Public - workshop

Hello. Welcome to the pre-budget workshop number four for July 9th at 1 p.m. We're going to start out with an opening prayer led by City Attorney Nevin Zimmerman, elder of First Presbyterian Church, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance led by Commissioner Jostry. Please rise.

Thank you so much city manager. How is you are up?

uh whether it be signage which we just did some public parking signs earlier this afternoon that's what we're here for we're here completely to support the city okay any questions from anyone yes i do sure okay so when you said that um in the it division which does a great job does it does pd have their own it PD has a staff, a smaller staff for IT. So potentially the numbers you gave us of other cities incorporate their staffing of all the, so when you say like information technology, I was wondering how many other departments have IT people? Those are the only two. Okay.

Why doesn't this IT department manage PD's IT? Has that ever been had a conversation?

Fleet management. Usually a lot of times you see logistics managing fleets for an organization. Does each department manage their own fleet?

So, Sean, that's one question that I had was, you know recently we had a question that came up is like why do we have so many different kinds of vehicles like we've got nissan trucks we've got these kind of things is like there is there a standard format or is everybody just doing their own procurement on what kind of vehicle that they want to drive or do we have a standard issue you know city vehicle procurement method. When I say fleet, I'm not talking about equipment. I'm talking about specifically vehicles.

to Sean's what Sean just pointed out is the exact reason why is these guys have got tire sets they've got things like that that they keep in standard equipment maintenance well if you have you know 15 different types of vehicles well that means they have to keep 15 different types apart so what I would like to say just so we communicate based upon what you've said so far what I can hear is maybe there's a way to combine IT services between the two as well as a standardized fleet approach would be something that I would be interested in seeing.

Well, certainly someone who's going, and all of our suggestions are all just going, hey, what about this? We don't know. We don't run those departments. But I'd love to see someone on staff who's going, you know what? We could share a car between departments. That's right.

Okay. So how you would handle this in just typical corporate world, you have vehicles, you have some that sit for a long period of time. Rather than charging an entire vehicle department, go on a mileage basis. There's other ways to handle that other than having to sign an entire vehicle to a department that sits four days out of five days a week. um what what i'm seeing and this is just me from multiple years i'm seeing our leasing continue to increase as we've replaced our fleet and it's be and while you can drive by city hall at any point in time you can see a ton of vehicles just sitting t

Yeah, the reality with any equipment at any organization is you don't want it sitting around a tire factory, a water bottle factory. You want that machine that's moving.

So your next probably biggest, if I put the city in categories of expenses, personnel's obviously number one, you spend more on people than you do anything else, which people are your most valuable resource. So I don't have an issue with that. Second may be buildings. And third is probably vehicles. Like that is, if we talk about the big numbers of what you're spending money on, that is probably millions of dollars every year and standardizing it, consolidating it into one purchasing spot and, and tracking it, assigning it out based upon usage rather than just department, we should see that nu

I would err on the side of being, you mentioned having enough vehicles that if we just absolutely needed all of them. I would lean on the 80% rule because we all drive vehicles to get here. And worst case scenario is... Jonathan drives his awesome Ford Ranger to wherever he needs to. That's okay. But to plan on the most catastrophic issue to happen, that's actually the opposite. I would say go conservative and plan for daily and normal use as well.

I think what all you're hearing, Sean, is implementing the same type of system that exists in private and private market. The way that it's currently operating is not a normal way of, in private work, to implement a vehicle policy. And I think... I think what you're hearing today is I think you're hearing a majority support for creating some type of consolidated vehicle purchasing thing that reflects more along the lines of standardizing vehicles, putting it into some type of purchasing piece. You'll have a much easier time asking your commission for replacing vehicles when we can look and we

No, I have a question. On vehicles? Yes.

So actually, it's a little bit broader than vehicles, but it's come up in this discussion of vehicles. What's the difference, having cited your experience in the private world and in government, what's the difference between operating as a government municipality, and operating as a private enterprise when it comes to, for instance, fleets?

So, so Sean, I think, I think one of the things that you're alluding to is like in those emergency situation, pipe breaks, those kinds of things, you know, one of the things that had been very successful, both fire and PD is mutual aid agreements. I mean, we're not the only ones that have sewer lines. We're not the only ones that have water lines. And I think what you're. hearing now and the discussion is broadening is how do we work better together with our neighbors like there used to be a time if you need a cup of sugar you just walk next door to ask it for your neighbor and essentially tha

That's just the way it was. That's just a natural thing. Well, I think to Commissioner Lucas' point, what's the difference between private market and government? Government's a monopoly. There is no competition. So we're not in competition with our neighbor. We're not in competition. if i wanted to ask another plumbing company to borrow their truck to go do a job they probably would say no if i was a plumber but in our case yes if there's if they're going through a similar emergency they don't have something of course they're going to say no they've got to take care of the citizens they repres

Okay. Is why is just curious, why is signs and marking division not in public works?

