City Council - workshop

to other jobs within your organization, what you in fact get is other organizations setting your hierarchy for your jobs. But there could be the case where you have a job where you value that more highly than the market or less highly than the market. There's something, what we call internal equity in compensation is how jobs rank internal to each other in the hierarchy. based on a number of factors. And that's different than external equity. There are any number of ways to do this. I don't know if any of you heard about point factor systems, classification systems. In the past grants, PASS has used a system called the decision band method. And I actually came from the organization that put that in place many, many years ago. So we can use that internal equity system and right-size it for today. And what we would basically do is coordinate the results from that internal equity system with the external market, marry those together, and develop a classification and pay system that meets the Oregon standards is proven to be gender and race neutral, as well as takes into account market rates. So the RFP that we responded to, it appeared to be really kind of focusing on the external equity side, not this internal equity system that we could provide to you, and that you already have in place. We would just need to revive it.

So what I'm a little bit confused by, on the presentation that we got a couple months ago, it said that your company would build defensible comparator pool for the city. And I didn't know that our city needed to be worried about defending our pay rate against our comparators. That was basically just for our own information. When you say defensible, what do you mean defensible? Because I didn't understand, we've never been told that that was a legal requirement that we had to be able to defend ourselves against external comparators. Can you clarify that please?

It's... It's making sound decisions based on the data that you have, whether it's external, internal, or the combination. When we say defensible, we're meaning that the organization can say that this is our labor market, here's the data we have, here's how we made those decisions, and here's our end results in terms of classification and compensation.

Okay, so it's not legally defensible, that's not, but when someone says defensible, that's a word that I was concerned with, but we don't need to have a legally defensible rationale compared to our comparative cities. It does not have to be legally defensible externally.

You want to make sure that your, the various components of your compensation system are in alignment with the laws and regulations that can impact compensation, like the Fair Labor Standards Act exemption, your Oregon Equal Pay Act. Those are some of the laws that can impact your classification and compensation system.

So do those laws apply to, when you say the Oregon Equal Pay Act and things like that, I may have misunderstood, but our city attorney actually told us a while back that that was more with regards to internal focus. In other words, our internal equities are a legal concern, but the external equities are just something that is kind of optional for us to be able to weigh. Is that accurate, that it's the internal equities that are involved with the Oregon Equal Pay Act?

Is my understanding, yes. And I would rely on your attorney. And I'm not sure the context of the discussion, so it's really hard for me to comment on their perspective. I wasn't there.

Okay. Erin's got an answer to our question.

And I'm not an attorney by background either.

Thank you. Erin. So, the scope of work that the council approved from an RFP perspective was for consultant to develop a market analysis for the salary of each position just a market analysis to provide you with the tools to see how we would compare with other agencies within the five units then ultimately with that data we could potentially at some point from an internal perspective look at compaction compression issues etc based on where counsel goes from a standpoint if you did anything with the market analysis but the RFP was to select a qualified consultant to conduct a comprehensive salary and compensation study market analysis with five cities, Medford, Ashland, Cloud and Falls, Central Point, and Roseburg for non-bargaining, approximately 50 people. And that was the service that was sent out in the RFP.

Okay, that to me is really disappointing. I don't remember reviewing the RFP at council level, but because I know that all councilors were concerned with our internal equity potential liabilities. And we were actually told that staff didn't want to basically be the one to take that responsibility on. And that's part of why we decided to hire somebody else, because no one on staff wanted to take that responsibility on. I mean, that was very clear to us. Staff didn't want to do that. And we didn't really want staff to do that for us either. How that got left out of the RFP is just, I can't imagine how that happened, because that was important to us. And we communicated that to staff as well, that that was important to us.

We provided an RFP for council review. You discussed that. It was staff's recommendation that we, for non-bargaining, do something similar to what the bargaining units are. plus or minus based on population, which is Oregon Revised Statutes, which we do for the collective bargaining agreements. Council provided direction that they wanted to have a study and market analysis of the five cities. We provided a document for council to review. We published that. Council ultimately reviewed those RFPs and ultimately selected logic.

So back to question for logic. When on your document you say not to exceed fixed fee of $27,500, what did you mean by that?

That is within the scope of the work that was set out in the proposal. If there were additions, like additional comparators, additional jobs, additional work, that could be added to the cost of the engagement.

Thank you. So in your presentation today, you mentioned that if other comparators were brought in, that your overall picture or package would prioritize for Southern Oregon. Can you please explain what you mean by that? How would you prioritize or weight more Southern Oregon results than you would the other five?

That would be a discussion with the organization. depending, and we do this with many other clients, is that you could weight the data, if you wanted a greater weight to Southern Oregon communities, you could maybe give that a weight of 75, the other the other the additional 25 there are a number of different options for that and we would have to discuss what is appropriate for your organization you could also weigh every single organization that you survey at the same weight meaning that the data is seen as equal in that result We typically do a lot of weighting if it's between public sector and private sector data. That the organizations will give more weight to public sector than they would private sector. And the reason they want to include private sector is because some jobs have a private sector component to the potential market rate for the job.

Thank you. So the thing in the, when you talked about different factors that you could potentially bring in or that you would recommend or would be options for us, I didn't hear anything you say anything about what the median income or poverty level would be for any of the comparator cities, and it just happens that of the five cities in Southern Oregon, Grants Pass happens to be almost the exact median of poverty level and median income and things of that nature, which really made our five really, I think very useful, potentially useful to the council. But do you ever try to find cities with similar median incomes or similar poverty levels? Or how do you wait for, we'll say, a city's ability to pay, which is really of huge importance to this council. So how do you wait for that? Because I didn't hear you mention any of that.

That could possibly be one of those many factors that we've talked about in your decision making. It may not be the only factor, but it may be one of the factors to consider. And again, we can do some research for you, but it's working in conjunction with the organization to determine what the best set of factors are to determine the appropriate labor market for your organization.

Any other questions from council or comments from council? Questions I guess? Joel. We'll get to that after we're done with the questions. Any other questions from anyone? Indra.

Yes, Erin, you said council reviewed the RFP. Was that, I don't know, I must have missed that. Did that come up before council to review that or how did we review that?

Yeah, I'll pull up all the dates of when we've had those discussions, and I can get those for you. If you want me to try to do that at the moment, I'll try to pull some stuff up, but I can also provide you with additional information.

Well, I know we discussed it. I'm talking about, it sounded like you said council reviewed the actual RFP that went out. Is that what you meant, or no?

I will take a look at what I can pull up from the records.

Thank you.

So do we have any other questions for our consultant? I guess one other thing, I guess when you mentioned before that geographic differentials, what exactly, geography to me is like mountains, rivers, streams, things like that. What kind of geographic differentials are you referring to?

This would be like location to location. So grants passed may be compared to Medford.

Thank you. Okay, I guess we are finished with our consultant. Staff, do you have any other questions or comments for the consultant? No? Okay, I guess we'll move into council discussion on this. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

So, let's see, Victoria.

Yeah, we had several companies who put in bids, and we chose one. And it was very affordable. And as I remember it, I could be corrected because it was a while ago, but they were offering a lot of the services for a much lower price. And I just remember that consultant being very eager to work with us when she was online with us. And we lost that first affordable one to my estimation. It was due to just some out and out rudeness from this dais towards that company. That was my mistake. take on why we lost that particular bid. And so now we are faced with much more expensive consultant. And we just found out that it's like you go in to look for a car and you think that you're going to get all of the bells and whistles. But you find out when you go into the back room that you're only getting the base model. And it's going to be even more expensive, which that's just nothing against this consulting company. That's just the business and the way they do their business. And I'm sure they've done it with other cities as well. But I would not be for paying any more money. because we're already paying so much more for this consultant than the original contract that we had. So I don't think I voted for moving on to this consultant. And I would certainly not be for adding $5,000 more for five more cities. So that's where I stand.

Joel, you had a comment earlier?

So, I was thinking of the desired outcome of this whole effort is to have our pay scale resolved and our pay equity issues addressed and do it with an awareness of what the comparables are externally. I also realize the fact is that the addition that the contractor bid on Didn't talk necessarily about pay equity issues at least that's my understanding from what I heard from staff So what what plays the most important part to me is what is the end result and and what do we get yeah because he you know you can not spend money and then not get the end result that you need and that's a complete waste of money or it's not a really good use of money so i i think we got two options are given the way that the uh... uh... bidding contract uh... documents were prepared uh... we can uh... go ahead and pay the extra five thousand dollars for the uh... pay equity issue. I'm not sure about additional comparisons. Or we can go back and look at all of the bidders and see if any of the other bidders included that in their bid and re-look at our decision. So this one contractor in good faith has come before us with an offer that fulfilled our request. Our request really didn't include the pay equity issues. And so she pointed that out, but it's going to be an extra cost to us to have her do that. And whether the other contractors threw that in as a part of their cost, I don't know. So that's the two options we have. We can either pay the $5,000 here, because we need to get that desired result. or we can go back and look at all the bidders and see if there's somebody that met that pay equity issue, if contractually it's legal for us to do so.

Rick. I would not be in favor of expending additional monies in this, and I would still wish to honor the PAVE results of our committee, thank you.

Yes, I was against hiring a consultant to begin with. With that said, the majority council voted to award this company. In my view, I think it would be a waste to just stop and through no fault of their own, they did what the RFP asked them to do. I think throwing it out and starting over is a horrible idea. So if we have to spend a little more money, So I think we need to do that to get this done. I would disagree though with the 5,000 on internal equity. I'd be more interested in the recommendation to expand the geographic differentials. that balance local market concerns. So I guess I would be more concerned about adjusting fair market wages for the positions. And I don't understand why our own staff, we're in the process of getting a new HR director, can't solve the equity issues in-house. the cost that we're already paying our staff to do so I would be more for doing that and and it was a thousand I think a thousand per org added organization I don't know how many would be added but to me just getting the base market equity raises or wages would be more important to me than the compression compaction, because that's always going to be changing. As we hire people at different levels, as they move laterally within the organization, And we have a lot of long-term employees. I don't see that as a major factor for people quitting or leaving or not taking jobs. It just doesn't appear to be that. So that would be my preference.

Kathleen.

Yeah, I have the sentiments of... not paying extra. We were given five suggestions, solutions, and I'm gonna go with number one, and that is just using the five cities in southern Oregon, which to me is what it depends on. I don't think we lose a lot of people to northern cities or out of state cities or wherever. I just wanna point out that in a summary of high performance organization that we got, one of the qualifiable benefits in our city is our retention factor. It says many employees plan to stay until retirement, citing meaningful work and supportive culture. And I thought we were in the process of fixing the current, the acute pay equity situations, and that we would continue to address that as they came up. So, I'm in favor of going with the first solution and staying with the Southern Oregon cities.

