City Council - Regular Meeting

Welcome to City of Keene in Focus.

Thanks so much for listening.

Hello, and welcome to our next episode of City of Keene in Focus. My name is Asa Kramer, and I am joined today by Elizabeth Furland, our city manager.

Hi, Elizabeth. Hi, Asa. Good afternoon. Yeah, good afternoon. I'm really excited by this new equipment that you're using.

Yeah, we have some new equipment to record this podcast on, and I'm sure it'll be used for other things as well, so... Let us know if you hear a difference. Hopefully you do. Yeah. Did you have a nice holiday weekend? I did. It was so busy.

How about you?

It was nice. It was very summery.

And it was great weather. I mean, it was hot, right? But it was wonderful weather to do cookout. Never lasts long enough.

Yeah, right.

Oh, it's Monday already. And the parade went fabulously downtown. Wonderful. Yeah, huge, huge crowd. Yeah, it was really good. There was a little social media buzz about having more flags in the downtown area. Right. Right now, what we do, and it's been the tradition here for a long time, is we have these posts that go around Central Square. And we put flags in there. But then we also take those flags out at the end of the day. And so I had somebody concerned that they weren't up on July 3rd. It's the fire department who puts them out. And they were planning to put them out on the 4th. And I called them up and said, hey, could you put them up? today too and said sure so we got him out oh great we got him out but you know little things like that that crop up when you think you've thought of everything but there's been talk about whether or not we need more locations for flags so I'm sure we'll talk about about that at some point. You know, West Street, for example, when West Street's in the 10-year plan, and so it's towards the end of 10 years, and it'll work its way up, it's aligned with the state plan for the state of New Hampshire to get funding, because we get 80% of the funding from the state, and the city pays for that remaining 20%. Well, that might be a conversation among all the really important stuff, like infrastructure and sidewalks and all of that. Then we also take a look at, you know, what do the light poles look like? The light poles in the downtown area, there are these little banners on them, but the city does not do those banners. So I have gotten questions about that before. Why is this up there? This is not up there. Long before I got here, there was agreement with one of our nonprofit organizations. They could maintain and use those banner holds. The benefit of that is you'll see them put up things around holidays or teen state when they're coming back to school and all that's donated. So they raise the funds for those little banners or flags and they put them up and take them down. So we don't have people like the fire department going out there putting it up and taking them down. So it's kind of a nice benefit to that. But there's know conversation after the 250th it was such a big event and such a big important celebration that do we need to have more flags i don't know the answer to that question but yeah worth considering for sure so the fourth of july all went well and swamp bats and their fireworks everything went well i really didn't hear any negative feedback and we had great attendance in the downtown And then leading up to that, we had our city council meeting on Thursday. That's right. It was pretty quick. Yeah. We had a public hearing at the beginning of the meeting, and this is the first application under a newly adopted resolution. So the law changed, it was either last year or the year before, to allow towns and cities to create residential property revitalization zones. And so This is similar to 79E, which is another tool that towns and cities are able to use to defer increased assessments. And so what this revitalization zone allows an applicant to do is if they are creating more units in these residential neighborhoods, they have the opportunity to apply to defer some of the increases in their taxes. And so It doesn't take the value of the property backwards. It raises it for whatever number of years they are awarded by the city council. And so this is the first one. So there's been some questions along the way about how many years does this project qualify for and qualifies for additional years and questions about should it be two units? The law says it has to be under four units. And so the question was, is it four units in total average? after the project is done or four units before the project is done. And so community development interpreted that to be, has to be under four units in order to apply. And in this case, this project is going to five units after. Then the committee will make a recommendation, which will go to the full city council at their next meeting.

Great. That's exciting that people are starting to take advantage of this, even if there's, you know, if it's the first one and there's going to be some questions along the way.

