City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening everybody. This is the Newberg City Council March 16th edition. I call this meeting to order. Could we have roll call, please? We will in a minute. I'll be right back. Okay, I'm here. Councelor McBride here. Councelor Wheatley here. Councelor Yarnell Hollowman here. Councelor Kilberg here. Mayor Rosacker here. Councelor Turges here. And councelor Carmen

here. Thank you.

Would everybody please stand and join me in the pledge of allegiance? Well, thank you for being here everybody. Um, this past week I was invited to uh join the chief and uh officer Sterns. Uh Chief Cosmiki, would you please tell the people what's going on? Yeah. So, uh, we attended the graduation, uh, for the DARE class and a young lady impressed the heck out of me. Uh, her name is Sunonny Johnson and, uh, she gave a really good speech and so I invited her to come here and share it with the council uh, with Officer Sterns. So, you guys go ahead and come up. Officer Sterns can answer any questions. Uh, I think we'll probably let Sunny go first. and then he's he'll stick around for any questions you may have. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Henresa Johnson and I made this DARE report for an activity that we call the DARE organization with Officer Sturds as my teacher. DARE is an organization that fifth graders such as myself get to have as a class once weekly where an officer will teach us about things that we should and should not do. Immediately I was worried that all this class was going to be about was to not do drugs. Then I went in and it was just our school resource officer sitting on one of the desks reading the questions we had asked. In this class, Officer Jay had taught us how bad drugs were for your body and the outcomes, but also how to handle peer pressure and stressful situations, but most importantly, how to make better decisions with everyday problems. In our DARE classroom, we were safe to say what we needed to say, and that was what we loved. Dare did help me a lot with my basketball games, especially when I got hurt. Let me tell you about this one time. My basketball team was playing the toughest team in the league. This one player was really bugging me. She would always kind of push me out out of the way and get me out of the game. Then when I was on the court, I got really mad and just kind of yelled out my feelings, causing my coach to worry and bring me to the bench. After the game was over, I cried a lot. I was saying how I was embarrassing myself in front of my old coach who was really excited to see me there. Then on Valentine's Day, we were playing this team again, and I was worried. Then I remembered what Officer J had said about handling stressful situations. Think about how you reacted to this

before and handle how you can handle it now. So, I kept that in my mind and played the best game I could. Sure, I got pushed around few a few times, but I just got up again and tried my best. Every time that I got pushed down or fouled and the ref did not call it, I remembered how I felt after that one game and how I made this decision to not feel like that. My team did not win the game, but we still scored points. I felt good about how that game played out, even if we didn't win. The DARE decision-making model, DDMM, has really helped me out of tough problems before, like when I got in a fight with my brother, Angus. He was getting on my nerves by putting really moldy sausages in the back of our car. I was supposed to be cleaning out the car for my friend who was coming over later. When I found those sausages in the back seat, I knew it was Angus. When I came inside, I told him to go to in the back of the car and clean it out. He said he didn't want to. But I didn't say too bad or I don't care. I simply said, "Well, if you don't, the car will stink so bad and mom will probably yell at you." Telling Angus an outcome helped him realize that he needed to clean the back of the car. So when when I defined the problem, I could think of ways to assess, respond, and evaluate. I defined that the moly sausages needed to be taken out by Angus. I assessed that he did not want to take them out, but I responded in a way that was kindish, not mean or rude. Afterward, I did evaluate my decision, and I thought that I did the best option possible. Dare is by far one of the best things that could have happened to not only me

but also my classmates. I think that's I think that this experience has helped remind myself that I'm not the only important person in this world. In the near and far future, I will be using the dare. I will be using DARE to get me out of stressful situations like meeting somebody new, fights with my family, health and safety of myself and others, future opportunities, and most importantly, my academic and personal success. With tough time like these, we could really use DARE all over the world, not just in schools, but also to show grown people just how bad some things are. While I will miss the DARE classroom and the questions I could ask officer J. Love those, I am glad to successfully move on from this part in life. This experience has definitely helped me make the best choices possible in basketball games, fights with siblings, or something more serious. DARE has shown me that choices, big or small, matter. That is definitely something I want to show the world. Thank you, Officer J, for this opportunity you've given me.

Did you want to come up and take some pictures, Mom? And for those of you who were facing the wrong direction when she talked about her brother, he was uh quite animated back there and maybe just a little bit guilty. Thank you so much. I appreciate you all. Do you have any questions about the deer program? I know it's been a while.

