City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening everybody. I have 6 pm on May 18th. Thank you all for coming. I recognize that all council members are present except for Miss Molton. Okay. Uh would you please join me in the pledge of allegiance? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

And the clerk will note that Miss Molton has arrived and we are now playing with a full deck. No, no, no, no, no comments from you, Mr. Fantini. All right. Uh, thank you everybody. A couple of announcements first of this morning, this evening. Uh, the highlight of tonight's meeting is the fleet utilization report. So, I expect we're all looking forward to that. Next slide, please. Okay, it is public works week. Uh, we have a number of public works representatives in the back of the room. We can thank them, but we can also thank everybody else that you see out there on the street who are keeping the city literally running. Uh please congratulate them when you see them for a job well done. Next slide. It is also National Bike Month and last week was National Bike Week and last Friday was National Bike to Work Day. Uh we celebrate biking in Anacortis like we do other modes of transportation. There are plenty of us. Uh so please share the road. We also want to encourage people to ride safely. Wear your helmet. We especially want to encourage you viewers at home to encourage your kids uh because that certainly has been a problem and uh we'll be talking more about that later. Uh the Fourth of July parade this year we are requiring registration for all floats or marching groups. It's the 250th birthday of the country. We expect there to be quite a bit of demand. We need to make sure that everybody is up to speed on the rules. And one of those rules is that candy may not be thrown from vehicles. But first of all, we want people to sign up. So anacordiswah.gov/4th, if you're planning to be in the parade this year, please sign up. There's no cost. We just want to know in advance who you are so that we can keep track of you, make sure that we get the rules distributed to you and get everybody on the same page.

Uh, the library is hosting a book fair for grown-ups after hours May 20th at 6 PM. Looking forward to that. Uh our fiber department is hosting a information uh uh session at the senior center Tuesday, May 26th at 10:00 a.m. If you've got Anacortis fiber, or even if you don't, uh you might benefit from this information session about how to get online with fiber, how to watch TV over your internet connection. uh our um our own Corby Stevens, who's our fiber network administrator, will be presenting and I think you'll find it pretty interesting. So, Tuesday, May 26th, 10:00 a.m. Also, at the senior center, there is going to be a hearing loss consultation. Uh Friday, May 29th at 900 p.m. 9:00 a.m. Don't know why I'm having trouble with that this evening. Uh eventually everybody needs to have your hearing checked. It need not be embarrassing. The senior center is offer operating this um uh with registration required but otherwise free of charge. So please come take take advantage of it. Uh veterans hangout. I actually didn't see this slide earlier so I don't know too much about this one but we'll just read it. Friday, May 29th, 10 o'clock at the senior center. You can visit with fellow fellow veterans, veteran families, and veteran supporters. Um the county veteran services officer Chris Diaz will uh be there. The Scadget County uh veteran service officer will be there to help answer questions. So that's May 29th at 10 a.m. Kids Fishing Day at Heart Lake is May 30th starting at 7:00 a.m. Ages 14 and under. And Bark in the Park is Saturday, June

13th, 10:00 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Storvick Park. Bring your dogs on a leash. Uh here's that slide I promised earlier. We are working uh the public safety committee right now on new regulations on ebikes and e- motorcycles uh to protect not only the riders of those ebikes but also pedestrians on the sidewalk alongside the ebikes. Um, so full council will see a a proposal in the coming weeks, but our goal is to get that adopted prior to the beginning of the school year and we've contacted the school district about um doing some joint communications on what whatever it is you end up adopting so that we make sure that people are well aware of those uh new regs when they are they are in effect. In the meantime, please be careful. Finally, uh, we have some committee reports this evening, starting with the finance committee,

Mayor Walters, Miss Hunt,

uh, Council Member Clay McGrath and I met with Steve Hogland and Rhonda Pek on May 14th. Uh, Miss Molton was away at a special work event that day and unable to join us. We took a preliminary look at the revenue numbers for April. Um, not all the figures are in yet, but lodging tax and utility tax are trending in the right direction. The April sales tax, which is for February sales, remember, was down from prior year for the second month in a row. But year-to- date retail sales tax received, is still up 4% over prior year. So, we are remaining cautiously optimistic and checking every few hours to see how that changes. Um the finance team is hard at work on the 2025 annual report which is due to the state auditor by the end of this month. It's on track for timely completion and we have the finance department has requested an earlier slot on the auditor's schedule this year. So we may see auditors wandering about city hall early in the summer. We also briefly discussed the possibility of adopting a little bit more granular cost coding of some minor but ongoing expenses to better track actual costs of programs that we offer. So, we'll revisit that topic uh during our 2027 budget discussions later this summer. That's all I have. Miss Clean McGrath, did you want to add anything?

Thank you. All right. Um that was the finance committee. We also have IT and fiber that met recently. Mr. McDougall.

