Springfield City Council — October 11, 2021

0:05 i'm going to call the uh work session of the springfield city council to order with roll call mayor van gorden here councillors pitts here mo here broadly here woodrow here all right we have two items tonight the first is the city manager compensation 2021 with chain hello again american council i will um try to talk fast and do what i can to try to make up some time for everybody but i also recognize that for many of you this is the first go-round of meeting and making a wage recommendation

0:51 for the city manager the city manager is employed under a employment contract reporting directly to council as part of the city manager's employment contract council is required to meet on an annual basis with the intent of submitting a recommendation regarding a salary or cost of living adjustment for nancy newton's position i'm here today to seek guidance not specifically a number but a guidance that council would be willing to approve for next week's regular session your packet includes a number of attachments there isn't a very specific methodology that is used in making a determination so we provide lots of info and i've provided as well three recommendations you're not

1:37 required to go with any of those recommendations but i wanted to put something on the table for council to consider inside your packets there are three attachments as i said all of them are associated with what i would describe if we were in a labor world as past practice for ways of looking at compensation one of those is the which is attachment one is the salary index comparison so that's our look at different cpi's there are currently three cpi's that we're able to look at and then we pull an average of those cpi's it gives us generally a sense of what the cost of uh living changes have been for this particular position and once again nancy was hired in april 20th of 2020 her initial job offer was intended to have a wage reflective of the june 1 it was a

2:22 crystal ball of that but she has not had a wage increase and of course inflation factors and a number of things have changed between april 20th and where we sit today so that had an index factor if we look at the three cpis of an average of 3.23 once again that's just factoring what the cost of living differences are in addition to that attachment to is a look at i was going to say comparable communities but historically we've looked at both comparable communities and we've also looked at the city of eugene and lane county recognizing that on population sizes they are not what we would typically determine as a comparability but wanting to make sure that you could see that so that you know where we sit with our

3:07 neighbors and then also it basically pulls together or does pull together all of the factors that we consider compensation which includes wages deferred compensation purse pickup any kind of hra viva car stipends there's a host of different ways that city managers get get compensated we look at all of that we total those up and then we apply which is a pretty traditional practice for all of our labor contracts and our non-represented employees here at the city of springfield uh a cost of labor adjustment it's kind of an equalizer way of looking at ourselves across the board in a more neutral way uh so when we factor that in um that shows that um she would be sitting at um

3:53 she nancy newton would be slightly below nine percent of average once again that's not the best factor so i threw in an attachment three and attachment three is really excluding communities that are of larger size which would be the eugene lane county uh and really looking at it in a way that i would say is probably more accurate for the way that we would look at other positions that report up directly through and to the city manager so when i pull out the eugene lane county comparison you see that that number changes to five and a half percent below average and there's a wide range so it's not that nancy's sitting in the middle it's it is it's not a median score it is really where she says compared to average score or average wages um to comparable communities

4:39 so with that i i took those numbers and applied three recommendations um these are intended to be conversation starters for council they're not intended to say that you're limited to one of these three options and so option one is really just looking at the cost of inflation uh and just adjusting her wage uh comparison to cost of inflation which is 3.23 percent uh and then i've applied what the fiscal year cost impact of that wage would look like to the city budget so that's what option one looks like option two is um is a recommendation to put her to average uh and doing this retroactive back to july one which is comparative with

5:24 option one as well and that recommendation is the most expensive based on those factors and it's just slightly over ten and a half thousand dollars in addition to the fiscal year budget and then option three is basic what it option three is option three reflects uh that same five and a half percent or five point five point three percent increase uh of adjusting your wage to average without a retro and making an effect of the next coming payroll cycle that we have which would be the october 24th that option is would be my preferred recommended option because it adjusts the wage and make sure that the city manager for the city of springfield is uh paid competitively

6:09 um and doesn't does the retro uh but still hits a kind of a budgetary number that's consistent with what option one was laying out once again those are just three options that i looked at as a if i was to make a recommendation for council for you to consider uh but the ask for this session is some guidance on what council would like to see as part of a wage recommendation that we would submit for council approval next monday and with that i'll pause and ask her any questions that you might have thank you um so i'm curious when looking at this the comparables is that it really doesn't tell me

