Town Council - Regular Meeting

Well, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us. The media is now called to order. With the clerk, please call the roll.

Mayor Stanton. Here. Vice mayor Labelle. Here. Council member Andean Keller. Here. Council member Liebherr. Here. Council member Moore.

Here.

Council member Pace. Here. Council member Thomason. Here. We have a court.

Thank you. As a reminder, this meeting is being streamed live on the Internet and will be archived on the town's website for future viewing. The first item on the agenda is study session. These items are scheduled for discussion among council staff and their designees. Votes will not be taken on any of these items at this time but may be scheduled for final action later in the meeting or at a future meeting. Members of the public are asked to hold their comments until call of the public scheduled to begin shortly after 6PM. Public comments will also be invited when the agenda topic is placed on a future agenda for action. There are three study session items today. The first is to receive an update on the healthcare request for proposals presented by our HR director Gina Monger.

Good afternoon mayor and council. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today about this. So as it is noted this is the second update for the healthcare request for proposals. The purpose of this presentation is to give a brief summary of the project. We also want to provide an update on the feasibility provided information to council on.

We also want to share with you the results of that RFP process and then the ask at the end of the presentation will be for counsel to consider consensus for the recommendation to remain in the Arizona Metropolitan Trust at a future consent agenda item. As you may recall, we did contract with Capital Financial Consulting, CAPPHI Consulting, to assist us with the RFP process. The year to date spend on that contract is $14,375 Those services include the feasibility study including the original and the updated version that we'll share with you today as well as the efforts to gather the claims data including large claims, prescription information, medical use as far as well as demographic information that we submitted to them to put together the RFP for us. They also met with the RFP committee to review the submittals and then they have prepared the analysis that we are discussing today. So as a quick reminder, we are with the Arizona Metropolitan Trust and we have been with them for coming up on, if I do math here, six years.

So our membership expires at June 30 this year. On February in accordance with the Arizona Metropolitan Trust Board of Trustees bylaws we were extended and approved for membership to begin effective 07/01/2026 for a thirty six month period. That is their process. Basically they have to extend an invitation and then at that point we take action upon that invitation. So to recap on the fully insured feasibility study, that was the study to determine if we were possibly a good fit to consider fully insured healthcare benefits.

As you may recall, in October we received results that were pretty promising. About 78.9% of the projected outcomes suggested that a projected savings would occur if we went fully self funded and that was based on our three prior years of claims information. We were aware that we had some large claims coming through and so we ran those numbers again because we wanted to be absolutely certain that if we considered this model that we were in fact a good fit. And lo and behold, 2026, we had some significant claims come through and that projection of self funding outperforming the self insured pools dropped to 47.2%. So what does that tell us?

Very simply is we are not currently a good fit for a fully self insured health care benefits. So we are not here to discuss that any further in terms of as an option for the town. And I'm going to let Dave Thomas introduce himself and he can jump in and speak more to that for you all. Great. Thank you, Gina, Mr. Mayor of Council. My name

is Dave Thomas. As she said, I've got twenty six years of experience in all levels of medical plans, fully insured, alternate funded, and self funding, all types of stop loss and so forth. So along with Allison Sparks and Rob Brooks, we all have significant exposure to self funded plans and municipality type benefit plans. So yeah, like she said, we were very encouraged by what had been the reporting through those three years through June. And then that's when the first feasibility study was done.

Then we were able to get July through September that Gina got from the trust. And unfortunately it was dramatically higher. So for loan was $291,000 Normally you've been spending around $100,000 in claims for the prior three years. The average for those three years was $205,000 as opposed to around $100,000 a month. So when we went back to the feasibility of underwriters, again, the actuaries like she said, then the feasibility became 47%.

So a lot of times making a move like going to a self funded plan is really about timing. And as far as an underwriting perspective goes, the more recent claims are the more credible claims. And so like for example, if those three months had happened twelve months ago or eighteen months ago, it wouldn't have been an issue. If those months had been flip flopped, you'd still be in pretty COVID-nineteen And And the funded quotes because that's what we were pursuing. We even went back to the market again for fully insured and alternate funded quotes and we got three, but all of those range between 1938% as far as increases go.

The middle one was at about 31%, just not going to make sense. We would never recommend that you do that. So while we'd love to have you guys as a business partner, just wasn't going to make sense.

And to that point, here's just a quick overview of the RFP process itself and we worked with our procurement administrator as well to coordinate this effort. We released it on November 14 and invitations were sent to direct providers, third party administrators, and benefit pools. So we feel that we did our due diligence to try to reach out and get folks to respond to our bid for health benefits. The bid opening as it's noted here was on December 15. We received nine responses.

Two of those were rejected, deemed unresponsive, and one declined to provide a quote. So as Dave alluded to, we did not get the results that we had hoped for. None of the respondents actually quoted all of the town's lines of insurance with the trust. So that was one of the first indicators. And then what was there?

They were significantly higher than what we're currently paying. The other considerations were that we did contact other known health pools within the state to see if we could just get information for comparison purposes for ourselves and for you as counsel when you're trying to make the appropriate decision. None of them actually responded. So what we did do was, know, got to love Google, right? And so I spent a fair amount of time just Googling, looking for premiums, and so I found a couple from a couple specific municipalities and they were significantly higher than what we are today.

I was comparing today's premiums against their current premiums. So that's where we ended with the RFP process. And so today that leaves us with what we believe is the best choice for the town both in terms of the benefits as well as the cost of those benefits. And so therefore what we are asking is that council provide consensus to approve the renewal for the thirty six month term as outlined. And you want to add any more to the RFP itself?

I do. I think the blessing of it all is that a commitment wasn't made while some of these other chronic conditions or larger claims were happening because as you know there's no way to really predict those. And so if you were already going down that path with us and then those things made themselves known and then became could be significant dollars that would we would have been disappointed with that as well. You definitely don't want to start off your first year in a self funded plan underwater. You don't wanna start off in a tough environment.

And so it's better that it's better for you guys that that didn't happen again. So maybe in two point five years when you get going down this road, I'd be happy to explore this. You guys were doing all the right things. You explored the market, you checked everything out to see what would happen. And it was just simply in my estimation timing.

So thank you. And with that, that's our presentation and we're happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. Questions from the council? We can start with Councilmember Moore.

Thank you mayor. No questions. Thank you for the presentation. It was very clear. Thank you.

Councilmember Thompson.

Thank you mayor. Looks like we had an aberrant quarter or aberrant period of claims. My guess is we have about two fifty covered lives.

Yes, that's correct.

So my question is of the bad claims experience that we had, was that spread over a small number of covered lives or was that spread over a broader amount of covered lives? And how does that claim to your period? Was this the bump in the python or a part of the trend?

Answer

your question. The specific information from the trust is pretty minimal. But from what we could see, it was perhaps two to three claimants. And the most recent conditions, there were two that we knew about. And again, not sure exactly what they were or what level they were. Now you're protected up to a $200,000 right now with the trust, a $200,000 specific deductible limit. So everything above that is paid for by reinsurance. So yes, it would have been just a limited bump in the python like you were describing, not widespread, which is if you're going to have anything, that's how you want it. You want it

we're I

I think think your suggestion as moving with the trust. My question is, do we provide any kind of like wellness programs where incentivized for our employees where they could participate in certain I know when I worked at several different employers, well, I only worked for three, so that all three of them, they had where you if your cholesterol was below 200 or you did 10,000 steps or whatever the parameters were then and you met those parameters then it would you essentially would buy down your cost to the for the employee cost of the medical insurance. Do we do that? Through the Arizona Metropolitan we do

have a wellness program that includes several things. One of them is to what you're speaking to where it's actually like an app and you go on there and it tracks your steps and if you engage in certain activities you go to the doctor for preventative care those kinds of things, you earn points. And it's basically points to purchase things from within that portal. We do not take that and use it as subsidy for the employee premium at this time. In terms of overall wellness though, trust actually does provide a robust program.

They have annual skin cancer screenings. They do mammograms on an annual basis. They also do we just got done with the health risk assessment, which is where you go in and they do your blood and they they weigh you and they, you know, they do all those things. You get this full detailed report that you can take to your provider for further information. They do another one, I'm not thinking what it is at this moment. Organ screening. Thank you. Yes, so they also do organ screening. Interesting. Yeah, so there is a lot of information and it's all intended to be preventative, right?

We're hoping we catch something before it becomes something big. And that is what I would say personally one of the frustrating things about the results of this is that we have as an organization we have been doing the right things. People are going to the doctor, but it's but it's one of those things where what happens when you use It goes up. So even though we're all doing the right things, even just the utilization affects premiums. And then when you tack on some large claims that we have had, that just puts us out of the range of, you know, considering alternatives.

Having said that though, the trust is still a very solid and a very robust plan. Right? So as we will recall, part of doing this was just our fiduciary responsibility to make sure this was a good fit for the town. And I think if nothing else through our consultant we have learned that we are where we should be in terms of providing our healthcare benefits.

Yeah, I would suggest doing some sort of program. I know where I was we were all type A super competitive but we made it a big competition to see who could have the best results so something like that might be interesting.

And we provide an HSA? Yes, we do through if you have the high deductible health care plan. But you can also do the flexible savings account which is the annual enrollment. Yes. And then prescription drug program? That's through the medical plan.

Okay. And everybody knows they can use Trump Rx or whatever good Rx or whatever as well. Yeah.

Those those additional coupons. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Very good. Thank you.

Thank you. Other questions or comments?

Councilmember Leipman. Thank you mayor. I really appreciate this information. That was a well presented report and if you're looking for a consensus, I consents. Hearing about these wellness programs, I know as we have a number of town volunteers including the peep most of the people at this table I wonder if we could participate not in the insurance plans but maybe in the wellness you know the what did you say that the if we're allowed to do that and the judges and

So yes in some circumstances and that's probably a reflection on myself for not communicating that better to staff. For folks who are covered under the plans, most of those are covered either 100% at a very low cost. But if you are not covered under plan, then there's just an out of pocket amount that you can pay. So that is available to essentially anyone. If you're not covered under the plan then you could pay. I can tell you from the health risk assessment where they do the blood draws and things that the out of pocket was still significantly less than what you pay for going to

the doctor to do it. You. Casimir Repayce.

Hi. Thank you, Gina. Thank you, Dave. Good presentation. Good that we had this done. I think it's always good to take a look. I was there the night we had to approve the first time and had a fellow council member opposed and we were having a big debate and worrying about it. We're right on the deadline before year end and to be able to join. And we advocated and the group got together and all of us agreed to do it and it's turned out to be the best thing. I am glad to hear the follow-up

to

that and how it's done during this time period. So that's good. Following up on what Councilmember Leipman asked you about people participating. The judges and counsel don't receive any compensation and we're not part of the plan we wouldn't. I just want read that on the record. Are not part of the health plan. We do not receive anything from it. And it's been that way in the town from the beginning. So what you're talking about is people can come and join self pay if they want and that could be anybody. So if you're doing blood draws, come to the front. Is that what you mean?

For these wellness events that we have, yes. Some of them allow for those that are outside of the plan to participate as long as they provide their own payment for them.

The payment. Yeah, it's like a self pay. Just to self pay for the service and that's

for everybody. Yes. Right. Okay, just to clarify.

We don't have any cover for the judges or for the volunteers and it's for the counselor volunteers. The other thing I thought was what is the following up on councilor ending Keller's questions. How much do we have for life insurance for everybody that's employees in the plan

so that so the the health care town paid basic life insurance is equal to one year salary and that's both a term life policy as well as a accidental death and dismemberment There are supplemental group term lines that employees can self pay.

Okay, got it. And do we have a disability LTD policy as well?

Yes. Available to people? For employees who are less than five years of service, we do have disability program for them.

Okay. That's fine. No, those are good. I remember before it was all competitive and we have a pretty competitive program compared to the other municipalities, correct, for the benefit?

That's my opinion,

Okay, that's good. Well I support it. I think it's good to have done this look back to kind of see how did it work and is there another option. It looks like it's been doing very well for us and it was nice to just reaffirm that. You know, it was in the beginning, it was a little bit people were apprehensive because it was newer. And should we do it or not? And was it the right move? And it could have not been. But it's turned out to be great. So I support it. I think it's great. I think we're getting better. And I'm assuming the employees, you've gone out to the employees and they like the program and their service and benefits?

Mixed at times because it's not what everyone wants all the time because it is governed by a board of trustees. So there's 11 other seats at the table where people are making decisions. So we have one of those seats at the table to, you know, provide guidance to the board. So, you know, when we did a survey about a year and a half or so ago, to no surprise a lot of the results were we want better benefits at lower costs. Of course. With that I will leave it with that. Certainly there are some things that have been added. I was the victim of you know, getting a mammogram and finding out that the three d was not covered on the plan,

and so

that was out of pocket. But then we fixed that during the next renewals, and now that entire screening is covered. We do try to make things but again, are, well right now there's 1,100 of us. San Tan was just recently approved into the trust as well. So right now I think they have two employees but that is soon to grow.

We They shall will. They will grow. And if needed to get out if we as a town, at some point, needed to get out of the program, how does that work? Because I remember we went over this in great detail when we adopted this. It was a big concern of ours. But how was the time notices and how do

we go about that? I can speak generally. I don't know how specifically you all remember. I mean there are provisions for that but there's also like penalty buyout. So there is provisions for it but there would be a cost to do so.

Yeah, but so if something went terribly wrong with the plan in the time period we have signed up for them we'd have to plan. There might be a consequence but it would have to be something severe to get out, but

we could get out.