Yes. The uh combined IT fiber committee met last week. Mr. Young, myself and Mr. Lindberg and Mr. Svantes from fiber and IT respectively. I'll cover fiber first. We we covered actually kind of just uh one of the main things we covered was installations to date and to compared to forecast and revenue compared to forecast and we're running basically a bit ahead on installations but more importantly actually running a good amount ahead on revenue to forecast uh $30,000 ahead actually and that's largely because uh we're getting more basically more gigabit customers than forecasted. So we've got the the 100 megbit service which is lower cost and the gigabit service higher. Um so having that higher amount of adopters of the high high speeded service has led to that that nice revenue boost. We also the other thing we spent the most time on was uh we got into some gory detail as to the the outage uh that the mayor actually uh reviewed last week's meeting. Kind of got into the details of what happened with the OOLT and the kind of the back plane and potential bug there. So the team has a replacement basically it's it's temporarily resolved. Uh there's replacement hardware also coming uh so they'll swap that out in a maintenance window and so then we'll also have like on-site sparing. So should some such an incident arise again um they should be able to just do a simple like swap basically that night or as soon as they can do a essentially a maintenance window. On the IT side, I switch notes here. Uh Mr. Cervantes reviewed the uh the ERP migration. Basically, they're in the process of the continued process of migrating data over um from various databases and other systems. That is a a complex painstaking process as uh they

make sure to get data to migrate over correctly uh you know so fields and everything populate in the correct places, things like that. That's always uh always fun. Another item he covered was um as part of the the farmers market expansion kind of east of the Preston, they've also expanded uh Wi-Fi out there. So, uh the city Wi-Fi service the ability for gives basically vendors the ability to just hop on the Wi-Fi and do credit card transactions, things like that. Uh as well as, you know, anybody who's down there can hop on it. Uh finally looking at potentially converting to a um a cyber security data loss prevention service that comes as part of the Microsoft sort of Office 365 bundle which would allow for um some cost savings as we could move off of a standalone um data loss prevention service. That's what I have. Anything else to add? Cool. Thank you.

Thank you. Uh and then the economic development committee, Mayor Walters, Mr.

Um the economic development committee met on uh May 12th. Uh it was um of course director Coleman um Christine Cle McGrath and myself and as well as members from downtown development, the chamber um Scadget Tourism um the um uh um and accordment um stakeholders that was also there. Um of course Meredith was there. Um, and the thing about it that was so exciting was that, you know, we have a goal in a timeline trying to get up the billboard, the boards, the signs up and that's by June 1st. And the beautiful thing about it was each of the stakeholders had to take a part and develop that part and to make it work for the whole whether that was let's say Meredith in her work to um bring some of the boards up and show what they'll look like the big lettering whether that was the port of Ana Cortez um working with us Christy Sutherland about the installation pro process whether that was Brienne Daly at the chamber talking about the QR codes, the chamber marketing. So once you get the boards installed, which is a big deal because we're in a sprint to try to get it up by June 1st, um it will connect not only to what we're doing here in Anacortis, but it'll also connect to Magic Scadget, which is part of what um we've been trying to do to sort of tie in all of the cities and the work that's being done. Again, our goal is to try to simply figure out how do we tap the two million people that come through our

island headed to the San Juans yearly. Now, even though we are aware that the match schedule is around June 13th in Vancouver, uh, for the, you know, soccer and also the 15th in Seattle, but we're still hoping that, you know, whether or not people choose to come here from that and all the different things that the other cities are doing that we still have those two million people that choose to come through Anacortis and trying to figure out how do we let them know that we're more than just the fairy town, but we have an extraordinary amount of wonderful things happening. So, you know, one of the to the kudos of the economic development committee is that we've chosen to target them to help us not only at events and know what's going on, but to come into town and help our shops downtown to, you know, boats and at some point we're hoping to maybe even bring some of their businesses here. So that's the idea and the thought and the thing that I really wanted to say to uh the council members that are on the team of course Mr. Courier Miss Cle McGrath but the team and the staff and the stakeholders is that everybody brought their agame to the table and you know and it's delightful in the sense that we're very clear as to what we're going after. We'll find out from the hits the you know geoloccating all of those metrics that um you know Christian Kelts as well as the chamber will help us measure and try to figure out how we tap that and use it to help Anacortis become what it wants to become. So you know I'm very encouraged. Anything you wanted to add add Miss Kita McGrath or Okay. Thank you

Mayor Walters

Mr. Pantini. Yeah, I'm very excited for the Anacordis sign to come. I think it'll be excellent. Can't wait to get my picture underneath the tea. Um, but I'm also curious. I know a couple times uh out of some past readouts that we've heard that there's like maybe a larger stakeholder group that's being put together and I'm just kind of like I'm excited about the letters and everything, but um I'm really kind of uh more curious about um I think it was more of like a stakeholder group that was mentioned to come together and to try to work on um uh you know economic development within within our city and I'm just wondering if there's anything happening with that at all.

Absolutely. That's a very fair question. Um just part of the genesis for the creation of the economic development committee. It was centrally around trying to figure out what Anacortis need our economic development alliance for Scadget County. have served on the board, helped hire their CEO as well as many of the other board members and found them. Edes function is more Scadget County as a whole and bringing in parceling those dollars, opportunities, job postings, everything wonderful about it. But Edes role in my opinion is not to tell Anacortis specifically what it needed. And so the goal for the economic development um committee for this city was to figure out from the stakeholders and quarters what we need, what we don't have, what we're looking to do, how do we get it, and then partner with EDA, partner with the council of government, partner with all of our legislative leaders. And so what we've done in last year at this time and even in this year trying to pull together part of this, we partner with the chamber, we partner with the port, we partner with downtown development alliance, we um creative district, we've partnered with um the chamber, and we've already um met and talked with um the um hospital, both refineries, and we've also met with a number of other groups within that. And part of it that was that we really wanted to sort of begin to see where we were came up with some ideas and some solutions. And part of the goal that's coming forward is to include those other stakeholders at the table. But our goal initially right now is to sprint for June 1 to have the board up. But your point is well taken and it's absolutely what the intent is. We just for the record uh last year in the economic

