City Council - Regular Meeting

So it was back on April 21st council meeting in which this item for downtown safety was placed on the work session pending list. That was just two days after the tragic shooting that we had on April 19th in our pedestrian mall. Chief Liston's here, he's gonna walk you through the details that are in the information packet memo. Ultimately have a recommendation for you. That centers around a joint walking beat with the University of Iowa public safety team. And I just wanted to start by thanking the University of Iowa for their support through this incident. I've worked in a college town my whole career, either here in Iowa City or in a college town in Illinois, and I've been blessed to be a part of a lot of really good town-gown partnerships and overall good relationships. I think the support that we felt as staff from the university from the first minute after this incident has been as strong as I've seen through current day. They were there offering first responder services, alerting the public through their Hawk Alert system. They supported us night and day through those early days in the investigation, and then post-incident, the safety planning that they've done with Chief Liston and his team, and the long-term commitment that they're offering here. again, is a strong show of partnership that I've seen in my time in working in that town-gown relationship. So I do want to thank them. I know we've got a lot of decisions ahead of us in terms of what our next steps are. but I felt that was important to say. I'm gonna turn it over to Chief who's gonna walk you through some violent crime statistics and also talk to you about the partnership with the University of Iowa Police Department.

Thank you. Dustin Liston, Chief of Police. One thing I want to note, five and a half years ago I didn't need glasses to read things and so it's funny how quickly things can change. I WANT TO THANK YOU FOR THE OPPORTUNITY TO ADDRESS YOU ON THE ISSUE OF SAFETY IN OUR DOWNTOWN AREA. AND I WANT TO BE REALLY CLEAR WITH ONE IMPORTANT MESSAGE. DOWNTOWN REMAINS A GENERALLY SAFE PLACE FOR RESIDENTS, WORKERS AND VISITORS AND BUSINESSES. THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE WHO SPEND TIME DOWN THERE DO SO WITHOUT INCIDENT. OUR PET MALL CONTINUES TO BE THE HEART OF OUR DOWNTOWN. AT THE SAME TIME, WE MUST ACKNOWLEDGE REALITY. VIOLENT INCIDENTS DO OCCUR. While they remain relatively infrequent, each one has a real impact on victims, nearby businesses, and public perception. These incidents, though limited in number, cannot be ignored or minimized. I'm going to provide you a factual overview of recent trends and outline the steps already underway, as well as recommending next actions. Our goal is a clear-eyed assessment that neither exaggerates the problem nor understates the need for continued vigilance and targeted response. So I want to talk about violent crime in the downtown area over the last six and a half years, so from 2020 on. And we define violent crime using the FBI's definition, aggravated assault, murder, non-negligent manslaughter, rape, and robbery. And the area we're talking about, we're going to talk about area one, which is the way we define our downtown, which the boundaries are the Iowa River West, Iowa Avenue to the north, Dodge Street to the east, and Kirkwood Avenue to the south. Now the downtown proper, which is what most of us think, the Ped Mall area, we're defining as Clinton, the area inside of Clinton, Iowa, Gilbert, and Burlington. So I'll talk about the area one and I'll also talk about downtown proper to put a finer point on it. From January 1st, 2020 to June 3rd, 2026, there were 430 violent crime offenses in the downtown, the larger downtown area. 62% of those were in the downtown proper, the smaller Ped Mall area. 81% of those occurred on weekends, Friday evening through Sunday morning, concentrated between the times of 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. 75% of those violent crimes in area one, the larger downtown, were aggravated assaults, with 12% being robbery or forcible sex offenses. In area one, the larger area, during that time period, there were 20 shootings, which averages to one every four months, evenly distributed between two and four a year. And we define a shooting, as we've talked about before, as corroborated gunfire excluding suicide attempts or accidental discharges. Eighty-nine rounds were fired in those 20 shootings with 16 people hit by gunfire. Eleven of the 20 were in the Ped Mall area or the smaller downtown area. That averages out to nearly three violent crime incidents per month in the downtown proper. And as you guys know, the downtown is visited by thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of people on a weekend night, and it's an elevated vulnerable bystander risk there. The weekend nights, weekend late nights, those are our busiest calls for service time, which means less time for proactive patrol and community policing. Post incident, post April 19th, as Jeff mentioned, we had immediate UIPD and for that matter, all agencies in Johnson County assisted. we transitioned the following weekend with partnership with the university of iowa to ongoing walking patrols every friday and saturday night the uipd contributed a minimum of two officers and a supervisor and sometimes up to four officers per shift all on overtime some of those were forced on overtime iowa city's practice was the same additional overtime officers on downtown on the weekends pre and post incident we had been doing that prior to due to the risk volume in a vulnerable area The successes of the combined patrol have been as follows. There was a decent article in the Daily Iowan a few weeks after the incident, but high visibility as a deterrent and reassurance focused on prevention, not diluted by regular calls. Officers aren't being pulled away to handle regular calls for service or handle bar checks. It's strengthened by interagency relations and mutual aid. So we're working, we're basically doubling the presence down there by partnering with the university. In that time, since April 19th, we have seized six firearms downtown, including three in the downtown proper in the smaller Ped Mall area, just since April 19th. The refinements we'd like to make. We'd like more time for relationship building with downtown employees, patrons, and partners. We want to model this after the success of our downtown liaison program. The position that Colin Fowler currently fills, we'd like to see that work into the nighttime. The business owners are eager for collaboration. City Manager's Office and members of my staff met with the bar owners two days after the shooting, and it was pretty unanimous on what they wanted to see down there, and it was more presence. Long-term success requires dedicated, not overtime or rotating, sergeants and officers who are fresh to focus. Again, we're currently staffing that with people on overtime, sometimes forced on overtime, so some of these people are working double shifts. We'd like to have dedicated staff to follow the community policing model. These people are going to be known to the business owners down there and they're going to develop relationships with them. The recommendations are to leverage partnership, enhance visibility, strengthen community policing, stakeholder collaboration, minimize violent crime occurrence or severity, and keep late-night downtown safe and welcoming. The core proposal would be to create three new specialty positions, one sergeant and two officers. We'd work with the University Police Department, which is prepared to make a parallel investment. The likely schedule, we've got a lot of things to work out and we've got time to do it, but the likely schedule would be Wednesday through Saturday nights, like a 4-10 schedule. We'd have to be flexible with that. But on Wednesdays and Thursdays, obviously there's less activity downtown, so that would provide more time for community-based policing events, training, and professional development. The rationale for dedicated staff, the consistency enables true community policing orientation, unlike rotating or new officers every night. Better strategic operations, information sharing, and early intervention on escalating behaviors. And supervisory support eases pressure on existing teams and improves overall efficiency. The implementation timeline and staffing authorization, we'd like to increase authorized staff from 85 to 88 in the coming weeks to accelerate hiring and promotion. The dedicated sergeant is likely several months out. The interim reliance on overtime officers until full-time positions are filled without impacting minimums. And we anticipate there would be minimal to no impact this fiscal year to the budget because it will take time to fill those positions. And I'll turn it back over to Jeff to talk more budgetary issues.

Yeah, so I just want to talk about the funding environment. In another two weeks, we're going to be sitting here at the same table talking about property tax reform. And we have to acknowledge what the financial reality is for us going forward. Simply put, the revenue constraints that were placed on cities with this recent legislation will not keep pace with the cost of providing municipal services. That's going to hit different cities at different times. impact us in slightly different ways. But at the end of the day, when we look ahead, we do not see the revenue stream coming in that's gonna support our current level of services citywide, those services that are funded by property tax. over the long term. That means tonight and subsequent nights when you're talking about this, you're going to have some tough decisions. And I think these tough decisions are going to continue to roll through different budget sessions in the years ahead. And we're going to have to prioritize which services are the most critical for this community. When I thought about this and I talked to the chief about this, we ultimately believed that this investment is critical for the community and should be prioritized. That's difficult to say in this funding environment, but ultimately that's where we landed, that this is a critical investment and it is important for us to make it despite the financial challenges. And that's going to make an even more uphill battle ahead with future budget sessions. But again, we believe it's the right decision to make, and that's making the recommendation to you. We'll wrap up by just a couple concluding remarks and then look forward to answering your questions along with Chief Liston. I want to talk a little bit about the growth in police positions over the last 15 years or so. We detailed this in the 2020 report that's still available online. I think other There's other sources of data that show kind of staffing levels, but the police department has remained relatively flat in terms of sworn officer positions over the last 15 years. We've added four and those have all been specialty or investigation positions. Other positions added in the police department have been civilian based at that time. So for a steadily growing community, I'd say that's probably a bit unusual that we haven't added just your typical patrol positions. But we've been very, I think with all our funding recommendations, not just in the police department, we come to you and we see a very specific need. And in the past, those have been addressed by specialty positions. So think of the downtown liaison. Officer or the sexual assault investigator, those are very specific tasks that we were looking to improve service levels on with the community. And that's what we see here is we see violence prevention and community policing relationship building as that missing baseline service that we should be offering. And we believe that increasing by those three positions that the chief mentioned, we'd be able to provide a stronger service to the community. I think with that, Chief, unless you had anything else that you wanted to offer, we'll maybe turn it over for questions.

Yeah, if I could just, I just want to describe the margins that we operate on. I've had several conversations with many of you. Since I've been here, we've added one sworn position. I don't come asking for positions if I don't think we really need them. We're authorized 85 right now. We have 82. We have a new officer. He was a former officer. So a certified officer starting on Monday. So that will be 83. And I think it's a valid question to say, well, you've never been able to get to 85. Why don't you just get to 85? It takes us so long to spin up new staff. So we have a conditional offer out to a non-certified person who will start the academy in January. He'll graduate the Academy in April. He'll go through four months of field training. And if everything works out perfectly, he'll be able to contribute as one of our numbers a year from now. So it just takes us so long because we don't overhire. So my thought is if we are authorized 88, I think we'd probably hover around 85. We'd finally be able to get to that number because we'd have to go over. to account for attrition because it takes us so long to spin people up. Because we don't hire 86 if we can get to 85. If we can get to 86 or 87 and then eventually we'll probably be back down. But where our positions are allotted, we have 17 supervisors from myself down to the sergeants. We have 14 detectives. And then we have 54 people assigned to, 54 people that are officers. 50 of those are assigned to patrol. So 14 people are assigned to day watch, 18 and 18 on the other two shifts. So we have four people that aren't assigned four positions. They're not people because we don't have those positions full. We have four positions that aren't assigned to patrol. And those positions, the names have changed over the years. We've called them specialty positions, but right now, Two of those positions are full. That's our Collins position, the downtown liaison, and that's our co-responder. The other two that are unfilled would be a secondary co-responder and our community outreach officer. Those have gone on and have never been filled since I've been here. We just haven't had the staffing because patrol takes a priority. So that's where we are. And I feel like if we can get to 88, if we are authorized 88, we eventually can get close enough to where we can fill those those specialty positions and I would consider these a specialty positions we haven't come up with a name for it, but I'm thinking like the nighttime downtown liaison unit or something like that. One of the things we do this meeting with the city manager every month and I have a wish list that first thing on my wish list the entire time we've been doing that has been an extra supervisor so my former agency we had one extra supervisor at least per shift than we have here and evenings as you guys can imagine is one of the busiest shifts and they're running around going to call to call and i think in the interim this position would go to evenings to help with the downtown issue and then once we got this specialty position stood up and specialty units stood up it'd be permanently assigned to them so With that, I think we can take any questions you have. But it's not lost on either of us what we're asking. Again, this is my going on sixth year here, and I've asked for one sworn position, and that was a sexual assault investigator. So I don't take this lightly, and I understand it's a big decision.

