This meeting is being held in person at City Hall and by video conference.

The public may participate in this meeting by coming to City Hall or joining the Zoom webinar.

The meeting is being broadcast live on the city's YouTube channel and Comcast Cable Channel 30 within city limits.

If you would like to address council, you may come to City Hall or participate via Zoom.

If you are interested in speaking, please let staff know by filling out a yellow comment card on the table over there in City Hall, or emailing OCR at Milwaukee, Oregon.gov for those on Zoom.

When it is time to take public comments, staff will monitor the comment cards, email inbox, and Zoom participant list and chat.

We will take comments in the order they are received and seen.

Comments may be emailed to OCR at MilwaukeeOregon.gov.

We ask that all Zoom participants who intend to speak label their Zoom username to show their first and last names for the record.

Spanish translation services are available upon request.

The public is asked to request translation and other meeting accessibility services at least 48 hours before the meeting.

For more information, contact the city recorder at 503-786-7502.

Servicios Servicios de Tradución en Español esta disponible cuando se solicitado.

Se pide el público que solicite servicios de tradución y otros servicios de accesibilidad por lo menos 40 y 8 horas antes de la reunión.

Para obtener más información, llama a El Secretario de la Ciudad.

Cinco Siete Ocho Says Siete Cinco Cero Dos.

Translation Services are also available in other languages.

Please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

And to the Republic for which it stands under God, indivisible with liturgy and justice for all.

In 1855, the surviving members of the Clackamas signed the Willamette Valley Treaty, also known as the Kalapuya, etc.

Treaty, with the federal government in good faith.

We offer our respect and gratitude to the indigenous people of this land.

And now we have a series of announcements.

The Llewellyn Neighborhood District Association's annual concerts in the park series begins tomorrow at 6 30 p.m.

featuring Son de Cuba.

The band features a blend of Latin, African, and jazz rhythms playing various genres such as Salsa Merengue and others.

The concerts continue each Wednesday in August at Ball Michelle Park.

The Ardenwald Johnson Creek Neighborhood Association's annual concerts in the park also begin this Thursday at Ardenwald Park.

The first concert features the band Soul Cooking, which will kick off at 6 30 p.m.

But be sure to stop by at 6 for the NDA's annual National Night Out event.

Public safety representatives from both Portland and Milwaukee will be there to promote safety awareness, answer questions, and provide fun activities for kids.

The concerts continue each Thursday in August at 6 30 p.m.

Be sure to stop by Scott Park each of the next two Thursdays at 1030 a.m.

for live entertainment for kids at the amphitheater next to Letting Library.

August 7th features red yarn, which includes high energy folk music and a puppet show.

Then on August 14th, Angel Ocasio will be on stage with comedy, magic, and juggling.

If you are looking for a great way to volunteer in August, registration is open for the annual Johnson Creek Cleanup event sponsored by the Johnson Creek Watershed Council.

The event takes place on Saturday, August 16th and provides an opportunity to volunteers to get into the creek and get out the trash.

And they take a million uh a ton or more of trash out every year.

Volunteers will work at about a dozen sites all along the watershed.

And you can see the information on that at JCWC.org.

Um then join Solve and the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative at a community cleanup and recycling event on Thursday, August 14th from 10 a.m.

to noon at the bottle drop on King Road.

Volunteers will help remove litter around the neighborhood and any bottles and cans that are found will be recycled with all proceeds benefiting solve.

Learn more and register to participate at bottledrop.com slash solve.

For more information about each of these events and others, please visit the city's homepage at MilwaukeeOregon.gov or call 503-786-7555.

And then it's a haiku.

neighborhood and any bottles and cans that are found will be recycled with all proceeds benefiting solve uh learn more and register to participate at bottledrop.com slash solve for more information about each of these events and others please visit the city's homepage at milwaukee.gov or call 503 7865 and then is a haiku uh this haiku was submitted by our uh uh video tech there in the booth um joshua people are confused middle housing isn't easy questions for counsel he wrote that before our recent middle housing town hall but i did want to it was a good nexus to um mention that event to folks who weren't here we had a big crowd in this room a lot more people than tonight uh for the middle housing town hall last week and you can see that online at our YouTube page so uh you can snap a snap that uh that image that 2D barcode if you want to look it up or just go to city of Milwaukee YouTube page and it should probably come up pretty easy but uh it was a really I thought a very useful um program I really appreciated all the time that staff put into it and I have encouraged a few people already who missed it to go online and watch it because people will we will continue to get questions about this and I think uh it's a great resource to direct people to so again thanks to staff for pulling all that together okay um so we have a proclamation tonight for National Farmers Market Week we have someone from the board of the CMI to present that and uh read the proclamation if so inclined I'd be happy to good evening mayor and good evening counsel my name is Shauna Walker and I'm representing Celebrate Milwaukee and the Milwaukee farmers market um I've been with them for the last five years serving as president the last year so very pleased to read the proclamation tonight whereas farmers markets are an integral part of Oregon's food system and agricultural economy and are an important sales outlet for farmers and food business owners generating revenue that supports the sustainability of family farms and the revitalization of rural communities and whereas farmers markets provide residents of all income levels with access to healthful locally produced foods through the Milwaukee farmers market and over 70 other Oregon markets that accept supplemental nutritional assistance program otherwise known as Snap benefits and other critical food access programs.

And whereas the Milwaukee farmers market is celebrating 27 years as a cornerstone in our community well loved by customers and vendors who come from Milwaukee and far beyond.

Now therefore I Lisa Beatty mayor of the city of Milwaukee a municipal corporation in the county of Clackamas in the state of Oregon with the consent of the city council do hereby proclaim the week of August 3rd through 9th as farmers market week and do call upon all Milwaukeeans to celebrate and support the Milwaukee farmers market and other farmers markets other area farmers markets.

And I will say it I mean everybody loves the farmers market we I just just last night I was at or just yesterday I was at a meeting and um people were talking about how to reach people and I said the best way to reach people is to try and get a booth at the farmers market is a great way to get people from across the community and um and I especially appreciate the SNAP benefits in this time when food insecurity is kind of on the rise and some of those benefits are harder for people to get so it's really important that the that that's still available at the farmers market.

So absolutely thank you.

Yes hope to see you all Sunday okay okay okay I thought Darcy was before public comments no okay all right um so we're doing community comments and again if you have a if you would like to speak give a yellow comment card to Scott I think you have one person there who wants to speak this is the part of the agenda during which the council will hear community comments on city business that are not already on the agenda.

Before we begin is there follow-up from the July 15th commons Miss Sagar Mayor at the um July uh let's see July 16th does that the July 15th meeting uh the only comment we received was about middle housing um from Mr.

Cruz who also attended our town hall so I think we followed up on a lot of uh Mr.

Cruz's questions there.

Okay great um so Mr.

We will have a time to talk about that later when the police chief is presenting that.

Would our if but if you're time constrained, uh I can let you go now.

It's your kind of your choice.

If you're available to stick around till we get to that part of the agenda.

Okay, okay, great.

So otherwise, I don't have anyone who here in the room who is looking to testify, and you're not seeing anyone online.

Okay, so I will dispense with that script.

But I can confirm that Councilor Stavendort is on Zoom.

Okay, great.

Welcome, counselor.

Uh tonight's consent agenda includes minutes of the city council July 18th, 2020, July 8th, sorry, 2025 special session.

A resolution acting as the local contract review board approving an intergovernmental agreement with Clackamas River Water for the King Road Improvements Project, a resolution authorizing a contract with Topani Inc.

for the Harvey Street Improvement Project, a resolution acting as the local contract review board reinstating an engineering services agreement with OTEC Inc.

for property line adjustment services.

Does any council member wish to remove a consent agenda item?

Seeing none, I will entertain a motion.

I'm move to approve the consent agenda as presented.

I second.

It's been moved and seconded to approve the consent agenda as presented.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Counselor Stavador.

Sorry, Mayor.

Aye.

Okay, great.

Uh so the consent consent agenda is approved unanimously.

All right.

Now we will move on to uh a very exciting project of a Spring Creek Childcare Center going up on uh Monroe Street at 224.

The intersection of 224 on Monroe Street has been the hopping this summer between ODOT's work and the Clack Co kids work on the new um center.

Uh I got to be there for their groundbreaking earlier this spring.

Um, but I wanted Darcy to come tell everyone about what's going on there.

So Darcy Tilstonk is the executive director of the Clackamas County Children's Commission, which operates a lot of uh operates Head Start programs across the county.

Uh and you need to press the little button so the red light comes on.

That way you're picked up by the microphones and everything.

I mean the camera and everything.

Hello, Mayor Beattie and Council members.

Um it's my pleasure to be here today.

Darcy Kilsdunk, I'm the executive director at Clackamas County Children's Commission.

Uh, I have a bit of a PowerPoint just to share about our agency, and then I know what you really want to know about is the Spring Creek uh project.

So I'll get started.

I always tell people the work that we do is heart work.

And um, Mayor Beatty, you you mentioned the importance of child care, and we're certainly um proud to be a part of that.

But I do tell people that uh because we run the programs of Head Start, Early Head Start, and Healthy Families, we're more than child care, and I'll talk about that.

So we refer to ourselves as CLATCO kids is just uh um shorter term for the long name.

Uh it's a little bit confusing.

We're not part of the county.

We are a 501c3 nonprofit.

Um I always share about our vision and our mission at every gathering that we have because I think it's important.

Our vision is a future in which all children have the best possible opportunity to succeed.

And we do that through supporting the growth of healthy children and families, positive parenting, and school readiness.

We're three programs, Head Start, early, head start, and healthy families under one agency umbrella.

You know where we are.

I don't have to tell you that.

Um, but you might be interested in knowing that um we have 13 uh current centers.

Um Spring Creek will be our 14th, and then I'll talk a little bit about um other centers coming on also this year.

Uh it's a big year construction-wise for our agency.

And you can see where Spring Creek is.

Um, this isn't part of the presentation, but I will share that.

Our agency serves lots of communities, and we are not funded like schools where we have limited funding for a limited number of children to serve.

So it's not that every child that comes in the door gets services.

And so we have to find a way to prioritize them.

We serve children that are in poverty.

And we use the poverty guidelines of 100%, which means that a family of four has to make less than about $30,000 a year to qualify for our services.

So it's a it's a low threshold or high threshold, I should say, to qualify for our program.

We also prioritize children in foster care, children who are identified as houseless, and children who reside in a home where there's a person with a disability.

And what I was going to say is the way we prioritize is on risk factors.

What's important for you to know is the children in the Milwaukee area have the highest risk factors of all the program of the entire program.

So we're serving the children most in need in the Milwaukee service area.

So we currently serve 306 children in our program Head Start, which is ages three to five.

All of those children are served in a full-day setting.

We also serve children prenatal to three in early Head Start.

And currently we have 296 children served.

60 of those are served in a home-based program.

And that means they get a home visit a week of an hour and a half in duration.

We have 16, what we call combo children, and they're served two days a week in a classroom and also get two home visits a month.

And then most of the infant and toddler infants and toddlers are served in full day settings.

About 87% of the children we serve come from homes where the parents are working or going to school.

So they need that full day of care.

And that's why the importance of child care as a part of what we do.

We also have the Healthy Families Home Visiting Program, which is also prenatal to three.

It's really focused on developing the attachment between the caregiver and the child, and is proven to be a prevention effort for child abuse and neglect.

These are our staff.

Our staff are really committed to the work that we do.

They don't get paid enough, and we can't provide enough benefits for them, and yet they show up every single day.

Another really important piece of the work we do is parent advocacy.

So our program is governed by a board of directors, like typical nonprofits are.

But what's important to know is that we're also governed by what's called policy council, and it's made up by current parents in the program, and they are the pass-through to get information on the agenda for the board.

So the parents meet the week before the board meeting, and I present to them pretty much everything that I present to the board, including grant applications, employment policies, budgets, credit card statements, the budget to actuals.

They have to approve it before it goes before the board.

So they have power, which is unusual in programs like ours.

But the parents that are receiving the services really have a voice, and that's the reason why I stay in Head Start.

I think it's a really important part of it.

And each year I can take two parents to Washington, DC to meet with our Congress people, and that's always a highlight for them.

Yeah.

So I always say we have two or three three-legged stools, so to speak, and that is we work with children, but all of our services are multi-generational.

So at the same time, we're working with children, we're working with parents.

So all parents have a home visitor, they work on family goals with the parents, accessing community resources.

A lot of their goals are around improving housing, getting basic needs met, improving education, job search skills, and our home visitors are trained to work with them on that, always with the goal towards upward financial mobility.

Um, and our the third leg of our stool, um, besides parents and children is community.

And so it's really important that we're involved in the community.

Um, some of the things that we're involved in are externally hosted committees and groups, including the Early Learning Hub, um, the County Public Health Advisory, the District Attorney's MDT, P3 Committees, and the Safe Kids Coalition.

Internally, we also host committees that we invite the community into, and that's our health services advisory, our curriculum committee, our strategic planning committee, healthy families advisory, and of course the parent policy council.

We operate a food pantry out of Barlow, and we're hoping to open a second food pantry in Sandy this year.

