Springfield City Council — November 7, 2022

0:04 all right I'm going to call the city council work session to order with roll call mayor Ben Gordon here councilor Pitts Council Irmo here Council Bradley here councilor stair here answer Woodrow and Council appreciationary here thank you all right counselor Woodrow's excuse for the evening we have two work session items the first one is the museum advisory committee applicant interviews with Emily David for the staff good evening mayor and counselors I am Emily David director of the library in the museum and it's my pleasure to be here this evening on behalf of the museum advisory committee uh we are

0:50 asking that you interview three candidates there's three open positions there's two candidates that are renewing and one new applicant so I believe the first applicant or the first interview is for Patty Sage if we're ready does anybody have any questions before we get started all right I think we're ready Nancy on or Mary Bridget I just noticed just just now that one of the members of this committee is actually also now a new Springfield

1:35 employee oh okay okay um so the the plan really is that I'm going to ask all the questions um and we're still sort of figuring out how to do these interviews now that we're in person in the most formal setting as possible normally we would go around and introduce introduce ourselves but uh I heard it well thank you are you are you ready for the first question hit me with it all right why are you interested in serving on the museum committee um I have been um I was a teacher in the district for um 26 years of my 30 years of teaching

2:23 and um I have served on the Springfield Museum board um from I think it was about 2008 until 12. um I worked with the teaching American history Grant um and um so I've been real involved with the museum for for quite a while and I have a great history love of History I love history and I love Springfield history we moved over here from Eugene in 2011. so I really want to get back involved with my town I volunteer on a board in Eugene and I want to get involved here

3:10 okay so I'm going to that you've touched on some of this already so describe your professional and personal experiences it relates to your desire to become a museum Committee Member I don't know if you have more to add um not really I mean not really I taught elementary school for 30 years um Oregon Trail and you know local history was was always a highlight the Springfield museum has a rotating exhibit space one of the roles of the committee is to make recommendations for exhibits and programs can you give us an example of an exhibit you might recommend for the museum

3:56 um you know I I did a lot of research this summer on um on the bridges that we have and the the Old Trolley bridge and just how that linked up with with our communities to the West um I find that kind of fascinating how long that lasted and um or just I know they're doing a lot of Road Improvement in in the area so maybe to kind of involve that uh you know present day with Transportation Transportation I think that might be kind of interesting and how do you think the work of the museum uh the Springfield history museum improves our community

4:46 they just kind of ground us in our past where we came from um who who we are you know um I think it's a great space over there it's a wonderful building and we just really need to preserve it and um take care of everything that has been donated to it and that it's about yeah all right thank you so much that was the last question yay okay I believe the next applicant is with us in the room as well Jennifer Lee

5:35 and I'm up for reappointment hello Jenna do you need us to introduce ourselves to him no thank you unique and interesting maybe a fun fact but no pressure all right why are you interested in serving on them continuing your service on the museum committee um I've really enjoyed participating on that committee so far um I'm involved in a lot of of the little projects that we're doing right now um we're currently putting together a a kind of a historical Atlas which will be published hopefully next year um we worked on the joint program of the Heritage Awards um I I'm super also into local history and uh really like digging around and

6:21 finding tidbits of history that people forgot even his existed I guess like and treasure hunting and in our in these buildings that I work on I'm an architecture in town and so as we're remodeling a lot of the buildings on Main Street just like trying to recreate the puzzle of who has used that building over time and kind of a lot of cultural and economic factors that brought it to where it is today and just I just enjoy that a lot and how that can serve Main Street long term could you describe any of your professional experiences as it relates to your desire to uh become a museum Committee Member um I mean I guess I just mentioned that a little bit so as an architect we our

7:06 firm is on Main Street and we're really involved in the revitalization and um we really like to use to uncover that history of the building that we're about to remodel in order to like inform the work that we do on the building it doesn't need to be a reenactment of old-timey times but just there are a lot of cool assets that we have in downtown that we may not have even realized were cool because they've been covered up by just Decades of layers of new things and really when you peel a bunch of that away um you reveal like original transom Windows above a lot of the storefronts that really give that character to downtown that has been kind of concealed over the last 40 years so

7:55 the Springfield museum has a rotating exhibit space one of the roles of the committee is to recommend uh make recommendations for exhibits and programs can you please give us an example of an exhibit you might recommend all day I could talk about this all day so one thing I'm really interested to explore and I think would be really cool to put something together about is the influence of fire and how it's shaped our downtown over history so there are a lot of gaps in the kind of architectural fabric of downtown and a lot of that happened because of fire so even just the space right down here right we have a huge empty block between the museum and the um well and the art center and that was a fire you know that happened to burn down Alexander's department store and it's been sitting as a as a

8:41 empty space for a long time it doesn't mean it can't be activated but it's just interesting to know that there was a thing and there was a fire and that's why it looks the way that it does today even just the building of brick buildings in the 1910s happened as a result of fire because you know buildings were wood before that and fire was a major threat and then of course we have the Wildfire issue now and just thinking about how fire shaped a community is really fascinating in the development of a fire department about tracks that go with that I mean there's so many things a fire Bell that's on display in the gal right now like that's the original fire Bell so cool how do you think the work of the Springfield history museum improves our community [Music] um I think through you know just uncovering all of those lost stories and

9:26 those stories go to pre-colonial Times not just you know postcolonial history but just understanding recapturing and telling the story of a place helps people to appreciate the place and appreciate the Nuance of the place which then Fosters stewardship of that place which is really important in building and revitalizing a downtown and making a downtown that you feel invested in and proud of and you really want to be a part of great thank you so much so our final candidate is Tara priyat and it um we reached out to her and didn't hear back I know she's been having some medical issues so she isn't

10:12 we just checked and I don't think she's in on Zoom so she's not here this evening she is reapplying she's been on the um the committee for the last three years okay thank you I'm sorry Emily there's three appointments correctly all right thank you all right our decision any discussion I like them okay I'm fine with them yeah okay Leonard Damian anything that you guys want to add I I guess I would just ask um Emily's probably got some experience with the group his tariff the Tara priyat as she bit in pretty well I can tell you that Tara works at the Lane County History Museum so she has a

10:58 lot of experience and has been an active member in the on the committee so I would say my answer would be yes I think she fits well with the group good that's all I got I'm I'm happy to move forward thanks okay so um we're moving two out of the three forward um and then and then I know we're gonna do a committee uh recruitment probably February March um if we can recruit for the the third opening and then if Tara is feeling better she can reapply thank you thank you all right second item is budget checking with the

11:45 finance director Council so typically in the fall we like to get in front of you uh with the five-year General funding forecast as we kick off the coming budget cycle uh to give you some context into some of the challenges that we'll be facing as we put together the budget and some context for the budget that we'll be bringing to you uh in the spring additionally though with that five year forecast and assumptions that we'll share with you we're looking for some guidance this evening we continue to have a structural

12:30 imbalance as a result of measure 5 and 50 and just how we fund government in the state of Oregon and so this has just been our sort of situation here for decades and typically in addressing that structural imbalance we have three tools one of those tools is finding efficiencies and restructuring and staff reductions that's been the tool we've historically used the other tools are service level changes and new Revenue sources red point where I feel that we've really exhausted the efficiencies and Staffing reductions we'll continue to look for those always will but we really need to start looking to the other tools to address this imbalance and so before we start putting energy and we've had this conversation

13:15 in the past in regards to service level changes and new revenues uh covid and then the arpa funds put a pause on that conversation we're getting ready to re-engage and we want to make sure that we're putting our focus in the areas that you want so we're looking for guidance on on whether you'd like us to focus more on service level changes new revenues or a combination of the two and I'm not looking for that answer right now we can jump into the conversation and then come back to that so let's start with the five-year general fund forecast um I think the first thing I want to point out here is is looking at we're putting together the fiscal year 24 budget in the coming year uh that's the column that's shaded in Gray and if we

14:01 go right down to the bottom we have the ending cache as a percent of operating expenditures typically we like to have 20 to 25 we'd like it to be more on the 25 range but 20 is the floor that we establish that Reserve is what gets us from July 1st until November when the property tax receipts start to come in we're at 21 right now as things are forecasted that's a good place to be going into this budget and that has a lot to do with the arpa funding that we've used to stabilize the general fund going out into fiscal year 25 you can see that we dropped down to 16 we have a number of positions that are being funded through arpa funds that are right now in our special Revenue fund

14:46 those will be coming back into the general fund mid fiscal year 25 the arpa funding has to be spent by December 31st of 2024 and that's why you see that drop down to 16 and then a more significant drop to uh 10 and then four percent in that outer year um we've made a lot of I think uh gains uh in terms of some of the um initiatives that we've we've taken here over the past few years in addressing our structural imbalance um you know in 20 and 21 we did some significant uh um cuts and then the other big item was engaging sub and negotiating the in lieu of increase however we've also had some setbacks

15:33 um you know one of those being our risk and liability insurance than the increase that we've seen in those premiums uh we've seen coming out of Salem the Paid Family Medical Leave which is coming into our 24 budget uh and then lastly um you know we had a jail medical vendor that is getting out of the business or at least providing support to our jail we found a new vendor but the cost is doubled and so it feels like you know we make these sort of steps forward and then we end up you know with a few steps backwards but I think the the larger sort of need here really is is to really find a sustainable um kind of source of funding for the services that we provide

16:18 um the other thing I think I'd like to point out here is the transfer to the ambulance fund uh if you look at the deficit spend in fiscal year 24 it's around 750 000 to transfer to the ambulance fund is seven hundred thousand dollars in that year and then it grows over the coming years that's something we've been forecasting but we hadn't seen come into our general fund yet in terms of having to actually do a subsidy uh that changed last fiscal year where we had a subsidy of around seven hundred thousand dollars it had a lot to do with the change in software and getting behind on some Billings however that corrects itself in fiscal year 23 I mean it's revenues that we were going to eventually collect it was just a timing issue so you know that's one of the

17:03 things we've been keeping an eye on um is you know gemt has helped I think sort of uh prolong that but eventually the value we're getting through GM is not going to address a longer structural issue we have in the ambulance fund and then I think the other bigger issue that you become aware of recently is that Metro West is getting out of the transport business and that work is going to come back into our ambulance fund and it's going to create I think um some additional challenges uh tonight there are a number of Department directors here to answer questions as well if you want to go into some of that detail and I believe Chief Cayman is attending by um video and can come up if needed for questions in regards to that

17:50 so I'm going to just give you a moment to absorb that and also this can be a dialogue if you have questions you can ask them now or you can hold them not seeing anybody ready to no Corey well I'm sure we're going to explore all of the options but when we talk about finding additional Revenue sources I'm interested in what are what are the suggestions around that and what are we thinking around that and um yeah so I'm not ready to go into the detail of naming those different Revenue sources but just to give you kind of an idea of how we approach that is you know our challenges are the same challenges in every city across Oregon and um and so we typically like to watch what our

18:36 peer cities are doing and we've seen a lot of of cities implementing different types of revenues to address this you know we we don't want to be that sort of progressive sort of leading in terms of these types of revenues but when we start to see kind of more adoption of certain types of revenues in cities that are similar to Springfield that's when we start to step back take a look and say hey maybe that's a possibility for our community and so that's what we'll be doing is is going out there and and looking at what other cities are doing and ones that we think might work well for this community the other thing we might consider doing is is maybe Consulting with someone to you know help us identify alternative revenues that maybe are more familiar with what's being done across the state and so

19:21 that's another possibility foreign thanks I really um just wanted to ask about the ambulance fund um with the provider pulling out would it be a possibility to just do our ambulance work our routine ambulance transport and our higher urgency transport in-house would it be possible to do it with uh with fire Personnel for instance so that's your question for chief Kavin um do you want to bring him up I I would love to bring Chief Gavin up yes

20:22 all right I think I got my mic on let's even get the camera to open up um good evening so uh thanks for bringing up and answering that question we are actively exploring or planning for bringing this work um in-house uh it already coincides with some ambulance system redesign work we're doing to get the right not only right resources the right calls but the right Workforce um on the right calls and expanding opportunities for the community to work for you Gene Springfield fires so uh absorbing that work uh under the fire department's umbrella does make sense having fire Personnel do it is kind of the very most expensive option that would be out there least likely to help stabilize our ambulance fund and so very preliminarily as we look at in the the

21:07 private contractor has been pretty open with us as far as sharing call data Revenue data and the normal reporting um so we're able to forecast that a little bit what resources would we end up deploying um and then what would be that cost recovery it looks pretty positive for us could be a to help to help stabilize things but in particular the work we're already doing around redesigning the workforce that serves on the ambulances should help us in this out year forecast thanks chief so I guess I have a follow-up question to that Chief so or this may be a Nate question too when I look at this forecast is that assuming that that ambulance work is going back specifically to sort of fire Personnel

21:54 that like the I guess the old way when it was all all transports were done with the the most advanced life support that we could or is that assuming some sort of right new business model that we could that we can sort out so that actually um this news is so recent that it's not actually baked into this model yet so this was based on their pre um um news um kind of forecast typically um and and I'm comfortable with this approach from the forecast that they provide us tend to be conservative um and um so I I want to say take them with a grain of salt but I you know it we haven't really realized the the kind of um amounts or forecast uh deficits that

22:40 we've been expecting though we've been trending in that direction so with this news I'm assuming that it will have a negative impact on the ambulance fund finances unless uh Chief cave and feels otherwise making those numbers I think more likely than prior to that news uh go ahead Chief yeah and I it's a good question a good answer um as far as exploring kind of how we take that work on as we know right now that works bundle and given to a contractor uh so a piece of what we're looking at is it makes sense to keep that bundled um and put the work within one city or the other to kind of manage that new component of the system underneath our umbrella if we do go that route or if we

23:26 do split it out between the two separate atfs which makes it a bit more complex we'll need Bridge funding from when we first start taking the work back on to uh when we actually start receiving those bills it's 90 to 120 days from when we actually provide a service to to getting those that cost recovery money uh coming back in the door and so there's some complex pieces of that we're going to work on that but I think the bigger part of answering your question um no are our continued work is to transition those most expensive assets off of ambulances the firefighters what we find is our systems is quite busy and Staffing them in that way while growing to the demand just didn't make good

24:11 Financial sense going on in the future so um we were preparing to get on both Council schedules uh here in the future to talk about the redesign work that's underway currently and then also address this emerging issue at that same time we should have more clarity and answers on that but in the out years right now the forecast for us uh preliminary shows that it will show a little bit of Blue Sky um as far as just the Wayward staff that work the revenue that would come in from it and the capacity that those units would actually help add to the 911 system during periods of high demand and and I think and and I understand that you're in the in the early stages of that here's the I guess ultimately

24:57 here's the the question that I have we can't take on from a City Financial perspective a new set of business on an Enterprise fund that would require a subsidy right like is and I'm looking around for head nods to make sure everybody understands that we're already subsidizing a significant amount of this service so in my am I assuming correctly that if this thing does not pencil out and we're not it's not self-sustaining then we're not going to be taking that we're going to go out to we're going to consider a third party vendor um so and that's a great question as well one thing I think we probably all know but I'll I'll repeat it just so folks have it is this work is our legal responsibility um so if they you know pulled out

