Springfield City Council — April 24, 2023

0:07 city council regular session to order with roll call Mayor Van Gordon here councilor Weber here councilor Mo here counselor rodley councilor Doyle here and councilor Pictionary here thank you so first item please we have one item tonight it's the interim counselor oath of office and Mary Bridget Smith is here for uh the staff report

0:54 do it quickly before she changes her mind

3:22 yeah hi hi that that was the hardest part will be never any hard decisions from here on in right right okay where's the Easy Button so wow before we adjourn and go into our regular business you want to take a minute and maybe introduce the folks that joined you to support you sure absolutely this is uh my husband Michael in there my son Drew my daughter Brooke her best friend and kind of our other pseudo daughter Kaylee my mom gaynell my dad Rob and in the back row very very good friends Todd and Chris Zimmerman and their daughter Danny and her husband David daleman and we all know Betsy

4:12 well um congratulations um I know it's been a little bit of a long road to get here but we're we're glad that we're always to a full team here yes thank you before I adjourn did anybody else wanna jump in all right go ahead welcome thank you looking forward looking forward to working with you thank you thank you thank you all right then we did that in six minutes so apparently they knew fully staff council is four minutes ahead of schedule so I'm going to go ahead and adjourn us we are going to reconvene in the other room um best family feel free to join us for the rest of our meetings or you can go out and eat on your own

4:58 Springfield City Council award section to order with Morocco here thank you all right we have two more section items for the evening the first one is the annual use of force report 2022 with the PD Chief it is all yours thank you mayor good evening Council mayor and thank you all for allowing us time to see me to present our 2022 we support So beginning in April 2020 and then again in May of 2021 SPD presented its first use of force reports to the news Council the public reporting of this kind of data stem from a settlement agreement between the City of Springfield and the estate of Stacy Kinney after shooting death

5:44 involving the Springfield Police Department in 2019. he's a forced by police is something that demands public transparency and that transparency along with a consistent and meaningful oversight is a key component to building and maintaining trust among communities that we serve so this yearly use of force report that includes the amounts of force the types of force the types of injuries to both officers and to people who are taken into custody the demographics of those involved and transparency about the lessons learned all help to reach the goal of this community and having confidence in legitimacy of the work SPD engages in before we begin um presenting this use of Forge report I want to introduce Sergeant Mike Massey who leads our Professional Standards division Sergeant Massey's been in this

6:29 role for a little over two years since just before I came here in Chief as Chief in 2021. and in the last two years he's onboarded a new Chief during a time of what I could say a significant change at SPD he's helped develop enhanced internal accountability processes he's implemented a new software platform that's now used agency-wide to capture data related to force usage as well as complaints he's worked with our Force analyst to create the newly formatted yearly use of force report and he manages and investigates Internal Affairs cases so I want to recognize him and thank him publicly for his commitment to this community and to our work in the areas of accountability transparency and continual Improvement I also want to introduce our Force analyst Lilly Wick she's been critical in her efforts to create this comprehensive data collection analysis

7:15 and Reporting component within our department she works very closely with Sergeant Massey to create this report that you have in front of you tonight and I also want to recognize and thank her for her objective review and Analysis of the data to help us determine his name see what we can improve and before I turn over Sergeant Massey one more thing I want to thank the entire team at SPD to include command sergeants the officers under Corrections staff for their work in this area they've all participated in this transparency effort through more comprehensive reporting and data collection than ever before it's required more work on their part but the results are tangible they've also willingly participated in increased levels of training which is going to keep them safe while also reducing the frequency and amount of force necessary to resolve incidents

8:00 there always has been and there always will be an inherent level of risk for police when dealing with situations that are rapidly evolving and uncertain an effective and measured use of force is a necessary component of this profession given what we're sometimes called a responses however we are always going to strive to resolve incidents professionally in a manner that respects the sanctity of Life of all involved in the demonstrates the level of dignity and respect towards those that we interact with so with that I'm going to turn over to Sergeant Massey the guy with slide presentation will be going through and he'll do tacos through each of these slides thank you chief um again I'd want to give the analyst lillywick a lot of credit for this most of the data questions that we may have

8:45 will be referring to her for Clarity on those as well but she did she is my human calculator and the real brains of this operation to be honest um is there a laser on this one too no we're not that fancy Okay so um some people have seen us some have not just go through it as if nobody has seen it um this slide has about 10 slides but there's 21 pages of a lot of data earning you so this just touches on a lot of it so I just want to clarify that not everything in these

9:31 slides or what the report is there's a lot more on the report as well we're going to go through the routing how stuff is captured how the force and data is captured the method it's reviewed at we're then going to start discussing the force counting method that is the numbers regarding how many uses of force and what method and why we do it the way we do it training that we conducted use of force training in 2022 horse types used in display there's a difference between force use and force displayed the effectiveness of the force and then also uses a force and calls for service for the year included is subject injuries and also officer injuries for the year and then

10:18 we'll do a comparison for this year to last year and the recommendations that we kind of discovered going through it that we would like further clarification or to capture better going forward there we go so the system we we use is called Blue Team when an officer uses Force they go in and it's uh a desktop Software System and they go in there and they input all the use of force they had it has tons of information they go through here's diagrams where they can use check boxes select what they did and it goes in Junction with their police report that gets routed to the sergeant that was working at the time and that Sergeant will then compile any

