owner of the barrel district thank you for your interest in our glendale city council workshop okay we'll go ahead and get started here good morning everyone welcome to the glendale city council budget workshop session of april 7th 2022 meeting is called to order uh i will call roll call we have one member that's not here i do expect him to be here he's just not here now so to do it properly we'll go ahead and call roll call council member clerk councilmember hugh here councilmember melner council member tom chop council member tom trump here councilmember turner here president i'm present so uh we have mr milner when he comes in if you just take note of that on the roll please so moving right along miss bauer would you go ahead and introduce us uh to item number one and we'll get things moving fiscal year 2022 budget workshop well good morning mayor members of the council it seems like it was just a couple days ago that we saw you in fact it was uh so again we appreciate your time uh here today another workshop and uh we're ready to uh take you through the last part of our budget presentation and so with that i'll turn over to our budget and finance director lissette camacho good morning mayor members of the council today is our fifth budget workshop and also our second operating budget presentations the first part of the presentation will cover follow-up items from the april 5th workshop the first slide that you're seeing in here is the number of employees by department with direct contact with the public and employees with no contact with the public i'm not going to go through all the information in this slide but the first column would be the department name the second column is the number of employees with direct contact with the public the third column no contact with the public and the last column is the total number of employees by department mayor um can we get a copy a printed copy of that mayor members of the council will get some front syndrome thank you the next slide that you're seeing is the operating budget by fund it's a comparison of the fiscal year 2022 budget and the fiscal year 23 budget the first fund that you're seeing is the general fund in fiscal year 2022 the operating budget was 222 million in fiscal year 23 it's 257 million that's a change of 35 million or also 16 for the enterprise funds the fiscal year 22 budget was 104 million and the fiscal year 23 budget is 114 million a change of 10 million or 10 percent the third largest is the internal service funds with 74 million or 75 million in fiscal year 22 and 93 million in fiscal year 23 a change of about 18 million or 25 percent the next slide is the same in is the general fund budget comparison by function so the first budget function that you're seeing is for police services it's it was 94 million in fiscal year 22 and 106 million for fiscal year 23 with a change of about 12 million or 12 increase for fire services in fiscal year 2022 the budget was 47 million for fiscal year 23 the budget is about 54 million that's an increase of 6 million or 14 percent we also had a question on the maintenance of efforts or the inner fund loans but for the water landfill and solid waste the budgets for fiscal year 23 is about 800 000 for water 1.1 million for landfill and about 210 000 for solid waste the next follow-up items cover the community services so with that i'll turn over the presentation to ms moreno thank you ms camacho good morning mayor and council um so we had a couple of follow-up questions from tuesday the first one was about library hours and whether or not we had um returned to pre-covered operating hours and so you'll see when we reopened in april of last year we were actually able to increase operating hours from pre-covered by about seven percent and that included being open seven days a week and having consistent hours at all of our branches um the next slide please this shows you a comparative analysis um this goes back to the fiscal year 2021 um and this is a valley benchmark cities report so you can see there's a comparison here of 13 other communities and it shows kind of where glendale's at in terms of average operating hours per branch um so currently we're ranked about 5 out of 13 here in the region any questions on the library hours mayor question um ms moreno thank you so much and mr might be able to answer but i i feel confident you will too um i don't know the exact name of it there's a committee that meets regularly on schedule for anything everything library the future of the library does that include um its operations and its um its hours and going forward it can if if so and if not can you explain uh marin vice mayor um yes so the the process improvement team i think is what you're referencing it is an internal team i'm part of that uh mr phelps mrs rios and several other departments and we're looking at everything from a to z in terms of library operations so from circulation um operating our spines programming everything from a to z to really kind of consider what are some of the things that we could do differently at our libraries to really meet the needs of the community again we are doing that community needs assessment which i think all of your assistants are including in your council newsletters so lots of activity in the month of april so that we can get really good quality feedback from the public about things that they would like to see at our libraries as well and so all of that will culminate um likely and some and some recommendations whether it's administrative changes to our library operations or potentially a future council of policy consistent decisions thank you for that and uh council member clark is absolutely writing her comments on asking if if if you know we're at our fullest potential of ours i know a few years back we increased those hours from from the reduction i didn't see your your presentation too well because it was really quick is it our plan as part of that group to make glendale libraries when we talk about our peer cities number one library that works to its full potential has more hours or equal hours is is that part of our uh process objective oh sorry mayor and vice mayor so from my perspective it's not about necessarily the quantity of hours that were open to the public it's about the quality of the service that we're providing when we are open to the public so if from my personal perspective i don't think we have to be number one in terms of operational hours per branch what i do think that we need to be number one is our program utilization and the utilization of our facilities and materials so that is what i would like to see i'm i'm a little less concerned about operating hours because that's that's just a quantitative number i'm really looking at more qualitative information about are we fully leveraging those resources that are geographically located within our community to make sure that we're providing quality programs and services out of those facilities thank you thank you for articulating that um i still agree with the council member that that ours are always a concern i did meet with some library folks that operate elementary and high school libraries and i asked them how can you do so well with the little bit of hours that you're open and they said exactly what you just said it's not the quantity of ours it's the quality of service we provide to our students and we do it pretty quickly pretty fast we don't need to be open 10 hours a day thanks for articulating that and i can't wait for mr phelps to provide an update on that committee whenever that committee is uh terminated or ended thank you i would like to respond to this whole question on ours there are people yes the library is open seven hours more than it was pre-coveted hooray but we used to have hours that fit our residents needs and that's what i'm concerned about not everybody can get into a library from nine to five we do have limited evening hours i do appreciate the committee's concern for creating equity of programming services throughout the city i think that's been long overdue but i still am focused on ours and our libraries are there for the convenience of our residents not for anyone else's convenience thank you all right next slide so there were some follow-up questions about the glendale works program specifically one of the questions was whether or not we're servicing um the the homeless folks that are participating in that program whether or not they were glendale residents and so i was able to work with phoenix rescue mission and they were able to provide this information this is fiscal year to date and um so the human or excuse me homeless management information system is a regional system that collects data about individuals that get into coordinated entry um so during this period there were 343 unduplicated participants in the program and you can see here 143 of them reported their location of prior residence as the city of glendale which is 41 there were a large amount where the client refused to provide that information but you can see clearly based on the numbers that glendale residents are the ones receiving a majority of those services the next slide shows program outcomes i know that was another question so this gives some information collectively over the history of the program so that number of unduplicated actively engaged participants means that those are individuals that participated in glendale works program but are they're working the program and what that means is that when they're they're doing a shift and earning that that wage they're also participating in the case management services and any of the other services that are being provided as part of that program and they're actively engaged in that program for a period of 90 days so you can see the number there is pretty high it's 270 that means that we're having multiple engagements with individuals to help them address their barriers and challenges and and hopefully getting them into permanent housing um they have had temporary housing placements of about 22 this year you can see that's um you know pretty consistent we still have a few months left in the calendar year and then permanent housing placements is up from last year any questions about the glendale works mayor what not a question about any of the numbers but we're getting a lot of new information today and via slides and i think it's appropriate that this new information that's being presented to us be printed out and delivered to all the council members mayor members of the council it's on its way thank you it's being printed now mayor thank you i don't really care about the paper but can you upload it or add it to the powerpoint or as a separate attachment i don't like all the paper i just rely on our our digital records but it's not included in today's powerpoint so certainly we can do that thank you here good thank you um miss moreno on the on this glendale works program the top line participants turned away for a shift there may be various reasons the participants turned away does this include all reasons or is this strictly demand exceeding supply of hours available or what mayor and councilmember turner this is is to demand exceeding our ability our capacity um a lot of that is due to covid so during covid um they were they had to reduce the number of people they could accommodate in each of the vans um they had to reduce capacity by about half i'll be interested to see how this number looks over the next like throughout the rest of this fiscal year and then into the next fiscal year to see if we are continuing to have to turn away people who are interested in the program because that would obviously mean that we have excess need and again that goes back to sort of the next phase which is engaging the private sector to help support and grow the program and if i'm a mayor one of the really heartwarming successes that was mentioned one of the previous times we talked about this program was participants who were through some day labor with us able to raise enough money perhaps to get home wherever their home may be and um i don't know if we can track that or anything but for those who don't continue in the system is it because they've in essence graduated out they've been able to move on with their lives in a way that's appropriate for them marin councilmember turner you're absolutely right each person's situation is different there may be program participants that you know work a few shifts and are able to get into a better situation on their own without having to receive permanent housing placement through the program and we wouldn't we wouldn't have access to that kind of information um but you can see that we are clearly getting folks into temporary housing permanent housing getting them into substance abuse programs so the program is working and it is changing lives and this combined with the master services agreement truly is making a difference thank you thank you mayor all right thank you the next follow-up items cover the questions for transportation as far as the enhanced detection mayor members and accounts so i'll turn it over to mr abbas thank you listen thank you mayor and council my name is shahid abbas dr transportation there was a question about the nas trans enhancer detection at the intersection as i said we have 209 traffic signals in the city as of today we have been able to con convert 92 of those to enhanced detection system and we have the fundings available in the federal grant monies to convert another 53 in the next uh two two to three years so we are processing the agreement with the ada to convert another 53 to enhance detection system and that will bring us to 151 and then we'll use our operating funds which we requested the council uh on tuesday and we'll convert another five so that will take us to 1506 for which the funding will be available as to converge and we are seeking additional grant funds as we do the project to try and convert the remaining traffic signals to enhance detection system thank you thank you the next follow-up items is on organizational performance regarding what work cities for platinum certification the two cities that have that are los angeles in california and louisville kentucky i do have one more follow-up item that's not on the slides today and the question on the asta sales tax rebate that will expire when the facility facility use agreement with the cardinals expires we're now going to move on to the operating budget presentation today's schedule will cover presentations from the city attorney the police department development services city manager's office mayor and council offices code compliance public facility recreation and special events public affairs fire department innovation and technology field operations and the city clerk's office which we'll be doing the um detailed budget presentation you saw this slide last tuesday so the fte count the proposed for fiscal year 2023 is 57 new ftes 42 in the general fund three in enterprise funds five in internal seven service funds and seven in special revenue funds you also saw this pie chart last tuesday and the fiscal year 2023 operating budget the total is about 541 million the largest component is general fund up 48 or 257 million the second largest is enterprise funds at 114 million or 21 third largest is internal service funds at 93 million or 17 percent mayor go ahead thank you i i have a question about the 57 new ftes um i did a rough calculation it looks like every new fte that is added is about a hundred thousand dollars to the budget could be a little bit less could be a little bit more but average is around 100 000. so that means the cost of adding 57 new ftes is around 5.7 million and i'm curious where that money is coming from are we relying upon one-time construction sales tax payments from the new frontier area are we relying upon ongoing sales tax increases how do we account for that addition to the budget mayor members of the council we are not relying upon one-time revenue there is has been continued strong revenue in other than one-time categories within the particularly in city collected sales tax as well as state shared revenue in almost every category so in particular the retail sector is very strong we consider things like construction contracting and that type of revenue to be one time so no we are not relying upon those also in addition to that some of these ftes are being added into enterprise funds as well so we we have to take that into account i recognize that i think there were 42 in the general fund which it comes to a roughly roughly 4.2 million so i was just curious what we were relying upon and that it wasn't one time money thank you mayor thank you mayor um i uh i have a question and that was one of the reasons why i asked for the comparison is because i thought 6.1 for the vehicle replacement fund seemed high and then based on your slide on number five it's 90 percent increase you're over so um is it the what is what is the reason for the nearly double um amount budgeted for vehicle replacement mayor members of the council councilmember tomlichoff that's carryover from the current year we're experiencing some we're seeing some vehicles that we've ordered that have not been delivered as of yet due to supply chain issues and so a lot of what we have budgeted in the vrf for the current year is being carried over to fiscal year 23. okay thank you i'm looking at slide four and number of employees with direct contact with the public and i'll just use mayor and council office no i won't i'll use the city manager's office sorry city manager contact with the public all 23 employees but i would imagine what i would like to know what criteria was used to determine that employee made contact with the public or didn't make contact with the public what was the criteria that was established mayor members of the council we didn't set out criteria necessarily we just asked the same question uh that you asked of each department head and this is the information that each department had sent back to us so we felt that they're in the best position to know for their employees who has contact with the public and who does not okay that i won't ask any specific questions at this point thank you okay with that we'll turn over the presentation to the city attorney's office thank you mayor and council just before we get started here i wanted to take the opportunity attending today is ryan glover he is the city prosecutor for the city of the city attorney's office and then also presenting today is brittany leslie i've shared this previously with the council but this is the opportunity i get to do this to her and that is is brittany recently received her masters of public administration and was the recipient of the arizona league of cities scholarship award so she has done a commendable job with the department and for doing such a commendable job she has the opportunity then to present the budget to the uh the luxury i should say of presenting the budget to the council so with that brittany good morning mayor and council this also gives me the opportunity to um represent our department so if you have any questions about mr bailey you know where my office is [Laughter] just ask fair enough you're off on a good start um so we also have a reputation of keeping our presentation short and sweet so i would like to skip to the supplemental slides please and we can discuss the two supplementals that we have so we'll start with the new full-time employee the legal assistant for the prosecutor's office the prosecutor's office staff has reviewed and redacted nearly 400 cases involving body-worn cameras for the first half of this fiscal year so july 1st 2021 through december 31st 2021 many of these requests include multiple cameras gathering footage at the same time that must be reviewed redacted and disclosed individually while the president's office added a full-time legal assistant to handle these tasks when glendale police department first enacted the body-worn camera several years ago this has proven to become an extremely difficult task for one person to manage and keep up with the additional legal assistant is necessary to remain current with the body-worn camera disclosure obligations required by the prosecutor's office so next we will go to the new full-time employee the administrative support assistant for the prosecutor's office so this was actually a position that the prosecutor's office previously had that was eliminated several years ago so the court has added multiple court coverages over the last several years including four coverages that were created during the covid pandemic alone that this growth has included the expansion of the mental health court document creation of other dockets such as probation violation virtual court and veterans court so while the prosecutors were added to handle some of these increases over time staff remain static each of these dockets carries a unique workload including the necessary data entry file preparation and case processing to support the prosecutors in court so that is all that i have as far as the supplemental requests does mayor council have any other questions good thank you mayor with the addition of these two positions can we expect to see the numbers increase in terms of prosecutions that are made mayor member clark that might be a good question for mr bailey or mr glover um mayor councilmember the answer the simple answer is yes but one of the challenges that we're facing as well is that due to covet there is a significant backlog of cases that we're also trying to get caught up on as well so what you're going to probably see initially is that the dockets we're going to get caught up on and again this is a no fault of anybody this is just the fact that the the the what we experienced with covet um but ultimately yes you'll see that the the intent is that you'll see more um and we're anticipating more prosecutions moving forward thank you mayor thank you i just want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the city attorney's office the attorney and all of our attorneys they've done a tremendous job this year and last in [Music] settling cases definitely in the city's favor winning cases in the city's favor which ultimately saves taxpayers tons of money but also make sure that the right thing gets done and and i just think we have a tremendous attorney's office and i hope all of the employees in there realize that thank you thank you thank you any other questions thank you thank you our next presentation is the police department which will be presented by mr st john warning mayor members of the council unlike brittany i'm a talker so you're going to have to bear with me a little bit as i cover some of these items first up the police department has a budget of about 111.5 million with 585 ftes separated into two bureaus each bureau having three divisions next slide as you can see you can probably see through most of the presentations personnel costs are the majority of the overall budget at nearly 80 percent some statistics pandemic and now hopefully exiting the pandemic you can see that violent crime continues to increase property crimes during the pandemic we saw a pretty decent decrease in those crimes but we're seeing it come back again on the rise part one crimes cleared we saw a little bit of a drop last calendar year no real explanation uh the the number of cases that are cleared are small so the percentage decreases are relative if you know what i mean and then crimes cleared by arrest we actually saw an increase in that and you're going to see a budget supplemental later asking for an increase in our expense to the county to house and intake those people that we arrest calls for service stay at about 180 000 increasing just slightly from year to year what is good our response times to priority one calls for service at 82.6 our benchmark is uh 90 percent but 82.6 is a is a good number for us and 46.6 of our part two crimes are priority two calls rather we like to see that increase it's been a struggle for many years and we have several initiatives within the police department to try to increase that traffic accidents fatalities are up as you know but overall accidents with injuries are down just a little bit and our dui arrests are up which is good and then we're seeing proactivity from our police department drop a little bit and that's because of the numbers in the patrol division quite frankly we've had a number of vacancies that have caused officers to work more overtime and be more responsive to calls in the field with less time to be proactive and then some of our proactive units have run with less numbers because we had to put more people back in the patrol division and so we are responding to calls for service our response times are good uh but our proactivity is suffering a little bit as we continue to struggle to recruit and then communications uh 89.7 percent of calls answered within 15 seconds and i would submit that the reason why we're not higher than that is because the communication center gets flooded with 9-1-1 calls anytime there's a major car accident or a house fire or something significant that many people call on otherwise i think that number would be higher next slide we can skip this slide it's just all the training and everything the police department is doing to maintain standards we're hitting all those benchmarks so as i say to the patrol division responded to nearly 182 000 calls for service last year and re-engaged the community in face-to-face conversations with coffee with a cop hoa neighborhood watch meetings presentations gain site security assessments all the things that we want our police department doing in the field that helps reduce the crime numbers and just educates our community on what they can do one of the big things that was created this last year was the west valley incident response team so essentially what that is is all the west valley agencies got together and they and they decided that it's best and more transparent for another agency to investigate officer-involved shootings from one agency so one of our officers gets in a shooting traditionally we would handle the criminal and the internal investigation assuming the shooting occurred in our jurisdiction so if we engaged in a shooting with a suspect in another jurisdiction that jurisdiction would handle the criminal and we would do the internal we are still doing our internal investigations but the criminal investigations are now being handled regardless of where they occur by this valley investigative response team and so if one of our officers gets into shooting in our jurisdiction or any other jurisdiction this west valley investigative response team sends the team members out and one of our detectives acts as a liaison with the lead detective in the case to investigate that shooting and that is just a trend that we're seeing nationwide where the community has a higher expectation of transparency and believes that occurs when an outside agency does the investigation and i don't disagree i think it's a great idea so that was initiated last year and to date they've been activated 11 times and then a final bullet point here which is significant the police department was awarded nearly 1.7 million in grant funding to support the initiatives of the police department last year the real time crime center that's really the jewel of the police department they are doing some tremendous work i'm working with the city manager and the police chief on how we can get some of that information into the public number one we believe it'll help to deter crime if people know what we can do maybe they'll choose another location and they'll stay out of glendale and that'll be a benefit to our community for sure and then second we want to showcase what technology has done for the police department and how we investigate crime and how the real-time crime center really acts as they're more than just support they are the eyes and ears of officers responding to these calls and directing these officers to where suspects are leaving to a lot of times we see crimes occur we get the call for service and by the time we get there the suspects are gone and that's still the case today but now we're able to track them when they leave the business or the residence or a street location where something occurred we can now track them and the real-time crime center can direct officers to where they are currently as opposed to where they were when the crime occurred and we've seen some huge benefit from that we we're making arrests today on cases within 24 hours we're making an arrest on cases that in my history we probably would have never solved because the information provided by the people on scene isn't significant enough to lead to the person who committed the crime but because we're able to see portions of the crime that occurred and then people leaving and we're getting license plates and we're getting information about where they're going we are able to solve crimes today that in years past we would have never known who did it significant crimes homicides robberies you may have heard a couple of weeks ago there was a robbery at a jewelry store up north on bell road we caught two of the people inside the business the other two left before we got there and the real-time crime center tracked him and we were able to take them into custody fairly quickly in years past again those other two people we may have never known who they are depending on whether the two we caught actually talked or not but the real time prime center has just been a huge addition to the police department and we're looking forward to what they can do in the future full deployment of department issued cell phones the patrol division what we're trying to do here is enhance communication with people that are calling the police department for service you're going to see a supplemental at the end of this presentation that will help to enhance that as well but issuing cell phones into the patrol division so in in years past detectives have issued cell phones people that are on call have issued cell phones but the patrol division has never had issued cell phones and so now by issuing the cell phones we can guarantee a better service in the community because they can talk to people as they're responding or taking calls and reports over the phone without having to go to a substation which just takes a longer amount of time so it's it's an efficient efficient way to serve the community and then of course we return to regular operations special events staffing resources at 111 different events this last year on to the supplementals the police department received the cops grant for four new police officers and so the first supplemental is our portion of that cost for the first year the ballistic vest reimbursement increase we've traditionally given police officers a thousand dollars to buy a ballistic vest i think it's been that way for probably the last 10 to 15 years and the cost of ballistic protection has gone up significantly and so we need to increase that to 1500 per officer and this supplemental is a result of that professional development for 585 employees we have a hundred thousand dollars traditionally and when you do the math on that it's just not a lot of money to train people and so we're asking for an increase of 50 000 that will help us to provide the training that our folks need to better serve our community the regional wireless cooperative cost increase was anticipated we knew that there would be a cost increase they're doing some internal restructuring and modifications to some of their hardware and this is a result of that we will probably see another cost increase next year and then we'll see it start to level out again axon contract restructure we currently have three separate contracts with axon or the company you might know as taser those three separate contracts cover everything from body worn cameras to the actual taser to cameras and interview rooms fleet cameras and evidence storage by bundling and combining those three contra and i should mention that each of those contracts is going to see a significant percent increase this next year as the contracts come due and so what we're trying to do is bundle those contracts together get some services for free so evidence.com for example all of our evidence from body worn camera and fleets go into evidence evidence.com at no cost to the city but any evidence that we collect in the field from a business or a homeowner we have to pay when we hit a certain terabyte limit we have to pay for that storage in this new contract we won't pay for any storage every video every piece of evidence that we collect that requires storage in a electronic fashion will be covered under evidence.com at no cost and then we get an upgrade to our taser we get an upgrade to our camera systems everything that we need moving into the future and it is a seven year contract the mco jail maintenance these this is just an increase in the fees we typically see increases from year to year and this is a reflection of the increases that we've seen and also the number of arrests that we've made if you remember earlier on in the presentation our arrests are up right now and so there's an increased cost to that and then pd security services so we contract security for certain areas of our city including the court and some within the police department itself there is a cost increase because of the hourly rate increase that the federal government approved minimum wage increase i should say and we are currently under rfp to select a new vendor but we anticipate the need this additional 84 000 to cover the cost of that contract police net motion cost increase please net motion is a system that keeps us deciduous compliant so as a state and federal mandate we there are only certain people that can access computers or run certain databases and that motion make sure that we're in compliance with all those standards a new fte police personnel specialist so we currently have a contract employee working in recruiting and we'd like to transition that contract employee to a new full-time employee and we believe we need to do that based on all the hiring that we're doing and the ongoing needs that we have i am happy to tell you that come this july we anticipate that we will be roughly 10 police personnel short of our authorized numbers by this council and we anticipate being able to fill all those positions within the next fiscal year and be fully staffed new ft police civilian policy specialist so this is our accreditation specialist uh typically it's been handled by a police officer we would like to return that police officer to the field where we believe they'll be more useful in their capacity as an officer and civilianize this position ongoing software expenses every year we see a three to five percent increase in all the software used by the police department then this is a reflection of that pd digital forensics computer we have three uh specialized computers for dealing with sensitive materials if you know what i mean uh and we need to upgrade those computers so this year fiscal year will upgrade one and then the next two fiscal years we'll upgrade the other two so this is a one time but you'll see it again over the next couple years ammunition for the range there was a lot of back order last year we didn't receive the ammunition that we thought we would receive and so we need an increase one time increase of a hundred thousand this year uh to get us back to where we need to be and then uh the budget that normally exists for ammunition will be sufficient there on out provided there aren't ongoing supply chain issues a civilian real-time crime center specialist we would like to civilianize at least a portion of the real-time crime center we do believe there's a benefit to having some sworn personnel in there but having civilians in there that understand computer technologies and dealing with camera systems and all those things that not a lot of officers are too familiar with we believe that's a good direction to go and so we'd like to civilianize one position this next fiscal year and evaluate that and hopefully come back over the next couple of fiscal years with some additional positions and then we have two records tax records tax handle a lot of different things and one of the things they handle are redactions and you heard from the city attorney's office that redactions are a burden and they're going to only become more of a burden as more camera systems are implemented into our investigative response and the need to redact is only going to grow and so we're asking for these two positions that will essentially be redaction specialists and then finally we have two i.t projects the first is technology enabled training rooms this will be at fire station 151 and also at gateway police and fire station 158 so they share a training room out of that location upgrading the technology in these training rooms creates an efficiency particularly in the fire department because the fire personnel don't have to travel to the training they can stay where they're at and view the training online and so we believe this will create a pretty significant efficiency at least in the fire department and it's something good for the police department as well and then the customer service communication platform this is a company called spydertech they came into the industry probably four or five years ago is when i saw the first presentation in arizona a couple