We did just pay for all the downtown signs to be installed by someone like a CRS company.

That's all I'm asking. So I think what you're hearing, too, is a willingness of, you mentioned, just broadly, it's so hard being up here, because when you talk about department, it's like, we're not trying to shame anybody's department. But what we're trying to explain is a willingness that you can come back to us and say, OK, well, we're going to reduce the cost of this thing. And you might not get the sign installed within 20 minutes of it being knocked down. We might have to wait 12 hours. Is that acceptable? And then we take the heat for that level of service to the customer. So we go, it

And they're not. And one of the things that might be helpful to what Robbie's asking for is, You know, regardless of where someone works in the organization, HR supports whoever they are. So their HR costs are over that employee. Same thing with supervision. Essentially, the city manager's salary is divided over every employee in the entire organization. So maybe we could just come up with a calculation that is the average cost of an employee at the city and utilize that as a benchmark for what we're talking about now. And at least you would be able to see, hey, look, you as an organization, t

does that sound like a reasonable approach so help me understand what you're asking for the employee not just the salary but the additional costs associated with that yeah so you would be asking me to calculate the entire overhead for an employee

What I would say is taking all payroll into account, all benefits, all departments everywhere, and extrapolating that out by dividing by 500 and whatever amount of employees, and you come out with an hourly rate associated with employees across the board. And to what Robbie is asking is... I'm trying to figure out what it costs us for that truck to sit there. If a deployee... There can be times that it's going to be more of that if it's a department head that's driving a vehicle.

So if I'm understanding it, we want to understand the cost of vehicles.

That's one thing. Well, I think how I would ask the question I think might allude to how many vehicles do we have as a city? It taught across every department, including PD. PD's got 150. So let's say every one of them.

And that doesn't include the fire department either, right? No, that does include the fire department.

It does? Okay. So that's facility maintenance, that's trash, that's everything. Right. Okay. All right. So you've got 500-something employees and you've got 300-something vehicles. There's obviously, you know, that seems excessive. It seems excessive.

if we couldn't do that then that i wouldn't be able to meet the services and requirements that that's on us for the city okay so go ahead i was just going to say so what i'm hearing is a concern about the number of vehicles that we have what the real cost of operating those vehicles are when and then how much idle time or outliers do we have and so That's what we want to know. And then where could we save money by slimming the fleet?

I guess it's how we distribute newsletters and internal things.

not just the wow lines we're doing that with the verizon lines as well any land line that's sitting there if you have a phone a cell phone why do you need both and we're just checking with the directors that's their discretion yeah my question my question on these was just you know can we not do we're just the receptionist and each i mean we've got like five or six maybe ten receptionists in city hall that they can have a landline and everybody else just goes to their cell phone because i think

One of the things you give up is not having the continuity of a city phone number where the system now goes, I just quit the city. It doesn't ring back to the city.

Well, I have two phone numbers, one a city number and one an east number. That's another thing that we can do. Yeah, it's just a willingness to explore all options and we're trusting everyone's doing that.

We would discuss the tradeoffs of decisions.

Awesome. I have a hard stop before 3 o'clock. I did not realize this meeting was supposed to go to 5, and we are down a commissioner. Do we want to keep going with departments, or do we want to go one more and then reschedule, or what would you like to do?

I think each one of them are taking a little longer than we are.

in order to do that so i mean i i think everyone's seeing i mean i plan on us giving you guys some pretty definitive feedback at least i plan on and i was going to send y'all something like y'all did i wanted to wait till after this and i was planning on doing that and i told alan that i'd like to

I think given the situation that we're in currently, I do think that we need to be direct on what the expectation is on the overall budget number so that they know exactly what they're shooting for as far as in their proposals. Because, Sean, this is based upon what percentage cut?

So this is included in your $2 million model? Yes. This one is.

where we're going next year then we can finalize the budgets and present something to you guys so you did hang on you did present the four and a half that was in the one big night when i went through that whole presentation yeah we've done the four and a half previously and again it's about a three hundred thousand dollar difference than what i presented today so the department presentations uh commissioner hughes i believe you wanted to hear directly from the department yes what what they would cut without having the senior management make more cuts exactly so that's what you presented today Correct. And then prior to that, we got the cuts.

But I do have to ask my colleagues, how do we think we can get the $4.5 million, Commissioner Street, I know you've looked at it, how can we get that without touching any personnel? When personnel is, what, 70% of the entire budget?

