City Council - workshop

We're going to get started. Are we ready? All right. We are round four. for our yearly budget hearing. Today is going to be HR, city clerk, facilities, IT, finance, city hall, capital funds, city attorney, and police. So with that, go ahead and get started. Thank you, council, again, for being here and all the extra hours. Staff, thank you for all you do. This is a lot of work. So with that, I'll go ahead and turn it over to finance.

And actually, Chief Ingram asked to go first, so we're going to turn it over to him first.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, Mr. Mayor. Thank you very much. We have an active SWAT call out right now and the farmers market stuff happening with people over the city. So I just appreciate it. I'll start out by saying thank you very much. I'm going to make this very brief. You guys have in front of you the entire packet that we presented to the mayor and finance back on April 15th. And in addition to the PowerPoint, it's just, I think, four pages long. So, and then feel free to stop me at any point and ask questions if you'd like. And we'll go from there. If you notice up on the screen, I have 96 and 23.3. So why is that significant? It's significant because 96 is the number of the amount of victims less this year than we had last year to date, as of this Monday at 6 a.m. 96 less victims of robberies, murders, rapes, aggravated assaults, thefts, violent crime. That's 96 people that don't have to be prosecuted. That's 96 less witnesses, at minimum, that have to be interviewed. That's 96 less people that have to go to jail, that have to tie up the criminal justice system that is overfilled here with people. And that's 96 patrol cars that don't have to drive to calls for service and waste gas and all those other things. So it's not just one crime. These aren't just numbers. These affect everyone's lives, day-to-day lives. Why is that significant? Because our city is growing. We've experienced more growth in the last four years than in the history of this city. Yet we are still reducing crime by, as of this week, 23.3% for violent crime. Again, those are historical lows. We do that by managing our people and leading our people with technology, with training, and equipping them with the tools and the funding that they need to operate a 21st century police department the way that it should be operated. Page 2, or the 1st, actual slide, these are your, uh, the city proposed budget. If you just, you have all these numbers already. But if you go to the difference. Without any bodies, or without any raises or anything that we're going to be proposing to you, we're already in the whole a 1Million dollars. So we understand that we understand that this is about balance and that, uh. We just get it. We see the big picture here. So we're already in the whole a 1Million dollars. This is nothing new. You guys have been made aware of this for several months now by. But with that, we're going to go right into the actual request. So. We did a Pam study a few years ago to counsel where we had a PhD come in here and explain to where we are and where we need to be by 2029. And again, with the rapid growth that we have, and the expansion of all these. projects and things that are bringing in revenue to the city, we have to keep up with that. So we propose 17 new sworn positions and five non sworn positions. Those non sworn our CSOs will actually help balance our workload and handle non priority calls. So our police officers can go handle those calls for service. Um, and that will put us, uh, as you see a new total of 111 sworn and 23 non in addition to that, We're asking for a 3.5% raise. I think that that is pretty standard across the valley with with the exception of meridian who's getting 12% voice. He, I believe is getting around the 12% mark and other agencies across the valley are getting in those digits estimated cost. That is 525,000 to to give a 3.5% raise. I believe as well, fire negotiations are underway and that's what the fire department is also looking at as well. INCENTIVE PAY, I WOULD BE REMISS IF I DIDN'T BRING THIS TO THE TABLE AND ASK FOR SHIFT DIFFERENTIALS FOR SWING SHIFT, NIGHT SHIFT, OBVIOUSLY THE SPECIALIZED ASSIGNMENTS. CAN WE GO TO THE NEXT SLIDE? I'M SORRY. NEXT SLIDE. THANK YOU. I CAN DO IT. THANK YOU. OKAY. ALL THAT'S ESTIMATED COSTS.

DO YOU WANT TO COME UP, CAPTAIN, OR NONE, AND HELP?

So 220,000 dollars for those assignments, every other department in the valley is doing these, these incentives to recruit and retain the best employees. As of right now, we are significantly behind all the departments in the valley 2 years ago. We were almost at the bumper of Nampa, and then they pulled away Meridian. Obviously, we can't keep up with them Boise. We can't keep up with them. But the bottom line is, we have people right now in the organization. They're trying to get a collective bargaining unit together because they feel that they haven't had anything for the past 2 or 3 years and are begging for help. So I'm here as the chief to really. Propose this. It's not unreasonable. We're not asking for 15%, 10%. We're asking for 3.5%, which I think is pretty reasonable, considering other agencies are getting way more than that. And we're going to start losing bodies to those agencies. If I don't say anything as your department head and your department leader, you can say you didn't tell me. You didn't tell us. So here we are officially on the record telling you.

There's a lot of controversy, obviously, with flock happening in the country right now.

Not just Idaho, but a movement across the country. Technology that uses automated license plate readers like flock is a game changer for law enforcement, for public safety, to be able to reduce crime and reduce the incidence and fear of crime. This next slide right here is my proposal, our proposal to transition from Flock, the company Flock, to bundling all of our programs and technology together to Axon. Axon currently makes our body cameras, and they are the company that makes Taser. That's their company. They designed it, patented Taser. What this would do is this would eliminate our Flock cameras, Thomas Greene, replace those with axon cameras which there's been no drama with axon the company they've been around for a lot longer for decades. Thomas Greene, they're a bulletproof company, and it would actually save us some money i'll show you on the next on the next slide, but it would actually be giving us for drones. which are the same drones that we have right now, the Skydio brand drones, which are the best in the industry. They would be giving us AI software, which would really help our officers do report writing. It would give us a chance to have translation in our body cameras. So if they encounter someone that speaks, I think, is it up to 300 languages, John?

It is several, I don't know.

I think there's almost 300 languages that this thing will translate. So if you go up to someone or officer goes up to someone at 3 in the morning, and they're talking a language, they don't recognize they can just say, speak into my camera and then the camera will actually translate it back and then spit it back out to the person that they're engaging with. So this technology has been out there for about 2 years now. Axon has, they got the lead on this stuff, the AI report writing. This would actually help. Our officers, where this technology gets the body camera footage, puts it into a report. The officers would still have to then go and review it and make corrections if needed. We're not relying solely on AI. That's not what we're trying to do. It's a tool. It's a tool to reduce overtime. It's a tool to reduce fatigue. It's a tool to get our officers back in the field where they can actually reduce crime and home safely. Uh, and being able to use this with the prosecuting attorney's office. Um, this is this is the future. This is where we're going. If we can't get the bodies that we need, which we understand, we have to compromise that with something. And again, it's about balance. We have to use technology to help us offset the body count because we simply we, I understand we can't facilitate 15 new 20 new positions. I get that. So what does that look like? So currently our flock and axon contracts combined and insight is $708,000. That's what we're paying per year for license plate cameras and our body cameras and our tasers and all that stuff. If we bundle everything with Axon as we sit, this is a 10-year approach. The first three years would give us a significant discount, and then it would go up after the third year. And you can see the numbers there. It would go to $648,140 for the first three years, which saves us About 60,000 dollars, and then it would go up to almost 800,000. So just a little bit over the 708 that we're currently paying, but that would give us the best equipment. Um, a lot less drama, a lot less issues that were that you guys are facing every day. It's still, we're still going to have critics out there. They don't like that stuff. But, you know, I mean, these phones are doing much more than these cameras are so probably listen to everything we're saying right now. Um, so with that being said, this, I think would be a significant, uh, benefit to the city and to the police department. Also, I don't want to speak for the finance director or the, the treasurer, but I've been told that, um. Having it all together in 11 check is a lot easier for them to do and process than having all these different checks going out multiple contracts every year. And so it just makes sense for us.

Any questions on when does the contract end?

There are several we have about 8 contracts and again. Correct me if I'm wrong, but we have, I think 3 that are up for a renewal this year and then several through 2020. so. 1 or 2 already got paid is my understanding, but they're scattered out. So the only downside to this and it's really an unknown. It's not really a downside is. um axon would be giving us about a million and a half dollars to basically absorb the rest of those contracts kind of like if you switch cell phone companies they'll buy out that contract that hasn't been confirmed yet we're still waiting on flock to get back to us that we've been going around that's why we pushed this budget meeting to today instead of last week we're still waiting for answers but the bottom line is these companies both want our business and right now the ball is in our court the ball is in our court because we are coming up for contracts

So there is a potential then that this other company would buy us out of that contract? Yes, ma'am. Thank you.

Finance, just to confirm real quick, and thank you for that, Chief. Yes, sir. Very good to hear. If we're not appropriate, right, for future, for flock, that clause is in there to where we can then make the switch. Yeah.

I mean, Oscar can talk about it, but any contract that has multiple years should have a non-appropriation agreement clause in there. So the hope would be if it's run through the proper channels, then it should have that contract language in there. I can't speak for them because I don't have them in front of me, but I would hope that they do. Because they're multi-year contracts.

We'll have to look at it. Non-appropriation doesn't mean that you want to switch contracts from one person to the other. We'd have to look at it. It's a little bit more nuanced than just not giving money, allocating money in a budget.

A buyout option, potentially. Yes, and this is not a knock on flock. I mean, they've been phenomenal to work with, uh, despite the, the political, um, fallout with the company. They've been a great tool for us. They've helped us reduce crime significantly. Keep people safe. Uh, but. You know, acts on for us is more it's easier for us to look at in 1, big picture acts on, uh. owns Fusis, which is our real-time information center. And so it just makes sense to have it all together on the same platform. Basically, the way I see it as, you know, this is like using a Mac computer with like a different brand screen and a different brand mouse. This would put everything together. Having a golf bag with numerous different branded clubs, you know, this would be all the same. And it's just a lot more efficient and effective to do that way.

How long has Axon been doing those types of cameras, LPRs?

About 2 years and then how long has been doing about 5 years.

So, is there any concern that axon is also going to. Start having problems with information sharing or anything like that.

No, because they actually so axon was going to buy flock a few years ago and the CEOs had a fallout and axon. is seeing all the things that are happening with that company and they're they're worth a lot of money and their reputation is everything so i don't foresee anything like that happening with axon okay i guess we can get into the all of the details later but i assume they would have the same option of turning off the switches and i don't think they have that option to begin with okay yeah

they they're aware of the issues and they don't want to end up in the supreme court and just so anybody who's watching we've turned off the switches yes so we've done everything we can yes so yeah so chief is this a complete hardware uh equipment change yes sir so everything would come down new stuff would go up yes sir and so this would be for i can't really it's too small

Is it 85 cameras? 65 cameras, which would be a reduction from what we currently have, but it'd be more ALPR cameras and less just video monitoring cameras. This technology, the ALPR technology, we had a drive. We've had One drive-by shooting in a long time, which is not historically what we have in Caldwell in the summer months. And within eight hours, we had that suspect identified and in custody without incident or force. And so that was solely due to an ALPR camera or several ALPR cameras. and this isn't the right venue for that, but they're a game changer. This, especially because we don't have the resources, the actual manual labor to go out there and effectively police a community that's growing every day, we cannot substitute this with anything else. I mean, this is the only thing out there that we can do. And so we feel like Axon is the way to go right now, just because we'll get more drones out of it. We're not asking for money for more of those things. For more drones, yes, sir. um and they're actually replacing since we're on that topic we currently have the dji drones which mr mary i think you brought in several years ago we can't use those anymore because they're made in china so skydio through axon is willing to give us four skydio drones that are made in the united states to comply with federal law and the president's orders and that are way better than the patrol drones that we currently have So the interior drones that we can use to go search inside residences, you know, to prevent officers from getting injured or having to use force or lethal force on people is a game changer. We're talking about risk management, liability control, things that I wish I had when I was a patrol officer kicking in a door. This is a game changer.

You just want to real quickly, thank you for looking into that and trying to find some sort of proactive solution before it turns into a bigger mess. I know there's still going to be. Contracts to look at and information and details and community feedback and all those kinds of things that I do appreciate you looking into a solution.

Absolutely. And I'm willing to do as many workshops as we can to bring people in to talk about this stuff. Um. No, 1 understands it until their kid is abducted or they're involved in a violent crime and they say, are there cameras? Where are the cameras at? No, 1 knows what it's like to be a victim until your victim and that's the unfortunate part. And so, you know, I hate to say, but had there been 1 of these cameras or 2 of these cameras when Michael bond was kidnapped. we would have got those suspects in custody immediately. And so that's what we're talking about. The president of the United States was almost assassinated on the golf course, and Flock actually caught the suspect within 15 minutes on the interstate in a different county. So that guy was brought to justice immediately. And so I get it, but this is the future. This is the direction we're going. There are so many cameras out there, ring cameras, cell phone cameras, doorbell cameras. If the only people that don't have the cameras are the people that are in charge of keeping the community safe, then everyone's against us, and we can't operate that way.

Yes, sir. I was just going to say we had four college kids in Moscow killed, and the reason they were caught is because of cameras. One camera. Yes, sir.

On the interstate. We want crime-fighting tools. We just want to make sure that they're not doing something they're not supposed to do. I know when I was dispatching in California and a kid had gone missing, even if they were just innocent and they just didn't know where they were, we're not talking like a confirmed kidnapping, there were helicopters out and dogs out and everything else.

Resources.

Yeah, when we came here, I was like, well, where's the helicopter? We don't have that. So I believe in crime-fighting tools. I just want to make sure that we're not violating...

Absolutely. And no one, I mean, no one likes big brother watching. I don't, you know, I get it, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about things, cameras that capture license plates and that capture vehicles, no facial recognition, no people identified. We still have to go in manually and run that plate and see who's driving that car and tie to an address and do all that fancy police work, old fashioned police work. It doesn't just tell us everything about the person. So we physically have to go in and type in that license plate and actually do a full workup.

i think it's worth listening to like without obviously making any connection that we want to see all of the details and feedback that people have had on it and again community input absolutely and i'm open thank you chief um i'm i'm pleased to hear this today but i want to um be fairly redundant forgive me for it no problem sir

Flock isn't the problem. The Supreme Court has upheld that what they do is legal and acceptable. However, this is good news for us. Because of the hot potato that it's become, this is a very opportune time since we're in budget. And not only are you telling me this is going to save us money, but they're going to buy us out of our contract so that we'll actually be ahead financially. So again, just so I get it in my head right, even if there weren't a question about flock right now in the community, this would be a smart move to make because there's money savings in it, and we're getting better technology and more technology out of it and saving money.

Is that fair? That's correct. So to answer your first question, that is correct. It's still lawful. It's gone to the Supreme Court and been completely vetted. It is constitutional. However, even with them out of the picture, let's just take flock out of it. If Axon came to us and said, hey, your RTIC is already using our technology, you already have our tasers, you have our body cameras, we have these ALPR cameras, and we can give you three more, four more drones, For this price, and we're going to give you a discount for 3 years, but the only downside is you have to give us sign a 10 year contract, which I know historically, we don't really sign those contracts that far out. But if we can do that, if you guys want to do that, it would save for the 1st, 3 years, give us a chance to save a little money and then prepare for the next 7 years. And by then, probably have different technology and they'll keep us updated on that stuff. They're hard. Thank you. Yes, sir. Thank you. Just to clarify further. Oh, sorry. Council.

just on the graph here it shows you know it evens out at just under eight 20 30 20 31 do we have any guarantee that's is that like a flat price there ford or is it going to go up more that's a locked in 10-year price so the first three years are just shy of that 400 000 it's excuse me the uh um 648.

No, that's that's the 10 year price. So it's locked in at the 1st, 3 years and under 400,000. Then it jumps up to that. Basically, 800 or 8, whatever. For the next 7 years, it also includes an Heisman sergeants here. It also includes some upgrade pieces within that timeframe.

So that's what I was going to ask too. And at the end of this, do we own during this? Do we own? Is this more of a leasing. good timeframe and I appreciate the upgrades, but are we going to own any of these items?

Some of the items, yes. So for the Skydio drones, it's a five-year refresh. So every five years we'll get the newest, latest, and greatest drones. And we get to keep those old ones to be patrol based, which are what the four X10s are going to be patrol based. So yes.

All right, Councilor Dinberg, I think was.

Yeah, Chief, thanks for being here. I've got a couple of questions with regards to FLOC and Forgive me if it's kind of simple questions, but just for my clarification and maybe the public's clarification, I look at what we're doing with FLOC and Axon. like I look with the people who offer me printers in my office. You have them three or four years and somebody else comes along with a better deal and you say, oh, hey, better deal, save more money. And a few years later, the next company comes around. And so we're always saving money. And that happens because technology advances, the product improves, and they're able to offer it at a more discounted rate. So I have no complaints about trying to switch over to Axon. But some of the questions that I have with regards to the flock camera and staff, is it fair to say that staffing-wise, that the department is probably as thin as it could be? You know, without making reference to the thin blue line, staffing is pretty thin.

It's beyond thin. Honestly, if we didn't have this technology, we would be, we're about 10 years behind right now in staffing. to where we should be.

So that was my next question. And you already answered in advance of me asking the question. If we did not have this technology, our department would not see the numbers that you showed on your first slide. Correct.

That's 100% correct.

And so with regards to the officers and your department, and I'm flashing back to my involvement in law enforcement almost 30 years ago.

Are any of your officers concerned about flock that?

Oh, we get flocked. We're going to take our job away. Is there any, is there any officer on your department that says we don't want flock?

Not that I'm aware of.

And what would, if we were to say, let's do away with flocks and let's not go with Axon and let's just remove this under some sort of manufactured suspicion of Big Brother. How many officers do you think it would take to just replace the broad, broad reach of the flock?

As of right now, at least 15.

So you're 17 short plus another 15 if we get rid of the flock cameras. So really, without the technology, we are 35 to 40 officers short of where this department should be to provide effective law. Oh, one other question. With regards to changeover from axon to flock, and I know there's a broader discussion about budget that needs to take place, but part of our responsibility is to determine the appropriateness of every expenditure. We say, okay, we give you the go ahead. You go at that time, just flock, get mad and just take all their stuff. You know, they just come in one weekend and a black man and take everything down. And all of a sudden our city is without any sort of LPR and security. How do you, how do you anticipate that transaction?

I don't think that they would do that, but then again, I don't have a crystal ball. I think that they would be good partners. They've been great partners. And the way we still have contracts through 2028, so depending on how it's structured with finance and how we want to do that with Axon, my goal is to not have intersections and coverage with a gap. I want to have full coverage wherever we have a camera to replace those. But we have to figure all the logistics out.

Thank you.

