Human Resources & Information Technology Committee - Regular Meeting

Good evening. We're a little late, but I would like to call to order the Wednesday, August 13 meeting of the Human Resources and Information Technology Committee. Please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. I will do roll call of membership since we have not met in a while. To my left.

Adrian Stansel Martin, District 11.

I'm Sherrius Hartz. I'm District 13. I'm the chair of this committee. Maya Jones, District 10.

Nate Wolfe, District 12.

And absent and excused today is Alderman Hayden of District 7 question mark? Seven, yes. Seven. Excellent. Thank you.

Item number four is approval of minutes from the previous meeting twenty five-nine twenty nine, our minutes from 05/14/2025. Do I have a motion to approve?

Second. Have a

motion and a second. Attorney Berwyn will decide who is who. Are there any corrections, changes, notes? All right. There being none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Extensions? And that passes four zero. There are no public hearings or appearances tonight so we'll move on to our action items. The first action item is 20 Five-nine30, request the approval of successor labor agreement with IAFF Local two fifty seven for 2026 through 2028. Do I have a motion?

Move to approve. Second.

We have a motion and multiple seconds. Who would like to speak on this? Director Rachman, hang on one second. There you go.

Great. Thank you, Chair. So this really represents work that started back in February. We took a little bit different approach this year in that we got together. And when I say we, fire management, the union leadership, and human resources, just talked about kind of the state of the union, like what's going on, what's on the mind of the union, what's on the mind of management, etcetera. We brought forward some things about administration of the contract when it came to certain benefits, specialty pay, etcetera. And those are things that we'd like to try to come up with better solutions for. Union also expressed concerns with how they request time off, how that time off is granted. They weren't looking for additional time off necessarily. So that was not negotiations.

That was just discussion. From February, we went into management meetings. Those started in April. I'm guessing the union probably also had their leadership meetings somewhere around the same time. We entered into negotiations in May, and then throughout May, I think we had three different bargaining dates.

Union brought forward a tentative agreement to their membership in July, and they ultimately ratified that which means they approved it so now it's in front of this committee for approval I think it's important just to give you a little bit more information on this action item than maybe I would others because it's a contract. It's a three year agreement, and there's money that's tied to it. So the first thing is, you go through the strike and bold, it looks like there's a lot of changes, and there are. But a lot of those strike and bold changes are simply clarifying language where union might raise a question or management of what did we intend by that and we just want to clarify. So really most a lot of that language is not to change the contract or what the practice is, but to better reflect what the practice is.

Of course, the biggest thing generally with negotiations is wages. And so you will see we have three increases, one in 26, 27, and 28, all effective on April 1. The increases are 3%, 3%, and two and a half. When we looked at our comparables, and comparables are other municipalities, ultimately, if we went to arbitration with, we were looking at comparables between 45%. But it's important when you look at percentages to look at the dollars behind it.

So we felt like total rewards of compensation, structure of positions, as well as like our health insurance, etcetera, that those were fair wages. So ultimately, we landed on those three percentages. And certainly, if you want dollars, I could give that to you as well. The next thing is fire has been doing specialties for a long time. And so some examples of that are like hazmat, technical rescue, swift water rescue, confined space. And what was tied to that is they would get $10 per paycheck for participation in one of those specialties. The problem is administering that $10 per paycheck was an administrative nightmare. Who's on what team? Who's come off? Who switched?

Etcetera. So we were honest with the union during that discussion that we had with them is that the chief would like the ability to assign that work to the employees for that to be part of what we consider to be a fair wage and to get away from administering the $10 per paycheck. So ultimately, as part of the full package, the union did agree to that. So the specialties remain, the skills, but the pay tied to it does not. So that's about a $22,000 annual decrease in pay, but again, as part of the total package.

We have a new assignment that we are the chief has established. I think as everyone knows, fire has raised the bar when it comes to paramedics, etcetera. So we will have three shift EMS shift coordinators. These are not new positions. These will be existing employees who want to take on this assignment. It's pretty specialized, so there will be compensation for that particular position. It's basically calculated if you take the top firefighter rate times three percent and add it on through their hourly rate of pay. The reason we did that is we wanted to have lieutenants and driver engineers and firefighters all put in and compete for that position. Selection process will be best qualified. It's determined by the chief who gets that assignment.

