Springfield City Council — September 13, 2021

0:04 i'm going to call the springfield city council work session to order with roll call mayor ben gordon here councillors pitts here mo here rodley here all right we have one item tonight which is the american rescue plan action 2021 guidance and it looks like it's nathan that's representing uh good evening mayor and council tonight we're looking for guidance on potential uses for arpa funds not just a quick high-level uh summary of the information in your packet we were allocated 14 million dollars in

0:49 arpa funds uh we received the first seven million or just shy of seven million in may of 2021 and we expect to receive the second apportionment on a similar time frame here in the spring at the time that we received those funds the guidance for using those funds wasn't fully formed and so we put up this conversation until your return from uh the summer recess um in the packet you'll see that i've described six high-level categories uh in in terms of how we can use and qualify these funds uh the one that staff has focused on primarily is the revenue replacement and not that you couldn't spend it in any of those other categories but from an administrative perspective it's probably the easiest and neatest

1:34 way to qualify the funds as of december 31st of 2020 and based on the federal guidance for calculating the revenue loss uh the city uh had lost revenue of just over seven million um being that these funds can be expended um as late as uh december 31st of 2024 we feel confident uh between january 1st of 2021 and december 31st of 24 that we will be able to qualify the entire 14 million as revenue replacement um in determining and at the end of that cbm we have a list of potential uses but in putting those uses together uh we really looked towards the guidance that was provided by the gfoa

2:20 that's the government finance officers association and i just wanted to stress a couple things in that guidance one is just the temporary nature of these funds these are one-time funds and best practice is that you use them for one-time expenditures and try to avoid adding new programs or growing existing programs that require ongoing funding and i think the other element from that guidance is is they talk about shoring up your government finances you know from the impacts both short-term and long-term impacts of the coveted pandemic and if there's one silver lining from kovid it is these funds and this opportunity that it presents i also included the five-year forecast we typically bring that to you in october but given

3:06 the nature of this meeting that it felt like a good time to bring you an updated forecast we made some significant cuts in our fiscal year 21 and 22 budget between the two i think to a total of almost a million dollars and that has had a positive impact on our five-year forecast but as you notice from that forecast we still have that structural imbalance and uh these uh funds really provide us an opportunity to buy us some time as we continue to work on long-term solutions and i think finally um you know we provided a potential use of funds so in addition to any of the uses that you bring forward this evening we provided a list as well you'll note that the total of these sort of uh wish list of projects is more than 14 million i think it's

3:52 closer to 20 million but these are projects that have kind of been on our work plan but lack of the funding and so again this might be the opportunity to revisit some of these and use some of these funds for these purposes um tonight what we're really looking for is if you're wanting to use these funds in fiscal year 22 we're going to be bringing you the first supplemental budget on october 18th in regular session so we'll want to get appropriation into that supplemental budget if we want to start using those funds in the current fiscal year and that's what we're looking for this evening this really is the first conversation we don't have to allocate uh all 14 million uh this evening in fact uh the jiffy guidance uh mentions uh uh recommends to

4:38 take your time and careful consideration we'll have a lot of other opportunities through three more budget cycles that these funds could potentially touch this evening there will be a number of staff members available if you have any questions i'm not going to go into detail on any of these items but am available if you have any questions and with that i'm going to turn it over to you to start the conversation all right um leonard uh thanks mayor van gorden um nate thanks for the report um you uh you said that right now we're uh as of this year we're seven million in the hole um do you do we anticipate in the in the next two years that we're going to be operating at another 7 million in deficit or is is it going to be that neat

5:24 well um it's a little more complicated than just being seven million in the hole um because we have uh healthy reserves uh currently um that helped us uh weather uh the impacts the other thing is the um the guidance provides every agency across the nation who's receiving these funds revenues behave differently uh some are significantly impacted others less so so they had to come up with sort of a uniform way to calculate that revenue loss and they provide for a 4.1 percent inflator that could actually be greater than the actual uh inflation that we experience in our revenues so in some ways that seven million is is is the lost revenue based on their calculation it's not necessarily the loss we've experienced when we calculated the loss that we had

6:09 actually experienced it was more in the four to five million dollar range and again we made some significant cuts in anticipation of that um as well as had healthy reserves so we're not necessarily in the hole but to answer your question i think there's no question over the coming three years that we'll be able to we'll see with that inflator easily qualify the remaining seven million thanks um so i'd like to look into the possibility if we do have discretionary funds to spend in the next three years into restoring the funding of the programs that absorbed cuts in order to make the budget work this year um the uh can can you give us some examples

6:54 of the programs that were cut as a result of the lack of revenue that we had this year um yes i mean we made a number of cuts uh and you know when i say we made those cuts is um i wouldn't say that all those cuts are equal and i'll i'll just give an example one of the cuts was in my department uh we eliminated 0.7 fte and then we did a restructure um you know i think my staff would be disappointed in me saying this but i wouldn't recommend adding that back you know there are needs in this organization that i think are greater than my need to have that back while it's challenging for us to do more with less again i would invest it elsewhere when i think about putting dollars to work in this organization i think about put them to work where they can generate potentially uh future benefits to this

