City Council Budget Work Session Transcript – 08/30/2017 Title: ATXN 24/7 Recording Channel: 6 - ATXN Recorded On: 8/30/2017 6:00:00 AM Original Air Date: 8/30/2017 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== [9:17:56 AM] >> Tovo: Good morning. I just got word that the mayor is on his way, but he's happy for us to start if we have a quorum, which I think we do. Yes, we do. So welcome. It is 9:18. I'm mayor pro tem tovo and we're in the boards and commissions room having our -- what is this? Budget work session. Welcome, Mr. Van eenoo, do you have a sense of what we need to accomplish today? >> Well, today is our kind of final work session. I think we've had four prior work sessions on the budget. This will be our fifth and final work session prior to council taking action on the budget on September 11th, 12th and 13th. The plan for today is we've had departmental discussions and budget discussions, but today it's about your concept menu. If you printed a copy of the concept menu last night, I would ask that you actually work off the ones we just handed you because it changed this morning. We've added some additional items that came in this morning so you should have a fresh copy of if. If you're pulling it offline, I believe it's been off-loaded. If it's not, it should be. We were just doing this 20 minutes ago to make sure it was the most updated possible. >> Flannigan: Can you give me a line item number to show what the newest numbers are? >> Let's do a test. Under economic opportunity and affordability, you should see a number of items at the bottom there, E 44, 45, 46 from councilmember Garza. Those are some of the -- 44? Actually, I don't have -- your economic opportunity version from like E 40 to E 46 from councilmember Garza, those are some of the ones we added this morning because we missed them previously. [9:20:02 AM] Goes through 45? There should be an E 46 for 2,165,000. So we'll get that online version updated as soon as we can. So that's the plan would be to work through this concept menu. There was only -- I think council had asked at the last work session if there were any of these items on this concept menu that staff felt might be -- take some time for to us work through. The only things that we would have potential concerns with, depending upon what council wanted, would be on the other tab. And these are not new. So you will have it in your electronic version, but under the "Other" tab, the first three items from councilmember alter seeking percentage reductions in consulting services, commodities and non-cip capital, we've already run the reports for that. That's pretty easy work. So we've already, you know, put the numbers in there. The question is -- this is something that we've discussed with council previously I believe two budget cycles ago we were talking about this. So if there's a desire for staff to do the more detailed analysis of what those reductions would actually look like, that would be a more time consuming process. These numbers are just coming from a report. So some of these numbers, for example, would be coming from dsd where they would be offsetting fee implications of removing these costs. Some of them came from police asset forfeiture funds, which can only be used for very limited and specific things. Some of this funding would come from the library's book budget, which I know is a huge concern of council's last time we had this discussion. So if council's desire is for staff to do more detailed analysis of really how would these reductions look, how would they impact city services, there may be some line items that we just can't Russo they may have to take bigger reductions to other line items. [9:22:03 AM] The numbers are easy, kind of the story behind what those numbers mean to the departments and their operations is a lengthier ask that we have not done yet. >> Houston: Mr. Van eenoo, can you always give us the page number? >> Sorry. I was rambling on about page 31 and 32 way near the end of the package. >> Alter: Perhaps my staff can get with some of your staff and we can get over some of the issues that we were proposing and we could see what some of those issues are. I think we were trying to get a sense of the magnitude of how much money we could save if we took that approach. And obviously doing across the board stuff has its down sides and there's nuances that we would want to take into consideration. So I appreciate you raising those and maybe we can talk through some of those. >> I'd be happy to do that and then we can refine these numbers. >> Alter: Thank you. >> Those are the only three issues that I wanted to highlight that staff would maybe want to do some additional work on. Beyond that I think we're good to go and for you to have your discussion about your concept menu. >> Mayor Adler: Council, does anybody have anything that they want to do? This is an opportunity to talk to each other. We certainly -- yes, Mr. Flannigan. >> Flannigan: One math error on the roll-up screen, it looks like it didn't include the first item under safety budget reductions because it's a text field in the excel file because it was set as a range of values. [9:24:08 AM] So it would more than double the roll-up value or triple, quadruple depending which part of the range you select from. And I'm happy to speak to that item. So we're talking about S 101. So this is the first item under safety under budget reductions. This is -- >> Mayor Adler: Page what of what? >> Flannigan: I'm on the digital. >> Tovo: Mayor, would it work -- we can start here, but I wonder if we could spend a little time going one by one after we hit this one because we've not had any discussion on these items? >> Mayor Adler: That sounds good. Jimmy, why don't you -- what was your? >> Page 12, S 101. This is the adjustment to four-person staffing for the fire department. And I want to be clear that the fire dpartment in its additional information asserts some impacts that I don't think are true. And when we had this conversation earlier this year talking about four-person staffing the department went out of their way to misrepresent this concept in the public. We are not talking about three-person staffing. We're not talking about pre-2007 levels of staffing. We are talking about the different between 2007 and 13, the staffing that began with the safer grant. When you look at actual data that we have -- and the advantage today as opposed to in previous years having this conversation is that we have multiple years of data to show the outcome of the fire department. So we know how safe the firefighters were before 2007. We know how safe they were between 2007 and 2013 and we know how safe they were between 2013 and today. And when you look at the rate of workplace injury for priorities, pre2007 it's higher than post 2007. So there's no question in my mind and there shouldn't be any question that the 2007 changes to staffing were a good thing for the fire department and a good thing for the firefighters. [9:26:14 AM] But when you look at the difference between 2007 and 2013 levels, there is no difference. In fact, the firefighter injuries are in some cases statistically insignificant there are so few injuries in our department. And I recall a conversation that chief Kerr and I had earlier this year when we were reviewing the fire department where she talked about the unusually high level of injuries in the Houston fire department which also has full four-person staffing and I asked her what the difference was. Why does Houston have such a higher rate of workplace injury for firefighters than we do even though we have the same staffing levels? And she said it was department culture. It was policy around how they fight fires. They go into more dangerous situations than we do, which only reinforced the notion for me that the staffing levels between the 2007 and the 2013 level are irrelevant. The real impact are the good decisions that the department makes in which dangerous situations do they place firefighters. So it's a pretty big range. As you can see, I don't doubt that it will be difficult for the department to roll back some of their operation strategies to account for this change, but it is a significant savings to the budget beyond other items that I know councilmember alter and I are working on for the fire department. But this one especially, the data just does not back up how the department describes this item. I think it could really save the community a lot of money. I know there are many, many spending items on this list. I don't think I submitted any of them, but nonetheless I think this is a real opportunity to create a better and more physically restrained fire department. [9:28:16 AM] >> Mayor Adler: Okay. This is the first time we've done this. Do we just want to start at the top and just run through it and see if someone has a question of an author? Do you want to organize ourselves that way. Does anyone have a different way that they would propose to organize this? Mayor pro tem? >> Tovo: I would suggest that, but I would also suggest when councilmember Garza gets here that we circle back to this. I rely a lot on her expertise with the fire department, so I would like an opportunity to talk about this when she's here. But I like the idea of going through one by one. >> Mayor Adler: Councilmember kitchen. >> Kitchen: This is a question for the mayor pro tem, but she and I put a lot of questions in related to funding for homeless. And I think in an earlier meeting we suggested that we devote -- devote a section or something or a block of time to talking about that. And if we still want to do that, and I'm looking to her for some guidance, we might want to designate a time for doing that in case we need some staff here or something. So instead -- if we just go through these one by one we're going to hit the homeless stuff one by one instead of talking about it as a package. So I'll defer to the mayor pro tem, but I think we set aside a specific time to talk about the homeless issues. What do you think? >> Tovo: I'm fine with that. I had sort of remembered that as your suggestion so it must have been somebody else's. >> Kitchen: Great minds think alike. Whatever. >> Tovo: That's fine. I would say -- yeah, either way. I think some of these are passages that we can talk about so we can hit it quickly and it's related to homeless issues and homelessness. I think the homelessness might take more time, but maybe we can at least on our first pass kind of go through and talk quickly about it. But I like the idea of talking also about where your items are because we still do have some overlap. [9:30:18 AM] I don't know if we have our social staff here and they're really -- I'm fine with setting a time certain on that discussion. >> Kitchen: Maybe we can go through the way you're suggesting, mayor, and just note that as we go through the homeless stuff each of us can highlight what they are and then if need be we can have further conversations about them at a time certain. Does that work? >> Mayor Adler: That sounds fine. I think as we go through we'll have a much better idea of where we are. There may be multiple groups like that to do. Councilmember alter and then councilmember Casar. >> Alter: I wanted to suggest a slight modification of that is there are some items that have co-sponsors already and it might be useful to hit those first. And then I know that for my mobility officer proposal I know that I have staff here to talk about it. I don't think it will actually take that long. And so just to be respectful of the staff, I don't think Mr. Spillar is here yesterday, but he is on his way, if we could just be mindful if there are some items where we have already asked staff to come. We've been working with them. If we could try to facilitate that so we don't have to wait around all day somehow. >> Mayor Adler: We could certainly take that kind of thing out of order. Mr. Casar? >> Casar: My comment is going to be about our precious time so I'm going to keep my complaints here short, but I think going through them in a list with over 100 -- well over 100 -- I don't know if it's over 130, 150 items, there's no way we will get through it and we may spend a lot of our time arbitrarily at the front. I would prefer almost any other method, but will defer to the group. We're pretty close up on budget time so I would be just interested from each councilmember sort of what it is they see us doing with the city manager's budget, what their proposed strategy. Knowing that it's not a commitment and this is one of the first times that we've actually talked about what we want to do, I'd really rather hear what people's strong preferences and priorities might be or any other method. [9:32:27 AM] And if we end up going through them one by one, that's find with me too. >> Mayor Adler: If we were going to start with anything, what I would like to get is the best feel for how much money we have to spend. Because I think that gives us some kind of parameter and governing force on it. Maybe a conversation there might be helpful. And by spend, I don't mean necessarily that we have to actually spend it. We could put it into reserves. We could return it to the people in the tax reduction. By just trying to figure out what the uncommitted portion is. Does that sound okay to start with that? Still preliminary comments. Ms. Houston? >> Houston: Thank you, mayor. I was about to say the same thing that we need to start with where we are and then try to -- with the manager's budget and then see where we go. We have way more than we can accommodate and it makes me feel very uncomfortable to be put in a situation where something is very worthy, but there's no money for it. Now we are pitting worthiness against each other. So if we can start with where we are, Mr. Van eenoo, I'm all for that, but there needs to be a better way to do this, y'all. There really needs to be a different way than going through these one by one. >> Mayor Adler: Mr. Flannigan. >> Flannigan: I concur with the mayor. I think it probably makes sense to start just with the reductions and make sure we understand how far we can get to how far we can go. But I also concur with councilmember Houston that I am concerned about taking items one by one, both from a timing perspective like councilmember Casar said, but also that it sets up this situation where we're forced to vote yes or no on very good programs, but never on the trade-offs about which ones we're going to select. I think it might be nice after we review maybe the highlights that each councilmember has, their priorities, but to come back maybe even on the message board with some packages as a group to say, here are the set of things that I think makes sense, here are the set of things that you think make sense that different councilmembers might make sense and at the end of it we might have some consensus on some main items. [9:34:38 AM] But the one by one thing will just upset a lot of people. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Mayor pro tem? >> Tovo: I don't think the intent was to vote on the one by one, but I think that we need to reserve at least some time today -- are we meeting until 3:00? Is that a point of information? >> Mayor Adler: We certainly can. We have that blocked. >> Tovo: I think it makes sense and go through one by one for the reductions, but I'm looking through the concept menu and honestly, I wouldn't have any idea what some of these are if we don't spend some time talking about them because some of them there's not money, not information, not a description, and I can't conjure up what these are. So it may be a very worthy idea that I want to consider for funding, but we haven't had an opportunity to talk about it. So if we could just make -- my goal is that we will talk about everything on here today, but I'm fine starting in the way you all have suggested. >> Mayor Adler: Yes, Mr. Renteria? >> Renteria: Yes. I notice going through the concept menu that I have some items that are about the quality of life, hispanic quality of life and [indiscernible] Are supporting the home package. So I would like to wait before we get to that one until Delia gets here. >> Mayor Adler: That would be fine. Okay, Ms. Kitchen? >> Kitchen: One other thing. So Mr. Van eenoo, somehow it didn't make it on this list, but the E 201 on that is councilmember alter's, I am a co-sponsor on that. That's the one related to the senior homestead exemption. Thanks. >> Houston: Mayor, let me ask everybody to say what page they're on so we can keep track of that. >> Kitchen: There's no page numbers. I'm sorry, I'm sorry! [9:36:38 AM] Page 8. That's page 8. >> Tovo: Mayor? I just want to say once for the community members who might be watching, there were lots of things that I committed to putting on the concept menu and then we looked and saw it on there, and rather than -- I just want to be clear that there are certainly items on here that I would have -- would have put on, but I didn't realize we were sort of adding our names if we support things. I'll just do that with my vote. >> Tovo: And I'll do the same thing. I made the same observation that I didn't need to add it. So I'll be doing the same thing. All right. So let's have a general conversation about how much money there is that appears to be at this point undesignated. So the manager's budget came from you. You had about four million dollars in ongoing, annual recurring that we could do. And about one million dollars that was not. What was the actual numbers? Do you remember? >> Those were the exact numbers, four million one going, one million from the reserves. >> Mayor Adler: Now, we have in addition to that, based on the way that the budget was done, there is an element of a number that could be adjusted depending on how the negotiations go on the contracts, but we don't know what that number is yet. Do you have a feel for timing on that? Is that something that we're going to be able to consider as part of this budget process? Is that something that's going to have to be picked up as an addendum or an amendment to budget, after the budget? Talk to us about timing and how that impacts the budget conversations? >> Timing is not such that it will be available for the budget readings, the 11th, 12th and 13th. We had expected to bring the contracts back on the 28th when the council met, depending on the negotiations and it associations taking their votes and us bringing the contracts back. [9:38:47 AM] We had anticipated that any monies available from that would need to be taken up as a budget amendment after the budget was adopted, but would likely -- there would likely be some dollars available there. >> Mayor Adler: But we just don't and shouldn't be budgeting that at this time. >> My request is that you not budget it. That we have been negotiating in good faith with dollars available. And certainly it doesn't preclude you from doing your work today and during the readings and then coming back and making amendments to that. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Yes, Ms. Alter and then Ms. Pool? >> Alter: City manager, would it be possible to have an executive session related to that to help us understand better? We have requests for more officers and other kinds of things that are all wrapped up in what happens for the contract, and I'm not sure that this is the appropriate time for you to get any questions answered on that. >> I think that we could break into executive session, but frankly, until the contracts are -- until the negotiations are done and we know that the associations have voted in favor of the agreements that we've made during the negotiations, we can't bring a contract forward to council. We do think that will occur after the readings. So what we are asking the council to do is leave the money in the current proposed budget at the place that it's at, not spend the money. And then once the contract amounts are known, if there is sufficient -- if there are excess funds available, we would report that back at the time of the contracts to council and council could then amend the budget, either that day or at any council meeting subsequent to that. [9:40:52 AM] There is some thought that you would possibly want to save that money until we see a little bit more about where the economy is going, where our sales tax are coming. Wait until we get year end results in January. And then do the budget adjustment at that time. But that's certainly up to the council, but we would have more information at that point. I don't know how many new officers that the council would entertain adding at this point or how much discussion y'all might want to have on that. So -- but I know that we're not going to be ready to use any of that money during the budget reading so there will be a somewhat delayed budget process although the monies -- a portion of the money will likely be available. >> Alter: I still think -- I'm happy to talk with you maybe at lunch and then we session is useful, but I know that I still have some questions and I don't really feel like this is the forum given the negotiations and stuff. Thank you. >> Kitchen: Mr. Mayor, I would like to have that session too. >> Mayor Adler: We'll set that. >> Kitchen: So we'll set the session. Because there are a number of budget items that are interrelated so it's pretty hard to make the decision about budget items without having the full picture. >> Alter: And Mr. Spillar is here whenever you're -- >> Mayor Adler: Okay. The next possible place was a conversation that we had yesterday about whether there's general fund operating money that we can take out of the hot tax funding. Are you going to be prepared to talk to us about numbers tomorrow, say with item number 60? >> Yes. That's our plan. We have some meetings today after work session with an update on the information. [9:42:56 AM] >> Mayor Adler: Yes, Ms. Pool? >> Pool: Along the lines of the one percent reduction that the city manager, acting city manager had requested of all our departments, I think I remember that you had indicated that it was the fire department that wasn't included in the one percent voluntary reduction because of the overtime challenges that we had. Is that also the case with the various enterprise funds? Were they requested to sequester or pull off one percent for other spending within, obviously, the parameters of what they can spend on? >> They were not. That limitation was placed on the support services fund that service all city departments, so any savings would be shared -- that they made would be shared with general fund departments and surprise funds to represent reduce their rates, but it was general fund departments and support services funds. The surprise funds raise their own revenues to match their cost of service or their costs. But there was some savings passed on to them in the 18 cost allocation for the support services departments because of that. >> Pool: Say that again? >> Any savings in the current year that we have in support services reduces the next year's cost allocations. So the one percent savings in '17 reduce the '18 cost allocation to all city departments for those -- for the cost of the support services departments. >> Pool: Okay. So what does that effectively for those enterprise fund departments that have to spend their money within their parameters, they have lower support services costs which means they have more for operations, is that right? >> They had more for operations but it also allowed them to keep their rates either flat -- it did impact their rates in a positive way, either allowing them to keep their rates flat or to reduce them somewhat. >> Mayor Adler: So there's not a general fund monies we can get to spend by cutting the enterprise budgets. [9:45:01 AM] Is that what I understand? >> Yes, sir. >> Pool: And I'm not quite done. I just want to drill down a little bit more because I understand that if there were to be reductions in operations with enterprise funds, it would be more a shifting. The money would still have to be spent within or put in reserves within the enterprise fund. So we have a couple of enterprise funds that are raising more they cost to operate. And -- let me back up and try it this way. Can you name us the enterprise funds? I know that energy is one of them -- Austin energy is one of them. >> We have nine of them. Austin energy, Austin water, the airport, those are our three major enterprise funds. We have Austin code, which is adding some staff. We have the transportation department, public works. Please don't be offended anybody if I can't remember you. [Laughter]. Austin resource recovery. I named Austin water already. They were one of the top three. This is a test of the -- >> Did you get aviation and convention center? >> I got aviation. I did not get convention center. I know there are nine. Watershed protection with the drainage fee. >> Code compliance. I don't know if you said that. >> I said Austin code had added staff. >> Transportation. >> Pool: So I have Austin energy, Austin water utility, aviation, code, transportation, public works, Austin resource recovery, convention center and then no on watershed protection. >> Watershed protection is included. >> Kitchen: Is it? I didn't know it was an enterprise fund. >> I know they get money from -- >> Kitchen: We didn't turn it into an enterprise fund. Is it an enterprise fund? I know it gets a drainage fee. >> Under law it has to be accounted for in a separate account. >> Mayor Adler: If there's a fee associated with it, it has to be called out. [9:47:04 AM] >> So then development services were trying to move that into an enterprise fund, is that right? >> It's still in general fund this year, but they're at full cost of service. >> Pool: On watershed protection, they use general revenues as well as monies from the D.O.T. -- >> They don't use any general fund revenues. >> So they are strictly from the drainage and utility fund. >> And there are other fees they charge, but it's not general fund money. They do have a few other fees they do charge, but it's 90 plus percent. >> Is that the same with transportation? >> Transportation department has some right-of-way fees they charge, but it's 90 plus%. The parks fees too is a significant piece of their overall budget. >> Pool: And then with public works? >> Public works is almost all transportation user fee. I will say that the transportation department does get a small 850,000-dollar transfer for the general fund to phi some activities that are not available for tuf funding or neighborhood fees. Maybe in public works. Public works does not get any general fund transfer dollars. I believe they largely pay for the neighborhood partnering program through their capital projects and the staff billing their time to those capital projects. >> Pool: Got is. So when we have funded mpp it's because we have funded it through increasing capital projects. The cip budget. I'm trying to remember how we did that last year. >> They have a small staff, but the bulk of the cost is for the actual projects, which is capital money. >> Pool: Okay. Just apropos of our conversation yesterday about the convention center where we were talking about potentially shifting around within their budget how they spend their monies, that one percent identified would have put us a little further down that road to make those decisions if they had helped us by identifying where they might free up one percent. [9:49:17 AM] So perhaps we could request that they do that just to kind of get a sense from them where they might be able to do that. Do you think that would be possible? City manager? >> We'll still have to consult with them, but they are working on a reduction plan. >> Mayor Adler: I think those conversations are happening right now for tomorrow. >> You had asked us -- >> Pool: I'm saying that's helpful to know. I don't know that we were aware of that. >> The mayor had asked us last week that we look at both the convention center and the acvb budgets again and scrub them. >> Thanks. >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Kitchen? >> Kitchen: Maybe I didn't hear what was said, but councilmember pool I thought you were asking for some of the other departments or the enterprise funds to look at that one percent. Or were you only talking about convention center? >> Pool: I was specifically looking for because of our conversation yesterday we had talked about whether the convention center could reallocate its monies within operations and I thought it would be a good exercise to have feedback from that about where they could do it. I'm sure we could ask it of other enterprise funds as well if you want to, but I was just focusing on the one. >> Kitchen: I have two questions related to the other enterprise funds and I apologize. I'm not remembering whether any of them are rising fees. So I would want to have that conversation if any of them are raising their fees. And the second thing is I've got at least one item -- I have one concept menu item at the moment that I'm going to be looking to fund out of the Austin energy enterprise fund, so when we get to that one we can have that conversation. But that relates to lighting, which -- safety lighting, which the Austin energy enterprise fund has paid for in the past. So that is one item that -- so understanding, you know, where they had room to cut to allow for that shift in cost would be helpful. [9:51:27 AM] But we could take that item by item if there's an easier way to do it. >> I just wanted to mention that Austin code and Austin resource recovery both have rate increases this year. Austin resource recovery was because we continued the organics program rollout and Austin code was related to the additional staff that our director Cora Wright, needed to address some of the audit issues and some of her additional improvements and service delivery. >> Kitchen: And those are the only two? >> The only two that I recall. >> There was no base rate increase in Austin energy, but there was some increase in the pass through cost and some of the regulatory charges, but those are the only two base rate increases that we would have control over as a city. >> Renteria: Mayor, where would the code increase come from? >> The code increase was 90 cents to the clean community fee. >> Renteria: And what bill is that? Where did that money come from? >> The clean community fee would take it from $8.05 to 8.90 per single-family home. It also gets assessed to multi-family properties, but it's a single evaluation. >> Renteria: So where would you find that bill? >> It comes in the combined city bill that comes from Austin energy that includes electric fees, water. >> Renteria: Is it under the drainage fee? >> The drainage fee is in there. So the resource recovery fee, the clean community fee, the transportation fee, the water fee, and if Austin energy serves you, also the Austin energy fee. >> Renteria: Where would that code department increase come from? What department would it come out of in that fee? >> It would be specifically on that bill, it would be the clean community fee and that's a fee that gets split between resource recovery and Austin code. [9:53:29 AM] >> Renteria: So why would we take it out of the clean community fee? What does that have to do with the code inspection? >> The clean community fee when it was set up by council, the resolution was established to do a number of things such as street sweeping and some resource recovery activities the resolution also talked about it being utilized for code enforcement activities. >> Renteria: And they can't increase their fees for the inspection fees? Why can't they go through that instead of charging everyone for it? E councilmember, Lela fireside for the law department. The fees have to meet -- not to exceed the cost of service to regulate the activity. And the type of work that they're doing for which they need the increase is not something related to the inspections for people to get licenses and things like that. This would be more related to abatement of nuisances, which is something that benefits the community as a role. So that's why that's in that clean community fee that's assessed on all of the bills. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Councilmember alter. >> Alter: I was just wondering if it would be possible for me to do item M 2 now that Mr. Spillar is here. He spent two hours with my community last night and I want to be mindful of his time. I don't think it will take very long and it actually didn't have a negative impact on the budget. >> Mayor Adler: That would be fine. >> Alter: Thank you. So the item is M 2 and it is on page 21 under mobility. [9:55:31 AM] And the proposal is to use funding that is in existence in the Austin transportation department to expand the capacities of the Austin parking officers to serve as mobility service officers and consider the hiring of new mobility services officers to expand team capacities. So a mobility services officers would allow us to expand the capacity, to address various mobility related issues that are right now being done by APD off and on overtime. So this is a way of expanding capacity and costing less bringing up our officers to do other things and allowing atd to get various issues addressed in a more cost effective manner. I'm going to let Mr. Spillar say more of what he thinks needs to be added to the sources of funds and how it doesn't affect our general fund budget. >> Thank you, councilmember. Robert spillar, Austin transportation director. The first thing I want to make sure everybody is aware of, this proposal from councilmember alter revise a conversation that Austin transportation department, Austin police department have been having casually for several years, but I do want the disclaimer understood that I've not talked to chief Manley about this as it's just come up in the last couple of days. >> Mayor Adler: One more time, identify the page number and the number? >> Alter: Sure. It's item M 2. M is mobility, item 2, and it's page 21 of 32. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. >> So the transportation department when presented this proposal would come back and respond with we would propose that this be launched as a pilot this first year so we could get our feet under ourselves and done with a total of 10 rather than 16 officers initially, just so that we could get this done. What we propose is modifying existing parking enforcement officers, six parking officer, two leads and two supervisors, rather than the 16 proposed by the councilmember just from a capacity perspective. [9:57:38 AM] You could imagine the amount of training and start-up activities that these officers will have to go through to get there. And we think that we're better prepared to handle it with 10. These officers would not be able to enforce moving violations per state law, but we could enforce a number of regulations as do their counterparts in other cities. So for instance, detached trailers, when somebody drops a boat or a trailer unattended in downtown, those could be removed, those cause traffic congestion problems. Abandoned vehicles or property. When somebody calls in and says there's an abandoned vehicle, we can address that. Immobilized vehicle, somebody breaks down in traffic, we could get those vehicles out of the moving lanes. We already can enforce towing, but we've been hesitant to do that, but it's certainly something we can do to reinforce both traffic congestion as well as parking. Traffic control and emergencies, these are non-sworn officers so they can't routinely do traffic control, but we would certainly train them in an emergency, a breakdown, an accident, pedestrian issue, we could enforce that or help with that. And barricade enforcement for special events. Right now during special events we often barricade streets and we leave an officer there to man that in case it needs to be moved. The thought we have is that one officer under state law could still set up a number of barricades, but then leave a mobility enforcement officer in place to man or staff that barricade, move it when there's an authorized vehicle that needs to come through or whatever. Right now that's done by police officers often and seems like we could use police officers better during special events. In terms of concerns, we really don't have any other concerns other than we need to work with APD. We really think this is an opportunity for management to just have a discussion about reassignment of issues. [9:59:43 AM] We do need some more budget but I have that in the parking fund if you will increase my allocated budget by about $165,000, I can take that from my fund balance in parking management since it's associated with that. As you might assume we've been saving up money to replace the current pay stations and meters over time, but they are extremely reliable so I think we can trim $165,000 off of that this first year and better predict what we'll need in following years. So we think it is consistent with our mission. But again, if you will allow that extra budget from my fund balance to accommodate a pilot, then I will go to work with chief Manley and we'll figure out an appropriate split on this. As you've mentioned there are similar officers in both Fort Worth and Houston. The unique difference there is parking in those two cities I believe is managed by their police department as opposed to to a transportation department. But I believe especially since these are nonsworn officers they could operate within the transportation department and that would be my preference. >> Alter: What kind of savings might we expect from not having to man the barricades with officers? >> You know, you should probably direct that question to APD, but I can tell you that if we had this as part of our regular budget that we would pay those officers since we have both night crews and day crooks we would pay those folks as regular time as part of their positions. Obviously, and the assistant city manager is here to respond to that is correct but because they are not sworn officers, they would obviously not be paid sworn officer rates. >> Alter: I just want to mention we did talk with chief Manley and he didn't raise any objections. [10:01:46 AM] Obviously the two departments need to talk in more detail. He mentioned you have to have an officer by state law around the barricades so that would have to be accommodated. >> Absolutely. The thought there could be an officer assigned to five or six or seven barricades and be moving around doing other activities at the same time but that's a detail we have to work out. >> I just wanted to add my comments with regard to supporting looking at these different kinds of options. But with regard to potential savings that might occur, I would caution not to count on any savings in this final stage because the degree of any savings that might be had would really be dependent on the kinds of functions that might be assumed by the transportation department. Again, I support fag a look at this. I I know they talked with chief Manley about it but that would be my observation. >> Alter: We would still be able to expand our capacity where right now we are having to rely on overtime for APD, so at the very least we're not putting our officers into situations where they have to be doing so much overtime for things that are not perhaps their favorite thing to do doing as APD officers. [Laughter] >> Mayor Adler: Thank you for that explanation. Anybody have any questions about this item? Mr. Flannigan. >> Flannigan: I just want to thank councilmember alter for bringing this up. I think there's an opportunity to look at some of the duties at the police department and even in the matrix report they called it out at community service offers but this is a really good idea. I agree with the assistant city manager probably hard to tie a budget savings number to it this year, but I think if you look at it over multiple years, if the pilot works, even if it didn't result in a dollar savings, it would certainly arguably help reduce the overtime or uncommitted time for our officers. [10:03:53 AM] Every officer would get more effective doing the work that I know my community asks them to do and not necessarily just checking traffic tickets or towing cars. Although I do have people in the community that want to see the police department do that more. They also don't want to see their taxes raised for highly trained or badged officers to do it. Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Mr. Renteria. >> Renteria: I also will support that. Recently there was a downed telephone life and we had two vehicles, one on each side of the block blocking traffic from going into the hazardous area and they stayed there about 12 hours. You know, two cars tied up blocking the street where we that could just man that kind of thing. So you know, free our police officers up. So thank you. >> Alter: And just to conclude, I want to thank Mr. Spiller and his staff for coming out last night for over two hours to talk about speed bumps and alternatives and really appreciate your presence last night so thank you. >> Thank you to your staff for being there. It's quite the commitment. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Thank you. Ms. Kitchen. >> Kitchen: I was just going to say that I think this is a great idea too and starting with the pilot and maybe it will work into something for the whole city. Thank you for bringing it forward this way. This is a good way for us to understand what's on knees concept menu items. >> Alter: And I assume that the city manager can work with us to do whatever we need for the budget documents that would be appropriate if we do want to move forward. Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. [10:05:57 AM] That gets us back then to the conversation we were having a second ago. It looked like in terms of dollars. Does anybody have thoughts or suggestions or things they want to talk about in terms of extra funding that might be unallocated to be spent or returned or associated with something? Yes, Ms. Pool. >> Pool: My staff and I are continuing to look through the budget to see if we can identify some new moneys or reductions that would bring us new moneys for other purposesment I don't have anything to offer today, but my intention is for those items that I've offered on the concept menu, most of them are low dollar, although not all of them, but many of them are. What I'm working toward is to off set increases that I'm asking for with reductions in other areas. I'm also going to try to bring more reductions to the table to share as well. That's kind of the plan. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Do we want to move off this then and get into then items that people have that they would like to be able to spend money on or associate dollars with? Yes, mayor pro tem. >> Tovo: So I'm just trying to make sure that we've hit on all the possible budget reductions before we switch gears. And I'd like just to have an explanation of 0106, which is pages 31 of 32, which is the beyond diversity training. I'm not clear on how that would be a budget reduction. And then I also have just some questions about 101, 102, 103 must have been the items you were talking about before that would take some additional time to analyze. Is that correct, Mr. Van eenoo? >> That's correct. [10:07:57 AM] And I think you are correct also on 106. That subcategorized as -- should be cat categorized -- >> Tovo: The others that are posed on there, 101, 2 and 3 are going to require some more staff analysis? >> We committed to work with councilmember Ater to work with her to refine those proposals. >> Tovo: And I just want to be sure, are there any other budget reductions we haven't talked about? They are scattered throughout, I'm just trying to make sure that we hit them. It looks to me like the others are in safety. I know councilmember Flannigan, you talked about them. Was all of that amount your proposal? >> Flannigan: I think councilmember alter has a few and there are others I would like to discuss. >> Mayor Adler: If you look at the summary page on the front, the budget reduction is in the second group and you can quickly see what sections they are in. >> Tovo: Right. That's why I'm trying to find safety in my document in front of me so I can see what those are. And I can't -- I'm sorry, I -- >> Flannigan: Starts on page 12. >> Tovo: Somebody just said I have others, I would love to hear those other ideas. >> Mayor Adler: We'll talk about the safety ones. >> Flannigan: We already talked about 101, which is the four person staffing variation. And then 102 is -- again, I think the fire department is taking the worst possible version of my ideas when they reply, but the idea on 102 is that where we have a density of stations that we might not need every single station staffed 24 hours. We may be able to find off-shift efficiencies depending on call volumes and other opportunities. They did stick a number to it, but if you look in the description, that number is based on closing a whole fire station, why I don't think is a thing that would happen, but if we were to look at turning off some shifts where we may have overstaff based on necessary call volume one shift might save us 100 or $200,000 and we could measure that. [10:10:14 AM] So it's a little complicated to take that number and throw it into the bottom line because the analysis coming out of the department is less nuanced than my intent. To say I think councilmember Garza is on her way. I didn't realize all the reductions that were suggested were all about the fire department. >> We can wait -- >> Tovo: That would be my suggestion. >> Mayor Adler: Let's wait until she comes back. When that came up during our work sessions and we were talking about different ways to deploy our forces, we had talked about -- one of the questions was whether or not that was something we should be doing from the dais. But we had also talked about bringing in an outside consultant for the purpose of looking at deployment strategies, joint strategies with ems and fire, strategies with respect to platooning and operations. Is there an item in the -- we talked -- how would we do that if we wanted to do that? >> Kitchen: I have an idea. Let me speak to it. Mine is reduction because what is -- but what I did is it's not showing up as a reduction because I repurposed the funds, but we can certainly have a conversation about that. It's on page 20. I think it's page 20. Wait a minute. Did I get the wrong page? It is -- shoot. I'm sorry, I'm having trouble finding these pages. It is on page -- it's on page 12. >> Mayor Adler: What's the number? >> Kitchen: Sf20. Sf-20. There's an item of 250,000 and it's designated for ems service delivery model study. And my understanding of what you are talking about is different than that and also I think 250,000 is too much. [10:12:19 AM] So based on the conversations we had with ems before when we talked about this item during the budget, so I'm proposing that we reduce this item from 250,000 to 75,000. I had suggested a reallocation of the 175 back to ems either for their community health paramedic program or to their electronic patient care report solutions. Those two things will have much bigger impact on the delivery model than $250,000 for a study. You may all recall when we talked about this item at the -- during the budget, our ems director explained about the national efforts that are going on that he is part of that's producing information related to best practices on ems service delivery. So -- so I do not think 250,000 is necessary. I do think that looking at -- I'm not sure I would name this delivery model study, but maybe what is meant by is to look at efficiencies. But again, I -- I don't think that that requires 250,000 and I think that we talked during our budget sessions about what the scope of this would be. And it is -- the scope is not putting these departments together. The scope is looking for potential efficiencies. And I think 75,000 working with what's happened nationally with ems, that information that's available to us that doesn't require us to pay for it, plus working with, you know, with other expertise through universities, et cetera, we can accomplish this kind of information gathering without spending $250,000. >> Mayor Adler: For me from a form standpoint, it would be easier for me if we could separate funding reductions from funding adds. And also I think that the council needs to reserve the right to get a funding reduction and be able to apply it somewhere else. [10:14:21 AM] If we could split these kinds of things otherwise they are going to get lost. >> Kitchen: I mean however Mr. Van eenoo wants to do it and I think others are doing the same thing in terms of putting in reductions that they want to use for other things. But whatever way we want to do it is fine with me. >> Mayor Adler: So -- so I would recommend Mr. Van eenoo if you could record those separately so we could see where the reductions are and we could see where the adds are so that we could see those separately. With respect to the study issue, let's talk about that for a second. The study and whether we want the study and what we would want the study to -- >> Kitchen: And I would like to remember we had this conversation -- extensive conversation during the budget and what came back was not what I remember that conversation to be. >> Mayor Adler: Manager. >> And I need to check. I think this is a different study than the efficiency study between fire and ems that we had spoken about earlier in the year. I think this is something that ems is trying to do to improve their service delivery so that we reduce the amount of time of times that people go to the E.R., they get service from a medic. I need to get clarification and ray had to leave for a meeting at eoc so he can't respond. >> Kitchen: I spoke to ems about this. >> I'm just saying there's another study. >> Kitchen: We can check further. >> Mayor Adler: One of the questions I think Mr. Flannigan raised was a broader study not just ems and fire, but to cover things like in that last one with respect to shift deployment and those kinds of things. A broader efficiency management study. Yes, Ms. Alter, then Ms. Pool. >> Alter: I just wanted to comment quickly on the item that was listed as q106 beyond devarsity since it's going to get completely lost. [10:16:25 AM] I am funding 23 spots out of my office budget towards that. I have not heard from all the offices so this number of the 20,000 is a -- is a place holder, assuming -- because every office I heard from wanted all of their staff and themselves to participate. Mayor pro tem tovo is paying for her staff automaker of her office budget from this year, but neither I nor the city manager's office has heard from several offices, but every office that did reply wanted all of their staff. And so in order for us to understand whether we need something on the concept menu, we really do need to hear from the other staff and I'm not trying to make anybody public of who has responded or not. I know the message board is an imperfect process, but obviously the training works better if we all participate in -- beyond diversity. We have chosen to put the funding into a training that is a two-day training, it is a time commitment. It also has coaching afterwards so that it is likely to have the most bang for the buck in terms of helping us to understand how to bring the issues that were brought up in the institutional racism and in equities report into our processes. So right now what I've done with mine is these are spots and it's my full staff and we'll do however many spots are available, but if other offices who have not responded do want to, please let us know so we can know whether we need to be moving forward with the budget concept or if you have money in your office budget that you want to devote to it, please let me know on that. That's currently listed under q106 as a budget reduction. It was improperly located so before we go through everything I just wanted to call that out and you can either respond on the message board on that post or I believe rosemary Martinez is collecting things from the city manager and letting us know the totals so that we don't have any quorum issues involved with the process. [10:18:37 AM] >> Mayor Adler: I really appreciate you putting that on the agenda. I know that the recommendation of the group was that training start and that it expand out and that we get as many people in the community to participate. I know that they are trying to attract C level people and businesses around the community to participate and I think the degree to which we as a council model participation in that, not only will it be good for us individually and collect I feel but send a real message to the community. >> Alter: And the training won't be just us talking to ourselves. It will be, you know, out there with people in the community who will be funding their own way to participate and the fact that we will be there will attract people to come to the training. And they are working out all of the quorum issues on that and I believe we have that resolved and we are shooting for options in November and January. For people to choose from. I believe the mayor has already done the training and so I just encourage you one way or another it doesn't -- that's your choice. We just need to have some numbers so we know if we need to move forward. >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Pool. >> Pool: Thanks, and I'm one of the offices that has indicated interest in participating with my entire staff. On the -- >> Mayor Adler: I'm sorry. Before we leave that topic, anybody else on this topic. >> Pool: I was going to talk about the AFD surveys. >> And you don't have to have money in your pot left. I know people have various different salary things. [10:21:27 AM] -- >> Tovo: I would be glad to do that. I just don't want to allocate 20,000. >> Alter: It is our place holder and we've been talking about it so we can -- when we get the numbers talk about it later. >> Tovo: Thanks. >> Mayor Adler: Anything else on this topic? Ms. Houston. >> Houston: Thank you, councilmember alter, for suggesting this. Last year I think the city manager Ott and several of the folks here went through undoing racism framing and I think this is a great compliment to continuing those discussions because everybody didn't get to go through that particular process. I know that councilmember kitchen and the mayor and I went through that. I've been through it multiple times, but systemic racism and institutions and in equity is not something you get with one shot, it's something you have to work on so I appreciate that and I will check with my office and let you know. >> Mayor Adler: For those folks that have gone through undoing racism, this is a different program than that. So I just want to point that out that different -- but as you say -- >> Houston: It's complimentary. >> Mayor Adler: Absolutely. >> Alter: The interim city manager mass committed the executive team who will be participating as well and they will find the money for that. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Anything else on this topic? Ms. Pool. >> Pool: Back to the study on AFD staffing levels. I would be interested in -- it was the one of Jimmy's, s101, page 12. >> Mayor Adler: And this is 20. It's half of s20. >> Pool: Because my thinking on reducing the staffing based on demand and call volume is what happens when a crisis occurs in that service delivery area and it could in fact wipe out anything savings just in one or two instances that may have been estimated to save. [10:23:42 AM] Because we're balancing risks if we reduce the staffing at our -- for each of our engines and I think that's why we increased our previous councils increased from three person to four person is because the risks to the firefighters and the response times were improved and we saw some positive outcomes of that. So if indeed a study is needed in order to dig into that and refresh that information, maybe that would be helpful, but my thinking on it is, as we balance risks, that we might be on the negative side of that balance then the positive even though the on the front end it looks like we may be saving money. We may have to spend more should a crisis occur in those areas where service levels have been dereesed. >> Mayor Adler: Let's go ahead and park the public safety issue for a second. Oh, there you are. Sorry. I keep looking for you over here. We had started talking about earlier and held up on it. Mr. Flannigan. >> Flannigan: Well. As I made very clear, this is not the difference between three person and four- person staffing and it's very easy to talk about risk and scare the community, but to a community member, they have experienced only multiple engines responding to multiple -- what few fire moments we have, I can't find a single community member that hasn't had that experience. And it would be very easy to spend all the money on the fire department, so yes, this is about making a decision. I like the idea of doing the study because clearly we are not going to either -- either of us is not going to come to the same answer and we're not going to trust the reasons why we came to those answers. So that's great. Let's find an independent consultant to answer some of these questions for us. But there are $50 million of possible spending items here, and we have to be extraordinarily precise in how we spend the 160 closing in on $200 million on the fire department. [10:25:53 AM] Much less the other departments. And when you've got a department, as we found out earlier, that spends two-thirds of its time doing medical calls and we have a separate medical department in the ems department, this is where the additional scrutiny for me has to fall. And I don't want the community for a moment to confuse the debates and the conversations we've had around this. It was very clear from the conversation we had with chief Kerr that firefighter injuries and firefighter safety is about fire department policy, not about the difference between four person and four person plus, which is the difference between 2007 and 2013. And when she talked about the Houston fire department having much higher rates of injury, it was about the policies they follow on how dangerous of a situation do their firefighters go into. It's not about whether or not their extra units have four or three people. So I want us to be able to do a lot of things for the community, and it's very easy to rile up the community about closing a fire station. But the fact remains that we have more fire resources than we need. We do. Because we have practically zero firefighter injuries between 2007 and the 2013 levels. We have overstaffed ourselves and there has been no data to show that it has created any positive benefit for the community. Pre-2007, completely on board. It's very clear the injury levels between broad three person and broad four person are different. But again, I'll end my conversation here because when there's a gap in understanding we're going to have to rely on an outside consultant to get there. >> Garza: I was watching earlier and I guess I have a lot of points to make and I don't -- I don't know if this is -- there is even support for this so I'm wondering how much it's necessary to dig into it. [10:28:00 AM] Initially I will say that to the point that we have zero information that this helps, I have one. It's zero deaths in the Austin fire department. Our department has never, to my knowledge, had any deaths of firefighters. We've had a lot of close calls and a lot of them very recently, but it's hard to show -- it's not hard to show the data that we've had zero deaths because of the way we do business and because of the way we staff. You know, a study is -- has been -- this stuff has been discussed ad nauseam within the fire department industry because this is a problem that fire departments face throughout the country, staffing and budget and whether we can provide that. And little towns with small budgets can't and that's very unfortunate. But for a city that has a $3 billion budget, almost $4 billion budget, a billion dollar general fund budget, compromising safety should not even be a conversation. We had a discussion a couple weeks ago about contracting and procurement and there was significant discussion how we dig into that and whether we dig into that and there's policy side and there's admin side. Now we're attempting to dig into how we staff our fire trucks as if we're experts in this, as if we understand the intricacies of being on a medical call. Yes, firefighters make more medical calls, and I don't know if this is part of this, adjust levels at some stations based on call volume. My first station was one of the slowest stations in the city as far as fire calls, but it was important to have four people responding immediately to some kind of horrible accident on mopac. In addition firefighters have been killed on the highway. [10:30:02 AM] Fire deaths don't just occur at fires. They occur on highways when fire engines are having to respond to a medical call and cars are still going 60 miles per hour. And so there was another safety thing put into place if you see on medical calls there's usually an engine working the scene and there's an engine further down blocking traffic and letting traffic know, hey, there's something going on up here because firefighters have been killed on highways. In fact, I think that's one of the ways more firefighters are killed. So I'm not supportive of cutting any staffing and I appreciate any councilmember's diligence in digging into the budget and trying to find ways to save, but to find waves to save by cutting our front line, first response, there's other ways to dig into the budget and I think we should be going that route as opposed to attacking safety, our front line responders. I'll also say I don't even know if they will be able to be here on Thursday. I know a lot of firefighters are out responding to what's happening throughout our state voluntarily and, you know, I guess I really want to know how much support is to cut staffing because the fire department and the association members should be alerted to this because I was a firefighter once in council chambers with 300 firefighters waiting to speak about these kinds of issues and staffing and we'll see that again if it has to come to that, if there is support to cut staffing. >> Kitchen: Just to respond to councilmember Garza's question, I don't support this item. For all the reasons that you eloquently put forward, and I also don't think that we need to study it. There's been a lot of analysis done across the country and a lot of analysis done by our city. I don't think we need to change what's working. [10:32:12 AM] >> Flannigan: I think it's unfair to the community to say that any change in the fire department is going to cause public safety issue. The data actually shows no difference in firefighter injuries between the 2007 level and the 2013 level. There is no difference. We are not talking about old school three-person staffing. There was a difference there. It bore out in the data. And for lack of support on the dais to make a change now, that's fine, but there has been studies done across this country. My staff and I have done the research and every single time what happens is the fire department starts running negative ads on the councilmembers that broad it up. That's why the changes don't happen. And you know what, they already did that to me. So I don't have a problem digging into this issue. The reality is we spend too much on this service, we have what are effectively frat houses across the city. They do not provide the service level that we are paying for. There is a way to save significant funds that we can do better service for our community and we are going to spend the next weeks talking about a bunch of ways to spend money we don't have. I am fully supportive of doing the study because debating it here in this room, councilmember Garza, to your point, none of us are experts. I wouldn't purport to be an expert on something if I served on the front line. I would know what my anectdotal experience was. But I think it's important we be as diligent as possible when we're talking about a segment of the general fund that is not insignificant. We can fund a lot of other things or we could give the money back to the taxpayers or do a senior exemption. We're going to find it very difficult to do all the wonderful things we want to do for this community when we keep sending seven fire trucks to every single call. [10:34:20 AM] It is just not sustainable. It's just not sustainable. >> Mayor Adler: My sense on this issue, and I appreciate that, and I think there are two issues. My sense from looking around the dais is that we would not be voting to make this staff reduction this year in that. But I think that there is interest in having a study that would take a look at it so those questions -- so I would keep that continuing on the agenda, on the concept menu. But I would like to have manager, you indicated you thought there was more than one study and that was going to efficiencies in public safety. If you could look and see all the studies associated with public safety, staffing or efficiencies or cost cutting measures so that we could see all of them. And I'd be interested in knowing if the scope of the studies that are in the budget as it sits now. I think that one of the things that people wanted to look at was efficiencies in the operation of fire and ems. I think the questions were who is it that first gets sent out on a call, medical call, is it a fire truck, I don't remember exact issues, but it was platooning issues and I think it could also draws these kind of -- address these staffing issues that Mr. Flannigan raised so that kind of thing could be looked at too. That would be something I would be interested in from a study standpoint so we had data and independent look at that. But I also would not be supporting doing that kind of policy change from the dais. Ms. Kitchen. >> Kitchen: What you're speaking to perhaps in part, I'm not clear if there was another study being considered, but my item on page 12, the service delivery model item, which I think could be done for $75,000, not $250,000, I think that's very separate and different than looking at staffing for the fire department. [10:36:29 AM] So I want to make sure we're clear on the difference between that and I don't have a problem with 75,000 or so, talking about it, but to my mind the scope of that is best practices in ems service delivery. It is not how do we combine or cut or put together ems and the fire department because I don't think that is necessary, it's not what the -- it's not what the industry is moving towards in terms of ems, et cetera, et cetera. So I think what I'm hearing is that perhaps you are talking about two different scopes, which is fine, but I wanted to be clear that the item -- and I can get with the city manager and I did already talk with ems about the scope of that service delivery model and we can perhaps flesh that out in terms of the language so it's clearer to folks. I think it's really important to be clear on what the scope of the study is. >> Mayor Adler: I agree with that. What I was asking because you had found a study and your indications were this was the study. >> Kitchen: Yeah, I thought it was. >> Mayor Adler: I'm hearing there might be more than one study. My first question is asking staff to take a look at how many studies, one or month, and then identify what the scope of those one or more studies are, and that then can come back to us on the dais and we can look at it and collectively decide if we want to change the studies or not change the studies or change the scope or not change the scope. I was trying to get that information. >> Kitchen: Okay. >> Mayor Adler: Then if since now Ms. Kitchen has raise the question of whether the cost of at least one of the studies should be 75 as opposed to to 250, if you could get with Ann's office to see whatever information she has on that to see whether or not it's appropriate to change the cost of that study. [10:38:33 AM] If you could just come back to us, let's have a little conversation about studies generally as they relate to public safety and figure out what they are and where they are and what they should be. >> Kitchen: And I would like to have -- since I brought the item forward on the concept menu, I would like to sit down and talk with you about what you discover in terms of the studies. >>. >> That's fine. My belief is there are two studies, one we put in management services, I'm having staff check, which was different. It was what we talked about any efficiencies we could gain by changing how we dispatch, not about combining fire and ems, it was not about that at all, but how we could change our practices on who hits the scene first. This one appears that it has a different scope and it may have been something that was put in the ems budget. My direction to staff was that the first study I talked about about the efficiency one not be managed by either ems or the fire department because it needed a neutral party. So we'll find out if we have two studies. My belief is that we have two studies in there and this one we'll talk to ems about the changing the scope to get to the 75,000. >> Kitchen: Just so you'll know, we were not able to find studies in our backup. We found this on the budget presentation -- I think it was part of what you presented, I forget which day, but it was a line item on the budget presentation. We weren't able to find it in the backup. I'm sure it's there, we just didn't know where to look. >> I just need to confirm that we have two studies, funding for two or one. >> Mayor Adler: Let us know the cost so council can see if there are things they want to add to it or subtract to it or narrow it. I think that would be the better way to handle that. And I appreciate councilmember Flannigan suggesting he's not going to press on the change this year. [10:40:40 AM] If we could get a study looking at efficiencies, I would like that. Just as a general rule as we go through the budget, these are going to be tough choices that we make and as a group we should do our best to try to keep hyperbole down as best we can. Our fire safety people are doing a great job keeping us safe and they are platooned all over the city and they are there so I -- if I was to characterize those folks in those stations, I would characterize them as our staff and our public safety first responders. So I'll just -- if we can stay focused as best we can on the issues, I promise you we'll do better as a group. >> Renteria: Mayor? I would also like to see that management be included in that study because, you know, they are the ones that set the policies that have gotten to this point where we're, you know, having to dig into our budget to come up with that extra $3.5 