of valley agencies adopted it essentially what they do is they what's the word i'm looking for they merge the cad system so as people enter calls for service spider tech will communicate with those people about when an officer is expected when an officer is in route uh so a lot of times people call the police and it takes 20 30 minutes for someone to arrive and they wonder do i need to call back what's going on so spider tech not technologies through the cat system will inform them of what's going on with their call and when they can expect to see a police officer in the investigations module it updates uh victims and people associated with an investigation on case status changes so if there's an arrest made or if there's a court a court date set or anything like that then it communicates automatically with those victims and witnesses on where they need to be and what's going on with the case and then there's the last module that we're purchasing is a survey module so after you've had an interaction with the police department whether in the patrol division or through investigations it provides a survey and solicits feedback from those people and it helps the police department to understand where we can improve our services and with that i'm happy to answer any questions of course chief briggs is here if there are specific questions that i can't answer mayor go ahead thank you mayor um i have a couple questions um and thank you rick and thank you chief briggs i'm extremely proud of our police department this customer service communication platform is it a basically does it tell people where the officer is or like i'm wondering if it's like you know if you've ever had the misfortune to have to have aaa dispatch a tow truck to you it basically lets you know or like a lift or uber or anything like that you can see where the driver is is that what this does uh mayor councilmember tommel chaff i believe what the technology does is it tells you where you're at in the queue as far as response when you can expect a response so it's a little bit more like uh going to a restaurant and asking how long is the wait for a table okay and then is it text messages mayor councilmember donald trump yes okay all right i i think that's pretty cool my other question is and maybe the um mayor if i could continue the name of the position has changed but um do we still have csos mayor councilmember tom will chaff we do are they called i can't couldn't find them in the fte schedule they called something how many do we have mayor council member tom traff i believe we have six csos and a supervisor but chief briggs traffic services specialist okay chief briggs is telling they're now called traffic service specialist or tss that's why i couldn't find them and have you found that to be effective and let the patrol officers get back on patrol and they stay and fill out seems like there's a lot more traffic accidents so i mean hopefully you know that's helping keep our officers on the road you know on patrol and not standing there filling out a bunch of paperwork for a traffic accident mayor councilmember tom schaaf we do find it extremely effective yet okay thank you i just wanted to make sure because i figured the name had to change i didn't see him in there thank you thank you mayor first let me preface all my questions with i am the mom of a retired law enforcement officer so do not be upset by any questions that i ask i want to go back to slide 17 under your goals and objectives it's performance measures for ucr part 1 part 2 crimes and i was concerned percent of ucr part one crimes cleared and the number between 2020 and 2021 actually goes down was 15.2 percent 2021 it's 14.6 percent and the same for the other statistics related to that particular area can you tell me why um [Music] those numbers decline i'll allow chief mayor councilmember clark chief briggs to respond to that mayor council member clark there's a lot of reasons why our clearance rates can go down there's staffing issues that many times our officers go out they take a report and then they can do their own follow-up when our staffing is down they take a report then they're going to the next call the next call the next call so they're not clearing it in patrol and then it goes into our investigations unit so that builds up their cue some of our crimes are whodunits and it takes longer to clear those crimes than it would when we have a suspect's name or a license plate or something like that then let me follow up i was curious by the phrase crime cleared by arrest or by exceptional means what do you mean when you use the term exceptional means the the biggest one is death of offender say that again death of offender oh the suspect's no longer with us i didn't realize it happened that frequently okay um my next question has to do with the ballistic vests and the request for 1500 and i never asked but i'm going to ask now what is the process does the officer buy the best and ask for reimbursement or do you just allocate that 1500 and you don't know whether the officer used it to buy a vest or not mayor councilmember clark the officer goes and purchases service from a vendor it has to be a type of vest that we allow they then bring back the sheet from the vendor saying that they did buy it with the receipt that they paid for and they get reimbursed for the amount they paid not exceeding what we allow very good my next question is answers do we have as of today or whenever you remember the latest figure so last year we bid i think it was 186 so we anticipated 186 slots in patrol so 186 slots out of 584 strictly for patrol how many bead areas do does the city currently have i believe there's 24. okay how many we have three shifts how many patrol is typically uh in a bead area per shift two three uh mayor councilmember clark each beat normally has one officer one officer that's correct okay so for example if you have a domestic violence call policy requires for an officer and a backup does that still hold that policy mayor councilmember clark yes similar circumstances okay so if it's going to be hypothetical if an officer responds to a d dv call in his beat area that means the one officer in the other beat area adjacent or whoever is nearest has to come and back him up now we have two bead areas where the officers are busy how are those two bead areas covered so say another call comes in a priority one and these two officers are handling a dv call how do you handle that priority one in either of those two beats that are now uncovered mayor councilmember clark then officers from an adjacent beat would move into that be for the priority one so it's like a domino effect that's correct okay do you ever envision at some point in your lifetime or mine increasing the number of patrol officers per beat area do you think it ever can happen mayor councilmember clark yeah let me let me clarify each beat normally has one officer so that's our minimum staffing okay giving staffing we might have more than 24 so we will have more officers in a b so clarifying that first question but typically if i can continue there why don't you let him finish that i thought recently about three four years ago we actually doubled all of our beats so we did add more beats where we used to have maybe two officers in a beat then we split the beat in order for the officer to have beat integrity is what we call it they understand what's going on in their beat they get to know the community and their be what vehicles belong what vehicles don't belong anything that looks suspicious so we did add smaller beats with the same amount of officers if our staffing is full everybody shows up to work everybody's healthy very often we can have more than one officer and a beat clearly right now we're struggling with staffing so it's not as advantageous as it could be usually year over year where we've got about 20 vacancies in patrol it's been my history over the time i've been here where are we on vacant season patrol right now mayor councilmember clark that's a tricky question so my priority as we've been going through this is patrol and case carrying detectives those are the priorities so i'm carrying vacancies in other areas our neighborhood response units carrying vacancies our motor units carrying vacancies some of our special investigations units are carrying vacancies so patrol isn't bearing the burden of that but in addition we have officers that are out for injuries or other reasons that also complicate the the vacancy rate well but usually there we know pretty well what that figure is i mean i've been told over the years it's averages around 20 20 vacant positions at any given time would that be fairly accurate what we average mayor council member clark we do average 20 patrol officers on light duty industrial leave or fmla that's an average and then again our vacancy rate in patrol isn't the same as it used to be because we're prioritizing patrol and case-carrying detectives so it's okay if i might continue mayor yeah thank you on slide 18 again under goals objectives and performance measures this bothers me officer initiated call volume traffic stops and they go down year over year um from a high of 19 000 in 2020 to an estimate this year of or last year yeah this year 2022 of 14 000. can you explain to me why we're actually initiating less traffic stops yes mayor councilmember clark our crime is going up our calls for service are going up because we're coming out of covid so therefore self-initiated activity um is going to decrease because we're going to more calls than we are self-initiated activity which includes traffic stops i spoke about carrying vacancies in other divisions my motor unit is supposed to have 14. i have i think four or five vacancies but in addition to that with injuries i think i'm down to seven riding motors right now yeah that's 50 that's not good my last question is kind of a philosophical one if you bear with me mayor do you know what the broken windows theory is mayor councilmember clark i absolutely do what is it broken window theory is if you continue to have broken windows you do nothing about it it's just going to get worse but if you deal with the issue that's causing it at the root cause then the crimes when we're talking about crimes they'll reduce so if you have a broken window you replace a broken window it gets broken again it's going to keep happening if you board it up if you do something different it will solve the problem okay it has been it was first used in new york and boston excuse me many years ago and basically the theory is if a place looks there's no nice word to say it crappy then it becomes an inviting target for criminal activity and so back in new york and boston patrol officers beat officers cited people for even the smallest infractions everything from jaywalking and littering to more major offenses and by doing that they sent out a strong message to the criminal elements that there were police there and that they were proactive and they also enlisted the help of code to fix those broken windows and those things that made an area of a community look not as inviting to the criminal element i this is my own personal belief i have we get sent the big deal sheet all the time in the mornings and of course we get the most um violent crimes that are on that big deal sheet and it's usually shootings stabbings major robberies things like that major assaults but my feeling is is that that kind of violent criminal activity has increased now you may not think so but my civilian perception is that it has and i wonder at what point do we feel that maybe using the flop broken window philosophy would work in certain areas of our community that are experiencing an increase in violent crime could you respond to that please yes mayor councilmember clark we do subscribe to that when we are not in a staffing situation like we're in as you're aware our neighborhood response squads are very active in community policing and broken window theory problem solving policing what we are currently doing and have been doing for the last year and a half is we've been looking at our intersections where we have high incidents of traffic accidents and then those correlated with adjacent neighborhoods that have crimes of opportunity so it'd be your burglaries your thefts and what we're doing are saturating those intersections with both patrol when they're available and the motors to be making traffic stops to be very very visible um and this theory is that those coming into the area to commit the crime of opportunity will continue on because they're seeing that police presence not just a police car driving but a police officer out of his car doing something on the job we're also finding that when we make those stops we're identifying other criminal activity within the vehicle so we are doing it and again i can't emphasize enough and you know this we have a staffing problem but we're doing better we're getting out of it but i would like to say this so we're down 17 swarm positions right now and that is actually very good considering where we started less than a year ago but in there i've got eight of those um of the new officers in fto so they're not on their own they're not doing the job i currently have 17 in the academy so they're not on the job i have three in pre-academy so they're getting ready to go to the academy so i might be down 17 but i still have over 20 that aren't actually doing the job but they're hired and there's a light at the end of the tunnel and there's a lot of good things that we're going to do in the future i just have to get us out of this slump and sometimes i'm chasing the bouncing ball because i have people retiring i have people quitting so i hire two i lose three so we're working on that there's some legislation that might help us so okay uh thank you for your answers to my questions i i just am concerned about and worried about some of the the areas of our city that are experiencing a lot of violent crime and if there is anything new out there or anything old that can be reused to try to get a handle on that so thank you for your responses thank you mayor chief to follow up you just were discussing that you were down 17 but you had i think you estimated about 20 what i would call in the pipeline either in the academy or pre-academy with when those are those included in your down 17 number or when those come through will you be closer to to full capacity mayor council member turner i am down 17. so the there's 30 roughly 30 that are in some form of training that is not included in that number so i have roughly 30 that are hired not doing the job yet but will be very soon and then i have 17 more to hire so i'm looking at in may with some laterals i'm knocking on wood my recruitment team tells me we should be getting about 10 more okay thank you mayor so chief of understanding down 17 plus another 30 that are not on the streets mayor councilman returned that's correct so absent on the streets at this point in time are around 47. mayor councilman overturned that's correct and then i have people unlike duty fmla so i have roughly another 20 that i average monthly okay and i've again don't don't get me wrong fully fully appreciate and support our police department that's what i want to try to do here today and i realize this isn't a glendale specific uh challenge that you know and in fact that we are probably in a better situation than many police departments our size across the country because we do have a great community and a great force with plenty of political support is there more that we can be doing to assist you in getting us back up to full strength for the safety of our community and for the safety of your officers as well mayor councilmember turner and to the whole council i appreciate the question i think what you guys have done with your voice with what you do in the budget process um assisting me with that video that we did you are doing it um there's been a negative narrative around the country related to law enforcement the one thing that our officers have going for is they have a chief and executive staff that support them to no end that grew up in the department knows what they're going through and are here with them but we also have a council and a city manager a city management office that support them and are willing to stand up and support them i recently not recently monday and tuesday we had a virtual site assessment for our reaccreditation and in the exit interview they were actually impressed with the number of vacancies that we have for an agency our size and with everything that's going on in law enforcement additionally they were impressed with how we haven't lowered our standards in hiring people but are able to be doing the hiring that we're doing so our incentives are working our recruiting strategies are working we're really leveraging social media and geo-fencing so we're seeing a lot of success there right thank you and mayor if i can continue if there's more please don't hesitate to reach out to us and i would i know my office if there's a graphic that i could incorporate my weekly newsletter that would talk about you know any incentives that we have for hiring and what a great department ours is to work with or that i can use when i'm out in the public that would be some you know it's not everything but anything that we can do i think all of us are willing to do for you and this may not be for chief it may be for deputy or city manager so some of our budget costs in in police and certainly in fire are driven by the mous and i believe that process has been completed i haven't received a copy of the mouse or any breakdown on any budget impact that the mouss have and i would like to have that mayor councilmember turner i believe we will be coming to council with some information regarding the negotiations we just went through with both police and fire we do have a finished product in the police department the fire department is not quite finished we're hoping to get that done within the next week or two at which time i'm sure the city manager will engage council to talk about what is new in the contracts or agreements i should say okay thank you deputy city manager um i just finished by saying that i think we have a terrific police department that does excellent work in some very challenging times and with a very challenging portion of our population so much appreciate it thank you vice president thank you mayor i haven't been so anxious to speak in a long time my hands are sweating and trying to dry them off first of all mr st john you eloquently articulated the quality of police that we have in the city of glendale so thank you so much for doing that you also articulated the quality of chief we have who's standing right behind you chief you are absolutely the best chief sorry rick because you were chief before that we have i'll tell you what i am so proud of you and the work you do if there's anybody that's watching this show today this meeting today that thinks because of what the chief just said about having lack of staff that you think you're going to be a potential criminal here you got it wrong absolutely wrong because this man behind you has a plan a strategic plan and he and i have spoken many many times and he speaks highly about his staff and he never speaks about how low he is on staff and he just says we're going to go out and get it done we're going to make glendale the safest city in the state of arizona so if anyone's watching and our citizens are watching know that we have a chief and a commanding staff police officers and and and civilian employees who make this city the best city in the entire state of arizona and we are the safest with that said i had the absolute honor and pride to speak on behalf of chief and the glendale police department to the accreditation organization on monday and it was an absolute honor chief to speak on your behalf and your leadership team and how well the job you do to keep this city safe you guys are phenomenal you guys are my pride and joy and i appreciate everything you do with that said mr saint john i have a question for you because it's important for our citizens to know and if the answer is yes we're slightly under then i'd like to know why so the citizens know why you talked about response time are we at the national average above it be lowered or right there on it on response mayor vice mayor the target of 90 for part one and part two is a national standard that is sat at a mark that the people that set the standard don't expect anybody to hit it okay uh they want to set it that high to incentivize police departments to always be striving to do better so i know so we're at 82.6 percent on part one that's extremely high across the nation i would put that number up against any other police agency the part two a lot of the part two crimes are categorized differently by different agencies to try to increase that number uh in my opinion wrongfully so we don't want to take certain crimes that should be categorized as part two and let me explain for a second the difference between a part two i'm sorry a priority two or a priority three call a priority two call is dispatched voice dispatched and officers engage the communication specialist and respond immediately priority threes are entered into the computer and they're polled as an officer becomes available and can take calls off the computer you can imagine if you take calls that should be priority 2 and move them to priority 3 and stick them in the computer which has a 20-minute response time as opposed to a 5-minute response time your numbers are going to look better but are you really providing the service that your your citizens expect from their police department when you do that some agencies are doing that glendale made a decision under chief conrad many years ago that we were not going to do that chief black held that line i held that line and chief briggs is holding that line because we believe that having that response that level of response is more important than looking good on paper and so while we would agree 46.6 percent is well below where we would like to be we we believe that that is an accurate depiction of the way police department should work and we're striving to get that number where we believe it should be and that's closer to that 80 90 percent thank you mr saint john mayor if i may continue it sounds like the national standard is is almost an unattainable goal but for a reason it allows you to continue to improve and strive to be better if you meet the standard and you stay there and you're not improving so you continue to try to reach that goal and so it's important that that that you articulated that so our citizens know that yeah we're we're there we are where we're supposed to be it's a goal that's much greater than many police departments can get to but that's because there's room room to grow um again i just want to thank the both of you and chief thank you so much for always answering my questions uh when i have them and picking up the phone for me and um i it was a pleasure and honor to speak to it to the accreditation organization on the glendale pd's uh progress and and and success but i hope i'm not out of line here and i know i'm not but this council supports the heck out of police i i think this is one of the few cities that that has 110 percent your back and and the rest of your team so thank you so much thank you mr saint john city manager thank you mayor members of the council if you uh will indulge me like to make a couple quick comments um on this first with rick with regards to the recruitment what i will say is uh this has the full attention of our department uh chief briggs his leadership team and the people in the organization have really focused on this first of all thank you to the council for really allowing us to have one of the highest if not the highest bonus incentive to attract people here but i hope you and you saw in our budget we're going to a full-time position on our recruitment strategist i hope you heard um in the presentation this notion of that we're geo-fencing to help us within our recruitment you know the old days of how you recruit for a police officer was was had been the model for years and years and years they not this has their attention and they're using technology they're using a lot of strategies at which to do that and so i also hope that you heard him say that we believe that there's a good likelihood that we can get close to full staffing in the next budget year i encourage you to call up fellow colleagues in other cities and see how close their goal will be next year to getting fully staffed and i think you'll be i think you'll be very proud to you know with the response that we heard from here but my other comments really were first of all i think a couple things are deserved i want to start and i know vice mayor mentioned this couple others have it starts with the city council support for this police department we received numerous calls i did from other city managers we i know we did within the internal to the department when you did your video that we sent out to our police department giving your support this you would think would be common but unfortunately in this day and age it's actually uncommon and we had i had several city managers say that they could never get their council to weigh in publicly and support their police department so it started with your support second chief briggs you you called it out he is a fantastic chief his leadership team he's put together is fantastic he wears this department on his sleeve 24 7. and it kind of ripples really throughout the entire organization and i i just again want to compliment chief briggs they do a phenomenal job i want to thank our rank and file and specifically i want to thank our two labor unions that represent our rank and file because they're part of it as well as you mentioned we have we think we're very close to successful negotiation on both our mous for both fire and police they are very much part of what's going on and i think we're very fortunate that we have a relationship with our both of our organizations within within our police department that formed the g-pac coalition they've been very much in the forefront of how we recruit and and how we do things and so i and i just want to take a brief moment uh one of the long time negotiators on behalf of one of our unions julie pendergrass is retiring i believe after 20 years chief after 30 years i just want to uh you know publicly acknowledge her and also to think justin harris who represents the other department because they're very much a part i believe of the success that we're having here and so again i i just think i want to start with support uh thanking the council for their support for our police department it's a tough job now with regards to the beats i clearly we're focused on trying to take our higher activity beats and either add more staffing or to reconfigure our beats we think it's going to be a combination of getting back to full staffing and using technology and so that's why you saw a lot of the focus by deputy chief our deputy city manager st john on the real-time crime center because really it's going to be a multi-prong attack but thank you for your support for this department chief i just wanted to publicly acknowledge the work you guys do and to make sure that your men and women know about that in your department thank you so at this point in the day we're actually scheduled for a 15-minute break but it's up to you guys for running a little behind so uh our next presentation is development services and we'll turn it over to mr metta we don't need more good morning mayor council members mr phelps i am joined today by tabitha perry and george pavlovic two incredible employees spearheading one of our very busy and most one of the more productive working groups in the city there are three goals embedded in our mission statement providing exceptional service to our customers those who are making property or land use changes ensuring safe structures that protect the occupants within those structures and then to ensure that our processes preserve a strong community those who are affected by development changes we have 45 full-time equivalent staff in the development services division our request today is going to be to add six additional ftes and four contract employees our budget is people-centric with most of it dedicated to staffing needs as you can see and it's reflected in the pie chart going to this slide which relates to performance of the planning division this is the first stop in a series of contacts that the public has with the city if there's any physical alteration of a site or proposed change of use on a property the year hasn't ended and we are already heading into another year of a high caseload we're now in the second year of electronic plan submittal and plan reviews all applicants whether they are adding an accessory room a necessary structure in the back of their property or they are building a one and a half million square foot industrial building they can submit questions and their plans at any time and i can assure you we are responding to them also at odd hours of the day the direct consequence of us adapting this electronic communication and a 24 7 submittal process is enhanced customer service you may notice that year over year service requests and the number of cases on this slide does not increase but the scope of the land use related changes are notably more complex in the loop 303 area cases are larger in size very complicated and have interests from multiple surrounding jurisdictions in the older and the more built up part of the area of the town we are seeing infill projects that have its own set of challenges in addition to these 300 or 375 targeted cases that we are referring to there are several more hundred closer to a thousand additional activities that planners are involved in not truly reflected in the number of cases that are filed so not on the slide but worth mentioning by the end of this year development services center will have received 10 000 in excess of 10 000 calls or visits which include planning and building matters additionally staff deals with approximately 200 business sign applications that's signage on buildings and approximately 1200 business license reviews that are done annually not all service requests lead to a judicial or a quasi-judicial entitlement either through council or planning commission or board of adjustments in the fiscal years 2020 and 2021 incidentally there were exactly 137 cases that were agendized on these three committees we have already exceeded that number and there's still three to four moments left in this fiscal year so a lot of work in the pipeline to the slide before you this slide represents performance of the building safety division the division that is most affected by the surge in construction activity their work generally picks up after the planners have completed their design review and the division's primary mission is to ensure safety of the structures and its occupants every work area within the building safety division is experiencing unprecedented workload this includes coordinators or customer service representatives who interact with the applicants the planned reviewers who include architects structural engineers and then the inspectors who are out in the field there are two types of challenges associated with new development one is quantity the other is scope of work the quantity of work is illustrated in this slide before you we are passing or approving more building permits than ever before and judging by the number of cases in the entitlement process in the in the planning process and in our meetings with prospective developers there is no slowing down of building activity in the short term the medium term and we predict even in the long term now to the scope of work or the complexity that's an interesting phenomenon as well we've noted in the past couple years that's not apparent in the statistics that are before you not only are projects larger that we would see than what we would see normally some of these are also more complex and involve sophisticated mechanical electrical or safety systems that are in it so these reviews they take longer and our inspectors too are on each site for longer durations term speed to market is a term these developers have learned to expect from our processes from our performance and we are doing our best uh often with overtime work as well to meet that demand shifting to accomplishments the corporate limits have grown significantly this year as they have in the previous couple years and there is every indication that there will be additional square miles several square miles added in the next few years on the development side we could fill up many slides to list new businesses and major reuse projects that were approved by council for new entitlement but here are just a few whose names you might be familiar with on the slide as you know following the entitlement process that's the planning process the applicant goes through design review where planning division coordinates with several departments and outside agencies to give you an example a snapshot of how of how much coordination is involved in it 21 reviewers within the city itself are looking at every application that's coming in that's in addition to the primary planner who it's assigned to we work with the school district luke air force base if there's an adjacent city if it happens to be close to the boundary of the city limits private water utility and other dry utilities that are there state agencies all of these are involved in this planning review effort i share with you one additional factoid from many design reviews that we undertake housing in addition to the number that's on the slide and these are year-to-date numbers you see at the bottom of the screen by the end of the year there will be over a thousand more single-family and a thousand more multi-family units approved to go forward to the next phase which would be construction plans review so going to the slide the next phase of construction plan review another couple thousand residential units will be reviewed for construction in the current fiscal year and these reviews will lead to more building permits in the following years just last month we were reviewing over 5 million square feet of commercial development this is where our development services center and our architectural and structural plan reviewers are their busiest after all the plans are reviewed and they're done here's what's permitted and under construction as we speak right now this is where our building inspectors are the busiest the slide not only reflects a lot of numbers but also shows the diversity of development within glendale knowing what's in the pipeline from the previous construction plan review phase the first line which shows 5400 permits have been issued we believe by the end of this year it will exceed 9 000. last year we ended at 8 800 so we'll be exceeding last year's and last year's was a very busy year you see 16.5 million square feet of industrial development in luke 303 corridor that's three times more than what we permitted last year in the new frontier now we're all interested in knowing how much more can you fill in the loop 303 area this is not on your slide but between the office of economic development and planning we have seen design review applications initial concepts for an additional 43 million square feet that's another increase by a factor of three that will likely be in construction within the next two to three years based on this trajectory and what developers and landowners are sharing with our economic development department we will see over 80 million square feet of industrial and distribution centers in the loop 303 area in the next roughly 10 years compare that with 16 million under construction right now we have a lot of exciting growth ahead of us naturally that translates into one-time revenues from construction sales tax development impact fees and also ongoing revenues in the form of tpt lease excise tax property taxes along the same lines construction commercial development equally strong in glendale as is single-family and multi-family sectors if you add up what's in the pipeline for housing between watson planning what's in the building safety area and what's being inspected as it's being constructed there's an excess of 8 000 multifamily units and at least four to five thousand single family units ongoing right now this last bullet innovative customer service i've got a few examples to suggest what's going on here it has to do with material supply chain and the workforce constraints to give you an example there's a shortage of glass glazing material for windows as you know in the sequence of of how of home building or any structure start with the grading and then you got the foundation and you got a structure and then you got all the other elements in it including windows there's a shortage of windows right now they aren't being delivered at the time they really need it our building safety staff is helping the contractor accommodate and change the sequence of inspections of course it's a burden on us because now we have to go back and make sure that there'll be adequate exposure so that we can then see what we're inspecting when the windows do arrive and then they get installed but these are the changes that we have made in the field on the fly to accommodate a situation that's not in