Morning.

Call this meeting of the city commission to order.

Um, this is a compressed agenda today, so um not quite as complex as our usual meetings.

Um I'd like to move straight to the roll call, Mr.

Clerk.

Commissioner Kilgore.

Present.

Commissioner Knight.

Present.

Commissioner Asassi.

Present.

Commissioner Purdue.

Present.

Good morning.

Mayor LeGrand.

Present.

I haven't seen uh anyone have heard any word from Commissioner Belchuk.

I will assume she's running late and not ask for her being excused at this point.

We'll just simply hope that she's on her way.

Um so uh city manager.

Um this is your ship to drive today.

Uh we're gonna discuss the budget.

All right, thank you, Mayor, and good morning, everyone.

Good morning, Commissioner, staff, members of the public.

Glad that uh everyone could be here today.

I'll do a couple things.

One kind of describe this morning.

We're gonna have uh four sections of our strategic priorities review the budgets for those sections, and we'll call the presenters up one section at a time.

But we will allow questions between each section.

So we'll we'll start with public safety.

The other thing I wanted to highlight, uh at the end of the briefing, the very end, we do have a slide related to the commission's budget in the vacancy, uh, the cost uh relative or cost savings uh to the vacancy that allow the commission both to discuss that in the fiscal as well as uh operational implications of uh allowing that position to remain vacant.

Uh a couple other things.

Um wanted to highlight.

We did uh our CFO Ms.

Claren did send uh some of the responses to questions that you indicated you had interest or asked last week, and you should have received those in your email.

And uh some of the questions we did refer to today's session as would be answered in session, but there are written remarks, uh written responses to those questions, and we hope to not only provide it to you, but it should be posted for the public uh shortly.

Okay, with that, uh we'll begin today's uh session.

And um just a reminder to the public we did present a preliminary fiscal plan last week, and today is the first deep dive into the budget work session, and we'll cover stay safe community.

Uh that'll be our first section, and we'll then we'll have a group of staff coming to talk to us about uh vital streets and mobility as long along with the Vital Streets Oversight Commission, and then um we'll cover the last two together.

I think we'll take uh engaged and connected and governmental excellence uh together.

And we'll continue to have conversation on next week, and we'll um uh cover the last two strategic priorities, economic prosperity, and affordability, health and environment, and also we'll have the uh public hearing on both the tax rate and the um revenue uh fees.

Oh, I do want to highlight we also in that response.

I know there were some questions about um the fees.

Uh we included a little bit more uh summary analysis of those fees and which ones are decreasing, remaining the same, or increasing, and uh a little bit more analytics related to that information.

I know some of you asked about it.

Okay, um our values remain unchanged, and what I'll do, I'll just give a highlight overview.

There, I mean, we have all the experts here this morning that will cover um some of the issues that are in the budget.

Thankful for our um interim police chief here who's gonna talk to us about uh some of the things you see before you relative to the investments in uh the police department and our fire chief is here to also do the same.

We have our OPA director uh here as well as um I do want to thank uh I can I mentioned this before and thank the courts for uh while we often speak about the general fund subsidy, their budget is actually a decrease from last year's appropriation.

So without further ado, I will uh let the police department lead the way and kick us off.

Uh Chief Trade.

Thank you, sir.

You're you're you're welcome to sit or stand, whatever your preference is.

All right, get my stuff follow along on my gut.

I have some notes here as well.

All right, good.

Good.

Thank you, sir.

All right, good morning, everyone.

Okay, we'll start with our operating budget.

As you see there, 75.4 million.

You'll see the bulk of that is for our personnel, uh 6.9 million.

Uh that's 81%, and the non-personnel 14.5 million, 19%.

See the capital budget of $516,000 with our advanced radio encryption software updates uh to keep us, you know, on regulation there.

Then our dispatch budget of 8.0 million personnel is the bulk of that at 7.391%.

Non-personnel uh 100 uh thousand dollars, nine percent.

Um let's see here.

Next slide.

All right, uh the overview.

You can see we're at 299 authorized strength now out of out of 312.

Uh that includes the seven recruits uh that started in-house training on Monday.

Um we are 100% city beat covered.

I know that was part of our uh strategic plan is something we wanted to get covered 24-7, 365, as well as our uh community officers.

We've got five community officers currently.

Um our community officers are tasked with uh various task forces like our Swiss Army knife, and they've been able to address a lot of issues that come up in our city, uh, most notably the uh car meetups and stuff.

They've been making an impact as we try to prepare for summer and make sure that we show that uh GR is not the city uh to come and do the different car meetups.

Uh 40 of 40 authorized sworn uh staff utilizing um uh our sworn for the patrol on the street and uh other sworn positions.

Uh 54 of 56 authorized staff uh in dispatch.

Our dispatch uh unit, the morale is uh is up, which is good because if you remember years back, they were uh a lot of forced overtime morale was in the tank, and uh it's good to see that number rise.

Uh see at the bottom there, uh GRPD response to an average of 285 calls of service, uh over a hundred thousand uh each year.

Uh that 285 per day is up about 15 uh from last year, and that's a number that's gonna slowly, I think, just increase.

Uh we look at the projected uh the personnel here.

That 304 number, uh, you see the blue line is the authorized strength, and you see from May 22 to uh the projection of May 2027.

But that 304 number on top uh included the two uh grant positions for St.

Mary's.

We no longer had those, so then we dropped down to that 302, but then we got the authorization to go to uh 312 is where uh we sit uh today.

Um as you see from May 2022, we're at that 286 uh number, and we saw a decline of to 266 officers, which was a combination of uh just retirement, I think low morale, and people were leaving the profession.

But we have climbed ever since May of 23, which is a good thing, and like I say, we're up to that uh that 299 uh number.

I know being in the deputy chief seat for since 2023.

I've seen about 120 officers uh come through that we've hired, but we got to realize that just because we hire 120 uh doesn't mean that they all make the team.

Um there's we have a very extensive training that we go through, and historically we lose about 30 percent uh through our training program.

So let's move to the next slide here.

Look at the our recruiting efforts.

Uh 1.2 million for uh the police academy classes, which includes tuition, salary, and benefits.

Uh it's important to keep up with the hiring and keep up with the attrition.

Uh our city our our sponsorships are key.

We're seeing our our candidate pool dry up a little bit.

Nothing to be alarmed with.

I think you're just seeing agencies that are filling up with bodies, but we still want to continue to make GR the destination uh for young and men and women, even older that want to get in the profession and making sure that our training and our our police department is is at the front edge of technology and law enforcement in general.

You see uh 719,000 for our cadet in current pro intern program, which we uh can go up to 32 interns, which is which is key.

They take a lot of the small task uh off our men and women, so they help aid in our our job.

Uh and we see a lot of our interns and and cadets grow into officers, and as you see there, talk about growing our own programs.

I I think I counted a half dozen of interns and and police explorers that have grown to be officers.

So growing our own is exactly what we're doing.

Uh we still support the uh youth police academy.

Obviously, that's a I look at that as a great benefit.

It's something to teach the uh profession to the young men and women.

It's an opportunity for our our officers to connect with the youth, even if you don't want to get in law enforcement, it's an opportunity to learn why officers do what they do, uh, which I think is is key.

Back to our police explorers.

We've had that explorer program since 2015.

I was the one that initially uh was involved in getting that program uh off the ground, and our explorers just competed in a uh competition uh this weekend state competition and took first place.

That's I think three first place finishes in the decade we've been running that program, so that's uh that's a positive.

Uh let's see, next slide.

Uh our overtime.

Breaking town our our overtime.

Uh you'll see from 2022 uh to 20 uh 26.

It's a breakdown in and hours uh of overtime each year.

Our overtime comes from a uh variety of of things.

Uh mandatory overtime shift, which helps fill the vacancy.

This is the first time since 2020 that we don't we do not have to have mandatory overtime shift, and that's a credit to uh that we've increased our our staffing.

Uh so that's big for department morale.

Uh the voluntary voluntary overtime shift uh is just what that is, voluntary.

Uh that's something that we use to backfill for uh light duty when our officers get injured, uh various leaves like uh FMLA, uh military leave, training, uh, and et cetera.

Um, which is uh we we've been able to scale that back due to our staffing level, uh which is good, so we're not having to run as many voluntary overtime shifts.

Court court is a uh uh a big draw, most likely.

Um when you have more officers, which we do, uh if you previous slide where it showed we had 266 in May of 2023, uh we have plus 33 from that at 299.

Well, more more officers, more enforcement, more court time.

Uh so that's gonna uh you know require overtime uh from our our men and women.

Look at the the special events that they work, concert sports, uh races festival, etc.

Uh the amphitheater, which has got a lot of attention, it's that's open up here on May 15th.

We're not expecting it to be a main uh driver of overtime.

Uh there's 10 events left in the fiscal year with a maximum PD staffing of 20 to 24 officers, uh, which could add about a thousand hours uh of overtime uh you know to the budget, but uh once again not a main main driver.

Um various community events.

Um our men and women, uh well, community alone is asking for our men and women to be at various events.

I've been a part of those events, and uh the community loves seeing our officers uh out at these events, and uh I'm proud to be able to bring uh to be able to staff these events, and obviously sometimes that's on on overtime due to due to staffing, but that's another thing that staffing has helped do.

The fact that we have adequate staffing that we could actually do some of these things on duty and not impact patrol in a negative way.

So you've got your critical incidents.

Uh that's when our our SWAT team is called out to something that involves such like a barricaded uh gunman.

Uh that's critical.

That's a that's a team of 16 to 20 uh officers.

If you count the the command staff, and uh that's a draw.

If they're if they're called in on their off days or after their hours, that's that's a lot of men and women and uh um uh overtime that goes into that.

Our detective unit call outs, as you see there.

Uh the uh if we have a major incident, uh they're gonna get on investigating that as soon as possible because every moment is is key, and that's a draw.

Uh digitary protection.

Um I know uh we still have that.

You know, it's it's um uh it still pops up from time to time, and that's stuff that we have to to plan on.

And then you got the holdovers.

You know, we have as I mentioned, 285 uh calls uh for service a day.

And uh, you know, if their shift ends at 530 and they get a call at five o'clock, uh and it's a a critical call, they're gonna be working working late, and that's gonna draw.

Um and then the overtime analysis to help assess the main drivers of OT.

Like I said, I from my experience, I don't believe the special events is uh is a main draw.

I think it's gonna be operational.

Uh as you can see the difference in hours from 2022 uh to 2026.

Those numbers are very similar with the exception of 2025.

You see that 108 number, uh, which that draw is due to the uh second half of the uh the election uh season where that was uh a big draw uh on our men and women from the dignitary protection or uh whatever we were we're gearing up for there.

Uh let's see, next slide.

GRPD training.

Uh we are uh uh training uh training culture.

We stand by our training.

204,000 dollars for third party training and professional development.

Uh another thing that we like meeting the needs of the community as far as making sure our training uh is uh top notch and that we're getting any type of tools, we're giving our officers any type of tools that they can to do their job better, and it's what the community expects of us, and we like fitting that uh that need.

Uh professional development.

We talk about uh I recently talked about Captain Cyber from our training unit and Lieutenant Wu from our uh commander of our vice unit.

Uh they are retiring this year.

That's close to 60 years of of service.

That's that's walking out the door, but due to uh our dedication to professional development, uh we have a deep bench and we have men and women that are willing to uh answer that call and pretty much step in uh you know seamlessness.

As far as that professional development, I'm an example uh of that standing here today, as well as uh deputy chief uh Maycroft and Deputy Chief Baker who are not here, uh two men that are willing to step in and and fill in uh if need be because we believe in developing our people in secession planning.

Uh 217,000 available through uh December 2006 for M COLS continued professional education pilot program, just ways to offset some of the cost by using these uh ability to get some of our training paid from there.

The minimum of 30 uh eight hours of mandatory in-house training uh per year, um, which uh realize that not every agency uh trains the same, and not uh I don't believe other agencies train as much as we train.

Like I say, we're a culture of training, we stand by that.

Well, that's our brand, and we're happy to provide that service.

Seeing the laterals that have come through the hiring process, the last you know, three and a half years.

I've been in this leadership role.

You you see it on their face, you hear them talk about the difference in training from our agency to others, which is another thing to be proud of as a agency and as a city.

Uh you see the focus on Brazilian jiu-jitsu and grappling for safer outcomes and less use of force.

Um, our Captain Cyber has noted at least six to seven, maybe even more OIS that were prevented uh due to this training, uh giving the officers confidence to one be on their back when they need to, or if the opportunity presents to be able to uh safely uh you know um use techniques to arm subjects and and have the outcome and in a a safe manner and de-escalate the situation and and have less injuries.

Uh the mental health co-response.

Umization unit.

Um remember the ribbon cutting for that May of 2024.

Uh as you see, we have transported 368 of the 463 patients, 80 percent.

Um so these are previously all patients would have gone to local emergency or been taken to jail.

We've known for a long time, not everyone needs to go to jail.

Jail's not the answer uh to everything, but as we know, sometimes uh we are the default button, especially in the middle of the night.

But to be able to have these other options that we can use uh to take uh subjects to and get them the care they need is is crucial.

Plus, it gets our men and women back on the street answering answering calls.

You know, this is uh as far as this is a five-minute process, dropping a subject off, making sure the handoff is smooth and seamless, and then getting back out there to help respond to the 285 calls a day.

Um, lastly, you see the uh GRPD Network 180 co-response team uh responded to more than uh 27 uh hundred calls uh fiscal year 2025.

We have three full-time clinicians, and we uh hope to keep increasing that number.

We've seen a very uh seen a benefit from that program, and we have men and women that are willing to commit um to if we can add more clinicians.

We I have men and women that are uh willing to take on that that role.

Last slide.

Uh on the horizon, staffing.

Staffing's always um you know key key for us, right?

It's um reach and maintain authorized strength.

We're not there yet.

Like I said, we're we're at 299, and um it seems that this in this position, we you know we will add three and then one will retire.

We'll add five and you know, two will retire.

So it's always just trying to try to uh make sure we're staying on on track.

But increase the size of the department as the city continues uh to grow.

We know adding the amphitheater and the soccer uh stadium in 2027, more people are gonna be visiting in our city, so we want to make sure that we have the staff to adequately um provide a uh a great uh service.

And um radio replacement, you see 4.5 million over the next three years, uh, is on the horizon.

Community officers increase the number of community officers without harming patrol operations.

The plan is to add another uh five community officers uh this fall, which was the plan when I added the five last uh last fall, and slowly get that team back up to uh back up to par.

I was a community officer back in the day, I was one of 17, and uh just the benefit that we've we've seen from them so far.

The community's happy, neighborhood associations, businesses, and etc.

And like I say, they are helping with uh the crime in our city, which which is key, and then a second shift uh traffic unit uh kind of a vision.

Traffic is a main issue, uh or it's it's still the number one complaint in the city, and there's track of traffic issues that occur at night that sometimes with patrol have to dedicate going from uh call to call sometimes to have a few bodies with the traffic unit to address whether it's parking downtown, speed enforcement, OWI issues.

It would be a great also, too.

It could help supplement uh special events, which is is kind of key, so we don't have to um you know uh order in or have that done on duty.

So um, and I believe that is that is it.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Yeah, thanks, Chief.

Well, all right.

Good morning, everyone.

Let me start out with our mission statement, like we always do, to set the stage for the 48.3 million dollar investment that you are considering.

The Grand Rapids Fire Department values all people by saving lives, protecting property, and responding to the needs of our entire community.

We're gonna start out today.

You have a copy of the uh latest annual report uh up there with you.

We're gonna start out with three quick slides going through uh some some outcomes from the last year, move into some budget highlights, and end on some horizon issues.

So our annual impact from last year 25,000 incidents, 35,000 apparatus responses.

So 70 incidents a day approximately, 96 apparatus responses a day.

Uh much like police that continues to creep up a few percentage points each year.

117 million dollars of property and contents were directly saved by our efforts, in addition to dozens of lives from the river, from car accidents, from structure fires, and from CPR saves.

This is gonna touch each one of your wards.

So I want to talk about our districts.

Uh, some really good things in one of the districts, some trends we need to pay attention to in the others.

Uh let's start with really good Kalmazou.

Kalmazou metrics are improving.

Kindle station is working, engine four is much better.

So that is a huge win for commission for the fire department and for our community.

Three areas of concern that we continue to monitor.

Don't need an e immediate action today, but we need to keep track of these.

That's where our two rescues operate out of.

Is downtown continues to get busier and more congested.

We find that they are both on calls quite a bit of the time.

Simultaneous incidents.

We are then drawing in units from around downtown, and there's a domino effect to that.

So keep in mind all these events downtown are fantastic.

We love them.

They're exciting, they're great for the economy.

They also have a public safety impact.

Bridge Street.

I believe you've heard of a little thing called river redevelopment.

That's where our water rescue team operates out of.

We currently have a three-person engine and a three-person truck crew.

They're supplemented by an airboat out of the Monroe Fire Station and swimmers out of the Le Grave fire station.

There's LeGrave again.

They're very busy.

As the river changes, I will caution us.

We don't know what we need yet, but we're gonna need something.

Okay.

We're going to have to change the way we respond to the river.

And then finally, Leonard Street.

In my opinion, this is the most concrete and the most urgent timely decision.

Um, this is a district that is the fourth busiest district in the city, up on the northeast side.

You wouldn't think, right?

It's up on the northeast side, quiet neighborhood.

That's the fourth busiest district.

Ladder one is the most deployed unit in your city.

Ladder one was on emergencies 832 hours last year.

Ladder one consistently needs help from Engine 9 out of Plainfield, Engine 5 out of Monroe, and Engine 11 out of Chester.

We used to have an engine up there pre-recession.

We've been monitoring that for years.

My professional recommendation is that we need to place an engine back up there.

As staffing allows, we have been placing an engine in service intermittently.

It helps tremendously.

But this is also a very large investment that will have legacy cost attached to it.

Not something that you should take lightly, but something that we need to look at in the next few years.

Emergency management.

Boy, has this program grown and developed under the leadership of not only our previous emergency manager, but certainly our new emergency manager, Benjamin Rance, and his assistant, Ingrid.

A lot of great things happened during the past year with emergency management, and then there's a call out to a specific investment we're looking for today.

A lot of plans were updated.

This work takes place behind the scene.

You never even know about it, but I can tell you they are very diligent in making sure emergency plans are updated.

The EOC was activated four times last year.

This is when a big group of city employees comes together to coordinate a response to something happening in the city.

Ten exercises were conducted, some full-scale exercises with a myriad of community partners.

And then finally, CERT team and emergency alerts have also continued to increase.

Over on the right side of the slide, you're gonna notice the disaster relief fund.

This is something that's spurred out of a need for our community where we do have incidents and emergencies that do not require or meet thresholds for federal aid or state aid.

People are looking local for assistance.

This is also a very tricky thing to do with general fund dollars.

So we have partnered with the United Way of West Michigan.

It is not final, but we are working through the final steps where they would be the fiduciary.

We would have a say on the board, but ultimately the United Way of West Michigan would dole out the funds to people and or agencies in need.

Originally I had brought forth $50,000 to manager for consideration as seed money.

With the conservative nature of the budget this year and reinvesting in some savings accounts, we felt it prudent to ask for an additional $50,000, bringing the ash to $100,000 for the disaster relief fund.

Our hope is that this will spur additional investment from other community members and businesses to grow this fund.

But we must take the first step.

Pretty simple, very similar to police.

We were uh in 2023, we're at 85%, 2024, 85%.

2025, we were at 84% personnel cost.

That was a really good spot for us.

We're projecting to be at 86% personnel cost next year.

It's only one or two percent, right?

It doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

That's almost a million dollars for us.

As personnel costs go up, think about your own purchasing power in your house.

I can buy less equipment, we can buy less tools, we can buy less of everything.

So 84% is really a sweet spot to make sure we're maintaining our equipment, maintaining our facilities.

I want to make sure that that doesn't creep too far.

Our projects, we've talked about most of these for years.

The residential safety program, the smoke alarm and CO alarm installs and home safety assessments.

We did have to dial that back a bit.

We were doing 200,000 for many years.

We dialed it back to 100,000.

Um grants, we continue to apply for them every single year for smoke alarms.

Sometimes we get them, sometimes we do not.

So we felt it important to still maintain these.

Much like police portable radios.

We're maintaining a sinking fund to get ready to replace our radios.

They have a lifespan.

Our self-contained breathing apparatus has a lifespan as well.

That's what we wear into fires, into hazardous material calls to make sure that we can operate.

We're paying ahead, we're building up that sinking fund in a responsible manner so we can pay cash for these when we're ready in about two years.

Two more engines are coming.

Engine six and engine eight.

What we don't want to do is go backwards and wait three, four, five years and buy a bunch of vehicles.

Buying one or two vehicles a year is the right cadence for this community and is the most cost-effective manner to rotate in uh equipment in and out.

Facility master plan.

I'll talk about this on the horizon issues a little more in depth, but we have a third party conducting a facility assessment study right now.

We have over 200,000 square foot under roof.

We have a lot of buildings to maintain, a lot of things to maintain, and we've employed a third-party professional to help us figure that out.

Let's sit here for a minute and let's take this in.

Look at that picture.

That's our new Kindle Avenue Fire Station.

Beautiful, isn't it?

73.7% of that station is covered with our regular personnel hours.

These are the men and women that show up to work every day to put their hours in.

They're 2,750 hours a year.

Unfortunately, 26% of that station is covered by overtime.

And you might be wondering, well, how could this be?

Well, let's do some quick math.

The hours needed to run our fire department in fire suppression only, 446, 760.

We run 51 personnel a day times 24 hours a day times 365 days in a year.

That's what it takes to run our system with personnel hours.

We look at how many people we have in fire suppression, it averages about 200.

If you look at the bottom of the page and all those leave types, I'm not going to read them to you, there's a lot down there.

There's a lot of ways not to be at work.

When you look at all those leave types, the fire chief has discretion over about 3% of the hours.

The rest are contractual.

These are earned benefits.

The men and women have earned them, they're in the contract.

I have no issues with it.

However, there is a direct impact on how many times people do show up to work.

And so when we look at the average amount of hours a person produces each year, it's a little over 2,000.

It's 2,026.75.

That's how many hours a firefighter will show up to work.

Think about it.

Vacation, sick leave, training leave, all these leave types, right?

So we go into each year at a deficit of 41,000 hours to staff our fire trucks.

I'll let you do the math, but if we have about 2,000 hours per member and we're 41,000 hours short, that's a lot of people to wipe out overtime.

I am not advocating eliminating overtime.

Overtime is a very efficient and effective, cost-effective tool to run an organization of our size.

What I would caution us on though is relying too heavily on it.

Right after I made chief, we were at the breaking point.

We were at over $4 million in overtime.

We were mandatory back.

It was not good.

We worked with you, we worked with management, and we were able to hire additional staff and bring our overtime down by almost 20,000 hours.

Significant impact.

We're starting to creep back up again.

Why are we creeping back up?

Contractual changes.

We are actually using a hundred and twenty percent of our sick leave right now.

How is that possible?

We are burning through not only every day we earn, but dipping into the reserves that we've earned over the years.

People are tired.

They need a day off.

They're taking sick leave to get much needed rest or take care of their family.

Parental leave has doubled.

We've had 12 babies come into the fire department family in the last year.

It's great.

It's fantastic.

Every one of those members gets 96 hours off.

These are things that previously we did not account for.

And now we have to backfill.

So these are the things that we're constantly looking at to staff our fire station.

And let me end up on horizon topics.