Thank you both. And counsel, it's our time to ask any questions, or we can deliberate as well.

Will this position have or this recommendation have any impact on the existing daytime liaison or will that just on top of.

Now I was joking with him saying was positions getting moved tonight he wasn't too happy but now I will keep this position.

Chief you mentioned 4 sworn officers. I think that have been added over a number of years that right Jeff mention that in the last 15 years since I've been here.

It's been one.

Yeah, OK. How many civilian positions in that time or how many do we have now? Maybe is a better question.

So if we have 85, if you count crossing guards, I think we have around 130, and that includes animal control. But since I've been here, and this is a stab, but we've added several civilian positions. We've added the part-time community outreach officer dealing with immigrants, and we have the civilian data analyst that we've added. might be drawn a blank. It seems like we've added one more.

Animal services, I believe we added a position, a customer service type position. And then slightly related, a public information officer that's in our community, not in the police department, in the communications division that serves both police and fire, so quasi-related there.

And that was a position that had been held by a sworn officer before?

Yeah, that was formerly a specialty position for an officer. I think that's it. I'm not recalling anything else. I should have anticipated that question. That's a good one.

You mentioned it would take some time to fill these positions. I mean, I heard estimations, and you never know, right? But I've heard estimations about what to expect between a year and two years. Does that sound?

Yes. Okay. When we're having the conversations, we've had several meetings in the president's office with the university staff, and that's what I tell them I think is a realistic timetable to get our staffing to where it needs to be to fill those positions, yeah. And just so you know, we wouldn't hire someone and they go immediately to that position. We hire people, they go to patrol, and then we put that position out for someone to put in for, to apply for that, to move from wherever they are in the department to that position. So when we add positions, that's just adding on our staffing table, but that doesn't mean that's a brand new officer that's going to be doing that.

So you'd expect these would be internal reassignments, promotions, what have you? Yes. Okay.

including for the additional um sergeant position that you're talking about the that leadership role that's been on your wish list that would be an internal yes okay yep typically you you want to teach someone to be a police officer or in this case you want to teach someone to be a supervisor first so they would work with other supervisors this these positions will be a little more autonomous. So if we were, I don't think it'd be fair to put a brand new sergeant in charge of when they hadn't really supervised people. Sure, sure.

So, oh.

Go ahead.

So just so the public knows to so since April 19th we have actually would you say we've had it had this additional 3 bodies in that sort of dedicated to that don't only think already if I understand correctly we kind of already doing a version of this but relying on rotating staff on over time is that correct.

Correct. And we are going to continue to do that. But it's going to be people who are working on an overtime basis. It's going to be different people every night. And in some cases we have to force. And that's part of been the university's issue. They started out with four and then they had they're having a hard time getting volunteers to do it.

Well, I think that's important for people to know. I know several of including some people here on this council have have students at the University of Iowa or several of my friends have students that are just starting at the University of Iowa. So they know even if it takes a year or more to spin this all the way completely up, that doesn't mean that our downtown is going to be lacking that additional protection coverage public safety presence for this upcoming school year which is just getting underway so I think that's an important thing for the public to know that that that that is already a level of protection what I would I hear you saying and what I'm kind of processing this and correct me if I'm wrong. But we're looking at is how do we make this sustainable longer term and more effective by not having the rotating staff is that a fair correct. Yes, so so but also with that there's already because one of the I know for probably and probably not the only person who looks at the price tag and and you know that's you know doing cart was what there's already a cost to the city to do what we're doing because of overtime is that also correct correct.

We're paying people over time to fill those spots. So there there is a cost and in the same with the university.

So there's a monetary cost of if you happen to have a ballpark figure of that but in addition to the monetary cost is there a cost in terms of overall personnel morale effectiveness of the department as we do this month after month right we could certainly get you the monetary cost we could run the numbers but

That's what we're kind of addressing is the, it starts, you wonder if it remains sustainable to be doing this five years from now where we're still forcing a day watch officer or an evening watch officer to stay until 3 in the morning to do this. So that's what I worry about. And then it starts to feel like it did about five years ago when we were down in the 70s and new officers, we used to joke about I hope you don't want to go to a Hawkeye game because you're never going to have a day off, you know, and that's just not sustainable.

Thank you. I just want to ask you, the three positions that we have not filled yet, and one of them now almost finished from the academy, is this, we budget for this already. Do you, in the top of your mind, you know how much that budget is? Is it close to what you ask right now, like 3,000, 370-something thousand or less? Anyone know?

The 85 positions in the budget would be the same as the, I guess if we're not filling three, it's pretty close to the same. The only difference is a sergeant's paid a little bit more than your typical officer. So it would be a little bit higher for the three we're requesting just because there's one sergeant in that mix. But the cost estimate that we offered was based on just the step one officer, the step one officer. which is how we would project our payroll to with any vacant positions.

Sure. And those three, you mentioned specialized positions. The one that in the police academic right now is a regular officer, right?

Right.

Is it a or just like regular?

No. Everyone who comes from the academy or a new hire starts as just a regular officer. They go to patrol. And then after they get some experience, they could put in for a specialty position or an investigative spot or they could try to promote to a supervisor.

Okay, unless somebody who came ready already becomes Syrian, or that's the way typically the Syrian process go?

Right. We have two officers that came from other agencies that were supervisors at their agency. They still have to be an officer here for at least three years before they can promote to supervisor, which I'm hoping they do. But we want them to learn our culture, our department, because sometimes the agencies they come from aren't the same.

Oh, that's what that means. Like, anyway, this is going to take time.

It's going to take time. And one thing I forgot to mention, I had in my notes, I think it's important when I talk about the margins that we have. So right now we have 82 officers. We have nine officers that, again, are not and I might be repeating myself that are not contributing at all to the academy, to an FTO and and five that are out. Last week we had 15 officers at crime scene training, which is not uncommon to have a large, you know, when you start doing percentages of the department, that's 10% of our department that aren't contributing because of either academy training or illness or long-term injury. Then last week we had another 20% of our department out on training, and that is not uncommon. that we have mandatory training we have to go to, never mind the fact that a few people are sick here and there or people have their patrol officers get a pretty healthy amount of leave. They get, I think, 11 holidays. They get a lot of time off. So we have to account for that. So our numbers get run down pretty quick. And a good argument would be like, you're at 82, just hired 85. But again, because of the turnover that we have and the long buildup to get people out in the field, we, if we were at 85, we'd be at 85 for a couple weeks until someone retired and then we'd be back at this. And we don't have 82 people out in the field. We have 73 out in the field if everyone shows up at work.

And if anyway, does Sergian have to go through the academy and have some disability and after that promote those supervisors? Is this like you have to hire a new person to go through this process or you can also just like promote somebody from the people who already

exactly yeah that's what we'll do we'll make it faster we will promote them into this position eventually but we still have to have to hire somebody to cover their position cover their spot correct kind of back fill sure we've had that conversation before i think every year right because there's always these unfilled positions um that

we've talked even the last few months when we created the community response reserve fund, right? We had the conversation of like, we know each year there's excess money in the budget because those positions aren't ever filled. I think, you know, just to kind of back this up, when we're talking about community safety, I appreciate in the memo, you know, this is a proposal coming from you chief and the city manager. I think i hope we can have a broader discussion before we would make a decision like this mostly because we're talking about violent crime prevention and i think you know i i would love for if our data analysts or others have information that suggests that physical presence of officers is preventing violent crime let's have that conversation I do think the data shows that a presence of officers moves violent crime and can deter it in specific moments when there's an officer there but if we want to be talking bigger picture and more like upstream why did this happen why did individuals come from outside the community you know what could have Intervened, you know, prior to the incredibly efficient. Good response that our officers had on scene. So I would just ask that we kind of zoom that out. We know that from the county perspective, the violence prevention program that we have. very intentionally collaborates with law enforcement but isn't based on law enforcement positions those positions are more of a you know community almost social work if you talk with um Jess or Marcus about what their day-to-day is I think there are good reasons for that and there's a good reason that you know those positions are in public health and the county attorney's office so those aren't your purview chief right and I don't want to um take away from what I hear and understand, including from the years that we've been talking about this, that from a basic patrol standpoint, you're always going to be in this place where you feel kind of short. I think that's been true for many years. And the other big picture thing that I just don't want to lose sight of is, you know, our, I think what we'd be talking about with three additional sworn officers, knowing that they're starting in patrol, knowing that that's increasing capacity, before we would commit to a permanent investment in that, I want to talk again about the disparity and impact among our community members with police contacts. We know that we had a longitudinal study based on traffic stops for 20-some years. The University of Iowa was engaged to give us updated information. We have the data analysts, but we haven't actually revisited that anytime since, gosh, 2020.

It's been since I was here. The last Barnum study was probably in 2021. And that's when shortly thereafter we engaged university. Yeah.

And I think, you know, there's no, I want to be really, really clear. I do not believe there is like overt racist intent happening in enforcement in our community. But what we do know is there is real, real, real disparate impact. and it could be that that's improving but we don't have that information and i don't want to commit to a permanent investment that would increase that capacity when we know there's disparate impact without taking a look at those numbers and talking about what our options are. I think, you know, and it could be that the data that we have would bear out significant improvements. I don't know. And I hope that we'll get that information soon. And then the other piece is just, you know, the things that we could be investing in that wouldn't be binding us to an additional half million dollars in positions where in the future, These are general fund dollars. These are the dollars that, you know, are being impacted by these property tax reforms that our city manager is telling us, you know, it's going to be really, really hard in the coming years. And we could do something on a short-term basis, like a pilot project with, you know, the field mediation that is currently being trained up and downtown you know, crisis intervention workers. And we could say, we could scope it and say, we want to measure, you know, from here to here, this amount of time, these amount of contacts, this kind of engagement, and see if it makes a difference before we would commit to increasing patrol policing.

I think that you've raised some really interesting points and it is part of this piece in front of us right now is part of a much larger discussion and you've raised several components of it. I think where I'm seeing this is that it is part of a yes and. This is focused very specifically on particular growing circumstances of violent crime in a particular area and that I think that we've all recognized and acknowledged and actually to a certain extent moved in different or in multiple directions of how to address systemic problems, community problems in alternative ways. that help with public safety in this instance with violence and gun violence in particular in talking about you know a large investment you're absolutely right we need a big picture discussion but in terms of talking about the increasing patrol without saying I do want to return to the conversations to get back to what are the traffic stops and how is the pilot doing. I would love to have an update on that. But what's being proposed here is actually to consolidate and to allow for, eventually, a team to have more of a community-based, deliberate, and focused focus, sorry for the repetition, on a particular segment of a neighborhood with different people in that neighborhood of the downtown district to be able to create relationships. And so this isn't actually to increase patrol, as Chief has said. This is to have a team that would address this specific issue. And this is our densest area and The statistics are there that there have been some incredibly scary things happen and without I think I just want to return to it's a yes and conversation but I think one of the things that we actually have not talked about a lot in the past years is the actual role that Public safety Allah the police have as a part of community safety and in this particular instance, I think that this. Proposal has some legs to it in that they have actually taken firearms and that there haven't been incidents and that there has been a deterrent is one way to help in. So I'm just saying it's a yes and. I think to continue to ask and I know it will take time so there will continue to be overtime but ultimately in the same way that we had social work and embedded team of rather than sort of ad hoc a police officer sort of running in a rota to team up with a social worker, it's much stronger partnership for that team to work together so that they can have a better bond with working in the community. I feel like this model could be stronger than simply having people working overtime.

