good afternoon welcome to our june 16th meeting today's city council meeting will be preceded by a brief meeting of the park central community facilities district board i will call to order that facilities district board will the city clerk please call the roll board member ansari here board member conlan board member conlan here thank you board member decision here board member gervais here board member here board member o'brien board member pastor board member stark board member waring vice chair garcia here chairwoman gallego thank you we'll begin a public hearing on the proposed district budget for fiscal year 2021-22 and the proposed five-year financial plan for the district we do not have any members of the public to address the board on this item so i will close the public hearing do we have a resolution motion to approve the resolution we have a second second roll call i'm sorry conlon decision yes gervais yes yes o'brien pastor i apologize pastor yes thank you stark waring oh garcia yes gallego yes passes ten to one thank you that concludes the business of the board thank you to boards members conlon and gervais for your participation we are adjourned we next call to order the phoenix city council formal meeting for the 16th of june 2021 will the clerk please call the roll councilwoman i'm sorry councilman decisio yes i'll be here councilwoman i apologize councilman guardado here thank you councilwoman o'brien councilwoman pastor councilwoman stark councilman waring i apologize counselor thank you vice mayor garcia here mayor gallego mario barajas is with us here today to provide interpretation mario would you introduce yourself thank you hello my name is mario barajas and i'll be serving as today's spanish interpreter i'll now take a few moments to introduce myself to our spanish-speaking audience when i started thank you for your service mario i will turn to our city attorney after the clerk reads the 24-hour paragraph [Music] will our clerk please read the 24-hour paragraph the titles of the following ordinance and resolution numbers on the agenda were available to the public at least 24 hours prior to this council meeting and therefore may be read by title or agenda item only ordinances number g 6866-6868 s and four seven 47639-47647-47649-476 five eight three four seven seven two three and resolutions two one nine two nine through two one nine three three thank you so much public is invited to participate and provide comment on important items during the council meeting we will turn to our city attorney to explain that portion of our meeting thank you mayor members of the public may speak for up to two minutes to comment on agenda items to be discussed comments must be related to the agenda item and the action being considered by the council general comments that go beyond the scope of the agenda item must be made during the citizen comment session at the end of the agenda speakers must present their comments in a respectful and courteous manner profane language and personal attacks on members of the public council members or staff are not allowed a person who violates these rules will lose their opportunity to continue to speak thank you so much we next turn to the boards and commissions portion of our agenda vice mayor do we have a motion yes motion to approve mayor and city council boards and commission nominations second have a motion and a second any discussion all those in favor please signal i i any opposed nay passes unanimously passes no i the mayor said no oh sorry that says eight to one we advise the state on liquor license applications um when we turn to that portion of our agenda next vice mayor do we have a motion motion to approve items two through eleven second discussion oh second so yes second from perfect any discussion all those in favor please say aye any aye nay passes unanimously city clerk are we ready for ordinances resolutions new business and planning and zoning yes mayor vice mayor do we have a motion motion to approve items 12 through 118 accept the following items 13 28 31-39 62 67 84 93 117 and 118 item 77 is continued to june 23 2021 and excluding these items for public comment 86 and 90. okay we have a motion from the vice mayor in a second from councilwoman stark any discussion roll call i'm sorry dececio stark apologize wearing mr jerry yes yes thank you garcia yes gallego passes 9-0 we next move to item 13 uscm membership do we have a motion motion to approve item 13 any discussion roll call i'm sorry yes decision no yes o'brien i apologize the audio is a little choppy over here yes thank you pastor dark wearing oh jeremy thank you i did garcia yes gallego passes 7-2 next move to item 28 fort mcdowell yavapai nation gaming grants motion to approve item 28 second and noting that uh councilman pastor will not be participating in this vote any discussion roll call i'm sorry decisio yes o'brien dark yes thank you garcia yes gallego yes passes 8-0 item 31 is a public hearing on the adoption of the proposed property tax levy truth and taxation and adoption of the final 2021 annual budget i now declare the hearing open we do have one member of the public to address us on this item and then significant number of the public to address us on item 33 which is the operating funds budget uh amanda mccauley the floor is yours i thank you i think that um i was just confused on which item i was trying to just um to talk to and i think it's actually number 33 so in regards to police funding perfect we will then take you uh on item 33. thank you thank you the public hearing is closed item 32 is a convening of a special meeting of the city council to consider adoption of the 2021 2022 budget do we have a motion in accordance with state statute i move that the regular meeting of the city council be recessed and the city council convene a special meeting to consider adoption of the budget we have a motion and a second any discussion this will be a voice vote all those in favor please say aye any opposed nay passes unanimously item 33 is adoption of the final 2021 2022 annual operating funds budget do we have a motion mayor i move that item 33 being ordinance s slash 47 661 the final 2021 2022 annual operating funds budget be adopted we have a motion and a second this is our third such vote on this budget in keeping with state law we do have a large number of members of the public here to address the council our staff will call the members of the public but we'll begin with amanda mccauley followed by nadine so my name is amanda mccauley and i am calling to represent the arcadia calm back neighborhood association regarding the phoenix police budget funding and we did send a letter hopefully everybody received it but just in case we did want to have the letter um read into the record so um i just wanted to go ahead and read that dear myego mayor my sorry about that mayor gallego and council members o'brien wearing stark pastor guardado decision and sorry and garcia the arcadia camelback neighborhood arcadia camelback mountain neighborhood association or acmna would like to voice his concern relating to police budgetary cuts we believe it is imperative that the current police funding levels remain unchanged and that efforts be made to rebuild our understaffed precincts currently the department is losing an average of 18 officers per month while hiring a mere 10. this net loss comes during the year when arizona has also seen one of the largest influxes of residents on record and a migration which shows no signs of slowing more people with fewer officers has led to an increase in violent crimes and delays and response times the well-publicized movement to defund the police has sprung from incidents seen at a national level not at our local level under the leadership of chief jerry williams and our local precinct commander chris irick we have seen high standards of ethics equality respect and compassion for our diverse population our city's police should be celebrated supported and appropriately funded let phoenix police department be a model for community relations between peace officers and the citizenry they serve thank you for allowing us the opportunity to provide our input our next speaker is nadine elloria followed by stan bates nadine are you on the line nadine is not on the line so our next speaker is stan bates followed by ann ender stan are you on the line can you hear me yes we can thank you please proceed good afternoon mayor gallego and peace council members my name is stan bates and i've lived in phoenix for over 40 years i want to take a couple moments and express my families and my support for the phoenix police department i can give several pages of information that some of you might similarly dismiss because it does not meet the agenda you are trying to force through on the citizens of phoenix however i do want to point out one thing that needs to be crystal clear to everyone the number one priority of every government official whether they be elected appointed or hired that priority needs to be the protection and safety of each of the citizens that reside in your city nothing is of higher priority or importance your police department is the only defense that most of your citizens have protecting them from increasing violence that is occurring within the borders of the city of phoenix ironically the districts where the reduction calls are coming from appear to be those plagued by increasing calls for service especially with violent crimes response time for all services have increased dramatically but are most evident in the priority one calls for life or death incidents are taking place we cannot afford to lose any more officer positions in fact need to vastly increase the number of officers to protect our citizens to be in line with communities of similar size above population square mileage in the 40 years i've lived in phoenix i've lived in some in several of the various districts and for each of you to please vote to save our police force and not to reduce any of the police staffing perhaps a saner approach on how to deal with this matter should be to have those districts that wish to reduce the number of police officers to voluntarily allow those officer positions to transfer to other districts where their services are most appreciated thank you for listening to my thoughts and i pray and i pray that police staffing levels are not reduced thank you our next speaker is ann ender followed by gabriel espinoza ann are you on the line i am can you hear me yes we can thank you please proceed yes thank you mayor gallego vice mayor garcia and council members i think by now you know that i'm annender and i'm the president of operation blue ribbon but i'm grateful to be and proud to be a first generation native phoenician and like my third fourth et cetera generation friends and colleagues i do truly care about the future of our city i don't think i can say anything as well as mr bates just did so maybe i can save us some time other than to say if we don't have safe communities we how do we attract businesses to the city of phoenix in 1955 motorola semiconductor division shows the valley of the sun as a nearly ideal location to manufacture semiconductor products among those qualifiers were that the availability of skilled employees and the major draw was the excellent living conditions well what happens to our living conditions if they aren't excellent and that part of the reason for that is because we don't have a full fully staffed police force and a supportive police force so i just want to put out there respectfully to be prepared for economic impacts if we don't staff our police department and have safe neighborhoods or be prepared for the loss of revenue as businesses revolt and refuse to pay their taxes because of the crime affecting them such as some of the businesses and restaurants in baltimore are you prepared for revenues lost due to the exodus of long-time deeply rooted residents because of the escalation of crime well i don't want to be one of those leaving phoenix but i have to see that our city government supports the police department if we don't we don't find qualified candidates that we can retain recruit and retain so during the meet these meetings we've heard many times several the council members expressed their gratitude for um oh no thank you [Music] our next speaker is gabriel espinoza followed by cynthia graber gabriel are you on the line yes can you hear me yes we can thank you please proceed uh hi uh my name is gabriel espinosa i'm speaking in regards to a youth basketball program called pal elite basketball that is ran by officer carl of the phoenix police department it's a youth program that's ran by the police department my son jacob espinoza has currently been playing for paul lee basketball for over two years i'm retired due to a disability and my source of income is disability ssi uh for there to be a opportunity for my son to play for a team like pal basketball is tremendously vital you know for my son to reach his basketball goals because families like me with my type of income just can't afford all the other you know high-end club teams my son has been playing competitive competitive basketball since age six i have close to nine years experience in coaching myself uh and i'll tell you power basketball really gives so much to the kids they organize properly they teach proper fundamentals coaches implementing life skills players play on a highly competitive platform with college scouting exposure players having the opportunity to travel with an unbelievable support system from the coaches of the players thanks to officer uh carl and coach dev and pal basketball my son received an offer to play college basketball at park university he's a schedule for a campus visit next week so uh i really highly support keeping pal basketball in your budget and running officer carl is doing a tremendous job with this program he's really running it the right way organizing it coordinating it properly and uh it's it's budgeted and funded through uh the phoenix police department so i highly support you guys keep fellow basketball running and that's what i have to say about this budget matter our next speaker is cynthia graber followed by jose guzman cynthia are you on the line yes can you hear me yes we can thank you please proceed perfect thank you mayor council members and city staff thank you for putting together a well-researched budget i am 100 in support of this budget and all funding related to public safety i am a fourth generation native and i care about making phoenix better for generations to come we are the fifth largest city let's make phoenix an example for all america and city councils and show how teamwork exemplifies progress our team mayor council staff and phoenix residents 100 support and back our phoenix police department and all public safety let's become a city that every other city strives to be and that is united let's do what is best for