So we discussed staffing.

We have a staffing study soon to go out by a third party.

Absolutely endorse this.

This is the way to go.

We need to grow effectively and efficiently.

And having a third party validate our data is going to assist with that.

Facilities.

Strong additions to the city portfolio.

Super proud of these.

Really?

World class facilities.

The rest of our stations average 62 years old.

They're old.

They need some work.

We're working through that third-party asset management plan.

Fleet.

When our new panel fire training center is open, we will be transitioning how we do fleet.

We are still working through the details.

I know I mentioned this last year.

Commissioner Kilgore asked about the cost of it.

I've got something cooking.

I think you're gonna be excited about.

So that's gonna change.

And then finally, growth.

As the city grows, so must public safety.

All people need to feel safe and be safe in our community, and not having units to respond is not where we need to be.

Thank you.

All right, good morning.

I have the next section, which is the section about the Office of Oversight and Public Accountability and our 2.9 million dollar budget.

Like the Fire Chief, we always start with our mission, which is through targeted change, accountability, restorative justice, empowerment, and engagement.

OPA will help create and improve just outcomes and respectful relationships between public safety and community.

Like we always say, our our goal is uh starts with the just outcomes and respectful relationships.

We know you can't uh build trust on a shaky foundation, so we work to clean the foundation so that we can have that strong trust in the future.

Uh, we start with our financial overview.

Again, our budget is uh just under three million dollars.

The largest part of our budget, as you can see from this pie chart, is devoted to the axon products.

So that those are our body worn cameras and things in that nature for the police department.

That budget is managed out of the Office of Oversight and Public Accountability.

So a little more than uh little under three quarters of the budget goes to that.

The remainder of our budget is broken down in a few areas.

We'll uh highlight a few of those programs.

One of our clean slate expensive program, which serves approximately 600 people a year.

Um, we do offer year-round services, it's been amazing results.

Uh, we hear uh from community members almost on a daily basis saying how much they appreciate it.

It's one of the my favorite things is when somebody stops by the office and talks about how their life has been changed.

Uh, we did move that program, the the uh in-person program this year to August.

So traditionally, it had been around this time of the year, but with all the other things we do uh with Summit and some of the other things, it was just too much at one time.

So we moved it to August and look forward to doing that again this year.

Additionally, we have our know your rights program, and that's at $15,000 a year.

That gets us about 40 workshops.

Uh, with those 40 workshops, though, they're the large range of the amounts of people who attend those workshops, they're generally uh somewhere between uh 30 to 50 people, but we also get workshops that are well over a hundred people.

We also have our community informed training, which is at 75,000.

That's something that we do in partnership uh with the police department department, and traditionally, since we started this, it's been uh pretty successful in terms of uh the number of officers who've attended and also community members who've been a part of it.

Uh this allowed us to implement about 15 workshops, and just as a reminder, the way this works is community members come to OPA with either an idea or a plan, and they say, hey, we believe this is what we need to train officers on, and we'd like to be a part of making it happen.

We sit down, help develop that training, uh, and then work in partnership to get that training presented uh to officers.

Okay, additional program highlights include the I Am the Dream Civil Rights Youth Academy.

This is the eight-week civic engagement program.

This is designed for middle school students.

We've done this in partnership with a few different places.

We've done it with the Boys and Girls Club previously, we've done it with some schools previously, and this year we are uh working to partner and do this in the fall.

Uh so details about that will be upcoming.

In addition to that, there's $25,000 in this budget to support uh immigrant and refugee services in Grand Rapids.

Uh, we partner with over 30 immigrant and refugee led organizations to help remove barriers, and we do that in several ways.

We partner with over 30 immigrant and refugee led organizations to help remove barriers, and we do that in several ways.

Different organizations come forward with different ideas, different needs, and we help partner with them and support those things.

Moving on to our civilian violence intervention and prevention, which I am uh very pleased to say has continued to grow this year, uh, thanks in large part to the work of Miss Letitia Lipscomb.

Um prior to her coming, we did receive a grant um uh two million dollars, and that's a federal grant.

With that, we were able to hire a violence uh prevention manager uh and create our violence reduction strategy citywide.

In addition to that, uh, and that also is the fund what that we use to support uh cure violence.

In addition to that, there's $500,000 that we received as a two-year grant from WK Kellogg.

They've been amazing supporters of the work of OPA, and we're very, very grateful.

Quite frankly, we would not have been able to do a lot of the things that we've done without their support.

Um, with that, we are working to currently hire an administrative analyst, which will also be uh help us to continue to build out that violence prevention uh portfolio.

We uh work uh to lead several of the violence prevention efforts in the city.

We know the violence prevention is an effort across many departments, but for the civilian part of it, uh we leave that part that includes Cure Violence Grant Rapids.

There's 750,000 reflected in this budget uh for that, and again, that comes from that federal grant we talked about, as well as 125,000 that's for Cure Violence Global.

That is uh our training and technical assistance.

That's a part of the contract requirements in order to have the program.

So that's reflected in this budget.

There are $35,000 reflected for the It Takes a Village Summer Youth Violence Prevention Program, and that uh funding comes from the Third World Equity Fund.

Okay, uh OPA now uh serves as the liaison to the Safe Task Force.

Um we know that the Safe Task Force is an anti-violence initiative that works to lower violence in our communities with a particular focus on uh individuals in the ages of 15 to 24.

So investments include $50,000 reflected in this budget for the Safe Pitch Night Competition.

Uh, we recently spoke about the $20,000 for the gun violence memorial art installation, which will be uh brought over, and then also uh there is a contract with size strategies in an amount of $23,380.

They help do capacity building for the individuals who uh are awarded contracts through the safe pitch night competition.

Then we'll talk about the uh the public safety trust fund.

So as you all know, the state of Michigan is expected to allocate approximately one point uh seven, a little over 1.7 million dollars to the city of Grand Rapids through the public safety revenue sharing grants program, which we've been referring to with the public safety trust fund.

So these funds are designated to support public safety related activities, uh, but the guidelines are pretty clear.

Uh they're explicitly clear.

The 75% of that funding has to be used to support law enforcement, and up to 25% can be used for broader public safety purposes.

So uh these next few slides talk about that 25%, right?

Uh, how we would go about allocating that 25%.

So that's about $400,000 that the uh city can use to support community-based public safety initiatives.

So uh the $400,000 again is available for non-enforcement public safety investments.

Uh the intention is to use $200,000.

That's the recommendation for internal city projects like the Safe Task Force, OPA civilian violence intervention and prevention programs, and other related internal programs, and then the other $200,000 for external community uh grant programs.

So uh those grant parameters will include uh what will be set up like this.

There will be a minimum award of $10,000, and that was intentional because we do have other ways that we offer grants throughout the city already, like the Neighborhood Match Fund, the SAFE uh task force.

We wanted to make sure we were filling a gap that didn't already exist, not just repeating a process that we already have.

So the minimal award will be $10,000, and examples of eligible uses include uh violence intervention and prevention programs, community-based safety initiatives, and training and workforce development programs.

Uh, there can also be diversion or alternative response programs.

So community members, community members will be able to submit um applications uh for an award in this area.

All funded activities have to align with the state requirements, and of course, we will make sure that we engage with community well so they clearly understand what those requirements are and how those parameters work.

So as far as eligibility, eligible applicants include community-based organizations that so we took a similar format to the neighborhood match fund.

I won't spend too much time going through these, but it's the it's very similar to the neighborhood match fund.

You have to be a 501c3 or a neighborhood association, faith-based organization, uh, informal community groups can also do it.

That means if you're not a 501c3, we can make that happen as long as there's a fiduciary involved in the process.

An important part is there has to be a clear connection to Grand Rapids.

Okay, so as far as the application review process, the city will implement a transparent community focused application process, which we will articulate well.

We'll get to a timeline.

You'll be able to see how we plan to do that, but there will be a cross-departmental committee involved, which will include OPA, OOE OEE Community Development, GRPD, and GRFD.

Departments that are regularly involved in the public safety space and involved with community.

As far as the timeline, uh, the plan is for the program to launch in July.

So with that, there will be a web page that goes live with all of this information.

There'll also be community engagement.

We plan to make sure we get the information to the neighborhood associations.

Uh our list are the public safety organizations, uh, organizations involved in justice work and make sure that we're getting the message out very well.

And then around August, we'll have uh our grant application open.

So that means we'll have a full month of time after doing a month of uh community engagement for individuals to submit those applications.

In September, we'll do the review of those applications.

And the plan is in September uh 22nd at the public safety committee meeting.

We'll bring forward our recommendations to the public safety committee.

Public safety committee will then make a recommendation to the city commission uh at the evening meeting on that day, and if that's accepted, our plan will be to notify recipients at the top of October that they've been accepted and they can move forward with those public safety trust funds.

As far as horizon issues for the Office of Oversight and Public Accountability, um again, OPA violence prevention functions are largely supported both through federal and private grants.

Uh, this funding will take us through uh this year, and I uh and much of it will take us through FY28.

But at some point, those uh grants are decreasing, uh, and that's something that's a horizon topic.

Additionally, OPA continues to work with GRPD to gain access to information in order for us to fulfill our charge of increasing transparency and accountability and public operations.

Thank you.

Good morning, and greetings from Judge Ross and the rest of the bench.

Unfortunately, well, it's fortunately, but unfortunately, she can't be here to say hi herself because we have a hundred students from Ottawa Hills at the courthouse right now.

We're celebrating our law day a few days late, but this is the best day that we could do it on the fifth.

But she wanted to say hello.

Uh let's start with um little overview of the court.

So we are the front door to justice in Grand Rapids.

We have six elected district court judges.

Last year, the judicial resources report uh was published, uh, which is a recommendation to the legislature on the number of judges that are needed.

We are still at a solid six, therefore, we need a solid support staff to support those six judges.

We currently have uh 68.5 out of the general fund for grant funded, total of 72 employees.

As most people are aware, our jurisdiction, every case starts in the district court from your civil infraction to your felony charge, um misdemeanors, uh, you know, 92 days, 90 days um, and uh one year.

And if people want to come file file a small claims case um without an attorney, they they can for up to 7,000 dollars to seek a judgment.

We have our civil jurisdiction, it's 25,000.

And one thing um that we do is wonderful is uh uh engagement with uh the public is uh jury service.

People can come to the courthouse, be part of the process, and also see what it is that we do at the district court.

Another item that people don't know mostly is that we have Fridays, we secure several time slots for wedding ceremonies.

We do more than probably the average court in the area because well, we want to be available, we want people to have a place to go to.

Um problem solving courts.

We still have our two uh substance abuse recovery courts, the uh uh felony sobriety court and a misdemeanor sobriety court, both by Judge Ross and Judge A.U.

And we have a drug court uh by Judge Distal who presides over our domestic violence court is in operation currently, and Judge Faber leads that.

We have a community outreach in the public with Judge Dotson, and we are adding operation drive.

This is one of the reasons our grant funding that we secured the 1.5 million has increased slightly.

So at Operation Drive is it's a program administered through the uh state court administrative office to give courts for one of 12 in the state that received funding to help individuals restore their licenses, their privileges.

Um the financial overview for the court, uh, as it was mentioned earlier, we're looking pretty good this year.

We do have an adopted budget of 13 million.

Our budget change requests is uh a reduction about 2.23%.

Um I'll share a little bit how we're able to do that.

But 64% is staffing.

That's a good rate for district court.

Um 17% of our budget goes to the beautiful Kent County Courthouse, uh but the leases is uh the bonds are being paid off there, and then we give about almost two million that's c from the budget our transmittals to fees and services and go to the state of Michigan and then the county.

Uh we projected about and are really seeing conservatively an 8% increase in our compliance with court orders.

You know, we don't want to keep generating revenue, but we want people to be held accountable, and we have a staff that is doing a great job, which results in the 8% increase.

Uh that reduced our requested city contribution by nearly 9%.

Uh little history of uh city appropriations from 25 to 26, and our future for 2930, those are definitely projections working with uh you know city uh budget office.

Um, but that's partly based on we are conservative and how we estimate our revenue, so we're never in a situation where overestimating what we can collect let's see.

This gives us a little bit of a history of cost savings and checks take taken since 2019.

I did go over this last year, I won't focus too much on it, but uh we do track how we are planning not only for today but the future.

Uh in 25 uh we started working on our migration to our case management system for the state.

You uh the city and our budget will start seeing a um a larger reduction in our IT cost because of that.

We also note on here the discontinued work pro uh work crew program that many are familiar with.

Although it states on here we have uh uh it uh it impacted a budget reduction for our operations by 140,000 in the fiscal year 25 and moving forward, but it also created a program where people are providing community service to over 50 agencies that we partner with in the community, and we're having an 85% success rate, and this year alone we it's about a community value of $345,000.

So those are some positives that we're seeing from the shift from the work crew to the alternative sentencing uh department that we have.

Uh we're still working towards trial court funding.

I'll briefly talk about that here in a minute.

We expanded our grant uh program funding, it's still a little little over 1.5 million dollars.

And what impacted our budget or helped us reduce our budget this year and the allocation from the city is the bonds for the building uh will be paid off.

Um that has helped us a great deal.

But what our other focus is that you don't see the monetary value currently is that we've been working a lot of our internal processing and workflows.

We rearranged how we do business with our court dockets.

We provided a brand new website that's community focused with services such as a virtual clerk.

We have virtual counterclerks that people can access without coming to the courthouse.

We're trying to do more with less because we are seeing an increase in workload, but we don't we want to also have a maintenance of our budget and um not just uh always come and ask for staffing.

So we're in a pretty good position with that focus and with process and procedures.

I'm just gonna talk about this for a brief second, but this slide a lot of information is on it, but it's here for informational purposes if you ever want to dive into it.

What I will draw the attention to is that if you go to the top right of the table under 2025, for example, the very top row is felony cases.

You see from 2024, we had two 2021 eighty-seven new cases filed.

In 2025, 2,491.

That's an increase approximately of 14% year over year.

But the bottom number you will see in case age.

Now, case age is the goal of the time frame that we want to adjudicate our cases, so we do not delay access, we do not delay any type of um uh access justice for the people that come to the court.

But from 2024, 75% of our cases were adjudicated within 28 days.

In 2025, even with the increase, our adjudication rate jumped up to 80 percent.

That's 5%.

So felony cases for our court impact our budget by over $2 million because we don't receive revenue from felony cases.

You're in, you're out, you go to circuit court, we're done with it.

So this is a big huge chunk of our workload that people don't always understand that we do, that we don't collect on.

So um solving courts.

Talked a little bit about the multiple problem solving courts that we have.

Now let's touch base on recidivism, because why have them if they're not working?

And they are.

So since 2023, our court is focused on best practice.

We did a best practice reset, brought in the state court administrative office, and really looked into how we can improve our programs.

And we're doing a great job.

And our goal, uh, I like to think we're the best now, but our goal is to be the best at everything we perform uh for the district court and the community of Grand Rapids.

But of the participants, eighty-nine percent of the participants in one of our courts, problem solving courts, had no new drug or alcohol convictions, and 75% avoided any new conviction.

So this is at or higher than the average you're seeing statewide amongst the problem solving courts.

Our judges are doing wonderful, our staff is doing awesome, they're passionate and committed about it.

What's on the horizon?

Um, some horizon issues we have for the court, trial court funding.

I presented a lot on trial court funding last year, our budget.

I'm not gonna go through that whole piece now.

I think we're we're aware it's still going through the system, but that's something that will impact us.

It'll impact the city.

Um we are also have to deal with uh specialty court funding, which ties into uh stabilization of federal funding, and our Kent County DV court support.

So our domestic violence court, like I said, fully functional.

We've had our few few uh first graduate um this past year.

Um funding is gonna run out.

We get a local funding, and it will run out in 2027.

Um and we are seeing some we are seeing some success, and that'll be on the horizon on how we're gonna continue that.

So briefly when an alternative funding for trial courts.

So state court budgets.

Here's the why.

So local funding units, obviously, City of Grand Rapids, you allocate a several million dollars, several to keep us functioning.

And the cost just keep rising.

Um Michigan courts, Michigan courts throughout the state cost 1.2 billion to run.

Funding from our grants only make up about 15% of that funding.

And uh collectively, the courts um only collect about 34% from fines and restitution.

So half of the assessments that we collect that we order are collected that first year.

So if we c if we order five million, you know, not like particularly us or any other court, two and a half million might be collected.

So it's a problem, and and this is something that the court that the state has been addressing, because there's an increasing increasing cost with limited revenue.

So, what's the current status of the court of the trial court funding?

I remember last year, Commissioner Yasasi asked me, Am I gonna see this in my tenure?

And I said, you'll see parts of it.

Okay.

Um, and that's exactly what's happening.

The judicial council is working with the state budget office currently uh and the legislature to fund courts for its uh towards a share model.

Uh the concept recommendation paper was published and issued at the end of 2025.

And there's a lot of work in Lansing going on with our state court administrator Tom Boyd and um the legislature.

Now, uh, where does that leave us today in May of 2026?

Um limited communication with all trial state courts because there are there is a lot of, as the mayor knows, a lot of uh legislative changes that are going to happen, but they're not giving up on it, and that's where we're at.

Thank you.

All right, Mayor, we'll uh pause here, see if there are any questions of me or any of our presenters.

Um yeah, uh to take the last first.

I certainly I think our principal strategy on the trial court funding has got to be to make sure that Tom Boyd stays healthy.

Um so I know that this is something we've been working on for you know years and years and years at the state level.

Um and it's something the city needs to keep focused on is that is that funding piece.

Um so uh colleagues, any questions?

We just went we cover a whole lot of ground there.

And um let me just remind you, I put I put a lot of notes down about policy things, um, which I'm not gonna ask.

I'm excited about them, but those are my follow-up questions.

But we're we're talking about the budget.

So in the interest of getting through our next what four chunks, uh let's keep ourselves focused on the the dollar questions as best we can.

Uh Commissioner Knight.

Uh oh, I'm sorry, commit what your Commissioner Usassi had your hand at first.

Okay.

I got to get better peripheral vision, maybe more carrots.

Thank you, Commissioner.

Glad to have you as a partner.

Always so thank you.

Uh my first question is really around um the GRPD overtime, um, Chief.

You had said that you felt that probably these special events maybe kind of initially there'd be a push and and just planning up for these first events, but probably not as much disruption.

Are other, you know, in thinking about the budget, are there other agencies that are assisting us, you know, and thinking about you know, we talked about some of the crosswalk and all these different you know, places where people are gonna be kind of connecting and coordinated.

So I just wondered um how that works.

Well, we're not seeing a need for uh other agencies to assist us at this point.

Obviously, we're gonna uh first see what the impact is before we is that mic on?

Yeah, yeah.

Is on okay.

Yeah.

So not closer.

You just shy.

Yeah, shy.

Um yeah, we want to be able to see what the impact is.

Uh a lot more goes in than when you just bring another agency in and start helping you uh with an incident.

I know we do it up for things like the river bank and uh Fourth of July, uh, but those are just one incident.

But a lot goes into as I think uh Director Davis mentioned at his know your rights, so departments train differently.

We want to make sure our expectations are the same for all law enforcement at a working event, make sure our citizens know what they can expect from the law enforcement agency in the city, which is GRPD, uh, and we know how we handle things and how we operate.

So before we dive into that, we want to make sure that there's a need.

Okay, thank you for that.

Um, my next question is around the mental health co-response.

I know uh again we'll be focused more on the budget, um, although these are some policy pieces kind of thinking about partners like network 180.

Um, you know, I know that there was a lot of work in, I think, uh with this in terms of like mental health transfers and that you know that certainly would take time out of the department, right?

But are it are are other people doing those mental health transfers or is GRPD, are you all still responsible for those?

I'm not sure what other departments are doing specifically.

I just know what obviously we're doing it, it's been a uh great benefit from time-wise as far as like I think the drop-off time, it's it's literally five minutes and the men and women are back out there calls.

Because I remember there's at some point like sometimes if there was like an order, there would have to be a mental health transport, and then I'm seeing your your your partner behind you shaking the head.

And so I I I know at some point we were just saying in terms of staffing usage and sort of where was the highest and best use.

So just wondered about that in terms of the budget and staffing.

Um if that was a concern.

And then if network 180 or were they did they have any concerns about their funding or staffing and that how that might impact our cult response model that we've worked towards.

I don't know specifically but maybe uh my partners here, chief of staff, Matt Weibel.

Uh or DC Maycroft can add to that, but not to my knowledge.

And a follow-up is fine.

I just think you know, kind of hearing the common thread.

Again, the I think the city and all of your departments have done such good jobs of breathing in state and federal funding, but we also know that there's been challenges and reductions with that funding, and so just trying to get ahead if that's a concern for that agency.

So that can that can definitely be a follow-up.

Commissioner, I I did speak to um Bill Ward shortly before we presented the budget and um was pretty um a firm that there would be continued sustained services or pri at least a partnership with the city from network 180 that at the present moment they're not challenged by any uh funding reductions.

In fact, we we talked with them about how we could even increase more of the co-response of social workers uh for late night um kind of uh operations for the police department.

And so they were pretty he was looking forward to continuing to partner with us.

Okay, that's good to know.

All right, um, thank you.

And then um this is this is a bit policy, but I also think budget as we're talking.

I I heard both both chiefs say, you know, kind of what is the staffing in the future, our city is growing, there's a lot of like one-time investments, we have more people coming in, becoming a destination.

Um and so, you know, I I can't speak to uh specifically, and I wasn't on the commission when we did the last, I know uh that Hillard Heinz study in 2019, uh, but watched it closely, and I'm not sure.

Will both do both departments use the same sort of evaluation to understand what are the staffing needs of the future, both you know, say next year into the five-year process?

So uh our our CFO actually is kind of is leading the procurement effort to find a consultant to help us look at the overtime needs in both departments.

And so, as you've you know, as you've heard both chief identified all the reasons, uh what we want to do is be really clear on what is the biggest cost driver of overtime.

We still have the uh deployment study from Hillard Heinz, and we go back to look at uh some of those recommendations uh whether it's uh operational improvement or civilianization, and so uh that um is often referenced, particularly around collective bargaining, but this one specifically is going to be focused on overtime usage.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you and same study for for both uh departments.

Commissioner Knight.

Um thank you, Commissioner Mayor.

Um, along that same question that um Commissioner Asasi asked earlier, you mentioned um Chief Trig.

Um you mentioned that um implementing that second shift might help with some of that overtime cost.

Um, and how how do you see that happening?

And do you have a timeline for that?

What does that look like?

My goal was just to make sure our staff and it's continue to uh increase, right?

Obviously, the cost for service is number one priority, and then we start moving into uh you know the proactive type thing.

So having a second shift um uh traffic unit could help fill voids in those special uh assignments because obviously we know those are mostly uh at night, whether it be Divos Place, Amphitheater, or uh Van Andor Arena.

So let's say we're uh the commander um is having issues filling those slots instead of ordering someone in, which would be overtime, you have this second shift second shift traffic unit that part of their role would be to fill in in that spot, and that would be an on-duty thing, so that would be a cost savings.

Okay, thank you.

And then um my other question um for Mr.

Davis around the um around the safe public safety trust fund.

Um two things you mentioned um part of uh some of the work that's already been done with some of the organizations within the city, and you mentioned neighborhood match fund.

Um I'm wondering though, and and I'm not sure what that budget looks like right now, but uh, my understanding is over this past year, there are a number of organizations that didn't get funded because they didn't have the funding, and so is there extra funding that can go into the neighborhood match fund to continue to um support some of those organizations that were doing that first, since that was already that's already been a thing that's been established, and they've been doing a lot of that work um over the years, and then the other part of that is in the decision making process.