And we're partners with the PDX diaper bake so that we can give out diapers to families in need when they can't afford them.

Um we hold events that are community facing, including the Super Bowl, that's um S O U P E E R.

Um, that's held every um the Saturday before the Super Bowl.

And it's an event to um, it's a it's a food and supply drive to fund our um or to put supplies into our pantry at Barlow, and it's a lot of fun.

Artisans um donate uh beautiful ceramic bowls, and we have unlimited soup and bread, and um people come and they have some soup and bread, and um, we have a faux tailgate party where um they can sample different restaurants um bites.

Um, it's a lot of fun.

Uh so look for that.

And then we have family fun day each year in June.

Um, and this year we held it at Clackamas Community College on a rainy day, which was unfortunate.

But um, we partner with um PNC Bank to hold that opportunity, and families come and it's just a day of fun for them.

Uh our Tears for Children event is coming up in October on October 4th.

That's our big uh community facing event where we have a silent and live auction, a nice dinner, a wine wall, and a dessert dash.

It's a lot of fun.

And then uh each year we hold Kicks for Kids campaign.

Uh, we've been lucky enough to partner with the Oregon City Subaru, and they um through their Share the Love event have helped us to purchase new shoes for every child in the program.

Um, and a lot of the children in our program have never had a new pair of shoes.

Um, so that's really uh fun event.

The parents come and they shop with their child and find shoes.

So um that's a little bit about what we do in the community.

Some pictures of Super Bowl and Cheers for Children.

Uh but what you really want to know is what's coming up.

Um, so on the right-hand side, you'll see our new buildings, um, including the Milwaukee building, which I'm going to talk about today.

Um, we've titled that Spring Crick.

Um, but we also have one that we're about to go out for bid on at Gladstone.

It's also the Gladstone YMCA building.

We purchased both at the same time.

And then we are opening the Merrillhurst building, the Mare Arts Building.

Um, we received some funds from the state legislature to renovate that.

So that will be a new center for us this fall as well.

So this is the architectural rendering of the Spring Creek building located at 2992 Southeast Monroe Street, as Mayor Beatty indicated.

It's on the corner of 224 in Monroe.

Um, these colors are incredibly bright.

They won't be.

I keep giving them a hard time.

Like it's not going to be that bright.

Um of the details about the project are um, it's really important to me that children are connected with nature.

And so every detail in the building will make sure to uh be a reflection of nature.

Um of the things we're excited about is we're doing a sensory hallway in an effort for children to be able to kind of decompress on their way into the classroom as well as on their way out.

Um checking my time to make sure I'm not going over.

Uh, very calm classroom environments, um, a nature-based playground that features play expiration exploration with water that will have the hand pump with a dry creek bed that water um the children can pump water through it and play in the water, um, limited play in the water.

So they walk up the hill and then they can slide down, which is really fun.

We have gardens at every center and gross motor opportunities.

This center in particular will have two preschool classrooms and three infant and toddler classrooms.

The capacity for the preschool classrooms is 20 each.

We typically keep them at 17.

We found that 17 is a little easier on the staff to make sure the children get the attention that they need.

And then three infant and toddler classrooms, those the capacity for those by licensing is eight.

So total capacity, if we're maxed out, is 64 children at this center.

There's a covered area for parent pickup and drop-off.

It'll also be arranged in a way that a lot of our parents lack socialization opportunities.

And so we find that once they get to know each other during drop-off and pickup, it's an opportunity for them to connect.

So we wanted to create a space that naturally is conducive to that.

We're really excited.

This is our first center that we're going to have solar panels on the roof that will hopefully power much of the center as much as we can.

What we're super excited about is we'll have battery storage.

Because all of our centers are licensed.

If we lose power, we have to send children home by licensing standards.

This will allow us, if there's a power outage, to continue operating.

And as I said, many of our parents need the care so that they continue to work and go to school.

And so it's really important that we don't call them midday and say power's out, you got to come and get your kids.

So we're excited to have that.

In the building is a renovated office space, break rooms, and kitchen, as you would expect.

But we've created one of the classrooms will also be used as a community space.

And so we'll use that for parent education opportunities, family gatherings, and events that we typically host for our families.

But in the case of an emergency situation, like we experienced during the pandemic, we can turn around and utilize the center for natural disaster relief, emergency food, potentially shelter if we had to.

So that's really exciting to be able to serve the community in that way.

As I said, we have solar installations.

So this is a picture of that's the roof on the right-hand side, and they had to structurally kind of beef up the roof.

And then on the left, that um skirting around the roof is also to accommodate the solar installation.

You were putting in for a PGE grant.

Did you get that?

Or you're not know about that till December.

So you're funding it.

I'm really counting on it.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's for the battery storage.

Um, we have the funding for the solar panels, um, but the battery storage, we've submitted a request to PGE to fund that.

Uh as you can see, new HVAC and electrical upgrades throughout.

Um, new framing insulation walls.

I just wanted you to see kind of where it's at right now.

I was just there uh two weeks ago, and they were putting all of the um sheetrock up, which then you start seeing the rooms.

It's exciting.

Um I'll stop here, and uh this says I have two minutes left.

So I'll just run through these um pictures real quick.

Um this is the front of the building, it doesn't look quite as bright.

I mean, this um can see down here the log structure that I was talking about, and then some boulders that they'll also find over.

I should note for people that Ben Johnson, a Milwaukee resident, and who helped uh design our parks, also did the um landscape architect design for her.

Not just on this project, but there are landscape architective choice.

Um they do such a nice job.

I always think they get another rendering of the from the building.

As you can see, it's not as bright as the drawings.

Um here's another great picture of I'm sorry, you can't see this.

Um outdoor space.

And then more of the boulders.

We're really excited about the center.

Um it's gonna serve the families of Milwaukee.

Um, this is our fourth century in Milwaukee.

Um, so we have one at um Milwaukee Presbyterian Church on Lake Road.

Um we have our River Road Center, which is one of our meeting centers off of the river road.

And um we have five classrooms.

We use we utilize one as office space, but four classrooms at the Wichita Center, and then Spring Tech will be our court.

Um in Milwaukee.

The need is great in Hawaii.

And I'm happy to answer any questions if you have any questions from anyone.

Yeah, sure.

First of all, this is fantastic.

Um very exciting.

Um, very much needed, obviously.

Um, and I I was I was amazed at how many kids you guys serve, um, which is fantastic and incredible, but it's also sobering, right?

To see that that many kids are are in need.

And my question, you may not have an answer to the timer.

You may not have an answer to this right now, but I'm just curious on on a couple of levels.

Um I don't know how much your your funding relies on federal grants or anything like that.

Um, but what I am interested because I do think with the the newest um terrible no-good bill that more people are gonna be in need of more families will need these services.

Um, and just seeing just your your capacity and potential to grow over the next three years.

Um, what does that look like?

Yeah, great question.

Um, so good news, bad news.

Um, the good news is our agency is unique in that we're funded, uh, about 80% of our funding comes from the state of Oregon, the Department of Early Learning and Care.

So we're we're feeling really stable.

I I have said for quite some time that we need to really diversify our funding more.

And now I'm really, really glad that we're mostly state funded.

Um, but 20% of our funding um does come from the federal government through a grant um from the Office of Head Start.

Um as you may or may not be aware, um it was slated to uh Head Start was slated to be cut um in March, April.

Um and you know, this is where the beauty of Head Start comes in.

We have over a million alumni that are um working tax paying citizens and they're not afraid to speak up and um talk about the importance of Head Start.

Um I don't know if it was that or um we also have some um really supportive people in Congress that um all of a sudden Head Start was back in the budget.

Um we think we'll be flat funded at this point and we'll be happy with that.

Um that could mean down the line because you know, I just met with our insurer and our insurance costs have gone up 23%.

Um so when you when you get hits like that and you don't have increases in funding, um, it's hard to figure out how to make that, and about 87% of our costs are purely staff.

Um, and we have a minimum of staff to meet licensing requirements, so there's not a lot of give there.

Um the state too, even though uh we're really thankful for the priority that they've placed on early learning in Oregon.

It's a great time to be in Oregon in early learning.

Um, but they too have had some budget shortfalls, and we believe we'll be flat funded there too.

Um and so I you know, I always say there's lean times and there's fat times.

We're in the really lean time.

Um so right now we're just uh watching and seeing, and honestly, I've told staff we're just gonna ignore the noise and um pay attention when something happens, but we're moving forward.

We've also applied for additional slots from the state.

There is a tiny pot of money that's available, and um they've told me that the number of slots I've applied for is half of the money they have available.

And I said, Well, that's great.

Clackmas County really needs it.

So I don't think I'll get all of them, but I am concerned.

Um, we just shifted uh 179 of our part day preschool slots to infant and toddler care.

Um, and we did that because the need is greater in infant and toddler care right now, but that's gonna create a bigger wait list for preschool now that um will not be met.

Um and so I think we're in a good position.

We've been fully enrolled, we've never been on an enrollment plan fully staffed.

Um we're in a good position to take more slots if they award them.

Yeah.

Um I wanted to add I had a couple questions.

One was your classrooms at Wichita.

I know Wichita was kind of closed this summer for a new roof.

Is it all ready and it will be ready for the school year?

Wichita, I believe will be ready for the school year.

We have an excellent partnership with North Clackamas School District, but we are limited by you know, they're doing some upgrades to the building, which is really welcome news.

We can't have infants and toddlers in the summer.

And infants and toddlers by performance standard are year-round services.

And so each summer um we're gonna have to figure out how to shift those.

Um Spring Creek will be really helpful when we open, we'll be able to shift um children into Spring Creek purposefully.

We'll will serve more infants and toddlers there and more preschoolers at Wichita because we have to exit in the summertime.

Um the need is great at Wichita.

Families love Wichita.

Um I'm thankful that we'll have Spring Creek to allow us a little bit of flexibility to meet that.

Yeah.

And so when do you expect to open Spring Creek?

October.

October.

Yeah, they're telling you the last week of September, first week of October.

Um, and it's only because we have a log, um, the logs that are being built, there's a backlog on them.

So they won't be here until September 12th.

Then we have to allow for installation and the finishing of the playground, and we can't license it until all of that is done.

So we'll be geared up and ready.

As soon as that's done, the licensor will come, we'll get it licensed, and then we'll shift.

So the building's almost ready.

It sounds I it did not, I didn't, I haven't driven by probably in a week, but it I did not think it was that close to ready, but it's it doesn't look from the outside like it is, but like I said, two weeks ago, they were doing the sheet rock.

Yeah, um, and I know that um the sensory hallway people, which to me that's like a final finishing touch, they met there last week to make final plans.

So they're gearing up and getting getting ready.

There's not flooring yet.

Um, the final flooring and um the playground is still ripped up.

So from the outside, it looks really, really rough.

But inside it's starting to look a little more finished.

Yeah, awesome.

Yeah, and I will invite all of you to a ribbon cutting for sure.

Yeah, great.

Great.

Yeah, I was hoping to it looks like I guess two questions.

It looks like you have about 750 slots across all of Clackmas County.

Like how oversubscribed are you, or how long is your wait list in comparison to the number of slots that you have.

Uh, so that's hard to tell right at this minute because we just did that shift.

Um, so I can tell you what I think it will look like.

Up until this point, um, our wait list, we we go by percentages.

So we always want to have about a 20% wait list, which means whatever capacity we have, we want to have 20% um waiting because we have to fill slots as soon as they become available.

You can't have an open slot.

So if somebody moves, we have to fill in with the next child on the wait list.

Um so up until right now, um, our wait list for early Head Start, which is our infant and toddler program, um, was 120%.

We could have filled every single classroom over again with eligible children and still had a 20% wait list, which is why we did the shift.

Our wait list for preschool has been running 18 to 20%.

So right about where we wanted it.

But now that we've shifted, I expect our wait list for um preschool to be more like probably 40 to 45%.

Um, so the need will be greater there.

Um, if the other thing is we're serving new communities with infant and toddler care.

And every time we five years ago, we only we only had two classrooms.

Starting this fall, we'll have 25 infant and toddler classrooms.

So we've grown, we've really blown up our infant and toddler care.

Um every time we serve a new community, people find out we have early head start there and more applications come in.

So it's possible we'll realize that that wasn't even enough.

I suspect that could be true that both wait lists will still be sizable.

Okay.

Wow, that's a big gap there.

Yeah, and it's unique because um, I mean, two things.

We've been able to stay fully staffed um to be able to run all of our classrooms.

Other Head Start programs have gotten slots taken away because they haven't been able to do that.

Um we have knock on wood, um, pulled out all the stops to try to keep people in our program.

Um, and we don't have a lack of children at all.

Yeah.

Um well, all of this makes me think what are the things that we use, the city can be doing to help better support your program, better get more child care slots in the city of Milwaukee.

Well, I have to tell you the city of Milwaukee has been incredibly supportive to us.

Um I've asked for letters.

Um, so thank you for your support um with letters.

Um when we had some permitting uh kind of bumps.

Um I know people were working in the background to make it happen.

So um I can't think the city of Milwaukee enough.

Um, truly feel like there's good partnership here.

