Public - workshop

All right. I'm calling to order the pre-budget workshop number three for June 29th at 4.30 p.m. We're going to start out with an opening prayer by city attorney Nevin Zimmerman, elder, First Presbyterian Church. Oh, I know. Followed by the Pledge of Allegiance led by Commissioner Brian Granger. Please rise.

Let us pray. Father, we're just so thankful for today. Thank you for this time of doing the business of the public and through their representatives. And we're so grateful that we do live in a country that enables and allows us as citizens to elect our own representatives. They're accountable. to the public. Thank you for this day and pray for wise decisions in the future. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Thank you, Nevin. You'll join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Please call the roll.

Commissioner Hughes?

Here.

Commissioner Lucas? Present. Commissioner Granger?

Present.

Commissioner Street?

Here.

Mayor Branch?

Present.

All right. Mayor, you have a quorum.

Awesome. Yep. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, commissioners. As the mayor announced, we have our pre-budget planning and priorities workshop number three this evening. At the June 11th pre-budget and priorities workshop number two, the city commission asked to hear directly from our directors and our chiefs. We split up department presentations into two meetings. Workshop number four is scheduled for July 9, which would be next Thursday. Following the presentations by the staff this afternoon, there will be an opportunity to ask questions and to provide direction on the budget at each of our workshops. Tonight, next slide, tonight we'll cover the following departments in this presentation. Human resources, parks, culture, and recreation, public works, specifically the engineering and the streets and drainage division, which were paid for out of the general fund, and then our fire department, and then our police department. So at this time, I will turn it over to Ms. Vicki Lewis, our director of human resources.

Good evening. So I first, I know it's a budget workshop, but I'd like to start off a little bit by talking about kind of what we do in human resources and risk management team and kind of give you a little bit of information. The first thing I would say is our city of Panama City Human Resources Department is all about people. That's the first thing. You know, I'd like to share my thoughts on the collaborative process that we have here as leaders and the quality of these people. I think it's a really fine group of leaders, and I think you'll find that we've worked together, and I've had the pleasure of working with this particular group for, as Jonathan says, decades and decades and decades of human resources.

Only one decade in there.

But with this group, it is something that we do not function in a vacuum. We really genuinely work together every single day. And it's our desire to keep each other in the loop and our desire to collaborate, and I think we do it quite well. We lean across departments often, and we work together. In the Human Resources Department, we are a full-service Human Resources Department. Some places I've worked, the desire has been to hand out phone numbers, to tell people to call someone else, but I would say in our team, we certainly provide a full service. We want to help people across the board, and we don't know what battle they're kind of fighting each day, and so we realize that as we work with them. Our job is to help them and work together across the board. So internal and external customer service. I firmly believe that if we expect excellent customer service from our folks paving our streets, working in our parks department, giving out permits, if we expect excellent customer service, our internal divisions have to give them excellent customer service. Because if they're busy worried about the bills they haven't figured out how to pay, if they're busy worried about getting their kids on their health insurance, their mind is not on what they're working on every single day. I believe we're a resource for humans. And I think sometimes HR departments forget that, but I think here at the City of Panama City, we haven't forgotten that. It is about the people that we work with, whether they're internal or external customers, every single day. From a culture perspective, I would say, you know, we set the tone for the culture here at the City. It doesn't mean we're the only ones to set the tone, but I believe we certainly do. I don't think that any of us believe that culture is not important. I think we know that culture really drives action, and I think it's what we stand for. I think we have to hold each other accountable, and we have to support that culture, and we have to interact every single day. I'm going to quote Jonathan's phrase he's got in his office. Culture eats mission and vision every day. And I think it says for breakfast or something like that. I think it's every meal. But I do believe culture is very critical. A lasting impact. I think that's the other thing we do for our folks. People remember how their employers treat them. And I think that's important to make a lasting impact in our folks' lives every single day. Because if we can impact them, they can impact others. If we don't help them every single day, they're not going to be able to help others. Jerry, can I get the next slide, please? Benefits. I think it's important that we explain our benefits to our team members. It's not relevant to have a benefit if people don't know about it. We help our folks with their best days and their worst days. In any given day, and I can use the example of the last couple weeks, we may talk to someone that has a sick child, a brand new set of twins, and somebody that lost the love of their life all within two hours. And I think we have to be there for those folks, helping them find care, helping them get care, helping them navigate when a doctor says, well, I can't find anybody to help you with whatever it may be. That's our role and our job so that they can get back to the things that they do. If we're waiting on HR to go pave a road, it's going to be a really ugly road. But if we're waiting on HR to help somebody with their insurance, with their kids, with the challenges they have, we're there to help for those things. I think we also build and execute wellness programs exceptionally well. This not only is the right thing to do, but it does save us money. Whether it's through walking programs like you see above there, where we had a 5K, whether it's health screenings, those things matter to our team members. They also matter financially because it does have an impact. I think educating our team members with financial advisor access at no cost, education classes, health assessments, webinars, just any other opportunity does improve the quality of our folks, and it does improve the economic outcomes for those folks. We also serve our retirees by helping them with health insurance, retirement health insurance, retirement insurance, and life insurance questions under Florida statute. Candidly, we have to offer some of those things to our team members. We have to offer the health insurance and the life insurance, but the reality is it's just the right thing to do too. So we spend a lot of time working with our retirees on a regular basis. A side note is we also support Panama City Port with their health insurance. Due to the similar nature of our funding stream, it makes a lot of sense, at least at this point in time, for us to help them too. Jared, safety. The next slide we have here talks about our safety. One of the things I'm most proud of in the last 12 months is we have started offering our own MOT training. That's maintenance of traffic training. We were previously spending between $2,200 and $2,500 per class to offer this. We trained our own in-house person for $2,400 per year, and then we spent an extra $20 per person to get that certification. Not only are we training more people, we're training them more cost effectively, And candidly, they're getting better training. I'm seeing our folks learn and apply the knowledge they have in that class. So definitely a huge win for us, and I'm really excited that we've been able to accomplish that. We also collaborate and cooperate with our fire team, and our fire team helps us with CPR and first aid training. It's important to have our folks, especially our folks at MLK, are all trained in CPR and first aid, and we do that at a very, very decent cost of roughly $25 per person because we collaborate with fire, and they're able to teach those classes. OSHA training is an attempt to decrease our accidents. We're doing OSHA 30 training for our foremen and above, OSHA 10 training for our rank and file team members. The goal, again, is to prevent accidents. Having one accident that's a major accident, all of the training in the world is going to be well worth preventing that one accident. We also have safety committees. We have three safety committee meeting committee meetings per month, our central, our supervisors and our employee safety committee meeting. Each of them has a different purpose, but they certainly go hand in hand to figure out what are we going to support collectively? And what are the challenges our rank and file team members face every single day? And how do we solve for those? Relationship building. We work with our carriers to get the best rates we can get every single day. We have a carrier and we have an agent, and we leverage our safety programs. We currently are getting a $75,000 discount on our workers' compensation because we are progressive on safety, because we have safety committee meetings, because we walk and we talk safety culture. Prevention. We never know the accidents that we prevent, but we are preventing them every day, and I'm confident of that. I'm confident of that because I hear about the near misses, and I'm confident because we are training our folks, and I do believe training matters. Additional services the human resources team provides. We do recruiting. We find the best team members we can every day for the city. That means we process over 3,000 applications in a given year. Doesn't mean we hire 3,000 people. But we weed through those, we evaluate those, and we provide our leaders with the best pool of candidates we can. That sometimes means we're a little bit short on staffing. We're short in environmental services right now. We know that. but the reality is we're reading through those candidates, so Clint's team spends a little less time vetting through applicants that are not qualified. The stuff we have to do just because it's part of life, EEOC claims, litigation compliance, civil service, we work with other departments on all of those. We work with our legal team to make certain that we protect ourselves from a litigation perspective, and when those things happen, that we defend the city, and we process those in a timely fashion. We're also a resource to other leaders. So we continue to plan, evaluate for emergencies, to discuss improving our performance, and to work to figure out the best paths to prevent problems to arise, whether it's accidents, litigation, whatever it may be. And the last thing everybody's favorite is our public records compliance. Like every other department in the city, we get a decent amount of public records requests and we work with the city clerk treasurer's office to fulfill those as quickly as possible and as cost effective as possible. It's an important step that we show we're transparent. I think it's important to our citizens and it's important to the state. So last slide. Here's the meat and potatoes. But HR doesn't really, numbers aren't as easy to translate, I don't believe. Our fiscal year 26 budget was a shade over a million. Our FY27 proposed budget is a shade under. It does represent a small reduction in the HR budget. Our goal is obviously to be as frugal and as financially responsible as we can. I can't speak to the many years past. I've only been the director a couple years. But what I can say is I'm very frugal and fiscally conservative. And I believe that with this budget, I'm continuing to maintain that for our team. Our goal is to hit that budget with just a couple of small things. We're going to focus on $0 alternatives for recruiting when we can. We're also going to eliminate our orientation welcome kits, which is a very minor change. And we're going to see a little bit of reduction probably in other teams they're hiring, and that will equate to fewer physicals and fewer drug testing. But most importantly, we're going to continue to collaborate with our own resources to share savings and to share our options there. The last thing I would say is reductions beyond this level would actually result, in my opinion, in probably not having a net savings. If we reduce training, we likely will have more accidents. If we reduce staffing and are not as proactive when it comes to litigation, we have likelihood of more things falling to the wayside. If we reduce our recruiting, scanning, and reviewing, we very likely would shift the burden over to another team. So that's kind of my really quick down and dirty, and everybody knows I'm not good on shortening my conversations. I tend to go long-winded, but, boy, I try to stay at ten minutes.

Mr. Mayor, would you like to go through all the presentations first, or do you want to kind of deal with Ms. Lewis and any questions you all might have for her right now?

Yeah, let's do those questions right now.

All right.

Can we turn the clock off? This is a really important meeting, and if we're here until 10 o'clock tonight, it doesn't bother me. I know it bothers y'all, but having that in front of them, I'd rather them just talk to us. How would y'all feel about that?

I think if we want to run over, that's fine, but it also lets them know how long they've been talking. That's fine. Just know that it doesn't matter. No one stopped her. I do agree with this, but it helps them keep the pace.

It does help keep the pace, and I appreciate that.

We're not going to cut you off at 10 minutes. Yeah, maybe after three of them.

Okay, maybe the third one. Do you have any questions or would you like to ask those at the end?

So your overall cut is $14,000. It is.

But I would say our costs, like everything else, have gone up. So although it's a relatively small cut, I think that when you think about the fact supplies have gone up, contracts go up, those sort of things, I think it's being very frugal and trying to be very fiscally responsible. And what I would say is if I don't need to spend a dollar, I don't care if it's my budget, I'm not going to spend it.

I'd like to add to that. That's in the proposed budget that Vicki proposed. That doesn't reflect any reductions in what we all decide to do with either a $4.5 reduction or $2.5 million reduction. She would have to go back to the drawing board and reduce even more.

That is what I propose to reduce, just in conversations and what... I think we can propose and not impact service. If it's beyond that, I believe it would impact service.

It was more like $75,000.

So, Vicki, with that in mind, obviously we've not looked at any revenue projection that didn't have a significant cut, regardless whether it was four or it was two. What is your first? Where do you think you're going to tackle that first?

If I were to have to cut $75,000, which is one of the things that was proposed, I would have to go down a team member, in my opinion. Um, and that would impact service. There's not a lot of fluff in my budget. A substantial portion of mine is mandatory. We have to do hepatitis B vaccines. We have to do physicals. We have to do drug testing. We have to have software to operate our time and attendance. There are things in my budget that are really non-negotiable because if we were to take them out, We either wouldn't comply with the law, which I know that's not palatable, or the reality is we would reduce what we're offering to our team that would result in additional accidents, or in my opinion, or would result in not having a net savings. Obviously, I'm at the will of whatever decision Jonathan makes, the commission makes, and I'm happy to serve in that capacity. But I would say if I had to cut 75, I don't know how I'd do that quite without cutting a staff member. It's not my goal. Understood.

Second question is, can you, can you walk me through what our partnership with the port looks like? And is there another level of scope and size we may in expanding collaboration on the healthcare procurement that we might find, um, some additional savings. So what I'm asking is I know the port relies on us. We buy it in bulk. That's kind of how we run our pools together. Obviously we sent out a letter this last week. reaching out to other municipalities on potentially finding shared savings in your in your opinion what you've looked at how what size do you think the health care purchasing would need to get to before you could get more competitive can I add to that we are in a group health plan but we are self-insured so we're not buying a fully insured plan with the port

We're self-insured. So our claims and their claims all go together. All come together. Yes.

And they pay in.

They do pay in the same premium that our participants pay in. And they also pay us an administrative fee.

I assume our health care plan is solvent. It is. OK. So from your minds, how might further collaboration look and the potential of finding additional savings?

I believe that we've actually leveraged that and we're at the right size. I do not believe we would save money by losing control. and actually expanding to other groups. The reason I say that is we're very meticulous with keeping up with our people. We follow them. We know what's going on. We're quick to get people service. If we brought in another partner, we would lose a great deal of that ability to strategically plan and I believe keep track of are people sitting at home waiting for care or are they proactively getting care. And I think that the way we manage our plan, given the size that we are, I think we're at the sweet spot. I think any larger, we would lose control and likely lose our ability to be successful, and yet we are large enough, we're attractive, and people want our business. We negotiate very heavily, and I'm happy to have a detailed conversation, but I'm also very engaged in that process with our partners at Hub, and we're very willing to tell our partners that, Don't be creeping this up, there's other fish. There's other places. We're desirable to have as client, and I think that There's probably, at this point in time, we would either give up control, which would lead to claims lasting longer, or I believe that it would lead to folks being out longer. I don't think larger is better in this particular case. If we were much smaller, I would think it was. But with roughly 570 team members, we're in a really nice sweet spot, in my opinion.

Is there anything else that you might see would benefit us in further collaboration? Maybe it's not health insurance.

i i would say that i certainly lean into that and other department heads can speak for themselves but i certainly feel like i'm collaborating right now for example i would never pay someone for a wage study unless i was directed by jonathan to do so right now i can get a wage study done by sending an email to about 17 hr directors and i get what i want and i don't pay anything There are other entities that are spending 20 and $30,000 to have wage studies done. I believe that our collaboration with other communities, we're able to do that very economically. It's a little bit of my time, a little bit of my team's time, and we're not spending the money on it. I do think we leverage already a substantial amount of education. We reach out to other folks and say, who are you calling for this? Who works for this? And I think that saves us a decent amount. I would love to see our claims get better. As our claims get better, we save money. We leverage HUB and their education opportunities to hopefully improve our claims. That's probably my biggest place I think we can save money is improving our claims experience. But that's why we implemented the MOT training in-house. It's why we implemented the OSHA training in-house, is to try to improve those claims. Collaboration with others, I think, in my team is most effective to be communication and to sharing resources that are kind of between the ears. because it's not equipment we could share. It's more knowledge we're sharing, and I think we're doing it very successfully. I could pick up the phone right now and call Panama City Beach's HR director, Lynn Haven. I could call Tallahassee, and someone would answer my call, and we can share those knowledge resources very effectively, in my opinion, sir.

Thank you. A question in reference to the $75,000, if we direct that cut, is that two or four and a half?

Four and a half was the $75,000 for HR.

Okay. And to get us to two?

I will have to find that, ma'am. I will find it. There was something I wanted to add to your question.

Two I want to say was around $40,000.

$40,000, okay.

And that is something where we would just have to shave off some things we're doing somewhere. You know, probably for recruiting, I would go from having any advertising to no advertising. Shave off a couple thousand there. We'd be a little bit more frugal on small things like training or travel and things we would just kind of whittle it down, because I'm already at 14. And so to get another 5 to 10, we would just have to sharpen our pencil everywhere we could. And that would get us to 2.

correct thank you commissioner also to um your question about is the health fund solvent um we are required to do a self-funded actuarial every year and so it reviewed they reviewed that and the state has to approve that and so we were required to have a reserve and all of that have we already done that oh yes we do it every year and i would say that um we're very meticulous about making certain that we are solvent

We would never want to be anything but that. And we're very, very conscientious and cautious. Brandy and I review that together on a regular basis to make certain we feel good, but we do have an actuary at a very reasonable price that does that officially for us every year. I've managed self-insured health insurance since 1996. So I'm going to date myself back to Jonathan's decades, decades, and decades. Only two decades. Only two decades. And I would say I think that self-insured definitely saves a substantial amount of money. And we do reevaluate at what level should we be reinsured every single year. And that saves us some fixed costs as well.

Do HR costs typically scale with the number of employees that you have?

A standard ratio for most entities is a 1 to 100 ratio for HR. It's between 1 and 1.25 HR professionals per 100 team members. So we're currently approximating 600 team members. And I will tell you in the broad scheme, that should be approximately six team members between six and six and a half. Um, the reality is though, it depends upon the level of service you provide, how many people you can have. You can have an HR team of two people with 500 people. If you're going to give out a hidden or numbers and say, we don't help people here, call these people. They help you. Um, and that is, that is always an option, but I would say in my opinion, that leads to more litigation and it leads to more claims.

But we're servicing more than our active team members because we're retirees. I mean, there's other team members that we do.

We have roughly 110 retirees on our health insurance. And I love our retirees. but I would also say retirees don't have a time clock. Um, and it does certainly take a bit longer to assist a retiree with a health insurance claim than it does our non retirees. Um, so we, we have roughly 110 retirees on our insurance. We have roughly 350 additional ones that are on our life insurance. are they paying for that or are we sharing in that cost the retirees are billed at the rate for cobra minus the two percent markup on cobra so they pay 100 if they're on our city plan if they've elected to have the medicare advantage through the city they're paying 100 of that as well The only thing we're actually paying for retirees is $1,000 life insurance policy, which is very substantially rated down to less than $55 per month is what we're spending. We negotiated that very heavily a couple years ago to get a better rate and the time that we spend with our retirees. So the cost for our retirees in dollars and cents is very, very minimal, roughly $600, $650 per year total, sir, not per retiree.

Okay.

But as Brandy said, the ones that do select us to enter our health insurance plan, their claims are in our pool of claims, which could be impacted on how many claims that particular individual has too, sir.

Okay. Can I ask some questions? Oh, yeah. One question. I'm a new guy and I ask a lot of questions. I'm not here to be adversarial. I'm not here to pick. I'd rather hear from y'all than you hear from me. So I'll ask a question if that's all right. There are several. What makes up special pay in your, in your, in your, in my department, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong.

Is that car allowance, Brandi?