all 1.7 million phoenix residents and keep phoenix safe phoenix will grow and prosper when we all work together for the benefit of our great city one more thing go phoenix suns win thank you our next speaker is jose guzman followed by james hill jose are you on the line jose is not on the line so our next speaker is james hill followed by caroline lobo james are you on the line james is not on the line our next speaker is caroline lobo followed by aj marsden caroline are you on the line caroline are you on the line we do not have any audio for caroline so our next speaker is aj marston followed by frank steinmetz aj are you on the line hello yes uh hello to all who are actually listening this third vote will pass like the second vote and i support the budget the majority of phoenix residents are community engaged yet not always civically engaged but day after day for years your constituents have been voting for police funding support and partnership by their actions every community meeting block party coffee with a cop and clean up is a vote with their time your community engaged constituents and our officers keep your districts safe think about your message to all these engaged constituents and officers about their safety when you fund support and partner with our police we are very thankful think about your message to criminals if you defund disrespect and distance yourself from our police the criminals are very pleased our officers are all over phoenix protecting your constituents right now you know our officers who arrest people who do crazy things while driving and kill people with their cars steal murder others our officers arrest people who molest and abuse kids sell drugs assault others abuse animals steal ids stalk and traffic girls you know our officers who respond to our calls for service watch before the badge facebook segments to learn about some of our officers we need more officers let's ensure phoenix is a city where police applicants want to come to and protect us yeah a few budget items might not align with your goals but we all need protection from criminals your constituents visitors and our officers deserve police funding support and partnership let's ensure phoenix is a city where police applicants want to come to and protect us and if i have time i always end by saying i'd be happy to talk more about these ideas with anyone willing to chat and that phoenix pd and communications are hiring thank you our next speaker is frank steinmetz followed by jeff tesot frank are you on the line frank are you on the line yes can you hear me yes we can thank you please proceed thank you for passing this funding now i have to change my presentation having served in public office very similar to you council members 52 years ago i was told that the swearing-in of my primary function was to work for the safety and well-being of the entire community not just my election area is that not what each of you are supposed to be doing we're the fifth largest city in the nation yet we rank 14th in the police officers for 10 000 population even if we were to reach the 3125 officers approved in this current budget we would still rank about 11th in officers versus the current population let alone the future population increases our caos and multi officer multi-housing officer levels especially need more staff as they are far below what they should be to meet the needs of all communities if you ever work closely with a cao or multi-housing officer just think what your community would be like if they had 15 or 20 cio multi-housing officers working in your community if you ever if you never worked with a cao or multi-housing officer i highly recommend you spend four to five days at a minimum with these officers then sit back and honestly decide their value to your community thank you for approving this budget so we can at least get the 3125 officers then we can work on raising that level of 4 000 officers after all it is for the safety of the entire city which you are responsible for thank you stay safe and stay healthy our next speaker is jeff tissot followed by darlene vallo jeff are you on the line jeff is not on the line so our next speaker is darlene vallo followed by tom white darlene are you on the line darlene is not on the line our next speaker is tom white followed by charisse dickerson tom are you on the line yes i am everybody that isn't on the line is in agreement with me that you're doing great on this budget i thank you all for everything that you do it's not easy uh just driving in today you could tell the need for more police officers because of the people that passed you at 70 75 miles an hour or the people that tailgated you all the way in and the officers are doing other higher priority things than traffic patrol and we need people in that area for safety and i again i thank you for all you do it's everything's been said before but again thank you and i do support this our next speaker is cherie stickerson followed by maria garcia cherise are you on the line maurice is not on the line so our next speaker is maria garcia followed by kim garner maria are you on the line maria is not on the line our next speaker is kim garner followed by barbara jennings kim are you on the line kim is not on the line our next speaker is barbara jennings followed by pam civili barbara are you on the line i am can you hear me yes we can thank you please proceed yes thank you for taking the time to listen to my message i'm just calling because i want to reiterate what so many people said as far as funding the police we need to fund the police and we need to stop trying to defund the police every other week this has to stop we have other states and other cities that we can look to to see what happens when you defund the police especially when we have a mass amount of illegal immigrants coming through our borders we have detention facilities being set up in our neighborhoods this is not the time to even consider defunding the police i hike every week at pasqua peak and i've seen cop cars every time trying to recruit people to be policemen if you do not get behind our police they aren't going to want to come they aren't not going to want to serve in phoenix if they do not have the support from phoenix city council and from our government and i don't blame them this has been a hellish year for our policemen they are undervalued and it is very sad and it's time to change that it's time to respect our police understand how they risk their lives every day and we have to stop putting this on the agenda to defund the police if anything like so many people said we need to fund the police we need more policemen now more than ever especially due to the border crisis we have going on right now so i appreciate that you passed this budget keeping all their funding but this has to stop this has to stop defunding the police should not be considered at all anymore thank you our next speaker is pam civili followed by lavelle lewis pam are you on the line yes thank you very much i appreciate being able to speak before this group because i know running a large organization especially a city is tremendously huge's phoenix is incredibly complicated with a lot of decisions to make and never enough money but i strongly agree in pretty much every way with the people have spoken before me that having a strong police force having enough staffing having clear support of the this this representative body here transform the city i know that for example my daughter went to school in university in st louis and it was appalling to see how little the police were able to do to to manage crime um people had to carry their own weapons and defense dogs for personal safety in any area of the city and still there was a really high rate of crime so that's just my own little small personal testimony and the last thing i want us to see is to go down a path like that for phoenix because safety affects every single one of us especially those you know who can't afford those extra measures for personal safety that some people can so this is especially for let's say the middle class the newer residents and more anyway sorry i don't want to get too wordy but definitely please fund the police thank you very much our next speaker is lavelle lewis followed by amanda mccauley lavelle are you on the line yes i am can you hear me yes we can thank you please proceed okay thank you um i want to thank everyone for just giving me an opportunity to speak before you all and i have been a resident of phoenix my whole adult life and i'm calling on behalf of the power program as well i'm a flawed single father with a couple boys and i have a temp job right now or i work in human services and hopefully i'll be fired on full-time and with benefits but i say all that to say this my uh funding is limited for me to keep my boys engaged in activities such as basketball at the next level and just to have them do something productive um hell's been like a godsend for us and i know there's other representatives that are in the community that i live in in south phoenix that would share the same sentiment but aren't on this call either they're working or doing other things but i hope hopefully speak for them as well because i talk to the parents at the games and and we talk about how meaningful how has been to us and i i think just with the already fragile morale um with relationship between law enforcement and the community to get rid of something that's working to kind of bridge that gap between law enforcement and um the community speaking specifically for south uh phoenix which is not necessarily known to have the greatest relationship with law enforcement uh would be a shame to lose that um officer carl has been amazing um to my son and and other uh african-american males i'm a black male uh that aren't necessarily trusting of police uh he's build rapport with all of us and uh has our trust and i would it'd be ashamed for that uh by the way site that's my time in thank you for hearing me out mayor lavelle was our final speaker on this item thank you wonderful thank you all for the important testimony on our budget we will close the public hearing council member comments councilwoman o'brien thank you so much mayor first i want to thank the staff here at the city in all the different departments who put so much time and effort into creating this budget my office has received well over 200 emails and phone calls asking us not to defund the police and to oppose the budget however i want to make this very clear i do not support reducing or defending our public safety officers this budget as proposed does not defund the police there has been some misinformation passing around claiming the current budget will cut or fully defund the police this simply is inaccurate in fact this budget actually provides more funding to our public safety department in addition civilian positions created for the expansion of the community assistance program which will work to provide properly trained responders to de-escalate situations where police officers may not be involved i will be supporting the budget as written so that our police force can continue to receive the funding they need in order to keep our neighborhoods and communities safe as well as to actually recruit more officers in order to maintain the recommended 2.5 officers per thousand residence requirement this budget also helps to address early childhood education attainment for our most vulnerable communities i believe a proper education for every child is the first step to raising phoenix to the standards i know we can achieve this budget also allocates necessary funding to help address our homeless population and works to create regional solutions with our neighboring municipalities to ensure our city doesn't bear the brunt of helping these people this budget also provides necessary funds to our transit department which connects citizens our citizens across the city i hope to work closely with them over the next year to develop new route routes into the northern part of the city once again i want to thank everyone who put all their time and effort into creating this budget thank you mayor thank you councilman o'brien any additional council questions comments or questions councilwoman pastor i just want to i want to appreciate all the work that has done been done with the staff on the budget but in particular also in the water conservation area as we worked really hard with the community and experts within the community to build their water conservation plan and are able then now to move it through so thank you thank you councilman and thank you for your leadership of our water conservation committee that helped make today's investments possible that is going to be on our mind during this uh difficult summer from a drought perspective today's budget is very exciting it brings forward a significant compensation increase for all of our city employees it recognizes that we have to work hard to develop a top-tier city and we're going to continue to make the investments that has made phoenix such an exciting and dynamic and desirable place to live we want every person to feel safe and respected and the budget makes investments that allow that to happen we also know that having a safe place to call home is very valuable and the budget again makes strategic investments to move that agenda forward we're working to protect our environment and climate and finally as i've said many times before the fastest way to recover from covet 19 is to invest in public health we are doing that today it's a balanced budget that addresses those priorities in a way that is responsible and effective i am particularly excited about the 15 million dollars we are investing in the community assistance program will help make sure that clinicians including social workers can be there responding to 9-1-1 calls and helping find proactive solutions in our community it's a real leadership investment that we are making in the city of phoenix and we're excited to see a very successful program grow even further we are also moving forward with the office of heat response and mitigation which will help phoenix again be a leader in responding to climate change we're going to be planting trees climate solutions it really is exciting what this office has the potential to do thank you to our city staff for their work on the budget we had a tough year but we are moving forward to create a stronger safer smarter city and i'm looking forward to supporting this vote roll call i'm sorry decision no guardado o'brien yes pasteur dark yes dark yes wearing uh mayor i'd like to explain my vote uh in the last uh 24 hours i've had occasion spent a lot of time with our police officers both from the black mountain precinct and one from desert horizon i just appreciate the passion that they bring to the job how many hours uh they dedicated myself and constituents who were with me we were doing this on their behalf i'm