City Council - Regular Meeting

We don't have very many people here.

Oh, there's Joel. Okay, so I'm going to preface this before we start. I'm going to get this meeting started. We're starting off with logics compensation discussion. And I actually have to duck out at 12 o'clock to take an actual business meeting. And so I will leave you guys hanging a little bit, but I'll be back after I'm done. Just another prime example of why this is ridiculous to do in the middle of the day, especially when everybody works. But we're going to power on from that. All right, 11.45, let's get started. Today's Grants Pass City Council workshop, June 15th. We have one, two, three, four, three items on the agenda. That's who she is, okay. And we're gonna start out with, first item on today's workshop agenda is logic compensation discussion. And we have, is it Lori Messer? Yes. All right, Lori, and you are a representative from Logic Compensation Group?

Correct.

Awesome. So I will, are you going to start out with a presentation with us?

Yeah, I do have a slide deck to share.

Okay, perfect. Well, I'm going to hand it over to you and let you get going.

Okay, great. Let me just get this set so it's showing in slideshow. And then I will go ahead and share my screen here. Okay, trying to move things around a little bit. All right, let me share.

There we go.

Oops, sorry about that. I have to mute my phone. Great, can everyone see my screen?

Yes, we can.

Okay, fantastic. Good morning, Mayor and Council. Thank you for having me at this workshop this morning. My name is Lori Messer, and I am the managing director of Logic Compensation Group. We're thrilled to have been selected to do the city's 2026 non-bargaining compensation survey. Today, I'm going to go ahead and walk you through a little bit about who we are, what the study covers, how we'll do the work, And most importantly, what we'll be bringing back to council to act on. So here's our agenda, basically who we are, our experience in the Pacific Northwest. Again, what we're going to cover, how we'll do the work, what we'll report back, as well as timeline, investment, and next steps, leaving plenty of time to leave room for your questions. So that being said, a little bit about Who Logic Compensation Group is, we're a 100% woman-owned firm, and we work exclusively in the public sector. We do cities, counties, special districts. We run a limited volume, high engagement model, which means that the senior consultants like myself and principal consultants do all of the work. We are heavily involved in all aspect of the work. We don't hand it off to junior level staff. That matters for you because the recommendations that we bring need to hold up through the budget cycle, need to be reliable, need to be valid, need to be done by experienced professionals who have done this work for several years. So a little bit by the numbers. Our team has completed more than 250 classification and compensation studies, and we bring over 125 years of combined public sector experience. It's not a side practice for us. Government compensation is all we do. And again, you will be working with senior consultants throughout the study. So we have done quite a bit of work in the Pacific Northwest. So we're very familiar with the region. In Oregon, we've done work with Hood River County, Crook County, Eugene. We have some other experience from when we were with a prior firm, Eugene, Springfield, McMinnville, et cetera. Also outside of Oregon, but still in the Pacific Northwest, Washington specifically, We've done work with Tacoma, SeaTac, Seattle, and several different transit agencies. As I mentioned on these examples of work we have done, those identified with an asterisk were both Annette, my principal consultant, and I led those studies when we were with another consulting firm. So the point of this is that we understand the Oregon labor market and the agencies that you compete with for talent. So this study is a market review of base pay and benefits for roughly 40 benchmarked non-bargaining positions. We'll compare the city against a minimum of five Southern Oregon comparators and with the option to add more if council would like to see a wider lens. And we really do recommend that council consider expanding from five organizations because one of the issues that we tend to encounter when there is such a small number of comparative organizations is that in order to report out data for it to be considered reliable in making decisions based on pay structures, you need a minimum of five data points for each benchmark job. And if there are only five comparators, sometimes that becomes a little challenging to get enough data to ensure that the recommendations that we make to you are valid. So we just wanted to bring that forth. The goal overall is a very practical one. You want to see clear findings, cost implementation options, and a pay structure that the city can not only maintain, but also sustain moving forward. So this study will run in four phases, and some of them, they kind of overlap a little bit. But in phase one, study initiation, we align the cities with the city staff on your goals, the scope, and schedule. In phase two, that is where we do the custom survey, collect data from the comparators, analyze where the city stands in relation to the market. Phase three is our report and recommendations. This is where we will detail, here's what we did, here's what we found, Here's what we recommend. And here are some options for implementation that hopefully can align with whatever the city's cost restraints are. Phase four is really an aside. It's not a primary for the first three phases. This is just ongoing support that we provide to the city. They're complimentary quarterly check-ins. for a year after the study closes. And it doesn't have to be quarterly. If the city has questions, we are here for the first year to assist with any questions regarding the study and our recommendations. This is how you're going to see the results. And we've broken this out into how we would present the results to you. The first is ranked market results. So for each benchmark job, we do a market data sheet and against the comparators, we list them in rank order from the highest paying organization to the lowest paying organization. And we let you know where the city falls amongst the comparators when it comes to pay. We also, we look at range minimums and maximums for every comparator organization shown alongside and compared to the city's range minimums and maximums. Then we provide a competitiveness summary and that shows how far above or below the city is from an aggregate perspective and looking at all of these jobs from a Holistic perspective, how does the city, how does their pay system align with the market? Are you leading? Are you lagging? And what potential opportunities are there to get you to where you want to be in the market globally? As for cost implementation strategies, we do provide up to three options for the council to weigh on. We'll present this data the way the council asked to see it. We are very flexible and we want to make sure that we're meeting your needs. We're not cookie cutter. So we develop our deliverables in a manner that works for you as a council and as a city. So what does this is an example of what a ranked output would receive. I've redacted it. This is a client who happens to be in Washington. But as you can see, this is on the left, this is a market data sheet. We do this for every benchmark job. And we hit all of the agency names, but you can see that it goes from the number one payer of senior executive assistant all the way down to the number nine payer, which is a senior admin assistant for another organization. What's highlighted in gray is the organization's information, which would be your information, for example. So we tell you what the titles are, the FLSA, the number of incumbents, average time in position. In this case, this client wanted adjusted average salary. And then we also show the range minimums and maximums. So this is an example of what you would be able to see with regards to every benchmark job. A few words on how comparators are chosen. For most public sector organizations, we select like public sector employers in the city's labor market. Cities and agencies that are of similar size, budget, services. So the comparisons are more apples to apples and defensible. One key standard, as I mentioned before, is that each benchmark job needs at least five solid matches to be statistically valid and reliable. It's a standard compensation practice. Anything below five matches is considered unreliable. So this is where, you know, once again, we'd like the council to consider adding comparators, additional comparators other than the five to strengthen the data and fill in the gaps. but each one adds outreach survey and analysis time and therefore costs and it's typically about a thousand dollars for each additional organization so today there's five that um five organizations if we were to add an additional five comparators that would add about five thousand dollars to the cost um but in the grand scheme of things we want to make sure that we end up with data that will help us to recommend a pay structure that will keep you competitive in the market. That being said, also with regards to selecting comparators, I'm aware that the city does have bargaining units. And in a lot of work we do in the Pacific Northwest, I really urge organizations to have some alignment between the comparator organizations used by those represented groups into the non-rep comparison pool. The reason for that is when there is a disconnect there, what we often see is that there's misalignment of pay. You could be having non-rep data come back at a higher rate than their supervisor in the non-rep group as an example. And so we want to mitigate that as much as possible because we want to alleviate any pay compression that perceived or real or what have you. So we want to try and mitigate that. All right. So speaking of compression, compression happens when the pay gap between levels, whether it be amongst jobs that are in the same role or between supervisory roles and their subordinates. This tends to hurt morale, makes people reluctant to move into higher level roles because it's more responsibility with just not a significant differential in pay. And it also creates retention and equity risks. We do recommend that as part of this study that we're looking at compression across both the bargaining and non-bargaining groups. The groups sit side by side, so fixing one in isolation can create a new inequity issue in another area. Reviewing them together keeps the pay structure overall fair and defensible. So we are recommending for council to weigh in on that, looking at compression, not recommending to change any bargaining agreement, but to look at them collectively from a pay perspective. The project timeline. This is a high level timeline. There's a lot of milestones and key activities within each of them. But the core study is going to run for about four months, roughly June through October. And study initiation is occurring right now. We're in the process of that. The survey and the market analysis will be running from late June into September, with report and recommendations coming in the fall. And again, that ongoing support at the very bottom, October 26, ongoing for one year following the end of our work in the study. So as we are working through the initiation, we will hone in with more specific dates regarding the timeline. But this is meant to give you a high level overview of what you can expect and when. So let's talk about the fees for this. We broke down the fees by phase. It was a not to exceed fixed fee of $27,500. The study initiation is $2,500. The market survey and analysis, $20. And the final report and recommendation, $5. Now, the only caveat here with the fees is if the scope of work is happens to change, for example, additional comparator organizations, additional analyses outside of our scope of work, that does have an impact on the fees. And before proceeding with any work, should an additional item come up that the city would like, we would thoroughly discuss what the cost impact would be before moving forward on that. So there's no surprises. We do bill monthly, and we also offer optional site visits. We didn't have any site visits in our work plan, but should any onsites be requested, they're usually $1,500, not to exceed $1,500 per day. That covers consultant time and travel and expenses. Any additional meetings that we have that weren't on our initial timeline, but fall within the scope of the study and the work that we're doing. And if those meetings are done virtually, there are no extra charges for that, providing it falls within the original scope of work. If it's anything outside of that, that would be charged at just an hourly rate for the consultant you would be meeting with for prep time, presentation time, and any additional work following that. We just always want to be real clear upfront about that so there's no surprises. So next steps are pretty straightforward. The agreement's been executed and we are getting ready to hold the phase one kickoff with city staff to confirm the goals and schedule. We'll be gathering a variety of documents from the city, including like job descriptions, pay structures. And then we will work on confirming benchmark jobs and compare to organizations. Then we will build and run the survey, analyze the results, and then we will come back with our findings, recommendations, and related cost items. So that is a high-level overview of the study, and I'd like to answer any questions that you may have.