Just one point of clarification, because I truly just may have missed it in the memo. I did not get the impression that we are saying that this incident that happened in April is part of rising violent crime in the downtown. Is there a pattern of rising violent crime that you're trying to respond to?

I think, like I mentioned in my opening comments, And I mentioned during the press conference too, we used to have more shootings, but the trend has leveled off now. It's such a densely populated area that, again, it's not the Wild West, and I don't want to portray that because that's not fair to the community, and I know that's not what anyone up here is saying. But it's a regularly occurring thing that happens downtown. We've had multiple shootings in the Ped Mall when many people were around, and that just can't be acceptable as a community, and I know no one's suggesting that. So that's, and I agree with Megan, I think it is, Megan, I think it is a yes and, you know, but, and I'm glad you pointed out, I run the police department. There are a lot of different strategies that we participate in, but we don't run. We work closely with CVI, but it's not a law enforcement operation. We're working with the mediation group. We're all on board on this and I would love to catch some of these actors long before they even thought about this stuff. But I also think that had we had someone on April 19th, we had someone very, very, very close, And my heart of hearts tells me that gun didn't run out of bullets. The person stopped shooting. And that's because we were there. But had we been standing there, and like you mentioned, I do think, I don't think people are going to be shooting at the pet mall when we have officers standing in there. Does that move it somewhere else? I'd rather move it out of a place that has 10,000 people hanging out, you know. And that's one of the things people ask me why, A lot of times some of these, most of the time these people are from out of town. Why are they coming here? Sometimes crime flows like water. It goes to the path of least resistance. If they feel like they can, I've often said I want people to be comfortable downtown. I don't want them to be comfortable committing crime downtown. So that's our goal here. And again, I don't want it to be a SWAT team out there. I want it to be a bunch. I wish we could clone Colin Fowler. I'd like it to be three Colin Fowlers down there with his bright yellow shirt. That's what we'd want. And that's the model that I'm looking for.

But just to be clear not rising by no no no agree it's unacceptable whenever it happens not rising and I apologize for so I just for the public want to make sure yeah absolutely we're responding to a specific incident yeah limited having that conversation yeah it is generally a safe place. And it's limited, but it cannot be ignored or minimized. And I think that it's sort of saying let's, yeah.

Yeah. And I think that when it comes to, I was going to ask, specifically when it comes to the, you know, how positions can change within a department, how you are like, well, nowadays we are seeing less of a call volume in around noon or whenever that shift is. So we think that some of these officers can go to, we can promote them or reassign them to a team like this. And I guess one thing that I think about especially when it comes to the funding we've approved and field mediation is, especially since this is gonna be probably a long time until we hire these officers, I try to think about the here and now as well. What can we do that we might be positioned to quickly do as well. And I think when people, when Laura says something like field mediation, community crisis responders, I think sometimes the public can get the impression that this is, oh, there's a shooting, we're sending out the mediator. It's like, well, no. What it does do is, and I hear you saying it's a capacity problem. We don't want people there and we don't want people overly exerting themselves with overtime and stuff like that. But I do think about the examples set from us that you can look at the data from places like Durham or Dayton or Seattle, for instance, where they were effectively able to reduce their call volume and just like make their existing staff be able to go and respond to the violent things. I think about the other direction, how can we make it to where we can significantly reduce the officers having to respond to more minor things in bars or small conflicts or trespasses, things like that in bars. to where we can make it to where we're having the same desired effect of more officers out on the beat being visible. And so I guess that's where I agree that when it comes to making a decision like this for Most importantly, before budget comes public safety. That doesn't mean we don't think about a half a million dollar investment every year on the high end, but how can we reduce the potential collateral damage as well? That just sometimes comes inadvertently from increased police presence, so yeah.

I think that's an interesting point to talking about collateral damage because I think that's kind of gets back to the I think the point of this particular place in particular times of day because the concentration of people and the need for that presence or at least you know if we think the presence is going to reduce the number of people willing to escalate their own violence just the deterrent of having an officer in a uniform. But the collateral damage when you have somebody popping off firearms. I mean, so we had this incident that happened on April 19th and, you know, multiple people were injured. The poor, you know, the most serious, the young woman that was hit in the head, you know, and our downtown, that high concentration we have is also a very It's kind of both things are true. It's a very diverse time to be down there. And this young woman that was shot was the child of African immigrants. So bullets don't care. And so when we talk about collateral damage, that strikes my mind. And I was thinking back to some of the other near misses that we've had. You know, the chief mentioned the number of shootings every so often. We've had a couple downtown where I can't remember which bar it was, one of the bars I think close to the public library, but multiple shots and it just didn't happen to not hit anybody, hit a few buildings, especially in the density of people downtown. I mean that's a kind of collateral damage too that I think is really important to think about and I think Councilor Burgess made an excellent point talking about the challenge we face and we have local programs and that the county does and that we do and looking at other sources of the might drive crime you know as we try to take a look at ways to help with everything from people staying in their homes to affordable housing all kinds of issues supporting programs to help people get treatment for drug addiction and mental health care but then what happened we have people coming in from out of our community that we don't have an opportunity for our programming to touch ahead of time. And so that's where I see. You know that point place time and physical. The value that physical presence because that is like in that concentration of people specially on you know Fridays and Saturday nights which we all know and you know that been enjoying the downtown pet mall since I was in my early 20's. So, you know, that's not unusual. It's been that way for a long time. You know, it's a place we do want people to enjoy, you know, and even into the wee hours of the morning and to enjoy safely. And especially, you know, again, from the perspective of parents with kids at the university or, you having people working downtown in the different bars and stuff like that. That tends to me to be some of the more compelling parts of the case for this approach. I will say I do also appreciate in this proposal we've been given, the community policing aspect. So it's not just focusing on, hey, let's have a big, you know, big bulky presence on those two days of the week, those two evenings of the week, but a lot of focus on that community policing, kind of walking the beat, talking with people, identifying things ahead of time, being there week after week, establishing those relationships I mean everything that that I've learned about policing indicates that that's actually a very positive way and that actually goes that does some of the work of mitigating some of the other kinds of the other kinds of collateral damage and so I appreciate that that's part of this proposal yeah and one thing that I think I should make clear is I think that

The proposal for creating a specific unit exactly like you're describing sounds like a good idea. It's about, I guess when I would say collateral damage, not just from having, it's about reprioritizing where our police department's focus is and giving it the capacity to do so by easing the strains on it. Does that make sense?

It does, but it's kind of what this proposal seems like is they're doing is they're bringing us something of looking at like a way to something we haven't. I guess we haven't done in this way. We're kind of doing now with the overtime and whatever, but this would be this would be that approach, but done in a way that would be more effective, is kind of how I'm reading it. But I actually do think, then seeing how we can integrate the various things, whether it be the new crisis intervention, or the existing sorts of mental health liaisons. So I know, and just from my conversations with Officer Fowler, who we've referred to several times, and for the public who doesn't know, that's our daytime liaison in the downtown district, that through his work, being able to create relationships with people that are downtown a lot, and maybe some of our unhoused population and able to build a relationship and then move them into either the street outreach, connect them with the street outreach from Shelter House, connect with different mental health, the mental health liaison program. So I mean, that is another way in which I see that like, as Councilor Alter said, a yes and. Like being able to like say, okay, if we do this, we also want to make sure that we're continuing with the pieces that this council has already also supported, like the liaison, you know, giving a shot to this, the intervention. Am I saying that wrong?

The field mediation? Field mediation.

Thank you so much. You know, to see if that works. But in the meantime, like, you know, that's all great stuff, I think, or has great potential. We'll see, you know, when it all plays out. But in the meantime, trying to get that like, okay, we need something a little bit more concrete, a little bit sooner, and something that, you know, would be sustainable and also be more effective community policing on top of that. I mean, those are the things I like about it, so.

And I think I have to be real that we're going to be trading dollars then don't know if we make this investment. I would hope the council would be willing then to also invest in these other things that we haven't yet right other than the ARPA investment that we made with mobile crisis and the liaisons that we've added so it'll be a net.

overall increase which also means taking away from other places in the budget which is that that's in that city managers is book about that at the beginning and I agree that's that is kind of one of those ugly things that you know pieces of this I agree I think some of the other stuff you know as they come online as we try them out as we get solid proposals like like I wouldn't want to say oh we'll do a dollar for dollar match until we know how well they work but as we get you know, as we get, like, tried and tested and things like that, then I think absolutely, you know, things should be on the table for us to be talking about and support as things look like they're effective.

And I think we need to be thinking about, sorry, the culture downtown too. I think, you know, as someone who's been here forever, pre, I was talking with Jeff the other day about like the pre-21 ordinance downtown and how much the culture changed at that point in time. I do think, you know, with this proposal is three dedicated officers and UIPD would also have three dedicated officers. So that's an addition of six armed officers walking through downtown and what does that tell the community about the culture? I think it tells the community that we're looking, we're expecting fights, we're expecting violence, we're expecting alcohol over consumption, we're expecting to need to crack down. I do not think that's the culture that any of us are really wanting to cultivate in the downtown area. And I think having this come out of budget cycle in response to not an increase in violent crime is concerning to me just because I don't, I think the issues that, Chief, you've talked about, we have been talking about every year. And the capacity, like this cushion problem, we've been talking about every year. And we never fill all the positions so this is not new to this issue this is not new to policing in general we've had these specialty positions that we've been wanting to fill for as long as chief has been here and have been unable to because we can't hire enough officers with the attrition with the people being out and the culture Yeah, exactly. So I just I just don't want us to think that this is I think this is like all the things that the chief is saying are totally valid and I don't want us to get caught thinking that this is the response to a particular shooting on the pet mall. I think these issues are longitudinal and real and we have an obligation as stewards of public funds if nothing else to not rush into hiring or adding the capacity for three additional positions in any department right not like take it away from the the police department in any department often what we see is okay we are not filling this one so but we would love to have another leadership role so what comes before council is a swap right we're going to take this one off the books and we want to replace it with this other you know step whatever We're not seeing that here. We're seeing a full ask for three additional full-time positions, which we all have to know how basically impossible that will be to take away in the future.