voting no because i don't think this budget does enough for police even though those who have said this isn't cutting police are correct i still would like to see more done and the budget includes oat and i find that objectionable as well as some other things that were added i appreciate the staff effort i think they did the best they could with uh the way the uh i guess the politics shaped out but i i think we could do better and so i both know thank you garcia no diego yes passes 6-3 thank you item 34 is the adoption of the final 2021-22 capital funds budget do we have a motion here i move that item 34 bean ordnance s slash 47690 the final 20 21 22 capital funds budget be adopted thank you any comments the clerk will call the role mayor if i could just ask before you vote on this one just a technical thing there's a slight delay in the audio so if when when you all are hitting your unmute button if you could hit that wait just a second and then give the clerk your vote it'll make it easier for us to hear sometimes if they're done too quickly we're not catching it so that's part of our struggle over here thank you i'm sorry yes the cco yes yes thank you yes o'brien yes pastor stark yes waring garcia yes gallego yes this is 8-1 item 35 is the adoption of the final 2021-22 reappropriated funds budget mayor i move that item 35 being ordinance s slash 47662 the final 20 21 22 reappropriated funds budget be adopted second thank you we have a motion and a second any discussion the clerk will call the role yes o'brien yes pastor stark yes wearing garcia yes gallego yes passes 9-0 thank you that concludes the business of our special meeting mayor i move the city council adjourn the special meeting second we have a motion and a second any discussion voice vote all those in favor please say aye aye aye the against say nay the special meeting is adjourned i hereby declare that the special meeting is concluded and we reconvene the regular phoenix city council meeting items 36 and 37 are legally required amendments to the current 2021 budget allowing the city to close out the current fiscal year's budgetary accounts and proceed with the annual independent audit item 36 which we will take first amends the 2020 2021 annual operating funds budget to authorize reallocating appropriations mayor i move that item 36 being ordnance s slash 46715 the required real location of the 2021 2020 21 operating budget appropriations be adopted we have a motion and a second we do have one member of the public to address the council on the reappropriated or the annual operating funds budget maria cruz the floor is yours mayor it appears that she is no longer on the line wonderful thank you any discussion will the clerk please call the role i'm sorry yes decisio yes yes o'brien f pasteur yes stark yes waring garcia yes yes passes 9-0 item 37 amends the 2020-2021 capital funds budget to authorize reallocating appropriations mayor i move that item 37 being ordnance s slash 46716 the required reallocation of the 2020 21 capital funds budget be adopted yes okay we have a motion and a second any discussion roll call i'm sorry to cecio yes yes o'brien pasteur garcia yes gallego passes 9-0 thank you all who've been involved with this important budget process we next move to item 38 which is the adoption of the proposed update to a pension plan's funding policy we will have a presentation on this item and i will welcome our chief financial officer denise olson thank you mayor members of the council we're here today to present a pension strategy for the city of phoenix i want to start off with some background information as you know we've got two pension plans the first one we refer to as psprs and that is for a public safety personnel the second plan that we are responsible for paying into is our copers plan and that covers our city of phoenix civilian personnel as you know per state law it requires us to adopt an annual pension funding policy every single year in this policy it's important for us to acknowledge our assets of the plan our liabilities of the plan and the net pension liabilities of the plan this needs to be posted on our website for transparency purposes on july 1st the funding policy per law is only applied to psprs however the city council of the last two years has adopted a policy for both pension plans i want to talk a little bit about why this is important so as the cfo for the city of phoenix over the last five years i will tell you that this is the most critical and challenging issues and moody's a rating agency agrees with us they have us on a negative outlook which means they can downgrade us at any moment the reasons that we're on a negative outlook is because our pension costs continue to increase and it really is crowding out our ability to provide essential services if you look at what our annual pension payments were in 2014 they amounted to 238 million dollars if you look at what we paid in 2019-20 that amount is now 403 million dollars again this is our annual required contribution payments for both pension plans so i want to talk about the funding status of our pension plans if you look at psprs for the police you can see that the funded percent which means this is how much we have paid into funding the entire plan we are only at 40 well actually 39 percent if you look at fire we are a little bit better at 40 percent funded again the goal is to be 100 funded if you look at our copers plan we see an upward trend in recent years and that is currently at 60 percent funded we have compared ourselves to other u.s cities and the median is 71 percent funded now i want to just focus on the copper strategy so as i stated earlier it's important for us to acknowledge our assets our liabilities of the plan which then amount to our unfunded liability which in copers amounts to 1.7 billion dollars that amounts to a funded percentage ratio of 60.74 percent again the goal is to be 100 funded i showed you this earlier but this adds on a trajectory of where we think this plan is going to end and you can see that copers is on its way to being 100 funded some of the things that have helped this plan recently is that we have been able to free up some cash from our enterprise funds to make large payments into this plan and help pay down the liability one of those funds was our wastewater fund and we are currently looking at paying down the pension liability for the aviation department over the next two years so staff is proposing our copers policy which is very similar to last year that again we pay 100 percent of our annual required contributions this again is required by state law we also will continue to look at opportunities to use our enterprise funds such as aviation and water to find opportunities to pay down the pension liabilities for those departments and we will also continue to look at excess funds that could could go towards pensions at the end of each fiscal year with this pension strategy in copers we can be 100 funded by 2039 and 80 percent funded in 2029 i will pause here for the mayor and council to consider the copper's policy mayor yes councilwoman stark yes i i'm going to declare a conflict on this it's a potential conflict i am a member of the cop ers so i think we probably need to take separate votes thank you perfect we will do that mayor vice mayor i want to make a motion to approve staff recommendation to adopt the annual copers pension funding strategy thank you so much vice mayor and councilwoman pastor noting that councilwoman stark will not be participating in this item do council members have comments on the copers pension funding strategy portion of item 38. all right so this will be a roll call on the motion for the annual copers funding pension strategy will the staff please call the roll i'm sorry my wall i'm sorry yes thank you to cecio yes yes o'brien yes pastor yes wearing did you hear me i did not i apologize oh yes thank you garcia yes vallejo passes eight zero thank you do we have additional slides in the presentation yes thank you mayor and city council i would like to move on to addressing the second pension plan which is psprs so on psprs again i want to highlight our assets our liabilities and our unfunded liability which amounts to 3.2 billion dollars for psprs we are only 39.81 percent funded i want to highlight what we approved last year with the city council approved last year for psprs policy the first one is again we have to pay 100 of our annual required contributions we also want to and i'm going to take you down to the third line we also want to make sure that we're paying this liability off over a 25-year period we want to determine if well the next thing i take you down to the second to last line which is we want to continue to maintain a pension stabilization fund currently we have 41 million dollars in that fund and with those three items will be a hundred percent funded by 2042. also in last year's policy we committed to the council that we would look at any additional revenues and specifically what we looked at this year was the result of proposition 207 which is the increase in marijuana revenues from taxation that was voter approved the second thing that we wanted to look at is the impacts of the pension plan is if we issued pension obligation bonds and so we've completed that analysis and are bringing it forward to you today for your consideration i am now going to turn this on marijuana here we go councilwoman pestor denise can you go back to slide 12 or 13 i don't know i think it's 12. um in the results right there where it says continue to support pension stabilization fund currently at 41 million what are we reaching towards what will it will be the final a dollar amount that it stabilized mayor members of the council councilman pastor thank you for that question right now it's at 41 million dollars and we think that that is a fund balance at app that is adequate again the purpose of this stabilization fund is to make sure that if there's any shocking increases in the annual required contribution payment from one year to the next we can use that fund to supplement that increase versus making cuts to existing programs and mayor can i have another question uh please continue councilman pastor so you're saying cuts to to uh programs would it really be cuts to programs or would it be more of it taking away from the general fund um as surplus are you saying we would we would cut programs mayor members of the council what i'm saying is we would use the pension stabilization fund for any increases in the annual required contribution payments to avoid any kind of decreases in the general fund budget but that would be part of the budget process at the council's discretion at that time got it that's what i needed to know thank you and that the largest portion of the revenue 51 percent is already allocated by statute of public safety there's another 25 percent expected to be generated by the regular city sales tax then we have 7 percent coming from the shared revenues and 17 percent that's allocated to highway user revenue fund the first two components the public safety allocation and the city direct sales tax the general fund portion of that could be used to pay down the psprs unfunded liability the other two components were not considered because of the difficulty in separating out the marijuana portion from total shared revenues and because of the use restriction on highway user revenue fund so if you look at those two pieces and council chooses to use the public safety allocation and the city's general fund direct sales tax to pay down psprs and this would be extra this would be an in addition to the actuarial calculated annual contribution amount be a credit positive to the rating agencies because it would assist us in achieving eighty percent funded status one year earlier this would also ease pension related burden burdens by lowering overall pension costs percent now if you compare that to 2000 the average taxable rate back in 2000 was 7.4 percent so the number one criticism of pension obligation bonds that if you sell these bonds put the proceeds into the pension system and then the pension system doesn't earn more than the interest rate that you're paying on those bonds the system will be worse off so if we had issued bonds in 2000 at seven point four percent and psprs is expecting a 30 percent you can see that there's that the price that we issued the bonds for would have been high and if you compare that to the seven or seven point three percent that psprs is expecting to earn that gap is much larger thereby lowering the risks associated with issuing pension obligation bonds and i want to talk a little bit more about those risks because one of the things that was really important for us is to heed all our warnings and all our benchmarks and make sure that we mitigated against risks when we were analyzing this and these benchmarks that i'm going to talk about are right in line with the cautions that gfoa outlines for reasons not to do pension obligation bonds so the first one the rate of return might fail to earn more than the interest owed and that's what i was talking about on the previous slide your gap is widen and you mitigate against the risk that you're not going to earn enough in the pension fund another caution they may contain complex and risky financial instruments okay the city has never issued complex finance financially risky instruments and we wouldn't do that now issuing bonds increased the outstanding debt and uses up capacity for other purposes this is true and it's one of the big considerations when we looked at this we wouldn't recommend funding the entire three billion dollar pension liability instead we're recommending that we we fund only about a billion of that extended amortization periods the city has no intention of extending the amortization period right now we're on a 25-year amortization period on the pension liability and we would not issue pension obligation bonds higher than that that period of time rating agencies are neutral this is really important because we leverage our credits quite often for the entire infrastructure of our are not impacting our credit ratings and we believe that this transaction will actually be positive to the rating agencies that that on the next slide and then finally one of one of our major cautions that we look at because this has been done many times in the past by many municipalities is utilizing pension obligation bonds for budget relief so again we're recommending that we don't do that that we take the savings and instead of programming it that we put it back into the psprs pension system mayor i have a question on that councilwoman stark thank you how would we ensure that because i want to make sure anything if we go down this this route and i do think we need to explore it i do think maybe before we decide to do it come back for another commending that you do that today when we come back with a bond ordinance we