Yes. I could add. If you were going to go leave earlier than the three year contract allows, then yes, they would definitely charge you for that. There would definitely be a fee for that for sure, for sure. And like Gina was just saying, part of that customization of plans was one of the things that Gina was interested in because in that trust pool, you can't do that. And you can't customize it specific to PV. And then when she was seeing these three years of reports, hey, are we getting the financial benefit of that? When I was here the last time, I said, yeah, in essence, you're running great, you're helping subsidize other municipalities and you're not getting the benefit of And that's what our hope was.

No, that's great. It's great to see this kind of a prudent review at this stage in detail level so it's good to know. So I support it. We're doing it. Thank you.

Vice mayor.

Thank you mayor. That was a really clearly spelled out and thorough presentation. I appreciate it. I appreciate the clarity and responsiveness on that. To sort of piggyback on council member Pace's question about the thirty six month commitment, is that three year lock in, that's what they came to you with but there's no negotiation there. Do we have any flexibility if the marketing conditions improve and is every municipality given that same timeframe or is that specific to Paradise Valley based on our our claims and everything?

I don't know the specific details of the contract. I know generally speaking it is thirty six months there and everyone signs up for a thirty six month term and then you can do renewals after that on the initial applications. In terms of know can that be less, I have not seen that. So I think if we sign, know if we you know approve a resolution for thirty six months effective 07/01/2026, it is for that entire thirty six months period. Then if circumstances change as we discussed that there are provisions in there, but those those come at a cost and consequence to

the town. Okay. Thank you. And then one more. Just kudos. I know last year we budgeted in $45,000 for the consult and if I'm understanding correctly are we all done at 14,375 or are we still going to doing more research on that the 21,125 just a little confused on those two numbers.

Yes so the budget was 45 we contracted with cap five for I believe it was the 21,125 we have currently been billed for the I think I said $14.14 14,000 give or take there. At this point we haven't received a second billing so I'm not going to say that somewhere in there. We at this point this kind of closes the loop with us and CAPPHI and so we appreciated their professionalism and helping us guide us through this complex process and at least this gave us an answer that I'm confident recommendation for counsel. Right and I think

it was worth a look so thank you very much.

Appreciate it. One more call for questions. Member Pace.

Yeah I forgot one question. So the contract itself, did our town attorney read that? And have you signed off on this contract, Sandra McGuire? Sorry. Just to make sure.

We have not presented a new contract yet. It would basically be done by resolution and but we needed to kinda get this point first and then we will begin that that process. Okay.

Last time we had it handed to us and we read it and that's how we went through it on the dias and that's when I had debates and I had to kinda win over my counsel over someone who's opposed. And we went through line by line and provisions that we have concerns about. So I haven't seen that contract and just want to make sure it is reviewed so we don't

have any surprises in it. Understood. That's all.

Council member Moore, anything further?

No other questions, Mayor. Thank you.

All right. Well, Gina, thank you for the presentation. Very thorough. Thank you for going through the process and you had explained it in advance and I appreciate that. Mr. Thomas, thank you for your expertise and your organization's confidence in where we're at. This is a big line item, and it has been, and it's that way not only in the public sector, but in the private sector and in the home sector and whatnot. So this is something to keep an eye on and see if there is a change down the road. We'll hope the best for our staff and our employees and their families, but thank you for that. And I'm not seeing any opposition to the recommendation from staff and with that Gina I think you should have enough to move forward.

Thank you mayor, thank you counsel.

Absolutely. All right next up on study session is Item 20 six-seventy eight, Discussion of Fiscal Year 2026 Compensation and Classification Study. We've got forty five minutes set for this and very excited to welcome Gina Monger.

Welcome back, right? Okay. Okay, so this topic today is to share with you the results that we have regarding the compensation study that was approved by council for this year. So I would first like to thank council again for budgeting for this line item so that we could engage in this study. As you may or may not recall that there has not been a full study done by the town since 2007.

So for me doing that, that's about nineteen years. We did do a partial study in fiscal year twenty two, but that was directed towards sworn and dispatchers, that was to establish a placement in range for those job classes. Council subsequently approved $107,000 to implement that study in fiscal twenty two through contingency funds. So we are here to talk about this study because in our employee handbook we say that we want to attract and retain highly qualified employees. And to do so, if not the first thing that we look at is compensation and how do we fare against the folks who we are competing for, those highly qualified employees.

In the staff report that I provided you all, there was some data in there and I just put it in there just to kind of help start the conversation. I want to be clear that that turnover data that I provided was no way intended that that is the end of the story. It's more of a starting point for the story. Because what we can't give you numbers on is how many people simply do not apply with us. And they do not apply because why? Well if I'm a candidate and I'm applying what do we look at? We look at the job, we look at the pay, we look at the benefits, and we look where it's at. Those are pretty much the first four things that we look at. And some folks depending on where you look, might look at one over the other first. With the power of job search engines now, we can literally look side by side at positions.

I can look at Scottsdale, Tempe, Glendale. Look at the same job and see and if I need to be honest I'm probably going to start looking first at the one that pays the most Then I'm going to dive into the rest of the and see if it's a good fit. But it starts there. So what this study is really hoping to help us with is to address those people who look at us and then move on. Who never even click the submit button on an application with us.

So that's what we're hoping to talk about today a bit more. So when we do have folks apply with us, one of the questions and I've got lots of directors in the room and they will attest to this and that is that we get people who say what are the opportunities within the organization? You know what are my opportunities to promote? Right? And we are a relatively flat organization so that means we do not have a lot of opportunities.

So, we have to compensate for that lack of opportunity in other ways, and I would argue that we do a pretty darn good job of that. We really promote and push work culture, environment, leadership, supportive council, a community that we do. We do those things when we can get someone in front of us but we have to get them in front of us first and if we have a wage that is lower than our competitors on a regular basis that makes that much more difficult to achieve. So where does that leave us today ahead of what my consultant here is going share with you? And that is the town overall has done a really good job.

I hope folks didn't have too significant of sticker shock when they read through this presentation. Bob will share with you some anecdotal information about the results of this compared to maybe some other municipalities that he's worked with. But the important thing is we have done work up to this point for nineteen years. We have been working to try to stay with our competition And what this tells us is that you know we have done a lot of the things but there's something that we still need to do a little bit more to kind of push us up ahead to where some of these hard to fill and some of these things they're not so hard to fill and that we get more people sitting in front of us at interviews so that the chief can talk about his bulletproof plan and why this is such a great place to work and those kinds of things. But we've got to start addressing those candidates who never hit the submit button.

And so that's what we're here to talk about today and how we can positively affect that in a relatively small way compared to where we would be had council not been approving market adjustments previously. Have we not been doing our own internal classification reviews? Have we not been addressing salary equities with staff. So I guess what I hope is that council will look at this open mindedly and look at as the larger scope project that is probably and arguably long overdue and having said that we're only a net 3% behind. So I kind of want to do a happy dance because I feel like that really speaks to the work of everyone.

But certainly respect that this is public funds and that there's people who are going say why do we need to pay these folks more when it's good enough now, right? So with those being my opening comments, I'm going to introduce Bob Longmire. He is headed up this study.

Thank you for

your time today. Happy afternoon. We have maybe forty minutes, so I'll go through this a little bit quick and then save some time for some question and answers. If you have any questions during, feel free to kind of stop and we can talk about it then or come back to it at a later point. But I thought today we'll go over a little bit of who we are, what we do, what the study entailed, a little bit of what it is, a little bit of what it isn't, review the findings.

We had a little bit of a spoiler alert of kind of where we are, you know, maybe high level as a result of the findings, and then kind of discuss the what do we do about it? So a little bit of where are we and a little bit of now what towards the end of this. So ultimately, as Gina said, my name is Bob Longmire with Public Sector Personnel Consultants. All that we really do is personnel consulting for the public sector. We get the chance to do maybe 30 or 40 studies a year. I probably do maybe between six and eight studies a year. It's nice. This one's a home game for me. I live in Mesa, so it's nice to not have to go through TSA pre check to be with you here today. So that worked out great for me.

You know, we get a chance to do a lot of total compensation studies and really be able to answer that question. Where are we salary schedule to salary schedule? Where are we total compensation to total compensation? And how does that help us recruit and retain quality staff? You know, anecdotally, I'll say salaries recruit, benefits retain. That younger generation's just looking to make the truck payment. They're just looking to put food on the table. The value of those benefits hasn't really hit home yet. That usually hits home like 2.2 kids, maybe twelve years away from retirement, and you go, oh, that's what deferred comp is. Right?

That light bulb moment kind of happens. So we wanna make sure we're not over rotating or under rotating on one of those factors, That we have a good balance between salary, good balance between benefits, and I think this place to start with that is just having an understanding of where are we. So the first thing we did is we went out and we collected the salary schedules, the org charts, the pay plans, the benefit documents from seven different organizations. And I'm gonna slip here to the end and show a map here where we went and we looked and we plotted out where do all of our employees live? Where are they commuting in from?

Who do they pass in order to get to work to us today? And it's a little bit of a, like, scatter map and a little bit of a plot. There's not a clump of where our employees live. They're coming from all over the valley, which ultimately means that when we're looking at the market, that we're looking at competitors, other organizations that might be a little bit larger than us, that might have 10 jobs where we have two jobs, where it doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the job whether that employee is one of two or one of 10. Now, certainly, as we go up the food chain and get to, like, the director level, that starts to matter, and we'll talk about that here in a little bit.

But I think it's just kind of a helpful context to know where are we commuting in from, where are we ultimately recruiting people from, and where are we losing people to. And that was really the emphasis behind these seven comparator cities. These are the cities that the town has historically used in its compensation philosophy as well. So we didn't reinvent the wheel here. These are the already agreed upon existing previously used comparators that we went and requested all of that information from.

I'm gonna say maybe my final note here is we also read through any MOUs or contracts between any of the represented employees and those organizations to also be able to look at what COLAs are coming down the line in 2026 so that we can say here's where we are today and here's how much we know the market will move tomorrow so that we can have the conversation of getting caught up and then also staying caught up to the market because those are two different independent fundamentally different moving pieces, getting caught up and staying caught up. So ultimately, kind of again the results. We surveyed over 60 different job titles that you have here at the city. We found a little over 330 comparable jobs out in the market. And on average, the city's about six and a half percent behind market based on salary only.

Now that picture gets a little bit better off when we take total compensation into account. When we look at the value of your benefits, when we look at health insurance, retirement, ad pays, salary, we put all of that together, we gain a little bit of ground back on the market. I think that's really nicely echoed with the conversation you just had about your health insurance and your benefits. I think your benefits are slightly ahead of market and help you get some of that ground back. Not egregiously so, not recklessly so.

I think they're very well managed and in a really good spot, but they help us get a little bit of the ground back on the market. So maybe my one sentence takeaway here is I think you're a little bit behind on paper but good on payroll. And I'll talk about that here in a minute, and we can kind of go into that a little bit more in detail. But maybe the takeaway here is a little bit further behind on salaries than on total comp. Really the main driver behind that and I kind of alluded to it a little bit.

Total compensation has four moving pieces. Piece number one most obvious is the salary. How do I compare salary schedule to salary schedule right down the midpoint of the range? Everybody has different strategies around your range widths. You think about it, you have a minimum, you have a maximum. We're looking right down the middle of that range at salary range midpoint. We're then adding to that maximum amount an organization is willing to contribute to family health plus dental insurance premiums. So that's piece number two. Piece number three is retirement. Are you getting deferred comp?

Are you getting kind of any of those other ancillary contributions to the retirement? Finally, all of the others, the ad pays, uniform, boot, bilingual, longevity pay, premium pay, You get into the police, any other kind of educational certifications, additional training certs, those kind of things. If it is available to everybody in that job title, we'll count it. So, you know, example again in PD if, you know, only four people can get SWAT, we don't count it for everybody because only four people can get it. So if everybody is eligible for it, we'll count it and that allows us to be able to say how do we stack up salary schedule, salary schedule, then how do we stack up total compensation to total compensation?

Now what's interesting in these findings is that you tend to be more competitive at the entry level of the city than at the tire level of the city. So if you think about some of your entry level jobs, those are going be over here on the left hand side of the graph, kind of where that green line is. We think of that green line as market. On the left hand side are your more entry level jobs with a midpoint around 50,000. And then as you move right on this, as you move up the salary of the you know, up the food chain at the city, we tend to be further behind market.

I think that's really driven by two factors. Factor number one is our market basket is made up of larger comparing organizations. We used and we tried to be size sensitive to those organizations when we were going out and looking out in the market. So we tried to say, if that organization has an assistant director, we would compare that city's assistant director to your town's director. You know, now not everyone had that, so sometimes we had some of those larger ones in there.

So that's a little bit of to be expected as the result of that. But additionally, it kind of is a trend that as you move a little bit higher up, we become a little bit further behind market. Now the good thing in that is those are single incumbency jobs. So we can move those jobs and we don't necessarily need to move those employees as much and we'll talk about that here in a minute as well. Kind of back to my I think you're a little bit further behind on paper than actually on pay roll.

So finally, when we look at this and we start to say, okay, if we take every single employee and we put them onto a scatter plot and we say where are they in their range based on their years of their years in the job. So bottom left corner is gonna be someone with zero years experience at the minimum. As you go up the y axis and we get to 100% of the y axis, so as we go up, now we have people who are towards the maximum of their ranges. You see we got a good number of employees who are maxed out. They're at the top of our graph.

Now, as you move to the right, we have more years in that job. And I'm really happy to see where you currently are. And I'm going see if I can take the mouse here and just kind of circle here. Oh, I have a nice red mouse. This is great. Okay. So it's really a good thing that we don't have a lot of employees in this quadrant. I don't want to see a one year, five year, and ten year employee all sitting on minimum seeing the same thing, And you don't have that, which is really good news. So that allows us to start to look and say, where is everybody at? You have a very aggressive strategy in moving employees through their ranges.