The mayor stepped out briefly, so he asked me to sit in. Any questions from council? If not, Seth, go ahead.

Yeah, do we know who the project manager is through the city?

Her primary contact is going to be with HR department, as a lot of the information she's going to need with regards to job descriptions and other things are going to be all information will be sent through the HR department.

Anyone else? Indra.

Do we have an HR director? Who is that going to and how many people?

Our HR specialist, there's an individual, Tony, our HR specialist will be the one that will be the key contact for her to request information.

Okay, I have a few questions. So, following up on those last two, Laurie, do you think, so we have, in Grants Pass, we have no, no one in the non-bargaining group is without significant conflict of interest on this project. Do you view that as a problem, having them be the study manager and the contact person with you, especially when we're talking about confirming goals and things of that nature?

You know, typically in all of the other Pacific Northwest, we typically do our primary contact is with HR for gathering information, clarifying information. Usually, you know, we tend to work with like once we get the data and the recommendations and it's time for like decisioning and things like that, we would typically work with the city manager prior to coming to council. But for the day to day, we do typically work with HR, who tends, in most organizations, not represented.

So have you ever had a situation where, with whatever communications you have had with the contact person, whether it's HR or the city manager, that a copy of those communications, 100% of those communications, would be seen by council? The reason I ask is we had a problem with a past consultant And it was felt that the staff that were involved maybe didn't communicate what council thought the goals would have been. So I guess, if you understand my question. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah, so one of the things that we do before we launch the actual custom survey, we put together documents called market specifications. And it talks about how are we going, you know, based on discussions that we've had, how are we going to proceed with the study? You know, what jobs are going to be benchmarks? Who are the comparator organizations we're going to look at? How are we going to assess the level of competitiveness? Is it at the median of the market? Is it at the 60th percentile? And what's the primary metric? Is it actual salaries? Is it range data? So we lay all of that out. and we provide it to the city. And how the city moves that through for agreement, that would obviously be up to the city, but we do provide that information to the city. Because before we start the survey, before we send it out, before we start doing all of this, we want to make sure whoever that decision maker is at the city that you know we're all on the same page there's no surprises at the end it also helps so the study goes smoothly so we don't get to the very end and present and go wait a second this isn't what we wanted to see so how that would who the decision makers would be with regards to that within the city is, you know, would be a decision of the city, how they would want to do that.

I hear what you're saying. That's an internal decision for city council and staff to make, and you are basically going to do your job, and it's up to us to figure out how we're going to communicate within our organization. So a few other questions. So when you talk about adding other comparators to make things a little bit more, we'll say maybe representative or valid, you'd mentioned things like similar size budget services, things like that. Would you also be considering things like median income or unemployment rates in whatever cities you would use as comparators to make it a true apples to apples?

So this is very interesting because we're doing a refresh for Pacific Northwest organization. And the last time they did the study budget, the budget office was, and it's a larger city, the budget office was heavily involved and they were very, they felt that those were the right metrics that needed to be utilized, household income, all of those things to drive who the comparators are. That is not a typical criteria when looking at comparator organizations. Typical criteria are, you know, organizations within your proximity, and I know it's very limited where you are, the number of organizational population, what is the population served? Who do you lose people to? Who do you get people from? Those are like the, you know, the similar service types of, those are the most common criteria that's used in determining who should we compare against. Now, in looking at, you know, the area, there's a very limited number that meet those criteria within, you know, very close radius to grants pass. We do look at or would recommend, you know, possibly expanding, you know, widening the net a little bit more. But one of the things that we want to do is we want to make sure that we're comparing apples to apples from a pay perspective. And to do that, we would, you know, if we have to go out to get more data, we almost always apply geographic differentials to the salary data that we receive to normalize those rates of pay to the cost of labor in Grants Pass. It's kind of a long-winded answer, but does that answer your question?

It might have, but I'm not 100% sure exactly what you said. You know, I guess in a certain sense, when I say median income, that means something to me, maybe what you said kind of almost gets us to median income, but maybe not. Uh, as you could see, you know, from, I guess, from certainly from the public's perspective in Grants Pass, we could have, uh, cities of similar size budget and services that where the median income is, you know, double what it is here. And so from the public and possibly council's perspective, that may not have been a really great comparator. Part of choosing from Southern Oregon, it kind of does give us similar median incomes and things of that nature. But rather than choosing cities that, again, maybe the median income is double what we are, I don't know if that's necessarily representative or the best possible comparator for us, if you understand what I mean.

Right. Well, you know, so in a lot of areas where we can certainly collect that and share it, you know, and then determine, you know, we can look at it. I just, I think my recommendation would be to not necessarily rely really strictly on that figure because I believe that the cost of labor will help to offset that. I know in a lot of high-income communities, most people who work for that city don't live within that city. You know, they have to drive into those cities. Okay, thank you.

Yeah, I have several more questions, but Eric, you have a question?

Thank you for the presentation. I'm looking at slide 12, and it looks like the project timeline, nine months. Is there a chance, or, actually, let me rephrase. Is this a bare minimum that you need, or is there a chance that it can be shortened, or is it gonna be a minimum of nine months, or can it be less?

Actually, you know that the core of the study really will wrap up in October. And this gray at the very bottom, the ongoing support, that is us helping the city, you know, HR, making sure that everything is going okay. So that's really that gray bar at the very bottom. So if we start So really, starting June, July, August, September, October, it's really about four and a half months for the study.

Gotcha. Thank you. Thank you.

Kathleen.

So I know that with our last consultant, we were compared to cities more in the north from southern Oregon. And that just didn't seem very comparative at all. with what salaries and tax base of those cities are. So I was wondering, is there cities east of us that would be more comparable, more in size, and that we could take as comparative cities?

Possibly. As a matter of fact, I've been working on kind of identifying what some additional cities might be so I could bring forth that. and make some recommendations for consideration. So I will be looking at that. I just haven't completed that, but some of the things I'm gonna include in it have to do with population. I can include tax base, I can include median income, but again, I kind of see those as an aside. Obviously your tax base has a lot to do with what you can afford to do today, and not only today, but to sustain throughout the future, so.

Yeah, thank you. Laurie, I have another question. So on page nine, I'm trying to understand when you talk about benchmark to median plus 5%, So who agreed that market medium plus 5% is the competitive target for Grants Pass?

No, this is not a Grants Pass. This is an example from another client. This is a different client. I'm just showing you an example of what our output would look like. And their philosophy, they happen to be in Washington, their philosophy is they were trying to determine they wanted to be a market leader. So they took They wanted us to look at the median plus 5%, the median plus 7.5%, and the median plus 10%.

Excuse me.

So that was just based on how they wanted to position themselves in the market.

Right. Okay, so that's what the adjusted average salary on that is. That's plus the 5% because they asked you. Because they had already told you they wanted to be a market leader.

Right, in the summary data at the bottom. Yeah.

Is that on the row where it says adjusted average salary? When you say adjusted, adjusted in what way? Is that for the 5%?

So on those, no. Not in the top part of the nine organizational data. Adjusted here is they're going to implement in like January 1. OK, so we aged the data to January 1, and we applied geographic differentials to the pay rates to normalize the rates of pay to the location where this organization was located. So those are the adjusted rates. The reason, and this will be one thing that as we're putting together the market specifications, the reason we recommend adjusting to when you want to implement based on statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and World at Work and what have you is if you say, for example, we're going to collect this data today, we're going to implement it in January. And most organizations in your area, if they're all adjusting in January, if you don't age that data to the time you're implementing, by the time you implement, you are no longer at the median because everybody else has moved. Now you're below the median of the market.

Yeah, thank you. Thanks for that clarification. Yeah. Anything else from council? No questions?

I do want to just clarify that, you know, while most of our clients, we do geographic, you know, cost of labor adjustments, and we age the data, we don't do it for all. Some say we just want it where it is today. Again, how this would look at the end of the day is all based on those market specifications that we put together and are approved by the city.

So something you said earlier, I didn't quite follow. When you talked about, you know, our, my understanding is, is that the main issue that, or a big, one of the big issues that Grants Pass has, when we're talking about compression, we're talking basically about the point where the bargaining groups bump up against the non-bargaining group. That seems to be our issue with regards to succession planning and things of that nature. But you mentioned earlier that you would also potentially be looking at compression within the bargaining groups. So I'm not exactly sure, if I heard that correctly, I'm not exactly sure what purpose that would serve, because I didn't think that that's really what our concern was in this particular case.

Right, no, we're not going to look at the bargaining groups within the bargaining groups. We would be looking at non-rep supervisors who have bargaining units people reporting to them, and is there compression there between non-rep and rep?

Okay, thank you. That's been one of our focuses. I just must have misunderstood what you said earlier.

Thank you.

Anything else? Anyone counsel? I think that answers most of our questions. And you also mentioned that, I guess you'd seen an example of how we had asked to have the data laid out. And that seemed to be something that's easily doable for you to customize it for us.

Yes, absolutely.

Great.

Absolutely. Everything that we do is customized. I mean, we have standard look and feel and all of that, but we are flexible. in providing outputs, deliverables to the client in the way that best serves their needs. And every organization is different, so.

Okay, thank you very much.

Yes, thank you.

Oh, I'm sorry, Eric.

When you said that... you can customize to our liking, whatever the output is, the spreadsheet. If we decide that we don't like that particular style, or something's not right with it, can we request that it be changed, and if it is a big change, will that be an additional fee imposed, or is that just the way it is, the way you do business?