I think it's really cool that they're deciding to use that. You know, that's what it's for, to encourage housing development. I think that This is a good test case for us. On Thursday, we had several communications that were referred to committee. Then we had a few items that were just accepted as informational. So one of them was related to project signage for capital projects. That was referred to me and I've started a draft. It's what's called an administrative directive, which is a set of rules for the departments. And so I've started to draft a administrative directive with some input from Public Works and Parks and Rec about when would this make sense and what sort of information would go on the sign because this would be an additional expense and I think you've heard at least one counselor say we don't want signs up all the time everywhere all over the city but it can be helpful if a big project is happening it could explain sort of like the timeline for the project and have a QR code website address so that people can follow it and get more information on the website it would be to create signs with all the information about a project, but enough for someone to drive by or be walking by and say, oh yeah, I didn't know there was a project going on here. Like for instance, Robin Hood Park, it's a big project coming up right now. And right now the first part of that project is going to be discussing how to rehab the pool. And that will be the next MSFI meeting. So we haven't worked out all the details of this administrative directive, but how I sort of envision it is projects over 500,000, so a substantial project. Once there's been a decision about the project and the design of the project, putting the information out there about when the project will be built and where they can find more information. So I know that at least one of the city councilors was interested in doing one before the project was designed. But the challenge with that is projects of that magnitude go into the capital plan and they work their way up just like the West Street project I was talking about. They work their way up in the plan and then when they get close to the time of implementation, there's a final design and then it goes out for bid and then But then it comes back in and assuming it's within budget, then they award the contract. And then that's that construction season or the following construction season. So putting a project in in the early design phase doesn't make a lot of sense. Just because we will go through many steps before it becomes a reality and the timing will change. So maybe it's a grant project. or at least a partially grant-funded project that will influence when it gets to the actual year on the budget. So there's a lot of moving parts with these projects. So I think we'll see how we do with signs for these larger projects once we get ready to start, you know, moving towards implementation and then tweak it as we go and find out what works the best. So that was accepted as informational, but that doesn't mean nothing is happening. We're working on a directive for that. There was also a request from Elizabeth Hansel for a resolution regarding single-use plastic. That also, I believe, was accepted as informational, but is being treated the same way. The council asked me to come up with an administrative directive for departments to reduce the use of single-use plastic. And so I'll be working on one for that as well. And I think that there are some opportunities across the organization where we can find ways to reduce single-use plastic just to become more aware of it and, you know, look for ways to incorporate compostable items. There was discussion about events in the downtown. That's a little trickier. The event holder decides, you know, what caterer or what organization they're going to use. But we do actually have several event holders that try to do either zero waste or all compostable products. And they're very proud of that. When we do protocol meetings, that will be one of the things we mentioned just to be aware. If there's an opportunity to reduce single-use plastic, it would be greatly appreciated. And then we had the report from the 100 Church Street efforts. And the group came in and just talked about all the work that they've done to activate the space and keep it clean. And they have really done a great job with that. Ken Cost and the East Keene neighborhood really stepped up to try to find ways to address some of the problems that we were seeing at that location. And I think at the council meeting, it was just an opportunity to thank them for that. They are interested at some point in changing the designation of the site from just basic town property that's under the control of Public Works to a pocket. park designation that would be under control of Parks and Rec. It's technically not going to make much of a difference because we've already done things like post it. It's being mowed by Parks and Rec. But I think they want more assurance that it won't be sold because there was a neighbor that was interested in buying this property and We were having so many issues at the site. It was something that we were considering. But once the neighborhood came out and they really took the lead and activated that space, it has not been something that we've been discussing anymore. Then, of course, we had our usual downtown project update and some donations and then another informational review about the budget for the fire department, the current budget. Well, actually, now it's July. We're in fiscal 2017.

Well, that's true.

