Recommendation to receive and file a staff report on Equal Employment Opportunity Plan and 2017 Workforce Gender, Age, and Ethnic Diversity Report.  (Citywide)
Did you want to do 21 unfinished business? Yes. Item 21 Report from Human Resources Recommendations Receive and file a staff report on Equal Employment Opportunity Plan and 2017 Workforce, Gender, Age and Ethnic Diversity Report Citywide. Thank you, Mr. West. Ms.. Mr. Vice Mayor, council members on the city of Long Beach is greatest assets are our employees, and we take great pride in supporting the highly productive, innovative and caring and customer oriented workforce that we have. So I'm going to turn this over. To our human resources director, Alex Vasquez. Who's going to give us our EEO plan and diversity report. Alex. Good evening, City Council members. This report here is a report that was requested by the City Council on the city's Workforce Diversity. And tonight, we're also presenting the EEO plan report that details a comparison of the city's workforce against the standard relevant labor market benchmark and also similar agencies. These reports build on the city's commitment to EEO principles, and the objective of these reports is to evaluate the city's workforce data and maximize our diversity enhancing programs and activities. We'll do it. So as indicated tonight, we have two reports. The EEO plan covers full time employees, details the comparison of the city's workforce against the census data, specifically the relevant labor market. And one of the key findings is that the city's minority workforce exceeds this benchmark in all EEO categories except for sworn and crowd. The diversity report covers all city employees, including full time, part time and seasonal employees. It contains summary statistics based on gender, ethnicity, age and salary. It also includes a review of aggregate civil service applicant flow data. And the main key finding is that the city's gender and ethnic demographic compare favorably to other similar agencies. I'd like to introduce two of my staff members that assisted in putting putting these reports together. And they're also going to give a presentation. So Christina Keisling is our new human resources officer who's over our EEO program, yield training program. And she's going to cover the EEO plan. And Elizabeth Cagliostro put together the diversity report, and she's going to give her summary of that report. Good evening, Vice Mayor, members of the City Council for the EEO Plan. This was our report that provides an in-depth comparison of the city's workforce compared to the relevant labor market data. And it serves as a tool to identify possible barriers to the participation of women and minorities in all levels in the workforce. As a brief history of our EEO plan with City Council in 2008 in 2011, the Council reviewed the EEO plan report and adopted a resolution committing the city to a policy of nondiscrimination and equal employment in all hiring activities, and referred the proposal to the proposed EEO plan to the Human Resources and Civil Service for review. Some of our key findings, as stated by Alex for the plan, is that we've made significant improvement in minority representation in the civilian workforce. There are some areas that do require attention and improvement, such as our. Representation of minorities in fire and police and our. Female representation in traditionally male dominated fields such as maintenance, skill, craft and sworn protective services. To briefly take you through some of our accomplishments for our racial, ethnic minority workforce. And 2014, we were about 38% for our officials, administrators, and in 2016, we were able to exceed the relevant labor market benchmark by reaching 44% for all civilian positions. So these are areas that exclude sworn we were able to go from 56% in 2014 to 64% in 2016. Once again exceeding the relevant labor market. And looking at our female workforce. In 2014, we were 34% for our officials administrators, but we are now at 39.9%, exceeding the relevant labor market for all civilian positions. In 2014, we were at 33%, but we now are at 45%, which is just a 10th of a percentage point shy from reaching the relevant labor market. Comparing ourselves to other cities, we were able to determine that in terms of gender when compared to the city of Los Angeles, Sacramento in Oakland, the city of Long Beach ranks second in terms of our ethnic minorities. We ranked third in comparison to the other workforces. And so at this time, I would turn over into L.A., who will go over the diversity report. That I got a topic that ranks back in making it look like mayor. Vice mayor and members of the city council. At this time, I would present to you the key. Findings and highlights. Of the 2017 Diversity Report. This analysis is based on a snapshot in time of the Long Beach workforce as of December 31st, 2016. The diversity report. Provides summary data citywide. And by department, and it is broken down by gender, age and ethnicity. There are about 5600 employees in the city and the majority are in classified positions. The diversity. Report contains a comparison of salary. Between men and women. As well as in terms of age and ethnicity. The pay gap between men and women is similar to other public agency agencies, which is in part due to historically lower