development committee we met with all of the stakeholders at two different meetings and um and it was it was a wonderful meeting and I think um our team uh John um Coleman um as well as Stephanie we've got some stacked cards Q cards and there were three colors one green was what we thought was good about an accordis things that we thought could need improvement and three things that they thought um we needed to have here in Anacortis and we compiled all of that and we looked at it to try to see what are some of the lowhanging fruit that the economic development committee could go after. One of the things that came out to my not my surprise but came out was that uh the refinery Dakota Creek and so many the hospital they needed child care. Many of them were having to go other places to bring their child get their child and then come back here. So what I'm saying is that we're learning what we what's needed here and our goal is to target and bring in all of our other stakeholders, those people that help us bring it and make it achieve achievable to the table and then we figure out how we go from there.

Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Fantini and Mr. Young. Uh if there are no other announcements at this point, we'll move on to public comment. Hearing none. All right. Uh we had no one signed up for public comment. So if anyone would like to make a public comment at this time, simply raise your hand or raise your hand online. Anybody online? No. Okay. All right. We'll move on then to the consent agenda. We have a number of items on the consent agenda. Council,

Mayor Walters, Mr. McDougall, I move approval of consent agenda items as presented. Second. Okay. Motion a second to approve the consent agenda. Anybody want to pull any items from the consent agenda? No. Okay. No discussion is possible on the consent agenda. There is an ordinance. We'll take a roll call vote. Mr. Franc. Mr. Young. Yes. Miss Clea McGrath. Yes, Miss Molton. Yes, Mr. McDougall. Yes, Mr. Fantini. Yes, Miss Hunt. Yes, Mr. Courier. Yes, Mayor. The eyes are seven. The nays are zero.

The eyes have it. Consent agenda is approved. Thank you, council. Our first item of other business is our fleet utilization report. Mr. Ludman, assistant director of public works is going to present this item. Good evening, Mayor. minted assistant director of public works very newly. Congratulations. Thank you very much.

Um good evening. Um I have our fleet report here. I'm just doing a high level overview for you guys today. Um feel free to ask any questions you want. Also ask for questions at the end. Um what we want to provide you is enough information. This report I hope you all had a chance to review to be able to make educated decisions for our fleet operations and uh procurement purchases and bring them forward to you. Will, could you get a little bit closer to the mic?

It's always the mic issue. So, we did this um report in response to the executive order 20261 and we did lots of valuations and you'll see how we kind of separated some police vehicles out of the equation to make them separate because they are a different use. This is a little um overview of our fleet staff and department and how we operate. So we have about 420 pieces of equipment and about 103 of those are light duty equipment. That's kind of what this was regarding this overview. We didn't really go into like the excavators and dump trucks and and that specialty equipment. We stuck with like the what I'd call the automotive class. So the pickup trucks and the SUVs and that kind of thing. And I would say here in Anacortis, we are fortunate that we have a centralized fleet. Some cities don't have that. Some cities have like their fire department does all their own equipment. Police might do all their own. Public works does all their own. So we are centralized, meaning it all comes through one department. So purchasing comes through one place, which helps us keep um everything consistent and that helps keep our cost down as well. We also have a very diverse fleet because we do garbage, police, fire, wastewater, sewer, water, all that in house. That's not typical either for places our size. Some strategies we use are right sizing, which right sizing can be kind of confusing to some people. It means two different things to me. It means having the right number of vehicles in our fleet, but also the right size vehicles because we don't want to send someone to class in a 12 passenger van when there's two people. So, we want to make sure we have the right sizes and the right quantity on hand when we need them. Something we were able to do during this, we'll talk about a little bit

later, is we were able to stretch our um loaner pool so people can actually have more vehicles to check out to go outside training, things like that. So, like I said, standardization is something very important to me because it reduces maintenance costs. It helps our mechanics get things fixed and turned around faster and just consistency in the fleet. Uh, we do a lot of manual life cycle planning. You know, there's lots of software out there that will help you do life cycle planning. Some of our cardigraph stuff will help you tell you when life cycles are up, what um kind of classifications they are for being replaced. But I've found that, you know, our mechanics um know our vehicles so well that we can really stretch those out if we think about it logically from what we know in house. And we can get a couple more years out of some of those. You know, if we have a 10 year life cycle on a truck, often times we can get 12, 15, we've gotten 20 out of some vehicles, not just replaced when the calculator says it's due. Uh we often retain some vehicles, especially for seasonal demand. So, we have some trucks that are getting replaced. Um, but they're good enough to pick up garbage or or go water the flowers down commercial for a couple times a week. So, we'll keep those through that season and then surplus at the end of that season as well. Here's uh going to open up the police fleet. So, the the APD is home to the largest and most specialized light duty vehicle fleet in the city. So they have admin vehicles, detectives, and various other staff vehicles. But their patrol fleet where they have 25 vehicles are almost all identical, but they're all assigned as well. So we wanted to keep those separate because they do totally different job than the rest of the vehicles in this study. These are the three models that we um kind of looked at. The first model you see there is the assigned model. That's

