Council - Regular Meeting

Welcome to the East Lansing City Council discussion only meeting of Tuesday, September 15th. It's 6 p.m. The meeting will come to order. Could we have the roll call, please?

Council Member Whalen.

Here.

Council Member Meadows. Here. Council Member Singh. Here. Mayor Pro Tem Grigsby. Here. Mayor Altman.

Here. Is there a motion to approve the agenda? Moved by Meadows, second by Whalen. Any discussion of the agenda? Seeing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries. The agenda is approved. That brings us to a special presentation from Advance Peace Michigan Public Health Institute. Mr. Boggin, if you would care to sit or stand as your preference dictates. Thank you for being here tonight.

Thank you for having me. Again, good evening to everyone and thank you council members for allowing us to present to you. My name is Daniel Bogan. I am the Chief Strategy Manager for Michigan Public Health Institute. I want to take a few minutes to explain why Advanced Peace has been in East Lansing on the weekends the last three weeks. We are working and accomplishing an extremely important goal of keeping gun violence out of East Lansing, as well as making sure we control the environment that comes back into Lansing. Advanced Peace is a community violence intervention organization. Our approach is centered on the relationships, credibility, prevention, and intervention. We work directly with individuals who are the center of gun violence in our community. either victims or someone that potentially can cause harm to others. When you see our team in East Lansing on the weekend nights, just not walking around observing, we are actively working. We spend our time engaging with current fellows and individuals we have identified as potential recruits for Advanced Peace Fellowship. These are young people and young adults we are intentionally building relationships with. Those relationships give us the opportunity to mentor them, to connect with them, and give them resources to help change their mindset to make better decisions. And we hope for a safer and more productive life. Our second responsibility is conflict intervention and de-escalation. We want to recognize situations before they become violent. If our team sees tension developing, individuals or groups, we use our relationships and credibility to intervene, communicate, separate individuals when necessary, and try to prevent that conflict from escalating. We have now spent three weeks Six nights in East Lansing during that short period, our team has already stopped two potential incidents involving members of three different gangs. On those six nights, we have also encountered approximately 12 to 40 fellows or potential fellowship recruits while working in the community. That tells us something very important. We are trying to reach the right people, and they're here. Community violence intervention is about being present where and when intervention is needed. Sometimes the most important work happens after 11 p.m. and sometimes much later, before argument becomes a fight, before a fight becomes a shooting, and before family or community has to deal with another tragedy. Advance Peace is not here to replace law enforcement, schools, community organizations, parents, or other partners. We are simply here to add another layer of prevention to the CVI ecosystem. That CVI ecosystem is made up of, of course, Advance Peace, The Village, Lansing 360, Lansing Empowerment Network, law enforcement, hospitals, schools, courts, mental health, and other community partners. Our goal is simple. Build relationships, interrupt conflict, engage those at the highest risk, and help maintain a safe community environment for everyone who lives, works, studies, and shops and visits East Lansing. We appreciate the opportunity to serve you and we look forward to continuing to work alongside East Lansing and its community partners because when credible people are present, relationships are strong, and intervention happens early, we have a better opportunity to prevent violence before it happens. Thank you very much.

Thank you, sir. Questions for Mr. Bogan?

Mr. Whalen? Not a question, it's more than a comment. I have personally observed your team over many years now, and they are incredible de-escalators. They are relational, they are kind, they are proactive, and I just think incredibly invaluable to our community. I just think your presence just really changes the environment when you're there, and I just really appreciate it. to the staff person, just really, really the right people. So I just I really love what you do. I love that we can be collaborating together. And I just really applaud it.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Mr. Grigsby.

MR. Yeah, thank you. I echo Councilmember Whalen's remarks. Although I haven't had many years of working with you and being around your organization, I did get a taste of the impact through our recent Welcome Weekend initiative, and I got a chance to meet a couple of the field guys. I have their cards, but I don't remember their names exactly, but they were very impressive. actually went out there and spent time and I felt like knowing there was another layer in the community for de-escalation and equipped to address conflict arguments for shoving fights which I saw many scenarios like that with just young people and then to the more important issue when it comes to gun violence. And the initiative that you guys are representing and impacting over a significant period of time is just a really beautiful thing. We have gun violence is really destroying so many lives and families. And so I just am appreciative of you. I really want to commend what little I do know. I did a little bit of reading about the fellowship program. I think that's the heart and soul in making those relationships, getting people involved, empowering them with a platform, a voice, and a family, if you will. And I just think that's great. So thank you.

Thank you. As we always put it, it's hard work. It's not hard work. It's hard work. So that's why we do it, and that's what makes it important to us and to our community, which we love and I know you love as well.

Council Member Singh.

One follow-up to your presentation and then an additional question. The numbers that you cited, I think there were six and two. Is that specifically within East Lansing?

There were two incidents that could have been extremely volatile and escalated in East Lansing. And we were able to get cooler heads to prevail. We had some of our neighborhood change agents take those individuals and leave with them. At one instance, there was a group that I had saw with another staff member and we just We knew it was an extremely tense situation. I just took them to the pizza parlor. I said, let's go eat. So I was able to get them to get that squirrel moment. And I know

Last year, we, within the City of East Lansing, were looking to help support our community, address a number of issues we were seeing unfold downtown. And happy to have your nonprofit engaged, recognizing the prior work. Are you still doing work within City of Lansing as well?

Correct, yes.

And I believe you got recently a state appropriations for $500,000. Congratulations on that. Thank you. That's important. And is that going to be focused within MidMichigan for the work that you're doing within communities?

Yes, I mean, it's still going to our whole East Lansing, Lansing relationship. Everything that we're doing is right now focused there. There may be private situations that may happen in other counties, but our focus is East Lansing and Lansing.

And then remind me, because I think when we first heard a presentation from a dance piece, we may have reviewed this information, but recognizing the engagement, the relationship model, what do you build towards?

So we have seven touch points. Number one, we have to make sure we're engaging the right people. Once we've identified that those are the right individuals, then we really, we have to really court them, you know, and spend time with them even when they're telling us to get away and build those relationships. Sometimes it's easier than others and sometimes we really have to So creating those, our seven touch points are those three touches a day once we have that individual a part of the program. And then the second is creating a life map goal with those individuals. A lot of them have never had a dream past the next day or the next week. So we dream with them. And we start that. And then our third one is we get social services net navigation, housing, Medicare, whether it's sometimes it's as easy as helping some individuals gain license or ID getting their GED or graduation you know actually just getting them focused back in school just getting them around healthy people along with jobs and internships would be number four number five would be Elder and elder circles because we do have young ladies involved in gun violence as well as we know what happened a year ago in the Meridian area, so We're now putting them around healthy people in the elders and elders circle individuals in our community Who have given their time? And we have about 50 male and female elder and eldresses that spend time with these young people. We do this once a month for those that are involved in the fellowship, along with life skills, and that's every week. that we spend life skills and we incorporate cognitive behavioral therapy within the elder circles and we share out some of our shortcomings so that they know that we're not perfect as well. And along with the cognitive behavioral therapy that happens in life skills and at the elder and elder circles. there's a lot of sharing and there's a lot of growing and they start to see other individuals as the humanity in them. And they're like, wait a minute, I went through that. That's the same thing that's happened to me. So they start to share and develop relationships with other adults and healthy relationships. And also gaining resources with those individuals who might own businesses and help them gain employment. And then our six is life map allowance. Once they've been in the program, I should say, I'm sorry, fellowship six months or longer, they're eligible to receive $200 a month. They're eligible to receive that. Now, say, well, they have to check all the boxes. They have to stay out of trouble. They have to go to all their meetings. They have to go to school if they're in school. They have to... be at home when we check on them. And we're checking on them daily. Like I said, at least three times a day, if not more. But staying out of trouble like healthy families do and we have our kids do. And so they're rewarded for it if they do it. But they know they must check all the boxes. And so that goes a long way. But then there's a seventh touch point that's very important within our excursions and our transformational travel. Once we start to see that our young men or young ladies are changing in a healthy way in their mindset, different from what they were talking in the first couple months of the fellowship to 18 to 24 months later not wanting to live the same life that they have been living and taking them in different places and exposing them outside of their block or their city or their state or their country and them seeing that wow I can I can do this This is accessible for me? Yes. And so exposing them to different places, it changes the mindset. And as a former, I'm still an educator, always an educator, I've seen that happen when we take kids to just Cedar Point. And you take for granted that a kid, you know, I've been to Cedar Point a ton of times when I was in middle school and high school. and to be able to take a kid and be on the bus with those students and for them to say, I've never been to Cedar Point before, or I've never been out of Lansing before. And those are just students I've had when I was a principal or a coach. These are young people just like that. They've never been outside the block. They've never been able to take the hood off and say, I'm safe. I'm okay. And they like it. They like that. They like the fact that they can smile and they can laugh and they're not looking over their shoulder and they're not being hunted and they don't have to hunt anybody. So Exposure and transformational travel is that seven component. When we get them to that point, they're ready for change. They've already showed us that the transformation has happened, and this is just the final part. They must travel with a rival, and so they must agree to it. And I've seen some unbelievably things happen organically. within these trips that's blown my mind. And so that is what we do in a nutshell.

Well, thank you for that, for recapping that this goes long beyond just a night's activities or engagement. It is much offering supports for a life map, ultimately. So I appreciate that work, and thank you.

Thank you.

Mr. Meadows.

Just a couple of quick things. I can't remember who suggested that we engage with Advance Peace, but that was a great idea. And I appreciate that you will be here through October on our weekends. That's extremely positive for us. And I'm just wondering whether we have a plan to have you come in after that and give us a report on the entire period I'm hoping that happens and then we've got to talk about next year too because I think this is a very, very positive advancement and anybody who's been downtown at 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock, 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock in the morning knows how chaotic it can be and how alcohol can fuel a lot of these engagements. that you are able to intervene on and make sure that we don't have a bigger problem here. So thank you very much for your work and thanks for contracting with us to do this.

Thank you.

I just have a question about how the contacts work in the downtown. So I've seen some of your team down there when I've been there, and they've been wearing an Advance Peace t-shirt. Do they all wear that as a signal so people know about the organization and so they are willing to come over and talk because that's what you're wearing on your t-shirt?

Yeah, so we do it for a few reasons. One, we want people to know that Advance Peace is there. Two, we want the fellows and the people we're recruiting to know. And I can see sometimes when we show up, they're like, oh, you know, I'm like, yeah, how you doing here? So, yeah. So it's we want them to know we're there also. And and it puts them at ease as well, because sometimes when they're there, they're down there and there's rivals. So. We're telling them and explaining to them, hey, why don't you guys hang out over here? You know what's happening over here. And we'll split up and spend time with all of them. And then there's other individuals we're trying to reach that are also down there. We want to be able to approach them, and then most of them know Advance Peace, so when they see us, they say, okay, that's somebody safe.

And I've been down there when your team has been there, and it's been great to see you there. As you say, it's another layer. Any further questions?

You'll be back in the spring, right?

Whenever you need us.

Thank you for your work and thank you for your presentation tonight. It was great for us and for the community to get that briefing about all the different work that you put in.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks for being part of the community.

Thank you.

That brings us to communications from the audience. I do have one slip for tonight. Christine Root.

Good evening, I'm Chris Root. I'm a member of the Police Oversight Commission, but I'm speaking on my own behalf this evening. I always try to come to discussion only meetings because I know that you try to have a report from ELPD on those evenings. Also, I understood from your August meeting that the Council plans to enact a revised use of force policy for the Department by an ordinance. And I gather that that will be coming up maybe in October or something. So you're getting more involved in use of force policy. And so I want to talk a little bit about information about use of force incidents in the city and some things that I think need some work. Because you're planning to take more responsibility, I would urge you to ask to regularly receive the monthly narrative use of force reports that the police department prepares and gives to the police oversight commission, which is mandated by the oversight commission ordinance. At this time, the commission members are receiving an unredacted version. The format of those reports went through lots and lots and lots of changes. Right now it's a fairly full report and we are receiving it unredacted. It is then put on the ELPD website in a redacted form. So I hope that you will request to receive them every month and that you will request the unredacted form, the same one that the Commission receives. We have not yet received the August monthly report. The incident on August 3rd in front of Harper's is one that many of you have spoken about and have raised the importance of people seeing the body-borne camera video of that incident so that we can understand more about what happened. We have not yet received the August report. I hope that that monthly narrative report will be finished and given to the Commission before our next meeting which is on September 23rd. So I hope we will be seeing it soon. I wanted to share something with you about the narrative report for April of 2026. When we first received the report, there was one incident that was missing. It was certainly the most important incident that month, namely the incident on April 15th that the ELPD has consistently called an officer-involved shooting. ELPD, excuse me, the Oversight Commission noticed that the incident was missing from the report and asked for the monthly report to be updated to include that incident. After about five weeks we did receive the April report again with that incident included. This was within the last week. The report does not include any narrative at all. It simply says that the incident is currently being investigated by the Attorney General's Office. And I just can point out that the last time there was an officer-involved shooting involving ELPD that went to the Attorney General's Office for investigation, that did not hamper the Department from including a full report in the monthly narrative report at that time. And the community learned a lot about what happened actually as a result of that report which one would think is the reason for the report. But the narrative isn't there. At the top part of the incident report, there are 12 items of information that are redacted. So I can't talk about the ones that aren't, you know, are redacted.

Ms. Rue, could I ask you to work toward concluding your remarks? The three minutes has expired. Okay, I'm sorry.

So I'm particularly concerned that the information in the field for injury seems to me not to be accurate and that we have accurate information from the video that ELPD released and is on their website. And I think it's important that we need to be truthful with ourselves if we're going to make improvements in this city. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments. Is there anyone else who would like to address the council during public comment? Before anyone starts, I just want to remind people that we are now in the new phase where we're having three minutes per speaker during public comment. And I should have reminded people about that earlier. But I will take the opportunity to do this now. So please just leave it up there and we'll pick it up later. Thank you. Go ahead.

Thank you. Mr. Mayor, my name is Owen Ronk. I live on North Lawn Avenue. And I think tonight you're going to hear the results of a year at least long study. As it relates to that study, I live in concern area 34. In that study, I expect that you'll be informed about the fact that we need to spend about $300 million to modernize our sewer infrastructure and to make this community, frankly, habitable during wet weather events. In addition to that, though, tonight you'll hear about a $30 million balance proposal that addresses none of that. 84% or so of that $30 million bond proposal is associated with water and sewer, but that's not informed by the study you're going to hear about tonight. So I just ask you to really carefully consider the community's needs and prioritization decisions that you make tonight and in the future. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments. Is there anyone else who would like to address the council?

during this period.

Seeing none, do we have any callers? There are no callers on the line. OK, we have no callers. All right. That brings us to item 4.2, communications from the council, Councilmember Singh.

I'll pass for the seat well I one quick comment is we had just prior to this meeting had the University Student Commission's first meeting of the year so yes the students arrived back to town in August and we had our University Student Commission again their role is to help represent student organizations and the student community at large with our operational government as well as our community events at large. So I'm really excited for their ongoing participation supported by Elise Hodges who's been wonderful in the staff liaison role as we last updated our commission ordinance to reflect today's

operating and of student body organizations so just really excited to continue to work with that that body uh and that's it for the evening thank you mr grigsby yes thank you um i don't have any report i do have an announcement to make on september 24th at 5 30 at the traverse pie company um council member singh and i will be doing a community conversation we encourage everyone to come down and say hello and let us know what's on your mind if you can't make it please reach out in another way but hope to see there the community especially for those who might necessarily not come to council and expressed their experience positive or negative in regards to the community conversation thank you thank you mr. Meadows

No comments this evening. Mr. Whalen. I just want to say that our neighborhoods are the foundation of our community. And I had a really great opportunity, actually myself and the mayor went to Brookfield, which is one of the best neighborhoods in this community. I spent 30 years there. And also Walnut Heights. That's really where everything all starts and stops. And most people love the city of East Lansing because they love their neighbors, right? I just really appreciate those that coordinate those who support those those who sit on each one of those boards it's really a powerful contributing contribution to the city and I just really appreciate those I'd love to get all that I can thank you city managers report miss Irwin

Yes, thank you. I just have a couple items I'll announce for this evening. One, I do want to share that we did have 80s night this past weekend, which was a big success. We had quite high attendance. We had music downtown that everyone of all ages seemed to enjoy. You would literally see people of every age singing these songs from the 80s. I clearly knew the songs, but... people much younger than me also were singing along so that was fun there was we want to thank there was pinball Pete's they had some games out on the street you could play pinball and it was there were some other games I always call it the bean bag toss game but it has a more official name than that but anyway there were games out in in it was it was a good evening I also want to say thank you to all of our first responders and those who serve in that capacity and the remembrances that took place for 9-11. The MSU and many in the area do have an annual tribute sled push honoring the nearly 3,000 lives that were lost on 9-11 and there's been some pictures of that that are nice to see and our first responders joined in that on campus I see with some of their first responders some of the athletes I believe the president was also even there and involved so again I want to thank all of all of those folks for their work and for everyone who honored that day in their own particular way We do have a songwriting contest coming up. The finale is Friday, September 18th down at Ann Street Plaza. So if you wanna come and hear some songs and they're all a bit about East Lansing is my understanding. It sounds like it'll be a fun event. And also just a reminder that the East Lansing High School Homecoming is this weekend. Yes, this weekend. And Friday is the homecoming parade. So just a reminder to our residents, there will be the typical street closures. Those will start at approximately 4.30 in the afternoon. Usually the parade is pretty much through town by about 6.30. so again if you're in the area join in the fun with our East Lansing community and the school community and have a nice evening and then to round out the weekend Sunday you can stop by the farmers market thank you that's all I have for this evening

Thank you. That brings us to the first of our three discussion items, item 5.1, discussion of bond financing for capital improvement projects. We have Director Drenke and our Chief Financial Officer, Ms. Kincaid.

Good evening, Council. My name is Justin Drinke. I'm the Director of Parks, Recreation and Arts for the City of East Lansing. I'm here really to continue the conversation that we started back in March about buying financing for some capital improvement projects. We kind of presented a list of projects and some estimates at that point. And we are kind of ready to move forward with that process. I've kind of outlined in your agenda the timeline of what that process looks like. Audrey's able to talk a little bit about some of the financial details of that. We also do have some representatives from our bond council here to answer any technical questions that you might have. But really wanted to talk through, you know, the list of projects is pretty much the same as far as the facility side of things that you saw in March, one exception being that we took off the project to replace the boilers because we do need to accelerate that a little bit faster than we'll have the bond proceeds in hand so we'll have a different proposal for you for that actually next week's agenda but all of the other projects are the same and then we've incorporated some of the water and sewer infrastructure projects all into the same issuance just for some efficiency of issuing those bonds all at the same time And I just want to point out that this aligns with a couple of the city's strategic priorities, but also does align with some of the recommendations made from the Financial Health Review Committee, specifically their recommendation number 14 that talks about utilizing debt financing for allowable capital improvement projects. So Audrey, if you want to talk about some financial impacts.

good evening audrey kincaid cfo so i wanted to provide a little bit of context in terms of the annual cost because these are big numbers that we're talking about um we don't have any official um debt service schedules for these issuances that we're talking about but again kind of using the the march discussion and extrapolating that out kind of looking at the first 10 million and the 30 million if we do everything um so you can see the allocation between water sewer general fund and parks and rec is it's about in total 62 water sewer 15 general fund and 23 parks and rec and that's across the total if you're just looking at the 27 it's a little bit heavier weighted on water sewer it's more like 76 percent nine percent general fund and 15% parks and rec. So just to give you some context, if we were to issue the 10 million, thinking about about a $700,000 annual debt service payment, the general fund portion would be $63,000 annually. And then if across the full 30 million, the general fund would be about 315,000 annually. So that kind of gives you some budget context for what we're talking about on these annual, and we're talking about 20-year bond life here. Um, I would also say that one of my goals would be to have the income tax re renewed and that, um, as we pay off our pension, we also segue into, um, using those funds to pay off our longterm debt. So this would fall right in that, um, that arena, um, focusing mostly on the general fund and parks and rec side, not necessarily on the water sewer, since those are recovered through, um, rate payments.

Questions for Stu?

I just had a question about the income tax renewal initiative and just really how important that is to, um, I wouldn't say necessarily educate but inform the community about why that's important and what exactly we're doing with that money. Um, and what that money means to our future of East Lansing. I just want to emphasize, uh, I will be prioritizing that and I would like hopefully I know that you are and just really making sure that we really have a pathway forward with that communication and that information that's available for the community.

Yeah, just some context. We have reached out to MERS to do some ballpark estimates based on what we hope that we're going to contribute in the next four years. Um, and that really does change the outlook of that, um, funding ratio in a good way. Um, but we're doing a couple of different scenarios with them. So I think good news is on the horizon. Um, and so then that I think would be really set the stage for that renewal conversation.

Councilmember Singh.

A couple questions. One, I just want to, again, ensure that I heard you. For the water and sewer work, we would increase races or rates to recapture?

They would be incorporated. I don't necessarily know the full impact, if that's going to be absorbed. I kind of defer to that team that has worked with their rate modelers to... to answer that.

Ron wants to jump in. Yeah, Ron did. He perked up. He's being called to the stage.

Yes, we do have a detailed rate model that projects out for 10 years to make sure that these projects are incorporated in that rate models that aren't any big adjustments to the rates going forward. So it's not an exact science because it's 10 years out, but yes, we do try to predict all these projects, debt service, all that kind of stuff.

And they assume the public has a line of sight into that 10-year model?

We have not publicly shown anybody the right model, but it's not a secret. It's taken a lot from the CIP as far as projects and things go. That's where those are parallel.

My head's going in a couple of different ways. I do have a bond question as well in terms of, guess what? Bonds have been in the news a lot. US Treasuries have been in the bond news a lot. Will that impact or not impact our municipal bonds that we would be pursuing. I shouldn't assume anything, but that's a big question because that impacts what we will have to pay back and that also impacts what we may or may not be raising rates on our community members on. So this is all what's the dollar figure? So I don't know if you want to start with the bond question first.

Sure. So my name is Steven Burke. I'm with MFCI. And so we're the financial advisor to the city. So we're your fiduciary in this transaction. And so in working with this, exactly what you just described. So the price of oil and inflation have been relentlessly pushing interest rates higher over the last few months. And really looking back, I think we've been in front of this council several times over the last four or five years. You know, we started at a historical low in interest rates and then we were here refinancing bonds a couple of years ago and going, oh gosh, you know, maybe we're doing this, you know, right at the point where interest rates have run up and now, you know, looking back, it was a fortuitous time to refinance some of those bonds that we did because of the most recent move. So as long as oil prices continue to pressure rates higher and pressure inflation higher, that's going to be a moving target. So if we issued these today, we'd be issuing them at about four and a quarter percent. I think most of the models that are probably being used are anywhere between four and five percent, so we're still being reasonably conservative. But if things continue and rates go to beyond where they are now significantly. So you start seeing 10-year treasury at 6% rather than 5%. That is going to start pressuring some of those models looking forward, and we'll continue to work with staff to update those estimates on a forward-looking basis, and they'll adjust and bring those to you as needed.

Thank you. That's helpful. And I guess, especially as we're looking forward to September 22nd with a possible vote is from my perspective, I just want to ensure not only me who will be voting on this, but also our community has a good understanding of what the city will be on the hook for to pay back and, or. what the outlook looks like in our rates over the next 10 years, because there's a push and pull there. At the end of the day, I'm really concerned about people's pocketbook right now across the community, our state, and the world, frankly.