female. Representation. In higher paying occupations such as sworn. Officials and. Skilled craft. First we have here are gender. Demographics of the city wide workforce. Again, this includes full time and part time seasonal as well as classified and unclassified. Which is one. Of the key differences in this data versus the EEO. Report, which is specific. To full time permanent. Employees only. We found that 61% of our workforce. Is male and 38% is female. We also found that the highest. Representation of. Females is found in the 0 to $60000 income. Bracket, and the representation of females decreases for higher income brackets. In terms of age. We found that over 50% of our. Workforce is over the age of 40. Which is the age at which. Individuals become. Part. Of a protected age class. And we also found that. About 18% of our workforce is at or near retirement age. Which is important to. Keep in mind when we think about developing. Strategies for succession. Succession planning. We found that younger. Employees tend to fall within the lower income brackets, and more seasoned employees tend to fall within higher income brackets as a result of experience and education, for example. In terms of race and ethnicity. We found that about 41% of our workforce is white and. 59% of our workforce is comprised of a different ethnic minority. Latinos represent. 31% of. Our ethnic minority workforce and. They are followed. By Asian and blacks up 14%. We found that the largest. Representation of ethnic minorities is found in. The 0. To $60000 income bracket at about 67%. And that this number decreases as the income goes up. We also found that the largest. Ethnic minority representation in the highest income bracket is by Latinos at about 18%. Followed by blacks who. Represent about 18% of the highest income bracket. I talked to. Based on this analysis and our findings, we have identified. Preliminary. Areas in which we can improve with regard to gender, age and ethnicity. In terms of the wage, wage gap. We did an analysis of the city of the city, white average salaries by gender inclusive of all classifications. And that revealed that in terms of. Average salaries, women. Salaries are $0.81 on. The dollar, on the dollar compared. To white males. In order to address this pay gap. We can begin by. Increasing female representation in higher pay classifications. Including sworn positions and. Also in management. With regard to age. As previously mentioned, 18% of our workforce is at or near retirement age. As such. It is important to increase support of succession planning. And training programs for current and prospective employees. Lastly, with regard. To ethnic and. Racial diversity. It is critical for us as an agency to increase targeted support and recruitment. Of ethnic minorities for employment at all levels. So in summary, some of the EU strategies that we're taking to address underutilization is leveraging technology and social media to streamline the process and create innovative ways to reach and communicate with potential candidates. We're also increasing transparency in our recruitment efforts to make sure that our applicants have access to information, whether it be through social media, our social media presence, or our websites. And we've collaborated with civil service to have a unified place where all applicants can get information regarding job opportunities. We're also developing training opportunities and career career advancement programs that help retain and train our workforce. And we're also supporting initiatives, projects and groups that work to advance diversity in the workplace by fostering cooperation, acceptance and transparency. Some of our notable accomplishments to date include encouraging all city departments to utilize Internet based job boards, such as jobs available, indeed idealistic boards and so on, to post jobs for higher visibility. We're also utilizing a Fuze executive fellow to conduct a top bottom review of our selection and recruitment processes, including civil service and on civil service to assist us in developing some strategies to streamline our process and make it more available to a diverse candidate pool. We're also increasing our presence in social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and other platforms again to increase our recruitment pool and market the city of Long Beach as an employer of choice. We've also implemented a free, free email subscription service link Albee that allows interested party parties to receive job alerts or alerts for job openings . We've also migrated to an online based application system that creates greater visibility, allows applicants to apply easily, and allows also the city to screen applicants in a more much more expedited fashion. And we're also streamlining the application process through the use of computerized testing systems. And this is being spearheaded by the civil service there, using items such as Wonderlic Montage and other systems to expedite our testing process. So these are some of the things that we're working on. And at this point, we'd like to take any questions, if you have any. Thank you, Councilmember Yolanda. Thank you, Mary. And I want to thank Alex for her report as well as her staff. So things are just tied up now. Real quick, the equity first initiated the request to do this report. It was to get a picture