Give you an idea like compensation per person would range anywhere from a dollar $21 $1.21 per hour up to $1.25 an hour, depending on what position they have, whether it's EMR, EMT, or paramedic. Okay? Chief can certainly talk more about things they would do in that role. Promotions. If you go back to the last contract, we brought in or we made some pretty significant changes to the captain promotion process that that's no longer senior qualified.

It is best qualified. So that basically means the chief gets to decide who's the best candidate for that position. We try to also do that with lieutenant and driver engineer, but it's a little different. And so we did not get that promotion process updated to be best qualified. But what we did do is, if you are a lieutenant, you've likely been an acting lieutenant for a period of time.

If you're a driver engineer, you've been an acting driver engineer for a long or a a period of time. The promotion process will now be once you become an acting lieutenant or an acting driver engineer, that starts the clock for seniority for that position. So you get qualified, you go on a position, you're performing, and then it's the person who's been in that grade the longest. So that seemed like a nice move forward. Sick leave, this one was pretty heavy on my mind because sick leave is set up in that new employees, until they hit the top firefighter rate, get four hours per month of sick leave put into their bank.

Once they're over the top firefighter rate, they get five hours put into their sick leave bank. They accumulate a payout at retirement of seven twenty hours, but they're allowed to accumulate up to ten eighty hours. And there's an incentive that if they don't use that sick leave, which is a look back at the end of the year, they can build up to fourteen forty hours, pay out still being seven twenty. Administrative nightmare. To the point where we actually have to map it out each year to make sure everyone's correct.

So we went in to simplify this. We know that new employees struggle with time off. So we're going to have all employees on the same playing field. All employees will get five hours of sick leave per month. Employees can accumulate up to $10.80. That's where it caps off. The payout retirement is still seven twenty hours. So no incentive to go up to $14.40, and so we're simplifying the benefit. Don't really feel like we're taking away the benefit from the employees per se. Same thing is true for PTO.

New employees until they hit the top firefighter rate get two PTO days. Once they're beyond that, they get three PTO days. New employees struggle with that time off, so we're going to increase that to three days across the board for all employees who are under the collective bargain. A big change that the union brought forward is they're not looking for more vacation. What they're looking for is in November when they make their selection guaranteed for what would be called a four slot.

That's important to the members because if you're trying to plan a vacation, let's say in July, and you have to book that trip, those slots fill up fairly quickly. So then you're basically left with coming in the eleventh hour and seeing if some time is available to take off. In an ideal world, is one that required a lot of discussion from a management standpoint because we're guaranteeing time off. You never know what staffing would look like from day to day. But when when fire is running at full staffing and things are working well, that will not cause any sort of staffing issues or overtime issues.

Of course, if things change, you get a bunch of resignations or retirements, you get employees who are injured on FMLA, we could run into an overtime problem. If it became an emergency, we would deal with that like we would today, which is the chief would have to take a step back and figure out a new plan. So that's really what vacation selection was all about. Overall, I'd like to thank the chief. Great leadership on his part. Also, the union, particularly Scott Pelkin did a great job. I would say relations after negotiations between fire management, the union, and human resources are is strong and things went well.

Chief Hansen, would you like to add anything?

District 6. Thank you, Chair. One item I think Director Rachman detailed out the changes of the contract very well. But the one item I want to add is let's not forget the masterful facilitation of these meetings with labor that Director Rachman did. So I greatly appreciate it. I've been in many negotiations, and this one ran the smoothest I've ever been in. So I applaud Director Rachman's efforts.

That's wonderful. Are there any questions from the committee? I have some questions. This may sound like a silly question, but are there midterm contract renegotiations should some of these terms somehow become egregious to any of the parties involved?

Absolutely. I mean, can ask to open up the bargain. So if, let's say, we hit a really tough budget and we have to open up the bargain based on wages, that's always the concern when you have a three year agreement. The difficulty without doing three years is you're packaging things together. And so you're trying to get things, and that's why it gets strung out. But we could. Or if we end up having issues with the new sick leave benefit, how it's administered, we could come back and try to open up.