No, I mean, I guess it depends on like, you know, I don't foresee that there would be an additional charge for that.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, Aaron, you had a question.

Yeah, Laurie, Aaron Kubik, city manager. I had a question for you to help provide clarity amongst this whole process. Are there certain points in your phases where it will be important to make sure that we're aligning and clarifying the work that you're doing to make sure it coincides with council's desires. For instance, we were just talking about the way you're gonna ultimately present your end product. I could see that being one of the points in your whole process that you showed where you would maybe wanna provide provide me or staff with an example that we can forward to council and say is this what you're looking for and get council feedback and then we can get you the feedback of yes this is great or no this isn't. And so that I could see would be a point where we'd want to make sure that there's at times before you end up with your finished product we'll have a couple of check-in points with council that being one. I could see maybe another one before you go gangbusters and take off that maybe there's some kind of okay here's where I am, here are the comparators I'm using or whatever or This is where we might need additional information to where that might be a checkpoint to where we're getting some additional council feedback. Do you, and maybe it's too early for you to say that, but I'm curious, that might help also from this process where there's going to be a couple maybe key points in between that will go to council with additional clarity.

Yes, and on one of those points, Aaron, the market specifications, we can also include this is how that will be an excellent touch point for council to get their buy-in. And included in that, we can put kind of a layout of here's what we're proposing the output look like and get feedback so we can set things up at the onset. But definitely before we go sending out a survey and start doing any analysis, there will be a document that comes that we'll be looking for approval on.

Okay, excellent. Thank you.

Yeah.

Those are great points, Erin. I appreciate that. I guess are we finished speaking with Lori then? Thank you very much, Lori. You've been helpful today, and we'll be getting back to you, I'm sure. Thank you.

All right. Thank you so much. You all have a great day.

Okay. Bye-bye. Okay. Let's see, so we're gonna move on to Municipal Court and SB 48, and I would imagine Stephanie is gonna be leading the discussion.

Good afternoon mayor and council. I guess the mayor is not in here again yet. So oh Good afternoon mayor to we're just getting started on the Municipal Court implementation feasibility So as you're aware the written feasibility study was provided to count to you for your review in advance of this workshop and I'm going to be focusing on the recommendation and the options. I'm not going to be going through that feasibility study item by item. I'm just simply focusing on what would need to be discussed moving forward. Implementation of a municipal court as recommended would support council's goals of public safety by modifying the municipal compliance protocols to better address emerging issues, as well as by providing a balanced and accessible criminal justice system that supports accountability, fairness, and community well-being. It would also support the goal of fiscal stability by starting at a level of service that supports long-term sustainability of a municipal court. So just a brief overview. Some of the benefits of municipal court would include faster processing of city cases, a greater responsiveness to community needs, increased operational flexibility, and the ability to tailor court practices to local priorities. We wouldn't be bound by the constraints of the circuit court, which is a state organization. We would have more ability to change on the fly as we needed to. Municipal courts have jurisdiction over traffic, violation, and violations of city code that occurred within its jurisdictions. We can also elect to handle misdemeanors, and that would include even extending it to DUIs if we so chose. A violation is an offense for which jail time is not an option, and that's something that's going to weigh heavily, I think, in your discussion and any decision making in this process. Misdemeanors can have a sentence that includes jail time, but they also come with more constitutional rights and procedural requirements. The only exception to the misdemeanor rule is that there are certain drug offenses that involve minors that are by statute excluded from the jurisdiction of a municipal court. One of the things that I did find in the study that was done is that DUIs are often excluded from municipal court jurisdiction. DUIs often require a lot of additional hearings, contested hearings, and specialized legal knowledge to be able to handle appropriately. So there are a handful of jurisdictions that do those in municipal court. Most of those tend to go through circuit court. I also did not see any municipal courts indicate that they handle person crimes, so things like assaults. most of them stick to the non-person, non-DUI cases, the trespasses, the retail thefts, things like that. Cities can also have certain functions handled in municipal court, like the exclusion appeals. Currently, as we know from our discussion two weeks ago with the ordinance amendments, that we have a hearings officer that currently does our exclusion hearings. we could transfer that responsibility to municipal court for handling. So appeals from administrative decisions or designated hearings officers under city code could be handled by municipal court as well. Some of the data regarding municipal courts, there are only four Oregon cities with a population over 20,000 that do not have their own municipal court. Portland is prohibited by statute from having a municipal court. It's the only one that's excluded that way. Redmond is the seat of the Deschutes County Justice Court, so it's included in county justice courts. Grants Pass does not have that option because it's the county seat, so the county seat's not allowed to do that. The only other two are Grants Pass and Gresham. I'm not 100% sure about why Gresham does not have a circuit court, but I also know that the Multnomah County Circuit Court essentially developed a violations bureau to handle all of the Portland ones, and so Gresham benefits from that. Another data point is that more than 90% of cities with a population over 5,000 have either their own municipal court, which is the vast majority, or are part of a county justice court. The caseloads would support a municipal court. There are enough cases to keep everybody busy. I pulled circuit court data and district attorney data And it looks like the city of Grants Pass has about 5,200 violations and traffic offenses going through circuit court per year. According to the DA's office, they handled about 375 property misdemeanors per year and approximately 120 DUIs per year. And Grants Pass police data also shows that there were, I believe, 525 misdemeanor cases declined in 2025. Many of those were declined by the DA for lack of prosecutorial resources. It is anticipated that the number of violations cited is going to increase. Council authorized the additional six officers that will be coming on board. So anytime you add more law enforcement, you add more enforcement citations. As well as the chief has indicated that they will reinstate the traffic unit and staff that with two officers. So we will see an increase in traffic offenses as well. Even if misdemeanors are not included in the initial court implementation, there is a sufficient caseload for a municipal court. And that 5,200 violations and traffic per year is far more than many municipal courts reported processing every year. As far as venue and schedule, we would not need any additional facility space to have a municipal court. Many courts are actually held in the council chambers, which is what our expected process would be. We also, from here, would have the ability to have a conference room if misdemeanors are included for jury deliberations, and we would have the ability to provide space for defense attorneys to meet with clients. Just based on the schedules that other courts are seeing, we'd probably anticipate a violations-only court to be held one to two days per week. We could consider offering some alternatives. There are certain jurisdictions that do community court where it's not actually held in their normal spot, but they actually go out to the community. For instance, Medford has a community court where they go to a nonprofit and have court there because it's more accessible to some of the individuals who received citations. Some of the other jurisdictions reported evening court sections, which have the benefit of allowing the part-time judge to also have a full-time job, but it also enables those appearing in court to have jobs and not have to take time off, It also reduces the amount of overtime paid to law enforcement officers if trials and contested hearings are held in the evenings, because then it's within their scheduled hours and not outside of their scheduled hours. One thing to keep in mind regarding the one to two days, I know it sounds like a lot, 5,200 cases with only one to two days a week. But most resolved violation cases occur outside of the court system, either through online or counter payments. Another big chunk fail to appear and receive judgment by default. And so that often results in the fines being sent to collections. But those cases, they never see the judge. If misdemeanors are included, we'd probably have to have some additional court sessions beyond the one to two days per week. My initial review of the data says that about 40% of cases pay online or at the counter, and about 56 are resolved by default due to failures to appear. So only about 5% of cases probably actually appear before a judge for violations. For funding, the city would receive all fine revenues of fines with the exception of $50 that has to go to the state pursuant to statute, and $16 to the county. And the way that that's broken up is the first $50 of the fine goes to the state, Then the next up to that last 16 is retained by the jurisdiction, and the last 16 goes to the county. So if a fine is only partially paid, that $16 to the county doesn't go out. Projected annual revenue based on the 2023 to 2025 circuit court data and current caseloads is about $600,000. We would anticipate that the municipal court, at least based on current allocations, would only receive $300,000 of that. The reason for that being, as it stands now, all the fine income that is received by the city is going to law enforcement to help support programs there. When looking at the way fines are allocated currently with circuit court and how fines would be allocated under municipal court, that would be about 50% of the fine, if you want to keep the same allocations, would continue going to law enforcement. So they would see no reduction in funding as a result of this change. We have a question.

I'm sorry to interrupt you, Stephanie. You're on a roll, which is good. That second dot, I don't quite understand. The projected annual revenue is $600,000, and then we have expected fine revenue at $300,000.

That's what I was just talking about with the split. So the $600,000, $300,000 would go to law enforcement, and $300,000 would be retained by the municipal court if you retain the same allocation structure.

Okay, and then it talks about remaining funding.

Yes.

Remaining expenses. Yes.

Any remaining funding needed for municipal court would have to come from the general fund if it's not covered.

Remaining expenses. Okay, not funding expenses. Okay, thank you.

Why does the state get $50 off of every fine? Because the statute says so.

It's the same with the county. The statute says 50 and 16, so that's what we have to do. As you noted probably from the feasibility study, just over 50% of cases have their fines paid in full. Court records from 2023 to 2025 show that around 4% have partial payments. They're likely on a payment plan and making their payments over time. About 45% are not paid and are in collections. We do, anticipate that fine revenue would increase. So this is the average based on those three years. That was before we added six officers. That's before we add two that are specialized in traffic. So with those assignments, we would expect to see increases, particularly because the fines that are paid with the highest frequency, according to the court records, are speeding tickets, which 86% of those violations get paid. So if we have higher traffic enforcement, we'll see more getting paid on that front. Same thing with vehicle operation offenses like careless driving, failure to yield. With those citations, about 75% of those get paid and they usually get paid quickly because failure to pay can result in loss of driver's license. So those are the ones that are the most stable income streams when it comes to funding.