Yeah, thank you. And I do want to be here at some point. Yes, yes, please. Yeah, I just believe, as, you know, Councilor Oliver said, I don't have any problem with the proposer, but you are doing it anyway right now. Like there is officer over there. We give them overtime. So whatever you are covering it, but we're doing through the overtime and all this. So again, I will go back to the position that is not being filled. And we have somebody almost ready to come in from the academy. And we can just use those position for now. to fill them out because this is being like a long time it's not being filled instead of like just like adding more you was just saying that you would like to see them the people downtown comfortable and and coming to the counter and not thinking i also don't believe like present of like policing in downtown if it makes some people comfortable it make a lot people uncomfortable you know to come even to the town town if I we have a lot of but if we're doing in any way why should we. It's not like what why should we just think about additional city officer that we're not going to fill immediately. We have already 3 positions if we can fill those 2 city position right now and cover the the thing that you have and but but important to me is going back to the study. and see the study from 2021, the traffic stop is still, even though I see a lot of improvement from 15 years ago, but I still have a lot of people who complain that being stopped more than regular eye on here immigrants people of color and i i would love to see them the traffic stop i would love to like in the same time while we are doing like hiring for those positions that we never failed while we're doing that we should also evaluate the data evaluate what can we do to solve those problems it's not just about like bringing officers everywhere in the city, and that will make us safe. I don't think so. But yeah, I understand that downtown is a busy area, and the focus is there because there is many incidents. Yeah, I don't have a problem with that. But we already budget for three different officers. So can we fill that first and in the meantime just work on like evaluating like the study, evaluating the traffic stop and see how can we prevent. Like working preventions more than just, you know, wait until the things happen.

appreciate all the questions and comments so far um lots going on here i guess i just wanted to add to the conversation about um this is a longitudinal need in our community it's not just from one event that we're having this discussion. We saw the stats where from January 2020 through June 2026, 430 violent crimes. In the area one, which is our downtown proper, there was 62 percent of violent crimes. When I look at this and I hear the concern about why are we going this route. I also want to say that I do think sometimes we underestimate the resources that we already have in our community. I think, you know, bringing on the civilian aspects of our police department has We're advanced more than many of our communities, other cities that are larger than us. We're doing field mediation, working on that, the CVI program. There's a lot of great things that we're doing that is in addition to policing, that I really think that we underestimate some of the discussions and the impact that we're having through those programs. Of course, there's still more to do, willing to sit around and have those conversations. But in this moment, we're talking about Specifically, three positions for downtown. I have to say that I'm from Chicago again, and today, back in the day, we begged for police to come around in our crime-infested areas because their presence made a difference. It did deter our crimes. Yes, it may have moved it to another place, um at times but often um it it would move from where it was and when we're talking about downtown and we're talking about violent crimes i do believe that we're going to see a decrease and you won't get that data one we're a growing community and so as we grow we may even see the number of violent crimes grow but i i believe that If the police are down there, because we're a growing community, we won't know the crimes that were not, you know, caused because of their presence. I want to acknowledge that the staff is presented to us something that has been happening and they're already down there as we all know that they're doing overtime already. The need is there and I'm going to support the three officers. I think where people are having discussions about You know if there's a officer that is assigned to a day shift can they not move where maybe the needs are not there any longer can they move towards where the need is at night or you know and or. you know, the positions are being used right now. Can we just use those open positions and all that other stuff? I think that we're talking about staffing patterns and I don't believe that the council fully know about staffing patterns and you have to have, you'll never probably be fully staffed. And because of the longevity of getting you know new officers into these roles and then you also have the retirees that are coming up which can be planned and to some degree and then those incidents where you know folks kind of leave unplanned. I think the staffing patterns has been accounted for is my the point that I want to make. I think the staffing patterns of 88 Staff fully within the police department has been calculated. And so while I do appreciate us saying, you know, to the chief and to the department, if there are a decrease in daytime, we do expect you ought to acknowledge that and pick that up and make some transitions, but that's with any department. where if you are seeing less of a need in your staffing patterns or your staffing doesn't meet those ratios anymore, we expect you to make those changes without the council needing to identify that. I'll be supporting this and I really do appreciate this conversation. And just wanted to maybe ask council where they are with this on this topic.

If I may, I just have one thing that I wanted to sort of say. First of all, that I am supportive of these three positions. I was looking in the fact that there's been four sworn officer positions added in the past, what, 15 years, I believe is the notes that I took. In that time, there's been 9,000 people added in population. so and that's not including who comes in on a weekend or what have you so I don't think that this is an exorbitant ask the other thing that I was noting and we've focused a lot of our content of the conversation on the downtown proper but the very fact remains that we actually all did approve you know a specialty position for an officer to be able to investigate sexual crimes because of the regularity that there have been for forcible sexual offenses, the difficulty and the horrific nature of them. And in a college town, unfortunately, that tends to be even more rife. And that in area one, of within those crimes committed, 75 and a half percent of them are for robbery and forcible sex offenses. So I think that there is additional, you know, we've focused this very much on shootings within the Ped Mall, which I'm going to have a comment on that as well. But I think that there, this, you know, let's not forget as well that this also has to do with some violent crimes that themselves carry a great deal of trauma for the victims. and that this expands out beyond what's happening just in the Ped Mall and that these officers would also be able to patrol in that area. One of the things that I did want to comment on is that the notion of well there's not that much and I absolutely I do not want to fearmonger or say anything because it is true that we have not been rising in um our levels of um violent crime the shootings gun violence thank you um but in the memo it does say that um there has been an average one per four months for the past six and a half years um and there's Plenty of cities that say one shooting with victims is too many, period. When we also talk about the impact and racial discrepancy and that there's too much disparity in terms of who the police are touching, I think one of the groups who hasn't been mentioned are the victims and who the victims are of gun violence. And this troubles me a great deal. So, I understand and I go back to how I began when I first started talking. This is a yes and. The police recommendation here is not nor should it be the only way in which we are addressing community safety and public safety. But it is one piece for one specific problem. I do not think that looking at gun violence and violent crimes and then saying let's go back and look at traffic safety and equating the two together to say therefore we don't need these positions for this particular situation. white makes the mark at the same time we absolutely do need to go back and look at those studies and to see how can we do better in terms of a broad multifaceted lots of tools in the toolkit. But to say let's do studies because there aren't enough shootings for us to be worried about and I know that is not what anyone here on council has said. But I'm not OK with the thing saying we're fine as is because we don't really have that much gun violence.

I don't think anyone's saying that. And I do think if we wanted to spend across that way if we wanted to spend half a million dollars a year committed locked in every year on sexual assault prevention let's do it. Let's do it. There are so many places in the country that we could look to for models on how to make our campus safer. Relating to that, but we're not talking about. Preventing we're literally talking about foot patrols for visibility and the nexus between. Visibility and crime prevention is. very, very, very tenuous at best. So if we're gonna say think about the victims, if we're gonna say think about prevention, let us take an approach to conscientiously invest in those things because it's not the reactive tool that is patrol policing. And that's just factual. That's not based on anything that I think is, again, I want to be proven wrong. I'm not trying to plant a flag where it shouldn't be. This is because of all the work that we've done over the years in looking at these issues because the council has not voiced an interest in adding additional sworn officers before now, even though we've heard these same problems year after year after year. If we want to talk about victim services, if we want to talk about violent crime prevention, then we need to be looking at the tools that are best for that and investing in that.

I will just say that can be determined.

yeah before you can yeah because yeah i you know appreciate what you said but as you said in the end nobody from this council said that but the way you said it you're concluding what i said or maybe council you know i don't want the public to hear us wrong We care about what happened on April 19. If increasing officer will prevent that, we're going to do it. There is no problem. And I personally said I'd have no problem with the proposal. We are doing it right now. We spend overtime money. And we can hire the three officers that we did not hire yet to cover this for now. And in the same time, do the study. What's wrong with the study? It's really good. We're going to come out, you know, from a lot of things, you know, to prevent, like, this kind of crime. If we can do it, why not? Always, like, treating the root cause of a problem is, like, okay from, like, just, you know, That's kind of great because we're preventing it and I just want the public to know that we they are we the city is doing it anyway right now we have officer in the like in the downtown right now we pay them overtime we have 3 officer that we did not hire yet one almost done those people can cover those instead of the overtime in the meantime let us think about studying everything and revisit the other three officers that we're going to add, because we are not going to hire them tomorrow. It's going to take us another three years to hire them. Then we can do, while we are thinking about hiring those in three years, we can also do the study. I think this is not about, oh, the shooting happened is not enough. And we can, the way that you concluded, we can't wait to do the study because the shooting is not enough. No, nobody said that.

No, no.

Yes, please take that back because, you know. And I was not intending it.

It was not targeted at you specifically. I want that to be, I want it to be clear. It was not targeted at you specifically.

I guess I just want to point out again that we do have some alternatives to policing that we are doing, field mediation, CVI, and so many other things, even within our department, that I do think that we should continue to have those conversations on. When we're talking about various aspects of this, There isn't a one stop shop for any anyone. And I do think that's why this role is a part of that equation. While there are other roles to still be filled and conversations to be had that I'm very open to happen. I guess at this moment just wanted to see the request is for these you know to kind of give the to give some communication to the to staff about these 3 positions want to know who want to get some reactions to who support in the 3 positions that. Already been the other recommended 3 positions.

Real quickly, what would be, this is not a decision at this point, correct? We would be, this is an indication of whether or not we want to move forward to making a decision, correct? Correct.

We would bring you an item at a future meeting, ideally for us in September. We'd come back to you and ask for three new positions to be reflected in our agenda.

if we recommend that tonight.

Pardon?

If we direct you to do that tonight.

If I felt there was a majority of council that supported it, we would bring it forward.

Sure.

Yes. So I think I'm leaning enough in support to make it worthwhile bringing back. I want to sit with this with the comments of my my various counselors and community some some some education and some additional fact gathering. But I think right now you could I would be definitely leaning towards the support.

Again, I don't mind having three officers from the three positions that we have, but adding additional money right now, as if we already have three positions ready, you can use that. I will direct the police chief to go ahead and use that. And even if you need more money to promote one of them to become a surgeon, you can still do that. But adding again three officers, I'm not agreeing for that right now until we fill out this. And again, if we need more officers in the future, I will revisit that and we can do this. But I want to fill out this reposition to direct the police chief to use those existing regulations for the sake that he asking for three officers.

So that is reassigned and already approved positions is what you're stating although we heard that it's staffing patterns so the 85 that they have right now even though it doesn't fill up at some point it will fill up and the next day it may drop down to 84 so their staffing patterns are correct. for the current need and so in order to have these positions really be placed there we have to in order for it to be within their staffing pattern it has to be 3 new positions sure.

Right now I think the needs right now which is brought this proposal to us is people are working overtime at the downtown and they need some officer and that need can be filled with the current you know approved But yet for three officers and still I'm hoping to come and talk about the other one will be specialized. Later we're going to hire specialized, you know, positions and we can hire them later and we can come and talk about it. I don't think it's going to be a problem. But right now I want to do this in the same time think about hiring a specialized, in the same time think about the study, all of them together. While this means the police get what you want if they go by what I'm saying, in the same time, we are thinking seriously about doing evaluation and thinking seriously also in the future to hire specialized. As if I'm not wrong, the position that we assign is a specialized position. So we can hire them still later. But now, for the sake of the time, we have three positions open. We don't need even a broker for it. Just give him direction to go ahead and hire people.

and they still need to hire for that position but i just want to um get uh to her from four of us now wanted to get the other two uh counselors if you all are supporting that or not i agree with counselor solid okay yeah as well OK. So I think the majority number that Jeff mentioned is not exactly true for direction to get it on a council agenda for a vote. With three being present, saying yes, I think that's sufficient enough to put this forward to a council agenda.

sure the counselor mo expressed an interest in watching a recording of this and then coming back and he had emailed chief and i and indicated he would follow up with any other questions after he could watch a recording so i was going to wait for that to take place yeah but uh despite even that this is just direction that put it on a agenda okay understood this is just a direction yeah because it's we can't do a yeah

There's no majority vote here. I need also our city of Tenerito. I hear the area Jeff said if we have enough support tonight, we will move forward with it. And isn't this like a meeting where what we're saying right now, consider as we are not like voting, voting, but it's like in a professional setting where three people say yes, three people say no.

