Harrison.

Our dear Father in Heaven, we are grateful to be gathered together as a council and department heads and city staff to um discuss and talk about what we can do to best serve the residents of Lehigh.

We are grateful for our first responders and we ask that they'll bless them and their families that they'll be safe and they'll be watched over and protected.

We pray that thy spirit may be with us to help guide us to make the right decisions for Lehigh, and we say this in the name of Jesus Christ to me.

Um just for a roll call near Binance's absent, but we have Councilmember Lockhart, Harrison, Friedman, myself, Stalin's and Newell here present today.

Um we'll start with item two, open a public meeting discussion act.

Open a public meeting act discussion.

That's me.

Okay.

I just wanted to take a few minutes and maybe follow up on the email that I sent out I don't know, a week, a week and a half ago.

Kind of realizing that we're a little bit trying to straddle two provisions of the code.

And so to answer your questions and maybe have a brief discussion about best practices.

So fifty-two four eight is the one that says, you know, outside of a public meeting, um there's you shouldn't be discussing things as a quorum in a deliberate way or figuring out how do you gonna vote and thing.

I think we're we're being careful about that.

But then I realized that, you know, in our meeting a couple weeks ago, we talked about getting email feedback and then making sure that there was a consensus as to whether to put something in the draft, and they got thinking, well, that's there's a little bit of a conflict.

Oh, there could be a conflict there, right?

Or we could run a foul in the open meetings act if we require three of you to give a consensus, but then if it's by email, then we we we risk maybe crossing a line for fifty-two four eight in nor quorum of you deliberating, or could at least be construed as a deliberation or a discussion.

So I guess more than anything, just to identify that as a possible risk, and then just caution you to continue to be very careful.

And and I guess my advice would be if three of you are communicating electronically, make sure that it's informational.

Two of you can talk about whatever you want.

If there's a third one that joins, then stay away from any policy discussion, and then push as much of like the consensus building on certain red lines or certain additions or deletions from contracts as much as we can.

Let's push that to the public meeting part of a you know specific contract discussion or something like that.

So again, that I just wanted to have that brief discussion, answer any questions because I got thinking about those two things, and I was like, uh yeah.

Like we could definitely be crosswise if we're not really careful about about lines that we cross.

So if if you have any questions, that's all I wanted to mention.

Just it was a good follow-up from the emails and from the discussion that we had had on the dais a couple weeks ago.

So that was it.

Okay.

Um I just noticed that staff will like reply all and start like looping all of us in on those emails.

I think that maybe where I've gotten a little confused is if I'm not supposed to be seeing that, but staff is replying all, and now I'm on this thread I never asked to be on.

Yeah.

So how are what's our policy moving forward from that perspective?

Yeah, it's a that's another difficult one because we I think we have Jason can chime in.

We we want to be careful that if we respond to one of you, that we respond to all of you so that you all have the same information.

And so I think if it's one directional from us, that's fine.

You don't have to worry about having been included.

We have to be careful, and and you have to we have to be careful together that that push of information in one direction doesn't become we have an or inadvertently asked you to start a discussion and to respond to the information that we've given you.

So again, I don't know that I give you any blight bright line rules, but we'll all just have to be cognizant of that and careful, both as staff as council is that we give you information, but then we be careful about how we ask you to respond to that.

So if we and if we do, then feel free to call us out and say, you know, I don't I'm not comfortable responding when there's more than two of us on this email chain.

So that I mean that's a really good point.

I was just gonna add to that.

I think the key is your guy's response, right?

You can ask us all the questions you want, we can respond with all the information we want or you want from us, but then when you guys start pontificating on, hey, here's what I think, or here's our remote, maybe that's yeah.

Well, and I think that I think there's been a couple times where we have kind of asked for that.

Yeah.

And so we have to be careful that we we clarify that we'll we'll just give you information, we'll have the discussion with a core at least a quorum of you at a later time.

But I could yeah, I could think or you can reach out to me and say, hey, here's what I'm thinking, yeah.

And I can kind of be the repository of all that information.

So just don't reply on to each other.

Yeah, to each other.

Yeah.

Okay.

So to Paula coming from staff to all the council members giving us information is appropriate, we would respond individually.

We felt back.

What about information coming from the council member that's a side from you know, just uh dates or you know, factual coming, I guess.

Just is that appropriate to share this.

Between two council members, no to the whole council.

Well, like on the text, we said that's why there's this part of this event for earthquake.

Oh, that's fine.

Yeah.

Yeah, but if it goes beyond that, if it's well, what if it's okay?

Um council members found certain information.

Here's some data I found, I want to send it all out to council.

You get to send you this data.

I'm not going to give my opinion on it or anything we should do with it, but I want you to have this data I discussed.

Or this letter.

I think that's totally fine.

I think when you guys start debating, or even if you're agreeing on a policy decision, that that's a fine line.

Okay.

So and again, like Ryan said we may have inadvertently asked you to do that in the past, and you will refrain from that.

Kind of prime the pump a little bit the way we have sent out an email to all of you and wanted your feedback without thinking about wait, we can't even even individually give us feedback, but copying each other could be construed as a policy discussion.

So we'll do a better job.

Is it copying more than one other council member?

What was that?

Like I can copy Emily, but I can't do anyone else.

Right, just can't do a quorum of you.

If staff's sending it out, do you want to BCC us?

I mean, you could say this is going out to all council members, but it's we're no longer able to do a reply all the time.

Because I mean that would come and then I'll reply just as staff, right?

You know, mayor copy in or something like that.

But I don't know if that might help.

If you're if it becomes a concern, but I think we're all pretty good at that about taking the council members off.

Yeah, I want to make sure that everyone has information when I ask the D my 50 questions.

Yeah, and again, asking questions.

That's totally appropriate to include all of you if you're seeking information.

Totally fine.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay.

And communications discussion.

Yeah, so Teal, we'll invite TLF.

She so what we want to do is just kind of give you some information about how we intend to engage and communicate with the public, specifically with our uh website and with our social media channels and some best practices that we found over the years and how we do that, and maybe some suggestions on what we think might be best practices as you engage on our official channels as well.

So until the term.

Okay.

Thank you, Matt.

Okay, so as you know, every message that the city puts out, it matters.

Um words matter, and that it shapes the understanding and also the perception that residents have on us as a whole.

Um is what helps with our goal of communicating with transparency, accuracy, and trust.

Um, you know, in our goal in transparency.

Um, we want to provide timely, accurate, and clear information to the public.

We want to ensure communication reflects the full perspective of the city, build trust through consistency and transparency, reduce confusion, misinformation, and unnecessary conflict.

Um, from the residents' perspective, the city includes everybody that's in this room.

It includes you guys as the city council, it includes leadership, it includes staff.

Um residents do not distinguish between departments, only the city.

If you're on city chat and people are mentioning the city, they're talking about you guys, they're talking about all the departments.

They're talking about staff.

Um communications should reflect one unified books.

When I say that, I'm talking about like our official pages.

I'm talking about city chat on top of our social media, on top about our website.

Anything that I put out, I speak to the department, either head, or whoever needs that message to be conveyed to the residents, I speak to them.

So back to city uh chat.

Um, it's our official group form for lehive.

It was created for residents to ask questions and connect with city departments.

It allows residents to report concerns or issues in the community.

It extends the city's awareness.

Now we don't not have eyes in every corner of the city.

And so that's why I appreciate City Chat, because it allows our residents to be those eyes and to share their concerns.

Um, I get a lot of cities that will ask us like, why do you guys have city chat?

Because you know, it's a lot.

Um sometimes it can seem a little um negative, but the way that I see it is that it fills our holes, our communication holes.

It shows where um where there's issues, issues that we might not know about, or maybe issues that um need I don't know, a little more attention.

Um it encourages open two-way communication.

So as I said, like we value uh Lehigh City Chat.

We really do, and the openness that um it has created with our city and our residents.

Now, with um with our platforms, we again want to maintain clarity, consistency, and trust.

Um, City Chat and our social media, it's not a platform for issuing official decisions or commitments.

It's not a place to provide responses without confirm complete information.

It's not intended to override or duplicate responses already provided by city staff.

It's not for speculation, assumptions, or partial context.

It's not a substitute for established communication and decision making processes.

Social media or our social media represents official communication from the city as a whole.

Following the communications process ensures information is accurate, aligned, and trustworthy.

Now think back like, well, currently we're dealing with water conservation.

I'm no expert in water, so that's why I have to go to the water department after Matt Daughton.

I have to go to Matt Dalton.

I have to go to Dave, I have to go to all of them and really take in what information they want for our residents.

And going to those departments, then I know that what I'm sharing or what my team is sharing is aligned with what they need to get out to our residents.

We want to make sure that the information we're getting out to our residents are helping them and that they're helping our community.

So the value of a structured communication.

By having a process, it prevents the spread of incomplete or incorrect information.

It ensures alignment across departments and leadership.

It shares information from subject matter experts, supports informed decision making by the public, and also minimizes confusion, risk, and public concern.

Okay, so one of our, I think our biggest policies or core principles actually is accuracy before speed.

I know, especially looking at city chat, you look at the questions and you're like, oh, I gotta answer this really quick.

But we do not publish or comment until information is verified because we do that.

What usually ends up happening is we have the backtrack.

And that you know breaks trust, that it creates confusion.

Um by being accurate and waiting, um, we avoid speculation or partial information.

We prioritize uh credibility over immediacy.

We ensure messaging reflects the full city perspective.

Sorry.

Um I'm gonna share the process that it's a tried true process that we use on our team and just within the city as a whole.

This is what has helped us with just making sure that we are getting the information that our residents are asking for.

So the first is identify the issue or need for communication, connect with the appropriate departments.

And the one thing that I love about Lehigh is that every department is willing to answer your questions.

They know that you know they're the experts, they're almost like waiting to share that information.

Uh and yeah, they are there to help.

And also they want to get that information to the residents.

Um, gather accurate, complete information from subject matter experts, which again at part of your departments.

Align messaging across departments and leadership.

When we are doing the water conservation, it would have been so easy for us to just put out, hey, do not water before April 15th.

Also, let's wait till May 1st.

But we knew that residents would want to know information as far as what's the parks department doing, what's the city as a whole doing?

So, what have we been doing?

We've been meeting with all the departments.

We've been sitting down and we have a uh aligned message.

So if you're talking to somebody from the parks department or you're talking to somebody from uh water department, the message is all the same.

There should not be any sort of confusion.

Review for accuracy and unified voice, and then share through appropriate communication channels.

So, how does this help our residents?

And what does this mean?

It means that our residents get timely, reliable information, clear understanding of city actions and decisions, reduce misinformation and confusion, increase public trust and engagement, and confidence that communication reflects the full city perspective.

You know, even besides the residents, we have media that watches our social media.

We're just good at getting our information out, and the media knows that, and they know that we have open communication with our residents, and so they see that, and so they will create a story out of anything.

And that's why it's important that whatever we're putting on our social media, especially our official social media, is it's accurate information, it's verified information because a lot of times before they contact me, they'll go on there and they'll grab this information, and we want to make sure that information is correct.

So, yeah, I think all of our goal here, goals here are to get information out to our residents.

For our residents to know that they're seen, that they're here, that they're heard, and that we are here to help them.

We're here to find solutions on any sort of issues that they have, but we have to do it in a way as far as getting the information.

We have to do it in a way where we are being responsible, and that we're working together to get that correct information out.

Do any of you guys have questions?

So would you prefer us as council members to not comment on Linai City Chat and just let the official account do the communicating on that particular forum?

I think it would be better that way.

Like I see you guys like on Lehigh link and all that, and I think that's fine.

I just feel like for city chat and for any other um official page that you know, first allowing us to have like that official uh message, especially because we are taking the time um to work with these different departments.

Now, there's been times, say like on our um just our regular uh social media where um especially like uh oh with the school district.

Um Heather, like she knew like so much about it that like when she would make comments, um it was a lot of the information we would go and get from her.

And so she didn't do it very often.

She usually would come talk to us before she just like post it.

But it's just more of like looking at each situation and saying, okay, is there a need for me to speak?

Did this you know, did city staff already comment?

Am I going to create more confusion?

It's more of like looking at it that way.

So because it's this isn't to silence anybody, it's about showing that like we're all on the same team here.

We're all trying to get information out to our residents.

Yeah.

I feel support in the right way.

And that's like, yeah, just looking for the clearing.

Yeah.

I just say too, like, there's times that stuff gets posted incorrectly, like you know, our meetings changed or whatever, and I just texted you and it's you've gotten it fixed like right away.

Like there's no need for me to go and comment and try and look like I'm you know, fixing something.

Right, right.

Like it's much better to have you guys fix it in the original post than do that.

Anyone else?

Michelle?

I feel like it's like happening.

Um I I appreciate that, and you know, you brought up the water issue, and I think you message it very well.

Um, and maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but I kind of guess other council members as well.

But we're here too if you would like us to be involved in those kind of messages in any way.

Um, I think we'd be happy to again water as an example is an important thing, and we we all we all I think want to encourage use of water and conservation that's stuff.

So we're here to help with that as well.

Um the other thing that I hope that we're careful of.

I I do try to stay off the city's official pages because I feel that's your responsibility, and then I'm always worried about all on there, that's a quorum thing going on, you know, be careful of that, and just to be careful of not to this has been brought up before, but just when we post ourselves and make sure that people understand we're speaking for ourselves and not for the entire council there's been times in that way.

I don't agree with that.

If I have a different opinion, then that's okay, but just to clarify it, I think that's a good thing to do.

So kind of separate.

It's harder like on the official pages, you know, to just represent yourself because residents see you as the city, you know, no matter what.

It's like even like you know, the new ones, like you guys are the city, and so um, yeah, I don't I don't know.

I think that's like with James, he's done like a really good job um on like your recaps.

I think people know that this is coming from you, but then like at the end, you're like, hey, for official word or this and this, this is where you go, you know.

So I think that helps.

So yeah.

But we'll make sure that especially with the water conservation that whatever we're putting out that you guys know um the messaging as well, because I think that's you guys are um the faces of Lehigh as well, and so um when you guys are um putting out information as well, like the residents are listening.

So sorry, put Rachel the spot.

She did a post on the water because I thought it was great.

We'll do it once.

Yeah, very visual.

Because I've spent a lot of time with the water partner with them, I've done the research.

I'm not a water expert, but I have spent many hours looking into it.

So well, and and uh regarding water, for example, and we had a city council discussion about going into phase two, right, and where the city is on that position, and so helping us get that information out once the decision has been made is really helpful for us, especially with water, right?

And where the city is on that position, and so helping us get that information out once a decision has been made is really helpful for us, especially with water, right?

We want everybody in the city talking about how much water we should not be using.

Right.

So I think that's an example of you you coordinate with staff, you we have a meeting where we discuss we're going into phase two, helping us as council on your platforms to be able to resent this job.

It's great.

I thought it was great to do that.

So I'm just giving them information.

And that's what's important is making sure that we're given out, you know, correct verified like information.

So yeah.

Thank you guys.

Thank you.

Okay, number four.

This would be fun.

Excited about this.

Uh library book drop box discussion.

The mayor was going to lead out on this when he's not here.

Sure, sure.

But so we don't have anybody presenting on that.

Well, we do, we do want um have some information that Chrissy wants to provide to you as we start this discussion.

Um then I think it's just a discussion on what we've seen from the residents and what what direction we want to take.

Do we see read for one?

Where you can sit at the two, you don't have to.

Okay, Jill just had her PowerPoint.

Okay.

Um I uh I've read the social media posts, um, so I'm aware of what was going on.

Um I just have some concerns about the idea of a drive-up book drop.

I do know it's super convenient.

I I get that.

And we when we were designing the building and it was happening, we really did look at every possible way we could do to make a drive-out book drop be feasible.

It just wasn't.

Um, part of that was just the design of the building.

It sits up so high, you have to have a book drop that's even higher so that they can drop down into the building.

I mean, it meant like we'd have to have this drive up that was 15, 20 feet in the air.

Um, there were just a lot of things like that, and it is a security risk in a building to have that drive up there.

Um, our hope was that people would adjust to the idea of walking up.

After all, they do walk into the library to get the books.

It shouldn't be that big of a hardship to walk back into the library and return the books there.

Um we also looked at the cost in order to get a book drop.

Probably the absolute minimum that we would be able to do is a two-stall drop box.

Um, that is about that would be about sixteen thousand dollars.

That doesn't include the cement pad underneath and uh covering like a not a pavilion, but it's worth an awning over the top to cover it to protect.

Um it does it would require our staff to have to go out even in really terrible weather and try to protect those books as we pull them out.

Um I've talked to other libraries that do it, and they've talked about having to tarp the things and they still get damaged.

Umbrellas, um, that kind of thing as you do a distance um drive-up book drop.

Um I know if we did install one, quite frankly, it would probably take up 80 to 90% of items returned because it is convenient.

It's really convenient.

People would just drive up and drop them.

But what that means is that my staff currently has a book drop area that has two automated book drops.

We spent like 42,000 getting those automated.

It would make them worthless because now we'd have to walk out, pull out those book drops, come in and manually check them out.

So we've just kind of defeated the purpose of the equipment that we put in to the building.

Um it also would require extra staff because we are not staffed for that.

We weren't counting on that to be how we would check items in.

So how it's the best I can look at estimating how much it would be.

We would have to drop uh clear that book drop a minimum of five times a day.

That takes two staff, um, and it takes about an hour to go out, pull in the bins, and then manually check all that material in.

So we're talking about adding 30 to 45 hours minimum of staff time that we would need to increase.

Um I didn't make calculations on the dollar amount that that would cost.

Um plus it is just a lot of work to try and do that.

The bins hold approximately 560 books each, but I can guarantee you that our high school kids going out there would not be able to push a cart with 560 books.

It's just, I don't know if you have any concept of the how the weight of that.

I know when I talked with Provo Library, she said every time we do it, we have to have two people out because it takes two people to try and get those bins out and back them into the building.

So it just it is a difficulty there.

Um if they're like I said, if there is inclement weather, it's tarping, it's umbrellas, it's all that kind of stuff trying to protect them.

Um the other questions I would have is does that mean that I now have to make my staff work on Sunday.

Do I have to bring them in so that they can clean out those book drops on Sundays?

Um, do they have to be in on every holiday?

Do we lock the those book drops over holidays so that I don't have to make my staff work them?

Um I've worked every Christmas the entire time I've been director because I don't want to make my staff do it.

But we did have a book drop there, and it has to be cleaned out and it has to be cared for.

And so, you know, I I hate to make my staff do that.

Um I guess my other question is can we wait?

Can we wait long enough to let the patrons adjust and see if they can adjust to a walk-up book drop that we have and just return their own items?

They we do have a drive up spot that is designated on the east side, and if people want to call, we run out holds.