our hands take another example this one you might be familiar with the brand name brooklyn bedding they've located from phoenix and now their structure is up they are waiting for equipment to come from overseas some of it has arrived some of the machinery has yet to arrive they needed to start their business usually we would wait for the full package to be there and then give them a certificate of occupancy instead we worked with them and had them installed machinery where it could be located and provide them with a temporary cfo now they are in production partly and waiting for the next batch of shipment to arrive until we can clear them for a complete cfo then there are other projects fast track projects the project the resort lagoon project in in the western area south of the stadium things are happening at such a fast space that the design team from the consultant the contractor and our staff from building safety are literally planning approving plans on the fly in the field so that we can meet their expectations whatever their timelines are we we do earn accolades uh for this level of service we hear testimony from owners who have completed their projects and this is a quote i got from one of them and there are several if they have another project they would like it to be in glendale the list is exceptionally long of those successes so we could share with with you only some of the popular names that you would recognize here on this list last fiscal year counting all permits that were issued mechanical residential commercial industrial additions alterations solar panels the total valuation of new construction in glendale last year was 1.5 billion b that's not what we're collecting that's the valuation of construction this year in the first nine months we've already exceeded that 1.5 billion valuation now understand some of it is inflationary we know that but it does translate into revenues for the city last year when we did permit 1.5 million worth of construction the development services center collected 37 million in one-time revenues by the end of the fiscal year we will have processed 2 billion worth of construction in the city this would translate to approximately anything between 44 and 48 million of one-time revenues to the city in rough numbers that's a 19 jump in a single year gis data i bring the slide before you because one of our supplemental requests happens to be a gis specialist and something that is done sort of behind the scenes we rarely ever get a chance to understand and appreciate what goes into mapping and all the elements that go with it here's a snapshot it's only representing the work done in the last three quarters of this year it does not include many other internal customer services that are provided by this group of three in the gis section within planning they also include adding meters water meters service lines if you can imagine how much work goes into gis just to give you an example here we take a square mile of the city between 59th and 67th peoria and cactus one square mile almost fully developed how much goes into it there are over four million editable attributes in one square mile it includes layers whether it's things that are in the ground on the surface above the ground easements water lines hydrants every element so every time there's a change whether it's a plaque a new zoning those changes have to be reflected there's a lot of work that has to be done and within that work we've also got so much that's still on paper that has to be digitized and that's my pitch for the gis position exclusively so finally i have these two slides that represent all the supplementals that we have they're all from the general fund on this slide all requests are one time only except the last line which is ongoing for professional development from the top we've been using on-call engineering services each year to assist with high volume of work as needed and with on-call services we also tap into the expertise of the private sector sometimes we end up with something that's sophisticated very novel very different some construction techniques that we aren't so familiar with the on-call service provider can assist and we keep the project moving given the surge in new developments coming into glendale we are requesting contractual employment for dsc reps also known as permit techs inspectors and plans examiners as you know we have some very fast-paced construction and inspection projects whether it's the resort the lagoons resort or it's even preparing for super bowl where in a very short time we will have a lot of our inspectors in the field literally 24 7 for a couple of months as they prepare for large events like that we intend to use contract employees to handle some of the more routine projects single family residential subdivisions you've seen one you've seen them all and we take our experienced employees staff the permanent staff and direct them to those high-profile projects where they can their professional expertise provide the high level of customer service that's needed the zoning rewrite process is nearing completion this year are seeking additional funds in the event that there are changes requested by council as we go through the final review and adoption process and that's worth 30 000 that's for just in case but i'm pretty sure we might be using their services as we come forward to you and you'll have comments to suggest changes and the final slide there are six full-time employees being requested here the first three from building safety division the last three in the planning division in building safety the demand is extensive in all areas we are seeking additional development services representative a residential building inspector and a specialist inspector who will deal with electrical and other heavy and complex mechanical installations in the planning area we need a gis specialist to help clear the backlog to assisted infill and long-range planning a couple years ago there was a internal study done in internal assessment of gis city-wide was quite obvious over there it was noted that if in development services there should be at least two additional gis specialists to help make up for the backlog and also continue at the base at which we are going this is the first of one of those requests within with the sheer volume of work we feel the need for an entry level associate planner to help with minor projects and to provide exceptional customer service to small businesses and to individual residential property owners and finally the last line senior project manager this would be a planner dedicated to doing long-range planning they will assist this person will assist with the general plan update one of the major requirements you know state law requires us to update the general plan every 10 years the last one was done in 2016. about a year from now we'll be engaged in seeking a consultant to assist with us through that process it would be roughly a two year long process so this would be the appropriate time to have a senior long-range planner on board and get prepared for that major activity yet to happen long-range projections neighborhood plans all of these were part of what used to be the long-range section within the planning division many years ago through budget cuts over the years that entire group of staff have gone away we don't have long-range planning as a section this would be an introduction back into that into that realm of work so with that mayor and council i'll be glad to answer your question thank you mayor i really don't have any questions for you rather just to comment i know that council is aware of the tremendous amount of growth that has occurred throughout the city especially around the loop 303 i am impressed with the fact that that i know you have been understaffed through this whole process so i am delighted that many of the supplementals that you requested are being are being recommended i just want to thank you for the work that your division does it's it's tremendous but what a lot of people don't understand is when these plans are approved and they are finally under construction you are actually earning money for the city through those one-time construction fees so the more that you can approve and get into the pipeline the better off the city is revenue wise so i want to thank you and your division for the work that you've done and i'm sure it's been very trying and we appreciate it thank you mayor and council members the credit goes to these two individuals who lead a terrific group of professional staff they are here some of them on weekends and a few of them i know because i read their emails in the morning and they happen to be shooting out cfos to prospective to to developers uh in the middle of the night so a lot of activity thank you mr melner uh thank you mayor um i too would like to congratulate the apartment um you know the the saying that the economic development department says is speed to market and planning has a lot to do with that to making sure that our large customers are getting their projects uh evaluated and put into a manner that they can and then speed towards construction and so i appreciate all you doing and i fully support the additional manning that you're requiring i i believe it's needed in our departments right now and i think it's going to be it's going to help the department become better one area that i would like to address in our business committee that we recently disbanded that was held for three years one of the topics that came up on a regular basis was the speed to market for small very small business and um i want to kind of know what you're doing to improve the efficiency and service because you talked about your goals of providing better service and i know we're doing that and and we see that and it's mostly the larger corporations larger projects and i think they're all very satisfied uh with the process that your departments are doing but my question is what are we doing for the small and i'm talking the mom and pop operations that put their life savings into us into their project and uh end up having to add a lot more money perhaps because of delays or other things that happen at the small business level what are you doing to help improve that at this very small business level mayor councilmember mariner one of the supplementals as you see was the associate planner a position that we identified and this is really after we heard you loud and clear as part of the business council committee's input what are we doing about the folks who haven't really uh understood or haven't had the opportunity to be involved previously with the development process the larger projects are usually handled by professional firms they have consultants they have lawyers to assist them the mom and pops do not there are a lot of folks who already come up to our front counter not all of them are doing it electronically we do help them we walk them through the process but having an additional planner like the associate planner specifically identified for those kinds of cases walk them through it it's not like their cases are any more complicated they just need to be given more time and attention so that they don't end up repeating the same mistake with a second and a third submittal but guide them through the process so that's the effort we are trying to improve by having this dedicated staff person thank you mayor if i may i applaud you for that because i think i think that's a part of the big problem is the communication perhaps misunderstanding and having that additional person there to to help assist those small businesses through the process and most importantly i think for small business is to avoid the need to ever resubmit other than one time i'm obviously when they come in with their first plan you're going to have some issues but what i have heard from various community members is the resubmittal process on very small project that percentage-wise costs them lots and lots of their their dollars of their project dollars and that's what i would like to see eliminated and i hope that this new position will take that into account that that's really the goal is to make it so that we're not having to resubmit and resubmit on small projects because they didn't understand or we didn't explain it exactly how they understood it and i can understand the communication may be part of that but i think we just need to take step up and take responsibility for that and make it make it happen we hear you mayor council member both on the planning side as well as on the building safety side additional staffing will help provide them with additional time that they would need to understand the process thank you very much council member tom thank you mayor thank you uh jim sheed i believe you got all of your supplementals approved if i'm not mistaken i didn't see anything in here that was requested and not approved so congratulations on that um i do have a question though because i see i identified in the in the actual spreadsheet part of the budget where the engineering on call services are showing under professional services but all of the other contract employees the people and i wanted to say also i think this is a really great concept of moving forward because we don't want to over hire while we're this busy and then we've got too many people in there i mean eventually this is going to slow down so i applaud the the idea of getting the work done getting the contract people in here but we're not going to end up with too many people when eventually there's no more to develop out there so that's great but i just i is that just basically uh all in with the salaries for the call the contract positions i just wanted to see where that is in here mayor uh councilman thomasoff if you're referring to how we will be funding those yeah i'm just looking for the line in the budget where the um it's not under professional services because the only thing under professional services is the additional 123 732 for the on-call right engineering services so the rest i'm just curious if we mix all the salaries whether contract or non-contract we mix that all together and those are just all all the salaries i do believe it's under salaries okay all of them are combined all right but the contractual ones would be one time and the ftes are ongoing okay thank you thank you mayor oh yes sir not a question i just want to say thank you so much the data you shared with us is absolutely incredible i don't know if any other city is doing that kind of work but we are um for the two of you sitting back there thank you so much for the work you do but i really want to pick on you miss perry you were the right choice then when they put you in this role and you were the right and you're the right choice today you've supported my office and constituents in my district so well not always do you give them the news they want to hear but it's how you deliver that news that prides me in having you and your role you've been more than professional and you've been more than responsive and i absolutely appreciate you and thank you for always picking up the phone to my office and i and like i said constituents business constituents call me and say not what i wanted to hear but i i thoroughly enjoy how they gave me the news and you always come up with the response and the solution so thank you so much and sir thank you so much thank you thank you thank you our next presentation is the city manager's office and we'll turn it over to ms hanlon good morning mayor and council today deputy city manager rick st john and i will be presenting the city manager's office budget of approximately 4.3 million with 26 ftes this does include the city manager's office and our code compliance division our performance measures were previously reported on through presentations from the department of organizational performance and economic development but i will have mr st john report on codes performance measures good morning mayor council uh as you can see if we can skip to the next a couple of slides i think for code is the next one i believe yeah right here uh the number of cases opened and resolved in fy21 you can see a pretty significant decrease in those numbers reasons why we had those decreases cobit the primary reason we had a lot of staff out for a lot of time related to exposures and or i don't want to violate hipaa but having covid and then there were some administrative struggles through that time period that mr bulling our code official and i are working to resolve and we're seeing we're working with i.t to resolve some administrative issues that will free up time of our inspectors to go out and perform more inspections open more proactive cases and be a little more responsive next slide proactive cases for fy21 you can see that's where the decrease was at five percent uh but we are estimating that for fy 22 will be back to our normal normal 60 percent and i'll turn it back over to miss hanlon for goals and accomplishments so two of the accomplishments i would like to highlight is our employee appreciation event this year we were able to expand it to be a month-long event um where we could just show gratitude to our employees so we sent out videos we hosted contests we also had an opportunity for employees to show gratitude and appreciation to their fellow colleagues also something new this year as we launched an employee giving opportunity campaign this is where we can give back to the community that we serve so everything that we are hosting goes directly to the glendale community our first event that we kicked it off with was the adopt-a-family program through that program we were able to adopt 80 families valued at over 48 thousand dollars and we had over 400 employees participate next we held a pillow donation and this was in support of community services bed build that they did with sleep and heavenly peace and we had 30 employees participate with 138 pillows donated so we will have three additional campaigns to close out this year it's just a really great opportunity for employees to kind of just give back to the community that we serve and we will look forward to continuing this next year as well accomplishments in the code compliance division as you know there was some significant rewriting of the code this last year this council sat through many conversations engaged in many conversations i should say about several aspects of the code chapter 24 and and traffic and parking and all those things but also everything from grass and weeds to to bees and a whole host of other things that were accomplished this last year to help us better serve the community we received as you know the american association of code enforcement award as the co-department of the year very proud of that and appreciate the council's support and recognition of that earlier this year and we performed 38 lakh cleanings through our clean and lean program moving on to supplementals we are asking for two new code inspectors this year we currently have seven grid inspectors we would like to increase that to nine we believe that uh creating smaller grids to a point made by council member clark earlier with the police department budget is the right direction to go this will accomplish that and then we'd like to add an fte administrative support person we have a new program that we implemented it was a trial program this last year where we sent mailers into communities identifying the most common violations for those communities letting them know that we were coming out to do inspections in 30 days we saw moderate response the first time around but second time around pretty significant responses where people were taking care of issues before we even went out and served a notice of violation and we would like to continue that program this administrative support assistant will help us do that and then we also have a code compliance-based budget increase with this new program you're going to see an increase in mailings which there's obviously a cost to and then we had some additional cell phone allowances and things like that that we need to make up for and with that we're happy to answer any questions you may have about the city manager's office budget mayor thank you sir um first i want to thank councilmember melinda for the diligent work sir you did with your committee on the code review we've there's so many reviews that will set us in the right direction so thank you council member with that said we are on track now to either eliminate or reduce blyth in the entire city of glendale all districts um there's code review that now that will that is going to cause for an increase of enforcement that's not to scare off citizens that just means that we're going to eliminate blyth i understand that you're asking for two code enforcements i'm gonna go out on the limb here and i hope the council members will be on that limb with me but with the work that i know you guys are gonna do with the two i feel comfortable saying that we need to increase that from two more and i'd like to hear from the council if they would support additional ftes for code enforcement so we can continue to enforce and make glendale better and reduce the blyth and continue to enforce the reviews that councilmember malnar and his team did because they did an extremely well job but i think you need help and i think the citizens would appreciate having more ftes so i want to put that out there and ask the council to chime in on whether or not they could support an additional or even two more thank you thank you mayor um thank you for that recommendation i would wholeheartedly support that uh i know that we've had a lot of changes in our code and i know that there are a lot more cases that are coming in especially in certain areas and talking to mr st john we really can't keep up with the demand and that's part of the issue that i think we're facing right now and so i would wholeheartedly support the idea of increasing the workforce in code an additional four individuals i'd like to know where that compares to our pre-recession pre-great recession and numbers i believe we'd cut code basically in half at that time uh over the last you know since 2008 to 14 or somewhere in that time frame we cut code many in half and i'd like us to see if that's going to get us back up to where we were because i know we have been adding steadily a few code inspectors each year and i know we're moving that up but where where would that put us in relationship to the enforcement that was being uh completed in 2008 time frame mayor councilmember malnar it gets us very close to those numbers for sure back in that time period we had 12 grid inspectors the addition that we're asking for to move to nine grids is a staged approach to help grow the code compliance division to ultimately where we think it needs to be i do appreciate the comments from the vice mayor from from council member malnour as well on the efforts that the men and women that work in code are putting forth to help control that blight and the fact that seasonally and kind of historically in some neighborhoods people respond they comply but within months they're not in compliance again and so we're having real cases uh at certain residences time and time again and we believe the addition of the two inspectors to nine grids or if the council approves in addition to that we'll increase the number of grid inspectors that we have reducing the geographic area of responsibility which will hopefully enable them to be more proactive in those smaller grids uh may or if i may uh let me let me do a follow-up real quick so with the request to add two additional does that change supervisory positions is that something that you guys need to look at and talk about a little bit or an arbitrary number of just two more to me it doesn't sound like we got a lot of planning in this before we make that decision for additional people is that we're now going to require another supervisor mayor the short answer is no we have two supervisors and four senior inspectors the senior inspectors act as a corporal of sorts and assist the grid inspectors and then supervisors step in when needed so the addition of two or more grid inspectors would not we would not see a need for additional supervision okay then uh follow-up question to the follow-up question does that now require more vehicles i mean what other costs are going to be incurred by adding additional people mayor council there would be an increased cost across the line so the budget request as it stands today i don't have the dollar amount in front of me i think it was 72 000 per fte is that right no 96 94 000 for ftv fte that includes uh the vehicle and equipment needed for those ftes and so um about 95 000 per fte okay i i just would like to slow that process down a little bit before we just say we're going to hire them but i'd like to put some more thoughts we have a real good idea maybe you can come back at our our next budget meeting maybe give us a little bit better idea of where we're going to be cost wise for everything if we added two more people uh yeah just along the lines of what you were speaking um adding the additional code inspectors what i really am looking for is that additional proactive approach as we had you know pastor allen here a few weeks ago who spoke to uh we we dedicated i know we we took a coding spectrum basically took him away from the uh his other job the rest of the city and dedicated him in granada states and he worked very diligently the the citizens were extremely uh responsive he was very good at what he did and how we did it uh and and it turned the community around in a year um but i know we haven't been able to continue that because we really don't have the manning to do it so that's really in those areas where we need it the most i would like to see that more dedicated effort in the communities that need it the most because when you're there constantly reminding people then they take care of business but when you go away and we've seen it happen in granada then it starts to slack uh just because the code inspector isn't there and so that's why i really do uh support this process i don't think we're out there to beat people up we're out there to remind people and to to to change an attitude perhaps in the way people take care of their property so that it improves the entire community thank you remember tom chops connection than you thank you mayor um this was these were these additional two code uh officers or uh inspector both code inspectors one senior one regular were requested um in the and they're listed in the supplementals not approved so we do know how much the number is 199 973 dollars for both of them so i'm i mean there really isn't anything else to find out um and i mean this is this is really important to our entire community i mean our our curb appeal and that's a real estate term but like we talk about right-of-ways and all and parks and all of this this all matters um and i think this is a very worthwhile investment in the curb appeal for our city um i mean we we get these emails i think we got a couple more last night and this morning um very long emails from you know um dissatisfied citizens about uh the condition of property and they're in and around their neighborhoods and we are well aware that we don't have enough manpower to then the grids maybe are too big especially in areas where there's ongoing issues to actually finally address and as ray said we had our councilmember melner said we had some places we probably need to dedicate somebody at least for some period of time to really work with the community and help them um you know raise raise their standards a little bit um so i absolutely support this and i don't really feel like there's a reason to put kick the can down the road because we have a number we know what the number is it's just under 200 000 and i feel like it's incredibly worthwhile investment in our our community thank you thank you mayor i would share the comments of the vice mayor councilmember malnor and council member tomachoff i too believe as councilmember tommenchoff said there's no reason to kick the can down the road we know we know every time we add a new employees approximately a hundred thousand give or take one way or the other but so we're looking at an increase in the budget of approximately in the 200 000 range and those are the costs period but the reason why i want to move forward with dramatically increasing code is because code is perhaps one of the most contentious elements within the city between citizens council members senior staff code itself it is it is the issue that we as council members hear about most frequently are code issues and and every time i ask it's the response i get is well we're not fully staffed like we used to be okay i want to make you fully staffed so that um i don't get that as a response to a code issue i think it's time we're in a very strong economic cycle right now and if we can afford to add 57 employees 42 of which are in the general fund i think we can afford to add two additional code inspectors and bring that up to 44 in the general fund so i support it i support moving forward with it now rather than later thank you mayor thank you mayor mr st john i'm really happy to hear that the pilot project of mailing out notices of violation and then following up with an inspection to see if it's cured and if not then a contact has been proving fruitful i'm really glad to see that that's working out um how are we doing on weekend code compliance officers uh we have excuse me mayor councilmember turner we do have someone that covers saturdays for us okay two people actually okay um i also noticed that the department request was for a senior an additional senior inspector and regular inspector but that they weren't recommended i'm kind of guessing that the dollar amounts in here were probably salary amounts and maybe salary and benefits there may be additional amounts if we approve that but i'm willing to go ahead and do that i think that more officers is really more co-compliance officials is really us living up to our commitment to make a difference to the people we serve every day right in their home neighborhoods and i think we need effort while we can afford it over the next few years to get things back into condition if we go through another down cycle or if we get things resolved and our volume goes down then through attrition or innovation we can you know let staff drop down to a level that might be reasonable you know might be appropriate for the future but i think for right now we're playing catch-up and the way that you solve that is by getting more feet on the streets and i'm i'm willing to go for the two that were requested thank you well and i am going to make another statement i don't appreciate the term kicking the can down the road that's not what i asked what i asked was to find out we're in a budget meeting i want to find out what it's going to cost and i think that that's very reasonable at the next meeting for somebody to come back and tell us two additional officers with the trucks with the equipment what that would cost that was my request that was my request all right it's in the book mayor for those uh individuals are um also included here um they're about 27 000 a piece but we'll work with um mr st john and his staff and make sure that we add that as a follow-up item what the total cost is and we'll bring it back to you at the next budget meeting i'll make sure we're clear perfect and then earlier it was discussed about vehicles not coming in because of the problems with chips so how does that play out as far as uh if you order two additional trucks how much longer is that gonna i just like to information we make good decisions with a lot of information mayor thank you mayor you you stole my thunder um i i understood clearly what you were asking for and it's absolutely uh appropriate to ask what the ancillary costs are going to be because it's not just two people and i believe that the staffing is fully loaded retirement benefits everything but but there's fuel costs there's repair costs there's a vehicle cost there's there's a vacation there's everything so that i you clarified yourself i was going to do that with you but at the end of the day i still feel what those costs are when they come back and and councilman tom and chop is correct there's some in here now not all of them there's still value and benefit to the citizens into the city and and like i said we're on track because of some of the work that councilman malnour and his team did and this council too and your team that we're going to improve even more the lives of the people we serve and we're going to have and get to where we are a world-class city and that we're going to do it by more code enforcement and working with staff and not staff with our citizens and bringing awareness to them and and communicating with them but uh yeah i think it's absolutely appropriate to bring back anything and everything that goes into that cost but but i want to continue the voice that i still support two two additional full-time employees thank you thank you mayor thank you mayor when we approve other employees and other departments we don't grill staff about well how much is for the salary how much is for the benefit how much is for the vehicle this is an attempt to slow walk this whole initiative there are five council members here that support increasing code enforcement by an additional to inspectors we have all experienced issues with code and are more than ever committed to seeing that code has everything it needs to be successful and in turn reduce the volume of issues that we deal with um again it's going to be around 100 000 a person and if you throw in 27 000 per vehicle we're talking about 250 000 total for two people vehicles benefits salaries vacations everything now i don't think 200 increasing an overall budget where we are increasing our total budget by 89 million dollars year over year i don't think 250 000 is too much to ask for and again i would like this council and those who support the idea of the code inspectors to develop consensus that we move forward if if next cycle or next meeting we get feedback that confirms what we think the salaries and benefits and the vehicles will be that's fine but i don't think it's an amount that can be not justified thank you mayor mayor go ahead thank you sir i think it's pretty clear it's pretty obvious in the eight years that i've been on council that uh a majority of the council rules if you have five today you have what you need i just re-clarified that i support the mayor and his appropriate requests for what it's going to cost but i also went back and said i still because of the benefits believe that we need to have two more to have a world-class city but you got five but today is not the day to vote on anything there's a schedule here and we'll be voting based on that schedule you're not even gonna walk away with that consensus today you're just listening but the way it works is we're listening to you if anybody's not comfortable with it say your peace but there will be a day where we have to vote on everything in this budget today but that won't be today that'll be for another day and then council members then can vote yay or rate vote nay but today you're not even walking away with consensus but if if you can read the writing on the wall you've got five i think you're you're good but it's appropriate to have information that's all thank you mr melner uh yeah i just want to clarify because i've heard the word two and four i want to make sure that i understand what we are saying that we want to get the costs for four is that is that understood two additional then so we have two requests we're saying we would like four that's correct is that is that okay i do want to make sure i understood that mayor i have a i do have a question another question actually but before you go there um this this thing's gotten stupid as far as i'm concerned all i was trying to point out was the fact that vice mayor wanted an additional two that wasn't in her books it wasn't discussed about with anybody i just wanted clarification what's the additional cost nothing more than that not a big deal and i think it's very appropriate that when we come back at our next meeting you just tell us yeah simple as that please go ahead thank you mayor and i was just trying to make the point that the actual cost was listed in our in our budget for the for the two ft's and i believe the ftes when ftes are requested and it includes the cost of the fte um maybe possibly the vehicle difference but that's that was my understanding is that when we see an fte and i want to make sure that i understand that going forward that if the ftd doesn't include all the costs for the ftes and we should probably be aware of that but that was my understanding up to this point is that it includes i.t stuff that they need cell phones it includes the cost of the fte so i just want to understand when we're looking at an fte if are there other costs that we're not seeing uh mayor members of the council the that supplemental should include all of those things okay and so that's typically how we do it in this particular case all i'm saying is when we come back to the next meeting okay we will we will show you and make sure and and we'll go back and look at and make sure but it should include all that so we'll just double check it and then we'll come back to you as a follow-up item very good thank you mayor and i just wanted