Springfield City Council — February 1, 2021

0:03 i am ready and this meeting is now being recorded i'm going to call us to order with roll call mayor van gorden counselors mo here bradley here stare all right perfect thank you um it looks like we have one item for our work session which is the fiscal year 2020 comprehensive annual financial report everybody's favorite kafir and it looks like meg for the staff report meg good evening counselors um i'm meg locko i'm the accounting manager we're here today to talk about and present the fiscal year 20 comprehensive annual financial report for the city of springfield we

0:49 finally refer to it as the kaffir the accounting entries statements and the notes and statistical tables are all prepared by city staff and they're audited by an outside cpa firm the city this year engaged grove mueller and swank to audit the financial statements and ryan pasquerella is the partner in charge of our audit and he's here to share his opinion on the financial statements with you so i will turn it over to ryan well i'm not sure if it's my opinion it's more like my firm's opinion for it let's go with that instead thank you for allowing me to be here this evening definitely a completely different format than i am used to i am

1:34 used to driving to the city of springfield my firm's in salem and you know sitting around the table and talking to all of you so this is definitely a different way of doing it and i think we're all adjusting this year so um as meg said um i work for grove mueller and swank uh we are a cpa firm out of salem and we perform the independent audit for the city so an audit is required because of the um well the state of oregon the state of oregon requires pretty much all municipal entities to receive an audit if they have any amount of significant amount of activity in them i believe the amount is five hundred thousand dollars being expended

2:19 in one year requires an audit so springfield will always always always receive an annual audit we um the audit is done basically in two phases the first phase is what we call our planning phase it's historically done in june july somewhere in there and what we do is we sit down with with the staff of the city and we gain an understanding of what happened during the city during the year that also includes looking at your city council minutes just inquiries with people around the city and looking at preliminary financial information so we use that and kind of gain an

3:04 understanding of what happened in the city did you change any of your financial processes during the year that we need to be looking at them in more in-depthly and really help plan for the year and audit the year-end audit is meg and her department uh they give us well two items really they give us their year-end account balances and they give us the kafir that meg said already the comprehensive annual financial report i really hate saying that name is kaffir that is such an easy easier way of doing it so um our firm then in october sometime spends a couple of weeks working with the city going down through the account balances

3:49 for your debt balances we're looking at third party support to make sure that yes that debt amount is properly stated in the records looking at cash balances by looking at bank statements looking at amounts that are owed to the city and really trying to figure out if you've collected those are you going to be able to collect those and just the whole list of things and really it is about a two-week process that goes through all of your numbers um so we did that in october and then the kafir was actually finalized right at the end of december the due date for the kafir is six months after the end of the fiscal year and so we made that by a few days i know we were working pretty hard there near

4:34 the end of end of december to get it out the door but it was filed timely the city also goes for um an additional certification which is called a gfoa certificate and basically what that means is that people independent from the city independent from us take a look at that kafir document and make sure that it meets generally accepted accounting principles and that is something that the city has done historically and it has been submitted they did the city did receive their certificate for 2019 but we will find out about the 21 here which is the audit we just finished for at least a few months um i think

5:20 this last year with everything going on it took quite a bit longer for them to get to it but luckily by the time we finish all of this the certificate and ready to go hopefully you were provided two documents related to the audit one of them being our uh governance letter um it is a pdf document that is 10 pages long in total and it just has our it's on our letterhead and then you should also have the cafe in there if you look at the governance letter there's there's really one thing i want to talk about in there is there a question

6:07 okay um so during the audit we ended up recommending two audit adjustments to the city and if you look at that governance letter uh the on page three basically that we were recommended to the city and the city did did record one of them being an adjustment to the allowance for bad debt related to the ems billings and the other one is related to the inventory balance in the street fund and the two balances 160 about 64 000 one's about

6:53 85 000. there you go um those two balances really when you look at the city as a whole are not that big of numbers for the city based on the amount of assets that you're in but part of what makes governmental well reporting and government auditing different than other types of auditing we don't give an opinion on your financial statements we give opinions plural which really means that when you have funds that have a significant amount of activity and both the street fund and the ambulance fund in this um are considered major funds which basically means we treat that as its own audit we we

7:39 audit the street fund as its own thing and we also audit the ambulance fund is as its own thing that causes these two numbers to be significant for those funds as it relates to the year just barely significant but they were significant based on the thresholds that we use so it ends up that we needed to put these in there because if there are any significant adjustments made that we need to communicate that to the city council so that is why these two items are in here that is the one if you're going to compare this later to last year's that's really the one change that you would see in this year that you would not have seen in last year's there are times also when we recommend

8:27 our misstatements we recommend adjustments to the city to post and the city decides not to record them for some reason none of those happen this year the things that we did ask the city to adjust they did adjust and then um and that's really the only thing in the governance letter i think that i really wanted to discuss with you i was also going to walk you through a few pages in the kafir if you want to share that document as well uh counselor stair leonard had a couple questions okay yeah i really got just one um those uh discrepancies in the in in the overall big picture they're not big discrepancies but they're

