.

Can I ask on um when we're doing forecasting on something like this and we're forecasting, you know, the future growth?

I'm assuming that kind of similar to Christina's earlier, like we're modeling that based on kind of what's happened in the past as well as going forward.

Yes.

Have we ever looked at when another community has increased their kind of general sales tax?

Does that have an impact on the model for going forward?

Like we don't see as much growth or the same percentage of growth, or is it just kind of a wash based on all the different factors?

Yeah, there's a lot of factors you would have to consider to do something like that.

The size of us, you would be looking at places like Kansas City, St.

Louis, St.

Joe, all of those places have uh border around them where like you got Kansas on the Kansas City side, you gain St.

Louis on the other side.

And so uh it's not uh apples to apples type of comparison.

There'd be some difficulty because the timing of their sales taxes could have coincided with a recession or some type of economic growth in that area that would have outweighed or had an additional effect.

So kind of measuring that isolated would be very difficult to do, I think.

All right.

I appreciate that we thought about it, but then yeah, it's harder to model.

Okay.

So here's the uh sales tax receipt by location.

So about 68 percent of our sales tax dollars come from our local residents, and about 32 percent come from out of state or in-state visitors outside of the City of Columbia.

And this is probably at the uh highest point for the local residents.

We wanted to we wanted to not show it at the lowest point because there are some points during the week where you see uh uh 57 percent and in low 50s on local residents uh portion of sales tax paid.

So this is what the impact would look like uh to some everyday type uh purchases.

So like a four dot four dollar cup of coffee, you would be looking at uh four cents, four additional cents.

Uh for a twelve dollar meal, you would be looking at about twelve additional cents that you will be paying for that one percent.

And then for a hundred dollars worth of groceries, you would be looking at about a dollar.

Yeah, Jackie.

Have you looked into um the impact of like an annual impact on for different household incomes?

Yes, we have.

So we did uh a low medium uh hold on just a second, let me get it pulled up.

So we did a uh uh lower class, a middle class, and a upper class uh separation, and basically on a yearly basis, uh lower class individuals spend about 50 percent of their income on taxable goods, middle class is about 45 percent, and upper class is about 12 percent.

And so uh with those percentages, uh about uh annual increase of one percent would be around sixty-one dollars for uh the lower class, for the middle class, it would be about two hundred and sixty-seven dollars, and for upper class, it would be around two thousand dollars.

So annually.

That's annually, yes.

Any other questions from council?

Okay.

Oh, okay.

That's right.

I think one thing that I feel like I haven't quite gotten a grasp on here, um, just based on the on the presentation.

Um so you talk about the by being able to put dedicate this money to public safety, we are also going to be able to alleviate the general fund some and take some pressure off the general fund.

But then we're also talking about the new and bigger things we'll be able to do with this money working on the pension improvements, that kind of stuff.

So if the money is going to new projects, how is it then alleviating the general fund?

Like can you kind of explain that piece?

Yes.

So the dedicated one cent will be around 38 million.

We will be uh moving over around 60 million for police and fire from the general fund.

And so currently we're paying out about 66 million.

So immediately you would be seeing a relief of around six million dollars uh from the general fund.

So any fluctuation in what we will be sending from the general fund to that public safety uh fund would be that would be your relief.

So in the early years, that fund would build very quickly and you would have money to do things like your pension and like uh put additional money towards uh the build out of the new police print seat and the new fire stations.

Uh so that that's basically what we had thought about.

Do you the six million figure?

That's for you said kind of the the immediate alleviation of the fund of the general fund.

Yes.

Do you have predictions for what it will look like for the general fund moving forward in terms of how much will be alleviated?

Yes, we have we have a few slides uh coming up to kind of show that.

So uh I can always ask more questions.

We have more slides.

Okay.

Lots of opportunity.

So again, this is kind of uh how it would be funded.

So it would be a separate fund, separate account uh to segregate police of our expenses, looking at 30 million for the new uh sales and use tax and 60 million uh from the general fund sales tax.

And then uh an ongoing allocation from the general fund.

So now we're gonna talk about some additional sales and use tax priorities.

And so okay.

You can have the seat.

I don't we could switch.

So we've outlined this a couple different times, but 50 police officers over four years, 42 firefighters over four years, uh replacing the downtown facility that we've been in for 92 years.

Uh obviously we have more people, so we need more police vehicles.

We buy one vehicle every for every two officers.

Uh to plan fire stations with apparatus and uh a technology plan for public safety in general, which is police and fire together.

All right.

Talked about the pension a lot.

Matthew, you want to math.

I don't.

Yeah, so uh one important thing or additional priority that we would be looking at is stabilizing the the current police and fire pension.

And so this would be uh hopefully a move to loggers for new employees, uh, and then stabilizing the current pension.

Uh we have made headway over the last the last year.

Uh we've made some pretty good headway, and we're at 53 percent uh for the police pension and 61 for the firefighters pension was the first time it's been over 61 per 60 percent and probably 10 years or so.

And the total unfunded accru uh actuarial liability is 148 million.

That's down from about 156 million from last year.

Okay.

And this is the slide that that you were asking about.

So this is what the projection would look like.

And this is with the transfer at 60 million uh for those four years projected.

And so it it could fluctuate there, but basically it would give us it would it would give us a little room uh where we would have uh maybe could possibly uh add to the uh fund balance if there was no additional changes.

That would just be status quo of how we're doing things right now for the general fund, and which probably will not happen.

Can I clarify in that?

Um can you go back?

Can I clarify in that that what you have there that um the orange to dark red, right?

So this is in our existing the one percent sort of general fund revenue.

Yes.

And but that would be the expenditures for public safety of that one percent.

That's correct.

And so then on the next slide, is that when we get into your dedicated what I was talking about earlier, where you have a little bit more uh fund balance in the in the beginning years, uh, but that would that would help us with uh the debt that we would possibly incur by completing the build out of the police station and the fire stations.

Uh over as as you get down the line in this though, uh it there will be a time where that 100 million or so that would be revenue for this fund is not going to be enough.

And so that is something to think of.

So you will be building a little fund balance in the beginning the beginning years, but in later years, it could be uh the other way around.

Can you repeat that?

You're saying we we will still need to go up on our like.

I mean, we're talking about the so we got to 2033 here.

You're probably talking about 10, 15 years from now.

So it's it's far enough out now that a good you're not going to get a good projection on it.

I mean, you usually can give good projections about five years out.

But uh that's that's about it.

Anything else past five years is usually speculation.

So your thoughts are on this is that this is giving us yes, that cushion potentially, because we're potentially going to have some debt service, more debt service than even this shows for those renovations or new.

So we've played with it a few different ways.

We play with it with with uh paying for it out of fund balance and not uh incurring debt and the other way around.

And and it is sort of a toss-up.

I think it's gonna is gonna matter a lot with interest rates, what the interest rates look like, uh what that additional debt would look due to this fund and and to our ratings.

So from a police and fire staffing point, you know, part of the proposal is this increase in staffing, right?

I'm assuming to allow you to have a little bit more work life balance for people not doing as much overtime.

Would this I guess I guess part of my question is, you know, the idea is that you're trying to reset the percentage of sworn officers or firefighters that we have in service.

Is the idea that that growth will also continue to happen because you talk about the next four years?

Is the thought that that will continue and will this be enough to cover that additional or I guess the question, and that might be that might be too much of a future crystal ball.

I think that's exactly what we have to look at is what we know is as we're expanding.

So right now, this is planned for two additional two existing firehouses to be three to be renovated.

But we do know that in 3435, we're gonna start, we're gonna have to look at an additional firehouse being built.

And so when we build the new firehouse, that's that's an additional 12 firefighters plus any apparatus that's need to be included with that.

So that's all has to be part of what we look at going forward.

So being able to grow a fund balance will help us address those issues when when we approach them.

And so I think Chief, with your crystal ball looking proactively looking forward, you're saying that in the next less than the next 10 years, we're gonna have to have two additional.

Yes, sir.

So this is a metric that's often used when we look at uh sworn officer staffing, and so you'll see some comparable cities to uh Columbia on this slide with their current estimated populations, their police budget, their sworn officers uh that they're allocated, whether or not they have a public safety tax, and then the per 1,000 ratio, which you can see we are uh definitely at the bottom of that pile.

Can you explain?

Oh, sorry.

No, it's right.

Yeah.

Christine, I'll get used to that eventually.

With the uh St.

Louis there they have a 4.49 ratio.

Do you know what that like why that's so much more than say some of the other areas?

Because the population went down exponentially, people are leaving the city.

And so the number of officers stayed the same and people were leaving.

Okay.

Now that's also their authorized strength.

They have a huge amount of positions that are not filled.

They can't hire cops.

So you might speak to that because it's a good idea.

Yeah.

So the sworn officer number that's on there is how many sworn positions each one of those agencies is allocated.

It doesn't mean all those positions are filled.

It's mean that's what they're budgeted.

So in St.

Louis, for the example of St.

Louis, um, if you look, their population continues to go down in the city.

A lot of people move into St.

Louis County, which is a weird thing, but it's just like moving into another part of the city, really, what is what it looks like.

So because they've had so much movement out of the city limits of St.

Louis, um, there, although they're it looks like that on paper, you also look at the crime rate of St.

Louis and some tough decisions have to be made there.

Yeah, I'd also mention the part to this slide that was enlightening for me is the number of our comparables that have a dedicated public safety tax.

So you mentioned Springfield in the email, and they do as well as our comparable of independence.

Those are our two closest with population.

So since the year 2000, Columbia's population has grown by 49,000 residents, which is 58 percent, so we've doubled.

And the city now covers another 15 additional square miles, which is a 28 percent increase.

So in two in 2000, we had 1.49 officers per 1,000 residents, which is I don't think anything to pat ourselves on the backs about.

And by 2026, that dropped to 1.39 officers per 1,000 residents.

The average number of full-time law enforcement officers in the U.S.

cities is 2.3 per 1,000.

The rate of full-time law enforcement officers per 1,000 residents in Midwest cities is 2.2.

So for the fire side, again, public safety, fire police for this issue.

Our plan is to add 42 additional firefighters, which will fill out all of our companies to be four person.

The reason for four person is uh to meet our accreditation standard, which is to deliver four firefighters to your door when you call 911 in five minutes, 90 percent of the time or less.

For us to accomplish that with three person crews, we have to send two fire trucks from two neighborhoods.

Leaves a lot of open gaps and the uh response times are more lengthy.

Additionally, there's a federal standard for something called two and two out, which uh essentially says that when we send two of our firefighters into an immediately dangerous life and health environment, we have to have two people outside.

Right now we have to wait for that second company.

Oftentimes there could be a delay depending on how busy the system, the system is getting busier, uh very, very busier as uh as the community grows.

So we've seen this, we've admired this problem for 20 years, and and unfortunately, the police chief and I are, and all of us as leaders in the community are faced with dealing with it.

We can't admire it any longer.

So I I mentioned life-saved.

Uh, this is an urban fire service now.

So what our expectations are if you intend to survive being trapped inside of a fire uh dangling from uh from uh high angle or from a low angle underground or in water, you expect for us to arrive and take care of the problem.

For us to do that, we have to arrive in a very quick fashion with the correct staffing and be able to accomplish simultaneous tasks, such as if you have a structure fire search, find the victim, keep the fire at bay or attack the fire, establish water supply, ventilate the roof, and then provide by law uh uh ability to rescue firefighters when you put that in, put them in there, which means we have to deliver 16 firefighters for just a simple single family dwelling fire within four minutes and a box alarm, meaning the entire 16 people within eight minutes, 90 percent of the time.

We can't do that with our current configuration.

We've got a program that we can model how we can be successful to meet our accreditation standards and provide uh a likely survivable outcome for the person that needs help, and that is adding that fourth person to those companies and all of our fire stations.

Lastly, it's just the common sense here is we we have more people, especially during the day.

Uh we've added, like Jill mentioned, 15 square miles to the existing uh system.

And um to the station 10 point, we don't want survivability in Columbia to be based on what your zip code is or where you live.

We need to deliver consistent service regardless of where you live.

And that means building fire stations, staffing them correctly and having that professional response when somebody calls 911.

So a dedicated public safety tax helps us make up for the last 20 years, at least get caught up to 2026 so we can move forward.

I would also add I there was a comment earlier about that this is going to support I'm paraphrasing, so my apologies is a while ago we've been talking about this for a few minutes.

But that this is a lot of new things.

And really, I would tell you from my chair and from Chief Schaefer's chair, this is just catching up.

We are woefully behind, woefully behind.

And so at adding for for me, I'll speak selfishly for a minute, but he's in the same boat, adding 2.25 police officers on average over the past 26 years is just completely insufficient for the rate of growth of this city.

And so I don't think I would be doing my job if I let you all think this is just to buy a bunch of shiny new stuff.

This is to get us staffed.

And to be honest, even if we got 50 officers today, we're at 1.76 per 1,000.

So we're still not we haven't we haven't overtaken a bunch of these cities.

And that's not the best metric.

I'm not saying that it is.

But this has been a conversation for so long, and every year that goes by it gets worse because the whole it just gets deeper and deeper and deeper.

Can I just mention Mayor?

So the survivability profile for us by adding the personnel on the fire side is critical for that person.

But one thing that we both share as chief officers that at work for the community is is our employees.

I can't provide a safe uh workplace with three-person staffing.

And I I know I because I see police CAD and police CAD sometimes is three and four screens deep with waiting calls.

Um with the additional personnel, we help create a safer environment for our firefighters and our police officers.

So they can go home at the end of the day safe and in one piece and mentally well.

I think we as again, we as community leaders, we owe this at least to our employees.

And that's what that's the more profound argument, I think, is that we focus on the survivability and the customer service, but also taking care of our own people, our own employees.

Go ahead.

I'm sorry.

No, I just imagine we have a lot of questions before we even get to general comment questions.

So your hand up.

Chief Slute, you said this would help us to catch up.

So my question is will this catch us up?

And if what does that look like?

What what would be the number of officers, for instance, per 1,000 when we catch up?

Well, right now if we hired our opinion there.

Yeah, we've hired if we hired 50 today, we'd be given our current population, we'd be at 1.76.

Um, and a lot of this comes down to what type of service does the community want.

And so in all the conversations that I've had over since 2012 of being a member of command staff, I constantly hear the same conversation.

And I don't disagree with it, and it's about community policing.

And that requires time.

And so when we have one person in a traffic unit, which I don't think constitutes a unit technically, but we'll say it does for the sake of argument.

When we have conversations about we need to restaff a downtown unit, we want to expand.

I mean, clearly I think everyone would agree four officers in our parks and trails is not enough given the amount of land that those cover and the great amount of use we get.

And it's a it's a pride point for the community.

I think a lot of it has to do with what people want and if they want responsiveness or proactiveness.

We can be reactive or we can be proactive, and that moves the needle on how many crimes we solve, how many crimes we can potentially prevent.

There's just a lot of metrics in there, but the issue is right now we're just so far behind, we're trying to dig out of a hole.

So to put it another way, does this get us to 2.2 per thousand?

No, it does not.

So when you say catch up, does it get us closer to catching up or does it get us to where we need to be?

You know, I think I think that all depends on where we think we need to be.

And I'm not trying to talk in a circle, I promise.

But you know, from my for my chair, the fact that the county has an Internet Crimes Task Force that does a lot with crimes against children.

We have not had anybody part of that task force for years.

We had to pull them out.

Um when I started, we had a a community services crime prevention unit.

That went away.

Um the fact that a city this size, I'm sure you can all actually be witnesses to how many complaints we get about traffic in this city.

So not having a functioning traffic unit is a huge thing for a city this size.