We could certainly run out and take a load of books back in if we needed to.

Um I I'm just wondering if our patrons will adjust if they just have a little time.

I mean, they've spent the last year and a half with no book drop at all.

So we do have an exterior book drop.

It is working.

I I feel like that meets the need.

But I don't know.

Do you guys have questions?

Yes.

Are we it's pretty informal?

Um I think I I just want to say thank you for all the thought that went into that.

Like I I know it was a thoughtful process when the building was being designed, and I think some maybe some residents just don't know the extent of all the work that you you and your team put in.

Um I will say that this is one of the posts that has gotten some of the most in engagement I've ever received about people really wanting this.

And so I'd love to find some common ground of like how can we address the residents' concerns but also meet you where you're at.

And I think that's maybe where I'm hoping this discussion can help us find that middle.

Um yeah, that's I I don't want to not respond to the residents on something that I've received more engagement on that comment I made than I think any other comment, including the campaign season.

And so to me that that's a huge thing that we need to not ignore.

But I also want to recognize the concerns of the library staff.

So yeah, I'm guessing through our discussion, we hopefully we can find some common ground.

I I like the idea because even in no matter which direction we go, um, I think the fact of having that drive-up stall for those who do have you know true accessibility fees if they could drive up and know that that stall is available if we had a sign there that said call this number, we'll come out and get your books.

I feel like that could be something good that we could do right now.

And then based on the usage of that and the need, then they could say, like, okay, what's the next step?

But at least that's something that addresses the need right now.

And that I just don't think people are aware that they could do that.

And that would really help the you know, the ones that we're most concerned about with the ones who have mobility concerns.

Yeah.

And I don't know if it's a possibility or how the the you know the city would feel about it, but we do have all the parking on the east side of the building, and that actually is much easier accessibility because they can go right up at the ramp in between the two buildings.

It's super easy.

So it's just not as hard.

You know, if we designated more parking spots there so people can get in and have that access.

I don't know if that's something that would be helpful.

Can they get in between the two buildings?

Yeah, the ramp is much shorter and it's much less of an in a much minority.

And the store back here is a public door, so that's it.

That's an alternative place for people with disabilities there between the building.

Chris, do you have we tried that approach?

Do you have staff that could do that?

Like immediately drop what they're doing, go out there or is that I feel like we could make it work.

We could go out and do it, especially if it if we're aware of that and that people will be calling, we can just kind of make an assignment and create that.

I don't know if that would need additional staff.

It might.

It might need additional staff.

But we could certainly try it with the staff we have to see what happens with that.

And um you'd probably run into the same problem with the you know, weather if it's raining, then I'm guessing if it's smaller amounts coming in and out, they yeah, and we do have bags that we can you know tuck them in and take things in.

It would depend on if they're asking us to come out and get something and they don't have bags, that might be an issue.

But yeah, weather is a big issue with books in particular.

Well, um it's true we didn't have a drive-up drop box at the temporary building, but it was about 10 feet away from the parking spot.

So it was there's no stairs, so it was a little, you know, a little bit more easily accessible.

Um and having had young children quite recently, um, I know that it seems like it's easy to bring the books back in, but it's not with the kids, because then five minutes becomes 45 minutes, right?

Or if you I unfortunately, and I don't know engineering planning, all that, but with the handicap spots on that side and the handicapped ramps on that side of the building, it it's prohibitive for people with mobility, in my opinion, if they're trying to go over the front, and I don't think people know maybe we don't want a sign or something, they don't know that.

I think we just need to communicate that they can park all along that, and if we need to designate some that are specifically library, maybe we need to do that.

But I I think just communicating that that they could come in that entryway would be great no matter what the outcome is, you know, with the book drop is just letting people know you're welcome to come in there.

Yeah, I think at a minimum we need to have some a couple, at least more than one designated spot with a sign, like they're suggested that does say call this number these hours or whatever it is these days, right?

Just like when you go to the grocery store and want to get your grocery pickup, you know what stand we um but that's probably at a minimum what I say, especially with the governor's push with literacy, I just think we want to remove barriers um there.

Um also to me um I think that it can be done to do to have some kind of drive up book drop to be honest, probably with the concerns that you're raising, it might be eventually more better to have it attached to the building, to be honest, um, like it was before, and you have the automated things.

I mean, there's I don't have all the ideas, but I know there's so many smart people in this room that do and that can figure it out, and I have faith that it can be figured out.

Like I know that we can do great things, and that's one of the solutions that we can do.

But in the meantime, um I think at a minimum that having some signs up and letting people know that someone can come get their books for them is a great solution.

I think that that's probably some pretty low-hanging fruit that we could do as far as the communications.

Um that you know, we opened the pub this building to the the library and the public.

Uh library about a month ago, public a couple of weeks ago, and we haven't I maybe didn't realize how difficult it was going to be or how unaware people were going to be of the ramp on this side.

So that's a very easy thing that we've already talked with our communication staff about advertising.

Um so that access can be more uh readily available.

And I think putting some signs up there for some additional handicap parking and or 10 temporary library parking, 10-minute parking or something would be easy to do too.

Well, I I if we do the drop like the people running out to grab books from vehicles, my request would be that those people wear safety vests when they walk out to those cars.

They need to be seen.

So like um, yeah, I I just want them in the uh neonest so people know that they're out there where I would hate for a library employee to be hit in the parking lot while they're helping.

Well, so if we're talking about there would be east of the old city hall building, right?

That's where they would you're saying they would park or they would park here.

This road right out here instead of the building.

Okay.

Between police and this building.

Yeah, I I think that parking there east of the old building is like one of the best spots because you do come right into the the city.

And if we were to have like a book drop out there, like it's pretty covered between the two buildings too.

Just kind of an idea.

I I know we were talking about this before having a book drop attached to the building.

I think that is like an outdated thing now because of safety concerns with like bombs that have been dropped before.

So I don't know that that we would ever go that direction with having an access.

No, we did look at some systems where they had a remote drop that has a conveyor system that conveys it the books under and comes back up, and they just said it's constantly out of order, they're constantly trying to repair it because it just doesn't work well.

Rocks get in it from the drive-through, and you know, just gunk and um so we did look at that as a possibility as well, and it just wasn't really feasible.

And yeah, I do think the east side yeah, but if they're parked on the east side, they'd never be in a parking lot, they would just go out and then be on the sidewalk, right?

To or at least the staff would yeah.

If you're talking if there was a drive-up book, if there's a drive-up, or like we were to have staff members go out to if we had to do one putting it right in between the two buildings would probably be the best thing because there is that awning that goes out over, and yet we could probably extend that and do it.

I just my preference is not to do a drive-up book drop, but it will probably be the best location a little bit more accessible, like three steps away versus coming up.

I I gotta start talking about that.

Okay, apologize.

I've talked to most of you about this already.

So if we put it up there, we've got a crosswalk we could continue with, and we're gonna block that crosswalk.

And so parking there is gonna be very, very problematic.

I really do like the idea of the underground stuff.

The problem is library staff's not gonna be doing that.

It's gonna be our staff that's gonna have to crawl underneath there and try and figure out how to get that.

You don't want to do that?

Um, Springville City has one of those currently.

We did talk to them, like Christie said.

And frankly, they're disgusting.

People are gross, and I don't want to put my staff in that situation.

I mean, they're gross.

Um just the things that have been found in theirs, and I know just dealing with the parks in our public spaces, that's no different here.

Um I I will say if we do it on that east side, we do need to think about the police as well, because that is the majority of their parking or excuse me, on this side of the building over here.

Um that's majority of their parking when they have their trainings, and when they do have their trainings, I mean you guys were here when we were in construction.

Usually you're parking around the side of the building.

Um we we have adequate parking for the for the whole block for the whole building if we utilize it correctly.

The problem is is we can't take away from one to do this one as well easily.

So we almost need to have like two stalls or designated five-minute parking kind of spots.

Well, and as I was thinking over or as I was back here, we kind of have discussing it as well.

I worked with Chrissy's staff quite a bit during this project.

Um we need to either have cameras on this.

I I don't feel comfortable putting staff out there, some of our younger staff going into a car grabbing books out, uh, talk about a safety concern for somebody get pulled in.

So I mean that's that's a big deal too.

So we gotta watch that as well.

Well, so in the previous library, there was a I mean, during COVID, you could call and they bring you out books, and I mean, we've done this has been done before.

Um I'm not saying that it hasn't.

I'm I'm not saying that.

My my concern is is we need to at least have cameras on where that is so that we can track what people are actually utilizing and who's utilizing it.

I don't want to put one or more staff members in a risky situation just because somebody doesn't want to bring it up.

Are we is the ballot box gonna stay where it is?

No, they're coming over here in the parking lot.

So that's gonna be in this parking lot.

Where is it gonna go?

Uh we haven't decided yet.

We're we will look at it three different.

So we're gonna have people driving and doing the utility billing at least correct, somewhere and and the ballots as well, two different areas or two different boxes, maybe potentially some area.

Sorry.

Um Christy, did you say Provo has an exterior box book?

They have exterior um drive-up book drops, they're out in the parking lot.

Um, the staff goes out and does it.

They have two dual, so basically four drops, and they do five times a day.

If we only have one drop that's a dual drop, I have concerns that it would be even more than five times a day.

Because when we have programs like wiggleworms or story types, we've got 60 parents bringing their however many books, you know.

My guess is we'll be doing far more than five times a day.

Okay.

Is that what Highland has also?

Do you know when there's I don't know what Highland has, to be honest.

I just know there's just kind of far from the building, so I wondered if they had to go out in it.

Yeah, yeah.

I think when we were looking through the only compared belts we knew of were a spring.

Well, Spring Hill.

So Highland, if it's not connected to the building, it's probably a panel.

Oh yeah, I could say it's quite a distance.

Well, and and something I think that I just want to like echo it and we're saying is I saw this chart once.

They're the ones that are at the top of the that like we are serving them, and so um I think that we just really need to keep that in mind that we're not in charge per se, and we're serving them, and it is called public service for a reason.

So I think that is an important issue that we increase accessibility the library.

Um a messaging thing that I think has been confusing going with what Chantel says is I've heard from different staff publicly and privately.

I've heard from public who have told me they've been heard, they've heard from staff that there this is just a temporary situation, though there's gonna be not a new library, blah blah blah.

So like while that might be true at some point, there might be another building.

There's no plans right now that I know of.

We have no funding for a new library.

So like this is what we got, and we gotta make it work, and and I think that we need to embrace that.

This is the library at this time, and to help it be successful in all the ways which increase will it help all of our city if we're having this huge push for you just expanded a literacy center, like let's let's help literacies here with books, book is book accessibility.

Well, my my my concern is you know if everybody has busy lives, right?

And for me, I can get out of my trial can bring in books, no problem at all.

Um but what I don't want to happen is even if you have five, ten percent of people say, you know what, this is just not convenient enough.

Like when I go into the library to get books, I'm dedicating time to that.

When I want to drop off books, it needs to be quick because I'm running kids around, whatever.

Um I just don't want to lose people coming to the library.

Um the more members, the more people coming in and out of this building using the facility and you know, checking out books, that's a good thing.

So we want to make it easier for them.

Um and so I'm I'm very supportive of a drop box.

I think we can make it work, we can look at different creative options.

I do like the east side option because the ramp is so short.

This ramp over here on the west side, most people don't even know it exists, right?

And I've seen some comments from elderly folks that they didn't know where it was, so they went out the front door and they almost tumbled down the stairs, and that's the lawsuit for that is probably a thousand times more expensive than installing a drop box.

So uh I think I'm very supportive of of making it work, looking at different options, even just having replaceable bins, right?

So if you library staff goes out with an empty bin, well that's what it would be, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, just plug and play.

And I think that that's such a short distance on this um northeast corner that um it's I like it better than the front, maybe, but we can look through the options that we supportive.

Yeah, and and to to Rachel's point, I think that we all understand we want to we want to make the books accessible to the public and we want to hear what the residents are saying also, but us as a staff trying to balance what we're hearing from the public, but also the concerns and safety of our staff, there's also a concern that we have as administration.

So I think that's why where Christy's coming from is bringing those concerns is to make sure that you have the full picture of what those concerns are, and then if you uh direct us to put a book drop in, then that's that's what we'll do.

We'll make it work.

Yeah, and I know like some of the comments made were like please consult with the library staff before you make decisions.

And so I even think some of our residents are like aware of the issues too.

Um, but yeah, we we've got to find some common ground.

Where could that common ground be for you?

What could you see working?

We want to we want to meet in the middle, right?

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Oh, just wondering about the crosswalk situation.

About the what?

The crosswalk situation over there.

We have that need to be new.

Well, it it potentially should well, I don't know.

I don't know enough about it personally, but we can look into if that should be moved because I know in InDesign we did talk about the main thoroughfare crosswalk would be down around the corner and the next one, so we didn't have the mid block.

Oh having two different crosses.

Correct, but again, I don't know enough about it.

There was located there more because that was actually building.

Yeah, I I think too, like we have the opportunity to test it out with seeing what the need actually is, and also you know, there I know this like we want to make sure that people can return their books.

There's no late fees on the books.

So it's not like anybody has to get books returned at a certain time too, but I think that would help us know like are these one residents who are really concerned about it, are they the ones who are checking out and returning books?

Like it would be able to at least be able to test and say, okay, we have this amount of need, one drop box isn't gonna be enough.

We need two, we need four.

At least we're gonna be able to, instead of trying to shoot from the hip and and base it on just Facebook comments, what what's the actual need there in the community, and then we know what where it needs to be, but I I think because it needs to go in, I it's gonna take time to go in.

This is kind of like the low-hanging fruit of being able to say what is the actual accessibility need having a designated parking spots.

You have designated parking spots with a sign that says this is a number to call, and then you know, have that communicated out and tracking it.

How much data would you collect?

Maybe 30 days, three months.

I think it would be like we want to see it through the summer.

I mean, we might it could be something that is like, hey, we're two weeks into this and this is not working, we need a drop box.

I think it would you know, I don't know that it would set a timeline on it where it could be like this is working really well, and the residents think it's working well for them.

It could be something too where residents the feedback comes back is yeah, this works, but I don't want to wait five minutes to get it.

This is this still isn't good enough.

I think it also depends on the weather.

I remember just you have the car seat and the baby and the books, and you're trying to not get the books wet and protect the children, and so you do the drop box because otherwise something's gonna get damaged, right?

Um so if we keep having rainy weather, that'll help us.

And that's my concern to the the weather is if we do have a drop box in school, because we don't want to empty it, but it has an awning, people are just gonna start dropping their books on top of the drop box.

You know, it's like other things too, we're making sure we have trying to protect everything with all the bars.

Like to Christy's point, I think I think we close it when a library is closed, right?

Because there aren't late fees, no one's you know running back on a Sunday to try to get it in.

So yeah, closed on holidays is a lot of fun, right?

But will there just be another social media post that throw or somebody thrills the yeah and now it's oh well we've got people who are upset?

I guess you've got to unlock the drop box.

I don't know, we're I'm okay to escalating.

Yeah, I'm okay to address the residents and say that Sunday is Sunday day abreast, and like I I can stand by that speaking for myself.

I don't know how the other thing is.

Well you know that on Sunday.

I'm okay to the building probably really easily, you know.

If you you can always drop it off then to the one that attached to the building, right?

They can walk it up, yeah.

They can they can do that.

Um and I just I have concerns that if we're doubling my staff's workload, are we going to double the staff?

Or are we going to pay them a living wage?

Um, you know, what do we do to to make that doable?

Because with the current staff I have, there's no way we can man this and have it up.

We're gonna run a bracket and we're gonna have everybody quitting.

Well, why don't we just try with the with the parking situation with the signs and see what the uptake is?

If we can start that first, because I mean we knew, like, I mean, if you have a a two-story library, it's more expensive A, because you have to have the floors to support heavier loads than just not, and you have to have more staff because you staff two floors of desks versus one.

So that was kind of a known like expense when this was built.

So for I think that either like we've all kind of echoed, let's start with this designated spots, be the you know, grocery pickup, whatever this model we could get a time install one.

Can we put it?

Yeah, but um, yeah, I think you know, if you if you have staff that's able to do that, it's answer phone and to run out there with a yellow vest or whatnot that they're designated a designated book picker upper dropper or offer, then it might work out.

So how much would science cost?

Like two signs.

Not much.

Okay.

I mean, I have to say that I do understand that there's a little bit left in the budget from this building, so I think we have a little bit of money to work.

We can make that, yeah.

Okay, so the just so I'm clear like the messaging is we're gonna test to for demand, we're gonna do the drive up call, someone comes and picks it up, and then based on demand, we'll have a later discussion about an actual box, possibly.

The message can even be to make sure that we're serving our residents who have mobility or you know, perhaps it even could be mothers or at least have who want to say that, but rather than test demand.

Well, yeah, can we send a survey out to everyone with a library card and ask them how they prefer like what they like and don't like?

We can't we have the ability to send out emails to all our patrons and help them do a survey.

I kind of like the audit idea though, because I think it'd be asking if I'm not sure.

I think everybody can also say yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because there's always missing no.

It's a different situation where you do have to weigh years in the car.

I mean I think uh a drop box would be utilized more than just uh the parking stalls.

I think it's a good first step.

I would like to look at other cities and see what they're doing.

I don't know of any city in the many places I've lived who which hasn't had a drop exterior drop box, and I know we want to protect books, um a city resource.

Um but when we talk about we don't want staff to go out and increment weather.

What about our our residents, you know, who again have to unload all their children, drag them out in rain or have a wheelchair.

Yes.

I guess that's maybe going back to Heather's point though.

We're not forcing them to go out and implement weather because they don't have a due date or fines associated with it.

So if it's bad weather, I mean they could wait to you do until your son or daughter may not have returned a book in a very long time and you get a notice that you're buying the book.

So your books on and you have to pick it up by a certain date.

Do we do that?

Do we make people buy the book?

If it goes like six months and they have whatever, then yes, it just goes on their account.

You also have to pick up the certain date.

So then they've also received multiple, multiple, you know, notices saying this is due.

Can you please the day after and then at some point they return it and it just goes off.

And then it just goes off.

What I'm trying to test is need versus want.

This is gonna this will not show the the want demand for the job box.

It's going to show how much we need it for.

Yeah, because if you really need it, you're gonna call.

Instead of get your stroller or get your walker, whatever issues you have that you need to get up.

So let us run with that, and then we'll bring it back and we can have a further discussion.

But I think we need at least two stalls.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We can't like the one stall yeah, no, close to stuff.

I mean, we have a city of a hundred thousand.

The closest ones to this door on the east of that one.

We'll figure it out with Steve.

Yeah.

And then yeah, I'd love to know the impact on your staffing.

Like this was this was manageable, this was not manageable.

I need one person, two person was the cost.