11:04 body camera and videos any photographs police reports and put it in a package deal they will then review it and if it's to their satisfaction and has everything that they need they can afford it to the lieutenant if it doesn't they can kick it back to the officer for further clarification as well so I'll go from The Watch Commander which is a patrol surgeon then it will go to the lieutenant for again another layer of review the same manner that the sergeant did it that the lieutenant has questions or wants further clarifications they can also take it back to the surgeon to have clarified but if everything looks good then it will go into the database that Lily

11:49 manages called IA Pro and that's where this big brains is kept in the system and where we basically dissect it and turn it into what you're looking at today so on page two other report you'll see this and this part's kind of important to keep track of because you'll see that later on we had a certain amount of people that had Force used against them but more uses of force and the reason why is because one person can have one method used on them and this will explain why so if you have two officers this is just an example we use two officers

12:35 one of them does a takedown and a hand strike and the other one does two hand strikes we count those all up we don't count that as just one as Springfield we counted as four so you may see more uses of force than individuals on the final number is that makes sense okay so just keep that diagram in mind but you could have one officer and they use one thing that doesn't work you go to another one you could have multiple but that that is why you're seeing a higher number at the end higher than how many individuals there were so in 2022 the coveted Gates kind of lifted a little bit for us we're able to do more training which was good and we did a lot of

13:22 de-escalation CIT some lateral restraints the de-escalation tactics at the top had was mainly focused for verbalization Stuff um talking and teaching officers about pausing when they're talking to someone let them speak um just different methods than they might be used to we implemented a 40 millimeter less lethal as well and pepper ball Duty they intervene is also in Junction with a house bill that came about regarding officers that they see in the excessive force they have to intervene and Report Airway training will go in Junction with the bottom one called calm training I'll talk about that some more

14:07 every annual year we have dpsst required training and that is for the police academy it's requirements that we have to do we did an annual taser certification and patient evaluations CIT training we've brought on some new employees so they all went to the 40-hour full CIT course we also have advanced CIT training and then we have a coordinator for the police department who's kind of our liaison for all the CIT training and Mental Health First Aid a lot of that was also given to our front counter staff not just Patrol officers but for the front counter and then the calm Trend it was kind of a big one we had um they came from Texas to the police

14:53 department and they taught us about um basically if someone's in handcuffs and they had a lot of excitement or exercise and then we handcuff them and sit on them they can still talk but not breathe and we actually did a live demonstration of it with an employee and it's true and then this teaches them how to reduce injuries reduce um the respiratory system how to open the airway let them breathe a recover faster that was a full either of course for that Sergeant yes sir one question about the training you've got two things sort of mixed in it sometimes you're saying you have people going to the training right and sometimes you just have a a is flat

15:38 out eight hours so the way I read that and I'm curious if this is accurate is if it doesn't say how many people went that everybody got that training is that fair unless they're on some kind of leave yes okay yes can I have an add-on to that so all those hours add up to about 121 hours 122 hours of training and so if we take out the ones that are specific training to teams you know like your CIT and their interview and your uh I think it was your negotiation anyway so the ones just like what the mayor just said so for example let's look at the Leslie the 40 millimeter so are you asserting that everybody in

16:23 the department went through that training no that's going to be mainly swad at this time for that one so I'm curious the old leftover hours comes up to about 72 or 73 hours of training besides the specialized training so what is do we have an average of if we go through just pick any officer if they gotten over their 40 hours so the trainings that we put up here were just trainings that are specific that we felt to use of force this is not a comprehensive list of all the training that every officer went throughout the year we just wanted to portray up here that the trainings that we did that were specifically related to use the force so we have all of our officers gotten our 40 hours met on

17:08 the dpsat required 40 hours or 2022. yeah which what 40 hours are you talking about bbsst required to maintain certification they all have it later yeah they sent out their um list not too long ago and there was two Patrol officers that were one hour short on something and that was a data thing that's fantastic so they got another big milestone that our agencies shouldn't spout about because very few agencies can do that and we'd be very close attention to that and that was that's been Sergeant Massey's role for the last two years and now we have a designated training Sergeant who keeps various close tabs on every single individual in the organization to make sure they're

17:53 meeting their hours that in itself is commendable so this is kind of this is a chart of the different types of force that are used and displayed so obviously if it's displayed it wasn't utilized it was shown it was displayed it was used as a tactic to um you we want to gain compliance by displaying it rather than using it so if the display worked it didn't need to be used so that's why it's called displayed some agencies don't even track display we do

18:38 um for a couple different reasons but the main one is is it helps us see what's working and it's not working based on display and it's different instead of having to use it the downside is it might look like there's more stuff when there's really not but we can kind of get into that a control hold is the highest one there basically that is us physically grabbing on to someone hanging under their arm walking them along if they have any kind of resistance we're kind of assisting them or encouraging them it's not like a takedown it's just someone's saying I don't want to go in the police car but we're kind of pushing them along and getting them in there it's not a it's not a high level use of force and