So we have a lot of catching up to do, and I think when we get to a certain level, then it's going to be okay, what are the extra things people would like to see us do?

I think what we're trying to do right now is just provide what I would consider baseline services for a police department in a city this size.

Thanks.

All right, I've got Betsy, then Valerie then Christina.

I'm trying to keep track.

Well, I think I'm gonna probably ask the same question as Nick.

To get to like 2.2 staffing per thousand residents, how many more police officers do you need?

Well, that's gonna depend on how much the population grows every year, right?

That's the same thing.

For now, oh, you want me to do math on the fly.

That's not fair.

Okay.

Well.

Yeah, you're fine.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I am cheating and using a calculator.

What about fire?

Yeah, we haven't gotten to fire yet.

I'll get to the case.

But we will use maybe he can do math on the fly while I'm using the calculator.

I do not do public math.

I think you've already that I think our fire chief has sort of already answered that by putting four people on Firefox.

And adding fire stations.

Yes, ma'am.

We have a standard of cover, and that that deployment system is all based on five years of previous data and overlaying that and making predictions on the future.

So we can do that in real time.

Four-person staffing gets us where we need to be.

All right.

We'll come back to math questions.

There's probably more questions for Jill, though.

So I'm sorry, Jill, I think.

No, that's okay.

CFO is saying 286?

Well, one of the things that we're going to get to 2.28 based on a population of 133,500 people, we would need to add 120 police officers.

Okay.

That's more that that's in the current budget and the proposed.

Right.

Yes.

Proposed budget.

That's right.

Both of those.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Betsy, did you have more on that?

Um I well, I do, but it might be more for um there's some discussion about whether we can sunset this or sun, is it sunset?

I'm always going to find out.

That's a word about it.

Um, you know, in 10 years or 15 years, and yet it sounds like a lot of this is going to be for wages and pensions and things that we don't want to all of a sudden not fund.

Do we have a feel for how much of this we definitely need as a permanent tax?

I mean, I know I know our finance guys would like all of it to be a permanent tax, but is there you know, is there some discussion about you know if you did 1% for 10 years and then had to renew it like we do the park sales tax, if that would work or not.

So maybe I should save that for when.

This could be a Decarlin question also.

Maybe the decarling question.

Why or maybe not?

I don't know.

No, no, I think the one thing you have to look at is 85% of our uh of our expenditures are people.

And so if you try to put a sunset on that, what does that look like as you've added additional bodies?

You've added additional benefits for those bodies, and then you have to go back to your voters and say well, without this, we're gonna lay off people, and that would be the reality.

Because that additional 15 percent is not enough to carve that out.

So 85 percent of it is benefits and salaries.

And so that's the chunk of what we're trying to look at.

And the 15 percent then would be the fire station.

Yes, things that we do need to replace after using them for a number of years.

That is correct.

Okay.

Yeah.

After being there, after experiencing that and having to do layoffs, um, my recommendation would stay into perpetuity.

If if you build it and you hire people on a revenue source, the worst thing you can do is add that uncertainty in the future because then it impacts our morale, our ability to keep people very similar to grant funded positions.

I'm not a fan of of hiring on grants because it it's it has a termination date.

And we've also unfuture there's yeah, it's scary for the employee and it doesn't give us any ability to continue service.

Okay.

Something else that I don't see changing in the near future is I mean, to put it bluntly, kind of the bidding more that we're in for personnel on the police side.

So Springfield just announced a 13.5 percent wage increase.

Who just announced Springfield for their existing officers and they bumped their starting pay up as well.

So you know, we're we're gonna be in that for a while, and I think we're gonna need that money to also build into some of that some growth if we're gonna stay competitive.

You're talking about retention, so retention of our officers in addition to trying to recruit.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Value at questions.

Yeah, I do find this discussion about staffing and retention um highly compelling, um, especially as it ties to community policing.

Um, my question really ties in well to where Betsy's going.

Um and it has to do with the um different objectives that we had for each department as part of this tax.

And some of them are recruiting 50 new police officers and 42, 40 something new firefighters.

Um and and some of them are um kind of project-based building um remodel vehicle.

Um my question is really like where does that spending come in and balance out against staffing versus projects?

And in future years, how much of that is continued?

Um getting to Betsy's point.

So if we're hiring 40 police officers, and you know, I can attest we've been trying or 50 police officers.

We've been trying to hire 50 police officers for the entire time that I've been here.

Um down to 12 vacancies.

Well, we'll say that.

Successful.

Yeah.

But but also we were successful at our steps towards that.

And the portion of the funding that it's coming out, we don't have leeway on.

If we're putting 50 that's coming out of this tax, does the staffing from the general fund portion stay the same?

Um and then if we have project bases here, are we we've already talked about a strategic planning for technology into the future?

Do we have a strategic planning into the future for our other items for our vehicles and for oh we do I know that one and for our um for our buildings that way we know what those costs are into the future?

Um I'm sorry, go ahead.

No, I was gonna say absolutely.

I think that's been part of our issue in the past is that we would build, but we wouldn't fund for continued maintenance of that build.

And so you find yourself having several facilities that are my age, which is and you're 92, my building's 92 years old.

But we find ourselves at least with the fire service.

So we have a lot of buildings that were built in uh the 70s that are now at its life because we did not have the fund to continue on with those maintenance.

And so as opposed to being proactively looking forward ahead and saying, okay, how do we make sure that we have funding available for when the air conditioning goes out or when the heating system goes out, that we have the funds available to make those repairs?

I guess what I'm looking for here is the strategic plan that illustrates that to us because we've already identified, like we know that really concretely.

We're going to hire 92 new employees out of this, and their salaries will stay there because that's what we want.

But what what's our strategic process?

So on the rest, because we already identified that we need that for the other portions of these exact objectives.

So similar to what we've done for our vehicle replacement fund where we've actually created a process to actually look at our vehicles and proactively look at see what vehicles need to be replaced so we could replace them on a cycle.

We're going to do the same thing with our facilities.

And so we'll have a program where we'll look at our facilities and we'll go in and actually annually look and see exactly what improvements need to be made so that we can budget for and plan for those improvements in the future.

Yeah.

And then so tied into this discussion is um, you know, what is the timeline on our goals?

Um, what is the information that I have, and what is the information that the public has.

Um so I know Don previously had asked for um for us to provide a um uh progress expected timeline for each of the objectives in here.

Um and I don't know if I've seen that in a slide, but it was communicated to us through email.

Yeah.

Can you um 50 officers by 2030, 42 firefighters by 2029?

The new police facility would depend on response from bidders and the build out.

We would plan to bond for this activity immediately in 2027.

And then the estimated timeline based on the kind of the uh renderings that we did uh last year, they told us uh 24 months from the start of construction, we could be in that building, which is very good.

Uh police vehicles will be again being purchased in 2027, the renovation of three current fire stations, which would be fire station four would be financed in 2027, station six in 2028, and station two in 2029, and then two planned new fire stations with apparatus.

Uh fire station 12 would be financed in 2032 and station 13 in 2035, and we would immediately start uh the technology plan funding.

So and I know Chief Schaefer gave his own too.

Um I want to say this is great information.

This is huge to me.

I would really appreciate that being made in some sort of physically viewable sense for the public to access in the future.

Um I think we're cooperatively doing from the putting together, I think a lot of presentation material, and so I would imagine that's all going to be shared online, and so absolutely.

I'd love to have that in your presentation.

Thanks.

Yeah, and I I would add to that, since there's a there's you know, there's discussion, there's a potential of of tabling just of the the potential of tabling of the vote till May 18th, if that were to happen, if some of those things, those answers that were given could be made into slides for the next and then attached to the agenda, that would be helpful if it happens.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh no, Christina and then Vera.

I remember my order.

Uh I think I remember my question.

So when we uh were talking earlier, you said that you know you weren't quite at the staffing level that you would need even when you added the the 50 officers and the 40?

42.

42 fire-to-fighters, sorry.

Thanks, Betsy.

Um what are what should citizens expect um if we are looking to grow that number or have a certain if you have like a certain idea in your mind of the number of officers per thousand and we're not there yet with this and we have these huge projects uh planned, what should citizens be expecting um once this happens?

Like should they be expecting us to come back and ask them for an additional increase?

I think that's a long-term question that Matthew kind of touched on.

I I don't see uh I would based on my not limited knowledge of financial projections.

Uh I would not there is no this is not a magic wand.

This isn't gonna fix it forever.

Um but I would say the immediate impact definitely on the for us on the facilities side would be I I talked with DeCarlin pretty extensively about this.

And once that it's approved, we would have a funding source.

We'd have a revenue stream, I think is what Matthew calls it, to look at bonds and things of that nature.

And so that could be a very quick project.

I think at the pace at which we've been doing hiring, and I think Chief Schaefer's been moving along at a really good pace as well.

I think you could see, and again, I I couch this with it takes 10 months to a year from the time a new person is hired till they're through the academy through field training and out on their own.

Um could we potentially track some lateral hires?

Good chance.

We certainly try.

Um but we would be, I think, very aggressive about this.

I think maybe I need to rephrase my question.

Okay, sorry.

Um so if your current number, I don't remember all the numbers that were being thrown out earlier, but let's say 1.6, but your your ideal number per thousand is 2.2.

Um with that 40, you're not going to get to that, right?

So should citizens be expecting that you eventually want to get to that number or and then potential additional tax increase from that.

Does that make sense?

It does.

I I think when it comes down to it.

So our first and I've had extensive meetings with my command staff about where we would allocate these resources, and we have that on paper.

And of course, there's what if things, you know, what's the next thing that happens that we have to move people around.

But the very first thing would be correctly staffing our patrol division.

Uh-huh.

Right.

So that's the officers that answer calls for service and work in the beats.

And so we have a number.

The patrol commander has a number he feels like we need to be at to get a sufficient number of officers staffed in the beats so that they could stay in their in their at least their sector, which is two beats, and not have to leave.

So none of this, I start my day in the northeast side of town, and two hours later I'm on the southwest side of town, and I never go back to my beat.

So staffing those beats immediately and trying to get that uh what for lack of a better term, really the community policing aspect of this built out as just a standard uh way of doing business at the Columbia Police Department, and then also looking at, I mean, we're incredibly understaffed in our investigative unit.

Um so it just kind of builds from there, and then there's things like the things that we'd like to do that we used to do, like I have a traffic unit, we used to have a juvenile unit that just worked with juveniles.

Um just a lot of things that we'd like to get back to doing.

Right.

I guess maybe I'll phrase it a different way to ask slightly different questions.

Maybe I need some more caffeine.

Sorry.

No, that's okay.

And I don't know, I don't know all the things about policing like you do.

No, that's okay.

Um you say you have a list of things that you would like to look at.

Do is that list available for us to say as citizens, yes, this is services that I really want in our community, and this is we want to get to whatever number of cops or per ratio would sorry, officers per ratio would be um at that level to staff that particular service.

Does that make sense?

It does more.

So I could put and I have on paper kind of our what we what would we do?

That was the the question of my command staff.

What would we do if we had 50 more officers today?

And so we line that up what we would do with them.

Um if we had 120, that looks completely different.

There's things in there that are things what we'd like to do that we aren't doing now.

Um I could certainly come up with a list like that.

I think that's a lot further down the road.

Um and the other uh point that we're trying to alleviate some of the I think the constant tension in is getting them off 12 hour shifts.

So that's another great outcome of get of staffing patrol first is get having the option of taking them off 12 hour shifts, no more training on your days off.

We have an all squad training day, back to the way it used to be when we were on 10 hour shifts.

So we could definitely map out the the what ifs, uh what we would like to see, but um we definitely have a plan for the 50 with some you know room in there to see what what the community is really interested in.

I I think also to answer your question, it might be useful to share the citizen survey results that we got, like so we do the annual survey.

How many officers?

I I I don't know that the officers question, but as far as the priorities of post safety, like maybe it's if you were to connect the results for the citizen survey where people are giving us feedback on what they want to see for policing with what those numbers might look like might help answer Christina's kind of your office.

That's a good slide too.

How do we weigh in on the priorities?

Yeah.

The citizens are going to vote on it, like how do we make sure they know what services they're gonna get from that?

A lot of the feedback from the Citizen Summit was what I would consider quality of life crimes in your neighborhood and then proact being able to be proactive were kind of what some of the things we knew instinctively would probably garner more uh votes, if you will, than others, but um I I was not surprised by the quality of life crime issue.

Most of the feedback we get and that you will soon be getting, I'm quite sure, is more about things that happen happen in people's own neighborhoods, and they're usually things like peace disturbance and traffic issues and things of that nature.

All right.

I'm gonna go on.

Vera?

So I I have uh a couple of questions.

Um first again, to maybe rephrase Christina's question a little bit to maybe get to uh a piece of what I think was being asked.

Um so if we get the full 50 officers, are you then the next day asking for another tax increase to get you up to the 2.2?

I'm not I I I probably should not say this, but I'm not married to 2.2.

Um I I think that is a symmetric.

It's one metric, but it's not the metric.

There's a lot of metrics out there, and a lot of it has to do with what type of community are you policing?

Um we have a college community, we have a huge commuter community, we have a lot of different things here that make us a little bit different.

So our needs might not be St.

Louis, frankly, probably needs every single one of those four point seven, whatever it was per thousand.

Here that that may be more than what's necessary to do what we're being asked to do.

So I wouldn't it's one number, but it's not the number in my mind, if that makes sense.

And even organizations like the International Association of Chiefs of Police and PERF will tell you that's probably not the main metric because there just is so much variance between community community expectations and needs that they don't really drive that home as the main number.

Thank you.

Um and then I'm guessing that my next two questions are more Matthew questions.

Um I think that so Valerie talked about the thing that really really sticks out for her is the ability to recruit and retain staff.

Um and for me, the biggest thing there is making sure um we can pay off this pension.

The biggest concern for me is the pension.

So I'm wondering if this passes, what does that then look like?

At what point are we finally out of this hole?

When is the pension paid off?

I could not tell you like a specific date.

What I could say is that if fire the post-2012 uh moves to loggers as expected, um fire would almost immediately be funded uh and we'd be off the the watch list for fire at least.

Um police is a little bit more difficult because their pr their post-2012 plan is a little bit more rich than the current loggers plan.

So I wouldn't anticipate many of those officers moving to loggers.

There could be a few that would have and and those will be the ones that would have previous experience on loggers and maybe they want to continue, so they may move over.

Um but that would be mostly a new employees uh for police, and so uh we would have to the additional funding we would throw into that pension would be mainly for police uh to get up to the the funding level they would need to be.

One of the things we talked about is in the in the first few years, obviously I'm not gonna hire the 50 officers in year one and year two.

So it gives us the ability to have some extra money there to put towards the pension.

Well, that somewhat answered my last question, which was a question of how kind of a question of how this is gonna be written, how flexible is the spending going to be?

And I ask that from two perspectives.

The first perspective being we're not gonna hire 50 people the first year, so will we be able to reallocate that money to something we can use, or if we get 10 years down the road and realize one of these things is no longer needed, can we be flexible?

And the other perspective is for the taxpayers, can they feel confident that the projects we are projecting this is what we're going to use with this is what we're gonna do with the additional tax money, can they be confident that that is actually what it's going to be used for?

I think with the um with the creating a fund, a dedicated public safety fund, you have already made that dedication that these funds will go toward this.

And so there is not that wiggle room of saying, well, we're gonna move it from here to here.

So I think they should be able to feel comfortable in that aspect of it, yes.

They'll go towards public safety.

I think I'm talking more about like the specific project.

So the can they be confident it's going to go towards build paying off pension, building fire stations, getting vehicles rather than increasing flock cameras.