So you said that if we don't get the full fine repaid, that we would not pay the $15 to the county? That's my understanding of the way the statute's written. OK, is that a state statute, or is that just in our? OK, so we can't change that to the county either? Nope. So then I'm wondering if the county, I don't know if you have an answer to this, if the county would be interested in helping fund the municipal court, since they will have a funding stream coming in from it.

Short answer is doubtful because they get no benefit from this. They're already, what's happening now is the county circuit court is retaining 50% of the fine. And so when they lose that funding stream, all they're left with is the 16. So they're actually taking a hit on this. But they also are losing workload too. So maybe they can balance it out. Some of the possible costs, and I don't have the numbers as strongly associated with possible costs because This is an area where, without direction from counsel, we didn't want to dig too far. We want to see what the next steps are. So possible costs for municipal court, we would need a judge, obviously. We're anticipating that would look like a part-time contract. Medford does have a full-time judge, but Medford has a much larger caseload and can support that. I don't think that we would need a full-time judge in this case. How much of a part-time contract depends on whether we go with the violations proposal or if we add misdemeanors as well. For staff, we would need a court supervisor and probably an additional finance FTE because there's going to be a significant increase in payment processing and paperwork processing, kind of like we have with the utility billings. So we would need to have additional staff there. If we add misdemeanors, there would be additional legal staff that would be needed. And depending on how many cases we anticipate, possibly even another finance, the other area we could consider additional staffing would be in the area of court security. For hardware, we're talking computers, phones, et cetera, for judges and employees, as well as recording equipment. And for software, that's the records management software for the court, as well as transcription software. Training and memberships would include things like the judges association, court administrators association, leads or CJIS certifications, things like that that allow everybody to do their jobs. And then the typical office expenses. For defense counsel, if we're talking misdemeanors, jail beds if we're talking misdemeanors, those would be additionals. Some of the numbers, and I'm not sure, I thought I had put numbers on this slide. Let me double check. I put them on the next slide, that's why. So I'll move on to that next slide so I can give you some idea of what we might be talking about based on Medford. A part-time contracted judge, the Medford full-time contracted judge, her contract is for $170,000 a year. That averages about $81.75 an hour. So I think we could use that as a starting point to consider. I'll also be pulling the additional some additional contracts from other jurisdictions. She also receives some, I believe, contribution to retirement. But because it's a contract position, she does not receive full benefits. So it's a pretty firm 170 plus, a little bit. Medford's court supervisor position, the salary range is about $80,000 to about $102,000. And benefits would add about 50% on top of that. They're court specialists, so the clerks, the people that are taking those front counter things. Let me get through my numbers and I'll get back to you. Those range from about 51,000 to about 72,000. They have three different tiers, so there's a court specialist one, two, and three. They also would receive benefits. But we would, in order to appropriately place our staff, we'd have to look at the job duties and a job description and place them appropriately on our salary schedule. That's just to give you kind of an idea of what other jurisdictions have. The defense attorney contracts for Medford are $102,000 per year for a caseload of 200. It averages out to a little over $500 per case. They do get paid the same whether they handle more cases than that or less. There is a provision in those contracts that allows them to ask for additional if they're getting well over that 200. And then the last piece is that the jail contracts for Ashland and Sutherland are about $100 to $112 per day. So that's about $36,000 to $41,000 a year for jail beds. So I had a question.

So your cost figures, you have a full-time court supervisor and a full-time FTE for finance?

Yes.

uh... cable and then you have a part-time judge so that cost is only what halftime for the judge probably if i i was thinking about probably point six if they're going to be spending up to two days in court or two chunks of court so uh... uh... and that's included uh... you so you didn't assume a full-time judge in your in your costs but you did assume a full-time finance person and a full-time court supervisor.

The full-time finance is based on finances assessment of what would be needed and their understanding of how things operate in other jurisdictions. The full-time court supervisor, there is a lot of paperwork that comes with running a court. There's a lot of processing. When you're talking 5,200 cases a year, having to make sure they're entered in the system, updated, running dockets, scheduling, all of those kinds of things, it takes a lot of time.

Do we have software for the finance as well?

The software would be part of the municipal court program and or the software that finance is currently using to take payments.

And the software should limit the amount of labor, hopefully.

Some. Yeah. There's still labor involved.

Well, I understand.

We've got more questions. Eric?

So, obviously going off of what we were talking about with the personnel, is there a chance that we can lighten the load a little bit with internships, other things like that? I mean, is that a possibility, or do they offer, is that?

Nobody else does that, and it's not recommended because the data that you're dealing with, the criminal justice data, a lot of it is protected and or CJIS, and so you're having to talk about high levels of certification and confidentiality.

I mean, even on the lower level to help out the full-time staff that will be there?

We could look into it if that became an issue, but none of the other jurisdictions use interns.

Thank you.

So Stephanie's almost done with her full presentation, so unless you have a specific question in regards to what she's talking about, if you could maybe hold for a few minutes, let her finish up. Do you have a specific question, Victoria?

What was the sum total of all the fees of what it's going to cost us. You've read it there. Did you have it together?

No, I'm not telling you what it's going to cost you. I was giving you examples of what Medford does. There's a reason they're not on the slide. It's because I don't want you relying on them. We would have to assess what the job duties are and where they would fit into our current salary structure, what the comparable positions are.

Do you just have a ballpark of what those were so we have just some idea of what we're looking at?

Well, we're looking at having a revenue of about $300,000. And so we anticipate that the cost for what we're looking at with two FTE part-time judges is going to be a little over $300,000. As we mentioned in the presentation, we do believe it's going to require some general fund subsidization.

That was kind of what my question was going to, how much from the general fund. That's step two.

We don't have that number yet, but once we get direction from you on, from a policy perspective, what level of service you want to have provided, that's when we're going to dig in further on the true cost. But the caveat that we have is whether you choose just violations or violations and misdemeanors, we do anticipate general fund subsidization will be required.

Thank you. And that is going to be the phase two of this. Today we're talking about is it feasible and do you want to take the next step? What I would bring back to you next is a detailed proposal as well as a budget of what that would look like. So I think there was one more question that said it was about what we were currently talking about.

One more question in regards to what she said. Okay, go ahead, Kathleen.

Okay, so when we first started talking about the municipal court, I believe you and another person I won't mention who they are, but we're brainstorming that we don't actually need a judge. We can use a different type of service. I don't remember exactly what that was, but the other person that was brainstorming with you was pretty confident we could get, because there are so few judges that are available, that we could use a different type of...

So a judge would just need to be a licensed attorney that would act as a judge for purposes of this, The other piece of it is we would establish what's called a violations bureau. And that would allow counter payments and things like that from the clerks at the counter to be able to take those payments and enter the convictions. So that would take some of the load off of a judge. But you do actually have to have a judge, even if it's just minimum. But it can be an attorney and not an already practicing judge.

Perfect. Okay. If you want to finish up and then we'll probably dive into... Sorry, Rob. I didn't see you. You're too close to me.

So you talk about... I don't know if you did so much here, but in your report, you talked about how if we go to misdemeanors, there's a considerable extra expense due to defense lawyers and all that kind of stuff. So... Does the amount that is likely to be required from the general fund, is that going to be less or more if we also did misdemeanors in addition to violations?

It would be more.

OK. So we would need a bigger subsidy from our general fund. Correct. Thank you.

Yes. So the recommendation, going back to finish up here, the recommendation is to pursue implementation of a municipal court as a court of record to handle violations, traffic, and certain civil matters and house the staffing under the finance department. The initial startup for that would be the part-time contracted judge, a full-time court supervisor, and an FTE for finance, hardware, software training, and memberships. Once established and once that funding stream starts coming in from the fines to then assess expansion to include misdemeanor cases, which would likely add the additional staff, FTE, the defense attorney contracts, the jail bed contracts, as well as an increased judge contract. Outside of that, if counsel wishes to change some of those parameters, these are some options for you. So the recommendation for violations only comes from a financial and operations analysis. You could choose to include non-person misdemeanor, possibly even DUI cases. The inclusion of the non-person misdemeanor cases would address some of the public nuisance type cases that are often highlighted as a problem for the community. These are the cases like trespass, retail theft. These are the offenders that Senate Bill 48 often keeps from being held in custody, the misdemeanors that are basically taken in and immediately let back out. They're the ones that the DA's office has been known to decline for lack of resources, so they're not being prosecuted. This is the category of offenses that a violation of an exclusion zone would fall in, and why we're discussing municipal court before we get to exclusion zones. A municipal court that handles non-person misdemeanors would better address the community impact of those cases, but as we've talked about, there would be significant costs associated, and it would be more complex to start up. So we need to know what direction council wants to take with a court before we can craft options relating to exclusion zones. If we have a municipal court that does violations, there's gonna be a limited number of those exclusion zone options, as well as limits to the council's expectations. We don't, at this point, recommend person misdemeanors or DUIs at this point. DUIs may be an option down the road, but even if you choose to do some misdemeanors, I would not recommend starting with DUIs. And including the misdemeanors, as we talked about, would require funding for defense attorneys, a prosecutor, and jail beds. Additional parameters we could include in the next phase of this, if you decide to go forward, are red light and speed cameras and evaluating what the hardware costs and the staffing needs regarding those would be. We could look into additional options regarding court security and what that might entail. We could look at whether staff should be housed under a different or a standalone department, and we could look at the options and costs associated with a full-time judge. So moving forward, if you so direct, we will come back with a detailed municipal court implementation proposal and budget for a future workshop. We will obtain the information about case management software, as well as information about recording and transcription technology. We'll develop draft contracts, for the judge if we're talking about violations, for defense attorneys in jail beds if we're including misdemeanors. We will develop and revise job descriptions for needed staff, draft an amendment to municipal code 2.16, that's the one that currently says that all of our municipal court matters are gonna be handled through circuit court, so we would put together an ordinance amendment to make it tailored to what we're looking at doing instead. And we would start a process of the municipal code review to update for municipal code needs. There's a lot of ordinances throughout the municipal code that are scattered all over the place, duplicative, overlapping, to some extent they're even contradictory. And so there's a lot of things that need to be cleaned up, which we are gonna do anyway, but with having a municipal court plan, we'd be able to better do that as part of this. If necessary, we can come back with a baseline budget as well as kind of a la carte options and costs and pieces on top of that, but it would be better to provide more direction today if possible. So your direction options are to direct staff to bring back formal implementation and budget proposals as recommended. Direct us to bring back a formal implementation and budget proposal with revised parameters. You can request additional information or you can direct us to discontinue this project and move on to something else. And with that, I'll take additional questions.