9:12 significant um did they um did what was one of the things that your firm did just trace how the uh how the how the discrepancies were reached and how they can be corrected well really a lot of time when we found when we're finding adjustments it's that there's formula errors or something in some of the documents that we get we we all work with a lot of excel documents and meg you can correct me if i'm wrong but i believe that the ems thing a change was just a problem with the excel file itself that we do a lot of recalculation to make sure we kind of agree with first of all the methodology on how you came up with that allowance amount but also that you're following that

9:57 methodology in the spreadsheet when you're calculating the number and the methodology was there it was just an error and how it was being calculated was not being followed in there and then for the inventory um we look at really the city does um like a physical count or something near the end of the year we use that as a start of our support documentation and we compare that to the numbers that like meg gave us and i believe that there's a difference between what the physical count was and what um the amount that may provide it and meg looks like she wants to talk yeah i was just gonna take the inventory was actually correct on the street it was a difference in the equity accounts of how much of the equity was

10:42 tied up in inventory and so it was it was a minor difference but um part of the change in inventory shows up on the income statement so we appreciate them double checking these things right that that's all i got thank you all right and then if we could go to the kaffir um just i want to show you a couple of things in there uh as far as the presentation of the kaffir this year and how it relates to prior years there were going to be some changes some fundamental changes on some of the areas in the kafir based on the federal rules on how this should be presented um but with the pandemic that happened

11:29 and everything all of the changes that were required got pushed at least a year so really the the format that you're seeing in this kafir is the same format that you would have seen in prior years and really what happens is that the federal regulatory board the gatsby is what they're called um they go and from year to year they kind of look at a specific part of the kafir and see if there are things that need to be changed or not in there and the big thing that's coming up is the uh the agency funds that the city has and really how that information is being presented not changing like the year and balances it's really just how it's being presented in the financial statement so you'll see that next year because that will be coming up

12:15 next year okay so i will go ahead and just share my my screen three here okay all right so can you see the governance letter at this point is that what's on the screen downtown's on the screen yeah the capper is that brian okay and for whatever reason my little thing is on the other screen that says that that's the screen being shared that's why i asked that question okay so here's the kafir for you the

13:01 first thing i want to do like i said the presentation is pretty close to what it was last year so i'm gonna go to page 11 in here this is the transmittal letter i and i should say this is a 226 page document my firm created a whopping five pages out of this document the city's staff created every other page in this document and my job as the auditor is to read the information look at the year in numbers make sure it agrees to what we've audited for the final numbers so really meg and her staff they did this document um i just have a lot of reading to do once they put it together so similar to last year similar to how

13:46 this goes on page 11 here this is the start of the transmittal letter and i will say that your city's transmittal letter is a very good version of a transmittal letter it is very detailed it really helps you understand first of all your city and changes that happened uh during the year so it's a little bit of a read but if you really want an understanding of what's happening with the city this transmittal letter is a great place to start and then after that if i go to page 43 this is management's discussion and analysis and this is what i've talked about in years past and it really compares the current year

14:33 to the prior year as far as what happened with the cash balances what happened with specific revenue accounts why some things are up what's different this year uh like one of the things you're going to see in here is uh the street capital fund um issue debts a 10 million dollars worth of debt for street improvement projects so that caused the street capital fund to be major and it's going to be talked about in here so if you want a good understanding of just year-over-year comparisons of the city this is probably a this is a very good place to go and look for it and then once you get down past this um this document the more the farther you go in the document more detailed it's going to be so when i

15:18 get down to like page 61 and this is tiny writing i get that once you get down that about page 61. this is where you're going to see your financial statements really where they start for the year and this page 61 basically combining all of your governmental activities which are primarily property tax base activities all your business type activities such as uh sewer and store drainage that type of activity so you're going to see your cash and really your balance sheet split out between those two so as you go back farther you're going to see more detail revenues related to that i did want to show you i'll just scroll for a second so in your governmental activities once

16:03 you get past that front one it gets broken into your individual funds and so when i said that we give opinions on the financial statements this is exactly what i mean my firm gives an opinion on your general fund an opinion on the street about police uh yeah the police local and the street capital just on this one page we're giving four opinions because we treat all of these as individual audits i don't know if anybody wants to become a governmental auditor with me saying this isn't this just riveting what we get to do for work at this point it's inspiring it's it's there are not near as many governmental auditing firms as there used to be um gentlemen are retiring that used to be

16:48 doing it you know quite a few that i know and they're just there's not people coming back behind nobody teaches this in school so um you know i guess we're you know a smaller breed than we used to be but you'll see why this takes two weeks to really do this audit um you know we definitely do sampling we don't look at 100 of the stuff but there's so many different buckets within the city that we need to look at it just takes time to get through all of that and make sure we're following the auditing rules that are out there so um the only thing left in the audit for the fiscal year 20 is we are still working on the federal compliance audit the city oh off and on needs the federal