7:40 organization and i think we gave uh some examples in our list of potential uses we made a cut in our police department of two positions that actually weren't filled at the time had been held vacant for some time and were being used to absorb uh overtime we made cuts uh in our operations department uh we made cuts in our i.t department there's a number of places where we've made them and actually we've actually made some cuts and pastures unrelated um to these previous two cycles or the covet impact um one of those being in our hr department uh some significant cuts in staffing that's another place if i was to look to invest could be an area so you you referred specifically to

8:25 programs that could yield dividends down the road um could you give some examples of those well uh one that just comes immediately to mind and we've talked about in the past is if we were to add uh some fte in our hr department uh for a training position to if we had a training program of city-wide and when we look at the issues we've had around our insurance you know a training program might be something that could help can reduce our risk exposure going forward so that could you know you have investments that can generate money and you have investments that could avoid potential outlays of money and that would be an example of one that would avoid a potential outlay another one in here and this is an item that's actually going to be coming to

9:10 you next week i believe in work session is the replacement of our street legacy street lights um with leds and we've done a cost benefit analysis on this and the breakeven or payback on this project is roughly 11 years and then from that point forward it is a savings to our organization so that's an example where i think you know in addressing our structural imbalance that would be a great investment okay well i don't want to bogart the mic here but i uh i would like to say that i i i would advocate some sort of a hybrid um resolution to this where we could say sign off on half of the amount going to revenue replacement this year and then revisiting this same time next year

9:56 i uh that that's just where i'm coming from right now thanks thank you and thank you um counselor stare for kicking off the conversation um i don't know exactly what i want to do yet but what i wanted to chat about a little bit is what i'm thinking in terms of um what my mindset is and what my priorities are as i'm looking at this and thinking about this and and one of them is thinking you know in five or ten years i want us to or whoever's sitting in these seats to look back and think oh that was money well spent and that was money that was invested in a really solid way um so that's one of the just the top

10:42 things that i'm thinking at as i read through each of these i'm like okay is this something that is going to um that is it just feels good you know at this moment or is this something like for example it sounds super boring but we've been talking about you know the hvac system for a really long time and the longer we let things like that go the bigger it creates it's a an issue somebody down the line so as i'm thinking about that i'm thinking about that like in 10 years i want us to feel like oh right we invested that money really well and the other consideration like counselor stare said is um and we've seen this happen before is i also don't want to spend all the money before we actually get it because things such things change and so it's like starting to try to think about

11:28 that in a really reasonable way and prioritize those investments based on as the money comes what feels like it's going to make the most sense long term either save us money or like nathan said help us to make more money help us to take care of things that are not going to cost us more money down the line down the line and the other thing that i'm totally open to and thinking about is like how does this best benefit all of springfield so if that looks like some potential sort of partnership or sharing in some ways i'm absolutely open to that because it's not just like how do we how do we benefit the buildings that belong to the city but how is this most going to put springfield continuing

12:13 continuously on the road for um more progress so that's really i don't know i don't know my answers yet but that's where my mind is at as we start to have this conversation thank you joe and then i'll come to steve um actually steve had his hands up beforehand and i'll jump in after him steve anyway uh we haven't talked about elaine how much are they going to take out of that and then so then we know what we're dealing with and uh so i had another question but i'll wait till later because i don't remember all right i think people are looking for our direction on the willamette lane letter so that's something that we've got to talk about tonight and give some direction for to nancy about how to respond to it um so if we want to maybe

12:59 save that one for last and we'll kind of come back to it um joe all right well i'm just going to say one thing real quick based on what steve just says that willamelain doesn't get to take anything it's what we allow them to have so just want to make sure we don't set the wrong tone there all right uh so corey and leonard both make a ton of sense i completely concur i think that um with nathan's making a ton of sense we need this is a i want to my hat's off to you all that put this list together there's many things on this list that i went oh yeah oh yeah things that things that these are these are things i've been on a council for a long time and this is these are some of

13:44 the same cans we've been kicking down the road since i've been on and when i started and and i really think that it's time this is an amazing opportunity because frankly i don't see anything in our near future that's going to take care of these things we've got to get done and if we don't it i would consider it irresponsible if we don't because these are assets that that i think that we are bound to make sure that they serve the community well and and update when needed so we maintain a safe atmosphere for our staff maintain a safe atmosphere for the public coming in so i i greatly uh hugely support the i mean i'd love to go down the list if anybody wants to is this time where i could do that if you've got stuff that you like yeah

14:29 remember there's 20 probably 20 million dollars plus on this list so it's got to get whittled a little bit and we got to get this direction on so you talking about what's important to you is helpful yeah and that's fine because on some of these because for example the uh cover projected general fund deficit spend is four to five million well that you know because i support that doesn't mean it has to be four to five million so i'll just tell you what the things i support and that's and then we can look at that list and maybe nathan take a look at this list and say okay we've got all these on the list but that's represents this much money so where could some of these be shaved down and it could be proportionately saved shaved down as opposed to targeting one thing to eliminate if that makes any sense okay so uh

