Presentations by General Fund Departments on Proposed Budget for Fiscal Years 2015-16 and 2016-17. (Finance 2410) [Continued from April 29, 2015]
We're going to start with a presentation by Chief Hillary for the police department. Actually, I'd like to just do a quick intro, if you don't mind. Madam Mayor, please. That. Okay. So good evening. I just wanted to to say welcome to everybody out in the audience who obviously is taking a great interest in this item tonight. Hopefully, folks at home are watching. This is the fourth of six meetings that we're having on this on our budget for fiscal year 15, 16 and 16, 17. Tonight, we have what we're considering all the majority general fund departments. So that's all eight departments that will be presenting tonight. That includes police and fire admin services in H.R. finance, city clerk, city attorney, city manager, which includes information technologies and the city council's budget. So all eight of the budgets will be presented tonight. And then also we have at the very end of the presentation a discussion about what I call filling the gap for the deficit that we've identified in fiscal year 1617. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to our first presenter, which is Chief Larry. Actually, if we could have two more public speakers before we start, that would be greatly appreciated. So Kelly. Laura. Thank you. Good evening. City Council and Mayor Spencer. Thank you for having me here this evening. I'm here tonight to speak about the possible cut of the SRO officers that are placed in Alameda High School. And it's not high school. That's being considered for the 20 1617 budget. And I ask you not to cut the SRO officers and not to make any reductions in that area. SRO officers. Have been in our high schools for. Over 20 years. During this time, they have served students and supported the community by providing a valuable resource. They partner with the school staff to keep our schools safe. They form relationships with. Students. And staff. They take reports. They investigate. They provide assistance to use who may not feel comfortable going to the station. They take reports and de-escalate situations. I know firsthand that they have supported our young people through issues of sexual assault, drug and alcohol issues, robbery, etc., very serious issues. And of course, I know that we all know in our recent current events throughout our country how important school safety is, and SRO officers play a critical role in that. So I ask that we continue this discussion. I absolutely understand budgets. I understand the predicament that you all are in and the need to make budget reductions. I ask that we consider this conversation and continue to have dialog and see if we can figure out another way to make the budget balanced. Thank you very much. Thank you. Can Petersen. Now he's speaking on this item. Thank you. Isn't this an item that's on the agenda? Right. Except that there's all these presentations. So they don't want to wait until apparently like ten or 11:00. They're all connected. I thought our process was presentation public comment. Right. So I was asked because we have nine presentations on one agenda item. They could be two speakers could go first. We only have one agenda item, right? Yes. Yeah. Can we after each presentation so that if a public speaker wants to speak on a police issue or a fire issue or whatever department presenting, can we break in so that they hear the presentation first? That might inform the discussion. Or to the. Comment. I would I would favor that sort of thing. And I think other. The particular item that Ms.. Laura spoke about with is actually in one of our. It's the last later the later one last presentation. So, I mean, if we. No, but I do I do think that the vice mayor suggestion, at least maybe hearing the police. So, Mr. Chair, are you here speaking on which of these presentations? I'm sorry. I can almost understand what you're saying. I'm sorry. Which presentation are you planning to speak on? I'm thinking about the overall process, which I think you should keep the. Last one, the overview presentation. As it fits into the overall city. So that's. The. Okay, hold on just a moment. So that's number three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I'm I'm sorry. I can't. So if you could if you're speaking on the last one, General, for an overview presentation, which is like the 10th or 12th presentation this evening, but council will be agreeable to allowing him to speak at this time on that item. I'm fine with that. Thank you. All right. So if you and then if you could hold your comments to make sure you stay within the 3 minutes, that'd be great. You want. Me to wait. Till I know you could go now? Because you're speaking on the last item, the overview presentation. Yes, you may proceed. And then if you could hold make try to keep your your comments to 3 minutes. Thanks. Okay. All right. My hearing isn't very good, and I almost understood most of that, I think. Anyway, a few years ago, I spoke nearly every council meeting about issues and the budget, and I think I stopped when my former dam came on. And I didn't think that a new person needed any more trouble than she might have already had. And so the key thing about the budget, I think, has to is that it has to do with city money. And the money the finances has to do should have to do with the city's financial condition and its prospects. Some issues have come up before regarding their elected financial officers and what they were saying and then what was done. And it was represented that the city managed the city's finances very well in spite of what the the doom and gloom that was presented or proposed by the financial officers. Of course, it was misstatement. And the misstatement and the attack on the person. It also corrupted the discussion because it shifted the attention away from the key issues into personalities. And the key issues need to be discussed. And that is, in fact, what is the city's financial condition, what are our assets, what are the prospects for being able to pay our debts and what are the debts and how are they trending and will we be able to pay them in the future? And how will that be done? As the budget system has been changed and been shifting over the last few years, it becomes less clear as to just how these things are going on because they're shifting the finances and the and the operations out of the general fund and into other books and departments. And as soon as you no longer can tell exactly what happened, but we do know that in the last few years that the city's income has not greatly increased and that the expenses have increased. Yet still we had a balanced budget. And so I think somebody needs to consider and explain just how that magic was achieved. Thank you. Thank you. All right, Chief for Larry. You may now proceed with your presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Council members, city staff Paul Larry, Chief of Police. So thank you very much for the opportunity to present the police department's budget. I want to tell you just briefly that last week was my 23rd anniversary of working for the city of Alameda. After growing up here and 26 years in law enforcement. And at last week's meeting, I was very pleased to hear a positive comment after positive comment about how people felt about the police department and the fire department in the city. And I was very grateful for that. And because of the length of the meeting, I didn't get a chance to say thank you to everybody that night. And I would have. And now it's an empty room. But had they been here and so if they're watching on TV. Thank you very much. The men and women at the police department appreciate the support that we get in this community. It's a big deal to us and we don't take that for granted. So with that, I'll briefly I'll go through the slides and then of course, if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them to the best of my ability for the people that are sitting at home. And for those of you who may not remember when when I'm talking about patrol and the police department in general, we slice the city of Alameda up into five patrol beats. Alameda Point from the Alameda point to eighth street, eighth street to Willow, Willow to the east to shore and then Bay Farm Island. Those are our five patrol beats. So when I talk about our staffing levels and the number of people that we have, I'll refer back to that. And so forgive me if I if I do that, but I think it's important for people to have the kind of some perspective that they may not completely understand exactly how we deploy our patrol officers in the city. So as a slight state patrol, we provide the core law enforcement functions, everything that everyone would expect. What people probably don't know is that we have about 5000 priority one calls a year. A priority one call is a call this in progress, something that's happening right now versus something that is reported cold that happened several hours or several days ago, 63,000 non-priority. One calls for service annually. That number has been relatively steady for the last couple of three years. Investigations, they conduct follow ups for patrol cases that are felonies or that go beyond the time constraints that a patrol officer on a ten hour shift can do. There's witness contacts out of town, etc.. So the investigations division, which is about 13 people right now, conducts 1900 plus investigations during the year, and then the probation and parole searches. And they monitor 70 to 90, we call them to 90 registrants or sex offender registrants in the city. And we do that every year. Traffic speaks for itself. Traffic enforcement. Now this is in addition to patrol. So when I'm talking to you about traffic, I'm talking about motorcycle officers. We have three officers and one sergeant in that unit right now. In addition, we have some non sworn personnel who are responsible for writing parking citations in addition to what the patrol officers do. So as you can see on the slide, roughly 30,000 parking sites per year, 6000 plus moving violations investigate 850 traffic collisions. And then we do one state grant sponsored DUI checkpoint annually. Animal control, as you'll remember from a couple of fiscal years ago, we went into a public private partnership with the animal shelter with force, which has been very successful, something that I think has benefited the city. And it certainly has benefited the police department. It reduced our our budgetary contribution to that service by about $600,000 three or so years ago. We still contribute and it will pop up in our budget sheet later on. The city is in a contract with this with force and we are currently providing about $320,000 a year towards their operation. It started at 300, but there's some CPI escalators in there. New initiatives, uh, initially scheduled to be. I was going to be before you on May 19th. As of this afternoon, that's going to be pushed back to the council meeting of June 2nd. I will be coming before you with the staff report recommending or asking for your approval to purchase body cameras. We can talk about it more that night, but as you all know, there's been a national conversation about body cameras in law enforcement across the country for a number of different reasons. I'm happy to say that when Chief Noonan was here, we began beta testing several different cameras. We've narrowed in on the one that we'd like. As I've mentioned to a few people separately, there is a sticker shock attached to that purchase. As you can see, it's not an inexpensive item. Most of that is data storage. And what we'll talk to you about that in a few more weeks. But a very, very promising, hopeful attitude at the police department about about getting out in front of this and getting our officers equipped with body cameras. Previous cuts to services. So I just mentioned it and I was hired here in 1992 and we had about 111 sworn officers. That number, as you can see on this chart, has decreased from fiscal year 97, 98 to the present by about 21%. We've gone from 180, 111 sworn down to 88 sworn over the last 12 years. Over on the right side of the slide, you'll see that in 1011, we eliminated one lieutenant's position and two sergeants positions. And that was in response to a study that was, I believe, directed by counsel at that time that looked at our staffing levels, looked at our calls for service, the allocation of among each rank of the police department. And they determined that at the time we were probably a little bit on the top heavy side. So we reduced from 6 to 5 lieutenants and from 17 to 15 sergeants in that cut. I mentioned the animal shelter partnership, which reduced our our expenditure by about $600,000 a year. And then following that in 1213, we eliminated one of our three school resource officer positions that that officer at the time was responsible for bouncing around between the three middle schools. Before he continued. Service sergeants, did you say? We have 15 now. We had 17 previously. All right. Thank you. Sir. And then we also, as you might recall, we we closed the jail. We permanently closed the jail that led to. A layoff of about eight non sworn jailor positions. There's one at every meeting. Can you repeat in regards to the jail operations, how many positions to that? Sure it was. Forgive me for not remembering exactly. I want to say it was eight non sworn jailers who who were laid off. We were able to actually help them find positions at the San Leandro Police Department, several of them. Unfortunately, the San Leandro Police Department in a budget cut closed their jail. So those have been full time. Pardon me. Yeah, they were full time. Yes. When the jail originally opened back, right about the year I was hired in 1991, we had as many as 13 or 14. It was reduced over the years. And then ultimately in conjunction with the the the court closing it at over at Shoreline Drive become its family court now was moved over to Oakland. We weren't we didn't quite have the need to keep the jail open that we might have 20 years earlier. So it was a it was a tough decision to make, but it did like the Animal Shelter Partnership, it saved us about 600 or so thousand dollars a year out of a it was about $1,000,000 a year program budget within the city at the time. Okay. So here's our overall budget. And the police department has 13 total programs. It's been slightly condensed just for the use of the slide. Administrative services, communications records and logistics are all things that are happening inside the building. When when I talk about communications, that's that's the 911 comms in the dispatch centers. Some people might refer to it as property and evidence. Also inside the building patrol obviously jumps out. That's the backbone of the organization. It always has been and it always will be. We currently have about 39 officers on patrol. Ideally, I'd like to have 42 or 43. That number goes up and down, depending on injuries and vacancies, etc.. Right now, today it sits at about 39. Investigations I mentioned earlier. We have we had we have 13 people in there now. We have a property crimes unit, a violent crimes unit, and then a special investigation unit that does the probation, parole monitoring and the sex offender monitoring in addition to any other special cases or help that they can provide to the other units. The traffic section. You may recall in one of the other budget cuts, when we cut four vacant positions, two of those positions were in the traffic section. So we reduced our motors, which were six at the time. We went all the way down to one for a little bit and currently we're back up at the previously mentioned number of three officers and one sergeant. So for four officers riding motorcycles right now. Okay. Next slide. Administrative services, as I mentioned, is everything that happens within the police department. Before you ask, I'll I'll address the cost allocation number on the bottom. You'll see that that jumps up pretty significantly from 122 to 41. And that represents a litigation settlement that was released, reached within the city. And the the amount of that settlement was being distributed over 15, 16 and 16, 17. And that represents that, that large chunk. Next slide. Communications, as I mentioned, that's the that's the concern, as we call it, the dispatch center for those of in the public that don't remember this or know this. We formally when I was hired in 1992, we dispatched both police and fire from the third floor of the police department and the communications center. But about 12 or so years ago, I'm guessing I could be wrong. The fire department dispatch was transferred over to the Alameda County facility in in Livermore. So if a citizen were to call 911 for something that's happening in Alameda, whether it was medical, police, emergency or fire, that call will still come to our communication center in the police department. If it's a police emergency, then we will dispatch that call directly. If it is a fire or a medical call, the dispatcher will keep the caller on the line until they get the Livermore Dispatch, Alameda County Dispatch on line. And then there's a seamless transfer. They tell the police dispatcher will inform the fire dispatcher of what we have, keep the person on the line. And then once the handoff is successfully made, then the calls transferred and dispatched from Lawrence Livermore. We have. I didn't I'm sorry, I didn't mention earlier. We have 15, 15 dispatchers in there in the commission right now. 12 dispatchers, two supervising dispatchers, and then one consent supervisor. Okay. Next slide. Records, material and logistics. This is our this is the fleet. It's it's our record section. We have several records, clerks making copies, answering requests, taking parking fees, etc., downstairs. I think some of you may have may have met them in your travels throughout the building. Again, all all stuff that happens inside. It's the business of the police department that the public generally doesn't see. Next slide and. Property and evidence. We have one property in evidence clerk for probably 50 or 60 plus thousand pieces of property in evidence that we collect. There's a constant, constant collection of items and a constant purging of items. We do the best organizing that we can. Barbara Lahey does a great job in there by herself and keeps keeps the lid on everything down there. Some of the she does not cost $1,000,000 by herself, though, I will be honest with you. Worth a million. She is. She is. But we don't we don't quite pay her that much. When we talk about property and evidence. There are other things that are attached to that. For the purposes of this slide, we have crime scene specialists or CSI, as people like to refer to them on television. There's a police sergeant that supervises that unit, both the crime scene specialists and the property and evidence clerk. So that's that's all represented in that particular slide. Next one. Patrol, the backbone of the organization. Everything starts and ends with patrol. When you're a new officer coming in through the door, that's where you start. That's you work patrol until you get some experience. And then you get a chance to become a field training officer, go up into investigations, and after that rotation you go back to patrol. And that happens at the Sergeant Rank. And all throughout your career, you you begin a patrol and you return to patrol. It's the most important thing that we do. It's the most visible thing that we do. It's where our or the majority of our contact with the public is. And it's where the majority of the vast majority of our staffing is dedicated is to patrol. Question. Chief Miller, can you just talk to us about the center revenues, the fees for service in the $485,000? This would this be for housing authority officers or is that needed elsewhere? If you could bear with me for 1/2, I will get you to answer. So the revenues for patrol are attached to Prop 172 sales tax that the that the police department receives from the county alarms, service fees and then the housing authority the housing authority officers. That's $210,000 a year. That the housing authority pays to the police department. For. Part of the officers you. Allocate? That's correct. We have two two officers who are assigned to the Alameda Housing Authority on a contract basis with the city. And the Housing Authority pays a good portion, not 100% of their salary and benefits, but $210,000 of it. Excellent. Investigations. As I mentioned, that's this basically it's the detectives, it's the probation, parole monitoring, the sex offender monitoring, um, 13, 13 officers. We have a few sergeants in there and one lieutenant who oversees the entire investigations division. By the way, I was remiss. I didn't, uh. The reason why my command staff is here tonight is because I asked them to be here for the for the budget presentation, and that's why they were here last week as well. But unfortunately, yes, I told them I had to apologize to them for doing this to them twice, but. They're good. They're good troopers. Next slide, please. Traffic. Again, we're talking about three police officers, one police sergeant and five parking techs. That number goes up and down quite a bit. I will tell you, as a quick aside, we had one very prolific employee who unfortunately left the police department to move to Texas after some some personal issues. And he we had a rough, rough time replacing him. Ernest White. Ernest was responsible for ticket revenue of around a half a million dollars a year. So we all miss him. Texas revenues just went up. Yes. He I reluctantly gave him a good recommendation. He's now working for a county sheriff's department in Texas as a jailer. And I told him if if it doesn't work out, that they'd be happy to have him in the parking section. Does anyone have any questions about traffic? Next slide, please. Okay. But just one question. Medicare facility, the $1.1 million in fee for services. Those are tickets, right? Is that correct? Yes, I can I can give you exactly what those revenues are, if you can just. Oh. But what I'm really getting at is we don't get the full amount of. I take it? No. No, that's a good question. And it's come up before people who sometimes get tickets think we're doing it for revenue. I can tell you that is absolutely not the case. Parking tickets generate a good portion of revenue. We get a good percentage of that money. I would say we get a very small percentage, six, 7% of the fee. So if somebody gets a three or $400 ticket for running a red light, for example, or a speeding ticket, we get a very, very small amount of that. The state and the county take a good chunk of that before before we get to see any of it. So when we do it, it's from a business model. It's it's not a moneymaker. It's not it's not a good business. But we all know that the reason why we do it isn't to make money. It's for public safety. That's it. That's the only reason why we do it. But it's also important to send the message that to the public that we're not ticketing people for revenue generating purposes. No. And that's a that's a very good point. And it's 100% accurate. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Can you clarify the amount that's that's included here for revenue? Is this the total before the distribution of where else it goes or is this just our portion? That's our portion. That's what we get. Next slide. Take other police services and give me just a moment here. Okay. We're talking about here, a ban on vehicle abatement and special services support, I'm sorry, which is another way of saying contract over time. So there are several events that happen throughout the city where patrol can't handle it. And we actually require, through the permit process for the event to hire one or two or more police officers. The most common example would be the antiques fair. So they pay they pay a fair amount of contract over time to have a couple of officers out there at the Antiques Fair. Yes, sir. I've met a married. Man. And I don't know who sets the fees, but those fees take into account the full burden of the person's employment. I don't know. I don't know that it accounts for the benefits. I actually don't know the answer to that. If we could park park that as an issue, would I assume that one, the Del Monte truck issue was going on and we had a police officer there. Making them hire a security guard. Oh, they were paying overtime. I understood. Mm hmm. But our cost is not just the overtime cost. It's much bigger. So we can talk about that as a policy. Yes, I appreciate the work, but the bill is probably bigger than. Yeah. That's a pain. That may be the case, but they did pay, by the way. They did pay everybody that worked during the time that those trucks were parked out there that was fully funded by by the contract overtime. Possibly not. The benefits will see. Next slide. So this is basically a our our particular budget pie, which as you can see, I told you, patrol is the backbone of the organization. I mean, that's that's the vast majority of our our expenditures goes to staffing 39 patrol officers and eight patrol sergeants throughout the year. And everything else is relatively small investigations because it's the next biggest unit, followed by traffic. Next slide. Same thing for 16, 17. We are right now, as you all know, we are authorized to have 88 sworn. The police officer rank makes up 74% of the police department. We have two captains. One chief and five lieutenants and then the 14 sergeants that I mentioned to you earlier. Vice mayor of requests on the last slide. The. The pie chart. The revenues are in dollars and the expenditures are percent. Can can we have them in dollars and percent of it? Or at least if these are posted, we can have some homework and looking at those. Member de SAC. Chief, you said you have 88 sworn two captains, one chief and 14 sergeants. Are these all held positions or are there any vacancies? I have four vacancies currently and they're all at the rank of officer. Thank you. Which department is that patrol or their patrol? Okay. And those numbers are included in your budget? No. So that's an excellent point. Up until this year. So when the prior finance director was here, Fred Marsh funded us for all 88 positions even we didn't we didn't have 88 and he funded us for that. So you've probably seen and I think we've talked about in other venues, the fact that we have a salary savings of a little over $1,000,000 for 1415 and that is a function of us being funded for positions that we didn't actually have. So we had the savings. That was an unintended consequence. I certainly and I'll if it comes up later, I'll tell you that I, I really do feel that we need those positions. But this year well, now that Alan has moved into the finance director's chair, the, the thought this year was that we'll just fund for what we actually have. And so that that budget represents the fact that I have 84 sworn. Actually, I'd like to clarify that. I think the budget that the numbers actually are based on when we think we will be able to fill those four positions. So there are salary savings in his budget worked into those numbers. But the budget does assume that at some point within the year, those four positions will be filled this year. That's correct. Within the fiscal year? That's correct. I mean, and. Alannah worked with with H.R. to determine, okay, when do we think those positions will realistically get filled? Because what was happening is we were budgeting January, July 1st that we would have all positions filled and that was unrealistic. So we sort of drill down a little bit further and said, when do we think realistically we can get these positions, these people filled? These positions filled. And that's how we budgeted it. So. So we expect, though, by the end of the fiscal year of this current fiscal or this next 1516, that those four positions will be filled. And that's what those numbers reflect. Any other questions? Counsel Then you want to make comments now or we can just proceed with the next presentation. Because this will come back up at the last minute. Yes. I just want to make sure I understand, because you said it up and then I think this story was finished here. Is that. In the two year cycle. Of the full burden of those for positions that are going to be hired sometime this first fiscal year. It is shown in that second year. So it's an 88. A sworn. Department staff in fiscal year 1617 and it's only a partial it's 84 going to 88 during in this coming one. That's correct. So and and that shows the difference between the two years, the increase. In the two years that. You look from one year to the next year on this slide. Yes. The vacancies are. Closed. Yes. Okay, I. I understand now. So you answer my question and everyday. So just a quick question. So when we did our OPEB calculations, it's based upon 88, correct? Yes. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Before you proceed, Chief. I don't know if she wants to. Did you want to make any comments? Introducing? No. All right, then. Now we have fire chief long. Thank you. Good evening, Madam Mayor. Vice Mayor. Council members. City Staff. Doug Long, fire chief. Thank you for allowing me to present the fire department's budget tonight. I am very excited about it. New position for me. As you know, I was born and raised in town here. And this is a huge thrill for me to be the leader of the fire department. I celebrate my 27th year here next month. Graduation. Thank you. Working. Oh. All right. Here we go. All right. This is our organizational chart. The fire department, we have six divisions comprised of our emergency services, emergency medical services, training, disaster preparedness, fire prevention, fire admin, and our suppression. All under the fire chief. What we do. Emergency services that that takes care of all of our people on our fire engines, fire trucks. Those are the people that you see out on the streets responding to emergencies out there to protect life, property and the environment. We also provide all the emergency medical services in town by providing at least or advanced life support engines, which means that they have a paramedic on them. We also provide three advanced life support, or A.L.S. ambulances to the city. Those are all full time, 24 hours a day. You also have tactical medics. These medics support the police department with their SWAT team. They have training, but they can be right alongside of them in case one of them gets injured during one of their. You know what you call them? Problems when they're out serving warrants and such. They'll be right there beside them. If they get injured, they can take care of them. They've also found that like an active shooter type of things where shooters are in schools and a lot of children have been shot. What they're finding is that most of those children actually bled out, waiting for emergency services to secure the area and get in and get them. Our tactical medics would be able to start put on tourniquets, stop the bleeding so that most of these children would would survive such an incident. We currently run about 6000 calls a year. 142 of those are fire calls. 