25:43 tonight we would pick up uh that work just like we did in 1981 when the last private company abandoned us um so we know that we did preliminary work we didn't just dive in to try to bring this work into fire um reached out to the Private Industry to find out what's the market look like and who's bidding um and the answer we got was um probably nobody uh which tried to reach out to Falk and say on the next nearest private provider they did not respond to our request to make contact AMR which is a large National company um they did out of Portland we had a good conversation he explained what was going on in the market our biggest problem here challenge in in trying to recruit a vendor if we if we did was

26:29 that uh one that we wouldn't get any and two that all we're offering is the non-emergency side of the business which doesn't necessarily pin cell out if you don't have the economy of scale of the entire transport business okay so but what I'm hearing is that that is still being considered as you're putting together more information and that we we as a council are going to see more like what the game plan is before anything happens right yeah absolutely so um not to turn this into a work session about the ambulances but uh basically uh you know they gave us notice that they didn't intend to renew their contract at the end of June they would like out sooner um and work with us on that but again

27:14 that has to work for us both timelines Workforce um all of that so yes okay uh Joe so I'm just trying to get my arms around this correct me if I'm wrong on these sets of facts that I think I know here is that based on the chart in front of us we're looking at a five to six million dollar deficit over time and it looks like five million of that just just shy of 100 or 300 000 shy five million of that is personnel and so we also know that we had this in-house and that failed because of

27:59 personnel costs and so we went outside and have some other outfit that's now doing that is that correct are all those correct facts somebody or less more or less hopefully more than less yes okay so now I hear that we're looking at it internally again when we already know that's failed so I'm a little concerned about that and how that looking at it internally is being formulated and other folks and there are other folks's plans and what's the big picture here and what uh what thoughts are driving that and where is the end goal

28:45 so I think one short answer to that or is related to this redesign work that we'd like to present to you that we just initiated the first phase of that within the City of Eugene the next phase is is with some City Springfield assets it builds Upon Our successes with the BLS program bringing kind of the right resource to write an employee to the right calls and lowering our total overall cost so Staffing of firefighters is the most expensive we're transitioning away from that to a more financially sustainable model bringing this work in we already have those classifications within the BLS and single role ALS Workforce whereas when

29:33 this work first got contracted out in particular in the City of Eugene all the assets we had to put on ambulances were were firefighter paramedics now we have a different Workforce that we have access to to help you know basically make sure that the the costs are run the program don't exceed the cost recovery options available all right thanks Chief Nancy looks like she wants to jump in here perhaps we can I can provide some context any decision regarding ambulance services yes we do have you know there is that liability at hand if we if we suddenly lost a provider that would that would be obviously that happened in the past that was um that was something that the city really had to scramble over was my understanding

30:18 um any type policy decision like that would require coming before this body for your decision making and um so I don't want you to think that this is a foregone conclusion um we're still in the information gathering stages um however I do think it is important to note that the the marketplace itself has changed um you know it's it's not as easy to recruit um workers as we know so there are some different factors at play that you know make this a little bit of a different analogy but I think it would it warrants its own probably more than one obviously work session on this item yeah all right so I I think you you guys just uh brought up a fact that was uh sort of people had a lot of opinions about and I

31:03 understand that we're going to get more information about it and have a longer conversation about it um Leonard um thanks yeah just um not to beat a dead horse but one more thing about the ambulances um they're what I know from my limited experience with the ambulance companies is that there are providers and then there are providers I I don't think that Metro West is what they call the bottom feeder outfit I think that they charge a respectable rate for their services and I don't know who it was that we had before that proved to be um more than competitive with our rates but you know with initial outlay and I don't even know if we're gonna have to

31:48 buy ambulances to make this happen but um if we do then it seems to me that it could still be cost effective depending on what the um what the contract was with Metro West before this thanks all right so I still have other other questions you have more material to present yes all right let's do that before I leave the slide too I just want to say one other thing and I've heard this comment before and looking at this forecast it looks a lot like um the previous forecasts and there's this feeling like that outer year number never comes so one of the things I I want to say is it can't we by law have

32:33 to put a forward a balanced budget so we take action to address it um secondly we really were through some of those initiatives improving that that five-year Outlook and if we were to back out the subsidy to the ambulance fund and we are still looking for uh efficiencies as the chief spoke to over there and we'll continue to work on that if we back out the subsidy to the ambulance fund and then there's a number of positions that we've added back in and I'm going to get to those and why we've added those back in it brings that that Elder Year back up into you know a closer to that 20 it's still below but it's not as bad so we have made improvements as I get further into this conversation now you know one of the

33:18 things those cuts in 20 and 21 have shown us is is that we are lean organization and and possibly too lean in some areas and that can result in other costs uh you know as we've learned so we'll talk about that um you know but we we've made improvements and but as long as we're in this funding environment with measure 5 and 50 this is going to be our reality and we need to kind of find our way over to a more sustainable source of funding um so with that let's move into the assumptions uh the other thing too I'd like to mention is I think it typically with forecast there's a bias towards being very conservative and one of the things that we're trying to do is sort of break you know we really kind of beat

34:03 up these assumptions and we don't want to Doom and Gloom projection we don't want sort of a Rosy you know kind of too Rosy projection we're really trying to zero in on what we really think is for the most part a relatively kind of accurate you know not biased in One Direction or the other so starting with our Revenue assumptions we started with a baseline of three percent growth uh and then we built into that um Marcola Meadows and then we have an Enterprise Zone exploration uh international paper and what we have is over this forecast period at least over the period that has the Marcola Metals in an Enterprise Zone in it which is I think 24 through 26 we're averaging between four to five and a half percent

34:48 increases in our property tax revenue to give you some context for that our historical average is 3.4 percent and that would include other time periods of development and other Enterprise Zone Explorations coming on so the fact that our forecast is is four to five and a half percent over that period we're pretty bullish on the property taxes looking at our total revenues uh we're including the property taxes but all the other revenues we're looking at average growth of of around 3.2 percent that's right in line with our historical average um moving into the expenditures um um our cost of living assumption doesn't uh factor in inflation right now the

35:33 feds are taking some pretty aggressive action uh and trying to tame inflation uh we are still operating in the assumption that they are going to be successful uh and that this inflation is not going to find its way into our wages but that's something we're going to keep a close eye on right now we're using our historical kind of averages which is around three percent uh increases year over year across all labor groups materials and services we built in a five percent uh inflation for fiscal year uh 24 then we're stepping that down to four percent and 25 then back to 3 and 26 and 27. uh underspend uh recognizing that we set a legal appropriation but for a number of reasons we never fully expand that appropriation

36:19 um you know it could be projects that we don't get to it could be vacancies um we're putting an underspend of 800 000 per year which is right in line with typically what we experience a little bit of context in that though our underspend for uh fiscal year 22 was 300 000. as we've cut our budget Tighter and Tighter we're going to see our underspend also uh shrink but with some staffing additions and then some vacancies that we typically experience we're going back up to 800 000 and then lastly on the jail medical contract that was a 600 000 per year increase uh we're uh having a 200 000 subsidy from the general fund for that contract our hope is we're working with our we lease out

37:05 jail beds to partner agencies and we're working on those contracts and hopefully we'll be able to recover more and there's the possibility that we'll be able to recover the full amount but right now we're making the assumption that we're going to have about a 200 000 subsidy that we need to factor in so like all forecasts this is accurate today and range in the future uh tomorrow yep okay foreign any questions on assumptions all right moving on to Joe just one one quick one on the you said I'm confused with the wording uh on the medical contract that was an increase of 600 000 or it says 200 of 600 000 per year so

37:50 were we already spendings 600. yeah I think if memory is right um our previous contract was around 600 000 and it doubled to 1.2 million so of that 600 000 increase 200 000 of that is being covered by the general fund yes and for that increase we're getting an increased service level so uh it's a 24 7. yeah no I know we got much more better coverage I'm not walking at that at all I'm just trying to get my hands around what the total cost per year and what what it was and what it is so do we have t-shirt can you I can I can kind of give you a swag if

38:35 you don't mind I'm not sure I think previously it was right around 600 600 000 and I think it increased to 1.2 so it's just it was double it about doubled and we are we are in the process of recovering some of that through through increased contracts with um Eugene and we're exploring the contracts we have the feds as well so we're working on ways to recover even more of that 600 sprinting bids okay so the 200 000 I'm just trying to figure out where the 200 000 fit in there so with that increase uh in fiscal year uh 23 um because I don't think it's it's the full year for that year uh we absorbed it's about 472 000 um increase in fiscal year 23 we've absorbed it in the levy um the Levee is what funds the jail starting in fiscal year uh 24 we have

39:20 400 000 in the levy and we have two hundred thousand dollars coming from the general fund to cover the full 600. based on our projections um uh we feel that the levy can absorb 200 000 of it without and then the other two hundred thousands coming through increased revenue from uh our jail bad leases our hope is you know that one is a conservative estimate right now because when we put this together we really had no idea where that would go but from a conversation that I had with Jessica uh just today um I there's a high probability that we're going to be able to cover um quite a bit more than the 200 000. okay all right uh arpa funded critical positions so as I mentioned

40:05 um the Staffing reductions in in 20 and 21 and kind of getting to a point where we recognized we were too lean in some places uh We've added positions back in 22 uh 23 and we're going to have uh I think another position added back in 24. um starting with um 23 we added back two positions in Fire and these are positions that we've held vacant to you just again balance our budget but these are positions that were required to fund through the IGA that we have with our partner agency and they were left unfilled for a period of time where it was getting to the point that it was becoming a point of tension and so this is just us stepping up and and

40:51 fulfilling our our IGA obligations moving down to the deputy police chief I think this is a position that many of you are familiar with and I'm going to let Nancy speak to this one thank you it's awkward to coordinate a team presentation when you're sitting right next to each other um I requested um I talked to Chief sure about this about adding a deputy chief I did some uh checking into this this was a position that the city had uh previously in Prior administrations prior to Chief cheer uh coming on and even prior to Chief Lewis um my intent here is really you know as we are looking at increasing our transparency and our accessibility with

41:38 our police department and making a lot of the policy changes that have happened um she sure just hasn't had the ability to be out in the community as much and he's been had to be more focused in on um more administrative matters that really don't fall customarily underachief and he probably you know he probably he never complains but this is my observation based on over 20 years working with law enforcement um I would also say you know are our apartment this department like many of the other departments in the city is understaffed you know we you know we we're always trying to recruit more officers because there's just a natural churn in this position level but also on the leadership side um so for me it's a couple of things

42:24 it's um increasing accountability to the community it's um it's a succession planning as well um and it's really kind of trying to put back resources that were I think probably could have really been very helpful um had that been done in the past so I'm looking forward to that um the next a couple of positions are related in the Human Resources side of the house um we have had a lot of State mandates coming regarding uh human that affect Human Resources the Oregon pay Equity laws one of them um we have family leave Law that's coming in councilor rodley's nodding her head because she does all this HR kind of stuff um and again so in the city we did a lot

43:11 of cuts with the last recession we are still not at a staffing level um that we are in pre-recession and I think um when we start talking more about the budget we're going to be showing you that Trend um so that was this position has really helped with a lot of that administration of how we do different types of mandates from the state but also we have people that are retiring new hiring so we really needed to to beef up our Administration and HR I also noticed when I came to the city a couple of years ago that there didn't seem to be a comprehensive centralized training structure and what I mean by that is just really uh somebody that's dedicated

43:58 to tracking where we are in some of the mandated training that we would like to have all employees receive so for instance um preventing sexual harassment um diversity equity and inclusion initiatives um things that you know are good organizational development types of training making sure that we're all hitting those marks I think we do a really good job in um some of the more legally mandated things to do um but I'd like to take that um to uh to the next level for the city and I think this is really boils down to a loss prevention uh philosophy um it's kind of like if you don't invest in training you're going to pay for it one way or the other right because you don't want to have people that are performing

44:44 functions that may not have um be adequately trained and you know I think we do a good job on some of the more critical functions obviously safety uh job duties but some of these higher functions that you could run into liability I think we could be a little bit stronger on that uh the other one was the legislative Economic Development analyst this is a physician that's part partially funded through the general fund partially through the urban through Ceta we're doing a ton of work on our active projects and really needed to get that extra capacity in the CMO office

45:29 all right and I know that we're pushing up against time so I'll try to be a little quicker here last two positions uh senior planner there's a number of planning positions that are funded by arpa that are not coming back into the general fund I want to recognize that there's three of them this is a position actually that was created as a limited duration while they did a development code update and there's this recognition now with a lot of the mandates coming down through the state that our development codes could be in a constant state of update and so this is a limited duration position that kept getting pushed out a year after year after year that we've decided to make permanent and then the programmer analyst you know this is a position it's kind of based on secession planning it's hard to find developers with PeopleSoft experience you have to grow them in-house and it takes time to grow them uh additionally we have some external vendor contracts that we think that we can slowly dial

46:16 back and replace with in-house staff which is gives us more value actually than the vendor contracts and with that moving on to considerations as I mentioned before inflation we haven't factored in the inflationary environment into our labor at this time it's our expectation that it will come back down but we'll watch that closely and adjust accordingly um recession again as part of trying to tame inflation the possibility of of causing us to go into recession the question then becomes um how deep how long um again another thing that we'll watch closely telework and Commercial vacancies in this telework environment you know we have large commercial spaces

47:01 that we're watching uh if they'll be coming back into those spaces or if those organizations will stay remote where that can impact is it doesn't impact us the short term because the value is already set for the property taxes on those spaces and they'll continue to pay them it sometimes results in challenges to those property tax valuations and those can take years to resolve but something we're paying attention to uh the ambulance fund we've spoken to the jail medical expense we've spoken to and then finally City facilities maintenance and replacement as a government and again this is pretty consistent across most I think agencies we're great at building assets not always great at maintaining them in some previous budgets we were starting to set aside some dollars for future Capital maintenance and replacement however uh

47:47 We've we cut those in I believe 22 and they are not in our 23 budget nor do we plan on putting them right now on our 24 budget so it's just an area that concerns me um questions any other questions all right so uh I guess I had three points that that I wanted to bring up one of them was when you look at when you look at that five-year forecast I know it can be I can it could be big it could be scary and I think um it's important to see any big organization if you forecast Revenue five years out it won't look like that and we haven't done anything yet to address what what is It ultimately a structural deficit and I know it's important for us to see that there is a structural deficit we need to address it but also it everybody's kind

48:34 of you know private public non-profit is always sort of out of whack five years from now um the second thing that I do want to point out is there's a lot of federal legislative work being done around agency services like Cahoots right now and this is a place that we've always sort of monitored but we've not really done a great job of being able to leverage and understand the work that's being done in the Medicaid space and how that money is becoming available um to fund programs like kahoots and when I think about the amount that we set that we provide to have a kahoot service I really want to get our arms around um if there's federal dollars that are coming down on the Medicaid side if we can leverage that money as being the funding source for Cahoots we can effectively move it off of our books and

