Appointments Committee - Regular Meeting

Well, that's called Order the Operational Strategy and Administrative Committee Special Meeting of September 18th, 2023. Please call the roll.

Mr. Erickson?

Present.

Deputy Mayor Bushnell? Present. Council Member Scott?

Here.

Council Member Walker? Here.

All right. Good morning, everybody. We have one briefing item today, and that is the city manager work plan discussion. So I'd like to call on city manager Kidd to start us off.

Thank you very much, deputy mayor, mayor, council members, committee members. I'm going to actually shift over here for an intro from Ben Thurgood to just talk about where we are in the process of reporting back to you, and then I'll take it back and talk about the substantive report that are in your packet.

Excellent. Thank you, city manager. Thank you, OTHAC, for having us today. As you are aware, this is the check-in, the first check-in of the City Manager's Work Plan in preparation for a check-in with the whole City Council. That is scheduled to occur on the September 29th study session, so just a week or so away. The next check-in on the Work Plan will be in January. We're aiming to discuss it at OTHAC on January 8th and on the 26th with the City Council. And then in March, we'll begin gathering input starting the process for the annual performance review, as well as beginning to create an updated work plan for the city manager for 2027 and 2028. A couple of major items coming up for the city council are that we are, as you know, about to move into the 2027-2028 budget development conversation. In this work plan, check-in provides an additional angle or insight for how you might approach those conversations and those decisions. You are also going to be beginning to prepare for immediately after that, the City Council Retreat and Priority Setting event. Shortly after the budget is adopted, you'll begin working with directors alone. OSAC will help with the planning of that. With that anticipated to take place in January or February or March, and then just for your awareness the center for strategic priorities director cologne is leading an effort to create a tacoma 2035 dashboard it will have a lot of the detail the metrics that we look for in the various areas that are represented in the city manager's work plan but some context and next steps thank you ben thank you very much um deputy mayor i'd like to start um this morning with just gratitude perfect form of um

I think it would be an understatement to say your teams, your staff have been doing much in support of my work plan and deliverable back to you. And then also my compliments to the city council and partnership. Many of these items that are reporting back are legislative authorized, legislatively funded. So all the reporting goes out on that. And I'd like to start. First and foremost, within the organizational performance and internal administration, it's sustainability top of mind. We are well on our way to be mayor and mayor, county members. For the 2027-2028 budget development, the through line is I will be delivering our revised forecast that will show a material way in which we are addressing a balanced budget for your consideration. where we will have the structure of that both addressed and giving you options to potentially look at other ways in which you want to deploy your resources and your budget in the coming days. I would like to really, again, once again, all departments that have sacrificed by the higher increase that we have imposed and we will keep in place until the end of this calendar year. We've identified $11.65 million in savings from those positions alone. of the general fund, a little over $2.25 million. The balanced budget that will be delivered to you on October 6th, about two-thirds of the reductions are ongoing. That is, when we're saying we're addressing the structural deficit, two-thirds of the budget reductions will directly address the structural deficit. The balances will be relying on some cash balance, But more than not, the vast majority of what we're doing is not one time in nature. So it's hard because when I say reductions, those are council priorities, community priorities. And so there's gonna be robust discussions with you all in workshop in October to discuss those. So we're well on our way. My initial draft of this was that I was gonna report to you that we have tens of millions of dollars. I wanna talk about the people, the humanity of the budget. We've identified a little over 104 positions for elimination, of which about half of those positions are filled. The HR team led by Linnea and her team are working really hard with all the department directors to identify relocation efforts within our utilities, other enterprises, so that we can get that 50-plus position. reduction of actual field positions to find jobs. That's what we're trying to do. Speaking to the humanity of what we're trying to do here too. This is about jobs as well as reductions. Deputy Mayor, Mayor, council members, would you like me to pause on each of these or do you want me to just go through the sections and then pause?

Let's go through the whole section. And if you have questions, unless it's very burning, feel free to ask. But I think I want to make sure we can get through the whole agenda before.

I concur. Perfect. Thank you, Deputy Mayor.