Yeah, so my thought is... one one today even in our conversation with with sean's department which you guys do a fantastic job sean so i mean this is like your stellar department you guys have found savings every single year this is no this is no different um the the point in making the cut further than what you have to is because we do not have reserves we have no we have no safety net that's one

Are your varying opinions, and you've said we have money we can access in the event of an emergency, even though it's not in the pot call reserve, so we're not broke?

And so far we've not presented a, no one's presented the actual bringing over environmental services and designated for reserves. It's still sitting environmental services. So until someone shows that.

Yes, because that's what I've been told. In the event of an emergency, we can access those funds. They're just sitting in a different pot.

and why are they sitting in a different pot yeah and that that that's my point is like present a budget that accomplishes that and then we can have that conversation so but the point is not in making the cuts the point is that and and what we get to in this conversation and it doesn't matter what department what what it matters is like there is a tendency to go to cut things that necessarily we're not wanting to cut but there's a protection on things that necessarily like I don't really care how many landlines there are in the city. I want to know that somebody's phone gets answered. If that's

I think the conversation that I was hoping we would have would be discussing the trade-offs of potential reductions of revenue and budget. I probably have 20 people that do marketing for me and they'll come back to me really stressed out and they'll say, we have so much stuff to do. You've given us so much things to do. And I'll say, okay, my job is to tell you the top three priorities, but you should always, if you ever ran out of things to work on, that's when you worry about your job. Even with the signs, I'm going to pick on the signs. That is a trade-off of saying, hey, well, we can't do

And I'm picking on the sign department. That's just a little tiny. The frustrating part up here is when we get paraded as sacred calves, you want to take all these people, officers off the streets. And we're like, no, we don't. We want to get rid of all airlines. We want to get. We're in some cars that are sitting over here. We're not trying to get rid of all these people. And then every suggestion is a dead end. We're like, we can't do that. And you're like, well, we're not trying to.

So this is what we're kind of setting up to ahead here. I'm just gonna say I'd like to meet with you. So so um what you just said um why I'm a proponent of making as deep a cuts as we can because it gives us the flexibility to backfill. So if I'm presented with a budget that has us cutting 16 officers, well, guess what? Like the $300,000, Sean, I love you to death, I love what you guys do, but I'm gonna fund public safety first. And the same thing goes with anybody. and i i think that's the piece where it's like we only have so many tools in our tool chest of we can we can be presented a budge

It's based on policy. It's 16.7%. My expectation is not that's fulfilled in year one. My expectation is that we have a plan. And I've said this, I think multiple of us have, a five-year plan, a three-year plan. So what you guys are probably solving for is a balanced budget. That's what you guys are solving for. Why? Because you're required to by statute to do that. In my realm, as I'm looking at public works, I'm saying, well, we've got to have money to do capital projects once we're done with all this stuff. We've got to have money that we can go replace park equipment when it's broken. We've

hey we want you to have a conversation they're requiring a conversation and being up here you know robbie's trying his hardest to point out like hey maybe we have one copier per floor and and we just seem silly up here but we're trying our best to just be like hey we're trying to help you guys i think that's what it kind of feels like like it may think like it's adversarial

But it goes into some of our conversation at First Bridge Workshop. Sure, let's say we all agreed to raise taxes. Well, guess what? Every one of our citizens is going to vote to reduce their taxes on a ballot amendment that is going to require that and probably replace all of us. As well. With people who want to burn the place down. With people that are going to be like, let's cut everything by 15% this year.

But in fairness to everyone in this room, What we have not been clear on as a commission is what budget number we're asking you to do. That's one of the things is why I said, hey, next week when we meet, we need to give you guys clear direction on this is your goal. No more moving based upon projections or whatever those things like we need to give you an actual defined goal. Otherwise, you guys are just presenting us stuff and I don't think that's fair. Now, more money's there, things end up better, economy grows, whatever happens, we can always backfill. But we can't really, well, we could,

I think you guys are getting that. You don't need to start with thousands. I think it's a great question, Samantha. But I feel like that's exactly what I'm saying when I'm saying, hey, don't really care about Microsoft Office. Hey, don't really care about lines. Don't really care. I feel like that's what works. Now, if there's something else that needs to be communicated, I'm I mean, I think I've found myself pretty willing to say pretty much anything at this point.

And I've yet to see a budgetary meeting where there's another city or county where the elected officials go, you cut and this and your percentage of that. That's typically not how that happens. It typically happens to the staff bringing recommendations of what they do because we have no purview into these departments and we have no authority and we don't know how to run them. And so I think that is poor leadership from the city manager's office of that approach, and it should be coming from this office to us of their recommendations. I'm in favor of what Josh is pushing. I think the exercise o

That doesn't sound like a lot of money. To me, each department says, hey, we can do virtual passes to conferences and watch the sessions.