19:26 a lot of agencies don't even count that one we just wanted to count everything we wanted a total transparency it is what it is um there's another chart later we'll see but this is the main this is the main uses of force that we have at Springfield one that we implemented this year that we didn't have last year was the presidia jail uh we have seven members currently using that and that is a different form of the pepper spray into jail form and from the previous chart those were the options and these were the effectiveness of it

20:11 you can see at the the bottom of the Presidio gel and the taser discharge rank at 25 and 52.9 that doesn't mean they're not great products but for that year they just weren't the best utilized tool and obviously we're going to analyze that and figure out why it is I have in the report the reasons why those things did not work and some of them is environmental factors clothing factors and such but I wanted to make it clearer why that wasn't working and the reasons we had we manually went through and read the police reports and figured out why those things were not working

21:00 any questions on that one okay I want to point out on that um and 2021 there was one less police dog in service 2022 we had another one so when they have the dog out we're gonna have more numbers this year because of that as well so 2022 we were dispatched to more calls for service

21:50 than we were the prior year our use of force is down and the shell of force is up which is mean the display is working where the force isn't having to be used we arrested 2219 individuals 168 of those resulted in some use of force that is about five percent of all the arrests in the green line You'll see where it says individuals arrested and then up above where it says incidences that's because the same person could be arrested more than once

22:35 that's why you're seeing more numbers on that down below the police officer holds for people that don't know what a police officer hold is that is when an officer transports someone to a mental health facility who's in crisis or endangered to themselves or others they're required to to take the person into a protective custody is what it is and transport them and that is the bottom number you're seeing there 127 of those cases were in 2022 and 15 of those resulted in the use of force 12 percent

23:32 subject injuries these are the types on the left how many injuries of those we had and then contributing factors on the right is the reasoning why so 56 people out of 168 had injuries the most common one is the abrasion and complaint of pain so this again is one of those kind of double dipping somebody can have an abrasion and a complaint of pain and that all gets counted into

24:20 so total number injuries are 68. out of 56 people for instance there is one situation given the story right where ahaba was utilized but then the custody decided to basically bang their head and injure themselves in the back of the car that would be kind of that as an injury as part of the arrest as well so we're trying to count everything and anything that's out there well so those should be separated if somebody can use themselves it could look like as the officer's fault and and the police report is documented but for the number crunch units it's kind of rare we that's why we kind of go through and call those of Noam for a mental note

25:06 as well if it's if it's a lot then we'll probably have to make a different category officer injuries 14 total of employees that had injuries in 2022 and again the same abrasion lacerations the highest and that could be any kind of cut or anything um other minor injuries we don't have a category for what other is the system doesn't let us type in other than have them type it in you just like check the box but we're gonna look at that for next year to try to change that absolutely I got a question yes sir the uh

25:51 so we know how many injuries we have and those are the officer injuries based on strikes and yeah I mean legs strikes and Strikes is there any or how many of those officers that that had those 29 injuries or of those 14 officers required medical care or was there any work loss based on any injuries um I asked our Safety Committee people about that they kind of work with the city's risk and I'm told that we currently in 2022 had one of the lowest claims year injury year loss of work here and we're a small enough Department we're I don't recall hearing someone like

26:37 having a broken hand and off for seven weeks in 2022. we don't we state that we didn't have any officers that lost work due to that I mean we can't say that I mean there's officers I'm sure the laws will work at some point really into some kind of injury there's some of those numbers it'd be interesting to add to the work loss to these to see you know as far as how they're engaging and be able to see what kind of a loss the city suffered because of that yeah we we definitely put that as a talking point to look into to see how much we can dive into that um kind of off to that we also started looking into when the use of force situation does occur how much what's the average time on that call right and so we're that's also something working on

27:23 absolutely I know you're doing this we're doing this quarterly aren't we yearly yearly yearly yes or maybe on the next one we can Cipher that out at least some Council knows how many days are lost and what kind of cost it is to the city and to the officers themselves and I I know that HR tracks that risk tracks that and then we have I think quarterly meetings with risk to kind of talk about some kind of stuff so that that data does exist through HR but that's not something we have in front of us right now yeah should be easy enough to grab yeah I think a risk report would have that here's a comparison from 2022 to 2021. again you're going to see the control hold is the highest one utilized

28:13 um take a half a second kind of process this but kind of what I see looking at this is displays and shows a force are up and the actual use of forces are down now do you feel like that's something different that the PD is doing or is that do you feel like that is just a mix of the sort of calls and experiences that you guys have had in 2022. um I think we put a lot of time and effort into these topics let the police department the last couple years I think it is part of what we're doing as well um I mean we're trying to do a lot of training to focus on that because we want to limit limit everything that we

28:58 can um I think I mean I can't say what people are going to wake up and do every day but I know the officers have a lot more training and tools to utilize now than they have in Prior years to be working there absolutely and then hesitate to make a direct correlation but I know the amount of training specifically related to different techniques and de-escalation is higher than it's ever been number of training hours is last year I think it's higher than it's ever been I think that in conjunction with body cameras with new accountability procedures more follow-up I think there's there's a lot of different factors at play like I said the specific correlation but I'd like to believe that all the steps we're taking