Anyone else? Okay. Yeah, with the, what occurred to me when the consultant said that the It's very difficult to make good matches across the board with just these five cities. I mean, it seems to me that these five cities basically deal with the same issues that we deal with. I mean, they've got fire departments, they have public works departments, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And while the titles might be slightly different from one city to another, the same basic jobs are being done in all these cities. You know, we might again, we may not get matches with the exact titles, but I just don't see how our city is uniquely different than the others. It would seem to me that the matches would be close enough because we're really similar. And the big advantage too is that We're right in the middle of median income for the five cities. The median income I think goes from 73,000 down to 46,000, 73,000 in Medford down to 46,000 in Klamath, and GP, median household income, is 59, which is almost exactly in the middle. So just these five are really, make a lot of sense to me on that. on a lot of different levels. As far as the danger that we have, or we may have, the potential liabilities we have on internal inequities, that does concern me. I wouldn't want to come out of this and then immediately have a problem that we get sued for or lose a lawsuit for that was easy to address. That was most of our concern. I also just have to make one comment about the group that we, the inexpensive group that we didn't hire. They were clearly a startup. They had very, very little experience or examples that they could cite for us. They were giving us entry market, basically market penetration pricing, a super low price. And as soon as they were asked for examples of their work, That's where the discussion stopped. When you have someone who's got a super low price, is basically a startup in the field, and doesn't want to give you any examples of their work, we couldn't go forward. Actually, they decided not to go forward. They didn't have it. They didn't have what we asked for. So, I guess we have two issues here. We have two issues of, if we're gonna move forward with this, are we gonna move forward with just five cities, our Southern Oregon, comparable cities, or are we gonna expand it and pay extra and expand it? That would be one issue. And then the other issue would be, would we want the consultant to give us their opinion on how to resolve compression and internal equities of the of the non-bargaining group. So if we want to divide this up, we can divide this up. Or we can, I guess, the other options is we can go back and look at one of the other companies, the most expensive company. I don't necessarily have an appetite for that. Does anyone want to go back and look at what the most expensive company was going to offer us? Because there was one more that I think was like $36,000, if I remember correctly.

so that that's out we're not we're not going back to look at the more expensive company Indra I will just suggest that we find a way to work with this company to get what we want so we're not starting over if that's agreeable to people I would agree with that anyone else comment on that Kathleen well we were given five options I think we could

Vote on those options, what options everybody can agree on.

OK. And working with the company might be what Kathleen wanted to do, just going forward with what we already decided.

Five options are, yeah. So I guess, yeah, the first option, obviously, is that this company didn't offer us. The first option would have been to go back to get another company, go back to the 36,000. I'm just saying that's the first thing that we're ruling out, or we're going to decide on. So, Eric.

Yeah, my thoughts are, you know, to what end, you know, where are we going to put a limit down? I mean, how much more are we going to spend? Are we going to... Cut it off at some point. I mean because they say we do agree with a Certain amount of cities and then they come back and they say well, that's still not enough Okay, how how far are we gonna go to what end is my question? We were we were promised in a sense one thing and now That's it's coming back to us as far as oh, that's know that That's, we need more and that's not, we're gonna change it up. So I mean, so we need something, we need to put a cap on it in some way or something. But right now my, I'm favoring option number one, if at all. And then hopefully when we, hopefully the HR director can, pick up where this study leaves off.

Okay.

So does everyone have the five option list in front of them? Rick's not holding up the right list. It looks like this. It was sent out by Aaron the other day. It was one way that we got it. So it's got a blue first page. Okay.

At the end of the presentation, there's a four questions of counsel, and if you wanted to counsel to just go ahead and go through, that's on page, slide eight. That might be a good way to go, too, if you'd like. The consultant was asking four things of council. One, they were asking if council was interested in extending to 10 organizations. Two, was council interested in geographic differential? Three, did council want to do an internal equity study? And four, did council want to schedule certain future work sessions to talk about and have an education session on methodology and study processes?

Okay. Okay, so if we, there's four things you said or there's five? Because I'm looking at four.

Well, I see four based on the presentation from today. Right. Slide eight.

They're the same options.

I was looking at decision steps, the four council decision steps that the consultant was wanting to get council.

Well, from page three on her presentation, there are five options. Okay. I mean, you could potentially pick and choose from these five and come up probably with your own, but she presented five to us here.

Okay, so where are we? So are we going back then to the five options, or are we going with today's presentation, which had the I guess, the four decision and next steps, or how do those fit together? How do those fit together?

So really, and, Councillor, it's a good point. So slide number six that they're talking about with the five, the five is really the four at the end. The number one is just to continue to proceed. So really, you've got four policy questions in front of you. The four policy questions are, do you want to extend to 10? Do you want to include geographic approach? Do you want to look at expanding scope to include internal equity issues? And do you want to have additional training on salary study structures and methodology? Those are the four things. Those are the four policy direction questions they're looking for. And that can be found on slide eight, page four of the handout. Kathleen.

All of those four would increase the price as far as I can see. And when we're looking at the five options that you gave us in the memo, number one does not increase the price at all.

So number one technically really isn't an option because you were in contract with them to do the service, to do the five comparators. So it wasn't a policy decision that was needed. They will continue to move forward with the proposal as we have in place, but they came to you with these four policy questions.

The first consultant that we hired did comparators as well, and so with this one, council decided specifically to focus on Southern Oregon, which is why we asked for five Southern Oregon comparables. So I don't see that we should change that and maybe we can, she can use the data or we can from the previous comparables we spent a lot of money on.

You make a good point, but I absolutely would not want to use any data that came from Dr. McGrath. I want to burn her information because I don't feel that it was straight either. I just don't. Maybe I get sued by Dr. McGrath for saying that, but I don't want to use Dr. McGrath's stuff. Seth, did you have something to say?

Yeah, I was going to say, similar to what Andrew just said, I mean, we set out to specifically pick five local to Southern Oregon. So I think we should move forward as planned. I was surprised about the internal equity piece, but that does seem like an option that if we really wanted to, could be done later. It seems like it's almost a separate thing that they would have to do on their end. So again, I think we just move forward as is with the five comparators from Southern Oregon.

I would agree that the Southern Oregon comparator should be sufficient. I would want to make it clear to the consultant that they do their best to try to align things even if the job titles are not the exact same wording, they have to be similar. Our cities are fairly similar in the services that they offer the citizens. So I would want them, rather than come back with a lot of, we'll say, empty spots or not available or whatever, I'd like them to do their best to line things up with similar job duties as best they can, rather than have blank spaces. If they can't do that, that's a major problem. Then I don't know that they would be of any value to us. But they should be able, I believe, they should be able to come close. And that's the instructions I'd like to leave them with. As far as the... The pay equity piece, personally, it sounds like the majority doesn't want to go for this, I personally would want to pay extra for the pay equity piece, and hopefully our HR director, month by month and year by year, can keep us in compliance, as when we get an HR director, hopefully they can keep us in compliance on a monthly or an annual basis. But I would like to know where we stand, and I'd like to know what an outside professional's opinion is on how we come up with defensible positions for that. My understanding is that state law that changed in 23 creates some potential liabilities for pay inequities. And I'd like to hear from an outside an outside opinion on exactly how grave is our danger there, and what we could do to minimize it. And then I think that our HR director should be able to keep us appraised, or prized I should say, and then also in compliance. So I would be for keeping the five, why don't we vote first on whether or not we're gonna try to expand the comparator list. Does... We need to have someone make a motion that we're going to keep the comparator list as the five. Someone want to make a motion to do that?

I'll move to keep the comparator list at five.

OK. And seconded by Kathleen. And any discussion on that? OK. Indra, how do you vote on that?

Yes.

Seth?

Yes.

Yes. Joel? Yes. Kathleen?

Yes.

Eric? Yes. Victoria?

No.

And Rick? No. Okay. So that passes 6-2. We keep it at the five cities. And hopefully we can give the instructions to the consultant to do their best and not come up with very many not-availables and do their best to line things up. And then second... unless someone else has something else they want to bring up to me. Second is, do we want the consultant to address and give us suggestions how to address any internal equity and compression issues that they come up with along the way? Do we want the consultant's opinion on how to do that? I personally want that, so any further discussion on that? And the reason I want it is just that I think that it legally would be the smartest move and give us the most defensible positions if we ended up with any kind of pay equity lawsuit. Joel.

Well, we need to make a decision, so I'll go ahead and make a motion, and whether it passes or not, that's fine. I'll make a motion that we go with that option, let me see here, option four, to add the internal equity framework. It would cost an additional $5,000, and it wasn't in the original request for proposals.

Okay. We have a second on that? I'll second it. And any discussion? Joel, how do you vote? Yes. Kathleen?

No.

Eric?

No.

Victoria? No. Rick? No. Indra?

No.

Seth? And I vote yes. So that measure fails 6-2. Is there anything else that council feels we need to decide on this today?

We're good.

Staff, are we clear on where we're going? To you? Clear to you?

Oh, yes. Continue as is, and they'll continue to work with the five southern regional cities as comparators. Okay.

All right. Thank you. We're now gonna discuss the blighted building code and who is it that's giving us a presentation? Who's this guy?

This is, I believe Justin was introduced at a previous city business meeting, but this is our new principal planner, Justin Giddensburg. He actually comes to us from Central Point. But before that, he was Grants Pass. So he's been with Grants Pass for a number of years before coming back. So he saw the light and he came back to the wonderful community of Grants Pass to serve us well.

Thank you, Aaron, members of the council. So I just have a brief presentation here, a little discussion on blighted buildings and property maintenance in general. So we'll talk property maintenance, how to address blighted buildings, do a quick overview of some of the current city options that we have, compare that to some other Oregon communities, and then just have a discussion on furthering our goal of public safety by at least addressing compliance for some emerging issues. So I believe that this was brought up at a previous discussion Specifically about a particular property on H Street that had some boarded windows The property owner has been contacted. There's really no development plan or redevelopment plan on that It's been that way for quite some time and just a little bit of frustration on some lack of options and enforcement here at the city So these are our current options. There is a nuisance ordinance in Title V of the Municipal Code, but that's really focused on public health issues, which are generally unsanitary conditions, stagnant water, debris, things laying around the property, things that are generally pretty dangerous. And then also addresses attractive nuisances, things that we would see as blight or dangerous. And one source that I saw described it as sort of an unsupervised playground for kids, you know, places that you wouldn't want your children to go and play and it could be very dangerous. So the other item that I found was in our building codes. These are the adopted building codes that our building official enforces. And this particular code is pretty common around Oregon. It's the abatement of dangerous buildings. But again, this is really focused on the dangerous, derelict structures. You have something falling down, pieces falling off into the public right-of-way or on the sidewalk, things like that. The building official can come in and cite them. For a violation for repairs things like that So something new that's coming up is a new grant for the urban renewal area Or the urban renewal agency, so this is specific to vandalism only there is $5,000 per incident for that but again It's just due to to vandalism so broken windows graffiti things like that specifically to the structure and that's only within the urban renewal district and So looking at some other communities, we could probably reorder these a little bit, kind of put Medford, Portland, and Eugene all at the top. They focus pretty heavily on property maintenance. And then you get into like to Bend and then Ashland that do a little bit less. And so the biggest difference with the property maintenance Medford, I think primarily, but then also with Portland and Eugene, they have these custom codes and they really look at appearance and kind of aesthetics, whereas smaller communities like Grants Pass, we generally rely on state level specialty codes, so we're looking at more safety as opposed to what the property Looking at Bend specifically, they actually include derelict structures as an attractive nuisance, so they add that into their definition so that they can actually enforce on something that's not just falling down, but needs a little bit of maintenance or repair, things like that. So that's all I have for my presentation. I'm happy to answer questions, further discussion if you guys need clarification, have ideas.

Questions from council? Rick.

Thank you for the presentation. So if we want to proceed on that course, what would be the next course of action you would need from us to do something?

updating the municipal code to, I guess it's really how you guys want to enforce and proceed from that point. If you're thinking more along the lines of just adding something to the municipal code to see if that would work for enforcing on this particular building or in general, I think scope of the city, do you want it just commercial, do you want it residential, those sorts of questions.

Yeah, really just getting an additional direction from council on how far reaching you'd like to have our codes go with regards to building facade and improvements. If we had a general direction of council that, hey, you know what, we don't have enough tools or resources to help with regards to the aesthetics of some of the buildings in the community, then if we had a general idea or spirit of where you'd like to go, we could draft something for your review for a future workshop or business meeting. if you wanted to go that route, and then talk about from the standpoint of the code enforcement side of it also, and responsibilities, but.

Okay, in discussion, I'd be happy to share that, thank you.

Joel.