Um, what more could you do?

I would say, you know, just let people know about us.

Um let people know about what we're doing in the community.

Get people to go to their dinner in October.

Yes.

Yes, come to Chairs for Children.

Tell your friends.

It's a good time too.

I always tell people it's most important that people have fun.

Yeah.

So uh thanks, Darcy, for coming in.

Uh, I have uh sort of uh two comments.

One may be a little bit uh uh out from left field, but we have a goal within the our city of economic development.

And you know, every study I've ever seen about Head Start, they talk about you know the the advantages of Head Start and educational achievement, lifetime earnings.

Uh and so I I see this center as uh as an early economic development for our city.

These are our future uh workforce here.

So thank you for uh for bringing these uh well educated uh wonderful uh children to Milwaukee.

So that's one of my practical side on the on the on the on the on the softer side.

I live about three blocks away, and I can't wait to see them coming down on the Waddler line, you know, on their walks.

Uh because that'll get me out of the porch.

Well, you'll see the big strollers.

We have strollers that hold, I think they hold six Ps.

Wow.

Uh wow.

And so you know they go trucking down the street.

We we call that the infant toddler field trips.

We don't take them anywhere except our around the neighborhood.

Yeah.

Um, and people do get to know the children and I look forward to it.

Yeah.

So please do.

Yeah.

Great.

All right.

If no other questions for Darcy, I will let her go on about her evening and we will go on to the rest of our agenda, but we will be looking for those invitations to the ribbon cutting for sure.

You'll definitely get them.

Thank you so much for having me.

I preach that.

Thank you.

Um, Scott can probably take a few.

We have a we have a table for uh, you know, we have a table out here for stuff like that.

So that'd be great.

That would be great.

Okay, thank you.

All right, next on our agenda, it's the police chiefs night tonight.

And the next thing is the downtown open container conversation, which is I believe part three of this conversation.

Uh so we have Chief Burdick and Captain Cherignino to talk to us about that.

Hello, council.

Thank you for the button.

Oh, yeah.

Sorry about that.

Uh, thanks again for having us here tonight.

Uh Ryan Burke, the police chief.

Uh, this is Tony Cheragino, our operations captain.

And we're here to do some follow-up on the open container.

Um, in last April 15th, during regular session, uh, we talked about some of the concerns related to open container, uh, including uh staff resources to patrol and enforce an area, proximity to McLaughlin Boulevard.

Uh it's a busy high crash corridor, and some of the unintended negative impacts that could be uh occur on members of our community struggling with substance abuse or behavior health challenges.

Uh we explored the idea of the open container zone that could be activated for permitted events, but all the previously mentioned concerns still apply.

Uh the insurance requirements that would likely be needed for the city to assume the risk, uh permitting in such a broad zone uh really made this uh approach untenable.

Uh staff asked for some clarification and proponents were explaining the biggest goal is just supporting uh foot traffic up and down uh our downtown uh to support the local businesses.

Uh during that April meeting, uh it sounds like there were kind of three touch points.

Council requested some additional information.

Uh the first was estimated insurance costs for a large uh event that serves alcohol.

Uh insurance estimates are easier to identify for your your space limited kind of beer garden events, uh conservative estimate using eventhelper.com.

This was something that Dan Harris carried me completely on uh because I've never applied for insurance.

Um it's a planning tool or software, uh, and was about four to nine hundred dollars with coverage of two million per occurrence and a three million dollar aggregate.

This coverage is consistent with what North Clackmas Parks and Rec's district uh require for park events with alcohol.

Uh additional coverage can vary, obviously, depending upon crowd size or other elements of a large event.

If the city were to try to determine an insurance requirement for a large unmonitored zone, it would likely be prohibitively expensive for any potential applicant.

Further, there's some big challenges.

Downtown, we have a very active bus mall uh and the light rail, both are transit properties or trinet properties, and TriMet will not allow alcohol uh on their property.

Then we have a follow-up with uh Captain Sugar Gino.

So one of the other questions was what standards does OLCC Commission have for volunteer alcohol monitors for large events.

And this is covered under an Oregon administrative rule uh labeled alcohol management and public venues.

And alcohol monitors are responsible for ensuring uh that unlawful sales services and consumption of alcohol uh does not occur on licensed premises.

Alcohol monitors and uh their some of their duties are observing people, observing monitoring uh their alcohol consumption, uh monitoring the sales of alcohol, making sure people aren't getting too uh intoxicated to make sure kids aren't in minors aren't purchasing uh and drinking uh alcoholic beverages on the premises.

And then they also uh are monitoring and checking IDs.

A lot of times when you go to these vents, you'll see uh wristbands a pretty common source of uh marking if someone's 21 or older and has been checked by an alcohol monitor or the generated the servers at that location won't even serve you.

And then also potentially preventing the access to alcohol for those who are underage, like I mentioned or visibly intoxicated.

And there are some uh permit eligibility requirements that OLCC does require.

And one of those is you got to be 18 years old.

You do have to pass uh an alcohol server education class.

They do have a fee for 23, and then you have to take and pass an OLCC test.

And then there is a small uh like criminal check uh as far as like a criminal records check where you have no recent disqualifying criminal histories and some of those would be like felony uh DUI convictions uh that were you know in recent that occurred recently.

Uh OLCC does also have some uh mandates for uh staffing for the number of monitors, and that's based on the number of attendees that uh are expected to be in the crowd.

So, for example, uh anywhere from 2,000 to 7,500 attendees, they require to have three monitors and 7500 to 10,000, four monitors, and then an additional monitor for every additional 2500 people.

They also require additional monitors if they have for each point of sale that maybe isn't visible.

So if you have multiple locations where you're selling alcoholic beverage and it's not visible from one to the other, they require an additional monitor on top of that to make sure a kind of site and uh insight that everyone's being monitored and can be seen.

And so, what does this have to do with like our budget impact?

And as our staffs recommended course of action, there would be no budget impact.

However, if if council chooses to uh go a different direction, a different action, and that does result in the open container or something similar, there's gonna be additional cost uh borne by the public safety, by the police, uh, finance department, uh, public works because we have to there's undertake planned work that we need to do for enforcement, signage, liability, assessment, insurance, uh, contract vetting, and even more.

And so the workload impact on this was another question that came up.

And right now we have a minimum staffing level of three officers uh for the whole city.

So uh a little over five square miles, 21, 22,000 people.

We have three officers, mandatory minimum requirements.

So this would uh put stress on our staffing levels, and we're already at low staffing levels.

We have generally at full staff, 18 patrol officers, patrolling, and six uh sergeants uh to maintain the 24 hour operation seven days a week.

And so this would put uh if we did create open container and container zone in downtown, uh Waukey has both opportunities and challenges, and permitting an activation of a downtown open container would require significant staff money for these resources.

I have some personal experience around this a little bit.

I started my career in Phoenix, Arizona, and it's it's it's not an apples to apples comparison.

Phoenix, Arizona is the sixth largest uh city in the United States, and there were 3,000 officers when I was there at the time, but we did have venues that they had large uh entertainment districts where they would close street down, streets down or allow open containers to uh people to walk around through business districts or entertainment districts.

And when you have police officers doing staffing, there would be downtown business alliances that would cover the cost of that that the city here that we don't have to cover that cost of the overtime where the police it's not in the police budget, and they would contribute to that.

And when you're picking 20 to 30 officers from 3,000, like we had in Phoenix, that's that's one percent of the staff that's getting burdened working working extra overtime.

Our staff right now, there's officers working 200, 300, 400 hours of overtime a year.

If you take two officers at overtime to help with that, that's 8% of our patrol staffing that's being affected, or 10% as we're running now, which puts extra burden in staffing and on our officers just trying to fill the extra responsibilities that this week could create.

Um one of the other touch points was uh council had asked for some engagement with local businesses, particularly businesses that were more interested in the open container idea.

And the one thing that came across was the their goal was how do we get people downtown, not necessarily we want an alcohol open container zone.

So this was an idea, but not something that they were fixated on in any way.

Um the conversations had general support for staff's recommendation of utilizing the SIS the city's existing permitting process.

Um one of the things I asked was they said, hey, I've never been an applicant.

Is this process easy for you?

Is it doable?

And they said yes.

Uh, and so I was pleased to hear that uh government works, that this process was clear, uh, it wasn't overly uh burdensome, and they could get through it in a timely fashion.

And essentially, let's keep doing these city events.

They really enjoyed that.

Uh, we've you know, Milwaukee Fest was great.

Uh, the addition of uh frame has really set, I think, us on a great trajectory, and the permitting process totally supports that.

Um, so kind of the coordination concurrence piece of this uh staff report is to keep building off this current permitting process to expand that, make sure that that process works for our business owners.

We can keep getting feedback to see if there's issues that come up, uh, but to stay that course.

Um, in summary, it's just the current approach to permitting strikes the right balance.

It's between fostering vibrant downtown, we ensure public safety, livability, equitable access to open spaces, and the idea of a permanent open container zone may appear to offer some convenience.

It carries significant regulatory enforcement and community impact risks that outweigh its potential benefits.

So the staff recommendation is to stay with the existing permitting process, uh, continue to support local events while also providing the necessary oversight and flexibility to address uh these community needs.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Um counselors have questions or comments.

Um, I I will say that um your recommendation makes sense to me.

Um I did talk with the city manager yesterday about whether our events staff have some capacity to maybe help applicants with the process a little more and make it a little easier for applicants.

But you're right.

I mean, we have some of the same applicants, free and beer store doing the, so they probably know, you know, most of them know, but there could be new events where people don't necessarily know.

Um so uh yeah, I think um we know we want it to be easy.

I think the you know, the beer, the beer garden aspect of the um little float this weekend, or of the uh having you know, not only the beer at Fream, but the beer down by the uh professional wrestling venue during Milwaukee Fest.

Was a popular was a popular thing.

So um so I think you know, it seems like the businesses know how to make the work.

Um other people, other thoughts?

I have a couple of thoughts.

I don't want to jump in anybody's toes.

No okay all right cool.

Thank you.

Sorry for my tardiness um but I've been following along online and really appreciate the report back and it answered some of the questions that we came that we had in the um in the previous meeting um we have a business that is within close proximity to some of the others that serve alcohol downtown and um so we've had a chance to reflect on this a bit more um just from a different vantage point um having gone through the process and we are not the bar um but we do serve alcohol and um it makes it a lot a lot more oh I'm sorry you can't hear me okay let me get we'll go a little bit closer okay how about that okay um you missed all the important stuff though sort of no I'm just joking um anyway I just want to like we had a uh an event over the weekend in which um for the first time had a chance to use the fully permitted space from the OLCC um and to think about having people moving through that space and coming into you know our business having I mean and some of them were because it was first Friday and so they were drinking in other places and it was a lot to man it was a lot to manage.

It was a lot to monitor we have a system where we have a certain number of drinks you know because it's for a show not um not you know uh not a bar situation um so it's been it's been difficult you know to think about how the implementation would work and I think it would actually um adversely impact our business um to have something you know that that has more of that free flowing um foot traffic um there and and it's hard if you tell someone you know well they've only had one drink you know in my place but I'm cutting them off because they don't look like they're in a position to drive um and then that reflects negatively on me because I'm the jerk right so um anyway I just I I want to say thank you for the thoughtful process and for reaching out to businesses in the area and kind of you know answering some of the questions about um insurance and OLCC implementation um the the piece about trimet I think you probably should have come to mind but it didn't come to mind until you called that out one out so um you know I think that there are jurisdictions that grapple with this topic and they're they're able to figure out some type of implementation and maybe at some point Milwaukee will get there but um I think I think continuing with the application process seems like a good step at this point and uh anyway I just want to say thanks thank you council president uh thank you for coming back with all this information I feel bad it sounds like we're at the same spot we were in uh after our second meeting so I feel bad that you had to come in for a whole third discussion but I think that we've landed in a really good spot here and appreciate all the legwork you've done so happy to if and it was it was valuable talking to some of the folks uh Rudy of Freem Mike at the beer store and those folks in particular who that's more of their business to say how is it for your business how is it for the permitting process is that working and they're just like hey we're just excited about Milwaukee we like the direction uh and just how to get people downtown and enjoying this you know uh experience so not hearing anybody pushing back against the staff recommendation so uh anybody want to make any final comments or shall we move on to the next thing on our agenda okay all right don't feel too bad counsel president he had to be here anyway for the next yeah yeah yeah true enough true enough so now we are going to talk about the public safety fee which we did have someone who wants to testify about and we did get at least one letter on we received two uh submitted pieces of correspondence in advance of the meeting so we have uh again captain verdict uh I mean sorry chief verdict captain oh no not captain uh our finance director Michael Osborne and our library director Brent Hesher

So we have uh again Captain Burdick.

Uh I mean, sorry, Chief Burdick, Captain, oh no, not Captain Jerry.

Uh our finance director, Michael Osborne and our library director, Brettcher.

I think I'm actually kicking this one off.

Um, but it's a pleasure to be here joined by my rock star team of directors.

Um, this really was a it is a team effort and uh and a conversation that spans departments, so that's why you've got the full brigade today.

Uh next slide, please.