I certainly do. This made my day. I love hearing these stories. I love I mean I remember when the police would come into my classroom and teach us things and I think that went away and for a long time. So I'm really glad to hear um what you guys are doing. Um what I was wondering is um how is this a year-long program? Um is it just elementary school? Like how long does it last? Can you give me some more details? I fully support it. Yeah, great question. So, the DARE program, it's a 10-week program and it's for the fifth graders in our district. So, I teach all of them. At this point, this is my third year. We've graduated graduated over 936. Uh, so I I go to all the different elementary schools and for I'm in their classroom once a week for 10 weeks and there's uh there's 10 different lessons and we learn things such as uh how to communicate, peer pressure, bullying, good decision-m skills, the dare decision-making model, which is what she was mentioning there. Uh DARE is quite a bit different than probably the DARE that you and I did when we were kids. I still have my certificate from 1992 and Hillrest Elementary. Back then it was a officer that came to the classroom and said, "Don't do drugs." And I think that's about it. He had a cool car. Now I'm in the classroom with these with these students. Uh we're building these relationships. And so uh yeah, it's a 10 week 10-week lesson and it's much different. Uh I think around 2000 we stopped doing it here in Newberg. And then um around 2008, DARE went back to the drawing board and you know partnered with some universities and and says we're going to do it better. Uh it wasn't that DARE was bad, they just found a better way to do it. And so the new dare is uh social emotional learning. It is uh effective. It's science-based and uh it's really it's really wellreceived and I think

successful. And that's why I wanted to bring my secret weapon here for you.

Yeah. So is this for the whole fifth grade class or is it just open to whoever wants to join the program? Currently I teach uh all of the elementary fifth grade classes in our district and I also teach CS Lewis. So it's it's it's not open to just anybody. It's got to be a classroom setting and and I partner with the school for that. I guess what my grandson is in fifth grade at Mabel Rush and he's not said a thing about this and so I was just wondering if he just wasn't paying attention or or if it wasn't or it was just an elective of some sort. You know,

I'm I'm a little surprised. Yeah, I just graduated 76 fifth graders from Mav Rush. Uh he's probably got a certificate at home. What's his name? is well no I'll let that go. But I'm gonna ask him about it tonight. Yeah, he should have a t-shirt, a certificate. So

I'm Thank you so much and it's so great to see you when I drop off at Edwards. Um, I just want to say that I think it's great that we have an easy way for kids to be introduced to very hard conversations and topics and um, especially around drugs and alcohol and mental health component that comes with that and um, I wish there was way way more of that and um, really appreciate you and what you're doing.

Well, I appreciate that. um as as successful and as effective as the DA their curriculum is honestly I think what's even more important is the relationships that I'm building with these students because currently the sixth and seventh is my third year so sixth and seventh graders were my students next year eighth graders so I'll have every single student in the middle school will have been one of my students so I have that relationship and middle school is when they really need an officer and they need that relationship so uh you know possibly I'll follow some of these students into high school when the other off the other SRO retires. I don't I don't know yet, but that's that's I think even more important than the DARE is this relationship building. So, I appreciate the opportunity and I thank you for your time and uh great job, Sunny. Well, Will, you get to follow that. So, I'll give you two choices. You can either go ahead and make your presentation or we can just call it a meeting and go home.

Well, Mr. Mayor and honorable counselors, I think I I still probably should do this presentation because it's got four years of statistics in it. It's not going to be as good as that was. But, you know, so this is not the usual statistics report that we do. This is actually a compilation of four years of statistics with some commentary based upon some analysis. So first of all though I'm also kind of making this a bit of fun. So if we look at the first slide, what do you think that is? And any counselor can interrupt me if they want to or or perhaps even anyone in the audience. What do you think it is? Solar energy. Let's find out. It is clean water made. Now look at the pattern and look at the colors for each year. Now you can see broadly speaking, the pattern follows the pattern of the seasons. However, and this is the really interesting takeaway for me, look at 2023 and look at 2025. Right? So, here's my thought, right? Maybe what's most important about this number is to drill down a little bit is what summer production is by day. You know, I said when I looked at this, I would start to maybe have some other thoughts about what does it mean? What we haven't been looking at is daily production. Now, we know we had the biggest solid run in the summer of 4.1 million gallons per day this summer. What would happen if I compared this summer production with the other threeear summer production

to see if we can see what's happening there? Because the most important thing that we do with water production is summer water production because that's when we're going to start to run into a bind. So what I'm trying to say is this was food. All of this is food for thought. Honorable counselors, I was trying to see what thoughts this would give me. What thought that this gave me was I need to find out what summer daily production is and compare those numbers and that will give us more of a sense of where we're going with water consumption in the summer. So, more to come on this next thing. What is that? It's not much of a pattern to be seen there.