Yeah, good evening. I'm Roger Swetz. I'm the bond attorney with Dickinson Wright. Steve is the expert on what the rates are going to be. What I just wanted to add was what we're looking at in the plan for this issue would be to split this up into at least two series of bonds, the first of which would be issued before the end of the year. By doing that and keeping that first issue at $10 million or less, we get to issue these as what are called bank qualified bonds. It doesn't mean a bank is going to purchase them, but it does mean that the bond purchasers who are financial institutions get an extra tax benefit from being able to buy the bonds. So one, we're setting this up in a way that we hope will be the lowest possible interest rate environment for the bond issue, and two, we will be getting you know, if you decide to move forward into the market relatively soon with this first tranche. So hopefully, you know, we're going to be in this, you know, relatively close to this current interest rate environment that Steve mentioned. And this all will come back to you again before we do that with a bond resolution that will come in October. So we'll be a little closer to the actual issuance, you know, before you give your final go ahead.

Again, you mentioned oil markets before. I think both the Wall Street Journal as well as the New York Times reported that they're predicting this war could go into beyond January of 2020. Nine. Um, so I just, again, as we all watch the news in terms of the middle East is erupting on top of what's happening in Russia and Ukraine. Um, even now we're supposed to have some sweetheart deal with Venezuela. Anyway, I say this all to say that the outlook's not great. I can't imagine the outlook is that good. If we're doing this in two bites, like even though the first bite may safeguard us to some degree, we still have another 20 million or almost 20 million worth of work that we won't be able to move forward with. Right? If we do this in two bites?

Correct. I think the challenge here is if we really knew where interest rates were going to be in a month or even a week, or even in two days after the Fed meets on Wednesday, depending on what they say, we could make a lot of money trading interest rates, obviously. So we can only pretty much field what we can see directly in front of us, which is the amount of projects that we have on the immediate horizon that we have line of sight to for the first tranche is about, I think it's about 6 million. for year one. Moving into year two, there's about 13 million total projects. We're going to be able to finance the first piece, part of the second piece, and then come back to the market. I think that that's a reasonable plan given the volatility that's occurring in interest rates. If the price of oil and interest rates were to significantly slow the economy, then you're going to see rates start to come down really quickly as we move forward through that. The challenge being how far does inflation...

In normal times and normal markets.

Correct, for sure. I mean, there's been plenty of times over the last couple of years where lots of folks have predicted that we've hit a high in interest rates and rates will be lower in a year. And I mean, even going back a handful of months ago, the expectation was for Fed cuts rather than Fed increases. So... It's a challenging market, and I think the most prudent way to approach it is you finance your projects as those projects are ready to be built. And we manage the interest rate environment at the time that those are issued as best as possible by doing things like qualifying the bonds as bank qualified by keeping it under $10 million to get the best rate in the environment that you're presented with.

Mm-hmm. I might also add that part of the structure in splitting this into two is looking at the fact that there probably isn't a need to spend some of this money for 12, 18, 24 months from the time we would be issuing this first series of bonds. And the conventional wisdom is that paying the four and a quarter percent on X numbers of millions of dollars in that amount of time before you need it would be more expensive than hopefully what the risk of the interest cost risk is. So that's kind of the traditional conventional way to look at it. But this is totally up to you as a council to decide what you want that first tranche to be. So if you had other ideas, you know, we certainly would respond to what your thoughts are there.

I don't have any good ideas.

Mr. Whalen. So point of clarification, I know we have a vote for next week. Are we just voting on the first 10 million? Or is it yes for the entire project? Or we get to vote on it as we go? Tell me the procedural.

Yeah, no, thank you for that. That's a very good question. What we're doing with this first resolution is we're just opening the door to the possibility of financing these projects with a total $30 million bond issue. And the reason why it's opening the door is there's this 45-day referendum process that's mentioned in the notice that's attached to the resolution. So this is just getting us through that initial process, which then gives the council the ability to make further decisions and move forward with this process once we get past the 45 days after the notice is published. So this, as I said, will come back to you. If we stay with the plan of a first bond issuance of 10 million, there will be a bond resolution for that amount that will come to the council in October. Needs to be adopted no later than November. So that's the timeframe you're looking at to actually give the final go ahead with the amount and the approval for the first tranche of bonds. And we can have further discussions at that point in time. But at this point, you're just opening the door. And then this will all come back to you really in two ways. One, with a final bond resolution to authorize what the first tranche of bonds will be. And then even more importantly, before the money is spent, you obviously have to approve the contracts and the actual projects on which the money will be spent.

Just a follow-up on that last point. So the resolution we may adopt on the 22nd does not necessarily identify exactly the bond issue that we will ultimately vote on after the 45-day period, correct?

Correct. This is approving the over, this is stating your intent for the overall project. So the projects are listed there, the maximum amount is listed there, but then the bond resolution that will come to you in October or it could slip perhaps to November, that resolution will give the more specifics as to the amount for the first tranche.

And the more specific amounts could be less than the total but not more. They could involve projects that, it could remove projects from the list but not add projects to the list, right?

Correct. It can be less than the total and it can remove projects.

And the 45 days starting September 2nd, how does that get us to a resolution in October? Or am I missing something there?

Well, that deadline will pass in early November. I think for the sake of allowing the council time to react to the bond resolution, I think we were looking at October, right, Steve? I think that was the date. That's giving the council approval, but we have to get past the 45 days before we would actually go into the mechanics of the bond issue.

So we can act before the 45 days is up, but you can't act until the 45 days is up because the people have an opportunity to say no. Right, right, right.

Yeah, so the overall process looks like the adoption of this resolution next week, if it's of your mind to do that. A notice is published in the paper, 45 days runs. There does need to be this bond resolution adopted, which could be in October or November. We won't do anything to move this out forward towards the sale to the 45 days runs. And after that point, there would be a notice of sale published in a national publication called The Bond Buyer. We'll go out to the entire bond buying world to get the most competitive pressure and get the best rate that we can for the city. So we wouldn't take that step until after the 45 days passes. And then at that point, that will set a date for the bond sale. And then after that, the city manager or yourself as mayor would have the authority to award that bid. And then we would go to a bond closing.

Okay. Thank you. Further questions? Mr. Meredith.

I've got a couple. Number one, I guess, I think we need that 10 year rate model to be made public so that the public knows what's going to happen. But that only takes care of, as I understand it anyway, the DPW project. So where's the cost to the public on an annual basis or through their property taxes for the rest of these? Do we have that?

So I think for Parks and Rec, the intention is that that would be funded through – sorry.

So for some of the portions that would be for this building, for example, we would be looking at recovering our annual debt service payments through program fees, possibly through other revenue sources that come into the Parks and Recreation Fund. for City Hall and other government buildings that live in the general fund, that would be using existing general fund revenues. We're not asking for an additional millage to support any of this. This would be with existing revenues.

So those general fund revenues are being used for other things right now. What would we be switching?

The other thought is that if income tax dollars are available If the switch to that is available, then we would focus on using those funds. There's a lot of ifs.

If I'm going to vote on this on the 22nd, I need a little more information on how we're going to pay for all this. And then I do have some, number one, you know, I do feel that Based on the Financial Health Committee's recommendations, I really support the idea of us bonding to do this type of work within the community. But, you know, we've got $17 million or so, almost $18 million of DPW stuff, which I have zero problem with. They have a plan on how they're going to pay for it. So I don't know why we're going 10 million and not taking care of that, like right in the get-go, if this is the best time for us to be doing this. You've indicated you want to do it 10, then 18, but I'm not sure why I understand it wouldn't be the opposite.

Yeah, so it has to do, I think, with the engineering, design, and bidding realities of when that work can get done. So I think the... You know, the staff has put together a spreadsheet showing the amounts of money that would be able to be spent in the current fiscal year and in the following fiscal year and in the fiscal year after that. And the thought is that to borrow all of it now and have all that money outstanding, we'd be paying interest on all of it when we wouldn't be able to spend it until we get into the next or even the fiscal year after that would be incurring an unnecessary interest on that money. And so the thought in splitting it in two is simply a way to, one, reduce the cost of issuance because we'd only be paying for well it wouldn't reduce the cost, it would increase the cost of issuance because we're paying for two bond issues but the savings of four and a quarter or whatever the interest rate would be on ten million or whatever that number might be is a significant number so the thought was is that that savings justifies breaking this into two issues. Now that's a planning point that we have you know come with a recommendation as but it's totally up to the to the council to decide if you wanted to do it in one that would be your prerogative but you know we believe that the savings and splitting it on two or the potential savings you know is something that the city might want to realize okay i'm not advocating that you don't do it in two i hope i didn't sound like that what i'm my question was why not do the 18 first and then do the 10. And I think that just has to do with the timing of those projects and when they're going to be available to actually be built out and started.

And before you respond, let me just say that on other bond issues that we've had in the past, we have bonded even though we know we're not really spending that money for two or three years. And we've earned it, so we had a bigger pot of money. At the end, are you saying that this will not produce some revenue on these funds or we are prohibited by some law from obtaining earnings on this?

Sure. So the most recent issues that we've done at the city have been through the state's SRF program. So those are draw-based loans in those cases. And so you borrow, say, $30 million, but you only pay interest as you actually spend the money because that's the nature of the program. And that's an advantage of using that program, and it's obviously managed by the state. In this case, given where we are with interest rates, the short term interest rates are now lower than our longer term interest rates. We're borrowing at four and a quarter, but we may only be able to get three and a quarter in interest. So we're actually losing 100 basis points on the arbitrage, where if we go back even a year ago, that was flipped, where we were borrowing at three and three quarters and we were getting four and three quarters. And so that has flipped over the last year to 18 months.

And the other thing I would add to that is under the federal tax laws from the IRS, the city is capped at earning interest in that it can't earn interest more than what the bond rate is on the bonds. So that's your best case scenario is that you break even, but then as Steve says, your actual investment rates of your short-term funds is below that, you would actually have some loss and that's called negative arbitrage.

And then I know you had something to say, so come on up.

I just wanted to point out that some of these projects need design to be finished up and also they're multi-year projects, so it doesn't make sense to get the $17 million up front when it's going to take us three or four years to implement like the meter and reading system upgrades. Okay. So that's part of the reason.

Yeah, and then just a couple of personal comments here. I don't have any problem with anything on this list, but I do have questions regarding the City Hall investments. I mean, if we're still thinking about moving City Hall, We're talking about putting another $3 million into City Hall with significant upgrades that we haven't really had the discussion about what are our other options with regard to this building and that location. I think we need to have those. In terms of... of the building we're in right now, I don't have any problem with, you know, we're committed to this building. I mean, this is the community center and it's not going anywhere. And so all of that expense of maintenance and improvement, I'm very much supportive of. I'm still not convinced about the third floor, frankly. And I need a little more information because I think when we talked about the fact that we don't have to have the outside exit any longer. We chopped off about a million and a half dollars in what we thought the expense would be, but we're still looking at almost $4 million to improve the third floor to provide, I guess, additional programming, which will allow us to do, but I'm not sure the revenue from that of additional programming really justifies a $4 million investment in that floor. And then one last thing. One part of that is the parking lot expansion and repavement, which I think can be part of the The entire improvement of this location, I assume you were referring to the expansion by a redesign of the front? Yes. Okay. And I think that's part of the improvement to the entire building, not just the third floor. So even if that was part of the other proposal, I think I would be supportive of that, just so you know.

Yes, I will offer for the expansion to the third floor. I've started to look at what are the programs that could relocate up to the third floor? What opportunities does that open up for us as a department? A couple of things that I've done some preliminary forecasting on. So one of the programs that's quite popular is our ceramics program. And we're currently maintaining a wait list for all of our ceramics classes. If we were to expand the ceramic studio up to the third floor in a space that accommodates just the size of our wait list, we could generate an additional $45,000 of program revenue every year, which is about a quarter of the annual debt service. And that's just one sixth of the space on that third floor. So I do believe that there's a programming need just by using the third floor space that more than covers the annual debt service that makes that project worth it. The other things that that does is when we move things up to the third floor that are currently located in the building, it opens up that space for additional programming opportunities One of the things that we're currently exploring is whether it makes sense to operate a preschool out of this building and looking for additional child care opportunities. And so I think that beyond just expanding up to the third floor it really allows us to imagine how we can best serve the needs of the community out of this space.

Well, that's very interesting. We have had a child care program operated by the city in the past, and we've run into trouble with the state. So I think we can operate a better child care program. This might be the location. It may not. But certainly, we've given that a chance before. Bottom line, I need to know what this is going to cost our citizens overall. So if it's program fees that are expanded, I need to know what those are going to be. This is a time within our community and all across this country where it costs a lot more to live right now than it ever has in the past, and mostly on food and gasoline and all of the things we rely on in order to live our regular lives. So there are a lot of challenged people in our community. We are not a wealthy community. We have a lot of people who struggle to get by, so we have to be very careful about these costs.

I will also speak to a little bit of the City Hall question. The projects that were identified for City Hall are critical priority infrastructure projects. Some of these projects that are identified are replacing equipment such as air handling equipment or HVAC equipment that is 18 to 40 years beyond its expected service life. We've got a piece of equipment that's been operating for 60 years that was designed to operate for 20 years, and I'm afraid that that's just not going to continue to operate. We really do need to invest in those if we're gonna even get another three to five years out of that space.

Yeah, and I think that's a pretty good argument for us to look at what are we gonna do about City Hall as we go forward.

Anything else?

Yeah, Mr. Whalen. So I am perplexed by this because I do see the needs. I see it does seem like some of the projects may be a little bit more wants than that say critical infrastructure needs but I'm just concerned with our so much unknown and debt I'm kind of a no debt guy debt is debt but I understand there's smart debt in that smart debt So honestly, I'm a little perplexed here, and I'm still investigating and still learning and still growing with this. But I appreciate all the thought that's gone into it. Yeah, I'm still in process.

A couple of questions. One concerns the, I mean, my big concern is the general fund, right? Because that's the fund that's under stress. And with a 30 million, with a debt service for the total of 30 million, the debt service is about 2.1 million. 15% of that is about 315,000. Is that correct? Okay. So that would be, that would, 315,000 would be the burden on the general fund. I just wanted to check my math there. I had a similar question about, so the parks and rec fund proportion would be 23% and the idea is to recover that through space rental and program fees. You started to address this with a plan for how to increase revenue through third floor. I gather the plan is also to recover the cost of the new parking lots that way as well?

Yes, that would be through those different programs. So, for example, for the aquatic center, the cost of debt service for that portion of the parking lot really amounts to less than a $1 per person increase to the daily admission rate. So if we raise ticket prices by $1 for admission to the aquatic center, it covers the cost of that parking lot project.

So I guess I think it would be helpful – You've worked through these analyses?

I've started to, yes.

You've started to. I think it would be helpful to have some of that attached to the AIR for our next meeting because it makes sense to me that we want to go to a full cost recovery model, but I think we in the community need to have some sort of proof of concept that that's actually going to work. And so I think some sort of analysis along those lines would be helpful.

What I will offer is that this first step just continues the process and opens the door to approving those bonds at a future meeting. So the item that will appear on next week's agenda really is just saying this is the maximum scope of projects and up to $30 million. Because it will take a little bit more time to do a more thorough analysis that I think will answer those questions. But we can certainly have that for the October conversation when it's actually time to approve a specific bond amount.

That's great and that's perfect. It doesn't have to be. Thanks for reminding me that it doesn't have to be by next week. Further questions?

Okay. Let me say one last thing, which is that I think the message that we give to our citizens is extremely important with regard to this. If there's a 45-day referendum, we have never had a single citizen who isn't willing to sign a petition or to get this on the ballot or for a referendum. And that means they've got to be convinced, our community has to be convinced that we're headed in the right direction. Right now, I don't think we have enough information to make that argument.

just because just responding to what you offered and then also some of bond counsel this next step doesn't strap us anything so we would still have a runway to hear from community but we need the you know the final what it's going to cost and what the impacts on rates and all that to your point it's going to take some time so i would say i'm still open you know to supporting this next week if it's on the agenda i'm recognizing it doesn't hamstring us in any way i'm looking for the nods from the bond council as well i see yours okay would the interim city manager care to add anything to this discussion

Thank you. I think it's been covered pretty well and I am glad that Councilmember Singh brought that up because I think a part of tonight was to help get this conversation going so we did have even more information about what some of your concerns might be or what questions you might have which I think this helps. us in knowing that but also we wanted to keep the process going so that we could have the opportunity you know to bond for some of this because we have been looking at staff has spent a lot of time predating even my tenure here looking at some of these projects and I know Phil that some of them are quite important for us to do in order to be able to function properly with what we have. I know City Hall is one thing that has been a discussion and there's been for a number of years now I think the discussion of do we invest in the current City Hall or do we keep trying to keep the current one going and we do have some concerns about some of the systems we have in place and even if we were to go to a new City Hall it's gonna take a little bit of time. So we are balancing that risk, I think, in some of the discussions I've had with staff of, okay, if council were to make the decision we're moving to another city hall, and let's say that takes three, four years, is our system going to be able to keep operating that long because we have to have certain, We have to have heat and cooling in our building if we're going to operate in there. So that really is some of staff's concerns that I have heard in my time here. And even before I returned recently, I've heard this discussion. And that is really what we are all trying to balance. not an exact science clearly so I thank you for your comments all of you and I think it helps us and we'll get you some more answers you might not have all those answers clearly by next week but if we can keep the process going that gives us a little bit more time and we can get a few more answers to you before the October by the October deadline

So my last question is actually for Bond Council again. And if I could ask you to address it. So you said, I mean, appropriately enough, it's up to us to decide what our strategy is going to be, right? The two tranche versus one tranche. And you recommended a course of action based on certain characteristics of having one tranche be below 10 million, right? That would save us some money. But I don't think we have an analysis here that says exactly what the benefits would be projected, right? You're making that recommendation based on your analysis that has a suggestion that we would save money that way, and I wonder if you could provide that, some analysis that would tell us what the numbers were.

Sure, and absolutely, we can present that at your next meeting. We have done the analysis and discussed it with staff. I don't think it was included, but I think that the other piece of this is you have a tremendous amount of projects that are in your stack, and they're all at various stages of development, development, whether they've been designed or not, going through the process. The most conservative way to approach it would be to finance them kind of in this tranche system to address them as they're designed and they're ready to be completed. And then you complete them rather quickly after the bonds are issued under each tranche. Certainly the other option would be to borrow all the money upfront and complete all of your projects under that. What that risks is borrowing too much money if your projects don't end up being 30 million and you only needed 25 and you borrowed 5 million extra. I'm sure you can find somewhere to spend it within the project descriptions. But the other one would be you don't have enough money. You've maxed out your notice of intent and now you need to go through another notice of intent period where there's a chance that potentially those projects are partial partial away done and you have a referendum or something like that, that occurs that you're not able to complete those. So doing them because there's so many and they're over several years, that was the advice of just the group's discussion. But we can certainly give you the analysis of doing the whole thing at once and what that cost looks like and then what that looks like over the next 20 years. So we're happy to present all those scenarios to you.

I think we're interested in doing our due diligence and also making it clear for the community's benefit that we're doing our due diligence. And so even if it's not necessarily, you know, chapter and verse of ten pages worth of numbers, but some outline that describes the different parameters you thought about that leads you to this particular recommendation I think would be helpful. And if I heard you right a moment ago, you suggested that if we had too much money, we could spend it on other things. But my understanding is that we can't do that, right? We have to spend it on what we propose to spend it on.

Within the projects. I'll let Roger address that.

Yeah, so we, you know, you will notice from the description that I put in the notice of intent that, you know, we want to provide enough specificity so the public knows what the plan is. We do have a little bit of wiggle room in there by allowing other projects that the council might approve for money to be spent on. And largely it's to address that issue that Steve brought up. If for some reason, it doesn't happen very often, but if for some reason you do have some extra money once the projects are completed, you know, it's very bad to have bond money sitting around, occurring interest, subject to IRS rules, so we do want you to be able to spend it. So there's a little bit of a doorway there to do that, but that is certainly not the plan that you'll do that.

it's all part of the fact that you can't predict the future right and so you need various mechanisms to make sure that you can get as close as you can yeah okay any further question so that I thought this was really helpful so thanks to everybody for their questions and input thank you thank you that brings us to item 5.2 discussion of police and fire department updates Chief Newman.

Good evening.

Thank you, Mayor, Council.

It is Chief Newman, correct?

Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

I do have some additional documents that I want to provide for you. I'm not able to complete some of the data that we were, data collection that we were conducting before the AIR was built, so I want to make sure.