Where you are right now is the average employee gets to midpoint in five years. That's pretty aggressive. Most organizations, it's closer to seven years. So again, this is good news for you in that we're moving employees through these ranges. We're using our ranges.

That gives us freedom to then adjust these ranges based on market. It kind of has cleared out the bottom of your ranges a little bit. So we can move these ranges and then go back and look at the employees. So ultimately, I think the takeaway from this is we're in a really healthy and competitive spot in what we're paying a lot of our employees based on their experience in that job. Then what that lets us to do is to go through and move those ranges based on the market. So this is what this is going to look like afterwards, and I'm going to come back to this. But if I kind of just flip back and forth between this, you can see here's where you are currently. We've got a lot of employees who are topped out. They can't go anywhere. They're only getting their cola.

Right? I'm going to put only in air quotes because it's still very to get that. K? But they're topped out. And like Gina said, we don't have, like, ones and twos and threes and seniors and leads for them to go up into. So ultimately, what that looks like is I'm going to skip here to the potential steps to getting caught up to market. So I want to think about a couple of different things here and a couple of different moving pieces and strategies. As decision makers, there's really three levers you have to pull on a total compensation study to implement the study. The more you pull on each lever, the more it costs. Kind of lever number one is what's our relationship to market?

What's my target? What's my goal? Do I want to be at market? Do we want to say we want to be the employer of choice and we want to lead the market? Do we say we want to be the single highest paying I don't ever recommend that, but you know, do we want to be the highest paying organization in the market, right? So the more aggressive we are in relationship to the market, the higher that market target becomes. In these recommendations, I'm suggesting we get to market average. We shoot right for the middle of the market. We don't exceed. We don't fall behind.

We're going for the market average for all of our employees. Except for the director level jobs, we want to be within 10% of market. That's our way of acknowledging that the market is made up of some larger organizations and that at that director level, being a director at Scottsdale is different than being a director here. So ultimately, so shooting for a little bit of a lower market number for the directors. We can always come, you know, adjust that if there's a desire to do so. Okay. So that's kind of number one. Lever number one. What's our relationship to market? Lever number two is then what do we do with the employees who are in that job?

So what we want to recommend is going and placing all jobs onto the salary schedule based on market, then going back and say, if I move the range, if I move that, does any employee fall below that desired pace of getting to midpoint in five years? Is there anybody? If I shift that range on them, is anyone falling below minimum? Is anyone falling below that pace? Right?

So making sure that the employees are keeping up with that movement to market. Final piece is the COLA. So wanna make sure that we move these jobs and keep up with the market. So you'll kind of see there my bullet point number one. The first option here is to provide a 3% market adjustment to all jobs.

That's a nice round way of saying we're about if you remember kind of that that takeaway from one of the first results, we're about 3% behind based on total compensation. So providing a 3% market adjustment to get caught up. Then point number two, we go back and say, is there anybody who is still further behind Is there anybody that, that didn't get them to market? Are there any jobs that need more than just that three percent? We would then move those jobs to get caught up to market.

Then bullet point number three, we would go back and check. Okay, if I move the ranges, is there anybody who then fell below that desired pace? The cost for a COLA is about $450,000 in increases based on just kind of what your payroll is, what those numbers look like. Nice round way to think about it is about every percent you give is about $150,000 It's back of the envelope math. It's going to vary a little bit if someone quits or you hire someone new, but it's good kind of round numbers to think about there.

Then we go and we move jobs based on market. Then the nice thing is when we go back and we check, is there anybody who fell behind market? Is there any jobs that need more? That's a relatively smaller number of around $20,000 to make sure that no one is falling behind that pace. So that's the strategy.

Now, anecdotally, I'll say you're in a pretty competitive spot. You're about 6% behind for salary and about 3% for total comp. We normally see organizations closer to 11% behind market. So this is a very strong and healthy response based on what we typically see out there. So just kind of for contextual purposes, that's a little bit of what we see. So what it would look like then is I'm going to flip back to this proposed slide. This is where all of your employees would be after we make those adjustments. And then we would come through here and we would see these couple dots here. These employees through these lines here that are falling kind of below my cursor, and I I probably could have put a red line there on that slide for you. Sorry about that.

Those employees that are below those that line, we would increase their salaries here to get them above the line to make sure we have and they're keeping pace with how we want them moving through the ranges. Okay? So I'll pause there. Any questions the salary, salary survey, total comp, COLA, market, moving employees? Any questions?

I do think we have a few questions. Let me start with Councilmember Memoir online.

Yes. Thanks, Mayor. Yes, have a couple of questions for that. So thanks for the presentation. So when you did this study, you did you select you're saying you selected the seven cities that are included in our yeah. Right there? Mhmm. So when you looked at that, did do you have the the numbers on how many staff personnel each one of those cities have, population of each one of those cities?

I do, but not with me today.

So when you were comparing that to a small town like town of Paradise Valley that doesn't have utility departments, commercial, industrial, office, parks and recs, all these other areas where the directors may have a staff of many people. I mean I'm not gonna throw numbers out there, but I know it's more than what we have. So how do we compare to municipalities or small towns that are similar to the town of Paradise Valley as opposed to the city of Scottsdale?

Yes. I think that's a great question. And ultimately, for me, comes back to the purpose of the study is to recruit and retain quality staff. And we're competing with the larger cities that are around us. And I kind of use that word as competitor a little bit intentionally.

In a market study, it's not uncommon to think of things in terms of competitor and then I think what you might be alluding to is a comparator. Who else is like us as an organization? Who else is like us with the similar number of population, similar number of employee headcount? You know, if we started to get into similar cost of living and similar services, now pretty soon we're a sample size of one. And there's no one else truly like

Similar job responsibilities and personnel and and and things like that. And and not to mention the quality of life of being in a town of Paradise Valley versus not gonna pick on any municipality, but there are some municipalities that are a little tougher to work in. So, I mean, those are some of my questions. I don't see where this is a true, I get what you're saying. So what you're saying is that the city of Scottsdale, I know their last city manager was one of the highest paid city managers in all 91 cities and towns in Arizona.

And so are you suggesting that our town manager should be should see a a payroll increase to be the same as the city of Scottsdale and the city of Phoenix?

No. No. What I'm saying is that at for your entry level jobs, so if we think about, like, maybe The police officers are looking out and saying, okay. Do I wanna go to Scottsdale? Do I wanna go to Mesa? Do I wanna go to Pure? You know, they're they are less concerned about the nature of the size of your organization, whether they are one of 15 or one of 50. That doesn't necessarily fundamentally change the nature of the job as much. And that's where when we're looking to recruit people, as Gina said, this younger generation tends to sit on their phone. They're looking at Monster.

They're looking at NeoGov. They're flipping through these online job application sites, and they're just catching the hourly rates for the work. Right? They're looking through, and they're not going through and saying, okay, you know, do what's how many residents do they have, and what's their taxable revenue base, and looking at some of those factors. When we're looking at recruiting employees, a lot of them are looking at what is the hourly rate.

And ultimately, my belief is we wanna try to get you in the fight. We're not looking to be the highest paying organization out in the market. We don't have a strategy here in these recommendations to say we wanna make you the highest paying and beat Scottsdale. Now we wanna know what Scottsdale's doing. We want them included in the dataset, but we don't wanna be getting in a salary arms race with them.

There was organizations in the Dallas Metroplex that called us. It was about six years ago, and there were 13 organizations in the Metroplex, three of which had counsel adopted philosophies to be the highest paying in the Metroplex. Well, all three can't do right. And like they would be calling us and be like, stop calling me. So I'm a believer of we want to know what the market is doing. The people we compete with for our talent, I wanna know what they're doing and kinda shoot for the middle so that you're in the fight. Then you

can let

all those other that. When you when you talk about you're looking at job comparisons, and you're looking at all these other municipalities, they have much more different and complex job, positions than we do. Not not that ours are simple. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying they have much more different departments.

Now are those part of our comparison here as well, or do you just specifically look at what the town of Paradise Valley has for staff personnel, and and then you're gonna go from that. And the other question is when you start talking about the police department, I mean, I don't think I think our chief has been very clear on his hiring practices to us. And I know that we've done a study with the with the chief on salaries and everything else. Is is this replacing that one that we did with the chief, a couple years ago? Is that is that something you also were looking at is is also the police department on this one?

So so, yes. We also included the police department on this one, and we found out that you were within 1% of market for officer, and then I think 3% for sergeant. So very, very close. Like

Yeah. That's good to hear.

Yeah. You could tell that a survey had been done. You were within a rounding error ish. You know, you're right there. The the rest of the jobs were the ones that were further behind market.

Okay. So are you going to provide that for us the the job sectors that that the the comparisons that you did? So we have an idea that are they jobs that we even have in the town of Paradise Valley that we we need to be competing with these larger cities? Some of the largest cities in in Arizona. I I just kinda have some concerns there. And Gina, do you know if we did the league this league of cities, do they have any type of compensation analysis with all the other cities and towns that would include others that are more comparable to ours?

There's they initiate a survey each year where all of the municipalities submit their information and they provide it in a in a booklet that is sent out. So, yes, they do do that. With respect to the actual cities that were used in this comparison, I'm going to step in and help Bob out here a bit. These are historical. This is not something that was created for this study only. These were inherited. They've they've been on the books, you know, at least prior to 2002 and I don't know before that. And the reason why we use them is because of where we are seeking applicants. As as the map showed, we are all over the valley in terms of where employees live. So what does that mean?

That by and large all of our jobs you have to come here on-site which means we are traveling through all of our those neighboring cities. So when we are looking at where are these applicants at, they're they're in these cities that we're traveling through to get here and all we're trying to do is to say we we want a piece of that action where these people who are not coming all the way here, how do we get them here? And so to your point, my job is 100% not the same as the HR director at Scottsdale nor do I suggest that it is nor do I think I should be paid as such which is why the study results suggest that we get within 10% of market versus, you know, full a 100% that we are suggesting for the rest of the workforce. So that the the 3% to get us to market is for everyone but the executive level folks. Everyone else, we're trying to get within 10.

Thank you. And so you do have something from the League of Cities that you can share with us that shows comparables and how we, rate with, along with cities and towns like that?

Yes. I can I believe they publish it, but I I know that I did receive an email on that? It's it's it there's it's a lot, but yes, I'm happy to share that.

And when we look at job pay benefits benefits and and location, location, I being in the business with engineers and planners and all sorts of utility workers and stuff like that. The the private sector, a lot of them will get out of the private sector because of quality of life. And the nine to five type of environment when it comes to the municipality as opposed to maybe the private sector, which is more demanding and everything else. Some of them do it because they're older. Some of them do it because they're raising children for their families and everything else.

And I think the town of Paradise Valley is one of those great locations that really offer a great quality of life. Was any of that considered when they were doing the studies on, you know, as far as, I know that the chief has talked about that with officers from other municipalities, but what staff members? Do you have studies on that or any information that talks about quality of life and what we offer if we're not the highest paid like Phoenix and Scottsdale?

Mister mayor, if I if I can jump in, council member Moore. The answer to that is that that was not the direct purpose of this study. He was the consultant was looking at salary comparisons, but I I think you raise a good point. And part of that is we are looking at comparator organizations not to be the highest, but to be competitive. Putting ourselves in sort of that fiftieth percentile place means that we're not going to be the highest.

We're certainly not gonna be the lowest in these comparisons. The difference maker that you alluded to, which I think is important, that we all strive for is that we have an organization as a culture that is attractive to people. The point that Gina made at the beginning of this presentation is that may work for people who actually bother to apply and actually get in the process of becoming an employee here. What they can't gauge and what we can't quantify, but we know is most likely undoubtedly true, is that when we compete and we have job vacancies, how many people don't bother to apply because the initial sorting mechanism that they use, because they can't use culture, is the compensation piece and if we're losing people, good quality candidates before we even have the opportunity to interview and as we know an interview is much oftentimes about the employer interviewed for the employee as much as vice versa. That's where it becomes more difficult to quantify.

So and again, I I I credit your mentioning the chief and the police department because, you know, what we have learned there is we need to benchmark against those other cities that we have because when we attract and when we lose police officers, it is invariably do cities like that. And that if we only benchmark to the smallest municipalities within the metropolitan area, we would not be competitive and we would have a problem with retention. I think that can be true. Now part of the reason why we do have what we have is not just because we pay well to officers, let's say, is that we also have everything you just alluded to, which is the chief and his predecessor creating a culture and environment that's conducive to people wanting to be a police officer within the confines of Paradise Valley and what that means. But they have to work in tandem.

If one is out of alignment, culture, let's say, is no good. Salary won't matter. If salary isn't competitive, culture won't matter at some level. They have to be roughly equivalent and the equivalency is what we're striving for in this survey. Hope that answers your question.

It does. Thank you Mr. Shing for that. I guess I just want to really focus in on the potential steps for getting employees to the market. Number one on the list is provide a 3% market adjustment to the staff members.

Is that all of the staff members that are working here? Obviously, you wouldn't hire outside and pay more than the people we have that we really want to try to keep. So this is about money and so, you know, where does that where is this market adjustment to salaries? Where does, when we're talking about directors and everything else is are we talking about everybody short of you then, mister Chang, or are we talking about if all staff members?

The recommendation is in the the dollars was based upon the entire workforce of the town. The entire paid workforce of the town.

Thank you. I've I've got my questions answered. Thank you.

Thank you, council member. Know there are a few of my colleagues in the room have questions. Think council member Leitman.

Thank you mayor and one of my questions has been answered but first of all I very much appreciate this. I understood the numbers and I have a few questions. I have one question on understanding the numbers. When it says on page I guess it's 25 of mine, it says the town is on average 6.5% behind market on the salary range midpoints.