4300 are emergency medical services calls, and 1500 fall under the other category, such as patient. Patient assists turning off hydrants that are sheer that type of a call. We also have our special operations. These are things like our Marine operations program. Where we have our water rescue swimmers. We currently have 30 members that are trained to the lifeguard standard and are actually going through an open water rescue swimmer program now, which is more in tune with what we actually do. The lifeguard standard was more for pools. So we're changing that standard, which will also be once you're trained, you'll always have that training instead of having to get recertified each year, which is an expense to us. We also have two rescue boats at either end of town that can go into shallow water. We can launch them right off the beach or right into the estuary and quickly get out to anybody that's in trouble in the water. Also have our fire boat, which protects the marinas and waterfront property in town. We have the second largest number of marinas on the West Coast, secondary to Newport. Newport Beach. We also respond to hazardous materials calls. All of our firefighters are trained to the first responder operational level. Which means we can identify what type of hazard we have, basically secure the area. We can solve smaller problems. Otherwise, we call an Alameda County Fire Department. We have a contract with who provides full service hazardous materials teams. We have found that those hazardous materials teams are very expensive to keep certified and operate and we need them very seldom here in town like and even remember the last time we needed to call them. They also provide technical rescue. That is our people who can go into the ships and down into small spaces for our ready reserve fleet and the ships that are in port getting service along the estuary. They also have specialized training in the event of an earthquake to shore up buildings that have partially collapsed so that we can actually get inside and search for people. Chief long did the mayor. May I just take you back on the Marine operations? We as a council recently approved purchase of a new police boat. Does the fire department coordinate with the police department on Marine type operations? We will coordinate now. We just got our boat back from service and repairs yesterday. It will get a quick go over by the Marine operations team and probably be launched this weekend. So we'll be back in service and then we'll start coordinating trading with the police department. All right. Good. Thank you. Cylinder. What we do are fire preventative services. We're out there in the community inspecting buildings for code compliance to make sure that they're safe. We also do vegetation control to make sure that we don't get out of control and cause fires in neighborhoods. A big portion of what our code compliance officer does now is permit the reviews for new construction. Also regulates household hazardous waste and enforcement of that hazardous materials storage. We were down from seven full time people in our fire prevention bureau. We're down to one code compliance person trying to complete all of our inspections. Now we've flattened our organization. And due to the cuts that happened in 2009, we have pushed down all of our commercial inspections down to the fire companies on suppression. They have historically completed all of the inspections for apartment buildings. Now they complete the ones also for commercial inspections. Also have our disaster preparation and our CERT teams. CERT teams are trained citizens. They learn how to respond to emergencies in their neighborhoods, to take care of things in case of a disaster. They learn how to turn off the gas by small fires. I know that they've been used to search for missing persons. Were able to get them together very quickly. And have them start searching. They also can provide a secondary means of communications for the city and event that all communications go down. There are ham am radio operators. It gives us that back up system. Currently we have 500 trained active citizens on our CERT team. I. Question. Oh, no. I was remarking on how 500 trained. Also what we do. Fire department is very active in the community. We are part of the resilience planning for the city. The fire department meets often with different community groups in town, as well as department heads coming up with a plan for resilience for the city in the event of emergency. We also got in very, very many community events. We go to National Night Out. We do Safety Town every year for the small children in town. We have many visits with our trucks to different neighborhoods, events in town. We do benefit events so that we can generate funds for donations. And in the town with Alameda Family Services. And station tours are constantly ongoing. Anybody can call us, line up a tour, come in and see what we do. What we carry on our rigs. How we respond. And the doors are open. Now, we're not a closed door mystery out there. Relay for Life. Relay for Life. I couldn't fit them all on the page. That's point. It's coming. Up. You can see our cancer awareness shirts there on the in the picture. New initiatives, one that we're very proud of, our community peer medicine pilot program. Currently, we have five of our paramedics in training. They've completed their core training. They are getting ready to start their local training in local hospitals. What they will be doing is they'll be doing follow up care for patients that have been discharged from the hospital. They'll be going to their houses, coordinating care with their personal care physicians, making sure that they follow up on their medications. And they'll they'll watch them to try to decrease the number of times people are readmitted to the hospital. And we'll also be managing our what we call 911 frequent callers. A lot of these people are homeless and call the fire department via 911 for just about everything, whether they are hungry. Whether they have slight pain, we're really all they know how to do and call for help. We'll be reaching out to them, monitoring them and showing them what social services are out there and available to them. When I'm in the right direction and get them hooked up with the people that can actually help them provide the service that they need. Amber Ashcroft. Thank you. Question on the community paramedic, peer medicine pilot program, how are you coordinating or in communication at all with the it's called the Alameda Health System. Now, the county medical system that has absorbed what we know as Alameda Hospital. With this program. We are in communication with them frequently. They're helping us actually build the program because we have to to set up the means for our community medics to get the list of names of patients, their needs, and then they need to interact with those physicians in the hospital. So is there any discussion of funding assistance when the grant runs out? I think they're going to want to see that the data and how much it actually saves them, because all the people that we don't take there that they basically can't and help is going to be a savings for them. With the Affordable Care Act moving forward. A lot of the transports, if they're multiple in nature, if you go back to the same thing, often insurance isn't going to pay for it or the hospital is not going to get paid and the ambulance transports are not going to get paid for. So this is a way to decrease the load on on the whole system and to get the load off of our emergency rooms. Also, because they're just cluttered up with with too many people that don't actually need an emergency room. So I take it you're keeping those kinds of records and collecting the necessary data? Part of it is a huge a huge database. Yeah. Thank you. And that is completely grant funded. $1.4 million. Okay. More grants. We've applied for staffing for adequate fire and Emergency Response, which is known as the SAFER Grant. We have gotten two in the past totaling $3.52 million. We're waiting to hear now if we're going to be authorized and awarded another grant. We should be those should be going to review this month and next month and then we'll wait to hear. We've put in for $2.2 million, which would fund six four firefighters for two years. That includes your benefits. That includes everything, including their OPEB. Fully, fully funded. I swear. And I think one of the things we also have to talk about separate from this is we have a couple of grants and we have an initiative and on the power of medicine. And we also have a hospital district that we pay parcel tax into. And it seems to me, especially with the previous discussion on. The on the parrot. Medicine that there. I think we need to get more response out of them on when they can take this program, because to me, it's to have a highly trained, multi qualified individual that are probably the most versatile employee in the city, adding yet this to it when we have a hospital over here that we pay into, even though it's a county run part of the county system, we're paying and we need to figure out what we want to extract from that. And I'm hoping that we can, because I also understand that the paramedics and has part time temporary firefighters filling in for the firefighters that are in the paramedics in program, is that correct? That that is correct. They're in backgrounds right now to be hired and then the budget for them. Are they going to be our liability in the future? Can you explain a little bit about that? Are we compounding and going over our because we we had the big discussion during contracts on on the sustainability based on the number of positions we have now. And are we are we compounding that without having the proper funding upfront? Well, they're they're funded for the program. And when the. When the funds run out, either additional funding from an outside source will be provided or those people will be laid off. But as they're working here, are they accruing vesting toward vesting so that at some point if if we keep granting them and granting them and granting them, then now we have a vested employee that is that. It would only be vested if they became permanent positions. Okay. What's the source of the grant funding? Alameda County EMS and County measure a fund. Is this something that the hospital could apply to if they were interested in it? Or is this something that's. You know what? I'm I'm not sure. This is a state of California pilot program right now. We're one of about 11. Groups in the state are working on this pilot. My question goes to possibly whomever is giving out the money may think that the appropriate department for fire, but the appropriate use for fire. As they they are looking at. Basically everything. I think we're the only fire department. Yeah. Full service fire department that is providing this. There are also groups. UCLA has two different groups that are doing this. There is an ambulance company by itself in Butte County. I believe there's a group in Ventura. I can't recall where the other ones are. I want to thank you for applying for the grant. I remember Ashcroft. As I recall, because I do remember when we were going through this. It was just a handful within the state, and we were one of the handful that was chosen, which is great. And I would also suggest and I've had some just informal discussions with some of the members of the board of directors at the Health Care District, Alameda Hospital. And I think that's something that we we should pursue. I mean, they're obviously part of a much larger county organization, but it seems like a natural extension to look at. And just to add on to that, if. In a in a recent event, I ran into one of the directors and they expressed interest in working with the city and trying to get more involved in emergency service. And in 2009, there was a council referral to set up a liaison committee between the city council and the hospital board. At that time, the hospital declined the invitation and the board, or at least this board member, expressed that there is no interest. So if we could follow up on that to help. Help fund. The delivery of medical service on tax dollars that were already spending. I think that would be a good use of our time. So can I ask if we can skip a step and ask whether or not it's the Council's desire for us to look at that? Doing your own committee to a hospital board. Yeah. And bring that back. And by the way, I'd be happy to participate. Having had a little involvement with them once upon a time. This point, I think you're asking for a direction from council as to whether or not we'd want to proceed with that. I'm agreeable to proceeding with it. I remember days. Oh, I think it's a good idea. Not specifically on that point, but on this. Okay. So in regards to at this point, she'd like direction city manager, like direction guards to whether or not we want to proceed with the liaison committee. With that. I have no problem with the policy. I mean, the fact that we're giving direction on a non agenda item I'm a little uncomfortable with but. To get more money. I'm just curious. I'm straight. He's raised an inappropriate child. Okay. I think I think it's. Well, I. Think China ordinance and all. But it would come back for us. Absolutely. Yeah. At this point, we would just say we want to drill little deeper. It's just made. Be skip. One step on the referral process. Okay. I'm looking for revenue on tax dollars that we're already spending for this purpose. That was the promise at the hospital that we were going to have emergency services. If the hospital closed, we wouldn't. So I think it's it's it's right to the point of this because our department is at the front end of providing basic life support . Thank you. Brody. I thank you, man. The thing with the hospital is now at HHS so that the discretion of the of the our hospital board, you know, their discretion in spending funds is actually pretty limited. I think their only role left is to authorize the personal tax or not authorize the personal tax. So, I mean, it may be with HHS, it may be with the hospital. I mean, I know they're having, you know, severe financial issues with HHS right now. And the supervisors have put them on the board of supervisors, put them on a short list. But the whole point of a pilot project, if I'm correct, is that, you know, somebody came up with an idea to do it statewide. It would cost, you know, millions and millions of dollars. So they decide let's let's try to do a pilot, do it in a small number of cities and counties. And as you're saying, we have some fire like us. I think we're with Hayward, too, right? Hayward dropped out. Oh, they dropped out. Okay. And then, you know, some ambulance companies and so on. And then we collect the data and then the legislature takes a look at it and says, is this something that's effective? Is this something that we get bang for our buck on? And then if know it turns out that it is, you know, then the state may turn it into a program that they may fully fund. So absolutely no. Ah, in my day job, we were very honored to be supportive of this and I'm glad that we were able to be part of this pilot and I'm excited to see what happens. Thank you. Yeah, we're trying to see if it's a viable option and we'll see what the data looks like. And the Affordable Care Act basically made this possible, if I understand, correct? Right. Yeah. You. Hey, more grants that are pending. We've also put in for an assistance to firefighters grant. This will be to replace our old, outdated and obsolete scba our self-contained breathing apparatus. Those are the tanks that we wear on our back to provide air so that we can go into hazardous areas and still be able to breathe in there . Our grant puts in for 66 of those breathing apparatus. And it totals. $568,857. We're still waiting to hear on that one. And I want to thank you for requesting all these grants. That takes a lot. It takes a lot of time and administrative time. And but there is money out there and we go for it. And we've been pretty successful. Another new initiative. This is a new one that we're pretty darn excited about. All in Alameda, we've been asked to participate in this program to help youth in Alameda. Take a look at different career opportunities, get them pointed in the right direction. YOUNG So that they don't end up on the low end of the poverty scale later down the road. We are planning to start an Explorer program and or a recent regional occupation program, but we we are already jumping in. We're taking two interns this summer. Actually, today was the job fair. Yes, it's an old high school, so we should have a handful of applications to go through. And I was able to participate in that. And I want to commend you for showing up and reaching out to our youth. It's really important for our community. It's another collaborative effort. So thank you. Thanks. Another new initiative, the replacement of existing fire station three in conjunction with the construction of the new EOC. $5 million project. It'll replace a fire station that was deemed seismically unsafe in 2000. We've been renting and living in the house next door since 2001. The California Infrastructure Bank, N.A. unanimously approved our $3 million loan last week, which will partially fund this project. We are very excited about it. It's time to get this done. Well, congratulations on that. Thank you. The great stuff. They were they were very excited about it and interested in the project. Or new initiatives or vehicle purchases will be replacing staff vehicles as well as a couple of pickup trucks that date back to 1988, which I believe we actually acquired from the base when it closed. Also purchased a new ambulance for $150,000. We're saving money on that by doing what is called a remount instead of purchasing a brand new ambulance. It's essentially new. What they do is they take off the existing box, rip it down in it, rework it, wheel the the old chassis away and put a brand new one underneath it . So it's actually a brand new vehicle, gets a new VIN number, but it is much cheaper. A new ambulance is about $218,000. So that's kind of like recycling. It is. Recycling. It saves all that aluminum that we don't have to. Write. Use on a new box. All right. Another new initiative that I am unhappy about. We are going to suspend our basic life support, transport, ambulance. We were doing very well with this Alameda Hospital, was very happy with us. Our other clientele at the skilled nursing facilities were very happy with us. However, when Alameda Hospital was taken over by Alameda Health Systems. The contract went out to a RFP to include all of those other hospitals. Our grassroots program, which has worked so well in Alameda, did not have the infrastructure in place that met the requirements of the RFP. We were not able to put in a proposal for that. So in essence, we lost a big portion of our clientele when the award was given to somebody else. We were in a restructuring mode with our bailout program. We believe that getting out there and getting other contracts with other skilled nursing facilities and being the overflow provider for the current provider, which is West Med. That we will be able to bring the bailout program back, especially as the Affordable Care Act gets going and our community paramedics get going out in the field. They will be able to downgrade the patients of TLC ambulance. And I believe that that's the the wave of the future. But being fiscally responsible. We didn't want to drag this program along until we could see where those revenues were going to come from. So. Question Chief Long. So how many personnel did you have working in the BLS transport program? We had 20 part time people. And where do they go there? They're currently working until. Sebelius still exists. BLS, which exists right now but is not funded for the next fiscal year. So where do the 20 part timers go or are you just laying them off at the end of the term? They'll be laid off. And how long? How long have you had this program? It's been about three years. If. If this cuts to service. We've eliminated two firefighter positions over the last eight years. The reduction to our fire prevention bureau in 2009, where we reduced from seven positions down to two. Also in 2009, we had the closure of fire station number five, which eliminated one fire engine. That's don't mean to point. I'm sorry. Okay. This is a graph that shows. Our cuts. You can see in 1993, 1994, this line. Up here. This is a line that we use. This is the required number of staffing that we need to provide, the level of service that we currently have right now. No, I'm sorry. It's not showing up on our screen right when you. Well, here's this. When he's off, you can do it again. This line right here, the orange line. That's a level we need to get at, provide the level of service that we have right now, which is four engines, two trucks. Three ambulances and the division chief. In 93, 94, we had 96 personnel and backfilled with overtime to get up to that line. In 1997, 98, we acquired Fire Station five on Alameda Point from the military and our authorized positions went to 111. Which we acquired 16 positions from that. Until 2005. 2006. We went down to 103 positions. Eight positions were eliminated during the budget cycle. Overtime was used to fill those positions to get up to that yellow line. And when over time became too severe. Stations were were closed to save overtime money. In 2005, 2006, our overtime budget was 1.23 million. What we actually spent was 1.2. 4 million. From there in 0607 or over time budget was 900,000 994. But our actual expenditure to keep the stations open was 1.7 the 176% of our budgeted overtime. Excuse me, Chief. Why is that on a slide in this presentation? Are you looking at. I'm looking at supplemental information. So what? I'm just point seven. 1.7. I'm just trying to show you in this area when we don't have enough staffing. Our overtime goes very high, almost double of. What we're authorized in 0708, we're budgeted 1.2 million. Our actual overtime was 2.2 million. 80 0809. Our overtime was 134%. And then when we started getting into the year's. Right in here. This green is our safer firefighters where we acquired six firefighters through the safer ground. Or overtime and during those periods. Gets reduced. In 1112, we were budgeted for 1.1 million, though our actual overtime use was only $611,000, 55%. In 1213, our budgeted overtime was $846,000. But our actually use was only 502,059%. And then in 13, 14, but it was 793. And use was 721. Still under our authorized amount. However, with the loss of the safer firefighters when the grant expired. In 1415. Our authorized overtime is $795,000. A projected overtime expenditure will be 1.4 million 178%. So without the safer firefighters, we're still continuing down that same road. If we don't get the grant or if we don't fund the firefighters with overtime. It's a it's going to be a huge cost. Additionally. I'd like to point out that. Oops. Wrong, but I'm sorry. This time frame here. We don't have. The base. We're not protecting the base. We are protecting them. Basically, the main island, this side of Main Street and Bay Farm Island. Across the middle when we have the base. Our staffing has gone up. This was 96 firefighters over here. Over here, we've gone down to 92 authorized positions. However, we're still protecting the whole island, including what we've taken on with Alameda Point. Those are authorized positions. I've gone down by. What we need to protect has gone up, and our call volume has increased by a thousand calls a year. This line right here is 98. Firefighters are authorized for 92. This is what we need to make up in here. Here's our overall budget. For administration. That's our people in the office that take care of our business. Emergency operations, the biggest portion of our budget. That's the people you see out on the street running the calls. Our prevention services. Our one code compliance officer and a partial office person. Emergency medical services is our. EMS captain and our non sworn. Forgot the name of her position. EMS coordinator. Disaster preparedness is our one fire captain that provides training to the city, to our cert people. Ah. Training one fire captain. Higher grants. We have some part time people in those positions. That's our senior safety program. I have a person that goes out and installs smoke detectors for the elderly and low income, as well as sets up contractors to install handrails and safety hardware in people's houses. Question. So that sounds like does public works ever do anything like that? Or is there another department that's always the domain of the fire department to do handrails? No, that's usually fire department. Thank you and completely grant funded. Basic life support we've talked about that will be eliminated in 1516, hopefully coming back in 17. Right. Administration. As I said, that's our our people in the office doing the business. We have seven full time employees, two sworn and five non sworn. Emergency operations. People are out on the street. Going to fires. Going to medical calls. Everything. That is called by 911. These are the people that are taking care of it. Our fees for service are the revenue that we take in from our ambulances and our inspections. Chief, what would be the distribution between ambulance and the inspections? Is it like 50, 50? 60, 40, roughly? Ballpark? Mostly. Mostly ambulance. Okay. I can give you a thank you. I can give you a number here. I'm sorry. Councilmember Desai. We can come. Back. I'll have it for you. Thank you. 2.2 million for the Animals Prix. All right. I preventative services. Once again, that is the. Fire prevention or I piled stock. A lot of our revenue this year is coming from new construction permits. Actually, most of our fees are coming from that now. This isn't a major point, but is that is that why we see a drop off? I'm looking at the revenues fees for service in the first line. We see a drop off of $10,000 from one fiscal year to the next year. Just anticipating a. We we adjusted our our numbers on some of our inspections that weren't getting done because of the emphasis on taking care of the permit process so that the construction could continue. Thanks. Right. Emergency medical services to two full time employees. One sworn, one non sworn. That's our EMS coordinator and our EMS captain. Disaster preparedness, one full time employee that's a captain that is split 5050 between police and fire. I'm sorry. So you said you're one captain. Who's in charge of disaster preparedness. She, right? Yes. And she divides her time, 5050, between police and fire her. She's funded 5050 between police and fire. All right. Thank you. Fire training. One fire captain. And our fire grants. Currently we have the community peer medicine program under grants and our housing and. Safety Inspector, which I told you what's in the smoke detectors and grab rails and cert is also funded by grants. Okay. Fiscal year 1516. Emergency operations, the revenues. Generated are 71.2% from emergency operations. Grant funds are 23.8 and our preventative services are 5.1%. Obviously our expenditures are mostly in emergency operations. Those are our personnel. Smaller portions are emergency medical services. Fire training, disaster prep are Prevention Services Administration. Before you move on, I'd like to make take note of the revenues. 23.8% is grant funding. I think that's a very significant some truly goes to your hard work in getting these grants. Thank you. And a mayor. A vice mayor. I realize it's a lot of hard work that does it, but I the pessimist, he says it's a liability because we're not guaranteed that we're going to get the grant in the next cycle. And how would we address if if they half of the grants or a significant grant didn't come through? How are we? That's a rhetorical question, but should we be prepared for that or is that a reserve issue? Is it? Well, that's actually the issue. I mean, I think that that is your call. I think our position is that if the funding is not there, the positions don't exist. And if the council wanted to backfill those you are, you know, that's your prerogative to do. But I think our position is that if the funding doesn't exist, those positions don't exist. Thank you. So I'm going to try to be optimistic here. Sorry about the. Balance. All right. Sorry. 16. 17 is about the same. Emergency operation revenue. 81.5%. I preventative services 5.8 grant funds are down to 12.7%. And that's because the vice mayor was thinking about. Well, as I skipped ahead, as the as the grants run out, these are would be for a community per medicine. All right. Questions. Member Daisuke. Thank you very much, Chief. Long and again, congratulations on becoming chief and also a hearty thank you to former Chief Chief Ramsey. I just want to say, you know, I know it must have been a tough decision with regard to the bells because I remember that matter coming up before us. And the discussion really pointed for me, as I recall, came down to making sure that we had all the data points as to should we, you know, make it permanent, which we did, actually. But then I guess with more data coming in and also the change in the and the relationship with the hospital, I guess, you know , you had to make a really, really tough decision. So, you know, that's why. It has been tough. That's when many people. Yeah. That were, you know, working there for us, gaining experience, getting involved with the fire department, became part of our family. But part of that program was that it needed to sustain itself. And based on Alameda Hospital being swallowed up by Almeida Health Systems and not being able to get the contract that we had gotten from Almeida Hospital at this point. We wanted to make sure that we found a revenue source. To make it sustainable instead of going down the river of. You know, personnel costs without the revenue to back it up. Thank you. Member. Ashcroft And I just want to touch back on the question of the grants. And. As has been said before, I commend you and your department for the hard work in applying for and receiving grants. And and we see that actually across the city. But I and maybe it's the optimist in me, I think you go after the money and you see what's out there and we don't have a crystal ball, but we've always got our eyes open ear to the ground and we'll, you know, we'll see if we have to make the tough decisions as as you're doing right now with, for example, where else we will on the pyramids in program. I think, you know, there's some other avenues we can explore before saying that that one's going out the window. So I just think in these challenging financial times, you you look at every possible source of income knowing that it's not it's not open ended and, you know, nothing's forever. But I think we might as well benefit our departments and our city, our citizens, as much as we can. So I would encourage you to keep up the good work. And in that regard, we will. And we've always kind of been on the cutting edge. We're one of the first departments to have defibrillators. We've been first at a lot of things and jumping into this and seeing if it will work as far as the community paramedics. And we're we're very excited about it. We believe it's the wave of the future to help decrease costs and more importantly, it our citizens the care that they actually need. We are not doing people, the homeless community any good by picking them up and taking them to an emergency room. We need to ensure that we get them into those social programs that can actually help them and help them find shelter and get them the medical care that they need. We're excited about that and we'll keep pushing the system forward. And I think that it's going to show that it's going to be a big cost savings to the to the county health as well as the hospitals. And I think that they'll be more than willing to to pay for a program like that. Thank you. Mayor. Vice Mayor. I have a question on the emergency operation center and the placement of fire station three. Is that. That's not is that it's not part of this operating budget of the fire department. Is that correct or. It's a notice list is an issue here. But that's it is actually developed into our budget. So all the cost to both fire station three and the EOC are already factored into the budgets that you've already seen. Okay. And one of the things that I've I've looked for and I've I've seen some pointing to it, but I haven't seen what satisfied me as far as the gap analysis for the necessity of building an emergency operations center. I understand what the function is. I've seen the staff reports, but I haven't seen it broken down into a. And I mentioned this a number of times in conversation that if the emergency happens tonight, what is it tomorrow that we can't do? That a $3 million building will allow us to do? And can we do it somewhere else? We're actually this item will be coming on your next agenda May 19th. So we just review that report and we'll be having that conversation then. Great. Thank you. Chief Long, if I could just. Similar question that I posed at the end. So you need 98. Servicemen and women. Yes. You're authorized for 92. Yes. Within the 92. I mean, what is the actual staffing level? So what if there is any vacancies? Is there any vacancies between between 92 and something else? Or is the vacancy between 92 and 98? We are authorized for 92. Currently we have five openings, which includes three of those to backfill for the three people that are assigned to community per medicine. So we really our staff, our staffing level right now is 87. That's that's correct. But what you're going to need there. That's how we end up with all the overtime because we need to get to 98 to provide the service that we provide on the street. Okay. And just following up, when we did our OPEB calculations, it's based on 92, correct. Or, um. Or we can come back. Yes. He was based on 92, which is the authorized position. That's right. Thank you. Question. No, I'm scratching my head. So if you had 98 officers or firefighters, would it be what would your overtime look like? It would it would decrease greatly. That's the thing. Go back to my chart here. With the with the safer positions, which were those additional six? They got us up to 98. Those were the years where our overtime. Was well below what we were authorized in 1112. Our authorized overtime was 1.1 million. We actually spent $611,000, which was 55%. In 1213, we were authorized $846,000. We actually spent 502,000. And in 1314 we were authorized 793,000. And actually spent 721000 to 91%. So her overtime was greatly, greatly reduced. When we had our seafood positions in place. And that's when you're at 99, 98 positions. That's that's 98, because those six safer positions got us up to 98. Okay. So when you're at 98 positions, then you're approximately 5 to 600000 over time. Yes. And when you're at 92 positions, is that what? Of what you are now. That's your. That's what we are right now. And at the 92 positions, then your projection is the 1.4 million. Yes. Overtime. So those are the that's the equation trying to balance. Yes. Thank you. In Manama. Yes, Chief Long. And maybe Mr. Adair can also correct me if I'm wrong, but we budgeted as if we were not going to get the safer grant. So the way the budget is, is developed, there's no safer grant. So you'll see very high over time, already factored in. So if we do get the safer grant, I think we we determined and this is we're going to talk about this later as well. That will get 250,000 in savings. I think that's is that this year. In 1516 and then 16, 17 the full amount. The full half a billion. And then I'd like to look at these numbers, though, because so I don't know what the cost is of these six positions, but the difference in over time is approximately $900,001 million. So actually, I'm not sure what is the best way to do the staffing that utilize this the most economical. Well, the grant is the best. Is the most. But in someone else's money. If you didn't have the grant. So if you had to pay for the six positions. Versus your. Overtime? Correct. I think that an equation. Would need to do. Everything. In its salary and benefits in this. Member J. Now just thank you again for your patience. Chief Long, I appreciate it. Just to make sure I understand clearly. So we're authorized for 92, and we're going to go out to fill five more positions that are open right now. Six, 6% just. To get us to 90 to the actual 92. It's not to get us to 98. Oh, I'm sorry. The the the five positions we're actually going to fill six because we have a person that's going to retire first week of June, but we have six in backgrounds that will get us to 90. Exactly. So similar to the last time and will that happen in five, 15, 16 or it will spread between the two fiscal years? That that will happen very soon. Okay. Thank you. It's warmer down. So when you're running these numbers, you're including benefits for this equation. Yes, Sam, it's it's not an exact science because it depends on where the person comes in, you know. But roughly speaking, six firefighters roughly cost about $850,000. And is that including benefits? Including benefits as fully burdened? That's it. They have seven. Without getting to too complicated, but they have seven steps and they come in at step three. That step three. It's about eight and $50,000 versus the million dollars that that approximately. Right. That's interesting. That's a rough estimate. So if you really want that's just a. That. Is that the benefits just for the person right now or does that take into account the of the person the OPEB. But at the back end that's. Today that's how much. So it's bigger, right. If you actually looked at the you have. To do a present value calculation, you're probably right. But we never tried to do that. Right. So no question. But I think we need all that to make a real. I have I have numbers. Yeah. Fully benefited. Firefighter is 205,866 annually. Same replacement with overtime is 151,238. For one for one firefighter. All right. So. So, based on your numbers, is this the fiscally responsible way of doing it, then running the over? Is that coming in lower than having the six firefighters. Over some overtime is. Is lower, however. That burden on staff is very high and they generally end up with more injuries, especially long term injuries that actually cost us more in the long run because those people are still on the books. They may be off for a year trying to get over their injury. During that time. We are then paying for them. And backfilling them with overtime, which in the long run. More costly. We would much rather have people in those positions rather than over time. Thank you. I appreciate that. The other question comment. Is. This mayor. Check a note. It's about 72% of our calls right now are medical. That sounds about right. I have 2014 data. Number of incidents was 6049. And 4300 something medical. Of medical was 43. 