of where we're at as a city in terms of our diversity and our hiring practices. And this this report certainly points that out. I had a meeting with with Alex. We did discuss some of the concerns that I have about our diversity and our efforts in that area. One of the things that you'll notice on page, in that last page, that the database, the back and that that that page 12, you'll notice that a lot of the stuff that's there is what I call passive recruiting. It's put the onus on people who have access to the Internet to get an application, to get a job description, to apply and then get a notification as to whether they qualified or not. And then eventually, at the end of the road, they come in for an interview and either get selected or not. So one of the things that I brought up was the fact that this is a passive recruiting effort. Many of you, if you don't already know that I worked for the city for 28 years to 16 of those years were in the civil service department as the recruitment officer for the city. I want to say a flat out straight up. There's nothing that succeeds more in recruiting people than pressing the flesh, then being where they were. The recruiters or the applicants are you. We go to we visit classes, you go to colleges, you go to community based organizations. You go anywhere where there's a potential for hiring people or recruiting people. There's also made emphasis that I had at the time that I was there was police and fire recruits. Nothing was more successful than being able to go and visit a police academy somewhere. There's a few here locally. Real Handle is is a big recruiting recruiting station where people go there to get training and police efforts. Santana has another one. And we would visit those places. And they also got to go up and down the state because we weren't getting enough applicants to come in and join the police department. This era that we're in is providing special challenges because of the targeting that is happening out there with recruit and in response to public safety concerns, police and fire being under the gun and literally in regards to the job. And so there might be some apprehension, if you will, of people wanting to apply. So it's one of the things that I think is important, that when we are out there looking for people to apply for jobs, that they see people who are actually on the job and can ask them some questions in regards to how the job is working for them. What is the take questions related to what do they do on a daily basis, that type of thing? Well, when you have recruit pass a recruiting efforts like this that's on line and you don't talk to anybody, he's like, Well, I'd like to be a police officer, but they don't know what I mean. They have no clue as to what the job entails. And that's why I'm always I've always been a very strong proponent of having an actual recruiting team, if you will, that actually goes out and talks to people and and provides an opportunity for individuals to ask questions about the job itself. Now, I know I might be talking a lot right now about police and fire, but that's also true for vacancies in the professional ranks. It's also true for positions in in our professional ranks and our technical ranks, such as are engineers and and other professional in the trades and professions. So what I would like to see is, is a greater and stronger commitment towards recruiting. And I've said it before, if you don't get them at the front end when they apply, you're not going to get them in the back end when we do hiring. You saw that statistic up there at our page on page nine, if you could put it back to page nine where you see ethnicity and you'll see that whites, you Americans. Are the ones that are selected at the higher rate of any other ethnic group. I think that that American Indian statistic is got to be wrong. 30% Native American. I've never seen a number that I. Didn't know that number. That's got to be wrong. That's crazy. It's 30 people. 30 people. Okay. Well. Okay. So 30 people are in 0%. Okay. And I get it. Yeah. Thank you for the clarification. I read it wrong. If you start. But anyway, as it's really clear here is that, you know, still white Americans are higher at a higher rate than any other group. Now, why is that? There's something going on there. So we're still being challenged in in terms of what we're doing with recruiting and getting people to apply. And so I would like to see that, you know, we reinstitute a recruiting effort, a strong recruiting effort team, whether it's in civil service or H.R. or a combination of both, I think is a is is appropriate now in this day and age where we're being challenged to really meet our diversity needs. In addition to my discussion with with Alex. I just learned that there's a new way of identifying diversity in the RLM. For me, when I was back in the day, it was the SSA, the Service Metropolitan Service Area or something like that. But it's not changed to to RLM where it's, you know, that is great. So I'm looking at this document and I see it as a good first start of, of trying to identify where we're at as a city in our diversity. I would like to recommend that we get this report on a yearly basis to see how we're doing using this as a baseline at this point. I know there's there's been other reports in the past, but we haven't seen one in Barry in a