49:19 still maintain the same level of service so I think that's that's valuable and then I guess the third piece um is I is I think I'm open to probably the medium version of this right which is hey if we look around at other agencies and they have different funding models it is valuable for us to explore that conversation um but that's got to be balanced with efficiency and being able to understand and contain costs where appropriate right you know we shouldn't we shouldn't do it all with cost we shouldn't do it all with Revenue but look to see on individual areas where it makes sense to try to approach those areas where it makes sense and I guess I gotta add a fourth bonus Point while I'm getting to

50:04 wrap up here there are issues in here that we really need to break out for the 2023 uh you know um when that when the years changes over you know facilities needs to be a longer conversation right like you know what we're doing with the jail bed you know it needs to be a longer conversation and I just want to put a flag in that or some of these big conversations need to come back as part of you know Council goal setting and things like that Corey strategy planning I set you up for that one I know I think it does fit really well with you know earlier conversations around us actually having a strategic plan and that's where those conversations about you know what does our Revenue structure look like do

50:49 we want to set specific goals and plans around getting to you know structurally balanced budget and things like that I think we can we can pull together as an organization to start to have those conversations all right we are over time for this so I'm giving one last chance I know we'll get another opportunity to share plenty of opinions all right thank you so much Nate I always I'll these aren't easy conversations and someday you're going to show up and say we had more money than we thought but not today all right we are adjourned um and then we'll take about 60 seconds of a break and then we will switch over to the regular session

51:46 we're going to revise our time in it and take about a three minute break so some so just stay with us and we will get started here shortly

56:40 all right I'm going to call the Springfield City Council regular session to order with roll call Mayor Van Gordon here councilor Pitts here councilor here Council rodley here councilor stare here Council Woodrow and councilor Pictionary here thank you and councilor Woodrow is excused for the evening uh please join me for the Pledge of allegian Allegiance I pledge allegiance to the point of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God individual or the liberty and justice for all as we begin our meeting tonight I would like to ask members of the audience who

57:26 are joining us by phone or online to please keep yourselves on mute until you are called on to provide public testimony there are two times designated for public testimony this evening under public hearings in business from the audience Heidi orwick from spark Labs has been approved for 10 minutes at the beginning of the business from the audience this evening and then we will have standard business from the audience if you're attending in person please complete the request to speak card located at the entrance of the council chamber and give it to the city recorder if you're joining with online with a tablet smartphone or computer and wish to speak at either of those times please use the raise hand feature in Zoom the order of public testimony is as follows anyone in person in the city council chambers

58:12 anyone who has raised their virtual hand and Neil could you let us know how many people are joining us this evening mayor we have approximately 22 participants online and 23 in the room thank you first item please mayor the first item is the consent calendar I make a motion that we approve the consent calendar second Anil could you call the vote please yes counselor Pitts aye out sir Mo yes Council Bradley yes counselor stare aye councilor Woodrow and Council Pictionary aye motion passes five yeses zero no's

58:57 one absent next item please uh next time is you have one public hearing tonight uh public hearing number one is the Comcast franchise extension this is ordinance number two an ordinance to extend the term of ordinance 6208 granting to Comcast of Oregon to Inc a franchise for operations of a cable telecommunications system adopting a severability clause and providing an effective date this is a first reading and Neil o'bringer is here for the staff report good evening Maryland Council um as Neil said this is a first reading no action required um but the uh ultimately it extends Comcast's uh cable TV franchise through January of 2025 staff from Springfield

59:42 Eugene Lane County have been working jointly to negotiate a renewal of the franchise we were optimistic that we'd be able to reach agreement this summer but couldn't quite um couldn't quite reach agreement and so we're hoping to extend the franchise for until January 2025 we're hopeful that we'll be able to conclude negotiations well before then but this duration gives us plenty of time hopefully to wrap up negotiations Comcast finally open an office back up in Springfield with for customer support is like good real good for us

1:00:27 right then I am going to go ahead and open the public hearing I do not have any cards for this item Neil do you have anybody on Zoom that wants to speak uh we do have a hand up it is Christina kras our assistant City attorney I don't know if she's on for this item but we're gonna okay no hands for this item all right then I'm going to close the public hearing um this is no action required first reading next item please mayor next time is business from the audience and the first item as you mentioned earlier is a sparklab introduction

1:01:22 hi thank you for having me my name is Heidi larwick I'm the executive director of connected line County and I'm here to talk about our hope for a space at the booth Kelly Center um but before I do that I just wanted to give you a brief background on the organization so you kind of understand what we're coming to with this um connection Lane County started at the Education Service District about eight years ago as an initiative really with the hope of trying to increase High School graduation for all 16 school districts in our County since that time we've grown pretty immensely from a staff of 2 to 17. we're reaching youth in the entire County so from the coast to McKenzie and Oak Ridge all the way down south to Cottage Grove and North Junction City um in that time we have grown three

1:02:07 programs uh the first is called Elevate which is a career connected learning program so we're taking young people outside of the classroom and we're connecting them with industry through experiences like job Shadows internships tours Hands-On competitions things that they can really take what they've learned in their core content classes like math and science and see how it's applied in Industry our second program is called navigate and it's finding those kids that have disengaged from school either they've dropped out or they're just sort of on the fringes and trying to re-engage them and completing that education and getting them on an employment path and our third program which was called spark um it's really about Hands-On learning this is our newest program it's been around for about a year and a half and we opened with our first physical

1:02:52 facility in Eugene we have equipment in this facility where young people can come and they can learn Technical and professional skills the equipment is something that you might see in a manufacturing or a tech company it's a 6 000 square feet and we have been at capacity for the last year and a half so much so that we're actually bussing Springfield kids over to Eugene to access the facility when the board heard that and the community heard it they suggested that maybe we start to look at a Springfield site so we weren't busing kids over from the east side of the county into downtown Eugene and so I wanted to share with you a little bit about what we hope to do with Booth Kelly there's a space there it's 11 000 square feet we'd like to turn it into another Hands-On Learning Center

1:03:39 equipped with again with manufacturing technology and computer science equipment have brought up can't really see it in the zoom but I wanted to show you a brief rendering of what it could look like inside it's a really active learning space where young people are collaborating they're solving problems anytime a student is in this facility they're solving real world problems we're giving them lengths of time to do it and they're working together one of the a couple unique things about the what we're calling spark at Booth Kelly is that we hope to launch a pre-apprenticeship program in manufacturing there working really closely with Springfield School District to provide an opportunity for the students to walk during the day come

1:04:24 take classes there and potentially go back to the the school we hope to create a Workforce Center um the employment department is in a place where young people feel welcome right now there's not a lot of resources there for them and a significant portion of what we do in our work is help young people get connected to jobs we put on resume workshops we do practice interviews we help with job search strategies and so right now they're coming to our facility in Eugene but they're often competing with classes that are happening there and so part of our hope with the booth Kelly site is to have a dedicated space for Workforce Development a place where they can drop in they can come to a class we also offer Financial foundation so personal finance classes a

1:05:10 lot of young people are having their first jobs and are not quite sure what to do with their first paycheck and so we're helping them kind of figure out how to open a bank account what it looks like to save have some saving goals and so we want to have a place where they can come and do those classes um the space that we're looking at needs some significant renovation we're looking at probably investing about a million and a half dollars into making it a space where people feel welcome where it feels like a kind of a newer a newer space just a place where they can come and and kind of hang out but also be learning at the same time we have support so far from the school district business Oregon Lane County government Lane Workforce partnership

1:05:57 Oregon Community foundations and about 10 businesses so far and we're just continuing to work with them to try and bring in that Revenue to make that space what we want we feel really uh strongly that this is going to benefit Springfield youth the most because of its proximity to the high schools and the middle schools it's on the willamalane they can get to a Lama Lane quickly from where we're at and so we're really excited to hopefully have this space and just connect Springfield youth with um Workforce Development hopefully get them excited and curious about what they might want to do after they graduate I'll pause and see if there's any questions Joe I thank you other exciting stuff good

1:06:42 good stuff um couple questions is there what are you asking of Springfield or are you or is this just an informational there's an Ask later in your agenda around a long-term lease yep put it together now that's us the other part is is name the unions that have stepped up to help with the trades and developing our youth where it would be advantageous for them who are starving for employees yeah um we mostly work with the industry Partners not with the unions themselves um so I can't I can't name any off top of my head but we're we work with Lane Community College pretty extensively to try and prepare students for their

1:07:28 apprenticeship programs we work with a lot of companies to try to get kids excited about apprenticeship and then we kind of help them apply for that we don't necessarily work with the unions because you have to be in the apprenticeship program to work with them and that's kind of the place at which we the youth transition out of our care if that makes sense so well it doesn't make sense for the unions not to help invest themselves into this organization and I'm only saying that publicly not to put you on a spot yeah at all but I'm saying it publicly that this is an opportunity for the unions to step up and be part of the solution as opposed as opposed to being uh the benefactor of everybody else's efforts yeah

1:08:17 we got somebody here that's used to that he's got his hand up I think well so that was a hint for you Leonard so Heidi this is a topic that's clearly a lot of interest for us and um you're gonna like thank you for taking some of the questions um but uh I'm gonna let folks kind of talk and ask some questions here and some of them are appointed probably towards your your organization and some of them are a broader I guess opinions about how we approach Workforce in in Lane County Damian hi Damian Hi how are you um so uh I mean we all I mean I've been pretty vocal about how much you know I'm a proponent for this but I guess one thing that I am curious about has there been any talk about like small

1:09:04 expansion of uh in in providing you know life skills I can't tell you how many college students I've worked with since I've been here from Eugene OR Springfield even Portland who you know don't know how to cook you know and so yes they might have the you know Acumen to do technological stuff for Math and Science but they can't really take care of themselves which I think is a huge part of professional development I'm just curious is there any talk about exp like doing something like in that Ram or or is there a way for you to potentially partner with another organization or an entity that can provide that service and inherently if you all work together you can become stronger and have more power in

1:09:50 Springfield and Eugene yeah so we're we're actively already doing a little bit of that when we opened our physical space in Eugene we have a monthly thing called Wonder Wednesday so it's a Wednesday that I think it's the first Wednesday of the month it's usually a four to six and we bring in different speakers so we've done things like housing rights accessing housing we did how to cook with a crock pot and then we gave everybody a crock pot uh so like really simple recipes especially a lot of the youth that we work with are lower income and don't always have all the you know kind of kitchen utensils or even ovens sometimes and so something that you could just plug into a wall um some of the other topics um recently we did on accessing Healthcare so we we help young people

1:10:37 get signed up with health insurance if they don't have it we've done how to open a bank account so yeah I welcome any ideas and and in all of those cases we are partnering with non-profits and other social service providers because that's not our specialty but bringing in things that hopefully are some of those life skills sorry I know I'm looking up there but I was probably looking somewhere else um but yeah I'd love more ideas uh the the young people typically give us the ideas of kind of what they're looking for most recently for Halloween we did a how to dress professionally they all came in costume and then our staff came in our you know normal kind of business casual so that they could understand what it looks like for an interview or your first day of work um so yeah we're trying to infuse some

1:11:23 of that into what we do too Leonard all right Damian were you done I just one quick question so you know I I've noticed that a lot of programs especially ones that uh work with any type of minoritized populations have been coming under Fire but not necessarily on the fire but people have been asking for some type of assessment not necessarily always quantitative but a lot of qualitative assessment and has that been something that's kind of been implemented to where you know organizations want to support but they want to see proof that this is something that is is is is working any type of assessment piece that has been implemented or at least been thought about yeah we do so thank you for

1:12:08 bringing that up uh the majority of the the youth that we work with are young people that haven't historically had access to the type of learning or they're underrepresented in a lot of stem fields and so spark on Seventh has been about 90 bypoc was specifically Latin next African-American youth accessing and so we do do a lot of pre and post conversations and interviews with the young people to make sure that they feel safe and that's typically our measure do they feel safe with the adults do they feel safe in the space and so we do get asked that by funders a lot um you know kind of what are you know what questions are you asking and how are you addressing the needs of the bypoc populations

1:12:55 Leonard um thanks uh Sean I um thanks for this presentation it's very informative and very uh very exciting potentially the uh that there is a um an outfit called Northwest Youth quarter um right off of uh right off of I-5 and it seems as though they they do some vocational training and some Outreach to Marginal um Youth and it seems as though their services would coordinate to an extent with your your Elevate and navigate programs and I I just wanted to find out I mean have you um have you done any sort of communications or um or coordination with that program Yeah we actually send them youth quite

1:13:41 often our the navigate program that I talked about just briefly is our re-engagement program and we often are sending uh our young people to Northwest Youth core to get their first kind of work experience because part of that program is giving um use a kind of a training wheel job and then once they've kind of demonstrated success and understand what it's like then we we move them on into a paid opportunity and so often I can think of a picture in my head that we had we had three young people at Northwest Youth Corps that graduated sure and um counselor Pictionary brings up a great point I mean uh the uh the unions do benefit and reap the benefits of um the this kind of a program and toward

1:14:27 that end um there are unions that have apprenticeships the plumbers the electricians uh the Carpenters that do sponsor programs at Northwest Youth Corps to just sort of feed into the apprenticeships that they have out of their union halls and so um would you uh would you welcome that kind of participation from local unions yeah we love it all right yep good deal all right um this looks great this is the most material I've seen about what you've done in in one in one sitting so it's exciting information I know we we're gonna get to an agenda item later uh I guess the two the the two places

1:15:14 um that I that I kind of have comments would be really you know for this is about kids and having a great and having a great Workforce and um when I look at how much money is being spent in these programs right now and I think it's really on all of either the public private agencies non-profits to really sort of be able to pull back and be able to work left to right and you know and I know this isn't going to be a a question this is going to be more Aegis Sean's opinion here um these problems are really tough right getting kids into the system taking care of them making sure that they end with the skills and careers and it requires that we you know all the partners work together and one of the concerns I have

1:15:59 are things that I'm instantly thinking about when I look at the workforce partnership world is how do we actually do it better because we've got a lot of cash from the government coming down and um and sometimes we don't do a very good job of making sure you know we're not duplicating efforts we work left to right we make it as easy as possible for kids to go from graduation all the way into a great job and I don't know if you have an opinion here I just wanted to say say that now that you were here because I think it's something that the groups involved have to do a better job with yeah I mean I agree I don't I don't know if I have more of an opinion with that I think um we're very fortunate to work closely with the workforce investment board and a lot of the sort of sector membership

1:16:44 groups like omepp manufacturing extension and the tech Association um and ultimately what we're trying to do is is not duplicate things and I think our board and our staff are very aware of that so oftentimes there are instances when we actually step away and sort of let folks kind of carry forward so I'm glad to hear that oh yeah and I'm on the board of Lane Workforce partnership and then their Ed is on our board as well so there's a lot of communication and and definitely um trying to make sure that we're kind of all working together yeah and there's a lot of work the Chamber of Commerce currently does around around this as well work ready yeah yeah we're familiar with that too we've worked with them on our Elevate program uh for the last five years trying to make sure that the um experiences that