I had two questions. Having it in the code is one thing enforcing it is another like we had the lady on Washington Boulevard for the property owner and the the fire hazard is the city Once it's codified willing to enforce it I

Well, yes, we are willing to enforce. We enforce all the codes. The question is how proactive, depending on the code itself. So we have a multiple number of codes out there, and we have different mechanisms for enforcement. So that would be one item that we would want to discuss, is from a resource perspective, Do you want to have this very actively patrolled, or is it complaint-driven type of thing? But we do have resources, and we would enforce. It's just how...

So the question I think Joel has is, what triggers enforcement? What would trigger enforcement, Aaron?

Well, health and safety violations would definitely be a key number one priority. Other things that would trigger enforcement would be complaint-driven enforcement, if there's individuals or groups that see a violation or have concerns about the aesthetics or the condition of a structure they can file a complaint very similar to the way we have our current codes nuisance violation codes right now i wouldn't see a change in that unless we had some kind of uh level of service direction from council well just to comment on that one of the things i think that the city has the responsibility to do if something is dangerous that we don't wait for a complaint

Or if it's hazardous to the children or whatever that don't wait for me to complain about it if it's in there if it's a violation of the code that that we should for the for the public good Be proactive on those things And so we can we can discuss that as part of this, but I don't think we want to wait on complaints for things that are dangerous The other question I had was There's a lot of, so council direction, council discretion, which is an interesting word, that's a good word. Those different codes, you're more familiar with it and you're, you know, for me to make a decision on that and not have that familiarity, so I gotta be educated, right? And one of the things I think could be important and a good way to do it in a democracy is to have our farming out and have staff work with one of our committees to go over that and then have it come back to council in a way that's a little more easy to digest and that the meat is chewed up a little bit so that I understand what the choices are. and not to have to do it up here on the dais, but to have that staff work in coordination with a committee, do that homework for us. I think that's what they're there for.

Kathleen.

Okay, so what I think I heard you say was that Grants Pass is governed mostly by state codes.

They're the specialty codes. Sorry to interrupt.

So I'm wondering, how much more inclusive is Medford's code? It sounded like they have a more all-inclusive code. And what would be the difference between what we have now and what they have?

Yeah, so Medford adopted a completely separate code. It's the International Property Maintenance Code. So it's very extensive and they have dedicated staff. I think a separate department that actually goes out for enforcement. Yeah, so it's very comprehensive and very expansive what they do.

Does it address buildings that are just vacant year after year after year after year? Maybe they've kept it up minimally so that it doesn't go against any of the codes, but yet there's no resolving what's gonna happen with the buildings. Is there any kind of codes like that?

I think that falls under the property maintenance code that Medford has as far as if a building is quote unquote blighted, that they can require whether it be boarded and then I think they can go back, and if somebody's not doing something with it, that they can enforce on that as being unsightly. That would take a little bit more research on our part.

Okay, Victoria.

Are we still in question? Question, I think, yeah. So where, this would be for staff, where do you think our code is lacking? I mean, this came up because you,

believe it's lacking somewhere so generally where is the deficiency so I'm gonna take one stab at that first the context I think what what brought this up is that I had a couple of constituents come to me about a particular building downtown that in the central business district There's an active business next door to it. It's on H Street. And for about 11 years, the building has been boarded up, plywood over glass. The glass was never broken, but plywood over glass. And so the restaurant owner that's trying to run the business next door said, this is a really bad look. People don't even want to come down this part of the street. Isn't there any code that can address An appearance thing like this that's going on for 11 years. He had reached out to the building owner. He offered to buy the building. Um, but the owners were not going to do anything and they weren't going to sell it. So that's how this discussion started. It wasn't staff saying they thought that the code was lacking. This came, this was constituent driven. And then it came through me at a agenda setting. that we could discuss this and see if there's anything we could do in that situation if somebody's next to what a lot of the other cities would define as a derelict building, one that has basically looked terrible for a decade and kind of bringing the values of the property down.

So there's no code? There's nothing currently that we can use to address anything like that?

So we have somewhat of a laissez-faire code compared to some other areas like the city of Medford. Ultimately, I think today's discussion, and so we do not have some of the tools in our toolbox to take a look at blighted buildings as much as some communities. I think today's discussion from a standpoint of what would be most productive, of course for staff, but potentially for council, is do you want to look at providing additional tools, code enforcement tools, to deal with these blighted conditions or conditions of buildings that may not be favorable to commerce, Council does desire that, we will draft options for you. We don't need to discuss all the options today because there are a lot out there. This is an initial discussion of would you like to provide additional tools for the city? And if so, that would be, I think, a great thing to have in your conversation and we will bring something to you to then discuss those tools. And you can tell us what tools that you'd like to implement that we've seen that work well in other communities.

So Aaron, this is a situation that I've heard come up a couple of times with vacant buildings that are downtown. So it seems that this has probably come before the city before. But is that not true? Or is this like, because it seems like I've heard it before for maybe even many years.

I think there's just been a general community discussion about some. We all know some of the buildings out there that have either, they look like they've just never been used for 20 years. And there's some, like Councilor Pell said, that have been boarded up. And there's codes that are out there that we could implement that you can't have boarded up windows. Or once a window's broken, it needs to be repaired at a certain amount of time. and those kind of, there are codes that we can utilize to help with the aesthetics of our community. And we have never had a formal discussion on the dais about changing our policies to implement those type of tools. But we would be more than willing to bring those forward to council if you so desired.

Did, oh, one more question then. Did I just hear you say we do have codes that have addressed it, but we've never utilized them?

No, no, no. We don't have codes to specifically address some of the things, but we'd be more than willing to suggest some codes if that's where council wants to go, and then you can sort of pick and choose what type of level of policy change you'd like to have when it comes to those blighted structures.

So the reason that when this was brought to me about, I don't know, maybe six months or a year ago. But the reason that, to me, it seemed appropriate to bring up now is because we passed our vandalism grant So if somebody has broken windows due to no fault of their own, we, the city, we're willing to help them make their storefront look reasonable again. So it seemed to me that if we are willing to provide help with the most common, we'll say blight we have downtown, which might be broken windows, and we're willing to provide help for that, we might be able to take that a step further and try to make the neighborhoods look a little better. We do have facade grants and everything else to help people. So we're willing to offer help, the city's willing to offer help, especially after we passed the vandalism grant up to $5,000 per occurrence for a broken window. Since we're willing to do that, in return I think that our neighborhoods maybe deserve a professional better look. So that's kind of why this came up at this time. Indra.

So when we talk about blighted buildings, we have an idea of what that is. One of the other problems is, I mean, who determines that, I guess I want to ask. Would it be specifically detailed of what a blighted building is? For the appearance nuisances, who determines what is a bad appearance or not? Is it specifically described?

in some of the property maintenance codes it is you know some of the communities Medford has amended that code so that could be up to grants passes what what I quote blighted building. And I would caution that blight is defined in the ORS for other purposes. So most communities use like derelict building, dangerous building, attractive nuisance, things like that. And then they have some aesthetic requirements on there. So if, for example, if A window gets broken and it's boarded up to prevent additional entry or vandalism or something like that. It could be sized just for that size window and then secured so people can't gain entry and then painted to match the building, something like that, for example.

OK. And then is there anything, because obviously you're balancing property rights with use of property or what it looks like in code. for vacant buildings that aren't in bad shape but first whatever reason the owners don't need to fill them for years and years and you have a lot is there anything that addresses that again I think that's back for for council discussion but generally not if they're maintained they're not dangerous you know there's there's nothing that says you can't have a vacant building

Yeah, Joel.

So we owned a business. We changed our office. Our landlord was Asante. The building was abandoned. What happens is, I don't know if the police know this or not, but somebody took over the building with crime. and uh... ran a drug operation out of there for probably half a year i didn't know about it i went back and try to get some furniture they got their office set up inside an abandoned building so that the nuisances out we we need to look at it That's what I'm saying. We need to look at it. I don't need to come to an answer today, but we need to look at the different options. I still like the idea of having a committee explore those options for us, because that's what they're there for. But we need to proceed with some examination because we got a lot of buildings right now, not a lot, but there's some that are vacant. And I know what happened in the office that we vacated, and it wasn't pretty.

Victoria.

Are we in discussion?

I guess we, unless there's any more questions, I guess we moved into discussion. Yeah.

So I think it's really worth looking for, looking at, and really important to look at. But I would, so I would love for staff to look and to come back and to tell us what, should we go the Medford route? Probably not, too expensive. That's kind of what I was hearing. But I would want to make sure that property rights were the utmost in consideration for our municipal code looking at this. And then I would also want to make sure that we weren't solving a problem that didn't exist. So we obviously have some codes. So I would be also interested in looking at how the the enforcement that we already have, where is it perceived that it is failing, and then how could it be improved while balancing at the utmost property rights. And then I also just, as a general observation, there are a lot of reasons that buildings are empty and businesses are having difficult times that have nothing to do with grants passed and have everything to do with the state of Oregon. And so those are things that we can't necessarily solve for. So I would just caution to, I don't want to be a part of a city that creates a municipal code that is very punitive for citizens because I think it's better for governments to have... Less government is always better. So I would want to make sure that we really optimize property rights and understand that there are reasons for the hard times that people are having in their buildings. So I would just...

caution about moving forward with a with the heavy hand of the Municipal Code enforcement that's just my my take Rick imparted that when I was at Josephine County Planning one thing we found is one thing that was very controversial when the complaint was staff driven versus citizen driven, so I would want to see the emphasis to be staff driven. Of course, there could be situations where there could be an extreme situation of public safety and so forth that fire or police would want to step in without having to have the input from the citizen. Thank you.

I know one thing to consider when you have citizen driven complaints, there are often times when citizens to report things. That happens a lot. And I see it downtown a lot. People come to me. I literally have had other business owners come to me in tears with certain things and they will not put their name to what their observation was or what their complaint was. I'm like, you know, without your name to it, I'm sorry. I'm just not going to help you, you know. But so staff, I think when staff sees obvious I think it's important that staff does it too. Otherwise, I would pretty much agree with everything that Victoria just said about being careful not to be heavy handed. But I'll also say that I think that certainly in the central business district, it may not mean that be that much in other parts of the city, but in the central business district, I think there's a reasonable expectation that business and property owners have that the property next door will at least have glass in the front windows. as opposed to being boarded up. And so, even though that's kind of an extreme example, but we have one of those right now, and we have our grant program that's willing to help them with that. So I don't believe that would be overly punitive, I don't believe that would be too heavy handed, because we're willing to help people with that. But I think it's a reasonable expectation that business and property owners could expect that the building next to them or nearby doesn't look you know, that it's got glass in the front window at a minimum. So I would agree that we'd like to hear, that I'd like to hear from staff to come back with those considerations. Indra.

I would also like to hear the options. I would not want to have a nuisance appearance for residential, just businesses, in my opinion. And Brad's not here, but I... we have a lot of empty buildings and to me that's a blight too and i get that i mean i'm all for property rights but how many years it really is a um makes our economic development in the city look bad because when people see you know buildings for years empty empty um it's just it's not uplifting and who wants to go in you know there and I don't know why I don't you know I'm so I'm hoping I don't think we need an ordinance against that or or anything like he said it's it's people have the choice to lose money and not have tenants or whatever, but we have a lot of out of town landlords that aren't really invested in the community that don't care. I guess, I'm assuming if they're vacant and it looks horrible and it's not an advantage for the businesses in our community. And so I'm hoping that our economic development department works with the, I don't know how closely the relationship that the city works with those landlords to try to find out what the problem is and why they don't have tenants. I think that's important. That might be another issue, but I think that would be important as well to know. But I'm all for moving forward with options for businesses for appearance.

So, Aaron, did you want to say something?

