Remarks by Hans Buder
91 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 2 of 4
Okay. Okay, slightly different direction. So tell me about the 0% COLA. So because we obviously want to be treating our employees fairly, and when you hear the 0% COLA, it sounds a little harsh, honestly, but employees are actually getting a 3% increase in take-home pay. Can you just explain that a little bit more to folks? Sure.
Okay. And so to make that concrete, like say I'm an employee of the city and I'm getting $100,000 in take-home pay. Does that mean that with this arrangement, my take-home pay would go up to $103,000?
OK. All right. And then just maybe a little granular, but there's a couple, I was looking in the salary study, it strikes me if I was if I was an at-will employee, I would be very interested in what positions are selected for this comp study because it like directly, if we're saying you're gonna be at Market Media and here are these seven, it's really six, right? Cause we're one of the seven. I'm trying to see where it is on here.
But so go back to the one where we were looking at, maybe not even be on here. Is the finance director one on here somewhere?
So what I noticed that was interesting about this one is on this one, the comp study includes, like, three assistant finance directors and accounting services manager.
and only two like full on finance directors aside from us.
But then if I go to like go to the assistant city administrator one, these are all like assistant city administrators, right? So I get the argument is like, and something similar like on the police chief, for example, I get the argument that like maybe finances are not as complicated in Carmel as they are in some other slightly larger city, but presumably like, the public works, or sorry, the police chief's responsibilities are slightly less complicated and the assistant city administrator's position is slightly less complicated. So I would just be interested in making sure that it's truly…
I hear what you're saying, and this is not supposed to be a comment period. I'll just say, like, I'm skeptical. Like, if you thought about what the assistant city administrator is handling or what the – again, there's a number in here where it's, like, the exact same role, and then there's some where it's, like, an assistant. And I'm just kind of skeptical about the logic carrying over across those categories.
One thought I had was that we want to give some thought to eliminating these pay bans. So apparently this is something that, like, these folks just kind of inherited, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to tether, for example, like the police chief and the assistant city administrators' salaries together. They're like two totally different labor markets. Similarly, I think the public works director and the community planning and building directors salaries are tethered together. Again, it could be two very totally different labor markets. And if our salary philosophy is to be a market…
I think it's kind of the same thing, really.
Well, sorry, I just cranked my neck. If we, if these pay bands didn't exist though, right, there would only be two market equity adjustments, right? Not three?
Hi, Chief. Hey. Mine's about parking too. Okay. So if, this is about if you spend over two hours in a spot, the fees. Right. maybe it's not categorized legally as a fee, but if somebody parks like in front of someone's driveway, for example, can you tell us maybe that's a fine? I don't know if the legal difference, but how much are those charges?
Okay, and that's, just to be clear, maybe I should ask you, is that set through this fee schedule or is it a separate?
Yeah, I just bring it up. I had a couple residents reach out and they were like, hey, I just wanna make sure there's a strong financial deterrent to that type of parking behavior.
I'll just tell you, I just got a $128 ticket from the wonderful city of Monterey. So I don't know, I don't know exactly what I did, but it was for parking on Garden Road.
Do you want a fee schedule? Do you want to segment that?
So when I was a middle school teacher in Teach for America for two years, I found that... bringing the hammer down was generally a good way to change behavior. And so on this one, I think that we need to raise the parking charges. I think there's certain parts of town where somebody would just park and it's, you know, kind of on par with what you'd pay for a day's parking, you know, on cannery row, or if you go to the beach boardwalk. And so I'm for hire on the first offense, I could even go up above the state average. You know, I think I'd be at like somewhere like 80. I do agree with a…
Yeah, I will just say I'm not interested in punishing anybody, but I am never going to over park on Garden Road ever again. And so that's what I'm trying to do. So I will go as high as you will let me go.
Yeah. I I am not a, not a fan of how it's drafted. I didn't expect that there would be so much agreement on that score actually, but I think that it's pretty broad in terms of the language pretty broad discretionary power there. And so I would much prefer to have to us go through the work of having like a defined list, like Jeff mentioned And so, yeah, that's my preference is to have a defined list, so.
And I think we could potentially take the lead on it. I don't view it as a fee waiver, per se. I think it actually is just you could lower them, you could eliminate them. I feel like it's kind of our prerogative. I remember asking you about this. I've actually been interested in this for a while. I can't remember if I asked you or Chip, but somebody gave me a dollar amount of how much it would actually cost. That must have been chipped, but that's something we could easily pull together.
So it's not trivial, especially given our budget situation.
and move on yes all right Hans you want to go to number three simplified descriptions oh simplified descriptions including legal costs as a heading oh the legal costs yeah so the only concern I have with this is You're basically, if I'm doing a home renovation or I'm building a house, I'm essentially giving the city a blank check, right? And they're just going to charge me whatever it costs them. And there's something along the lines of like what you do in insurance, where you have like a deductible, thinking from the perspective of the insurer, you know, is there some element to which the…
Yes, you can. Is it the same you know 800 ish whether somebody's like building a new house and they're putting in brand new landscaping over the whole thing is there any is there another tier or is that that's it no matter what you're doing I don't know immediately off the top of my head I'd have to scroll through the the fee schedule I think that's it Cause I'm, this is one of those where I I'm with Dale. Like I, I completely agree whenever we can add tiers, because what ends up happening is you have a lot of people building a brand new house, scraping the whole lot takes a lot of staff…
I'm sorry. If you're going to come back with this, do you want to take a stab at like a tiered landscape plan check option that we could do if we wanted to?
I'm just thinking, do you think this one's gonna be a long one? Do you think we can get through the next little one or do you? Financial? That's totally up to you. What's next? Financial stewardship. It's fast for me.