Remarks by Jeff Baron
127 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 4 of 6
Do they affect, like, so you're the human resources manager. Are you going to get a 4.51% pay raise with pay band, or is that up to brand?
Is it a yes or no question? Like, are you going to, like, are there three people?
I'm only asking because I want to know what's going to happen when I vote on this thing.
But I'm gonna use the police chief as an example. Maybe I should use the building official. I'm gonna use the police chief as an example because he was hired more recently than you. He took his job, and I'm just making this number up, $200,000 a year. He's an at-will employee, unlike our unionized employees. The terms of his employment are he has a contract with the city administrator, with the city, and he accepted a job for $200,000 a year, and regardless of what the pay band was, he accepted the job. And so I think that my view, like I'm wondering why, yeah, I'll save that for comments.…
Yeah, I'll just follow through by, you know, by saying what I, by finishing what my thought was earlier that, you know, our employees have a contract. And you, you know, you sign up for the dollar amount. You negotiate your contract every year or every third year, however it is your contract is written. And it's up to the Atwell employee to figure out to negotiate with their manager or the city acting city administrator. where they are in the salary band and what their market is. And to me, that's how that game works. It's a completely different pay experience than being a union employee.…
Sorry, I'm asking a question. With the caveat that it does not affect contracts other than those that are at the...
OK, so I'll make a motion to adopt resolution. So we're all OK with that before I? Yes. I'll make a motion to adopt resolution 2026-065 approving the fiscal year 2026-2027 compensation and benefit adjustments for at-will employees with the caveat that the raises in this resolution do not automatically raise the salaries of any at-will employees unless the lower end of the new raise pushes up their salary. Second. Roll call please.
Jeff? I'm trying to think if I have any last minute wishes. I have one. An urgency ordinance prohibiting the installation of electrical appliances in the public driveway.
All right so we're only talking there'll be another opportunity to talk about things other than parking yes okay we're just taking one at a time so I'm okay with raising the parking fees so that they are in line the parking penalties so that they are in line with neighboring jurisdictions the the problem I'm having with anything past that is basically the unintended consequences of pushing what is now a downtown parking problem into the residential neighborhoods. And I realize that we pretty much already have that problem, but it seems like fees higher than this are simply going to make that…
You know, my, if, if I were a emperor, I would raise it to 48 and not, and not have it not have it escalate. You know, I, I don't think that You know, it sounds like punishment. You know, the comments from the public and whatnot. It sounds like the idea here is sort of listening. The idea, it seems like there's talk about deterrence and there's talk about punishment. And I think that the talk of punishment really leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I don't think it's our job to punish people. And I don't think that that's a good look. So I can live with the 48, 60, and 80, but I would actually…
I would say so far, but we haven't gotten to the second part of the conversation.
Okay. So this is where I have some, I think, significant issues. there are sort of two paragraphs in this, there are two paragraphs in the city administrator fee waiver authority. The first talks about the, the first talks about, the sort of ability of the city administrator to weigh fees and the second paragraph talks about examples of where the city administrator might use his or her judgment to weigh fees and I'd like to talk I'd like to talk about these in my comments I think would be better understood in the reverse order so I'll talk about the first paragraph first I think that You…
Well I have a procedural question. Can we approve the fee schedule without these two paragraphs? Yes. So it seemed like that's the right thing to do, right? Well, I have some other questions about fees. There's a couple other categories.
I don't have anything to add. I'm okay as in the report.
No. I assume you're starting on this side. Everybody's good with it?
If I've got three, I'm looking one, two, three. Okay, cool. So I guess I'm going to object. You know, we have a process for fees. You know, we have the fee schedule come up every year. We have three months of budget discussions. We have something in writing here, which unfortunately was not put in resolution form, no disrespect to staff, was not put in resolution form. So it needs to come back next month. And now we're gonna bring something back next month and it won't be right because work like this is never right the first try. So we're introducing something into this process that is gonna…
Sure. So staff has presented us with, so first thank you Hans and Bob for all the excellent work you did. Staff has come back and presented us with three options. I definitely have a least favorite option, which is keeping the committee as ad hoc. I think we should either turn it into a standing committee or be finished with the work. I'm a little bit torn. You know, I was I'm kind of struck by this slide that is in this that's in the staff report about the amount of work required to to do this. And, you know, I hear, you know, there's a lot of talk now about KPIs and metrics and stuff. And,…
Jeff? I think standing committees are composed of council members period so I don't think you I don't think you even have the option of including members of the public as members of a standing committee. Brian? Is that true?
The things that are important to me, so on the other boards that I serve on, the standing committees are instantiated by the charter of the board. And they have set meeting times. So, for example, on MST, there's an operations committee and an admin committee, and they meet every other month. Opposite to one another on community human services. There are a number of board committees and they meet every month So I would like to see those I would like to see a structure that's a little bit more formal like that rather than sort of ad hoc if you were and I would like to see that the meetings are…
Yeah, I have a question. So when I look at the bids, when I look at the bids on the packet, I see that the silicon construction, the lowest bidder was $223,000 and change. But I see that the grand total was $303,680.94. And when I look down the list, what I see with wave construction and, in fact, all-star development, is that the grand totals are less than $303,680.94. So I want to make sure I'm understanding this right. So Silicon construction, they were the lowest bidder, but the highest alternate. And so we don't have any choice but to use the lowest bid with the highest alternate, which…
Well, how do we, like, how do we as a council sort of and I don't know how to say this, hold you to that since the grand total here is basically $40,000 more than- It's a fair question. What choices do we have to hold Silicon to, hold you or Silicon to task here?
Is there a way to set the guardrails so that the project doesn't come out to $364,000 when we could clearly do it for $40,000 less using one of the other bidders? Like do we have the mechanism to do that here in this forum? I'm going to look to Brian for that answer.
What have you asked? Well, the issue I'm having is that the base bid on SOCON is $223,000, which is, frankly, only $5,000 less than the price on the bid on wave construction. But their ad alternate is $80,000. And so the ad alternate on wave construction is $40,000. So when you add those two things together, the grand total price of the project under Silcon, which is what staff is saying we are legally obligated to do, is $303,000. And the total price of the base project and the add-on for wave construction is $268,000, so $35,000 less.
So I understand that. So I got that from staff. My question is, was then what can we do about it here? So what I'm inferring is our only two choices are either to accept the Silcon bid for the base and the additive, which makes it $35,000 by the time you have the contingency, $40,000 more. for the total project than it would if we used wave construction. So we've boxed ourselves into the corner by specifying that we would use the base bid and not the base plus the add-on if we wanted. Or we can just do the base bid with silicon and cause staff, you know, ask staff to scramble to do the…
Can we require staff to negotiate down as part of this resolution? We shouldn't. Can we require staff to negotiate down the price of the ad alternate with SOCOM to something close to the ad alternate of Wave or just or say either you negotiate it down to $40,000 or $50,000 or you just scrap it altogether?