Well right, but as you indicated, this is not a formal vote and the mayor has authority to put anything on the agenda whenever he wishes and so what I understood his direction to be was to go ahead and bring this forth as an agenda item. The mayor has the power to.

No, no, I understand that, but I'm just talking about because the area said if we have

I just indicated to be a majority support and yes mean in the moment here. I know that counselor Moe is interested in weighing in on this and until he's in and provide that direction.

Yep and we know he's in where he's not here, but if if the council was talking about any topic. 3 people to people to counselors.

to get an item on the agenda?

Correct.

I believe it's three.

Three. So three people can get an item on the agenda.

Or the mayor.

Or the mayor. The mayor can buy him or herself. Yes, I know that. The mayor or three. So I was going off that logic with this meeting here that there was three supporting of it. Sure.

I guess it was talking about what Jeff said.

Even if it was to come and fail, you know, at the meeting.

You can put it later on the agenda by yourself. We understand that.

Yeah.

I would also encourage us as colleagues to in the meantime make sure we are understanding each other and what we are bringing forward and what our ideas are as to make sure that, you know, because this is something that's serious and all of us deeply care about and we want to make sure that we understand each other before we go into any decision.

Maybe I'll ask the chief to come back up and just talk about the 85 current positions and the 3 additional positions, please.

OK, I'll go through the breakdown we have. 85. AUTHORIZED POSITIONS. CURRENTLY WE HAVE 82, BUT WE DON'T REALLY HAVE 82 BECAUSE NINE OF THEM AREN'T EVEN CONTRIBUTING. THEY'RE EITHER IN TRAINING, THEY'RE OUT ON MEDICAL LEAVE, SO WE'RE REALLY DOWN TO 70. BUT LET'S JUST PUT THOSE ASIDE AND WHERE OUR PEOPLE ARE ASSIGNED. WE HAVE 17 SUPERVISORS, WE HAVE 14 PEOPLE IN INVESTIGATIONS, WE HAVE 54 OFFICERS WITH 50 OF THEM BEING ASSIGNED TO A PATROL SHIFT. 14 on days, and that's based off of calls for service and being able to handle regularly occurring incidents. The minimum staffings are different. On days, they're smaller than they are on evenings and late nights. 18 and 18 on evenings and late nights. So that leaves four positions. They're not people. They're just positions that are not assigned to a patrol shift. Two of those positions are full. downtown liaison officer and our co-responder. We have one co-responder position that is not occupied. We hope to staff that soon once community can provide us another mental health liaison. And then we have a community outreach person that we would like to fill at some point. So if we were to reprogram some of those, we only have two extra positions that aren't assigned to patrol. So we would I guess get rid of those positions and assign them to this nighttime downtown liaison and then we'd have to pull someone else from patrol to be one of the supervisors. So that's that's where we get to the 85. That's why we asked for 84 because I don't want to get rid of any of those four if we if we can fill them. I don't want to get rid of any of those four specialty positions because I think they're important. We've made a commitment especially on the downtown or the co-responder position. So that's we have 82 on the books out of 85 we'll have 83 on monday again but we have to be in a position where we're we feel staffed appropriately enough on patrol to fill those positions that and that doesn't mean everybody's full staff each patrol shift is down a couple of officers and we can function with them down a couple of officers. We made a hard decision several years ago. When I first got here, we had no specialty positions full, meaning Colin Fowler was not doing Colin Fowler things. And Jeff said it's a, it's the, THE DOWNTOWN DISTRICT HAS AN INTEREST IN IT, THE COUNCIL HAS AN INTEREST IN HAVING THAT POSITION FULL OR OCCUPIED SO WE HAD TO TAKE SOMEONE FROM PATROL EVEN WHEN OUR STAFFING WAS VERY LOW AND I GOT TO TELL YOU THAT WASN'T A POPULAR DECISION WITH MY STAFF BECAUSE THAT MEANT MORE PEOPLE WERE BEING FORCED ON OVERTIME BECAUSE THOSE PEOPLE DON'T ALWAYS COUNT TOWARDS OUR MINIMUM STAFFING ON PATROL. SO THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A

New so I just want to make sure that I understand that so 83 positions will be filled here. Quickly next week. And then you have 2 positions that are not filled that will make the 85 one is the co responder and then the other one is the community outreach person correct.

I just want to remind you that there are nine of those officers that aren't plugged in any of those spots because they're out. Some of them are on baby leave. Some of them are at the training academy. So that's the part we're always struggling with. We're fighting. And you mentioned it, the staffing patterns. We're trying to get above and then next thing you know, like tomorrow. someone could retire yeah or some you know and that doesn't happen all the time but it does happen enough you know that we can plan for regular attrition you know people who we know are going to retire but we we have medical retirements that come up suddenly every year so that's that's the challenge and with our limited with our slim margins that's what makes it tough to fill those specialty positions

Can you just remind me how long we've been looking for this community response and how long for those city position since we've been looking for them.

We've not been in a position to fill those spots because we didn't have enough officer.

I'm asking how long.

Before I was here it's not been filled since before I was here so I'm how long you've been here 5 and a half years okay.

This that that's my question so I think we do we don't.

uh advertise those positions we're hiring people into them right they're filled based on right functional would in order for you to have or for the department to have a functional consistent staffing level of the full 85 would that require some sort of council authorization for over hiring in order to really make that work like in order to really consistently have 85 sworn officers while accounting for the consistent staffing patterns of things like training you know medical leave maternity leave whatever else that might be coming along I mean right now you can only hire up to 85 and if you always have some attrition it is functionally nearly impossible for any length of time to have the full 85 positions

that's been over the history of the department right i think that's true 30-year officers that say i can remember being at full staffing for two weeks or something yeah yeah and it's not unique to police no no public works and transit staff here out in the audience and they can all relate to this incident where darian's always hiring bus drivers right and that's that's always going to be the case we're never really fully staffed at the mto uh mass transit operator position Ron, I met with Ron and team today, and you probably have eight or nine vacancies in public works at this time. It's a similarly sized department. That's just, when you get to those larger departments, that's pretty routine to where you're constantly working to get full staff. You rarely, if ever, get there. right and that's kind of what i was getting at if we really if that's what we wanted to do we would almost have to authorize the over hiring which was not a practice that we participated yeah we haven't really done the over hiring um a good example and i'm not really arguing for that by the way i'm just correct you know a few years ago we asked you for four new transit um drivers it's a very similar situation to what we're in right now where Darien was having a hard time operationally getting all the needs met. And so people were being pulled off onto overtime and supervisors would be pulled on the buses to drive. So we came to you and said, we could really use four more mass transit operators we've never probably really been full staffed for more than a couple of weeks at best, but going up those four positions helped bring stability to that position. And I think that's what we're trying to convey here. If we go up to 88, we don't have, It's probably not realistic to think we'll be at 88 ever for an extended period of time, but if we can get to that 85, 86 where that's our regular, then we can start to change staffing deployment. The chief can start to change the staffing deployment

just one more comment just remember how long it takes us to get someone up to full speed from start to finish if everything if we don't miss a beat it's nine months uh... so it just nine months yeah the academy is four months the uh... training is four to five months and then they get out in the field and and that's that's not background investigation or any any of that stuff so I mentioned we have an offer to one person right now if they won't be this time next year they'll be in the FTO program so that's the person who going to start Monday.

When the last time you have another one before that during the police department well.

I have hired about 40 people in five and a half years. So, I mean, you can do the math. So we.

It was like all of them officer or civilians?

Those, I'm just talking about officers and many more civilians, maybe not more than 40, excuse me. So what's nice with this one we're getting on money, he used to work here. He used to be an Iowa City police officer, so his FTO program would be like a week or something, hopefully, and meeting his training, and then he'll be able to hit the ground running. That's how we look for certified officers, which is what a lot of people in the industry do, people who are officers. We've got several officers. The other agencies don't like it, but we have several North Liberty officers, Coralville officers, and things like that because they've already been through the academy. That shortens the build-up time because they avoid going to the academy.

I was going to ask how common that was for already certified officers to just, if they move or if they just want to make a career change.

It's much more common now. It's a buyer's market right now, or actually a seller's market. The certified officer can basically go wherever they want right now. Everybody is hiring at all times. We've been lucky. I think we run a pretty good organization. We rarely lose officers. We do sometimes. Usually when we lose officers to go to another agency, it's because their wife gets a job on the other side of the state or her husband gets a job. But we have had plenty of officers come in. And usually they're looking for opportunity, especially if it's someone who is in Johnson County, whether it be North Liberty or another Johnson County agency. They just like the opportunity that Iowa City provides for a bigger agency.

So we could be voting on this as soon as two weeks from now?

Yeah.

to add three additional officers could we have an evaluation for that conversation of like since this is coming out of out of cycle right and

Can we just have a- As others have come out.

Right, no, absolutely. But I just, I think having, and I just wanna be really also very straightforward that most of the staffing changes that we make when we add new positions or we switch out, like this level of position isn't filled, but we want this other position. And so we're gonna authorize as a council that change in a pay grade, for example, or a job title. As we did also re categorizations after the, um, the whole employee, you know, pay evaluation that we did where we had to do some adjustments. Those were not controversial. We've got a split council on this issue, and I would just ask that we have the opportunity to look holistically to say, what are we for going right? If we had these. three positions as you said we've got other departments that don't have the opportunity to capitalize on a tragedy and push the issue to the front and so you know i want to make sure that we're looking at this as the whole picture because we are going to lock ourselves in to these three additional full-time people if we go forward

We're not capitalizing on a tragedy. That's not what we're doing. The tragedy gave us a moment of reflection. We reflected, and we feel like this is a service that the community needs. We understand there's room for disagreement on that, but we're not capitalizing on a tragedy.

Can we also while we're doing this as I mentioned area about the study about the traffic stop all this I don't think because going to disagree on like doing that to find out exactly what the.

I think we would say we're going to get that information last spring what's the status of that.

I meet monthly with the university on that. Because of the delay, they added another year's worth of information. The can keeps getting kicked, but we expect it soon. I know I've told you that more than once now. I apologize for that. We're just waiting on the university. From what I understand, they're wrapping it up. We haven't seen it yet, but hopefully it's soon.

What about traffic stop.

That's what we're talking traffic stop study that's the study by the university.

There is no data like locally in our.

We have all the traffic stop data is in the annual report that we put out.

Yes. I guess. Can you even forward it to me if everybody saw it or I just want to know that.

Sure. We posted on the Web site. It's on the city's Web site but we can get it to you.

No. Yeah please get it to me or city mayor.

Or if we could at least get a real timeline of when. Yeah, because it's been years. Can we reach out to them? I care deeply about knowing where we are when it comes to the racial disparities.