Yeah, I think there's some commonality here within the conversations. If council's okay, what we'll do is staff will come back to council, schedule a workshop, work with the mayor and council president to have a discussion about this, specifically with three items that I'm hearing, to discuss vacant building regulations, nuisance code increases, and then how do we deal with those things from an enforcement perspective. and we'll schedule a workshop for that future discussion, which will then provide you an opportunity to balance, you were talking about what you'd like to enforce, or including your codes and enforcement, so we can bring that forward at a future workshop.

Everyone good with that? Thumbs up on that? Thanks, Aaron.

I'm good with what Aaron is proposing, thank you.

Yeah, all right. Okay. Next up, we've got Police Headquarters Refinance. And JC will take it away. Somebody close my PDFs, please.

Good afternoon council, I have just a brief presentation and then hopefully get some direction from you guys. The relationship to council goals is public safety and fiscal stability. So most of this is gonna be background, and then there'll be a decision point. So on May 1st of 2019, City Council authorized a full faith and credit financing for the public, or what was then called the Public Safety Building. It is now the police headquarters. A full faith and credit refers to a legal pledge by a local government to repay its debt using all of its legal taxing power to meet interests and principal payments. So this is general fund backed, and for our definition, it is supported by property taxes. On June 6, 2019, a FFC debt was awarded to Wells Fargo. The principal was $6 million. There was a 10-year term. There is a seven-year call option, which is a refinancing slash payment point. The approximate interest rate is two and a half. The approximate payments is about $510,000 for the first seven years, and then the final three years is a little bit over $1.1 million, and that is an increase of $600,000 per year. There's a remaining principal balance of about $3.2, $3.3 million. And in front of you, I've got some different colored pieces of paper. The white piece of paper labeled with Exhibit A, is the actual current debt service schedule. And you can see the final three years, if my laser pointer's gonna work here, are those 1.1-ish million dollars. So why is this important? Budgetarily, council has authorized the spending of up to 19.2% of the general fund for its fund balance of fiscal year 27 in its budget. The policy, though, is measured by the ending annual comprehensive financial report that requires a 25% fund balance. So increased debt service would draw, obviously, that fund balance faster. And as a reminder, 1% of the general fund is about $460,000. So this increase is gonna take at least 1% more. So the call to action, kinda have four options for you today to consider. The payoff of 3.2, 3.3-ish million dollars, you could just pay it all up front. You can continue with the current payment plan, which is, again, Exhibit A is the white piece of paper. You can refinance around the current $510,000 payments, which that is going to be my recommendation, and that is your blue piece of paper, and that's the schedule in front of you. I see some people digging around, so I'll go slower. And then the next is just as a, if you wanted to elongate the term, so there's a 10-year example, which is the purple. And then this pinkish color is a 15-year term. And you'll notice that the interest rates are a little bit different for each of those because of the term length. This is all an estimation too. So this was done for us by our consultants on July 14th. They did put some cushion in there, but I'm guessing that with the change in interest rates that have gone up recently, some of that cushion has potentially gone away. So we could see this as a full rate. We could see something that's slightly less, but this was just an estimation of what those payments may be. And with that, I will take any questions.

Thank you for a good presentation, J.C. So the latest monitoring, we always monitor the budget. The latest monitoring, what is our fund balance in the general fund? Not what is the, the 25% is the requirement, but what is the actual spending and the fund balance now?

So it's close to about $15 million is where we're going to estimate as of right now, but we still have months of doing the financials and closing the fiscal year 26. So what was the amount again? I'm sorry. It's about 33% for the beginning fund balance for fiscal year 27, when we recalculated, about $15 million, which is really close to where we estimated us to be at, that beginning balance of fiscal year 27. So it's really close to where we budgeted, and we budgeted to spend down from that 33-ish percent all the way down to about 19.2%.

So we're at 33% now, if I heard you correctly. Okay, and how many dollars is that? Fifteen million. Fifteen million, okay. My hearing battery went out, so I apologize.

You're good. Statistically, and we'll bring it up probably here in two weeks with the level of service. Statistically, we've been around this $15 million for the last four or five-ish years. Sure. That $15 million used to also be 43% because the expenditure budget was so much lower.

I need to ask this question. It's kind of a scary question, but I need to ask it. So if we... project a percentage of the general fund carryover based on our monitoring, not based on the budget with any unspent obligations that always happen, how many dollars would we be above that 25% fund balance?

It's got that's not really easy to answer Because the amount is going to change next year's budget So it's going to go up because costs are increasing and so every dollar potentially and I haven't estimated what fiscal year 28 is gonna look like But every dollar is going to be less impactful if that makes sense so the same 15 million dollars if we held flat is going to be less than 33 percent the following year and

So, I didn't hear a dollar figure there.

And, again, off the top of my head, I wouldn't be able to predict that right now.

Okay. Right now, at 33 percent, it's 15 million. By the end of the year, what, we're three-fourths of the way through the year?

Yeah. So, I would guess by the end of this next year, we're going to go down another three to five percent in fund balance to where we end.

Okay. So, we'd be down to about 30 percent for this year? And that would be then about $13 million?

Not necessarily. Okay.

I was just doing a quick proration. Yeah, if expenditures actually stayed. If it's down 3%, that's 1 11th.

Yeah, it's a little bit different because expenditures are going to go up and that's going to change what that calculation ends up being. But there would be more than the $3.2 million significantly. Probably.

Yeah. Up to maybe three times the amount.

Could be. And again, if you instill a different level of service requirement, too, in the meantime, that's going to change the calculation as well.

And if we did that, it would come with some risk. Yeah.

Okay. Eric.

Thank you. I had a question in terms of for the general public. So, you may... For your staff recommendation, can you explain why it is exactly why the recommendation you're making for everybody's knowledge, why it is the best option in your eyes?

Yeah, so I'm making the recommendation to refinance at that about eight-year term because our current payments are about $510,000. So we can keep with that eight-year term the payments the exact same for the next eight years and not be any more of a draw to the general fund or less of a draw. and continue with potentially our current-ish funding source. Now that's obviously gonna be a conversation moving forward. Also, it allows for us to start thinking about or planning what is the next public facility that we potentially need to put in place or have a plan to replace after the end of that eight years. So you could buttress that next debt service issuance for the next facility for the next 15 years and stay around that half a million dollars.

Okay, and then how does that compare to the other options that we have?

So the other options is you pay more money up front, right, and then you have less of an obligation for debt service, but you're obviously gonna have to use more cash, so that'll draw down your fund balance, which again, we're already having issues, and we're gonna have C cost increase, and that percentage requirement by policy is 25%, so we're gonna get there faster. The other is if you go longer term, yes, you do reduce that payment, you do reduce some of that um requirement of the general fund but you're also now elongating how much longer those payments are going to need to be made and if you look at the total you can see kind of the the difference in total debt service for each one of those options and what that looks like as well thank you so much really appreciate it andre

So we have three years left on this, and I understand that it goes up quite a bit. We cannot afford to just pay this off in three years at the $1 million?

You would need to probably reduce services or add a new funding source or increase the funding sources that you have. So whether it's the public safety utility fee, increasing franchise fees, something that hits the end consumer would have to happen for you to increase fees, or potentially if you're gonna try and keep that fund balance policy over the 25%, you're gonna have to change or reduce the services that we're providing.

Or tighten our belt and cut spending.

Cutting spending at this point would drastically change the level of service.

victoria so tell me if i'm understanding this generally correctly so if we choose what you're recommending will keep our payments the same it will be will extend those for roughly five years past what we would have if we just stay with what we are doing but will we will just But we aren't going to have those three balloon type payments. And so that's going to be easier year to year on the budget, obviously. But what question I had is, did I hear you say that the current interest rate was two something or something for the loan? And then what would it be for the, well, it seems to me then It seems we're going to pay about $800,000 more if we go with the recommended refinance, which is going to obviously be much more affordable year to year. But is that about right? It'll add about $800,000 overall, but easier to pay.

It's easier to pay. You're hitting all the notes. So just as an estimate on each one of the colored sheets, you can see... the length of term changes the interest rate. So at 15 years, you're looking at close to 5.1%, the 10 years about 4.95%, and the eight years about 4.85. We are in a completely different market than we were back in 2019. And so that's why there's such a change in the interest rate. But I would focus more on the total payment at this point and how we can ease that potential balloon payment over the next Eight years.

Yeah, okay. Thank you.

Joel, you have something else?

And you might have mentioned this in passing. I just wanted to emphasize it if you hadn't. So if it was paid off, we would save approximately $700,000 in interest?

Yeah.

And that's on the refinance part. On the existing part of... continuing the current payment plan, well, it wouldn't be cumulative. It would be one or the other.

Right, but you also have to take into consideration the cash that you're using You're going to use between five and eight percent of the general funds fund bonds to make those current payments, right?

so if we paid off the three point two million dollars out of the fund are we to have some risk our Percentage would go down in the general fund. We'd still be above 25% I'm guessing though. It would be based on the actual not on the budgeted And we would save about $700,000, conservative, $700,000.

Correct, but you're also going to exponentiate the decision point for council.

You're going to what?

Exponentiate. So you have potentially a two-ish maybe year, 24 months, where it's going to be a hard line of 25%. You make this $3.2 million payment. We're going to be talking about that right now. Sure.

I understand.

Okay.

couple questions and I didn't hear you cover this if you did I apologize for asking again but so there's err to pay this off well actually the reverse of my questions if we refinance is there any prepayment penalty if we decided to if we've decided to refinance and then in a year we decided then to pay it off

I don't believe so. I think that's where our seven-year call window is at. We can pay off at any point in time from this point forward. What I would think is why I'm recommending it is we just take care of that now and refinance now. That way we're not using $600,000 plus of the general fund in excess of what we're currently paying in debt service.

So if we refinance, then in the future there's no prepayment penalty? or that's the way we would do it. So is there, what's the limitation on where the funds can come from? obviously there are some funds you can't use for that. So what's the limitation? What funds can we use to pay this off?

It's an interesting question. It's a general fund building that services a general fund purpose. You can't use water, wastewater, stormwater, which are all of our restricted funds. And so when you're talking about eligible dollars, there aren't a lot. We may be able to use some LB interest earnings, but we've We don't have those as of right now. We don't have extra LB money because general fund normally gives to those LB funds and projects. So there's not really another fund of money to pull this from.

So what about any funds from building sales?

So technically, building is restricted to the building program, what it takes to run and operate the building safety program.

Well, I think he was talking about the system development charge.

No, no, I'm talking about any, yeah, funds from excess properties, et cetera.

So all of our excess properties go to funding affordable housing system development charge incentives. That was done by resolution. So if you wanted to change that, you could change that by resolution and potentially use those funds.

Thank you.

because I guess one thing that just immediately pops into mind is we didn't really go out to buy it or shop for it, but we ended up with the Yankee Pot Roast building. At the time that we got it, there was discussion about potentially selling it when it was vacant, and it's finally vacant, and we finally don't need it for a resting site, and my guess is it's probably $500,000 or $600,000, and I'm just wondering if we could pay back a substantial part of this loan, even if we refinance it, can we pay down a, substantial part of this loan using proceeds from selling a building like that.

That probably goes for the other facilities that we have. If council so chooses to sell off property and wants to change the dedication of property sales away from those SDC incentives into something else, we could take a look at that. I do know with the MuniCorp discussion coming back around, that's a potential site for office space is the Yankee pot roast as well.

Thank you. Any other questions for JC? Seeing none, thank you. We'll bring it to council discussion. Victoria.

So from what I heard from everyone, I think, and from JC, it just seems like it makes sense to do the refinance at the eight-year to keep the payments the same, and we'll be able to pay it off in seven years if we are able to. So I would just like to make a motion to refinance the current, and it will be about $510,000 payments over the course of eight years.

We have a second from Rick. And any further discussion? Joel.