Has there been a thought about possibly um allowing the the the same way that we kind of did the participatory budgeting, um, allowing community um some community leaders to be a voice in how that money is disseminated as well to support some of these other projects?

So, Commissioner, take your first question first.

Uh that 400,000, that 25%, it's split into two buckets.

One is two hundred thousand dollars to be uh this community grant funding process, the other two hundred dollars is to support existing uh city programs uh that deal with spaces around violence prevention.

Uh so I think that's something that could be considered whether um because there are some spaces in neighborhood match funds that's but fund those type of programs, so if it fits the requirements, I think that's initial 200,000 could be considered for part of that.

Um I'd relates to your second question.

Uh, we did spend some time talking about the best way uh to implement this part of the funding, and because the requirements were very specific at the state level, we thought it best to have staff involved in that process.

We definitely want to continue to partner with community leaders, make sure they're informed and they can make sure that the right people are applying uh because the requirements are so strict and go beyond just city purview.

We thought it's important to have staff lead that process.

And just to add to your comment though, but part of the process I understand it would allow before the recommendation comes to the city commission, still go to the public safety committee where there are community appointed people involved in that committee to that's correct.

That's correct.

That's how we get to city commission.

The uh final recommendations from staff will go to the public safety committee, public safety committee will be able to apply on that, and then it'll come to commission.

Okay, okay, good.

Thank you.

Um, for each of your presentations and um you and your entire teams for what it took to prepare to get to today.

Um a few follow-up questions.

Um let's start with uh GRPD.

Uh so you started off talking about the number of calls increasing slowly.

I think you know, we all kind of mentioned that you did too, fire.

Um outside of growth, pure population growth, right?

How much are we understanding what is driving that?

Is it as um for example are certain types of crimes or certain types of incidents, incidences growing more faster than more fast than others?

How are we understanding um kind of what's behind those numbers a little bit more?

Well, I think it's a combination of a lot of things.

Obviously, uh you know, as our city grows, you know, it has various events.

There's going to be uh things that you know people call for assistance, whereas with the amphitheater, whether it's a lost child or uh trouble with person type things, those things are gonna happen.

Um I know I mentioned um you know when I did the um presentation uh about a month ago about the number of guns we take off the street now uh pre-COVID was was 210 and now it's 476.

So we're just in uh you know different times from I don't know what the all the drivers are from uh mental health services to needs.

I know we we wear a lot more hats now, I think, than uh we did when I started my career, which we're happy to do.

Um as I talked about being the default button sometime to uh answering calls that we're not maybe the best equipped to handle, but just getting uh make sure we're getting the right people to the right services that they need.

Um but yeah, I think it's just part of the uh the times.

Um, you know, our our our city's growing and it's just the the need for various services, but um I don't have a specific answer for you, unfortunately.

Okay.

I'd be interested to see what we can find.

I think um the 61st district uh court committee might be a good uh uh opportunity to dive deeper into some of that data.

I think we've been talking about that a little bit over the last year to understand as we grow.

I think you know we need to understand and the department needs to understand when we say we're growing and we have more cost for service.

What kind of costs are we talking about?

What type of incidences are we talking about?

Is it violent crime?

Is it traffic related?

Is it uh accidents?

Uh I think that's important um from a staffing perspective, but also a program and prevention and intervention, right?

Um relatedly, um you mentioned a new pilot program with M COLS, um, but I I didn't catch what that pilot program is.

I think it's a type of training.

Um is that the one that's focused on grappling, or is that something separate?

Uh I believe that's something separate.

Okay.

Do you know those?

DC Maycroft, can you see the overseas training?

Yeah, CPE money is it's from Michigan Commission on Law Enforcement Standards, I believe it was 217.

Yep.

That is in addition to our regular training budget.

So it's a pilot program where it's uh depending on how many officers each agency has, they allocate that money.

That 217,000 has been extremely important for us to do continuing uh uh training on our officers.

We have mandated training, excuse me, through the state, but I can tell you every officer gets significantly more training than that.

Part of it is because of this CPE money, and so what we do is if we have a certain amount of training, and I know we've done it with our um Jiu Jitsu-based grappling training where we've sent train the trainers to other states to get trained by the best and brightest in the country.

That CPE money covered it through M Calls and not through the city budget.

But we are using it, it's really uh you petition the M calls.

Will you pay for this training?

They authorize it, and then they'll pay for it.

Okay, so not a a new a new pilot training itself, but a new way to pay for it and pay for it, yes.

It's a new funding source for additional training, yes.

Wonderful, thank you.

And we had over 35,000 uh hours of training last year as we talk about uh being a culture of training.

It's it's important to our our men and women and giving them the tools that they need to do their job best ability.

Absolutely.

Um moving over to fire.

Um, thank you, gentlemen.

Um, you talked about the facility master plan.

I know that we are also uh doing something similar as a city, so curious how that's working with departmentally with kind of the city's plan.

We're working right alongside facilities and the CFO to make sure we're lockstep together.

Yeah, facilities uh is attending the meetings and has input into this.

So we're not not operating off to the side, we're operating in conjunction.

Uh but we do have such a specialty set of buildings, we're doing a separate report.

Yeah.

Yes, you do.

And then finally, uh thank you.

Um for OPA.

Um, two things.

One, um, through public safety committee, we were uh presented uh by the adjust GR group that presented to the group to public safety.

So I'm curious.

Um, and that's a prevention chronic cross sector approach to preventing violence and making the best use of public dollars.

So curious how that partnership is going, um, and if uh and what the plans are might be to support that work, and relatedly, um you mentioned um the budget and the program work with immigrant and refugee commit communities.

So I am wondering how uh the department might be responding to more emerging issues with those populations.

So two-part or just GR, and then um how is your work with immigrant and refugee communities shifting as the landscape in these change?

Okay, thank you.

So uh OPA uh and and the city in general has been involved in the just GR since before.

It was a just GR.

Uh when we originally talked about it, some of you may have talked about it as the Aspen Institute project.

Um, and we continue to be a part of that work.

That work is uh continue to grow.

It's at a stage now where uh just GR is working on uh the next phase of engagement.

That's the uh next space the group is working toward.

The idea is to make sure that they're uh just GR a large part uh is looking at numbers, right?

We want to make sure that there are uh we have data.

The the point is to look at evidence-based uh data to uh kind of see where interriches need to be.

And this next stage of engagement is looking at uh the stories that go along with uh that data.

So that is where a just GR is working towards it relates to where we are and how this work can be supported.

I know that there has been some interest from a Just GR uh in or in uh getting some funds from that public safety trust fund based on what we've described today.

I think that would be a process that would be appropriate for them to submit an application through.

Um although we wanted to present here first.

Uh I did let them know that after we presented here, I would get with them and let them know what was happening.

So I anticipate that happening.

Dear second question, Commissioner, as it relates to our immigrant and refugee uh work, um we are very intentional about partnering with people who would be trusted messengers uh to help navigate this space.

What we know as a city and as a department is we don't have all the answers, and that uh people are facing a time that uh it's is different, and that's the nicest way for me to say it, right?

We're not we're in a different time uh where people are really struggling on how to navigate.

We don't have the answers about everything in every way, and then city government there's not uh we can't always do all the things we want to do, but what we can do is support organizations who know what's best.

So that's why we've been really focused on our partnerships.

We've been focusing on connecting with organizations who are doing work and community supporting those spaces, and and if there are ways that we can support, we do that.

Um, one of the ways that we we support directly as far as information is through our know your rights program.

Again, as we've talked about previously, we have tailored programs, and sometimes we uh do presentations in spaces where they ask us to um let me pause and say a lot of times we don't publicize our know your rights work as much as some may want to see.

And it would be great for us to take pictures and put on our websites and say, hey, we're doing this work because we want community to know we're doing the work.

But some of the spaces we're coming, the people who are receiving this training don't feel safe.

Uh and they've made that very clear to us that um they're very grateful for the trainings that they're receiving, they're grateful for the information, it's really helpful in the way they're navigating their lives, but they don't want to be in pictures.

Uh you know, they don't want their names on the website, and we respect that because the point is to get them the information needed.

So that's the way we're doing it, is by meeting people with their where they are in organizations where they are and trying to support the work.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Uh Commissioner uh King Mark.

Uh thank you, Mayor, and thank you, gentlemen, for presenting to us today.

I greatly appreciate all of your presentations and and notes.

I'd like to go to uh Chief Brown, the fire department.

I'll start by saying, as uh we noted we really want to talk about budget today.

I want uh to be uh transparent to the public and my colleagues that I'm uh very supportive of the disaster relief fund being funded at 100,000.

I think it's exactly like the chief said, we have an extreme need uh right now in community to create sustainable ways to respond uh in a very prudent manner to what we see currently from increasing extreme weather to everyday things that I want us to be able to be equipped to to tackle.

So I'm very uh excited to see this.

I think this is a highlight of the budget, in my opinion, and one of those ways that we can say to our neighbors and community that we are doing our part, and of course, I'm hoping that in turn community partners will also uh lock arms with us on this.

Um, and our state and federal partners will see the need in our community because it is present.

So very supportive of that, hoping my colleagues are as well.

And then when we move on to staffing, I think it's very important.

Um we haven't been able to have a more detailed as we've been on uh public safety.

I haven't been able to really sink into staffing for the fire department as much.

So when you say that there's this internal study underway, um, when do you foresee that being wrapped up and when can we have numbers on what the actual need is?

So it's both internal and external.

So we poured through the numbers to get ready for this presentation to show the gap.

But working with CFO, we are bringing in a consultant to verify, validate, really dig through the numbers.

And I don't I don't have a timeline yet.

Okay.

Uh but I would I would assume, having done some of this work for other places, that it'll be done in time for next budget cycle.

And that that would be the intent, right?

Is we can come back with information to make informed decisions on staffing.

Wonderful.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Yes, thank you.

Commissioner Belichick, did you have any questions or comments?

I think what I want to just say is that what I'm noticing and throughout this these presentations is that there's an increased focus on public safety, community safety, and the needs that our growing city is providing.

I think there's an emphasis on um really strong emergency management and resiliency planning.

I think those are going to continue to be there.

I really appreciate the highlights on the horizon.

I do think the overtime is an ongoing pressure that we're gonna have to watch over the next few years.

So I'm I too am paying attention to what's going on with those staffing um analysis.

And um just from a little um evaluation that I did in the 2025 police data that was publicly available, it does seem like a large proportion of our policing work is not uh necessarily crime initiated, but nuisance or um personnel person to person, um domestic violence, things like that.

And so um I would be interested in knowing more about um this could be a longer discussion not necessarily today about how that's going to be maybe moved off of policing and into a different format.

Um I I too am supportive of the hundred thousand dollars for the emergency disaster relief.

I think that as we're looking forward, city manager, I would be interested in paying attention to other kinds of not disaster relief, but a different kind of contingency fund that we could talk about for when people come to us asking for um amelioration of situations, but we can talk about that off not here necessarily today.

So um, yeah, just thank you for your presentations.

I'll be continuing to watch what's going on very closely, and I would add that I'm supporting any public trust fund dollars that can be spent in um like this person-to-person mediation and and other ways that we can address uh bringing the temperature down in our community.

So uh thank you, gentlemen.

Uh thank you, city manager.

Uh very I think clear, concise.

Um, maybe we're a little all too inside.

I think we all understood it very well, but I I hope that that was uh understandable to the public.

Um I I just want to highlight two things.

One is uh a random thought going forward, city manager um on cost control, uh which just occurred to me right now, so I haven't thought it through very much.

Um but the other is I want to point out like I think that it in macro terms, I mean there's some things in this budget that are like $50,000 questions.

That's a very small question relative to the size of the budgets we're talking about.

And so the public knows like the majority of city funds are actually spent on police and fire.

So this is the biggest part of our our budget we're talking about right now.

Um and so it seems to me probably our biggest opportunity is to be very, very serious about this overtime analysis, because um if we can staff right so that our uh so that we get the most bang for our buck.

Um we get more humans doing this work, uh, and we are ameliorating our overtime.

There's huge, there's millions of dollars potentially of cost savings there.

So that's a I think an order of magnitude bigger question than some of these uh other programs, which many of us can get excited about.

Um so I just want to point out that I think in organizationally we've really got to be willing to take the hard look at the numbers, and you know, I know that uh Chiefs you're both very focused on this, you're very clear on this.

I know city manager, you're very clear on this.

I just want to point out for the public that that may be the forest.

Uh and there are some trees we talked about, but the forest may be that overtime discussion.

Um the other thing that I will suggest is and this is you know me responding some some to some of the citizen input that all of us have gotten around when we say growth right now the city's population isn't growing five percent a year it's we're growing but not exponentially and not explosively in population um our attractions are maybe growing are exploding right so we're going from the DeVoe Center to adding two new major things um and so maybe we're going from one event thing focused in the downtown core to three and that's that's sort of an explosion not of population but of um one off uh focal things and that always leads to two questions from the citizens which are perfectly rational which is how do we deal with parking um and how how are we going to have our uh public safety folks staffed appropriately to respond to this and um I know that's going to be an up and coming conversation so partly I want to like name that so the citizens can hear it and we're about to talk about mobility next but there's one thing that I do want to think about going forward and you might call this automation we know that we need uh police officers for traffic control but we also know that things like instant on flasher uh traffic signals can really help with crowd flow.

So we've got them at the DeVos Center right now.

I think we're gonna be in a learn as we go uh mode for a while with the amphitheater and I hope that some lessons from that we can apply to the soccer stadium but I think that as mobility comes up this is something that I really hope that we don't silo our conversations where we're just like well Chief Trig knows we got a lot of traffic so he's got to send a lot of bodies out to deal with it and our uh parking system knows they got to park cars but we don't think about the fact that I I want us to think about how we can do road design in ways that may actually help uh take some of the load off of our officers because I think some of that those automated crossing signals may actually help us with peak demands and and uh influx of pedestrians because every parked car produces at least one pedestrian the minute you turn your car off your pedestrian you're walking around the city and our officers are moder are going to be working on pedestrian safety as much as anything else uh when those events happen.

So just wanted to lay that out as it's something we can have a conversation about I don't expect any answers now because we're going to have to I think experience um how polite Lionel Ritchie fans are whether they know how to park their cars and we're gonna find that out in about two weeks.

So thank you all uh and thanks for the presentation city manager.

Thank you uh mayor and while they're transitioning I'll just um say a couple things um just to get clarification I know there's been discussion I heard Commissioner Belshack uh mention uh mediation I know you have mentioned in others uh if we were and when there's lots of opportunity to talk about the development of such programs that would be uh taken out of the internal resources that we would be looking should that be the desire to stand up uh uh supportive uh services like that and lastly just for the record I want to clarify yes you are correct the police department and the fire department um operate the majority uh use uh of resources from the general fund but overall city budget our water systems uh both uh water and wastewater uh is a significant investment much much larger than public safety so with that we will uh transition to our next section and discuss mobility and vital streets and I think we have several presenters and I guess from our Oversight Commission as they come forth City Manager I don't know if we want to have um biological break after this next previously does this commission anybody want to take a break before this next section we can take five mayor if you prefer I think we just lost two commissioners so why don't we take at least three minutes okay and let's pull up another chair no okay he's working on it great let's move on to our next presentation which is um mobility thank you mayor leGran commissioners happy to be here today uh joined at the table for this section which will cover mobility in vital streets uh with Chad Patton who is our mobile GR chair Jessica Smith the director of mobile GR Cindy Irving who is acting city engineer and then Tim Roseboom who is here for the Vital Streets Oversight Commission.

So appreciate uh everybody being here to present on this topic.

And you see there the key pillars and objectives that we have articulated as key to ensuring that we are planning for and providing the mobility and parking choices that the city needs to be both hitting all of our mission and preparing for growth and changed expectations over time.

So safety, we always start with.

Safety is foundational to the mobility system, and really the number one thing we have to ensure that all of our investments deliver on.

These are a cute a few key highlights of how we are investing in this budget in safety in our mobility system.

So continuing to look at our sidewalk system, obviously key to safety for many of our non-car users, but also for car users to make sure that everybody's staying in there in their respective lanes.

We are working on some bike safety projects.

So here we have our matching capital investment.

We will leverage that $650,000 investment with grant funds at a significant rate of about $3.6 million.

So you see we're we're making good headway there.

Neighborhood traffic calming program is something that we work with our community on and have a long history of.

We are doubling the investment in that program with this budget, so uh really excited about that.

We are continuing to deliver on some specific uh pedestrian safety enhancements.

You'll see one called out there on East Belt Line and I-96.

And then the uh safety audit, again, that $5,000 local investment is matched so that we end up with $50,000 that will help us pursue two particular safety audits.

Um is on the Michigan Street corridor and one uh Kalamazoo from MLK to 28th Street.

Moving on to mobility choices, again, we are uh needing to think about how we are meeting current and planning for future expectations in terms of how people get around and to and through town.

So we are continuing our and rounding out really our investment in the Dart and EV car share program to complete that pilot, which is uh slated to end in fiscal year 2027.

So $30,000 allows us to complete that.

Uh we have talked about the mobility blueprint uh with the commission in the past at a at a past briefing, but this investment will allow us to do that really robust work both on the technical side and the community engagement side to again implement some of the vision of the community master plan, some of our existing plans and update all of those into a package where we really engage the community again on what it is we need to do to meet our growth needs and get people around conveniently allow them to plan those trips and to uh be able to access what they need to access.

We have continued investment in engagement, so that allows us to touch base with our uh residents and users of our systems in a variety of ways.

Um, this year in particular, we do anticipate being able to reach out and talk to folks about how uh the the reimagined Dash alignment is working for folks, uh that we would be able to talk more about soccer stadium mobility and parking needs around that, and a number of other just very variety of initiatives that we undertake for outreach education in line with our vision zero objectives.

There is also an investment in a transportation uh planner resource, so uh taking in-house some GIS uh functionality and expertise, something we have relied on DewPoint for for a while, but makes more sense to be able to have that in-house and have a little bit more robust uh subject matter expertise as we launch a number of initiatives uh citywide.

And then finally, we are continuing our contract with uh micro mobility vendors.

Just a reminder, those contracts don't have a direct cost uh to the city, um, but we do contract so that that resource is available.

Getting to the DASH, uh we did speak with the commission earlier this year about some changes to the Dash uh route.

So this was really driven by the fact that our current agreement with the Rapid was coming to a close uh later this year, and the RAPID was uh highlighting for us the need for that contract amount to increase for a number of drivers that are there on your screen.

We were also looking at the health and uh sustainability of the parking fund, which does support the Dash route.

Uh so the revised alignment and uh agreement with the Rapid allows us to avoid a number of significant costs, not least of which was uh investments in new buses, which would have been a significant investment over the next five years.

There was engagement at the stakeholder level, kind of inform level engagement if we go back to our community engagement documentation, inform level engagement with the community as we were rolling out this new alignment or route.

And then we will continue to, as we have throughout the operations of the DASH, get feedback from users, understand how it is working, get feedback from the community and continue to make adaptations to that route as needed and as within the resources we have available.

We do believe this will be a great asset as we prepare for the opening of two new significant venues downtown as well.

So hope that people are going to be taking a look at the DASH and other rapid alignments to help them get into downtown from a variety of places as we think about mobility.

Just a couple highlights, and this is just highlights.

This is by no means an exhaustive listing of all of the fee pieces of the ordinance, which the manager mentioned you will be seeing at your meeting next week or having a public hearing about next week, but wanted to hit just a couple of highlights around parking rates and fees.

So we are not making any changes to the on-street hourly parking rates.

We are not making changes to the level of fines that people hopefully aren't used to getting, but some people may be used to getting their parking tickets.

Probably of most interest would be the monthly parking rates.

We are raising that to meet uh cost of living adjustments as our parking rate framework has laid out as important to keep pace in order to maintain the health of the parking fund.

And then we're making some fee structure changes.

So again, not necessarily can't really do an apples to apples comparison here, but uh just calling out a couple of notes.

So Market Avenue, Mobile GR operates that surface parking lot adjacent to market near 131.

That had been a flat fee daily uh rate since it will be kind of prime parking area and uh area that we expect to support accessibility parking and drop-off locations for the amphitheater in particular.

We're moving that to an hourly free structure.

EV charging stations are moving from an hourly parking rate structure to a cur per kilowatt hour fee.

That's consistent with state law.

And then we are changing some maximum event rates.

So if you recall, our parking ramps uh have event rate parking tiers and variability parking, and those rates are set by uh combination of demand and size of the events and number of attendees at events scheduled downtown.

Uh there are a couple more ramps that we want to draw into that system and uh particularly allow to be charged at the maximum event rate, but again, because of their proximity to the amphitheater or uh future soccer stadium.

We are not changing the maximum event rate, so we're just adding ramps that can get up to that maximum event rate.

Um, a number of other parking system investments uh we have and uh under Ms.

Smith's leadership, the system has really been taking a look at the uh parking system overall, the health of the fund overall, and making moves to ensure that that can be sustainable.

Also gathering information for us as we continue to hear from not only development downtown but development outside uh farther flung areas of our city on the importance of parking and the cost of building parking.

So, unfortunately, parking is needed and not beloved by anyone.

So, uh especially when you're talking about developing it and using property to support parking.

So it's it tends to be the least desirable land use from a capital cost standpoint, uh, but not one that folks are willing to forego much convenience for.

Uh so there's a continued investment in understanding capacity of both of public parking, our public asset, uh, privately held parking that may be available to the public, and uh utilization of both of those things that will help us support requests to uh assist in building new parking, uh, whether downtown or outside of downtown, also assist in figuring out how to use some of that privately owned parking for uh publicly beneficial uh parking as well, publicly accessible parking.

So, again, making the best use of investments people have already made.

So, you'll see some investments in that.

Uh continuing to upgrade and maintain the uh communication and security equipment on our assets.

Uh, we are investing in a couple more positions to support that facility.

I will highlight we are adding one parking violations checker, um, and that will be something that we continue to monitor uh again as we see pressure on street parking potentially around some of these venues.

Uh we may need to consider additional investments in parking violation checking and enforcement to ensure that both neighborhoods are not unduly burdened and that commercial areas, those on-street parking that really is intended to be relatively short-term and turnover, so people can find parking convenient to a retail establishment really does turn over, and people aren't sitting there for five seven, eight all day long hours all day long.

So uh one investment in this um budget, but maybe more that we recommend in the future.

And then just a couple horizon issues on mobility before I turn it over to Ms.

Irving to go over the vital streets uh budget investments, and then at the end of that, we'll talk a little bit about state funding and changes in state funding.

But uh so horizon issues, particularly with respect to mobility.

Um as you may know, the city commission has a policy of moving towards full cost recovery on our fees.

There are a number of fees for mobile GR that still haven't achieved uh full cost recovery, and there may be very good policy reasons for those, but again, as opportunities allow, we bring those forward to the commission to validate or uh make moves towards fuller cost recovery.

So the block party fee is one that is uh quite um quite under full cost recovery at this place at this point, and again, back to that enforcement and are we getting street parking to be used the way we want it to be used.

The meter violation fines outside of downtown are half of downtown meter of violation fines and may not quite be causing the turnover we're looking for.

We will continue to monitor the impact of those new uh performance and entertainment venues on our staffing demands, uh particularly as we bring the parking ramp that is adjacent to the amphitheater into our management portfolio.

So we are uh very close to bringing forward an agreement for the commission with the CAA to manage that parking ramp.