1:17:30 they were offering to Springfield youth we were doing something to complement so they were typically doing like an eighth grade Hands-On day and then we would do a seventh okay so we were just making sure that there wasn't that duplication and you're you're describing the thing that I'm really listening for which is hey we're all talking right if you have seventh grade we have eighth grade or if we have eighth grade we have seventh grade and the last comment Before I Let You Go are those your kids those are my kids I offered to let them watch a movie at home but they wanted to come so look they're here that's Emerson and Veronica hi thanks for bringing them yeah like it's always great when we have kids in the in the council chamber well hopefully they're learning something too wait the governor earlier this year too so it's been a good good political year

1:18:16 for them oh one more thing just a quick comment yeah now the um population your target population is 18 below uh 20 up to 24. so which which I had going here is that another potential resource is through the Sherman Center at the Lane County Jail they have the education program for inmates MLK program like the at the no different one lane County Jail Lane County okay we work with MLK in The Phoenix Program already but okay MLK has got an education program for adults that work on their geds they also have a an agreement with DMV so they can get licenses etc those part of those basic things but there's uh actual certified

1:19:02 LCC faculty members that go to the jail and are authorized to get GED credentials for those students that's great so there's a bunch of groundwork already done at the Lane County jail and many contacts through there and there's also several different uh funding sources that are being used at the jail such as the Ford Foundation McKay Family Foundation and the Lane County Economic like development monies that come from the state for the lottery funds so great thank you I'll follow up with that too thank you for coming yeah thank you for having me uh I think you've got a lot of people that are interested in what you're doing so please um you know if you've got more material you know get it to us because I think we'd all love to learn a little bit more

1:19:48 okay thank you all right we're going to proceed to other public comment I do not have anybody else in the room Neil do we have anybody on uh line that wants to comment they are just giving folks a moment in case they want to raise their hand to make a comment not seeing any hands okay I do see one hand um if you're ready uh let's do yes why don't you go and bring them up we got somebody in the crowd that wants to do them AJ's gonna have a card for you to fill out um if you can get her the information and then we'll bring you up up right away right after okay all right and our first speaker is David from Hope On Wheels and David you

1:20:33 should be able to unmute your microphone or I should be unmuted now we can hear you David ah good evening um this is David Strahan Hope On Wheels I'm also a sight leading volunteer with the Eagan warming Center and I just wanted to thank the city again for allowing us to use the memorial building to provide winter shelter for our residents in need uh it's a vital service and I wanted to share some numbers with you just a little bit that I know of to date uh with our involvement with uh Carry It Forward Eagan warming sentence St Vincent de Paul and having that site in Springfield we've been able to house nine of those

1:21:20 folks who would normally come to us for service so those are folks who won't be coming back this year needing our meeting that emergency shelter those are folks who are working on a durable housing program and that's all because of folks in Springfield believe in the service that we provide as Eagan as an emergency warning site and hopefully getting these folks a little more than a sandwich in a warm place uh but I hope an ability to stay alive on a freezing night and the fact that they have Springfield is place they can do that in so I just wanted to say thank you for a personal note um that this is near and dear to my heart for providing those in Springfield with a place to be um and we've had it's not just our local

1:22:08 homeless I just wanted to share with you that we've had quality Farm fire victims here we've had Hospital release folks here we've had people that broke down on the highway here and of course we've had our local homeless uh staying here also so again thank you again uh from the bottom of my heart David Strahan and we still have um someone in the council chambers filling out a card but we have another hand up that speaker is Tim black and Tim you should be able to unmute your microphone thanks I appreciate it um and it's good follow-up with David

1:22:53 and certainly well timed with this crazy weather we're having this week I just want to thank you officially on behalf of Saint Vincent De Paul and Egan warmin Center for considering considering later tonight once again letting us use the memorial building it it really is um it saves lives um right in the heart of downtown Springfield our mission is really simple and that's just to provide a warm safe place on nights when uh you could die by being outside that's it that's our very simple Mission and you are allowing that to happen if if you once again let us use that building and we really do appreciate it uh you know Sunday we thought maybe it was going to

1:23:39 be warmer and then um about the middle of the afternoon we watched things start the fall the temperatures and the snow at least at my house and you know Egan used to have an official season November 15th the March 31st uh well uh as you know the cold weather has arrived early in the last few years we opened in October a couple times the last couple of years and here we are again so we really do like to say that we're going to do our best to be ready on that first cold night and we have a lot of Kinks to work out um tomorrow absolutely uh and we could be open one night we could be open three nights we we could be open six nights that's the the nature of what we do and it's all about people like David and the volunteers Eagan exists

1:24:25 today because of the volunteers and uh there's a lot of organizational support for this infants DePaul behind the scenes but when those shelters are open those are all volunteers and they all appreciate what the city leadership in Neil does year after year of doing your best to help us find Space it's a great partnership really appreciate it thank you very much thank you all right anybody else online no other speakers online right uh the one card I have is Colton Peterson would you please

1:25:11 come forward and then uh say your name and location in the city or address for the record I think I'm done yes Tim right hello uh I'm Colton Peterson I go to Springfield High School and I live just down 7th Street at 63 Pleasant Street um so as a high schooler I actually participated I'm addressing spark lab I actually participated in some events and programs that they offered such as the Elevate paid internship and they were able to connect me with a local business that is nine wood write down I believe a

1:25:57 street and I was also able to attend two events that they hosted which were the coder create event and then a marketing Jam which the environment was extremely welcoming and I really approve of one that is more local in the Springfield area rather than having to commute to Eugene and I also believe that it would be easier for them to work with the Chamber of Commerce if they were closer to Springfield and I also worked with the work ready committee and connecting high school students with uh the Chamber of Commerce and local businesses and I think being able to do that even more and in a

1:26:42 welcoming space is very crucial all right is there any Council response okay next item please here the next item is an ordinance and that is uh replacing ordinance 6450 adopted October 17 2022 this is ordinance number three an ordinance annexing certain territory at 1279 Janice Street the intersection of Aspen Street and Janice Street and approximately 339 foot long segment of

1:27:27 Janna Street and Janice Court to the City of Springfield and willamalane Park and Recreation District withdrawing the same territory from the rainbow water district adopting a severability clause and providing an effective date and we have Andy limbert here for the staff report thanks Neil good evening Mr Mayor and counselors um this ordinance is being submitted for councils consideration for adoption to correct an error that was on one of the attachments to the prior ordinance adopted in October um staff discovered the error after it was sent actually for confirmation with state and local agencies for the change to the boundary and the legal description and diagram was incorrect

1:28:12 however staff does note that all of the public notification and the signage that was posted on the site and also published in the newspaper and mailed out had the correct information it was the adopted ordinance that was the official document of record that also went to the city recorder's office that had the incorrect attachment so the remedy for this and I thank the City attorney Christina Krause for assisting me with this is to provide a new ordinance to repeal and replace and it's essentially allows for the swapping out of those exhibits uh to indicate the correct area so that's the nature of

1:28:57 this ordinance it does not require public hearing we have the public hearing with the correct information it's essentially changing the exhibit to the adopted ordinance that is this requirement so I'd be happy to answer any questions if you do have them then I think we're ready for the emotion this is awkward uh I'll just guess I read the whole thing uh ordinance number three an ordinance annexing certain territory hey Steve I think you just have to uh just design it to approve motion number three or I can do that I just like I said it's awkward so just tell me what you want to do I'll uh make a motion to me ordinance number

1:29:43 three has worded all right Neil could you call the roll yes councilor Pitts aye Johnson yes Council Bradley yes answer stare all right answer Woodrow and counselor Pictionary all right thank you motion passes five yeses zero knows one absent next item please thank you uh next item is business from the city council anybody have business from the uh that they want to share um the one piece of business that I did want to bring up uh we did receive a memo from commissioner Bernie that outlined work that was being done around

1:30:28 the Glenwood transfer site it came in our email directly from his desk I would encourage um if you haven't encouraged you if you haven't read it take the time to read it if you've got questions get them to Nancy effectively what it's saying is that the commission's sort of moving forward with a plan to move the transfer site it's going to be a long time um but it's PR it's good for us in the long term because that property would become available for redevelopment eventually um so this is the fir this is something I think we've all talked about for years and this is the first real actionable step the County's taken all right next item please

1:31:15 the next item is we have several items under business from the city manager item number one is the introduction of alley Camp as the city's economic development manager and I have that item so just ask Ali if she would join me up here so um I'm just going to talk for a few minutes and then I'll give Ali the microphone but um just want to go over kind of where we've been the last 11 months we did two really thorough recruitments looking for a new economic development manager who fit the needs of the city turns out the most professional and qualified candidate was already here living in Springfield Ali served previously as the um

1:32:03 Eugene's development investment liaison which included work in Eugene's Riverfront urban renewal District supporting developers through the complexities of building on that site so that might sound familiar to the work that we have waiting for her most recently she also worked in Eugene's downtown Urban real renewal District while she's here she'll lead a three-member economic development team with an immediate focus on the Glenwood Riverfront development blue McKenzie apartments and business retention and recruitment not just in downtown Springfield but throughout Springfield that three-member teen there are two of those members here Sam Kelly quattruki he's our Economic Development analyst

1:32:48 he's working on the rfqs the contracts the budgets all of that detailed work that we need to make these projects move and then you probably know vahana Keane who's been here for quite some time she's our downtown she's our Economic Development officer with a focus on downtown but she's also taken over property management and kind of whipped all of that into shape in short order so before I um say anymore I just want to turn it over to Ellie camp and say congratulations on behalf of Nancy noon and I and all of the city manager's office uh thank you mayor and city council and Neil for that great introduction my name is Ali Camp I just want to start off by saying I'm so excited to be here knowing that I am a Springfield resident and how important this work is to the council in

1:33:33 the community I think it means a lot it resonates widely when someone can say that they're from this community and they're invested in its future Neil highlighted some of my experience it spans far and wide I've been working locally for about 11 years I went to U of O so I've touched everything from transit safe routes to school new development Redevelopment business assistance and I'm most excited to start on the land development in the Glenwood area and with the downtown housing efforts as a resident these are things I've been hearing about for a long time and it feels pretty cool to know that I'm going to be a part of a team that helps bring them to the community um that's all I had to say I'm excited to be here uh thank you I look forward to seeing you more often

1:34:23 I think we are all excited to have you um and it was great when when I walked into the office and you were already here because people been talking about to stay for a long time and getting the economic development staff fully filled out and you know working in the uh working on these great projects is going to become important so welcome we'll be excited we'll see you a ton thank you shortly next item mayor the next item is approval to enter into lease terms of three years with options to renew for an additional three years at the booth Kelly complex and bahana Keen is here for the staff report so it really is economic development night here at city council yes it is but

1:35:08 right now it's Property Management now turn our hats around uh so good evening mayor and City councilors I decided to join you in person rather than hiding 10 feet away in my office it is so very nice to see you this evening uh so in April I came to you with a resolution authorizing the city manager to enter into standard lease terms at the booth Kelly complex through July 1st 2027 and this was an important move because the purpose of this resolution was to state that it's a property that is not needed for public use through the next five years in duration so essentially we say it is what it is for the next five years um so the outcome for that resolution resulted in a standard lease at Booth Kelly which is only one year in length

1:35:54 so I came to you in September to share that we have a potential tenant who you have now met and would like to make an investment at the booth Kelly Suite 150 and Upon Our measurements it's 11 500 square feet so it's a pretty large size there was a requests for additional information from you and uh Financial impact for the three-year lease terms and that's included in your packet um any extension of the lease terms at Booth Kelly complex past July 1st 2027 would of course be contingent upon approval of any additional resolution that would be extended to the current resolution so I am here today requesting your permission to authorize the city

1:36:41 manager to enter into least terms of three years with an option to renew for an additional three years if requested by the attendant Joe have any questions yes Sirens yes so um not trying to be a stick in the night I was I'm always looking at making sure that um we're doing things correctly from every point of view not saying that you're doing anything incorrectly I just want to cross the t's dot guys so um this works out to if my math is correct about me um about 2 000 well actually close to three thousand a month so it's thirty thousand a year no 20 000 years so that's going to be about

1:37:27 three thousand whatever four thousand whatever anyway is that the market rate for that size facility number one number two were other entities given the opportunity the same opportunity for which they can look at that property and take advantage of that property so that we are uh and you know I already love the program so but I want to want to make sure that that someone doesn't come knocking on our door six months we're not saying how come what about me and then us find ourselves in a pickle so I don't know legally you know was there any other requirements do we are we obligated to give others opportunity are we obligated to go because it is with the public interest are we obligated to go with the uh market rate those kind of those kind of rules are those been have those been looked at and signed off yeah I can tell you um Council

1:38:13 missionary that those issues have been looked at and it doesn't set a precedent for other tenants necessarily to approach this lease this way those are the exact two questions that I was going to ask thank you great questions oh sure you were all right anybody else Steve I make emotionally authorized city manager to enter lease terms at the booth Kelly complex of three years with the option to renew for an additional three years if requested by the tenant a

1:38:59 second you know could you call the vote please yes counselor Pitts aye councilor Mo yes Council rodley yes counselor stare aye councilor Woodrow and counselor Pictionary aye thank you uh motion passes five yeses zero knows one absent next item please great night thanks vahana uh the next item is uh short-term lease for emergency warming Center uh this is my item along with Christina kras who's here virtually so good evening again mayor and Council on October 24th we brought a request we received from St Vincent de Paul to use the memorial building on a temporary basis for one season for warming that

1:39:45 was brought to Ceda cedarboard approved the short-term lease agreement um and we are now bringing it to the city the city would need to allow the use um of the facility as outlined um and so what we're asking tonight is for you to authorize uh us to enter into a short-term lease with Ceta for the seedone property at 765 a street and then enter into a sublease with Saint Vincent De Paul to facilitate the emergency warming Center are there any questions I make a motion we authorize the assistant city manager to enter into a short-term release with the Springfield

1:40:30 Economic Development Agency for the seat-owned property at 765 a street and to enter into a sublease St Vincent de Paul of Lane County and so they use as an emergency warming Center by Saint Vincent people second Neil could you call the vote please yes councilor Pitts aye councilman yes Council rodley yes Council stair aye councilor Woodrow and councilor Pictionary hi thank you motion passes five yeses zero knows one absent next item please next item is any other business from the city manager just one uh brief item I just wanted to mention um upcoming Veterans Day holiday and uh take this opportunity to thank the

1:41:15 members of our community members of this Council and employees that have served in our Armed Forces uh protecting our nation and I thank you for your patriotism and your service to our country um on a side note I um want to also mention one special veteran that has been in my life which is my father Stanley Emanuel Anderson who was a World War II veteran and there were seven children in my father's family five boys two girls all five of the boys in his family were enlisted in military service and served in different capacities in

1:42:01 that war not all of them came back um so my father passed away this past December 3rd and I would just like to mention his name this evening and say how proud I am of this service thank you thank you Nancy next item please your father was a hero any business from the city attorney uh no no additional business tonight all right and we look like we are adjourned for the evening so have a good night everybody um and we'll see you next week thank you