So that's a green dot. We are on track for physical sustainability. The next goal to ensure the sustainable delivery of city services To the community, the city manager will promote a healthy, stable workforce and lead the roadmap for recovery to provide options to effectively align revenues and expenses by 2030. Green dot on this one, we're well on our way. Thanks to council, mayor, your efforts, as well as our EPW team and other departments. I really thank Comins for this special passage to support Connect Tacoma, which secures ongoing revenues to support infrastructure, proper work, of which our budget also, not to tagline this, my proposed budget for your consideration does not see a pullback of general fund dollars to our infrastructure funding for Public Works. That's something that I'm going to really stress when I present this. The voters supported you all with a successful package of a package. We're not going to use that to address our structural deficit. That's not what we're doing. Develop an effective and resilient, sustainable approach for using funds generated by the Public Safety Sales Tax. This is very much still in play. I presented to you about four weeks ago some options for your consideration. We're going to come back to you through the budget process and let you know what that looks like, and then take a look at what dollars you want to allocate to Public Safety Sales Tax dollars. This is one of the basket of options for your consideration. On July 7th, Roadmap to Recovery was presented at the study session outlining Save Now, Later, Innovate Framework, and the Five-Year Approach to Structurally Aligned Revenues and Expenses. This is to say we are still in the assessment options stage. We'll be taking more options as we present a balance budget that addresses structural deficit in the coming years. I still firmly believe it's taken us many years to address what we can address now. It's been taking us some years to sustainably figure out a way in which we can provide new revenue sources for you, new ways in which we can be more efficient in how we serve. So that's coming soon. We also launched our quarterly offsite with senior leadership to create alignment with the roadmap to recovery. So we are starting with all of our supervisors, division managers, our assistant directors. We're not just talking about this as a group of directors. We're trying to push this down to make sure people understand our people, our biggest resource and our biggest asset, how this change has to happen, how it can actually impact tomorrow. Our biggest challenge, and this is just a footnote editorial, next year is going to be talking about our biggest cost drivers for the general fund, which is wages and salaries. We're going to be earnestly talking about those things and honestly and frankly, righteously, lots of big words. We're going to be talking with our union partners about how we can make sure we address this in the next few years. And then after that, what comes to the reserve. The 2026 employee survey will be launching on October 7th. This is my editorial. We will be revising the forecasted gap of the structural deficit on October 6th in public meeting with you all. We'll let you know what that looks like. Then the very next day, we will have our next ESAT, our employee survey that goes out. Deputy mayor, mayor, council members, I will share this with the full council as well. I am anticipating that the ESAT will come back. It will be disruptive. It will be hard. We're talking about 100 positions. We're asking our employees to do more with less. And so this survey will be a wonderful baseline to what the recovery efforts will look like in the coming years. That's my thoughts. Long-term structural challenges within EPW. We're going to advance the consolidation efforts that we've taken place. And there's more. It's not just EPW. We're taking a look right now. In process, even with the budget happening, about enterprise safety, talking about NCS, housing, all those things that are happening here. Where else can we drive efficiencies, but not just efficiencies for the sake of saving money, but how should we be configured, not in scarcity, but in abundance? How can we provide better support? Green dot on this one. And the next one, promote transparent, timely communication internally and externally. developing options to improve the impact of internal and external communications. Director Clancy is here with me today. We just completed our two-year community survey. It was presented to council here in the last 45 days. We're expanding employee and community communications through a podcasting effort that I'm excited to have you all partner. So it's not just a city manager podcast for the budget, how that looks like. We've held two employee town halls, reaching approximately 1,100 employees. The mix was a lot of remote employees that are able to join us. Our next employee town hall will be in early October, probably either the day before the 6th or sometime that week. We're going to send that notification here next week. And we're going to be candid with our employees. I'm going to be vulnerable with our employees. It's going to be live Q&A. We're going to be asking our employees, how do you feel about the state of the city? What data is coming through? And so we've been getting a lot of good feedback there. We launched the webpage with our dashboards. We've got graphics, metrics, centralized information. This is where we want to put all the things, the efforts that the council is blessing. It's a report card for me and my team that is the director so that we can be responsive to our staff and the community as well. Tacoma 2035 dashboard is in development to provide community consolidated view. citywide indicators so this is our strategic plan for the next 10 years i do believe i have good indications to you that there's further efforts with mayor ibsen and deputy mayor and osak to talk about how that could be further aligned with potential council staffing ideas as well as potentially looking at our cbc so looking forward to that as well um budget outreach team uh providing additional tools for kindly accessible public information we've launched uh once again uh the the budget tools to allow our patrons to take a look at where we're looking at potential offsets and also giving our our the citizens we serve an opportunity to take a look at maybe interactively where else we can take some offsets and giving suggestions for council and the teams are out we are Allison and myself and department directors are out now in community. We'll be through the month of October meeting with all our neighborhood councils and community groups to talk about the budget process and field comments and concerns. And then council staffing and communication options underway. Meaningfully, OSAC has been leading the charge. I'll be supporting OSAC's efforts on council staffing. presenting options i think we're kind of looking at something um even this year we talked about options for your consideration and we look at things even in a constrained budget situation this is something that's relatively new that's my work plan going forward all right that concludes the operational excellence portion of my work plan um i can keep moving on definitely mayor mayor What is your pleasure?

Yeah, I say proceed.