Uh we'll continue to monitor that.

We have a number of other parking management agreements that are expiring over the next fiscal year.

And again, as we think about cost recovery objectives versus other economic development and community support objectives and strategic outcomes, expect that to be a conversation we have with the commission as we look at those parking management agreement and the terms of those.

Um we are looking ahead uh strategically to the vital streets income tax uh renewal expiration in 2030.

Uh that mob uh mobility blueprint work that I talked about will help uh underscore some of the overall objectives of what might we think about as we think about a next Vital Streets uh conversation with the community, so that will help us understand our needs, uh some rough order of magnitude costs of of the things we'd like to be able to uh develop and and provide in addition to our our normal asset management approach uh and and expect that to be a conversation over the next couple years with commission to to position us for that community conversation.

Um we'll talk a little bit more about the the state supporting revenues in future slides here, and then just wanted to highlight that car share pilot does end at the fiscal end of fiscal year 2027, and if we were to uh extend that permanently, that would be the you see the annual cost there.

So that would be a future budget conversation with the commission.

Okay.

Well, good morning, commissioners.

Um my name is uh Tim Roseboom.

I am the chair of Vital Streets Oversight Commission uh with me is uh Cindy Irving, the assistant city engineer.

Um I'm representing Ward 3 on the Commission.

I'm also a um Rapid employee, uh which is which entitles me to uh a voice on on the commission.

Um Cindy is the city staff that is uh assigned programmatically to the to the vital streets program.

Uh so vital streets came out of the income tax uh referendum back in 2014 was put on the ballot uh to direct a portion of the income tax toward uh street and road repairs.

This commission was stood up and uh did a plan you'll see that later in in the um presentation, but um we're directed to sort of apply certain principles of asset management um balanced by ward.

Uh there was a sidewalk program that was included um in vital streets uh and obviously our this commission that I oversee was stood up.

So uh we did uh before this plan that is going to be presented to you today uh make a declaration that we are in compliance with um the vital streets criteria.

Um we're here to present our 2027 um budget request and then our six-year capital plan.

So um with that, so obviously on the screen there is um the city's overall mobility goal.

Uh I don't I won't read it, you you can read it for yourselves, but um that goal kind of guides the the vital um streets plan um which is sort of the basis for determining investments.

You look at the vital streets plan, you look at the type of street um that is uh exist in existence, you determine investment level based on that, and then you go to the vital streets design guidelines, which were also were adopted by an earlier commission, and um you determine uh you basically build projects out of that.

I think the mayor kind of talked about getting people out of a moving vehicle and to their final destination, and a lot of the Vital Streets guidelines sort of look at like what does that street look like for for all of the users.

Um then on the screen, I think you'll probably see a lot more of these before and afters, but um sidewalks, I think I mentioned was a big important component of um the Vital Streets plan.

So there's a um example of a Vital Streets funded project that's completion of a sidewalk like about a half a mile um of uh Michigan Street that did not have any sidewalk at all before, and now there's a nice wide flat sidewalk.

Um so we do get asked often like what do we use, what factors do we use to determine um you know what streets and what projects to get invested.

Um so there was uh that task uh forest report that was done back in 2013, they kind of set up the um referendum, and then that led into the adoption of um the Vital Streets plan.

Uh there's a neighborhoods of focus component where you're kind of balancing investments by ward, and you're looking at um you know where needs are and maybe where disinvestment had occurred in the past and where you want to direct um funding.

Uh there's obviously a payment or an asset condition uh that Cindy's gonna talk about that is sort of set in in statute as well that you have to get a streets to a certain um you know asset condition, and then there's also leveraging um private investment and then a lot of them state and federal dollars that sort of go towards the plan.

So with that, I'm gonna kinda turn over to the technical uh Cindy's gonna take you through the the plan and the uh and the budget request.

Thank you, Tim.

Um good morning, everyone.

Um so when we're looking at asset management, we'll start with asset management.

That's often a big part of the conversation.

Um so we do assess our roads every year with the help of Grand Valley Metro Council.

We use a system called the PACER rating.

Um we have uh good, fair, and poor is their ranking, and it's a one to ten scale depending on the condition of the street and also other investments within the street.

I think that's another thing to highlight.

Our utility departments, our water and sewer department, they also invest heavily in our right-of-way, um, complete very large projects and partner with Vital Streets to help enhance our investment beyond even the the income tax that we have and the investment we have in Vital Streets.

So depending on the work to be done in that street, we'll we'll reconstruct um, which is where we're tearing everything up, likely putting in new utilities.

We may do rehabilitation where we're taking off um at least three inches of asphalt, adding in two layers, and then sometimes we do preventative maintenance, and that's pretty broad.

Um, but that can be very effective on local streets with low traffic volumes, and it's very cost effective, so we can stretch our dollars further.

Um this is um we talk about balance and distribution, and I know this slide is very small.

And I know in your budget packets, this is on page 181 in your packet, and page 189 in the PDF if you're looking online.

So every year the Vital Streets Oversight Commission looks at a budget proposal and makes a recommendation to the city manager, and that's what's included in the budget packet.

And then this talks specifically about fiscal year 2027, where you can see that we are investing um about 8.5 million in ward two, twelve million in ward one, twelve point eight million in ward three.

So each year there's some variability in our investment, but as you'll see as we go through this um slide deck that as we get towards the end of the Vital Streets program, we are maintaining balance and distribution.

Just some years we have larger projects in different wards.

Um we look at our annual investment and our percent good and fair.

Um when we started the program back in 2012, our streets were 60 percent poor.

If we did not pass vital streets, we estimated we would be at about 87% poor, so only 13% good.

So we are fighting time.

Streets have about a 20-year asset life, and some of our preventative maintenance will have a 10 to 12 year life.

So we are holding at about a 60 percent um good and fair, and we can see a summary here of where we're at.

We're at 57.5 percent good and fair as of September of 2025.

Um this is when our um condition assessments were completed by Grand Valley Metro Council.

So we're constantly fighting time, right?

So we've been doing this for 11 years.

And as we improve streets, other streets are degrading, but we continue to invest and far better condition than we would have been had we not had this investment level.

When we started the year that we started, we were investing about $500,000 in streets capital.

So we still had OM repairing potholes, but we had a very low level of investment.

So to date, we have done almost 2,300 projects.

We have touched 696 miles of streets, that is our center line miles.

We have a total of about 605 center line miles of streets.

So you can see where we have some where we've gone back more than once because it we they've needed additional work, and we've invested 256 million in Vital Streets dollars.

In 27 fiscal year 27, we're anticipating 93 projects, about 36.7 miles of streets, and about a 33.3 million in Vital Streets dollars just in street investment.

We have additional investments in sidewalks, and we'll talk about that in uses.

When we look at our sources and uses for Vital Streets, our orange is our income tax support.

That is certainly our largest dollar amount that we receive in Vital Streets, our largest amount of investment.

And that is almost 19.6 million.

We also get Act 51 revenues, and those are shown here in two different pies.

In the lighter blue, there's Act 51 of 3.4 million.

That was part of the promise to the voters that the first 3.4 million of Act 51 dollars would go to Vital Streets.

That second group called State Investment in Green of 8.1 million.

That kind of tied into a program where we anticipated the state was going to come through with more dollars, and when they did, those dollars would be shared between Capital and OM.

Our goal was to have six million, that is up to 8 million, so that's very encouraging.

We're having that additional state investment.

We also have a certain amount of cash available from projects being delayed or additional contingency carrying over from previous years that we continue to look for opportunities to invest and improve.

And then we also have grants.

So we continue to partner with the state for additional investment.

We have paid off of all of our bonds for both our sidewalks and our streets.

When the income tax passed in 2014, we recognized there would be a delay before that revenue was received.

So the city went forward and went out for bonds to start investment immediately.

For our uses, you can see we have a large investment in our federal aid urban streets, almost 17 million dollars.

These are our large arterial streets, and these are the streets that are also eligible for grant funding through federal highway and MDOT.

And then we our second large investment is 6.2 million in our local streets.

We have another small group of streets, about 50 miles of streets, which are our major non-federal aid urban, so they're also arterial, but they don't they don't fall in the same classification at the state level.

That's a smaller investment, but that's because that category is at 70% good and fair.

So you can see that's about two-thirds of our pie, and that's that 33 million that we're talking about.

But we also want to highlight some of the other great things that Vital Streets is able to do.

So we transfer roughly $3 million to our sidewalk funds, and we continue to close sidewalk gaps and improve our existing sidewalks.

We maintain money in our contingency account in preparation if state funding does not come through as anticipated.

We don't want to overprogram.

And then also if we have projects that need additional investment as we start to do design and investigate, we have additional contingency to support those.

Working with Mobile GR, where they have a funding source from us, so they're able to continue a lot of their neighborhood traffic calming and other good work they do to focus on safety issues.

Looking at some of the projects that we completed in 2026 helps to highlight what Vital Streets focuses on.

This is Fuller from Kalamazoo to Adams.

This is near the Boston Square Together development.

In this area, we were able to complete a road diet to narrow our lanes to slow traffic to have dedicated bike lanes on each side of the road.

We were also able to have enhanced transit stops where we were able to add a bus shelter in partnership with the Rapid.

We also improved our pedestrian crossing there at the um at the bus stop.

We have valley from Fulton to Bridge.

This is a good example of some enhanced public engagement.

We have a school at the corner near Park Street, and we were looking at different treatments for the intersection to improve safety because we have a lot of pedestrians and parent drop-offs.

We looked at a potential roundabout, we looked at a four-way stop, had extensive meetings with the school, went out and kind of looked at how people were using and interacting with that space, and we did wind up maintaining that four-way stop, determining that would be the safest bet for the children and for crossings in that area.

So just an example of being able to come in.

This was also a project where you can see on the left the curb head had been paved over and pretty beaten up, and it's kind of amazing how that new curb just brightens up a street and really makes it look nice.

But being able to add in that new curb and new new asphalt in that space.

We have Leonard from Powers to Alpine.

This project is an important business district, and we really wanted this space to feel very accessible and walkable.

So as people were coming into the business district to visit one business, they would be able to very comfortably walk along the sidewalk and visit other businesses.

And in this area, um we were able to do extensive traffic studies looking at both on-street and off-street parking and working with the neighborhood businesses and um removing parking from one side, maintaining it on one side, but then also at a critical location, switching parking from one side of the street to the other in direct response to businesses that had limited off-street parking to help support them and help support that business frontage.

Um part of what supported that is we were able to remove um on-street parking from in front of the library.

Everyone was parking in the lot, no one was using that parking, so we could repurpose that space.

And then here's just scenario we always think this is fun, right?

When the drone flies over the street, it's always nice to look all the way down the street and see the improvement.

We also support our green infrastructure goals.

So vital streets, we have MS4 permits, and our stormwater team will talk about that, I'm sure when they come and present.

Um, and we're looking at treating stormwater in place as much as we can.

I'm sure, as many of you know, this April we hit 18 feet, the minor flood stage twice, right?

So, right, it's a little it's a little stressful, a little exciting, right?

And so one of the things we do that's really important is we try to hold and infiltrate and use that storm water where it falls as much as we can, right?

Because ultimately it's making it to the river.

Last year we talked about leaching basins.

This year I want to talk about trees.

So if you ever look up trees and how much water they can take up, um we use a very conservative estimate of 600 gallons a year.

Um if you look at a very mature oak, it can be tens of thousands of gallons a year, and most of that water is taken up and then evaporated into the air.

So gives a tree canopy, slows the cars, makes the road feel narrower, it's place making, makes the sidewalk more enjoyable when you're walking, but also supports green infrastructure.

And then our stormwater team tracks our goals and they track how many um acres we're treating, and we continue to infiltrate more.

In calendar year 2025, we added 500 over 500 trees.

We added 47 infiltration basins, and we added an additional 14.9 acres of treatment area.

In our engagement, we have several stats here.

We we hold several community meetings, we have great opportunities with our business, our business associations, our corridor improvement authorities, and our neighborhood associations where we're able to come in and meet.

Um, we also send out postcards and mailings notifying people of projects.

Um we respond to 311 calls, and we also provide postcards in two different languages, English and Spanish.

We're also looking at enhancing our engagement for the right-of-way.

We understand this is these are people's homes and businesses, and they want more information, more time, more engagement on what's going on.

We're partnering with our planning department who help who helps with our community engagement, um, looking at adding an additional staff person to help support that, to have that capacity to put in that time.

Also looking at how we're providing more direct contacts during construction in case people have concerns.

We transfer dollars to sidewalks.

Our sidewalk program is something that that we're very excited about because in engineering we know it's very expensive and hard for a homeowner to get a contractor to come in and fix a sidewalk square, right?

So we know that's a challenge.

So it's been very exciting for us to be able to take that over and really make substantial investments in our sidewalks.

We switched to one contract per ward to be able to increase the volume of work by kind of maximizing the location and the number of units that could be replaced and reducing mobilization and contractors moving around the city.

We are back to the third ward with another systematic sidewalk.

We also maintain our public request contract when there's a trip hazard or a concern, so we can go out and fix that.

And we're continuing with our connectivity projects.

This year we're doing Lakeside from Michigan to Fulton, which is really exciting.

We had a chance to work with Dominican sisters and get kind of creative with easements to maintain their trees and their tree canopy and work with some challenging grades, but to make it a very nice kind of meandering, comfortable sidewalk for everybody.

These are just quick maps of the different wards and some of the projects in the wards, just to kind of highlight how we're trying to do work and improvement in every area.

And just highlighting in ward one, we are going to be completing Butterworth from O'Brien to the West City limits.

And this is a project that's been on people's radars for a long time, really challenging area, right?

Where we have the mines were out there, we have really high groundwater, we have a lot of uh rain and soil erosion.

We were able to complete a study, work with the private property owners to identify the entire watershed that was impacting the water in that area.

Also working with them for improvements to soil erosion and sedimentation control to keep that dirt off the street.

So, and then we're gonna be able to reconstruct that road to change that vertical height so there's better visibility.

I think there's concerns with driveways and some blind spots.

So we're really excited that project's happening.

We know it's taken a while, but it was a it's a complicated road, and we wanted to get it right.

Um, in ward two, um, we're completing three mile from Monroe to Plainfield.

This is an interesting example where this is a major arterial, so it's a higher volume street.

So, as part of Vital Streets, we are adding sidewalk to the north side, and we're also adding an extra wide sidewalk, acknowledging that we're probably gonna have young kids and families that are gonna want to go to the park on Riverside.

So we want to make sure there's ample room.

So we're adding that sidewalk to the north side and just to accommodate that residential area.

And then in ward three, just highlighting we're gonna be adding um Burton from Giddings to Plymouth.

So right now we're doing Burton from Division to Kalamazoo, and it's a really big project.

We know it's a big project, but it's a very important road in the third ward, very heavily traveled, so we're excited to make that investment.

And then, as we talked about our investment by ward, if you look at going through 2031, so we did make the assumption that the Vital Streets investment will continue beyond 2030.

And looking at 2031, our investment would be about 132 million per ward.

Um, also going back to 2030, always wanting to be conservative.

I think it's an engineer thing, right?

We always want to mitigate risk.

We're at about 124 million each in each ward in 2030.

Um, but we're um we're very encouraged.

We really hope that the investment continues.

We've seen a lot of improvements in our roads.

Um, we hope that continues.

Um, as promised, uh, just a couple slides here about the state funding changes.

So, as you saw in the sources slides that Ms.

Irving just went over, we do receive a significant amount of funds that we use towards roads in our budget from the state.

State made a couple changes uh recently about from those funding.

So, Michigan Transportation Fund, what we call Act 51.

Uh, they changed a source of funding from uh one source to switching to a tax on cannabis operations.

That's generally intended to be neutral in terms of how much money comes to us from that source, but obviously that remains to be seen.

Uh, those funds can be used on capital projects, maintenance, and operations of of things that impact your roads, right?

Not just general operations, but uh road-related uh services and operations.

Then we uh see at the state level a new source of funding, this neighborhood roads funding.

Um, that again is entirely new based on current state uh forecasts.

We expect that to be for to translate for Grand Rapids from $8 million or more annually to us, and those funds can be used on capital projects on local streets.

So given that we at the local level braid those two state funding sources together with a number of other funding sources, not least of which, actually, most significantly of which is our vital streets income tax to generate both maintenance of our assets and operations, things like street squeep sweeping and and the other things that you see public works doing.

Uh we are maintaining that idea of braiding those funding sources together, adding the neighborhood roads fund to that uh set of sources and distributing them across the uses that that are eligible across those pots of funds and recommending some additional investments because again, we expect that could be about a net 8 million or more annual increase to us across those uh uses.

So we do have a little bit more to invest.

Uh we are recommending that the commission consider increasing investments in a number of fronts.

So the first would be to add to our ability to do sidewalk snow plowing and seasonal green infrastructure maintenance.

That would also, the investment in that top bullet would also allow us to do more seasonal drain maintenance.

So currently we do a lot of this by contract.

This recommendation is to bring that uh functionality in-house.

We would have full-time staff who would then kind of flex across those uh needs.

So there would be sidewalk snow plowing, an additional 200 miles.

So we currently do 200, so that would be doubling what we're able to do, allow us to get deeper into uh the neighborhoods and some of the safe walk to school routes could be added.

Um and then do seasonal green infrastructure maintenance.

So, not when we're not snowplowing, we're doing green infrastructure maintenance, or on those shoulder seasons of the spring and the fall, we're also looking at increased seasonal drain maintenance.

So that's very important in the fall, get the leaves out of the way before we might have some of those storm events in the spring, get out and clean out those drains from sand and other uh things that have accumulated over the winter, which as we saw uh this spring very important, and we had we got a lot of questions in those first couple weeks.

Have people been out cleaning the drain, cleaning the drains, clearing the drains?

Uh so that would this investment would help us on all of those fronts.

Uh, we're second uh recommending that we braid these uh resources together to allow us to fund the city share of the regional approach to deer management.

So there is kind of a three-year plan to get up and running a program that would uh partner across the Kent County jurisdictions and GVSU to manage that deer population.

Uh and so our the city's investment is projected to be in that 235,000 dollar range for the first three years.

That would be an ongoing program.

So after year three, uh assuming the region wants to keep that going, there would be annual investments to continue our support for that.

Um third, then we would recommend significant uh enhancement in some of our traffic safety offerings.

So we're looking at about we're recommending about a four and a half million give or take increased investment there, and we can uh provide more detail offline, but that would allow us to do to look more at the safe routes to school, the high impact uh high uh I always get this wrong.

High injury high risk areas, more of our traffic safety protocols.

So we have a number of tools that we can bring to bear on existing rights of way like rapid flash and beacons, like traffic circles or different uh types of things that we can layer over into roads or add into our vital streets projects, and this would give us some more buying capacity, if you will, for some of those tools and techniques and the ability to design and install those.

Um and then finally additional funds.

So after all of those investments that were recommending, additional funds would just go into the sources uh pot that Ms Irving highlighted and be braided into and support various construction projects, including some additional investments in that sort of customer service side of the construction projects.

So we touched briefly on and have talked to you all before about our enhancements in the community engagement pieces of those construction period projects.

We would like to have a little bit more resource for each of our capital projects to do things a little bit more creatively with signage, have a little bit more wayfinding signage, have a little bit more ability to support hey, businesses are still open, get down here, whatever those things may be that we have found useful and want to make a regular part of our uh project budgets as opposed to having staff feel the pressure of like I've only got so much funding.

We don't expect that to be a significant cost, uh, but something we do want to call out uh specifically.

Uh so with that, the next step on these funds in particular, we did not build these recommendations into the capital budget that's in front of you.

We haven't seen these resources come in yet from the state.

So what we believed was most prudent was get some feedback for you from you all on those recommendations.

Any other priorities you'd want us to consider.

We expect to see those state funds coming in by September, and we would do the appropriate budget adjustments at those time, but budget amendments at those time to take the money in and then invest them as we have uh highlighted here with any modifications that you've talked about.

And then again, as we move forward into to thinking about vital streets, its expiration and and what we do next and the mobility blueprint, we always have that ability to re-look at how we braid all of the all of these revenues together and appropriately maintain what we have, but think about building new and always with that um funding to ensure that that we are primarily doing what we need to do for all the users to be safe in the network.

So that is that.

Uh we are happy this panel of experts to take a few questions.

I know uh we're trying to keep you on schedule and there's another section after this, but uh we'll either take those questions and get back to you, or we if we can answer them quickly, we'll do so now.

Thank you.

Um because I'm so excited about this, I'm gonna go first if that's okay for everyone.

Um so um I want to flag again as we're looking, so thank you.

A lot of this is really, really exciting.

I think the thing I'm most excited about, and I'm sure Commissioner Purdue uh like lit up too was 200 miles of sidewalk snow plowing.

That is awesome.

If we could do the whole city, that would make me really happy.

Um I did the math on this, and if your cost and my numbers worked out right, that means if you were plowing in front of my house, it would cost 12 and a half dollars a year.

Uh that's my budget for Advil for when I throw my back out snow plowing snow shoveling myself.

Um so it'd be a huge economy.

It'd be great for people with disabilities, people, the elderly, like it's so important uh that we actually build a world where people can get around on their in our and it's funny in our values system, we talk about 21st century multiple mode mobility.

I'm like, well, we also have a five million year old mode of mobility, and that's feet.

And like we should lean into like people's abilities to get around as pedestrians.

Um as we're looking forward, and I've named this before, and Commissioner Yasasi love this little thing because it's uh it's uh alliterated.

I think we need to continue to look at we're investing this money in things that are cheap, changeable, and continuous.

Um so by continuous, I mean if you're gonna put sidewalks in, you don't want them to start and stop because people can't teleport when there's a gap.

Um when we are doing things uh some things are a lot more expensive than others.

A four-way stop sign is a whole lot more uh less expensive than a roundabout.

Um and the other thing is changeable.

Um if you put on a roundabout, that's a 30-year thing.

We're not gonna be like, whoops, we're wrong, we're not gonna like take that roundabout out.

Whereas a four-way stop, you could, you know, take your red pieces of aluminum somewhere else.

Um if you do bike lanes that are changeable, um, then the community doesn't have to be like a thousand percent confident that's gonna work.

We can test.

Um so I I would hope that we can lean into uh more experimental and lower cost things that I think can have bigger impact if we're gonna spend that money.

So I'm really glad to see the four and a half million of that proposed new funding going into things that I hope are really going to be good for pedestrians.

I couldn't help but notice um in a couple of your pictures there, um, the pedestrian enhancement on Fuller.

Well, there's no flashing light there.

Um and I see so many people, you can paint lines on the sidewalk, um, people don't stop.

So I think if we actually want to have traffic safety and there's a bus stop in your picture, like I would like people to be able to get to the bus stop with permission.

Um there's a new one on my walk to work, I mean my walk to church, which I love.

And I use it every time when I cross Eastern now.

Like I don't cross Eastern Avenue without hitting the button so that cars don't hit me on Eastern.

Um so I would love to have us really remember, like we want to keep pedestrians really safe, not kind of safe and not like you know, we don't want to anyway, enough said.

So I'm excited about that.

Um thank you for the investment in the mobility blueprint.

I think that's great, and Jessica, you've sort of led the charge on that.

I think that's absolutely appropriate because and again you didn't really touch on it, uh Ms.

Burns, but the idea that we mean to need to move past sort of one-off plans on let's do this for this group of uh mobility people, let's do this for this group on mobility uh people, but to have a global plan.

So um I'm excited that that's in line.

The other thing I would challenge us all to do is um I think honestly, one of our communication gaps on roads is lack of pictures.