would recommend it at that time today we're just seeking a policy in which um criteria would have to exist in order for us to consider issuing so mayor council just just to clarify so today's vote would set a policy we think staff's recommendation for you would be for the policy to say that you would use uh savings to be applied to the pension plan to specifically and legally make that the case as kathleen explained that would be a part of a vote to authorize the issuance of the bonds which would happen at a later date so today would be the policy statement and the actual execution of a b would be at a later date okay thank you thank you mayor thanks for that clarification thank you councilwoman stark councilwoman pastor so what i just heard was this vote would be a policy statement when i thought and i thought this is more of an exploratory to look at this and then it would be brought back to us as what the possibilities would be but i'm hearing we're voting for a policy councilman pastor i think it it actually is a is how you described it though the the pension policy would be the pension policy staff is recommending would be to ex based on the criteria and kathleen will show those in a minute to pursue pension obligation bonds and use any savings from them to be applied to the pension that's a policy to actually go and issue bonds we would return to the council at a meeting explain what that is and and lay that out and then the council at that point would vote whether we would actually go to issue the bonds or not is that helpful um kinda oh it's helpful for me making my choice okay thank you okay so the policy is we are going to uh pursue it but to actually execute it would take another vote of the council with specific detail about that actual transaction so we couldn't go to the market based on the policy we could only go to the market after another vote of the council great move on to the next slide so this is the explanation of the savings that that i want to talk about as far as what we think the rating agencies would show as a positive so this tan line going across the top here is our pension costs what our pension costs would be if we just trudged along as usual status quo and we didn't issue any kind of pension obligation bonds so then if we issued a billion dollars worth of pension obligation bonds and we put that billion dollars into the pension the pension system the psprs pension system these blue bars are these light green bars that you see coming across um would be the cost for the pension and so you can see there's a gap between that tan line and those green lines and that would be the savings and so the blue bars represent the savings that would be generated by issuing a billion dollars worth of pension obligation bonds and putting them into the system and so what we're recommending is that we take those blue the savings in those blue bars and put them back into the psprs system and i'll show you what that that means to the system on the next slide so here again if you look at the tan line this is status quo this is not doing anything not issuing any pension obligation bonds we really need this plan to be at 80 percent currently as denise mentioned it's at 40 and so we expect that if we do nothing it'll be at eighty percent by 2038. if we issue a billion dollars of pension obligation bonds that's the red bar that i just brought in um we could expect to be at 80 percent funded by 2036. so two years sooner by issuing the pension obligation bonds and this is what most municipalities have done this is what we've seen across our state recently but what we're suggesting is that we could take it one step further and we add the savings into the psprs plan and that would get us to 80 funded by 2035 so three years sooner in total by using that savings and then when you add the marijuana attack marijuana revenue that we talked about earlier you can get to 80 funded by 2034. councilwoman pastor can you clarify uh for me it's only one million and not three i mean one billion not three billion correct okay thank you but and my question is why why only 1 billion if we're going to go down this road by only 1 billion mayor members of the council so we did extensive analysis where we did stress testing we've been looking at this for many years really it comes down to that caution that i mentioned earlier about capacity and making sure that we're not taking capacity away from the city's ability to construct major infrastructure and so we looked at what those credits could sustain and this would be on our excise tax credit and so a billion dollars is something that we felt we could sustain and still continue growth within the city it's also a number that we think psprs would be able to handle very easily as far as absorbing into the system and getting it invested and working for us thank you so today staff is proposing a policy for psprs and what i'm going to do is i'm going to break this into three different sections to make it easier for discussion for the mayor and city council so the first part of the policy that we want to address is basically the same thing that we've done consistently over the last two years and that is we want to stress that we want to pay our annual required contribution payments every single year at a hundred percent the second thing is we want to make sure that we continue on paying down this liability over 25-year amortization period we want to continue to support the pension stabilization fund which is currently at 41 million dollars and if we follow these these strategies we should be 80 percent funded by 2038 and 100 percent funded by 2042 and i will pause there for consideration or no i won't i will continue to roll we'll keep rolling so the second thing or the second area of consideration by uh the mayor and the city council is addressing the marijuana tax revenues what we're proposing is that we incorporate all of the marijuana tax revenues that we receive from the public safety allocation and also all the revenues that we receive for the city's general fund direct sales tax portion and apply that to the pension plan again we think that by dedicating these revenues to pay down psprs would be a huge factor with our rating agencies and give us enough tools to fight that negative outlook from moody's the third area that we would like your consideration in terms of the strategy is is developing a framework for issuing pension obligation bonds we thought that it was very very important to make sure that we set a criteria and had an overall strategy that was involved in paying down our pension liability when it comes to issuing pension obligation bonds and by putting these criteria around when we would issue this if we were to issue pension obligation bonds we think that gives us a better chance to really minimize the risk that are associated with these pension obligation bonds so to minimize the risk we are saying that we would only issue pension obligation bonds if we could achieve rates under 3.5 percent only if we can take the savings and apply it to psprs and only if the rating agencies came in as neutral saying that they would not have any negative impacts on our existing ratings and so with that that is what the staff is recommending for the psprs strategy for 2022 thank you denise vice mayor thank you i have some questions before and make a motion um if we could look back at the what we had up there before um [Music] can we put that back up thank you and so i'm comfortable with with one and three i have questions around number two and then the city general fund direct sales tax um do we know either how much the public safety allocation or the city's general fund direct sales tax would be or do we have a sense of how much that would be thank you mayor vice mayor what we are projecting right now and again we are this is an estimate but if we look at three years when this has been fully fully implemented we're anticipating that from the public safety allocation we could receive about 20 12 well 11.5 million dollars from the city and i think what i'll do is i'll pull up this dollar bill real quick from the city general fund direct sells the 25 we think that we're going to be able to receive about 1.2 to 2 million dollars and from the other two areas we're looking at a total of about five million dollars so from the 25 1.2 but the 7 and 17 which is the same because we get bigger percentage or how does that make sense the amounts i'm sorry so let's i just want to make sure i'm being clear so on the public safety portion which is the 51 we're anticipating that we could get 12 million dollars for a year on the city's general fund direct sales tax the 25 we're thinking we could get approximately 5.6 million a year half of that would be applied to the general fund which would amount to about 2.3 million a year and then we also have the state revenue at 0.7 percent which is about 1.5 million and we have the herf allocation which we're anticipating to be about 3.9 million so the total amount that we anticipate receiving would be about 22.5 million dollars but that can also be higher or lower correct absolutely these are these are guesses based on very limited data so one of the things and i want to ask staff if this is possible or if we can do this is it's hard for me to make a decision right now with it being guesses especially with the the city's general fund tax that can be used for other things um i understand the 51 so wondering if we can do something where it either goes to the general fund uh while we know how much this is or if we pass as you're recommending now but get an opportunity to decide or bring this back once we know the exact number does that make sense and i don't know if that's the question of chris what makes more sense is there a way to move with this plan but once a number is determined that we have an opportunity to look at it again when we have real numbers in front of us uh mayor vice mayor i think that's that's a we're we're looking at each other trying to puzzle through it here i think if i broke it down i would say the the 51 number that denise identified as 12 million that by law has to go to psp to public safety so i think at a minimum if the council would dedicate that that amount that public safety allocation from the state surcharge that comes to phoenix will go to psprs that's kind of the foundational piece of it then what i hear you asking is is there a way to identify over time what is that that 25 bar going to actually represent so that the council can evaluate uh what you want to do with that amount of money i think you could certainly make that part of a policy it's a policy direction uh there the the most important piece is definitively setting the psprs chunk at the public safety allocation as psprs denise anything to add on that that's correct okay yeah no that makes sense to me i just again without knowing the exact numbers like i think i could formulate it into a motion um and it's my understanding that we need three motions so it's okay with you mayor i'll start with the first one if i can just before you do that counsel if i just add vice mayor at one other thing the reason why we're recommending the general fund sales tax go to it and again this is our recommendation you guys make the policy but the more funding we can put to psprs early on the more impact and more effective it is so so in the ideal financial world for psprs having that entire amount go to it is a good thing uh for bringing that psp rs liability down now the council has to decide you know you have to balance a whole bunch of things but our our recommendation is to try and get as much money as the council can can stand towards psprs and that's why we recommended that second piece that direct sell that sales tax piece to it so i just wanted to clarify the reason for the recommendation yeah so but absolutely mayor yeah if i could just continue with vice mayor yeah just one last question so ed right now we're assuming it's 11 million on the public safety allocation but it could it could if cells are are greater than than what we're thinking could potentially be 13 15 up to 20 or however much more all i'm saying is there a way for us to look at this decision once we have those hard numbers in front of us instead of committing at it committing to it now so let's say right now you're saying if we give both of these buckets to ps prs and you're assuming that that's a 14 million dollar kind of combined commitment that we're making to that but when we get the real numbers isn't it true that just the public safety allocation could even be north of that number therefore either freeing up or if we want to you know pay it down faster we can definitely come back later and allocate those funds so just that's what i'm saying it makes it difficult to to make the full commitment now not knowing those hard numbers and we could even be in a better place than we're thinking now if if the numbers are greater and and the same for it if it's lower and then we have to think about maybe increasing from somewhere else yeah it could be better it could be worse as i'm listening to you one thing that you could consider would be on the city's sales tax side is to do that in arrears so you you go the whole year see what that number is and then bring it to the council for a decision about what to do with that money you know i'd say up front say that the public safety allocation is going there and if you wanted to go the direction you're suggesting vice mayor we could have the policy say that we're going to hold the city sales tax amount and review it at the end of the year for a specific decision by the council on that portion i don't know if denise is going to kill me for saying that or not so the only thing i would add to this conversation and i just have to do it is i just want to remind the council that last year our annual required contribution payment was 402 million dollars the budget for this year is 486 million dollars and so we are seeing significant increases in our pension contribution and again we have to pay that per state law so the more money that we can put towards paying down this pension liability the better off we were going to be in the long run especially if we hit a downturn in the economy that we will make anything work because because i will take anything rather than nothing it is a little bit of the uh like the recommendation that a financial advisor would give you personally which is when you get a raise put a portion of that into savings or investments because it's money you're not used to yet and so so the rationale here is the general fund's not used to this sales tax so before we get used to it take it you're not cutting anything take it and put it into that that that's the the philosophy of of the recommendation from staff thank you we'll go to councilwoman pastor and then councilman decisio so uh denise what i heard and i think it's the second slide but i'm not sure i heard 12 million