The latter was my concern more than my former. I mean, the former, we obviously would try to make the budget work for what we have signed on the bottom line as a city once we approve this, assuming we will. But if these other new things that came out don't work out the way that the chief and the firefighters expected to, you know, there's room for that renegotiation.

Yes.

Excellent. Chief Hansen, could you explain more about this EMS staff coordinator? How is that an actual like does someone become that then or is this a you get assigned that for a period of time and then you're not that for another period of time? How does that work?

Yeah, great question, Chair. Thank you. The EMS coordinator is mirrored off of a position that the Oshkosh Fire Department currently has. And it is an existing employee that has excelled in the medical side of the fire department. And there is a ton of work to do on the medical side of the fire department.

Right? It's about 76% of what we do. So everything from inventory to writing protocols to catching up another person that was maybe on vacation during a specific training to quality review and quality assurance of report writing, Those are all things that those individuals could do along with maybe purchasing equipment. So essentially, they're aids to the current division chief EMS. So that is a new position for us.

We don't know exactly what it's going be. We have an idea with a job description that was approved by human resources. But when we start getting into it, if somebody excels in a particular area, they'll focus more there. And then if somebody enjoys writing protocols, which nobody does, then I'd be happy to push that off on somebody That weird as

person will get it.

It just allows us to get a lot more work done with the people that really enjoy doing work on the medical side.

So each EMS chief, for lack of a better word in my vocabulary, would have a few coordinators that will do these certain things? Or there will be one coordinator for each of those? Or how does that work?

We have one division chief of EMS.

Okay.

And then there will be one EMS shift coordinator on each of our three shifts.

Oh, excellent.

So we'll have three of them.

Okay. That makes sense. Excellent. Thank you. I appreciate that both of you and through this negotiation worked through that, PTO structure because I would love for us to see the firefighters take those those sick leave or those days that they're given off rather than keep banking them, keep banking them because I think that will be good for them physically, emotionally, etcetera. And I hope that's kind of the way we were going in that direction. Excellent. Bottom line financially, Director Rachman.

Sure. So I wish I would have given you a running total but I can tell you what the increases individually will be in '26 if that's okay.

Yes.

So on the wage schedule the wage increases on fourone so if I just run that through the end of the year that's about $159,991 in wages. If I run it for a full year, so April through that following March into '27, I guess, would be 213,322. Now that's based on current staffing and folks where they are in their pay grade. Social e pay would be a reduction of 22,000. The three shift EMS coordinators, that would be a total cost between $7,557 and $7,839 again, depending on their qualifications.

Sick leave, there's no impact that I can cost out. PTO at this point, no impact that I can cost out. And then in regards to, coming up with the the guaranteed time off again, if fire is running where they need to be, the cost should be zero. In fact, I've heard fire say if staffing's where it needs to be, they could even potentially run a fifth slot, which we're not going to talk about. But that would be an option. She canceled it. So, no,

we're not going talk about it.

So, there's it's hard to cost it because I could take best case scenario and worst case scenario of any kind of numbers that I want, of like how many people want to leave. And even on the average, it's tough to cost it out because there's a lot of variability during the year where someone might come late in the game and they would not be granted time off because there's four people ready on the schedule. So it's just really difficult to cost that one out.

Right. Thank you for these numbers because these make it clear to me that this is a fair and reasonable expectation between the parties. So I very much appreciate that. Any other questions, thoughts? All right. There being none, all those in favor

of

our acceptance of this pre ratified labor agreement, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? All right. We're four-zero in approval. Thank you very much. Moving on to item number 20 five-nine 31, request of the approval of changes to the city's fringe benefits policy May 2025. Do I have a motion?

Motion to approve. Second.

Motion and a second. If you are like me, you did not see the teensy, teensy little change that was given to us, but Director Raschmann will speak to this further.

So if you go to page 11, about midway down under F, it's called compensatory time. We refer it to as comp time, which is a lot easier to say. In the public sector, when an employee works overtime, you have the option to allow that employee to bank that time and a half as future time off, or to take it as wages as time and a half off, or I'm sorry, pay. So the proposal in front of you is to allow employees to increase that comp time bank for future time off from 40 up to 60. And how this came about was our culture team was out meeting with groups of employees and asking what was important to them.