0:04 all right I'm going to call the city council work session to order with roll call mayor Ben Gordon here councilor Pitts Council Irmo here Council Bradley here councilor stair here answer Woodrow and Council appreciationary here thank you all right counselor Woodrow's excuse for the evening we have two work session items the first one is the museum advisory committee applicant interviews with Emily David for the staff good evening mayor and counselors I am Emily David director of the library in the museum and it's my pleasure to be here this evening on behalf of the museum advisory committee we are asking

0:50 that you interview three candidates there's three open positions there's two candidates that are renewing and one new applicant so I believe the first applicant or the first interview is for Patty Sage if we're ready does anybody have any questions before we get started all right I think we're ready thank you Nancy on or Mary Bridget I just noticed just just now that one of the members of this committee is actually also now a new Springfield

1:35 employee oh okay okay hello again Patty hello um so the the plan really is that I'm going to ask all the questions um and we're still sort of figuring out how to do these interviews now that we're in person in the most formal setting as possible normally we would go around and introduce introduce ourselves but uh I heard it well thank you are you are you ready for the first question hit me with it all right why are you interested in serving on the museum committee um I have been um I was a teacher in the district for um 26 years of my 30 years of teaching

2:23 and um I have served on the Springfield Museum board um from I think it was about 2008 until 12. um I worked with the teaching American history Grant um and um so I've been real involved with the museum for for quite a while and I have a great history love of History I love history and I love Springfield history um we moved over here from Eugene in 2011. so I really want to get back involved with my town I volunteer on a board in Eugene and I want to get involved here

3:10 okay so I'm going to that you've touched on some of this already so describe your professional and personal experiences it relates to your desire to become a museum Committee Member I don't know if you have more to add um real I mean not really I taught Elementary School for 30 years Oregon Trail and you know local history was was always the highlight the Springfield museum has a rotating exhibit space one of the roles of the committee is to make recommendations for exhibits and programs can you give us an example of an exhibit you might recommend for the museum um the

3:56 um you know I I did a lot of research this summer on um on the bridges that we have and the the Old Trolley bridge and just how that linked up with with our communities to the West um I find that kind of fascinating how long that lasted and um or just I know they're doing a lot of Road Improvement in in the area so maybe to kind of involve that uh you know present day with Transportation Transportation I think that might be kind of interesting and how do you think the work of the museum uh the Springfield history museum improves our community

4:42 um they just kind of ground us in our past where we came from um who who we are you know um I think it's a great space over there it's a wonderful building and we just really need to preserve it and um take care of everything that has been donated to it and that it's about yeah all right thank you so much that was the last question yay all right Emily okay okay I believe the next applicant is with us in the room as well Jennifer

5:27 Blake and I'm up for reappointment hello Jenna do you need us to introduce ourselves to him no thank you I mean you're welcome to share something unique and interesting maybe a fun fact but no pressure all right why are you interested in serving on them continuing your service on the museum committee um I've really enjoyed participating on that committee so far um I'm involved in a lot of of the little projects that we're doing right now um we're currently putting together a a kind of a historical Atlas which will be published hopefully next year um we worked on the joint program of the

6:13 Heritage Awards um I'm super also into local history and uh really like digging around and finding tidbits of history that people forgot even his existed I guess like and treasure hunting and in our in these buildings that I work on I'm an architecture in town and so as we're remodeling a lot of the buildings on Main Street just like trying to recreate the puzzle of who has used that building over time and kind of a lot of cultural and economic factors that brought it to where it is today and just I just enjoy that a lot and how that can serve Main Street long term if you describe any of your professional experiences as it relates to your desire

6:58 to uh become a museum Committee Member I guess I just mentioned that a little bit so as an architect we our firm is on Main Street and we're really involved in the revitalization and um we really like to use to uncover that history of the building that we're about to remodel in order to like inform the work that we do on the building it doesn't need to be a reenactment of old-timey times but just there are a lot of cool assets that we have in downtown that we may not have even realized work because they've been covered up by just Decades of layers of new things and really when you peel a bunch of that away um you reveal like original transom Windows above a lot of the star fronts

7:44 that really give that character to downtown that has been kind of concealed over the last 40 years so the Springfield museum has a rotating exhibit space one of the roles of the committee is to recommend uh make recommendations for exhibits and programs can you please give us an example of an exhibit you might recommend all day I could talk about this all day so one thing I'm really interested to explore and I think would be really cool to put something together about is the influence of fire and how it's shaped our downtown over history so there are a lot of um gaps in the kind of architectural fabric of downtown and a lot of that happened because of fire so even just

8:30 the space right down here right we have a huge empty block between the museum and the um well and the art center and that was a fire you know that happened to burn down Alexander's department store and it's been sitting as a as a empty space for a long time it doesn't mean it can't be activated but it's just interesting to know that there was a thing and there was a fire and that's why it looks the way that it does today even just the building of brick buildings in the 1910s happened as a result of fire because you know buildings were wood before that and fire was a major threat and then of course we have the Wildfire issue now and just thinking about how fire shaped a community is really fascinating in the development of a fire department about tracks that go with that I mean there's so many things a fire Bell that's on display in them gal right now like that's the original fire Bell so cool

9:15 how do you think the work of the Springfield history museum improves our community [Music] um I think through you know just uncovering all of those lost stories and those stories go to pre-colonial Times not just you know post-colonial history but just understanding recapturing and telling the story of a place helps people to appreciate the place and appreciate the Nuance of the place which then Fosters stewardship of that place which is really important in building and revitalizing a downtown and making a downtown that you feel invested in and proud of and you really want to be a part of great thank you so much

10:07 so our final candidate is Tara priyat and it we reached out to her and didn't hear back I know she's been having some medical issues so she isn't we just checked and I don't think she's in on Zoom so she's not here this evening she is reapplying she's been on the um the committee for the last three years okay thank you I'm sorry Emily there's three appointments correctly all right thank you all right our decision any discussion I like them okay I'm fine with them okay Leonard Damian anything that you guys want to add I I guess I would just ask um Emily's probably got some experience with the group his tariff the Tara priyan as she fit in pretty well

10:55 I can tell you that Tara works at the Lane County History Museum so she has a lot of experience and has been an active member in the on the committee so I would say my answer would be yes I think she fits well with the group good that's all I got I'm I'm happy to move forward thanks okay so um we're moving two out of the three forward um and then and then I know we're going to do a committee uh recruitment probably February March um if we can recruit for the the third opening and then if Tara is feeling better she can reapply thank you thank you all right

11:41 second item is budget check-in with the finance director do you mean uh mayor and Council so typically in the fall we like to get in front of you uh with the five-year general fund forecast as we kick off the coming budget cycle uh to give you some context into some of the challenges that we'll be facing as we put together the budget and some context for the budget that we'll be bringing to you uh in the spring additionally though um with that five year forecast and assumptions that we'll share with you we're looking for some guidance this

12:27 evening we continue to have a structural imbalance as a result of measure 5 and 50 and just how we fund government in the state of Oregon and so this has just been our sort of situation here for decades and typically in addressing that structural imbalance we have three tools one of those tools is finding efficiencies and restructuring and staff reductions that's been the tool we've historically used the other tools are service level changes and new Revenue sources red point where I feel that we've really exhausted the efficiencies and Staffing reductions we'll continue to look for those always will but we really need to start looking to the other tools to address this imbalance and so before we start putting

13:14 energy and we've had this conversation in the past in regards to service level changes and new revenues uh covid and then the arpa funds put a pause on that conversation we're getting ready to re-engage and we want to make sure that we're putting our focus in the areas that you want so we're looking for guidance on on whether you'd like us to focus more on service level changes new revenues or a combination of the two and I'm not looking for that answer right now we can jump into the conversation and then come back to that so let's start with the five-year general fund forecast um I think the first thing I want to point out here is is looking at we're putting together the fiscal year 24 budget in the coming year uh that's the column that's shaded in Gray and if we

14:01 go right down to the bottom we have the ending cache as a percent of operating expenditures typically we like to have 20 to 25 we'd like you to be more in the 25 range but 20 is the floor that we establish that Reserve is what gets us from July 1st until uh November when the property tax receipts start to come in we're at 21 right now as things are forecasted that's a good place to be uh going into this budget and that has a lot to do with the arpa funding that we've used to stabilize the general fund going out into fiscal year 25 you can see that we dropped down to 16 we have a number of positions that are being funded through arpa funds that are right now in our special Revenue fund

14:46 those will be coming back into the general fund mid fiscal year 25 the arpa funding has to be spent by December 31st of 2024 and that's why you see that drop down to 16 and then a more significant drop to uh 10 and then four percent in that outer year um we've made a lot of I think uh gains uh in terms of some of the um initiatives that we've we've taken here over the past few years in addressing our structural imbalance um you know in 20 and 21 we did some significant uh um uh Cuts uh and then the other big item was engaging sub and negotiating the in lieu of increase however we've also had some setbacks

15:33 um you know one of those being our risk and liability insurance then the increase that we've seen in those premiums we've seen coming out of Salem the Paid Family Medical Leave which is coming into our 24 budget and then lastly um you know we had a jail medical vendor that is getting out of the business or at least providing support to our jail we found a new vendor but the cost is doubled and so it feels like you know we make these sort of steps for forward and then we end up you know with a few steps backwards but I think the the larger sort of need here really is is to really find a sustainable kind of source of funding for the services that we provide

16:19 um the other thing I think I'd like to point out here is the transfer to the ambulance fund uh if you look at the deficit spend in fiscal year 24 it's around 750 000 to transfer to the ambulance fund is 700 000 in that year and then it grows over the coming years that's something we've been forecasting but we hadn't seen come into our general fund yet in terms of having to actually do a subsidy uh that changed last fiscal year where we had a subsidy of around seven hundred thousand dollars it had a lot to do with the change in software and getting behind on some Billings however that corrects itself in fiscal year 23 I mean it's revenues that we were going to eventually collect it was just a timing issue so you know that's one of the things we've been keeping an

17:04 eye on um is you know gemt has helped I think sort of uh prolong that but eventually the value we're getting through GM is not going to address longer structural issue we have in the ambulance fund and then I think the other bigger issue that you become aware of recently is that Metro West is getting out of the transport business and that work is going to come back into our ambulance fund and uh it's been create I think um some additional challenges uh tonight there are a number of Department directors here to answer questions as well if if you want to go into some of that detail and I believe Chief Cayman is attending by um video and can come up if needed for questions in regards to that so I'm going to just give you a moment

17:50 to absorb that and also this can be a dialogue if you have questions you can ask them now or you can hold them not seeing anybody ready to no Corey well I'm sure we're going to explore all of the options but when we talk about finding additional Revenue sources I'm interested in what are what are the suggestions around that and what are we thinking around that and um yeah so I'm not ready to go into the detail of naming those different Revenue sources but just to give you um kind of an idea of how we approach that is you know our challenges are the same challenges in every city across Oregon and um and so we typically like to watch what our peer cities are doing

18:37 and we've seen a lot of cities implementing different types of revenues to address this you know we we don't want to be that sort of progressive sort of leading in terms of these types of revenues but when we start to see kind of more adoption of certain types of revenues in cities that are similar to Springfield that's when we start to step back take a look and say hey maybe that's a possibility for our community and so that's what we'll be doing is is going out there and and looking at what other cities are doing and ones that we think might work well for this community the other thing we might consider doing is is maybe Consulting with someone to you know help us identify alternative revenues that maybe are more familiar for what's being done across the state and so that's another possibility

19:27 Leonard um thanks I really um just wanted to ask about the ambulance fund um with the provider pulling out would it be a possibility to just do our ambulance work our routine ambulance transport and our higher urgency transport in-house would it be possible to do it with uh with fire Personnel for instance so that's your question for chief Kavin do you want to bring him up I I would love to bring Chief Gavin up yes

20:22 all right I think I got my mic on let's even get the camera to open up um good evening so uh thanks for bringing up and answering that question we are actively exploring or planning for bringing this work um in-house uh it already coincides with some ambulance system redesigned work we're doing to get the right not only right resources the right calls but the right Workforce um on the right calls and expanding opportunities for the community to work for Eugene Springfield fires so uh absorbing that work uh under the fire department's umbrella does make sense having fire Personnel do it is kind of the very most expensive option that would be out there least likely to help stabilize our ambulance fund and so very preliminarily as we look at and the the

21:07 private contractor has been pretty open with us as far as sharing call data Revenue data and the normal reporting um so we're able to forecast that a little bit what resources would we end up deploying um and then what would be that cost recovery it looks pretty positive for us could be a help to help stay stabilize things but in particular the work we're already doing around redesigning the workforce that serves on the ambulances should help us in this uh out of your forecast thanks chief so I guess I have a follow-up question to that Chief so or this may be a Nate question too when I look at this forecast is that assuming that that ambulance work is going back specifically to sort of fire Personnel

21:54 that like the I guess the old way when it was all all transports were done with the the most advanced life support that we could or is that assuming some sort of right new business model that we could that we can sort out so that actually um this news is so recent that it's not actually baked into this model yet so this was based on their pre um um news um kind of forecast typically um and and I'm comfortable with this approach from the forecast that they provide us tend to be conservative um and um so I I want to say take them with a grain of salt but I you know it we haven't really realized the the kind of um amounts or forecast deficits that we've

22:41 been expecting though we've been trending in that direction so with this news I'm assuming that it will have a negative impact on the ambulance fund finances unless uh Chief cave and fills otherwise uh making uh those numbers I think more likely um than prior to that news uh go ahead Chief yeah and I it's a good question a good answer um as far as exploring kind of how we take that work on as we know right now that works bundle and given to a contractor uh so a piece of what we're looking at is it makes sense to keep that bundled um and put the work within one city or the other to kind of manage that new component of the system underneath our umbrella if we do go that route or if we

23:26 do split it out between the two separate atfs which makes it a bit more complex we'll need Bridge funding from when we first start taking the work back on to uh when we actually start receiving those bills it's 90 to 120 days from when we actually provide a service to to getting those that cost recovery money uh coming back in the door and so there's some complex pieces of that we're going to work on that but I think the bigger part of answering your question um no are our continued work is to transition those most expensive assets off of ambulances the firefighters what we find is our systems is quite busy and Staffing them in that way while growing to the demand just didn't make good

24:11 Financial sense going on in the future so um we were preparing to get on both Council schedules uh here in the future to talk about the redesign work that's underway currently and then also address this emerging issue at that same time we should have more clarity and answers on that but in the out years right now the forecast for us uh preliminary shows that it will show a little bit of Blue Sky um as far as just the Wayward staff that work the revenue that would come in from it and the capacity that those units would actually help add to the 911 system during periods of high demand and and I think and and I understand that you're in the in the early stages of that here's the I guess ultimately

24:57 here's the the question that I have we can't take on from a City Financial perspective a new set of business on an Enterprise fund that would require a subsidy right like is and I'm looking around for head nods to make sure everybody understands that we're already subsidizing a significant amount of this service so in my am I assuming correctly that if this thing does not pencil out and we're not it's not self-sustaining then we're not going to be taking that we're going to go out to we're going to consider a third party vendor um so and that's a great question as well one thing I think we probably all know but I'll I'll repeat it just so folks have it is this work is our legal responsibility so if they you know pulled out tonight