17:34 compliance audit because you have to spend more than 750 000 of federal money in a year in order for it to apply so depending on what's happening in the city sometimes it applies sometimes it doesn't apply it definitely applies this year and the reason that the federal compliance audit is not done is uh the coronavirus relief funds that the city got so the federal government made sure to get the money out as quickly as they could well i guess i'll say that um yeah they got the money out and cities really started getting the money back in june july but the rules weren't out there for how we should audit it they just wanted to get the money out the door so that people could continue

18:19 working um those rules finally got finalized right around the end of december so then we have to wait for the guidance on how we need to audit it to come out all of that information is finally out so now over the next i guess about month year or so as time allows for us we're going to work on that coronavirus relief funding to make sure that it was spent correctly based on what the federal guidelines and yes is there a deadline on having that now that they have the rules out um the deadline well the regular deadline for your federal compliance

19:04 audit is nine months so that would be march 31st however like with everything else there's been an automatic three-month extension which puts it out into june i do not want to have anything to do with that june deadline i want it done now so we will get it done here fairly quickly because um if i wait and finish it in june that means i'm starting your next audit at the same time and i don't want to do that i want to get one wrapped up and you know take a break for a little bit before i continue on but yes it is through june 30th okay so that's basically what i have for my presentation um not like i said not a lot of changes from the prior year kind of based on you know how the audit

19:50 went or anything i will say um the i.t department your finance staff they made this audit go very smoothly um we have you know we were out there for two weeks when we go sit on site we perform the it's a two-week audit that we're out there in october we performed this whole thing um virtually which is definitely um different than a lot of our audits how they went this year the the fact that you keep a lot of your documentation electronically already was a tremendous help for the audit team and the fact that we were able to get in and look at things on your network in a read-only format we don't want to

20:36 break anything um that was very helpful for us as well because we could sit at our desks socially distance at our desks in salem and we could still look at pretty much everything that we've been able to look at in a hard copy you know over over the years one unique way that we did this audit and i don't know if it was meg's idea or my audit manager scott's but we ended up starting a meeting like a go-to meeting and it ran basically the entire day and it was muted for the most part for all of us until we had a question so we could just unmute and ask mega question she could answer it and then we would mute again and we continue on almost like we were sitting out there

21:22 and i could walk over to meg's desk and harass her um but instead it was just unmuting instead so it was we did a um an oscpa conference here about a week ago and one of the topics was how did you make remote auditing work this year for you because a lot of us it was a crash course for us and how to do this um what your city allowed us to do was one of the examples that i shared because i mean we weren't on site but it was about as close to being on site as you possibly could and we were able to work through the information as effective as we have in prior years so i i appreciate meg in the finance

22:07 department and the it department for making sure that was all set up for us and allowing us to do that scott was a little uh the lead auditor was a little hesitant about that at first but he kind of came around pretty soon um i would just wanted to add that ryan you guys they spent more than two weeks with us they came out for a week in june um well virtually um this year they do some preliminary work they come out for a couple weeks in october after we've finished the trial balance and then they continue to work on it up in salem uh asking additional questions and follow-up things and then they review this whole document a couple times so they they spend more

22:54 than a few weeks he made it sound simple but they spend a lot and a few weeks is what i call like our on-site type because that's really when we would be in springfield sitting in your conference room going through the documentation so in this i mean we already had the audit scheduled you know quite a long time ago so that october two weeks is what we have set aside so i mean i had there was a group of four of us working on the audit and we had blocked out those two weeks so whether we were sitting in our houses or sitting at our at our firm we were working on in those two in that two-week time period and that's when we get 85 to 90 of the work done because we're looking at all the documentation but yes

23:39 meg is correct there is wrap up uh once the kafir is ready for us to look at we start looking at that um and that came end of november beginning of december somewhere in there is that right meg yeah so it is spread out a little bit more are there questions questions or comments from anybody all right uh corey my comment is really just appreciation i want to thank you and your firm for the work and i really want to a big hearty thank you to city staff it sounds like the accounting and the admin and the it department i just really appreciate it i love being first and best so i love hearing that we were an example

24:24 so thank you for hearing that all right that looks like it thank you guys for putting this together i know it's a little bit of a complicated document but i always i always appreciate when it comes back pretty much clean um that's i think all we had we are adjourned until seven aj are we on a new link now that we're on zoom are we staying on this link you will be on a new link um i am still in the testing phases to make sure that you can get out and get back into an existing link and i didn't want to chance it today so you will be on a new link perfect all right then i will talk to everybody at seven o'clock we are a church thank you thank you for your time thank you ryan

0:05 this meeting is now being recorded all right i am going to call the springfield city council uh regular session to order with roll call mayor van gorden here councilor mo here councillor rodney here counselor counselor woodrow here and counselor pictionary here all right please join me for the pledge of allegiance

