The city council met to discuss the findings of a cost of service study conducted by the finance department for general fund departments. The study analyzed fees for public safety, health, community development, and housing/neighborhood services to understand cost recovery and inform future fee adjustments. Council members deliberated on the methodology, specific fee recovery rates, and the potential for a cost recovery model to guide fee-setting policy.
An item on our main agenda, which is the cost of service study. So Matt Liu, I'm thinking I'm kicking this to you. So this is our cost of service study that uh we produced through the finance department. Uh here are a few of our discussion points for today. We'll talk a little bit about the background of the project, the scope of the project, uh, some methodology, the findings, and then proposed changes that came from this project. So background, uh the city manager had requested a cost of service study uh for general fund departments to ensure that we are looking at all of our revenue sources that that we have control over and making sure we're we're uh in a good place with them. And so the departments that we looked at were public safety, uh the health department, community development, and office of neighborhood services. So a little bit about each one. So the public safety uh basically they're in charge of protecting preserving the safety of the community. They have two fees that were involved in the study. Uh that is false alarms for police and fire. So for police, they had uh 2,256 false alarms and fiscal year 25. It's around 2% of all calls, and for fire, they had 1,828 false alarms, and that's about 10.8% of all calls. What is a false alarm for? Um mostly for the security systems, things of that nature. I said that's right. Yeah, that's what it is. It's it's something that didn't it doesn't require a police response or a fire response, but the alarm got those people there anyway. So not like somebody called and they didn't actually need you, you mean an alarm system? Or the dog barked and set the alarm off, or somebody at a nursing home pulls the fire alarm and gets, you know, because they're not of sound mind, for example, and then that sets you know that sets that into motion. And one of the things with false alarms, you see that it's something that a lot of cities go through. And part of the reason why you actually have a fee for that is to disincentivize people for not so to incentivize people to take care of their systems, so they're making sure they do rental checks so they're not getting that false alarm. Um, it's a drain on resources every time a police department police officer has to respond to a call, well, there's not really a call, an assembly for fire, and so that's part of the look. It's part of it repeat, like you know what I mean. Like, do we have one for repeat ones? So that's the first something we need to establish. So most cities what happens is your first call or your first or second call, there's no charge. After the third or fourth call, you start charging, and sometimes you do it on an escalating basis in order to incentivize somebody to actually fix our system. I believe in 2017 we had off the fourth call. We used to, yeah, yes. Why did we repeal it? Not sure. Any what? Do you know why we no longer why we stopped doing it? The charge after the fourth call. I wasn't aware that we ever did it. Uh-huh. Okay. I know they've been working on like not they, but I mean it's just as a whole, the city's been working on this. This has been one of those projects that has been ongoing for the better part 15 years that I can remember, and it just never gained traction. But I don't ever remember anybody charging to my knowledge for that. Okay. Yeah, there'd have to be some way for us to track it. Like how many, you know what I mean? How does it get known? Yeah. Lisa said it was when joint communications left. So jointly. Okay. Since when joint left, we don't own the data, and it was just hard working with them to get information.