29:43 are a minute well and I noticed in the recommendations um recommendation number three that this very thing is something that you all sort of called out that we haven't figured out yet how we're going to track how the de-escalation efforts are working um which I really appreciate you calling that out because looking at these and thinking of the conversations of the past two years it's like I see the efforts and I see how this is looking and so it's like okay great now let's measure what's working um and so I think that that maybe next year we'll be able to say okay we did all of these trending so we did all of these things and now here's the next level so I appreciate that as a recommendation yeah Lily handsome I was just gonna say that I watched a lot of body cam footage and I know from watching a lot of those

30:29 that I see them put the the calm training as a um respiratory relief training into practice just you know they have someone I see them all okay let's lift them up on their side let them start breathing so I see that a lot so we're gonna basically when we're done with this you know anything that we might scratch our head at we want to know more of it is kind of what we put in as a recommendation or this report the data that Lily pulled tells us something what is it or why you know what is the why so we always don't try to have those answers and these are what we came up with this

31:15 year for this year's report and the first one we had was regarding the police officer holds you know to determine what are the factors and how to reduce you know uses of force involving this it's a very Dynamic call for service for officers they're obviously going to a call for service where there's a lot of you know emotions involved for these people and the the way that we can find to do it the most efficient and the safest we want to do it and the numbers are looking better but we want to know what what else can we really be doing I mean what what is out there is there even a thing we're just continue doing what we're doing but that's one of the main

32:01 things is the police officer holds um the second one is I kind of talked about it section seven in your report is you know these these boxes in the system called other but they don't have a fillable box to say what it is we want to try to see the system's pretty customizable and we want to see if we can Implement something to not other doesn't tell us anything it tells us what is other and we want to know what the other is so we want to try to find a way to track that and not have other in the report if possible for any sections and number three I think is a super important one this one will tell us what is working what is not working and that

32:46 is to track successful de-escalation applications um we know if your use of force happened de-escalation should be involved but we don't hear about the cases where it was just de-escalation and then the officer was able to leave without use of force there's no there's nothing we have to capture that and so we're going to work on that because it's extremely important and we want to know what is working I can chime in on that one yes sir that is that is the question of the day does de-escalation work and if so how do you measure that is like a scientific study that needs to be done and so I don't want to make false promises that we're just going to you know answer that by next year because that is a deep deep question what is de-escalation is the

33:32 effect or any amount of time that you're on a call and how many officers were on a call was it Daylight it's a night time it was the weather like you know I mean like the crimes there's so many different factors to analyze to be able to truly measure you know what works as far as de-escalation but it's something obviously we want to we want to find out um the final one was the taser in the new Presidio and that Joe was on a six-month trial run that expires at the end of this month and um a control tactics supervisor got all of our data and he'll get it to the rest of the month they're going to analyze it and see if it's something we want to go with or not go with or um can you define it Presidio gel

34:19 it is it's the alternative to the pepper sprayer the current new the pepper spray the best way is it comes out like Hairspray kind of a Mist the wind gets a hold of it it can go who knows where this comes out more like your shaving cream not that thick but the wind shouldn't be grabbing it there's pros and cons to it people can take it off and flick it back at you there's all kinds of different reasons but we talked about it last year and so we tried it we want to see if it's something that's working or not but that's going to be up to um the people responsible for that at the police department that is what we have right now so then Victoria thank you you said that that you're analyzing data but

35:04 are we also like talking to officers like how are they liking using it or not liking using it like do you get feedback from the people that are actually and they feel using it yeah the people um I think there was seven officers I volunteered want to be a part of it and so they're going to get all their input and all that their likes and dislikes or it was just something new to try to see we've had the other thing for so long and it got brought to our attention so we said why not if it's a good thing then it's a great thing and if not we'll find out why but yeah quick question yep the active ingredient in that Joe is CS yes and typically as well it's not a pepper spray it's it's a it's a chemical agent

35:49 you know it's an irritant and so with pepper spray as an organic ingredient and it's not a chemical inheritable so it's not as serious as Cs and I know that there's there's a legislative moves last March 22 in regards to it it's not really specific but it's they're talking about riot control agents which the vast majority of Riot controlling is the very same CS you know so was that um so is that considered in regards to the decision to deploy that that will be I mean there because that I know what you're talking about the legal

36:34 part of it because that's coming down so yeah that might be a big contributing factor to it I mean it's an important thing to know because I mean you said it is it is perfect I don't know the exact what it is but I do know it's a CS type gas and then they have this Aftercare product you can put on that leaves it right away I don't know if there's something in the law about that part but it's definitely a contributing factor if there's something that they're trying to regulate more to use if that's even something we want to yeah one of the one of the factors that came into the decision to run this trial period was the amount of time it takes to recover from this and so like you said they provide spray it's a like water-based stuff that you spray because the recovery from this gel is supposed to be substantially

37:21 faster than pepper spray pepper spray the impact of it can last a long time we all have it can last a long time and this you spray the stuff in the eyes and sometimes within even you know five to seven minutes the results um you're no longer impacted by it so it has less of a negative impact once the person's in custody on the person is one of the reasons we wanted to try and see if that was true yeah and I know that CS typically takes much longer to affect the person than OC does because the typically does because it's a massive analogator it takes a while for it to get back into the system as a part as far as its immediacy so I'm curious if there's been I mean it'd be great if it does if there's been some changes I'm for sure not up to date on it so

