Springfield City Council — January 25, 2021

0:05 and we are now recording we don't have a nice voice all right i'm going to call us to order for us springfield city council work session with roll call neil i'm happy to jump in on that mayor van gorden here counselors mo here counselor rodley here counselor stare here counselor woodrow counselor pationary here and it looks like we have one item tonight which is the budget adjustment discussion with nate bell so i'm going to turn it over to you nate all right thank you

0:50 good evening uh mayor and council tonight we're looking for direction from you in regards to some proposed adjustments we would like to make to the fiscal year 22 budget we kicked off the 22 budget season back in october we brought you in late october in work session a five-year forecast we opened up the city's budgeting software in december to departments to enter that budget and we are now here in late january getting close to closing down that system to start preparing the materials for the coming budget committee meetings which will happen in late april and early may and you know in those budget committee meetings or in the budget committee

1:36 process we like to bring you a balanced budget where we've done a lot of the work in the hopes that we're close to where you'll want to be in terms of an adopted budget back in june when we made some reductions to the fiscal year 21 budget we mentioned that we'd be coming back to you in the fiscal year 22 budget process with some potential additional reductions working with our executive team and with a continually updated five-year forecast to provide the context we're coming forward again with some additional reductions and we just want to get the thumbs up if we're moving in the right direction so i want to start this conversation looking at the most recent five-year forecast and as always with these work

2:24 sessions it doesn't have to just be me speaking with the canned presentation feel free to jump in at any point with questions can everyone see this uh in its entirety all right uh some things i'd like to point out here is that it's actually improved uh since the last five year forecast at the end of october um i think the two largest things driving that improvement and i think it's improved by roughly bottom line over the course of five years by a million and a half it's resulted from some new numbers from the state in regards to purse that has improved the pers outlook as well as our ambulance fund some adjustments we've made to the five-year forecast there that has also improved that

3:10 outlook which has resulted in a smaller subsidy over those five years with that being said uh in fiscal year 22 as you can see from this forecast uh we're looking at an ending uh cash of around 8.2 million dollars ending reserve um and that is right at 20 of operating costs and something we've talked about in the past is that we like our ending cash as a percentage of operating expenditures come in in the 20 to 25 percent range is what's considered healthy closer to 25 is ideal but we've always described 20 as the floor of what we don't want to go below so at the end of

3:55 fiscal year 22 our forecast has us right at that floor and then going below it in fiscal year 23 dropping down to 17 i think the other thing you'll uh take note of on this forecast is that we in fiscal year 22 have a deficit spend of roughly a negative 1.3 million dollars that means that uh our expenditures exceed our revenues by roughly 1.3 million and you know while there can be reasons for having a deficit spend it's again not something that we'd like to see um so this is really the context that we're coming to you with some additional reductions um and we'll get to those in a few moments i think the biggest thing i want to address here is that and this is a question that gets asked a lot in

4:41 regards to these five-year forecasts is that a lot of times we'll have over those uh further out years some uh scary numbers um some challenging numbers um and it feels that it doesn't always come to fruition and so one of the things we're really working on here is to really true this up and give you as accurate of a picture as we can with all the current information that we have this is not a doom and gloom forecast in fact we have built in a number of items that we expect to materialize but if they are not to materialize could have a significant impact built into this five-year forecast is what we call underspend when we set our budget we set a legal level level appropriation that we are

5:27 not to exceed and this is for each department so we'll have essentially roughly 10 legal level appropriations within the general fund all 10 of those departments have to come in at or under we typically end up with an underspend each year that underspend basically varies from about 800 000 to a million across all 10 departments we built that underspend into this five-year forecast additionally neil brought you the good news in regards to marcola meadows last week in regular session we have built in our forecast on what that development can bring in property taxes into our projections here as well in this five-year forecast uh in fiscal year 23 we have a number of

6:12 enterprise zone exemptions that are expiring we don't know what the value of those assets will be that come on to our tax rolls but working with courtney griezel in economic development we've made a a guess at that and we've incorporated the potential tax revenues generated from them coming back onto the rules into this forecast and lastly we have some in lieu of negotiations that are going to be happening here in the future with the expectation that could also bring some additional revenue to the general fund and that's been incorporated as well in regards and i think i talked about this in october in developing our property tax projections we consulted the county and some