0:59 indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay as we begin our meeting tonight i would like to like to ask members of the audience who are joining us online to please keep yourselves on you until you are called upon to provide public testimony there is one time this evening designated for public testimony and it will be listed as business from the audience on the agenda if you are joining us online with a tablet smartphone or computer and wish to speak during this time please use the chat window it looks like the speech balloon in the upper right corner please send a comment to the meeting organizer with your name ward or general location and the subject

1:44 you'd like to speak about you can select the organizer at the bottom of the chat window we will call on you when it is your turn to speak the order of public testimony fault is as follows anyone who submitted a chat anyone who has submitted an email in advance and if there is remaining time neil will read the emails into the record first item please first item is springfield upbeat item number one mayor's recognition uh children's bookmark contest winners 2020 through 2021 taylor worley and emily david are here for the staff report

2:32 hello hello is my sound okay all right great well um thanks mayor and thank you counselors for having us this year um as you can imagine it's been an interesting year with our bookmark contest so for any of those not familiar um every year for 40 years the springfield public library has hosted a bookmark contest the theme of that contest typically is the upcoming year's summer reading program so this year that theme was reading colors your world all about art and perspective and sharing your story and and what makes you you um so this year we uh uh mindy linder who is our outreach specialist and then myself and emily david um worked to um keep this tradition

3:18 going even with all of the restrictions around coved and i'm very happy to say we got some really beautiful artwork again this year so we just like to recognize our 14 winners um so here uh let's see here i need to share my screen so you can actually see what i'm seeing to be able to see uh one exhausted red crayon and a very heavy rainbow crayon okay sounds like that's correct beautiful so 40 years strong and a little take that copied so this year we'd like to recognize luke jordan luke jordan is a long time library patron lifelong library patron um kindergarten at yolanda

4:03 and this is his beautiful artwork he's got a blue and green crayon they are coloring their world they are very happy and they made all of us quite happy too so we want to say thank you to luke luke thank you so much great job uh this is david willis also in kindergarten um springfield public schools online we loved uh david's whimsical design so very happy um reader here reading about dinosaurs probably one of the most popular um things at the library we've got a little close-up of some of his dinosaurs there so thank you david great job hello jordan also another lifelong library patron uh we see them um very frequently at

4:49 curbside pickup so reading colors our minds and our hearts um we loved her nice clean design all of the beautiful colors so you can see she matches her bookmark very well thank you ella great work this is ada willis second grade springfield public schools online um i we just loved again so many of these are like whimsical and happy but this just made us really happy to look at and we loved her little read with me slogan so aydah good job thank you so much and then genevieve genevieve e martin fourth grade at ridgeview um we've got the rainbow for the colors your world stories are magic we've got the line of books um so and then we've got a close-up of

5:36 her her friends there sharing a book thank you genevieve great work maya lee oldson uh maya actually used our second option for a theme this year which was where mines grow which is the library slogan so uh we loved that she took our logo and made this beautiful rainbow design out of it um so we were of course partial to this design maya great work thank you so much landon laplante we didn't get a photo of landon but check out the detail on this amazing bookmark so we've got where mines grow a treehouse we've got someone reading in a swing um this was just so incredibly detailed and wonderful and it makes me happy every time i look at it so the green crayon is standing in for landon tonight

6:22 thank you landon if you're out there in the audience denver klein uh denver representing our thousands of lego fans in the area so fifth grade at riverbends um this is a really detailed like this little man has technical drawing in his future i love love love how clean this is so um and he's even he's even thinking about a little book you can see in that speech bubble there so great work denver thank you so much the fabulous della williams she might have my favorite photo of the evening so she even drew a little narrative so we've got a little cherry walking along a little frustrated finds a book and is super happy and the whole world is just better and filled with life

7:08 after our cherry finds their book so we thought that that kind of fits the where mines grow very well della great work thank you thank you mira mcfeeter's geeding um bringing a little social justice into the reading colors your world um so we've got black lives matter and the rainbow flag and all of these wonderful kind of universal concepts and with um the book so that one was really great it printed up beautifully um mira sixth grade and homeschooled and one of our most stylish contestants uh i must say this is ava ava martin seventh grade nice clean beautiful bookmark with bright colors um

7:53 really liked the two friends um you know on opposite sides of the planet reading we've got the rainbow splitting going through beautiful work ava thank you so much gary gray couldn't be with us tonight uh garrett's in eighth grade we've got the yellow crayons standing in for him um and i wish i could have fit about like four details of this bookmark because there's so much to look at um but just this beautiful stack of really nicely illustrated books and all the animals and then he came up with his own little slogan the books give you a place to be when you have nowhere to go so that makes us all warm and fuzzy inside and this is a this is actually we had three sets of siblings in our winters this year which i don't think has ever happened before so we have some

8:38 highly artistic families in springfield um a did this beautiful kind of like sunrise or sunset uh rainbow with the two people bonding over the story in the book and then of course posing with their most amazing cat there eh thank you so much if you are listening and then our last one madison couldn't be here so we have the red crayon standing in for madison 12th grade at destination career academy and where mines grow and her book uh her shirt says fresh books are my favorite um and she went with the where minds grow uh logo as well so usually we would pause and we would do photographs and we would have everybody handshake and say hi but we can't do that this year