Okay, thank you very much. On council priorities, the status of this, the first metric was enhanced perceptions of community safety. So here's some efforts that we have moved forward. This is where I credit Chief Jackson came and reported under the city manager report at just Tuesday. Thank you very much, council. You have invested in TPD. We have achieved staffing levels of 10 positions from full staffing for the department for the first time in a decade. That was as close as five positions to full staffing. We've had some retirements, but we're still well on our way. And the pipeline is robust and robust. Council has approved the potential to work towards a grant that the department has been awarded through CDATC to hire 12 additional officers. There's other partnerships that are happening. Chief Jackson is doing a great job on your behalf. The fire department has launched at the end of June an incident dashboard. So this is tracking with the DPD dashboards for crime stats. I think this is more transparency for the public that we want to have. Again, to reiterate, the two-year community survey was delivered to council for community resident satisfaction with police patrol. We're looking at an 8% increase over that two-year period, 7% satisfaction overall versus response times. Deputy Mayor, Mayor, and council members, this is a little bit of a cherry pick on that community survey. We still have much to do. and we will be doing that. And especially with primary response for those acute calls that are still taking too much time to respond to us. Patty of Tacoma, expanded partnership with the community. Just this weekend, we have a cleanup at 14 various locations. My hats off to both the mayor's office and council's support for this program. The EPW team, environmental services team, is doing a great job. So targeted downtown graffiti mitigation. That is happening ahead of budget. So that will be supported. There are budget proposals with them programming in 27-28 as well. So in the report, it says installed 100 garbage cans in commercial areas in 2026. I think that's an understatement. So we've installed through the Tidy Up team the commercial waste bins that are decorative. Our community has been anecdotally really happy about those. And the Tidy Up team is looking forward to moving forward with even additional budget requests that would allow for more deployment of work. waste bins so that folks don't crash the coma. Sorry, that's also a campaign that's coming up potentially in 2027, 2028, if you approve that. That's coming up. The stats are pretty clear from May 1st to September 15th. The teams have removed a little over 1.3 million pounds of garbage, litter, and debris from public bases. That through line is something that we're both proud of and we have to do some other things to disrupt this. So that's the report on that one. PDS and BPW collaborating on a hazardous tree assistance program to mitigate tree hazards and provide ways in which to replant new trees for qualifying individuals based on that green deck and eligibility. This program is launched long range planning and urban forestry on proposed code updates for tree development Lots of feedback from staff, homeowners and developers, Council, Council Member Walker, who are leading on these efforts. So looking forward to, this is a blue dot. There's some new things here that are coming on board in my work plan. Urban forestry work continues, completion of the right-of-way tree analysis and ongoing tree planning programs. There's much more here. These are some of the, items that I'm reporting to you in process, you know, depaving projects, Council approved a partnership with Ecology on Union Avenue for some other depaving projects that will be coming in 27-28 as well. Vision Zero efforts include monthly KSI monitoring. I just had a chance to talk to someone this morning about the fact that those projects Those metrics are being provided through my weekly report. More of that will be coming. We have much to do with that. So that's for that measurable. The next report from the team for housing and homelessness to support the well-being and dignity of our unhoused residents, promote the safety and cleanliness of the city for all residents. The Council adopted a resolution with an intent to pursue a unified regional approach to homelessness. We are excited for this possibility, and you are leaving out for us. Director Esparza and our team are working towards ways in which we can provide resources, and more importantly, for the data governance as well as the staffing for the central URA. Looking forward to what comes of that in 27-28. A cross-departmental core team launched the human services need assessment and aligned update to the human services for affordable housing strategies. The RFP was released on 8-26. Director Esparza is working very quickly on getting this RFP out. We're looking for someone to help us with aligning these things as we look at the totality of our plans or strategies. I'm looking forward to that. NCS additionally is reviewing current operations strategies Within inside of our house, the municipal code to identify opportunities to improve our response for our most vulnerable in our community. There are new ones on here from when this was first passed. On the jobs and economy standpoint, the performance metric, the first one is to support a vibrant business environment. City manager will direct VED and other departments to engage with community partners. Lots going on here. first outcome in process. Many of these are new. EPW has partnered with CED to implement council's high investment corridors. Council led on this effort. We have some dollars. We have some priorities here. Improvements to the hilltop area are planned. I'm looking forward to the evolution of what was before and now is called the high investment corridors, this emphasis. And council, thank you for your leadership on this one. CED also completed 35 targets industry visits and is supporting 12 active retention expansion projects representing about 275 employees that were retained or new employees that were brought to our community. So employment opportunities. Business engagement included 104 company visits, 15 workshops reaching 437 participants, ongoing business group engagement, a council district dashboard was created to identify and track business issues, They consolidate across all of our districts, not just in the downtown and dump areas. Partnered with EDB and the county to launch a 40 key business retention strategy. So this is the overlapping. What Tacoma does in a vacuum is not the most effective way. We have to work with our partners, between EDB, World Trade Center, the county, our efforts, consolidate and look at our plan. So a lot coming on that end. That's cross-departmental team, all those things. The next metric here, or outcome, not metric, economic development efforts also include incubator support for early exploration of Tacoma Math Timber Manufacturing Center. I am excited to have Director Bingham come and report back to you in the coming weeks on what this represents. This is somewhat of a teaser here. There are ways in which we can play to our strengths, especially within our tagline. The best team, Freedom, deployed three areas to solve specific business issues. Again, high visibility, emphasis on cross-departmental teams, hilltop, dome, 72nd and Pacific. We also created an internal business visit issue analysis report and dashboard. So when we are individually out, when I say we, the teams, so Director Bingham and her team are out in community specifically with businesses and what they need and what they need from you and what they need from the community. They're trying to retain that and make sure they have a dashboard. So we're trying to visualize all the things that we're learning so that we can come back. it will help you create more policy that's effective in addressing business needs. So that's a measure for there. The next performance metric to enhance the speed of permitting, all things permitting, we've revised the ordinance for code compliance, and we have a study session that's coming up in 9.9 at the end of this month. Permitting and housing unit data and home and Tacoma quarterly reporting have been transitioned to the city's analytics systems dashboards being validated for end of the year report out or sooner than Q4. Just want to give credit where credit's due. The PDS team has heard you loud and clear. They presented to you early and second quarter of this year, about the 20 units or less. How do we speed up the process? You know, this was the whole nature of, like, how do we do concurrent permitting processes? Credit where credit's due. TPU Power and Water are meeting with the permit advisory group to discuss their involvement in that process as well. So we launched a pilot this year.

We have engagement with our utilities across the board.

That is not the extensive list. I have another sheet here to talk about all the other efforts. I think I'm going to save that probably for January or maybe even my report out at the end of the year. Just don't want to surprise you. The teams are doing really well. Your employees are doing really well. We're nimble too. A lot of the blue dots represent a lot of new efforts that are happening even after you set my work plan. A lot of talking. I'm going to pause. Thank you.

All right, let's open it up to questions. Walker, do you want to start us off?

Sure. Just a couple things. This is all awesome, and a few things. Thank you for including the links in there. I have not had a chance to click on those and it wasn't working on my phone, but thank you for putting those in there so we can dive in. Thank you, Ben. Sounds good, and I know we're heading into budget, so we're going to have lots of conversation there, but it was clear what you said. So in the second bullet around sustainable delivery of services, you talked about an employee survey to launch October 7th to inform workplace and organizational culture strategies. Can you just talk a little bit about what kind of things are we asking staff to weigh in on, or how are they helping change that?

So, yeah. So I'm going to just tee it up. So This is an anonymous survey that we launched, and the campaign is not extensive. It's for two or three weeks. We will launch that in early October. We're asking all the things. How am I performing as your city manager to our directors? Do you understand the mission, the values of our council? It's all those things. I just said I was in keto.

Come on in. Come on in, bro. Yeah, so it is an employee satisfaction survey. There's a number of dimensions around communication, direction of the organization, equity and belonging, organizational kind of the workplace dynamics and things. And so we're not directly surveying about specific initiatives or items. It's not kind of that input mechanism. It's more broadly, what is your experience as an employee working for the city of Tacoma, as well as TPU is taking the survey as well.