Thank you, sir. I provided it to you, and we'll give this information

As far as the PowerPoint presentation that was put together for you, I decided that instead of trying to put data up on the screen, have data on the paper, and then also be talking to you, that I would just add a few pictures on the slides and they can breeze through those as we speak. The slides that you see will give you some idea of the new hire candidate testing process. Is it within a couple of the photos? It seems to be a bit of a task in order to hold those processes. And I believe at this point we have held six different hiring processes within the last 15 months. Currently we are two personnel down. We had another young firefighter leave the department to attend He will. He will achieve his goals down south, but he's separated from East Lansing after seven years. It was a loss. We were bummed to see him go, but at the same time we wish him well in his goals as he moves forward. Even though we're at 55 personnel currently, we have two additional new hires that will be coming in. Mr. Jafervich will be joining us next Monday on the 21st. And we will welcome Mr. Williams on October 5th. That will put us right back at full staff at 57. I believe there may be some training photos on the other slide that follows the hiring candidate testing. And we might as well briefly go over the training aspects, since that's the most fun piece for any of the staff. They would definitely tell you that. We had a significant amount of training over the summer since the last update that I was able to provide to you. We were able to utilize the training facility there you can see in those two photos for structural collapse training that involved multiple departments from the area. It was quite a success. Everybody spoke highly of the training. We actually had a building that we could place the shores up against and they could actually use their skills to design, build, construct, and then get inside the structure and continue some inside work. That was an eight-hour day that they put in. All of the staff did a phenomenal job. It was well-received, and it was good to see those professional relationships build again with additional training. There was additional tower rescue training by our tower rescue group with the Michigan State Police. They have continued to review that training and practice the lowering of equipment and personnel from the helicopter as well as raising patients, hoisting them back up to the helicopter for those remote areas. I believe they have practiced that three different days they spent time on that this past summer. I did list out all of the training within the brief that was provided in the documents. I don't want to just read through it as if I was reading off a PowerPoint. I also included in the brief the total call volume, incident call volume over the last four months. I just gave you some documents that gave some comparisons from month to month. And you'll notice that the numbers are going to be different. What was given to you in the brief was very specific to total call volume. So that's going to also include the mutual aid that was provided outside of East Lansing. The document that I gave you this evening is specific to call volume within the City of East Lansing versus call volume on campus. It was requested to be able to have some comparisons in those pieces so you'll see when you read through there that those numbers don't equate and that's the reason. The mutual aid pieces were separated. Although the platform that I'm using to pull the data, there were a few addresses that had a 48823 zip code on them and it attached them into this report with City of East Lansing calls. So I separated those out and called those out in each month and let you know. It was not large numbers that was actually captured. It was very minimal. One incident for June, one for July, four in May, and three in August. So it did not skew any of the numbers or change anything. There's the reason for that separation in there. In the comparison that I just gave you, you can see that there was a decrease in run volume between May and June. And even with that call volume reduction, I did include in the brief that staff covered 250 man hours for special event, large assembly events, graduations. So university graduations for MSU as well as Lansing Community College and multiple high schools. from within the mid-Michigan area held their graduations at Breslin. So that was an additional six weeks. If you're talking actual work weeks, it was six additional work weeks between May and June that staff came in to make sure that they had those hours covered and we were able to provide the standby emergency medical services for those groups. And then you'll notice that Looking into July and August, you'll see a significant change in that call volume as it starts to ramp back up. August specifically because that was the welcome week or welcome to state for the students. And you'll see quite a jump in there. I did include within the report that I just gave you data in regards to adult health care facilities within East Lansing. And I think it's very interesting to see that those numbers are almost exactly the same moving across, except for June. May had 138 EMS calls at adult care facilities. July was 132. And August was 139. It's pretty much a standard piece across the board. June did drop down to 108. Not certain why that occurred, but it is just over 100 that we capture each month just on those adult health care facilities. Any additions to those facilities or additional facilities will add to that call volume, and it will stay the same across, moving across, on an average. It'll remain the same. Last year we averaged 20 runs per day. Currently, to date, we are at 21 per day. I did have a calculation pulled together for you in my notes in regards to this past football weekend. So we maintain on an average 21 calls per day. Thursday the 10th we did exactly 21. We had 15 EMS calls and six fire related. Friday we had 27, not an extreme jump, 23 EMS and four fire. saturday we staffed an additional ambulance so we had four ambulances in service within the city on campus we had two ambulances at each station we pulled 69 total calls 53 of those were within the city and on campus and 16 of those were managed by staff that were working within the stadium there were 16 of our staff members within the stadium one within the EOC MSU's EOC. Uh, and they were able to manage those calls within the stadium during that event. Those were the majority were heat related due to the sun, the direct sun and the heat while they were in the stands. Uh, ironically they did try to hydrate. They were just not using water. The Emergency Operations Center. I apologize for that. I remind myself not to use the acronyms, and we use the acronyms anyway. Out of habit, I'm sure. The report to you a few months ago was that we have new cardiac monitors in service on our ambulances that were just put into service. We've had multiple training days with our staff on those monitors, including a 15-lead class, which is a specific cardiac monitor. rhythm generated report that they can achieve. They have the ability to not just get the standard 12 lead EKG, but they can move those leads around and get a 15, which gives you three additional views. to the back of the heart, which is normally, it's not always gathered. That's not data that's always captured, and oftentimes it is relevant because if you have all of the signs, the symptoms of a cardiac event, but yet it may not give you that information, they move the leads to the back of the chest on the patient, and they're actually able to identify that it is at the posterior or the back of the heart that that event is occurring. So they've spent a lot of time training on the new cardiac monitors. There is quite a bit of comfort and positive reception to those new monitors, so we're looking forward to seeing those coming into effect out in the public. I know that multiple times as I've come up and sat and given reports, there's been additional pieces that have been asked to be provided to you and it seems like a lot of information that was dropped out today for the jumping to try to capture what occurred this summer. I wanted to make sure that I gave as much as I could to you to provide that information to you. I also included with the information that I gave you tonight a snapshot from January 1st of our mutual aid runs It gives not only the mutual aid runs that we received service for, but also what we provided service for. And you'll see that those are, it's quite a broad piece. We have mutual aid with all departments, but we have an automatic aid with Meridian Township, and we have an automatic aid currently with Bath Township. Bath Township, we have an automatic aid because of the fact that the Hawks Hollow portion of the township and that very southern portion of their township, we actually can arrive much sooner than they can in that area for any response, EMS or fire. You'll see in there that, yes, we have provided quite a bit to Bath Township. compared to when you look at percentage-wise to what we've received from Bath Township. What we are getting from Bath Township is the time that we're spending in training. Chief Kooner brought down a specific water rescue professional who came in to provide training, and that was opened up to us. No charge, no requirement. It was just... We know that we have that benefit from you on the automatic aid. We want to open up the straining for you so your staff can also participate in that. So there is a genuine shaking of hands in service in that aspect. They do not provide any EMS service, so there's no way for us to have any type of reciprocity on that side, not the way we do with Lansing Township, Lansing, and Meridian Township. You'll also see in those numbers that we received some assistance and provided service to NISA, which is the Northeast Ingham Emergency Service Authority in Williamston and Weberville. So we did provide service in Williamston, but we also had their services making it all the way over to us. And the reasons for that were, Our resources were taxed and already active. All of Meridian Township's resources were already taxed and in service. So the next service available, being as Lansing Township and Lansing were also unavailable, NISA came into East Lansing. But I wanted to give that information to you so you understand the full spectrum of how big that mutual aid piece becomes.

You said this, the difference between the mutual and automatic. OK. Can you break that down for me? Yes.

Mutual aid is if a service or authority municipality is managing an emergency response and they realize they need additional resources, they can call out at that time for additional resources. We have an agreement with all the metro area that, yes, we will provide that when requested. So mutual aid is a requested assistance. Automatic aid is Meridian Township and Bath Township are toned out, but if it hits within that specific area of Bath Township or Meridian Township, we are also automatically toned. So everybody is called relatively at the same time without that request from that municipality. And we do the same with Meridian Township. We also automatic come across on fire calls, Meridian Township sends an engine and a battalion. Further questions for the Chief, Mr. Whelan?

Clarify when, very impressive. When there is a graduation or something, do we get compensated for that? Like if you have to have sent extra people to the stadium?

Yes, there is cost recovery billing on those. Thank you.

Also, and with all these incredible stats of us saving the world, which is fantastic, it shows the quality of your department, the quality of your staff, that they're able to give beyond what we need. I think it's interesting that... Some of the disparities are pretty big. Actually, township we actually received more than we gave, which was a surprise to me. But when we would go and assist other agencies, that was necessarily on a time that we didn't have to pull away from a need in East Lansing, correct? No. It was necessarily downtime so that these assistance for other agencies didn't necessarily hinder a response in East Lansing, correct?

Usually.

I'd love it to be yes. No, it's usually. But then that means somebody else from another part would come in and help us then.

There was actually one day the deputy chief came into my office and he said, did you hear those calls? i did not i have my radio off i was in a team's meeting he said it's been ten minutes and we have three of our ambulances in the city of lansing they all three were removed within that ten minute period what that left was our dependency meridian and lansing township to then back us up only to look into the situation to find that lansing township was already also in the city of lansing so was delhi township meridian township was then covering meridian township and east lansing and then was actually available for anything further west so like in my former life there would be times that somebody would ask for mutual aid and sometimes we'd have to say i'm sorry we can't that's true that is that yes that is true there there are those times one of the benefits within the city of east lansing is both the truck out of Station 2 and the engine out of Station 1. Both of those are advanced life support units. So we have the ability to respond, treat, while we're waiting for that outside ambulance to come in, which takes much longer to arrive.

So we're still able to take care of our people, even though we're being generous to others. Without question, we're going to do what we can do. Fabulous. Thank you.

Mr. Meadows. You know, looking at the documents that you gave us tonight, you know, I'm looking at the calls to MSU campus and it's clear that, you know, we're looking at, you know, May where a lot of students left, you know, June and July. But by the time we get to August where we had about 10 days students back on campus, you know, we jumped, we doubled the number of calls on the MSU campus and that's just 10 days. So what would we be expecting or would you be expecting that number to be in a full month of students on campus?

I'm not certain yet because I'm still following the data, but I'm very interested to find out what we're going to be looking at. Yeah. There hasn't been any historically Historically, there hasn't been any effort given to collect and try to compile this data so that we can actually compare it.

Yeah, I think it would be very useful, and I know you're doing this now, so we will have that information. But, you know, this helps us in our relationship with the university as well in talking about maybe the contribution that they need to be making to maintain our station on campus and the service that we're provided. So I think the fact that you're getting that information or accumulating that information at this point is very important. And then just one comment on the the mutual aid received and given. As we've talked about stronger relationship or a different way of us providing fire service within the region, it's pretty clear that Bath, Meridian, and the City of Lansing use us a lot. And that may be a good reason for us to look at a way to sort of broaden our ability to provide fire service, not just here, but also in those communities.

It definitely shows that municipal boundaries don't mean anything when it comes to emergency services. Mr. Grigsby.

I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but I just, the training that you're doing, especially with the regional training, I just want to throw in your ear, because I know you've got a lot of different things going on, but to have a community aspect to that, we talked about that, I believe, several months ago, and just kind of really giving Not necessarily just the community members, but also people like myself who don't normally get a chance to really see the type of training that you're doing or what it takes, even if it's just an observatory type situation, I think is something that would be really, really insightful and impactful down the road sometime in the far future maybe.

I'll just note that, you know, I do remember being fully encased in a very heavy fire department outfit, crawling up the steps into the third floor of Hanna Community Center, which was full of smoke because I was in citizen training that the police department was offering. So that's a really good suggestion. I'll just note that it's a hard job. And that type of training will demonstrate to people in the community just how hard this job is. I think we cut open a car. I'm not sure. I think maybe the clerk was hanging from rafters on something during that training as well.

I want in. I want in, okay?

Noted.

Any further questions?

questions councilmember Singh just on the and forgive me if I miss this but I know the EMT paramedic program and then prerequisites you're still down in terms of being able to fully staff the third no what we are we were

Council approved three new positions and we have brought on those three. Unfortunately, there's been a cycle of those leaving some leaving, and now we're bringing in the last two to fill those, fill those final two positions. The majority of the days are filled by overtime in order to keep those, keep that third ambulance in service.

Yeah.

The, Two of the EMTs that we hired that are in paramedic program, they do count to staffing and they are on the ambulance. Their EMTs, they're with a paramedic, but they're continuing their paramedic training so that they can close that out and then it will be an easier shared responsibility. Currently, the paramedic on that ambulance is carrying the weight of the calls because of the seriousness of the calls.

And I know when you've presented in the past, I mean, when you look at your total staff, non-paramedic or EMT, is there interest to pursue that? Or what would you say percentage that you've seen over the years that people want to pursue that?

We have hired a few EMTs. We currently have three EMTs. So out of 57 people on the department, 54 are paramedics. So nobody has come in who said, no, I'm not interested. They are interested. And they're striving. They're succeeding. We are seeing success in this process. We haven't approached this. process of bringing in EMTs and training paramedics for over 35 years. So it's a new concept, a new plan for the staff currently. It's always been hired nothing more than firefighter paramedics.

Gotcha.

But it has given us an ability to bring in some very good quality people and then have them go to paramedic training. So it is working for us.

Gotcha. Thank you.

Couple of questions. So in terms of the mutual aid, well, first of all, I wonder if you could repeat your answer to Councilmember Whalen about cost recovery. If you could repeat the question, if you can remember it, and the question and the answer about cost recovery. There was a particular type of run?

Yes, his question was specific to those graduation events on campus in the 250 hours that we had covered. Yes, there is cost recovery for all of those hours.

And that's not included in the runs to campus that's in the data you give us tonight?

It depends on whether or not they actually had a patient that came out of that event.

So my question, what I was aiming at, is looking at these numbers that you gave us, about 20% of the runs, of your total runs, seem to go to campus, roughly. It's a little bit lower in July, but the rest of the numbers are pretty constant, about 20%. Do we get enough 289 money back or by other channels to cover that?

That is going to be a whole different Breakdown of data in in order to bring that to you to say yes or no. Okay, that's great But it's something clearly we're thinking about.

Yes. Okay, great. Yes, and then the mutual aid The the the asymmetry with the city of Lansing is pretty stark Yes, 19 runs versus 102 Does that concern you?

It does but that it actually provides data that shows evidence of the fact that each municipality is understaffed. Lansing is understaffed. football Saturdays we have four ambulances in service they may have five for the entire city of Lansing which is why there is that disparity of the amount of assistance that they receive compared to what they give and are they working on we are definitely we are definitely at the table talking okay All right. So you've got your finger on all this. We are working on encouraging. Okay. All right. That's as far as that conversation can go. Yep. Fair enough.

Any further questions for the Chief? Okay. Thank you for your update. Absolutely.

Thank you.

Next we have Assistant Chief Kraft, who's here with Lieutenant Steeman and Captain O'Hario. Thank you all for being here tonight.

Well, good evening, Mayor Altman, Mayor Pro Tem Grigsby and council members. It's been a few months since we were here last and I'm excited to discuss a few updates from the police department. I do have Captain O'Hario and Lieutenant Steeman here joining me tonight. So first up, we'd like to start with a hiring update. We brought these new officers to meet you guys last month and I'm excited to announce that we swore in Officer Nick Dennison yesterday, which brings our staffing numbers up to 51. Chief Braun will be introducing him to this council at one of the October meetings. We have several other applicants in various stages of the process and we are focused on filling the four remaining vacancies that we have. We also converted two of our part-time PACE positions into a full-time spot, and we moved an existing employee into that role. And we've also hired our one remaining vacant neighborhood resource specialist position. So the change to PACE was something that this council supported us during the budget process, and so we wanted to thank you for that allowance. Next slide. So here's a bit of a fun update to note. Now, for the first time in our history, we have three members of the same family working at the East Lansing Police Department. So Damarius, Giovanni, and Marquise Washington are brothers and all come to us with prior law enforcement experience. We are very excited to watch these young officers continue to grow in their careers here with us.

Next.

So these next two slides were constructed to show our recent efforts to continue hiring the best and brightest for East Lansing and trying to do our best to be representative of the community that we serve while also increasing the number of women serving in law enforcement. I did want to point out that the information provided here was how our staff identified themselves to our human resources. So on this first slide, while we recognize the state has not conducted a comprehensive demographic study of officers in a few years, we can still see that we are far more representative than their last posted numbers and right on par with national levels of diverse hiring. I did want to note that since Chief Brown took over 18 months ago, we have hired 17 new police officers and our numbers for diverse hiring are much better than national averages. Excuse me. Next slide. This next slide has similar stats, but is more focused on gender. And I wanted to showcase our department-wide hiring and also highlight that our sworn numbers of female police officers far exceed national averages. So again, do we still have work to do? Yes. But are we moving in the right direction? We believe so. So next, training update. I've asked Lieutenant Steeman to talk about our efforts for training, both current and upcoming.

Thank you.

Let me go off my paper here.

Past training we've held was in, for our command officers, was from the Dr. Ike McKinnon group, based on ethics, building trust and professionalism, and then our non-supervisory personnel also completed training in July of 2026. In this coming year and scheduled for December 2026 and then hopefully for spring 2027, Joseph Morrow's training group is coming back to focus on advanced de-escalation techniques, trauma recognition, and mental resilience. This will be a second time that the Samaro training group has come to East Lansing, part of the series that we are scheduled with them. A lot of this focuses on active listening, rapport building, empathy, recognizing behavioral and emotional cues, slowing down our encounters with the community to create time and options for officers to make decisions. Early 2027 at our annual training, we're hosting emotional intelligence and accountability through a training company. I think the curriculum is attached to your packet. So we'll be focusing on developing our younger employees to grow within ELPD. The crisis intervention team training, this is a tri-county training initiative. Four officers are scheduled for this November. And you can see the data here, 32 out of the current 48, so about 67% of our officers are trained in this, and 71% are assigned to our current patrol. That number will go up with the next officers trained in November. This training offers our officers to be able to identify people in crisis, mental illness, focusing on pre-arrest jail diversion. And lastly, MCOLS training. Currently, MCOLS requires approximately 24 hours annually. ELPD has completed approximately 98 hours in core training last fiscal year, and that's not counting other officers that belong on specialized teams. The training hours for certain individuals could exceed easily 150 to almost 200 hours. I think those were... Sorry.

I think the last point on that last slide was to show that again, the state's requiring 24. On average, our officers are four times that with the amount of training that we are providing as a baseline. So we do, again, focus on that training and then additionally, depending on what team you're on, you may get quite a bit more. All right, we're gonna move on to technology next. We've got three new items to share with council. And again, each of these items was purchased with either grant funding or revenue sharing. First up, through a grant from MMRMA, we've been approved funding for new signal holsters, which again, similar to our tasers, will activate our body-worn cameras whenever an officer removes the firearm from the holster. Next, we have purchased a fingerprint scanner to assist with identification in the field. We already have this item, but we're still working through training and the policy before we can actually deploy it. And finally, we have purchased and are awaiting the arrival of our TrueNARC, which is pictured on the slide there. And that's a handheld narcotic analyzer that can identify over 1,200 illicit substances and allow for identification of a substance without our officers having to open up any packaging or extract a sample for field testing. It scans straight through clear plastic or glass and gives a clear answer on the small screen in seconds. We're very excited about this piece of equipment and the immediate safety it brings to our staff when dealing with unknown narcotics. Thanks. So next we wanted to give a brief update on our newest social worker. Kelly Arbonowski was our former social work intern who we hired full time in June. She's already made an immediate impact as hopefully you saw in the July report that was attached. Some of her many accomplishments this month in our downtown included passing out food to those in need, connecting many people to resources through referrals, assisting people in applying for state benefits and obtaining their state ID, and even getting an individual placed into housing. We are very proud of her effort to assist our unhoused population and look forward to her future successes. So the next two slides show the last four months of stats relating to our calls for service, traffic stops, and OWI enforcement. This first slide shows our month-over-month numbers for the past four months. As you will see, our calls for service remained steady, but our traffic stops increased every month as we began focusing more on traffic safety initiatives. We also saw consistent numbers of OWI arrests throughout the summer. The second slide shows the year-over-year numbers. And once again, our calls remain steady, but we increase our traffic stops in OWI arrest fairly significantly. And this is a result of our improved staffing numbers, and again, our focus on that traffic safety here in the city. And Mr. Mayor, last time we were here, you asked me about traffic stops relating to loud exhaust, especially in the downtown area. So I did look before we came here, and over the summer, we have stopped 27 motorists for loud exhaust, and we've cited 11 of them.

All right, next step.

So this next slide we're presenting is an engagement tool we call Power Engage. And what it does is it rates citizen satisfaction with the LPD. The system sends a text message survey back to citizens who call the police for assistance and asks them two questions. The first is, how would you rate the professionalism of the East Lansing police officer who responded to your call? And the other question is, did this interaction strengthen, not change, or weaken your opinion of the East Lansing Police Department? And so this chart includes the last 90 days of data. And for those who responded, almost 90% were satisfied with the service they received. This is just one tool that we use to further engage those in the community. Anything to add on that?

We presented on this piece when we first implemented the piece probably about a year ago or so. And since we have implemented the piece, we've been pretty steady at about the 80 plus percentage up to 90% in regards to satisfaction. What's important to understand is that this is an ongoing survey that is linked to a CAD, which is computer aided dispatch calls for service. So these are actually people that engage with the police department, not necessarily a survey that just goes out and takes a single snapshot of At one moment in time, this is a constant feeding survey that is completely voluntary. You see that 26% is the survey response rate. And from the company, anything above 25% is good response rate. So we kept the survey. We can customize the survey to make it long or short. But generally speaking, in contact with the company, the shorter the survey, generally the better the response rate you get because people will respond to it.

So the next two slides will summarize our Welcome to State weekend at the end of August. So for almost six months, members from all divisions of ELPD came together and worked on strategies to improve the safety of those who came downtown that weekend to celebrate. And so part of our planning included securing additional staffing from outside agencies, our community partners, and the state of Michigan, utilizing new technologies with drones, cameras, and lighting, improving our internal scheduling, our intake procedures, and our communication strategy with dispatch. And so in total, we had over 100 personnel on the ground each night, and we had a very successful response. And then again, these are the preliminary numbers that we released in our press release for those that were interested in calls, citations, and arrests for that weekend. And finally, we wanted to take a look at some of the engagement efforts we had over the summer. And as you'll see, we had officers headed to safety patrol picnics, glam jam, safety days, national night out, an event at MSUFCU, and then our comfort canine Silas went to the EL Farmer's Market and was a very large hit there just this past August. So that is what we have for our update, and we'll do our best to take any questions.

Questions for...

staff mr mr grigsby did you have something yeah go ahead first mr whalen so i um did read some different articles a few officers have been hurt this summer one was sprayed and i guess have we been seeing a growing number of people under 18 in the downtown area at night is that a growing concern or just kind of a consistent situation It seems like a good job on that call, helping to interact with those juveniles so that they can get some help.

Yeah, I think it's been similar to the last few years. I don't see more than... Years pass, but it depends. Like if it's a home game, you see more. It'll be interesting after some area homecomings, how many people come downtown. I've seen that increase on those nights. So right now I think it's pretty similar to the last couple of years.

Mr. Grigsby. I've got a couple of different questions if you guys don't mind.

But just jumping back to the text signal.

Is your mic on?

I just have a few questions about what you mentioned here in your presentation here with the tech signal holster, I think it was called. Is that also for non-lethal? Is that for the TASER II and for both? Okay, I missed that.

The signal holster is already... When you draw the taser, that already actuates. That holster has been in place since we brought on the new Taser 10.

Gotcha.

The holster that we're discussing or that was brought up here is specifically for the sidearm. You need a special holster to enable the technology to fit into the sidearm or the firearm holster. that will actuate the body camera without having to push the button. And the reason for that is that we want officers to be able to address any immediate emergency concerns before having to try to remember to turn on their camera. So in this instance, just like it currently is already set up, that as soon as a taser is drawn, it will actually send out a signal to any body camera that's in a specific radius and will turn on those body cameras.

Oh, it's not just the individual officers?

Correct. It's like a big Bluetooth blast that goes out, and if there's any officers. So it is always fun at the beginning of briefing when somebody tests their taser, as in pulls it out and does a cycle test, it will turn on everybody's body camera.

Gotcha. And I apologize. So... I remember for like the camera thing, is there like a delay before the actual camera comes on?

There is not a delay. There is a preset record feature that occurs. So as soon as you actuate it, whether it's actuated by the light, or actuated by the taser draw, or as in light, as in sirens, or whatever from your car, or as soon as you press it, it will automatically start capturing the sound. The prerecord is up to two minutes. of prerecord, so it's always recording up to two minutes prior to that body camera being activated. The standard generally and the default from the company is actually only 30 seconds. We actually backed it up because we felt that it often captures at least, again without the sound, it often captures things that are beneficial to the agency that are evidentiary that we want to capture and that allows again our officers to address any concerns or emergencies that come up and then they're like, oh, I got to turn my body camera on really quick and they'll still capture that.

Thank you. I got to say, the 24 hours from MCOS and us hitting 98 hours is pretty impressive for the training standard. I don't know what it is nationally, but that just seems like a huge investment in to what you're doing and how you're going about that. And I think that's huge. So I wanted to acknowledge that. I do have some technical questions. You can refer me back to maybe some of the, which you had in your presentation if you want, but I do have a couple of different questions here, if I may. So we haven't had a chance to kind of really talk in a while because of the break and whatnot, but I want to know, or at least get an update, to the next three to six months, what are the two or three most important short-term initiatives

Or operational improvements that you want East Lansing Police Department to advance in and for each one, you know was like a visible Meaningful progress to what that looks like if you met if you can The first is staffing, you know, so many of the difficulties that we face are improved almost overnight by having the adequate numbers so you know progress to me looks like getting ourselves fully staffed and then exploring ways to increase our strength and Training has been a hot button here for a while and will continue to be. And again, we want to continue to bring in recognized instructors, increase the number of our CIT-trained officers as well because we find daily use in that CIT training. And then I think the third one would be improving traffic safety. And that's also education, enforcement, and that's what that dedicated traffic unit that we want to have set up. And we believe that staffing will allow for that at the beginning of the year. And so progress would look like getting that thing stepped up and having officers assigned, finding more centralized way to log complaints so that we can direct enforcement, and then continuing to explore new grant opportunities to improve our technology and equipment. So those would be my three short term.

Thank you. So as you consider those priorities, what are the three most significant obstacles to that then? I mean, are there limitations? And what support does the department need to be able to accomplish them?