our current model. We've had that for about 30 years as far as I could tell. And uh it offers accountability, local control, but also ends up having some older vehicles because they don't get as many miles on as fast as you'd think they would. Um it shows to be the most cost effective, which we'll see here in a couple slides, which really surprised me. me. I mean, I've I've been in the fleet for 26 years here at the city, and I've always assumed that the poolled model would be the cheapest model we could do. So, I've always kind of leaned towards that, and this is the most in-depth study we've done. So, I I learned that and had to accept that during this study, which was interesting. The poolled model, um, we'd have about onethird fewer vehicles if we went that direction. Um, but then you'd have more frequent replacement, more frequent maintenance, and higher repair costs. Um, one good thing about the pool fleet is you would emphasize the efficiency and stay up with newer technology, newer radios, um, all those things would be newer but more expensive. I did note that uh would have a negative impact on morale and the surge capacity which between shifts at the different events going on, you'd have less vehicles available. Um the take-home model is something that was uh being asked about to be explored. So we looked into that and it has a improves morale quite a bit and recruitment was the the big topic but also carries a really high cost and the weakest benefit to the public. We found that it would actually almost double the miles we put on our police cars because we don't have a lot of people living in town and uh especially with the fuel cost we've been seeing very recently is that that makes it much more expensive to operate and much more um labor intensive for the fleet staff as well.

And here's a breakdown of some of the costs. You can see um the life cycles here in this column. Um, these are estimated life cycles that we would use. We're currently using 12, but we're not really replacing a 12. We haven't replaced one, a Tahoe at 12 yet. So, we're stretching those out. So, you can see over here on the far right is it's it's pretty considerable savings staying from with the assigned model we're using right now. This just shows kind of the actions were taken. Um, three uh underused vehicles were reallocated to different departments or sorry into the shared pool. So we actually had two vehicles in the shared pool before. Now we have three. So it's more vehicles available. And some of those departments that had these in their in their fleet are now just checking them out of the pool when they need to, which makes a lot more sense. It's actually worked pretty well so far. We found two vehicles that were were low operational value and we just we got rid of them. The departments haven't missed them yet from what I understand. That's a good thing. And we found two that were kind of underutilized. We can shift them to different departments. And I think two departments are sharing one up at operations and other one just just shifted to another department entirely. And moving forward, we're just going to focus on finding more smaller incremental improvements we can because we didn't really discover any major deficiencies. Um, we didn't find any major surplus of vehicles that we didn't need. And you can see in the back of that report, if you've read through it, that there's I kind of itemize each department, how many they have, what they do, and kind of the uses of them. I hope that was interesting. And here's my key takeaways I got for you. I said the the vehicle fleet's generally right sized. Um the biggest question I get a lot and got from some

of you in particular is uh why do we need so many vehicles or do we have too many vehicles? And um the way I kind of explained it is it's kind of like comparing like manpower to workload to the timing. So you have to make sure everything lines up. You can't send a guy to do a job if you don't have a vehicle for him to take. So we uh we're geographically small here and with 100 white vehicles running around. you're bound to see them driving around a lot. So, it seems like you run into every corner you take. Um, but that's just kind of how it is. Often I get questions about a truck that's driving around and it happens to be a port truck cuz they look identical to ours and they have very small logo on the door that you know from a distance someone could think it's our truck. So, that's to be thought about too. So the optics and perception there is just it's it shows the true story when we actually look at the details. So the pooling can be effective but it's not always viable. Um we looked at one department engineering for example they have you know a fleet of say five pickup trucks but they all have different kinds of tools, plan sets and things they carry around. So without like a storage unit they'd have to come back and trade things out throughout the day. They have individual trucks. Maybe that's something we can explore down the road if that's really necessary, but that's one of the hindrances we have to pull in more vehicles. We've done some EV adoption. We have uh five electric vehicles and five hybrids and they're definitely cost effective. Um they just don't fit every use class. So, we've had to really look at where they fit and where we can use them. And from what I understand, the people that have been using them have been pretty happy with them. Uh, last year we changed our auto insurance from a kind of a low deductible plan. We went with WCIA and

went to a high deductible, which is saving us some money and kind of allows us to be a little more flexible with our insurance as well. So, as I kind of went over already, our current police model is the most cost effective. We're always looking for opportunities to improve efficiency, and we're going to focus on efficiency and planning as we go along. That's what I got for you. You have any questions? Thank you, Mr. Lman. Council, do you have any questions? Mayor Walters. Mr. Young.

Um, Mr. Ludman, you know, again, I um I always appreciate working with you and I appreciate your presentations.

Thank you. what I know about you from just observing and um in the committees that we've been on together in my terms of being here on council, you always are thoughtful, you're intentional, you make sure that um you know, things are not out of whack and you all and you always seem to be trying to um not only save the city money, but to do things that really benefit. So, what I loved about this piece here is that not only did you pull the um the issue, but you also pull the team and you also recognize that, you know, the team may not always be happy at the decision, but the decision that was made was the right decision and it didn't cost us lots more money unnecessarily and and I appreciate that. So, you know, again, I didn't want to miss my shot to tell you congratulations. I'm so glad uh the work that you do and I'm thankful as a council member and a citizen of Anacortis that we got you at the helm doing what you do.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Fantini. Thank you. Congratulations on the new gig. Um I just have a couple of questions. So the report shows that the pool model is actually more expensive than the assigned model over like that six-year life cycle. Is what's driving that? Is it primarily the replacement cost increase from the shorter cycles or and the maintenance or are there any other factors involved with that?