So this is different than the employee survey you usually do?

It is the same. So every two years we're just heated up for this.

So the way that you talked about it in how we're making structural changes, adapting to these big potential layoffs, those kind of things, are you using the information differently than the past? Because I am actually glad to hear we're doing the same because I think comparable over time are really bountiful. but it does feel like we're in a different moment in time. And that's what I thought you were getting at. Yes.

So let me plain speak it. The survey questions should be consistent. So we know where we are. What's so different about this is a question that I am proposing to answer for our employees. What's different about this? So the survey doesn't ask this question, but the steady state of we've had a structural deficit, you know, The survey has shown over the course of many years where our employees are satisfied and they're not satisfied. And as many of those areas are, I feel I'm in scarcity. Like I'm pulling that out from previous surveys. What I'm just highlighting for you all is that on the 6th, we're launching an effort to permanently reduce the budget. That's programs, that's resources for our staff. I am anticipating that the survey is going to take a hit. And I want to see that because I want to know candidly how our employees feel about how they're being supported by the city overall. I'm just highlighting that. I want to say, I want to use that as almost like a new baseline for management to say, okay, we've made a lot of disruptions. Programs that have not had funding that we're now saying, council, we'd like your permission to move forward to have resources allocated somewhere else.

Does that make sense? Perhaps I can give a couple of examples. Like one of the questions on the survey is I experienced manageable levels of stress on the job. And so this would be a good time to take that and see how much stress is the budget causing, is the roadmap to recovery causing? Or the amount of work expected of me is reasonable is another question that we'll be asking. And so where we're asking for more from less, how is that reflected in the survey? And then using that as a baseline. So after two years of implementing and seeing what progress we can make, how would those questions then

look in 2028 so it's really kind of setting that baseline and seeing the impacts directly on employee experience and morale over that first two years of implementation okay thank you that that helps make that make a lot of sense and also cross block those answers by department yeah so that's what we do have so when i um i want to stress this for employees that are on my team members that are on

The individual responses are anonymized, but we will note to the department. And our department directors, Amy, sorry, I'm not fiddling out MCO. Our department directors also use that for their departments of what they should be working towards on. Communicating, resourcing, or really moving towards that.

Yeah, follow up to that. We had some questions come through just this weekend. And so just to reiterate, it is run by a consultant. Nobody at the City of Tacoma has access to anybody's individual responses. But we do get the ability to break it down by demographics with certain confidentiality thresholds built in. And so we do it by department, race, gender, union affiliation, tenure with the organization, level of the organization. So we're slicing it in a lot of ways to get further insights. Okay. where you can't pick out anybody's individual responses.

Thank you. Just a quick note to say I have experienced and heard from other folks how much cleaner Tacoma is looking. So the idea of Tacoma is doing great. And also thank you for including Vision Zero and reminding us that we get those monthly reports in our packet. So thank you for highlighting that. Um, and then looking forward to after this hearing more about the, um, work plan on high investment orders. Definitely. I don't want to go into detail now, but just hear more about that. Cause I had just been thinking about that. Um, and I think that that's it on my end. Um, an enormous amount of work and thank you. This is really helpful. And overall, just making sure that we have a plan to give this to the other council members who are not on the committee so they can take a look. Okay. I mean, I think a huge part of this is a jumping off point for discussion with you in our, you know, individual conversations. So love having this public to show people, yeah, that so much is happening. And then we can follow up with details too. So thank you. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Mayor, go ahead. I think you're muted.

I pressed it, sorry. Thank you very much, Deputy Mayor. Thanks for chairing, and thank you for the robust presentation here, City Manager. I'll start by saying I concur with Council Member Walker. I'm glad that we have Vision Zero included here, and in general, I'm glad it's a robust... descriptive safety definition. It's a more universal idea of safety. And as a sidebar, I think Vision Zero is one of our best dashboards that I've seen on the city's website. So it's just a good thing. It's instructive for other dashboards. It's just very clean and intuitive to look at. First off, it looks like there's some areas of feedback that were incorporated. So I think that's really cool. I like that description. We've seen some greater specificity under operational excellence for budget purposes. It looks like we've added some more specificity for permitting. I think that's great, seeing as that's something that we've really talked about, and it's on everyone's mind in the business community. I also do like the specific specifications. neighborhood targeted focus, whether it's Hilltop, whether it's the different teams, the cross-departmental teams, that is the way to go. So I'm really thrilled that that's baked into our central strategy. That's a great direction to take. And even though this isn't technically the work plan, just as a preview, as we start our budget briefings going into next month, I'm really thrilled that we're not just looking at individual siloed departmental briefings, but we're My understanding is that Jacques and Allison had a lot to do with this, but having our budget be more wrapped into Tacoma 2035 and just the different sections there, just making the strategy and the budget the same thing, I think that's phenomenal. So just definitely credit where credit's due here. A couple of questions and then some recommendations here. So under operational excellence, it talks about executive level accountability and how that's going to be baked in. Hyun, can you explain more what that looks like?

So specifically within the operational excellence metric, ultimately, I am your employee. And what I am hopeful for is through this evaluation period, this look back over the last year, that you will hold me accountable. And more importantly, not just in grading my performance on behalf of you, but you can find an opportunity to put those measurements upon which I can now incentivize And I actually need to back up from that word, incentivize. I need to develop the tools in which I'm pushing our department directors to move towards actual outcomes that we can actually speak to, Mayor. Another that I could speak to is, I said this yesterday in a group of all of our division managers and assistant directors, and this is just who I am. I know I made a lot of folks nervous I do want to have a conversation in the coming years about performance measurements. And starting with that, on that executive accountability, dashboards, measurables, department, you're seeing that through the course of all these measurements, these departments are departments. The city overall is getting a lot more comfortable, but that's not something I'm starting. I'm just reinforcing and let's keep pushing forward on that end. So when it comes to dashboards on the budget, targets, this is a foundational step towards maybe having some conversations about performance.