I guess probably all the time I'd do also.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay, let's move on to item five budget discussions.

Um start with the justice court.

Before I forget, we need to squeeze IT in.

So we're gonna squeeze IT in right after the city recorder.

That's okay if you want to make a note of that, because I might forget.

In the heat of budget discussions.

Thank you.

Um I'm not sure if you'd like me to to kind of uh present our budget if if you have questions and other uh we should know a little bit about our budget request and the need for it there.

So if you tell me what we need to do.

Can you present your request and then you know a little bit of why and then take questions?

Yeah.

Since 2021, our case load uh has increased by 46%.

And we've got about half a less clerk can we have back in 2021.

So uh we we're busy uh to say the least, and we need help or our clerks right now or uh drowning in the work that they've got, and we're projected to uh increase by about another 24% just this year alone.

Um extremely busy.

So uh the hope is that we can get uh two new full-time clerks to come on board and and you know if I had to give a reason why uh the increase, I mean I've got an increased population, and more people that are in an area, the more crime that happens.

Um obviously the police department has grown significantly in that time as well.

And uh the more officers they have out doing work, the more cases trickle down to us.

So you see a direct correlation between increase in officers and increase on your department needs and the demand on your staff's time.

Yes, yeah.

Uh and she could probably give you better numbers.

I probably in that time they've increased by 18 to 20 officers or so the last five or six years.

Uh yeah.

12 or 14.

1214.

Okay.

Yeah.

So uh, you know, they're they're out doing good work and all not all those cases.

A lot of those cases go to the district court.

Many of those cases come to us as well.

And then you add Utah Highway Patrol and UTA and Utah County and DWR all file cases in our court.

And um it's it's busy.

So in this, I just see like the the mayor's budget just has an increase of warrant, and that is only the tax increase, is that right?

That's what they tax increase today.

You were talking about how remind me, because you have part-time clerks.

Do any of them want to deter full-time is that I think, or is it just fully too new full-time?

Um a couple have expressed interest in uh going full-time if those types of positions were ever open.

Um, we we'd love to I know that there are certain rules that we at least got a post internally and maybe even externally, but we do have uh some very great candidates who are well trained and qualified if for approved first.

But it would be two new, like two full-time positions, not basically converting a half to.

That's our request is that it can be two brand new positions, yes.

So you keep your part-time ones as well.

Correct.

Um I have a quote another question.

I I think Eagle Mountain contracts with the county for these services.

Um why do we do you know why we do it here locally in Lehigh and why we don't contract out with the county?

Yeah.

Um, I mean, ultimately, I guess that's a that's a policy decision.

Um from my perspective, it's an essential government service that we can provide to our residents.

Um that they can have their disputes resolved here rather than having to travel to provo.

Uh and and I think the I mean, I guess I can't speak for other cities, but look looking at the practicalities of it.

I think it gets difficult if you're sending your officers to provo every single day for the cases that they need to be there for.

If you're sending your prosecutors, if you're sending your your residents who uh are either resolving a criminal matter or even a civil dispute.

You're sending all of them to pro home back every single day.

Um I I think the residents are better served for those cities who keep a justice court in their city or town.

And are is our caseload so heavy that we need another judge?

Um we will.

We don't we don't yet.

Um so we we we typically are hovering around about a hundred percent caseload, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less.

Um and usually courts look at hiring either a part-time judge or full second judge when you reach about a hundred and thirty percent of the caseload.

That that gets to the point where it becomes unmanageable for a judge.

The the reason it's unmanageable for our clerks, you know, a lot of people want to come in and just you know, pay a parking ticket or uh a traffic ticket.

Um and so I'll never even talk to those people.

Uh and so you know, of the roughly 9600 cases that can get filed each year, we'll see maybe 3,000 of them in court.

Uh but our clerks are having to talk to every single one of those or address their case in some way.

Um and so that's why it's become kind of the point of a breaking point for our court.

I just want to kind of re-emphasize the point that you made when I visited right now.

The justice court is profitable as far as your overall expenses versus the revenue from these tickets and fines and so forth.

And even with the two-head count, you're still profitable, is that correct?

That's correct.

And I guess I should say a caveat to that is you know, we're the ones who collect the money at the end.

Uh, but but acknowledging that a lot goes into that.

I mean, the police uh are are writing citations, and those ultimately lead defines um, you know, highway patrols writing citations and those lead defines the prosecutors are there doing their job that lead to fines.

We're the ones who ultimately collect that at the end.

So I mean it looks nice for us because we can say look how much more.

But uh, but yeah, to the extent that some of that's attributable to us.

If if we were to add two clerks, uh the the justice court would still be in the back.

But you're not necessarily yeah, I think what what I'm hearing you say is you're not directly the cause of revenue.

It's it's really the police, right?

And that's not being reflected in your budget of the cost of what it takes them to generate that revenue for yeah, some of our budget a couple years ago, but you know, not nearly enough.

I uh granted went to having uh police officers come to be our court security rather than kind of contracted companies.

Um and we've been much safer ever since, which is it's been great.

Uh, but but it wasn't nearly enough, I'm sure, to cover the full cost of having those officers there.

And you have bring in revenue from like you said patrol or other things, like it's not just the accuracy that's yeah.

Highway patrol is is our next biggest.

We um they they filed they're very proactive uh along I-15, and um we get a lot of filings from them.

Um UTA seems to be pretty active in Lehigh.

Um some of those are trespassing cases, lots of them are just people trying to steal fares, and so they're they're very proactive here in Lee High to try to kiss those folks, and then to a lesser extent, uh division of wildlife does some here, and uh every once in a while we get some neighboring jurisdictions that happen to file cases here too that happened in the end.

So I have a question.

Um that was helpful information that it's not just the court system, people coming to you, it's the things that you're through clerks have to deal with that never reach you to that level.

Um and obviously there's a growth in that number.

Is that do you see that more of the kind of the routine things where part-time clerks help with uh or could be effective with, or the higher level more complex issues that you need the full-time staff that's filtering?

A little bit of both.

Um we we have found it difficult uh in the court system in the past.

You know, I I say this, we we have some great part-time clerks right now, and they're they're fantastic.

We we have had trouble recruiting really good part-time clerks in the past.

Um based on on the work that we're asking them to do, the stress level that they have, the kinds of things that we hear day in and day out.

We we have a tough time keeping really good part-time clerks.

And uh part of our budget request, you'll see that the at least the trend in other courts of similar size, this is on I think the second page courts really try to avoid part-time clerks, I think for that same reason.

Um, and you'll notice that it's it's rare, at least for courts that are comparable in size to us.

And when I say size, I mean case filings, not city size, but you know, how busy their court is.

Um, you can see we're you know, of the one, two seven courts that are list there, we're one of two that actually kind of dove into the area of part-time clerks.

Yeah.

Are you not asking for any capital expenditures this year or anything like that?

No, our our building's in bad shape, and uh Chief Craft probably needs it more than we do, so we we don't want to dump a whole lot of money into a building that could be fallen down tomorrow.

So well, we um just if we were to move you, um there's have been talks of possibly moving you into the old council chambers.

Do you have any heartburn over something like that?

No, um that I think that's a fantastic idea.

It's it's set up in in such a way that I think it would work well as a court.

Um we're we're happy to make whatever work.

Um if I it's okay to ask my last question is do you and your staff feel safe?

Do you need additional support from fight for us to provide anything safety-wise that for you and your team, do you need additional security or any like type of equipment that can I I just um I know it's a risk a risky spot.

I'm just curious if you have any need for that.

You know, I appreciate that a lot because it is a concern of ours all the time.

Um and and it was a big concern when we were hiring private contractors to come, they weren't doing a great job.

Um since uh we worked with the police department, they've got two excellent security uh officers there.

Uh we feel safe every day with that.

We we know that we're taking care of well with them.

So I mean, yeah, that there are some you know minor security upgrades here and there that that we love, but I I don't know that the the cost is necessarily justified for remote building like that that we might not be in for well if if a choice was to move you to the old council chambers, it I think the council would benefit from seeing what you would need if that choice if that was to happen, we'd want to know what upgrade would be needed so we could think about those costs.

Yeah, I'm happy to put together.

I think one of the budget items is to renovate part of the old city building.

Um but I don't know.

We'd never contemplated that.

I know you're moving a department, I think it was permitting or stations.

Yeah.

So I really like the idea because it saves taxpayers um probably millions upon millions of dollars in a new building or or something else.

Another option we're eventually gonna have to rebuild station 81.

You know, if we added another floor to that, again it would probably be much more expensive than just moving the court to the old chamber.

Plus, I know there's one requirement, you have to have your own office as a judge, and I think that back office room could accomplish that, plus some other office space for your full-time country.

Yeah, that's kind of makes sense.

It does make a lot of sense in my mind.

But it's close to the police station.

Yeah.

If you were to move though, we would just if you could think through anything you would need for some security or things like that, so we would understand the full cost.

That'd be awesome.

Yeah, if if if that becomes uh something that you want us to explore, I think what I'd do is maybe work with Chief Paul and put our heads together if you go make sense to make that a safe place, not just for us, but you know, we we recognize that some of the the folks that are coming into the court aren't the safest people to have in a lot of government buildings, and and so how do we make sure that you know they don't start wandering out to floors that they shouldn't be on and creating risk for others, so I think that'd be something we need to collaborate on on yeah, with the book drop there too.

As I think about kids going, yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

It's a legitimate concern that you know, for example, I don't know that we won't have a court downstairs here if you've got families coming in to the library all the time, and you you mix it a different bunch of people, and that you probably don't want to.

That's a great point.

I think though, as a as a I think it does make sense if we aren't gonna rebuild the one and we're looking for a place for you to go.

Um we change the entrance or something.

Yeah, I mean there's a there's another, yeah.

There could be there could be another thing on the other side or something.

I don't know, something like that.

Yeah, there's just set up the 10 grads.

No, I appreciate the thoughts though.

You know, we you certainly would come in ability in the cheap craft most of uh the the path like settings and I think it'd be great to have the ideas so we know what um instead of maybe remodeling something and having to pivot in a year or something like that.

So yeah, that's my that's my opinion.

What we may want to consider is putting money into updating the master plan allowed uh rather than tackle buildings one at a time.

We can plan out all the rest of the same things that we have.

Well, I mean, I understand where the master plan has a justice court, but I don't think that station 81 can wait for sometimes for something like that.

And I know that fire, they can adapt and be in a tent or something.

I mean, yeah, I know you have the capabilities, but the justice court cannot be in something like that.

So I'm just saying I'm just saying I can.

I'm just saying I've I'm like, I've done some of the mass mass casual training, whatever.

I know that we we can adapt in some ways, but I know that I don't believe a justice court can't adapt in certain ways.

That's all I'm saying.

So well, yeah, I think we would want all of the departments to be actively involved in any of those discussions, but just so you know where we would like to see you guys be safe and functioning.

I appreciate that.

Thank you so much.

Sooner than later, I think sooner than later.

Yeah, and planning and uh permitting should probably be involved as well.

They thought they were getting moved up and they might not be.

I don't know.

Okay, anything else?

You guys good.

Okay, thank you so much.

Yeah, um, can we I'm just looking at how many we want to get through.

Do we want to like just plan for like 10 minutes per?

Because I think we have 30 left with IT we can add it.

Or do we want 10 minutes for each one or take any more time for or like a maximum?

But yeah, whatever.

Because I think some of these we may not have very many questions, others may not have.

That was a big one, I think, for all of us.

Okay.

Yeah, I just want to.

Yeah.

Cameron or Jason, can you guys just give us like a you've been talking about this for 10 minutes in the morning for that's okay, we can be first or two.

That's fine.

So uh I guess I'll start.

Uh first we appreciate the opportunity to talk to you all.

Um from the time we made our original proposals until now, we've we've made a few changes, and I think we've had the opportunity at different times to speak with all of you.

But um we can go back and kind of go through the the proposals as they were originally, or kind of where we're at today with some of those changes.

Um however you want to.

I think I think we understand your original proposals.

I think most of us I wasn't there, but then I asked you.

Okay.

So yeah, if you could tell us what you need now, how would we I guess I'll just tell you kind of maybe what changed and why it changed and why we think it's maybe even a better solution.

Originally we we asked for nine officers.

Now I I will say the workload and the growth is is the main thing that I think about as I think about the things the officers have to do, similar to the other uh departments that have mentioned growth.

So we started out with nine, but then it was it was brought up in the first discussion about the use of AI tools to lessen the report writing time and getting the officers out in the public quicker.

Certainly AI does not replace the need for manpower per se, but it can certainly help help with the turnaround time and getting people out.

And I think it is worth the investment and trying that for a year and see how that affects the numbers as we continue to watch our growth and our our growth study that we put together.

So I think that's a viable option.

So based on that, we we felt like we could eliminate possibly two of two officer requests.

So that's one reason why it went down a little bit.

Um this is somewhat unsettled with the legislators, but it is getting more and more acceptable.

I I know the county attorney was really hesitant to um allow AI, but but the products are getting better, and it's worth a try for us to see how it affects things.

So we put this uh proposal in for for this AI program after the original time.

And I will just say we put in the proposal for this program, but we're actually demoing three different three additional programs now to see which one fits the best and makes the most financial sense for us.

So is that called axon draft one?

So yeah, that's the axon draft one proposal.

Axon is they're the they're our taser company, but they they use our body cams and stuff like that.

That's the tie-in.

But we're looking right now, as I said, at other companies that the price is comparable across all three or four.

We want to just make sure we get the best product.

So we're we're testing all of them right now.

Um the the other thing that changed that we didn't uh know at the time was the military academy has since opted out of our contract for an SRO.

So starting next fall, we won't have an obligation to put one there.

And so we can now move our SRO that we currently have over and have full-time SRO representation in our two high schools and our three junior highs.

So that kind of resolved itself, so to speak.

Um can I ask you for the um AI feedback song?

What's the price point on that?

Because I see I do two different prices.

I see like a 101 and I see 84.

84, 84 is the quote that we were recording.

So, Chief, you you're saying original was a nine head count requests.

You move that to seven.

Yeah, and and we've even made an additional changes and adjustments.

So we moved it down to seven, and then with the SRO position being eliminated, we'll we'll move an S we'll reassign an SRO to the junior highs.

We'll be able to place full-time SROs in the junior highs.

Um that will affect our calls for service.

Um right now, our patrol doesn't respond to the military academy because it's it's handled internally with the SRO, but it will affect our patrol teams a little bit, and we'll have to adjust there.

But it kind of eliminated the need for another SRO.

So let's see what the sound to clarify um the 101 number that you're looking at in the budget.

That's also their axon, the officers that we funded their axon yearly subscription.

In addition to the 84.

That's the body campaign.

Yeah, so that's 84 plus the body cam yearly amount.

You know, an annual subscription for body cams and also uh in-car cams and tasers, it's all kind of bundled, it's all part of the AXOs.

So with you don't need the vehicle for the SRO either, then any officer position we eliminate would also affect the fleet.

Okay.

But that for the SRO, just that requests just simply transfer to a regular patrol officer.

Well, that that would be helpful.

Yeah, that's yeah, that would be helpful.

I mean, there are still it's still we like I said, we'll still have to respond to calls.

And so it will take resources away.

But well, can I interject real quick?

Because when we sharpen our pencil on the study, my recollection was it went from nine to five this year.

Is that not right?

I think that I think it I think as I recall, Mariah, if she's here, yeah.

I think we set about six is where we were at.

And and I really am intrigued to see how AI affects that saturation level, and I and so I that's why I'm okay with the two.

And I guess the point I'm trying to make is we're still not shooting for nine.

No, yeah, we're not.

I just want that to be clear.

Yeah, we're not shooting for nine.

The number we're trying to hit is lower than nine.

Yes.

We we we eliminated to with AI, which also eliminates two vehicles and the other costs associated with that.

I think our SRO position had resolved itself, and if we could just transfer an officer over, then that's you know, helpful.

We we do have in the budget still to add basically three officers.

And what we would do is we would look at our saturation and our workload times, and we would plug those officers in at the most needed time, which is gonna be our our cover shift, our afternoon shift, which is what our call is the highest.

Um the mayor's budget, I think reflects four new patrol officers.

So do you need less than what he's allocated?

Well, there's one more thing that we want to address, and that is market adjustments for our current officers, because we also have a clearer picture of what the wages are where they are now and where they're going.

And we feel like we need to make a bigger adjustment there than we had anticipated.

And so we also felt like it was a good reason.

It was a fair trade-off to eliminate officers in order to pay our current staff.

And if you want to talk about that specifically, Jeff has done most of the legwork, and I'll just have him answer the questions.

But I see that the mayor's included the shift differential pay.

That's separate than what you just talked about.

Yeah, so what I'm hearing is the mayor gave four in his budget.

You're willing to get three, but that one seventy-seven ninety you would put towards police wages.

Well, I think there was I think there was actually five in the budget.

Well, for the SRO.

Yeah.

So what what our home was is to eliminate two, okay.

Apply that to wages.

And some of that comes down depending on you know what in the mayor's statement talks about cola versus merit and things of that nature.

Um affects our start, merit doesn't, if I understand correctly.

And so with just working with a little bit with HR and things of that nature, the if if we reduce by two officers and we apply that to just to wages, that's the equivalent of a dollar forty-nine an hour for increase on our start, and then just apply it out evenly to keep f for compression all interages.

So do you want me to take the SRO amount, which is 174840, and add it to the 1770 for like what you're asking for wages, or do you have to want your total wage amount?

And are you including benefits in that?

Yes, yeah.

So that includes the 28%.

It's actually closer to 40.

Yeah.

It's actually closer to 41%.

Okay.

So what's that total amount?

So the total amount I I was working with was two officer, two officer costs, not the SR.

But I probably should have used the SRO one.

That's probably no percent of my part because what's the difference in the wage?

If it polls like $5,000 difference, right, which is why I just want to know what we're doing.

So it's minimal minimal amount difference.

But the number I was working with was $335, $335,000 and 30 cents, 30 cents, $30.

Okay.

And when you break that out with benefits and everything, it's the equivalent of moving our star from wherever it is with the skill.

Or it's the equivalent of a dollar 49 on top of wherever the colour moves our wage too.

Okay, so and so if if the cola is one percent, it moves our start to 29.99.

And that brings our that $1.49 brings our start to $3147.

The current midpoint with the cities that we compare against, which is a list of 25 different cities, that average right now is 3204, and we expect it to move closer to 33 by July to August.

Okay.

So to just to make sure I understand you correctly, you want three full-time patrol officers, 335,000 for wage increase, the AI tool, and the fleet vehicles associated to such.

And then there's a records clerk posted also.

And a records clerk, and yeah, that that just goes to same thing, growth and increasing.

Yeah, but that was just the number that we came up with based on if we eliminated two positions.

Yeah, and it's significantly different than what fire needs.