6:57 guidance that they put out the guidance that they put out is what i would describe as a one size fits all meaning it's information that is meant to guide all communities across uh the county uh regardless of the makeup of their tax rolls so we actually looked specifically at our tax rule and what constitutes our primary revenues and and our expectations and our projections are actually quite a bit rulesier than the guidance that the county has put forward so again knowing that we're making adjustments to our budget we wanted to make those adjustments um on what we consider to be very sound and solid numbers so i'm going to pause there any questions

7:46 and i just see five uh because i'm sharing my screen five windows and one of them is mine uh so if someone has their hand up i don't see it i'll need someone to call yeah i don't see i don't see anybody's hands up okay um so a couple other things i guess i'd like to mention here is if you look at fiscal year 20 uh fiscal year 20 and 21 we were making contributions to a building preservation reserve of 400 000 and to a ada reserve of 100 000 in each of those years we pulled that out in fiscal year 22. the numbers just didn't allow us to continue making uh that contribution um that's concerning to us but

8:31 you know based on what we're seeing we just it didn't seem prudent let's see additionally we're showing you the ambulance fund contribution that has been updated since the last five-year forecast we've found that those numbers tend to come in a little more conservative in terms of their projections and and haven't always come to fruition so that is one area that could provide us a little bit of wiggle room but um you know what we are seeing is a trend um towards uh eventually a subsidy uh to our ambulance fund and i use that word subsidy loosely because we've discussed that a portion of our first response is within our ambulance fund even if we were to get out of the transport

9:17 business uh there's a significant expense that would then come back to the general fund so it makes sense for us to do some level of subsidy up to a certain point um and i think that's it i'm going to scroll past the ambulance fund if you look at this forecast we're actually nate corey's got a question okay that's my first you're still on mute today and i'm on zoom all day long so i'm fading um i appreciate this and i have a couple of questions about those reserve funds that you mentioned the building reserve and the ada projects so are those

10:02 money that was going into a reserve and that is still sitting there or was it being used as it was being put put aside no that money has not been used and it is sitting there so at the end of fiscal year 21 we should have around 800 thousand dollars set aside uh for deferred uh uh building uh maintenance and two hundred thousand for uh upgrades to uh ada uh facilities here at the city okay and then my second piece of that question not that i want to hog things up is um now is are there plans to use that i know that um there are often requirements to bring um you know whether crosswalks or buildings up to ada compliance and it

10:48 can be really hard for municipalities to get to that but we often have a plan like you know often by the time you get halfway there you start all over again because the compliances have changed but i wondered if there is already planned to spend that on those projects or if it's going to sit there until we all decide what to do with it it's a good question so i'm probably not the best person to answer this i do know that on the development public works side as they do work on city infrastructure they tend to bring it up to standard and use their own reserves to fund that i also believe that there was a study done on work that needs to be done here at the city um i think it was done in

11:34 our hr department and at this point it's just a matter of bandwidth to start picking up some of these projects and moving with them and this is kind of ties in with today's maybe larger conversation is what we're trying to do here as an organization is make um reductions without impacting outward facing services and we're really bringing this right down to the bone at this point so what that doesn't really tell you is while we may not impact our facing services we are impacting our capacity to do work that goes above and beyond what we're typically doing now and those types of projects would fall exactly into that category i don't know if that's the answer you're looking for or wanted i don't know if anyone else wants to

12:20 speak to it thank you gives me more context thank you all right um counselor mo's got questions all right you have to educate me the ambulance fund expenses cover exactly what is it just the ambulances and crew or does it also cover the ambulances plus the two fire trucks that always go with it is that charged to ambulance fund or not um you know again i'm going to speak to this to the best of my ability if we wanted a really accurate answer that's all i need yes but our ambulance is part of our response to

13:08 any incident in terms of number of bodies that need to show up so it from my understanding only funds the ambulances and those personnel that are tied to those ambulances okay not to the actual engines and personnel all right any other questions i do not see anybody else so i just think we can keep going i won't spend a lot of time here on the ambulance five year forecast you know on the general fund side we built the subsidy to the ambulance fund into the forecast on the ambulance side we didn't build the