15:14 we'll just actually i'll skip the covered projector general fund at this point because it's the high dollar one but uh i absolutely believe that we should um make sure that we have the ability to uh handle the new developments and and all the different things going on so the limited duration positions make an absolute sense um as long as they they know right up front this is a temporary position and if a position potentially opens up that was pre-existing then they may be able to apply for that but it's a temporary position um the carter building makes absolute sense we've been kicking that thing around for oh my gosh uh years and years and years we need that it looks terrible down there oh my gosh but i think that's that would be a great investment and it's a

15:59 return on our investment we can make money back on that we're already making 100k a year i think we could even bump that up and and make more money on that building and to me that's a great investment on rental property the legacy street lighting replacement to me is a no-brainer it should be street-wide and 11-year payback that means that it's not an expense considering an expense in 11 years it's no longer money that's being used it's money that's that's that's being saved so to me that that exes itself out and instead of it having to be spent so to speak in the first year and used up it's going to come back to us in the in the future i mean let me turn one thing in there on that i did a project years ago bonneville power administration uh it was 2000 street lights replacement

16:44 eugene that i did we went from mercury vapor to high pressure sodium bpa paid for it because the power limit guys maybe there's a program like that's still available let's check into it other than that let's do it well and the other part i was going to talk about with those lighting is that with with the led lighting that's white white light and and the hvp uh their hpv lights um hps whatever the heck that the high pressure sodium they put out that amber um yep a light wavelength and it it really clouds and fakes you out on on true colors so whatever they put in yeah the led was led was is much safer for the entire public everybody um

17:30 so moving down is the uh the city hall i'm sorry the justice center roof replacement we can't have a leaky roof i think that's good money well spent it irritates me that it died so quickly so to speak or prematurely and and and frankly i would like to look or have someone take a look to make sure that when it was specced out that we bought and if we hadn't expected life expectancy on it if there's any legal way in which to come back i don't know it may not be but hopefully somebody will take a look at it and not just assume that we can't recover something on that um city hall roof and hvac placement replacement it's like corey was saying totally smart i mean we need to do it kick that kind of can down the road it i'm done with that

18:15 don't like doing that website enhancement i'd like to see more on that information i think it need we need it but i could see more um council chambers and court security that's absolutely something we need to do i i fully concur that that that's actually a pretty conservative price tag i think but for what it's going to do i think it's going to pay off in the end fire life safety radio replacement excuse me that uh i know i brought this up as far as it was it came up i recall coming up during budget committee meetings and that they wanted buildings that would that or have the ability to penetrate buildings et cetera for the signals they can get signal in and out i thought it was mentioned i heard more information later that it wasn't budgeted so therefore i think it's i think safety

19:01 wise it would be foolish not to buy that as a well just needed to do it for safety staff safety um museum elevator again that's one of those things where like hvac if it's old and torn out and spend instead of spending you know eight ten percent to repair it something like that that old and for that price tag is not that unreasonable should be replaced um probably providing better safety for our for the public uh city hall space remodel definitely needs to be updated and for that price tag it's not very expensive i don't think and something i would like to keep in there revenue share for parks that's the next subject that i will um

19:48 hold off on my comments until after towards the end of this meeting um city hall external security camera system i'm not i'm surprised we don't have it already so that means we're way behind on that i think that's something that we should do um but probably get more information because there's going to be some ongoing costs there and how we're going to uh how are we going to go maintain that type of security system for around city hall is going to be important to know north gateway planning how to address transportation issues i think that's something that that if at the sake of these other ones i would not um i probably wouldn't endorse pain into that um i think we can partner up with odot et cetera for different options instead of us paying upfront

20:34 and then uh that's it for now i have my own initiatives that i'd like to bring up and maybe after i hear from everybody else sean i mentioned a little bit about those should i mention that part now yeah why don't you get them all out so we can kind of start talking about them all right just kind of go back all right so uh this part is that there is a part about the parameters for these funds that what they can be used for and what i did notice or what i didn't notice on this list was anything that was really geared towards economic development and how that can economic development to me helps pay the city give the city money and return investment and i would like to look at something to the effect of okay what is our greatest needs right now that's housing right

21:19 what why isn't there more housing being built right now part of that is because of the development cost i think that because we have a requirement for them for folks to build and create bioswales that's a significant expense that's quite often a yay or nay breaker for development so bioswell of course is where the water runoff from the impervious surface collects in this bioswale it gets back into the aquifer and any overrun goes into this the regular stormwater drain system but that's a significant expense i think that the city could look at paying for part or percentage of these bios wells at these developments at a set rate so if a development's saying okay i got

22:04 to put in a 25 000 bios whale but that throws my numbers off where i can't even build i can't i can't move forward with this development then that's something or at least minimize that at least that will allow for us to reimburse for a bioswell and of course different sizes are going to have different costs but so we would have to look at is what percentage of the bios will should the city help reimbursement for to me that's economic development you got job creation you got climate improvement for the walk that bringing the water into the aquifer and you're moving the city forward with everything coming back in after it's built you got income off that property so there's my abbreviated sales pitch

22:50 and and folks just recognize that like we're going to get more than one talk at this so even though the staff's sort of noting down other people's ideas we're going to kind of refine this and have a couple of conversations about this so we don't have to be like yes violence oils tonight or no bile swells tonight just kind of have a conversation about it i think i had barely next speaker microphone thank you um yeah i went back over the last 10 years and was trying to think of all the things that we had thought of over the last 10 years that we hadn't done because we went through the great recession and then we went through everything else and so we just kept you