Um why is that?

Do you know like this different markets?

Different feed sources.

No, I mean we're both public safety, but there are two plenty of different animals in the way we staff, the way they their hours work.

Um two different kinds of people applying.

I mean, they're both public safety, but you take a fireman police officer, they're two very different individuals.

Yeah, I guess I'm wondering like historically what I don't know if we had we just I know the tax increases have gone to both, so I'm just trying to figure out where they shifted one way or the other over time.

I I couldn't answer the question.

So the current philosophy is we we benchmark every position separately because every market is different.

Markets for streets workers might be different than police officers, different than building inspectors, so it really just depends on the it just seems like they need less of a jump than fire does.

I'm wondering if there was a policy decision at some point that focused more on police than fire.

In in the past, their market has gone faster.

I think this year or two, fire has gone faster.

They're not they're not linear, it's uh they erratically.

Um the records lurk.

My understanding is you asked for one, but now you think that you can take one of your part-time and have it be full-time.

Is that correct or no?

Well, I thought that was an alternative.

Okay.

If there wasn't if there wasn't enough funding, okay.

Um it's converted is it it helps, but it's minimal amount.

Okay.

Okay.

So you'd like a full-time plus the part-time.

Same as a we would like I think we would like we prefer that it is funded as proposed as a full-time records clerk and not uh eliminating a part-time.

However, we could adjust that that was what was decided.

Fair enough.

Where the jump comes in, and if you go from part-time to full-time is in the benefit package.

Sorry not to do the market, but it's you're fine.

Getting confused.

So this uh that has five full-time separate now.

You're saying you can you're eliminating two to be able to go towards wages.

That's what you're eliminating an SRO, which could also go towards wages, or you're saying you're chasing.

So you're eliminating an SRO and a another full-time to get it you to three.

Yes.

Okay, absolutely.

Yes.

And at the end of the day, we would be looking for as it's proposed, the AI software, three officers, and the wage adjustment and the records.

And the shift differential.

And the differentials of the uniform allowance.

And then our time.

We kept talking.

We let them work very well.

We bring the multiple or something because that's what we've got the city of the cycles now.

Exactly.

Okay, this is helpful.

I uh my last question.

If you had to um rank wage increase over head count.

I think that it is I think the wage is something that I I didn't put enough weight on originally.

I I think we have to pay our staff that we have here before we bring that to May.

So I would prioritize fair market wages over head count.

Okay.

Any equipment wise, you feel fine.

You feel like you have what you need.

I feel like we're very we're in a real good position with that.

There's part of the clothing allowance adjustment is to allow officers to purchase the hard rifle plates, the it's a little offers more taxable protection.

And the idea on that was they would purchase them and then we would increase their clothing allowance by a certain implement to pay them back over the over the life of the plates.

Thank you.

Anything else?

I do have some questions.

The the AI gives me some concerns.

And we just we were at a lead conference, and this was one of the discussions, and I talked to some somebody from another city who actually has an AI policy.

Do we have an AI policy currently?

I think we were working on it right now.

Um so I talked to a council member in another city, they have the policy, their their police department is using AI for different things.

Um but we talked about that need for the human role in it.

I mean, ultimately your police officer is going to be accountable, right, for the reports they send in.

And I asked him how do you how do you make sure that they review it?

Because that could get us into some problems later on.

I yeah.

Um crazy things with AI.

Uh and he he talked about or no, it was our our state data collection or data privacy uh officer who said this is that it there has to be significant accountability tied to those reports, like to the point of if you don't review it and it even firing them.

So that's my concern.

AI seems to be a wonderful thing that will solve all our problems fairly or create more of it.

Um but it but it's not, you know, and I I appreciate that you're testing out different um vendors, I guess, and different products to find out which ones are the best ones.

Um, but I please keep a close eye on that.

And if it works, that'd be wonderful.

If it's helpful for your officers, that'd be great, but I just don't want to get us into more problems down the road with that.

So I'm just throwing that out there.

I appreciate that.

That there are some um safety things built into it, but above them, I think far beyond that, the officers have to take ownership of their reports.

I know that's a concern the county attorney has expressed, and there are products that he will endorse, and there's products he will help us to stay away from.

And and again, the AI is meant to create a first draft overall thing, and like our detectives and our investigators, they they might use it to simply transcribe uh an interview, but their reporting, you know, they'll they'll go through above and beyond the initial report and really make sure that it's everything's done properly.

So that's a concern that we also have.

And as long as we're doing that, it'll that'll probably be a great thing.

So I think beyond just the city's AI policy, I think police department should probably have your own with very strict and clear guidelines because it you know, I'm sure other departments have used this, there's lessons learned that you can learn from other departments, but um in a worst case scenario, uh I think it should be very clear, you know, if the report was not accurate, what happens at that point?

Sure.

And we use we use uh a system called Lexical.

I don't know if you're familiar with it or not, but it's for our it's for our policies, and they have pretty large staff of attorneys and people that make sure our policies are up to date, and I believe they actually have one in there that we would just go grab and look at it and tater it to fit us, but but by the time we get a policy from them, it's pretty well vetted and um rumpted in anger.

One last thing, just caution to throw out there.

One of the things they did mention was control of the records, where some vendors with their contracts or agreements kind of um had had control over those records, it has to stay with the the government entity.

So that was just one they threw out there to keep my hearing out.

So yeah, and we have during this testing phase, we've got some contracts that we just reviewing to look at before they get moving forward to make sure those things are all in place.

Okay, you're on it.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So I gotta watch this.

You know, it was the tents.

Where's the tent in the tent?

Okay, we had a conversation.

We have we had a conversation about it.

And you said we could figure it out, and I figured out we talked about some options because I was one of all.

Um Madam in your content.

I just wanted to bring this up to the council.

When we did our initial budget discussion in February, I had written station 85 as a goal, and we had all kind of put our stickers on that.

I wrote that not having not having the full picture from Chiefcraft at the time that really what we needed was the reno of 81.

So I just wanted to throw that out to you guys before we get started and see like would you be okay amending that goal to say reno eighty-one instead of station 85?

And would you still support that?

Yeah.

Yep.

Okay.

Okay.

And just as we begin, I I just felt personally responsible because I'm the one that wrote that, so I just wanted to bring it to you guys and see if you're okay.

Yeah, whatever they think is their fixing that for sure.

Okay, awesome.

Thank you.

I guess where I want to start.

I mean, I've met with all of you, and I appreciate the conversations we've had, is um not necessarily in what I requested, but what I didn't request, but I need more than anything.

And so I'd like to have the conversation about the wages.

Um I guess I want to throw out a little bit of a disclaimer in that I know I don't have the full picture that the uh budget committee has of the entire city and the needs of every single department, and I appreciate what they tried to do, and I in no way want this my discussion to reflect on them.

But the reality is what was uh given in the mayor's budget is not enough.

We are gonna lose firefighters, and we're gonna lose them rapidly.

I have David Kitchen's numbers right here in front of me.

And he said at the minimum we needed a 20% increase just to bring us up to the minimum, and more likely about a 32%, well, 31.64% increase.

What's proposed is six percent, just over six percent.

Um to me, I've never felt like we're gonna lose people in the past, uh, but we're gonna lose people.

When you talk about our young people that are trying to buy houses and things like that, um that amount of money is significant for that.

And and the problem is this it we're we're amazing at what we do.

And I can prove it.

I have all the numbers right here.

When you talk about medical alone, Ross greats um for us.

Uh we're at just over 30% ROSC's return of spontaneous circulation.

Meaning we go on a full arrest, we get a heartbeat back.

We high fire is just over 30%.

The average in Utah is 22%, and the national average is 25%.

Uh we're better trained, we perform better, and the other departments know it.

And they also know that we're not paying them enough, and they're starting to target our people.

And so uh whatever we can do to get closer to that 650,000 that we need, but that doesn't include the 28% on the back side, right?

For every dollar that you increase in the fire department, we need 28%.

And I know that's different than PD, and there was a question there, and it all has to do with tier one retirement.

Um as I understand that the city always budgets to tier one retirement, and in tier one retirement, we're at like 21%, and I don't know what their percentage is, but that's the difference.

It's it's higher.

In tier two, it's the same across the board, but not in tier one.

Um can you repeat your numbers really quick?

You said the mayor's budget's only giving the six percent increase you need.

Well, it would be if it's three percent, or if we're getting four percent like COA or Merit or whatever we're calling it, plus the it was 390,000, but if you take 28% off of that, it brings us down to 200 and something thousand.

Yeah, we took two 250 off.

Yeah, and you that that equates about a six percent increase across the board.

But you minimum you need 20, and then what was the 30% number you said?

So according to so we asked for 640 in the in the budget, David asked for 640,000.

That doesn't account for the if we take 28% off of that, that reduces it even more.

So in reality, you mean it's 640 plus 28% of 640.

Yeah, which is like 8019, 819,000 to bring us up to where we need to be.

And I can, I mean, I was prepared to go on this big speech about all the things that we're doing that other cities aren't doing, and I have it all, but in the event of time, I'd rather open it up and answer questions.

Sorry, do you know?

It's 800 bucks, something else.

819,000.

This assistant chief position.

Um, I'm gonna ask the same question that I asked of Chief Paul.

If you could do wages or head count, where would you what would you prioritize?

That's a hard question for me, but my men and women deserve the money more than Chief Robinson and I deserve our weekends back.

That's really the the decision for me.

I think the assistant chief would help administer you as administrators to be able to do that.

Well, it helps in a larger sense too, because when we added station 84, we added 25% more people.

Our line of county chiefs are now supervising 25% more people, but we weren't able to take some of the administrative duties off of them that they're helping us with.

And that's a big area is to help take some of those.

So Chief Robinson and I have tried to pick up some of those administrative duties so they can focus on that the additional people.

That was my mistake.

I should have asked for that assistant chief when we opened station 84.

Um yeah, it's there's a there's a real crunch there, and um, like I said, uh we spend a lot of time on the weekends, a significant amount of time doing work uh administrative work that just has to be done.

I can't wait until the week B.

And so but if I if I have to choose, I'll give the money to my people.

That's what they deserve.

And the 820-ish that you need is in addition to the 4% total that we that is standard year to year.

I believe so, yes.

Yes.

Because that's under HR, I think.

Yeah.

Um the heavy I think it's the house map vehicle.

Right.

Well, it's called a heavy rescue for us.

Initially, we would stand it up for hazmat response, but ultimately it would do trench rescue, high angle rescue, structural collapse, uh confined space.

Like it it it handles all the specialty equipment for those types of things.

Is it 400,000?

For the equipment?

Yeah.

Or the I thought it was like 131.

Oh, it says on the 115, it says one time 115K and ongoing is 131, 230.

Like 152k.

Yeah, so that's ongoing.

And the vehicle you're trying to do.

That's a payment.

That's what I'm saying.

But yeah.

Um Dean, did you ever find out if that vehicle could be paid for with impact fees from TI?

Okay.

We're in the middle of an updating study.

And uh question, how much of it's landing growth, right?

So possibly some.

Possibly some.

I really asked that's I like it.

Possibly anything.

So, Chief, can you explain why that's ongoing?

The total cost is it's like over a million dollars, right?

Yeah, so it's like 1.4 million I think we asked for.

So they do an ongoing cost, so that equates to replacement, because I understand Dean can help me.

This is Jeremy and Dean's program, because I used to just ask for the poll, and that's the number that I gave Jeremy, and then he came back.

So I think that is just um partitioned out, so in the 20 to 25 years we put that would would need to be uh replaced.

Yeah, the idea is for every vehicle we have at least we're gonna have it forever.

And so it's not just a matter of how much does it cost to buy today, it's how much should we put in the budget every year to keep it forever?

And so there's a lot of ways to, I mean, we've done capital leases, we've done different things, we've used reserve funds, we use capital funds, so there's different ways we could buy it the first time, but we need to have an amount in the budget every year forever.

And so the replacement costs the 100 and something thousand that was it.

I can't remember.

115.

115.

That sounds that's how much it would.

We should have that much in the budget every year so that when that because that's the so not only just to replace the vehicle, but it's also for maintenance and stuff like that.

So I I have a question though, because if the it looks like the mayor's budget is unfunded and the rest of people's underfunded, so why are we funding the ongoing?

Yeah, I think the idea was there's no way it can be in this next year's budget because it's gonna take four years.

Yeah, well, two to four years, depending on which manufacturer we go with.

So we're not gonna be actually buying if we said we love it, we want to do it today, we could get it in 2030, right?

And so we just wanted to show it's really not in the budget because we don't have it, but if we fund it, then we need to get an extra thousand in the annual budget.

Yeah, but that's just the ongoing and the make the one time if you look at the fleet, it's 1.5 million.

So thank you.

Is that answer?

I mean we could do a much better calving.

I don't think so, because that makes them confusing.

Well, so is this are you budgeting the payment of the one and a half million over four years?

Or then why would we spend 131 this possible year?

I don't even think it doesn't arrive until the the problem we have is if you say yes to buy it, there's a council in four years that has to live with that.

Oh, so this would be like get it in there.

We're we're acknowledging that it's gonna be in that base budget forever.

Okay.

It's just weird because it takes so long.

No, I think that makes more sense.

So we would basically have a savings for the next four years.

Then you've got six hundred thousand.

I don't know.

Would you be in a tenth?

Yeah, we just need it in the bank's budget if we're gonna be.

Yeah, just make sure you know that we're gonna make sense.

But it is we come up with this on the future.

Power has some of the same issues.

This wasn't an issue 2019, but every vehicle was an issue for three or four years because we had hard time getting vehicles, and so I don't know the a better way to do it than its idea of we're committing to do this, even though it's in the future year's budget.

So you can like order it now, right?

Yeah, is that how we can actually order it to order it?

And even the truth is these are in demand, so if we ordered it, we have a back out time over period of time.

We can back out until the day it actually hits the assembly line.

Oh, because the demand's so once it hits the assembly line, you're usually about four to six months build out.

So we can cancel any time.

The market's such that there's somebody out there looking for one, and if I cancel it, they'll just build it anyway and sell it to them.

So but you'd be giving it you'd be approving a purchase for it, even though it's in the future yeah.

That makes sense.

Okay, clarify that again.

The four years is when you need it, or is that the lead time that the like manufacturer needs to build it?

Even now, but it's how long you're gonna do that.

Well, honestly, I'm looking, we need it about two years.

I feel like once TI is up and running full time, running all those hazmat up and down the road.

Um watching our special resource or uh special teams call volume go up about two years is when we'll need it.

And so once again, depending on the manufacturer, you're two to four years out from from signing of contracts.

So they're still gonna be, I mean, from July 1, it'll take us four or five months to get it designed, get the RMPs, pick a manufacture, and then sign a contract.

So and there's the possibility that some impact fees could go towards the 1.5.

Yes.

Yeah, so at least a portion of a portion.

I'm sure it wouldn't do all of it.

Because it all has to have to be related to new growth.

Which tells me TI's already here.

I'm not sure how much they could attribute to new growth.

So 11 billion dollars.

There's people who are there's a handful of people who are really well versed in this, and I don't want to speak for them, but we would certainly add it to the list of things that they would consider as they're putting it together.

You'll probably see the impact, the public safety impact fee pretty soon.

I'm really hopeful within the next couple of months.

Okay.

We're at 13 minutes just for your information.

That's it.

Thank you.

Anything else from council members?

Okay, I think we got the message.

Thank you.

I hope so.

I appreciate thank you.

Sorry, the reno of 81.

I just wanted to bring up we have some surplus in our reserves with the possibility of if the council wanted to this year, put forth some of that money towards design plans and cost analysis of what renounce 81 would look like.

Um I just wanted to see how the council felt about doing that with some of the rebers to make it.

I I really love that.

I we need to decide whether it's actually worth to renovate it, or if we should just rebuild it.

I mean, it seems if you talk to uh we already see rebuild it.

There's a big crack right through the center of it on the court side.

I know it's not earthquake proof.

So I'm a fairly conservative guy, I would hate to spend a couple million or annually only in five or six years to spend about more million dollars to rebuild it.

But I I don't think I would make that decision.

I wouldn't want to see you in some other people to help me make that decision.

But if you need it, it's like probably it probably for your own.

Yeah, how do we figure that out?

Like, do you need a study, or can we say put some architects in a room and decide those things?

What would you do?

We reto that or we rebuild it.

There's structural issues.

I mean, how you can get costs.

Uh 1987 building uh yeah, unreinforced issues.

Yes, can we?

We can.

But it's already happened once.

Uh we've already renovated it once.

You can see the situation with the environment at that point.

We're talking a major and construction cheaper.

So I I think what I'm trying to say is if the council feels this way, if we put money towards facilitating a change to 81, whatever that change is, but let's throw some architects and some experts in a room.

Tell us like what do you need from us to get you guys to a place where you could come back to us with this would be the design, here are the reasons why.

This is the cost timeline and the logistics of having a functional station during this time.

Like a monetary.

Like what what amount do you need from us?

Do you need a study?

Do you need a design plan?

What do you need to solve this problem?

I think what I need is we're ready to do something on that building.

And we need to have the decision that we are going to build a new building, and then we can go to the architect after we select them and say, does this make sense?

Is it worth our money to renovate this and have them do the study, have them look into it feasibly financially space-wise, all of it, and then at that point make an educative decision.

I can or we can go after it and say, okay, we're wanting to do this, what's it gonna cost?

But the problem with doing it that way is if we go with the full intent to build a new, we can actually we're in the same process.

We're starting and then we can finish.

Does that make sense?

Instead of saying we're gonna try, does this make sense?

We might not go this route.

We're just throwing bad money at it.

Steve, if we did a design to remodel, we would have to, or even an estimate to remodel.

Does that cost money or something?

Yeah, oh absolutely.

Anything that we if I the minute that I get a professional in here to say these are your options, we're we're spending money.

I would rather spend the money once and be in the process than spend the money twice.

Does that make sense?

Yes, and I I if I'm hearing you right, I think I agree that personally I'd rather just redo, just rebuild.

Um, just from walking through there.

That's okay.

Unfortunately, that building has had so many different purposes in there.

I mean, when I first started, it was a police station as well.

I mean, it it's it has had so many uses, um, it's very similar to what we've done to the old city hall.

There are so many different hallways, and we've made every nook and cranny office and whatever else.

We don't even know what's in there anymore.

If I I don't have an actual set of plans for that building.

I mean actually do well.

I have a set of plans for that building, but not with all of the remote.

I don't know if I do the out-ons.

The add-ons, the redoes, the we did an IT room.

We didn't, you know, we don't have that information.

I don't have that for half of our buildings because we have done this to every one of them, where we go and say, okay, we need to add on to X.

It doesn't, it's not a good situation.

So if we did if we wanted to look in design costs, it we probably want to get it done by the time we need to pass this budget.