The

question is, is that a salary the average is that a median or is that an average and how is it affected by outliers? Just

Yeah. I love it. Great question. So just straight average. So not median. So we're looking at the highs and the lows. The methodology behind that is kinda two fold. One, it's the easiest for the employees to understand. It feels the most true. Right? Everyone remembers averages from high schools, and it's kind of the easiest to explain for employees. Number two, I also like it because it includes some of the if there's a larger employee employer in the area, it includes them in the data but doesn't let them push the numbers around. When you use median, you're ignoring the what someone is doing. So it's you're you're you kind of ignore data.

Right. So thank you that that makes a lot of sense. When you did this did you notice that we had a lot of outliers or are we pretty much? No. Because outliers can really can really throw this off.

Yeah. No. I didn't notice anything that was an outlier. If it's an outlier, we would tend to not include it in the data. So when we

go didn't include it in the average. Was an outlier. Okay.

Thank you. So sometimes when we're going through that, we have 60 of your jobs that we surveyed. So we start with your job and what it is that they do. So obviously other organizations have more jobs. I don't care if they have an airport. I'm gonna touch their airport org chart. I don't care about

Okay.

Right? I'm looking at the jobs you have and then going down through and seeing what they have.

Understood. They match Exactly. The

And might only end up with five out of the seven. Mhmm. Because the other two do something weird and they don't have that same level. Now I wanna make sure I have a statistically significant sample size. If there's only one that I'm not gonna include it because we don't have

enough data points. Okay. Thank you. My next question is for Gina. You said that in the last five in your report ahead before the slides, you said we've had 72 employees turnover in the last five years and that 19 went on to other employment. So my question is if my is it anyway, what happened to the other 50 some odd employees? And that 19 I mean, does that 72 include retirement or firing? Is that what you were getting at by saying the people who left within five years

was Yes. I excluded retirements and I excluded those those other things. It was really just trying to focus on the folks that were leaving due to other employment. So but the 72 includes retirement Yes. That's everyone who was no longer here that was hired here.

Understood. Alright. So that's pretty good. So were most of them retirements or firing? Or

I would say so the data showed that the majority of the turnover was number one retirements, and then number two, you're talking it was other employment. Personal is a big one, and that's kind of a big category because that could be you know, someone just had a family dynamic change. They had to leave. You know, we we had one person who left after eleven days. I mean, there's some there's some of those little things in there too.

There was a handful of relocations. What else was in there? And then there was a dismissal, resignations in lieu of dismissal, probationary separations. We had some probe steps. Because you brought it up, what I will say is preparing for this presentation today, did spend a bit more time looking at that turnover and saying that what could we have affected? What could we have done better? And one of the things that stood out to me was the number of probationary separations. And like, you know, I know why they happened. And so it's like, why did they happen? And what can we do to prevent?

So when I looked at the handful of them that occurred in the last three years, because I had a request to look at the last few years, there was five probationary separations, which seems like a lot. And when I looked back on who those people were, it was three of them were related to attendance. So how do you vet that sitting in an interview? Of course I come to work every day. Of course I come on time.

But that's not reality. So what I, you know, impress upon our directors and our directors, you know, take this responsibility very seriously because, you know, we have, as an organization, worked so hard to create a culture that people do want to come to work and stay. So the so what we wanna make sure is that we are making the right hire because what we know is making the wrong hire is more costly in the long run. Got it.

Final question is following off of some earlier comments. When you said the managers are within 10% whereas everybody all told were 3% and we understand that the managers in Paradise Valley do a very different job from Scottsdale and Tempe and Chandler. Difference to that $150,000 per percentage point that we would need to pay on one of your slides to increase it? What percentage how would that change if we didn't increase the managers by 3% also? Because I understand that our managers here do not have often the same scope as they do and maybe a lot fewer direct reports than in other places.

I don't have a I would have to like go back and look at the payroll file to come up with the exact number.

Just to clarify your question, Councilman Lieberman. You're talking about directors when you say managers. Right? Yes. I'm sorry. Okay. Wanna make

I'm sorry. Yes.

Because we have positions that we refer to as managers, like mid manager as opposed to director. But right. Okay. Okay.

Right right here it says the okay. The town is more behind at the director level. Understood. Okay. I misspoke. Thank you. So that's the end of my questions. This is a fascinating study and I really appreciate it and it was very interesting to read. So thank you.

Great questions. Councilmember Randeen Keller.

Thank you, mayor. And thank you for the study. Great information. I know it helped the police department tremendously when retaining when we did it a couple years ago. I had a question it was on the staff report and the summary statement where it said the overview was counsel has provided direction to the town administration through the employee handbook to strive to offer competitive wages and salaries to recruit and retain highly qualified employees through consideration of market conditions, competing employers and internal equity. What is internal equity? Is that DEI or what are we talking about?

Not

at all. What it is is internal equity in terms of salary. So compensation plan is set up by job classification. So we take jobs that are kind of similar in nature. We group them together.

And then from that classification, then we have individual jobs. So for example, police is a good example. So when we have someone who is a new hire and they're placed in the range based on their years of law enforcement experience, we have to go back and look at the other police officers to make sure that they didn't they didn't that they are now placed on the range appropriately. So internal equity is simply that our salaries are commiserate with the experience. And so so we take a look at that when we hire people and, you know, we do promotions and things like that because what we don't want to happen is that because we have maybe new hires who are very aggressive negotiating, they jump way ahead of our new staff.

We know what that result will look like and so we just try to manage and monitor what we're doing internally as well as externally when we bring out new people.

Okay. Alright. Very good. I had no idea what that meant so I was When very you talk about market conditions, we just saw the First Lady Melania Trump come out with a humanoid robot to introduce at a conference what her conference was about. So have you do you factor that in the robot situation?

You know, I always

Because that would drastically eliminate

Yeah. I always say I'm gonna do this job until I write a job description for automation crew leader in public works. Yeah. You know like I think eventually it's coming. Yeah. You know and until it does you have humans on board. Right. And we want to pay them like humans. Right? And we wanna make sure that we're appropriately compensating them based on market.

I have yet to find and and it it's it's fascinating side note, I've dabbled in some of those things and it's not dependable enough to rely on and to trust with our jobs and with the employees' livelihoods. Like, I've I've kind of played with around some AI and compensation things, and it hallucinates wildly and isn't trust worthy in a government setting. So none of that is included in the study. We didn't use it or rely on it, and we don't have a way to say, hey. I think a robot's coming for your job, so I'm not gonna pay you. Right. Right. No. I wasn't

insinuating that, but I was just curious if if any

of that had come into your world. No. It's it's still not reliable enough for us to trust with the weight of responsibility we have been given.

Okay. One last question. I would just wanna make sure we're we have a merit based system.

So we have a merit based system for performance increases, yes, and then we break ours out. So we have increases that we call market, and then we also have a merit. Other municipalities, they lump it all into one and they call it, they would just say a number and they say it's both. Whereas we break them out so we have the market, we can demonstrate that we're moving trying to stay with the market and then we have the merit for of course based on performance.

That's approved by Council Leach. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Pace.

Yes, thank you. And thank you for your comments. A couple of things. If you go back to the picture that shows us where people live in, I think you have that on there, where they're all living. There you go. What number? I don't have that. So a lot of folks can make a decision to apply elsewhere, especially with gas prices now. With as high as it is, I'm just looking at the distance right now and the costs with the economy and the inflation because once you factor in the gas, mean I went to my truck and it was over $5 a gallon. What happened there?

It's $100 from a gas tank. So that has to be a factor for others. We don't allow a lot of remote work. Well, because I have yeah, right, because I have a big truck, you know, whatever. But the reality is it's noticeable. It doesn't matter what size car you have or whatever. I mean, it's an increase in cost. So annually, as every organization looks at, they're looking right at the COLA. We call it the COLA, but the cost of living increases that are real so that they can maintain the same amount of net income to pay their bills. I mean, isn't that sort of where we're at?

Okay. And so you're suggesting a 3% increase for the COLA for our employees to keep up with inflation and to keep up with the market and to make sure it's going to help for those kind of things. But I'm looking at that map. I'm like, a lot of people are going to rethink. I'm looking at how far someone are driving. And I'm like, personally me, I wouldn't be doing the time or the gas for that. So that's something that would factor in for me. But is that part of the equation then in looking at trying to give them a 3% increase?

Yeah. And that's ultimately behind the philosophy of every employer out there.

Yeah.

That's what

Fundamentally, the driving force behind is is keeping up with Anecdotally, it never quite does. If wages kept up with inflation, I'd be a janitor in Maui. Right? And I'd be able to afford a house and put my kids through college and afford my health insurance premiums. So it'll always ebb and flow.

Some years it does. Some years it doesn't. Some year you know. So keeping pace with the market, I have found is the some employers who have a strategy to, like, track the MIT livable or to based it on the Department of Labor cost of living indexes, subsection six and they get really specific about tracking some of those metrics. I've found that just keeping pace with what your neighbors are doing is what tends to matter. When someone's coming to look for the job, they're interested in what the market going rate is a little bit more than they're interested in what cost of living was last year that resulted in that wage, if that difference And kind of makes

usually the list comes out. I think all the cities and towns try to wait till about June to see for their budgets, you know, what the rest of them are doing for the cost of living increase. Do we have any idea what other cities are gonna propose yet? Do we have any kind of list on that?

So when we were reading through that and looking at the MOUs, it's a little bit more than 3%.

Okay. So we'd be a little under what our other cities

and municipalities are doing. I would like to make a point of clarification. This 3% that the study resulted is to get us to market today. So July 1, if we do nothing more, we will be effectively behind again. I get it. No, that's helpful to know. And then

it's interesting on the comments that we're all having and thinking about the positions we have here versus other cities positions. I quite frankly think positions at other cities are much easier than ours. So I have the opposite view. You may become an employment lawyer, and I see a lot of staffing, and I do this for a living. And so the reason I say that is because we require our people to wear more hats, and that's not fair sometimes, and it's not how other cities do it.

So when a Duncan sits here as a town clerk, he's wearing about five hats all the time. Chad's having to wear five hats. So what I have seen is different than what I see at other cities. When I'm in Mesa or Scottsdale, Tempe, and Andrew can speak to that, in Tempe, you have a lot more people who are specialized in their lane who do just this. And they don't have to stay later or they don't have to go to this. Our public work has to work here a lot harder because unfortunately our town failed in infrastructure when I compare it to Mesa, where we built from the ground down. We have nothing. I mean we are so behind here and have no storm water drainage and no issues. So I feel the opposite about some of the comments made because there are some positions possibly here that are easier or maybe something different. I don't know.

But when I look at some of our key positions, we have a smaller police department. So every time we have off duty sources, our chief prefers to be our officers in town. So they're required to do more. Our public works doesn't have as many people. And when we have storm flooding because we don't have infrastructure here in storm water drainage, they have to go out. Mean, work days and days. And then we have our residents and our counsel complain they've got to do it enough. And here they're working their selves to death to get deadlines met. Duncan has to cover a million things. And it just goes on and on a few of on the list.

So I kind of think when we're looking at this, I don't think you can look at a salary survey and just pull the leads. We used do a CFMA, some in that group with construction financial management. We get the same surveys. You pay for it. You can't really say every CFO gets this and every controller gets this. It just doesn't really work that way. So I understand and appreciate for the first time hearing that what you guys do was a competitor analysis versus a comparator. And we are used to as counsel asking for a comparator like what's the next door neighbor doing? What's Carefree doing? What's Flagstaff doing?

What's Fountain Hills doing? We tend to ask those questions. But I think it's helpful that we look at that and it's helpful to see the spread out. I do want to follow-up and should say I do want to treat our employees fairly and I think that we have a duty to do that. And I like the fact I saw your numbers which is good to get the metrics. Thank you Gina and Bob too. But Gina knows we always like to see that. When you're asking for an increase on directors, it's only a $20,000 increase to make them at the 10. Is that what I understood to get it with the market? Is that what

it means? But I don't even know

if directors are involved in that one.

No. So that $20,000 number down at the bottom here was the total cost for all employees who are after doing step one and step two who fall behind pace. So that's not your directors. So your directors would be included in this $450,000 of getting the 3%. So the cost savings before someone had asked what happens if you back it out, you would just take their salary minus 3% and that's how much Okay, that number would go

got it. And if we didn't do a 3% increase then there's no increase for their income, correct? Unless we do we get into bonuses, but I'm talking about for their base salaries for next year. If we don't do a 3% increase, is there no increase then for these employees?

No. That's incorrect. We're getting a little ahead of the next presentation.

I know. It's coming.

In the next presentation on departments and budget, what you'll see is that this, as Gina said, is the recommendation coming out of the classification and compensation study. So to get to that midpoint of market would require a 3% adjustment.

To get to midpoint.

In addition to that or separate from that, I should say, you'll hear that plugged in a 3% cost of living and a 2% merit increase as part of the fiscal twenty seven budget. So that is separate. One is study driven and the other one is some annual increase that we try to budget based upon whatever factors we calculate in. So but they're two separate. I mean they're both forward employees, they have separate testifications.

Got it. And so we have to I think I have to as a council member look at both in coming up with the total for the year because they're I can't do I think we should talk about them separate to understand them but I think when I deliver it I would need to talk about the max each gets for the year. And then the only other thing following up on what Councilmember Andrew Kelly brought up, there is a push right now to see how much can go AI. And if you talk and bring them in and if you haven't talked to them, mean it's reducing law firms. We don't use many paralegals, we don't use many staff, we don't need clerical.

That water department probably can do everything automated. No offense. It's just with the reality of what's happening in the transition in the corporate world right now. And there's a lot of speakers who can come and talk with you about which kind of jobs can phased out very quickly. We're seeing the turnaround in the legal profession just overnight in health care too.