Thank you, Stephanie. And I don't see anybody that wants to talk to you. Oh, oh, sorry, sorry. Let's see. We'll start with Joel, Eric, and then Victoria.

Joel? I just had two quick questions, Stephanie. You know, I'm not familiar with violations. Not that I haven't had any, but it's just not something I'm familiar with. What's the difference between a violation and a misdemeanor?

Jail time is the big one. With a violation, it's a fine.

Okay, so a violation is speed limit, parking.

Correct.

Trespass. That might be a misdemeanor, I guess.

Trespass is a misdemeanor.

Okay, okay. So then the other question I have, and I don't expect you to answer this, 5,200 billings a year for 5,200 violations, assuming that they all result in a fine, But they don't, so I would guess, I don't know, 80% of them result in a fine of those 5,200.

So of the 5,200 convictions in the court data, about half of those paid their fines. They're all assessed a fine. Half paid their fines and half went to collections.

Right. Okay, so there's 5,200 violations. We don't get 5,200 fines because they're not all guilty, right?

No, that's the convictions.

Oh, that's the convictions, okay.

The data that was provided to me was the convictions only, and they either resolved primarily by paying the fine or by failing to appear and having it defaulted.

So that's 5,200 bills of collection.

2600 went to collections.

Yep 2600 and then so I was wondering with the water bill We probably do that more than that in a month for the bills of collection And I was wondering how many FTEs do we have in the water?

Because they do a lot more than 2600 I Know most of the agencies use a collections agency and

Sure, a collection agency?

Yep.

Rather than a FTE?

Correct, for collections.

That makes sense. Okay.

Hold on. We have our supervisor come up, and Kimberly will maybe provide some additional direction on that question.

I don't know if that's on. Is that on?

It's on.

OK. So we turn less than 1% of utility accounts to collection. In the City Grants Pass, the utility goes to the property, not the person. So annually, we turn over less than probably $9,000 to collections. It's very different with a municipal fine. We do have a collection agency that we work with. But for the most part, we don't turn over to collections for our utilities.

If I understand you correctly, this would be a higher percentage of collections, which would result in a higher expense that a collection agency may be better equipped to handle than an FTE.

So, no, you still have to have the FTE on this side. Turning over to collections in the state of Oregon is extremely complicated and you have to do all your due diligence in trying to collect the money prior to turning it over to the agency. And then you have to prove to the agency and subsequently the person that you did everything that you had to to attempt to collect that money before you turn them to collections.

Sure. I just question the use of a full-time person for 5,200 collections.

Yeah, so if you're thinking about the 5,200 cases that happen and those people are coming in, Unless you're going to limit somebody's ability to come in and pay to a certain day of the week, you have to have somebody that's there and available to answer the phone, to do payment arrangements, because a lot of the muni courts will allow someone to do a payment arrangement. And so that person may be coming in and giving you $5. every week, and I'm taking that as a, and you have to have someone who can access that information, that is CEGIS certified, so you're going to need a full-time person on the counter to take in those funds. And then to account for all of that money, download that from the software, import that, import those into our GL, there's a significant amount of work that happens on the back end, it's not just the taking of money, it's all the other pieces that come with that in accountability.

Thank you for your answer. All right, further questions? I got Eric.

Thank you, Stephanie. I had a question in terms of the history of the municipal court. Specifically, you mentioned comparators to Medford or I believe other cities of specifics, but do we have any trends of the old municipal court and essentially any learning points or any kind of reason of why the municipal court went away? Perhaps we can learn from that, I don't know. And help us go forward with trying to figure out best practices, et cetera.

I don't know the history of Grants Pass, and maybe Erin can provide more information there. What I did hear from several courts is that several did discontinue their municipal courts, even though they're technically still on paper as in existence. Primarily that was due to lack of funding, but they also tended to be much smaller jurisdictions. For instance, Cave Junction. discontinued their municipal court because they weren't even able, it wasn't worth the 10 cases every so often that their city recorder slash others had to manage. So I know there's a couple that have had that issue. The bigger your caseload, the more likely it is to at least be somewhat self-sustaining. When you're that small, you still have to have the same number of staff, potentially, but you don't have to have, you just don't have the income coming from the fines. So I don't know if Aaron has additional to add on the other side.

Yeah, the past history for Grants Pass specifically, we don't have. But I can assure you that we have a very comprehensive report that provided our conclusions and recommendations to you. Stephanie has done a great job in researching all the municipal courts to get best practices and to try to figure out what's going to work best for our community. from an implementation standpoint, not from a policy standpoint. That's what we're here asking you for is direction. From an implementation standpoint, we're saying the best thing for us to do implementation-wise is to start with violations only and see how that goes and then step up to misdemeanors. Now, that may not be the way council wants to go from a policy perspective. You may want to start with misdemeanors because that addresses more of the concerns that you have addressed to us and some of the concerns that you hear from the public. However, there is a larger implementation stage and cost associated with that. And so best practice from just strictly how to implement, it's what Stephanie's recommending today. Start with violations, move to misdemeanors after we have violations under our belt.

It's kind of like she's presenting something that's more bite size and doable and chewable and we can build from there. But it's kind of like with all the research, I've had some personal conversations with Stephanie in regards to all the research that she's done and it is, it's kind of presenting a palatable start. something that we can actually chew on, but can be built from there. So even if you do start small, you still can build and go forward, but this is kind of a starting point that's very doable and economic to what we want to get accomplished. Further questions?

No, I appreciate it. I just figured, You know, we have a history of it. Maybe there's something there to where we can, I mean, it's there. Maybe it's something that can be grasped up or looked at and get some learning points out of it. I don't know. But, yeah, thank you for the answers.

Sure. For the questions, I've got Victoria and then Indra. Victoria?

So I was looking or trying to find the budget for the Medford court, And I just wonder if that serves all of Jackson County or if it's just the city of Medford because it looks like it's like $5 or $6 million or something.

Two things on that. First is that's a biannual budget, so that's two years worth of operating expenses. So about $2.5 million a year. And second is from my research and from talking with other jurisdictions as well, Medford is the gold standard and nobody else is.

Does it like that?

Yeah, they've got program specialists that will help connect people with services, things like that. They do a lot of things that we probably wouldn't be able to do here, but our budget would be pretty, just trying to crunch numbers, it would not be what Medford's is, but it would be higher than our fine income.

Gotcha, thank you. Further questions, I got Indra.

Yes. Thanks, Stephanie. So you touched on the physical space of holding the court. The counter you were talking about with the full-time person, where would that be? Finance.

Oh, okay. You could go in and pay your water bill and your speeding ticket. Perfect.

Okay, on the misdemeanor cases, the 525 decline, many, I'm assuming those are mostly the low-level crimes that people are very concerned about.

Is that the case? The trespasses, things like that, the chief might be able to weigh in a little bit more on those, but they're the ones that people get upset don't get prosecuted.

yeah I don't have a little additional update but I think you're right counselor these are the low-level cases that the district attorney's office decide that it doesn't meet the requirement to move forward on regarding their staffing levels but it's a it's typically all the news and stuff that frustrates community disorderly conduct trespass things like that and so starting with just violations what's

how much more difficult would it be to add those misdemeanors in?

It would add a little bit of complexity to the court because with misdemeanors, you're usually talking about two or more court hearings. With violations, you're talking about one, one, maybe two. You're talking about needing to make accommodations for juries because a misdemeanor is entitled to a jury trial. A violation is not. So we'd have to factor those complexities in. It's doable from that perspective from procedural. Where you're going to see the biggest concern is probably with the budget, because you're going to have a lot more expenses. That's where you need to start talking about defense attorney costs. There will need to be an assistant city attorney if we start going with misdemeanors. We will need to contract for jail beds. All of those costs will need to come with a misdemeanor level court.

So doable, it's just a little more costly. And more, a little bit more money too. Okay, can you give the pros and cons of the taking on DUI cases or not?

Pros would be another additional revenue source. My understanding is that the fines for DUIs are pretty hefty, so that it's a little bit more income. The cons are they're very complicated. People challenge them on a regular basis. There's a lot of contested hearings that have to come. You're talking about a lot more staff resources. So from a prosecution perspective, the judge, there's going to be a lot more hearings on those cases. Law enforcement is going to have to testify more often in those cases. And some of those would potentially then be on their off hours. So you're not only talking about testimony, but over time being paid for testimony. So DUIs are, if you're going to take on misdemeanors, I don't suggest we go there.

Yeah, it was not recommended that we take on DUIs. I mean, if we had a well-oiled machine or something like Medford's municipal court and we're ready to expand and try to do something new, then that would be an opportunity. But that's like probably five years down the road that we would be considering that after we start up our own municipal court.

And Medford does not do DUIs. Most do not. Thank you.

For the questions, I got Kathleen and then Victoria. Kathleen?

So you mentioned a little bit before about the exclusion zones and how they would be affected. Could you be more specific about that?