So, Victoria, would you be amendable to if the property sale, the money from the property sales can use to pay down those new bonds? Or at the end of the year, if we got 33% or 30% left over in the general fund, that we take half of the surplus of over 25% and apply it to those bonds as well, trying to save up to $800,000 of interest?

I think those are really good ideas, but I think that's something we can come back and do if those things present themselves, which I would be very willing to do. But right now, I don't think I would want to limit it that way. Oh, and JC is...

So I'm going to add something. This doesn't work like a mortgage on your own personal loans. You can't just make extra payments to these. These are basically... Separate issuances of debt on their own and they have their own terms that they can only be made as far as what is on the schedule Not that you can kind of buy down future interest by making an extra payment a year too early But we would still be able to do we would still be able as a council to come back and do what?

What Joel is presenting generally? I mean, wouldn't we but we don't we don't want to limit ourselves right now with it. I

I will work with the consultant to see what prepayment terms look like in our contract. That also provide us the best interest rate, and we are going to sell these publicly, so we are going to get bids for the best interest rate as well.

So I think they're great ideas, Joel, and I'd be for them, but I wouldn't want to add them to this right now.

Well, I'll be voting no.

Joel, can you elaborate? Why would you, what don't you like about that?

I just hate to spend money, public money on interest when we don't have to.

Thank you. Indra.

I will also be voting no and I'll go back to that buying a car analogy. I mean, you go in and whatever monthly payment you can pay, that's what they'll make you at, no matter what the interest rate or what the price is. And it's kind of what we're doing now. We've been paying $500, whatever, we'll keep at that for five more years. Debt is a burden to the taxpayers. And if you look at the thousands of dollars, tens of thousands more that we're going to be paying in the long term, I don't think that's a great idea. And I mean, 500 grand more a year for the next three years is a heavy lift probably, but I feel like we can do it if we tighten our belts. I mean, we spend a lot of money and we find money for lots of things. And I get that it's... It's sometimes dedicated, but I really feel like we can work to pay this off, have us debt-free from this at least in three years, which I think would be an enormous help.

Victoria?

I think that we're accomplishing all those things if we go with this right now. because we will be able to do those things. Although we aren't going to pay down the interest rate, like JC said, there will be no penalty for probably paying it off. So I think we're accomplishing all of those things. It just seems like it's the safest thing for the city to do right now to protect the rest of the budget. Not that anybody wants to do that, but I think we'll be able to... to pay it off quickly and so I think it's the best thing for all the services in the city. It's just that when you're looking at it globally, it just seems like the best choice.

So JC, could you repeat one more time? If we refinance this and we carry it to the end of the term, how much interest are we paying to do that? What's it costing us to extend this out? Given your recommended path, that's going to cost us what in interest?

Give me a second.

So, JC, as opposed to paying it off, your recommended path is going to cost us what?

Yeah, I'm just going to double check math really quick before I give you an answer. So you're looking about $3.4-ish million is currently. And then if you look at the blue piece of paper, it changes to 4.1.

So it's roughly $700,000 in interest to take your advice, basically.

Correct, but you're also elongating the conversation of the general fund fund balance. I'm sorry, say that again? You're elongating the conversation of the general fund fund balance as well. That's why I'm recommending you to take the eight-year plan. It's because it doesn't force the issue sooner than later as far as making a general fund either service level change or adding a new revenue stream.

Male Speaker All right. Thank you.

Eric. Male Speaker JC, can you please elaborate on exactly Well, I know it's kind of difficult to elaborate on exactly how it's gonna be affected if we were to go with trying to pay it off right now, which it sounds like the city more than likely doesn't have the money for that, obviously, otherwise we wouldn't be borrowing the money for that. But you mentioned services are gonna be hindered. Can you go into some examples of specifically what kind of services are gonna be hindered. I know it's kind of general and it's difficult. I realize that, but if you can kind of give us some examples.

I can't, is the brief explanation. That would be a policy decision as to what service level you want to change. The $600,000 increase, so to speak, each year, though if you look at it, that's a little bit over, three, maybe four, five FTE in the general fund. And so if you want to put it as far as people, police officers, firefighters, we just added 12. And so it just changes that conversation potentially.

Yeah, I think that's what I wanted to hear. Thank you.

Indra.

I think we work with such a big budget, we get so used to hearing, you know, $800,000 now isn't a lot of money. I mean, that's a lot of money to a lot of people. I'd rather give $10,000 to eight families that need it for rent for six months. I mean, it is a lot of money, and the more debt you're in, have have you ever been at a meeting where someone comes and says oh we sold we have this extra money let's pay off our debt I've never heard that I would love to hear that I would love it but I don't trust that we would actually do that I think we would go out and then we would get more loans for other things which is fine but I think I just think it's bad to carry debt

OK, anything else from anyone else? OK, so we had a motion on the table, and we had a second. I don't remember who seconded, but did you make a motion, Victor? Rick? OK. And no more discussion? So we wait for Joel to come back from the restroom. Come on, Joel.

Generally, we have started the vote from the person who made the motion, and then we go around. So by the time he gets back, we could probably start.

I'm going to wait one minute for Joel. Okay, Victoria, how do you vote?

Yes.

Rick, how do you vote?

Yes.

Indra?

No.

Seth? Yes. I vote no. Joel?

No.

And Kathleen?

Yes.

Eric? Yes. Okay, motion passes five to three, I think. Okay, next up is meeting agenda discussion, and I imagine this is Stephanie taking over.

Good afternoon, council. I guess the mayor was going to be participating online. I'm not sure if he is. What we have before you today is to talk about the meeting agenda. I know over the last month or so, probably actually even further in the past, there's been some questions and concerns raised about some of the items on the agenda. And in particular, the last couple of council meetings have brought some of those into the public eye. So what we're here to talk about today is the meeting agenda itself, the structure of it, the agenda items, as well as the advisory that's currently contained on it. I'm gonna operate just a little bit differently than usual with the presentation today. There's three points of discussion. I didn't want them to get jumbled together at the very end, so we'll go one at a time through the three components that I have on the list. But there's also a little bit of a free-for-all at the end if there's any other aspects of the agenda itself that we need to talk about. We're talking again about the infrastructure about council's procedures. We've updated those a number of times of late. So some of those recent questions about agenda meeting items are related to the First Amendment as well as procedure. At our last council meeting, there were some rules changes related to the removal from meetings as well as general public comment and decorum. But there was also additional discussion requested regarding whether or not there should be the inclusion of the optional public comment and other agenda items. So that's what we're going to do today. Council Rules Section 7 provides the order of business that happens on the agenda. This is what your agenda looks like if there's something under every category. If there's ever any category that doesn't have an item to be discussed, it's not shown. But in general, this is what your agenda would look like. And there are three of these components that we'll be talking about today. The first is the invocation. The second is the public comment for those items not on the agenda, although To some extent, we'll also be talking about public comment as part of council action items, as well as the advisory regarding public comment. That's the paragraphs that are on the agenda as well in that public comment area. And all of these need an understanding of the First Amendment and the corresponding Oregon constitutional provisions. So I'm just going to quickly go over those. The First Amendment is probably one of the most famous rights that we have, and there's actually six components to this. Three of them relate to today's discussion, specifically those regarding establishment of religion, freedom of speech, and the right to petition your government for redress of grievances. To some extent, free exercise of religion and the right to assemble relate to that, but it's not really the focus of what we're going to talk about. And so we'll be talking about at least half of this amendment. The Oregon Constitution splits those up into separate sections. provides for the freedom of worship, freedom of religious opinion. It requires that no money can be spent on religion by the government. There's freedom of speech and the press, and then the right to assemble and petition for redress of grievances. One additional one under that section 26 that I thought was interesting is there's also a right to, quote, instruct. you're not prohibited from instructing their representatives. So they're supposed, they have the right to tell you what they want and how they want you to do it. So the first topic that we'll talk about here is invocation. And I will tell you up front, we have had recently the inclusion of invocation questioned and challenged. So this is a conversation that we do need to have to make sure that we're, if we're going to do it, that it's being done correctly under the First Amendment. So an invocation is considered under the clause of the First Amendment regarding establishment of religion. The Supreme Court has held that legislative prayer is consistent with the establishment clause, which means it's permissible. And there also is a case out there that specifically says a city council can open its meetings with prayer. That being said, there are cautions that are included in the case law that's out there. And we just want to make sure that if we continue with the indication that we're in compliance with those cautions. So it is permissible so long as it reflects the values of the nation, is given in a solemn and respectful tone, invites lawmakers to reflect on shared ideas and common goals, and is non-discriminatory among faiths. It also should not, well cannot, denigrate or disparage any religion, threaten damnation, preach conversion or proselytize or advance any one faith or belief. And it's those last two on each of those lists that often is where we see the challenges in the legal realm. It's when one particular faith is the basis for all of the prayers. We just want to make sure that it's an equal opportunity to provide invocation regardless of faiths. So we have to consider what happens if someone wants to give a prayer from a non-Christian faith and how is that handled. The best way to do that is to have some kind of a process in place. So we just, for today's discussion, we want to ensure that we're within the court's parameters for compliance, and we don't have a policy that I've seen on how this happens, and so from my perspective, perhaps we want to look at creating one if we're going to continue. So that's the question before council today is, are we going to continue with invocation, and if so, should we establish a policy and procedure, and what parameters would you like What would you like me to bring back to you for that? So this is our first discussion point. That's what we're here for, is to ask questions and discuss what you wanna do.

Joel. So I remember down in the federal penitentiary, they have the same laws, federal laws. And one of them was a devil worship, and they have a devil worship class. And being in charge of a federal office, I had some stuff posted on the bulletin board in the bathroom that dealt with other religions. And it's kind of a sticky thing. It's very sticky. I kind of like a moment of silence.

And on that topic, JC actually brought to our attention, there is a documentary out there called Hail Satan with a question mark at the end. It is about the satanic temple and its social activism, where when you offer something of a religious nature on one side of it, they want to do the same thing from the satanic perspective. And they've won some cases. One of those cases was actually in Oregon. There was an after school Bible study group. They were able to get an after school satanic worship group. And so if they came and asked us to be able to do an invocation, we need to be able to have a policy in place where we can respond to that and how that works.

Kathleen.

Stephanie, can you give us some examples of where these not complaints but what did you call them um concerns concerns have come from rather not do that in this forum that would be a an executive session better served eric did you have your hand up also eric um just to go back to what joel was talking about there

Article 1, Bill of Rights, Section 2, Freedom of Worship. This is Oregon, not even federal. Going back to the satanic example that you brought up, it says, all men shall be secure in the natural right to worship Almighty God, not Satan, according to the dictates of their own consciences. So I don't think we have... I mean we have to worry about Satan but we don't have to worry about that in this instance as far as prayer goes.

Um, so Stephanie, would you, uh, can, I think you already mentioned that that's a possibility that we could end up in legal, in a legal situation over that.

If they asked to do a prayer and we did not have a mechanism for how that's done and how we ensure, uh, that we're, it's essentially viewpoint neutrality is what we're looking for. We want to make sure that we're not discriminating on the basis of any kind of religion. If they asked us to do that, we would have to figure out how we handle that. We can't just say no because of what denomination they are and what they preach. Thank you.

Victoria.

So, counsel, couple of years ago now voted to bring back an invocation at the beginning of our meetings and if it is being challenged I think that we need to know where it's being challenged I don't know why people would be you know shy about their opinion about it so we we should be afforded the the opportunity to know if there are complaints, what they are, where they're coming from. And the Supreme Court, I think the case that you're probably talking about is Town of Greece versus Galloway in 2014. Yes. And so the U.S. Supreme Court has already settled the question about prayer at the beginning of public meetings just like ours. And that was 2014. There was something that used to be called the Lemon Test, Lemon v. Kurtzman, where there was more of a I think this might be where the complaints from people might be coming from, that they have this idea of separation of church and state. But that's not a standard that is followed in jurisprudence today, because we don't use the lemon. The United States of America doesn't use a lemon test anymore. There are at least three Supreme Court cases that have been decided on this. So I don't think we have a problem And I don't think that we are going against any. We aren't doing anything wrong. So I don't know why we have to fix something that we aren't doing wrong. And if we did attempt to put language in, that's where we're going to run into the problem. So as long as we're already following what the Supreme Court has already decided, I don't see that we need to do anything different here. You know what, I went into discussion. I had a question for you and I went into discussion, Stephanie, so sorry about that. I did have the question about the court case, thanks.