9:23 um but we know that a lot of these um you know these kids and teens are in the attendees tonight so i just want to say thank you so so much um we're so pleased with all of the artwork and i believe um you all should have gotten your packets of bookmarks in the mail if you haven't gotten them yay if you haven't gotten them they should be too very soon so that's year 40 and hopefully year 41 um we'll be able to be back in person again thank you that's an amazing set of a set of bookmarks and i'm looking forward to them finding homes in my books because i go through a number of them a year uh the twins pull them out and

10:09 color on them a wonderful imagination awesome once again awesome we've got some great kids in our city we are partial to them we're kind of fond of them all right thank you all for your time thank you thank you all right next item aj all right so we i asked that we had a uh additional thank you uh be added to uh mayor's recognition tonight this was on behalf of us and the rest of the council this has really been our first opportunity to really thank one of our own and recognize joe for his uh additional service through the uh through september i wanted to just take an opportunity and

10:54 read it into the record and then i'll open it up if anybody's got any more comments last august springfield found ourselves suddenly and unexpectedly without a mayor the position of mayor serves not only an important role in the city's leadership but the springfield community as well in these unexpected times challenges that can bring forth exceptional leaderships tonight we'd like to acknowledge and thank ward 6 counselor joe pistianieri he stepped up to guide the council today to take on additional responsibilities and to help us lead at a time when we needed him most this was no easy task and he did it with a calm and focused leadership that allowed the business of the council to continue this comes with experience that we've been fortunate to have while he served springfield uh since 2000 in 2004 with a two-year

11:40 break in between 2012 and 2014 while taking on these additional responsibilities of acting mayor he remained dedicated to ward 6 constituents especially during the holiday farm fire this level of commitment to service and dedication to his community is of the highest a public servant can provide we the mayor and the city council thank councillor pictionary for his additional service and his continued dedication to the springfield community signed well the rest of the council thank you so much joe well thank you all very much it was very unexpected thank you it was supposed to be [Laughter] i i'd like to say something one thing go ahead merrily i just i wanted to thank joe i know that

12:26 not only was especially with the fires not only was he uh getting out there to every morning meeting and paying attention to what was going on but he was also paying attention to where his home was and what was happening you know and coming coming west from those fires so um that was extra stress on top of his paying attention to what was going on um with the whole uh emergency situation so i appreciate that and i appreciate his being willing to step up and put a give a hand out to anybody that needed it um advice wise or just update wise and i know that his own community um looked forward to his updates as well so i would just like to personally say thank you joe um you stepped up and you didn't do it with anything other than just a

13:11 concern and love for the city all right steve it was an extremely stressful period for joe and he stepped up and went through it and i i really admired for that he's been sort of a mentor to me over periods of time and i i thank him for that also but but he's been there for springfield and he's he's a great counselor thank you joe counselor of steer yeah i um chime in here um this was the perfect storm that joe stepped into he was not only handling the issues relevant to the virus but also the wildfires this fall there were a number of issues that would have been trying for

13:57 somebody who had been mayor for 20 years and the fact that joe was able to step in and and into the breach and handle all of these issues with um greater plum and he bore the burden lightly and i want to thank him very much for uh i want to thank you joe for uh for all of your service thank you uh counselor rodney so i don't have as much gooey personal stuff because i'm new um but i do want to personally um express my appreciation i think every time someone steps up and answers the call of duty and serves it should be recognized and honored so i

14:42 appreciate you doing that thank you thank you corey very much thank you so much joe next item please mayor the next item is your consent calendar do i have a motion to approve or reject the consent calendar you you have to do it once do i do that okay i'm new here okay i make a motion that we approve uh the consent calendar uh moved by uh counselor mo and seconded by counselor woodrow um could you call the role neil yes counselor mo here i mean yes counselor radley

15:35 council radley yes yes sorry i was muted yes counselor stare yes counselor woodrow yes and counselor pictionary yes the motion passes next item please you have no public hearings tonight so your next item would be business from the audience and um mayor if you're good i will start calling on folks that that would be great okay our first speaker is heather milhair huerta followed by lauren williams

16:34 okay heather you should am i unmuted now yes all right wonderful thank you so much uh first of all i would like to say congratulations to our bookmark winners i enjoy my library bookmarks very much and i am looking forward to seeing all of this all these uh new ones throughout the year so my name is heather moller werted i am a library advisory board member libraries have given a great deal to me over the years and the springfield library continues to give and give and give to me and my family especially during pandemic times serving on the board has given me a chance to get something back both to our library and to our town and i'm here to just give a little state of the library to you guys uh as an educator and a parent i'm very