So it's true there are some positions that forget it, like officers or public I get all that. When you're looking at some of the back office from what you can do with financial analysis and Excel spreadsheets and doing it through Claude, right Claude is very good, and then what you can do with paralegal work, it's just going in a different direction. So I do think and the McGuire's firm will be looking at that, I know our firm looks at that. But I think we should be looking at it in some positions here and see where we can save some money. And I do think it should be part of the analysis because it's quick right now.

It's not so far away not to say it's this year. It really isn't because when you really go through those and see what's done, there's things that can probably reduce some FTEs down the road. I agree with you Bob, it's not like this month but I do think it has to be a factor because what we don't want to do is have more FTEs and more increases where no one ever leaves. We don't know what we're going do, lay off once Claude comes into play fully enough in the municipal world. But I think municipal is a little behind on the AI right now than the private sector. That's all I would say. I think we should just think about that from our budgeting side. It might help us in some way. So that's all. But I do support some of the things you're saying.

I do want to factor in the final decision on all the factors. And then love to see I know Councilman Rendy Keller has brought this up before in technology. But it kind of hits home more when you said it today when the president of Washington is bringing in an AI robot. And I'm thinking we're seeing it in the legal profession, health care tremendously right now what Claude could do. So it's just something to think about because it may save us money we find to pay some of our existing employees more while we have less FTE and save more money for budget. Just a thought. Thank

you council member. Additional questions. Council member Thomason.

Thank you mayor and I want to acknowledge I know we're short on time but I do have a number of questions.

And this is very important so obviously vet your questions and we may have to adjust the executive session for following the business. This is important topic so ask away.

Thank you. Bob, thank you for your presentation. I know that you are doing God's work. I spent thirty years in the toll rewards consulting with Towers Watson, Towers parents, so you'll either hate or love my questions. My first set of questions are for you Gina and thank you for responding to my request earlier this week for an analysis of our turnover.

So I want to make sure I'm understanding the issues because the truth is I don't think we have we certainly doesn't appear we have an employee retention problem. So we had 72 employees that left us over six years. 53 of them were retirement or family issues. So we had 19 of them that left for other jobs. 13 of them left within the first three years.

So people who leave early, I'm going to say are not really retention issues. They're more of a hiring issue than a retention issue. That's yesno. But we don't have a lot of people who leave us because they're unhappy. I think the people that the data tells me the people that leave us picked the wrong job to come to. So most people are pretty happy that leave us. I don't think we have a retention issue.

Agree, disagree? I'm HR so it depends, right?

Me. I I have the floor, Ms. Pace.

Please let's scale. Let's stay focused here team. Stay focused. Go ahead, Council Member Thomason. You're talking to Gina.

Thank you, Gina. I think the one

thing I would say about the numbers is small except when you compare that to our overall headcount at 121. So 20 positions is, you know, what's the math there? So it may not be significant for a Scottsdale to have We are getting ready to open up a recruitment right now for one position, but it's critical position and we're scrambling to figure out how to disperse those duties while we go and fill that position. We have another one that just happened last week. So do I think it's do I think the the building's on fire and everyone's running out because, you know, of any number of reasons?

No. Do I think that there are opportunities and strategies for us to implement to where we can maybe affect some of this? Yes. Do I think that there are people out there who we never even got to interview because they never applied? Yes.

So I think there is no one strategy and I think Bob alluded to this and Andrew as well is that this is one of the things that we're doing. What I can tell you with our recruiting strategies, we know we are not the biggest proverbial fish in the pond. We don't pay the most and we know that. We also know we don't offer the most opportunities, but I can assure you that we certainly promote that in our job postings. We promote that when we are talking to people because to Council Member Moore's point, there is something special about this place and we want people to come here.

But also to the point being special and wanting to work here does not pay bills. That's what we're just trying to get to is that we are not going to slow down put on why you should come work here. But we have to be able have the opportunity to have those conversations with people. And I think on the retention side, I think yes, I agree that there were bad hires. Probationary separations is a bad hire and I will own that as those.

We had one, two, four resignations in lieu of dismissal. I think we can debate if those are wanted or unwanted, right? So yes, there is always room for improvement and I am not here today to tell you that this three of our problems and so I apologize if I came across that way to you. I'm just looking at as an overall strategy and this is one area that frankly we have not done anything within nineteen years. And so again I will reiterate that I think that also speaks to the council's present and past and their expectations for what they want out of a workforce.

The fact that we are are again only 3% net behind I think is actually pretty incredible. Yeah, so thank you. So

to the turnover number, in five years we had 19 people leave us. So that's four people a year

for those reasons. We still have the turnover.

Had 53 that were retirements and go to non jobs. We had 19 people that left us to go to other jobs in five years. So that's four people a year that go leave us to go to another job. That's less than 4% of the people who leave us to go to another job. I just want to make sure I'm understanding the numbers correctly. And I want to give you way more credit than you're giving yourself. I don't think people that leave early are bad hires. I think it's a match. We might not have made a bad decision at all. I would bet decision.

So I just wanted to put that on the table please don't give yourself credit for that mistake. Comparative group I wanted to acknowledge the comparative group is consistent and that's great, but I also want to put on the record the average of our comparative group is 14 times larger than we are. So it's not like they're sort of close comparative group. They are wildly different. And a fun fact, the number of employees in those six municipalities, the number of those employees are greater than the number of residents that we have in Paradise Valley.

So we are comparing grains of sand with apples here, and I know there's a way to do that. I acknowledge your profession more than you can appreciate but I just want to put that on the record. Talk to me a little bit if you would about the recruiting issue because you started the discussion very appropriately with a recruiting issue and the concern is we're not seeing a good slate of candidates when we have an opening.

Is that true? It's hard for

us to fill jobs or more difficult than we think it should be.

I think it's the latter. I think it's more difficult than it should be. And again, I cannot give you data to support that. That's just looking around at what the other opportunities are. And if I'm in the shoes of a candidate, I'm looking at everyone and I'm making the best decisions.

We have an employee that we hired, I think it's maybe less than a year ago, and they were looking at two positions. They looked at here and they looked at I believe it was Mesa, and they straight up said we chose here because particular job we paid more. So they chose to drive further. So that makes sense, and I think that's what we're trying to say about this study is that people are making choices based on numbers on a screen, and I just want to be sure that we are giving ourselves the best chance to find the best people and make the best hires. And to your point, recruiting and hiring is always a two way street.

It's always are we a good fit for you and are you a good fit for them. And so I think there's failures on all sides of when we have people leave for any number of reasons. Let's be honest, if someone says they're leaving for personal, that is true. That's what they put on their resignation notice. But we also know that maybe there was something else going on.

Maybe they were mad because they asked for reclassification of their job and they didn't get it. I mean, it's all those things that we can maybe that's what I can do is they can analyze all that and spit out something for us. So the data which is there to kind of enter into conversation and things to think about, but I don't think it one way or proves any argument on the table today. I think it's just things we have to be aware of and are there things that we have the resources to do to maybe affect the workforce in a positive way.

So this is a question for you Bob, and by the way I love your geo chart of where employees live. I think that really drives it home, especially for a municipality. We have to be good to be driving past lots of other opportunities. So thank you for that chart. So you talked about salaries are key for recruitment, benefits are key to retention.

I agree with that. I also believe drivers of retention and data proves this are promotion opportunities, growth opportunities, a lot of things. So the problem I think we're trying to solve is more of a recruitment problem than a retention problem. Because I don't think people are leaving us because they're unhappy. If they're leaving us it's because it's a smaller flat organization. And again that's a hypothesis.

So I have not had a chance to look over all of your recruitment and retention data. So I want to defer to Gina on that area

of it. Yes. And I'm truly not trying to back anyone into a corner. I'm just fiscally responsible and want to spend our money in the right way when it comes to rewarding our employees. And I want to be laser focused with every dollar that we spend.

That's really where I'm going. So to bring it to a conclusion in my questions and to the issue at hand, am I understanding that a market well I got two questions actually. So you said earlier that given the vast disparity in size between 14,000 population PV and 300,000 comparator groups. As a professional you're saying we should get within 10% of that market after you've done the job matching adjustment.

What I'm saying is you should be at that market average for your entry level staff. So again, if we use PD police officer, if we use public works, our maintenance workers, right? We want to be at the average of that market for those jobs. Now when we get to director, we're okay then being 10% behind. I don't want your police off.

I don't want your maintenance worker to be 10% behind. At those entry level jobs, their duty functions, tasks, duties, and their authority, and their scope are so similar. Even though they're one of two here or one of 200 there, fundamentally change the nature of the job the way it does when you get to the director level. Then those are wildly different jobs.

Makes complete sense. Thanks for that clarification. So if I'm understanding the question in front of us not just for this study but the broader budget conversation, there's three potential components of pay. There's a market adjustment, which is to get us up to our comparative competitive companies, not comparatives. So that's a market adjustment.

The number of 3% is thrown out. There's a cost of living adjustment, which tossed around 3%. And then there's a merit budget for people who did better in their jobs. So if I add those together, the discussion in front of us as a group over the next month is potentially 8% more pay for our employees. Again, I just want to make sure I'm understanding the components correctly. Okay. Thank you for all that clarification. I think my questions have been answered. Thank you, Mayor.

Excellent. Thank you. Vice Mayor.

Thank you, Mayor. And to Councilmember Thomas' point, I'm going to try to be aware of the time, but I do have some questions also. Please. Thank you so much. Very good conversation from everybody, and many of my colleagues have already asked the questions that I have.

Without weighing in on where I fall in any of this, I do have some questions because I think it's a good conversation and very interesting topic. I think it's Okay and good to be proactive about this. I think it's information we need to know whether we do something right now, whether we do something next year. I see that when we're looking at and I think Council Member Thompson probably touched on this, the 19 of the 72 departures, 26% left for other jobs, many were early tenure. So that fits the narrative, I think, of the flat organization where my guess would be those entry level jobs probationaries or anyone who were to leave were maybe even of a generational demographic that is used to not staying at an organization that long.

So that is a culture issue for more possibly, maybe not. Just a thought process there. Also about recruitment, and I'm saying as a partnering resource. I'm not saying let's not get everybody up to a competitive marketing recruitment number. But incentives, if I look at the map of where everybody's coming from, and we're talking about gas prices are going up, but gas prices will go down again.

Mean, it's like you said, it's a cyclical thing. Have we looked at things like partnering resources such as e chargers here on our town hall, incentives for if you have an electric car? This sort of mitigates some of those. Just try to get creative. I mean not as a necessarily replacement, but additionally, just creative because we are a different kind of town, because we don't you can't compare us maybe you can compare us a little bit to Mesa or Scottsdale as far as proximity but also recruitments of candidates do we have headhunting services what do we do you're good at your job again I'm not trying to tell you what to do.

I'm just curious about my brain is going, else can we do to partner with this? I mean, why not throw as much at it as we can? So 19 the fifty three seventy two minuteus 19, the 53, whether they retirement or whatever they are, we still have to replace those people. So regardless of why they're retiring, they still need to be replaced. So yeah, there's a lot of good information here. I don't have the answers right now. I think I'd like to continue this discussion, but I appreciate it. Yield.

Would you care for me to comment on anything With that you respect to commute incentives and things like that, we do each year. Amy Rebinaur is responsible for the trip reduction program through Maricopa County. I know enough about it probably to get in trouble, but there are incentives if you drive an electric vehicle or an alternate mode transportation and it's a per day amount and if it's the high pollution days that amount doubles. So we have those programs available. In terms of headhunters, we use them on a limited basis for a couple of reasons.

Number one is they are expensive. You're talking anywhere from 20 to 30% of the negotiated salary for the person that is ultimately selected. But we certainly do, that is certainly something that was used, for example, when we hired the town manager. So I just try to be selective and do it when it makes sense because it is a significant cost, and so I try to avoid that when possible. Let me see. Did you have another question? I'm going to look at Isaac. I think no. And one other thing too about commuting that is hard to mitigate is that most of our jobs, we've got to be on-site and we want to be on-site. Number one, because that's where the work is.

Number two, there's an expectation that we are here and available for folks. And so if we're all working remotely, yay for us, but not so much yay for our customer base. So we are mindful of that, and that is why we tend to limit remote work opportunities.

How would we go about getting the e chargers if we were going to do something That like might be buying different option.

Looking at

the people in Superior or wherever they're driving in from Apache Junction, yes, it might help because how are they going to get home if

they can't I appreciate that it's looking at all opportunities and so I think that's what we're saying about this study. Is something we have not really looked at in a long time. So we look at that along with wellness benefits, along with commute incentives, and all of those things is a total compensation package that we are putting out there for people to come to work for us.

Great questions. I know we have a little bit further to go I think on the presentation or if you okay. Well, I would sum up in a couple of ways. One, we were never designed this evening to get the answers. We were here to generate questions. Our town is based on a limited government model. We look for really quality over the quantity. So we have a lot of demands on our staff and we want to treat them fairly. This was a real eye opener on a lot of fronts and generated some great questions. I know Gina there will be some further discussion.

The meeting that follows this is going to do a deeper dive on those elements of the budget which will reflect how we build and how we make accommodations for this. I think the fact that we haven't done this in nineteen years, it could have been a lot worse. And so I I think from that standpoint, I don't feel this is necessarily bad news at all. This is a this is a course adjustment to to make to continue to be competitive. And I concur with all my colleagues and council member Moore about the quality of life here.

And granted that may not pay the bills, but it definitely helps the soul. And I think when you look at when you look at this study, Bob, and I congratulate you. This was very easy to digest and very strong in presentation. It's hard to compare and contrast because of all the unique qualities of Paradise Valley versus the unique qualities and sizes of these other municipalities. But this was a very clear description of where we are.

It gave us all a chance to reflect. And I know, as I said, we will move forward with some action steps and building on strategy because we are providing a service to our And our residents deserve the best quality. They deserve to know that they've got a reliable professional staff and it's our job as the town leadership to assure we're pursuing that and maintaining that. So I thank you, Bob and Gina. And I think we'll look forward to further discussions and appreciate the presentation.