I would say that establishing at least a policy that says we are going to do invocation and at least explain the city's position on being content neutral and making sure that we're not discriminating amongst religions would be appropriate because that would ensure, as of right now, if you look at all the invocations, somebody can look at that and go, they clearly favor one kind of message and therefore this is discriminatory.

The message that is coming forth there's nothing wrong with it. So I mean, we wouldn't need to defend against it is what I'm saying. I can tell you there are others that disagree. I mean, somebody could disagree and say that. I hear laughing over there. But that wasn't my point. My point is the United States Supreme Court has said there is nothing wrong with that. So we don't need to fix it. something that there's nothing wrong with.

You can absolutely have prayer at the beginning of the meetings if you choose. My recommendation is to make sure that it's clear how that is done to avoid legal challenges going forward.

I have to say one more thing then. We are not going to have a legal challenge that stands. The Supreme Court has already decided it.

It's not about can you do it, it's how do you do it. What I would like to see is something that helps identify the how, not that you're going to.

Then I do have one more question. Where have you seen challenges on the how then? I mean, that would be the problem that I don't see exists. Where is there a case where there has been a case about the how?

Actually, the town of Greece was one of them, and the In that one, the court said that because it met some of the, from the Marsh case, it met those criteria, it wasn't a problem. Many of the cases are about the how, and that's what we want to make sure. I know that there are other jurisdictions in Oregon that are reaching out to their colleagues saying, do you have policies, what are your policies, because we need to implement a policy. So it is a, going around the state, that we do need to be looking at this if you're going to include an indication.

Okay, thank you, that does help answer some, the question I had, thanks.

So are we going to move into discussion at each point or wait to the end?

I would prefer, because they're essentially separate discussions, they could have been their own mini-presentations, I would prefer that we make a, I get guidance on the invocation piece before we move on to the public comment.

Okay, so we have any further discussion from any other councillors on this part of it? Okay, then I'm going to say something. To me, it's blatantly, it's completely obvious that In this case, Stephanie's advice seems reasonably reasonable, that we have some kind of application selection process. Right now, to my knowledge, I would have no idea exactly how people are selected. I can't imagine that the public knows how they're selected. Somehow just, there is a selection process, it's just not open to the public because I know that there is a selection process. So for us to have a selection process that's open to the public makes complete sense so that we don't potentially run into any legal problems in the future. So it shouldn't be a problem, especially since the fact that we are constitutionally afforded the right to have prayer at a meeting. How that prayer is selected is the only question. And to have an open process, to me, is the only thing that makes sense. Victoria.

So it's a voluntary process as far as I understand it. And I would not want to see our places of worship in the city to have to come to the city to put an application in to come and give a prayer at the beginning of our meeting. So I don't like the idea of an application process. It's a completely volunteer process. And I think it would just discourage the prayer, and that might be the intent.

Well, I do know in Town of Greece, the case that you referenced, the way that that played out is they had a staff person that, at the beginning of the process, contacted every religious institution within city limits and asked them if they would be interested in providing an invocation and then just had a list and just worked through the list and scheduled for whoever could be there. So it spread it out. It kept it to those that were within the community. And one of the questions in town of Greece was, were they required to look outside their boundaries to try to find that diverse community? And the court said, no, you don't have to do that. But that was the way that they did it. They didn't have an application, but then it did take staff time to be able to coordinate that invocation. So that is a way council could choose.

So rather than an application, basically it was an official open invitation to all churches that were in the jurisdiction or in the city limits or whatever.

Yes.

Okay, thank you. Indra.

Yes, I'm in favor of having prayer before meetings, but I do agree we should have a process that protects us legally.

Any other counselors want to weigh in on that? Kathleen.

Could we have that executive session Transparently see what the challenges are.

I would request that Why don't I start with an attorney-client privileged communication?

And I can get some information out and we can go from there So do we want to have to dress on this thing Well, yeah, I was just I mean and you may not be able answers right now, but it seems to me like Rob may have just mentioned it too, but even the selection process, it seems like there's really not a selection. It's just people apply, and I'm assuming what you mean is you have to go one by one.

Right. It wouldn't be a we're going to stick with this one for six months, but this one only gets one. There would have to be some kind of a how do you determine who's next kind of a system.

Yeah. Rick? I'm in favor of pursuing this further and coming up with some system, because I think the two issues here is where the world is headed. There's a lot of conflict there and different viewpoints, but also just freedom of expression and the ability to protect religion. And I realize it can be different viewpoints. Thank you.

Eric, did you have your hand up?

I'm gonna be careful with the way I say this, but I understand that we have to that the option or the recommendation is there to go through the various churches. Then it becomes, okay, how do we equally distribute that? Are we gonna try to figure out the population in terms of what denomination each individual is? ARE WE GOING TO HAVE TO HIRE A CONSULTANT? THIS IS WHERE I SEE THIS GOING. IT'S AN EXTREME CASE. IT'S A SOLUTION TO A PROBLEM THAT DOESN'T EXIST RIGHT NOW. That's where I'm going to leave it. I think this is just going way out of control. I made my concerns here. We even went as extreme as talking about the Satan thing, and it says right here in the Oregon Constitution, Almighty God. It doesn't say anything about Satan in there. That's my worry, that we're going to start overthinking, well, not me, but the process is going to start overthinking this, and Next thing you know, we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire a consultant because we're worried about some kind of lawsuit. I'm not 100 percent sure that it even is a problem. But, okay, thank you.

Male Speaker 1 So, I would be in favor of tabling this this particular discussion until we get the memo that Stephanie is talking about, so we would be able to make a better decision. That's not a motion, but I mean, it just seems like that is a natural step to take. Next step in this particular discussion for our agenda is just wait until we hear from Stephanie in a memo.

I could also bring back the proposal based on what I'm hearing from the dais today and provide that as a supplemental background information so that we're not pushing any, continuing to kick things out so far, but you would have all the information the next time this came forward with actual language to consider.

I would agree with that, with Victoria and what Stephanie said. Any other comments or thumbs up to table this until we have a memo from our lawyer? Okay, unanimous. Okay, we move on to our next piece.

All right, next piece is on public comment. As we've talked about, the First Amendment provides a right to free speech, but there is also Supreme Court case law that says the Constitution does not grant to members of the public generally a right to be heard by public bodies making decisions of policy. So there's no right to be heard at that public meeting. There's a little bit of a caveat with that, which is that state law does require public comment in certain matters, such as on public testimony regarding land use decisions, things like that. So there are some state-mandated areas where public comment is. Other offerings of public comment are at council's election. And in Grants Pass, we are currently offering on each council action item as well as a general public comment period for all topics. You've had this before, but just to make sure everybody's clear, state required public testimony and comment on council action items, those would be considered limited public forums because they are limited to comments on that specific agenda topic. In a limited public forum, all we have to have is reasonable and viewpoint neutral restrictions. General public comment, depending on how it's framed, could be considered a designated public forum, so we have to be very careful with that. If the general public comment portion of the agenda is deemed designated, then the standard is a very difficult one to meet, and restrictions would have to be narrowly tailored to achieve a significant governmental interest. We currently require general public comment to be related to city business, but it is a grayer area than public comment on the public hearings and the council action items. This was also, I was asked to bring this forward, and I'm not making a recommendation one way or another on this topic. This is for council to have an informed discussion, but this is one of the reasons why it's a hot topic. This is the increase in cases filed with the terms First Amendment and public comment. First Amendment cases around public comment are skyrocketing, and so we wanna make sure that whatever we're doing, we're doing appropriately. So we're gonna talk about some of the pros and cons of having public comment. And in general, I'm talking about general public comment with this portion, although a number of these things also apply to the public comment for council action items. I will also admit that I took most of the content of this slide from the IMLA presentation that I was at two weeks ago because I thought it was such good information and really helps understand where some of the concerns come from. So pros and probably the biggest one everyone thinks of is community engagement. You get to hear directly from your constituents right here in person and everybody else is in on that conversation as well. You get to hear from diverse perspectives or at least there's the opportunity for diverse perspectives to come in. You may identify problems that you hadn't thought about. We've heard a couple up here that have triggered some council taking some action. So there are some benefits to hearing about different problems. Transparency, because everything's happening in an open public meeting. And accountability, because it's all in person. However, there are some concerns with allowing general public comment. One is misinformation. People that are speaking, don't have all the details, they may have different perspectives, they may not have done their homework, so what they're saying from the podium may or may not be factually accurate. Unequal representation, this is the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so if there's only three people that speak on a topic and they're all on the same thing, a lot of times you think, well this is a huge broad scope issue, but sometimes it's just those three people. And the entire rest of the community doesn't think that way. So just something to keep in mind. There's fatigue. I know those meetings can get long. Council members get tired. So when you get fatigued, you're not as engaged as you may want to be. It can lead to potential disruptions, as we've seen recently. And time management, from a time management perspective. And this is where some of the time, place, and manner restrictions can come into play, where we can limit that for time management purposes. but it also does extend your meetings. So those are the pros and cons. And our discussion today is we've got three current periods of public comment during council meetings. We can't do anything with the public hearings, but the council action items and general public comment ones are optional. And then just to identify, there are other mechanisms available to address council members or city staff, such as email, meetings, phone calls, written letters, social media. The discussion for today is, do you want to continue with public comment? And if so, do you want to make any changes to how that's done?

Indra.

I'll start. I think the pros completely outweigh the cons of public comment. And I think... we represent, you know, emails and, and phone calls. That's all time away from our business and what we're doing in our personal life too. So I'd rather have it at a meeting if someone's going to come up and usually not always, but a lot of times the people that come up, um, They come here because it is a very important thing to them. And they could be the only person. I mean, that's for us to judge. And we have acted, I think, on a lot of issues that came up here that weren't through email or mail or phone calls. I think action items for sure. We're gonna be voting on something and I like to hear. It does affect sometimes how I vote, what the public says or they say things that I never thought about before. So I think that's good. And then on any topic, there are always topics that people should be allowed to address the city. And I get that there's grievances, and I get people come, probably not because things are going great, but because they're upset with things, and I think we need to hear that too, because those are, we make a lot of important decisions that affect people's lives, and they should be able to come speak to us.

Victoria.

So could you go back to the screen where you had the increase in the lawsuits? Because I had a question there. So this is not just city council. This could be school board meetings. This could be It's all public meetings, is that correct?

It would be any public meeting where a public comment was challenged. And the rules regarding public comment at public meetings are going to apply across the board, not necessarily dependent on school board versus city versus state.

Right, but I just wanted, yes, so it's not just like a city councilor. No. So I believe that the increase in these lawsuits are, I know that many, many, many of them are people speaking at school board meetings because they are challenging curriculum that is in the school. That is a huge increase. So it's not necessarily even heavily in a body such as ours. So that is reflective. I think of that phenomenon of people are just continuing to come in and challenging curriculum, I mean, I could be corrected on that, but I think I'm probably somewhat accurate. I think our city is used to public comment, and I don't think, and it's useful most of the time, so I don't think it's something that we should take away.

Thank you. We have Clint online. Clint, can you hear us?

Yes, sir. I can hear you. Can you hear me? Okay.

Go ahead. Yes, we can hear you.