You're correct, Mr. Mayor. That is building permit numbers. And you will see there that I didn't really learn a lot about this. This is kind of something I knew about. Construction is generally down from the very busy years of 21 and 22. I don't see a particular call to action here. For example, right now I would not consider adding adding another plans examiner. I I don't see that supported in the data. And I don't see a particular seasonality to this. I just see that we've seen a decline in housing starts. And you're going to see this several other places, but staffing as we have it today is going to work. Okay, what is that?

The phone calls, the 911.

It is. Yes, it is non-emergency calls. Now, here again, this one is really interesting. So, there's been a steady decline in the non-emergency call classification. My assumption here is that our residents are becoming ever more educated due to our enhanced web presence and are using other ways to connect with the city. Maybe they're not necessarily making this type of call all the time. But we also know that another metric you're going to see later has been going up which is contacts through the website. Maybe there's a connection. I'm not certain. Notably, there's been no overflow from this into 911. Now, I want you to think about that for a minute. When you look at the 911 chart, we're not seeing we're not displacing non-emergency calls into 911 calls. So, that gives me some other thoughts. Right. There has been an increase in socials activity and website data requests. Maybe the public are using our services in different ways. Sergeant Hagen and Emily's work in the PIO area, I think, is probably paying off here since we're not seeing an overall change in the 911 image, 911 pattern. But anyway, that's my thoughts initially on this comparison. Now what is this? Correct. What? Accounts payable. Now I've come to realize that this is a volatile metric with more and less active years. In this case, I can see predictable end and start of fiscal years. I can see there's an uptick the beginnings and the

end of fiscal years. That is to be expected because Katie shuts off spending near the end of the fiscal year and Katie starts the spending again at the start of the next fiscal year to give us time to balance out the ledger at the end of the year. That's one of the things that you would expect to see. But I can also see that in the years when we had heavy spending on capital improvement projects such as Elliot Road, you see there's a spike in those procurement expenditures. The clear takeaway is that by keeping our reserves rudently high, we can balance out the up years and the down years even when we're building more or less stuff depending upon the year. Okay. What data is that?

Correct. You're not reading ahead, anyone, are you? That that is indeed building inspections. In line with the other constru construction related metrics, these have come down from their high heady points of year of 2122. And for those at home that have never looked at any of this stuff before, the city didn't collect any statistics until four years ago. That was when we began to collect meaningful statistics. And so it's it's useful to inform us about questions like staffing and expenditures. All right. What is that thing? Yes, that is building permits. in building permits similar to miscellaneous permits. These seem to have reached a new normal for the current pace of construction starts. Once again, this does not indicate the need for additional staffing in this area. By looking at the numbers, we can see that unless we start to move into a real expansion of construction, we wouldn't want to add an extra building inspector, an extra plans examiner, or whatever. So, that's a that's a clear takeaway. and a similar sort of thing and this is correct social media engagement. Now you see what I was saying as and I'm not saying there is a you do you give correlation and causation folks right but it is interesting that non-emergencies have come down a bit whereas normal social media connections some of which is run by the police PIO that is tracking in the other direction in line with council goals there's been

a steady growth in this area and we haven't added any resources here so there's an important thing We've always had two PIO positions working. No extra resources have been added here and this has grown. Notably, there's a spike in November of 2023 and that is associated with the day that Instagram arrived. In other words, we weren't reaching the kids. People in my generation are on Facebook if anything. and Instagram. So, we're by reaching a different demographic, we saw a great acceleration and maybe that also helped reduce some of the calls on non-emergency. That's what I'm taking away from this. Yes, certainly. So, you said that some of these were run by the police PIO. Do we know like what proportion of these engagements are police related versus general city engagement? Not right now, but I can definitely get you that division.

Yeah, I know they're I know they're both very active, but I can I can find out how many are Sergeant Hagen and how many are Emily. It'd be curious, especially just for that correlation with like the decrease of non-emergency calls if that's where the if there's a corresponding uptick. So, again, correlation, not causation, but I'd be curious. Thank you. That's a really good idea. If we dig into that and they've seen an expansion of their social media presence, that would tend to reinforce the thesis.

Okay. What data might that be? That is

public information requests. Since the other reforms like the new website and the expansion of our social media presence, our PRR requests have been growing greatly. And under the current city recorder, who is brilliant, although she can't be here tonight, we have been keeping up with this growth in production with the same staff. So, that is pretty remarkable. More people are finding our web pages more easily and then they're asking more questions and we're answering them. What is that?

Website forum postings. Wow.