Um so often when I am I'm a receiver of these things and I hear, oh, we're gonna do something on Fuller between X and Y, and I'm like, well, okay, you give me a word picture, but like a picture picture really helps me understand what I'm expecting and maybe give input.

So when I saw the bike lane proposal on Division Street, I saw a picture eventually, and I was like, oh, what about this and this and this?

Whereas a word picture wouldn't have helped me give input.

So I think as our neighborhood are you know, people the people in the neighborhoods are gonna be using these things, um, deserve to have better communication so they can have better input because it always, you know, we should always be collaborating with the people who are gonna be end users.

So that's my long rant.

I'm excited about this.

This is great.

I'm so happy we've gotten into state money, and I'm glad that I think you're I think your vision or city managers' vision for how to allocate that money really uh matches up well with our values.

So Commissioner Kilgar, you look excited too, but Commissioner Knight, you want to go first?

Thank you, Commissioner.

Um, yes, thank you.

Thank you all for this presentation.

I think um I talked to some of you all a couple of weeks ago and said it would be really great for the full commission to have an explanation of a lot of the changes that are going on so that the community can be better informed about how we're switching things because there's been a lot of feedback about the change and change is difficult for most people, but I try to tell people keep in mind saying the statement change is good.

Um grateful to have you know some of the the changes with traffic calming, especially I think a number of our neighbors in the third ward have talked about that fuller um Kalamazoo area and wanting more, and so thinking about um that funding that the possibility of that new funding coming in, maybe just a continuation of some of those uh safety measures over in that area would be really really helpful because um it is it is rough over in that space.

And um I I kind of had a question when you started talking about our green infrastructure goals and and how that's um connecting with where we are with our tree canopy goals, like how how far we what else do we have to do, how far does that need to go to really help with some of that work?

Um I'm probably gonna throw out a whole lot of things and then y'all can go ahead.

Um thinking about engagement and putting more money into our engagement and how we connect with our our neighbors, and when I think about us being a welcoming city and all of the different nationalities that we have in our community, we still only translate things into two languages, right?

And so I had to deal with that with in my own organization recently with one of my kids saying that my parents don't speak English and they're not Spanish, right?

And so it's like how do we communicate with everybody to make sure that everybody in our community is understanding as a whole what's happening around them, how they're a part of this, how this impacts their lives so that they can move forward.

So that's that's just a thought, probably way ahead of what I need to be thinking.

But um, and then also of course the the sidewalk snow plow piece uh I really love.

I was around when that pilot started.

I was probably one of the people out there on the sidewalk speeding in my bombardier as I should not have been.

But wondering what the um cost value is gonna be with bringing that extra 200 in-house as opposed to still contracting.

Um, does it really pan out or what do what do those numbers look like?

Uh you know, and I know it's a thought, but just just thinking ahead with that um because it is really important that we um branch out into our neighborhoods, and I know that the lines where they go currently, you know, stop at a certain part, but there's still like more of that neighborhood that's totally getting missed and lost out of that.

And I know that there are schools and uh other walkable spaces in there because I was out there.

Um so just want to throw some of that out there and uh that's it.

Uh I will just note a couple things that we'll bring back, uh, Commissioner Knight.

So the net impact of bringing some of that work in in-house will bring that in.

I know that for the level of service we're recommending.

We believe we hit the tipping point of it being more efficient to do it in-house, and there would be some offsetting um contracted costs for what we currently do, the current level of service.

So I'm bringing that, we can bring you that detail back more on the translation policy.

So we do have policy around translation, so we can give you a little bit more on that, and where we are on the tree canopy um tree canopy goals.

So how might we?

Can I answer tree canopy?

Sure, go for it.

Um so they they do a survey about every 15 years because it obviously takes a while for tree canopy to change.

We have increased.

We're at 37% now.

The goal is 40%.

Um, but what I like about this opportunity is I can say to everyone in the city, we will not hit our goal without help from private property.

So um, Friends of Grand Rapids Parks is a great partner with the city of Grand Rapids, and they not only plant in our right of way, helping our right of way, but also on private property.

So we're excited, we're going in the right direction.

Um it's helping, but we're not quite there yet.

Thanks, Mayor.

Thank you all so much for your presentation.

I it's like children, you're not supposed to pick favorites, but this one is always a favorite.

And it's so nice to see that the uh vital streets share still from the third ward.

Uh when the chair when I was there went to Hawaii, and then I ended up getting elected.

So I'm like, you can either you've got like a cool pathway here, either you're gonna retire in Hawaii or be a commissioner.

I don't know.

You can give some time to thought and thought to that.

But I'll just go through the slides here, and I'm hoping to I'll pause for questions as they come up as I look through my notes.

So, first here on slide 55, I'm very excited to see the over a hundred thousand dollars for a transportation planner, just being uh very familiar with some of this work.

I think it is gonna be a great cost-saving measure to bring this in-house and in concert with the history and the knowledge that will be present and not have to be sort of contracted out or um got from someone in community.

So I think that was just awesome to see, and we'll be looking forward to hearing updates on that.

In addition, now moving a little bit into Vital Streets uh on slide 74, the Vital Streets engagement update.

So, one a question for Ms.

Irving.

Uh, the so is there can you illuminate for me the social or online media engagement strategy?

What has that looked like?

I still am hoping to see us have more modern updates on this.

Uh so may I hear some feedback on that?

Sure, and and I agree with you.

Our website needs to improve, right?

So the city recently um transitioned to a new website.

Um, we're looking at our project pages and how they're being presented.

So there has been some improvement and how those are being presented, but I think to the earlier statement, we are looking at enhancing those more towards maybe a marketing perspective with more visuals and pictures to help people better understand a little less engineer and a little more um visual and regular people, right?

Approach.

Um, we've also been working on our GIS maps.

When we started our maps, we didn't have many projects.

We put all the projects on one map.

And at this point, that's simply overwhelming.

So right now they're all they're also working on pulling those apart.

So they're focusing right now on just the map that says this is what will be in construction this year.

So people know if things are coming to their neighborhood.

So we're also looking at that, just really trying to pull things apart with having individual visuals that help answer very specific questions.

We've we've been doing this long enough that we've got a pretty good feel for what people want to know.

Yeah, wonderful.

I'm so happy to hear that that's being thought of.

Uh and then did I hear correctly additional, a possible additional staff person for communications?

That's awesome.

I think one tourist is stellar, uh, but it's a large job.

It I mean, just getting and communicating effectively to one project is a significant amount of legwork.

I think Juan does a fantastic job.

I've seen it firsthand um as just a community member and uh former chair of the Vital Streets, but I really am supportive and colleagues really want to highlight that need for an additional person too, because we end up getting that right as the elected official of hey, this wasn't communicated with me, or I wanted more robust communication on this project.

This is a direct example of how we can uh provide a remedy to some of those challenges that we hear in community.

So very uh uh happy to hear about that.

And then in line with Vital Streets, if you could, I I can't understate how important of a tool uh this is in community and how uh really thoughtful our community was in passing this some time ago.

It's sunsetting soon.

So if you could walk me through or give me some information maybe now or later about what that tentative strategy has looked like.

Uh, you know, are we talking with our community partners that were supportive of the first Vital Streets uh plan?

Are they on board again?

Uh are they gonna help us push this out in community to make sure we don't lose this very important funding source?

And then in addition, are we thinking of keeping it at the same level of 0.2 uh and the same amount of dollars.

Um let me start with that last uh comment about the renewal of the um vital street oversight uh the vital streets um income tax.

So it is uh very very important to sustain that funding as you've seen on the condition of the streets that um Ms.

Irvin highlighted earlier that we have much more work to do, and uh we've talked about this, especially in light of the recent conversations that the county has had about the uh museum zoo millage.

We would want to have a a renewal committee, uh a subcommittee of this body certainly to help us focus on that as well as engage our oversight uh commission and other community partners similar to uh the effort from uh 2015.

And so our plan is to really have a focus strategy discussion on how to lay that out uh this year.

Uh as we know time is of the essence, and I think your point earlier on making sure the public really understands the benefit and what has been done and engaging uh very transparently electronically will help us to uh um have that uh conversation regarding the uh amount.

I think uh what we have been discussing because of the affordability issues, just sustaining the current level, so that wouldn't be an additional increase in cost uh to the residents, but we certainly are open for any feedback that uh this commission or the public might have regarding that.

Thank you, and that answers that.

And then lastly to touch on some of the uh new funds and maintenance and my support for that.

I just want to uplift uh East Town, the neighbors who uh really they lost some funding from the f uh federal designation and they were having uh a program that was helping elderly neighbors, people who are differently abled, and that really highlighted a significant need.

So with these new funds, I am very uh thankful that we're finding a way to fill in.

Once again, I I'm hearing a lot of problem solving in this uh with these presenters, and I deeply appreciate it.

I think um I was open to doing what Mamdami did in New York City of paying people, but you know, a few um, you know, a good livable wage per hour to go out and shovel, but I think neighbors are already working together, like East Town highlighted to fill in that gap.

But I'm happy we're doing what we can in addition to some of those funds.

I do think being more innovative, uh more thoughtful uh in terms of urban planning would be cool.

I would really like to see an urban planner come in and work in concert with community on things like bike lanes and those big ideas that have had some rub with from city hall to community.

I think an urban planner is sort of a missing piece that I've discussed uh with my colleague and the third ward and city manager on a two-to-one.

I know I've at least said this once, where I think that's a missing piece where if we even consulted with them uh and these new funds may be a way to do that where we can bring them in, give them our ideas where we're seeing it, where community sees that and sort of braid that together.

But thank you all again for your presentation and your answers.

Greatly appreciate it.

Thanks.

Um Commissioner Belchuk, you had your microphone up.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Um I just again, yeah, this is an exciting area as I mean I'm gonna pick on some different things because I agree with largely what um Commissioner Kilgore has said, and I will just piggyback here that I do I do think as I'm thinking about how we're um b bringing uh a cohesive look, and I've talked to some folks uh already about this on the staff, but a cohesive look of how we're bringing infrastructure into neighborhoods, especially ones that maybe haven't had full street um and sidewalk and gutters and things like that, and and we're having pressures in the west side in particular on housing and different developments, and so there's some areas that need to be re like really have some infrastructure.

So I think an urban planner would be very helpful as a potential missing piece.

And along with that, I'm curious to know as we continue, not just now but in the future over the year, um, if we can continue to have a look at what the pipeline forecast is beyond this year and next year, so that can constituents and residents can understand like where their neighborhood would be coming up next.

We have these nice maps now that you should have in the presentation, but there could be some you know questions about why are they so disjointed or where where's the next piece coming?

And so just kind of bringing that fuller picture as we're talking about communication and public engagement, and I would also encourage um where's the quality assurance um piece of community engagement during and after a project.

Um sometimes as uh an elected official I hear from our neighbors about things they're not happy with um after a construction project.

I don't think it's always our construction contractors, but it could be utilities or these other folks that work in the neighborhoods.

So just maybe streamlining that process.

And again, I think that's where I'm seeing you look at additional funding to be able to do those sorts of things.

Um and the stormwater aspect is the piece that I was going to pick up on as something new.

Because I think that you know, increasing as we increase our neighborhood infrastructure, we do need a maintenance plan and dollars to be allocated towards who's taking care of these bump outs, who's taking care of the stormwater drain, um, particularly, you know, um right now we feel like it's a voluntary thing, maybe, but it isn't because our street sweepers sometimes do it.

Um, you know, roundabouts where there's circles and things, you know, that might have green infrastructure.

Who's in who's responsible for the funding that I I applaud the extra attention to signage and notification and wayfinding.

I agree that pictures would be good, especially for neighborhood associations that they're trying to be our advocates in the community to get that information out.

Sometimes they have to create their own maps and images because we haven't had enough staffing time to be able to do that.

So that's great to think about.

And um Yeah, just continue moving forward with uh deer management.

I'm gonna be looking forward to what happens there.

But overall, I think we do have some new opportunities with this funding, and I think that you guys are thinking about it strategically.

So thanks for highlighting these pictures.

Um I don't know that I have a question, except to, you know, if you want to respond to anything that I've said here, I would open that up.

So I just want to connect a couple dots in those comments um back to some of the efforts that we have underway uh specificially specifically about sort of what is the urban planning support for some of our our bigger vital streets projects.

So uh the community engagement improvement that we've talked about has brought all of our departments around the table.

We're also looking at making sure we have all the right uh voices.

We obviously have urban planners uh across multiple of our departments.

So we have transportation planners in mobile GR, we have traffic engineers in mobile GR, we have traffic engineers that we work with through our consulting team, we have urban planners in the planning department, us and we have economic development staff who are you know a little bit more in uh touch with some of the smaller businesses and what their pressures are.

So we're really looking at how are we more formally engaging uh earlier in project design and project scoping to ensure we have all those voices in some of those questions.

Uh and you know, as we talked about the braided funding and and some of these new resources coming through the state, we uh have some pressures in the budget to be able to have each one of those right-of-way projects deliver on everything that some of our plans say it should deliver on, and at there are certain times when we're sort of we've got to prioritize amongst uh those outcomes.

We may with some additional fundings be able to to buy a little bit more of what we're looking for in some of those projects when we have timelines we have to meet and and budget pressures.

So there is more happening on that front to address some of the things that you all have uh talked about.

Uh so I just wanted to reassure you of that.

In addition that the mobility blueprint will give us some sense as well about sort of what is um best practice today in terms of safety for all users, and we think about what kinds of facilities all of those users need in order to be protected from each other, but also uh to deal with human nature and the you know the path of least resistance.

We've all seen people on different uh types of technologies using the path of least resistance.

So we hope that the mobility blueprint will allow us to engage with the community and really talk about some of that, take it back to um some of our technical and and planning level documents and update those things and have that all under one umbrella, which will also be helpful when we talk about Vital Streets um update to that uh particular funding source.

What is it that we need to prioritize for those funds?

What's the what's the community appetite for that, and then that helps inform what that renewal looks like as well.

So I just wanted to highlight that.

Let me add to your comments and just to clarify also when we approve the um funding for the um mobility blueprint.

We also uh funded having a consultant coming in to work with us with outside background who will be a transportation and urban planner expert to help us in looking at our policy issues.

So that is happening.

We have lots of expertise internally, but we're also going to rely on the industry expert to help us as well.

Yeah, so I'm glad that those conversations are happening in your two-on-one meetings, uh city manager.

You and I have talked about this too, but for the public, I mean, one of the things that I've said is we have an engineering department.

Um, but if I was building my dream mansion, I wouldn't hire an engineer to draw it for me.

I hire an architect.

Uh engineers are supposed to very crudely make sure things don't break.

So the architect can draw, you know, uh hovercraft, but the engineer comes along and says, well, that it's not gonna work.

It's gonna snap in half.

Um so um it's great that we have engineering, but I think that um what uh commissioners Kilgore and Belchuk and and perhaps uh Commissioner Purdue, maybe all us have been involved in these conversations is I think we can do, I think we can level up potentially on our visioning.

I mean, one of the things that's just a reality is 30 percent of our city real estate is streets.

Uh that's a lot of our city uh and I think it needs some design attention.

I think it goes broader than safety.

As much as that's a key thing for me.

Um, you know, there are things that are chicken and egg problems, and and you can talk about attracting businesses to create jobs for our employees or for our residents.

You can also say businesses go where people want to live because otherwise they can't hire employees because nobody wants to live in those places.

And so making Grand Rapids an interesting, fun, well-designed place will help us drive growth.

It's not I mean those two things are it's hard to get the causation on which one comes first, but I think that we have to think about design in terms of attractiveness and you know the fact that there's a global there's a global competition for where we can live.

All of us human beings can only live in one place, but like why I live here or not Amsterdam.

Well, there are reasons for that.

But you know, if Amsterdam's got cool things that we don't have, uh that's a gravitational pull to people ch you know applying for Dutch citizenship or moving to Cleveland or moving to Ann Arbor or moving to Flint.

Um and so everyone's making those decisions, and they're partly based on the environment.

And it's it's not just culture, but it's also design elements.

And so I I just it's a longer conversation, but it it it is.

Urban planner, engineer, architect, yep.

Uh we've all the professionals uh are being discussed, but in all seriousness, I think um we do have an opportunity to rethink design once we go through this mobility blueprint process.

And uh with the uh absolute renewal of the final street, maybe Ms.

Irvin uh can share this.

The design guidelines for complete streets.

Uh and I know that part of that was in our planning department, part of it was through the Battle Streets process, but there when will that be revisited again?

Yeah, I think now that we've finished the community master plan, now is the time to revisit that.

And I think it'll happen in parallel with the mobility blueprint so that we can share and collaborate with resources.

Great.

Thanks.

Um Commissioner Yusassi, you had your hand up, but uh um I don't Commissioner Purdue, I'm sure you want to speak to uh thank you all so much.

Uh great to see you all.

Thank you for the presentation.

Um I won't belabor the points uh that have already been made.

Uh I will highlight uh what I see as a major highlights from this section.

Um really excited to see the extension of sidewalk plowing.

I think that uh you know some of the health and safety issues have already been raised.

But I think particularly as we've been growing as a city, not everyone who lives here feels included in that.

And we have part of our promise is if we have more assets, we have more tourism, we have uh more spending, then we could provide better quality services or additional services.

And with the types of winners that we have and just how horrendous uh not having plow sidewalk can be for um ability, people's ability to get around and how difficult it is health-wise for a lot of people to do.

I think that's really really important.

Um and just to show proof that hey, we are having extended services and enhanced services in this time of growth.

We can all benefit.

So I think that's really, really important step for for a lot of different reasons.

And the other piece is uh, as mentioned, additional support during construction construction season.

We do not want to see businesses close because of the challenges with construction.

Um so thank you for um thinking ahead and integrating that into these suggestions.

Um I think um the things that give me pause from this this section um is mention of um in terms of the the horizon issues as it relates to mobility um are some of the additional thoughts around fees for uh block parties for events for neighborhood meter violations.

Um and the reason for that is you know, again, as we're growing and we want to encourage people to throw events and to uh find ways for people to gather and connect, uh hopefully at low cost.

We want to make it as easy as possible, particularly for our local neighbors to be able to plan and execute an event.

Um of those as mentioned are for our benefit.

You mentioned friends of Grand Rapids Parks.

I mean, we charge they are tasked with helping to activate our green space uh amongst other things, and then we're charging them to to have a uh event permit.

And so that doesn't seem like the best form of partnership for me uh or to me.

So um those are the things that give me pause, and I think we need to ensure that we're thinking about the everyday person and how we might engage them and include them in our growth and make sure they have access to um uh to affordability as they as they work and contribute here.

So uh thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks for the presentation.

Nice to see everyone today.

A lot of my colleagues mentioned some things that I had interest in and certainly questions on.

So I won't uh jump back into those.

Appreciated just we did we, you know, it ended abruptly the other day.

And so there was a really great presentation that Dave Bulkowski from Disability Advocates of Kent County did with other members and actually users of the Dash and the Rapid, and it was I think one of the more highly attended events.

So, you know, I think it it continues to be uh a number one piece in terms of mobility and how people get around.

Um but my question is really more on the engineering side, Miss Irving.

Um I would concur with the comments about the staff that we have that are very much engaged in community, going to a lot of our corridor events or you know, business events, um, and then looking at the number of more than 260 cases from 311 uh from people asking questions about road construction.

And you know, we're we've all gotten those.

I think last week, uh Mr.

Canfield got an email from somebody who's like, this is an emergency, a road is blocked, you know, how can we resolve it?

Thanks, Lou, for helping out.

Um but my question is really how are we using, you know, I always think about you know, every request is not a priority one request.

And I know that in your department you use a lot of uh project management uh considerations, right, to make determinations of the prioritization of what needs to be enacted on.

Uh what you know, you talked a little bit about that today.

Some projects are gonna, you know, you might the percentages are never gonna equal out, but how do they work that way?

But could you talk about that new position?

Um, you know, mentioning that new position that would help with that engagement, but also how we're using our systems efficiency technology to resolve what I will call um I I don't know what the prioritization is, but sort of the the lowest level we can answer this question very quickly.

Hey, this is a medium one, this is you know, much more involved.

And so just like to understand um, you know, I think we've all we're all being asked to do more with less, right?

Squeezing out everything that we can, and as I look at my inbox and my colleagues too, we feel that, and so how can we help to alleviate that, you know, adding a position but also using technology to help with those um I don't know, standard standard questions on road construction.

Thank you.

So I I will have um observing talk jump in on the triaging and answering the questions.

Just a reminder the new position was approved by the commission as a budget amendment.

Uh it is under recruitment right now.

Um, and we really are looking to supplement with so somebody in that team that will also have a little bit more marketing skills.

So we're kind of leaning towards that marketing and um different, so adding to the skill set as opposed to repeating the skills that we have already.

So uh, and that is maybe in the final rounds of interviewing.

I'm gonna look at Cindy on that one.

Uh phone a friend on that one.

So we we hope to add that position uh shortly.

And then yeah, so um so when we talk triaging, like right, we start with 311.

We really appreciate when people call 311 because there are lots of um departments that share the public right-of-way.

311 does a really good job with our scripts to try to get people as quickly as possible to the right person, right?

So we start there.

Um, and then we do have certain internal tools, and often the front office can answer questions.

Some of them go to um community engagement in our planning department, which is where we're adding this additional person.

Um, and then our next steps, right?

We'll go to the project manager, and sometimes we go to the assistant city engineer, sometimes we go to the city engineer.

And I think with the new marketing person, really the vision that we have, what we want to drive towards is when I have one person ask a good question.

How do I formulate that answer and put it out there publicly so I can give the answer to 10,000 people?

Right.

That's really the goal because one person calls, they ask a question, it's reasonable, it's a question other people are gonna answer, and how do I kind of mass market that that answer to help grow people's understanding and knowledge?

And that is an area where we need to grow, and that is an area where we're staffing up to improve those community communications.

Can I add one just quick comment?

Thank you.

Thank you for providing the explanation.

Can I also add um we talked a little bit about where um there's a lot of misinformation that's happening right now in this country in the state in this city?

People who throw stories out that they have not done any research on, and it's unfortunate.

And so I really I think this is a good example of our like democracy, you know, it's like engineering, and I don't know, I started working at an engineering firm, so I think I I want to be engineering and come past the math classes.

Let's just be honest.

Um and here I am.

But uh, but I think that um I I wanted to point this out because I think sometimes we get a lot of requests of like what is the new or different thing.

But we are infrastructure.

We are infrastructure.

This city is like what are the bones, what are the things that we keep together?

And we get a lot of requests, and a lot of people are like fill in the blanks from like federal government, fill in the blanks from state government.

So I wanted to really highlight that because in in some way it's a line item of like, hey, it's gonna be you know, community engagement, but it really is disseminating a very important topic to people.

And I just wanted to add, I uh it would be remiss if I didn't add uh hope that position.

We'll also be able to work with our neighborhood associations who are helping us to disseminate facts instead of opinions.

Um, you know, and and I think it's really easy to sometimes you see an opinion and you want to respond to it, or you feel a certain way.

And you know, I used to work in HR and you have to do you have to do research.

You have to do a little bit of that.

So I just wanted to highlight that as this is part of ensuring our democracy too, that people have access to real information.

Because there are some things that would have you believe that this city is not well run.

That you know, there's all these things happening, and what this morning has shown once again is that we are extremely well run.

We have volunteers, people who come and be part of these boards and commissions who share their time and energy, you know.

I know you have another job chat, you know, and it's like and so I think that's really as I was sitting here on something very benign of like construction communication.