23:35 know we get as joe we just kept kicking the can of some of these things on down and when i looked at some of these things i i'm pretty much in agreement with joe's list is pretty close to mine um with very few differences um but to me a priority for the for where we focus at the moment is things that are maintenance that will take care of issues that won't become larger issues later if we don't do something like the roof on the justice center like the hvac like the elevator in the museum i mean i was volunteering on the museum board 12 years ago and we didn't we the elevator was terrible it's been terrible forever so those are the kind of things those are maintenance things that not only

24:21 just maintenance and upkeep but it maintains the value and so i think it's really important to to look at some of those and realize that they if we have this as nate said this is a little bit of a windfall that we weren't expecting um but we can get benefit from it and to be able to utilize some of these to take care of some of those issues and not have to say well but we need this first i'd like to see some of those things taken care of um i think that's i don't have much to say past what joe said just just the idea that that i think it's important that we look at some of these things that we've been not able to do um i do like the idea of the of the basic remodel though

25:06 um of expanding the library and moving uh city manager down to the old uh fire uh area i think that's i hadn't thought of that until i saw that in this list and i thought boy that makes a lot of sense and uh the connection it wouldn't be that difficult to make to expand the library into from the library meeting reminded the city manager area so it just just sounds like a good idea 100 000 sounds you know minimal in order to be able to do that so i think that's worth looking at something new that's worth looking at um but otherwise no i i uh um i'm glad it was presented to us the way that it was so that we can then look at

25:52 um the issues in our city hall building um our justice center roof you know so we can look at those we don't have to go oh but we can't spend it on that i like the way it was presented to us so that we can look at those things and um something that i've always been a big advocate of that doesn't fall into this is setting up something that is going to be an ongoing uh cost we can do that with other programs and we do that all year long with other programs and other funding this to me this needs to be a situation where we look at these things that we haven't been able to take care of in a one-time thing

26:37 um we've been working on these street lights forever we've been you know little by little by little um we've been working i remember having conversations with gino about them because the yellow the amber lighting is terrible for safety it's terrible for being able to see and when they came out and replaced the light in my neighborhood and they replaced it with an amber one i had a fit no replacement there we put a little white one in there you can't see so i the bed the sooner we can get that kind of thing really going and done would be that's a safety issue and i'm and i'm all for that that safety issue in that so um that's all i have to say but i i i that's where i'm coming from that's where my mindset is at the moment all right uh damien i think or

27:26 uh council riley was first i'll let her go okay i was going i was gonna go a second round but first round so you're still on the first round here okay uh so i mean as we all know i'm simple and so one thing that i think about is a lot of these are infrastructure based uh and i do believe those are needed but when we think about how do we increase the cultural capital of our citizens how do we provide uh access to understanding other cultures how do we create a space where everybody will feel comfortable and be in a constant state of learning about one of one another so we can be better citizens to each other and so i think of things like a sister city we haven't had a city since 1965

28:11 you know uh but we have populations with origins in other countries why don't we celebrate those cultures or cultures that are similar to where we can all learn something you know how do we provide our k-12 with access to culture education that they won't get in books that they won't get in school that they won't get it home uh and i you know and i think a lot of this will feed into willamalane so i'm a huge proponent and of course i'm going to talk about creating convenience with barbecue grills because you feed people they become happy and they want to stay here and so i think that oftentimes we focus so much on creating new things and fixing old things which you know is understandable but how

28:56 are you going to keep the citizens happy and can keep them growing culture but then also how are you going to attract more people to want to make springfield their home especially you know as we think about what diversity means all of us uh you can't bring in diversity if you have the same people rotating throughout these new houses you know how do you how do you create a space where people feel comfortable here and so i would definitely ask and there are multiple ways to handle this but i would definitely ask that we consider how do we enhance and add elements of culture to our city all right thanks damian um i'm going to make a couple of comments and then we'll go through uh we'll go through round two i like the list a lot i think it's i

29:42 think it's pretty good and pretty spot on um i would be supportive as we refine this to put money and i don't know how much a sister city costs or what it entails but uh you know i'm supportive of having that conversation and making sure that we sort of do some due diligence around it um and see what which direction that we go um one of the things that i really like what counselor rodley said is if we imagine 10 years from now we want people to feel like this money's well spent right and that's kind of the filter that i'm that i'm looking forward to it like so the revenue recovery and understanding and getting that money programmed so that we understand how to fill in the the structural deficits critical to me um understanding that you know having the project delivery the additional

30:28 folks come on almost immediately in the museum elevators you know kind of become critical to me the website thing is something that needs to be fixed um for i don't know if it's two or three versions we've been through the website but it's terrible and like we we sort of do it in you know and we always try to do it on the cheap instead of having sort of a modern uh a modern website that goes with them you know modern growing city so i think that's um i think that's pretty important too um i've got some uh other the the one um i like joe's idea i think that's valuable to kind of have a development conversation um in the next version around this um the carter building's really important to me i love that that's on the list um the other one i would from a