6:54 their ability to pay in regards to what what kind of income do these cities have and it's and and to have that to have that piece of information would to me would be very informative because there is town such as lake oswego is highly evaluated city and so the their taxation can create a per capita a much greater uh pool of money or expendable cash disposable cash as opposed to perhaps even uh like grants pass for example or albany that doesn't have an extremely high valuation on on the average piece of property or you know it doesn't have

7:39 that i mean we're comparing i mean we could literally can be comparing apples to oranges in it with this information or should say without having that information and at least in my mind um because again it doesn't tell us like corvallis has always had a uh at least historically i recall corvallis is popping up this is paying their ce ceos uh good money you know what much more than we've we've traditionally paid but you look at you look at their their spendable uh their income or their budget per person so i i don't know it's and i i guess i'm not i mean it's i'm just one counselor but for me

8:25 it could really skew these numbers in a sense of you know if our if our numbers are you know our spendable income or our total budget coming in or collected taxes coming in per capita as opposed to some other cities we could be we could be very much way underpaying her or she can be in the ballpark closer than what is uh what is shown is at 5.5 or almost 9 i just want to uh as far as this has nothing to do with her value to me if we had tons of cash all the counselors would get paid and she would get double their salary but but it's you know

9:10 we don't so to me that just that just seems to make sense to have that information but again i may be late in the ballpark i i'm okay with giving her raise i don't i mean she i think we need to pay her for what we can afford but again i would be more comfortable because i have a fiduciary responsibility to look at all the information that may be available to make this most sound fiduciary decision okay i'm done if i may i don't know if you've made any sense of that or not but yeah so i would have to get probably get better guidance from council moving forward on how you're defining ability to pay so i come from a labor background

9:55 an ability to pay as a very different context i hear you on the tax revenue or what's in the budget projections but i would have to think about with nate um what the thought is there's other ways that i would do it from a more traditional standpoint which is you could look at a narrowed population approach that's plus or minus 50 we slightly exceed that on both ends of the of the fence uh and historically the city of springfield and i'm just saying historically from the almost five years that i've been here uh yeah we've right-sized that through the cost of labor adjustments and in the cost of labor adjustment in some ways is is supposed to connect to the ability to pay concept uh although that number sorry there's

10:41 some sort of event going on outside city hall uh there is um i don't know if you can hear the horn talking and the people yelling um so so that certainly certainly could play a a a role into that and even costa labor isn't always um i think the best indicator as it shows you know ben for example being um slightly more expensive from a cost of labor than springfield i've always find that statistic to be quite odd because i'm familiar with the bend area uh and they certainly seem to have a lot more revenue at this point but we could certainly look at ways of both narrowing it down and looking at it from a budgetary level to help council moving forward and i'm not putting this out there in any way saying that i'm representing the council feeling but i i'm just expressing what's in my mind and i

11:28 certainly am fine with what the majority of the counselor from a consensus is but i just thought i'd throw that out there in and maybe helpful to others or you know i know it would be helpful for me but it may be helpful for others so absolutely leonard um thanks uh i i i think the counselor pictionary is bringing up some relevant metrics i like chaim i come from a labor angle here and so i would also throw in the difficulty of the job i can't imagine that the city manager in albany or the city manager in grants pass has had to make the decisions of the difficulty that nancy has over the last year and i think that should be

12:13 recognized i um just for grins i went and did some um comparisons of um cities that were bigger i noticed that the city managers in vancouver and the city managers in eugene for instance similar populations also similar wages and surprisingly they didn't make that much more than the people that are staffing the jobs that we just talked about albany or grants pass or springfield so i well what i'd like to do is i'd like to recommend uh i i i'm in favor of step of uh option two that shame um laid out um i'd like to

12:58 bring nancy up to the average um and uh make it retro to july the first um i i would also ask that if we adopt option one which is just the cost of living that we take into account the projections uh through the end of the year right now what i'm understanding is that cola might be going up by the end of the year up to four and a half five percent so um that's uh that's where i'm at right now steve i support no less than five and a half percent she's the greatest asset this city has we need to show other people we respect that we need to show her respect her that respect and she's working merrily