It really is making sure that we get the most true, honest, and up-to-date information.

So, you know, we we give you a lot of jokes about engineers, but I want to say thank you.

I think that this really highlights how so many other departments are thinking about what we need to do to make sure people have true information coming from the city of Grand Rapids.

So thank you.

Thanks.

Let me uh underscore uh one of the points that Commissioner Saucy had brought out that I think makes this um more important to discuss holistically.

In addition to this new resource, which is yet to be hired, yet to be on boarded.

And so it's kind of like firefighter discussion we have.

We prove the resources will take time to bring them out to speed.

We are also losing a resource that's helping us with particularly corridor engagement with the retail retention and attraction specialists.

So we're going to we have some resources in this budget to try to have some continuity, but we know what that's gonna be challenging because it's not fully resourced as it was before.

And so it will take a while for us to build the momentum that I think that everyone would like to see with further engagement.

And so we are discussing on how we can um lessen the impact of that change.

Our partners from the chamber in downtown rapid rapidly in chose uh not to continue the program as it was, and so we're still trying to re-engineer it in a way that will help us continue to engage our business corridors.

Thank you.

So I'm gonna close this part with my engineering joke, which is that engineers run the best meetings because their agenda is what are we gonna do, who's gonna do it, when are we gonna do it by, why are we still talking?

So um this is a good uh chance to segue into our engagement, engaged and connected community uh conversation.

So thank you.

We'll do both sections engaging connected in government excellence, and we will hopefully try to conclude this section by 1230, because I know you guys want to have some additional dialogue about uh some commissioner uh vacancies.

So no pressure.

No pressure.

Got it.

Got it, but Mr.

Matthews.

Sure.

Uh we'll take a two-minute break here um bio break since we don't have a quorum.

Call us back and uh Mr.

Matthews, you want to take it away and uh your teammates.

All right, thank you.

So now we're gonna talk about uh engaged and connected community priority.

Um we broke this out into uh several kind of categorical areas that relate back to some of the commission priorities.

The first one here is inclusive engagement.

This includes investments that we're making specifically to make sure that our work with the community is in fact inclusive of the community.

So you see in investments here related to bilingual engagement, refugee, immigrant engagement, and involvement that covers across the clerk's office, our court system, of course, through OPA, engagement with the criminal justice system, code enforcement, as well as more broadly, some of the things that equity and engagement is doing to make sure that our communities are involved.

The next here is neighborhood connection.

These are the things that we're doing specifically to make sure that our neighborhoods are informed and engaged in the work that we're doing, as well as all of our residents for that matter.

You'll see items here related to voter awareness.

Of course, we have an election coming up this November, as well as education and engagement around our sustainability initiatives and how we can help our residents reduce things like power bills, water bills, sustainable landscaping, things like that that contribute towards our climate goals.

Continuation of the We RGR magazine, that is the one piece that we have that we know goes to every household in the city.

Community engagement initiatives across the parks and recreation department.

They've been what really one of the standouts over time in terms of both project and program engagement, and this represents their full investment in that work.

And then you see uh continuation of the development with us program, which gives developers the opportunity to engage directly with residents on projects that may impact those neighborhoods.

Also in this area, you have uh I'm sorry, investments uh that we're making in relation to um property taxes, education for our employ for our uh for our residents.

Um, the neighborhood summit, which is a traditional investment that we make to engage neighborhoods.

One of the things that's uh really shifted on the summit, um the city is taking a much more active role, um both in terms of having a presence, but also in offering sessions where appropriate to be able to engage directly with uh with our residents.

Um that wasn't always the case, uh, but we've got a much, I think a much stronger relationship uh between the planning of that um and some of the things that have direct intersection between our work, um, whether that's on the infrastructure side or whether that's on the programming side and where we can better engage with the community.

Continuation of the neighborhood match fund, um, as well as some implementation of customer engagement tools and technologies that are integrated with 311.

We'll also be talking about that a little bit in government excellence.

From youth engagement perspective, of course, our community's children is taking the lead on a lot of these initiatives and have for quite a long time.

The mayor's youth council, the ELO network, um.

We've got an investment that was mentioned earlier uh in OPA's um presentation, but I wanted to call it out here as well the Civil Rights Youth Academy, um, as well as the investments that we're making in the water career program to get young people engaged and interested in those careers and opportunities.

So here I don't expect you to be able to dig in and read this.

It's representative of the engagement framework.

The core premise here is that all of our engagement is circular.

You don't have a beginning and end.

Um that this is a cyclical process where you continue to evaluate, modify, and respond accordingly over time.

So in FY27, we plan to continue our investment in the time training and facilitation for our employees in regard to the engagement framework.

Um we launched those training initiatives in FY26.

Um we will wrap those up in the fall, uh which would be early FY27.

But we do anticipate that that's going to be an ongoing process for our departments and for our employees.

In terms of the framework itself, we're really focusing our testing around some of the core things that we've already talked about.

So project engagement, public safety engagement, uh, and then the mobility planning and execution process.

Those are some of the ones that we're really gonna be leaning into in the coming fiscal year.

Um arts and culture is also mentioned in Engaged and Connected, so I did want to give uh some updates in that respect.

Um you all know that the city helped uh to fund an economic impact study in regards to arts and culture that was followed up this year with a joint investment that includes us, Kent County, um, and the Arts and Culture Collective to bring in an external consultant that's currently doing work in the community to help build out an arts and culture strategy for the city and for Kent County.

Um they've already been on site for a set of meetings.

There is currently a survey that's out in the community that's available that we're promoting through our own social media channels for any resident to provide their feedback on what their experience is uh in the arts and culture space and what it is that they would like to see.

We expect for those recommendations to come back to us early in calendar year 27.

So uh you also know that 26 FY26, we launched a commission support pilot that included uh both administrative support and also communications and engagement support.

Um currently we have about 9,500 subscribers to the Ward Wednesday newsletters that includes both news and short form social videos.

Presently we've got a uh about a 12% click through rate on those efforts and a little over 32,000 social media views in total.

Um if you look at the unsubscribe rate there, that is uh notably low.

That means that the people who are engaging with this are finding some value uh from the information that's provided.

Um I do want to note that we did make a pivot uh a little past midway of the initiative because we were seeing some fairly low engagement around the individually distributed um ward-based videos.

Uh we've rolled those up into a single package when Ward Wednesday goes out, and we have seen a significant increase in the engagement with those videos since we did that.

Um so if we do choose to continue, we'll continue to measure, modify, and refine as we see what works and what doesn't.

As you all know, um the continuation of this is not currently budgeted.

That's something that we've put on the table for discussion amongst the commission to decide how we want to move that forward.

We'll move on to governmental excellence.

Again, we put this into a couple of categories.

One of the keys, of course, is asset management.

How are we taking care of our facilities?

Uh, how are we taking care of our infrastructure, and how are we planning for the future?

Um, you see pretty significant investments here in environmental services, um, in our facilities department, uh, fleet, as well as some continued work uh in the IT space.

Financial stewardship is the next one.

Uh one of the things that we want to make sure that we're doing is we're investing in the people in the systems that help empower the management of our financial systems, make sure that we're responsible stewards for the public money and that we're leveraging those assets as best we can.

So when you look at some of these investments, um some of them sound a little wonky.

You look at PCI compliance.

Um those are all things that ensure the security and the validity of the collections that we make.

Some investments in personnel, um, particularly when we talk about capital budgeting and budgeting in general, uh, to make sure that we've got good coordinated enterprise-wide oversight of how those programs are both budgeted and attract over time.

We've got funding to continue the optimization and the extension of the uh Oracle ERP.

That does include some additional implementation around HR modules, which is one of the areas that uh we still have some opportunities in.

And then uh some funding to be able to enhance our cash flow forecasting over time through the treasurer's office.

Workforce investments, this is not inclusive of all of those investments.

Um a lot of these you'll note are not just investments to help cover our operational needs in the present day.

Um we've really looked at those entry-level positions and opportunities as ways to get people into the workforce early in areas where we have particularly hard positions to fill.

Um so when you look at the utility aid positions, when you look at the public works academy, when you look at some of the things that fleet's doing in environmental services, all of those are designed at targeting people who choosing a career.

And how can we create positions that help create those opportunities and hopefully keep people over an extended period of time and advance them through those departments?

Then we look at service efficiency.

Um we're doing a number of things in the coming fiscal year we propose to that really continue to look at the way that we're utilizing our assets most efficiently.

So you see that with fleet.

Um you see that in some of the work that the innovation office is doing across our departments.

Um the most recent example of that is some of the investments that we've made in terms of the management of organics.

The question was is this a most effective way for us to be able to serve our community based on what it is that they're telling it, telling us what they need.

And then we've got 100,000 set aside to be able to really take a deep deep look at one of the things that was talked about earlier, which is how our scheduling and our overtime is being utilized across our public use or our public safety departments to make sure that we are most efficiently utilizing our resources and allocating those.

In terms of legislative affairs, we know it's uh particularly challenging time right now.

Um we do or have in the past receive federal funding from a number of areas, including um direct allocations through the congressional process.

Um, but a lot of the federal funding runs through the state as well.

Um at this point, we're starting to feel it on both fronts.

What I'm happy to say is that in the past fiscal year, we did get some pretty significant awards uh through our state and federal delegation.

Um we're hoping to continue that going into this fiscal year.

You'll see here a list of some of the things that have already been submitted by our state and federal delegations uh to help support some of the critical operational needs that we have.

Looking out on the horizon, um the implementation of the compens compensation and classification study, or at least the plan for doing that.

That's something that we're really going to be digging into when we go into FY27.

We do have that draft final report and are just working through some of the details with the consultant.

We'll have it by the end of this fiscal year to be able to start engaging with our workforce and engaging with the Civil Service Board on that.

Ongoing talent attraction and retention is going to continue to be a challenge for us.

Uh we've seen that in the skilled trades, we've seen that in our inspections positions as well as in our utilities, and we want to be able to continue to stay ahead of that.

Um at the beginning of this process, uh, Ms.

Claren did mention one of the priorities is the ARPA spending plan, the closing down and closing out of those funds.

Uh continued refinement of Oracle ERP, that's one of the things that I mentioned earlier.

The tactical and responsible deployment of AI tools.

Um we had a meeting with the internal AI steering committee, the AI Council just yesterday.

Um, so they've divided up into subcommittees, something that I'm gonna talk about a little bit more here in a second.

Looking at how we're investing and or dispositioning certain properties, we know that we've got a number out there that there are questions around, and we're going to have to continue to talk about that in FY27.

Then the last one here is the renewal of the public museum, John Ball Zoo Millage.

Um, and that's one that I'll cover here at the end.

So speaking on artificial intelligence, we were early in establishing a policy shortly after the open AI drop.

Um we realized that we needed to get ahead and provide guidance for our employees at the very least on what appropriate utilization would be and what the channels were.

Um after that we developed and launched the AI Council.

That was in 2026, uh, early this year.

We have partners from both GBSU and Fair Estate that are a part of that.

Um we've also got sustainability engaged in looking at all of these tools and trying to get an evaluation of how that aligns with our own sustainability principles.

Um we found is that a number of our current tools, and I've got a list here, uh co-pilot our security tools in particular, um, GIS, Adobe, our body warm camera systems, all of them are starting to roll out AI integration as part of their programs.

Um it's not going to always be a pick and choose, um, but we uh want to know uh eyes wide open what it is that we're getting into and being able to provide guidance to employees on what's appropriate use and what's not, um, and how do we best manage our own data, which is one of the critical liabilities that we have as an organization and responsibilities for that matter.

We are rolling out a uh customer service chat bot pilot in FY27 with 311.

Um that will be pulling from all of our scripts, all of our collected knowledge on all of our systems, and hopefully be able to provide some folks answers more efficiently and quickly if they're willing to opt in to at least try getting that information from that resource.

So we're not going to force anybody down that channel.

Um we're also exploring solutions right now and some of the priority areas that we've talked about.

So the development center, there are ways that we can increase efficiency in the permitting system by utilizing some of these tools as well as in the uh processing of freedom and freedom of information act requests.

I did mention that the Sustainability Office and the subcommittee that's part of the AI Council is working in collaboration with planning on potential zoning amendments.

So this goes back to not just AI utilization, but it goes to the siting of AI data centers and what are the potential impacts.

That's a conversation that our water department is actively involved with.

In fact, have been uh called in from some of the regional economic development authorities to have a conversation about what our capacity is relative to the potential, not in the city of Grand Rapids, but in the region, because we are the primary water supplier for the region.

And this is just a quick example.

Um from AI, we're trying to be very intentional.

So Microsoft Copilot can be built into our systems, it's our primary office system.

Um what we want to do is be very intentional in the way that gets rolled out.

So we've got a pilot group.

We're reaching out to opt-in users to do real world real world testing of the capabilities and what are the potential risks.

Um there will be a consistent feedback loop from those testers on what it is that they're learning over time.

Um those insights then will you will be able to use to inform future potentially more broad utilization, but we don't anticipate that any of these are going to be universally used by all of our employees.

Um first of all, not all of them have a need for it.

They might have a need for very specific use cases.

Um and from a practical standpoint, they're they're expensive.

Um so we need to be conscientious both of the budget but also of what are some of the long-term implications.

On the museum in Zoo Millage, that was a millage that was established back in 2016 at.44 Mills.

Uh the agreement was that it would be a 50-50 split between the museum and the zoo.

Um it's specifically intended for operational support in the maintenance and care of exhibits, so it's not intended to be utilized for capital investments.

Um there was a renewal committee, and this is required by the county because it's a countywide millage, a renewal committee that was established in late 2025.

Um they had asked for financial analysis from a third party of both operations and um the net of that financial analysis when they looked at the two side by side.

They felt like other than the 50-50 split that we've previously had, that they wanted to look at alternative scenarios, all of which uh tilted additional funding towards the zoo.

Uh that was a function both of a realization of the deferred maintenance that the zoo has on their books, um, but also looking at uh the pretty ambitious goals that they have in the master plan for the zoo.

So they presented four different scenarios initially to the public museum officials, eventually to uh the public museum and city officials.

You know, we made it clear to them that this has an impact not just for the public museum, it has an impact for us as an organization because it is our asset.

Um that was proved out in FY26.

We put additional capital funding towards the construction of those elevators as part of their renovation, um specifically in terms of of increasing accessibility.

Um if we're unable to maintain a certain amount of funding, either a certain amount of things get delayed, deferred, or come back as potential impacts to the general operating fund.

So we have a particular interest in the outcomes here.

The last feedback that I've got, they were supposed to have a millage committee meeting this morning.

They canceled that meeting.

Um I don't know where their recommendation is going to land.

Uh the assumption is that it's likely going to be between an $800,000 and $1.6 million annual impact on the current uh funding that is going towards the public museum.

The last is the uh vacancy that we have up here on the DIS.

Um, you know, that was vacated on March 6th.

We were asked to come back and let you know what does that look like if we fill it or we don't fill it.

Um the answer to that uh is $33,000 and 146.

Or thirty-three thousand one hundred and forty-six dollars, I'm sorry.

Um that is a half year of the built-in costs and salary uh benefits for a commissioner's seat.

And with that, we're open to questions.

Thank you.

And colleagues, um I I I would just I prefer if we could have a conversation about the vacancy um after we talk about everything else, so for purposes of clarity.

So um I do want to have a conversation about that, but let's talk if we could talk about everything else first.

So if anyone wants questions or comments or feedback, Commissioner Knight.

Yeah, I'm first on everything today.

Look at this.

Um I just uh had a couple of questions around the um governmental excellency under the workforce investment, like you had the 1.6 to support public safety recruit cadet classes, but I went back to the police presentation, and they have 1.2 for police academy classes, which is tuition salary and benefits.

So just trying to figure out where the differentiation is between those two, and the same with the 100,000 for police fire and dispatch over time, um kind of looking at the analysis to determine the cost, and then we got the same thing under um the safe community for um GRPD with OT analysis to help assess the main drivers of OT.

So are these one and the same?

Are they added together?

Are they because it it was a different number from one to the other?

I'll have to do that.

Let me I think on um police and fire, in addition to their normal recruit classes, they do have uh the fire department has uh chief talked about some of the cadet programs that they have with high school students, and I'm not sure that number police may include your um cadets are your um interns, interns as well.

So we'll we'll double double check those numbers.

Okay.

Thank you.

And then the other piece was um, of course, on artificial development or intelligence.

I know I just said a few minutes ago, change is good.

Um so still working into that space myself.

Um but just wondering um even with the uh thinking about our 311, um, and we still kind of have some they doing an amazing job, and and things have gotten a lot better.

I know since I've been here on this diet, but just even thinking about some of the the near misses, like you know, I I've been on that uh some AI bot calls and literally said you're not real, and they're like, Lisa, yes, I am.

And so, you know, that just made me madder, right?

Um yeah, that that right there got me twice.

Um but just wondering how we can still be even it I I know it's it's it's a process.

I know we got to test it to see what happens.

Um it just it makes me really nervous on people getting missed, things getting missed, right?

Because we get calls and emails and things all the time that go around 311 because they feel like they haven't been um uh addressed or you know, nobody's listening to their questions.

And I mean, again, me on this side, listening to this person talk to me, and I'm like, I know you're AI, and and and then then you telling me you're not, you know what I mean?

Just kind of escalated things just a little bit.

So just just want to throw that out there.

I know change is good and it's gonna take time, but um those were just a couple of things that um jumped out to me.

Well, I mean, one of the things that you'll see in the initial policy that we put together um was we were very specific about making sure that we have what we're calling human in the loop principles, which is nothing is 100% autonomous.

Um so if you look at customary interactions as an example, when we when we look at human in the loop, the question is asked, okay, well, who's reviewing these interactions?

The same way that the human interactions are recorded, somebody needs to be reviewing those AI interactions, again, to make sure that there's accuracy to make sure we're controlling against one of the things that you brought up, Commissioner Kilgore about the the hallucinations.

Um in that respect, one of the other things that we have to do is to be very thoughtful and very disciplined in how we manage our own data.

Um and that's a entirely separate conversation that we're having right now, which is how do we create a reliable pool of city-owned data that's also secure that can provide the most reliable results.

Uh because we have a lot of systems that we run, and not all of those systems are connected to each other right now.

And every one of those areas where we're not connected is a potential for an error.

Um so again, we're trying to be very disciplined and thoughtful about this.

Uh none of it's free.

Um, so we're also trying to be very judicious about the way that we go about it.

Yeah, I had a robot yesterday that I had to sing a song to.

He kept telling me it was going to do something, and then I was quiet and said, I haven't heard from you in a while.

And I'm like, would you like me to sing you a song while you think about this?

What song would you like me to sing you?

Like and yeah, so robots are not perfect yet.

Um Commissioner Belcheck.

Oh, all right.

Well, I'm a real human.

Um so I want to just start with the engaged and connected community portion here.

Um I know we're doing a lot of different things to communicate, and we've had some conversation already this morning about maybe questions or ways we could do better.

Or refining.

Um I just want to note that um I've paid attention to the 323,000 that will be supporting community initiatives to increase residents' participation in the parks and rec um stakehold stakeholder relationships.

I think that that's going to be incredibly vital going forward.

Um I do think that um the president of the Roosevelt Park Neighborhood Association is very happy to see that we're going to be making investments there.

We'll talk more about that in a different section.

But given, you know, given certain things in the past, I just want to make sure highlight that that's something I think is a good investment.

I want to make sure we monitor it and you know what would it be, you know, being needed or where do we have extra um that could be put somewhere else.

I think in this case it's needed.

But that kind of brings me to the question I do have about forecasting any additional costs that we might have in the implementation of our new framework, which by the way, super love.

I hope you're having some good experiences with it.

But that's one of my questions.

And um I have some more.

I don't know if we want to do it in phases or um sure.

I I I can speak to that.

So when we talk about community engagement, um, our intent has never been that there's one group of people whose job is community engagement.

That's reflected in the in the framework is it's all of our jobs to do community engagement.

Um so when we're tracking investments over time, the question is are departments embracing the framework and are and are they investing appropriately?

So you won't see it as a single-line item that's coming out of the communications department, but hopefully we're seeing increasing numbers over time, and how other departments are.

So a good example we just talked about is engineering, is making an investment in additional people in the community engagement space that are going to be guided by the work that the communications department has put forward.

Well, since you mentioned communication, thank you for that.

The communications department is doing a great job.

And uh I want to highlight under this ties in both here and I think under government excellence is um the continued support for being able to reach constituents directly, both in formal ways and in informal ways.

We've talked here, several of us about how we get a lot of contact from constituents directly.

Maybe they want to work around 311, maybe they want to just be heard by a human, maybe they just feel like they need to talk to someone who has some levers of power, quote unquote.

But um, I think that having the support to do that, you know, and support staff under the governmental excellence is necessary.

Um I think it facilitates great um not only constituent communication, but facilitates staff access to us and our busy schedules.

So I'm just going to mention that I would call on all of us to support that, even um given that we have a difficult circumstances and forecasting going forward.

And I think that the statistics, I would like to just give you a chance to give you some praise.

The statistics on this from a digital marketing perspective are fantastic on these Ward Wednesday newsletters.

And if our regular newsletter or commission recaps are anything close to this, we should be winning Eddie Awards or something.

I don't know what the communication equivalent would be right now, but if you would just want to touch on that, these are like remarkable.

So, yes, the the um uh our all of our newsletters um are performing similarly uh very well.

Um we are within industry standards for open rates, which is a little bit different than click-through.

Uh we chose to focus on click-through not just because it was a higher uh overall rate, but it actually shows engagement.

So it's not just somebody looking at it on their phone or on their computer.

They're actually taking action in there, they're clicking on something in there to find out more information about that thing.

Um and so we are four times over for uh industry in this case means government.

Uh so in in terms of what other government entities are seeing and reporting.

Um so we do see that across all of them.

It is uh it is an incredibly cost-effective way of doing business.

So the the resourcing again, um, it'll be a discussion up to you about the about the the specific commission uh support uh facet, but um but but it's something that we're it's relatively cheap to do, and we get very good responses from it.

I will add that um while it's not you know called out, we are going to devote some funds uh this next year to try and bump up the subscriber count across all of our properties.

We kind of intended to try and do that last year, and we kind of momentarily forgot that it was our 175th birthday, so we diverted some funds over to pay for that.

Um and so we're gonna we're gonna make that a uh kind of a push this fall uh to try and get those numbers up because right now we have about 10 to 12,000 subscribers across the city of 200,000, and and we'd like to see much more, obviously.

Well, I will be passing the microphone over to the next person, but I just wanted to highlight that and to just call out that um I am continuing to watch what's going on with our Oracle stuff.

I know that it is difficult to implement these things, but again, under government excellence and watching out for the budget.

I do think that that was a large chunk of our overruns, and personally that makes me a little nervous slash uncomfortable.

Commissioner Usasi, I saw your hand.

Thanks for the presentation.

Um I love I think the theme, and and and you talked about this, Mr.

Matthews, the the last group, but this is about the infrastructure and it flows through the entire organization.

But I think the theme is it's communication, not notification, and how we've evolved from like telling people things to having some back and forth.

I also think, and you know, um, you know, Andrea, I I think a lot of your work has also been just what are the expectations that we have too, because I think we all would like a really I shouldn't say well, there may be some that have expectations of a very engaged plugged-in piece, and I think our as you said, we are in an industry, we have to make choices about what we spend more time on.

Where's the um you know what is this costing us to deliver?

And we heard that in some of the other presentations, but I just want to say that's what stuck out for me is communication, not notification.