13:54 subsidy from the general fund in there only because i wanted to see what we will respond what wanted you to see what we were responding to when we built that into the general fund and this brings us to the document that we're looking for guidance from you these are some additional reductions that we'd like to incorporate into the fiscal year 22 budget um let's start with um police on the on at the bottom um originally this was a reduction that we had put forward back in june but based on some feedback we received from council prior to that we had removed and put forward the body worn

14:39 cameras uh council chose to keep the body worn cameras in the budget but we never revisited the other potential reductions and we were comfortable with that knowing that we'd be coming back to you with the reductions that they had originally put forward you know in working with the chief these are reductions that he believes he can absorb without impacting outward facing services these also would not result in the lamp of actual individuals these are positions that are currently vacant and have been vacant for some time typically this these positions have really been used at a legal level to

15:24 help them absorb their overtime so by making these reductions it's just going to create a more challenging budget for police um uh in terms of overtime but again it's something that they believe they can manage hey steve did you have questions i saw you wave in your hand i i did uh i like these the reduction of a community service officer at this time i don't think is good for our public image i don't know i don't have it i don't have any other alternate but that bothers me we we need we need our public image is pretty bad out there and if we can get officers or police out there that can help deal with the public

16:09 and soften that we we need to do that that's all corey i guess my follow i hear i hear what you're saying counselor mo and my follow-up that would be um how many community service officers do we have because i think we don't just have one so there may be others unless i'm making that up so again i could try to speak to this and hopefully i'm accurate but if chief lewis is available he might be a good person to speak to this

16:54 nathan if you give me just a moment i can um make it so he is able to speak nancy do you want to jump in here yes i would thank you um and i can't answer the question on the number of community services officers that would be for the chief but i would like to just point out that this is a position that is currently vacant so it's not cut so we will not be reducing what we have currently i i do understand and appreciate counselor mo's comment about um you know having a presence in our community we have we are currently um going to be advertising for a position in the police department that will have um this kind of element to it um outreach

17:40 kind of element as well as public information officer um so we're kind of enhancing that um through a new a new position that we're recruiting for i just got a text from jessica crawford the police analyst there are three cso positions um and i think specifically the two positions that we have up here one is the cso and one's a record specialist both have actually been vacated since late 2000 i want to say 2007 and 2009 after two years so we're talking a long time this won't have an impact in terms of the services we've provided at least for the last decade

18:29 you call me yes okay thank you so it may be helpful if uh the counselors knew what the community service officer job entailed because i think there may be some confusion can i jump in here would that be helpful can you hear me yeah that that would be helpful chief okay uh so right now and jessica is right that job has been vacant for quite some time and we've used it as nathan described earlier uh kind of a budgetary issue to cover some of our overtime there are a number of csos there was originally four csos in the patrol division and then we had that one reduction in there that we've held vacant that's the one we're proposing to be reduced right now so the community

19:15 service officers out there providing a service to the to uh our citizens [Music] go out there and take uh reports that typically don't have suspect information they handle a lot of our crashes that don't require police officers to handle the accident scene so they do and they serve subpoenas they do evidence collection they do do a number of varieties that doesn't require a sworn police officer to do it's paid at a little bit of a reduced cost the police officer and the training is not quite as extensive but they do provide an incredibly valuable service to our citizens but i really feel that the reduction of this officer this community service officer position will

20:00 not have an outward impact on the service delivery as as mentioned earlier has been vacant for a number of years thanks mayor um so my understanding was that one of the cons community service officers was primarily um assigned to outreach in the latinx community is that correct yes and so i think the confusion is created there's actually four the foot was four in patrol and then there was two in our community outreach and that's the positions that we have to uh make outreach to the public and then as the city manager mentioned earlier we are going to have a kind of a hybrid

20:46 position of community outreach slash pio position coming open which is one of those community service officers all right some of those some of those are out of the general fund and some of those come out of the levy but the um the the cso um that is primarily assigned to uh to the latinx community would not be affected by this guy is that correct that is correct i i also wanted to ask if there was just a some sort of a triage done about um i it looks to me like most of these cuts are one full-time uh full-time employee in each department is that correct nate well um no uh we have one of them is a