To your first point and to Council Register's comment earlier about helicopters and all these resources, that's what I'm used to is endless amounts of resources. You ask for an officer because you're in a fight in your life, you're going to have 100 cops there. like that within two minutes. And probably some crashing along the way and all kinds of drama to come with that. So that's how we reduce that risk. We reduce that risk by putting cameras out to help us safely deploy to critical incidents and capture these people without using violence for force or getting injured along the way. And so we won't need to be doing that stuff the way that I'm used to policing and a lot of the officers that are coming to move here to work here are used to policing. It's just the new way of doing it.

Mr. Mayor, I have a couple more questions for the Chief. So you make a good point there. You know, officers respond to incidents. They respond to things happening. And in the process of responding to things happening, there's a whole bunch of different factors that come into play. The adherence to the law, the adherence to training, a whole bunch of different things. So Flock Camera gives you the ability to take a step back, reflect on the situation, collect the resources necessary, and finally resolve something Is that a fair assessment or a fair statement?

Yes. And so we had an incident about maybe one or two ago up on the overpass where a person was trying to jump off and commit suicide on the interstate. And we were able to pull up that camera in our real-time information center, see it live, and give our officers, our responding units, the actual real-time information on their phone so they could see exactly what was happening and they could deal with that and get the proper tools and the resources ready to go. We also incorporate with the fire department. Uh, so when they're responding to fires, they can actually pull up the cameras and see what's going on as well through our drones and through our, um, through all of our camera systems, which is a game changer for them as well.

Thank you.

Just a couple of quick ones.

This will lock us inflation wise for 10 years. Next question. on flock cameras that we're going to be sitting on them no flock owns the cameras is my understanding so all the equipment that all the equipment we have basically we don't we're not out anything correct it's their it's their equipment okay next question would be kind of an odd one but maybe but will axion be able to tie in at all with campus center yes be able to work together yes They on Flock or are they on?

No, they were on Motorola, but all the companies work together. So we've had access to their camera system since 2023, early 2023, which is a game changer as well. And just our current MOU, there are so many law enforcement agencies across the state that actually currently have access to our flock system, which have been able to rule suspects out or corroborate crimes happening in their jurisdictions. And people might live here or visit through here. Just when the St. Al shooting happened, when those prisoners escaped, we're able to help IDOC immediately and say that vehicle or those vehicles never came to the city of Colville. So they can focus their resources elsewhere and not come here and do a big manhunt for those two savages.

So, the new system won't affect any of that.

Correct.

Clarify they have what they have access to means. So council's aware.

Yeah, so, um. We did the project, so certain agencies have actual, like, search capabilities and then certain agencies can go in and put information like county county sheriff's can actually put in information. I believe Idaho state police can, but. Not every agency in the state can just go into the system willy-nilly. We audit that stuff. It's under Captain Thomas. He oversees our real-time information center and Sergeant Heitzman, who does monthly audits, and Marlin. And so everything, we haven't had any concerns yet. I know there's a lot of public concern with us using the technology to spy on people. There was an incident down in south-central Idaho where a sheriff was using mis- misusing the system to capture images of his car coming across the bridge that his wife was driving. I don't have I don't have a login to flock if I need to. For example, if someone asked me a question, I can I have people that I can ask to go in and get that information. But, you know, Bad things are going to happen across the country. We hire humans and humans are going to make mistakes. We believe that we have the most robust system and control in place through active leadership and management to prevent any sort of thing like that happening.

Thank you. And just to clarify, Sergeant Heitzman, it's access to the data can replace or search for things. They're not watching our cameras and things like that in other jurisdictions.

Correct. So certain agencies here in the Trek Valley, like NAMPA, Boise, Meridian, detectives or analysts, we give them search capabilities. So they can search, add vehicles to hot lists, and work their investigations. That's completely separate than accessing our video footage.

um as well as other agencies in idaho that are flock users can have access to our nationwide network okay but we don't share with any federal or out of the state i just want to clarify what that meant thank you all right do you want to have a question um i'm very glad that the understaffing thing came up that is why i wanted this cover sheet that i've been asking for for years to try to do that long-term planning because as we grow if we don't know where we're And we don't know how to plan for that, so I'm glad that came up. And maybe this was answered already, but I'm going to ask it anyway just to make sure. If they upgrade their system, and it's kind of like with your phone, where they upgrade the system and then all of a sudden you have to buy a new phone, is that included as far as the hardware is concerned?

Yes, it is. So there's a refresh for everything, whether it's the tasers, the body cameras, that budget that we gave you. It's a large number. That's for everything, for evidence storage. It's anywhere between three and five years for most of the tasers, body cameras, whatever it is for the refresh. So I know we're on year two of our current contract. This is rewriting that for a 10-year contract, and then that would work its way through, whether it's tasers, body cameras, whatever we need. We just got new body cameras. We just got new tasers. And it kind of moves forward in that, if that answers your question.

Yeah, and then I guess the other question I have is, and maybe this is more for finance, but if there's not a bundle, what's the difference in the cost for the stuff we are keeping?

$1.6 million, a little over, is what they're saving us with this 10-year contract. We have some additional slides. I don't know if it's in your guys' paperwork or not, but we can provide that over the 10 years, whether we went with a 5-year or a 10-year.

1.6 is the savings, right?

Yeah, the discount they're giving us.

Do you know what the yearly fee or cost is for the stuff that we're keeping if we don't bundle it?

Off the top of my head. So, sorry, you're saying if we don't switch to the Axon LPR?

Let's pretend like we decide not to have any kind of LPRs at all. And so there's not a bundle with Axon. It's just the

the other stuff whatever whatever it is we already have with them it would be the contract you guys already have agreed upon 345 000 is what it is for the dfrs um that doesn't include the lprs but it is the dfrs the drones and the tasers is about 345 000 here so everything that we have are keeping 345 and then adding the

LPRs into it then we're at three about it.

No three.

That's currently 169 correct So it's not just that you're adding you're adding a bunch of the other pieces that come with the body body cameras for the translation the draft the Report writing all the AI stuff. That's also being incorporated in there to help save time. I

Okay. And then the only, and again, I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, but if we do keep something, like with Axon, is there any talk in this area of having like sort of like a task force that, like, you know, if there's an officer involved shooting, it kind of rotates through ISP, Nampa, you guys, Canyon County. Is there any kind of accountability outside of the department that's... that we're talking about. I know right now the accountability for the cameras stops with you, right?

It stops with us. I mean, we have professional standards bureau, internal affairs.

And we've had this conversation before, like for me, like audits through NCIC and stuff like that, that all goes to somebody else outside the department, right? Whether it's the DOJ or whoever it is that manages all of that. So who is If there's a complaint about Flock or Axon or whoever, is there anything over our department that says, hey, we're going to audit this?

So that's a good question. All of our technology that we have, including radios and everything, is all CEGIS compliant. CEGIS is monitored by the FBI. If someone wants to make a complaint for misuse of this system, then they would go to Professional Standards Bureau, Internal Affairs. If it's a conflict, then we would conflict it to another police agency. Uh, ISP does a lot of conflicts, but to answer your question, we wouldn't have civilians that don't have access to that be monitoring us.

I mean, not talking about civilians. I'm talking about. When you have a complaint, somebody misuses and there's a whole.

Like, and I let's board.

Yes, like, something along those lines, has there been any talk of that in this area where. What I'm sorry, I'm drawing a blank on what's the name of the team that goes out and invest. Yes, exactly. So, is there anything that's kind of coming together like that where you're sort of checks and balances and keeping each other accountable?

No, because not everyone uses this, but everyone can use deadly force. So. The agencies that use this technology, the complaint process would be the exact same. If someone is alleging an allegation of misconduct, and we do an internal affairs investigation and depending on the nature of the scope of the investigation, we can either conflict it out. We can investigate it ourselves. If the complaint is on me, then obviously the mayor would determine human resources where that complaint goes. But ultimately. The people trust us to investigate our. allegations of misconduct. We're comparing police shootings with running a license plate.

Well, no, I think that it can be bigger than that. That's why I'm asking. So I think that, like I said, I'm all about, I like crime fighting tools. I want to find a way to support that, but I also want our community to feel safe. So I don't even know if it's a possibility. I'm just throwing it out there because I think that if there was some sort of issue that was brought up, if it was Looked at investigated outside of the department in which it's being accused, then we might have more support. That's all.

Yeah, and I agree. I mean, I'm all I came from the most transparent organization in the country that leads progressive policing. So I'm used to this type of environment. However, I think we're comparing apples and oranges. I see what you're saying. I totally understand what you're saying, but. We're talking about using deadly force and then using a tool that's literally no different than having an officer sitting on a sidewalk recording every license plate in a system. I think to mitigate that, we have to have some trust in our police officers that are doing the right thing and trust the fact that we do have checks and balances to effectively police our own department. We also have the DOJ. We have ISP. We have these other agencies that if there was a serious allegation of misconduct, they would come in and investigate that allegation.

All I was asking was, is that what you're saying? Yeah, like, I was just asking if there's any talk as this progresses throughout the other departments, if there's some sort of collaboration that goes on that says, hey, if somebody complains, you guys look into us, we'll look into you. Keep your hands out of it.

No, not at this time.

That's all I wanted to know.

Chief and I could talk about that and maybe come up with some...

That's the council that way we can move on with budget, but I'm sorry I just feel like that you may get some more support from the community for really good crime fighting. Sure. If you had something.

That didn't end at, I would and for the record, the only people that I've heard not support it are the people that are on default on on social media. No one has yet come to one of our town halls, our open houses, our workshops. During a city council meeting where we showcased this stuff, I never said, Chief, you're inappropriately using this information. So I would encourage and hopefully get your support to encourage those critics that want to come in. And I will bring them into my station, open the doors, allow them to use the system, look at the system, see how our officers are using it in real time, because I believe that's what we're here to do is serve our community.

I agree, I think that people show it and they should have those conversations. I just like you were being proactive by possibly shifting companies that maybe we'd be proactive by having something in place in case there's to help with that.

Chief and I will meet and have a conversation and maybe bounce some ideas off council.

So, the last screen, Mr. Mayor, financial summary, what this cost is 2.65Million in addition to the one. So basically 3.65. With the total for the request that we are presenting to you today, obviously, it's up to you, Mr mayor and the council that would be for the sworn positions, the non sworn 3.5% raise. And then the incentives for shift differential and those hazard pays and stuff. So that's in a nutshell, everything's broken down line by line in the fixed presentation that you have.

Thank you real quick before we get to questions. I believe there was an additional proposal that you may be aware of now as far as requests and such brought up today.

We did add 2 police officers to your budget. So that is the 1M dollars that does include in the 1M dollar deficit. So there's 2 police officers. Um. I know there's been discussions of whether police officers is the priority or whether to give take those funds and use it as an additional increase in pay. I had Councilman Williams request to do some analysis on that. And the difference would be we could do for sergeants and below. So it's not anybody above a sergeant. But instead of the two police officers for budget neutral of those cost of police officers would be about $1.06 increase for each of the TPs that you have.

Sergeant and below, correct?

Sergeant and below.

So it would be how much, really?

$1.06.

On top of the COLA.

On top of the COLA. So just yeah, just under 2 bucks if we don't do 2 police officers, if we don't do 2 police officers, if that's the request, it still doesn't resolve the deficit, which is, I think a bigger conversation. But I think that's kind of, you know, if that was the incentive, the request is to do pay instead of. Um, I don't know what that percentage is. I didn't break that down by, but, um, yeah, it's a dollar 6 and I and thank you.

I can speak for myself and my, my executive team. I think that we would absolutely support that. Um, foregoing even our praises, uh, we need to make our capsule and that's a, that's a big problem right now. Um, there was an internal survey that was done by the fraternal order of police. About a month ago, and then I was privy to the results of, um. They were shown to me, 49 people out of our 100-ish employees responded, and an overwhelmingly amount of the responses supported raises over positions. And so I'm here to just say that I think that that would go a long way with our rank and file, sergeant and below, our non-salaried employees, because at the end of the day, all the training that we're doing, all the technology we have, all the great things we're doing here mean nothing if our cops put in their resignation and go to Meridian, go to Nampa, go to Ada County, et cetera. And that's what's currently happening right now in my department.

Those are all good. Thank you, Chief. Thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you.

Yeah, this is this is a lose lose situation because, you know, I realize everybody wants raises in our current economy. Everybody needs raises. However, every year we don't have bodies, we get further behind. You're at 17 this year. Next year, it'll probably be at least 20 because our population is just continuing to go. And so I don't know how these other cities are providing the pay raises they are because we're all in the same economical situation, roughly. What's your manpower now? How many sworn are you down today? We're 94 sworn.

We're supposed to be at 128 by 2028.

But today, for what you're allocated today, how many, are you missing bodies so far today? We're at 86.

86. Okay. We have, but we're starting an academy in July, so we're constantly filling. And then we don't really have a lot of turnover, thankfully. But we're starting to see the trend shift a little bit.

And we did have one position that was being held. Yes. Move that forward to go ahead and fill that position. Okay.

Yeah. And I'm just, like I said, I completely respect the position that we need more money. This economy is terrible and people are suffering for it. Sure. But my my biggest, you know, I'm a fan of the technology. I support that. But just as the fire department discusses, um, And your consultant, when they came in and talked about people, I'm very worried about getting further behind. And so I'm hoping we can meet some middle ground where we can do some of both. I just, like I said, I don't want At the end of the day, somebody's got to show up at the house when bad stuff's happening. And we need those people.

Absolutely. And there's a lot of tenure and experience on this council, this board. And I'm going to rely on you guys also to tell me what it is that you want. And so I appreciate your comments. Thank you.

I just want to add something to Councillor Allgood's comment on that. Just so that you guys are aware, when we did the impact fee study for police and fire, one of the big contingencies of it was, is there buy-in from council to add positions? Because that is the responsibility to keep up with the requirement of impact fees. We can't charge impact fees if we're not keeping up with that requirement. requirement of meeting that that level of service that we set originally and so From all the previous budget meetings, obviously, I told a consultant that was something that was going to be a goal. Council was planning to do that. So just as a perspective, just so that you are as aware, I know it's a fine balance. One year is not necessarily going to get us off track, but it is something that I think the impact fee committee took that by and understood that. The consultant took that by and understood that. So just as a perspective as well.

RAYLAND, ONE OF OUR CHALLENGES IS COMPARTMENTALIZING THESE BUDGET WORKSHOPS. TAKE ME BACK TO LAST WEEK WHERE WE WERE TALKING ABOUT A FIRE, WHAT DID WE CALL IT? A DISTRICT, THANK YOU. WE WERE TALKING ABOUT A FIRE DISTRICT AND YOU SAID ONE OF THE THINGS THAT COULD HELP If we went that direction, we could make police whole.

I have a scenario in my packet that I figured I would talk about later this evening. So I do have a scenario to show you how I would do that if that did happen.

So will that, I appreciate your desire to run this your way because you're our financial director. But now that we're here in this discussion and looking at these lose-lose scenarios, is there a way for this to be a win? We just have to wait and see, I guess I will defer to you if that's your decision, but we're in it right now.

The 2 pager should be a 2 pager separate from the big packet on the front of it. It has, like, the levy rate property taxes. So on this 1st page. this is i haven't got numbers from the county i reached out to them to see if i could get numbers add some turnover currently they're kind of scrambling to get us information so i don't even know if i'll have it on july 9th but uh This is the preliminary. So to kind of start from the left-hand side to kind of go through that of what our base is, the 3%. So 31,783,636, that's our base. That is the highest of the last three years. That's how we start that calculation. Um, the 3% is the inflationary factor that's the 953,509. The new construction is a, is a estimate. So, this number comparable change based off of it, but that is based off of the information that I received early in April from the assessor. And same with the annexation. So those numbers could change, but the total budget you'll see is 34,290,457. We're really, really, really close to the max budget of that 8% cap. We haven't hit it yet, but if annexation's higher, we could possibly hit it this year. That could be a conversation we might be having. So that's kind of where that calculation, I just wanted to briefly go over it. It's helpful to get the values to have that more actual. Also the foregone discussion, I wanted to put the actual numbers of what we could take in foregone if that was council's desire. I do not have these amounts included in the budget, obviously, but these are conversations. For 1%, which goes into our ongoing base, The amount that we'd be able to levy is an additional $317,000 if that is something that you guys wanted to do. There is always an option to take up to a 3% capital, but that is only one time. So it doesn't get levied into our base. It's just to add cash into our cash. That's what it does to fund a capital project or something to that. So right now we do have over 3 million dollars in for gone that is available. It'll stay there doesn't mean that we have to take it. It's just a number of property taxes that were not levied in previous city councils. So. Just as a refresher, because I know I talked about this previously, this is the current allocation for property tax of where it's at. So general fund, which includes police and fire, is getting $27 million. Library is getting $1.5 million. Street fund has a reduction of that $500,000. Airport has a reduction because of the decrease of positions. So you can kind of see those increases. It's a little bit I did the left chart this morning. I didn't update it in the budget because it's still estimates. So the revenues haven't changed in the budget. And then we have an exempt, which doesn't go towards the 8% cap, which is our fire bonds. So that number, I separated that out because that number is just separate.

It doesn't go. But it is property taxes that we do levy.

So that's the first page. The second page is, this is the one that we look at every year, is kind of general fund. So this is kind of an explanation of what I would do and kind of the movements. so as my recommendations would go is i would reduce our transfer out to the capital building fund i would not do that the reason is is because yes there's a priority to move money to the capital building fund to prioritize the airport tower to prioritize library building however in this case because i i would know that there would be some cash flow Needed in in fiscal year 28 that would be needed for fire As they transition to the new district. I would not do that transfer. I would keep those that money in general fund That transfer could happen at a later year in 28 or 29 Doesn't mean that cash is just is it just means that it's being housed in general fund instead of the capital building fund. I would reduce the property taxes to fire by 1.6 million That keeps what what fire got as property taxes last year. So not an increase or decrease. It's just what what we levied for them last year. And then I would move 500,000 back to streets, I would move the property tax amount to police of the 1.1, which you can see the differences. So I've already in this proposal, because I didn't do it in the budget, just in this worksheet, I did those moves. And then I would use one time funding of 2.3 million to fund fire to get them through the end of this fiscal year of 2027. That could be, we know that I understate investment revenue significantly because that's one of those ones I can't always guarantee on, but that would be a revenue source to use on the 2.3 million of ongoing revenues. Doesn't necessarily mean that we have to dip into reserves because we still do have additional above the reserves that's available. But this is taking into account that no other budgets changed or nothing was cancelled. So the only thing I would reduce is that transfer. So that that is how I would do it in the budget and 27 to prepare for fire becoming a district.

