Council - workshop

I mean, it was mostly unoccupied. I mean, there's no light stretches. Maybe the towns all touched. Yeah. And.

We'll call the council work session to order on Tuesday, September 8th, 2026 at 6. PM and ask the city recorder to call the roll.

Council President Briggs is excused. Councilor Berrientos?

Here.

Councilor Blosser? Here. Councilor Fitzgerald?

Here.

Councilor Holzapfel?

Here.

Councilor Jantz is excused. Councilor Schilling?

Here.

Councilor Shane? Here. Councilor Spivey? Here.

All right, we have a quorum. First item on the agenda, the City Manager's Office Annual Report. Okay.

good evening mayor and counselors thank you for the opportunity to share the city manager's annual report and so just first a quick refresher on where our office sits mayor and council sit at the top of the organizational chart and are supported by the city manager the municipal judge and the city attorney and under the city manager my role as assistant city manager works alongside the finance director police chief fire chief down through the economic and community development director, public works director, and library director. Brian and I divide up supervision of the departments and shuffle that supervision every once in a while. It's a lean structure, but we cover a lot of ground. So what does our office do day to day? We handle strategic planning and implement the city council's policies and directives. Human resources, risk management and employee relations run through us. We are home to the city recorder function, which includes records management, codification, elections, that area is really all Kim and she does a phenomenal job. General administration for the city. So while this presentation focuses on what we directly work on, as you see all of the annual reports that follow over the next few months, we help with administration on all of the things you're gonna hear about from those departments as well. We help with budget preparation and management, communications, getting information out to the public. And Alison does a great job and keeps very busy doing that. And finally, staff support for city council and committees.

Steve, that slide, you remind me of something I wanted to ask. This is really comes in, has mostly to do with the way we budget, but budget season is finished. So I'm going to ask it now. The general administration support that you provide to all the different departments, do we do any kind of internal bill back for that time?

And part of Brian's salary, for instance, is spread among some of the different departments. So yes. So that's the umbrella kind of what we do. And now I'll walk through some specifics of those areas. So city council goals, we gave the final update on our current two year goals at the August 3rd council work session. And just as a refresher, those goals were community safety, balanced economy, community growth, welcoming community, and recreation. And we'll talk a little bit later about the next goal setting session that is coming up later this year. We had some federal legislative success. We secured $500,000 for the Loch Rial sanitary sewer main project, that's phase two, and $500,000 for the James Howe Road water tank project. So a million dollars in federal support for two projects that will directly improve our infrastructure. On the records management side, staff has continued to digitize our records and transfer them from lots and lots of paper to the Oregon Records Management System. We have identified certain departmental staff that need access to that and have gotten them licenses and user access and continued training all of those departments on how to use that records management system. Yeah.

licenses don't cost us anything, do they?

They do. It's like $30 a month per license. As they get more users, the license costs will go down. And that's statewide users, not just us. So the reason that records management particularly matters right now is that we have a couple of upcoming moves. The Public Works are relocating to their new building and City Hall staff will be relocating to the itemizer. So our hope is to not move paper with us when we go. Just to give you an idea of the scale, Kim has emptied several filing cabinets already, and we have over a thousand files left to go just in her records. I have managed to get down to two file drawers in my office as we digitize to get over to the new building, but we've got a lot of work to do.

Where is this hosted? Somewhere in Salem?

No, it's east. I think it's eastern Oregon.

The server and data center is in Baker City.

So moving on to permit and license activity, we serve as kind of a vital point of contact for our residents and business owners. We processed a pretty steady kind of volume of applications across various categories, including 12 solicitation registrations, 24 special event and block party applications, which shows that we've got a pretty active community. 16 civic center rentals, 12 itinerant merchant permits, 3 noise variances, 3 regular OLCC applications, and 14 temporary OLCC applications, 20 parking variances, and 1 RV parking permit. And, you know, again, that's quite a volume. There's a lot of work involved. Kim takes in the application. There's usually background checks that have to go for several of these. We've got to run things past insurance and all of the department heads and Kim coordinates all of that. So it's a lot of work. Um, and you know, it, it makes sure that our, our community members are safe and everybody's following regulations. So, um, whoops. What did I do? So onto hiring and retention. We currently have 183 employees, or at least we had 183 employees at the time I did this slide. It fluctuates mostly because of the lifeguards. Of note this year, we hired a new police lieutenant and added an apprentice mechanic position and had two internal promotions for a water distribution supervisor and a recreation coordinator, which were promoted from within. The number I'm pretty happy with is 88% employee retention, which is above average for governmental agencies. And that includes our lifeguards, which they really do come and go pretty frequently, just given the nature of the folks we hire at the pool. So this shows me that we are a place that people want to work.