While we have seen peaks connected to local events, there has been no specific um pattern that I can detect over time. You can see it's a fairly blended picture. We've had higher moments and lower moments. Generally, the activity has come up a little bit, but I wouldn't say I could see any specific driver. And I don't see any seasonality, and that surprised me. I expected to see some seasonality around the holiday season or the 4th of July. I didn't see that. Not really. Ah, payroll processing as expected for almost the same staff. We're basically the same staff for four years. You see, our payroll expenses have gone up every year. Our increase on average has been 9% per year for payroll expenses. is they've just steadily gone up. They've been driven higher and the biggest driver has been health insurance costs which have gone through the roof for everybody. So that's that's it. Same people though, more cost. I mean that's all I can really say about that one. Yep. And on health insurance there is worse is to come. We don't see any sign that health care cost is decelerating. And we'll be telling you more when we find out more about the latest healthcare hikes, but they're they're always double digit. That's all over the board.

Kashunk DUIs. There are several elements to this success story, but one must be highly effective deterrence carried out by individual police officers in our town. This shows the focused effort in line with our council goals. We have had generally a positive effect on reducing DUIs and I'm going to be continuing to watch this going forward. But I mean, look at the numbers. This is this is a really good success story. Our DUI intervention training and our reasonable suspicion stops are clearly having a deterrent effect on our town. And I hope that this continues and that less and less people choose to make that stupid decision. What is that? It's the other stuff. When you flush the toilet, it has to go somewhere. In this data, I can see that our INI efforts have had a moderate effect, but they have not had a fantastic effect. I say that they've had a moderate effect because we've had some a very very wet year in 2025 and we still got the the amount processed down a little bit. So we're moving in the right direction. We're spending a lot of money this summer on INI work, $900,000 as you know on lateral connections. We hope that helps with that sewage line that is currently searchcharging. So, we have to keep focusing on this and try and do better because it's a waste of chemicals. It's a waste of money. It's a waste of staff hours. But we have

old pipes and we can never afford to replace all the pipes that we have. That's just life. We can only do what we can do with the money that we have. Okay. What is that? Go. Traffic stops. Marginally more activity developing and more interventions for safety over time. Perhaps unexpectedly, no clear seasonality to this data. I expected more reckless driving around holiday events, times when you might expect people would be maybe having a few drinks and driving when they shouldn't. I don't really see that in the data. I do see the focused effort on good safety programming over time. I think that many of the traffic stops may also be helping with DUI outcomes. And now I'm going to explain that drop out there that's got an explanation behind it. You already probably know what that is, but any ideas? This is citations and warnings. First of all, when the number crashed to zero, it wasn't because we weren't doing any citations and warnings, that was when we were moving to the new cloud-based system for dispatch. You remember there was a couple of months when I couldn't give you statistics about that because we were between two systems. So, that's what that is. But in looking at this in the data, we see that spike in 2025 and a data drop in 2025 by moving to the cloud-based system. Overall, I can see

steady and efficient work. I don't see any particular pattern to it that would indicate something in particular. And I don't see any seasonality either. Now, why that spike happened? I don't know. I don't have any idea. June of 25. Yeah. Yeah. Is it Is that where like the red light camera was? The moment we had the red light camera.

No. No. That was that wasn't on exactly that moment. So, I we've racked our brains about that spike and um maybe there was was there an enforcement. Oh, here we go. The chief knows I can tell you exactly what it was. Uh do you see the number right there for March? It was fairly low. I sent an email to the officers. I sent an email out to the officers. Get busy. Earn your keep.

Earn your keep and get after it. And you can see the spike. And that's exactly what we want. So the chief noticed that maybe a little bit of relax I would say relaxation but maybe not full full on sent an email and whap you get a spike in your statistics. Good to go. It looks like I need to send another one. Just kidding. Just joking. Not really.

Okay. Here is another type of data. And you know, by the way, I don't think a lot of cities collect data like this. I think we're kind of unusual for actually trying to figure things out. Planning decisions. Now, you'll see there that in planning decisions, similar to other building and construction metrics, there has been an overall activity drop to the heady days earlier in the in the data period, especially 22. But there was a lot of activity also in 23 but it's a lot lower now that is in line with construction less construction less building less planning decisions and what is this thing and it is 911 calls. So, you see what I meant about there's not an overflow effect from one type of call to the other. And when we dug into this, our most important calls for service have held steady except for 2023. And that was a really busy year with fires and other accidents and that generated a lot of calls. So, you may recall that was a just a from my other from my narrative report that was such a busy year all around. If criminality were growing, so would these calls. Therefore, we can see that we have the best policing in my opinion in the state, which goes along with our safest city, fifth safest at the moment in the state designation. This is really good work. And so I don't see any growing trend of 911 calls despite a population that's growing about 1% a year. So that's that's another a good positive