million, and, you know, if we're going to really study we should study the whole department as a whole and see how and when did we get into this problem and how they are planning to get us out of this. >> Mayor Adler: Yeah. Okay. Mayor pro tem. >> Tovo: Mayor, are we still in public safety or are we moving on? >> Mayor Adler: I think we've moved off the study question. >> Tovo: I have a couple things -- I'm somewhat interested in seeing if there are things on this list that we are going to eliminate or things that we might consolidate. In going through it, I notice there are a few things I think are duplicates and so that would take a couple things off and help us pare down, if I can find them again. I have an item on there -- e33, which is page 6 of 32, the Austin city data hub. [10:42:48 AM] This was following -- a couple weeks ago we approved a resolution I had brought related to -- related to resources for renters and the accompanying piece was a data base that would kind of take measure and include information about various -- various housing opportunities for those who are looking for more affordably priced housing. We got a memo August 25 with our staff talking about -- how they see moving forward on this, but also -- I would just remind you this was a staff -- an initiative the staff had been working on too, we brought the resolution because we added a few elements to it, but it was an interest and desire of the staff. Anyway, the budget item would be 120 and I think that after the neighborhood and planning committee which happened a few days later, councilmembers Casar and alter, you added 36 and 37, but I think they are basically duplicates of 33 even though they add up to 125 and the staff estimate for mine is 120, it's the same thing so I would propose we consolidate those if that's all right with you. >> Casar: That makes sense. We got a presentation and the number is very close. >> Mayor Adler: Let's consolidate those by using the e36 and e37 since that breaks it into finer detail. >> Tovo: I don't know why -- that's not the way that -- it doesn't break it into finer detail. It just says phase 1 and 2 and our staff memo, it doesn't track with the amount our staff memo talked about and they don't talk about it in phases. I think I would suggest that we -- it doesn't matter. That's fine. Let's just use the 20 number since it's less. If they can accomplish it in 120. >> Casar: I think there's a dsd and ctm and private component so I think we huddle with staff and figure out what's right. I think we're all headed to the same direction of trying to make sure people know where our affordable units are and hopefully those tools and programs can help us monitor and track what's really Gooding on and affirmatively market it. [10:45:02 AM] >> Mayor Adler: I just wanted to keep a remind other the page perhaps there's a way to break it into pieces. >> Tovo: That's fine. Cut e33 and add me to 6 and 7 and your items about the development services is different. That is not -- that was not contained within what I described so that's fine. Does that make sense? >> Can I just add one? >> Mayor Adler: We're talking about taking off e33 because it's covered in ee36 and 37 and certainly the mayor pro tem could be added to the councilmembers. >> Tovo: I would just also ask since my fabulous staff members have been doing a good job on their concept menu, I have detail and you don't so I would move over my detail to the other items. >> Mayor Adler: Cool. >> Tovo: So there's a description on this. >> Mayor Adler: That would be helpful. If you could put the link to the memo in that additional section so that those of us can easily see the item and click on the memo. >> Tovo: Good idea as well as the resolution if that's not too challenging. >> Pool: It looks like the resolution is named so probably would be easy to put a link there. >> Mayor Adler: Councilmember alter. >> Alter: Thank you. I didn't observe that overlap so I'm excited to have that combination. It might be useful to put the presentation that was provided to the mobility committee and the video link for that. We were building off of a presentation that we -- in the housing committee, we were building off of that and that may be helpful background as well for people. On the -- as we're looking at this, I just want to point out for Amanda, we were hoping that would come out of dsd money. >> Mayor Adler: Which one? >> Alter: For e-38. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> Alter: I'm not sure if that nuances something easily caught on the concept menu, but so my understanding is what they've pointed out is they need to have modifications made to the Amanda system in order to track and monitor the subsidized housing, and dsd is going through a process right now of revising the Amanda system so the hope was that could be covered by dsd as part of their modifications for the Amanda system. [10:47:23 AM] So in order to -- in order to successfully create this form housing data base, all of the systems have to be able to work together and a piece of that is the Amanda system. And I have no idea how you get that to work on the concept menu. >> Mayor Adler: So e-39 is intended to say is there money already in the ctm budget to cover items e-36, 37 and 38 at in the dsd budget or can we create by a quarter cent on the fee or something. Whatever that would translate to. So that wouldn't come from general fund. >> Mayor Adler: Another question, could you check on that? Thank you. And I didn't catch that nuance. >> Alter: I don't think we knew how to put it on the southwest concept menu. >> Mayor Adler: But this is good. That's a good thing to catch. Okay. Yes. >> Tovo: I have another -- I believe another overlap. My item e-35, eviction intervention program for 65,000, I think may be the same, councilmember Garza, as your e-4 to create a pilot program to assist in navigating eviction process. I think it's an important one and I hope we can find funding for it, but I would suggest right now at least consolidating those two. Is it the same? >> Kitchen: What's the item number again? >> Tovo: E-35 on page 6 of 32 and e-42 on page 7. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Does that sound right to you, Ms. Garza. Can you consolidate those two? [10:49:26 AM] >> Tovo: If I could point out next year, let's sort of mark we should figure how we're going to do this. I think when we said there were a couple things that looked similar, we heard back that they hadn't heard from our council offices a confirmation they wanted to co-sponsor. I think we need to just have a little clarity around those. Sometimes -- around that process. But we don't need to figure it out now. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. All right. Any other duplicates that people see? Ms. Alter. >> Alter: I don't have a duplicate, but I did have another budget cut that got skipped when we moved off of the safety that I wanted to raise. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. By the way, while we're getting to that, I think councilmembers, if you could check back with your staffs and your office, I think the mayor pro tem and I both believe that we should give consideration to getting some time next week when we can meet to talk about the budget or these kinds of issues as we continue to think. So if people could kind of look at their calendars, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monday is a holiday so it's off. I don't know what people's travel schedules are coming back. It's not a week we have set now, but before we end today, let's have a conversation about times that might be available next week for us to get together. We have a codenext meeting on the 6th. I think. Yeah, codenext meeting. The morning of the 6th is a codenext meeting. So we might be able to continue that day if we wanted to. >> Pool: In the morning or afternoon on the 6th? I don't know if that matters. >> Tovo: I believe it's in the morning. >> Pool: One is in the afternoon. >> Tovo: For some reason I have the whole day blocked off Tuesday for a work session. I don't know if anyone else did because that would make it easy to schedule some budget time on Tuesday. Anyway, I support definitely trying to find time next week. [10:51:26 AM] But hopefully -- maybe we'll blast through so much today that we won't need it. >> Pool: Mayor, just as an early heads up -- >> Mayor Adler: What time? >> Pool: I will be out of town. >> Mayor Adler: I don't have a time set on my calendar. That's on the 6th. [Inaudible] >> Alter: I think you posted 9:30 to 12:00 on Tuesday. >> Mayor Adler: 9:30 to 12:00. I think that's right, on the 6th. >> Pool: And then I think we posted Wednesday, September 20th in the afternoon. Is that right? 1:30 to 4:00. I pulled these off the message board. >> Mayor Adler: We did and we asked people to keep the 27th open as well, we deal with additional codenext topics. I think asking people to look at calendars next week, we're meeting in the arch of the 6th. >> Morning. >> Mayor Adler: Not now, but in a little before we leave, I'm going to bring back up the topic when would be a good time to get together next week on budget. Councilmember alter. >> Alter: I had two more safety items. One is an an an adjustment and one is budget savings. I think item s-7 on filed wire. -- Wildfire. It is on page 10. >> Mayor Adler: And it's S what? >> Alter: 7. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. >> Alter: So there are seven positions in the wildfire division that are not sworn staff that are temporary positions right now. So if you may recall the wildfire division was set up a few years ago and they were more focused on kind of physical things they needed for their office and they have now moved into a different stage, and it's my understanding that they are having some issues with retaining people because they are skilled professionals, and by not being permanent positions, they don't get their benefits right away, et cetera, but the -- if you can -- you can convert them and they can absorb the costs and they feel like this would allow them to deliver better services because they would be able to retain the stock that and so there would be no additional budget costs beyond what's already allocated to wildlife for them to absorb the benefits. [10:53:59 AM] But it would have a tremendous impact on their ability to meet the community's needs better with respect to wildfire. There are seven temporary positions. It's one gis analyst, one program coordinator, one forestry specialist and four forestry technicians. And we have talked about this with fire. We had had someone coming down but they had other activities and were not able to be here. But this would be making these nonsworn positions permanent within wildfire. Again, this is part of the stage that the wildfire division is in that we need to transition how we are approaching things. >> Mayor Adler: So for me on this one it would be really important, manager, to get your reaction to this. This is -- it all sounds really good to me. I'm nervous about the council reaching into that level. But obviously wildfires and wildfire prevention is a concern among many parts of the community. So I would really like to know what you and what fire and the wildfire division think about making those adjustments in that department. See whether they had something that they think is the right thing for us to be doing. >> I would need to talk to the fire chief and ray Arellano to discuss why they have left these as temporary positions. I know we have moved at least one fte out of that unit to achieve the savings that we've put in to off set the overtime this year. So I need to talk to them about the operational impact of making these [inaudible] >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> Alter: These are the nonsworn positions. The position moved out of wildfire was one of the sworn officers and we have been talking with fire and with wildfire to develop this, and this is a direction that also makes the funds less -- so they get to focus less on wildfire and as they transition they are having issues of turnover that they need to address. [10:56:14 AM] >> I would just comment that any time a councilmember reaches down into the depths of a department, when they get that kind of attention they are also going to be more willing to talk to you about their needs without the supervision of their upper management. So I do need to talk to the fire chief about why she's made the decision she has made. >> Alter: We did talk with ronell and chief Dodds and this is my understanding what they were recommending. >> Mayor Adler: They will come back and -- >> Alter: I understand your concern. I just wanted you to know we did talk with leadership there if not chief Kerr directly. The second item is a reduction that comes out of the a AFD audit that was released. >> Mayor Adler: Number and page? >> Alter: S-104, page 14. This would result in a savings of $255,000. And what the audit recommended was that for the following -- and I think this is the amount we saved just for this fiscal year, not for the next fiscal year, would be for the following 18 months or until vacancies at Austin fire department stabilized to 40 vacancies, we would implement an added time rule that requires priority for mandatory Kelly followed by late volunteers and comprehensive overtime. For those not absorbed in the staff, a Kelly day is the 19th shift for a firefighter which is normally a day off for them. So if they are asked to work on their Kelly day, they are fresh, they've just had their 48 hours off so it is when they are add their best in terms of being able to do the overtime. The auditor's office has indicated that ultimately because you would be rotating once you had worked oner your Kelly days, you would go to the bottom of the Kelly day list that you would end up working a day or two on your Kelly day throughout the year. [10:58:23 AM] You get your pay from the Kelly day as part of your Normal package, plus you would get time and a half above that. So this is one way to address the issues that we're facing until we get down to the point where we're facing Normal vacancies and provide some savings to the budget. You know, this is something we can do while retaining four-person staff to go try to manage some of the fiscal consequences of ballooning overtime from 7 million to 21 million that we've seen from 2014 to 2017. And so I think this is an option. It's outside of the contract and can be put here. There are also several items that would be part of the contract negotiations that I will just point out that were pointed out by this audit that potentially also could yield savings, so right now they calculate vacation slots based on the number of people who are -- number of slots that are authorized as opposed to the number of slots that have people in them, which means you have more vacation slots, and if you have more vacation slots available, you end up having to have more overtime. We also saw there were some things potentially going on with respect to when people were taking sick leave which were creating additional needs for overtime. Again, this is all keeping four-person staffing in place and is a question of, you know, how are we managing that overtime amount, which is very large and we can -- we can maintain safety but also be concerned about some of the fiscal choices that we're making. And I think this is one step we can do outside of the contract and I hope that we would be looking at some of those other mechanisms that were identified through the contract negotiations. These can be these can be potentially -- once we get down to vacancies you won't have to do that because the overtime demand will not be there. [11:00:27 AM] So once we get down to 40, which is kind of a Normal level of vacancies, these kinds of measures may not be as much in need, but we are in a particular time now and there are trade-offs that we need to be making. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. So you mentioned three things. The last two you indicated were part of the negotiations. The vacation issue and the sick leave procedures. >> Alter: As I understand it, we're still trying to figure out which pieces are -- this piece, the Kelly piece is not part of -- having the Kelly day is part of the contract, but what they do in terms of overtime is not. The other things are. >> Mayor Adler: So with respect to the last two items, the vacation and sick leave procedure, manager, would you please make sure, if you haven't otherwise, to understand that issue as you're going into negotiations. The third thing that you raised, which was item a 174, which was something they could handle outside of that. I'm interested in -- here now going into actual management policy on how the force is used, so I would very much like to hear from you and from -- well, from you whether -- what do you think about that kind of management issue? >> Again, I'm going to have to sit down and talk to the chief and ray. And I wanted to note that we have a lot of assistant city managers that have been moving in and out of the room today, we are currently working on sheltering issues, so if you will bear with us I don't know everything about their departments so I would normally rely on them for some additional material for you, but I will get back with you on these two items. >> Mayor Adler: There is no expectation that when we generate these questions that you will know the answer to them. [Laughter]. >> Alter: And for anyone who is watching or for my colleagues if you want to find where those items are that are in the contract or where this Kelly datum was identified, there was an audit of the fire department which council requested in March or April that came out a week or two ago and there's a section at the end of things -- the action items that we could do to help us naves gate this time when we have all these vacancies beyond what the chief has already identified, that do not -- in auditor's opinion -- affect the safety of our officers or of our community. [11:03:07 AM] >> Mayor Adler: If you could address that section of the auditor's report, I think that would be helpful and also timely. Ms. Kitchen? >> Kitchen: I just have a question. And this goes back to whether or not we have a document or not? I notice that C 5 on page 16, and I think this is yours, mayor, relating to Umlauf, and then I also have an item on S 15 on page 11 that relates to Umlauf. I don't know if these are overlaps or not, but the item that I have on page 11 is bringing forward the budget rider that we had from last year about Umlauf that we all voted on that related to unmet safety needs at Umlauf. They were issues related to flooding, fixing some flooding issues at Umlauf at that time. >> Mayor Adler: What's your number, I'm sorry? >> Kitchen: I'm sorry. S-15, page 11. >> Mayor Adler: Got it. >> Kitchen: So that one, you will see under additional information it says carryover budget rider pk 104 from fiscal year 15. So that particular budget rider had a list of repairs -- >> Mayor Adler: So my answer to the question is I'm not sure what the answer is but I can check and see and if it's a duplicate then I'll ask Ed to take it off. Mine was C 5. And it's something near 17. It's either 17 or the page before or after. >> Kitchen: 16. >> Mayor Adler: 16, C 5. >> Kitchen: The mayor and councilmember pool are on that one. >> Pool: And I'm happy to see them consolidated. I think my understanding was along the lines of continuing the repairs that were introduced last year. And so to the extent that that's what the mayor is also looking for I think we're all aligned. [11:05:10 AM] >> Tovo: Mayor, can I speak to this for a minute? So Umlauf skull capture items is one of the things that we've talked about through hotel motel tax occupancy if we allocate some of that in a way that's been suggested. So I would highlight that may not need to be a general fund expenditure. >> Mayor Adler: And if the general fund -- we can't turn that hot money into general fund to do this, it's something that we could handle under 101 perhaps. >> Kitchen: So without getting into all that again -- [laughter]. >> Tovo: Except that it is on the concept menu. I didn't see anything in 101 that actually had us reallocating that money in >> Kitchen: And let me just talk about this one in particular is about Umlauf was flooded a number of years back and there were a couple of items that were not repaired during last budget cycle. We had put into our budget rider to repair a number of those items, and some of them were done and some of them were not. So this is carrying that forward. There was also A.D.A. Issues. At Umlauf related to their restroom and something else that had to be done. So I'm happy to take this out of whatever budget it's appropriate to take it out of. I just wanted to make sure we carried it forward because these were items that we had all voted to give direction to last time, but were not done for whatever reason. They did what they could, but they didn't finish. >> Pool: And could I add something to that? >> Mayor Adler: And I don't want to get caught in a debate on 60 and 61, but in case people were watching, the presentation we had from staff yesterday had money in next year's fiscal year to be able to fund that kind of thing. But it would require us doing it. It would require us executing it. >> Kitchen: Wait a minute. These items I'm -- I'm not understanding what you're saying. >> Mayor Adler: I'm saying funding to be able to do historic preservation issues, that bucket of money is available this year under both option 60, if in fact you can take the money the way that it was done, or under I think 101. [11:07:26 AM] >> Tovo: Mayor, with all due respect could you explain what would be the mechanism -- >> Mayor Adler: I'd have to know more about the repairs and what they are. >> Tovo: I was taking a very long pause but formulate my words in a way that doesn't get us back into that debate. But we are in the process of approving all of those budgets, so we would need to do it either tomorrow as well as in the budget process -- if you could point me to where this is in the budget in the same time frame that would be helpful. >> Mayor Adler: That was out clause in 101 anded asked staff to come back with a plan to execute the funding streams associated with 101. If it were negotiate executed on the timing that was presented, the testimony yesterday was that the first year of that income stream could be generated in fiscal year '17, this coming fy. So what I was pointing out was if we followed that plan there would be money that would be spent in this fiscal year generated from that plan. But you're right, we wouldn't be executing that or authorizing that until the three months that we chose to do that. And then the money would be available to it if the council chose to do that. >> Kitchen: I don't want anybody to be held hostage. It's a carryover from last year. >> Mayor Adler: I understand. Yes. >> Renteria: I know there's a lot of duplicates right now with the quality of life initiatives. [11:09:33 AM] I know that if we take -- I know my colleague Garza has a lot -- the hispanic quality of life and that's $2,165,000. And they have the quality of life initiatives included. And when they have the hispanic quality of life, that should be $4,867,000 and -- for the other quality of life, if you take the hispanic quality of life out. >> Houston: Can you give us the page number? >> Renteria: [Inaudible]. All the amounts in the quality of life. >> Mayor Adler: So I put in E 21, which was the total quality of life provisions that they came to us just because I wanted to make sure that they were on the menu. That was before individual councilmembers started refining that concept, which I greatly appreciated. So the E 21 was more of a placeholder at this point to be able to say I wanted us to be able to look at that and see what we would have been able to do. >> Renteria: And then I have through C 15 to C 19 -- they're also in the hispanic quality of life. And -- which would be a duplicate of -- of 288,276 of all my recommendations. So we need to go through there. [11:11:33 AM] >> Tovo: I'm thinking if we did the page number first. >> Mayor Adler: So councilmember Renteria has pulled out some of the quality of life on C 14 through C 19. It's about page 17. It could be page 16. >> Renteria: Page 16 and 17. >> Mayor Adler: So he's pulled out some of the quality of life items that were in the quality life from the hispanic quality of life commission. >> Renteria: Correct. Those are the ones that I'm recommending. But I'm sure that you might have some else included. >> Mayor Adler: And the other number just to be able to talk about a duplicate, but not entirely. On page 5, E 21, there's a line item that just captured the the total amounts coming from the requests from the quality of life commissions. >> Troxclair: The way my office was supposed to add it, and I don't know how it goes from my office and gets to the budget people, but I didn't intend to put a line item. I just intended as a placeholder because I hadn't seen it on there yet. (Garza). The way I had filled out the worksheets was the hispanic quality of life, the African-American quality of life, the asian-american quality of life and the lgbtq quality of life. Because we've had the question of how we fund these and maybe doing an rfp process instead. I didn't intend to put a number, so I don't know if it got put as the hispanic quality of life and add it to the entire number as well. I just wanted to add that for clarification and that's why it's on there several times for me. I also have some additional duplicates if you want to clean up. >> Mayor Adler: Sure. >> Garza: E 20 -- page number 5 E 20 and E 26 I think are the same because my -- the E 26 is the workforce development for capital idea, 700,000. [11:13:47 AM] E 20 is the same thing, it's just allocated differently. So I don't know -- those can be combined. >> Mayor Adler: That was the same. Rather than identifying any particular service provider on E 26, I just identified the need. So in keeping with the -- what we were trying to get to as a council where we're not identifying individual providers, but we're identifying the need and then we have a process within the city to figure out how best to meet that need. >> Garza: And I guess I want to add a caveat, the concern I have for the quality of life is some of those are brand new organizations that we don't know exactly metrics or if they have the ability to do what they have proposed to do. I would -- for when it comes to capital idea we do have, I think, the numbers to show that it is a good program. So I don't know if you need to add me to E 20 instead of E 26. I don't know if that's the way to do that. But I think that's the same -- E 20 is specifically for capital idea. I would want my name on E 20 as opposed to E 26. >> Mayor Adler: I think the question of whether we're identifying individual people or not is obviously a conversation that we'll continue to have here as we go through this budget process. >> Alter: I want to point out on -- >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Pool was next, hang on. >> Pool: I apologize because I wanted to make a comment just to remind us that on the funding for the Umlauf, if we are to fund it through the historic preservation under the hotel occupancy tax it can't already have been funded under general revenue because the law properties us from making that kind of specific shift. [11:15:52 AM] So I want to be sure that whatever this funding would be -- so we can talk about it more later, but I just want to make sure that we don't inadvertently foreclose an avenue in front of us. >> Kitchen: I would just say that the law doesn't say that. There is some discussion that we've had with our attorney that there may be some circumstances where we need to take that under consideration, but it's not a blanket the law says you cannot. So I don't want to get into that right now legally. I don't want to have that discussion here right now. >> Pool: And that is a discussion we should have probably in executive session, but I just don't want to inadvertently foreclose an avenue. >> Kitchen: Sure. But this item is very defined in its carryover from last year so I would think it would not be caught up in that, but we need to sit down and have that conversation. So thank you for bringing that up. >> Pool: And it has not yet been funded, which is the piece I wanted to preserve. >> Kitchen: Gotcha. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Councilmember alter. >> Alter: I just wanted to make sure that people were clear for E 20, two other parts of that. So for what we put down for E 20 we have 230,341 coming from 29, not the 300,000. The rest of the funds come from transfers to economic development from the enterprise funds. Just want to point that out in terms of the fiscal. >> Mayor Adler: I don't understand that. I understand the 700 for workforce development. I understand that expense. >> Alter: It is a total of 700 that would go for workforce. I'm proposing that 469,000 of it is coming from the enterprise and economic development because they can transfer in to cover workforce development. [11:17:57 AM] >> Mayor Adler: Can you talk about the savings, the elements of the savings that you're recommending? >> Alter: I can if you give me a little bit more time to make sure I have enough details to give to you. >> Mayor Adler: And the first question I'll ask is if we're going to save money we'll save it from those places, whether we have the opportunity to be able to spend that. I mean, what are the limitations, if any, on our being -- on our ability to be able to spend the money? >> Alter: It's not necessarily savings, but not all coming from the general fund is what we're saying. >> Mayor Adler: No. But if it can be moved over to that expense, what I would be interested in knowing is if it can be moved over to cover other expenses? >> Mayor Adler: There are limits to the economic development money so it could potentially be used on other workforce development, but it can't just be moved anywhere and I don't know all the nuances. >> Mayor Adler: So with respect to this item I understand the item with respect to spending money on workforce development. What I don't understand is the detail associated with the savings from these other funds that would be used to pay for this. In terms of what were being cut out of the existing budget to be able too do that. And second, what are the limitations on how we would -- could spend that money if in fact we were to repurpose it. So I would need the information on both those two things. >> Alter: I think that what it's saying essentially is it comes out of economic development's fund. And then that could come from these other things, but it's not a savings. >> Mayor Adler: So the -- we could certainly change it, but the practice we've had for the past two years is not to have a practice for someone that says I want to fund a and I have found money for it. And I get to fund a because I was the one to be able to find money for it. So we've separated those two things. And we've said let's find all the money we can. And then we'll have a vote on what we want to do with that money and we'll have a discussion on the merits on both of those two things as separate things. [11:20:03 AM] Now, it could be that a savings that we find in one area has limitations on what we can spend it on. We would certainly have to take that into account, but what we have not done, and I think it's a practice we should continue, is to pair two things just because someone has -- maybe one person is interested in both spending this money and cutting that money. If anybody can find money on they don't have the problem on we should bring that forward and then as a council we can decide best how to allocate monies that we find given the limitations on those. >> Alter: So I guess another way to put what I'm saying is we want to add 700,000 and I'm suggesting that a portion of it come from economic development. >> Mayor Adler: I understand that, but people might very well say I like the savings that you found, but instead of putting it on workforce development I want to put it on some other program, be it an economic development program or a different workforce program or a general fund program to the degree that any of those monies monies can be used that way. That we have not done a give-take motion. We have money we spend and we have money that we raise, but we don't link those because different people's priorities might be different. Ed, you're trying to speak, do you want to speak? >> These numbers would have come from my staff. So the proposal was to increase funding for capital idea by $700,000, capital idea has historically been funded by economic development, which is then funded through an allocation to the general fund and enterprise departments. This is just what the allocation would break out, if you wanted to increase the funding for capital idea by $700,000 following the current allocation system, 469,651 would land in those various enterprise departments. I think to the mayor's point in regards to where would the enterprise departments get this money, potentially they would get it through increasing rates, although I think that's very unlikely for these dollar amounts. It probably would just impact their ending balances, their ending balances would be slightly lower than what we currently have in the budget. [11:22:12 AM] If there's other -- if there was other workforce development programs, other workforce development programs are funded in health and human services that are more related to basic needs as opposed to the purpose of the capital funding. It's only capital idea that staff thought was appropriate to fund out of economic development. >> Mayor Adler: So what I would like to know is then what would be the ramifications on each of those departments. If we're ending the end of year budget does that move us out of compliance with the percentages that we wanted to obtain? If we have actual end of year budgets that exceed what we want and there's extra money in any of your balances, I'd like for us to look at all the end of year balances and figure out where all the extra money is that's not required by our financial policies. But if there is no lots of extra money if each of these departments then I would like to know what's being -- what are the changes to the manager's budget in terms of the allocation that would have to be made associated with reallocating money. So it's either being real indicated from some purpose it will be spend to, reallocated from a reserve end of year budget. I had thought that we had trued up all those end of year budgets, but if we haven't I would like to know how much money we have in all of end of year budgets that exceed what our policies are, so that -- because that would all be additional money that could be respent someplace else. >> We could certainly give you those -- each enterprise department will have its own reserve policies. And to the extent they do have reserves beyond the minimum required by financial policies, they're going to be pretty strict limitations about what they could be used for. I can provide you all that information. >> Mayor Adler: That would be helpful to know. >> Alter: And there was a second part. In E 19 we have some money for childcare for workforce development participants. It's not the same item as E 20, but it's very