So if you move forward with a violation-level municipal court and then proceed to implement an exclusion zone, exclusion zone violations, what I've heard from you is that when people violate the exclusion zone, you want them to be arrested. which means that would have to be a misdemeanor level offense, those would then go to the DA's office in circuit court for prosecution. Already the DA's office is declining. A, they won't be held hardly at all under Senate Bill 48 because of the rules around that. But then the DA's office is more likely to be one of those cases that would get rejected for lack of resources because of the way that they're already handling things like trespass and other things. They may prosecute some of them. I don't know the way that they make those decisions, but it's along the same lines as a number of the cases that are currently being declined. If you went with a misdemeanor level circuit court, or municipal court, then misdemeanors would be handled by the municipal court. And so they would be processed, they would be prosecuted, and we would be able to move forward on them. But whatever we decide here will then impact the discussion that we have about exclusion zones and how we want to handle those.

Further questions? I got Victoria and then Indra. Victoria? Do you know if there are any municipal courts who do any cost sharing or job sharing at all with the DA's office? Are there any that partner in any way to? No. I wonder if it would be interesting to think about how that would work with resource sharing. I don't know. It seemed like it would help both. the city and the DA here, but I was just curious about that.

Two different things. So the municipal court is primarily focusing on municipal code.

Right, right, I understand they're different things, but people who work at the DAs, maybe they, I don't know, it just seemed like it's an expansion of something that they'd like to do but can't do. Well, I'm assuming they'd like to prosecute everything, but okay, thank you. Further questions? I've got Indra.

Yes, along those lines, you mentioned Cave Junction did away with their municipal court. Can cities, can we prosecute for others like Cave Junction? Could we take their cases into our municipal court and help them out?

Somewhat. What we could do is we could enter into an intergovernmental agreement with Cave Junction where our municipal court and our judge would handle their cases for them. they would still get the fine amount, but we could have an agreement on how that was structured and potentially get a portion of that revenue for processing their cases. Once we got up and running, that was something I was going to look into further if council wished.

Yeah, probably a great idea. Also, so back to the exclusion zones, so Chief mentioned that it would be beneficial at one of our past meetings, and so Obviously, if we're not arresting or they're not being prosecuted, but Chief, I guess I would like you to address that again. Is that because you feel it would be a deterrent just to have it on the books? And do you feel like there would be a reason to go forward with that quickly? Because as mentioned before, municipal court, this is going to take a while to take effect.

Yeah. That's a great question, and I just want to get my words formed properly in my head because I don't want to contradict anybody. From a boots-on-the-ground perspective, knowing what our community wants, giving our officers more tools on the tool belt and the toolbox to resolve problems, even for a couple of hours, we believe that an exclusion zone would be incredibly beneficial. I don't prosecute cases. That's not on my side of the house. Would I prefer them to prosecute more cases? Yes. But when it comes to law and order, we have certain roles and responsibilities, and I would like to see an exclusion zone available to our officers when they see Mr. or Mrs. Smith who violated multiple violations time and time again and or misdemeanors, and we can arrest them on the spot for trespassing. What happens in the court is up to the court and the DA. But that individual has then been removed and arrested. Will he or she come back again? Maybe. But depending on how you look at it, that individual... Might feel that accountability piece and might decide to change their mind stay out of our area for 30 days Decide to be a good person and not commit crimes again in that particular area So I do see a benefit from a boots on the ground perspective And just to be clear municipal court does not if you decide to go violations only I missed it on municipal court It does not mean that we're going to recommend no exclusion zone what it means is what it gets recommended as far as the exclusion zone might look a little different and

And you would have to make sure that your expectations as far as what would come out of it were adjusted. So it's not a don't do it because there are benefits. There's the immediate response as well as there's the fact that sometimes people actually follow orders. They actually do what they're supposed to every once in a while.

We should give them a chance to do that. So right now, Chief, because there's no exclusion zone, you can't arrest them and you're just saying move along or stop what you're doing?

yes and no it depends there's a lot of opportunities within code municipal code and Oregon Revised Statute that give our folks plenty ample plenty of opportunities to solve the problem and take to jail give a citation and or provide a warning gain compliance the exclusion zone is just another opportunity to give our folks additional tools and it's on the tool belt like I said earlier

So my question to you, Stephanie, is there a reason why we can't move forward quickly with an exclusion zone? Is that a time?

There's already a workshop scheduled to talk about exclusion zones on the agenda. If you want it sooner, that's up to the mayor and council to place it on the agenda. But I believe it's already scheduled.

When is that scheduled? I don't know off the top of my head. Yeah. I would like it moved up.

August 3rd. And if I could just throw...

If other council members would agree, I would really like that moved up as quickly as possible.

If I could also throw in, Councillor, because I think it's applicable, the municipal court ordinances that you all recently put forward are going to be a great benefit to our folks, boots on the ground as well.

And one reason why we don't have the exclusion zones before this municipal court is you have to have some place to actually deal with the exclusion zone. So this, me and Stephanie had conversations about this with Aaron and putting the exclusion zones before the municipal court was kind of put in the cart before the horse. So, go ahead.

Well, Chief is saying that it is another tool to have and what happens after is up in the air. We don't need a municipal court to actually start doing it, is what I'm hearing.

That's a misunderstanding of what, or that's not the way I understand it. The way I understand it is you can utilize exclusion zone before a municipal court, but then it doesn't actually have any teeth. You can't prosecute people because you don't have a municipal court.

There are some teeth, just not as many. So you can still go to jail, but you might get released immediately. you can still, there's a chance that they may get prosecuted, but there's also a chance that they might get rejected by the DA's office for lack of resources. So there's just fewer teeth available.

Which is happening now, but there is more accountability on the spot, which I feel is important.

For the questions, I've got Joel and then Kathleen. Just real quick, Stephanie, I'm a little, I think I heard Correct me if I'm wrong. An exclusion zone violation can be worded to either be a misdemeanor or the lighter offense. What's that called? Violation. A violation. Depending on how you word it.

You could, but one of the... One of the reasons to have an exclusion zone violation is to, if somebody goes into a place that they're not supposed to be, you can remove them, which means arrest. So you really want it to be a misdemeanor, you don't want it to be a violation, otherwise you're just gonna write them citation after citation.

So what I was thinking here is if we go forth with the municipal court to start with, and I can understand why you would want to do that, and it doesn't include misdemeanors, then that would limit the exclusion order to a violation.

It would not. You could still make them a misdemeanor. It's just whether or not they would be prosecuted and how they would be handled at the circuit court level and whether they would remain in custody past the initial arrest.

Okay. Well, I'm ready to direct staff to bring back formal implementation and budget proposal with recommended parameters. I don't want to cut short. Sorry.

Further questions, Kathleen? Okay. Further questions? Victoria?

Are there grants to help to implement municipal court?

There may be, and that's one of the things that we can look into in the interim. I did a quick preliminary search, and I didn't see anything available at this point. I think a lot of things are up in the air with federal funding streams being questionable. So we can look into it further, but I haven't seen anything recently.

All right, any further questions, or you want to go into discussion?

Eric, questions? Do we want to entertain bringing the exclusion zones ahead of schedule? I mean, I'm willing to if it's going to help the police department. And any little bit counts. So if that's a discussion point for later, then that's fine. But I'm willing to move forward with exclusion zones.

Any further questions in regards to the municipal court before we can go into discussion? Seeing none, thank you Stephanie. Bring it back to council for further discussion and or providing some direction for staff, so Rob.

So, I read Stephanie's 16 pages and it's more detail or in depth of what she just presented, very good stuff. towards the bottom of page 14, to me, I'll just read it, maybe not everyone's read it. However, until misdemeanors are addressed through municipal court, there will be no impact on public nuisance-type conduct or the ability to get and keep offenders off the street. In other words, if we go, these are my words now, what I just read was what she wrote. If we go with violations only, basically, I view this as an exercise in expanding government, but not solving the problem that we've been wanting to solve, which is the catch and release problem. So, to me, again, just going with violations, I heard what the Chief had to say today, I also know what Stephanie wrote on the page, and I tend to believe, or I lean more towards what she wrote on the page, that it will have She says no impact. I think it will have minimal impact on public nuisance-type conduct or the ability to get and keep repeat offenders off the street. So we will be adding to our payroll. We will be adding to expense, et cetera, et cetera. But the biggest problem that we've all been looking for is how do we stop catch and release issue? And the way that that could potentially happen is if people are trespassed and things, violations through a sequence turn into misdemeanors. But if we're just going to do violations, I don't, again, I don't see it solving our, the biggest problem that we are trying to solve, which was the catch and release problem. So if we are going to go with the municipal court, and then we end up contracting for jail beds, et cetera, et cetera, that's a different level, but that might actually solve the problem that we're trying to solve. But otherwise, I just don't know, violations only, It expands our government, and it costs us money, and I don't know that it solves our problem.

Further discussion? Indra, then Victoria? Indra?

Yes, public safety remains our community's top priority, and I think we should do everything in our power to help with that and to help our law enforcement officers. I don't see a reason to start municipal court with just violations only because as Councilor Powell said, it doesn't solve most of our problems which are low level crimes. With that said, we're still gonna have the catch and release problem because that's a state problem as well. So we can only do the best that we can and put forth barriers and deterrents to crime. And so I would be for, I understand it's a little bit more money and work and effort, but I think it would be well worth it to start out with both violations and misdemeanors because 525, that's a lot. to just not do anything to and they get away with it and there's no accountability. So even if they don't go to jail or go to jail and get out, at least there's something done and there's some accountability. So I would be for starting that way. With the exclusion zone, same thing. It is a catch and release but we've heard from Chief Hensman that it is another tool and they can remove more of the persons doing nuisance problems on our streets and get them off and that perhaps it would be a deterrent for some. And so I would be for today moving forward, I don't think I even need a workshop on it. I would be for implementing an exclusion zone direction today as well. Thank you.