If I was to do that now, I'm sorry complicating. your life even more with this proposal of needing $2.5 million, Chief, and TV went off. $2.65 million. Does this get us anywhere closer to that?

I'm sorry, repeat your question.

The ask is $2.6 million.

That is not included in this budget.

Right. So how close can we get to that with your reworking of this with this

Project, I would only have that additional, maybe 69,000 dollars to really do that. This includes the 2 positions. So we would be able to do that dollar 6. To give the sergeant some below increases for the 2 positions, but. Much more than that, when you really look at our property tax. We levy 34Million dollars. Out of that, general fund is getting $27 million. If police's budget is $22, where is the remaining going? So I get police asked. I understand it. But where is your priority on everything else? Are we wanting to fund streets and give them library, all of those? And so I can reallocate all the property tax so police does get $22 million. But that means streets is cutting projects. Cemetery is raising rates and cutting personnel parks is cutting personnel. The capital fund parks is, I mean, you're pretty much defunding parks because we would move all the capital fund, which is all their replacement equipment. Um. you know, airport, that's another one that we would raise lease rates, and it would be fully lease funded. So if that's the direction that council wants is to make those special revenue funds that get a portion of property tax portion of sales tax to be more fee driven, we can move it that way to fund police at the $22 million. But, you know, there's going to be have to be some drastic decision making on that, if that's the direction that council wants me to go.

the indication is we didn't want to see significant increase in fees so that's not happening on all fronts um you know and so i just need to know that direction if that's something that you guys want to do and these are these are the hard questions because at some point we've got to get caught up we can't continue to be the city that says we're 20 30 40 police officers behind we have a pathway to get fire um situated Somehow, we've got to figure this out.

It's I would put the blame on the state legislature every year. We do property taxes. We will fall further and further behind. Because of House bill 389 every year. I get the goal of what they were trying to do. I appreciate the state legislature and their authority, but they handicap cities so much that. it makes it to where we cannot just provide regular services anymore. There is not a way for me to say this is the easy button or this is the way forward without making drastic changes or policy changes that you guys want, whether that's shifting. Streets is hard because there's no alternative funding source that I can say, let's raise a fee for streets. Parks is hard because we're gonna raise recreation fees, but how do you supplement a swimming pool that these are like the max that they are? So where's that money coming from? That's coming from sales tax and property tax. So I get that there is hard decisions to be made. I'm not saying that you guys have an easy job. But at the same time, if those hard decisions are that you want me to shift property taxes, then I can raise all the rates. I can increase the revenue that way. But there are going to be discussions on layoffs as well.

Councilor Rao, sorry.

Councilor Hogan.

So I'm looking through this, and this is why we hate to lose you, because you do such a good job. But it says, increase property tax by $1.1 million.

this on this second page yes yes because i'm reducing property tax of uh in fire by 1.6 million yeah and so i would increase polices to 1.1 and i would put 500 back into streets okay and so these numbers here they do not include the one percent ongoing or the three percent one That is correct.

So I'm not for cutting these other agencies. Police is extremely important, but everything is just going crazy. I'm not for cutting anybody. However, I like a lot of what you have here. I mean, I could buy into a lot of what you have here. But the big question for me is because We're all going to be sitting at this table next year having the same discussion again. Are we kicking the can down the road here? Are we addressing it? I mean, next year, where are we going to be next year?

So here's the thing, is that if I do these moves, there's two scenarios that could happen that I see. The first one is fire becomes a district, which means that their budget is no longer 2028. It's not going to be on here. So it will not be part of the discussion. And at that point in time, there's There are some risks to the city. Obviously, the levy rate's going to drop. We're going to have a decrease in property tax revenue because we're going to be giving up that $9 million, dollar for dollar, that $9 million that we set aside for fire. But we'll still have new construction. We'll still have the 3%. We'll still have annexation come in. But because our levy rate is going to drop, it is going to be a different calculation. So it's not going to be this 3.4 mils levy rate. It'll be half that. So, you know, when you're doing the calculation, you're just going to get half, you know, less new construction, less animation. So that's 1 scenario. The other scenario is. We do this and fire does not become a district. You guys vote on it. At that point in time, there's a lot of risk. Because now we funded fire with one time funding, and we made police hole and we made streets all but we are now short $2.3 million to start off with fire. And we know that we're going to have to fund the rest of those 12 positions. um that we have budgeted this year for three months so that is another scenario that there's a lot of risk in that i'm not saying this is the best answer there's one answer that that's the right way but there is risk if fire does not become a district that this could set up to be very difficult conversation and And my recommendation is if we did this and fire did not become a district, go for a fire levy, 100%, because that would be the only way to get out of this scenario.

So just so I understand it right, our base levy rate is $31.7 million.

Yes.

If the fire were to leave, that drops by $9 million?

Yes.

million and so if we did if we took the extra 3% now we're getting 3% of 24 million instead of 31 million that is correct those are those are impacts because yes there is so

With urban renewal, so what ends up happening is that because the city's levy rates drop urban renewals, increment funding will drop as well. And so 1 of we'd have. To ask fire to opt in to the urban renewal districts that they're in those areas to help offset that increment. they are not required to opt in but they can which then part of theirs would be but that would be a discussion item as part of this as well because yes it would decrease the urban renewal increment because the city levy rate is dropping significantly when i said this was a lose-lose situation i didn't realize how accurate i was there yeah this is yeah so um

Thank you. I appreciate it. And just to further clarify, this is if the voters approve a police and fire levy?

Yeah, voters would have to approve a police and fire levy.

Fire going to a district is a separate process.

Go ahead, Councillor Stoddart.

Just to preface my comment, anyway i agree 100 with what they then said about the legislature that's one of our biggest problems because we're just not collecting what we need to run a city and they seem to think they know how to run a city better than we do and i've complained to mr betty and especially mr moyle he's a he's a real thorn in the side relative to how the city should be run And I think, and hopefully counselor all agree that we're still suffering from sins of the past here too. Uh, number 1 would be impact fees. You know, when we looked at impact fees, we were so far behind on impact. Sessions in there where we hadn't checked them for 5 to 10 years. And now we're trying to catch up and then. workers are on that board what they tell me is that gosh if we increase impact fees on based on what you folks need to run the city uh you know we won't be able to sell homes well i told them you proved that to me and that hasn't happened so far nobody's come up to me and said we can't sell any homes because of impact uh again then you you have to and I'm not trying to diminish fire at all, but if there's a fire and there's, say, an active shooter within that particular area, who has to come in first? Police do, right? So there's got to be some priority there also. Regarding the cameras, I think, I can't speak for council or register, but I think all we're asking for is checks and balances, just like we're doing anything. Absolutely. When there's an investigation. Again, in the past, going on my experience, we were the training ground for both firemen and policemen way back when. Right, Chris? Absolutely. As soon as you got them trained, you know, they served what 2 or 3 years and they were gone. And if we don't do something about that, we're going to wind up with the same situation. I don't want that to happen either the collective bargaining thing. I know all of you probably got phone calls from a certain person. Regarding that, and that just scares the heck out of me because. Once that bargaining unit is formed, and I was against the firemen, by the way, a long time ago. Once that's formed, they're going to expect about the same increase that Boise gives and Ray and everybody else. And based on our current figures, we can't do that. So what happens then? we don't have police then you know i mean you gotta ask yourselves that question again impact fees are way behind we're still not caught up as far as i'm concerned the fire district you'll never convince the people where napa that was the best thing to do i know i've sent you some figures regarding that and the rest of these people too on how much more it's costing them and and being on the 5c committee concerned citizens of canyon county committee I saw the numbers and that doesn't look like an alternative either, but you know, better than I do on what to compare. So, uh, foregone taxes, you know, again, the previous administrations didn't want to. What didn't want to do the foregone deal at all. Because it makes them look bad, you know, that's, that's all this to it. But when the legislation deals is the cards that we've got now, sometimes we have to use those foregone. Revenues to make make this thing work and as far as residential and commercial and taxes and. This, this is another good reason when we're looking at this year's budget and next year's why this Brooks project is important because we've got to have more. That's just the way it is. Until the people realize that, we're going to be suffering every doggone year from not having enough taxes, period. Because you can't expect the homeowners to carry the burden. And that's exactly what's been happening over the last nine years that I've been here.

So, I'm done good information. Thank you for that.

Yeah, just to quick. So I also kind of have a question about impact these as to when they were last audited and whether or not that was something we could look at as well.

So, police and fire were just updated in this last January. Um, traffic was updated previous year. The only one that's currently outstanding is parks. It's not been updated since 2020. And we are working on a master plan. Once the master plan is updated, then we will be getting the consultant to update the impact piece for parks.

So then the other question I have is about property tax. So for years, since I've been on the council, we've been told if we just keep approving building and keep approving and keep approving that eventually growth is going to pay for all this and we're going to get all this property tax and we won't have these problems. And I realize that it takes a while because they have to do whatever it is that they do, then build, then get somebody in there, and it takes however long. At what point does all of these projects that we've approved, when do we start seeing that?

So it's really a timing thing. So if you think about when a project's approved and say that they put a house on there, the house, depending on if it was approved in January, it's not going to pay property taxes for another 18 months. Because they, property taxes are levied based off at the end of the year. Like that's how they're levied. So if it's not on the tax rolls the previous year, it's not going to get levied for that fiscal year. So we're always a year behind, about between a year and 18 months, essentially, to start off with. On top of that, with property tax of new construction. So if a house is valued at $300,000, we're only getting 90% of that value. We're not even getting 100% of that value in the calculation of adding that to our budget. We do get it when they spread out our budget and calculate the levy rate. It's 100% of the value. But when we add that calculation, so it's the value times the preliminary levy rate

that gives us the addition for our budget and that calculation is only 90 for new construction and um 90 for annexation so so basically all the residential that we're approving and being built is not actually paying for itself in the law right um so question uh going off of what counselor static said about because The idea of having more commercial is because they use less services, right? So they pay more in taxes and less services. So do you know what the current balance is between residential and commercial right now?

So last year it was about $35,000. 3565, I believe is what it is, close to 6040. It was right along there. I asked Brian Stender to, when he gets the updated assessments finalized, to send me the updated one. I haven't got that request yet. So 65 residential, 35 commercial or so, and where should it be to have a healthy balance? I have asked people that question. I don't No. I think I would recommend talking to Dan. I would talk to our economic development director, as well as Robin. They might have a better insight of what a community for our comp plan should be. Because I mean, for my history, I've asked several people. I'm like, tell me where it should be. What are we looking to do? Because I don't know what that is. Should it be 50-50? Should it be? I cannot tell you.

Yeah. Because I feel for the, like with the Roger Brooks plan, if we do do some of those projects to help with the commercial, where do we have to be to balance it out?

the continued approvals of more and more and more and more residential that's obviously not paying for itself and now we're struggling to pay our police with increased growth so all right thank you we're gonna ask a couple more police questions just one more comment really if we take the one percent ongoing foregone and dedicate it to police because fire we're dealing with completely differently now with the district idea We could go a long way in salaries with $315,000. Then the FLOC Axon agreement could move forward because it's going to be a cost savings and still continue to meet needs. But yeah, we've still got some room to make up, I know. But let's talk about that 1%. foregone makes up quite a bit of that 525,000 right there with 317,800. We're closing the gap.

So Ray Lynn, I've got a question and a comment first. And so maybe following up with the question, we hear over and over again, I've heard for many, many years in government that today's taxes never pay tomorrow's salaries. That's why we're always sitting here talking about what we're collecting today isn't going to pay for what fire and police and everybody else is reasonably asking for next year. But the Axon contract is a 10-year fixed contract that we know the cost for the next 10 years. Is that correct?

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely known, and that helps to budget, right? So that helps to say, okay, for the next 10 years, we have this much of an obligation. So there's a couple ways that we can do that. We can say, oh, there's a little bit of surplus. Let's make sure we fund this a little bit with a future transfer and fund it kind of like what we're doing with the capital building fund. We're trying to fund something that... not obligated yet for the airport but we know it's coming so we're going to fund it um so you we could do stuff like that that's definitely an option we know it's coming so we can say we're going to transfer you know a million dollar every year for the next five years so that this is funded for the next ten you know so there's options like that we can do with that um so we're trying to go with this and i i appreciate your explanation and chief you can you can give me that nod yes or no or whatever

if we know if we know axon and the cameras in our city which are doing a good job are a fixed cost that we can reasonably say these are the cost it is it's a no-brainer not to continue with that for the future because it's a fixed cost and tomorrow's taxes will pay for tomorrow's axon fees and 2029's taxes will pay for 2029 axon fees. Is that correct? Is that a fair? Okay. So what we're really dealing with now is the request for personnel and the request for salaries. And that will be the hard thing to swallow. Yes, sir. Just so you know. But back to my original, where I'm going with this, we're spread thin. You'll have to live with whatever personnel we give you. Simple as that.

We're cops, sir. We do. The mission's always the same. We pivot.

But the technology is critical to making you survive.

Yes, and today's in the 21st century of the way things are going, and absolutely, 100%. All good?

I know what I have. Anyone else? Councillor Tillman? Anything else? Is there anything else, Ray Lynn, with this discussion? I'm going to take a break after this.

No. I guess the big thing, and I think as we go on with the discussion, I'm sure that you would like to know as we finalize, because we do have the two positions in there and trying to figure out the priorities. And so at the end of this meeting, I'm going to be like, what would you want to do?

What's that value for the two positions?

They are... 210? yeah they're yeah about that to the 317 right so and i don't know i guess the 525 to three and a half percent did that include the cola or is that not including the cola no So that amount might be smaller.

We include the cola and try to get to the 3 and a half because on the cola and the 2 positions we might be at that 525 we're close.

I mean. That's I'd have to run the numbers to see, but I mean, if you give me what you guys are wanting, then I can kind of put it in the budget. Obviously I've heard the technology is a big one to move forward with. Which will move some funding around because right now the are in the capital fund. So.

And I'm with counselor all good entirely the further we don't add bodies the further behind we get, but I want to listen to what they've said. They've come to us and said, don't give us 2 bodies. Give us the increase.

Well, I've asked for 17 bodies and an increase. I understand that, sir, but would balance.

Yes, but it's all about balance. Correct. Yeah. And then potentially new. Package general nod for.

Yeah, can any impact fees please impact these be used for the new technology?

So, I know when we were putting in the, we asked the consultant if the drones would have been eligible for that new technology and they told us no. And I think that's because when we originally established impact fees, they were not something. So kind of like if you have a, the easiest one is parks. If you have a swimming pool, then impact fees can pay for another swimming pool. But if you've never had a swimming pool, impact fees can't pay to add a new swimming pool until the city funds one. And then once the city funds one, then they can add one. So.

but raylan on that note we now have drones so there might be i mean it could be used with impact we're adding one more right but we're also with this contract adding three more correct all right so yeah the additional good part of that state that we are adding to what we've already funded we're adding swimming pools to what we already have as a swimming pool

we i'd have to talk to the consultant which we already have to because uh the rtic uh build out was under estimated in the impact fee so we're not collecting bees for the full true cost as a rtic build out so we're gonna have to bring the consultant in to update that anyway so this could be something that there's potential for some coverage of impact fees maybe not 100 but maybe like 20 or 30 percent so um we can definitely have that discussion and see if if they become eligible so

Thank you, Chief. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for all you guys do. I know you've had a lot of things going lately.

We appreciate your good action and your constant

and solving across the city. So thank you for your presentation. Appreciate it. It's my staff. You can get a win-win. Help me out. So thank you. Yeah, staff are amazing. And yeah. Thank you.

If money wasn't an issue, you'd get everything you asked for. I'm sorry? If money wasn't an issue, you'd get everything you asked for. Oh, that's OK. Yes. Was that a bad dad joke?

All right, let's take a 10 minute.

Thank you. Police taken care of. And now we're going to move on to the next.

Yes. So I don't really have an order.

So Michelle, do you want to go first?

Oh, you can do finance. That's fine. We can do finance. All right.

We're going to move on to finance.

We want to start with Jose and get him out of here.

You want to get out of here?