takeaway I think. What is that spiky thing? Peggy is correct. That is hires. Hires have varied over time with a low in 2024 after we initially got up to full staff. We can't see a firm seasonality in this pattern. But I'd like you to think for a minute. All of this hiring work is done by one and a half FTEES. That is a lot less than the Yep. That is a lot less than the industry standard, which is supposed to be 1 to 50 people. So, we're always making do with a pretty skinny crew. And what is that? A pop-up library door count. For those who may wonder if the library is dead in the modern world, think again. Steady growth over time is visible. Also, clearly we can see the seasonal impact of summer reading in the data. And that makes my heart sing. If this growth continues in the next bianium I will be asking council for another FTE for the library. This is clearly where there is some need for some growth and what is this calls for service. So many calls for service are initiated by officers themselves. Some people don't know that if they put a call in. Sometimes it's a call that comes through one of our other channels. With some

peaks and troughs, this has remained steady over time. And these calls are critical for our residents. Once again, we can see a steady commitment to community policing and safe city status keeping the workload steady. Yes.

Just I want to make sure I understand what you said. So an officer somebody gets a call and the officer goes to the door. The police gets a call and then they put a call for service such as like medical or something along those lines. You said the officers make these calls, right? Let me defer to the chief to explain better the difference between a selfinitiated and nonselfinitiated because I only know vaguely. Yeah. So those can be traffic stops, it can be responding to calls, uh those sites, those types of everything we go to we track with computer automated dispatch. So uh they're really accurate. Um, we're even more accurate now that we're on the cloud. Uh, because we weren't able to pull all the data out and that's why it all those stats are pretty darn close, but they should be a lot more accurate now. Uh, because we're able to actually pull better stats faster and it's a lot easier. Did that answer your question?

Thank you, Chief Wood. Circulation. Circulation. Circulation has gone up every single year since I left the library.

Yeah. What does that make me feel? So that trough you see there, that's the impact of the library front door ramp work uh circulation dropped dramatically while the library could not be accessed by anybody because we were rebuilding the ramp. So um yeah, this just we we keep doing more and more and more work with the same number of people. What is that? This is This is work orders completed by public works. I didn't really realize until I put this chart together that these have fallen off over time. Frankly, this is an area where I can see that the city has room for improvement. This did not really come into sharp focus in my mind until I created this chart. We are currently working on some restructuring in public works led by the new director. We are going to be trying something different. I would like to see this number start to climb dramatically. This represents individual tasks that are completed. Now, we've got the same numbers of staff, but I'm experimenting right now with breaking out the teams into dedicated teams, one team for each utility instead of having a group of staff working together that move from one task to another. This this will mean that there'll be a supervisor focused on streets, one on portable water and one on sewer storm water.

I want to see if this can create more workload generation, more tasks completed. This came into crystal focus. I I didn't really notice this as creeping up on me. Right? When you look at the averages, it's not as obvious as when you look at a chart. So what I'm telling the council is I've said, you know, good, good, good. Wow, great. Good, good. This isn't good. We can do better and we're going to do better. So it just comes down to increasing productivity, right?

Precisely. These tickets are represent productivity and our productivity has been going down. And I'm not blaming anyone. I'm just saying we can do better. Okay. What is this thing? After hours help tickets. Now, let me say something about this. As you know, we've done a lot of things recently in the last year, moving services to cloud hosted services. We've implemented some AI services. This is one to watch. If after hours help tickets stays low or keeps lower in the future, then these reforms are working because we're not paying for call back time. We're not creating after hours events. I would like to see a time come when you see almost no after hours events, but we'll see how it goes. That's the concept.

Yes, Mike. So, the after hours is is that also figured in uh overtime or do you have guys specifically set up, hey, you're going to handle this week any after hours or whatever? We do have a rotation for that, but it does create overtime. So, somebody knows that in it that they'll have the duty, but if they do get called back in, we're burning money. So, we don't want to do that. Yes.

So why do you think I mean from November to December there was like nothing you know what what was what was going on that was that created that anything unusual that was happening. So I think broadly speaking a lot of these events were created by something failing like it could be a winter storm event but it could also be in the winter some some of our fiber failed. It could also be um there was there was a lot of help tickets generated during the flood. The city flood created a heck of a lot of events. So that might be a correlation. One time an electrician took a sawzall and sawed through a ROMX cable and turned off the servers. That was a great weekend. So, you know, there some things just happen. Switches fail. But the more of our stuff that is cloud-based, the more resistant we become to local events. Okay, here we go. Kachchunk. that is running recruitments with some reduction over time. I do not see seasonality or any predictable pattern in this. I do see a spike where we lost people to Hillsboro. We had that unfortunate event. Um but they they pay higher salaries. So unfortunately that's what happens when you don't pay good as good a salary. Sometimes you're going to lose people. So there's no helping that. And what is this stuff? It is normal service tickets. Now you see in it, we've had a lot of service tickets connected to going to