Yep. It's car allowance. It's also going to be sick leave and annual leave payouts. If an employee leaves the city or if they also qualify for like the, if you are, it's, we call it a sickly excess pay. At the end of each year, if you're over the amount of hours that you can have in your sick leave account, then you get paid out one-third at the end of the year. And so that all comes out as special pay.

In my team, it would be car loans. I don't live in that world, so what does that mean? If I get paid time off and I don't use it?

So a general employee can earn a max of 480 hours of sick leave. Sick leave and 408 of annual leave. and so at the end of the year if they have over that amount that they've earned and they've accumulated then they get paid out one one day for every three days that they have over that 480. So if they get paid out, that hits that special pay line in the budget.

Ms. Waldron, but don't you have to be an employee here a certain amount of time before it starts?

That's when you leave.

Okay.

I mean, of course, you've got to be here several years to accumulate a balance that high.

Yeah, if you never took a day off for the first five years of your employment, you would qualify for that.

You accumulate 12 days of sick leave each year. So you would have had to have been here several years before you get where you exceed that amount. Okay. But when you leave the city, if you've been here at least a year, then you get paid out 100% of your annual leave. And if you've been here, if you're retired, invested, then you get paid out one half of your sick leave, right? Okay.

How many people have car allowances in your special pay?

In my team, two people have car allowances, $300 per month per person. But that means those people do not turn in mileage ever. The only way they would turn in mileage is if they're leaving, I said ever, if they're leaving the county to go to a large training, they would turn in per diem in mileage for that.

So the lion's share of that $7,200 is car allowance? It is. That $7,200 is the entire amount, sir.

We don't typically budget for the sick and annually payouts because we don't know who might leave. Now, if we know someone's scheduled to retire or leave the following year, and we work with the director on that, if we know someone's planning to leave and they have a lot of hours on the books, then we will budget for that. But a lot of times, we don't know. Like, we didn't know Jan was going to leave. So you're going to see a big hit to the city clerk's special pay when she leaves because she's going to get paid out her annual sick leave.

Can I ask one follow-up to that? Yes. So let's say someone leaves, it's not budgeted, what happens?

Typically, it's absorbed in the other accounts in that cost center. If there's not enough at the end of the year to absorb that, and one other account at the end of the year will transfer from another cost center to cover it, or that's part of that final budget amendment that we do, that cleanup budget amendment. But we try to absorb it in the cost centers. it's usually not so substantial that we can't, um, you know, absorb it.

Uh, I don't know what hub and power, what are those? They're expensive. I know that, but what, what, what's in, what do we use this for?

Hope is our agent that negotiates our rates, um, with our various carriers. And they're also an expert that we utilize for trainings. So hub international is, an agent they go out and shop and shop and shop our health insurance they shop our general liability they shop our auto as an entity nobody's gonna like return our phone calls at Chubb which is a major carrier at Sun Life or at preferred governmental insurance or FEMET. You have to have an agent to make those relationships to shop all of your insurance. We are currently total spending roughly $150,000 a year. I spend $75,000 out of my budget and Sean Self spends $75,000 out of the logistics budget for HUB. To put it in perspective, our prior agent was 400 and it was a percentage based on our premiums.

So as our premiums went up each year, it would go up and I believe it was 12%. So it came to about $400,000. So when we moved away from them to hub, it's a flat fee of $150,000 and they have not went up on that. We've been with them, what, three years now?

Yes. But I would also say it's how we get additional training at no cost and additional support at no additional cost beyond that. And so their success is tied to our success. They don't make more money. If we spend more money, they have a flat fee. and we hire them to do our work, to really engage with us and do the best for the city to get us the best premiums. Your second question was PowerDMS. PowerDMS is a collective software that's used by police, by fire, by the general team. We're advancing in that area, and that's how we do a lot of our training. We log our training. It's how our fire and police team and police... No, gentlemen, I defer to you to expand on Power DMS, but it's how they track things for accreditation. It's how we make sure our folks have access to policies and procedures and forms. And Power DMS is a collective system that does that.

So we need three departments to pay for that?

I put the entire thing in my in my budget except for the very small sections that are solely police and fire. And you'll see very minor costs in their budgets for items that only they use. I pay for the lion's share out of my budget.

Which one of those two programs are most important?

their hub is not a program hub is an agent um and i can't services that we get for that money is more important to you to me i have to um if i had to say which is most important they're two totally different things and they do two totally different things for my team I could not bring you an affordable health insurance, affordable general liability auto property without a partner like Hub. I can't do that. Neither can anyone else in this room. You have to have an agent to buy insurance. So I will tell you, there's in my mind, there's no way we could do without an agent. And I believe that Hub is the most effective agent I've had the pleasure of working with.

I will say this.

I'm alive today because of this woman and the health insurance that we have. So I'm picking on her only because I love her. She's awesome. And I was hoping that's what you were going to say. We have an incredible insurance program. I just had to work with it a whole bunch before this meeting. So I appreciate you saying that. However, is 75 000 a little more than what six grand a month is that what we're looking at is we every month are they doing something for us can we look at it and say we're doing better over here because they did that yes sir okay and and they also participate in all three of our safety committee meetings each month

I have two days that they're coming up here in July, and they're going to do safety audits for us. And by safety audits, I mean internal audits where we can go around, find places where maybe we could do a little better on this, a little better on that. It's much better than having an accident and finding it later. So we certainly leverage their skills and their experience every day. Vicki, how long have we been with Hubb? Three years, um, three years for the entire, um, package, but we were with hub on the benefits side prior to me joining the team in 2020. So I can't answer on the benefits side when we started, maybe Brandy could say that, but I know they were with us.

Vicki correct my numbers if I'm wrong, but we went from an, uh, an agent that acted as, as a, a, like a sales agent. And it was between our relationship with the carriers in the city. And we stopped doing that because we realized we were paying in excess of $400,000 annually to that agent, and it was commission-based. And so now our relationship with Hub is much more affordable and is a flat fee, and they're incentivized. I'm sorry, they're not incentivized to grow our premium on a commission basis. That's good.

They're incentivized to make our insurance be as cost-effective as possible because, candidly, we could just go pick another agent.

Right.

But it is unique to find an agent that will do a flat fee and not commission-based.

QuickBase shows up twice in your budget. Who does? I'm sorry. QuickBase?

There's two different sections of QuickBase. One is called something heavy.

One's under professional services and the other one's under memberships.

Okay, and what that is is a database where we collect all of our workers' compensation into a database, and we track trends on our work comp claims. We also track our trends on citizen claims that are placed, litigation, and we use a database for that. Part of it is called QuickBase. The other one is called Something Hippie, and on the system, you're going to see they're both labeled... risk hippie thank you sir risk hippie they both say quick base because i don't want to say we would only use risk hippie for their part but at this point in time they are the ones doing the other segment we have looked at other software um sean self and i and our teams demoed some other software that would do the same thing the cost was almost three times what we're spending right now so we are looking for better solutions on a regular basis and bringing the best ones to the table okay which is why we've stuck with that as a general rule do all of our contracts are they automatically renewed or do you review all of your contractual services every year each contract to update make changes whatever the case may be i can tell you i definitely review all the ones in my team on a regular basis some contracts we do have rate locks so we might have a rate lock for two years or three years but that doesn't mean that we're not reviewing in my team every single year and evaluating i would also say i don't wait for the year to review the contract um i'm evaluating are we using it on an ongoing basis should we continue it are there other places we should shop we do a decent amount of shopping um that doesn't translate into changes but it translates into being physically responsible like i mentioned we shopped our our database for our work our work comp and um liability claims

coffee machines in every one of these. There's coffee, there's a lease, then there's coffees.

There's maintenance and there's a lease.

Do we have one contract with Harris Business Machines to take care of everything?

We do. And we're working towards it because when we went to a mass lease, we still had some on leases. So we're getting very close to having everybody on the same schedule. But it's cost down. You've got to remember, we do the... uniform accounting standards for the state of Florida. So every cost center is going to have very similar costs in it. So when you look at the HR cost center, you're looking at what it costs to run our HR department. If we had it all in one cost center, not in HR, not in PD, you wouldn't be able to tell how much HR is costing us to provide that service. So there is, we cost it out to the different cost centers, but there is.

But it says coffee lease and then it has maintenance. Right. In a lease, there's maintenance. That's correct.

Because you have to pay for the lease of the equipment and then rental, and then you have to pay for the copies. Per copy fees. Per copy fees, and that's not rentals and leases. That goes into repairs and maintenance. It's the uniform accounting, chart of accountings.

The lease that we use with Harris, we had X amount of copies, and then after that, you're paying, and you're paying for color, and included in that is all the maintenance. In here, we have lease and then maintenance. Correct.

Are you saying because you don't have another charge code to bill that to?

It's costed out by the account of what we're paying for. So when we're paying for a rental on a piece of equipment, we can't also charge the copies to that same account line. If that's what are you asking about the different account lines?

I'm just asking why we have coffee leasing and coffee maintenance and in coffees It's because of the different one line item for coffees I mean and but why do we have why we make what we think for maintenance when we're paying for a lease that with That's the kind of stuff that I'm talking about is my in my budget at my office I have a lease payment no maintenance because that's included in the lease.

Okay, ours is not included. I

But your budget at your office follows a different standard than the budget that the government has to use.

But why do we not negotiate a lease that has maintenance in it or covers everything versus I don't understand that.

So we do. It's because we get invoice for both the lease and the per copy cost. And according to the uniform accounting standards, we have to separate that out. And that's why you see it in two different line items.

I think he's asking us to try to negotiate a contract that would include the maintenance.

Everything. But you'd still have to break it out.

If we're paying for both, then we have to break it out on what we're paying for.

Do we have a main contract with Verizon? Yes. We have hot spots. We have tablets. We have landlines with Verizon. We have landlines. And when was the last time that was negotiated?

I'm not sure.

That's probably going to be more a logistics question for Mr. Self, and he's going to be July 9th.

Okay. I think this is a natural progression of what happens when you start to get tight on your budgets. People start leasing rather than purchasing because it's extended over. But let's call lease what it is. It's financing. That's what it is. It's financing where you don't own something at the end of it. And so... um i'm seeing that in a lot of these budgets we've got a significant amount of leases and so that is something that we should perhaps evaluate our leasing policy not only on copiers but on vehicles but on all sorts of different things because there's a significant portion because it also it hamstrings your commission from being able to make decisions because we're in contractually obligated leases and now we can't you know get rid of a copier because it's got a three-year contract on there those things so I guess my final question for you, Vicki, is some of your counterparts have proposed some very substantial reductions in employees. Are there any benefits that you would like us to look at as potential alternatives versus having to lay off employees? Should we look at benefit reductions to offset that, in your opinion?

In my opinion, and I can only speak for myself, I believe the quality of the team member you have is somewhat dictated by the benefits you offer. I think if we cut back on health insurance, for example, we will have people coming to work and be the walking wounded. I don't think that adds to our value and our ability to successfully complete projects. I believe that our benefit structure is in the sweet spot, and I believe it's the right benefit structure. If I felt differently, candidly, I wouldn't have encouraged us to renew it last year before we discussed this. I can't speak for my counterparts, but I would say from my perspective as the HR director, I think we are the right place on benefits. I don't think we need to add new benefits unless it is entirely paid for by the team member as an optional benefit like a critical illness. We have that, but the team member picks up 100% of the cost. I don't think we should add more city-paid benefits, in my opinion, but I obviously would defer to Jonathan's recommendations on that. But from my perspective, I think we are the sweet spot, and reducing it would lead to new challenges that would end up costing us more money. That's my opinion. But that is opinion-based, to be clear.

That's why I asked.

If I may, can I tell you one more thing, sir?

What's in office supplies at $18,000?

Okay, so that's going to be binders for every safety training we do. That's going to be all of our supplies that we have, whether it be our wellness event. $10,000 of that is our wellness event, so it's all of the things we do for our wellness screening. That's a substantial portion of that. If you take the $10,000 out for that, it leaves $8,000. And literally, it's pens and pencils and binders. It's all the crazy little stuff that adds up, whether it's getting new placards for our civil service board members or business cards or whatever it may be. But the predominant portion of that is for our wellness event. If I may tell you also, back to your copier, we have one copier in my team, and that is the only copier we have. We do not have any supplemental printers or anything along those lines. We have one old printer that sits by our open enrollment computers. When it dies, we're going to discard that. But right now, it's sitting there. It's cheap to operate. When people come in, if they want to print their benefits, they can do so. But when it does die, we will not replace it.

And all I'm doing there is trying to figure out a way to be more efficient by having one down line from the vendor, and it saves money versus everything. And reading it this way with lease and then maintenance and all, it just doesn't make sense. And I'll defer to my counterpart, Sean Sullivan.

In reference to health screenings, do you have a matrix that shows the direct return on that investment?

You can't actually show a metric in my opinion, but I can tell you some anecdotal stories. So we spent, we had nine people at our last health screen that were considered critical. That meant that within the next 24 hours they needed to see a physician or go to the emergency room or the nurses felt like something bad would happen. High blood pressure, out of control glucose, diabetic and they didn't know it. things along those lines flashback two years we had three people that were taken either to the doctor or they were taken um to the hospital because they were undiagnosed with challenges so i can help straight from the health straight from the health screening um and so what i will tell you is it does change habits in my opinion we have a segment of our population that we we encourage and we beg them to come and then they come and they go oh my gosh i had no clue i had this We have one particular team member that was undiagnosed with a cholesterol issue that was out of control and a diabetic issue out of control. Hadn't been the doctor in five years, but his supervisor said, come on, come with me. Came and got diagnosed, got on medicine. So what I will tell you is if we catch it before you have a stroke or a heart attack, we can do 10 health screenings for the cost of one of those. And so I can't give you direct ties, ma'am, but I can tell you it does make a difference by just anecdotal evidence of that.

Thank you.

And finally, and I won't ask as many of all of them because she's answering some of the others, Kronos and NeoGov, what are those?

Kronos is the older system we had. It is in my budget as of right now because we are working to get the read-only access solved. I believe as of earlier this week or last week, I'm sorry, late last week, that likely will be able to come out cody and his team have come up with solution to take that out i believe it was to maintain the read-only access of our historic timekeeping system which we have to maintain for up to seven years the other question you had sir was which

Neogov.

Neogov is our applicant tracking system. It gives us access to governmentjobs.com. If you do not have Neogov, you cannot get to that website. It's how we track our applications. It's where we get our applications from. It's an entire, it's called an ATS system, applicant tracking system. It's exceptionally good. I've been very pleased with it. I've demoed multiple different systems. not emotionally tied to anyone but i've demoed multiple systems to see are we still on the best system and i believe we are as of right now certainly there's 20 000 you know we're talking about trying to get some more up or something i think you know robbie's point is bringing those all these items up is

You know, we're not in the department, but you mentioned if we were to bring up a no more placards for silver service boards, we would sound silly because the budget's so large. To point out a little tiny thing, we look silly, but there is a willingness of us to hear those sort of detailed cuts or removal of little pageantry things that we are completely unaware of. And I think that's the point that Robbie's making. It's like, hey, you know, we don't want to fire anybody. We don't want to lose budgets. We'd love to see, hey, you've got to bring your own water bottle to meetings, Alan. That kind of thing. Yeah, that kind of stuff.

Well, if anybody's going to feel pain, I'd rather be everybody in this room first, and then second, the employees. I mean, keeping jobs but feeling pain is what I'm saying. And I don't know. I've got to learn about your department by asking questions, and that's all I'm doing. Of course, sir.

Any other questions?

Any other questions?

All right. Thank you so much, Ms. Lewis. Next is our Parks, Culture, and Recreation Department, and that is Mr. Keith Myrill.