to clarify because that was the way i understood it we don't hire somebody and then find out we got to spend another 25 thousand dollars to make sure they have everything that they need so with that said i do mayor i have one other question i wanted to clarify i think i understood when you were talking about the administrative support assistant that is also a code person to actually handle administration and and help hopefully with the backlog of the administrative part of what work gets done in code is that right mayor council member thomas joff that is correct very good excellent thank you mayor thank you when i look at the fte schedule in the tabs the second page where the city manager's office is i see that we have a manager we have two uh assistant city managers but i'm only seeing one deputy city manager listed is that an error is that a title change is it something we can provide clarity to so that the council and the public can see exactly how that office is staffed thank you mayor members of the council the second deputy city manager is actually budgeted in public affairs public affairs no public affairs that's mr stoddard he his budget is sitting in public affairs it's never been transferred to the city manager's office is mayor i would suggest that might be something we'd want so that we can see more clearly mayor yes mayor members of the council it's we're neutral it doesn't affect anything for budget if it moves from one place to another so if that's something the council would like us to do and you have a consensus to do that we'll we'll update it and bring it back the next time differently also i tend to get criticized anytime i use the word transparency but i think it would be more transparent to show it over in as a in the manager's office if because i think my impression also is that mr stoddard is a utility player he's covering more than just public affairs so thank you um i i don't know if this is the appropriate place to bring up the topic i know we're talking about code and we've talked about a program that i'd like to discuss is this the appropriate time to now talk about the feral cat program and i know i have some slides out there are they ready mayor membership council if you'll give us a couple of minutes we'll we'll bring them up and and we need a little help doing that so okay just give us a few minutes okay um well what i'll do is talk just briefly about as many of you are aware and last at the end of the last fiscal year several council members came forward and gave part of their council um mate are there improvement council improvement funds to a program called the feral cat program there's an organization called the animal defense league of arizona and several of us donated uh several thousand dollars uh in total to this uh organization and the reason we did it is is there's been and i think most council members have uh received concerns and complaints about feral cats in their neighborhoods and so uh what we did is we we looked at a program that might could help us in that arena because the city has no program for controlling feral cats there's nothing that that is being done directly by the city and i don't think that the city should get involved in that i think it's better done by an outside organization who have the professionals to take care of that kind of thing and so let me know as soon as that is ready is it ready okay go ahead and put up the slide presentation okay so uh an unspayed feral female and her and her mate and all her offspring producing about two litters per year with 2.8 surviving kittens per litter will produce about 2107 offspring within four years and as you can see down at the bottom that number just grows exponentially again assuming all those cats live and they all multiply and so feral cats can become a nuisance in a community if they are not controlled in some some manner and so now let's let's look at what our what our rules are next slide please um there are there are no regulations or lease laws that apply to cats they're free roaming animals it's not legal to harm a cat or abandon or dump a cat in someone else's neighborhood public property or the desert and it's a violation of statute animal cruelty to intentionally harm any animal so within these confines i want to kind of talk about how stanford university took care of a feral cat problem that they had they had a large feral cat population over 1500 cats which was quickly getting out of control and causing public nuisances and concerns throughout the campus utilizing a very animal friendly program called trap neuter and return next slide please the cap population over a period of years was reduced to a very manageable 200 cats now tnr are trap neuter and return the goal of the program is to maintain a colony within the confines of no harm to animals and last year the city council donated approximately seven thousand dollars to the organization and what i want to do is show you what that money did for us in the city of glendale next slide please oh that's not the right one that one and i'm sorry you can't read these numbers very well so i'm going to just give them to you um so in the barrel districts there were 136 cats that were trapped neutered and returned in the troy district there were 16 in the cactus district there were 169 in the saguaro district there were 98 in the okatio district there were 124 in the yucca district there were 128 for a total of 671 cats that were trapped uh neutered and returned to their colonies now the reason that that they do that is again to uh avoid some of the problems uh that um the k feral cats can cause if you back up one slide i think that went over some of those issues so um the spade uh return program is intended to prevent many of the problems that neighborhoods see for example one it's a humane way of reducing the nuisance of a fighting spraying destructive behavior predatory behavior cats are humanly trapped uh they're spayed and neutered and ear clipped and returned to their environment now part of the pro the process and this is something that the community does not always understand is there has to be a feeding program because if you don't have a feeding program in the community for that for that community of cats then they simply will start scrounging on their own they will start becoming a nuisance and this is what many citizens of the city don't understand is without a feeding program you have nuisance cat feral cats with the feeding program you have an individual who goes out and feeds them daily they monitor the the community when there is a new cat that shows up they go out and trap and neuter that cat and put them back in the community so the cat population remains the same they do the things that cats do chase off rats and other things which which we want them to be doing but they're not creating a nuisance for the neighborhood now cats aren't perfect and when you have feral cats in the neighborhood you're going to see some evidences that there are feral cats but in most cases they're very calm in the city of glendale we have the these cats that they gave you statistics on 138 colonies communities of cats that these cats were trapped from uh and there's many more these are just the ones that were trapped in this cycle and this cycle is from june and through february and that those are the numbers and the cost uh is quite high i mean it costs 25 to 50 dollars for each cat to go in and have them uh neutered and then also to have their shots or take care of their other their other issues now a big benefit of the literally scores of individuals who donate their time and money in this community and next skip a slide and go to the next one are that many times you have a cat that comes in like this that it's it's a a baby cat that is in the wild and it's got problems and what these volunteers do as part of this program is they take care of that cat they nurse it back to health and next slide please and they turn it into the the two brother cats which this is the those two cats this is the brother you can see the one cat doesn't have an eye they had to have its eye removed and i want to recognize midwestern university they supply many of the services for these programs and they do charge occasionally on for certain services but they have been a great partner for the animal defense league in providing uh services to take care of these cats so with that what i'm asking council to do is consider making a a budget request to put into the code and again the best place we felt would be for code enforcement to have a contract with an animal defense league or if there's another organization that fits better to provide some money that would then be used for those services and that we let our citizens know that those services are out there and we let our citizens know that when there's a feral cat issue in their neighborhood that somebody from the volunteer group can come out and they can help them or if they want to get involved i'm going to recognize councilmember hugh here he went out and he trapped a cat uh in his in his neighborhoods so you know i hear about everything um and so um anybody can do it if if councilmember hugh can do it anybody can do it okay so um it's it's a great program i'd like to see some funding put into that now the seven thousand dollars that we put in as a council from our district funds was really a small portion of what the need is out there that covers a little bit of the actual cost for taking them to the to the vet but there's a lot of overhead costs which aren't weren't covered at all there could be some staffing needs if we increase our demand the staffing needs at the organization is going to have to have a better staffing need and they're going to have to have some overhead costs covered as well as as this grows and people become aware of it and we we see it developing into a better program there would be a more of a demand as people recognize there's something out there that'll help improve the cat feral cat situation in glendale so with that what i'm recommending is that the council uh provide uh twenty thousand dollars as a budget item uh and then this to be an ongoing budget item that we would either approve or disapprove each year based on the success of the program uh statistically i've looked at the the numbers uh it's been very successful the money that we spent the little money we put in was very successful we're talking 670 cats remember that that pyramid what 670 cats would turn into in our city it's a great program and i'd like to thank publicly the hundreds possibly of volunteers who regularly go out and do this kind of work and help and they're animal lovers obviously but they help maintain the populations in our city and take care of the the cats that need additional assistance and make sure that they get also that they have a program where they cannot adopt out uh tame kittens uh that they that they are able to capture so with that i'll open it up to council and see if we can get some consensus to to add this into the budget you're looking for a five-year contract no we we have to go less than five years because i found councilmember eric clarkson meow go ahead i i did not know that this item would be presented or it was coming forward but i would support the request for 20 000 for an initial program such as this i think it's an invaluable one and i like you and all the other council members do get calls feral cats and people are very upset about them about the damage they do to their property their cars etc so i think this is very worthwhile and i can support it thank you if i may me or i'd like to also recognize councilmember turner for his efforts in this area um he he jumped on board uh i was doing some research and kind of it kind of got dropped and he he's been on this as we chatted about it for many years uh way before we discussed it here on council and so i appreciate all the efforts he's put into and and moved this program forward with that anybody else have any comments mayor i'm supportive of that i think it's a good investment in the community feral cats are a problem um i think it's even though i mean it's the way you propose doing it is for the city basically to not get involved then just to provide some re funding resources to for some volunteers in this other organization to take care of it so i do want to say though that i think one of the reasons there's so few feral cats in the toya district is because we have a lot of coyotes in our neighborhoods so but i am supportive thank you mayor um you know the next year there'll be a feral coyote proposal but i'm in support of this and i think it's also important to note that these feral cat colonies are not just in our residential neighborhoods they're also in our city parks and in our city property city facilities so it's a it's it's our problem too and uh so i'm supportive that we go ahead with this and i also want to thank councilmember malnour for his effort and his getting this ball hopefully across the goal line but also the volunteers that are out there including from glendale community college and from ocotillo district and from other places that have been diligently working on this without our support for many years so i'm glad to see us to help come and shore up their efforts thank you next mayor yeah i'll just share my support uh councilmember malnour thank you so much for the informative presentation and i think there's value to it and thank you for bringing that up and i do support it all right next great you can just go to the supplemental side from get all the cash okay our next presentation is actually the mayor and council office which mrs hanlon will also be presenting i think we're just going to skip forward to the supplemental slide so the mayor's office budget and the council district budgets will remain the same as last year i am requesting a supplemental for the council administration budget to support professional development for our administrative staff this request does align with our strategic plan and our organizational values of excellence and learning that's it i'm here if you have questions thank you mayor i do have a question because when i saw the supplemental i looked at the professional development um line item for three thousand dollars for some either five or six people right it would be it's for the council office assistant staff yes is that what that's for and the mayor's office has a staff of four and their professional development request is for 38 000 is that coming out of i just want to understand if so did we not we didn't have a budget for professional development before and this because there is an increase in the professional development amount in the mayor's office i just want to understand how that how we're managing that mayor councilmember thomas um you are correct we did not have a budget for professional development previously in the council administrative budget the council district's budgets have professional development for the council members the mayor's budget is calculated differently his budget includes all of his staff as well as his professional development whereas the council budgets and the administration budgets are separated out so that's why there is a difference and i know it does look on this sheet that there was an increase in the mirrors but the mayor's budget is flat it's just kind of how they were rolled up in the reporting of it okay so mayor if i could so the that's the mayor's professional development budget mayor and his staff okay and so uh mayor if i could so do you think three thousand dollars is enough for professional development for um [Music] what does that come out to per person i i guess i need to do the math but so currently we do have three 500 percent yeah so i have been taking a look at some stuff just with um obviously with covet a lot of trainings have gone virtual which previously we didn't have that option and so they are more affordable um but i will leave that up to you guys okay um yeah because if i could i mean but you know council assistant is a really difficult job because there really is no training manual because it's they it's different every day and so um i mean i think it's a i think um you know it's an opportunity to learn a lot about a lot of different departments in the city i think it's a really good foot in the door for people who want to work in the public in the in the public sector but um you know i mean it is it is a difficult job to learn because it's just it's if you learn kind of as you go it's not like here's the binder memorize it you'll be fine it just doesn't work like that so i'm happy to see an opportunity to at least offer them some more training and then i guess if we wanted our person to get even something above and beyond then we could take that out of our own budget or is that how that would work uh mayor councilmember thomas off at this point yes okay thank you thank you mayor i i do have one question just curious um since professional development was brought up in all but two districts ocotillo and yucca have professional development line items of eighteen five and the other districts all the other districts have 64 078. what accounts for that difference uh the different mayor councilmember clark the difference is that the council members that are sharing a council assistant have additional funds put into their budget that's just where those funds were located all right thank you any other questions thank you our next presentation is public facilities recreation and special events and our presenter will be mr burke good morning mayor and council it's a pleasure to be here today to talk about our budget and a little bit about the work we do in public facilities recreation and special events department excuse me um i have my leadership team joining me down here in front just so you have an idea that all this work that we were talking about today does get done by a team they're an excellent group and very supportive and i really appreciate their their contributions our budget is uh 17.7 million dollars and 72.5 ftes this year with consideration of the new supplemental request ftes and our breakdown is 52 percent for salary and 41 operations looking at performance measures the number of volunteer hours is starting around it's not quite back to where it was before covid but it's getting a little stronger and our cost per acre of maintenance is improving each year and that's a thank you to the mayor and council for contributing more money in our budget to support that work in the area of the cdb we have strong hotel sales and occupancy and over the last 12 months it's reported that glendale remains number one in the metro area in this category which is really strong for us having to do with our entertainment district the number of attendees at the glendale adult center and at the foothills recreation center our numbers are coming back up they're not quite back to pre-covered levels but they're strengthening constantly and the civic centers had really good participation of course mayor council contributed that a lot over the period of kobe because you did your meetings there we had a lot of uh boards and commission and other other activities that came to the civic center this one has a lot of apparent change but we've done the pivot strategy now so we're not doing the big festivals that's why that reporting is different we'll be coming to the council with a workshop in the near future to look at the live at murphy park and special events activities so we'll answer i'm sure some of your questions there but i will note that that social media response rate that has grown in the last couple years is in part because of our partnering with the various groups that are coming to live at murphy park all the bands the food trucks the beer vendor and working with the downtown chamber of commerce they're all tagging us on social media and that's multiplying the number of contacts and it's starting to work very effectively looking at accomplishments for the department this is just kind of a highlight section it's not everything we work on as an organization but we have just recently removed and replanted 129 trees at the orchard at swirl ranch park made a magnificent difference in the look of that orchard and the feel of the place we transition youth baseball from the summer season into the spring season and some of you are with us at dinner or we could go at sore ranch park and you could see the four fields were inactive or activated there were youth there was really a busy evening and the vice mayor commented to me that probably not a single parent over there complaining about the 70 degree weather that night instead of 115 in the summer for evening play so we think that was a great move and you can see the participation rate stayed pretty high we completed the harold's park lake my colleague don bezler talked about that in his presentation the other day we were really pleased to be involved in design process and make sure we brought some amenities to that feature so it wasn't just a hole in the ground with water that we had walking paths and area lights and turf and ramadas and fishing piers so there's activities to make that amenity really work in that park we produced the new live at murphy park events in downtown which i mentioned we've had a couple months of that and we've been very successful we'll be bringing you a a workshop presentation on that in the near future the cvb the convention visitors bureau got a grant of eighty thousand dollars from the arizona office of tourism that was a nice surprise and the glendale civic center is once again ranked number one by arizona magazine for meeting and convention facilities and i hope the mayor and council join me we really like being number one [Applause] looking at the supplemental requests there's uh quite a list here all of them are general funded the first group is primarily that the cost of doing business is going up so the convention and visitor bureau that's a increase in the grant every year there goes the three percent increase so we just budget the supplemental the increase the cost for the star report is going up that's a data set we get about hotels and the convention visitor bureau area postage going up and the ability to mail out our magazine to glendale residents we'd like to be able to increase civic center has a cox communication cable increase custodial services all of our facilities we had an increase in the contract amount the matching part for the grant that i mentioned for the cvb is 12 000 for the tourism and then we had rent increase for the cbb over at the media center control increase and landscape contract increases all the vendors are giving us increases as their contracts allow and in the case of the contract maintenance it also there's a slight scope increase that two peripheral washes up off skunk creek next the flood control cost for our parks is going up as well as the water utility this is a big increase big single item this is making up for the cost of water for the last few years the six and a half percent increase in rate we we miss getting the opportunity to put that in as an ongoing supplemental we did one year as one time only so we're catching up for a few years here and that's why that big number part-time audio visual staff to support all the work we're now doing supporting meetings like this like we just had this morning is in my area the special events banner program that program has kind of floated a little bit so we're taking it on and saying we'll work with uh the vendor to make sure the brackets are in good place that the banners are in good condition that they get set up and that's both downtown and out at the entertainment district and up on bell road special event part-time permitting staff is to help us with the number of permanent requests that are coming in and how we manage special event permitting the annual fishing event this is a program that the city used to do it was cut from the budget the vice mayor was gracious enough to step in with private sector support and kept it alive for the last few years i don't actually know how many but i know it's been quite a few this will bring it back in and we'll operate it and we'll also do two programs one in bonsal and one at the new lake at heroes park with this funding so we'll have two events for fishing in the city heroes lake water utilities and the two splash pads these are utility bring up the cost for water and the cost for maintenance for those two new three new facilities eighty two thousand forty four thousand each for the splash pads mayor good thank you mr burke so our capital improvement plan calls for two new splash pads the one at sunset palms and one at swara ranch but i don't see the o m included in here mayor members of council yes that they'll be under construction this next year and then we'll apply for that for the following year so i don't have a schedule right now one will about to actually implement those the design and the construction implementation not exactly sure i understand that are both of the new splash pads going to be under construction next year that's our intent in 23 yes okay is one of those sunset palms no the two you mentioned sir the swirl ranch and sierra sierra verde park okay did i miss your question i'm sorry um i'm confused and i knew we were adding two and i thought one was sunset palms which i believe is coming online this year yes okay and then but i thought saguaro ranch park was on the same that we were adding two and and it was that one and saguaro ranch park we just completed the o'neill one this last year we did not ask for supplemental money to operate it we've stretched it with our existing budget so this request is to cover that the sunset palms are going to be building this year probably be completed into the new fiscal year and then there are two new ones that are planned as part of the new federal package that we just presented in the cip slow ranch park and sierra verde park okay and um those are we haven't requested the funding operating funding for those yet because they'll be in the next fiscal year okay if i again i'd ask you guys through the chair please sorry certainly and and so mayor my impression was that the sunset palms and the saguaro ranch park splash pads were double tracking together that that was the two that we were talking about but you're telling me that there's a third one and now and suarez ranch is in between those two there's the sunset palms is in the current cip and in this current year the other two that i mentioned the soil ranch and the sierra verde are in the in the presentation we just gave you that included the arpa funds for the capital for the next year but they're we haven't begun them yet we haven't started the design process or the permitting process uh mayor mr burke i'll not use more time here i'll try to see if i can give back to you one-on-one i'm sorry i can get back with you one-on-one thank you thank you and then excuse me i'll wait till he starts perfect okay thank you mayor the final slide is a new ftes so we're asking for a recreation service worker to help with aquatics to help support what we were just talking about the aquatics program that's growing park service worker which should just be a general service worker doing line work for all the parks this is one that was identified in the forecast last fiscal year to come on in this year and then a request for a service worker to help our irrigation team to be able to manage the irrigation problems and repairs system-wide a service worker for ball field maintenance so that we can keep up with the in-field maintenance lining of fields and maintenance of the turf on the sports fields that we allocate out for uh tournaments and and program and then a service worker for the orchard the program i just mentioned at the ranch it's a 17-acre cultural area but a lion share that is orchards both citrus and stone fruit orchard and we think it take a lot of time to just keep that maintenance up and keep the work going that we're doing now with the new planting and then final is the cip project manager to go with the new cip program the expanded program that the council has been looking at to help us manage all these projects and with that i'll try to mess up some other questions any other questions yes first i would say that parks are one of the most visible benefits that accrue to the citizens of the city of glendale and and it should be a priority of this council and i believe it is my questions are curious questions about various numbers on slide 61 the number of community volunteer hours leveraged by the department is down to a third of what it was and i know kovid intervened for two years but i think your rebound recovery number is still quite low could you comment on that mayor members of council it's just a number of the how fast people come back to us and want to and are able to work with us we're offering basically the same programming prior to covet but it's not 100 yet and the community has not responded in a way okay we are still using like glendale adult center still using quite a few volunteers but it's slowly growing and it's just what's going on in the market with regard to slide 63 number of people who attended foothills recreation and aquatic center events and programs again this is a rebounding situation after covid but it also affects the amount of revenue that is generated by foothills have you adjusted um the amount of general fund support that has to go to to foothills to cover the shortfall mayor members council i don't do revenue projections so i don't believe mayor members of the council we fully budget for the operational cost of that facility and then whatever revenue comes in comes into the general funds so the amount of subsidy may be changing but it's it's not really measured in the way that okay that you're suggesting because if i remember correctly uh mayor i'm asking another question if i remember correctly council at one time had set a goal of foothills revenue recovery it's somewhere like 72 percent or something like that do you remember mayor members of the council um when the former director was here we heard that multiple times and the staff were were sort of driving in that direction but there's never been really a formal that we can find a formal policy that said that it had to do that that's just more of a goal i think for it to recover 70 but it's not hard and fast all right and [Music] let me see if i had any other questions i think i had one more if i could continue mayor under division parks maintenance and this would be in the budget page 147 under supplies for parks maintenance there's a reduction of nearly 50 percent so what they don't need fertilizer or anything anymore to maintain the parks no mayor members council we've reallocated that money to other lines in the budget principally into professional development to cover specific contracts where we're doing the work okay just better allocating where we actually spend all right that happens in multiple divisions that's a good answer and i believe that's all the questions that i had mayor very good did it you guys doing a good job parker's looking good thank you uh the presentation for public affairs is our final presentation prior to breaking for lunch that's my plan too okay and that'll be presented by mr stoddard thank you mayor council uh the public affairs department is responsible for planning and implementing the strategies and the programs to accurately communicate the priorities of the city of glendale to our various targeted audiences now there are multiple a multitude of of external audiences that we engage with stakeholders residents businesses visitors legislators members of congress uh our other business leaders from around the the region in the state uh our media outlets uh the other local regional and and state organizations that we often interact and communicate with that work is in addition to the extensive communication that occurs with the glendale employees and the work that's done working with every department in every division of the city now the programs and the functions of the department are are numerous and you know them well from legislative to security and additional funding military affairs public relations web services our social media the graphic design work for the city the work of assisting the mayor and council office to the amazing award-winning work that our multimedia journalist team does under sue breading now over the last seven years you've seen a transformation in the public affairs department we have transitioned into an aggressive proactive approach to the public affairs business simply put we are no longer waiting around for others to tell the story of glendale we are out doing that ourselves communicating that our approach has made us a leader amongst our colleagues we often receive phone calls from the other valley cities who've seen a video or seen a production that we put out and asked us how we did that and how to help them do something similar over the last three years worked to secure over the last year we've worked to secure over three million dollars in federal appropriations that will go directly to glendale projects that will save the city and the taxpayer money i think this is a perfect example when we talk about the proactive and aggressive approach that we're taking when congress made their change over we started hearing rumors and kind of reading the tea leaves that for the first time in over a decade congress may entertain direct appropriation requests from members of congress sometimes referred to as earmarks we quickly without delay got together with our departments and put a priority list of projects together not knowing what the criteria might be that they would come out with but to put our priority list together about what projects we may have shovel ready we then also as as that looked to become even more of a reality from leadership as they talked about it we quickly brought a short-term contract for some federal consultant services to the council and with your trust and support we were able to bring them on board and over the last year through a very heavy lift we were able to secure as i said three million dollars in projects over the last few weeks you've seen us kind of celebrating those in the media with senator kelly our congressman what that has resulted in not only in funding from us but it also resulted in some phone calls from our colleagues in other cities who were a little upset with us because they were getting phone calls from their managers and their councils who were seeing these media reports and asking why they didn't have any projects or why they didn't secure any of the funding during this round we had about a two week window to make that appropriations request and get the information to our congressional delegation which allowed us to secure this funding when others didn't so a proactive aggressive approach is what we're doing we navigated the complex and oftentimes controversial process of the redistricting that occurred in the state congressional lines state legislative lines we wanted to position ourselves to have the the representation that was appropriate within the respective boundaries for the city of glendale we helped advocate and fight and honestly it was a fight at times to make sure that the proposed 25-year transportation sale regional sales tax pension included a large amount of funding for the city of glendale this also included a last-minute negotiation and some maneuvering to secure an additional 263 million dollars for the city of glendale for seven additional projects this was the last we'd been talking about a 20-year program the region decided to add on an additional five years but because of some large legacy projects for the region it had resulted in an allocation of zero dollars to glendale and zero projects in that final five years obviously that wasn't acceptable to us so with the help of public affairs and mayor wires we were successful in working with our regional partner cities who actually agreed to reduce their funding in order to allow glendale to program these seven additional projects in and that wouldn't have been possible if not for the relationships and the the groundwork and the trust and confidence that people had in the city to be able to to deliver on what we said we were going to you all know sue bretting and her team have produced professional award-winning video features that are telling the story of glendale we've highlighted the amazing growth and development that's occurring we've celebrated with ceremonies heroes lake park is a great example public ceremonies we're inviting the public out and then we're turning around and producing content to engage hundreds of other residents who may not have been able to attend those events all of you have participated in those things we appreciate your time when we call you and say hey we want to highlight something or we want to profile something or we have an opportunity to engage with you're all uh very gracious and and providing the flexibility and the time that we need to to produce those um in addition to the external production that we are doing there's sometimes a lot of behind-the-scenes work too that goes with those videos the police department was up for their uh accreditation which typically is a very intense and hands-on uh process with those accreditation agencies but with the onset of covid those accreditation agencies were the the agency was shifting to more of a virtual assessment