the cloud base. I don't see yet that it's having a positive effect on general service tickets. However, the IT director assures me he feels strongly that over time more people will be able to do more self-service things and service tickets will diminish. So once again, this is one to watch. And then Boom. This is claims processed by HR. There is not a lot of overall pattern to be seen here. We had a somewhat busier year this year. We see a spike in activity in 2023 that was created by a random upsurge in FMLA claims because I had to check what was that about. But broadly speaking, not a lot of pattern. We did run a bit more claims in 25 than we did previously. I'm not sure exactly why that is, but but it's not we didn't have a big outbreak of illness or something. So, I don't I don't really know why that happened. I'll have to ask Allison a bit more about that because it is a little higher. And then that is separations. And this is my last one here. We can see that the initial spike created by my reform in city leadership aka layoffs and then we can see a spike caused by four employees going to Hillsboro and broadly speaking apart from those two events it has been fairly random across the board but once again not carried out by that many people and we

are about to start. Sadly, I have to tell you a recruitment for Allison Syler, who is going to retire. So, I I do hope that things stay as efficient as they have been for the last four or five years. Now, this is just for fun. I thought you'd like to see this. I decided knowing that we are the sixth safest community in Oregon to look at the criminality of my hometown right now. Dumbartan in Dumbartan Shshire, sorry boys if any of you are watching this. Weston Bartonshshire has constantly ranked as having one of the highest crime rates in Scotland, often the top four or five. The area reported 672 crimes for every 10,000 people, approximately 67 per thousand. Overall crime rates are high and they include a high proportion of violent crimes. And then there is the comparable statistic for our town. So there's another reason why I love living here. And people say, "Do you ever miss Dumbartan?" I say, "Not so much." So, that's it for a four-year overview. As you can see, we're smarter than we were four years ago and better informed. I've got some things to follow up on, and thank you, Jerry, for that idea. I also want to look at the uh individual daily water production for those summer months and see if I can drill into that a little bit more because I'm curious and I'd like to bench precipitation against daily summer water production

and see if we can get the the statistics a little bit smarter. And that's to find out if we don't need a water plant exactly when we think we will. We still know we're going to need a water plant, but it might enable us to come up with a better analysis on the exact when that might happen. And who knows, I might even get some help from Mr. Jim Taught again. So, we shall see. Any questions, folks, about our four-year overview.

Yeah, I I just want to thank you, Will. I mean, this is some good information and um we haven't necessarily seen it in the past and I this I think will give us a better handle and give you a better handle on uh the different processes that you're looking at and that's so this this was good. Thank you. You're very welcome, sir. Thank you. Thank you, Will. You did good after that little girl. So we have now as public comments we have one public comment that is Penny Raider. Welcome.

Good evening council and Mr. Mayor. Uh I want to take a moment to commend you for your efforts on bringing our community uh community uh together a bit more. Uh, I've been hearing that on the you're off Mondays, you're meeting with the public, which is is really great. And I've also have heard that our mayor has been staying after and talking with people who have disagreements with information that's being presented. Um, appreciate the fact that you've been meeting with people regarding their concerns with ICE, even though that's not under your jurisdiction. Um, I believe that we all can feel the difference in Newberg and so just want to say thank you for your efforts. They they are paying off. So I appreciate that.

Thank you, Penny. Now it's time for new business. Uh Danny is presenting on the city hall roof replacement. Welcome. Good to see you. Good evening. Net Hilton, City of Newberg Engineering Department. Thank you. See if I can actually work it. Wrong way.

Look at there. So, I'm here to talk about the uh city hall. I thought I'd start with a moment of just reminding us it is a nice historical building. Been around since 1914. I thought it was uh kind of fun to add in there that we actually purchased it for $14,7725 back in 1914. So, it does have a long-standing history and it means a lot to the city, means a lot to us. I opted not to play with photos of our flood from city hall, but instead I took the excerpt of the uh flood that did happen in 2024. As you all are, I'm sure very aware of a conservative estimate of 4,000 gallons of pressurized water went from the roof or basically in the ceiling of the top floor and found its way all the way to the basement. We all know the great expense and great length that we went through to regain our lovely city hall and make it so that we can work in there again. The findings of the flood is due to the lack of insulation within the roof. The three shafts that I have circled on the picture for you are open barometric shafts. There is no valve, no lever. They are just completely open. And then of course a single pane windows that do not seal when closed throughout the entire building. We're only here today to look at two of those three address two of those three problems and that is the lack of insulation with the roof and those open barometric shops on the roof. We've received three bids. One of was a non-responsive one is fairly high and a little bit uh above the budget that I was hoping to target. However, we did receive one base bid at the 3,21

sorry 321,71 175. We are recommending to award that bid. This resolution that I'll be bringing forth on April 20th is to make said repairs. We do have funds in the budget to do this. However, once we do complete the pairs, we do have FEMA funding coming in that will cover all 321,175 to replenish the account that is that the funds are coming from. Moving forward, this is the timeline. As a project manager, got to have timeline and milestones. These are my big major milestones of the dates that I must meet in order to be able to do this. Any questions? So, I want to make sure I heard you right. You're we're only doing two of the three items. You had three barometric shafts and one uh window that isn't insulated very well. So, but did I hear you right? Is that correct?