It's kind of a little bit of everything. So you can see the the replacement costs are definitely higher. you're going to buy and replacement cost is not just buying the vehicle but upfitting the vehicle which is a huge expense to that vehicle as well. So the more you buy vehicles the more upfits you have to do such as drives that cost higher. Okay. Um, also I remember being here before I was on council and listening to a discussion around police vehicles and the electrification part came up and you know I think it was said that we don't want to be the first people to have the electric cop cars because uh they get better as they get refined and used. But kind of to that point on EVs,

I have to say that the the cost per per mile data is pretty compelling. um especially on lightning versus a gas half ton. Are there any specific future procurement decisions where fleet services would recommend EV as the primary option rather than just a consideration? Have we gotten to that point yet? I

we haven't got to that point yet. I think direction from from the policy makers would be great on that. I think one hindrance on those for police use is going to be charging, especially with take-home vehicles um or assigned vehicles. if they are going home at night, how do they get charged? That's one thing that I haven't seen how any police agencies are handling yet. I don't know of any that have a ton of them yet. I know some are starting to buy them, but that's that's an interesting question that I have to answer. But I think there is a great opportunity there to come.

Okay. I just have two more questions and I'm done. I promise. Um, and then as far as the 45,000 insurance saving from the the switch, is that savings reserved specifically for the fleet or does that flow back to the general fund? That savings is going into a fund. Um, correct me, Mr. I'm wrong. It's going into a fund so we can use to pay for repairs up to our and our deductible if we need to, which we had to this first year with the ladder truck accident we had. Um, so it'll be reserved in a fund to help pay for the repairs below deductible and including the deductible.

Okay. And then my last question is just this is phenomenal data. Um, is there ever any way, you know, between police and fire there's there's kind of a lot of specialized vehicles. Is there any way to track um other than mileage like actual usage of these of the vehicles? Usage is hard especially with our small geographic area because you can look at hours but depending on the type of vehicle you have like a firet truck has very low miles but can have very high hours especially just from training. Sure. So you have to kind of look at those numbers together and the use of the vehicle. So it's it's not just black and white.

Okay. Thank you. And a lot of those procurement decisions I think will get driven by price of gas and the unpredictability of the price of gas. Um EVs would be ideal for police vehicles. But what IV is what EV is out there that you want to buy for that yet. Maybe in three years, maybe in five years. Uh but especially with the amount of idling and just sitting there ready to go that they do EV would be perfect. Air conditioned. Air conditioned for the dog. um high high torque at zero miles per hour. I mean, ideal for an electric vehicle. A lot of upside, but which model electric vehicle do you want to buy for that yet? So,

they've had the Chevy Blazer EV is made for patrol and they've been off for one year, I think. So, yeah,

it's coming. But, like I said, we don't want to be the first. We've been there and tried that with some other things that haven't really worked out that well. I do want to uh get a note in there is I I don't know how many you heard this last month. I I kind of mentioned at one of our internal reports that our fuel costs were up $8,000 over the previous month and now they're up over $16,000 since February, monthtomonth. So, it's it's a huge cost increase for us right now. We're at 44% of our budget as of May 1st for our fuel. So, hopefully they drop off. I don't think they're going to drop off that much that fast, but something to think about. And we've got both APD and public works directing staff to avoid idling and avoid excessive trips and those kinds of things, but there's only so much you can do.

Mr. McDougall, Mayor Walters, um, thank you for the the question, Mr. Fantini, on EVs and also the commentary on EVs. I actually had a kind of a similar set of question or question really. the 103 vehicles, are there any classes of vehicles that over the say the next 5 to 10 years are just not going to be sort of eligible for electrification? Um, and you know, and this is highly speculative, but feasibly within the next 5 to 10 years, could we electrify 80% of that? Could we electrify 80% of the fleet? Of the fleet? Yes. Well, I don't think we could ever re have the money to replace the 80% of the fleet in that amount of time.

No, probably not. But of the eligible for replacement, I guess. Yeah. So, right now, like Ford had the most popular 1/ half ton electric vehicle, which they stopped making now. I'm sure they're going to make a replacement for that eventually. We have one in our fleet now, and that's actually worked really well in the in the parks department. So, I'm hoping as those use classes grow, people see that, see it working, and we have the need to buy buy replacement vehicles, we can kind of start fitting those in more and more. So yes, I think we will can start going that way um more often. I think a feedback from from you all will help that because there are some people that are want to be hold out and not want to venture in, but I think that's getting less and less as they actually see them in use.

Okay. Um yeah, I think the the bigger the medium duty class is not quite there yet. The heavy duty I mean there's garbage trucks you can buy right now that are electric. Mhm. I don't know anybody smaller than like Tacoma or Seattle who's tried them. It's pretty early adopter at this point.