which is different than they've ever done different than we've ever done so we set to work to produce with our police department and our multimedia journalist team a video a lengthy 30 usually or you know our videos are short because of the nature of this video it was a 30 minute video that went in depth into the work the processes procedures statistics with our police department and the feedback that we got just yesterday from that accreditation agency is that in all of their years they hadn't seen something as well professionally produced by a city that was as extensive and it made their job a lot easier for the work and the assessment that they had to do so kind of an example of something that happens maybe not externally now that we've gotten that video to the accreditation department uh deputy city manager rick st john and i have been talking we will provide that link to that video for uh for the council so that you can review it too i think you'll find it interesting and and engaging uh our social media presence since cc romero joined us has has skyrocketed we're engaging uh with with all of our residents and businesses when people are on social media it's not always a public back and forth but we're engaging with them to get them the information and the uh the assistance that they need we do all this with a very uh dedicated a small group of staff you work with them often you know them and i would just say our work is just getting started uh our public affairs work over the next year will the next few years will be even more critical with the uh you know major events such as the college football playoff the fiesta bowl will be a a semi-final game this year which will bring national attention and of course the super bowl in 2023 which will be an international event the ncaa final four in 2024 and that's in addition to all of the other exciting development that will be coming out that we'll be celebrating and profiling and highlighting including crystal lagoons the addition to parks uh and the other amenities that are coming into the city now our performance measures are really focused on our opportunities of increasing outreach through social media uh engagement with the shorter more uh uh engaging videos that we're producing uh also to make sure that we are informing our community about the legislative actions that are happening at the state through the legislative link program uh and then of course ensuring that our council has the opportunity to provide leadership on the different policy committees that are available to you you're busy folks you've got a job as a council member and oftentimes i i don't think the public appreciates when we say you serve on a committee what exactly that means in the influence you have but we've really been able to be a leader in in regional state and national policy discussions because of the work that you do um i think that you know for instance mayor wire serving as the chair of the executive the mag regional executive committee during the period of time when we were negotiating that 25-year sales tax extension paid tremendous dividends to the city uh councilman malnar who serves on the mag economic development committee we talk a lot about infrastructure he sits on that committee with business leaders from across the region as they're discussing and talking about projects and implementation that will allow us to leverage the funds and the relationships that we have council member clark you serve on policy committees at the league of arizona cities and towns where that's really the the level where we're trying to prioritize the legislative agenda and that can grow out of control at times with 91 different cities and towns and so we have the ability to not only help formulate that stuff but make sure that the glendale priorities are also a part of that and we've seen some of that from our fireworks bills and others that have gone through that process water you know how much time have we spent talking about water as a policy in this state over the last year council member bart turner who serves on the serves as the chair of that organization trading uh and reviewing and developing policies that are going to have impacts for decades to go uh vice mayor aldama serves on the national public safety and crime prevention we spent a lot of time this day talking about public safety and crime at the end of the day while it's a local issue a tremendous amount of funding regulation and support is coming down from the national level not a surprise and through opportunities like that we have the ability to make sure that uh the unique needs and requirements of not only just glendale but i would say arizona the southwest united states which are different than the east coast cities which are different than the the northwest cities and sea but we have an opportunity through all of these type of and there's many more committees and things that you serve on but i think it's important for the public to know that we have those opportunities to impact and direct public policy in a positive way for glendale because of that time that you take to do that and of course as we continue to move towards our strategic planning developing our tier two uh balanced scorecard approach for the public affairs department we will make sure that our performance measures are fully aligned with objectives such as stakeholder engagement and superior customer service delivery for this year we have three supplementals first is ten thousand dollars for social archive this is the software that we use to be fully compliant with the federal and state regulations regarding retention policies of social media this is everything from the granular metadata that has occurred we have we are responsible for doing all of that because of our increase in social media activity uh we have an uh there's an increase in some of those costs storyblocks is a software that our video team uses when they're producing the videos for the graphics the names the transitions all of that we had been operating under a kind of one user account that we'd been sharing amongst the four or five people who are doing the video editing storyblocks contacted us and said hey it's more appropriate that you guys are an enterprise account and they were right we looked into it and we want to make sure that we're being fair to their uh their proprietary product that they provide that we utilize and so the fifteen thousand dollars allows us to have uh the multiple licenses to be operating under that software appropriately and then lastly twenty thousand dollars for the media uh center utilities we pay for the utility bills for the expo hall and the four stories uh within the media center with the increased additional staff that are in there and then as the expo hall uh is becoming uh utilized more coming out of covet and then of course with the um the high increases in uh utility and electrical payments this increases needed to be able to make those adjustments so in closing i just want to thank the great team that we have in public affairs i think the council for their support and their participation this is public affairs work is a team work it's something that nobody can do on their own it takes everyone's efforts and so we appreciate all of that and with that i'd be happy to answer any questions thank you mayor first i want to thank your media team i had the idea for them how to build a lake and how to build a road but it was really their expert expertise that fleshed out something that that i am very proud of and i'm sure they are as well i do have a question with regard to slide 75 on goals and objectives can you explain the average positive sentiment even though it's increasing is still very low can you explain what that positive sentiment signifies and how you intend to to raise that number yeah so um mayor councilmember clark it's a good question i'm not a social media expert myself so i asked a very similar question when i get these reports in the metrics most of the most of the engagement with the city uh a vast majority is what in that world and the science of social media they call a neutral engagement meaning someone's not upset or negative they may just say hey where do i you know where do i go to report a you know a pothole on the road and so we still capture that i mean that's some type of media engagement but it's neither a positive nor it's negative so the vast majority is neutral what we try to focus on with the positive is when we are actually putting out something about the city and then there's either people see it and go oh good for you the positive engagement is when someone would either respond themselves personally or share so then that tree kind of grows in the social media world the distribution with saying something positive of this is you know crystal lagoons this is really exciting i can't wait to go that would be a positive engagement as opposed to someone just sharing it without saying anything which would be a neutral type of engagement so we want to increase that positive you know we want people to share we want people to make a positive comment when they're doing that so do you have strategies in place to do that yeah so again not being the social media expert but as we as we build the followers as we have as we use the science to kind of determine what people are reacting to there's some things that we can push out that there really is no engagement at all there are some that we put out like the heroes lake park where all of a sudden people are engaging so we then try to coordinate our our social media playbook to find those areas where we're having positive engagement and create more of that type of content so it's not necessarily how do we get someone to engage with a specific post it's recognizing what are the type of posts that they're engaging positively and then producing more of that okay thank you very good answer thank you thank you mayor and it's so often the case council member clark and i are like thinking like with the same mind so i had that same question at hand that i wanted to ask so i want to go just oh calm down i want to go just a touch deeper do we have do we track our negative engagement yeah yeah so we um and and if you want mayor council we can we just did an end of the year report um cc produces we've got software this is all data driven the the science of social media we got an annual report that cece just presented to the executive management team and we'd be happy to share that with you and you can kind of see some of those that really granular detailed metrics of of our engagements and and mayor if i may continue and i realize that now i'm the guy standing between us and lunch the when there is negative engagement do we maybe push that out to the department that's over that area so that they can follow up if appropriate or or correct an issue or that sort of thing yeah so um mayor councilmember turner um sometimes we get this question where a council member will see somebody a resident of theirs that responds to something and they say well it doesn't look like you know it just set out that we didn't respond well what we are what we've traditionally done is cc takes it off like they'll send that person a direct message on twitter and then they will engage or have a phone then have a phone call and figure out how can we help okay let me get you connected to this so that's really the customer service the two so you may not serve it see it if you're just reviewing a thread what we've tried to focus on is if they're asking a question that we think is also more applicable to other members of the public while we do take it offline we will then follow back up and say you know good question here's a number that you can contact or you can put information into glendale one we're not telling that person to go to glendale one we've already gone offline probably had a phone call entered it in ourselves but just so anybody might see that and wonder the same thing we follow it up so that they can see oh here is this resource that's available thank you and mayor leslie there's so many different aspects of social media so many different places you know like facebook twitter and instagram and on and on so it's really difficult you know nextdoor.com is one and i know as a council member i track a fair amount of that and i don't dare respond to everything that gets said because it only you know can increase the negativity and amplify it but when i do see something i like to you know give a heads up to a department or something that there's an issue you know maybe could be addressed so i think it's important that if we're going to use social media to our advantage for outreach we need to also be responsible and accept any negative that comes and try to correct it thank you thank you okay for recessed brunch we'll be back here at uh 12 i'm sorry 1 15. i can't hear you but it's cold up here make a statement okay folks let's go ahead and get started uh we'll bring this back into session our first presentation of this afternoon is the fire department and that presentation will be done by mr st john good afternoon mayor vice mayor and council uh to me again last presentation for me of the day fire services 60 million dollar budget 297 ftes broke into several different divisions in like all other departments personnel make up the majority of the budget at about 80 response times at the 90th percentile what that means is 90 percent of the time we get there in this time our goal is seven minutes and 20 seconds and we are meeting that goal the valley average is probably just under that around seven minutes with some agencies being well over 720 and some agencies being under that seven minute mark for an average of about seven the national average for response times is six twenty ish six and a half minutes and uh the nfpa goal is five minutes and 20 seconds and i'm not aware of agencies that are able to meet that so we are working to improve that 7 minute and 20 second response time but that's where we're at today and then you can see fire suppression als bls calls all other calls received and of course we have the automatic aid received and given numbers up there as well and our iso rating remains at a one which is the best you can get these are the training hours and all i really want to do is point out that seven eight hours of actual training in 2021 is much lower than what we would normally expect to see that is because of the pandemic we did all the training online that we could and we deferred in-person training and so we've resumed the in-person training example would be for our engineers there are certain things they have to do that you can do online but then eventually they have to get in the truck and demonstrate the proficiency and so that face-to-face proficiency demonstration is what we're doing now this is the fire marshal's office you can see some pretty significant increases as a result of construction expenses excuse me construction inspections and then plans reviewed for new developments when we continue to see that increase and are projecting that it's going to eventually level out but stay at an increased level customer contacts are trending up and that's just calls for service that are coming in so some accomplishments since 2007 we've taught over 38 000 people the hands only cpr and aed training we have 62 firefighter recruits from around the valley that have been trained at our regional academy and we expect train 50 more by the end of this fiscal year we do have a new a couple of things associated with cancer initiatives and we have installed new exhaust systems at all our fire stations and as you know medical response unit 153 went into service in july 21 we're seeing good results from that mr being in service and mr 158 which was approved by council here recently will go into service when our recruits graduate the academy we have several new paramedics that are graduating and the good news is we did a lateral recruitment a heavy push on lateral recruitment this past fiscal year and we're able to hire four lateral firefighter paramedics so they're they're coming to us already trained to be paramedics so we won't have to incur that cost and then the other cancer initiative we have a grant to help start early cancer screenings and we have our firefighters engineers captains battalion chiefs everybody going through this and we're seeing good results from that as well and then finally we have two of our members on crisis response team that received crisis interventionist of the year awards and that's sarah stefan and sarah amberst and we're very proud of the work that they've done they have crisis response does a lot with interns and volunteers so this last year we had 20 000 hours with an estimated value of about 540 000 in volunteer time and they were dispatched to over 2 400 events 46 bachelor bachelor and master level interns from various universities across the country we're supervised by our staff as part of their intern program and complex case management essentially what that is is when we have people that use the 911 system as their primary care essentially we put them into complex case management and we try to resolve their issues and get them steered in a different direction so we assisted 98 customers last year and closed 89 of those referred cases which relieved a pretty significant burden on the 911 system so here are our supplementals the cad dispatch fees for ambulance services this is a projected increase that increases every year and so this is just noting that percent increase that we often see electronic patient care reporting we moved to electronic patient care reporting several years ago this is a software uh ongoing maintenance upgrade cell phone and data plan increase we have new tablets that our fire marshals use in the field and there's an associated cost for the air cards that they need we have standby for our public information officer and car 1559 which is essentially a medical response a medical aid response on scenes that are very intricate and involve interaction between our fire personnel and hospital staff we are due for our scba hydrostatic testing we've begun that process this fiscal year but we need additional funding to continue it next fiscal year video laryngoscopes this is a new piece of equipment that's used by paramedics in the field essentially it allows the paramedic to see through video what is going on in the patient's throat to better place and intubate so that they can breathe we have a couple of training supply needs the first is glenville fire department only so the cost of wood and things that we use to train our firefighters has gone up dramatically you used to be able to buy a piece of plywood for you know relatively low cost and it's i think seven times what it used to be now and so this cost is reflective of that as i talked about in the fire marshal's office we've seen a lot more work related to new construction and plans review we've also seen an increase in the number of inspections that we have to do and so we're asking it for a new fire inspector to help us maintain the level inspections that we want to maintain and then we're also looking at vacant buildings and a plan to make sure that they're included in routine inspections at some level and then we're asking for new uh three new firefighters essentially this is manpower backfill and what we'd like to do is place one firefighter on each of the three shifts as you know in fire operations through the constant staffing model they have an a shift a b shift and a c c shift that rotates we'd like to place one firefighter on each shift to help reduce the overtime cost now of course if because of firefighters that are either in paramedic school or on modified duty we're seeing that the b shift is significantly understaffed we may put all three of them on the b shift because that's where majority of the help is needed but looking at the numbers today i think it's pretty evenly distributed across the three shifts mayor thank you i think it's appropriate this time to ask a question it looks like you're pretty much done with requests for firefighter ftes and so obviously there's some other things here but let me just stop there and if the chief is better appropriate to answer then that's okay too and before i start i will congratulate chief barnes thank you for being here and congratulations on being appointed the interim chief and welcome to your first budget mean that you will to some extent have to uh answer some questions but congratulations fine man fine man um three firefighter ftes requested for manpower backfill i got a lot of questions i'll just go through them and then you guys can answer them were there other requests for ftes that weren't approved to be brought to the council outside of the three one question if only three that you're asking for the chief i i believe we're already over budget on overtime let me stop there and we'll get back to some other questions i believe it to be nearly a million dollars can you tell me what that overtime budget overages right now mayor members of the council in the current fiscal year we are about spent of our overtime budget i think we have roughly 2.1 in the overtime budget and as of mid-march had spent just over 2 million so we are projecting to be i think a million dollars would be a reasonable dollar amount some pretty close only requesting the the three backfills should this council expect to see mandatory overtime for firefighters 48 hours 72 hours is is that what we're looking at if we're not asking for any more ftes and then go back to the question i asked them but were there any more ftes than just the three mayor vice mayor if i can address the first question which i believe was were there other requests that were made chief garrison chief barnes and his staff and i have been researching this for quite some time working with the labor association who have been very beneficial in helping us look into this and we were on a track that we thought was a specified track and then recently we came across a different information that i've not yet shared with the labor association so out of respect i'd kind of like to have that conversation uh before i go into detail on a public meeting but with this new information and speaking with chief barnes and his staff along with the city manager we feel that there's other measures that can assist to reduce mandatory overtime which this is the first year in the history of the fire service in glendale that i'm aware of where we've had to force over time and so that's an issue that we want to address not just from a cost perspective but we don't want and i don't mean any pun by this but we don't want to burn out people and so we want them to be happy and healthy when they're at work and we want them to be on their best game and that's why we have 24-hour shifts instead of 48-hour shifts for example and we at the end of a 40-hour shift you're tired you've run a lot of calls and you're probably not at your best and so we want them to work 24 and then go home and that's not always what we're able to do today and so looking at all the data that we've pulled we felt like adding three additional firefighters this fiscal year could give us the data to support the need for additional firefighters in the future if that were the case or if the other measures that we're going to implement are hopefully implementing soon bear out as we think they might three may be the number that we need so thank you for that let me just go back did um and obviously you asked for some respect to give you time to go back to the fire union was that the answer to my question were there other ftes requested mayor vice mayor the request that came in from the fire department was more than three fte firefighters thank you and and granted if you need that time grant i'm not going to beat you up on that my concern is is what you just said you just you just described what my concern is and to the chief as well we're going to go over our budget on overtime so should we expect a midterm request for dollars for that if we're not going to hire anymore and i don't know the answer to that yet because you want some time to to meet with everyone my biggest concern is is our response times going to get are going to decrease because as a result of not getting ftes one two what you just described the wear and tear in our firefighters that can be that that can have a negative effect on each of them the department our city and our response times so it sounds like you're speaking on behalf of the chief unless the chief wants to answer he has a strategic plan to deal with what we just talked about mayor vice mayor that's correct we are developing a plan chief barnes is preparing to present the city management a plan that he believes will work we are working through that still having conversations but i anticipate that will happen sooner than later and to your point about response times firefighters responding to calls for service in the field with the certain number of assets we have in the field are what directly impact response times even when they're tired if you will and have been on say 16 calls in a shift and they're now taking their 17th their response times aren't any worse because of that so what we're doing is implementing infill units during peak hours so that's the medical response units and that should help drive down the response times are there thank you mayor if i may continue are there any training that as a result of not asking for other supplementals with regard to the professional training that we're going to lack mayor vice mayor i'm not quite sure i understood the question i apologize so your supplementals don't include that includes some training but are there any training that we're not providing to our firefighters as a result of not asking mayor vice mayor i can tell you that our firefighters our engineers and our captains are the best trained in the valley excellent thank you that's a good answer my last question is um is the mou conversations done or are we still wrapping that up sounds like we're wrapping it up i thought we were through with that mayor vice mayor the overwhelming majority of the conversations been had and we are in agreement we're dotting eyes and crossing teas on language i've got a meeting this coming monday with the labor association to work through a couple of small dotting eyes crossing tease issues and then we'll compile the complete record formulate the final version and present that in front of city management and the labor association for discussion usually that's just hey thanks for a good negotiation cycle discussion and then as i stated earlier in the police department presentation will be bringing the information to council okay i would hope that it come today but it sounds like you need some time we're not done with our budget means i believe we have one more so we can expect that you're going to bring back the supplementals that were asked for above the three mayor vice mayor i believe you have that information already i may be mistaken about that um i don't have that okay my apologies is why i'm asking why we don't have it today but it sounds like you said you need more time today would have been appropriate to have that information but mayor vice mayor my apologies but yes that's correct a little more time would be useful and then we'll have an answer to how many ftes were actually asked for and and the justification why we don't are or are not going to don't know the answer mayor vice mayor we will we will present that in a follow-up discussion yes thank you sir appreciate you mayor vice mayor members of the council the as far as the mou goes the substantive cost elements we have assumed into our budget so what we're really talking about are operational issues how they're interpreted and it's always important that when you go through i think we had 90 uh roughly or is that am i thinking of police um when was about 60 uh mr city manager i think fire department had 82 and police department had 69. so there were say 82 proposals uh not all those obviously are financial a lot of them are just operational how you do things so what rick and the labor union do is they want to make sure there's clarity to what intent is from both the labor perspective and management perspective so that's what's being worked on it's just a couple of those elements but the proposal in our proposed budget has anticipated uh the implementation the mou cost items are into here so there's nothing from a budget standpoint that the that the mou is going to change in terms of lowering or raising our proposed budget mayor if i may clarify thank you mayor so then let's go back to the question against i guess then it's appropriate answer today because it's not included in you you're only requesting the chief is requesting three ftes how many did he originally ask for and didn't make it to us it's in the report isn't it no mayor vice mayor i don't recall offhand i believe that the chief would know mayor vice mayor was 15. 15 total yes sir okay so thank you chief uh mayor council member obama um 15 was the the what we have here but there was a total of 28 and that included other divisions if that answers your question it does sir thank you so much and so not not bringing to the table the the total of 15 and just the three you two gentlemen are saying to this council that response times won't be affected we won't have wear and tear we're not going to ask for additional budget midterm and everything's kosher mayor vice mayor we will not be coming back to the council mid-fiscal year for an additional overtime allotment we are preliminary looking at numbers and the numbers seem to indicate that adding more bodies would not have the effect that we're looking for now when i say it won't have the effect we're looking for obviously if you add more bodies and have more available staffing for the constant staffing model you're going to see a reduction in the overtime but what we're trying to do is find efficiencies and that operations model and how firefighters are able to take time off how we backfill when they're in paramedic school how we backfill when they're in the training academy assisting as either a mentor or a training captain in the academy and how we're managing as chief briggs talked about earlier the number of firefighters that are on modified duty so looking at all of those different features and and what causes overtime chief barnes and i are developing a plan to address some of those items and we believe that working with the labor association to address those items while adding three firefighters gives us the time we need to do an actual assessment of what the needs of the fire service is in the constant staffing model thank you mayor it sounds like you have a strategic plan you're working on is what i'm hearing and you're not going to come back and ask for supplemental dollars to cover uh a an overage on budget for ot you realize that there could be some overtime but you have a plan to address that okay i'm all ears and you're going to come back with that our next budget meeting mayor vice mayor if we have it done by then i certainly will and that will be my goal thank you sir appreciate it thank you mr phelps uh mayor of vice mayor members of the council so just a couple things to to consider yes we had this year has been a an extraordinarily high utilization of overtime one reminder that our department has been impacted like many departments because of covet and so we're starting you know so we had a lot of outages based on covid so we don't want to go and and because of a uh something that happened in a specific period of time to change the entire staffing model we but we're going to monitor that as we go forward the other thing is that over time in of itself is not bad over time if it's the right amount of overtime is in a very efficient tool for management to manage the workload it's really when you get into too much over time is what you try to minimize against so our goal would never be to minimize overtime because that means you're likely overstaffed uh you know but by having the right amount of overtime uh it's a good tool for efficiency and again that's what our challenge has been to uh to to interim chief barnes and to his team and to rick has been to really be efficient on how we utilize uh our resources because the the we would rather get the overtime managed correctly and then once that's there if we're going to add additional resources it's really adding other services that would help better protect better protect our citizens by looking at our call volume et cetera so again a reminder we came out of covid that had a huge impact on our overtime it drove it up higher and again rick and and when chief garrison was here and now with uh with interim chief uh barnes they're working really hard to kind of go through all the operational strategies and we're we're very comfortable with our recommendation that we believe this number uh can can achieve the goal that we're looking for thank you uh mayor if i may continue thank you so much for that um and mr st john thank you for the relationship building you've you've created while you've been in this role with the fire unit it's i i hear like you guys have been doing really really well and that speaks volumes of both the fire union and and our administrative staff under your leadership with with mr phelps so thank you kudos to you on that um just lastly i know so the fire union have they have subject matter experts is why they bring you these fte requests of 15. all i'm saying is i hope that you as a subject matter expert and chief barnes and the fire union can really get down and think about only the citizens and i know that's what you do that you'll come back to us with the strategic plan that works that our national standards won't decrease more than they are now if anything meet or exceed that's what i'm looking for but when i hear 15 and when they only receive three i'm thinking okay there's probably some more negotiating than to go on but if you have that in mind i'm going to lay back and listen to your next presentation thank you thank you mayor i and uh mr saint john don't take this wrong but because of cole but i've now gotten very used to the fact that anything can happen so i i take very seriously your comment about you won't be coming back providing that nothing crazy happens and i'm going to throw that little caveat in there because we don't know what can happen and and i do know that sometimes we're surprised by things that aren't good so if you came back i think it only because of a something that we couldn't control or had no uh foresight on so i i want to give you that much in there uh just to make sure but with that councilmember clerk's next and then mr milner thank you i want to put some things in context either chief barnes or deputy saint john how does the glendale fire department rank in terms of pay and benefits compared with other valley cities mayor we first second third fourth fifth foot mayor councilmember clark we are committed as a management team to keep them in the number number two position number two position okay um i don't remember what period it's for but i'm going to bring up an issue that that has been brought up before other valley cities they work what 56 hours is it a week or a month mayor councilmember clark they are on a 56 hour work week okay but glendale is on a 52 hour work week correct mayor councilmember clark that is correct and if you multiply that deficient four hours by 200 and what is it 57 87 employees that's a lot of time isn't it mayor councilmember clark that is a very detailed conversation that would take probably a half hour for me to explain if he'd like to meet offline one-on-one i would love to meet online but but just looking at it from an ignorant civilian point of view those hours would go a long way to covering over time okay and i understand the implications of covet over the past two years a lot of firefighters got covered because they worked directly with the public and that did have a significant impact on overtime i agree with you i believe i mean when i hear that their initial request was 15 to 28 people 15 represents one quarter of the city's entire fte budget of 57. for everybody all the departments in the city 28 represents nearly 50 percent of the entire ftes granted this fiscal year i will tell you this i think that's outrageous i don't think you're considering the needs of any of the other departments of the city who desperately need additional personnel and didn't even bring a request forward this year and for fire to initially ask for 1518 i i really do think it's outrageous i'm willing to support fire in the fire department and despite my remarks i remain committed to the fire department but i also think that sometimes there's a feeling that you may be the only department in the world because you administer services to people who are in need and i understand that too that logic that's used there as well i i am just shocked to hear that the original request was for 15 to 28 personnel it it just blows my mind i think that management and deputy saint john are making a good faith effort to fulfill the fire department's needs i really do believe that and i believe that 80 percent of our calls are no longer fire related they're medical and we are about to employ a second mru unit which i think will help considerably in response times for calls for service because most of those response times are medical these days and i don't think we'll ever solve the response time problem nor will any other major city because of the traffic and population growth and the way cities are laid out you can have instant instantaneous response from the time a call is received but you can't do something about a train at 59th and glendale or traffic out by westgate if there's a game day going on those are just parts of urban living and i suspect that our response times are generally comporting with other major urban areas as well in fact we're probably better than a lot of other urban major areas i'm sorry i i popped off but when i hear what the kind of requests that the fire department ask for it just boggles my mind thank you mayor excuse me we're gonna go to mr phelps next then mr milner yeah uh mayor members of council councilman clark let me to to defend the fire department let me say this is that when we begin our budget process especially almost for all of our departments we really let them have kind of an aspirational initial proposal and then from there we work a lot so much of the work that's done by our budget team and by my leadership team is really as we kind of start at a high level and then we really drill down into the detail level of it so it always normally starts off somewhat aspirational and then we work with the departments and so in some cases we've had examples where department maybe was too light once we got into the detailed work and we recommended them increasing the number of positions but it's very often the case in this aspirational budget that we say look timing we can't onboard we don't have space we don't you know maybe all kinds of circumstances that would drive that or the budget team is great about showing them where other resources can be used to accomplish what that physician may want to do so i think you know again uh we weren't you know we weren't shocked by the number that we originally proposed what i will tell you is as we then work through this and as rick and and the team had a lot more uh input uh on this this year this time around than i did is that we got to that number you know kind of with our heads nodding and feeling like with all the information that's been shared that we think this is a defensible budget so i i i would just say i understand the frustration but having done this many many years we want our departments to be aspirational set the goal high in terms of what they need i think it's important for management to see what's there many times it helps us down the road know where we may have to go with additional resources in future budget years which then as we put our five year forecast together we can start making some really good kind of range decisions on on how we size our future budgets but but again i i i don't want it to come across sounding like that they just through a number there we say be aspirational and let's work our way through there and in this particular job i think uh our our chief and all of our assistant chiefs that worked on this our labor units uh uh that we that we work with um you know i think we got to this recommendation not speaking on behalf of labor unit but i will say from a management perspective we feel good about the recommendation mayor if i might i appreciate your remarks and i understand the context in which they are made and i do understand the aspirational aspect of this but it still boggles my mind and this is going to sound crude that they had the hotspot to put in for that many people even on an aspirational level thank you okay mr milner next mr turner then miss tom chomp uh thank you mayor uh there wasn't much discussion or i didn't hear much about the mru uh i know that's we've we've talked about that in council several times and we've been in i guess we provided consensus to move that program forward to expand it but i didn't see any any additional add-ons or requests for that can you kind of tell me where that program is and what the plan is for the future mayor councilmember melania we have one medical response unit out of station 53 it's probably our heaviest hit station right now with the exception of station 54. and phoenix under an agreement with them has staffed an mr unit out of 54. so we don't need to put one out there phoenix already has one out there and it's a seven day a week a seven yeah seven day a week unit at a 54. 