Yeah, right. So last year's budget, which was fiscal 26, which ended at the end of June, talking about the lines in their budget that they anticipate will be overexpent and the need to move some money around once the year closes out. And we have all the bills and outstanding purchase orders paid, and we know where there's money available in other parts of the budget. So That'll come back again to FOP probably, I would say, like mid-August. We'll be back with a request to move some funds around. And then the property tax exemption and credits, which the motion on Thursday night was to direct staff to create the resolution for these changes. And so it wasn't for the actual amounts themselves. That will happen now, so this will be back on FOP. The numbers that were reviewed at the last meeting at FOP will be reviewed again, and then that will go back to City Council for a vote. Now that second vote, that next vote, will be to actually change the exceptions and credit amounts. And this is important because you really need to do this when you're going through a revaluation process because we know that the values, especially our residential values, are going to dramatically increase. And in order to keep people at the same general amount that they were paying before in terms of their value of their property to the value of the credit, you need to adjust the credits accordingly. And so that's what our assessors do. attempting to do with these changes and then there was just a couple of other ordinances for first reading that will get further discussion and that's a highlight from that meeting great something that i think is interesting and valuable to share is the work that we're doing internally at the city to look at continuation of operation plans for all of our departments So every department and division needs to have this continuation of operation plan. We really saw during COVID how important it was to have these plans worked out because there was a short lived emergency at first where people were trying to decide like which services would stay. And then when you realize this emergency was going to go on for a longer period of time, we had to adjust again. And if departments can just take a look at their operations and think about a building closure, a power internet outage, a cyber attack, severe weather, staffing shortages, take a look at just their day to day. And if that were to happen, what are the essential services that they must find a way to continue? So for instance, in almost every emergency, we need to have finance. The employees and the bills have to be paid. So we have to find a way to ensure that finance continues. Now, it might be less people. We may decide that we can skinny down the department for a short period of time depending upon the emergency, or we may actually increase the department depending upon the emergency and the amount of tracking that we need to do for potentially reimbursement for a federal declaration of an emergency. So it really depends, but going through this process now before you're in state of emergency, and most of the departments, if not all of them, have a plan. So you just got to annually take a look at those. And so we have a changeover in our emergency management leadership. Court had been working with the departments, Court Blomquist. to get this started. And now Rick Wood is the Emergency Management Director, and he'll be working with them to finalize it. But with you, Asa, you're an important part of this as well. You're the role that you have here at the City. If you think about it, regardless of the emergency, communications is going to be important.

I think of last year, Rebecca, our deputy city manager, did such a fabulous job when there was the water main break at communicating all throughout that. Just how important that was for people to be in the know. Is the boil water order over or not?

right she did a really fabulous job with that yeah she did she did great and you know sometimes it feels like you're over communicating yeah there's not not a lot more information but the feedback that we got was great about how communication went out during that emergency and people really felt like they understood what was going on so yeah she did a great job and there's a lot of work that goes into that when you have an emergency so when that happens everything else stops, right? So the work that she does on all the other projects, that had to stop. The emergency became the priority, and she really had to spend her time on that. And think about it, something even larger scale or longer lasting. A lot of communications. And on the emergency management team, Rebecca is actually the information officer. So there's, you know, roles for everyone, and she's the information officer on that team as well. So I think this is a good exercise to make sure we go through and think about, you know, towns, small towns around us have actually had some cyber attacks that have put them out of commission for a while. Staff meeting this morning, we talked about these continuation of operation plans and we had community development department, Paul Andrus, go through his plan. in case others were having questions or really wanted to see how they went about attacking their plans. I looked around the table and there's a lot of new faces. And, you know, when we were first talking about this several months ago, I'm thinking, we just went through COVID. We know how to shift and reprioritize and do all of that, but not every Everybody did go through COVID, but they didn't go through it with us anyways. They may have been in a different role or at a different organization, but we have a lot of new people in the leadership positions across the city. So this has been a good exercise so far.

I really appreciated when our assistant emergency management director had joined us for the podcast a few episodes ago, Mike Hagan. He said that emergencies don't need to be scary. Preparedness is all about having a plan.