So for staffing, I think it's always trying to source new applicants. The amount of folks going into law enforcement has been declining for a long time. And so again, we address that by continuing to develop an applicant pool, which sometimes is kind of the grow your own through our cadet program. Employee-led recruitment is another big thing. A lot of the hires we've had this past year are by word of mouth from current staff. Social media is another way to engage with different parts of the community. And also we've been partnering more with our city communications to kind of highlight what the department has been doing. And then also we continue to publish a monthly newsletter which also contains recruitment information in it in case somebody wanted to reach out for more information on potential career paths. In terms of training, our biggest obstacle is just budget. And then a bit of staffing, you know, as much as I'd love to pull all 51 people off the road to go to training for a couple of days, we still have to take 911 calls and be available to help. So, you know, for example, the SMARO de-escalation training that everybody went through, that was made possible by council, approving those funds. Additionally, you know, we're talking about additional resilience training in 2027, and that may be another ask that we come back to this council to see if you'd like to support that or not. Recent conversations we've had with LAPOC, they wanted us to start exploring sending part of our training cadre to ICAT training, which is more... To what training, I'm sorry? ICAT, which stands for Integrating Communication Assessment and Tactics. And what that focuses on is critical decision making and also crisis recognition. And so again, it would just be a funding thing to send part of our training cadre, and I think it's in Chicago is where they do most of that training, to then bring that concept back to East Lansing. And again, we address that by maybe increasing training budget or continuing to bring these priorities to council to see what you'd want to support. And again, finally, traffic safety is just getting folks up and trained. We've got four currently that are in field training. we have two that are in the police academy still we've got one hopefully two slated for the january academy it's just a matter of waiting for these folks to get trained so that we can have them getting into patrol and then dedicating officers to this traffic unit but within our budget we are repurposing vehicles already getting them ready for this opportunity we're looking at we've got an award that we believe coming up from OHSP for about $20,000 for additional enforcement over time. And then, again, it just comes back to staffing levels. And we're hoping, again, beginning of the year, once some of these folks get out of training, we'll be able to step this up.

Yeah, thank you.

Yes, sir.

I do have a couple more, if that's OK. Excuse me. So I've been contacted by a few community members in relation to the flock cameras. And what's going on with that? I know there was some local reporting done with that. And if I understand my numbers correctly from wrong, there was an investment of, a two-year investment of $60,000 for the flock mobile cameras. We're getting billed for that, about $30,000 a year. During the 30-day period, recently examined that East Lansing Police Department conducted fewer than 200 searches, while agencies conducted tens of thousands of searches involving East Lansing citizens' data. So I'm just trying to understand what the measurable public safety benefit is to these cameras. the validation of the investment for what it's doing for us in regards to the 200 searches so i'm just trying to find balance with that and then the second part obviously is the data and our citizens concerned about their information being shared outside of a public safety initiative that we have here in our own city so i was hoping that you could provide some clarity some understanding so as we consider these types of things down the road whether we want to continue investing them move into a different direction or looking at a different way of going about addressing our public safety needs outside of a flock system

Yeah, I can handle that question. In the shared network, we have a closed network. When we subscribe to Flock, we have one Flock trailer that has eight cameras on it. Within those eight cameras, there's just one of the cameras is a license plate reader. The rest are just high definition cameras that we can access. And in that shared network, when we search with partners that we allow us to search or share with us, that's where you get those data hits or sources back. The shared networks that we actually allow East Lansing data to be searched are only in-state law enforcement networks. That's who we share our data with. So that would be people like the Michigan State Police, the DNR, Lansing, Grand Rapids. That's who we'll share our data with. There is also a different source of users or consumers that subscribe to FLOC that also will share data and we have searchable access to them and some of those agencies are out of state, but we only allow in-state police agencies to view our data. That is a feature that you can select, that each individual agency can select within when you sign up with FLOC. We do not share outside of the state of Michigan. We do not share with the federal government. So you can see that when somebody who may be looking at that has a flock system, that subscribes to flock, that is a shareable agency, they may search. And when they search, that goes out to all of the other flock agencies. And so that's why who's searching us 200,000. That's why, again, if Lansing searches something, it goes out and pings off. That counts as a search on every single agency. So that's why the number disparity there. You asked the question of what's a measurable public safety benefit that receives from this investment. officers are using this as a investigatory tool which is what it is it's a reactive tool essentially we can log into it and you could sit there and wait for a hot hit or a ping to occur on that and say hey that's a stolen vehicle or whatever that that's a feature but our officers don't do that we don't have the time to do that so what they do do is guided by our policy a very strict policy that we have in place that the only way at time that they can search information within the data or within that flock system is when there is a police call and they actually have to log that and they put that in their report. Unfortunately that is not tracked because the search is tracked but when the leads come back they log that or they put that information within a narrative of a police report and unfortunately the searchable function, there's not a search tab within our SRMS database that We say, hey, we use this system because it's documented in the narrative and that's not searchable. But I have gotten multiple reports from officers that have been using the flock system that has generated leads or the queries that we've looked at within the last 30 days at least are for motor vehicle theft. missing endangered persons or runaways, hit and runs, criminal sexual conducts, weapon offenses, assaults and batteries, and domestic assaults, just to name a few of the parameters that our officers are looking into. Some of the recent cases that are documented, that flock has produced a tip, and again, once a tip is only produced, that still requires our detectives to go in and investigate the crime and actually substantiate information but what's important is to understand how the partnership of flock works because all three of these tips were actually generated by outside agency other system flocks but we have access to that that the three three instances include a parental kidnapping case that has been referred back to the front of the court they include organized retail fraud case in which these alleged perpetrators have stolen over $90,000 from a retailer throughout the state of Michigan, and a road rage incident that resulted with somebody waving a firearm at somebody, that subject was located. Again, these are all hits, not from our flock camera system, but information or tips that were provided to us at the East Lansing police about the crimes that occurred in our city. But then we were able to access the flock system and find our potential leads at other agencies or jurisdictions that had those leads. So you had some other questions, and I don't know if you just kind of want me to roll into those other questions or not, but I can do that for you. Is there any other question or any follow-up that you'd want to ask about those two?

No, just share it, because you know that I inquired about this, and so I think it's important to have community conversation about what is going on. And so if you want to divulge what you want to share that you feel is beneficial, that'd be helpful.

Absolutely. So you asked again, how do we measure kind of the financial costs of investing in a technology like that? And it's hard to kind of measure that financial cost, but when you look at some of the examples that are provided, right, if we can bring closure to a family that, you know, was having a custodial dispute and we got a child home safely, I mean, how much does that cost, right? And that's an actual example that happened here at East Lansing. Again, the flock system is used to, again, bring accountability and bring some closure to victims. We're using this technology to solve crimes. What it does do is it improves the productivity of the minimum staffing that we do have. We have 39 road officers. That's all we have. And if they can quickly find a tip or a lead and put that in a report that then gets forwarded to our only three detectives, that allows our detectives to really focus their time in and narrow down their scope of their searches of what they need to do to really investigate these crimes. So again, it saves taxpayer dollars by increasing the productivity of the limited staff that we currently have. Again, as technology moves forward, we kind of talked about when we use these things, we have to document through our policies and procedures that we have a legitimate purpose to use this technology. We understand the importance of transparency. We understand the concerns of the citizens. We do an audit every year as part of our policy, and we just completed one on August 8th, and we randomly query or we randomly pull 10 flock searches, and then we go back and we look and say, were these searches appropriate? In all 10 cases, they were appropriate. They were tied to other crimes, such as aggravated assault by strangulation, domestic violence, stolen vehicle hit and run, and another felonious assault with a weapon. We again, this is the first time that we've done that audit because we've had that flock system for under a year or just about a year. So what we are going to do, though, moving forward is the chief has indicated that we're going to change that audit to instead of annually to quarterly. so we will be auditing our internal sources uh much more but again we haven't had an issue here at the east lansing police department and our policy is is very robust violation of the policy would result in discipline up to and including potentially termination and that you know that our policy is publicly available online that's one of the other things that we're doing is that we are working on a transparency page that has some of that flock data that we hope to share publicly online with our East Lansing Police Department transparency page or selection within our city page. And we're hoping to have that up by next week. So these are some of the things that, you know, how do you measure the financial costs? Well, retail fraud cases where we've got tips and leads where businesses that are here supporting our community and paying tax dollars, they're victims. You know, we're supporting victims with the use of this technology. That's what the focus of this technology is about. The other thing you had asked or inquired about was, you know, what are some of the alternatives to this? And I haven't had really a lot of time to kind of look into that or what are some of the alternative solutions. I do know that Axon has a license plate reader option. Those actually are standard in our car. They are not turned on. We don't have those turned on in our vehicles at all, but the camera is already there. It comes part of just their standard technology package, but you do have to pay for that. Um, so there are other options potentially out there. Um, but again, it's just, we haven't gotten that far or I haven't looked into it to that as what is important to kind of know. And I think that you've already said it and it's very good as, as we continue to review technologies and, and kind of look at what best suits our community. It is important that we have these discussions and that we educate ourselves on what each technology can actually do and what the solutions can actually do. and how those solutions can be applied to your public safety. At the same time, understanding and determining and creating guardrails through policies and whatever to make sure that those systems aren't abused. And you've seen the state actually already step up kind of into that with, I believe, a Republican senator proposed a bill on the retention periods of data within the flock system being limited to 14 days. I think we're moving in the right direction and the public concerns are something that definitely needs to be talked about and these conversations I think are very beneficial for all parties involved.

Yeah, I appreciate the thorough answer and just really trying to explain this in this format. So I appreciate that.

One thing I could clarify is that the flock camera, that one ALPR camera system and the other high def cameras, the only thing that they do is plate reading. They can automatic license plate reader, ALPR. They read plates, and then they also take images of vehicles. That's all they do. There is no facial recognition built into them. There is no signal recognition, whether it be Bluetooth or cell phone. That's not what our trailer capability is. It literally only looks for vehicles. And so when we have tips, those are the tips that we're relying on. That's what we're searching within that flock system. So again, with the retail fraud instance, there was a witness that provided us a tip about the vehicle. We put that in there with the instance where the parental kidnapping or custody issue, somebody was able to give us the vehicle information that they thought, you know, the child might relate to. So again, we're looking for sources that are, or we're looking for vehicles, which then lead us to the tip, which goes and puts us in a general direction. So there's a lot of other police work behind it that does have to go into this. Um, it's just a piece that ties into, um, getting the job done. And again, working towards some type of resolution for our victims.

Oh, right.

Um,

So we had a citizen, not a commissioner, speak tonight about the monthly reports and just really the access to that. She made a suggestion about maybe council members benefiting from seeing those reports. I'm just wondering if there's any issues for us to be able to have access to those monthly reports when they're sent out in regards to whatever policies that are in place or isn't. I know they're unredacted, too. So I know there may be another issue there because that's part of the issue.

It's probably that you said unredacted. That would have to be redacted. There could be some issues. We can look into that a little bit to figure that out. But that would be the one that stands out first.

OK. That's what I was curious about. And then the other thing is there was a question, and I wanted to ask about the injury field part there. Did you guys hear that part of her presentation where she's asking about those minor reports and there being some discrepancy about the injury field part there? Do you guys know what I'm talking about? Okay. Could you take note of that and just as you are doing your evaluation that whatever information that is pertaining to the injury field, just making sure that that's consistent. But that's all I really had overall.

sorry about that no not at all further questions we hadn't talked in a while we hadn't and these are excellent questions and i made a bunch of notes in response to this conversation so i'm going to go on for a long time too maybe not that long mr meadows so um well let me let me start with your last comment i get an unredacted report

So if I get an unredacted report, I don't see any reason why every other council member shouldn't be getting an unredacted report. In fact, I assumed that those reports were distributed to other council members, so I apologize, or I would have brought this up a long time ago. Let's talk about Flock just briefly. Because one of the questions is what data, and you've already identified that, that you're using it as a plate reader, you know, some kind of a discovery item, and that the information that you would receive from the Flock camera would be something that you would buttress with further investigation. Is that a fair way of describing what we're doing with this?

Yes, absolutely. That's one option to that. There's also, you can use it on the, shall we say, civilian side. It actually tracks how many cars go by, so you can do traffic safety studies off of it. We can use it to, if we have a complainant that tells us, hey, this loud vehicle is passing by every day at this time, and this is a description of the vehicle, we could then use it to identify potentially who the owner of the vehicle is and do some productive, proactive policing there. There's lots of different options, but your statement is correct.

And so the, you know, when we look at my truck parked out in the parking lot and somebody walks by, they could write down my license plate number.

Correct.

They could contact the state of Michigan and say who owns this thing. It's public information, correct?

I don't know how the lookups work with the state of Michigan, but I do believe it is correct. You are correct, yes.

And so my question is really in terms of the other, I guess, the real worry that was exhibited in the person who was contacting you is, you know, what about these other agencies that get this information and how do they use it? I mean, this is just the information. And my question really relates to FOIA because if I can get it from the state of Michigan, by making a FOIA request, then this is information that theoretically would be available to any of our citizens within the community by making a FOIA request to us. But there is section 13 of the FOIA which provides that a public body may exempt from disclosure as a public record under this act any of the following. And among those is information of a personal nature if public disclosure of the information would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of an individual's privacy. I don't see any of the information that you've described that would fit into that exemption. But the next exemption is investigating records of a police agency. So during the time that you're doing investigation, is this capable of being shared with another agency of some kind?

If they are a partner agency, then yes, when they search, they have access to that. If they are not a partner agency, then they would have to request either an agency assist, so they would have to request from us to do a search and we would run it through, or they could get a court order requiring us to share that data again. So that would be your search warrant in order to come in and look at that data. In regards to FOIA questions and the current flock status, I do believe Carlito has had a little bit of experience with some FOIAs that have come into this.

Yeah, and I would expect, you know, what I was going to suggest is that I think the flock issue within the community is worth having another presentation with regard to it at some point so that we get a better feel. for the entire, we don't have a lot of flock cameras, obviously.

We have one and it is not our intent to expand. I should say that we have one trailer system that has those eight cameras, one of which camera is a license plate reader.

And I think we had, this is for a period of time so that we can check it out and see if it's useful to us, right?

Correct. We're on a two-year contract as Mr. Grigsby noted.

Okay. So those are my fly questions. I have a question involving training because some of the training, especially if I can get back to my... There we go. I looked at this training by Ike McKinnon, by Dr. Mike McKinnon, and was that off-site or did he come here and do training?

He came to our police department.

Okay, I just want to suggest to the city manager anyway that, you know, this is the type of training, ethical policing, building trust, professionalism, obviously good training. But one of the questions I have is, can we offer that type of training to, say, members of LAPOC so that they would know the training that has become more, I guess, knowledgeable about the actual training that is that is being presented to the police personnel. And I look at some of these other ones like Joe Samara, the advanced de-escalation, I think that's coming up, but trauma recognition, mental resiliency, all this seems useful as a background information for ELIPOC, which means they should be offered the opportunity to either sit in or have a specific training. And then you mentioned a request from ELIPOC to to go to this other training. I forget the acronym there.

ICAP.

What is it again? ICAP. ICAP. And, you know, I'm just wondering what sort of the genesis of that was. Is this something that LAPOC members have attended? and receive training in?

If you know. It was a recommendation. We just met with LAIPOC for basically de-escalation training. It was recommended by the members of the subcommittee group. And that's a training we're looking into sending out.

And we don't know whether they actually have gone through the training.

I don't believe so.

Okay, because I think that training is useful for members of a commission that are taking a look at whether the police department is doing the right thing anyway. So if there is some kind of estimation of the cost of sort of expanding our training opportunity, you know, I would like to see us to have a discussion with regard to it at some point in time. I guess, you know, and I'm not talking about Citizens Police Academy because everybody can apply and participate in that if they want to. As a graduate, I would say that it was very good training. And then, let me just make sure I got it all. Oh, I had a question about the new item, which is if I'm pulling my pistol from my holster, my body camera automatically comes on. I'm guessing, why isn't that body camera already on, is my question. Because I assume this would only apply, let's say I'm leaving the vehicle and I'm drawing my gun at the same time, then I'm making sure, but Wouldn't the body camera be on already in about 90% of the cases?

I would say if an officer has something happen directly in front of them, some sort of threat emerges, whether they're walking down the sidewalk or driving, again, their first thought needs to be to defend themselves and others before we start worrying about cameras. And so we're trying to find ways with different equipment options that they would go to first that will automatically turn that on so we don't have to have that, oh, I forgot, or in the moment I couldn't. Because sometimes that happens. Things happen so quickly, they evolve in front of you, and you've got to get to a defensive time-distance cover, these different things that we're teaching, and we're not able to necessarily be focused on double-tapping another piece of equipment. We're trying to make it as automated as we can.

And I wasn't being critical of the technology. I think it's good. But I wanted some information on when the body camera normally would expect to be on. So anyway, those are all my questions.

Further questions, Council Member Singh?

I just want to follow up, actually, to Mr. Meadows. I know Christine Root sent us the ICAT training information via email background, which I shepherded over to ELPD as well as our city attorney's office and just to give you you know the police executive research forum is who puts on the ICAT training and I was just pulled up their website so like you get the chief from Nashville, Austin, Texas as well as some other communities that are on their board so just to give you some background in terms of where that or at least what I'm aware of where that came from. So, sorry, I got candy and all sorts of things are happening. Okay, so first I want to start by thank you for being here in LA tonight and presenting, but also engaging with the LEPOC Policy Subcommittee. I know that takes additional time and attention. But I just want to thank you each for participating in that. I'm so glad to on the FLAC information that's obviously top of mind for a lot of community members. It was really helpful when you mentioned the federal government isn't necessarily a party to that data. So the only thing that came up via FOIA is if they could access any of our data, which I don't want to go down a rabbit hole, but anyway. Anyway, just talking out loud. I got a lot of federal and global issues on the mind today. I want to go back to training, and I know I had a meeting with you, Assistant Chief, as well as Chief Brown on some training elements, and it is, I think, you know wonderful you know that we are supportive of um our our police uh in embarking on a variety of training i am still interested in understanding what the department's goal is in professional development and what is that balance between each officer selecting training versus what is kind of a departmental wide priority and or required. So what is that balance and that push and pull? So I don't know if there's been additional thoughts since we last met.

So obviously we follow our policy, what we have set in our policy. We try to accomplish that during our annual training. The MCOLS requirements as well, and then also officers can apply for training. When I approve training and look at what they're Seeking to go to I try to see what can benefit the entire department not just the individual So is it is it a train the trainer type program? Can they come back and train the rest of our department and whatever it might be? if it's a Like when we used to have our peace team, our detectives on our peace team, they would go to specialized training for that team. So what can they bring back to our department and to other officers? It's just not always individualized. Special training or special units as our accident investigators, if we just had I think two new officers put on that team. I believe there's like a four to six part training series to that. And I believe they're both, each training is two weeks long. So it's a very intensive training process for each step in that accident investigation. But that's a benefit to the entire county as well as the city for the accident investigation team. So I'm looking at training as what benefits everyone.

Yeah, and I think that's, and again, I have a workforce background and have worked at the cross-section of kind of higher ed as well as Fortune 500 companies, but, and from that work, It's who wants to pursue leadership opportunities, not only special skill sets, but also kind of a core foundational community priority, and I think departmental priority as it relates to some of the I know we've spent a lot of time about use of force, de-escalation, the crisis intervention. What are those, almost like that core curriculum that is beyond the MCOL's requirement that if you want to work in East Lansing and be some of the best and brightest in community law enforcement, What is that professional development supports? So, and I know it's a lot of balance because you mentioned there's special skill sets like in terms of certain accidents or you used a different word, but I heard you. So I'm just wondering if there's a balance that you could actually create a stronger framework for the department.

Yeah that's part of our succession planning as well. So it actually is within our policies that as officers promote that they get leadership training. Part of that pre-promotion is are these officers expressing interest in promoting and are they putting in for these types of schools. At the same time we have to balance that with the staffing. The staffing is an issue where when some of these trainings, as Lieutenant Steeman had indicated, take significant amount of time, and that means we don't have those officers there to work the road, and then we're leaning on our other officers to not only work the road, but now having to post overtime to backfill, and they're We're taking away, we're drawing away from their families and their other off duty, whatever they're doing. So that is a balance that we have to work with. But we do look at and we talk to our officers and we look at and that's where the training lieutenant looks at who goes to training and we document that. who's on special teams, and we try to make that equitable. So there is, again, the standardized set of training that every year there's that annual training. We get this annual training, and those are your basic stuff, like every two years our CPR expires, and so we gotta bring in the fire department. There's the standardized stuff. The Michigan Commission on Law Enforcement Standards has produced a new standardized professional development curriculum. That's MCOL's core curriculum now that's new. That's what, within the last two, three years? And that actually has a rotating kind of system where you have to do 24 credits, but the 24 credits change. There's a core amount that you kind of have to do every year. Those are those high risk, high liability things that you talked about. de-escalation, weapons, that kind of stuff. But then every other year, sections of that change. Well, one year it's mental resilience for officers, and another year it might be critical incident stress management for high-risk scenes or whatever. And so they recognize that we need that, and when they put that out, they have to take into account that They also govern agencies that are two and three officers large, all the way up to the large ones in the state. So that's why you see that they set the bar at 24, but we far exceed what the state minimum is because we have the support of the council. We have you guys providing us with the opportunity to train our staff. The other thing that we kind of see and we recognize through the succession planning is that when people retire from us, they take a large amount of knowledge with them, that institutional knowledge and everything that's invested. If they come off of a specialized team, they pull that knowledge with them and we have to replace that with something. And so there is that investment, which also kind of leans into not only the hiring and recruiting, but it leans into the retention of our officers. If you are able to provide us with that opportunity, we're able to send our officers to training, which makes them want to stay, which makes them want to invest in the community here because they're getting this opportunity to further their professional development. So, I mean, it's a win-win, but it's definitely not free. And there's time and there's cost involved. And, again, we are very thankful that this council is supportive of what we've been trying to do and also is knowledgeable and can see the 5-10-year plan that we are a very young department right now. And so in past years we may not have needed as much training because we had that built in over the years but now it's flipped and we're a very young department so this training is very important to us.

I'm a huge believer in that, and for all the reasons that you mentioned, and deeply appreciative you understand the investment that we've made, including increasing personnel, funded personnel as well as training. I guess that's what I'm asking for, a layer deeper to have an understand beyond MCOLs, recognizing you have additional hours that officers are participating in training, we've sat up here and said what we've heard from the community and have purposed additional dollars like on the Joe Schmarrow piece, right? And okay, but like what is the continuum? Okay, is it Joe Schmarrow? Is it ICAT? You all are the experts. Yes, we're taking advice from our community in terms of their recommendations, but what does that continuum look like and growth? Because I do believe it is a retention because we're investing in our staff, and that's the most important thing I think we can do to show value. Um, so that would be, you know, I don't want to continue harping on it. Cause I, I mean, I think when I met with the chief that people in the audience are nodding after I said, don't harp. I won't keep harping. I'm teasing. I'm sorry. I get a little funny this hour at night. Um, but I mentioned to the chief, you know, it, when I looked at the list of training, it looks like a laundry list. Right. And it's like, how is this subgrouped? You know, is it a master or I mean, this is even like an HR piece across city staff that we should be thinking about professional development across departments. Like, what are the, how are we supporting folks grow? So that's, you know, kind of an enterprise-wide kind of point that I would make across the city. Think and I guess that's the other question recognizing that like the CIT training I was looking at the Percentage of staff I think it's 67 percent overall 71 percent of patrol that rings true if I'm reciting this correctly If that's not all given in one year is it different curriculum I

So we try to stick with the tri-county crisis intervention training. I think theirs was last April. I believe they hosted maybe twice a year. They might only do it once this coming year. We're actually looking to center four to Oakland in November. So it's not offered as often. And when it is offered, it fills up extremely quick. So if we can't get into it, we're out of luck.

I think the other thing that is important to kind of understand is that we have, you know, is there a set core curriculum? Yes, there is a core. But we also think it's very important that we do listen to what the council says. We do actually listen to what IPOC has for suggestions as well. And we look into and lean into those training opportunities. when we find value in researching what they are and then bringing those forward. So it's not just us picking the training, it's what are the current trends and what do our consumers, what does the community feel that potentially has value. Yes, we're going to research it so we make, that we invest the tax dollars wisely in an appropriate training for the police department, but we're very open to, again, working and taking and listening to suggestions and working with community partners.