Perfect. Hey, just to remind you guys in this discussion, I believe the discussion realistically is going to revolve around what I always refer to as general public comment. Because as you all know, as Stephanie pointed out, during the meeting, during any council business, during any council action, the public has every right to weigh in before you guys actually make a vote or make a decision. So I actually brought this to all of our attention to have a little bit of a robust in-depth conversation in regards to the general public comment portion at the end of our meeting. So I just wanted to just reiterate, that's why I brought this for you guys to have discussion today. I'm just gonna sit back and observe unless you guys want me to weigh in, but if I do see that I weigh in, I will, but you guys proceed forward, thank you.

Yeah, Stephanie, can you clarify, because I think what Clint said was actually factually incorrect. So the public, when you say has every right, that's on hearings that are coming from the public. Correct. But as far as on action items, no, the council would have the right also to cut out public comment there. But Clint said the opposite, which is true.

As noted on the slide here, they have the right to speak at public hearings because that is required by state law.

Right.

Council decides whether or not they're given the opportunity to speak for council action items or in general public comment.

Okay. Thank you for that clarification. Anything else from council? So, a couple of points I'd like to make. With regards to the alternative ways that people can communicate with counsel, email meetings, phone calls, written letters, and social media, realistically, any counselor who doesn't want to hear from a constituent can block them from any one of those means. You can block somebody's email or social media or a phone call or whatever. So there's really no guarantee that any of those ways will work for a member of the public to communicate with a counselor who doesn't want to hear from them. or doesn't want to hear the subject matter. So coming to public comment, whether it's general, well especially general public comment, in some cases might be the only way that a member of the public would have to communicate with their elected representative. Because the elected representative may have blocked them from every other means. You know, and I would agree that there's times that we have gotten information out of general public comment that realistically we could have gotten in other ways, but it wouldn't have been as effective. When you've got, you know, And some of it's really valuable. We can easily point to Suzanne Hill with the fire hazard next to her house, which for counselors that don't know it, I don't know if it was necessarily resolved, but it was greatly improved. The staff stepped up in one way or another, hired someone or whatever, and it was greatly improved. It's not 100%, but it's way better than it was. And frankly, I really believe that that happened because she came to public comment, because she had already communicated with the staff in an appropriate manner in May. And staff, I guess, had started a process, never got back to her. She had no idea the process had been started. But my point is, is her coming to public comment to a great degree ameliorated that fire hazard So that's just the most recent example. So I'm, I'm totally in favor of public comment. I know recently we, uh, voted to extend it to three minutes. So the council at that time, anyone who had voted yes on that felt at that time that it was important. But, um, uh, to me, I I'm, I'm definitely, um, and I'm sorry, I guess we're getting into discussion part, but, um, I guess it started with my question, the clarification from, uh, Stephanie about, um, when we have to. Does anyone else have any questions for Stephanie at this time? Okay, so I guess we can then continue with the discussion I started. Any other discussions about the keeping public comment to three minutes? Joel.

So Stephanie, I'm struggling a little bit, having dealt with a lot of public comment. We're presently in a chain of events. where it kind of follows that exponential curve of the lawsuits, but it has to do with the energy level in this room. And that chain of events needs to be interrupted or diffused in a healthy way for all concerned. How do we have policy and discussion that when we get on a chain of events that is not healthy, that we change it.

That we change the chain of events? Or that we change what we're doing?

Yeah, well, we don't have that escalation occurring, to everybody's detriment.

I think it's a matter of, we learn lessons. Every time something happens, we learn and we figure out if we need to make any changes. And I think that's what the impetus for this discussion was, We've had several meetings, not just the last two, but recently as well, where things have, in particular public comment, has not gone the way that is usually considered respectful. And so is there a change that's needed? Is it something that should be offered, given that there are pros and cons, and right now we're in an issue of potential liability because of some concerns. So the question we have is, do you want to continue offering public comment? We did make changes to the rules regarding decorum at our last meeting, so those will be in place moving forward. Do we want to let that play out and see where things go from there? Do we want to take a step back and reset and not offer public comment for a period of time? How would you like to proceed knowing that we've had some difficulties of late? We can leave things as is and just continue to learn lessons and make tweaks as we need to as well.

Indra.

Yeah, I feel comfortable with you gave some specific direction for us. I think now we're well versed in the First Amendment and what can be done at public comment in addition to the fact that the Clint or whoever's leading the meeting can look to you to kind of get direction for how to handle those controversial speakers. So I feel comfortable enough and I think we should move forward and live and learn as we go too.

Kathleen.

It's always amazing how few negative actions can ruin it for everybody. And I don't feel like it's fair to, or I don't like that word fair, but I don't think it's reasonable to keep many public comments that are respectful and appropriate and viable and important for the couple of people that are abusing it, let's put it that way. We just did change it from two minutes to three minutes. I would think it would be not good to take it away. But you're saying something about taking it away for a season or can you elaborate on that a little bit?

If you take it away, you can always put it back. Or we can just let it continue for a period of time and we can always readdress it if there's another concern down the road.

Victoria.

Well, I'm inclined to keep it the way it is, although it is disappointing.

It seems like what I'm hearing from the majority up there is leave things as is, and we'll just keep keeping our eye on lessons.

And Clint has his hand raised as well.

Yeah, that's what I was going to agree with Kathleen. I think we should keep it the way it is with the changes we've made.

Okay, Clint, you're up again.

Thank you. I do respect your guys' decision and this is your decision. I did want to just bring it to all of our attention so we could have a robust conversation in a public sphere here. I just want to reiterate that the last Wednesday's meetings actions will be a common occurrence from here going out and if you do keep with general public comment, At the end of each meeting, you have the opportunity for one community individual to take your chambers hostage again and again and again. So that was just one reason I wanted you guys to have a full discussion in regards to this, and you've done that, and I appreciate your participation. Thank you very much, and I will respect your guys' decision. Thank you.

I did have one more question, if I could.

Sure, Victoria.

So Stephanie, the last disruption, I still believe that this is so that it limited other people's ability to, I mean, it was their choice to leave. But they chose to leave because they really didn't feel that it was a polite or safe environment. And now the reason why I have the question is because what Mayor just said. Is there anything that could be done to make sure that everyone will have the opportunity to have public comment before they feel like it's not a place where they can be to make their public comment?

Hopefully that made sense. If we have what happened last Wednesday or two Wednesdays ago happen again, I don't know that we can do that. There's not really a way to structure. We can't always say, we want you to go last just in case. I don't think a court would uphold that. I think that would be risky. What I can tell you is that based on what happened at that last meeting, I am also putting together some language for when a disruption starts to occur. what specifically should be said to provide a warning and then how does a removal take place or a recess and what does that look like? And so we're all on the same page because it was kind of thrown together piecemeal a little bit last time. I think it would be a little bit more structured and perhaps we can make it less of a disruption than it was at our last meeting. I also think that there was miscommunication last time with Mr. Fitch and Mr. Fitch thought He had been given an additional three minutes for general public comment. That's what he had been told. He tried to take that during council action and he didn't listen when the mayor tried to tell him when it was supposed to happen. So there was some miscommunication as part of that. I think that we can likely minimize that in the future. Mr. Fitch is aware of time limits and I don't think we'll have that miscommunication going forward.

So then I have one other. Is there an I don't know. I guess there probably hasn't been. Have there been cases that people have brought to a city where they were denied their speech because of the actions of others? Has that ever happened?

Not against us. I can't imagine that would happen against a city because the city is not in control of the actions of others I mean they can control it like we did where we took a recess and then the other speakers may have chosen to leave But it wasn't the city didn't take action and prohibit someone from speaking. So that would be on the individual then maybe There's no requirement that a private citizen like a private citizen speak. Yeah, okay Constitution only applies to the government

Yeah, it's an interesting question, though. I would love to. Maybe it should be answered sometime.

OK. So do we have any more questions for Stephanie on this subject? So if not, this.

What I'm hearing is we leave it as is. Is that?

We leave it as is. And I'd just like to make one statement that while we called it the decorum protocol, And even at the last meeting, we were even told, no, it's only the decorum protocol. Actually, it's where decorum butts up against the First Amendment, is what we had actually discussed and what we're deciding on right now. So it's kind of our decorum First Amendment policy. And I guess we've decided that we're gonna leave it as it stands. I did have one question, Stephanie, when you talked about people, because I was thinking about, you know, actually it may even be in the next part of your deal, if the public comment is... The advisory? No, if it prevents us from doing business. So to me, that would be if someone is talking more than three minutes, would obviously be the most obvious example.

Yep, that is a valid restriction is the three minutes. That's the most obvious.

But that isn't really the problem we've been having. So the question, and for anybody that hasn't read it, the memo that Stephanie wrote, five-page attorney-client memo on this subject, First Amendment, and it's called First Amendment and City Council Rules of Decorum. It's extremely detailed. It's extremely well written. It has lots of case law. And I just wanted to be clear, because people might still be misunderstanding. So the volume of someone's speech, the delivery method, and even the style of speaking, if it involves some vulgarity, that is not considered by any court to be disruptive in anything that can be banned, is that correct?

That would be my, during a general public comment period, that would be my understanding as well, because essentially your business at that point is to be sitting there and listening to what they have to say.

Thank you very much. I guess we're on to the next now.

All right, and moving on to the last piece, and this was one that Councilor Pell brought up regarding the public comment advisory. I'm not going to read this. You all have seen it. It's in your council agendas every week. This is the current language, but some of the concepts also apply to testimony at public hearings, public comment on council action items, and generally throughout the meeting. I think it kind of ended up being a general decorum statement, but it got stuck in the middle of the agenda and it doesn't get read until most of the way through the meeting. Seems like it's a little bit out of place at this point to me, and Councilor Pell also brought up the component about addressing council as one body and not to individuals in there. So the questions about the public comment advisory are, do you want to have that in writing on your agenda? If so, do you want it in the middle of all the agenda items? Or would it make more sense to have it as a separate public comment rules section, either at the end of the agenda or the beginning, like a decorum advisory at the beginning of the meeting, something along those lines? We can also have handouts. I've seen it done where, I think it was Winona County where I worked, they had their agenda, and then page two was the behavioral ground rules. So it was a two-page agenda packet that always had those ground rules incorporated. It wasn't consolidated into it. And then if we're going to be reading an advisory like that, should it be at the beginning of each public comment period? Because by the time we get to general public comment, we've already had testimony on public hearings or we've had public comment on council action items. So should we be giving the same advisories or a consolidated version? So I guess the question for you today is, do you want that big block of writing in the middle of the agenda or somewhere else, and where would you like to see advisories be read to speakers?

Victoria.

We can limit discussion on agenda items to the particular agenda item, is that correct?

On council action items, the speech is limited to that action item only.

yeah so it doesn't ever seem like there's too much issue there so it seems like just reading it before public comment makes sense any other questions comments

Well, to me, the public comment advisory, I think one part that is helpful for the public, when it says the public is to address city council on items not related to the public hearing or council action item tonight's agenda, because every once in a while, it hasn't happened recently, we would have people in the general public comment start talking about something that we had already discussed, and that wasn't appropriate. So to me, to have that in writing for the clarity's sake, for the public to know, so it doesn't look like we're pulling it out of thin air, like we don't want to hear anymore about that issue. Well, it's not that we don't want to hear anymore about it, it's just that that actually is our structure, and you can't talk about that. So to me, that part of it is definitely really, could be helpful for some people. The other part that, when it says, let's see, internet, okay. When it says that we'll proceed in an effective and courteous manner, I would like to see the word encouraged. The public is encouraged to proceed in an effective and courteous manner because, I don't know, or not. Courtesy is obviously in the eye of the beholder and the Supreme Court's actually written to that effect that one man's vulgarity is another man's poetry or whatever. So we'll proceed in an effective and courteous manner. If we keep that in there, frankly, we could have members of the public screaming at us for allowing other people to be overly loud or whatever. So if we want to have the word encourage in there, that makes sense to me, or even take that part out. I would like to see the word encourage. The public is encouraged to proceed in an effective and courteous manner. Not that the public must do that, because again, that sets us up for ambiguity and more trouble. Andrea.