56. And are we are we looking at that? It sounds like it's in the. The service is evolving. And I think the paramedics in this part of that evolution are really looking at a different structure that we might be able to. I hate to say save some money, but I'll say it anyway. Save some money and how we deliver this based on how we're how our equipment is staffed, how how equipment is deployed, and how we have the positions defined within the department. Are we even considering that? Right now, I understand that crews on the ambulance are also firefighters. So like a full service employee all around. Has has that been examined to see if that's the most cost effective way of delivering the service? I think the city gets the most bang for their buck by having firefighters on their ambulances. What you get is those quick response times in the county right now. They shoot for getting on scene within 8 minutes and 30 seconds. Our average on scene time is 4 minutes and 30 seconds. That really matters. If your heart is stopped, if you're having a stroke, you start getting brain damage after 5 minutes. I don't think 8 minutes and 30 seconds is a really great goal. And that's that's I'm saying, is there a way to. Well, I'd like to think of it to. To deliver this service without such a versatile. I leave? Benson. Versus going at it. But I think what I'm hearing is that, for instance, when the call comes in, could you then send someone that is going to address the medical concerns, if that's what the call goes to, as opposed to someone that can do fire and medical? Yes. Well, I think. See what we have here is we have to have a certain number of firefighters on scene of fires. So those three ambulances that we have in town, that's six firefighters that we count on, which is part of our total of 24 on duty daily. If we reduced those people and had, let's say, outside private transports that weren't sworn firefighters. Those firefighters that we would be trying to replace to save money would actually need to go on other fire companies in town. So we'd still we'd still be paying for them. Otherwise we wouldn't have the response that we need to to fight fires. So they'd be put on other fire companies. And then we'd be in that situation where we were waiting for the private ambulance company to come. Everybody. I didn't want to interrupt you. I just saw a whole bunch of questions. I know that. Did you finish your answer, though? I think so. And, you know, and not only are they our firefighters, but they're multifaceted. They're also your rescue swimmers that are stationed throughout town. They are also your people who can do auto extrication. We have those what you might know as the jaws of life on our ambulances. They are right there, provide that service. And we're fortunate that there are paramedics and can provide the ambulance service in town. So. I think they're very cost effective. You could look at it like we don't generate any revenue out of most of our fire companies, ambulances or fire companies that are generating revenue. At $2.2 million. You remember. Odie? Thank you, madam. Just to add on to that point. My understanding is there was some study that may have answered the question. Like three or four or five years ago, they called it trying to study. Can we. Find out about that and. I think that question was answered already. And. It was similar to what you gave, but I like at least the council to have access to that information. That'd be very helpful. Man. Amir. I remember this. So I just want to summarize what I thought I heard was an important point, which I think for me is. Is. I heard it correctly. So the three ambulances have six firefighters now. In sum, some people might say, well, if you have. Paramedics or not non firefighters and the three ambulance, then they'll be a savings. But I think what I heard you say, though, is that the six firefighters are counting towards what I believe are some kind of required staffing level. That's that to help us reach those required staffing levels. And we need at least one paramedic on each of the ambulances for it to be advanced life support so that we can provide those high level services, such as intubation, starting IVs to to give drugs. All right. Thank you, Chief. So one last one, less tag on the chain. So I'm trying to catch up and educate myself on this. If we have three ambulances, six firefighters on them. And 75, 72% of our calls are medical. Is it fair to say that a good amount of time it could be that six firefighters are out of town having taken someone to the trauma center. Or to one of the other specialty hospitals. It's possible, but but generally we have at least one ambulance. And the way the mutual aid system works is when we have a fire, our firefighters generally go to work as firefighters, unless there is a patient, immediate mutual aid with the mutual aid, with the ambulances from the private contractor come in and backfill to provide them the medical care unless it's something emergent. Right when we get there, then our ambulances will take them and transport them. Amber Ashcroft, thank you. So given the the ratio of your incidents of 6049 incidents, more than half, about 4300, some were medical. Do you think your staffing percentages are where you need them to be to address those calls? I think they are. I think we're at the the bare minimum of for what we need for fire protection if we go any lower than that. I don't think that we'll be able to adequately protect the city. There are laws that I must follow for basically fighting a fire in town. There's the what they call the two in to out rule where unless we have a confirmed and known rescue, the first fire crew on scene cannot enter the building unless they have new people outside to go get them if they're in danger. If we start reducing our fire companies, we're going to limit our ability to to fight fire. We're very proud of being an aggressive fire department that goes inside and puts the fire out. I believe that probably most of the significant incident reports that you get say that we can find it to the room of origin. If we don't have enough people there quickly that we can make that initial attack. The fires are going to get bigger. We're going to have larger, larger fire losses. And, you know, it might go upstairs and you have two floors and we might be protecting the structures on either side. Well, that's why when you said earlier that the you don't generate any revenue from fire companies, but you do from the ambulance companies. I would argue that actually the savings in terms of, well, human life and property damage is hard to quantify on a balance sheet. But I think we all know if, you know, a fire is burning in your neighborhood, we have a lot of older historic neighborhoods in this city and fire can travel fast. So I think you're you're adding quite a bit of value, even if you don't see it at the bottom line. Thank you. In other questions. Comments. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our next presentation, Human Resources. Good evening, mayor council. I'm Stephanie Gerber and Sierra, your administrative services director. And I'm here to present the budget for human resources. I'm going to grab the clicker. You're in movies through. Let's go right into what we do now. Part of this presentation is going to be a little bit about how our staff has been cut over the years. So when I was putting this list together, I realized that the list of what we do is actually what we kind of like to do and what mostly we do. And gosh, I'd like to do more and gosh, we really don't do some of this because we're so busy. But let's start with this recruitment. We do approximately 50 recruitments per year. Looking back at our numbers, we actually hit 55 in 2014. This includes our outreach administration. We test, we on board. We process approximately. We say 2000. Actually, last year it was 2561 applications which we have read and processed. Now the selection process is governed by the charter and is governed by very vigorous civil service rules and the law. And we pride ourselves in having a very fair process and making sure everyone has a chance to move forward in our civil service system. And everyone is on a firm equal background. When we recruit for positions, we administer and implement contracts for health, dental, life insurance, disability employee assistance plan. There are 457 plan for nearly 500 active employees and almost 500 part time employees. We have 11 different bargaining units, all of which have different benefits. That requires work on all of our staff's parts to make sure that all these benefits are taken care of for each individual employees, each employee. The differing benefit structures is one of the biggest challenges we have in our down to the issue of different bargaining units have different death benefits for which relatives. So it is actually very time consuming and difficult to administer these systems. We administer retirement benefits for over 300 retirees on three different plants. And now that we have Peprah, which is the the new PERS retirement plan, now we have a different layer of PERS creating even more complexity in our system. Training. Now, this is the part that I wish we did more of. Of course, we administer the mandated training, Caesar sexual harassment. We have the D.O.T., which is the Department of Transportation trainings that we must do pursuant to state law. We also organize and facilitate other trainings as much as we can. We'd like to do more. Obviously, training is an important part of our mission, making sure that our workforce is ready to encounter the challenges of the 21st century . Employment services. We maintain employee records and personnel files for all of our active and retired employees. In terms of the payroll system, we help maintain it and we do position control. What that means is, is we know who is in what position at what time we administer and track special pays raises, leaves, step increases. Most of these you don't just push a button in our payroll system or a 2% raise. Here's that button. We actually separately maintain for pretty much every employee, we have to put together a spreadsheet. Every time there's a raise for each special pay and then we have to feed it into the system and then it is calculated . So much of the work for a simple raise takes a manual work on Excel spreadsheets, taking weeks, sometimes months, to prepare for for any kind of a race. And most people don't don't realize that it's one of the reasons we are looking into some new computer software, because our office, our human resource information system, is quite outdated . And so we're looking for a new position, new system that can help us with that. Classification and compensation. Now we have job descriptions for approximately 350 classifications, all of which have been passed by the Civil Service Board. We try to update these when we can and when people have new positions in mind because we have a new and changing economy, we constantly are being asked for to have new classifications written, which is done by our staff. Each classification is about a page or two in length and they're quite technical. We maintain uniform salary schedules. We consult with and receive direction from our civil service board on all of these matters. We try to ensure market competitive competitiveness for attraction and retention of qualified staff to the continuous review of these classification and compensation data. We try to keep track of what's going on in the market to make sure that we're attracting the best people for the job. We look at external benchmarks for cities of similar size and what we're doing so we can remain competitive. Compliance. This has become an ever increasing area of our lives. We ensure compliance of federal and state employment laws by directives, advice and training. That includes FLSA, the Affordable Care Act, which has actually consumed a good deal of our time. Sexual harassment laws. FMLA. We track the leaves for FMLA, whether it's a family leave, personal medical leave or whatnot, because all needs to be tracked separately. Their Employment and Housing Act, the ADA Pregnancy Leave, which is a separate type of leave that we all need to keep straight federal EEO laws, etc.. Employee Relations and Labor Relations. We have work rules here in the city of Alameda and we try to maintain and enforce those. We give advice on employment and employee performance issues and disciplinary matters. That includes terminations, separations, grievance handling, reductions in workforces, reorganizations, union correspondence, or just calls from the unions. We handle those on a daily basis. Any time we want to change something within the system that requires and we confer that comes to heart, we handle that and we respond to employee complaints. Not that we have any of those. We also negotiate, administer and interpret our M.O., use with our 11 bargaining units and employee groups. This is quite a large number for 500 employees. Let me just say. We also provide staff support for two different boards, the Civil Service Board and the pension board. We hold a public meeting. We keep minutes and records. We write reports, make presentations, and we implement the decisions of these boards. What a lot of our day to day work is actually, is we answer questions. We help people. We saw problems. I would say a good part of our day is picking up, is answering the phone. When somebody's got a question, we answer it. Someone need to report it. Run if we can. We'll try to run it and we just try to streamline the process for our departments. New initiatives. One of the things we'd very much like to do is we'd like to move to the 21st century by using Neo Gaia, which is a new system. Actually, it's not a new system of cities for using it. We're using a somewhat of an outdoor, outdated system. It's a software that automates the hiring process, onboarding and performance evaluation process. We're actually asking for funds this year, only to do the entire process week onboarding and performance evaluation. Maybe we can do that someday in the future. Online training. I'm very excited about this initiative, and now what that would do is give every employee an onboard platform to be able to take trainings online. Their supervisors could then choose from an array of a catalog of training courses so people could actually get some training online, such as management training and just a variety of trainings that we just don't provide now. We just don't. Investigations One of our new initiatives is although the city does do investigations right now, we do not have a steady funding source. So in other words, when we have a complaint for sexual harassment or workplace bullying, something of that nature, and we have to hire an independent investigator to go out and do the investigation. Right now, there is no dedicated funding source for that. So departments have to find the money. It's always difficult. So what we've done is we've put a very small fund in the budget so that that struggle wouldn't take place, that we can just go ahead and move forward with our investigation. One of our new initiatives for this year is actually we have five unions coming up at the end of their contract. So we need to begin negotiating with AMC, ACA, IBEW Pans, Uber, which all expire at the end of this year. So we are actually gearing up now to go into negotiations. We were planning on doing that for the four sworn unions next year, but they we've taken care of that. And so we're very grateful that that has happened. And so now the non sworn unions can go ahead and hopefully we can conclude those for this year. The new unions we have, we actually new union is Uber. It is an employee group. It's the utility electrical utility professionals of Alameda. They are recently formed, it's a new MRU and we are currently in negotiations with Uber regarding their salaries. And then we're going to continue on with negotiating their full contract at the end of this year with the rest of the unions. Question, shouldn't you anticipate that these those five employees will be negotiated prior to expiration? It is our hope. There is a calendar for that. It is always our hope. You never know how difficult and complicated a negotiation will be. One of our main goals in the upcoming negotiation is to streamline and make more standard the benefits included in all of those milieus, which have tended to extend outward like an octopus so that they're all different. So if we can get them back on the same course so people get the same leaves and it will help the city's administration immeasurably if we can do that. So that is the main goal for the upcoming labor negotiations, is getting everybody on sort of the same tracks, the more usual look somewhat similar to one another. They all have the same grievance rights. They have the same leave rights. That would help a lot. If you. Past staffing cuts. In 2001 through 2004, there were 11 staff members for H.R.. In 2010, that was cut to seven. And that was a pretty drastic time. There were a lot of things that didn't get done. We still have piles of filing that has yet to be filed from 2010 because we just don't we don't have the staff. We didn't have it now, did have it then. And we are struggling to catch up. Is it still on? Okay. Current staffing is eight. We did add eight an analyst this year, which was of tremendous help. As you see, we we increased our recruitments, which was wonderful. At the same time, these last five or ten years, H.R. responsibilities have really increased. So and I wanted to make sure folks knew that because of our infrastructure, our I.T. infrastructure, we have really fallen behind because now we do so much work by hand on spreadsheets and by hand calculations, that is become much more complicated and much more time consuming. For example, right now we have the ACA, which is about which is a new initiative that we we are all complying with. And unfortunately, we need to do reports regarding, you know, how many of our. Part to tell you about the Affordable Care. Act. Affordable Care Act, I'm sorry. Affordable Care Act. We need to keep track of how many of our part time employees may be reaching the 30 hour a week mark because we will need to offer them health benefits to do that simple report. Who's working? How many hours takes? An analyst? Approximately two full days of work. Um. Also the changes in the various milieus we have created special pays, special leaves, an amendment and an administrative leave here or there creates much more work on our end and the qualifying parameters, because you were the people who have to qualify them, you know, did you let me see your your educational background, let me see your degree. So we have to make sure that that they qualify for these things. There has been a dramatic expansion of compliance and monitoring the implementation and administration of citywide performance reviews. That is a new John Russo brought that along about three years ago. Right now, each and every employee receives a performance review and you may rehearse a department. We implement that. We have the mandatory training and sexual harassment, which has been expanded to include bullying as of this year. And we're going to have a live training to live trainings this year that you're all going to be invited to. By the way, the affordable care act, of course, is an enormous amount of h.r. Time and work. And i know a lot of cities have actually contracted out to do part of that. We have not done that. We are doing that. We have absorbed that internally. There's, of course, hit that, which is the medical act, which makes sure that people's medical records are kept private. Since we do keep medical files, we have to separate our files and keep those under lock and key. We have ban the box. And what that is, is increased opportunities for folks with felony convictions to make sure that they're not discriminated against in the hiring process. And that changed the way we did business in terms of the hiring system to make sure we don't know a person's criminal record until they get much closer to the appointment process. There has been an expansion of ADA in California, disability laws in California, and we have new responsibilities for tracking leads and the interactive process. I don't know if any of you have heard about that, but when someone does show that they've got a health issue, immediately, H.R. needs to be called and we need to bring them in for a one on one. Talk about what are your restrictions? Can you do your job? What kind of accommodations can we do for you? It has gotten to the point we do approximately 1 to 2 per week now, an interactive process. What else. We have. Oh, and there's a new a new law just came on the books this year. And as of July, there will be mandatory sick leave for our part time employees, and that will go through our payroll system. We have our pension reform PEPRAH, which has now created a two tiered purse system which will create separate tracking. And we were actually sued in 2006 for FLSA overtime issues. So we are extremely meticulous about our FLSA and we have not had any issues with that since then. That's family. Leave. No, that's Fair Labor Standards Act. And when you work over a certain amount per year, we actually have two types of overtime in Alameda. We have the federal overtime law, which is FLSA. Then we have Alameda overtime, which is pursuant to the misuse and we need to keep track of both of those. We have disability retirements that has actually been expanding in Alameda as safety personnel are able to if they're on worker's comp when they retire and they become permanent stationary, they can now get a disability retirement. And that is a burden that is now on the Human Resources Department to process those disability retirements. You're all familiar with the Sunshine Act. Alameda has a very stringent Sunshine Act and we get all kinds of requests for information regarding employees and pay systems. And I think you you know, that the last few weeks have shown that there were a lot of information that went through H.R. on that in that process. And of course, the new bargaining units, which we discussed previously. Getting to our budget. Oh. The other thing I just wanted to bring up before we came in here is past staffing cuts. We talked about the things that we did do. I want to talk about the the few things that we don't do that I'd love to be able to do. One of the things is update our classification system. We have updated, we have out-of-date job descriptions that we're not able to keep track of and we'd love to update those. Same with our work rules. Our work rules are terribly outdated. We're working on updating those and we're doing that right now. Training, professional development, succession planning. These are things that a modern h.r. System should be able to do. But with staffing cuts and with the current state of really trying to tighten our belts, it's been really difficult to do diversity and inclusion. We really don't concentrate that on that in the city, and I'd love to concentrate on that more. The executive management division for the first time had a segment we brought a segment of diversity inclusion training to the executive management training last Friday, and it was very gratifying to me to see that training happen in this city. Basically, I think. An H.R. department. Should move from a simple service provider. We're here in the trenches doing just the trench work is what we're doing now to be. Do you come an enabler and a builder of talent? And that's, I think, our future goal. And I just wanted to throw that in there before we get into the nitty gritty of our budget. As you see, we have very limited funds, fees for services that comes from AMP. AMP does pay for a portion of H.R. because they do have a very active H.R. need because of their diversity of services. They have three different employee groups just within AMP, and they have a great diversity of different types of jobs classifications within their organization. And I think it's self-explanatory. Ah. One thing I would like to point out is services and supplies. We do anticipate an increase that is due to our negotiation, the budget we're going to need for the upcoming negotiations, because we will need outside help to do salary surveys and outside help for the negotiations coming up this year. So I have a question. Sure. I think first or second slides that there were 11 bargaining. Yes. Groups, and then you had four groups that have recently been. Yes, resolved. And then you have five that were coming up at the end of this year. What about the other two? The other two are actually unrepresented, but they're bargaining units, but they're unrepresented right now. So we have agreements with them, but we do not have to negotiate with them. And that would be the executive management group. And that is also the there's an AMP unrepresented classification bargaining unit and they are not yet organized. So does that not? So then there's not additional time by you to address those two groups. It's limited because there is a negotiation process. However, they do have separate salary schedules and they have a separate agreement. So we have to maintain we have to maintain the agreement and the salary schedules. And there's a certain amount of determination, you know, what their salary should be in the market. For example, I believe in the in an upcoming council meeting, there is an item regarding raising the salaries for the AMP assistant general managers. They are belong to AMP to the the Alameda Municipal but they're the assistant general managers for for AMP and they are unrepresented. And so that has to come to council on a separate item. And, and again, all of their classifications do come before the Civil Service Board whenever you do have change. Thank you. Cost allocation has risen slightly again. We have no control over that and. So what do you do when an employee issue comes to you? I'll tell you what everybody in the city does. They call they that cute and they call us. So I just love this slide because that's exactly what people do. Questions there, vice mayor. The increase looks like it's about $250,000. Can you tell us what the. From last year. If you go back to that. Yes, we're projected to. Two five, 15, 16. What? What's. Well, part of that is we're increasing the services that we're going to need because of the upcoming negotiations. Secondly, we did add another senior analyst, and that's an advanced position which we sorely needed. And part of it is, I think, partially my salary because I moved over to this department. And so that takes care of my salary. And I do mostly employee relations sorts of issues. Of the one new. One. Being added? Yes. Has it already been added or it's being added? It was already added. Thank you. And when you moved over to this department, was that a new position for you? It was a slightly it was a slightly changed position. It was a human resource director and a change to administrative services director. It's the same, right? All right. Remember, even though I actually do other things as well, besides H.R., for example, the project labor agreement, that's under my purview, I'm also to the extent that I have time, I try to help with public contracting and other issues of of kind general contracting and things like that. Thank you. So, Miss Sherman's here. What would you say? That the H.R. department spends the majority of its time doing? If you had to quantify. I would say maintaining employee records and making sure payroll is correct. Okay. And benefits, I think benefits administration. So my question my next question is more to staff. Are there cities who contract out all or part of the functions of their H.R. departments? Many cities have looked at doing that, but particularly, for example, one of the areas that that is probably the most likely to be contracted out is recruitment. But one recruitment can cost $10,000 and a few. How many recruitment did you do last year? 55. 55. So it is not really cost effective to outsource that type of that type of service. So I think particularly when you have 11 milieus that you're trying to manage, it's very difficult to outsource that type of service. Well, and that was my question about outsourcing. All are a part of the function, because I've heard over the course of the discussion the need for new I.T. infrastructure, the need for services, personnel, services, when we're doing all these negotiations. And. And I'm. I don't do a lot of recruitments. I've been involved in a couple, but I would imagine there's maybe some economies of scale that if a firm is working for you anyway, I just when we're looking at these budgets and not only trying to keep our our costs reasonable, but also trying to do things as efficiently as possible, i, I would just like to see the range of possibilities. And. You know, I think h.R is probably the one of the best examples of why we're asking for what we're asking for in the I.T. division. And we'll get to that later. But we're trying to be more efficient as as we heard and one of the ways we do that is through technology. And we just do not have the technology right now to to be more efficient. And in the past, essentially, we've thrown bodies at it. And what we're trying to do is not do that. And we're trying to come up with some so some not even innovations, really. It's not innovations. It's just some i.t infrastructure that actually can help them do their jobs and be more efficient. And in fact, I don't know if you want to talk about the kickoff of your of your program that just happened last week. Yes. We had a firm come in from solutions who came in and did an analysis of what we did and and how we interacted with our i.t and with payroll it with other departments to try to come up with a system that is more streamlined. Because what we're doing is we have so many outside dashboards that don't really feed into the main system. It has become very, very time consuming. I can't imagine how an outside firm could do this because it needs to be completely integrated into the existing finance and payroll system. And that's why we are working hand in glove with the finance department in this. However, unfortunately, we work with one system, the Sungard system, and as Sungard has, you know, it's a very expensive software system and as they've innovated in certain parts of their their mission, which is in the in the payroll it in well, actually not the payroll in the finance side. They have not updated their h.r. Side and you the system needs to work together. And so that's not something you can bring from outside. And so that's one of the challenges that we needed an outside consultant to really look at, to see how do we do this best? What's out there on the market? Is it even possible? The biggest complexity we have are are myriad a variety of email use and the fact that we have so many different benefit structures to have an outside person doing that, we would pay so much money, it would just be incredible. I have to tell you, i've got a staff member who the h.r. Manager who comes in the morning approximately 6 a.m.. She never leaves before 6 p.m.. She works Fridays, even though she's not paid to work Fridays and she works most weekends. And she's I think she's worked probably this is her 27th year. So the institutional knowledge in this this person's had Djokovic's is incredible. And when she retires, it's going to be a tremendous loss to the city. And I'm almost everyone has touched what she has done. And and I really am concerned because half of our staff has an extended amount of time. And so they know this stuff in their head and having to teach an outside person to do this, I don't see how it's possible because they have to know, oh yeah, in 1998 this happened. That's why this is and this is why. Oh, and this guy got that benefit because I remember because I helped him 20 years ago. And that's why you can't it's it the institutional knowledge is absolutely crucial for a function such as H.R.. You could contract simple payroll out. I don't know if that's possible. Cut it like that. But but in terms of the bargaining and the day to day phone calls from union members and negotiating and meeting confer and most that we have very few grievances in the city of Alameda and I'm very proud of that. And one of the reasons we have so few grievances is because union members know to pick up the phone and cause I'll talk to them and we'll work it out and I'll talk to the manager. And if we can work it out, it's going to get worked out. And that's my business model. That's our business model. H.R. Everybody feels that way. We want to solve problems, not bring it to a litigation. Thank you. Did I understand you to say over here on page four of new initiatives under investigations solving a need to provide steady funding source? Is that saying that you want to hire an investigator? No, we it's not going to change our need for investigations. All it is going to do is create a funding source for those investigations. So who does the investigations now? We have a variety of investigators and we work with the city attorney's office and we pick an investigator. We try to outside the organization. You're outside the organization. So you do outsource some services? Oh, absolutely. And that's the type of thing that is good outsourced because it's independent. No one can claim that they're short of internal. Can you clarify the eight positions? Full time positions? Yes. Thank you. And were the 11 staff that was full time at that point? Yes. And the other question. Comments. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next presentation is finance. Good evening. Members of the council, mayor. It. We'll see if finance is going to be as exciting as all the other ones. Generally it's fairly, I guess, boring department in essence, but would do a lot. So what do we do? We have several divisions within finance. One of them is accounting and cash management. So what we do there is we compile and analyze, assemble a bi annual budget as we are doing right now. So finance together with the city manager's office taking the lead. Of course, all departments have to pitch in and help out as we don't necessarily know their business. Precisely so. But the lead in putting together document assembling all in one document is really with finance. We also, after the time that budget is done actual on the annual basis in this particular case, we prepare a comprehensive annual financial report and that's the management of the audit for the city. As I said, that comes every year on top of just the regular annual report that has to be done. We are also facilitating other audits, such as single audit, which is the audit of federal grants. We also work with the auditors for any state required audits such as TDI or local, which we have county coming in and doing the audits for various measures, transportation measures. Ashcroft. Hey, may I just ask you? Under the first accounting cash management section and the the second bullet prepared the comprehensive annual financial report Kaffir Write in Audit. Do you work with the city auditor and treasurer on this? Or or at. What point or where do you work with the city auditor and Treasurer? We usually connect with actually both of them. The Treasurer particularly reviews the investment type of reports when we meet with the financial advisers for the city in managing the cash. So he takes active role in that. Obviously when we brought up the investment policy, the Treasurer was here presenting um with the audits, the internal auditor, he's involved , but he's an internal auditor. This would be more of a working closely with the external auditor. However, external auditors do meet with Mr. Kearney in. They usually consult to see if he has any concerns or any particular areas to look into within the city. So they take his advice, I guess, in essence, and. You know, address any issues that he may have. Thank you. Mm hmm. We whole handle the accounting for all departments and funds in the city. And actually we maintain over 120 funds, various buckets of money that we account for, whether it's individual programs or grants. Some of the separation is required by, I guess, grant agreements such as housing, CDBG home. So those are separated on purpose and required to be separated. Obviously, the biggest one is general fund, but within that, we have a number of departments that are being presented here and talking about it today. So should there be a request to make budget amendments, finance processes, those? If somebody inadvertently charged something to a wrong account, it comes to finance. We get to fix it. So we do a lot of work that normally is not really seen, which is I guess alright with us, but I think we put in quite a bit of work in doing that. We also manage the city's debt portfolio that involves all the certificates of participation, all the tax allocation bonds that we have, any revenue type of bonds. So for like sewer, if it's refinancing, refunding finances and involved a lot as well as some of the other departments such as city attorney's office, city managers, of course, as well. We also do a continuing disclosure. So just because we issue debt, it doesn't really stop there. The work begins after the fact, and that's usually is handled by finance. The next item I have is accounts payable and payroll. So all the employees in the city that we have, whether they are part time or full time together working with h.r. We issue either the checks or direct deposit. So almost 500 full time employees. But usually by the time payroll is actually done with all the part time people, it's somewhere in the range of about 600 or so. The payroll is processed by weekly, so hopefully you all being paid on time when we are very happy about it. So we don't hear from anybody that they missed the checks or any of that. We also process accounts payable that's done on a weekly basis and the accounts payables vary depending on what's going on in the city. It could be anywhere on the lower end of 400 to 500000 and on the high end of like two and a half million dollars. Again, it depends on what's going on in the city, which includes some of the large capital projects and things like this that are happening. We also are in charge of a business license. So we send we have in the city about 7000 businesses that we send out the business license renewals to. On top of that, we also assist improvement districts like the Park Street for which those fees are included also with the business licenses. And so we in essence act as a billing agent for them as well. We try to do as much collection in-house as possible for all of those that are delinquent licenses. You will have actually, I believe, on the next city council meeting May 19th, actually. A report brought to you to put delinquent business licenses on as a lean on the property tax bill to set the date for that. So that's a responsibility of finance department as well. We also try and collect the revenues. So last council meeting, you've approved a an agreement with the Franchise Tax Board. We, in essence, collaborate with them. We get the data from them, they get the data from us, but we use the data to see if there are any businesses that may be listed to be in Alameda but maybe have not been paying their business license tax. So we try to approach those as well and that's usually is done in-house. Central Services. Those are. We pretty much do some centralized items such as utilities, fuel copiers. Those all run through finance. We manage it even though it's for the entire city. In essence, it's citywide. But we manage that and charge all the departments for their appropriate costs. Well, so have mail room. That's part of the finance. There are three part time employees that do that. We deliver internal and external mail for all the departments in the city. Okay. Some of the new initiatives that we're working on, employee access center, that would provide the staff, particularly at this point full time staff access and the ability to inquire about their financial records such as they can request and see their paystubs, they can print them. W-2s is a big deal. I know for everybody. Sometimes you go in to get your taxes done and you forgot your W-2 or maybe it's lost. Hopefully not so. But this gives you an ability to access it via web and it's secure. It gives you get a username and password, you get to log in and the information is there. You can also review your salary, your current benefits, some of the information, such as your address, your tax withholdings. So if you need to look at it and change it, verify it, you can do that. We are hoping to roll that particular one out soon. We've done some testing already with some of the employees and hopefully that will be coming out to everybody in the city, at least the full time employees. The next initials we have is electronic time system. We're just in the very, very early stages of it. Pretty much working with the departments or tried to get information as to their flow in terms of who would be doing the approvals of the time, she told Prepare them and then moving forward, working with our Sungard provider to see how we can set it up. It's going to again take some time but hopefully will eliminate some of the paper and we don't have to use that again. Moving towards more of an electronic type of processing for which we do need the I.T. infrastructure for that and I.T. staff to assist us with that. Workflow enhancements. We do a lot of manual processes right now. Again, a lot of paperwork. So any time we have to do approvals of invoices, it goes to each individual departments. They have to sign off on it, it has to be routed and it does take a while. And you don't necessarily at any stage know where invoice may be located, how long it's been since it's been received. So one of the things that we are considering is looking into accounts, payables, electronic approval, which means the invoice will come in, it could be scanned potentially in the system and the approval will be done electronically from the departments and upon move into finance. Redactions. So I get to speak about something that I wasn't here for, but I do understand that there were quite a few people or quite a few more people within finance than we do have now. On the slide, actually, you see all the staff that was actually cut out of finance, which is looks like seven people that we used to have more than we do now. One of them was a budget analyst. And I can say it would be a great thing also to have this as a full time position will have Evelyn and she's been absolute savior for completing this budget and helping and coordinating with all the departments. But I think it would be important to at some point hopefully have that here in house and have the institutional knowledge in here so that we can retain it. We also lost a supervisor. This department used to have three supervisors. Currently we have two. At some point there were two cut, but I believe last year one of the supervisors was added back. So we currently have two on staffing, but we used to have three. We also had additional two accounting use as part of the budget cuts. One of the accounts two positions. It wasn't fully cut out of the department, but it was downgraded to an account one. So the level of proficiency, I guess you would say, was reduced. It would be great for the city to have rather an account too. That would have been my preference, but that's what I have. So. We also had cuts, senior account clerks. And then what I can say is actually one of them wasn't specifically. The position wasn't really cut out of the city. It was relocated from finance department to police department, and that was for the parking division. I guess that was switched to PD and the other two senior account clerks were one for accounts receivables and business license and one cashier. So now we don't have those people either. Before you move on. Were those all full time positions? Yes, they were. And how many people are in your department now? We currently have 15 people of 15 positions. Three of them are part time. So we have the director and myself. We have two supervisors, two staff that work in the Business License and Revenue Division. We have an administrative clerk to accounts payable staff to payroll staff, and we have two accounting positions. One of them was currently under filled and one is vacant but is being filled with a part time person for the time being. And when you say part time, how many hours are each of those positions? Mailroom staff. There's three people, three part timers in the in essence, sharing one full time. I guess I would say position. So divide regular, I guess position by three. The part time accountant is really just half of the week that's present. And would you have to annuitants, retired annuitants that come in. One of them, as I mentioned, one is assisting us to put together the budget and one is helping out with some special projects and any items ongoing that we have that she actually has an institutional knowledge for the city. So mailroom. That's finance. Yes. But what's the description for those positions? But it's a mailroom, too. But ones that are under your department. They are. Well, we pretty much oversee them. They're adjacent to us, literally, but they deliver mail internal, external from within departments. So any mail that goes in between departments and also they pick up the mail from post office and do the delivery for the and for the city. And there's three people sharing one position there. Correct time. And why is that as opposed to one full time? How they like it, actually. Yeah. I, I don't know if I have an answer to that one. But. It actually works out pretty well that they're part time because they all of them are retired. Yeah. And they all just want work all across the weekend and they're lovely. They are. They're really fantastic. And don't forget, we have a lot of buildings throughout the city. So it's not just within city hall at City Hall West Park. It's, you know, the fire station. So it's there. They also have a vehicle that they carry all over. Thank you. K Moving on to our budget, so gives you an overview primarily. Accounting is really a service department and therefore we have mostly salaries that are included in here. We almost 100% supported by general fund not for everything. We do receive some revenues from EMP for cutting their checks, for payroll, for accounts payable. So there's some revenue comes in for that. That's our program revenues. We also account for any of the interest and penalties for delinquent licenses. So the actual business license tax is a general revenue. But any time it comes in late and if there are penalties, those are associated with our program revenues for finance. Key for accounting cash management. As you can see, I've mentioned before, personnel services, that's primarily our accountants, myself included. That charge in here. There's there hasn't been really much of a difference from year to year. You wouldn't see that 1415 was lower in terms of expenditures in general for the department. Primarily it's because we had some vacancies, including the director vacancy, which was filled with a part time person, as you're all aware, with the interim person, but it still didn't account for the entire salary. So you see that projected 1415 is actually lower. The services and supplies here as well. That accounts for a contract for the auditors, external auditors that we have. And we just got the auditors this year bring you firm. Accounts, payables and payroll? 100%, really? General fund accounts. As you can see, the spread in here is really mostly 90% of it is personnel or salaries and benefits. There's some minimal services and supplies and cost of location that's included. The services and supply is really minimal in terms of it really is just copying. It's purchasing the actual checked stock, mailing out accounts, payables, payroll, postage costs. That's in there. Business licenses. As you can see, we have the fee for service and we have that's part of it included into our charges to other departments and they pay for. Services that were pretty much provider in billing, providing a billing service. God, I miss it. May I ask on the the first line here in your revenues, fees for services, why do we see them going down as time goes on? 110201 to 91000. Actually, for the business license, that would be. The penalties and interest on business license that we had. I understand we've had a. Collection. Firm that was hired. We had some difficulties. Yes. And I understand there were some some difficulties. And at that point in time, because they were so aggressive, we did receive some late fees in interests that were coming in at the time. They are no longer performing the service. The only thing we really have is internal staff. And so those do go down because one, we don't have enough hours for the staff to actually complete all the collections and we don't have as many resources to go in after the businesses if they're delinquent. We'll have happier members of our business community. Okay. Thank you. So we also have a lawsuit. Oh, yeah, that could be. Okay. Thank you. Sure. Central services, primarily. These are what you see in fees for services and actually the general fund component, unlike others. These are actual charges to the department. As I've mentioned before, we have the utility, we have the fuel, and then those charges do go out and being charged out to various departments. So what you see on the general fund side is actually a revenue to pay for the services that we provide. It's in essence an allocation of those costs, and that's what ignites this revenue. Graphical presentation of our revenues and our expenditures. As you can see, business license has a portion. Essential services is the primary one and accounting has very little primary charges go to on expenditures is accounting. Like I said, we are service organization or service department and therefore salaries and benefits is primarily that's what it is in all really four divisions. It looks very similar in 1617. There wasn't really any increases other than what we couldn't control, which is really salaries and benefits. And that concludes my presentation. Any questions? Council members. CNN. Thank you. That was very nice. Thank you for your presentation. And now we'll continue with the city court presentation all. You go. Okay. So the Secrets Department is a small but mighty department. And what we do is we do lots and lots of council meetings lately. No, not that many. I'm not. I'm not. Yeah. That we handle legislation as a follow up at the council meetings, we run the elections for the city dealing with all candidates measures. We administer a bunch of filings, all of your good campaign filings, everybody's form seven hundreds that they love so much. And one thing I left off of here is we are Sunshine Central. We handle a lot of stuff with ensuring everybody's complying with the Sunshine Ordinance, stopping the Open Government Commission, responding to public records request, meeting all the deadlines. The newest initiative we've been working on for the past year and we're continuing is we have been scanning and preserving historic records. What you see on this page is actually a page of the minutes from 1896. My handwriting isn't this good, but we have all the resolutions done. We need to finish up the old series of ordinances the next after every ordinance you see is because there was a new series and an old series. So the old series ones are very we haven't gotten to those yet. They're older books. As the minutes you can see, we're back to the 1800s and the meeting videos. Are. They they go back on the web to August of oh six because that's when we started livestreaming. What we're going to do, the database itself goes back to 2005 because we were trying to, you know, kind of have a good break when we transitioned it and launched the new database. So we were going to at least go with the council meeting videos and upload them back to 2005, which involves converting some VHS, this into a digital format and uploading them. So we were going to just make that a really complete database and keep going back further on that. Previous cuts to service, we eliminated full time position in 2013. We also, at the same time decided to launch a citywide agenda management tool because why not do more with less? And that is what has allowed the iPads to replace paper has allowed the new format. And that was the transitioning to that new database, which was a very large effort. We also did a lot of citywide training and continually still administer the whole program and do all of the, you know, requests for new users and all that type of stuff. With no personnel increase, we also assumed cable studio operations in the 2010 11 budget. So basically there used to be a public works staff person who administered it. We didn't get that person who came over with the studio. We just had to learn how to administer it ourselves and have the part time crew up there. In addition, we also took on the Sunshine Ordinance and staffing the Open Government Commission. So we really, really are doing more with less, I promise. How many positions are in your department? I have three full time and two part time in the office, and then I have a part time up in the cable studio. This is our overall budget. The revenue the revenue is mostly, as you can see from the cable studio franchise and then the general fund, the cable studio franchises, a dedicated fund that's just used for equipment. So and hopefully someday that will be able to be used for operations and we can ship some of that out to the general fund. Then the other interesting thing on this chart is you can see our cost goes up in fiscal year 1617 pretty dramatically. That's because there is an election that year. So we kind of always have this every other year thing in our department just based on general municipal elections. Yes. Don't you also do the weddings? Is that what part of this. Oh, part of our revenue. Part of our revenue does come from that. Yes. So we do we do weddings. We you all have to pay for your candidate statements, which unfortunately was a little higher this year. We yeah, we charged the school district for the cable studio. They reimburse for the cable studio time that they use. So that's where yeah, the general fund isn't paying for that. So and in regards to the cable franchise, I know you briefly touched upon that the moneys need to be spent on equipment. And that's by legislation, state legislation bedrock federal legislation. But that's and I don't know if that's an I would think there's can we put that in our parking lot in regards to issues that are we could consider advocating to modify it because you want to explain that. Sure. I can tell you the most recent act action that the city took was back in December. The Alameda County mayor's conference that the mayor serves on was having a couple of mayors who were taking leadership on trying to get something changed. And so the city took a position to support it just in December. So that was our most recent action to support that. And, you know, definitely anything to support the cause and have that changes. We're all for it. If you can just add that to a list. Or maybe because we have that lobbyist firm in Washington, D.C., that's something that we could refer to them. Question Number Day. So thank you, Madam Mayor. Just a quick question. Can you describe the study you referred? This a lovely loft. The studio cast the studio loft there. It's terribly exciting. And give you a tour if you like. It doesn't take long. The steps are pretty. Okay, so this is just our overall 1516 in the graphic. So you can see, you know, we're very heavily gen general fund department budget and also, you know, mostly personnel and it's pretty much the same. But like I said, it changes in 1617 just because of that election that year. And I am available to answer any. You have two part time employees. How many hours do each of those are? Each of those positions? So it varies, but usually about. 20 to 30 something hours a week or ten. Those positions include. And when it's 20 to 30 hours per week, does that include benefits? Anything over 30 does. Oh, so we don't get up to the 30. Sorry. 29. All right. So that's another issue I would like. But in the parking lot in regards to the number of employees that we have that do not receive benefits. I'm sure H.R. would love to run that report for you. I'm sure they're going have to do it manually. So I'm getting the attorney up next. Again, I. But you're on almost. Okay. Players don't like numbers. We're here to help her. If you think you're okay. If. Okay. So the attorney's office. So we're going to tell you about, as you've been seeing from everybody else. Who we are. What we do and what we cost. So before I even get into who we are, which I guess is about who we are, I just want to make it clear to everyone that the city of Alameda and so on to you folks, but to the people who may be listening. The city of Alameda is like a corporation, and we are the in-house legal office for the city, the corporation of Alameda. And so our job is to give advice to and provide all the legal help we can to the council, to other boards and commissions and to the city departments. We are not the attorneys for the 75,000 people who are resident of the city of Alameda. And sometimes we have a lot of confusion about that. And we are often contacted by citizens who think we are the city attorney and therefore we should provide them legal advice. So I just want to make that clear. We are the municipal lawyers for in-house the city of Alameda, so we have eight full time authorized positions. City attorney. I have been here for three and a half years now. Thank you all very much. And I moved to Alameda about a year and a half ago, so I know that doesn't count for anything until I've been here for 30 years. Doesn't count. But I just wanted to point that out. I have three assistant city attorneys that you often see in chambers, Rima. I'm going to mention them from a Brown who services the planning board, Allen Cohen, who is even here tonight, who is primarily our litigator, and Andre Penick, who you saw last night here with Lenny, at least to a level that I said that. Struck. Me. From the webcast assessment. Okay, she's getting a little crazy here. Then we have a risk manager, Lucretia Akil, because part of the city attorney's office, besides giving legal advice, which I will talk to you a little bit more about as we flip through these slides and I won't take that long is also my office is also responsible for risk management in the city, which basically we are your good hands people. We are the State Farm Insurance, we are the property insurers and do claims and what have you. And we also handle the worker's compensation program for the city, and that is all under Lucretius management. And we have outsourced both of those things through third party managers for a lot of that work, because we found that that not being able to do more with less, we have to work smarter. And so that's what we're doing. We're looking for ways to try to manage it with systems and where we can to outsource as best we can. Then I have a legal office administrator and two paralegals. So our personnel reductions over the past year have amounted to cuts in four positions in 0203, we had 12 positions five six, we're down to ten, and now we have eight. And were those full time positions that were. They were all full time positions. So what do we do? I think you don't want to go through all this. I'll just really quickly, as I said before, we are the legal adviser to the council policy bodies, to the city manager, city clerk, all the departments who you've had seen stand up here and will continue to see as we go through the budget and many boards, committees, commissions, the kinds of things we do is we draft the legislation that the city clerk was telling you she tracks. We provide legal advice and opinions as required. We are involved in negotiating, drafting and revising all the legal documents from the city agreements, leases, financing documents. All of them come through my office. We participate. This is a big part of what we do as an integral part of the city team for complex transactions. So the site A matters that have been going on that you've been seeing. Jennifer Ott Two of my staff have been spending a tremendous amount of time working with them, attending negotiations, drafting documents, and that's the kind of thing we do in everything we do. We defend the city in a wide range of state and federal civil litigation, and we prosecute code enforcement actions. And as I mentioned, we do risk management and worker's comp. So in our transactional advisory role, we. We do a wide range of of work because we have a full service city which spans a lot of different things . And you've been getting a good sense of that as they've all come up. So we work with the police and fire, which is much different than the finance department with with human resources and I.T. in the library. So it's a very varied, varied. The diverse areas that we cover, and we are delighted to do so. In our litigation role. Again, we try to resolve claims and litigation at the lowest possible cost to the city while maintaining a strong and aggressive defense strategy. So we try to be very diligent to make good choices and of course, keep the council informed because you ultimately make the choice. But trying to really assess your risk analysis as to when it makes sense to be strong and aggressive and when it makes sense to try to settle things in the most cost effective way. And of course, we do enforcement actions to protect the city's rights. For instance, the Islands Boat Works property was one of the more recent enforcement actions that my office handled. In risk management touch on that. Now, that side of it the city is is self-insured for its first $500,000 and then we have excess coverage with the California Joint Powers Risk Management Authority, CJP Ramsey. So they are our umbrella insurer and the city is responsible for and pays out of the general fund for the first 500,000 and after and above that then it's April-May. And as I mentioned, we recently brought in a third party administrator because of the time and the personnel costs of trying to do all of the claims, basically claims handling early on investigation, those kinds of things that at Public Works and other people who are taking a lot of time and were able to utilize the services of the third party administrator to do that. Your question is a question, madam. And so the 500 thousands that per incident or. Yes, okay. Next we do workers comp. Workers comp is we are also self-insured this time for $350,000. Again, general fund with excess coverage paid by the local agencies workers comp excess joint powers authority locks. The Workers Comp Program is a program that provides, excuse me, temporary and permanent disability benefits. This is for this is for people who are our employees who are injured while on the job. You heard chief long talk about the fact that overtime in lead to injuries. So those are the kinds of injuries that are that the worker's comp program is in place for. So if you're hurt on the job doing your job, it's the city's responsibility to try to to to take care of that issue, get you that the medical benefit, the medical care you need and pay for those benefits, and then determine if it's determined that you can't completely return to work, it can't be fully healed, then some compensation is provided for that. So there's dependency benefits for survivors. There's lifetime medical for injuries that are actually determined by by medical doctors, are determined to be have been caused on the job that are unable to be healed. And and so they are compensated. And the 10,000 medical care is during the time that the initial claim comes in, we will pay up to $10,000 while we're determining whether or not it is a legitimate worker's comp claim. And again, we utilize a third party administrator to help us do this. As you heard Stephanie Garbrandt Sierra talking about all of the documentation and reporting requirements that are required under so many of the benefit programs. There is that whole raft of things that are required under worker's comp programs. It's a very heavily document intensive and high privacy rights because of of medical personnel issues. And so because of that, we opted to to go outside and manage it. And we're still very engaged with it, but we manage it with outside systems. So the major projects we have in mind going on during this next two year cycle is we want we will be doing being very engaged in the continued development and commercial residential leasing at Alameda Point. We are we are very involved in the redevelopment of the city's northern waterfront. We are engaged very heavily in the financing and contracting for Fire Station three and the EOC, as well as any new public safety initiatives such as the emergency medical services programs that you heard Chief Long talk about. With financial strategies, budget balancing initiatives such as all the OPEB reforms. My office is very involved in there. And you just heard Andre Echo Penick from my office talking to you about the issue with the Oakland Inner Harbor Tidal Canal. So that will be a big one on our plates in these next couple of years. Internally. The initiatives that we have going is we are very much trying to move toward that paperless document management system to facilitate what we have to do. Claims management, document retrieval, document retention. I have to say I was very surprised when I arrived here three and a half years ago to find that we really didn't have computer systems. Again, as you were hearing some of my colleagues talk about, we were doing things in paper and trying to find things. And one of my favorite stories, not even a story, we actually in some ways continue to do it when we're trying to find some documents that the city clerk doesn't have. She's great. If it comes through the council, Laura and the city clerk's office will have it. If it didn't happen to go that way, though, however, if it resides someplace else, we often just do email blasts to department heads. And it's a matter of does anybody have know anything about this area or does anybody have documents about this? And so I know the city manager's office is working very hard to try to get systems up. But I mean, this I've just found appalling. So we were among the first with the with the help and encouragement of the council supported the council that we got. We have we have engaged city law, which is a new computer system. We were among the first and Leon King is in the audience. I think we drove him crazy, but we were one of the first to get off of the Novell Group wise and onto Microsoft Outlook. And so we are trying to utilize systems because again, we realize that there's no way we can do more with the less people we have and there's more and more demand that's being put on us. So we have to be we have to prioritize and we have to work smarter. And the way to do that is to utilize systems and computer systems and the technology that is being developed right here in Silicon Valley where we live. Additionally, we're providing in-house training for the various departments on ED as needed basis on various legal procedures and ways to avoid liability and in connection with the City Clerk's Office. We have been doing Sunshine Ordinance training and ethics training for boards, commissions and other folks as necessary. Okay, so that's what we do. That's who we are. So here comes the bad news. This is what we cost. And we don't have a lot of ways to get a lot of additional revenue. So the reason our numbers are higher is again, because we have worker's comp and risk management. If we were just doing legal services, these numbers wouldn't be this high. So I think people might get, whoa, how come it's that much for eight people? We don't get paid that much. So our revenues are our fees for services, which is really just charges to the departments, to various departments and general fund. We are primarily a general fund group and then the departments again who are not general fund who contribute to our services on cost allocation basis. So the number you'll see on services and supplies, that is a lot of the insurance premiums we pay and reserves we have for worker's comp and those kinds of things that are in that line item. And so the jump that you see from 1415 to 1516 is really it's really not as bad as it looks. For one, there is not the 4,769,000 should be upped by 418,000. There was an adjustment made already to that line item. So where are you misheard? I mean, so I'm in services and supplies. Between. 