would go 12 million is allocated i think i don't know what the percentage is i didn't write it down um can you move to that slide thank you so 51 is going into psprs and then what i heard was 5.6 million would be going into approximately that's the 25 the jet cities general fund direct sales tax did i hear that correctly yes councilman you did but i would like to make a clarification here just so that we're being very clear um the 51 percent has to go to towards public safety we're recommending that we put it toward psprs and paying down the liability now the 25 percent there's 5.6 that's being um that's being collected from the 2.3 sales tax what we're saying is we would like to apply only the amount that goes to the general fund which is about 2.3 million and so that slides a little confusing and i apologize for that so of the city's sales tax 1.2 percent it's a it's a 2.3 rate 1.2 percent of that rate is the general fund and then there's a tenth of a percent for parks seven tenths of a percent for transit and transportation and three tenths of a percent for public safety prop 301 and and the others yes because that is confusing because i heard different things i heard 5.6 when we first 25 percent would go to the general fund direct tax sale that's 25 then when we started to break it down 5.6 million is from that area but then i heard 1.75 or half i don't know where i'm getting half i wrote it down but of that 1.6 then we'll we'll go to psprs towards the liability and then another portion is going into the general fund am i hearing that correctly so let me just try one more time so the 25 is going to collect 5.6 million dollars that's our estimate that's for our entire tax base of that entire tax base only 1.2 percent goes to the general fund and that is what we're recommending we take from the general fund and use it for psprs the rest of it is voter approved taxes and will go to the voter approved allocated funds such as 3pi block watch and transit okay so now okay i think i have it i think i'm clear out of the 5.6 million you are asking for 1.2 from the general fund the rest of the 5.6 million that is left goes to the general fund that is that was in the ballot uh and voter approved such as parks and everything else is that what i'm hearing yes yes that's correct and why the 1.2 percent so the way i view this is that is the discretionary amount that we can use for basically for council's discretion the rest of it is voter approved and we really can't allocate those dollars so so okay so so i'm trying to process this in my head uh so that 1.2 percent is discretionary so as a council we could determine a percentage that could go to psprs and that could go uh to the general fund if i'm hearing that correctly that's correct that's correct yes that's the policy decision of the council you identified it exactly councilwoman okay any additional questions councilwoman one more one more what happens if it's additional there is additional dollars more than the 1.2 percent does that come back to council i don't think it would be there wouldn't be additional dollars above the 1.2 percent it would be if the one point two percent number is more than denise and kathleen projected but the policy is the same that's what i mean the cash number if it's more than whatever the 1.2 i don't have my calculator right here and figure it out but the 1.2 percent um if we generate or there's uh money's generated say six seven then how is that determined it would depend on your policy so if the policy was just simply to put that general fund portion which is what we're calling the 1.2 percent towards psprs then whatever is collected we would just send to psprs if your policy was specific to say we want to cap the amount of of that for it let's say it 3 million and we collected more than the 3 million then we would come back you're just getting into very complicated calculations in that but but that's possible in that case i guess i would say you'd be better off just saying a policy of we're going to put half of the 1.2 percent collection into psprs and not worry about what that number is rather than saying we're going to put a dollar amount on it but right i think there needs well go ahead i'm sorry i'm out uh thank you councilwoman pastor we'll next go to councilman decisio oh thank you mayor uh the plan that's presented by the city staff is probably the least uh fiscally responsible plan that i would support any weakening of that i wouldn't and so let me explain to you why at least from my perspective the reason staff is in their nicest way to say this is that if we don't handle these things in the way that they presented by putting these monies toward paying down the debt we're going to be screwed in the future as a city and the reason pension obligation bonds that have done in the past you'll see some cities that have been able to make it and been very successful at it and then other cities have failed at it and they've lost really their rear ends on it and the reason why is that they did not set in place fiscal measures and fiscal ways of handling the those additional dollars coming in they started using it for everything else so debt pension debt is no different and this is for the viewing public i know everyone up here knows it but pension debt is no different than a bad credit card or a credit card that has gone out of whack and the only way and the only way to bring it down is to a you can refinance it to a lower rate if you can if your pen if you're uh if your weight if your uh credit standing is strong enough or you start paying down monies and if you don't put those monies toward that pension debt or that credit card then it continues to compound compound interest is massive and that is what hurts and that's what how people make a lot of money and that's how people lose a lot of money the other part of this with pension debt whether it's 30 35 or 30 38 i don't i don't think any of those numbers are going to work anyways because this is based off of a pension debt a 7.4 percent as a rate of return now other than the last few years we have not seen that ever so if you based it off what i believe to be a true pension return of about five five and a half percent which is an average over 10 years then your pension debt would not be 488 million dollars a year it would be some number considerably higher than that and that is the real debt that we're looking at so any weakening of this and this is not just for this council it's for you know you the majority can make that decision here but if this council starts to weaken the plan that i don't believe is strong enough from city staff then you're going to see a future council having to deal with this problem and the city of phoenix will go into financial chaos and that will happen that's happened across the nation right now every city that has not been fiscally responsible up front being able to pay down that debt that that credit card debt or pension debt call it whatever you want ends up having to eat it later in the future and so here's something else about pensions and i could be wrong on this but i'm pretty sure about it they are first to be paid so what ends up happening in the future is that let's say 20 years from now 15 years from now whatever that number is that we start hitting that that wall pension debt eats up all the future revenues in the future they just need it because they are first to be paid it is a debt that is required to be paid up front so if we've got a pension debt of a billion dollars and our general fund is a billion two all we're going to be able to do in the future is to do 200 million that's just the way it is and staff can correct me on that if i'm wrong on it but pension debt is always first to be paid because that is a debt that's incurred about on to the city of phoenix just like most other debts that we incur like geo debt so i would strongly encourage the council to adopt this plan and i like i said i don't believe it goes far enough it should be a lot more than what's being presented today but it's fiscally responsible it's just not perfectly responsible that it should be thank you mayor thank you councilman decisio uh we do have one member of the public to address the council so we will go ahead and take that comment now brian the floor is yours uh thank you mayor and council my name is brian moore good afternoon mayor and council and thanks for allowing me to make a couple comments um two years ago i was appointed to the board of trustees of the public safety personnel retirement system by governor ducey i'm a phoenix captain fire captain and also a vice president of member benefits for united phoenix firefighters i am asking council to support the pension funding strategy for psprs as well as the recommendations for the marijuana revenues and the pension obligation bonding as proposed by staff to counsel thank you very much thank you thank you for your service uh councilwoman o'brien thank you so much mayor could you explain to us what happens if we do not make these payments to pay down our debt and we do go into an economic downturn go ahead denise uh thank you so mayor members of the council um i think what you're saying well we have we have to pay our annual required contributions we have to per state law um if we do not make those annual contribution payments then that that starts a sequence of events that's that's detrimental to the city um i don't know if i'm answering your question correctly but i will tell you that you know we pay our debt and then we pay the co the pension payments and then we pay our operation and maintenance cost and so we would have to make some pretty drastic reductions to make sure that we could pay those priorities in that order thank you so much you did answer my question and i do want to voice my support for all three of these proposals uh i would agree with um councilman decisio that this is really the least we could do and it is um in our best interest to ensure that we are being fiscally responsible and and not making things worse for for future uh years thank you mayor thank you councilman o'brien appreciate all of um steph's work on this so we'll turn now to councilwoman stark thank you mayor i i understand where the vice mayor is going because i do think we're going to see a lot of revenue from the marijuana tax perhaps we go ahead with our policies here and then revisit in a year and see what kind of revenues we are actually realizing to see if there could be some money that we could then allocate to the general fund just a thought thank you thank you councilwoman and just explain where i am on these three i'm very supportive of item one and two i think it makes sense to take all available marijuana tax revenue we have a significant obligation to meet and it makes sense to me to put that revenue towards it on item number three i am not going to be supporting that one right now i'm a huge fan of our staff that put this together and i'm very thankful for all of the hard work that went into it also very appreciative of those who served on the psprs board right now i have had concerns in the past with about some governance risk with that board but think there's a very solid and smart group of people who are serving there at this moment and on this one i think it would be reasonable for my colleagues to vote in either way but just will explain my current thinking during my time as an elected official we have needed to use credit from our exercise tax revenues to address a wide variety of unprecedented or unexpected expenses and so i would like to be able to preserve liquidity because i don't know what is happening in the future there have been things like shoring walls from convention centers that have needed to be addressed quickly i am nervous about what the state legislature will do with state shared revenues and so want to preserve our options for the future i also um have been looking at what psprs is thinking of doing with this money and they now have hundreds of millions of dollars i think more than 800 millions of dollars from other communities that have done these similar transactions that they're putting towards private equity and um i guess i just am concerned that levering up is not consistent with the nature of the obligation of pension payments we want to make sure we are there for those uh public safety professionals who are counting on this i think the prices of private equity where this money might be going reflect very real risks and so uh for that reason i i do have concerns and then in the past there have been um some governance challenges and i just look at how the board is appointed and folks who are might be in the governor's seat in the future there's also seats um for example the senate president so in the past andy biggs and karen fan and others have made appointments here and i i do have concerns in the future about some of the candidates for governor who are likely to to succeed and who they might put in these seats and and whether there might be some some risks in the future that we do not see right now so for that reason i am not going to support item number three but again very respectful of the folks who are moving this forward and think it is a reasonable policy although it is not right for me at this moment vice mayor do we have a motion on number councilman decision oh thank you mayor actually you and i do agree on psp rs i from my end of it i would love to disband it and put the police and fire groups under the asrs i think that would be more fiscally responsible to do that except however it doesn't matter what they put their investments in does matter i'm sorry we don't have control over that the only control that we do have is whether or not we want to pay down the pension debt mayor so you and i are totally in agreement on the status of the entity itself and i would love to find a way to get rid of it and move it into a more stable fund but that's not what's in front of us the only thing in front of us now is whether or not we want to pay down that debt and i i would feel bad if we didn't as a city make a commitment to paying down that debt um again how they make their investments we we have very little if no control over unless we move everybody off of that debt and put it into our own system which might be an option for us to do because we're a lot more stable quite frankly so from my end of it i would be supportive of that it's a lower interest rate it's refinancing it at a lower rate but again it's just about the debt that we're paying down today thank you mayor thank you and i know from a previous discussion of pensions that you and i both agree some of the investments this pension fund made in the past were unnecessarily risky and didn't pay off and that's part of the reason for the current funding levels it's very complicated and certainly reasonable on both sides and it is important to meet these obligations vice mayor thank you mayor um and thank you staff for for