And we were hearing from public works in particular that this is was a common request from the employees, particularly new employees who don't have a lot of time off. So I then engaged with the supervisor group, the deputy director, and ultimately the entire director team about this concept. And everyone is in support of increasing the bank. If you can think of like public works, when do they work their overtime? A lot of times they're held over because of a snow emergency.

And this would allow them to put those hours in the bank. And there's still management discretion on when to approve it. So if it comes at a really popular time, it would not be approved. So there's certainly risk to the organization in that you are carrying forward larger banks of future time off, or if an employee ever chose to cash it out, it would be at a higher rate of pay than they earned it at. But to give you some perspective, we have 12 employees today who are at forty hours.

So we're not talking about a large group that are getting to the maximum. Generally, when employees get to the maximum, they're drawing it back down. This would allow them to get to a higher level to draw it back down. So it I I don't think the risk are significant and it's definitely something that our employees were asking for.

Excellent. Any questions, concerns? Oh, Alder Wilson.

Thank you, Chair. Yeah, I think that's a really great idea. Especially in general listening to the employees and being receptive of what they're saying and then actually implementing it. So yeah, kudos around to making that change

for JULIET J. Our Anyone else? All right. There being none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Attentions? That passes four-zero. Thank you very much. We'll move on to informational items. Is no AL after information. Twenty five-nine thirty five, the 2025 Mid Year Budget Report for IT. Director Popp, would you like to queue this up or are you just going to take questions? Which would you prefer?

I'll queue it up a little bit. There's just a couple of things I want to mention, maybe not even specifically to the budget, but just some accomplishments. So I'll start by saying it's all in the memo. We're in good shape. We're going to be fine this year. There's no risk to the budget whatsoever. I described in the memo the worksheet or the table that I attached on page three. The first three monetary columns are straight out of the ERP. You can run those, see those on financial reports. The carryover, I manually entered, Double checked, triple checked those numbers. Those are correct. Any budget overruns I have are covered by the carryovers. They're just not entered in the ERP system. That's to say they're not even pending. They were approved in May.

It's just strictly paperwork at this point. They are that money is there. So I'll take questions on that in a moment. But I did want to point out some key accomplishments that are on the second page. And specifically, I want to talk about a project that's been in the works for about two years that finished two weeks ago, and that's the utility billing project. So we've I reported on that back in April. We had a request to just update the committee on all of the ERP statuses. And I repeated some of them here. But back then, I had said I was hopeful, if not a little bit leery, that we'd actually be able to go live in July. And we did go live.

We went live two weeks ago, mostly without incident. The balances came over to the penny on all accounts. We have residents already making payments. We have that very same day of the conversion residents making payments into the new system right away. So I'll defer to finance committee and utilities committee as to details on that conversion.

But from an IT standpoint, we have some there's work to be done yet. We haven't completed a full bill run actually yet. We've just done move out bills or if you're familiar with those or familiar with utilities. But otherwise, it looks really good at this point. I'm also going to mention that we are looking to set up in November the last kickoff meeting to the ERP project, and that'll be for enterprise permitting and licensing.

That's the last module approved by committee back in 2016 to move off of the I series onto the new ERP platform. We're estimating that's going to take about a year. So with a little bit of luck and some planning, by end of year next year, we will be fully migrated to the Tieterm unit system. I'm very happy to report though as of now, my biggest concern I think committee shared it as well. All major revenue right now is coming directly into the ERP system. So there's no cash flow issue electronically with the risk of whatsoever with the city right now. So with that, that's my mid year report. I can take any questions either on projects or on the finances department.

Excellent. Anyone have any questions? Of course, I do have a question. You mentioned, Director Popp, the, RingCentral telephone system.

Yes.

I have noticed in communications with city staff that there seems to be a bit of a time lag. Is this a problem that you're hearing about, or is this something that people are just starting to just deal with?

