Okay, we'll go ahead and get the uh CSO budget process and parameter work discussion online.

And uh do we have uh you want to kick us off?

Yep.

All right, thank you, Mr.

Fleming.

Um the CSO subcommittee met.

Um at some point I'll defer to them to kind of guide the conversation and give their insights to what they were thinking and why.

Um agenda packet has some notes that uh were taken.

Um apologize to Barbara, I just raw put them in there.

Um but what she had is is good and it is all relevant, and so I have no regrets.

Um called the middle of page one, it says staff staff recommended menu of potential edition or additional requirements.

Uh exempt documentation.

Um so we presently request tax documentation.

We presently request tax documentation, um, but it's hit or miss what they provide.

Uh and it's fairly inconsistent.

And so the thought was to request a current tax exempt letter.

Frankly, it's typically the original letter that they received, they just put the current year's date on it.

Um, but at least it'd be consistent across the board and everybody'd be providing the exact same information.

Uh the second recommendation that we made is that um just stating a potential conflicts of interest as it relates to receiving the grant funds uh and members of their specific board or members of the organization of how the funds are going to be expended.

Um not to say that uh say a member of the board is a contractor balloon supplier and they need balloons for their event.

It's not to say that you couldn't necessarily buy balloons from that board member, but at least state the fact that we're gonna buy balloons from board member X who supplies balloons.

Uh that way it's it's fairly transparent.

We're gonna use this money for this purpose to this uh entity, which may or may not be on the receiving end of this grant.

So that was another suggestion is just to have some type of statement of conflicts of interest as it relates to expenditure of grant funds.

Um then the third piece is kind of a continuation on that last one, but a little bit more formal reporting as it relates to actual expenditures.

Um we don't want to make it exceptionally onerous.

Um we understand that these are smaller, less sophisticated organizations, but I do think it's important to have some accounting of where the city's funds went and what they were spent on, and so just getting some type of uh QuickBooks or or even frankly receipts, um some form of documentation when they're providing the reporting that says you gave us this much money, here's what it went towards.

Um, and something a little bit more than a simple statement on a piece of paper.

You know, by having a QuickBooks report or some accounting report and/or receipt, there's there's some tangible correlation between what the money was spent on and and to whom it went.

So those were our three suggestions for the subcommittee to incorporate into the um into the application and the reporting.

Uh take a step back.

So when we're talking about CSOs, there's kind of two buckets of CSOs, right?

There's the community service organizations who do things and provide services, and then there's the CSO events.

Sometimes there's an overlap where one will do both.

Um sometimes they're very separate but but equal entities.

So the recommendation was for these three to be applied to both the CSO organizations and the events.

Uh, I think there's an applicability uh to either of them.

So there was fairly decent consensus among the group to adopt all three of those, and so we we wanted to make sure that there's consensus among the entirety of council to do that.

Um there's some conversation on a few other topics that there wasn't necessarily consensus on, and so we wanted to see if the whole body of council had an opinion one way or the other.

I guess I'll stop there if we want to talk about the the three staff recommendations.

If those who who weren't in the meeting had comments, or if those who were had further insight that they wanted to share.

So, yeah, uh what I'd like to do is uh go through first with the three members that are on that committee to hear from them first, because they've been working this issue the most, and uh start with you guys.

So uh would you go ahead and yeah, um, so regarding the three um that staff uh recommended.

Um the one thing that I do hear from the public when it comes to CSO events.

While not everyone in the public agrees on every single CSO event getting funding, the one general thing that I do hear from the public is that they want accountability.

And so these three made a lot of sense to me.

Um it just provides that accountability, it shows that we are doing our due diligence of um you know, making sure we've got documentation that the public I think is requesting.

So for those three items, I see absolutely no reason why we would reject any of them.

Uh yeah, the three items that were staff recommended, we all thought were uh pretty reasonable.

The third item, more formal reporting of actual expenditures to a company existing biannual progress reports.

Um we we did ask for a little bit more detail on exactly what that would entail on his face.

It sounds great.

We don't want people to have to bring in a ream of 500 receipts ideally, but if they you know, especially you know, later we can in the in the other discussion, we kind of talk about maybe having like a dollar threshold of like you know, if they if they bought a piece of equipment or spent something on a vendor that's like a thousand dollars or more or something, a receipt for that would be good.

We don't need receipts for like or well, in my opinion, I don't know that we need receipts for things like you know, balloons and streamers and things like that.

Hello, Olivia here.

Um, I want to take a step back too, and just for new council members, explain what community service organizations are, and those are nonprofit kind of grassroots civic groups that are dedicated to providing unpaid charitable services that address local needs and improve public welfare, and are it's things that the city of Valdez would like to support in our community, but they don't want to take that on as the city and have one more thing for the city to um you know provide operational human beings to support these um different organizational goals and initiatives.

Um, and then some of the CSOs, some examples of those are the AVV, the advocates for victims of violence, um, the Valdez Adventure Alliance, Lynnette Oliver's here tonight, um, the Valdez Avalanche Information Center, and then the events are organizations like the Snow Machine Club, and he was talking about that overlap thing, and that overlap thing is like when at uh Aldi's Adventure Alliance, they'll have like a bike bash event every year, and that's like an event, and then they had a hiking event up on little Odyssey one year.

Um, so those are like considered events, but they're run by CSO organizations, but the funding buckets are a little bit different.

And CSO organizations historically, when I first started on council, there wasn't a lot of accountability.

Like we didn't really know what people were spending their money on, and there wasn't ever like a three, or maybe there were, maybe I'm wrong, Sherry Pierce.