It's a wonderful number. Just out of curiosity, are we a little bit above average or a lot above average?

Not tons and tons, but I want to say it was 78%, 79% maybe. By above average, you mean above the statewide average? Above. That's a national average for governmental agencies. So I also handle risk management. This year, we worked very closely with our CIS risk management consultant and our citywide safety committee on ways to improve our safety. And we have noticed that that paid off. We went from 19 workers' comp claims with an incurred loss of $547,000 in 24-25 to only five claims last year with $74,000 in incurred loss. And that won't impact our workers' comp experience rating a whole lot yet because 24, 25, and 23, 24, we had a couple of pretty significant workers' comp claims. It's the public safety workers' comp claims that tend to get expensive, but the number of claims went down significantly. And so we're going to continue working. The safety committee is continuing to work to make sure that we keep that number down. So the big news this last year has been the police station in city hall plan. So after the police station bond failed, we've had value engineering attempts to reduce those project costs and we just couldn't get where we needed to be. So we pivoted and an alternative plan was developed to relocate city hall functions to the old itemizer observer building, and then repurpose this building into a police station. So to fund that transition, the council introduced a new facilities and equipment fee to pay for that work while also reducing the stormwater fee by the same amount. So it was a net zero impact to our rate payers. And permits have been issued for the IO building remodel and work is well underway for the conceptual design and the seismic upgrade plans for that new police station.

To in order to for basically economy of scale and and rather than doing it in pieces spread out over the for this building.

Yeah, you're stealing my thunder. That's the year in advance.

I'm sorry. You didn't say it was confidential.

It's not confidential. It's on a future slide. So public engagement. And again, this is Alison's work. We had a lot of public engagement this year. 12 newsletters were issued with 617 subscribers. We have 622 new subscribers in the last year on our social media. We had 200 posts, 834,000 views, 7,600 post interactions. Over 120,000 views on our reels, all increases over last year. We issued 15 public press releases, had three public open houses, printed 10,000 activity guides this year. For the third year, we've issued that. We had 42 episodes of our podcast with 266 downloads, 42 subscribers, plus our 296 YouTube subscribers. We created the Council in 45 Second videos, averaging 2,000 to 3,000 views per video, and we had 586 participants in our community survey. So we are reaching a lot of people in more ways than we ever have. so on april 21st of this year the staff and counselors held a recognition event for our volunteers that serve on city boards and commissions the council also adopted a volunteer recognition award policy in order to honor those who give their time to make dallas a better place to live work and play So our nominations for this will open in January for our first awards night. And just as a reminder, we've got three categories for that. There's the youth volunteer, there's the Bob and LaVon Wilson committee commission and board volunteer and the Bowman family outstanding volunteer awards. So be thinking about who we can get nominated for those, encourage people to be thinking about that. As I said, nominations should open for that in January. And the Council adopted the Community Excellence Challenge Recognition Coin Program. The design that you guys approved is with the sculptor. It'll take her a couple of months to get that done, and then that'll be ready to start printing the coins. The Council approved 13 ordinances and 23 resolutions since we had our last annual update. A few items to that you know are worth mentioning we restructured the rates for sewer and water services and. kind of modernize them so that they better match what we are offering services to we establish the facilities and equipment fee that I mentioned earlier, and we updated the fee for the floodplain development permit to better reflect that the actual cost and to recoup that cost. And we are continuing to focus on reviewing our current code to clean up outdated, unnecessary language, modernize things. Updates so far have included eliminating the fee waivers in the code because we had determined that those were also covered elsewhere. We regulated e-bikes. We're allowing non motorized vehicles in the central business district clarified who maintains those mid block sidewalks and we are going to continue the review and update of that code. So. Now we get to look ahead. It doesn't even look like this anymore. I took this picture last week and already City Hall looks a lot different. They have pretty much finished framing of our new City Hall. Dahlke has begun work on the IO remodel and Oregon Corrections Enterprises will begin work on our furniture soon. We're just waiting for a final quote so that we can get a PO and get them started on that. And we anticipate moving into that new building by Christmas. And just to note, the council chambers will remain here for now until we remodel this building and get the seismic upgrade done. So police station next steps, the seismic report and cost estimate should be done by the end of December. They are working on that now. They've walked through the building and the structural engineer took a bunch of notes. So they are working on that. provided the legislature allocates funding, the next seismic rehab grant application period will open next fall in 2027. And so we should be ready to apply for that grant. Fingers crossed we'll get it on our first try. If we don't, we will continue to apply for that until we do. And that'll cover, that should cover most, if not all of the cost of the seismic rehabilitation. No. Maybe. I recall thinking that Brian and I thought were like, hey, that's a little bit less than we were thinking it might be. And that was just like a rough number before they had done any kind of preliminary work. So we, they have already, the architect has already completed a preliminary redesign plan for this building to include the courtroom and council chambers where the civic center is now and kind of a public area in on that level of city hall. And then all of the upstairs would be entirely secured. So this would be a training room for the police. So we do have those preliminary redesign plans. And the plan is that as we are doing the seismic rehabilitation, we are just going to do the remodel because it doesn't make sense to pull things out and put them back the way they were only to remodel again in a year or so. So assuming we've got the funding, the plan is to do the seismic and the remodel of this building at the same time.