But if we're using refer reserves, it can be a budget.

Yeah, frankly, frankly, at this point.

It's not going to be done in that timeline.

Right.

And what's the well, what's the ballpark cost for with design.

So I I closely four, I had two different bids.

Just to get a design.

We were around about 300,000.

But if you want design with all your engineering and all of that stuff, like ready to build plans, you're over.

But you can start with the 300.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, the problem is it's not just a single firm that we're going to be involving.

We've got to get geotechnical in there.

We've got to look at the survey, we've got to look at we gotta have somebody come in here and tell me where all of our uh um foundation footings and how deep and I mean we're gonna be doing a lot of invasive work on the building to be able to actually see what it is at this point.

If you do a complete demo, not no, if we do a demo, absolutely.

The only thing is I've had firefighters tell me they love that building, so keep a brick or two.

There is some emotional attachment to that building.

They do.

So like keep some historical stuff, like I think we all need to do that.

Look at what we did with Broadway.

I mean, I I can say that we're very I I feel like we're pretty good at keeping the historic feel.

I think you definitely we just want to know like hey, millions of million, yeah.

So you need a million and a half for design.

But then will that include the logistical planning of the city?

Because we have to have a functional station.

No.

So that won't be back to Rachel's point.

She asked me this question.

See, we had a conversation.

So what I said is I've seen other cities where they'll pull in a trailer and then they get these pop-up tents to keep the apparatus in to keep them warm.

But the firefighters in the case.

Okay, all right.

Like a warehouse.

Like a warehouse rent a house.

If there's a will, I'll finally approve you.

Well I think we just want total costs, right?

So like those are I mean spitballing that it's million a half, but we can get them for that or design.

Or more full engineer plans.

I can do both if you want.

I mean, I can get you what you want.

I can get you a design cost, and then I can get you an estimated this is construction cost.

Because I talked about a bunch of different engineering companies trying to sell themselves to us at ULCC last week.

So I've talked to 75% of them.

And I'm not sure, just speaking for myself, I'm not sure if I'm comfortable saying like I'm ready to build it today.

But I need the I just would love the information of knowing like here's what it will look like, here's what it will cost, here's the plan where for station 81 during this time, and if we can just get that package in this fiscal cycle, then next year the council can make a decision or not with information.

So, frankly, right now I'm sitting on money in our current budget for uh um downtown revitalization or what am I calling it?

Our facility plan for downtown.

The campus, the campus uh master plan update, thank you.

Campus master plan update.

Um we haven't touched that due to the fact that this building has been going crazy and trying to get into this.

So we currently have some money for that.

That was going to help with the analysis of what do we do with fire?

Is that the right spot for fire?

I don't know.

I can't give you that educated yes, no, maybe.

I know that there's thoughts both ways.

I know that this old building is a thought of maybe that would be the place to go.

What do we do with the courthouse in between?

I don't know.

I mean, I can tell you what my opinions are, but we have money to actually do the right study, have a professional firm come in and say, these with your help, this is what we would like to do.

Can you accomplish both in 20 in fiscal year 27 so the next cycle we can make informed shift business?

And of course I'd love to do that.

Yes, yes, say yes, please.

Yes, we can.

Steve, so how much do you have in that specific campus?

I'm gonna ask Allison.

Do you know what I have in the campus master plan?

I think it was like sixty thousand.

Well, another thing is like I think we come to consensus to skip steps.

Like I don't I'm not interested in saying should we renovate it or demolish and rebuild?

I think I think all of us think we should demolish the building.

Thank you, because that's my gut feeling as well.

Yeah, that's what I would prefer to do.

Okay, okay, purpose-built buildings.

I also see that we have in there feasibility study for the legacy center, which that might impact like I don't know where you meet, I don't know what that would show.

But I think that's I think that's a different study.

I think that is operational study, isn't it?

I think it's both.

I think it's I think it's make it.

It's also going to be like part of Reno to I would like to skip that for 81.

Like I those are two different needs to have something like that for me above each other.

That you mean well if legacy somehow expands out.

So for this building, we took out a bond that included the station 24, correct, and this building, right?

Yeah.

So if I mean if we did a bond, it's probably cheaper.

Some cost savings to combine to it to one.

That's direction.

Maybe for a new one.

No legacy centers attributions there.

And then Chiefs and do you have thoughts that I can get?

Do you have a lot of different things?

Well, it's absolutely a perfect location for us, honestly, because we have Center Street that is a really great corridor.

We can hop right on Main Street.

It's off of both busy roads.

I mean, center's not that busy, but it's a good thoroughfare for it.

So keep it there.

Yeah, it's a great location or somewhere.

I mean, really close, right?

If you want to buy the church, yeah, you knew where that was going.

You already asked you.

It's packed, it's the capacity.

Yeah, they're they're buying homes for parking.

Yeah.

So expanding the church.

Which is great.

Yeah, yeah, you're in the church.

I really didn't tell me either.

They make a lot of money.

You go there every day to do your job there.

But I mean, there's there's options that require a lot over there we've talked about.

I don't know if that's enough space.

And we've already talked about moving the court into the old council change.

So I think we feel good about that.

You can keep us crossing.

I think that you've got you've got very similar those buildings were built five years apart.

You're talking the oldest part of that building.

We want to try and retrofit for a courthouse.

Um we've done a lot of legwork so that if we do move the court, or we've got our first or every futile on a home right here.

We've already got the hallway set so that we're bringing them from our jail facility into the courthouse, and it's a secure.

I mean, we went through all of that legwork so that if the court is to move, we have the spot for it.

But we don't own that land yet, and 81 needs to happen.

So I don't know.

It's and so I would say ASAP.

Yeah, and that's why I think in this fiscal year, if we can get the construction cost designs, and I like Rachel's idea, and Michelle's like incorporating the legacy center, like and the master campus, great.

But next year we need to make some decisions, and we need the information to make those decisions.

Okay.

Thank you.

I didn't mean to suck you into this, but I appreciate there's a reason I'm still here, but is fire needed that line item, or would it come out of your it doesn't matter where it's from, I'll be spending it.

Chief will help.

I learned very quickly on station 83, not a spaceship builder.

Okay.

I need I need to we work really well together on these things.

So awesome.

Thank you.

I'm just gonna stay here, I think on the next.

Would you like me to stay and help you?

Yes, okay.

I I looked for fire department stuff and we looked for police department stuff.

I didn't have either.

I'm kind of feared on upgrade.

I don't have a chat.

Thanks, are you episodes right now?

Are you no?

I'm good.

No.

If I need to go get my computer, it's over there.

So hey Steve, just so you know we're pretty strict on that 10-minute thing.

Thank you.

Can I set my own timer and leave it?

Of course, we just want to make sure you had something to do.

I'm awake, so Steve, time's short.

I don't know how this is running, but I would assume time's yours.

We're trying to figure out what it's been 10 minutes, but then we're gonna do that.

Okay, don't we?

I guess we're getting the big ones first, though, though.

So these are ones we'll talk about.

Um you guys have seen my requests.

I've had several conversations.

You know, I in my tenure here, especially in this position that I'm in, I've never necessarily come and asked to build a park.

I did that one time, and I'll probably never do it again.

Um skate park is a wonderful thing, but I never want to build another one.

So uh with that being said, you guys know briefly how the impact feeds work.

Um, a lot of the past councils, a lot of area plans, a lot of that has been kind of determined for us and how the money gets spilled or spent when the park triggers are what we have to do, how we have to do it, you know, in some cases.

Um the problem that we're facing is I can't slow it down.

Uh last year we built 64 acres of park.

Um with very minimum staff increase.

Uh we're just like the last two people.

We're getting we're getting beat up.

It's to the point right now where staff's hard to come by, good staff's even harder to come by, and I have a great crew.

Uh if I don't lessen their workload, I'm gonna start losing them where that's gonna be bad situation.

Um I'm not prepared to talk about budget increases because I think David and HR do a great job with uh keeping up with my market stuff, and they tell me every year, hey, by the way, you need to X and help.

Um I will say for the last few years we've been tracking other cities like our size.

Um frankly, we maintain about 63 acres, or excuse me, 36 acres, an FTE, where other cities are doing about 22.

Part of the reason that we're able to do that is I do hire out all of the leisure park mowing.

Um that's about a 300,000 ticket every year.

Uh that's an eight-man crew that mows it once a week for us.

That's saved us.

Um fleet costs are weighed down for repairs on mowers, on equipment, on trucks, on trailers.

Uh that's about a million and a half dollars line item just to get us back to where we could do ourselves plus eight full-time FTEs.

Um with the proposed increase in taxes, you've you'll see that we have three full-time employees associated with that.

One of those, um, our leisure parks.

Like I said, we've gained uh 64 acres last year.

That's that's not just a single park.

The whole brooks is huge, and that was one of them.

Um, but also we're talking neighborhood parks.

If they were all single locations like the cemetery, um, you know, that's 55 acres up there.

I've got four full-time people and about four to five high school kids and uh part-time secretary.

I could do that with those numbers very, very easily, but where they're spread out in every neighborhood throughout the 26 miles of Lehigh, it's really hard for us to be able to hit each spot.

Um so the leisure parks supervisor, that just helps decrease the amount of areas that each gardener's in.

The full-time arborist right now I have a two-person working crew and a one-person uh management crew on that.

Uh Jessica's our urban forester slash arborist, and she has two people up in bucket trucks cutting trees, uh doing plant health maintenance, uh, not only for city streets, city parks, city anything else, but she also helps very dramatically in storm cleanup education throughout the whole city.

That's a big deal, so to lighten that load would be huge.

Uh then we also have the sorry, getting lost.

Oh, the irrigation.

Um I have a two full-time person sprinkler irrigation.

Um I can't even guess how many sprinkler heads we have.

Uh we try and have all of our gardener staff maintain the heads themselves, but as soon as it gets to mainline cracks to valve replacements to uh filter changing and clean out and all of that, and with how how dirty our well water and run of the bottom end of all of our ponds is uh some parks we have to clean the filter every day to be able to or every run cycle to be able to have them spray it all.

Um yeah, other than that, I don't know what to say other than we're in just we're in dire need.

We need help.

So what questions do you have perfectly?

Um question for which I alright.

Let's see.

Actually, I don't, that's for streets.

I like those ones.

So, Steve, I I did get to sit on the budget discussion with you, and you you talked about if you're not getting the employees, you're gonna try to find other ways to save them of labor.

So, what efforts have you done there?

What's been helpful?

What so I I kind of went into it.

I believe deeply that I don't ask for things that we don't feed.

No, I in fact I I grew my staff every time to be able to do it.

I'll tell you what my fears are, and that's one of them's coming up in three weeks, and that's Dry Creek Lake.

We had another meeting about it this morning with Dry Creek Lake.

How many times am I gonna have to be up there cleaning restrooms every day?

I don't know.

Hopefully, it's once.

How much garbage am I going to be taken off the site?

Hopefully, not much.

I doubt it.

Um if there's not enough water to have that up there, are we just gonna have our bathrooms full of mud?

Am I gonna have to be replacing the injector pump that was put in every month?

Potentially.

Uh how do I do it?

And and so to answer the direct question of what efforts have I done.

I think that I think that my staff has been very above and beyond trying.

Like I said, we outsource all of our mowing.

That's a new change as of six years ago.

Um that's not something that we ever did, and that was a hard change for staff because it's really nice to be able to go in and mow your lawn and say, boy, this looks nice.

They hate it.

They if I could pull that back in house, they'd have me do it in it.

Can't can't afford it.

Um we've we have implemented a volunteer program.

Um, our Lehigh serves, you've seen a lot of that.

Hopefully, you guys have seen a lot of that.

Uh, to the point where we have a uh part-time volunteer coordinator.

I also have our weekend guy running volunteer shifts constantly.

Um the Steve Roll project up there when we did the grand opening last week.

Everything that was done in that park, minus a few plantings was done through volunteers.

We have service projects going about once a week cleaning up our areas and doing things like that.

So I think that we have been very aggressive on trying to find help that's not paid for.

Can I ask?

Um because you know, when I first was running, I heard parks and facilities, which I always thought about parks and rec.

So, how do you feel it is working out with parks and facilities, or do you feel like that would be a good idea?

I feel like my splits my position's very odd.

I don't know how else to put it.

I mean, uh you've seen me up here with the library now, seeing me up here with fire.

Uh I have my fingers in a lot of pots.

Uh we work very, very well with everyone.

I will say that we kind of are the doers on a lot of things, and other people are the organizers.

Um I I would I would even put that.

Sorry, sorry, Mel on the spot, but even with our events, uh Mel does a fantastic job getting things here and ready to go, and we come in and make it work.

Um do your parks people also do facilities jobs.

When they need to?

Okay.

When they need to, but I do have, I mean, I have to be very careful of that because it is frankly two separate budgets.

Um even the cemetery when I need something, we we work as one just like the the city would.

I mean, if I need help from streets, I call streets, and I try and act like that the same way with our department.

Uh recreation, recreation is very different.

We we set up for everything except for in the legacy center itself.

So any program minus setting up you know, field goals for the flags and stuff and organizing the sport and so on, but we still paint the fields, we still do all of that.

Do I think it works okay?

Yeah, it's all right.

I I mean I have a great relationship with all of them, so it's okay.

So is the true cost of rec not shown in the rec budget because you're carrying some of it?

Well, we do all the operation and maintenance.

Right.

Okay.

And parks.

That's what parks and rec is sometimes together.

I think I think that's about the easiest way for me to do that.

I have a lot of hats, and I no, no, I don't want any part of it.

Um, for the for Willow Park.

So I noticed a line, I believe that's from the park.

So I have two of them in there.

One of them, one of them is in the impact fees, uh, and that is a well, it's a hundred thousand dollars that we use every year to upgrade something in the that's what we did the dog park with, that's what we did, you know, and that was part of the original agreement with the county.

The other one that you're referring to, I think it was 400,000 ish.

Yeah, so what that is is getting sewer and culinary water into the site right now.

Everything down there is on septic, and so that'll get that'll get the sewer line into the first restroom, which is just those pit toilets, right?

As you first pull in everything else down from there is uh is not we have to get an injector pump to pump it back because it's too low.

Um which we would do at a later cost, but a lot of that is getting done through other projects like the water department has a project that will also help get that.

This is to fund the grant that we're getting to help cover the cost.

And so what happens there is we have to sub we have to supply, I think it's a 50 map 50% map.

So we have to do 50% of it with uh but we have to be able to pay for all of it as reimbursable, and so that's what that's for.

We'll only get 50% reimbursed back, but some of that can be through manpower labor and those things.

Um so I guess my hesitancy was global park is I think we're trying to figure out what future of the park is, right?

Whether it's status quo, whether it's something else, right?

And of course, a lot of this we have to work with the county on, but um, but I'm wondering if that could wait one more year if that's urgent.

Potentially it could, but realistically it's the storyline's got to go in regardless.

So it could, but we're getting 250,000 back from it.

So I mean we're spending 400 to get to a is that a time sensitive thing, or would that be available?

Yeah, I think it's a time sensitive and already approved or applied for it, and I think that we got it.

And I can follow up and verify all of this, but yes, and that's coming out of 70% park tax, correct?

Well, it looks like it's under impact.

No, no, it's it's park tax.

Is it park tax part?

I think it is.

I'm getting I'm getting it, yes.

So it's like the park tax capital.

Oh, okay.

The park tax capital.

Camp site renovations.

So and and um councilman.

Well what we're doing there is we're upgrading the campsites to ADA, we're getting rid of all the wood benches, we're getting picking tables.

So if the use of the park changes, it's not like all of that stuff can't be utilized elsewhere in our park systems.

So really it's it's we're not throwing away money even if we decide to do something else with the entire facility.

Yeah, and I guess I guess just one conversation I had with Dean, where the the capital, 70% of capital, it's it's decided by the council what we're gonna do with that, whether we spend it yearly, right?

So we keep the low balance or zero balance, or if we save it up and we use that for a larger capital project down the road.

Is that correct, Dean?

Yeah, it's it's an annual amount, and you could, you know.

We said we're gonna spend the first five million on uh family park, whatever we call it.

Family park that's family park still.

And that took like two or three years worth of money to get so now that now we've got the first five million.

What we do next is like we don't necessarily have to do that.

We can do a bunch of small things, or we could say that's one big thing.

But this here we're also park tax.

This is like making the decision for us, so it's not gonna be a good thing.

Oh, that's just what's in the budget.

I think just where I'm gonna go.

So that those were let me let me back that up a little bit and say I asked my park staff, you know, if we had a choice on what we want to do with park tax, these are the things that we would suggest.

Do you have to do any of them?

Absolutely not.

But where is that?

Because I I on page 91.

It's on that's down at the bottom.

It's in the request.

Okay, no, because I was trying to find it in the other pages.

Thank you.

So I guess I guess my point with this, like I these are great suggestions and we did exactly what you're supposed to do.

I I kind of want to step back a little bit because there may be larger projects, because if you add up all the park tax capital, there's I think eight line items on that, equaling what, one point something.

So and I should probably Steve just proposed doing the projects, and we looked at it and we said, well, hey, we could use our capital reserves to do them, or we could use a park tax.

Or not do them, that's fine.

So we did propose the funding.

There's some that I absolutely agree with, like the playground replacements, family park, safety service increase.

So that's stuff that we just have to do because we're you have to if it's gonna stay open.

Um some of it, like Holbrook pick the ball lighting.

Oh, no.

Um I'm telling you, that's a big deal.

Uh the main stream is a big deal.

I guess they want there's no lighting in that part.

People use it.

Yeah, we use it a lot.

Well, no, I mean that's that's fine.

There's great, but I just do it right on the parts of that one.

I think what I'd like to do is maybe maybe at a council meeting in May, we could like kind of discuss the total budget we have with the park capital and take these options as well as any others that the we can think of and and determine what the priorities would be.

Because yeah, personally, I think the campsite renovations of little park, same same reason, like I think we need probably the next several months, if not a year, to kind of really collaborate as a council to determine what what little park is going to be.

Um and so I don't I don't want to throw money into it where I would love to be involved as many of those conversations.

Absolutely changing well we're still like I don't know.

I've no longer talked about it.

I know, I'm I'm not but I'd like to.

So maybe we can hold off on at least some of the things.

So some of those projects are happening.

Regardless, is I guess what I'm trying to say.

The the most expensive part of that with the water line improvement, the sewer line improvement, is part of our water department's plan currently.

Okay.

And so this would pay for it in a reimbursement section.

So yes, we would be out, we would be spending 200,000 roughly, but we'd be getting 400,000 worth of work.

So I don't disagree that you know part of that could yes, part of it could be set aside.

We're getting money back if we do the work.

Well, let's pretend like we reroute it with whatever your plans from the park, and then you're like, oh wait, we didn't want the sewer line there or whatever that's it's not on the site at all is the problem.