bringing this forth and and for two and three for being creative and and getting us into in the path forward so for the first part i'd make a motion to approve staff recommendation to a adopt the annual psprs pension funding strategy second we have a motion and a second roll call on item one ansari yes decision yes garcia yes gallego yes passes 9-0 we next move to the second item which is related to marijuana tax revenues vice mayor thank you mayor um and in this one like i said earlier i think it would it would make me feel comfortable if we decide at that point to to know first the numbers that we decide at that point that the best place to put it is here i'm okay with that but uh i'd like to make a motion to create a policy to apply um the available marijuana tax revenues from the public safety allocation and the city's general fund direct sales tax to ps prs pension plan to be paid in excess of the arc and i'd like to add something that if we could revisit this once we know the numbers and i don't know if i look to chris or ed of of how we do that and and again not saying that we will or will not move forward i just would appreciate knowing the numbers yeah mayor vice mayor you this will actually come back to the council every year by law this has to be uh affirmatively something has to be affirmatively adopted every year before july 1st and so next june as a matter of course we would come back with this we could report on it more regularly but the council will actually get a chance to vote on a policy again about a year from now sorry to do this because i know there's a motion on the table so do we know when we will know what these numbers are denise and kathleen how often do you get updates on the on this revenue collection so what would happen is we would we would definitely have a good sense of what's going to be going on with the city general fund direct sales tax revenues because we get that every single month now the public safety allocation will receive once a year but we can also i think in a year we'll have a very good idea of what that's going to look like based on the city sales tax portions that we're receiving so we'll be we'll have a clearer perspective at the end of next year we'll go to councilwoman o'brien followed by councilwoman pastor um thank you mayor so i guess i would ask um vice mayor if he would consider making the motion for us to approve the policy as it is presented for this year with us reevaluating it next year for 2023 when we would have numbers and if there is there are greater numbers we would be able to make modifications to the following year's budget i don't know there's if there was a second mayor or we do not sorry i did not hear a second so is i can i have a clarification on what the motion is then mayor that would be very helpful vice mayor over the next over the next year um so we'll be completely transparent in what those revenues are on a month by month basis thank you city manager council iran we'll go to councilman pastor and then councilman decisio so uh denise if i heard correctly we will be receiving monthly reports um under the uh i guess under all the dynamics but specifically the city's general fund direct sales tax we will be receiving reports um my question to you is we're estimating uh 5.6 million um i have a gut feeling but you're better at this or actuaries are better at this are people budgeting if we surpass 5.6 million then i would like to have a conversation about the additional dollars so my question is to chris or my question is to ed or vice mayor garcia is is there a way to add that into the motion and i understand that you'll come back to us monthly and and give us updates but i want to be able then to say uh to be able to say okay we've reached our goal or we reached this point now with the additional dollars how do we uh look at it or if we may be able to we maybe put it back into psprs i don't know mayor councilwoman you know i think let's just take a hypothetical and say by the february report we're on track to exceed that certainly the council can have a meeting where we can talk about that in february or march if we see that those numbers are trending above that number certainly that's always in the council's purview to bring back and have that discussion and i would just also clarify we were talking in this case about recreational marijuana not the medical marijuana this is this is the newly legalized recreational sales thank you and i do like the idea of having a year of data i understand that in other states that have legalized recreational marijuana there is some seasonal variance any additional comments oh councilman to ceo uh just point i just want to want to know what the motion is again i mean is there any language in there that softens it to where um you know i i totally agree with councilman garcia on this one 100 percent he should always know the numbers we should always know what they are knowing full well that we can change the policy later but any you know softening of the language of hey we approve this policy for now not for now if we disapprove of this policy i'm probably not going to support only because i think it has a bad standard moving forward so i'm just trying to understand what the motion was to me it was consistent with the staff motion on item two vice mayor is that correct that is correct this is simply moving forward stop recommending okay ah perfect okay thank you for that mayor thank you roll call on item number two related to marijuana tax revenues i'm sorry yes the cco yes o'brien yes pastor yes stark yes wearing a mayor briefly explain my vote i would just say i'm glad we're moving forward as we are but the concerns that were expressed were valid uh but we got to do something i'm glad we're moving forward in this direction thank you councilman can you please express your vote sorry yes thank you garcia yes diego yes passes 9-0 thank you we next move to the third portion related to pension obligation bonds vice mayor make a motion to okay make a motion to approve a policy to consider pension obligation bonds when the following conditions exist interest rates are under 3.5 percent apply all savings from issuing the bonds to ps prs and rating agency indications are neutral second any discussion roll call i'm sorry i apologize i'm sorry yes thank you decision o'brien i'm sorry o'brien yes thank you pastor and i will explain my vote um i feel like it's too risky and uh i'm just a no stark yes wearing hear me yes thank you garcia yes gallego no 7-2 thank you that incl concludes item 38 thanks to all who serve on psprs and who worked hard on this as well as our koppers board we moved to item 39 the proposed 19th avenue and parsons road annexation public hearing i will open the public hearing we do have one member of the public to provide comment paul gilbert the floor is yours paul gilbert are you on the line robert is uh attending right now thank you for your patience i apologize paul gilbert are you on the line uh paul gilbert is on the line would you like to speak on item 39 only if necessary i'm not anticipating you need to you've gone on long enough thank you very much thank you mr delbert we will close the public hearing we'll not take any action on this item today we will move to item 62 which is to repeal the existing pay ordinance and adopt a new ordinance for new rates and compensation motion to approve item 62. second promotion in a second any council comments roll call i'm sorry i apologize i'm sorry sorry yep i said yes thank you decisio yes o'brien yes pastor yes stark stark thank you wearing no garcia yes gallego i apologize mayor yes thank you pastor 7-2 thank you we next move to an exciting item in district 5 the building assessment services for the former kmart building locating located at 2526 west northern avenue this is probably the first project that the vice or the councilman guardado and i sort of spoke about together and she's been working very hard on this so i will turn to her for a motion thank you mayor yes definitely i'm very thankful um to all of the staff um to the mayor to everyone on the council for voting to making sure that we can make this a reality um it's definitely gonna change what what used to be the kate mart what we're going to be bringing into that corridor is going to be incredibly amazing new opportunities for people that need to be re-skilled opportunities for our youth in that area so very excited to see what we what will be happening there um once again um huge thank you um to chris mackey and her team um for making this happen and i we've been talking about it for for a little bit and excited to see how how far it's come i'm so very proud and happy to be able to make this motion so i move to approve item 67. second we have a motion and a second and this investment comes in great partnership with our community college district asu west back we also made a significant commitment at a previous policy session and this particular item awards a design contract to a great partner of the cities so excited to take this additional step forward other council member comments councilwoman o'brien i want to say how excited i am that councilwoman guardado and mayor gallego that you worked on this this the prospect of reusing this existing kmart building into space that's usable for potential education and workforce development space in partnership with our maricopa community college district asu as well as west mech is just incredible i think i'm support i am supportive of anything that will revitalize our communities without tearing them down and especially when it's education related so i look forward to finding out what we are able to do with this area thank you so much for all your work both of you thank you councilwoman o'brien the city has been i think a great leader in looking at retail spaces and how we can reinvent them and i am excited for this one to move forward speaking of great leaders who interested in reinventing retail space councilwoman stark thank you i too am excited about this project because it doesn't just influence or it doesn't just change what's happening in district five it's gonna permeate into district three in district one and district four so great job very excited about this uh thank you councilwoman stark certainly a regional asset roll call mayor oh and noting that councilwoman pastor will not be participating thank you i'm sorry decision yes and congratulations to councilman guardado for all her hard work understand the mayor for all that they've done to move this project forward i think it's going to be a great benefit for that area thank you yes o'brien yes stark f wearing i apologize wearing oh thank you garcia yes and if i could make a brief comment mayor please do thank you i just also want to echo what my colleagues have said and thank councilwoman guardavo for all her work i i'm already having conversations even with folks working with people without shelter of how they're looking as this uh to to this place as some some support that they haven't found in that community um looking forward to not only supporting this and making it successful but hopefully it becoming uh something that we can replicate throughout the city and other places so thank you all so much for your work and i'm a yes yes passes 7-1 thank you next we move to item 84 the extension of the airport concession consultants agreement vice mayor motion to approve item 84 second thank you uh this isn't another good news item where we are extending the contract of acc who's been a long time supporter for us at sky harbor and um acc's principal and owner cindy oliveira has given us a wealth of experience with um her knowledge about um compliance and monitoring helping our acdbe concessionaires and joint ventures and i think she's been really an important partner in bringing some of that local flavor and small business success stories to the airport so i am looking forward to supporting this extension any additional comments from council roll call i'm sorry yes the cco no stark yes garcia yes diego passes eight one we next move to item 86 the october 2021 proposed bus service changes do we have a motion to approve item 86 second we have a motion and a second we do have a member of the public to address the council would mark rodriguez please testify hello mayor cake how are you going everybody at the city council it's good to hear from you guys again i am wondering that you guys are going to change the bus in october because i always take the bus all the time because i always take the bus all the way to the stores to restaurants and malls and all that stuff because it's kind of having fun riding on the bus and i doubt you'll be changing real soon in october because it's because i am trying to always get on the bus and all that because i like riding on the bus because i always like to ride everywhere on the bus as well and also i want to give a shout out to yasmina sorry carlos garcia betty wangato laura pastor deborah stark which i also want to meet dan o'brien which i wanted to meet jim waring south of cco2 which i'm still not a fan of him but i respect to that because i always love talking to you guys and all that it's because i'm always been a fan of you guys of city councils because i always love helping in all the communities and all that stuff because i'm a phoenix resident too i was born and raised here and i was live with my mom and we still live in levine and i hope you have a great day have a wonderful time sayonara thank you mark any council member discussions councilwoman cordado thank you mayor i just want to thank mark i i get it how important our bus lines are he makes it to every event i think i've seen them at two i wanna at two different vaccination events so mark thank you so much for all your help and all your support and always coming out and definitely excited about these bus routes thank you mayor thank you and thanks to all who worked hard to update our bus routes we'll call i'm sorry decision yes o'brien i apologize pastor yes thank you stark yes garcia yes yes passes nine zero we next move to item 90 the don boze ceremonial sign toppers vice mayor motion to approve item 90. second we have a motion and a second we do have one member of the public to address the council on this item steve berlin the floor is your mayor and council my name is steve berlin i want to thank deputy city manager mario paniagua and the street transportation department for the for submitting this um a good friend of mine was don bull's daughter we went through kindergarten through eighth grade at tavana elementary school and we attended high school together our families were very close june 13 1976 when her father was assassinated we had just graduated from eighth grade and it was an exciting supposed to be an exciting time and it ended being such a sad summer and uh and and don boles he his life was taken um from him while he was using his profession really in journalism to make