serendipity and all of this because when we originally bought that building over there we didn't know what we're going to do with it i mean we knew it was worth owning this valuable lease real estate it's right next to city hall we'll have a use for it um and then the police situation came along and it's like you know everything happens for a reason and there it is and it's available for use there you go yeah it's solved a huge huge problem

So, um, coming up in November, November 3rd is the election. We've got the mayor's position and four council seats open and then elected officials will take their oath of office at the January 4th council meeting. At which time we will also elect a new council president or the same council president. Um, and we will have new assignments to the council standing committees. Council goal setting. So as I mentioned earlier, we are wrapping up our two years from our last goal setting session. So we have a contract with SSW Consulting who did our last one to conduct our goal setting session to cover 27 and 28. And that session will be held on Saturday, November 21st. Location to be determined, please make sure you mark that on your calendars and I don't know how long we are planning the day last time we started at eight it'll probably be a fairly early start to the day and but plan on plan on spending a few hours together, so that we can get some goals established for the next two years. So our charter review committee started having meetings in August to review our 2014 charter. Their plan is to finalize proposed charter amendments to place them on the May 2028 ballot. So they are working hard to get public engagement and input and determine what direction we want to go with the charter. And we will have that ready for the May 28 election.

upcoming this next spring. Cecilia is so excited.

We are moving to a biennial budget. So it'll be like our last urban renewal budget. It'll be a two year budget. The benefit to a two year budget is it better aligns budgeting with processes like the election and our goal setting. And Probably more importantly, it reduces the number of budget meetings. So it allows staff more time to work toward council goals and getting those advanced. So we're cautiously excited about the biennial budget process this year.

Something to look forward to.

And our new community vision, like city council goal is to develop a 2045 community vision. So we, which will replace the 2030 vision. This upcoming year, we will work to secure a consultant who will work on community engagement, develop that new vision, and then hopefully have a completed vision by June of 2027.

Less than a year from now.

Yes. That was it. I want to take a moment to thank you guys for all of your supportive staff. And I want to thank staff for all of the hard work that they do on all of the things that we work on. Any questions from anybody?

I asked mine as we went along.

Perfect. Okay. Thank you.

Good evening, everyone. I'll try not to put you to sleep before your council meeting.

So we only sleep during the council meetings. We're not supposed to do it now.