38:06 it'd be I'd be curious to see if it how fast it actually is effective compared to the OC product yeah I think the end of the month I mean they'll start compiling all the the data and the feedback and kind of weigh the options at that time that's interesting yeah that's all we have right now besides there's a lot more in your report in the slide so I can touch up some more stuff yes thank you um I just wanted to call out my appreciation for the demographics um because as as maybe a couple of people as I was beating that drama of wanting us to start to collect the demographics so we could have the sort of transparent and understand between males and females what's happening

38:52 um also appreciate you all calling out that you have the ability to select non-binary or unknown um so that we're sort of expanding our understanding of the gender so I just appreciate that we are starting to track that both in race and gender and age and all of the ways that we're looking at that as we move forward so thank you for that I think that came as a recommendation last year as well I mean every year we can make it grow better and that's in direct alignment with partners here variety of different agencies tracking different things we want to be consistent with the states

39:40 okay I've got just a couple uh a couple of things one of the things that I've heard you say a couple of times really is your desire is always forced to collect everything right and sort of sort out the details when it you know when you get there um that makes me happy supportive glad to see that that's the really core of a process Improvement culture is to really grab everything that you can and really you know because once you have all the data you can sort through and and improve it so I would just continue to encourage you guys to keep collecting all the information that you can get so that you can get a better line of sight at on it um the other question that I had was really when I looked at uh well it's page four but it's page 5 of 22 and an attachment one that's in there in the report

40:25 the the two questions that I had about this this is the first time you've put average applications and median applications of course by officer in there but when we saw the complaint report you did you did analyzing provide some some sort of view on hey what is the extreme what are the outliers of you know of course when it comes to or in that case complaints when it comes to individual individual officers they weren't named obviously do you have a sense for what if if you think of if you think of all the use of force or is is it spread pretty evenly between officers or is it are there some folks that because of hours and arrests and they're particularly High users um well definitely this report once it got done some of those things were the

41:11 whys or you want to know and come in a little possibly ask about that we can analyze that more but definitely you know an officer that might be assigned to a DUI enforcement he's dealing with impaired people on alcohol more um a canine Officer is probably going to have more displays of force being a canine so it kind of does depend um I cannot say if we have any outliers or any things we haven't dissected it that much this is just the raw data and it was captured and produced for if that is requested later we can do that and and I think that's a super valuable piece of information we do that for complaints we want to know who the outliers are who's getting those

41:56 accommodations who's getting the most complaints and why so we can analyze it I think it would be pretty easy for us to pull that course as well so if there are outliers if there's somebody that never uses Force but maybe they have more rest than everybody else like how are they doing that if there's somebody that makes very few arrests but they have the highest level of good use as a force like why is that so that something we'll definitely look into like we're doing quarterly reviews of the complaints accommodations We'll add quarterly reviews of the levels of use of force from the supervisors also yeah and I think and I think that was the final point that I well I wanted to end with the behavior one comment about the behavioral health uh the those sort of holes where you're transporting people I know that there's a lot of discussion between you know the council as they sit on a different organization you know groups with Behavioral Health you know sort of questions so if we can get an

42:42 appropriate summary um you know about anything you you find with the behave you know Behavioral Health System now that would help some of the kind of regional conversations um you listed in three in three years you 2020 2021 and 2022 right and if I remember right 2020 was the year you did it all by hand in an Excel file yeah I think it was 182 reports I read that would have been great yeah and the reason I want to end with this right like is if you look at the work product here and look at how you guys are discussing this work product you told us four or five different times about other things you want to add other steps you want to take you've got recommendations in it and you're sort of thinking about how do you continue to

43:27 develop it Council Riley pointed to other feedback we gave last year that showed itself in the report you don't what oftentimes you don't report in this is the 2019 one was the single sheet that was on a pie chart yeah right and I always bring that up to just say thank you for taking this as seriously as it needs to be and continuing to hit a rate on it and improve the quality of work because the the thing that the thing that's really important about this is that it the training and the emphasis and the follow-up is you know sort of changing how we're doing policing and I really appreciate it thank you so this one a quick comment this report is really great I mean as far as you're in this report section is you're

44:15 answering more questions in your create I mean you're answering more you're giving us more information than you are creating questions and so it's it's very informative I was blown away at some of these numbers your pohs that's it's slightly over two per 24 hour period is what your average was and you know when you're averaging 6.6 arrests per 24 hour period and two of those are pohs and pohs very time consuming pain in a tail that are very difficult to deal with as an agency because there's there's a lot of paper behind it there's a lot of Officer times and it's just amazing it blows me away as to how much work your agency is doing in a one-year period and I'm looking at these I don't

45:00 know how you do it I mean these numbers were not even thought of back in the hey days and uh so I'm really commending you for the work the agency is doing and the steps forward it's making um I mean I'm ready for anybody to ask questions or you can just point them right to this say hey you have a problem take a look at that we're we're doing it so my hats off to you guys did a great job Lily and Sergeant Massey done tremendous amount of work last couple years like I said earlier I mean it's also been a team effort because everything that you see in this report is a result of the men of women that are out there every day they're filling out new types of reports there providing us this data they're clearly articulating what they do and why they did it and the ration behind all their decision making so this is it's