21:31 reallocation uh of a position um that wasn't uh filled and is now being fulfilled by our uh assistant city manager and then the other two are yet to be determined uh their dollar amounts kind of based on a certain percentage and proportionality of what we've done in other outward facing central service type departments but you know we haven't provided any specifics in regards to those because we're still looking at the outward facing impact and whether or not that's really doable but it's an aspirational goal for us okay my my other question would be was there any consideration given to um voluntary furloughs and access to the state workshare program in

22:16 order to assuage the need for permanent reductions in these departments in regards to voluntary furloughs we've done those in the past what we have found is they typically don't generate the type of reduction that we really need to address the budget issues we're having the other thing is these would be ongoing reductions typically a voluntary furlough is a single year it's challenging to get people to agree to a permanent furlough if you've been possible so it makes it a challenging tool to use it's a good tool when you're looking at just the single year gap that you're trying to overcome but when you're trying to overcome a long-term structural

23:01 imbalance it doesn't always become the best tool okay familiar with that state work program um i just got one more question ah the i i know that there are some programs that are probably due to sunset in the next year or two i i know we've been working um with a pr firm to rebrand the city for instance and that that program is probably scheduled to uh schedule to wrap up where was that uh was that taken into consideration in the budgeting it was that was a one-time expenditure and and that actually came out of some dollars that we'd set aside um for the council for initiatives uh out of a comcast settlement um but um yeah that

23:46 wouldn't be in future years that's a it should be complete in fiscal year 21 if i understand correctly all right that's that's all i got right now thanks so nate when we look at these general funds uh reductions when at the top of the ais none of these were baked in right so that the the first page was essentially where we were right now but it excludes anything on this list because we haven't okayed it yet exactly i don't want to assume anything and so um we would have a new updated five-year forecast if we were to incorporate these expend uh reductions into our budget okay i could roughly tell you what it does is it brings fiscal year 22 up to around 21

24:32 and it brings fiscal year 23 to around 19 which is an excellent position for us to be in um for the next two years as we continue to work on solutions to address the longer term issue you know another thing i'd like to accomplish here is is we're kind of coming to that end of that runway in terms of actual reductions that we can make without impacting services and at this point and i need to be working on this concurrently as we work on the fiscal year 22 budget is to start looking at potential proposed service level changes as well as increases to existing revenues or potentially new revenues and those will be additional discussions that we hope to bring in front of you over the coming uh months and years so this isn't the last set of reductions

25:18 that we're going to the last conversation about this that we're going to have these is i would call these the last conversations on reductions that don't include painful difficult decisions okay um anybody else have uh questions or comments see somebody mentioned marco marcola meadows the property taxes that we're going to be getting out of that eventually is that reflected in this or is that just something in the future that we that we can look forward to no it's reflected in this okay if i was a rich man and and built a hundred million dollar

26:03 building downtown how much in property taxes for the city would that generate just an idea um well let's use a project that's actually in in front of you right now that could come to fruition uh and that is uh the share project we've been discussing um that's a 27 million dollar project or 85 two and three bedroom units and that will uh generate uh increment in the neighborhood of around uh two hundred thousand dollars thank you that's good now that being said though that is increment to the entire taxing district that went all come to the city in the short term because it's an urban renewal district it would come to the urban renewal fund but then when that district

26:48 sun sets then that would get divided with our partners as well which would include the county uh the school district and willamelain sure it gets complicated doesn't it thank you are there any other questions or some sort of head nod about that whether or not this reduction proposal is okay right nate do you have anything else we got to cover no um i think that's it so i know um and maybe to kind of help us understand about how we're working into a but into the budget again i know

27:34 what this is coming up are are we going to have is this the last conversation we're having in a work session before we move into budget committee or is there another conversation coming up there's one more conversation uh i think it'll be an easier conversation and that's on february 16th and it's regarding our process this year we are still in covid uh and so we need to talk about um what the process will look like again if it's going to be done remotely and the number of days and whether we're going to do the pre-recorded department presentations so we'll work on a proposal be bringing that to you in mid-february perfect thank you any other last-minute comments

28:23 and i think we're good that was the only item thank you everybody have a good night all right thank you we are