I have not heard that. Okay. So a time lag on

Meaning, I'll be saying something and the other person is saying something, and then we both go, Oh, go ahead. Okay. Because there seems to be a little bit of a delay in the city's staff hearing what is being said to them on a phone conversation.

Okay. I can follow-up with that. I have not heard that.

Okay. You has anyone else experienced that? It's rare when I make a phone call in the first place, but when I do make a phone call, I start to notice those kinds of things because it's that weird little delay. And it's not significant but it's a little. It's annoying. It is a little. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. Any other questions, comments? Alright. Thank you very much, Director Popp. We will move on then to item number 20Five-nine32, the twenty twenty five Mid Year Budget Report for HR. Director Rachman.

I think a lot like Director Popp, I'm happy to hit a few highlights. So far, ran some new numbers today. We're at about 32% unspent of our budget. We're right on track. There's no areas of the budget that I've identified that are of concern, areas that we should run over or, based on what we're doing have to come back and ask for additional money. The highlights that I'd like to talk about is the health insurance program. The money for the program for the claims is not in the HR budget, but the administration of the program is. But that program year to date is running well, knock on wood, because you never know with claims. I would expect by the end of the year, claims will go up. They generally do in October, November, December.

Right now, our loss ratio is at 90%. It doesn't mean that costs will not increase for next year because of trend and other things. So but things like specialty drug program, Prudent Rx, Proximal, this is the incentive to use high quality, lower cost doctors, as well as the Connecting Care Clinic are doing a lot to help that program. So they all have positive returns year to date. The other thing is, well, you just approved the fire contract, so I don't need to highlight that one.

But a few meetings ago, I brought forward a side letter with Teamsters. And basically, we asked to increase open the contract, in a sense, by creating a side letter to bring up master mechanic rates. That those rates were so far behind the market. The position had been open since, I think, May '24. We weren't even getting applicants. So that's on here. We established that, and I'm happy to report we have a candidate starting at eighttwelve. So we didn't go crazy with wages, but they are competitive, and they're competitive with public works. So those are just a few of the highlights that I want to bring forward.

Excellent. Alder Jones. Yes. I had it. It's just getting late. You're getting it. With

your culture group, I would strongly encourage them to consider when they're doing a chili cook off or any of their, you know, competitive things to find a process to maybe tap in an older person to and just share their skills. Just a thought.

I concur not just for the chili and the other cooked items, but because I think it is important for city staff to be, you know, understanding and easily able to speak with any elder person at any time. I think that would be good for both parties.

I think you both just signed up, right?

Hey. Right now, of course. Don't schedule it now.

It's definitely not because the firefighter's silly at all, you know? But I agree with that. You thought me.

Let it throw

me in there.

Any other questions, comments? All right. Thank you very much, Director Rachman. We'll move on then to item number 20 five-nine 33. Again, Director Rachman, for the Employee Mental Health Resources memo that you've prepared. Thank you.

I'll just say a few words, and Alderperson and I talked about this ahead of time, so I can drop a name now. But so one of our meetings, were talking about an open position, and mental health became one of the questions. And then outside of that meeting, Alderperson Wolf and I were talking about mental health. And some good questions were asked about what do you offer to your employees. So to me, that it serves an opportunity to tell everyone on this committee and anyone who is watching our minutes and all the person in hard time, you've on this committee for a long time, probably as long as I've been director.

We've done this once before where we've reported out. So this was just an opportunity to really get my arms around everything and share with the committee all the good things that we're doing that are traditional and nontraditional for our employees to support their mental and well-being, mental health and well-being. Yeah.

Alderwolf? Thank you,

Chair. Yeah, I'm new to this committee on NASA release, so and having that conversation. I appreciate the report. But I'm very impressed with the amount that we're doing and some things that I wouldn't have thought we were doing. And I don't think many other businesses do some of these things. So us being kind of ahead of the game on some things that I think are pretty innovative, I'm really impressed with the report, and thank you for putting it together, and for implementing these policies, keeping them.

You're welcome.

Alder Jones. See, didn't even know that. I

I really want again, great job. I I wanna highlight how excited I am about the position specific employee resources. I am a child of a public safety retiree, so please fire and rescue. And there's a lot of trauma just to do your job. And I think giving and having that available is what makes truly shows that we care about our team and make them the best possible. So thank you.