45:46 definitely been a team effort but I feel like things are going a good direction they certain people have been listening Nancy I'm sorry ordinarily I only I can only put things up to the council but I I feel so strongly about this issue um I just really want to recognize this team here um I feel like you know Sergeant Massey went through so much to generate the first report and he did the best that he could with what he had at the time and now we just have so much better tools the product reflects that and our other people sitting in the room here that have all played a role in this and I just wanted to briefly recognize uh lillywick for her work um doing all the analysis I think you know having hiring her to do the crime data was just a very

46:32 smart move by Future um we've talked about Sergeant Massey and all the work that you've done I I know you love it when we talk about the great things you do so please love it when you engrave about them um and I wanted to also uh I recognize Zach is in a room he's a public information officer for the PD and he's the one that really gets out the great messages about what the police department is doing and he was a hire from the outside hadn't worked in law enforcement before and I thought that was really smart because he can really anticipate what our community is wanting to know about and he's really good at that um deputy chief uh Jamie race is here um just again just adding to our strength and um just you know her wealth of knowledge she's already made a huge impact in in a very short time and of

47:19 course to share um you know I call him my karma hire because I feel like I use my karma points when we got him um I just feel very very lucky to have this amazing Department they're so dedicated that's it thanks thank you thank you thank you guys well we'll see you the next family homework session thanks so much

48:13 don't worry we'll text him later and say you missed the best presentation yeah it's going to be the best okay welcome good evening mayor council my name is Matt stouter I'm the Environmental Services I'm the director for DPW and with me as Catherine program manager for uwd I want to talk to you tonight about annual user B review and proposal for user rates maybe visit with the council each year on this topic take your feedback and we'll incorporate it into your public hearing their food so um all right um kind of a quick outline of there's a few lunar faces um so we usually Breeze through this

48:58 pretty pretty quickly we'll still move quickly but we'll give you some context and background for what we're talking about I want to talk to you a little bit about revenues touch on the systems um talk about some of the challenges the permits that drive our systems and then a little bit about our programs and great options foreign facility of uh Franklin uh we had a picture in here from the last previous couple of years and this facility is starting to mature some of our one of our stormwater systems but goals of our associated with Revenue we want to look at funding our CIP maintaining our debt service requirements that we do have increasing those Capital reserves where

49:43 we can or at least holding the steady and then maintaining the sound fiscal health and credit rating foreign I think the main takeaway here I want to show show you we show this each year but really um kind of remind the council about the the size of these systems and the magnitude and the value of the assets that we own and maintain um we're talking about 100 hundreds of millions of dollars in assets between the two systems our Wastewater system has two components it's uh the local conveyance system that Springfield owns and manages and maintains and then there's no Regional component which is really the treatment that occurs at the treatment plan at 410 River Avenue that mwc deals with in partnership with Springfield and Eugene we have you know 240 miles of pipeline 17 pump stations

50:29 on the storm water side a significant amount of miles of pipelines that we're responsible for lots of catch basins I'd like to point out specifically the water quality structures or water quality facilities those are increasing um everything from you know a stormwater manhole but moreover mostly these are water quality facilities like vegetative swales or detention ponds those types of things the biggest one probably being our Mill Race storm water facility that's one of our bigger ones the whole Mill races it's the Mill Race itself you have to maintain that and then the facility there as well the water quality facility as new development comes online there there's a lot of private facilities that come on but then we have maintenance agreements with those Property Owners to inspect and maintain but we also have the public systems that

51:16 we want to maintain so um there was it on that one we do uh survey the public you know periodically and the healthy water is waterways and the recreational opportunities provided by these systems business from water system is a high priority and it's worth noting that really the user fees are the primary source of Revenue that we had we were of our Capital program work that's also funded some with sdc's but really user fees is the both of the funding there and then for our operations of Maintenance user fees are kind of our sole source of Revenue um a lot of challenges paying you know paying for clean water the pixel operating costs are probably say increasing operating cost but what we mean by fixed is like in the Wastewater side is that um as you know the amount of money you

52:03 pay on your Wastewater bills can be controlled based on how much water you use so it's unfortunately it's built based off the the portion of water that you do use so it's more water efficient fixtures get put in and as people choose to use as much water they their bill goes down but the operating costs on the system remains essentially the same on the local side for the conveyance of that of that Wastewater our systems are getting older they're obviously aging we are putting a new systems but the older systems need to be maintained and eventually someone will assist you replaced um Capital cost is associated again with our construction of new facilities uh the regulatory requirements are really the driver for these programs and that's based on our permit

52:48 in both the storm water and the Wastewater system um obviously inflation is affecting everybody uh so we have materials and services labor costs Etc and then we mentioned this each year but the significantly reduced Federal funding is so 30 or 40 years ago there was much more um much more of a partnership from the federal government with respect to funding these systems um I've shown I think I've shown slides in the past or you know 20 to 30 percent of systems were funded federally or 20 to 30 percent of the cost associated with constructing these systems and it's to the point now where it's it's one to two percent um so that way is of course the local rate payers have to shoulder that burden and then we have our we have sold Bonds in the past so we have uh outstanding