I was I would say so because that's what we've planned this out around.

So we've planned it out around these priorities and and getting these priorities done.

And so this is not something that that you know, we police and fire have both let us know what their priorities are, and so these are the things we would get done.

And so when you needed to do a list and check it off year after year, that'd be fine.

And I also clarify too that um for any of these things, it's also still gonna come forward back to council.

Absolutely.

So if there is, I mean, I think that's the additional check, right?

Is that we have that decision making and they would have to they would have to bring it back to us.

Yeah, this is this will be part of our annual budget allocation.

So anything that we do will be discussed with City Council and so it has to be approved.

And so it's not just a fund that we can just kind of do whatever we decide to do with.

I mean, there is this public conversations about how we spend our dollars.

Yep.

Great.

Jackie, and then we can circle back and then I have questions.

I have questions too.

I was gonna say this for discussion, but since we're on the topic, I'm gonna go ahead and ask it now.

Um if we if it's possible or to make a requirement that part of the budget process is to include a detailed report out of how this money is spent.

Um, and does that need to be added into the language of this current ordinance?

Uh, where can it be in writing so that we make sure that that is happening to you?

I think you would do it as part of a separate ordinance to require that as being part of the budget process.

And so that's not the ballot language.

Not part not part of the ballot language, but that's just so we would need a separate motion for an ordinance.

Sorry, Nancy?

We can actually add, sorry, we're gonna add a section to this particular ordinance that would address that.

I've got some draft language uh prepared based upon your earlier comment if that's something that you want to add.

Great.

Perfect.

Yeah, we did say for after though, right?

All right.

So I have some I just have a few.

And this is uh so just so just to be clear, it would not be added to the battle ballot language.

So that's where I think we're having our but it would be added to the ordinance as as a separate section at the end that just would require a report out on an annual basis as part of the budget process.

Yes, thank you.

You have more on questions?

Okay, so I just have a few questions, and this is kind of related, and this is going way back into your kind of general fund revenue discussion.

And so I don't know if you want to go back to any of those pie charts, but you know, some of the questions that we've received is, you know, in light of some of the things being discussed at the state.

Like when you have on here, I guess my question is for to speak to um our amount of general fund, public safety obviously takes up the biggest, and then public health and human services is next.

Is there so you know if if we see some of the budget cuts happen from the state coming to us, which a lot of those are going to public health and human services?

What's what I Carlin, this might be a crystal ball for you.

What are what are we worried about with our general fund when I when I look at where that money is going?

So uh only around one percent or so of our general fund comes from the state.

So most of our, most of the money that we get, even even the grant money we get is passed through money.

So that's money that went from the Fed, then down to the State, then to us.

That we wouldn't anticipate a movement there.

You would anticipate a loss in revenue from this from the state's actual funding.

And so of that we're only talking about, I believe is one point five percent or something like that.

So it's a small, small amount of revenue.

Uh not to say it it's something we shouldn't think about, but it's definitely a smaller portion than uh what you generally think about when you think about grants.

Okay.

And then my other question is on um, and Carlin, this could be for you, but also potentially for Matthew.

You know, we've heard some concerns over like our budget.

So like, you know, the conversation around how intergovernmental fees are calculated.

And I think I'd last like this is a you know, for especially for someone if they haven't worked in city government, or even if they have, like to understand how it's calculated, because how we spend our general fund, where our general fund revenue also comes from impacts how much revenue we have to spend on these things.

So can you speak to that question?

Actually, I'll let Matt, because we've actually we've done formulates to actually look at how we do intergovernmental fees to make sure that it's not something where we've uh punished the utilities to support the general fund.

It's actually the actual cost for those services that are provided.

And so Matt, can you kind of give how that break breakdown is for intergovernmental charges?

Yeah, so that's something that we shared last year as well during the budget process.

And it's basically the the you the funds outside of the general fund do not have their own finance department.

They do not have their own HR department, they do not have their own law.

Uh and so these are things that we have to charge out and give reimbursement from uh to the general fund.

I know that it was said something about the general fund doesn't pay for those.

Well you don't you wouldn't uh that that would be like paying yourself uh for gas or something.

You know, you can't you can't it's paid out of the general fund, so you can't again pay it from the general fund as well.

So it uh I don't know if I said that.

Yeah, so what you would say what you would have happened if you look at the all our fund allocations.

So if let's first short number, so we say if um you're looking at 10 people for the utility account and the total allocation is 12 is what we're looking at.

That general fund allocation of two would be separated from that 10, so it would actually be eight.

And so it's so it's created in the in the formula.

And so you look at the number of full-time employees for all the entire cities, and then you would break it down between these are general fund employees.

So while the general fund may not be charged for that, the cost to the utility fund is lessened by that amount that's the general fund.

And so it's taken away from that cost.

Okay.

And so it's not.

So I I think the I think what what when people look at it, they say, well, I see in the budget where you can say well.

Utilities are paying out to the general fund.

I don't see where police are paying out for the same service.

And so that amount for the police is just shrunk from the amount that it goes to the utility funds.

And so that's how we come up with that formula.

And but it's all there is there is a rubric that you can look at, you can actually see exactly how each point is uh come up with.

And so it's not something that's kind of and I think we've shared that already, but we can share it again.

We can make it actually public.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I think that was my questions.

Additional questions before we open up for public comment.

Yeah, Christina.

While we're talking about using your microphone, please.

Oh, yeah.

Uh while we're talking about interdepartmental cost and things like that.

Um what have we considered for additional uh support staff that wouldn't be needed in order to help support the additional firefighters and the additional so from you know, my background being in IT, you know, there's going to be an additional maybe app uh systems that you want to install or possible support for those um people that need help with their computer or something like that, or hiring and things like those.

Some of that's a little tough to predict.

Um I think I put in some of the notes.

So our RMS conversion is taking us from on-premise-based servers to cloud servers.

We're hoping that will reduce some of the burden on IT as far as how much they have to deal with our current system, which can be excessive at times.

Um I'm assuming you're talking about not internal like support staff within the police department, but things like human resources, law the departments that wouldn't be included in helping with your supporting your specific.

HR has really um elevated its assistance test over the years, and so we do uh hiring processes and interviews almost every two weeks.

Um those are scheduled if there's one applicant or 10.

Uh so we kind of already have a format for that.

I don't we we do most of our own recruiting in-house.

We have uh an employee that works in the training unit that that's a huge part of his job duties, so we already absorb that.

Um of course there's going to be some.

That's to be expected.

Um HR is going to get more questions if we have 50 extra employees, but um certainly we would support them if they came and said, hey, we need additional staffing.

There's also cities that there's an HR person that's just embedded in those departments as they get larger.

Um and as we grow, that might be a discussion that comes up as an IT person that's actually in the police department budget or an HR person in the police department budget.

So it's different ways of doing that.

I'd say the I'd say.

You recognizing that is uh is enlightening because that's the truth.

I I talk a lot about logistics, logistics wins wars.

So part of this plan is that we haven't come up with a ratio yet, but when we realize we reach that management action point for additional HR support, it may be a 0.5, it may be a 0.25, but it's a point that we have those conversations early, and then we support that in the next budget process.

And like Chief Schlute said, if we can tie it to public safety, we should be able to embed that in into the plan.

So that that is we're we're facing two things.

We're facing a a changing uh changing landscape completely.

Like she mentioned that she's going to a cloud-based server system for their RMS, CAD and everything that we do is manageable now in the cloud.

So it really takes the need for an FTE to uh less than 0.5 FT to manage our servers and to manage a lot of what we do, and we're implementing AI for patient charting and a lot of the uh other um processes that we do for forecasting.

So that that whole world is changing.

I think we're gonna be relying less and less and less on the physical person to do the work and seeing more of the bring your own device and disposable devices in the the future.

So I'd say yes, the recognition is uh is good and it is a part of what we've been discussing, but we're also facing a changing landscape with the technology pretty quickly.

And then I think my second and probably last one for this is um obviously when we're talking about sales increase, that's definitely impact to people, families, and things like that.

What would um I don't know, one thing that each of you guys would want to really depart to or share with the public about why um how that dollar amount, whether it's the $550 for the a year for the lower income versus some of the other amount, like what what would you say to that when they're feeling strapped?

Well, I think we're trying to support the community and create the safest community that we can with the dollars.

I think that's why it's important to move this forward and let the people decide, because uh really it is their organization, it is their decision on what capability they want.

So if if the person or the person that you're trying to explain um has an expectation that's here, that expectation comes with a cost.

And we all as a community need to pay that cost.

If the expectation is lower, obviously they'll probably vote no.

And uh and they wouldn't want that survivability or in in our case the the level of safety.

So I I think I think enabling the people in the community to make that decision is critical, but educating them at the same time is our responsibility.

We need to make sure that they understand what the what the connection or the nexus is to survival.

And I think from my perspective, I always be very candid.

I I get asked a lot of times something happens and people say, Well, what are you going to do about X?

The longer this goes on, the harder it gets to answer that question.

Um when we have increased crime downtown or in different beats and wards.

Um resources can only be spread so thin.

Um we've reduced the narcotics unit by 33 percent this year to move detectives into the unit to deal with violent crime.

Uh we finally have more than one detective investigating property crimes.

Um there are costs associated with people being crime victims.

And so I don't like I don't ever want to be accused or anybody think that I'm using scare tactics by any means.

That's why I've tried to be so transparent about crime rates in the city.

Um but there is a point at which we can't do everything.

We can't be everywhere, we can't meet every single need.

And we will get to the point where we are completely 100% reactionary to 911 calls.

And I don't think the things that I hear, I don't think that's the type of service this community wants.

Um but certainly them deciding.

I think Chief Schaefer is exactly right.

And to be uh go out on a limb a little bit, uh the city has done a very poor job in my tenure as a police officer in 20 years of telling the story.

Um I have said very publicly, I sat through budget cycles where we were told do not ask for personnel.

How can you all make decisions if you don't have the information?

It doesn't work that way.

And so finally we're talking about this, and I'm so sorry for all of you that you are bearing the brunt of this, like we feel.

Um, but it's such an important conversation in this community right now.

And so um just having it, I think is important, and I think if this moves forward, obviously people will hear Chief Schaefer and I speak more than they ever probably wanted to in their lifetimes.

But I think having those conversations in each and every area of this city and really letting people know what the ask is and why is is important.

And then I I just want people to make informed decisions.

That's all they I can really ask.

Thank you.

Yeah, I think the the question becomes how do we get here?

And so I think that has to be part of the conversation is that uh to quote some of our friends, you know, we've kicked it can down the road for a long time.

We've we've known that there's an issue with staffing, we've known there's an issue with how we respond to staffing, and we've been reluctant to ask the question and say, here's the need.

Uh we talked about community policing is our model.

This is how we police.

If you are only responding to calls, you're not community policing.

If you are only responding going from call to call, you're not in your neighborhoods, you're not talking to residents, you're not involved in your community.

And so if those are the goals of who we are as Colombians, then we have to say, okay, here's our plan on how we get there.

Um it's it's been interesting when you look um backwards, and you've looked at, you know, for for several years, we've talked about we don't have the capacity, we don't have and we were constantly still adding to our fund balance, even though we weren't paying our employees accordingly.

You guys make the change.

No, you said that our employees need to come first, and so let's budget for our employees.

And so we've done that.

And now the next step is we have to budget for our growth.

And so we really have to look how do we provide the services our residents are demanding.

You know, when we talk about our survey and you listen to some of the things that people talk about that they're concerned about, it's public safety.

It's our maintenance and cleanliness of our streets.

It's how do we support our neighbors that are in need?

All of those takes financing and it takes the ability to actually pay for those things.

And without being able to address those things, we can we're just constantly talking, but we're not actually proactively going out doing the things that we want to get done.

And so the one thing that you know you've kind of charged me with as a city manager is to make sure that we are engaging with and we're listening to what our residents are saying.

And so we've made it made it part of our hopefully it's being coming ingrained in our DNA.

We still got some room to grow, but we're working on it to make sure that we are engaging with people and we're asking those questions.

And as people are saying, here's our needs, here's what we're looking for, here's what the expectations that we actually put forth plans in order to do those things.

And so that's what we've done for the last couple of years.

I think we've we've made grounds, and I'm excited for things we've been able to do, but we know we have a long way to go and there's a lot more that we still need to do.

All right, I'm gonna go ahead and open up for public comment.

Uh would anyone from the public wish to speak on Bill 11926?

Jim Windsor, 200 Manor Drive.

Um I sent uh you all emails, and I do have problems with the intergovernmental fees.

I would ask you to hold uh the vote on this until the next meeting uh specifically because you will be able to hear the cost of service both for sewer and solid waste.

Solid waste currently pays 13 percent of their revenue uh to the uh general administrative fee, which covers uh all of the departments, uh city clerk, city manager, city council, uh finance human resources and and uh law.

Uh which how do you justify having a utility pay 13 percent of the revenue they're taking in for that?

No, they don't have their own law department or finance department or whatever.

Uh but the utilities as a whole uh pay the majority of the general administrative fee.

They pay 70 percent of the total uh all of the five utilities.

Citizens have to pay a minimum of over $67 if they have a smallest roll cart if they live in a house less than 750 square feet before they use any water, any electricity, or discharge any sewer.

And you you are going to hear, I mean, you've already hearing uh Water and Right Board wants to raise uh water another 10 percent.

Electric, uh they want to have the uh power cost adjustment go up 10 percent.

You're probably gonna hear that solid waste is going to have a rate increase.

Citizens can't do this.

And so why can't you take part of that six million dollars that now the general fund is going to have available and do a better allocation of cost?

And you need to ask why is solid waste uh based on their own methodology, which I believe is wrong.

Why is solid waste paying more than electric, which is vastly larger budget?

Uh it's like seven million dollars more based on their methodology.

Yet solid waste pays a million dollars more than electricity does for the general administrative fee.

So we need uh transparency on this issue and not just brushed off with some quick words.

So I hope you will hold this.

I hope you will look deeper into it.

I would love to support uh public safety, but if this continues, I certainly can't.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jim.

Um good evening, Tracy Wilson Cleveland.

I'm gonna try to escalate um what the city manager said.

Um, I saw things in the slide that I wanted to pull out, but since it's not online, I can't refer to what page it's on.

So I'm gonna have to skip all that.

It really irritates me when we have these conversations and it's not available to the public.

There's no way we can follow along.

There's too much information going on to expect the public to take.

I mean, we record these meetings and then go home and strip them down using AI.

That's the only way we can follow, because not even the media can report on the minutia of data that's going on tonight.

It's just not acceptable to not put the presentation online where you're going to talk about something you're gonna put on the ballot that people are going to vote for, and yes, I'm raising my voice because it pisses me off.

First of all, we should be talking about systems and structures.

You can call it logistics if you want to.

What's missing from this conversation is systems and structures and how we failed in systems and structures and how we're gonna fix it.

Where does that at the top of the line?

It's growth.

You got it on your chart, I don't know which page it is.

58 percent growth.

Mmm.

Talking about raising all these fees.

Well, if we aren't serious about the cost of growth, let's just backtrack how many houses did we build last year?

How much does each one of those houses cost and what's it gonna cost to pay them, right?

I don't have a quibble with them.

My issue is I think it's wrong to pass on your losses to poor people, because it's not just about the one percent on their grocery bill, it's about all the other taxes they pay when I go to I high V, and I'm also paying my TDDs toward them and some other taxes, and it's a lot of money.

And I paid 412 per gallon of gas the other day, and that pissed me off too.

Okay.

So why isn't the North Central Station fixed?

Somebody tell me that.