13:48 i was looking at option two uh the reason i was looking at option two is because we didn't have any probationary period we didn't have any period we we had a certain period of time and we evaluated her after a short period of when she first came on so i'm comfortable with making retroactive and bringing forward to the to the salary that we wanted to be at so i'm i'm more in favor of option two all right looks like we lost corey damien did you have an opinion here i'm actually trying to find the actual document it got to get lost in my email uh is there any way that it can be put up on the screen i mean i took notes but still

14:34 perfect my question is which document would you like to see counselor pitts actually um that's i'll pull it up uh uh like i said it's it's monday you have to excuse me but give me a second talk amongst yourselves i said aj i i think what damian was asking for was the three options right right but i can pull it up myself uh but i mean if if it will benefit anybody else on the screen that would be great as well there there it is damian okay

15:27 so i can tell you i'm comfortable with option two um and i think a lot like oh when you when you look forward here as far as where we are from a wage perspective it just makes a lot of sense based on based on what nancy's performance has been i also agree with option two i mean i think money aside we have to think about the livability of a place and so you know we can do all kinds of comparisons but we i mean regardless i mean she's still a citizen who you know is taking up residence here and you know the livability could be a reason to keep somebody here as well as push him away and so i think those things we need to think about if we're looking into other cities

16:18 all right i'm double checking to see if corey is in the attendee list before we move on to the next topic um i think i hear enough folks to uh to kind of go forward here and since we're bringing it back with um a regular session now joe go ahead don't get me wrong i'm okay with with option two i just was voicing what i was thinking that potentially in the future or whatever to come back with that information i just want to be more comfortable more settled with it but again i'm okay with moving forward instead of slowing things down and give her some assurance and i completely support her and she's worth it all so i don't have a problem with option two

17:06 yeah and i and i think yeah so like let's uh shameless package it up for a regular session and yeah and then i think it's the same question that we always keep talking about we're you know as we sort of manage our three employees right like we're always looking for opportunities and maybe and keep helping us to do it more effectively better um oh here comes corey all right corey we didn't quite wrap up so did you have it did you have an opinion or did you want to just save it for regular sessions and i didn't hear where everybody else landed basically mostly most people ended up on option two yeah that's where i want to be

17:51 yeah i thought maybe i was going to be the only one who wants to give a good way the barn but no i want i'm number two all right do you need anything else from us no i appreciate it thank you everybody for your time uh maybe you could just start with a quick to joe's question maybe you could just start with at some point an email just explaining where that geo what that geo labor adjustment is that might help answer some start the conversation i'll do absolutely all right very good next item looks like we are returning to street lights with brian yep well good evening mayor and counselor i'm very happy to uh be joining with you and we've got 30 minutes to talk about the most important topic of the world

18:36 the street lights and so i'm going to move briskly through the slides with the intent to reserve time for your questions um at the end and so um scott is going to join me and he is going to be doing the slide wizard part and so here we go um so we did visit with you um on september 20th and so i'm going to recap that very briefly and then move to our our key question of the evening that we would like to ask you and so um on our next slide you'll see that we own about 4 500 street lights about 30 percent have been

19:22 converted to led and the key point i really would like to point out is that a third bullet there the current system is antiquated and aging and is in need of expensive and frequent repairs so that is project need number one the system is at the end of its functional life and we are having to replace fixtures fairly regularly um we had a cost of just six hundred and fifty thousand dollars last year and we also have a deficit that we're trying to make up uh with springfield utility board so next slide through scott we have the justification of led lights use much

20:08 less energy and even less maintenance cost than legacy light systems do we can improve street lighting levels to promote a better better traffic and security we as a result of the system failure and of the efficiencies that we can gain by using led lights we plan to upgrade all non led fixtures led and we're recommending the use of an esco and i'll get into what an energy services company is in a moment the project cost is just over 2 million dollars and the project need number two is the last bullet which is this project upon completion will save

20:54 the city approximately 184 thousand dollars per year which escalates over time because of inflation of materials and labor and of energy that starts out at fifteen thousand dollars a month of street funds so we can save fifteen thousand dollars every month uh in the street fund if we were to go forward with this project the finances are shown on our next slide and how graphically the 184 thousand dollars there on on your left is what the current cost of excuse me let me let me start that one again look at the top line of the graph