Thank you. I didn't think I was going to say anything more, but I'm going to. So I forgot to mention, and I think this is really, really important, not the fact that you've been phenomenal in being able to get talent in here and recruit. I think that's something that you had talked about. maybe in our third public safety presentation that you were doing that and you have been doing that. I want to commend your efforts and the team of making that a priority. But within that, the diversity aspect, There was a speaker here that spoke who was a Michigan State professor who wrote a book about representation in the police department and how impactful that is when it comes to community relations. And as I understand it, this is the most diverse police department that we've had in the history of East Lansing. And that's a really big deal. And so I wanted to really mention that and bring that to your attention and keep doing that because it's really, really important for a lot of reasons that you probably could tell me better than I could tell you. And just for lighter side of things, I know that I talked to you, Lieutenant Seaman, about getting in some training as well outside of the police academy. I owe you to that. I'm waiting on the call, okay? I'm waiting on the call. All right.

Thank you.

Other comments? So I have a couple of questions. You see, Kraft, you mentioned 27 stops, 11 citations, I think, for noise. Were those just in the downtown or were those throughout the city? Throughout the city. Throughout the city. So there was a media report earlier that suggested there had only been four stops or two stops or something and then everybody...

No, that was just a summer. I had them pull that out of my way here because I know you were going to ask.

No, it's on people's minds. I'm on the lookout for others who may be listening. I'm on the lookout to get people's impressions because people's impressions are important because that reflects what they're bothered by, right? And my impression in the past few months is that it's been a little quieter. It's been improved, but it's not solved by any means. And I'm getting emails from people saying, for example, I got an email from someone who lives close to Michigan Avenue who said last Friday was probably the loudest Friday on record down there. So there are other, you know, it continues to be an issue. And it sounds like my hunch is that when you get the traffic detail set up, that that's going to help with this. And then we can start seeing the citations go up. Yes. You mentioned the possibility of changing the survey, the ENGAGE survey over time. There's also benefits to keeping the survey the same because then you can compare the data over time, right, longitudinally. I had a question about the TRUNARC instrument. Does that—that's not measuring blood alcohol levels. That's measuring a substance that you've got in front of you, right? That's correct, yes. Okay, all right. The two-minute recording, the way I understand that you said that is the camera's always on, but it's throwing away everything that's older than two minutes. Correct. Right? Is that one way to understand it?

Yes, it doesn't snip that previous time. It drops it because, one, the battery life could not sustain a shift. It would not be feasible. And then, again, the storage, the amount of storage and data that would have to be stored. They're two of the biggest hurdles.

So it's always on, but you're throwing away the old stuff.

Correct.

Except you go back two minutes. When it's activated, yeah. When it's activated. Correct. And so that way you capture the lead up to the incident. Exactly. Essentially. Okay. I just wanted to make sure we all sort of understood that. That's a neat feature. AC Creft, you mentioned the In response to Mayor Pro Tem's question, you were working on new ways to direct complaints that were more centralized. Could you say a little bit more about that? Does that have to do with dispatch?

I think we need to develop that so that when he was – what I thought I heard is what are some of these things we need to work on in the next couple of months to improve operations? Because right now we get complaints from – anywhere from phone messages to emails, they come from council, they come from city manager's office. So we do our best to make sure that we're tracking those, being receptive to those, and then trying to have visible enforcement action taken where we can. And again, right now it's maybe an email or what we call a pass along when we're bringing up concerns. So I need to look for maybe a better way that we can track that to know that we are responding to what the community needs, whatever direction it comes in, because they come from all over. And as our friends in DPW will back us on, traffic seems to be always the number one concern of people in the community here.

Yeah, my hunch is that when you start tracking those complaints, they're going to add up real quick, and it's going to be pretty impressive how much response you engage in.

Once we have a dedicated couple of full-time employees every week, and we have a list of concerns, that's going to be top of what we expect to start making sure that we're handling those.

A couple of questions about flock. It sounds like, so you've got an internal policy that sounds like it's similar to the policy to the law on lean access, which is basically there has to be a purpose and you get in trouble if you do not ignore that. Are those comparable? Is the internal policy for flock similar to the law for lean access?

Yes, I believe our internal policy is similar. The lien access, which is regulated by the state and the law, has a criminal penalty. That would be one of the significant differences. However, if you look at, again, the misuse of office, if one were to violate the flock policy, that potentially could also lean into criminal penalties as well. So again, we take it extremely seriously.

OK, that's helpful. Thank you. The other question I had about flock was you mentioned that when officers get a lead, the fact that the source was flock is not documented in your reports, right? So it's a little hard to make them searchable.

No, it is documented. It's documented oftentimes within the narrative body of the report. So the actual words of the report, they would document it, and they're doing a very good job at that. The problem is is that the kind of quantifying how many reports. There's not like a checkbox within the state reporting system that I use this reporting system that we can pull out to a dashboard and say this produced X amount of leads. So that's the difficult part of kind of that measurement question that Mr. Grigsby asked, which is a good question, right? So again, I'm forced to kind of, hey, who's had some positive leads off of flock? And not all of the leads go anywhere. They may produce a lead, but it truly is up to the officer. It's the requirement of the officer or the detective to look into that lead and kind of go down that path because is it a false hit? Is it not something that, you know, I'm looking for a red car on Tuesday between this timeframe and I have five different red cars that actually show up with a Michigan plate on them or whatever. I'm going to have to do some detective work or do some officer work to do the follow-up. So again, it's a tool that provides us and increases our productivity and so that we can really focus on the crimes that we are investigating because we should be looking, the only reason to be looking at that system is to investigate crimes or to investigate complaints, whether it's traffic or whatever. We have to have a legitimate reason to access that data.

So the context for my question is, if there is a way to quantitatively document the value of the system, that would be helpful. That's purely the context for the question. So it sounds like it's maybe not as easy as it could be, because there's no checkbox to tick off. But if there are other ways to say, we got so many leads from this system, and so many paid off, or so many didn't, which is fine.

And that's kind of why I gave the example, and I hear what you're saying, and it is difficult, but that's why I gave the example of, you know, we got a lead on an organized retail fraud that potentially is up to $90,000. You know, what's the cost there? We got a lead on a custody dispute, parental kidnapping. You can't put a price on, you know, public safety of children, you know, like, so... at some point, that's the difficult part. But yeah, you're correct.

I mean, those examples are helpful. And all I'm saying is the more of those, the better. And so I think that the data we heard, well, there were only 200 searches. Well, from my perspective, 200 searches is a lot of searches. You're using that tool for good reasons. And that's a lot of use. And that says to me that it's useful. But if there are other ways to I don't want to create more work for people, right? The last thing we want to do is create more bookkeeping tasks. But if there is a way to track some of these things so that we have more of these sorts of examples so that we can evaluate the value, that wouldn't hurt, right? I guess my last comment is about recruiting. And you mentioned grow your own was one of our strategies. And cadets is one mechanism, but PACE is also a mechanism. And converting part-time to full-time seems to me like it should help with that because now you get to watch somebody grow in a full-time position and evaluate their performance.

Yes, and the council approved two of those conversions, and so we're kind of waiting a bit through attrition to bring the next one on, but yes, it's very exciting to be able to offer a long-time, part-time person that full-time opportunity, so it was a definite positive this week.

And then on that subject, so I've spent a fair bit of time downtown after hours on busy days and I've learned a lot by doing that and one of the things I've been really surprised by, this has happened multiple times, where people who are down there, down there to have a good time, they come up to one of your offices and say, How do I apply for a job with the LPD? I've seen that multiple times. And then the officer has a conversation with them about, well, here's what you've got to do to apply. So I think that's just interesting. People come up late at night with an interest in joining the force.

And like we talked before, I mean, the vast majority of a lot of these hires are word of mouth and folks saying, hey, this is a great city. We're supported. It's a great department. We've got great training. We've got great equipment. All the things that young people are looking for in their career department is right here. And so it's nobody better to speak on that than the people that are out doing the job. And so that word of mouth is really why we've been so successful this past 18 months with all these new hires. Most of them had an in, so to speak, with somebody they met in the public at a recruiting event, community engagement events. you know, the touch of truck that I think a lot of us went to. I mean, there were thousands of people there engaging with police and fire and public safety, and it was great.

So, yep, we source people from everywhere, everywhere we can. Yeah, well, and thanks also for your efforts on the recruiting front. And then I guess my last question is my impression having spent time downtown, sort of welcome weekend, a couple of nights, and then the game day after that, and then 80s night, one of the impressions that I have and also the time that I spent down there last fall is that a lot of the officers spend a lot of time in our downtown. That's sort of my impression after hours. And we have to figure out how to portion those costs appropriately because people also want to see officers in the neighborhoods, especially if you have loud cars. And they sometimes want to see police driving through the neighborhood. This is just sort of putting this on the table more generally. I think we need to figure out how to make sure that the rest of the community is not subsidizing bar owners in the downtown. That's just how I'll put it. Because right now, it seems like the downtown is soaking up a ton of resources. That's anecdata, right? It's based on my observation. But at some point, it might be helpful to have a sort of a more quantitative analysis The DDA has gone down this path and has allocated funds for funding police dedicated to the downtown, and that's all important. But at the moment, I'm not sure we know just how imbalanced that time spent down there is. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's all perfectly balanced, but I suspect it's not. Moving forward, it would be helpful to think a little bit more about where officers are spending their time.

We're happy to have more of those conversations and, you know, when we plan for these busy weekends, we have contingents that are just assigned downtown and we've got patrol that patrols and takes the 911 calls throughout the city. You know, again, as busier things happen and we get some of these larger scale incidents that occur, it does... soak up a ton of resources. You know, when we got to provide service and make sure the officers are safe and community members are safe. And so it is a challenge. It's a challenge. But again, we definitely don't put every every officer we have downtown all night. That is not what we do. But we do have officers that will respond. We've got some these larger scale events as you've seen being down there.

Thanks for that context. That concludes my questions, and I want to thank my colleagues for their questions because they prompted some of mine. Any further questions or comments? Mr. Meadows.

I want to follow up on what you were just talking about a little bit. Because when you look at the sequence of the population of the police department, I think I mentioned before, when I left for the legislature, we had 63 officers. When I came back, there were 43. And in the meantime, just before I left for the legislature, we doubled the size of the city. And now those neighborhoods in the northern area are built out. There's 448 new houses in northern East Lansing. And we have fewer officers. And one of the other things that was mentioned by you guys is the importance of experience. And it is because, you know, and This is dangerous because I think as an old guy, I can probably say that old people like to tell anecdotes. So I have an anecdote, which is after the 1999 riot, which was a planned riot, about a week before that, we saw people carrying scrap wood into the city to start fires, which is what happened. And it didn't go off without any problems. But we found that most of the problems we had in terms of interaction with the participants were from agencies we asked to come in. And so you can't ask Lawton Connolly anymore because he's passed away. And maybe Lou Munn is around, and maybe you guys I talk to them every once in a while, or Tom Wybert, because they can verify this too. But we found that primarily the problem was these outside agencies didn't have the experience that our officers had in dealing with 18- to 24-year-old people. And what we have now is, and what we've seen over the last few years is, yeah, we hire three people, but we have three people retire. And so we're continuously trying to repopulate the police department. So this issue of, I think, recruiting, experience, and retention is a critical element. And there are people in our community who say our police department is too big, and my position is we need to repopulate, we need to expand our police department to take care of the issue that you just identified, which is that if things are happening downtown, basically we're putting all our personnel to take care of them. Which means that our northern neighborhoods, our outside neighborhoods,

you know even the car that occasionally you know runs up and down the street just uh... make sure people know police department is present isn't happening and we need to make sure that happens and i think piggybacking on that you know our our reliance on outside agencies has been a lot it's been a lot especially on the weekends and welcome week and you know these these big scale events you know we're always you know just like fire we're always gonna help each other out and and and and provide where we can but You know, I'm also cautious of an over-reliance on other agencies exactly for the reasons you just spoke of. So, yes, I would love 20 more. So if we could make that happen, that would be fantastic.

For the record, I was there in 99.

I just want to thank the fire department and you guys for the conversation and the preparation that it takes to come in here and talk with us we didn't have that before and I thought that this was a great opportunity to kind of do these things so I really appreciate the fact that you guys come prepared and ready to try to give us and the community a better understanding about what the priorities should be and what we could do I mean we're not a perfect product And we're working for that. And I talked to Chief Brown early when I first got on that striving for excellence is the goal. And I think these types of things and some of the different initiatives that are going on, we're going to the right direction. So I appreciate both the guys.

Any further comments? Any closing comments from the team? Thank you for your preparation. And again, I want to thank my colleagues for their questions. I think this was a lengthy conversation, but it was really important. So appreciate your being here. And so my last question on this agenda item is actually for my colleagues. So we have, it has been four months since we had our last update because that was our most recent discussionally meeting. We previously were getting these updates monthly. I found this more substantive update after a longer period of time to be very helpful. And I was wondering if there was an interest in pushing the next regularly scheduled update another three or four months down the line, which doesn't mean that we can't have police or fire here to talk to specific issues if we want something on an agenda. But that way, for example, if we had an update in December or January, we could get an update on the whole fall semester. And then if the next one maybe happened in May or June, then we can get an update for the spring semester. I don't know what people think about that. Well, we had been doing these monthly. I don't have a problem with a quarterly update.

Mike? I say I don't have a problem with a quarterly update. No, it would take in the entire fall season, which is football season, and start a basketball season. So it would be good.

So that was going to be my suggestion. Do people have thoughts about this?

I don't mind that. I think it's important to have that consistency, but that's not a hill that I'm I think if there's any special circumstance that happens in our community that we have the opportunity to be able to like, Hey, look, I don't know. We had this plan in December, but let's come in here and talk on November. Uh, outside of that, I'm pretty good with it.

That was going to be my suggestion. So that if someone, if there is a special circumstance or someone has a particular question, um, that they want to address, then we can treat that the way we treat other deal meeting agenda items, which is anybody can ask for an item on, on the agenda. Council member Singh.

And that's for DO, so it doesn't take two of us. Okay.

No, DO is one. Council Member Whalen.

I am an agreement. I think December is good. I think the concern is like tonight, there's quite a few people that really want to hear about the water resiliency. Yep. And they've been very, very patient tonight. Even though the information has been really valuable. That is a pressing issue for a lot of people. So I think when we have that, maybe we just prioritize and

So maybe sooner than four months, maybe three months is good.

I think three months is good. And if there is another one situation, maybe we put it toward the end of the meeting if there's another pressing issue. Sure.

Okay. So I think that gives our staff some direction about where we go next. All right. Thank you. Thank you all.

Yeah. We're only required to have four DOs a year, right?

Mike.

I'm just working through all the numbers that in terms of and and we've already have I think at least in the August meeting three of us talked about bringing the policies before this this body so and we can do that at a separate meeting dedicated to that if that's what people want I'm just thinking in terms of the general periodic updates Yeah, no, well, this would be a vote. So we would need it on the business agenda. Correct.

Yep. OK, so I think we got a plan for that. So that brings us to the presentation of the city's wet weather resiliency program. We are three hours in. Does anybody? Any one of us or any one of our audience need a break? Or do we want to keep going? Okay, let's invite Cliff Walls and our HDR staff and thank you for your patience. We have a whole team here who have been working for over two years I believe now on this. study and I think we're all looking forward to some important and potentially expensive updates.

You guys still up for this?

Say what? You still up for this? Oh, yeah.

All right. Good evening, Mayor, Council. I'm Cliff Walz from DPW, and tonight we're presenting the results of the city's wet weather resiliency plan, and we appreciate your time. We have a lot of slides and a lot of technical material, and the actual plan and dependencies document is about 800 pages, representing almost three years of work by staff, technical experts, and some pretty advanced modeling. While it would be my dream to nerd out and spend hours going into all the details with you, I have to keep this train moving, especially now that it's 9. And so I scripted my words to ensure that, so I don't kind of follow into my old habits. But feel free to ask questions along the way or after. Just know that there's no way that we can build a slideshow that addresses all the points that I know you're going to be thinking of and still get you home at a decent hour. And you may notice that I'm proud of this work. I'm really excited to share it, but I do want to be clear that under that excitement, I recognize that this topic and flooding in our neighborhoods is serious. And for many in the room and watching the video, it is personal and I get it too. You know, I've had to pump out my mother-in-law's basement on Glencairn more times than I care to. After the July storm in 24, seeing my nephew up with water up to his chest and his waiters in his front yard, I've had to clean out my basement, seeing it happen to my neighbors, and the impact it has on our community. And I don't raise that, of course, to make this about me, but I want you as council and our community to know that for what it's worth, this effort was made with some skin in the game. This is more than just a work assignment for me. Next slide. So Ron and I are here representing the city. Oh, I think we're, it's the meet the team slide. I jumped ahead. Ron and I are here representing the city side. Stephen's back there. Danny Stanley from engineering is also part of this team. But I do want to specifically call out Bob Scharman who came out of retirement and was critical to this effort. And also Dina Fitzgerald, our asset management analyst. This tool does not exist without them and their institutional knowledge cannot be replaced. can't be purchased we're just blessed as a community to have them from HDR Ernie West is our project manager he's based right here in East Lansing Julie Stein is HDR stormwater business class director joining us from the Big Apple New York New York and so their local and national lens is going to be really useful for the decisions ahead next slide Here's what we'll be covering tonight. I'll take you through the project overview, kick it off to HDR to do some of the heavy lifting. And if you have clarifying questions as we go, we'll do our best to answer them in the moment. Feel free to interrupt us. There's a lot of time at the end for questions. We know it's not a lot of time in the night left, but we are here as long as you need us. Next slide, you can probably jump too. Yeah, one more. So jumping into it, you've all probably heard the term 100-year storm, 1,000-year storm on the news. But these are statistical probabilities. These are not a schedule. This doesn't mean that if you get a 100-year storm today that you're safe for the next 99 years. You can think of it like rolling a dice. You could hit the same number three times in a row. The math just resets. But you don't have to be a civil engineer or a climatologist to sense that those probabilities might be a little bit out of alignment. This table tells that story pretty clearly. In 21, we had an event with, under the current precipitation estimates, less than 1 in 1,000 chance of occurring in any given year. Three years later, we had another one exceeding those odds. Eight significant storm events in 13 years tells you something about the direction of where things are headed and that those estimates are no longer reliable. This project aims, among other things, to address that. But what I also want to flag is what the footnote there says. The projects that you're going to hear about tonight will increase the resiliency against this trend, but it cannot address every extreme storm. That's not me just hedging this. That is foundational to stormwater management and for interpreting everything you see tonight. This plan definitely moves the needle significantly, but we cannot flood-proof East Lansing, and anyone that tells you that's possible is not being straight with you. There's always the chance of a bigger storm. Next slide. So in response to that pattern, the city pursued state funding to commission a formal study. We were awarded a grant through Eagle's high water infrastructure grant program through their coastal management program of all places. And the goal of this was always to do it right, not rush shovels into the ground, but to expand our understanding of a very complex, hydraulically connected system well enough to make investments that actually address the root causes, where those root causes actually are. And so when residents see pooling water in their street and wonder why the drains aren't draining, a lot of the times the cause is not often where they see the effect. When receiving systems rise, be it the river, be it a county drain, be it a storm main, the hydraulic grade line, which is essentially the water level inside that pipe system rises with it. So you can see on this graph, once it climbs above the elevation of a catch basin inlet, it doesn't matter how clear the grate is or how many grates there are, there's just nowhere for that water to go. And so the solution is often expanding pipe capacity downstream and not adding drains where the water happens to show itself. This graphic helps illustrate that concept, and also it's good to keep in mind that East Lansing is not totally flat. Topography plays a big role in this, and gravity is gonna win most battles that we score up against it with. And while this is an exaggerated illustration, it is worth noting that minor street flooding that doesn't affect emergency access, public health and safety, or structures isn't necessarily a problem. Streets are part of a drainage network that can act as a relief valve, holding water temporarily while pipes catch up so it doesn't end up somewhere worse like a building. The project prioritized problems where that overflow affects people's homes and safety. Next slide. So you can boil this project down to three goals, establish where and why urban flooding is occurring, identifying existing and future wet weather vulnerabilities, and determining an equitable and community-driven capital investment to increase our resiliency. So this diagram shows the 11 tasks that made up this long effort, and now we're at the finish line, task 11, which is what we're reviewing tonight. Next slide. So for outcomes, the model is the crown jewel of what this process produced and incorporates the size, elevation, connectivity of the pipes in our drainage network layered with surface topography. So we can see not just where water ends up on the ground, but what's happening underground, where and how much mains are surcharging, where basement backup risk is highest, and how the whole system performs across a range of storm scenarios. It was calibrated with in-pipe flow and velocity instruments and validated through public feedback and pictures. That map on the right is a preview of what the model produced, but that's showing just the surface. But going forward it means that we can test interventions, a detention basin here, a pipe upsizing here, and actually quantify the impact before we stick a shovel in the ground. The projects that you'll hear about tonight are the results of those tested alternatives. This plan also establishes new level of service targets, calibrated not to today's conditions, but those to projected rainfall. Next slide. So level of service is a phrase that gets tossed around in the engineering and planning world, but not always necessarily explained. So I'm going to do that. You can think of it like a performance standard. It's the size of a storm the system is designed to handle without causing flooding or backups. A higher level of service means the system can handle a larger storm. It's also more expensive to build. And this table here shows precipitation depth estimates from NOAA Atlas 14. That's the national standard that most engineers use when sizing infrastructure. So as an example, you can see the red callouts there. A system designed to attend your 24-hour storm the level of service should handle 3.3 inches of rain over the course of a day without surface flooding or backups being anticipated. If a 50-year storm hits, you'd expect problems. It simply exceeds what the system was built for. But the key point that I'm trying to make is that a level of service is a choice. ENGINEERING COSTS, REGULATORY REQUIREMENTS, AND COMMUNITY EXPECTATIONS ALL FACTOR INTO THAT CHOICE, BUT YOU HAVE TO PICK SOMETHING TO DESIGN TO, AND THERE'S ALWAYS THE RISK OF A STORM BEING BIGGER THAN WHAT LEVEL OF SERVICE YOU PICKED, AND THERE ARE REAL FEASIBILITY AND AFFORDABILITY LIMITS ON HOW HIGH YOU CAN GO. NEXT SLIDE. So here's why level of service matters so much to East Lansing and many peers right now at this moment. Our climate analysis found that historical trends already show a 70% increase in those short duration downpour events and 30% overall increase in rainfall volume in East Lansing. Those aren't projections, that's what's already happened between mid-century and today. And these tables here of the table, shows projections under two emission scenarios, one under a medium scenario, one under high. And under the high emission scenario, we anticipate volumes climbing another 20% by the end of century. This isn't calibrated to the Great Lakes region or Michigan generally like a lot of these estimates are, but the specific to global climate models scaled down and focused on East Lansing and the work done by HDR's hydrometeorologist. So what this means practically is that the standards of the city's infrastructure in most of the Midwest were historically built or what the standards were historically built to are already behind where precipitation trends are already at today, let alone where we're headed. And so that's a core problem this plan is trying to address. Next slide. So as we address that risk, I want to be upfront what this plan can and cannot do. These projects address flooding caused by capacity limitations in the city's public drainage system in the right of way where the city and the public has actual jurisdiction and influence. Flooding that comes from private property conditions, how a yard is graded, whether a sump pump is working, where downspouts discharge. That's real and it's a significant contributor to what people experience, but a public system capital improvement project is not the tool to address that. That doesn't mean the city has nothing to offer on that front, but we should not expect the projects coming out of here, the specific projects, let's say a municipal pipe upsizing to address a grading issue. The community resilience will take effort from both sides of the sidewalk. So what these public projects will do is meaningfully improve conditions, and substantially, but remember what I said about level of service, you pick a design storm, you build to it, and the goal is that the vast majority of what nature throws at us, the system handles. But there will always be a bigger storm than what you designed for, but the goal is to make sure East Lansing is ready for a lot more than it is today. Next slide. And so these red areas were the highest priority concern areas based on weighted community informed criteria. A key goal on the outset of this project was to let data drive where this planning work would focus and giving council, you all, the tool to know that it's investing where the impact is greatest, not just necessarily where the calls are loudest. So where the data send us is not surprising. The core of the city is the oldest. Many of these areas are in the combined sewer system where sewage backup is a component of the overall risk picture. But I also want to point out those hatched areas, the lines, these were considered high priority concern areas, but are either already in progress by the city or fall under the jurisdiction of another entity. The area up by Deer Path and Hazlet is a good example. This was a high priority based on the concern and the criteria, but it's tributary to the Heritage Hill County drain. So improvements there would be performed by the drain commissioner, and we've communicated the results of this to them. But the city doesn't own the infrastructure to improve. But I also just want to give some credit to our current and former engineering staff. The fact that some of these highest priority projects were already in progress or soon to begin is a testament to their good judgment. And this project spans our playbook, but by my account, we are already running some pretty good plays. Next slide. And I'm going to turn it over to Ernie now. I tried to go as fast as I could. Talked a lot faster than normal.