Before I hand it over to these wonderful people, I just kind of wanted to set the stage both for council who it's been a while since we've talked about this, but also for anyone watching to kind of explain how we got here.

Um, and it really started back a year plus ago uh in in May when we were adopting the last uh or the most recent city biennial budget.

When we uh brought that to council, uh, we daylighted an issue in our general fund, an issue that we had seen coming, but it was getting more and more acute.

Um I just pause while they work on a tech issue, just because it's hard for me to not get distracted.

I need to not Scott might be able to get you some from our first aid kit when he's done.

Tylenol Okay.

Um Scott's gonna get paying killers for counselor coast for body, and I'll pick back up where I left off.

So uh last last May uh we we brought the budget to you and we daylighted then that there was a there's a stability problem in the city's general fund.

Uh if you looked out over our five-year forecast in year three, we dipped below what our policy says is where we should keep that funds reserves, and in year four, we were into the red.

Now, why?

Um, and and this is not a Milwaukee problem.

This is a cities and Oregon problem.

We have um some structural issues with how we fund municipal services.

I won't go through the big deep dive tonight, but um measures 550 and other constraints mean that our revenues don't increase at the same rate that the cost of providing services do.

And we've kind of known this was an issue for a while.

Uh all cities have, but it became very it's becoming very acute as we experience the same inflationary pressures that our entire community has.

So when we brought brought the budget to you, Michael and I um committed to a three-pronged financial stability strategy that we have been working hard on for the last year, and we'll continue to work on.

It has three components.

The first is stabilizing costs.

So this was you know, you've got to get your house in order.

You gotta make sure you are not having any superfluous expenditures.

We will we were already very lean, but we adopted a budget that was effectively a hold-the-line budget.

We told most of our departments you could not increase um your expenditures, um, which effectively means a cut when when inflation is hurting um is its affecting costs.

Uh the second was maximizing existing revenue streams.

We've taken some um efforts there to make sure any existing revenue um is clearly audited.

We're we're bringing in the money we need to, and we're making the best use out of those existing streams.

Those two features, um, those two features of the strategy have already paid off.

Uh at our last budget committee meeting in May of 25.

We shared an updated forecast that wasn't perfect.

We still have a problem, Houston, but we were starting to see some stabilization, which is great.

Um, but this third prong of the strategy is still needed.

This is identifying new revenues back in at that May budget committee meeting.

We daylighted three recommended strategies to you, and we got consensus from budget committee to move forward with all three.

One is a payment card transaction fee that you adopted um a couple months ago as part of the consolidated fee schedule.

The second is investigating a red light um and speed on green camera program that will take at least a year to develop, but we're moving on that.

And the third is a proposed public safety fee.

Uh, one piece of this overall puzzle.

Next slide.

Um, so why?

Why public safety?

And I think it's important to note that this revenue strategy isn't just any revenue for revenue sake.

We really wanted to make sure we were being as strategic as possible because I have a belief that government should only bring in the revenue it needs to provide the services the community demands.

We're not a profit making enterprise.

We are here to provide city services.

So as this team and I audited our general fund and looked around and said, where are we at the greatest risk of service impacts and cuts if we don't stabilize this?

It was abundantly clear.

It was across what I call the public safety continuum of care.

I'm very proud of the city's uh values, ethics, and commitment to public safety, and that we don't just think of that as one piece.

It's not just emergency response.

It's what you kind of see in this wheel here.

It is response, and I'm proud that we have very good response rates when you need emergency attention in the city, but it's also support.

It's recognizing that we want to be a compassion driven, human-centered safety system within our police department and across all the departments that are interacting with folks in a potential safety situation.

And finally, it's accountability.

We want to make sure that we hold ourselves accountable and that we hold our community accountable to meeting the laws and the codes that we um have in the city.

So when you say that and you kind of think of those three parts of a continuum of care, it's not just police, it's police, it's library, it's municipal court, it's many departments that play a role in providing all these services.

And tonight you're gonna hear a little more from the staff that lead those departments about what that looks like.

So, as I mentioned more broadly, demand for city services is outpacing revenue, but it's really acute in these areas.

These are the teams where you're gonna hear we have not been able to increase or in fact we've had to reduce staffing.

We have not been able to maintain training needs as uh situations become more complex, and we are behind in investing in tools and resources we need to provide the services.

So, as your city manager, I the reason I'm bringing this forward to you as opposed to some other revenue ideas, is because this is where I feel our services are most at risk without stabilization and investment.

Next slide.

So, so the last slide I'm gonna talk to, then I'm gonna hand it over to the experts to really uh explain the the what and the why.

But why I think it's a logical question why are we seeing an increase in public safety demand greater than other demands in our system?

And I think it's complex because there's a lot more complex community issues.

Uh substance abuse is on the rise, the fentanyl um epidemic has affected the entire Pacific Northwest, West Coast.

Um houselessness is something that we struggle with, and um we are seeing an uptick in in Milwaukee.

Um, those two things and more lead to an increase in mental and behavioral health crises that we are are grappling with, and then finally economic pressures.

You know, we um we the all of those three things I just mentioned are volatile compared to how the economy is doing, and we know the economy has been um up and down.

Um, then there's kind of a positive side of the coin too that I really want to say.

We we are proud of Milwaukee to have open arms to services we want to see, like affordable housing, like the new stabilization center, um like the business growth we've seen downtown and the economic activity that's happening.

Those are all wonderful things, and they also increase demand for public safety services.

That's just data just supports that when uh our hillside, um, a wonderful uh uh development in the city was already the highest source of calls to their PD, and it's going to more than double not in population.

Um, these are things we want to see in Milwaukee, but we have to have eyes open that they will have a public safety impact.

So, what we're gonna do now is turn it over to Chief Burdick and then to um Director Husher to talk a little bit about in their departments in their world, how these issues, this increase in public safety demand is impacting their teams, their resources, and the services they provide to the community.

Chief.

Thank you.

Uh so this next slide.

Uh since 2020, our calls have gone up approximately 21%.

When I go to my area chiefs meeting, all the chiefs are seeing uh increased call volume.

We're all dealing with short staffing.

Um we are working our staff exceptionally hard.

Um we have staff between two to four hundred hours of overtime per year.

Uh and one of the things we're also trying to do is we're trying to keep up to make sure that we have the fast response times that when you need us to be there, we are there.

Next slide.

Uh impact on uh services.

This is our incredible behavior health specialist, uh Glenn Sakotic and Officer Morton, that's with us tonight.

Um I also kind of refer to it as BGAG before Glenn after Glenn.

Uh this is an incredibly good model that we need to expand.

But the problem is we only have Glenn Monday to Thursday.

Um the impacts he has are tremendous.

Without there's a chart of calls up there.

And Glenn went with police officers 89 times.

But he had almost 400 plus other types of contacts from touch points in this community.

And when we talk about the service that we want to provide for the public safety, a quick anecdotal story is one of our officers pulled a man over for uh DUI, made the arrest.

Man was at our police station on the autox laser and afterwards broke down and says, I can't quit drinking.

I want to, you know, I'm still trying to work, but I just can't stop.

Instead of taking him to jail, Glenn worked with one of our local partners to see if there was room for him to do inpatient treatment that afternoon.

He made that connection, and we were able to get him into inpatient.

So instead of just taking him to jail, here's your court day.

Uh, he gets out the next day and likely continues to drive, continues to drink.

He's getting the medical help.

Those are the outcomes, those are the smart uh humane outcomes and financial outcomes that make the most sense.

Next slide, please.

Um we have a lot of missions to do.

Uh, we have 33 Shamoran officers.

When I started in 2002, uh, we had more officers then than we do now.

Um not all the officers are active all the time.

It takes a long time to train an officer.

Uh we've had more injuries the last five years than my probably I've seen my first 20.

Uh, we've had three officers hit by cars within the last 30 months.

Um, it is definitely dangerous out there.

We had an officer shot in 2019.

Uh the sheriff's office had two deputies shot in Johnson Creek and Val.

The suspect just pled guilty to that last month and received 30 years.

Uh 18 month training for new officers.

It takes a long time to hire, train, send to the academy, get them back for field training before they're solo uh ready to be released.

Um we've had to implement mandatory 12 hour shifts, uh, actually two times in the last several years, just because our staffing levels were so low.

Uh when we mentioned our behavior health specialist, he only works Monday to Thursday.

There's work all week long, 24 7.

Uh overtime expenses.

Uh our overtime budget is averaged about 410,000, and it seems to keep going up because we don't have enough employees.

We don't have enough working officers.

Uh additional officers will help uh decrease um that overtime rate.

I just want to share a quick anecdote that the chief filled me in on.

You probably saw the news about the uh individual named Looney Toons who uh shot at our officers and evaded arrest.

That like one incident, so this is you know, we've got a major incidents frequently because of having it was a middle of the night or wee hours, you have to call people in, you have to investigate it.

That one incident generates $8,000-ish of overtime.

So it's not just overtime because people want extra hours, it's the actual need of having folks meet the response.

You can't just say, Oh, yeah, finish your shift, come back and write that report later when it's something that someone's on the run and we're doing a major crime investigation.

When we have those large events, it's all hands at the pump.

Um, I think I got notified a little after midnight.

Uh, we all came in uh because we're working that event, and then we also have to maintain calls or ask for our partner's help, sheriff's office to maybe help with some calls.

Uh Portland showed up huge for us, and then working through the weekend to locate this suspect at large.

Uh, he was located the following Monday, but then also he was located in an apartment complex.

So then we rolled out the crisis negotiation team, SWAT team.

We have personnel, uh detective Meyer, she's amazing.

She has our uh canine flora, she's a detective, she's also on the crisis negotiation team and one of their main players.

Uh, one of my patrol sergeants, he's a SWAT sniper.

So they're going to these calls too.

And the overtime rate for a significant incident is always several thousand dollars.

And that's very difficult to plan for.

Next slide.

Um, so it's kind of speaking to all the hats they wear.

We're members of regional task forces.

Uh, our agency takes the point on human trafficking missions in Clackamas County.

We do an exceptional job uh for working uh prostitution related missions or child trafficking.

Um we have a SWAT uh CN team we're members of with uh participants.

We're part of the uh county craft team, uh, and that's basically the fatal or serious injury accident reconstruction team.

Uh we do other things too.

Retail theft missions.

Um, we're partners with sheriff's office and other agencies.

Uh we did a mission at our new seasons.

Um those are important to do to be proactive.

Uh the folks that are stealing at town center, they come into our community.

Um our community businesses, um uh Charles Day Tool Company, uh, they are a fantastic local company.

They moved from Portland and have been incredibly happy to land in the city uh with just the type of community uh and the type of public safety.

Uh we're also very active with neighborhood uh meetings and events.

We do the seven neighborhood meetings and PSAC.

Uh rarely do we miss meetings, but once in a while we do just because uh operational needs or something.

But um that's something that's important to me.

Uh my predecessor, the prior chiefs, we're gonna go to those.

We're also gonna attend the city events, pride, uh, walkie fest, umbrella parade, uh shop with the cop at Christmas time.

That kind of outreaching and kind of outreach uh and community work is something we pride ourselves on.

And when we interview candidates for uh new hire, we tell them, hey, you have to want to do the community work because if you don't, we're probably not the right fit.

You should work for another agency.

And that's an intentional question we we put out there to candidates.

Right.

Thanks, Chief.

Uh, much like the police department, oh, by the way, thank you for uh letting me share a little bit with you tonight.

Um, much like the police department, in addition to those traditional roles, uh library staff are taking on uh other uh other things to sort of support our community and those needs that are so acute.

Um so what I want to do is just to provide the context for how safety uh uh and our services apply within the library and how we are working in that continuum as well.

Just give you a little bit of that context so you have that as you uh think about this conversation as we go forward.

Um in many ways, the library is really the busiest it's been in the past decade.

Um so I want to talk.

We're still doing those traditional services, we're still serving families, we're still serving adults, we're doing programming, we're getting those materials to people.

Um, all those traditional things.

And with the advent of the new library, we also have public spaces for our community.

We have the community room, we have the conference room, we have those study rooms.

We are seeing 600 to 800, or sorry, six to eight hundred people in our library every day in this community.

Uh, that is a number that uh in this past fiscal year is approaching a quarter of a million people.

So nearly 250,000 people walking through those doors.

So we're doing all those good things, and mostly uh it's a good time at the library.

Uh but like when bad things happen, it's pretty bad.

Uh and we'll talk about some specific numbers and we'll talk about how uh police uh and other community partners are sort of supporting us, but we'll also talk about what that impact is uh for the library staff when we don't have that support.

Um, because the police can't be at the library all the time.

Uh and our folks have to sort of think on their uh feet uh and sort of serve the folks who come on in.

Uh and just for fun, because I'm a numbers guy.

Uh, this is the most uh libraries use sort of data points.

Uh you can sort you can compare other libraries, uh, and it's a way to sort of compare over uh the arc of time how you're doing.

Um this was the most items circulated uh in the last 10 years.

Uh we issued the most cards that I saw on record uh in fiscal year 24 at over 40 at 4192 card new cards.