much related, so I just wanted to flag it while we were talking. [11:24:14 AM] >> Mayor Adler: That's good. So the same questions with respect to E 19. >> Kitchen: I want to make sure we treat things the same because the item that I had a give and take on before we decided to separate. So I don't care which way we do it, but I think we need to treat them the same. >> Mayor Adler: We're going to separate them. I think what Ed was saying some monies that we separate are general fund monies so they're open to us, and some monies that you would separate may be from within an enterprise fund, in which case they have to be spent related to that enterprise fund. >> Kitchen: That's fine, but we're still separating them. I don't care how we do it, but I want to make sure we're doing it the same and we're not making judgment calls on what we're separating and what we're not. The only other thing I wanted to say is I have some items on quality of life that are overlapping. So I just want to understand what we're doing about that because you have the placeholder that has all the quality of life. Are we saying that that placeholder goes away and we keep what the individuals have brought? Or should we take our individual stuff and combine it? >> Mayor Adler: No. I think we want to try to go from the general to more individual. So to help me keep straight, we created a page that took the recommendation that came from each of the quality of life folks and reduced it to one page, together with what the request was and what the amount was. The total amounts there, the individual projects are here. I'm going to post this worksheet on message board so that everybody has this. And it might be a way for folks to let me know -- I mean, which are the ones here that seem to be the council priorities. I see us going from the general to the more specific. >> Kitchen: So if I've not chemical items on here, which I do super -- I've got concept menu items on here, which I do under the quality of life, under the category, you're going to keep the seven million -- >> Mayor Adler: Just for now, although I think eventually that will roll off. But it would be helpful if people could help me identify -- if there are concept menu numbers associated with these things -- [11:26:18 AM] >> Kitchen: I got you. >> Mayor Adler: It would be helpful to have those. And then the council could easily see which things are being brought into the concept menu and which things are not being brought into the concept menu. But we'll go ahead and post this. >> Kitchen: Okay, thank you. >> Mayor Adler: That would be good. And we'll make copies now and hand them out. >> Garza: I have more duplicates. >> Mayor Adler: We'll take more duplicates. >> Garza: Page 22, page 7. I guess I would be adding to that because H 27 and H 24 are the same thing. Yes. And then H 21 and H 25 are the same. And it should be one-time funds because it is -- >> Mayor Adler: What number, I'm sorry? >> Garza: H 21, H 25 are the same. >> Mayor Adler: 21 and 25 are the same. And you were saying that that should be -- both are one-time funds? >> Garza: Yes. >> [Inaudible]. >> Mayor Adler: And A.D.A. Improvements has a misspelling. >> Pool: So when we consolidate we just add to combine the names up? Great. >> Garza: And I had one quick question and I think you've addressed this. If something is on there with one -- like say it's under Adler, can you take it off or is it there? Because sometimes I have -- I won't add my name if I know it's there. And you can't take it off once it's on here, correct? >> Mayor Adler: I think we should do that as a practice. If it's on there, any individual can't take it off because somebody else might be counting on it being there. >> Garza: Okay, thanks. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. So in that respect, there have been some things that have been pulled off and I think the next time we get together we should have that list of things that have been pulled off just so that people can see that to make sure that they see which things have been pulled. [11:28:31 AM] >> [Inaudible]. >> Mayor Adler: The tab at the end shows removed items. So at the end of the deal there's a page that has items that have been pulled. So you can take a look at that and -- >> In the electronic copy. >> Mayor Adler: It's on the last page of the electronic copy so everybody should take a look at that to see if something has been pulled that they want to make sure stays on. Ms. Houston? >> Houston: Thank you, mayor. I'm going to sound like a heretic and I admit that from the beginning. I think we should have started from the city manager's budget and then look at the things in the council resolution and one-time funding to see if they wanted to include any of those. Because there are things on here that we're not talking about yet. And I have put on for the African-American quality of life initiatives about five million dollars. And so we've got four million in regular and one million in reserve and even in my -- what is it aggie math? That doesn't add up. Or HT rams math, that doesn't add up. [Laughter]. So I'm unclear how we will get to a point where we can match up what our needs are and what our available funding is. So that's given me great cause for concern because I have concerns as I put in the making government work for us is that we don't have any idea what the federal government is going to do about a budget. No idea. If worse comes to worse we'll have some real unfunded mandates from the federal government. So my proposal is just to hold off on allocating that 4 million, $1 million until after the first of year, but no one seems to understand that except me or agree with that. [11:30:39 AM] So I'm getting -- I'm really uneasy because we're making all these moves and yet we've got things here that we -- we've rolled over since last year, 12 unfunded police officers. We had them allocated, but no funding for that. And yes, I understand that some of our social services programs really have a positive impact not only on our youth and juveniles, but also on adults. But our city is growing. Our city continues to grow and we continue to fall further behind in being able to get those resources out to our community that are at the furthest edges of our community. And so it's a both and, yes, we need more social services, but we also need some police officers, and we're behind in that. So I'm not sure how to reconcile this, and you probably have a vision because you're a visionary, so if you can help me understand how we're going to make some of these things that we said were our priorities, and yet now we're adding other things to it? It would be helpful to me. >> Mayor Adler: I would suggest that either at the tail end of this meeting or as we reschedule for next week that we try to pare down the list. As we go through the list, people between now and the next meeting perhaps, identify things that their sense is that there would be a significant and material consensus for us to be able to pull things off the list so that we can pare it down so that we're actually focusing on a smaller subset. We tried to do that last year. We weren't real successful in doing that, but I think we ought to give that a real serious attempt and try to pare down the list, recognizing that everything on here is important and desired, but so that we're not trying to do all this at the end. >> Houston: So just one more part of that is that I kind of represent two or three quality of life initiatives in that I have both the asian-american resource center in the district, African-American, and I have hispanic quality of life issues that we're concerned about. [11:32:51 AM] We have not put very many resources -- last year we did them a disservice, all of the quality of life. We started at a number induce kept paring them down and paring them down and got down to 900,000 -- >> Mayor Adler: 700,000. >> Houston: Thank you. Because we kept paying them down. -- Paying them down. Now Sare take this is an opportunity for us to be able to do some of the things that we thought we might have an opportunity to do last year and we were not able to. And they did what we asked them to do, instead of saying we need this amount of money for this particular entity, they said this is a bucket and this is what we think the need is. And I think we do our communities a disservice when we keep making them pay the price for -- and don't get mad at me, everybody, please don't. For parks and pools. Because they think that they have valid requests that this city has not responded to in a long, long, long, long time. And so it's kind of like how do you make that decision between whether you continue to do historic parks or animals, that's the other one that we get a lot is we pay more attention to animals than we do to the quality of life initiatives that people have been asking for time and time again. So I'm just pointing that out because it's all interrelated, but people are now saying when is it our time to get some of this funding to fund some of the entities in our community that are doing a good job and that have been asking for funding for a long time. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. Mr. Renteria? Did you want to speak? Your light's on. Okay. Mayor pro tem. >> Tovo: I think there are still some areas of overlap and frankly the quality of life one is, I think there is - - I'm really quite confused about what's on here and not here and we've all identified it differently. [11:34:55 AM] I've got, and I think councilmember Casar may be on it, E -- H 20, the recommendation that came forward. >> Houston: What page? >> Tovo: Sorry. After asking that people identify the page first I don't have a page. >> Mayor Adler: Page 24. H what? >> Tovo: H 20. I was just going to suggest that one way to help us organize this material -- thank you for this handy worksheet. And I was going to suggest if we were going to break for lunch, which I would love to do maybe at noon that, we all do this and write our quality of life things and we have on the blackboard all the quality of life initiatives and we can at least know which are all related to that because I think we have everything from -- unless Mr. Van eenoo has a better idea. >> I think we could do this because we did this internally. We could highlight the various items that are from the various quality of life initiatives, so you could -- and reprint so you could quickly see this is an hispanic quality of life item, this is -- >> Tovo: If you don't mind doing that. I think we have everything from the largest bucket, which is yours, to sort of the more general, to then specific individual organizational names again. So I think we're -- I think we have sort of a philosophical discussion, but I think there's also still some overlap in that. So that would be helpful. At least we could identify what all the elements are pro fill lated out through the 32 pages that are all related to the quality of life recommendations. >> Mayor Adler: There are two different ways to do that. We could have this here and you identify which are the quality of life. The other one that would be helpful to me would be to have the universe of things they asked for to know which one of these things correspond to items on here. So I'll do that myself or we could do that collectively as a group. But for example, H 20 that you had is the first thing. That is on the lgbtq item. So I know that that one is on the concept menu as H 20. [11:36:55 AM] >> Tovo: Yeah. So they're all going to be in different -- one of the challenges here is that we've all put them into different categories. So not only do we have to look for duplicates in the same category, we have to look for duplicates across categories. Okay. So this -- in some ways this is the right list because then we can just map other on to this. >> Mayor Adler: And it would also tell you what's not there in addition to what is there. >> Tovo: Except that these are the specific names and then they would have to be backed out to the more general category. In some cases. >> Mayor Adler: If we were to do that. >> Tovo: And that's what some councilmembers have proposed and not others. Anyway, we have more discussion there. One of the other areas that I'm a little confused by is childcare. And so -- mayor, before we get to that I have some items that might relate to some questions about items that might relate to the quality of life that you put on that I need some help understanding. Place based planning. No, that wasn't a quality of life recommendation. I'm sorry, page 5. E 22, 23 could you tell us what those are? And also the expenditure for the displacement task force. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. So the place based planning was something that's growing out of the spirit of east Austin initiatives. There's a group that did some purpose built communities in Atlanta, did a really good program in taking a community that was having significant difficulties and being able to work with the communities to raise them. They've formed a foundation, are now giving free consultation. And I know that they've been talking to colony park and offering to bring services and support to colony park. [11:39:00 AM] They're also looking at some other of the eastern crescent communities. So let me find out exactly what the detail is on the 275 because the last time I saw that list it was a "To be determined". But it's that effort. It's looking at whether or not there are things we can be doing to accelerate the work that are being done in communities like colony park and dove strings or rundberg I think are the other communities that they're looking at. >> Tovo: So did you say the number 275 -- mine just said a tbd. We don't have a dollar amount assigned. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. So I'm unsure yet. The list I had from my office has a number, but I can't tell if it's 275 or if it's 27,000 or I don't know what it is. >> Tovo: It sounds like a very interesting possibility, but I think without backup information, if you could provide us with some information that would help us assess, we have such hard choices ahead of us. The task force training, what task force would that refer to, the one underneath it, E 23, the equity task force training? >> Mayor Adler: The task force training talked about taking the training sessions that we're trying to fund internally here at the office and take that to the phase 2 of what was in that report. That was one of the things that we had given to staff and asked what would it take for us to be able to execute the recommendations that came out of that report. There were recommendations in that report that were by area, but one of the first things that that task force came back and said was we needed to do a better job of changing the communication and the awareness in the community generally. So they had talked about taking the training that is now being made available to the city and being able to take that broader in the community to raise awareness of that issue as well as to bring the training broader. [11:41:05 AM] So to get more C level and more businesses that were involved in those kinds of programs, more organizations involved in those kind of training opportunity. The task force having made the conclusion that if we really want to change things institutionally we have to do deeper work than just trying to address an individual program. My understanding is that the 255 represents half of what the budget was for that, but again, none of that detail appears in here. I think we need to get that information out so that you can better assess that. >> Tovo: So it's not that a task force of the city would be trained. It's called task force training because the task force recommended it and would be training people out in the community. >> Mayor Adler: Correct. It was taking the recommendation of the task force. >> Tovo: But their recommendation was that the city pay for that training for private individuals? >> Mayor Adler: I think that it had the city contributing to pay for half of that and then having the folks that were involved in that task force go out and raise the other half of that. >> Tovo: Okay. And childcare. If we don't want to talk about this now because I've asked a few questions all at once and I see -- well, there aren't that many lights. But there are several different childcare and I don't know if we're so I've got passages on there and that was a subject 2, E 2. This is the childcare program for families at the women and children's shelter. The decision of council is not to recommend the city manager include in her budget, but that we discuss it during this budget process. And then I think councilmember alter, you have E 19 different, and that's specific, as I understood you, to say that is specific to capital idea and would be funded in the way you've suggested. And then councilmember Garza, I think you had a childcare amount and I was curious about that. And I don't know. I thought I saw another one, but maybe it was just the three. [11:43:08 AM] I just want to be sure I'm understanding the distinctions among those. >> Garza: Just FYI, my office sent my concept items last week before the Wednesday item and they somehow didn't get on, nor did the descriptions as well. So I hope those will be added. The additional funding, is it the 200,000? >> Tovo: I'm not sure where I saw it. It was near some items that you had on. One was childcare and then underneath it was a childcare analysis, I think. >> Garza: Are you talking about page 7, childcare continuity? So it is the early childhood commission recommended funding for -- there's a gap in when a parent is in workforce development program they have childcare provided for them. But then that stops once