14, 14, 15 projection. There's already been an adjustment to that for that 4,700,000 number I another for 418. So the change from 1415 to 1516 is not as large. It's 352,000, which is a 7% increase, which most of is attributable to the increase from our insurance pool. So it's our insurance premiums. So that's that is the difference. And that's primarily what the up is from 1516 to 1617 in that line item as well. Personnel services are the employees and you know, they get raises and they do serve them. Here are the expenditures by program and category. So as you can see, workers comp and risk management are the biggest part of what we do by program and category. And and the contract services again is managing those programs. So it's it's the claims, the liability that workers comp. Okay. So worker's comp, self insurance. There was some question about that. So I put in a couple of extra slides about this. I think Vice Mayor Matt, R-S.C., had some had some comment and some questions about the worker's comp. So the accounts. So this is about worker's comp compensation claims. And as I said, the funding source is from charges to other departments. And and there has been an aggressive cost allocation strategy since fiscal year 910. And I actually have. Cheat. I think it. Ruth, this is this is an answer. I don't think I have a slide of this. This is an answer to. Now isn't too councilman matter as these questions about some concern that there had been on the workers comp that the program was not adequately funded. And so the sheet I have enough. The sheet that I am passing around shows that in 910. The the working capital ending balance for the workers comp fund was was basically it turns out to be like a 10% coverage. But it was it was it was in the negative, which is what I think you were concerned about, if I'm correct. Vice Mayor Yeah. So and so make sure that we weren't building that deficit up again, right? So what. You see 2009. Right? So what you can see in the rest of this chart is that we have with the cooperation of the city manager finance, we have been on an aggressive program to try to increase the reserve and we are now at four 1415 will be at a 65% coverage ratio. You have. Projected up a. Sorry. Oh. Oh, perfect. Okay, good. Everyone is doing that. I'm just going to say, last year and in November, when there was the budget surplus, the council directed to take actually a half a million dollars of that surplus to direct it to the workers comp fund. So just last year, we, we, we increased the reserve by half a million. And one of the things that I'd like to be able to to settle on, because I've been looking at the projections, the projections that were put together in the last budget cycle, the projections that were on the PowerPoint slide on April 16th, and then this comment about putting a portion of a surplus into a fund that. Really? I'd like us to be able to tighten up those projections and also to look and see what it really costs us, because if we're funding something that's in the general fund from a surplus. That surplus we can't count on. It's to me, it's like. It's we have to look at what our general fund revenues are excluding one time revenues. And seeing what we can actually afford on an ongoing basis. I understand and I know the surplus was built by a lot of belt tightening and just wringing the last drop out. And we either continue to operate that way or find where we are so that we can live within the means of what is generally expected for general fund revenues. So this strikes me as is we're again, we're drawing down the reserve to pay for operating costs on some level. And I think we have to think about that a little bit and see where it might be appropriate and where it puts the city at risk. Right. I guess I would I would not care to categorize it as drawing down on reserves. I mean, essentially what you have is that you had revenues that were higher than you thought and expenditures that were lower than you expected. And that delta is your bet. I mean, in in business, that means it's your profit and you've taken your profit and you put it it back into your business, and that's what this is. So I guess I would characterize it a little bit different than than that. It all depends on what's in that wood built that. How the deficit occurred. And also how the surplus occurred, whether it's, oh, like vacancies that are deferred, we either live without the position or we got a one time revenue because we saved on salaries. Yes. And then these big bubbles and transfer tax. It wasn't. So I'll just say it wasn't all one time. I'm just giving the exhaustion. Of it was. That's right. That's true of one time, one time revenues and one time savings. So I just want to be mindful of that as we go through this and whenever we're taking from the reserve. Are we taking from what's a normal revenue stream? Are we taking from a one time and just start adding those up? Because a little here, a little there suddenly or we're back to actual problem. So we do on an annual basis an actuarial study on workers comp. It's done by outside firms and they look at our history, they look at what's going on in in the industry, and they do projections going forward. And their recommendation is a 70 to 90% average ratio. And so we are trying to get as close as we can to that 70%, as you can see. So we are we are now, I guess should be at 65 for 1415. And that's appreciated given the experience thousandnine nine when it was. I've $6 million shortfall. So that is my presentation. Do you have any questions? Do you keep track of the number of hours that are built outside attorneys? We do get. I mean, they bill us and we have copies of their bills. Yes. I mean, we can give you numbers on what we spend for outside counsel and what the number of hours are. I can give you hourly rates on outside counsel. So I'd like to know what is the cost or the outside counsel. In what period would you? Is anyone else interested? Not. So. Well, I don't know. I mean, interested, certainly I know from the previous councils that we. And I mean, I think every council has probably made this decision that there are certain cases that are legal staff is very capable and competent to handle. And there's some things, oftentimes litigation that is specialized, that is extremely time consuming where we contract out. But it's, you know, certainly a good thing to know what we pay. And we have those records. And I'm happy to do that. I think I think if I can just add to that, since I've I've practiced both in private practice and in both in law firms and in corporations, private corporations. And here that there's always this balance about whether you basically contract out all your legal services or whether you you try to do most of them in-house. And I think, frankly, that we've reached a really nice balance for a city the size of Alameda between our in-house and our outside counsel use. We have a small enough staff that I think we're able to really stay on top of and participate in and understand the issues and help do a lot of that preventive advising that hopefully does not get us into lawsuits claims what have you but but council member as you Ashcraft is correct as I'm sure you all know there's three of you here are lawyers as well. But there are just certain things that are either such big time time requirements like on a major litigation. I mean, it would just really take up completely four or five staff members. So in my experience, what happens in cities that decide to take it all in-house is they they build a lot of staff, a lot of inside staff. And I'm just not convinced here that we need to do that, I think, or it's better to manage the money to utilize, go outside, hire it when you need it, and develop some good relationships with firms who know us. Watch their bills because we don't just send stuff out and ignore it. We are all over them managing it and working on it. And then beside that, there are the situations where you need some certain expertize because I mean, if it's a tax issue or something like that, I mean, that's just something that, as you all know , too, there are areas of the law that are very, very discreet. And at those times, it serves the city's best interest for us to be able to tap into some expert outside counsel. And then there are times when we just have the city is going gangbusters and everybody has got so much work going on that we need a little filling and but we don't bring somebody in as a full time position. We are able to manage that by getting outside counsel and watching what they do and trying to manage it. And so I'd be interested in three years going back. The last three. Yeah, that. A member decide. Just two questions. So when it comes to contracting out for legal assistance, that would be a subsidy. Is it correct to say that that's a subset of the services and supplies numbers that you have that we have in our summary? Yes. Okay, great. And then the second question I have is for non general fund entities. I presume that the city attorney's office provides some kind of legal assistance. Is that that's not calculated in here. Correct. So so for example, it or it. Well, I don't know. That's a question is how. Is where her revenue came from? Mm hmm. So so that's the issue on the what we call sheet back on. Well, that's their fees for services and general fund fees for services. Is that pretty much the non general. Okay. I see. Groups that there is some magic that happens and I guess Elaine a left that the finance department and the city manager says you're hiding. There is magic that comes out of the finance. Department magic. That they do this thing they call a cost allocation and they decide how each department is going to be charged a certain amount of money, an internal charge, and that that's. With that. Okay. So the key thing, what I'm really driving at the end, so this is the true and total cost of of not just the general fund portion. Yes. Wonderful. And we don't charge other general fund departments cost allocation. So internally we. So she wouldn't charge. Right. But but they're to put the city attorney's office would charge the super fund or would charge. Right. So the other funds, there's a charge. That's where that revenue comes from. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions. Comments or others? Comments that I feel like in recent months we've kept your office really busy with lots of lots of questions. We I appreciate all the time you spend with each of the council members before meetings and prepping us for these complex issues that we've heard. The rent ordinance last night was one of them, and there have been many. And, you know, thank you for all the hard work you've done and are going to continue to do on our behalf. We appreciate it. Ex-City manager. Okay, so I'm going to confess that I know more about the city's budget than I know about my own budget, but I'm not in that position. Okay, so we are the city manager's office. Okay. Maybe Laura was doing it and she made you feel better. It worked. Okay. Okay, that worked. All right, so as you all know, we provide policy, report support and recommendations to the council. We ensure the fiscal health of the of the city. And we develop solutions when we are faced with fiscal challenges and we look at streamlining, trying to streamline the organization and fostering economic development. I put that in here because, you know, that really is part of our fiscal health that that is tied together. We provide leadership and direction to our nine departments. And we work collaboratively with the city attorney's office in the city clerk's office. And we've foster community partnerships. That's like with Almeida Unified School District, a bag, AC Transit, the Water Emergency Transit Authority, ACME, which is the Alameda County City Manager's Authority Agency. Excuse me. So different kinds of relationships throughout the county. We try and foster those, make sure that we're doing best practices and that our departments are on track. We also do other injury. That's actually also in our agency collaboration. And we support the City Council's efforts to advocate for the city of Alameda at the local, state and national level. And as you'll see in the budget numbers, that includes the the lobbyists that we have at the federal level as well as at the state. And that's Ackerman and, uh, um, former Senator Perata. So previous cuts to to our department, obviously we have a very small department, but we did actually have at one time a management a senior management analyst. And just when I got here, so that was two years ago, we eliminated that position. And really that the effect of that was sort of the analysis that often people ask us to look at sort of the special things that we'd like to know about this or what do you think about that or what about that parking study or this these kinds of analyzes. So we haven't been able to really do that. We do that in obviously in with the time that we do have. Departmental collaborations. That's that was that that individual actually did a lot of that when we did a studies across the across the across citywide. That was something that she took on. But anyway, that position is no longer with us. How long have we had to? Assistant City Manager. So the department has fluctuated. It's always had. It's always had, obviously the city manager and then two other positions. At one time it had a assistant city manager and an assistant to the city manager, which is a little bit lower than an assistant city manager. It had an assistant city manager and a deputy city manager. So it's always had one and two, but that too has kind of varied in form from one, from one time to another. But I think this mayor's fans are you asking how long have we had to equal assistant manager positions that I. Appreciate the history that you've always had to position those full time positions. But and then they actually also had, I think a long time ago, they had three assistants and now we have two. And how long have we had to assistant city managers? I think that was when I got here. So that was two years, two and a half years ago. Before that, it was an assistant city manager and a deputy city manager. Thank you. Okay. So our budget essentially what our budget includes fees for services, $45,000. That's. Actually, I can't tell you exactly what that is. Um. Let's see. That may be some of our cost allocation. Actually, I think that's cost allocation. The are our expenditures mostly, as you can see, is in our personnel services. And it goes up from this year, which was 720000 to 953 and then almost over a million. And the reason for that increase is twofold. One is the position of the admin services coordinator for the disaster preparedness, which we actually did. We kept these not kept this in here, but we retracted that that proposal, as you recall, that was on your agenda. And this actually that position will come up later as one of the positions that we're recommending that you don't fill , that you don't authorize coming for going forward. And then the other position, which we have authorized but we haven't yet been able to fill is the public information office officer. That's something that we really would like to do. We'll talk about that later in the next at the end of the presentation. But that position has been authorized for over a year now, and we are sort of we re tweaking the kind of individual that we would like to to fill that position with. But that's the reason for the increase in those salaries there. And then the service and supplies that includes the as I mentioned, the lobbyist. So that's the federal and the state lobbyists. And those lobbyists have been actually fairly successful for us. Obviously, they they were they helped us get the Jean Sweeney Park grant. They the federal lobbyist has been helping us with l made a point. So they're they've they've done a very I would say they've been successful. They give us updates monthly on the types of work that they're doing. That number also includes contracts like the Bartles work that we did on the OPEB contracts. It also includes the city manager recruitment. So that number is that number includes that contract that you will be letting in the next couple of months. Actually, hopefully it's next month. That both lobbyists provide monthly updates. So I know the federal lobbyists provides a monthly update. I'm not sure if the state lobbyists does. Do you know arrangement? Probably not. Not yet. She's weak on the job. Yeah. Third day on the job. I have meetings set up with both of them, so I'll find out what they're regular communicate. I'll request monthly updates. If not, and if those could be shared with council, I think that'll be great. Not a problem. And. And I would like. I would suggest that they be itemized with the hours. I'm not sure what it looks like, but if it could be itemized. Yes. I would I would support as much atomization as they can provide. Okay. We'll find. Out. We'll take a look at what the contract looks like. One paragraph. Sorry. Okay. So obviously our revenues almost 100% is through the general fund. The miscellaneous is a cost allocation and then our expenditures primarily are the personnel services and the services and supplies that I mentioned and then our costs, the cost allocation that's charged to us. Essentially the same for the next year. That concludes the city manager's presentation. Thank you. I've come to remember Jason. Thank you very much. In terms of the assistant city manager positions or position, I think what I'm hoping to get from your office is a discussion and recommendations, some kind of plan, perhaps with filling one of the assistant city manager positions if there is to be two. With with as an internal hire. Something to think about so that that there won't be any net new person, whoever. And whatever other position, then we have to figure that out. That's something, you know, you're. I would like your office to think about. Uh, so, I mean, I don't necessarily think of it as a given that, that there should be two assistant city managers. But by the same token, you know, I recognize that in the past, you know, we used to have, uh, basically the deputy city manager or the assistant city manager when we had two of them. But one time, like Doug Yount was a deputy city manager, I think. And. And I forgot his name, but he was for a short time was the city manager in Union City. I think they were both together here at dinner. Dave Berger. Dave Berger. They were, yeah. So and I think Doug Yount would focus on Alameda Point. Dave Berger would be the assistant city manager. And another point in time, it was Paul Benoit. And and I think. And and David Brandt. Actually, I'll bring in David Brandt. So it's. I hear I hear you. And we'll take a look at that. One thing I would like to say is, and I think hopefully what you've heard from the conversations from all the departments is that they're all doing more with less. And so these folks are actually doing a lot of the work that their folks were doing before them that got laid off. So now they had to absorb a lot of that work. And then to ask them some of these department heads to who are doing their department's work, hands on work, and then to take on the other responsibilities of an assistant city manager, I think would be a little bit asking, might be asking a lot. And I'm not sure that there's any department head here who has extra time that could actually fill in that position. Well, I think what I'm getting at is it's kind of like this collateral effect and an internal hire feels the assistant city manager position, too. And then an internal hire fills the the department head position. So more for some progression within the organization? Absolutely. I 100% agree with that. So I think that I don't think you necessarily understand what he was asking conversations. I guess I had in the mind. Jen Ott being the assistant city manager in Alameda Point C or CIO. And I just remember that thinking, Oh my God. That's not what I heard him asking for. A combination of two sessions. Thank you, Ambrose. Thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, because if we do, what we have now are net minus two, right? Because we lost to really backfill. I haven't backfilled all the way down, so. You know, my only comment on that is, I mean, that's kind of a city manager prerogative. I mean, who they're going to hire to have as their team and as their, you know, their their high level managers. So, you know. Well. The point being that it's really not our business to meddle in. Yeah. You prohibited? Yes. Okay. I was trying to be polite about it, but thank you, Vice Mayor, for being blunt. I don't think so. I think I think I think we have a prerogative with regard to the budget. The budget, you know. And we have a prerogative is a charter prerogative with regard. It is in the charter a charter prerogative with regard to department staffing. It's in the chart and as we bring the organization of departments. And as we bring in a new city manager, I mean, I don't know if we want to tie his or her hands. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean, different city manager candidates may have different ideas. I mean. They may want a senior exec team and, you know, a junior with them. They may want to seniors. I think we have to just see what our our potential candidates have in mind, you know, before trying to tie their hands, either his or her hands . I was only hearing preferences at the. All right. So any other questions comes on that one? Thank you. All right. So at this point, it's 930. We have three more presentations and if possible, we'd like to take a five minute recess. Yeah. Thank you. So we'll be taking a five minute recess. Thank you. And we did start at 6 p.m., by the way. I. All right. We're going to resume our meeting. Up studio. Over. Thank you very much. We really appreciate your attention. We have just completed the city manager's presentation and now information technology knowledge presentation. Leon King. Take it away. Madam Mayor, City Council. Good evening. Leon King, information technology manager and I will be presenting what we call the I.T. division, which is a division of the city manager's office, who we are. Information technology has four full time positions. We have one, information technology manager, myself, one, public safety information technology systems coordinator, which is basically responsible for police and fire. We have one technology services coordinator, which is primarily solely for a library, and we have one computer services technician. What do we do? We support over 700 network users. That means these are people that are on the wire that has a computer. We have 450 desktop computers excluding aluminum and municipal power. So we do not support them. So they're not included in that number. We have over 160 mobile devices. That's the iPads that you all have and cell phones. We also have 450 telephones and 500 voicemail accounts that we support throughout the city and excluding Alameda Municipal Power. Some of the things that we maintain, we actually maintain five data centers. So we have servers in five different locations, one here at City Hall Library, Police Department, Alameda Point. And we have a. Shelf. At Alameda Municipal Power, we have over 70 servers citywide, and most of those servers are virtual machines. But then we also support the switches, the routers and everything that's in the closet. Also, we have city networks, switches, routers. That's the software side of it. So we do maintain all of the software that's related to make making those devices work the utilities, the management utilities, the monitoring software, all of those things that run on a city network. And we also support 450 desktop computers and laptops throughout the city, including public safety and fire. Some of the things that we've done over fiscal year 13, 14 and 1415, we've migrated email conversions from group to Outlook. We actually just finished it was pretty much 80% done in President's weekend and we still have a little bit left. Alameda Municipal Power is scheduled to migrate at the end of this month. We are also migrating our servers from Novell to Microsoft. This includes the data files, all the servers that are involved that people access that were on Novell. We've also implemented our first stage of our document management that you've heard from the city attorney's office, the I manage. We've also virtualized over 30 servers over the last year and a half. We also are in phase one of our Alameda Police Department computer aided dispatch system upgrade. Actually, they just received their first boxes of shipment this week, so they will be unpacking. Starting next week, the library. We've upgraded the internal wireless system at the main library. So the wi fi that's over there, we upgraded that to a little bit more reliable, hopefully system. They've also installed thin client terminals at the public library. And what a thin client many probably are wondering thin client is a fanless desktop terminal that has no hard drive. All the features typically are found on the desktop PC, including applications and data that are stored there are in the server room, so there's physically nothing on the desktop but a monitor, a keyboard and some devices to plug into. I'm kind of going back to the old mainframe days where we just had a green screen, a keyboard and everything was going to the server room. So thin client is the new technology that companies are going to for managing HeartWare. So we don't have to run around and do a lot of legwork. We can just upgrade the server and we're pretty much done. We are replacing the unsupported Microsoft Windows computers with Windows seven and as most people know, Windows seven is no longer supported. That was kind of a we had quite a few Windows XP around in the city and we've also upgraded majority of the city's Microsoft Office to 2013. We still have a few that are hanging out there in public safety and a few miscellaneous locations. But we're trying to get everyone up to Microsoft Office 2013, mainly because we have recently converted over to Outlook and then we also have some miscellaneous support things that we do for various departments. As you've heard from, I think everyone that has come up that there are some technology needs and we support every last one of them with their goals, their dreams and hopefully their dreams, but a lot of their technology needs that they have. Fiscal year 1516. Some of our plan things that we're planning on doing, we're planning on finalizing our document management system. We are also going to complete the Alameda Police Department computer aided dispatch upgrade. We're hoping to get that done between next year, over the next two years. We're also working with public works with their in-house graphical information system, the GIS system that they are now implementing. And we're also planning on installing wireless systems at the remaining city buildings as we have Wi-Fi here at City Hall. We would like to get wi fi at other locations with mobile technology taken off. Many of our inspectors, our code enforcement officers, our even our maintenance garage is looking for wireless technology so that they can actually use these devices in their location and actually connect to a cloud system or some type of system using their new mobile devices, which is now very popular. We also would like to explore to thin client terminals for city staff. The library has kind of pilot that process for us, so we kind of have a great understanding how it works, but we would like to pilot that here for the rest of the city. And we also would like to reevaluate the city wide infrastructure and software to ensure most efficiency use of resources, as you've heard from various departments, all needing some technology upgrades and services. Some of the cuts that we've had over the last nine years. As you can see on this graph, we started off in 2003 oh four. We had six and a half people. As the years have gone down or gone up, we have decreased our staff down to four. And with that decrease in staff that has caused great deficiencies within the I.T. group and some of those deficiencies don't allow for us to do proper cross-training with our staff. So we can't, you know, learn what's going on in one department for the other because we just don't have the resources to learn. I don't really know all that goes on in the police department. The police department guy doesn't know what all goes on to the city. So cross training has been hampered. We're also limited it to remain in reactive mode versus excuse me. I don't know what that's like. Okay. Here we go anyway. So we're in reactive mode versus proactive mode. So many times we're trying to put out fires versus we're trying to establish and provide new technologies. Yes. But remember Ashcroft. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. King. I know I take up a significant portion of your time with some of my past iPad troubles. But can you tell me this 38% reduction staff over the last ten years? That's troubling. Was that attrition? Was that department was that mandated department cuts? It was cuts. Cuts. So. Well, let me not ask you this. What other departments have we have seen a 38% reduction in staff? You know, I don't know, but I don't know. 38, but I can tell you that their department has probably been most decimated department in the city if you. And yet it appears that they so technology use is growing. So I would think that that the need and demand has increased in the past nine years. And I would actually think that it has a whole new world has been created in the past nine years with technology. So. So. If I can give some perspective, Madam Mayor, we did a little bit of research because this is something that we all feel very strongly about. And I think everybody in this room is going to shake their head and say, yes, the city of san leandro, the same size that we are. Nine i.t. People, city of walnut creek, same size as we are nine people in the it actually departments. It the one that is the closest to us city of pleasanton, which has a smaller population than we do six people. So we are in a slide with that information in this presentation. No, this. Could be added in regards to our parking lot so that we are aware of what other departments, other communities have. So if you could tell me those numbers again. San Leandro nine. Walnut Creek nine. Pleasanton six. And Alameda. Or. All right. So. I think that this is a very serious problem. And in regards to funding, I'm hoping that this we will see. We have two positions requested in the budget. So the budget that you've seen has requested two positions. All right. So let me ask another question. How many hours do you have any idea how many hours per week your for each of your four employees works? I can tell you four for myself and for the rest we we're 24 seven. You call us at three in the morning. The police department has a system down where they're. Every vacation. My computer is with me. My phone is on unless I'm on a boat or in the mountains. We we're there. You know, we work the weekends. That's the only time we can get upgrades done. I mean, you know, tomorrow morning I'll be here bright and early as we repair the manager's office for their move. I mean, we just this is what we do. So I don't think that's acceptable. I don't see to it or as a solution. I think we serious have to look at upgrading this department. And I don't think it's appropriate that we have four employees. And if you look at and I'm confident if we look at these salary ranges compared to what other people are paid in our city and the hours that they are expected to be on demand because they're such good employees and loyal to us, this is a very serious problem. So I agree with you more. I think this has to really be addressed. When a fish. Okay. All right. So as we've heard already, city departments have taken on the responsibility of purchasing and finding their own software and products that may not be compatible with our environment. Also, products could be cross departmental, but that knowledge doesn't get shared because each department is servicing themselves opposed to it, servicing them. Other limitations that we have, as were a limited ability to research and evaluate new technologies. We just don't spend the time doing it. And we kind of tell them that departments, you know, kind of find it yourself and, you know, let us know once you find it. There struggles with assisting other departments to meet their goals. And we just can't you know, every department has goals and we just struggle to meet those goals. And then we also are we don't do training because we're just too short. If we're gone, that means there's a body missing and there's work that's going to be undone. So we do not have training among the IT staff. So without a dedicated, you know, executive team leader, forecasting and direction for the city is compromised. Over the years, it has not met the needs of our users due to outdated and limited product upgrades. City staff members have taken upon themselves to assist us the IT department in researching, going on site visits and working with technology vendors to find products for their departments. And sometimes the outcomes are positive and many times the product is not, and sometimes a product is purchased that will not fit within our current i.t infrastructure. And these are just, you know, the benefits or the benefits, but the deficiencies that we have seen over the years. But the i.t. Division. All right. And what type of. Did I hear you correctly that in regards to we don't have training for our I.T. staff? Yes. Well, I. I can't remember the last time any of the staff members have gone to any technology training. We just came up with the Microsoft outlook. We're kind of learning as we go. And we did have a training for the users to learn the product. But as far as the administration side of it, we basically rely on consultants and just online help. So I think that this is another poll in that if we