Yeah. Wonderful. I'm glad to have that ingrained. So, starting with operational excellence, a small suggestion and then a couple things I think would be pretty big, and I think we've spoken about this earlier, Hyun, is it looks like the reference to the employee survey to inform workforce organizational cultural strategies Your call where you want to put this. Maybe that could be something in the comms section or if you think it's more appropriate for the road to recovery, then totally your prerogative there. Stealing with good judgment. I think we should always look at great ideas, and if we can take them on or make them ours, then cool. I know TPU under Jackie over the last few years, they've really taken employee surveys to the next level. They've institutionalized a process where... If there's a recurring challenge that keeps coming up in the survey, then Director Flowers actually has a process by which she will highlight, okay, you really care about this one thing. And then there's a formal response. Okay, this is going to be TPU's plan for addressing it in the next year. And then there's a reporting process for how we did to respond. And so that's just a great way of responding. I say the best way of building morale is just direct responsiveness and candor, especially if we are in difficult times, if we're making big changes and adjustments, layoffs, what have you. So I don't know what that looks like or if you find value in that or how you might word something like that. But just putting that in there since we do name the employee survey as part of the strat plan. The two things that I think are really going to be important for operational excellence in the context of road to recovery is, as we're talking about reducing the structural deficit, is if we're going to talk about Connected Tacoma, if we're going to talk about other options, we have to address deferred maintenance. We have to address the deferred maintenance of our infrastructure, which last I checked is about half a billion for our streets, and capital facilities. So whether that's getting really smart with bonds or getting – just getting some sort of set aside or some, some kind of plan for addressing the deferred maintenance question, uh, that has profound deficit implications because, um, you know, a destroyed street is exponentially more expensive to fix than just a street with a few potholes that needs some touch up. And, um, if we can devise a way to chip away at that deferred maintenance on our physical plant, on the streets and on capital facilities, that has really big road to recovery implications. So I just wanted to name those things. I think that we made some good headway with jobs and the economy, so I think that's great. With housing and homelessness, we named the URA, which is great. I think something that the council's talked about before is the desire for some kind of measurement for tracking how people graduate through the different stages. So... I mean, identifying shelter space, especially if it's getting our neighbors to adopt something, that'd be amazing. But maybe something to do with successful placement in shelters and services. I know HEAL does track that. If there's some way of tracking moving on from shelter to permanent supportive housing or... um, halfway housing or regular workforce housing, like some sort of goal attached to graduating through the housing system that we can actually track. So we're not just responding and reacting, um, which I know we track that latter part, but people want to see that we're actually making sustainable progress. So something there with, uh, housing and homelessness, um, This literally just came to me now. I didn't put this in writing, so apologies. We're talking about homelessness, but is there something to do with affordability in some way? We just had a really inspirational ribbon-cutting last week at Viridian Grove off of South Tyler Street, for example. Three-bedroom apartments, new construction for $1,800. Just crazy good news. Affordable. And they're beautiful units, too. Are there affordability goals that we can flag in there in some way, like the construction of X amount of new affordable units or some kind of meaningful progression on affordability metrics for housing? I don't know what that looks like, but just an open-ended question there. And then under community safety... I like how we have progress there on the tidy-up goals, like the distribution of more of those bins. I think that's great progress there. And I like how we have a survey metric for, I believe, it's satisfaction with police patrol and emergency response times. I think surveying is the way to go when it comes to measuring safety, just because of how... how relative that is for, for some people's perspectives. Um, what about measuring, uh, like a survey for measuring trust in law enforcement? So like a before and after snapshot, especially with the work that chief Jackson is doing. So, uh, measuring trust in law enforcement, I think might be something worth looking at. And, um, maybe just an overall perception of safety in my neighborhood. Um, Since we're already doing surveys, I think a before and after snapshot, that might be worth taking, especially in certain key neighborhoods. We could do it based on the equity index or other heat maps. Also, while we're talking safety, if we are going to address things like therapeutic court and other successful programs, why not a recidivism goal? Or we could say if we wanted to be narrower, instead of reducing recidivism globally, we could say increase the success rate of those participating in therapeutic courts by X amount. But something about getting people out of the justice system or something more on the prevention side. Those are a few ideas there for safety, and those are my recommendations. Gotcha.

Thank you very much, Mayor.

All right. Thank you. Did you want to respond to any of those?

No. So Mayor and I have had some conversations about some of these ideas here. To Council Member Walker's point, I want to absolutely propose some new ways in which we can move towards this. Mayor, I would say the recidivism for, were you thinking in lines of all misdemeanors and gross misdemeanor, or are you thinking therapeutic core recidivism? When we provide the resources from a city standpoint and we're providing a diversion or a restorative program, I think it's the latter, Mayor. I just want to confirm that for folks that are listening.

Eternally open-minded. It's your work plan. If you feel one is more appropriate, more doable, more measurable, then that is entirely your prerogative.

Gotcha. I will certainly have conversations with my team when it comes to those things. I just want to caution when it comes to recidivism in a lot of ways, and Mayor, you and I have some really candid conversations about this. When you place a measurable or a objective or goal I can't accomplish much, but I have to be in partnership with you all. So recidivism, when it comes to providing potential incarceration options that are also part of that too, from an accountability standpoint, I don't want to lose that third book, Mayor. I look forward to working with you and the council and OSAC on what that might look like.

We will take that back. Thank you very much for that feedback. Of course. And I just remember the thing we talked about yesterday about the fallacy when the measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. That's called Goodhart's Law. Yes, sir. Okay. Thank you, hon.