17:20 attached to the for every student a library program that provides library cards to students and their families and to teachers who live outside of the city limits so that all springfield students and teachers can have access to the extensive library resources we provide these resources include the books needed for learning to enjoy reading for doing homework and research projects and for supporting teachers and having the books they need to support their curriculum aims which includes curriculum bins that provide classroom sets of books as well as collections of books on individual subjects as well as books though the library offers a wide variety of digital resources as well databases that support every kind of learning including those that offer tutoring and

18:05 homework assistance this program has struggled to find funding over the years and actually began this school year without any funding i'm very happy to report though the library just learned of two donations to help fund this important program the springfield school district will be helping with ten thousand dollars and a grant was received from the springfield rotary for thirty five hundred dollars this is great news for this year the funds will be used to buy materials and electronic resources that support teachers and students the library will continue to look for sustainable funding for the coming years another program that is about how the library can best serve during difficult times is the digital library card option the library is continuing to create digital cards for

18:50 residents to access services during the pandemic and these continue to be free of charge over 700 digital cards have been created during the pandemic and just recently the library has developed an innovative zoom meeting process for people to meet with a librarian via zoom to verify their information in order to update their digital card to a full access card this allows the patron to then access the physical collection and use curbside service to pick up items the zoom appointments are short and help keep staff and patrons safe during covid and as for curbside pickup from june to december of 2020 this important service delivered 20 788 items to people's cars where librarians put items directly in patrons trunks with a smile and a wave

19:37 in all of 2020 150 2044 physical items were checked out and 57 000 18 digital items were checked out thank you so much for listening and my time is up thanks heather yeah mary your next speaker is lauren williams followed by holly shaper yes we can yes okay great um first i'd i'd just like to say that this is the best city council meeting i have ever attended i loved seeing those bookmarks thank you for sharing that um

20:24 i wanted to follow up oh my name is lauren williams and i live in ward 2 as you all know i'm sure um i wanted to follow up about your last work session and your discussion around the budget reductions um and i i just i want to make sure i understand that from what i heard spd has held a community service officer position unfilled for the last 14 years and will continue to leave that position vacant during the foreseeable future using that money as a slush fund to cover over time

21:10 it seems like especially astonishing considering that the public has been specifically insisting on reductions and reallocation of funds from sbd to more effectively address the issues of public safety and equity as i've looked into it it looks like we spend 1.7 million dollars a year on dispatch we spend a hundred and thirty thousand dollars a year on our swat team we spend four hundred and ten thousand dollars a year on our k-9 unit and these three services are readily available from other local agencies uh springfield could contract these services as needed i would love to hear you consider and discuss the idea of collaboration with

21:56 other local agencies um and specifically address is it is it true that spd has held an open position for the last 14 years not using that money for a community officer position it just seems wild to me that that is the case thank you so much i yield my time thank you lauren and neil i think we're ready for the next one your next speaker is holly shaper followed by elizabeth utterback and holly you should be able to unmute now hello can you hear me yes all right great um good evening my name is holly shaper i'm in ward 2 as well

22:41 um first i wanted to mention that the chat feature is actually not available and so you have to raise hand if you want to speak um which can be a little confusing second i wanted to echo heather and lauren's comments about how just incredible and amazing all of the bookmarks where it was so great to see really really impressive i love our library um and then tonight i wanted to ask about the status of a few important issues related to spd the kenny settlement business cards and the body-worn camera implementation so the kenny settlement stipulates that a comprehensive risk management assessment of the spd be conducted with specific items completed within 3 6

23:26 and 12 month time frames given that it has been at least three months since the settlement was reported to have been finalized have these items been completed as just a few examples an enterprise risk management team is supposed to be developed and meet monthly there are requirements for specific supervisory trainings and there is a requirement for a best practice assessment for spd and the municipal jail so is council checked on the status of these action items that are required by order of the court from the kenny settlement if so what is the status on these items next in late september council directed spd to finalize plans that would allow officers to begin handing out business cards with every encounter what is the status of this new practice

24:11 also what will the policy be for these business cards i believe the original request was that they be handed out at the beginning of every encounter an officer has when will spd begin handing these business cards out and finally a comment about the body-worn camera delay memo from chief lewis dated january 8th so almost exactly a year ago the city council directed spd to implement a bodyboard camera program at that time chief lewis told the council that spd had researched and would apply for a grant opportunity from the doj in order to partially fund the program he also noted that the body-worn camera policy had been vetted by the springfield police association as part of a previous trial use of the cameras indeed the body-worn camera policy

24:56 appeared as an appendix in the contract agreement with spa as early as 2017. so this current delay is troubling because it seems that there has been ample time for this policy to be created reviewed and submitted in order to meet doj funding guidelines and avoid delaying the already delayed implementation of body-worn cameras so in advance i want to thank you for checking in on these important issues thank you for taking the issues of the body-worn camera and business card delays seriously and thank you for checking in to make sure that our city is following the legally required terms that came out of the largest settlement for police use of force in the history of the state of oregon thank you thank you um neil i think we're ready for the next person