were able to train our staff and then we could do so much more. I think they'd like us to be able to look at that also. And I'm just wondering if you know offhand any other departments that do not offer training for their staff. You know, I mean that. Because of the recession. I mean, this is essentially a hangover of the recession. Every department, particularly the internal departments, got pretty much decimated. And and training is always the first thing to go. And so across the board, we have not done training. We're just starting to do that now back again. Okay. So could we. So we have ten departments, right? One, two. Well, we have nine departments in the city. Attorney. City clerk. All right. So I. I think we do have training going on in other departments overall across our city and all of our departments. So there's so we could have a slide that shows training available for all of our departments. That's a slide. I'd like to see how much money is spent on training across all of each each department. And then I think that we have to address this issue. And I'm really grateful that we're having this. Absolutely. And one thing I would just like to take a moment just to say thank you to Mr. King, who has done a Herculean job over the last few years. Absolutely. I thought that gray hair was earned. And it's true. He he is on call 24 seven and he's just really you've done a fantastic job. And I just want to say thank you. Thank you. And I'd like to be able to promote from within. And I know at some point we were talking about a director, someone of this department, but it seems to me. Can I ask, how long have you been in this department? I've been with the city for 25 years and only in the IT department. This is my 25th, so. I can't help but think that if you were receiving training over these years that we would have an incredibly well-trained gentleman here and that which he is. But he's had to do so much of that. But it cannot be if you if he were receiving formal training. So that has been a loss to our city and it's very unfortunate. So I think it's imperative that we get these people that have hung in there 25 years serving us training, that that really has to be added. Thank you, Mayor Brody. I just want to follow up on that comment. You know, I look at the the I.T. budget and what happened to. Well, first of all, you know, we went through the Great Recession and some of the people up here actually sat through that. And they probably still have the scars. And, you know, it's very, you know, painful. And it kind of changes your psyche when you're doing a city budget as opposed to, you know, someone like me who didn't have to go through that. But, you know, I look at it kind of similar to like the sewers and the streets, you know. It's like deferred maintenance that we put off. You know, our I.T. infrastructure, you know, is just as crumbling as some of our streets are, just as crumbling as some of our sewers. And now I realize there's a reluctance to, you know, commit to the long term on, you know, new positions. And, you know, hopefully we'll have that discussion. But, you know, if we have to do that, I mean, this, I think, is the most critical spot. And so. Let's try. To minimize I mean, I'm not in favor of like spending wildly and hiring a bunch of people. But if, you know, if we can limit it to, you know, two or three or four people, I mean, this is where I would hope to focus. Vice mayor. Yes. It's a daunting task. And I appreciate. Watch what you're doing. It's it is clear that we have a huge gap, especially when we're talking Novell versus Microsoft. That being said, I'm hoping two things caught my eye. One is that AMP is separate. And. Its infrastructure is, I think is one of those things that can be imposed across the city with big time savings. So I'm hoping we're looking at that as a strategy. The other thing that I'm hoping that we look at is a strategy, because I see this in the private sector where there are firms that provide the kind of I.T. infrastructure support, especially off hours support that are on call. They have many clients and they're also up to date on the latest of the latest. So I hope and we have and this is why I, I think the gap is there. But the how we we look at it strategically is where do we get the most for our money when we want to spend? For the latest and keeping on top of the latest, I'm hoping there's a place for looking at a firm that will will service the city and have the access to the very latest technology without in us depending on a city department. Keep that up. Madam Premier, I respond to that. So two things on that. We are this at these two positions that we have in the budget are actually proposed to be shared with AMP l mean municipal power. So the cost. I was looking at the responsibility in the coverage because there's I think there's economies of scales too because it said the AMP hardware's included there. Well they do also have their they have a small crew there, but they don't have a director either. So the idea was that we would hire a director that would manage that would would handle the entire city. The other point that I wanted to make is that now we do actually contract out a fair amount of our work. I don't know if you would say. Do you know how much the contracts are? I don't know, per se, the actual amount. But for this project it was based. I mean, the contractor did majority of the work. For the upgrade to the. Upgrade job. Yeah. So we are in. Typical. And I think, you know much like what the city attorney was saying, I think there's a balance. You have to strike the balance between what you can outsource and what you really need to keep in-house, which is what are our unique needs? How do we interface with building and planning and the finance department? Right. How do you how do you when somebody pays the bill, it automatically gets posted to the general ledger. It's those kinds of things that I think we need kind of we need somebody internally that understands, that need, but then can actually go out and contract maybe to help implement the need that we have identified. So I think, again, it's kind of a balance. What member. ASHCROFT Thank you. And I was just going to say that i would certainly look to the folks in Leon, Mr. King and his staff in i.t. And Ms.. Madame has worked closely with it to give us direction as to what they think the need is. I think the vice mayor raises some valid points, but you're in the trenches so you, you know, information through your through your budget proposals what you need. And we're not obviously here to micro-manage, but you do. But I do want to acknowledge I can say that every time I've called Mr. King, I always say, is this a good time for you to talk? It's always, Leon, come on, then. But that's how he is any time. So thank you. Thank you. And in regards to the director position, I would like us to consider Mr. King and what we can do to make him be qualified or have him be a big part of the the department moving forward. As much as he wants to be. No comment. The request that the city council has over site for three positions and for unfortunately this isn't one of them but. Kudos. Okay. All right. So what we call the slide basically shows that we're kind of broken up into three divisions. We are city information technology, which is the city side, the library information technology, which is dedicated specifically to that and telecommunications significant costs. And 1516 reflects our network platform change from Novell of Group Eyes to Microsoft Outlook and the other calls includes new hardware, software, licenses and installation for the future wi fi. So that will basically why our costs jumped and 1516 to implement those new technologies. It services the slides shows our revenue and expenditures. Please note the increased costs compared to our fiscal year. These increases again are regarding our reflection of our Microsoft environment and additional equipment needed to support the new platforms and the Wi-Fi. Personnel positions are included as is warmer than I mentioned for the two positions. And our revenues are what we charge to Alameda Municipal Power. We do charge them for services. Basically, its web services, barracudas send you those different software technologies that we have on our side and we charge them for usage of that. Again, just reflections of our expenditures, 61% for services and supplies, 36 for personnel, and 3% for our funds from cost allocation, which finance has some magical number that makes that happen. The right side shows that we're 96% general funded. I'm again four 1617 51% for services, 46% for personnel, 3% four from cost allocation and 95% General Fund and 1617. Before I end with questions, I did want to make a statement that the I.T. division has been using consultants for many years, and we have used them to assist with projects. We do not have the resources, training or knowledge to implement a new technology discussions regarding to in-house vendor versus contract staffing. I view this topic as project and or slash strategic city goal planning projects or a convenient for outsourcing, since they are usually short term in scope with defined and goals. Strategic goals are incorporated with city mission goals at the executive management team level. They often have a life of their own and may go through multiple revisions over time. Completing these goals require a long term commitment. An overseer that is fully engaged with the city staff and vendors or consultants usually don't have the time or the type of relationship or access to staff to to our staff. In my experience, I've seen consultants make recommendations that do not integrate with our environment or our staff objectives. So over the years, city management has invested in technology and we are finally recovering from the past neglect in spending and maintenance. I encourage management to continue down this path and providing staff with the tools they need to provide proper services to us. And we're doing more with less, as you've heard from pretty much every department. Questions. Well, I'd like to make a comment in regards to your last sentence. I think you've done the most with the least. And I think we only have one more presentation. You do have a speaker that wants to address. Yes. Thank you. I appreciate the reminder. Carol Goldstein. Hello. Carol Goldstein, Alameda. Resident I. Just had a question about the. Uh. The thin client terminals for public use that the library because I do use the public computers at the library and this just go in like yesterday because as of Monday there is still a quantum difference between the quality of the computers in the computer lab room, which is unfortunately the performance metric that our previous city manager chose to measure. That room's only open two. Afternoons a week, Wednesday afternoon and Sunday afternoon, and it's closed most of the rest of the time when people don't use it. Can't use it. But that's where the computers that work well are. And that's the only. Place where you can put an actual disk. In a computer and read it. The ability to. Read a disk is not available. Out in the. General public area that's open. Whenever the library is open and those computers. Are still slow. They go. Off and break down intermittently. Throughout the. Day. They don't receive flash drives on a reliable basis. And you can't turn the volume off if you go. To a website or there's. Like an ad. Blaring at you, there's no way that person can actually. Even. Adjust the. Volume because. The icon doesn't work. As of Monday, that was. All the way it was. So I don't. Know where these great thin client terminals are, but they're. Not out in the general public. Use of a library. And then address her concern there. Of. I'd like to. I'd like a response on this possible. BERMAN Again, I don't have full knowledge of where every computer is. I do know that the thin client installation is fairly new. It is on the public floors and there are this lists, there are hard drive lists, and they have kind of locked them down. The library staff has chosen to do that. The as far as the computer lab, those are funded specifically by the Library Special Fund. So it's not really funded through the city's general fund computers. So I don't have all the answers as far as where all the broken machines or the ones that don't work. But it we'll be getting a presentation by the library in future. That's next week. Thank you. Appreciate that. All right, city council presentation. And there's us. What a nice picture. Right. Could you pass for some color coordinated in that picture? It's going to be very brief. And this will be very brief. Since I hope you know what you do. But for the community out there, you formulate a finding priorities for the allocation of resources. That's usually money, but it's also people time training, that kind of thing. And adopting the biennial budget promote the city's interests at the regional, state and national level. Enact ordinances that's our laws, and provide guidance on quality of life issues. I'm sure there's plenty more that you do there, but that's sort of a thousand foot look. Your proposed budget is very simple. Much of your budget actually left your budget city council and went into the city managers in the past. All of the lobbying actually was in the city council's budget, but it went to the city managers at the council's request. Most of your expenditures are in personnel. Those are for your very limited benefits and and the very small stipend that you get for the meetings that you attend, the services and supplies. Those are pretty much the league. For example, the League of California, Cities, memberships, air bag, membership meals, lodging and travel to things like the California League of Cities, the THERE Annual Conference, as well as the East Bay Division League conferences. So that's pretty much what your budget is. It's as you see, it's pretty slim. Can you discuss or elaborate on the lobbying budget being transferred from city council to the city managers? Sure. So typically the city, the cost of the lobbyists, I think, which to some extent can be a little controversial, has historically been in the city council's budget. And two years ago there was a request to take it out of the City Council's budget and put it into the city manager's budget. And so if you look at a historical going back, you know, probably ten years city manager's budget kind of increased. But that was essentially it was still a function of the general fund. It was still something that we needed to do. But it just landed in the general in the city manager's budget. Thank you. Formidable and brash. How could I ask? Under expenditures for 14, 15, 127,000 going down to 53,000 in the next. That is benefits. So that's from the change of the at the election you have three new council members who for without going into too much detail have a lesser benefit request than the previous thank. Huh? We're saving money. You are? Okay. And you are almost entirely well, you are entirely funded by the general fund. And again, this just to break out of your expenditures. And that concludes the. City Council's budget. On that is a significant reduction in personnel costs of more than a half, more than 50% reduction there. Right. I mean, you still have the same five people just and the same class that that some of you have elected things that the other council. Hmm. And that's significant. So the next we go on to the next. So this is sort of the the meaty and the other part wasn't meaty. But this is this is where I need you to put your thinking caps on. This is what I call the Closing the Gap discussion. It's just so why we get in hard. So the reason why you're getting hard copies is because the because of the essentially because of the contracts that were approved last week. And again, we're continuing to get new information. I wanted to provide you with the most updated PowerPoint. So that's why you have it hard copy. It's also on the screen. Is it available online? It's not. It was the issue of. Posted. Top. All right. Thank you. Okay. So I wanted to just start off with a little bit of perspective. There's been some discussion. We've really focused on the general fund. I just wanted to start off by by reminding folks that the general fund is just one source of funds that we have. It is our discretionary fund. So that's one of the reasons why we do focus on it. But the general fund constitutes 34% of all the funds that this city spends. So the total that the four 1516 the total funds are $240 million, of which the general fund is 34%. If I going along on these, uh, here you have got your general fund, which is this blue wedge and you've got your special revenue fund, which is 20%. Those are things like the library measure B B funds for transportation. This is this wedge right here. The the red, red wedge. Say that ten times fast. Lighting and landscaping districts, those are for all of our medians and some in some of our business districts. That's recreation. It's base for use. It's Tidelands trust. It's the gas tax, parking meters, waste management programs. That's this 48 that constitutes this $48 million here in the green. We have the capital projects. Those are the things that we will have a capital improvement project plan that we'll be bringing to you next week. Those are all of our streets and sidewalks and and Kersey Park and Sweeney Park, all those kinds of things that makes up 20% of our budget. And then we have these small pieces. Enterprise Fund, 9%. That's the sewer fund. Internal Services. That's our fleet. Computer equipment, technology, successor agencies. Excuse me, the 9% in the dark blue, a successor agency, that's the former redevelopment agency that constitutes $22 million. And then plus pension and trust agency funds. That's OPEB small, small amount. We have OPEB as well as the 1079 and the 1082. So that all constitutes the city's budget. It's $240 million, of which 34% or 80 million in 1516 is the general fund. These are all millions of dollars. There's not a key here that says that on this. Oh, right. Okay. We'll make sure to include that. Sorry. So very similar in 1617. Okay. So the next slide is something I wanted. So you've all been asking for this, and so I wanted to provide it for you, which is the history of public safety as a percentage of the general fund. So we're starting off in 2010 and we're projecting out to 2017, which is what our two year budget goes out to. And as you can see, we hover around 30% for nonpublic safety, and public safety hovers around 70%. It goes up I think the lowest is 68% in fiscal year 1213. And the highest is a combination is either in 2011 or what will what will be in fiscal year 1617. Question from the April 16th pie chart. That's 79%. Right. So the. So as I I thought I had maybe I didn't explain that pie chart and did not include transfers out. So transfers out is is kind of one of those things that people kind of their eyes kind of glaze over because they don't really know what transfers out really means. But essentially what that means is the general fund is contributing to the library, the parks to debt service. They're different categories, but essentially it's a general fund expense and it's considered what we call a transfer out. And the 79% did not include all those other things that the general fund funds. That clear? Okay. So. The next slide is a history of public safety as a percentage of all funds. Okay. So now we're looking at public safety as a percentage of the $240 million that I explained. And this is all departments, including the sewer, public works, capital projects, Community Development. And you can see the you can see essentially public safety hovers around roughly around 30 to 35%. And all other departments are somewhere in the 70%. So kind of swap it switches. But anyway, I wanted just to give this to you as a historical perspective. I know a lot of you have been asking for that. Hopefully that answers that. Okay. The next slide is a slide that you've seen before. This slide includes. The contracts that you approved last week. So as you'll see in 1920. Oops. He's me. Oh. And is this identical to the page two that was in the package? Yes. So page one in the packet was the pre contracts. This is post contracts. Okay. So this is our reality today. And just as a reminder in 1516, we have we. In the wrong thing. So we have 81.4 million in revenues again. Now, again, we're talking just about the general fund. We have expenditures and transfers out of 80.7 transfers in of about a half a billion. So you get an operating surplus of 1.2 this year. So that means we're in the black this year by $1.2 million. Okay. This is again, this is sort of a reminder because you've seen this before, and that leaves us with a 38% reserve in this year. Again, the general general gap. And remember exactly what the accounting principles thank you is 16%, that's one 6% is the best practice. And we're at 38. 1617, which is next year. Revenues are where we were. Obviously, this is a very conservative estimate because we're still in a growth economy. The reason why it's low, as you recall, is because we had an amp catch up. So we had $1,000,000 of one time, so we couldn't count that again. But that's still an extremely conservative number. We had I think we talked about Beacon Economics, who we contracted out to look at our revenues. They far recommended much more than this, but we thought we should be prudent. So we're expecting 81.6 million in revenues with a transfer and of another half a million in expenditures of 83 and a half and point five with a deficit of 1.4 million in 1617. Although that is a deficit, we still have a reserve of 35% and we do have the trend. The trend does continue and I don't want to make anybody believe otherwise. We do have a downward trend. We do have there is what we would consider a structural deficit. However, we are, as I mentioned in the past, in a much better position than we have we expected to be at this time. And and that is because people people have I mean. I think, Leon, is is Mr. King is is an example of what happened is that that department got decimated. Many of those departments got decimated because of the recession. And we had to tighten and tighten and tighten. And we are now just starting to come out of that recession and trying to make up some lost ground. It doesn't appear that all departments shared equally in these cuts. Well, actually, I disagree. I think everybody in all of their power points. I mean, one of the questions that you asked us to provide was the cuts over time. And if you look back at the presentations that we just heard tonight. Every department had cut. I don't think we saw a department with the number with 38% cut in personnel. Well, because I think the departments didn't actually say what the percentages. I mean, when you have a small number and you cut to people, obviously that percentage is going to look a lot higher. I appreciate. That. I think it was over 90. I'd like to just jump in here. I mean, mine was 12 people. It's now eight. I think that's a 33% cut, if my math is right. And I'm just one, I'm sure, my fellow folks. I heard those kinds of numbers from a lot of them. And don't get me wrong, I think it is probably the one area that we cut the most and probably were the most negligent because we didn't keep up with the times. And we're taking care of that now. And I think that's one of the things that we're asking you to do. And I think it sounds like I'm hearing that you're absolutely on board with that, and I'm not saying that. You know, maybe, you know, hindsight's 2020, but I think the previous councils did what they could to balance the budget the best they could. And sometimes you have unintended consequences. And I would just add that when I bookmarked a remark, when I was looking at this table, when I was preparing for this meeting, that we we have been very fiscally prudent. And you're right. Prior councils have brought us to this point, some good fortune has as well. But it may be time to reconsider having such high rivers reserves. I think that's a discussion this council will have. It's good to be prudent, but there is a cost to that prudence. And for example, Chief Long talking about the fire fighters and the overtime and I don't just mean the dollar amount of the overtime, but when you're looking at the cost, the human cost to personnel of injuries and fatigue, and we really can't expect people to do their best jobs if they're putting in horrendous hours a week. So this is it's you know, I and I don't feel the need to pit any one department against another. I think we are fortunate that we may be able to, you know, loosen the purse strings just a little and and spend a little more a little more prudently. But that's a you know, that's a further discussion to have. But thank you. All right. So this is a slide that you've seen before. This is from April 16th. We discussed some measures that we thought would be useful in filling the gap. The first one was to use a portion of the general fund balance, and this is not in the order of that we're suggesting, but this is exactly the slide that we had that we just put back in using a portion of the balance reserve over 25% to assist. Essentially what we would say is a smoothing effect, this five year smoothing effect that that has impacted the general fund, expanding the expanding and potentially increasing the outdated uut tax as utility users tax in the 2016 election. As we talked about before, that ordinance is 25 years old, does not include cellular, does not include anything about cell phones, something that we could look at. And I'm going to suggest that we come back and do that at a later date. Reduce general fund contributions to the equipment replacement fund. We're going to talk about that in a minute. Requests from departments to cut 1.4% of the budget, which we've done. And we'll talk about that. Hiring excuse me. DeLay hiring and use vacancies savings to reduce the annual deficit. We've got a slide on that. And then also what we talked about earlier, which is the safer grant, which is a potential that we will get, but we can't count on it. We don't know that we're going to get it. But if we do, we suspect that we would save in this fiscal year $250,000 and next fiscal year. Potentially a half a million. And we find out about that in September. We're not sure when we're going to find out about the safer ground not. Okay. So they'll start reviewing applications in May and June and we could hear as early as the fall. Something we can hope for but we can't count on. So one of the things that you all asked us was to. Cost out every one of our suggestions. And so that's what the next couple of slides have done. I just like to walk you through this. This is general fund reductions, which is the first option, which is an across the court, across the board cut of 1.4%. And I'll just go down the slides and everybody is here. They're still here tonight to talk about what this this means. City attorney's office, roughly $15,000 in part time positions, city clerk also, and part time positions in our office. We're suggesting that you eliminate what we originally were trying to. Phil was a disaster preparedness position in finance, where he continued. Now that position has not been hired? No. In finance, part time position services and supplies human resources reduce funding for investigations and employee training. Doesn't mean that we wouldn't do the investigations, it's just that the departments would have to absorb those costs. Normally we try and centralize those costs in h.r. But so that would be something that they wouldn't they wouldn't be able to absorb. Recreation and parks. This is a reduction of the park and swim center maintenance and potentially delay of maintenance. Playground replacement of equipment. In the fire department. This is a this is a a option to eliminate one ambulance. Before you continue the swim center, maintenance under rec and parks. So this is suggesting that we would reduce swim center maintenance. Want to answer that, Amy? Yeah. What it would do is it would we would reduce the maintenance that doesn't affect the health and safety. So that would be things like the pool deck wouldn't be cleaned as often, the ground maintenance wouldn't be kept as well. But we would certainly have to maintain the health and safety aspects such as the chlorine levels and the janitorial. Yeah. Okay. So on fire there, their suggestion was to eliminate one out of the three ambulances that they have. The individuals that currently support that ambulance would return back to suppression. And then that what the impact of that would be to reduce over time. Vice mayor chief long to come up because I see you're asking a lot of questions. Well, it seems to me and maybe there's an explanation that if most of our calls or medical. Why would we if we're not firing anybody? First of all, why would we return to suppression of most of the calls, the medical. Why not reduce suppression? Because that's all. Keep the ambulance. By reducing fire companies, we wouldn't be able to adequately respond to the fires in town. You can't reduce the fires because of the staffing levels that you spoke of. Right. We can. Count on somewhat having the private provider that responds to the county. They would be coming in more often on mutual aid to back us up because of our loss of an ambulance. We've estimated we would need to close the ambulance for seven months out of the year to meet our 1.4% cut. Which ambulance is this? That would be medic four, which is on B Farm Island. We chose that ambulance. It has the lowest number of calls that it runs annually. And when we take into account the revenue that the ambulances produce, Medic four was our choice because we'd only have to close it seven months out of the year. If we closed. Medic two We would have to close it for 13 months to close that same gap. And Medic one, which runs out of Park Street, we would have to close for 18 months. You. I offsetting the revenue that those other ambulances generate. ASHCROFT Well, and this is just something, I think, for all of us to contemplate when when I made my earlier suggestion that maybe it's time to loosen the purse strings a little bit. I and I appreciate I spoke with Chief Long today, and he also emailed me some some financial or statistical data about this. And we do we make revenue from all of these ambulances. But even beyond the making revenue, probably first and foremost is we respond to medical calls of our residents. And so it makes me cringe a bit because we're taking one segment of the city and saying, okay, you're going to be not without an ambulance, because obviously you can still have ambulances cross the bridge. It's just that those two remaining ambulances are going to have a much wider territory to to cover. So anyway, something to think long and hard about. Did you want to respond? I just want to give you a maybe a preview that these are just suggestions. And and they're and there are multiple suggestions. And when you get to the end will sum them all up. And then essentially this is a menu. So we're not suggesting that this is what we're recommending. You had asked us to come back with costing out a 1.4. We went back to the departments. The department said, okay, if I have to cut 1.4, this is what I'm going to give up. So it doesn't mean that we're we're this is our preferred alternative. We're just giving you a menu of options. Well. Go ahead. I'm member de SAC. And on this. Question. Well, thank you very much. You know, the key thing is. And this isn't a debate. But I think it's an it's an important point that I have to make, that it is SFI in the city charter that it says. I think I looked it up three seven. The City Council shall set. Employment and positions. So this is this is the nuts and bolts of why we are here as a council members to make decisions as to what are the positions we think the residents need. But having said that, though. And I think the city manager warmer Dan was getting to this. This is a menu from which we can choose, make different things. Like, for example, if we so choose to build a $1.4 million gap that we're seeing down the road, if we so choose to fill it by, buy these 1.4% cuts . These are the cuts. But then on the very next page, it has other ways of achieving that, closing the $1.4 million gap through vacancies. And I mean, it's not optimum. I know you guys don't like to have vacancies, but the point that the city manager is getting at is that it is going to be a combination. Absolutely. So in the end, to emphasize that is our role, figure out the right balance when it comes to that job. Profile number member Ashcroft. Well, and I think and this might be what the vice mayor is getting to is it is the explanation about why this would be cost savings, because staffing these ambulance requires a significant amount of overtime pay. Currently, we're staffing or are some of our rigs daily with overtime because we're short of the savings would be. Down by reducing that over time, which is staffing our budget in the fire department is 87% personnel. So to make these cuts, we basically have to get into service level cuts. We've tried in the past to do it through programs such as the Marine Operations Program, the technical rescue program. You get to a point where you are decertified and unable to respond to a myriad of calls, which makes us completely ineffective. And we saw an example of that at Brown Beach. Even still, when we did our analysis, we found that cutting these programs still wouldn't get us to our $400,000 mark and. Though I. I don't support having to cut service levels. That was. What looked like it would work the best for us because there would be the backup coming in from other ambulances. And this particular ambulance, though it is isolated, made them made the most sense for us. And did you want to comment? And I think not to not to take more time tonight, but if we can get. An expansion of what you just said and are as an off agenda. I'd appreciate it. So I understand how. How this giving up basically giving up revenue. It gets revenue in light of the overtime. So I can explain that quickly if you want. Or we can do it off another block. Off. Of it's. I like it. Be in the. Audience for the part that's listening. Right. The Cliff Notes show the position. So the the the ambulance comes offline. The individuals that are manning the ambulances are shifted into suppression. And the million dollar overtime that you talked about that we were talking about before is now absorbed by the people that were on the ambulance. But the virtue of