City Council Budget Work Session Transcript – 08/17/2016 Title: ATXN 24/7 Recording Channel: 6 - ATXN Recorded On: 8/17/2016 6:00:00 AM Original Air Date: 8/17/2016 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== [9:17:49 AM] >> Mayor Adler: All right. I think we're now six. Before we convene the work session, this is the first time that we have gathered as a group together with our city manager. I want to say congratulations on the job of. Only fitting if you leave us that you would be leaving us for an international stage. I think that the community is now taking stock of where we are today. So many positive things that are happening in the community. We had a presentation yesterday from the chamber that took us through the recession, showed how Austin went in last, came out first. This is such a desirable city internationally, and you deserve a lot of credit for that. So on behalf of the council and the entire city of Austin, I want to say thank you for your service, almost a decade here with the city. You have left your imprint on the city. You're leaving it in -- again, in incredibly good shape. You will be missed. And I just want to say -- I want to say thank you and congratulations and godspeed with the new work. [Applause]. >> Ott: Well, thank you, mayor, mayor and city councilmembers. I guess I didn't come here equipped to make a speech this morning, but I do appreciate the heart felt comments from you, mayor, and on behalf of the council. As I think perhaps I noted in one of my recent correspondence to you that when I made my commitment to [9:19:51 AM] the city management, at that time I hoped I would have the opportunity to try to provide leadership to one of America's premier cities. And I certainly think by all accounts, by any account, Austin certainly measures up to that. I say that not to take credit, but rather to give credit to lots of other people, all of the elected officials that I've worked with, citizens that I've worked with, and especially the city employees, our employee family that I've worked with now for almost a decade. It's been an incredible experience that I often characterize as my greatest professional joy. And I -- I really mean that. It has been an absolute joy. And as I go forward I only have and will have good things to say about Austin, Texas. I love Austin. I love living here. I love the people here. And I'll be back from time to time. So thank you very much. >> Mayor Adler: In fact, I read one news report that suggested that you would be retiring here, so we promise to try to keep the city in good shape while you're gone so that it's worthy of your return. >> Ott: That's what I meant by I'll be back. [Laughter]. I'm going to be watching. >> Mayor Adler: That was a challenge. I didn't quite understand it that way. I do now. [Laughter] Yes, sir! We're going to go ahead and convene today's work session. Today is August 17th, it's Wednesday. We are in the boards and commissions room. It is 9:20.@here at city hall. Work session day. I just want to let the council know that staff has asked me to precipitate a conversation about the concept menu, see if maybe [9:21:51 AM] we could at on some things, maybe pare it down or give some direction a little bit. As we've talked about that at the last several meetings, encouraging people to post something on the bulletin board if they were going to do that so people would have notice, people wouldn't just be walking in to find that there's a discussion they hadn't anticipated. I anticipate filing something on the bill continue board by the -- bulletin board by the end of the day to give notice of some things that I think might be good for us to talk about tomorrow in terms of the concept menu. Again, we don't take any action on the concept menu. That stops or prohibits in this case from being able to push forward any idea they want to, even up to the end of the budget time, but just by way of giving just general direction. That said, if anybody had a comment on that, we would go to that. Mayor pro tem? >> Tovo: I look forward to that conversation and I hope we could have some discussion about concepts that we would like to bring forward for which we had sponsors. We had talked about carving out time to do that since our meeting schedule has been tight enough that it's difficult to find time to talk with one another. I hope we'll have a chance to talk about that as well today. >> Mayor Adler: In fact, if you wanted to do that -- the conversation I was talking about was a conversation tomorrow because I think that I need to give notice to people if we're actually going to be taking a look at it in terms of potentially considering moving something off, but today in terms of having the conversation you're talking about, trying to find sponsors, that would be perfectly in order to have today. So let's make sure that we do that before we leave. S Ed, the floor is yours -- I'm sorry. >> Houston: Mayor, on the concept menu, we get updates everydays and I really appreciate that. Is there some way we can note when something is removed? Because now we have to go line by line? >> There is a tab on the concept menu for removed items. I believe to date there's [9:23:51 AM] only been two removed and they were removed by the councilmember who initially added them B we're tracking track F it gets removed by the city councilmember, we have a tab for removed items. We also put an asterisk next to -- there's a numbering system and we put an asterisk next to any number that was a change from the previous day. So the asterisks are always moving, but if you look everyday and all you want to see are the changes, just look for the numbers that have an asterisk. >> Houston: By them. And then there's a tab for removed? >> Yes, ma'am. >> Houston: Is there a tab for added? >> There's multiple tabs, depending -- there's multiple tabs for different categories of added items. There's not a single tab for just items that are added the last day. >> Houston: I'll have my person get in touch with your person so we can organize how it is. >> We're happy to help you in any way we can. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> Good morning, mayor and mayor pro tem, members of the council. My name is Ed van eenoo, deputy chief financial officer and budget officer for the city. There are two items on your agenda today, the first being briefings and discussion on the fiscal year 2016-2017 proposed budget for city departments. This is our fourth proposed budget for the council. The second item that I don't think we would get to until later in the afternoon would be discussion and possible action on the council budget concept menu. Last night we circulated the presentations for today and you should all have a packet of presentations that can be included in your budget binders that have been building over the work sessions. There are six departments scheduled for today. Can we get the calendar up just so you know what we're covering today, where we've come from, what we're doing today and where we're doing. Today, August 17th, we have three public safety departments, police department, emergency and medical services and the municipal court. And then we have three internal service departments, our fleet [9:25:52 AM] services department, communications and technology management and building services. So those are the departments we're planning on covering today. And you can also see what we have planned for our final budget work session on August 24th. First up today is the police department. I'm joined up here by police chief art Acevedo, assistant director of the police department, Alice Thomas and assistant city manager ray Aryan know. I'm going to take a back seat so that assistant chief Manley can take a seat up here. Last year the city council put money in the budget to do a consultant money in regards to community policing and at the end of the police department's presentation we're going to have Dr. Richard Brady join the panel to walk you through a presentation, the the final report of the community policing study that council asked for last year. So I will turn it over to the chief and take my back seat. >> Good morning, mayor and council. I will take one second to just acknowledge my boss, Marc Ott that I've had as my boss for eight years. And when he got here he got the grand prize of coming with the economic downturn and somehow you have always found a way to fund public safety and keep the city safe. I want to tell you on behalf of the men and women of the Austin police department and the community we serve at a time when police departments were cutting left and right around this country, you somehow have always managed to support public safety and the police department. So thank you for your leadership. It was always kind of embarrassing to talk about our budget because of our leadership around the country. But as a result this fastest growing city continues to remain one of the nation's safest and I'm glad that you've always seen public safety investment as a point of pride and not something that we need to apologize for. Thank you for your leadership. [9:27:52 AM] I look forward to seeing you in D.C. On a regular basis. Well, good morning. Art Acevedo, Brian Manley, Alice Thomas. Great to be here this morning with you all to discuss our budget. And can we get the slides up so we can begin? Great. That's matrix. I don't make that much, or I can't. That would be Dr. Brady's slides. Okay. Here we go. No. Good morning. You want to just go through your hard copies so we don't waste time? Great. If you look at the department overview, Austin continues to really enjoy one of the safest cities -- to be one of the safest cities in the country despite our growth. We continue to be the second safest city in the nation. I am very happy to report that as it relates to property crime we continue to trend in the the right direction. Years back we were in the low -- absolutely the bottom of safety as it related to property crime, but because of the some of the investments of prior councils and the city manager, we've been able to leverage some -- some resources to focus on this issue and I'm proud to say that we have moved up four positions from the previous year to the number 17 when we used to be about number 32. We believe that as you look at this most of these projections are based on five-year averages because of anomalies. A year can be an anomaly or is it something that is a trend? With the exception of response times. And the response times we are projecting once again about eight minutes, four seconds to the emergency and urgent calls. Our priority or our goal [9:29:54 AM] is to keep it under eight minutes so we're close, but not quite where we want to be on that. Another area of pride for us is that we still enjoy, is despite the backdrop and the nation as it relates to the relationship of the police department and their community, an above average residents satisfaction rating chamber of commerce above the average around the country for cities around 250,000 or more, which is 67% nationally. We're at 72%. And I am strongly of the belief -- I strongly believe that if you looked at cities of 500,000 or more or cities of a million, which we basically are, that we probably stack up even better when you make those comparisons. The next slide is really a quick overview of our budget, our total proposed budget is 402.5 million operating, grants is included in there. We are asking or included in this proposal are 12 new sworn positions and 22 civilian positions. We actually reached out to the city manager early on in the process. He had more sworn positions in the budget and one of the things we want to do is always try to stretch our budget dollars as much as possible, but more importantly to try to get more boots on the ground as far as having guardians of our police officers in the community. So he has agreed to include 21 new positions, civilian positions, so we can take those police officers, hopefully if you approve them, by October 1 we'll be able to advertise them and have the people before the end of the quarter on board and we can move those positions back to the field, those sworn positions doing police work, which will cut out some of the time it would take to hire new police officers. And I think that not only that in terms of a sustainability standpoint and keeping those boots on the ground, there would be 22 civilian positions, which is a lower cost than adding another 22 [9:31:54 AM] officers. So we are really appreciative of that. Now, the tough part is because of all the challenges I think with all the -- with all the growth of this city and also all their needs, including social services and everything else, that we have to fund as a city, it's short of what we originally requested, but we believe that as always we'll try to do our very best with whatever play is called, which I think is what makes our department very unique and a special organization. If you look on this slide, here's some of our highlights. The 12 sworn positions that are new, we want to deploy those resources to add another evening shift around the city. That is a cost of a little under a million dollars. The 21 new civilian positions, the transition existing personnel is about $1.5 million. The analyzed cost is another one of the drivers this year for the positions that you authorized last year, which included 50 new officers and 19 civilians. And we're going to convert several part-time positions into one full-time position -- four full- time positions in the city at a cost of -- in the department. And it also includes $762,000 to support the wireless phone service and support the body-worn cameras. You know, vacancy and vacancy rates are something that we've talked about over the years with the mayor and council. And this council is no different. One of the things that is important for us is to try to hire positions as soon as possible when they become vacant, but as you can imagine, recruiting, testing, background and training takes time and we're in a profession and business and you can't do it on a dime. Our fiscal year vacancy [9:33:55 AM] rate in fiscal 15 was 6.1 percent. Our fiscal year vacancy rate in 2016 is 7.8% with about 170 positions vacant right now. It was 150 at the time this written. But I have good news for the sworn. We have added positions to recruitment and we've retoll tooled recruitment and continue to retool recruitment to make the process shorter. And more importantly to make sure that -- imagine where we're at right now. In 2007-2008 you want employment was much higher in the country. This city is blessed to have an unemployment rate that is less than four percent, I may be wrong on that, but it's very low. And at this time the entire nation is hiring police officers nationwide. So we're competing with everybody around the country. Having said that, this sworn vacancy rate, we have currently right now two classes in session, a modified class and a regular class. And we project 69 new officers being sworn in in October and we have an incoming class in November of 110 cadets that will be trained. And we have enough people in the pipeline where we can some time after that 110 class, maybe in April, is we can be able to put together another 110 person class. So if you think about our vacancies in terms of sworn, it's going to dry up pretty quickly, especially if these are the resources we get in terms of new positions. The civilian vacancy rate in '15 was eight percent and in '16 it's down to 6.3 percent and both of our rates are lower than the citywide average. And I attribute that to Alice Thomas and her team that do a very good job in conjunction with hr to really work diligently to try to keep the vacancy rates down. So that's where we are [9:35:55 AM] on the vacancy rates. If you look at capital improvement highlights, our mounted facility, we hope to spend about 3.8 million for fiscal year 17, our mounted facility was underfunded back when the bonds went out for that facility and when the budget was first included, but this is to move into the construction phase. It includes reallocation, utilizing the available balance for the northeast substation project to mounted patrol project, so we really need to get this infrastructure built so we can move our horses out of manor into our land and into our property sooner rather than later. And that includes again the reallocation of $3.2 million. Excuse me. If you were wondering where the cost went up? Well, you know from the time that we have a bond measure to the time that we actually go down to -- get about to the business of building, sometimes costs go up, especially in a city like this is probably one of the hottest economies in the nation. And with that construction costs go up. So that's why we're moving the $3.2 million. We're also working on the practical park rangers joint use facility. We hope to move into the preliminary planning stages to the northwest police substation. Our issues, horizon issues continue to be obviously the challenge of staffing. We all know here living in the city I've been an austinite for almost a decade now, proud austinite, that our police department is very lean. That's not the police chief saying it or the city manager who has always proposed significant investments. That's the police executive research form that showed that we're about 258 police officers short in 2012. That includes the study that you all saw last year that the manager supported a five-year plan to increase the police department by 400 based on the university of Texas study that was [9:37:56 AM] commissioned by the greater Austin crime commission. And as you will hear from the matrix and Dr. Brady, this latest report shows that we are a lien organization. So staffing continues to be a challenge. Technology continues to obviously be a challenge. We're looking forward to getting our body-worn cameras deployed as soon as we can on to the officers. I'm very proud of the fact that in may cities, police officers and police associations may fight the cameras. Our folks have embraced them completely and are looking forward to deploying them because they know what I know and what most austinites know, that the very, very vast majority of the times they are doing the right things for the right reason, being honorable, being professional and they know that that's what those cameras are going to capture and not from a camera taken from an angle that is going to make the use of police force as horrific as possible. So we're looking forward to that. The last thing that we really need to continue to look at is facilities. It's a challenge for the entire city and the police department. We're no different. And again the overcrowding issues and some of the aging infrastructures, especially at the headquarters, we have so many buckets on the first floor yesterday it was like the bucket brigade, it was kind of funny running around. With that we look forward to the conversation and we're ready to try to answer all the questions and whatever question we can answer today we look forward to going back and researching it and getting you a detailed response. >> Mayor Adler: I'll go ahead and start then. Chief, again I want to commend you, your shop [9:40:01 AM] and your officers. Austin is one of the safest cities in the country. We have a great police force in that regard. The safety factor we all feel in the community is one of the reasons why this is a wonderful community to live in. And this council has been and continues to be real supportive, and has funded public safety to a large extent, in fact, recognizing that this is the priority that it is. About 70% of the general fund budget goes to public safety in this city. And I think that reflects the priority that the community puts in public safety and this council and the prior councils have shown toward public safety. This council has continued to that level of percentages. Being -- I think it was 70.5 percent on the numbers that Ed van eenoo had given us, which is up from a lower amount, three or four years ago, in one year it had gone down to 61, I think 62%. But we're back up at that number. Because we have that commitment. I know at one point, and we'll talk about policing levels, the goal had been to have two officers per thousand. We'll talk today about a different metric for looking at that. I want the community to know generally that this council has also kept that level at the two per thousand. As the city has continued to grow by the actions this council has taken we've at least [9:42:02 AM] maintained that number as well. And I point those things out because there have been some questions in the community, some people wanting to know if this council is maintaining the investment and the priority with public safety in this community, and we have. I want to commend you and the force with respect to how the members are with respect to crime in this city. And I think it's important for the community to know that if you look across the list with respect to crime -- if you look at murder and robbery and aggravated assault and burglary and theft and auto theft and you look at the numbers in our city going back to 2010 through the last complete year, 2015, we have made progress, you have made, your force has made progress virtually every year in every category. And the numbers are just real impressive, I think. And again, I think that's why we feel safe. The one category where the numbers have not improved similarly is in the category of rape. Is there a reason why the numbers would look so good every year, virtually every year in every category except for rape? Do you know why that might be? >> Yes, mayor, and we have an asterisk and explanation for that. The FBI unified crime report, ucr, definition of sexual assault changed I believe three years ago now. And consequently there's -- that changed the numbers. But if you look at -- I'm confident that if you looked at the numbers based on the old [9:44:02 AM] definition that the numbers continue to be consistently on a downward trend. Having said that, this year, so far this year there is a cautionary tale for this year. Year to date our violent crime for the first time is actually up about seven percent, which is the first time since I've been here that we're starting to see it creep up. The question is is is that an anomaly this year or is it an indication of things to come? Last year in traffic we had an historically high number of fatalities, a record high number of fatalities, but that was consistent with traffic fatalities nationwide in a lot of areas last year. We had seen that there was a really bloody year on highways. And this year I'm happy to say that that turned out to be an anomaly so far. And we're hopeful that we'll end the year with a significant reduction in traffic fatalities. So we're not sure if this seven percent increase -- by the way, it's also an issue in a lot of cities this year. Traffic was last year. This year violent crime is. We're not sure whether this will be an anomaly, but I will say this, that one of the things that I have -- as a police chief, we're having a conversation with code. I'm not sure that when my response time is over eight minutes and creeped upwards or violent crime is going up that our taxpayers are best served by having the police department respond to a junked car and somebody on private property. We just don't have the resources to do that. And to me that's more of a code issue. But we have to look at moving forward some of those lower level priority calls while we see this upward trend to ensure that we bring that back down and it doesn't become -- we don't want this to turn into traffic where we didn't do a good job of planning for traffic and now we're playing catch-up. We never want to do that with public safety. [9:46:03 AM] >> Mayor Adler: Agree. And I don't want that too. Let me go through some of the numbers and I appreciate you going through this with me again. A lot of the questions I'm asking are intended to just get information out to the public that's watching this with respect to -- let's talk for just a second about the numbers. And you talked about and the number of sworn officers that are being deployed. This budget adds 12 new sworn officers and you said that you had recommended adding a significant number of civilians so as to free up officers to be able to be actually deployed on the streets and the like. Those are 22 civilians. Will that free up 22 sworn officers to go to the streets? >> Yes. And that was our recommendation and the city manager had initially -- was talking about getting the real estate 33. And we can get more bang for our buck and get officers back on the road, back on the patrol quicker, more quickly. And in terms of sustainability it's a lesser cost moving forward. So we will have -- if you approve these 22 positions we're hopeful to have 22 police officers back on doing police work by January 1 at the latest. >> Mayor Adler: That's great. So if I'm looking now at officers that will be deployed this coming year relative to officers as existed on the streets a year ago, this budget would add 12 new sworn positions and 22 civilians, which would result in 22 sworn officers being out. So that would be an additional 34 officers. >> 21 new positions. For purposes of moving officers, the 22nd position has nothing to do with moving an officer back to patrol. So it's a total of 33. >> Mayor Adler: So 33 new officers that way. In addition, if I look a [9:48:05 AM] year ago the council last year increased the sworn positions by 50 new officers over a two-year period of time. So this time last year those officers weren't there. They came in sometime over the course of the year. This coming year will be the first year that these -- the first year that these new officers have been out for 12 months for the full year. Is that right? >> With the hiring cycle, the positions that you approved last year, many if not all of them are sitting in one of the current cadet classes that will graduate October 28th. >> Mayor Adler: So in the budget descriptions -- I'll get to the cadet classes in a second. But with respect to the budget, one of the increases that we're paying in this year's budget relative to last year's budget is there's almost three million dollars to pay for the annualized expense of 50 officers that were added last year, but in a two-year phase in. And by that I mean they were added in at some point. The budget standpoint was somewhat during the middle of the year and now we have the annualized cost for those 50 new officers. >> Correct. >> Mayor Adler: That's what I'm saying. So as compared to this time last year, in addition to the 33 officers that we're funding right now, we're going to have 50 officers that are in this budget for the very first time in an annualized way. Is that right? >> That's correct. You're picking up the other six months of salary for the positions from last year because we received midyear funding. They came on the payroll effective August 1st. >> Mayor Adler: So this is the first year that they would be in for us. So that's 33 plus 50. So that's 83 officers. Now, in addition to that there's also some -- you've accelerated the cadet class movement to address the vacancies that have been -- that existed. And you're filling those with new folks coming into and out of cadet [9:50:06 AM] school. Do you have a feel for how many more officers we'll have out now because of the cadet school over what the attrition rate is in the department? >> So our average attrition is between four and five positions a month. So we lose between four and five officers each month. We're going to graduate a class of -- well, two classes actually graduate simultaneously in October and we expect, I believe, 63, I believe, is the number we're looking at right now to hit the streets out of those two classes. So that will be an immediate benefit. If the budget goes through as proposed right now, by the end of the year, December, January timeline, we will look at continue to deploy those additional positions that we're going to get through civilization since there's a truncated process for that since it's civilians, then those will be on the street end of December, beginning of January. >> And those would be officers in addition to the 33 that would be funded here and the 50 that will be analyzed. -- Annualized. So we have the 50 on the force that would be annualized, we have the 33, that's 83, because the additional ones going through the cadet school that will also be on force. >> The 50 that are being annualized are part of those that are in training and about to hit. So I think that those are the same. So you have the two classes that are about to graduate and then what you'll have is whatever you all approve as a council this year based on our recommendations. >> Okay. So the 50 then would be authorized last year to be put into the force, but were not funded for the full year. I thought those would be -- and it all depends on kind of your hiring sequences and the like. What we funded was ability to have 50 in the force this past year being paid on the force this past year, this current fiscal year, [9:52:06 AM] that would then be annualized next year. But you're saying that some of those 50 did not -- >> On the 50, in your explanation you have to draw a distinction in terms of new ftes versus costs. What we're incurring for the proposed budget is the added cost associated annualizing the 50. It doesn't add any new ftes. The 50 ftes are already in their budget. So it's the cost that's the increase in their budget plus the 33 that we're talking about or the 12 that are actually new ftes, the 33 -- I mean the remainder, the 21, not the total 22 are just transferring officers that are serving in what will be civilianized positions, correct? >> That is correct. And Mr. Mayor, to your point I think what we're looking at is we begin paying them obviously as cadets, so the money comes in the budget so we can start paying them through the eight-month training that they have to go through. So without going position by position, and identifying which positions you actually approved last year and where they are in the cycle, that would be something we would have to follow up with you. The reason we get the funding when we do is because we have to start paying them as we begin training them. And that's eight months prior to when they will hit the street unless they're in a modified class, in which it four months. >> Mayor Adler: I understood that. And I understand it's funding versus the ftes. What I wasn't sure is how many of the ftes were actually filled last year or the current year that we're in. I'm trying to figure out how many officers we're going to have on the street versus -- this year, coming year, versus the officers that we had on the street a year ago. And as I look at that it appears to me that that number consists of 33 new officers on the street because of this budget. 50 new officers that if what you're saying -- those are ftes that were created for last year, but only for partial year, which means that in this time last year they weren't on the street because [9:54:06 AM] the fte position did not exist until halfway through the year -- but we also funded it phased in. So the fte couldn't have been filled by -- by the chief until the fte position was created. And then obviously there's a pipeline to be able to fill that. And in addition you guys are doing an accelerated job with taking the vacancy rate down. So when I look at all of those components in terms of officers in the field on the ground in the first few months of this year versus the first few months of last year, it appears to me that the number would be somewhere north of 80 new officers. And I say that without knowing how many new officers would be picked up with respect to the vacancy acceleration. And I mentioned that only because I want the community to know this is a council that has invested in public safety and in putting police officers on the ground and it's important in order to be able to preserve -- the work that -- the great work in terms of the safety that the department has been able to achieve. >> Mr. Mayor, I think to that point it just depends on when do you count the 50. Do we count them when we got them last year. If we count them this year and then in addion to the 33, then last year we didn't get any. It just depends on when you say they came into the budget process. >> Mayor Adler: That would be true and it would be a double count assuming that your vacancy levels were exactly the same last year as this year, except that you're dramatically improving the vacancy level. So -- and because of that even recognizing that we funded 50 -- and [9:56:08 AM] I don't want to double count the 50. Right? I don't want to double count the 50. What we have is 33 new officers on patrol by virtue of this budget. In addition to that we have 50 officers that in this budget for the very first time will be annualized through the year. So if I look back at the beginning of last year, those 50 officers were not ftes that were created because they were phased in over two years, and the 33 that would be part of this budget are also not included because they're part of this budget. That gives me 83 officers that we would be funding in the first month of this fiscal year that were not funded in the first month of last fiscal year. 50 that were phased -- the 50 that the ftes weren't created until midyear some time, plus the 33 this year. In addition to that, there are officers on the street because the vacancy level has dropped. Without regard to -- and that's not double count the 50. I just want -- public safety is really important and I want to make sure -- I'm not trying to preempt the debate on whether we need new officers for community policing because I think that's a separate conversation that I think we're about to have here in a second. I just want the community to know that as our population grows we are investing in and putting a lot of new officers on the street that were not -- that were not there before. I will now pass the baton and subject to asking some more questions in a second. Councilmember pool, then Garza, then Zimmerman, then Casar. >> Pool: I just wanted to say I really appreciate the focus on the community policing aspects of it. I know we will dig into it more with Dr. Brady's report, but community policing has been a conversation -- topic of conversation in our community for quite awhile and I like the idea of sending a cadre [9:58:10 AM] of folks who have possibly more of a social work background or something like that into the community to make those contacts and connections and then folks who have the more explicit law enforcement credentials and training, we put them back on the patrol. And I know that in my district in particular that's what folks have been asking for. I do follow the math that the mayor is laying out and I agree it's important to get the ftes that are vacant filled and move the new folks through the cadet class and get them deployed on the street. So I thank you for all the efforts that you are putting toward that end. >> Thank you. >> Garza: I appreciate the -- you asked a lot of the questions I was going to ask, so I appreciate that. And even -- because I also want to make the point to the community that we have invested in our public safety and even if we -- I'm not saying this is going to happen, but didn't increase any, we've added 50 officers in the past two years. And I don't know if -- I don't know of other departments where we have added 50 ftes, but I also understand the importance placed on our frontline, and police are our first -- our first defense, first line of defense for our citizens. What are the positions that the 21 civilians -- are the 21 officers were doing that now civilians can do? >> So what we looked at across the department, we looked at officers doing the functions don't really require law enforcement authorities. So we've got positions on the firing range. Our instructors that teach our officers the mechanics of using a firearm. We've got I believe nine instructors out there and we believe we can split that and have civilians teach the actual mechanics of how to handle a firearm safely, how [10:00:12 AM] to manipulate and use it, but we want police officers to teach the tactics, the when and the other options. And so we believe that we can realize some efficiency there by getting folks that are experts in firearms to teach the mechanics, officers to teach the more specifics on situational use and other options. We have a position in risk management that is over our policy development and we have, as you can imagine, a rather significant policy manual. We have an officer that oversees that policy manual, keeping the updates, writing the new policies and we believe that can be civilianized. We have positions with officers that monitor cameras that we believe can be civilianized. We looked across the department and identified those positions. As you recall in our initial submission, we also included 27 district representatives. We felt like we could, you know, put a substantial number of civilians in the Dr program having officers there to represent law enforcement and make that connection and civilians do a lot of what they do. That is not in the current proposal right now and I know that Dr. Brady will talk about what their thoughts were on civilianizing parts of the Dr program. I can get you a list of each and every position that you want, but those are the ones we looked at across the department primarily. >> Garza: Okay. And the question that the mayor asked about rape, I didn't really hear an answer. I heard that the definition has changed, but the reason the definition has changed is probably because it's changed to better capture the crime of some kind of sexual crime. And so is it an issue of we need more staff to investigate those crimes, is it an issue of it not getting the priority that it deserves? Why is that number higher? >> Are you talking about the number of actual occurrences or the clearance rates? [10:02:12 AM] What are you looking at? >>>> Garza: The mayor referred to a rape number and the reason was it's been defined differently. >> Certainly. So the federal government actually a couple years back changed the definition of what we have to categorize as a rape and it includes new offense titles. These were crimes still occurring prior to the change, we were not supposed to include