I'm here to present the finance budget and the utility billing finance budget. They're kind of managed overall by the finance department. The finance department currently has ten full-time employees and the utility billing department currently is made up of seven full-time employees there is an open position still in the utility billing department for a customer service rep at the front the front line uh entry level position for cash receiving um Our mission is to support the city departments through accurate and reliable accounting, budgeting, and other financial information, as well as ensure compliance with federal, state, and local regulations. We provide oversight assistance and training in financial stewardship for the city departments. Some of the accomplishments that we have had over the last year. Um, we transition from lease book, lease query to debt book, which is our debt and the least management software. We have over 350 leases with the airport. We have about 10 long term soft 10 to 15, probably long term software. that we have to track through this software and we also have our new equipment lease program with Enterprise that tracks the GASB requirements for accounting in that software and so we were successfully be able we were successful in converting over to debt book and it has created a lot of time savings within the department That book is a more efficient software. It's faster and some of the features in there are a little bit more robust and it's created some efficiencies internally and it also saved us about $10,000 a year in software costs. We also updated the city procurement policy as well as the city travel policy. We started implementation of our new utility billing software. We are currently in implementation right now. We're hoping to go live at the beginning of next fiscal year, so October, November timeframe. There shouldn't be any difference to the look of the utility billing invoice when it comes out. We're going to try and keep that as similar as possible to what we currently have now. but all the account holders will have to create a new account if they have an existing account, so we will be dealing with announcing that to the public and making sure we're prepared to ensure that everybody's aware of the transition, because there will be some uptick in calls related to that transition. We completed the City Health Trust and the City of Caldwell and the Urban Renewal Audits with no findings and a clean opinion for fiscal year 2025 during the 2026 year, this year. And we have... About $53,000 in rebates received from the PCard program. Through that program, we receive a rebate for usage on those cards. We're expected to have at least another $53,000 in PCard usage for 2026. We also have a savings projected of approximately $157,000 a year, and that was a transition that we made. That's a savings in bank card fees for credit card processing fees on the merchant end. Um, with our current citizen service software, which we use to charge. Permits to individuals that apply for permits throughout the city. Um, we decided to have, uh, individuals pay a 3% fee. And bear the cost of that instead of having the city bear the cost of that. So it transitioned the cost to the. the customer. We do offer e-check, which is free. So if they have a checking account, it doesn't cost either of us anything. So they still have the option to pay electronically. But if they so choose to pay on an actual credit card, they are having to bear the 3% fee, which is saving the city about $157,000 this year and potentially another $50,000 next year. So overall savings of over $200,000 from that transition. Over the last year, Finance Department has issued 9,800 vendor checks, reviewed and approved approximately 16,900 invoices, reviewed and processed 5,400 payroll checks, created and issued 72 purchase orders and 60 bank reconciliations collectively for the City of Caldwell, City Health Trust and Caldwell Urban Renewal Agency. The utility billing department reviewed and approved approximately 300,770 cash receipts, as well as managed the invoicing, collections, and maintenance of 25,700 water service accounts. And I put those numbers in there just to kind of highlight to you, you know, we're busy. There's a lot that we do. There's a lot of, you know, it's not really paper anymore, but a lot of processing and reviewing of expenditures that are coming in, cash receipts that are coming in, uh checks that are going out and there's a lot of um a lot of uh checks and balances that we do to make sure that we're following procurement policy travel policy um fixed asset policy and ensuring that we're doing that all within gatsby regulation and compliance and making sure that we're recording the data so that when we present information to you in the budget and on the financials, you can ensure that those numbers are accurate. So now we'll get to the actual numbers on the budget. So for the fiscal year 2027 budget, in the finance division, we are actually seeing a decrease in personnel costs. That is due to a removal of a position, which you guys have been emailed about. And there's an increase in software costs of about $267,000. That is related to our new ERP system. Its first phase took place this year with the utility billing software implementation. Next year will be the second phase to bring on the finance side of it. It's a software called GovSense that we're transitioning to, and we are essentially moving away from Springbrook and going into this new software. A lot of that cost is going to be one-time implementation costs. This year, currently, we paid about 120,000 in implementation costs to get started on the utility billing side of it. Next year, we're going to be paying the remainder of implementation, which is about $60,000. Then we're going to start implementation of the finance software, and that's going to be an additional $130,000 in implementation costs. Once we are done with implementation, those costs will reduce. We will also see a reduction in our existing software costs for Springbrook. And there's also some software that's kind of tied into payroll as well. And Michelle might touch on that. But we have some increases in software coming there because we're hoping to get a human capital management piece. And so collectively, all those software costs, all those softwares are tied together. Utility billing, finance, HR, those are all part of the financial ERP systems. And so we'll see an increase in uptick, but next year we won't have the one-time cost in 2028. And we will also slowly start to see the Springbrook and the existing software costs go down. So the overall cost increase, ongoing cost increase for software implementation will be about $55,000 to the finance department. And so that's why you see an increase there in software. We started implementation this year for utility billing, so you'll see the increase for software took place in the previous budget, so fiscal year 25 to 26. You'll see that's where the uptick in software took place. We're still seeing existing software costs this year as we move into implementation with utility billing. And again, those two will drop in 2028 and 2029 as we start to regulate and get back to just using the existing software that we are transitioning into. There wasn't much change in personnel for utility billing. We actually see a slight decline, and that's just because of the way we budget. When we budget for – if we have an open position within the budget, we assume they're going to be taking the most cost to the city in benefits because we don't know what they're going to have benefit-wise. And so last year we did fill an empty position, and the benefit cost came in a little less than anticipated, which – create an overall decrease, even with the COLAs and stuff that have been input this year. And then lastly is an organizational chart. So it kind of shows how we've structured things within the finance department. Matt, I'll answer any questions you might have.

Council.

First question is, you kind of alluded to it when you first started off. How much walk-in traffic is utility billing doing? And do you see a transition to people doing online paperless transactions? Can you talk a little bit about that? Because it does affect staffing needs.

yes um thank you for bringing that up i also forgot to mention one other item in relation to that aspect we are seeing a decline most of our foot traffic is during shut off when we have people coming in to pay before we get shut off we send out several reminders ahead of time. And so we see a bit of an influx right before that time period. And then during shut off, once we have shut them off, we see again, you know, some foot traffic to come in so that it can get turned back on. Outside of that, the foot traffic ever since COVID has been significantly declining. We do have it set up. I think a couple years ago I had it so that when someone signs up for, because we have a lot of new accounts that we're adding to, you know, we're increasing our homes. I want to say it's on average about 800 to 1,000 accounts that we're adding a year. to our utility billing, and so I made a feature so that it defaults to only get an e-statement, and you have to click a box if you want it mailed by paper. One thing that I'm looking to hopefully provide additional cost savings on is we're paying about $180,000 a year right now in mailing statements, and that's a lot. and so when we transition to this new software um and into the new fiscal year one of the fees that's proposed in the water fees will be a three dollar paper mailing fee and that is simply to reduce the cost it took the number of accounts that are currently still getting mail papered which is about half of the utility billing accounts are still getting an actual mailed statement and divided that by the cost. And it came roughly to a little under $3. And so this will help recoup that cost. If they transitioned and decided to get an e-statement instead, we would obviously not charge them the fee. So this will recoup our costs and or hope incentivize individuals to get a e-statement fee so that way we don't have to spend the money to send out a mail paper statement, although the option will be available. I'm trying to offset that cost a little bit. I think a lot of people will hopefully transition. Just half of them transitioning would save the city approximately $80,000 a year. And that would also help in paying for these additional software costs for this new ERP system and more if we can get. So that's my goal is to try and get at least half of them converted over and do it in a You know, send out some mailers and some information to kind of let them know, you know, that that's going. And if they want to not pay that fee, they can log into their site and switch that over. But we are seeing a lot less foot traffic. More and more of our payments coming in revenue wise are through credit cards and a lot less is being mailed in mail. paper checks and stuff like that. We have bank bill pay, credit cards, pay over the phone, a lot, I'd say 70% of it is probably 70, 75% of it's received through some kind of electronic payment format.

And the other question I had in just a couple times over the last couple years, I've heard comments by one of you three ladies Well, we're trying to maybe updo our new software may improve our payroll system. Our new software may improve this. Is anything that you talked about improving the payroll system? And is it part of that?

Yes, so the new software will create huge efficiencies and create even more of a paperless environment, which is a big efficiency internally. There's huge efficiencies with the human capital management piece. Right now, a lot of times, if you want anything changed in payroll, you've got to fill out a piece of paper, and then that goes through a process of approvals and updating a system, whereas this, you put it online, and then it would automatically go to an electronic approval. Once approved, it would just update in the system on its own. So you eliminate a lot of those little steps. And utility billing, one of the things we're trying to do is connect to GIS. And so doing our service requests and our turn offs and turn ons electronically so that the techs can use their mobile devices. And they just get a list and they can just say done. And as soon as it's done, it's done. And there's not this, right now we have to use Excel spreadsheets, assign it to the techs. mail it out to them, physically identify when they've turned it off, there's lag times in between people paying, and when they can get out there and shut off. And so it will create huge efficiencies interdepartmentally. That's one of the reasons why I haven't filled the frontline position in utility billing, because I'm hoping that with the efficiencies that the software brings on, that we can

May not have a need for you know processing cash receipts and stuff like that So I'm a chance that question, but just a general comment to my fellow council members I ask these questions because it is very clear that this department is using technology to drive down costs and And if the city can embrace more technology to drive down the cost of human beings, I think we ought to be moving in that direction. And I applaud you.

I was just going to say, if we did not get the software, we would be asking for at least one personnel. And so we looked at it as like, OK, we're going to implement this software and look at efficiencies in the personnel looking at their job duties and see about consolidating and revamping that instead of asking for more personnel.

Just knowing the payroll process alone and what both of our teams go through to process payroll. My team spends three to four hours every other Thursday stuffing envelopes for pay stubs. So you can't access your pay stub electronically right now. This will be at the fingertips of every employee. Quarterlies, I know quarterlies and end of year documents, the system that we're going to is a giant upgrade. I know how much time I used to spend on it. I see how much they're spending on it. That's going to help efficiencies so that payroll can be a lot more efficient and maybe open them up for some time to be able to do other things within the department to help learning workload on the P cards and other things. But I'll talk more about it in my presentation as well.

Councilor Tillman. Just real quick then on that same topic. Looking at $200,000-ish in software costs right now on time fee. What's the ongoing after that?

So the ongoing increase in finance is $55,000.

So we're at an additional $55,000. What would an employee cost? Roughly what, 80, 90?

Oh, with benefits, at least 80, 90, yeah. For, I mean, finance usually has, I don't know, level four, level five positions. And so, yeah, at least for one of the lower entry-level positions.

I'm just trying to add up in my head what the difference is between the 55, 80, on top, possible COLA. And you're looking at what, saving maybe 30 a year, it's gonna take, what, eight years to pay off just the software upgrades?

So we've had our current SpringWorks software for over 20 years. So I mean, we needed software three years ago. This was something when I came in, I recognized it. And we have been talking about software for three years. We did a deep dive in it. We demoed so many softwares and looked at cost. There was many softwares that we looked at that were three times the cost that had much more features. um that could have done a lot of things and so we looked at what did the city need what would be the most cost effective way to get that while still providing efficiencies and so um you know looking at it and and saying okay where is this benefit and i get what you're saying like the return on investment i will say between the reporting and and the efficiencies within finance and payroll you're going to save at least over a hundred thousand dollars a year between those two things between the consolidation we're going to have one system instead of i think when you count them there's probably seven between hr and finance that we use right now to do everything that we do it's going to be consolidated into one I mean, that alone, to have all one information database to house all the data and have one source of truth is going to be fantastic.

Don't get me wrong. I'm totally for the software. It's more for public knowledge of when they're starting to see these numbers of 200,000 floating around and what's it going to cost to put an employee in? What are we saving? I'm trying to make sure that everybody understands that we are looking at being fiscally responsible, both short-term and long-term.

And that was taken into account in the decision-making, which is also where I identified using the P-Card rebate program would come in. That's about $5,000, and that's on the low end, conservatively. And it continues to increase as we have more vendors come on, and we purchase more as a city, which every year our expenditure budget increases. A percentage of that increases in P-Card purchases as well. And so as that grows, that rebate will also grow. And therefore, we'll have that ongoing revenue to come back and offset. So that doesn't go directly to the finance department. It does go back to the general fund. But it's all part of the big picture. And so that cost is coming in and helping reduce the cost of the additional software program. and the three dollar fee that we're charging is hopefully going to more than offset the cost of the utility billing portion of ongoing costs so uh those those were concerns that i took into consideration when when making all of those decisions and correct me from wrong potentially as we build out our city need to add more staff this

consolidation of software, not having to spend so much personal hours transiting information back and forth could negate needing as much staff in the future because we're gonna have this better software, which also helps with retention and happiness.

I don't foresee us having to ask for another finance position. If the software does the efficiencies I want it to do, I could potentially, my payroll person, I will have a half-time position open right there, which I already know how I would utilize that. We have a lot of needs in the department. They're not going away, but it will allow us to not have to ask for a position next year and maybe even the year after.

I was just going to say, I think most of us, you know, like human beings in the seats, right? Like, they like to give people jobs and all that kind of stuff. So I never want to get to a place where we're replacing people with, you know, stuff. But I do believe that we have to catch up and get organized and remove the duplicates and have all that kind of stuff. And that may be something that we do this year and then, you know, continue to keep in mind how we can best then utilize employees. So we're not fading them all out with computers and softwares and drones and whatever, you know, because we, you know, I think what I want to do is acknowledge the value of The positions and the people and all that kind of stuff while we're trying to put it together. So it makes no sense.

100% I think the big shift is that we're going to move from being data. Our staff is going to not no longer be data interest and they're going to be data analysts and so they will be able to say this. instead of them looking at typing in the data and just processing forms by typing in the data they're going to be looking at invoices and have more fraud detection opportunities to look at that to make sure like all we go through so many invoices and so many things and we talk about fraud we talk about all of those things and we we can catch as much as we can catch but this gives us more options to catch all of that if that comes through duplicate invoices that maybe we We now have to try to collect a refund for all of those things. The system will only do so much, but our staff does that with reporting, looking at just different opportunities where maybe we can consolidate a contract, things like that. Proper contract tracking of costs to make sure we don't go over the contract billable amount, the not to exceed amount. Those things don't necessarily get done unless it's on a manual basis. And so now we will have a software that will allow us to do those things and our staff the ability instead of just entering invoices or entering timesheets on payrolls.

Like they now will have the ability to actually analyze the data.

And we have a great staff.

I appreciate that. And it makes sense to me, too. Like you think we should. do whatever it is that we have to do with that. I just also want our community to know that we're not, you know what I mean? That we're just not replacing the whole city hall, you know, robots or whatever. And that they will continue, you know, that we continue to value our employees and everything that they do.

And this just makes more sense right now. And then eventually that may lead to more specialized positions that will help even more.

100%.

Thank you for that. That's all we have. Since she can talk about this.

Now you can kind of just skip through, I mean, on the human resources for those listening. I mean, my, my team hasn't changed in the last year. I'm grateful to have all the same team.

Um, yeah, I mean.

employee numbers I actually have been saying a lot less than this every time the mayor asks and so when I actually put the numbers together in preparing was like oh it's a lot more than I actually have been saying it is so our current employee number is 473 that's not any of the vacant positions we currently have this is current employees on our payroll and clocking in clocking out so we're not 473 total it's growing so this is why I am also asking for some better efficiencies in my department instead of asking for more staff and asking for a better software update for us. So our areas of responsibilities and support, they are still, a lot of them are the same. Some of them grow and change and we add some more every year, but we continue to just keep adapting to the ever-changing workforce and what our job duties actually need to be. budget so my personal budget actually had a slight reduction as the year prior we hired somebody in that was making a little bit less than the previous employee that had been there for a little while but the operating costs in this year's budget have increased because of the addition for the software but this software addition and adding into the budget is also a one-time fee of $30,365 for the implementation. But I will also get to lose in the next year's budget for other systems that are currently doing what this one system will do, which will decrease it again another $35,000. So the ongoing costs for my part of the system will be about $36,000 each year. I recognized immediately when I came in our inefficiencies in HR because we are on paper everything, and we again have five or six systems to do everything in. And so I wanted to do this last year, but there just wasn't enough time to demo, as well as I wanted to really align with finance and what system they used. Because yes, I could go with any HRIM system, and we could figure out integration where you export import but I wanted something that was seamless if that was possible so I kind of joined in on all of their demos and we found a system that had both and we were my team was very pleasantly surprised with the seamlessness that of them talking to each other real time we change it or the employee goes in and changes it and it immediately goes straight over there's just review there's a review catch that we would still have to review the stuff going over And so that's how we ended up with the system that we're going to be going with. In addition, we're currently already using the time card system that this platform has. So the employees logins will remain the same. They're just going to have a new dashboard when they log in for their time cards. It will be their entire personnel file per se. They can change their W4s right there, their direct deposit, their address. We get alerts so that we can go in and make sure everything is seamless and push it through. But the data entry, the room for error, all of that goes away, which is a lot nicer than all the amount of manual entry that my team does every time somebody makes the slightest change in benefits or whatever that might be. Because the current... ERP system is very clunky and archaic for sure. Our reporting is a nightmare to report through. And with the amount of public record requests we get of wanting data and wages and hire dates and all of this, the reporting system is very user friendly and not as clunky, you can to be whatever you want it to be. I also will appreciate the retention data that I'll be able to, like literally my dashboard will be our turnover, our hiring departments. I'll be able to see all of that and track it a lot easier, which is helpful to see kind of as staff comes and goes. And we have the ability to actually track why people are leaving or where people learned about the jobs that are coming in, where there were referrals or which recruitment sites. um which is helpful because right now we have one option and it's they're either hired and active or they're terminated and that's it those are our only two options in our system so there is no tracking electronically so that will be very helpful for us um i think i mean the council registers point as well It's never, I think when you implement a new software or system, it's never to replace staff. It just shifts their duties. I went through an HRIS system implementation at my last job, and in the end, it just shifts duties. The duties change throughout what's needed. And so in the end, yes, there'll be less data entry, but that'll free them up to be able to do different duties that have come up that we're all just kind of shuffling around. Leave management is a huge one. FMLA leave, work comp leave, paid parental leave, all of those things take a ton of time to track, and this software system has all of that built right in. So it will just allow a little bit of a shift, because my workload is overflowing. So it will be helpful to be able to offload some of those things to others. But right now, they're maxed. So I feel like I don't want to add anything more to their plates. So this will be helpful.

So for example, I want to give you guys how we update colas. Because cola process is a huge, it's huge. So you think about, oh, you should be able to upload it.

No.

We have to go to every single profile. in finance the budget person creates what the call is going to be whatever is budgeted and then we give that to hr and hr splits it because we have 400 plus employees that they have to down data enter that in for every single employee and then destiny our payroll has to go verify that everything is accurate and entered correctly so can you imagine the number of staff hours of happening like that's not just a couple hours that's hours upon hours i'm like that's multiple days that to get everybody updated and then to get it all processed and but it has to be done in like a three-day time frame because of how payroll works so hours that need to be crunched down in a hurry where mistakes can happen and then if people's pay are affected that can create so it's a lot of pressure on hr and finance to get that all done and the hope would be there would be something that we could upload there's a literally just enter in if it was one and a half percent you enter and it just applies it where it needs to go all of those like we just do a quick check versus yeah yeah

And the same at end of when we do our open enrollment for benefits. That's an I mean, the current system that we're using now is also clunky, that then our our broker sends us a spreadsheet, which then we have to go through and go like, line by line go through every employee's work when the employee goes in and makes their selections in the system, it will just pop right into payroll. So yes, there's a lot of efficiencies. And in HR, we have not added a new position since 2023. So for the last three years, they've had four and it's stayed with four. So we shouldn't have to ask for another staff for a while, for sure. I think this will create a lot of efficiencies within my department. Um, the next slide really is just a little bit about the ready of what are the HR platform is for us, but that's really all I have in this year's budget council.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Okay.

Michelle, just real quick. I think. So, we're spending 30 grand upfront to get the new software. The new software is 36,000 a year ongoing. Correct?

Correct.

Okay. What is the current three or four softwares combined? What are we spending a year on those?

So let me go back up. The $30,000 is just a one-time implementation, just to get us set up. On top of that, the actual system itself is $87,000. So, this year, that's why there's 102 increase because it's the 1 time implementation plus the actual software. But then we'll lose the 1 time implementation next year, but the other 4 systems is 35,700.

Okay, so the 36 is the ongoing of what we pay right now for the other 4 systems.

I just subtracted out the what we'll lose. Plus, I subtracted out the 30,000 implementation and so the ongoing would be the 36 going forward.

Right. I'm just trying to see how much we are going up here. Ongoing. So we're going we're going to go up 36.