Um if you look back the previous 10 years, it was in the more like 1500 to 2500, so approaching double the new accounts.

Um, and again, you heard about all the numbers uh people walking in the door.

Come by and see us, it's not a sleepy library.

Uh so we still have to do those traditional services, um, but we also have expanded the services to meet uh the needs of this community and their acute needs.

Uh we work with uh Milwaukee Police uh and Glenn, our behavioral health specialist, and Don with the fun and 40 and other uh social services providers to provide direct drop-in services, direct connections uh on Tuesday mornings.

Um but here's the thing about that that's one morning a week.

We are open to the community seven days a week, and people know that we are resourced.

And when people come in and they have those acute needs, we're still the ones trying to connect and facilitate those connections, even if those partners aren't there.

So we continue to do that.

There's nearly daily triage where our staff is connecting those people to those social services, those needs.

Excuse me.

Thank you.

It's time for new.

But here, you know, and finally, I think you all know the library's commitment to the extended cooling uh hours for heat events.

Um even though that is a citywide effort, there are managers and staff across the city, and even some folks at this dais who have sort of helped provide those cool spaces.

Um the library takes a large role of sort of creating those safe spaces there as well.

Um, by the numbers, uh, in the last fiscal year, there were 171 clients uh who were served directly at those Tuesday morning outreach uh with uh police, love one, 4D, and others.

There were 288 uh folks served at parole and probation drop-in sessions.

Uh at the library, we've also found that uh community members who have who are hydrated and have some food in their system, tend to also do better in our public spaces.

Uh and we provided 13 1,327 water bottles or granola bars uh in that last fiscal year.

Uh in an extended hours cooling center, there were seven last summer, and there have been two so far this year.

Uh maybe another one coming up next week.

We'll see.

Um then finally, specifically the safety issues and support needs.

Uh in fall, about two years ago, we implemented a system that recorded our incidents at the library as well as notations on social services referrals.

In that two-year period, we've recorded 323 severe incidents or social service referrals.

35% of those, uh, or just over a third, really did require a uh response from police, our behavioral specialists, or a social worker.

These numbers are good process, proxy, excuse me, but they're also certainly an undercount because uh Kelly and Jan of our two managers are regularly uh in contact with our chief and our captains, our behavioral health specialists.

We're all on text groups, and we're sort of trying to connect very, very regularly.

Um safety and support by the numbers, though.

In addition, uh during that two-year period, there have been 67 calls to 911 or non-emergency, 21 referrals to behavioral health specialists, 24 referrals to left one.

There have been 97 incidents of disruptive behavior.

This is where I go back to say most of the time it's really great at the library, but there are also these moments uh where we're really are managing some very difficult situations.

Um, and we have good response time.

Uh, I hope we continue to have good response time and we have good partnerships, but they're not always there.

And like this team who isn't trained to necessarily do these things are doing a marvelous job.

Um, there have been 80 incidents of harassment, 26 incidents of making threatening statements or assaults, 10 incidents of destruction of city properties.

Uh, but sort of on the need side, I can tell you incidences of people walking in without shoes or without a coat or without shirts, and our staff making sure that they walk out with those things.

I can tell you about folks in full crisis.

My staff, including me, have like approach people in full tiers.

Uh, I can tell you about the time that you walk folks have walked out of the library to people crying that they've lost everything from a fire and trying to make that connection even though they were leaving work so we could get them connected.

Um examples of that.

Uh, but they're also like these dangerous moments of people uh sort of like in full crisis mode, like throwing things off the shelves.

Uh, one there have been multiple incidents of uh people charging at our library staff.

They're not trying to take care of charging people.

Uh and one incident before I started of a commuter monitor being thrown uh in the space.

So what?

A commuter monitor being thrown across the room.

So I say all that, it's not the norm, but like there are these, that's also what we're doing.

In addition to the beautiful things of uh our programming, uh the summer events that you actually talked about at the start of uh this meeting, in fact, those things are also happening.

Okay, so next slide.

The library.

So then there really are resources challenges for the library too.

And we have a very small management team.

There is a director and two managers for a seven-day operation.

And with nearly daily incidents, that really puts a lot of pressure on that team.

As I mentioned, our stay, our staff are not trained social workers or behavioral health specialists or trained safety responders, but they are doing their best.

In this period, basically since fiscal year 2021, we've been at an FT or full-time equivalent of 18.25.

But 10 years ago, it was about 2.17 more or 87 more hours of support.

But as you can see from earlier, like many of our numbers are back to uh to levels that are comparative.

We're still trying to do the same services.

Uh, and then we're also doing these extended services with fewer people.

Um then I guess finally I would just leave with we do have a strong relationship with MPT.

Uh their response is good.

I love working with Glenn uh and love one.

We're all doing our part.

But as we heard, Glenn is uh Monday, Monday through Thursday.

My library is Monday through Sunday.

Um, and folks are in need every one of those days.

So that's my library piece.

You you may have heard some store new recent news stories out of our neighborhood of the north about a very different situation where the library and police relationship is not strong.

So I'm so grateful that we built that true continuum of care.

And it keeps me up at night, um, wondering what's gonna happen when those daily incidents require a call and you don't have enough staff to respond.

So I'm gonna quickly touch on the court piece.

I don't want to um I don't have time to dive too deep here, but that's the third leg of this kind of continuum of care is accountability.

Um we did reduce court FTE during COVID.

Um, and that was again us being prudent uh fiscal stewards.

We had a real decrease in citations and the need for that workload.

It has totally returned.

We are back at pre-pandemic levels, trials are back, um, and we have one staff member for all of court.

Um she's amazing, and I I'm proud of our court being efficient, responsive, effective, and supportive.

And I worry that with one staff member, um, we just aren't gonna be able to maintain those kinds of um service levels um if the citations continue to grow.

So next slide.

So you've heard a lot about needs.

You've heard a lot about um things that keep us up at night and things where we are feeling so thin that all the good stories you've heard become more and more um harder for us to sustain and maintain.

So this team kind of looked across and said we okay, we're we're gonna try to be really uh frugal and prudent here, but where would those investments, where are they most essential?

You've heard Glenn mentioned so many times, you've heard BG, AG, we need another Glen.

We absolutely need another Glen.

If we could have an additional behavioral health specialist, the community would see more than just that Monday through Thursday ability to provide compassionate response.

Um, we'd be able to meet those needs that do not have a weekday focus.

Um we would want to invest in a dedicated training officer at MPD.

I have high standards for the police department as does chief, and we do our level best to meet those standards, but I will be honest with you that with the lean staffing, the mandatory 12-hour shifts, um, we we can't keep up with the level of training that we would like to on things like de-escalation and anti-bias training and firearms training, and having a dedicated training officer, it's gonna help allow us to do that and really walk our talk on all of those values.

Um, we do need more patrol officers to get that overtime number down to get uh to a place where we are feeling confident about meeting that minimum three required 24-7.

Uh, we absolutely do need need more patrol officers.

Um we need more support for the library.

Um, all those things that Brent talked about, you know, we're providing the library services, but there's a whole suite of safety work that's happening there too.

And it's it's unfair and unsustainable to rely on the wonderful staff we have um to do those things.

PD is a great partner, but again, there's a we've got to shore this up and not just hope that that will always be a resource we can call on.

And then finally, court, um, I just think it's a supply-demand issue, and I think we need more efficient, we need more capacity there to do more efficient processing of tickets, trials, and citations.

So the brilliant Mike, who's gonna take this over from me in a second, took that wish list and said, what would be the price tag if we made the investments that we need across this continuum of care?

And you're looking at about 900,000 to a million dollars annually.

Now that doesn't necessarily have to all be pure new revenue.

I think we all feel that if we can bring in some revenue, we can reduce overtime costs.

There's just kind of a magic equation there.

But I just want to be transparent that that is really that target that that would we could hit that I think would make us all sleep a little better at night.

Not that we're gonna be, you know, doubling service levels or anything, we're just maintaining those minimum great standards that we have our communities come to expect.

Next slide.

Uh so I think I'm gonna hand it over to Mike now and talk about why a utility fee is where we land it as a proposal.

Thank you.

Um, so how are we going to pay for this investment?

Um first I'm a resident here, so when I drive in, I don't take adding a fee lightly to the utility bill.

I'm adding the fee to myself, my neighbors, my friends.

I think back to what Chief said on how the staffing levels have fallen since it was when he started here in early 2000s, and I see the need for the investment.

I see the need that uh the first couple slides gave with calls increasing.

So I just want to start by saying this impacts me as a resident.

How we propose to uh pay for this investment is through adding a public safety fee to the utility bill, and that'd be much similar to safe uh and SSMP, which I'll get into in a minute.

Uh we want to add this rate to the city's uh consolidated fee schedule that you council set each year.

You would have the ability to review annually based on needs.

We can kind of assess like, is the rate working?

Are we bringing in more than we expected or less than we expected?

And much like utility rates, it gives us the opportunity to evaluate the fee to keep up with kind of demands.

Uh analogy that Emma had brought up is like a utility system with water and infrastructure.

As the infrastructure kind of slides, you need to tinker with the rates to bring them up in order to keep that sustainable.

That's kind of where we're thinking where the public safety fee goes as we gauge the community's need for public safety.

We can on a yearly basis kind of look at those and see do we need more officers, less officers, how are we doing?

So it gives you a mechanism to review each year.

You can see these are just a couple that we've picked out.

Um I did a poll of regional cities kind of around here, Oregon City, like us we go and things.

Uh, Oregon City has a $6.50 fee currently on their utility bill in financial circles.

This is becoming a popular way to for revenue to support different public uh safety needs.

Um because measures five and 50 have constrained revenues.

This is the mechanism that a lot of other cities are looking at.

And as I reached out to my counterparts today, there was a lot of let us know how that goes so that we can look into it ourselves.

So I think this is a trend that's um becoming popular getting to the proposed rate.

So I went through and worked on a number of different scenarios on kind of where we would be and the annual revenue that would come out of it.

Um this is modeled much like safe.

The majority of the fee would be coming from single family residents, and you can see the four different tiers go from five dollars for residential, uh, kind of a three dollar for multifamily that's apartment buildings and complexes that ranges all the way up to six dollars.

And then we listened to your feedback from earlier when we were going through this uh talking about this through the budget committee phase, and we're doing a tiered approach non-commercial, and that would range based on trips data on the amount of trips that are generated to each of the commercial type businesses, and we range that from a five dollar a month minimum fee to a $50 a month maximum fee.

So it kind of spreads out through there.

We also wanted to exclude low-income residents on this.

So if you're in our low-income program, uh this fee would not apply to uh those individuals.

So based on the monthly revenue fee that were that you all would recommend, it drives the annual revenue anywhere from 635,000 a year to 1.1 billion per year.

And kind of as Emma noted before, that I'd like to think that this money is also working for us, and that if we bring in more police, we can't eliminate overtime, but we can bring that number down so that we can find ways to um help help when we do those annual look at the uh rates to make sure that we're meeting the need.

Hopefully, that revenue that overtime number will come down so we can kind of reallocate and re-look at the rate on a yearly basis.

So we've uh been doing the chief and I and Emma and Brent have been doing a community conversation outreach uh tour.

We began this really last year in fall when we went before the budget committee and we're looking at financial stability strategies.

That's when it started.

Uh in May, I went to uh budget committee and we pitched kind of loosely this idea and got feedback.

Ummittee in July.

Chief and I went to the public safety advisory committee earlier this year.

Um we're with you here now.

Um, we're gonna talk about it next week at the budget committee as well.

Brent's gonna bring it up to the library board.

We put this into the pilot and the MBA newsletter putting that out.

We also uh put together a two-page front and back kind of synopsis of this PowerPoint, just uh hand out here at City Hall for people that have questions, just kind of talking points on why this is such a big deal.

Um and we're having on August 13th a community uh QA town hall downstairs in the dogwood room where the three of or the four of us are going to be down there um answering questions, going over this PowerPoint and listening to uh community feedback, and then we're hoping to have this all coincide with the vote on August 19th, where we would bring before you a resolution to add this fee to the um fee schedule.

If passed, uh, we would hope to adopt it in fall of 2025 this year.

Um, and then move forward from there.

So, Mayor, this is our last slide.

It's sort of some questions we would like to get direction on tonight about are you supportive of us putting this on the agenda for August 19th for a vote?

And if so, um Michael showed you four rate scenarios.

We'd like to get some direction on what you'd like to see in that proposal.

Um, I know you've got some testimony here that you'd like to take, and I just want to end on kind of one note.

I think there have been some good questions of why are we doing this now?

Why not just wait and do it in the um in the spring as part of the budget process?

The the true answer is just the acute need.

Um, as you go from the chief, it takes 18 plus months to hire and train new police officers.

I really am being honest when I say this is stuff that keeps me up at night.

Those PITS reports I see from the library, and and so I just feel like the need is acute.

Um, and you will be able to adjust the rate if you'd like at the next um you actually can adjust it any time by resolution, but we review the consolidated fee schedule annually as part of that kind of budget cycle.

Um, and so that's why we chose to bring this on this schedule was just that need and the need really to be urgently taking action to fill um these service gaps.

Okay, thank you.