25:43 we would pick up uh that work just like we did in 1981 when the last private company abandoned us um so we know that we did preliminary work we didn't just dive in to try to bring this work into fire um reached out to the Private Industry to find out what's the market look like and who's bidding um and the answer we got was um probably nobody uh which tried to reach out to Falk and say on the next nearest private provider they did not respond to our request to make contact AMR which is a large National company um they did out of Portland we had a good conversation he explained what was going on in the market our biggest problem here challenge in in trying to recruit a vendor if we if we did was

26:29 that uh one that we wouldn't get any and two that all we're offering is the non-emergency side of the business which doesn't necessarily pin cell out if you don't have the economy of scale of the entire transport business okay so but what I'm hearing is that that is still being considered as you're putting together more information and that we we as a council are going to see more like what the game plan is before anything happens right yeah absolutely so um not to turn this into a work session about the ambulances but uh basically uh you know they gave us notice that they didn't intend to renew their contract at the end of June they would like out sooner um and work with us on that but again

27:14 that has to work for us both timelines Workforce um all of that so yes okay uh Joe so I'm just trying to get my arms around this correct me if I'm wrong on these sets of facts that I think I know here is that based on the chart in front of us we're looking at a five to six million dollar deficit over time and it looks like five million of that just just shy 100 or 300 000 shy five million of that is personnel and so we also know that we had this in-house and that failed because of

27:59 personnel costs and so we went outside and have some other outfit that's now doing that is that correct or all those correct facts somebody or less more or less hopefully more than less okay so now I hear that we're looking at it internally again when we already know that's failed so I'm a little concerned about that and how that looking at it internally is being formulated and other folks and there are other folks's plans and what's the big picture here and what uh what thoughts are driving that and where is the end goal

28:45 so I think one short answer to that or you know is related to this redesign work that we'd like to present to you that we just initiated the first phase of that within the City of Eugene um the next phase is is with some City Springfield assets it builds Upon Our successes with the BLS program bringing kind of the right resource to write an employee to the right calls and lowering our total overall cost so Staffing of firefighters is the most expensive we're transitioning away from that to a more financially sustainable model bringing this work in we already have those classifications within the BLS and single role ALS Workforce whereas when

29:33 this work first got contracted out in particular in the City of Eugene all the assets we had to put on ambulances were were firefighter paramedics now we have a different Workforce that we have access to to help you know basically make sure that the the cost to run the program don't exceed the cost recovery options available all right thanks Chief Nancy looks like she wants to jump in here perhaps we can I can provide some context any decision regarding ambulance services yes we do have you know there is that liability at hand if we if we suddenly lost a provider that would that would be obviously that happened in the past that was um that was something that the city really had to scramble over was my understanding

30:18 um any type policy decision like that would require coming before this body for your decision making and um so I don't want you to think that this is a foregone conclusion um we're still in the information gathering stages um however I do think it is important to note that the the marketplace itself has changed um you know it's it's not as easy to recruit workers as we know so there are some different factors that play that you know make this a little bit of a different analogy but I think it would it warrants its own probably more than one obviously work session on the side yeah all right so I I think you you guys just uh brought up a fact that was uh sort of people had a lot of opinions about and I understand that

31:04 we're going to get more information about it and have a longer conversation about it um Leonard um thanks yeah just um not to beat a dead horse but one more thing about the ambulances um there what I know from my limited experience with the ambulance companies is that there are providers and then there are providers I I don't think that Metro West is what they call the bottom feeder outfit I think that they charge a respectable rate for their services and I don't know who it was that we had before that proved to be um more than competitive with our rates but you know with initial outlay and I don't even know if we're gonna have to buy ambulances to make this happen but

31:51 um if we do then it seems to me that it could still be cost effective depending on what the um what the contract was with MetroWest before this thanks all right so I still have other other questions you have more material to present yes all right let's do that before I leave the slide to you I just want to say one other thing and I've heard this comment before and looking at this forecast it looks a lot like um the previous forecasts and there's this feeling like that outer year number never comes so one of the things I I want to say is it can't we by law have to put a forward a balanced budget so we take action uh to address it

32:38 um secondly uh we really were um through some of those initiatives improving that that five-year Outlook and if we were to back out uh the uh subsidy to the ambulance fund and we are still looking for uh efficiencies as the chief spoke to over there and we'll continue to work on that if we back out the subsidy to the ambulance fund and then there's a number of positions that we've added back in and I'm going to get to those and why we've added those back in it brings that that elderly Year back up into you know a closer to that 20 is still below but it's not as bad so we have made improvements um as I get further into this conversation now you know one of the things those cuts in 20 and 21 uh have shown us is is that we are organization

33:24 and and possibly too lean in some areas and that can result in other costs uh you know as we've learned so we'll talk about that um you know but we've made improvements and but as long as we're in this funding environment with measure 5 and 50 this is going to be our reality and we need to kind of find our way over to a more sustainable source of funding um so with that let's move into the assumptions uh the other thing too I'd like to mention is I think it typically with forecast there's a bias towards being very conservative and one of the things that we're trying to do is sort of break you know we really kind of beat up these assumptions and we don't want to Doom and Gloom projection we don't want sort of a Rosy you know kind of too Rosy

34:10 projection we're really trying to zero in on what we really think is for the most part a relatively kind of accurate you know not biased in One Direction or the other so starting with our Revenue assumptions we started with a baseline of three percent growth uh and then we built into that um uh Marcola Meadows and then we have an Enterprise Zone exploration uh international paper and what we have is over this forecast period at least over the period that has the Marcola metals and Enterprise Zone in it which is I think 24 through 26 we're averaging between four to five and a half percent increases in our property tax revenue to give you some context for that our historical average is 3.4 percent and

34:57 that would include other time periods of development and other Enterprise Zone Explorations coming on so the fact that our forecast is is four to five and a half percent over that period we're pretty bullish on the property taxes looking at our total revenues uh we're including the property taxes but all the other revenues we're looking at average growth of of around 3.2 percent that's right in line with our historical average um moving into the expenditures um our cost of living assumption doesn't factor in inflation right now the feds are taking some pretty aggressive action uh and trying to tame inflation uh we are still operating on the assumption that they are going to be successful uh

35:42 and that this inflation is not going to find its way into our wages but that's something we're going to keep a close eye on right now we're using our historical kind of averages which is around three percent uh um increases year over year across all labor groups materials and services we built in a five percent uh inflation for fiscal year uh 24 then we're stepping that down to four percent and 25 then back to 3 and 26 and 27. uh underspend uh recognizing that we set a legal appropriation but for a number of reasons we never fully expand that appropriation um you know it could be projects that we don't get to it could be vacancies um we're putting an underspend of 800 000 per year which is right in line with

36:28 typically what we experience a little bit of context in that though our underspend for uh fiscal year 22 was 300 000. as we've cut our budget Tighter and Tighter we're going to see our underspend also uh shrink but with some staffing additions and then some vacancies that we typically experience we're going back up to eight hundred thousand and then lastly on the jail medical contract that was a 600 000 per year increase uh we're uh having a 200 000 subsidy from the general fund for that contract our hope is we're working with our we lease out jail beds to partner agencies and we're working on those contracts and hopefully we'll be able to recover more and there's the

37:13 possibility that we'll be able to recover the full amount but right now we're making the assumption that we're going to have about a 200 000 subsidy that we need to factor in so like all forecasts this is accurate today and range in the future uh tomorrow yep okay uh any questions on assumptions all right moving on to Joe just one one quick one on the you said I'm confused with the wording uh on the medical contract that was an increase of 600 000 or it says 200 of 600 000 per year so we're already spendings 600. yeah I think if memory is right our previous contract is around 600 000 and

37:58 it doubled to 1.2 million so if that's 600 000 increase 200 000 of that is being covered by the general fund yes and for that increase we're getting an increased service level so uh it's a 24 7. yeah no I know we got okay we had much more better coverage I'm not walking at that at all I'm just trying to get my hands around What's the total cost per year and what what it was and what it is so do we have t-shirt can you I can I can kind of give you a swag if you don't mind I think previously it was right around 600 600 000 and I think it increased to 1.2 so it's just it was double I get about doubled and we are we

38:44 are in the process of recovering some of that through through increased contracts with um Eugene and we're exploring the contracts we have with the feds as well so we're working on ways to recover even more of that 600 sprinting bids okay so the 200 000 I'm just trying to figure out where the 200 000 fit in there so with that increase uh in fiscal year uh 23 um because I don't think it's it's the full year for that year uh we absorbed it's about 472 000 um increase in fiscal year 23 absorbed it in the levy um the levy is what funds the jail starting in fiscal year uh 24 we have four hundred thousand dollars in the levy and we have two hundred thousand dollars coming from the general fund to cover the full 600. based on our projections

39:30 um uh we feel that the levy can absorb 200 000 of it without and then the other two hundred thousands coming through increased revenue from uh our jail bad leases our hope is you know that one is a conservative estimate right now because when we put this together we really had no idea where that would go but from a conversation that I had with Jessica uh just today um I there's a high probability that we're going to be able to cover um quite a bit more than the 200 000. thank you all right uh arpa funded critical positions so as I mentioned the Staffing reductions in in 2021 and kind of getting to a point where we recognized we were too lean in some places uh We've added positions back in 22 uh 23 and

40:16 we're going to have uh I think another position added back in 24. um starting with um 23 we added back two positions in Fire and these are positions that we've held vacant to just again balance our budget but these are positions that were required to fund through the IGA that we have with our partner agency and they were left unfilled for a period of time where it was getting to the point that it was becoming a point of tension and so this is just us stepping up and and fulfilling our our IGA obligations moving down to the deputy police chief I think this is a position that many of you are familiar with and I'm going to

41:01 let Nancy speak to this one thank you it's awkward to coordinate a team presentation when you're sitting right next to each other um I requested um I talked to Chief sure about this about um adding a deputy chief I did some uh checking into this this was a position that the city had uh previously in Prior administrations prior to Chief cheer uh coming on and even prior to Chief Lewis um my intent here is really you know as we are looking at increasing our transparency and our accessibility with our police department and making a lot of the policy changes that have happened um she sure just hasn't had the ability to be out in the community as much

41:47 um and he's been had to be more focused in on um more administrative matters that really don't fall customarily underachieve and he probably you know he probably he never complains but this is my observation based on over 20 years working with law enforcement I would also say you know our Department this department like many of the other departments in the city is under staff you know we you know we we're always trying to recruit more officers because there's just a natural churn in this position level but also on the leadership side um so for me it's a couple of things it's um increasing accountability to the community it's um it's a succession planning as well um and it's really kind of trying to put

42:34 back resources that were I think probably could have really been very helpful um had that been done in the past so I'm looking forward to that um the next a couple of positions are related in the Human Resources side of the house um we have had a lot of State mandates coming regarding uh human that affect Human Resources the Oregon pay Equity laws one of them um we have family leave Law that's coming in Council Rodney's nodding her head because she does all this HR kind of stuff and again so in the city we did a lot of cuts with the last recession we are still not at a staffing level um that we were in pre-recession and I think um when we start talking more

43:20 about the budget we're going to be showing you that Trend um so that was this position has really helped with a lot of that administration of how we do different types of mandates from the state but also we have people that are retiring new hiring so we really needed to to beef up our Administration in HR I also noticed when I came to the city a couple of years ago that there didn't seem to be a comprehensive centralized training structure and what I mean by that is just really uh somebody that's dedicated to tracking where we are in some of the mandated training that we would like to have all employees receive so for

44:05 instance um preventing sexual harassment um diversity equity and inclusion initiatives um things that you know are good organizational development types of training making sure that we're all hitting those marks I think we do a really good job in um some of the more legally mandated things to do um but I'd like to take that um to uh to the next level for the city and I think this is really boils down to a loss prevention uh philosophy um it's kind of like if you don't invest in training you're going to pay for it one way or the other right because you don't want to have people that are performing functions that may not have um be adequately trained and you know I think we do a good job on some of the

44:50 more critical functions obviously safety uh job duties but some of these higher functions that you could run into liability I think we could be a little bit stronger on that uh the other one was the legislative Economic Development analysts this is a position that's part socially funded through the general fund partially through the um Urban through Ceta we're doing a ton of work on our active projects and um really needed to get that extra capacity in the CMO office all right and I know that we're pushing up against time so I'll try to be a little quicker here um last two positions uh senior planner there's a number of of uh planning

45:35 positions that are funded by arpa that are not coming back into the general fund I want to recognize that there's three of them this is a position actually that was created as a limited duration while they did a development uh code update and there's this recognition analysis with a lot of the mandates coming down through the state that our development codes could be in a constant state of update and so this is a limited duration position that kept getting pushed out a year after year after year that we've decided to make permanent and then the programmer analyst you know this is a position it's kind of based on secession planning it's hard to find developers with PeopleSoft experience you have to grow them in-house and it takes time to grow them uh additionally we have some external vendor contracts that we uh think that we can totally dial back and replace with in-house staff which is gives us more value

46:20 actually than the vendor contracts um and with that moving on to considerations as I mentioned before inflation we haven't factored in the inflationary environment into our labor at this time it's our expectation that it will come back down but we'll watch that closely and adjust accordingly um recession again as part of trying to tame inflation the possibility of of causing us to go into recession the question then becomes um how deep how long um again another thing that we'll watch closely telework and Commercial vacancies in this telework environment you know we have large commercial spaces that we're watching uh if they'll be coming back into those spaces or if

47:05 those organizations will stay remote where that can impact is it doesn't impact us the short term because the value is already set for the property taxes on those spaces and they'll continue to pay them it sometimes results in challenges to those property tax valuations and those can take years to resolve but something we're paying attention to uh the ambulance fund we've spoken to the jail medical expense we've spoken to and then finally City facilities maintenance and replacement as a government and again this is pretty consistent across most I think agencies we're great at building assets not always great at maintaining them in some previous budgets we were starting to set aside some dollars for future Capital maintenance and replacement however uh We've we cut those in I believe 22 and

47:50 they are not in our 23 budget nor do we plan on putting them right now on our 24 budget so it's just an area that concerns me um questions any other questions all right so I guess I had three points that that I wanted to bring up one of them was when you look at when you look at that five-year forecast I know it can be I can it could be big it could be scary and I think it's important to see any big organization if you forecast Revenue five years out it will look like that and we haven't done anything yet to address what what is It ultimately a structural deficit and I know it's important for us to see that there is a structural deficit we need to address it but also it everybody's kind of you know

48:35 private public non-profit is always sort of out of whack five years from now um the second thing and that I do want to point out is there's a lot of federal legislative work being done around agency services like Cahoots right now and this is a place that we've always sort of monitored but we've not really done a great job of being able to leverage and understand the work that's being done in the Medicaid space and how that money is becoming available to fund programs like kahoots and when I think about the amount that we set that we provide to have a kahoot service I really want to get our arms around um if there's federal dollars that are coming down on the Medicaid side if we can leverage that money as being the funding source for Cahoots we can effectively move it off of our books and still maintain the same level of service