Abs. I didn't state the windows very well. The we have single pane windows throughout the entire building. I will be coming to council at a later time to discuss the windows and because of the fact that we have 83 windows that fall in this category, we will need to divide it out into phases to be able to accomplish this with great efficiency as well as cost effectiven. Okay. So, we're basically putting a new roof on and those fixing those barometric three barometric shafts

as well as an R30 insulation to replace the 1 in insulation board that exists in 70% of the roof, I think, is what the report found. I'm still getting the full we we we went in and did core samples uh across the roof on both sides of the building. We were anywhere from 1 in of insulation board to 3 in of insulation board to some areas that had no insulation board. And the membrane that is on there today is actually adhered directly to the board itself. And so there is no air gap. So the the insulation is actually reduced due to that as well. So we have approximately an R5 at best and we're going to go to an R30. The windows though, that's just an upgrade for more efficiency. That's not a FEMA thing. we won't be covered for those. Correct.

We actually do have some FEMA funds that are helping us with the first phase of the windows. So, I just did not include that in this. We have a uh approximately $45,000 in this phase and another 300,000 coming in on top of that. So, we will be able to do phase one, possibly into phase two with the reimbursement of the FE FEMA funds. And so the final phase and final push would be the only portion that we wouldn't get reimbursed for at the way that it's trending. But I'm still working on those uh estimates and bids. As I said, we're going to break this down into phases and as we go forward, we'll be able to to outline where we get some FEMA reimbursement. So, the ABC roofing bid, was that within what you anticipated would the cost would be or is it way lower than what you anticipated?

It's slightly below what I anticipated. I actually I expected to be right in the middle between the two. And so, we're we're it it actually kind of balanced out um from that aspect. There's uh a little bit of an alternate on the membrane application is where we are saving some labor is what the appearance is on the ABC roofing between the JR swagger. But uh it is a it is a good process and it is a solid membrane. It is a it is definitely an R30 insulation that we are lacking and so we're looking for something that is longstanding. Um, as well as there's some other items on the roof that uh we will be able to address at the same time.

And from a non- construction person, does it scare you at all when a bid comes in that significantly lower? That would actually I would personally It's like wine. You pick the me the middle one. I don't know. Yeah. But that's $250,000 off. It's not Did I say something? D.

Okay. So, the way they do procurement in Oregon is terrible. So, we shouldn't do procurement the way we do it here in the law. This is a silly law. In Australia, they have a great system and it's the one that we should use here in the United States. They choose the middle bid. So, people that are too low is unrealistic. They might have a price overrun. Too high is perhaps gouge. They actually go with the with the middle of the target range and whoever's closest to the median gets the bidy. I wish we used that system here. to follow. I was gonna say to follow on,

we actually do have a roof architect firm that we've been working with that has reviewed the bid and so it is a solid work and we have had we we as a city have not, but the company that we're working with has worked with this company in the past and so they do have a good reputation from that aspect. So the risk is reduced from that that to if that helps answer the question on the risk.

Yeah, that's awesome. And I totally trust you're doing all of that behind the scenes. But I am now I have another question. In the case that say ABC roofing and I should know this answer is projected to go over their bid. Then what happens? Like what if someone undercuts and then that significantly and then says, "Oh, just kidding. We need to add in $80,000 for whatever."

We've already closed the bid. The the bidding actually closed on the 8th. The presentation was put together on the 9th. We reval evaluated over the data between then and now. And so we're I'm actually bringing you clean solid closed bidding data.

I I mean going through the project and and they has that does that happen ever with with vendors? So, do we find that as we're doing the construction, we uncover something that we didn't anticipate uncovering? And this is an old building. We This is where we do have funds for and I'm bringing you today as information and we'll be bringing for the RCA on April 20th. So if there is questions on bringing what are what are some of our mitigation is it 10% is it 15%. That's what I would add would be added into the presentation that I bring you on April 20th. So, do we have any type of u asurances that let's say they, you know, they they're in there, they're doing the job, uh we don't find anything extra that we need to fix, but they just missed on on the bid and they're they're they under bid themselves by, let's say, $80,000. Um, do we just say, "Well, I'm sorry. We're sticking to the bid and you have to fix this and finish it out or are we paying an extra $80,000? So, we would obviously in that circumstance go beeek with them. They say they can do it for this price. There will be some contingency. We're going to ask council for a margin. I don't imagine we'll be asking council for a margin of more than 10% though, no matter what they find. They believe they can do it. The oversight architecture firm believes that it can be done for that price. I think that that bid from Swigert was much that's much higher than I expected. We were expecting something about