53 is a 40 hour unit so they're only in service four days a week 58 will be another four day unit and we are in discussions on how we increase that to make both of those seven day a week units but we need to bring them in and get them staffed and get them up and running and measure the success so we have done some measurement on mr53 they average probably eight to ten calls per shift which takes a big burden off of the engine company that runs out of 53 and as was pointed out in the conversation about the police department and their beat deployment when engine 53 is on a call and another priority call comes out in their first due area another engine company from a different area has to shift over and so that's where you get the relief on the response times because we're not having to shift say a ladder out of 57 or an engine company out of 57 over to 53 to cover because 53 is on a call that's really uh maybe it's an als call but a lower level als als call that could easily be handled by an mr so we're still doing those assessments but we're seeing a lot of positive outcome so so me if i may um so basically we're not ready to move forward with the next unit is that what you're saying mayor councilmember malnour we will be implementing the next unit here within the next couple of months okay okay all right thank you thank you mayor uh chief deputy um so i also had questions on the mru i actually thought we had more mrus stood up and operating i thought we had two of our own plus the phoenix but were we on that schedule before kovit to have the second one up and have we not purchased the equipment or at least the council's authorized the equipment for the additional mrus i just i was i'm a little surprised that we don't have our own second one up mayor council member turner if i recall correctly the original mr was initiated by council member hugh in a in a meeting back in october of 2019 i believe and so we were able to stand that unit up i don't think we got it up until fy21 i'm not sure how long they've been in service and then in conversations with labor and fire management within the last probably four or five months management made the decision to stand up a second unit i don't know if that answers the question i know there was a council item of special interest at one point about the medical response unit and i believe that was introduced by council member hugh i could be wrong about that but that's my recollection and that was the implementation of the first unit okay um mayor and deputy cm i just it's just i'm just saying that was my recollection it may not be accurate sometimes you might appreciate that the information coming to us is like you know water through a fire hose and so i just thought that we were farther along on this program mayor councilmember turner i could kind of answer that question for you uh we applied for a safer grant unit in service and and we were denied so in mid-term of the year that's when council and i believe city manager agreed to go ahead and put that in service we were unable to get those four members into the academy until february i think we started that academy they're in there right now okay so then they graduate at the end of the month so does that answer your question yeah so that affects the second unit in service i guess my recollection is we had been talking about the second and then the next you know for some time and i just thought it was moving but i understand that you know for you know the better part of two years things have been turned upside down and we've had you know personnel out and all of that so i just trying to make sure that i represent to my constituents what's going on accurately but you know i'm all in favor of you know getting the next whether it's the second or the third or whatever the next mr i'm all in favor of it i think that they've turned out to be a great tool and a great service that we provide to our residents um are we still on track to bring shita gate or a comparable consultant in i know the council had requested that mayor councilmember turner that is a council item of special interest from councilmember tommel chaff that i am working through yes working through okay um [Music] i really regret that we probably don't have the time today for you to explain kelly days to all of us but maybe maybe that's something that could be done in the future because i know that's the core of the distinction between the 52 and 56 or eight work week for us and i will take a different point of view on the supplemental requests and the number of personnel that fire or any department just you know would ask for or material supplies whatever i want to hear all of it okay one of the things i'm proud of as far as us in this budget process is over the seven years i've been here we have finally got to a point where we're seeing the supplementals not approved i'm not confident we're seeing all of it i'm not confident that management at the department level is fully comfortable in putting everything out that they would like to have because there's plenty of departments that don't have a supplemental not approved which means they got everything they asked for and i'm just not sure that you know that's not my experience and not to pick on any not just as an example but not to pick on that department because i think it's widespread but there's no supplementals not approved in parks and i just find that really hard to believe that our parks and our recreation and everything else is at 100 you know are we improving sure but there's a lot more we could be doing and a lot more just that we used to do in the past you know as far as even having a historian on staff so that we can have you know interpretive programs at swirl ranch park for instance so there's a lot so yes we're making progress and the supplementals not approved but i think there's more out there and let's face it you know the seven of us all of you we're all grown-ups we understand nobody gets everything they want right but we also understand that the buck stops up here and if we don't know what the needs are then we can't make the best decisions we don't have to have everything filtered through management you know we're not going to give away the store that's not our you know that's not been our mo but let us know from the heart aspirationally what is it each of these departments want what do we know that we don't aren't yet able to provide for them because we can't make the best value judgments or cost-benefit analysis if it's better to do this than that if we don't really know what it is then even you know get to the table that we're not considering and if on occasion we override management's recommendation and we say we want to add a couple more code enforcement officers or do something else that's okay because we're the ones that are closest to the residents we hear their input we're acting on it we're the ones that go knocking on doors you know every few years you know and we go to the neighborhood meetings and all of that so we know better what the residents want and expect so it's it's important that this supplemental's not approved list be more accurate be more full let us know what we're not yet providing so that we can make the best judgments you know we may you know we don't need to sit up here thinking ah everything's under control when it's only under control we need to be performing it better than just the under control level so enough of my soapbox um thank you okay thank you mayor fire budget go ahead yes no i'm up to speed thank you i had to attend another budget meeting for valley metro so sorry i missed the beginning of your presentation i'm sure it was fabulous um i i have a i'm i wanna i wanna make sure i i'm i can wrap my mind around where we're at with the mru so i know that we we approved the first unit and we got and we we approved and i think the the the we thought we had some equipment we could use but we applied for a grant to get to get everything we needed you know and we didn't get the grant but we got the four ftes and that was 20 fiscal year 2020 i believe right and they went to the academy and they were ready to to be deployed and then covet happened and they were used to backfill overtime am i am i sort of right so far mayor councilman tom chaff i think you're tracking pretty well yes okay so so now that unit did so we didn't get the grant but we still got the equipment and we're ready to stand that first unit up now is that where we're at mayor councilmember tommel chuff no that's not exactly accurate we we did fully fund out of the general fund the first medical response that's 153 the second unit we applied for the grant we put the four positions in the budget for this current fiscal year but we did not receive the grant so we didn't receive the grant for the equipment the truck and we did not grant for the personnel there was a prior grant that we applied for for mr 153 that would have covered the vehicle and we didn't get that grant either and so we had to pay for that vehicle out of the general fund but we did that with council approval and i believe that was an fy 21 so it would have occurred right before the pandemic so we have the first stood up and we're getting ready to stand up the second and once we have the second up we'll see what that does for our response and service delivery and determine where a third needs to go and i am intentionally saying it that way because we do believe that this infill idea is the path forward for for providing better service and reducing response times okay and i agree dispatching a for an engine company of four people to grandma dizzy is dizzy calls is i think an overuse of resources so we i think we all agree with with that um but before you go on let me ask one follow-up question have we received that truck do we have that in possession ready to roll because i i i don't think we do but i'd like you to discuss that real quick no we do not have that truck in our possession yet and i think uh you'd have to talk to transportation facilities on where that's at i believe it's maybe july we do have reserve apparatus so we'll put those those members in for that truck okay all right thank you so um so i guess my question is what i wanted to get to was i saw in the supplementals not recommended that there were 10 ftes requested for mr units and i i'm not so basically they're 40 hours so the same two it's a paramedic and a captain is that how they're staffed or american member tom will chop it's a four-person staffed unit okay so there are there's no there's four people on a single mr oh okay i didn't i didn't did not realize that so mayor council if i can explain low acuity units are staffed with two people and they can respond to basic life support calls which account for about 50 percent of our total medical calls the other fifty percent are advanced life support calls okay and they require four people now you don't have to roll an engine company in all hazards unit and what we found is for those medical calls it's cheaper to run an ambulance looking vehicle that well actually the low acuity certain ambulances they're f550 trucks so an f550 truck is what the mr would use and they have fire suppression personal equipment with them so they can support a fire suppression event if they're needed and when they're not needed in fire suppression they can handle any als call that comes out so they're staffed with two paramedics a captain and an engineer and you know that could be a captain who's a paramedic and an engineer who's not and then a firefighter paramedic and a firefighter who's not but we ensure that there's at least two paramedics on every als responding unit whether that's an all-hazard unit or a medical response unit okay mayor so i'm i'm think i'm still pretty confused and i think i'm seeing some other confusion so okay so the mru is that low acuity high acuity both what what councilmember low acuity units are staffed with two and they handle basic life support so the low acuity calls i understand that but i'm saying do we call all of them mru so what i'm wondering is the one that we're standing up or that we have stood up is that low acuity mayor councilmember tomlichoff we have two low acuity units that are in the field today we have one medical response unit for als okay we're implementing a second medical response for als so mru's are for high acuity calls okay mayor councilmember i wanted to make sure i understood that so and phoenix is also an mr unit correct that is correct they have an mr unit out of 154. okay um so the the 10 mr unit uh the 10 ftes for the peak time mr unit what was the intended purpose of of that request to stand up more units or what was that for mayor councilmember tom chaff that was to make them seven day a week units okay they're currently 40-hour this would have made the coverage seven days a week okay thank you question me yes to that point and thank you for the clarification the reminder about the la units versus the the mrus that helped me a lot so that's the three units that i had in my head i think so it'll come to me go ahead thank you mayor yeah one second go ahead mayor members of council just another thing on the i think it's important for context the mru uh unit is fully trained so they can go on to an engine company so they're fully trained firefighters and so one of the advantage that is in theory not in theory but if we're say training an engine company and it's and depending on call volume we can then move our mru into that engine company they can staff it during that window of training that's taking place and then deploy back into being an mru where the low acuity team doesn't have that flexibility so having that four person we think is a good model because it provides us additional coverage uh under under different kinds of circumstances but that's why there's a captain uh two paramedics engineer that are on each of the mrus we're a little bit confused about which is which and and i didn't really realize the high acuity units were four people but it makes a lot of sense so but back to the to the 10 fte request was the was the intended purpose to stand up another unit or just to simply take the two units that we have and make those seven day a week uh responses and do we have data that shows that that that that's necessary or that we're really 40 hours is fitting the the needs of the community mayor council member tom chop that's currently what chief barnes and i are studying okay so should we i'm just wondering whether we i mean how long is it going to take to i mean once the once the budget is established if you say yes we really need this and we didn't we didn't put it in the budget then we have to wait until next year so that's what i'm what's the time frame is that something you'll know by the end of this budget cycle or should we have a placeholder for that i mean these i think these units are really vital to our community for immediate medical response for high acuity issues for our residents and so i'm willing to wait to find out if the data shows that we really need them but if the data shows that we really need them i really would rather not wait until next year to put them in the budget so i don't know if you can help me figure out what the timeline is mayor council member tamil chaff certainly by this time next year we'll be ready to have a more in-depth conversation about what mr 53 mr 54 which is a phoenix unit and mr 58 which we're standing up here very soon what impact those three units have on response times so the automatic aid system the way it's set up we're getting every no one's being turned down when they call the fire department i think everybody knows that but i want to make that statement that no one ever gets turned out who is this never mind somebody is going to go and the right resource is going to go every time and we don't miss that benchmark ever what medical response does is it decreases your response times those infill units decrease your response times we want to make sure that where we're putting them and when we're putting them out is having that impact and not having stood up the second mr yet it's really hard just to have one that's our data and phoenix i'll say mr54 about 60 65 of the time they were stood up during the pandemic especially during the height of omicron when everybody seemed to be hit the hardest as far as staffing the other 35 to 40 of the time they weren't even able to stand it up so the data that we got through the pandemic isn't realistic data we have some pre-pandemic data on mr54 that looks very good we have some pandemic post pandemic data on 53 and then we need more data on what 58 does because the system operates as a whole so we may think about service areas in the fire department being similar to police beats it really doesn't work that way it's a different it's a completely different model and so we need to see what the impact of these mr units has on the model as a whole okay so we um mayor if i could so we will it's it we get we've got some work to do to find out um and we're looking are we looking city-wide too i mean like how many we may have other pockets where we have you know higher volume of just high equity medical calls that may be outside of 53 and 58 and where phoenix has got 54. and that i mean not only does it lower the response time but i imagine it also saves money and wear and tear on the engines that don't have to be dispatched out to these uh medical calls mayor councilman tom chop to answer both questions number one we do look at every apparatus in the city and their individual response times and so we play we try to place the mr in a position to support those engine companies or ladders they're all in any really all hazard unit that's out on the road today that has the higher response times because what that indicates to us is they're never getting back to their station they're taking a call and while they're out on the east end of their first due they get a call to the west end of their first do and when they should have been in the middle of that area they were on one extreme side and so that response time is increased traffic related by sometimes upwards of a minute minute and a half and so what we're trying to do is look at the individual units that we have in our constant staffing model and where we need to place the mr and and you know to the point you may have an engine company whose response times during peak hours which would be say 8 am to 8 pm are over 8 minutes but from 8 p.m to 8 a.m they're six and a half minutes and so we're just trying to look at all of that data and determine where to best place these units up that work has been done we know we needed one at 53 and we know we need one at 58 and 54 is supporting that station beyond that we need to look at what the impact of those mr units have so that we can then assess where the shifting is occurring so in the automatic aid system anytime calls go out and units respond and then more calls come out it creates a shift at times and so we need to understand that so we can place the third mr at the right spot and anecdotally it could be another unit out of 58. the data may suggest that it just depends we need to do that complete assessment okay so just to just to wrap it up mayor if i could we're going to be doing all of that assessment and also looking at the seven the seven day a week response and it's all part of the what we're going to be gathering data for mayor councilmember topshop correct and we'll have that as a part of our budget process for the next budget cycle mayor councilmember tom that's that is my hope yes okay very good thank you all right uh and i just briefly want to remind some folks that may not know this uh several years ago i think it was seven or eight years ago the first unit was was actually my idea of working with delta williams trying to get empty space that we had in that fire station where a majority of our calls were going into phoenix to have phoenix kind of pick up their fair share and we found a good what we felt was a very good working relationship with another department manning that using our facilities where we both benefited they take our calls would take their calls that unit ended up then growing to well what if we expanded this program uh and i think it's done a good job i wish that it would have been done quicker uh and and we've we've been dealing with a lot of it but uh i i do believe in the program both the la unit uh and in in the other i just like to see them done quicker uh what we were trying to respond to the two main things is better service for our people quicker response times because that was a huge problem that we've been hearing in this council for years but then also firefighter burnout uh people that are that are you know getting to work and they start taking calls and they don't stop taking calls until the next shift comes in and so that's really what those were benef trying to benefit and try to help so i hope the council all realizes that i think everybody's in the same on the same page trying to do this we just it's it's difficult without having that information to make those really critical decisions where do you deploy it and when do you deploy it and how often do you deploy it so i have a question with our city member next yeah mayor members of council councilman tom will drop first of all thank you for the line of questioning this is all really good stuff one of the reasons why i think our glendale fire department is is considered one of the best if not the best departments in the in the state is because we use data and a lot of analytics around that data to make operational decisions the easiest thing is always to do in my experience in government is just to put more resources but if you don't put those resources and deploy them strategically you know you don't always achieve the uh the best utilization and that's not as good as you can be from a public safety perspective remember that and and the deputy chief our deputy chief deputy uh city manager st john mentioned about the difference between dynamically staffed and constant staff one of the advantages of low acuity teams and mrus is the fact that we can dynamically staff during the busiest time when he said we want to look at data let me just kind of throw out this scenario we can certainly look there may be data that supports taking our existing two mrus to seven day a week but there may be if you take that same uh amount of resource we may be better off to put three mru's at three different stations so that's what we want to look at all the call volume data look at our and then we can also factor in which stations are having excessive caseload by the engine companies and then we can assign uh a perhaps mru unit there as well so that's they're going through that exercise um you know my hat's off to them they they get in they pull a lot of data we're a frequent caller to uh phoenix dispatch uh which handles all of which collects all of the call data um i think we have them on speed dial and you know they've been providing a lot of information that's what these guys work on and so it's not that we're not ready but we just want to kind of go each step of the way we want to be able to present a really compelling case for how we can deploy additional resources and i'll just end with this i mean somebody could say why don't you do an mru all 24 hours a day well now you're into a constant staffing model and you better off to have an engine company because at that point in time the the the incremental cost difference between a a 24 constant staff mru versus engine companies not very much so mrus are designed to be very efficiently kind of dynamically staffed during the highest call volume which is very predictable for the most part i mean there's good data to show how it's done so we'll continue to have this conversation and maybe what i would maybe suggest i think this would be a wonderful topic uh as we move through this to have a workshop on it and and i think that would be we can perhaps into the differences on the 52 and 56 we can look at some of the operational issues but i think you'll be very impressed with the you know what the fire administration and what our fire department is proposing they they are really trying to make really good decisions built around the budget mayor may i thank you um and i just want to say thank you for that and i know i thank you for giving us a better at least for me and i think looking at the rest of the council we have a way better understanding of this now and i mean i think it's good to say what was the purpose intended purpose of this do we have the data to support it at this point we don't but i appreciate the opportunity for the interim chief to be here and to actually explain this to us and i know these are long days for staff but they really are helpful for us to get an understanding of your operations and how you budget and how your all of your departments work so thank you for your patience with us as that we as joyce likes to say slog our way through this budget um but this really really i think helps us to understand it and um so and you know i wanted to say also that i'm really proud of our fire department i really do think that the men and women in the glendale fire department are absolutely a wonderful representative of our community the caring and the treatment that our residents get um does not go unnoticed so thank you mayor what yeah um so kevin the city manager mentioned something that i was going to mention uh earlier the question was asked where did we rank and the answer was number two that's compensation where do we rank and the city manager said it number one when we talk about quality of service and that's what i'm concerned about but it takes compensation to be number one for the quality service okay number two it's premature to say that the fire department has the gall to ask for 15 or 18 ftes without knowing what they were asked for councilman thomachoff had some information that maybe some of us didn't and that's okay that 10 of those were to stand up seven days a week did i say wrong day no i just said it's in the book oh it's our book i didn't see it thank you councilmember but it's pretty mature to say that i'm shocked unless you know exactly what the subject matter experts are asking for not not the qual not the quantity of people but how are they going to better the service to to the citizens of glendale right and that's what i'm concerned about so you said you're going to bring it back next week or our next budget meeting i should say whenever that is i'd like to know not just how many they were going to ask for but why in the justification if you can do that yes sir thank you sir thank you chief mayor i do have one more slide if i can continue with the presentation only time okay so the last general fund request is to reclass four firefighter positions to engineers essentially there are a certain number of engineers that you need in the field we have the number of engineers that we need so when an engineer is not able to come to work because of a vacation day or some other reason for leave we have to pay someone else a higher rate to fill that position and rather than continuing to do that we just need to increase the number of engineers that we have so that we can ensure that they are and we always use people that are properly trained and have all the necessary skills to do the job but they should be paid to have those skills and to conduct that ongoing training and so we feel this is a reasonable request to accommodate that the last set of requests are specific to the glendale regional public training center so i will point out that these are the full dollar amount requests but the city's portion is 74.8 percent so we will outlay the money in the beginning and receive that back from our partnering agencies out at the gripstic so the first is is landscape maintenance the city entered an agreement a year or two ago i'm not sure a city-wide agreement for landscape maintenance gripstic wasn't included it needs to be included we've been using modified duty staff or anybody that's willing to go out and do the work maintain the aesthetics of that building and we'd like to be a part of the citywide service for that the virtua training is the is the 300 degree police training equipment that we got a couple years ago through a grant the grants expired we now have to take over that cost thirty thousand five ninety is the cost the total cost for that but again we pay just under seventy five percent as a city and then the scba fill station replacement at the grip stick needs to be replaced it's just it's original 207. so it was purchased back in 2007 and it's time for it to be replaced and that's the cost support vehicles again were purchased when the building was originally built and so they're old and need to be replaced and these vehicles will support or can support i should say major events at the stadium such as super bowl final four fiesta bowl other other needs uh it does include a large pat like a 12 person passenger van a stake bed truck a couple of golf carts and at least one gator if i'm not mistaken and then all the markings that go on the vehicle to identify it as a glendale vehicle or grip stick vehicle rather and then we talked about training supplies that were glendale specific the academy training supplies have also gone up and so we need an increase to the budget line for the glendale for the training academy supplies and then we have a service worker position that was in the budget originally back in 2006 through 2000 probably 10 or 11 when it was eliminated because of the great recession we've we've made several requests to bring that position back and have gotten that request through the leadership team at the gripstic and so we're bringing that request forward here today and then the last uh is the it project and we talked about this with the police department it's the technology and enabled training rooms at fire station 151 and fire station 158 which is a joint police fire station i just i just have a couple of curious questions that perhaps either you or the chief can answer how many engineers do we have within the glendale police police fire department roughly ballpark america council member clark i believe it's i believe it's 57 it may be 55. okay that's good enough how many battalion chiefs so total cheese is 18 we have one fire chief two assistant chiefs um i believe it's seven battalion chiefs you know make that eight and the rest of the remainder are deputy chiefs okay i'm just trying to understand the structure a little bit better so like the assistant fire chiefs are they assigned to different or to supervise different departments within the fire organization mayor councilmember clark yes they are so gary benson is the other assistant fire chief and then myself still serving in that capacity he's over operations and i would be over logistics personnel okay next up would be battalion chiefs that are under the assistant chiefs no no mayor uh council member clark that'd be deputy chiefs how many deputy chiefs do we have so we have three that work at the field and then we have one that runs over gripstic and training one that's over our emergency operations center one that's over resource management and then one that's over ems okay so what do deputy chiefs what what do they oversee we know that the assistant chiefs are over different divisions mayor county clerk i explained what the ones on staff do the ones out in the field of the ship commanders they would they would serve probably the same person as a commander in the police department so they run this shift for the day okay and then the the battalion chiefs we have two we have battalion 151 battalion 152 three shifts one battalion chief per shift and they manage stations so they will have either five or six seven stations each and they manage those stations that's very good i finally understand that and then the engineers are responsible for the fire trucks yes ma'am they they they drive the fire trucks and they make sure that they're in good working condition very good thank you very much thank you next presentation is innovation in technology and the presenter will be mr mercia good afternoon mayor council member city manager phelps i have with me two of my team member christian palachan and katy brackett so before we get into our budget for fi 23. uh a few things few acknowledgements uh first and foremost uh i want to recognize my team for their hard work and dedication um because of their professional work we excel and you'll see in the presentation in all the kpis that we monitor i also want to thank city manager's office for their support and trust making sure that we are adequately supported from a leadership perspective so we take on these assignments that are challenging we deliver them on time with proper support and last but not the least i want to acknowledge all my fellow directors their participation their collaboration their partnership is critical to us we are internal service provider so unless they collaborate with us and they partner with us our mutual success is not insured so their participation has been great and you'll see that in my presentation so before we get into this i think context is important