And so this is only getting it 150 feet or probably 300 feet in the gate.

Regardless of wherever whatever structure is built, we have to at least go that far.

No matter uh we're not going any farther than what is absolutely necessary.

And the grant will help paid.

Correct.

Okay.

The grant is paid for.

From what I understand, there's places you can't put restaurants there because there's no sewer line.

Yeah, frankly, everything that side of the tension river is all on septic.

Right.

The one that we're putting um sewer to is a pit toilet that we have to get sucked out every year a couple times.

So I mean it's this is this is one of those.

I agree, don't get me wrong.

If you guys want to cancel the product, that doesn't hurt my feelings necessarily, but we are still we still have work going on in this area.

This is just paying for that work if we utilize it.

I just I like what James was saying where I think it this council we we would benefit from a conversation or two of like what are our park priorities involving you two.

I just don't know if these reflect that like the parking cold spring ranch.

I'm not you know it's not even it's not on here, and yet that one is a huge issue.

So I think we should do James' suggestion of having more of these discussions.

I would love it.

And if with the park tax if we want to save some up for a specific project, and did you have in here, I thought I saw it now, I can't find it of course, uh design for Mellon Rhodes.

It is in there, it's in the impact piece.

There's also a parks committee would be would love can we do a joint meeting with that?

Yeah.

Could we do something where instead of like we just don't move for five years because we're saving that we could take it out of capital and then we use the park tax and pay back our capital fund?

Isn't that what we did with family park?

Yeah, yeah, sorry.

Pretty much we take it out of capital and then pay it back with parking pack fees.

So we can move on some.

Yeah, I mean if we spent parking impact fees in advance and collecting them and borrowed them from the capital projects, and I think that's what you're saying.

We would just have to know what project we want to pay for.

But I think it it's not impact, it's the it's the tax part of tax with the tax.

So use a part tax that comes in to pay back the capital that we have basically.

Basically, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

But you can do it with impact fees as well.

That's what you did to purchase the property of at Valley Park.

Yeah.

Yeah, we spent some of those in that fees in advance and collecting them, if that's what you're saying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When you gotta be careful, you don't want to get too far extended.

When you and I met and you had your list of you know the parks written on the board and stuff, we were totaling it up, it's like a hundred million apart priorities.

Yeah.

We have two major regional facilities that there's no funding for.

Family Park and Mallor Roads Park.

There is no way that we can build those in our current budget.

Well, and just uh whatever parks we build, then we need more staff.

Absolutely.

So it's something to think about where some of these don't necessarily need more staff if you're triangle park, you know, playground replacement or safety service receiving.

And and I think I think that's the hard part in in the parks side of my job is we haven't asked for these things.

I mean, we're just trying to maintain what we have and we're trying to give what has already been promised.

And you guys are in the same boat.

I mean, how do we actually afford to be able to keep everything that we have and keep it all operational and build what's been promised?

I mean it is a million dollars of promises that this council didn't make but other councils made.

Correct, but also it was $30 million five years ago or ten years ago.

Yeah.

And there's impact fees that people have paid, and there's an expectation that there's gonna be some well, but we're we've tried to be very careful with that, and we've changed a lot on how that goes.

Like up in Inverness, we wouldn't allow them to tell us what we're putting in up there.

We said you show us our ground.

Or you you give us the open space that we need, we'll tell you what amenities we're gonna be putting.

That that helps us a little bit, because we have our level of service that we still have to provide for and our standard service that we provide for, but now we're not giving the developer the selling opportunity, the selling points.

And that's what's bid us in the in the past is they come in here with pretty pictures and say, this is what you're getting and moving into next to it, and then come back and say, Well, we used all of our impact fees on it.

Where's the rest of the money?

And we have to go, are you kidding me?

Or no, this is what you said.

It's a hard, it's a hard line to play, and it's it's a really hard situation to be in.

The cold spring situation is.

That's the cold spring situation.

Yeah.

So are we been other places too?

Sorry.

Um I would like to see more private parks, I guess.

If it it if it just serves one neighborhood, I would like to see that neighborhood pay for it.

I I've talked to all of you about how we are doing a lot of open space things that are not open space, but right-of-way areas that we shouldn't be, in my eyes, maintaining.

Um we have we have a lot of things that are planned for us that's buried.

I mean, we just we just went through the the mill pond situation.

Is it a great thing to have the ground shore?

But uh we always want it.

But how do we maintain it?

And I think that's why I'm so very, very vocal about how do I do this.

Um I can't keep asking, you know.

Every time I ask for guys, it's like pulling teeth.

And totally justifiable why it is that way.

I mean, money isn't just free, it's not just here.

But we can't keep asking more and more and more of the staff without giving them some reprieve.

And and and frankly, I I feel like I do that very often.

So we're coming up on 24 minutes first.

So I didn't ever hear time.

If you want cemetery too, real quick, do you have any questions about cemeteries?

We can take that one off and be under the 30 minutes.

Well, I can we do James's idea and circle back to this discussion in May and have like that with the parks committee if possible, but I just think that would be so valuable where we have a mayor can fit it on the agenda.

So we do it about 3 a.m.

Can you make that how we work?

Well, of those seven items, it says eight, but there's actually missing seven.

So of those seven, can you just let us know maybe over in the mail?

Which ones have like the matching grant?

Because that obviously really it's just a little park one that we have.

It's just a little bit.

I believe so.

Okay, so it's family park, sports park, the playground replacements, Holbrook, the Christmas lighting.

Yeah, and that the Holbrook one is actually pushed off just so you guys are aware.

That won't happen until 2029.

Wait, the not the lighting.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Never mind.

That I'm I'm thinking two different things.

The park tax proportion.

Yeah.

Yes.

Can I ask for the one of the cemetery workers as a cell phone around someone that doesn't?

Do you want to start that in a public meeting?

Probably giving them all.

Reach them all out.

So closely.

So quick question.

So I have to do that.

I need to give it a both one just so you know that's a mistake on my end.

I also think it'd be really great if the mayor was okay with it to have like the public come in and tell us what they want too.

Like yeah, like for them to be able to weigh in and say, like, Miller Roads is the most important thing.

I think that's why we have the parks master.

So like I mean, I read like hundreds of pages of surveys.

There's nothing wrong with the public comment.

I I don't disagree, but I think that we do it in a complete different.

I think that that has to be a survey that we send out.

Because what I would do, I would go rally my neighbors and get them all in here and say this is what we're doing.

Well they just did it and they got a sample size of 1300.

Yeah, we have such a don't do the public comment.

I just um I think they would appreciate the opportunity, but scratch that.

Yes to everything else.

Here's the thing.

There will be a work session where they can listen to the work session if they want to make public comment, then we'll want them to do so.

So there's there's a way in my 30 minutes.

A lot of neighborhoods are the training.

No, I know that's what I want.

I want if they care and have to show up before we pass the budget.

I I'd be careful to pay it that way.

I I've been there.

I've done that one in it first.

I think everybody's got a lot of things.

Yeah, I think no matter what.

But it's just that we're we're being held to account for promises we didn't make.

Then now is a great time, but it we don't have to do it that way.

I just I love James's idea of circling up before we pass this budget to make sure we all are unified on what we're doing.

If we don't want the public comment, that's fine.

No, I would just uh well and I don't think it is that we don't want to.

Yeah, I don't think it's that we don't want public comment.

I will say that is the one good thing that we got out of the park master plan.

Because the public comment portion was amazing.

We had such a huge response.

Steve, with the Miller Rhodes design, are we if we set aside the money for that?

I don't think we're ready for that.

To design it?

Yeah.

And I think we've had several designs, right?

We've got the land changed.

You guys tell me.

I mean, that's well that's why I I'm ready to build a lot of things.

Well, let's make a funding for it.

I'm ready to have plans and have you guys get me funding.

Yeah, we we change plans a lot.

Well, let's not do that anymore.

I don't want to do that.

I can I I can tell you what needs to go down there, and I think wrong with the plans that we just need to expand it to the property that we bought and the drainage down there doesn't work with the plans that we have.

Frankly, we need to rework the current set of plans to fit the site, is what we're doing with that money.

Correct.

I didn't that money isn't enough to do a full new design, change the world and put different uses down there.

That is take the use that we currently have and make it fit on that site.

Check it out.

Correct.

I yeah, I'm just hesitant because it again, without the funding there, it will be years probably, I guess, maybe.

Let's not let it be years.

Let's come on.

Well, we've got anything else.

You guys do your job and I'll do mine.

Sorry, that was way too much for me to say that.

So I I would like that parks discussion to see how we want to go forward with the in fact these with the park grants, what's the next big project regional?

You know, I think it would make sense to put a hold on any new plans for Mellon Roads, in my opinion, also if we don't have funding mechanism or a necessary uh separate.

You're still grading and moving dirt and doing that.

Frankly, I'm uh how do I say this and not crude?

I we are moving on on at least leveling the ground down there.

We have things that have to happen down there.

We've got drainage on the site that has to happen.

So regardless on the use of the site, we have to do some work there.

Um if you want to change what it is, that's you guys' prerogative and I'll support it.

But yeah, that's what this money would be for.

If it sits barren for the next few years, we're gonna have a lot of money in maintenance just keeping the weeks down because it's it's gonna be pretty ugly here pretty quick.

When do you need what is it 40 million?

I'm gonna say it's closer to 30, but so when would you actually in your ideal world, which budget cycle would you like to see 30 million dollars?

In in our department's goals, Miller Rhodes is next.

So 2020.

2028.

2028.

Yep.

I think that our recreation justifies it.

I think that our citizens need it.

And that would be my those for me.

Sorry that I took so we covered parks.

What else did we cover?

A little bit of facilities.

Do you want cemetery too?

Do you have any questions on cemetery?

If you're here, give us cemetery while you're here.

I think we're good.

We're selling blocks.

And fee in total cost, yeah.

That's awesome.

Okay.

Anything else uh for Steve?

I do have I'm sure we'll come back up.

Sorry.

Yeah, I'll be back, don't worry.

You guys aren't seeing the last one today.

The memorial upgrade, what is that?

The memorial, so uh the cemetery, uh the the veterans memorial area, all of the concrete is just heaving or needs to be replaced, repaired, patched, fixed, and then also asphalt throughout the whole cemetery, repaving it, re-sealing it.

And that's an every 10-year item.

So civic campus lighting.

So what that is doing is putting holiday lighting on every one of our buildings in here, so my staff's not up on the roof creating holes every year seasonally.

And repairing lights and repairing lights and doing someone hanging.

Discuss in the house.

They said things have to turn around.

Yeah.

Anything else?

So we are gonna have when there's a majority for that meeting.

Yeah, we want to have social.

I don't know.

The work shows and trees committee has asked also to come like for months, so they are coming at some point in collection.

Okay, so the focus app meeting, I would prefer a broader long-range outlook kind of thing versus this kind of budget cycle.

What we want what the rest of you can do more.

Some of we haven't much time.

And the part the park shows and trees who would like to talk about what their role is.

Well, I think I think there's a few.

That's a separate.

I think that we can do that in one meeting and say, what are our goals?

Very similar to what they do over here, but budget retreat.

What do we want to see done?

And I I'm happy to have me and my staff there so that we can say these are what we're committed to.

Um these are the time frames that we have to do it in.

How does everything else fit in here?

And and the same thing with Parks Trails and Trees Committee.

They need they need something to do.

They need they need more than what they're doing.

Um, some direction.

Yes.

Well, I think frankly, I would like them to have some direction so that they're not just sitting there going, okay, well, here we are.

And and it's a it's a hard situation to be in.

So I think I would I we I just want to make sure we're all aligned on what we have so that when we message out to the residents that like this was included in the budget, and this is why the council felt this way.

So that's all.

I just wonder if we could do like a short term discussion and then the long term basically.

But you're just talking about the park tax, not the parking practice.

No, all like just parks that in 2027.

That's doesn't really.

Well, impact things are basically spent, so I think that that's like a null.

Yeah.

But yeah, for the park tax, I think that's a good point.

I think we just need to figure out to find the slide right now.

It doesn't mean we won't.

No, I agree.

It just means that we may need a few more months of discussions on this budget.

We may not find this specifically or free.

I just feel like we have one.

Does that give you guys enough information to be able to help out here through this?

I think that was five.

And then IT was left off, and so we're going to squeeze that.

Okay.

So that's good.

And so when we had our time, yeah.

I was like, I'm gonna need one.

I have space on this.

Yeah, you know.

Okay, well,

Um do you have any questions for me?

So that's not trying to be up to it.

I don't really understand the idea.

That's just protecting access, right?

Yeah, that's that's becoming more common thing that I'm finding.

So I'm doing I take part in a lot of the audits like for PCI, uh, for cybersecurity insurance renewals that I do with Scott.

That's becoming more of a common uh question on all the pods is do you have a hand?

And we talk something that you probably get on our radar, so it's here.

It's just becoming more commonly asked, I just want to get that in place now and stay ahead of the game.

Like myself, I'm donating this room.

My staff has donated this year, right?

Who have walked that's typical considered no.

You don't want to have one limit that as much as you would be possible.

Um that does is essentially create an environment where I'm I'm part of an advocate.

Okay, I'm gonna give you this for an hour for whatever time you set it out.

And now I'm gonna record it.

So any time within anywhere is right, right.

How often are you giving up?

Yeah.

I'm not one I'm charged with hard part.

How many do you get how many?

How many times?

So I like to answer yes to all those questions if we got it.

So yes, we have this place.

I think I that's become a big priority for me over the last five something years of security.

I've mentioned that in previous uh budget units.

Um the municipalities have been under cybersecurity tax, ransomware tax like knowledge business, and I would like you know the phrase I use my department that used with CR staff before is my goal is to stay out of the news for the wrong reasons because it all takes is once, and then we will be in the news, but not because we want to be any other questions.

Any any other questions for Tyler?

Thanks for getting for setting the pace after our yeah, Steve Steve can learn from me.

Challenge challenge.

Okay, welcome to Dave Kitchens.

David Kitchens.

David Kitchens.

I hope I don't take up 10 minutes.

So if we don't want to take up the 10 minutes the camera's gonna start as long, no.

Um I just have a few requests.

Most of these are uh just because we're growing.

Um I I don't have any questions myself, but um there's the health insurance reserve fund is something we're getting towards is becoming self-funded for health insurance.

We were building a reserve reserve last year, and this will help us transition a lot easier when we do when we're already self-funded for us.

Where's the source of funding for that?

Is it the surface of reserves that we have?

Um I'm gonna look back at Dean and say where is the the surplus of reserves?

Yeah, our we have our general fund surplus, and then we are what's the kind of capital reserves we're just taking it from there?

That's that four and a half million.

Yeah, yeah.

So Dean, with the legislation that would likely fail.

Is there any way we could put this in its own funds?

It would be in its own fund.

Oh, it would be okay, yeah.

And it's not necessarily Oh, you're getting the funding from reserves, I see yeah.

If we were if we were running bumping up against our 35%, this would help us because we would take it out as a different fund for a different program.

And how much do you need what's the target?

Um we finished a study last year, the targets between one point two and one point eight million for reserves for medical equipment.

Okay.

And this is going to save costs in the long run, but how is it will it just be replenished through reserves?

Is it drawn down or yeah, so so what the reason the funding for health insurance would be so right now we're we're paying our our broker and our carrier for that, right?

So we would just front that money and put it into that reserve balance or it would be an ongoing balance that we could monitor and see if we need pull more reserve funds, or if it's healthy enough that we could um just keep that going.

Okay, so would it be util like used and drawn down, or is it just there?

I think it I mean I think really the idea is if we're self-funded, most years we're gonna be ahead, but there's gonna be years when we're not, and we need to have a lot of money.

Okay, so it's a reserve reserves, yeah.

Or being self-funded.

Yes.

And is it being invested like with the so we can earn interest on it and all that stuff with the case?

All our money's with the state or we have the would we be totally self-funded then or partially uh for medical, I think we would be totally self-funded.

So we're self-funded for dental right now.

Um but medical or not, we're level funded with PHP.

Okay, and so this would allow us to transition fully supplemented.

So the goal is fully self-funded.

But we would have some reinsurance or yeah, I mean part of that would be.

If you had a million dollar claim, we might have to do that.

Yeah, there's stock loss carriers and okay, yeah.

So it's all part of that process.

We're not quite there yet.

Uh we have a few claims that that would this year your major claims about a million dollars each that we just don't want to take that risk on ourselves, and so we're not transitioning self-funded this year.

Um, but we're still building that reserve and looking forward to the right time where it makes financial sense for us to do that.

So your goal is 1.2 ish?

1.2 to 1.8, I think was the recommendation.

And this and this year it's 600.

Last year we funded 600,000.

This year would be another tranche of that.

And so we would look at it again next budget cycle and see do we have enough to put the do we need more?

And if we need more, do we need to put another last challenge?

Okay.

So I guess my question would be the 600 is the target number.

If let's say we wanted to fund 400,000, that's that would be okay.

There's nothing, there's nothing set about 600,000.

Um what so I believe what we did last year, we split up the recommended amount into three years, so we didn't choose the 1.8 million in one year.

So we broke that up into 600,000.

So this is the second of the three requests that I'll make.

If you decide to use some of that reserve in other place, then I would just request that we put in more reserves future year to make up that recognition.

This is also like one time, so we could use that money towards like one-time capital expenditures, but it's not like this can go to ongoing costs in any case.

Um I guess for for HR, so you're you're aware of a lot of my questions, right?

Yeah.

Um one of the things the definition of COA, the definition of merit, right?

Um and how that's paid to employees.

Um for me, speaking for myself, I'd really like to see a uh, I guess a more um well-defined system for merit, um, something that incentivizes the high performers and has maybe tiers of performance levels.

Um I think that is better reflective of what merit means.

Sure.

Uh my understanding is 95% plus employees get merit.

I'm sure that 5% are people that are going out the door or you know, um so I just want to hear your thoughts on the possibility of establishing something that's um I guess a little tad bit more competitive that provides those incentives, but um, and then also where within that 4% could be annual bonus rather than base increase.

Um that's I guess that's the second point, and then the third is is cola.

So for me, cola is true cost of living, right?

Groceries, gas, like the basics.

Is that based on CPI or what index I used to have?

Yeah, I mean the CPI is like overall inflation, right?

But but when you think of true cost of living, to me it shouldn't matter if you're the highest paid employee or the lowest paid employee.

Yeah, that it's typically a dollar amount for any individual person, right?

Um and right now it's based on percentage, so one percent of 200,000 is very different than 1% of 40,000.

So I just want to get your thoughts on it.

I know you've probably been thinking about it.

Any timeout before that?

Can we go back and can you explain for the public since we're like COLA, what is the amount that people are getting, and then merit and what your criteria for that and what percent the employees are getting?