53:33 debt service that we have to pay off as I mentioned the permits are really the primary driver of our programs um contain our discharge and Reporting requirements nothing ever gets less stringent with respect to mbds permits it usually ratchets down that's the way the clinical and Water Act works with the overall goal of eliminating all pollution um this new permit it's kind of new it was issued to us in June 2021 didn't have a huge impact on us it did have an impact but in the City of Springfield pursued litigation on that permit with the EQ and it resulted in a Oracle medical permit for us um however it had a three-year time frame instead of a five-year that was part of our our deal um and with that we have a so that

54:18 permit um is going to be it's going to be good through February of 24. however we have to make application for a new one so it's in every five year cycle so we make application for a new one this summer um the Wastewater permit on the Wastewater sides that permits issued jointly to mwc uh Springfield and Eugene primarily it impacts mwmc however there are some impacts on the local side it became we're in this limbo for 15 plus years on that on that side of thing due to a litigation outside of of um with environmental groups outside of the municipality municipalities but we did get a permit that became effective on it in November I think it depends on the treatment requirements and it's again

55:03 um it does have some operational impacts for Springfield for example like we can't have any sanitary sewer overflows or precluded from having any of those um there are a few other things as well uh the program since I hit the sampling of some of the programs that are funded with user fees so you have obviously the operations and maintenance we have education and Outreach programs unless it discharges that's that's if somebody is putting something in the system they shouldn't be whether they're dumping paint you know down the drain or there's somebody who sees something and yeah but there's a whole slew of things associated with holistic discharge and we have a staff person that's on call that gets called out routinely for those those types of things Federal program um all the inspection associated with new permitting or our own permitting for development and then the development

55:49 review and then a few other things there uh point out the picture here as a one of our educational and Outreach opportunities to to involve the public this is a canines for clean water calendar contest 2023 calendar obviously has been out for some time now we just wrapped up a social media campaign for the 2024 calendar and we had well over 200 folks participate and send us pictures and so we're judging those now and they'll be a 12 lucky winners in this next year's calendar so to add context to that they have to place to scoot the poop um after their dog and that helps eliminate bacteria from entering the waterways of his bacteria we have a we have that requirement to try to reduce bacteria in the city just for the record

56:34 has uh Scout ever appeared in this uh I know there's no way I don't think he has attempted but we didn't submit Bob the vehicle either [Music] um I'm gonna transition to the cat but here real quick so this is a photo of some of our Ops folks um doing some work in the Wastewater system we're going to get a photo collage here before too long of a dirty jobs in Springfield and I think we'll definitely have some opportunities with the Wastewater system and then the rate Packers again so I mentioned the the revenue bonds and the capital projects but the three there the customer usage efficient fixtures and Water Conservation are kind of lumped together so um less people use or the more water efficient fixtures they have the less

57:19 they actually pay but that can includes rate factors is not really influencing it this year um so yeah we'll move on and show you some some uh focus is a residential uh Wastewater fee comparison so we're actually uh kind of comparing to other cities and I'm just looking back um at already adopted rates from last year so you can kind of see the trend in where we are so Springfield's kind of in the middle um you can see that with the blue on the top uh for the regional component and then the local Wastewater is below that at 25.24 so when you sum those together that's about 54.19 assuming that you have 5 000 gallons of Wastewater and then the other one is Eugene our

58:06 partners and they're at 42.56 oh I mentioned that because it always comes up at least our commission meetings is why is that on the local side a lot of that is due to the fact that apart with Eugene they have a much larger population base to spread money out across we had to take on debt when they did not do some permit requirements from a previous decade um and that really influenced in a local raid that spring will have to charge and this is a stormwater Services just uh some pictures having to do with the recent Upstream are and then of course the daily cleaning of storms that it is and then this is the residential stormwater fee comparison you can see

58:51 Portland on the far left and Bonita on the far right you can see that we are now below um Eugene we Eugene was always kind of below us but now we are below um Gene as Springfield and over time given permits that were required from storm water there's been more increases in stormwater fees for other communities to kind of build up Revenue to be able to meet the permit requirements so I think it's worth noting here but Springfield was the first base phase two municipality to have to get a stormwater permit and that's impacted our rate Albany for example didn't have to get one until just three years ago um due to the population of the population in the census Works they work

59:36 some magic there I'm not sure how they did that but um that does impact our rates and then we do have two options in terms of a rate scenario the first one is um we're looking at that kind of uh the first row so that would be for local Wastewater a 3.5 percent um increase or a residential increase of 86 cents assuming you have the 5 000 gallons and then on the storm water component it's a three percent uh which results in an increase of 48 cents so when you sum those together that's a dollar and 34 cents monthly on the residential Bill assuming that you have 5 000 gallons of Wastewater treated

1:00:22 and then this is the option that we're actually um it's a lower option and so it's 2.5 percent on the local Wastewater that's 63 cents monthly and then on the storm water it's 3.0 as it was on the prior slide of 48 cents and so when you sum those together it's about a dollar eleven monthly assuming that you have the five thousand gallons everyone's usage is slightly different and then kind of side by side here there's option one that's the higher option for proposing option two um and would like to get some feedback on yeah

1:01:12 so I'm really interested I'm curious as to your like why the the methodology and the recommendation of Y2 instead of one so I'm just curious as to why just to provide an option an option for the console yeah I think really you know we can generate I think we did the math it's like a hundred thousand dollars more a year in Revenue at the higher option one part of this is that by getting into a lot of detail um is our like or the emphasis with our Capital programs right now is a big driver for race as his main operations of Maintenance but we're really focusing on an ad the last year or so and we won't be the next year or two on the street side so then the projects that we're working on um on the storm water and wastewater side they're working on projects but we're not working on them as actively as we may be in the future and so we're

1:01:58 looking at things like inflation or Reserve levels what we need for Staffing and then you know what do we want for um what's what's the lowest responsible rate increase we can we we can justify this year to so that the existing users in the system are going to be paying for that but they're not paying for future capital or future users of the system should be paying for great perfect I appreciate that thank you in addition to that we have revenue bonds that are going to be kind of working their way out um and um so we're getting to to have fewer revenue bonds each year something the inflation rate it's a pretty good deal yeah it is yeah we've had you know past council elections I think have been helpful in supporting the rate

1:02:43 adjustments but again um this is something that we're you know we know that like the teachers from water permit there's going to be additional increases required that's why we showed a three is the three is really that will always think we can go for in the spring water site we didn't have a higher rate but again we have one of the higher rates because of our permit status and having that first permit and then I want to prepare for our future yeah right anybody else anything it's one of those things um not and answering for this presentation and um Matt they do such a great job and you don't even know it's like they quietly do their work and it's sufficient and it's well done but boy would we all notice it a victims

1:03:31 and then this is the regional uh forecast which has already been adopted by the commission and it's going to be ratified uh through Springfield I think on the first of the month so yeah we'll be coming to you on Monday for about your ratification and this four and a half percent Readjustment yeah commission authorized is contained in that so let's bring bill can weigh in on that Monday night yeah okay does that mean that the rates are going to go up the dollar 34 plus the dollar eleven yes so there's the regional side the treatment and then on the local side is the so there's the storm water piece and the um local Wastewater yeah okay so there's ms4 is that part of Springfield the ms4 permit is our promoter per minute I didn't know about sizing if we

1:04:17 yeah so I think my question about the ms4 is I know that this is a pretty conservative um rate increase right so but that if you look in the out years does that position us in a good Financial place to sort of address any additional capital expenditure related to the ms4 permit that's hard to know I I think what we've been seeing or I anticipate things are going is it's not going to be the money's not gonna we have a capital need for new development but the money the requirements are really going to be on the operation as a maintenance side there's monitoring there's more inspections there's more facilities that need to be infected more frequently there's more pipes that need to be cleaned they want they should be um DQ would like and try to get earlier like having us do actual numeric

1:05:02 monitoring of stormwater discharges which is something that we're not keen on doing which is we use these best management practices and they're they're shown through science to work but we have unlike the Wastewater system it's where we have one discharge through the Wastewater Plant we have um hundreds of discharges in the river system to the promoter system and so I I the concern is valid and I think but it's going to be I think the operational side is where we're going to need to be focusing um more of our resources and I think there's a there actually is a request you'll see in this part of the pleasure committee process this commiserable with that it was sleeping right monitoring did you mean the volume no like monitoring a constituents like total suspended solids or you know you name the parameter

1:05:50 so I'm seeing head nods for option two um and I think the uh but I was going to mention that may not have been mentioned that the commission really that's I mean hammers them hard in regards to that see if there's savings but what's also helping with some of this is that our our natural gas reclaim is is you know they're they're reproducing Natural Gas and assembling it and that's helping pose some of these things down um so I I can't think of another agency out there that doesn't look as hard as as mwmc does to help the rate payers and keeping that modest and I know we're even at the last meeting we're talking about looking at some different areas

1:06:36 that may be able to even curb those down some potentially yeah that that's correct the new permit that we just got is was expected to hit us pretty hard and it's like I mean they were very well positioned but that's why it's reflecting a little higher increases on the regional slide right now right um those might change yeah so quite Victoria I'm still I'm still a little confused why you're recommending two instead of one because if you look at the long term for the project and it's only about a two cent or a point two cent like 0.02 um over yeah we're focused on the first year yeah and so the option one isn't a better I'm just surprised that you're saying it's a higher rate yeah but it

1:07:21 sounds like it covers more it provides more Revenue uh the differences is that with a with a focus the one of them on the Wastewater side that local Wastewater side the primary driver to come over Capital than operational we have our operational need but for where the permit's at is the regulatory requirements on the stormwater slider driving the operations so um we're gonna confuse myself here but on the Wastewater side of things it's really the capital but the local Wastewater not mwmc say Springfield on local Wastewater is the capital is driving it and when those projects are programmed out a few years we're doing a Wastewater master plan process right now this is going to identify the needed future work and so the thinking is that

1:08:06 if we have a a more modest rate adjustment right now the existing system users that live in town are going to be paying for that as opposed to paying more for future work whereas the future public the future rate payers okay that makes sense thank you I appreciate that yeah and and one of the things that you know I guess the untold story here is probably I don't know maybe 10 years ago we really they started bringing the five-year forecast to us and really started focusing on sort of small incremental increases through the entire thing and it really stabilized when the rate increases were going to be and I understand based on we'll know more about the uh about the permit soon and that may require higher rate increases in the future so option two please okay

1:08:53 all right thank you thank you so much they can figure it and see this and then we're going to stay here