31:15 remodel perspective i want to hear a little bit more for is like what's the actual gap from the from the chamber of commerce i know that that conversation is kind of out there about what that because because we technically own that building um and wanting to understand you know do we have an opportunity to sort of leverage some of these funds you know even though it's a much smaller building um with that goal as well the other piece that i would like to see is i would love to put a you know 100 grand or so in in plan from from neighborhood trees right we like something easy that improves livability would be more would be more tree landscape so understanding over the next five or ten years how do we spend you know find different ways to replace storm broken trees trees that need trams

32:00 but just generally spruce up neighborhoods would become is really important as well and i do see this willamalane superintendent get damien his barbecue grills michael um all right corey all right round two i'm for trees and barbecue grills too um one of the things that and you touched on it a little bit the marital a little bit is i also and this probably just creates more work for staff but i think there's an opportunity for us to look at how to leverage this funding as part of bigger projects so um and that has ye i mean i think that'll be unfolding in terms of what the

32:45 opportunities darks i know that occasionally grants come up or there might be these opportunities for partnerships that could be really creative and because we would have some capital to put forward we may be able to leverage that into it so that we are not covering the entire cost of some of these projects so um that's another thing that i would just like to kind of keep on the table is us to think creatively in terms of how do we use this money to possibly partner in creative ways and and grow it so that we can make it go further i love the idea of a sister city that just makes me smile i just i think

33:30 that's an awesome idea um i think that i think that can i think i don't know how to do that i'm going to defer to damian as to you know what the process of something like that is but that incorporates an exchange of cultures that incorporates all the different cultures and subcultures that we have in this community um and in exchange with another sister city at least that's my that's my initial concept of it and i could be wrong or i could be off you know offline a little bit but i just i just love that idea i just i just think that's really a fun idea i think that's something that the community could have fun with um and and i just yeah i just i just want to put my two cents in there i just think that's an awesome idea

34:20 thank you um i'm interested in the uh idea of a sister city too that counselor pitts brought up i um so how does how does a sister city concept work would it be cultural exchange would it be cultural festivals i mean what what generally happens with a program like that uh i mean a lot of it's based off of uh what the cities want to do uh the last city we had was in venezuela uh since then there are other cities in mexico and korea that have reached out uh to be honest some we probably don't want to partner with at this time uh but you know we have festivals we can do exchange you know if it is a country where some of our schools

35:05 teach that language i mean we can really get k-12 involved and this can be really great for all there is an actual organization sister cities international and so uh neil sent me some information thanks neil and i've been working with uh the museum going through a bunch of old documents i mean just some fascinating stuff uh and so we just gotta figure out how to make it work but i mean it seems like everybody's on board it's fairly easy to do it's not gonna cost a lot of money uh but inherently this would be good for the culture and could be potentially revenue generated i mean i've had some ideas to where we challenge every restaurant on main street to create a dish that's related to that specific country won't we choose i mean this can be really fun uh and really like long term we just got

35:52 to keep it going and so i'll continue to work on it and have more soon yeah of course i i was also thinking that a program like that could yield immediate material benefits if we picked a sister city that had had wildfire problems for centuries it's a fairly new problem for us but i'm sure that there are countries in western africa and in northern africa um in the deserts that have had wildfire problems for a while well actually not in the deserts but it would obviously require forest land but i'm i'm thinking that there have got to be ancient and long-standing programs of fire mitigation that we haven't even thought of and they could the uh her sister said

36:38 he could probably help us with so yeah i think this is a good conversation to have um i'm hoping that we can make you know i know some research has been done um when we do council goal setting maybe we can have some of that material to talk about a little bit more i see some interest in this um and maybe using using this as a funding source um but joe oh thank you very much now steve you've been quiet i mean as far as we've been doing round robin here and have you i like your list you're you already you've already done the list for me so i don't i don't know about the bioswales but everything else on your list i liked you i'm just trying to get i'm trying to get more housing that's all i i want more in sister city god i never even looked at that you know i'm too busy looking at

37:24 springfield to think about looking outside so i guess that's unlimited i'm thinking i think he is but and then we talk about wildfires we're going greece we're not spain russia's got the biggest wildfire of any place in the world right now i'm i'm working out that'd be interesting and then that's a that's an interesting concept of wildfire i like so um anyway so uh damian dang it you came up with a great idea and it was like i i think it's awesome the sister city thing i like i like the uh local neighborhood barbecue spots maybe even covered and so i i am all about i love barbecues i love bringing people into barbecue together because you can have some really amazing dishes um i know that they got a couple outdoor barbecues that

38:09 lamalane does back behind splash that are covered and are used i think that i guess michael's there could verify but i'm guessing that that those uh those areas are booked out um but it's something that maybe that that instead of just here in thurston to to get some of different parts of the city maybe not so huge and fantastic and where they're more usable for smaller groups and and and not necessarily have a price tag attached to them but there's a lot of things they got to consider you know for the for the undesired use you know this uses it that aren't really good for that and and yada yada but i support that i think that'd be great so anything neighborhood that we can bring these people together i'm down for and the sister city i think