very long time. So I'm going to start with this one because it's a new format. We've got a new staff. It's a it's a different way. And we've got a new way of determining our what's the the county's and the city's diversity and how we compare with with those areas. So I would like to see that come back every year. In terms of that, would I also like to see is there is no report here that includes our management team. How are we doing with our our city, our managers, our department heads, our ales and bureau managers, anything anyone who's in the EEO category, EEO being the management level of salaries. There's nothing here on that. So I would like to see that included as well and how we we how we rank in those in those regards. What I also would like to see is, is a some kind of plan. What's our plan for recruiting? What's our plan for improving diversity? What's our recruiting plan for when we recruit for managers, for department heads? I've never seen any any of those. So I think it's important for us to know what are our efforts that just a passive like we did right here, you put it out there in the air and put it in jobs available, put it in Incirlik or whatever those other platforms are. That's not enough. I think we need to have people out there pressing the flesh, talking to people and recruiting them here. And that's especially true when it comes to our recruitment teams. Now, another thing that I that I want to emphasize is, are the civil service departments very small? They have a few analysts to handle the whole city, 5000 employees, while maybe 3500, something like that of classified employees. And when we when we have this kind of we don't have a recruiting plan in how to change that, change our diversity. So I think it's important that city departments become part of the solution here. I would love to see. And your city manager, we could we could talk about this off line at another time. But I would like to see each department include a testing and recruiting plan in their departments budgets, because a big part of our departments is personnel. I mean, work when we talk about a city agency and what they do, it's all about people. It's people. It's people serving, serving people. We serve our residents by providing them with water. We provide we serve our residents by fixing their sewage. We. We provide we serve our residents by protect, by protecting them with police and fire. And we also protect our residents by making sure that there's adequate services and whatever they need streets, streetlights, sidewalks, you name it, they're all taken care of by people, people we recruit, people we test the people we hire. So it's extremely important that we look at how we reach out to the individuals to work for the city. And we're back in the day. Used to be the dream of people to get a city job because you got benefits, you got seniority, you get the pensions, you get dental, medical, all that. Thank you, CalPERS. I'm retired now. They get around to that, which is good for me and others. But the point is, is that when you can bring that back, bring that back again, we bring it back, bring pride back into being a city employee where you can get a good salary, a good job. And it's something that you that a person can point to, even if you wear a little emblem right here with its public works, water, gas, whatever, it's a sense of pride. And I know that many times residents, constituents might look at those individuals with a with a special or maybe with a jaundiced eye when they're taking a break lunch. You know, it's a fishbowl. Obviously, we are city employees are looked at differently when they're doing a job. When you see a working crew of gas department employees looking at fixing a pipe and you see five people there, why does it take five people to fix a pipe? Well, each one has a role. Same thing that I always get is like, why did it take ten police units to handle a pulling over a kid on a bike and you have ten police units there? Well, each one has a role. So and that's that's what's not understood. So I'm going to get off my soapbox at this point and just note that we need to improve our diversity. We need to change some of these numbers, especially in the professional ranks, as well as on our our public safety ranks. And if you take a closer look, you really look at it with a with a fine tooth comb. You're looking at the fact that many of our diversity are at the lower level salaries. Your refuge collectors are parking control checkers. They're not at the higher paying wages. And we need to change that. And the way to do that is making sure that we have a recruitment plan. And it's also that it comes from the top. It comes from the top getting our department heads to embrace diversity, to keep that in mind that there is a group of people out there that deserves a shot and a chance at getting a job with the city. So with that, I want to do it open. I see a couple of my colleagues when I make some comments, but this is a good start and I and I hope that we're able to continue this and maybe next time, this same time next year, we could get another report. And this time we might be able to include management as well and as well as some strategies on how we're going about recruiting more people of diverse of diverse backgrounds into the city. Thank you. Thank you, Professor. You mean Councilmember? You