Well, we'll go up 36,000. So we'll go back to I think my budget before used to be like 80.

Right now, when we get rid of the other four softwares, the cost difference between what we have going on a year right now are ongoing a year and the new one is about the 36.

Yes.

Okay. Ongoing is what we increase.

Yeah, would you talk to us a little bit about employee evaluations and ongoing record keeping?

Yes. um well the valuations that's the system also has an entire module that's why I'm also gonna have held off this year knowing this is where we want to be I don't want to create something to then have to recreate a whole other this system will be ready and built and we can set it up even by department for evaluations to be tailored specifically to their duties because they will it will have all the job job descriptions and create evaluations from those. So it will be a huge help to kind of like the AI piece of creating performance evaluations or job evaluations for us. So that's kind of why I ended up holding off this year and knowing where we were at budget-wise. We had a discussion of since there's not probably gonna be a merit increase this year to be based on, then let's kind of just pause and let this system not waste time.

So we're not doing evaluations currently or we have a antiquated, what are we doing today?

So we have the old performance evaluation that the previous HR director had created. Some are still using that one. Some are just individually meeting with their staff and kind of just typing up notes and having discussions with their staff. on their goals their challenges how things are going within the department because i encourage them to do that more than just annually i think it needs to occur more frequently than that staff generally won't come forward with stuff so i encourage them to meet more routinely and just document the things that they go through and then we can just keep that in their files one of the issues we addressed years ago when i was with the police department was

you work for this supervisor and something happens and you change to a new supervisor, you kind of get a clean slate because this stuff was not being forwarded, it was not being tracked. And I mean, years ago, they implemented a system where you could go in and make your notes and then they would transfer to the new supervisor as the employee moved. But it seems like we have never really progressed As you very well know, the whole thing with good and bad employees is records keeping. And my concern is I haven't heard anything in a long time about how we're records keeping employees, and those employees are being continually tracked. I mean, I had employees that were not great employees, but they were successful because they just kept moving supervisors. So my concern is in all these years, it doesn't seem like we have, we still have a system where we're keeping track of employees' records ongoing so that when it comes time to get a pay raise or a promotion, we can go.

wait this is an issue or this is great employee or this employee is something besides the last 30 days that we remember yeah you know what I'm saying I know PD has a good system that they do keep their supervisor notes those transfer over I have since coming in implemented more of a process when an employee is interested in moving into a different department or different job throughout the city that their current director, hiring director, have a conversation and sit down and we look through and like go through personnel stuff and have that conversation because what was happening before is the hiring director was just the hiring staff but not actually talking to their previous director or to HR for any of us to bring up, hey, here's some concerns issues just so that you're aware so that it isn't I mean, It's not a clean slate. It is, but it isn't because they just need to. They should be aware. It should be a transparent when an employee wants to change departments.

So will this new system have the ability for supervisors to absolutely to maintain records? Yes, absolutely.

And I very much a proponent when a supervisor comes to me with any questions, concerns. compliments, praises, document it, document it. Let's put it in our file. Because right now, that's all we have. But the system will have an entire module that can be dedicated to keeping track of.

Just to clarify, you've been working on looking at an evaluation system.

Yes.

performance and such we weren't able to get it into the budget this year but that is hope immediately shifting after this to look at that especially if we regain the technology be able to do that and you know implement the exact things that you're mentioning because i had started creating one a while back and then it was as i was trying to get through it i mean it was going to take a lot of work to get with each department to kind of to tailor them specifically and then when we did this demo and i was like

And that the amount of work that this will help with.

Let's just pause the director's work was to make sure that each department's different, right? There's. We want to see different things in there and that was her shift, but that was a significant amount of work to tailor in between each. So hopefully. The other piece that I really like about it is the applicant tracking piece of it. So, like, when you put when you post a job and applicants apply.

you can see the history so if they apply i mean neogov has a little bit of that where you can see they've applied but you can set it so that other departments so if the hiring director or another gets an applicant they can click on it and say oh this one applied for four other jobs here can see if they were interviewed or not they can't see the details you can set you can set access levels but then they can come to HR and say hey I'm kind of interested in this why didn't somebody go forward and then we can it tracks all of that into the same system which is really nice and then once you click the higher button that gets the offer letter ready you can have them do a lot of their onboarding stuff before they walk in the door even

Councilor Stoddart. I know, Michelle, you and I had the discussion when you first came on board, and part of my complaint, one of the many review people's performance enough, like once a year to me was terrible. The other part of it was because we didn't have a system set up that as long as you were part of the good old boys club, you got a raise no matter what. In the past, everybody get a cooler raise, and then they got another 5% or 10% on top of that. Not even based on performance. So I will be correct.

Michael once we have the performance eval in place is to you have to train and coach those who are filling them out how to what the expectations are of the city and. That way they understand that not every one of your staff is probably going to get, if you're scoring them between one and five, not everybody in your team should be getting fives. Those who stand out and who are your hard workers.

Yeah. I hope we do a semi-engineering instead of an engine or even, you know, test button. If an employee's performance is pretty bad, they need to go quarterly.

Duly noted. Thank you. Councilor Stoddart, full note of that.

Thanks a lot. Michelle, before I ask my question, I want everybody in the room to put anything you can throw at me away. Oh. Okay. The worst case scenario would be layoffs. That's what we just never want to get to the point where we're so far in. I have a question about FMLA. We have a very generous FMLA program here in the city of Caldwell. How would you compare that to How is this going to be a good question? It's already a bad question. Are we in a situation where we're perhaps spending more money on overtime and salaries because of how generous some of our benefits are. And is there a way to forecast maybe in the years to come how we might save money so that we don't get to the point? Glad I'm getting a nod from somebody. She didn't throw anything at me. But is there something we can look at in the coming years. It's not something for this year, but is that something we can look at?

So fmla is federally regulated. We have no control of that piece. But what we do have control of, which Oscar and I have identified, and that is my goal and plan before the end of this calendar year is to change how our how our periods are looked at and the city currently has it as a calendar year versus a rolling 12 12 months look back so currently staff can take fmla october to december and then again january to march when when you have a rolling look back in the last 12 months they should have a 12 week and that's how Every other agency has it. I've never seen it like that, but our city does have I guess that could be considered the generous piece of it.

That's kind of what I was looking for.

Yes, our rolling. And that just makes it fair because to hold a position for six months is hard when you are stuck to a budget and you can't hire when you have somebody out for a six-month period at times. But we're trying to help navigate through that. So, yes, our plan will be to change that. I think we have to post it 60 days prior, so we'll get something out into council because it'll be part of a policy update.

So on this document here has a bunch of stuff on it

About the fourth line down shows that the human resource budget went from $596,000 in FY26 to $729,000 this year, which is a difference of $135,000, which is different than what she reported as her $102,000. It'll be on your performance evaluation.

So I might have been on when Michelle grabbed her numbers versus when I dropped my numbers because mine were mine were most updated this morning because I updated every every time before budget council I go through and I update the admin budget and I update the cost allocation plan and so all budget numbers change at that point in time.

I think we also realized the HR houses the intern budget for the whole city and I think we realized yesterday as well that that wasn't added

in so that may be part of it but yeah when i pulled my numbers so changing i even realized numbers i had pulled like a month ago changed from like when i did it a week ago so our budget changes it's very live data it's we keep it live all the way until july 24th so that's kind of the number um but i would bet the biggest change is going to be and this is going to be cola health insurance and The software. Those are the three things. I know Michelle said there was a decrease, but when you take into the interim budget, it's most likely an increase, so.

Council? All right, thank you. Want to take a quick break or jump to IT?

We can have IT.

Very quick, right?

Sure.

It is always quick.

It's in order.

I heard 30 seconds, someone said. The IT budget for . Are you providing support infrastructure for every city department, not just IT? services every day. We're providing fiber connections. Wi-Fi keeps all facilities running. And we're supporting everything electronic on the network. manager, which helps us to address issues throughout the city. Cybersecurity, protecting residents data and systems tech behind the payments, residents services are connected in accomplishments for This current year, we replaced 200-plus devices and connectivity to Connor, which this past year was implemented. Aside from that, we've also added the connectivity for the three drones that were in place, currently being used now. Then we did do with Ray Lynn was standardizing as far as when we're placing devices. By your replacement. Expanded fiber. Processes.

Security policy implementing threat locker, which pretty much.

Our budget for 2026 is $836,000. It's personnel operations. switch from the PD this past year. We had to accommodate the fiber that we installed. Issues and challenges, wild source demand, places more employees on the network. Any aging infrastructure that we currently have in place, . . . . . . . . . . . . 5,000, that's mainly increasing the city. Can you explain real quick what a switch is? There are six different departments. That's 621, which is building services. There's the other treatment plan.

what they are. I mean, some people know they're not a switch. They're a sophisticated device.

No, no, it's a network connectivity switch. Each one's 48 ports. It's connectivity for each department. They're end-of-life, so we have to replace them. Those are moved to individual departments so they can cover those costs. My last slide is just our department.

to school thank you council so is orion still providing our base support contract if we replace them three positions that may be a hundred thousand a piece and there has been in the past anyway they've been very good about not increasing their fees a great deal correct

because if we go out to bid with the new contract, I guarantee you that's going to come back at least double as to what we're currently paying.

And so you're not asking for any more personnel this year?

We are not.

Yes, so I'm looking here through your little overview of connectivity, device support, cybersecurity, and public-facing systems and everything. So in preparation for the police department budget tonight, I was just asking them simple questions about how many flock cameras do we have, how many cameras do we have, and this and that. And they rattled off a bunch of numbers. We have this many of this and this many of this, and less the 13 at City Hall. And so how many cameras do we have here at City Hall? And are they no longer being managed by the police department?

They were never managed by the police department.

And so when you manage those, how is that data kept and stored?

It's stored locally on the recorders at each building.

So you have DVRs here that record them? Correct. I was just wondering.

But they were able to monitor those from the Arctic before, weren't they, Jose? From the Arctic? The real-time information center at the police department. They had access to the see all cameras.

They never were able to view them in their center exterior correct the exterior cameras.

Are they still I don't think they've access now has that been restricted, or is that their choice?

Well, before I don't think they ever really requested it, and now with their fuses system. we're working on getting them access to patients throughout the city.

Acts on business, correct? Correct, yeah.

Because your question is similar to mine. When they gave me the numbers and they said less the ones that, so there was some sort of, at least from my limited knowledge of how the camera systems work and interconnectivity of systems work, that one time they used to have at least access to or some sort of,

uh monitoring of the cameras here at city hall and they no longer is that uh is that a non i don't think they really ever had access to monitor the cameras now when they brought on axon buses they were supposed to be a device that they could place at each location to acknowledge that hasn't taken place okay all right they have access to the exterior they said they did

Why don't they? Look in the box for the exterior cameras? I don't think that, well, so.

We should grant that if we don't.

I just kind of follow up on you guys, but I'm going crazy here being silent. Sorry. Yeah. We're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on security upgrades, and the police can't see the cameras in City Hall, and they're right there. That doesn't make any sense to me. why we have a monitoring system over there to monitor the entire city. We're not monitoring our own city hall, but we're going to spend thousands of thousands of dollars doing upgrades for security. And I mean, I'm not in disagreement with the upgrades for security. I think we need it. But I would think the police department being a block away with cameras would be a priority.

And I think about the biggest threat to probably city staff would be here at city hall.

and uh to be able to plug in yeah so i i'm just not understanding the confusion is whether we can monitor whether we can't my understanding was we had access to the external cameras but we can follow up with that you know we did give them the ip addresses of all the cameras that we have throughout the city now i think it's the uh Or is it something that needs to be worked out for them to receive the feed from each location?

I'll follow up. I was in there several weeks ago getting a tutorial on it. And I was told they had them and then they don't. So I don't know. Next turn or end turn? I'll follow up to find out. But whatever they had, they don't now. and it was shut off so i would i would insist as a part of our approving these upgrades that we include that in there and if that's if that costs more money than this phone itself we have to know about yeah we'll take a look uh we'll go back and look at what they have and don't have and i had a couple

Yeah, go ahead, sir.

Yeah. So who is monitoring the door cards and giving those door cards now?

Aside from IT?

Well, I mean, citywide. Does IT do them all, citywide, police department?

We do not handle, for the most part, issuing the police department.

For the most part, they do their own? Correct.

We do have access to fuel.

OK, and for the rest of the city is your department? Correct. And the last question I know is a terrible question. It's just me and Councilor Tillmont are on the Finance Committee and every month it just blows my mind how much money we spend on cell phones. Is there any light at the end of the tunnel on reducing the cost of what we pay for cell phones every month?

Well, we did receive a cost reduction.

We did. And so two years ago, maybe a year and a half. We had a discussion. It was actually before Lieutenant Wright retired, so that time frame. We talked about switching from AT&T to another source, and they were willing to give police and fire phones for zero cost. There was zero monthly cost. That was the trade-off. There would be about the same cost for all the other city phones, but zero cost for police and fire. And we talked to police and fire and said, Please tell us how much you use the network for the. What is it the priority 1st, or the 1st, how much you use the 1st net? Is that a necessary thing? And they told us it was a requirement on their cell phones. And so, because of that, we renegotiated and. For most phones, it was between a $5 to, I would say, a $15 decrease, depending on if they had data, depending on if they just had voice. It just depends on what they have. And so that was the best that we could do at that point in time. because police and fire wanted to stay with FirstNet. And so that's the decision that we made, even though the incentivizing was we could have gotten all their phones for free, which is a significant amount of savings. But they said they needed FirstNet, so that's why we did not make that change.

FirstNet is the priority contact in case of a disaster. Yes. And at one time years ago, Jose, we had researched the possibility of having voice communications through our vehicle computers. Did that not come up?

Well, there was a whole mesh network throughout the city that wasn't really cost effective.

So Ray Leonard, Jose, maybe this is along the same line of questioning and the same line of concerns. Using my own lens and my own filter for my own job, every once in a while, I see our cell phone costs and our data charges, and I get upset. And then I realize we were using excavating equipment that required cellular communication. We were using other data devices that required the transmission of data that drove those costs. What other equipment do we have? I mean, we have officials in the field that are surely using electronic communicative devices for efficiency for themselves and for the general public. I mean, so this isn't all just cell phone stuff. It's other data efficiency stuff.

100 yeah we went i would say earlier this spring i did a full audit of all the cell phones and asked everybody for each of their departments identify the phone identify you know um if you have, like, do you really need all these services? Do you really need data? Does this person really need data and stuff like that? And so every department emailed. I know, like, when police did it, they found a couple that were duplicated, and they were able to shut off those lines and stuff. So there was good savings through that. But what we found is a lot of departments, like engineering is the biggest user. They have a lot of iPads and a lot of things that are out in the field that are connected wirelessly, that is not just a cell phone. So because of that, that also needs a connection, such as a wireless. So those costs are additional lines.

I have a number of the treatment plant does, the pumps. And they each have that modem, but I think they're going through Verizon. to replace each one of those modems was like $1,100.

I've got another question about our card access system now that I'm thinking about it too. It's obviously essential for security, which is what you're providing for us by managing that system. Who has access to the data of who's using their cards and when. Is anybody besides IT monitoring door access?

IT and police department has access. There's a few of them. That's it. No one else has access.

No reporting or nobody requesting reporting of any of that?

I mean, sometimes HR does.

or, well, not an employee, a supervisor will ask as far as.

Councilor Regis.

Oh, I know. Sorry.

That should do it. Councilor Stoddard. Thank you. Take a quick break. Let me go finish up. All right.

So we do Oscar, and then we'll take a break, and then we'll do me with the other departments. Oh, and Christina.

Oh, yeah. Sorry. I don't have to go.

Whoever's next.