having them on the ambulance was that we had an ambulance and we were still meeting our staffing requirements. But with the million dollar over time. But but the downside. So this is what by doing this you're reducing the overtime, the shift of bodies to backfill the suppression overtime. Yeah. And by choosing some of the other options, by not filling open positions, we circle right back into that same thing of more overtime if we want to have the same staffing levels and. Reading a exorbitant amount of work for our current staff, which leads to reason. And we're Ashcroft. I think I'm good. Yeah. And I think in another way, perhaps to say it is that you you don't have extra people for fire suppression and that that is the job of FDA, whereas the ambulance is, as you said, another company will come in and pick up those calls, dispatches account. Some of those calls. We will expect we will experience some delays. Yeah. Okay. So all things to consider. Thank you. And when the when the additional information is provided, if you can give us some estimate of regards to the delays you're anticipating. I can. And they will most likely be increasing at November of 16. The private contractor that services Alameda County. It looks like they will probably leave the leave the contract. And that is kind of up in the air right now with with county EMS is who will fill that position? Paramedics plus who has that contract right now is currently losing about nine, $9 million a year. And. They're looking to get out of the contract and that is their exit date. Is November of 16. So. We're not sure who's coming in there or whether we can count on them to be there for us. Every day. Thank you. A city manager murmured him. Are you asking us right now for a general notion as to what it is that we would like? Absolutely. I mean, I know you have two other slides you want us to hold off. Yes, please. Yeah. Okay. You don't mind? Yes. Okay. So additionally, I just wanted to clarify that because we have the gap in 1617, we asked the departments that that was the time period that we wanted their savings. So as you can see in 1516, there's really not much savings because we don't have a gap. The the the $84,000 was from the city manager's department because we just didn't fill that position at all. Okay. Okay. So we're on fire and police. That suggestion was a not recommendation, but suggestion was to eliminate two school resource officer positions. So as you probably all know, we pay to have two school resource officers, one in Alameda High, one in internal high. And that's not a gift, but it's it's a contribution that we make to the school district. Better mayor. Vice mayor. Are we going to lay off people? No. So that's why it says return that to patrol. How do we. If we don't lay off someone, how do we save hundreds? Those are two vacant positions. So their staffing level would go down by two. So but because they have vacancies, a position they wouldn't be. There would be no layoffs. Okay. So how are we saving real money? In this budget if we're counting positions that don't draw a salary. Because the way we budget is that we budget for the positions to be filled in the year. We expect those positions every year, we expect the opposite. We look at what we have for vacancies. Annually. And you expect and people expect that if we have vacancies, I mean, that's part of what H.R. does. They fill positions. So we expect that those positions are going to be filled. We budget to be filled. And if and so the budgets that you have in front of you include full staffing with. Now there are some exceptions in there because we know that there are vacancies that are we just there plan we don't know where they're coming from but we assume that they're going to happen. So we do factor in some vacancies and we are fact in fact, in the past, we never we never factored in vacancies. We budgeted 100% on July 1st. This year is a first year where we said that's not realistic. And so we have some vacancy savings. But but generally speaking, we assume that we're going to fill the positions. So if you say to us you're going to take those two positions out of the schools, we're not going to backfill those those positions, those two vacant positions will leave them instead of whatever your number is. 98, 88. He'll be authorized 86. So then the cost of these officers are this is $360,000 for two positions. So it's $180,000 a position? That's correct. So does that include benefits? Oh, yeah, it's fully loaded. So the more accurate way to to describe this reduction, because whether the person's on patrol or whether the person who is a management. Is that you're not going to fill two positions. That's that's correct. That's the real bottom line. And how you choose to put them is we can keep them in the schools, but you're not going to fill two positions. Correct. Someplace else. Right. And what we thought, though, that you'd want to see what the impacts would be. But to me, this this is colors the impact because it's it's it's either in the street or on the in the school. And what you'd rather not know. No, but but you can make a choice. There can be two less positions, which means we need them on patrol. And that's the prerogative of the chief is where we need it most. And. Well, you know that. Well, I appreciate that. I mean, it would be much easier for us to just say we're going to reduce two positions. However, I assume that you all wanted to know what the impacts would be to the community. No, no. You go ahead. If I know what I heard, I'm looking at my notes. What I heard Chief Roll Larry said earlier is that. While we have authorized 88 positions, we actually have 84 filled positions. And that in the coming year through this budget, he is seeking to, if he will, well, he will seek to hire four workers to get to what was already authorized. That's it is it is real money and real people. If we decide not to do the SRO because now he's not going to go for his four people. He's going to go for just two. Correct. So this is this isn't academic. It's number Ashcroft. And just for clarification, this this was a proposed cut from police or did we. Was that. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And then I'm just saying and I've discussed this a bit with Chief Hilary. I mean, there's there's this is something that's definitely on the table. We can consider doing it, not doing it. And there's other possibilities I referred earlier to police department has two officers assigned to the housing authority. Correct. Two. And there's you can probably tell this better than I and those two officers. We get some reimbursement from the housing authority, not 100%, but we get $210,000. So what percentage is out of there? But was it similar to. They would be similar? Yeah, they would be the exact same price. It would be 360,000 for the two officers. So. So but is more Madame alluded to this is sort of a gift we've given to the school district, but we heard from at least one school district employee this. She's an employee of the school district who spoke to us earlier today that you know how important the school resource officers are when and, you know, we don't tell the school district how to do their budgeting, but that's something certainly that they might consider as well. Yeah, it just so you all know and so the public knows this isn't something that I want to do. I mean, the school resource officer program has been a very valuable part of what we do for 20 years. KELLY Laura mentioned that earlier. It was very painful when we had to give up. I mentioned earlier in the presentation we gave up the middle school, school resource officer. We went from 3 to 2. Our partnership with the school district is amazing. They will tell you that they love having those officers in the school. I can tell you that they by themselves handle calls by them within the school that don't even get dispatched to patrol because they're already there to handle them. It's an invaluable resource. We talk about community policing now. There's never been a better time or more important time in the last 20 years than now to have officers in the schools. Having said that, if I'm presented with a situation as a business decision on whether or not I have to cut 1.4%, which is going to be two officers, and those officers aren't being funded. By the school district. That's where I'm going to make that's my first move. Not what I want to do, but as a business decision. If we're sharpening pencils, then I'm going to and I mentioned this earlier, patrol is the backbone of the organization. If I go down to spots, that's where those two officers go so that I can still we can still respond to calls in three, a little over 3 minutes and have enough people on the street. So and I don't know if you know this, but between 230 in the morning and say 630 in or 645 in the morning, we have five police officers on the street, five and one sergeant for the entire city. Now I say that to you and I say that to public because I know people don't. It's not. We're rolling the dice. Mm hmm. Every night. And we do that in part to be efficient with the way we staff because we know that our calls for service generally go down. But I mentioned earlier we have five patrol boats. That's one person in each of those five patrol boats and one sergeant to supervise them for that four hour period in the middle of the night. So I'm trying to do this to be efficient. But it and it's a tough it's a tough call. And I'll tell you also, in the police budget, you have. $186,000 a year. Also going to the school district for the crossing guard program. Am I going to leave those intersections unstaffed so the kids can't cross? Absolutely not. But I think it's important for people to know that that brings the total up to about $546,000 that we are providing in services to the school district every year out of that $30 million police budget. Add to that the $320,000 that the city's contractually obligated to contribute to FAS, which comes out of the police budget for the benefit of the community. It just happens to be attached to our budget. Chief, do you know by any chance what other in other communities, if they are paying for the school resource officer? There's there's a mixture. I was able today I made some phone calls in Hayward, for example, is they pay for a few. They have eight school resource officers in Hayward. Some of them are grant funded. Some of them are paid for by the district or partially paid for by the district. The Hayward Unified and part of them are donated, if you will, by the by the police department. Um. Are there other cities? It's a different mixture. So do we have any grant? We have any grants eligible for grants. I am unaware of a grant that would help us fund two police officers in the schools right now. I mean, I'm certainly I'm certainly agreeable to go out and seek and find those grants if we can get them. But you talking about school districts, the school district in Hayward, had it gotten funding? They have. Yeah, they have gotten Grant. Correct. The school district. I just I literally found that at lunch today, so I haven't had a chance to to look into it. In San Leandro, have some issue. Pardon me. In San Leandro, I have some issue with I thought I remember our member of Congress got some grant money for them and then people were not happy when the schools decided to spend it on school resource officers. Yeah, I'm not I'm not sure I apologize. I don't know about that one. You know, so I think a lot of times you can have education. People say, well, you're giving us money for education that should be spent on education, not on police officers. Chief, could you do this for vacancies? I mean, it seems to me like, you know, a lot of the the surplus and excess, you know, revenues we've had or decreased expenses we've had over the past few years are because of this delay. And can you just kind of explain, we can't keep counting on, you know, being under staffed by four people in the police department forever. But can you explain kind of why we have this delay? Sure. There's there's a number of factors that go into it. One one of them was alluded to during the human resources presentation there. They were cut and weren't able to do, you know, the level of recruitments that I think that they you know, they would have liked to have done. So that was part of the problem. I mean, they're they're working with one hand tied behind their back, trying to get recruitments done. When we do identify candidates, we're talking about a background process that takes a couple of months. Then we're talking about if we're it's a brand new recruit with no training, they go to the police academy for 16 or 18 weeks, and then when they complete the police academy, they come to us and they spend another 16 or so weeks in field training. So we're if I hired a brand new officer with no experience or training tomorrow morning, we'd see them on the street in a perfect scenario, about a year from now, one officer. If if we're lucky and we get a lateral police officer to come from another agency who's already been trained and has some experience, we still have to put them through the field training program, but sometimes that can be expedited because of their experience. But we're still talking about a minimum of ten weeks plus the background period. I will tell you that in the last couple of years, something that we've done to try to expedite, expedite the background process without being sloppy and having negligent hiring practices, we have contracted out to an outside firm at a much lower rate than what it would cost for my officers to do backgrounds. And we have that company doing backgrounds for us on a contractual basis for half the price that we used to pay to have police officers doing the backgrounds. And we get them generally get them back quicker than than we do here because the officers have other duties assigned to them. We're this outside firm. That's all they do. That's all they do is backgrounds. So that's been a benefit to us. It's been difficult. A couple of years ago, we were up to about eight vacancies. And this is sort of a it's a it's a it ebbs and flows. I as as recently as September, I was down to two vacancies. And then we had a new recruit that was identified to start the academy in October, decided three days before or maybe maybe a week before the academy, he didn't want to be a police officer. So he pulls out. We don't have we didn't have a backup officer background added to that we could put in we lost that spot in the academy. Then we had somebody retire and boom, just like that. In October I was back to four and that's where I've pretty much remained. We've hired some people since then, but we've also lost a couple of people. I have some anticipated retirements coming up later in the year. So if I hire four or five people tomorrow, I'm going to be right back right back where I started. That's that's kind of the problem. It takes a long time to background train and put a police officer out in the street where they can work as a solo beat officer. We're trying to get laterals, but it's difficult. You know, it's difficult to do that. I hope that answers your question. Yes. I'll comment more about that later. Thank you. Okay. Okay. If we move. On. You think? No, these are good. And in fact, we we totally anticipated the longest discussions in these areas. Public works reduce the number of arborist reports. That's for trees and part time staffing for graffiti removal. Weight and facility made. Before we move on there. Now the arborist reports is that going around determining which trees need to be are to see. That's right. Removed. That's right. So if we don't have that. I think we're not yet eliminating it 100%, but we're just reducing the number. It's my understanding during the drought that we've had an increase in the number of trees that need to be removed. Safety. So I would I'd like information on that. And then also in regards to graffiti removal, personally, I think that I've seen more graffiti across town as it is. And I in regards to that, maybe, maybe our chief could help with this because I think that actually you want to remove the graffiti as quickly as possible. Maybe you have some data that indicates or can help me or help us with that. So over the years, on the topic of graffiti, the city has started this concrete program. So a long time ago what we used to do was we'd fill out this form in triplicate and send it through the interoffice mail, and then public works would get it and somebody would go out and clean up the graffiti. Now we have the concrete so an officer can literally just go online and and send the request off to public works. If it's public property, if it's private property, we'll go and contact the business owner, because even though they are a victim, it's their responsibility to get rid of the blight. Now that stuff comes up. I mean, I can drive down the street tonight and there's no graffiti and tomorrow morning there might be. And we try to get rid of it as as fast as we can. But, uh, but there is, there is a process, there is something that the city does have in play. Public works tracks those requests just like dumped furniture and some other things. But my concern goes to the, the correlation of, of if you leave your graffiti that you can have an increased amount as well as other violence or. Yes, there's there's a well published theory and it's called the Broken Windows Theory of Policing, where if you allow a nuisance to exist, broken windows, abandoned vehicles, that it attracts additional incidents like that. So more people will dump their cars, more people will come in, spray paint, break windows and whatnot. So the quicker we can get to that stuff and abate it, the better off we are. So my concern would be that if this isn't removed quickly, and I can tell you right now it feels like it's as it is. It's not. I really do feel like I'm seeing more graffiti than I used to. So I would I don't think we're keeping up with it as it is. But then I think my concern would be then we would need more police to address this issue of having the graffiti stay there longer. Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with you. Thank you. So that would be. Those are. So I would have concerns about both of those for those reasons. Can I just say. Yes, I agree with everything the chief said and the mayor said about that. And my experience has been I know I had a constituent in the last couple months email me and it was about graffiti on his private property. And I probably emailed Public Works and the chief and I mean within 24 hours it was in a couple of times this. I mean, I so I think if if anybody sees graffiti, there's a way that you can let the city know. And when they know, they you know, I know we're talking about proposed cuts. That that also makes me very wary. But I mean, right here right now, I'd say the response is really fast. So but report it when you see it. I think I think other people must be seen and not just me. We'll get. There. Thank you. All right. Okay. Finally, library transfer 28,000. This would be for Fleet. I want it to the fleet and facility maintenance. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. 28 eight. And that's reduced janitorial contracts. That's here at City Hall from three days to two, which I think is reasonable part time staff, vehicle repairs. That's a staffing that they hire. They have some part time staffing to do fleet fleet repairs. So it would just it would take a little longer. So how does that impact the rest of our the people that need the who uses these cars? We all use it mostly public works and public safety. So do we have extra cars that then those are that they could be sitting around waiting for repairs. I don't know the answer to that. I'm not sure that they have extra cars laying around. I think instead of I mean, they usually if they they bring it down to the garage and instead of taking three days to repair, it's now going to take four days. So assuming that they made some accommodation for the three days, they just continue to make that accommodation for another day. Okay. In our janitorial contract. So that is that outsourced? That's correct. So do we know what those people get paid? I'd like to know what they get. I was hoping that you were going to ask that question to when we had the ACA contract, because Liam was the one who had the the answer to that. So I'm sorry, you don't have that denial. Free to prompt Mary Todd another. Prevailing way deep. In my brain. So I would like to know what. We'll find out. After the outsourcing of our Janet Janitorial staff of. Right. Okay. And then the last one is library transfer. This is for materials. So this was offered by Jane as reduction the general fund every year transfers. Roughly $2 million to the library supports the library $2 million. And so she would reduce that by about $30,000 in materials. And there's usually $2 million for materials. So the general fund contributes $2 million to the library annually for its operating expenditures. And so instead of. 2 million, it would be less 2 million. Less $30,000. And the library. Have have have the hours been reduced for the library over the years? Yes. And she's going to talk about that next week. All right. Right. That's not general fund. Okay. Okay. So this is hopefully understand this is just a menu. Don't have to do a wall but get you closer to your 1.4 number. And before we can continue, we would need a motion to continue past 11 p.m., which is in like 3 minutes. We have a motion to do that. Ooh. It's that emotion. If we have emotion, do we have a second? All those in favor. I. All right? Yes, I know. All right. Motion with House unanimously. Thank you. Continues hoping you vote no. Okay. So on your menu of options. One of the things that we suggested was to look at our current vacancies. I'm probably going to need some help from Miss Adair, so I'm going to ask her to come up, but I'm going to try and go through it and she help me out with this. This is kind of complicated because as you see, the footnote number one, it says from the expected date of hire. So we're not again, as we mentioned this year, we're now saying we actually, Ms.. Adair consulted with H.R. and said, when do you think is reasonable that you're going to fill these positions? And based on that, we had some vacancy savings. So this these these numbers are based on. So we're going to show you 12 months of savings and 18 months of savings. But it's 12 months from the date that we expect the person to be hired, not 12 months from July 1st. Hopefully, that's clear. Okay. So these are currently the vacancies, and I. I want to apologize. This number changes daily. Mm hmm. Okay. So this is part of the reason why there is changes in the start in the in the PowerPoint. Literally, these numbers change daily because sometimes we have people retiring. We have people resigning. We have people coming in. So this is a this is a these are fluid numbers. This is the best we could get for tonight. It's it's I would say it's probably 95% accurate. And we have all the department heads here tonight. So if there's any changes, they'll let you know. But this is this is pretty pretty darn close to what we're what we're seeing. Okay. So we have one position fleet mechanic that's in public works that's a fleet is paid for by and again, this is all general fund. So it would be eight it would be 15 months vacant in fiscal 15, 16. You see what the savings would be because it's only 12 months. You're going to get lesser savings in 16. 17. Okay. And I'll show you real quickly. The next slide is for 18 months. So we're doing 12 months and then 18 months. And do any of these positions by having this delay result in overtime, that is not as a true savings. I think. The fire firefighters generally would result a lot just. Because. Okay, so this was the m this. No, this is not the ambulance. This is. The vacancies. So should you not fill the positions? And because of the minimum staffing at the fire department, what will happen is that they would have to call other staff on overtime to come in and fill those spots. Right. So unlike with the ambulance where you're sort of freeing up bodies to go into and fill vacant, you know, the overtime that's actually real savings here. There will be overtime. You want to say something? I would add that in some departments like Parks, we've had two full time out of out of ten workers. We've had two vacancies since last December. And while we don't have overtime accrual, we we have a significant addition. We've gone way over budget in our part time. So we've had a full time vacancy savings. We've gone about 40,000 over on our part time. So that's where I would say other costs accrue. So it is not 100% savings, but there still is some savings. Okay. So I think for each of these, there should be a footnote letting you know when there are additional costs in overtime or part time or whatever it is, because then it's not a savings. It's not let's here. You're going to get a chart you won't be able to read. So as this chart really is not meaningful, is has limited value. I think it's an order of magma. Yeah. I have the information of knowing how much you're paying for overtime or these other positions. And I think the complete picture. When we start talking about slicing at this, you also. Have to. Understand, if we don't have a full time person, we're not paying benefits which. Makes it even more complicated when you have a part time person. Correct? So. I think this is an order of magnitude for budget purposes that tells us where we can get close to this and whatever we choose off this menu, I think then we can own down. And I think we're we're going to make decisions not just by every last dollar and sense amount. You know, digging deep into the weeds, but by some principles that we apply to, you know, where where would we make cuts? I mean, I can still hear. Mayor Gilmore always saying that you want to cut the make your cuts as far away from the service to people as you can. And so, I mean, there's there's some overarching principles will apply. I don't I personally don't feel that I need extra footnotes, because as you've both already stated, these are really fluid situations. Right. Everyday SOG also bear in mind that earlier what we heard especially from Chief Long, is that he does have an overtime budget baked into his cake. The problem, though, is that he doesn't want to go. He doesn't want to. I mean, we'd rather not use it, but even worse, we'd rather not go above what he had originally anticipated. So. So if we don't fill the three firefighters, for example, here, in some respects, I believe that there is an over time a projected end to his budget. The hope, though, is that that. To the extent that we don't fill those three positions and to the extent that we have the three people still in fire in the ambulance, that means that because he's required to come up to that yellow line, remember the yellow line earlier, and he's going to have to dip into his overtime budget. So and so so just to add that, I also I want us to keep in mind that we have a lot of information to present before we go into our actual budget hearings. And I mean, really making the decisions. We have another set of departments we're going to hear from, and I don't want to see us keep asking for more and more details to come back to us. And we can't decide we can't move forward until we have it, because in some ways that's just deferring, making the decision. We do need to act. And I think I think staff has has done an amazing job pulling all this together and with all the limitations that we've heard discussed. So I, for one, am going to try to, you know, make as much sense out of this. I as I said, I, I had conversations with our police chief and our fire chief because I was having trouble understanding some of these numbers. And he very patiently walked me through them. But, I mean, that's something that's always an option for any of us. And we can bring that information out to the public, as I did tonight. But I don't want to see us just keep, you know, saying, oh, we have to have this. We have to have that. That's okay. So what I'd like to do is just maybe highlight some of these. Well, it's my understanding, for instance, the fleet mechanic we don't hire that the the the cars were not the example was that they'd be sitting there an extra day as opposed to hiring having additional costs. Mm hmm. The I.T. director. If we postpone that, it appears that we don't pay extra to our those for employees in that department, but they do work longer hours. Absolutely. But there is no additional money to staff the current staff that works 24 seven. No, they do. And I and I've heard her. So I think I would I think it is important to make a distinction here. This these the next one, again, as technology services coordinator, which again goes to, I think I g. Mm hmm. And so then you have your four positions working 24 seven without getting additional money. And that and those have missions are different. Right. The accountant, as far as I know in that department, then it's your, your department that is then working longer hours with your your set staff. So there I think these are these the first four positions are different from possibly in fact the balance of the sheet here in regards to who. Right. I think the firefighter and the police officers, those are you could argue that the overtime there is more critical. It's more likely to happen because it's a public safety issue. And I don't want to argue that. I'm looking at regards to dollars, though. When you're looking at the costs here, the top four positions seem to actually be what I would consider more real in regards to these dollars actual what the actual savings would be. The other ones appear to have access to other funding from overtime. That that is different. So I, I think that that could be noted somehow. So the public is aware on the balance sheet. Okay. Looks like phantom savings. Right. I mean, I understand some savings. Mm hmm. I understand. I understand what you're saying. I probably choose some different terminology. Thank you. So, as you can see, for 12 months, if you keep all of these positions vacant in 15, 16, you have roughly the net is 1.5 million in savings in the first in this first year and not a lot in the second year because it's only those positions are only vacant for 12 months as opposed to those very same positions. If you hold them open for 18 months, again from the data higher, you're going to see significantly more savings. Same savings in 1516, but significantly more savings in 1617, obviously, because the position is open for longer. And then you get to your 1 million in 1617. Just just to clarify, the underneath the double line, this is the total savings. But because we've already accounted for some vacancies, we've reduced it. So so there's no phantom savings there. Those are real savings. Okay. So that's that's a menu of options there if you want to consider vacancies. Other options that we talked about very quickly, reducing contributions to the fleet replacement, the equipment replacement fund. Those are internal service funds that the general fund departments, police and fire contribute to. It's not a lot. And essentially what it would do would just delay their ability to purchase fewer vehicles in the future. It's not a ton of money. So it's not a huge wouldn't be a huge delay. The Uut we talked about before we'll come back with that I think probably within I'd like to come back within the next probably 3 to 6 months on that. Do we have an estimate of what the. Increase would be if we did attack on the uut. I really don't know. We haven't done the analysis. Some point in doing. That we will be reducing the vacation payout contribution. These are what's called compensated absences. We have been funding that because we were sort of we were not doing well. We've been funding it to the tune of like $250,000. That fund is doing just fine and I think it's totally appropriate to reduce it to $75,000 this year or by $75,000 this year. And then, of course, you have a balance in your in your general fund from last year or from what we what we expect for 1516 of $1.2 million. We think you're going to have a surplus this year. You could use a portion. You could use that and carry it over or you could use a little bit more. I'm just it's just an option that you can use some of that essentially profit if you want to call it profit. Not really, but. And roll it over to the next year. Okay. So this is a summary for your consideration of all the things we just talked about. This is the across the board cut the fleet replacement vacation payout, holding the vacancies for 12 or 18 months. So you can't do both so that those numbers don't add up. If you if you if you try to add them up, they're not going to add up because it's an either or. But if you hold your vacancies for 12 months with all those things, you get to about 1.6 million. If you hold your vacancies for 18 months with all those things, you get three point roughly 3.7 of of available funds to close the gap. Question member. Thank you, Madam Mayor. So when you're talking about closing the gap, what is the gap? The gap is 1.4. So I'm like, okay. Let me rephrase that. Oh, sorry. Out to 1920, what is the gap? 1920, the gap is $5.4 million. On page six. Right. But so. I guess. And we're we, we do a biennial budget, so we're trying to balance the budget for two years. So it's 5.4 plus 4.3 is a 3.1 or is it. Yes. Yes. Each year this. Year. So I guess then the the next question then is if we quote unquote, close the gap, where's our estimated reserves going to be in 1920? In 1920 if. Okay. I don't know that. Do you understand the question? Is he saying if we use up all the reserves in each year? I think if we don't use any reserve, if if we take these austerity measures and make these long term changes in 1920. Oh, you know, we we know our revenues may be 5.2 or as our expenditures are going to be, 80.7 is going to be 85.2. I mean, are we looking at still having are we doing all of this doing this exercise to have a 38% reserve in five years? Or are we doing it to have a 20% reserve? You know, we do nothing. It looks like it's 18. Well, this will be one council decision how you choose to actually do it. But theoretically, if you if we decide not to have any annual operating deficits in any of those years, and we always will budget in such a way where the expenditures will will not exceed our revenues. You will always have a zero and you will technically we will continue having 38% at the end of 1920. That's that. Thank you. So