What is the repair for the cost of growth that we lost?

And how do we get back on track?

How do we get back on track?

That's part of the repair.

So, yeah, we kick the can, but we have refused to deal with systems and structures in a way that matter.

Oh, other thing, Kyle Raymond, Kanye sends out a press release tonight.

Y'all can't all be doing the tax uh sales increase at the same time.

So the sheriff needs a sales tax, we need a sales tax, the state wants to get an income tax.

We should be having a collaborative conversation, so we're not all putting our hand in the cookie jar at different times and saying, oh, we want to get the voters on our side when actually we're confusing the voters because as institutions, systems and structures logistically, can't get their act together.

So if you want to close the grap and quit passing on losses, what we're gonna do to poor people by voting for this, we need to deal with our systems and structures and be honest about where we failed and fix it yesterday.

Good evening.

My name is Danny Perez.

I will not be doxing myself tonight.

Um First of all, I think it's appalling that we still don't put accessibility in the forefront of um our presentations.

There are people who can't be here and are watching this live and they don't have this information.

It shouldn't have be an afterthought.

Oh, we'll just put it on the internet later.

The A for accessibility is for accessibility, not for an afterthought.

On top of that, I personally don't mind sale taxes if they go back towards me and my community.

No offense, you said something about um you get a lot of um calls about traffic and you're falling behind in a hole.

Well, Colombia in general is falling behind in a hole.

I walk these streets every single day, and it's crumbling.

Whether it's historic buildings, a historic neighborhood, uh parks, we're crumbling.

And a good chunk of that is um climate change.

A good chunk of that is uh, of course, we just don't have the budget to always fix everything all at once.

I understand that we are a working class family and we don't have money for everything, and we're one, two disasters away from being out of budget.

I understand that.

Nevertheless, I think that if we're going to have a sale tax on anything, that money needs to go back to infrastructure or public transportation or preserving black history.

I don't understand why you guys can't get a grant.

I think that um right now we have different we need to have different priorities to make sure that we have actual public safety where we have accessibility to walkable, rollable, and drivable streets that are safe.

More police does not change driving behavior infrastructure does.

I know it's expensive, but nobody has to spend all this money all at once.

And looking at um, you said that uh it was like what almost over $2 million to get more storm um pipes and stuff.

Well, that number is gonna get higher as climate change comes upon us because you're gonna have more than just storm pipes as an issue.

You're gonna have issues with uh sinkholes, you're gonna have issues with wind damage, uh hail damage, you're gonna have issues with so much wear in neighborhoods that are not just the poorest neighborhoods, and I'm worried that we are not prepared for that.

And I'm worried that the people who will someday replace you will not prioritize that.

And I want us to prioritize that over paying more police.

I'm not saying they're not important, I'm just saying we need to reprioritize and be people first.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm back.

I should have just let you talk earlier.

You could have been out of here.

It's fine.

I'm gonna be here for the other one too.

So my name is Samantha Jones, I'm part of the first word, and I am here against this one percent sales tax increase.

It's a tax on the poor.

We already have a lot of sales taxes in Columbia.

I was looking at that number, and we don't have nearly as many people as Kansas City or St.

Louis, and you want us to put us at nearly nine percent of our sales taxes when we talk about that $550 on that poor population.

I recently lost my job.

So $550 is a lot of money that I could be putting towards my groceries.

And frankly, with the gas prices as high as they are, that's just one more thing that I have to worry about trying to make sure that I have food on my table.

And for those of us who are unemployed and trying to find employment, that's hard enough.

For those of us who are employed who are making less than minimum wage because we can barely make our ends meet, or we're working 70 plus hours a week.

The working poor do not need to have this kind of tax on them.

There are other ways to make the city safer.

Adding police officers is not one of the ways to do that.

Um I attended the public meeting for this um in Ward 5 when Don Waterman was talking about this.

They were discussing buying drones and increasing flock cameras as part of this increase.

We don't need drones.

That a single drone is $30,000, and they're only supposed to last three weeks.

Maximum.

They're not supposed to be used 24-7.

My partner is a um former um engineer, army engineer, and she has used those drones and has talked about the that they are not useful in this capacity.

Um this increase of taxes on taxes on taxes is just exhausting.

And it's not feasible.

And there are other ways that we can allocate funds and better ways we can allocate funds.

50% of our general fund is already going to public safety, and I don't think it's being allocated properly currently.

And so until we can look at that budget and make sure that the funds are actually being allocated the way they're supposed to be, we should not be voting on this increase.

Thank you.

Anyone else from the public wish to speak?

Yes, Renee Carter from Second Ward.

And I just want to point out I agree with Jim Windsor.

We need to wait and see what our cost of services report is.

But I also want to bring up the fact that repeatedly during times where they have we have new developments in the city that we've asked what is the real cost going to be, you know, how much are, you know, to have our trash collected, how much for streets, how much for cleaning the streets, how much for police and firemen.

And we don't see that put in when we're going to add a new subdivision.

And I think it's very important for us to start to focus on having those kind of items in our budget, or else we can't afford to expand.

You know, I hear us talk, oh, we have to have more houses, we have to have more houses to meet the needs, meet the needs of what?

If we don't have fire, the fire department that can even go there, if we don't have people that can pick up our trash, if we don't have police officers that can even go to that neighborhood, we can't afford to expand our neighborhoods.

We can't.

It doesn't matter how many houses we think we need, it matters of what we can actually do.

And so I came from a city that I lived in for a few years.

It was called Kingsport, Tennessee, and it was called a model city.

And one of the things that I remember most about that city is that until the infrastructure was in place, and that everything that was needed for a new subdivision was in place.

You know, we're talking about our utilities and the new plan for that.

That is going to be very expensive.

And who's going to bear that cost?

The poorest of our neighbors.

And that's going to include more expansion, and we're going to need more police officers and more fire, and you're going to have to raise the amount you're asking for.

We need to think very clearly and deeply each time we add more housing of whether we can really afford it.

Thank you.

Thank you, Renee.

My name is John Shin.

I may actually make comments on this before about a two months ago while I was here for something else.

The police and fire departments don't pay enough to our personnel as it is about 10,000 below the national average on in Middle America.

I don't know about the East Coast and West Coast so much.

The 2.2 officers per 1,000 people in the community is a goal that we should have.

That's just an average.

We're well below that right now.

So our police and fire are currently inadequate from what we're hearing.

Something that uh, and I generally support the the ordinance and what you're trying to do, but to simplify it.

Roughly $60 million, as I understand, comes out of the general fund.

It's roughly 49% of the total in the pie from what I saw.

What needs to be in this ordinance is that that percentage needs to be maintained as allocation to public safety fire and police on top of what the one percent we're about to be asked to approve.

So that when we approve this, two years from now you're not coming back and saying, well, we're reducing the amount in the general fund because we've already got this one percent over here, and we're not fixing the problem.

So if you tie it to a percentage that it will be 50 percent, 49 percent of the general fund will be maintained in perpetuity for fire and police on top of what we are being asked to approve, I would support that.

And also possibly put something in there where it's a statutory goal by the city to have 2.2 personnel per 1,000 residents.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Be well.

I know you guys have a hard job.

Don't envy you.

Oh.

There's no substitute for a good blaster kid.

He's giving you some Star Wars shout-outs.

Anyone else from the public wish to speak?

Hey, um, I just want to say that uh we stay your name.

Oh, I'm sorry, sorry.

Uh Matthew Shacht uh two-on-one North Ann Street.

Um I just want to say that when Vidwest building almost burned down because an HVAC system uh caught fire because a bird nest got sucked into it, you guys were there and you put it out.

When uh some of our vehicles got broken into in a parking lot, um, you came, you documented the evidence, we gave you security footage and you caught the gentleman's, and we felt safe operating in our space.

So I think when you invest in those services, you're empowering the community to do what they're already doing.

And and I think the key is is that when you project your city resources into these communities, understand some communities are really resource poor.

And if if a new police cruiser rolls up and it's a poor place and the buildings are poor and the resources are scarce, it looks like the city doesn't care about that neighborhood and it's just trying to clamp down.

So there really is a perception issue and a story issue and a vision issue with how you grow the city and what resources you project.

And if you can project the the really necessary infrastructure of public safety with your softer resources, and that's where the community media centers come in, your community programs, your love of your block grants, the things that get people out talking to each other that that create third spaces, because frankly, if there's somebody have a little mental breakdown, you may not need to call a cop if the neighbors know who they are.

They can just be like, hey man, sit down, we'll take care of you, we'll give you some water, right?

They can solve it.

Communities can solve a lot of their own problems if they're connected and they're working together and they trust each other.

So there is a really delicate uh and and complex thing you're trying to do when you project your city resources into the communities.

And if you can find the right balance, as crazy as it sounds, I think you'll make everybody happy.

If the balance gets out of whack, you're gonna have people coming being like, I don't want cops, or I don't want fire, I don't want this, or I don't want that.

And it's just gonna be kind of a chaotic chorus of different needs being unmet.

So please, whatever you do, and I'm in favor of the 1% increase because um I I don't know how you serve the public without giving them more funds.

It's just seems impossible.

Uh whatever you do, though, think about not this in isolation.

Think about projecting your resources holistically and what that holistic package should be when you go into the neighborhoods.

Thank you.

Thank you, Matt.

Would anyone else from the public wish to speak on bill 11926 for calling a special election?

Or special, yeah, maybe it's special.

I don't know.

All right.

My name is Shane Lowe from Ward 4.

Uh couple of questions and comments I had on this.

Uh first of all, and I might have missed this, but why are we looking at 1% specifically?

Why not 0.75%?

Why not 1.25, why not 1.5?

Uh, and just uh clarifying question does this capture online sales as well?

Um the other question I had is uh given that I know we often work with state preemptions when it comes to taxation.

Uh are police and fire the only things that can be funded with a public safety tax, or are there other things that that could uh apply to?

Because again, um public safety is a very holistic question, and like, hey, do I feel safe in my community?

Isn't just, hey, do I know that if I call 911, I'm gonna get a quick response time.

It also is like, hey, is my street design welcoming?

Is it the kind of place where a mom feels safe walking her kid and I feel safe because I see the mom walking her kid?

Um, is it um and the other question I had is specifically we're looking at a sales tax here.

Are there other additional tax instruments we have to look at this?

Um can we level excise taxes or things like that?

You know, one percent of, you know, obvious someone buying bread for today is probably gonna have less public impact on public services from that piece of bread than if they're buying, you know, the fifth drink at the bar downtown.

Uh and so I guess there's a question there.

Um I think overall this kind of gets again to this question of like growth and maintenance.

Uh I think a lot of times I worry that the temptation as the cities to operate is like, oh, growth's gonna pay for growth, and we're just gonna keep growing and we're gonna keep you know being able to fund the expansion because we're gonna continuously expand.

Uh and we know that, like, hey, that's not necessarily true.

And so my concern is one of the things I'm hearing here is like, hey, we are behind on our pension fund.

Like we're already not meeting a really important obligation we need to meet to be able to do this.

And so part of my concern is like it sounds like we're wanting to expand and get more, you know, elements here.

And I totally understand, you know, the desire, like, hey, we would love her officers not to have to work as many hours and such, but like I want to make sure we're meeting our core um responsibilities to our people uh before then.

And then uh finally, one last other comment I had in this discussion.

I'd really like to see a little bit more results-based kind of discussion here.

We talk about how many cops per or officers per uh hundred uh per thousand citizens.

I think it's probably important that we also talk about, hey, what are people's public perceptions of how safe they feel?

What are people's perception, like what are actual crime rates and things like that?

And hey, if we're getting a lot better results with a lot fewer officers, like, hey, are there things that we can look at and say, hey, we're doing something really good right now?

Let's not lose that if we expand.

Appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Shane.

Anyone else from the public wish to speak on Bill 11926 calling to special election for potential additional sales tax?

All right, seeing none, I'll come to the the council comments and questions.

And I will note before that um there has been a potential proposal for um delaying the vote to the May 18th.

I just acknowledge that other things.

So questions from or comments from council on this.

Yeah, Jackie.

So to the May 18th date, um, some things that have come up that have me concerned with that date is excuse me, the the legislation that is currently happening at the state level or and has happened, and I know we can't um necessarily predict what the state's going to do, but I think part of this discussion should be talking about um placement on the August ballot if the income tax elimination initiative is placed on the August ballot.

Um the messaging, not that we're not capable of doing messaging, there will be lots of other messaging that will be confusing, I think, potentially to a voter.

And so I do have concerns regarding that.

And it is my understanding of the situation the governor has until May 22nd to make the decision on where he's gonna place that ballot.

Um if it's gonna be on August or November, it is also my understanding that we have until 5 p.m.

on May 26th to make that question, she let I don't know if you can if that makes you freak out or not.

No, okay.

Um so my question is if we decide tonight to delay the vote on this, do we delay it till May 18th, or do we delay it until and call a special meeting on the 26th?

Or do we put a withdrawal trigger of some kind in in the language?

I think so.

This is both like a council kind of logistical question, or I mean yeah, philosophical kind of question, sort of, but logistically, I think some of these things for um might be staff answered.

I think the question I would ask to you is that you know, we also know that there's gonna be a bunch of potential things on the November ballot.

And the question is whether, you know, we know that we want to put this question to the voters.

Yes.

And I don't know if there's ever the right ballot in light of all the different changes that are happening at the state.

So I just I just lead it with that, where I don't know as far as philosophically whether or not it worked because let's say he does.

It then, but is it better on the November ballot for the question, you know, for turnout.

So I don't know if you wanted to speak to the logistical questions, Nancy, before we get into our we can do it either way.

I've actually um based upon kind of council questions from earlier today.

I've drafted some language to um to pull back if you wanted to do something else and schedule meetings for November.

Um, but I think that really does beg the question of whether or not you just want to move forward or not.

So I think it's what you you tell me what you want to do, and I will make it happen.

Yeah.

Any other staff comments before we go on ours?

And on to Carlin or Jill or Brian.

I do get the um wanted to kind of pause and see exactly what happens on a state level.

I mean, we have this you mentioned the uh press release from the county as well as I mean the one factors that we have to look at.

I think the one thing that we also have to talk about is you know where we're heading as a community.

And we're always gonna have different forces that we're gonna have to look at and kind of decide on how do we try to right path.

I I think uh we've we've talked about the August ballot for about a year now of being you know part of the thought process of if we're gonna go out to the sales tax, here's the time, here's the best approach to get to do that.

Uh there are definitely other factors we have to look at.

I would say that let's say the governor does put it on for the to talk on the income tax in August.

Nov November that there's still going to be that factor of well, what does that mean for other taxing uh revenues?

Because if we know if the income tax goes away, there has to be another revenue source that the state's gonna have to talk about.

The state hasn't presented what that plan looks like or what that approach is going to be.

Uh and so it's hard for us to kind of hold the chart to see exactly what can occur, what will occur from the state level when we're looking at what our needs are as a local community, did you have your hand up?

Um I after you all debate this.

My suggestion if you're going to continue it and not vote on it tonight, would be to continue it to the 18th, and then you can always continue it to be able to do that.

Continue a special call for a special meeting the following week.

Yes.

Um I would just hate for us to table it for a special meeting or whatever, and then you have a decision earlier.

Yeah, you know, there's no need to call a special meeting for that.

And if you have a special meeting, it's gonna have to be during the day sometime, which means potentially less public comment or whatever if people are working.

It just depends on the situation.

Yeah.

Valerie had our hand up.

I think on this question about the tabling or well, I have we have I have some discussion on the question about the tabling, but I actually previously had my hand up for other comments.

Um let's stay on this one, because they were answering this question.