All right, we have one more item on the study session this evening that's twenty six-seventy six discussion of fiscal year 2027 departmental budgets and we have ninety minutes set for that. This is a deep dive and I appreciate the fact that our Chief Financial Officer Leslie Duresh is going to lead us through this discussion and then partner up with department heads and directors as needed.

All right, thank you. I'm just going to go ahead and get started. This is the second meeting that we've had in a study session for the budget for upcoming fiscal year fiscal '27. The first one we had at the last council session was regarding CIP. This is regarding departmental budgets.

And we're also going to talk a little bit about our and future meetings to discuss revenue and other items. So here we are. Department budgets. So the three things I wanna talk to you about tonight are the fiscal year twenty seven proposed changes to personnel costs. The costs that I have built into the budget at this time are not reflective of the comp study that you just heard from.

So this is just based on market, what we think other communities are going to do. So that would bring us really up to pace for fiscal year twenty six. And this will account for fiscal year twenty seven changes. And then each of the departments has a slide or two to come up and talk about how their budgets are changing significantly. And then I will talk about the enterprise funds and the special revenue funds.

So before I get started because the departments actually don't control their personnel budgets that's controlled through HR and through finance I'm just going to go over that a little bit some of the things that we're looking at. So we are recommending a general compensation plan increase of 5% total. And it's the same that we recommended last year. I have not actually heard very much. Usually by now I hear more about what other towns are planning and it's been very quiet this year.

But I think this is very conservative but it also keeps us moving in the right direction. We are switching a little bit. We're going to do a little bit more for market because I think it's needed. But we still want to put that merit piece in so that people can be rewarded for performance. Our Arizona State Retirement went down just slightly. It's pretty insignificant, really, to the overall budget. The public safety tier one and tier two went down significantly. This actually was a cost savings of about $500,000 on the operating budget. And that's because we paid for it upfront. We are now 101% funded.

And so we no longer have to make large contributions with each payroll to catch up. Tier three is going up naturally. It's just normal cost. I know you heard earlier, I think she talked about it, but health care benefits are going up. Costs are going up. It's a 9.5% increase.

I came to help. Actually, I did not talk about it specifically, but the 9.5% is the approved increase for fiscal year twenty seven by the Arizona Metropolitan Trust Board of Trustees, and that number is based solely on claims usage of the previous year for the entire trust, and it was just high claims, high utilization. There was a small increase that's included in that to replenish the reserve pool, but it was a very small number. So by and large that is the claims activity over fiscal year twenty five for claims for the trust. So that's what that number is.

For town FTE's I do show a point two decrease. That's not a real decrease. What we actually had last year is we had a 0.8% employee recorded as a one full time. So that's just a correction. So we're not asking for any new staff this year. So I'm going to go ahead and move into department budgets and I want to give you the

Mayor? Yeah

Yes.

I'm sorry to interrupt. Can we ask questions before we move on? Do

we Absolutely. Absolutely. Please.

Do you want me to go back to

the No, no, no. I have two questions. One is does the merit increase go to all the 2% does that go to everybody or do the department heads get to It's

based on merit. So depends on their performance reviews, and they have to meet a certain level in order to get that 2%.

Understood. Thank you. And my second question is, if we do this $450,000 to bring everybody up by 3% to the market adjustment. Can the budget handle that?

I'm going get to that.

Okay, thank you.

Just hold on just real, real quickly. Very good. Here's the, you know, I need to widen that column a little bit where it says percent change. I don't like that. So here's the overall budget for the departments.

This is what's coming out of the general fund. This includes all of our personnel and the department's operating budgets. And you can see right now with the 5% increase in salary, it is a 1.6 total percentage increase. Now, if we were to implement this in addition to the $470,000 increase, which would be that 3% merit plus a $20,000 adjustment of a few of the employees, the total increase for this would be 3.3%, which is I believe under inflation. So it's just, you know, I just want you guys to keep perspective a little bit.

So, yeah, we are not seeing huge increases. We're not seeing any increases in staff. We did see a significant savings in some in the personnel due to the PSPRS. That did help us a lot with our budget. And so do you have any questions on this particular slide? Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Amy to talk about the mayor and town council. And I'm just going stay here.

Good afternoon, and council. So looking at next year's budget, we have a couple of changes I wanted to bring to your attention. The first is that the PV Arts Board has requested an increase in their budget specifically to accommodate, transportation for their studio tours. They last year were able to get donated buses from one of our resort communities, but unfortunately that resort did not see the return in business they were hoping to see from that. And moving forward instead of hoping that we were able to get another donor, it would be better for them to have built into the budget the ability to conduct those studio tours obviously if there was a cost savings in the future that would be a benefit but they're just asking for this increase to make sure that they have that buffer Secondary, we are looking at an increase in the cost for our annual council recognition event of $10,000 This is based on the increasing costs that we're seeing at our local resorts.

So that is a direct cost factor that we're seeing based on estimates that we have received. The next increase is for our historical advisory committee. This is also included in the mayor and town council budget. Historical advisory committee is looking at an increase of $5,000 This is primarily to cover the costs of the historical recognition plaques. We have quite a number of properties here in the town that are receiving the historical recognition and those plaques are quite costly in the heritage event.

Thank you, Duncan. Additionally to be determined at the discretion of council we have the human services contribution of $265,000 which historically has been split between addressing homelessness and other community services. Are there any questions?

Questions from this webinar. Councilman Mayor Andy Keller.

Thank you mayor. As far as the historical committee increase the cost of each plaque is $488 so that can add up pretty quick. I'm thinking that maybe we should think about some guardrails around quantity. That's my 2¢ on the historical committee. Secondarily, the $2.65 for the human services contribution, I would be looking at something way different than way less than that.

So I don't know that we've had any real data show us what our money is actually funding for the homelessness initiative, the 200,000. So I would be looking at far less than 265,000. You. Thank

you. I think we had another hand up. Anyone else at this point? Councilmember Ward?

Well, thanks, Mara. Just a quick question. Amy, on the, historical society,

what what did

I forgot what was in the resolution as far as how they've been funded just in his what's the history of that? How they've been funded in the past?

I apologize, councilmember Moore. I do not have the history for that committee in front of me, I would have to defer to our town clerk, Duncan Miller.

Council member Moore, if your question is historically how much have we budgeted for the historical advisory committee? I think in distant past, I think all committees maybe have $500 a year, but, that was before they implemented their historic property recognition program and the heritage events.

I'm not I mean, I'm very supportive, and I think it's a great thing that we do. I just wonder what was in the resolution. I thought it was a donation based, but, I mean, I just I was just curious. If can find out, let me know.

Oh, actually, you've reminded me that I I do think that in the historical property recognition program, I think you're right. I think initially it was that the property owner would purchase the plaques, but the historical advisory committee has been covering those costs.

If we could maybe look at that next time we're, meet on this. Thank you.

Thank you, council member. Other questions? Vice mayor.

I like, as I'm looking at Nancy Kelly. Thank you. Thank you for that. One of the things I wanted to point out about historic and arts is that we don't have a traditional parks programming. We don't have parks and rec. There has been so much. It's in line with the general plan, community character and housing, that we will honor our heritage. And it has brought, in my opinion, so many people together to and we're getting so much buzz in this town. It's a branding thing. It's a very prestigious thing to have.

I think that they are vetting the properties and making sure that there is a historic or architectural significance there. So I think when you look at a population of 12,000 to do an arts tour, to put us on the map, to have community outreach, which we don't have a lot of avenues to do that in this town, to me it's long overdue. So I'm in support of keeping those budgets. I do remember when we started recognizing the properties. It was under a different mayor.

And he was very supportive and adamant about the plaques looking good. We actually brought brought them in to counsel, passed them around, because some of them were flimsy. And is that the branding that we want for PV, especially if we're going to be honoring somebody with that? So in the larger picture of our world, the more we can bring the community together, I'm all for. That's my

Councilmember Leland. Thank you, mayor. This is my second year on the council, and I am the liaison to the Arts Commission. And last year, I was the historic advisory commission and frankly I agree entirely with the vice mayor. I do know that both of those groups are very cost conscious.

They are looking for donations. I know that the Arts Commission worked really hard to try to get donations for the buses. And I know that the Historic Advisory Commission last year actually when they did their historic event, they got a lot of donations. So I agree entirely and I support supporting our few boards and commissions we do have. I know that both of those two are very reasonable. Thank you.

Councilmember Thomason? Nodding in violent agreement.

The same here. I just think we talk about trying to make history and preserve our roots and share, and these were things that, you know, thanks to council member LaBelle who pushed a lot on this historical committee in doing the recognitions. And and it was a good thing you did, you said it would happen one day, and I said, well, we hope, And it did. And I think we have to support that. And, you know, in the scheme of things, these are not big ass, and they are. I agree. We've always been very cost conscious as committees. And we get a lot of donations for a lot of things, but, you know, I helped try to get Ed Mel to do it and to get donations. It was it was a lot. And so I was very glad we settled on the plaques that we did and that, you know, it is expensive.

I do think that council member Moore is right. We have to go look at the resolution. We need to change that so that we can change that because I think initially I was having to go ask for donations. So anyway, I think we should do it. I think it's great. I think it builds community. Look how many people come to our our events. It ties them to Paradise Valley again and remember that. And I think the new art studio tours are a good thing too. So these are not huge increases, so I support them as well.

Thank you. And sort of moving from this point, I I would say that all of these things are reasonable. I think the plaques are phenomenal. I think that these two committees have gone above and beyond to expand and become more robust, which is only helping our residents and connecting our community and I applaud it entirely. I do think to council member Andy Keller's point, mean we have this is a these are minor relatively but I know that both of these committees are thinking and there may be further enhancements as we move along so that could reflect in how we look at the community services funding and how that may offset moving forward.

I am cognizant of the fact that it's a little bit here, and it could be a little bit there, and a little bit there, and all of a sudden, it's a bigger issue for the budget. So I'm cognizant of that. My colleagues are cognizant of that. But I think from what I've heard at this point, these are all reasonable asks. And I think the each one of

those

committees has just done a terrific job. I appreciate the the report.

Thank you, mayor.

Mayor, I just wanna say that, you know, as I said earlier, I I do support it. I am a firm believer in documentation. So, I just wanna make sure that what we do is put in writing and a resolution so that we don't so we know what the history of things are as we move forward. Thank you.

Very good point, council member. All right.

Before we move on, I just want to respond to councilmember Moore. For the human services contribution, this is a placeholder, and the decisions on how much you actually spend will occur later on. However, if council would like direction to change this number it's the time to do it. So

I'd ask Tom Turner do you have something to weigh in on?

We're just indicating it was

Councilmember Andy Keller who had made that comment.

Right. I have one question. The only thing I was going say is I don't think I have enough information right now to make a decision about human services. Mean I was talking earlier about the committees, but I think we need to get I know that others and staff and team were working on getting us data from last time and we need to look at that and see how those metrics work for what we were paying for. That one is just a placeholder in my book. That's just me. I'm just speaking for my right now.

Other comments? Councilmember Levine?

Thank you, Mayor. I just would like to say I agree. We don't have the full picture yet, but mentally, I'm keeping that as a placeholder. Thank you.

Alright Mr. Esh, please continue.

So in the town manager's budget, we do have some changes that we wanted to make you aware of. There is a shift in location of a position within the town. There is a now vacant position in the town attorney's office that's going to be shifted into the town manager's office. So that's why you're seeing the budgetary increase there that's associated with the shift of that position. It is not a new position but simply a relocation Additionally we are seeing an increase in election costs this is due to a cost increase across the board for conducting the election as well as election security And then we are seeing a significant reduction because we will not be having a comp and benefit study next year that was a one time cost.

So you're gonna see the total town manager budget be reduced by that 62,000 result. Additionally, we are looking at reducing the employee tuition reimbursement. That's a fund that's been underutilized and there's no reason for us to be banking the amount of money in there that we are when it has historically not been used.

Questions at this point? Councilmember Moore?

No. No. No questions on that. I just I want to go back to one point we had on the last something that Leslie said. She just made a mention that the council is here tonight to make decisions and approvals. And I I didn't see that in our staff reporter. That was the ask for tonight. This is work study. So I'm I'm sure that's not the direction. And that would be a question for our time attorney.

Not approval just direction just asking for direction if you feel that that number was you didn't want that anymore then you can give me direction I can come back with options. That's all.

Yeah. And I did not, mention that number earlier because I didn't have any there's no information tied to it as others have mentioned. So I I can't speak to it yet.

Mister Towne Turney, do you have anything to add on that?

Mister Mayor, you know, this is just the first work session. There's lots of opportunity for direction to be given. So if you have comments excuse me. The agenda's allowing it, but it doesn't necessarily this is not your only opportunity.

Thank you. And I think there are some more comments and questions here. Council Member Thomason. Thank

you. Amy, you talked about the shift in the position from the Town Attorney's Office to the Town Manager's Office. You highlighted that we're not adding a position. You're saying it's to respond to changing needs in the organization. Could you please explain further what this new position in the town manager's office is going to do?

Thank you, Mayor, members of council. This new position would be assisting our town clerk as well as our HR director

as well

as other needs as directed by the town manager.

So town clerk sounds like you're hoarse and I'm sorry if you say town so it's assist the town clerk and what are the other departments?

Yeah, I'll take it.

Thank you.

I'm a little less hoarse. As we are thinking about this position and we've held off on recruiting for it because we want to make sure the utilization is correct for the organization, It would be for our human resources director. It would be for the town clerk. And we're also looking at potentially assisting with administrative needs in the public works department. They have no administrative assistant in public works.