You know, we only have five garbage trucks to buy one. That's 20% of your fleet electric. If it goes down because just because of the new technology, that's that's an issue. So again, we don't want to be the guinea pigs on those fronts, but definitely interesting. I've driven driven the electric garbage truck at Pat Car. It was amazing. One one thing you do lose in that front, I mean I think a garbage truck cuz they get like 3 miles to the gallon, right? Like let's change that. But the batteries are so heavy that you lose 7,000 lbs of garbage capacity, which means you're going to the dump more often. Wow. So where it's a give and take somewhere. It doesn't it's not magic. So it's there's pluses and minuses to all of them.

Thank you very much for that that kind of context is really great. Like I I think, you know, speaking for myself, if we can find ways to electrify where it's feasible and makes sense, great. And if uh there's certain classes of vehicles where it just doesn't work, especially at our our scale, um then yeah, we defer those. So, thank you. And buying them where we can, it's kind of what I've been doing on my own for the last five years is find a good fit, especially pool vehicles or admin vehicles, like it's a perfect fit for that. So, we've been doing that. Yeah.

Um charging stations. Another question. I know Miss Hunt asked me some questions about charging stations and it's hard to plan ahead at this point in time because we don't buy that many vehicles a year anyways. So, it's hard to know where you're going to want them. And we do have, you know, we have eight stations at city hall, six or eight, I can't remember. We have two at ops, one at the water plant. So, we have some ground for charging. We have we have growth ability right now. So, we're not maxed out yet. Walters. Miss John.

Yeah. No, just as a side note, um it would be interesting to uh if you hadn't, I'd suggest uh looking online at the big car show in China right about now. I think they said they had 500 or a thousand vendors that were there. What I found fascinating though was the new EVs as other parts of the world have pushed forward with electrification. in that one of the things that I thought was quite interesting was that they had um the in the YouTube story about it they had a fiveinut recharge even in subfreezing temperature which was stunning and so they're pursuing that not only in trucks and everything else. I just thought it was interesting but it it I know it doesn't solve our immediate problem. I know that. But, you know, I just thought the hope of how we begin to address this is coming and, you know, just as a society of people, hopefully we can continue to pursue it.

Mayor Walters. Miss Hunt. So, I'm gathering that there's significant interest up here in pursuing EVs, pursuing electrification. Is it fair to say that every new vehicle we're buying at this point, you're already evaluating if there's an electric viable option or do we need a policy to support that? I I don't know if we need an actual policy, but I think someone I mean you guys to say it, which is great, but I think I'm already doing that to some extent already looking at every single model we buy.

Like I said, we just don't buy a lot of those types of vehicles yeartoear. I'm also happy to hear, mayor, that uh public works and everyone have been reminded not to idle because I have had several members of the public ask me why those trucks are idling cost of gas. Thank you. Yeah, you uh um you have our assuredness. We're looking at electric options when we buy new vehicles, but um you could adopt a policy that would push us toward more electric, but it would also increase the price. it would push us towards spending more. Um, which has a value. We just don't have any money right now.

I will say that the electric vehicles we've bought have not cost us any more than the internal combustion engine comparative like the the the half ton pickup truck was essentially the same price. Um, the Chevy Bolts we bought were essentially the same price what we would have bought. There's actually some vans are cheaper to buy electric just because they were giving rebates and stuff like that off them. But yes, typically they are more expensive. So, precisely my my my point is, you know, where the value proposition works, we're buying the the cheaper vehicle. Do you want to talk about why the uh Ford Lightning was less expensive?

They weren't a very good seller from what I understand and they had they were sitting on the lots quite a bit and so they kept marking the price down. And on state contract when I went to go look at vehicles, I was looking at the the gas trucks and the the electric trucks and I think the price was $1,000 of the same. So I don't know how you could pass that up. Mayor Walters, Miss Collegraph,

uh, so I just want to say that this is one of the most refreshing reports we have received. Um, you guys did a great you did a great job on it. You wrote it yourself. It did not require a consultant to do it and it shows. It's straightforward. It's easy to digest. It hits all of the high points

about how we evaluate our fleet, you know, vehicle utilization, how do we rightsize these these vehicles, replacement. It really is a a good baseline for the public to understand how we have these light duty vehicles and also for council currently and in the future to be able to speak to and ask the right questions of how what does our fleet look like now and how do we make changes. This makes me much more confident when you come to us in the next 6 months to 18 months asking for new vehicles that fit in the in this kind in the light utility vehicle kind of 103 um units. Uh it's just very helpful. I also appreciate the work that was done on the police patrol fleet. I know this was a discussion that we had um when we went out for the levy lid lift if how do we structure that? So, this is very helpful. Um and I just want to say thank you to you guys and um the folks that work on the on these kind of planning. It's it's localized. It's um valuable information and it shows that you guys have a good working relationship with all of the different departments that are using these vehicles. So, thank you for being good stewards of um this equipment and the dollars that the community is supporting us with.

Thank you, Mayor Walters. Miss Maltton, I 100% agree with Miss Cleland McGrath and you're clearly the right person for this job, Mr. Ludman. And thank you. the public works committee and over the past seven years that I was on it, this came up multiple times and I was one of the people who was regularly asking why does every police officer have their own car and now we know. So, thank you for really delving into all of this and um it's a relief really to have this information so well presented and be able to move forward with it. So, thanks again. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, Mr. Ludman, and thank you for the report. And thank you also for identifying the changes that we made as a result of the report and identifying some additional efficiencies be an ongoing task for us. Yes. All right. Our next item is our interlocal agreement with Kad County for the Behavioral Health Grant Administration. And Mr. Mr. Monrad, or as I might call him today, acting chief Monrad, uh, will present this item.