Thank you, Cliff. Mr. Mayor and council members, it's a pleasure to be here. And on behalf of HGR, I just want to reiterate how honored we are to have been chosen to do this project. And it's been a pleasure to work with staff. And it's been a long haul. And we're happy to be here tonight and tell you what we've learned. As part of the project, staff even up front realize that a robust public engagement is gonna be necessary to really make this project something that the community could get behind and support. And really we wanted the public engagement process to help define the problems that we're trying to solve, develop project alternatives that align with the community's priorities, and seek input and buy in on the proposed plan. This timeline illustrates our efforts during the project to engage the public. The activities there on the top are some of the critical internal project milestones, and the activities on the bottom illustrate some of the touch points with the public that informed our efforts during these times. On the top right of the slide, there's a QR code that'll actually take you to the ongoing virtual public open house, which is a website that's still open. It's been open since early August when we had the public open house. Now, linked to the website is a link to the current draft plan that we're presenting on here tonight. The whole plan is out there now for the public to see, but certainly let it be known that we've sought their input throughout the process. One thing to note, in summer of 2024, right after we got really going on the project, there were two large high intensity storm events in June and July. And through data collection, listening session, analysis of the precipitation events, using the model that we were building, we were able to really use those two events as sort of a benchmark for our team and for the community to say, hey, is this model showing what was actually experienced out in the out in the field and I think for the most part we captured that and it's been nice to go back and actually see how a model recreated what happened in short history. Next slide please. So this slide summarizes some of the key themes and takeaways that our team heard from interaction with the public. I just this morning went out and looked at the feedback received since the open house and launch of the website in August, and there's a few more, there's some more comments coming in, and they still fall into these same categories. Namely, what's the timeline that can be expected for some of these improvements to occur? What are the responsibilities for private, property issues, issues outside the right-of-way or outside of the control of the public drainage system, and how is the city gonna prioritize getting after these improvements? In general, if I had to summarize what we heard from the public, it's that something has to be done This is a big problem. They understand it's a big problem. But doing nothing isn't really an option. We heard that in one of the focus group meetings. But also that private property issues, as Cliff said, while we can't solve all those with public infrastructure problems, we've got to make sure that those are considered and we've tried to address those through some non-structural recommendations in the plan. And I think most people realize that this is a big problem that needs a holistic type approach. So we've tried to take these themes, and within the plan that's in draft form right now, incorporate what we heard, those takeaways. And we've had really good discussion, I think, with staff within the project team meetings, and have made many good improvements to the plan that are now incorporated. Next slide. So I just wanted to give that, um, kind of context for what efforts we've made to get to solicit public engagement before we dive into the nitty gritty. And we'll do that now. Um, first we want to really understand, um, as Cliff mentioned, some of the root causes of the risks and then, um, from those, those would then inform the strategies, right? That we're going to try to use to reduce that flooding risk. We spent a lot of time up front, as Cliff mentioned, collecting and analyzing historical precipitation data and future climate change models. And the image on the right speaks to that 70% increase from those short duration, high intensity events. The historical data tells us where we're at today. The climate models are used to inform where we might be headed. Using the 2D model, computer model that we built and validated, we analyzed the infrastructure to determine how it was performing under current storm events and to predict how it could perform in the future under even heavier rainfall amounts. The key findings that are shown here are critical to understanding the root causes, namely that the stormwater collection system and conveyance system is undersized and really drives a lot of the flooding, as opposed to, say, the Red Cedar River coming out of its banks and doing a lot of harm like some cities might experience. Basically, the current system can't handle the change and changing conditions. As Cliff mentioned, what may have been properly sized decades ago is now undersized, and we're actually seeing a level of service in the one to five year range or less in a system that might have been originally designed for much more. There are many causes of flooding in the system, but the main cause is related to the pipe capacity. And it's not an uncommon problem in older systems, but I would say that East Lansing is on one of the more proactive communities in addressing this problem. Next slide. So with a good understanding of the root causes of the flooding and the concern areas and a knowledge of the system informed by the model and the staff insights, we worked collaboratively to identify strategies that would be the most effective in reducing flood risk. These strategies are shown on this slide. Of note, the city's been pursuing stormwater separation from the combined system historically. By separating and routing stormwater directly to drainage courses, you offload that stormwater from the pipe system and free up capacity for the sanitary sewage, reducing the likelihood and frequency of the combined sewage overflows and basement backups. Upsizing of pipes is proposed both for separate storm sewers and combined sewers when bottlenecks exist that cause flooding upstream that can't be resolved through other means. Similarly, the use of flow diversions is a means to use the existing capacity in the system by moving water in different directions. to take advantage of capacity that might exist elsewhere. In some cases, this strategy also reduces flooding by sending water to the city's existing CSO storage tunnel sooner, maximizing the benefit of that existing asset. And finally, storage of stormwater within existing city-controlled green spaces, either above ground or below ground, allows us to slow down the flow of stormwater and provides additional water quality benefits. And we've tried to maximize the use of available space to accomplish this. Next slide. So this map indicates storage sites that were identified, most all of which are city-controlled. locations that offer opportunities for stormwater storage. Certainly there's other open space in the city, but we not primarily plan around open spaces that are privately controlled property. Now this is something that should be considered moving forward. as the city hears of information relative to private property control or redevelopment. An example being in the northeast quadrant of Saginaw and Abbott where there's an abundance of existing hard surface parking and building that contributes mightily to the rate of stormwater runoff in this area. Another thing to highlight related to the storage opportunities, you'll notice most are related to park properties. Staff have already started collaboration with the Parks Department regarding planning for the multipurpose use of some of these spaces to incorporate a stormwater management component while also preserving current land uses and aligning with their planning efforts. Next slide.

One thing I do want to,

mention on that is that the idea behind like picking these parks is finding something that you can design to a particular known quantity and volume for this modeling. But there's a lot of things that we could do when we're at the design phase and you're actually implementing stuff. We had questions from the public on this like what about curb cuts and what can you do in the right of way. Definitely on the radar, but as far as trying to see what it would take to meet the level of service, we wanted to do something like this, understanding that anything we do additional would be like an additional climate factor. So it wasn't considered in terms of the, we didn't conceptually design the infiltration along the street, but that's definitely not out of the, that's on our radar moving forward. But there also are some issues just with the fact that we're built on a old swamp and infiltration is not as good as it would be in say like Grand Rapids.

Next slide please. So the next two slides illustrate a couple of storage concepts just to provide a sense of scope and scale on how a couple of these larger sites could become beneficial for stormwater management. The first one here shows a large surface stormwater pond in the Harrison Meadows Park area west of Abbott Road. Again, this is just a concept, and a project like this would require a lot of detailed design, environmental permitting from the state. However, this is a site that's controlled by the city. It's large enough to accommodate a large pond. It's located in an area that would be beneficial to controlling stormwater downstream into the county drain system and offers multi-use possibilities. This second concept illustrates an underground concept at Valley Court Park. which could store a lot of water below the ground surface in an existing low-lying area. This could provide flood risk reduction, water quality benefits, while maintaining surface use of the site after completion of construction. So again, these are just two of the larger sites that we've considered in the development of flood risk reduction alternatives, but we want to show how, get a sense of what that involves, what that looks like in those areas. Next slide. I got it. So as we gained understanding of the root causes of flooding and explored the flood risk reduction alternatives, one of the key things we needed to consider was the watershed connectivity in East Lansing. The map on the left shows a zoomed out view of the Grand River watershed. You can see in the red and in the lighter blue both the Looking Glass and the Red Cedar sub watersheds. In East Lansing, mainly north of Saginaw, highway drains north to Looking Glass, and south of Saginaw drains south to the Red Cedar. You can see that kind of in the image on the top right. But when you zoom in even further within East Lansing, you start to see a lot of related interconnectivity at both the surface and the subsurface pipe system levels. We call those sewer sheds, and we'll hit on those in the next series of slides. The takeaway here is what we do in East Lansing affects areas downstream of us, but also what we do within East Lansing in one watershed can affect other areas. watersheds as well, sewer sheds rather. Next slide. So these next four slides will just build on each other for some clarity. These is an elevation map, kind of a heat map that shows the ground elevation with the higher elevations in red and the lower elevations in blue. The main point being that as we studied the existing combined sewer system and used the model to simulate sub-watershed level changes to the system, we needed to consider connectivity of the sewer sheds. This point directly later informs how we packaged up the improvement options, and just as importantly, how we recommended phasing them in during implementation. So to step through these to start, concern area B, located north of Saginaw near Coolidge and Harrison impacts area A, located south of Michigan and Grand River in the Frandor area. Next slide. Looking to the east, the area around East Lansing High School can impact area C in the North Lawn Sunset area. Next slide. but also area E can impact area G to the east, south of Burcham and east of Bailey. Next slide. And then this, there's only one sewer shed in the combined sewer area, in area D, around Valley Court Park, that's not hydraulically impacted by surrounding areas, yet it's still impacted by downstream conditions CSO tunnel and rapid treatment basin. So all this to say we really needed to analyze things together in combinations to understand the benefits that areas could receive even if work was not done at the location where flooding is experienced. And that goes to Cliff's point that sometimes where the problem is experienced, solution or the cause may be upstream or downstream and that's going to be a theme through some of the solutions that we go over next. So once we understand how the water is moving through the city system and what types of structural changes are needed to reduce flood risk To Cliff's point, we need to pick a design criteria to evaluate improvement alternatives. This graphic illustrates how the criteria were used to compare some of either the historical criteria, which is the raindrop on the left there. That shows that 1.61 inches of rainfall in one hour. as having a recurrence interval of 10 years. We know that from our previous analysis that that amount is too little given the storms we're seeing today and the frequency at which we're seeing them. So the middle raindrop represents what today's actual 10-year, one-hour storm is, and it's updated to a two-inch rainfall. BUT WHEN WE'RE PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE, WE DON'T WANT TO ASSUME THAT THE CURRENT TRENDS WON'T GET WORSE IN THE FUTURE. SO WE ALSO CONSIDERED A MORE AGGRESSIVE, ENHANCED LEVEL OF SERVICE DESIGN STORM THAT INCORPORATES THOSE FUTURE CLIMATE PROJECTIONS THAT CLIFF MENTIONED. So we end up with a two and a half, 2.54 inches of rain in one hour, which for comparative purposes is roughly a 50 year storm by today's outdated standards. In the year 2100, it'll equate to roughly a 16 year storm. So moving forward, our analysis was bookended by the two inch storm on the low end and the 2.54 inch storm on the high end. Next slide. So, using the model, which informs our understanding of how things are flowing and running current and future rainfall events, we identified the top issues that would need to be addressed, the alternatives that we wanted to put forward. The next slide, this slide and the next one will kind of summarize some of the important findings from our analysis. First, the separating the east side of the combined sewer area becomes difficult with campus blocking a route to the city, a route to the river rather, shown there in purple, which leads us to wanting to optimize the use of the CSO infrastructure where possible offloading stormwater upstream and resolving the main bottlenecks. Secondly, Charles Street combined sewer and connection to the CSO tunnel is the main bottleneck and causes a lot of backups way upstream into the system where by flow actually reverses and it's kind of illustrated in the yellow. Next slide.

Can I mention one thing on that? I just think that's a good visual to, like, compare to that graphic that we had because the flooding and those extreme events that we see right out here at this intersection where, you know, there are students kayaking in it, you know, intuitively you may think, well, we need some more drainage right there. There's a problem. The model and the work that went into this has found that the bottleneck at Charles and Grand River is the cause of that. And it's raising the hydraulic grade line to such an extent that it's reversing gravity flow and coming up into that intersection. So just kind of drive that point home that just because you don't see an excavator in front of your house doesn't mean that the problem isn't being addressed, if that is a good analogy.

Other main findings included just the overall interconnectivity of the combined system is both a challenge, but it also allows the expansion of benefits to areas outside of those top eight concern areas because of the way everything is connected. East Lansing has some tough, low-lying bowl areas that are difficult to improve due to existing topography challenges. Separated flow, storm flow to send it down into Rainy Park is limited by existing agreements and infrastructure. That's going to require additional collaboration with Ingham County Drain Commissioner. The map on the right there shows some of the planned connections to the Rainy Park facility. And while there's capacity there, it's not a silver bullet. In addition to water quality benefits, available storage locations can reduce pipe sizes and provide higher levels of service, or both, and we've tried to take advantage of both. And then finally, the new storm trunk line sewers that we're going to need to direct water out of the combined sewer system to the drainage courses are going to be large diameter, They're gonna require long routes, and they're gonna be deep and expensive, which is likely why they weren't built originally during the system development. Next slide. So to kind of wrap up this section of analysis and discussion around getting to improvement alternatives, before we even got in heavily into the development of alternatives and selection, we wanted to connect with the community stakeholders to see what things were important to them as we explore improvements. And this is a photo from our stakeholder focus group meeting back in fall of 2025. And we did an exercise with them where we scored alternative non-monetary evaluation criteria to see what kind of things are important to the community. The top item, flood risk reduction, is obviously a no-brainer. But it was interesting for us to see that water quality was a close second. And we think it highlights the importance of quality of life and environmental protection within the community. Also of note, even though there was criteria for reducing impervious surfaces, no actual projects will be brought forward in this category tonight, as it is normally going to come from policy-driven private development projects or policy-driven changes to things like road design standards, etc. But note that both the public and city staff were interested in previous service reduction efforts and hope to address those through non-structural strategies targeted redevelopment and new development. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Julie to walk us through the projects and the prioritization.

Thank you, Ernie. Good evening, everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here. And I'm happy to walk you guys through or walk you all through the projects that are included in the Wet Weather Resilience Plan. Next slide, please. Great. And we can skip this one as well. So what you'll see here are the actual projects that are included in the wet weather resiliency plan and they started out as alternatives because what we needed to do is really combine multiple projects into alternatives that would service or that would minimize flood risk reduction in those concern areas. And so really what to note here when we say selected alternatives is they're a bundle of projects. There's no silver bullet solution, especially when we are looking back at the analysis findings and realizing how interconnected everything was and also that this is a fully built out system and in many cases we're trying to get out to the river, right? So really it's a bundle of projects. And also one other thing to note here is that For every alternative, we did want to include one of those resilience opportunities or one of those large green infrastructure stormwater storage in park spaces type opportunities because that was important to the community or that was important to external stakeholders. For each one of the alternatives, we did an analysis based on those level of service goals, whether it's current or future. And so that was the mechanism for analyzing and comparing different alternatives to understand the performance and the positive impact on each one of those concern areas of those top eight concern areas that we were really focusing on. I will say there were more alternatives. We probably analyzed about 16 alternatives and what we're showing is five here. Again different iterations or kind of variations on the theme different Bundling of different projects to get the right project make sure we can hit those level of service goals And so I'll walk you through that next next slide, please So this alternative is what we reference as the West central neighborhoods combined sewer relief Alternative is definitely a bundle of projects and it is doing just that it's sewer relief we primarily are using sewer separation to relieve the Capacity of the existing combined sewer system. So this one is definitely in a combined sewer system It definitely relies on sewer separation about 77 acres of sewer separation and as a result We need to build or we propose a new storm sewer trunk lined right to capture all that separated flow in this instance we would actually be bringing that separated flow down to Rainey Park and subsequently to Mount the Montgomery County drain and system or the Montgomery drain system I should say for the existing combined sewer system there is a bit of upsizing this would also help to relieve some of the bottlenecks that Ernie previously talked about and some actual in system modifications like increasing or the regulator so that the regulator is can flow through more water or so that more water can flow through with these system improvements that are proposed. Similarly sewer bulkheads is another way to redirect stormwater or redirect the flow in the system to where you want it to go. And so for this actual alternative again a bundle of projects we are actually with the modeling that we did with the alternatives analyses we did we were able to suggest or project that it actually could convey and manage the 50 year Storm today or what essentially is a 16-year storm in the future so that enhanced level of service goal so going above and beyond Just to a great degree compared to a current standard What we'll do on each one of these slides is present a high-level breakdown of what the costs include since we are presenting costs today. And so what you'll note for all these costs is roadway improvements or roadway restoration, utilities configuration, kind of that last row in the cost table, it does make up a sizable proportion of the total cost. So those mobilization, demobilization costs. Those regular costs of doing construction in the city is a big chunk of the total cost for each one of these projects. Next slide. This next project is the Valley Court Corridor Combined Sewer Relief. So it acts very similar to the last one we just walked through in that it does rely on sewer separation again. This time it's about 90 acres and a new storm sewer trunk line. that storm sewer trunk line just for some context that's about half a mile long and so this case though is a little bit different this project's different than the last one in that instead of going back to a drain system it's actually discharging to the red cedar river so one additional component for this project would be a water quality chamber at that outlet to the river so that it could get approved by the state, right? Because the state and EGLE, they're gonna look for water quality treatment, especially if there's that direct discharge and it's no longer going to a combined system or it's no longer going to a wastewater treatment plant. Now this one, we analyzed it. There is also some sewer upsizing here for the existing system. There's also those similar structural modifications like improving the regulator, adding a new regulator to get more flow through the system with the upsizing of the system or with the upsizing of the combined sewer. and also to make sure we're getting the flow where we want it to go. This also includes one of those green infrastructure resilience opportunities upstream of the proposed improvements. So that green area in the middle of the slide, that is Valley Court Park. I think this is about 2.2 million gallons of storage. I don't know that's about, you know, five Olympic sized swimming pools about just to give some context there. The other thing to note is Valley Court is truly a valley, right? It is low lying at that is definitely a challenge as far as getting water out. But it also presents that opportunity to really capture a lot of water and to manage it. And that's what we would be doing at Valley Court Park. Next slide. Okay, this is actually a pretty big alternative, this one. This one is focused on the downtown neighborhoods combined sewer relief. And this one is definitely using some of the same project elements or components as the previous two projects. So there's definitely a significant degree of sewer separation for this project. And in total there's about 278 acres of sewer separation here. This one also has a new storm sewer or a new storm sewer trunk main, and that's about a mile long. As you can see, it would go directly to the Red Cedar River in this instance. What we also realized is how significant the Charles Street sewer is when we were doing the analysis not only of of current conditions but also when we were overlaying in the model these new improvements or these proposed improvements. And I think Cliff talked about that really well that street that actual part of the system can actually reverse flow. And so by upsizing by separating sewers in that area We're also able to get more flow through the system. And one thing also to note, like the areas of North Lawn and Sunset that are kind of in between those two sewer separation areas, just by the improvements along Harrison Road, along Charles Street, that's where we're really alleviating some of the flood risk for North Lawn and Sunset. So while you don't see a project there, just like Cliff was saying, North Lawn and Sunset will benefit. This one we can actually achieve that larger or that future enhanced level of service goal with all of these improvements, but you can see this is one of the larger cost projects at 160 million as shown here all together. So a lot going on with this one. It does add up. I will also say that there's opportunities here for the resilience or the stormwater storage at parks. The northernmost park is Gordon Geyer on the west kind of side of the map on the screen. The southernmost park is Glencairn Park. And both of those would provide another about 2.2 million gallons of storage. Next slide. OK. We're moving quickly into the separate storm sewered areas of the city. So all those previous projects were covering or managing addressing flood risk in the combined sewers areas of the city. Now we're in the separate storm sewer areas. So these these storm sewers are already separate. There is no storm sewer separation proposed here. And essentially there's a lot of upsizing of the current a separate storm sewer system here, and also downstream storage. And this is a really interesting example. Harrison Meadow Park was one of the renderings that Ernie showed, right? There's a lot of opportunity there. There's also a lot to still figure out. It is floodplain area. There is permitting requirements, right, but it does present a lot of opportunity for a lot of good storage. And there's also an area just to the right of Abbott Road on the map anyway, which is the fire department. We also looked at area below ground where you might have large swaths of impervious surface, but there's a good enough space below ground where we wouldn't interfere with anything going on in the surface, like a parking lot. We also looked for some storage opportunities there. And I think for that one, it's another, I think, 2.2 million gallons of storage between yeah 1.5 and 2.2 for this one it is important to note that this is actually one of the highest impervious areas of the city and this is one of the highest stormwater generating areas because that impervious area so it's kind of right where we're proposing some upsizing of the separate storm sewers so those yellow lines But it's private property. It's commercial area, right? So we're doing the best we can here to capture that water, upsize that system. But in actuality, it's going to be about that 10-year level of service. And there's really not a good reason cost-wise to go beyond that. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. The next one is quite similar, if you don't mind the next slide.

That's a good example, not just the impervious surface being so high there, but it's a good example of how we ended up in these concern areas and why certain things were prioritized. An example for this one, police and fire were involved in the early, they were stakeholders among the public and everyone else on setting the weighted criteria. This corridor is how the ambulance gets to the south end of the city and how the police get to the north end of the city. Yeah, there's other routes, but that's a pretty important corridor for emergency services. Part of this was asking the crews, like, well, how deep can you drive through? And if it's over that, then we have a problem. It's also a big corridor, obviously. It's business 69. It's on a highway. So it's something at that level of speed. It's just another public safety component. So there's other reasons in addition to that, but that's part of the nuance that went into that. Thank you.

White Hills drainage improvement, very similar to the previous project in that it is a separate storm sewer system already. We're proposing to upsize it. And there is in this case downstream a park that is available potentially for storage or was looked at and leveraged as an opportunity for storage and that one is Albert a white Memorial Park. You can see how low the cost is on this one compared to the downtown neighborhoods area. So a real range of costs, a real range of projects, a real range of projects all bundled together for the alternatives that we were exploring, evaluating, comparing, and ultimately selecting or recommending to select.

Next slide.