Sure.

It's just so as a baseline for going for that.

Um yeah, happy to answer any questions.

So currently our program is that we do we do uh so cola is just based on cost of living, so it doesn't matter what wage you make, you would get the same percentage.

It's based on cost of living index.

Most commonly we use a CPI index, right?

That measures a basket of goods, whether that's an it's going up as an inflation or rare to go down, which we would usually keep wages the same, right?

Um what we've done with that is in years past the the budget committee has allocated three or four percent, and um uh previous administration didn't like a colour, they wanted it more based on merit performance or the performance of the employees.

And so that's what we refer to as a merit or paper performance.

And in the HR world, there's there's flavors of pay for performance, right?

James, you mentioned one is you know, do you have ratings?

Do you have uh competitive?

Does everybody can everybody earn the same amount, or do you have different rating systems, right?

We've had different here at BIC.

There's pros and cons to each method.

I would say the pros to the um to having ratings is um you can motivate higher performers, but you usually disengage most employees because you're competing, you're making employees compete against each other.

And say, I know I could get a bigger increase if I make someone else look worse than I do.

That's not the message we want as employees.

And we want everybody just be available to say, okay, everybody's a good employee, they should get the maximum amount that the budget allows, right?

And that involves the council as well.

So I've seen it that way.

I I do like to incentivize and to pay for performance.

I think part of that is also when the cost of living increases faster than your cola or your merit increase, then the cost of wages is not actually keeping up with the cost of living.

Does that make sense?

And so many times managers under pressure from their employees may say or want to give them the full increase because they want to keep up with the cost of living to decrease term over as a as a balancing act.

And there are some line items that actually address that, right?

Separate from merit and cola.

Correct.

Right.

Yep.

So we we do want to motivate employees to do their best, and they should be rewarded for very good performance.

And you call out 95% of employees are getting the full amount.

And I would say I think 95% of our employees deserve that.

They are great employees across the board.

And I and I think we may be discounting those employees and their and their service if we say we're gonna force a two or a less than average rating from someone.

We can force that.

So just to clarify, every 95% of employees have a 1% cola increase, and typically a 3% merit increase, and this is compounded onto their wages every year, and like annually, they get a 4% increase in their wages every year compounded annually.

So what's been allocated in the budget is uh those are looked at differently.

So depending on the cost of living, so that would be a per same percent for everybody, doesn't matter if they're full-time or part-time, they would just get that.

So but it's 4% total.

And 3% merit.

And 3% based on their performance.

Okay, I just want to clarify that that's what we're talking about.

So do part-time employees get the merit?

Um part-time employees are not required to be to have a performance review, so they have just gotten a full 4% if that's what the combined amount of the full-timers are getting.

Okay.

And the reason for that is part-term employees are at will at any given time.

If there's performance issues, we just deal with it.

Basically, if they're there, that means they pass their performance review.

If they're not performing, then they would not be employed.

That makes sense.

And they answer all the time.

Yeah, sorry, you have four questions.

No.

Yeah, because whether we call it color or merit, to me it's just it's it's a base increase per year, right?

4%.

Would it I guess in order to kind of empower department heads?

Let's say, let's say we turn the 3% merit into instead of 3% per employee.

It's 3% of those total salaries as a chunk given to the department head.

Sure.

And they can allocate it, they can say, I'm gonna give all my employees 3%.

Or they may say, I have some underperformers, I have some incredible employees I never want to see leave.

I want to give them 7%, but I may want to give this employee 2% with to hopefully encourage them for next year to, and this honestly it all kind of goes back to the objective, like OKRs or KPIs, whatever you want to call them, where it's like, are you achieving are you do you have certain goals?

Performance metrics.

Performance metrics to be able to achieve, and so it's a very measurable thing where it's objective.

It's not, it's not even competitive, it's against another employee, it's it's competitive against their own performance, right?

And that's not unheard of in the public sector.

The challenge is what are those metrics for the public sector?

Is it how many uh arrests the police officers make?

Is it how many reports they make?

Is it the level of service on a paramedic call?

Like, how do you define that for each position in the city where departments are so different, right?

And then there's a lot of that would be very time-intensive for department heads to determine that for all of their employees.

Um we've done what we have found that works better is that the department heads and the managers are most in touch with their employees.

They know they work with these employees every single day, they know their performance.

It's my belief that that's the appropriate level that should determine the right amount increase.

If it's if it's a if the cost of living is going up, I think you know, if if the cost of living for the whole community goes up, that's called a cost of living increase as a cola.

If we need to differentiate between employees' performance, that's performance management, and that's a merit increase or uh uh pay for performance increase.

They're different levers that you pull and they have different impacts on the workforce.

What if so what if Cola again that that adds to their base, right?

Yeah.

So one percent and floats up all the ranges, so if merit was instead of a spread out over the 12 months as just kind of part of their salary, if it was uh an annual chunk bonus that did not increase the base, but they got the same amount, right?

Um or maybe like semi-annual, like Christmas and yeah, so so I guess um, and thank you for re-assing that question I didn't address it the first time.

My my feedback on that is um that will affect different employees differently.

And the reason for that is how it's considered towards retirement income.

So one-time monies do and for public safety for police do not count towards increasing their base retirement wage.

And so that would be received differently than for public employees that it does count towards that.

Um I also think that, and I forgot to mention this the merit increase would increase individuals' pay within their pay band, but it doesn't increase the pay band.

The cola increases everybody's pay band by the same percent.

The merit increases just lets them advance in their pay range until they hit their max.

Does that make sense?

That's an important distinction.

So there's a max, yes, each we have pay ranges, and there's a there's a minimum for that pay range, and there's a maximum for that pay range.

And so we've uh we do market studies, we help determine that.

So there's a certain value attached or maximum value attached or cost attached to each job.

How many employees are hitting their max per year?

Um I would say less than 20.

Okay.

So very small amount.

Right.

When if the employees are hired, they start somewhere in like the 10% of the range, 10 to 20% of the range.

The ones that are hitting their max are the employees that have been here the longest, right?

For the city for 20 years.

20 years in the same position or still in that same position.

And so they've hit that max of their range.

Because most of our employees, when they start for, you know, five to seven years before they get to 50% in that range, yeah, usually.

So we hope that employees are improving their skills, improving their performance for an average about 15 years.

Once they reach 15 years, then they pretty much have the max of that position.

If they're in that same position for 15 years, if they promote, they're in addition, they're in a different payment.

Am I correct in my understanding that after four years that they can collect retirement?

If they're a member of tier two system, they have a four-year vesting period.

Okay.

And that's any any full-time employee that start after 2011.

They don't have prior URS service credit.

Okay.

Tier one.

Tier one, there's no besting period.

Tier one is the goal.

They don't operate.

No, I was I was there.

They pass the legislation to slice it.

I'm still looking for a tier one trap.

Yeah.

Is there is there anything the city can do to improve the system for performance, Merit Pay?

I'll leave on COA for now, but um, and I'm thinking like, you know, if you're a parks employee, right?

Yeah.

I mean, how many promotions can you get, right?

There's probably not a lot because you have a um there's fewer positions as you advance, right?

Because of leadership, right?

Yeah.

Um so if if we want employees to advance, there's we have what we call series promotions working from a uh park park employee one, two, three, so they're getting advanced certifications, they are advanced service levels, they're leading more projects.

Hopefully they're taking off a little bit more pressure from the user as they're doing more to more, right?

Um so that's one way to advance through systems, but not every position has that.

We don't have a fire chief one, a fire chief two, a fire chief three, he's just a fire chief, right?

So fire chief three.

He's a fire chief three, right?

So five star.

Five stars.

Um my thoughts about if you want to improve performance of employees, discouple, disconnect the conversations about someone's employee about their performance from their pay.

Move performance management, those discussions to the calendar year, and then you still reward them for per for performance based on budget was allocated, but those uh conversations are different than the performance of an employee.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah.

And again, kind of going back to the definitions, they they do matter, and there is this very unhealthy competition between cities and counties, right?

Where your climber and you know, fire chief can attest to this.

It's like no one can ever catch up, right?

And it almost adds to market inflation just by continuing to expand those bases to where um you know you're losing an employee to another city because they're paying you know eight percent a year or something insane, yeah.

Where the private market, like true market economics wouldn't be eight percent, it might be three percent, but it's you know what I mean.

So I I'm trying to figure out a way to stay competitive, but also not add into this unhealthy company.

Yeah, there's a ratchet effect with wages in the public sector, right?

Because not public sector businesses that fail, and there will never be those, right?

The economy is different, there's different economic forces there, but we're always in competition, and there's there hasn't been enough police officers so that we're all fully it.

There's never been enough paramedics, so there will always be another city or county that is gonna compete with us.

So there's two lines of thinking is okay, how do we set that prevailing rate?

Do we just attach a cost to a position and just leave it that and ignore market?

That would likely increase turnover, and you're just gonna turn through untrained staff, right?

We don't want to be a training ground.

Um we want to have good employees that are motivated to do well that are aligned with the objectives of the city, and that's and the reality of it is inflation happens, right?

The cost of wages now is not what the cost of wages was 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 50 years ago.

And so, from my perspective, understanding you know what are the if costs are gonna inflate, do revenues keep up with that?

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

And there are certain revenue uh challenges with with the public sector, right?

There's limitations there, and we have to work within those boundaries as best we can.

Well, yeah, my question is if we have a 4% compounded annually raised to every employee, I mean, how is that sustainable?

Like, what is the solution?

And and there's certain core, like core services that a city provides, and there's others that aren't maybe considered its core, and and how do you yeah, like who bears the burden of that, you know?

Yeah, um, you'll have some when seasoned employees retire, the new employees usually not hire the same rate as what your output employees were, right?

So you're gonna kind of reset that position and that range a little bit, so you'll have some savings there.

Um I understand the concern of if the costs are to keep it up, what are the what are the pressures to keep those costs from going up, right?

What can we do about that?

Um from my perspective, is it's a similar question of what do you do to keep fire trucks from going up in price?

Like you have to provide fire trucks.

Is the cost of a fire truck the same as it was 20 years ago?

I don't think so, right?

And and maybe I'm stepping out on the line a little bit, but employees are an important asset to the city, and they have a cost to them.

And if we're not taking care of them, and if we're just gonna turn through employees, is that a policy decision that you're comfortable with?

I'm not comfortable with that, but but I understand the realities is there's there's limited revenues to pay for increasing expenses too.

Yeah, I sort of personal it's the biggest expense.

I mean, the first year was it 22 when they did the first of the every two-year tax increase, it went through two employees, and there were some big raises then.

I mean, there it was way beyond four percent.

I was trying to see if I brought it with me, but I went through the numbers, and some of them were quite high, even up to 10%.

Yes.

Um I don't with all the needs in the city, it we can't fund it all.

And I I don't know if um continually this rat race is gonna be the answer.

I think there's at least in the private sector, they they some companies, prominent companies realize that they're not gonna be competitive as far as wages, we're gonna you know, provide this, but we're gonna offer other things instead to attract employees, to retain employees.

And I think I think Lehigh City, I think we have great employees.

I think we treat them well.

I think we provide good benefits for them.

I think with the police department, we provide the specialty save one.

We have a lot of the extras and the perks, you know, and that's a great thing.

Um but I I just feel like we've got to make some hard decisions because we also have residents that are like we can't do this.

Again, people on fixed income, this is one of the reasons I ran it's like we don't want to tax them out in their homes.

Absolutely.

So I I don't think I guess I I'm hoping we find better solution than two increase taxes every two years a little bit at a time, but it it adds up and with all the other taxes they have to pay.

It I don't I don't want to be California, you know.

I don't want yeah, I I want it to be you know, affordable housing as if they property tax increases.

That was a big emphasis in the state legislature this year, right?

And they're I don't think it's the cities causing the problems necessarily, but it's something they're looking at, and some of their solutions are gonna make things worse.

So I I hope we can find a solution, I guess.

I have some ideas, but can we go ahead?

I guess I don't know what Michelle when that first comment you made about 10% raises.

Can you provide some context?

I'm not aware of that.

So I I think I'll speak and then you can correct me if I if it's not mentioning what you're thinking.

Is um every year we do wage studies, so we look at are our staff competitively paid compared to similar positions or similar cities or like to like as much as we can.

Sometimes we identify positions that are just underfunded.

Um for example, in the fire department right now, we're we're losing out, we're under we're not paying as well as other cities are so we've identified places or positions where we they could use a 10% increase in their range.

Sorry.

But I think that's why I got a little confused.

I thought you said like a 10% the first tax increase gave everyone a 10%.

I know the numbers are very high, and I can't find my numbers.

But were they strategically done on those certain payments?

It wasn't like, and this is no need to admin, but you didn't just give 10% to the top, right?

You went to strategic payment.

Correct.

Okay, so I just want to clarify.

Yeah, it's not across the board, it's it's done with the scalpel.

Um, not with the uh hammer.

So this is your meeting, but I think there's an important thing to add to the equation of employees that we're talking about, and that's how much money it costs us to train.

So when I hire a new employee, and I put them through fire camp, they get their year on.

If I send them to paramedic school right at a year, by the time they're done with paramedic school, and I'm being conservative, it costs us about 150,000 entry.

And so every time somebody leaves that's 150,000 and experience that we lost.

And I just wanted to add that because I I love the discussion that you're having.

I wish the market would flip myself because I get that this is unsustainable, but that that has to be as part of the equation and experience.

I mean the numbers I told you earlier about ROS, we start getting turnover, those numbers they die.

That's not something you get from new employees, that's something you get from seasoned training employees.

So I just felt like that was important.

I'm I was looking at all department heads, I didn't even look at fire employees because I know there's a uh employee short or worker shortage for sure.

Um but to be fair to that point, there is in a lot of departments.

We've had hiring issues with our billing inspectors, we've had hiring issues in other departments as well, aside from fire police because it is difficult to find employees in some of these departments.

And hiring is not my issue right now, it's retention.

Yeah, we we can get 50 applicants.

Yeah, I got a hundred and when they turn four years on the job they leave us, and so we have to retrain them.

So we we'll churn through those applicants, but at what cost.

And what does that apply?

I I can see how it applies to fire and police for sure.

Doesn't it apply to other departments as well?

Absolutely, yeah.

The training aspect, yeah.

For in fact, building inspectors, we could train them, they get their certifications, and then we have a developer say we need an inspector for our project, we'll take yours because they're training and we'll pay them more than you will.

Public works power, there's a lot of departments that we invest in the employees to get those kind of trainings and certifications.

And do you have with like certifications for instance?

The city pays for that, it helps pay for that.

Do you have some kind of like if you're gonna leave a few years pay us back kind of thing or something?

So so there are some rules in place.

If it's required for the job, we're required to pay for the training.

Okay.

We can't, and it since it's required for the job.

I've been told it's not been enforceable to have them pay back that required training cost.

Yeah, if it's a that's an optional program.

We have put that in place where we have like a three-year payback period, or with tuition reimbursement programs.

So we're recouping some of those costs.

That also has incentive for them to stay with us three more years too, because they want we want their services for three more years.

Along with all of this, the biggest thing that I see on my side of it too is more and more that we're turning over our employees and seeing a bigger increase with our workers' cops.

Um because we're training them again, they're having to go through everything.

We're seeing a cost in our our workers' comp funds go up.

Um just one other again, back to definitions, right?

Sure.

So vehicle and phone allowance.

Yes.

Um it ranges from zero, and that's typically because people opt out, they don't have a vehicle uh, or they do have a city vehicle, so they don't need the vehicle allowance, right?

Or they don't they're not required to use the vehicle for the job.

Right.

Um I don't know why they'd opt out of the phone.

Oh, I'm also assuming that most employees would use their phone.

They use the city phone, city issues them a phone.

They do.

Okay, so like at library, for example.

Are you saying that all the employees except for Christie have a city phone?

Or they're not required to carry a city phone, they're not required to respond after hours or is there a requirement to have a I guess for those that have the phone allowance, which is six hundred and fifty-four dollars per year.

Um they're required to use a phone for their job.

Yeah.

I'm I mean, again, private sector, I have my phone, right?

And it's my personal phone, it's also my professional phone.

Right.

Company doesn't have to phone.

I'm the same way, yeah.

Right?

Um my company has that.

Okay.

Um looking at comparables.

Yeah.

Pay company.

I might be able to do that.

I mean, my husband has a company phone.

I would I I just prefer to have one phone, right?

So that's what we might want to have.

So I I prefer one phone, so I uh qualify from eligible for the phone allowance, right?

If I want if I didn't want to have one phone and I wanted to keep my business stuff separate, then I would the city would pay for a device that I would carry around with me, and I would not get a phone allowance at that point.

To your point about the library, for example, not every position is it's deemed as required to have a phone be accessible after hours, right?

You guys call me or Jason on the weekends, we're expected to pick that up.

A clerk in the library isn't expected to respond and they're not.

Or some positions don't need a full-work computer for their job.

A parks worker may not need a computer, right?

A laptop, but maybe they need to respond via email for uh a ticket or a work order or something, and so we pay for a phone allowance, and they are allowed to use their personal phone as their communication device.

And then that's a way of because they're more like remote, they're kind of out in the city, you know, I think yeah, they they're just not they don't have home office, right?

They're not an office job again.

Um I guess the other aspect of this is the vehicle allowance, right?

And it it ranges based on some, right?

So um anywhere from I don't know, a couple thousand to almost seven thousand per year, which seven thousand per year that's that's a full that's a vehicle, right?

Um about five, six hundred dollars a month.

Um and I get it, like with how much Steve Marsh banks turns around, like of course, right?

But he also has a city vehicle, so he doesn't need to be a rules.

But either for others that are an admin or you know, other other jobs that don't re require you to be out on the road very much.

I'm just wondering what the justification is for that, and my understanding is it's executive pay, but again, that's executive pay is different to me than a vehicle allowance.

Um so I'm just wondering, you know, my thoughts are I think we could probably adjust that a little bit because I I think it's fairly high, and again the definition doesn't really match the purpose.

Yeah, and I would say um I'll say this.

There's administration functions, and then there's policy functions and the legislative functions, right?

And and maybe I'm out of line for saying this, but I would say I think the view of the city council is to be the legislative body of the city.

And to approve policies that affect employees, right?

And we have an employee policy manual that we come to you that's approved by the city council.

And and certainly your responsibility is to approve the budget.

That's that's what we're doing today, right?

If we're going into the details about performance ratings or the cost of certain benefits, I see that as an administrative function, and you can certainly tell the city administration we want this fixed or we want to decrease costs, but I don't know if it's the wisest use of your time or the legislative's body time to get into as many of those leads as we're getting into.

Well, and I appreciate that.

But again, but it goes down to the number, right?

Yeah, you're trying to make a budget work, right?