21:39 that green sloping line that starts at about three hundred and twenty thousand dollars and moves on up to just under six hundred thousand dollars is our annual cost of maintaining the current system if we were to replace with leds our cost line would be roughly half of that so look at the darker colored bars at the bottom that would be the cost line with leds for operations maintenance and energy the 184 thousand dollars that is shown in year number one that would be used to pay off any debt service if we were to take a loan to uh complete the project and that debt service would be paid off somewhere

22:24 between 10 and 12 years every year after that payoff point occurs the darker colored bars on the right the top portion that is what we would save every single year thereafter that would be money in the bank savings if we choose other methods of directly funding the project from reserves for example that savings occurs immediately and it would be 184 000 over current expenditures per annum

23:09 so we have some options on how we would like to pursue this project of replacing the street light system next site please three fundamental approaches one would be continue replacing fixtures as they fail we have about 70 percent of the fixtures that have not been replaced and so the 30 percent that was alluded to in the prior slide is the fixtures that have either been constructed as brand new usually in as a result of development we've had a few projects of our own that have replaced fixtures but most of those fixtures of that 30 percent have come about because they have the the original fixtures failed and we had sub replace them in the matter of maintenance

23:54 activity pardon me that is a slow way and an inefficient way from a cost of construction and materials manner it's also an inefficient way because the savings accrue very very slowly the second approach would be a conventional design with staff or consultants did the project out and have a contractor do the installation it is our anticipation that given the current staff workload and resource available that that would take approximately three years from beginning to end again delaying the amount of time that we would be accruing that fifteen thousand dollars per month uh savings

24:42 the third approach would be to use an energy services company and i'll refer to that as an esco frequently you've already heard me say that and that energy services company is a specific type of company that is authorized under oregon law to provide professional engineering financial and construction services all as one lump kind of company another way to look at it is a similar product is called a design build contracting method and you may have heard that around the construction of buildings typically the energy services company can provide us a lot of benefits so let's uh let's

25:29 turn the slide and we can go through a little bit about what the esko entails so it's qualified through the state of oregon's department of energy it's a single procurement it's used to purchase a complete package of services which are enumerated there they do an audit that's the first two bullets and then they do a design and then they handle the purchasing and installation of all the equipment they manage all of the selection of these vendors they do the on-site project management they commission the product they train the staff and then they also guarantee the energy savings that will occur throughout the life of the project

26:17 oregon has eight eskos that are qualified two of which are capable and interested in performing street light upgrades that is what an esko is so let's look at a justification for an esco i've already touched upon the quick execution component creating a significant savings and much sooner and esco by the way i should have said earlier can can deliver our project in 12 to 15 months that's the best estimate we have presently we don't have time in the staff to deliver the project excuse me again

27:02 escos are specialist type organizations they have considerable experience they've delivered many projects in the past and so they can reduce our risk through better engineering and more knowledge about the project they also because of their high volume of purchasing they get preferred pricing on the fixtures themselves and the controls and an esko also has deep knowledge of different lighting control systems and how they so they could assist us in that selection and esco would be selected through a competitive request for proposals process so we would have uh scoring criteria that would be established that would be

27:48 varied in their in their nature and cost would be one of those components as is their past performance and their capabilities specific to our organization's needs we have begun an experience with an energy services company um you all probably recall that oregon department of transportation ask that the city of springfield install 300 plus lights on main street and south a street as a part of the emergency pedestrian safety project they did that because they felt that we were much more capable of delivering a project quickly

28:34 they gave us a four-month window in which to complete the entire procurement contracting and installation process as a result of that need we selected mckinstry a company that is in one of the two energy services companies uh in oregon with municipal lighting experience and they are in the process now delivering the project they will demonstrate their capability in the midst of that project and so we'll have a good benchmark for future consideration and we anticipate that they will be interested in submitting a proposal should the council choose to use an energy services company delivery method

29:23 so that concludes my presentation i think now would be a good time for us to consider what approach might be best question yes state highway project where'd that funding come from um that is state monies that come from the highway fund i don't know the specifics of the color of the money but it was money that was um established as an emergency project as long as somebody else paid for it that's all i want to know thank you yeah yeah joe thank you brian i got just a couple questions just to clear my mind i i like option three already just so you know um but i got a question with the sub connection