and for context i want to present the number and the number is 854 million now that's not our budget our budget number is 500 something but 854 million is the volume of traffic traversing through our network that is the scale and size of the network that we run here in our city now imagine if this traffic was on our streets what kind of a system what kind of orchestration synchronization we would require to manage and maintain that that's what my team does what you see on the kpi is the output and sliver of that output in terms of what we deliver but that's the scale we're talking about so how do you set an operating mindset when you're dealing with this kind of scale that we deal with and the type of team that we have here which is fairly lean we deal with a mindset that is action driven and the single word that defines us would be resilience and the two factors that trigger this mindset one is where you talked about it with go with anything is possible precisely pandemic is one of the driver it basically transformed the entire world from brick and mortar nice to have digital to digital first now every business irrespective of what industry you are in requires digital capability the second thing most important and most pertinent right now geopolitical you heard many people talk about inflation supply chain issues now throw in geopolitical issues and it just further aggravates and what it does for us in i.t is cyber security and the amount of threat and amount of attacks that are taking place is unprecedented so i'll just quote one example microsoft recently came out with their recent research on cyber defenders and out of all the global attacks that are taking place that took place last year end of 2021 46 were targeted towards u.s out of the total population and out of those 46 48 were targeted towards government entities which means we literally have bullseye on our back and i said it last time when i was presenting it we have adversaries who has to be right once we have to be right all the time we have to be precise we have to be diligent we have to be vigilant and that's the mindset of resilience that we operate under today so let's get into and we'll talk about it more as you see more initiatives that we are undertaking next year but a little bit about our budget so innovation technology is 23.4 million uh comprised of four department telephone technology maintenance technology operation technology projects and our mission you can see reliable secure innovative services delivered so we empower the entire city to deliver services to our citizens and that is the reason why that resilient mindset needs to be there and the breakdown of our budget 24 salary 65 operating and 11 is our internal services now let's look at the kpis i talked about so what you see here is what our customers our internal partners see from a service perspective we're maintaining year over year high 90s and we plan to maintain that next year as well so no change there or just continuous improvement as we introduce more technology we need to adjust our strategy to support those we we want to make sure that we continue on that high 90 track on not to reopen so first call resolution is the key factor when we operate and that can only happen if behind the scene that 854 million transaction are flowing through our network without a hitch there is no congestion there is no fender bender there is no traffic cap required it flows through seamlessly and that allows us to do that single call resolution finally a number of replaced equipment we're a future forward forward looking technology forward mindset department so what we are trying to do is make sure that we maintain a consistent cadence of retiring old hardware because it's risk prone from wear and tear perspective it's risk from from security perspective and bring in new technologies so our employees are able to serve our citizen in more efficient manner possible so that's what we plan to do next year so that brings us to some accomplishments now these are list of few there are many we undertook i think about 30 or so projects there are some multi-year projects there are some in flight others are completed but this is the top of the mind items that i think would be worth sharing here so the first one you see here is its summit the pictures uh kind of give you a perspective in terms of what took place in that summit but there there is more that was delivered through this id summit in terms of value that is not apparent so yes it was a technology summit we talked about technology but the important thing was to bring everybody all the city leadership and their direct report to come in and sit at the table and have that collaborative conversation and co-create the vision of future in terms of where we want to go how we want to leverage technology that is immensely powerful we did it for the first time ever now more interesting and more more powerful thing is that we did it ourselves easy thing would have been for me to go look for a facilitator hire a bunch of facilitators bring them in conduct the session call it a day but what we did was we brought in our team from i.t and all the other department and this is the example of collaboration mr jim brown talked about employee retail retention employee hiring new strategies this is one of the new strategy it is one of the key factor of hiring good talent and retaining good talent you give them challenging environment to grow and develop and exercise those skills and that's exactly what we did here which is not apparent the way we did this is we conducted a training with the help of hr and we followed a model called 70 2010 what that means is 70 of the learning happens by doing something 10 only happens when you go into the classroom you run this learn the subject matter then you 20 is through coaching so you learn something you get some coaching and then you apply that learning and we did that in the context of this so mr jim brown and his team conducted two-day facilitation training first it was training second day was coaching so what they learned they practiced the next day and then the following week they actually conducted a full-blown hundred percent session and facilitated the session and it was immensely successful and my colleagues here can attest to it and we have teams that came out of that session that are part of initiatives that we are undertaking in next year and the years after so that's an example of how an internal service organization recognizing that digital first is the future collaborate with their partners and build the future jointly not in isolation and that's what we did and in the process developed the staff gave them the new skill and allowed them the opportunity to practice that skill so that was kind of highlight the next one mr mancha talked about az central so we'll have a dedicated presentation about that the one thing that i'm going to talk about here about azcentral it was again a very successful collaboration between finance and i.t but from a technology perspective a key takeaway how do you turn an internal ip organization into a startup from a silicon valley build a product out of that idea and not only build actually launch it build all the support structure and not a legacy product a modern sas based solution software as a service solution comply with all the adore security requirement uh consistent with fedramp all done in a short period of time same staff same talent that's why i wanted to acknowledge my team because that's what they brought to the table next continuity of operation exercise so you heard me talk about resilience this is again physical manifestation of that resilience we have a plan we never tested our plan in recent past so when i joined last year this was one of my personal goals that i wanted to do this and i wanted to do two exercises and we did both the first one was full continuity of operation again a highly collaborative exercise we went through the critical applications we exercised our disaster recovery plan finance hr uh ems pd everybody was there and it was successful we met all the targets and goals for that coupe exercise next we did through um participation with internal audit and external auditor a desktop exercise for incident response and some of you received that presentation during the audit committee presentation that was also very successful you heard throughout various different presentations about data and analytics this was one of the themes that came out during the summit as well so there were several operational analytics and data needs that were not being met because we have technology that is little dated and doesn't have the modern capabilities so what we did was we brought in team together figure out what those pressing needs were we addressed those needs by providing those capabilities and those solutions are in use and they're very effective next gis you've heard mr mehta talk about gis how they're leveraging it pd is leveraging it water is leveraging it entire city from planning perspective leverages gis in one way or the other so it's a critical piece of technology that we have now resources are somewhat decentralized so there is a little bit of inefficiency involved what we are doing is building a center of excellence we hired last year a gis manager so first manifestation of that center of excellence is creating a community of practice people who use gis they come together and they have a discussion and dialogue and they share good practices we had 19 department participate 10 presentation were done on projects that were done in collaboration with it they shared their learnings and experiences and successes and failures and it was highly collaborative and it created the basis of that center of excellence next is our new employee orientation so if digital is the table stake and the day one you bring an employee and you want that employee to have a fantastic experience working for the city and it it doesn't feel like that he's traveling back in time but he's coming to a modern organization the one thing that we can do is we can train them empower them day one to understand what technology is available to them how they access it how they use it day one so instead of having a single slide deck presentation we have a dedicated hour we actually walk you through all the tools and technology that you would use in your day-to-day life in your role and get you acclimated to that not fully trained but acclimated so you are productive day one the benefit of that is that the managers and the supervisors don't have to spend time guiding them how to do things they are effective and productive next is security cameras now this is not necessarily a project this is more of a multi-year multi-phase program so one we're deploying 423 cameras 20 23 sites so each site is literally a project the way we are approaching it is making sure that each site is designed specked properly taking into account any kind of remodeling construction that is going on all those things are sequenced in supply chain issues uh resource issues all those are accounted for so so far phase phase two is 211 cameras 16 sites phase one is due for completion 923 which will be next year and uh phase two would be june 25 uh 2025. last one here is the important one zero trust architecture what that means is basically implementing a modern security posture in our organization across the board what that what that allows us to do is to make sure that we have enough preventive control in our environment to prevent any kind of bad actor to get in and do anything uh malicious it falls on a basic principle of role-based access control and principle of least privilege so whoever needs access they get access to precisely the amount of information that is required for them to do their job for the purpose that they are required to do the job all those things are detailed traceable auditable and we have the ability to monitor and control that so that's what zero trust architecture is we piloted the program we're gonna roll it out into a full deployment in coming fiscal year this brings us to our supplements it professional services and contractual services everybody talked about cost has gone up so this is towards those services that we frequently use some of the services are related to our uh dated access control hardware and infrastructure which is due for replacement so we're getting higher than usual uh support calls software hardware and maintenance again the cost has gone up so we're making sure that we account for it here and maintain the software with proper license and maintenance and support the next item is as i talked about earlier we want to make sure that the hardware the the computers laptop or desktop that are being used are current because no software vendor is designing laptop or software for old laptops or desktops so we have a schedule by which we roll out new hardware when the old hardware is due for replacement so uh this fiscal year uh we have a bunch of desktops that will be replaced and we're replacing it with laptop again to plan for contingency should a situation comes up where we need to be mobile the laptop would allow us to do that at the same time it will allow you to perform the way you would perform using your desktop the next previous discussion was about staffing in a different context we're looking for temporary staffing we have a solid slate of projects that are coming up next fiscal year and what we are trying to do here is rather than bringing in ftes which may or may not be needed uh we're bringing we're bringing in the flexibility in our staffing model so we're doing project-based staffing this allows us to be more nimble more targeted more focused the kind of skill and expertise is needed to implement a system is different from kind of skill set is needed for maintenance and ongoing operation so for these projects when we need these different resources we can bring them in just like software as a service or subscriber on demand we bring in the right resource at the right time of the project have them deliver what they need to deliver and bring in a different resource for the different phase of the project for different purpose so that's what this temporary staffing is for there's a lot of construction and remodeling work is going on which impacts our network infrastructure physical infrastructure from a technology perspective so our team has to go around different facilities so we're requesting two vehicles for that purpose next list of supplementals are fdes so the first one is information technology supervisor for networking again we don't have this resource uh this position filled today so we're requesting this uh there's ton of infrastructure work that's going to take place in coming years so we want to make sure that there's a supervisor available guide and oversee some of that work and this work is not localized to a single location it's dispersed across various facilities so we want to make sure that we have right coverage from a management perspective cyber security analyst we only have one so if this person is out sick takes up another job then we don't have any so this will allow us to create a little bit of a backup and a cushion and it will also allow us to manage those 854 million transactions that flow through our system because one of the key responsibility for security analyst is to investigate identify and prevent some of those things data analytics as i said is a theme that was consistent throughout just became gold certified our goal is to become platinum certified the way we would do that kayla and jean before that and her team and rest of the city what we have done from a data perspective is heroic with without much automation that's what we have done and achieved so it's as a technologist when i see this it's amazing work that's been done but through sheer heroic a lot of it is manual process so what we're trying to do is we're trying to build a technology platform to support them to empower them to do this consistently and do it without having to manually do it but do it in in an efficient manner what that would allow us to do is publish more rely more have access to that data more efficiently more effectively so that this position of data and analytics administrator would be for that purpose the responsibility of this person would be to manage that platform and make it available for rest of the city to use that data as efficiently as possible next is it business analyst so we had a summit we talked about what the future would look like what our strategic needs are business analysts would be that tip of spear resource for us to go talk to each business understand what they are trying to embark on make sure that we have a sound business case before that proposal comes to it's telling community or goes anywhere in terms of implementation so this would allow us to do an upfront due diligence once the project is approved this resource the job would be to work with business gain full understanding of what is required from this new solution take those requirements convert them into functional specification so the technical team understand what they need to build so we build it once and we build it right and finally on top of that this business analyst would have an enterprise view the reason why we had the summit was that we all wanted to come to the table and have a conversation so what one department is asking for is similar to what other department is looking for so instead of building 31 flavor uh baskin robbins we bring one platform and solve multiple needs so build ones deploy anywhere kind of model and the way you would do this is having this kind of resource in the middle trying to understand those needs and translating into an enterprise solution last you heard about um pd and fire talk about technology enabled conference room um those are not training rooms but we have a technology-enabled conference room everywhere on our campus so the need is there for a specialized resource in our service desk area to focus on those so your zooms and teams and and go to meeting whatever technology platform we have and what kind of camera sound system is needed there's a resource focused on that we make sure that that is available again the reason is that technology should not be an encumbrance when it comes to usage and then we're asking for a professional services to go along with it because chances are as more people come back onto the campus more usage there may be a redundant need uh or simultaneous need and one person may not be able to support or there may be an advanced need that a technician may not be able to handle so this professional services would allow us to bring in those specific resources and help us the next slide is just for context it kind of gives you a high level view of where these resources would reside in our technology organization if you have questions i'm happy to answer on this but this more for a reference let's look at some of the projects mr mancha talked about budget and reporting software the output that you see in front of you again heroics a lot of manual work and the reason because the technology we implemented we are using it has aged it has served its purpose it's due for replacement there are modern solutions out there that we should be using city is growing the needs are growing it's in our best interest to look at new technology new solution that meets our need for now and future so that's what this is for so just like security cameras we talked about earlier access control is a companion program that should go with the cameras and access control is all access within any given facility so there are 32 sites we plan to again handle this as a program each individual site has a project so we understand the schedules in terms of any kind of construction or remodeling work that's going on sequencing in terms of networking work that needs to be done uh availability of equipment and and supply chain issues um the timeline for that is august 20 22 ending in december 2023 next one is mass notification system so we're in the middle of implementing the phase one this is phase two phase two allows us to provide opt-in opt-out feature for our communication so when we communicate with our citizens we give them option to choose to opt-in or opt-out and that would be true for our employee notification as well it also allows us to have a curated validated cities phone list so we don't have to spend time compiling one it would be readily available so we can use that for notification next one is timekeeping software our current solution is end of life end of this year so we need to replace that system and this would be the replacement cost esri enterprise license so we talked about gis as the usage is increasing licensing number of licenses available will outpace the demand so what we have to do is we have to make sure that we right size it and the way to write sizes get an enterprise license which will remove the restriction of number of licenses available why now we're doing it now because the licensing is dependent on size of the city we're at the top end of the current size if we don't make a decision now next year or year after we may be on a higher level and the pricing would go up so timing is important to get into the enterprise license and most of the city in the valley are on enterprise license so this is for that reason the next set of projects are performed projects the common theme here is they are most of them are cyber security related except for digital signature immutable backup it's a requirement you heard mr jim brown talk about cyber insurance yesterday or day before yesterday it is a requirement as part of cyber insurance that we have immutable backup and all immutable backup allows you to do is to have a copy of your data available in a safe secure place separate from your primary or secondary site so in case of an adverse event you're able to recover from that so we need to establish that so that's immutable backup application rationalization we talked about time keeping system coming end of life other systems we have 140 applications they put into commission or use at different points in time some are highly demanding some are less demanding some have more risk than other this application rationalization tool will allow us to track all those make sure that we know where each application is in its life cycle how we need to handle when we need to retire them when we need to plan for replacement and then we timeline everything in terms of resource availability and when it's technically feasible and possible for us to deliver those changes so that's what this is for so it has a security component it has an operational efficiency component cyber security implement zero trust as i mentioned we did the pilot now we need to roll it out the way this would be rolled out is down to the single device so we will be able to isolate should an adverse event happen isolate the device where the malicious activity first started so we can narrow the blast radius if an adverse event were to happen digital signature we have this solution in in use in some areas what we are trying to do is to avoid the process of printing paper signing it scanning it and storing it so if we can digitally sign it then we don't have to print it and it it retains its integrity and and it makes it makes a good sense in terms of not having to print endpoint detection we have a system in place again this is a regulatory requirement for most of the cyber security insurance requirement our current system is dated and old it's uh end of life end of this year so we need to replace this so this is for that and with that we come to questions happy to answer any questions thank you mayor think you really love this stuff for the first time i saw you get excited and animated about talking about data and analytics and i t so that that must really be your passion however let me uh ask you a couple of questions um do we have a way to monitor hacking attempts people who try to get into the city network and have there been such attempts are there a lot of attempts or tell me more about the hacking situation okay um mayor councilmember um do we have the capability to monitor yes we do second part of your question how many attempts this is not the forum for us to have this discussion um happy to provide you more detail but a different forum would be more appropriate then let me ask another question if i might mayor um for the the tax you talked about the tax central yes now that was a program we wrote yes why are we not doing that more often i hear from so many different departments that they're looking for a function to be delivered via i.t and none of the programs they've investigated or software they've investigated really meets the needs i have said for years we need programmers who are writing programs tailored specifically to meet the needs of our departments is that a good idea or not um mayor councilmember it is a good idea when there is a business justification behind it the reason why we did this because there is no commercially available software i am absolutely excited about the fact that we developed something and turned it into a product if if i have to write it as my professional credit yes absolutely fantastic but if i'm doing this as a cio i would always look at marketplace and see what's available and and bring that into the fold as opposed to building it from scratch because me trying to do this would be trying to reinvent the wheel i don't want to do that i wanted i want to add that value where it is truly warranted and not making a claim but there will be more opportunities where you will see us come in and present to you those kind of innovative solutions because the need was so unique and there was nothing available out in the market and that's when it makes the sense for us to do that otherwise if there is something commercially available we should consider that because it makes good business sense or if i might continue but a lot of times the programs partially meet needs and partially do not yes is there an ability to modify those programs are proprietary to someone else so mayor council member yes absolutely so one of the things that we are looking at and gene talked about grant management project and how they worked with us instead of there instead of buying a package solution we're buying a platform and the purpose of buying that platform is that i can build something for you on that platform and use that same platform to build something else for another department that would need and within that platform you do have a capability of writing a piece of code to make it fit your needs i think that's great i think that's the way to go because a lot of these software packages are so generic and try to satisfy everybody and they satisfy no one let me ask two questions with sure if i might continue there with regard to i.t oh conversions of desktops to laptops i'm always curious what's the cost per unit to convert a desktop to a laptop so how much money are we talking about sure and how many can you do for 320 000 250 are written on the kpi the exact number is 288. i don't have the per unit cost with me but i can have i'll be happy to get it and send it to you absolutely but excellent answer you knew the numbers and that tickles my little baby heart um lastly temporary staffing for it and you alluded to some major projects that were coming up what kinds of major projects are coming up that that that temporary staffing would be used for so here in front of you um are some that are listed so we have budgeting and reporting software uh implementation you have mass notification phase two you have time keeping access control has a whole software component to it so there's a physical hardware on the door there's a software that is behind it and that software would not only help us monitor the doors opening and closing but this software will integrate with hr so what will happen is today if you hire an employee that employee gets hired the manager sends in a request to say please grant this employee access to building a b and c floor 123 right it's a paper-based request when when we implement this new solution this will be integrated into your hr system so when you have a new hire request come in it would send an automatic notification based on the person's role to grant them access to specific areas they need to have access to when they leave the organization that system will go back as per the hr uh disposition of the employee no longer in service it will take the access away so no more moving the paper around doing anything you have efficiency throughout the onboarding and off-boarding of an employee that's what this data is only good as the data inputters too sure i would make that comment mayor if i excuse me if i may also add to that we also have a couple of projects that are already have already started this year or are are in process that are not here one of them is lucidity the asset management system i think you saw that with a number of departments are in the middle of implementing or going to start implementing and we also have uh the replacement for the permitting system is also it's already been budgeted but these are additional projects that that funding will help us get the right resources to get those projects actually done because they've they've been in the queue for some time very good i understand i've got a better idea of what they'll be used for thank you very much thank you mayor i want to first say i love the forum that you did i think that is excellent that we didn't have to bring in consultants and pay outside people and i love that you gave your staff opportunity to grow and develop and do presentations and things like that that's really shows a real good leader of a department so i am really impressed by that i do have a couple questions on the it project fund the budget and reporting software for budget and finance maybe i didn't understand what what the purpose of that was are we getting new software i thought we did the erp and we would need no more modules and no more anything so i just want to understand what that was for mayor members of the council it would be for the budgeting of our operating and capital budgets and also for um the development of the budget book that we submit to the government's finance officers association right now for budgeting we're using various several software so we are using munis for both capital and operating but for the materials that you have in front of you this is actually information coming out of munis but to make it look in this format we have to use tableau and then we're also using a lot of excel worksheets for various supplementals calculating mou impacts salary impact and so on so we're looking for a software that could do all of that and it's helping us with that process okay very good thank you and then two other quick questions if i could mayor um i wanna i wanna understand the mass notification system i i kind of missed what that is that basically for the public at large is it like a reverse 9-1-1 or or and i guess we've already phase one and now we're on to phase two so what is that mayor members of the council that is a project that's already underway and it is for emergency type notifications so an example for our employees just as an easy example would be when we have an air conditioner out on the fourth floor of city hall before we get everyone here and everybody drives in and then we have to tell them you have to go somewhere else because the air conditioners out we would be able to notify so we can create groups of people to notify um if if there's any type of notification that needs to go out of of a traffic accident or something like that that we think is going to impact our employees and then as mr mercia said the second phase of it we can do notifications to the public as well so if there's a a water main out or a major accident again or something that we want to notify people to avoid a specific area they can opt in or opt out of receiving those notifications and but the system will group them and notify the appropriate people based on mayor if i could so based on gis if that's a you know i mean you'd notify the people and that would be affected by whatever the water main and for the example that you used it doesn't need to be a city-wide notification mayor members of the council that that's correct but there could be other types of opt-ins as well if you just want to know when some event is happening and we happen to do that then we could do that as well we also think this will be very helpful with the upcoming super bowl because if you've been to some of these venues when you get there you can you know text a number to here to get traffic updates around your venue and things like that so many systems have them and other entities have them and they are very useful particularly for that type of event so mayor says is this integrated with any kind of public safety use or just other uses other than public safety i'm going to let mr st john answer that question certainly could be beneficial if it notifies when the train's coming through [Laughter] 10 minutes ahead mayor councilmember tom will chop it could be it really could be used for anything on the public side we want to keep it to not necessarily public safety emergencies but emergency situations until we enter into phase two and have that opt out option so do we have mayor if i could do we have the database uh we need this would be i'd imagine text notification so are we so should example for the council members should we be trying to get people to opt in if they want to be i mean i don't i wasn't aware but i don't know that the public's aware of it that we're going to we don't probably don't have you know a whole data or do we have everybody's phone number and that we would need so mayor councilmember tom chaffetz is primarily cell phone driven we don't have that information people would have to opt in and once we enter into phase 2 development we'll develop a communication plan with your constituents and anybody that would want to participate to give them the the mechanism for participation okay very good that's that's really interesting to know um let's see one other thing here um the last thing mayor if i could the the cyber security implement zero trust is that just an internal thing [Music] that basically um is that part of like the the you the training and all of that that we do internally or what exactly is that so mayor council member uh zero trust is a security architecture the the basic principle is that access to systems and resources whether for internal users or external users should be grounded granted based on their role and responsibility and the reason why they need access to it and it should be monitored and managed so this architecture will be applied both for internal users and external users now there's a strategy part of it or process part of it the next step is leveraging technology to do that the the project that you're seeing has a technology component which will allow us to segment or micro segment environments so that we can give access to person a to environment one because that's where they need to be and they shouldn't have access to environment b similarly person two can have access to environment b and not have access to environment a and that's the purpose of that zero trust minimize exposure and minimize exposure okay and if there is an adverse event we now have the ability to segment our affected area so so that we can avoid infection or malicious activity to go through the entire environment so that's what zero trust would do very good but mayor i sleep much better at night knowing that that you're you're managing rit uh it's really i mean it's a really dangerous world right now as far as cyber security and you know any any form of government entity is a target so i sleep much better at night knowing that you're in charge of our i.t thank you mayor council member i i have a good team behind me this is to a representation of the folks who are behind me who are helping us do this so very good thank you hey we're not moving on no question i still have some comments yeah i just um i i i want to echo the sentiments that council member thomachoff about their cyber security i really appreciate your intense stance on cyber security and i assume you're responsible for those pesky emails i get about my training for cybersecurity i have learned a lot from those uh and i do get pestered quite a bit because i'm always behind it at class too but what i wanted to say really was you know last year when you gave your presentation you said we had a lot to accomplish yes um and i've really seen you do that in just one year and from your supplements i mean uh that's pretty aggressive uh what what you're asking for but i approve and and support that because i have confidence in just in the way you present it and and your plan and i have confidence in your staff to making this happen so i appreciate what you're doing for us i think it's going to help the city of glendale and it's not only cyber security but in in providing a service to our customers thank you thank you and mayor and council member i think your trust means a lot to us that gives us that that we need to accomplish what we need to accomplish so thank you good thank you thank you so at this time during the afternoon we're actually scheduled for a break no break i can see why the mayor's shaking his head so we'll move into field operations will be which will be presented