I do want to just take a little bit of time to talk about the practical benefits of these projects because we did analyze those as well, or the benefits that would be most visible. So we did spend time thinking about how much flow you could get through the system, what that would look like as far as a design storm, if that's a current standard or if that's more of an enhanced future goal. But because some of the prioritization criteria that we heard from external stakeholders and the city was about flood risk reduction, actual flood risk reduction on properties in the street, we analyzed all of the street, the linear footage of street. We analyzed the properties adjacent to these systems with these alternatives now in place in the model. And so the real practical benefits, especially for west central neighborhoods, is it does reduce basement flooding. And so what we did is we quantified what that reduced basement flooding would look like for properties, the same thing for street flooding. And when we were looking at street flooding, it was very much like Cliff was just saying. It was thinking about, okay, is this an intersection? Is this going to be above six inches? Is this going to be now reduced below six inches? so it was real specific metrics that we were looking at to quantify linear feet of flood risk reduction benefits and also properties and again the properties is always about basement flooding in the combined sewer areas and then also adjacent properties to the right of way where where flow or flood might flood waters might spill over So those were the big practical benefits, definitely for the top three in the combined sewer system was the benefit to basement flooding or the reduction in basement flooding. For several of these, especially Valley Court, it was very much about taking the, or having and using and leveraging the opportunity that the park provided to store stormwater. Those are kind of the benefits that we really tried to maximize leverage. And downtown neighborhood CSS, that sewer relief project, like I said, it affects a really big area. And what I should actually mention, too, is it's not just those concern areas are the top eight, but because of the breadth and depth of that or the scope of that system and how hydraulically connected that area is downtown, it actually impacts positively multiple other concern areas. I think it's about half a dozen other concern areas. And just like Northwest, or Northland and Sunset as well. The Abbott and Saginaw storm drainage improvement, White Hills drainage improvement, those are the two in the separate storm sewer areas, and we really looked at those, like Cliff again was just saying, you know, will they improve mobility, especially at critical facilities? That kind of, you know, relief in street flooding was the benefit we looked for and quantified. So the total dollar amount, which is shown on this slide, is $309 million for all those projects. And I do want to point out, don't want to forget to point out, that this is $2026. So we're going to talk about phasing real quick next. We're going to talk about what phasing might look like for schedule for implementation. These are not escalated dollar amounts, right? This is 2026 and the longer or the further out they get built, the cost will escalate. Okay, next slide. Real quick before getting to phasing, we wanted to reflect back on the prioritization criteria that Ernie covered because it was built up with or created with stakeholder engagement. And really, just as a reminder, things that were highest on the list was the flood risk reduction as far as a prioritization criteria for projects, water quality, Um, does it align with city initiatives for resiliency and also high impact? And if you look at this list and how they ultimately were prioritized based on those criteria, it really matches, right? So downtown neighborhoods, CSS relief, uh, that's where the most significant flood risk reduction benefits were quantified. And not only that, if it's a CS, a combined sewer system project, and now we're peeling off or offloading water from that combined sewer system, that's a direct water quality benefit. So you can kind of get a sense of why things were ranked as they were based on just the criteria alone. I'm happy to walk through more of those, but this was really important to not only think about implementation, but also to help phasing and also to refer and reflect back on some stakeholder input. Next slide. So I mentioned the implementation part that we did take some time and effort with the city or collaboratively with the city to think about, okay, what does implementation look like? No one wants this to be a plan on the shelf. How do we think about next steps? So next slide. We always start with what the city is already doing and they are doing quite a lot or you all are doing quite a lot. So that's basically the launch point. Where do we slot in these other things? When, how, what's the benefit? on top of what you're already doing. And so the first or the top row there is really about funding. As you know, the city is already using SRF funding in a significant way for the combined sewer system and they're exploring how to use it for the separate storm sewer system as well or for some of these projects moving forward. It is reliant on that repayment though, right? As we as we've already heard along more on this though is is just the city is really thinking about okay What else can we do to supplement funding? And this is where they've already started to explore the feasibility of a stormwater utility and there as they funded the study through a grant They're also exploring more grants and funding opportunities there. Do you want to say anything cliff before I move on from those three? I

Yeah, I will say, you mentioned very briefly about the repayment mechanism. And I just want to make sure that that's well understood, unless there's another area that that's better. So a repayment mechanism, what that means is that you can fund, like if you're taking a loan out of SRF, then you have a way to back it up. And it can't just be the general fund. It can't be, it has to basically be like a sewer rate, a water bill, something like that. What this plan does is set us up with having the vetted plan which not many communities in Michigan have because there hasn't been a need for it until recently because about four years ago or so the clean water SRF program expanded to include funding for stormwater. To my knowledge and on good authority, there has been zero applications at the state level for that because no one's ready for it. We're probably ahead of the pack with this plan or we are definitely ahead of the pack. But the one other prerequisite is that repayment mechanism. But just some added flavor on that, there's like the first five million is 0% interest because they're really trying to encourage stormwater investment. So I just want to mention that we're at this weird situation at the state. Not weird, but for years, stormwater was off the table for SRF low interest loan, loaning mechanisms. And that has changed. And I can't say it enough. We're ahead of the pack now with this, but there's still this big piece that's missing. But we're in a good place.

I wanted to make sure you got to talk about that.

The only thing I would say on the bottom right is that the city luckily and well before my time had the foresight to work with Ingham County Drain Commissioner and kind of pre-planned some capacity in terms of the agreements for volume into the Montgomery drain and some connection points. So that's why this was available to us as a potential option relatively easy because when that was built, there was kind of baked in some capacity that was available to the city.

And I'll just note one more I definitely want to make sure you could talk about what you're already doing. But you know the backflow prevention program the reimbursement for backflow prevention at individual properties is significant. And we really learned that when we were building up the model and really trying to understand where basement flooding could still occur. So that's a great program and one that the city is not only doing but plans to continue. in addition to all the informational materials that you see an example for. So, next slide. But then it was really about us taking all those projects and trying to figure out, okay, we know which are priorities for the city and for external stakeholders, hopefully, but what makes sense given how the system is already built and how hydraulically connected the system is? So all five projects are shown here, but what you really want to note or kind of key into is more the color coding. So the blue could be phase one across all those projects, right? And then we've got the green that is more like a phase two, then the pink is more of a, or I'm sorry, purple is more of a phase four. So we really wanted to think strategically and wisely about how to phase these projects. And the rule of thumb is you always want an outlet, right? So if you're now conveying more flow, you want to start downstream, make sure there's an outlet, make sure there's an outfall that can handle anything that might in the future be coming from downstream. And then you want to work yourself up or work your way up and create that new storm trunk line or that new storm sewer trunk line. And then you want to do all that before you're going to separate any sewers or you're going to upsize any sewers. You want to make sure that there's capacity downstream to take anything new that's going to get there faster or in a greater rate of flow or a greater volume. And then storage, the same thing. You want to build that out before you're really sending a lot more flow down the system. So that's generally the rules of thumb in addition to the, again, again, we'll repeat it over and over again, just thinking about the hydraulic connections and making sure we're not increasing CSOs or those combined sewer overflows, I should say, in any areas throughout any of this implementation program. Okay, next slide. So this is what it would look like as far as more of a schedule and also a cost schedule. And so you might think about how we built up each of these projects based on many several bundles of projects or different components. Well, now we're breaking that all down again, right, to make sure they're in more fundable chunks or phases, right, knowing that it's unlikely you'll get the whole or you'll have whole 309 million to spend at once right so we wanted to make sure there was a logical schedule a logical cost schedule and so this is what uh ultimately i think is one of the the end products in the in the plan uh that we're hoping is most useful and again um these are all in 2026 dollars next slide um While those were phases and not necessarily years, unfortunately, looking at that kind of plan, looking at all those phases and all the projects and looking at that total dollar amount, it could take decades to build out. I mean, that's the experience of places that have tried to do it before. However, there's good reason for some of that time built into like the project life cycle, right? So I just wanted to make mention of a project life cycle because While we do have a plan, we have capital improvement projects potentially proposed or recommended, we do have a level of analysis done, right? There's a lot more analysis, both at the planning and preliminary engineering level. And that's really important because that's what your funders are going to ask for, right? Some more design beyond concept, right? And it also gives you time to think about things like monitoring certain improvements, right-sizing any of these system improvements or upgrades. So there's good use of this time, I guess that's what I would say. But ultimately, you want to get to real detailed site investigations, and that's what you want the funding for, or detailed design, and that's what you want the funding for. and then ultimately all these projects would have to go into bidding for construction, construction, and project closeout and completion. So something to think about is that life cycle. All right, next slide please. We did also, next slide, I'm gonna talk about non-structural strategies. This has come up a little bit, and it was very clear up front that a program of structural and non-structural strategies would be needed and through this process we really did identify a lot of non-structural strategies some that the city is already moving forward with as we just mentioned and really a whole menu of others to consider based on how some of the ones that we're working through right now or that the city's working through right now might might actually produce the results. And the whole goal here is, like Cliff was saying, there's always going to be what we call residual risk or remaining risk citywide or on private properties in particular. And so you really want this layered approach or these complementary non structural strategies to continue to buy down that risk. Right. The projects that we identified in this plan the structural projects the capital projects they can only do so much. There's always going to be like Cliff said a storm that comes along where there's always going to be residual risk. So it's really important to have these non-structural strategies also as tools in the toolbox, and we were just happy that the city was looking forward to exploring these. I will say that this is a program, right? It's like a campaign, a program, and it will be many years in the making or it's already started, but it's a real holistic approach to flood risk. Okay, next slide. Um, just a little bit more, I'm gonna pass it off to Ron real quick, um, but just a little bit more on, um, really why East Lansing is, I truly think, ahead of the pack and unique. It is that taking this on as a program thinking about not just the capital improvement projects, but those non-structural strategies, working with private property owners like they've already done, doing more of that, thinking about other standards for the right-of-way that would be more of the decentralized distributed type of green infrastructure systems, the stormwater utility, and really looking at the funding. I would also say that the real deep dive in the analysis, starting out with historic climate analysis, current climate analysis, future projections for climate, using that as the starting point and then really focusing in on these short duration storms that are causing the flooding. Often we call them kind of cloudburst like events. I think this is something really different for a master planning or for a resiliency planning effort, right, I should say. And so I think that makes the city really unique. I think that you won't find a lot of cities with this level of detail in their analysis and then this really good picture of what the costs involved look like and really having that as a launch point for looking for funding. There's many places you can look. You won't find this type of planning effort. in many places, and if you did, whether it's a small city, a medium city, or a large city, and if you do, I guarantee you it's probably 20 years outdated at a minimum. Finally, the only other thing I just really want to point out is I think other cities are really starting to think about are starting to reevaluate their combined sewer system projects that have been basically planned or even through some level of design for combined sewer overflow reductions. I think cities are starting to look at those to see if there's any flood risk resiliency benefit. And what the city of East Lansing has done is they've really started with, okay, let's start with the flood risk resiliency benefit and see where we can get more combined sewer overflow reductions or improvements in our combined sewer system so that integrated approach or and starting with that i think that's what we're going to see more of i think people are starting to think that way but i do think the city has projects that are really multi-benefit and really gonna meet a lot of the policy goals too

All right, so me sneaking into the end is kind of symbolic of the amount of daily effort that I put into this compared to the rest of the team. I really want to give credit to the team sitting here and our engineering staff that spent a lot of time on this. But we wanted to end on a good note because you can look at this and say, well, this is decades out. This is hundreds of millions of dollars worth of projects. So we want to point out the benefits of this right off the get-go. And the model is confirmed, you know, because of flooding hot spots. We know where the model predicts flooding. So in a rain event, we know where we can send our staff, where they can have a benefit. There's no point in sending them to a spot where the sewer is going to surcharge. We can send them to a spot where catch basins might be blocked. And we've developed mapping and procedures for that. So it's really helped steer our ops staff as to where they can have benefit during rain events versus where we're just spinning our wheels, popping sewers that are already full. It's a robust FEMA-approved hydraulic model, so it helps us look at any potential larger developments that would come in. We could look at that and see how that would impact the system. So that's a huge benefit of having this model. updating standards for more resilient developments. We've already used the climate projections to update for development projects that they're already having to follow, so that's already had a benefit for any project going forward, now has to follow those new standards. Better positions as for funding, we talked about that, that while the repayment mechanism isn't there, most of the funding, whether it's grants, whether it's anything it's gonna wanna see, show us the projects and prove that they're actually needed. We have that, and so we're a step ahead of everybody else. um it would open the door for public engagement we spent a lot of time as they said during the the presentation on public engagement we have a really good feel for what our our residents where the problems are and what what they value and and what the needs are so that was a huge benefit to this and that'll pay dividends as we go down the the path of projects And then it supports investment. We know where the problems are. We could spend, without this model, we're looking at, Cliff already mentioned, you're looking at the intersection of Abbott and Burcham and you're wasting money there. And this allows us to not do that. And there's no point in doing that when we can spend our dollars. So it really helps us save money until we can do these projects so we're not just throwing money chasing a problem. Now we know where the problems are. So it's already... Paid dividends all of these things are benefits to the city right now, even though you know The projects and stuff are are down the road. There's significant benefit to the city as a result of this this project, so It's not static No, and it's not static. This will be something that will be updated as we go and as new ideas, new projects. You never know what comes that could redevelop something, and then you can run the model and it may change things. So this is something that we can build on moving forward. We keep updating. We keep rolling with it now that we've spent the money and we have the model. Questions?

Questions?

We are going to get a copy of the slides, right? Okay. Can we go back to the slides you were talking about where you started with the five sort of projects? Can we go back to the first one for one thing? I've got a question on that. There we are. Just keep going. I want to see the sort of little map of the first one there. Okay, yeah, and I think you mentioned this, or one of you did, but the, you know, we had a long dialogue with regard to what was happening at Michigan Avenue during the construction of the Red Cedar Project, which is all the apartments and restaurants and the senior housing that is south of Michigan Avenue by the Frantor system. And one of the deals was this drainage that is supposed to run down from Lake Lansing Road all the way down to connect in there. So that is, as I understand it, the responsibility of the drain commissioner because that was part of the project. Are we now thinking that we have to... somehow contribute to this because we worked out the deal on Michigan Avenue and I think it was a it was a difficult negotiation where we said this is how much we're putting in and that's it so

Yeah, I can speak to that a little bit. We negotiated connection points and capacity, but not the construction of the projects to get the drainage there. So they built capacity into that whole system to take a certain amount of flow from the city. And that's what we negotiated, not any construction in East Lansing to get the water there.

Okay, so what we're talking about specifically is how we're going to hook up.

Correct.

Is that it? Okay. Yep. Good. You've answered my question on that one then because I was about to call Pat to say what the hell. You know, we already paid for this, but can we go to number two now? And this is the Valley Court sort of storage piece and I know there's a, we have a project within Parks and Recreation that is sort of the redevelopment of Valley Court Park. I'm just not seeing how we can use that for stormwater retention. in any way. So I'm not sure whether that was part of the redevelopment discussion as that went through Parks and Rec. So I'm just trying to find out if that was.

Oh yeah, if you go back to the rendering, that's probably back a few.

But yeah, I've been communicating with the parks director a lot. And I spoke last month to the parks advisory board to kind of go over this and give them kind of the lay of the land that we have a lot of interest in the parks. uh... got a lot of uh... they get feedback there but from my understanding even to start uh... justin last week about this because this is underground but you can still build on that just grass on top of it could just be an open space so you preserve the land use and based on their current plan like you know this is conceptual so it's not going to be exactly and so is that plan but we were definitely uh... communicating quite a lot about Stormwater at all parts. We've said a meeting this morning about the the new park in Chesterfield, but There's from his assessment and our assessment that there's plenty of room to put something like in in this would not impact the existing parks plan that they're working on or have worked on or approved and

Well, you know, given that one of those parts of that project is the construction of an amphitheater so that we have, I just don't want people sitting in water while they're, you know, listening to their music. So I want to make sure that's going to be part of it. Okay. Can we go to number two? I mean, the third little map that you have.

Going towards the end. Yep. Keep going.

okay and that is the downtown neighborhoods this would hook into the existing giant i guess it isn't as giant as i thought it was when we put it in but the giant cso that we have going down grand river would we have to expand that expand the tunnel Yes.

No.

No. Okay. That was my question when I was hearing this, is whether there's another sort of disruption at Grand River that we'd have to deal with.

Okay. No, there are some what we call structure modifications right where the water – goes from the sewer down into the tunnel. That needs to be enlarged, the opening, and change some weir levels and whatnot, just to allow the water to get into the tunnel faster. But that's a fairly constrained area. But upstream of that point in the orange, those sewers are going to be undersized. So there's going to be a relaying of sewer upstream from that point, but not of the tunnel itself.

And we've been talking about this for several years of improving those. And I think, I think we, did we do the work in Chesterfield Hills that needed to be done? Cause that's like a hundred years old, but. I don't know, but that's a different downtown area. And then the other question with regard to this, okay, the tunnel underground river, then Harrison, then the water treatment facility on the Red Cedar, is that where this water is going to end up?

What's separated in the combined area all flows south to the Red Cedar, so it would go to the Red Cedar. Is that what you're asking?

I was talking about the water treatment facility at the Red Cedar and Harrison Road.

So the net effect of this plan, so the areas that are kind of highlighted and a little bit gray, we're going to be separating stormwater from the combined water. and so we're not completely eliminating combined sewer it's still going to go through the tunnel which will still go to the rapid treatment basin and still go to the treatment facility it's just to be a reduced level reduced volume because we're separating areas upstream

Yeah, we don't have to expand the capacity of the treatment facility in any way.

That's a good point, that by separating there would be reduced demand on, you know, those high flows in these events to the plant. So even the areas that are not separated would have better outcomes because the incoming flows are going to be reduced. And also, like, the work that has been done through the SRF for the last 10, 15 years You know 130 million in improvements Like this would just add resiliency to all those investments that have already been made But yeah, there would not be in this what this would reduce demand That's also a key point as it relates to how that we broke these projects up into an implementation plan because

basically the separation needs to occur first such that you don't send more flow to that combined sewer tunnel which could cause potentially more overflows to the river so you need to do the separation first that way you lower the the flow to that CSO system and then and then it upsides those pipes only where you have those bottlenecks to be able to relieve those so it's yeah it's a And if you really get into the implementation and phasing plan, you'll always see that the separation comes first, upsizing comes later. And in fact, there's a recommended period of monitoring flows to see how effective the separation has been so that you don't over invest in the upsizing of pipes.

Can we go to the next?

separation that you're not going to get every single thing that somebody may have in there. Do you guys have a better way of explaining that?

Yeah, correct. When you're talking about separating combined sewer areas, there's sources that are roof drains that are presumably disconnected. You can separate Easily the Expensive but he's easier the road right-of-way right this catch basins can pretty easily really take all that water but when you're talking about old houses with old footing drains and footing tiles and some pumps like there's still some amount of water that you're not going to get out even after you separate a neighborhood and so That's what really drives someone still needing to do some upsizing because you can't get a hundred percent without another factor, exponential factor above cost to really get all that from the individual house plumbing.

Can we go to the next one? Okay, you've got a couple of council members that live in this green area, I guess, or this area, but including myself. So I want to just mention that the neighborhood I live in, which is directly across from the green area on the right-hand side, discharges all our water into that green area on the right-hand side. We have a retention pond that overflows into that area. That area, at least over the last three or four super rain events that we've had, have also overflowed into the apartment complex that's directly next to it. There is a pond in White Park that is a little further down from there, and the fire station is just on this side. I don't know what the plan is here, because I can't tell from your map or that. But are you talking about expanding the retention area on the right hand side to make it deeper and longer in order to take care of the problem flooding the apartment complex, but also to handle all the water that comes out of the Bessemer neighborhood?

Yeah, so part of the resiliency storage strategy would be having storage just north of the fire station, in addition to the west there. Also, the pond was factored in. There's some potential to increase the size of that. One thing that I think is useful...

The pond in White Park, right? Is that the one you're talking about? Yes, potentially. Okay.

Yeah. The one thing I think is worth everyone knowing, not everyone may know, is we call it the fishing pond, but it's really the Taylor drain. And that is taking all the flows from White Hills, Pebble Brook, and then passing it through that area north of the fire station, down to the trail, up the Sanderson drain, to the Remy Chandler, to the Looking Glass River. And so right now it's been treated more as like a pond and not as so much a stormwater asset. And so you're getting less, you know, just a sediment that comes off the road and all that build up and the dredging is probably just needs to be on a higher schedule. But that's, I think it's just a good point to make that that pond is receiving all the White Hills water and all the runoff and all the contaminants that come with that, contaminants being sediment and beyond. But yes. The resiliency factor project over there would be increased storage and it would take some more design to confirm the feasibility of the pond expansion because it's swampy and all that and there's a lot of permitting to but we've been in touch with Eagle about that because the Taylor drain runs through that conveyance area that's north of the fire station as is.

Okay, and then you know there's a you know the I can't forget the name of the drain, but the drain that runs through Let's see, which park is it? Azacadiaca. The Sanderson Drain also runs right by Council Member Singh's property, basically. Is there an expansion of that drain proposed to deal with the Harrison Meadows proposal that you have?

No, and the Sanderson is actually a county drain. I think back in like 91 or something, I don't know the date, but the Taylor drain, which runs east to west, used to be a county drain and was, for lack of a better term, I know there's an official one, but gifted to the city. The responsibility became the city. So that's why it's focusing on there. It's where the city has the infrastructure. But the Sanderson has the capacity to handle anything we would do up there. But there was a lot of focus on the Sanderson in particular because it was intentionally designed at Lake Lansing to not send too much flow north during these big events. To not flood out everything that's north, like the hawks nest and all that area up there. So there's kind of an offset at the culvert to account for that and use the Sanderson to store more water than it otherwise would. But I guess to answer your question,

no no improvements under this but yes it'll work with what's existing okay but it's not our infrastructure yeah i think the the two concepts and we it's a bit of this one this is a bit of a compromise i mean internet so on this map all of the orange is upsized pipe that's a lot of upsized pipe and you've got some very large pipe running up abbott in an ideal world you would limit reduce the amount of runoff coming from that commercial heavy paved area and drive that pipe size down. But not controlling that property, not being able to just go in and do What you want to do, the next best thing is to say, OK, we're going to convey it out of the area that's causing the problem. And then we have to slow it down and control the rate at which it goes north into this. So that's the concept you see here is the storage on the downstream end, not ideal. But it's what you have to work with. If something changed and you were able to programmatically incentivize and get pavement reduction, that would not only drive down the size of that project in between the two, but we just didn't want to model that.

The neighborhood I live in was designed to run water from every aspect of that neighborhood into the pond in the neighborhood, which overflows into this area. The streets that are adjacent to us are a little bit lower than us, and there are constant water problems within those neighborhoods. So, you know, I assume this is going to be a big boost for taking care of that problem. Can we go to the next one?

real quick that you know this is where i i always caution these areas are are low and wet for a reason and what what they're designing to is that design storm either the 10 or 50 year storm you know what you see when that whole area north of abbott woods there's flooded you know what you've seen in there is a hundred year storm the thousand year storm that that is still going to occur in in those areas and i want to caution that that this is talking about that level of service that we're picking to design to and those events are not going to materially, what we do here was not going to materially change what happens in those big events in these areas. I do want to make sure that people understand that a low area is a low area and gravity always wins.

Okay, and then to follow along with your comment there, the area north of Bessemer is, you know, our recreational trail goes through there, but that is a big swamp in that area. There's no plan to sort of increase the capacity in there that's a protected swamp in some way?

So the Harrison Meadows component, like I said, is very conceptual of what that could look like. Much of it, the last time it was delineated, is a scrub wetland. There's some area coming to the southwest still within the envelope of the Sanderson and Taylor that is not. But we've, I've already started some initial conversations with Eagle just on like, what do you think about this? Because they typically don't like taking scrub or any wetland and turning it into open water. That would be a pretty good reason for it. But if you're, you know, you could still submit a permit for it and mitigate. And if it's already, you know, just from living right there, like, it's a lot of buckthorn. It's not necessarily high quality. Like, if it could be rolled into, like, a habitat improvement, I think that would be ideal. But again, just kind of hedging against, there's still conversations that would have to happen to make that work. Doesn't mean there's not another possibility, but that conceptual design was based on something that is not yet greenlit.