30:09 play on terms with us in regards to the lights and it looks you know obviously we have a deficit that cost money et cetera i want to know if there is anyone else that we can use and it's and it looks like you hit on it with a to a local line worker qualified contractor but uh i want to make sure that that we are getting the best bang for our buck for the citizens and that i don't want to pay sub at a profit for them as i'm seeing it milk and a cow and so we have a responsibility to the i don't care who's paying for it we have a responsibility to them to make sure that we are paying the least amount that we have to so it has that

30:54 that whole uh statement of um led replacement would be contracted to a local line worker qualified contractor not performed by sub with an estimated economic benefit to the community of one million dollars and um so i'm just trying to i'm trying to figure out how that how that plays into your conversation in regards to assuring me that that sub is only doing what they that they have what they have to do i guess by some some code or law or whatever but but we're using uh local folks local people to take care of all the other work that some had that we're not required to have sub do i i understand your interest and i support it fully sub has indicated that well

31:39 let me answer you this way sub has control over about 30 percent of the poles that the lighting system is on right their control can be delegated to a qualified line worker type of company and in the odot project they have indeed done that and that is what mckinstry did is they found a contractor that was qualified to do work on subs polls and sub has approved of that and so that's how that is going to be done in the uh emergency pedestrian safety project as a follow-on sub has indicated that the time frame in which we want to do

32:24 the project does not allow for them to do the work so there is no expectation that sub would do any of that the work that is on their pulse it would all be contracted with the same contractor to do all the work on city and sub polls that's an excellent answer i appreciate that and the last question i have in regards to the smart lottery smart lighting control system the numbers um the numbers that you're using for savings per year that's projected out that the payback is 10 12 years out the cost of the smart lighting control system is that part of those factored in numbers and if so what is the cost of that and what would

33:09 those numbers how would it affect those numbers if we stayed with our current system and not using the smart control i want to figure i want to know if it's worth the money yes understood the smart lighting controls are included in the 12-year payback figure approximately 12 years non the conventional controls the just a regular photo cell would be the payoff at approximately 10 years so there's approximately two years of additional debt service if you will before we get to payoff due to the smart lighting controls now the financials associated with smart lighting controls have to be done by the energy services company on the

33:55 most cautious method that is appropriate and that is done because the energy services company is guaranteeing the energy savings well the energy services company can't guarantee how uh scott miller and brian barnett will choose to operate that smart lighting system and so they don't guarantee much savings at all as a result as a result of that i think that our savings will be deeper than can be included in that projection and the second thing is that smart lighting controls allow us to have much less management involvement in the lighting system and that management involvement that we do have is is much less

34:41 expensive because i can sit at my desk just as i am today and i can manage the light system i can find out where the troubles are and get them resolved it also helps us deliver a much higher quality of service to the citizens they're going to get quicker response to outages for example it also provides us some flexibility in how much illumination we provide on the road yeah i'm familiar with when it does so yeah i'm totally familiar with that it didn't mean to stir up a bunch so so basically what you're saying is it runs about a third of a million dollars um i don't have that number at hand so i can't confirm it but i i i suspect you're on the right track so 184 times

35:26 two is what i'm getting about 360 100 364 000 on top of the cost of polls but the way it's projected out it seems to that i'm not adverse to that but i just wanted to make sure that that that wasn't such a big number that it was kind of ridiculous to do so i'm good with option two thank you leonard thanks i'm mom i'm looking at these um before and after photos on the la led installation it looks like these are the the led

36:11 bulbs are on the same poles on the same fixtures would would everything have to be replaced uh just the just the fixture needs to be replaced the arm the pole it all stays in place the wiring remains in place okay i i guess what i'm struggling with is if you're just replacing a fixture and you're replacing also i'm sorry the smart lighting controls that how does that add up to 2.3 mil i mean is a is it mostly labor or what's uh what's going on with that um well there's labor there's materials and then there's the design and engineering component of it those three components so there are the cost okay and and i

36:56 apologize if i was sleeping through this but i uh what what was the overall cost on the esko and on um and on replacing the incandescence as they burn out well the uh total replacement cost is two and two point three million dollars okay but but is that for any of the three options i mean for the esko or if we do it ourselves well i don't i don't have figures at hand about what it would cost for staff to do the work or a consultant to do it on a design bid build approach we are we're building a significant deficit with sub because in other words