I think we can reach out to them and ask them for a deadline. isn't as they doing it for free or what why you know we had them to do it. Yes, then can we would be not going to St. Ambrose but then come back home.

I mean that's what I'm asking here is if we could please move that along.

Thank you to do it. All right anything else on this topic.

I guess before we move on, I want to make sure that Councilor Burgess, you're asking if there could be looking at other departments to see what their needs are?

Well, I think, you know, each year when we talk about, I think about it, particularly this last budget conversation, I think the fire department, we talked a lot about it, right? Of like, when we see the requests for adding staff positions, it's already gone through, you know, the negotiation that every department kind of has internally with themselves, what they request to city manager's office and the meetings that they have to get to a place, you know, of coming to us. And I think we don't have, transparency into that which is fine that's the process but I'm just I want like I really want to frame this in the context of the budget impact and if we're going to lock ourselves into three additional full-time positions like what are we for going and to me the easiest comparison is like other departments where we have the same staffing pattern issues that maybe haven't been able to rise to the forefront you know and Because I do think the staffing patterns are I don't know that it's going to get better right for for police if we don't.

So I do think that this is going to the normal process where for if we were to use the transit that we just heard they were going through overtime overtime after overtime because of a a particular moment in time that it probably lasted a little longer. But I'm sure that wave is what they experienced a lot. But as they step back in that moment in time to say, you know what, we need to really reassess our staffing pattern and we need four additional positions. And it was, it elevated where the city manager's office uh agreed that this is something that needs to come to the council so i think that did go through the the right channels the right process this is also going through the right process as well where the police department in this moment in time it as we mentioned this has been uh kind of you know a position in the back that's kind of been needed but in this moment in time stepping back and reflecting this is the service that is needed and that's why this is being brought before us is my belief

well and maybe i can just react a little bit you know we had a three counselor side of meeting with jeff on friday where it was made very clear to us that this was the opening of a conversation and tonight we may be voting in two weeks from today so i'm just feeling like there's something else going on that i'm missing and it's making me very uncomfortable for what you know are we opening a conversation no we're actually gonna have a proposal to vote on in two weeks

From what I said in that meeting, the council should vote when you're comfortable voting, and that's what I was trying to express. If you want the traffic stop disparity study before you vote, then your position is we should wait. If others are ready to vote now, then they vote now. That's what I was trying to convey. Everybody has different concerns. That doesn't make anybody right or wrong, but when I feel the council's ready to cast a vote, then I would bring it forward.

Okay. Thank you.

With that information one thing I kind of alluded to this earlier. I find I would find it useful to kind of take a look at the expected cost the projected cost of these 3 positions balanced out against what our current cost is funding this kind of coverage in terms of like the difference in over time so like the hard costs. So be like you know 380,000 minus the overtime right that would be savings with their at plus and if there's some way to probably not quantify but maybe qualify the soft costs, you know things in terms of officer burnout what's it look like and so what are we really what's the full scope of what we would be and would not be getting by adding these 3 positions I think that would be helpful to me.

I don't know if you're asking staff to do all of that but we know where burnout is when it comes down to people working overtime like just it. Also This is a position specific to downtown. I don't know if everybody knows Officer Fowler, but he's phenomenal, awesome and amazing. I do think that just having any officer doing overtime, there's a lot of reasons why you don't want to do that. But you also want someone that will have some specific training and more or engagement specific to the needs of the downtown and that nightlife and and so while we're having all these officers work is great. We're getting the need met. But you really want

someone trained for that position and I think that's something that we can't lose sight of yeah, I I actually agree that when I was thinking soft benefit or soft cost that's kind of right that we're on the same page man so.

Are we Dustin chiefs are we currently doing overtime. I'm assuming the answer is no I just want to make sure doing overtime for like the Wednesday and Thursday like community building that you envision.

No not unless there's an event going on if there are specific event. Yes but no.

OK. I just wanted to try to get a scope.

All right anything else on this topic. All right, we're going to move on to item number 4 which is Council of the updates on the sign boards commissions and committees. And I should have did this under the information packet discussion, but this is related to not really a commission, but it would be something else. Would the council be interested in having a youth council discussion in a future meeting?

Yes. Yes.

Okay. So we'll just put that down. All right.

That'd be awesome.

Great. hearing no updates from Council. We are adjourned with our work session and we'll be back at 06.00 PM for formal agenda.

We have the final say. Thank you. Mics are on.

Well it is 6 p.m. on August 18 2026 and I'm going to call the city of Iowa City formal meeting order roll call please alter here Bergus here Thompson here Moe here so left yeah Teague here why line here. So want to welcome everyone to your Council chambers and to those joining us welcome virtually welcome as well. We're going to move on to items number one which is I should actually items number 2 through 6 which is a motion to approve the consent calendar so moved well. 2nd quarter. Anyone from the public like to address the topic that is on our consent agenda. And no one in person or online Council discussion.

I actually wanted to comment on slash ask a question about item 5d the fire station one and City Hall third floor renovation project first it looks like it came in significantly under budget under the estimated cost at any rate and I wasn't entirely clear looking at the the documents about whether there were pieces that had to just be removed from the project or if this was just a happy moment in construction cost that everything came in under budget.

Yeah, this was just the estimated cost was prepared before the bids were received and the bids that were received were much lower than we expected. That's the 575, so that was just one of those fortunate circumstances that we don't see too often, but we did in this case. And then there were a few change orders once they got into the work that we decided to pursue, which took it up to the 660. And if you wanna look at those change orders in that, anytime we do this closeout, there's a linked engineer's report in there, and that'll give you a summary of those change orders. So in this case, it looks like there was sink and countertop addition and a whole list of different things there. But yeah, this was just a circumstance of a really good bid.

That's great. And if we wanted to get a tour?

Absolutely. Just reach out to us and the city managers. That would be fantastic.

Just because I remember what that looked like pre-Reno. So that would be really cool. So will do.

We'll put that out to everybody that's interested and Cool, happy to do that.

Thanks.

Any other discussion? Roll call please. Sala?

Yes.

Teague? Yes.

Weiline? Yes. Alter? Yes. Burgess? Yes.

Harmsen? Yes. Moe?

Yes.

Motion passes seven to zero. We're at item number seven, which is community comment. This is an opportunity for anyone in Councilor Chambers to comment on anything that is not on our agenda. If you want to come in or anything not on our agenda please come forth at this time. Seeing no one. I'm going to close community comment were on item number 8 which is planning and zoning matters 8 is local landmark rezoning tool for to 10 and to 14 North Gilbert Street. and 402 East Market Street. Ordinance rezoning property located at 204, 210 and 214 North Gilbert Street from commercial office zone to commercial office with a historic district overlay and 402 East Market Street from central business zone to central business with a historic district overlay. The staff has requested expedited action

I move that the rule requiring that ordinances must be considered and voted on for passage to council meetings prior to the meet meeting which is to finally pass be suspended that the second consideration vote be waived and that the ordinance be voted on for final passage at this time.

Move by Mo.

Second. Burgess.

Seconded by Burgess. Anyone from the public like to address this topic please come forth this at this time you'll be given 3 minutes to state comments and I know that you placed your name there so thank you welcome please state your name and city you're from.

My name is Richard Tiegs. I live in Coralville and I am president of Iowa City Community Theater at the present time. We would like to thank the council and its commissions for considering this. Mary Ellen Hudacek left the properties to the community theater with the hope that we would be able to achieve what she was not able to during her lifetime in getting the historic designation for them. They are representative of the Czech immigration into our community. Hudecek, if my Czech translator is correct, means poor things. And the Hudecek family was far from poor things. They gave a rich tapestry of service to the community. Joe, the patriarch that I, was privileged not to know, but should have known, because I was in town by that time, worked for the post office. And Mary Ellen, of course, was a legal secretary in the community that many people knew, as well as a leader in our community theater. And then Brother Bill had an impeccable driving record out at Hawkeye Foods. And we are very, very proud of the Hudecek family, and we're very glad to have worked with you in getting that designation. Thank you very much from the bottom of our hearts. Unfortunately, the theater is not in the business of owning properties, so this overlay is an important one for us so that we know that the Hudecek heritage can continue on into the future. Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else like to address this topic? say no one in person or online. I'm going to close the community comment Council discussion.

Don't repeat too much last week, but thank you to the other city community theater for making this happen.

Yeah, really that yeah really went above and beyond for the folks who live there and make sure that community still has a place so thank you it. I mean it's more than you know. So thank you I agree.

Roll call please. Teague. Yes. Weiland. Yes. Alter.

Yes.

Burgess. Yes. Harmsen. Yes. Mo. Yes. Salah.

Yes.

Motion passes seven to zero. Can I get a motion to pass and adopt? So moved Mo.

Second. Salah.

Roll call please.

Weiland. Yes. Alter.

Yes.

Burgess. Yes. Harmsen. Yes. Mo. Yes. Salah. Yes. Teague.

Yes. Motion passes seven to zero. We're at item number nine which is a regular formal agenda. 9A Iowa City endowment for the arts agreement. Resolution approving a designated endowment fund agreement between the City of Iowa City and the Community Foundation of Johnson County to establish the City of Iowa City Endowment of the Arts. Could I get a motion to approve, please?

So moved, Mo. Second, Weiland.

All right. We're going to get a presentation by Rachel Kilburg-Varley, but you're going to give us items 9A through 9C. Welcome.