Because when you get in those emergencies, you know, time is very valuable and not having to think it all through. The other thing, and we learned this during COVID, is there are a lot of people that want to help. Yeah. But it's hard to manage that if you don't really understand what the job function is that you might need help. That's like another whole job for someone to manage that. Yeah, for sure. In these plans, the last page talks about where people can be reassigned potentially, who would have to stay to run the department, and who might be able to help in the emergency in a different way. And what equipment do they have that can be shared or reallocated? So we have our monthly updates about the downtown project on MSFI and there'll be another one coming up. But we just had our pre-construction meeting for the downtown project and that was a big meeting. So that pre-construction meeting involves all the departments. And then all the other agencies like Eversource, the utility companies that also have to coordinate their work with the work that we're doing. And so it was a pretty big meeting. And our consultant, GPI Engineering, who is our consultant overseeing the project, went through and talked about the things that we need to coordinate, talked about some of the things in the contract that we need to make sure that everyone's complying with. just talked about how we were gonna work through issues if they came up because we know things will occur as the project goes on. And I think the big message at the end of the meeting and really actually throughout the meeting is communication coordination. everyone who's communicating wants to make sure they're communicating accurate information. So you have to have real timely information. And then coordination because, so Liberty Utilities is going to be the first company doing work in the road on Central Square. So July 13th, Liberty Gas will start with the relocation of their utilities. And then on July 27th, the Kinsella Construction Company will start with the actual downtown project. What they're trying to do is have Liberty Gas finish on one side of the road before Casella comes in. And so that they'll start on the other side and then being able to switch over. But I know Liberty Gas said, yeah. that's going to be tough for them to meet that deadline and get that work done. So there might be some time when both Liberty and Casella are working in the same general facility, but the hope is to get them moving down the road so that they can be ahead of Casella when Casella comes in. So yeah, so July 13th will be the start of it, and it'll be Liberty Gas that will start with their relocations. So we also are planning to store construction equipment on Gilbo Ave. On Gilboa, towards the end of the street, there's a gravel lot. And that lot right now is being planned for the location of the construction equipment. It will be fenced off with some of that construction fencing, but that will allow them to be relatively close to the downtown work. because we don't want a lot of vehicles parked down there. We don't want a lot of, you know, construction trucks, only the people that have to be there. So keeping the equipment as close as possible obviously helps to cut down with some of that. And we're in the process of working out the access agreement for that lot. And during this pre-construction meeting, they were talking about if they will need the full lot or part of the lot. I think they're going to need it all, both the gravel and the paved. So you'll see a lot of construction equipment there for the next three years. So the other thing that recently happened was a workshop with the city council to discuss fiscal policy. That's really something we try to do every year. And what it allows the council to do is go through and take a look if the parameters still make sense for the budget. And it's really the start of the budget process because they need to make those decisions before I begin putting together the manager's budget with the departments because it sets the parameters. How much new money can be allocated to the budget is based on those fiscal policies. And so it talks about things like the CPI calculation. There's been some conversation back and forth about which is the right CPI for us. We used to have the Boston-Cambridge CPI that we were using, a rolling three-year average. The rolling three-year average is important because you don't want to see ups and down spikes from one year. You want to sort of smooth that out. But then we went to a Northeast region slash New England CPI, and we looked at year after year what were the differences, and there weren't very many, but we just felt like that Northeast might be more accurate for our local conditions for cost of living. But this year, when we were putting together the budget for fiscal 27, we had a hard time getting the information from them because I think it's the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped using that one. And really, yeah, so it wasn't as readily available. And so the finance director In our prep meetings, talked about maybe using Northeast without the New England piece and just try to do the Northeast one. So what we're doing right now is we are getting a history of those three indexes. So we can see if, was it 3% for each of them? Was it 3.1? Or is it 2.9? So how close were they over the last, I don't know, five or more years so that we can feel comfortable regardless of the one being used. It's not going to increase the numbers or decrease the numbers dramatically. It will provide some stability and be readily available. So I know that will be a big conversation. I talked about that during the workshop. And we talked about other things like outside agencies and the process for outside agencies. Right now in the budget, it's really social service agencies that submit and go through a process to be considered as part of the city's budget. And the reason for that is we