25:42 yes mayor and as holly mentioned um this is our first night on a regular meeting on zoom so the raising of hand feature can work if you want to get in the queue we're still working out a few of the kinks so our next speaker is elizabeth utterback followed by jen smith hi this is lizzie utterback from word three first i have to say the library presentation was amazing thank you librarian taylor i love that our youth are showing you and me what they want our city to look like they're saying black lives matter and showing us rainbows to lift up the lgbtqi community members and they're celebrating imagination and friendship i took i hope you took

26:28 this heart as did i and thank you heather for reminding us how important our library has been to help us during these times and all times getting those curbside books pickups has been a highlight for my family i have a few questions tonight related to transparency in our city government i think we can all agree after last month that anything to strengthen democracy should be prioritized and transparency in government does just that it also ensures efficiency and effectiveness in government which i would guess to be a value of most springfielders my first question is about rick brazil's report from his investigation of spd's use of force at the july thurston protest i see the report has been delayed but when it finally is released i would like to know how the report will be made

27:13 available to the public then i was listening to the work session tonight about the governmental audit and it was joked that the work was inspiring but to me it is audits support transparency and budgets are a moral document as far as i'm concerned so anyways the second item i want to talk to you about has to do with the budget at last week's work session you all discussed adjustments for the current fiscal year which included reductions to spd's budget if i did the math right i believe the reduction is just over one percent of sbd's total budget my point being the money allotted to spd could be invested more appropriately to support the community and our library so i encourage council to increase reductions in this area also during that meeting it was

27:59 mentioned that a community service officer position budgeted a hundred thousand dollars is currently vacant which makes it an easy target for the budget adjustment but where my concern about transparency comes into play is that if i understood correctly the city has budgeted for this vacant position for over 14 years i understand this was done so spd could draw funds from the vacant positions budget to cover spd's overtime i'm concerned about the oversight and misuse of these funds and i can't help to think about what an extra hundred grand a year over the last 14 years would have meant for services like our library city works programs to help folks get and remain housed emergency shelter programs the list goes on and on so i guess my question about this is whether it is common

28:44 finance practice to budget for things that don't exist thank you here the next speaker is jen smith and jen you should have your microphone unmuted all right great can you hear me yes good evening mayor and counselors um i do want to thank the library for coming to show us the bookmarks i i honestly i teared up a little bit at the blm rainbow design bookmark and the thought going through my head right now is the youth will show us the way um i was going to comment about rick brazil's report i had

29:30 questions about how if we were going to talk about it at tonight's meeting or how it was going to be distributed um but i found out shortly before this meeting that the report's going to be delayed until the end of the month and i just wanted to understand that we understand that these are unprecedented times uh with covid and remote restrictions and with that insurrection uh in early january putting even more weight into rick's words in his report but i also just wanted to let you know that it's on my mind it's on many members of the community minds and we are very much awaiting those results um and once it is available again curious will there be special meetings held for the community or city council meetings to discuss it

30:16 and when and how it'll be available to the public and how the information will be disseminated um on a related topic i would like to ask i suppose this is a question of spd in the d.a or of your oversight of them through the city manager at least of spd why a springfield resident who i'm not going to be named who has admitted to the press to entering this ring oregon capitol building illegally december 21st seen on many videos and photos using a megaphone waving a flag standing inside the breach u.s capitol grounds uh hasn't been charged yet someone who's assaulted people locally participated in

31:01 violent riots in portland um this man's a dangerous minister community and democracy and he's made local state and national news doing it with no apparent consequences at the last meeting asked also that you have chief lewis conducting an investigation into whether any spd sworn officers or other staff attended the capital insurrection on the 6th epd's concluded their investigation as spd um last point i just saw that the madison police chief has banned the display of thin blue line uh symbology by officers who are on duty i

31:47 remember seeing on live streams uh i believe spd officers wearing thin blue line materials the madison police chief said the flag has been co-opted by extremists with quote hateful ideologies and our department needs to distance itself from the imagery to build trust with the community we must consider the cost of clinging to a symbol that is undeniably inextricably linked to actions and beliefs antithetical to our values so i would ask that that be done thank you and thank you for letting me speak thank you jim mayor that appears to be all of our speakers that are in the queue all right um is there then i would open this up for any council response uh

32:33 counselors here thanks yeah i um i i understand that the the brazil report is going to be released around the end of the month and i i did want to check in on the availability to the public also um i wanted to just check on the status of the risk management assessment that was mandated by the kennedy settlement for holly shaper's question so counselor stare mayor ben gordon would you like me to this is nancy would you like me to address that question yes that'd be great okay let me come up here okay so

33:18 counselor sarah i believe your first question was regarding um the brick resolver report and the distribution of that um so i did receive correspondence from mr brazil it's there's been a slight delay um in the report due to some health um reasons with his family um which is understandable um as far as distribution to the public it's kind of hard for me to comment on it because i don't know what it was in it yet um i want to make sure that there are no confidential elements of it if people are providing you know i'm giving using this as an example let's say somebody provides their own incident or