It doesn't hurt us to have more information.

I prefer to table um regardless of this discussion about what may happen in November.

I want to to know what's happening now on this ballot when I'm weighing the decision as to what I'm sending to the ballot.

Um so whether that's delayed till 18th and get all the information, and if we don't have it on till on until the 18th, delay till the 26th, I I'm fine with that, but I want to have the most opportunity to have the most information that I can to make an educated decision.

Um and I also want to say this only provides more opportunities for public information, for public input.

If we're gonna talk about this today and again on the 18th and again on the 26th, we have three times for the public to come talk to us as opposed to one time for the public to come talk to us.

So I don't like having special meetings during the day.

Um, but if it's a special meeting that increases the opportunity for input as opposed to decreasing it, it's it's different to me.

Okay.

Yeah, Nick.

Well, I think the the sense of the council is that we table this until the 18th.

So I'm I'm gonna assume that that's true.

Uh and if we have a meeting on the 26th, and it is during the day, I understand what you're saying, Valerie, but it also might open the way for some people to attend who wouldn't be able to attend at night.

So there's that as well.

And there are other avenues for people get to give their input too.

As to whether we put it on the ballot, I guess I'll be a little bit ahead of that.

Uh, with if if the governor follows through and does what he's saying he's going to do.

I think we need to trust trust the people on this to some degree.

We need to do the best we can, and sure that they will do the best they can to educate the public.

But there are two distinct things.

They're they're both about taxes.

That's that's to be sure.

Uh but I think they're they're different in kind and the in in an important way.

Uh so my tendency would be to support going ahead and putting it on the ballot on August 4 for that reason.

Questions on the tabling for that one.

Okay.

Okay.

Oh, just and and also I think it's important to hear what DeCarron said.

We we've been talking about this for a while, and though we haven't been talking about it in earnest until after the first of this year.

It's been out there for a good long while.

Our runway is much longer than what the state is is is considering, and certainly longer than what the county is concerning.

I mean, they're just basically throwing this out just before we talk about it at council, uh, which makes me wonder what the motivation for that was.

But um I think um we this has been in the public for a while in this regard, and people have had an opportunity to think about it for a good while yet.

And yes, we we look for and would want that further uh comment from the those further that further input from the public, but uh we we have been talking about it for a while.

Including at joint county and regional meetings, yeah.

Yeah, Christina on the tabling, yeah.

Um just kind of going off of what Nick said here.

I I do understand that it's been talked about for a while, but at the same time, I do think there's been a lot over the last six months that has changed dramatically in how people are feeling and security-wise.

Um I do think that's something to consider when when we're going out to ask people for I think it will save the motion for the end for the tabling until then we'll ask additional council questions or council comments.

So Valerie, you had your hand up.

I did, thanks.

Yeah, you know, we've had a lot of testimony tonight, and we've had a ton of information, and I I appreciate the commitment to have more information follow, um, and I'll be looking forward to that.

Um I hate that this is a sales tax.

Um I hate the things that made it a sales tax.

Um, and not everything can be a sales tax, I agree.

Um I can see the things that pushed us to a sales tax, our own history with property taxes, the movements of the state, um, our growth and our fees and our changes in fees.

Um I see it all, and I I share your frustration.

Um I want to talk about growth.

Um we're here because of growth.

We're here because of growth that has already occurred.

Um I agree, I don't think we've done a great job at capturing the true cost of development or the true cost of growth.

Um I want us to move to a place where we think of police as infrastructure, where we think of public safety as infrastructure.

And I there are people, so I know that sounds a little crass, but this is an infrastructure item that we provide to our population when there is new growth, when there is new housing, when there is expansion of city limits.

We have impacts to roads, we have impacts to utilities, we have impacts to public safety, and those are all costs.

We have development fees that cover some of those, maybe not all of them.

New roads within a new development are the cost of the developer.

And it's not just about stopping growth to prevent more costs, it's about how do we provide for the people that we have right now.

Um I think the staffing thing is important, and I will be honest.

I have very real concerns about what it means to our central neighborhoods and our existing population, whether they're central or not, our existing population, if we don't have the staff, the emergency personnel to meet their needs when called upon.

Um and proactive versus reactive matters.

Um this is our ability to do community policing.

Um, when we're talking about growth, I think we need to look at the impact of growth.

I think we need to capture those development costs, both in our projections on our agenda, what's the true cost of a um of growth of development, but also in our capturing with fees or whatever mechanism making sure that it's covered in our how much we charge for road expansions, our metrics for what does a linear foot of sidewalk cost.

Um that said, there's another story here, and it's not just development and slowing development, it's not all the same, you know.

If we I don't think slowing development will help because we don't have enough housing.

We don't have enough development to meet the needs of our current population, and that's well that's well understood.

Um I think we need to look seriously at annexation policies because that dilutes our ability to respond and spreads out our services.

That drives response times being spread out.

And I think we need to think seriously about where we put our growth because I'm looking at 2020 to 2024, a decrease in housing in Central Columbia while there is a dramatic increase elsewhere.

And that's a choice, and that's a choice that affects our cost of services.

So yeah.

I think this needs to go to the voters.

And I appreciate that it's a voter choice.

I also think that having the money to support our staff, having the money to have staff support our population.

It's needed.

It is.

So this is just my initial comments.

But this is where my thoughts are at the moment.

Other council comments, yeah.

Mira.

Much of what I was going to say was already covered by my colleagues.

So I will just say like a very strong affirmation to all of that.

But the other piece I want to talk about is that when we are talking about this potential funding for public safety, I cannot help but seeing this as a labor issue, seeing this as an employee issue, a worker issue.

The number one thing that sticks out to me is that pension.

We have been talking about this pension that we are struggling with, to put it kindly, for far, far, far longer than I have been on council.

It desperately needs to be funded.

We need to be out of this hole.

We need to not be paying debt into this pension.

I wish we had a better answer on when we would be out of that hole.

I wish we could look at this public safety tax and say in X many years we are going to stop being in this hole.

We are going to stop having to talk about this.

When we talk about retention, they're only going to stay in a job they feel safe doing.

And for our firefighters, the fact that we are not two in two out is truly absurd for their safety and their willingness to continue being in.

When we have more staff, that means they are working less overtime, they're working less mandatory overtime.

When they're working less overtime, they are less burnt out, they are staying longer.

They are doing better at their jobs and offering better service to our community and making a safer community.

We also see that trickle out into, I mean, you can talk about the trickle out of overtime for so long.

You can talk about how it affects their families, their spouses who may be having to take time off work to take care of the children because the police officer is working mandatory overtime and cannot stay home with a sick child.

There is there is just so much here where we will be able to treat our employees better, to value our employees more, and to keep them with the City of Columbia.

That on top of everything Valerie said, I think this is also such an important labor issue.

Thank you, Vera.

Other council comments on Bill 119.

I'll just I'll just add to Oh Jill, you want count you want to be on council?

Absolutely not.

Did you have a comment?

Can I keep my pension?

I should ask that question first as part of it.

Um, Chief Schaefer and I have talked, and just for what it's worth when you were asking about uh timing, I think we feel most comfortable with August.

Um we feel very much like we have the wind at our backs right now.

We've had a lot of community conversations about this.

We talked about it at the community summit as recently as March.

We've got a lot of great feedback about what people are wanting.

Um we asked some very specific questions that actually we knew were would be part of this discussion.

So I think that'll that'll be great information to include um in future conversations.

But we also uh went back, you know, the survey that you guys did that we do in the fall asked some of these questions.

So I think we feel like it would almost kind of break the momentum to wait.

Um we recognize there's some risk there, but I think we talked about it in for as much as uh votive we get uh as advisors, we would we would recommend August.

You know, I think if if you if the stream continues on the support and the safety of the employees, you'll have the employees.

I think there's there's a level of trust that needs to be firmed up.

And I think that's that's one way that you'll see it get a lot stronger.

And hope is a powerful thing, right?

I mean, Vera, what you're saying is completely true.

And we have we have staff that are really looking for a light at the end of the tunnel, and this gives them great, great hope.

That's kind of a Star Wars reference too, isn't it?

Sorry.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

Betsy, did you have your hand up?

Did you have a uh comment?

I guess um I don't really have as much of a comment.

Uh my question is what do we need to do?

And I presume you as the mayor will know this.

If we want to table this till the 18th to get more information, could you take care of that?

Well, I just had just one other comment I I think that um that I want to say is um I think you've heard a lot of additional information asked.

So like if we table it to the May 18th, like with the knowledge being that there's a few additional information, so kind of follow up with council members so that we make sure that that is all included uh in the attachment of what's on the agenda as well as that the presentation and the slides are attached to that as well.

Did you have something to say, Nancy?

No, the only thing I think I would ask is that if you are contemplating any kind of amendments to really get those to us early, um we need some time to I think it's it sounds like we're more open to the idea of tabling this to the 18th, we don't not adding the amendment on the withdrawal yet until and then we can have the conversation at that meeting about potential.

Just looking for any other amendments that you might have to do with the question.

I think the question on the ordinance uh piece.

There was a question on the ordinance, I think.

Annual reporting.

The annual reporting.

The annual reporting.

Yeah.

I have language for that.

I have that for the ordinance.

You can I think yes, suggesting for that, um, but not on the potential of the withdrawal, because we might just do that.

Right.

Okay.

All right.

Um so yeah, so uh I'll Gavia.

Can I ask?

So if we are not looking, if we're not looking at the potential of the withdrawal, and we're looking at adding about the annual reporting, which it sounds like Nancy has already drafted.

It so then I guess what is the purpose of the delay?

I like it for whatever other information people have asked about and some clarification and the opportunity just to sort of review this again.

I know it it's probably another half an hour presentation again, but I think it's important that we get that information out to the citizens and perhaps just another group of people.

So I I would the only other thing I would say to that is that that's also part of the educational campaign over the ballot measure.

I I just bring that up, right?

Like that is part of it.

Sorry, because right, because we're feeling consensus on council to put it to the voters.

It's the question of what additional information.

So Valerie would like to respond and then Vera.

And this information that we received tonight being attached to an agenda, I think is an important step.

The presentation that we had tonight is as well as if we can get any of the additional information requested.

It's different than it being part of an educational campaign later, because it's discussed here.

So it's one more opportunity to have these things together in a place where people will be able to look to access it.

So what I'll what I'll say is I am I am surprised and happy to hear that staff is confident that no matter what the state does, it could still be successful in August.

So when I was thinking about delay, I was thinking about it for the purpose of potentially moving to November.

And I do believe in trusting our staff if they feel strongly about August.

And so if we delay, that then means we are also delaying the start of the educational campaign of talking to the voters.

And so that is where it does have me concerned that we are suddenly in, if we are truly going for August, we are in a short time frame.

And the sooner we can get with the formal campaign of education rather than the council meetings, which love everyone in the audience, but it's not everyone in Columbia, um, the sooner that can kick off.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Christina.

So um newbie question.

Yeah.

Um Christina.

Yeah.

We um say we approve to go to the ballot and there's uh educational kickoff.

Um as the council becomes aware of things and stuff, is that an opportunity for us at council meetings to address the public in our public comment about it, or would we no longer be allowed to uh discuss it at the table or the dais?

Nancy, this will be a question for you.

So let's say once we voted on to put this out to the ballot, and now there's you know it's it's basically a campaign.

What can council talk about at the dais?

Like can we ask for additional information related to like this information?

Could we ask for that additional information?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Um this is a public forum.

You have a right to ask for and get and make statements and as does any other member of the public during the during the public comment period.

And I think one other question I have is just like we meet quarterly with the county and you know, monthly often with the county, uh, as well as with other institutions in town and the school board, uh, as we're talking about this with the voters, whoever else has a tax out there, will we talk with them?

You know, I mean, just kind of as we've already been doing for the past few years for for most for most of the departments doing that.

Just want to make sure that we're still collaborating on that.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Um now I'm not so sure if you have a full on.

So do you want to make your motion to my question is if we need to add the um language first regarding the annual reporting?

So what I would propose, and I can read this to you, and you and you actually can do this tonight and still table it till next time if that's what you choose.

Um, would be to add a new section six to the ordinance that would read if approved by the voters as a part of the annual budget process, the city manager shall provide a detailed report to the council on the revenues and expenditures associated with the proceeds generated by the sales tax.

Okay, so you want to make the motion to add that to amend the ordinance to add section six?

Oh, I'm I'm gonna apologize.

That was actually a section.

Not section six.

That was it would be uh section five five and new section five and then section five turns out to be six.

Can you read it again, Nancy?

Is there a way we can pull it up on the screen for everyone?

No.

Don't have that capacity.

We're we're replacing all of the IT in this room.

I would have to tie.

Can you read it out loud?

I'll read it.

If approved by the voters as a part of the annual budget process, the city manager shall provide a detailed report to the council on the revenues and expenditures associated with the proceeds oper the proceeds generated by the sales tax.

Question.

Do we need to add an would it be necessary to add an additional teal detail of like um for the last fiscal year for the time it starts to I mean, is that needed?

Because it's part of the budget process, which is the annual budget.

Christina.

Is it possible to request that an external auditor uh perform that?

So it be an actual audit rather than just a report.

An audit of the funding?

You could certainly have that d the audit is the audit occurs every year anyway, Matthew.

That might be something that would address to make sure that the funds that are being expended out of that fund actually meet the requirements of the of the ballot language.

So that audit occurs anyway by an external auditor.

But whether or not external auditors focus on what areas we tell them to focus.

So we would have to have that sp, you know, like as a plan.

And strategic audit plan.

And that would be your prerogative as as a council at any point in time if you actually wanted to either audit that fund specifically by not just the annual auditor, but a third party auditor, you could do that.

I probably wouldn't put it into your city your ordinance because then it would require it every year, even if you didn't feel like it was necessary.

Report and audit means two different things.

Right.

It is.

No, it is you're exactly right.

It is two different things.

Yeah.

You're correct.

Did you want to respond?

The the council has to approve the budget every year anyway.

I mean, this is something that would come to you all for passage.

Uh but Nancy is right as well that the audit would, I mean, our our auditors would look at that.

Um and we could have we could have them put an emphasis on on that account as well.

But yeah, um I think you are covered in this.

Okay.

So we have a proposed section five, a motion for um the wording that Nancy gave for section five and for section six, section five to move to section six or on your piece.

You have a motion on that.

Okay.

All right.

Do we have a second on the motion to add second in from Valerie?

All those in favor of the amendment say aye.

I need opposed?

Um me.

Uh nay.

Yeah, say nay.

All right.

So the motion amendment passes for that.

Um so now you want to make your request for then the delay.

Or not a delay.

Well, she's gonna let her go and make a motion to table until May 18th.

Okay.

We have a motion to table till May 18th.

Do we have a second?

Yeah.

Okay.

Second.

Okay, second by Christina.

Um, all those in favor of tabling to um May.

Now I want to really check because I've been saying the wrong dates and numbers all day.

It's the 18th.

14 days from today.

Thank you.

Um that's math, Sheila.

Um, all right.

So we have a motion and a second uh to table till May 18th, uh, Bill 11926 as amended.

Do we have a second?

I'm sorry, we had a second.

All those in favor of tabling till uh May 18th say aye.

Aye.

Aye.

All those in favor say nay.

All those opposed all those opposed say nay.

Oh.

Now we gotta do it.

Do a roll call.

Okay, thank you.

Okay.

Sorry.

On the motion on the table.

Ms.

Buffalo, no.

Ms.

Carroll, yes.

Ms.

Elwood, no.

Ms.

Sample, yes.

Mr.

Foster.

Yes.

Mr.

or Ms.

Hartman.