are looking at if their organization and what they provide for services is and if they were not here and providing those services to keen residents would the city have to provide it you know and usually that's a social service agency that would impact the welfare budget and so there's been conversation about a couple of agencies that are getting funding not really fitting into that category and should there be a different category and It's not really going to require much of a change in the fiscal policy. I would like to see social service instead of outside agency. I think that would help make it a little clearer when people are asking if they can apply. But the council has also been talking about whether or not they may want to open it up for an organization that is moving forward the principles of the master plan and which principles that they're focused on. So if it's housing, for example, if there's an organization that wants to make a pitch to the council to be included in the budget because they're doing something related to housing. I don't know what they're gonna do with that, but it came up. One of the counselors brought it up. They thought that it might be good to have a second pot or a second allocation of funding for those types of initiatives. So I think you will hear some additional conversation about that. And then a lot of the other ones are really mostly just cleanup. You know, like for instance, the city is to be self-insured for our health insurance. That hasn't been the case for probably a decade. And so that language should probably just be removed from the fiscal policy. And then also the fiscal policy talks about ambulance billing and it has some pretty specific language in there. We're proposing a more generic, paragraph that would allow those rates to change based on changes at the state level. So the law just changed recently related to ambulance billing, and now it doesn't align with our fiscal policy. And so just having, you know, whatever's allowed by law, I think would take care of that and not require us to come back or ask for an exemption from the policy. and then the other thing we recommended is changing the language related to projects right now it says upon project completion the residual funds would be returned to basically the fund balance and we are suggesting closeout similar to The reason why we aren't coming back until August for the budget is that there's a lot of stuff that happens during the closeout process that you don't want to release the funds too early until all the bills and the purchase orders and conferences, all those things have been paid, and then we can close it out. The other topic that got a little bit of discussion is the land use change tax. Right now, if there's a property in current use and you're getting a break from taxes because you have your property in current use, and then let's say 10, 15 years from now, you sell that property and the person that buys it wants to actually build on it. So for them to change from current use to a portion of the property or all of the property into now property you're going to develop, there's a tax on that. So there's a change tax. And it can be significant depending upon the number of acres that would be included. That money comes into the city. It's a revenue that's tracked separately. And right now, fiscal policies say that the Conservation Commission gets $25,000 a year, even if those revenues are, say, $5,000. So what happens is the general fund budget has to make up the difference. And we have to, from year to year, see what the difference is from revenues and make it up so that the conservation gets $25,000 in a fund. that they can use for conservation purposes. Then if it's over $25,000, the language says right now that they get 50%. So anything over 25, they get 50%. So there's been recently several purchases of property that has been put forward by the Conservation Commission and that has used this fund. So the question is, What's the right number to be in this fund? Should the city budget be subsidizing it every year? Because most years it's probably not going to be 25,000. But then again, when you get to a year that a big piece of property is coming out and being changed over to a property that's being developed, there could be a big tax. So what's the right number? So we're putting together a red line version of the fiscal policy resolution that will go to the finance committee. Then it gets back to the city council for adoption before they go on break because they will be canceling some meetings in the month of August. And if we don't get it in before then, then it will just be after September and it would be cleaner if we had it done ahead of time. But we'll see. It's not critical that it be done before they go on break. It's just a preference. I think that's it, Asa. That was a lot.

Busy meeting.

It always seems like, oh, this was a short meeting. There wasn't much on there. But when we really start talking about it, there's a lot to all these different, you know, meetings and moving pieces and what's coming up next.

Definitely. And I mean, even though the budget got adopted at the end of June, you're starting that budget process right over again. So on top of everything else. I know.

I get a few weeks to kind of try to clean my office up before it starts again.

I will encourage everyone to go to KenanH.gov slash jobs and check out the open positions there. I've mentioned community night a couple of times. That will be August 18th from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Put that on your calendars. It'll be super fun. There will be free food and ice cream and trucks and the city departments will be there. So if you have questions. questions about projects. It's a great time to come and it's super fun and cute.

And I think if that is it, we will wrap up for today and we will see you next time.

Thanks for listening to City of Keen and Focus. We'll see you next time.