34:03 description maybe i want to make sure that things are appropriately redacted if they need to be i also want to provide an opportunity for the to the council to review it and read it i don't know yet how long it will be so that might take some time for the council to be able to read and digest um before we you might want to talk about it i know i have a feeling it will be fairly lengthy just given the amount of materials that mr brazil has reviewed on the subject so um i my intent is to talk to council leadership about uh dissemination of this and go from there and we can set there's a number of ways we can talk about doing that but um

34:49 certainly we want to have a report out to the community and i recognize how important that is i i myself am anxious to see the findings of that report so i can i empathize with what our community and our council is saying the second question i believe you had was regarding the enterprise risk management team um as a result of the kenny settlement and i am i want to report that we are well underway we have a group of department directors plus myself and our city attorney that is reviewing an enterprise risk management program we have were on schedule with all of the reports that have been due to our insurance carrier and we have developed kind of a reporting

35:37 of likely risks that might occur in the city and how we can mitigate against those we will also have some software that we will be using to help do analysis of risk so this is going to be very helpful in our reporting and looking at what are our areas of risk and where do we need to focus training education hiring practices updating policies all manner of administration elements that are associated with risk management so those are both well underway is is there any kind of timetable about the risk of the risk management assessment

36:23 in my mind risk management is something we are always going to be doing um okay and so it's going to be an ongoing program for the city and we do have a individual in in our human resources department that is assigned to this project and so we are going to be continually meeting to evaluate our risk management program and look at potential risks right now um what we are doing is setting up the structure of the program and doing an analysis of our potential risks our next step is to evaluate claims and look at all of our claim history look for trends um so you know we're starting this from the ground up but we're being very comprehensive in our approach thank you counselor rodney

37:10 as the city manager is here i just want to follow up with a couple questions one i it is my understanding that the body worn cameras are the goal is that those will be live in march but the question i don't know the answer to is what is going on with the business cards and i think the that discussion happened before i got here so i just want to put a plug in for i'm assuming that they're going to be in both english and spanish but in case they're not just and they're not done putting that out there so do you know the eta on those i don't know if they've been ordered yet the last time i spoke to chief lewis regarding this and he may be in the audience and he probably is in the audience he might be able to answer this better than than i can but i know that the department was um putting in place the policy about how

37:57 to use the cards to give to the staff so that everybody was clear about their use as far as translation i i don't know yet if they have been ordered but we as a city do have translation services available and we can look into that thank you anything else i'll pop down all right um anything else from uh for a council response very good oh counselor mo i've had several emails relating to some of the testimony from them from the people tonight and uh i think and i hope that those people are watching and some of those questions have been answered so

38:42 uh i'm real sensitive to to the body cameras and the report those issues those are real important and one thing about the report um i i want to remind people some people are thinking that's that's going to be sort of a template or an answer to our situation it's not it's just going to be a report of what happened and hopefully it'll give us some advice on how to go forward but we still need to get together and and plan on doing some some changes in our place that's it all right thank you everybody next item please mayor the next item is business from the city council and item number one is mayor and council

39:27 committee assignments and mayor that's your item how'd that happen all right thank you very much um aj could you pull up the list of committee assignments um what i i asked aj to set this up just strictly as a quick check-in about what we're going to do over the next month um my plan is to do it when we get the new person here whoever's the new ward one uh counselor um to really when they get here in march is to really look at this holistically and you know make changes and make final decisions at that point so that would mean we as a group in february would be essentially going to all the committees that we were assigned to um in the past and we're just kind of

40:13 hold down the fort until we get the new counselor here and we find out their interests and their schedule um the two um changes to that would be that a counselor pictionary has been kind enough to cover the february um traveling county meeting and then um counselor rodley i was going to invite to the home consortium meetings for the next um couple of months so that we had two counselors there with that i won't see if there are any questions and then we will plan on redoing and having a longer discussion um well in mid-march right before we go on spring break um so i know that nancy's got that down

40:58 to get it plugged into the agenda that's all i had thank you next item next item is any other business from the council all right looks like we are good next item please any business from the city manager i just wanted to quickly um thank our finance staff staff we had a presentation in our work session about our kafir and i really appreciate the hard work they did i especially want to recognize meghalaka for the work that she did over several weeks putting that information together

41:47 yes thank you i know it was a ton of work and um and i would recommend anybody who um would has the time and energy definitely go look at that at least the introduction letter to the kafir it is a deep explanation of who we are as a city with lots of interesting facts next time neil next item is any business from the city attorney good evening council it's mary bridget i don't have any new business for the council this evening i did want to clarify one of the questions from business from the audience tonight um city manager is answering questions about the enterprise risk management program that the city is undertaking and that will be an ongoing program

42:33 the settlement agreement also required a best practice assessment by um which was completed by cis it's been done and in the process of being finalized and that was a separate assessment for the jail and for the police department and once it's finalized part of the settle agreement is also to post that on the city's website and that's all the business i have this evening right thank you it looks like we are done um i'm adjourning the meeting have a great night everybody