Um, and so you know, for me, I you know feel I'm glad to see the the information about how newsletters are performing.

I think I made a joke last week about the Ward Wednesday.

Um, and so glad to hear that.

I think for me, I'd like to understand how that gets plugged into our existing systems and the videos and the pieces that your department is working on versus external sources.

I think that's what we all need to think about.

If we're concerned about the overruns on Oracle, then we need to be concerned about where our efficiencies that could be existing here in other departments, right?

What is that?

What is that um uh system approach that we have?

And I don't know.

I think Hannah's great on the camera, so shout out Hannah.

Um the the other piece I wanted to bring up was as it relates to well, can I talk about government excellence then, city manager?

Can I go to that next step?

Um I know I've been a part of these pieces because I am part of uh civil service board, but if you and and maybe I didn't catch it, Mr.

Matthews, but just some of the deadlines and pieces um around the compensation and classification study, that's probably been one of the bigger questions at that body, which is pretty well attended, I would say, by city staff.

Um so if you could talk about that.

And then lastly, as we talk about what are overruns or what are things that we have to plan on, you know, we put we got the ARPA money, but there's no such thing as free money, as we all know, right?

There is the money that we had to add into our fiscal services to manage that.

I think we added some grant support to understand that reporting.

And when we got that money is a very different federal government than this federal government that will be reporting on.

And so um, are there any additional dollars or you know, understanding is is there gonna be additional things that maybe were weren't expected because it's just different people who are in charge of the government now.

And so maybe those assumptions that we had around reporting.

Um I just want to be prepared because I think that's something, you know, when this first came up, 2026 seems so far away, but here we are.

So those are my two questions.

Thank you.

Um cover compet class first.

Uh it it it has been a journey uh getting to this point.

Um and uh there were a couple of of pretty frank accountability talks with with our consultants along the way.

Um we're at a point now where we are probably certainly before the end of the fiscal year, we're going to have a final report.

We're going to have their charts and their recommendations when it comes to pay.

What I what I can say based on the report is that overall we're generally generally not that far off.

Um, particularly with the passage of the last round of CBAs.

Um the hope was that the CBAs themselves would help cover some of the delta that we might see in the pay, and we are seeing some of that based on what it is that we've gotten back.

But you've probably got 15 to 20 percent of the representative workforce where we might need to look at adjustments.

That number is higher on the executive side of the ledger, but clearly we want to make sure that we take care of our represented employees first.

Our next step, once we have that final report, we have the final charts, we hand those over to finance so that we can get some estimates on what our implementation options might be concurrently.

We'll make sure that that gets in front of civil service so that they can start to digest that as well as the represented groups.

The important thing to remind everyone is you know, ultimately the pay and classification process belongs to the executive office in partnership with the Civil Service Board.

Um but we want to be transparent, we want to make sure that we're responsive and we get the appropriate feedback from our representative groups.

Uh that's 95 percent of our workforce.

Um, but we're going to have to think through with the Civil Service Board what does an implementation plan look like because if we start looking at the looking at it position by position, it'll be five years before we get everything through.

Um so those are some of the things that we'll be working on in terms of next steps.

Let me add, thank you for asking that.

And I've been very reserved in my comments publicly, but I do want to echo what Mr.

Matthews has said.

Um I'm very disappointed in the third party consultant that has uh helped us while they have tried to improve some of the outcomes lately.

I do not have a high degree of confidence in the work that has been produced thus far, and would ask both our implementation team, the civil service committee, to continue to closely look at it, because that's important work.

And it's something that uh affects uh every employee, and it certainly has a huge fiscal impact.

And so we will um, while the study may conclude this year, we'll have to plan for the implementation.

We don't have any funding in this budget uh for any thing beyond the current contracts and the future out years uh modest cost of living increases.

So we will be uh really, really focusing on that.

The second thing I want to address, just put things in perspective when we talked about concerns about cost overruns or budgeting costs, particularly on the ERP system.

And just as you said, I'm glad you mentioned that, Commissioner Sassa, because I went back and looked at the ARPA spending plan.

And so uh we budgeted or we spent about 9.3 million dollars in Federal funding to allow us to implement the ERP in the general fund has uh been less than 10 percent.

The amendments have been less than 10 percent of the project costs.

Is that correct, Ms.

Claren?

I don't know, 600,000.

And so when we do, even on engineering or capital projects, we always have contingencies of 10 percent or more, and we come with those amendments occasionally.

So this time in investing in the system for our workforce, which we rarely do, uh, it certainly to this magnitude.

I think uh the investment has been worth it.

I know it has been certainly uh a change management process.

I think that could have been uh managed differently.

Uh but we are certainly looking forward to getting the full utilization.

We've talked about technology and efficiency and cost savings, and ultimately uh this will help us in the long run uh be much better efficiently in our financial stewardship.

Then lastly, your comment about um the reliability of federal funding and uh whether or not any attempts to claw back or to restrict.

I think our strategy of transferring um amending this year's budget and and transferring, I think the recommended $7 million to the stabilization fund.

While it won't be uh full hedge uh of protection against what the uncertainty lies uh may lie before us, it certainly is a step in the right direction.

And I hope uh to bring back that amendment the same meeting that we adopt the budget uh to allow us to make that that transfer.

And uh piggybacking on that, one of the things that I can't say you're talking about staffing and reporting and things like that.

Um experience, at least with my service group, has been that a lot of the same people are still in the same seats, um, which is encouraging because these are partners that we've worked with for years, if not more than that.

Um there have been some delays uh in terms of uh receiving funding for certain projects, uh funds that were were allocated either through to direct congressional spending or otherwise.

Um but they've come through in the areas where we've had agreements in place.

So it's required a little bit more work, interestingly, more from the departmental staff and the relationships that they already have, probably than it has been from any you know centralized grant management staff.

Lost track of Commissioner Cobra, I think.

Thank you, Mayor.

And thank you all so much and to all the staff that has given us all of these uh presentations today.

It's been very uh nice and uh I'd like to start with the engaged and connected here.

I've got some comments and then some questions.

The first one is a comment uh for slide 92 talking about the commission support.

I think as I discussed uh with Vital Shrets trying to modernize how we interface uh with our community is deeply important.

So I'm supportive of continuing the pilot and sort of making that a part of our budget and a part of our uh strategies.

I just want to be very transparent to my colleagues and uh the public about supporting um that work uh and also look forward to thank you, Mr.

Green, for talking about our other uh newsletters and really having some intention about getting folks plugged in onto that.

I've received uh very positive feedback on this model, and folks uh not only enjoyed watching me hit uh what is that, I don't even know the name pickleball, do pickleball horribly and I had one constituent that was very funny and said, you know, I've never seen anyone do it in cowboy boots.

Like next time that what that would be really helpful, like you could have broke your neck.

So that was funny, but not only to laugh at me, but to really have some fun with the work that we do.

It's important, but it can often be stuffy and for lack of better word, boring.

And I think you all are doing a really great job with uh this, and I think this enhanced commission support pilot was a good uh show of that.

So I'm very supportive of that.

Then moving on to the government mental excellence on slide 97.

I see 50,000 for executive internship program with GVSU to build public sector career pathways and talent pipelines.

That makes me think, and I'd love to hear some feedback on this of what about a possible program and model for this for our co-response.

We've talked about that on public safety, where we don't yet have locally in our region a lot of social workers or therapists thinking of the pathway of pairing with our uh first responders with our police officers.

So I'm wondering and would love to hear some feedback on if that conversation has been had and how we could use that type of executive pathway uh model to support the police department.

So I'll stop there for that question.

I I I'd like to ask permission if we can if we can bring that back and talk about it at Health and Environment.

I think that would be a great opportunity to kind of tie it into some of the other things that we're doing from a community health perspective.

Okay, wonderful.

Okay.

Is that work for you, City Manager?

Did you have a response?

Which part you say bringing it to the talking about the co-response?

Mental health, social work pathways.

I'll just be real directly.

Uh the mayor had mentioned a model of partnership with GVSU some time ago.

And um we talked to Chief Winston.

We wanted to really uh pause and be intentional about implementing the current model.

Um so there is no recommendation for that program that the mayor had proposed to um for the curriculum with G VSU at that time at this time.

So we need to, we have new chief uh uh in place, and so we need further dialogue around that.

The uh I'll just say real quickly just to clarify the um internship, it's not exact that's that's it's in the executive office, but that's our intern program.

This is not 50,000 for the next executive.

Okay.

Uh I wish it was that affordable to create an exact, but this is for the uh graduate interns that come into uh our office, similar to Mr.

Ho that came in and now is permanently working for the city of uh Grand Rapids.

Awesome.

Well, thank you.

I look forward to uh more conversation on supporting our co-response model and health and environment.

You said I'll make a note for myself, uh, Mr.

Matthews, and thank you for your uh thoughtful response, uh City Manager.

I think it's a good conversation, and I think uh building pathways using our community partners is a great idea.

So I'm happy to see it for the current internship.

I'm really also happy to see on slide 98 uh that analysis for overtime and just seeing how we can further support our first responders.

I'm happy to see that.

Uh in addition, uh moving to to slide 101 uh with artificial intelligence.

So uh whether it be our communication or now working with AI, what I'm very happy to see is a lot of best practices, a lot of investigation, a lot of feedback from the consumer, uh, both in just our city work and specifically I want to zero in now on AI, those are best practices.

Investigate, investigate, investigate, not going in and thinking you know about something that's new and emerging, but searching and finding, consulting with other people and saying, are you experiencing this?

These are best practices, and I'm very happy to see that our staff is leaning into that.

Uh we note here that the council uh has is meeting regularly.

Uh will we be able to, and not only us as commissioners but the public be able to see their uh meetings, are those public meetings, and will those also be uh publicly posted, so sort of like our committees where people can just sit in and do just what I just said, investigate and hear from leading experts.

Is that going to be available to the public?

Um I don't know that the committee meetings necessarily would be, but uh we what we've talked about is through the education subcommittee, just as one example.

The education subcommittee both has an internally and an externally facing component that that's a challenge that they're gonna bring forward is how can that group best engage with the community.

Um similarly, and this was a conversation we just had in the ethics and policy subcommittee.

Um, how do we bring in community members with specific interests and point of view to help inform our conversations around the ethics and the policies that we put forward as a group?

So those are some of the areas where we're being very intentional about the engagement.

Um frankly, a lot of the work uh at this point is is sausage making.

Um, we'd like to be able to be very intentional when we invite people into the room that there's a that there's a purpose and an outcome for doing so.

That's been our our at least our initial intent.

Awesome.

Thank you.

I appreciate that and just want to continue to push for as we talk about best practices of investigating, receiving feedback, connecting with community.

I think transparency is a big part of that.

So I I think the community can be a part of the sausage making.

I think this is this emergency emerging industry, it is going to be messy, and I think that our community members can handle that.

So I would uh encourage and push for transparency, and I'm hoping my colleagues will support that.

In addition, I want to thank my colleagues and thank this commission for being supportive of uh the zoning amendment and supporting and saying that that's important as we are a large uh water servicer and we're in the Great Lake State.

So I really appreciate uh this commission supporting that.

We talked about here on slide 101, uh Mr.

Matthews, you mentioned uh opt in an opt-in feature.

So as we roll out some of these possible, like the 311, will there always be an opt-in feature for users?

For externally facing it's hard to provide a definitive answer because it if if you look at 311, there's a direct one-to-one interaction there.

And you can say, hey, do you want to talk to the singing robot or do you want to talk to a customer service representative?

Um there's others that might be embedded in the back end that the customers interfacing with, but it's not a one-to-one interaction.

So if you look at, for instance, if we're improving if we're making improvements in the development center.

Um AI might be utilized to process a lot of what comes through on that submission.

But that submission then goes to a plan reviewer to check all of that work to validate that no mistakes were made, and then that goes back to the employee.

In that loop, I don't know that we would ask the customer up front, hey, do you want us to do this thing that's gonna make us faster and better at doing our jobs?

Um the ones where there is some where there's known to be or perceived to be some direct, I don't want to call it a liability, but that an individual might not be okay with having that interaction.

Um we want to make sure that we're thoughtful and we give an opt-out.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

That that's what I was hoping to hear.

I think that's once again a best practice where we can, where people have the option to have that agency over whether they are interfacing with AR or not.

I think it's another best practice, so I'm happy to hear that.

In addition, I just wanted to say how much I appreciated just the the uh laying out of the landscape that we're in, that it is being built into systems.

Uh there's choice, and then there's active tools that are helpful to community that it is just becoming a part of, right?

Uh, but I think we are really doing our part uh with the council and with some of these best practices that we've discussed today.

So appreciate your work on this and uh look forward to the updates from the council moving forward.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Mayor, just one clarification.

I think we may have overcommitted um on the co-response uh co-response, the response to the co-response request.

Um just was made aware the chief will not be here at the next work session on the uh uh next week.

And so I would uh ask that we delay that conversation if possible.

Well, well, we'll we'll certainly discuss our current state of co-response and the things that we're doing with network 180 as part of our investment in um um public health.

Um that more robust discussion about uh the pipeline for talent, I think uh for the police department.

Uh I'd like him to be part of that.

And we may be able to have that conversation at the public safety committee on the 19th.

Great, thanks.

Yeah.

Uh Commissioner Purdue.

Uh, in the interest of time, I'll um send my questions.

Thank you.

So will I.

Um so thank you all.

Um for the presentation.

Um this brings us to I think our last item of conversation.

Um so um at our last meeting when we were discussing the commission vacancy, um, we got to what sorry for that slide.

What I what what um I read as a uh essentially a 3-3 deadlock on uh the finalists, and I don't think that's the outcome that we wanted as a body.

Um so the question is whether we can go somewhere from here other than simply a vacancy.

And so um I think it's uh an opportunity for us today to discuss this.

Um and um if this discussion leads us to uh a will of the majority of the body to move forward to uh placing an agenda item to reconsider uh our uh vote on the replacement uh pardon me on the on the filling of that vacancy.

Um I think that that would be a a logical next step.

Um I do um uh I think we we have to be open to to further discussion uh in general, but um if we want to talk about where we are and uh a discussion of of that uh vacancy as it sits, um I think it's a good good to continue that discussion.

So uh Commissioner Belchuk, it's uh your ward, so I don't know if you want to lead off.

Okay, thank you, Mayor.

Um yeah, so by the end of the last discussion and deliberation on this, I had indicated that I would like to put forth Dan Cope, Miss Dan Cope as the person that I think would be serving well as my working partner.

I do think that it also addresses some of the concerns I've heard from some of my colleagues on this dais.

Um I think that we would work very effectively in the next few months to accomplish that which is needing, which is mostly uh a good listener and pres preservation of the democracy that we are in.

Um so I would call on my colleagues to take those preferences in how how the first ward might be best served and how I would like to work with someone uh as we go forward in this discussion and filling the vacancy because the ward does deserve to have full representation.

I've heard that very clearly and agree with that.

Colleagues, um Commissioner Kilgar.

Yeah, I uh really appreciate hearing from uh Commissioner Belchak and the first ward.

Uh I will support uh our colleague.

Uh, it is really nice to have a partnership and a partner uh in this work, and as so many in community know, um I took a part of to show my dedication to just civic uh work and was a part of the appointment process for the third ward.

Uh and through that I got to do a lot of history with some folks in community and went back and saw how this process usually goes.

And there's a lot of reverence given to uh the person who is in need of a partner and is serving their ward alone, and so I want to honor that.

Um I I think of past folks who have been appointed uh when I think it was Commissioner Kelly in the second ward uh didn't have a partner, then they leaned on what Commissioner Kelly was thinking, and so in can and that happened a lot as I researched and went through old meetings and connected with people in community of it's a partnership.

So I'm happy to support uh Commissioner Belchak with that.

Um yeah, I'm I'm looking forward to building consensus, and I also want to uh thank folks like the Garfield Park Neighborhood Association who Commissioner Belchak and I got to meet in person for a street safety project, but even in that folks were looking forward to us reaching consensus.

So I'm hopeful to do that today uh to uh again put my support behind Ms.

Dan Cope.

Um and yeah, looking forward to full commission and and making sure uh folks vo voices are heard.

I also want to note along with Garfield Park Neighborhood Association, I got a lot of calls, emails, uh just in-person conversation about all of the candidates and want to thank the folks who you know we're a part of this very public process, uh, and once again showed their dedication to the civic process by putting themselves out for appointment.

So thank you all very much.

And that's where I'm at on this.

Um Commissioner Yasasi.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh thank you both for your comments.

I think that um I fully support coming to a consensus.

I think that's really important.

I think my consensus is different though, uh, because when we had the final interviews, I heard both the mayor and commissioner Belchak say that they were very happy with all three candidates.

Um I heard you both say we're very lucky to have these three candidates.

I so that's where I'm at, and then when we had the vote, there were three of us who were supporting uh Kerr Repart.

So typically in a consensus, you would say, okay, how how many votes are out there is I think Dan uh Dan Cope had two.

Um Commissioner Belchak, you had talked about Lindsay, but you didn't put forth a resolution.

And so for me, I fully support consensus.

I just think we did have an opportunity for consensus that day, uh, where two of you did say you would support those three candidates.

So, or I'm sorry, support that you would support any of the candidates.

And so that's what I'm struggling with.

Consensus is how do we get here when we heard that sort of play out, but it didn't um play out in the in the voting.

So um I wouldn't support that that resolution.

I too had the opportunity to talk to a number of people in the first ward um who reached out to me um to share their concerns, um, to share their concerns about representation, uh, to let people remind people, you know, the diversity of the ward, which we all are wards have diversity in them, um, and the city as a whole does.

And so um while I know you, Commissioner are the person who was uh sitting in that seat.

Um I think we were sort of deadlocked, and so you know, to me, I um I appreciate this coming up.

I you know felt for the individuals who didn't have resolution for our constituents and who didn't have resolution that week, and so now it's been some time.

So, you know, to me, that's my consensus that I would move forward on, and so it doesn't so then it doesn't sound like we have consensus.

Um, and we've been here since nine o'clock.

So just those are my thoughts.

Thanks.

Thanks.

Um just just to be um, you know, it's always uh and when we're when we're listening to each other, it's always I think um, you know, we can often hear things uh one way that maybe were intended another way, and I think that's just uh part of communication.

But um let me just say that I what I intended to say, and I could go back and look at the tape.

But what I intended to say uh at our last meeting was that I thought all three candidates were talented uh individuals, impressive individuals, and uh great assets to the community in in a lot of the things that they were doing.

That's not the same thing as saying I didn't care which one of those three I advanced.

Um and so I did have a preference and I expressed that preference.

Uh it's also true that there's a question of like, do you come, do you think about things beforehand, and you try to consolidate your thinking before we meet as a group, or do you try to remain open in your thinking?

And we all have different ways that we do that.

Um and I'm not gonna say that one way is better than another, but um it's certainly true that I try myself to uh to on consider things on an ongoing basis.

And I will say that my support at this point, I support uh uh Ms.

Cope s and and my predominant.

I mean, initially I had some comments about why I preferred her, but frankly, my support for her is uh strengthened I think maybe by an order of magnitude.

It's it's strengthened by my desire to support um not just this body, but particularly our first ward colleague.

And um I um I think that and again I'm gonna put words in Commissioner Kilgore's mouth, and maybe they'll be the wrong words since they're his words, not mine.

But I think he might have been saying something like, and he didn't quite directly say this in a perfect world, we'd be able to call a special election.

That would be great.

Um and as a history lesson for those of uh who are watching online, we used to simply have a an appointment any time there was a vacancy.

And uh number uh I think it was in 2019 we actually improved that process so that if there was too long a vacancy, we went to not too long, a long and uh uh a vacancy of I think more than a year, we went to a special election process.

Now, yeah, in a perfect world, I would love to have a charter amendment that just said that we called snap elections uh if we had a vacancy.

We heard from the voters, um, unless it was literally too quick to print ballots or something.

Um but uh that's not where we are.

Uh that's the the charter we're working with uh has us fill an appointment.

And so um uh I wanted to express that that bit of grumpiness with the charter, but fundamentally um I uh started this whole process uh listening, uh trying to listen more to Commissioner Belchek's input than to my own, because um having been a uh award commissioner, I know that my uh partnership with uh Commissioner Bliss wa uh eventually mayor bliss was was different and and tighter and and more dynamic than my relationships with my other uh colleagues on the board, much as I like them.

Um, you know, I liked all all of my colleagues, but you know, when there was a second ward uh issue, we had to tag team, and so I'd you know it would be the question of like, do I go to something or did Commissioner Bliss go to something?

Um, you know, how we talked about or thought about an issue, we would we would sort of huddle and and uh you know, can and try to build a collective vision all the time.

And uh a good partner there is really important now.

Um I know that for example, even in our day our rhythm of how we do business, our city manager has two on ones with individuals from a ward.

So he doesn't bring the whole commission together for everything.

He often talks to just award.

And so um I want to um empower and listen to my first ward colleague, and that solidifies my my uh support for Ms.

Cope.

So and we continue to continue to disagree.

We all have different voices up here, and if we can't achieve consensus, let me just point out that I don't think we're going to walk off a cliff.

What's gonna happen is if we don't achieve consensus, this position will continue to be unfilled, which is suboptimal, but I think the city will survive it.

Um so Commissioner Knight.

Uh yes, thank you for that.

Um interesting in and the way I've been thinking about this for the last couple of weeks, and I think I made my my comments very clear that I felt like uh our time and the time of the people who put themselves forward uh in this process was a little disrespected.

Um and and because we as a body had a conversation when we entered into this process and discussed how we were going to move forward in it, and then that got convoluted as we began to make the votes.

And so that that was a part that I feel like we got off track and again was very disrespectful to the people who put forward their time in this process.

Um the other part is I I totally understand uh each commissioner, like I I didn't get to choose and say, I want Commissioner Yasasi as my partner.

This is how it was because she was already in that seat.

And so we learn how to work together and to um support our our neighborhood as much as possible or our ward as much as possible, but we also have to recognize that we don't just support a ward, we support the city as a whole.

And so each person on this dais is responsible for us coming together and talking about the issues that are impacting our city as a whole, because there may be some things that are slightly different or nuanced in each ward.

However, some of the same conversations we have are about the same things.

And even with, as you mentioned, Mayor, our uh meetings with the city manager in our two-on-ones, even though he's talking to us about our specific wards, it's also about issues that uh impact this city and this community as a whole.

And so if there are situations that we all need to come together or have some conversation on, he does bring us together for those things.

Um the reason why I'm I'm going to stick with my decision is that as I listen to the candidates talk, one of the things that Dan Cope said is that she would be coming in basically just to listen and hear what people's thoughts were as opposed to thinking about the things that we have on our agenda and in front of us that are pressing that we need to address and being able to have someone who is um educated in that space and has some institutional knowledge on how these things work, um, I feel is very important because again, yes, we need our support in our individual spaces, but we need support as a committee as a whole to be able to make decisions, and that's why we're at this stalemate right now, because if somebody was in that seat, um we probably wouldn't be in this space right now.

Um and so d listening to the way she responded to questions as opposed to the way um uh Mr.

Repart responded to those questions was what solidified my decision uh in moving forward with that.

And so you know, and and listening to and getting emails from um a number of constituents across the city, they were all um more heavily weighed on the side of Kurt Raphard as opposed to Dan Cope, and not um disrespecting the the skills and talents that they bring to the table, but really listening to what they were saying when they were all up here talking.

And so I'm still leaning in that same direction and and will stay in that space.

Thank you.