Yes. So don't fall asleep yet. Okay. Um, this is the report for the finance finance department and the municipal court. And for starters, I'll introduce you, six and a half FTE employees and nobody is new. The newest is Hannah and she's been here already two years. So we're going along and the first thing I do wanna start with her position. I introduced her position last year. And at that time, we were still working through the details and fine tuning things pertaining to this position. But this year, this slide highlights the progress that we've made during the Procurement Specialist's first full fiscal year with the city. And the position was established to strengthen our purchasing process and provide departments with dedicated support and oversight. So over the past year, we've seen improvements in these following areas. The first one is we've strengthened purchasing oversight. And so we improved review and consistency of purchases to ensure compliance with the city policies and applicable to state laws and requirements. We improved department support. She supports all departments across the city. Increased accountability and documentation, and this was one of the hard parts that we couldn't keep up with. So she established more consistent purchasing documentation and review practices, improving transparency and accountability. And then it definitely streamlined processes, identified opportunities to improve purchasing workflows, reduce delays, and make the process easier for departments to navigate. So those are the kind of the highlights that have occurred through this new position.

Is that a full position or half?

It's a full-time position. And she has been doing some other things for us in finance. yes it is um this is just our procurement specialist assistant public works with numerous projects during fiscal year 2526 and you could kind of look down the list of all the big projects that occurred this last fiscal year in the project totals and so she she really helps the department to follow all those expenses and make sure they're in budget and helps them with all the paperwork through it Some of the purchasing overview for 2526 inventory, she helped with purchasing water meters, chemicals for the water treatment plant and the wastewater treatment plant. We had some citywide computer and software upgrades. And then some of the small projects, the Aquatic Center Leisure Pool Reservicing and some items for the parks, the small court office renovations. And then also we actually purchased quite a bit of equipment and vehicles this past year, two ambulances, some police equipment and vehicles. and some other equipment for the ambulances and some trucks for the public works.

On the aquatic center, you know, the friends of the aquatic center just do a fantastic job helping out with getting stuff done there. Did they contribute anything in that particular project there?

For the leisure pool? Yeah. Jennifer, do you know? I don't remember.

I can't remember if they contributed necessarily to the coal resurfacing. There was a suite of projects that we were doing to improve, including the new whale slide. And I can't remember what the breakdown was.

I was just curious because they contribute to so many things.

Oh, they do. Yeah.

That's right. I remember that. Yeah. Yep.

So throughout my presentation, I call them fun facts just to keep you awake. Okay, so the first fun fact is our purchase order fun facts. And so this past fiscal year, Hannah helped with 107 purchase orders. And you can see the total purchase order dollar amount over 20 million. During the fiscal year, 71 of those purchase orders were completed and carryover of 29. So that means it spanned the fiscal year. So we call them carryovers. And she had to do 104 change orders during the year. And so that's just, so you create the purchase order, any change to it, she has to create a change order for it. So we had 104 change orders. And just as a reminder, the purchase orders are not required for monthly or annual professional contracts or utilities. So that's just kind of a fun fact on our purchase orders. And we were able to kind of roll that up now that she's had a full fiscal year with us. And we also wanted to remind her about capital assets. That's another thing she's helping us track were capital assets. That was one of the tough parts, trying to find time to really track the capital assets and it's really important. And as highlighted, it says capital assets are defined as assets with an initial individual cost of more than $10,000 and an estimated useful life in excess of one year. And so we were tracking, she put 1,236 assets and we added 47 new assets this past fiscal year.

Your list baskets that you track, I presume that when one depreciates down to zero, you take it off the list?

It stays on the list, but it's fully depreciated. But it has to stay on the list.

So this is basically anything we have, whether it's paid for, depreciated or not. Okay.