I like that word, encourage. It seems like that Mayor Scherf does speak about before agenda items, that they must speak to that agenda.

But the decorum piece isn't there usually. You have three minutes to talk about this topic. He doesn't go into the decorum thing. My thought on this when I was looking at it is perhaps what's in the second and third paragraphs up on the screen in your slide. Maybe that should be done at the beginning of the meeting and more of a meeting as a whole decorum because you could be talking about something and having discussion amongst yourselves and there could be a disruption. We saw that before two meetings ago where there was a disruption while you were receiving a presentation from staff. So having that at the beginning to talk about disruption and then just have the, before each of the public comment pieces, say this is the, what you're allowed to speak about, here's your time limit, you may proceed under our rules of decorum. And we can do it that way and streamline it, which would then leave most of this first paragraph at the public comment section, is what would be the advisory about general public comment.

Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Yeah, thanks.

Victoria.

So if our mayor is still online, he's the one that has to read it. I wonder if he has any preference.

Realistically, I don't have a preference, so it is what it is.

Okay. Thank you, Clint.

Joel.

Well, I'm gonna try this. I think there's a little bit more to this as well. I was always taught that in my professional career, how people interact reflects how I interact. And so the mode and manner in which the citizens of a city correspond to the spirit and the mindset of the council And I know it's very easy for me at times to dismiss those that are not The criminals the drug users the people that are disrespectful and and obviously there are, but that one mode or other of dealing with each other springs from the corresponding spirit in the breast of the council. And we who feel the respect due to others cannot fail to inspire in them respect for ourselves. While we who disrespect others cannot fail to manifest strong resentment towards ourselves. And so That's not the whole story, obviously, in this chain of events, but we need to examine our own heart. I need to examine my heart and the example that I set, because it sets the example for everybody. And it's not to say that some people don't try to take advantage of that. They do, but that's why we got the police chief. But as we go through this, I think it's important that we all play, people that behave as I expect them to, With my kids, if I expect them to go to college, they go to college. If I expect that they're gonna be a no good bum and not come in till late at night, that's what they do. So people behave the way you expect them to. And a lot of times it's us who makes that decision rather than that individual. So I would at least try to make good decisions with all individuals that come up here so that we can have a town that's worth living in.

yeah thank you Joel I'm gonna just go ahead and try to move forward and suggest that we do I think is what I think what I understood your recommendation and take that second paragraph public comment will proceed an effective and courteous manner that blurb at the beginning so it applies to all public comment something similar along those lines very consistent with that because that's I

It's specifically related to public comments. We'd make it more general to the whole meeting, but yes. Right.

And then that first paragraph specifically related to the three-minute public comment open would be before that section. And then I don't know. Sometimes I think when you bring more attention to things, it doesn't help the matter. So I would be against... doing handouts or posting things on walls at this time.

We do have the public meeting rules already on the wall.

Well, there you go. So I think kind of maybe keep it, you know, don't do anything further at this time. See how it plays out. That's my suggestion to council.

I'd just like to, again, I think if we take out the word we'll proceed. then it prevents members of the well-behaving general public of then coming back to us and saying, well, you're not enforcing that. Okay, well, we don't want to be in that situation. So, encouraged is a much better word.

I will take all that into consideration in tweaking some of this language. And then I did want to take just a moment to address Councilor Pell's question about addressing council as one body and not to individuals. There is case law out there that supports that you can require comments be made directly to the chair, things like that. So we can do that. Where we don't, and I think there's been some dispute about addressing individuals versus referencing individuals, because those are two different things. Normally what we hear is that they're addressing the body, but talking about something that a specific individual, or how they think an individual is responding. And so I think we just need to be really careful about that, but we are allowed to say, at least my understanding of the way the case law is written, we can ask that they address counsel as one body, and you can't come up and say, Counselor Nicholas, This is what I think about you. You can say, Mayor Council, I think Councilor Nicholas is wrong because, so those are two different ways that people can address council.

So I have a question. So at our last meeting, I specifically asked you why you changed the wording to the word may, and you didn't use shall or must. So the way you wrote that and what we voted on was may.

Because it's about enforceability. We want to make sure that it's, we're not, if somebody comes up and addresses an individual counselor, we're probably, that's not going to be a reason to have them removed or to tell them they're out of order. We're asking them to follow that guidance and to address counsel as one body, but unless it becomes disruptive, we're not going to go the path of taking action if they're addressing an individual counselor. And they can talk about individual counselors, but they can't, we're asking them not to specifically address a single counselor.

I have no idea what the last sentence just means. Can you clarify that?

If I'm saying, Mayor Counsel, I would like to, I think that you should consider doing these things because Counselor Benham has been doing this really well, and that's one way of approaching it. I'm addressing the counselor, but the council as a whole but I'm talking about a single counselor. As opposed to, Counselor Benham, I think that you're doing a really good job and they all need to follow what you're doing. That's a different way of approaching it, but I'm only talking to a single counselor. We want them to be talking to the body as a whole. But it's guidance.

I have to make a comment that the steep learning curve on that for the general public for 40,000 people to learn to be able to speak in that way and to know that that's the rule, I think is completely unrealistic. So that being the case, I don't think we should rely on that being ever followed, quite frankly, because they'll never get it. And they shouldn't have to get it either.

But when was the last time you heard someone from the podium actually addressing an individual council member? It almost never happens.

They've avoided it because they know that they weren't supposed to do it. But it's also clear now that that is very likely a violation of their First Amendment rights.

We are asking them to address the body as a whole. If they don't and it's disruptive, we'll deal with it. But if it's not disruptive, then it won't cross the line into any action being taken. All right, so is there any other discussion that anyone would like to have about the advisory? Otherwise, I'll work on tweaking some of the language and making it consistent.

I think we're all good on the last part too, right?

Then anything else anyone wants to bring up regarding the agenda?

Kathleen.

Okay, so I don't know if this is possible, but my observation is that We don't get to address public comment until Matters for Mayor. And it seems like by that time, people are leaving.

Because the consent agenda is in the middle.

So could we move Matters for Mayor for after public comment and do consent agenda after that? Just so they could hear our comments? Because there's been several times where I've wanted the people to hear what we have to say, but they're already gone.

Mm-hmm. That sounds reasonable to me. Anyone else have a discussion on that or?

I have just one caveat item with that, and that's totally acceptable for you to do. I know a few years ago, a number of years ago, there was a commonality where council was responding to public comment, which is your prerogative. But what happened was the council responses to the public comment, if you had 30 minutes of public comment, we had over 30 minutes of council comment back to the public comment, and so now we've just extended the meeting one hour, or at least 30 minutes or beyond because of those things. So it would be just something to consider when you're actually trying to respond. It's got to where all council members want to respond to each, almost each one of those 15 individuals, which definitely created and elongated those meetings. Victoria.

so we could just say to keep your your comments brief back to the public I mean I think we could probably all agree to do to do that so I don't think it would be yeah hopefully we'll yeah be able to keep the our comments back I think it usually generally they are I can't remember a time when I comments have gone over a half an hour.

The other caveat was it sometimes puts counsel in a position where they feel as though they have to respond, potentially without the appropriate information or guidance from staff on a specific agenda item. And some things may be said that may be inaccurate in nature to some degree. So that was another thing that came out of those. Immediate response is a public comment. There was one potential need to say, I need to respond right now to this, it may not have been the fully appropriate response without getting additional information about the whole situation. Maybe it was just one part of the story. So, again, that was just, and I'm just going off of historical perspective and what I've seen before in the past with councils.

Yeah, that could be something that would be of concern, but I don't recall that happening with this particular council. And it seems to me like it usually is a question back to staff. Can we address that? Can we put that on the agenda? And things of that nature.

Okay, Joel, you had something?

Well, I just wanted to say also what you tolerate, you promote. And so there's some things in the town that you really can't tolerate. And we need to do that with a good heart. But you don't want to promote that type of interaction. So what you tolerate, you promote. So it's really, we can't tolerate that.

Okay.

So I guess we have the question of did we want to change the matters from mayor council to be before the agenda, the consent calendar, or do we want to leave it the way it is? Is that the question, Kathleen? Yeah, okay. So we have a thumbs up on Indra.

I just wanted to say it is nice for people to stay and you can address them, but also they can listen when they go home or tomorrow. And the consent agenda is so short. In my opinion, it'd be nice to, well, it's read and usually, usually, sometimes there's questions, but it's read and we pass it generally. And then the business is done. To me, I'd rather close, you know, have the business done, and then get to the more personal part. That's just my preference.

Okay, I guess we got a show of thumbs for people that want to put the matters for mayor council before the consent agenda. Show of thumbs.

Okay.

How many we got?

That's five.

Five? Okay. Five-three.

Okay, then I have, unless there's other questions or discussion, I am finished for today.

Now we're gonna go into, I guess, agenda review. Is there anything that anybody wants to see added to a future agenda? Seth?

Yeah, I was just gonna see if we could add the Main Street fourth quarter presentation recap, so sometime in Q4.

Okay. Duly noted. We'll be working on that agenda, I think, next week. Joel.

This would be for the back. I don't think it's ready to be scheduled yet, but we don't want to forget it and that's There's a subject of honoring our veterans and and the banners And there's still a couple details that need to be worked out on whether it's even feasible or not before it comes to Council But I think we need to put it on the back of the agenda so we don't forget it Veterans We presented it to the Veterans Association last week, and they really, really liked it. Young Marines are on board to do the work.

And what specifically did you present to them, Joel?

It would be a presentation to the council on a program for each family that had a veteran that participated in active service could buy a personalized banner that has the picture the name and the conflict in which they participated or the service in which they served. Beaverton, Tigard, several other cities already have it. And it's a way to honor your past veterans. So for example, and this is not, this involves me personally. Like my dad was in World War II as a Marine. If we had this and I wanted to buy the banner, I would have to buy the banner myself. The Veteran Association would store it and the young Marines would put it up at a place to be agreed to with the city at no expense to the city.

So what is it that you're asking the city to do? I mean, it sounds like it's something that needs to be done.

Well, it's on city property, and I'm just asking it to put it on the back of the agenda because it would be a program. I mean, once a family purchases a banner, they have an expectation that it's going to be hung on a city street.

Okay, thank you. You understand that, Aaron? Okay. And Kathleen?

I was wondering if there's a way that we could have a workshop or... somehow address banning Kratom from our city. Kratom is a very dangerous drug and it's being sold at most of our smoke shops and small markets, A1 markets around the community. And it is definitely dangerous and something that I would be wanting to look into is how we could ban this from our city.

Thank you. Stephanie, would you know if that's even in the realm of being legal to ban a product that is theoretically legal to be sold over the counter?

I can look into whether or not that's an option. I don't know the answer off the top of my head.

Yes, we're asking you to look into that.

Yeah, we'll do so and then provide you with a memo.

Okay, so that's it for gender review. I'm sorry, Rick, thank you.

If we're through, I have a comment if we're through agenda review.

I guess we are through, yeah, comment.

Okay, I would like to comment of a job well done for staff and public safety. There were two residences on A Street that were overgrown with vegetation and were a fire hazard. Those were taken care of. And there was also one residence that was extreme blight and that's now resolved. And I appreciate the effort's been done, thank you.

And any questions on Wednesday's business meeting, which is on the lighter side? Okay. I guess that's... Is that it? Okay. We've got a motion to adjourn from Indra. Second. And we all say aye, right? Aye. Thank you.