Remarks by Erik Altmann
304 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 12 of 13
“sorry about that no not at all further questions we hadn't talked in a while we hadn't and these are excellent questions and i made a bunch of notes in response to this conversation so i'm going to go on for a long time too maybe not that long mr meadows so um well let me let me start with your last comment i get an unredacted report”
“Further questions, Council Member Singh?”
“Other comments? So I have a couple of questions. You see, Kraft, you mentioned 27 stops, 11 citations, I think, for noise. Were those just in the downtown or were those throughout the city? Throughout the city. Throughout the city. So there was a media report earlier that suggested there had only been four stops or two stops or something and then everybody...”
“No, it's on people's minds. I'm on the lookout for others who may be listening. I'm on the lookout to get people's impressions because people's impressions are important because that reflects what they're bothered by, right? And my impression in the past few months is that it's been a little quieter. It's been improved, but it's not solved by any means. And I'm getting emails from people saying, for example, I got an email from someone who lives close to Michigan Avenue who said last Friday was probably the loudest Friday on record down there. So there are other, you know, it continues to be…”
“So it's always on, but you're throwing away the old stuff.”
“Except you go back two minutes. When it's activated, yeah. When it's activated. Correct. And so that way you capture the lead up to the incident. Exactly. Essentially. Okay. I just wanted to make sure we all sort of understood that. That's a neat feature. AC Creft, you mentioned the In response to Mayor Pro Tem's question, you were working on new ways to direct complaints that were more centralized. Could you say a little bit more about that? Does that have to do with dispatch?”
“Yeah, my hunch is that when you start tracking those complaints, they're going to add up real quick, and it's going to be pretty impressive how much response you engage in.”
“A couple of questions about flock. It sounds like, so you've got an internal policy that sounds like it's similar to the policy to the law on lean access, which is basically there has to be a purpose and you get in trouble if you do not ignore that. Are those comparable? Is the internal policy for flock similar to the law for lean access?”
“OK, that's helpful. Thank you. The other question I had about flock was you mentioned that when officers get a lead, the fact that the source was flock is not documented in your reports, right? So it's a little hard to make them searchable.”
“So the context for my question is, if there is a way to quantitatively document the value of the system, that would be helpful. That's purely the context for the question. So it sounds like it's maybe not as easy as it could be, because there's no checkbox to tick off. But if there are other ways to say, we got so many leads from this system, and so many paid off, or so many didn't, which is fine.”
“I mean, those examples are helpful. And all I'm saying is the more of those, the better. And so I think that the data we heard, well, there were only 200 searches. Well, from my perspective, 200 searches is a lot of searches. You're using that tool for good reasons. And that's a lot of use. And that says to me that it's useful. But if there are other ways to I don't want to create more work for people, right? The last thing we want to do is create more bookkeeping tasks. But if there is a way to track some of these things so that we have more of these sorts of examples so that we can evaluate…”
“And then on that subject, so I've spent a fair bit of time downtown after hours on busy days and I've learned a lot by doing that and one of the things I've been really surprised by, this has happened multiple times, where people who are down there, down there to have a good time, they come up to one of your offices and say, How do I apply for a job with the LPD? I've seen that multiple times. And then the officer has a conversation with them about, well, here's what you've got to do to apply. So I think that's just interesting. People come up late at night with an interest in joining the…”
“So, yep, we source people from everywhere, everywhere we can. Yeah, well, and thanks also for your efforts on the recruiting front. And then I guess my last question is my impression having spent time downtown, sort of welcome weekend, a couple of nights, and then the game day after that, and then 80s night, one of the impressions that I have and also the time that I spent down there last fall is that a lot of the officers spend a lot of time in our downtown. That's sort of my impression after hours. And we have to figure out how to portion those costs appropriately because people also want…”
Not quoted here: it may name a member of the public. Hear it at the meeting.
“Any further comments? Any closing comments from the team? Thank you for your preparation. And again, I want to thank my colleagues for their questions. I think this was a lengthy conversation, but it was really important. So appreciate your being here. And so my last question on this agenda item is actually for my colleagues. So we have, it has been four months since we had our last update because that was our most recent discussionally meeting. We previously were getting these updates monthly. I found this more substantive update after a longer period of time to be very helpful. And I was…”
“So that was going to be my suggestion. Do people have thoughts about this?”
“That was going to be my suggestion. So that if someone, if there is a special circumstance or someone has a particular question, um, that they want to address, then we can treat that the way we treat other deal meeting agenda items, which is anybody can ask for an item on, on the agenda. Council member Singh.”
“So maybe sooner than four months, maybe three months is good.”
“Okay. So I think that gives our staff some direction about where we go next. All right. Thank you. Thank you all.”
“Yep. OK, so I think we got a plan for that. So that brings us to the presentation of the city's wet weather resiliency program. We are three hours in. Does anybody? Any one of us or any one of our audience need a break? Or do we want to keep going? Okay, let's invite Cliff Walls and our HDR staff and thank you for your patience. We have a whole team here who have been working for over two years I believe now on this. study and I think we're all looking forward to some important and potentially expensive updates.”
“So one of the good things I think I'm hearing is that there's pretty strong support for action from the council on this issue. People seem to treat this as essentially an existential issue, and it is, right? So a couple of reactions. In line with the scale of the whole project, I'm trying to... $309 million is enough zeros that you start losing track a little bit. So I tried to come up with a couple of numbers to give people a picture of where this fits. So our entire budget, including all enterprise funds, not just the general fund, but all enterprise funds, is about $150 million annually.…”
“Just to echo, so, you know, the reward for great work is more work, right? And so you've done great work and now it kind of sounds like we need to become famous for this study some way, right? At a policy level because no one else has done this and if we don't leverage it, then It's sort of a lost opportunity in some way. I don't know if that's feasible, but that's kind of what I'm thinking. Because a lot of people don't know this stuff, right? A couple of years ago, I made some flip comment about how solving these problems is going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Well, okay, turns…”
“Yeah, that's what's the cost of doing nothing. So my last comment is this is a generational project, right? This is like a longitudinal study that's going to spend 50 years and the problem with those studies is the management across the years. My question is, what are we doing so that in 10 years and 20 years, the model is still active and the results are still active and everybody who's here knows what to do with it because it's going to be guiding our decisions for a long time. It seems like that's got to be part of the project.”
“but also succession planning. We talk a lot about that, but here's a case where if we want this to continue to be useful, we have to plan to make sure that it stays useful.”
“That's right, and keep everybody active and engaged in it. Last thing that I wanted to do, we've talked a lot about the stormwater utility, and we did budget for a feasibility study, and so I wanted to ask the city manager to give us an update on sort of where we are with that.”