Hi, Mayor and City Council. Yes, I will present on the next three agenda items because they're all very closely related. So it'll be easiest to explain it that way and happy to answer any questions at the end or along the way. uh... so kinda how they uh... the three items that shown on your agenda kind of nest within each other so the first item is the uh... arts endowment agreement with the community foundation so that's what essentially establishes the fund the second item will be the policy our own internal policy on how we will uh... manage access and use that endowment and then the third item is the arts anchor fund policy that's a program named within the endowment policy as an eligible use, and so that will describe how that specific funding program will work. So first I just want to back up and kind of give you a little bit of context and history on how we got here, which you're all familiar with, but we'll just do a quick reminder. For many years, the arts organizations that we have funded with city funding have been demonstrating greater financial need and expressing that to us while they are also sharing a heightened level of community impact that they've been able to make. As you all know, we've experienced several years of stronger budget headwinds. And so the city has not been able to be as responsive to that need as we'd like to. So this is one way that we can kind of respond to that. And then in addition, there has not always been a clear and transparent process as to how these funds go out. Although they annually have gone through the Council Economic Development Committee, the amounts themselves have kind of come up over the years at different times, during different budget conditions, and then they just kind of became status quo over time without really any program or criteria defining what that should be. And then We kind of are aware, we know that this happening. There's a lot of examples of collaborative efforts. We have the Culture and Entertainment District, Ex-Marx the Arts, Free Week Arts Alliance. These are just a few examples of really collaborative efforts that have been led by our public art partners, or I'm sorry, our arts and culture partners that we fund. And they have really been at the center of all of that. So those are some of the kind of driving factors that all pointed us towards the strategy that we're gonna talk about today. And these were kind of some of the goals that we had laid out at the start of that, which was to kind of, again, respond to that need, increase support, continue to ensure collaboration, which we know leads to a stronger economy locally, also gradually shift our funding out of the general fund, where, as you know, the pressure is compounding, and instead towards this more sustainable and flexible source, and then partner with the community foundation to do that. So this is just kind of a look at that overall big picture strategy again. So the graph on the left, which shows the support breakdown, kind of shows where the funding would go. So we have mapped out currently that it would help support administrative support for a new arts alliance this arts anchor fund program which is those six organizations that we fund and then contributions into the endowment fund to seed that and grow that so it can eventually sustain itself over time and then the chart to your right shows essentially where the money's coming from, so to speak, the funding source. So that's a mix of lost general fund and then eventually endowment drawdown as well. So as you can see, we really focused the lost towards the beginning on contributing to that endowment, and then over time, as we're able to access that, the general fund reliance decreases. So I just want to point out a few key moments. So first I'll point out that the support for these arts organizations increases in FY27, FY28, and then after about year five or six when we think we can start drawing down from that endowment. So we have built in a few bumps for them. The other thing to note would be general fund reliance ending, again, after we've seeded the endowment at that level we think is appropriate. And then the third I would point out would be once after those first five or six years, we kind of get to the point where what we are kind of bringing in through our revenue sources is a little bit higher than our current funding commitments. So that's kind of when you see more opportunity to discuss whether that results in increased funding, other programs or that kind of thing. So this is kind of what that implementation looks like, just again, big picture over the next couple of years. So this current fiscal year, fiscal year 2027, we have built in a 10% across the board increase using lost revenues and based on those revenues for those organizations that we already support. So Film Scene Summer of the Arts, City of Literature, Riverside, and Englert. That 10% bump is to kind of help them plan ahead knowing that some of the allocations may change as we'll talk about. That's to help them be planful about that. And then the other focus this year would be to begin our first contribution into the endowment fund and then to also provide some operational support to an arts alliance as they get up and running. Year two, again, would be an overall 15% increase in the amount of funds we're putting towards our strategy. We're adding public space one to that list of anchor organizations. So bumps this up from the current five to six. Yep, got that right. And then we would be reallocating based on the available funds. continue our endowment contributions, continue our Arts Alliance support as planned. We would follow that for the next few years and then about approximately year six or fiscal year 3033 is when we'll reach the threshold that we have projected is necessary to sustain the endowment. So at that point we can either choose to end or decrease those contributions going forward. start our drawdown, which brings in more revenue to fulfill our arts funding strategy. And then that provides that new baseline of support as well for the arts organizations that we're funding. So first I'll talk about item 9A which is that fund agreement with the Community Foundation. So it's included in your agenda packet and I'll just give kind of a quick overview of the important parts in it. So the agreement is with the Community Foundation of Johnson County and they manage charitable funds for many organizations across the county and they will for us for this arts endowment. That management would include investing any contributions that we make into the fund and then eventually processing any distributions that we would request out of it. The agreement establishes this fund as an endowed designated fund which means the contributed principal is intended to remain intact as a permanent source of community capital and then our distributions out of it would also be capped annually. The next slide will kind of show what our projected returns are based on our plan contributions. Like I mentioned, we modeled this to be self-sustaining, but just by creating this endowment fund and this fund agreement, we also create a mechanism for other private contributions, if so desired, and that would further grow the fund itself. The purpose statement is, again, that charitable purpose statement. It's an important aspect of the agreement in the sense that it is what broadly defines what this fund is limited to. And so we established ours to ideally clearly define that the fund is meant to support arts in our community and also provide us a little bit of flexibility in case what those specific investments look like changes over time. And then the fund will be controlled by both the community foundations, board approved internal policies, so they have a spending policy and investment policy, grant making and due diligence policy. And then also through our own internal policy, which is the next item on your agenda. So this is kind of a look at where we project that endowment or how we project that endowment could grow based on our planned contributions. Again, it will all be subject to actual lost revenues, but based on what we think we'll be able to do. And these are the assumptions used here as an 8.3% annual return. That's the average over the last five years that the community foundation has seen. And then it also assumes a 4% annual spending draw, which is what we would cap it at through our own policy. And then the community foundation takes a 1.25% admin fee as well for managing the fund. So that would bring me to my next item, which is kind of our policy, which would be attached to this fund or to this fund agreement. So I'll kind of walk through what's all contained in that policy briefly as well. It will serve essentially as an addendum to the fund agreement. So it will describe to the community foundation how we intend to carry out the endowment and as well for them. uh section one is just the purpose statement which reflects the purpose statement in that fund agreement the next section kind of talks about all the governance structure and roles so city council will be the final approval stop for the agreement the policy and then any annual contributions or distributions from the fund EDC, all of that would also go to the Council Economic Development Committee before it went to City Council, so very similar to how it does now. They would review and then recommend on to City Council. City staff would be preparing those recommendations for the EDC's review and then just providing administrative support to the fund, documentation, reporting, all of that. And then the city manager would be named the designated authorized representative, which our fund agreement requires. And then of course the community foundation would be the one holding and investing that endowment fund. So this next section kind of lays out what our planned contribution schedule and triggers for accessing the fund would be. So we have established a minimum fund balance threshold of about $2 million and that is set based on the amount that we believe is necessary to maintain longevity of the fund at the funding commitments that we anticipate. So it can accomplish all that we plan to with the fund, kind of what I showed you on those first slide with the two charts. So under this policy, we would not be able to draw from the fund unless the fund balance hits $2 million. Again, this is our own internal policy, not that of the community foundations. So they would operate in accordance with that as well. And if it were for any reason to ever drop below $2 million, even if we had already been drawing out of it, we would again take a break and not be able to draw out of that fund. So our model kind of shows that we would probably begin drawdown and hit this minimum or be above this minimum threshold in fiscal year 3033. Even if we hit it early you know I think for the longevity of the fund or intent would still be a to stick with those at least first 5 years of planned contributions and then the annual spending draw rate is cut is a separate kept by the community foundation at 5% of. the funds balance we our policy implements a 1% lower cap at 4% and so we're a little bit more conservative but again that's modeled based on all the competing priorities of making sure we're trying to grow the endowment while also accessing funds as soon as feasible getting those back out into the community and creating that long-term sustainable mechanism. So the next category would be those distribution categories. So these are all would be considered eligible uses of the endowment And this would be important to at this time, you know, we won't begin drawing from the fund for many more years it could be different council members at that time and so We want to make sure we codify what our purpose is and our intent are with these funds. The Arts Anchor Fund are those five existing organizations that we fund as well as bringing public space one. That's the next agenda item I'll provide more detail on. The Arts Alliance is currently in their early stages of formation. The city, I should say, was an engaged partner throughout that entire process. to ensure what we anticipate would be the community benefit of that alliance. We had proactively planned for some administrative support funds through this endowment as well. And then the third category just provides us some flexibility for other uses or needs that may come up. The annual process will look pretty similar to what you have been used to with the funding we do provide now. So today you're just kind of adopting the framework for all of it. And then through this next budget process is how you'll see this play out. So we'll work with the organizations to review past performance, collect kind of their new requests and all that in the summer and fall. We will prepare a recommendation for you through your budget process of how much to contribute and or distribute, which would come later from the endowment. Council EDC would review and presumably forward that onto recommendation for the city council. through your budget process, you would approve that, but then we would also do a separate resolution just for really clear and transparent tracking. And then in May or June, we would submit those, either those distribution requests to the community foundation or as lost revenues are received, we haven't quite figured out what that cadence of contributions would be, but probably semi-regularly throughout the year as we kind of bring that revenue in.

I have a quick question. Yes. That's cool, before I forget. You said, I think going back in the additional uses from the endowment could be towards like public art projects. What is the current funding mechanism for the public art projects and is that being like taken over or is this an addition?

At this time, there's no intended changes to the public art program budget, so that's about $53,000 and that comes out of the general fund. An example of that could be a large restoration project or a large one-time opportunity type of project that couldn't be funded with such a small budget. Okay, so that was kind of the internal policy and then I'll move on again to now we're getting a little more granular with the specifically arts anchor fund program policy. So again, I'll kind of walk through this. The Arts Anchor Fund is that primary funding program of the endowment. So this is really kind of, you can think of it as more of a formalization of that funding you currently provide to those five, now six organizations. The goals here are based on kind of balancing predictable, stable arts funding and Making sure the allocations are equitable without really disrupting what they are receiving now. We based this off of Some examples from other communities Bravo in Des Moines Which is their Regional Arts Council is one example who provides a program very similar to this and so that was recommended by many of the arts organizations we fund to to look to and we did that. And then we also worked really closely with the arts organizations throughout the process to collect their feedback and incorporate that to make sure it made sense for everyone. So again, just a reminder of the goals, really working towards stability, predictability, and then measurable benefit, making sure that the community benefit for the funding we're providing to these organizations is more clearly and transparently identified each year. The eligibility, so the policy names who eligible organizations would be. So if you wanted to change who that is, it would require an amendment to this policy. The eligible organizations are sorted into what we call tiers. It doesn't mean that one is higher or better than the other necessarily, but just into two categories really. The first would be public access, which includes City of Literature and Summer of the Arts, and then the second would be those revenue-generating organizations, so the Englert Film Scene, Riverside Theater, and Public Space One. And then the policy also outlines what that eligibility criteria would look like, that they're a nonprofit, they're headquartered and primarily operate within city limits, they have that arts-focused mission, they've been conducting programming for at least 10 years, And then importantly, they're operating at a scale and a community role consistent with kind of that institutional and arts anchor role and focus of this program that we believe. So just a note that even if an organization were to meet this eligibility criteria, that wouldn't necessarily make them automatically eligible for funding under this program. Again, we would have to amend them into the policy if you wished to include another organization. So the funding tiers themselves are again based on these kind of two categories. So the first is the public access and that's largely defined by mostly free programming. So they have little to no opportunity for earned revenue generation and that's where Summer of the Arts and the UNESCO City of Literature falls in. And then that tier two is the earned revenue. typically have a more diversified funding model and a participation model. So they have higher earned revenue potential through tickets or rentals or memberships, things like that. And then while many of them do offer lots of free programming, they also rely heavily on paid programming to make up a significant portion of their budget. And then within each of these tiers, there are further categories by budget size, just recognizing again that those smaller organizations might require a slightly larger proportional investment to achieve kind of a similar level of support. And then as they grow and mature, ideally they have access to more revenue sources and greater capacity and don't need to be as reliant on our public funding support. So again, this slide in particular was drawn especially from those Bravo Des Moines materials as well as the feedback from the arts groups. They helped a lot with kind of refining where this should slot in. So this is just to give you an example. Like I said, we're not making any recommendations today or allocations today, but these would be kind of the projected funding levels as we go into this fiscal year 2028 budget season. So these funding ranges you see here are really intended to provide a framework for their allocation. It could change year to year based on current conditions or need or whatever that may be. As you look at the kind of total at the bottom of that approximate range category, you can see that we will have about 315,000 available in fiscal year 2028. So not everyone could be funded at their highest possible level. For each organization, you can kind of see they're falling in a range currently and it's kind of going back to some of this inconsistency we've seen. Some are already pretty close to their max, some are very low, some are kind of right in the middle. So we did have that conversation with all the arts orgs and they really understand that they might see some shifts as we kind of reallocate these funds and move forward. And then the process is very similar to the endowment process that I described and very similar to what they're doing now. They will submit their annual reports, budgets, all of that to me in the fall as we prepare for the budget season. OUR STAFF WILL PREPARE RECOMMENDATION FOR THE COUNCIL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE TO REVIEW FORWARD ONTO THE FULL CITY COUNCIL AGAIN CITY COUNCIL WOULD APPROVE THAT THROUGH BOTH THE BUDGET PROCESS ITSELF AND THEN ALSO A SEPARATE RESOLUTION AND THEN WE WOULD EXECUTE THE FUNDING ORGANIZATIONS WITH EACH ORGANIZATION AND PAY THOSE PAYMENTS OUT. We also incorporated some kind of, defined the methodology and criteria that funding awards would be based on. So it'll be based on the total overall funding available, again, those funding ranges that they fall in based on their tier and budget size, and then the merit criteria listed here. So community impact, collaboration, contribution, public access and equity, financial status and stability, and then economic impact. So very similar again to what they've already been reporting, but it formalizes and makes it really clear for everyone what we're expecting to see back from it. And then each year they would report to us their prior year operating budget and financial review. We would require a third party 990, an annual report which kind of describes their activities, impact, any of those metrics related to that criteria, an expenditure report of the last funding award they had and how they spent those funds, and then kind of their intent for any funds that they would be awarded for the upcoming budget year. And then the final section would be just noting that an amendment would be required to change anything in the policy by council resolution. So those are the three items on your agenda. I know I talked a lot about the mechanics and happy to answer questions, go back. It was a lot of information. But before we do that, I do just want to say, you know, we've been doing we've been spending about a year on this. And as I've worked with all these organizations, I've just been so proud with how collaborative they are and really care about each other and the whole arts ecosystem as a whole. So I've just been really proud of them and inspired by them. but happy to answer questions you have. I know it was a lot of information.