Yes.

And Ms.

Peters.

No.

It passes four to three.

Okay.

And so the amended Bill 11926 will be on our May 18th calendar, in addition to the additional information, presentation slides and all of that, correct?

That's correct.

And we will actually have that language on your agenda so you'll be able to look at it.

And if you want to make further tweaks to that or adjustments for their amendments, then you'll be able to do it at that time.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Can I just make a quick comment here?

Yeah.

I I hear the concern about education.

I I think that we we can still there still can be some education to happen between now and two weeks from now.

And I would encourage staff to do that in any way they can.

Do we have a be heard page for this?

Not yet.

Not yet.

Might be a good idea to have that.

Put some of this information on there.

Yeah.

And then I honestly most people are going to start paying attention to this most likely closer to the time that they're going to vote.

And so I think we need to have an ongoing educational process right up until that time.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, appreciate the three-hour discussion over a thing we tabled.

But it was good conversation and I appreciate the public comments and the questions brought up as well.

Thank you.

Two and a half, sorry.

Gosh.

All right.

We had a few items pulled from the consent agenda.

I'll probably just preface this, say we'll have Sheila read these, and I'll note the ones that are potentially being tabled or withdrawn, just so we can be aware of that one.

So Sheila, will you please read Bill 9726?

Council Bill 9726 is an ordinance amending chapter 29 of the city code as it relates to the definition of family and fixing the time when this ordinance shall become effective second reading.

Do we have a staff report?

Yes, thank you.

Uh Clint Smith, Community Development Director.

Um while I wait for the PowerPoint to be pulled up, um, can I kind of give you an overview of the request?

Yeah.

Learning all the new processes here.

Uh if I need to.

Okay, thanks.

Well, I didn't see my slideshow in there, so while I wait maybe for some IT support, um we can give a little bit of overview, I think, um, on this request.

Uh so as uh the clerk had noted, this was a a UDC text amendment uh request uh for the definition of family.

So a little um background um on that proposal.

So this was something that was identified uh in the city-county housing study um in order to address uh some of the items that were recommended in the housing study um for housing um potential.

No.

Okay.

Go ahead, Clint.

I think you can give some argument at least.

Okay, I don't know if for this will help.

So uh yeah.

So sorry, excuse me for the uh the pause there.

Um but uh so the request here that we'll be presenting tonight is uh is a text amendment.

So that is uh essentially to the unified development code that is essentially the city's uh zoning ordinance.

Um a little background, I think, on what precipitated and what led to this um proposed amendment.

Um there was a housing study in uh 2024 uh that included a series of recommendations uh in 2025.

This recommendation was specifically taken up by the planning and zoning uh through a series of work sessions.

Uh they did review um the definition uh and um this uh I think fall or early last year uh or early this year did um review a final draft of that definition.

So uh a couple main points with that definition, and I apologize that I don't have the PowerPoint here pulled up.

Uh it would be a little easier to reference some of those.

Um but really the uh the definition um of family really uh revolves around a couple main points.

And so there's two portions of the definition of family that really um I think were the kind of uh precipitating um topics for the conversation.

And one is it does uh separate the definition of family into two components.

Uh and it is a a related and an unrelated component uh to that definition.

Um and just to take a step back from that, uh just to kind of explain what family does regulate within the city.

Um so basically all the occupancy within uh residential structures within the city is regulated by this definition that's found within the unified development code.

So um family uh essentially allows for um if you are a related individual group, uh it allows for uh one type of I think um one type of arrangement, and that is uh in two separate zoning districts, there's an R1 designation and an RMF designation.

Um I'm sorry, I'm gonna pause for one second for nope.

Okay.

So there is um again.

Look at us.

Sorry.

There we go.

That's much better.

Okay.

So um the uh again, so the the UDC, and I apologize, it's a little hard to explain, I think, um, without the reference on the slides, but uh essentially the city, um all the occupancy generally within rental units, um, is really evaluated on on two criteria.

Um one is whether you're related or you're not related.

Um whether you're uh and also whether you're in a certain zoning district.

So I'll start with uh if you're unrelated.

Uh and that really uh speaks to the our nature as it is a city that has a university within it.

Uh so we put a cap, uh hard cap um on the occupancy within these structures if you're unrelated uh in most zoning districts, so R2 and RMF at a maximum of four.

So if you say, for instance, are a group of college-age individuals and you were looking to rent a uh a structure or a residential unit, uh, if you're located in the RA R2 in the RMF districts, you would be allowed to have four unrelated people within that structure.

Um we have a separate standard, so almost a second tier for R1 zone properties.

Uh and if you um looked at the map that was included within the packet, you could see that R1 is the majority of the residential zoning within the community.

So in R1, essentially, then you're restricted to only three unrelated individuals.

Um this uh R1 component, if you look back through the history of the occupancy rules that the city has passed over the years, um at some point the R th R1 was included uh with that extra stipulation that it reduced it from four to three.

Uh I think through our research uh within the occupancy um history within the city, it was most of this kind of additional restrictions is really pertain to I think concerns with the the consequences of having uh large numbers of unrelated individuals within certain areas.

Uh really the propensity, again, if you are called a student group uh to have say four parking spaces needed instead of three parking spaces needed.

Thank you, Sheila.

All right, well, I have it on my screen, so that helps you.

Albert needs to just switch from the uh podium textbook or laptop to that one.

And now that I said the magic will happen.

All right.

Excellent.

Okay.

Thank you for everyone who made that possible.

I do appreciate that.

All right.

So we'll we'll get back track on here.

Um we'll kind of skip forward a little bit to the to the conversation.

So again, uh a couple things uh maybe might be helped to kind of set the the tone a little bit uh before we we go much further.

So um and a couple things we'll be talking about too is uh we talked about family and how we define that.

Uh we also talk about the IPMC uh in this conversation.

IPMC is the International Property Maintenance Code, and that does uh also speak to max maximum occupancies for residential structures.

Um it's adopted as part of kind of the suite of building codes that the city adopts.

Uh right now we're in the 2018 uh series of building codes.

Um the housing study, of course, is what we mentioned as far as what recommended uh the revision or the revisiting of the the definition of family.

Uh and really I think when we when we talk about the goals of the housing study and why this might have been included in that is really I think uh trying to address the uh kind of that almost hidden occupancy that's within some houses uh that's restricted by some of the regulations that we have that does cap uh put that hard cap on on properties and creates that second tier, that lower tier for R1 properties.

Um I think we touched on a lot of this information, but so uh jumping ahead again to really what the proposed changes are.

So the definition of family uh really there's two main components uh that were part, I think, of the revision and the revisiting.

Uh so a couple of the things I'll touch on here.

So the existing column on the left and the proposed on the right.

Uh so when our definition of family, when it uh is concerned with related individuals, um right now our definition really contemplates um how that how a family would look as adults with children.

Um and I think what uh we realized during that our research and discussion was that leaves out a large component, uh especially with families that are composed of uh groups that are not just um parents with children, it also includes extended family.

Uh so one of the um principal revisions to this definition is expanding the definition of what we consider to be the related family part of this uh to include really anyone that's uh related by blood, marriage, um adoption, or custodial relations.

So the current definition does also include mention of foster children, but our our proposed there kind of expands that further and really um broadens that horizon to any any custodial relation that you might have with children within your household.

Um the unrelated side, so right now, as I had said, um we do restrict if you're unrelated uh within the definition of our of our family there, um you're restricted to three in the R1 and four individuals uh essentially everywhere else in residential districts.

Um you restricted to three in the R1 and four individuals uh essentially everywhere else in residential districts.

Um children really isn't mentioned in that definition.

Uh the IPMC is not mentioned within that component of our current definition.

So what our new definition does, uh it really one simplifies things.

We remove those two tiers uh between R1, R2, and RMF zoning districts.

So essentially anywhere in town, if you're unrelated, you know that your standard is for unrelated people.

Um so what that does is allow uh in the R1 district the opportunity now to go from renting a uh residential structure to three unrelated people to four.

So that does increase um potential for residential uses within that zoning district.

Uh it also uh clarifies, and I think this was something that probably had been uh implied in the past, but it does clarify that four unrelated adults does not include any of their children.

So you can have four unrelated adults in one household, and their individual children can also be in that household uh regardless of that max of four.

So it opens up uh potential for uh kind of additional family living arrangements uh within the unrelated portion of our uh new definition.

And it does uh kind of really uh I think clarify that the IPMC is still kind of the max regulating uh requirement.

So we do again have an adopted IPMC uh and it does have in there a specific restriction, uh a regulation on how many people can occupy a structure, and it really looks at it from almost a health and safety and overcrowding uh component.

And so what it requires uh is that there for every bedroom uh for a single individual to be in there, you have to have 70 square feet.

Um if you go beyond one person in a bedroom, you need at least 50 square feet for each person.

So really one person's at 70, two people's at 100 square feet, and then so on above that it's an additional 50 square feet.

And do you okay questions along the way?

I think we'd be fine.

Okay, Christina had her hand up, and then Betsy.

So um, when we look at this, um one of the things that comes to mind is the total maximum children for those four adults.

Um the other thing that comes to mind is how does this apply to the dorms and all the colleges that we have on campus, or does it apply?

And then the second thing would be, or the third would be um I think there's a lot of area for misinterpretation under the related piece.

So uh what are you?

Maybe answer the first two and I'll I'll rephrase my last question.

Okay, sure.

I'll go backwards.

So um dorms are going to be located on property properly owned by the University of Missouri.

Uh-huh.

Uh and so we don't have sort of we have more than just university in Missouri, right?

Um other yes, other other structures.

So those I don't think we would really uh consider those as separate.

I think they're still going to be um regulated under the same uh definition of family.

Um, for an unrelated everywhere.

It's that the yes, for unrelated everywhere.

In the entire dorm in the room, or depending on, again, I think the maximum uh would be the IPMC.

So if you had a, say, for example, if you had a one-bedroom house that was in the bedroom was 60 square feet.

I are you talking about like apartments, because I mean there we have rules, uh, right?

I mean, that there's not more than four in one dorm room, is or is that what you're thinking?

Yeah, that's one.

We have no say over the university, especially.

But Columbia College and Stevens College are ex are not exempt like the university is.

Oh, they're not.

I mean, I would think you'd worry at the is it the law the rise.

Group housing is a different land use with a different approvals process and a different occupancy.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And I don't know specifically what all of our dorms are zoned as and what type of route they went to get permission to be a dorm, but it's probably not straight RMF.

Right.

Well, group house group housing in the zoning rents is a slightly different um type of uh use, but as far as the building code goes, it that that's probably uh the case in that scenario.

So but but generally the uh four unrelated adults is going to be a maximum, but the IPMC is really uh the hard cap.

Uh so if there is only one uh bedroom within a unit and it is less than 100 square feet, that's still going to be limited to one person, if that makes sense.

So the the IPMC really is uh kind of a high standard, and then we kind of further restrict that.

Think of it as building codes where we can adopt kind of the standard code, but then we can also adopt further restrictions beyond that.

And that's really what our definition of family has done.

So when we say all related by blood, marriage, adoption, custodial relation, are we leaving anybody out in that?

I don't think I could answer if we're leaving anybody out.

We I think we spent time looking at other definitions and evaluating and receiving public comment.

And I don't think we received any public comment that there was a specific group that was not addressed in this.

Um there's always the opportunity perhaps to to revisit that at a later time if that comes up, but I think we were fairly confident that we covered a lot of those groups.

Is this wording um is it important to the intent?

So the intent I'm assuming is safety.

And so does this wording improve safety in any way.

I think this is kind of paraphrasing that.

I have the definition on the next slide.

So it might be if you want to get into a little more of the specifics of the af actual definition, we could go to the next slide and review it as well.

So let me maybe I'll wrap up the information on this one.

Um one thing I did want to point out uh on the zoning.

So the R1, which is again is one of the um those areas that we're gonna increase um the occupancy from three unrelated to four.

So that is the light yellow here, and this should have been, I think, included in the packet.

So this is in for this is uh areas that um would be impacted by that change.

Uh so kind of the the dark yellow and the kind of orange-ish colors, those are the R2 and the RMF respectively.

Um those would be less impacted by the change um on the unrelated component.

Uh the related, though, by expanding the related uh individual groups to include that uh extended family, uh that would apply uh across the board to all zoning districts.

Uh so just to wrap up again the kind of proposed unrelated.

So four would be allowed for uh up to four unrelated individuals, again, depending on IPMC um restrictions, would be allowed um across the board in all the zoning districts.

Um those children will be allowed of the four unrelated and then IPMC again, identified as the absolute maximum uh per each individual unit.

Uh so this is the proposed definition.

Um so kind of highlighted some of the the specific um more important, I think, changes from the previous version.

Uh I had the previous version on slides two.

It's it's considerably longer.

We can look at that if we need to.

Um but again I want to point out so this is where you see a little bit more of that structure that we had.

So the first paragraph, one or more persons related by blood marriage adoption or custodial relationship.

Uh that addresses kind of the related portion of our definition.

So if you are related by any of those fac uh those factors, um you would be allowed uh up to that IPMC limit.

Uh if you're unrelated, um you're fall into that second paragraph category.

Um that's where we've added some more of the clarifying language to that.

It does include um all individual children of those uh four unrelated individuals.

So uh it really doesn't prevent a uh a group that necessarily uh isn't your traditional type of family, but uh does include children of all those unrelated individuals.

Uh the last paragraph there, that's really providing that kind of uh really clarifying statement that the IPMC, while we have it adopted and it does uh address um uh rental and long-term uh rental applications, it also applies across the board to to all the zoning districts within the community and all residential units as well.

Um this is kind of I wouldn't call it uh housekeeping, but it is kind of clarifying what a single housekeeping unit is.

That language was already in the code.

Uh this is intended to provide that additional context on on what that's meaning to address.

I will say generally, this is really trying to draw the distinction between um a what you would think of as a a group uh that is familial, that uh are having that uh a shared living experience versus something that is more akin to a boarding house, where those individuals are really uh renting a single room and don't have a connection to each other.

And so that's kind of drawing the connection between uh the individuals that are uh really involved in that definition of family.

I'm not gonna do questions until he's done.

Okay.

Oh, I'll keep going.

Because we'll have a lot of questions that are going to come up like he's done, and I keep raising the question.

I know, yeah.

I'm sorry about that.

You're good.

You're okay.

Um so a couple uh kind of questions and kind of responses, I think, to some of the concerns we raised.

So uh we did put this out again for public comment.

We had a be heard page, and I think generally uh the responses were positive, right?

So this this amendment we think is moving it towards uh what the goals of the housing studies were.

Uh it it uh it makes two significant changes to this that we think do unlock some of the housing density popul or uh pop uh uh excuse me uh potential uh in some uh in some of the zoning districts within the community.

Um of the things that it doesn't do, though, and which was also identified in a lot of the comments and feedback we've got was completely eliminate um the idea of distinguishing between related and unrelating and putting a hard cap on the unrelated at four.

Um communities uh rely solely on the IPMC for their occupancy limits.

Um so what that means is that say again that that house that has say four bedrooms uh and it had and each one was a hundred square feet.

IPMC would say, well, you can have two people for each bedroom up to a maximum of eight individuals within that house.

So if you rely solely on the IPMC, that would be your occupancy maximum.

Um again, we have applied this definition of family, which puts some additional restrictions on it.

Um part of the reasons that looking back through I think the history of this that that was done was some of the concerns with our kind of uh kind of our our location here as a university city, and again the impacts that we have with kind of a higher proportion of our population being unrelated, and that might seek to be cohabitating.

Uh in a in a residential kind of environment where we didn't have that, I think uh there would be less concern.