38:55 is a great idea um so this has been a great conversation as far as i'm concerned so awesome and i like the trees we're good we're good with the trees i'm all right with that so all right but don't forget about the swales well we're going to take we're going to switch this into the next phase of the conversation here in a second so merrily did you have another comment you wanted to make just one quick comment it came to recall as i was listening uh my i have a very have a 30 year old 30 years long friend that teaches english in japan and her classrooms have been part of sister cities and they trade letters and translate letters back and forth and so it doesn't even have to remain within something that is strictly

39:42 the city but it can expand beyond into schools and and other cultural parts of our community so i just i just want to throw that in because i i just i think this is a super idea okay so here's what i think we should do um because there's i think two phases to this conversation um i think i hear everybody saying like comfortable that the staff can go ahead and program um the revenue recovery portion right so because that's something they actually need direction on you know sort of sort of tonight to plan plan from a budgetary perspective um so i think in nancy maybe you can help us here with the actual programs themselves right like i think you're

40:27 probably good on the temporary staff you're good on the uh on the on the money piece but i think there's places where you guys need to kind of refine the idea a little bit more um and try to get to an actual number and then there's places that you're probably going to want to program into next like next year's budget as far as the project goes i think really the next thing we probably want to do is sort of separate here's the first group of projects that we want to go and then probably here's the stuff we want you to research a little bit more yeah thank you mayor i think that's an excellent suggestion you know we we really and i want to thank our nathan um neil ledotti uh neil oberinger and mary bridget smith um for helping put this list together

41:12 um we were really trying to focus on what can give us the biggest bang for our buck in a one-time use and you know recognizing that we do have a lot of deferred maintenance in city facilities um and as councilor radley aptly pointed out it doesn't get cheaper to do it later so you know a couple i think the the really the newer one was the concept of the city hall space remodel which would allow the library to have more room so we kind of put a placeholder amount there that could certainly get further refined and and we can certainly put um some priorities on this based on you know we have some some of these projects as we know we

41:57 we've been working on for years so for instance the streets the street light program would be an easy one to plan and and launch pretty easily and rapidly so um you know we already know kind of what we need to do and and the mechanics behind it so i think that's a good idea we can put in priority order what what are more like shovel ready so to speak versus what we need to do a little bit more work on yeah and my suggestion would be because we still haven't even sort of dived into the lamellae conversation is that we can find more work session time when and come back with that list of saying hey here's the stuff that's probably going to go the next budget cycle that we want to head nod the program here's the stuff we're hearing yes and we probably need to research a little bit more and in more

42:44 broadly um i actually think this may be like this may be a good list to sort of talk about again when we do sort of goal setting because even if we don't find funding for all these projects immediately this is all stuff that i'm seeing people say yes we need to be doing that this is a really good project list to start working off go ahead merrily and their state level grants as corey mentioned getting partnerships they're state level grants that are where they're happy they're looking for places to give to in springfield they've been the last few years they've been very interested in getting money into springfield so they're state level grants that are available for different things like that especially increasing anything that has to do with arts and culture so it there definitely be worthy looking into to see if we can partner some of this money and

43:31 and really make it you know the best we can do okay um our so it in good job oh i thought your hand was left over from the last time no i went like this no i'm good um so i i just want to rephrase that like the the bioswell thing is what's in my head is is um get some information back and all those those multitude of of low impact development treatments is what i'm talking about the development treatments that are required to have some to construct some sort of incentivized uh those be incentivized so that way it can kick-start some of these these uh

44:16 developments that's but i think the first one that hit my head was that is the bioswell but i think there's others that we require that that if we have an incentive program that it would kickstart some development for sure okay so and sometime this week maybe nancy if we can kind of get a summary of this one because this conversation was great and it was all over the place but you know just that that that extra email you know look to say hey here's the plan here's what we heard would be absolutely fantastic um okay so now the question is what do you what what do folks want to do with the willameline conversation we if we got the letter i came out probably 4 30ish

45:02 i know some people have read it some people haven't we probably we need to get them some sort of response back um and i know we've spent like three times as much money as we actually have here but and that will get refined over time but what where are folks at well with willameling i agree i have no idea i i haven't had a chance to see the letter okay could you give us the gist sean um so i'm not going to get this 100 right so a little bit of grace would be great um the require when they calculate their revenue loss they have about 2.8 million dollars of lost revenue they've made a

45:48 request uh for the city uh to give them payments of 1.7 million out of this same bucket of 14 million dollar savings and let me see if i still have it up um and that their request would uh backfill shortages that they have in their parks planning and facilities increase offerings of child care preschool and early childhood youth programs and increased hours at their foot at their facilities that is really high level please right we've got to do um you know do the right right level of service for william elaine as an organization and read the read the entire letter letter in its entirety because it's still two pages long

46:37 go ahead leonard thanks uh so um who would uh who would the child care program for instance be available to uh some of it's low income my sense my sense from um from my reading of the letter when i read it is there was a ton of stuff where i felt like we needed more information um but it's not that it's not that specific it's just in general i i was going to say just based on my own empirical experience i mean my anecdotal experience there god knows there's a need i mean we we have a desperate need for child care in this city right now and at least in principle i i'm like you i think i need to know more about the nuts and bolts but in principle i'm certainly in favor of it nancy