Um, I'd like to wait on these questions till after we take our public testimony, but I wanted to invite counselors to ask any sort of clarifying questions they might have of staff if they wanted any clarification of anything that was presented.

I have a couple questions, Mayor.

Thank you for the presentation.

On there were a couple of slides back, um, a reference to low-income accounts.

Um, and it had a thousand dollars in there.

I was wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit and if that um like how that trend is defined, what accounts kind of go into that.

Can you give us some more information?

We have a low-income residential program that we administer, and I think it's based on HUD standards.

Okay.

And I've kind of done a loose calculation of how many in each of the different categories, how many people that affects.

It could be more minus off, but that's just kind of an estimate for it.

So I'm subtracting that out of the if if they were in single family or multifamily um residents to get to that number.

Okay.

So I guess you know, um is it based on uh a retrospective look back of our counts in the previous year?

So I'm I'm wondering if we need to take a larger number into account with um Hillside coming online.

So Hillside is going to be exempt from that because of property taxes.

Oh, they receive a utility bill.

Yeah.

So I don't think they would be, but I yeah, we can take utility bills, or is it uh is it paid by the building?

I mean, you know, is it one utility bill to the whole building?

It's one utility bill to the housing authority.

There is an interesting question.

Yep.

So I'm just wondering, you know, if it's a look back on the number of low-income accounts that existed in the last year, then that will be skewed by you know quadrupling or whatever, five times is.

I think it's a great point, counselor.

And I think you know, we also have an affordability goal.

And so, you know, our team has done a lot of work um to make sure our utility assistance program is clearly communicated, is advertised, is when we are hearing people who are in distress putting their utility boom or connecting them to it.

I assume our accounts enrolled will increase.

I do, and I think it's an important assumption to make.

So I think we it it wouldn't be a bad thing to assume that that line of the minus is going to be higher.

So I'll be clear, I'm not criticizing that program at all in this, and not criticizing anything actually in this question.

Um, I just want to make sure that the numbers are accurate as we're considering tiered approaches to to this, and as we're um giving direction for this to move forward, I want to make sure that those estimates um include a forecasting of future growth within that program.

Um, I also have a question about the schedule for the behavioral health officers or officer and um community partners.

So um, hey, Glenn.

Um if Glenn is working or if that if that position is working, you know, Monday through Thursday.

Is that usually daytime hours?

Okay, because um I guess I'm thinking, I mean, there's definitely a need for a million blends um and Dons.

Um I think that this is a good expansion um to provide that behavioral health support.

I'm noticing more and more um around our community, just in general and very acute instances um, which have prompted me to train our staff on de-escalation strategies and make sure that we have protocols in place.

Um, because you know, folks will be escalating and they'll come in to the shop.

So um, but that kind of stuff happens all the time.

And I'm wondering if with the new expanded, you know, let's let's say this moves forward and you're able to add another FTE to that.

Would that be just more weekdays, or would it be um additional hours, like off the normal work day hours?

Uh we haven't landed on a set schedule yet, but the initial thoughts was to do Wednesday to Saturday.

Okay.

Uh so they'd have one day uh or excuse me, two days that they can overlap and do some combined efforts uh to help each other, or treat, you know, Glenn also have inevitably has something that comes up towards the end of his work week, hand it off to the other person.

Uh that other person could be working maybe at 10 a.m.

start time to a little bit later.

Uh but we do have uh behavior health team in the county is a backstop.

Uh and I do believe they're 24 hours.

Uh the 23 hour center will come online roughly October, November.

Uh that would be another tool that's a resource.

Okay, thank you.

I appreciate that.

Other questions?

Yeah, can I kind of follow down this line of questioning as well?

Your 2,000, let's take so you provide four different options for tiering.

But earlier you say we hope to raise between 900 and over a million dollars in funding.

So it seems to me the only viable tier would be the last one.

Am I wrong?

To be to be clear, we the we were being honest that if we were making all the investments we feel we need just to meet these acute needs, it would have a price tag of about 900,000 to a million.

So, yes, the only one of these scenarios that fully funds that is this last one.

We do feel that in making these investments will reduce overtime costs, which then is a return back to the general fund and and supports this.

So we don't, I believe we can meet those needs.

We articulate on that screen without hitting the exact 900,000 to 1 million dollar target.

And I should also have said on that slide, all of these proposals will be proposed through the budget process, whether that is through a quarterly budget adjustment or through our biannual budget adoption.

So we want it to be transparent about kind of how we got that general target we're searching for, but there's still the budgeting process and the budgeting analysis that we will bring forward.

That's a bull.

Let's take that.

I kind of want to return to that, but looking at these low income numbers, is the 2,000 on that upper tier 2,000 dollars, or is it 2,000 accounts?

$2,000 a month.

If we look at $2,000 a month and divide it by a six dollar fee, we're looking at 333 households that have that low-income qualification, which if we look at all about 9,000 plus units of affordable or of housing in Milwaukee, that would be about 3% of Milwaukee households that qualify for the low-income program.

Or a three percent utilization rate.

Is that reflective in what we're actually seeing?

And I guess where is that low income threshold?

Because I would have thought it would be higher than three percent.

I don't have that data tonight.

I mean, I can look into that.

But I but I think we can definitely say it is your your math is pretty pretty spot on.

It's not it, it's probably not every low-income account in the city is currently being served by the low-income utility assistance program.

The efforts we're taking to increase awareness of that through the affordability goal, connect people to it, will I will I believe increase those numbers?

Um, I do think on the hillside piece, because they are exempt now, um, it's not actually a net loss of revenue because the new units would just continue to be exempt.

I but I will say there's a policy trade-off here.

I mentioned the hillside's the largest generating property of calls, so we would be exempting that property from there, but we modeled this on the transportation safe and SSMP rates, which do exempt those low-income accounts.

So I do think we have work to do to make sure our low-income utility assistance program meets the needs of of all of those who apply for it or who require who meet the thresholds in their community, and we utilize the thresholds for um those qualification rates.

And can I clarify then?

What is I was looking for in the packet?

What is the threshold for the low-income utility relief program?

Is it 40,000?

We thought I read somewhere, but maybe let me just pull it up.

It's in our equity section.

Uh it's 43,000 for a single person residence and up to 62,000 for a residence with up to four people.

Okay.

And I think we often talk about the average income of a Milwaukee household to be about 80,000.

So I'm curious, what percent of Milwaukee households do you think would qualify outside of utilization would qualify for the low-income program.

I think I don't want to speculate on that without doing the so, but we can bring that back on the on the 19th.

We can look at census data and figure that out.

Um I guess this is where I go through this line of question to get it this.

We kind of forecast three percent utilization for a program that aims to hit let's say 30 percent of Milwaukee households.

We kind of forecast 3% utilization for a program that aims to hit let's say 30% of Milwaukee households, and that gap, I think to me, is worrying because we're building a budget projection on the assumption that a program for low-insome Milwaukee is not actually utilized to its full extent.

And so I'd like to just understand that a little bit more, like where we're seeing this in the forecast, um, especially with all of our efforts to increase that utilization, right?

So what I can do, we can we can crunch some numbers with census data on on income and share that out.

We can do that before by email before the um the 19th, so you have that data.

Um this is an accurate reflection of the current registrants of the low-income utility assistance program.

I had a question going back the slide or two to the one about sort of the listing of the another one.

No, probably that one.

Okay, nope.

That one.

So it's um a behavioral health specialist, a training officer, and then it's kind of vague about um how many positions we're talking about.

So can you add a little clarity, or is that you're thinking some of them will be phased in later?

Exactly.

It's a great question there.

And and yes, the way that we arrived at the target was by you know making some assumptions about a number of patrol officers we'd be targeting and uh a number or a type of staff we'd be looking at, um, supplementing the light up library route.

The reason you don't see specific numbers there is because we want to respect the budgeting process, and we're right now not asking you to take a vote on you know budget adjustment.

We'd want to make sure we we evaluate all of that, you know, as those things come up.

Um for transparency, we're looking these assumptions were made with four patrol officers, uh or sorry, two to three additional patrol officers, um, two staff at the library and one more staff at the board.

But I I've you know, out of respect again for the budget process and for um just for the then you know desire for us to be um really intentional about fitting the filling the needs that we have at a certain moment, you know, the things where those will fall on the salary scale, where they will, you know, exactly what their portfolio will be is to be determined through the budget process.

Okay, but you're looking at eight three, four, five, six, seven, eight people probably and eight people.

I mean, I realize not all of them are gonna be at the same budget at the same salary scale, but eight people plus the benefits for eight people.

That doesn't sound like a big enough number to me, actually.

So is that a big enough number for eight eight staff?

And they're it's um their benefits back.

Okay, okay, okay.

Fair enough.

I have more specific numbers here.

Looking at the average amount that we spend per FTE in our budget, we spend about 300,000 per FTE.

And so this assumption would be about 200,000 or about 33% less.

I don't think that $300,000 figure per FTE is accurate.

I think that that's a that's a straight just division of our personnel by number of FTE.

It's and if you look at the you know where where these these positions would fall on the salary scale, I don't think it would.

I'm I I back my finance director who took the wish list of positions, worked with his payroll specialist to put the benefits numbers together and come up with this estimate.

Okay, before we take public testimony, any other clarifying questions.

Okay, and I will ask you guys to maybe step back and we will we have one person who's filled out a yellow card.

Do you have anybody else?

Do we have anybody online you think who is looking to testify?

Okay.

So um uh we'll call up Mr.

Crawford.

We will give you three minutes, which is our typical uh public testimony time, and um Mr.

Crawford lives on Jackson Street, so that's the Hector Campbell neighborhood, I believe.

Yeah, okay.

Oh, thank you for allowing me to come and speak.

I'm glad I stayed to see the transparency now because we saw no transparency here.

You know, all you see is safe at the bottom of your water bill.

Oh, and another fee.

I've lived in Milwaukee since 1962.

I came from Southeast Portland.

I've been working since I have 15.

Been paying taxes ever since in Milwaukee.

So when you get hit with a bill, especially us seniors, we get hit with a bill, we start focusing on not only the bill, where's the money gonna come from?

Opposite end of the spectrum.

She was talking about the infants and the kids.

How about the seniors?

How about somebody that's lived in Milwaukee, you know, for 76 years or above?

Uh is there gonna be a break for them?

I heard everything that I heard was so important.

And I have to stop and think.

Okay, to drugs, so I know a little bit about him.

I was very naive up until that point, until the loss of a child.

We've got to stop the drugs.

Now the people that are coming to the library, I can see right to him.

I know exactly what he's seeing on a daily basis.

I was in the military for 26 years.

I retired as a director of the Oregon Military Academy in Monmouth, Oregon.

I was surprised to see how much that he get out of Monmouth, right?

But it needs to be specific.

It needs to be, I'll pay for that police officer.

I pay for that police officer through my property taxes.

My property taxes went from 1,200 on a home on 45 Lake Road, 1200 bucks, it's 5,000.

Okay, when I retired as a licensed carrying electrician and a member of the military here in Oregon, I made 53,000 a year.

Now you just hit a fee of 40,000, right?

So how am I gonna justify more and more money going out when we don't have any coming in?

We'll get a 2% as a senior, we get a 2%, right?

Medicare takes it.

See the tape, it's always in the tape.

Now, if you're transparent, and we go, we look at our water bill, we go, why in the world are we paying through the water bill?

Why can't we just honestly say that that Milwaukee Police Department needs a couple of more officers?

I don't mind paying for that, and I don't mind paying for the library.

I really don't.

But it's got a hop in your at your three-minute time, so you can wrap it up.

Okay, I'm getting close to my time.

Thank you.

You go.

Thank you.

Well, I don't want to be a broken record.

I want to thank you for letting me allow me to listen to everything that was going on because it is important.

It is important.

And I feel for I feel for the seniors right now, because everybody that I'm talking to in Milwaukee right now is considering after all of these years of moving out of Milwaukee because of the taxes.

And there's nothing for that senior that hits 75 years old, and there's something that we try to get through the bills.

We tried to get it approved, and it never happened.

They need to do something for the seniors, as much as they need to do for the young children.

I'm serious.

But I want to thank you, people.

Thank you for what you do, and thank you for allowing me to speak.

Thank you for coming tonight.

Thanks so much.

And uh, yeah, I will say senior homelessness is on the rise.

We know it.

Um, there's been some statistics on that, and all the, you know, it is it is another challenge in the community for sure.

Um but in terms of how we pay for this.

I mean, we have constrictions.

Uh we have limits on the actual property tax from the state, the measures five and fifty that were passed back in the 1990s.

So this is the way, as you saw, most cities are trying to fill those gaps, is all the utility bills.

Um that is that is all that's really left to us after the after the property tax in light of the property tax restrictions.

Um nobody online and nobody else in the room wanting to testify.

Okay, you mentioned that we got two pieces of correspondence.

I saw one from uh Sarah Wolf, but I did not see another one.

First it was from Elvis Clark and it was received last week and was in the packet.

Oh, oh, it was okay.

Okay, okay, great.

All right.

Okay.

Um with that, if there's no more public testimony, umbite staff to come back up or maybe just Michael or whatever.