those in the numbers we reported as ucr. Now that the definition has changed, we have to include those numbers in the count when we submit our annual numbers so that's why we saw a jump in the number. When we actually go back and compare internally and analyze the sexual assaults changing the definition for prior years so we're capturing like cases, you don't see that increase. >> Garza: But was the increase an increase -- was the number that the mayor referred to an increase over previous years or just that it's at a high number period? Compared to our other crimes. >> When you look at the numbers, the definition, it's not APD, it is the FBI that changed the reporting requirements. But when you look at incidents and number of victims, regardless of definition, we haven't seen an increase. So that increase that you saw was because the -- the incidents that were reported, the definition and the types of incidents reported, the requirements change to have a broader number of incidents reported for purposes of uc are: But when you look at actual incidents regardless of the definition that the FBI was using, we haven't seen any significant increase in victims. Am I making sense? >> Garza: Okay. >> Maybe if you consider we have -- let's say we had four titles for assault, one, two, three, four, and the federal government required us to report one, two and three. Our numbers were those numbers for several years. They changed the definition. [10:04:13 AM] Now we have to include one, two, three and four. So we're reporting more numbers because we're reporting more titles. When we go back and normalize our data for prior years and we include that fourth category in prior years to compare like categories, we're not seeing an increase. >> Casar: Mayor, I think I have to interject at this point which is because of where the conversation is at, I want to make sure that considering that sexual assaults and other crimes are so heavily underreported that we don't give the indication as a council at this moment that we want to keep that -- we want sexual assaults to be reduced in our community as much as possible, but keeping that metric low, I don't think is actual -- negotiationly means sexual assault is being reduced in our community. There's some study out there about if departments are pressured to keep numbers low of certain kinds of crime that there could be unintended consequence of encouraging underreporting. And so we want to make sure an increase in the number of sexual assaults reported to the department does not necessarily mean an increase in the amount of sexual assaults and therefore is not necessarily a bad thing. And so while it would be tragic to find out that there is more sexual assaults in our community, we know there is much more than reported to the department and so I think at this moment it's important to interject and I think that the council would agree that it's not our priority to keep that number that's reported to the department as low as possible. We want to know, and I know our officers want to know and investigate every sexual assault case and we want to encourage those cases to be reported and I would expect if we were to spend money on an education program to let people know that you can and should report sexual assault to us, that that number may go up and that may actually be a good thing. And so -- and I know you agree on this point, but I want to [10:06:14 AM] interject before we keep going down -- >> The I believe campaign. I believe. We believe the victim. We want them to come forward. That's our starting point. We will always welcome people reporting. It's not just sexual assaults. It's the immigration issue. You know, we always tell individuals in the immigrant community [inaudible] Are police department are criminals. A victim or witness of crime, step forward. We don't worry about stats, we worry about people. You know, and I don't want a false sense of security in my community because people aren't reporting crimes, right? And one of the things you are going to decide is depending what's going on the city, it is self-defeating for a police department to under report crime. One of the things we've led in the nation with the white house is the public date initiative where we want transparency. We're moving away from ucr data that doesn't give enough sub sets so we can make better informed budget decision, better informed decisions as a community, as a police department and you are going to see the state of Texas with the Austin police department being one of the catalysts in terms of data, we're going to move to nibers -- nibers reporting which is much more inclusive and give this community a much better picture what's going on indication case and -- >> Casar: I appreciate that. We live on metrics in our job but at the same time you don't get points unfortunately for transparency in showing us what's really going on and I appreciate that sentiment because you should get points for that. >> Thank you. >> Garza: I had some more questions. >> Mayor Adler: Councilmember Garza. >> Garza: With regards to -- I know we're going to talk about the matrix report after, but what it seems to me to state was that there's not a -- and I heard a lot less [10:08:15 AM] community policing in your conversation this time than we had at last year's budget. But it seemed like the general conclusion was that there is not a -- a good definition of it and how we implement that into our -- you know, our police department. So I guess I'm just concerned about adding more officers when we still haven't defined exactly what that community policing effort is. But I -- you know, I don't for a second think that I know how to do your job better, but I'm curious if there are efficiencies that can be implemented into the way -- into policies that allow for more of that proactive time that you are looking for. So my staff asked some questions about, for example, class C misdemeanors -- >> I can barely hear what you are saying. I'm sorry. >> Garza: Class C misdemeanors that would only require a ticket that are often being arrested. Is there some kind of different policy change that could be implemented where -- because my understanding when somebody gets arrested causes nor time and more time for the officer to go on whatever status they are to put somebody in jail. Is there a policy about class C misdemeanors and whether there could be more tickets as opposed to arrests? >> We already cite a lot of folks for arrestable offenses. We cite folks instead of taking the jail as they do in other counties around here for small amounts of marijuana, for some of the thefts and some of the minor violations, we do cite a lot of them already. We can look at the data to see what the numbers are, but we're already doing a lot of that. >> Garza: Another question my staff asked was about alarms. So like the as a firefighter I remember making a bunch of false alarms. I know other cities have implemented a policy -- and there was a staff report with the recommendation that APD [10:10:17 AM] only respond to verified reports? Has there been any more effort to pursue that kind of policy? >> I can tell you that the verified report response, we can look at that, but that's really created a lot of angst and a lot of anger in a the lot of communities so we would probably want to be real thoughtful in getting our own community's desires and priorities. If this community wants us to respond unless it's verified, but I think you might find that a lot of the folks you represent would not be in favor of not responding. >> Garza: I think if they knew some statistics like 92% of those alarms are false alarms, I think it's important for them to know statistics before we start scaring the community about things that we might do. >> About the 8% that are real and there are suspects in the house, I'm just -- we're here to serve so we're good either way. But I'm just a word of caution that in a lot of cities that's created a lot of push-back from the community. >> Garza: Okay. And then I had another -- I can't find my other question, but out I guess -- the overall additional officers would be 83 in these past two years; is that right? >> Yes. >> Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for being here. Really appreciate the information and insights. Always enjoy talking to you, chief, because you are one much those people that actually tells me real stuff. Let me go back, last summer we had some extensive conversations in the public safety committee about the vacancies. You know, and our inability to [10:12:19 AM] keep up with attrition and back at that point one of the reasons that I was against adding new officers was because -- in the budget is because we had such a high number of vacant ftes. And if we had not approved the increase in funding a year ago -- going back to the point I think the mayor was trying to say, there's confusion between council's ability to fund or allocate money for officers, which we do and have done versus our ability to hire officers. We cannot as a city council, we cannot put cops on the street. All we can do is provide funding. So we had vacancies in the ballpark of 100 last year when we added 50-something more vacancies. So if we had not added those vacant positions, Mr. Mayor, we would be around 90 vacancies right now instead of 147. So I think I heard you mention several times that the vacancy rate had gone down but it did not according to the stat on page 5, the vickry rate -- vacancy rate increased because we funded additional police officer positions impossible to fill because we didn't have sufficient cadets in the pipeline to fill those positions. We pointed out that there was no way a year ago that we could fill the vacancies already on the books, already in the budgets. So it just didn't make any sense that we went and added over 50 new positions that were impossible to fill. So here we are with 157 positions vacant. It was an exercise in frustration. So the disconnect with the community is they look at the city council as being responsible for putting police on the streets and that's not true. What we do is allocate funding. It's up to our police department to make sure we have the right people and we get them out there. So I want to make that point. [10:14:21 AM] Let me back up quickly to page 4, and it is a technical question here. I'm presuming everybody knows that the taser contract has been in court twice. And one judge issued I think a temporary restraining order to stop the contract from going forward based on the evidence presented. And then a second judge earlier this month granted an injunction blocking the implementation of the taser contract and it's now scheduled for trial in November. So I'm not -- I'm not an attorney, I'm just looking at this last line of $762,000, increase in funding for smart phones and wire less services to support the body worn cameras. I don't think it's legal for us to say and do that right now until the court action is concluded. Is that not right? >>>> Mayor Adler: I think it goes probably to the spending to the allocation. It's certainly appropriate for us to put in our budget the appropriation for that because assuming the court case goes in the city's favor, we have to have already appropriated and had the funds available to be able to execute. >> Zimmerman: That's an excellent distinction and thank you for making that point. And that kind of goes back to my point of the officers. All we can do is allocate the money. We can't ensure that officers are actually on the street. That's up to APD. So you are right. As we could allocate this money but it's not legal for us to spend it at this time. >> Mayor Adler: Right. And what I was referring to before and the chiefs can come back to that is what I heard the testimony to say was is that there are a lot of cadets that are in the pipeline. There are a lot that are coming out, that the process has been streamlined and a lot of forward movement and work has happened in part because it's not in the department's interest either to have the unfunded positions, and I think that's a real welcome [10:16:26 AM] effort and I'm encouraged by the work that the force is doing. I see that all as being very positive. >> Mr. Mayor, it is important for council as you go into your discussions because when you see a number of vacancies that we have that's a very valid -- with current changes and some of the streamlining we've done, we look by November of next year to actually be -- be without vacancies and we will actually have to curtail our recruiting and hiring during this budget year you are working on now depending upon the number of officers that are approved because we would be recruiting next year for positions that we would not know whether or not you would give us next year. So although we do have a significant number of vacancies, when we plot it out on a spread sheet, we can show a class of 110 in November based on predictions of what we've in the pipeline now, another class of 110 in April of last year, we would have to slow down or cease recruiting for later in the year because we would not know we have positions for those folks upon graduation. >> Mayor Adler: Right. And I think we need to talk about that in the context of community policing, but just for the community to know with between the 33 here plus filling those 147 positions as you go through the pipeline, I mean we're talking about a community that because of all the things that you are doing will have 200 more police in the field next year than this year. >> We'll be able to put a lot in the field on regular duty instead of with over time. A lot of those is it going vacant we're having to put officers out in overtime but we will see an in crewes in positions out there. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Thank you. Ms. Houston. >> Houston: Thank you for being here this morning. On page 455 of the budget [10:18:32 AM] document, there's a statistic about Austin -- the airport, the number of calls for services and the response time. Does the airport contribute anything for you all to be that quickly there? I mean because that's lower than the response rate citywide. So do they pay anything into your budget for you all to be on site that quickly? >> The airport police officer positions are all paid for by the airline industry. >> Houston: Good. >> That's funded by airlines. We negotiate those resources with them on a regular basis. >> Houston: Okay. Thank you. I couldn't tell. >> Mayor Adler: Mayor pro tem. >> Tovo: Somewhere I have a button underneath all that paper. Thanks very much. I have a couple quick questions and then a longer one. So I know we went back and forth and as many times as we talked about this I hate to raise it again, but can you tell me what the final decision was in terms of a funding source for the smart phones and wireless phone service listed on page 449? I know you proposed to fund it through asset forfeiture funds, but for the fiscal year 2017, what is the proposed funding source? >> Okay, on your question did you say on the phones and the body cameras? >> Tovo: The smart phones and the wireless phone service to support the body warn cameras. It's noted -- body worn cameras on 449. >> That funding for the current year is in CCM's budget but in future years they are moving it to our budget so that's what the 762,000 is. It's the funding for second-year phone service for an additional 500 phones. [10:20:34 AM] So it's -- there was 500 phones in ctms budget this year and plus 500 for next year. >> Tovo: That's funded through general fund? >> Through general fund. >> Tovo: Okay. And just as I note to my colleagues, I did submit some questions through the Q and a. I don't believe we've got responses. I believe I may have submitted them yesterday asking staff to identify what any proposed uses of the following funds and also providing information about allowable uses for the department of justice asset forfeiture fund, department of treasury as set forth fit tour fund. What I'm really looking for is, of course,, you know, an answer from you all, but I also would like to have links to the document, the federal documents that actually provide those descriptions. So that -- that happened through the Q and a. >> And I think in terms of the uses that the city legal prepared a document that provides the authorities and all that and we'll be glad to let -- those already provided to mayor and council, we'll get that out to you. >> Tovo: It may cover the questions I'm asking. I'm not sure it had links but I'll go back and double-check on that. One of the items that I see as a transfer in here is the sobriety center funding or removal, reduction of funding for sobriety center and it appears the funding costs for the sprite center currently appear in the health and human services budget as proposed for next year. And just as a heads up, I think I've got some sponsors to put this on the concept menu. I'm proposing we shift that back to the Austin police department. We've had a lot of conversations about the sobriety center here in this group and in the community and a lot of -- we hope a lot of the cost savings and time savings in terms of allowing officers to get back out the street really do accrue to the police department. It has no financial impact [10:22:34 AM] this year, but I think it's just -- certainly there are crossovers with the sobriety center to health and human services as well as public safety, but I think in going forward it belongs in the public safety budget. Chief, you look like you have a response. I would ask you to respond to that concept. >> Well, I mean I this I we've looked at the sobriety center as a health and human services and really a mental health and a substance abuse and more of a social program and I'm just concerned we always talk about the growth of the public safety budget. Here's something that arguably is just as much of a melt program and so -- health program and social program that's being put in our budget that just helps drive our numbers up. That's just the only thing -- I would want an asterisk on there if we move it back to our budget. >> Tovo: The hope is if we're successful and it fulfills the promise in other places, the sobriety -- I'm going to address councilmember Zimmerman's potential paint before you raise it. If it succeeds, the hope is it will reduce costs not just as emergency rooms in the city and not only will it connect individuals to resources that will help that small percentage that may need those substance abuse resources, but it will also result I hope and this has been shown in other communities it hopefully will result in some savings within your budget. And so, you know, and in terms of time and response. So anyway, that's a concept that we'll have an opportunity to talk about in more detail. And I have some other questions, but it looks like councilmember Zimmerman -- >> Zimmerman: When I was officially being sold and lobbied hard and heavy on the sobriety center, it's going to save money. Remember that? Councilmember Houston, it's going to save money. APD doesn't have to spend sworn officer time picking up drunks. It's going to save money in public safety. Going to save money. I said show me the savings. If you show me the savings in [10:24:35 AM] APD's department, show me a line item of the money saved in APD, let's move that to the sobriety center. I'm for it. If you can show me the cost savings I'll vote for the sprite center and now the truth comes out it's just not cost. >> Tovo: I can't show you the savings until we have it open. And so, you know, I think you need to allow the sobriety center to open. >> Houston: Mayor pro tem tovo talked about the social aspect of the sobriety center but it was about able to keep the patrol back on fast so they didn't have so stay and book people into jail for a minor offense or whatever you call it public intoxication. [Inaudible] So they would be able to drop somebody off and go back on the street to patrol. That's the cost savings in that we will have people back on patrol quicker if the sobriety center is open rather than if they have following book them into -- have to go book them into jail. >> I think we would be more than happy to track those savings. [Inaudible] >> Tovo: Anyway, I brought it up while you were here to spent. I thought it was going easy one. More more indepth question and I want to begin by thanking -- we have some U.T. Students here to be part of this to hear this discussion so I appreciate you taking time to come and listen to this. One of the really successful pilots is the homelessness outreach street team and I really appreciate your officers who have been participating in that. I had an opportunity to read society anecdotes and some of the reports on a weekly basis and it is really successful. And I know that if that pilot is allowed to continue over a longer period of time, we're really going to see a difference in what's going on out there. And in really connecting individuals to resources they [10:26:36 AM] need and hopefully, you know, getting individuals into housing. So I understand that there is not -- there are not resources within the proposed budget to continue that pilot program. I believe it's really critical that we do so and I wanted to ask you if you are prepared to allocate some of those additional new positions to that program. To keep it going. Or what is your -- >> Well, our -- >> Tovo:. [Multiple voices] >> Is to add another evening shift to patrol is what we plan to do on that, and that's the 12 new positions. And the 21 were folks on patrol. It's one of the things I think regardless of whether we have a definition of, you know, a community policing that we can give you one tomorrow just take it from another department, put our name on it, one of the things we know is we're short officers. And so with violent crime increasing this year, we're going to monitor what's going on on the ground because I'm not sure that as lean as we are -- one of the [inaudible] We had earlier in the budget years, actually council funding a specific positions for the team. So we would if we can, but we have to monitor what's going on with violent crime in the city. With these current resources that are on the budget. >> Tovo: I have put on our concept menu that discussion of resources that would be necessary to continue the pilot in its existing form. I don't believe we've gotten a cost estimate back yet. If we are not able to come up with additional resources, is it possible that the officers who are currently working on it could remain in those positions? >> There's a good -- probably leave the ones currently on it in it because we want to continue to build the case for budget years. Or build a case and maybe it's not -- because it is early on, that it isn't giving us bang for our buck. [10:28:36 AM] But I would try to keep those officers that are currently on it working. Because homelessness is a significant challenge in our community. It does have a significant impact on all first responders including ems, fire and police, not to mention our hospital district. And so my commitment would be to try to continue with this current team. Although I would hope that somehow you could find funding to fund an additional team. That would be very helpful. >> Tovo: Appreciate that. Again, I think the work they are doing is really, really been successful and I appreciate so very much the officers who are out there doing that. The pilot is very new and it started in June. Again, I think they have been able to demonstrate some real success, but it is something that we really need to see on a longer period of time. >> And our folks are really, just so you know I've talked to them, they are really enjoying what they are doing. They believe that it is value added to everyone, all the stakeholders including the homeless community, the communities and all the business people, everybody in the area, they've really bought into the policeman and they are excited about being part of it. >> Tovo: Well, thank you, chief, and thanks to commander Cochran who has been integralry involved and the other officers who have been participating. >> Mayor Adler: Mr. Casar. >> Casar: You mentioned you would hope the council could fund another team if there was additional funding. I appreciate the commitment to keep going what it is that is currently happening if we were able to find additional funds that would address homeless out reach where would those funds go and how would that work. My second question is I hear from people on patrol in my own district that there are homeless individuals in particular in camps, many of whom used downtown services but some of whom don't want to [10:30:36 AM] come downtown and when do you think -- do you think the additional resources could address some of those issues or would you see them better spent on the existing downtown and west campus issues? >> I don't believe that you can just focus on downtown west campus. Homelessness is an issue that impacts a lot of our neighborhood outside the central corridor and the west campus area and it's something we need to address citywide because those camps are not just around here, there's green space that you know being used and some of the camps so if we can get the resources to move it and address issues not just in the downtown area. >> Tovo: Can I pop back in here? >> Mayor Adler: Are you on that topic too? Okay. Ms. Houston. >> Houston: Thank you, councilmember Casar, because it should be approached holisticly and not just location by location because people who live on the streets are everywhere. I this a conversation with mayor pro tem tovo about suggestions about and then we'll continue having those suggestions because all of our social service agencies are 8:00 to 5:00 agencies to people have to come into town to receive those services rather than looking at a new way of providing those services by going out to where the people are. And one of the those examples is under the bridge in front of the police headquarters. We've got two Saturday and Sunday we feed homeless people there. Rather than having caritas and Trinity stay in their buildings, they should be out there on those weekends helping those people because we can't fund enough host teams to be able to capture everybody. So there's some other ways that I would like to suggest to the homeless community, those folks that care about folks who live on our streets about how to use their resources differently, perhaps [10:32:38 AM] in order to address the issue rather than doing the traditional social service model 8:00 to 5:00 Monday to Friday come to us. >> Loaves and fishes does a great job of actually driving around the city in vehicles and if anybody hasn't had the time to go out with them, it's time well spent. But he travels around the city. >> Mayor Adler: Mayor pro tem. >> Tovo: I think this is a really -- I think this is a really important conversation and it would probably be useful if we scheduled a little time to hear from -- maybe to hear from the homelessness outreach street team. Chief, I thought I heard you saying that while you might be able to use the existing officers to continue the pilot, that some additional resources to continue that pilot would be helpful. I think that councilmember Casar's question suggests -- [multiple voices] >> Expand the pilot. >> Tovo: To expand the pilot. I do think we should talk with the team because there is really extreme value in continuing that geographic focus. Clearly there are needs throughout our entire city, but they are really in the infancy of this program. And having them focus in the area where the greatest need is and the greatest number of homeless individuals are for longer is really a value and that's what I'm hearing from them, that really focusing -- continuing their focus in this geographic area would be beneficial. So I hope whatever we decided to through the budget we won't be tasking that team with suddenly becoming a citywide team because we're not in a position to do that in terms of the resources, but also they really haven't had -- they haven't had enough time to really get their model -- they are constantly it rating. They meet multiple times a week and at least once a week to really come together, see what's working, what's not working, make adjustments. So tasking them with an expansion right now may not be the best from an efficiency standpoint or from a delivery [10:34:39 AM] model. So again, I think it would be most effective to hear directly from the people who are on that team before we make decisions -- >> And I think from our perspective the expansion would be -- geographic expansion would be different teams in different parts of the city so they can focus on geography. A lot of homeless population tend to stay in the same area and kind of like we want our police officers on patrol to know that neighbors on the patrol, you want their homeless outreach team to concentrate on specific area. >> Tovo: The needs are somewhat different and the approaches somewhat different when you are reaching out to individuals living in encampments in areas outside the urban area. It's a conversation we should have more discussion on, but I think it is critically important that we continue this effort and then expand it as we're ready because the needs are really dire. >> Mayor Adler: Councilmember pool. >> Pool: Just to add an additional piece to what the mayor pro tem was saying, the folks we will be bringing on who will be working on community policing will be a really good advance team in finding where the homeless everyone campments are in whatever districts they are assigned to working in concert with leadership at the police department to determine where the next host team would be best pointed. Expansion of it, then we could build on it that way using the input from our -- the new set of community policing folks. >> Yes, and we have been working with our operations unit and other assets to identify where the pockets of homeless population are including encampments. We've done that work and we're working with our partners at health and human services to talk about strategies to address needs outside of the downtown area. We've already done that work. It happened just in the last few weeks and we'll be sharing that information with our partners. >> Pool: That's great. So the skill sets of the folks on the host team would include [10:36:41 AM] the social work expertise, I would imagine, right? So that we can -- it's more -- >> Social workers that are part -- it's a multi-disciplinary approach. The police officers are there to build the trust and to safety and other stuff, but just trying to get to know each other, which quite frankly many of our downtown folks, they know the difference between homeless and transient. It's a different population. Majority of homeless folks are just homeless, but for their socioeconomic status they don't bother anybody. Our copies know them and a certain amount of trust. You have the ones who give homeless people a bad name and those are the ones that run from the police, not towards the police when they need help. It's a good program. I think it's showing some promise and we look forward to my commitment to the mayor and council and city manager and I know the city manager is very supportive of us is to continue with that one team to continue to explore what are the benefits and look forward to reporting back. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Mr. Renteria. >> Renteria: Thank you, mayor. I apologize for being here late, but I'm thinking I'm getting under the weather here. But you know -- [inaudible] Community policing. You know, in 1990, five of our teams got shot behind martin park which we call chicano park now. And you know, we knew that we had a problem with the gang members were rampant so we reached out to police chief Watson at that time and she started implementing community policing. It had a hard time taking off and then police chief Stan knee came in and he had a better time -- he was able to convince the community that we needed community policing. [10:38:42 AM] And at that time, you know, through lucky for us that we had officer Billy Fuente, mark gill and officer Martinez and they decided, you know, based on we had worked with some of the hardest core kids and in six weeks we had turned them around. And he made a commitment to help us out. And he said if anyone that could turn these kids around in six weeks we shouldn't give up on them. That was the beginning. That was the beginning of the change in east Austin. And we saw -- I mean you can go down there, you will see people walking down the street. It used to be if you didn't chain down everything that wanted your possession, it would just disappear out of your yard and that's the way it was. People were afraid to sit on their porch because they think somebody was going the drive by and shoot at them, which it did, a lot of that was going on in the east side at that time. Thank god for the chief making the commitment to community policing because I think that officers need to be able to get out and meet the community. You know, mingle with the community. That's why they know who lives there and who are the kids and who are the people that are leaders in the community, you know, so that's -- that's one of the things that, you know, we're lacking this time. We need -- we need officers that can go out there, I mean they don't have to be all of them sworn officers, but you want the sworn officers to make the community -- to meet the community because they are the ones going to be making the arrests. You know, we can get other people to come out and serve papers or, you know, check up on calls that are, you know, civilians, but we need the community -- we need the community policing because the police are the ones that are going to be the ones arresting people. And if there's calls, they are the ones who are going to know the community there and they can come out there and we [10:40:43 AM] won't have the kind of mistrust that some of the communities are having now because they don't know their officers. So I hope that, you know, that we can, you know, really get behind and support some kind of community policing. As you saw the report that came in, it's a very important thing. Even Dallas has already done it. Unfortunately someone from the outside came in and shot them, but Dallas has a very good community policing program and I hope we can stand behind our police and support them and I want to thank you for the job you are doing. >> Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you, councilmember Renteria. We're going to have the report of the matrix on community policing and discussion on that in just a moment so you are back in time for that. Ms. Houston. >> Houston: One last thing I want to say and again thank you this is a complex and complicated issue. As we grow as a city, as we become one of the most desirable places to live, that brings with it a lot of things that -- unintended consequences that we didn't think about traffic, crime increases, fatalities. I want to thank you all for trying to do your best. I just want to leave you with my idea of community policing, which is whatever you engage with a citizen, whether it's detectives, whether it's property crimes, whether it's patrol, horses, whenever you engage with the community, that's community policing because you have to treat people with respect and you have to be listening and attentive to what they are trying to say. Everybody doesn't talk the same way, everybody doesn't understand what it is we're asking people to do. They come from a whole different orientation and history. So whatever our interaction is with the other person, the people who pay our salaries, that's what community policing is. From the top of the chain down to the person that just comes out of the academy is we have [10:42:45 AM] to remember everybody's interaction is community policing. >> Mayor Adler: Anything else on the budget? Yes. >> Garza: I agree with everything councilmember Renteria said and everything you said and everybody on council has said. I don't think a single one of us thinks community policing is not a good thing and not something we shouldn't implement, it's just we ask the same questions of every department and we want to know what a program is and what kind of metrics to measure them by. And so, you know, you mentioned that you could just go dig for a definition of community policing from another police department and that's not what we're asking. We're asking for a real program that explains what they do in that off time and what -- what it gives the community is all we're asking. So it just seems -- and I don't mean this to sound critical, last year it was community policing, because of a report councilwoman kitchen put forward, what does that mean. So we have a report now that seems to say -- doesn't say don't do it, it just says it needs to be defined, it needs to be, you know, a program that we can see that the benefits that this brings a community. So again, I don't mean to sound critical, I'm just saying we ask the same questions of every department that comes before us because of the many needs throughout our community and the heavy weight that I think we all fill in trying to satisfy all these needs. But thank you for the work that you do for our community. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. Chief, thank you very much. Thank you. Ed, do we have a report on matrix? Is that what's next? [10:45:24 AM] >> Good morning. I'm Richard Brady, I'm the president of matrix consulting group and I was the project manager on this assignment and worked very closely with you, the police department and the community throughout the study. So what I would like to do, Mr. Mayor and members of the council, it's good to see you all together because I've melt you all individually. We get to see what it's like collectively as well. I would like to spend a few minutes to talk about the results of our study and then to answer your questions about what we did, how we did and what we came up with. So let me start out here. Let me just remind all of you and for everybody else here what we were asked to do. This was a comprehensive study designed to look at everything that is community policing. Certainly and we started out from the principle that it has to be defined within the police department. It needs to be a comprehensive set of principles that permanent it's a the -- the organization. In terms of its leadership, its management, in terms of who they are hiring, how they are training them when they first get recruited, how they are field trained, how they are trained every year thereafter in community engagement and community policing kind of principles. How staff are supervised. The policies that underlie everything that they do. How they work with the community and everything else I haven't mentioned. It's only once all of this is in place that you can start asking questions about how many people you need to make that work because every community needs to define what it is they want their community policing to be and the kind of employees they want to do it and how they are supported throughout that effort. So we looked at both of those, but we did them in that definite sequence. So the report that we put together is 200 some on pages that talks about what the police department is doing [10:47:27 AM] right now, compliments them on fine things they are doing as well as recommends room for improvement in the various programmatic aspects and loose at staffing needs as well. So while this was a comprehensive study, the methods that we used to do the study were very comprehensive too. Extensive input from the department, first of all, but also through with the community as well. And I'll explain that in a minute. And certainly as you look at the report, I think there are as many numbers as words so there's a lot of data that underscores that as well. And as we went through it, we raised issues with current practices within Austin's police department as it relates to community policing, compared that to what we consider to be best practices in law enforcement as well as to other communities that we looked at. And reviewed our progress both with the city and with the police department as we went through it. But the input was a really important part of this process. First of all, within the police department we interviewed well over 100 individuals within the police department so that's not just managers within the police department, but many first-line supervisors, unit supervisors and even line staff. We supplemented that with an employee survey. We thought it was important to give everybody an opportunity to provide some input to us on current services to the community and issues associated with that from their perspective. And 1170 police officers and civilians responded so a very high response rate which underscored -- in fact, many of the issues that we raised and complimented many of the good things the department is doing right now as well. From outside the police department we interviewed council and staff and the mayor. We also had an extensive process of getting input from community. First of all, we had community meetings in most of the council districts as well as meetings with various groups [10:49:28 AM] and other kinds of organized stakeholders within the community. I think in the district meetings alone we had over a couple hundred people attend those meetings. Each of them lasted a couple of hours and provided a lot of input to us on the current state of police community affairs and engagement as well as opportunities to improve it in everything that we looked at and everything that represents their interactions with the police department. We -- as I mentioned, we talked with a lot of other stakeholders within the community, the downtown Austin alliance, the greater Austin crime commission, of course the public safety commission. Various planning and neighborhood groups we met with on a request basis, as well as individuals who represented themselves or other formal or informal groups. There was an awful lot of input in that way. But we also had a community survey, an open community survey to which we got about 1700 responses which is really good. So we got a lot of input from people about the state of community relations right now, the things that they would like to see different in terms of community services. So as I said, a very comprehensive process. So before we go any further, I've heard a lot of discussion about what is community policing and I think I need to talk a little about that before we go any further. Because I've been doing this for a long time, for over 30 years, and community policing has been often a buzz word, buzz phrase, as well as an organized set of programs and approaches to providing law enforcement services and everything in between. Ranging from officer behaviors to creating units or capabilities like you have here with district representatives. Sometimes it addresses various activities that police officers do even if it's just getting out of their cars or [10:51:30 AM] having walking beats or bike beats for a certain period of time. But it's important that now it's more than that. Now more than ever police departments, like Austin and in the city of Austin, in every major and minor city, small city throughout the country, the past couple of years, certainly ever since Ferguson and everything that's happened in police interface since then, but it's come to a head because there needs -- there's recognition that there needs to be some substance for this, for whatever community policing is. The department of justice actually has a community policing unit and they've come up with a definition. I've got it up here. It's a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies that support the systematic use of important shapes and problem solving techniques to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to pun safety issues sunshine as crime, social disorder and the fear of crime. It is a mouthful. The three key ingredients are partnerships with the community. They are principles that underscore what it is to the community. And it's problem solving. Is really what it has to be. But as we describe in the report as we'll talk about here today, what it is for any particular community has to come up from within the community. There is no other Austin in the United States. Maybe another community called Austin, but there is no other place quite like this in terms of its problems and in terms of the solutions to those problems. I think the president's 21st century report on policing provides a very concrete place to start. The police department has reviewed that and is working towards it and I think it underscores everything we're doing as a consulting firm now. And what its conclusions principally are community policing is not a thing, it's not a definition that you have 36 people like district representatives in Austin do. It's everything that is [10:53:32 AM] policing as council person Garza and council person Houston mentioned. It's every interaction that the police department has and it's the support that's provided to that. It's a more holistic type of thing. So I think that this report is an implementation of that idea. It's important to note that it really is everything that is policing today. So there were a lot of compliments made to the police department this morning and those are very justified. As we've gone through our project there are major strengths that support everything that the police department is doing now to be efficient and effective as well as to be engaged with the community and solve problems in the community. The district representatives were a really great idea and they exist in every council district, every police region and they keep in touch with the community, they support community groups, they do things that police officers aren't charged to do or don't have time to do and work with community groups. Extremely important. District managers and region managers and managers throughout the department are actively engaged and committed to communitier is service. Commanders in each region hold their periodic, usually quartly meetings with the community to talk to them about what the problems are in the community and strategies they can employ with the police department to address and resolve those issues. There are many programmatic ties between the police department and the community, especially those supporting youth. The community liaisons, the explorer program and police activities league. [10:55:32 AM] The constituent liaison that works with you and the interface with the police department. A lot of very important interfaces that results in community needs being met. Here in the last couple of yours you've had a very important project, a landmark project to restore -- the restore rundberg project which was created to work the community in just the ways we're saying here today and solve the problems, to involve is community, to use data and police officers direct to solving problems in the community with demonstrated success. Not just in terms of moving crime around but reducing crimes. There's a very important tie and coherent set of strategies that were used here. As the chief mentioned, there are a lot of changes that are being made right now. The police department hasn't stood still waiting for this study to be completed. The police department hasn't used this budgetary process in the last two years to not look at the way it's conducting business and address problems like its high number of vacancy rate, it's high vacancy rate and getting people on the street and recruiting training and doing a better job of that. So there's been a lot of changes that we'll talk about here. On the other hand, there are certain issues within the police department that relate to this focus of this study and that's really what we spent most of our time in this project focusing on. I want to say though in summary that knows of most of these changes are more he have looks -- evolutionary and revolutionary. Things I just mentioned as successes to have it be more effectively parole community service. The issue that we have to start out with is it -- community policing and the way I've described it is not a [10:57:33 AM] coherent strategy within the department. Yes, they have a definition of community policing, but in their policy but it's not something that permanent it's a the department, it's not -- permeates the department, what they are doing in terms of recruiting and engaging the the community and that's something that really needs to happen within the department. The first hour we were on the job the police chief mentioned to us an important element to community policing is that it's a mind set. Absolutely agree that it's a mind set. But it also has to be supported in concrete ways by specific policies, by looking for people who are -- have characteristics consistent with that philosophy. You train them to hone and perfect that approach and that mind set and you support it through training, first line supervision, et cetera, so that everything comes together. So it's silent. Again, lots of great ideas, but these -- many of these great ideas are silent, they are not really cross-fertilizing good ideas one part and the other, using the success of one program to even inform other parts of the department. I think a lot of what we're talking about in this report addresses that. As a result a lot of internal support for community policing needs to be consistent with these strategies, whether it's people in human resource areas working a diversity and sensitivity issues bought respect to dealing with community as well as even internally training recruitment, first line supervision, et cetera, aren't on board with this being the central organizing principle of what we're doing. In policing. The department needs to be more accountable and transparent for more community policing. Like more departments, the Austin police department collects a lot of information. They report a lot of information about calls, [10:59:33 AM] about accidents, about citations, but it's only a anyway sent -- -- nascent, only in the early process of what is effective and what results are working for the community I they've recently created going down the road of an intelligence led policing kind of effort, hot spot policing where they're using realtime information to see that police officers are doing and measuring over a long period of time what's happening with crime in the community. That's what they need to do and we'll talk more of as well. District representatives are a great resource to the community, but consistency is lacking by region and even on an individual basis, based on who the district representatives are. So something needs to bring this together. So all this is well and good, but as we'll talk in a little bit you with address all the things we've talked about here. We've got into recommendations here -- 62 recommendations here, but 56 of them relate to the ways in which the department could do a better job of supporting, something engaged with the community, training it to have -- to be consistent with it, et cetera. But in patrol one of the most important things for community interaction is they don't have the opportunity to be as involved in the opportunity as you would like, besides responding to calls for current resources? So let's go with some of the support things in a little more detail. So it does start out with management and leadership and we start the project report with that. So the first thing the police department needs to do is develop a process in which community policing is defined? I gave you the policing and you can find one from another department and you can find that. You can use the one you have in policy, but it really should come up from within the community. What are the problems within the community? How do those vary within community and what kind of strategies do you need to do that? That's something they can do immediately. [11:01:37 AM] To work in each part of the city to get groups together of concerned stakeholders within the community. And define what the problems are that they need to address and the strategies they need to address in the communities. What comes out of that is a management accountability system for whatever community K community policing is and a more proactive, problem oriented policing organization should be. And there are metrics behind that. That will be evolutionary. It needs to first of all be defined by whatever the community thinks are those problems. But some of these things and some of them I've heard today mention to the effect of things like homelessness and mental health issues on resource needs that you need anywhere in municipal court, take time. So some of those measures, some of those performance measures, accountability measures are short-term process things, with long-term strategies for crime reduction, for making police officers more proactive and solving and identifying problems in the community, et cetera. They need to be reported internally and externally, not only to you, but to community. And needs the leadership to make it happen. When I refer to leadership I'm not just referring to the leadership here, but it goes all the way down through the department. First time supervisors are leaders. They mentor their people. Mid level supervisors, our managers are making their first line supervisors accountable for community service and for being productive, generating results in the community. So it's something that permeates the entire organization in terms of how you direct training for that, how you define what they should do, how you evaluate their performance in doing that. And looking at the results of those kinds of efforts. You mentioned some of the recruitment efforts. Part of the problem right now is we do have a really significant problem in the department. I think you mentioned [11:03:40 AM] that turnover rate has happened somewhere to seven percent, but vacancy rate is somewhere like 19%, more than twice that. So you really do have a problem. Some of that is the problem that all law enforcement agencies have today. It's very difficult to recruit for police officers anywhere for a variety of reasons. Close to full employment economy, large parts of the United States, so a lot of the people who would like to attract and bring to the police department aren't valuable. There are national stories that undercut that as well. And those are really some areas. And sometimes you get in the way of yourselves and that's where the police department is working. Three areas, how do you attract people, especially people who aren't normally thinking of police police department as a first step. How you facilitate their application and their testing process, and then how you make decisions. And right now in the Austin police department it takes about 18 months to fill a position. Most of the departments we work with it's closer to a year. So there's some decisions that you made, some practices that you have that make that six months get in the way. Some of that you want to do. You're doing more advanced officer training in the economy that most police officers do and that's a good thing, but in other ways in terms of making it easier to evaluate applications it takes a lot longer to make a decision. The backgrounding process takes a a lot log longer so they need to reduce that period of time because on its own if you took it from 18 months to something like 14 or 15 minutes, reduce 147 people today to something like 100, which is the number of people who are coming out of the academy in the next six months here. So that's really, really important. So in terms of attracting people you need to go through some non-traditional ways of attracting people who I [11:05:41 AM] heard social science kinds of backgrounds. A lot are focusing on that right now and not just doing the military recruitments, other police departments and those types of things. You need to promote not so much the warrior mentality. You need to promote other things like community engagement and solving problems to attract people. Those are some of the strategies that other departments are using. Once you get people in the department they need to berained more effectively in community engagement and community policing, proactivety and problem solving. And there is an important element in the police academy where they're doing that, they have an immersion program and get recruits involved with the community. But it's not supported elsewhere in the academy training. It's not supported in field training. It not supported with annual training that they have. When supervisors get promoted they don't specifically get anything in any of the things that we're talking about here. And lastly the community programs are really important. They could be integrated better. They'd be recently brought under the recruitment arm so it's a good if feeding mechanism for young people to eventually became police officers as become from receiving toys to becoming explorers to other aspects of the program to becoming eventually becoming a non-sworn person in the police department or eventually a police officer. So let's talk about field services right now. You've heard a lot over the last couple of years about how little time police officers have in the field to be proactive? And our numbers are a little bit different, but essentially right. Except it's even worse than that. So I think in the last couple of studies you've had and other efforts they've had, the police department has said anywhere from 17 to 19 percent of their time should be proactive. We feel it's 22 percent. But the problem is that [11:07:42 AM] that's a 24/7/365 average. And in the details, as we'll show in a little bit, that except for downtown and during the activity and during the non-activity hours of the day when most people are asleep, that police officers have essentially zero time to be proactive. Sometimes minus because they've got so many calls that they're holding that they can't respond to. Significant problem to do any of the things we just talked about in the last 10, 15 minutes. There's only limited opportunities to reploy staff to address that. District representatives, as they mentioned, provide a valuable link to the community, that's not possible with patrol resources and right now they are essentially your only proactive link in terms of sworn officers to the community. But as I mentioned, even among district representatives their roles in the community vary quite a bit. So I have a series of graphs and I'm not going to show you much except to eliminate it. What we've done here is we've defined a level of proactivety that is appropriate. I think the police department over the last couple of years has cited us maybe, national research organizations, other consulting firms, other cities, as saying a pro activity target of 35 to 45% of police officer time is the amount of time that you need to be effective. And they're largely right. The way it works is that until you get to levels like a third of your time that the time they have to be proactive happens in such small increments of time that they can't use it very effectively. It happens a minute or two or even seconds. And it's not really distributed in a way that it's like 20 minutes or an hour. You can do it that way once you start getting [11:09:42 AM] Mo proactive you can pull them off shift and have them work in a region-wide kind of way for certain problems, but that time doesn't exist. As you get lower as well, other things happen because they're always involved handling calls, they're always juggling what's a more call to respond to. So in the middle of a call they're having to cut it short to go to another call that may be higher priority. They're cutting time with the citizens short. Backup isn't there. It's an officer safety issue as well. All these things become an officer morale issue too because they feel, as evidenced by our interviews with them, and certainly in the employee survey, that this is important to them. That they want to be more involved in community, but they don't have many opportunities to do it. So what I've shown in this series of graphs here and I've taken each police region, and I've shown the number of hours that meet that 35% threshold by day of the week. It's only the green ones that represent this. You can see district 1, which is the central part of the city. Only -- what are those, four-hour time blocks two days of the week meet that threshold. In the northern part between two A.M. And six A.M. There's a couple of time blocks a couple a days of weeks. And then the same, 10:00 in the evening to 2:00 in the morning time block there. The east region, same kind of thing, early morning one time block, one day of the week. 10:00 P.M. To two P.M. A couple of time blocks in the middle of the week. South, same thing. Two A.M. To six A.M. Some time blocks, mostly throughout the week, and then a couple of time blocks in the late evening, early morning hours. So then there's downtown where your highest risk is, a lot of activity, but not a lot of calls to support the deployment there, but that's not the only reason why police officers are there. They're there for risk, they're there for when things do happen they require multiple officers. That's the one place [11:11:46 AM] where you have a special kind of proactive need that they're able to address. They're basically 69% of the time to be proactive, plus getting units from other parts of the city during high activity times, which helps make the other districts worse. And all the other districts are 13 to 15%, which again is no proactive time. So that's a significant issue. So let me get back to the why 35% and why not 40 or 45%? So we're just looking at patrol, the people assigned to deal with response for calls for service and are deployed in the field. There are other proactive enforcement units and capabilities within the department, district representatives are virtually 100% proactive. The metro tag team virtually 100% proactive. And you've got other capabilities, traffic, et cetera. So if we were to measure the total community pro activity it would be higher than that, but it wouldn't be in patrol. If we start from the principle that we want everybody to be involved in community policing, the biggest part of the department is a notable gap in that effort. So what were our recommendations here? So in order to meet that 35% threshold, you need something in the order of 66 police officers and eight corporals to be able to achieve that and that's above the number that you've been talking about earlier this morning. And we've shown how that would be distributed throughout the city. And it's important to note that because Austin is still growing, these needs increase every year. These increase by approximately, given the growth that we understand will be happening inside the city over the next five years by about 20 officers per year. So these are your needs for 2017 as we've projected. There are a variety of strategies you can employ to address that. Reduce the number of vacant positions will certainly help because you're above the Normal [11:13:47 AM] factor that you've allocated for that. Use of overtime, other sorts of approaches like that. But there are other things you can do. We've talked about civilianization here this morning. There are a variety of kinds of roles that civilians can play in a police department. The chief deputy, deputy chief of staff Manley, mentioned having civilians play leadership roles or programmatic roles in recruitment training, those types of things, and those are good roles for people to play because there is an active industry for police support service managers out there that can fulfill those roles very adequately. But there's two other kinds of roles that we've been recommending here and the police department has focused on one of them recently as well. One is that when you look at everything that district representatives do, they don't all require police officers to do. Some of the maintenance groups, even providing some programs, some of the code enforcement types of things that the district representatives do, like abandoned cars and things like that, those are things that non-sworn personnel can do and do in many departments in the state, for example, Arlington, for example. So we've recommended that start off with 12 of the district representatives be converted to community services officer classification and look at all the things that we do. We've got a two-page description or list of all the things that district representatives do and make a decision for yourselves with the community again of what things make sense. But we also recommend that you convert some of the resources that police officers -- some of the calls that police officers are responding to today to different ways of handling calls for service. This is an active field in police departments today of making decisions on what do we need to respond to. [11:15:48 AM] Unfortunately many police departments are saying we're going to stop responding to things and that's not acceptable to you. Or we're going to find different ways of responding. You've got a small telephone reporting unit for very, very minor types of things. Use it more. Have internet reporting if somebody is trying to get a police report for insurance purposes. An important strategy that we recommend is start out with a pilot program of community services officers who can respond to calls, minor calls for service in the field. They might be minor thefts. They might be some of the code enforcement things that patrol officers respond to, but work with the community on what would be a good set of things that they could respond to. Does that mean that you respond with a community services officer with someone calls with a 911 problem? No. You could triage that. Send a cfo. If they're not send a police officer or send both of them. But over a long period of time with public education and acceptance this is something that many, many police departments throughout the country have been doing. If you just start out with 12 csos you could raise productive active yet more by about two percentage points just by keeping the number of calls that they respond to lower and very different strategies to respond to requests in the community. So I also mentioned the district representative. I've also talked about that again that the police officers don't need to do everything so work with the community, work internally to do that. But an important part of this recommendation is that an important part of this concept of how you need to stop working in silos and bringing it altogether is there needs to be leadership specifically about these proactive enforcement units so we've recommended a lieutenant who the district representatives, sworn or civilian, report to, who make sure that the district needs are accounted for. The individual needs [11:17:48 AM] that vary by city as well as what should be the district representative program overall as well as to make it accountable internally and to the public. And to make sure that there's cross fertilization of ideas among these various programs and to make sure that they're all coordinated. So how will this all make a difference? Again, with appropriate time in patrol you can stop the disconnect between what much of the department is able to do in terms of community interaction. And what patrol officers are able to do. In community meetings and in the community survey we heard a lot about it's great, our district representatives are great, but the only time we see our patrol officer is he's driving down the street and passing us. That's people's most only interaction with the police department right now. Secondly the proactive and problem orienting policing be better coordinated once they have the analysis and working on the problems. The district representatives will be better coordinated at a more consistently high level within the community. That the support mechanisms within human resources, recruitment training, policy development and review within the department, performance evaluations and first line supervision will be better within the department. And the community will be brought into this more. I think it's important to talk about all of these things in the way you measure and account and report back to the community are really important, except for the extra people that we're talking about here, the police department has 100% control over implementation over these recommendations. More not. It's important that they start with these implementation and they have in many different areas as we've mentioned, as we've mentioned in terms of recruitment particularly kinds of techniques. Because you don't want [11:19:50 AM] to add people to an environment in which these kinds of disconnects occur. We're not talking about a long period of time. We're talking about something that could take a few months, but you need that fabric, framework in place as you start adding yet more resources than what you've already made the decision to add. I probably took more time than I should have, but I'll answer your questions now. Ms. Gallo? >> Gallo: Thank you so much for the report. I really do appreciate it. I've got a couple of questions. The page on how the study was connected, which is more or less the [indiscernible] Page. You talk about comparing Austin's community policing to six peer agencies. What were those agencies? >> It was Fort Worth, it was Arlington, it was San Antonio, so three in state, three out of state, Denver, Portland and San Diego. So most of those cities and their police departments we have personal familiarity with. We also use this less as a way to find communities in your population group that we can compare you with and get some comparative metrics. Arlington's not close to you in terms of size, but we tried to use this survey more aspirationally so we can find good ideas that we can use here. And some of the good ideas were things like the centralization of some sort of philosophy, the involvement of the community in the development of that. Some of the performance metrics. And to make you and the police department and the community comfortable, the use of civilians in various roles, including responding to calls for service. >> Gallo: Thank you for that clarification. If we looked at Fort Worth and San Antonio being more similar in size to Austin, [11:21:51 AM] and also being Texas cities, what were their -- what were their percentages as we talked about field proactivety? >> Oh. Much higher. We did a study for San Antonio a couple of years ago and we updated the numbers. So just as an aside here, so we didn't specifically ask that question in the survey because each agency counts it differently, as we found out here. But we know San Antonio quite well and it's about 36%. >> Gallo: Okay. And what about Fort Worth was the other one? >> It was higher than 30%, but I'm not sure exactly what it was. >> Gallo: Thank you. >> And their downtown, again, really skews it as well because they've got their entertainment district, which has a lot of resources dedicated to it. >> Gallo: Thank you. >> The variation is an important point so we could get an overall number like you have had here, but again the devil is in the detail and those graphs that I showed is the important part of looking at deployment and how many people you have. >> Gallo: I appreciate -- the graphs are really helpful. So the information for the graphs came from the department or came from your analysis of that, the police officers? >> We got dumps of hundreds of thousands of calls for service data dumps from the research and record service manage. , So directly from the cad system, and used that information ourselves to generate all of the analysis in the report. >> Gallo: Okay, super. And one last question. The analysis of the patrol staffing, where you were talking about the additional officers and corporals that are needed, I'm just curious when -- when the field productive active downtown is so partial -- and I realize the difference in the type of patrolling down there, but when it's so substantial in difference from the other areas, I'm just trying to understand why you would recommend four more officers there versus placing those four officers into the other areas of Austin? >> To do different kinds of things, but also to reduce [11:23:52 AM] the number of times that police officers from other police regions are coming downtown. See, they're factored into here. It's not just the people who are assigned to each one of those districts, but the net effect of how they're used everyday of the year. So we're trying to add people so that happens less. So -- >> Gallo: I understand that concept, but still it's taking -- >> All other districts are affected by the fact that downtown has these great needs. Downtown will always be higher because of all the people that are coming into town and the risk that that represents. So most of those people aren't generating calls, but you need to have people there who can handle them when they do. And because when they do happen they need a lot of officers. And you've got special purpose people there too. >> So that's what I'm trying to understand from your charge but it just looks like the percentages are really high already downtown and they're really low in the other parts of our community. So I'm just trying to understand the concept of still needing to place officers downtown when you have such substantial needs in other parts of the community. And I understand what you're saying that if you put more officers downtown it will keep other officers from coming from other areas, but it seems like the importance would be having the other officers in those areas increased first and then you deal with the issue of pulling officers from those areas. I was just curious. That was so substantially different in percentages and I'm surprised to still see a recommendation. >> And it will be. It's a different thing than the rest of the city, as you know. >> Gallo: So if you could not address all of those additional officers and you were looking at less numbers, would you still -- would you still allocate them in the percentages that you've shown here? >> There are a variety of decisions you could make. You could make the decision that I think you're -- >> Gallo: I'm asking you as a recommendation to all this. >> Sure. That would be one of the -- the district needs, the outlying districts to downtown are probably the greater need and that's why [11:25:53 AM] they have the greatest number of people recommended. >> Gallo: All right, thank you. >> And they're so far away from meeting the minimal understand of productivity. >> Gallo: Thank you. >> Zimmerman: I have a quick follow-up on that question if I could. To somebody that's not familiar with these statistics it just seems like a staggering number. We're talking nearly 70% when the other areas are down at 13 to 15. But I mean, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, I mean, are these consistent numbers with the other cities? >> Yes. Most large cities that have active entertainment districts, San Diego being one, San Antonio being another, Fort Worth being another, they all have downtown districts. And downtowns don't generate calls because they have different populations. During the daytime it's one population that doesn't have a lot of call generation to it associated with -- except for things like traffic and things like that. But at night with the influx of people, you've got the risk that you're trying to -- >> Zimmerman: I appreciate that. >> So the concept of self-initiated activity is really important in this too. You can't do many -- when we're saying problem solving we're talking about doing something with that uncommitted time. It isn't free time. It isn't time just to Rome around random -- roam around ran damly. It isn't time to be available for another call. It's pro productivity. >> Zimmerman: I'm going to leave this, but my point is I've talked to quite a few constituents that are concerned about the focus, the magnitude about the focus and attention downtown that leaves the suburbs unattended. And so I was just addressing the magnitude. If you're telling me it's the time in other subsidies, I bet the disturbs in other cities are equally unhappy, so much attention is being [11:27:54 AM] placed on downtown and so little on the suburbs. I appreciate the data. >> They are, but let me put this out there. This level of proactivety overall is the lowest we've ever seen. And we do this quite a lot. >> Thank you -- >> Casar: Thank you for your work with us, Dr. Brady. I really appreciate it and I remember when we authorized your contract I asked the chief if you