Thank you very much, Oscar class and the Caldwell city attorney. This is a second chance to do a budget presentation. So, um, a lot of, a lot of what we want to do and talk about in here, I do have the presentation to hand out to you, but I haven't given it out yet. I thought maybe I'd try to capture your attention a little bit more on the screen and we could talk about it and I'd hand it out afterwards. Um, City, here's our overview for our mission statement, our organization purpose and our community priorities. I know it's a little small, it's hard to read. But I wanted to put this quote from Abraham Lincoln about nothing else but the best reason of wise men applied for ages to the transactions and business of mankind. I take that to mean the law isn't what Oscar says. The law isn't what a judge says or what Google tells us, but it's something that's cumulative through our society and who we are. So when we talk about the law and what we're doing, we're really, we're really transacting across our society to figure out how we should be structured and organized and work as a society. So what I really wanted to draw out and all that and all the our statements in that second bullet point, we talked about creating practical legal solutions. And that's something I'm really proud of our department at the city attorney's office that I think we have attorneys and paralegals and staff who were dedicated to not just saying yes or no, usually no. But we're dedicated to trying to find some practical solutions to the problem. Our client is the city. It's the organization of the city. And sometimes that's at conflict within the city between different departments or different places. And sometimes it's not. And sometimes it's, boy, we really want to help you find a way to move forward, but we can't do it this way. Is there another way that we can do that? So I think I take great pride in that we're able to bring practical legal solutions. I think I received a nice compliment recently that our office isn't what you expect from typical attorney's offices, that we actually have a sense of humor and are easy to work with. So I was very happy to hear that. My wife might disagree that there's a sense of humor. Core services again is kind of our list out there. What I really wanted to point out again and draw out is we really try to focus on what the city needs and where we protect the city. We really provide internal services. We're internal facing. We have had a few, since we moved to City Hall, a few walk-ins for folks that were looking for help with their probate case. And unfortunately we had to turn them down. and tell them that although we are the city attorney's office, that doesn't mean that we're open for anybody in the city to be able to use. The other part of being an internal facing legal department is I think when I hear all the accomplishments that other clients in the city have made over the year. I share a little bit of pride in that because we help facilitate those to the extent we can if it's a contract review if it's looking at different policies if it's just answering some one off questions we're able to do that so. that's the advantage I think that we have now with having legal services, having moved in in-house, is there's a lot more opportunities for us to help and enable other departments throughout this city. Show and tell time. Last year at this time, actually we weren't even this far along in the progress of changing the exercise room into the legal offices. So here we are. And those one-year accomplishments that we've listed out there, there's a whole bunch of them. Again, I just want to draw out that I think we've been exceptional. We're still working on it, but building partnerships and building trust, also just kind of building that, and it works both ways. We're building it with the clients, and the clients are starting to get our trust also. Right. And just working on that, being able to communicate and being here at City Hall really helps with that. We are able to help accomplish goals, but we're also able to hopefully avoid that panic feeling in people's stomachs of that near nausea when something happens that we've been able to foresee that and cut it off or think about it a little bit. Over on the right side there, the accomplishments and numbers, I think what pops out to me a lot of that is the contracts that we're able to review. These aren't numbers that are up to date. I think these were toward the end of March that we put those together. 107 contracts that have able to have legalized pass through it and try to talk about things at at 1100 minutes. And I know we're not seeing all the contracts in the city yet and and probably don't have bandwidth to do all that. But to be able to reduce risk just by being able to see the contracts has been, I think, is something to draw out. We're going to talk about public record requests a little bit later on. Contract review. Oh, I said contract reviews. Collaboration also is what I wanted to highlight on this on this slide. I think there's some real worldly examples. We have great collaboration with the clerk's office with public records request. I don't know why my voice is shaky. You guys aren't scary. Um, there we go. That's better clerk's office. Um, and then in the community development department, we were recently able to talk about a land use application, come to a solution about a mediation, which hadn't been done before. And I think was was successful. Human resources, I think there's a well beaten path between our offices. We're able to ask questions of each other, try to plot out things that that need to be planned and addressed appropriately. So a lot of great collaboration, I think, has taken place over the course of the last year. Some of some people might note that we've been working on tripling our budget for legal over the past year. I might disagree with that, but it would be on there. Our workloads and challenges. Again, I know that's pretty small to read and I even got to put my cheaters on to look at it. What I wanted to highlight on this and come to is our public records request. It's a big segment of what's happening for us. And it's not a complaint or disparagement. We are committed to transparent and open government. We're committed to being able to help clients answer public records requests. But I don't know if people realize. So when we say FOIA, FOIA is not something that we have in Idaho. We do not have a mini Freedom of Information Act. And in some ways, I wish we would get there because we would have a much longer time to be able to do turnarounds on public records requests. Right now, if we have a requester from in-state, we have an automatic due in three days, three business days, which we can extend to 10 days. And I'm very proud of our team that we don't go past 13 days I can't even think of an example of going past it. There may be a few that will get there if we have to ask for for payment on things. But we are very, very good at being able to get things out when I hear around the valley how long it can take for other requests to get out. But it's a heavy lift. It probably takes my probably takes Jackie, the paralegal for us 75% of her time is probably taking up on reviewing emails. Checking and some of that's just to see what's responsive and what's not. And so you have to do a level of does this respond to the request and you have to do a level for seeing if there's possible redactions. Every document that we have at the city is a public record. That's where you have to start. And then there are some exemptions to those public records that don't go out. And we try to train and help the departments do that. But if you don't do it every day, it's difficult. But it does take a significant amount of time to be able to look through and to do those, especially if we're meeting that timeline requirement that we have. So those that that is a large challenge for us. And you can see some of our other biggest allocations that we have public works and engineering, we do a lot of work with police department, we have a lot in the mayor and the human resources are another are another big hitters. We've kind of we're breaking it down to present and personnel and our budget and our operating budget. The greatest asset for the city attorney's office is our personnel. It's our people. We have amazing professionals and individuals that work for us and with us. I was gonna go through a little bit and talk about our folks and what they do and who they are and what their roles are. I think that this slide really gets it, but I recently, I don't know if you've ever heard of Albert K. Moose. He talks about what would happen if Sisyphus smiled. And the idea being you can have a very mundane task that could be arduous. But if you smile, it changes it. So I would tell you that the people that I work around give that joy and that smile to something that can seem pretty mundane at times. So we have great people. We want to ask this year that we can add another great person to the legal department. Patrick Baur, principally to be able to take care of some of the database management systems that we want to do we we currently don't have much for that it would help us with our workflow. Patrick Baur, To be able to when we get client requests that clients can track the workflow workflow process through it would also give us places to be able to store differently or cross access our information. We could really probably also, when we were looking at this, we could use a full-time attorney, a part-time attorney, a paralegal. We just need some help to get through things. And as we kind of talked through it, we landed on asking for a paralegal to be able to help us with our services. Looking at a paralegal, a paralegal could help us with contract review. If we have the person that we can target and get that has experience with database management, that would be able to do it. If we implemented the system with our current personnel, that's just going to pull away Jackie as our paralegal. There's just not enough time for her to be able to do that and manage what she's doing. So we're trying to find a solution. We think the most cost effective solution for the city at this point would be hire a paraprofessional or paralegal rather than a full time attorney. It can be difficult to find a part time attorney that would have experience. So we focused on on asking for that that part time or not that part time, but for the paralegal position. And that should be able to help us do the addition to public records request paralegals can help do legal research, legal writing, they can help us do some initial contract reviews, answer initial questions, and to be able to free up more time for the attorneys to be able to focus on different things, or just be able to have interface and interactions with clients. Our expenses, as you can see, actually are staying fairly flat. We're able to take out about $30,000 from last year's budget to this year's budget. A lot of what we're still doing is still as a new department. We're still trying to figure out what sweet spots are in our budget and where things really need to go and be. But we we took a an effort in our office this year. Nobody went out on a on a travel training. We did. We did virtual trainings. We did local trainings to be able to try to to keep costs down. We also tried to. We're also looking at some of our subscription fees, and what we can do for that. We never really know, well, it's gonna be a long time before we know what our contract services will be for attorneys, principally because as in-house counsel, we're generalists, we have a broad range of what we know and can advise on, but if we get a very specific issue, like if we need bond counsel, or if we have a construction claim, or if we have some other things that happen, We we need to make a we have to make a decision of do we take a journalist out of that and send things out that the journalists could do to outside counsel why we focus on that or do we find somebody with the expertise and whatever that particular area would be. and have them do that so we can keep up with our day work. And I think that's the approach that we would prefer to do, but you just don't know from year to year what's going to happen and what pops up. So that's really a hard target to hit. And the $30,000 in this that we're able to reduce that actually also accounts for the legal subscript the the database management system that we're asking for. So if we weren't getting that system, we'd be even further down on what our expenses would be there. We're going to continue to reduce outside council costs as much as possible. We want to add I don't have it on here but we really want to focus coming up if we, if we can and all possible, giving support for procurement and contract drafting and negotiation. We're going to continue with our risk management goals and our service goals. We would like to also expand having legal counsel coverage for some of our committees that are meeting right now we cover city council meetings. And I think there's some other important committees that we would like to be there for I think planning and zoning would be the one I have in mind principally, but as of right now we don't necessarily have the bandwidth for that. So the request summary is the records management system that we're looking at. It's a web-based management system. It could enhance records management, timekeeping. It helps improve our response times. Something we hear over and over again that having in-house counsel has been helpful for, or not helpful but appreciated, is we're able to reduce turnaround times for folks. So we think this could continue with that. We're gonna continue with our training and professional development. We've been able to find, again, those virtual courses and do things locally. Our expected outcome is reduced organizational risk and expand city support activities.

Oscar? How much do you need, Justin? I'm just kidding. So when you came on, we had an expectation that you were going to continue to rely on our previous attorney for ongoing resources. But that's at a cost to us. How much are we still relying on Mark or his staff for city business? I'm not talking URA. They pay for their own legal services. How much are we relying on them at this point?

Very minimally. There have been some ongoing projects that Mark kept on as they were going. There were some litigation things. I can't think of anything that we're currently really using.

It's very minimal. I would say the general is between $2,000 to $5,000 a month at most. i haven't seen a large one above 10 000 since last may so it's been it's been very minimal but i think it's it gets very you know he's available when necessary and anytime there's a special project it's a separate retainer so it's not under the general contract it kind of goes okay we've got a separate contract for for example the the um I'm trying to think of a specific one that just happened. But if there was something that happened that we were getting sued for and he could take it on, then we could just have a separate retainer for him for that specific one. Sometimes it comes out of that same bucket out of the attorney's office. But if it's a wastewater-specific item, it's going to come from the wastewater fund and not from this contracted attorney services. So it really depends on the issue. It depends on... what it's for general fund general um claims i would say building or planning and zoning like disputes those types of disputes if those come up those are going to come out of this fund um employment ones are going to come out of this fund so so i'm hearing you say i'm rounding numbers because my math is bad you anticipate it being around 36 000 a year

that we're spending on Mr. Hilty in an ongoing capacity?

I think we budgeted for 50 is what we did.

And if we added a paralegal to you, that wouldn't reduce the need for him because that's a paralegal and not an attorney, right? Correct. And I'm looking for some give here. And I hate to pick on you because I don't want you to throw something at me. But your general fund too. And this is that year where we're making really hard decisions. you're one of the few people that we can really pick on because it's entirely general fund so i'm looking for how it saves us to hire one more person um you just heard the police ask for a lot more people and i doubt they're going to get any i don't know we'll have to discuss it but you know it's just it's that year when we really have to decide is this the year the the follow-up question to that and again somebody's Somebody's not going to like this, but I got to ask. There are specific, and maybe the clerk's going to need to help with this, there are specific limitations on when we can charge for public records requests.

Correct.

Right? But is it true or am I misunderstanding that if we had to employ somebody for a public records request need that we could charge for that or is there,

When you can charge for responding to public records requests, it's an hourly. It's anything that takes over two hours or it's a page requirement review. So it's based on that. Otherwise, it would just be another general fund position for somebody to look at the public records.

Because we're spending a lot of money from what you're telling me on public records requests. Would anybody like to guess how much public records requests have cost us this year?

In staff time?

Yes.

In staff time? Across all the departments? Probably $500,000. $500,000. Because you think about it, I just take finance. Probably weekly, we get two to three public records requests that I'm pulling data for, which two to three is not a lot. But still, that's time that I have to do that we're pulling staff. So I'm dedicating probably an hour, hour and a half. Well, when you take time and benefits, that starts to add up for me. Well, you have Christina, you have Oscar, you have everybody else doing that across the city. Why do you have police doing that? At least 500,000 at a minimum, I would say, in staff time.

That's just a fortune that is unfortunate. And I wish there was some way we could mitigate that or... have a fee base for that to help with that. Because if we're talking about hiring a paralegal, you wouldn't need your paralegal if we weren't having all this

I think the need would be lower. I think eventually, I do think having a paralegal in our office would be helpful. I think we could provide deeper services. I don't think all the contracts are passed to us right now. Right now, we're relying on clients to come to us. We haven't gone out and said, what are your contracts looking like right now? What do you have going out? We're just talking about trying to assist in procurements and assisting with doing an RFQ and some of those processes that we need to do. I think there's things that the city could benefit from the immediate need because we have to respond to these public records requests and we have to do it on such a tight timeline. It's always going to be there, but there are more things I think that we could...

i want to say that we're going out trying to find legal work i think that there's just things there that the city could benefit from that either nobody knows about because we haven't had time or could be done but we're limping along otherwise well and admittedly your job saves us money if you're able to do it because it's not costing us on the other end because we missed something so i'm not trying to minimize the value that your department is to us but this is new this is in the last 18 months WE'VE TAKEN A BIG SWING, AND IT'S A LOT MORE MONEY THAN WE WERE PAYING FOR LEGAL SERVICES PRIOR TO, YOU KNOW... I THINK YOU'RE PAYING...

I think the legal budget is higher for sure. I think when you're looking at the hours that you're getting of legal services, those have also exponentially increased. And so I think one of the things that we're trying to what we're finding out with public records is I don't think there was a unified system. I don't think there was kind of a clearinghouse. Legal doesn't really want to be the clearinghouse for that. But that's what happens in the clerk's office. But I think and I'll give you an example, I think, is the police department's records did not get legal support that they need. And I know I'm not saying that because of what Mark could do or whatnot, but they were not getting what they needed. And they need that support. And that's not a competency issue. That's a, they were over there doing what they needed, what they could do. But they needed legal support for that. And that wasn't anything that was identified. on a regular basis. And I think you could take that one example there. And you could add it to probably any other department. And I'll pick on Michelle, because she's here. So we'll come and say we need this. And she'll tell me no, you're not getting that. And we'll say, well, it's personnel. And we will go to the statute, we look at it, and we talk about it and get to that decision. But so I think there's a lot of training and education going on. And it's not just Michelle. There's instances everywhere. So it's a real call. It's easy to say we're transparent and committed to transparency. It becomes really, it's a commitment financially also to be transparent.

Sure. Last question. Is this the year, though, or could we go one more, stretching you and your staff as thinly as we do? Sure.

our new turnover in legal is we're supposed to say yes it's illegal so i'm going to start answering with yes my answer is with yes instead of no can we limp by yeah we're going to be on the team and doing that i think going back one of the things that works for our our legal department is our team it is a cohesive well-working team and what i really worry about is burnout and and pushing out And so my request would be if we look at this and say, maybe this isn't the year I can understand that. But I would really like to work with Ray Lynn to be able to we're asking more of them than I think that we've started when we when we knew when we started and if there could be recognition for that and knowing that, yeah, we can't get you this, but at least we can help you with some some increase in your in compensation. That's that would be my my ask for that.

That's fair, and I think maybe that's something we should consider. I'm probably saying too much, but if we could save some money by taking care of the people you have this year, looking at it differently next year, I don't know.

I don't do social media unless somebody sends something to me. That half a million bucks, is a lot of that social media triggered?

I would I would say no, I would say, maybe there's some but if public records are coming for different reasons if somebody's in a traffic accident or it's a public records request or maybe there's their criminal defense attorney might do a public records request. utility billing is getting public records requests for different things. So there's different reasons for different types of public records requests that come through.

The reason I ask that is because every time somebody sends me something to read, it's usually, you can tell it was a public records request. That's the reason I asked the question. So is there any particular category that costs a lot more than the other ones or is it pretty well spread out?

Do you think, what do you think?

So I'll get into the numbers a little bit more in mind, but two In the same timeframe in 2025, we had about 100 less records requests than we have so far this year. So far this year, we've had nearly 2,500 records requests. A lot of those are utility billing. A lot of that is assessments, houses selling, new houses being built, set up, that kind of stuff. The requests that are difficult are the requests that involve emails. The any and all requests is what we call them. That means text messages, documents, emails, all of that. Those take a set of eyes on every single email that is in that request. We had one recently that requested any and all emails related to flock sent by anyone in the entire city in a specific time period. As you can imagine, there were a lot of records tied to that. And every single one of those emails had to be touched by either my department or the legal department. You get better at them. Jackie and I have spent between the two of us nearly 30 years doing records requests, right? So we're pretty good at it. Some of the other departments don't have as much experience in that. I would say that there has been probably a significant uptick in the more complicated requests that are coming into our office that are taking the full 10-day period or an extended period because of costs associated, that kind of stuff. That was a roundabout answer to your question.

Well, I just was thinking that if the taxpayers, whoever's watching would realize how much this has cost them because they are taxpayers, maybe they would back off on some of the ridiculous stuff.

And we had a request that came in recently that it went over the 10 days because there we had to put a pause on it and do a cost estimate. And the requester ended up paying for the time. Um, and I had to sit down with that requester and have a conversation with them saying, Hey, we're not doing this because we don't want to fulfill your request. We're doing this because the time that's being spent on a records request is time that can't be spent on reviewing contracts or processing things up and planning and zoning or dealing with council issues, preparing minutes. Like I am taking away time from doing my day to day, whatever. so that i can look through every single email that comes through in a request so it makes sense for us to charge that requester if it is taking us away from our position and i think that answers counselor williams question that we're following state statute to the t there's no question we are not denying requests because we don't feel like fulfilling them but it is a significant tax on employee time for sure

and another aspect of the public records act is we don't have the ability to ask requesters by and large what do you want or try to we we're prohibited we have very little leeway to be able to say i mean you say any and all what do you mean because so we can ask some limited questions but we really have to take what we're given in responding to the requests just like say what a little bit i see it just seems like we're going off to deep end on record requests

If it's a half a million dollars, I could hire some people.

Every time you guys meet, we have public records. Really?

We didn't solve that.

I don't know if there's anything legally we can do to correct that. It'll be my phone.

It's hard because I think that there's a real need for transparency in government in what we're doing. I think that people just don't see the cost in terms of, and the other part of this, frankly, is it's no fun. It's a lifeless, I don't wanna say lifeless. I don't know any of my kids' friends that say they wanna review public records when they grow up. Right? It can be monotonous. I mean, if you have a return because you get certain search parameters, you might get 3,000 emails on something. and or more and and a lot of them will be the same email or it it it's not an exciting task to do it's so there's no restrictions relative to the law on what they could request and what they can't request they can you can make a request for anything that you can make a large request absolutely what we have the ability to do as the city is to to look at it and we can do initial review to see of how long it would take us to respond and we can do a cost of copy There are some times where we can come to cost a copy kind of question, we can also have some limited space to work with people to reduce that so they don't have to pay. So there are some things I mean, but by and large, everything is supposed to go out the way the law is written is everything is considered responsive unless certain exemptions apply. So, a large part of what we're doing is we're reading to see if it's responsive and then we're also looking to see if there's an exemption because there are things like personnel records that will get included in something or active police investigations. If you ask for any and all that say flock, you're going to have active police investigations. Well, how do we know. That, so it can't just be, it's hard to even have 1 person, maybe public records because. they're going to have to look at it in their department because people in their department understand what's responsive, but they don't necessarily understand the exemptions. So that's where it comes into legal. And the bottom line is we can't recoup that cost. We can to an extent. We can charge for hourly rates, we can charge, it's hard to say, you can charge the- The rate of the lowest qualified individual that can retrieve those records. After the two hours, right? After the two hours. After the two hours.

Maybe that needs to be changed too then.

Take it out and add it to the list, John.

It's a legislative change. Good luck on that.

There has been a fair amount of legislative change related to public records that has gone in the favor of cities in the last few years. So I think there's definitely an appetite for it. I mean, it's a difficult line, like Oscar mentioned. And I'm getting into my presentation. I'm sorry. But transparency is what we're built upon, right? We have nothing to hide. We're not doing anything nefarious. I want to give you the records that you want to see. but it is a burden on employees. And it is, I mean, a lot of times records requests that go out, there's nothing exciting in there. And we have spent 10 hours reviewing thousands of emails and documents that go out and nothing ever comes of it. There's no breaking news at 6 PM. There's it's just nothing because we're all at the end of the day, just doing our jobs.