that actually concludes this portion of our presentation. And so this time. Let's go back and look at these numbers because we were looking at 1.4 million of savings. The deficit grows in the future years. Correct. So that that's why my point was if we choose to have zero annual operating deficit in each year, which means in 1718 we'll have to manager expenditures and transfers out to reduce from 86.3 million down by another 3.1 million. Same thing in 1819 by the deficit of 4.3 in 1920 by the deficit in that particular year, by 4.4, you will end up having 38%. Now, some of the costs that you reduce in 1617 may be ongoing costs and maybe in the future years. Just by cutting something in 1617, your reduction will roll over into future years, and you don't have to maybe cut as much in the future years. But in the end, if you're just still trying to get to zero, you will end up at 38%. Thank you. Oh, Vice Mayor, I. Think I think the other thing and I don't suggest that we talk about it in detail tonight, because I'd like to have a coherent conversation about it, is that the difference between revenues in 1516, which is our year we're entering and 1617 is only $200,000. And I find it very hard I don't think I think that is overly conservative because we have houses coming out of the ground at the end of 2016 that will be sold in 17. But they're going to hit the tax roll, but they're going to hit the tax bill because it's dirt now assessment and then it's could be a house assessed on many parcels. So I, I think that's part of the realistic projection that I'm looking for is to to look at what, think what. And I understand why we are very conservative, but there's reality that's out there that's going to hit us. And I think we have to manage that expectation, too. So I'd like some analysis that. We actually have done it. Absolutely, because we've had this very conversation. Selena went ahead. So we did have that conversation that actually did come from Liz. Portion. What you're not seeing in the detail of it, the revenues were increased, let's say property taxes by about 3%. But there are certain taxes that you can increase, such as your single family homes. And it goes up with with disgusted on April 16th. You can increase it no more than 2% per year. But but don't forget, also, Alameda Landing is in a former redevelopment project area. But Marina Cove two two is not. And those houses were. Yes, it. Is. It's in B whip. But but those houses the land is got a much lower. Valuations go up more than 3%. So any increment that you get is going to go to your successor agency through what's now a successor agency. What the direct impact to the city in this particular case is going to be is when the house has actually sold or more immediate impact, I should say. That's when the city is going to get the property transfer tax. Going to happen in 16. So if you were to look at the detail when we provided it, you can look we increased property transfer tax by, I want to say 15, 16%. So we can only increase it by, I think so much. And that's. True. And then also, don't forget, your duty is going down. So. So it's there. I, I had this very, very conversation with Elena. And and if you look, there's there's adjustments. There's one time money in there that we cannot continue to, to, to count on. I would love to have that be. More than $200,000. Yes. So, I mean, technically, just as a maybe another option to think about. We're doing a two year budget. We're way more aware as to or, you know, can predict what's going to happen in 15, 16, 16, 17 is further down the road. We don't know what's going to happen. Generally speaking, as I understand it, with my annual budget and what I would have done anyway would have to come back to council and say, well, this is how we've done the year before when the audit is over and here's your mid-year update saying This is where we are today and this is our expectation. At that point in time, we will know more where we are in a variety of revenues with where the economy is going, how we're doing here. So another option is that if you choose to go with this, you will know a year from now if you do need to cut more or if you need to make that cut because it may be so that. I don't know if it's going to be true or not. I cannot have a crystal ball or I don't have one. If I did, I probably wouldn't be here. But technically, the revenues, what we've projected, if they do come in higher, you may be in a better position. And we don't know. Maybe our vacancy savings from 1514 fiscal year 1415 are going to be greater than we expected. So your fund balance is going to grow at some point. As one of you mentioned. You have to decide, well, to what point do you want to grow it? And at one point in time, you're going to actually start saying, well, you know, this is a lost opportunity for us that we could have spent putting into whatever program you wanted to put it in, which the higher the fund balance grows. Yes, it's a one time money and you may decide to use it for one time purposes. Or you can choose to say, well, you know, this year this is an important item for us that we would like to continue funded. So that's going to be up to you. It's going to be your choice. But the other way to look at it also is if we don't know what's going to happen in 1617, we will have to bring it to you anyway at midyear, or at least I would assume that that's going to be a prudent way to do it, which we'll know more. And you can maybe decide at that point in time if there's any other significant items you want to take a look at. One of the things that Mr. Van Dam said at the April 16th meeting, it's only $1.4 million. Yes, it doesn't look good, but it's a margin of error that we may have expected, which could be from the revenue that we did not projected to be high enough. But as council direction was, we do not want to say that one time revenues are being budgeted in the future years. We've taken those out. We were trying to take a look and say, here's the increases that we're expecting, provided that in the last two years we already had increases in 10 to 15%, which are already built into the base of the revenues. So just by looking at it, we are not living in the bubble and we know that the bubble bursts once in a while. We can only increase it by ten, ten, ten or 15% only for so long. Eventually it's going to slow down. So we don't have a crystal ball to say what it will be. But that's one of those things. It's an estimate that's the best we could have provided. For right now. All right. At this point, I'd like to call our two speakers, Rob Rato and then John Spangler. Got a little. Back to your usual time. Thank you. God bless you. Rob Reiner, executive director, Park Street Business Association. And you know, I got to tell you, I've been coming to. City council budget sessions for 16 years. Okay? And I believe the five of you have an opportunity that the city council has not had since probably 2001. Okay. You're not flush, but you're projecting a 38% reserve at the end of next fiscal year. You're projecting a 1.4 million. Deficit the next fiscal year. You're building a two year budget. Take the shot. Go ahead and accept the $1.4 million deficit. Fund these people. I will tell you what. If you guys. Aren't sending cake to H.R. every damn Thursday afternoon, an ice cream to it. You're going to have to do something, okay? They don't have time to eat it. I know. I will. They go. You know, you've got an opportunity. I happen to agree with a number of speakers who know far. More about this than I do. I, I think your revenue projections are way low. You've got a chance to set a two year budget at funding funding levels that will provide services to the people in this town who either live. Here or work here. That had been cut to the bone. You know that I work with the city staff in almost every department on a daily. Basis during the year. You've got a great staff. And, you know, I get up here and talk. About the fire department, the police department a lot, and God bless you. I love you both. But, you know, I t h r public works. These people are busting their ass for you and the people in this town. Give them some resources. You've got the opportunity. Elaina just set it into you know, when you start going through this process for the next two year budget, you're going to look at what revenue has come in with Alameda landing the houses. And I'm going to make a social comment that I'm not going to make on the record anyplace else possibly development out of Alameda Point. I know, Marilyn, I should have. Said it but you know, there are opportunities to increase revenue and that's always the part of the park that always seems to get lost. We always talk about, you know, expenditure, expenditure, expenditure. How about let's get out there and do something about that revenue? Because that's part of it also. And you know, I'm just a bookie guy that runs the business association. Like I said, you guys, the folks behind me, they know more a lot about this. But it just looks so simple to me that you've got this opportunity. And the last, you know, Elaina brought up that that slide from five years ago. I was in this room when they brought out the slide that projected a $25 million. Deficit this year. And I have three more seconds. Yes, I'm on a roll. And I swear to God. The fire council members that were out there and I think you were one of them, Frank. I thought they were all going to be throats that night. Well, guess what? It didn't work out that way. Okay. Take the opportunity. Do what you've been elected to do. Show some leadership. Let's get some services and let's move. On and get some stuff done. Thank you. Thank you. I was that animated this late in the evening. Excellent. Okay, John, you got a hard act to follow there. Thank you, Mayor Spencer, members of the Council and hard working staff. I have been very impressed ever since I moved to Alameda by the quality of staff. In the city. And I've always felt I had I got my money's worth as a taxpayer, both as a homeowner and as a renter, as well as someone who's sat in these chairs for a number of hours, maybe not as many as Rob, but it's something I hope Rob is sitting down. I want to tell you for the record, I agree with everything he just said about the city budget. And I wish I could be sitting down and say that. But here's the approach I want to build on what Rob just said, which is what I what I started with. And I thank the interim city manager and other people have provided me for information on this. My first point coming in tonight was to support the public information officer. The reason for that is that despite the advances in technology that we heard about tonight and had been going on for a number of years, the city's information distribution and management. Process is still hierarchical from the top down. City sends out information out to the community and cast its bread on the waters, and then it sort of disappears. Each department is in its own little silo. Side by side. Not really communicating that much in terms of community involvement, especially across departments. If you had a public information officer whose sole job was to flatten the communication network in the city of Alameda. So that the city's communication network was flattened and more horizontal, not hierarchical, top down and bottom up so that you got more community input from more people. On more topics. One of the outcomes of that could be you'd have more ideas on how the city could raise money from new sources. That's one. Two, if you go to the ballot with a new tax measure or change in the utilities tax, as was mentioned, you're more likely to get a yes vote. The third important aspect of the public information officer is going to be transparency. There are some people in this town who wouldn't trust anybody in city hall as far as they could throw. Now, whether that is as direct or not as an impression that they might have. And I don't think it's correct. The impression exists. And a public information officer could go a long way to make transparent. Everything that goes on in the city. I'd like to go on because I've been here through what I count, about ten budget items. Please continue. I'll do my best rabbi to be quick, but I think this is really important to get more input input from the city all the way across. The closest example we have is public works, using this open community process on some of their public works projects. That's the only one I know of in the city. Now it goes without saying the department's going to need to be in on this. But if you go through the city website, the new city website, which is supposed to be more transparent, it's still hard to navigate. And the information is not a two way street. It's one way from the city out. And that gets very frustrating. I want to contribute more. I couldn't beard six had to pick my wife at the train station, but I might have been able to send a text message if if that option had existed in the budget session while I was waiting for her to come in. That doesn't exist now. That's one of the options to put something detailed on. As to public safety. If I were king and I'm not and I don't envy any of you the amount of work you have to do with all those numbers. I would like to see another 8 to 10 public safety officers. In this town. How the police department alone could use ten. In order to really get community policing literally on the ground, to have police officers walking the business districts, have bicycles, bicycling, bicycle peddling, officers out on the streets, have more officers out doing community education intervention and more traffic enforcement. I'm not going to tell you to even try to tell you how many people I see driving at 40 miles an hour before they get to the tubes at six in the morning when I take Linda to the train. Four or five days a week. And that's when it's dark. And that's the kind of condition in which a woman was murdered by a speeding car at Eagle and Constitution a few years ago. Huh? Murdered. Cars are deadly weapons. We're not doing enough to enforce that. It also would solve the burglaries that took place in broad daylight in my own neighborhood a couple of days ago. Somebody wanted to unplugged an air compressor and walked away with it while the woman was in the house with the door open. You could right a wind up. Thanks. I'm counting 3 minutes for such an item. Only tonight, but that's pretty much what I have to say, actually. Thank you. And I really think it is time to to work on putting. More people back into the service provision aspect of this budget so that it will pay the dividend dividends, including how to figure out how to get more revenue into the city. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right. At this point, any other comments? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Member de sa. Thank you very much. There's a lot. Here to digest. So I think my. 5000 feet in the air. Observation recommendation. You know, this is just something for the city manager and staff to think about is and for the public to think about is. I think we need to begin from the outset of saying, you know, we keep saying we have a 38% general fund reserve. I think what people might want to say instead is we have a general fund reserve right now of $30.8 million. Right. My reading there. Right. Mm. I mean, I think I'm reading that right. Ending fund balance $30.8 million. Right? Right. I mean, that's a lot of money. And I realize that we're always wary of taking on costs that will continue down the down the road. When we have. You know, with regard to any amount of revenue streams that we have from the vantage point of the public, I think these are costs that that people want. So, I mean, as one council member, I think I am willing to spend I would suggest that we spend some amount of that general fund reserve towards that $1.4 million deficit. And the way that I would principal prioritize it is using the principle of. You know basically things that that assist kids. And when I think look at the things that assist kids you know I do see the $55,000 parks and swim maintenance that's on the possible chopping block. And I do see $360,000 for the school resource officer and I do see the $28,000 in materials for the library. And I know this isn't part of the general fund. I do know that the Parks and Rec Department would like a program manager. I know it's not part of the general fund, but nonetheless. I think. You know, and to make it whole. I mean, I would. One thing that I would love to go to bat for is to do that for two years now. Or 1516. How does that affect the. If we take those things off the table using that 30.8, a portion of the $30.8 million reserve, as then that lessen the $1.4 million. I haven't done the math, but I think are lessons that $900,000, by the way, do math. So then it becomes the close, the gap of $900,000 using, you know, whatever mixture of strategies that we have here. So and I want to say one one last thing. You know, I realize that the fire department, you know, needs to figure out how to deal with the need for three more workers. So I realize that. But and so I'm not precluding that as a councilmember. All I'm saying is my priority of using some portion of that $30.8 million of reserve or as these kids type of. Thank you. Enemy member OTI. Thank you, Madam Mayor and I really enjoyed my first budget presentation. For all the general fund entities, today is very informational. So I'm going to make one specific comment and then kind of go back to the to the high level. You know, I think if we look at, you know, the cost savings for eliminating the disaster preparedness position and that's about 210,000 over the next two years. And if you plug that into the two year budget and you basically turn that 1.4 into a 1.2, and if you net that deficit in 1617 with the 1.2 estimated surplus in 1516 over the two year budget process, and we're doing a two year budget today, you know, we have zero deficit over the two year process. So. You know, that's an idea. But, you know, I think if we're we're looking at two years and, you know, rather than look at each year as a chunk, you know, look at the to look at the big picture. So I just want to go back a couple of years. 2013, you kind of bring a little bit of my experience, you know, working at the state. You know, if you remember back then we were coming out of the recession, the state had six years of of disastrous budgets where we had massive cuts, not not unlike what we faced here at the city and that a lot of my colleagues had to go through and had to make those tough decisions. And then we, as the voters passed Prop 30, it's temporary income, kind of similar to our one time income and one time revenues that we have here in the city. We have it. You know, we're going to do something with it, but we know we can't count on it forever. And then we had a governor who basically began to do a couple of things. You know, one, he would have conservative revenue estimates and he'd come out with a budget in January. And this is three years in a row now. He's done this. He came out with the budget in January with revenue estimates that were far below what the legislature thought they would be. And then he revised them a little bit in May and upward, but they were still far lower than the legislature estimated they would be. And ultimately those estimates were far lower than the actual revenues that we encountered in the state. So we've seen it now for two years and next week we'll see them revised and we'll know whether his his revenue numbers are going to increase. But, you know, I imagine they are. But what he did was he basically said, let's put some money away to take care of some of our long term for a rainy day fund, which we kind of have at the city. We have reserves in case we have a disaster or an earthquake or any other issue. You know, put some way to solve some of the structural problems facing the state. You know, we took care of some work, taking care of some of our infrastructure. We spent some money on, you know, shoring up the teachers retirement system. So things like that that, you know, long term issues that we needed to take care of. And then the third thing was begin to grow some of these programs when we were in that austerity mode of six years, you know, rather than go back and keep cutting, we began to restore and not spend wildly like drunken sailors, but, you know, spend responsibly and invest in things that, you know, are important to us. So what I look at the decisions, you know, we're facing today, you know, we have whether it's 38% or 30.8 million, you know, we'll keep it at 30.8 million, four points of discussion if we're trying to today come up with a plan that over the course of the next five years, you know, eliminates an operating deficit, well, then that's going to be $30.8 million in the bank in our reserves in 1920. So what I'm having difficulty, you know, explaining to constituents and what I will have difficulty is saying, okay, we have 38% reserves. We want to maintain 38% reserves or 31, 30, 30, 31 million in the bank. But you at the same time, we want you to pay more tax or say to constituents, we want to maintain this high level reserve money in the bank. Yet we want to tell some of these staff members that are part time, sorry, you're out of here. We don't want you anymore because we need to be austere or tell the folks on Bay Farm that, sorry, guys, we want to keep 38% reserves and 30 million in the bank because and so you're not going to have an ambulance. And by the way, your bridge is going to be shut down during the day. So that ambulance that that now is going to have to come from the main island is going to be delayed even longer or tell the kids, you know, this this issue of police and community relations, you know, that's one of the civil rights issues of our time. And one of the important ways you can build community trust with the police department is to have these officers, you know, in the schools when kids are young and formative and learning. I got a call from a teacher today who said, why are you considering cutting that? I got a call from a Board of Education or email from a Board of Education member yesterday. So I don't know how I can go out and explain to them we're doing this so we can keep $30 million in the bank five years from now. And the same thing with the park in the swim, you know, in the library, materials and graffiti. You know, I'll tell you that in my day job, the most complaints I get from citizens in Alameda besides Caltrans is graffiti. I mean, that's something we care about. And to sit there and say, well, we're not going to wash your graffiti because, you know, we want to put more money in the bank or we want to keep the money in the bank that we have now. That doesn't mean we can't be responsible. So, I mean, I understand that, you know, we don't want to rely on one time revenues, but I think it's important that, you know, we try to come out of this. Early period and start, you know, restoring some of the cuts and not continuing to be in this cut, cut, cut mode. And, you know, I'm concerned about the vacancies. This is my last point because, you know, I think that's that's going to fall largely on the backs of the police department because of the nature of hiring, you know, the nature of how long it takes to hire. And, you know, just today we heard the slide. You know, today we had to redesign the slide because these are the vacancies we have today. You know, tomorrow they may be different a month from now, they may be different, but the police department is still probably going to have four vacancies on that slide no matter what day we do it. And I just feel if if we decide that we're not going to fill vacancies or permanently take that money off the table and and permanently cut, you know, these staff positions that we're doing it on the backs of our police officers and they're out there keeping us safe every day. So that's kind of my thoughts. You know, on a high level, I think that, you know, we have a bit of savings. I don't think we should spend it all. I think we still have to find ways that we can be efficient and save money. But, you know, at this point, you know, we have the purse smoothing, which I understand is a one time five year thing. And I think we should use some of our one time reserve money to address that and not continue to cut services and continue to cut employees. The other comments member ASHCROFT. And I'll try to be brief because I know we've all been here a long time, and I think I said earlier that I do think it's time to ease up a little on our on the purse strings of that 38% reserve the going over. And I do appreciate all the departments who were asked to propose 1.4% cuts for doing that. I do happen to agree with the city manager eliminating the disaster preparedness position, in part because in the reading I've done about that proposal in the years, almost three years now that I've been on the Council, it's always a bit different going in a different direction. Staff from a different perspective. And I also think that so I think we're a little unclear on exactly what the mission is going to be, but I think there may be some redundancy across the departments with fire and police that are doing some some very similar issues, addressing some very similar issues. And also, there may be some other funding sources that we can look into. So that's a code that I do agree with on the 1.4% proposals. The school resource officer, I think my colleague, Mr. Cody raises a good point and the police chief said it very eloquently too, that it's really important to build these relationships between police and young people. I come from a background as a probation officer and I worked in a small department. So with from juvenile to adult, I understand that I. All I'm saying is that I think we have to realistically look and ask for every possible funding source we've got. Are people in every department beating the bushes to look for grant funding and other sources of revenue. So I would just respectfully ask the school district, presumably this is an important issue to you, too. Can you help us out at all with it? Similar to the way the Housing Authority is helping fund the officers that APD provides them? Maybe the answer is no, we can't. But I think the ask is at least a reasonable one, because we also heard the chief police chief say it is not easy to fill police positions and on patrol on our streets. So just, you know, assistance from this is all one community. We work together. But I think it's a reasonable question to at least ask. And I think, you know, I think we've we've certainly made it clear that not only do we not need to make the departments cut so much, we definitely need to fill the needs that we heard about the I.T. woefully understaffed. And and you're not pointing any fingers of blame. But and I and I know there was an earlier council meeting where, you know, I kind of grumbled about a slide in a couple bullet points in a PowerPoint presentation. Don't don't make the case for me. Make your case. You've made your case. So I'm on board for on board to support what you're doing. But I think I think we probably are pretty similar minds up here that we want to we want to be fiscally prudent, but not at the expense of the safety and well-being of our residents. Thank you. I swear. I think we have more departments to hear from on the 12th. So we're about, you know, two thirds of the way there. I do think that the $30.8 million that is in the fund balance is an indication that we've squeezed and that money really does need to be put back into the system. And I think one of the things I'd like to see it is to a portion of that money, and I think there's a recommendation somewhere in this presentation, there's an option to put it toward future PERS liability. And I think that is very important as well as. Seen in some of those funds. And spending the money on some of those funds that relate to deferred maintenance in the city. I think now is the time to. Put the money in the fund. It may not be the time to quite spend it yet because it's a difficult time to get a good deal on contracts is a lot of work being done. But I think it should be at least earmarked so that we we don't save money to save money. And our goal is not at least my goal is not to set up a budget that preserves $30.8 billion 1920. My goal is to see what is our operating revenue that we can count on and to make sure we stay as close to that. And when I when I my standard is if we've got to hit that mark plus or -5%. And have that's what the fun balance of 15, 20, whatever the standard is and I think we can make our own standard based on past look back. Our fund balance is what buffers us in the downtime and we have great history that we can we can use to identify what the reserve is. Looking back at the period from 2004 to 2000 and where we are today, 2015, and we should get a good indication of what our our reserve really needs to be. So those are my comments. For now, I have a hard time losing the ambulance off of Bay Farm Island. I have a hard time losing the site resource officers at the high school. If there's another way to do it and still stay within our envelope. Let's do it. If we can't do it, then we have a choice to make. And those two stand out. At least prominently in my mind. And I the the it situation is it's a matter we have to invest cannot not invest. And whether it's more efficient to staff up or whether. Or efficient to contract up in current staff. I'll leave it to to the management to figure out what the best way to do it. Just us saying that it's a priority is what our job is. So. That's my comment. I. Thank you. I'm going to ask. I remember. I could wait. All right. So first of all, I want to thank everyone that came out watching us on TV, all the comments, all the work that went into each of these presentations. I had requested presentations from departments. And for me, it's very. It was extremely informative. So I'm really appreciative of all the work that went into these presentations and I am looking forward to hearing from the other departments. I think I agree with the majority of the comments from my colleagues up here regards to. It is important for us. I'm I'm concerned with cuts to a staff. The the hardship that imposes on our departments. I but I see and I in the office is staff really working really really hard and trying and I'm going to stay and trying to keep up with this council. I think it's created even more work for our staff, quite honestly. In regards to cutting these part time positions on some of the departments. I think what actually happens then is that you're either working your staff too much or they're they are outsourcing or they're doing overtime. That still does not that doesn't pencil out really at the end. And it's hard on our staff. It really is hard on our staff. So I think we have to look at spending and the result spending more of the reserves, at least at this point in time, and correcting some of the. Or that be put on that the employees have been burying over time. So. City attorney's office, you know, going over business, eliminating these part time positions. I would not support that. Same with the city clerk. I really don't know. But that would even look like I don't think they can run up and down the stairs any faster. City Manager I would agree with member Ashcraft that that could remain vacant at this point. I don't see it as a priority of finance, the part time positions there. And I think that would be I would prefer not eliminating those positions. h.R. I don't know the value of not having these trainings and whatnot that this is not people cutting staff. Of the swim center maintenance. I'm concerned about cutting that. The fire, the ambulance service, that could very well be a problem for multiple reasons that we've heard this evening, but especially I think, in regards to the bridge that we have to be very mindful of that some of the SRO officers. That's an amazing long term investment. That's that's really what it is. Public works the graffiti and the Theresa. I think that that also. No. Maintenance. So. So did you sing Janitor Tara from the three, 3 to 2 days? I'm not I'm not sure that we can't have that, but I'm concerned about how they're being paid. On the on that second page, the top four positions. I think that those if we could fill those, I think that would be great. And the other ones, we may need to fill those because of the term phantom savings, which I will repeat here, if if we're in if we're creating overtime and putting so much fear and terror on our staff, then we have a problem. So. And then. So I think I'm very similar reminded as all of you. And then we'll see when we hear from the balance of our departments what what our numbers will look like. Any other comments from staff? Did you want to comment? Well, I actually just would like to make a general comment to to all the departments. Just want to say thank you very much. As you can see, there was a lot of time and effort put into this. I don't think any one of them wanted to make the cuts, but we asked them and they all came up with what they thought were cuts that not that they would want to live with, but that that that you could all take a look at that you had some options. So I just I just wanted to say kind of a shout out to our department heads to thank you for all the work that you all did. And so I think well, I've really kind of what I've heard clearly we're not going to go forward with the resiliency disaster preparedness officer will take a look at some of the other things that we can save, like some of the contributions, lowering some of the contributions. But I'm hearing that there may be some appetite for using some of the reserves just in this next year. So we'll bring that back to you, see what that looks like next. Now, next week, we're just going to be doing the other departments. And then on on June 2nd, the plan was that based on your comments from tonight and your comments next week, that we would bring you a whole package on June 2nd to approve. I just wanted to make sure that everybody was okay with that. Yes. Thank you. Hearing no objection. I think that means the rate. All right, so at this point, we can. Oh, no. What else do we have in communications? That, if you don't mind, we would like to do one thing, right? Yes. So last night you all agreed to add another meeting on the Wednesday, the second Wednesday in June and July. As it turns out, the mayor and I both have a conflict on that evening. And we are hoping that actually that we could do it on the Tuesday instead.