But a lot of that concerns is would would communities be able to handle the impacts if we saw higher occupancy levels in some of these houses?

Would there be concerns with the additional parking that would be uh perhaps uh coming from those additional occupancy and other aspects uh that come along with I think some of those um higher occupant type scenarios.

Um of the research that we did, we did look at other communities, and we are not alone in having that kind of additional restriction.

Uh I listed three different communities in here that were listed within some of the research we did.

Uh by no means this is an exhausted list.

There were other communities within that uh research um uh additional um information that we provided.

These are three university cities as well.

They do have uh similar restrictions going from somewhere in the neighborhood of three unrelated individual individuals up to five unrelated individuals in some scenarios.

Some of the ones that were going up to five had special additional exceptions or additional approvals that were necessary to do that, akin, I think, to our um conditional use process.

Um I think that was taken into account by the Planning and Zoning Commission when they reviewed that was some of these examples from other communities, and I think really looking at I think the the principal concerns with the impacts that um unrelated individuals in some neighbors neighborhoods could cause.

Um what I think the product that came out of this process, and I think the view of a lot of those involved in it was this is really it's an incremental step in the right direction.

Um there are individuals, I think, based on the feedback we got would have supported um going um completely to the other end, which is removing uh any caps.

And so this I think uh takes us in that direction and allows kind of that um really looking at for more of a consensus approach uh where I think there's not uh a complete happiness with not eliminating all these restrictions, but there also is concerns uh by moving in that direction in the first place.

So this is a little bit of a middle ground approach, I think, coming out of this process.

Um so to to wrap up the plan zoning's recommendation on this um item.

So there was no public testimony directly at the public hearing.

We did have some of the feedback that's been provided in the be heard uh information included with the packet.

Uh the motion at the PNZ was uh in favor eight to zero.

Uh the recommendation tonight then from P and Z would be to approve the text change uh as presented and be happy to answer any questions.

Yeah, Valerie.

Thanks.

Yeah, this is an agenda that I pulled, an agenda item that I pulled.

Um I appreciate that it came from AIDO approval with planning and zoning.

Um I also think that there was a pretty wide variety of conversation and work sessions and histories.

And it's actually a request that I sent to planning and zoning as well.

And I the nature of the ask at that time was to move away from using a definition of family in our code for occupancy.

And I understand that was considered.

What I want to get at is where can you elucidate more clearly?

Where does IPMC come into play with this?

Certainly, yeah.

So IPMC really, I think from my viewpoint, should be looked at as as again that kind of absolute maximum.

So every every unit will have an IPMC maximum.

So we IPMC would look at the size of each bedroom and determine kind of that that maximum number of people that would be allowed in that dwelling based on the size of each bedroom.

So that's the maximum for if there is a definition of a housekeeping unit or a family, or if you're fitting relations.

What's the maximum otherwise?

So the maximum otherwise is then gonna depend on those two factors, whether you're related or you're unrelated.

So related again.

If you're unrelated, then we have the kind of lower hard cap of four unrelated people, but excluding, of course, if those individuals have children within the family, then that those can all be permitted within in the context of those four unrelated people.

So I know we're probably gonna have more opportunity for testimony.

Here's the hang up that I'm getting.

So our Office of Housing and Neighborhood Services is the ones involved with permitting uh rental units.

Uh I know they do provide some information, I think, to um each individual landowner is is and and perhaps the tenants as well, I think that explains some of that.

Uh it's certainly conversations we could have internally to see if there's a way to provide that information if it's not being provided today.

Yeah, I so appreciate that intent.

Um my next question is gonna be did we send it back to the human rights commission for input?

Not that I'm aware of, no.

Um like I think there's some information lost here because it was so long ago.

Um, but a recommendation came from them, and I want to have their input.

Yeah, there's other commission sense that I think could give us valuable input.

And I'll I'll wait for others to comment on that and bring it back around in the comments section.

But that will be the end of my questions for now.

Questions on this.

Yeah, Nick.

Clinton, it seems like I I know that the county did recently pass just using the international code, correct?

And part of the concern here is that we're just in a different situation.

But can you because largely because of the student population?

But can you give a practical example of what that might look like as a result of our concern?

So the concerns that maybe the city is facing that the county is not.

Right.

Yeah.

So we have a much more urbanized development pattern here in the community.

And so we have a concentration of homes, you know, especially in the central city, for example.

A lot of those homes necessarily may not have the same type of parking requirement when they were constructed for uh that structure.

And so I think there's just a higher propensity, I think, when when people are viewing this to see that, especially the area around the university that is very attractive to the student population that you could see a concentration, I think, of college students.

I think when you look at the county context, uh while I think it it's very appreciative, I think that they've moved in that direction to eliminate, I think that and go to the IPMC, they're probably not facing quite the same pressures as we do.

I think the majority of the county property is a little lower density, uh a lot of them are larger lots.

They do have kind of specific suburban type developments within the county, but I think by and large uh there's a lot more space there, there's a lot less density where I think you would be a little more concerned by those impacts.

Well, and I think part of the idea here is that is it not to provide for an increased density in general?

Yes.

But but the concern is about those areas where we have a great deal of density already, and that being having an um uh a serious impact on the infrastructure.

You mentioned parking, but I can imagine there are other aspects of infrastructure upon which that could have an impact.

Is that is that fair to say?

No, I think it's fair to say I think the parking is a little bit more, I think, tangible and easily to contemplate for residents within that area.

And they that's the infrastructure impact I think they would see more often on a daily uh basis.

But yes, I think across the board impacts on infrastructure could be a concern.

Yeah, Christina.

How would um somebody being related?

Uh I I guess I'm having a hard time understanding how that four people related versus four adults related versus four unredult adults unrelated would have um a different impact on uh parking or uh fire need or police need.

And um how does it improve safety to have that definition?

Uh well that's that first question I I think um initially.

So uh again, I think it goes back to the nature of um us as a university city.

I think again, kind of the concentration that we would see or the the level of unrelated adults living um together that could reach that maximum of four.

I think if you looked at a community that wasn't a university city, uh I think you'd still have unrelated individuals living together.

I think it's just the sheer number.

Is there any research to support that?

I'm sorry to have any research you could share with me that would support that claim.

To support support that because it's a college town that it would have a different impact.

Uh not readily available.

Uh I think it's just something we see um I think with our rental applications and the information that we have just is it a how does the application show that there's a safety issue?

Uh I don't think it's specifically a safety issue.

I think it's the impacts generally on the infrastructure.

Uh again, the parking being the most I think uh evident of that.

So for unrelated adults on their application.

I think somebody else.

Yeah, let's let's move on from this one.

And I think Betsy can probably speak to that being the ward representative for a mostly university uh neighborhood about the sort of calls to service that she hears about.

Um But again, this is on questions, so those might be a comments for later.

Well, I can do a comment whenever it's a comment.

Okay, do you have a question for Clint?

I have no questions.

Okay.

Yeah, Jackie, Vera, and go back and then to them.

Um just as a I I've done a lot of work in the community.

I've worked with a lot of different families in their homes, and I think um rightfully so, people define families in many ways.

And a lot of times it's chosen family.

You know, this is my cousin, this is my cousin, and this is my aunt, and they're not actually blood related.

So my question is if the city is called in because they receive a complaint of a lot of people living in a house, is the city gonna be satisfied with somebody saying this is my cousin, or is there some other investigation that has to happen to prove that that is true?

Um, so I I think we we um actually reach out to our neighbor services staff just to kind of talk about that scenario today.

Uh I think that's something that that doesn't happen very often.

Um I think generally um when we do see those calls for service and and you know, I can let Bill speak to that a little bit more too.

But uh generally we're we're it's very difficult, I think, to discern those uh can I think uh distinguish distinguishing family members and so uh but it is a pretty low level or not low level, but a a it's not something we receive a lot of calls on per se on the code.

That was gonna be nice.

When you say it doesn't have to, I didn't know if you I want to make sure it was referring to the number of calls, not necessarily the actual incidents, because I think we're walking a real dangerous line when we get in the business of deciding who's related and who's not.

And that that makes me nervous.

Yeah, I'll just say that when we uh go out and do an inspection, we don't get into are you related to who and and all that kind of stuff.

We don't ask those questions.

Um we have gotten just like the last fiscal year, we had 18 calls uh complaints about overcrowding, um, but none of those were related to familial status or anything like that.

So we haven't had a lot of history with this.

And staff couldn't recall a single time when we were called out specifically to address the relationship of the individuals residing in the unit.

Yeah, uh Jackie cued up my question perfectly there, um, which is if this isn't something that happens often to the point that we couldn't recall a single time we had to determine familial status, why is it important enough to put into the definition?

If family is not something that we are ever in a situation that we are needing to investigate, why are we defining family?

Well, I think the response here is if in order to have the unrelated definition, we have to have a related definition.

So if we're going to define unrelated adults, we have to distinguish those.

So what we've just heard is that the difference between related and unrelated has not been brought up before, has not been brought to an investigation.

So why do we need to make that difference if it's not an issue we're seeing here in Columbia?

Well, it it exists currently in the in the existing family definition.

Um we're not proposing to to add that or eliminate it.

We're actually um proposing to expand it to include more familiar opportunities.

Yeah, Valerie.

So I get that you're looking to expand it to include more familiar opportunities.

Um and I'll reiterate that I think there exists a potential to remove the tie to relation from the code.

Therefore, this definition is irrelevant.

The and you all cued me up for something that I think is a really good question for us to address um as we approach this.

Um I do think that there is an impact due to us being a college town.

I think there is a very real impact due to us being a college town in terms of our infrastructure, in terms of our parking.

I think there's an impact for the number of people that you have in a unit.

Um, especially in terms of parking.

Um because related children are less likely to be drivers than the other.

We still have public comment.

The question we need to ask here related to this parking question and these tools are what planning tools do we have that we can use in this section of occupancy to account for those impacts?

Right?

So when we say we should do this based on the structure, and we're identifying that there's other impacts, do we say based on the structure and parking or whatever those other impacts are?

And can we come up with a more concrete way, both of addressing those impacts and of defining what occupancy is that allows us to give good directions to landlords and eliminate easy definitions that can lead to exclusion?

Sure.

Do you have an answer to what tools do we have that could address the issues?

Yeah.

So I think what you're asking is if the concern with uh allowing more unrelated people in in a structure is parking, what do we have to do to address that concern with parking?

I think the answer is now if it's an existing structure, we don't have anything in place that would require us or allow us to require them to install more parking.

Parking is is usually installed during the construction of a uh structure, and so once it's completed, again, I don't think we have any tools to say if you were going to have a certain occupancy, you have to you have to install additional parking.

Doesn't mean that that couldn't be something that we explore.

I think that's actually come up in some of the conversation with uh our plan zoning team that uh and the commission about uh if we wanted to go down the path of moving further down the road, how do we how do we address some of those externalities that come from additional occupancy of the ocean?

So parking could be one of those.

Um that's not the step that was taken at this point.

It was uh we we took a we took more of an incremental step.

I I think a lot of these are discussions for future.

But what I want to say is could we not elsewhere in our code that we don't actually have built, or by requiring them to build more parking, for example.

Could we say, for example, for your existing structure, you may have up to four people, and additional if there are sufficient bedrooms and sufficient parking and set a definition, sufficient parking is.

Uh yes, I mean that's that's absolutely something that could be added.

I think we do something similar with our short-term rental as we do tie that occupancy to the number of parking spaces, and so I think you're suggesting going somewhere similar with with uh this type of definition.

I'm gonna open up for public comment and then we will have council comments and a potential next actions.

Would anybody from the public wish to speak on whatever one I am on?

Um Bill 9726.

Thank you for being here so late, everyone.

Um I don't think that this definite I'm Samantha Jones, I'm from First Word.

I'm also a representative of intact the Secretary Advocate, and I am against the wording of this bill.

There is no necessary reason that we should have a definition of family in our ordinances.

Every definition of family that you can come up with is going to be exclusionary in some form or other.

When this bill first passed with an occupancy issue of unrelated persons 10, 12 years ago, I was annoyed by it because I was a student at the time and I was a young person trying to find housing in Columbia at a way that it was not expensive.

This just continues the issue of expensive housing.

It doesn't actually change anything, and it just continues the confusion and exclusion.

Um if we're going to base something on occupancy, I think we should just base it on the IMPC.

I also think we should use other factors such as parking, et cetera, and work with landlords on their units rather than trying to define family in any sort of way, because then you can have a moral issue as well as that.

So please just remove family from the definition, use it for the maximum safe occupancy for anyone.

Um else from the public wish to speak on Bill 9726.

Good evening, Danny Perez.

I guess I'm just confused.

I I do not have a family, and I don't have a car, and I can't notice the car undertones of what defines a family or not.

Maybe I'm maybe it's because of the way the information is being presented, I am not receiving it properly.

But what if you have an adequate home that can have uh parking enough for two cars, but it can have five people, but three of them don't drive.

Then how does family like unrelated and related fit into that?

Um that was just something that that kept coming in my mind.

I don't see how it benefits um non-drivers or people with disabilities who don't drive at all, have nothing to do with parking.

How does this benefit them and their families or their chosen families?

Um I'm just kind of confused.

So I would love some clarification on that.

Tracy Wilson, Cleekamp, we'll start again with systems and structures.

And so we're trying to fix an infrastructure problem by labeling or defining family bizarre.

In California, it's illegal.

Can't do this, right?

So we have a parking problem because we have an infrastructure problem, and we have a housing problem, and we have an expensive housing problem.

When I was going to college, you'd have four or five, six people living in an apartment, a little apartment.

And but we actually have public transportation.

So people could huddle up and not have a car.

It's a little bit different here, but it doesn't seem to be solving a problem.

But yes, with there is an impact when you have a lot of people in household and they live someplace, maybe because they can afford it.

And they don't have access to public transportation or they need their car.

So I think we can tie it to occupy the we can tie it to, hey, I have this many units if I'm a landlord, but there's only enough for two cars.

There's no more space.

And I don't want to have more cars on the street.

So I don't know what definition of the family has to do with it.

Brown, um, also name change pending, Keith Winninger.

Um I agree that the definition of a family shouldn't be in this, but I do want to say that I I can appreciate the intent.

I can easily see the intent was to give a better, more expansive definition and all of that.

I really can.

Um however, I just genuinely think that it should be limited by parking parking as someone who's been here for a long time, you know, dealing with parking, trust me, I'm first ward.

Yeah, it can be rough.

So I genuinely think if we just change this to change this language, pardon me, to something that's more um, oh, you know, you can have this many part of the IPC.

I'm sorry if not saying that right.

Uh and yes, parking for up to two cars per, you know, house, what are two parts per unit, that would be probably more beneficial and honestly would have sought would still solve a lot of problems I face today as a disabled person here in the first ward.

So uh thank you very much.

Thank you.

Anyone else from the public wish to speak on Bill 9726?

Cornet Carter, I'm still in the second ward.

Um, you know, looking over this and pondering it for a while and talking to some people.

Um really feel like that this is not very inclusive and it seems very discriminatory.

And I understand issues with parking and with the number of college students in areas, but I want to tell you the college students don't need to live in your area.

Um to I guess wreak havoc if they feel like doing that.

Um I used to work down off of Walnut Street and the big apartment building was right next door to where I worked.

And we would come in and they like to karate chop our fence down and rip off our parking arms and we got holes kicked in some of our windows.

And um, I'm pretty sure that the standards that were set in the apartments next door would have easily fit into what you put up on the screen.

Also, parking was regulated, but guess where they parked?

They parked in our parking lot.

So our staff and our clients and people coming to our office couldn't park there.