ran good. I'll say, Mr. City Attorney. Let's start right now. An ordinance about a noise budget for the city council will just take the model from the airport noise bucket. Well, I'm joking. I'm just. He's got to get a word. Bucket. That's not right. A comment bucket. Against the lawyers. It discriminates against the lawyers. I think we'll get a pat on the back, you. Know, but I'm an English major, so really words are my thing. Thank you, Councilmember Councilwoman Gonzalez. Good, because I'm a political science major. How about that? Councilmember Wodonga, thank you for bringing this forward. I know this was a great item and thanks to h.R. And Civil Service for putting this together and it it really refreshed, you know, my thinking about what we're doing here and I really appreciate the work that's been put into this and a few things that I picked out as I looked at this and things that I think we need to dig a little bit deeper on. My first question was, I believe the very the original item included veterans and individuals with disabilities. Is that correct? I thought it included that. And then I also I think at that meeting I included an option for us to explore individuals that are LGBTQ. Yes, the original motion did include those items and we reported in the. Right. To form for update that we don't presently collect data on disability and LGBT data for from our city workforce or job applicants so that that information was not included in. This report. Okay. That's right. And are there any ways so under the EEOC, their website actually states that there are some pre-employment inquiries in and this is specific to disabilities, but perhaps there could be some for other demographics. Basically, after making a conditional job offer, an employer may ask disability related questions as long as all individuals are asked the same questions. So I'm wondering if that could be included going forward so we can collect that data. So we can certainly look at that. One of the concerns we have, though, with the the definition of disability is so broad that it would include a large number of individuals. We'd also have to look into whether or not we could request that data and whether or not it would have to be on a volunteer basis for current city employees and just in my experience in H.R. over 26 years plus. I'm not I'm not aware of an agency that collects that type of data from their employees or job applicants. And I think there might be concerns that that data would be used to make employment related questions. So it's definitely something, I think that we would need to work with the city attorney's office with and maybe look at some best practices, but we can certainly take a look into that. Great. I think if we're able to get some best practices and maybe bring that back in A to from for at some point, you know, just to see if that's something we can do. And then I have seen there's two demographics that kind of struck me, and it was women, of course, and African-American employees. And for women, I see the pay gap. We have the report that contains a comparison of salary between men and women. And so it's great that we have that, you know, a dollar to $0.81 is the ratio. I'm wondering if we could dig a little deeper into, you know, what type of demographic of women. And I think we may be able to see that here. But are do we have any other explicit data that includes minority women or women of not just minority women, but white women, everyone, and what they are currently being paid relative to their male counterparts? So we don't have that currently is certainly the date now that we have this data, something certainly we can look into. I would add that the pay gap data is something that a number of agencies are looking at. We did look at the state of California and the city of L.A. as well to look at what their benchmarks are. One of the things I will note is that the city's workforce is heavily male dominated, and that's true of other municipalities as well. And it's largely because of the occupations that we have in the city workforce, such as police and fire sworn, also the blue collar and maybe engineering type positions that traditionally have been more populated by males. So again, that's certainly something that will be paying attention to and looking at. But that pay gap is, as I indicated, largely attributed to to the occupations that the city has, and then also the fact that some of those occupations are traditionally heavily male dominated. Great. Well, I would say two things and then thank you for that is absolutely as you mentioned, I know we're going to do a lot of work in trying to recruit more women in these positions, especially engineering and tech and innovation, which I see is male dominated, public works, zero out of 23 women are well, there's no women in public works management whatsoever out of 23. I see that. And so the representation, but also just the pay equity, I think we could find out some some demographics to see where we're at with women just in general relative to their male counterparts, parts there. And then lastly, with African-American employees, I see it seems like it's 0 to 1000. So either high, you know, management level or, you know, very low ranking or low pay. So I would like to see some some more diversity in that sense where, you know, we see representation