All right. So, I guess I'm presenting the uh the um proposal for the interlocal the Okay. All right. Um, mayor, council, members of the audience, uh, Steve Monrad with the Anacortis Fire Department. Uh tonight I come before you to uh speak about um a proposed interlocal agreement uh between the city of Anacortis and Scadget County. Uh some background of this. This is uh um to administer the funds of the grant that we went over a bit ago. The BH CORE grant uh BH COER I've been through this many times and I always have to look to remember what that stands for. It's uh the behavioral health co-response and education program. It's a program of the University of Washington School of Social Work. Uh and this particular grant is a um uh innovation grant that was awarded to specifically fire departments um who were uh um implementing programs and supporting programs for crisis response, co-response and uh behavioral health and mobile integrated healthcare. Um we uh applied for that grant um as a uh in collaboration with uh Muscadet County uh which includes um the integrated outreach services with the city of Anacortis um the crisis response team with Scadget County and a new and upcoming program with the uh Burlington and Cedar Willy fire departments. Um we were able to get we were able to uh request a lot more funds if we collaborated if it was a multi-jurisdictional and partnering with other uh agencies. Uh this partnership is a direct result of uh our involvement with the the Northstar project. Um otherwise a program like this would we we wouldn't have even considered uh teaming up. So

it's been a real benefit to be part of that for the city. Um the the grant money is coming from the state of Washington. Again, it's it's administered by the UDub. Um we uh were awarded uh $270,000. That was uh the total grant amount. And uh this uh interlocal agreement uh which is number 26-042 AFD-002 um will reimburse Scadget County up to $192,000 $192,291 for a motel respit program. Explain just a little bit about that. It's a pilot program that the integrated outreach services team is is wanting to implement. Um, basically for folks who are hospitalized and don't have a safe discharge plan, this will give them an opportunity to uh put people up in a motel where they'll have followup from a a nurse practitioner on the iOS team and just to make sure that they have a safe place to discharge so hospitals don't have to hold on to them. Um, it's also going to uh support uh Burlington and Cedar Woolly and their new uh mobile integrated healthc care program as well as uh add additional um behavioral health specialists um mental health professionals to the Scaji County Crisis Response Team who will be able to deploy with fire department staff. So, it's going to be a real uh a real improvement over the crisis response capabilities that we have now. Um they will be available to respond to Anacortis and also the rest of the county. Uh so that's the uh in a nutshell the the grant and the interlocal agreement and I'd be happy to take any questions.

Mayor Walters, Mr. Vantini. Um yes. So, I think I heard the answer to this already, but we would not have been able to apply for this grant if we weren't participating in Northstar. Is that kind of what I

No. No. We would have been able to apply for this um solo, but we would not have been able to qualify for nearly the amount that we would have. And since what we have been doing uh in Anacortis here with our outreach team with the mobile integrated healthcare community paramedic program, it's not really a new program. It's it it it would have been a harder cell to um call that an innovation grant because it's it was an existing relationship. If had we started something new, uh they had some pretty specific criteria and it would have been it would have been tough. It would have been a tough cell for us to go solo, but adding on to some of these other things, we were able to tag on to that and uh had a successful grant.

Okay. And it looks like we're getting about 77,000 of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, that's what my math shows. Perfect. And then just for one big clarification for everybody watching at home, this is not us sending Anacortis's money to the county. This is us receiving a grant. Yes. And then piecing out the county's part to give to the county. Yes. There's no funds from Anacortis.

Correct. Correct. Again, this grant was only only available to fire departments and we just happened to be the fire department that was um I will say in the county the most active in this in this area and we were willing to stand up and uh be the lead agency on this. Um so yeah, you're absolutely correct. This is not Anacortis money. Uh we are just passing it on to um other parts of the county which I believe are going to benefit Sure. and a cortis and keeping 77,000 for the community paramedic position, right?

Yeah. Well, what that is going to that 77,000 again in this grant runs through uh the end of June 2027. Uh that 77,000 will fund uh community paramedic program, but also a big intent of that was to make up for the shortfall we had to fund uh the Anacortis family center. Um because we due to budget cuts, we had to cut that to 30,000. This will bring that up to the full 60,000. That's the intent of that. Perfect. Thank you. You bet, Mayor Miller or sorry, Mayor Walters. I know, right?

Whoa. Let me just let me just tag on uh we'll give some space here. Um tag on to the response to Mr. Fantini's comment. So, um $30,000 from not this interlocal agreement, but the grant that is funding the interlocal agreement is going to be added to the family cent's contract. So, you're going to see that in I don't know a week or so because um their amendment was under the mayor's contract or their original contract was under the mayor's contract authority of 45. Now, it'll be 60. So, that'll appear in front of you soon. So, that'll be another thing that this grant is is paying for. Now, would anyone else like to be recognized? Mayor Walters, Miss Ken Lra,