37:41 we're not paying enough each a year to cover the cost of replacements now the reason that deficit is occurring is because uh the the current intergovernmental agreement was sub for maintenance caps the annual increase in maintenance charges at five percent per annum okay well i i was just thinking that there might be a significant savings by replacing the bulbs as they burn out i'd love to get that figure if you could get it we will do that i do know that it is substantially more costly to repair in that manner than it is to do a wholesale planned repair the simple reason is that when you're chasing trouble calls you have a lot of drive time to get to the site and then respond you

38:28 know and then return and you're only doing one or two fixtures a day when you can apply a lot of people and a lot of trucks all at once doing them one after another right down the street then you get a lot more efficiency of production okay that that's all i got thanks spring are there any escos that are local i know you said there's eight in the state of oregon are there any that are springfield based i am not aware of any that are springfield-based and i need to clarify there are eight authorized eskos authorized by the state of oregon um many of these ascos well really there's only two who are

39:14 relevant to municipal street lighting mckinstry i already mentioned the other one is called amaresco these are very large companies and they do projects across the nation just sort of echoing what counselor pictionary said i mean i i i would love to see as much of the the jobs and the work stay as local as possible so that is part of it for me is just thinking about um how do we how do we keep that work as local as possible and i still understand the efficiency in wanting to save money thanks damian and then steve hi um i guess my question well my

40:01 question is about the materials that are being replaced uh is it any is is it possible to recycle or repurpose any of those materials and if not how can we be guaranteed that they will be disposed in an environmentally sound manner well counselor pits that's a great question the energy services company would have the responsibility of dealing with the results of any equipment that's removed they you know there's they we can provide them direction on an outcome that you might want i don't know if that would come at a

40:46 higher or a lower cost than how they traditionally handle it i would presume that there is you know there are some recycling mandates that exist in the state i'm not very familiar with them also some of the materials are hazardous waste and that would be required to be handled in a very proper fashion and documentation of that and so i know that that would be handled in that manner steve okay i'm i'm sort of familiar i was part of a similar project like this a long time ago and uh it was two thousand two thousand lights we swapped out but anyway a lot of truck goes down the road he lifts the lifts the technician up pulls one lamp off

41:31 puts another one on and goes on to the next one it goes rather quickly in most cases uh then the fixtures were piled in a in the yard they went in there with a drill or mercury vapors with a drill and drilled every ballast so the net could be used again environmentally in those days i don't know what happened to but that's that's how how that worked out so this would be similar uh the uh apparently these lights all have what what i call intelligence in a microprocessor at each one and i'm curious uh how does how does that connect to uh the main main station nailed as you go through the wires but it sounds like this is gonna be maybe even a satellite or something i'm not sure

42:16 well okay so the the uh the current um twist lock photocell which i know counselor mo you would know what that that is yeah and that photocell is just twisted into the top of the fixture a smart control would also be twisted into that same socket the communication technique varies between vendors on which type of product they're using some are cellular telephone based some are low low power radio where they hop from one to the next to the next kind of in a daisy chain where they actually create a network a mesh network others do have a hub and spoke approach where

43:02 you have one radio tower maybe two radio towers and they all report to that one tower yeah technology has changed since i was in it and i'm thinking about parking meters downtown when you put your visa card in that communicates intelligently that's it's amazing but in this case uh the intelligence is fine and i guess the only just question i asked is i'm talking about designing the system there isn't a whole lot of design is there just go ahead and swap them out and they probably set up the control system but i guess my comment that's all you don't have to say anything thank you i love it good all right it sounds like we're in option three um

43:55 did i did i mistakenly say option two brian okay i went with option three okay yeah you have to solicit is what i heard yeah yeah that makes sense i just wanna i was getting my head mixed up with the last presentation so yep all right so brian do you need more direction than that no this is quite satisfactory i appreciate your comments and we will consider them as we go forward with the request for proposals and contracting one last question where's the funding come from well that that question remains open we could do a variety of techniques and if you want to optimize right now i can talk about what i know but i think it'd probably be best deferred to another conversation okay that's fine

44:42 thank you all right perfect um we have ceta after this so um i believe we are on a different link for ceta so we're going to try to get do the hat trick of links for the meeting so we will see you on the other side we are adjourned thank you very much i hope i can find my way back