And I think to Robbie's point, this is a really complex organization. We have a CNG station, and everything we point out, people up here, we go, what about this thing? And we're like, well, other cities don't have a CNG. And so we just start picking on departments because we're like, what about this? And so this is a very complex organization for a size city that we are. We are in the complexity of like Pensacola, which is like four times the revenue. We don't have the personnel to do all these things. And so we just have things that we suspect should be removed and planned. And we just get dead in rows every time we suggest something. So we, again, are relying on this staff to scrutinize themselves internally and bring back us recommendations. That's what I

Yeah, I mean, you do go from a priority perspective, and what I saw in the first $4.5 million cut was a lot of public safety, and You know, am I willing to extend the lifespan of a vehicle? Sure. Like, I mean, I think that's a way that PD could tighten up. Am I willing to let go of officers that could put our people at risk in public safety? No, I'm not. So I'd like... that's kind of how i view it is is look like there's a lot of other things i would do before that i'd be looking at the entire team and saying hey guys we can't do any coal arrays this year because we got to make sure that we ke

from the department. Some departments have given us their presentation with A, B, C. Others may have given us a presentation with D and B and F and how they get to the numbers. If we had the same approach from every department of how we get to the numbers. There is an appetite for the $4.5 million cut at this time, which I do not share. I would say let's cut for two and let's continue this strategic process and not wait until another December, January and start it all over again. We can't get there in one year, but we need to get there. Hearing the sentiment that compared to Pensacola or compa

And I have to run. I've got to zip out of here. I have to be somewhere at 3 o'clock. My bad. Keep going. I will watch the video.

So I guess we're going to do development services, and then we'll kind of call it.

Well, I do point on trying to give you guys some further instruction. We can find another time. All right, Mr. Fuller. Ready?

I'm sorry. Would that reduce our permit fees? If we did. Yeah. So like savings in your department specifically, isn't it regulated by statute? So if you end up having savings, you got to reduce your fees. That's right. It doesn't really change anything budgetarily. It just means, are we, are we spending more than what we're, we're doing in permit fees? Okay. So if we find ways of savings, just making it cheaper to develop, we're making it cheaper for exactly.

Explain the public record request. Why is this team getting an exorbitant amount of public record requests?

Is that your entire team doing that, Michael?

Could it be like something that we look to combine with clerk responsibilities? That's right.

Do you need your desk phone? No, you can give it away. Take it, please.

I think what my only question to you, so like out of everything that is not covered by permit fees and the work that your team does for specifically development, how much is left of your department budget beyond that? And I know planners aren't part of that, like those kinds of things. Like what are you asking for? That's ultimately compensated through permit fees. And what are you asking for? That's not compensated by some other revenue source.

We had this conversation, Nevin and I did, the other day. There's some that we hang out there for years at a time. There needs to be some type of standardized formula, like 60 days, 90 days. otherwise we're just giving an interest-free loan to somebody so we need to kind of tighten that up to where there's some type of standard if they've got a lien we go through that because right now we're going through the posted abatement and it's going on the tax rolls definitely doesn't need to carry over year for year um because that just that doesn't help anybody yeah so And we're not talking about a l

Mr. Fuller, is the city growing? Yes. And describe that growth. Is it manageable? Is it profitable? Describe this growth of the city of Panama City. I wouldn't say it's profitable.

And your department is responsible for the growth within the geography of Panama City proper and North Panama City. And what I'm understanding from this conversation as well as from my experience in this role is that you have increased customer service, decreased problems, and have streamlined the growth process such that it is not the pain that it once was. So thank you. Thank you.

I echo those comments. I think you've done a fantastic job, Michael, under your leadership. You talked about software. I'm kind of with you on that one. Like, it doesn't sound very exciting. So there's an aspect of it that might be monetarily, but there's also an aspect of we have to go and retrain everybody. And it's just now gotten to the point where I'm like, I don't get phone calls every five seconds. So I appreciate the iteration, but it might be that, you know, movement that like... 80% effort that might only get us like five more percent in satisfaction, at least for this year.

yeah y'all know it yeah so it's all coming together so i think that's a good idea to let's let's keep that going for right now at least yeah and i remember what it was like with before cloud permit and it is light years better light years better yeah um but i do say like i want to know more about the software so that we know kind of like hey like if we end up in a spot where we need to make that investment to just improve it that much more that we that we can okay yeah we'll do All right, any other questions? All right, any other comments? It's a workshop. That's it.

Okay. All right. Well, thank you everybody for being here. Thank you. Departments for your patience, your ever your long suffering as I would call it. And, um, and we, uh, we'll see everybody soon.

Do we need to vote to dismiss or are we good?