It only comes off when we surplus this or it's totally gone. We get rid of it. Okay, I told you we're full of fun facts to keep you awake. So we have utility fun facts this time. And just so you know, we kind of picked some months. So in June, our water customers were 6,407 customers. And you could see over time, it's been increasing, of course. You could kind of guess that from our growth with the city. In August, we had service orders, 122 service orders. So that's... that goes to the technicians the water technicians whether it's to go turn on water disconnect water check for leaks there's various reasons why we create service orders and for the month in august i'm not proud of this but we had to disconnect 31 people for non-payment so i just thought i'd share that with you it's not too bad actually and we we really um try to focus on larger balances that are owed we really try to give people some leeway so we did have to disconnect 31 people in the month of august and i always like to brag about the bulk water station because you know it's paid for itself like three times now we're so excited but you can see for um last fiscal year revenue was 98 almost 99 000 which is three times as much or more as the year before. So I looked into it and we had a, and we're not sure, we just let people sign up for it and get the water they need. But we noticed that one was a large utility contractor that purchased lots of water from us. So we're not sure exactly what work they were doing, but they were a utility contractor.

Did that suggest that maybe that's just a one-time thing?

It could be because we noticed the last couple months they haven't purchased any water. So we're kind of keeping an eye on that. But even if we take in what we did a couple years before, it's been just a real good service for the community and those outside the community, actually.

A couple of questions on a non payment. So that was a month ago. So where are we now? And how long do they do you initially give the citizens a chance to, you know, does that carry over? Do you send several notices before you do the payment, cut off the services?

initial bill and then we send out send out a late fee notice which includes that you know it says that you are getting a late fee but you need to pay by this time where you'll be disconnected but then after that late fee notice goes out a disconnect notice goes out it says if this amount is not paid by a certain date then you'll be disconnected and so that um they can be about two months past due before they're disconnected And at that time, like I said, we're thoughtful about it. Like we see how much they owe for water only. And so if they owe over like $80, Because the bill could be about $300, but some of it, you know, is water. So we look at what they owe for water. And if they owe less than $80 or something, we let them go by another month. So that's kind of how we look at it. But also we started doing that. So we keep the number amount of disconnects low for the water department because it gets pretty tough for doing it for about four hours because we want them all disconnected. So if they weren't reconnected that same day, we could do it in one day. So we have kind of lowered the amount of people we disconnect just to help the water technicians out.

Do you know the number today of how many people have been reconnected or

so so what happens is we're on a two cycle billing cycle for dallas and so we we turn off water twice a month for those different cycles right and so just looking at what we did in august i think we had about three people then that didn't get turned back on but it's usually because they moved This is another way we catch people moving and nobody ever calls us.

And so- Trending data for disconnects over the last few years? Like- Like that 31. Is that number high, low, average? Is it trending upward? Is it trending downward?

No, it's average. And it fluctuates a little bit month to month, but that's about average, I would say. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Let's see what our next fun facts are. okay so we have some finance fun facts and i didn't share this with you last year i think i shared the number of garage sales with you last year and that um if you could see that trends kind of moving down and we were kind of surprised this summer because it wasn't quite as hot this summer and so we were kind of surprised that we were trending down a little bit on garage sales but it's still a good number um i did want to share that If you look at the way we take payments, because we take a lot of payments online, which is that express bill pay. So the payments processed through that for August was about 5,700. And we have about 3,200 people enrolled in auto pay. So those people who pay utilities just automatically. And we love that. We absolutely love it. So we always try to push that. If you're interested in auto pay, please sign up for it. And it's good for them too. Then they won't get disconnected. But in office for August, we took 526 check payments, 141 cash payments, and 103 credit card payments. And so that's where we don't take very many payments that number in office transaction has gone down a lot for the past 10 years, probably. So a lot of it is done online. So that helps us out tremendously. And then just accounts payable, just so you know, we paid 600 invoices in August. And that was 301 payments. So that means there could have been three invoices for the same vendor or something. So we made 301 payments to vendors with 600 invoices. So that's just kind of a quick look what we're doing down there. Okay, here's some municipal court fund facts. Okay, for fiscal year 2026, There were 1,197 citations that went through municipal court and that equaled 1,605 violations. So, you know, if someone receives a citation, you might have two or three violations on that one ticket.

That's an interesting trend because 24 was what it was and then 25 took a big leap and it's pretty much stayed in that range. I wonder why that is.

Yes, that's correct. Yeah. That would probably a police department question since we process.

That's quite a jump. Yes. That's a big jump.