were hopefully going to say some things that I didn't want to hear and some things that he didn't want to hear and I think you've achieved that so it's a good start. I appreciate your honest work on all of this. I'm most interested in the long-term recommendations in the report, but you're in a budget session and we've got a few weeks before we have to pass the budget. So my first question is going to be sort of the short-term, which is that while at once you have some critique around whether or not we have the -- a robust enough framework to actually execute the community policing that we want, while at the same time you have noticed a lack of resources as well in order to achieve that, in this given budget we don't actually have the city manager's recommendation does not have the 60 something officers. Instead it is about 30. Do you concur with that recommendation at this time or would you concur differently with what it is that we should do on a short-term basis this year or next year? >> Right. Well, in point of fact if you made the decision to hire 66 people it's not going to be until later in 2017 when those people are going to be there. So we're saying that the need exists now. The need for the 66 is our projected need for the next fiscal year. And it's going to grow by roughly 20 police officers a year for the next few years. And so I guess we're saying [11:29:55 AM] that, you know, police services is kind of an infrastructure that needs to be addressed. And you never heard from me or seen in the report anything about officers per thousand. This is really about what is a demonstrable need, what is an effective utilization for staff. So there are strategies to meet that shorter and over the longer term. One is that with the 100 people that are going to be coming on board, that will help raise proactivity right there. There are strategies such as overtime. Overtime in this department is extraordinarily low, I'll just say that. We normally see benchmarks of seven or eight percent of patrol officer budgets, patrol budgets rather, being dedicated to overtime. Yours is about three percent. So you've got some room to deal with that short-term. It doesn't take as much time to hire civilians or use a telephone reporting unit as it does to hire a police officer. There's that kind of strategy. So it's going to take you awhile. You can't do this overnight. You can't -- you can't get from zero -- 22% overall to 33% overnight. It's going to take least a couple of years. So there are strategies in place now and things you can do now to reduce the calls for service and add staff overtime. >> Casar: And so do you concur that the city management's recommendation is currently fine for this year or would you move that upwards or downward? >> Our recommendation is that 66 people and eight of the -- >> Corporals. >> -- Corporals are what the need is. >> Casar: And I had one follow-up question, which is a point that councilmember Garza brought up recently, which is that -- it was two [11:31:56 AM] different points. One the alarm systems and two the amount of time spent on arrests that could result in citations. Could you look at any of that for our department or have you seen that be utilized to any success in other cities? >> Yes, definitely. So the chief is right, the verified response issue is very controversial across the country. It's certainly controversial for the alarm industry and it's controversial for people who have alarm that get a delayed response or no response as a result of that. So most of the communities that I've worked with are modifying that and it's not a strict no response or delayed response. You have a strong alarm ordinance that has permitting and inspection and I think you have some of these in place like Progressive fines and likes like that for problems, but over time you want to get the alarms down. And have policies for recurring and information in place so that for recurrent false alarms that you don't drop everything and get there in two minutes. So on the other thing about citation, there is more things you can do in Texas law in order to reduce the number of arrests, but it's still a call. It reduces the amount of time on the call and they should be encouraged to do that as well as some of the other operational things we were talking about like telephone reporting unit, use and things like that. >> Just as a point of information, we do have telephone reporting and we do have online reporting so we do both. And we do have a cite and release program that other departments around us aren't using, however I think with the new da coming in to Williamson county they're going to start citing more and following our lead on that. >> Thanks. [11:33:56 AM] >> Mayor Adler: I have a question. From everything I've heard including councilmember Renteria, the concept of community policing and having the time seems to be real important for our city and not just in the% discussions in our city, but the discussions going on in other cities. And conversations that came out of the work that was done by the president and his 21st century community policing. And it seems from where we sit that we need to move into that direction on how we do that. It's how we get from here to there that I'm having trouble with and that I need help to be able to figure that out. You have analyzed the history from the data from the -- from the data with respect to how much available time there is for our officers on the street to be able to do the community policing. And I think that's real important. The work that you did, my understanding is that the concept of community policing goes beyond just staffing issues. And it's the kinds of things that you've talked about that I understand our leadership has embraced because I've heard them speaking out in community groups and it's first and foremost a philosophy. It's dealing with organizational strategies, you said. It's a systemic use of partnerships. It's focusing on problem solving techniques. And it's being proactive. And those things, with the recommendations that you've made, involve many things in addition to staffing issues. And I'm real supportive of all those. [11:35:56 AM] And I'm also supportive of making sure we have the right staffing so let's focus on the staffing issue for just a second. You've looked at the officers that are on the street and you've said you need to add more than 66. It's 66 plus eight. 74 officers on the street in order to be able to have the bandwidth. We've heard testimony that we have at this point 147 positions that are vacant, but because of the advances that we're making in recruitment and training we're going to be bringing a lot of those officers online and on the streets. Which I think is great. Weaved heard there's an attrition rate, four to five officers a month. So of that 147 units if we were to put those out, it sounds like 50 to 60 of those need to come out just to replace officers that we're going to be -- to be losing. So if I take 60 -- so five a month. If I take 60 off of that I have 57 positions coming in that we've funded that are vacant at this point. Plus the budget the manager gave us brings in 33 more people. So that's 87 from the vacancy level, 33 people with this budget, I count that to be 120 new officers out separate from meeting attrition rates. Could that meet the need for the 66 additional officers you're talking about? >> In part. So again the vacancy rate is twice what the turnover rate is. You're taking a long time to fill those positions for a variety of reasons. [11:37:57 AM] So you will always have vacant positions and we calculated that in the net availability in our analysis of how many police officers you need. The problem is that you haven't done a very good job of filling those positions, so 147 under more Normal turnover and replacement program would cut that -- it's going to be a little different here because of the way you treat the academy, but you will always have 70 or 80. So that's figured into this. So the people who are going to be coming out of the academy in October and in January, realizing that over the next six-month that other people will be leaving at four or five a month kind of a rate, gets you down to our starting point, the Normal turnover and replacement value for the people that you need to have taken that 35%. >> Mayor Adler: So on top of the efforts to fix the - - so on top of the efforts to fix the recruiting and the training, after we've filled those positions, after the 147 goes down, you said 70 or 80 number. >> We have figured something more like a five or six percent vacancy rate than your current much higher one. So over time that's where you need to be, otherwise the problem is worse. >> Mayor Adler: So the number, the 66 takes into account the additional 100 coming out of the cadet school? >> It does. >> We have a budget that is -- again, I want to do the community policing. I'm trying to figure out what the path is in order to be able to get there. So we have a budget right now that's 75% public [11:40:01 AM] safety. If we were to bring on -- I mean, I don't know what the Normal -- what the benchmark is for percent of budget that's public safety. About 70%. If we're talking about going above 70% to do this is there a corresponding -- if we're setting priorities, if our priority needs to be community policing, how do we do community policing and still have the appropriate amount of our public safety budget that's in line with where the public safety budget needs to be in order to be able to ensure that we maintain the wonderful work that we are doing with respect to crime in this city, but also add for us the community policing component that appears to be and sounds to be the way we need to go. How do we get from here to there to do that? Have you looked at the bunt overall? And I ask -- at the budget overall? And I ask that question because in part this is a council that I think has been really supportive of public safety and police. As I look at what the increases have been in past years it's just over a 40-million-dollar increase four years ago, $42 million increase. Three years ago this council increased the budget by $40 million and then this year coming in since we've come in with the body -- with the body cameras and the like we're increasing the budget by $70 million. And that's before we've done the additional officers with respect to community policing. And I want to deliver the community policing to the community because that sounds like the right thing to do. I just need help figuring out how we get from here to [11:42:03 AM] there. >> There's at least a couple of questions. One is how you get there. The other is what you are dedicating in whatever resources you spend on public safety, you're getting what you want out of it. So we didn't look at the entire city budget. We just didn't do that. Because we didn't want to go in that direction. We wanted to say what's the need and what's an appropriate approach to community policing? What are you doing it, what can you do better about it? And it really does vary quite a bit because some cities have utilities, others don't, so the percent really does kind of vary. In terms of what you're doing -- so it gets back to what do you get for whatever you're spending and what are you going to get out of these additional people if it's just the ones that you've authorized over the last year or so plus these other ones? So that's where the accountability and transparency and performance management need to come in so that they're not going to respond to more calls. Those are given. They don't generate the calls. But they will generate officer initiated activity that if it's defined in advance in terms of the problems they're addressing there will be results of that. So what are the results? Ultimately it's things like reduction of crime and community satisfaction. Can you measure those things, but like the discussion about crime trends here, it doesn't -- it doesn't go like that. It goes like this. So it will vary so you have to look at those things over a long period of time. So short-term over the next couple of years it's really process oriented things that will ultimately lead to effectiveness measures. First of all, you need as we've described to involve the community, in terms of defining what they want to know to know that they're feeling safe. And develop some performance measures around that as well as some of the things that we've talked about. So some of that is process about how do we involve the community. [11:44:03 AM] The kinds that we're looking at. How are we using the time that this proactive time that we have to be directed to community problems. And then long-term what is going ton the result of that. So that's an important part of it. So how do you get there is a process over the next I would think six months that deals with the first 100 pages of this report or the president's 21st century policing report and comes up with specified approaches to fixing those issues. >> Mayor Adler: But you're telling us the plan to get to community policing and I want to do that. But what I'm trying to figure out is from a budget standpoint, from an overall budget standpoint, how do we do that in a way that is sustainable in the community? So if the someone% of our budget that's spent on public safety is the right amount to be spent on public safety, how do we spend those dollars? And should we be prioritizing community policing? This budget has us adding over 40 new people in E.M.S. And I'm sure there are really strong, good reasons for us to do that I'm just trying to figure out is what we're saying to the community in Austin, Texas, we have to spend more than the benchmark with respect to public safety because we have a challenge or an issue or a goal different from other communities. Or if not, and this is what we should be spending on public safety, then what is the appropriate way for us to be able to spend that monies in a way that gives us what we want. And that's the help that I'm looking for. >> If I can sort of say what I said earlier differently and you guys pitch in too. So we're not saying that the benchmark is a certain amount of expenditures. We would say that the benchmark is making a difference in the community. And right now they don't, period. There are other things that they can do -- >> Mayor Adler: I think [11:46:04 AM] the question probably isn't so much for you. For me you've made the case on community placing. So I guess my question now is for the police or for the manager to say how do I do that? How does this council do that in a sustainable way? Relative to everything else that we have in budget, relative to whatever the appropriate level is for us to spend in public safety. You've made your case. How do we do that in a way that is sustainable. And I say that only because this is a council that I think has demonstrated a commitment to public safety. We've added more public safety spending in this city in our time in this office than, best as I can tell, any council has in recent times with everything that we've approved. I don't know if we're putting the money in the wrong place or if there were other higher priorities. I don't know -- in part because we get a request and we act on it. We get a request and we act on it. Maybe it needs a more holistic look. Maybe rather than reacting to requests as they come in, because they're all important things and in almost every case we've approved the request as they come in, maybe we need more of a global look to somebody to take call of those requests and then give us direction as a council as to what we do. It's not so much a question for you as I think it is for the chief and city manager. >> I think one reminder that we have to remind everybody and you have been supportive, and you've been supportive the last couple of years. I'm concerned about moving the -- the center to our budget is in the last couple of years the city has moved all the expenses for public safety in terms of technology and things of that nature, which is a significant cost -- what was [11:48:04 AM] it? 12.8% that has been moved into the budget. What historically has been moved somewhere else is in our budget. So it looks like there's an additional 12.8% and it's just an accounting difference. So you are committed into investing, but just in terms of total dollars there's just some of the expenses have been moved from the different departments into public safety and that's one of the things I worry about with continuing to move things. It looks like we're growing when in fact one of the things that Dr. Brady said that I think is important is that this is the lowest uncommitted time he's seen not as a result of lack of commitment, but our city manager and our city councils and mayors have had, a significant and sustained support for public safety. But it takes time. Everybody is talking about what is community policing? And I think Chaz Moore, a young activist that we know, I think he said community policing to me is in the middle of the night at three A.M. When I need a cop to come to my door, that patrol officer, I want to have had met that patrol officer and met that patrol officer, and he said that so eloquently. He doesn't want a stranger to come to his door. He wants a relationship. In order for patrol officers and police officers to build relationships it takes time. It takes time to be proactive and I think that's the conversation that you all started. >> Mayor Adler: And I'm convinced that we need to be more proactive and do community policing for that reason, for all the conversations. I'm trying to figure out how to get from here to there? How does a council like us -- >> Pay for it. >> Mayor Adler: And that's the question. It may be that in most cities the benchmark is about 70%, but in Austin, Texas it needs to be 75% for public safety. But if that's the case then that's a conversation that we should have and the community should understand why it is that we should be above the benchmarks for [11:50:04 AM] public safety for whatever -- for the goals or the reasons, whatever it is, but to have that more holistic conversation about what we spend on public safety I think would be helpful. Do you want to address that? >> Yeah. I think one of the things that's striking to me about the conversation is that it doesn't acknowledge the fact that in terms of community policing at some point in the city's past it was defined by somebody -- for many years, even trier to me, been saying that we have been -- part of what we do in our police department is we conduct community policing. You know, and either that's been the case or it hasn't. I think it has. I think the question is sort of a -- it's complicated. There's a level of service issue associated with that and all of the other elements that our consultant spoke to. We heard the chief talk about, you know, crime data and the fact that it's going down. I mean, it really is a very complex equation because there are all of these different factors and all of these variables and therefore I think it does require and tell a more holistic conversation that I don't know that you can really get to that kind of conversation substantively in a way that allows you to make specific determinations about investments relative in this particular budget, but it is a conversation that you need to have. Where are we today in regard to all of those elements? And when we think about community policing and the philosophy that it is, to what extent is what we're doing matching up with those things that the good consulting characterized as the definition of community policing. I think that conversation measured against what the [11:52:05 AM] philosophy of community policing is begins to give us, you know, some direction about -- and relative to what austinites think as well. He said that. Begins to give us context and the kind of guidance for where we need to make investment, targeted investments that speak to the values and the principles that are all a part of community policing. We have to decide within that philosophy what's important to us? What's important to austinites. And that's a conversation that's a little bit larger than what we have time for -- what you have time for in the course of this budget process. But it is a critical conversation. Short of that then we're taking stabs at it. We're -- we're taking a run at it. We're throwing much at it. Doing it that way isn't the best way to optimize the tax dollars that we're getting from austinites. So I guess I just don't want it to get lost that community policing, as a philosophy and as part of the mission of the Austin police department didn't just show up today. You know, quite frankly, they have been on the path and as the chief said, it takes time. As I heard the mayor pro tem use in regard to the special program, it is iterative too. And as we go through the process, as we have conversations at this level and in the community, and as we implement new things, we learn from that. And we validate our learning and the way we do that because the learning may suggest that we need to do something differently. We may need to make an investment tomorrow that we're not making today. [11:54:05 AM] So at the very least it's calculus, for crying out loud. It's complicated and it's going to take time and it requires these tough conversations in the community, amongst all of you with the police department. And it does, mayor, I agree with you. It has implications do the larger budget and fiscal picture. I talked about at the outset of this presentation. Public safety in most cities takes up the lion's share of the revenue, whether it's property tax or income tax in some city and even other revenue sources, all of it. And the rest of the organization that exists within the context of the general fund gets funded by other sources of revenue. That's the case here. On the other hand you have to make intelligent decisions. You can't be a prisoner from a financial standpoint. And that's again why the kind of substantive, thoughtful, deliberate, all-inclusive conversation that I'm trying to describe is essential and it's the kind of guidance and will provide the context for making the kinds of decisions that you're searching so hard for today. >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Gallo. >> Gallo: I think it's also the expenditure of funds that is able to get the coverage and the officers that we feel like we need throughout this entire community. But it's also looking at revenue opportunities to be able to increase the funding ability to do that. As we've talked many times over the past year about Austin is blessed with the opportunity to have largeful festivals and events and a very robust tourist economy here, but those entities and those functions pull a lot of our public safety resources into them. [11:56:06 AM] And I think it is time for us to start the conversation of making sure that those events pay their cost for the additional public service because, as we pull and as the police department tries to cover those adequately, what's happening is that it is pulling the resources from the rest of our community. And so the benefit of having those and having the income that comes into this town from those is not adequately being spread throughout the rest of our community. And so I think it is as part of the budget process the time to start talking about -- we started the conversation yesterday, the police department was able to provide some resources to do it from reserves, but once again they're providing those resources from the resources that should be used to do what what your report said. I think as part of this budget we need to talk about that and we need to look for those additional revenue streams that can come in from the different events that really tap into our public service. >> Can I add something to that? Many communities, many cities do that. Either influence hotel motel kind of sales taxes for public safety or public safety special taxes either to support general law enforcement or high demand areas like an entertainment district, Fort Worth is one. I think Arlington is another. It is very common strategy. >> Mayor Adler: Councilmember Zimmerman? >> Zimmerman: Thank you, mature. Mayor. Let me go back to this request. I always need a date and version number on the document. No date, no version number. And there are no page numbers. But let me refer to the fourth page here that had a definition from the doj -- >> I don't know which one is the fourth page? >> Zimmerman: I bet you do. And I'm going to ask -- there it is. And let me -- I think this is very pertinent to our conversation from a high level policy discussion, which is really what we do, right? We don't micromanage as a city council. We talk about high level [11:58:07 AM] policy. I want to read from the Dallas police chief David brown who I think said something incredible in a time of tragedy in the Dallas shootings. He says "We're asking cops to do too much in this country. Every societal failure we've put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. Here in Dallas we've got a loose dog problem. Let's have the cops chase the loose dogs. Schools fail, let's give it to the cops. It's too much to ask. And here's the point, policing was never meant to solve all those problems." Now I want to go back to the definition. Case in point, the last part of this definition, which I think is terrible, it says the fear of crime. Seriously, we're going to put on our police the burden of stopping or addressing the fear of crime? Fear -- you can have a rational, emotional fear of crime, but there are hundreds of thousands of definitions of the fear of crime. What one person in this community is afraid of someone else is not. In other words, the department of justice, but whoever did this terrible definition has put something in front of us that is perfectly not measurable and not achievable. It is impossible to come up with an accurate measurement, a benchmark, if you will, for the fear of crime. It's something that cannot be measured and cannot be benchmarked. So here's my solution to this and I've said this before. This can be fixed by looking at measurable metrics and then working your way backwards to the philosophy and the strategy. For instance, we could have said right where it says proactively address we could say the resolution of 80% of property crimes. 98% of sexual assaults. 90% of home sides. Some measurable [12:00:10 PM] objective where we could say we're making progress or not. We need to come up with reasonable metrics. We need to consult with APD because we know how hard it is to resolve some of these property crimes, but I'm pleading with my councilmembers, please, please as a body setting policy, we must set measurable metrics. And be reasonable in our expectations and stop asking the police to do what they cannot do. It's not the police department's problem or responsibility to stop crimes from happening. That is a dangerous, really a dangerous thing for us to demand to say, hey, police department, you need to stop crime from happening. You need to stop people from being fearful of crime. It's a dangerous thing to ask the police to do. The police are our last line of defense against the dangerous -- our police are playing defense, don't ask them to playoff fence. >> Mayor Adler: Councilmember Casar and then -- >> Casar: So the vast majority as you noted of the report are things that the department could implement themselves a more rebust policing strategy and management strategy and accountability so that if these extra reserves are infused, the uncommitted time produces something that we all want and we can be sure it does that. Help me think through the ordering. The mayor just articulated the challenges on the council side of committing those resources. We want to commit resources to everything all the time, but at which point do we feel like we would be ready to know that that community policing and uncommitted time is going to do what we want it to do. Talk me through the order, when you have all these [12:02:11 PM] recommendations, how long -- how many of those recommendations do you feel need to be in place before we know that it's worth investing those levels of resources? >> Well, many of the things that we've recommended here have already started. Certainly as it relates to recruitment. Others, such as training, evaluations that stress community policing concepts, an in-service training program, management supervisory training, et cetera, those are the kinds of things that can take three to six months even if you get lots of input from within the department. You need to start from just what Mr. Zimmerman was mentioning and what we said in our presentation and our report. You've got to start with the community to develop an appropriate philosophy that includes things like expectations that come out of it, achievable expectations, but involving them in the definition of what it is and what they expect to get out of it so that ultimately they do feel safe, which you can't really measure directly and the police department is only partially responsible for having an impact on that. But starting a process and getting the community involved in helping to define what it is that they are participating in as that relates to policing themselves is where you start. So this is a process that could take three to six months. I think it's that achievable. If you all accept the general direction of all of this, you would start a process immediately of having the department develop a strategy or a plan to address the things that you feel comfortable with in some reasonable time frame. Maybe it's three months, maybe it's nine months. But it's shorter term rather than longer term for everything that's in that first hundred pages. >> Casar: So you think in those first hundred pages what we would want to see is check back with the department about which recommendations they are moving forward with and within three months or six months, just like our other departments hear about -- >> That's the beginning of an accountability process. Once you decide what it is among these recommendations that you can live with and [12:04:13 PM] makes sense for Austin. >> Casar: My last question before you skip town, we focused a bit on the disparity of downtown versus other parts of the city given the high-risk environment downtown, but within your report did you take a look at other geographic disparities relative to the amount of community policing time based on risk and other places in the city? You know, obviously in my own district there are some communities that suffer really highly disproportionate amount of violence and property crime. How much of that did you find and -- or did you have any strong conclusions on geographic disparity other than the downtown issue? >> The other areas exist in different parts of the city that results -- has impacts on proactivity needs and results as well. So we didn't provide many of the heat map types of things we looked at. The police department is doing that kind of thing as well, so you can readily see where those areas are. But so just as is a problem looking at proactivity on a citywide basis 24/7 and getting a number 22% or 17 or 19%, whatever it is, it's the same thing within a police region that there are differences within each of the areas they've defined for themselves. That's part of what they need to look at in terms of their deployment and they actually are because they are doing hot spot kind of orientation in terms of data reporting and deployment as well. >> Just remember, just as a reminder because I think downtown get beat up because there's so many cops there, those people don't live there. He this come from all over the city, the Staten the country. The workload being created downtown is coming from all over the place. And you know, and we've got to be real careful, you know, we had that incident the other day a shooting, a tragic death and we just have to be real [12:06:15 PM] careful that we don't have more -- you are going to see a watershed moment for us where we're going to lose the vibrancy of our entertainment district. We have to keep that entertainment district and the entire city safe. >> Casar: Thank you, chief. >> Houston: Thank you, mayor. And again, thank you for allowing us to have this great conversation. The reason police officers are asked to do so many different things is -- is because of so many disparities in various communities and the fact that we don't acknowledge that. We are called to do more than keep the peace. You are called to enforce laws because of disparities in employment, holelessness in many -- hopelessness in many communities because of inadequate training, lack of education that will prepare them for the new economy that we operate here in Austin. So there are many social issues that you all are called to respond to. And so with that in mind, I understand councilmember Zimmerman's angst, but I'm willing to go with you to the legislature to ask them to restore some of the millions of dollars of funding that they've cut over the years for the same kinds of things that people are dealing with on the street for public health, for behavioral health, for substance use and abuse, lack of beds for adequate treatment. Those things were taken away from the state and so now our cities are being forced to respond to those social needs and the first people on the street are our police officers. I'm willing to go with you. Maybe we can see if we can get that on the legislative agenda for January to see if we can get some of that state funding restored the the people who are supposed to be having those first contacts with people so that our police can do the other kinds of property [12:08:17 PM] crimes that you mentioned already. So that's my ask and I'm willing to go with you on that. >> Mayor Adler: Yes, Mr. Renteria. >> Renteria: Thank you for this report. If you can -- I want to understand how the -- you have one here under district rep, the tasks and duties assigned, many can be performed by community safety officers. Can you tell me what kind of those tasks that you -- that you saw that you -- that can be done by -- >> Certainly things relating to maintenance and support for community groups in terms of getting them information, in terms of arranging meetings and meeting places, those kinds of logistical things. They can assist the police officers in developing plans for community policing that would involve other people within the department. They can do research, they can respond to problems that come to district representatives through council or community groups or other mechanisms that are maybe not cries but code enforcement types of things. They can do a wide variety of things like that. >> Within the report you start on page 170 will identify the duties of our district representatives and the ones that matrix felt were consistent with civilians versus those that require police. So starting on page 170 you will get a really good view of their analysis. >> It's two pages of tasks, but they basically fall out in those areas. And I mean I think that even a conservative orientation about what a trained civilian paraprofessional can do would say that about a third of those duties could easily be transferred by a civilian, to a civilian. >> Renteria: Thank you. I just wanted to make sure that the community knew [12:10:18 PM] exactly what we were talking about on those tasks so that they can actually go out and look at it also. Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Houston. >> Houston: I have one more question. This is for the chief. On page 465 of the budget document under performance measures -- >> Okay, I'm there. >> Houston: Okay, you are there. It says percent of and it has various demographics listed of cadets in the academy and they have no goals, no goals. I'm wondering what happened there. And I guess my concern is because on KXAN the other morning there was some -- hold on just a minute. There was some information about another public service entity who surveyed their -- their members, and one of the things they said was there was too much emphasis on diversity. I'm just trying to make sure that this no goals here is not saying the same thing that there's too much emphasis on diversity. >> No, absolutely not. Our goal, councilmember, is to be reflective of the community that we serve. I'm very proud of the fact as it relates to the Austin police department we are pretty close on those numbers. As we've discussed before on diversity, diversity matters. We have to be reflective but not just at the entry level but throughout all the ranks in the organization. >> Houston: Why is there no goals? >> I'm not sure why that's not on there. We have an internal goal in terms of diversity that all the departments want to be reflective of the community. I'm not sure why it's not in there, but I I would be happy to [12:12:23 PM] add it in there. >> This is one probably for H.R. To respond to. My guess, and not one who usually guesses, potentially we can't have goals, if you will, for minority hiring. So I think we have as a target to be as the chief says is reflective of the community, but -- >> Houston: So if we change that as targets. I just think it's a bad visual especially after the last union had it's too much emphasis on diversity, no reaching out to make sure that our police department is representative of the community that it serves. >> And I think if you talk to our union, they have a much different view. They absolutely support diversity and we're very unified as a police department not just in terms of race and gender but along sexual orientation and religion and all the other things that make us unique individuals. >> Houston: That just struck me. It's visible and it says something to the people who don't hear you make that comment. >> Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: So just to close for me, I appreciate the report. I like like what it says. I really think that the emphasis on having our community in our police, our police in our community feels so right, but I will also reemphasize the fact that even before the report came out when I talked to other folks in other cities, mayors in other cities and they talk about the relationship between their police and their community, we were already doing a lot of things right in our community in terms of our community being engaged with our officers and our officers being engaged with our community. I think this emphasis, you know, it takes that to another level and I think that's really important thing to do, especially in light of the national conversation, but I think we were already doing things and I think that the personality of the leadership [12:14:24 PM] we have in our city lends itself to that. For me it's not so much being sold on that concept philosophicallier an -- or all the things that can be implemented in here, implemented without staff increases, but if in order to make this work on the street we need to free up more time for officers to do that, I need help figuring out what the path to that is that is in fact sustainable over time in relationship to everything else that we're doing. That's the additional help that I need. Is your light on because you wanted to talk? >> Garza: I'm sorry hi to step out and somebody might have already made this point, but I feel like -- there's two conversation, community policing, do we need more police officers, and I think what this report -- because last time we had this conversation it was we need more police officers so we can do community policing. I feel like this report said we're not doing community policing right, but you still need more officers. So I mean that's the take-away I take from this. And I think that you know, I think that being said, I hope -- and I believe the report, we need more officers, and the report says we need more than what is actually being asked for. I just hope that all the things that don't cost anything that were recommended in the report are going to be used even though we can't use -- maybe we can't use community policing as the buzz word to get more police officers, we understand we need them now more with the numbers and the active time, I just hope -- and the report did mention -- it has to come all the way down from the leadership saying this is important, here's are some cost neutral things weapon implement that don't cost anything as we continue this [12:16:25 PM] process because community policing, however we decide to define that, is important. >> I think if you look at the last nine years I've been here, plus nine years and the mayor pro tem as in-- been part of that we have always been stewards of the taxpayer dollars and always worked diligently, despite the fact in terms of staffing we've always been below. No matter what report we commissioned, we've always been short significant number of officers. We've never backed away from the philosophy of community policing, the philosophy of respect and more importantly the million ossify of being stewards of that budget dollars is really critical when you have all these competing interests. I'm proud of the fact that prior to 2007 on my arrival we used to be over budget all the time and to this day, knock on wood, we have yet to go over budget. And despite the staffing challenges, we have reduced crime year in and year out with this year to date being the exception. We look forward to looking for those opportunities. I want to thank Dr. Brady and his team and the city council for actually commissioning this report and I look forward to continuing the conversation. >> Houston: Mayor, one more thing. I would be remiss if I didn't say what you all already know. Is one of the concerns in the community about community policing is that the majority, the vast majority of the police don't live in the community. And so their community is seen someplace else. It's not this community, it's someplace else. And so the people in the community continue to be concerned. I know we can't do anything about it, but I would be remiss if I didn't bring that up is that they don't see them as part of their community. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. And I give thanks to the police department too. They really helped make this an easy process for us and the success that I hope it is. Thanks. >> Mayor Adler: Great. Ed, let's talk schedule and timing here for the day. [12:18:25 PM] We spent a lot of time on police, which I think is appropriate given the size of our budget that police represents. We have five other reports to -- front of us scheduled, ems, municipal court, fleet services, communications and technology management and building services. It is now 12:20. Do we want to break for lunch and then come back and try to hit the five of those? Do we want to come back at 1:00, come back in 40 minutes to start up that presentation or is that too fast. Is 1:15 better? Mr. Zimmerman. >> Zimmerman: A vote to break now. I'll do whatever the group wants but I would like to break now if we could. >> Mayor Adler: 1:15. Does that work for staff? >> I think that will work. I think we'll five the next five will go much faster than police did. >> Mayor Adler: We'll break then and come back at 1:15. Thank you. [12:25:14 PM] [Music playing] : [12:55:53 PM] [♪Music playing♪] >> [1:31:33 PM] >> Mayor Adler: Let's go ahead and get started with E.M.S. >> Thank you, mayor. We're very excited about presenting to you our 2017 proposed budget. Your E.M.S. System is a highly dedicated system with great people in it. Very, very strongly devoted to providing great care to our community and being where we need us any time that we're needed for anyone who calls us. Next slide here. I'm trying to get that next slide up. >> Pool: We can look at it here if you want. >> Awesome. You're in charge of this then. That's delegation, you just saw it. Great. So for our department overview on our next slide for performance, we do have very good job on performance. One of the accomplishments that we're especially proud of that I wanted to really highlight for you is that we received the gold award from the American heart association as a cardiac care recipient. And what that means is that our medical staff are really good at quickly identifying somebody who is having a particular type of myocardial infarction. It's called a stmi. That's something where they have to look at the cardiac rhythm and look at the changes in the cardiac rhythm and needs intervention of a lab. Ultimately we move our patients to the will be very quickly, they get rapid intervention. And another thing we got is an Emmy this year. I didn't know E.M.S. Could do that, but we did. On our actual performance, percent of -- >> We've got a question. >> Pool: Tell us about the Emmy. >> So as you know, E.M.S. Has been working really, really hard to expand our recruitment. We're working really hard to try to improve our diversity and we really needed to reach as many people as possible. So we put together a [1:33:35 PM] recruiting video and we included members from all over our department. And the staff here at city hall actually put it together for us. They directed it. We starred in it. It was a little of fun. But they submitted that for an Emmy and it competed against agencies from all over the U.S., I think. And we were selected as one of the winners. We you can come to the office and see it in a little glass bubble we have it. And it's a lot of fun. It's really great. >> Houston: Could you send us a link? >> Pool: Send us the video. And quit hiding the light under the bushel. >> You have to apply, though. So as I was saying, the response time thing has been really good for us. On priority one calls we've exceeded our goal. Our goal 90% in less than 10 minutes, but successfully we hit it at 91, 92. We always exceed that. And that's a push goal. There are agencies throughout the U.S. That would just do anything they could to try to be that good and responsive as we are. But we managed to do that. And when I first got here in, oh, 2006, the department had never achieved anything higher than 83% on that performance measure. But we did a lot of work to redistribute our resources to become more attentive to what we were doing, and we met our response time goal within three years and we've met it ever since. So we've stayed on top of that. Medical priority dispatch, protocol compliance, is really important to us because everyone who calls 911 gets treated the same. And we use a national standard protocol to manage all of those patients. We exceed. We're at 99%, which we're really, really proud of that. Our goal is 90%, but we also have push goals in our organization, and that is meet or exceed where you are today. So with the 99%, we received our reaccreditation in the communications center and that's very exciting [1:35:35 PM] for us as well. Patients in cardiac arrest from cardiac causes delivered to an appropriate medical facility with the return of circulation, that is something that we're getting better and better and better at. That's a small number of patients, but we're up to 30% on that. We're estimating that in fy'16 we're going to hit 13.5% so we're beginning to exceed our goal now. That means once our medical director gets his feet on the ground we'll have to sit down and have a visit about increasing that performance goal for us, and that's something that we work really, really hard on with a lot of training and a lot of community participation. We train five to seven thousand people every year on how to do compression only cpr, which is a huge effort for us. On percent of priority one through five calls that we respond to on time, we're at 95.8 and 96%. That's really high. That again is one of those things that many communities would really, really like to achieve, and we're there. Percentage of patients who are satisfied or very satisfied with E.M.S. Customer service is up above 95%. We were at 97.5 and at this point we're at 95.3 with the current satisfaction rate. And what we do is within 48 hours of the time that we discharge them to the hospital, we get in touch with them and we ask them how we did and what we can do better. So we use that on a daily basis to stay in touch with our patients and get their feedback as quickly as possible. We've had a percent of reduction of E.M.S. Transports to hospitals of the part of the community that's enrolled in our community health paramedic program. So we have -- in this piece of the program these are usually the high utilizing patients. We have 221 of them registered in that and we've reduced that by 152 calls. So over 50% of the calls that we would have experienced with an ambulance we have now [1:37:36 PM] diverted to our community health medic program. And what that means is that we connect them to clinics or we find them the pharmacology that we get their medications delivered to them. We provide education for them on how to check their blood glucose and things like that so they don't have to call E.M.S. As often. So this is not a diversion program where we don't -- where we try to avoid patient care. We actually get up and become more proactive and provide the care they need before it becomes an emergency, and it's working. >> Houston: Mayor? May I ask a question? How does one know to get registered and what are the parameters? >> So the way that we do that is any time that someone starts calling numerous times to the 911 center we'll dispatch a community health paramedic along with the ambulance. And the ambulance will do its care like it always does because sometimes they are having emergencies. But if for any reason we detect that they need other type of support the community health paramedic does an assessment and enrollment process. Many times they register them with M.A.P. And our community medics can do that now directly. They don't need to refer them, they can do the enrollment. And then we connect them to clinics and other services, food services and anything else they need. >> Houston: That's great, thank you. I'm not sure some of the folks knew that, but you do it based upon 911 calls. >> Yes. And we also have another program that we're working with, the central health on. And this is part of their innovation grant. They funded us to work with them. We have I think it's 500 or so enrolled, and we have -- we've now reduced transports to hospitals for returns of the same thing 95% of the time. So that is huge. If you're talking about really making a difference in somebody's health, take care of them in their home with their family, avoid removing them to the hospital and putting them in that foreign environment and save the health care system lots of dollars. So as a demonstration [1:39:37 PM] grant, this is really proving that it works. So this is one of the areas that we want to expand on in the future. >> That is our community health program, community health paramedic program. >> Tovo: So the second initiative you were talking about is also the community health paramedic program. >> Yes. >> Tovo: Thank you. The next slide is uses and sources of funds. We are a general fund department so all of our funds come from the general fund. In 2017 as we're proposing 84.4 million total budget. Some of the drivers for that are insurance costs that are increasing, the increasing in staff that we're requesting for the conversion to the 42 hour work week M analyzing funding for the ambulance and some pay increases to our labor contract. There's one thing here that I should point out and that is the increase in civilian staff to 126. That includes 45 civilian cadet positions that don't require any funding. Those are positions that we fund as we need from vacancy savings and then when we bring a cadet in and they graduate, we transfer them into their regular position so there's no need to fund that although the headcount increases, there's no funding increase with that. >> Most of our -- as I said most of our money goes into operation. So that means that we're spending most of the dollars that we get out of the fund to respond in ambulances and to staff our stations and to provide direct services. So not a lot of money spent in other areas. And we maintain a fairly flat organization in order to achieve that. Don't grow a lot. And we do that on purpose. I think there's something that's not on this slide that I wanted to point out that I think is key. And that is that E.M.S. Also earns 43 and a half million dollars in revenues each year. And that number goes up and down as the [1:41:38 PM] medicare, medicaid and insurance payments fluctuate. But that's a significant amount of money. If you were to look at that pie chart, that $43 million will essentially cut that pie chart in half. So we're earning back about 52% of our costs and contributing that to the general fund. That represents about six percent of the total general fund, so it's not an insignificant amount of money. And also the general fund charges for services for E.M.S. Represent about 70% of those charges of the general fund. So we're a significant player inside of the general fund operations. The E.M.S. Revenues also played a key role in our recovery when we had the recession. The city manager Ott really pushed hard to keep us in line and made us make some very difficult decisions, but at the end of the day we kept all of our people, we didn't reduce service and we were able to contribute to the fund to help the city recover. So that is something that we're very excited about as well. The budget highlights, as you may recall from last year we asked for 52 new sworn positions that are going to be associated with the equipment and the personnel that we need to convert to our 42-hour work week. We've already started that conversion. It's scheduled to begin to take effect in October. And so that's when all of our new shifts go into play here. We're asking for one new sworn designated medical officer position, and that for sure is a dmo. A dmo for us is our medical quality improvement and clinical support staff. So they're out in the field and they work together with our medics, they watch how they provide patient care, they provide immediate feedback and they also assist along with the calls, especially on the more critical ones. So that's a key position for us. We have three. Our goal is to have five and we're asking for one in this year. We're also asking for [1:43:39 PM] funding for three sworn positions. As you recall, you added three ftes for our emergency communications center last year. And we don't have the funds to continue that into this coming year. So we would ask for the funds for that as well and that's 213,000. We are requesting annualizing funding for 12 sworn positions that were added for '15 and '16 that are associated with our new unit in lost creek. We want to continue that unit as well. And again, the 45 civilian medic one field cadets that are listed don't require any funding, but it does show as a headcount increase. As I said previously, E.M.S. Has experienced increases in 911 calls. I think I've said that previously. I can give you some details about what the impact has been for us. We looked back in our system for about a 10-year period to see what's the trend, what is this looking like and will this help us predidn't where we're going next. So there's been about a 31% increase in the city and county population altogether. We have seen in E.M.S. A 44% increase in 911 calls, a six percent increase in -- 16 percent increase in incidents and a 61% increase in E.M.S. Transports. At the same time we've been managed to reduce our response times by 16%. So that's pretty significant. Even with growth we're still performing well. But that creates challenges for us as we go. One of the things that happens is we start seeing -- we're seeing this not just here in our system, but we're seeing it in systems across Texas and we're seeing it in systems across the nation where we're seeing increases in fatigue and reductions in resilience of E.M.S. Medical staff. So we're working on those two areas to try to make improvements there. And we're one of the leading agencies in the United States that's really taken this on and trying to move forward with this. [1:45:40 PM] Not only are we doing things ourselves in our department, but we're working with the city's innovation office to help find solutions and ways that we can improve the fatigue and resilience. And there's a difference between these two terms. Fatigue is what happens everyday. That's being tired at the end of a difficult shift and managing that is important because if you don't it begins to accumulate and then you have cumulative fatigue. So that's what we're trying to solve by managing daily fatigue. Its other is resilience. Resilience has to do with how well medical personnel can exist in their job and last for a very long time. So what happens right now in E.M.S., and again across the nation, we're seeing higher and higher and higher burnout rates. And you have to ask yourself why does that happen? What are we doing about it? So addressing resilience has become a key issue for the industry. And a lot of folks are looking to see what we're doing, but we're doing more than most agencies are. So, for example, on the fatigue side, we work with a vendor to develop a work load monitoring system that alerts our supervisors when personnel have worked certain levels so we can make sure that they get a break, we can make sure that somebody checks on them and that they're okay and that they get a meal or at least time to have a meal throughout their shift. Little simple things like that are the things that add up and create problems. We're drastically reducing our most tiring 12-hour shifts. 12-hour shifts happen in a very rapid cycle and what we're finding is that there's not time enough-- enough time off in between those 12-hour shifts to give our medics sufficient rest and recovery time. So we're eliminating them. We've effectively eliminated most of them. We have a few that remain and we're working to see how we're going to do those. Those are in the busiest areas of our community. [1:47:41 PM] So they present a special challenge. That's something that we're going to start working on in October after we get our 12 hours converted mostly to 24s. We're also managing our high use population, as I said, with our community health paramedic program and we're even piloting a new service called alternative transport vehicle. So what happens is many times our medics will respond to a case and they'll do an assessment and then they'll determine that individual probably does need to see a doctor or they do need to go to a clinic, but it's very expensive to take them in an ambulance. It's expensive for them, it's expensive for us. And the Fastic we can recover that unit the better utilization we get out of all our equipment and staff. So we started piloting an alternative transport vehicle this last week. And I rode on it on Saturday and I got to transport one individual, and he was ecstatic. It was the best thing that we could have done for him was to provide him transportation to solve his problem. And we did that. So it looks very promising. We're going to keep working on that to see what else we can do to make it better. On the resilience side we're shifting to the 42 hour work week. That will allow our personnel to have longer recuperation time between the shifts, which is up to 72 hours most of the time. We also increased our peer and mental well-being support. We added a chip ran program and we're moving forward with the just culture implementation. There shouldn't be punishment when somebody makes an honest mistakes. So just culture gives us an algorithm for how do you review when someone makes a mistake. Do they need more training? Is it a repeating thing? And what can we do in a more healthy fashion to deal with that? Continuing the budget highlights, we're looking at our sworn vacancy rate in history and our civilian vacancy [1:49:42 PM] rate in history. In '15 our vacancy rate was 13.7%. We've managed to reduce that now to 11.4%. And we think some of the changes that we're making in fatigue and resilience are going to push that down even further. Our goal is to try to get that down to about six percent. So we've got a ways to go, but it's very doable and we're going to push really hard to do that. On the civilian side, last year we're at 8.6. This year we filled almost all of our vacancies, and we're at 1.3%. Something new that we're doing this year is we've implemented a communication medic internship. That internship allows us to reach out into the community and bring people in who have actually never done this kind of work before. What we've learned is that the communication area is such a specialty, it's hard to find people that already have those skills and already have the training. So we actually opened this up for the very first time and advertised it. We had over 120 applicants for only seven intern positions. That's quite exciting for us and just kind of shows how much work we still have yet to do, but we we're going to look to see what the first results of this are and then make adjustments as we go. We really -- our intention is to begin to use this to improve on diversity, to reach out into the community, bring in people that live here that this is their home, provide them the training that they need to give them an edge so they can move into a nice civil service position with great benefits and great pay. That's a simple goal. Not so easy to do, but that's our intention. I'm losing my voice. I'm going to allow Kerry [1:51:43 PM] Lange to wrap up here with clinical highlights and over the capital and also to talk about some horizon issues. >> Good afternoon, mayor and council. Just to talk about our capital highlights, we have our key projects. They are the truck bays and facility improvements at three of our stations. Stage two is at manchaca and William cannon. Station eight is at balcones near 2222 and mopac. And station 11 is at Mccarty lane near the Y at oak hill. So these bay expansions include -- these projects include bay expansions as well as some facility changes. When we look at station 2, it's going to be a complete rebuild of those stations -- of that station. And the others are bay expansions so that we can fit our current units into the stations because they're older stations and our current units do not fit into the bay area. So that's going to right-size those stations. When we look at horizon issues, our here roadway son issues that we discussed during our business plan process, the first one that we discussed was our operational support staff and work load. As E.M.S. Has grown over the last 10 years or so, our focus had been primarily on the frontline staff and so what we're trying to do is look at the increased work load for the ancillary programs such as our special events program, our special events unit, which primarily is funded -- or we manage those special events with overtime is what we primarily do. When we look at our support staff, such as the billing unit, our billing unit has increased 28% in work load since 2008, but we have not seen an increased in staffing for that increased work load. And we're also seeing an increased work load as the previous previously mention understand our quality assurance. So our dmo, our designated medical officers, they do the quality assurance for our department and we see increased work load for that area as well. [1:53:43 PM] When we look at our fleet needs, we've been working really closely with fleet services to try to right size the department with the fleet sources that we need. And what we're looking at and what we are seeing in the department is that there is an operational need. We're looking to try to address those with the stations, the busy west stations, the 12-hour stations. So that when a new shift comes on they can get into their ambulance and go right on shift. Right now as wire changing shifts the staff have to wait until a unit comes back from a call in order to go out on shift. And that has some operational impacts. So we're looking at that. That will also reduce the maintenance costs that we're seeing with some of our fleet services. In addition to that we see needs for fleet resources for our dmo program as well as for special events. The other thing that we look at and we try to stay ahead of are the changes in health care technology and health care requirements. As E.M.S. We are health care providers and some of the things that change in that industry happen very quickly so we're trying to stay agile enough to make those adjustments so that we can have health care exchange with our partners so that we can continue to adapt to the changes that are happening in the health care industry. And then when we look at facility needs, we have several facilities that are aging. We currently have station one and station five, which are over40 years old. So when we look at the facility maintenance needs we just look at how we -- we want to consider how we're going to continue those maintenance needs for all of our stations. As we move forward. And then finally we look at the rule changes in the medicare intermediary. What that is is we've [1:55:44 PM] moved from icd 9 coding to icd 10. And in that coding our medicare intermediary has added additional -- what is called secondary codes, the codes that we need to place on reimbursement requests to justify that reimbursement. Of those codes, those secondary codes, if a bls service, if we're trying bls services for a patient, if they don't have those secondary codes, which I'm going to kind of read off a little bit, bed confinement, ekg or IV, oxygen airway or physical constraint. If they don't have those codes in addition to the bls services that we're providing, then most of those calls are denied for reimbursement from medicare. What that translates into is that the patient is responsible for the services that are provided. And so we're looking at what impact that could potentially have on our bls basic life services, services for the patient and what that impact is going to have for our revenue. That is all of our horizon issues and challenges. That we looked at during our business plan. So now we're ready for any questions that you may have. >> >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Houston? >> Houston: Thank you, mayor and thank you so much for your information. Y'all are doing a lot of proactive work in the community. And I know that people appreciate that. I'm going to start with the last thing and work back. You talked about the billing system and I received an email recently from a retired city employee that the E.M.S. Is not in the network. So of course you have a huge bill from E.M.S. Because medicaid didn't pay for it. So is there any reason that E.M.S. Can't be part of the -- that may [1:57:46 PM] be a -- may be a human resources answer, but it seeps like our E.M.S. Should be covered under our health care. >> We are indeed covered. And I can give you some of the feedback on that particular call. It is a -- we're covered and because of the services provided it's the same situation that I was describing earlier. When bls services are provided and those four codes are not included, then medicare does not pay for those services. And then that goes to potential secondary coverage or it goes to the patient. And so in that particular instance the patient had the city's secondary coverage and that bill has been -- other than their co-pay. They have to pay their co-pay. The rest of the bill is covered by their secondary coverage. >> Houston: Okay, thank you. Hopefully that explains what happens. >> Yes, ma'am. >> >> Houston:on page 370 of the rather document it talks about increased revenue from the implementation of a new fee forrality tough transport program. Is that what you were talking about? What is that fee going to be now >> I believe it's $63, unless she elbows me here. It's significantly less. >> Houston: Better than 800. >> Absolutely. That's really just to cover our cost and fuel and operation of the vehicle. Currently we're leasing a vehicle for the test. We did receive some funding from community health to pay for that and we're using our community health paramedics to test it. We'll actually assign medic ones to that responsibility and the bill would be around $63. >> It will actually be $68. >> Houston: You were close, really close, chief. >> Really close. It's shaped like a. >> Houston: Thank you. That's good. On the billing are we getting [1:59:47 PM] faster and getting bills to people that use the services? And what is the time on that? >> So when we look at our bill processing time, historically we've been around five days for bill processing time. This year, in 2016, we did change to the icdtn coding, which was a more in-depth coding that's required so we've seen that number increase to about nine. Our goal is to stay about seven days before we can get the bills out to the patients or to get the reimbursement requests out to medicare and medicaid. >> Houston: And then at some point do you turn it over for non-collection to some other provider is this. >> Yes, ma'am. >> Houston: How long does that take? >> After 90 days, it is turned over to collection. >> That would be with no response from the -- >> That would be with no response. What we do is we send out a bill at the time of services, hopefully within that seven days, and then we do 30, S, 90 Daws. We give -- right before the 90 days we give the -- or at the 60 days we give information about payment plans so that if a patient needs to be on a payment plan they have that option. >> Houston: Okay. That's good. You know, I get all the horror stories. So that's good. I had one that the person had been dead for two years and they got a bill from ems, but hopefully that's not happening anymore, right? >> Okay. >> Houston: Okay. I really love the child safety -- the community events that we talk about, how to make sure that our children are safe in the car. Where do the safety seats come from? Do we provide some? Or you can bring your own some. >> Actually, we're doing a grant through txdot, I think you got it, Ms. Pool. And we do a grant through txdot where they fund us the car seats and we purchase [2:01:48 PM] them. And we're doing those car seat checks in -- and deliveries of the car seats to those in need. This next year we're actually expanding the grant and hoping to do a regional grant and almost be double what we're doing this year and we're already working with providers in Williamson con, hays county, surrounding counties to expand our services out regionally. >> Houston: That's great. My last question is about the capital highlights regarding the facilities. Are all of ems facilities able to have female and male bathrooms separate? Or how are we -- >> Yes. >> Houston: -- Managing that? >> I believe all our facilities have separate -- they had individual restrooms not marked for either but they can go in male or female. >> Houston: Unisex. >> There's no waiting. >> Houston: No waiting? >> Like in the fire stations where they had to clear out so that the female could go in and things like that. >> Houston: Okay. >> Unisex. >> Houston: Unisex bathrooms, okay. I think that's it. Thank you so much. >> Mayor Adler: Council? On the staffing issue, just so that I understand, we're talking about bringing in under this budget 52 new sworn positions and last year, am I correct, that we added three plus 12, about 15 sworn positions? That's what we did last year to begin to address the fatigue issue? >> Yes, sir. We actually converted to 11 -- actually 15 of our units to the 42 hour workweek with those 15 positions, and so as these next positions come in, as they are hired in, we will start to transition other units onto the 42 hour workweek because those positions make up the missing hours from every position we -- of transition over to the 42. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. How many units do you have although? >> We have 41, 37 full- time units on 24 hours a day and four demand units that are [2:03:48 PM] only on for 12 hours a day. Units, how many of those did we transition to the 42 hour workweek -- >> [Overlapping speakers] >> 15. That was 11 of our 12-hour units and four of the demand units were all transitioned in January. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. With the positions in this year's budget, do we get all the rest of the units or a certain number of them? >> By end of the year it will transition all units to the 42 hour workweek. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Mayor pro tem. >> Tovo: Thanks very much. And I may have some more questions to submit through the q&a process. Anted to take talk a little, though, about ems' participation in the homeless outreach street team. I know Corey has been involved and there may be other paramedics as well and as a management level it's been supported. So thank you, as I said during the police department discussion, I think it's already proven to be tremendously effective and I look forward to seeing that pilot continue. Can you help us understand whether the ems resources that have been dedicated to that pilot could continue without further action from the city council? >> The current way that we're doing it right now is we take one of our community health paramedics and he serves dual role so he still sees his regular number of patients who are enrolled in the community health program and then he participates in the host team. Right now it doesn't appear that that's gonna be a problem for him. But if the volume increases very much on the host side, then we'll probably have to add some staff to continue that. >> Tovo: Okay. Thank you. Again, thank you for your support of that initiative. And I guess my question for city manager Arellano deals with the vehicle for the homelessness outreach street team and that maybe better to bring up during fleet? Where is the right time to talk about the vehicle? [2:05:48 PM] >> Ray Arellano, assistant city manager. Probably if you help us with the question we can respond to that more particularly. I know that we are using the vehicle that was arranged for by council in terms of the interlocal with capital metro but I do believe after having it on board there are different ways we may need or specify a vehicle, and in the response to the concept menu we've actually accounted for that. >> Tovo: Super. When we get a response to the concept menu item you'll have some options for us to consider with regard to the vehicle? >> Yes. So as you're aware, for the rest of the council, not only is police involved in the host team but we also have participation from ems and so the response to the concept menu item will include the resourcing from both fire -- ems and the police, as well as one-time costs as well. So. . . >> Tovo: Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Anything else for ems? >> Houston: I have one more question. >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Houston. >> Houston: Can you tell me the status of medic three? Have we found a home for medic three? >> I'm sorry. Chief of staff. We have -- [indiscernible] We talked about in our meeting, we've been working with central health who will take over the campus. We're working through a plan when they move out of the campus in brackenith in may '17 they'll do construction -- [indiscernible] >> Houston: Thank you. Are we making everybody's throat close up? >> I've been like this for two weeks now. >> Houston: Do we need a medic here to help? [ Laughter ] >> This is actually the best it's been in two weeks. >> Houston: After we're through today, I really appreciate your definition of fatigue because I've experienced it, would you give it to me later so I can remind myself what fatigue feels like? >> Yes, ma'am. >> Houston: Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you very much. Thank you. So I think our next one is, [2:07:50 PM] what, municipal court? >> Mayor, Ed went to get them. They're on their way. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Thank you. . That's better than. >> Mayor Adler: I don't mind waiting. That's better than having folks sitting here. If there's a place for folks to go, I think that's great. [2:09:57 PM] Hi. >> Hello. >> Good afternoon. >> Mayor Adler: Good afternoon. >> Most of you know my name is Mary Jane grub, court clerk for the municipal court. Today Pete Valdez, court admin administrator for the downtown community court is with us, Dave Coleman in the finance unit for the municipal court and we have judges statman and coffee, judge statman is the presiding judge and judge coffee the judge for downtown community court. So we'll get started with our department overview, the mission of the municipal court is to impartially administer justice in a fair and efficient manner so trust and accountability are exemplified to the public we serve. Our key performance measures are average age of terminated cases, that's obviously as it suggests when the case is moved to final disposition, it's the average number of days so our budget target for '17 is 200 days. That's been relatively consistent over the last couple of years. The next one is percent of cases set on docket within 60 days, and that's set on a trial docket within 60 days of a not guilty plea. Our target is 97. Percent of cases terminated versus files, that measure is -- measures a court's ability to efficiently work their caseload so it should Alls be at least at 100%, you want to be terminating at least the same number of cases being filed. Total number of cases filed, we're seeing a slight decrease in that for our budget project -- sorry, budget target for '17. As you can see our fiscal year estimate for' 16 is significantly reduced from the [2:11:59 PM] fiscal year' 17 ax expel that's primarily due to a reduction in traffic cases, as well as parking. However, we are seeing an increase in city ordinance violations. Our level of customer service satisfaction, as indicated by the city of Austin citizen survey, our target is 88% and that's been relatively consistent. Percent of customers served within ten minutes, that's when a customer comes into the downtown location, take a number, and right now we're serving about 93% of our customers within ten minutes of when they walk in the door, and that's our same budget target for next year. The last performance measure is for downtown community court so Pete will speak to that one. >> Okay. I'll begin by telling you what our mission statement is, as it differs from municipal court. The purpose of the downtown community court is collaboratively address the quality of life issues of all individuals that live, work, and visit the area within the court's jurisdiction through the swift, creative sentencing of public order offenders. The court seeks to hold people responsible while offering help to change behavior. So our jurisdiction specifically outlines all of downtown, UT's west campus and a smart part of east Austin, which is closest to downtown. Our key measure is percent of frequent offenders who complete rehab recommendation, and a frequent offender is an individual that has 25 or more cases with our court and at least one active case within the last two years. All -- basically all of our resources, all of our rehab dollars are focused on providing assistance to this [2:13:59 PM] population because not only are they the people that offend the most in our jurisdiction but they are also the most vulnerable from the mental health, physical health, and substance abuse perspectives. So we have set a goal of 65% compliance. Within that group for people that get assigned rehabilitative recommendations through the court. And we're gonna meet the goal, it looks like, for this current year. >> So I'd like to highlight some of our major accomplishments over the last year. The municipal court has implemented several initiatives to improve work space in the customer service area and improve security throughout the building. So all of our customer service windows, about 14 of them, have been slightly renovated to allow for more work space and have adjustable desks. More importantly, a glass barrier has been placed in those windows that increases the security for our court staff. We are also looking at add willing additional cameras and some doors on our third flooring which will separate our staffing areas from the public. We did reduce our requirements from our 24/7 staffing by transitioning some tasks from our warrant unit to the central booking. Previously the court had two 24/7 units. With the transferring to Travis county book unit it allows us to close our building nights, weekends, holidays so we don't have staff in the building overnight. The court over the last couple years has been preparing to get a new case-management system. They've been working diligently putting functional requirements together and this year in particular we've been working on developing an rfp which hopefully will be on the streets within the next 30 [2:16:00 PM] days. >> And going back to the frequent offenders, we continue to work to stabilize this group but also any homeless offender that comes through our court and that is at risk for become a frequent offender, we continue to try to stabilize those individuals through connecting them to our support services. I should mention that based on the point in time count that echo did this year and the increase in homeless people in Austin, that's also impacted how many people we deal with at the court, either voluntarily or because they're arrested or cited and have to come through the court. So last year we decided to try to manage our own social service contracts in house, where before we were contracting with the substance abusement managed service organization, who in turn recruited their own vendors that would provide services to our clients. Since we've gained internal control of where we send individuals and have developed a robust array of services through our social service contracting, we have better outcomes in terms of how these individuals do based on really -- a harm-reduction model. We can show that when people are involved with our case management services, they are offending fewer times and being arrested less, as long as her involved about our case management services. So we think that developing this array of services internally has really helped us to be able to assist these individuals in a more comprehensive way. [2:18:05 PM] >> Next we'll talk about our department uses and source of funds. Our total program budget, proposed budget for fiscal year '17 is 26.4 million. Of that we have 176.75 positions. The biggest change between this year and next year is we are transferring three positions from the municipal court to the law department. In terms of our revenue sources, the biggest part comes from general revenues with small pieces coming out of expense refunds and special revenues. And then the budget activities that comprise our total program are municipal court operations, downtown community court, the judiciary special programs and support services and transfers for other departments. >> So the proposed increase for the community court has to do with the money that we are asking for as it relates to our social service contracts. And being able to enhance those services even more so that we can serve more homeless individuals but also provide more intensive services through the contracts that we have. In terms of the total sources and the expense refunds up above, we have three crew leaders, community service crew leaders that are funded by Austin resource recovery and Austin code, and those three individuals focus on assisting those departments with their work orders throughout the community. So we use our community service, probationers and defendants to complete those -- to assist in completion of those work orders for those departments. >> You're also seeing a slight proposed increase for special programs and support services. [2:20:05 PM] The special programs is a $500,000 increase for the tech fund and that will be allocated to the new case- management system. And the increase in the support services and transfers is primarily related to the market study for next year. >> In terms of the budget highlights, again, talking about the increase in the rehabilitative services that we offer, we're requesting that so that we can, again, enhance the social service contracts that we currently have, other to serve more individuals or to intensify the level of service that these contracts can provide to the individuals that we assist. I should also mention that we ever dedicating one of our full-time case managers to assist with the host team. So because of that we're also getting a lot of individuals that are connected to our services through the host team activities, which is gonna require, again, more funding for us to be able to assist those individuals as well. >> In the budget highlight for the municipal court is our budget is being reduced by a little over 194,000 and that is, again, attributed to the transfer of our three positions to the law department. In terms of vacancy rate, fiscal year '15 the court's vacancy rate was 7.9%. Fiscal year' 16 we're currently at 5.9%, we have ten and a half vacant positions. Of those ten and a half two having vacant longer than 12 months. And six have been vacant less [2:22:06 PM] than six months. Horizon issues and challenges. I think most of you are aware of the challenges with our outdated municipal court building. We've talked at length about that so court facilities are outdated and overcrowded, are in a high-risk area and have serious security concerns for both our staff and our citizens. So we're continuing to look for options for an improved space for municipal court, as well as downtown community court. Our technology upgrades and replacement continue to be a concern for us. Again, due to the building, we're in an outdated facility, with outdated technology infrastructure. Governmental mandates are always a concern for municipal courts and we do anticipate multiple bills impacting our operations coming up next year. I have heard that court costs are gonna increase. Oca, which is the office of court administration is putting some -- or proposed some significant changes in the collection improvement program that our court has to manage. And then we also anticipate some major changes in indigent defense. Staffing issues, court's turnover rate continues to exceed the city average. A lot of that has to do with compensation. I think the city has done a good job at least this year in terms of the market study, some of our positions were included in that market study, which will help with the compensation and us being competitive with not other cities but at least within other departments within the city of Austin. Last year our turnover rate was 22%, which I think was the highest in the city. Right now we're at 6.09%, [2:24:08 PM] which I think is pretty incredible. It's a large reduction. Something to be proud about. >> And for community court, we continuously look at improving the wrap around services that we provide. We essay the service -- we assess the services on a regular basis and we look at identifying any gaps in services that we've been not able to -- we're not able to fill and provide to the individuals that we support. And then going back to the facilities, specific to the community court, the current facility that we're in was planned to house half of the staff that we currently have. So when the court was planned, there were probably ten or 12 employees that were associated with the plan at that time. We currently have 25 employees. So we're short on office space. The lobby in the court room are many times overcrowded so we have to have customers wait outside until we can allow them to come in the building because of the overcrowding. And we're not able to house our community service restitution program at our facility. They are housed in a pard facility because we don't have the space for them in our current facility. And then, finally, we also don't have any access to public parking. Which is an issue, especially when we have trials and we have jurors that come to support the trials. We have to find places for them to park. >> Just to further highlight the overcrowding of our facilities, municipal court, I know, was built around 1953. At the time it had ten employees. Today in that building we house over 150 employees. [2:26:12 PM] And that wraps up our presentation. So our staff is here and happy to answer any questions that you may have. >> Mayor Adler: That's a pretty dramatic end to go the presentation. I want you to know we hear you on that. [ Laughter ] You know, I hope that that's part of the facilities look at that staff is going through in terms of the new direction and priorities. I do want to ask a quick question. The number that was presented on the percent of folks that -- completing the rehabilitative recommendations, from your perspective, why do you think that number has gone up so substantially? >> Well, I think there are several reasons. One is that we used to do a model of case management that was referral, was assessment and referral. Whereas now we have intensive case managers that actually transport individuals to appointments. We do warm hand-offs to other organizations that are assisting those individuals. We do a lot of hand holding, per se, whereas before we expected the individuals to follow through on the recommendations that we made and we realized that that was unrealistic when you're homeless and for us to expect for them to attend appointments on their own and find a way to get to these appointments and now they don't have to do that because we have complete vehicles that we use. We have eight case managers that assist these individuals. And we keep their case loads at 15 so that they are able to intensively provide services to them. >> Mayor Adler: Anyone else on the dais? [2:28:14 PM] Yes, Ms. Gallo? >> Gallo: Could you repeat again. You made a comment something about the code department, one other code department and transfer of people or transfer of funds. Could you repeat again what you said? >> Sure. They provide funding for, I believe it's one of the three crew leaders that are funded through other departments. And what they do is they send us their work orders for issues in the community that they can't address or that they aren't able to get the citizen to address. They'll ask our crews to go and address those issues, whether it be trash pickup or trash removal. >> Gallo: And it was the code department and which other department? >> Austin resource recovery. >> Gallo: Could you give me some examples, for example, the code department, what would they send to you to do versus they would take care of in-house some. >> So, again, you know, they have citizens that aren't able to address the issues that they're being cited for through the code department, things like overgrown trees, trees, you know, growing into sidewalks, or they may just have a bunch of trash in their front yard that needs to be addressed. So they will ask us to assist with that. If they have been unsuccessful in getting that citizen to address the issue. >> Gallo: So what is it that you can do -- I'mous trying to understand why the -- I'm just trying to understand why the problem get diverted to you? What is it you can do that they can't do? >> I think it's a lot less expensive for us to do it -- >> Gallo: What are you doing? >> We do trash pickup, we do landscape, we do trash removal. A lot of times people leave old mattresses on their front yard, they'll leave old tires on their front yard. We will pick them up and take them to the dumpster, to the dump site. >> Just to clarify, these are with individuals within the community service program who [2:30:15 PM] are trying to pay off their debits in other ways rather than pay a fine or go to jail. >> Gallo: Okay. Thank you for that clarification because I'm trying to understand why you can do things less expensive than another department -- >> The city funds the one employee but each employee they fund has up to five probationers that go out with them. >> Gallo: Okay. >> It doesn't cost the city anything. >> Gallo: That's a wonderful project. Thank you for explaining it because I'm trying to understand the concept of how your department and employees can do something less expensively than another department but it's because of the community service program, which is wonderful. >> Correct. >> Gallo: And thank you for that. >> Mayor Adler: Okay, great. >> Casar: Congratulations on that improved metric and I'm very supportive of the work y'all do so thank you for that. I saw for the downtown court, one of the upcoming needs is just to continue to find out which services you can provide, manage in-house, or contract directly out of your shop for support. And I would just be conscientious of the fact that this council has continued to work on increasing our health and human services contracting in any way that you can -- we can make sure that whatever we're doing with one hand helps us on the other, please do notify us because, you know, at one level we're just authorizing a budget expenditure, but if we can make sure health and human services funding potentially helps out with whatever you need at the downtown Austin community court and is addressing needs that the police department is having trouble addressing serial out of an enforcement capacity, I think that's really what a lot of us are going for, to magic sure that the social services funding we provide is indeed being both rehabilitative and preventive on the crime front so please stay engaged in the conversation and help us through that as we try to make these decisions in this budget and future ones. [2:32:16 PM] >> Okay. We'll do that. >> Mayor Adler:. >> Houston: Go ahead. >> Gallo: I have another question but she's -- >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Houston. >> Houston: Thank you. On page 411 of the proposed budget, we've had several comments -- conversations this week about gra fitty abatement so is that one of the other things that y'all do for the city? >> Through community service? That's correct. >> Houston: And the cemetery maintenance? Bethany cemetery specifically. >> Houston: That's what I was goon ask. Thank you, we appreciate that. That's an anomaly in the city, doesn't belong to anybody. Thank you all for doing that. Hold on just a minute while I got it. Municipal court security fund, how much is in that fund? I see where it's collected from, but how much is in that? >> We're look for that number, the target, the budget target is 400,000, but what I hear you asking is how much is currently -- >> Houston: Currently. >> We're looking for that. We'll get back to you on it. >> Houston: Thank you. Then on page 417, under the revenue changes, why is that going down? Do you have any idea why that's being decreased? The revenue? >> Because traffic fines in general are down. >> Houston: Really? >> Yes. They're down significantly. It's almost 20,000 from -- reduction from fiscal year '16 from '15. >> Houston: They must not be looking at the people I'm looking at. >> I didn't say the violations aren't occurring. >> Houston: We need the police back in here. [2:34:17 PM] I'm amazed it would be down that much. >> It's not all traffic. Again, parking tickets are down as well. So the current building security balance is 36,000. >> Houston: 36,000. Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Gallo. >> Gallo: So on page 422 that's talking about the budget detail for the rehabilitation services, I'm trying to understand, as we talk about efficiency by making sure services are handled in one department versus spread over multiple departments, and it looks like when I read the service details, which is assessment of needs for offenders, continued rehabilitative options including mental health, physical health and support services, crisis intervention services, job training, transitional, on and on and on, I'm trying to understand why you are doing this versus health and human services is doing it, and then I guess this would be a city manager question, is health and human services already doing that as part of their operations and would it make more sense to consolidate these efforts and we're trying to understand why it wouldn't make more sense to consolidate? Just seems like a lot of those functions really are things that we talk about in health and human services for -- there, so I guess start with maybe the city manager's -- is that a duplication? Is health and human services doing that already? Would it make more sense to have one department doing it? And -- versus both departments doing that? >> That's a good question. So if Pete could go ahead and talk about what they're doing, I'll be happy to talk about kind of what we do on the health and human services side. So I'll let him respond to that. Then I'll follow up. >> So we are engaged in partnerships with health and human services, and we do reach out to them if we can't fill a need for individuals [2:36:18 PM] through our own contracts. We reach out to see if they have a contract that they might be able to let us access. What happens a lot of times with our group is that they are the most difficult to serve because they have the duel diagnosis, also have physical health issues, and they have extensive criminal histories. So a lot of times our client population is referred to as the most difficult to serve, and our contracts in-house are created with that in mind. Whereas I'm not sure how the homeless services contracts through health and human services are created, but we really specify to the contractors and vendors when we engage with them that the services they provide have to be carrot catered around these very vulnerable individuals. Like I said, health and human services does help us when they can. We are currently in a grant collaborative with health and human services, so we do engage them as much as we possibly can. We've never discussed the possibility of sharing contracts, but I'm certainly open to that idea. >> Gallo: It just -- it just seems like -- and I guess maybe you can chime in also, but it just seems like as we talk about issues with the homeless, which is one of the more difficult parts of our population, and they're homeless for a multitude of reasons but it is a challenging part of our population shall we talk about programs that we run through our housing department, we talk about programs that we run through our health and human services, we're talking about sobriety center. We have all these things that are floating around in all these different departments and it just seems like at some point we have a resource and then the departments use that resource as the need is there. So if you wanted to -- >> I think that's a good [2:38:20 PM] question, councilmember Gallo. What I do know, for example, in our social services, we have everything from caseworkers that work specifically on cases relative to housing individuals, and we do that mostly on the health and human services side. As a matter of fact, one prime example of that would have been, like, when we had the flooding, those caseworkers were out at the dove springs interacting with the residents that needed those type of services. And then we also have contracts that we have that includes homeless individuals. Several years ago, we invested some funding with echo, which is ending in the chronic homeless organization, and working very closely with Howard to try to take a much more centralized function or approach to it. We have invested some dollars in echo to provide some capacity to try to centralize and get us the data to show where we had clients and make sure that we weren't duplicating and so forth. So I think that work has been on going. I'd be happy to give you a much mover - - a status report but we certainly recognize the fact that we've got to do, you know -- look at all these opportunities that we have in all the different areas and figure out how do we make them a whole lot more consolidated. But I think, you know, from what Pete is talking about, they seem to deal a whole lot more with individuals that they're interacting with on a much more frequent basis, and there is a category that we deal with on the echo side, which are frequent users and people that really affect a lot of our services. So I'll be happy to get you a little but the more information, but I do think that there's some distinct, uh, services in what our areas cover but we are looking at the centralized piece of it to try to be a little more collaborative in how we approach things. >> Tovo: If I could give one example, though, I think it is [2:40:21 PM] critical that we understand well all of the resources and where they are and how they can all work together but one of the examples that the host program mentioned from just the last couple weeks is that an individual approached an officer and disclosed his heroine use and that -- and had had a recent overdose and that officer was able to connect him with the downtown community court's road to recovery program so that is really I think the -- part of what I hope that host team will do, is to try to connect -- make those connections into programs funded through the downtown community court. But that's just one example. I'm sure there are others. >> I think that's a good point to make, because the need for immediate assistance can be addressed through our services in-house versus if we -- if we ask another agency or department for assistance, those services may not be immediately available. But we know they are through our contract. So we can link people right away and not give them an opportunity to change their mind because that window of opportunity is so small. >> Gallo: Thank you. But those services could also be contracted through a central area. >> Sure. >> Gallo: Also. What you're saying is that there are services y'all contract with that are a more immediate response 37 and this conversation is not saying at all that we do not have these needs and we need to provide for these needs. It's just trying to figure out a way we can do it -- as we know we don't have enough money to do everything that we need to do so finding ways that we can do it more efficiently so we can spread out the help that we do and certainly not to say that y'all are not doing a wonderful job. It's just as we talk about -- and we had that conversation all the time, that something is being done here and something is being done there and they have a great relationship with a nonprofit [2:42:22 PM] like echo but it may not be something that you have a relationship with so understand -- just seems like the connection for providing those services -- but I'm glad to see that the centralization of it is part of the discussion that we're having. >> Houston: Yes. Could you give me some ideas about who you contract with for the services? >> Sure. We contract with atcic's road to recovery program. That's 180 day program, substance abuse program that also addresses mental health issues. We also contract with a new entry, who provides transitional housing and also provides some substance abuse treatment. We contract with an agency by the name of plan of central Texas, and they provide peer to peer support services, therapy, life skills training, and they're also available to those clients around the clock. So a lot of times these individuals are in crisis at night or on the weekends and they can contact the case managers funded through that contract. We also have a contract with front steps to reserve mats for individuals that we want to make sure have shelter that we're also providing substance abuse treatment and working toward permanent stability, possibly applying for permanent supportive housing, and so that they don't have to live on the street, we reserve 15 mats. Through front steps. >> Houston: Okay. Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Anything else? >> Houston: So, Mr. Lumbreras, I'd be interested if we fund any of these things through our social service contracts. I think that's what councilmember Gallo was trying to get -- to gather all this [2:44:22 PM] together and make sure it's being used in the most efficient way to serve the population, and everybody has, you know, horror stories about people on the streets who need not only behavioral health medication and need to be in some place that's safe because of their substance use issues, and so we just need to make sure that we've got that -- our arms wrapped around where all those monies are going. >> Okay. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Wait. >> Tovo: Sorry, mayor, sorry, I had another question. >> Mayor Adler: Mayor pro tem. >> Tovo: Could you help me understand the caseworker you talk about that is dedicated to host right now? Is that in the budget as a request for next year, or is that gonna continue in the passion it is currently? >> It's continuing in the fashion it is currently. We're not asking for funding for a case manager. >> Tovo: Okay. >> Until we know how successful the collaboration with the host team is. >> Tovo: Thank you. >> Mm-hmm. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Thank you very much. Mr. Van eenoo, does that get us to fleet services? >> [Off mic] [2:46:27 PM] >> Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, councilmembers. Jerry, the fleet officer for the city. I have with me Gloria, who is our division manager over finance and contracts. So if there's any really numerous questions I'm gonna turn to her and ask her to use her expertise to answer. But I'd like to start off by giving you just an overview. I'd like to make the differentiation between system departments and mission departments, and you heard from police department and ems and some other departments today that I refer to as mission departments. They're the folks who actually go out and serve the citizens of Austin directly. Fleet is one of the system departments that supports their mission. And our John is to provide our customer departments, those mission department, all of the departments in the city with safe and reliable reliable equipment and do it in a cost effective and environmentally responsible manner so they can complete their missions. Currently as of today, as of this morning there were 600612 total units in the fleet with an estimated current replacement value of around $450 million. So we're the folks who take care of about $450 million worth of the city's assets there. Some of our major accomplishments that we've made, we were recognized -- the city of Austin was recognized by the national association of fleet administrators, which is actually an international organization, for the fleet management association sustainable fleet accreditation. We're one of the -- we're the only city in the state of Texas and one of the first fleets in the nation to receive that accreditation. So that's fairly important. It -- to get that recognition, we had to successfully [2:48:29 PM] demonstrate a credible sustainability plan and make a lot of progress toward reducing total emissions and negative environmentallial impacts of the fleet from burning carbon fuels. We were also selected as a finalist for the excellence in fleet safety award by that same organization at their conference, national conference that was held here in Austin in April. Talking about our performance measures, of course our major performance measure is our fleet availability rate. That's the most important thing to our customers, is having the fleet units that they need so they can do their mission. And we try to keep 95% of their fleet at least available to them at all times. During fy16 we're gonna hit about 93.64% is our estimated end of year number and our goal of course is 95 for if, 17. We also look at the number of units, percentage of the fleet exexceeding replacement criteria and we try to keep that number well below 10% and we're projected at about 7.63% of the fleet that is gonna be exceeding replacement criteria. At any time. You can never reach zero on that number, but just because of the time it takes to get units in and out of the fleet once you order them. Another thing we look at closely is the amount of alternative fuel that's issued as a percentage of all fuel issued. And if you look at the numbers there back in fy15 we were having a big problem with biodeals that year so that number was low around 22.7%, we brought it back up and expecting 65% in fy16 and our goal for fy17 we're projecting about 71%. Alternative hydride or electric as a percent of total units in the fleet, fy16 we're [2:50:30 PM] estimating that to be just under 80% and for fy17 we're gonna bring that up to about 82% of the fleet. We'll be either alternative fueled, electric, or hybrid. And then obviously our last performance measure there is the amount of the purge of on time -- percentage of on time completion for prevent maintenance services. We try to make sure we do 95% of those services as they are scheduled, and we're falling a little short of that in fy16, 92.23% but we're projected to have that back up to 95% by fy17. Department sources and uses of funds. We're projecting an fy17 budget of 55.7 million. That is less than a 1% increase over our fy16 budget. And we're asking for six additional positions in that budget. It's important to note that the pleat has grown -- fleet has grown approximately 44% since 2002. During that same time period, our staff has dropped by about 4.5%. Of the number of people that are available to support that fleet. We've gotten quite a bit of that back. The big drop was back in -- prior to 2008, and then we got a lot of it back over the last few years but we're still short by 4.5% of where we were in 2002 in terms of the number of staff positions we have to support that 6612 units in the fleet that are out there. Some major changes in our operating budget include a slight increase in service centers, the ftes, and then a decrease in fuel costs. We project fuel costs based on [2:52:32 PM] a federal index. You distracted me. [ Laughter ] It's all his fault. We project our fuel costs based on a national index called the eia, which stands for environmental -- energy information administration. Federal index. I hate acronyms. But fuel costs are projected to be slightly less next year in fy17. The six new ftes that we're requesting there, five equipment technicians and one service center supervisor. And that's to continue to support that quickly growing fleet. Budget highlights, as I mentioned, the addition of five equipment techs and one service under supervisor, about 550,000 or so there. Decrease in fuel expenditures, we're expecting about a 2.5 million savings there, transfer to the fleet capital program, we've got a compressed natural gas station out at Todd lane that needs a significant upgrade and some redundancy there. It only has one compressor. If that compressor goes down, the compressed natural gas portion of our fleet, fueled portion of our fleet almost becomes inoperative and we need to install another compressor and build in some redundancy there. Also a transfer to the capital program for our outdated lubrication systems that are at our maintenance facilities. That equipment is obsolete and needs to be updated and we're dropping $100,000 of one-time funding for the purchase of fleet rental pool vehicles that we had in last year's budget. Talk about our vacancy rate a little bit. Back in fy14 our vacancy rate was up around 14%, fy15 it was [2:54:33 PM] at 55.9, currently it's at 2.8%. And that's because we've been able to drop that down because of a couple of things. Many of you may know that the technician skill set, automotive and fleet technician skill set is one of the most difficult skill sets in the country right now to hire. I've seen it in some punctuations rated as number 2 or number 3 behind registered nurses and commissioned salespeople. But there's about a 40 to 50% shortage of that skill set in the marketplace, and we have to compete about the private sector to hire those folks with the dealerships and private fleets and so on. So several years ago, a couple of things have happened. We had -- we collaborated with H.R. To do a market analysis on that skill set and to bring the compensation levels up to where we were competitive with the market on that skill set. And, also, we implemented something that I'm very proud of, a internship program in collaboration with Austin independent school district, and started that a couple, three years ago. We have to date brought in eight interns from -- they've come from Reagan high school, Crockett high school, and eastside memorial, and we actually have staff who go out and start talking to those kids at the freshman level to get them interested in this as a career path and we provide occasionally guest speakers to talk to groups out there. That's been very successful for us. We decided that that was the only way we were gonna be able to stay staffed with the shortage in the market, was if we started building our own techs. So we brought in eight of them to date. Or we've hired eight of them to date now into full-time equivalent positions and one of those has already made a [2:56:34 PM] promotion, earned a promotion up to a tech two level. So that's been very successful for us, and we have, I think, two or three of those techs, of those young interns working for us right now. And that's, I think -- it's -- the way we're targeting it, it's serving some of the underserved population, if you will, in the city. We're expanding that program now. You may have seen a press conference that the city manager did a month or so ago. We're expanding that to include folks coming out of the military with their soldier for life program, where we will actually bring in people who are terminating their service with the military and bringing them in into our internship program. The military will pay them while they're interns so it's actually a zero cost for us and gives us the opportunity to bring those folks in and give them the opportunity to develop a career, perhaps. With the anticipation that we will be able to use them to fill positions as we need to. So those are two things that I'm very excited about. The -- hit the next slide here. Capital highlights. Fy17, appropriation 17.9 million with a spending plan of 7.8 million, the -- what happened? Oops. [ Laughter ] I didn't do it. >> I'm pushing buttons. >> There you go. The reason the spending is not keeping up with the appropriation is because the build time it takes to get vehicles once we place orders, especially for things like fire trucks, we typically can't take delivery of them until sometimes for over a year because of the build time on those units. Part of that also is related to some key projects, the [2:58:37 PM] acquisition of general fund support services fund vehicles, obviously, that c&g facility improvement I mentioned or lubrication dispensing systems that I mentioned. The c&g facility actually probably will not be completed until fy2017. That -- 2018. That takes some time. We're going to pilot the replacement of our stationery bay computer terminals with laptops. One of the things many of you may not realize is that the average car that you go buy today has more computing power built into it than your desktop computer does. As a matter of fact, it's got about five or six computers in it with 40 or so sensors taking readings up. And putting that all into a master computer. So my technicians frequently spend as much time with a laptop in their hands nowadays as they do with a wrench trying to do good diagnostics. So it's a very fast-changing environment out there in terms of the technical side of it. We also need to do some significant facility improvements to our facilities and I'll talk about that in just a second. I just this morning found out that one of our service center AIDS with problems in windows down there it's getting problems in the rain, and we're looking at about $100,000 to get in there and replace the windows in the facility to keep the rain out of it. So we currently have the bays to support the fleet for a fleet that we're supporting we actually have about 160 work it bays. We're way behind in keeping our facilities adequate to support our [3:00:38 PM] fleet. And we need a new consolidated service center. We're working with the strategic facilities governance group along with a couple of other departments to move forward with developing a new out towards the northeast part of town, which is why I think the -- where the projected growth of the city is 20 years into the future. They have new regulatory requirements as they move alternative fuel to moments into the week like compressed natural gas. There's new exhaust regulatory requirements on a facility where you maintain that such as maintaining adequate exhaust out of that facility. Our current technician ratio is about 60 to one. The industry average for municipal fleets is about 53 to one. So we need to bring our staff up to the level to support the size of the fleet that we're supporting. And when a unit comes into one of our facilities to maintenance or repair, there's three things we can do. We can park it until we get to it, which is not cost effective for those departments that need it. We can send it out to the private sector repair for repair, which is significantly more expensive or we can bring it in ourselves and repair it. But to do that we need the capacity and the capability to do that and that's where we need [3:02:39 PM] the staffing increase and where we really need a new consolidated service center. So that's the readers digest version of this. If I can answer any questions for you, I would be happy to do that. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. There was real quick,recollection was when we talked about doing kind of the departmental review, the manager said -- stepped up and said I'm going to do this kind of in-house and he created a departmental review group. Wasn't fleet services one of the group to be looked at? And can you tell us where that is and where that. >> Yes. We were one of the first three departments to go through that process. The performance review group owe headed by Kim springers is heading that up. We have completed that review and seen the draft result and have provided a response memo back to the recommendations that they made. In fact, for us the recommendations they came up with we had already either begun implementing or were outside our control and were going to be above our level to implement entirely, but we're moving forward with seeing that that happens. So it was very -- I think it was a very valuable process for us. And it will serve some significant benefit to the city for all the departments to go through that. I believe the first three that went through it was fleet, public works and code, if I'm not mistaken. >> We'll be happy to follow up with those departments and get with Kim springer, who is the director over that area, and follow up because I think the intention was when we went through this there would be something that we would provide back to council in terms of I'm assuming [3:04:39 PM] a report or something like that. Can we get that back now so we have that to inform our budget conversations? >> I'll get a status of that and follow back up. >> Gallo: Thank you. I appreciate that and I think it needs to come back quickly to be part of the budget conversation. >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Houston? >> Houston: You may have said this already, but where is the fleet located now, the service center? >> We have eight service locations around the city that's out around 183. Service center five is across from mount down here on the corner of eighth street and the frontage road. Service center six is out at our location on Hargrave, 1190 Hargrave. >> Houston: It's been there as long as I've been in Austin. >> Yeah. My understanding is that used to be an incinerator site long before I got here. >> Houston: It was. >> And that's where we maintain all of the fire trucks and E.M.S. Units. Service center 8 is down in the St. Elmo area down south of 71. And east of I-35. Service center 12 is a subservice center of 11. They do all of the -- 11 and 12 do all of the Austin resource recovery units. 12 is down near the St. Elmo area south of 71 also. Service center 13 is up at Kramer lane on the north end of town. So did I miss any of them? Bolm road is down south and that's where we do our make ready, upfit them for service and where we decommission [3:06:40 PM] units out of the fleet. That's our decalling shop. It's co-located with the wireless operation of ctm and those two have object co-located because -- have to be co-located because vehicles are brought into the vehicle. We do the decalling and wireless installs all of the radios and so on. Those two operations need to be co-located for efficiency and that's part of what we're planning into the consolidated facility is to move all of of that out of there. The space there is totally inadequate for the workload that we've got going through there. >> Houston: So for the centralized service center it seems as large as Austin is, it's going to be hard to centralize that function in one part of town. >> We won't shut the other service centers down. That's just to add the capacity that we need, that we don't already have. The only service center that would be planned under the current concept to be closed completely is the one at Hargrave to move all of that out there because that's -- really my understanding is that's on the edge of a development, planned development area not far from that metro station, and it's really probably a better location for multiunit housing, multi-family housing, than it is for fleet facility right there in a neighborhood. But that's the only one that we would actually be closing completely if we build that consolidated service center. >> Houston: Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Gallo. >> Gallo: Sorry. I have a couple of questions. Thank you. I was looking at page 31, which is the first page. And just wanting -- wondering if you could explain to the council, it looks like your estimated budget was about 46 million and then the amended budget was 55 million. And it looked like the [3:08:44 PM] previous two years you were at 47 and 46. Can you explain why the budget went up 20%? Over what was projected? >> I'm going to defer that question to my finance manager here. She's my numbers person and can do that better. I think it's primarily because we realign that between some budget lines. >> Seems like realigning wouldn't be a 20% increase, it would be an increase between budget items. That's such a large increase and also such a large increase over the previous two budget years. >> Hi. Gloria Esparza, division manager. What you're looking at is the actuals for '15 of what ended up -- what we actually ended in our expenditures. That wasn't the actual budget. And the reason it was the nine million dollars was the fuel reduction. We didn't have initiative expenditures in our fuel, so -- we didn't have enough expenditures in our fuel. So that was the difference in that particular year. >> Gallo: Now I'm really confused. So the total budget that was estimated that you came before the council last year to propose was 46 million. >> Yes. >> Gallo: And then the amended budget was at 55 million. So the budget went up? Am I not reading that correctly? >> Yes. >> Gallo: So the budget went up over nine million over what you projected this time last year. >> And -- >> Gallo: I'm trying to understand where the increases and expenses came from to cause that much of an increase in your budget because your budget this year is being based on the increased amount from last year. And I maybe reading that [3:10:44 PM] wrong. That's just how I'm seeing that. >> I might while she's looking at some of other numbers, there's a difference between budget and what you actually expend for the year. And it could vary a lot for fleet because of the fluctuations in the fuel prices. So they may budget assuming fuel prices of 250 and fuel comes in at two dollars a gallon, then that's going to be trimmed us savings. >> Gallo: That would cause the budget to go down. >> That would be less than what they budgeted. When you look at their fy15 budget, you're looking at an actual drum there. If you look at the fy-- >> Gallo: I'm looking at the pink page. >> Yeah, you're looking at the pink page. But what's not shown on that pink page is what the fy15 amended budget was. The fy15 amended budget was $52.1 million and the fy16 approved budget that council approved was three million dollars higher than that. We could talk to you about what the three- million-dollar increase in budget is when you look at it in terms of actual expenditures to the budget, though, the reason there's such a huge variance is because fleet didn't spend $52 million in fy15, they only spent roughly $45 million and that's because the fuel prices are so much lower than what they had budgeted and anticipated. >> Gallo: Okay. So the number that I'm looking at in the fourth column, which is 2015-2016 amended takes it up to 55 million. >> I'm saying it takes it up from 52. The actual budget, the council approved budget for fiscal year -- for '15 was $52 million. >> Gallo: So what is the estimated? >> The estimated for 15 was 46. The actual was $46 million. So the estimate for fy16 was what they estimated they were going to end the year at. And they're estimating they're going to end the year much lower than what their budget in the [3:12:47 PM] fy16 was of $55 million. >> Gallo: So the 2016 -- I'm sorry, council. I just want to try to understand this because on the surface it looks like that the amount that was actually amended for 2015-16 was nine million dollars higher than what the 2015-2016 estimated was. >> It is. Budget happens first, though. Even though the columns are transposed, budget was approved by council back in September, $55 million. And the departments estimating they will end the year at $46.2 million and I believe that's because the fuel costs are so much lower than they thought what they were going to be. >> Gallo: So one of the things that might be helpful because you look at this all the time, but we don't, and I think it would be a helpful if we actually had the budgeted amount in there also for -- for the previous year's budget. So what I'm hearing then is that the estimated 2015-16 estimated is what they're estimating to end the year. >> That's right. >> Gallo: This year. So what is the 2015-16 amended, which is the increase of nine million? >> That's the budget that council approved. That's their spending authority under the budget that council approved. The estimate shows you that they're not planning on spending it all. >> Gallo: Okay. So the next question would be if you're estimating that you're going to spend at 26 for this last budget year and you're looking at a proposed budget that would be nine million dollars more, where is the nine million dollars? Why is it that we're looking at so much higher of a budget that's being proposed this year over what you are projecting your actuals to be at for this current budget year? Ed, am I kind of getting the concept finally? >> No. I definitely think you have the concept. The changes that are shown -- it looks like you have volume 2 there with you. The changes on volume 2 on page 37, those [3:14:50 PM] describe all the significant changes in the fy17 budget, but that's relative to the budget that council previously approved. It's not relative to the actual expenditures. And again. >> It's all tied in with the fuel costs. You will actually see on page 37 that they are projecting a decrease in expenditures of two and a half million dollars, R, but they still may be higher than what they actually spend this year. >> So let me just ask then as we go into more detailed materials control. So we look at page 39. So let me go over this because I think you're conveying it to be the 2015-16 amended is what we actually approved in the budget last year. >> That's correct. >> Gallo: And the 2015-16 estimated is this department's projection of where they will end up on the budget. >> As of -- on September 30th that's where it will go in. >> Gallo: Great. And the 2016-17 proposed is what the department is proposing for the budget for this year. >> That's right. >> Gallo: So in this particular category materials control, which is inventory, audit, purchasing, part, storage, insurance, registrations, we're jumping from a projected year end budget for this year of just under 2 million and what you're proposing for the budget for this next year is 10 million. So can you help me understand the increase? [3:16:58 PM] >> I know part of it is realignment, but let me look into the details that back this up. >> Gallo: That would be helpful. Thank you. As you do that, let me mention the others that show a substantial difference between what is estimated to finish the year, the department is estimated to finish the year this year and what they're asking for in the budget. The other one would be fuel management, and that's going from an estimated year end this year at just under 10 million to almost 16 million. >> Houston: What page is that on? >> Gallo: That's page 40, I'm sorry. And so those two details are the ones that seem to show the largest substantial jump between what is projected to be actuals and this current year to what's being posted in the budget. >> I think the fuel management page explains it the best. You can see the story there, in fiscal year 16 council approved a fuel budget of $18.3 million and we're not going to spend anywhere near that. We're projecting we're going to spend $9.8 million. Now for fiscal year 17 the department is projecting a lower budget than ha what was approved by council for fiscal year 17, but they're still projecting they will need more funds than what they actually spend in fy16. So they budgeted 18.2 for fy16. They're only going to spend about 9.8. But fy17 they're saying they need about $15.9 million for their fuel budget. And if fuel prices end up continuing to stay really low, they probably won't spend that money and that would be savings for the subsequent year, but without the authority to spend it we would have to come back to council if fuel prices end up being different than what these guys are projecting. >> Gallo: And I guess we as part of your budgeting you have experts in projecting future fuel costs over the next year that can come in and help determine that. And let me say, I applaud your department for coming in below budget. I'm just struggling with [3:18:59 PM] the concept of if you're able to come in under budget why we wouldn't base county for this next year's budgets what your actuals were for this year. So that's the questions I'm asking you to come back with, is the reason for asking the higher amount what I'm wanting not to hear is, well, last year's budget we asked for this. What I really want to hear is this is what we spent, this is where we project our spending will be at the end of this fiscal year. And we're asking more because. >> And I do have an answer. It was a realignment for the materials control. It's the parts inventory was carried under the service centers, and so we created the materials control activity -- >> Gallo: So what page is service center? >> 38. Page 38. >> Gallo: The fleet maintenance and repair, service centers? >> You will see where it goes from 24.4 million to 17.1. And then so under the materials control you see the increase on page 39. >> So the additional -- but you had budgeted for that amount in last year's budget. >> I'm sorry, I didn't hear the question. >> Gallo: You had actually budgeted for that amount in last year's budget. >> Yes. >> Gallo: So you're reducing the ask for this year and moving that amount over into materials control? >> Yes. We're just realigning. >> Gallo: Okay. So about eight million or so? >> And we don't -- when you look at that, what we're trying to do on that significant pages change is just highlight for council and for the community what are really the if they're adding positions or new programs we highlight those things. If they're just realigning their budget and moving things around it nets out to zero so we don't put it as a significant change. It's just kind of moving the deck chairs around. [3:21:00 PM] But we definitely thought that the fuel reduction, you would see that on the significant change. It's a two and a half-million-dollar reduction in the budget for fuel. As I've said before, even that two and a half-million-dollar reduction in budget for fuel is still more than what they're projecting to expend in the current fiscal year. And they talk about that in the budget highlight section under that operational services program. There's a little bit of a description about how fuel is so volatile and some of the trends they've been seeing. >> Gallo: All right. Thank you. You always do such a good job of trying to explain it to those of us who do not think about this every minute, although this month we probably are. But thank you for helping us to understand all of this. >> I would like to say one more thing. If we used the, as I said earlier, a federally published index, the energy information index that projects fuel costs out for a year, we use that to project our fuel costs on. Having said that, it's a very, very volatile market, as everybody knows. It can change drastically from one year to the other. And while we've taken steps to mitigate the impact of that through a fuel reserve fund that's established, that's there to help us get through a major change in that market. But we try to -- we try to make sure we have enough budgeted that we don't have to come back midyear and say wait a minute, we misguessed and get a big amended budget or a big budget increase. So we don't carry over a profit in that. If we carry a profit in that from one year to the next, we give it to Ed and he puts it in his pocket. I'm not sure what he does with it. >> It's a little more complicated than that. >> Yeah, we don't get to keep it. [Laughter]. >> You might want to take a look at my [3:23:01 PM] 12-year-old car I'm driving, before you -- [laughter]. But another reason we want to make sure to the extent we're guessing on something volatile like fuel and we're guessing high is because we use that number and we give it to all of our departments, Austin energy, resource recovery, police department, all of the departments have to budget for fuel. And if we have savings, then that savings just rolls into the next year's calculations and they might not have to may as much in the next year's calculations. The problem is if we need to have a multi-million-dollar increase in the fuel budget because we underestimated the price then we have to go back to all those departments and midyear try to work with departments to find the money in their budget that they hadn't planned for. So the consequences for us on a volatile and large line item like that of missing it too low and not having enough money set aside for fuel could create a lot of complexities midyear for the council as staff have to come back to council and tear open the budget and try to allocate a way to find more dollars to fuel, it's not always easy to do midyear as it is part of your budget process. >> Gallo: Why do you think it was so off -- the projections were so off for this last year? >> We did not anticipate -- number one, the index that we use was projecting higher prices than occurred. The oil market has not gone up like was anticipated. A lot of projections were showing oil to be back up at $100 a barrel by this time of the year. It's still below 50. And so fuel prices are staying down. If I ever get to point where I can progeny more accurately that, than that with any degree of confidence, then I'm going to quit the city and I will be the next T Boone Pickens. But I haven't got there yet. [Laughter]. >> Gallo: You mentioned something about a reserve, a fuel reserve. >> We established several years ago when [3:25:04 PM] fuel prices shot up, we actually established by city policy a fuel reserve fund. We funded that through a surcharge for the first couple of three years on a per gallon basis until we built it up to a three-million- dollar reserve, and based on the city policy that was approved by council back at that time, we don't touch that unless our shortfall exceeds $500,000 in a given year. If it exceeds 500,000 then we can start dipping into that fuel reserve fund to make up that cost. What we do is we set a fuel price per gallon for each type of fuel at the beginning of the budget year. That let's the department's budget based on anticipated usage, we maintain that price regardless of what the market does. So while our cost for fuel may go up and down, the department's charge for fuel per gallon stays exactly the same through the year. If we make a profit, like I said, that goes back into savings for the following year. If we come up short, less than that 500,000, we just adjust the price for the next budget year on a per gallon basis and make that up. If it's more than 500,000 then we dip into the fuel reserve fund and we'll have to start rebuilding that fund at some point in time then. But so far we haven't had to dip into that. It's there and it's established and that was done four or five years ago, Ed? >> Gallo: How much is your fuel cost below market cost? If you have a truck that fills up at your fuel pump, what are they paying per gallon versus -- what is your charge per gallon versus them running down and funding the least expensive service station? >> I don't have the number off the top of my head. >> Gallo: Is it substantial? It's not as much as you think it is because that fuel cost per gallon also covers our internal administrative cost. [3:27:04 PM] Basically the only difference is that the profit that a private sector commercial facility might make on fuel and that's not a huge profit margin, I can tell you. >> Gallo: I'm just wondering why we don't have credit cards that they go down to the local service station and avoid all the administrative costs with having to run our own. >> It would still be slightly more expensive to do that. And plus you would lose the ability to respond in emergency situations. You get something like floods or tornadoes or whatever, those commercial facilities could be shut down and we try to make sure we have the ability to continue to fuel if the fleet in situations like that, that are protected somewhat from the volatility of the market and the private sector. >> Gallo: All right, thank you. >> We use a lot of different kinds of fuel too. >> Mayor Adler: Hold on. Mayor pro tem. >> Okay. My staff just handed me the current fuel prices, $1.72 a gallon for diesel. E 10, which is regular, is $1.83. B-20, which is the primary alternative fuel we use for diesel power, is 1.96. Propane is 88 cents per gallon equivalent. And -- say again? Compressed natural gas is $1.01 per gallon equivalent. And ethanol, which is e-85, we're paying $1.57 per gallon equivalent. Or selling it, that's our charge to the departments. >> Mayor Adler: Mayor pro tem T. >> Tovo: So on page 4 where you have outlined [3:29:04 PM] the additional staffing that being requested, the service center supervisor is that individual directory related to supervising the five equipment technicians? >> He is. Or they are. >> Tovo: So can you help me understand were that budget item not to be approved how would that affect services? >> Those five technicians and the supervisor are going to allow us to expand shifts primarily at service center 13. Their biggest customer is A.P.D. , You know, if we don't get those positions, it's going to be more difficult to keep up with the growth of the fleet. So they will primarily affect our public safety departments, those five positions and that supervisor. >> Tovo: How are those public safety departments managing their needs right now without those positions? >> Again, as a unit comes into one of our facilities we have three things we can do. We can either let it sit until we get to it, which is what happens with the shortage of staff. We can send that unit out to the private sector for that service, which is a much higher cost, or we can do it in-house. And when we do it in-house it's the most cost effective way to do it. Currently we use quite a bit of overtime. We'll use about 450,000 or so in overtime this year and those positions will help reduce that overtime somewhat. It will also help us reduce our against on private sector vendors for some of that. >> Tovo: Do you have data that you could provide us to show us what -- did you say it was service center 13? >> That's where the primary impact will be. The most significant impact will be because we're going to expand shifts up there until 9:30, 10:00 at night. >> Tovo: Do you have data for service center 13 that shows the amount [3:31:05 PM] of overtime that accrued for technicians at that location and also the amount of work that had to be referred to, that would help us assess whether or not this would be a cost savings. >> I don't have that information with me at this time. We'll be glad to answer that as a Q and a. >> Tovo: I would submit that to the Q and a. I would be interested in knowing that. I would assume that public safety vehicles are normally prioritized among the city vehicles. Is that accurate? >> Each vehicle in the city is assigned to a service center. So, as an example all the fire trucks and E.M.S. Units are assigned to service center 6 for service. And that's the only thing they serve as the other shops -- they really prioritize things based on need and on workflow efficiency. So they sometimes get to those quicker jobs more than the -- sooner than they would the big jobs that are going to take up bay space for a long time, that sort of thing. There's a lot of different factors that go into prioritizing that. But we try to maintain a 95% availability rate across the fleet. Some of those heavier vehicles are more difficult to make that with. >> Tovo: Sure. But if all the public safety vehicles go to service center 6 and these technicians are going to service center 13 I'm not understanding then how this would impact our public safety vehicles. >> Service center six only deals with fire and E.M.S. All of the police department vehicles that can go to any facility, they are primarily serviced through service center five, which is now across municipal court, and service center 13, which is Kramer lane close to the north substation. So that's where the majority of police goes through. We do take some vehicles, police vehicles through other service centers and we frequently will move jobs from one service center to another based [3:33:07 PM] on workload at each service center and staff availability and that sort of thing. >> Tovo: Okay, thanks. And then the question -- so there's an item on the concept menu from councilmembers Houston and Gallo to fund the vehicles for 16-17 and replace the current policy based condition to replace every five years. I understand from the notes that would not have a general fund savings. I assume -- is that because there wouldn't be any new staff associated with those vehicles that were being proposed? >> That's not really the relationship that was made. The problem you get into when you defer replacing vehicles at the optimum point in their life cycle is that you invariably increase costs one way or the other, either your maintenance costs on those units you retained in the fleet goes up to keep them operational. And then ultimately you have to catch up with that replacement cycle. We do not replace vehicles based on age. We replace them based on inspections that we perform in our facilities. Those inspections are triggered by generally mileage. And we're actually fixing to post a response to question number 152 that councilmember Houston posted, which will talk about the age of the vehicles that are on the list for replacement this year, and I can cycle through those numbers for you here very quickly if I can pull that up. >> Tovo: If I could better understand what you're saying in relationship to this concept menu. So this cites a fleet policy to replace vehicles based on condition every five years and what you're saying is the policy is really based on mileage and inspection. >> Exactly. >> Tovo: Not on years. >> When a unit hits its trigger point, and that's generally an odometer reading, we pull that vehicle into our shop, we inspect it [3:35:08 PM] and we code it either ab or C. A being that it need to be replaced as soon as possible. B being that we expect to get at least another year out of it. And a C rating that we expect to get two or more years out of it. And we do those based on those trigger points. So we don't inspect -- we don't try -- we try not to replace a vehicle until it's absolutely necessary that it be replaced, but we try to plan that based on the optimum point in that vehicle's life and what we're looking at for that optimum point is the lowest cost per mile across that vehicle's life. If you look at the general fund replacement list this year, there's like 258 vehicles, I believe, on here. Only 11 of those are less than -- are five years or less old. 137 of them are between five and nine years old. 33 of them are between 10 and 16 years old. And 24 of them are over 17 years old. So that's a result of those inspections. And then there's 53 new units on there that are proposed, additional units. But generally speaking, the only units that we will see come through the fleet that we would replace it five years or less would be those frontline police units that accrue very high mileage, and perhaps some ambulances. Ambulances accrue very high mileage also. But generally speaking, a fire truck as an example, we keep that unit in the fleet for 20 years, 15 years frontline assignment and five more years in a reserve assignment. So we never -- and you never in a fleet, municipal fleet, you never want to reach the point where you're trying to replace based on age. It's just a terribly inefficient -- >> Gallo: And just for clarification we removed public safety out of. >> Tovo: I see that. Could you respond to the [3:37:08 PM] first part of that proposal to freeze the purchase of new general fund vehicles? And what your position [indiscernible] Related to that and also whether there would be any cost savings that relate to staffing requirements. >> That would not reduce -- if I remember correctly, that exempted public safety vehicles and there's a very, very small number of those general fund vehicles that are not public safety related. So it wouldn't be a whole lot of vehicles that we would be freezing the purchase of and it wouldn't be enough even to affect one position. What we're trying to do is catch up with the staffing shortages that we have. We're not basing those additional staff positions on anticipated purchases this year. We're trying to catch up on the staff shortages that we already are dealing with. Our goal being to keep up with that 95% fleet availability target that we've set. It's important to remember that a vehicle or a piece of equipment is just a tool that you put in the hands of an employee out there to do that job. And if they don't have that tool available then they're inefficient. So while you might save dollars in the fleet budget, what you're doing is impacting the cost effectiveness of those mission departments out there, and it can be a significant impact. So you're making them less efficient. So there's not really a significant cost savings in doing that. And for those vehicles that you did defer the purchase of this year, they're still sitting there next year along with the ones that would come due for then, and ultimately you have to play catch-up. And that can be very expensive. I've dealt with that in the past and with Kansas City, Missouri when I was up there. >> Mayor, mayor pro tem, I believe staff has some additional information about the availability rate that was asked earlier about service center 13. [3:39:09 PM] And Jennifer walls -- >> I'm assistant director of operations. And some of those -- a few of those positions will be going to service center six as well as 13. While our availability number is at 94, at those particular location it's lower than that, in the high 80's. So those were going to be targeted to those public safety fleet facilities. >> Tovo: Thank you. >> Houston: Mayor? >> And also to speak to -- I wanted to add a point to him. The inspection process for the vehicles, we manage over 500 different classes of vehicles, all meeting different criteria for replacement and all hitting those targets, along with those 500 classes. Those vehicles are in all different kinds of applications. Hard applications, light applications. So I believe that the replacement process that we've adopted takes into account those different types of applications those vehicles are in on any given time. So that's important. I'm sorry? >> I'm so sorry, but what does hard and soft application -- >> You have a refuse truck that is constantly going back and forth through the landfalls, tearing up tires. Or someone who drives for the library. That's a light application. So that same vehicle bought in that same year will reach a replacement target at different times. And I'm sorry, also too with the maintenance costs is well, it's not just the dollars, it's the type of maintenance. If it's a high dollar related to tires, you don't want to replace the whole truck for a problem you're going to have on a new truck as well. So those are some of the things we look at. >> Tovo: Thank you. >> Houston: Mayor, I want to thank you all for this very interesting conversation. I mean, it really has been interesting because I go by Hargrave and 12th street all the time and I see how many E.M.S. Vehicles and fire trucks are there. I hardly ever see a police vehicle, but they are packed most of the [3:41:09 PM] time. I was glad to see that in of the relief would be to Hargrave and 12th so those vehicles can get back on the road. And then just a question for the fleet officer, how long have you been with the city? >> I have been here eight years as of July this year. >> Houston: And you were where before then because you're just delightful? >> Kansas City, Missouri. I was in Kansas City, Missouri for four years. They hired me to come up there and build them a consolidated department. They weren't even consolidated like we are when I went there. Prior to that I was with the state of south Carolina as the state fleet manager for 10 years, managing about a 17,000 vehicle fleet for the state. Prior to that I ran three different county government fleets, one in South Carolina and two in Florida. For a total of seven years. And that's after I retired out of the army. >> Houston: Thank you so much for your service. >> You're very welcome. And just to touch on one point you made there. We do not deal with A.P.D. At service center six. That is only fire trucks and E.M.S. The only police units that are serviced through six are their boats, which is another class of units that we have to maintain. And when you do drive by there, all of the ambulances that are pointed out are sitting there ready to go. Those are the reserve units that they can swap into. So you can always tell how many of them are ready to be put in service. >> Houston: I'll be looking for that. Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. Teed seeing no Marquez, I think we're ready to move on. - - Seeing no more questions, I think we're ready to move on. Thank you very much. Next we have communications and technology management. And then last is building services. [3:43:24 PM] >> Mayor pro tem, councilmembers. I'm Steven Elkins. I am the information technology director at ctm, communications and technology management. Joining me is Paul Renn, who is our chief financial manager at ctm. And I will try to be equally as delightful as Mr. Faulk. [Laughter]. It's going to be hard to follow, but I'm also interested in getting you back on track, so I will try and get through this presentation. So what I want to do is start off by talking about, you know, one of the messages I mentioned at an earlier believing, our -- earlier briefing, our I.T. Briefing, is more and more businesses -- when I say businesses I'm talking about other city departments are relying on I.T. To deliver city services. And you'll see that theme throughout the message in my presentation. So the first thing I want to focus on is the mission statement for ctm. There's some key things that I want to focus on. One is that it talks about that we are -- thank you, sir. It talks about that we are in the -- ctm exists to provide excellent customer services to the departments we serve so that they're able to provide services, excellent customer services to the citizens that they serve. And so we do not directly serve the citizens, but we indirectly. And that's our role is to serve the departments. Some of the major accomplishments, number 1 on our list is our open data portal, which was ranked number one nationally this year by the open data census. We were also recognized by the sunlight foundation as a best practice in how we manage our open data initiatives across the city. Next on the list is the work that we did with the Amanda web portal. When director Rodney Gonzalez was here last week talking for development services, a lot of the enhancements [3:45:26 PM] that came out of the Zucker report were technology based. He talked about the queuing system, he talked about electronic plan review. He talked about online submissions, fee payments, all those things happen online. If you listen to what that message talked about, it was the use of technology to enable inefficiencies within the -- efficiencies within the development services process and that's one of the things we like to highlight. Also on here is a 311 to maximum work order. This was an integration that allows citizens to call 311 and generate a work order through the Maximo system, which is a system for transportation and public works. We're also looking to go live with the implementation between 311 and code enforcement. I think when code was here director Carl smart talked about that that didn't exist. That was in the process of being worked on, and we pretty much have it done. We need to have some user acceptance testing and we're expected to go live around August 22nd so that code items will be able to be dialed in to 311 and generate a work order through the Amanda system. Next on the list is a cost savings of four million dollars annually through a fiber-optic network consortium that the city of Austin is part of. Also the university of Texas, aid and others. There's seven other government agencies that's part of this consortium. So again by the city being part of that, we save the city four million dollars annually. Around the last thing on here -- and the last thing is here is we factored two factor authentication. This was a mandate from dps as a criminal justice information systems item that the city had to achieve this year. And what this does is it [3:47:27 PM] makes our public safety data more protected, and what it is is you no longer just need a password to log in, but you also need another log-in that's randomly generated. So that was something that we was able to achieve to meet the mandate by dps. A couple of the -- I'm not going to go through all of our performance measures, but a couple of them that I will highlight is that the percentage of urgent 3 service desk incidents closed by ctm. In 2015 we were at 83%. During this time we were adding additional departments, and so we typically are around a 90% range, but in '15 we dipped down a little bit. In fy16 we came back up to 91 and we're projecting we'll be right at the 90%. And this is while we're adding other departments and taking service calls that we had not taken before, we're closing those within five business days. And of those calls the next measure below that shows how many of those calls are closed within two hours of receiving. And level 3's are break/fix type of things. So if somebody calls in and they're unable to work, then we call that a level 3. So again, we're very responsive that over 50% of our calls for level 3's are resolved within two hours. Then if you look at what the numbers are, they're roughly around 90,000 calls per year. And then the ctm, because we are, as I talked about the mission statement upfront, we are in a customer service business. We want to evaluate how well we're doing to the customers we serve and so we send out an annual survey in here and it shows the departments that we serve, how they rate us on the survey that we create. So we were at 96 in 2015. We're at 95. And again our goal is right at 90. I think for us to set a bar at 95, I mean, that would be unrealistic, but we're always striving to be better than we were the year before. [3:49:33 PM] So on this slide, the fy16 budget was 88.6 million and the fiscal year proposed 2017 budget is 97 million. You can look at how the dollars are divided among the parts of ctm, so we have communications and technology, which supports the departments, the majority of the city general fund departments. And then we also have ctac, public safety side and a wireless communication side, all of those communications work together to form ctm. The thing on this slide is that we're asking for an increase of seven positions over what we had in fy16 and what's driving this is we have a robust governance process that determines what kind of projects we're going to fund -- that we're going to propose funding for the next year. What we have not been good about is also requesting positions. So we've been asking for the technology without asking for staff to support the new technology. So in fy17 there was an ask for positions as we were also looking at adding new technology. So what you will see on the next slide is that it will actually show an increase of nine positions, but we're also decreasing by two positions. And the two positions that are being decreased, one we're going to transfer over to building services. We found an area where there was some redundant work done, duplication of work. So we in turn agreed that building services would take on that responsibility of work and in turn we moved over the position that supports that line of business. And then we also just decreased a position based on a city manager goal of cost savings. So the next slide will show we're asking for nine new positions, but the net of that is seven positions. And the nine positions were coming from our governance process. [3:51:34 PM] So changes from fy16's budget. We have a decrease in our cip transfer of 13.4 million. And what that is is a combination of completing projects and also completing critical replacement items. And then the line below it that we're going to increase the transfer to 12.6, so it's a net of .8 million, between the two. So there's projects -- as this council approves projects, the projects do not start and stop in one year. Of the projects start in the middle of the year and they go into the next year and they span across multiple years. And so in turn as we back out the fy16 number, some of those dollars have to be added back into the 17 budget. And then the other item on there is a data center replacement project for three .2 million, which I'll talk about on one of the later slides. There's an increase in hardware and software maintenance. As you see on some of the rca's when they come in, when they come to you that it will show that there is an increase that the organizations that provide the support and services, they show an increase in their maintenance costs and in turn that cost is transferred on to us. So that's why you see that 3.1 million. The Microsoft licensing agreement, sf 365 we're also adding the public library to office 365. This is something that came up in our discussions last year that we need to do more software as a service cloud solutions, office 365 is one of the bigger cloud solutions that any organization can take on and we took that on this year. And it -- in turn it cost a little more, but there are cost savings because it had additional features such as video conferencing features, which we'll be talking about at one of the council meetings here in the near future when we look at how the [3:53:35 PM] citizens engage remotely. So it has video conferencing, it has more robust sharepoint functionality. It has security features to it. And it also has more storage. So now our emails are not stored locally. I don't know if you've ever noticed before, we went to office 365 you would get a notice that your mailbox was full. You shouldn't see that anymore because now we have more storage since we moved to office 365. So that was -- that's an additional cost. And then -- >> [Off mic]. >> And then the last two items on here are an increase in body cam implementation of $100,000. Earlier you heard the police department talk about how some of the projects started in fy16 and midyear and some of it was going to go into 17. This is a result of that is that a position was funded in fy16 midyear and so now we had to add additional funds as well as incidental costs that was going to be part of the body cam implementation. And then the last item on here is just the transfer out, the position to building services to take on the physical security work of badging, badge readers, things that we were doing, as well as building services. The vacancy rate, fy15 was at 5.5%. Fy16 is at 6.3%. 20 vacant positions. The city averages 8.7, so we're below the city average, and I will say that when I look -- when we get to the horizon issues, I mean, this is a challenge for us. The amount of tech companies here make it challenging for us to fill our positions and compete with the private sector. [3:55:36 PM] Okay. So key projects. For fy17, the data center relocation, we had a study done last year or two years ago, and what the study said is that -- which we kind of knew was that our data center was out of date. It's 25 years old. The life of a data center is about that amount of time. The consultant we worked with had told us if we continue to operate under that data center we're taking a body cam implementation risk that -- we're taking a big risk that something potentially bad could happen. We in turn came forward through the governance process that we relocate the data center. And this would be similar to what we're going to propose is somewhat of a Claude offering for our data -- cloud offering for our data center. We're not asking to buy a new facility. What we're requesting is that we move into a lease facility. So there's organizations around the city of Austin who lease space and they are responsible for the environmentals of running the data center so that way we make sure that the things that were out of date at our current facility would always stay current. So we would have redundant power. We would have better cooling. We would have backup generators, things they were responsible for when we ran our own data center. So this would give us a higher probability that we would not have any issues with our data center equipment. The next thing which you guys talked about this morning was the body cam implementation. As A.P.D. Talked about, the money is in the ctm budget initially and some of the monies will transfer to the A.P.D. Budget. Servers and storage, we're storing more and more data. We're storing a lot of video. Those are things that we needed to make sure we had enough of in the upcoming year. I talked about Amanda already that we're continuing to do more [3:57:36 PM] enhancements. I think director Rodney Gonzalez did an exceptional job talking about the three-year plan for the development services. And a lot of those things evolve, the use of technology, some other things on here under that bullet which is the real estate inventory system, which was approved through last year's budget and we're working on that still. We are also -- in December -- november-december of last year the city hired its first chief information security officer, and we're putting -- we're having a lot of focus on security at the city of Austin. And councilmember Houston, I know you asked the other day we were talking about the wireless -- the small cell technology, and you asked a question about are we secure? And so the items under this bullet here are some security features that we feel are going to help the city be more secure. So the items here are a file transfer protocol. What this is is a site where the city and the citizens transfer large files. And so instead of taking a huge file and sending it through the email system, we put it in this location and it allows the community to -- such as maps, gis maps. And they can pull the files right off of this site. Site. The system we have in place has been in place for some time and what we realized is that some of the information that was being put out there may contain publicly personally -- personal identifiable information. And so, again, by putting in a new file transfer protocol example it relieves the opportunity to have those kind of issues happen. And then a denial ever service attack. This was something, again, that we see that other government agencies, if they're not going forward with the mitigation strategy, it [3:59:36 PM] will actually take down their city's website. We've seen this happen in Ferguson last year. Actually close by here it, happened in San Marcus, where their website got attacked and they were down for a week. And so, again, we're putting mitigation strategies in place to protect the city from those type of attacks. And then the last thing on the Lisa diversity management system for -- list is a diversity management system for small resources. As I said at the beginning of this presentation that more departments are relying on technology to deliver services and this is just another example. That the process today is somewhat automated and somewhat manual. This allows them to be better at delivering services to the community that they support. Horizon issues. Seems to be a common theme, so our facility needs -- the wireless facility that we have, we're out of space at the facility. Same thing with our C tech 911 radio dispatch facility. We're at full capacity. The wireless office, as directorrierery cock mentioned, we share that space about them. We just need to look at another option. If we're gonna continue to bring in the volume of vehicles to add arranges, I heard this -- radios, I heard the police chief talk about adding new officers, which may mean additional vehicles and more work for the wire office. Again, the facility today is at capacity. Flexible sourcing, this is what I was talking about earlier, about the competition in this area. Currently, the demand for technology jobs is outpacing the supply of it jobs, and so, again, we need to be flexible in how we get -- how we manage [4:01:37 PM] that. One of the things that we've -- we did this year is that we actually did an intern program -- this is our second year of doing a robust intern program, where we had 20 high school kids come and work in ctm over the summer so this is a grass roots way of us to making sure that we're trying to grow the supply side. One of the outcomes was that we had the students work on real projects. It was not just job shadowing but they worked on real projects and we actually had them develop apps that would be useful. One of the teams that we had actually is getting funded from a local entrepreneur to go forward with developing and fully building out one of the ideas that they had around identifying pets with folks interested in adopting pets. So, again, we're look at all kind of things under the flexible sources, looking at managed service contracts, using temps and contractors. We cannot stop the work that we perform, so we need to be flexible in how we get the work done. Master data management, again, this is the amount of data that we're collecting. The amount of storage, the retention. You know, we had the smarter cities discussion and the internet of things, and that involves collecting more data from centers around the city and so, again, there's more and more information that we're asked to store and retain so, again, this is something that we just need to make sure we have a strategy for. New service delivery models, this was something that came up last year that we need to do more cloud solutions than we have. One of the things that prevented us from doing this last year was that we did not have a second internet connection. And so that gave us a single point of failure. So the more we invested in cloud solutions, the more we were at risk. Last year the council approved [4:03:38 PM] ctm to go forward to implement a second internet connection so now we're better positioned to take advantage of the cloud strategies. We also need to be aware that it's easy for the departments to access cloud solutions, and we need to make sure we're safe about what we're doing. What information are we sending to the cloud, and who actually owns the information? So, again, it's just a horizon issue at the time. The last thing on here is human capital management system. This is -- this item did not get funded. This continues to be a high priority internally for the city of Austin through our governance process, over the last couple years, this was ranked as a top initiative that internal -- internal to the city that we should be looking at. Right now we have a system that was put in place, 1986 -- 96? Yeah. It's been put in pce some me ago and there's a lot of workarounds. The payroll portion of the system functions great, but then there's a lot of work-arounds with the rest of the system and so in turn we need to really look at a - - we need to look at funding a human capital management system in the near future. And that's all my slides, and Paul and I are open for questions. >> Mayor Adler: Yes, councilmember pool. >> Pool: Thanks for an excellent report, Steven. Can you give me -- I don't know if you can, but, you know, when we were having the conversation about how much the cloud storage would be for the body cams, it was a big number, and some of the questions that we asked from the dais were couldn't we do it ourselves and wouldn't the price be less? Because I know that cloud storage prices are dropping. Do you have any insight or any additional information into whether that is something that we could provide ourselves, [4:05:40 PM] with our proprietary storage abilities, be able to cover that cost for the police department? >> So what I would like to do is respond to that at a later time, through writing, if you're okay, sometime this week. I don't have the answer to that question. >> Pool: That's completely fine. It also occurs to me that it may be that we couldn't talk about it publicly anyway. I don't know. Because we've been sued on that. It just occurred to me maybe I shouldn't have asked the question. Is it okay? Okay. So it's okay to ask the question, and I'm fine with you providing a response in writing, and please do feel free to share it with the rest of the council. >> Okay. >> Pool: Okay, thanks. >> Mayor Adler: We have some pretty daunting upgrade modernization tech challenges, both with respect to the challenges that you have here, and we've talked in the past about the Amanda system and how we're kind of doubling down on that in the short-term in order to help us with the permitting process, but there have been some conversations, as other cities have done, about moving away from that to something that's newer or maybe Amanda is evolving to that. And I don't know what the -- how we -- because it's a big expenditure. I don't know what the path looks like to be able to fix that. At some point I think that we need to identify that, with every passing year our old systems become a year or two older. You're doing an incredible job of keeping everything going and everything moving forward. It's a big expenditure and I don't know how other cities, ones that have been able, to have managed to set themselves on the path to be able to do that, but it's one of those [4:07:41 PM] things that seems absolutely inevitable for us. And I don't know if there are -- what that path is. >> Is that a question for me? >> Mayor Adler: Yes. >> Sure, okay. [ Laughter ] So I would say that some of the other cities were probably in a -- a different position than we were in, and so how we are choosing to do the data center, I mean that's very critical to us at this point in time because without relocating our data center, doing a colocation and -- then nothing works. I think some of the cities, they may have had a case-management system that was either homegrown or very outdated. We're not in that place. As a matter of fact, the csdc company, they're continuing to upgrade the current tool and they're actually having a rewrite of the Amanda system so it's very modern. I think there's different philosophies that folks take, and a philosophy -- and this isn't a bad way but when blackberry was number 1 in the cell phone market they stopped updating and in turn the market passed them by and now they're trying to come back. Well, csdc, they have not stopped updating. They're actually looking at modernizing the current tool. So I don't know if our plan is to move away from that solution. I think had it not -- had they not started modernizing that would obviously be something we should look at, but what we have invested and what it would cost for us to move to the next version, it's probably in the best interests of the city to stay the course. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> And not do a, I think, San Antonio -- I think their cost was 15 million or something for a case-management system. I believe they had an old system that was not being modernized at all. And I don't think they had a choice. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> We have a choice. [4:09:42 PM] >> Mayor Adler: So I hear stories, and I don't know if they're true and air anecdotals, they come to me about some cities that have the ability -- everybody has, you know, iPad, inspector goes out, literally takes a picture, able to circle what needs to be done, it's made part of the file. We have inspectors that go back out to their cars and are actually writing written reports and those written reports are then processed. And in Austin, Texas, when you hear that, it makes you -- so I just want to make sure that in addition to the things that we have if there's -- if there's a need for doing something that is bigger than that, if it's something that we really can't do out of general funding like, that we have a bond commission that is being Teed up here with a quarter of a million dollars and funding that doesn't require additional tax increases in order to be able to handle. I just want to make sure that if there's something big like that that we should be doing because otherwise we wouldn't be doing it, that you're part of that conversation or adding to that or giving the commission something to consider if, in fact, there is a big expense that we're never really gonna be able to catch up to if we're trying to do it in general funding and I don't know the answer to that, but if in case there is, don't be shy. >> Okay. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Anything else? >> Houston: Unfortunately, I have something else. On page 6, the third bullet down, what is waller? >> Oh, waller creek. That's a city facility. [4:11:44 PM] Yeah, this is just -- that's a location of -- it's a city facility. >> Houston: Okay. >> It's where the water utility is located. >> Houston: Down on tenth street. >> Down on tenth street. >> Houston: Okay. I didn't know we were talking about waller creek or the tunnel. >> No. It's a facility. >> Houston: Sorry. [ Laughter ] Kind of like what are we doing down there? And then the -- because I'm still trying to get used to the cloud. My staffer will tell you -- staff will tell you about that. On page 7, under human capital management system, for fire -- are fire, ems included in that or do they operate separately? >> This here -- so the human capital management system would be citywide, include all city departments. As I stated this was a project that was not being funded. But what I did not follow with is that we are looking at doing a pilot for time and attendance and that would include the public safety departments, as well as some of the other departments. So to the mayor's point, I mean, we're a city of Austin and we still have paper time sheets. And so this would at least get us moving forward in the right direction if we accommodate do a full human capital management system, at least we can take on the time and attendance component. I don't have okay. >> Mayor, this woulding an example of something that is big that we had been kicking down the road every year because we could not fund it in our operational budget and it would be an example of one of the projects that would probably need bond funding and that's how some of the other cities have been able to do it. They've reached a point of failure. Then they realize they had to issue some debt to acquire the system. >> Houston: And thank you for that, Mr. Washington. And then my last question is that you will continue to have staff on-site here? Because I know where they live. [ Laughter ] And I run down there all the [4:13:44 PM] time and knock on the door and say can you come fix it? >> Absolutely. There's always gonna be staff here. >> Houston: Okay, thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Anything else? Thank you very much. >> Houston: Mayor, if you've ever been downstairs, it's like they're in a closet. It's really deplorable to have city staff and -- in those kind of cramped quarters. I just wanted to give a plug for trying to find a place for them. Not out of here. [ Laughter ] Because I need to know where they are in case I have problems. >> Mayor Adler: In fact Ms. Houston wants a spot right next to her office if there's a way to free that up. >> Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. And I think we're at the last report for today, building services. >> Yes. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> Good afternoon, mayor, council, Eric Stockton, building services. We have the last report to round out the support services group. So -- there we go. All right. So to provide a quick overview, building services provides a variety of services to city facilities and the departments that occupy them. That includes custodial, maintenance,-vac -- hvac, project management, capital renewal, those type of services. So our mission, our purpose in the organization is to provide [4:15:46 PM] those services so they support reliable, efficient, and sustainable city facilities. Real quickly, I'll go over a few major accomplishments or highlights from the last year. Building services has received certification for its custodial program by green seal, and this is the first municipal custodial program in the nation to receive this certification. So that is a very significant accomplishment. >> Mayor Adler: Way to go. >> Pool: That's terrific. >> Yeah. It helps us comply with the lady on in best practices. We have completed the initial roll-out of a lien 5s program, a program intended to improve efficiency and organization in the witness. >> Mayor Adler: Excuse me. Hang on one second. >> Pool: But do you have an Emmy? [ Laughter ] >> I do not. I do not. And we have, again, this year continued to improve one of our core and most important measures of the ratio of reactestify work of proactive or planned work as we move toward our benchmark of 40% we'll achieve 30%, improved that from 9% over the last several years. That's very important because building services has historically been a service organization that's essentially a work order maintenance shop, that reacts to problems and trouble calls. We've been working to lay the foundation so we can shift that into an asset management type of organization. And to that end, we've been test driving some new key performance indicators that are intended to help us measure our progress and our performance with respect to reliable, efficient, and sustainable facilities. That includes customer satisfaction, EPA portfolio manager energy efficiency [4:17:47 PM] rating, facilities condition index, operating costs of ownership per square foot and the ratio of schedule versus unscheduled maintenance, when I've already referenced. Okay. So our budget overall real quickly, the highlights, fy16 the amended budget was 17 million. The proposed for this coming year for '17 is 17.6 million. We are increasing by two positions, and the majority of our funding comes from the support services fund, with a few expense refunds. Changes from fy16 of some significance include realigning funding for interoffice mail services, which is one of the services we provide. This simply means we're moving the funding or the financial services is moving the funding from the departments that pay for those services into the support services fund so that taxicab be -- it can be more directly accounted by our program that provides those services. And you heard previously Steven mention the transfer of the ctm security coordinator position to building services. We have a security services we provide in some of the city facilities we're already doing a number of things that program was intended to do so this is an effort to consolidate that and put it in one location. Our vacancy rate last year was 6.2%. It has improved, currently down to 2.5% with four vacant positions, all of which are vacant less than six months. And some capital highlights. We have proposed in the budget for 2017 an increase of 5.2 million, and these -- this increase is related -- if you'll recall, the deferred maintenance presentation that we did in may, these increases [4:19:54 PM] will support several projects related to climate control, deferred maintenance, Ada improvement, infrastructure improvements at various locations, which are outlined in the chart there before you. And, finally, real quickly, horizon issues. Three really fundamental horizon issues for us looking forward include continuing this process of shifting the organization from a reactive type of footing to proactive facility management type of organization. That will continue. Efforts have already begun in that regard. Deferred maintenance as you heard about in may is -- will be an issue for the foreseeable future, and the growth of the portfolio, which will occur, as we address the capacity issues in various city departments with respect to facilities, which I think many of the departments that preceded me touched on some of those. And that pretty much wraps up the -- to borrow a phrase from Jerry, the reader's digest version of our budget. I'm open to questions. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. That means me and you. Ms. Pool. >> Pool: It's the rock and roll team. >> Mayor Adler: That's right. >> Pool: I do have a question. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> Pool: Are you able to give us kind of a scoping of the work that the contractor who is looking at our facilities right now -- where that effort is with regard to the municipal court relocation and expansion and then also our city clerk's offices? Oh, I see Lorraine is here too. >> Yes, Lorraine can tell you a little more detail about the development advisory working on the municipal courts and the other projects that are in planning and collecting information and programming. [4:21:55 PM] I'll let her respond to that one. >> Pool: Great. Thank you. Hi. >> Hi. Lorraine Reiser, office of real estate. Councilmember, we're very excited. We are looking at the rfp for the development center being out on the street next week. We're planning on sending a memo to mayor and council, updating them on our process. We're very excited about that. We're hoping to bring something back to council in November and then start the negotiation. So we're moving quickly about that on the municipal courthouse, we have done our initial space planning, and now we are going to look at some space. We've got some great information from the city of San Diego, which we think could save the city up to $500,000 in the initial planning stage and accelerate our moving on that. So we'll be doing some site visits in California to visit some of their court systems and some others, but -- and then, hopefully, by spring have an rpm on the springs for the new courthouse. >> Pool: That's great. And then are you also able -- okay. And then the city clerk's offices. >> I can address that. >> Pool: While you were talking about it, one other thing occurred to me, and that is the potential partnering about Travis county for the federal courthouse on -- I think it's on eighth street. Is there anything that you can talk about about that? Councilmember, the process is currently in the first phase, where basically H.U.D. Is looking for different activities related to homeless and that phase ends in November if they don't choose something related to converting that space for some kind of homeless use, then they'll start look at the applications with the county. The county has recently hired [4:23:56 PM] cbre who did our court system to look at how that building -- if they should be selected, how we all could fit in that building. >> Pool: Okay, great. Thank you. All right. >> Follow up on the city clerk, there's sort of a 2-pronged approach on that one, one is long-term, wear looking at the whole building of city hall and working with a developmenter staff to help up up with information to prioritize who stays and who needs to move out at city hall because we are full. There really is no place for any additional bodies. So for the short-term, what we're doing is since we're looking at three ftes we're also reviewing space in city hall and seeing where we can do realignment of worth station and/or offices and go ahead and fit them in so we don't have to go out for lease space for a small group of folks, we can keep them here with city clerk and they may have to be on a different floor because we did a couple years ago revise the space in the city clerk's office area and we've pretty much maxed that out. You're not gonna be able to squeeze any space out of that area so we are looking at other parts of the buildings for those three ftes. >> Pool: Okay. I appreciate being kept apprised of that. That and the municipal court epifollow pretty closely and I also recognize that there are some -- when you talk about adjacency there are some issues with the restaurant and the smells that come in to the clerk's office, which is a bit distracting. >> Yes. >> Pool: Of course that would affect whoever is in that space so I guess we need to look at what's causing that and address it. Thank you. Appreciate it. >> Houston: Councilmember, I like the way you said the restaurant smells. That's sometimes more than that, but. . . That was very kind of you. [4:25:56 PM] Short-term, what about the parking for the municipal court? I mean, because we're talking about another couple of years. To me that was the biggest issue for the municipal court, was to get them in an environment that was safe where they could park and they had the repair -- you know, had all the things that they need to function. And so I'm hearing we're gonna be looking for shotgun, but what are we gonna be doing in the short-term? >> Councilmember, we're look at different facilities to see if we can lease parking. We're looking -- talking to the hotel. We're -- just -- there's just not a lot of parking in that area. So we are struggling with finding any space for them right now, but we are talking to all the business owners in that area. >> Houston: So who owns the parking under the bridge -- under I-35? >> Basically, that land is owned by the state of Texas, and we have an agreement with them that they let us use it for parking and so Bev an agreement with a company -- we have an agreement with a company who manages that space. A few years ago there was a lot of crime out there and so we realized we needed somebody on-site during the hours that people are out there to keep the crime down. So that's managed by a parking company. >> Houston: So there's no opportunity for us to, say, during this hours are for folks at the municipal court? >> We can look at that. Initially, we had to back off of that a little bit because we had to pay for the lighting and some of the improvements underneath that bridge but I can double-check and see if we've paid that off and now if there may be opportunity for us to reserve some of those spaces. [4:27:57 PM] >> Houston: Thank you. I'd appreciate that. >> Mayor Adler: Yes? Mayor pro tem. >> Tovo: I apologize that I don't have as much information about this as I would like to have before asking a question but I assume the security guard contracts are under your division. Is that accurate? >> They're actually citywide contracts, but, yes, we are a big user of those contracts. >> Tovo: And I was just trying to pull up the one we have on our agenda for tomorrow and for some reason can't seem to get it on my laptop or phone. I wonder how recently you've done a cost benefit analysis of actually having the security be city employees, having those individuals being city employees versus having them be hired through a contract service. >> It has been a couple of years. The contract services pretty much are going to be in terms of just dollar costs are gonna be cheaper than the labor rate that the city pays. But not necessarily by a lot, and there are also other considerations to keep in mind. >> Tovo: Sure. >> When evaluating the pros and cons of contract versus in-house. So weaning -- we do tend to look at that as, you know, every year or two, and I think it's been about two years since we've done any kind of work on that. >> Tovo: I agree, and I appreciate you -- I would just degree that there are other considerations versus just the dollar amount and I think that's a really important consideration so thank you for alluding to those. It would -- you know, I think as an employer, we need to set a good example for the rest of the community, and it gives me pause when I see those contracts on our agenda and it's just been a long time since we really had that discussion. I know we had a similar conversation several years ago about custodian staff that Austin energy intended to hire, especially when we have individuals who are serving different facilities, some of them for multiple years, but [4:29:58 PM] they're not city employees, they're just -- they're providing that service to the public, much in the same way a city employee would be but without the benefits. That's a practice we should really look carefully out. Likely I'll have questions about that tomorrow for that contract. >> Okay. I'll have to defer to James. I'll check with him because there are provisions built into the contracts with respect to, you know, a living wage as well as other provisions that relate to benefits. And I don't know the particulars of those as they relate to the security contract. >> Tovo: Sure. Thanks so much. >> Mayor Adler: Anything else? I think we're done. Thank you very much. Ed? Anything else? >> Nope. We're done. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Again, I would tell my -- I anticipate that I'm gonna post something on the bullet continue board today that might tee up some matters for us to consider on the concept menu tomorrow by way of the staff's request to see if we can help manage that page. >> Tovo: Mayor? >> Mayor Adler: Yes, mayor pro tem. >> Tovo: Given that we have kind of a half day agenda tomorrow do you have a sense of when you might call up that conversation just so we can be thinking about where in the day it might fall? >> Mayor Adler: I hadn't yet. We're gonna be discussing -- I hadn't yet. I won't do it first thing in the morning just because I'm posting so late today. So I would expect later in the day. >> Tovo: Okay, super. Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: All right. With that we adjourn today's work session. [ Adjourned ]