yours sir thank you mr. mayor and commissioners thank you for the opportunity to have this conversation before we get into the budget numbers that would like to tell just a little bit about who we are what we do and how we do it so the parks culture and recreation department and budget is comprised of five main areas that assists in our mission enriching the lives of the residents of Panama City by providing safe welcoming public spaces as well as affordable, diverse recreational and cultural opportunities for people of all ages to play, grow, and build together as a community. And that's important for me as a director of Parks and Recreation is that mission of providing spaces and opportunities for the people of Panama City. department is devised of five different areas as I see it park maintenance and that's our largest division 22 employees and you do routine ground maintenance beautification conservation playground amenity repair maintenance special events assistant every weekend at the farmers market we're down there and special projects we just installed new exercise equipment out at Bay Memorial Park our team did that in-house programming. We have community engagement, special events, our special event permits, recreation and enrichment classes, our community centers. We do custodial, general maintenance and repairs, rentals and permits. We're out there every weekend with rentals of all those facilities, Bay Memorial, Glenwood, cleaning those up, setting them up for the people that are renting them. Our athletic division, youth and adult leagues, facility and field management, field rental permits, and athletic field maintenance. We have seven employees in that area that do all the dragging and the mowing of the sports fields. So that's a little bit different. They're divided from the park maintenance division and specifically to athletics. And then our MLK, our newest cost center, the MLK Junior Recreation Center, with all the programs and activities that we provide there. So getting into the budget a little bit. Next slide. Our approach really was kinda high level, then drilled down. So we looked at what is gonna be the biggest impact on our budget with the lowest impact on our operations. And once we kinda hit that number, we didn't just stop and say, well, okay, we hit our number. We continued to look at each line to justify the budget that we were gonna present. And just overall, this is just the highlights, the overall 2027 parks budget is a decrease of 10.2% from FY26. That's a number of $649,000 and change. The PCR budget, which is separate from the MLK budget, is a reduction of 13.1%. And that's a reduction of $660,000. And our MLK budget represents a slight increase of 0.08, mostly in COLA personnel personnel thank you so it's kind of the high level budgets as it relates to parks we go into the next slide we go into really the main cost center reductions and this is where i was talking about high level down our salary and wages and these positions that are that are on on this on this slide we have two equipment operators since i've been here those have been vacant So it's looking at, again, what's going to be the biggest impact on our budget but the lowest impact on our operations. So these two equipment operators we haven't had in the seven months that I've been here and even longer since prior to that. The project manager position, that particular individual retired. He had significant impact on MLK Center. Since he's been retired, Jared kind of picked up the slack on the Martin Theater. So there's ways for us to be kind of innovative to see how we can continue to operate in those areas without a project manager. So that's about $158,000 in salaries and wages. Utilities, that's about a $92,000 savings. We moved our Elm Street operation of maintenance back to the Massalina. Right now we're at Frank Nelson, but within the next month we'll be back to Massalina. We're re-renovating a couple of the sign shops for our staff to be at Massalina. And the Massalina... utilities was about $30,000. So by moving, that saved us that money. And then we've continued to look at irrigation and other things and have been able to whittle down and save that $92,000. So it's been a real deep dive into our utilities billing with the help of our utilities department to kind of trim that number down. Other contractual services, again, we've looked at each of our individual line items. But the major of those two is reduction if we could save in mowing. And we do a lot of outsourcing of our mowing. And partly it's because if you'll see in one of our next slides is our vacancy level right now is pretty high. So we've had to kind of contract some of that out as opposed to handle it in-house. But also the need for scorekeepers and athletics. We were budgeted really high, but we feel like we can do it at a lower number. So that's a savings of about $144,000 in contractual services. And then others is operating supplies. This particular one is largely in landscape maintenance supplies, but there are some other areas that we've been able to trim to get us down to that number. So just those four items is about $450,000. The remaining comes from other cost centers and smaller amounts, but it really helps us. That's the big chunk. And then going back to the $660,000 that we're able to accomplish, that gets the largest amount of that, and then we're able to kind of pick off the other ones as we go through our budget. So going to kind of our PCR staffing, we are 39 employees. And they're allocated to parks, maintenance, athletics, all the areas I talked about earlier. MLK Center consists of eight full-time employees and 11 part-time employees. And currently, you can see kind of a list of our current vacancies. So our arts history coordinator, we have two equipment operators, the project manager, a crew leader, the assistant maintenance superintendent, two maintenance workers, and then two MLK part-time workers. And additionally, we have three other individuals that have been on approved leave, but long-term. So really, the ones that really kind of stand out that really affect the operation are those crew leaders, the assistant maintenance superintendent, the maintenance workers, those individuals, guys and gals, that really are boots on the ground out there doing the work. So even though we're able to kind of trim a little bit in those salary wages, if we were able to get to fully staffed, we'd have a bigger impact on what we're able to provide. Here are some of the maintenance metrics of what we're able to accomplish. And it's just for your edification and knowledge. But we're out there mowing a lot. about 1,000 man hours a week. It's 826 man hours a week in parks and 189 in CRA areas. And there's a lot of the medians out on MLK and other areas that park staff are doing that requires five to six persons to be able to do that in a week. Equivalent cost is about $440,000 a year broken down by parks and CRA areas. We mow approximately 236 acres a week per cut, I would say, because we don't mow every week. We do about 39 cuts a year. Wintertime, it's slower. Summertime, we might be mowing twice a week in the summer right now when it's really popping. The linear feat of edging. Mr. Hayes says, I love a good edge sidewalk. So we do a lot of edging. It's 131 linear feet, so almost 20 miles of edging that we do when we go out and edge everything. And then acreage of fertilizer that we do apply, 218 acres. That requires a special license for us to do that. And we do have a number of our employees that are licensed to spray herbicides. That's one of those areas that if we're fully staffed, we could do more of that in-house. And then some of our programming and athletics matrices. An MLK center is open 74 hours a week. We currently have 4,647 members since January of 26. So that's a good number of folks who have already registered for MLK in the first five months of operation. Our total attendance, 15,000. 500, 454, and the number of programs we've had, 10, and that's just those who have checked in. So that doesn't include special events and those sorts of things. So the number of programs and events, we've had 10 and an additional 10,000 plus attendees for those events. for special events. These are the applications that we receive that we have to process for the special events like the Groove Fest we had this weekend. We've received 102 of those this year and have had 61 permitted events. The Farmers Market for us counts as one event. The Groove Fest counts as one. So all those events that we've had. And that's just tourism for the city. And our staff plays a large role in getting the permits approved with PD and fire, but also with the maintenance of getting set up for those events as well. And then just some park and clubhouse usages. We've had 163 clubhouses rented this year. 14 of our own PCR events that have had 5,800 plus attendees and 15 programs. Those are more smaller programs but those have had 7600 attendees as well so those are just a little bit of what we do and then some additional budget considerations we've talked about a reallocation of CRA maintenance back to the CRA and possibly having CRA manage that through a contractor and if we did that that would reduce our budget by $200,000 reduce reduction of a crew leader and a one and a half FTEs of maintenance, workers' positions as well, which is about $150,000. But what that would do, CRA areas and right-of-ways, they're hard. It's tough. It's tough work. Vicki was talking about MOT. Our guys are are trained in MOT because you have to have one or two guys out there with your mowers and your weed eaters and those sorts of things. But you have to have one or two out there guiding traffic. And so that's a tough job and a tough area. So if we were to eliminate that from our staff and give it I won't say give it, but send it back to CRA for them to manage that through a contractor. And those contractors, that's what they're designed to do. A lot of those road contractors, road maintenance contractors, they do that and they do it well. I'm not saying our staff hasn't. We've really rose to the challenge to be able to do it, but it's something that if we didn't have to do that, we would be able to focus more on park beautification, maintenance facilities, and other park projects. So... That's just one of the areas that would be able to impact our budget as well as potentially holding that assistant maintenance superintendent position. That's a tough one, though. It's continued. It's been a vacancy since I've been here, but it could be a hardship sometime on our superintendent. This person acts as an acting working supervisor as well as in the absence of the superintendent. And then some continued reduction in operating of our athletic programs. And this is something that we kind of talked about a little bit when we talked about our field fees. Is there a way to kind of manage that through having organizations be the one to offer the programs? And if we were out of the... athletic programming side of it, we would manage the fields, manage the permits, manage the applications and that could reduce a little bit more of our referee fees and those sorts of things. So just some additional ways that we could kind of look at being innovative to try to help the budget in the long term. And that is a particular, that particular method is pretty We used to use that in Jacksonville. We didn't offer any of our own leagues. We only offered basketball, which was in our Legend Center, which is similar to MLK. All other leagues throughout the city were managed by independent organizations. So that's a possible reduction of another $320,000 potentially in our budget. So I'd be glad to answer any questions that you might have, but we really try to do a deep dive into where we are, what we can do, how we can do it better, but also provide the citizens with the types of parks that they deserve. Thank you.

yours just as a reminder this coming Monday July 6th we'll have a workshop writer in this room at 4 30 p.m. looking at the recommendations from the parks Advisory Committee

so a couple things and we have this conversation on the cra congressional services by statute we're not allowed to do maintenance with cra dollars now we can do installation for a temporary period of time but when we accept the money from fdot we're obligated to to to do it so what's the plan if they're in this proposal it sounds like the cra is no longer they want to cancel their contract so how are we picking that up

Yes, the CRA will contract it out and pay for the services directly from the CRA. If the CRA installed the beautification or made the improvements they can pay for to keep it up. And it's the above and beyond that they're paying for. They're not doing just mobile and go sort of things. They're actually, you know, landscaping and providing additional services beyond what we do at other places.

my understanding and talking i think even michelle agreed with this point that i think we can only do that for a couple years once something's installed we can't just perpetually maintain stuff with cra dollars according to at least the last conversation that we had going through our trainings and stuff so i would just like to see how that's addressed it i don't think it's relevant from this year sure we can go pay somebody to to maintain it but there does need to be a plan on how long term the CRA is not paying for something statutorily we can't so that's all I would add I do have a question for you Keith how how in eliminating the reduction in contract labor from mowing how is that going to allow you to keep up with the stuff like mowing when we have open positions in mowing, I guess. How does that work?

So in our budget, we do have it budgeted for these positions to be filled. So that those open positions are budgeted to be filled so that if we were up to our level of staffing, then we'd be able to maintain that mowing and reduce some of that contract labor that we're contracting.

I guess what my question is, why aren't they getting filled?

We're currently under a hiring freeze, so we're not recruiting right now for those positions.

So if we were recruiting, it's not a pay issue, it's not anything else like that, they would just be filled?

Yes. I would say since March 1st, I've lost a crew leader. I've lost a maintenance worker, too. And then I have another crew leader and another maintenance worker on long-term leave. So that's four of those workers that are out in the field doing that work that have not been...

the payroll for sit for this mowing season so we had to go out and hire a couple of contractors to help us out to keep up i'd like to see us resolve that as soon as possible i mean obviously that's where we get our most complaints is on park grass not getting cut or right-of-ways not getting cut so that's kind of i didn't realize that we had maintenance workers in the hiring freeze, too, but it makes sense. The other thing I was going to ask is, like, so we've been getting some reports, and hopefully everybody's got it, on attendance at MLK. There's a significant amount of time where there's nobody at the center, or there's very few, but yet we're open with, like, six employees that are working there. So has there been any discussions on possibly making attendance-based hours versus just trying to keep it open when there's nobody there?

We did. We did look at that. which days were the heaviest attended, which ones were the least. Sundays was one of our least attended. If we were to close on Sundays, for example, that would save us about $23,000. That's four people, six hours a day, open, close. So that would be an additional $22,000 savings of those part-timers that would be working those hours. So there would be, you know, other examples of that would be Tuesdays. That's one of our... one of our slower days but mondays is one of our busiest days so it's which ones of those we want to do or would we propose but sundays would be one or potentially in the mornings and not open till 10 or 11 o'clock could be a potential outcome as well so we could we've looked at that and those the dollar saved there would be those dollars of part-time work we do have two of those part-time positions vacant So those could be held and not filled, and that would save approximately $50,000.

On that same note, I also know we were proposed, or at least I know I got a copy of it, for after-school programming from Boys and Girls Club, which would then eliminate a need from our staffing to handle after-school programming from your team, but they would handle that. Has there been any further discussion on that? Is it possible... not only cost saving measure but also open up the door for people that don't have their parents to sit there with them to come and be a part of the center.

We've implemented our own after school program similar not just like the Boys and Girls Club but we have our Dream Builders program. And we're doing classes every Monday and Wednesday and Thursday and Tuesday and Thursday. Two days a week is arts and leisure, and then the other two days are the STEAM classes. So we have those implemented and are getting good attendance in the after-school hours.

I guess what my question is, Keith, like they have to have a parent there, correct? No, sir. Okay. So we're allowing kids without supervision from parents? For that after school time, yes. Okay. All right. That was good because I know that was a big thing. Have you looked at the difference between Boys and Girls Club's offering versus what you guys are doing internally as a way of finding some savings? I mean, I'm asking because that is your largest line item and you have a whole – new designation for it and I know we were supposed to evaluate based upon attendance and memberships and things like that on what we would be offering moving forward.

I haven't looked at it specifically but I'd be willing to take a look at it as we go through this process.

So I think what we're hearing is a willingness to engage partners who can offer the same service or comparable service at a reduced or free cost to us across the board, every department. I think that's what we're trying to say. Whether it's partnerships, hey, can you adopt a park kind of stuff, or Boys and Girls Club, we don't have the answer to those, so we're asking the staff to come up with those options for us.

Yeah, I guess I'm trying to also kind of correlate why those, and this is not to, not to poke into you guys' process that you guys work out internally, but from my perspective, just from sitting on board, when I hear like, Hey, we're eliminating a maintenance position. And then I know that's the thing I get the most visually out. Like, that's why I'm asking the questions. Are we, are we going through these other options? Because I don't know that that's necessarily the option that I'm okay with. So we've got to find another way to work at this. Does that make sense?

I think one of the reasons why we didn't necessarily go down that road was because we are staffed to the level that we are at MLK. And if we were to do something like that, then we would be cutting positions essentially there.

But we're cutting positions regardless in your proposal.

Yes, but we're cutting positions that are currently vacant, which is you're talking about a vacant position versus a position that we have someone sitting in that seat.

So I think this is a great conversation, your point. it doesn't matter at least for me what position is vacant it matters what positions we need we're making a needs-based budget based upon what we need to make priorities and objectives and if maintenance is an issue then we need to staff maintenance it's not about just where now i think it's something as far as a whole that we can look at and it can be part of the conversation But cutting maintenance position is not something I'm willing to entertain from a budgetary perspective. So definitely from Parks and Rec because that is the thing that we get the most complaints about. So unless I want just more complaints from the citizen, I think we've got to tackle it a different way is I guess what I'm trying to say.

I agree, but I do think, though, that that wasn't even thought about because of the hiring freeze. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but you probably didn't think to, because the hiring phrase was just a flat-out no, you didn't think to say, hey, well, let me keep this maintenance position because I might be able to fill it, right?

No, and we've had those conversations internally as to which, but it goes back to kind of what I said initially, is which positions will, which areas potentially would be the least burden on the budget, and Since I've been here, like I said, the two positions of those, and I've had this conversation with our maintenance superintendent, how vital are these two equipment operators? And he said, we have people that run equipment. Our crew leaders and our maintenance worker threes, we train them, to Vicki's point, we train them to operate the equipment that we have. We're not like Clint's division where we're running big bulldozers and street sweepers and asphalt machines. We're running a skid steer. We're running tractors. We're running our bunker rakes. We're grooming fields. That's the type of equipment that we operate, and it doesn't necessarily require an equipment operator, heavy equipment operator type of person that you might see or think that would be required to run some of the heavy equipment that they might be running in public works. But to your point, those people, those bodies that help all the maintenance positions that we have out there, they are vital. But in talking with our superintendent, which, and we all talked about it, it's like, where can we kind of make those adjustments, but it won't affect us terribly in the long run.

Um, and, and some of those positions were the ones that we kind of, I guess maybe I'm getting different feedback, but I'm not, I, I definitely feel like it's better from a maintenance perspective, but I still don't feel like we're hitting the mark on maintenance.

So commissioner, we've also done a few other things in PCR, um, that, that I think are going to have longer term benefits as regards to that. Keith, when he got on board, the prior Keith had a small internal construction team that would go and rehab a clubhouse and go do some quick things. We've shifted that process and those things. projects uh to our logistics team that specializes in it that has our electricians and our carpenters on staff and so that's going to free his internal team up that's been doing that to do focus more on maintenance too so there's been some reprioritization and reorganization of his team as well since he's been here

I'd like to speak to the programming at the MLK Rec Center. First, let me say thank you to you and your staff for implementing programs that have been responsive. We're seeing that in the metrics that you've reported to us. People are enjoying what is being offered there. The idea of the programming being contracted out is one that I was not in favor of last year. I'm still not in favor of it this year, as we are doing well with our in-house team. If we were to move in that direction, rather than saying who we think ought to get it first, we would draft the RFP, what we'd like to have, and make it open to any nonprofit that has the ability to do that. I'm very uncomfortable with the dais who continues to call out individual companies with nonprofits in a way that we would not do with for-profit business. A nonprofit is a business. The difference is what happens with the profits. And as I've said before, a nonprofit cannot stay in business if there is no profit. It just doesn't go into anyone's pockets. And so we should treat them as we treat other businesses and not pick and choose our favorites that we want to make sure we get business to. On the issue of mowing, there was a previous practice of looking to hire people from within the ward or neighborhood, smaller contractors. And I'd like to see us continue that. There are some that have reached out to me that were doing some cutting on regular lots that were told, okay, you're no longer hired. needed, and I'd like to see us look at that and look at what the savings are of working with small businesses versus one big contract that may or may not be able to service us at the level that we need. One contractor in mind that I have in mind was able to, well, not able, but he saw a need. This is a public hazard. I'm just going to go ahead and knock this out. Why? It was right down the street from his city, from his home in the city, and he was already doing other lots. And so there are some significant community building customer service that we can do in that regard.

Commissioner, how recent was someone told that we weren't going to use them anymore? Is that like in the last six months or was it more like over a year ago?

It's been within this year. Okay.

This fiscal year? Yes.

To your point, and Commissioner Streets, one of the things that since we have been a little bit short-staffed, we have engaged some of our local vendors with just that type of work. We have three on a short-term contract. It's not a contract, but we did a bid. We got some rates, and we have a contractor currently doing Carl Gray. one currently due in Hentz Park, and one currently due in the two parks out at Millville. So that has been spread to three different businesses, all three small businesses here in Penniless City.

Okay. Is that following your $100,000 athletic field maintenance?

No, that would be other contractual services.

Okay. Let's talk about other contracted services. Um, I can understand you having an arborist, but I don't understand why MLK needs one.

I requested it.

Okay.

When we were under construction, there are five oaks. I wanted to know what condition and what we needed to preserve them. There's one that's 350 years old, one that's 300 years old. And so as an arborist city, I wanted to make sure that while construction was going on that we knew what we needed to do to maintain those heritage oaks.

Okay. And so we paid for it during construction and then this year, or is that a continued?

Cost that we want over there, so I'll yield to that, but I know I requested it And it was it was done last year.

It's an on it's an as needed cost basis So if whenever we need we're need to have the tree trimmed or pruned we would contact the arborist to do that as opposed to Someone who might not have the skills So we have to put it in the budget so that if it happens, we need to have it in the budget. Okay.

Similarly to a brand new basketball floor needs to be budgeted for what? I think you told me every five years it has to be redone. Every two years. Every two years. Yes. So we know how much it's going to cost. In two years? I mean, you're budgeting $20,000 is what I'm asking.

Correct. We have gotten costs from Lynnhaven, talking about partnerships with other directors. I know the director at Lynnhaven. He gets his done every two years. I've talked with Justin over there, and that's the approximate cost for that.

The reason I ask on that, this is brand new, so we've got warranty to deal with. We shouldn't have a lot of maintenance expense because that ought to – I mean, building expense because that should be covered at least for – What, until, what, nine, maybe six more months? Yes, sir. And I just want to make sure that we take advantage of that no cost to us for right now, and I'm sure we are.

We are, and that's a particular cost that wouldn't be covered under warranty. That's a wear and tear item. Understood. And would be required to have done.

We have lawn maintenance, and then we have lawn care maintenance. The athletic hill maintenance is one of those exact – Again, I'm trying to understand. In my mind, you got the same expense twice, but I'm sure it's different.

It is different. Athletic field maintenance is more the materials that we need for the athletic field. You're talking about OT, Oakland Terrors. It's the clay mix and those items that we need to keep those ball fields in the condition that they are.

So they're not taking care of the grass, they're taking care of the diamond, those areas.

As well as overseeding, it's specific to athletic fields. So we have the lawn care, which I consider more common grounds, and then the athletic fields, which are the sports fields themselves.

And how many of those are getting for $100,000? On Contreras?

Daffin.

Daffin. Millville? I mean, Sunneth? well oak grove and frank nelson okay all right um under communication there are three internet companies that are listed in there i mean at&t comcast and wow do we need access to all of them do we need all of them

I mean, I will have to check with, that's more of a... Yeah, IT can help answer those questions.

Some facilities were set up with the WOW and others, Comcast, and the Verizon's probably cell phones.

It's Hotspot, tablet, and cell phone, and then WOW, and then AT&T, and Comcast. What is Suncom? Everybody has it in their budget.

It's the state of Florida telephone system. It allows us to get a reduced rate for long distance calls.

Well, you don't get charged by if you call on these, do you? I didn't know they had long distance.

Well, for our landlines. Okay.

Well, all right. And then your numbers for the utility costs for the boat ramps, the athletic fields, cemeteries, facilities, are those historical numbers?

Those are based on usage. I mean, they looked at their usage and trend for utilities.

It's a lot of money.

It is a lot of money. I mean, I think we realize, I mean, for instance, the Snug Harbor wash down station I think is costing around $30,000 a year annually for water.

Yeah, because I drove by the other day trying to stop it because it was just spewing water and there was no going around. I'm trying to stop it.

Yeah, someone hit it, and so it's down currently. But we're in the process of repairing.

You're not breaking my heart. We don't get that. Pull it out. All right. Thank you. Yes, sir. I've got one more.

so I don't know how to do this but like I would love to see us prioritize like us communicate a prioritization and then you guys build the budget based upon those priorities because I think what's kind of creating the conflict like like made sense to you guys cut maintenance people I mean that made their open positions it makes sense let's go those things but maybe you didn't have as much feedback as what you're getting now. So I don't know, maybe a format that we could provide that?

Staff would welcome that, but I believe we were given a prioritization to focus on the MLK Rec Center as well in the process last year. So that's why we maintain that focus. We would love feedback from the dais for sure if there's different directions you guys want us to go.

i would love to evaluate based upon attendance as far as from staffing levels i think that's a pretty reasonable approach i know every facility does that and then look at how other other municipalities operate their centers and see if there's a way for us to find savings there but the big thing is making sure that we get maintenance taken care of and if cra is going to take over maintenance at beck avenue harrison avenue and these other mlk and very visual formats like i need to know a plan that's not ultimately going to have weeds down the most visual streets that we have so dib handles the maintenance on harris and i just okay so there's one so what about mlk and beck avenue it would be downtown north and st andrews cra So you're just going to throw it back to us and say you guys figure it out?

No, no. In fact, they're already working on getting quotes for that to contract it out. It will not go to the waste side.

And I'm assuming from that expectation that we should see maintenance be better in the parks as a result of not having to handle those things. Is that what I'm hearing? Yes, sir. Okay.

So a question about the FDOT roads. How much do they do maintenance on those roads, like MLK and 15th Street?

None. We took the grant money.

They help by providing grants.

Yeah, when we take the grant money for the installations, we're responsible for maintenance from that point forward.

Okay.

So...

they do the grant typically includes a year of maintenance the grants typically include one year of maintenance so currently for instance the like the whittington park area um we did with the grant and it included one year maintenance it's getting ready to go be our responsibility come july 1st but

the contract has been taken care and the grant has been paying for that maintenance up until now to our attorney if we could get the legal opinion we're going through all this training you guys are putting us through crazy amount of cra board training so i mean i think i've had like two or three trainings so when i hear we're not allowed to do maintenance and cra dollars and then we're proposing that i need to understand how that lines up from what we're getting in the trainings so

be happy to provide that yeah i think it's extra level super duper targeted uh type of work but give you an opinion on okay does that mean you're going to bill us for it yep yeah already have excellent junior point josh i mean i have a question about about travel

What if this year we asked you guys to prioritize your travel? If you have to get a certificate, you get educated to keep your certificate, all right, great. Let's start with can that be online first? Can that be in the state second? And if you have to go out of state third, make it be that way. After that, if... we don't need to travel in eight, nine people going out of town for a week. Let's, let's, let's leave that alone. But maybe you get one that you need to go to, you want to go to. Okay. There's a, there's a way to take travel, keep it there. You need to learn. Okay. But we're also keeping our certificates there. That's a way to keep the costs down, but also do the same in allowing you to move forward there. Is that something that's worth exploring and asking them to Josh's point? Now, you know what, in that section, kind of what you need to do and look at that. Um, We have a parking lot full of cars over here. Do they all work? Do they not work? Should we go through and look at how many of those we need to keep or get rid of? There are things that we're not even talking about that we can save money on and really make a budget. I mean, I'll keep going if y'all want. I mean, I'm deep and deep in this thing. But I'm looking for ways to have more money for you guys, okay? Cutting out things that we just don't really need, okay? And there's a lot of stuff in here we just don't really need. But there's money in there that could turn back into education. It could turn into computer software, making you more efficient. Maybe even... better pay for somebody.

Okay.

Or I'm not necessarily big on the hiring, but let's give what we have more more money. That's how I'm approaching this. And is that completely wrong or right? I don't know. I've never been through this process. And I start from I don't want to cut anybody's job. I want to make sure that you have the ability to do what you want to do. But let's get rid of the fluff first.

Can you go back to the slide of the main cost centers? um yes sir so commissioner hughes i mean to to your point um you know we we made the recommendation okay we'll we'll hold on on hiring these three positions which is about 160 000 but that's Still $500,000 of our budget that we dove into the line items to find those cost savings that aren't salary and wages. So we've really done that to what you're asking. We've gone line by line in each of our cost centers and looked at – where we can pinch pennies to get to that $500,000 plus that dollar amount that we proposed that we'd be able to save our budget this year.

And you did a great job. Okay. but is there something else in here that it could come out there could be for example all the subscriptions everybody has a lot of subscriptions do we need all of them or let's keep the mandatory ones but do we need the other ones no no i don't know why we pay 175 000 from microsoft office i was going to leave that to you guys and i'll let you explain that but those are the types of things i wonder about me either and i just want to know where can we cut so that we are more efficient and our people have education and they have the ability to work with better computer programs, whatever it is. I'll be honest, I was offended with this out of the first, out of the shot cuts of this budget meeting we had, the first one. It took away education, it took away computers, it took away all the things that make you better. Now, I don't know if your instructions were to do that or not. It doesn't matter. What matters is I'm the other side of the coin. Let's figure out how to keep the things that make us better and get rid of the things we don't need. Nobody up here, in my opinion, needs a car allowance. We all drive our own cars everywhere we go. We're going to do that all day long. I'm the first to say I'll be without it for the rest of my term. I have no problem with that. You bring that up, man, we've got to have mileage. Nope. need is, that's a want, that's not a need. How often do you drive your car once a week to and from a site? Could it be in a work truck? These are the types of conversations that I like to have rather than if we're going to save a job or not save a job because that's going to save a job. If we get down and figure out what we need and don't need. Now, I may be going too far in the weeds and I don't know.

Yeah, this is a weird job in that we have no authority over staff, have worked their job. We're really relying on them to propose these things to us. And then when we do make ideas, it's always like, well, that's silly, or we can't do that. And we're like, well, I don't really know what to do. And so it really is an odd position up here. But I do share the sentiment of like, we definitely don't want to remove important things. You know, Josh Street has identified that mowing your parks is super important. And so we just keep suggesting more and more things. We're relying on our department heads to, I guess, you know, trade-offs. And let's discuss the trade-offs is really what we're looking for.

And I think part of the challenge is that we are a governing policy-making board, and management is left to the city manager and that staff. And broadly, I think we need to do the strategic planning and let the professionals bring us what best accomplishes that. And we are, you know, all five of us respond to those calls, the emails, and so forth. And granted, we don't all get the same ones because we are representing different parts of the city, and that's part of the challenge as well.

I am not up for reducing maintenance team members. I appreciate that. So how do you solve that? I think I've given you a couple suggestions on what I could support, but I'll leave it to everyone to communicate, whether they communicate publicly here or they communicate privately.

And, Commissioner Street, I said this at the beginning of, and I appreciate this conversation, and it is a conversation because you get those calls. And I appreciate that and appreciate the sentiments of you wanting to protect parks maintenance. So we'll continue to look and see where we're going to make adjustments.

And, you know, we only know. what we've been involved in. And I always lean to the Glenwood Rattlers because that's what I do on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And I know there's a willingness of cleaning the bathrooms after practices. They're willing to do that. Last year, I had to call Keith. I was like, there's no soap in the bathroom. I'm like, just tell us where the soap is, and we'll put the soap out. So there's a lot of people that want to just participate. We have to enable them, like volunteers, the Adopt-a-Park program, those sort of things, too. So there's a willingness to see that as well.

I did want to clarify one thing, Commissioner Lucas. So when we say we're taking over maintenance of the state roads, we're not talking about all state roads inside the city. It's in a very focused area where there was grant money. So if we see – like I saw a problem today at 6th and Harrison, and I sent it to the appropriate staff with FDOT to come in and address it. Okay. If there are maintenance issues that you see on the state roads in our city, you should report those to me or Jared like you would one of our own roads, and we'll get it to the appropriate staff with DOT.

Yeah, no, my question was answered specifically with what was presented that we were taking over. Thank you.

All right.

Any other questions? You are free. Thank you so much, Keith. We appreciate it. Do we want to keep going, Mr. Mayor, or take a break?

You want to take a break? Maybe five minutes? Five-minute break. All right. All right. We are back after a recess. Public Works is up next.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor and Commissioners. Next up is Public Works. But I just want to clarify, this is only the general fund aspect of Public Works. So this would be the engineering division and then the streets maintenance and drainage division. So you'll see Public Works again next week. I think. in two weeks sorry so anyway just want to clarify that uh for for this evening so so we're going to see a presentation on like water and sewer yes yes this is just the general fund uh for this evening so uh that we have uh mr clint murphy the director of public works and then miss stacy roush the assistant public works director and our city engineer Yes, Murphy.

Thank you. I invited Stacy to come up because she was an integral part of putting the budget together for us. She was heavily involved in that. So when we get to more detailed questions, probably need her support on that. And I do apologize for needing to sit down today. I've got a little bit of an ankle injury that's flared up, and I'm not sure how long I'd be standing up. I'm going to sit down for this one, but I apologize for that.

Probably only five or six minutes, Todd.

All right, got it. And my clock hasn't even started yet, so I've got plenty of time. The good news is out of the 19 cost centers that are captured within Public Works, we're only going to talk about three of them today, so it should be a pretty short discussion. By far, the majority of our budget is oriented toward the enterprise funds that we'll talk about on July 9th. So out of the, we roughly have 200 employees in public works. That represents approximately one-third of the city's staff. And of those 200, only less than 50 of them are actually funded out of the general fund. The rest of those are captured within enterprise funds. So keep that in mind. And under each of the different divisions, you see the cost centers associated with that. You see that environmental services and utilities have the largest number of cost centers. And then I showed the new cost center that was created for our internal paving crew. That is obviously funded separately from the general fund as well. So that's 41.50 that was created just to capture costs associated with that operation. All right, next slide. So within the first cost center we'll talk about is public works administration. That is where the position of director is housed out of. My salary is actually split between the general fund, environmental services, and the utility fund. We also have an administrative manager, which is also split with some of the enterprise funds. And we have administrative assistant and one public works call center representative. So we input roughly, and this is primarily the call center, inputs year-to-date 3,850 work orders into City Works, which is the system we use to track work orders and efforts around the city. We received 12,570 calls so far this fiscal year. Normally, that's about, on average, we normally average about 25,000 calls a year, so we're tracking close to that number. And we reviewed and processed invoices totaling $12,300,000. And I'll let Stacy talk about her cost center.

Uh, public works engineering cost center is 1620 in that call center. We have, um, three engineers, two licensed professionals, me and Matt and one engineering intern, Tina. She does most of the drafting for our in-house projects that we do design for. She does those amazing parking lots, um, that y'all been seeing a lot of lately. Uh, we have construction engineering inspection staff. We have one manager, three inspectors and two vacancies currently. We have a full-service survey crew with one licensed surveyor, one drafting tech, and two survey techs. And we also have our GIS team, which is a manager, a GIS specialist, and a GIS analyst. Our GIS specialist also does all of our SCADA for our lift stations. He monitors that and helps our team, which is very critical to our lift stations, the health of our lift stations and our response. Not listed on here is a public works project manager. We had that after the PMO was dissolved. We had a project manager in-house that took over a lot of the engineering projects. He retired recently, so that position is currently vacant. uh, kind of a data in our engineering division. We have issued about 500 right away permits fiscal year to date, taking in about $150,000. I think that's pretty critical given that we did not take on any money 18 months ago for right away permits. I think when I proposed this, I said it would bring in like 15 or $20,000 a year. We were obviously exceeding that. Um, in, uh, The engineering division we have also reviewed about 1,300 building permits, 250 development orders. That's fiscal year to date as well. Our survey team has done about 80 surveys. Some of those are for code enforcement. They'll reach out to us because they have a complaint of someone's fence in an alley that's blocking access. many many things like that people encroaching in right of ways they will do those surveys they also do a lot of surveys for our in-house projects they do right-of-way determinations they do a lot of work for the cras as well and with our even being down the two vacancies in our cei we have done over 6 000 hours of in-house inspections which totals over half a million dollars in savings if we had to hire that out

All right, next cost center we're going to speak to is the Public Works Street Maintenance and Drainage Division. It has two cost centers, 4110 and 4120. There is an org chart of our group. There's approximately 36, and then we just added, if you look at Shane Jane to the far right of that chart, he's the foreman over our paving and grading crew. So we added six as part of that operation, so brought our total up to 42. We will not be talking about that cost center today as it is outside of the general fund. So what I was going to do is just go down through each of our crews and kind of outline the basics of what they do. The brochure that I handed to you, the trifold, was something we put together last year for the open house. That kind of gives you an outline of the services that we provide. If any of the public that's here would like it, I brought extra copies of that. But we'll just walk through the street maintenance operation and let you know what that consists of. Go to the next slide. Oh, first of all, one of the first task that I was handed when I came here back in 2020 March 2020 Mr. McQueen was still the the city manager at the time and he asked me to do a right sizing report and his request at the time and I still have that report available if you'd ever want to take a look at it's a little outdated now because it was done in 2020 but what he asked me to do was take a look at our service levels around town he wanted the right-of-way maintained every three weeks which was pretty aggressive at the time and He wanted to know what that would look like So that was really one of my first I was a capital project engineer that was brought in that was really one of my first assignments So I look I took it very seriously and I went out I had a stopwatch and you know I watched our crews and how productive they were how long it took them to do certain tasks and documented all that and What we determined was that if we really wanted to do everything once every three weeks, we needed a total of 151 employees. As you would guess, that was determined not to be feasible, and so we tried to find other ways to be productive, primarily through the purchase and maintenance of superior equipment that allowed our crews to be more efficient, more productive. You can see, if you look back historically, we did not get the 151 in FY21. We stayed at 35, 36. But if you compare it to even as recent as 2010, we're about half the size that we used to be. next slide so now we go into the street maintenance crew brad walkers our foreman over the right-of-way maintenance he has six employees that work with him and first of all all our crews are cross-trained so during peak their peak time obviously is the peak growing season so we have crews that'll help them out when they need help. So all our crews are cross-trained. What I'm showing here is what their basic responsibilities and primary responsibilities are, but does not mean that others don't get involved in this. So they do mowing of the right-of-ways and city lots, trimming trees in the right-of-way. So they do everything in the right-of-way to help us. Next slide. Rodney Bland is our foreman over concrete. He does really a fantastic job for us. John can speak to some of the special projects that he put him on, but he's really brought a skill set that was well needed in the city, and he's excellent at training his employees on concrete work. So they do sidewalk construction and repair. curb construction and repair, ADA ramp, and driveway repair. A lot of utility cuts are involved in that as well. So he has, as you see, he has four employees that work with him. One is vacant now. Next slide. Charles Harris is foreman over our construction area. They do head wall repairs and construction, inlet repairs, culverts. manholes and retaining walls anything construction related in the right way they will they can do it they also if they if our concrete team needs support uh they are well trained in concrete and they can switch over and help out on a concrete project if needed Next slide. Marcus Hodge is our foreman over asphalt. He currently has four people working for him with two vacant positions. And that's really causing some, he's, the asphalt crew does utility cut repairs. This is all asphalt. Pothole repairs and minor paving. So with our pothole repairs, program that we're really starting to slide a little bit behind because we really need those two positions as quickly as possible. Next slide. Joseph Sullivan, JW for short, is our foreman over drainage and that's both our open, our ditches and our closed stormwater pipes. They maintain both those. They also do cleaning and maintenance of the storm pipes, do videos of the storm pipes. So we have a camera system that we can put down into our pipes to determine the condition and if whether they're candidates for being lined or not. And then we do the maintenance of the access platform. That's for the ditches. So we can run a radial arm mower along the platform and cut the ditches without putting a person down there. So we see a couple of folks there that are off on some injuries. Next slide. And this is just a quick picture of our paving crew. Shane Jane is the foreman. He's doing a great job for us. And then, of course, this is funded outside of the general fund. One of the things we talked about is trying to find better equipment to make us more productive. When I started thinking about things that we could really use, what we came up with, they call this a spider excavator. I like just saying it. I want to buy one just to say it, but it's a very diverse piece of equipment. All those legs that you see can move, and that's why they call it a spider. We actually did a demonstration, was it last year? We did a demonstration, and Tim Tatum, well, we had several people, and Tim Tatum primarily, he's our most, I think he's our most tenured employee here at the city now. He's our most experienced operator, and he got down into the ditch there behind Massalina, and he was able to do in just an hour, I don't know how long he was in there, maybe two hours at the most. He did more on that ditch than a whole crew of six people could have done all day, or maybe two days. So it's a pretty versatile piece of equipment. It certainly would increase our productivity. We do not have this in the budget for this year, but it's something nice to talk about, because they go for about $560,000. So it's not a cheap piece of equipment. A lot of moving parts, but it is very versatile. Go ahead and you can rapid fire those really. Slope stabilization, storm water, drainage maintenance, vegetation management, dredging and wetland rehabilitation, and emergency response operations. If you had a storm come through, it could help clear things out very quickly. And then lastly, there should be one more. Yes, pipeline and utility work. uh you can access hard to reach infrastructure without causing ground compaction or disruption so if you ask me what my ultimate uh wish list was that would that would probably be it but again that is not in the budget for this year but that's something we can take a look at down the road Biggest challenges for public works is definitely people, staff. We're finding it very difficult to hire reliable people. And so that's probably our biggest challenge right now. I think Vicki even mentioned our environmental services division, which I realize we're not talking about today. We've really struggled to find qualified drivers. It seems like, well, certainly when you look at private companies like WastePro, they're able to pay almost double what we're paying. They're at around $30 an hour to hire somebody new. We're at around $18. Well, that's a big difference. Even when you start looking at some of the local municipalities, our pay seems to be on the lower part of that scale. We recently did a little research. I had Shane, the manager over in Massalina do, and we are highlighted in yellow compared to some of the cities around, and we're close to the bottom in a lot of different categories. So this has not been, these salaries that they came up with, has not been independently verified with Vicki. She's taking a real close look at those, and I'm working with her to kind of come up with a solution to this issue. But we are, if you ask me, the biggest problem we have, we're really struggling to find qualified people. Of course, the other thing that's obvious that I talked about, I think, during the first workshop was material costs. I mean, everything, without exception, is going up, including fuel, concrete, asphalt, road base, aggregate. I mean, across the board, the things that we need on a daily basis are costing more to get. So that's a big, big problem for us. Did I miss anything? think we're prepared for uh if you hit the next slide that's it oh that is i thought you had a q a slime you took that out okay all right sorry so money on paper there you go saving money on paper clint yes they took out the q a sorry yes and i did the trifold myself so i'm i'm responsible for any design errors that the mayor might point out

Um, you mentioned that we were had a hard time hiring drivers. Do we do any sort of CDL training?

We do. Yeah. That was a big obstacle for us for a while, but we, we have, uh, managed with Vicki's help and human resources. We, we have an in house program.

You have 400,000 temp workers. Can we take some of that money and bring it into me? Yes. If you're low on staff out and there's 400 grand in temp workers, how often do you Using those daily, weekly? Daily. Okay. And an FTE costs you more, I get, because that's a forever, but that's one way. Your bridge tender contract, how many people sit in the bridge house? I think there's rotation. Is it three shifts?

It's one at a time, but it has to be manned 24-7.

Right. It's contracted now. How many? What's the shift? Is it three or four? Do we know?

It's up to the contractor to make sure it's open 24-7. I'm not sure what.

Yeah, we contract the service out to Nelson Bridge.

No city staff. Right. I want $150,000 and listen to radio. Let's talk to them about renegotiating that. I mean, that's $150,000 for it works during the day, very rarely at night. Not works. It's operational on the weekends and during the day, but at night, 24-7, how often? I guess you've got to be there 24-7. We do. $150,000, is that the best we can negotiate?

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the Coast Guard regulations, we either have to man it 24-7 or we have to leave it up all the time. That's what I've been told for several years.

Manning it 24-7, it's things like that. You could leave it up at night.

You could leave it up at night. I think that was one of the things.

That would make everybody real happy. I'm not saying that. We'll just tell them the Ward 4 Commissioner said that. Blame it on me, I guess. That's the thing. Okay. Now, you said how many? We did it for TC. I don't know why we wouldn't do it for money.

19 different cost centers. But only three of them are dedicated to the general fund.

And who's in charge of all 19? You too?

Well, yes. It falls under the director of public works, so yes. And she's the assistant director, so yes.

All right. So on public works admin, and then you said you get paid another way. What's the other one?

So my salary is split between general fund, environmental services, and underground utilities. because I have responsibilities across all three.

It's split equally depending on how many employees are in that. So it's a ratio of however many employees are in each fund. That's how his salary is split between all three.

Okay. And because it separates into a different cost center, we have to give all the expenses, even though we're probably not charging them all and we don't use them all, like insurance and all these... We're acting like that that is it standalone by itself, and you're not in charge of it, but you are, but I think we're paying for something over and over again. There's got to be.

It's that way for the clerk's position. It's divided up over multiple... And look, as you go through years, the budget gets tighter. They typically try to maneuver things into the enterprise funds and share the cost over multiple cost centers, so it's not one cost center that's... This is just... one of multiple categories that exist for public work. Right.

Jared, can you go back to slide 17? Okay. A couple more.

Just a general question. FRS contributions and FMPTs. The FMTP when it's on every one of them, the FRS is not.

Yeah, we only have a handful of employees that are still on the FRS retirement plan that we had back in the 90s. And so if an employee for that cost center, if you see it in one and don't see it in another, that means that there is an employee in that cost center that is under the FRS contribution plan. There's no contribution. FRS is a defined benefit, but they were in that plan. So the city is contributing in that account is what you're seeing on there. Yeah.

Vicki, do you know how many we have? Top of my head, roughly 15, 12, and 15 is the top of my head, sir. But I'll get you an exact number.

I think it's in between 12 and 15 because Mr. Micah asked me this question about two months ago, and you answered it for me.

Thank you, sir. So my question is, you know, we've gone through a couple of these rounds of cuts into public works, and we have no capital in project money. So what are your project people doing, like if there's no capital project money?

project people as in like project managers or yeah project managers and i mean you have to have capital money to ultimately for employees to have something to do too so that's what i'm stacy i just want to interject real quick um we do have infrastructure surtax dollars that we are funding projects out of so there there is project money and then we have 100 at least 150 million of projects going that are reimbursable and so go ahead stacy

yeah so if you saw public works admin it was 13 million dollars in reimbursed costs so the project managers are there to manage the grants and manage the invoicing and keep those we have to do quarterly updates for some biannual updates for others also the previous project manager that i said retired he was managing grant funded projects that were left over from the pmo days that we inherited we could like Some of the projects with the PMO, they kind of just, you know, some of them went to parks. They weren't funded. Some went to us that weren't funded. Some of them were funded with grants. So that's what he was doing. That has been absorbed by myself and Suzanne Mandel in his absence. So a lot of our stuff is infrastructure surtax, grant funded. As you'll see, some of the projects that we work on in engineering, they're CRA funded or some other FDOT grant. Most of our stuff is grants. We don't.

we don't have capital i don't have anything to contribute from my budget as a match but the srf as well yes srf cbg yes i think the takeaway is they're managing several hundred million dollars worth of projects right now so just to answer the question so i guess my question is so we're looking at this year's budget but i believe we're done with these projects in the next two years i think is what we're projected

hopefully so so at that point if we don't start building margin for capital projects inside the budget what what what are we going to do from that point it's a really great question well i would still say we have 4.7 million around then there that comes in annually for infrastructure surtax and thankfully it will continue for the next 10 years So there are going to be projects to manage as part of that.

But not at the level of what they're today. Certainly not.

Not what we're doing now. And we have projects identified. Y'all have seen some of the plans. florida avenue frankfurt avenue state those are going to be funded by infrastructure surtax there are other projects like that that are have been identified as priority for infrastructure surtax and essentially whatever you guys wish and prioritize and vote on but we will not have the same uh influx of grant funds that we have had in the last eight years

Yeah, so I bring attention to it because, I mean, we're essentially, this entire department's relying upon grant funding. Without it, they have no money to do anything. And so I would say that we should strongly consider, you know, from what we do in Tallahassee and the supports that we provide to our legislative delegation, as well as that, I mean, we're very fortunate to have all of our, we didn't get a veto today. That's right. So, you know, but... I guess structurally my question is, what needs to change structurally so that there is capital funding put back into the budget that did exist four or five years ago?

yeah prior to the hurricane we had money budgeted every year for paving and for dredging we have neither now that was axed when we got all these grant funding and um infrastructure infrastructure surtax so unless we want to start funding that maintenance out of infrastructure surtax that is something that would have to be budgeted elsewhere right now our crews are only really working on service requests, repairs, some minor special projects, the sidewalks and crosswalks that we do, but we aren't doing any large public works funded projects.

Do you not see, and this goes to what we had to deal with with the FEMA aspect of requiring to maintain what you have, So if we have no money budgeted for maintenance, we get hit with a hurricane. How do we show that we've actually been maintaining these items? Because all of our funding is just going towards new builds, not tactful maintenance.

Actually, all of our funds right now are really going more towards maintenance. The only new builds that we would do is like some extra side some sidewalk projects or crosswalk projects. The rest of our work is pothole repairs, storm system repairs, ditch repairs, we're not doing new projects, we are primarily maintenance and service requests.

So you have capital money for maintenance inside your budget?

We have operating money.

And what line item is that?

Operating and maintenance. Repairs and maintenance.

How much is in repairs and maintenance? I'm just curious the dollar amount.

And you asked about project managers. We talked about a vacant project manager that we intend on not filling for next year. That's correct.

Okay, but Josh in repairs and maintenance on the street, they have building repairs of 6,000 and equipment and vehicles for 320, but no road. I'm sorry.

It's under road materials and supplies.

How much is that? Road materials and supplies.

$5,500. $260,000. But it's...

materials to take care of those issues it's not so when we say that's all our projects so i just count the between those three that's less than three hundred thousand dollars and remember please that utilities funds pay for their own materials for the now so you're saying we'll see more yes you will see all right i'll save my comments to the end after we get through all the presentations

and we were looking at other creative what you you saw how we handled the internal paving crew how are you using cra and hud options whereas looking at infrastructure surtax money that maybe can be spent on some materials so we're looking at creative ways outside of this budget to potentially come up with funds for those those materials

Yeah, and this is before my time, so I would defer. I think it's before most people's times in the room, but I think the narrative I've heard is that before the hurricane, we really didn't spend a ton of money on new projects or doing full replacements, which is why we have the situation we're in with A lot of our lift stations, our underground infrastructure, and the roads. So even if there was money in there for actual new projects, very little of it was spent was my understanding.

The one that comes to mind is Jenks Avenue between 23rd Street and Baldwin. The city saved up for a long period of time to do that project, and I think it took five years, Brandi?

It took us six years to save, and we would accumulate. We put about a million dollars aside each year, so it was about a $6 million project, but that's how we would save. put aside a million dollars that was before infrastructure surtax but that was the way we saved for a project in order to get something big like that accomplished and now the utilities fund paid for moving water and sewer lines and then the general fund covered the six million dollar contract to widen the road

But it's obvious we need to spend more than $300,000.

It makes sense to now think about, could we say in this budget, say $500,000 this year?

I would like to have a separate conversation on us prioritizing as a board what we spend the infrastructure surtax on. I think that was one of the things we walked into last year with kind of an agreement on, and I think that it would be a good time to look at that and say, hey, $500,000 each year is going to resurfacing, maintenance, whatever it is, all $4 million of it for all I care. I just want to make sure that we get a prioritization because I see project people and I don't see a lot of capital for project people to do things after the SRF and all these other things are done.

um well we've kind of already started talking on that and you guys have been involved as a reminder you approved a contract with rmt and so if you want to speak to that because that's kind of laying out uh in a very objective manner the conditions of our roads and where we really should try to focus that in an objective manner very similar to the heat map that we created following hurricane michael yes they're gathering that data right now as we speak

Well, they're still doing the installation. They're doing that this week, and then the data gathering will involve, but it's a road management technology, which is what RMT stands for, and it's a system for real-time PCI index readings, so they'll put cameras on approximately 20 of our vehicles, and vehicles that... run various different routes around town on a regular basis and they capture photos on a continuous basis when they get back to the yard that evening there's a wi-fi system that our i.t department helps with thank you donald and it downloads all the data every evening when they park and then that's loaded into a system, and it actually develops automatically a road management program, which I think you guys have asked for, like a 10-year plan. It automatically feeds into that so that we can come up with a plan that gives us the optimal...

bank tax is a great place to do that from we would love that i would encourage everybody if you have not seen um our cfo's comments regarding the property tax changes um he's promoting uh impact fees believe it or not so um on new development so i'll just say that that's his solution yeah just one question yeah one one point of clarification

So just a point of clarification. The one project manager we have left and her assistant are both funded under the utilities enterprise fund.

Not from the general fund.

Not from the general fund, yes.

Is there a couple of words that are probably not on that loan manager? Thank you. There are a couple of roads that aren't probably on your road management system that I'd like to have you take a look at. A couple of them, Jonathan, we went to last week, that 12th Plaza over there and in Millville. They're off the beaten path. They've gotten no love probably since they were first laid down. Okay.

No, that's great. I think we're actually installing some of the cameras on our meter trucks. So every resident in the city limits should be some outside of that. That's a good thing about this program. If we happen to go into Bay County for some reason or Lynn Haven, I know Lynn Haven is using the same system as well. I think Bay County's taken a close look at it. I don't know if they've signed the contract yet, but we can share data with them as well. So every road in the city should be documented, at least through our metered trucks.

Any other questions? That's it. All right. Thank you, Mr. Murphy. Thank you, Ms. Roush. All right. Next up is the Panama City Fire Department, and we will turn it over to Chief Collier.

All right, Mayor, Commissioners, Dave Collier, Fire Chief. Before we begin, just a quick history of the department. We were established on April 21st of 1912. So we just celebrated our 114th year of providing service and security to the citizens.

Nevin, was that an awesome announcement? It was. Thank you. It was a good year. Yeah. Oh, man. Vicky's giving you a side eye over here. We don't work for each other, so it's good. All right, next slide. There's going to be a complaint with the HRA office. Yeah, Nevin's contracted out. Oh, I needed that. I'm sorry, Chief Collier.

Oh, all good, all good. All right, so the first slide that we have up is our current map of Panama City proper and Panama City north. What you see here, a dozen of the colors, are the current coverage of our five stations. We do have a sixth station off of Star Avenue that is currently not manned. It is actually staffed by Bay County Emergency Services. so we cover both areas which are approximately 41 square miles you'll see in panama city north the yellow and pink area that is separated between two of our current stations in panama city proper which is station four and station three they are the closest unit response to those areas on average we're running approximately 40 to 70 calls per year to panama city north this puts our apparatus out of pocket between 30 and 60 minutes for each call that we go on And we have an average response time of 15 to 20 minutes it takes us to get up there. Just so you're aware, we've run the analytics of what future needs would be to provide adequate coverage to Panama City North in the future. We would need approximately five stations minimum to cover the same square footage or square mileage provide the level of protection that we're covering for Panama City proper.

You mean five up there?

Correct.

If it was fully... That's at full development. Correct. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm not saying all at once. That would be a phased-in approach.

There's going to be like 10,000 units up there at one point. Yeah.

Yeah. And we're slowly moving that way. Next slide. I know one of the questions has come up in the past about strategic partnerships. Do we have mutual aid agreements, automatic aid agreements with other agencies? So here is a list of all the current agencies that we do have standing agreements with. We have mutual aid agreements with every single fire agency in the county. We also have mutual aid agreements with Tyndall Air Force Base, NSA Panama City, and the Florida Department of Corrections. We are also part of the statewide mutual aid agreement. So if there is a state level disaster or disaster in the region, we can be called upon to provide any level of service that's being requested. So the JAWS agreement, right? So the Joint Agencies and Water Strike Team. So that was actually the brainchild of one of our battalion chiefs, Jerome Fleeman. That is specific to our dive team. It is one of the only types of agreements that exist in the nation. And the federal government has actually called upon the team to go up there and talk about it to look at establishing that as a national framework in the future. But that is a joint agreement between ourselves, Bay County Sheriff's Office, FWC, and FSU Panama City Dive Locker. So it has been phenomenal since its inception. The current automatic aid agreement we have is only with Bay County Fire and Emergency Services. We provide automatic aid response in the interlocal service boundary agreement, so the northwest side of Panama City proper that we took over two years ago, three years ago now. And then they help us with automatic aid to Panama City North for any calls that we have up there to supplement.

Next slide.

So here's a breakdown of our overall operations. We currently have 83 personnel total. We have 11 administrative staff, which include myself, assistant chief, my division chief of training, division chief of fire prevention, supply and maintenance team, and support staff that go along with some of those teams. We currently have 72 operations personnel. We were at 75, but three of those positions were unfunded last year. These are broken down to three shifts that are 24 per shift that are spread over five station locations. They now work a 1-3-2-3 schedule 365 days a year, so they are 24-7.

and they have great lunches.

Yes, they do.

We are known for our food. And then we have a list of our current special teams, our urban search and rescue team. It is a state asset. It's a regional asset, so Technical Rescue Team 101. We have our fire boat, our dive team, in-house SCBA maintenance, our peer support, critical incident stress management team, which is also now a regional and state asset, and our honor guard team. It's important to note that we are responsible for protecting over 41 square miles with approximately $3.4 billion worth of property that we have been asked to protect. Next slide. So this is just a overview of our current organizational structure and how we operate.

Next slide.

All right, so what are our strategic goals? So we want to continue progression with our strategic plan. So the strategic plan was developed last year. We're going through accreditation, but it was also time for us to do it. So when the city held its strategic priorities workshop last year, we took that input from our internal stakeholders and external stakeholders and developed our strategic plan for 2026 through 2031. This was accepted and approved by the Commission on August 26th of last year. So our initiatives are to continue enhancing emergency response capabilities, strengthen our workforce, promote community risk reduction, modernize infrastructure technology, continue fiscal responsibility and resilience, foster a culture of excellence and accountability. All right, so the next slide is a big one. So the first column that we have there is the revenue that we currently generate. As you see, our only revenue generator of any substance is the fire assessment. So what I've done here is I've broken it down for the last four years of what the assessment revenue has brought in. And you will see, beginning in 2025, we have seen a reduction every single year in the assessment revenue. So that has driven down our budget every year. what occurred in 2025 was the reorganization of how we assess the fire assessment and collected those fees so that's where we started seeing that that drop so operating costs again i've laid out for the last four years of where our budget has fallen you'll see beginning this fiscal year and what we're requesting for fiscal year 27 we are seeing additional uh decreases It's important to note that in the 26 budget, you'll see there is a large disparity and a large drop. That was because we unfunded three firefighter positions, and we had a one-time pension savings of $1.5 million that went back to the city, but that's being added back on this year.

Chief Carter, were those the FEMA safer funded firefighter positions? They were.

Yeah. So what Jared is talking about was back in 2022, we applied for a federal federal grant through FEMA called the Safer Grant. So we were able to hire three firefighters at no cost for three years. At the end of the three years, we were required to pay their salaries and benefits 100%, and we were. And then once we had vacant positions last year and we were looking at additional cuts, we decided since we had the three vacant positions that we would just go ahead and unfund those positions so they were not filled this year.

The pension, it's the second largest in your – explain that to me – I hear it's expensive. Well, of course, it's retirement. Why is it that way? I'm told that's one of the causes of this to go up, and we can't make it go away. There's a new way to fund retirement. Help the new guy out, please.

So I'm not the subject matter expert on the pension. I am just a member of the pension. The pension has a board, so it is a self-funded pension. The members put in 7.5%, and then there's a matching contribution by the city. Now, there's a lot of stuff that goes into that on how it performs, how much the city is liable for putting into it, and all that varies over the years. We have seen over, I know, this year a reduction in that liability, and we're hoping that that reduction will continue over the years. But, again, we could probably spend a day and a half going over just the pension itself.

Commissioner, it is a defined benefit plan, and so an actuary – The actuary is done every year on the pension, which takes into account the demographics, the economy, the market, and that determines what the contribution rate by the city is each year. So their contribution is fixed. It stays at 7.5% every year unless their pension board changes that. But the city's contribution fluctuates each year depending on that actuarial. So for next year, it's projected to be around 60%.

When you say 60%, 60% of what?

Of their payroll.

So of the $11 million, 60% of that is pension?

That's all personnel expenses, so that includes pension.

So the $11 million, 60% of that number is?

Close to it, because not everybody is in the fire pension.

That's correct. i believe this number here is is all of his personnel costs so that would include the the pension cost that's not just your salaries and wages that's right that's pension overtime all all of that so it's four million dollars is that right am i calculating that i think it's roughly 3.6 okay all right

Who negotiated that deal the best for the city? Not. I mean, fluctuating?

It's a defined benefit plan, just like FRS is. So FRS, we're told by the state each year what the contribution rate is. Same concept. Employees contribute 3% into FRS, and that's a fixed contribution every year. And then the percentage the city contributes fluctuates each year depending on the plan.

So what did it go up in one year?

I would have to evaluate that.

This was my concern with taking a deferment last year, is that we would just come right back to having to put it back next year.

It's actually projected to go down this year.

From what we put in, what about the year prior to that?

I would have to look at that.

It would be good just to see, because it would be good for us to understand the ramifications of doing a deferment to a pension.

It wasn't a deferment, sir. Those were contributions that were in the plan that we used to go towards our pension expense for this year. So we didn't defer.

It offset the expense. So it didn't defer. It's not like you missed a year of mortgage payments. Actually, the savings made most of the payment for us last year. We had more turnover than was expected, and so that savings in the actuary showed up, and we were able to use it for the next year's expense.

Yes, but if it goes back up, which is what it's done this year, how much did we actually save is what I'm trying to say. I know.

It didn't go up. It went down. It went down from last year. Correct. so even after the deferment of the or even we didn't defer anything so we used our contributions that were are in the plan to pay our contributions this year so the city contributed money not all that money was used

the in the program so you had a reserve correct chose use reserve for this year's contributions so it's not a deferment it's it's more just like an annuity made a little bit more money than it should have made so to speak I know it's not how that works but right but very similarly that that's what happened right had the 1.8 been there what would our number have been for this year

Our what number?

Our contribution?

Percentage would be the same.

It would still be 60%.

Because that 60% is based on payroll, so it's not.

Because every year you have to. How about this?

Give us a report five years of how much we've actually put in cash into the pension.

I think that was you said not everybody's in that pension. Is that was there a cut off at certain time? And now? Anybody knew?

So we have a handful of general employees who are in the joint general employee pension fund with the city. Okay, they're not sworn personnel. Okay. Okay.

Just a question to staff, really. I mean, I wouldn't want to mess up anything that we already have with firefighters that are already hired on board, but have we considered moving forward with new hires, a different plan?

No, I mean, we've had some slight discussions, but that's not a decision for me to make.

Yeah, I understand. I'm really asking that to the group here. The answer is yes.

Is that a train wreck in that department? We don't know.

Could it be? Yeah, there could be potential negative impacts for sure.

Well, you don't mess with anybody who already has a tab. That's what I'm saying. Everybody new would switch.

But I will tell you it is a recruitment tool for our department.

I'm sure. I will add, both Chief Collier and Vicki and I have had discussions on how to even start attacking that problem without harming those that have been promised what they have today. And we're currently researching that now, and we may have to seek some professional guidance as well.

To that point, it's similar to Social Security. You take people out of it, that means that it eventually becomes unsolvent, and we end up spending money regardless. I think that's why I don't like messing with pensions, and that's what I was very nervous with last year, and even on deferment. So I would say just for future reference, don't use performance-based of a pension to balance our budget. I don't think that's true.

Is that what happened?

Well, the only thing we could have done was use it to go back into the plan. That's what we did.

Or we could have found $1.8 million worth of cuts last year and not had that conversation is what happened. But you still have the money pension benefit.

Wouldn't have benefited the, I see what you're saying. Sorry.

It definitely affects the conversation you guys are talking about now, because now you've backed yourself into having less amount of money inside the pension. So when you talk about making a change, you can't without hurting other people that are in the pension. Let the pension be solvent is what I'm communicating.

The pension would have been solvent regardless. Let's get the report and have the discussion. I think it will be clearer.

But this reminds me of what our HR director said earlier. The quality of benefits you have lead to the quality of employees we hire. Would you say that is true given that this is a recruitment tool? 100%.

All right to continue. Just a final overview on this. So from fiscal year 25 to 26, we saw a decrease in our budget by 2.5%. This year, we're requesting a decrease of 5.86%, which totals over the past two years, a reduction of 8.38%, which equates to approximately $1.1 million. Next slide. All right, so about two years ago the department transitioned to what's called a program-based budget. So we've broken down exactly what it costs to run the services and programs that our department has. So you'll see on the bottom of this, well, so this is kind of a continuation from the last slides, and you'll see that for the past two fiscal years, or anticipated for the past two fiscal years, we've seen a continued reduction in our budget. And this is all associated with how do we measure our performance and how well we're doing with our budget. And you'll see every single year we are seeing an increase of calls for service, and we're anticipated to be over 7,000 calls this year. All right, next slide.

I think the 7,000 are fires versus...

It's fire medical. It's every call we go on. So that's every call for service that we have.

And all the service calls, how many are EMS versus fire?

Seventy percent are EMS, though. They're just fire.

Okay. All right. Thank you.

All right. Next slide. All right, so our first program is our administrative support services. Again, this is comprised of all of the administrative staff, and this year we're requesting $2.14 million to fund that. So, again, that's all the command staff. That's all of our support staff. Listed here are all the requirements that we have to run and manage the department, so incident reporting, certification, building maintenance, building inspections, everything that goes into managing and running the actual department. um important note here is in 2017 we received an iso classification of two which put us in the top seven percent in the nation of fire protection services Just so y'all are aware, we are up for that evaluation sometime next year. And we hope to maintain that level two service. Our other goals are to complete our accreditation process. This is a national level program with an outside vendor that comes in, has a set international standard or national standard that says, hey, we have met this minimum stance of accreditation. exceptionalism and professionalism and it places us it will place us in the top 12 percent of all departments in the nation all right next slide up next is city emergency management for those who did not know your fire department is responsible for emergency operations in the city anytime that we have a disaster we are responsible for the development and maintenance of the continuity operations plan the fire department emergency plan or hazardous materials response plan and the city emergency operations plan Again, this is an all-hazards approach, so any level or type of event that we have to deal with, we are responsible for managing and mitigating whatever that is. We review and update that annually, and we conduct training with all the staff. And during an actual event, we'll establish the COP team. Our incident command is established here in City Hall, and all the directors and all those that need to be involved in that process, that's where we meet and start those operations. And then we work collaboratively with Bay County Emergency Operations Center for any state assets that we may need. Next slide. All right. So your big one, emergency operations, your fire department. So we're asking for 10.3 million on this. This is all your fire department staff. So your 72 personnel and everything that they need to operate for the entire year. So again, we're broken up against three shifts with 24 firefighters across five stations throughout the city. Right now, we run four engines, one ladder, one tower truck, one rescue, and a battalion chief. All units are equipped to provide first responder medical care up to basic life support, so EMTs, and we run any type of call for service that you can think of. So each year, again, we're anticipating that we're gonna run over 7,000 calls this year, which range from fire suppression, tech rescues, alarms, MBAs, and everything in between. Just to kind of give this in context, we have an established response benchmark to anywhere in Panama City proper. Our goal is to respond anywhere in the city for 90% of the calls that we go on, less than five minutes and 22 seconds. This year to date, we were down to four minutes and 35 seconds, so we're doing really well.

Congratulations.

Yeah, Panama City North, we're averaging 17 minutes and 54 seconds. Okay.

Emergency operations for EMS, we're asking for 25,000. This 25,000 really is just supplies, materials, and certification upkeep. Again, this is a critical component because about 70% of our calls are EMS-based these days. Again, we provide BLS emergency response to these specific call types, so CPRs, auto mineral, chest pains, diabetics, all your significant medical emergencies. We also do backfill Bay Medical EMS. When they are not available or they don't have units available, we will respond to any type of call that they request. So we provide support to them when they have a need to as well. Again, we have our established benchmarks to respond anywhere in the city in less than five minutes and 13 seconds, and right now we're sitting at approximately five minutes for a response. And we have an average patient contact of over 4,000 people a year. Next slide. Fire prevention. So our fire prevention public education division, we're asking for approximately $6,000 this year. So the mission of fire prevention is obviously to reduce the potential for risk or fires or emergencies happening, right? So we have a comprehensive approach to education, code compliance, and fire protection engineering systems. So our key services are public education, code compliance, fire protection engineering. So we do a lot of plan reviews where we're heavily involved with code compliance and the building department for plan reviews for new construction remodels, that type of stuff to ensure that businesses and occupancies are coming up to code before they go live. So we average over 2,700 annual inspections a year. We average about 200 plan reviews annually, and we conduct a little over 75 public education events in the community throughout the year. The request is basic replacement equipment for hydrant flow testing, some computer replacement, and miscellaneous hand tools and stuff. Up next is just a slide showing some of the events that we have conducted over the last year. So our open house is a big one. We get a lot of reviews on that, and we plan on having that every single year. All right, next. Our supply and maintenance division, this is really the backbone of the department, to be honest with you. So this division is comprised of two personnel, and they are responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of all of our apparatus equipment and facilities. So as you see here, they do all sorts of stuff. It's important to note on this that over the last five years, their budget has only increased by about 2.72%. And that's because we implemented a comprehensive repair maintenance program for all of our apparatus and equipment, and that has paid dividends on the back end for us. So we are seeing a lot of reduced out of service times of our equipment apparatus. things are operating at the level they should be, our personnel have the equipment they need, and it allows us to function at an optimal level. all right next is our urban search and rescue team we're asking for 19 300 for this so this is a specialized team that was developed after september 11 2001 to provide urban search and rescue operations in the region one and state of florida so region one is all the way from pensacola to tallahassee we're one of a handful of technical rescue teams in region one we're one of 63 in the state of florida So our capabilities are structural collapse, confined space, high angle, low angle, road rescue, trench rescue, search ops, and swift water rescue. Um, currently we have 30 members on the team. This team is going to become more important over the coming years, especially with the discussion of FEMA, uh, being downsized or, uh, being dissolved completely. That burden will now come down to the states and local municipalities. We are anticipating future funding will come to help support these teams. Um, but we are requesting this year for replacement items and equipment. Um, we do have some stuff that is going out of date and needs to be replaced. And next is just a slide of some of the various things that we've done. So again, we are a regional team, a statewide team. That's them on a statewide deployment and us conducting training, you know, high-end rope rescue and some rope ops, maintaining that skill and ability. All right, next. Our fireboat team, we're requesting $2,000 for this team. This team was put in service. We actually received our first vessel in 2006, and we are responsible for covering all of the intercoastal waterways, which include the beginning of the pass all the way to Tindall Bridge, all the way to West Bay Bridge, and all the way to Lindhaven Bridge.

Why is the Coast Guard and FWC in?

They are, but we are the only vessel in the county that has fire suppression capability. So if there is a vessel fire, we're it.

All right. We're also the only one with a port.

We are. So we have two port facilities next to the water. And that's actually how we obtained the boat itself. The two vessels that we've ever had, we were able to obtain off the port security grant. So that was only a 25% match, which wasn't much on our end. But it is primarily there to support the port when they do have a vessel fire or some other fire on the property like the pellet plant. but it's also important to remember that when you look as a whole in the county we have hundreds of millions if not over a billion dollars worth of vessels out there that have little to no protection so at least for the Panama City limits we're that agency that has that capability to support vessel fire operations where's the nearest one the nearest other firemobile okay

That's crazy.

How does Pensacola? Well, no, I'm sorry. We take that back. Destin just got theirs. Okay. Destin has one. There's still a lot of gas. Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

Our fire boat falls under our mutual aid agreements.

they do so any of our apparatus equipment personnel all fall under our mutual aid agreements with all the agencies chief just a question like how is it handled in pensacola and these other ports do they typically contribute and like or Does the, are you asking funding wise? Yeah.

I'm just, I'm curious.

I mean, I'm assuming Pensacola has to have some type of fire protection for their port.

The closest one I know of is destined. I mean, it could be land-based. I mean, we do a lot of land-based at the ports as well. Okay. Yep.

They do have the Navy over there, so maybe that's what it is.

Yes, and you will actually see them for the 4th of July. They'll be out there monitoring the barge and make sure everything goes off good.

Every cop can get on a boat and be out there on the 4th of July. Oh, yeah.

And it's important to note, too, that with our mutual aid agreements, we do work closely with FWC, our own PD, and Coast Guard. Some of these agencies have certain requirements and certain things that they won't do, so that's why they do call on us because we're a capable agency of covering a lot more than they're able to. Next slide. And this is the vessel. It's a 29-foot safe boat capable of putting 500 gallons per minute of water out on any fire. Up next is our in-house SCBA maintenance team. So an SCBA or our air pack, so we use free clean air when we're going into a fire. This is a state requirement for us to have. There are a couple different ways to do this. Some departments outsource this to another vendor. We found years ago that it is cheaper for us to do it in-house, to do the maintenance in-house. We see reduced down times. We don't have to wait for somebody to show up. So we've always done this type of repair maintenance process. in-house our personnel are certified with the type of air pack that we use and you see here they do routine maintenance annual testing of all of our personnel asset management all that stuff that goes along with it it's important because we have to meet the annual requirement for testing that's out of the florida administrative code 69a62 so this is something that we have to maintain and do We are requesting 22,600 this year, mainly due to replacement parts and needs, and some updated testing equipment that's outdated. All right, next. Our dive team. So we currently have 10 members on our dive team. This is a specialty team that does underwater search, water rescue, recovery operations, evidence, hazard recovery, and mutual aid response. So our team members are certified up to the overhead cave diver level just because we have to enter certain things like vessels underwater or vehicles underwater. They have fully hazmat encapsulated suits, full face masks, so high technology capability that's on this team that's not seen in most other areas. Again, we work closely with FWC, FSU Panama City, and Bay County to help us support with any deployments that do occur on that end.

I'm out.

I did the certification. I won't do it again. And here are some of the operations that we've done. A lot of weapons recovery has been the Pat Thomas. We do have lift bags, if you all have seen. People like to drive their vehicles down the boat ramp. We're the only ones with the capability to lift them out. So that's why we have the team. All right, next. All right, so one of our newer teams is our Honor Guard team. We established this just a few years ago, and they are what it says. They're there for dignity, respect, professionalism, the highest level of professionalism that we expect out of our personnel, to provide services for funerals, memorials, department ceremonies, community representation, and line of duty deaths. Just so you're aware, they will be presenting the colors at the 9-11 Memorial, so that's a big event for them. They have been busy recently with several funerals and things that have happened around our community, and they've been the primary agency for those events. And next is just a couple of slides of, you know, this is the team, so they're phenomenal. right next our peer support team this is no cost to the city so years not long ago the state and nationwide there's been an intense focus on mental health awareness for firefighters suicide is probably the number one killer outside of cancer and heart attacks so a large focus has been put into peer support and what this team does is they're all certified through a third party And they go around to our stations every quarter. They go out to other municipalities when they have a line of duty death or a medical call that was very tragic to them. And it's just emotional support, that critical response to help diffuse them, let them know that, hey, what you're feeling is normal and how you should feel. And they also do follow-ups if somebody wants to follow up, or we can help them get the resources they need to talk to somebody who's certified.

Y'all interact with HR on that? Do we provide any support to HR?

For this, this is very specialized in what we do. The level of support that we have on this and the resources are more than what we can get from the Employee Assistance Program. Now, that is still an option that we present to the employee, that it is an option long-term. But there are other long-term free resources that our personnel can use. There's apps they can go on. They can actually talk to a mental health counselor live right now if they want to, and it's at no cost to them. And typically it's with somebody who's gone through training who understands the fire department, what firefighters do, and what they're experiencing. So it's a little more specialized, but yes, we do have that option. So this team was developed in 2023. It's important to note that we've had over 1,800 contacts with firefighters, either with our department or other local departments. And they were also part of the first ever state deployment to Hurricane Ian as a peer assessment or peer support team in the state to help go talk to first responders who were dealing with a natural disaster. All right, next. Here's a couple slides of those that influence her canine. Engineer Amanda Scoggin, she actually sent her canine through training, so she actually has a certified emotional support animal that she uses. She did all that on her own, but Lucy and Georgia, her second dog, have gone on multiple deployments, have been around the stations, and everybody just loves them. All right, up next, training and education. This is probably one of our more important areas. We are asking for $39,400 for the year. Our training division is just that. We have to train and educate our personnel to maintain a certain level of service that we expect. We also have state and national requirements for training hours that we have to meet. and also iso dictates training hours that we have to meet at all of our different levels and positions we have so they deal with recruit training new hire employee continuing education certifications clients so on and so forth so annually we train approximately 30 000 hours across all of our personnel we have 30 certified emts that have to maintain their certifications And we're asking for that funding to maintain that level of service. It's also important to note that the city, along with our department, pushes advanced education. So we have a lot of members either actively pursuing their associate's degree, bachelor's degree, or master's degree at this time. So we use that funding to help compensate that. Next slide. Just a couple of training events that you see here. So we're not just sitting at the kitchen table eating all the time. We are working and training hard. All right, up next is our five-year capital improvement plan and department needs. So for the past five years, these are items that I've requested to start setting funding aside for needs that are either here or are coming up. And you'll see a lot of it has to do with infrastructure. Our facilities are outdated. We have outgrown them. Most of them we cannot put more personnel in. We cannot put more equipment in. So we need to renovate or rebuild. And we also need to start preparing to build in Panama City North. So that's why we've asked for that funding to be set aside. Also for capital equipment, we've started to ask for additional funding to be set aside for new apparatus and some other items that are either out of date or need to be replaced or are coming to the end of life expectancy. And finally, our replacement schedule. So just so y'all don't think we asked for these arbitrarily, accreditation has required us to develop a replacement schedule policy. So here we've got actually, there's two different slides. So the first one is all of our first due and reserve apparatus. Those listed in red are either coming up or past due, their replacement schedule. Our fire apparatus are supposed to be in service for 15 years, no longer than 10 years after that in a reserve status, and then they're supposed to be out. So you'll see we've got two, actually three that are coming up or are already overdue. Next are our utility vehicles. Most of those we've been able to update here recently over the years, so those are doing pretty good, but we do have one or two that need to be replaced here pretty soon. And lastly... Next slide. Is equipment, just various equipment items. The biggest one really is our cascade system at station one. That's what we use to fill our air bottles. That is starting to come to its end of service life. Maintenance costs are starting to increase and its downtime is starting to increase. And then facilities, most of our facilities are doing okay, but you'll see stations three and four are at their end of service life station five we've outgrown and that service area has grown and our training tower is getting close to this end of service life any questions is the cascade the cascade system just like the air compressor from a dive shop essentially the same yeah

I just want to say thank you for your staff, for your service. You're part of the group that gets to go to work and may not come home, and that's not my work, and so I really appreciate you guys. I've learned one thing in this last year is that property taxes pay for y'all and our police, and that's why we all need to vote no in November, but I just really appreciate y'all. Thank you.

How many homes and businesses are in each given service area, roughly ballpark?

Can you go back to the first slide? Yeah, sorry. Yeah, so our GIS team actually helped us with this. So if you look in the lower right, you'll see that the little gridded area right there where it's got zones 135, commercial, residential. So it's actually got a breakdown of how many commercial structures we currently show in the city based off of our coverage areas and how many residential structures we have in our coverage areas. So we currently have roughly 4,400 commercial structures and over 15,000 residential structures.

Has that number trucked up or down in the past couple of years?

That number trended up or down? I would assume it's trended up just because of the amount that we've added to Panama City North and Panama City proper.

Yeah, I mean, houses are selling every day, so I would imagine it would go up.

Well, we've annexed in other locations, like more inside all that stuff is starting to grow up there. Yeah.

I'd imagine like your ward one numbers and maybe, maybe your ward two residential numbers would track like slower and growth. Um, but wards, uh, three, sorry, three, four and five, excuse me. Well, it's they're approximate to the board. So they're zones three, four and five with infill projects like sweet bay, and then your expansion projects up in Panama city north. And then all the growth we've seen in Glenwood. Yeah.

So I mean, there's a there's a clip there that once we have enough in Panama City North that we're going to have to provide our service.

Yeah. So I mean, when I so does their evaluation, they're the ones that are going to determine that there's not like a set threshold that i know of right so they may come in this coming year and say no we're going to split your designation and you'll share it but they may come in next evaluation be like you have a year to put something up here or this one the panama city north is going to go up and panama city proper will stay yeah um what that metric is i don't know yeah i'd love to see us get urban three involved that we saw from uh from strong towns on evaluation of panama city north

I would say the whole city.

Yes. I did email them. I will follow up on that.

I wouldn't just single out Panama City North. I would do the entire city. I'm not trying to take on Panama City North. Also, I want to point out, too, this is where the capital costs are going to have to happen.

We'll make the mayor sit in between y'all. Those numbers for commercial and residential do not include the interlocal service boundary area. So we've got several hundred more homes that have been added with that as well.

Okay. And just... So each fire station has a captain, lieutenant, or a couple. And then the structure, so you kind of have a unit size for a fire station. You know kind of the body amount that you need and the ranks that are needed for a fire station, right? Yes. So thinking through that, and then you have all of the support above that. How many more fire stations can you add to the mix? Not thinking about money. How many more fire stations can you add to the mix without having to add any more to the overhead? one and that's that's bringing down all of our apparatus of three personnel no no what i mean is that if money wasn't an issue right and we just could say hey you get as many fire stations as you want to get oh i want five to six understood so let's say we just had 10 that we could just give you today yeah how many how many fire stations would it take in order for you to have to add another chief Or another personnelist at the top?

No, so we've had those discussions. So, like, if we are to stand up Panama City North, it's not necessarily we would need administrative chiefs. It's another battalion chief, somebody that could separate, you know, our battalion chief runs Panama City proper, then our second battalion chief runs Panama City North. And that's just for the span of control aspect of it.

Okay. And then you could add all of the fire stations.

A captain per station, then rest lieutenants, engineers, firefighters.

Okay. So you... The expanse of fire stations doesn't necessarily drive a great need for more personnel in the head shed, so to speak. No. Okay.

No. If we did do that, I would say the only other positions we would need to add in the admin would be one more to our supply maintenance and one to our training division. Okay.

All right.

I know that's kind of a strange question. No, no. I'm just... thinking through some things. Thanks.

All right. Thank you, Chief Collier. Now, the last department for the evening is the Panama City Police Department. And we have Chief Mark Smith here with the presentation.

Are yours chief? Good evening, everybody. Before I get started, I just wanted to point out right here. The fact that his closest to me is our third excelsory rating that we just received last Thursday in Orlando, Florida from the Florida accreditation. And then the one to the right we received last Tuesday and that is our telecommunications accreditation certificate. That is the first time that We have got that for our dispatch. It's never happened in the Panama City history before. And then the one here in our Excelsior rating, that is our third, which means nine years of Excelsior rating. And agencies that participate in that, that never make it to Excelsior is only 3% of the agencies. And we've done it three times in a row now. So we're nine years as an Excelsior, and that program started for us in 2002. And the telecommunications for the state of Florida, there's only five communication centers in the state of Florida that have received accreditation, and we are one of those 25 out of all the law enforcement and dispatch services across the state. So just wanted to show you that. Some good work by my team and my accreditation folks.

Thank you. Chief, you said five or 25?

Of the attack?

Yes.

There's only 25 communication centers in the state of Florida.

And only five have achieved that?

No, there's only 25 that have received it. Out of all the communications stations in the state of Florida, only 25 of them have reached that level. And we are one of those 25 as of last Tuesday.

Thank you.

So a lot of what the fire chief just discussed with you about the size of the city population, same thing goes for us. So I just say a ditto on that. It doesn't change anything for that. Currently for this year we are funded for 102 sworn officers and 47 civilian employees. Currently we are running with 98 sworn officers and with 42 civilian employees. Over the last month I've lost four officers and over the last couple months we've lost the five civilians. The four officers I would like to replace, the five civilians, at this point I haven't asked for their replacements. I haven't put in for a request for those. Our agency, with the manpower that we have, last year answered 90,689 calls for service. We are on target this year to be a higher number than that. And if you wonder, well, how do we rank with other agencies? And not to pick on any particular agency, but the closest one to our size is the Bay County Sheriff's Department, which is larger than us. They'll answer fewer calls and do it with 253 sworn deputies to our 102 sworn police officers. And they'll answer less calls for service than we will. Our police department was built in 1975. We are still in the same complex. So 51 years in the same building. As everyone's aware, 2018, it was pretty well destroyed through Hurricane Michael. I don't think we quite reached the insurance's 60% loss, so they just came and took a year and put a new roof on it and rebuilt it and redid the drywall in it and said, this is all the lipstick we're putting on this pig, you can have it back. We still continue to make the best of it that we can, and we'll continue that until the city sees so fit that we can move into a bigger building. Along with that building, we have 8.24 acres of property on that. We have a firing range, a secure impound, a gym, a pole barn storage facility, and then just our parking lot beyond that. All right, our agency is broken into several sections, the first being the field service section. We have 70 sworn officers that work in that, so 68% of our personnel are in that section. For 2025, those 70 officers saw 383 DUIs, 3,046 traffic accidents, and did over 6,200 hours of training in amongst doing their job. But also, just to kind of give you some numbers, this is just some that we pulled today just to represent how busy that we get from time to time. The month of June, since June the 1st till about noon today, My officers have worked 249 car accidents, 65 domestics, 48 assault and batteries, 30 DUIs. We've investigated 14 missing children, seven dead individuals that we've investigated. We've had seven life-threatening medical calls we've responded to, four armed robberies, four overdoses, six stabbings, two of those occurring today, one of those resulting in a homicide, and we've worked one shooting. All of that has just been in this month since June 1st. recruitment and training is something that we spend a lot of time doing we have a mandatory six hours built in to each or every other Thursday where we do training in-house that will consist of firearms training defensive tactics de-escalation biohazard first aid CPR all of those types of things as well as We work with Gulf Coast State College, Florida State University, Pat Thomas over near Tallahassee and other places for training. A lot of that training we can get for free. Some of it we get the training for free, but didn't have to pay for the motel cost and the per diem travel, depending on where it's at. We do try to do a lot of hosting of training at our police department. We can seat about 60 in our training room. And everything else that we have there is up to date and within FDLE requirements. So it allows us a lot of times to bring the training to us. And when we do that, generally we get free seats. We don't have to pay for the tuition for the training. Our community service section is composed of nine officers. Six of those are full-time school resource officers. In 2027, their projected income into the city is $557,000 that their SRO contracts from the schools will pay into the city. Three more of the officers work the meetings and community events that take place around. In 2025, they attended 66 government meetings, 59 community meetings, 37 community events, and 677 SRO meetings were conducted with families and children. The Investigations Unit is composed of eight investigators. And in there, they handled 361 call outs for service. That's after hours. They collected 357 firearms off the street, and they have a closure rate of 77%. National average is probably around 35%. The administrative service section, which is five civilian personnel that handle our records and our accreditation. The accreditation that these plaques represent is we have 127 policies that we got graded on and we could not have a flaw in those 127 policies in order to receive these. Public records, we answered 9,780 requests for public records. Our IT department handles 172 computers, 118 cell phones, and works 22 servers in their server room to keep our IT and computer systems up and operating. The communications section currently operates with 22 employees. For the 911 calls, they answered 21,149 calls. Administrative line calls, 83,891 calls. And after hours, 999. And the after hours is referencing to utility calls for water outages and things like that that they take in for the answering for the cities. This year, we put into a program called VersaTerm or Vine. It's a program that doesn't cost us anything. But what it amounts to is when someone calls us and makes a report, they're immediately going to get a text back to the phone that they called from a cell phone. that is going to tell them, let's say it's a traffic accident, that if you are capable and the vehicles are movable, please move your vehicles from the road to a nearby parking lot. It tells you that the law enforcement is en route and what the suspected time of the law enforcement arrival is. If it was a burglary, it may tell you not to enter the home, not to enter the car, don't touch anything, wait on the officer. But it's gonna take the person, the complainant, the moment of their initial call all the way to somebody that's incarcerated and being moved from a prison to another prison. As it moves from patrol to investigations, they're notified that this case is now being handled by an investigator. It's a constant update all the way through the court system, who the prosecutor is, anybody that they may need to make contact with is going to come up. as long with that all the way through it, we receive or there's a survey that goes out and we receive a grade off that survey. So currently, let's see. For the officers are getting a rating of 4.71 dispatch is getting a rating of 4.64. And the overall safety of the city is rating at 4.57. Excuse me. that's out of a grading of five so four point seven one four six four and four five seven out of a grading of five yeah hey chief i'm sorry i believe you're in your binder and not to the slides yet i am correct if you want to look in your mind i apologize all good in the white binder yeah you have all this information that i just highlighted now i just highlighted it because There's like 12 or 14 pages of information that I just kind of flipped through and gave you some highlighted numbers. What Chief Smith was just speaking about is the last page of that first tab. The purple tab.

They're all different colors.

So if you, I give you this because in trying to narrow down the length of time that I take up here with tonight, but I wanted you to leave with this information so you have something further to read on and understand how we do business. So going to the slides though now, is if we look at the last three years, 23, 24, 25, 26 actually, of what this represents here for us, you see that our personnel cost is what is the big driving number for us, at 78% for 2026 of our cost. And yes, the personnel cost in 2023 went from 11,267 to 15,210. But part of that rise is that I believe in 23, we had to start paying for the health insurance, came over to the actual department instead of being held in the city. as well as retirement benefits went up and some other benefit costs have gone up. And so we haven't really changed the number of people that we have. It's just the other things that have changed that have driven that number to a higher number. You also see where our operating expenses, capital outlay, debt services. And then if you look down below it, it gives you the information of personnel costs continue to be the primary driver. Operational capital and debt service expenditures have risen due to contractual obligations. And there'll be another slide that'll help you understand that a little further. Infrastructure needs and the ongoing fleet repair and replacement that has to take place. So overall the budget continues to experience sustained pressure from fixed costs resulting in limited flexibility. If we look at the personnel breakdown on the next slide, you can see the actual numbers from 2023 of 99 officers to 111 to 110, and now we've dropped down to the 104. The 104 actually also represents full-time as 102 and then two reserve officers. So it's a little misleading in the numbers there. And currently, I believe I only have one reserve officer. Civilian funded, you notice we stay right there in the 50s, running at 52, 53, 50, and actually we're down currently at 47 on our civilian officers, our personnel. Next slide. So this one kind of gives you an idea when you look at it. If you looked at the dark numbers here, insurance, that's a fixed cost, $765,000. But it's also a fixed number that we don't know what it's going to be in 2027 yet. And I'm not sure, Vicki, if you know when that will come out.

We anticipate having some.

contractual services 384,000 this involves our 800 megahertz our fire alarms are cleaning biohazard pest control the 20,000 deals with uniform alterations in cleaning. So that one is not contractual, but the 384,000 is contractual, with the largest part of that going to the 800 megahertz radio system at over $257,000. Repairs and maintenance is vehicles, building, and equipment. We're at 384,000 is what we're set at right now. Operating supplies, we're contracted at 245,000. Fuel, 370,000. Communication services, 213,000. This involves phones, internet, cell phones, body cam, air cards for the body cams as well as the computers. memberships and software is 138 contractual rentals and leases 116 utility services at 80. The travel and the per diem and the training are the non contractual costs that we have that equals out to $70,000. Like I said, a lot of the time we can find that the training is free, but it may be in Tallahassee, it may be in Jacksonville, So we do have to get the officers over there so that they can get that training. The next slide takes you through just some more of the out capital outlay actually gives you a little bit of a pie chart there as to what some of the costs are in the capital outlay. And you see the biggest portion of that is going to fall into vehicles. In your back of your notebook, you do have where we list out all the vehicles that we have and their mileage as to what is serviceable and kind of what needs to be replaced also. 62% of our vehicles are projected to be over five years old by the end of this year. So next slide, please. We were asked, so let me back up, back in, On June the 11th, excuse me, on June the 2nd, we had a meeting following turning in our budget at the end of March for 2027. So we submitted that budget, and I believe you may have a copy of that line item budget that was given to y'all. But then when we met with y'all on the second budget meeting, we were asked to come up with some following numbers. from the 20 from June 15th meeting that we had when we looked at if we had to cut our 2026 budget by 1.5 million that it would eliminate three full-time sworn positions and eliminate seven full-time civilian positions, eliminate three part-time civilian positions, and then we would suggest that we cut our personnel funding to 95% instead of funding us at 100%. The reason why is because we continually, ever since I've been chief, we've been successful in giving back about four to 5%. So that would make up that difference for us. And we're on target to do that again this year in being able to give back some personnel costs. And the reason that we're able to give back personnel costs is just like right now, where I have vacancies in patrol, and I have vacancies in civilian, those vacancies start to add up in personnel savings for the end of the year. If we wanted to do a 4.3% budget reduction, which would be $835,000, we would need to eliminate three full-time civilian and two part-time civilian. We wouldn't have to give up any uniformed officers or sworn officers. And we would recommend that we look at a 96% reduction in our personnel cost. which would give us another 587,000.

Chief, 4% reduction, not 96%.

No, yes, 96% is what we would be getting, 4% reduction. So that would give you a 1.5 million look at it and 835. Just because we do not have, as the other graph showed you, anything there of large amounts. I mean, there's small amounts that we can adjust and move around on. But wanted to show you those and give you that information. In 2024, we had 5% remaining in 2026, I believe we had 6% remaining or excuse me. In 2025, we had 6%. And right now we're right at 5% under, I think just barely under that. So You know, as we look through this, again, if you looked at the 27 budget, we've proposed a 2027 budget back at the first of June, that was actually 18,760 698. That budget is lower than our 2026 budget. but that budget also is not reflecting what the insurance cost may be when that comes around, as well as we've not been assigned as to what our overtime would be. So those numbers are not there yet to be able to be calculated in. But it does show, right at the top, it shows a little bit less in savings, or a little bit more in savings, I should say. So, you know, what we got to look at is, you know, how can next slide, I'm sorry, is to invest in our workspace, our workforce, staying competitive and compensation, you know, so that we can stay in line with the other markets that are in the area and the other markets, meaning the other departments. It is something that when we did just a little in-house pay study and we contacted 13 other local agencies. When I say local, they're all just right here in the panhandle of Florida, all right here. And 14, excuse me, out of the 13 were higher than us at over 14.27% in their starting salary. When we looked at 17 agencies and just went to their starting salary and not paid attention to any of the other benefit packages, then we ranked number 15 out of that 17. And here in Bay County, I believe our starting salary is higher than Parker, and that is the only agency that we're currently higher than in our starting salary. We in your going back to your notebook, we put in here in reference to the current challenges. If you flip over to that, you know, if we look at a population of where our city has, we should be somewheres right around 100 officers were right on target for that. If we only wanted to pay attention to what our full time population is. But as I pointed out a couple weeks ago, when we were in here, our traffic counters tell us that we're policing more in the neighborhood of 120 to 125,000 on a daily basis. And that's because the people are coming here to go to school, go to work to hospitals, and take care of their businesses here in town. It's just like if you were to look at Lynn Havens for Calloway's, or some of the other bedroom communities, Parker, and you did an outgoing count on them, you would see that their numbers are going down as our numbers are coming up because the people are leaving those communities to come into our community to conduct business, and then they flow back to their communities in the evening. But keep in mind, again, they bring with them the traffic and the people. Flipping on through the notebook to the next page is talking about just investing in our workforce, maintaining adequate staffing, competitive compensation, an employee wellness program. We do have a gym at the PD. Currently, ever since we've had it, it has no air conditioning. Planet Fitness donated to us at no cost the fitness equipment that's inside of it, but that was five years ago. So we've not really been able to keep up with that and keep that updated. So being able to do that as well as keeping our peer group going and other initiatives that we have within the department. We have four chaplains that are currently working with us and providing services, and those services they provide at no cost. moderate modernizing the equipment. You know, keeping up with our patrol vehicles, public safety techniques, technology, communication systems. So much of what we do, much like the fire department has its explorations on it. The bulletproof vest that a police officer wears has a five year expiration on that vest. So every five years that we have to be replaced. Their computers, their in-car computers have to be replaced. Even all the way down to looking at their tasers, their ammunition, everything that they use and carry on their person, everything has expirations. And part of the accreditation is when they come through, all that has to be checked and make sure that nothing is expired. If anything is expired, then we're out of accreditation. Plan for the future. Long term priorities include planning for a more modern police and public safety headquarters. We want to continue to maintain our accreditation, build our community partnerships. With that, we have MOUs that are with all the local law enforcement agencies, the surrounding counties, up into Mariana, Port St. Joe, you know, all moving all through here. We even have MOUs with Pat Thomas, which is over near Tallahassee, as well as the Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Department. And one of the things that I would want to do is if we were to have a hurricane that we were going to be the target of, we'd maintain the MOUs with those agencies to move as much of our equipment as we can to one of those two locations, depending on which way the hurricane is leaning, east or west. so that we can get our cars away from here and get our equipment away from here from being damaged. In Hurricane Michael, we lost 28 police cars in three hours. So if we package up the police cars and the officers and we send them away for the few hours of the storm, and then once the storm's over, we bring them back, along with all of the equipment that we have that we can bring back and provide services to the police department. Flipping further back into the notebook, you'll see where I have a fleet overview and vehicle cost. So vehicle cost for us, there was some question last time about could we get together with the Sheriff's Department at the beach and maybe instead of buying 10 cars, maybe we could buy 100 cars, could we get them cheaper? we buy through state pricing all of us do we all use the same state pricing and it doesn't matter whether i buy one car or i buy a hundred cars i'm still going to pay the same price per car because the state has set that price so i gave you just a quick run down here like for the dodge charger the dodge durango the interceptor the tahoe giving you different prices here so that you can see what the state pricing is for those vehicles then when if you look further down you'll see on the actual wear and tear on our vehicles so we work 11 hour shifts those cars average about a hundred miles per shift gets put on them but the cars also have our counters and if you were to work out the math that I've given you there we're adding 59,400 equivalent miles a year to a car from the hour counter on top of the 18,000 miles. So a car that is one year in service that may be showing 18,000 miles actually reflects an actual use of 77,400 miles. And then if a car makes it to five years, which you'll see that most of ours are five years and older is 387,000 would be the equivalent mileage that that car would use. So there's just some more information here about the operational advantages of updating the police cars. One of the biggest things is vehicle maintenance. So last year we were seeing vehicle maintenance that was running us around 18 to $20,000 a month. Now we're seeing $50,000 to $60,000 a month in vehicle maintenance that we're paying out to keep these vehicles operational. If you look at the last three or four pages, three pages there, you're going to see that what represents the 126 vehicles that the police department currently has, 19 of those vehicles are not police patrol car vehicles as in vehicles marked police vehicles. They are Nissan Altima is that are driven by the investigations unit, the vehicles that my command staff unit drives, and the community units that are drug unit drives are undercover cars drive. So if you look down through here, we go all the way back. Maybe not fair to have it on there. But we have a cargo van from 2004. But we still use it. It makes the SAMs runs and goes and picks up paper and toilet paper and items like that. But then you can come on down through this, and you'll see that we have patrol vehicles that, you know, 89,000, 92,000, 86,000, 76,000. There's just, we've given you the miles, also gave you whether the vehicle was leased, whether it was obtained through state forfeiture, or whether it was purchased. One of the things on our lease purchases, Mr. Street, I believe you made a comment, was that we're just leasing it and we don't get it. Ours we lease for five years. At the end of the five years, we do own the vehicle. So if the vehicle is still serviceable beyond that five years, then that's why we have these here. When they fall out of service, we either try to see if another department within the city can use that vehicle, or we send it over to auction. give you some information there on the vehicles. I would ask you to encourage you to please look through the book that we've given you. I've gone really fast and just highlighted some material, but there's a lot more information, a lot more detail in there that I think you may find of some use and some information. So I would be glad to answer any questions if I can.

On Saturday, I ate lunch with some people, and they sat down, and the first thing they said is, I want to speak in favor of the Panama City Police Department. My kid has been riding with law enforcement. They want to get into law enforcement. And this guy said, what goes on in Panama City is really the bad stuff that happens. He said he sleeps better at night knowing you guys are doing a great job, and I just want to pass that along publicly and thank you to your officers and to you, and he made sure to let me know that he would in that sense as well. Well, thank you for the recognition.

The officers do try hard. You see it in the work that they do. They do some amazing stuff. For the numbers that we actually have and the numbers that we turn out, they do an amazing job.

You can just make 35 miles an hour and go away on this side of the bridge. People are yelling at us from behind.

I think we were all kind of surprised by that. We were, too, when they put up the sign. We were riding over there going, what the heck?

Oh, one question. Remember, you got new body cams that downloaded and they didn't have the patrol guys wouldn't have to go back and type, right? We've gotten that is that is that is correct.

We have those those came in through Motorola, right? What we did on those and we did a lease, but that's in a 10 year lease. But in that 10 year lease every I think it's 30 months on the replacement. So, all right, three-year replacements. They're 36 months. Then we get those cameras replaced at no additional cost. Those body cameras have air cards in them. And the problem that we were having before was the officer did an 11-hour shift. At the end of his shift, he had to go in and download that. that could take an hour an hour and a half for that to download so the officer was stuck waiting on that download where now the officer can get out on a call a traffic stop working a burglary whatever it is when he finishes it he can just send it from the body cam via the phone system in it and it sends it right into our systems and puts it into the server and it's there so it's working as you could hope and and increased productivity and

Some of those personnel costs that you were talking about might come back. When they went back and had to download, would that mean overtime that they were? That would have been overtime. And now they're not having to do that as much?

Now they're not having to do that overtime. It does have an AI writing service that we're still working with and working through. It will present something, but it's a lot of dictation by the officer at the scene. So the officer has to verbally be speaking a lot about who he's talking to, who he's interviewing, and things like that so that the system knows who you're talking about. And then it requires for the officer to go through and read up on that to make sure that what it said was correct. It does have transcription service requirements. Do they have the translation yet, Captain?

But they're still working on that. They're saying it's coming in the future.

Yes, so they're coming with that for the translation. That'll give real-time translation to other languages for us. One of the things is we were the first law enforcement agency in the state of Florida for Motorola. So we are their test grounds also. But that 10 years got we got the 10 year contract for under a million dollars. The closest competitor to them was five years for 2 million. So we had a huge savings that we were able to do there. Along with that, you know, we apply for grants and doing some work with DOJ, trying to get equipment through them, and trying to find the cheaper ways and the easier ways to save some money.

Thank you for that.

Two questions. One, so the debt service, I see that's bumping up again. What's in debt service for you guys?

Hold on, let me flip over to my notes. So the debt service is actually, it is pretty much everything. It's our professional services, contractual services, investigations, travel per diem, communications, freight and postage. Oh, the pie chart.

There's like a million dollars in debt service.

Yeah, it's vehicles and technology.

So how is vehicles going up in debt service when I see you've got this list of, like how many vehicles do you guys have proposed in this budget year? Is that what it is?

I thought it was body worn cameras.

Body worn cameras was the biggest thing. But vehicles, if you looked at the 27 budget that we submitted at the 1st of June, we did ask for 10 vehicles in that lease. Now if we take the 26 budget and do those reductions to it, There's no vehicles. We didn't ask for vehicles because we didn't have them in the 26 budget either.

No. So the debts, the debt services vehicles is based. Yes. Okay. Because they're leases.

That's the vehicles. Plus, and correct me if I'm wrong, chief body cameras, 800 megahertz radio system and bike.

So the 800 megahertz system, just a really quick question. Cause I, I know you guys have all talked about this thing particularly because of hurricane Michael and all those things. Why is that so vital for us to have an 800 megahertz system versus walkie-talkies to communicate?

The statewide talk, first off, so that with the 800 megahertz, we can talk across the state. And if we're in a different location, you can go to a channel on your radio and call upon them Or if we had to go over and help Tallahassee with the 800 megahertz, we can get on the same frequency. And then we can also program radios. And actually, my fleet installer is a Motorola service tech and has the computer and programs that he can set up any kind of radio for us.

Chief, did we have this capability during Hurricane Michael? No. And so that's one of the reasons. As I understand it, everybody was shut down. Emergency operations, communications.

Yes, we went about 10 days without communications services.

We actually gave the church had been donated, I think, by a previous one, like old radios. We had to give them back so that some of the law enforcement could utilize them right after the storm.

The walkie-talkies would only talk about a mile. Right. that's about the best they would do because our repeater systems were down and everything but getting over to 800 megahertz has now resolved that and then working with verizon we've also got some satellite services on our phones now too so that If we have to, we can fall back to that.

So we'll add that 800 megahertz from a public work standpoint, we're looking at divesting ourselves of some of those radios with the exception of environmental services because they can't talk and text and drive because most of their days on the road. But a lot of our teams start and stop and have realized that they're not utilizing them as much. So what we can do is the contract, the annual payment on that will lessen and we can backfill some of Chief Smith's radios.

answer my question i was trying to understand why we would just go get walkie-talkies oh great statewide the statewide network that was that was really all my question was i was just trying to understand the difference um the only other thing that i've gotten i have not seen this presented any other budget before budgeting off of projected personnel costs rather than the positions is this in any other budget proposal or is this strictly only increasing it's on slide 72 Proposed FY2027 budget. And it says fund personnel at 96% of projected cost to account for vacancies.

Yeah, currently we budget all positions at 100%.

I'm very nervous about changing any of that. And the reason for that is when you get down to the August timeline, and let's say you just so happen to be at 100% budgetary positions, does that mean we furlough people? Does that mean that we have to come back and find money out of cash? Like if we're putting a position in, it should be funded at a hundred percent. I I've never seen this before. And so like, I would, I would hesitate to, if we've got a person that we're funding, this should be funded a hundred percent, not at 95%, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

I would prefer that we could fund it a hundred percent, but I was looking for options to get the monies down for you without having to lose a large amount of personnel. Because otherwise, if I don't do that, then I've got to figure out how to absorb another $734,000 worth of personnel costs to get my, you know, that's a lot of people. And Josh, that was something.

Sorry. A suggestion. Why do we move insurance from here to you guys? That's a big number.

It was health insurance. We used to budget and expense it at the fund level. So for all positions in the general fund, there was one big transfer at the fund level. every each year to our health insurance fund we change that to show it coming out of each of the cop we allocated out amongst the cost centers that gives you a true picture of what the health insurance is costing by department versus at the fund so You know, you weren't seeing the true cost of what the police department or fire department was costing the city because it was not showing in their cost center. It was showing at the fund level. Makes sense. If that makes sense.

So chief, did I understand that at a hundred percent, just to use round numbers, that's easier for me. A hundred percent is a hundred. And at the end of the year, historically, you've got about four or five positions that were never filled or that were vacant. And so the new 100% would be 96 or 95 under these proposals. and not what your previous 100 is. Am I understanding that? Correct. That is correct.

So if you looked at like so far this year in the 26 budget, I'm set for 101 officers, I believe 102 officers. But I'm set for that. But I've only been to 102. One time, and it lasted like, I was going to say four weeks. And then it seems like when we get to that, and as soon as we say we're full, and then it's like four people leave. And we've been without the four now for a month. And even if I continue on, we're working with five, looking at employees that we could bring in, full-time officers. We're running five through the application process, but I still am waiting to see if I can hire any of those And so we're probably another three, four weeks before we could even hire those. So that's still another month that we'll be without paying their salaries, essentially. So that's where we're talking about that I think that we could do that. All five years that I've been chief up to this point, I've given money back at the end of the year.

So my concern in doing it that way, and I think that there's another resolve that we've done before that is set as a precedent. With PMO, you fund so many months of a position. My problem with the percentage-based piece is you are putting existing officers at risk to potentially either have to go, if you were at 100%, you have to furlough, you have to cut, you have to do things to existing employees. If it stays and you actually... execute what you plan. I understand what you're saying.

So this is this, we could, we could get to that same number by just saying, Hey, these, these four, you don't get to fill in January and you can't exceed that. So there's, there's another way to skin the cat there.

There absolutely is. From a percentage based piece, trying to do that across the board is put you're, you're basically saying to every personnel, we're only budgeting for 95% of your salary. that is a very concerning thing that I would feel as an employee versus, hey, you know what, we're funded to this point and this is what, just like we did with PMO or wherever.

Help me understand that. Yeah. Because I don't get it. If we had 100 this year, and next year we're going to have 95, that 95 is the new 100%.

So when we authorize them with our budget, basically what we're doing is we're saying, hey, staff, here's your keys. Your keys to the budgetary train. You get to drive it from this point. If they budget, they are authorized to 100% of that budget. If we authorize 100% and we don't have the money and the revenues projected to back that up, we're putting our employees at risk. And that's why we should never budget

that amount and this this communicates that we're still budgeting we're leaving positions authorized that we don't have money we don't have money set aside to actually fulfill but I'm not saying that we would reduce the number of officers like he's saying we could still have if you want to say a hundred officers but what I'm saying is over the years we've never been able to get to that hundred and stay at the hundred so therefore I feel that there is some percentage that could be held back And we could and should still be safe given the last years that we've seen in this.

So the proposed 2027 budget would be 95 officers? No, it would still be 100 officers. It would be at 95%.

It'd be like 100 officers.

Budgeted at 95%.

No, you fund it at 96% of what it would cost for those $100.

An example on the revenue side, we don't budget 100% of our Avaloram tax revenue. We budget 95%.

Well, you can't statutorily.

I know, but I'm giving that as an example that it's conservative. Yeah, but that's money coming in.

Correct. Yeah. This is money we're obligating. When we say to you guys, hey, go spend forth this budget, we should be confident that you guys have the money to actually execute that budget. And by doing it percentage-based, I think we're clear. I think you guys know how to work that. I think we can address the concern. I agree. I think you can get to the same result, but not.

I love the creativity, though. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. I appreciate it.

Any other questions? No. Awesome. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir.

All right. Thank you, Chief. All right.

So as we look, we move forward.

This is a quick reminder before we move into the next section. So we had our first budget workshop on March 31st, second one on June 11th. This evening we had pre-budget workshop number three. We'll have the other one June 29th, pre-budget workshop number four, July 9th, rather. July 28th at the commission meeting, we will set the proposed millage rate for FY27. September 8th at the first city commission meeting, or sorry, in the evening that rather, we'll have the tentative budget hearing adoption. As a reminder, the budget hearing has to be after 5 p.m. It cannot conflict with school board of the county commission and then the final budget hearing and adoption will take place at the evening meeting on september 28th so anyway that's just a timeline over the rest of this so i just want to be clear the final budget for you all to consider and vote on will not happen until september of 20 September this year for FY 2027.

If I may, colleagues, if everybody will take the opportunity in the next week to maybe review HB 1329, which was just signed into law last year, this will become a statutorily requirement for us to go through a 10% cost-cutting exercise every single year. I know this has been very uncomfortable, but from this point forward, this is the new normal. We looked at 4%. You can imagine what 10% is going to look like and having to do that every year. And we also have to publish in advance our defined budgetary priority schedule so that the public is allowed to participate. So anyway. Would you repeat that, Bill? HB 1329. Thank you. It was signed on the 24th. Of June?

Of June.

Mm-hmm.

All right, I don't know if there's any further discussion amongst the commission. We can move into audience participation, Mr. Mayor.

Audience participation. Anyone want to speak? Three minutes.

Yes, ma'am. Of course I do. Yeah. What do you think?

You've been here long enough. You can come talk. You survived. I know. My Apple Watch just said, time to go to bed. If I don't go to bed, I'm going to be very fussy tomorrow.

You'll get over it. Smile, folks. We've all sat here. Clint addressed the pay for the city employees. That was one of my questions. How many lawsuits has the city had in the last seven years? What was the cost to this? Oh, OK. What was the cost to the city? And how much has been spent on studies charrettes, et cetera, because some of them I believe are unnecessary. I think it's an overspend which wrecks havoc with our budget. What is the retention rate of the city staff? How are we maintaining, and that's probably a Ms. Lewis question, the morale. How are we maintaining morale to retain these employees? Offering opportunities to do nonprofits is a great idea, but not really. Not really. I think it costs the city money. I believe that these nonprofits should go out and raise their own funds and do their thing. That's me talking. Making all these cuts and trying to remove the housing department would be a big mess. And it would mess with the morale with city employees and with the city. You want to know the truth. And how will you look to attract great employees with low pay and lack of success? And we do have a low pay scale here from teachers, nurses, the whole gamut. My next question is, is the administrative staff, the directors, departments, heads, are they going to be subject to cuts? You're asking everyone else to do that. So why aren't you considering it? If the city manager took a 4% pay reduction, that would be $7,000 a year. Department heads at 4% would be $4,000. City commissioners, it would be $1,480. Actually, I think you all should do without a salary, because all of you work anyway. So do a service. That's what you're doing government for. And I don't know what Nevins is, I don't remember what that is, so I couldn't calculate that. It's a lot of money. I know it's a lot of money. I know it's a lot of money, but a 4% decrease is like to never but aside from that aside from that I think that the administrative staff should do that and almost everyone administratively makes over six figures and when I looked at it a year and a half two years ago so we need to speak to that I have some more to say

Thank you. Anyone else?

There's some questions. We'll have to search some of this information.

Yeah, totally. Anyone else want to speak?

Oh, I can come as a second person. I could do a dual personality. I'm making a guess. It's been a long evening.

It has been a long evening. There was one thing that was brought up earlier, Mr. Mayor and Commissioners, and I meant to ask Ms. Lewis to step back up briefly and just, you know, the question was asked or alluded to, it was like, let's say there is savings and, you know, like for maybe with the temporary employees or whatever, contract employees, What if we just took that $100,000 and gave the employees a bump in that particular division? There's a valid reason why you can't just do that, because it will break the system. If you could briefly speak to that, just to inform us all, Ms. Lewis.

Absolutely. So the key reason is you would arbitrarily assign that to this group of people that are in this division. And so you have an equipment operator in that division, an equipment operator in this division, and now all of a sudden they make different rates solely because of which department are they in and they're doing similar tasks so to reallocate and to change people rates simply because you do away with for example a temporary service agency would would break that parity because our entire system is built upon parity for who does what sort of work and what sort of skills do they require throughout the city when I started with the city in 2020 we had no parity and I will tell you if you just took that wall and you started throwing darts at it and said here's what we pay for different departments it was really not a good system in 2021 we built a system and we said if you're an administrative assistant here's kind of that grade and here's how it works. It didn't matter where you were, but if your skills were very similar and the expectations were similar and the education was, your pay was similar. And same thing with equipment operator ones or twos or threes or maintenance worker twos. It did away with, candidly, directors just kind of willy-nillying, here's what you get paid. We also, in my opinion, we rewarded the best negotiators when we hired them. The very best negotiators came back and they bargained and they nickeled and they dimed and they argued over what should I make and what shouldn't I, and they won. Now we have a system that does not reward negotiating because we don't need to hire the best negotiators for those sort of things. We need to hire the best CDL operators, the best maintenance folks, the best police officers, firefighters. And so building a system like this is based upon parity in various different departments. So a wonderful idea, and I'm not going to say that that couldn't go to other things, but I would strongly discourage us from just reallocating it to the team members in that department. Does that make sense, Commissioner?

It does if you believe in that idea, but I look at it and say, if a department is able to save money, the people in that department, Stacy, that's the only one that has an admin department and then 19 underneath, and everybody else has just their department. So in the engineering and all that, yeah, that could come into play, but those departments, because they're their own cost centers, if they save money, Go ahead and reward those people. They took the hard task and said, I'm going to live without this. I'm going to live without this. Why should those people not be rewarded if they agree to do that when the other group can't? That's my position is we can say that reward the people in that department because they proved that they can live without when other departments couldn't. I think the option would be. They have a reason for it. They have an answer for every one of my objections. Here it comes.