And so we have to understand those numbers because some of some of these adjustments may make perfect sense and they're overdue.

Others, if we don't understand, then we'll say we've got this.

Yeah, exactly.

It's not a it's it's a bad one.

So I'm happy to answer any questions with that framework of saying, okay, if you don't if if you think we can do a better job with uh vehicle allowances or or I can bring a market study back to you and we can look at what other cities and counties are doing, I'm happy to do that.

I I don't want to be resistant to that.

Um and and I know we have good information about okay, what are the gender general trends and practices across the whole state?

Um and I'm happy to bring that back if if you want that information.

I'm just gonna get into the weeds because I read the details, and I see that there's two fleet, two vehicles funded for the admin administration, but they also have they also have an allowance for for their vehicles for fuel for and then there's a fuel allowance.

So we have we're paying fleet for admin, then if the admin also gets the phone, then they also get to have the whatever trap travel separate, but like their own funding for what is it here?

Um for the so that they can drive their own cars, right?

Um so we have to I don't for us, so I mean that's what that's two kinds of things.

So I don't know if they're as a whole administration department.

So for me, I'm wondering who they do we need two cars for admin.

And then I think that the mayor travels as much as anyone.

And I see his allowance, and I see it compared to other people, and I think that everyone should have what the mayor has.

If they're gonna like I don't think anyone should have above what the mayor has, is what I'm saying.

I need some clarification on the vehicles because we only have one administrative vehicle.

Okay.

Well, that was a question I asked, that was the answer that I got received.

Yeah.

No, and now we're good question.

So fleet, I think has one vehicle assigned to them the budget.

I think one vehicle that's assigned to fleet should probably be to the one vehicle that's assigned to admin should not be assigned to someone else.

Okay, although it's part of that budget, it should move to a different department.

Okay.

It was just sort of in the budget.

But also the vehicle that's in admin, I don't think anyone with a vehicle allowed to use it is.

Okay.

But you're right.

I was surprised that there's two, I think one of them's on the place.

Okay.

So this is what I found.

Well, yeah, I don't it just wanted to clarify that.

We only have one vehicle.

Okay.

And he's right, Jason and I never drive our vehicle.

I'm not sure if anybody else in the department has a vehicle allowance that you listen to.

I guess before we move on to the vehicle, would it make sense for straight mileage reimbursement for anybody using their own car on city business?

That's another option, yeah.

And and would that I know this is a hard question, but do you think that would decrease costs, increase costs, stay the same?

I don't know how much they're driving on a daily basis, right?

So I think that's a logistical nightmare.

Tracking, like we just my personal experience and what I do professionally.

We have a logistics arm of our company, tracking miles and all that, just and managing and administering the tracking of miles and things like that is two people.

Yeah, that's why I think you I don't know if you would gain you it might end up being more in a headache, but you could maybe analyze that.

So it's a good question.

I'll I'll throw on this right and make sure that I'm right on this.

So a couple things.

Number one, you you're gonna have the you'll have inflation of what the cost of the mile is, so that will constantly change by code.

Number two, I can tell you right now the miles I drive, the my my reimbursement's not even close to what the miles would be if we went that way.

I would assume, and Ken, you can probably correct me if you're wrong, but I would assume that it would cost us more money if we did reimbursement simply based on because remember those miles will change all the time with cost of they've always gone up, I don't know if the miles cost miles ever, it has ever even come down, and it's based on tax, it's based on gas and some other things.

So that's like that's a good question.

That may be a study question to look at.

That's a fair question.

But anyway, from my experience in 112 days, that's that'll give you a thought process.

Typically you said that's a year, and then you do set it.

At least my I have a travel job.

Right.

And I was reimbursed per mile, and then it the next year change.

Yeah, I guess I guess just my crux of it is just you know, if you're gonna reimburse four or five, six, seven thousand dollars per year for vehicle.

Are you know is that is that accurate?

You know what I mean?

It's a fair question, and I think it would be subject to a further study.

I do know that those that receive the military embersement are expected, and they do do quite a bit of travel either within the city or to meetings to Salt Lake or or other places, right?

It's not all local travel as well.

So I think it is a I think it is uh um what's the right word?

I think it is uh required of that position.

Um whether it's set at the right level or not, I think we need more information if you're wondering.

This is probably why you're asking for an additional HR employee with lots of studies.

Um that would include finance and some other things, and yeah.

I it's okay, mayor.

I have a question on a different line of thought, but you guys are you know, are you James?

I just wanted to call back to what we were talking about KPIs.

It sounded like you said we don't have them, or we do.

We we have not set key performance indicators for each department or for each position within a department.

So what our administration has done is um performance management is set by the department heads.

Well, let me back up.

Um we have a citywide policy that encourages performance management based on criteria principles, right?

But someone's performance or their their adequate performance in their job is determined within that department.

Police department's gonna be different than fire department, right?

Yeah, it's I just find it strange that we don't have KPIs assigned to every job description.

So but that's just what I find that strange, but we have American groups.

Okay.

Um maybe explain what do you what do you envision with KPIs?

Well, I I just every employee would have benchmarks to reach based on the department, right?

So I'm sure fire would have very different ones from public works or what you know, whatever.

But every position would say, like we need you to hit this, this, and this, and annually we look at the performance and then we talk about it.

Yeah, I'm just surprised that we don't do that.

But to some extent we should be doing that.

Well, I don't know if I I think we're getting the same things, maybe we don't call them the same.

Okay.

And so they're employees and and departments set goals together.

They have individual meetings, they coach throughout the year, they they manage their performance throughout the year.

Um that that's ongoing.

It's um and then there's an annual review period where the supervisor determines overall for the past year, is their performance adequate and how much.

But if you're not measuring against any performance metrics, how can you give me adequate results?

Well, back to kind of what David is talking about, it's kind of on an employee-by-employee basis, right?

Like we don't have to be.

Sorry, just second.

Just second, though.

Um so we don't necessarily like put out widgets, like what he's saying is it's hard in some of these positions to track those different things, but we we set goals and hold our employees to accomplishing those goals.

That's the kind of the performance metric, is that they accomplish that goal, or either they're at or above accomplishing that goal, and we do that as part of our evaluations.

I guess Emily.

With no standardized across the pay band or the different paid positions.

I think what it is it based on attendance, is it based on service levels?

I think I I've seen this out of Salt Lake County.

They've invested a three-year project and determined those.

It's a huge take for each department to determine.

And we can do that if you want us to.

Public sector jobs are just different than other sector jobs.

And every sector can have KPIs if you want them to.

It's just that I think managing performance, there's many ways to do it, and we need to find what's right for the city and what's right for our departments.

And I've been a public sector employee, and I had KPIs.

Granted, I worked for John Duble, and he's a he's an engineer and auditor, so that makes sense.

So I think you know, I've got to be.

Yeah.

That's up to we can study it.

We can come back with a proposal.

Okay.

Okay.

Sorry, go back.

Well, I'll pick an easy one first, but then we'll go back.

So the the wrap are feedback check.

Background checks, yeah.

Yeah, so I wasn't in discussion for that, and I thought I heard that you you hear that anyway, if there's ever an issue you hear from the department.

That's not all the time.

Not all the time.

Is it is this needed?

I mean, it's a good idea.

So this was a recommendation from our risk management audit that they did, and they asked us um how often we do background checks because there's some things employees will go out of state or they don't want to come forward with something that happened off the clock, right?

But it may affect their duties of the job, right?

And so they asked us to look at a policy once every five years, a background check to make sure that everything's where it should be.

Oh, it's once every five years.

And it saves money in other ways, yeah.

Uh potential legal claims, yeah.

Okay.

Um is your recommendation from traffic or insurance?

R insurance.

Okay.

Um yeah, I hear parts of conversation.

So things are Olivia on that.

Um back to the pay increase.

Um again, when it's above the four percent, I'm looking what I won't see which department it is, but it's a nine percent increase this year.

Is that so that's just based on the market studies or you do?

And is that it could be.

I don't know which specific department, maybe Dean or someone Allison or Carmen can tell you more about that specific number.

Yeah.

Um but what we try to do is we do a wage study of all the full-time positions in the city.

See, are we m are we being competitive still?

And competitive leads to retention and recruitment, right?

If we're not competitive with wages, we will see an increase in turn effort, and there's a cost to that.

Okay, does that I think there was I can't remember what it was?

There was a line item where there's a certain amount that if that that's available, that you use that amount to just the market increase in the state.

The market increase, okay.

For for for example, um with 200,000.

Yeah, we we have a pool of money that we use based on priorities, right?

We can't give everybody and and not every position warrants that increase either.

So it's it's by priorities, and we we view that as administration and then with departments and we very strategic about where those increases are.

It's not across the board from that pool.

Maybe I'll talk to you later about I just don't want to put anybody on the spot.

Like here to be business, yeah.

Yeah, okay, I'm not sure how I answer that question.

Okay.

Any other questions?

Any resource questions?

Could you send us like if you're if you're doing that, you say, okay, the study, wage study justifies this department getting the race.

Can you send us that information?

What cities you're comparing to when the numbers are?

I would I would like to see that.

Yeah.

And then I like to understand our attrition rate, like how many we are losing.

Um turnover rates or attrition?

Turnover.

Okay.

Um I know there's a couple staff members that we lost that I'm really sad about.

Yeah.

Of course.

It was it a wage thing, was it a uh a better job?

Was it hey, I can move up in my career if I go over to the city or something.

Absolutely.

I I would like to understand that better if we're losing people because of wages or because of better opportunities somewhere else.

Stress.

And I think another thing would be interesting back to Emily's point, like the kind of objectives, even the department objective.

I know there's the themes that we came up with right citywide department.

But I'm I keep thinking like recreation.

If I worked at uh at the legacy center, like okay, we want to increase 15% memberships.

Yeah.

We want to um, you know, say we want to find $50,000 in savings.

Right.

Something that's measurable that may be a department-wide thing, one person can't do it, but maybe four people can use the process.

So you're thinking that merit increases for that department would be based on achievement of that goal.

Not necessarily.

I just I'm I'm just sure if I can speak to that.

We years ago, 10 10 years ago we had a performance measure program for the city.

Um, and it's something that we've always wanted to re-implement, but we just haven't had the manpower to do it because we had at the time we had it and we were trying to to operate it, and it took a lot of staff time to do it, and as we got busier, it just wasn't something that we were able to continue to have that buy in from our staff, make sure that those key performance measures are continue to be relevant and then to have regular updates on that.

So it is on something that we as an administration have considered, and I think that we can definitely look into restarting that.

It's just it's been something that's been on the back burner because of our capacity to be able to do that.

But I'm not hearing from you that it would be better if it's not tied to wages, but it's just like the the performance.

It's just I think you have better conversations with your managers at that performance if it's not tied directly to wages.

Yeah.

Okay.

However, I've also agree that employee high performing employees should be rewarded for their high performance.

Okay.

So how does it be a good thing?

So the department performance measure program we have wasn't necessarily um tied to the individual employees and their races.

It was more about the performance of the department and making sure that we're accomplishing the goals that the city council has set for us to accomplish.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like more than just you know, provide a good service to the Lehigh residence.

Right.

It's it's more specific, mostly like tied to financial or like specific metrics.

Yeah.

Right.

And it depends on the department, but how those metrics turn out, but and and I know other cities have done other cities and counties.

So we can we can pull information from other agencies, but it will be uh a project.

Project that needs more staff.

Well, at least let us know what it was in the past, and maybe we can just look at it and just see.

Yeah, I mean it's it's old, so it's very outdated, but we can go back and look at it and see what those were.

So the only thing I would add into the whole like merit percentage things and talking about CPI, just going and looking at the annual inflation rates over the past five years, it's gone up 24%, um, ranging anywhere from three to eight percent a year in inflation, which means that something that cost a hundred dollars in 2020 now costs 125.

And that's what we're talking about is purchasing power.

The fact that the dollar goes down.

So that if we don't, I know like it's a never ending.

The inc the increase, 4% whatever is never ending because the dollar value is never ending and it's decreasing going down.

So that's if you're not keeping up with the rate of inflation, you are paying your employees less.

That's just hardcore facts of that.

So that's that's where I'm coming from on this.

So if there is a decrease in that that goes below that amount, we are decreasing their purchasing power, it's impacting them, it's impacting their families, and we have to take that in as part of the under consideration of when those change, you know, making those kind of changes, how it impacts.

I I don't know that I necessarily mind whether it's called COLA or merit.

I would just almost assume that it should be under one umbrella, but to take the the rate of inflation into account, and that and then also the competitiveness because all the other cities are taking it into account.

Saratoga Springs budget's five percent every year.

They may not give out five percent in every department, and that's something that could also be looked at.

Um, but that when you're competing against other cities, it's just that's our competitive market because they're keeping up with the rate of inflation.

And it kind of goes back.

The other argument is whether you make 300,000 or 50,000, it shouldn't change, right?

Like the purchasing for me, it's what what are the necessities that are going up?

CPI, right?

Like well, it's just their value, right?

So if you're you're 300,000 valued employee, you're no longer valued at that amount.

So it's not like necessarily like you're talking cola, yeah, there's a different thing, but it's also your value compared to the market.

And if we take the value of say an employee in the public sector who's managing over 100,000 employees, and you put them into or you know, our are public, you put them in the private, and they're making way more base salary, they're making stock, they're making bonus shares, they're you know, they're totally compounded on what they can make at somebody at that level.

So, but I mean when we're like looking at it from this level, it's it's a little bit different.

So, you know, the fact that they're getting like a 4% raise, but they're not getting any profit sharing, they're not getting all these other things.

Maybe they get a car allowance.

But yeah, but there's always trade-offs, so I mean, definitely with job security, it's a huge thing.

That that is a significant thing.

And right now, I've been tech I'd love to have a word job.

It's a it's a gamble too.

How much do you I mean Lehigh is great?

Is it that great that you're gonna take a pay increase when you've got other cities that are all to rub their hands together?

So that I would if you're a police officer and you're facing would you take a 30 an hour job, or would you take a $35 an hour job at the same exact data?

Does that five dollars an hour make a difference to you?

And it depends on the person.

It's there's always trade-offs on the wooding value.

Yeah, so if you well, depends if there's a huge salt lake versus here, yeah.

I might take the 30.

But if we're talking like, okay, we're competing now with Eagle Mount Saratoga Springs or you work in PASIN for 35 or 30 an hour year.

Does $8,000 a year make a difference to you?

Right.

And your families and the food that you put on the table.

That's what we're facing.

And we can't control that, unfortunately, right?

But the reality is it's a challenge, and we'll forever be.

Yeah.

Thanks.

You've got to do this.

Thank you for listening.

T shirt you get two minutes.

Just because you only want two?

Yeah, all one.

It's working.

Well, it's all dependent on the city of questions we have.

Yeah, just whatever questions you have, I'm happy to answer.

Well from Tisha post questions.

Having fun.

Tisha's been on for a few days.

She's seen some.

She's had a vacation.

Someone also.

Can you tell me what is swag and suite whole media production?

Yeah, that's just kind of like a full video production of the like it's through it would be through Granica software.

They would basically somebody off site would manage the whole council meeting.

So it would have multiple camera angles, they would zoom in, like on your faces when we're talking.

I'll support it, but we're not doing it.

It has like kind of built-in AI refresher.

Yeah, there you go.

Filter.

Do we need is it does it work?

It's Granica's work without it.

I mean, we're doing a recording.

Yeah, it's an advanced.

So it's like an upgrade to the system.

Um it would like during the meeting, it would show on the screen like which item they're on.

Um it would also have like your guys' names at the bottom of the screen.

Uh so when you're talking, it would show your name on the on the video.

Um it's just it's kind of on there just to let you guys know that like that's an option and that that's what's up there, or that that's what's out there, but um, I don't think that right now it's something that is really needed.

And um I kind of want to see and explore more about the capabilities that we have with this new equipment.

And and the granite software update is needed on it too.

Yeah, so that one is for closed captioning to meet the new ADA requirements.

Okay.

So all live video that we have from the city, the new ADA requirements, yeah, are that it needs to be closed captioned.

Okay, and then I see second deputy city recorder.

So it's you, and you have some part-time staff, right?

So is that transitioning part-time to full-time?

Is that just hiring an all full-time?

Yeah, it's it could really be either way, either hire a full-time, so my part-time go to full-time or an additional part-time.

And I think we uh kind of decided that we can just kind of get by this year with what we currently have based on all of the other needs that we have in the city, but um next year where it's an election year, uh, we really would like to add that.

Um, I feel like I in my position, I'm always very reactive to things.

Um I don't it's hard to kind of get on top of things and think more and high level in a lot of things, planning and like finding uh more opportunity like better things that would serve our residents.

Like I'd like to focus time on that.

We also have the new um data privacy legislation that is gonna require a lot from my department to strength.

Um so the second deputy city recorder is it you know, kind of a full salary and the requests right about 72.

Um, but if you move a part-time to a full-time plus, yes.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

I was gonna say I'm not sure how it actually looks on the budget, but yeah, essentially, yeah, it would be from my current part-time would go full-time or yeah, part-time plus an additional part-time because then as I was looking through all of these, like I feel like the justice court needs a couple of new clerks, right?

And then the other one was your job, just because we see how much you work and you get grammar requests you're dealing with.

Yeah, time sensors.

Um I want to try to figure out how to make it work.

You're gonna I mean that's good to know because it cuts that cost probably roughly in half.

Yeah, from uh from a net new full-time hire to part-time right now.

Right.

So that's good to train because she's in there.

Yeah, and that's what I was thinking.

If if we did approve it next year, we need to be hiring like right in the middle of the right in the middle of the election, you have to train someone and do an election, that's difficult.

So ideally, and I mean there's a lot of part-time city reporters um around this area.

You know, hopefully could maybe pick up somebody that already had some experience.

Oh the publish now.

Yeah, we're gonna push.

But if we get the cost you need to make your part 10 fully full time if it's less than the 72?

Yeah, so it would be it would be about um I think like 25 to 30 is what I would need for a part-time, but we can move to full-time.

So like the wages, the wages amount would only be about probably $30,000.

Yeah.

I think so.

But from a part-time and full-time.

From part-time to full-time, it's still gonna be, I mean, you're gonna only drop it by about $30,000.

Because the benefit side of it is from 80 to 50.

Probably you said approximately.

Approximately don't quote down that full time or two part-times.

Um I could I could work with two part-time.

Sometimes it's really nice actually to have um two backups to myself rather than just one.

So if we had just one full pole, one full time, it only gives me one person as a backup still.

Um it's nice to kind of be a couple people deep, especially when you know meeting attendance planning commission.

And the benefits, yeah.

Yeah, like that.

Well, it's like saving benefits, it's almost like the cost of having three part-times.

Yes, so uh great time.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yes.

I think that's all we're saying.

Okay.

Is that you?