47:23 thank you mayor um i don't know if this is the time that the council wants to do this but michael wargo is available if you want him to go into greater detail on any of the portion of their letter we're going to try our leverage of of technology here yeah i think it would be a good idea to bring michael up to see uh corey go ahead well while we're well he's climbing into the the zoom i i would like to keep valenolane in the mix um because as just from reading the letter which i did read before coming on um it is service focused i am a fan i think i've told everybody that i think william elaine is great at treasure and um has not had access to the funding so

48:08 i would like to keep them in the mix i agree i'd like to have we probably need more detail because we need more detail on all of this um and as i mentioned very first i'm open to sharing for the betterment of springfield and i know that you know willamelain is experienced by so many of our neighbors so that's all i want to keep it i want to keep them in the mix as we move forward um marylee and then we'll we'll let michael uh talk a little bit yeah the only thing the only thing i comment was commenting on was again the the need for details um i i've said part of it you know with the uh increasing the offerings of preschool and early childhood and the you know the paid and free care options and that and and is part of it and there's other parts you know that need more they need more

48:54 details what what i'm looking at is i'm looking at um in thinking along the lines of what corey mentioned um being able to portray that that complete image of look what look what we were able to do in collaboration with willamela in collaboration with the city for the city with this with this windfall that we got and and be as as open and honest about it and you know we we're putting ourselves out there to do this for the city for the community and and i think women lane is part of that depending on how it however it works out well emily should be part of it uh michael um could you maybe just take us through your general ask and um some information and then we can open it up to some q a if if we put you on the

49:39 spot i don't know that you were expecting to speak so if you want if you know it's one thing uh i've never unfortunately for most have backed away from an opportunity to to speak so i appreciate counselor woodrow's introduction there and the support that we always get in all in all seriousness i mean this is a tremendous partnership between the city of springfield and willamelli we've enjoyed it for many many years um but just a little bit of background the first go around the coronavirus relief fund uh we we had direct access to those funds we immediately made application and we're fortunate enough to recoup a portion of what we had lost over the first uh six to 12 months based on the covid

50:24 pandemic this go around special districts were not as fortunate as were eligible but we did not have direct access to the funding we were told by the federal federal government representatives as well as at the state level that we would have to make a an ask to local governments and that's what we've done um shout out to the fine city staff that have worked with us but there's never been like an exact amount um so what we chose to do was and again um i i would honestly be really honored to get any of of of this funding because there's so many needs but um our budget in relation to the city budget operationally is about 12 percent

51:10 based on the gfo a calculations that my cfo uh betty nielsen had provided we we did have a 3.6 million dollar loss as a direct result of that's our total loss um 2.6 of that or 2.7 of that was revenue so what we figured out was 12 in proportion to the city budget would be about 1.7 million dollars what we would use that for well to me the biggest thing and i've heard it probably a half a dozen times tonight is economic development um you know we are still drastically short staff in our front line positions we can we are having a a horrific time trying to hire people in

51:55 those positions uh those in the for profit uh fast food companies those types of positions are able to offer incentives that we're not able to so not only have we lost a percentage of our staff because of that we also have not been able to recruit them back so we have had to reduce our early childhood programs we've had to reduce our before and after school programs at the different school sites where we've only got about 40 of those sites available and to me you know that's twofold number one the more people we can employ the more money goes into the local economy um and and the happier that the local businesses are the people can pay their taxes

52:40 people can get their permits all those things as well as it provides parents guardians the opportunity to go back to work and not worry about day care preschool because well emily would have them covered it also would you know encompass all need if someone has a need we have scholarships available they don't have any we pride ourselves in in running high quality programs at at a um at a at a you know a very very fair price so um i'm uh something else that we had talked about which is our increased hours of operation we've had to shut our pools down um and because of staffing and i think if we were able to do more of that so the majority of our ass is just lost wages um you know we did have a

53:26 significant on payment and unemployment that we uh are required to pay but that's a main thing as well as there are some other items that i don't think are as important or as big enough but you know we have had some expenditures to try to keep the public safe through it touchless um faucets reopening up uh our permanent lavatories versus having porta johns i know it's not a sexy thing but one thing that we've been you know almost required to do to keep everyone safe but um i know that 1.7 million dollars seems like a a sizable ask but it is only just a portion almost half of what we've lost

54:11 and i'm very very proud of the fact that we've been able to stay afloat to keep people as employed as we can but um this would be a significant help for us to provide you know i think exceptional parks and recreation for the city of springfield so michael i've got a couple of questions and then um i'm going to open it up for for folks and then we can see where we go from there um and i really appreciate you you know jumping in on the spot and you know helping some helping give us some sort of context to that when i read the letter when it said expanded hours i read it as additional hours right is that expanded as or is it sort of trying to backfill back to the historical norm yeah it's just and i hate saying new normal because it's just normal now um

54:56 it would be getting back to those historical hours of operation but of course we'd always love to be able to expand that based on the needs of the public but it wouldn't be it's not sort of incremental hours to where you've historically run it's more like trying to it's more like trying to get back to normal we would love to get back to those hours of operation and from february 2020. and my second question was and you know i know the the preschool partnership in the community is really really important um i with i know the school district is getting a lot of additional support for daycare child care preschool is there a partnership that's going on with between william elaine and the school district to try to get some of those resources to