Another project for Justin to work on.

also like if the records request had an uptick because of some of the projects that were going on you know and sure yeah you know and maybe that will calm down if we don't have more projects that are super interesting so that's always a i think the legislature has largely carved themselves out of the public record request process they've covered themselves so they don't feel the same sort of heat that any other agencies do I'm wondering, so I'm looking at your budget. It looks like you're asking for 93,000 more this year than last year. Is that right? That's the increase in the paralegal. Well, so I'm wondering, because to me, that is not a huge ask compared to other departments. So I don't have a problem with it. if it's going to alleviate some of the burnout and the stress and everything else that goes along with your job and everybody else in there. I was thinking it's too bad they don't have software that categorizes every time somebody sends an email that says quiet zone, that it doesn't just automatically categorize it. So when you do get the request, you're like, oh, I'll just go to this folder. Or if that's even something that somebody could set up monthly with like an audit or something.

We have just FOIA. We don't use the AI features on there because it's unreliable. And then I can let Jose talk about his software that he uses for keyword searches.

I'm just thinking, you know what I mean? So if there's not something that's going to be reliable or easy, then maybe the paralegal is the answer and maybe a part-time paralegal. might be better than nothing to start. And maybe that person's job is doing those kinds of tasks. and then seeing how it works out, and then maybe increasing that to a full-time position next year to at least help a little bit. And then my question with that was, where are they going to sit? So how long until you are built out of your office?

This would require what we have as our legal conference room would turn into another office.

Oh, I see. OK. So would that be something you could maybe consider as a part-time employee, and maybe that if there's no benefits that are included? I don't know how that package works exactly, but would that be helpful to at least alleviate some of it to start?

I think we're open to all of it to see. I really want to be able to try to, as much as possible, be able to protect the culture and get the right person in. But yeah, I think we're open to anything that we can to get assistance. And I want to be, and I think maybe I didn't express this enough, I think this position will help not just the city attorney's office, but I think it's going to help the clerk's office. I think it's going to help everybody. It'll help police records. I think it'll be something that generates just...

So it's kind of an all-encompassing helper.

Much like Justin is for our department, where he's in legal, but everybody has access to what he can do in his experience.

Well, personally, I'm not against a full-time employee to help with those three or more divisions. And like I said, I don't think your ask of $93,000 is... that big comparatively to other departments. And we wanted our own attorneys, so here we are. But.

Probably a public request just to hear you say yes on something. Well, somebody will post it and twist it.

Yeah, I know. But I just, anyway.

We can't control it once it gets out of here. We can't control what's done.

Yeah, well, I don't even care anymore, honestly. So say what you want, do what you want, add to it.

You're in the doghouse already.

I'm always in the doghouse.

Oscar, so you have all these built-in clients. No, I gave you a project recently. I still haven't heard anything. No, just kidding. My question is, Oscar, do you have some kind of work order, workflow, where if I have, I mean, basically, I just kind of handed you my project. But is there a formal way that if A COUNSELOR, THE MAYOR, WE WOULD HAVE A FORMAL WORKFLOW TO GIVE YOU THAT YOU COULD TRACK HOW MUCH STUFF WAS COMING TO YOUR OFFICE FROM US. DO YOU HAVE THAT?

CURRENTLY WE DO NOT. THAT'S PART OF WHAT WE'RE ASKING FOR IN OUR OPERATIONAL BUDGET WAS THAT LAST YEAR WE STARTED LOOKING AND WE PROBABLY WILL START A LITTLE BIT OVER AGAIN BUT WE IDENTIFIED A PRODUCT THAT WOULD GIVE US THAT WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT ALSO AS BUILT INTO OUR DATABASE MANAGEMENT. It would be where we could get an email or a contact from a client that would have the specific legal request so that we could process it. And then we'd also like to have a feature where instead of you having to call me to see if I've looked at it or where we're at, that could give some progress updates also. And what I would really like to see is the ability to be able for clients to see what we're currently, you are one of so many in line.

right not just that you have one ticket in but we have to be able to prioritize things because that's that's the situation i give you something i'm like when am i going to hear something but i'm sure that everybody is giving you something with the same thought that you know and so so the ability for you to to manage those on a on a timely basis and and you know I think would be valuable to you because I got more coming.

Well, and I think adding 1 of the 1 of the things I mean, we're focused a lot on the public records request, but adding a paralegal. A paralegals function can be to look at a lot of contracts working can draft some things out for the attorneys to review. So it helps speed the whole process up to where right now you give me a project. It's going to start with me and end with me. Right? And so it's going to be starting to end on my time and when I can get to it. So I'm opening it up. I'm reading it. I'm drafting. I'm moving through Everything gets looked at and reviewed before it goes out and finalized. But if we can have a process where I can now assign it to a paralegal to take a first draft look at this, or to do some research on this or that for me, I'm not spending my time doing that. I am now focusing on unable to look at a more refined product and editing into something.

And next year, when we sit here, you can say I received 150 projects from my clients, and my turnaround time was x, you know, because you have that data to manage, you know, to say, you know, this is what's happening. Right.

And I also don't want to overemphasize and maybe this a classical attorney, I'm going back and forth. I don't, we don't want to be the fast food of legal services either, right? Some things are just going to take more time to work through. But we don't want things to languish unnecessarily.

You know, it's just, you know, again, if we were to use another attorney, we'd be charged by the minute kind of situation. And your minutes are every bit as important as anybody else's, so.

All right, any else from council? Thank you, officer. Since I already took up half of the city attorney's time, I'll make it pretty quick.

Mayor and Council, thank you for being here this evening. I wanted to touch a little bit on the mission statement because I think we've talked a lot about this idea and the nuance of the city clerk's department in a lot of these presentations. So our mission statement is to provide transparent, consistent, and responsive services that enhance the quality of life, support sustainable growth, and build a thriving community for current and future residents in a way that balances the importance of providing historical records with the need for technology and forward thinking. So we've got to have tech. We have to be able to manage all of the things that are coming through our offices while still understanding the need for permanent record and paper record. And if you ever want to see something really cool, I have the minutes book from 1890 in my vault. I have special gloves that you have to wear. I'd like you to meet your city clerk department. Between this team of four, we have over 76 years of government experience. As you might imagine, I am on the tail end of that list of experience. But we've got military, municipal, state, and local government experience. So you're dealing with a very highly qualified team that takes a lot of pride in all of the work that they do. So our achievements in the 25, 26 year, we transitioned to a new clerk. I think that went well. We went through the election cycle. Every other year, elections bring a lot of pressure onto the clerk's office. There's some changes coming through legislature on how those elections will be handled in the future. We'll kind of see how things go with that, but it takes a significant toll on the clerk staff holding informative meetings, working with the county, making sure all of our ducks are in the row. And we did begin the discussion of moving towards a district. As you know, as soon as we hit that 100,000 mark for population, we do have to district the city. It'll change really all of the election process. I am thankful for my relationship with the clerk for the city of Nampa, Shar. She and I worked together really well. I started talking to her basically as soon as I started in the position here of what steps we could take to make sure we're prepared for that. So we are moving forward with that. One of the biggest achievements we had was implementing our agenda management software that touches in a lot into how much staff time is being spent on doing things the old way. Um, so to give you an idea, With the previous system that we were using for preparing agendas, I spent an entire day preparing an agenda, basically from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., compiling documents, linking, putting everything together. Now, all of the other departments have the responsibility of gathering their own documents, uploading it into the system. Once everything is in there, I quite literally push a button that says build packet. it compiles all the documents links it hyperlinks it and sends it out to everybody so it is well worth the money that we spent on it um we talked a little bit about is there a button to push so that we can see the pocket thank you for bringing that up counselor williams i will take responsibility for that it got out to you eventually We talked a little bit about records request as I mentioned before, the current numbers I'm looking at the system right now 2267 requests have come in to date. Every single one of those is touched by someone in the clerk's department, whether that is assigning it to a different department for processing, actually processing the request hitting complete communicating with individuals.

So there's a lot of staff time that is spent on those public records requests.

Our goals for the 26-27 in the clerk's department, I want to finalize our districting plan with the help of the city attorney's office and the Treasure Valley Partners. So like I mentioned, I've been working with the clerk for the city of Nampa. They have a really robust system. They formed a committee to figure out how the districting was going to happen. Got a lot of community involvement in that. Justin has been really great in working on that ordinance change. It'll be a pretty significant shift for Caldwell, and I want to make sure that we're prepared for that as soon as we hit that 100,000 mark because it's coming fast. One of the other goals is one that has come up recently is establishing an alcohol compliance committee. Lieutenant Matthews and the police department reached out to us a couple weeks ago. One of our event centers has been causing a significant strain on policing. They are regularly under-reporting how many people will be at events, what their security is, and unfortunately, there's not a lot of follow-through from the city side of things. Because alcohol beverage licensing is controlled by the state, a lot of that we have to defer back to Idaho State Police and the ABC. So again, I reached out to my friends in Nampa. They established a few years ago an alcohol compliance committee. Ours would involve police department, fire department, planning and zoning, clerk's office, and we would essentially create a point system. So when we have someone with a liquor license that is breaking the rules, we can assign points to any of those rules that are broken. If they hit a certain level, I bring it to you, you revoke their license. It gives us teeth and actionable resources responses to these entities that are not following the guidelines and not keeping the safety of our residents in line alcohol beverage control and our system exists to keep our community safe and when the police department is reaching out to me and saying hey we got to do something it falls on the clerk's office to make sure that we're making those changes happen so that's something that i'd like to get implemented Um, in the next six months or so, see how we can experiment with it. It'll take a code change coming to you all. And then ultimately a little bit of oversight from the clerk's department. We've also been doing a lot of coordinating with internal departments to update transparency. So obviously I work with the attorney's office every day. it's a real good time um but we've also been working a lot with police department and we analyze the records requests we can take reports of some of the high focus areas that are coming into my office a lot right now the focus is on flock as you might imagine so i've been working really closely with jackie and sergeant heitzman that was here earlier to put together a compilation of information that can go on the mayor's transparency page similar to what we did quiet zone when we were getting daily requests large voluminous requests for that information that way when a request comes in we can direct them to the transparency page and just say here's the data and we don't have to do a ton of that work so that's something that we've been working with internally as well the next goal is something that we're continually doing in the clerk's office is which is digitizing records, digitizing access, making sure that there's a lot of transparency, minutes, agendas, historical records, all that kind of stuff. We want it to be available to the public. Again, a lot of that information being digitized and available to the public is going to help with the records request side of things because when we can easily respond to a request and just say thanks for your request our code is located here or our minutes are located here it takes a lot of that staff time off of it yeah yeah of course yes so there used to be something on the city's website uh

If somebody's doing a public information request, can't they just go there first?

They could. A lot of people don't know that that system exists. It can be very clunky. Laserfish is a very, very old system that is supposed to mirror old microfiche systems. So a lot of those documents are not easily found. They're not great copies if it scans of old information. And a lot of people just don't know that they exist. So if people are asking for minutes, agendas, packets, that information, a lot of times we will direct them to that system. It's just a matter of people knowing where to find it.

I don't know that there's really a better system for

can't really that's those documents yeah that's probably the best system i mean the only thing you can really put is in workflow automated workflows that maybe would allow you to create forms or processes within that system a lot of the frustration comes from i don't know we say this a lot but it comes from legislature it comes from the way that state statute is written i don't think that statute being written in the 60s could have ever imagined where we would be on a technological level. There's still disagreement in the clerk world of if you can even digitize records and then get rid of them. Like there are some clerks that have buildings full of paper documents of everything that has ever existed. So I think there's a lot of catching up and a lot of education that needs to happen on like, what's actually happening in a clerk's department in 2026. because it's a lot different than what was happening in 1890 for example um the next goal is one that raylan and i have talked about and it comes a lot from the changes that are coming out of icrimp so they are now doing quarterly updates on our insurance premium so if we have a significant increase in vehicles for example we bought a lot of very expensive fire department vehicles recently which resulted in an increase to our I crimp numbers. I would like to go through our system. Debbie kept immaculate records, as you might imagine. So being able to take those records and actually go out into the fields in each department, making sure that we have the right fins, the right information that we have all of the right assets in our system is going to help us a lot as we prepare for continuing increases through I crimp. I think it can help us plan more for those budgetary increases that are coming throughout the list. So that's gonna be a lengthy process. We have a lot of assets, but it's something that I'd like to work on with each of our departments. And then finally, really the main goal is to continue our education, make sure that we're staying up to date. We do a lot of work and Justin's updates throughout the legislative season are super helpful. They impact the day-to-day life of what the clerk's department does. So really staying up to date on all that information is helpful. Let's get to the nitty gritty. Just some notes. I won't go line by line, but really the largest expense areas are software. Civic Plus is our agenda management system. Just FOIA is our records request system. The last city I worked for, we had no records system for tracking, and I can't even imagine dealing with records requests to the level that we are without the system that we have in place. It's clunky. It has its issues, but ultimately it's way better than an Excel spreadsheet. The next biggest line item is advertising. 90% of that is ordinance publication. So we are required to publish every single ordinance in the local newspaper within 30 days of passage or it becomes null and void. I personally have been fighting for the last five years with legislature to try and get that changed. The people that are reading the newspaper are not the people that need to be informed about what we're doing in local government. It's not the best way to reach our community anymore. I worked with Senator Cook out of eastern Idaho to try and get some legislative changes. Ultimately, government publications are the only reasons why our newspapers still exist. And so they are grasping onto those publications as hard as they can. And they have very, very powerful lobbyists that go to the legislature every year. There have been some improvements in the last few years, giving a little bit more grace to the government officials and putting more responsibility on the newspapers. But it's something that I'm going to continue to work with on the legislature to see if we can decrease that number. Our annual budget for ordinance publication just in the clerk's department is $18,000. That's printing words in the newspaper that nobody reads. And then the next largest line item is the dues and training. A lot of that is tied again to the required trainings for our certifications. You'll notice on the first page where we looked at the organization chart, there's a lot of letters behind your employees' names. And that means that we have continuing education and we continue to research what's going on in our field and make sure that we're moving forward appropriately. So we're not asking for any personnel. You will see some changes in numbers next year. Angie Point will be retiring next fall after 10 years of service to the city of Caldwell. Overall, there is around a $40,000 decrease in the clerk's department budget. We do not have an election cycle. We budget every election cycle for the potential of a runoff election, which comes to the tune of $35,000. That's another thing that I would like you all to consider is getting rid of the runoff opportunity. We'll talk about that later. And we have checked the boxes on a lot of our special projects that have come up over the last couple years, so really we're just Staying flat, trying to keep things moving. Believe it or not, I also manage the cemetery. So we've got four folks that are out at the cemetery as well as two seasonal employees. The main focus areas in the budget are repair and maintenance increases. We have a lot of aging equipment. For a really long time, the cemetery got all the hand-me-downs from the other departments. And we have been working through that to try and make sure that our team has all of the supplies that they need to be able to provide really, really important services to people that are in a difficult spot. I've been encouraging the team to bulk buy whenever they can. They know they're going to have to replace sprinkler heads, so they buy a whole bunch of sprinkler heads and they can get a discount on that. And then you'll see that our mausoleum project is on hold right now, pending some engineering reviews. We all had some concerns about the stability of the cliff out at the Canyon Hill Cemetery, and we did not want to put a giant granite box on the cliff before we investigated the stability of it. So that is where our money is going. And just real quickly, the achievements in the cemetery. There will be a ribbon cutting on July 1st for the wind phone installation that was completely funded by the Treasure Valley Realtors Association. We installed the internment center and the niches, which have been a really great benefit to the community. We've continued our partnerships with regional cemeteries, monument companies, and funeral homes. We've started replacing trees throughout the cemetery. We have a lot of older trees that have died, fallen, trying to keep it beautiful up there. If you haven't been to the cemetery, it is beautiful up there. And if you get the chance, please go up and thank the staff because they work their guts out to make sure that that place looks beautiful and they deserve to be thanked. And then our final achievement is that we started working with the Canyon County Juvenile Probation. We make them come out and clean our headstones. Good time. That's it.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

Any questions?

Only because I know I was in the crowd at the time, wasn't up here. The mausoleum is fully funded even though it's been put on hold, correct? It's budgeted from prior years?

Yeah, so it's budgeted in 26. If it does not happen in 26, it'll have to be re-budgeted. It's not requested for 27. In addition to that, it's probably I know it was a timing thing because we're out of space on the mausoleum side. And so I think a solution needs to be found. But at the same time, right now, we change the fee structure. So a portion of the perpetual fund fees are funding capital because there wasn't enough in the capital fund to actually pay for the full mausoleum. And so right now, that fund is building cash. So it'll actually pay for it instead of having to do a loan from the perpetual fund. So there's some pros to having it delayed to allow that cash balance to build up. But when they're ready to move forward with that, then we will need to rebudget for it.

I just knew that was a huge point of contention back to the .

our feedage our fee adjustments uh were in the black on everything uh yeah from for right now uh with the capital fund so what we did is we took i believe it was we did an ordinance change we took 10 of the the great fees that were supposed to go to the perpetual fund and we moved them to the capital fund and then any interest that is earned on the perpetual fund It used to go into the perpetual fund, and so that fund was consistently growing. Now any interest that's earned on the perpetual fund is going into the capital fund. So instead of having to consistently borrow from the perpetual fund, we use the interest earnings on it instead, which to me is the real purpose of the perpetual fund.

It's one of those city services that we're in the red all the time.

Yeah. Go ahead. I was going to say, the last two years, part of the reason the operating has been a little bit upside down is two years ago, I reduced the sales tax because I thought the fee projection was going to cover that revenue. It did not. And so this year, I did fix it to where the sales tax is, making it to where with an offset of fee increases, it's enough to cover all the operations.

And we regularly look at what our surrounding cemeteries are doing as well. Our numbers are significantly lower than everyone else. There are some things that we're looking forward to for the next couple years. We charge additional fees if people want a funeral on a Saturday. Um, we're looking at charging for staff time for set up that kind of thing. So I think there's a lot of places, um, where we can add a little bit more to that. As far as the clerk's department goes, those fees are really just pass throughs. Um, we saw one earlier this year when I don't see police increase their background check fee. We added a little bit of cushion on our end to cover for staff time. But ultimately, we're not in the business of making money on those sides of things. So we're really just trying to cover what we're doing and maybe get just a little bit in there.

That's the problem with golf course ad in the years past, too. It's so far below everybody else.

Good.

Thank you.