Further discussion, I got Victoria, Kathleen, and Rob. Victoria?

Well, I think we need to know all the information about what the cost would be for each tiered level. Like you mentioned, Medford is the gold standard, but that's probably something that we couldn't do right now. I'm just assuming we can't afford five to six million dollars a year. But I still want to know what the cost would be and what the benefit would be and if and also grants How they could be used to help Offset some of the the fees for a municipal court, but I would like to know what all the levels are It just seems like cost, from what I'm hearing from the presentation, that cost is the prohibitive factor in doing more. But I'd still like to know, what is the baseline? What's the gold standard? What are those things cost? And what would the benefit to the city be? Because it sounds like it really would be just a really good idea to do. With regards to catch and release, I think the community would like people to be caught, even if they are released. So I think it's a deterrent. Like Stephanie said in her presentation, sometimes people decide to do the right thing after they've been caught. So it's unfortunate that the DA can't prosecute all those cases, but they simply can't with the budget and the staff that they have. So that's what I would like to see. is just show us the different tiered levels of what a municipal court would be like, and what the cost would be, and what the benefit to our community would be with the citizenry, the police, just general wellness of the community. So that's what I would like to see. And I'm also for implementing exclusion zones as soon as possible. For the discussion, I got Kathleen and then Rob.

Kathleen?

Well, this all sounds really good. I would be in favor of exclusion zones as well, but I'm wondering about changing the, or adopting a resolution regarding concerns with SB 48, and how is that gonna interfere? And how, you know, what needs to happen first?

I believe that's your next topic with Aaron. It's not something we need to talk about as part of this discussion.

We're in the middle of discussion in regards to municipal court and how you guys want to proceed forward with it. I know you guys have a laundry list of things you want to do, but if we can stay focused, maybe we can get on to other things. So further discussion in regards to establishing a municipal court or not. Rob.

Yeah, I'm also in favor of getting back the actual costs involved of all the tiers. When a counselor says that having the misdemeanor level would be well worth it, well we don't know what it's gonna cost, so we can't say it'd be well worth it. So we need to know what that would cost. Again, we essentially are currently trying the catch and release model and it doesn't work. The catching is not being much of a deterrent. We see that every day. So if we can, the thing is the jail beds would probably, because we're gonna have to contract for jail beds, that would actually add some teeth to this situation, which currently is toothless. So I'd be for knowing the cost for all the different tiers.

Further discussion in regards to municipal courts. Joel.

I'm just trying to bring this to closure. Please do. So please be patient with me. So what I heard people say was direct staff to bring back formal implementation and budget proposal with revised parameters and costs so we could look at that and see what it is and that would include the purchase of jail beds and it would include the handling of misdemeanors. And at that point in time, we can make an informed decision on whether we want to go with the more expensive version or with the cheaper version. That's what I heard everybody saying.

OK. That's accurate.

So, and you so want to... Make that motion.

Advise staff to proceed forward with your... So I make a motion direct staff to bring back formal implementation and budget proposal with revised parameters of purchasing jail beds and handling misdemeanors with revised budget for us to consider.

So to clarify, to be more specific in the motion, if you can maybe do the motion to provide direction for staff to come back with costs associated with a violation only municipal court and a misdemeanor municipal court.

That would be good. Thank you. OK. Does everybody understand the motion? Victoria?

And if we could include in that any grants that are possible to help pay for them.

So we have a motion to go forward to direct staff to bring back information. Does everybody understand what we're asking staff to do? All right. We've got a second from Seth. Any further discussion in regards to the motion to go forward? Seeing none, we'll bring it to a vote. Joel? Yes. Kathleen? Yes. Seth?

Yes.

Rob? Yes. Victoria? Yes. Eric?

Yes.

Indra? Yes. Thank you. Staff, do you understand?

Yes, we do.

Thank you. Okay, next on the agenda is the discussion of SB 48, action of support.

So, Mayor, we do have, I drafted a small presentation, not necessarily expecting one for today, unless you really desired it, but my understanding is Council Marshall had a request for council support on something, and I thought it would be more of a council-led discussion, but if needed, I can put something on the screen too, so.

Okay, so I'm gonna throw it back to you, Victoria, since this was your, you pushing this, can you explain to council what direction you are wishing council to go? I don't want to put you on the spot. I'm just like, just give us a little synopsis.

Yeah, a little bit, but that's okay. Well, we just, I think it would do, we would do well as a city to come out for SB 48, a resolution just saying we support. And our handout that we just got talks about the quick summary, the purpose of SB 48, you know, so just what... what SB 48 is, but we, I think most, many cities, I know I as a counselor would like to see SB 48 repealed or very greatly changed. So that's all this was for, was for us to come as a body to come forward to let the public know that we really want SB 48

to be changed or repealed perfect I think you got two options at your hand at your disposal three options at your disposal today in regards to you have a counselor it's requesting that the council as a body support the repeal of state statute there is also a request out from a county counselor I mean County Commissioner for the city to join them in a sort of group support behind repealing this state legislation, or your third option is to not, as a full body, agree to support this. Does everybody understand? Rob.

Yeah, I understand, thank you. So, Stephanie, could you go over again the, bedrock constitutional tenant of innocent until proven guilty. Now, how does that conflict with SB 48? Because SB 48 basically reinforces that, does it not?

It does. And that's part of why SB 48 was put out there is because there is the presumption of innocence until you are proven guilty, which means you shouldn't be held in custody unless there's either a public safety or a failure to appear reason to do so. And so what SB 48 does is it provides the parameters and guidelines on when somebody can be held. It takes a lot of the discretion out of, not necessarily the hands of the jail, because the jail would hold people if they were brought. SB 48 requires the jail to release certain individuals that it used to be would have to go to court to be released.

Right. So basically, Without SB 48, someone at the jail would essentially be the judge, and they'd be deciding whether or not someone loses their freedom.

Yes, they are using the judge's rubric that says, if you meet this, this, and this, here's what happens as far as your custody. So they're applying the rules that they've been given by the court.

OK, but it's somebody at the jail, not necessarily a judge.

Correct.

Just some state employee decides whether or not somebody loses their freedom.

And one of the focuses also, I think, is it's more on bail and ability to pay to get out versus 48, which provides some additional criteria.

I don't understand. Could you elaborate on that?

Bail is another reason why SB 48 came in, because essentially what it means in practice a lot of times is that the more wealthy people, spend far less time in jail, even for the same offenses, even with the same histories. So if you reduce the ones that are related to bail and you look strictly at offense history, failures to appear, public safety, those kinds of things, that's when you're getting a more consistent across the board application of the rules and people are being held when they need to be held and not just because they can't afford the bail to get out.

So SB 48 does allow, theoretically, our county jail to hold people if they've had repeated offenses, if they've had multiple offenses within a few days, if they've had repeat of the same thing within five years, if they've had multiple failures to show up in court, then they can be held, correct? That's the way it's written now.

that's the way I understand it yes I'm not sure if I understand what my fellow counselors problem with it is okay so here's here's here's the way we're gonna solve this because in in the try to be more efficient here so I personally feel that we do not have 100% council support on this so is up to council as a body do you want to discuss this further option one or do you want to vote to get a true vote of see if you have full council support to get behind this Victoria well I would like to discuss it just a little bit more but I would also like to quickly vote I just want to quickly point out that there has I was just

I mean, there was justice before SB 48. I mean, nationwide, I can't think of a Supreme Court case where someone has won because they had to pay more bail. Maybe Stephanie knows of one. But SB 48 is not, I don't think it's like, if we didn't have it, our rights don't disappear. So I just wanted to point out that I don't think that's a very valid argument against wanting to stand against it because it has caused a great deal of damage in our state and the citizens are telling us that it has and they really would like us to come step forward and speak up for them. And so I would like to do that. So I'm fine if we just vote right now. And if people I would rather maybe somebody else has something different to say, I would rather that we vote as a body and not enjoying with any other government agency, but the county, but it's great. I would love for everyone to be able to vote right now. That'd be great.

Perfect, so I just want to get the sentiment of the council as a whole body before we actually get into an in-depth conversation about this because I don't think it's prudent if we don't have the full council support to go forward. You do have the option to join up with the county, but what I want to do right now is go through a roll call vote to see the support of this council as a full body supporting the recall of this measure. So I would just look for a thumbs up if you want to support us. Oh, go ahead.

So you're saying, are you saying the full, it has to be unanimous or just majority yes?

I think my personal opinion is I would want the full unanimous support of counselors because you, are supporting a state or not supporting a state legislation on the full breadth that you feel that your constituents in your specific ward want that to happen. So if you're going to do it as a council body, then I would think that you would want to go forward with unanimous consent.

And yet every vote we make is majority. So there are people against votes we go with and we work as a team to be supportive even if we disagree, right? My other thing is, how do we know how to vote to do it if we haven't discussed it fully? Because I have some things I would like to say.

Well, do you guys want to spend all afternoon discussing this? Or do you want to decide whether the council wants to go forward before you discuss it?

No, but I have some information that I'd like to share with it. Go ahead, Erin.

For action, technically if you make a motion, it's a majority that could provide direction. I understand what the mayor's talking about though because when we provide a letter of support or if we do a resolution and it's unanimous. Or a proclamation. Or a proclamation, that carries a lot more weight. So I get that from that perspective. So the recommendation would be if you want to make a stance as a council on an issue, especially legislative, if the recommendation passes, it would be good to determine are you wanting to do it through a resolution or through a letter, a signed letter from the mayor to the state of Oregon. And either way, we would get our legislative advocate to help draft something that would be appropriate and mirror the sentiment of council in the spirit of the motion.