Thank you. I just wanted to follow up on that. I do believe a lot of this or some of it might be already in some of the strategic plans that the city and obviously the city manager is beholden to. And so particularly when the affordability metrics and things of that nature, immediately what popped in my head was the ahas. And so if we need to re-examine some of those metrics and making sure that we're in alignment with that, I think is a as a worthwhile goal um i don't think you know we we have a lot of strategic plans all across the city and i don't think every single one of them necessarily needs to be within the the city manager specific work plan because if everything's a priority then nothing's a priority but um but there are specific goals and things of that nature uh so appreciate that

Yeah, I mean, and this is fundamentally a question of what do we disproportionately fund and pay attention to, right? And so that's to your point, right? What are we prioritizing in the sense of what is a step above some of the other stuff? So definitely heard on that.

Absolutely. All right. Council Member Scott, you didn't raise your hand, but I wanted to see if you wanted to chime in.

Thanks, Deputy Mayor. Thank you, Hyun, for the presentation. I think a lot of my questions are more about diving deeper into the budget specifically. So I'll kind of wait till we get into those talks. But just wanted to ask, and I might have missed it, but when should we expect to see the results in any like resulting like actions related to the employee survey? Yeah.

Directors will receive their results preliminary at the very end of the year. With the broader rollout, the employee survey results occurring in February. So that's really when we start having those discussions about what action items to take. So February is the most direct answer and that's when we begin developing those action plans.

And I would just add, Councillor Scott, I think the timing is very good for us because you are slated to evaluate my performance at that timeframe too. I won't say I'm, should I say this? That should be a factor for your consideration of evaluating performance. And even if it is tough from a morale standpoint, I'd rather you see it so that we can talk about what that looks like tomorrow. So I think my eval is slated for sometime in February as well. April 1st, I keep using that. That is my confirmation date. So that's looking forward to that.

Thank you. And then as far as the unified regional approach, do we have an idea of like what now that folks are kind of like signing on, what we can kind of see in the next, what we can expect to see from that in like the next six months to a year as far as like what steps are gonna look like beyond just that we're coordinating with each other, but more of like what folks can actually expect to see kind of coming out of that.

Yes, thank you, Council Member Scott. So the council ratified through a resolution much of the governance structure. The county intends to look at the hiring components for the leaders for the URA. And then over the next six months, it's really our teams that are embedded. It's director as far as that and her team that are directly embedded with the county to take a look at when it comes to the actual data governance, what that looks like, taking a look. And then over the next six months, I suspect we'll also have conversations about what we can expect to contribute meaningfully. As you're aware, the resolution called for the county to pay for the upfront costs, but we are anticipating and we have in the budget some baseline dollars for Tacoma's contribution. So dollars and cents in the next six months, for sure. Having those conversations.

Okay. Appreciate that. And then I think my last question is yeah, Can you talk a bit about, like, I know we have our, around public safety, we have in community safety, we have some various individual, like, dashboards, but can you talk a bit about how we're, like, measuring that collective impact and how that plays into, like, how we decide, you know, where to make those investments in the budget?

Yeah. Thank you very much. So individual department dashboards, crime stats that we have through TPE, TPD all in place. And then we roll up through a biannual process, so a two-year process to do the community survey. That's really how that's flowing through. I think we have more work to do, Council Member Scott, if I'm being candid, in terms of what the mayor brought up this morning as well. from the standpoint of how are we measuring trust in our police department? Can we get more over with that and have those conversations? That's something that we can definitely look towards. I can also offline with you, Council Member Scott, in terms of all of our other more detailed efforts when it comes to dashboards and visualizing the data. for our community and how we're making decisions based on that, how the council is prioritizing through the budget. We have presentations as the mayor alluded to. One thing that is both different and not different is we don't have departments coming to you with presentations of necessarily just the department reductions and plus ups. It's groupings along with Tacoma 2035 and community safety is absolutely one of your target priorities. We have police and fire and others that are coming on the community safety standpoint. It's not just police for community safety.

Okay. I think just hearing the mayor's suggestion about like the trust in the police department and stuff like that, I think it also would be interesting to hear from the community, especially with the streets will be passing just kind of the, you know, their trust and faith in that responsiveness as far as like our infrastructure as well.

It's a great idea.

All right. Thank you. I think those are my questions for now.

Thanks. Great questions. I just did a follow-up with the kind of the community feedback loop that we're looking for. Are those things that are already in the community survey that we do every two years, or are those things that we might be able to potentially add? Because I also want to make sure that we're able to be statistically relevant in a lot of the And I know that some of this, at least from what I'm hearing, we do do a community satisfaction survey, which includes perceptions of public safety. So I'm just curious if there may be some opportunity, you know, to Council Member Walker's point earlier, it's really important to have good data over time. But, you know, we do need to modify and update that depending on the conditions out in the community.

Yeah, I think it's both, to be fair. It's both. We can do more to actually synthesize all the touch points we have. For example, we have two efforts right now that are in play against Council of West Bend. We have participatory budgeting happening with non-general fund, non-city fund that's coming from the CPA dollars for South Tacoma. What are we learning from that process? That's not, you know, how do we tie those things? Chief Jackson got permission from you all to move forward with her partnership, the public safety partnership. That's another way in which we can get touch points. We're going to not just educate, but we're going to have, it's not like a police academy education on the police department. What touch points do we have there? And so, and then The other is we do have the survey and I need to just make sure for the record, I stated it was two years. I think we said that out every four years. Yeah. Oh, it's like, you know, I hope I'm not. So I think it's that too. What can we look at that? Just like the ESAT employee satisfaction survey. We don't want to necessarily change every two years materially. but there's ways in which we can drive a focus on what we're asking the community about.

Yeah. And I think some of the ideas around like being able to directly respond to those surveys, if there are particular areas that are really glaring, you know, I think both internally with the employee survey, but, you know, I think the idea around it also externally, there's something very glaring that's being presented in the community survey. Like, okay, well, clearly, there needs to be some sort of address with this. Maybe it's additional context for why something may be the way it is or, you know, things like that. And I think that just helps build that trust and transparency with both internally and externally with the public.