Fiscal year 24, 23, 24, were we still in COVID then? Or was that out of COVID? No. Maybe we were just getting out of COVID, though. It could have been slowly getting out of it or something. So, mm-hmm.

It's not earth-shaking, but it's interesting because it isn't, I mean, it's noteworthy. I wonder what's behind it.

And then we thought we'd give you a little bit on violations, like the number of violations. And so we took the largest amount that we could find. So violation of speed limit, 245. And then it goes down from there, but we were kind of, I know the police department probably isn't surprised, but when we look at these numbers, you know, driving while suspended, 133. That's quite a bit. Driving uninsured, 120. And then we took some of the misdemeanors out to show you how driving under the influence, there were 34 citations written for that. It kind of goes down from there. So just thought we'd share that with you.

Do you have any idea why from 2024 to 2026, the parking citations have gone from 94 to 343?

That's a tough one because I know code. Yeah, and I'm not sure why it was so up last year. I don't know. I'd have to look and see exactly what those parking citations were. If it was just, I don't know, it was probably more than time parking.

I might be making this up, but I've got this vague sort of thing tickling the back of my mind that there was a period of time where we were doing a lot less enforcement, and then we started ramping it up and doing more of it.

Am I making that up? No, that has happened over time. I just don't remember which years they were. Right, right. I don't know. Does the police department write any citations for parking?

Yes, if that's after hours and it's associated with a call for service, we will.

Okay, okay. That might explain a little bit. Okay, just some of the accomplishments that the finance department did make the past year and it kind of coincides with the things that the Council did we implemented the $5 facility and equipment fee on the utility bills and in that same process we reduce the existing stormwater fee. And all this is kind of behind the scenes. You know, we have to get into our computers and make sure it's all calculating correctly. We created the new facility and equipment fund and budget accounts so we can account for that new fee. We established a biennial budget for the Urban Renewal Agency. And we restructured the water rates to be charged according to meter size. I know Emily covered that. And the last thing, and I don't, none of you probably know this, we contracted with a new utility bill company that prints our bills and they're based out of Portland rather than California. And we've had heard a lot of positive feedback that people are receiving their bills in a more timely manner. So I think it's working out and they do cost a little bit less a month for us, maybe a couple hundred dollars, but that's a little bit of savings and our customers are pleased with it. So that was something that we kind of did. We've been wanting to do it and we finally just went ahead and did it. And now they're getting mailed out of Portland. I'll look ahead. I'll start with the bottom one because Emily covered that that we'll be looking at doing the biennial budget for the city and it'll be so the biennial budget would be fiscal year 2027 through 2029. So you'll be seeing that come forth next in a few months. More than a few months. Let's wait a little bit on that. I know I was like, wait a second. More than a few months.

It hasn't been that long since the last one.

because right now I'm in audit season and it's just not making me very happy. And so, but I wanted to share one of the new audit, annual audit requirements. It's called GASB number 103, financial reporting model improvements. So just, So this is more than it sounds. The objective of this statement is to improve key components of the financial reporting model to enhance its effectiveness in providing information that is essential for decision making, assessing a government's accountability. So if you look at our audit, it's called a management discussion analysis. And also there's a lot of narrative throughout it. And so we have to be more specific with it. One of the examples I put in the slide was the detailed analysis should explain why balances and results of operations change, whether than simply presenting the amounts of percentages by which they change. So we would say, let's just say example, general fund revenue increased by 10% last year from the previous year. But now we're going to have to explain why we can't just put that percentage change. So we're going to be working with our, we do have, I'm not sure if you remember, we have a couple, we have the audit consultants and then we have the auditors. So the consultants are going to help us put this together to make sure we meet these requirements for the GASB 103. So we're going to be doing that this year. And so we're going to be doing that probably in the next month or two and get that all ready to go. And that's all I have. Thank you very much. And thanks for listening about finance and municipal court. And if you have any questions.

Sounds like particularly that last slide sounds like. That's more work for you guys in a thicker report for us to read.

Probably so that's why I'm a little grumpy right now. So. Okay, well, thank you very much.

Thank you. Do you have any other business Emily? Then we'll adjourn. Any other business?