Um maybe it's just a matter of council uh council deliberation.

If we need uh Brent and Ryan, we'll summon you.

Um and then Michael, if you wanna um, we can skip around the slides, of course, but if you want to just go to that, the questions, what we really need to walk away with some direction, the the last slide with the questions.

Thing one before.

Yeah, we need to walk away with just clarity and of direction and and and or if there's further information you need before you can weigh in on these these questions.

Okay, anyone wanna jump in.

Go ahead, council president.

I guess I've got a few just clarifications that I would love to see ahead of an actual vote or as you're putting together more information about this.

Um the first, I think Emma, outside of all the work that your team has done on this package, you've also been doing a really important organizational assessment to see where are the needs in our city, how can we address all of the programs and kind of commitments that we've made to our residents versus what we're actually incapable of doing.

And I kind of see seven different staff positions that overlap in that organizational assessment in this program here.

A deputy court clerk, a library assistant manager, a library assistant, sergeant, one to two police officers, and a behavioral health specialist.

Um I guess I still have questions about how those, if those are the seven positions that we're trying to fund.

I would love to see more of a direct breakdown about what we anticipate the cost of those seven positions will be versus the revenue here.

Um, to understand, like I I don't wanna make a promise in those seven positions that we aren't able to follow through on because we don't get the revenue that we expect, or we aren't able to do that.

I think it is when we talk about the need that we seem to see, like these are really core needs that people are experiencing, people want addressed.

Um, and I would hate to, if you're going to raise taxes or fees, um, I would hate to do it, not being able to actually deliver on the needs that we're seeing.

Absolutely.

It's a very fair question, council president.

Um and I'll, you know, I think this has been, and I really appreciate the testimony.

Um, I agree that the specificity and transparency is incredibly important.

You thank you for reading my organizational assessment, you know, materials and and being aware of that.

Um we we can provide that breakdown, but I again I wanted to respect that this is not a budget process right now.

Um the budget process uh and the annual rate setting that we do in accordance with the budget is where we are very, you know, here's our infrastructure needs, here's our staffing needs, here's our resource, here's all of it in a big book and how the rates connect.

Um the re and I I mentioned this in my present or in the presentation.

The reason I didn't want to wait on this is because of that acute need.

Um, that acute need to get going on filling these gaps.

We're not gonna fill that whole list of yellow, you know, needs immediately.

We're gonna prioritize even that.

And we're gonna do that through quarterly budget uh asks to you and and the budget committee.

But I feel um the elements you see there are so important and so delayed.

Um, and the 18 month hiring lag time freaks me out.

That that's why I wanted to bring it here.

Now, again, we can we can show you know the calculations of uh, you know, how that target number was reached, but I just I do want to be transparent and respect that like I'm I'm not here with a budget ask for you right now.

Um because I want to, you know, see as we do with everything, kind of see where the revenues coming in and what our expenditures out need to be and make those proposals.

Um, I think that that's an advantage of a revenue um strategy like this is that this can be dialed up and dialed down.

This would be getting the much needed investment starting to come in the door so we can be ready to act on those needs um as soon as possible.

I hope that helps.

I think that does.

I uh my like slight track would be this isn't a budget process, but we're inevitably gonna have that conversation, and I want to make sure that we um whether or not we decide to fund those seven decisions, if that's a route that we choose to go towards.

Um I want to make sure that we have the funds to I yeah, I hear you, and that's why again we wanted to be clear, you know, that some of what we're proposing here, and um I could have come in with just that final uh column and said this is what we need to get those all those things on the wish list.

But I think that this is um this is an investment strategy conversation for you um with a budget asked to follow rather than a I need this to pay for this right now.

So this is about financial stability, and we wanted to show you different scenarios you can consider from a policy making perspective that begin uh that that stream of investment other thoughts.

Um yeah, first I just want to want to thank you, sir, for spending this time with us this evening and waiting for so long to testify.

Thank you first off for your for your service to our country.

I greatly appreciate that, and for your commitment to our city and community.

Um it's a long time to be in a place and raise a family and commit your life to.

So I appreciate that.

And I and I think what we also have to recognize is what the office side of the coin to these measures would have been, which would have been a property tax increase.

That's the only other funding mechanism we really have.

And if we were to do a property tax increase, you're probably looking at anywhere between 20 to 30 dollars a month, as opposed to a seven dollar fee each month.

The positive part about this too is the fact that if if you do a tax increase, when was the last time a tax decrease has been on any ballot anywhere?

So those tax increases are most likely permanent.

These fees don't have to be, and that's the other leverage that it gives us.

Instead of binding people to a tax increase, um, that seems to be the only solution that governments typically lean on.

We're trying to find another mechanism with the leverages that we have to be able to still maintain what we have while also giving us an opportunity to reduce those costs in the future if we see that our budget is a little higher than it needs to be, right?

Um so I just want to I just want to make clear that that the other side probably would have cost everybody more.

That we we do have a senior population just as much as as we do young families.

And I think with the affordability goal, that's something that we're looking at and we're taking into consideration as well because we do have a pretty big fixed income population, and that's a fixed income population that doesn't deserve to be forced out because they can no longer afford to be here.

Um and again, that's where the affordability goal has come in because we are actively looking at opportunities where we can help people save money on their water bills.

Uh in my hopes, what I'm aiming for is to be able to provide enough incentive to where you're your your incentive could eat the fee and therefore not even have not even be an increase, not even feel it as a decrease.

That that's my goal.

Um but as far as the as far as this fee goes, obviously it's needed.

Um I learned something new when I heard the chief say that the police department has actually gone down in officers since 2002.

Um it's kind of the opposite direction that you want it to go, especially right now.

Um I think we've seen a lot of what you know, this isn't just about the revenue, it's about the pressures that our officers have been under the last few years, um, and how we keep as a public and rightfully so, we demand uh almost near perfection out of them.

Well, if that's what we want, and that's what we expect out of our police officers and our police department, then we need to be able to give them the funding that they need to provide that type of service.

Um, and you know, as somebody that's that's served in the military, 12-hour shifts are not easy when you when you're expected to be at your tip top best, and your split second decision is is a matter of life and death between you and a person in front of you, right?

So that that's a heavy lift, and that doesn't give you much much time to go home and be with your family decompressed, but 12 hours to get sleep, decompress your family be, take care of yourself.

It's not a very healthy lifestyle, and we're asking these individuals to make the best decisions they can at every second of every day of every week of every month, so forth.

Um so I I feel like this does a multitude of things.

It it's it's it's helping us close the budget gap, it's helping us increase the services.

One of them which is concerning is that Milwaukee is the highest overdoses.

And sir, I'm with you.

I lost my sister to substance use, uh, unfortunately.

Um we've heard a lot of countless stories of that, and I do think that these investments are not an investment in the city's coffers, but an investment in the community that we're here to serve and an investment in what we value.

Um, and with all that said, I I do of the options on here.

If we're looking at options, I I would I would prefer we start with the seven dollar option, because that's one that we talked about from the beginning, and I would hate to go higher than that.

Um, but the amount of limited time that we're expected to pass this thing or vote on it.

Um I I do appreciate the amount of outreach we're doing.

Um I I'm not opposed to doing more listening tour of some sort.

Um, you know, being a part of that, uh I'll be there for that town hall too.

I would love to be a part of that because I don't feel that it's just on staff to explain this.

I feel it's on us as well.

Um, and yeah, but I think we would we should start at that at that seven dollars when I just I appreciate all the works that gone into it because it's not easy.

Um I'm a huge affordability guy.

You know, I don't take these lightning either.

I probably complain the most about the visa, to be honest.

Um, but I feel like this is a much better path than a property and a property tax increase at a time like this when we don't even know.

Some people don't even know what's gonna happen in the next six months.

So you're saying your preferences for this seven dollar fee, and you're okay with voting on it on the 19th.

I am.

I I mean I I would like to, I do wish we had a little bit more because this is new right now, everything on here is pretty new.

The tiering is pretty new.

Um so if we were to do something like if we were to eventually if we were to go with the higher rate, I think we would need more time to explain to people because we've been we've been pitching this on the seven dollars.

Well, I mean, we've been talking seven dollars sort of in some of our meetings.

I don't know how much we've been talking to the public.

No, but that's that's what's uh what I'm saying is that's what's on record.

Yeah, we've talked seven bucks.

And people since May have been having to adjust to that.

I think if we if we were to take a ten dollar approach, I think we'd need even more time to explain that that part, but with seven dollars um with what we have planned between now and August.

Um, considering the timeline we're on crunch-wise, um, I I think it is okay.

Um I will agree that I mean I so as I said after Mr.

Crawford spoke, um, we are constrained by uh measures five and fifty.

Interestingly, Milwaukee is one of only two cities in Glackamas County that has some ability to raise our tax rate, but we would have to go to the voters for that.

It is it would require much more uh public uh outreach, uh campaign, and we have other things in the works, such as our parks system, uh where we may need to go to the voters at some future day.

So I would agree that this is the better move that go into uh to the voters on a property tax at this juncture, but I do think it is somewhere Milwaukee may need to go in the years ahead.

Um I too agree that I I'm also thinking that the $7 rate is the way to go.

Um right, I guess council president.

I can also wait to want to jump too.

So uh first of all, I I appreciate the fact that that uh the proposal has come in with a uh uh a mix of uh personnel that reflects the continuum of care that uh is we're trying to uh deliver.

And uh, you know, um I'm just appreciative that you know that you know we didn't get a proposal that says uh give us seven police officers, okay?

Because you know, to me that that misses the mark.

So I appreciate the the fact that you've uh got this mix.

I will say that uh we can analyze this to death.

Uh I'm not a proponent of that because I think that uh money has a uh value at time, and uh, you know, that the cash flow needs to be started as you know, as soon as we can we can make a decent decision.

Uh and so uh I'm ready to to vote uh on August 19th, and I too uh would uh endorse the the seven dollar uh third option.

The reason for that is uh um when I look at the number, it's uh you know, the annual revenue is 840 wallet.

So the projection was 9 million to 1.1 million.

Okay.

So it's close, it's not over the 10 is over.

So uh that's kind of why I settled on, you know, a little bit under.

And uh it may not get us there, but it might it may.

You know, that's close.

It'll get us going and uh as counselor for the body uh uh said, you know, um uh you know uh this has some flexibility in you know turning the spicket on and up and down.

And so um, yeah, I'm ready to vote on the 19th.

Uh uh I'm in column three sounds almost like a straw poll.

Um so I I'll I'll round that out and say that I have um that I support the seven dollar proposal.

Um I think that this is I I think a lot of jurisdictions are going this route because there's just not a mechanism built into the funding for local government across Oregon, and that's we've been feeling the pinch of that for probably the last 10-15 years, but now it's becoming very very acute.

And I think that at a state level, we are going to have to re-evaluate um some really short-sighted measures.

Um, and I know that's a big conversation, it's bigger than just Milwaukee, but um otherwise we're going to have to piecemeal revenue streams together for a system that really just is financially inadequate to support the need in our communities.

So um, yeah, I don't know that I have anything more than that um that hasn't already been echoed by my colleagues.

I just appreciate that we're all on the same page and supporting this.

It's really important for our community.

Yeah, um I'll echo a lot of assemblings here.

I appreciate the work that's gone in, and I appreciate how clearly articulated the need um what we see.

Um I have a like I I really have a few semantic questions that I'd like discussed on the 19th or data brought back.

The first is the costume about FTE.

Um, I would feel uncomfortable whether or not this is a budget conversation.

I would like the ability to fully fund the positions that you've made a compelling pitch for.

And I will not understand that if we take on the speed that we'd be able to do that.

And if you don't believe that's possible, I'd like to understand that now.

Or if you do think it's possible, I'd like to really understand why.

I'd like a little more clarity on the um utilization rate for low-income accounts, why it's so low, why it's a three percent as compared to the actual percent of Milwaukee, whatever that might be.

What we're trying to do to expand utilization and what like what that would look like budgeted into it.

I think that there's to me a real disconnect of what our goal is for the program and what we see here.

Um I just want to understand that a little bit better.

Um I think the other thing that I'm a little bit curious here.

So on the tiers, you have a five dollar residential, five dollar residential, seven residential, ten residential.

The multi-family number jumps around a little bit differently.

Can you just explain how you ended up at $4.2 for multi-family?

And what I I guess I look at that 841 number, and that is lower than the low-end estimate that you gave us of what we need.

And I'm trying to think of creative ways in which we can get closer to the 90s 900,000.

I'd much rather be in that range than below it or above it.

And so is there flexibility in that multifamily number to get us closer to the 90,000?

And maybe that's some options.

We're all aligned on the seven dollar for residential team presenting, but seeing more clarity around what different multi-family numbers would do.

Sure.

Uh, but I had a question embedded in there somewhere.

No, I I I just to just to reiterate what I heard from you, Council President.

We can follow up with uh uh further data on current utilization of the low-income utility assistance program, um, comparing that to the population, and then um projections potentially, you know, for for the work that we're gonna plan to do with the affordability goal.

Two is further specificity on the assumptions on FTE behind that projected target.