Yeah, the permitting constraints or opportunities here we need to be really worked out.

Yeah, the two duplexes that are next to that generally are full of water any time we have a rainstorm that's significant, if I put it that way. Can we go to the next one? Which would be my last questions. So this is the White Hills drainage improvement and be your neighborhood. And that is White Park that you're targeting there, right? And that's that same pond that's sort of on the other side of the thing. So we're using that whole area for two full neighborhoods, I guess. That was my question. Okay. Then just a couple of comments. You talked about the authority over the drainage by Deer Path. And I know that we had a conversation when Costco was built because we took that property and we put the retention areas were built in there, but we left the roadway in the county hands. Whereas when we expanded up, Abbott Road across Lake Lansing, we sued the county and took over the roadway. So the question is, can we obtain something in there that would enable us to manage that drain in some way?

You may have a better chance at that one.

Yeah, I mean it's generally where the where the line is drawn. I'm speaking very generally This is not my area of expertise is is where the drainage is is specifically is Lansing Then it's ours in this particular case in in the area by deer path that takes a lot of drainage from radian Which then flows through that area of East Lansing and went so when it's multi jurisdictional the county likes to have jurisdiction so that you don't get communities looking at their own interest and not the drainage as a whole is what I understand. So that's the reason why the storm drainage in that area's county is because Meridian flows through East Lansing in that area to get to, I think, the Raby Drain over there.

Okay, and one last thing. I just think it's better to have too much than too little. So if you're looking at your plan, you know, to the extent that we can make it a little bigger so that in 50 years somebody isn't sitting here talking about this all over again, I think it would be the way to go. And I know it's expensive, but I think this is extremely important.

Other questions? Council Member Singh.

I have just two. One, you mentioned earlier, early in the presentation, MSU land is blocking us access to Red Cedar. There's no conversation there. Do we need it?

Well, Ernie may have additional commentary on this, but the 10-foot tunnel that I at one point spent a lot of money on is there. The work to get to, there's not a very good place to route it, like going west on Grand River and going in. Best case scenario, you're gonna be doing a massive boring underneath some historic building. But it just makes a lot of sense to use that resource that's already there. But there was not really a great alternative. Speaking about the technical feasibility of that anywhere, I'm sure it could be done, but the cost benefit, especially when you have this basically free discharge, the tunnel itself really can't back up because it would just flow to the river. Obviously, when you move further up into the system, it causes basement backups, but what we're talking about taking, it wouldn't be a bottleneck for that Charles Street sewer.

Yeah, I mean, certainly anything's possible, enough time, money, and discussion. But I think the cliff's right is a two-pronged thought process. One, because everything, when you talk about separating, which was our first idea, it's like we have to have a source to the river. West side, you've got those opportunities. East side, it's a lot longer, tougher, mature trees, campus, old buildings. It's a lot. And layer on that, that you've got that existing asset that conveys it a certain way. So if we can reutilize that asset and attack it from a different direction, so that's what we did. Why fight that fight if we've got another option?

I would just also add one of the causes or reasons for like refining some of the alternatives was just like the depth of these pipes that we were proposing or upsizing. So if it was getting too deep or too long of a route, we kind of, you know, shifted, um, to prevent those costs.

Okay. And then the, the 300 million, is that any part of the bonding discussion that we talked about earlier?

Ron could probably handle that also, but some of these projects, the Elm Valley and the Red Cedar project are, like they mentioned, you have to put in at this point to be eligible, but it doesn't commit you in anything. There's some projects that were- I can talk about that.

The SRF projects will fund sewer separation when you're building sanitary sewers, not when you're building upsizing storm sewers. So that's the the challenge of even those those areas that were Separating sewers while there's going to be an SRF component of it. There's going to be a sizable non SRF component and that's where that repayment mechanism stormwater is a general fund and Expenditure if you if you're separating out just stormwater so without that Funding to pay that part of it then it then it it makes the project challenging even though there's a there's an SRF component there's a Multi-million dollar part. We got to figure out how we're gonna pay for the rest of it because they won't let you use a SRF sewer money for that there is the stormwater component of that and But, again, you still need to be able to – when we do a sewer separation project, we actually have to show them how the model shows that our rates are actually going to pay for that over the next 20 years, and they're going to look for that same thing. You know, while the funding is there, we don't have the math to show them how we're going to pay that stormwater piece off. So that's the next challenge we've got to figure out before we can start tackling some of that stuff. I think – Unless you're –

The gold bonds that we talked about earlier, there was a few projects in there that have components of what is now before us that there's, I mean, I'm not going to say we're, Stephen would have a better idea of like where we're at on those. But those were originally in before we had this information. And so we're exploring like, is there a component that we can do now as we go forward towards like SRF?

So I would say two things on this. One is if there are components that we need to be thoughtful about on the bonding conversation for this fall, then bringing that forward would be helpful to peel those off and understand. SRF, there's going to be a new governor. and which always uh in new legislature but always an opportunity to change how some of these programs function i'm looking because you've got inside info too but at any rate that that may be something if there's provisions that we want to think about as a community i'm sure there would be other communities that would be interested in leaning in to help reshape some of those programs srf and what what how how that program, the pre-reqs and all that good stuff. I know there's federal components too, isn't there? I haven't looked at this since the Whitmer transition, so it's been a long time.

We met with the SRF team, the stormwater SRF reviewers and the head of SRF Thursday, last week maybe. And they mentioned the same thing, like, can't really predict what the new administration is going to do. So there could be some, you know, putting our people on it to lobby.

Yeah, no, all of the people, our current legislators, like everyone.

But the one thing that they, as I understand it, they're supportive of, but you could potentially change, is right now there's that first $5 billion is 0%. Yeah. And that could definitely change. So there may be some of those specific points that would be worth showing our support. But right now, it's a non-competitive. It should be competitive, but there's no one competing. And we're trying to be the first in line. But that's part of it.

It may be a risk communities to qualify for it.

That's why yeah, I mean it's a very There's a lot of funding challenges with stormwater in the state of Michigan We're the only state or province that doesn't have enabling legislation for you know utility You know, it's not necessarily a red-blue issue. You go to Indiana you go to Ohio. These things are very pedestrian and And very common, but because of the challenging situation here, no one has had one, money, or two, incentive to invest in a plan that we now have. And that's one component. But yeah, I guess what I'm getting as a roundabout way is no one's competing for that money. I would be a little concerned. They're like, well, what's the point putting it out there? But I know that at the agency level, they're really pushing more people. And there's other people kind of in this direction that we're headed. We're at the front of the pack right now, but... Shaping it.

I mean, listen, we've had community members here with us all this time this evening. I mean, this is top of mind. We know, I know you guys are on the front lines of picking up those calls to be responsive. So it's like we need to think holistically of the financing side and how do we... move to action as quickly to build. Listen, I don't want to be a Debbie Downer like I was earlier. I hate to do that. But I mean, listen, climate change is real. I'll leave it there.

Mr. Whalen.

A few things. First of all, the backflow protection program, is that easy for me to access? I looked for it through the day. Maybe Cliff can go offline and you can help me with that, or is there an easy way you can direct the public to that?

Yeah, it's on the website. It is on the website, and I'm actually going to be bringing an update to that to council in the next month or so to that plan.

Yeah, I'd love to, because I've had several constituents talk to me about that, ask me that. So that's great. It's on the website, but maybe we can even.

Yeah, I can look and see if that's.

And even as spring comes, we could put that in the dialogue again or something. I'm sorry, the dialect. So we'll go offline with that.

I think it's in the water bill this month.

Oh, yeah, we do little blurbs in the water bills each month, and that's one of them that rotates in. So we do get that information out.

Right. So the other thing is I was surprised that I actually bought a house on the lake Didn't think it was a lake until after, anyway, that's not the point. I think, I understand sometimes it's okay for the water to gather in the street because that means it's not gathering in the homes. Sometimes they act like little retention ponds, but This is an issue for a lot of us in our community. I was bailing out, like you were saying, I was on a house, my dear friends on North Lawn, and I was in their window well, sucking water out of their basement. And I've been in a lot of these different areas, so it's personal, right? It's personal for the people that have dealt with it, and some people haven't had to deal with it, but it's personal for a lot of people. So when we talk about the I appreciate some of this stuff is possibly in bond issues. The last time we did a, and this is maybe more, not a question for you, but more a comment. Do we do that later, or can I say that now? So we talked about bonding, and the last time I think we did the bond was Aquatic Center and the Hanna Center. I think that's the last bond we had. I think these are issues that are so important. We talk about 13.5 million for phase one. We've got to do something about this stuff. I love the investment. I love the research. I'm extremely impressed with your information and your depth of knowledge and you actually figure out why we have some of these problems. YOU GOT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

THIS IS DEFINITELY THE BEGINNING.

AND THEN SOMETIMES I THINK THAT, THAT'S WHY I THINK, SEE SOME OF THE LIST OF SOME OF THE THINGS WE WANT TO DO FOR THE BOND, IT'S LIKE, I THINK SOMETIMES THESE ARE MORE THE EMERGENCY BECAUSE IF YOU'RE AFRAID YOUR HOUSE IS GOING TO GO UNDER WATER, THAT AFFECTS OUR HOUSE VALUES, THAT AFFECTS A LOT OF STUFF, THAT AFFECTS OUR QUALITY OF LIFE. And I understand you live, okay. So I am pretty passionate about this. And I think when we do talk about bonding, we need to talk about the really critical issues. And even though they're saying maybe it's only once every two years that your neighborhood gets flooded. It's kind of a lot. And I do think there are streets that are much more affected than others. And I think it'd be easy for the people that don't get flooded to say, Not my problem, but I think it is an issue for other cities also. The fact that we're dealing with it, I just applaud that all day long. So I think it's great. I do think it's, we gotta figure out how we're gonna be able to pay for some of this stuff, and we need to do some of this. So if there's a soapbox, I'll jump on it, but right now I'll get off it, and I think we need to watch out. It's only time and money. That's all it is.

Can I just say two things?

You can say three things if you want.

Perfect. Just to clarify, I know I made the comment about the water in the street. I said minor flooding in the street. What is happening at your new intersection is the reason that this project is up here, one of the reasons. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about, like, on my street, like, Tamarisk. You know, for 15 minutes after a big rain, there's a couple inches. And, yeah, it's... For 15 minutes after a big rain event, that is... inconvenient but it's not impacting emergency service access it's not approaching any home that's what i meant by like the minor is like there's a lot of places where street flooding is happening but those examples like you are familiar with now is absolutely not like that's the priority which is why that's on the screen right now um this is number four but that's what yeah Second part that I want to say is like as I mentioned in the AIR, like this is the beginning, it's not the end. This is a long, this is a lot obviously that we've gone through. But this is the beginning of a long road and I don't want to oversell, like I do want to sell, like we're in a very good position here having this information. But it's the first step. And then because you gave me a third, I'm going to take you up on it. That's part of the feedback we want to hear that you're prioritizing this. Part of this, this is not, we have to come back to you and have you accept this plan. This is a formal plan that we would submit to EGLE and as contingent, that's part of our grant requirement. So right now all this stuff is draft. A lot of this stuff is just coming to a head now. And then we wanna take your feedback as part of this. If there's any kind of changes or things that you, just any feedback you have. hopefully in a couple weeks, depending on the level of feedback and the amount of mechanics that go into updating the plan, we'll come back to you, have you approve it, and then it's our stormwater management plan for the city. And at that point, we'll be, as staff, have the information that, hey, you guys agree with this or not. And then two, we'll be able to go out and use it to pursue funding or at least make those initial steps for rounding out the funding picture.

So no one wants to get started on this more than us, I'll tell you that. So I do want to give credit to my colleague, Councilmember Meadows, for knowing this stuff. And how many times have we said, well, yeah, I know about that, so I do appreciate that. And also, we eat the steak one bite at a time, right? But yes, I applaud that we are doing something about it, and I think that we've got to keep this very high on the list.

Mr. Grigsby, anything?

A lot of my technical questions were addressed. I just, I got to be honest with you as you were doing the presentation, you were talking about the scale of this thing. I was just, my head was spinning a little bit. And I just really appreciate the effort and expertise that has gotten us to this point here where we can actually start making the steps forward. and You know when I ran for office and wanted to do something for the city and really have an impact I think this is one of those major things that I think is a lasting impact for long before after Hopefully still here but in the position that i am in and just um i'm excited to have some resolution to some of the issues major issues that we're dealing with as a community i know that probably isn't perfect and gets everything but i appreciate what we're trying to do and what we're trying to accomplish you deeply care about the future of the city the infrastructure for our city and i appreciate the expertise that's been put into this effort and i just what a little part i can do to support that going forward i'm excited to do that

So one of the good things I think I'm hearing is that there's pretty strong support for action from the council on this issue. People seem to treat this as essentially an existential issue, and it is, right? So a couple of reactions. In line with the scale of the whole project, I'm trying to... $309 million is enough zeros that you start losing track a little bit. So I tried to come up with a couple of numbers to give people a picture of where this fits. So our entire budget, including all enterprise funds, not just the general fund, but all enterprise funds, is about $150 million annually. So it's twice our complete annual budget. Our general fund is about $50 million. At the same time, if my math is right, $309 million divided by 50,000 people is about $6,000 per person, which is your annual taxes, which is at some level not out of scale if what we're talking about is if you're going to have a home to live in. Of course, the question is how do you get that $6,000 from everybody? That's what we're going to run up against. it would be a different story if it were $100,000 from each person, but it's not, or from each parcel, it's not that. Just some numbers to help me think about this stuff. Sewer funds are not the answer, the way current policy is laid out. One of the things that struck me about being ahead of the pack, not just ahead of the pack, but I think probably way ahead of the pack here, is that it actually puts us in a position to sort of have an opportunity, but maybe also a responsibility to push some of the policy envelope. As Council Member Singh was mentioning, there may now be an opportunity with changeover in government. State and federal policies could easily reduce the impact locally, right? If, for example, there were policies in place to make it easy and enabling legislation for stormwater utility, right? But also policies that would appropriately assess the cost of impervious pavement, right? Because that's not just the property owner, that's all of us are being affected by that. if we could get rid of a whole bunch of by force of law get rid of a whole bunch of pervious surface that isn't being used appropriately well that would change the equation too so part of me is wondering you know do we need to as part of being ahead of the pack do we need to be leading the charge at the state and federal level which could be like rolling a boulder uphill right at some level um Is there an opportunity to lean into policy changes that could help us a lot? Then we would be waving the banner saying, this is not just us, this is everybody. Here's what we understand to be the problem based on almost three years of research. It's not just our problem, it's going to be everybody's problem. You got to do something. at a level that's above us, right? Yes, we can talk about $6,000 per person, but really this is a level above us. This is where we need state and federal help.

I'm going to want probably Julie to give some of the national insights on that, but I will say at this level... So the last two years, and I got one year left, I'm the chair of the Michigan Water Environment Association Stormwater Committee. So I'm the one who coordinates the meetings, the programs for the conferences, constantly meeting with my peers across Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, all of them. and everywhere in between, all the way down from a permitting standpoint like the MS4 program down to school districts. I feel like I have pretty decent visibility in what's happening locally and regionally and statewide, considering but no one really has a plan like this. There's components of it. Ann Arbor, they have a stormwater utility and which was just successfully defended. They have a little more of this. Grand Rapids is working towards it. But there's been a lot of push for enabling legislation. There's been a lot of lobbying. MWA, we have, or they, that I'm part of, have a lobbyist, focuses on this. There's been a lot of work at the government affairs level there. But I don't know if the scale for a mid-sized community like this has been so accurately. I mean, a lot of things are like those infrastructure asset management reports that say there's X dollars of money that we need for bridges and this. But for us to be able to say, here's eight problem areas out of 58, This is keeping up with a little bit. This is very aggressive, this level of service, but this isn't solving a 200-year storm. This is solving what we anticipate at the end of century being a 16-year. Maybe we do now have more to bring to that table in terms of this is the, this is conceptual, but it's modeled priced out into 20, $26 with exactly what we need. Like, you know, there's going to be some give or take on those prices when you get into it, but maybe it's a good way to take that kind of abstract idea about we're all in trouble and we all need money into here's how much. That's my gut reaction to that, but I think Julia will probably have a lot of thoughts too.

Yeah, I think to kind of add to what Cliff was saying, I think it's that you did look holistically across the city with the analysis, and in that way it was proactive and not just reactive, you know, focusing on one area, having the total cost for the top eight, knowing that this is a long program, there's going to be other concern areas to address once we, you know, make a dent in the top eight or the priority ones that have been identified through this really comprehensive analysis so I do think that is part of what makes this unique as far as having this plan I know that you know a lot of cities to just kind of you know think about what the quick fix is right you guys are talking about real improvements and not just one area but again looking at citywide On the stormwater utility side because it is it is a way to fund not only capital projects or cost shares or repayment Requirements, but it's also there to fund your operations and maintenance program because if we're talking about a building out more assets or improving assets, making sure they function for certain size storms, right? There's always going to be an O&M component. And so that's where storm utilities are really beneficial. It's not just to help fund these capital projects and those needs, but to also think about the life cycle of the projects on the O&M. Where there have been utilities, they have utilities formed. They really have been formed with almost like a really back of the envelope calculation of what the cost of service need is, right? Again, like you said, you have something that really has a lot of analysis and credibility behind it. I also think when you start a utility with kind of that back of the envelope cost of service need or the cost of project need, you often don't implement in a real strategic way. Like just the phasing plan that we developed together was I think real strategic, right? Because it's this funding and implementation plan over time, but it's really gonna make a dent or start to make a dent in the problem as opposed to waiting for the whole project to be built out, right? So I think there's those things. I would say the stormwater utilities though, we keep reporting out on it. um, publishing the latest and greatest information on it. Um, and, uh, they're really quite mainstream, um, across the country. And I think that's the point you were trying to make. Cliff is there's 21 over 2100 stormwater utilities across the country. Uh, there's communities with a population of 80 and then there's communities like, um, LA County with a population of 10, 10 million. And so they really are quite common because federal funding is no longer an option for stormwater infrastructure and It's not going to be paid through sewer rates And and we're not talking about you know a tax here. It's a fee for service And so I would encourage You know continuing your efforts to explore a stormwater utility and happy to provide more information on stormwater utilities across the country.

I think I misspoke earlier when I said the only state without one. I meant like in the Great Lakes Basin. I don't know if we're the only one. We're the only one without a sanitary code.

Yeah. Actually, I think Michigan was the first ever to have one.

Just to echo, so, you know, the reward for great work is more work, right? And so you've done great work and now it kind of sounds like we need to become famous for this study some way, right? At a policy level because no one else has done this and if we don't leverage it, then It's sort of a lost opportunity in some way. I don't know if that's feasible, but that's kind of what I'm thinking. Because a lot of people don't know this stuff, right? A couple of years ago, I made some flip comment about how solving these problems is going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Well, okay, turns out to be true, right? But now we actually have the data. Nobody else has got the data. So what can we do at the policy level to basically educate the people who need to make the decisions that will help us? Sort of one way to think about it.

and to ron's point and not not to nick pit nitpick but like i've tried to be so careful about not saying solve yeah because it's improving conditions like the other component of this is it's 309 million dollars and it's not like we're flood proofing the city but to your point You know, I think a lot of people see climate change on TV. You know, it's here. This is not something that happens overseas or down south. It's happening right here, and it's been happening. We see in the data, you know, the 70% increase in these one-hour cloudburst events. And that wasn't even since mid-century. I think that was from 1970, right? Yes, 30 years. 30 years. So what's the cost of doing nothing?

Yeah, that's what's the cost of doing nothing. So my last comment is this is a generational project, right? This is like a longitudinal study that's going to spend 50 years and the problem with those studies is the management across the years. My question is, what are we doing so that in 10 years and 20 years, the model is still active and the results are still active and everybody who's here knows what to do with it because it's going to be guiding our decisions for a long time. It seems like that's got to be part of the project.

I think that the answer off the bat, which is other ways, like when you get down to the operational side, but you approving it as council, it becomes the same with our, um, you know, the, the sewer plan and the water plan that all guides those models and the rate models and stuff like that, that for us to act on it, um,

but also succession planning. We talk a lot about that, but here's a case where if we want this to continue to be useful, we have to plan to make sure that it stays useful.

I think that was just one reason for kind of walking quickly through the project life cycle. There are so many steps for each one of these projects. It adds time. It's what the funding would be for, what those total costs are. But with each one of those steps, you're updating the model, right? Or with each one of those steps, you're learning more about, you know, what storage can do in this area to decrease the pipe size, you know, of the up-sized sewer downstream or pipe downstream. I do think, you know, once projects get funded, you know, those will be, you know, carrying this on and sharing.

That's right, and keep everybody active and engaged in it. Last thing that I wanted to do, we've talked a lot about the stormwater utility, and we did budget for a feasibility study, and so I wanted to ask the city manager to give us an update on sort of where we are with that.

Yep, thank you. And a little earlier, there was mention of Ann Arbor, and Cliff, I think you said Ann Arbor has their stormwater utility fee and successfully defended it. And that was defended by our current law firm. And Steve Jopik, who we've all worked with, was the one point on that. And I have. Steve Jopik. Yep. And so I have heard from many people that yes, Steve Jopik is the person for this type of work. And so we did just actually meet with him today and I hadn't had a chance to update Cliff and Ron about that, but Carlito, Mayor Altman, and myself had a chance to talk with Steve and he is working on, he gave great kudos to the preliminary document that I know Cliff and his team worked on regarding stormwater utility fee, RFP. He's working on wrapping that up, you know, because we certainly will need a consulting firm to design a legal, equitable, sustainable fee structure for this and it has had a lot of legal what I learned very strict narrow legal things that have to be handled and Steve is with a fine-tooth comb it sounded like really going through that document with that lens and and kind of the areas that he has to meet on the court cases that have led up to this point so to kind of Circle back to that, he anticipates wrapping that up very soon. I hadn't had a chance to even tell you that we're gonna be reaching out to you guys and scheduling a meeting with all of us at the end of this month, the week of the 28th is what it looked like worked best for schedules. And so we'll be getting that in your calendar for an internal meeting so that we can start working really on getting that out so that we can have a stormwater utility fee discussion.

Any final comments or questions? Mr. Meadows.

I just want to point out that two years ago, the mayor really started to talk about this. And two years into this, we are in a better position to go forward than I thought we would be, for one thing. I think there is one element, it wouldn't be the plan here, but I don't think we've completed our development standards analysis and changes that need to be done that will support this all the way through. I know you're the liaison to the Planning Commission, but I think we need to get that done. When you mention mid-sized city, that's great, but we're also the third most educated community in the country. And that's not just because we're a university community, although the top three are university communities.

Any further questions? Anything else we need to know from your perspective? I shouldn't have asked. But I want to thank everybody on our staff, but also HDR. There's a couple of other people sitting behind. And thank you for all your presence at the community meetings and so forth. It really was a big and deeply engaged team. So we're really grateful for your involvement with this. OK. With that, thank you for the presentation, which was also beautifully crafted, I have to say. All the presentations were focused and on target and efficient, and so thank you for this. I'm really glad it's part of the public record so people can go back and consult this in the future and know where we've been

Yes, and then when we bring back the plan for your approval, we'll put that in the packet. Good. Just this time, it was like just a lot of data or something. It just worked better for the link when it's not a final document for entering into the record. But, yeah, because it's 900 pages. Yep.

And I want to thank our community members here who stayed all night long for four hours just to listen to this.

Yeah, for sure.

Thanks for sticking around.

okay great so that concludes that item which brings us to our very last item which is adjournment is there a motion move to motion by Grigsby second by Whelan to adjourn it's 11 10 p.m. or all those in favor of adjourning please say aye aye any opposed that motion carries we are adjourned at 11 10 p.m.