49:21 so I think that's that's valuable and then I guess the third piece um is I is I think I'm open to probably the medium version of this right which is hey if we look around at other agencies and they have different funding models it is valuable for us to explore that conversation um but that's got to be balanced with efficiency and being able to understand and contain costs where appropriate right you know we shouldn't we shouldn't do it all with cost we shouldn't do it all with Revenue but look to see on individual areas where it makes sense to try to approach those areas where it makes sense and I guess I gotta add a fourth bonus Point while I'm getting to wrap up here there are issues in here

50:06 that we really need to break out for the 2023 uh you know um when that when the year changes over you know facilities needs to be a longer conversation right like you know what we're doing with the jail bed you know needs to be a longer conversation and I just want to put a flag in that or some of these big conversations need to come back as part of you know Council goal setting and things like that Corey messaging planning I set you up for that I know I think it does fit really well with you know earlier conversations around us actually having a strategic plan and that's where those conversations about you know what does our Revenue structure look like do we want to set specific goals and plans

50:52 around getting to you know structurally balanced budget and things like that I think we can we can pull together as an organization to start to have those conversations all right we are over time for this so I'm giving one last chance I know we'll get another opportunity to share plenty of opinions all right thank you so much Nate I always these aren't easy conversations and someday you're going to show up and say we had more money than we thought but not today all right we are adjourned um and then we'll take about 60 seconds of a break and then we will switch over to the regular session

51:45 we're going to revise our time a minute and take about a three minute break so some so just stay with us and we will get started here shortly

56:40 all right I'm going to call the Springfield City Council regular session to order with roll call Mayor Van Gordon here councilor Pitts here councilor here councilor rodley here councilor stair here Council Woodrow and Council appitionary here thank you and councilor Woodrow is excused for the evening uh please join me for the Pledge of allegian Allegiance I pledge allegiance to the point of the United States of America which it stands one nation under God indivisible liberty and justice for all as we begin our meeting tonight I would like to ask members of the audience who

57:26 are joining us by phone or online to please keep yourselves on mute until you are called on to provide public testimony there are two times designated for public testimony this evening under public hearings in business from the audience Heidi orwick from spark Labs has been approved for 10 minutes at the beginning of the business from the audience this evening and then we will have standard business from the audience if you're attending in person please complete the request to speak card located at the entrance of the council chamber and give it to the city recorder if you're joining with online with a tablet smartphone or computer and wish to speak at either of those times please use the raise hand feature in Zoom the order of public testimony is as follows anyone in person in the city council

58:12 chambers anyone who has raised their virtual hand and Neil could you let us know how many people are joining us this evening mayor we have approximately 22 participants online and 23 in the room thank you first item please mayor the first item is the consent calendar I make a motion that we approve the consent calendar second Anil could you call the vote please yes counselor Pitts aye councilman yes Council Radley yes councilor stare aye councilor Woodrow and Council missionary aye motion passes five yeses zero no's

58:57 one absent next item please uh next time is you have one public hearing tonight uh public hearing number one is the Comcast franchise extension this is ordinance number two an ordinance to extend the term of ordinance 6208 granting to Comcast of Oregon to Inc a franchise for operations of a cable telecommunications system adopting a severability clause and providing an effective date this is a first reading and Neil o'bringers here for the staff report good evening Maryland Council um as Neil said this is a first reading no action required um but the uh ultimately it extends Comcast's uh cable TV franchise through January of 2025 staff from Springfield

59:42 Eugene Lane County have been working jointly to negotiate a renewal of the franchise we were optimistic that we'd be able to reach agreement this summer but couldn't quite um couldn't quite reach agreement and so we're hoping to extend the franchise for until January 2025 we're hopeful that we'll be able to conclude negotiations well before then but this duration gives us plenty of time hopefully to wrap up negotiations all right are there any questions Comcast finally open an office back up in Springfield with for customer support is like good real good for us

1:00:27 right then I am going to go ahead and open the public hearing I do not have any cards for this item Neil do you have anybody on Zoom that wants to speak uh we do have a hand up it is Christina kras our assistant City attorney I don't know if she's on for this item but we're gonna okay no hands for this item all right and I'm going to close the public hearing um this is no action required first reading next item please mayor next time is business from the audience and the first item as you mentioned earlier is a sparklab introduction

1:01:22 hi thank you for having me my name is Heidi larwick I'm the executive director of connected Lane County and I'm here to talk about our hope for a space at the booth Kelly Center but before I do that I just wanted to give you a brief background on the organization so you kind of understand what we're coming to with this um connection Lane County started at the Education Service District about eight years ago as an initiative really with the hope of trying to increase High School graduation for all 16 school districts in our County since that time we've grown pretty immensely from a staff of 2 to 17. we're reaching youth in our the entire County so from the coast to McKenzie and Oak Ridge all the way down south to Cottage Grove and North Junction City um in that time we have grown three

1:02:07 programs the first is called Elevate which is a career connected learning program so we're taking young people outside of the classroom and we're connecting them with industry through experiences like job Shadows internships tours Hands-On competitions things that they can really take what they've learned in their core content classes like math and science and see how it's applied in Industry our second program is called navigate and it's finding those kids that have disengaged from school either they've dropped out or they're just sort of on the fringes and trying to re-engage them and completing that education and getting them on an employment path and our third program which was called spark um it's really about Hands-On learning this is our newest program it's been around for about a year and a half and we opened with our first physical

1:02:52 facility in Eugene we have equipment in this facility where young people can come and they can learn Technical and professional skills the equipment is something that you might see in a manufacturing or a tech company it's a 6 000 square feet and we have been at capacity for the last year and a half so much so that we're actually busing Springfield kids over to Eugene to access the facility when the board heard that and the community heard it they suggested that maybe we start to look at a Springfield site so we weren't busing kids over from the east side of the county into downtown Eugene and so I wanted to share with you a little bit about what we hope to do with Booth Kelly there's a space there it's 11 000 square feet we'd like to turn it into another Hands-On Learning Center

1:03:37 um equipped with again with manufacturing technology and computer science equipment have brought up can't really see it in the zoom but I wanted to show you a brief rendering of what it could look like inside it's a really active learning space where young people are collaborating they're solving problems anytime a student is in this facility they're solving real world problems we're giving them lengths of time to do it and they're working together um one of the a couple unique things about the what we're calling spark at Booth Kelly is that we hope to launch a pre-apprenticeship program in manufacturing there working really closely with Springfield School District to provide an opportunity for the students to walk during the day come

1:04:24 take classes there and potentially go back to the the school we hope to create a Workforce Center the employment department is in a place where young people feel welcome right now there's not a lot of resources there for them and a significant portion of what we do in our work is help young people get connected to jobs we'd put on resume workshops we do practice interviews we help with job search strategies and so right now they're coming to our facility in Eugene but they're often competing with classes that are happening there and so part of our hope with the booth Kelly site is to have a dedicated space for Workforce Development a place where they can drop in they can come to a class we also offer Financial foundation so personal finance classes a

1:05:10 lot of young people are having their first jobs and are not quite sure what to do with their first paycheck and so we're helping them kind of figure out how to open a bank account what it looks like to save have some saving goals and so we want to have a place where they can come and do those classes um the space that we're looking at needs some significant renovation we're looking at probably investing about a million and a half dollars into making it a space where people feel welcome where it feels like a kind of a newer um a newer space just a place where they can come and and kind of hang out but also be learning at the same time we have support so far from the school district business Oregon Lane County government Lane Workforce partnership

1:05:57 Oregon Community foundations and about 10 businesses so far and we're just continuing to work with them to try and bring in that Revenue to make that space what we want we feel really uh strongly that this is going to benefit Springfield youth the most because of its proximity to the high schools and the middle schools it's on the willamalane they can get to a lamb Lane quickly from where we're at and so we're really excited to hopefully have this space and just connect Springfield youth with Workforce Development hopefully get them excited and curious about what they might want to do after they graduate I'll pause and see if there's any questions sure hi thank you other exciting stuff

1:06:42 good good stuff um a couple questions is there what are you asking of Springfield or are you or is this just an informational there's an Ask later in your agenda around a long-term lease yep the other part is is name the unions that have stepped up to help with the trades and developing our youth where it would be advantageous for them who are starving for employees yeah um [Music] we mostly work we work Partners not with the unions themselves um so I can't I can't name any off top of my head but we're we work with Lane Community College pretty extensively to try and prepare students for their

1:07:28 apprenticeship programs we work with a lot of companies to try to get kids excited about apprenticeship and then we kind of help them apply for that um we don't necessarily work with the unions because you have to be in the apprenticeship program to work with them and that's kind of the place at which we the youth transition out of our care if that makes sense so well it doesn't make sense for the unions not to help invest themselves into this organization and I'm only saying that publicly not to put you on a spot yeah at all but I'm saying it publicly that this is an opportunity for the unions to step up and be part of the solution as opposed as opposed to being uh the benefactor of everybody else's efforts yeah

1:08:14 I'd love your help with we got somebody here that's used to that he's got his hand up I think well so that was a hint for you Leonard so Heidi this is a topic that's clearly a lot of interest for us and um you're gonna like thank you for taking some of the questions um but uh I'm gonna let folks kind of talk and ask some questions here and some of them are appointed probably towards your your organization and some of them are a broader I guess opinions about how we approach Workforce in in Lane County Damian hi Damian Hi how are you um so uh I mean we all I mean I've been pretty vocal about how much you know I'm a proponent for this but I guess one thing that I am curious about

1:09:01 has there been any talk about like small expansion of in providing you know life skills I can't tell you how many college students I've worked with since I've been here from Eugene OR Springfield even Portland who you know don't know how to cook you know and so yes they might have the you know Acumen to do technological stuff for Math and Science but they can't really take care of themselves which I think is a huge part of professional development I'm just curious is there any talk about expect like doing something like in that Ram or or is there a way for you to potentially partner with another organization or an entity that can provide that service and inherently if

1:09:46 you all work together you can become stronger and have more power in Springfield and Eugene yeah so we're we're actively already doing a little bit of that when we opened our physical space in Eugene we have a monthly thing called Wonder Wednesday so it's a Wednesday that I think it's the first Wednesday of the month it's usually a four to six and we bring in different speakers so we've done things like housing rights accessing housing we did how to cook with a crock pot and then we gave everybody a crock pot uh so like really simple recipes especially a lot of the youth that we work with are lower income and don't always have all the you know kind of kitchen utensils or even ovens sometimes and so something that you could just plug into a wall um

1:10:31 some of the other topics um recently we did on accessing Healthcare so we we help young people get signed up with health insurance if they don't have it we've done how to open a bank account so yeah I welcome any ideas and and in all of those cases we are partnering with non-profits and other social service providers because that's not our specialty but bringing in things that hopefully are some of those life skills sorry I know I'm looking up there but I was probably looking somewhere else um but yeah I'd love more ideas uh the the young people typically give us the ideas of kind of what they're looking for most recently for Halloween we did a how to dress professionally they all came in costume and then our staff came in our you know normal kind of business

1:11:16 casual so that they could understand what it looks like for an interview or your first day of work um so yeah we're trying to infuse some of that into what we do too Leonard all right Damian were you done I just one quick question so you know I I've noticed that a lot of programs especially ones that uh work with any type of minoritized populations have been coming under Fire they're not necessarily on the fire but people have been asking for some type of assessment not necessarily always quantitative but a lot of qualitative assessment and has that been something that's kind of been implemented to where you know organizations want to support but they want to see proof that this is something that is is is is working any type of

1:12:01 assessment piece that has been implemented or at least been thought about yeah we do so thank you for bringing that up uh the majority of the the youth that we work with are young people that haven't historically had access to this type of learning or they're underrepresented in a lot of stem fields and so spark on Seventh has been about 90 bypoc with specifically Latin next African-American youth accessing and so we do do a lot of pre and post conversations and interviews with the young people to make sure that they feel safe and that's typically our measure do they feel safe with the adults do they feel safe in the space and so we do get asked that by funders a lot um you know kind of what are you know what questions are you asking and how

1:12:47 are you addressing the needs of the bypoc populations foreign thanks uh Sean I um thanks for this presentation it's very informative and very uh very exciting potentially the uh that there is a um an outfit called Northwest Youth quarter um right off of um right off of I-5 and it seems as though they they do some vocational training and some Outreach to Marginal um Youth and it seems as though their services would coordinate to an extent with your your Elevate and navigate programs and I I just wanted to find out I mean have you um have you done any

1:13:33 sort of communications or um or coordination with that program Yeah we actually send them youth quite often um our the navigate program that I talked about just briefly is our re-engagement program and we often are sending uh our young people to Northwest Youth Corps to get their first kind of work experience because part of that program is giving um use a kind of a training wheel job um and then once they've kind of demonstrated success and understand what it's like then we we move them on into a paid opportunity and so often I can think of a picture in my head that we we had three young people at Northwest use youth square that graduated sure and um counselor Pictionary brings up a

1:14:18 great point I mean uh the uh the unions do benefit and reap the benefits of um the this kind of a program and toward that end um there are unions that have apprenticeships the plumbers the electricians the Carpenters that do sponsor programs at Northwest Youth Court to just sort of feed into the apprenticeships that they have out of their union halls and so um would you uh would you welcome that kind of participation from local unions I would love it all right um this looks great this is the most

1:15:03 material I've seen about what you've done in in one in one sitting so it's exciting information I know we we're gonna get to an agenda item later uh I guess the two the the two places um that I that I kind of have comments would be really you know for this is about kids and having a great and having a great Workforce and um when I look at how much money is being spent in these programs right now and I think it's really on all of either the public private agencies non-profits to really sort of be able to pull back and be able to work left to right and you know and I know this isn't going to be a a question this is going to be more Aegis Sean's opinion here um these problems are really tough right

1:15:48 getting kids into the system taking care of them making sure that they end with the skills and careers and it requires that we you know all the partners work together and one of the concerns I have are things that I'm constantly thinking about when I look at the workforce partnership world is how do we actually do it better because we've got a lot of cash from the government coming down and um and sometimes we don't do a very good job of making sure you know we're not duplicating efforts we work left to right we make it as easy as possible for kids to go from graduation all the way into a great job and I don't know if you have an opinion here I just wanted to say say that now that you were here um because I think it's something that the groups involved have to do a better job with

1:16:33 yeah I mean I agree I don't I don't know if I have more of an opinion with that I think um we're very fortunate to work closely with the workforce investment board and a lot of the sort of sector membership groups like omepp manufacturing extension and the tech Association and ultimately what we're trying to do is is not duplicate things and I think our board and our staff are very aware of that so oftentimes there are instances when we actually step away and sort of let folks kind of carry forward so I'm glad to hear that oh yeah and I'm on the board of Lane Workforce partnership and then their Ed is on our board as well so there's a lot of communication and and definitely um trying to make sure that we're kind of all working together yeah and there's a lot of work the Chamber of Commerce