So even though if that's where some of their job responsibilities lie, you could potentially cost share it within the budget for public works. We thought for ease of understanding, just putting it in the town manager's budget made sense because they would be doing work for employees within the town manager's office, which would be the clerk and the human resource director.

So to clarify, we're adding additional administrative staff to the town clerk's office, the HR office, and potentially the public works department. Whether or not it's in the town attorney's budget or whether or not it's distributed across other department budgets is not relevant to me at the moment. I'm just questioning the need to add additional administrative staff especially per earlier conversations about the advancement of artificial intelligence and the advancement of other technologies to make administrative level work easier and cheaper. So I guess I'm not convinced that we should be adding additional administrative staff at this point. You.

Do like to respond to town manager?

I'm not really interested in getting too much into the weeds as to the why. I can certainly do that. I can tell you that it's not so much adding responsibilities. It's taking responsibilities that two people who are departments of one already do. We ask them to wear a lot of hats.

That point has been made around this table already this afternoon. This position would give them an opportunity to have use their time more efficiently that is filled up with tasks and duties that they already do, but probably in excess of and more so the administrative level, it would be an assist to them. Can I say with any sort of precision that an AI engine can replace that at this moment? I've seen no evidence of that. I certainly understand that there is some discussion about that and certainly in private sector and I've looked at that at some level.

To me, the use of artificial intelligence by any organization should first start as a conversation about whether or not it makes the work of those who we have employed more efficient as opposed to the first conversation being how can we potentially eliminate positions and people. The reason for that is because we have literally been using that technology, I think, now for three, maybe four years in total. And to make that kind of wholesale change, not just societally, but more micro level within an organization, you'd have to do a lot more study, I think, before I would be convinced that, that would be the right thing to do. Now that being said, if that proves to be something that could, in fact, lead to the reduction of positions, we should look at that, but we're not in a position to do that right now. And I think part of the reason why we made the calculus in this case is because we said, if we knew we had a position, and again, think we know who this person was, someone who worked for years and years in this organization whose reach of assistance went well beyond just day to day town attorney work, who was probably the number one person who was responsible for the success of the single most important special event that this town does, which is the auto show or the classic car show that we do in November, that to eliminate that versus looking at where needs exist within the organization wouldn't make sense unless we believe that all the needs that are currently being unaddressed should remain unaddressed.

In other words, if the organization representatives come to me and say there are things that we could certainly utilize this and we would greatly be assisted in what we do and make it more efficient and we better serve the public by having this position in this office. I think that's why we do what we did and also added benefit. There's no net increase in positions. That's the reason why.

All right. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Are there other questions? Councilmember Thomson, did you have a follow-up?

I'll not carry the debate further. I just wanted to clarify and I should have expanded my comments about artificial intelligence, technology and job redesign as alternatives to adding new staff. I certainly would not want to limit our options. As I sit here today I'm just very reluctant to add staff for a town that's not growing and a town where people are already pretty happy but more discussion to be had. Thank you mayor.

Thank you councilmember. Councilmember Pace.

Thank you. Sorry I'm the AI discussion about replacing solar. I've got it all going now. But I do think there's some places in our overall I understand HR and town clerk and maybe public works isn't so much AI, but I do think there are places from water billing. We've done a very effective job in the court system to bill and do photo radar automated. So I think there's some places we can look and maybe save maybe places like that. An alarm system that we have that will allow attorneys, should we be doing that or not? We're looking at that or not? I don't even know why we're doing it. We can outsource it.

Things like that. So there's some things I think we can look at. The one thing I would ask about this HR town clerk, what I am interested in when I look at Duncan, is one day we need a succession plan for the institutional knowledge that Mr. Duncan Miller brings to us. So is this part of that? Is it a succession plan to start someone who might one day after the twenty five years of service that it keeps going which we're so happy about? But is the idea to also start training up someone to take on a town clerk role in some other duties, is that a succession plan? Because that's a little different analysis for all of us,

I I'll answer that as best I can, Mr. Mayor, council member Pace. And let me just clarify again, my point in explaining justification is in no way to diminish the fact that everything that we offer as budget recommendations is just that. Right? Yeah.

Ultimately, the decision making power rests with this body and you get to make those calls and we respect and understand that as we have questions, we try to answer to the best of our ability, but that you ultimately get to make the call in terms of how we collectively spend the money that is requested or not in the budget. But to your point, Councilor Mirafece, about succession planning, always a consideration as an organization. This particular position, I don't see as being one that would be specifically for succession planning. I see this being something that's sort of an administrative assistant level. So it's unlikely that we would recruit and hire someone who unless they're here for twenty nine years, but ultimately do other things.

To your point, I mean, we have some backup for Mr. Miller's position already sort of contained in the job description for our management analyst position, for instance. So we do have some potential for backup. But the reality is that when you have people of such a tenure in your organization, the likelihood that you're just going to be able to say we have an immediate successor unless you had a deputy clerk, which we don't, then it's always going to be some mixture of do we have in house talent and experience that could take the position versus going back out to the market and seeing who externally is available. That's in the unlikely eventuality that Mr.

Miller decides to retire at some point, we'll have to have that conversation. But until that terrible day comes, we're counting on him to remain here and to continue to do the great work that he does. This is meant to help that. This is meant as assistive to him in his current duties, things, administrative duties and tasks that would otherwise fall just to him because it's just him in the clerk's office. It could fall to somebody else.

Thank you for that clarification. No, I don't think we can let Duncan go yet, but I just wondered if that was part of the plan. I think what would help us all with this position is maybe a job description. I'm always big on those See what exactly are we hiring for and why. And sometimes when you put that on paper it helps you think about do we have others that are underutilized who could do some of the work or is there another way to match that up. So anyway I'm open to listening more. I'm not sure I understand fully what how that's going to work and who it is and how you know what their duties are and whether we have resources to help with that. I just don't know enough yet. So thank you for clarifying.

Thank you Councilmember. Councilmember Bateman.

Thank you Mayor. Whether we do AI or not I'm not going to weigh in. I have all kinds of opinions but I'm not really in favor of hiring an administrative position. I do recall when we were going through our post office issues that Andrew, town manager, you said that you would hope to maybe cross train or reutilize the postal clerks. And I want I would request that you think about whether they could handle any of these tasks.

And I don't need an answer right now but I do recall that there was a little bit of flexibility there and those are two town employees who probably might be able to handle some administrative assistant tasks. So thank you.

Thank you. Good point. Other questions? Vice mayor.

Mayor, I'm still out here. And if you wanna hit me first or do you wanna go to the vice mayor?

Go go ahead, councilmember Moore.

Okay. Thank you. Yeah. I do have some comments to this one that I've written down. So I think I didn't I don't Mr.

Cheng, I understand that you don't want to get into the weeds, but I'm not I don't get into the weeds with staff employees and what they do either. The town attorney's office no longer needs a legal clerk and you want to bring that person in, I think it's important to be public about it so that we can defend it with our residents that a 100,000 floater actually has a job description of what they're gonna be doing. And I do understand that that position in the past did do a lot of work and does a lot of work for the the Veterans Car Show Committee, but so do the 15 volunteers that that work on that yearly as well. But I'd also like to understand how this floater position is core also correlates with the intern the paid intern that you have as well that I thought was doing these types of positions. So if if you could bring something forward that that specifically talks about this as a permanent full time position and what that job responsibility is, that way I can, as a council member, be responsible in how to support or, not support that in a budget.

Thank you.

Thank you, council member. Vice mayor.

Thank you. I think I'm hearing a lot of consensus across the board, and I agree. And I think Council Member Moore's point is a good one and Council Member Pace saying, I would like a little bit more information on the job description, why it's necessary now. And it could be completely just my confusion. But in the past, my understanding was Amy's position, before her Sharon, before her Natalie, did a lot of those admin tasks.

I know that there's been some hybridization of Amy's position, and so maybe that is where some of this is coming from. But I'm a little murky on what the need is there, especially if we do have Aaron. And I'm wondering if another kind of fellow like that could help bridge that gap. The flip side of that is if somebody as valuable as our town clerk and all of our employees are valuable. But if there's an ask, my question would be what exactly is missing that's different from two or three years ago?

And what are the extra tasks that are either falling through the cracks or are additional? Because I want to support our staff, but I just want to understand more about where those things are falling. I truly believe there would not be an ask if there wasn't a need. But the job redesign idea that a few council members have brought up, think there are some perhaps. I mean, things change over nineteen or twenty years.

Maybe some staffing issues that were important two or three years ago aren't now. So I think a little broader discussion about the needs and I don't want to be insensitive to the needs. I just want to understand them better. So, I yield. Thanks.

Thank you. I would add, I concur with my colleagues. I think and to the town manager, I don't think it's defending a position. I think it's just showcasing the efficiency effectiveness. Where are we going with this position that's going to create the benefit that ultimately will be passed on through to our residents and our operations. So it's not a defensive position from my stand. It's an explanation of some clarity to get there. And I would add also, I've done a little analysis and our town clerk can never retire. So just as long as you know that and that's out there in the No, I think, mister town manager, if that's if that's my consensus that I'm seeing and what I'm hearing from this group. If you want to comment on that now

No, appreciate that. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I'll just say, you know, the purpose of this meeting in large part is to get feedback and comment on this so that we can go back. We're going to have another study session at our next council meeting to talk about budget items. This is clearly one of them that we will certainly take another hard look at and ask a lot of the same questions. Again, I will stress just for the record that this is not a net new position. This is an existing position that's being moved from one department to another. Had we kept it and staffed it within that area, this wouldn't even be part of the budget discussion because it would have already been sort of an understood FTE. We're trying to instead be transparent and say, if that position exists, if that's the if, then where would it be best deployed.

And to that point and what I'm hearing around the table is, we need more detail as to how it might be deployed and that you are open to hearing some of that information with respect to what it would be, you know, what that job description would look like, how that time would be divided, what sort of, you know, representative tasks and duties they would have working with either the clerk or the human resources director or with public works. And we will provide that for you. So we're going to go back and take the feedback today that we know is given in the spirit of trying to make all this work and make sense both for you and for this community and take that feedback back positively to to answer the questions that were raised today. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate that. And then so I think you've got some consensus.

Mayor, can I ask a follow-up question on that?

Sure. Absolutely, mister councilmember Moore.

Thank you. Mister Chang, that with with that being said, did are you did the legal clerk work in the public works department already in in the past?

Not that I'm aware of. No. The legal clerk worked in the town attorney's office, was hired for that purpose, I believe, like, maybe 2000, 2001 and continued working there for twenty six years or twenty

five years. Said if that position were were to stay in the town attorney's office that they that that person did you not say that that person would be working in human resources and public works No. And doing all the things that they're doing?

If if that's the way it came out, I apologize. That wasn't what I was trying to say. What I was trying to say was had it stayed in the town attorney's office, had that need still existed within that particular department, we would have recruited and hired for that position and they would have remained a line item, the personnel item within the budget. It would not have been reflected as a change because it wouldn't be a change. Is the change. Change would be if this were to go forward, what kind of duties would that position that exists, but is currently a different department. If it was ported over to this department, the Town Manager's department, what would those job duties look like? That's when I talked about the potential deployment for HR, clerk, and public works, not for the town attorney's current position.

So clearly the the clerk for the attorney is that position is being dissolved. So this position, whether it moves over to your department based on your job description and the ask for it, which would be an add to other departments even though it's dissolving. There's a position being dissolved within the legal department. It's an add position to other departments. Is that clear?

Yes, think I understand your point, I believe. And the answer is we are recommending as part of this budget that the position no longer be within the town attorneys. We're not positioning it as a dissolve it in one department and then re add it because in the end it's moving an FTE from one department to another. We collectively, the counsel says we do not want to do this, it would not be our recommendation to then have the position remain within the town attorneys as it is. So in that sense, if you were to remove one half of the equation, we wouldn't then say, okay, then our fallback position would be that it just stays at status quo.

That doesn't make sense. We wouldn't we don't see the need there anymore. We're looking to fill a need within the rest of the organization. So again, playing this out, if the ultimate direction is do not do, then the answer would be we would have one less FTE in the budget because the position would be eliminated.

And I would ask my colleagues to be conscious of the time because we've got a lot on the schedule. Councilman Pace?

Yeah. This this raises a a question. So we look at the town attorney's budget. Whatever reason, which I totally disagree with, that some of our peers advocated for, we paid $120,000 to Jill Kymak to move to the town attorney budget, but she never showed up here for a year. How do we move these positions back and forth like this, where we move a position who is the former town manager and then we somehow didn't get this much transparency and moved her position over to town attorneys for $120,000 to not be here and now we're moving this position from Diane Wayland over.

Mean I think I kind of they should be transparent, should be different, they should be presented as what they are. It would be an elimination of the town of Diane Wayland's position. A new position that because we're staying within the FTE that's being proposed and then is this person going to also do the veteran car show because he's doing that now. I would ask

a good question.

Even know. I

can jump in at least one of those. I know that

If you know her next Sure.

Prior to Diane's retirement, she had already sort of met with existing staff and had gauged interest and I think that the tentative plan right now is that we have someone in community development, Christy, who said I will subsume that within my existing duties and we'll step in to help. Because she's a very gracious person, Diane in her retirement has also reiterated that she would love to come back and volunteer and help, which is great. That's just kind of how we were very lucky that we hired someone of that caliber to be in that position. You don't always find that, but we did and we were very lucky to have that. And I don't want in any way to minimize her contributions by virtue of having this kind of conversation because I know how much appreciate.

Clearly, I think we're looking for some clarity here.