Are you saying the mayor would do a letter from the city just on his own?

Is that what you just said? We've done these things before in the past. We would draft a letter for the mayor's signature, or it could be the mayor and council president's signature, to go to the state that represents the spirit of what council's wanting to do on a specific legislative matter. And that could be reviewed by council before it's signed.

Okay, because in the past, letters have gone to the state without any council approval, so that's why I'm a little confused on that. But I do have something to share on that if we're going to continue discussion, so let me know.

Okay, so Victoria, do you want to make a specific motion so we can go forward?

Sure. I would like to make a motion, and then afterwards I assume that we're going to be able to discuss the motion, to draft a resolution if the majority of the council votes to draft this resolution standing for either the repeal or the reform of SB 48. I guess that's it.

All right, so you have a motion on the table to have council draft a resolution in support of repealing or reforming state statute HB 48 with a second from Kathleen. All right, does everybody understand the motion? Okay, we'll go into further discussion. Seth?

Can we amend that motion to include the county as well, partnering?

I don't know what, Clint, you mentioned that they were... Well, I don't think we can actually add the county into a resolution, but there is an email out there from a county commissioner that is requesting that we, that you all as counselors get on board with this. So I think there's an opportunity. if the council as a whole doesn't go forward with this, there's an opportunity you as an individual councilor could join up with the county commissioner.

The reason why I wouldn't probably want to do that, Seth, would be that then there would be two governmental agencies who were doing the same thing, and that's where the groundswell is going to be coming from. The more, I mean, if we're just, if there's just one thing going and it's Josephine County, we're going to kind of get lost, the city's going to get lost in that. So, I think

County doing it and the city doing it would be a lot more forceful Well, I don't think we have the jurisdiction that tell the county to do what anything either further discussion Joel So I need clarification on the actual bill impacts my impression is It does away with bail is that correct and and so We got a limited jail space so that for those that can't afford bail, but they meet the criteria that they would otherwise have been released, it would free up that jail space for people that are probably more dangerous. Is that true?

I'm not 100% sure how it works in practice. I didn't practice criminal law in Oregon. But I do understand bail and release provisions. My understanding is that it means that the preliminary decision about whether or not somebody gets held is based on risk management and assessment. And that is done earlier in the process than that first appearance when they get to court. So a lot of the same considerations are what a judge would have taken into consideration when they appear. This just makes that decision happen sooner, probably not long after they're brought into custody. As far as the bail goes, I don't know if monetary bail is still applied here. I believe it is. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I know that it shortens the length of time that somebody would spend in jail on offenses when they meet certain criteria. They're released a lot sooner.

So it would have an effect of freeing up jail beds then?

Well, it potentially could because the ultimate spirit of it is to provide the Chief Justice responsibility issue release guidelines that local courts have to follow to ensure that decisions considered in the offense types are considered. to determine whether or not the individual circumstance is truly a public safety issue. And bail is just one of those items. And so the bill's purpose is rooted in the constitutional principle that treats pretrial liberty as the norm and detention as a careful, constrained exception. So it does technically provide more potential space because you're releasing more individuals based on criteria that's been established by the court.

So then the next question I have, based on the data, and I was in there, but I didn't quite understand it for whatever reason. The people that show up under the existing situation and under if Senate Bill 48 was enacted, they had some data on where people were more likely to show up. Which one was it? It might have to do with bail, no bail, dangerous, not dangerous. I'm not sure.

Well, risk is one of those criterias I think that Senate Bill 48 tries to really put into place, is what is the risk of that individual coming to court? And instead of bail being one of the biggest items, there's an additional criteria established that really tries to define risk associated with the individual and the violation that's in place, the misdemeanor that's in place.

No, that's still a little hazy to me. Okay, thank you. Any further discussion?

Indra? So I would like to point out there's what's on paper, which often sounds very nice, and there's what happens in real life on the ground. My understanding, and this was from the visit to the jail last year, was that the state has an officer at the jail whose sole purpose is to get people out as quickly as possible. And even when the sheriff... and the personnel believed that someone should be held a little longer, whether it's another day or two for safety, that they were often forced to let somebody out on the street because of SB 48. So can you address that, please, what you know?

I don't know anything about those parameters. The only thing I know is that the state does have someone there that is applying the rubrics to make those release decisions.

And does that have directly to do with SB 48? Yes. Thank you.

All right, any further discussion? You have a motion on the table to see if council wants to make a resolution to support the repeal or the modification of SB 48. Rob?

Yeah, the more, to me it's pretty clear if we listen to that the fact that our city attorney's not 100% sure, and I'm not denigrating her for that, but she's not 100% sure of all the ramifications of SB 48. We've been told that SB 48 is bad by some people. There's a lot of details on these pages that make it sound quite reasonable. And I don't really know, maybe it's the fact that in practice, that the actual practice of it, as Indra said, is the problem. But I frankly, and I don't think that I know less about it than other counselors. I frankly don't think I know enough about it to have an opinion on it. And it's just, there's a lot written here that sounds very reasonable. And again, it could be an issue of in practice, is it actually reasonable? But I don't know enough about it to say that I'd want to get rid of it.

Eric.

So I'm on the, on the Public Safety Committee, Budget Committee, PSAC. And we had the DA come in and discuss it. We had numerous individuals, the sheriff, Discussing SB 48 and I'm hearing nothing positive not even from those individuals Everybody knows the this SB 48 is not a good bill and it needs to be revised at the very least if not repealed the that interview that recording of that meeting with with the DA and Is on the I would like to encourage people to go visit that and and watch it or listen to it It's not a video. It's just audio on the on the city website. I believe it was approximately a year ago I can't remember which someone could remember what it was. It was emailed out to us as well in fact Rob Was discussing it as well. So he he he knows he's heard the the the audio as well. Quite frankly, I don't understand what the resistance is in doing this if we're having all of these individuals telling us to include the public about this this very unhelpful, in fact, nuisance law that it is. I mean, it's creating a lot of, it seems to me like it was intentionally created to hinder the police department as well as our local community. So that's my standpoint on it, and I'm full, I agree with the motion.

Okay, so you have a motion on the table and this is I'm just gonna remind everybody SB 48 is the state statute is outside the jurisdiction of the City Council right now we are determining whether the City Council wants to support a resolution or that would be in support of repealing or reforming this bill. That is it. I believe you all have the platform to support this individually, to join with the county commissioners to support it. But at this moment in time, we have a motion on the table to see if the council as a majority wants to put a resolution forth. So with that, I would go into a roll call vote. Victoria? Yes. Eric?

Absolutely, yes.

Indra? Yes. Joel? Yes. Kathleen? Yes. Seth?

Yes.

Rob?

No.

Okay. So majority passes the resolution. Aaron, do you have full direction on drafting this resolution? I believe that council has asked for the draft to be presented back.

Certainly. We will try to catch the spirit of today's discussion in a resolution for council further action.

Perfect. And if you have any questions, let us know. All right. Next on the agenda is a review of the upcoming business meeting on June 17th, this Wednesday. Does anybody have any questions or concerns in regards to that agenda? Kathleen.

So looking at the resolution authorizing city manager to adjust the salary schedules for non-bargaining employees, There is a step schedule placed on here. Which schedule is that? Is that something current or something that's going to be, it's gonna change to with the cost of living? Is that a schedule that is in place with the cost of living that would be approved or not approved?

Are you talking about Council Action C?

Yeah, that would be what would be adopted with the 2.71% adjustment.

And then those are the monthly and hourly that are already in place?

Yeah, that's what the new salary structure would look like with the 2.7%. Thank you.

Okay, any further questions or comments in regards to Wednesday night meeting? Indra?

Yes, it seems like myself and several other counselors are in favor of an exclusion zone.

Okay, we're talking about Wednesday night's meeting. We'll get to that point later. I need to get through Wednesday night's meeting. Do you have any questions or concerns about Wednesday night's meeting? Yes.

Yes, if you would let me talk.

Exclusion zone, you want to put it on the agenda coming forward.

No, yes, I would like to put it on Wednesday night's meeting so we can vote and decide and not spread it out till August. It seems pretty straightforward and simple. We cannot have an ordinance drafted for you by Wednesday night.

No. It's not possible.

During agenda review, you can request that it be moved from, say, a workshop to a sooner workshop, or just go straight to a business meeting. And we will draft an ordinance for your consideration in a future business meeting.

We have been asking for this to be on the agenda for a long time. It's really frustrating. It is on the agenda. Yes, in August. We have people moving from an unmanaged camp to this now. And it would have been nice to have this already in place. I don't know why the delay. I don't know. I don't understand. So I would like it to be on.

It's a big conspiracy. It is, absolutely. I'm doing it completely on purpose, underneath the guidance of our council that says that we should probably discuss municipal courts before we actually did that, but that's okay. In regards to that, let's just do this because in time-wise, I want to get done with this in the next couple minutes. Let's take it from the August 3rd workshop and we'll put it on the August 29th. With doing that, we're going to have to take one of those items off, water incline rates.

I'm asking that we just move it to a meeting and vote and not have it at a workshop.

Okay, then the next future business meeting would be July 1st.

Thank you.

So if we moved it to July 1st, does staff have enough time to draft the ordinance?

We will make that possible and it'll be under council action.

Thank you, Aaron.

So then it'll go without further discussion or a workshop to discuss anything. Okay. All right, anything else in regards to the agenda review going forward?

Do you want to take council's direction just to make sure everyone's on board?

I have purview to move that forward and I'm okay with it. So let's just do it. Because I'm kind of sick and tired of talking about it. Anything else on the agenda review? All right. See you then. Workshop for today is complete and done. Thank you very much.