thank you. Sorry about that. Um, I want to say tagging on to what uh, Council Member Fantini said, uh, I think our fire department and, uh, Mr. Monrad are, they're being very humble. uh you as the community paramedic and our previous chief Harris knew we were having a budget shortfall and you guys both went above and beyond trying to locate funding because you know how important that community paramedic position is and the social worker partnership that the family center has with the police department which started a number of years ago when we had a real crisis um at T Avenue across the street uh next to the across the straight from the bathrooms for the um uh skate park. We and we had people living in the um the uh Washington Park. It was a massive crisis and we were able to partner with the family center and we were able to partner with Mr. Monrad who took on this new role um and because of the resourcefulness and realizing that this is a grant opportunity but by looping in Scadget County and I think Mr. Monrad has been really uh important for not only Anna Cortis' relationship with Northstar but the success of Northstar because you were one of the first uh adopters of Gelatada. you were at all these meetings, you understood how to be in the the rooms where you've have electeds and also be on the street when you're dealing with folks in crisis that we're very lucky to have you. Um, and so the fact that not only are we able to cover a total of $45,000 for AFC for 18 months, so 30,000 this year, and then another 15,000 next year, but then also the par paramedic position for

22,000 this year and another 11,000 for next year. Above and beyond that, we you guys, the fire department did an incredible job um looping in Northstar and the county to be able to provide this opportunity. So, thank you to you and thank you to uh our previous chief. Um so, we get a small portion, but also the the county is reaping the benefits too and and know we all work together, so it's fantastic. Um so, I just I think this is a great program. I the one question everyone asked at least when we've talked about is why is UDub involved and why do they want to offer money and it's because of this Rainbow Health app? Do you have anything to share about that?

Yeah. Um, it's kind of interesting how this uh started with this BHC core program. It it goes it goes back several years um to an organization that that our city outreach team is part of called uh Crowa and that stands for the co-response outreach alliance which started as kind of a loosely organized um group of co-responders and when and just for clarification the term co-response refers to um fire or EMS and police response along with a mental health professional or someone providing you know social service support but primarily a behavioral health um professional. uh two of the people that were involved with that, one was a uh professor from the University of Washington School of Social Work and the other was a woman who was very very involved with um different uh uh NIH programs and co-response programs and they basically built this program. They floated it to the University of Washington. They lobbyed the state um and uh that's where the funding came from. uh this BH core um program I believe is going to be a really um it's going to be a great thing for co-response in Washington state. Uh some of the training they offer u one of the benchmarks of this grant is that participants are going to uh provide training to first responders uh for crisis response. Uh which is something that you know our police officers get. that's uh they're crisis response trained, but believe it or not, EMTs and paramedics don't receive crisis response training in EMT school and paramedic

school. So, part of this uh grant program is uh each each grantee has to send um instructors to be trained to deliver this curriculum back in the communities for first responders. Uh they're even working on this BH core program is working on a uh uh a curriculum uh that they're going to present to Washington state that may add an endorsement on to uh EMT certifications for behavioral health uh because they're noticing this is this is a this is an issue that communities are facing and it's uh it's training that that we need. Uh some of the other really I think great training um that BH Core is offering is actually training for practicing clinicians who work with first responders. Um which is a great thing because not everybody that goes to school to be a counselor and they they don't know how we're wired. Maybe a little different than the general public. But I think this is just a great a great thing and it's going to be a great opportunity and it's it's really going to enhance um resources and response in the state. Yeah. But thank you for your kind words.

Mr. Yeah. No, I I just want to echo my colleagues and also commend you and the team that you guys have put together and the work that you do in the belly of this system of care and um you know mental health is issues in my opinion arising or being more uncovered and discovered and the urgency of us um being able to address that as best as we can tying in the services that we do have, the limited resources that everybody's complaining about, but you know, but just fighting for that efficiency that allows us to give the care is really what it's all about. For many years, you know, we kind of looked the other way. And I think some of the institutions had turned out those people to the streets. And even if we were to look at our jails, we were to look at the prisons, we were to look at any of these places that hold people, we will find uh that thread of mental health and that work and that need for triage. And what I'm excited about about what we're trying to do here is that we're trying to stitch those pieces together for greater efficiency. We're stitching together and training people who give are the first responders sometimes to that and having the ability to offer um just that small measure of hope or that measure of the moment to sort of come back or deescalate. Maybe that's the best word for it. and and um so I I'm a fervent supporter um and not only with what I do here but also with my private resources um because again you know even in my own family there are mental health issues and you know it's a tough road to

hope and um so but you know I'm thankful that I live in a city like Anacortis with people like you and the others that are working so hard to um bring care and to um shine the light on that need because again um in my opinion it's very urgent. Thank you.

Thank you. Um, and I will mention too, you've mentioned a couple times our the work we've done here in the city of Anacortis. And I I I can't say enough that the success that that that we have seen here in town is because of the the team that we've assembled, you know, with with the fire department, the police department, and and AFC. Um it's it's definitely a team and I truly believe that um co-response programs and and MIH programs are now a fact of life in in fire and EMS and police work. Um I just think that's going to be part of what we do as a profession.

Mr. Creer, uh Mayor Walters, I'm also a huge fan of co-response. And on that note, can I make a motion? I move that city council authorize the mayor to execute interlocal cooperative agreement number 2642 AFD- 002 between the city of Anacortis and Scadget County. Motion a second to approve the interlocal agreement as presented. Any other discussion or questions? All right, then I'll call for the vote. The vote is on the motion to approve the interlocal agreement with Scata County as presented. All those in favor say I. I. All those opposed say no.

The eyes have it and the motion is approved. That concludes our business for tonight. Our meeting is adjourned. Thank