55:42 you yes quite honestly uh mayor we would not have been able to run our summer programming at the level that we just did if it wasn't for that partnership with springfield public schools they were able to get some funding and i cannot thank superintendent hamilton enough and his staff for working with us to provide opportunities scholarships just to give an example you know our one pass program where there's destination sites to keep kids busy and active all summer long they provided a free one pass for each and every public school student this summer so there was a high level of collaboration that really had a positive impact on the quality of life uh during this past summer okay thank you um does anybody else have questions for michael

56:32 merrily i don't have a question but as michael was talking the first thing that came to my mind was when this when we get opened up we need to have a team springfield meeting so everybody can be a cheerleader for everybody else you know it just we've been through this for the last almost two years now and and we just we needed we need it we can get damien's barbecues and we can have a big team springfield where everybody just cheers everybody else on because it's been that kind of two years and nobody has given up everybody has hung in there and tried to do the best that they can do and listening to michael and phil and realizing that the school district has pulled into their part uh we just yeah we just need to keep that ahead of us so when we get to that point where we can do that boy we really need that

57:17 we'll sign me up with a spatula i'm i'm in and just talking about really quickly about team springfield we continue to meet each and every week um i can't thank uh nancy newton enough neil ledaudy they meet with my staff each and every week to find out how we can collaborate on special things and that's what makes springs field so so important and so special all right perfect um any other questions and michael like we see it like i i know that you know it's easy you know when we talk about how hard everybody's working it's a lot easier for you know us at the city to see what the what our staffs are doing but we're seeing the willamette in the school districts as well so i think it's

58:02 important that you that you carry that message to folks too is that we see we see it people are holding their tail off well i certainly appreciate any consideration and again um my uh submission was really just out of you know we we do need the money but it was completely respectful because we know that there is no guidelines and i uh empathize with the situation you've got more ass than you have money for so i just appreciate being in the conversation i think the best thing and and i'm kind of looking for the right the council because we're gonna go into sort of phase one of this conversation in phase two is maybe bring you back into phase two of that conversation and let give you a chance to sort of develop this a little bit more and maybe take that you know 1.7 and kind of

58:47 because i think you had like three buckets in the letter you know they'll give people a chance to read the letter and then maybe you can come back and talk to us about like you know how you're trying to you want to split this up a little bit and get give us just a little bit more context and then we can talk about it when we get into the next conversation be more than happy to thank you all right i appreciate it michael joe don't go away michael so one of the questions i would have and it's and it's not that i not that i'm uh against what the request was or anything like that what i as a numbers counter type thing going on is that your uh your decrease in those fees were you know basically are saying that she lost

59:33 2.7 million in the in lost revenue and so that's creating a shortfall i assume but um i know that you you laid off what 50 or 46 folks and so if uh that means also that your operational costs drop significantly and i'm just wondering what the difference is in you know was that how shortage i getting to this the 46 people that weren't getting paid do those were those people getting paid and you uh got that loss or were they were you were they already gone and you didn't actually you didn't actually suffer a uh an outlayer did you have to dip into um reserve funds so to speak to cover

1:00:19 their costs so that's that would be kind of the breakdown i would look for in in regards to the ask no we can absolutely provide that but you know in a nutshell we're required each year during a regular budget a non-pandemic smoky air quality year right to make between four and a half million and five million dollars to make our budget and those revenues also go to pay for some of those revenue producing programs that we have if we don't have the programs we don't have the staff um however we do have fixed costs that you know we're required but a lot of times during you know we provided um covid leave that was not budgeted for to take care of families as they went through um and um you know emergency family leave act we got on the

1:01:04 work share programs there were a lot of costs that uh still are required to pay for including we chose to still pay for everyone's health benefits even if we laid them off or furloughed them so there are some of those fixed costs that continue to pile on but i was very happy that we didn't have to dip into our reserves it was very close but it wasn't without reducing um programs uh offerings as well as some of the positions as well okay thank you i was really curious about the reserves if they were hit hard or not all right awesome thank you michael roy and just to add to that a little bit even though i don't know all the details as a lama lane member

1:01:49 um i know that we were not charged our membership for the first several months during the pandemic and um i've said this to a few people i swim really regularly at the willam langston swim center and i have been crabby like everybody else i have been crabby because just when things opened up then that couldn't find staffing and the hours reduced and then just when i'm like getting a new groove then they've like got a clothes for me so i've been crabbing with other people and also understanding as merely said that we are all in this together so i think that i i have i have experienced it and i also see it from our perspective too so i just wanted to add a little anecdotal that it has been challenging and i i would have continued just so you know i would have continued to pay even during the pandemic

1:02:35 but i know that your expenses continue but you were not collecting that revenue my cfo was on the line we couldn't retroactively charge you uh councilmember just get just give me a heads up that's all cory only the cory only plan all right all right perfect so i think we have a game plan um did anybody else have other questions before we adjourn for ceta i believe ceta is 7 p.m on a different link it's executive session yes all right great then i'm going to join us thank you very much everybody all right