Uh Commissioner Purdue, I think you're the last of us to speak.

Yeah, thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone.

All right, so um on this topic, um I'm glad we're having this conversation today.

I wish we would have had it last week, um, because I think people have just been been waiting, um, both uh residents of the city and the first ward specifically, as well as obviously the three final candidates that that we interviewed um and we're discussing now.

Um so I my my support still remains for Kurt Repart um of those three finalists.

I think we are in a unique opportunity where we have someone who um is well known, well supported, um, well um versed on the issues, particularly the issues that this body has said is important, who is ready and familiar with our processes and our work, um, and to some degree has working relationships with pretty much everyone up here.

Um so you know, one one thing that's been troubling me is this appointments process was two rounds.

The first round of interviews happened with um I think maybe ten original applicants with the appointments committee.

The appointments committee is chaired by Commissioner Kilgore, Commissioner Yasassi is on that committee as well as Commissioner Belshack.

That committee unanimously unanimously supported moving Kurt Rapart forward in the process.

And now two of those three members on that committee is saying today that there's no way that you can support him.

So that's a that's a disconnect.

And I still haven't heard a clear reason and a compelling reason, particularly not in a public setting, of why there is this anti-curt sentiment.

What is the issue here?

It's not being said, and I will challenge us in the spirit of transparency to let's put all of this out there because I still haven't heard that uh shared openly, transparently, and publicly.

Um, if the if the concern here is ensuring that there is support for Commissioner Belshack and meeting the duties of the first war, which I I I agree with.

I do not think I said from the beginning I would not be okay if this this remained uh vacant.

Um that I understand that the part the person that we're talking about, Kerr Repar has been a huge support um in different and informal ways.

Um, and I also understand uh that he was encouraged by folks on this day is who does not include Commissioner Yasasi uh to put his name in uh for this role uh because there was excitement about supporting him.

So um I'm I am I'm personally feeling um still have the same thought process and why um I thought the the strength what the strengths were of each candidate and why Kurt to me is the the the clear choice right now um and still I'm not hearing a strong answer to what is the reason behind the the the anti-curt sentiment A and then B this person will still support a unanimously out of committee and then um now just to be to be uh kind of uh blacklisted in a way uh so those are my comments where I where I think we are.

I hope that we can come to a majority here, um, even if it's not full consensus because I think that the folks of this city and we all deserve to be fully uh staffed in terms of having a full city commission.

Okay.

Well, um I think everyone's spoke on this.

I don't know if we we can continue this discussion now.

I'm not sure that we're at a point where that would be productive, um, but I'm happy to continue it if uh anyone wishes.

Otherwise, um I think we can, if there's the will of the group to come back and continue this discussion, we can I'm certainly remain open to that in the future.

Um if we are remaining as it sounds to me in a 3-3 uh uh position, uh then I think something has to change for us to reconvene this conversation.

But I'm happy to reconvene the conversation so that we can continue to discuss it even if no one's vote is changed, because logically um we might want to advocate to change other people's votes.

So those are the two possibilities, but um not seeing the need to prolong this discussion today unless anyone else wishes to.

Yeah, I just want to be clear so that the public and the staff know how to prepare for the 19th.

If there's a desire, there's a there's a difference of discussing it.

But the city attorney may want to procedurally inform us on how to formally reconsider it uh and vote on it.

But if if there's a desire to have an item on the agenda to continue this discussion, uh I would need to know that now because we're gonna finalize the agenda in a couple of days for next week.

Got it.

Uh City uh attorney, you want to weigh in on this.

Well, the clerk and I have uh kind of discussed and I've I've reviewed the minutes just in preparation of today's meeting.

I think that uh I haven't made a final decision on this, but it it appears that we're contemplating reconsidering a question.

Uh if I rem if I remember from the meeting minutes, there was a motion to appoint Daniel Cope, and that motion did not pass.

If that's the case, even if it was a tie vote and did not pass, there's some authority out there that would suggest that it was defeated.

The prevailing parties were the no votes or those that did not pass the motion, and under our standing rules to reconsider a question under Rule 8, there needs to be a member with those who voted in the prevailing side, the no votes or uh not the yes votes to make a motion to reconsider the same or succeeding at the same or a succeeding meeting, but no question shall be reconsidered without the consent of five members of the city commission.

So that I haven't applied that to any of these scenarios specifically because I wasn't certain how individuals were going to show up and comment on the matter today.

I'd like to work with the clerk and the city manager offline to make a final decision.

But uh my initial interpretation is that that rule eight applies to either Mr.

Rapart or to Daniel Cope, and we may need five members uh to reconsider either of those motions.

So, Mayor, um what I will do is put an item under continued briefings or discussion, because even if we don't reconsider it, I think what the public wants to know, how long is this position going to be vacant?

We have budgeted until the end of the year, and the other alternative was to leave it vacant until the election and immediately appoint someone the day after the election or at the next meeting, so subsequent uh after the after the election.

And we can plan for that as well.

That's direction.

And so even if it's not reconsidered, it would be good to have some closure on the next steps, or we just leave it vacant until January 1.

Well, uh I guess uh yeah, I'd like to hear from my colleagues, but it seems to me that unless um someone is reconsidered their position or does reconsider their position in the future, um, then the uh uh it's possible to have a uh to reconvene to discuss and to advocate to each other, um, which we can certainly do.

But otherwise, um I think uh so there's the two possibilities.

One would be to convene to simply continue to advocate, and the other would be to uh reconvene if someone had reconsidered their position or um independently of you know us discussing it as a body.

So Commissioner Purdue.

Yes, thank you.

Um I think it seems to me that we're not having much of a discussion here, right?

We each kind of set a statement and then there's uh kind of as chairing this committee, kind of this this desire to move forward.

Um I would like to engage in more of a discussion if folks are willing.

Um I put out a few questions, a few wonderings that I have, and that I hear that other folks in the community have rightly so.

Um so I would love to hear responses to that, some of the things that I brought up.

Um I also um do agree with city manager that clarity on what to expect um is really really important.

Um I also recall as we've talked about what the process could be, um, that there are folks who were okay from the beginning, I think leaving this open, and I think that's kind of what we're feeling.

I'm not okay with leaving it open, um, but I think that that's part of what the split is now.

Um and so if we are to consider what those future options might be, um I would not at this point be comfortable appointing someone after the primary, because the first war race is a three-way race.

So there's going to be a primary in August, and it's very possible to have the top vote vote getter.

This happened in the third war, the top vote getter from the primary, not win the general election.

And so if there's our concerns about how we would um, you know, put our thumb on the scale, then that that concern still exists all the way through November.

So I just want to be clear about that.

That would not be my intention.

I think that will be meddling way more than some of the other options that we've talked about.

Um and again, I uh for the sake of discussion, uh, will love to understand, particularly from those who initially supported Kurt and who changed their mind not to support Kurt where that is coming from and where uh the strong anti-Kurt sentiment is because that that's essentially what's holding up this process.

And I have to say publicly too.

I mean, I I feel for for everyone who put themselves out there, particularly the these three finalists, and particularly Kurt.

I mean, I think he has been treated extremely unfairly in uh in media and uh online uh groups.

Um and he went through this years ago, and he took his uh defeat uh this very small margin of defeat um uh very graciously.

He's been digging into the work.

Um he's been staying out of the drama that can be local politics and just focusing on the work.

And he was asked, he was tapped on the shoulder to say, hey, please consider this, please consider stepping up.

And he did, just to be left with this stalemate, just to be left with this kind of flip-flop, and then to be smeared all throughout social media with so much misinformation and bullying and just um just not this type of um thing that I think would encourage anybody to want to stand up and raise their hand, especially someone that you see who has done work in the community with community-based organizations, with developers, doing all they can to help people and help move our city forward.

Uh so I think I just think it's really unfair, it's really unfortunate, and I think it also speaks to this larger challenge that we're gonna keep having, I think even more so on the local level of attracting quality people to step up and serve.

More and more this job is becoming extremely unattractive, right?

Um because it is we know we know it, we knew it when we stepped into it.

There's a bit of thanklessness.

We know that it is not about the money at all.

We know it's it's a lot of hard work.

Um we we joke that it's a part-time job with full-time uh expectations.

Um and I can say I think about this role in this city every single day, all day.

I'm always finding a way to learn something more, connect with someone further to make what we do up here better.

Um so I just have to say that um that I just I I feel for for Kurt, no matter how this goes, this vote goes, um, that on a personal level I feel for him and his family, and that uh we have to do better in order to really set the bar to help attract people to say, hey, I want to join that team, and I want to put myself out there.

So for discussion's sake, I think I think there's still more to be discussed, um, and I would love to hear from my colleagues.

Okay.

Um so I just if if I I I'll just respond briefly if I may, uh, Commissioner.

Um I think it's more important that we discuss um how we're moving forward than that we discuss um past steps because I don't think there's any allegation that the um committee on appointments made the wrong, you know, acted improperly, or I don't know that it's all that productive to discuss um the the past uh selection process.

That being said, um uh and I don't perhaps there's anti-curt rapper sentiment out in the community, um but I think that uh characterizing somebody voting for one candidate as anti the other another candidate uh maybe I mean we that could be possible, but uh it's certainly not uh not how I'm envisioning um my thought process here.

Um so rather whether I mean I don't know if I wouldn't say that the three people who didn't vote for Dan Cope are anti-dan Cope.

Um so uh, you know, we can uh and and also I'll say, you know, uh I am happy, I would have been happy if we had had a hundred people apply for the job.

So if somebody asked me if they were if they wanted to apply for the job to step up to be considered for city commission, I said I would have said great, apply.

That'd be great.

It'd be wonderful.

Um and so we know we had a commission, we had a process and we narrowed the field down.

And I don't I think that the com uh the appointment committee's job was not to decide a finalist, uh it was to come up with a final three and then to bring it to this body uh for this body to decide which of those three they wanted to ultimately fill the position.

And so I don't I don't imp want to impute malice or bad uh intentions on the part of uh the you know the past process and how we got here, uh nor do I think if anyone encouraged somebody to apply for uh consideration, that meant uh a commitment to vote for that person when the thing when the when the job went through.

I mean I have uh you know I've I've employed a number of pe I I've had a number of employees in my life, and if I encourage somebody to apply for a job, that's never at least I uh you know, almost ne I I don't I don't think it's ever a promise that they'll get hired, particularly if the if the decision is not up to that one person.

Um so and and I also think that you know the hope, I would hope that the voters would want us to be able to think as we work through the process um and not simply be pre-committed um before we moved into the process.

But um, you know, we can differ on that, but I do think that um uh I I certainly don't think that anybody who voted against uh or who didn't vote for uh Ms.

Cope was an anti-Cope uh sentiment.

And I don't think anybody who didn't vote for uh Kurt Rappert was an anti-Kurt sentiment.

So I I would encourage us all to keep our to keep focusing on the process and keep focusing on the virtues of the candidates uh and and do their best to discern who they want to support with I think everyone's intention up here.

And again, uh I think that it would be uh ideal and optimal if we could fill the seat.

And maybe uh others don't think so, but I'd rather hear that from them.

But I just want to make clear I don't think it's optional optimal if we don't fill the seat.

Uh Commissioner Knight.

Um I've been agreement with that in and not feeling the seat, but you said that we weren't gonna have discussion and then there was just discussion.

So I just want to add to that piece to say that um the process got a little convoluted if we want to go back to saying that there was anti-sen uh sentiment towards one person or the other when we made the decision beforehand before the whole process started that we were going to look at who was going to run and then we were going to vote after that because we weren't really interested in choosing somebody who put their hat in the ring or who filed to run for the position.

And we were going to allow them, that group of people, whoever that was, to run for that position, which would have then only left two people at that time.

So when that one person was voted on and then the other two were, that one single person would never have been in the discussion to begin with.

And we would have had two people that we would have had discussion about.

So I just want to make sure that we're clear about that.

And the other part about saying um thinking that there's no sentiment towards one towards another, there have been multiple discussions, and we just gonna be honest and clear about this.

Behind behind this dias, we have had multiple discussions on people who were feeding information and saying things and um having different conversations on one person or the other.

It's just been happening.

So let's just not say that it isn't because it is.

And so we just need to be honest about that and to Commissioner Perdue's um statement is why is there that sentiment?

Because if we keep sitting up here saying that there has been no anti-uh or no feeling of sentiment towards one or another, that's not true.

It's not true.

It has been.

It has been discussed.

People have been talking about it left and right, and so I need people to just be honest and be true to what they're going to do and what they're going to say.

Don't say one thing and then turn around behind closed doors and say another.

Say what you mean and mean what you say, and let's just be solid about that and let's stop playing games.

Well, Commissioner, if I could quickly respond, I I I guess you and I maybe had a differing opinion on how the selection process is going to work.

I thought we were clear that we were going to be voting on the finalists after we knew who was going to be running.

I didn't think that that we were precluding the selection committee from including those people as long as our vote came after we knew who was going to run.

So with that full information in front of us, we could make a vote on the finalists.

So I did I do I I did not think that the uh inclusion in the thr in the three finalists uh uh one person who ultimately is deciding to run uh was improper or a violation of what we uh what we discussed also frankly, many of those people could have filed or as the decision was being made, none of them had filed, but they could have filed.

Um so when when that commit committee made its decision, any of those three finalists could have filed.

In fact, the one who decided to run could have withdrawn.

So um, but I think that the uh for me the key was that we had our deliberation after we knew who was gonna file.

And in fact, I think that it honored the spirit maybe of that in the sense that the two people were down to now, neither one of them uh can possibly run.

So again, I don't want to spend too much time in the past here.

Um what I'd like us to do is focus on uh our reasons for uh supporting candidates going forward.

And I and again, I I would just challenge everyone to say if you want to articulate reasons why you support someone, that's great.

And if you want to even articulate reasons why you support someone over someone else, that's great.

But the more we can talk about what we want to do and less uh you know attribute motives to our colleagues.

I think that's gonna make the discussion more more profitable.

Uh Commissioner Sazi.

So last week after the meeting, city manager, you rightly sent us something about how we move into this budget process.

And one of the things you said was find the commons, right?

That was in there.

How do we act as a body?

And I I really do appreciate Commissioner Perdue and Commissioner Knight for naming this because our meeting ended very abruptly, and there were some things that were said that were really quite ugly.

And and Commissioner, you know, quite honestly, there is, and this is what I talked about earlier, is there's a lot of ugliness going on with fake news, and and almost all of us have been subject to that as well.

Um, or you know, maybe it's a partial truth, but you know, it's your life, and we live in a city of 200,000 people.

Like I would see Chief Windstrom at Kingmas.

Like we live in a small community where everybody knows each other.

And so it is extremely hurtful when you're being accused of things or being s being told that people who you're working with are saying things about you.

It hurts.

And maybe it was maybe it was, you know, a higher power that ended that meeting because I was very upset.

I was very upset.

And I've been really trying to think about like why am I so agitated lately?

And and Commissioner, I think you you Commissioner Purdue, you talked about that, and it's just like this is this is um again, when you would think about how you move forward with a vote, if somebody had not the majority, but the highest amount of votes, which was three, then logic would tell you, at least in my head, then that is where the consensus moves toward.

And so I'm thinking about commissioners, you know, uh, you know, what you have said, you know, city manager, what other colleagues have said, and um, you know, I mean, quite honestly, I think maybe you would have had one person who was the only person running, because my understanding is that Dan Cope wanted to run, but was encouraged to drop out of the race.

And I think she should have run.

But I don't think she is the right person to fill in for eight months.

Do you know what I mean?

That that's where I'm at is if I've got eight months, I want somebody who's developed housing at 30 percent and below AMI.

I want somebody who understands intricately what we are trying to do with a cap.

I want somebody who, without him talking to people or any of us, had a neighborhood association who felt so strongly to say we have to communicate that this th this would be an obvious choice.

And so, you know, and I and I I I agree we all get to change our minds, and you know, we you you kind of come here and listen, but you know, sort of where this conversation is going is we're hitting another stalemate.

I am hearing that some of us want to stick with where we're at, other people are maybe changing, but it's now one thirty, and I think the best thing that we could do is is is probably adjourn.

Um because it just feels like yes, there's a lot of things not being said, and those of us who want to say it are being villainized for speaking our truth.

Whether or not that is, but it's like, hey, don't say that, don't say it out loud.

But it needs to be said because to your point, Commissioner, then like people we want people to do this.

We want people to give their time and energy.

Um, but it's it's not great.

It doesn't feel good, it doesn't adhere to the things that you know the city manager sent to us and it is asking us.

And so, you know, I today I'm like, I have to be focused on what I can control for myself, and I can only control sharing my truth and then the truth that other people after what they feeled was a failed a missed opportunity.

Quite honestly, I've not talked to some of you about this since that happened, and that was a pretty significant thing, and I'm I'm I'm sort of surprised.

And so we have people are asking us can't make a decision, then I think it's just best to say this is a stalemate.

Um, and then just keep it moving.

Appreciate that uh commissioner, yeah.

Um and and I agree at this point.

I think you know, we're we're able to communicate with each other going forward.

Um I think probably today we should um simply adjourn.

But uh, Commissioner Kilgore, and if you want to say anything, but yes, uh, thank you, City Manager, for the reminder, we do have public comment after this.

Sure.

Yeah, I think it's I really appreciate it, and I was hoping that I continue to push this.

I think we had a workshop one time where I was sort of like, well, hey, I have this this time allocated.

Let's discuss.

So I really thank my colleague in the third ward, Commissioner Perdue, for saying let's have some more robust discussion, right?

Like this is the work, whether there's tension or a little bit of discomfort from some folks.

I'm saddened to hear that.

Um, I don't want people to feel uncomfortable in their roles or any of our work as we just recognize public service.

But I think it is incumbent upon us as our these folks elected representatives to have robust discussion.

Um, and that's okay.

Um, and to try to build consensus, and it sounds like we all in good faith came here to try to do that today.

So I want to thank you all for that.

Um, I do want to um have some of that open and transparent discussion with Commissioner Purdue.

So I in the beginning uh talked about a special election, like we said, it didn't happen, didn't have the support.

Um, so I moved on and worked with what you all decided in the majority on doing a part of that of why each individual and and I'm hoping as we move forward, a best practice that we've done on the committee of appointments is to not name names so much and really focus on uh the role or the responsibility just to respect uh the community members who aren't in these elected roles like us.

So the I'm gonna try not to name names as much as I can, but um, in terms of why I advance the three people out of uh the committee that I chair is to respect the second ward and to respect the first ward.

So as I discussed as the chair, each ward, each member of that committee would be able to advance someone out of the top ten to the top three, and that's what happened, similarly to what happened last time with the uh vacancy in the third ward last time when you chaired the committee, uh, where I remember former commissioner Robin said I'm gonna support Marshall uh to the final three, but I won't be voting on him in the end.

So that's just something that can sort of happen and it's a part of deliberation.

So I think um deliberating, having robust conversation is deeply important, and I'm supportive of, I want to make sure of there need to be five people to sort of continue this to bring this back, to bring a motion back.

I'm supportive of that and am hoping that we can really allocate some time.

Although it was on the uh agenda today, it doesn't seem as though um there still seems to be this rush to not have this open conversation, like Commissioner Purdue said that I also am supportive of I have time if we want to stay here, but also we'll support for the five um uh for being one of the five to bring this resolution back if need be.

But I appreciate you all's perspective.

I think this is just a part of the work, and uh I also I remember I was reading or listening to a podcast, and someone had said, Well, I think aren't we into a time where no one will want to pick up a book and read it?

And someone else pushed back and said there'll always be a time where someone wants to pick it up and read it.

So I sort of push back on that of like no matter how messy or how frustrating public service can be.

I think there's always gonna be a point where, like I've said throughout this whole process, all it is is people stepping up to help their neighbors.

So I think nothing that we're doing with having robust conversation or opinions is going to detract from people wanting to step up and help their neighborhoods.

So look forward to the conversation and thank you all for your input today.

Um if it's okay for everyone, I'm gonna move to public comment unless anyone has any.

Uh okay.

Then I'll move on, move us on to public uh Commissioner Beltrick, did you want to say anything?

I I've been trying to figure out where the appropriate or best place to interject would be because I really respect hearing everybody's opinions, but um, and I think that this is an example of where reasonable people can reasonably disagree on different things.

Um we all have different thought processes, and some people are good at articulating how they arrived at that, other people get to the end, and then they're like, I that's where I'm at, and I don't really remember how I got to that, but that's how they know.

I think that we need to respect those differences too.

So um I'm not sure I understand the points of order, especially with our standing rules, which are different than bringing back a regular motion versus not in Robert's rules of order.

So I would look to our attorney to to help us a little more on that.

Um it sounds like we need five people uh wanting to bring a particular motion back, and the majority on those winning sides have to win to bring it back.

So um, you know, I I want us also to move forward.

I have expressed a willingness to be open and have conversation and you know go forward in goodwill.

And I understand that you know maybe there is a consensus point where we can all everyone can be unhappy.

Uh but right now um I'm not sure how to proceed with the the process and the standing rules.

Thank you.

And uh Mr.

Clerk, you wanted to we were nodding, maybe your nod was all you wanted to say.

No, um Commissioner Kilgar brought up the point that I was gonna make to answer Commissioner Purdue about the process because what happened with the third ward process was there was an actual vote taken and three names were advanced.

This one each member advanced a person instead of instead of saying these are our top three, we moved each member of the cut committee on appointments, moved a member forward.

So it's it's a little bit different process than happened in the third ward.

Um so I just I was just gonna but Commissioner Blackilgar brought up that point of how that process worked in the appointments.

Thank you.

Uh Mr.

Uh City Attorney for moving forward uh uh again I would be happy to talk with the clerk and the city manager offline.

This hasn't come up uh since I was interim seven uh seven months ago or September.

We're in a very unique situation, so there's not a great past precedent to tell us how to apply our standing rules in these circumstances.

The way I read the standing rules right now, there would be two votes the f or two motions.

The first motion would be to reconsider a question that was at a previous meeting.

That would need five yes votes to continue on to the second question, which would be reconsider either Mr.

Rapart or Daniel Cope, and that motion would have to be made.

That second motion would have to be made by someone that was a no or an abstention in the prior vote.

Gotcha.

That makes sense.

Okay, we need obviously four on that second vote.

Yep.

Okay, thank you.

So that moves us on to public comment.

Uh anyone wanting to come up and address us on any issue can do so.

Have one.

Thank you for standing up.

I was about to say no one.

And if you could give us your name and where you live in the city, that'd be great.

I'd be happy to.

My name is Dane Gates.

I'm a resident of the third ward.

And as I as I listen today, I I don't I don't know how I feel.

If I were a drinking woman, I'd go to the bar.

But um, but when I say that, you do have a consensus, and and I will be very plain.

I mentioned this to Commissioner Knight earlier.

It's very simple, it's about doing what's right.

Sometimes as humans, we overcomplicate things and make them harder than they need to be.

And there's it's rare in life that you get a chance to do what I call poetic justice.

And I and I know Kurt Repart quite well, and he said in the first that was his seat.

It's not often you get a chance to write an injustice in your lifetime that can be rectified.

And I would be the first person, I would never tell any of you up there how to vote, but I would fight to defend everything your right to.

Actually, I'm just actually standing in for my uh my comrades that I worked who had to suddenly go out of town.

So uh I I leave you I have a I usually write things down, and this is kind of just spontaneous that I'm sharing with you.

Um so I I trust for the best outcome.

So as I say, do what's right, and I trust you as a body to move forward.

Thank you.

Thank you, ma'am.

And with that, I will adjourn us.