So the clarity to that point, I'm sorry, I just want to put a point on this. All the other things that you talked about, Councilman Pace, I would just say those were decisions that were made in previous budget years. Here in terms of transparency, again my only point was had we not wanted to utilize the position in another way, it either A, stays within the department in which case it's not a budget change because it would be status quo or B, we would say this position no longer has utility within the organization and we would eliminate it. For instance, if we said this position is currently vacant and in the next budget year something happens and we would have to add, I don't know, a motor squad, let's say, we could easily take this position and say this is one of the three or four FTEs that we would need to stand up a motor squad. And instead of adding four positions, you might just add three because this position will be repurposed.

You see what I'm saying? So it's it's there's a fungibility here that I wanted to sort of emphasize, but it's not completely fungible because there is some uniqueness within the duties and the descriptions, which as I'm hearing this conversation, we'll bring that back and kind of flesh that out more because I think the council has made a really good point, which is how can you commit to something if you don't know exactly what they're doing.

Very fair point. Question Councilmember Thomson?

Yes, I have a question for you, is or maybe I have a question that I'd like to ask staff. And it has to do with a comment that was just made about prior budgeting and funding of our prior town manager and that money being in or out of the attorney's office. And that was stated as a matter of fact and I'd like clarification from staff if there was town manager funding in the town attorney's office and there was some shell game between the budgets. Could you clarify that either now or at a future meeting?

Future meeting was given as an option by the way.

On purpose.

I believe future meeting is

a better point to do

that because we're talking about something that's outside of this budget.

Thank you.

And that's not the topic of the agenda. So we'd be happy to give you whatever information background from prior budgets if you want.

Thank you and thank you Mayor. I just think it's important when things are stated as fact that they be verified.

Thank you.

I'd like that information too. Going ask my colleagues to vote Focus for because we're going to move forward with Mr. Resch. I think you've got enough direction on this subject I believe. And I would ask you to lead into the town attorney discussion.

Oh sorry. Yes, now we're going go into the town attorney budget. Now we were going to do the town attorney budget.

Mr. Mayor, members of the council as you can see it's massive changes to the town attorney's budget. We just spent a lot of time talking about the first one which is the decrease of moving the loan position out because Diane's position is no longer necessary. We handle all those administrative costs as part of our contract. So there really wasn't much for her to do for us that couldn't be done with our own staff with what you're already paying for.

So that's absorbed in what you pay us in the flat contract. The increase that's budgeted is shown as, $10,000 for our contract because that tracks, our contract tracks what you pay as an increase to the staff. So if you give the staff a 5% increase, the contract increases by 10% or 5%, which is $10,000 So that number will fluctuate a little bit depending upon what number you pick eventually, but that is the lump sum of all of our changes for the year.

Thank you. Are there questions or comments? Councilmember Leibman. Thank you, Mayor. I'm not an accountant, and I'm looking administrative allocation line, and everything is in parentheses, which means it's a negative. But the end is a positive of 3.8% change and help me understand how that line works and what those numbers mean. It's becoming more negative so that's a positive.

It is becoming more negative so it is a positive. So what the administrative allocation is is we have three enterprise funds and so services that the town provides to those enterprise funds that work as independent businesses get allocated out so those expenses come off of this budget and go over to those enterprise funds And as you can see, it has increased, so it's a positive. So we're moving more money away from the town attorney budget to the enterprise funds.

Okay.

Let me, turn to councilmember Moore. Councilmember Moore?

No further questions. Thanks, Mayor.

Anyone else on the team? Questions? All right. Thank you. Please continue.

Okay. And, now we're going to move on to information technology, which is going to be presented by James Bailey.

Thank you, mayor and council. It's a pleasure. Leslie, thank you for putting me closer to the top of this slide deck. Our budget strategy, which we set more than four years ago, is still underway. Our focus areas of cybersecurity, infrastructure, enterprise applications, which are the business tools, are moving forward very well.

A few increases in here are mostly related to enterprise application and maintenance, the yearly cost, your government club count for your budget stuffs there. Clear gov. Website digital improvements, that's what's there. The magical word today is AI. All those specific capabilities that we're already addressing now with certain proof of concepts, but, that number helps support that moving forward, including our GIS and other applications.

So as those technologies within each business team gets more mature, every and one of them are chasing the AI holy grail within their own ecosystem. We're evaluating those and trying to, at least at the website level, put together a single sheet of glass that would give us more of that the human language intelligent response that we all love out of Google, which has a larger budget than we do. So but each one of our partners that we do business with, and you're familiar with Granicus and and all the other tools, they're racing to provide those capabilities. And as they get better, we're going to take advantage of those. In cases of longer term strategy, Andrew and team and I have talked about if a vendor isn't making the cut and the capabilities don't exist because the market has shifted, We're always looking at ways to improve our business processes with different tools.

So that's just an approach. And our website kind of started that upgrade this past year. We have a lot of compliance goals coming this summer, ADA and other pieces and we're testing, searching and other improvements as we speak now and that's kind of focus for our piece. Our cybersecurity plan is very deep in AI. Our police department, of course, is moving forward in those areas, and they take advantage of that today within the boundaries of our policies and laws.

And that's kind of, I think, the talking points. Now business process improvement I think is what we've really been talking about earlier, if I could just clarify. My colleagues are really focused on business process mapping and the tools and the things going on with that. And I think they very thoughtfully put together the net improvement in most of those areas. And where I can affect that, we're certainly taking advantage of those tools. I don't see evidence yet that I have enough capabilities in the menu of the AI world that I can replace the whole positions yet.

But we are trying to

make this more efficient, including town clerk and things like minutes and other documents that need to be part of our permanent record that we hope to automate that needs to be accurate and up to date.

So questions, Councilmember Thompson.

Thank you Mayor. This is a question for you. When I look at the budget changes for information technology, they look fine to me. They only look fine to me because I don't know enough. We are I think at the beginning of a new age of technology and I am sure that you are doing many many things that are great for the town and taking advantage of the new age technology.

So my request for you mayor is that we agenda size an information session or a work study session whatever the appropriate construct is. I would like an updated briefing on our technology strategy and how we're using the new available technologies. It doesn't have to be before this budget at all, but it would give me the foundation to better understand how and why we're spending our money.

I think that more than adequate bring that up in agenda setting but yeah I think that's a good plan and I obviously I think how that matches up opportunities threats type of an analysis and sort of a benchmark where we are makes a lot of sense because there's a lot of moving parts here and I know we've seen some dangerous times and we've seen some threats that have come to us so it would be great to get that update. I agree.

Thank you, Mayor.

Other questions?

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for the presentation and I agree with what Councilmember Thomaston said. Searching out redundancies where we can eliminate those with AI or robots or whatever. And I think we should have an innovation hub or something here and really search this is my opinion search ways to cut costs and make our jobs more efficient. AI could be taking notes right now for Duncan.

Maybe it is.

Maybe it's not really Duncan at all.

Yeah. In

any event, great job on the website refresh And all of the other stuff, I just defer to you. So that's awesome.

I'll let you check-in with council member Moore.

No questions, mayor. I mean, they're good placeholders. I I'm sure we'll hear more detail about what they involve later on. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilmember Pace? Thank you, mayor.

And thank you, James. Love the refresh. It's much better. I only have one suggestion. I've been, talking to town manager Ching about this week is if we could put the the require when when our residents had an issue where they see a tree down or a bush too big or they have an issue that's a complaint about party rentals or things not being zoned right or any of these categories or police.

It would be nice if it's up front. So he and I went on the phone and did it and it was not so easy and it didn't have all the questions and then we keep getting them. So you know I've had like a dozen in the last ten days that I've had to keep sending in. So I'd really really love if we could get that site up front on the page where if I'm a resident and I say, oh, I've got this squatter now on the property to build a fort, which is the one I sent yesterday. And then I've got the lighting on the top of the mountain, I have to dig for these things. Like where do I put them? Right? And I tried. So I just think if it was right on the front of the page and we could just let the residents fill it out and get it to the right department, and then I think it's easier for the town manager and Chad and everybody to manage and the chief which ones go where. So anyway, that's my one suggestion.

And we traced through it and I did the what for and how do you search. It didn't or. And then my other question is on AI, have you started using Quad yet in R anywhere on campus for the town? Because that's the best one out there.

Correct. We've tested. We have a few vendors trying to put together proof of concept using our data and some requirements we have around our data specifically. There's been a lot of promises. We're still waiting to see how that evolves.

It's probably a little I mean, within the next six months, I think we're going see this huge wholesale evolution on all this. But I was going to ask you for security reasons because we've got a lot of tech people in the legal world who don't quite want us yet to put it on into the IT systems that they manage onto the desktop versions to put down into the computer yet. They don't want to manage it downloaded from them yet. I was wondering, that's why I was going to ask you is have you started doing that to any individuals here yet who are still in the research phase?

No, we through our data loss prevention on the outbound and the inbound through our firewall and other Microsoft tools, we're able to restrict copilot and some of other brands that you may hear about on a case by case basis. So and our policy so far unwritten

Yeah.

And kind of one of our parking lot discussions, mister mayor, is, what our approach is. And each department, think, is gonna have a little different there'll be kind of an overview about how we manage data and protect our citizens and and and respectfully approach that. But then police departments will have a different strategy than permitting those teams.

The other thing is right now we're drafting a lot of AI policies from an HR standpoint. Should have brought that up to

Council member I think we need focus on the budget.

Because that's more content Yeah, well just one more second. I promise. Just a second. But are you doing anything to restrict our data so that individuals aren't signing up uneventually to do their job here and then having the data out in the public forum. Are we doing some restrictions for I mean I think there's going to be more here that needs to be in the budget.

And I do think again this is kind of getting off it. Have a question for a deeper dive at a later time I think.

Quickly we have those controls in place when I bring back to you the categories we focus on through cyber and business intelligence. Okay. I'll be able to address some of those capabilities. And those are

great questions especially when we do a deeper dive on the bigger subject of cyber security and

could you be raising your hand? Councilmember Lieberman? Thank you, mayor. I have a comment and two questions. First of all, I was the cybersecurity lawyer for ASU. So I'm fascinated by all this and I entirely support the request to break this out. This to me is really interesting. That was my comment. My question is I understand that our website is not currently ADA compliant. Did I hear you say that that's part of this 100,000 website increase?

That's correct, yes.

Thank you. And is there a reason why we didn't make it compliant when we built it or was that just always intended to be the next step?

Outside of a few areas of our website, most of it's called behind the scenes surface level, tags and headers and things that ADA technologies read to folks who might be blind and all the other features and functions. Some of it is just clean up Okay. On our part. And some of it is a wholesale technology change with PDFs and some other documents that have evolved.

Understood. Thank you. And and finally, when I went yesterday to find the information on the arts tour on our website, I could not find it. I know. And I found information about past Yeah. Events that are old. So who is in charge or which department is in charge of keeping the website up to date and posting things regularly?

Ultimately, I'm in charge of the framework. I have a few people across campus who maintain their areas of that. So I wouldn't speak to how accurate some of that is or of the day because I'm not in their workflow every day.

Thank you. I would think that to the extent we do look at a new position that's been an ongoing frustration of mine that nobody is looking at the website utility on a regular basis. Thank you.

Got it. MDN, all valid questions and points, but this is a content driven point that we need to do at a separate meeting. This is I know. Specifically to go through the finances and looking at the line item budget. So I'd ask my colleagues all to be respectful of that and to be focusing on the numbers that we're seeing and some specific questions. I'll turn to the vice mayor.

Thank you mayor. I have some numbers questions. Yes. It's exciting topic. That's why everybody's excited about it. Get it. Okay. So obviously salary benefits, Page 11% change. That's just completely reflective of the 2% and the 3%, the merit and the okay, that's fair. I noticed that the supplies are way down. Just curious what that would be about and is that something that you think is going to be consistently is there something you don't need anymore that ongoing or you've made your department more efficient? Is that something we will see moving forward? Is that a one time decrease?

We've lowered those because of our technical debt has been improved with all the infrastructure updates. Typically that is break fix pencils and paper type of things.

Congratulations. Thank you. All

right. Thank you. I'm again in light of time. If there's anything else for this portion, if not we can thank IT and we'll look forward to the study session and some deeper dive on some of these subjects and probably more so. Very happy to. Thanks, Mayor. Thank you.

And finance is next. And I'll be representing finance. So, this year the only increase I'm asking for is payroll processing fees and that's because based on our actuals this year we are paying more for payroll processing fees. We have been working with our vendor and trying to get enhancements and improvements on the website and every one of those costs us a per person fee. So just overall we just have an increase in payroll processing fees.

All right any other any questions for Mr. Resh on this proposed? Councilmember Moore?

Just a quick question. Thank you. It's a minor amount, but have we looked at any competitors? Or are you comfortable with what we have? And it would just be too expensive switch anything over so it's just easier to upgrade? Is that what what we're looking at?

So we have actually done an evaluation, and we will continue to evaluate other options for payroll processing. But in the meantime while we're moving towards looking at other processing systems we're just trying to improve the processes that we have.

Thank you.

Any other questions for mister Resch? Alright. I'm looking at the time and I think next up is community development. I don't know if we'll have enough time to go into that at the level and at the pace and in light of the fact that we've got a business meeting coming up and you may want to take a break for a few minutes and refresh. And I know there's if people are hungry, there's something to eat there.

But I would I would propose that we suspend study session for this point and pick it up after the business meeting that will occur at 06:00. Alright. Welcome, everyone. Welcome very much to the town council meeting for March 2026. And I would ask if the clerk could please call the roll.

Mayor Stanton. Here.

Vice mayor LaBelle. Here. Council member Andean Keller.

Here.

Council member Liebman? Here. Council member Moore? Here. Council member Pace? Here. Council member Thomason? Here. We have a quorum.

Thank you. And next on the agenda is our pledge of allegiance, And tonight, I would like to welcome corporal Wayne Crenshaw to come and lead us in the pledge of allegiance. He was promoted to corporal last week, and we're very proud of him. And ask him if he'll lead us in the pledge. Thank you, corporal.