I fully agree. If we're going to ask questions, our community has to have a sense that we're listening.

Speaking as a director, I know that we use the community survey to help form Where do we communicate with people? Because a couple of the questions are specifically about where do you get your news about the city of Tacoma? And so we use those responses to make sure that we are in places that people expect us to be. So do we give more resources to our social media? For example, this community survey said that that is the number one place that people get their information about the city of Tacoma, higher than any earned media, higher than television, higher than newsletters, higher than anything. So where do we put our resources so that people are getting our information? And so that's how we do it.

Right. Thank you. Yeah, that's a great real-world application to direct response to the community survey. I know I like to use it when I'm thinking about crafting and prioritizing our budget, of course, as well as talking with the community at large as well. So just appreciate those efforts. Um, I, a lot of my questions have been asked. I'm really interested in the mass timber conversation.

Um, I'm teasing that out standpoint of what, uh, director of income and the team will be, uh, working in partnership on playing to our strengths.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, historically, you know, Tacoma is a timber town. And so I know, uh, we've kind of gotten away from that a bit. We do have some great, um, timber industry here and like Mankey's for example. Um, but I think that there's some opportunity for, you know, going back to our roots and, you know, building our city up and, you know, bringing in, you know, what's old is new situation, but then there's a lot of opportunity I think for, and I also particularly appreciate a lot of the targeted business retention. Um, you know, we've had some, uh, employers exit from, uh, Tacoma market for a variety of reasons. Um, and so I think it's really important to be able to be, um, nimble and try to be supportive of our larger business environment because it's important for the economy and jobs and tax base of Tacoma. And, uh, I know I, it's my understanding recently, uh, there, there's a larger effort at looking at, uh, economic development that was just, uh, presented with Pierce County and multiple counties up and down the town. Um, so we're looking forward to seeing, uh, that as well. But, um, I'm really, really happy with the status and progress. I really appreciate the way you have this laid out. There's always more that we could add to this. And so I just wanted to caution my colleagues on that. And some of it is stuff that you help orchestrate through your directors and staff and recognizing that part of 2035 is also very important for the overall umbrella. So with that, do you have anything you'd like to add?

So to Council Member Walker's prompt, as far as the rest of council, would you like me to transmit this OTAC report, my work plan report, after this meeting so that they have it after this meeting and then I can catch up with them in individual briefings? Is that what you'd like to say?

Yeah, I think that's always a good thing. All right, any final comments? All right, seeing none. All right, thank you so much, City Manager. Really appreciate all the work. Appreciate the directors all across the city, their work as well, and every single staff person in our community or our city here. Next up, we have topics for upcoming meetings. I'm gonna call on Ben, our Executive Liaison.

Thank you, Deputy Mayor. Those we discussed in our prior OSAC meeting about the upcoming events fall, Rock called me out about staffing busy in addition to the council being busy, but we had called me in. We had proposed a tentative cancellation of all the OSAC meetings from would be September 25th, our regularly scheduled meeting for next week through November 27th, which is that Thanksgiving weekend. Then we would jump into October beginning the council workshop planning retreat. The second meeting in December is canceled due to a holiday conflict. And then we would jump back in in January with that city council workshop planning and the city manager work plan review. So the question for OSAC is, are we good with that little hiatus here from September 25th through November 27th?

Go ahead, Mayor.

Oh, thanks Deputy Mayor. Just taking the pulse to see what the level of interest is. So as part of the budget, something that the city manager and I have been doing, and we're wrapping this up in the next week or so, is that we've been having some very productive focus groups with staff from different departments. So these are frontline supervisor managers representing different departments. And the context is the budget, but it's also more just what's working, what's not, just the staff perspective all over the organization. We've just had one of three. We've got two remaining. And I also defer to the city manager with the best way to utilize this. But seeing as we are the administrative and strategic committee here, For the budget, yes, but also just for general knowledge and helping us make quality decisions down the road. Once we're done with those focus groups, besides incorporating that into the budgeting process, would that be a value for this committee to study? Or would you just prefer to look at that in a study session as part of the general budget process this year?

At least from my perspective, it's hard to say because I don't know what the content of the focus groups was and the frequency and all these other things. I think as a city manager, I expect him to be out there doing those things regardless. I could see it just being a part of the general course of business for the budget, at least from my perspective.

Okay. Anyone else? Okay. Appreciate the feedback. Thank you.

All right. I did kind of have a question on topics for upcoming meetings, and you alluded to it earlier, City Manager, and we had talked about it, and Sonia Howland, before she retired, had done some extensive work on looking at our CDCs. I think that might be something as a topic of conversation for OSAC specifically, thinking about how we utilize our CBCs. What are the strengths that we have with them? What are the challenges that we're experiencing with them? Is there some opportunities for alignment with our strategic plan? We have a lot of 2035 goals. Do our CBCs know what our 2035 goals are? Are they familiar? working out, you know. So I think that there's a lot to unpack for CBCs, and I think OSAC might be a really good committee for us to kind of dive into that a little bit more. And so I don't know where that report is currently or if it's complete, but I think maybe that's a topic for us to be looking at. And if we're maybe, I don't know how soon we can bring that before the committee, but if there's open

uh dates in september or november maybe there's some opportunity for us to at least start conversations around that and there there may or may not be budget information implement uh implications i should say yeah go ahead city manager thank you very much uh three things on that uh i think the first step that um i need to do administratively support the council is furnish you with the draft report from uh our former deputy signature that has that report Second thing is, I think this dovetails really well with council staffing discussions. without pre-concluding where you're going to go with council staffing. The CBC report has for all of our committee boards and commissions, OSAC, the various city council committees, where the CBC, where the various CBCs can line up. Actually, there's a great opportunity here for all those things to come together. And actually, that could be a substantive part of the discussions that you all have in January with the retreat too, about what that looks like.