A lot of great information. Any questions?

I have a few. So starting in 9B, just a curiosity about the spending drawdown rate, that the cities will be a maximum of 4%, but the Community Foundation typically is 5%. I understand they can change that as well, and we could change ours if we change the policy. Is that right? Right, yep. Other than I think our sort of general financial conservativism, is there a reason that we were at four rather than just tracking whatever the community foundations draw percentages?

Yeah, it's based on, so when you look at what our funding obligations would be and kind of the timeline of contributing but not quote unquote locking these funds up too long. We wanted to strike a good balance of making sure we had enough in there to sustain at least at the current level we we are funding but then also you know get these funds back out into the community as quickly as we can and so a four percent draw rate allowed us to do that faster than continuing to contribute longer and waiting for the five percent rate that makes sense and it would it then also follow you may not know this now but like further into the future it could be that we would adjust up to the five if the returns are good certainly yeah okay yep

I have more questions. Keep going. Okay. You said on the tier one and the tier two, the different types of organizations. I think you mentioned that the organizations themselves had input as far as who counts as what. Is that right? and also that the council would need to amend that list to add any new organizations. I could imagine that there would be other organizations that as we, you know, invest in this and learn about it, that they would want to be included. Have we considered a process for that or will that be like, you know, are we going to keep it closed for a certain period of time? We thought about that.

Yeah, I've been mostly relying again on that projection. We have understanding that what we have budgeted for based on what we will believe will be able to draw from the endowment and the other funding sources lost in general fund for a while we wouldn't have any capacity to even consider new funding organizations until that like year five or six unless of course you wanted to decrease and reallocate across all of the existing funding organizations. So that would have to be a decision of probably the Economic Development Committee and the City Council of whether you wanted to amend in new organizations, but

um in my mind that is kind of when that next trigger would happen to consider that i don't want to be too overly optimistic but are we is this whole thing premised on what rate of return for the math to work out 8.3 okay all right so we're not being like super conservative no that's the five-year average okay perfect

And can I can I ask a tag on that specific question the change in these policies is just simple ordinance change by the city at a majority resolution simple resolution majority so. Just come have the flexibility.

In the future. And then the at the merit part of the. So there's the ranges of percentages for the different years and, you know, they're sort of like the harder data, but then like the merit metrics. Is that mostly coming through like the annual reporting? Like, are there specific statistics that we're telling these organizations this will help with your? I don't know if that's a clear question.

At this time our funding agreement just requests performance metrics based on those criteria. So it doesn't define specific performance metrics. If that was desired, we would want to require that through the funding agreement. and we had specific you know things we were looking back from them we could define that through the funding agreement but at this time it really just asked them to report the data that they believe is valuable based on our our goals and priorities I think no that makes sense I've just again these are all out of curiosity and then the aspect for the reporting I my understanding from having served on EDC before and how we've made these allocations is that this is

is often like a consistent operational support kind of spend like you know the the organizations they're not guaranteed to get this money but it's a hope that there's going to be few strings attached or no strings attached and you know now now there's even more of a framework of what they might expect so is there any prioritization or does it fall into the waiting as far as those softer metrics if for example it's just operational expenditures like if in the reporting they're like yep we funded staff salaries and that's what we intend to do for for our award next year

We will ask them to show how the requested funds will be contributing to Some sort of public benefit and so whether that's you know a free program that they run or you know Can't think of another example an event they do So somehow tying that request to that and that could look a lot of different ways staff time is spent on that and all that so we will still want to see through the funding agreement and their reports We kind of want to get an idea of how their funds were spent and if it aligns with our intent but it's not the kind of and it will be it won't be about for a specific event Roger or something OK great thank you.

The mess was understand that this creation of this mechanism which is you know being. city funding you know lost funding but also opens up the avenue of people want to do private donations it opens up that possibility right now obviously this is early on we have been approved this yet so but has there been any thought about any sort of a campaign that wouldn't overlap into these organizations own fundraising efforts but would would look towards funding for the sort of the overall arts endowment. Any idea what that might look like?

Well, through the Arts Alliance process, that was a big topic of discussion. And of course, many of the organizations are in community draw from a small pool of donors. And so there was concern about cannibalizing or any of those donations. And so that was a strong priority of them is they really wanted to focus on collaboration over competition. And so that was one of the reasons why our focus, again, was on creating this to be self-sustaining just with our contributions. If there are private donors, that's great. I don't think our intent would be to go out and run a fundraising campaign or anything like that. We know it will succeed, or we hope it will succeed based on our plan, but private contributions would just be a perk, I think.

Sure. And so the percentage payout then, so let's just say Angel Donor kicks in an extra million, all of a sudden 4% equals a bigger total amount going out to the organization. So it does have that nice, not a deep impact on one area, but a broad impact across some really critical local arts organizations.

Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Thank you.

Thank you okay, thank you. All right, anyone from the public like to address this topic if so please step up to the podium. I don't see anyone online and no one in present here. Council discussion.

I'm so sorry. How inappropriate is it of me to ask a question that I just came up with? I'm so sorry, Rachel. I have a question. With this, when it comes to a broad coalition of people, organizations that probably have different opinions sometimes about how things should be run, I've reached out to as many as I can. But I'm sorry. This is a weird question. But what do you think the internal conversations like? Has there been any in particular like conflicts or disagreements that have been like, you know, ironed out? Or is there any like points that we should know about? Like maybe some folks think this way or this way.

I don't think anything comes to mind. Like I said in my final comments, I've been really impressed by just the level of collaboration. I think there's been a really strong understanding. I've, of course, had many meetings with the arts organizations that we already fund. But as it's gotten out into the community, other organizations have reached out and wanted to learn more. you know, as I've talked through our strategy with them and kind of talked to them about, like, what those future opportunities could look like, I think there was a strong understanding of just, like, the tradeoffs we're working in currently and what's available and what future opportunity could look like.

Yeah.

Does that answer your question?

Yeah, I guess maybe, you know, it would be if, you know, we voted on this and then after the fact, you know, an organization or whoever involved would be like, that was, you know, like... reached out and said i wish you would have done it this way i guess just wanted to know if you had heard anything yeah nothing comes to mind okay thank you all right roll call please alter

Yes. Burgess. Yes. Harmsen. Yes. Mo. Yes. Sala. Yes. Teague.

Yes.

Weiline.

Yes. Motion passes 7-0-9-B, Iowa City Endowment for the Arts Policy Resolution Adopting the City of Iowa City Endowment for the Arts Governance and Distribution Policy. Could I get a motion to approve, please? So moved, Weiline.

Second. Alter.

All right, moved by Weiline, seconded by Alter. The presentation was done already. Anyone from the public like to address this topic? You know one in person or online Council discussion.

I think this is probably the item that we had the most discussion of the C but I think it's something also understanding that every Council's going to have a little bit of flexibility on how we balance the certainty of getting those funds out but also compliance and flexibility and I trust us and future councils to do that.

I really like the idea and wish to see how this is going to be successful ideas and we can apply the same thing in different kind of aspect that we need for something else. Yeah.

Roll call please Burgess yes, Thompson, yes, Mo yes, yes, Teague yes, why line, yes, alter yes motion passes 7 to 0.

9 see ours anchor fund program policy resolution adopting the Iowa City are so anchor fund program allocation month methodology and distribution policy can I get a motion to approve please. Some of them all.

I'm sorry.

Moe by Moe, seconded by Saleh. And this presentation was also done within 9a. Anyone from the public like to address this topic? See no one in person or online. Council discussion. Roll call please.

Harmsen. Yes. Mo. Yes. Sala. Yes. Teague. Yes. Weiland. Yes. Alter. Yes. Burgess. Yes.

Motion passes 7 to 0. Item 10 is announcements of vacancies previous. 10A we have Human Rights Commission one vacancy to fill an unexpired term. We have applications must be due. It must be received by 5 p.m. Tuesday, August 25, 2026. Airport Zoning Board of Adjustment, one vacancy to fill a five-year term. Airport Zoning Board of Adjustment, one vacancy to fill a five-year term. Board of Appeals, one vacancy for a licensed electrician to fill a five-year term. Board of Appeals, one vacancy for HVAC professional to fill an unexpired term. Historic Preservation Commission, one vacancy for Brown Street representative to fill a three-year term. Historic Preservation Commission, one vacancy for Jefferson Street representative to fill a three-year term. Historic Preservation Commission, one vacancy for Woolan Avenue representative to fill a three-year term. Vacancies will remain open until filled. We are at item number 11, which is city council information.

You were there mayor. I don't know if I saw anybody else, but we went to the new neighborhood center ribbon-cutting it was I Beautiful I cried, you know like that library is so good and the staff there is so knowledgeable and it's just such a good facility.

I What a good location to I'll say yeah perfect location where the need is for child care services

I am not sure if I'm allowed to do this. I'm on a board that's through the county on early child care.

So you can give a report.

Okay.

I'll just leave it at that. You can share information.

They're looking for new board members. I'll just leave it at that.

By the board you're talking about? Yeah.

Some board somewhere. It's the Early Childhood Iowa Board of Johnson County. And I'm on the nominating committee if anyone is interested. My email is available. And you can have a conversation. Yeah. So that's all.

That's probably good. All right. Anything else? We're going to move on to item number 12 report on items from our city staff city manager's office tonight. Thank you city attorney not for me. Thank you and city clerk. All right. We're on item number 13. Can I get a motion to adjourn, please. Second alter all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed motion passes 7 to 0. I was we are adjourned.