I agree. Anyone else? I just oh, sorry.

Sorry, no. You. So it says on page one that the HealthSmart team chose to focus on mental health as one of the top issues in 2025. Is that because of employee concern, or is that something that you decided how did you come to that decision?

There's a variety of reasons. One, so our wellness committee annually does planning. And they get a lot of intelligence information from the health plan. So no individual, but like what are the trends. They get it through the EAP program. We see things through workers' comp. So they gathered all that data, looked at our employees as to what some of those trends would be. Also looking at national data, as well as community data of I know our council has talked about this quite a bit. All those factored into that should be one of our top priorities moving into the new year.

Gotcha. Thank you. Yep.

Thank you. Director Raschmann, I was really interested in this comm psych.

Yes.

I had not heard about that before. Has that been something that has been available through the city's EAP for a long period of time or is that something relatively new just because, you know, COVID and post COVID, lots more mental health professionals are offering online service?

So we've had Comm Psych for quite some time. We've had other EAP providers as well. But we've been with Comm Psych for quite a while because they're nontraditional. So they do offer traditional coaching or I'm sorry, counseling in person, via phone, or as well as maybe like via Teams or Zoom. But they also have a lot of other resources. I'll give you like a really nontraditional one. New employee to the area struggling with finding out who are the daycare providers in the area, they can call Comp Psych and they will do the research and give them a list. That's just one example. Or aging parents. What are my resources for aging parents?

Financial wellness, attorneys that I could turn to you. They won't necessarily give you the legal advice, but they'll get you connected with the right resources, etcetera. So it's the traditional six sessions counseling, but also those nontraditional resources, as well as if you go to their website and register, the amount of resources they have on there, it's just it's amazing.

Would you say that the average City of Appleton employee knows of this existence and this is something that they can regularly tap into?

You know, we reinforce it through new employee orientation, general employee training annually. We have it on the HR page. We train our supervisors how to use the resources, etcetera. I don't know if you if you poll the employees they would all say they know all the resources, but I I think we promote it pretty heavily.

It's awesome that you can take a you don't have to know somebody who knows somebody. You can say to all of your supervisors, Please let your folks know if they have a question about, Hey, how do you do or Where do you get this resource from? That they can ask them or have them tap into that. I appreciate that. Anything else? Alright. I believe that was our last oh, no. We do have the RSR. Item number 25Dash0934, recruitment status report for 07/31/2025. Director Rashman, any highlights?

You're probably getting sick of hearing me, so I'll make it really quick, but I'll get ahead of you on the drivers. We had one driver start on Monday. We have a medical pending on a candidate. As we I touched base with our staff, they're looking to add at least one more to the schedule. That's based on today's numbers. Okay. Electrical inspector, I will tell you the it's hard to find inspectors, but we do have a final candidate. So I'm expecting that start date will show up soon. And then administrative services lead, this is the deputy city clerk. So as Amy Malitor was promoted to the clerk position, this position opened. We have a start date of September 2 for that position.

Thank you. I am looking at the two well, I guess I'm looking at the Police and Fire Commission interviews scheduled all the way out into November. Is that common? Is that something that they just sort of batch them to that period of the year? Or like, does that stymie the city because they have to wait through that period of time to a PFC interview?

So this isn't as much about the Police and Fire Commission not giving us dates as it is mapping out what we think will be domino effects. So if you look at assistant police chief forming a list to have a list of potential captains, potential lieutenants. So they have to put in for the position. There will be screening interviews, etcetera, and then having police and fire commission being part of it. So it's really about the timeline, more so than, and having everything line up versus the Commission not giving us dates.

Sadly, when you think about it, November is not that far.

Great.

Anyone else have any questions or comments? Alder Woolf.

I was going to cheer on the master mechanic of one being filled, but you already talked about that. Wasn't going to question the bus drivers. So, you know, I just wanted to put that out there.

Anyone else? All right. There being none, we will move on to item number eight.

Motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn.

Second. Many motions, many seconds. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. And we are adjourned. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank