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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2016-05-05 Finance Committee Summary Minutes Special Meeting Thursday, May 5, 2016 Chairperson Filseth called the meeting to order at 6:06 P.M. in the Council Chambers, 250 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, California. Present: Filseth (Chair), Holman, Schmid, Wolbach Absent: Oral Communications Chair Filseth: First on the agenda will be Oral Communications, and we have two speakers from the public. The first is Ken Horowitz. Good evening Ken. Ken Horowitz: Good evening. Thank you. Just a quick comment, I didn’t want to stay around for the entire meeting, but I just wanted to comment on Project Safety Net and I was here a couple weeks ago when City Manager put up on the screen a million dollars for Project Safety Net, but I am happy to see that you have separated it out. I support 100% the collaborative portion of it, the collaborative portion. I’ve been a member of the collaborative for three years and I support Mary Gloner for all the work she has been doing over this past year. So I just want to make sure that portion of Project Safety Net gets funded. I’m not a big fan of Track Watch and I see that that’s been moved to the Police Department, so I will leave it up to the Police Department to sort of say their case tonight. Thank you so much for your time. Chair Filseth: Next we have Rita Vrhel, Rita. Rita Vrhel: Thank you. You told me to come back today if I wanted to talk about Track Watch, so here I am. Track Watch is in the news again today. The Daily Post had an article on it. I think there are lots of questions that surround the program, and I guess I’m looking for some answers and some transparency. My questions would be: Who is in charge of managing this program on an overall versus daily basis. Did the City Manager select the October 2015 vendor on his own, or was City Council input sought? If so, why did it seem, at least like in the paper and the reaction afterward, that the City Council wasn’t fully aware of the new vendor selection? What are the criteria for changing vendors and/or selecting vendors? Why was a background check not required of all employees prior to hiring? That seems like a fairly minimal requirement and could have avoided some of the issues with felons working on Track Watch. What is the actual cost of this program, Fiscal 2015 to Fiscal 2016, and then moving forward? What is or has been the total cost of this program since inception? What is the contractor paying his employees? Did the City set a minimum wage or a wage that might ensure quality employees that would have avoided possibly some of the problems that have been reported with the Track Watch Program? Why does a TV channel and high school teachers need to watch the Track Watch guards and report deficiencies in the program, and once these deficiencies have been reported, what has the City Council and/or City Manager response been? Has the City Council, as mentioned in the last budget meeting a year ago, have they sought the 50 percent pay in from the Palo Alto School District, as was discussed, or does the City of Palo Alto continue to pay all the costs of this program? I think last year it came from Stanford funds. I understand, just a minute ago, that it’s being transferred to the Police Department. So I guess the other thing is, you know, I don’t know how I feel about the program. I mean, obviously this young woman’s suicide a couple of weeks ago one stop up from where Track Watch guards were not stationed is a very sobering reminder of what can happen. This young lady also, or anyone could also run up to Redwood City or to Menlo Park or down to Mountain View and also commit suicide if this is what they want to do. If the City of Palo Alto is going to continue to pay an estimated $800,000 a year for this program, I would really request that consideration be given to putting this money to another use within the schools for additional counseling, perhaps a suicide hotline that students could call that were manned by students and/or professionals, educating students more as to what to look for in their friends, perhaps family outreach as to what the danger signs are of possible suicide, including that many depressed people, before they commit suicide, actually seem jubilant and have an increase in their energy, because they have a plan now, and they don’t have to worry about being depressed any longer. Suicide is a huge blight and terrible tragedy for all students, families, every resident in Palo Alto and I hope this can be mitigated. Thank you. Chair Filseth: Thank you. So that concludes Oral Communications. We will then move to Action Items. Agenda Items 1. Staff Responses to Committee Questions From Budget Hearing Meetings. Chair Filseth: First is Staff response to Committee questions from the meetings last week. Kiely Nose, Manager of Budget: Thank you Chair. There weren’t any last week, but just to kind of reorient ourselves, just to reorient ourselves based on the decisions that were made last week, although this is a little bit small, we haven’t added or subtracted anything from the General Fund. In the parking lot we put those five proposals from non-departmental listed out there and you guys haven’t touched your Council contingency of $250,000 yet. Otherwise, I think, unless Lalo has something? Lalo Perez, Director of Administrative Services and Chief Financial Officer: I just wanted to say sorry I missed the fun last Tuesday. I think that’s the first budget meeting I’ve missed in my career, but I just wanted to remind you that the Council Contingency is for General Fund purposes only. Chair Filseth: Thank you very much Lalo. Great to see you back again. I’m glad you’re feeling better. On the issue of the parking lot which you bring up, I was going to suggest, and I’m not sure this is something we need to do tonight, but I think as maybe part of the exercise on this we consider something that the City Manager alluded to the other day, which was the Council’s responsibility is, part of it is to prioritize things and I’m going to suggest that we think about, as we fill the parking lot up with a variety of things that we try something we didn’t last year, which is maybe take a whack at prioritizing, right? The things that we feel are the most important priorities, and sort of put some order to that potentially for consideration by us, potentially consideration by the full Council later on. I’m not sure we need to do that tonight, but I think we should think about that. Council Member Holman: We could also as for something else too, because this, unless I overlook it in seeing it, this is the first we’ve seen this, to the right it says non-departmental but maybe it’s helpful for us to go forward because I don’t know how many other things we’re going to put in the parking lot, as you have like a general heading that it’s, you know, non-department budget and then you list these as the subsets under that. I have a little bit of concern as we go through these with different dates at different times, that we’re going to get, perhaps, confused just to when we did what and what it was associated with. So this was associated also with the... Which one, we looked at this when we looked at, which budget was it? Ms. Nose: The Non-Departmental Budget. Council Member Holman: But non-department was associated with another item. We did two things at the same time. Ms. Nose: Oh, so one of the proposals, the very first one, appears in non-departmental, but we discussed it both as part of non-departmental as well as the Office of Sustainability Budget, given the nexus. Mr. Perez: So the way it’s laid out in the calendar is going to lend itself to be grouped by night and by department as well, so I think your concerns are well taken, but I think the way it’s laid out, it will be grouped, it will not be split out. It’s just the non-departmental, like we mentioned, could be a little bit of a mix because sometimes when we are talking about a contingency, it has typically been the Council’s preference to put those in the non-departmental rather than the department itself. It’s kind of been a mix of that. Council Member Holman: I understand that. I didn’t mean to interrupt you there. I’m sorry. What page were these on? Suzanne Mason, Assistant City Manager: It’s on 467 and, I mean, 468 and 469 in that section. That’s why it’s called that. It’s called non-departmental allocations, so it’s the five budget adjustments in the non-departmental. Ms. Nose: And it was Item number seven last night, or Tuesday night. Council Member Holman: It was a discrete item. I was thinking it was associated with something else, so that’s, I’m just misremembering. Ms. Mason: It’s those five items at the bottom of 468. Council Member Holman: Yes, okay. Alright, thank you. Ms. Nose: Okay. Then we’ll move right along to our first… Chair Filseth: Further discussions on Staff responses. Okay, sorry, go ahead. NO ACTION TAKEN 2. Fire, Operating Budget. Kiely Nose, Manager of Budget: No, sorry. Thank you. We’ll move right along to our Fire Department. So this is our Operating Budget, Pages 239 through 251, and we have the Chief here. Eric Nickel, Fire Chief: Good evening Chair Filseth, Council members. Eric Nickel, Fire Chief. I’m here to do a quick overview of the Fire Department, as well as provide a list of some of our accomplishments that we did last year, and then move into Fiscal Year ’16/’17 and our requests. So the mission of the Palo Alto Fire Department, we are a professional team of men and women dedicated to safeguarding and enriching the lives of anyone, anytime, anywhere with compassion and pride. The purpose of the organization, the purpose of your Fire Department, your ambulance service, clearly is to deliver high priority, emergency services to the community. We do that around four large service programs, the first being fire suppression, fire engines, ladder trucks, emergency medical services, which accounts for about two-thirds of our total business, total call volume. I will remind you that we are the only city within Santa Clara County that operates its own ambulance, paramedic ambulance service and we’ve done so for going onto 41 years. Our Fire Prevention Bureau, which is really in a very unique and probably one-of-a-kind in the State of California, that it’s actually housed budget-wise within the Development Center, which allows us to do full cost recovery for prevention-related activities, but in terms of reporting relationship, still lie within Fire and we work very closely and collaboratively with the Development Director. In fact, I spent part of my afternoon working with Peter this afternoon. Then the last piece is the employee fire and Emergency Medical Services (EMS) certification training. As you’ve heard me talk before, 26 percent of the Palo Alto Fire Department is eligible to retire today, and in five years that goes up to 46 percent. So we’ve made some significant investments under your leadership over the last couple of years to really prepare the next generation of fire officers to serve the community. Accomplishments: Our call volume for medical and rescue calls, 5,200, about 5,300 calls. Kind of the highlight here, we made a deployment change a couple of years, early January of ’15 that put paramedics on all fire engines, so we were all ALS all the time, which allowed us to bring that number up that we’re putting paramedics on the scene of every EMS call within Palo Alto and Stanford within 12 minutes or less 99 percent of the time. That’s significantly higher than what we see in the rest of the County. Fire incidents continue to remain fairly stable in that 130, 150 range. We did see a slight uptick in our performance in responding to these fires, kind of 86% percent. We’ve typically seen in the low 80 percent getting there within eight minutes or less. Our fire inspections continue to trend up now that we have a fire marshal in place and he has been in that position permanently for a little over a year, and we’ve seen our fire inspections, particularly or higher-risk fire inspections on some of the, you know, the plating industry, the plating shops, particularly in South Palo Alto, as well as our State Fire Marshal mandated occupancy, schools, educational facilities. Key succession planning tools: We have a training chief in that position now, really making some great strides. I do want to highlight the medical priority dispatching and Auto-Aid Agreement. Under the leadership of Deputy Chief Blackshire, sitting behind me here, we instituted medical priority dispatching, so not all 911 calls are life-and-death Code Three emergencies, and it’s really important for the dispatcher to sort that out so we’re sending the right resources at the right code, sometimes with no lights and siren to the right call at the right time. So we prioritize calls based on the severity of what the caller is reporting and it allows us to respond much more efficiently and much more safely, because day in and day out, one of the most dangerous things we do here in Palo Alto through the Fire Department, is drive Code Three, lights and siren on with our ambulances and fire engines through the narrow streets with bicyclists, with pedestrians. So, if we can reduce the times that we have to go lights and siren to call, that’s really important to us from an overall risk-reduction perspective. The Auto-Aid Agreement: We have a little over a year’s worth of data with our Auto-Aid Agreement with Mountain View and in the south part of Palo Alto and the north part of Mountain View we send the closest available appropriate resource, regardless of what name it says on the side of that fire engine. We’ve been able to reduce response time to South Palo Alto on average 51 seconds compared to before. We’ve done a little bit of analysis around that. To get the same bang for that buck, and again, this is at no additional cost to taxpayers, for us to get that same reduction we would have had to build another fire station and staffed it to get that kind of cost savings or performance reduction. So we are huge around regionalization and collaboration between fire departments. We are just starting that same initiative of automatic aid with Menlo Park Fire and we will be in conversations with them to work out the technical details. Then, obviously, several of you attended the celebration, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of our paramedics and our ambulance service this year and we are one of the oldest providers of paramedics in the Stage of California, and that’s pretty amazing. Then, again, thank you and under your leadership and support we successfully completed our labor negotiations and have a new labor contract, which as you go through the budget, really accounts for the significant proportion of increases over the last year in terms of salaries and benefits. So some of our initiatives for 2017, obviously the elephant in our budget is the Stanford Fire Contract. We’ve discussed items with you related to the potential litigation in closed session. We continue working very closely with them. We feel we are on a good path right now. Certainly having Assistant City Manager Suzanne Mason on the team has allowed us, her and Ed Shikada to take a really fresh look at this and look at the way we have been proposing, a very different way that makes a lot of sense and is very fair. We continue to modernize and replace essential equipment. We have a very good Capital Replacement Plan and Replacement Program. We’re developing operational efficiencies. So one of the things that is good about going through the work that we have in the last few years with Stanford is, we have found ways to be more efficient and run the Department more efficiently. I just highlighted one with the Automatic Aid Agreement. We still, despite an increase in calls and fewer firefighters out there on the streets and fewer Full Time Equivalents (FTE’s) overall total, we’re still maintaining our performance standard of eight minutes or less 90 percent of the time. We’re eight minutes and four seconds, so we’re very close to that, even the call volume continues to increase. We continue to make smart investments in our training plan, particularly around succession and around high-risk fire training. This year, right now has been wildland training. Even though the drought has somewhat mitigated, if you take a look at kind of the Sierra front and the bark beetle die off, we have some very significant wildland threats that we respond to every summer with our crews as part of mutual aid. Then the last piece that we’re doing, this was actually funded in last year’s budget and we didn’t quite, we’re just now getting to this project. We’ve done our community risk analysis and assessment on the buildings and the risks in the community. We’re now taking that same approach with the community health assessment to take a look at public health really long term. You’ve heard me say this before, but it’s an important metric, 17 percent of the City of Palo Alto is 65 and over and that 17 percent accounts for almost 50 percent of our ambulance transports. We have this bubble that continues to age into it and as part of the Long-Term Economic Forecast, when Steven Levy gave the presentation and said, you know, we expect this population number, 65 and over, to increase by 50 percent in the next ten years, we’re trying to understand, what does that mean ten years from now for our call volume. Are we going to need more ambulances? We be delivered two more ambulances in two weeks, which will give us a total of six ambulances, so we’re trying to prepare for that, sort of, ten years out window. But we want to get a real clear understanding of our community health and public health risks, specifically as it relates to unplanned or emergency medical events. Our budget proposals this year are pretty minimal. Obviously with the uncertainties of the Stanford contract and then having just gone through the labor contract where there we some large increases, given the most important part of our organization are our people, we have some pretty minimal budget requests this year. As part of our overall initiative to reduce worker’s compensation injuries, we’re trying to update some of our exercise equipment. Our firefighters are expected to work out on a regular basis, and they are expected to work out, exercise while they are at work. The fitness equipment in some of the fire stations is 15 years old. Can you imagine going to a gym, you know, and seeing exercise equipment that’s 15 years old. It breaks quite frequently, it’s serviced on a regular basis. We’d like to give them some new exercise equipment. The second piece here, this California Incident Command Certification System (CICCS) Training, we’re trying to become fully compliant with what is called CICCS, which is short for this here. This is incident management, this is incident command, this not only works here within the City, but most importantly, when our folks are traveling outside of the area on these large all risk, although mostly wild land events. You know, the danger is out there. The biggest fire threat that we will continue to face in California in the next 15 or 20 years is not the structure fire risk, it’s the wild land interface risk, and whether it’s here in our own backyard, up in the foothill, or more likely, out on somebody else’s fire, it’s important that our folks are all fully trained to this Statewide standard that has been adopted by all the fire agencies within the State. The past piece is the realignment of the Development Services staffing. So as the Development Center has evolved, we’ve taken a very close look at the fire professionals that are in the Fire Prevention Bureau, and how much of their time is allocated towards fire service, which should be in fires budget, and how much of their time is allocated doing Development Center activities. We have determined that about 20 percent of the time, which equated out to these 2.15 FTE’s, even though I believe there’s like nine people over in the Bureau, 2.15 of those FTE’s really, and it’s a conglomeration of all the employees over there, that portion is really towards Fire Department. They are doing Fire-Department related activities. They are going to mandated training that they need to maintain their certification. They are doing fire investigations after a fire. So it was only fair to reallocate that back to the Fire Department. As one of the efficiency things that we’re taking on in the coming year, and Chief Blackshire brought this back from one of his leadership trainings that he had gone to, we’re going to respond differently to fire alarm calls here within the City. We have a pretty significant fire alarm problem. We get lots of fire alarms and 99 percent of those, more than 99 percent, are malfunctions, unwanted, unwarranted. When I first got here we were sending sometimes three, four pieces of apparatus on those calls. We’ve scaled that back to just one piece of apparatus. Now we want to send one fire inspector in a pickup truck to handle those low-risk type fire alarms. So that’s another reason why you’re seeing some of those allocations of those FTE’s back over on the fire side. They’re not doing cost-recovery Development Center activities. They’re actually making our system more efficient. So those are the significant budget proposals that we have this year and I’m available for any questions that you may have. Chair Filseth: Thanks Chief. Questions from the Committee? Karen. Council Member Holman: Okay, I’ll start. What you were just describing, because I did highlight the $2.15, so the false alarms that you get, you know, malfunctions, whatever, do we still have a policy in place that’s exercised that, you know, one okay, two warning, three you get a significant fine? Mr. Nickel: We do. Council Member Holman: So what’s the… I wasn’t aware actually that that was in Planning before, or Development Services before. That’s a very odd place to have that, it seems. So it seems like it makes sense that reallocated back here, but how much of that, do you think, is reimbursable because… Mr. Nickel: Well, and the costs that we’re able to recover typically is pretty minimal. I will tell you that we have not done a good job of doing that, and there’s a lot of reasons why we haven’t done a good job. Typically it’s been the engine companies that have gone out and done that, and I think some of them didn’t know we had that cost recovery process, but honestly, the majority of our false alarms are coming in during the peak call times of the day, which are usually between 10:00 AM and 5:00 PM. Oftentimes they are clearing that call and just as quick as they clear that call they’re getting dispatched to another higher priority call, say a medical aid. A lot of these false alarm calls that we’re getting are being cancelling before we ever arrive on the scene, so we don’t even make contact with the property owner, and these are some things that we’re trying to do to minimize those calls from ever being dispatched. So we do have a program in place, and you described it perfectly, your first one is free, the second one you get a warning, the third one we’re going to bill you for the cost that it took to come out and respond to that call. Council Member Holman: Are there very many that get to that third level? Mr. Nickel: I don’t have those numbers for you. I don’t know. Council Member Holman: It sounds like they’re not being logged actually. Mr. Nickel: Correct. Council Member Holman: I look forward to that being corrected. Then also, training and personnel, the way I read it in the budget and as I heard it, I guess I’m not understanding why some of that training time was in Development Services to begin with and by training, that’s internal training, external training? Help me understand that better. Mr. Nickel: Yeah, so when the positions were originally moved over to the Development Center for budget purposes, we didn’t have the time to do a really detailed time analysis of how many hours they were actually doing and we thought that first and second year that we would do that analysis. We have done that analysis and so for firefighters, just the mandated training that we have to do, either by Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) or Federal standards or California (Cal) OSHA, that typically works out to about 25 hours a month, and then we haven, in order to maintain your professional license either as a paramedic or an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), that’s typically another 24 hours per year. That doesn’t make sense that that would be allocated towards the Development Center. That is fire-based training, because a lot of the fire inspectors come off line and take a special assignment over, the firefighters take a special assignment over in the Fire Prevention Bureau typically for a year or two. Some of them are permanent assignments and then they rotate back out to the field, and then that allows us from an overall risk reduction, now we get people who have got the eyes and ears of a fire inspector that we now have back out on line. So it took us some time just to figure out how much time are they actually spending doing Development Center activities and how much are they doing fire-related activities. Council Member Holman: So I’m not quibbling with the allocation, but I’m not quite sure I heard the response to the question, that was, is this internal training or is it external training that we are getting. That’s where we’re getting to the employee add here. So is it training that happens on the outside that somebody else is doing or is it training that somebody on the inside is doing the training for the Palo Alto employees? Mr. Nickel: So it’s no overall FTE adds. (crosstalk) Council Member Holman: I know it’s a reallocation. Mr. Nickel: It’s both internal and external training. Most of our training is done with internal staff, our Training Bureau. There are occasions where we bring an outside specialist that might teach a very unique course, say like how to work with aircraft in the wildland setting, but most of our training is internal folks. Council Member Holman: Okay, and I wasn’t quibbling about the number, I was just wondering about, given the description, I was trying to understand what it was and what the source of it was. That’s what I was trying to understand. I think Council Member Schmid is going to have a question that he and I shared. At this moment, that answers that, but I don’t want to go without acknowledgement that I think our Fire Department is, well I do have one other question too, that our Fire Department is a stellar organization and Deputy Chief since you’re here too, I want to make sure you hear that too, and I think you’re a source of pride for our community and you do respond and we have a very good response record, so thank you for that. I said that then I lost sight of my other question. I’ll think of it and come back. Thank you. Mr. Nickel: Thank you. Chair Filseth: Council Member Schmid. Council Member Schmid: I would just start by reiterating the point that Council Member Holman made, our Fire Department has done an excellent job. No question it has the confidence of the people in the community who rate them very highly, and looking through the budget what you’re, you know, asking for seems reasonable and modest. I do have a couple big issues though, and they’re at the level of strategy. Maybe one for the Fire Department and one for the Budgeting Department, so let me throw out some data first. Part of the Packet handout last week was the Citywide salary survey, and that was as of February 2016, so before any of the recent approvals. To compare the Fire and the Police, I’m looking at the lines of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) and Palo Alto Peace Officers Association (PAPOA), the number of people in IAFF are 99, in PAPOA 83. Part of that reflects that you have responsibility for Stanford as well. The average salary and benefits for IAFF was $226,000, for PAPOA was $233,000, so roughly comparable in February of 2016. The number of calls that are responded to are 8,500 on the Fire side and 59,800 on the Police side. Now I know a call is not the same thing on Fire or Police, but that is a significant discrepancy. Now if you turn to our current budget, if you look at salaries and benefits on Page 246, the salary increase between Budget 2016 and Budget 2017 is $2.35 million, pension increase is $1.13 million, a total of approximately $3.1 million. The Police increase for salary is $0.8 for benefits, $0.6 million, a significant difference. Do you have a comment on why, given the fact that we’re starting in February at the same place, the salaries and benefits for IAFF is so high? Mr. Nickel: Why don’t you take the numbers, I’ll take the call stuff. Ms. Nose: On the numbers side, that Citywide salary chart that you’re looking at, when it says February of 2016, what it means is that the base level of salaries, benefits, pension is as of that date, so it’s the employee population as of that date; however, it has been adjusted for all of the approved agreements. So those averages that you’re looking at are as of February 2016’s employee population, with the inflations associated with the agreements. Council Member Schmid: The increases were voted April 11th. Ms. Nose: Right, so the increase, but the base is the employee population as of February 2016, but built into this budget and all the assumptions within it are all the approved increases in April, so we start at that February baseline, say it’s $20 million, it’s not but let’s just say it is, and then we say, okay from that $20 million from those employees we increase based on the agreed upon salary changes, the agreed upon benefit changes, and that’s how you come to those forecasted averages. Council Member Schmid: Yeah, I wondered. I looked at this and tried to figure whether this was appropriate for the 2016 Budget or the 2017 Budget, and you imply it’s a mixture of both. Ms. Nose: Well it’s your 2017 Budget is probably the correct answer, and so it’s the February ’16 population, but it’s been adjusted for step increases and it’s been adjusted in accordance with all of the Memorandum of Understandings (MOU’s) that we’ve been, that Council has approved. Council Member Schmid: Council approved in April, mid-April. Lalo Perez, Director of Administrative Services and Chief Financial Officer: Yeah, when we switched to actual pay, we had to select a point in time to get the demographics, the base, and so we had to choose a little bit earlier to produce the Budget, and that’s why it’s February typically, so what we look like today will be different in two months, so it would be difficult to keep moving that base to compare it, so we leave it alone. Council Member Schmid: Okay, so I have the problem of I have listed on the left side is the 2016 Fiscal Year and then the 2017 Fiscal Year, and yet you’re saying you have taken into account during the 2016 Fiscal Year some of these increases. Ms. Nose: No, I think what we’re trying to say is, on page 63, the average one, if we look at the footnote number one, when we’re calculating the actual pay for this Fiscal Year ’17 Budget, we have to use Fiscal ’16’s population of employees and escalate it based on the assumptions used to build the Fiscal Year ’17 Budget, so that’s what this chart is doing. It’s looking at your Fiscal Year ’16 employee population and growing it based on the assumptions necessary for ’17. Council Member Schmid: Okay, that’s helpful to understand the difference between the two. Ms. Nose: And so you’re ’17 Budget, when you’re looking at your Police versus the Fire Department, the approved increases in salaries between the Police Union as well as IAFF, were very different, and so that’s why you’re seeing that difference in the Fiscal Year ’16 adopted to Fiscal Year ’17 proposed difference. That’s why IAFF is a lot higher. Mr. Perez: As you may recall, the firefighter group was further out of market than our Police. Council Member Schmid: Okay, did the Chief have a comment on the number of calls? Mr. Nickel: I do. Actually I have a couple of comments. You know, one of the things that is unique about this Fire Department is the amount of cost recovery that we do and whether that’s the Stanford contract, whether that’s charges to insurance companies for transporting people to the hospital, you know, the revenue that we bring in that goes back into the General Fund is about $12 to $13 million. That is really unusual that, in this case, just a little under half of the budget, 40 percent, is brought back in in cost recovery, versus if we weren’t operating an ambulance service or we didn’t have, you know, a contract for service, to maintain the same level of performance, that would be $29 million out of the General Fund with no cost recovery, so we do a really good job of that. So if you net that out, that $29 million is now more like $17 or $18 million. With the full breadth of services that this organization provides our residents and our visitors, that’s a pretty darn good deal. In terms of the workload measures, you know, and I can’t comment directly on law enforcement, but you know, the Fire Service, we travel in teams of two on the ambulance or three on the fire engine. We try to build everything around performance and how many bodies it takes to get the job done. So just a typical emergency medical services call, you know, chest pain, shortness of breath, a diabetic problem, that’s a pretty common EMS call for us, that is going to take a minimum of five personnel responding to that scene, two on the ambulance and three on the fire engine. In order for us to maintain the Council-directed of eight minutes or less 90 percent of the time, that performance measure, we respond two different companies and one typically gets there first, usually the fire engine, but just in that instance it’s going to take one paramedic to assess the patient, one paramedic to drop any sort of medications that may be needed to start treating that patient there, somebody has to scribe and take information down, otherwise we can’t cost recovery and we don’t have good documentation of what we did, somebody has to get the gurney and then somebody has to be in charge of that crew, sort of watching out for the big picture, that’s five people right there just for a basic EMS call. So now we throw in a vehicle accident, well that’s another company that’s got to go or if extrication assignment where we’ve got to use the jaws to cut them out, these calls might take 10 to 15 people, so while it’s a lot less calls, typically our calls are much more labor intensive and require more people in order to get sort of that same bang of performance. I hope that answers your question. Council Member Schmid: Yeah, that’s helpful. Let me go back to the revenue side for a minute, and then a question for the Budget people. One of the concerns about the 2017 Budget is that salaries and benefits went up $3.1 million, the revenue increase is expected to be $500,000, that’s about 16 percent. So the revenue share of this new expenditure is not going up as fast. Let me take a step further on the revenue side, if you look at our total revenue for the City, under 2017 Page 84, it says it’s going up $9.2 million. Of that, about 50 percent is from Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT), but the TOT was identified that approximately $5 million would be targeted to infrastructure. Now the Non-Departmental Budget took $1.4 million out of that, so there is only $3.6 targeted this year, but that would reduce the net increase available for salaries and benefits to $5.6 million and if you add up the Fire plus the Police contracts, that comes to $4.9 million, or approximately 88 percent of our net increase in revenues. So we end up saying, oh, we need to transfer $5 million from our Budget Stabilization Reserve. With that 12 percent revenue increase, we want to add 12 personnel and we have concerns about our unfunded liability, so from a strategic point of view, I think we have made a decision to invest in public safety and acknowledge that, but that puts severe constraints on all the other priorities we have, and I think, you know, having 12 percent of our revenue increase available for transportation, traffic, parking, new personnel, unfunded liabilities, is a pretty big burden, so I’m concerned as we go through this budget step-by-step, that we need to keep in mind the revenue side and what we have on the revenue side. Is there any comment you would like to make about available new revenues to pay for new services? Mr. Perez: Yeah, to be honest with you, I didn’t quite follow the whole link of your comments, but knowing you over the years, you’re pretty accurate in your numbers, so I’m going to go with that. Council Member Schmid: I can give you page numbers. Mr. Perez: Oh, no, no. You gave them to me. I was just trying to do the numbers in my head as you were saying them. I can tell you that we are very concerned about our revenues and how we continue to track and it is one of our most challenging areas, because the hard part about it is discerning what’s ongoing, and to your point, because if we have these increases that are permanent and ongoing and the revenue is not, well then, that’s a problem. So we share your concerns and we do monitor this closely and it is something that’s even more of a concern, especially in this department because of the remarks the Chief made, that we’re still in negotiations with Stanford, so the revenue is in limbo right now in terms of what that bottom line number will be. So you’re on point with us having to be mindful of revenues. Council Member Schmid: Yeah, I think when it comes time to motions, I would probably move that the budget proposals we have be put in the parking lot without approval. Mr. Perez: I think it’s a fair statement that, you know, we do need to go through the whole process and keeping in mind our challenges and so, you know, I think it’s a point I made to you a couple of months ago when we were talking about potentially advancing some funding to the pension unfunded liability for ’17 and I was saying, well let’s wait until you see the whole picture, and I think for those same reasons the concerns you have are the concerns we share. Council Member Schmid: Thank you. Chair Filseth: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: First off, may I echo what I have heard at least from my colleagues that the Department is doing great work. I had a chance to do a ride along with the Department several months ago and I was very impressed. So I have seen in previous career working security that when there is a call for Fire services, the number of people needed on scene really is necessary and I have also seen that when Fire Departments have had to come to my house for a medical call, I’ve seen that and you guys do a great job. I’m also curious, based on prior experience, how many, I’m sure you’re not quantifying, but almost anecdotally, how many of the calls that you get that are false alarms are from either bagels in a toaster or microwave popcorn? I will echo what I heard from Council Member Holman as well, that if there is a way that we can start keeping track of and maybe touching base with him later, you know, people who have, when there’s been a false alarm even if it’s gotten cancelled, maybe just send them a postcard or call or an e-mail of something later on to let them know no charge this time, but if it happens three times or three times in a year, our policy is to make sure they are aware. You know, at this point I’m not going to make that a mandate, but I would be interested in seeing if we could start getting in that direction so we can, you know, one – track for ourselves and also make sure that they are hearing from us and are aware of what our policy is, and the it also opens up the opportunity if there is better documentation and better outreach opens up better opportunities for follow up and cost recovery if there are some really back actors. Also thinking about my prior career, if they know and property owners know that is something that’s looming, they might, you know, they will start doing a better job of making sure they don’t cook the bagels or the popcorn or whatever it is, that they have a bad habit of too long, if they wanted to avoid that. So we can provide a nudge for them if we’re doing a better job of that. A couple of questions, in talking about long-term health analyses and trying to take steps to, you know, address long-term health in the City, I’m curious how much you’re partnering with County Health Department? Mr. Nickel: So great question, great comments. You know, first on the alarm reduction piece, we’ve got a comprehensive multi-department team that are tackling this alarm reduction issue and you nailed about 80 percent , like gee, I was thinking, were you at one of our meetings. So we’re working very hard on that. One way to build capacity in the response system is to add resources, which is clearly cost prohibitive. The other way is to pull calls out of the system that have no business being in there, and that’s what we focused our efforts on. And yes, it’s popcorn, it’s bagels and it’s construction workers that are generating dust that haven’t called and let us know that they are doing a tenant improvement. That’s a lot of it. Council Member Wolbach: Especially when they forget to tape up around (inaudible). Mr. Nickel: Correct. That being said, I completely forgot what your question was. Council Member Wolbach: Oh, I have a couple. The first one is, are you partnering with the County Health Department in the long term, looking at long-term health issues. I’m curious how that relationship is, you know, without getting into too deep a policy discussion. Since you brought it up, that issue, I’m curious how that’s going working with the County. Mr. Nickel: We’ve got a couple of different partnerships working, one on a County-wide Fire Chiefs’ level and this year I’ve had the privilege of being the president of the County Fire Chiefs’ Association, so we’ve opened that dialogue with the EMS Office, which originally had been in Public Health and has now been moved to Health and Hospitals. We are having that dialogue at very high levels at the County. We just got a new Medical Director in for the EMS System who comes with that idea of, how do we reduce emergency calls. How do we promote overall health? The County has clearly made it an issue that public health is very important to them, and we’re seeking out those partnerships. We were very close to exercising a partnership County wide about two years ago in collaboration with the fire agencies and the ambulance providers and County health, and two weeks before we were to submit our proposal with the support of the County to the State, because the State has to approve these trial projects, the ambulance provider in this County declared bankruptcy. So clearly we weren’t able to take advantage of that opportunity to do something new. We were just trying to make sure the system was going to be available when people needed it. Our partnerships right now are probably closest aligned with Stanford Hospital. They have approach us, we have approached them, and we are working on right now part of that health assessment. We are going to be working with the team that did their hospital health assessment. Hospitals have to do these health assessments, but for a whole wide area. I just want one focused on Palo Alto and Stanford, so we’re working with them around these concepts called Community Paramedics and it’s the whole same process of trying to eliminate a fire, we want to eliminate a medical call. So we do have those partnerships working. It’s an exciting time and a very challenging time to work under the new Affordable Care Act, because we’re all seeking these ways to reduce overall health, so yes. Council Member Wolbach: Okay, so one other question. I was really, you know, excited to be reminded of the partnership with Mountain View and happy to hear about the benefits that brings to providing timely service in South Palo Alto without adding as much cost. I’m curious, do we have any similar partnership with Menlo Park Fire Protection District for the north and west borders of the City with Menlo Park and East Palo Alto, where they provide coverage? Mr. Nickel: So the answer is yes. We also have an Automatic Aid Agreement with Santa Clara County Fire in the Los Altos Hills area. We have one with Woodside Fire. Obviously the call volumes are a lot less there. There are some technical challenges with the Menlo Park. It’s a different county, it’s a different dispatch center. The one way Mountain View was so easy to pull off, we have the same dispatch system, we have the same radio frequencies. That one’s very easy. We have a few other technical challenges to work through with Menlo Park, but they want to do it and we want to do it, so we’ve had discussions at very high levels and now our Operations Chiefs are starting to work that out, the details. Council Member Wolbach: Okay, well if you hit any roadblocks, I’m sure you’ll let us know if there is anything we can do to help smooth things out, but I’m glad to hear that you guys are moving in that direction and look forward to the improved service and cost savings that come with that. Mr. Nickel: Thank you. Council Member Wolbach: I think that’s it. I had some other questions that were about regional coordination, but I think it’s probably most appropriate for Office of Emergency Services, so I’ll save that for the next presentation. Chair Filseth: Okay, thank you very much and I add my thanks to you and your department, Chief Nickel for keeping us safe at night. Actually the first question I wanted to ask was Greg here, which is, the number I have here for average total compensation for IAFF is $267,000. You had a number that was different from that. Council Member Schmid: I had $226,000 on Page 63. Chair Filseth: Yeah, I’m looking on Page 63 and IAFF says $266.838, right? Ms. Nose: I think I can help clear this up a little bit. Chair Filseth: Can you help? Ms. Nose: So at the last Finance Committee meeting we had an at-places memo that had some replacement pages in it, and so we needed to take those replacement pages, pull out the ones that were in the printed version and put in the other ones, so you have the old pages and Council Member Schmid has the replacement pages. Chair Filseth: We just saved $40,000 ahead. Ms. Nose: Sorry about that. We found that typo as well. Chair Filseth: Thank you very much. Council Member Holman: And I’m sure we can find a place to spend it. Chair Filseth: Thank you very much. So not wanting to… I have a number of mostly technical questions, but not wanting to sort of spend a lot of time on this, but the increase for next year is about 11 percent in the budget proposal and I know when I go home tonight my wife is going to ask me, what does the City get for that? So, do you have like a 10 second sound bite on what that is? Mr. Nickel: What you get for your 10 percent budget increase? Chair Filseth: Or $3.4 million or whatever it is, yes. Mr. Nickel: Well, clearly the majority of that is salary and benefits. I mean, 85 to 90 percent of my budget is for people. You know, we lost 14 really highly trained firefighters, many of them paramedics over the last three and a half years to other agencies that were paying more. I think this certainly has, the salary increases that brought us up to the median of the market has certainly helped stem that tide. What you can tell your wife, is you’re getting top-notch service with a very fiscally conservative Fire Department led by fiscally conservative Council that watches the bottom line and aggressively attempts to recover revenue from insurance companies for using ambulance transportation services. Chair Filseth: Which we appreciate. So you see it primarily as a retention kind of thing. Mr. Nickel: Correct. I mean, just to get an employee in the door and train him for six months, we’ve invested $150,000 in that person. Chair Filseth: The first thing I thought was, we should see a reduction in overtime, but overtime looks about flat, right, so actually I take it back. That’s the 2.15, the 2.15 is the transfers so, okay. I wanted to ask you a question about the calls. So what percentage of the calls we get are from Stanford? Mr. Nickel: Excellent question. Stanford accounts for about 17 to 18 percent of the total call volume. If you break that out, they’re about 13 percent of EMS calls for service, they’re about 33 percent of the total call volume for fires and fire alarms. The real problem with fire alarms is… Chair Filseth: Kids play with matches, or what is that? Mr. Nickel: It is young college-age students living alone for the first time, burning popcorn in the dorms, drying their clothes from the sprinkler the pops the head off. It’s a variety of things. They understand that they have a false alarm problem and some of the challenges out there, that we have out there, when we do get these fire alarms, they are in some of the highest density living high-rise buildings that they have out there, so until we can confirm that it’s not an actual fire, we’ve got to send some resources out there. Chair Filseth: And I was listening when you said earlier that fire, well, I assume a fire alarm call is more expensive than a chest pain call, or is that right? Mr. Nickel: It depends on the occupancy. A higher-risk occupancy, like you know a dorm or a high-rise dorm, we’re doing to send some more resources to that. Typically a fire engine, the ladder truck and the Battalion Chief, which now you’re looking at eight people on that response versus five, so yes, it is more expensive. And there is no cost recovery, or minimal cost recovery on that compared to billing an insurance company for an ambulance ride to the hospital. Chair Filseth: Okay, I understand. I also wanted to ask on the calls, I saw you project 135 calls last year, but I saw a reference somewhere else that there is, I also saw a reference to structure fires somewhere, that the number was much larger, so what’s the difference between a structure fire and a fire incident? Mr. Nickel: Anything that can burn that comes into the dispatch center and they say something is on fire would be a fire, so it could be a car fire, it could be vegetation fire, it could be one of the trash cans out here on University Avenue that is on fire. When we do get… and so that’s the larger number. When we differentiate those, a structure fire, so somebody calls and says, my house is on fire, my bedroom is on fire, we get there, we confirm that. That’s why that’s going to be a much smaller number. Chair Filseth: So if somebody, I mean if there is a false alarm, is that also part of a fire incident, the 135 fire incidents? Mr. Nickel: No, those are actually confirmed burning. (crosstalk) confirmed something was on fire. That’s after the fact versus what it was dispatched as. Chair Filseth: How many structure fires do we have a year these days? Mr. Nickel: How many structure fires? Chair Filseth: Yeah. Mr. Nickel: So we’re probably, when we get there and confirm that something, yes, was actually on fire, I just reviewed the next quarterly report that’s going to come to you and I want to say we were on track in the 50 range, 40 range of actual structure fires. Chair Filseth: The piece I saw from the Weekly last year said that in 2014 there were 15 structure fires. Does that sound right or do they have it wrong? Mr. Nickel: Those are probably when we get there, when you say a number like that, that’s probably that we’ve had to call for more resources. Chair Filseth: Okay. Mr. Nickel: And again, on a structure fire we’re sending three fire engines, two ladder trucks an ambulance and two Battalion Chiefs, so that would be something that we would get there and that’s either everybody’s working or we’re now going to need more resources. Chair Filseth: So a big one. So one other thing I wanted to ask is, I know that we sort of had some, you know, I’m looking at this, we have 40 Firefighters and 21 Fire Captains. That’s a pretty flat management hierarchy. What I wanted to ask was… Mr. Nickel: Well, just real quick, a typical crew component for us on a fire engine would be one Fire Captain, one Fire Apparatus Operator, they drive the fire engine and run the pump, and then one Firefighter Paramedic, so that Captain would oversee two people. Chair Filseth: Thank you. I remember what I wanted to ask was, there’s been some ongoing dialogue about maybe the direction that the City needs to take is, so if you look at the Firefighters and the Fire Captains, are all those sworn? Mr. Nickel: Correct. Chair Filseth: So there’s been some dialogue that one of the directions the City might take is sort of moving away to a staff which had a different balance between sort of sworn Firefighters and EMT’s, right. I don’t see any of that in here. Is any of that in here or is that something we’re still talking about, or… Mr. Nickel: We’re still working on that. One of the models that we’ve talked about, a long-term ambulance delivery model is what’s known as a single-role paramedic or a single-role EMT. So our ambulances would be operated by non-sworn paramedics and EMG’s, and there obviously is some cost savings there because they’re not, we’re not paying the safety pension. Chair Filseth: That makes some sense and I thought of that when you were talking about sort of the chest pain call, and it makes a lot of sense. Why would you role a truck, I mean, a fire truck with hoses and stuff like that on a chest pain call, right? Mr. Nickel: So the fire engine is our basic all-risk piece of equipment that, it’s like the toolbox that has everything in it and often times we don’t know what we’re getting until we actually get to the call and lay eyes on it. And just as many times, particularly during the day, we oftentimes don’t make it back to the fire station before we get dispatched to a fire, so we may have left the station to go to a vehicle accident… Chair Filseth: So you want the truck just in case. Mr. Nickel: You want the fire engine just in case. Where the ladder truck, that’s the large truck. That is the big aerial ladder. Chair Filseth: The one that makes all the noise, right? Well they all make a lot of noise. And finally, I wanted to ask about the revenues and thank you for the discussion of it before. It looks like it’s $12 million or something like that, of which you’re assuming somewhere in the neighborhood of half of that is from Stanford, right. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less, but, what’s the rest? Mr. Nickel: When you look at the breakdown, so in the first charges for services, that would incorporate the Stanford fire contract as well as our cost recovery work for ambulance service. From other agencies, I’m not sure the charges to the other funds, I’ll let one of my colleagues up here address that. Chair Filseth: It looked like it was pretty small actually. Mr. Nickel: From other agencies, that is cost recovery we get when we send crews out to the large forest and wildland fires in the summertime. That money is paid back to us to cover the equipment and then the staff that are on that crew at time and a half, and then that money comes back through the State Office of Emergency Services, and then the other revenue in the small, little minor ones, I’ll again let my colleagues address that, but the bulk of the revenue comes from the Stanford fire contract and then ambulance cost recovery. Chair Filseth: Okay. Alright. Thank you very much. It all makes sense. I understand that the implication of the revenue makes a significant difference on the expense. It remains, I mean, you can still sort of go, well, is it worth it, but it does have an impact on the total, right. It’s a sufficiently large number and none of these includes the unfunded pension liability which, for this group, I think is something like $75 million or something like that, if you include Other Post Employee Benefit (OPEB), right, it’s between 50 and 100, right? Mr. Perez: I didn’t bring that folder, so I would have to look it up, I’m sorry. But it is, the Public Safety is the most significant portion of it, but we know that. Chair Filseth: Sure, I mean, that’s more than Menlo Park’s entire unfunded liability and a couple of other cities too, right. So it’s such a large number that I think I’m going to support Greg’s idea that maybe we should put it in the parking lot for now, and have a chance to revisit it in terms of other priorities. It’s not like we’re not going to do it, right. Okay, but I think we’d like another crack at it, alright, sort of in context of other stuff. So I think if you’re going to make that motion, I think I’ll probably support it. Thank you. Any other comments? Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Yeah, I never did remember the other question I was going to ask, but I have a curiosity about one thing, which is, do we see fewer fires in our parks since we have adopted the Smoking Ordinance that bans smoking in our parks and open space? Mr. Nickel: That’s a great question. I would have to get that data for you. I don’t know. Council Member Holman: It’s curiosity and maybe good for us to know for support for, additional support for the ordinance. Going back to the smoke alarm fines, just, I would… So before, a few years ago, maybe even several years ago at this point, there was a good amount of publicity so that people knew there was a fine for such activities and such incidents and it seems like maybe if you get a lot of those, it seems like it’s maybe time to do some publicity again, even (inaudible) utility stuffers, or both or something like that, and indicate that the department will be collecting and I encourage you to get your staff to make note of those. And then, last question actually is, and I hate to just harp on this one, but, on the training and personnel again, I’m wondering if that’s quite the right title for that. You don’t have to answer that right now, but I wonder if that’s kind of the right title for that, and the other is, because some of this is a transfer, most of it is a transfer over from Development Center, if the cost recovery is, that was captured in the Development Center, is being captured anywhere here, because as I heard you describe what the work is that’s being done by Fire personnel, at least it sounds like some of it should be cost recovery or for-fee service. Mr. Nickel: Yes, so their time in the Development Center when they’re performing fire inspections, planned checks, that is all 100 percent cost recoverable. Council Member Holman: It seemed like, and maybe I just misunderstood, but it seemed like some of the work that is being done by employees shifting over, it sounds like still some of that would be subject to fees. Did I misunderstand that? Mr. Nickel: Well, the work that they do on the Fire side and the work would be either keeping their certification up to be a Firefighter, or doing a fire investigation. That’s not cost recoverable. Council Member Holman: Okay, alright. Thank you. Mr. Perez: Chair Filseth, it’s $103 million, the unfunded portion for Public Safety combined. Chair Filseth: That’s combined, but that’s just pension not OPEB, right? Mr. Perez: That is correct. Chair Filseth: Okay, so if you assume OPEB is another $40 or $50 million or something like that, on top of that for that group because it runs, you know, about half of the pension expense Citywide and you assumed 50/50 for Police and Fire, then that would be about $75 million ballpark. Okay. Thank you. Council Member Schmid. Council Member Schmid: Yeah, I’ll make a motion that we tentatively approve the budget with the significant budget proposals going into the parking lot and I guess I would make the case that the work being done in the Development Center is primarily benefiting people who are building, developing and to transfer funding from the group that is building onto the general fund and primarily residents is an important step and can be looked at seriously. MOTION: Council Member Schmid moved, seconded by Council Member XX to tentatively approve the Fire Department Budget, with the significant Budget Proposals going into the Parking Lot. MOTION FAILED DUE TO LACK OF A SECOND Chair Filseth: So are you proposing that the $2.1 FTE transfer also go into the parking lot, or just the first two items? Council Member Schmid: Well, I would propose that Item One and Two onPpage 250 to into the parking lot. That includes $412,000 for the third bullet, $125,000 on the first bullet, so the California Incident Certification is fine to go. Council Member Holman: Could you repeat that. Could you just repeat your motion in its entirety. Council Member Schmid: The Motion, I guess with what’s in front of us, is I’m proposing that bullet number one and bullet number three go into the parking lot. That otherwise the budget would be tentatively approved. Chair Filseth: I’ll second that. MOTION: Council Member Schmid moved, seconded by Chair Filseth to move Realignment of Fire Prevention Staff from Development Services Department, and Fire Station Furniture, Fixtures, and Equipment - Phase 2 into the Parking Lot and to tentatively approve the Fire Department Budget. Mr. Perez: Just so we understood correctly, to make sure we follow the motion, it’s one and three into the parking lot? Is that correct? In the book sorry, Page 250 or on the slides we’re talking… Council Member Schmid: They’re in a different order. I think on Page 250 it’s number one and two. Mr. Perez: Oh, one and two, thank you. Chair Filseth: What about number three on Page 251? Ms. Nose: Number three on 251. Council Member Schmid: That I’m perfectly happy to allow. Chair Filseth: That’s the $38,000. One and two. Ms. Nose: So I think your motion is, in the actual document on Page 250 and 251, it would be budget proposals one and two would go in the parking lot, which are the Development Services realignment and the Furniture, Fixtures and Equipment (FF&E) Phase Two, and then the third proposal, the CICCS Training would be tentatively approved as part of this motion? Council Member Schmid: Yes. Chair Filseth: I’ll second that. Suzanne Mason, Assistant City Manager: So I just want to make sure we’re all clear, and I know we’ve talked about it, but Item One, the reallocation of the 2.1 positions, FTE, is really just taking part of positions that are assigned to the Development Center that due to the law around cost recovery and fee development, we could not include parts of their overall cost allocation to the Development Center, so it’s just reallocating it between departments and funds, so I just want to make sure we’re all clear. These are not distinct bodies, these are just parts of different employees. (crosstalk) that cannot fairly be allocated to fee charges. Chair Filseth: I understand. It’s not like we’re not going to do it. Ms. Mason: I just want to make sure we’re all clear. There’s not a whole body. Chair Filseth: I think that’s what you intended, right? Council Member Schmid: Well, I think it’s important to make the distinction between development in the City and residential burden, and let’s keep those distinct. Chair Filseth: Thank you. Other comments? Council Member Holman: Just, and I brought this up and I appreciate the motion, but I think I’m satisfied that you addressed this, so if I vote against the motion then we’ve got, I don’t know what Council Member Wolbach is going to do, but… Chair Filseth: What happens if its 2-2? Council Member Schmid: So it’s two to go in the parking lot. Council Member Holman: I understand. Council Member Schmid: And that’s all we’re doing. Mr. Perez: You know, past practice has been two. I missed your first opening night, so I don’t know if you set ground rules. Chair Filseth: I’m going to proposed we stay consistent with past practices. Mr. Perez: Okay. Chair Filseth: What does that mean for tentatively approving the rest of it? Mr. Perez: The rest goes forward. You know, just to recap maybe a little bit of practice, I’ll call it, when you tentatively approve, that doesn’t mean you can’t revisit the budget, but typically it means that you’re fairly confident that you can approve it moving forward, but you want to have additional discussion with the parking lot itself. Chair Filseth: So if we wanted to, it’s a procedural thing, if we wanted to tentatively approve most of it, but a subset of us, a sufficient subset of us wanted to put a couple of items in the parking lot, how do we do the motion? Mr. Perez: So you make it the motion that you tentatively approve the budget for the Fire Department with the exception of Items one and two on Oage 250, that those be sent to the parking lot for future consideration. Chair Filseth: Okay. Is that your motion? Council Member Schmid: Yeah. Chair Filseth: Second. All in favor? Should we bifurcate the motion? MOTION PASSED: 2-2, Wolbach, Holman no Mr. Perez: So it’s 2-2, so if the Committee wants to go along with the past practice, the past practice was all it took was two and then it goes in the parking lot and then at the wrap-up on the 23rd we revisit everything that’s in the parking lot. At that point, if they were to be 2-2 on anything, not picking on the Fire budget, then that goes to Council as a 2-2. Chair Filseth: Okay, so in that case did we just pass this? Mr. Perez: Yes, from our point you’re done with Fire. Chair Filseth: Super. Thank you very much for coming out and putting up with us here, Chief. Council Member Schmid: Could I add one thing? Chair Filseth: Yeah, a comment from Council Member Schmid. Council Member Schmid: There was one thing in the Fire Department, because it’s such a big department and we went through, we have included in there a market adjustment salary, and the market adjustment is to bring salaries up to the median. The median is defined as being the mid-point of a distribution with an equal number above and below. So, bringing everyone beneath the median up to the median changes the median. You no longer have a distribution with anyone below, so technical question, is that, are we skirting legal issues or definitional issues. Ms. Mason: I’m not sure I’m following but what the market adjustment did is we looked at our comparable agencies without us and we did an analysis of the middle of the market based on those agencies. Council Member Schmid: The median. Ms. Mason: The median. Council Member Schmid: Which is the distribution? Ms. Mason: The middle. Right, an equal number above that number and below that number and we aim over the lift of the labor contract over the next three years, to move our firefighters to the middle of our comparable market. That’s what we did. So there are still an equal number, even after the three adjustments that will be, well, who knows in three years. Council Member Schmid: I don’t think that’s what happens, and if you have say five cities around you that you’re sharing the median with, it is continually raising the median of all five cities, you will never reach an equilibrium. Ms. Mason: That’s if you included us in the analysis of the median. Council Member Schmid: Well if we’re included in the others, than… Ms. Mason: Well, when we do the market analysis, we look at these comparable agencies without us, and then we say where do we compare, and we may be at the bottom. What will it take to get us to the middle, and that’s how we do it. We’re not included in that analysis. Council Member Schmid: But we’re not moving an average. Ms. Mason: No we’re not moving an average. Council Member Schmid: Making the median our base, our lowest. Just a question (crosstalk). Ms. Mason: I can set up a separate time to go through with you Council Member Schmid and show you how we do that. Council Member Schmid: It seems inappropriate to use the term median, where you’re making (inaudible). Ms. Mason: Well, let me show you because it’s one of the things I do a lot of, and I believe it is the median, not the mode, not the average, but the median. Okay. 3. Office of Emergency Services, Operating Budget Chair Filseth: Okay, next up is Emergency Services. Ken Dueker, Director of Emergency Services: Good evening honorable Chair Filseth and fellow members. I’m Ken Dueker. I’m the Office of Emergency Services (OES) Chief or Director of Emergency Services for the City of Palo Alto. For the record, D-U-E-K-E-R. Thank you for having me here this evening. I am not asking for any changes. I’m not, hopefully, going to create any complexity and it’s unusual for me to be the rose between the two Public Safety thorns, as it were, so we’ll move on expeditiously. Next slide. Chair Filseth: That’s not how we look at it. You guys are all roses. Mr. Dueker: We want to be on the first slide. You jumped to the end there. Sorry, next slide, one more. My slides got changed from my printout. That is fine, well good. We’ll make this pretty quick. The mission of the Office of Emergency Services is to prepare for, respond to, recovery from and in some cases, prevent or mitigate all hazards, whether that be the El Nino floods that I think we’ll take a little credit perhaps, or planned events such as the frequent presidential visits and other dignitary visits that come to our area, serious crime complex situations, be they utilities accidents, power outages and so forth. So we have our hands full. To kind of set things into perspective about, effectiveness of resources, we’re doing all this with 3.48 FTE’s, about one-half of what Stanford Hospital invests in emergency management, so we’re a busy and efficient little group. Next slide. Some of our accomplishments in this current fiscal year, one of the big ones, as the Council is well aware, is that after years of process we did a regional process with the fellow North County Public Safety Agencies of Los Altos, Mountain View and Sunnyvale and us to develop a standard Emergency Operations Plan and while this may be somewhat in the area of Wonke Propeller head territory, what it means to us is that when we have the big one, always when, not if, if we need to go and assist Mountain View or we need to have a joint operation with Los Altos or Sunnyvale, we’ve now laid out a structural framework to facilitate that. So similar to what the Fire Chief was talking about in human interoperabilities, it’s done at the most basic level, so we’re pleased about that. Another related concept and an exercise of regional leadership was the City of Palo Alto and my office, such as it is, spearheaded an effort to bring together agencies in both counties along the San Francisquito Creek to form the San Francisquito Creek Multi-Agency Coordination Group (SFC MAC), MAC stands for Multi-Agency Coordination Group, and it allows us to share resources, to be aware of common threats and to be more effective in responding to floods and related incidents along the creek, which remains, despite the lack of precipitation today, an ongoing threat as many of you know, and we continue to work, even as the Joint Powers Authority (JPA) is doing their good work as well. I want to just highlight a little bit, I’m not going to read all the bullet points here, but a lot of the work we do is out in the community. We define that as broadly as possible. That’s our residential neighborhoods, our faith-based organizations, our businesses, nonprofits and so forth. We make that a real focus because the reality is, as you have all been alluding to, public safety staffing is super expensive, will never, ever get to the point where I would be comfortable, it’s not fiscally possible, but what is feasible and desires to do is to engage our volunteers and our other partners to make sure that when the bad thing happens we all have a role to play and we can interoperate together. So we’ve been very steadfast in that, building our capabilities and our relationships over time. One of that is the final bullet point. You may not be an NFL fan, but we had this big game recently in our areas, Super Bowl 50 and for those who were not tracking it, the Broncos actually practiced here at the Stanford stadium. That presented a very significant public safety risk or threat to our area, not just the practice but the number of VIP’s and other people who were floating through and dining at our restaurants and shopping at our retail establishments, all of which are great news, but the implicit cost is there. We had to track all that. We had to remain situationally aware and we had to coordinate at a level that was really unprecedented, probably last seen before my time here, in Super Bowel 85 at the Stanford stadium. Next slide. So the three key elements of our initiatives going forward, you’ll see thematically, it’s training, planning and infrastructure and technology. We mentioned community training and obviously a big burden for us is training staff, and I want to be clear, we do not just train Public Safety Staff. When we activate the Emergency Operation’s Center, we’re bringing in everybody from Public Works to Utilities to Administrative Services Department (ASD). Lalo’s people, for example, have a big role to play. It doesn’t sound exciting but the minute after the earthquake, we need to think and we need to act with compliance to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Guidelines if we have any hope of cost recovery, and they are very, very much stringent about that these days. So, not exciting all the time, but very important the work that we do with staff. Planning, I’m going to skip over that in the interests of time. Infrastructure and technology, we have a lot of big initiatives. Many of them are shared with other agencies and our fellow departments. Our Emergency Operation’s Center has gone from a dusty room in the basement a few years ago that nobody really ever used to, I want to be humble about it, but I think it’s a pretty good system now. We don’t just focus on the room or the gear, but it really is a system and it’s here to serve all the departments in the City and make us a better partner to Stanford and Menlo Park Fire and all the other players with whom we interact. We’re proud of that. We’ve all seen the giant Mobile Emergency Operation’s Center out there. We’ll have it out on public display for example at Airport Day on 9-11, so feel free to come by and visit it. That vehicle was deployed last fiscal year over 30 times, right. When we originally were thinking about the funding for that, many people said, well, nothing bad every happens in Palo Alto, why do we need such a big, expensive vehicle, and it’s less about what bad thing happens in Palo Alto. It’s actually more about what good things happen in Palo Alto and how we prevent those good things from going bad. So that’s one of the missions of that. We’re also innovating in clean, alternative energy, for example. People have missed an opportunity, I think, when they only think of the environmental impact, and they forget that installing solar panels, for example, if they’re properly done, could yield giant benefits. For example, at Cubberley the City has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars on a large photovoltaic array. We’re working to make a small additional investment to add what is known as a United Parcel Service (UPS), an Uninterruptable Power Supply, basically a battery bank so that when there is no grid for whatever reason, the solar panels charge the batteries and the batteries run lights and other equipment for the Red Cross shelter and other key facilities that we have. So I want to acknowledge the work that the Community Services Department (CSD) in particular, and Public Works and Utilities have been doing in our partnership with that. We also, for the next fiscal year, going to deploy probably the first four-wheel all electric Public Safety vehicle, an all-terrain vehicle that will help us at all these special events that we tend to be involved with, as well as some corner cases for flood recovery and earthquake recovery. And, finally, the Public Safety Building, which is the biggest item and the number one priority for you on the infrastructure list, that will be a very important thing for us as we build out the new Emergency Operation’s Center and we work with our partners in the Police Department and the Fire Department to ensure that the building itself is the best it can be, that it’s resilient, survivable and maybe even green. Next slide. I have no requests from you. Thank you very much. I’m happy to answer any questions. Chair Filseth: Thanks Ken. Council Member Wolbach, I think you said you had a number of questions. Council Member Wolbach: I’ll go ahead now. I know that Council Member Holman also had a question. I was actually curious about the issue of a couple of things around regional coordination, north Santa Clara County. You mentioned Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Los Altos, was Los Alto Hills in that list also? Mr. Dueker: They are not directly, just because of the structure of their government, but they are by inclusion. Our mutual aid structure certainly includes them and Stanford, regardless of the contractual relationship, Stanford is part of that as well. Council Member Wolbach: Okay, and I remember hearing a couple of years ago, I think before I joined Council, about perhaps establishing some North County Regional Emergency Operation’s Center, perhaps outside of Palo Alto, but nearby. I’m curious what’s the latest on that or whether that’s been pursued. Mr. Dueker: Yes, so thank you Council Member Wolbach. When Council Member Holman was Mayor last year she actually received an update on that. It’s an ongoing program, calling it a program generously, an unfunded program with no resources. I’m not sure what the word is for that. Council Member Wolbach: Aspiration? Mr. Dueker: Aspiration, that sounds better, to build a Regional Command Center, most likely at Moffett Field, most likely in partnership with the existing resources that are there. So for those who are not familiar, Moffat Field is no longer an active military base. In fact, most of it is now administered by an arm of Google, known as Planetary Ventures, but on the former Naval air station there, there is still a significant National Guard presence. FEMA, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and others have large warehouses and other facilities there, and the missing link, unfortunately for us, and this was amplified in the Katrina situation, is there is not a good nexus and coordination modality to local city government and that’s an item we’ve been trying to address and figure out a solution. So I don’t have much of an update other than the Public Safety leadership, including Chief Nickel and Chief Burns and I, and our partners in the other North County cities remain interested in that. If we could find a source of funding or project management, it would accelerate the effort. My hope is that we can do that before Mother Nature or somebody else reminds us that that was a good idea. Thank you. Council Member Wolbach: So I guess my only comment and response is, I was actually surprised that there wasn’t anything under significant budget proposals, because I thought that might be something there. Because we have a tight budget this year, I’m not going to suggest that we add it in on this one, but please to keep us updated, and as I said to Chief Nickel on the efforts to coordinate with Menlo Park Fire Protection District, on you know, any potential hurdles there to let us know. Same thing here, please do keep us informed of any opportunities that we as a Council collectively or individually can help move forward that initiative or aspiration, concept, whatever you want to call it. Mr. Dueker: Thank you. I appreciate that and I alluded to the new Emergency Operation’s base plan is a step, a low-cost step in that direction. We actually just had our monthly meeting this morning with all the key players, so the relationships and the foundational work is going on. The capital side of that is still a large constraint, but I will certainly keep you posted and if we have a thaw in the fiscal environment I will come back to you. Chair Filseth: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: So, thank you and just a, I have as much in the way of comment as question almost. I think if the community is, for some reason, not aware of how very fortunate we are to have, and Chief Nickel was just here, but our Public Safety and Emergency Services Staff and leadership, whether it is Eric Nickel, Fire Chief, or you Ken, or Dennis, since Dennis Burns is here now too. I would hope there would be a way that people could find that even better, how fortunate we are in this community to have such really stellar leadership. So thank you for that and you run your department actually quite lean and mean. You what I’m going to ask, is any update on the redundant power source, and I know that’s within Utilities as well, but you know I’m going to ask that of you as well. Mr. Dueker: Sure, I don’t mean to punt on that, but that actually is a Utilities Capital Improvement Program (CIP). I know it’s on the work plan, so Mr. Shikada or his Staff should address that. I will just point out in the context of that is that one ought to consider, at the policy level, the massive investment that that might be. It might be $100 million plus, and just if you’ll indulge me for a quick side on the topic, Ted Koppel, the former anchor of Nightline issued a monograph recently called “Lights Out” and it has to do with the vulnerabilities of the U.S. power grid, both to physical as well as cyber-attack, as well as accidents, so I would posit that as we move with that, as much as I think that’s a valid risk mitigation measure, that there may be some other ones, local solar generation I alluded to, there are some other things that might compete and/or enhance a fuller discussion about that. Council Member Holman: I would look forward to such a discussion. So, last year, having the good fortune of being Mayor, I was able to sit in on some meetings and the coordination, and again this is just a little Public Relations (PR) for you all, but the coordination among other agencies and the City of Palo Alto having to do with preparing for a potential flood with El Nino and stuff, was just really remarkable, really impressive. And then, if you could remind me of, and the other thing is, if anyone in the community hasn’t seen them, I’m sure all the Council members have seen and toured the Mobile Emergency Operations Center (MEOC) it’s not an inexpensive toy, if you will, but it’s just such a remarkable facility that we have, and I call it a facility, even though it’s mobile because of its capabilities. Can you remind me, if you would please, Congresswoman Eshoo last year made an offer and I was sitting here trying to remember what the offer was in terms of helping with emergency preparedness and I can’t remember exactly what it was. Could you remind me, please, and what our actions have been in following up on that? Mr. Dueker: Absolutely. So Congresswoman Eshoo as part of a Chief’s meeting that you attended last fall, I can’t remember now, but some time ago, regarding the Regional Command Center at Moffett Air Field. She really made two offers. One was to have her Chief of Staff assist us in having some outreach to senior leadership at the Federal level, which we’ve done. The other one was more of a soft offer to basically strategize about possible funding opportunities. One of the things that’s gone on in the post-9-11 era is that, frankly, the amount of funding available to cities, especially of our type, has largely dried up. There was a brief window in time, and we paid for part of the MEOC with some of those funds where grants were move available. In fact, you can see in my performance measures, factors beyond our control, they are very exogenous now, have died up a lot of funding that we used to be able to at least have a chance to have a bite of the proverbial apple, and they no longer exist, and I’m afraid that in the context of her offer, that’s still largely the case. Most of the Federal funding and the State funding now is done in a regionalized, which generally sounds good, except when you’re not part of the region, or in a block grant format, which tends to mean that large and important things such as infrastructure for radio interoperability and other such money-sucking, but important projects get all the funding and very little, if any, is left for these other initiatives, so that’s as concise an answer as I can give to that. Council Member Holman: Thank you very much. Chair Filseth: Greg. Council Member Schmid: Yeah, just very quickly, I support you’re budget proposals. I guess in terms of cooperation, my understanding is that the Red Cross and the schools have an accord that the school sites would become an Emergency Center, so I assume we work with the School District on being ready for that. Mr. Dueker: Shall I answer that or do you have more? Council Member Schmid: Well, the second question is, if Hetch Hetchy water gets cut off, are you working with the Water District on that? Mr. Dueker: Okay, I’ll answer the second part first. So the Hetch Hetchy vulnerability, in fact, there was a recent internal plan mentioned about the vulnerability about the Hetch Hetchy system to seismic activity, which is just about as scary as the power grid, depending on what you care about more, so the City Utility Department is working on active plans and arrangements with the Santa Clara Valley Water District, the San Jose Water Company and other water suppliers. There are some interties. Losing Hetch Hetchy, to be blunt, is bad news and we’ve done a lot of work to build infrastructure, the new reservoir under the El Camino Park for example is a major improvement, but it doesn’t give us days and weeks of water. It really just gives us a little buffer while we figure out how to make some switches. Again, we encourage everybody, including Council members, to have two weeks of water which at a metric of one gallon per person per day stored, and rotate that water, don’t waste it. So that’s point one. Point two, refresh me. Just the school relationship with the Red Cross, so there is an MOU set up, a Memorandum of Understanding, with the Red Cross and all schools. It’s pretty much a national standard. The bottom line for us in Palo Alto is that the Cubberley Community Center is our primary Red Cross shelter. The other schools could be used in an overflow capacity. The limitation is less about the facilities and more about who is going to staff those shelters. The Red Cross has had a number of cuts over the years as well. They have had a diminution in the number of volunteers from the citizen population as well, so right now it is really primarily incumbent upon CSD and Rob de Geus’s Staff to fill in those gaps and our Emergency Services volunteers have been trained to help operate the shelter, so I think we’ll have a super abundance of facilities and more of a bottleneck on people to run the facilities. Council Member Schmid: Great. Thank you. Chair Filseth: Thank you. Just pretty briefly, I hope, here. The first one is, I’m going to ask you the same question that I asked Chief Nickel a minute ago, or a little while ago, which is, I’m going to go home and my wife’s going to ask, hey, these guys are spending $80,000 less this year than last year. What are we giving up? Mr. Dueker: Well, so that is a one-time cost that had to do with an agreement the City Manager Keene made with the Superintendent McGee of Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD), so that diminution in our budget is a little bit specious, but I hope that my budget will not get cut $80,000 so I don’t have to make a longer term intrinsic statement about that. Does that answer the question enough? Chair Filseth: Yes it does. Thanks very much. The other question I had, I think, it may actually be for Lalo, which is, I see in this group salaries are increasing I think 5.2 percent salary expense. Head count is flat, right, and again our actuarial calculations, we continue to use 3.5 percent as average City-wide wage growth for calculating the Unfunded Actuarial Liabilities (UAL), and yet we keep seeing departments where the salary increases five, six, seven percent or something like that. So, is 3.5 percent the right number or should we be using something different. Lalo Perez, Director of Administrative Services and Chief Financial Officer: No, it is the right number. Part of the issue is how we compare what we have in one base versus the other base, meaning Fiscal Year ’16 versus ’17, because it’s a small group and the numbers haven’t changed. Chair Filseth: And yet, if I look at the last three years, from 2014 it looks like it’s gone up 23 percent over three years. Mr. Perez: Ken reminds me that we had vacancies, so part of the… Chair Filseth: But the head count’s flat over the three years. Mr. Dueker: I believe as a partial fiscal year, OES didn’t come into existence until I think Fiscal Year ’12, maybe Fiscal Year ’13, so there was some time where we didn’t have all three head count for the entire fiscal year. I believe that’s part of that. I think you’re seeing a sample size error. Mr. Perez: So part of the process is how we load the salaries, Chair Filseth. As you may recall, we’ve had this discussion that at times we loaded it in non-departmental and held it in reserve pending final negotiations. In this year, we loaded all the increases for the known groups of all the departments and so those are loaded now in the department versus non-departmental, so when you compare one year to another there’s going to be a different methodology in how you load those salaries. So part of it is that, so what we can do is we can try to break it down and tell you what is the salary increase and what is a difference is base structure. Chair Filseth: That’s quite confusing. Mr. Perez: It is confusing and part of it is because we haven’t been consistent with methodology from ’16 to ’17. We’ve had a different way of putting money aside and reserving it for increases. When we know for a fact that it’s going to be, that it’s a done agreement, that’s when we’ve put it in the department. When we don’t know if it’s going to be done, we put it in a contingency under non-departmental, so when you compare the base of one year to another, it doesn’t compare apples-to-apples, because of that. Chair Filseth: Yeah, I mean, it’s for a different time than tonight, but this is when it sort of crops up. We need to be able to do apples-to-apples on this stuff. Mr. Perez: And you know, I agree with you. It’s part of the challenge that if the agreement is not ready and you put it in the department, then the money is sitting there and it’s really not ready for distribution, so it’s philosophical or practice that governments can bury. Most of us tend to put it in a reserve when it’s not assigned or approved or agreed upon with the labor groups, because you don’t want to show it in a department and then have that particular number be out there. Chair Filseth: I understand but the status quo is we see the salary numbers and the answer is that’s not really the number. Suzanne Mason, Assistant City Manager: Chair Filseth, I hear what you’re saying. Some of these groups that we were negotiating with, their contracts expired June 30, 2014 and so not knowing the salary adjustment, it would be irresponsible to just say, let’s put 3.5 percent in everyone’s budget and so it’s a perspective. Is it prudent to guess or is it more responsible not to put something in we haven’t negotiated. It’s a struggle, I think, that many agencies face, but it does make it difficult to analyze year-to-year. Hopefully, in the few years ahead where we have an agreement we’ll be able to do a better analysis. Kiely Nose, Budget Manager: And kind of piggy-backing on what Suzanne is saying, that’s one of the reasons why at the beginning of this, we kind of looked at it Citywide and we looked at both the reserve level funding at the Citywide level, so you could see in totality what’s happening. The things were changing, obviously, between categories as, you know, we’re changing benefit levels, we’re changing salary levels, but ultimately you are able to see, and we can pull that slide back up if you want, bottom line how are salary and benefits doing Citywide, including that reserve that was planned. So it does kind of mitigate and adjust for that to ensure that we can see that Citywide look of apples-to-apples. Mr. Perez: It’s a lesser an impact with this group. You know, we were just taking and it’s the merit and the… Chair Filseth: Well this one’s easy because it’s small and there’s no head count change, so it makes a good investigation case. Well, alright. Motions. Council Member Schmid: Move. Council Member Holman: Second. MOTION: Council Member Schmid moved, seconded by Council Member Holman to tentatively approve the Office of Emergency Services Department Fund, Operating Budget. MOTION PASSED: 4-0 Chair Filseth: Motion carries. Thanks Ken. 4. Police, Operating Budget Kiely Nose, Budget Manager: Okay, we’ll move right along to the Police Department budget, which is the Operating Budget Pages 331 through 343 and the Chief is coming to join us. Dennis Burns, Police Chief: Good evening Chair Filseth and members of the Committee, Dennis Burns from the Police Department. It is a pleasure to be here. I’m here tonight with Ian Hagerman, who is the Senior Management Analyst, also with the Police Department. So thank you for allowing us to speak tonight. The mission of the Palo Alto Police Department is to proudly serve and protect the public with respect and integrity. The purpose is pretty obvious. Our core divisions are Field Services, which is our patrol group. When we’re fully staffed we have 50 officers, 10 supervisors, a traffic team that work 24/7/365. Personnel and training is essentially Human Resources Division. It’s a smaller group. There are four folks who ensure that we are in compliance with all of the different California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training guidelines, as well as ensure that we have proper people going through the process when they are being hired, background, so on and so forth. Investigative Services would be our detectives. So we have about a dozen detectives who cover everything from property crimes, fraud, computer crimes, body crimes and so forth. Technical Services encompasses both our 911 dispatch center, which is directly below us, that works as well 24/7/365. It’s the third busiest dispatch center in the count, behind San Hose Police and the Sheriff’s Office. The second part of technical services is records, which also encompasses crime analysis and some of our tech support. Traffic, Parking and Special Events Services are a smaller group and handle a variety of different complaints that we get. We have an unusually large group of parking enforcement officers, given the size of our City, but I think that’s due to the nature of our town. In fact, we have so many people coming into town that we need to issue citations to move them along. Another piece is Animal Services. We have a full-service Animal Services group at (inaudible) Bay Shore, which is very unusual for a Police agency. We are one of the few in the Bay area that has such a thorough group and provides such outstanding service to the community. So last fiscal year we received 135 commendations and not on the slide, but contrary to that, we received a grand total of four citizen’s complaints. Another accomplishment we managed last year was to develop our Tri-City, when I say Tri-City, it’s going to be the City of Los Altos, City of Mountain View as well as ourselves. Our Records Management System, we developed that, which we are implementing this year, but again, that works hand-in-hand with our computer-aided dispatch system. We’re involved in a variety of different regional preparedness initiatives including up to what Ken Dueker was talking about, the Super Bowl was kind of one of the largest ones. It was a great opportunity to work side-by-side with our neighboring agencies and test a lot of our systems and our policies. We continue to work on vehicle occupancy safety programs, which include texting and driving as well as combating drunk driving as a part of our routine, especially around holidays. So the initiatives for this year are we want to replace our 911 phone equipment. That’s an initiative we will be doing with the other Cities, Mountain View and Los Altos and presumably we will be able to go ahead and have the opportunity to share dispatchers in the event of a significant incident. One of our outreach efforts that we’ve done for a number of years, but got away from due to staffing is we want to reinstitute the Citizen’s Academy. A lot of our volunteers that we’ve had were graduates from the Academy and it’s a great opportunity for our community to get to know our officers, get to know a little bit more about what we do, and a lot of them like to come back and help around the station. I talked a little bit about our new records management system. We look forward to that, and that’s well on its way. We’d like to get that done here soon. Then, also, there is a regional radio system called the Silicon Valley Regional Interoperability System. We’re completing a part of that and, hopefully, we’ll be on board either next year or the following year. One other one we’ll be working on, we’ll be working to implement body worn cameras for all of our folks. We’ve already received the money for that and we’ve identified a vendor. We’ll be moving forward on that, developing a policy, go into the community to make sure they have the opportunity to weigh in on that because there are some issues with regard to privacy that we want to ensure that we speak to them about and they are aware that the officer they are speaking to actually has a device recording them when they come in contact with them. The other thing that has been pending for a while, we contacted the California Commission on Post and they are going to come and do a study of our department. We’ve been identified that we will have the study done. They have not identified exactly when it will occur. It will be free and we can really kind of tailor what we’d like to have done in that. We’re thinking about staffing, deployment models and so forth, and the good news about that is it will be done by professionals from within the State of California. They are familiar with our community, they are familiar with the Bay area, how policing is done, a little bit more about our community, so we feel very fortunate there. So we really have two budget proposals for you tonight. The first one is Track Watch and we’re shifting that responsibility and the funding for it to the Police Department where it resided for a period of time, I think probably around 2010, before it went over to Community Services, then we’d like to get some new Police vehicle modems which allows us to communicate better amongst our cars. We have mobile data terminals in our patrol vehicles and sometimes they don’t have the best reception. These new devices will ensure that we have just more robust connection throughout our shifts, we find fewer dead spots. I think that is it. I would be glad to entertain any questions. Chair Filseth: Thanks Chief. Question? Cory. Council Member Wolbach: First, actually, just a comment, which is in the last two to four years, especially the last couple of years, nationwide law enforcement has been under acute scrutiny from, you know, Black Lives Matter and questions around and important issues around racial fairness, political protests from Occupy, and now around certain political candidates, questions around surveillance and how that’s utilized and as with any level of government or any area of government, I tend to think that scrutiny is a good thing. It keeps us honest, it keeps us making sure we’re delivering the best services to the community and representing all their interests and protecting their rights, so I tend to think that on the whole that scrutiny is a good thing for law enforcement and I’m also very proud of how we survived that spotlight here in Palo Alto. I think we have an outstanding department with really strong forward-looking leadership and really good rank and file officers who are cream of the crop, as you really do know. So that’s just the first comment I wanted to make. Keep up the good work as a department. Regarding Project Safety Net and Track Watch, there has obviously been a lot of discussion and concerns around this. I think that as a community, as a Council, we are fully supportive of whatever it takes to keep people safe in this community and I think that, again, we want to make sure that we are doing this with appropriate scrutiny. So after some discussion I’m tentatively leaning towards saying the Track Watch money might want to go to the parking lot unless we can have a full enough discussion here tonight and we feel comfortable with how that money is being spent. You know, there were a number of questions raised earlier by Rita from the community. It think she had a lot of important points. I think right off the top of my head a couple of them were, how’s the money being spent, what’s our process for hiring an appropriate contractor, what kind of oversight on the long-term basis, on a regular basis do we have of the people of Track Watch? I know we are also continuing our efforts to transition to include or replace Tract Watch individuals with technological options, so that we can detect people and maybe dispatch an officer or something. There are a lot of tough questions around this, so again, I guess really the question is, is this a finance question that we’re going to be able to resolve from a financial lens tonight, or are you going to want it to go to the parking lot. Chair Filseth: That’s what we were just talking about. Council Member Wolbach: Or is it a policy question that should be best left to another forum for discussion. I think we all absolutely agree that, you know, those discussions need to happen, but I am happy to hear what my colleagues think about what the best time and place for that discussion is. So the Police modems, I also wanted to ask, is there anything more you want to tell us about that and the process you used to identify this upgrade, again a question of the selection of the best and most cost-effective value for that change, and recognizing that having dead spots for law enforcement, just that phrase itself raises a morbid implication which could potentially be a real thing if you’re not able to communicate with the rest of the force, and so I do recognize that’s very important, but I’m curious if you want to tell us anymore about how you came to this contract. Mr. Burns: Charley Cullen, who is our Director of Technical Services, who has done the research on this is much more well equipped to answer the question will come up and speak to you. Council Member Wolbach: Thank you. Charles Cullen, Deputy Director of Technical Services Division: The modems we’re looking at allow us to use several different media out in the field to communicate with the mobile data computers that are in the cars. We run Computer Aided Design and Drafting (CAD), we run mapping. The officers can do inquiries from the field, receive information, message back and forth, so it is really a critical source of information from them. We have experienced some problems with our primary carrier. We compete with everybody else. There is no priority for public safety when you’re using a cellular network. At times we get squeezed because there’s a lot more users on the network. What this modem allows us to do is to put two cards in the modem so that we can actually use two carriers, depending on where we are and which has the best signal, and in addition, gives us a Wi-Fi options so if we do get the Public Safety Wi-Fi project that is currently in the design phase, that would help us tremendously, and it’s also forward compatible with a project called First Net, that is a national project funded by Congress, I think in 2012. It is supposed to build out a Public Safety Data Network nationwide. This device is forward compatible with that technology, so it gives us a lot of options, and hopefully provides better connectivity in the field so that our officers, and I think ultimately our firefighters as well, if it works as well as we think it’s going to, will have better operational information from their devices in the field. Council Member Wolbach: So I guess two follow-up questions. One is, where there multiple vendors considered for providing this or is there only one game in town or how did we end up making the decision for this particular vendor? Mr. Cullen: I think we’re going to go out to Request for Proposal (RFP), so we will entertain multiple vendors. There is one particular vendor that we have seen that’s had a high degree of success and we’re putting a couple of those devices in the cars, but we haven’t selected a vendor yet, and if there is another solution out there that’s better or more cost effective, we’ll certainly consider that. Council Member Wolbach: That’s what I wanted to hear. Okay, so that process is still ongoing. Sorry, I should have realized that. And the other question is, or maybe a comment since it’s not done yet, is I’m sure you’ll be considering, as something we’ve talked about with the last two departments we were just chatting with, you know, operability with our neighbors in bordering towns and counties to make sure that if we’re pursuing something obviously one of the values that a particular vendor might bring is if it looks like they’re providing the industry standard that’s likely to be adopted by our neighbors so that we can work closely with them, seamlessly. Mr. Cullen: I think that’s one of our key strategies, what we call Virtual Consolidation, where we’re sharing technology with our neighbors in Mountain View and Los Altos, our computer-aided dispatch system, the records management system, the radio system and this year we’re going to implement a shared 911 system that allows us to have better technology for a lower cost and, hopefully, have some redundancy so that we can back each other up in the event of some kind of a failure at one of the centers, and in addition, hopefully, we’ll see some staffing benefits and other synergies we’re not even aware of yet. Thank you. Council Member Holman: I think I just have one question, because Council Member Wolbach used clairvoyance and brought up the issues that Chair Filseth and I were talking about, Project Safety Net, or about Track Watch. So on, hand on I lost it, on Page 340 it shows other taxes and fines down $114,000 and you have 50 Police Officers. I know we have a couple of situations in town, one of them in the downtown area that’s a lot of illegal turns being made that’s resulted in a lot of accidents so, I guess I’m curious if that’s the right staffing level to be able to cover these, not exactly emerging, it’s been going on for a little while, issues, and the other is why the fines are down when we have illegal turns and such being made that are even resulting in accidents? Mr. Burns: One reason may be, Council Member Holman, our staffing is down significantly, so right now today, we’re down six officers, we have four in training, we have three pending retirement, we have three pending a medical retirement and we have one with a significant worker’s comp injury that’s been out for a period, so I think the reduced staffing is probably going to be a cause for that. Ian Hagerman, Senior Management Analyst: If I can interject, Ian Hagerman, Senior Management Analyst, you know, a large proportion of that revenue is also derived from parking citations that our parking enforcement officers issue, and so, you know, as we make changes to parking and that kind of ebbs and flows. People get kind if hip to the system and understand how it works, we hit a certain saturation level with citations, and so some of this is, we had a number of years of kind of increased revenue from citations. As the economy grew we had more traffic downtown and we’re sort of kind of right-sizing the revenue budget this year with L&B. That’s something we look at every year to make sure that the forecast makes sense. Council Member Holman: So have moving violations revenues gone up or down, do you know?.0 Mr. Hagerman: Just off the top of my head, so you’re talking about actual traffic stops, we’ve certainly initiated many more traffic stops over the last say three years than in prior years. A lot of that’s related to our traffic team being reinstituted after it was frozen for a number of years, so without having he exact numbers, I would say just based on that activity we’re certainly going to see more citation revenue, but that’s not a primary, I think for us, driver of, you know we don’t necessarily require or expect our officers to issue a citation on a stop, but it’s more about the activity and being active that way. Council Member Holman: Nor am I suggesting that it should be a goal to have that as a revenue stream, but given comments that people make in repeated fashion, like how much illegal motion there is taking place, it seems like that’s a revenue source that should be out there. I’m certainly not indicating any desire to use it as a means to just increase revenues. Mr. Hagerman: Sure, and anything punitive like that, I think for us it’s more, we’re more reactionary and kind of plan based on what’s happened versus what we think is going to happen. We don’t drive behavior. We kind of respond to, historically what we’ve done, based on activity and certainly don’t look at that as a revenue source in a sense that we might increase and balance our budget that way or anything like that. Council Member Holman: Just a very quick thank you and then I’ll move on here, because I know there have been some officers issuing tickets from monitoring downtown streets on illegal left turns onto Middlefield, so thank you for that monitoring and issuance of tickets in that situation, very dangerous, so thank you. Council Member Schmid: Let’s see, my understanding of the traffic watch number, whether we vote it tonight or put it in the parking lot, though is to take responsibility for approving funding of the program in Fiscal 2017, so let’s see, we should have a little discussion of it. Let me ask a brief question. You’re asking for $824,000 and at the end of Item One on Page 342 it says, ongoing costs $250,000. What’s the difference between the $824,000 and the $250,000? Kiely Nose, Manager of Budget: The difference presumes that throughout the course of Fiscal Year ’17 that the work to implement the technology, the new technology will allow us to steer away from the Track Watch contract to that new technology, and the $250,000 is representative of an estimated what the on-going maintenance of that technology system would be, and I think a lot of that’s associated with the monitoring component, so we would have to be monitoring the new technology. Council Member Schmid: So it might be next year before that? Ms. Nose: Correct. Council Member Schmid: Chief, could you talk a little bit about the current program, the oversight that the Police Department provides, are you comfortable with that. I know there’s been an extension of the program to another crossing. Is the funding adequate for that? I guess the key question, though, is oversight. Mr. Burns: Thank you for the question. The Police Department works with Cyber Security and their manager on issues that come up, and literally, especially in the last month or so, maybe two months, we were on the phone with them multiple times a day and we’re convening and we’re trying to identify and use the word accountability, that a great word, so what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to find out are the guards on post at the time that they said they have been, and sometimes it’s difficult to prove one way or the other, so we have done, and other people have done from the community have done their own kind of spot checking, and we’ve identified that there are some deficiencies and we work with them on a regular basis and we’re trying to identify, you know, how can we make sure that we have a guard at each location that’s been identified pursuant to the terms of the contract. We continue to work with them. We have some other strategies, I’d prefer not to go into them tonight, but we have some other strategies that we’re considering and, you know, up to and including, do we look elsewhere for these types of services, so that we can have an external accountability system that guarantees us, do we have people at these locations, because we think it’s important. Council Member Schmid: Yeah, is the cost of oversight above and beyond what you expected? Mr. Burns: I’m sorry, can you ask that a different way. Council Member Schmid: Do you have to use some of your scarce resources in order to assure that the job is being done? Mr. Burns: We do, and for a couple of reasons I think it’s particularly important. Number one, because we recently suffered a death at the tracks, and the second reason is, I think, this is a time that people, especially students, are under a lot of stress, so we need to be really on top of this to make sure that we have our contractor having people at these locations, so we have spent a lot of time, both as a management team working this problem, but also a couple of managers working with the vendor, the contractor. Council Member Schmid: Do you feel confident that the Track Watch Program is an important element in protecting our young people? Mr. Burns: I do, I think it’s important that we continue to have this. You know, I should go back a little bit, back to probably 2009, early 2010, when we started having these incidents at the tracks, and what we did was initially we had police officers there and it was very, very expensive. I think at another point, we actually had the community there and we had great volunteers who were out there, Ray Pakety being one of them, and it was so wonderful to see them out there, you know, and their concern for the youth in the community. Eventually we migrated to the Track Watch guards and I think it’s important for quite some time, that we continue this. You know, I would probably defer to, you know, like Dr. Yoshi or one of the other mental health professionals who is really well versed in suicide clusters, but I know they agree. They feel very strongly that we absolutely need to have people there, and you know, the question is to know what location, hours, and so forth will work to try to come up with the best option there. Council Member Schmid: Well, we are all very concerned about it and if you feel that changes need to be made or more resources are important, you know, feel free to come back. Let’s see, one other question I had, there was an incident on Forest Avenue around the turn of the year. I know it’s being investigated. Is there any idea when that may be, information may be available on it? Mr. Burns: Sure, thanks for the question. That was, an incident occurred at 652 Forest Avenue where a subject with a knife ran at a couple of our officers and nearly stabbed them. Our officers used deadly force. They rendered aid. Unfortunately, he did pass away. That case was investigated by the Palo Alto Police Department and also by the Santa Clara District Attorney’s Office. That night they sent a District Attorney, actually a Supervising District Attorney and a district attorney’s investigator out there and they did a parallel investigation with us. We completed our investigation and presented it to the District Attorney’s Office about a month ago. The District Attorney is reviewing that report right now, and they will, my sense is they will report back to the community probably within a month. You know, I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to speak for the District Attorney. Council Member Schmid: Great, I appreciate the update. Mr. Burns: I should also tell you that pursuant to our own investigative procedures, we’ll do a separate internal affairs investigation to ensure that the officers who were involved were using appropriate tactics, equipment, followed the policies of the Palo Alto Police Department and make sure that nothing that they did contributed to the use of force, and that will be done probably as soon as the criminal is completed, as soon as the District Attorney’s. Then we will do another report, investigation, if you will, to talk about, what did we learn, are there things we need to change within the department, for kind of continuous improvement, quality improvement. Council Member Schmid: Great. Transparency is so important. Thanks very much. Mr. Burns: Thank you. Chair Filseth: So I only had a couple of questions. I notice there is a big drop in worker’s comp this year, about a million dollars from last year. Do you have any color you want to provide on this, if appropriate? Mr. Burns: I’m sorry, did you say there was a drop in worker’s comp? Chair Filseth: It looks like there is a drop in worker’s comp. Ms. Nose: I’ll take it. Chair Filseth: Is that something we can expect to continue or not? Ms. Nose: No, no, that’s probably, not probably, that is due to three different things that are going on in the worker’s comp fund this year. The first one is we’ve changed the, Lalo help me out here, the liability or the risk, I’m sorry. Lalo Perez, Director of Administrative Services and Chief Financial Officer: Yeah, there’s an actuary study that is done based on the cases that are known and some assumptions of what will occur in the future. Then they come up with a valuation for those cases. Then you assess the degree of certainty or degree of confidence level they call it and what we’ve noticed is the actual expense towards those cases have been lower than anticipated by the actuary study. We were conservative. We were using 90 percent confidence level, and as a result of seeing the cases being at a lower amount for both general liability and worker’s compensation, we made a decision to not allocate the full costs that we had been anticipating from those actuaries, and allocate a lower amount to all departments. So what that did is allow us to have some flexibility, to have one-time solutions of about three million dollars for the General Fund, Kiely remind me of the full amount. Ms. Nose: Okay, so across three funds is what Lalo is talking about, so we lowered the risk from, I think, 90 to 85, which is saving on the expense side, and then because of all that savings that have accumulated in these funds, we’re reducing like all the allocated charges. In total it’s five million dollars in all funds saving and like Lalo said, in the General Fund it is $3.1 million. So that’s general benefits, that’s worker’s comp and that’s general liability. Mr. Perez: So you will see for this year this dip, and this is why it’s difficult in government budgeting because next year it was going to go back up, so if you look at the historical trend, in five years you’re going to ask us, why did it go down in ’17 and back up in ’18. So that’s the explanation. Because sometimes you have to review the financials, look at the opportunity and reassess based on the risk. Chair Filseth: So this is really an actuarial change, not any specific observation of these people or those people and so forth? Mr. Perez: Right. Chair Filseth: But you expect it to go up again next year? Mr. Perez: I’m sorry. Chair Filseth: Did you say you expect it to go up again next year? Mr. Perez: Well I was saying that it was going to normalize back, right, because right now we’re essentially taking a credit, so the credit goes away, so then you normalize your expense. Chair Filseth: Another on-time… Mr. Perez: Yes, it is a one-time solution. Chair Filseth: I just have one other question, which is, I notice we have a full-time veterinarian on staff, is that Bonnie? And salary for that position is $122,000 a year, is that right? On Page 340. Mr. Hagerman: Thanks Chair Filseth. So I’m not sure that’s what we actually pay her, but that would be the median of the range that that position’s been classified as. Chair Filseth: What? Mr. Hagerman: So whether or not that’s her actual salary, the actual veterinarian, I’m not sure. I don’t know exactly what she makes, but yeah, that’s what we budget that position at in the City. Chair Filseth: Got it, but that would be the best guess and that would be the target. Mr. Hagerman: I’m sorry. Chair Filseth: So I notice that, if you look at Citywide, the Citywide uplift for from salary to total compensation, Citywide looks like it’s 1.78, about 78 percent. It’s actually a little higher in this department, but Citywide it’s about 78 percent. Do I read that right? Mr. Hagerman: Yeah, so the total comp number will vary a bit based on the labor agreement that individual is in, so this particular position is in the management group, which is significantly less than the Public Safety Department, but it’s probably in the 50 to 60 percent range on top of the salary. Chair Filseth: I notice that the Police Management Association average is actually 70 percent, right, so you think it’s… Mr. Hagerman: That’s probably accurate, yeah. Chair Filseth: So then if I looked at, not necessarily for this person, but for this position, total compensation would be at a 69 percent uplift, which is what the PMA average is, is about $206,000. Is that right? Mr. Hagerman: Yes, that would be kind of how we would calculate the total comp for that position. Chair Filseth: Okay, thank you. The reason I bring this up, you know, I think Council Member Schmid alluded to a little bit earlier some frustration with kind of the process by which we all as a system, and I don’t mean specific to this department or even this City, but all of us do public sector compensation by comparing our compensation to other cities, right, and then they compare their compensation to us, and so forth and so forth, and I think, I hesitate to say this this way, but in honor of Donald Trump, who I am not a supporter of, winning the Republican nomination, I’ll say it very bluntly any way, I think a lot of people think that system is rigged against the American workers who pay into it, right, the same way that Wall Street is rigged against the small guy, but one of the issues is it’s hard to tell because it’s rare that you find actual direct comparisons for this kind of stuff. I mean, it’s not like there are a lot of private sector police detectives and fire chiefs to compare it against, right. But every once in a while you do find one where there is a very clean comparison, so as I think a number of people know, I have some intimate familiarity with veterinary pay scales in this area, so you’re typical veterinarian in this area in the private sector makes about $100,000 a year in wage, a little less, maybe a little more with maybe 20, 25 years’ experience, and if you put on top of that another $20,000 in benefits, medical, dental, vision, a little bit more than that assuming they’re on 401k’s, maybe 20 percent, 30 percent, you’re looking at a total compensation of $120, $130,000 a year. So the City’s pay scale at $206,000 is like 60 or 70 percent above that. So, again, I bring it up because it’s rare that you find a direct comparison like this, but for those who argue that, well no that’s not true, public and private pay scales are the same, no they aren’t, and when you find an example like this, there you have it. And that does not include the unfunded liability. It is the Neiman-Marcus of staffing services. And with that, I’m done. Motions? Mr. Perez: Chair Filseth, a quick comment. I’m not sure it’s $200,000. I do get your point, so we’re kind of looking at it, but what I wanted to make sure, as you guys are considering the motions, I want to make sure that it’s clear that this is more of a finance comment than a policy. Chair Filseth: Absolutely, it is a finance comment and I’ll support the motion that I think is coming. Mr. Perez: The $824,000 is coming out of the General Fund for the first time. Previously it had been coming from the Stanford Development Agreement funds. Chair Filseth: And I think we decided that last year, didn’t we? Mr. Perez: Well, it’s been discussed at different points by different members of the Council, I should say. I don’t believe there’s agreement in totality, that’s the best way I can say it. So I just wanted to be clear that you thought this was a change from what had been occurring in the past, because to your point about impacting the bottom line of the reserves, that this is a significant change, and I just wanted to make sure that we were all aware of that change as you made your decisions. Chair Filseth: Council Member Wolbach did you want to comment on that, because you’re the one who is going to make a motion here. Council Member Wolbach: Actually, I’m not sure I am going to make a motion, but I do have a question, something I meant to ask earlier. This $824,000 for Track Watch, is that the totality of what would be budgeted from local entities for Track Watch specifically, or is that Palo Alto’s contribution? Essentially, is anyone else chipping in for this initiative, either Stanford or Palo Alto Unified School District or any other, for instance, any other partners through Project Safety Net? Mr. Perez: This is all City funds. Ms. Nose: So this is for four stations in Palo Alto’s jurisdiction and it’s the entire contract costs for that. Council Member Wolbach: I just wanted to ask before I make this motion then, we’re talking about the year ahead? We’re not talking about right now and so if this were to go into the parking lot for discussion in a couple of weeks, that’s not going to negatively impact, I just want to say this out loud, right, to make sure everybody in the room hears this, that’s not going to negative impact our ability to provide security, or positively impact, whatever we do tonight won’t really relate to what we’re doing in the next couple of weeks anyway? We’re talking about next year’s budget, right? I wanted to say that out loud. Mr. Perez: That’s why we’re saying it’s a finance discussion, not a policy discussion. Council Member Wolbach: Right, for Fiscal Year 2017, right, not for May or June of 2016? So with that in mind I’d like to move that we tentatively approve the Police budget with the exception of the Track Watch, $824,000 to be placed into the parking lot. MOTION: Council Member Wolbach moved, seconded by Chair Filseth to tentatively approve the Police Department Fund, Operating Budget with the exception of the Track Watch, $824,000, to be placed in the Parking Lot. Chair Filseth: Do you want to speak to your motion? Council Member Wolbach: I think I’ve spoken enough. I think our Police Department is doing a great job and we want to keep people safe, but we want to do so in a fiscally responsible way. Chair Filseth: I’ll speak to it briefly, which is, I agree with the spirit is that it’s deserving of a little bit more discussion, but that I think, along with the caveat, I think this organization is the Finance Committee and the focus of our discussion should be primarily finance and we should not attempt to lead on policy. The other thing that I would say is that, and it may be that part of the discussion is this, but I agree with the Finance Department head and I think, Cory, that if we are going to do this on an ongoing basis, then the funding belongs appropriately in the General Fund and not in the Stanford Fund, which is more of a one-time kind of thing than sort of an on-going operating expense. Other comments. Council Member Schmid: Yeah, I think I will vote against it. I think Track Watch is an important priority for the City. Council Member Holman: I think, before I go to that saying, nevertheless that putting it in the parking lot doesn’t mean we’re not funding it, so I’m okay supporting the Motion. I guess going back to the veterinarian again just quickly is (inaudible) I know you don’t. Anybody who doesn’t know it and is listening to this so it doesn’t get reported somewhere in an odd sort of fashion, I don’t think it should be interpreted that there is any lack of support for the Animal Shelter on this dais. I am a little concerned, though, that that’s what the money is that’s been allocated, but we don’t know what the actual is, so I don’t know how often that happens, but it seems kind of an odd approach. Ms. Nose: So I have looked up that specific position. What that salary value, the $121,989 is the projected 2017 salary, so that’s all the assumptions we’ve talked about for merit increases, Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) increases, etc., and then with all the benefit costs, whether it’s pension, medical, management, the total compensation is about $195,000. Chair Filseth: All in favor? Council Member Wolbach: I won’t try too hard to sway any other votes, but I’ll just say that I agree that keeping people safe on and around the tracks is extremely important, and in moving and suggesting that we include this in the parking lot, that does not prevue that I’m suggesting that we necessarily reduce it. We might suggest increasing it, we might have more discussion about whether other partners might contribute to help reach that number or to reach a higher total number, perhaps. So there are a lot of possibilities and I just don’t think that tonight’s the time to have that in-depth conversation. That’s it. Chair Filseth: All in favor. MOTION PASSED: 3-1, Schmid no Chair Filseth: Motion passes 3-1. Thanks very much Chief. 5. Community Services Department, Operating Budget Kiely Nose, Manager of Budget: So moving along here we have Community Service, we have Rob here with us and we’re looking at the Operating Budget for pages 201 through 221. Rob. Rob de Geus, Director of Community Services: Good evening Council Member, Rob de Geus, Director of Community Services. I’m joined here with Kerri Russell, the Management Analyst within the Community Services Department. I thank you Kerri for all your hard work these last few months. We have a brief presentation that we’ll go over now. We’ll start with the department overview. The mission of the Community Services Department is to engage individuals and families to build a strong and healthy community and we do that through our parks, our recreation services, public art and arts programs and science programs and social services. The focus for the department is really to try to develop and implement a diverse range of quality programs that are highly valued and relevant to the needs of the community. A big focus for the department is health, health and wellness, as well as increased knowledge, creativity, artistic expression, physical activity, social health and enjoyment of the outdoors. We try very hard to be proactive, responsible stewards of the many unique community assets that the department oversees. We have four primary divisions: Office of Human Services, Arts and Sciences, Open Space, Parks and Golf and Recreation Services. We do a lot in the department, I think, as you all know. A few highlights that just I wanted to mention of the year past, I’ll start with the Office of Human Services. One highlight I think that’s pretty unique is the successful community forums that Minka and the Human Relations Commission (HRC) conducted this last year, they had forums on Senior Services, Veteran Homelessness, Domestic Violence and Implicit Bias. I think it’s a testament of a healthy community when you are courageous and have those difficult conversations and try to understand some things that other communities maybe don’t want to talk about, and so really, hats off to Minka and the Human Relations Commission for that good work. The Public Art Program, doing outstanding work, really dynamic interactive art that they are installing. One that I think is pretty special is here at City Hall in the lobby, Susan Nardelli, “Conversation”. I think it’s just really something special. Junior Museum doing really good work. One highlight that they’ve had this year is their Accessibility and Inclusion Initiative where they have a Packard Foundation Grant, and they are improving access to the JMZ and its programs for children with different abilities. The Art Center and the Junior Museum and the Children’s Theatre have record-breaking numbers in terms of visitation, higher than it’s ever been, just doing really great work. Open Space and Parks and Golf continue to make significant headway in completing a variety of capital projects, including Scott Park, El Camino Park, Monroe Park and some work around City Hall, among others. This team also are some unsung heroes. They keep all of the park system clean, save and welcoming. I think they do a terrific job. And lastly in the Recreation Division, with the Mitchell Park Center now open for a year, I think these folks are doing a lot of good work, but in particular in the teen services area and the Bryant Street Garage Grant Program is a pretty unique program. We’re going to talk a little bit more about that because it is a significant budget request that we have, but Teen Program is really starting to take off at Mitchell Park. As we look ahead to 2017, there are a number of initiatives. These are just a handful, but we want to really get started on the Cubberley master planning process with the School District. We want to build on the Healthy City, Healthy Community Priority and Initiative. We have the stakeholder group now reconvened and this year we’ll have another health fair, second annual. We’ll create a new resident welcome packet and invest in the workplace, health and wellness forum, among other activities. We will complete the Parks and Recreation Master Plan and the Public Arts Master Plan. We’ll continue to invest in the new community center and library to ensure that’s a vibrant and dynamic experience for all. As every year, we invest a lot in the staff. CSD is very much a public facing department. As you all know, a lot of times citizens’ interaction with the City is really through community services or through the libraries, and we’re very cognizant of that and so we spend time ensuring the staff is engaged, creative and inspired by service, and we’re happy to say we have a very, very good and talented staff within the department. So some of the significant budget proposals are (inaudible) as you know, but it’s a department that has $25.4 million dollars in terms of expense for next year, $5.9 million in revenues. The expenses are up approximately 2.4 percent over last year. Revenues are down, anticipated to be down approximately 1.8 percent. The revenues going down is a little bit deceiving, because it assumes the golf course closure with the year, which is a significant reduction in revenues of over $500,000, $542,000, so absent the golf course, revenues, the revenues for the department outside of that are actually increasing approximately $400,000. So several budget proposals we want to highlight before we get into the discussion, of the more significant ones, the one that I’ll begin with in the Human Services Office, Office of Human Services I should say, is $125,000 collaboration with Santa Clara County. We’ve done this for the last couple of years. I should first say it is a very difficult problem, homelessness generally. We know that it’s more than a local problem, but we also know that we want to invest more in this area and the City Manager cares a lot about it, so we want to invest locally, but that’s part of a regional strategic strategy and that’s what this program is, where the City provides funding for case management and the County provides housing vouchers for up to 20 homeless individuals per year. It’s been a great collaboration. It was intended to be just two years, but we’ve been able to house 13 individuals so far with the program. We think it’s worth continuing. I should mention that we’ve informally requested by the Santa Clara County to continue this program and Healy is the Director of the Office of Supportive Housing. He’s in the audience here if you have an interest in asking a question of the County Health Department. So, the other one I wanted to mention regarding the Office of Human Services is, and you may have missed it, it is in the budget on Page 221 and it’s a footnote and it relates to the existing Human Services Resource Allocation Process (HSRAP) reserve. It’s a $50,000 reserve for HSRAP. Apparently the reserve fund is intended to be accessed with Council direction to make up for funding shortfalls for HSRAP grantees during the budget process. Staff is recommending that if the reserve remains intact after the budget process, that the reserve can then be accessed for emerging needs and crises that may come up outside of the HSRAP Grant Funding Program, and that would be done through the Human Relations Commission making a recommendation to Council for consideration. So I did want to point that one out. There are a number of service delivery enhancements that you will see in the Budget, where we are increasing some expenses for marketing, supplies, hourly services, so we can better deliver those services. As best we can we try to offset those with revenues, so in this case we were able to offset those costs with more revenues than the actual expense, so happy to be able to do that where we can. Open space technicians. This is one that we wanted to call out. This is a request for two additional part-time hourly positions for our open space unit that has five rangers and two senior rangers, which is really a small unit for a lot of open space, over 4,000 acres of open space as you know, 40 miles of trails and growing and we’ve added Bixby Park and other acreage, other additional trails. Really they need additional support. We didn’t request full-time benefit position. An additional ranger would be terrific, but recognize that that’s challenging for the general fund generally to do, so the open space technicians, the hourly seasonal ranger would be really terrific for that unit. They’ll be able to do more trail maintenance, picnic site maintenance, litter removal and basic vegetation removal and just gate, fencing repair, bridge repair, all of those types of things at a cost of $39,000. We want to point out the Junior Museum and Zoo, Market Analysis and Collections Management. This is a one-time expense. We’re embarked on a pretty exciting endeavor with the Friends of the Junior Museum and Zoo to rebuild that center, a $25 million capital project that the Friends will raise money and pay for and they have raised almost all of it at this point. So we’ve been working closely with them, Assistant Director Roy Halperin and I, and Kerri I should say, to try to work through an agreement to rebuild that center. It’s going to be a slightly larger center, so we really want to understand what the program will be and how the cash flow will be with the next center, to that we know what we’re really getting into and having an independent analysis on that would be especially helpful. The Junior Museum and Zoo has a number of collections, both living and nonliving and with rebuilding the center we’re going to have to move that collection, so we feel we need to do some work on making sure we have a good inventory and plan for temporary location of that inventory. The Golf Course Project, I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment, but it looks like we’re in a position where we may be able to start this summer, so that’s good on that one and it’s been a long time coming. Before I get into the details of that, let me go to the next slide. The one position that the department is requesting is out of our Mitchell Park Center and our Teen Program. We’re looking to transition a program that is run by hourly staff to a full-time Program Assistant. This is really a mentoring program where students can submit applications to put on an event, start a program, provide a service, and then the Teen Staff provides a mentorship, some funding, some incubator space if it’s needed and help them make that dream they have a reality. It’s been very successful and it’s growing. It’s not really sustainable with an hourly support where we get a lot of turnover with our hourly staff, as you can imagine. It is unbenefited, and particularly when you get really good people they have options and we can lose them. I would say we can cover the cost of this through the revenue stream that comes out of the Bryant Street Garage lease that is estimated to be $108,000 in revenues next year, so part of that revenue stream will also support this position. We will eliminate some hourly positions that currently support the program to help pay for it and that leaves a balance of $32,000. What’s not included in this here is that there is also increased revenue from Mitchell Park rentals generally. It’s such a popular place so revenues from Mitchell Park Community Center are going up more than $30,000, so if you include that, it actually covers the entire cost of that position. Next page is the golf course. So a lot happening here. At this point we are anticipating what’s built into the budget is closure of the golf course on July 1 and closed for the entire year and under construction. So that has an Operating Budget impact, decrease in revenues of $542,000 and a decrease in expense of $601,000 with a net loss anticipated of $825,000. Estimated capital costs for the Golf Course Project, we had our architect provide that estimate and it is $10.9 million, which is up from the 2014 figure when we last put out the bid for this project, and you may recall we did do an RFP and the permits were just too far away and we had to hold off and start over. So we do anticipate costs to be higher. We still anticipate $3 million coming from the San Francisquito Creek Joint Power Authority for the mitigation of their project to support the Golf Course Project. The remaining cost of this capital work will be paid for by certificates of participation at their issuance in the $7.7 to $8.3 million range, which will have an annual cost of $534,000 to $569,000 which will be paid for by golf revenues, is the idea there. Timeline for construction is anticipated to be 16 to 18 months. A little more on the process and where we are on this, we have put out the RFP. It went out on April 22. Responses are due May 24 and Staff plan to be to the full Council in June, probably June 13, with a recommendation for proceeding with the project. So this is a big topic. I’m not sure how much the Finance Committee wants to get into it this evening. We also have on the 17th, capital budget that will be discussed. We’ll have a little more information at that time, and also at wrap up, it can be discussed at that time. I did want to mention that we did as the National Golf Foundation who did an extensive study on the golf course and the likely market conditions of when it’s built and how well it will function and cash flow four years ago. Because it’s dated, we asked them to update that analysis and do some sensitivity analysis, given where we are today and how the golf market has changed, which has changed some. We received that report this week and Lalo and CSD and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and ASD are all reviewing that report and we need a little more time internally to speak to it, but we will come back to do that and certainly it will be part of the packet when we go to the full Council with the potential construction agreement. I know there is a lot on this one. I apologize for that. The permits are the big thing. We’re waiting for the permits. This is a Public Works project primarily, but we’re very close. The Army Corps of Engineers and Fish and Wildlife have completed their consultations. They have drafted the permit. They need to tweak it a little bit and then it will be ready, so we hope within the next month we’ll have the permits. This is the last slide. This is Project Safety Net. We have, you heard about the track security with the Police Department (PD). Project Safety Net, the community collaborative component is anticipated to cost $270,000 this next year. The Stanford Development Fund, which had two million dollars for Project Safety Net we anticipate has, will have $85,000 remaining by the end of the fiscal year, so we would apply that to the $270,000 needed for next year and the general fund impact here will be $185,000 and its supports the Executive Director for Project Safety Net and some hourly support staff and some nominal extra expenses. They’re working diligently and I’m working closely with them in the community collaborative to build out a roadmap for the collaborative, evaluate a fiscal agent and how we might sustain the collaborative over the longer time with other partners contributing to the sustainability of the program, elevating youth voice and a number of other things that they’re working on. So there are a few of the big items in the department’s budget and we’re here to answer any questions. Chair Filseth: Thank you very much. Before we move on, I don’t have any speaker cards here, but I do see quite a few people in the audience out there. Is there anybody who has come here to speak? Okay, just making sure. Committee member questions and comments? Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Thank you Rob. Good job always. Appreciate you’re being here and making your presentation. So I have a rectification question, potentially, unless I’m missing something. On Packet Page, on the Binder Page 221 and 213, on 221 it says positions by division and on 213 it’s staffing, and on 212 it looks like it’s adding 2.7 and on 213 it looks like it’s adding 2.8. Steven Guagliardo, Senior Management Analyst: Thank you for that question Council Member. Steve Guagliardo, Senior Management Analyst with OMB. That represents the addition of a 0.1 Project Manager that was added in Public Works for Capital Management. It doesn’t appear in any of CSD’s divisions because it’s not actually in any of those four divisions. It actually sits in Public Works, but it is captured on that overall summary reconciliation sheet that you see there and that accounts for that 0.1 discrepancy. Council Member Holman: Well that doesn’t track very well for me. I hear what you’re saying but, gee. So the other thing is, a couple of other things. So again on Page 212 is position by division, and Arts and Sciences is 1.25. Is that because of the Junior Museum and Zoo? Is that why that is up or what other programs are we… So let me further ask the question. So it’s 1.25 for Arts and Sciences, Open Space, Parks and Golf is 0.94, Recreation and Cubberley is 0.28, so we note that the Parks Master Plan is not complete yet, so maybe it’s not going to take the whole year and that’s why this is lower, but I just need some help understanding that. The Cubberley Plan will certainly take the whole year and it seems like that might take more, so I’m just trying to justify or rectify the three additions, the 1.25 for Arts and Sciences, 0.94 for Parks and Golf and Open Space and Recreation and Cubberley at 0.68, so help me understand the balance there. Mr. De Geus: Yeah, so this summary table on 212 is inclusive of all of the regular and hourly increases and decreases for each of the divisions. So if you look at the detail, I think it’s the next, 214 and 215, you can see the ups and downs of different FTE regular and hourly positions, and cumulatively they add up to, for Arts and Sciences and addition of 1.25 FTE. Is that getting to your question Council Member Holman? Council Member Holman: Not exactly. I guess I’m just trying to get, why one is up more than the other. Given the activities that we’ve talked about. Suzanne Mason, Assistant City Manager: I believe, Council Member Holman, you’re seeing a cumulative by division, and the Budget Staff can correct me, on Page 215 if we look at the budget adjustments, we’re seeing that there’s a number of differing service delivery changes that were proposed by CSD in various programs offset by revenue. Those are a combination. They’re in Number Three under Budget Adjustments, 0.68. And then the Open Space technicians are 0.96. That’s what you’re seeing in the division for Open Space. It’s 0.94 in the division and there’s probably a number of minor rounding differences. Then the Bryant Street Garage Teen Program staffing, the 0.29, you’re seeing mixed in these different programs, so they would need to go through each of the divisions and do a specific ups and downs of various positions at a micro level which we can bring back to you. Council Member Holman: So the Bryant Street Garage is lumped in with where? Ms. Mason: It should be in the, is it in Arts and Sciences? Oh, Recreation and Cubberley at 0.68. Mr. De Geus: And the reason it’s 0.68 is because we added one, then we reduced other hourly staff in other parts of the division and we added hourly staff in other parts of the division, so there’s probably anywhere from three to six changes related to that division in terms of staffing, both on the hourly and regular staff and the net is 0.68 increase FTE, a combination of hourly and regular. Council Member Holman: I understand it’s net. I’m just still trying to rectify that. So going over to, certainly glad we budgeted for the $125,000 for the County Homeless Services, I’m certainly glad of that. Well glad of most of this. You heard us talk earlier about Project Safety Net and Track Watch, so won’t rehash that. Going over to Page 221, which you did reference, I think there is a typo here actually, under, just above total it says, “Human Services Reserve one time” and the footnote there is two and I think it’s three actually, it’s supposed to be. So just a little typo there. Mr. de Geus: That’s correct. Council Member Holman: So your note here, I want to make sure I’m understanding this correctly, so your note here about the one-time reserve and do you want to talk about that a little bit more. It’s like you’re talking about maybe for emerging or newly identified needs and applying it that way, but it’s not included in the 542, correct? This is all on Page 221, the $50,000 is not included in the 542. Ms. Nose: That’s correct. The 542 is the, this is probably not the right term, but the base budget, essentially the allocation towards each of the agencies. The $50,000 is on top of that, so if Council so chooses, we could allocate that as part of this budget process if something was under funded and that was the original intent of that reserve, but since we are fully funding things, as Rob was discussing, we are looking at potentially using this in a different capacity, meaning to augment services during the year at a later date when something new appears that’s unexpected and not part of that original 542. Council Member Holman: Okay, so this is an item where I’m going to want to put this in the parking lot and the reason being this particular piece, the reason being is I think our contributions to HSRAP funding is tracking much lower than it should be. It’s not a new topic for me, and I didn’t calculate the percentage, but going from 436.5 to 448, I don’t think represents the values of the community. We have so many issues and so many demands on services, especially at this time, and all the demands on the nonprofits that provide these services between providing the services and the other stresses they have about rents and that sort of thing, there are great demands on our nonprofits that provide these safety net services, so I’m going to want to put this one in the parking lot and I think the way it was (inaudible). I’m talking about the Human Services funding, the two year contracts. Yes, so basically Page 221 to put in the parking lot. I think it was mentioned earlier, that, (inaudible). I think it was mentioned earlier that we are going to want to do some prioritizing, so keeping track of things that go into the parking lot, for me this is one that if we have to shave a little here, shave a little there, whatever, this one should be increased more than it is, and as liaison, as I think Council Member Wolbach has been too a liaison to the Human Relations Commission, how much they struggle and the due diligence they absolutely exercise, I’m trying to allocate funds, and if you look at what the requests are compared to what the funding is, and if you look at how much the funding actually goes up, it’s so minimally incremental that I would look for, again, finding some funding in other locations to supplement this so, parking lot. Ms. Nose: I’ll let Rob and them discuss the policies behind things. From a strictly numbers perspective, the percentage between your ’16 funding level and your ’17 proposed spending level is the same general CIP that’s been applied to the entire City of 2.6 percent. Council Member Holman: Thank you for doing the math. Again, for me personally, and we’ll see how everybody else feels, not enough. Chair Filseth: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: A couple areas of interest. First, because it was just being discussed, HSRAP funding, it actually, going back earlier to your staffing chart on Page 202, I guess I didn’t realize just how lean the Human Services Division is within the department. It’s really just two people, right, is that Minka and Mary, is that it? Mr. De Geus: That’s correct. Council Member Wolbach: And considering all the things that fall under that, I’ve always been impressed. I’m floored at this point. I’m going, when it comes time for motions, I’m going to support what Council Member Holman is saying about Human Services and HSRAP moving to the parking garage, sorry, parking lot, next week too. We’ll see. But I do think that (inaudible), I think that it’s worth at least a little bit further discussion. Whatever we end up doing in our proposals to the full Council, I think it does deserve a little bit fuller discussion. So I guess there are a few areas I want to highlight, HSRAP, homelessness, golf course and PSN, Project Safety Net. So that’s HSRAP for now, I’ll just leave it there. On homelessness, there are a number of elements to this and we could have a deep dive discussion which we shouldn’t have tonight about all the things the City is doing, could do, should do, partnerships with the County. Thank you, by the way for coming to QE. A couple of questions I’ll mention tonight and I’ll try to make sure they’re really finance focused, but in thinking about this just from a financial perspective, the future, first question, the future of the Opportunity Center and what that means for the City and the City’s budget. I know there are some changes coming because they’re going to lose one of their original partners and wondering if that’s been incorporated here, if you guys are able to talk about that tonight. If you’re not prepared to talk about it we can save it for either an off-line discussion, the parking lot or some other briefing. Mr. De Geus: Thank you Council Member Wolbach. We’ll probably have to come back on that, unless (inaudible) and the Opportunity Center does phenomenal work and there are some changes happening there, but I’m not as familiar with them as maybe some others, so we could come back on that question. Council Member Wolbach: Okay, another is whether there, I guess maybe just something to think about is, what the cost to the City would be for using City facilities as emergency shelters in inclement weather and something that the past year’s Mayor, Council Member Holman, will recommend is the concept of pay-for-success and how much, the kind of question is, this is really a financial question, how much do we use, are we using or planning to use pay-for-success as part of our Rubric in looking at who gets funding, especially around homeless services and sheltering. Any of that you want to talk about now or if that’s something we should send to parking lot for further discussion, or if there would be another time for briefing on that for either this committee or for Council as a whole? Mr. De Geus: I will say that, and if you’ve had a chance to read it, there is a Staff Report in your packet for this coming Monday, homeless services, and it has a pretty comprehensive review of what are some possibilities where we could invest further or less, and it includes this $125,000 that we’re putting forward here. It also has two resolutions for the Council to adopt from Destination Home and the County. It’s really a comprehensive report so I think if you get a chance to read that, I think we’ll have a great discussion the next time around. Council Member Wolbach: I’m sorry I was behind on my reading. Thank you for the preview of my weekend reading. On the golf course, I guess this is maybe something that’s going to have to go in the parking lot also, because I do want to have a better understanding than I have tonight about what the golf course costs will be to the City upfront, long-term, how much will the revenue from golf course operations help defer the capital costs, how much will that help defer operating costs and I just don’t have a clear enough sense to make decisions relating to the golf course this evening. Chair Filseth: Just a question on that, do you say that we’re going to revisit the golf course in the capital budget later? Mr. De Geus: That’s our recommendation. We think either on the 17th or wrap up would be a more appropriate time because we will have more information for you. Council Member Wolbach: Okay, thanks for the reminder. So I’m fine with deferring that conversation until then, rather than putting it in the parking lot, if it’s going to come back anyway. Chair Filseth: We will have to make a, vote to tentatively approve this or not, but I guess if it’s tentative we can bring it back, right? Lalo Perez, Director of Administrative Services and Chief Financial Officer: Correct. Council Member Wolbach: We can always revisit stuff. Mr. Perez: Your concern is legitimate and it’s our concern as well (crosstalk). Chair Filseth: I’m not arguing it shouldn’t go in the parking lot by the way, I just want to make sure we have time to have an appropriate discussion about it. Mr. Perez: Yeah, so I think Rob saying you’ll have a couple of opportunities. With the capital we may have a little more information to provide you, as we get a little more clarity as we go through the analysis of the review of the report, wrap up and then, most definitely, in June with the Council, so if we don’t get everything into you as the Finance Committee, we will definitely see it as a Council. Council Member Wolbach: Okay, and so I think I’m fine with deferring it for now. There is a possibility that after we talk about it in the capital component, if we still feel like it’s necessary to have further discussion as a Committee, maybe we’ll still at that point refer it to, at least I would just speak for myself, I would be okay at that point deciding whether to refer it to the parking lot. So I will not be making that recommendation tonight, but others may disagree. Chair Filseth: As long as you remember not to forget. Let me ask a point of procedure. Is it possible that we could get out to a discussion on the 17th if we so chose, could we come back and take something from tonight and put it in the parking lot, even though we tentatively approve it tonight? Mr. Perez: I’m sorry. Can we try it again. (crosstalk) Council Member Wolbach: Put something back in the parking lot. Chair Filseth: Let’s say we say, you know, here’s something we’re reviewing it tonight. We’re not going to put it in the parking lot, but then we review (crosstalk) capital but we could come back and say, we want to put it in the parking lot after all? Mr. Perez: Yes. Chair Filseth: I want to make sure we don’t miss our chance to do it. Council Member Wolbach: Yeah, so thank you for confirming. That was my understanding as well. And thank you again to Staff for seeking the updated information from the National Association so that we’ll have up-to-date context for making our decisions, so I very much appreciate that and I understand why we don’t have that tonight. It’s because you guys are doing the analysis and I know how understaffed this department is, so you guys are doing a great job with all that considered. Then on Project Safety Net, as I mentioned in our discussion with the Police Department, I think this is a huge priority for the City and certainly deserves all the funding that we can afford to send its way. It’s incredibly valuable, it’s incredibly important. Of course, we want it to be as cost effective as possible, and we want our partners to be as invested in it as we are, but I certainly don’t think we ought to shy away from our contribution and focus there. Chair Filseth: Council Member Holman, do you have a follow-up question? Council Member Holman: I do have a follow-up question, and I think I’m remembering something here, but help me out with this. So under, again I’m back