Yeah, I mean, having those conversations and might be able to tee it up into a January retreat. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Looking at dates and kind of knowing behind the scenes where staff are working and looking at that report, the October 23rd meeting seems to be the best fit for an initial conversation about something like that.

For CDCs.

For CDCs. They'll be within that window when you're looking at the budget, right? But they will also then be teeing it up for that January, February, March conversation with the strategic plan that would give staff just a little bit of time to prepare for the work that they're doing.

Would you be all okay with setting that as a microphone to you all? Can you set that as a tentative? I will work with our team and make sure we can print that report by then or the week before so you have something a week to work with your council policy teams to understand what the report is. It's actually a very comprehensive report. I'm looking forward to it. You've seen that report.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it also potentially gives us on the OSAC committee an opportunity to kind of maybe talk with our colleagues about it and see if there's some aspirations or concerns or issues that they see as well that we might be able to bring those and work through here at the committee level. By the time we get to a retreat in January, it'll be a much more solid product. Mayor?

Yeah, I'm very much on board with the review of the CBCs. I think there are a lot of opportunities that we could have as we start to embed our strategic plans more into the budget. Having a good launching pad for the 2027 retreat, I think it's really timely. And yeah, I'm very much in support of that.

Thank you. Any other feedback on that? All right, that's all I had. Any final, we do have public comments as well, but anything else for topics for upcoming meetings from the committee? All right, seeing none, we're going to move on to public comment. Proc, will you please read?

To request a picture and public comment for items on the agenda, please sign up in the front of the room if you have not done so already. If you are speaking virtually, please press the raise hand button near the bottom of your Zoom window or star nine on your phone. Your name or the last four digits of your phone number will be called out when it is your turn to speak.

All right, very much. When you're called on, please state your name for the record. You will have three minutes to make your remarks. Please be mindful of the time frame. And do we have anybody signed up in person?

Yes, we have one individual signed up in person and one online.

All right, we'll start with in person. Please come on up.

All right, please state your name for the record, and I will share my recording with you.

My name is Kip Burns. I live on Hilltop. I've lived in Tacoma with a house for the last 33 years. I mentioned the city manager previously. The primary place I get information on what's going on in the city is the city manager's report. And so I try and tell people that so they're aware of it. It's a really great resource. So I start out with a study session and then with the city manager look at what's happening. So compliments for that. It's always, I think, very informative. I'm glad to hear what you just said recently. I'd like to hear more discussion on the CBCs. I've been looking at that. One of the things as far as the council committees go, I think the descriptions on what each committee is doing should be reconfigured, maybe restructured so it's easier to understand because we try and find out what's going to go before what committee. When you look at those definitions, my personal observations, I think they're a little bit mangled. I'd like to see that cleaned up. I do go to some of the other city council meetings and also the commissions. Like recently I went to the Transportation Commission meeting and also to the Tacoma Permit Advisory meeting. So I heard DPU talking about power, water, and also as that relates to home in Tacoma because there's a lot going on there. There's still a lot of things I think that need to be ironed out. So I always learn a little bit or sometimes a lot when I go to those meetings. One of the things when I went to the Transportation Commission Southern made two statements, which I was very glad I was there for. They suggested taking the downtown transit center and moving it all to the Tacoma Dome Center. And I thought, huh, I thought about that. I thought that might be a good thing. The buses still didn't go through downtown Tacoma. I put that as the transit center. But also related to that was the one in South Tacoma, you know, Sound Transit's here with are paying some $42 million. I think the city has also addressed another $10 million for that area along the South 56th. And so the suggestion was to take the Tacoma Mall Transit Center and move it over to the South Transit. And I was thinking about that. We have a bus line that comes across I think it's 57 or 52, and you have that stop there. A person that's using the transit system only has one stop. They don't have to interfere with the stop. So that's just thinking out loud. One thing I've mentioned on tidying up Tacoma Yachts, good to see those. I spoke to a woman who lives on the west end, and she says, how come we don't get any of the new tidy up garbage bins. And I said, well, because you have a pretty nice neighborhood. That was really offensive to her. I should have said that. But I just want to raise that, like make sure that's covered. And regarding where I get most of my information, I don't watch television.

So usually Facebook and city emails are all over the place.

So that's my two cents. Thank you for the opportunity. Enjoyed it. I'll be here. I'm going to be there. All right. If you are. Thank you so much, Kit. Appreciate it.

All right. Next up, we're moving online. Sally Perkins, I see you raised your hand. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Sally Perkins, District 3. Two points. The Neighborhood and Community Services RFP is in the City Manager's Work Plan. In that RFP, there is no focus on the needs assessment or planning for behavioral health. And that puzzles me for a couple of reasons. One, behavioral health needs in Tacoma are considerable. And two, Tacoma is collecting the one tenth of one percent behavioral health tax, which is a fair amount of money. It seems to me that behavioral health ought to have far more focus than that RFP calls for. Second point related to trust in law enforcement. Individually, a number of council members have said that you support stronger oversight of the Tacoma Police Department. That would be a great contributing factor to greater trust in law enforcement. If that support is real and the city manager is your only employee, shouldn't a topic as important as police oversight be in his work plan? I would request that you would add it to his work plan. And I would note that there's a lot of energy in the community for independent civilian oversight of the Tacoma Police Department. And this would be a really affirming way to say to the community, we hear you and we hear your interest and energy around this topic. So I ask that you put it in the city manager's work plan. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Sally. Always a pleasure to have you here. All right. Any other final public comments? Maybe someone on the phone. Not seeing any. All right. Thank you all so much for your attendance. That is the conclusion of our agenda. And I'll entertain the final motion unless there's any final comments from the council. All right.

Move to adjourn.

Second. It's been moved and seconded. All in favor of adjournment, please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Opposed? We stand adjourned.