all across the board in various in various departments. And and so that is what I'd like to see, too. And then I think lastly, I think that was those were all my questions, but I really appreciate the work. I hope to get in for more, more information back that digs a little deeper, as I mentioned. And hopefully we can get some more information to make us a little bit more innovative when it comes to hiring. Thank you very much. Thank you. Councilmember Pearce. Yes, thank you. I want to say how much I appreciate the report. I know that the more we can based off user numbers to base our hiring practices, the better off will be. I think there's a lot of numbers in here and I I'm sorry I didn't look beforehand. Did we do all of us in-house or did we hire somebody to work on this? Yes, we did it all in-house. Okay. So I appreciate all the numbers that have been included here and just a couple that I want to highlight for the public that I know are at home watching because you get the emails looking at the last ten years and our female representation of by job category really hasn't changed. And so in the last ten years, even though we've had these conversations at the federal level and the state level around equity and making sure that we have access for women to other positions, those numbers really kind of stayed the same. And the fact that we have office and clerical, 81% of women are in those positions where we have for skilled craft, 2.6%. And to your point, Ms.. Vasquez, I think, you know, saying that the reason why it is this way is because women traditionally don't get those jobs for council. It is our job, I think, to start creating some policies, to start shifting that dynamic instead of just saying, well, women don't traditionally take these jobs. So that's our excuse for not being able to have an equitable and equal workforce. And so down the road, and not necessarily today, but I would like us to start having a conversation around what other municipalities and what other organizations do to try to encourage women into nontraditional women's roles. I know the Building Trades has a big program LBC, Cal State, Long Beach. How are we really looking at the numbers and the population in our city and having a targeted plan to support education in our city to get a pipeline into our city? Because if we don't create those pipelines, we're not going to see this this change. We can get a report every year, but we've got to be able to do that as a council. So I think my colleagues, for bringing this forward, you know, and I hope that we continue to do work on this. I do want to raise one other presentation that was presented to me by our Office of Equity for King County, their Office of Equity and Social Justice Strategic Plan. They have a presentation that shows what their population is in King County and then how they've been able to shift their hiring demographics to almost mirror exactly what their demographics are. And so as we move forward for the next report, we'll hopefully give you guys some direction between now and then to work with the Office of Equity and possibly having some hiring practices and pipeline practices to get us to a more equitable city. So thank you guys again for all the work. There's a lot of awesome numbers in here and more to dig in on. Thank you. Thank you. And before we go to the next speaker, we're going to call for public comment on this items and any public comment now will be the time. Very briefly, it's a reference to this was about six months ago. When you take the beginning of this meeting we had earlier on, we spent considerable time dealing with hospitals, getting people to hospitals care. When you take your kid to the hospital. You could give a rat's rear end what color, what sex, what country that person is. What you want is the best available person, period. And that applies to any job. Whether it be in the city, the state or a hospital. Anything less than that is politicking. Looking out for votes again. When you take your kid to the hospital, you could care less what color, what sex, what gender the person is. And that's the same thing that should be applied. When hiring anybody in any company or any city. Thank you. No further public comment will bring it back behind the rail. Councilmember Ranga. Yeah. During my presentation, I failed to recognize that we have Candice Taylor, the director of civil service in the audience. And I wanted to give her an opportunity if she had anything to, to add to the report. I know that many years ago there was a budget for recruiting and that included advertising and ability to go to job fairs and schools and that kind of activity. So I'd like to give her an opportunity to also chime in on the report. Absolutely. You have the floor. Is this on? Yes. Yes, it is. Just a couple of things I wanted to highlight. I think in general, stepping back, big picture, one of the things we need to do as a city is is just to highlight and promote the trades in general. We over the past ten years have really kind of pushed to our youth and those coming up behind us, the importance of education, but at the expense of trade occupations. And I think education is great, but not at the expense of choosing certain kind of occupations. And so I think there needs to be a push toward highlighting the trades and in so doing, using. I agree and appreciate