on Page 221, pardon me for that, the Human Services contracts with Evanitis and Child Care, so the requests in both have been exceeded by what’s budgeted, so the request for Avenidas was 442, proposed budget is 465.5. The Palo Alto Community Child Care’s (PACC’s) request was 448 and the proposed budget is 471. Can you tell me why those are over and I think it’s a formula that was established. Help me remember. I can’t remember for sure. Mr. de Geus: I believe it’s a CPI increase for both Avenidas and PACC. Is that right? Yeah, it’s a CPI increase and they received it last year and this year, we’re recommending it this year. Council Member Holman: And we’re bound to that? The reason I’m asking is, no opinion of that, or negative opinion of either one of those, but we could take that in put it in the bottom or are we required to do the percentage? Mr. de Geus: I don’t believe it’s a requirement in the contracts with them. It’s not written in the contracts, but Staff is recommending it. Mr. Perez: I think we should have Minka come up, because my recollection is that we split the two pots, and I think Minka should come up and explain that, and then the second point to your earlier comment about increasing the funds, what I want Minka to also talk about is, where are we in the process in terms of is this the second year? So another words have these been vetted out and are set? Council Member Holman: Yeah, I think what I was remembering is something about the two different pots and you can help me with that, I’m sure. Minka Van Der Zwaag, Manager of Human Services: Thank you for having me. Minka Van Der Zwaag, Human Services Manager. I think what you’re seeing with PACC and Avenidas is their asks are pretty close to historically what they have received as far as spending, so for that fiscal year, even though they were just removed from the HSRAP Program, when last year’s Finance Committee and the Council authorized a 2.6 percent increase, that got them pretty close or over their ask, and this year there is another recommended 2.6 percent increase, so that again bumps them a little bit higher, so their starting point was very close to their request, so I think that’s quite a bit different. We have some grantees that asked for $60,000 and we’re only able to get them $20,000, so when you see those 2 percent, 2.6 percent increases, it doesn’t even get them sometimes close to what their original ask was, but with PACC and Avenidas we have always been able to fund them very close to their funding request levels. Council Member Holman: I just note with this that we’re over funding based on the requests. Mr. Guagliardo: Steve Guagliardo here again, OMB. So the request is made as part of a two-year cycle, so it’s the same request for two years. That initial request was made prior to the CPI’s adjustment, so the request was made for that $442,395. The 2.6 CPI growth on that for Fiscal Year ’16 is seen in that $453,000 number. An additional 2.5 CPI applied to that results in the Fiscal Year ’17 number, so you’re exactly correct. It is exceeding what they requested and that’s a direct result of the application, the CPI. Council Member Holman: Okay, and I appreciate Lalo’s comment earlier too, so thank you. Council Member Schmid: Yeah, just a couple simple comments to follow up what others have said. The overall budget ask is for 2.4 percent. After going through the Fire Department and the Police Department, thank you. That’s very reasonable. A very nice part about that is your asking for some funding so that you actually generate more revenue. In other words, get more people participating in your programs, so that’s a wonderful outcome to be presenting to us. The only hesitancy I have about your increase in personnel or the technicians you’re asking for for open space, I get up to Foothills Park probably three times a month and always commenting on how well kept the trails are over the course of the year, but if we’re expanding the amount of trails, let’s do it. Our tax revenue, which is our most discretionary funds went up 9 percent this year. Your overall ask is 2.4 percent and I’m frankly embarrassed that when we get to HSRAP and funding for homeless, we’re trying to get through with the same amount of money, or plus 2.7, so I am enthusiastically supportive of the $125,000 which goes to a partnership with the County that has worked out very well. We have limited shelters for homeless, but by providing funding through this partnership we’ve placed what, 13 people. That’s a great outcome. Number Two, the HSRAP, I would enthusiastically support the $50,000 and not even put a qualification that it’s to be kept for, if some need occurs. You know, one way is just distributing it as a 10 percent increase for each of the HSRAP current programs. A comment to my colleagues, we’ve been putting lots of things, even positive things into the parking lot and it’s like one of the Palo Alto parking lots, it’s overcrowded. The goal of the parking lot, as I understand it, is to make some final decisions about cuts. If we have something we support, now is the time to make enthusiastic support and unanimously say, you don’t have to go to the parking lot, we want this, so I will make an amendment to the Motion if it comes, that we approve now the $125 and the extra $50 going into HSRAP. Those are my comments. Chair Filseth: Okay, thank you very much. A question over here, because the $824,000 for Track Watch is also mentioned in the text here, but it’s not in the budget, is that right, because it’s a (inaudible) budget, right? Ms. Nose: That’s right. Chair Filseth: Okay. Just wanted to be clear on that. I only had, so first of all the parking lot discussion, I’m going to support the forthcoming motion to put the HSRAP funding in the parking lot. I think it’s an appropriate use of the parking lot to discuss this and I think it hadn’t occurred to me before, but I think Karen is exactly right, that we could well get into an increase of things instead of cut, right, so I think that’s an appropriate use of the parking lot. Personally, I don’t know how everybody else will feel, but personally I’d like to see this part of the discussion in the parking lot as opposed to simply approving it tonight. That would be my preference. (inaudible). Actually, I had one question, which is the Bryant Street Garage administrator. I’m assuming that person is going to have a total compensation cost to the City of $90 or $100,000 or something like that. I mean wage is going to be 50 or 60 and then there’s going to be benefits. Is that accurate? And the Bryant Street Garage Fund is going to disperse $25,000 next year? Mr. De Geus: That’s what we anticipate. Chair Filseth: So we’re going to pay $100,000 for an administrator to disperse $25,000? I mean it sort of seems counterintuitive. It might be the right thing, but it seems counterintuitive. Mr. De Geus: I think it is the right thing. These are high school teens, the majority of them and middle school teens, so the grants we give out are really small, but a large impact actually, so they are like $500. $1,000 is pretty high actually for the grant requests. Chair Filseth: Okay. Is this person, I mean, is all they’re going to do is review grants, or are they going to spend time with these kids? Mr. De Geus: Well, they spend time with the kids and mentor them, and this person joins the Mitchell Park Teen team and we’re trying to grown the Teen Center into the evenings and weekends for high school kids, so the person will be part of that. Chair Filseth: Okay, alright. And I had no other questions, so motion? Council Member Schmid. Council Member Schmid: Yeah, just a clarification on the parking lot, I agree, it’s a good point that we should put things in there that might increase in scale, but just a clarification, the parking lot is not for presentation of new information. We’re discussing the information tonight and we will weigh and balance what we have. Chair Filseth: That’s my understanding. Council Member Schmid: Because we only have four hours and we have to, we have a Council meeting that begins at the end of the Finance Committee. Council Member Holman: That said, there might be new information that comes about based on our comments and questions that Staff might want to present to us, so I guess the comment would be, if you can get that information to us earlier rather than later. Mr. De Geus: Could you be specific about what information you are requesting. I think we have taken some good notes here, but if there is something that’s burning that you want to clarify, it would be good to hear. Council Member Holman: Well, one question I would have with the HSRAP funding for instance, how many organizations weren’t funded that requested funding and to what levels. Mr. De Geus: Okay. Chair Filseth: I shudder to broach this subject, but my recollection from last year was that as we went through this process in the month of May and we added more and more stuff into the parking lot, it became clear that the time we had allocated for parking lot discussion wasn’t enough and I hope that doesn’t happen this year, but it may be that in a few days and a few more of these meetings like this, we sort of start thinking that way. Mr. Perez: You know, it may be something that we address at the end of the meeting under future agendas, but we do have a challenge that one of you is out the rest of that week, and so we are challenged to one day and Council Member Schmid mentioned that the closed session and then the Council meeting. Chair Filseth: Fair enough. Let’s revisit it at the close of this meeting, when we talk about future stuff. Ready for motions? Karen, I think you were going to. Council Member Holman: I’ll move tentative approval of the Community Services budget with the exception of the HSRAP funding on binder page 215, which that will go into the parking lot. Council Member Wolbach: I’ll second that. MOTION: Council Member Holman moved, seconded by Council Member Wolbach to tentatively approve the Community Services Department Fund, Operating Budget, with the exception of Human Services Resource Allocation Process Funding to go into the Parking Lot. Chair Filseth: Do you care to speak to your motion? Speak to your second. All in favor? MOTION PASSED: 4-0 Chair Filseth: Motion carries. Thank you very much folks. It carries unanimously by the way. 6. Library Department, Operating Budget Chair Filseth: We’re only an hour behind. Welcome Monique. Council Member Wolbach: Luckily Library will be quick, because everything in there is perfect. Kiely Nose, Manager of Budget: So as Monique joins us, we have Library Services Department, Pages 289 through 291 in the Operating Budget. Chair Filseth: Council Member Holman informs we are not only an hour behind, but we’re 14 runs behind too. (inaudible) Colorado Rockies 17, Giants three. Monique LeConge-Ziesenhenne, Library Director: Well good evening. I’m happy to be here. I’m sorry we’re a little bit late, but I will, hopefully, make this a little bit interesting. Council Member Holman: Are you taking responsibility for us being late? Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: No, no, even I’m not that good. Monique LeConge-Ziesenhenne, Library Director, and you’re advancing for me, us? Beautiful. So the mission of the Library Department is to connect and strengthen our diverse community through knowledge, resources and opportunities. We inspire and nurture innovation, discovery and delight. The purpose for the Library is to provide exceptional, responsible, responsive public service to Palo Alto residents and employees, to promote exploration of library resources, to support learning, creation and personal enrichment, to foster a love of reading, creative expression and community engagement for all ages, and to develop library facilities, technology and staff to create a welcoming, inclusive environment, in which to share valuable resources and skilled expertise. We do this in three divisions, Public Services and Public Programs, Information Technology and Collections, so the collection acquisition and organization of both virtual and physical materials, and through the Buildings and Support and Administration. Last physical year we increased library operating hours by 32 hours, or 14 percent per week, from 228 hours to 260 hours. That began mid-August 2015, coinciding with the start of school, and again, thank you very much for the budget we received last year that made all of that possible. That’s translated into dramatic increases in service. For example, last week Wednesday, just a random sample, Mitchell Park Library by 6 PM had over 1,500 people who had come into the Library that left three hours of service left, and we’re routinely seeing 2,000 people per day on Saturdays and Sundays in Mitchell Park Library. So I just want to give you the context. We’re seeing steady increases at Rinconada Library, but certainly not the dramatic change we’ve seen at Mitchell Park, where nearly any time of the day you come in, every seat is filled. We increased, we achieved our Fiscal Year 2016 goal for increased satisfaction or people rating the library as very good or excellent. Our increase was actually 10 percent. Our goal had been to see a change of 2 percent, so we achieved that in a statistically significant fashion. In February this year we implemented the new integrated library system, called SIERRA, the New American’s Program last year with English as a Second Language (ESL) classes for beginning and advanced learners, and these are primarily folks who are living here long-term, temporary people living here, family members who have come with students, and we’re using volunteer ESL teachers for those programs. Right after Mitchell Park opened, we formed a Teen Library Advisory Board, and these are teens who regularly interact with a young adult or teen librarian to design programs, advise on collections, give us feedback on what they’d like in the library. We received a grant from the Pacific Library Partnership to replicate other bike-related grants that libraries have done in the region, so we will be installing two bicycle repair stations, one at Mitchell Park and one at Rinconada. These are poles that have tools on them. You’ve seen many of them, there are many on the Stanford campus, but none that we’ve seen around. There is one in front of the Mountain View Library. It has tools attached. Bikers are able to put their bike up there, change a tire, repair a tire, fix something else that might be going on, and that’s available outside of the Library. Along with that, we’ll have a safe route to libraries map to compliment the Safe Routes to School maps and bicycle safety training for children during the summer reading program. We’ll be purchasing a bike mobile, so rather than a bookmobile, we’ll be using bikes with a box on the back to take a small collection to the various events that we’re invited to participate in, to set up at school, in the campus and to be able to check materials out and sign people out for library cards. By the end of the Fiscal Year, fingers crossed, the drive-up book drops will be installed at Mitchell Park and at Rinconada. Before we’ve been working with Public Works and those items are planned and going through the Planning Department process as needed. Then this year, as we’ve done in the last few years, we were one of the regional participants for Silicon Valley Reads. This year’s subject was very timely about water and drought, and we offered a variety of programs as well as two or three different books for the community to read and discuss. And while those are all significant and interesting programs, it’s just a small percentage of the new things we’ve offered this year. Looking forward to Fiscal Year 2017, we’re going to be implementing, now that we’ve been in the libraries for a year and a half or so, in the two larger libraries, we’re doing a work flow analysis to make sure we’re using the automated materials handling machines in the most efficient and effective ways possible. This was using lean principles and training the staff to be able to develop a process, so that going forward we’ll be able to think in a lean way when we’re looking at the repetitive work that libraries are often involved in. We’ll be finalizing E-branch requirements and evaluating whether the new Integrated Library System (ILS) will meet the needs that we had initially laid out, or whether we need to do some further independent development for making all of our resources available on line, including both just the regular on-line and mobile experience. The Library’s Procedure Manual may not seem like a big deal, but now that we’ve changed systems, we have a lot of revision work to do and the new facilities have also necessitated a grand overhaul so that Staff are able to make independent decisions on their own and work together more cohesively. We are continuing to expand the New American’s Program, adding new materials and print resources, as well as including courses on American culture, citizenship and those topics for adult learners. There’s a kindergarten library campaign which is going on and will go on into Fiscal Year ’17. We want to make sure that every kindergartener in the schools has a library card. We’ve done it with similar groups and tomorrow night we will have a kindergarten family date night for kindergarten card holders. That’s their entry into the library after hours. Finally, we will be following up on inclusive programming for children who may be on the autism spectrum. We are working with some of our great neighbors, Abilities United and other groups nearby Mitchell Park to think of ways of presenting stories and story times and other activities that will better meet the needs of children who have special learning issues going on. So, our only budget proposal or addition or change is converting a half-time senior librarian. This person retired, a regular half-time librarian retired during this current fiscal year. We would use vacant hourly positions to offset the costs associated with converting this to a full-time position, so this would be another experienced librarian at Rinconada to assist with a lot of the data base, outreach and training that goes on, particularly to the schools and other organizations, adding to the people who are available because we have two shifts on four days a week at the Library and are open seven days a week, and then work with specialized collections, like Foundation Center, grant resources and that outreach, which we’ve had a lot of interest in that specialized collection. I’m happy to answer any questions for you and provide any other information. Thank you. Chair Filseth: Committee Member questions? Cory. Council Member Wolbach: Unless anyone has any questions, I’m happy to make a motion to approve, but I think others might have some questions, but that’s where I stand. Chair Filseth: Other questions? Karen. Council Member Holman: I don’t think, well maybe I have one question, because it comes up every once in a while, College Terrace Library staffing, and what, it sort of like the chicken and egg sort of thing, like what’s the visitation and checkout rates there are, does that merit having longer hours, but if it had longer hours would it have more checkouts, so can you update us on that. So we’re looking at staffing or volunteers. Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: Yes, so tonight with me I actually, I know you haven’t met her yet, but (inaudible) is the new Assistant Library Director. She comes to us from Santa Clara County where she worked at Cupertino, Cupertino branch. You know one of her things will be to assess that use. That’s directly under her prevue, as well as look at the potential for use of volunteers in other ways than we’ve been using them, so we can get you the statistics. We do normally give you those. They come through the LAC packet, the Advisory Commission packet. College Terrace and Downtown both experienced a reduction is circulation and attendance, though more likely because they had more hours and when, you know, when Rinconada was closed, more people were using them. But I think we will continue to monitor and investigate what we can and the Library Advisory Commission (LAC) is due for a report to Council likely in the early Fall, so maybe it could be part of that report to you. Looking at the trends for circulation and attendance and, unless you would like more than what’s available right now. Council Member Holman: I think I’m probably okay with what’s available now, but you said in the fall you could identify potentially, but go ahead. In the fall you will have more information and could potentially identify what services might be added to increase circulation and visitors at both Downtown and College Terrace, to that’s the fall but budget gets approved in June, so I guess in general, you probably can’t answer it now, I’m sure you can’t answer it now, is like what would you want if… Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: One of the things that we’ve done this current year, particularly as it relates to Mitchell Park for example, is that Mitchell Park really did double its circulation in the first year, so they needed proportionately more staff to manage that. You have an automated materials handling machine, but you still need clerks and pages to put those books back up on the shelf, so we have not done a similar analysis at Downtown and College Terrace to see, do we have the right proportion of staff that we already have? You know, we do have a couple of full-time staff members there and then we supplement with hourly staff, so it would be, it’s such a small place that programming is pretty limited in terms of what we can do, so for us, I think it would, I would rather look at, what are the options for reallocating the existing staff that we have, rather than looking at adding more staff just in an attempt to increase it, and also reevaluating what we’re doing with volunteers, because as we’ve seen, we’ve had some really well trained, very experienced people and I know that there are many people like that in Palo Alto who would like to come to the Library and either do a weekly conversation class or something like that. It could be that the needs that we might be able to address at College Terrace, because that’s the one place where we have very limited programming, that might be something that then, in turn, generates more attendance and interest. Council Member Holman: Given that you’re speaking to the Finance Committee, you’re comments are very well received. Just one quick comment about College Terrace is, the programming that I’m familiar with at least there, is inside. There is such great space outside that maybe the programming could also expand outside. Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: Yeah, when I took (inaudible) over there, the Library Associate and I were talking about the Summer Reading Program and how we do use the park area for programming and we talked about magicians melting in the sun, but we’ll definitely continue to us that really great space. Council Member Holman: Okay, great job. Thank you. You’ve heard me say I think once before, that I have five favorite libraries, and that continues to be true. Just a great job, thank you. Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: Thank you. Chair Filseth: Greg. Council Member Schmid: Yeah, it’s exciting to hear about new things going on and lots of people. Looking at the data that we have, it looks like visits have finally exceeded the amounts that we had before all the closures. It looks like you mentioned, the programming is way up and it looks like the meeting rooms, which were not available before, are being well used. Also, there is no late number, but it looks like the collection is much larger than it used to be, because we’ve added different types of things. I guess the one number that has not bounced back, and in your forecast does not, is the turnover rate of items. That would seem to indicate that people are going more for activities as opposed to taking home a handful of things. Do you have any comment on that trend? Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: I agree with you, that’s one area that has not bounced back. I am reluctant to say that it’s not going to come back, but I do agree with you that it’s more about, it’s been more about using the spaces and coming in and seeing the facilities. We have a market penetration rate of about 40 percent, so 40 percent of the households in Palo Alto have at least one person who has a library card, which actually, compared to the national average and participating, is it’s higher than average. Most are somewhere in the 30’s. Council Member Schmid: And that’s been pretty constant through the last decade? Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: It’s actually increased over the last year, year and a half. We’ve been tracking it since before Mitchell Park reopened. We started off around 32, 34 percent, so we’ve been steadily gaining traction there. What we feel like, and it’s hard to capture is that it seems a lot of people come to see the beautiful building, get a library card, might come back for programs or to use the Wi-Fi, but may not be there to check out books, so we did a, we recently did a children’s author festival so that we would be able to generate perhaps more interest, meeting the authors, circulating items. We’ve developed some new book clubs and things like that, and so we’re going to continue to sell those and, hopefully, nobody will be leaving without something in their hands. Council Member Schmid: Is there a growing share of the take-outs that are virtual rather than hard copies? Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: Well, you know, every year we do see soft of almost a doubling or 25 percent more to 40 percent more circulation of eBooks, however, we’ve sort of reached the point where there are not as many eBooks being published and so the collection itself is a little more limited. We still have issues with the cost as compared to print. Council Member Schmid: So are the number of books that are circulating going down, or has that leveled off? Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: For us everything has actually increased, contrary to the rest of the nation. The trends are that those are going down as more people are using mobile or E-Resources but that doesn’t mean people don’t like them. We have a lot and Pew Research found that overwhelmingly people will say, yeah, I still like a real book, but there are certain things I want on my screen. So, you know, we seek a balance and we try to, it’s sort of like McDonalds, would you like fries with that, would you like a book with that? We continue to promote it. Council Member Schmid: I guess there are a lot of ongoing questions, but it seems as though the community’s idea of keeping five libraries and investing substantially in space has been a good investment. Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: I would say yes, I would agree with that. Council Member Schmid: Good, thank you. Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: It’s a thrill to work in these libraries. They’re just really amazing, so thank you, although we could always use more money. Chair Filseth: We have cool libraries. I want to ask a couple of questions. One is, I noticed there is a, I mean on an absolute scale the number is not huge, but percentage-wise they are pretty big, I noted there is a big increase in worker’s comp this year, and we were talking about this earlier. It sort of seemed like the accounting, I mean, actuarial changes sort of pushed it in one direction and here’s the other direction. Is there any color on that? Kiely Nose, Manager of Budget: Right, so the third thing that’s kind of occurring there that we didn’t really discuss as part of the Police Department (PD) is that we had the same outside contractor not only look at our liabilities, but also look at the activity by department and by funding source, so they redid that allocation model, so what we’ve done is implement that as part of this budget to more accurately reflect each department’s liability. That’s why you’ll see in some areas swings to the positive, is because we previously hadn’t allocated those charges to that department, but based on this new analysis that the contractor did to more accurately reflect whose costing worker’s comp or general liabilities etc., more accurately aligning it with the appropriate department and funding source. Chair Filseth: So in this case you would say, based on these five variables we think that Library is going to actually have a significant increase in worker’s comp this year as opposed to the general trend. Ms. Nose: I wouldn’t say that Library itself will have a significant increase compared to prior years. I would say that we are more accurately reflecting what Library’s component of the annual worker’s comp is. Suzanne Mason, Assistant City Manager: So their past experience is influencing how we actually budget worker’s comp, because we were obviously coming in higher, so when you do your worker’s comp budget you look at experience and exposure, so the experience portion of that has increased their allocation. Chair Filseth: I understand. It sounds like this is probably just the way it is, but from here it sort of looks like this black box. It’s like, well, the number comes out. You can’t understand it, but this is what the number is. That’s sort of what it sounds like and maybe that’s the reality. Ms. Mason: We can set a follow up and go through the actuarial tables. Chair Filseth: Yeah, I guess I’m just curious, is there anything deterministic here, that we ought to know about, as opposed to it’s purely an actuarial exercise. Lalo Perez, Director of Administrative Services and Chief Financial Officer: Yeah, I think to your earlier comment, can we get closer to apples-to-apples, and that’s what we’re trying to do. We’ve had a different methodology. We had the average of three years’ experience, then the average of five, and now we decided, let’s use the actuarial methodology that this firm recommends, so we can have a little more consistency and have that with all the other adjustments that we made, so we’re trying to strive to that apples-to-apples. Chair Filseth: I understand, but it’s not the case that somebody broke their leg slipping on the snow outside? The other think I wanted to ask was, and again these are not gigantic numbers, but they sort of just started to look anomalous, which is, I noticed there is a 43 percent increase in administration, which is like a quarter million dollars. Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: What page are you on? Chair Filseth: Page 294, down at the bottom. Steve Guagliardo, Senior Management Analyst: Thanks for the question. That has to do with the way we allocate charges, so allocated charges are all budgeted in the Administrative Division, so when you see a $45,000 increase for the worker’s comp allocation, for example, that exists entirely in the Administration Division, so anything that goes out is allocated as part of a cost allocation plan is budgeted in that Administration Division. Chair Filseth: It’s complicated. Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: It is, because if you look on Page 295, this is one that I love, you look at the positions by division, there 0.4 FTE in Administration, but that’s because our work is divided amongst the five branches. Yeah, those allocated charges don’t make sense. Chair Filseth: Then, I mean, the total staff is like 64 people, and I was trying to just understand what percentage are sort of central staff versus tied to one specific library. I know it looked like there are 10 or 12 Central and 53, 55 sort allocated to the different libraries. Is that about right? Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: Well, yes. So of those, so there are 48.5 that are full-time people, and those are… Chair Filseth: That’s right, they’re not all full time. Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: Not a half, right, but then that 15 FTE hourly, that’s actually many, many more people, because there’s 88 bodies total in that 65 people. So the say it’s distributed is somewhat accurate, and I always say that because when there are fluctuations in times that we’re starting to pay more attention to, when there are fluctuations in times that we know will be busier, we’re bringing on more hourly staff to accommodate that, so there are many people will work between two or three branches in the course of a week to respond to the need, and so while what you’re seeing is that Rinconada and Mitchell Park are the two, and they are also the two places where there is actually work space for more people, then that’s where they’re mostly centered. But again, based on Mitchell Park a little bit heavier than Rinconada. Chair Filseth: Then sort of my impression, and tell me if this is right or not, but my impression is that sort of in libraries in America generally what’s going on in staffing has been because of, you know, automatic sorting machines and self-checkout and stuff like that, generally the trend has been sort of for gradually decreasing staffing, but a change in the staffing that you need, sort of different and different kinds of people. Is that an accurate picture? Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: It is accurate. I think that the work that librarians, you know the degreed librarians with Masters Degrees are doing is of a higher level in terms of being able to assist people, but we are needing many more people who have a technical sort of background, because, for example, the IT kind of work, we’re like a (inaudible) but not just for one product, right. People will come in with, I can’t get the app or the eBook to come on my phone, I can’t get it to come on my iPad, it doesn’t work on the screen, and will help you. We will troubleshoot with you until we get it to work successfully, so yeah, it’s becoming more of a, where technology is a tool that is just a part of everyone’s job in the library, and depending on your specific needs is how in-depth we’re going to be. We’re sort of triaging where you end up and who ends up assisting you. Chair Filseth: Alright, thank you very much. Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: You’re welcome. Council Member Holman: Move to approve the recommended budget. Chair Filseth: Go ahead. Further comments. All in favor. MOTION: Council Member Holman moved, seconded by Council Member Schmid to tentatively approve the Library Department Fund, Operating Budget. MOTION PASSED: 4-0 Chair Filseth: Motion passes unanimously. Thank you very much for hanging out with us late at night. Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: Oh, it was fun. Thanks. Chair Filseth: One question here. Council Member Wolbach: No pressure, but how long before we can start calling you Dr. Monique? Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: Oh, you know, I’m editing my dissertation now and I’m hoping to defend sometime this summer, so very soon. Council Member Wolbach: Oh, really. I didn’t realize it was coming up that soon. Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for asking. Chair Filseth: It sounds like you spend a lot of time in a library. Ms. LeConge-Ziesenhenne: A lot of time on line using electronic resources. Thank you. Future Meetings and Agendas Chair Filseth: So Library was the last one tonight, right? So that should bring us back to a discussion of future agendas, is that right? Lalo Perez, Director of Administrative Services and Chief Financial Officer: Yes, thank you. So the next meeting we have scheduled agendized is May 10th. It looks light, but it’s heavy. It’s a deceiving light. If you don’t have copies we can get you additional copies. Council Member Holman: Lalo, so could I ask you, because Rob was wanting to know what question I had and I gave him a question, could you also ask Rob to bring to the parking lot meeting or sometime before hand, bring us what the tracking history is of the level in dollars amount of HSRAP funding has been, like pre downturn and since? Mr. Perez: Yes, I will. Council Member Holman: I appreciate that. Thank you. Or, can I find that on Open Gov or do we go back that far? Mr. Perez: I don’t believe it’s at that level of detail, because it’s something we specially pull out manually and prepare, but we’ll get it. Council Member Holman: Okay great. Thank you a lot. What you just gave us, is it any different than what we already had? Mr. Perez: It should not be. I just wanted to make sure you had one. Council Member Holman: Okay, thank you. Mr. Perez: So looking at next Tuesday, which is the next scheduled meeting, if you look at Number Two, Mr. Bartel is scheduled to join us to give you an update on the retired medical, so 15 minutes is probably unlikely. So I think this is going to be a heavy night because we have Planning, there’s a lot of requests there and Items of Interest, Special Revenue, there’s some concerns about some of the parking funds, as some of you may have heard, and then we also have the Development Center so that’s another big budget. So I think it’s a pretty heavy night for us on the 10th. Moving over to the 12th, I think it’s going to be a lighter night. It’s predominantly municipal (muni) fees and Public Works, not only the General Fund Operating, but the enterprise side, so you had some comments earlier as a Committee about maybe prioritizing the parking lot. My recommendation is that you maybe consider doing that this night, because by the end of the night you would have heard all of the General Fund departments, so it would make sense for you to do it there. It’s a little bit lighter. I not necessarily suggesting what you do, I’m just trying to offer you windows. May 12th, right. Chair Filseth: Am I correct in looking and thinking this, that basically by the end of May 12th, after May 12th, we’re kind of going into the Enterprise Funds and the Capital Budget. Mr. Perez: Correct. We start the enterprise side. It’s a mix that night with Public Works and then the 12th itself it’s the capital side of the budget which so it’s funding source right, even though general fund, and then the Enterprise Funds with Utilities. Chair Filseth: So I’m old and have forgotten already, but what’s the relationship of parking lots to the Capital Budget. Do we have a parking lot for that, or is that a… Mr. Perez: You could have items from any fund in a parking lot. I was merely suggesting, because typically the rub, I’ll call it, it’s within the general funding, so that was merely a suggestion, but obviously, you could do it any night you want. Chair Filseth: So I think that sounds like a sensible suggestion, right. I mean, we may discuss parking lot stuff on more than one night, but spending some time on it, if there is time. Mr. Perez: Yes, and again, you didn’t make a, I was just finishing saying that you didn’t necessarily make a motion for that. That was based on comments I heard from Committee members. Council Member Wolbach: Given how many days we are away from these meetings, I was going to suggest something, but I think it might be too late, just because of our noticing, because it’s such a heavy night on Tuesday and such a light night on Thursday, I was thinking that we might want to look at whether we want to bump something from Tuesday to Thursday, but I think we’re talking about a meeting that is less than a week away, and I think we could technically do it legally, but probably not a good idea at this point. Chair Filseth: It seems like technically if we got there and it was like midnight or something like that, we could agree to continue something? Is that correct? Mr. Perez: You have the flexibility. So you could still do that. Council Member Wolbach: Should we maybe let Peter Pirnejad know that it’s going to be a busy night. That means that we might end up continuing something, as he’s last on the agenda. Chair Filseth: Oh, that guys and iron man. He can deal with it. Mr. Perez: We’ll let him know that it’s happened in prior years that, I’m not sure if it’s happened to Peter, but we’ll let him know. I do have one suggestion along that line of thinking, and I know that one of you has a conflict, but I believe in order for us to have a more successful goal on the 17th, we should start at 6:00. I understand, Council Member Wolbach is going to miss the 12th entirely so I understand. Council Member Wolbach: I’m missing the 12th entirely. Chair Filseth: Which date did you mean? Mr. Perez: The 17th, because if you look at the agenda, we’re looking at 10:45. Council Member Wolbach. I’ve known that for months. Chair Filseth: That’s the night we were talking about the parking lot. Mr. Perez: That’s true. Chair Filseth: I think we really want Cory here for the parking lot discussion. Mr. Perez: You’re right. I’d forgotten about that until I made my comments. But, I mean, I think you need to consider, you know, given the size of the parking lot, where it is now and we haven’t gone through a couple of meeting for the general fund, that is a very aggressive night for us and the capital program, it’s the big, and then the Utility rate increases. Chair Filseth: Let me cut to you in a second here. So, basically what you’re proposing is, or what you’ve suggested we consider, is that on the 17th, if we were to start at 6:00 instead of 7:00, basically we would lose Karen for the discussion of the General Fund Capital Budget. Mr. Perez: You could reorder stuff as well, but the reason we put the general fund capital is because we are going to have quite a number of staff members because it goes across a lot of our General Fund departments. I’m just concerned that if we start at 7:00 with that type of agenda and then having the constraints on the wrap-up, the only other thought I have is, I would need to check with Beth on staffing and resourcing, would be to start earlier on the wrap-up date, because right now we’re starting at 1:00. Council Member Holman: I was going to suggest, I didn’t know that Cory was going to be out on the 12th, I hadn’t heard that come up before, but I was going to suggest on the… I don’t know if this works out or night, on the 10th, that we start at 5:00 instead of 6:00, and it doesn’t help with the parking lot issues though, because Cory won’t be here on the 12th at all, but if the 12th is such heavy lifting, do we want to shift some stuff, and the 10th is not, or the 10th is the one that you say is heavy lifting, the 10th is heavy lifting. Okay. Council Member Schmid: I guess an option is to start the 10th at 5:00. Mr. Perez: So the only thing that I’m not absolutely sure, I think we can. The noticing requirement, I’m not absolute sure of that. Council Member Wolbach: We’re really close. Suzanne Mason, Assistant City Manager: The agendas have to be posted at least 24 hours, but we like to give the public more time, so if it’s for the 10th we would just have to check with Beth, but technically it’s possible. Mr. Perez: There is staff from the City Clerk here tomorrow, so they would be able to do the noticing tomorrow then. Council Member Schmid: Yeah, I’m in favor or that. Chair Filseth: So if that’s doable, I think we have consensus on the table that we would be okay for the 5:00 on the 10th. Mr. Perez: The only thing we might have to change is the order, but we can do that, no problem with your permission. I was thinking that Mr. Bartel may or may not be able to be here at 5:00 because I told him 6:00. Chair Filseth: We can change the order too, is that right? Mr. Perez: Yeah. Council Member Wolbach: So a couple of things. One, I could do earlier on the 10th. Again I will not be here on the 12th. If something gets bumped to the, if we are reposting then we could actually just say to Peter, don’t bother coming until the 12th. As long as you guys aren’t too mean to Peter. Ms. Nose: If we start early, he could be the first up. Council Member Wolbach: Or alternatively we could do that. Regarding the 17th, if we start an hour early, that doesn’t mean we necessarily have to take votes an hour early. It does mean that we have to do some quick catch up for anyone who misses the first hour, but we could hold off on having any votes until everybody is here. Then again, I’m going to miss a whole night, so I’m sympathetic to anyone not wanting to miss part of a meeting, but that might be a way to think about being. Council Member Holman: So it’s also been suggested that if the 12th started at 6:00, I mean, I really don’t want to miss Item Two on that night, but maybe the Utilities overview, we have great expertise here on that, not to say we don’t on the others, but if that order could be changed, maybe? But I really don’t want to miss the General Fund Capital, Item Two. Mr. Perez: I think, you know, to make it work we can move the order around. Ms. Mason: So you’re saying if we started early at 6:00 on the 17th, that we start with Utilities, right? Council Member Holman: That would be my request. (inaudible) Mr. Perez: Yeah, so we can break it up, but at the hour point give or take when you arrive, then we can switch to general fund, because I would really like to try to get, there’s going to be many project managers, try to get them out of here. Council Member Holman: Then it also came up about the 23rd? Mr. Perez: Yeah, something to consider. Council Member Holman: Do we just want to talk about coming a little bit earlier, and if we finish up in between, then we won’t be so wiped out for the Council meeting, so that gives us a little latitude. Mr. Perez: Yeah, because it’s going to be pretty tight for you. And again, I want to caveat without having discussed it with Beth, that staffing. Council Member Holman: Yeah, thank you. Chair Filseth: If we don’t’ take up the parking lot on the 12th, then we’re probably not going to take it up on the 17th because it’s already a busy night and we’re starting earlier, right, and so that means either we do the whole thing on the 23rd, or else we schedule some other day, Sunday or something like that, I don’t know. That’s problematic. Council Member Wolbach: You know, one thing could be, you know, if some of the parking lot is addressed on the 12th. Well there are a couple of ways to do this. One is if you want to give me an opportunity to weigh in on this, if the parking lot stuff is addressed on the 12th, but there’s an opportunity to revisit, if I take issue with any of the decisions made, but then you guys end up discussing it twice, but it’s kind of just an open question, whether I end up saying, you know, they made good decisions and I’m okay with that, but at least it gives you a chance to have some of that preliminary discussion. I can read the minutes or watch the video later. You know, some of these follow up questions can be knocked out of the way, and then when we talk about it later when I’m back, I’ll keep my comments short and just vote support or nay. That’s just one thing to think about. Another option is, is there anything at a later meeting that could be moved up to the 12th that I don’t need to be here for the initial hearing of, because I’ll be here, you know. I don’t know if there’s anything on the 17th that could be moved to the 12th. Mr. Perez: We would have to maybe break up the Utility, if you’re looking at the calendar, I’m looking at Four, Five and Six, those schedules. (inaudible) Ms. Nose: Like Lalo said, we need to talk to Beth. Moving rates has a lot of noticing associated with it, so we are more likely to step on a landmine there than we are if we move the Utilities overview up, however, the reason we kept them together is, given Utilities budget, you’re going to see significant changes and so if you’re asking questions about that kind of stuff, it’s going to lend to the rate conversation, but it’s doable. We could move them up. Chair Filseth: Which item is the rate conversation? Ms. Nose: Four, Five and Six on the 17th. Chair Filseth: The rate conversation, I mean I’m probably hopelessly naïve about this, but the rate conversation, haven’t we had that a whole bunch of times already in the last three months, as so are we really going to spend that much more time on it here? What do you think? Mr. Perez: Our assumption is not. To my recollection, these are not Prop 218 notification requirements. These are not subject to that, but to probably regular notifications. So, yeah, you can see it’s a challenging calendar. Chair Filseth: So if we’re already starting the 17th at 6:00 PM and we hope that, think that maybe Items Four, Five and Six might not take that long, are we going, is actually the 17th not going to be as busy as we thought, and we might actually have some extra time there? Ms. Mason: So, maybe going back to one idea that was suggested, which was looking at the 23rd and maybe starting early and making that more of a day. Chair Filseth: An all day off site. Ms. Mason: An all-day parking lot. It’s actually here now and we’ll make sure there’s lunch or a short break, but maybe you’ll all be here, it will be a focused conversation on items you’ve put aside. It’s a long day. Council Member Wolbach: I’m sorry, I just wanted to say, I could do it. Chair Filseth: So perhaps maybe that’s the simplest. Maybe what we do is we sort of get through next week and we see how big and how complicated the parking lot is, and then we sort of hold that in our pocket and say, okay, nobody schedule anything after 11:00 on that morning, right, and if necessary we say, you know we’ve got a lot of stuff here, maybe we should do that. Or maybe we’ll get down to the end of it and we’ll only have, we won’t put anything else in it and we’ll say, we can finish this in a couple of hours so we’ll stick to the original schedule. Council Member Wolbach: Okay, fair enough. Mr. Perez: And in the meantime we’ll check to make sure the rooms available and staff’s available. Chair Filseth: Cory. Council Member Wolbach: This is a question, for me it’s really a question for Staff about, on the Council, on a day when you’re prepping for a Council meeting, I guess it depends on what you all specifically individually have on that evening on the Agenda, but if you guys are comfortable starting earlier on the 23rd, I’m comfortable starting earlier on the 23rd, and then what we might want to say is, let’s just schedule earlier and then let’s try to finish as fast as we can so we can enjoy our afternoon, but that might be the way to do it. So we just plan sooner to do that. But I’ll let Staff get back to us maybe next week and see what works best. Chair Filseth: That might be simpler actually. Mr. Perez: I think the majority of the impacts are known, we know them now, so we’re going to be working on preparing any documentation that we need, or backup information, so the impact would be from that night’s agenda versus the budget itself, I think. Council Member Holman: I have a procedural question. So if there is something in, let’s say Capital Budget and the Council has taken a vote on giving direction, but when we come to pick a topic and we see though that in order to maybe not transfer so much money from reserves, in other words, if it becomes a budget-balancing matter, can we make a recommendation to Council that might differ from what a prior recommendation from Council has been. What’s the procedural aspect of that? Mr. Perez: I do believe that it would be as a result of a funding issue, so while the policy may have been made with an understanding of a certain funding position at the time, there has been a significant shift in our resource availability so I think form that level it would be appropriate that the funding levels are much different than they were. Council Member Holman: Thank you. Chair Filseth: So then, if I understand where we are in terms of changes to this document, really it’s two, actually it’s three. One is that we would start the May 10th meeting at 5:00 instead of 6:00. Did we decide to do that? Okay. The second is, we would start the May 17th meeting at 6:00 instead of 7:00 (crosstalk). Mr. Perez: Yeah and if it’s too late and we understand from Beth that the notice went out, then you have the priority as a Committee to change the order that night. So if you don’t see the order the way it should be, Council Member Holman, the rest of the group can make the change. Chair Filseth: And I guess if there’s nobody in the audience versus we have a packed house, or something like that. And then the third is, we’re talking about Monday, the 23rd session starting at 11:00 instead of 1:00. Mr. Perez: 11:00 makes sense. I mean at that point you can make a call if you want to have a break for lunch or something, that would be appropriate. Council Member Wolbach: I was going to say, I would be also fine with starting earlier than 11:00 and then we get our own lunches and come back if necessary. Council Member Holman: Starting earlier than that is going to be really challenging for Staff because of pre-Council meeting. Mr. Perez: I think 11:00 is fine because.. Council Member Wolbach: I’m just saying I’m flexible. I want to let Staff think about it and come back next week with a recommendation if you guys are okay with that. (crosstalk) Mr. Perez: The City Manager may have a scheduled meeting with the Mayor and Vice-Mayor and you would probably want to let him finish that and then come joint us and start the meeting. That’s all I have. Chair Filseth: Alright. It sounds like a plan. Thank you all very much and meeting is adjourned. ADJOURNMENT: Meeting adjourned at 10:24 P.M. TRANSCRIPT Page 90 of 90 Special Finance Committee Meeting Transcript 5/5/2016 FINANCE COMMITTEE TRANSCRIPT Page 1 of 3