400ish. So yeah, it's a great bid. Let's see what happens. There'll be a margin and we're going to watch it closely and Danny will track every step of the way. The one piece that I didn't bring today and I don't have in front is our Serta roofing company that is the architect firm that we brought in. It is a 300page manual that was outlined step by step that was included with the that had the expectations for these companies in the bid. So that 300page manual is outlines a every single detail to the nuance. So if we do have a problem, it would be very surprising that it's not already called out in that because we did spend that time with that architect firm.

So I don't imagine that you are familiar with the buildup that they're going to use. Um, could I see that sometime between now and the next meeting? Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you, council. Thank you, Danny.

Now I'm feeling guilty. Should go by Danny or Dette? Either she says, "All right. Oh, can I say something? Sure.

Just a quick thing. So, um, Danette was a troubleshooter for Intel. That means she floated from one location to another without having an office. She lived out of a briefcase. She just had a laptop. would go into different buildings, solve problems with clean rooms, labs, structures, digital equipment, and uh and it's the best uh hire of the year that we did. So, while we're still on new business, um the city manager and I have been discussing the River Street project. You've all gotten comments from citizens at this point, I'm sure, as we have. Uh what we would like to do is create an ad hoc committee. We're going to put five citizens on it. Two of them will live on C River Street and the rest will live someplace within the city. Um we've asked Jerry to be the chair of that committee and she's graciously accepted. So if anybody has nominations for that, please give it to Jerry or to me or to Will and uh we'll get rolling with that at some point in the future. That fair enough, Will. Okay. Thank you. All right. Now, we have a public hearing for the adoption of the rates for 2027.

Okay. Good evening. I believe this is the public hearing tonight.

It is. So, thank you. I call this legislative hearing to order. The purpose of this is to approve adopt the rates for the rate review from the rate review committee for 2027. At this point, any counselor who has the declaration to make of conflict of interest or absentations, this would be the time to do that. Seeing none, I close that. Um we are ready for a staff report.

Okay. Um you guys got the full presentation at the last meeting. Um just for a brief recap, um the rate review committee made a recommendation for a 5% increase to water, a 4.1% increase to wastewater, a 4.5% increase to storm water, and a 4% increase to the transportation utility fee for 2027 and 2028. because these are two years of rate increases.

So, we have no public comments on this. So, I'm going to close public comments. Yes, Peggy saying it's the rates will happen each year for two years. Are these increases are for two years?

Um, good clarification. and it'll be um these same rate increases will happen in 2027 and then again in 2028. However, I would like to point out that due to the removal of the communication line item from the bill, the effective rate change for the first of those two years will actually be about 2.8%. because we're removing one class of charge from the billing statement permanently.

So at this point uh recommendation from staff to adopt resolution 2026-418. So at this point this is the time for council deliberations. any Carrie please.

So my memory and then reading the fiscal impact line these rate increases are like are break even to sustain current functioning. we're not making money and if we don't do this, we're not breaking even and we will have to we will have a consequence of some kind.

Yes. So these rate increases are to keep staffing levels the way they are and then um we presented the reduced CIP projects and so if we don't get these rate increases, some some sort of cuts will have to happen. either we delay some of these CIP projects or there will have to be shifts in staffing or something because these are the bare minimum that we could get by with okay for the forecast. Thank you. Yeah.

If there are no more questions, would somebody like to make a motion? I move that we adopt resolution 202648. Second. It has been moved and seconded that we adopt 2026418. Is there any further discussion? Seeing none, can we have a roll call vote, please? Of course, Mr. Mayor. Councelor McBride. Yes. Councelor Wheatley. Yes. Councelor Yurell Hollowman. Yes.

Councelor Kilberg. Yes. Mayor Rosacker. Yes. Councelor Ferguson. Yes. Councelor Carmen. Yes. Vote passes unanimously. Thank you. Thank you very much. Mr. I want to say thank you to Ned Knight who uh is here because he's on that rate review committee and they're so concerned with the work that they're doing. I had to come and see the results. So, thank you. Yes, Will.

I would like to also thank Councelor Kilberg. um at her prompting we went back through the CIP list and we declassified removed any projects that were not absolutely essential and that's why the rate increases were a little less than they were last time. So thank you for that prompting. Thank you. Well, that concludes our our agenda for tonight. So this meeting is ajourned.