Um, which again, I just just kind of want to say like there's there's unknowns too.

So, you know, uh there's we'll get we'll we'll tell you what the assumptions were based on, and we'll still use the budget process for those kind of specific um specific presentations and asks, and then um I think that was was the what did I miss?

Multifamily, yes, multi-family, yeah.

And and great question, and I'll let Michael answer because you know, where maybe that 4.2 came from.

There's a lot of ways you can slice and dice this.

I think when we first brought it to you as kind of a uh just let's throw it at the wall and see if it sticks, it was seven all around, seven multifamily, seven seven residential and seven commercial.

We really heard you on the tiered um commercial.

Um, and so I I think modeling that on the SAFE program was the most logical methodology for us to follow.

Um, but yeah, Mike, you want to talk a little bit about to the multifamily scenarios?

So option two was kind of just a flat residential, multifamily and residential at the same.

And these numbers, however, you want to construct them, I can make them work out that way.

Options number one, three, and four were based on like trips data and how safe was calculated.

So there's a per trip charge that we're putting into that.

And essentially, if I'm looking at this a residential, we're saying is one is one trip, and we're saying in the calculation that uh multifamily is two-thirds of the trip uh per uh residential trip.

So the way I'm looking at it is that apartments we're putting into this uh formula is drive two-thirds of what a normal single family resident drive.

This is what comes this is based on engineering principles and TRIPS data, which I am not an expert at.

But when we went and did for SAFE and SSMP, we do it based on the per trip charge.

And for residential, we hit them at the full one trip, and for multi-family, we we do at seven tenths.

So that's where the two-thirds comes from.

So that's how I got to the different factors.

I didn't answer that very well at all, but that's I well, I kind of got it.

I guess just looking at the prior column, if you did it five dollars, it would raise three thousand more a month, so it raised $3,600 more.

I mean $36,000 more a year, yeah, closer to your $900.

And also too in scenario one, there's five dollars residential, and then three.

You see in the multifamily goes from 10.6 to 17.6.

So by going up that two dollars, you're you're bringing in another 7,000 revenue.

I think that is helpful.

And I the tension that I'm feeling right now is I believe in the math and the like lofty ideas about the differentiation and trip data between residential, single family residential and multi-family residential needs.

Um, and I also as we set a fee schedule for this, don't want to be under that $900,000 in short change or low-end projections of what we would need.

Um, and so having maybe a seven and five split, I think is something that I would be more supportive of if that got us closer to the 900,000 number.

I think that would get you close.

And I should mention too, there is so many different ways that we can construe this.

And I reached out to a lot of other cities to kind of figure out what they use it on.

Ums is more of a flat idea, but I got feedback from council that we wanted to use near the more safe approach.

And so this is how we we got to this model.

But we can make we're open to whatever you're comfortable with.

And and the beauty again of a utility fee is we we can at any moment you want us to come in and present data on what we're seeing revenue trends look like, and we can do that.

And these are um taps you can turn up and down.

I do appreciate the point cover is we have a lot of random fees and programs, and the average person is not anxiously watching all of our videos to understand them.

Um and so the more that we can have the more that we can have kind of a standard system, standard way that we have calculated these fees and a standard approach.

I think that is just transparency baked the system that I appreciate.

So I appreciate all the work you did to me or this is more crypto.

I just have a quick question.

Do we know do we have an estimate of what the overtime savings is going to be per year?

It's a good question.

It's a hard uh it's it's a hard crystal ball to like fully dial in.

Um but I think what we could do, we can look at you know, some of our when we were more fully staffed and aware that, but like yeah, 410,000 a year is what we're using now.

Um overtime is just a hard thing to predict because again, an example of the major incident, but you know, things that are a little easier to predict are employee leave, somewhat injury, although when you have three people get hit by cars in 30 months, that makes that hard to predict.

So I I do think we are all confident.

I'm looking at my team that there would be savings.

And that would be also the that would be the operational or managerial uh direction that we would give our staff is that we're doing this, and so we need to get our overtime utilization under control.

Um so uh yeah, I I we could try to splice diet data for you, counselor customer body, but I I think it's a it's a murky case whole ball.

Well, and it's probably not changing much in the first 18 months while people are getting trained and getting up to but also I guess what council requests are body is teasing out is the 900,000 that you're hoping to raise.

It doesn't already include the savings of overtime or does not it does not that's I liked how Michael put that is this money can work for us.

All right.

It sounds like we got uh we got uniform answers on going forward on the 19th, and we got uniform answers on the $7 rate with a little asterisk about what the multifamily rate is.

So is that good enough?

Or do you want um?

What would be better is if if I could see uh head nods from the other counselors on if you would also be supportive of a five dollar multifamily.

So you're so good at mental math, council president, but if I think it was what 3,000 more a month, 36,000 more a year.

I calculated math pen and paper, but I gotta give Nar credit for saying it out loud.

So seven and five, and then tiered commercial.

And we will follow up with the additional on the low-income utility assistance customers.

Um I think that's it for that agenda item.

Uh we have oh, we do not have another executive session.

No, that's okay.

That was a definite.

Okay, so we just have council reports left.

Uh anybody have council reports they want to give.

The mayor asked me really quickly to provide a quick update on the short or special session that's coming up in the legislature.

Oh, I didn't know.

August 29th is when the legislature will be convening.

I think they plan to be around until September 1st, paper day to try and find some stop gap measure for our transportation goes to be experience.

ODOT has 400 positions that are unfilled and will remain unfilled, in addition to about 480 positions that they have given layoff notice to.

So that's about 800 positions that are being cut.

There are massive cutbacks in what that means in terms of services, plumbing the roads, filling potholes.

Um, that has some people really concerned.

Um, and this doesn't even include the 50, 30, 20 split um about how this money would support cities um and counties were in disparate need of more funds.

So all of that is a background underlying uh stopgap measure that the state's considering.

Um it would be uh much smaller property tax or much smaller gas tax increase than discussed previously, about six cents that would be split three cents, two cents, one cent.

Um it would be very similar to the last day proposal that the state considered, except this maintains the 5030 20 split.

I think the big context here is this does not help fund the projects established in House School 2017.

This does not help supplement programs like Safe Roads to School or Great Streets.

Um all of the kind of aspirational things in a transportation package are not included in this.

It's just accountability work and a stopgap measure to prevent the layoffs this session.

So if the legislature is serious about um making sure that we can repair our bridges on a time horizon that's less than 99 years, which is what it would take right now to replace all of the bridges in Oregon, we're gonna have to look at another transportation package.

So it's hard.

You're kind of constantly having these transportation conversations.

Um, but at the very least, this is what can be passed now, and what can prevent those layoffs.

So you should be prepared on the 29th letters.

I know that it is helpful.

There's a sentence.

LOC and AOC were not active and enthusiastic about the first packages.

Um, and I think that it is hard to advocate for a 5030 split if you're not also at the table advocating for the funds for grace.

So I think there is an important role in cities saying these funds are important.

You see a need if we want to keep getting our slice of the buy.

So are you expecting I had through the MMC had heard uh had seen parameters of a bill that was six cents gas tax, but was also increases on vehicle registration fee and a few other fees.

So the full package, what I've seen so far is a six cent gas increase, some title and registration fees, um, and uh 0.1% payroll tax increase to be able to start awesome, for example.

So they're spreading these out amongst a few different sources.

Um the fee increases are much less than they were in the original proposal.

Um the hope is there are other provisions to kind of create parity in EV payers as well that happened with registration.

So they're attempting to do some of the things in the original Household 2025, but it's a much more cared down.

Do you think we will see a bill before our next meeting before August 19th?

I think so.

It's funny.

Uh Kelly Brooks is the one who's working on transportation in the governor's office.

The governor's office has stepped up much more.

So I've gotten to see Kelly come back.

And it's funny to see Kelly and Mark.

Um, and so she has promised um bills, one pagers, and other information soon.

If you're not seeing anything coming yet, um, but I think that that would be a very good time.

I know that there um there are two ways you can do a special session or one is you have everything planned out and called the special session, one is you call the special session, kind of figure it out on the fly.

I think we're opting for the latter.

So I think there are some last things being ironed out to make sure that you can get quorum, the votes necessary.

Um so I would hope that they have it figured out.

Yeah, I guess there's some um well, anyway.

Uh okay.

Well, thank you for that.

I appreciate that.

Um I wanted to mention, you know, we had a we talked about parks earlier.

Um I had a conversation with some folks yesterday around the uh cut of the senior services at the Milwaukee Community Center.

Um it was presented by, you know, for those who didn't may not remember, um, it was uh the the budget in the budget process in May June was to cut the transportation system program, which is the transportation program rather, which is what brings people to the center, picks people up on shuttles and brings them to the center for lunch, as well as to cut Fridays from the schedule and so make uh you know Milwaukee community center be closed on Fridays, no meals, uh, I guess extra meals delivered by wheels on Wednesdays and Thursdays to cover the weekend.

Um there was an agreement in the there was a lot of public app try.

There was an agreement in the budget process to fund that for six months out of reserves.

There was some uh, you know, some expectation that the county was going to uh lead some kind of conversation around how to um fill those gaps.

Um that is coming up in our parks conversations too.

Um, you know, so looking at us uh for looking by NCPRD and county commissioners at us for providing senior services.

So um just really disappointed when at last week's board meeting, Kia just reported that those cuts will go in effect January 1 and said nothing about any efforts to find further funding.

Um, some people from the Milwaukee Community Center Advisory Board and the Milwaukee Community Center Foundation are having ongoing conversations with NCPRD.

Um, but I just sort of wanted to flag it for people out there that it does look right now, like uh no nothing has uh nothing has been brought forward as uh uh uh a way to address those shortfalls in the budget and those services may indeed be cut at the end of the calendar year.

Um I guess that's it for me.

Any other people with folks with council reports?

No, no report, just a comment.

I just expected a little bit better out of this coming commission.

Pretty disappointing so far like council said I have a little update.

Uh well, I was looking to see if I could find the name of this young woman that I met.

Um, but hopefully she watched until the end of this meeting, and then she'll see this.

Hold on.

Just waiting, staying up, super tired.

Um, so I had this really cool opportunity to meet um a very young member of the I think maybe of the arts committee.

She said she was the the liaison for youth ambassador.

Yes, the youth Adeline.

Okay.

So she was um stopping by different porch fest locations and taking video and taking photos and putting together something um that would be it was just on the heels of like you know, the time capsule and everything, and it just it was so neat, and she was probably like 10, 8, Jesus.

So which just aged me by about eight years.

So um, she was wonderful.

She was super excited, and um, she was doing her job like very seriously, and um it just made me so happy, you know, to um to see somebody um really excited about community events being a part of building community in Milwaukee.

It was really, really neat.

So if you're still watching Adeline, go to bed.

And thank you.

And I and uh the chair of the arts committee, Jeanette and um Jordan, the staff lady interviewed her in late June, and they were an interview right before the arts committee meeting, and she did attend part of the arts committee meeting.

And actually just today, I was like, oh, we owe her an appointment letter.

Um so I'm I'm thrilled to hear that she was out there going after an at Portuguest.

Yeah, she had her official uh she was on the beat.

Yeah, yeah.

And I would love to see the final product of snippets and you know, updates from the perspective of some such a young community member.

Yeah.

Um maybe at a future meeting we can get.

Well, maybe I let her invite her.

Yeah, come back.

I first met Adeline when she came to my one of my city manager open doors, and I mean I could be out of a job soon.

She's impressive.

Yeah, like before she's nine.

I know.

Yeah, she was she was awesome.

She was a firehouse.

So um, yeah, yeah.

Well, that's cool.

Did you see her downtown on a Porch Fest or in the new?

Um Yeah, we were hosting Porchfest.

We were one of the businesses like and that's a really cool expansion of Porch Fest too that businesses are getting involved in offering free music.

Um, so she came in and she was reporting on, you know, very seriously reporting on what was going on and you know, took some photos and videos and um gosh, she was just really, really cool.

And so I, you know, hopefully she's gonna run for city council in this next cycle.

Okay, well, yeah, we will keep you posted on Adeline, and maybe we can try and bring her to a council meeting uh to show her videos.

Um Scott does not have a goose, but I think Scott has a comment.

Well, I'm confusing this for you.

Uh just a quick question for council, uh a request from staff regarding uh August 12th next Tuesday's executive session.

So for well, we noticed it today, uh, but instead of a study session, there'll be an executive session for continuing um executive session that you started in July for uh staff reviews.

Uh there's a request if council's open to starting at four o'clock instead of 5 15.

So I told the person who requested I would convey that message to council and uh see if four o'clock next Tuesday works for council.

It's uh employee reviews.

We're still which employees are we are still waiting on some stuff like that.

Four will work for me.

It will.

Yeah.

Yeah, it would work for me.

Are you okay?

Okay.

Okay.

Council?

Okay.

Sure.

And we'll uh have to revise the list, but no big deal.

So four o'clock next Tuesday.

Thank you.

Okay.

Uh if no other council reports, uh, I will entertain a motion to adjourn.

Motion to adjourn.

Second.

So did second to adjourn.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed, not heard, we are adjourned.