by ms watenko thank you miss lindsey mayor council here today to discuss with you field operations as with most of the others it does take a team and so i've asked the team to come here today and help me out uh mike carr i think you've met he's now over the solid waste and landfill doing phenomenal things we'll talk about that a little bit next name is craig cronen thank you for a chance to meet craig he is our fleet superintendent responsible for taking us now to that next level fleet uh with them is kim mackert and charles thomas who do our budget and with field operations budget rates are a huge part of it so there is four divisions as i just went through the team and as you've seen with most of them most people are heavily their budget is salary we have 50 of our budget sorry 60 of our budget is that operating charges and so with field operations we do pay several large things for the city we do cover most of the city's electric bill for the general fund buildings locations that's about 3 million dollars 1.2 million dollars of the custodial services contract we also do fuel and solid waste has large landfill disposal fees and shop charges so there's a large component there that we cover city-wide when we go to some of our metrics this one here brand new metric very excited about this one we just talked lucidity asset management water started this several years ago facilities hopped on board two years ago i couldn't have told you number of air conditioners we had across the city now i can actually tell you number of preventative maintenance that we're doing on those and our preventative maintenance compliance so we've had this live for about a year now we've done over 5 5000 work requests in this first year and we're actually able to report on things so it's great that we actually have some data and we can talk about this so very pleased with this and we're helping support the rest of the groups as they get on felicity and asset management uh in solid waste our residential containers have gone up a little bit uh we we don't like that we want to pick up people when we say we're going to pick up we've gone up this year and a lot of that has to do with our uh staff turnover we are driving that back down we're working closely with hr we've got some great plans in place to get the drivers back and keep it going uh landfill i'll talk about this as an accomplishment here soon our target next year is gonna be a little bit funky as we do two cells and this is a first time ever we're going to two cells so great accomplishment there too uh fleet craig is here with me he looked at these metrics we're going to change some of these metrics on you next year we looked at that pm compliance and the way we report whether a vehicle is past due or not has been wrong in the past and one of the supplements we're going to ask for is going to help correct that we looked at you know we should be touching a vehicle every three months and we we shouldn't we need to know what it's doing how often it's driving and so one of the supplementals can help correct that his last one there though that fleet downtime rate less than five percent um so we want our vehicles to be up and available more than 95 of the time and we as with everything else look at things by components how critical they are so in public safety 99 of those vehicles are available when they need them to be so we have service level agreements for things like buses solid waste we need to maintain a minimum service level and we do that great accomplishment here didn't hit the paper or on words yet but earlier this week glendale was named one of the top 50 government police officers in canada it's the first time ever and i'm very proud of craig and his staff for for getting us there on to some of our accomplishments i say some of them street sweeping uh we did increase this to monthly thank you very much councilmember malnar and the rest of the council for supporting this we started off with a little bit of a soft launch but we're now down to that point where we follow bulk trash within three days so from the time we pick up your bulk trash within three days we will sweep behind it so just a great accomplishment there and you'll see later on we asked for a supplemental to actually add a street sweeper uh we just got a grant to help cover uh the majority of that cost to that street sweeper as well landfill expansion to the north cell since the 1970s we've operated that south south landfill so since the 1970s we've kind of dealt with the same way we've made a lot of innovations and a lot of improvements what staff has had to do in this past five years planning for this and then actually implementing it now is just absolutely incredible we can't have stuck with status quo the way we've always done it just does not work anymore and so some of our supplementals actually go to the new work we have to do now in the north cell so our north cell now is completely compliant state of the art nice liner in it we're going to spend a lot of work over the next year protecting that liner and making sure that we're in compliance not just in the next 10 20 30 years but for hundreds of years to come asset management i just talked about that for uh facilities we can now talk about you know how many air conditioners we have what sort of compliance rate we do and so we got some great metrics on that really really proud of doing that and we did that in-house we followed along water we listened to water and we implemented that with the staff we have so just a great job they did the people responsible for that couldn't be here today but just very proud of that the down campus reinvestment project that great partnership that we've done we've touched every single city department we've done field trips focus groups work sessions to get to the point where we can now call it a project so we have to take each group from city hall mayor and council included and move you to an off-site location to remodel this and then bring you back on just a tremendous amount of work that's gone on there and very proud of that and couldn't have done it without don bessler in engineering just a great partnership we've got but speaking of partnerships in the glendale operations campus is just absolutely one of them if i talk from you from public works perspective we talk about you know what do we have to do to get this going and we saw an opportunity there we had five acres where we could take lazy j and use it for police evidence storage public works just grab me a bulldozer we'll knock it down we'll get it done and we didn't do that with the help of gene moreno you know gene moreno is out to reduce poverty which is actually improving people's lives too we took every resident there and we improved their lives and she did that you help with finance we figured out a way to actually you know help them get to a better place and their living situation improved so just just a tremendous partnership just happy to have people like that on our team so now into our supplementals uh start off with the general fund so we do manage the majority of the custodial contract for the city um you know some people like the library adult center pay their own so for the places like city hall uh the general fund locations the con the custodial contract cost increase 210 thousand dollars is what we're requesting for next year at the cemetery uh there are four requests we've got there first one is a cell phone reimbursement we have a employee out there that is not getting a cell phone reimbursement currently because there's two people on that site really for for their safety we ever should have a cell phone so we're just asking for that second cell phone annual operations and maintenance this covers fifteen thousand dollars to actually add internet access to that site so when people go there we can actually deal with the family right there at the site without even making making them go to a second location to do the complete burial arrangements and the rest of it is to cover that cost of adding that credit card machine and also some small cost increases with the water rate increase and electricity increases but before you go on i just want to make a comment i recently was out at the cemetery your staff's doing a fantastic job it really really looks good thank you what a far cry from a few years ago it but very proud when i was out there they're doing an awesome job i'm glad to hear that and i will pass that along next request is purchases for the public so when somebody goes to our cemetery and requests certain things the headstone we essentially just pass that through and so we're seeing now those costs have gone up and so we're actually asking judges the increased appropriation to pay for those supplies and then the cemetery uh 900 for a uniform allowance for that second individual the building maintenance repair this is in our facilities this covers all those maintenance contracts that we have and this is the minimum maintenance frequency for things like elevator maintenance fire protection services the emergency power system these are the things we don't do in-house because they are highly specialized and wouldn't take a full-time person all the time to do it but this is the amount that we need to cover all those essential contracts chiller preventive maintenance energy management system automatic doors gates that type thing the next item is professional development and this is for facilities a lot of our systems become a lot more automated and this is to give the technicians the actual training in the automation systems so mayor today when you commented you were getting a little bit cold they can actually adjust the controls from an office versus having to come over here and adjust the thermostats so we want to make sure they've all got the proper training to do that the next request is facilities uniforms facilities technicians for them to do their work appropriately they have to work on things that are energized so they cannot go to an air conditioning unit and troubleshoot it after the power's turned off so they do require specialized uniforms these are arc flash rated uniforms such that if they are hit with that you know it's higher than just static electricity but they're hit with that it doesn't melt the uniforms so they are specialized uniforms for that and the final request on this page is uh utilities this is our increased need for electricity um jim burke was up earlier talked about his increased need for water and other things related to heroes park and the two splash pads this is electricity to support those additional sites that have come online and the general fund with all those contracts we've got and contracts becoming a lot more specialized this is for a contract monitor to oversee them this is the person that actually develops the contract so works with the vendors gets them under contract and then goes out and does the oversight of those contracts including access to different locations escorting them monitoring them verification and paying the bills the next items are there you've heard from so initially it was jim burke when he talked about his service worker in recreation um then a parks inspector these are the vehicles and these are all the general fund vehicles so each of these vehicles are associated with one of those positions you heard from the other directors explain we'll go through though you do see a different price for each vehicle we did work with them they're all basic vehicles and then the differences are so the first two there and the bottom two have service bodies on them and then different upfitting charges some of them have lights radios laptop stands so each of the vehicles have slightly different price this next page here too is just um all sorts of different vehicles you can see on them some code vehicles cip building inspectors again these are all associated vehicles associated with the other positions the directors have asked for this next list of supplementals are back to what we are requesting so what we i just explained to you for facilities this is now that same facilities request but specifically to the glendale regional public safety training facility as uh rick st john explained the city pays a portion of it and the partners pay a portion uh the 72 000 is the full amount that we need and this is for same service contracts and then the increase in electricity same as we described for facilities but this is just a different fund the next requests are for the landfill fund so custodial services contract increase we have some buildings out there that are serviced by custodial landfill pays their own custodial and this is for that increase next one is advertising this is specifically for recycling landfill fund does pay for our recycling and this is for us to increase our advertising mailers for customer outreach and just as a reference we did our recycling survey about a year and a half maybe two years ago the the cost of that postcard and mailing it was about twenty four thousand dollars so it does get rather expensive rather quickly next request is just training memberships and materials uh this is for our solid waste admin our administrative group in the office three thousand dollars is for professional development seven hundred dollars memberships and subscriptions uh we do have our safety program manager in there and he does need some uh wearing apparel and some safety supplies tool allowance our landfill we have two mechanics at the landfill they are required to bring their own tools so all the wrenches that type stuff are all their tools and then we provide just the highly specialized tools typically we pay these employees you'll see the same thing in fleet we pay them 500 per mechanic per year and that's their allowance but they provide all their own somehow or the last year we lost this in the budget and so we're just adding this back in next request is for a landfill equipment operator starting in about june july this year our north cell will open and it'll open but only to very select few people we want to be very programmatic about this and protect the liner leachate system everything we've just put in and so well we're going to operate for the next year or so both the north cell and the south cell and to do that we do need additional staff the staff we thought long and hard about you know do we need a full-time or do we need temporary type staff and just with the increased regulatory requirements now going into the north cell we felt it best getting a full-time person to make sure that we achieve our compaction everything else if you do look back and the supplementals not approved you will see that there's a service worker for the landfill in there and there's ten thousand dollars we asked for for training we found we had a vacant service worker position at our material recovery facility so we pulled that one back and said we don't need that we're gonna move this person over landfill and train them and at ten thousand dollars we normally ask for a one-time uh funding from council to cover ongoing lawsuits luckily that is now ending and so we use the ten thousand dollars in saving that item and the mechanic's actually in training today so we went ahead and did that so just you know what those two supplementals did not go forward our next uh requests are for solid waste this is a street sweeper and this is actually a street sweeper so we just were notified last week we did get the grant so we paid 5.7 of the grant so it's 18 000 to actually purchase a new sweeper the rest is going to come through the maricopa association of governments and council will see that resolution and approximately end of next month but we do need three thousand dollars in software maintenance radio radio repairs landfill charges shop charges fuel charges and then replacement brooms for it so that makes up the remainder of the eighty nine thousand dollars i want to back you up to slide 115. you'd said on the tool allowance you have two mechanics out there in the past there's been that allowances that's a thousand dollars for two or 500 for each mechanic is that correct you're correct you didn't do it last year but mayor we unfortunately did it last year somehow it got uh missed out of the budget so we paid them last year but it wasn't budgeted and so now we want to put it back in and be very transparent this is what we're doing with it okay it's 500 per mechanic once a year we pay them okay how many years have we been doing this at 500 for each mechanic uh we've been doing it at 500 for the last three four years and we look back at craig and he's not going to know since he's been here about nine months now and and prior to that it was 350 so we did recently raise it to 500. and i i would hope the council would would think about this for a minute but uh you can't you can't get your car worked on any longer for less than 90 an hour and the mechanics are all have to have their own tools tools are very specialized anymore especially when you start looking at all the computers that have to be used and utilized i i honestly think that this should be tripled i mean 500 is is not a lot of money all it takes is losing one wrench he could very quickly be out or drop something and break it i i seriously think this council should and we're talking pennies compared to everything else we've done but i think that should be at least tripled uh and it still doesn't even come close to cover what the mechanics expenses are mayor if you can let me wait until i actually get to fleet and i'll talk about the tools we provide versus the tools and mechanics provide if that's okay with you okay uh while you're on this topic of the street sweeper now is this going to be uh like a backup street sweeper because we're fully manned now with streets or we have street sweepers now correct that are hitting the entire city once a month so is this going to be what is this additional one going to be used for mayor councilman councilmember malnar you are correct we are fully manned now street sweepers though require a high level of maintenance they've got a lot of moving parts on them and they break down fairly frequently fairly frequently what this does is gives us a backup sweeper such that we can always maintain and sustain that new sweep schedule this provides us with that backup good uh thank you on the subject of street sweepers are all of our sweepers the larger size that we see go up and down our streets on a regular basis american councilman turner they are so we don't have anything particularly well designed for the downtown area with the curb parking you know the diagonal parking and the tighter radiuses and things like that uh mayor councilmember turner we don't have anything that's small enough that could get into a parking garage we do do our downtown area there are some places in certain areas and i can't remember exactly where they are where the sweeper operator is required to get out of his cab he's got a broom with him and he sweeps back behind certain things pushes it out and gets it that way it's one of the things that we were we were looking at you know should we be getting something different some of those smaller ones just don't have that same efficiency and so we're going to continue to look at different sweeper types as this comes up in the future we this will bring us up to and i can't remember if it's six or seven total sweepers we have now but as they come up for replacement we are looking at different different options with them okay mayor thank you thank you yeah i'm particularly thinking about the parking spaces that are parallel to traffic say you know along glendale avenue here the diagonal ones like we might see just on the other side of the park that are all over the downtown where the radius to get into the parking area not the street itself but where they're parking radiuses are too tight so is that an area where they actually get out and sweep or councilman return that is one of the areas where they do get out of sweep and that's we have a night sweeper so he does the arterials and does it downtown at night when there's nobody parked there and he does get out and sweep those areas thank you so the next one in solidwaste is a roll-off equipment operator we recently did a rate change for roll off and when we were looking at that we realized that most of the time we've got one equipment operator today in roll off we were actually using the second one most of the time and we were using them for one of the other divisions on time and so what this does is it gives the roloff division its own one and it will help reduce the overtime in the others landfill charges this is for our roll off and front load this is our commercial services this is now that we've done that rate increase this is the amount that we're going to additionally pay our landfill to cover those charges this temporary pay lube service worker this is a great collaboration that mike and craig came back with right now our solid waste equipment operators when they're done in the afternoon when they're done doing their routes they've picked up all the homes they come back in the yard they get fuel and they do their post trip but you think they all arrive about the same time and they're all lined up waiting for those four fuel pumps and so instead we want a temporary fuel lube worker to come in in the evening report to fleet and he will go along and pick up each one of these solid waste trucks take them over to the fuel island he will fuel them and he will do that additional lubing service and what this will do for us is it'll pick up half an hour to 45 minutes per employee and make them more efficient in the day if this works out and we we've got high expectations for this one we'll be asking next year this to be a permanent position so this is something solid waste is going to pay for and will report to fleet and the other thing it does for us it gives us another set of eyes on it so we're really excited about this one the final one is a equipment operator this is for our residential we call it our curb division again we've been funding this using overtime for this and we kind of watch that where after overtime hits so much then you ask for a full-time person to pull the overtime back down and so that now we're at the point with growth and over time that we need another equipment operator mayor what is the curb equipment operator what does he do um mayor councilman clark uh curb is our division we talk about so this is a residential equipment operator and solid waste so this is the person that would pick up your weekly solid waste or recycling services the next two are within our fleet services division uh the first one we modeled this after what don bessler and craig johnson have done this is an incentive for us to allow our staff to go get additional training so an asc automotive service excellent will allow the shop mechanics to go get training and what that does is it gives us additional trained mechanics gives them some incentive to go get the training and become better mechanics for it it then it becomes a progression program for them to move their way up to a coordinator and supervisor position the next one is vehicle gps you last year council funded 32 000 of a basic gps type system that covered approximately half of our light duty vehicles not including any sort of police vehicles and what that gave us was we were able to see where those vehicles were what craig has done for us though is that's not enough and we've worked with it and some others and now these this with the 54 additional 54 thousand dollars almost 55 000 it does more than just live tracking that vehicle anything your vehicle's computer will tell the operator it'll tell us so we've demoed this now in facilities we're working in to john seeds group but it tells us if you're not wearing your seatbelt i know that in real time if my people are not wearing their seatbelts it tells us if you're speeding it tells us if you have heartbreak so we know they're driving behaviors now before they come back in the other thing that gives us that fleet doesn't need anymore we used to rely on people telling us that the vehicle had driven so so many miles and they did that when they got fuel now we get a reading from that vehicle all the time so we know is it being driven in the morning is it driven all day we know it's usage and it's data and we're able to predict now and be able to pull it in for maintenance when it's due for maintenance and not just based on three months or 3000 miles so just a phenomenal program that craig's developed one of the stories he has at a solid waste is before that light came on that you know the angel was getting too warm his supervisor knew it was able to call and tell them pull that vehicle over you know limp back in the shop and hopefully saved us about a thirty thousand dollar engine in one of those heavy vehicles the next one's in fleet um you know right right now uh people and oils are killing us oil and lubricants uh we're asking for ninety six hundred dollars just the increased price for that uh tire outsourcing uh most of we want our vehicles out driving during the day and so this is to add a second shift contract to come in and repair and replace the tires to keep our vehicles on the road during the day 600 membership fee to keep our fleet superintendent involved in all those different fleet organizations and keep them going the next one is a tool allowance and this is for the fleet mechanics we give the mechanics 500 per year is to cover their toolbox so they have to provide their own wrenches and that type of thing vehicles are becoming much more electronic we provide that and so all that is done through the fleet division we provide all the highly specialized tools the torque wrenches and all the calibration type tools they're responsible for just those small tools in their toolbox which you know they want high quality but it's also their own so they take care of them and we provide them with the allowance it's 500 per employee per year the final one i thought i'd kind of ended on a on a good note we're asking for 2.2 million dollars to cover increased shop and fuel charges [Music] really when you look at city operations drive 7 million miles a year and we we consume over 1.2 million gallons of fuel this is an increase it's approximately 50 percent on unleaded it's not good news craig has done a great job developing a contract where we pay approximately a dollar less than what you pay at the pump and the reason is we buy it large there's a large valley-wide consortium that buys it we buy it based upon market rate plus the taxes so we're about a dollar less than what you would pay at the pump he's also done some nice analytics so i also know now you don't go buy fuel on mondays or fridays you buy them different days of the week and he makes sure that our our pumps are always full and we don't buy on those high days so mayor and council that ends field operations i'd be happy to answer any more questions you might have i and i want to go back to that tool now and so you have 500 uh dollars per mechanic so you have 11 000 plus the other one which was a thousand a thousand i i still think we should double that i if that's been ongoing for three four five years uh go to a harbor freight cheapest placer is to buy tools and you're buying the cheapest tools and all of their tools are up dramatically in price you buy a good quality tool snap on mac something like that i just think if you want to keep your mechanics and i know you do they're hard to get they're hard to keep we seriously as minor as that may be as little as that cost i think i think this council should should think seriously about at least doubling uh to a thousand dollars per mechanic per year for the tool allowance but i i have no knowledge of anything that y'all are talking about but it would seem to me that you all could go out and build a toolbox let us know what it costs for you to do it and if it's more than 500 come back and tell us you know i i don't know you don't want to do that yeah yes thank you uh miss one tango is it a reimbursement or or is it just an allowance a mayor councilmember tom job is an allowance we do not require them to bring in a receipt but we do know as the mayor said most of them buy it through one of these high that's not a tool that's going to break on them and the wrenches are rather expensive i'm pretty sure if you want craig i wish you would come on just craig if you want to talk about fuel prices and we've got we've got a council member sitting here that's owned auto shop for years he knows how expensive these tools are go ahead sir yeah um mr mayor council member we have several mechanics that have over twenty five thousand dollars worth of tools um on site every day some of these tool boxes even a snap on tool boxes is upwards of you know several thousands of dollars so to your point mayor i mean i know that the mechanics would greatly appreciate uh you know an increase to that mayor if i could i would be okay with that as long as we were able to somehow document i mean that that the money was spent on if somebody already has i mean i just wouldn't want to give somebody an extra thousand dollars if they already have every tool that they need and i mean i don't mean that in a terrible way but and as councilmember melnor just said a lot of those tools come with a lifetime warranty so if they break their if you buy really good tools snap-on i think offers replacements at least for a lot of their tools so um i you know i mean i i want people to have what they need to do their job but i don't want it to be just a extra thousand bucks either so yeah and i i if i could i'd like people to think of it another way tools get wore out they get used so when we think of fire department we're buying new sets of turnouts for the fire department or buy a new vest for the police department things were out they just do the the difference is is they can't get the job done without good tools and if it breaks they don't put lifetime warranties on all the tools and there's constantly changes all the time where they have to buy new tools to keep up mayor if i could i don't have a problem with that and i don't disagree with you but my point is that it's public money and that for the fire department we actually go out and purchase whatever works so i just would want to have some sort of evidence to show that transparency to the residents what the money's being used for because it's public money i don't just i don't disagree with doing it i would just want to know for sure that if we were going to increase it to a thousand dollars that there that we could be assured the public that it was for tools mr you yeah thank you mayor the tool boxes you're talking about they belong to the employee themselves yes so they've already invested thousands upon thousands of dollars before they ever show up for work the other employees don't buy all their equipment to come to work for the city of glendale it is different like tamir said i bet they have ten thousand dollars before they ever start with you guys and tools in a box yeah so i'm in favor of just exactly what the mayor wants to do get give them the extra money and they've already spent it before they ever began to work with glenn thank you mr phelps yeah mayor members of the council uh a couple of thoughts i mean one we we can certainly come back and and when we present the you know the the first role of the budget we can include that into there we have a number of situations where we provide an allowance and don't ask for receipts it's very cumbersome on finance and budget to have to track every single little so within fire i think ballistics vest is an example we have a number of where we just do an allowance and and remember that the there's a there's an ebb and flow it's not evenly every year maybe you know 500 maybe one year they need 700 700 worth of and the next year might be 250. so the allowance kind of smooths out over time but we'd be more than glad to come back and and and recommend or show that take your recommendation and include it as i mean it's a fairly de minimis amount uh into the budget but i i guess well i understand councilmember tomlinshot's desire to make sure we have good accountability we do have a number of situations in our budget where we do allowances because it just by the time you calculate the cost of all the accounting and tracking small invoices it's not highly efficient to do that council member clerk give him the money councilman turner uh thank you mayor um it is de minimis and and i do think that you know it's important to that our employees have good tools to work with i know mechanics that's the nature of the trade and that these tools are their personal property if i might look at it like okay so we're paying the depreciation and the wear and tear on the tools while they're doing the work for us and i'm kind of fine with that but you know we pride ourselves on being a data driven organization and we maybe have some data around this what are other cities providing similar employees and you know we certainly want to be you know number one or number two in the market i suppose you know does it help us to attract and retain you know top-notch employees and let's look at it you know from that point of view thank you anything down here that's my mind anybody no i don't know ray you got anything yeah i'll i'll just and uh i just think uh what what councilman turner said uh you know go back to your mechanics and and talk to them and say hey is this is this sufficient or are you spending a lot more than that to recover the cost of your tools and if they say no this is good and again it's hard to say no to money but you know there you go all right so there just i i did miss uh recognizing sonya saramento she's the one over facilities done a lot of work with lucity so i did miss her she snuck it on me so i didn't want to call her out thank you um here before she leaves changing gears a little bit here a while back i had a item of special interest regarding aeds and our facilities and i've had some conversations with deputy city manager about that i thought we were on track to do it they had been handled in the fire budget before but i thought the decision was made that they would then now be handled out of facilities but i don't see them in here anywhere where are we on this mayor councilmember turner we were given direction by management to implement the program this fiscal year so the initial buyout or payout for the program will occur this fiscal year we've identified working together with you in particular the locations where we think we need the aeds and we're developing a cost model for an ongoing cost and it's just not prepared for this budget discussion but i can have it ready for the next budget discussion um mayor um deputy so we have an imp we haven't done it yet we haven't installed the aeds anywhere yep mayor council member turner that's correct we have not done any installations why i'm assuming we haven't purchased them either so i just want to make sure either there's either we're in a budget somewhere or there's a commitment to do it out of contingency or something mayor councilmember turner uh i'll work with the manager to get that settled but yes that's my understanding from the manager's office yeah and and mayor to be for the record not that i'm demanding it but i'm told that we're going to do it i just want to make sure that we've covered it in some fashion that we actually can do yes thank you thank you moving on to our final presentation of the afternoon the city clerk's office ms bauer will be presenting that and she is one of the departments that did the detail budget this year good afternoon mayor council even though i have a very complex budget i'll try to keep this really brief basically the city clerk's budget is status quo we're not asking for any supplementals we're moving some money around to to better allocate where we need it and you receive detailed budget information on my budget so if you have any questions i'd be happy to answer them otherwise mayor i would say this is another department that is small but mighty you you really are you have seven people and when you look at the amount of just public information requests that you handle per year that's a ton of them and yet you get you get them out excuse me excuse me for slamming the previous city clerk but it might take 30 to 60 days to get a public request go ahead joyce fulfilled you guys do it in a matter of a week or so it's truly amazing um i and it's a very clean budget so i i have nothing but kudos to offer you and your department i think you're doing a fantastic job thank you thank you thank you sorry anything else no no if i could just um and i ray said i could say it on behalf of the rest of the council we couldn't be happier julie i honestly i mean i after i got home from the boards of commissions dinner which and it wasn't just you i know there was a lot of staff involved and thank you guys all did a really wonderful job i looked at the program after i got home and i was like every time it comes to mind you don't have to worry about it julie will take care of it julie took care of it we really don't have to worry about it she handles it so thank you thank you mayor yes i'd like to suggest that when we do performance evaluations next year for our hired employees instead of a scale of one to five we go to a one to ten so that julie can get 10 out of 10. okay there being no further business before this council the meeting is adjourned thank you you