our city a better and safer place to live and uh when i saw this on the agenda i i text his daughter and she was so she did know that this was going to be on the agenda um she said this is absolutely wonderful she asked her and her sister asked me to pass on to you all how grateful they are and thank you for this consideration and his family and his grandchildren will be proud of this recognition that you all have an opportunity to provide for for don boll so with that i thank you and i hope you can support this agenda item thank you steve uh i know it's probably difficult to testify over about such a hard uh moment but we really appreciate your testimony and reaching out to the family this came to us for an application through the clarendon hotel which is funding it councilwoman pasteur represents the area and we will turn to her so i really want to thank the clarendon hotel for submitting this and also for paying for the sign topper as you know june 1976 don boles was killed by a car bomb outside of the hotel clarendon while investigating a story regarding a land deal that presumably was connected to top-ranking arizona politicians uh with the mafia so um he sacrificed his life in doing a and investigating and doing a good deed to get to the truth so my heart goes out to the family and this is one way to pay back to the family and all the sacrifices that they had experienced and be able to go to the hotel and see their father's name so thank you for for clarendon hotel i will second thank you thank you councilwoman stark any additional council comments mayor councilman decision i will keep them brief don boles was a great man and the things that his family had to endure after that are just unimaginable i mean you cannot imagine that going on in our country that just doesn't happen here it's not supposed to happen here and the fact that he was brave enough to do what he had to do shows a lot for the integrity and shows pretty much about how his family was treated and you know from my end of it you know many thanks to the family for what they you know had to endure and my prayers would go out to them as well and they constantly do thank you mayor thank you councilman decisio roll call i'm sorry decisio sorry yes i'm sorry pastor i keep doing what you're telling me and i don't hear me so yes yes yes thank you very much stark yes wearing yes garcia yes that's nine zero thank you we next move to item 93 which is the transportation 2050 program management consultant do we have a motion motion to approve item 93. we have a motion and a second i certainly appreciate the work aecom has done to move our ambitious investment agenda forward and help us communicate to the public about what we are doing additional comments roll call ansari yes the cco no thank you o'brien yes pastor stark wearing i apologize wearing no thank you garcia yes thank you garcia yes gallego yes passes 7-2 thank you item 117 is the biannual biennial certified audit of land use assumption infrastructure improvement plan and development fees we will begin this item with a staff report from our planning and development director alan stephenson thank you mayor members of council uh this item in short is an audit of the city's impact fee program our impact fees are charged in our new growth areas at the time of achievements of a building permit and they help pay for the capital costs of public infrastructure to serve that new development this audit is required pursuant to state law and it requires we have a third party reviewer come in and do the audit of the program and then there's a public hearing before the council however the council does not have to take action on the item in this particular case this slide lays out the audit report has been available on our website pursuant to the 60 days required under state law we did meet with our development community stakeholders and went over the results with them was a quick summary of that so overall within the last two years of this audit period the city collected 83.4 million dollars in expenses to new development to help cover our capital facilities cost the audit looks at three different items the actual and projected new development projections that's the amount of growth and development that's going to happen in those north and south areas the accuracy of the impact fee charges as well as how the the money was spent to make sure that it is spent in appropriate categories for items that are within the plan in this case the the land use demand projections coming out of the great recession uh they were a little bit more aggressive than what actually happened and so the overall audit found that they were about 52 above what was uh the projections were above what was actually uh developed and so this is a great example of how being on top of updating your impact fee program and doing these audits allows you to adjust that because we had already went back in and adjusted that growth rate as of april 2020 to address these issues overall there were no major discrepancies found there were a total of five water resource acquisition fees out of 35 000 transactions where there was a an error committed by staff and that combined overcharge was eight thousand dollars that's all uh since been refunded this is an example of the the third component of it which is expenditures so this is how the various departments spend the impact fee monies that are collected and so you see before you pictures of for example fire station 55 up in district one there was about a million dollars of money from impact fees went into building that facility uh that allowed for response times to be reduced from about 12 minutes up in that area to the citywide average of three to five minutes the center picture is a new park that was built in levine area using impact fee monies as well that is the one that's a joint use with the school district down there and was one of the first parks that was able to uh open down in the levine area and then the third one that you see is a baseline road widening project and so this was an effort where uh there was about a couple million dollars of impact fee monies were put into allowing the city to do a joint development project with developers on both the north and south side of baseline road so that baseline road improvements could be put in concurrent with the construction of the freeway so that when it opened the road was already in place easier to use for the public and it facilitated development on that south parcel in particular which was a sprouts and a retail center and also led to the harkins theater that is going to be built a little bit further south as well overall in summary the audit found that there were no discrepancies materially in the revenue expenditures were all as they were permitted and the land use assumptions were since revised to adjust for a slower growth rate than was originally projected out of the great recession uh with that i'm happy to answer any questions and i would like to thank adam miller who is our infrastructure financing team leader for his uh leadership on this entire effort thank you thank you any questions for our planning and development director all right and i should note this is a companion item to an item that passed on our consent agenda earlier today for investment and study about public safety infrastructure in north phoenix that has been a priority for council woman o'brien and councilman waring to make sure that we do have the appropriate public safety infrastructure as our city grows i will open the public hearing we do not have any members of the public to address the council so i will close the public hearing any final questions from council members thank you we will next go to item 118 related to landscape maintenance and again welcome our planning and development director for a staff report thank you mayor members of council i'm going to uh introduce mr josh bednarik who is a deputy director within the planning development department and he has been the lead on the landscape maintenance text amendment which is an outgrowth of direction that the council provided in 2018 regarding implementing the tree and shade master plan and so josh has been working with all the various stakeholders to lead this effort which is across various city departments as well as the the private sector and the public uh stakeholders who are interested in this so with that josh please go ahead thank you alan mayor members of the council as alan said really excited to be here this text amendment directly responds to some long-standing council adopted policies the traineeship master plan the phoenix general plan and and soon uh the climate action plan so what does this text amendment do really break it down into three parts it strengthens existing zoning ordinance and codifies best practices by embracing three concepts trees or infrastructure trees provide benefits when appropriately planted and sri should be kept in place in a healthy and living condition and we use those three core concepts as lenses as we evaluate the ordinance to see what changes we would need before i go too far with that i want to point out a quick clarification that we really needed to make sure that we addressed during the public hearing process this text amendment applies to commercial property so landscape setbacks and any common space open space areas industrial landscape setbacks multi-family property worth landscape setbacks and common open space single family subdivisions with their landscape setbacks and common open space areas but it does not does not apply to individual homeowner lots the graphic on here highlights a conceptual subdivision and highlights some of the areas where this ta would apply so that's the open space areas and then the perimeter landscape areas okay so back to what does this text amendment do we're proposing changes to two sections of the phoenix voting ordinance chapter five and chapter seven chapter 5 really embraces the concepts of trees as infrastructure and trees provide benefits when appropriately planted so the modifications we're proposing is just a clear reinforcing that site inspection and certificate of occupancy are tied to the fact that the landscaping that was said was going to be put in is actually in that an approved landscape plan on file with us is the valid document guiding landscaping on site we made some modifications to the design guidelines to provide some clarity where we had some inconsistency added some language with respect to plant materials to better address the concept of right tree right place the concept of tree protection which i'm going to cover in a couple subsequent slides but something that came up and was added to this text amen through the public hearing process as a direct result of a lot of great advocacy by members of the urban heat island and tree and shade subcommittee specifically committee member nicole rodriguez the graphic that you see on this slide here is a very simple illustration of the tree can the tree protection concept where essentially we're requiring a developer to come in when they want to preserve a tree to show how that tree is going to be protected one of the basic measures that's typically employed is the fence is put around the tree in line with the tree's critical root zone also proposing changes to trap chapter 7 that this embraces the concept of trees should be kept in place in a healthy living condition this is where we outline the landscape removal standards installation and maintenance plans and then the salvage salvage and tree protection plans really appreciate all the support we got through the public hearing process from our village planning committees and the environmental quality and sustainability commission we heard loud and clear from our village planning committees a strong level of support but they also gave us direction that they wanted us to incorporate language with respect to tree protection zones into the textime happy to report that thanks to a lot of great work again by nicole and other members of the urban heat island tree and state subcommittee we're able to work together take a look at nicole's language integrate that into the to the text amendment propose an updated version of the text amendment to the planning commission and ultimately receive unmost approval from the planning commission i want to close by just thanking again the members of the urban heat island tree and shape subcommittee for all their time and effort from the from the chair ginger to amy esposito this is one of the long time members that we worked with and when we started this dwayne allen sarah porter all the members of the environmental quality and sustainability commission our utility partners aps and srp lots of of community organizations who contributed this process and i also want to just take a second to note the tremendous work of our staff jackie keller our landscape architect has been a tremendous technical resource for us christopher christopher de pero oversees our site planning team was really the original author of this text amendment and trisha gomes has been my partner going out into the community working with everyone and oversees all of our text amendment efforts i also want to thank nancy allen for all of our help in working with the various committees and bob lozier from nsd mayor members of the council that concludes the presentation i'm happy to answer any questions we humbly would offer a potential motion to move move to approve the planning commission recommendation adopt the related ordinance thank you wonderful thank you we will have a public very brief public hearing and then take a motion but do any council members have questions at this point all right i will open the public hearing like the last one we did not receive any registered individuals i will close the public hearing do we have a motion a motion to approve for the planning commission's approval and adopt the related ordinance i will second thank you councilwoman stark i want to join josh in thanking our environmental quality and sustainability commission our villages our planning commission and all those who were engaged with this process it's an uh important tangible step to support trees that makes a lot of sense in conjunction with our budget vote today to plant 1800 additional trees per year in cool corridors with heat vulnerable populations and additional staff to maintain them council member comments we'll go to councilman i'm sorry and then councilwoman stark all right um with the temperatures rising it's you know more important than ever that our city works to preserve and enhance shading for pedestrians i'm very excited to vote in support of this new language that will keep our city but also people who do business in our city accountable more accountable in this space i haven't had the pleasure of meeting nicole rodriguez but i've heard so much about her and i really applaud her for leading the charge in this effort