1:17:18 currently does around around this as well work ready yeah yeah we're familiar with that too we've worked with them on our Elevate program uh for the last five years trying to make sure that the um experiences that they were offering to Springfield youth we were doing something to complement so they were typically doing like an eighth grade Hands-On day and then we would do a seventh okay so we were just making sure that there wasn't that duplication and you're you're describing the thing that I'm really listening for which is hey we're all talking right if you have seventh grade we have eighth grade or if we have eighth grade we have seventh grade and the last comment Before I Let You Go are those your kids those are my kids I offered to let them watch a movie at home but they wanted to come so

1:18:06 hi thanks for bringing them yeah Michael it's always great when we have kids in the in the council chamber I believe they're learning something too so typical year for them oh one more thing just a quick comment yeah now the um population your target population is 18 below uh 20 up to 24. so which is which I had going here is that another potential resource is through the Sherman Center at the Lane County Jail they have the education program for inmates MLK program like the at the no different one lane County Jail Lane County okay we work with MLK and The Phoenix Program already a bit okay MLK has got an education program for adults that work on their

1:18:52 geds they also have a an agreement with DMV so they can get licenses etc those part of those basic things but there's uh actual certified LCC faculty members that go to the jail and are authorized to get GED credentials for those students that's great so there's a bunch of groundwork already done at the Lane County jail and many contacts through there and there's also several different uh funding sources that are being used at the jail such as the Ford Foundation the cave Family Foundation and the Lane County Economic Development monies that come from the state for the lottery funds so great thank you I'll follow up with that too thank you for coming yeah thank you for

1:19:38 having me uh I think you've got a lot of people that are interested in what you're doing so please um you know if you've got more material you know get it to us because I think we'd all love to learn a little bit more okay thank you all right we're going to proceed to other uh public comment I do not have anybody else in the room Neil do we have anybody on uh line that wants to comment they are just giving folks a moment in case they want to raise their hand to make a comment I'm not seeing any hands okay I do see one hand um if you're ready uh let's do yes why don't you go and bring them up we got somebody in the crowd that wants to do them AJ's gonna have a card for you to fill out um if you can get her the information

1:20:23 and then we'll bring you up up right away right after okay all right and our first speaker is David from Hope On Wheels and David you should be able to unmute your microphone or I should be unmuted now we can hear you David ah good evening um this is David Strahan Hope On Wheels I'm also a sight leading volunteer with the Eagan warming Center and I just wanted to thank the city again for allowing us to use the memorial building to provide winter shelter for our residents in need it's a vital service and I wanted to share some numbers with you just a little bit that I know of to date uh with our involvement with uh

1:21:11 Carry It Forward Eagan warming sentence St Vincent de Paul and having that site in Springfield we've been able to house nine of those folks who would normally come to us for service so those are folks who won't be coming back this year needing our meeting that emergency shelter those are folks who are working on a durable housing program and that's all because of folks in Springfield believe in the service that we provide as Eagan as an emergency warning site and hopefully getting these folks a little more than a sandwich in a warm place but a hope and ability to stay alive on a freezing night and the fact that they have Springfield is a place they can do that in so I just wanted to say thank you for a personal note

1:21:57 um that this is near and dear to my heart for providing those in Springfield with a place to be um and we've had it's not just our local homeless I just wanted to share with you that we've had quality Farm fire victims here we've had Hospital release folks here we've had people broke down on the highway here and of course we've had our local homeless uh staying here also so again thank you again uh from the bottom of my heart David Strahan um we still have um someone in the castle Chambers filling out a card but we have another hand up that speaker is Tim black and

1:22:43 Tim you should be able to unmute your microphone thanks I appreciate it um and it's good follow-up with David and certainly well timed with this crazy weather we're having this week I just want to thank you officially on behalf of St Vincent de Paul and Egan Warman Center for considering considering later tonight once again letting us use the memorial building it it really is um it saves lives um right in the heart of downtown Springfield our mission is really simple and that's just to provide a warm safe place on nights when uh you could die by being outside that's it that's our very simple Mission and you

1:23:28 are allowing that to happen if if you once again let us use that building and we really do appreciate it uh you know Sunday we thought maybe it was going to be warmer and then um about the middle of the afternoon we watched things start the fall the temperatures and the snow at least at my house and you know Egan used to have an official season November 15th the March 31st uh well uh as you know the cold weather has arrived early in the last few years we opened in October a couple times the last couple of years and here we are again so we really do like to say that we're going to do our best to be ready on that first cold night and we have a lot of Kinks to work out um tomorrow absolutely uh and

1:24:14 we could be open one night we could be open three nights we we could be open six nights that's the the nature of what we do and it's all about people like David and the volunteers Eagan exists today because of the volunteers and uh there's a lot of organizational support for this infants DePaul behind the scenes but when those shelters are open those are all volunteers and they all appreciate what the city leadership and Neil does year after year of doing your best to help us find Space it's a great partnership really appreciate it thank you very much thank you

1:25:07 all right anybody else online no other speakers online right uh the one card I have is Colton Peterson would you please come forward and then uh say your name and location in the city or address for the record I think I'm done hello uh I'm Colton Peterson I go to Springfield High School and I live just down 7th Street at 63 Pleasant Street um so as a high schooler I actually participated I'm addressing spark lab I actually participated in some events and programs that they offered such as the Elevate paid internship and they were able to connect me with a local business

1:25:53 that is ninewood right down I believe a street and I was also able to attend two events that they hosted which were the coder create event and then a marketing Jam which the environment was extremely welcoming and I really approve of one that is more local in the Springfield area rather than having to commute to Eugene and I also believe that it would be easier for them to work with the Chamber of Commerce if they were closer to Springfield and I also worked with the work ready committee and connecting high school students with uh the Chamber of Commerce and local businesses and I think being

1:26:39 able to do that even more and in a welcoming space is very crucial all right is there any Council response okay next item please here the next item is an ordinance and that is replacing ordinance 6450 adopted October 17 2022 this is ordinance number three an ordinance annexing certain territory at 1279 Janna Street the intersection of Aspen Street and Janice Street and approximately 339 foot long

1:27:26 segment of Janice Street and Janice Court to the City of Springfield and willamalane Park and Recreation District withdrawing the same territory from the rainbow water district adopting a severability clause and providing an effective date and we have Andy limbert here for the staff report thanks Neil good evening Mr Mayor and counselors um this ordinance is being submitted for councils consideration for adoption to correct an error that was on one of the attachments to the prior ordinance adopted in October um staff discovered the error after it was sent actually for confirmation with state and local agencies for the change to the boundary and the legal description and diagram was incorrect

1:28:12 however staff does note that all of the public notification and the signage that was posted on the site and also published in the newspaper and mailed out had the correct information it was the adopted ordinance that was the official document of record that also went to the city recorder's office that had the incorrect attachment so the remedy for this and I thank the City attorney Christina Krause for assisting me with this is to provide a new ordinance to repeal and replace and it's essentially allows for the swapping out of those exhibits uh to indicate the correct area so that's the nature of

1:28:57 this ordinance it does not require public hearing we have the public hearing with the correct information it's essentially changing the exhibit to the adopted ordinance that is this requirement so I'd be happy to answer any questions if you do have them then I think we're ready for the emotion this is awkward uh I'll just guess I read the whole thing uh ordinance number three an ordinance annexing certain territory hey Steve I think you just have to uh just design it to approve motion number three or I can do that I just like I said it's awkward so just tell me what you want to do I'll uh make a motion to be ordinance number

1:29:43 three as worded second all right Neil could you call the roll yes counselor Pitts aye not sermo yes not so badly yes answer stare aye answer Woodrow and cancer Pictionary all right thank you motion passes five yeses zero no's one absent next item please thank you uh next item is business from the city council anybody have business from the uh that they want to share thank you um the one piece of business that I did want to bring up uh we did receive a memo from commissioner Bernie that outlined work that was being done around

1:30:28 the Glenwood transfer site it came in our email directly from his desk I would encourage um if you haven't encourage you if you haven't read it take the time to read it if you've got questions get them to Nancy effectively what it's saying is that the commission's sort of moving forward with a plan to move the transfer site it's going to be a long time um but it's PR it's good for us in the long term because that property would become available for redevelopment eventually um so this is the fir this is something I think we've all talked about for years and this is the first real actionable step the County's taken all right next item please

1:31:15 the next item is we have several items under business from the city manager item number one is the introduction of alley Camp as the city's economic development manager and I have that item so just ask Ali if she would join me up here so um I'm just going to talk for a few minutes and then I'll give Ali the microphone but um just want to go over kind of where we've been the last 11 months we did two really thorough recruitments looking for a new economic development manager who fit the needs of the city turns out the most professional and qualified candidate was already here living in Springfield um Ali served previously as the um

1:32:04 Eugene's development investment liaison which included work in Eugene's Riverfront urban renewal District supporting developers through the complexities of building on that site so that might sound familiar to the work that we have waiting for her um most recently she also worked in Eugene's downtown urban renewal District while she's here she'll lead a three-member economic development team with an immediate focus on the Glenwood Riverfront development blue McKenzie apartments and business retention and recruitment not just in downtown Springfield but throughout Springfield that three-member teen there are two of those members here Sam Kelly quattruki he's our Economic Development analyst he's working on the rfqs the contracts

1:32:50 the budgets all of that detailed work that we need to make these projects move and then you probably know vahana Keane who's been here for quite some time she's our downtown she's our Economic Development officer with a focus on downtown but she's also taken over property management and kind of whipped all of that into shape in short order so before I um say anymore I just want to turn it over to Ellie camp and say congratulations on behalf of Nancy noon and I and all of the city managers office foreign thank you mayor and city council Neil for that great introduction my name is Ali Camp I just want to start off by saying I'm so excited to be here knowing that I am a Springfield resident and how important this work is to the council in the community I think it means a lot it

1:33:35 resonates widely when someone can say that they're from this community and they're invested in its future um Neil highlighted some of my experience it spans far and wide I've been working locally for about 11 years I went to UVO so I've touched everything from transit safe routes to school new development Redevelopment business assistance and I'm most excited to start on the land development in the Glenwood area and with the downtown housing efforts as a resident these are things I've been hearing about for a long time and it feels pretty cool to know that I'm going to be a part of a team that helps bring them to the community um that's all I had to say I'm excited to be here uh thank you I look forward to seeing you more often well

1:34:21 I think we are all excited to have you um and it was great when I walked into the office and you were already here because people have been talking about this day for a long time and getting the economic development staff fully filled out and you know working in the uh working on these great projects is going to become important so welcome we'll be excited we'll see you a ton thank you shortly next item mayor the next item is approval to enter into lease terms of three years with options to renew for an additional three years at the booth Kelly complex and bahana Keen is here for the staff report so it really is economic development night here at city council yes it is but

1:35:08 right now it's Property Management now turn our hats around uh so good evening uh mayor and City councilors I decided to join you in person rather than hiding 10 feet away in my office it is so very nice to see you this evening uh so in April I came to you with a resolution authorizing the city manager to enter into standard lease terms at the booth Kelly complex uh through July 1st 2027 and this was an important move um because the purpose of this resolution was to state that it's a property that is not needed for public use through the next five years in duration so essentially we say it is what it is for the next five years um so the outcome for that resolution resulted in a standard lease at Booth Kelly which is only one year in length

1:35:54 so I came to you in September to share that we have a potential tenant who you have now met and would like to make an investment at the booth Kelly Suite 150 and Upon Our measurements it's 11 500 square feet so it's a pretty large size there was a requests for additional information from you and uh Financial impact for the three-year lease terms and that's included in your packet um any extension of the lease terms that Booth Kelly complex passed July 1st 2027 would of course be contingent upon approval of any additional resolution that would be extended to the current resolution um so I am here today requesting your permission to authorize the city manager

1:36:41 to enter into lease terms of three years with an option to renew for an additional three years if requested by the attendant Joe have any questions yes yes so um not trying to be a stick in the night I was I'm always looking at making sure that we're doing things correctly from every point of view not saying that you're doing anything incorrectly I just want to cross the t's dot the eyes so this works out to if my math is correct about excuse me um about 2 000 actually close to 3 000 a month so it's thirty thousand a year no 20 000 years so that's going to be about

1:37:27 three thousand whatever four thousand whatever anyway is that the market rate for that size facility number one number two were other entities given the opportunity the same opportunity for which they can look at that property and take advantage of that property so that we are uh and you know I already love the program so but I want to want to make sure that that someone doesn't come knocking on our door six months we're not saying how come what about me and then us find ourselves in a pickle so I don't know legally you know was there any other requirements do we have are we obligated to give others opportunity are we obligated to go because it is with the public interest are we obligated to go with the uh market rate those kind of those kind of rules are those been have those been looked at and signed off

1:38:12 yeah I can tell you um Council missionary that those issues have been looked at and it doesn't set a precedent for other tenants necessarily to approach this lease this way oh I'm ready Leonard those were the exact two questions that I was going to ask thank you great questions oh sure you were all right anybody else Steve I make emotionally authorized city manager to enter lease terms at the booth Kelly complex of three years with the option to renew for an additional three years if requested by the tenant a

1:38:59 second you know could you call the vote please yes counselor Pitts aye Council Irmo yes Council Radley yes counselor stare aye councilor Woodrow and Council Pictionary aye thank you uh motion passes five yeses zero knows one absent next item please great night thanks Johanna uh the next item is uh short-term lease for emergency warming Center uh this is my item along with Christina crass who's here virtually so good evening again mayor and Council on October 24th we brought a request we received from St Vincent de Paul to use the memorial building on a temporary basis for one season for warming that

1:39:45 was brought to Ceda cedarboard approved the short-term lease agreement and we are now bringing it to the city the city would need to allow the use um of the facility as outlined um and so what we're asking tonight is for you to authorize us to enter into a short-term lease with Ceta for the seedone property at 765 a street and then enter into a sublease with St Vincent de Paul to facilitate the emergency warming Center are there any questions I make a motion we authorize the assistant city manager to enter into a short-term release with the Springfield

1:40:30 Economic Development Agency for the seat-owned property at 765 a street and to enter into a sublease St Vincent de Paul of Lane County and so they use as an emergency warming Center by Saint Vincent people second Neil could you call the vote please yes councilor Pitts aye councilman yes Council rodley yes Council stare aye councilor Woodrow and councilor Pictionary hi thank you motion passes five yeses zero knows one absent next item please next item is any other business from the city manager just one uh brief item I just wanted to mention um upcoming Veterans Day holiday and uh take this opportunity to thank the

1:41:15 members of our community members of this Council and employees that have served in our Armed Forces protecting our nation and I thank you for your patriotism and your service to our country um on a side note I um want to also mention one special veteran that has been in my life which is my father um Stanley Emanuel Anderson who was a World War II veteran and there were seven children in my father's family five boys two girls all five of the boys in his family were enlisted in military service and served in different capacities in

1:42:01 that war not all of them came back um so my father passed away this past December 3rd and I would just like to um mention his name this evening and say how proud I am of this service thank you thank you Nancy next item please your father was a hero any business from the city attorney uh no no additional business tonight all right and we look like we are adjourned for the evening so have a good night everybody um and we'll see you next week thank you