the comment that you made. About our small team. And I think that we need to really partner with the the with the departments. We provide a general recruitment strategies for across the city. It would be really nice to be able to partner in doing videos, maybe focus groups to meet with certain with certain people to see if we can tweak the recruiting message to attract a certain demographic, to highlight partnering with the departments, to highlight a certain type of culture that might be within their department. We have tried to augment the classification specifications with an inside view, interviewing employees about the work that they do. So I think if we can find creative ways to broaden that and partner with departments in highlighting stories and highlighting the employees that perform the work, that's definitely something that I'm interested in doing and in trying to engender support from other departments around that area. I think it would also be helpful to have training on implicit bias, our aios and those people who make the hiring decisions. That's something that could probably be a very good strategy for us to implement. And and then another thought I had is just maybe implementing and partnering with h.R. On some employee referrals, something that might have some incentives. Oftentimes, people know people who would be great to work for the city. So I think that. Would be a good strategy as well. We we have typically we have. A. We do have social media that we've used one of the areas where I think we could expand. We have a presence on on LinkedIn, but that's one of our weaker platforms. So one of the strategies I've thought of doing is expanding what we are. We use Facebook, we use Twitter, we do some stuff on Instagram. But definitely broadening that social platform and using LinkedIn more than we have in the past is another strategy that I've considered using. Alex mentioned that we're using more online, we're doing a proctor testing. I think anything we can do to streamline a process to make us easier and accessible is definitely something that is going to help. But then also making sure that we're resource for those people who may not have access and just knowing that people can come into our department, we have kiosks and we have computers and we can certainly provide elbow to elbow help for someone who may be a little bit more challenged with making an online application, I think that's something important for us to communicate and get out there, that there are resources within our department to help people who might be challenged with the technology. That's about it. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you, Candice, for your comments on that. One of the other one of the last things that that this brings up right now, you just reminded me of it, is that sometimes a process just takes too long. I mean, it went from a point of submitting an application to hire can take six months or more. Also when you get people on an analyst our you still have eligible this or bandit list but if you have that that takes even longer because it's the life of a list is three years or so so we might lose we lose people when we the longer we take in the selection process, the likelihood of somebody not being available for hire, the one that you want, that that top candidate will probably move on and take another job elsewhere. So we need to look at that as well in terms of trying to. Make the prices a little easier as we're trying with the with the online applications. But in terms of contacting people and making sure that they're still interested in working for the city and making that process a little quicker in terms of from up to the point of hire. So we need to to address that issue as well. And finally, it's it's always about the money. And I know that we've been challenged over the years. And in terms of where we stand with salaries across across the board, we're always looking at, you know, police and fire, trying to put them at the median in terms of where they are with salary compared in comparison to other jurisdictions. But I think some of our professional ranks are at the same in the same boat in terms of not being as competitively paying as maybe other cities are. So we also have to look at that. I know that we had the A salary study done a few years back. I don't know what happened to that and where we stand citywide with salaries, including management professionals. So that may be something that we want to visit as well in terms of where are we standing with salaries , in terms of our competitiveness, with our our other our neighborhood agencies and neighborhood municipalities. So with that base where I want to go ahead and move that, we receive a pilot report. All right. So it's been moved and seconded. Members, please cast your vote. And a yes. Martin KASTE, thank you. We're going to call an audible. It's getting late. These are great presentations and we want to make sure they all have the respect they deserve. We have a really important we still haven't done a public comment and we still have quite a few items. One big presentation tonight was is the technology item, this item 29. And I know that it's an important item. We want to sink our teeth in, but it's about 30 slides and a lot of conversation. So will the council entertain a motion to continue that, continue that?