um as well as folks such as amy esposito at trees matter ryan boyd at urban phoenix project and stacy champion for really working so hard and echoing the urgency of this matter with this amendment no trees plants or cacti may be removed or destroyed on a property without first obtaining a salvage plant permit and people who do business are in our city are actually going to be kept accountable um to ensure that these same plants and trees are healthy and sound this is a small but important step that will ensure that phoenix actually meets the tree and shade master plan goals and more importantly better serve our residents for generations to come so thank you again to everyone who worked so hard on this and i look forward to supporting the motion councilwoman stark thank you mayor i want to thank josh i know he worked on this it was i'm going to say a labor of love correct josh i know that you had to work with a lot of different interests on it and i think you came out with a remarkable ordinance i just hope that we also attempt to do the same on our right-of-ways and in our parks that we offer up the same kind of solutions that we're asking the business and multi-family community to do i will be supporting this as well thanks josh thank you councilwoman councilwoman pastor i would just like to also you were state that as my colleagues had mentioned many people have been working on this it's been a time lots of time has passed i would appreciate champion and nicole rodriguez for really working with staff on some of the items that weren't accepted by the group um in the i don't know the acronyms i know it's s sqsc and uh then uh worked with alan and josh on uh clarifying some of the language and getting it to where it needs to be so i want to thank everybody everybody worked on this and appreciate it thank you thank you roll call i'm sorry yes to cecil just a quick explanation mayor uh i i'm gonna be opposed to this for many reasons but one of the big ones and it just cracks me up government always imposes rules on others and never opposes those same rules upon themselves and that is just pitiful i mean if you're going to impose roles on individuals and you know that are part of our you know basically our bosses you should at least impose upon yourself and it's just it just doesn't happen thank you mayor o'brien yes pastor yes stark yes wearing i apologize wearing no can you hear me yes thank you garcia yes thank you pastor 7-2 thank you that is our final a jedi's item for today we next move to the citizen comment portion of our council meeting and i'll turn to our city attorney to explain this portion of the meeting thank you mayor during citizen comment members of the public may address the city council for up to three minutes on issues of interest or concern to them the arizona open meeting law permits the city council to listen to the comments but prohibits council members from discussing or acting on the matters presented [Music] thank you i will ask our staff to call the public comments our first speaker is ari barron huber followed by cynthia graber ari are you on the line ari is not on the line so our next speaker is cynthia graber followed by april hernandez cynthia are you on the line i am can you hear me yes we can thank you please proceed perfect mayor council members and city staff i would like to start engaging in community outreach and want to recommend funding for cameras at every major intersection along the 19th avenue light rail otherwise known as the hot spot next year we will receive 198 million in american rescue plan funds if we could get funding for cameras at every major intersection along 19th avenue light rail it will make it safer less jaywalkers less prostitution it will control speeders and a way to stop the same people creating crimes over and over again and selling drugs every major city has a camera system we need them to keep everyone safe please keep that in mind thank you our next speaker is april hernandez followed by phil lopez april are you on the line april is not on the line our next speaker is phil lopez followed by erica martinez phil are you on the line bill is not on the line our next speaker is erica martinez followed by scott matos elliott erica are you on the line erica is not on the line so our next speaker is scott mattos elliott followed by santos mojica scott are you on the line yup i'm on the line can you hear me yes we can thank you please proceed gotcha um so good afternoon members of the phoenix city council my name is scott mathos elliot and i work for hms host i've seen fair harbor airport for about two years as a barista um i'm here to address the concerns and say that they don't need any more rent really relief because they have not increased the staffing we have dealt with a lot of problems considering like code violations not enough employees to help maintain a good staffing and broken and run down equipment if you if you can um keep this in mind with giving a more rent relief and demand that they step up and help fix and staff us they'll be much appreciated thank you our next speaker is santos mojica followed by chitula mumeka santos are you on the line santos is not only santos is not on the line so our next speaker is chitula mumeka followed by maria ocampo chitulla are you on the line chitoula is not on the line so our next speaker is maria ocampo followed by abby pacheco maria are you on the line yes thank you please proceed good afternoon members of the city phoenix councilor my name is maria ocampo i have working for hms house at phoenix sky harbor idaho as for 32 years through all the hard workers with falling hm at home sources serving starbucks coffee drinking and snacks to contact follow of the sky harbor guests however our jobs are not sustained we are under environments pressure every day to perform your work to the company heights standards but without the workforces we need to do so because of the understaffing including and and our alkenes coaching of the boat workers and training managers we find ourselves rushing to full orders and on extremely difficult embarrassment we ask the councils to help establish the dialogue dialogue between the workers and hms house to immediately correct this issue of the understaffing thank you our next speaker is abby pacheco followed by cassandra prasume abby are you on the line abby is not on the lines our next speaker is cassandra presume followed by carmen quintana cassandra are you on the line yeah i'm on the line thank you please proceed yes we can all right good afternoon members of the phoenix city council my name is cassandra presume and i have worked for hms host for about half a year we have provided comments to the city council throughout the pandemic to express our concerns with hmso i work at terminal 4 baggage claim starbucks and i have experienced discrimination with the human resources department i went in for ada relief or accommodations and they did not offer that to me at all and instead made me feel very embarrassed for asking for these accommodations i'm here to join my co-workers in saying that hms host cannot have it all at the terminal four baggage claims location where i worked we had 10 employees prior to the pandemic and now we have just three employees at the same time this location had 47 percent more sales in april 2021 when compared to april 2019. hms health neither needs or deserves more relief their sales are recovering but they are still not adequately staffing their location we need the council to act to end their relief and solve this staffing crisis thank you our next speaker is carmen quintana followed by maria rios carmen are you on the line yes i'm here and i've been working at sky harbor airport for hms for 33 years as a preparer and during this pandemic era we've been expressing our concerns uh throughout all these city council meetings and we are asking to put an end to hmn hms host is the city of phoenix provided a guarantee of a minimum they haven't called me back to work yet i'm still waiting for hms hms close to call me back i've been off for over a year now and i want to go back to my work a few weeks ago i heard about they were hiring people for preparers and so i called celeste at hr to let her know that i was ready to go back to work at the beginning she told me that it was fine and then a few minutes later she called me back and she told me that judy had said that i was not my job duty i feel like that's a discrimination against older people there's unfortunately statistics have improved in the city of phoenix and that in april 2021 that businesses have recovered or 70 79 of businesses have recovered com compared to april of last year [Music] and we need for hms host to support our employees thank you our next speaker is maria rios followed by brianna romero maria are you on the line and i've been working at hms host at sky harbor airport as a preparer for 17 years we've expressed our concerns to the city council meetings regarding hms hosts and i want to get together with my coworkers as well so that you can put a stop to the aid that is being provided to hms hosts and hms host was provided an extension of the annual guaranteed funds the issue is that they're not calling us back to go back to work and we are ready to go back and for me the greatest concern is the discrimination that there is against the older people there was 80 people that that were applying for people that they wanted to hire is and so i called the office and i asked after calling back the preparers and they said no they said cooks only for the airport and so i know firsthand that people are saying that they are hiring preparers so what they're doing is they're discriminating against these people that have been working there for over 20 30 years our city helped out hms host during the pandemic and so the city in april 2020 the statistics show that 75 79 of the businesses have now recovered compared to april of 2019 [Music] and my thought is that hms host shall start supporting the employee employees that's all i want to say thank you very much our next speaker is brianna romero followed by lucia salinas brianna are you on the line brianna is not on the line so our next speaker is lucia salinas followed by victoria stahl lucia are you on the line lucia is not on the line our next speaker is victoria stahl followed by david vlasic victoria are you on the line yes i am thank you please proceed good afternoon members of the phoenix city council my name is victoria stahl and i have worked for hms host at phoenix sky harbor airport as a barista for about five months now my we have provided comments to the city council throughout the pandemic to express our concerns with hms health i work at the n4 starbucks location in terminal 4. my colleagues and i have spoken out about the understaffing we have to deal with shift after shift one of my co-workers earlier abby has already spoken it is incredibly stressful and physically exhausting while we are professionals at our job is that it is extremely overwhelming to meet the standards that are needed to provide passengers at the airport with the best possible service we sometimes work longer than we are scheduled to close operations with fewer staff members it takes much longer than it should to close many of our co-workers who have said that they cannot handle the stress or that they found better opportunities elsewhere have quit in recent weeks hms parent company auto grill reported a 57 turnover rate for the incoming employees in north america and their 2020 financial report the american rescue plan act of 2021 appropriated 800 million dollars in funds to be provided to an airport sponsor for the purpose of release from rent and minimum annual guarantees for in-terminal airport concessionaries we estimate that the city of phoenix will likely receive a total allocation of approximately 19.2 million from these funds we believe hms host does not need nor do they deserve any of these additional relief we respectfully ask the council to require hms host to publicly provide testimony to the council and answer the following questions regarding the staffing crisis that my co-workers and i experience every day one can hms health provide a breakdown of how much the firm received throughout the abated minimum guarantee lease payment at phoenix sky harbor airport and explain how hosts use that release either serve payroll costs or other issues two can hms hosts provide a breakdown of unemployment levels at phoenix sky harbor and three how is hms health working to bring more people on staff to lessen the burden for its current employees thank you so much for your time our next speaker is david vlasic followed by amber zuniga david are you on the line david is not on the line our final speaker is amber zuniga amber are you on the line [Music] [Applause] amber are you on the line yes i did respond my first name is amber middle name is lynn last name is tunica can you hear me on the phone call yes we can hear you thank you thank you very much and thank you very much for allowing me this opportunity amber are you still on the line i wanted to let you know that i'm very thankful to be on this phone call and of course phoenix city council if you did not hear me the first time or the second time my first name is amber middle name is lynn last name is suniga i have worked for hms host at phoenix scar harbor airport for over a year and i wanted to let you know that we definitely did provide feedback as to the concerns at the airport and the ship schedules and if any emergencies occurred so i wanted to let you know that at this time the reason why i am on the call is because i'm one of the workers who informed hr directly and management directly of an emergency situation and instead of acknowledging my emergency situation they disregarded my phone calls disregarded my text messages and terminated me without a justified reason and i'm one of the hms workers we currently do not have any negative write-ups within the 12 months or over 12 months and i am one of the workers at hm airport that would definitely accommodate weekends holidays not an issue and the other concern is that i am here with my coworkers my coworkers who are have the ability to work at the airport and my other co-workers who are trying to get back on this schedule and so i am definitely joining my co-workers and saying that hms hosts cannot continue to behave negatively or abusively to the employees to the workers who want to work to the workers who are calling texting letting them know what's going on and want to do more than just above average and do not want to provide poor service at all and as of right now i'm not at a terminal i'm still waiting to be officially reinstated and once again i just wanted to thank you very much council and i hope that you help in resolving this issue mayor amber was our final registered speaker wonderful thank you that concludes today's council meeting we are adjourned you