So I feel like you need to find a different way to regulate those things, other than excluding who can live together.

And so to me, it seems like it'd be a lot better to focus on limits such as square footage, number of bedrooms, um, other sort of distinctions that don't rule out families who don't fit our norm or mold of what a family should be.

And so I don't even think we should be talking about families.

We should talk about how many people can fit in the space safely and comfortably.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Anyone else from the public wish to speak?

Well, hello, my name is Shane Lowe, still fourth ward.

Um not speaking on behalf of them, but I am on the parking commission.

Uh and I bring that up because I think it's germane to this conversation because at the end of the day, this is just a parking regulation, it sounds like.

That sounds like what we're really getting after.

Um it's been said, uh, I think by Jane Jacobs, but it's too late for me to fact check, um, that the right to drive anywhere and have free readily available parking there is the right to destroy the city.

Um what we are asking if we're gonna cut the capacity of housing in half just to protect parking.

Um we have to ask what are we doing there?

Because that's gonna drive up the cost of renting that unit.

It's gonna drive up the cost of development.

And who's a benefit?

It only benefits the people who drive.

Um and when we do that, we're asking everyone who doesn't drive to subsidize the fact that, oh, we need to have free readily available parking spaces at every residential property.

Um I would really like to see, hey, if we're having routine parking issues on the street, let's expand the world of paid parking out there.

You know, that's a valuable resource.

It's our resource as a city.

Every member of this community has a part in owning it, not just those who are behind the wheel of an auto.

Uh and so if we're having spots where we're consistently seeing overcrowding on the streets, then we need to start, we need to affix a price to that.

Because there is a price to the community.

There is a price to infrastructure, and you should charge the people who put the burden on the inf you should charge the people who burden the infrastructure with the cost of the infrastructure, not those of us, not people who don't involve themselves in it.

Uh because, you know, like at my house, like, hey, we've got somewhat limited on-street parking.

It's free.

I have no pressure other than the cost of my car to sell one of my cars.

I really don't need both autos at the house, but because there's not that additional pressure, I just take up two extra parking spaces.

Uh and so if this is something where at the end of the day, this is a parking regulation, let's regulate the parking, not try to come up with some definition of family to regulate parking in an indirect way.

Uh so I would like to um I I think this is a great move in the right direction.

But if this is ultimately about parking, I'd like to see it go a lot further than this.

Thank you, Shane.

Would anyone else from the public wish to speak on Bill 97?

I just flip the page, sorry.

All right, seeing none, I'm gonna go um come back to council.

I'm I'm gonna start first.

Um, Valerie, you we've we're almost done an hour into this.

And if your intent is to request to send it to boards and commissions, I might ask you to make that kind of request first, because then if we're gonna have this again, you know, just to it was that still your intent?

That's still my intent.

We've had some requests for clarification.

And I'm I'm fine with the answer.

I just wanted to, I I wanted the point of order kind of to understand the process for right now.

And Sheila, what was the recommendation?

Like if we were to want to get that additional feedback from additional boards and commissions, was yours to withdraw.

I think it wasn't my feedback completely, but um I guess it depends on where this is going.

Are you rewriting the whole thing?

Because then it should be.

We're not doing that from the dais, right?

Because that's the value is not valuable.

I guess my point is that should probably go back to P and Z.

And I think Valerie also wanted to send an additional.

You want to send it to the other commissioners.

I'm kind of I'm not, I haven't been involved in that discussion.

Yeah.

Can we get some clarification from Valerie then and maybe move this on in the next 10 minutes?

Yeah, I see a P and Z commissioner shaking her head on this over there.

Here's the thing.

Um, and I think the discussion around parking has cloud clouded the issue here.

Um I don't think that having a definition of family for occupancy is where we want to be.

I don't think it's where we need to be.

I fully appreciate that this was done to move us along and to expand that definition and do better.

Fully appreciate that.

Um I think we're I think that we're in a place that we can do even better than that.

And I'm gonna ask.

Now when I bring up parking, because it is clouded the information, um and and it's confused people.

And I want to clarify that because if I'm gonna ask more people to work on it, I don't want to be confusing.

Um I bring this up because using a definition of family for occupancy is an imperfect tool.

And possibly an exclusionary tool for all kinds of different people.

My rationale for bringing in parking to the conversation is that we have other planning tools to address the impacts that we feel.

So if we're concerned about impacts that are different to us because we're a college town, and I'm ready to explore those, we should use the planning tools to plan for the impacts.

I'm not willing to use a definition that could be exclusionary to some people that we're not trying to regulate against in order to get to that place.

And it's a huge ask.

I know that it's a huge ask.

I want to do the heavy lifting of using the tools to adjust for the impacts and not the people.

And I ask is to my recommendation would be to withdraw this and then to further explore removing the words relation from our occupancy calculations.

And in the process of doing so, make sure that we send this consideration back through the Human Rights Commission that was originally involved with it.

And I'm sure they have a different commission now too.

Um the Disabilities Commission, um, because surrounding disabilities may change ability to get married.

Um the collegiate advisory council, given that college students and their occupancy issues have been such a large discussion around this.

Okay, so we have a motion to withdraw this uh and send to the additional the um uh for additional feedback on the removal of this.

You had a question.

Yeah, we have a second, yeah.

No motion and a second discussion on the motion on the floor, and we have a clarification from staff.

Uh yeah, I think just a question.

Claration you'd mentioned um I think so I think what I would helpful for staff and some additional clarification.

You mentioned zoning tools.

Is it specifically you would like the idea of parking requirements to be evaluated in use with the IPNC requirements?

I mean, you see the the per the potential that we would require additional installation of parking requirements.

And and that again, I mentioned that that was part of the short-term learning cards.

That's not part of the conversation.

And I don't want it to be part of my motion.

I actually want to separate parking.

And you quoted my favorite book, so there's that.

Um but I think planning and zoning is used to having conversations about what impacts there are and engaging with the public about how to use planning to account for those impacts.

All right.

So we have a motion and a second to withdraw this and kind of go back to the drawing board.

I think this will probably on the additional I imagine you might need to give some additional clarifying kind of direction or questions to this.

So we have a motion and a second to withdraw any other conversations on the request.

Yeah, Nick.

I'll just say uh point to a little bit of frustration here.

One of the things that I do look, you know, when we were having um interviews with potential candidates for the P and Z.

Uh, we were thanked for reading the minutes and and I do.

I uh always read the minutes.

What I'm frustrated by this one on is we don't have minutes from all the deliberations that PNC went through.

And then it went to PNC and they gave I'll support the motion.

But I'm just saying that it went to PNZ and it was brought to us on an eight to nothing vote.

So I I feel like we're working a little bit in the dark on this when we've when this has been done by a commission that we've appointed.

Um just a point of frustration more than anything else.

I I also have problems with defining family, and I think there are there is very likely ways that we can do the regulations uh that we're concerned about in ways that don't require that.

Um I just want us to keep in mind that we we have a group of our citizens who've made a recommendation to us, and we're we're not going I I I kind of hate, I know I understand they don't want it to come back to them, but I I maybe we can have some conversation with some of them about what their what their um deliberations were like and how they ended up where they were, where they did.

All right.

Uh motion and second uh to withdraw this and send back uh to this in addition to two additional commissions.

Any other comments?

Additional commissions.

Three.

I have P and Z disabilities collegiate advisory HRC.

Oh, HRC, thank you.

I forgot about the first.

Okay.

Um discussion on the withdrawal motion?

All right.

Um, all those in favor of withdrawing uh 9726 from consideration say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

All right.

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

So going back and there probably will be some clarifying questions from from staff, I imagine, to council.

Uh so we'll look forward to that email of request.

And we can continue conversations around it.

All right.

Moving on.

Uh Sheila, will you please read Bill 10126 that Councilmember Peters requested to be pulled from consent?

Um Council Bill 10126 is an ordinance granting the issuance of a conditional use permit to Hinkson Valley View LLC to allow the corporation or sorry, to allow the operation of a short-term rental on property located at 2002 Valley View Road and fixing the time when this ordinance shall become effective second reading.

And I will note we did get a message from the owner of this property that we're not able to be here this evening, and so they've requested for us to table the vote until June 15th.

Um but I know that we have people in the audience who would like to speak for the public comment.

So you can you can do as long or short of a report as you feel you need to do, but you're going to do it again June 15th, Clint.

So uh do a quick report, Clint.

Like two sentences.

All right.

But Russ, don't get up yet.

Sit down.

Yeah.

So this is a short-term rental request.

Uh it's 210 nights, six transient guests request.

Um it wasn't previously an STR and there's no SERs within 300 feet.

Um this uh no violations on uh file for this property.

Uh the um registered agent does live very close to this property, and so I think a lot of the conversation at that meeting uh was about uh the submitted, I think comments from the surrounding neighborhoods uh and a petition that was filed as well that that was not supportive of that.

So I'll I'll leave that report uh at that point for now and we can fill that in later.

Okay, all right.

Um would anyone from the public wish to speak?

Yeah, you're still awake on member class.

Uh Russell Voigt, uh six ward and the neighbor to this property.

So I have some comments.

I'll keep this short, but it's more of a question than answer right now.

I have um a number of clients.

I'm a realtor and a broker.

Um I have spoken before on other Airbnbs.

I am a huge proponent of private property rights.

So my question right now is to the City Council as this pertains to other potential properties coming up, also others that I'm working with clients looking at homes to purchase.

Um you follow the Airbnb regulations to apply for an application.

People have purchased homes.

This specific property was purchased for 450,000.

There's in no way um could be considered affordable housing.

It's over 500,000 now with the improvements that they're about to make.

Um this went before planning and zoning.

Um great debate on that.

We had an in-depth conversation, and it was just lost in kind of um there was a lot of concerns on adjoining streets.

Property owners are claiming rights to dictate what other owners can do.

Essentially, they have stated Airbnbs, they like Airbnbs, but they don't want it next to them.

And these properties, the subject property sits on 1.5 acres.

The neighboring properties are both over one acre, and the other homes in that area are over three-quarters of an acre.

So we've got a lot of sp separation, but um my question is I feel this is the perfect Airbnb in Columbia.

As a property manager, I live directly next door within 50 feet line of sight out my living room window.

So this went to planning and zoning.

It was approved the planning and zoning committee um or commission, I say, recommended the approval of this.

We went through the process of 16 neighbors speaking in opposition, um, essentially fearful of fret parties, couch burning, bonfires in the front yard, maybe animal sacrifices.

It was fear-mongering based on what was going to happen.

My question is does the City Council a motions removed.

Should this process be administrative?

Can it be administrative?

I've wasted a lot of time sitting in meetings trying to meet with different neighbors and or uh just massage their feelings to make sure that they're comfortable knowing we're going to manage that with an iron fist because keeping property values up, keeping the neighborhood safe is my utmost priority as a neighboring property.

But that being that aside, this entire process of the Airbnb's having to submit a 450 dollar application and check all the boxes.

We went before planning and zoning and were approved.

It's now been with withdrawn based on an emotional response that they're fearful of traffic.

They're fearful of loud parties, which are not all these things that are not allowed and which would be prevented.

But other Airbnbs have been declined as well for similar reasons.

So my question is why is this not administrative?

Thank you, Russell.

You're at time.

Appreciate it.

So anyone else from the public wish to speak, knowing that you can talk again on June 15th.

See none, we'll go to to council comments, council questions on this one.

All right.

So you want to make your motion to table?

Yeah, we are gonna table this then or whatever.

You can make the motion to table.

I'd like to make motion to table it to June 15th at the request of the owners.

Second my all those in favor of tabling bill 101 26 till the June 15th meeting, say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

All right, and this will be on old business at that meeting and first on the old business of that evening.

All right.

Uh next one we have.

Uh Sheila, will you please read Bill 11826?

Council Bill 11826 is an ordinance authorizing agreements with the Kansas City, Missouri Board of Police Commissioners and KC 2026 associated with mutual aid support for the 2026 FIFA World Cup events and fixing the time when this ordinance shall become effective second reading.

And this was a request we had uh from council member sample.

So I think you all have some questions to start with.

Yes, just some uh points of clarification.

Um my understanding that our the local law enforcement officers number will not be decreased in order for them to go serve in Kansas City.

Correct.

When this came up, when the original mutual aid request came to us, uh we discussed it as a staff and just said we don't have the resources to allow on-duty personnel to go.

But in the spirit of cooperation, and we know they're really grasping for resources.

We said if we can find a path so that people can voluntarily go on their day off if they want to work overtime, we we that's what we tried to figure out.

So that's what we settled on.

And um how much experience does an officer have to have in order to volunteer for this type of um position?

Yeah, so we have a policy that uh kind of governs what we call extra duty employment.

A lot of people would call it off-duty employment.

That's what we called it years ago.

And that really dictates um you could work extra duty, which is like Walmart, the gas station, um, extra work at Columbia Public Schools once you're off probation, uh, which is a minimum of 18 months.

And then when they are working in Kansas City and they have to make an engagement decision or a use of force decision, um, do they follow KCPD or CPD policies for that?

So there wouldn't be time for them to learn all of KC's policies.

Fortunately, they are KCPD is an accredited Calia agency, so they have achieved the accreditation we're trying to get.

So a lot of our policies are very similar.

They have the same standard requirements that our policies have, so we're we're very similar in that respect.

So they'll be acting under our policies, but those are basically the same with some minor, I'm sure, changes in language.

Okay.

And then um body camera video footage.

What who does that data belong to?

Still ours.

Uh it will upload wirelessly to our system and it'll go in just like normal and it's still subject to all the records requests provisions and all those kinds of things.

And then just the more or less of a comment.

We were talking about shifts earlier and how they're generally eight to twelve hours.

And um Kansas City has stated they would pay for lodging and then one meal.

So I'm just kind of putting a pen in this because it was mentioned that our officers now here are working eight to twelve hour shifts and not getting a meal allowance.

So I'm just kind of saying it out loud that I would like to review that, especially if we can get this public safety tax passed.

So anyway, hopefully we can get them off to 12 hour shifts.

But duly knows.

That would be the that would be the ideal.

Yes.

But if we don't, can we have a different conversation?

Absolutely.

All right.

Additional questions.

Yeah, Christina.

Uh how do we ensure like um ready for duty?

I don't know.

I don't need the wrong words, but if um, you know, they're working twelve hour shifts for us and then go work twelve ten or twelve, was it in Kansas City?

How do we how do we make sure that you know they're rested and ready?

So Kansas City's asked for I'm gonna give you a kind of a long answer, but it'll make sense.

So Kansas City's asked for mutual aid from any law enforcement agency in Missouri that can respond because they desperately need bodies.

All of obviously all of us are on all different shift configurations all over the map, and so they know days off aren't gonna marry right up with what they need.

So one of the things we talk to their staff about that are kind of running this uh event is hey, if we can't, if our people can't do a 12-hour shift, can they do less than that?

They're pretty much like, hey, if they can do four, we're happy with that.

I don't think any of our folks are gonna drive there for just a four-hour shift.

But as an example, they're not being really hardcore about 12 hours.

The other side of this is our extra duty policy and actually all of our policies that talk about work hours dictate that you cannot work more than 16 hours continuously without the approval of the supervisor.

So even if you're working a homicide or anything like that, you have to have approval to work over 16 hours.

We have very strict guidelines about working, like if I work a regular shift, if I work my regular 12-hour shift, I can't go and then work more than four hours of off-duty or extra duty work.

So we have really figured out, and and because of our shift rotations, frankly, most people if they sign up for this, they're gonna do it on their three days off.

So every other week they get three days in a row.

That's when they'll likely do this.

Any other questions for Joe?