I don't know. It makes it easy. So we'll kind of start through my packet. I have quite a few departments that we'll kind of go over, not in super detail unless you have a lot of questions on them, but more they're really internal and not a lot of increases, just movements. So I'll start with the big packet. So the first thing is general fund. This is where we look like right now. Now that you've heard from the majority of all the departments, Um, this is where we said the revenue really hasn't budget too much. I've updated the cost allocation plan. So it'll just. A little bit, um, but, uh. With the full analysis of fees that's happening, this is kind of where we're going to end up without. other recommendations from you, which we can talk about at the end of my presentation. One of the things, I know the chief didn't talk about it, but one of the things in the police budget that really, to me, makes a significant portion that doesn't allow for us to do a lot of flexibility with police is there was two significant contract increases. one for misdemeanor probation and the other for dispatch. And both of those are... I did it again. I don't know. Yes. Prosecution. I always... I apologize. I misspoke on that. prosecution services, and dispatch services. And then the other third contract that's not necessarily a pass-through from the county, but is the animal control. And so the good news is we thought the animal control was going to be significantly higher. It was not. It went up about 5%. So we were very happy with that. But both the prosecuting attorneys and the dispatch was pretty significant between both of those, about a $500,000 increase in police's budget. So when you have that significant amount of increase on those contracts, There's very little flexibility that we can do on other things. So I just want to just bring that up because I know that you didn't really talk about it and there's not a lot of. I know that there's a lot of decisions on the table, but those are our other decisions that are going to be made as those contracts come through.

same with you know with every contract that comes through it's always at your guys's discretion even though it's budgeted whether to approve it or not so those are what at some point i lost track of where you were saying and so everything you said for the last three minutes didn't register with me so i've got a question yeah so prosecution services are in what line item of our budget

So they are in police. Do you have the breakdown of police?

And dispatch services are in police also?

That is correct. Both of those are in police.

Okay, and animal control?

Police. Okay, so... Fire has a separate dispatch contract that's $100,000.

Okay, so not only are we talking about police having a steep staffing request, Police also has a steep budget request that is outside of their control whatsoever.

That is correct.

Nothing as far as mismanagement or anything. Beyond their control. That is correct. And beyond our control.

And so I just wanted to bring that up because the chief didn't bring it up. And I think that's a big portion of that creates a little bit of frustration from the state because we're all tight on these property tax budgets. And so those are our partners that are charging those increases. And so it makes it to have those difficult conversations of Is there other ways that we can approach those contracts? And I'm not taking the lead on them. That's not my place. But I just wanted to bring those up because those are so significant. And they're essential services, but that to me is.

So Raylynn, I want to drill down a little bit more. Thank you. So for prosecution, did we pay this year?

Let me pull it up here and I will tell you. Prosecution. For 2026, we budgeted $378,000. $378,000. And how much is it going up?

$570,000 is the new request. New request is $570,000? Yes, an additional $200,000. And then dispatch?

And dispatch is... You and your software make this faster. They have a lot of divisions. Dispatch went from 320,000 to 500,000. 180,000. So... then originally the county the animal control we were budgeting uh 320 but the new price on it it went from 270 to 283 000. so 270 to 280. maybe i exaggerated the 600 000 but it is probably that's that's still pretty significant increases and then just to clarify

Fire got added. This is the first year that fire is paying for dispatch services.

So we had it budgeted for 26, but we have not paid that contract because I don't believe it's final, correct? So because that contract is not final, even though it's budgeted, we have not paid that $100,000.

So you're closed $400,398.

So I look at a lot of numbers and so little exaggerated, but really close.

But but just just rough math between prosecution and dispatch. We're going to pay over a million dollars to the county this year.

Yeah.

So basically, their overage is the county.

The county, their two overages are the county and then softwares. Those were the two biggest requests and they weren't even really increases. It was just a movement from Harper to the police department budget. And so with this new request that they presented today, that's not reflected in the budget, but that could see a decrease in the deficit. I have to move the money around to see how that's going to play out. But, um, Those that was the increases that they in their operating and so I just I just wanted to make you guys aware, because I think those are those are big increases for contracts that are hard to absorb within our limited budget so. As we're going through this as well, like, I didn't make a ton of changes. A lot of these changes came from either just cleaning up things, making sure the allocations are correct. I did adjust the attorney allocations for the library with the attorney's allocation. The library now, their charge is $1,000. So it went from $33,000 to $1,000. Just with adjusting that allocation, refined it a little bit, made sure it made more sense.

That's a big change in allocation.

Sometimes it's OK to call me on my numbers and say, where are you getting this? I appreciate that. So the library's budget did change as well. So if we go into this first pages general fund, like I said, we'll still talk about this because I think there's definitely some decisions that we'll want to talk about. as we move forward into the next couple of pages uh as we're looking through this the big ones that i want this first the second this this page that says general special revenue at the top and it this is cash and so the big one that i want you guys to look at is the street fund I have a big concern about the street fund. And I will have to talk to Haley a little bit more about this. But when you look at the street fund and where it is right now, and with the projection at the fiscal year 27 that they cash based off of if they did all the projects that they have budgeted, we would be at a negative cash position. It's very concerning to me. And so with that, I'm going to be having further conversations with Haley, but I think that's going to come back to her ask on if that $500,000 is going to become permanent, what are your guys' thoughts on what you want to cancel? So I think that's going to be a discussion because they can't continue providing what they're providing with that reduction of $500,000 in cash ongoing.

When do you need an answer from us on The fire district, because that's really the key to all these other things, too, isn't it?

It is. And so I don't want to put pressure on you guys, but here's the timeline. And I'm going to take myself as me out of it because there's the timeline is by July 24th. That's going to be the last day that we can make budget changes before we're posting the ordinance. After we post the ordinance, we can make budget reductions, but there can no longer be like. increases or movements around those funds. And so it was a budget neutral thing, that's okay, but changing amounts to different funds is not possible. But so July 24th, and I know that that is a lot of, that's not a lot of time to make decisions.

We only have a couple more meetings. So we might have 30 days, but we have one more budget workshop.

On July 9th, yes.

We have two council meetings.

So, and we don't have answers to a lot of stuff so we're putting together that as we speak, so we have an email that's going out trying to bring everyone, especially the amplifier people and others in a thread going to try to raise a question and Oscar maybe you can maybe so.

What does creating a fire district look like? Is it item number three on the new item business where there's just a simple resolution and we make a motion? What does it look like to kick the fire department out of the city and make a district?

I'm going to defer to Justin. Justin did a dive into this, so he's really going to be the one that can give you the best answers.

Okay, there is an option to form a new district, but that would be kind of cumbersome and the city would have to get. Approval from the county commissioner, start the process. So that would be a longer process. probably the shorter and more efficient way to approach it would be to annex into a fire district and that's the process that Nampa had and you just need the approval of both of the governing boards in that case the city council and the governing board fire district both have to for authority will happen. But in that case, you don't have to have an election if both of the boards of the city and the fire district agree to it. But if you have creating a new district, then you do have to have an election.

Is there a Caldwell Fire District Board now?

Yes.

Rural fire district. I knew there was rural fire.

So they would annex into the rural.

And they would have to approve it too, even if we approved it. Correct. That's correct.

So both the city council and the fire district. But there would not have to be an election.

So you had said something about we lose the ability to do that if we don't do it by December 31st, but that was on a certain legislative timeline.

Well, yes, that is because property taxes are based off of December 31st deadline. And so to make the decision to annex has to be done before December 31st so the county assessor can do what they need.

But you're saying for us to put our budget in some sort of final position, we only have till July 24 to make a decision on the fire?

That's correct. So like I said, there's a couple of pathways forward. If I took this scenario that, OK, there's the likelihood, maybe an 80% likelihood, that fire's going to join an annex with the rural fire. And so I make the adjustments that we talked about earlier. not doing the transfer, reducing FIRE's property tax, transferring it, and using one-time money to fund FIRE, if I did those adjustments in the budget, and that's how we presented our budget, then if FIRE, you would have until December 31st to make that decision of whether FIRE's becoming a district or not, both the boards. If that didn't come into fruition, then the next year would be a risk there would be a significant risk because we've now funded fire with one-time money and i would say essentially all new property tax would have to go to fire to fund them and get them caught back up if they were to stay with the city if they were to become a district that budget goes away and then there's other impacts like our levy rate goes down obviously Other impacts that would happen but the budget process would happen the same if fire with us except fire wouldn't be part of the discussion so you're the I'm gonna rely on you as the Best expert best evidence your best evidence right here.

So what is our What is our greatest risk? waiting till December 31st and then amending our budget and or doing a budget now and taking a chance that the district doesn't come to fruition? What's the biggest risk?

So because of how property taxes work, you can't really amend property tax levy December 31. So whatever set is set for property tax levy when I file the L2. That's what's set. that decision has to be done by i believe it's september 2nd is when the l2 is due so but the l2 has to match what is in the ordinance that was published on the 24th

So publications. Quick question, Raylynn. Because I think in years past, we finalized our budget in August. Why are we at July 24 this year?

So yes, the budget hearing is August 11. But I have to publicize it, the ordinance, two weeks beforehand.

So if we go to a district, Raylynn, what's our revenue exposure? Do we have any idea?

I haven't done that calculation yet, so I don't have that number. It's hard without the values. I can do the city side all day long, but not knowing the values of the rural and not having that data, I don't know. I know I saw an email during the budget meeting earlier that Brian was asking for it, so hopefully we'll get it and we'll be able to see. My best guess, and this is just going to be my best guess based off of the hard math, The city's gonna take a reduction of about $10 million and the rural will see an increase probably about 12 to 15. That's my best guess based off of just current valuations, but it's two different budget years, right? So we're using 26, excuse me. We're using 27 fiscal year, 27 property tax levy number to reduce the city's budget. But when the district is formed, they're going to be using the next year's tax assessment. So there is going to be an increase that the city would have recognized if they had been part of our, but we're not recognizing.

What about the assets? What happens to that?

I think those are all up for discussion within the contract of what you want to do, how that's distributed, how, you know, all of those are just a contract. That's all.

Well, I won't say those are unimportant, but I think those are the issues that could be ironed out over time. But let me just say, I bumped into the chief a couple weeks ago and asked him this. And he and the rural district have already started this discussion. So the rural district's fully aware of this and moving forward really the same way we are. So it's not a mystery as to whether or not They're thinking about joining with us so that this could be done.

Yeah, I'm just looking at the NAPA complaint and the framework, and they're saying it's been costing them a lot more money since they went to the district. So taxpayers, that's what we're all about.

My only question is this, because this is now new. I didn't hear this before. So we as a council can say, yes, we want to let them join with Rural District, as long as the Rural District also says, yes, they want to join. That's correct. It does not have to go to the voters. That's correct. OK, so now my question becomes, according to the new legislation, is there an advantage one way or the other?

The advantage to the fire district?

Right. Does the district get an advantage if they wait and do it through the vote compared to us and the other district combined? I mean, is there anything in the statute that

No, it just talks about fire districts as fire districts. So there's nothing relative to the date of creation that would impact the district. Or the method of creation.

The advantage to us is financial. Oh, no, no. Yeah. I just wanted to make sure. Struggle to fund streets this year. Right.

I just wanted to make sure there wasn't a advantage or disadvantage through the statute of if we did it compared to having it. Gotcha. Having the voters vote on it.

so shouldn't we be reimbursed for the assets though the city somewhere i mean i i think that's a valid question and i think that's a policy decision you think about it property tax and reimbursement from the rural both paid for those assets so if we're asking for reimbursement are we taxing ourselves yes i mean so it's a policy decision all up to that type of discussion.

The last city I worked for, the fire department went to a fire district and we had all of these same conversations and they went through a phased approach. So all of the property was still owned by the city. The district took on all of the insurance responsibilities, and then as they phased out equipment, the new equipment was purchased by the district. So it would be a process to go through it.

So the assets we own now, we wouldn't get paid for it, period, right?

Well, if they sold a fire engine, yeah, then we would get the surplus money for it.

The more complicated piece is the real estate. Yes. Yeah.

sorry lynn with so along these same lines uh and i just wrote these down when we were chatting about things because this reminds me of things so if the fire district starts their own district if the fire department starts their own district they're automatically they automatically have their own icrim policy and so so you factored that reduction in our policy amount

I have not factored that amount. There would be additional cost savings.

There was not for the City of Ammon. They did not get a decrease in I-CRMP, even though they took all of those numbers off of there. They said they were so far behind that they used it as a catch-up process. So I would not count on that.

So the other thing would be workers compensation so there would be a reduction in the amount of workers compensation by They would assume their own workers compensation And then the same thing would be for the city's fuel and cell phone and all those costs so so so now we know that those costs that haven't been figured into this or We just kind of left them out there because there's extra bonuses to letting them create their own district. So if I go back to page one here and I see this line that says fire revenues and you say fire revenues last year was $13 million and fire revenues this year $14 million. Those aren't necessarily fire revenues. They're not making money. That is the money from the general fund we allocate to fire that we call revenues.

That is correct. So that includes really two main sources of revenues, property tax and the rural fire contract that we have, which is about $3 million.

So if you subtract the $3 million from the $14 million, that's $11 million. That's the $10 million of savings that we would get with the understanding that we have an 18-month commitment to make them whole. That is correct.

The only question I have about districts, just real quick, just to confirm, is that if they're a district, then they are not held to HB 389. They can increase taxes however much they want without any city.

No, they still have requirements. So they still would follow the same property tax law that we do. There's just additional language for them. So they still can only do the inflationary of the 3%. they still would get values for annexation and new construction they might not do annexation it depends on if their area grows or not i don't know um but they can't just start charging our citizens whatever no they would follow the same calculation the the main due differences are they are not held to a preliminary levy rate so preliminary levy rate takes in the property tax value that's coming in this year and adds that in to reduce the current levy rate to calculate it based off the new construction. So it's reducing it even more. They can go off their current levy rate on that calculation. So they'll get more new construction and annexation. And then they are not capped at the 8% like we are. They have 15%. but they also are subject to an initiative process so um if they're if the voters of the district start an initiative they can reduce the budget of that district with an initiative process so so the property goes where then As our property goes where the property, the city's property, the shared property, I, you know, like I said, I think those, those are all up for discussion, but I like my recommendation. I was looking at, I don't want to double tax residents. So I'm like, okay, let, let fire half the property, but deed it to the city. So if they go to sell it, it always come back to the city. So.

So the question I have is. Or say we reduced our value by $14 million. The fire department steps out. We reduce our value by $14 million. Does that give us more room to reach our 8%? Or does that make us less room to reach our 8% because our total value is less? I mean, because you say we're getting close to bumping up against that. Oh, yes.

So every year we get much closer and closer to the 8%.

So if we take out $14 million, does that give us $14 million worth of room, or do we lose it?

No, because it's always going to be on the base. So because our base recalculates down, it'll be 8% on the base again. And so if our new construction is very high, so for example, say we had i'm just going to say two fred meyers come in or fred meyer and home depot come in all at once that's a lot of value uh in new construction all at once in one year we very well could hit our eight percent and we wouldn't be able to take that full budget amount because we make it easier for us to hit our eight percent yes it would very much make it easier because that dollar amount now becomes less but also because our levy rate is so much less you could have a million in value but now we're only getting let's say 1.1 mils instead of 3.4 mils and so we're not getting as much and we're we're not going to get the 1.2 1.3 1.5 million in new construction anymore it's probably going to be half so so it the cost savings

is really not actual. I mean, it's not going to be a big.

Yeah, I mean, I think Mike showed me a graph that said, like, okay, we're going to be on this line, and then because we're taking out fire, we're going to go down to this next line down, and we're never going to get back to the same path to add that money back, unless we were to do a property tax levy or something. um you know an override levy because that money is permanently removed from our budget permanently removed from the property tax that we levy so um that's why i that's my that's why my recommendation is if we can make the departments that are staying with us as whole as possible it might not get us ahead but at least we're not behind and we're not in the hole starting out um then that would be my recommendation because then next year we don't have to start that conversation with police is in a revenue deficit no guess what police now we're adding we got 1.2 million total and you're getting 800 000 of that so that's that is how much you can grow your budget is only by 800 000 you have to stick within that amount you cannot go over

And that's an ongoing number.

That's an ongoing number. I mean, those are just generalizations. But that would be the conversation next year. And instead of being like, you're $1 million in the hole, and you're only getting $800,000, how can we add anything, right? It creates a tougher conversation each year.

That's a way to hit the reset, really.

And, you know, Rochelle and I really talked about, like, and I'm still doing an analysis on, like, our salaries, but, you know, the big thing is I know a lot of, we hear a lot of departments compare themselves to Boise, Meridian, Nampa, all of our neighboring cities. And every other city has this same discussion, I think. But the hard thing is is that we are paying very similar wages to all of those other cities to not lose employees, to not lose value of employees, because turnover has a cost. But what that does is it creates to where the majority of our cost is now in salaries, and no longer can we expand operations like we would like, which means that we really have to look at alternatives to not add new staff, or we're adding software. And so those are going to be the harder discussions ongoing, because if we consistently If we go back in and we consistently say yes again, and we get back in, there's not going to be another way for us to get without devastating other departments or layoffs or this. We really have to stick to this is the revenue that's available. You have to stay within that budget.

So Justin or Raylynn, if this district thing happens, It is no longer involved with the fire department period. They're like gone gone.

That is correct. It's an independently governed district with its own district board and Napa, I think, increase the size of the board to 5 or 7 members. I think when they. merged with the rural fire district and so that would add another political dynamic of being another governmental entity that the city would have to interact with and you know hopefully you would get along with the board members but that definitely adds another wild card to the discussions about issues in the future and how cooperative those new commissioners would be so if if the city was unhappy with

the service from the fire department that they were getting, I said we would be board to board talking about how to.

Yeah, they've got an ex-Boise fireman on the board right now with an Napa deal. And you think he's got the Napa city interest in mind? It'd be foolish to think that.

So, but yeah, so it just completely goes out of our relevant influence.

We would have to negotiate with them over the things that are important, but yes, that would add a new element of political dynamic of having to interface with another local government and its own independently elected governing body.

So how recent is this House Bill 595 that deals with these districts?

This year. It just passed. So it's relatively new.

So my next question was, we talk about the city manager form of government and how long it's been around. And some people go to it, and then they go back. So we don't have any sort of longevity to have any cities that say, hey, we went to a fire district, and oh my word, it doesn't work. And then, ma'am? I don't know. I've never heard anything from Napa say that their fire district doesn't work.

I sure as hell have. From the city of Napa? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I sent you guys out some numbers on that.

Sure, you sent me the numbers. I saw that.

That's why they're dissatisfied.

Because they say they're costing a lot more. Do we want to move parts of this to the one we have? Yeah. Is that okay? Okay. A lot of good questions, and please feel free to send those into or accumulate those and then have those ready for you.