they finish that program, but usually once they finish that program they're trying to find a job to use the training that they received. And so it wasn't the ability to continue funding that parents' childcare while they're looking for a job to fill that gap. And then once they get a job there are programs that allow them to subsidize their childcare. So thankfully there is continued funding from my original request last year, but this is asking for more funding because the more funding in there allows for more families to be served. That being said, I'm still trying to massage this number to get a better understanding of the need and so I -- that's what that one is. And -- >> Which number? >> Garza: E 40. Once I get that information that number might change, but I will be sure we get our additional information added to the concept menu. [11:45:12 AM] The E 41 is -- we have the discussion -- which is page 7, E 41. There was discussion during the highland mall development services, p3, about childcare and there was conversations about -- there have been studies done and -- I don't remember what was said, but it looks like there was a saturation of academic, but we got different information from United Way. Showing that district 4 and district 2 really do not have the amount of childcare services needed in that area. Study -- and again, I don't know what the number is. I can't imagine it being too high and it would be one-time. Just to get a better understanding of the childcare needs throughout the city. And if -- and -- and frankly to push for that highland mall development to provide some kind of childcare services because I think it's a perfect spot for it. There's ACC students there that could use it. And so that's what that one is. >> Tovo: I completely agree. >> Mayor Adler: That is E 41? Thank you. >> Tovo: As soon as we heard about the new development services building I started asking the questions about whether it was going to include childcare so I'm really distressed that it doesn't and I'm now more distressed based on United Way's feedback to you. So I'm definitely supportive of doing whatever we need to do as a city to encourage some follow-up on the possibility there at highland. Who would do -- I know we're not naming vendors, but are there -- I'm still talking about Delia's. >> Pool: Are you still talking about this particular one? >> Tovo: Yeah. I was just -- I just want to clarify the childcare facility study would be sort of an assessment of childcare needs across the whole city? [11:47:13 AM] >> Garza: Yes. >> Tovo: And we would -- we would have our staff do like an rfp or something for that? Or do they have some people in mind? >> Garza: I would assume an rfp process. >> Tovo: Okay, thanks. And I think just to -- I would just say that I think there's also support for that kind of needs assessment back in the 2003 families and children task force. That was a recommendation from the childcare piece of that task force to do -- they were actually suggesting a needs assessment in the downtown area, especially, because there are so many employees downtown and very little childcare. But I think it's consistent -- I think this is -- this would be even better if we could look citywide. The hope was that if we did one downtown that we could get some of our downtown partners to help pay for that. So I hope to the extent that if this passes, and I mopac it does, that we can maybe sigh 15 off a piece of it that could be supported by employers to look at that downtown piece of it so that we're not funding all of the assessment, when really it would be an economic development benefit for a lot of those downtown companies. >> Renteria: Mayor? >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Pool is next. >> Garza: I guess a better description would be a citywide childcare facilities need assessment study for a description of it. >> Pool: I wanted to add my name to that, the citywide childcare facilities study. It's really important. And especially if we can look at places that we're willing and downtown -- we're building and downtown. When my daughter was first born and I was working downtown, there were only two options, three if you considered UT, that were close to my office. And not many opportunities to get her in, although we did get her in at the Greek orthodox church, which I don't know if they're still doing childcare there. And one of my assignments when I worked for the state was to open the state childcare center which is near the lemon building at 15th and lavaca or Guadalupe. [11:49:23 AM] I don't remember where it is. And there were a lot of issues surrounding that, that the state had to grapple with. So there was -- there were challenges. And I'm thinking because that was so long ago that maybe those challenges are -- have been addressed and it's easier to do this. At any rate I think we should absolutely move forward with trying to understand where the childcare is being offered in the city and to augment it where we can. And if we have an opportunity at the new permitting center to put that in place, I would be supportive. So thanks for adding this, whoever all is doing that. And show me in support of it. >> Mayor Adler: Mr. Casar and then Mr. Renteria? >> Alter: She had asked about my childcare item and how it differed. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> Alter: So for E 19 that $100,000 is for workforce development childcare. The number came from capital idea, but it could apply for scope one alliance or any other program that is providing childcare for people who are in workforce development. It's on page 4. And I just want to add that I'm having my staff ask Rodney if we can ask the state to include some childcare in the Texas model proposal that they're negotiating. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Mr. Casar? >> Casar: So I'm not sure if we're on the topic of duplicates. I wanted to briefly take us off of that topic, if that's okay, to just state -- >> Renteria: Just one quick comment. You know, it's not as much as having the site, it's having it staffed. My granddaughter, they won't take her kid to a academic center even though she's going to ACC at highland, because there's not enough staff members there and she feels like, you know, there's -- that's a big problem right now is the staff to take care of the population that they have right now. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. [11:51:24 AM] Thank you. Mr. Casar? >> Casar: So I know that there will probably be continued work to free up more money, but the way that I've been trying to think about -- I just want for clarity, the way that I've been trying to think about the five million that is there has been sort of in two buckets in my head and I don't think that -- I think we could all argue about what would fit in those two buckets, but I just want to put this out there as one potential idea that we have some standing council resolutions on commitments and we're -- that we've tried to make to folks that are most in need in our community, like the health and human services contracting, our housing trust fund, the wages for our lowest paid folks and making sure programs don't shut down in our title one schools, are just -- just even covering a little bit of some of those commitments would easily eat up the five million dollars obviously, but just thinking about that. And then also addressing people in crisis situations or in very dire situations. And some of these things overlap with some of the quality of life recommendations like providing prep access, addressing the needs of sexual assault survivors, the advancing on homelessness initiatives or providing deportation defense services for folks whether they be Latino, Asian or African-American communities. So for me just thinking about our limited resources, just that five-million-dollar chunk that the manager has identified, and I really appreciate her diligent work and the staff's work to bring that forward, I am just -- you know, just even one or two of the things I just listed easily eats up those five million dollars, but I just want to note that since we're coming up on budget readings really soon I want to put out there not that these are my specific items and that those won't change, I just want to sort of put those categories out there for folks that thinking about what resolutions we've been passing and driving to address the needs of folks and then kicking off and sustaining some of these programs for people that are in crisis are kind of the way that I'm thinking about the five-million-dollar set aside of money, knowing that there's still other money that we can find through budget reductions. [11:53:45 AM] But just for this five million that's where my head is at right now. I'ding interested if anybody has any thoughts on that. >> Kitchen: I have a question. >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Kitchen and then councilmember alter. >> Kitchen: Just a question. You know last year -- I hear what you're saying. I think we need to have a little bit more conversation about where there may be some additional dollars. And I'd like to ask for the help of the city manager and Ed on that. At the end of the day last year if we did things like we found dollars that if we made some changes on some policies, we freed up some dollars, for example, that related to some assumptions that were made, and I'm going to forget all the details, but some assumptions that were made about -- now I don't remember, Ed. It was at the end we found a significant amount of dollars with assumptions that were made about when things were carried over and when they weren't. I'll look up the details. But the point being is there are some things that maybe difficult for us to see. And I know that you all did a -- -- I really appreciate the effort that you put in to finding the five million, but there are a lot of -- I don't think any of the things on this list are things that are not critical for our community. And councilmember Casar -- even the things that you focused in on the categories you focused in is more than five million. >> Casar: Yeah, exactly. >> Kitchen: I want to say we need some additional help. We will dig in ourselves, but we need some additional help from the city manager and our staff to help us see, well, if you've made a tweak in this policy here or in that policy there, then it might free up some additional dollars. One question I had also related to that was that I think it goes back to something that you said, mayor, about dollars that would be going back -- that were unspent from last year. That would be going back in to I forget how we say it. [11:55:47 AM] But goes back into the general fund at the end of the year. Maybe I missed it, but I'm not seeing on here an accounting of or a listing -- listing might be a better term of those dollars. And we had that happen last year and the year before. It's not that it's a huge amount, but I'm sure there's some amount of dollars that were not expended that are going to go back into either our reserves or to general fund. We've also had conversations in previous years about the amount of our reserves. So anyway, I just throw those out as examples. I don't know if any one of them is an area to look at for additional dollars, but I'm asking for your help because those are the kinds of conversations we had last year and the year before, and I'm not seeing us have those conversations this time. So I have some questions about it. Does that make sense what I'm asking? Okay. >> To the extent that we had any savings projected from this year's budget we used those for balancing the '18 budget and meeting our reserve requirements. >> Kitchen: So we have no dollars that we're sweeping back into reserves? >> Only to meet the required policy guidance on the reserve. I don't believe we have any excess in reserve, but Ed can correct me if I'm wrong. >> The budget we proposed was right at the 12% policy. In volume II of your proposed budget on page 771 there is a list of one-time items that are in the proposed budget that would be coming out of our reserves, but keeping us at the 12%. One of those items is the million dollars of one-time funds that the city manager put aside in the budget. But typically there's other things in there such as, you know, replacement of public safety radios, generally like capital equipment that we need to replace on a regular basis. That's a source of funding that we've traditionally used for that purpose. >> Kitchen: Okay. I guess my question is more general then. [11:57:49 AM] My question is simply, please take another look and let us know if there are any other areas that you can identify, understanding that these are all hard choices for all of us. But that would be helpful to us. >> I think some of the -- we have looked at some things like that. One example is we would not -- an option would be to not increase the living wage. We did not believe that the council would approve -- >> Kitchen: That's not one the council wants to I prove. >> So we didn't propose it that way. But that's an example of something. We did look at many of those. And based on our knowledge of what this council wants to do we just didn't propose them, but they are available. >> Kitchen: So there's none that you're aware of right now. And I would just -- I'm saying you probably already did this, but if you haven't done this exercise, if there are any that you think there might be a possibility, the living wage is -- you're spot on, it's not something that we want to -- you know. But if there's an item or two that, you know, that you think that we might consider, I'm just asking you to look again. >> Sure. We'll be glad to look at it again. I'll speak with Ed and the acms about it. >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Houston, did you want to say something? That's okay. So it is noon now. I'd recommend that we stop now, we break, we come back at 1:00 after lunch and I would recommend that at 1:00 the first thing we take up is what time next week if we wanted to free some time for us to be able to talk. So if everybody could check their calendars over the lunch period, without objection, it is noon, we will stand recessed until 1:00. [12:49:22 PM] . [Recess] [1:10:04 PM] Te St. [1:12:29 PM] Test. Test [1:20:56 PM] >> Mayor Adler: Are we ready? Okay. We're on. So it is 1:20. We're going to reconvene this budget work session. Today is August 30, 2017. We're in the board and commission room here in Austin. Let's begin by talking about calendars next week. We're trying to see if there's any time available for us to get together just to hold, so we can talk about the budget. Monday is a holiday, the 5th is when we come back. How do people's mornings look on the 5th? >> Mr. Mayor? I would suggest the 5th. I would like to start a little later, maybe at 10:00, if that's okay with people. >> Mayor Adler: Are people okay with starting a session at 10:00 on Tuesday the 5th? Sounds like people are okay with that. >> Tovo: Just one second. What is our end timing because that will determine what our beginning time is for me. >> Mayor Adler: Okay, if we're going to start -- I would suggest that we -- that we hold the sessions kind of shorter. I would say can we go -- we could go and have a late lunch? Could we go until 12:30, 1:00? How about 10:00 to 1:00? Does that work for people? >> Three hours? >> Mayor Adler: Three hours. >> Tovo: That's fine. I just -- I just have a hard stop at 2:45 and I think occasionally other colleagues do as well on Tuesday. So -- >> Mayor Adler: Let's go 10:00 to 1:00 and then we'll eat lunch after we -- we get back. Does anybody want to set a time for later in that week just in case? Like on either Thursday or Friday? >> Thursday would be preferable. >> Mayor Adler: Thursday would be preferable. [1:22:56 PM] >> Thursday is good. >> Mayor Adler: Do we want to do something -- >> (Indiscernible). >> Mayor Adler: Can't anytime during the day? >> (Indiscernible). >> We have codenext on Wednesday. >> Mayor Adler: I'm trying to separate that a little bit. What about -- let's look at Friday. Could -- could people do Friday morning so that we're not -- >> I can't do it in the morning. >> Mayor Adler: What? >> I can't in the morning. >> Mayor Adler: Can't do it in the morning? What about Friday afternoon? >> (Indiscernible). >> Mayor Adler: Can't do Friday afternoon? >> What did we say about Thursday? No? >> Mayor Adler: Well, we pushed it over to Thursday -- we can't do Friday. So now let's push it back up till Thursday. Is there -- can people do Thursday afternoon? >> (Indiscernible). >> Mayor Adler: Okay. So Thursday afternoon general works? >> (Indiscernible). >> Mayor Adler: What about Thursday afternoon from -- from 1:30 to -- from 1:00 to 4:00? Does that work? Thursday afternoon 1:00 to 4:00. Okay. So let's hold that tentatively on everybody's schedule and then on Monday morning when we're done, let's look at each other -- I mean, Tuesday, sorry. On Tuesday let's look at each other and see if we want to do that. So tentatively we're going to hold Thursday of next week from 1:00 to 4:00, and we're going to meet Tuesday next week from 10:00 to 1:00. Okay? We need to call the sessions, we could note, if we're going to do to executive session on the Tuesday one so that we can discuss the legal issues related to the negotiations that are going on for public safety. >> Is somebody going to send us an email with all that we just talked about? I'm not allowed to add things to my calendar. [Laughter] , And I don't know if my staff is watching. So is somebody going to send us -- [1:24:58 PM] >> Mayor Adler: We'll post that on the message board. We'll post those times on the message board, and we'll also set the meeting so that they're posted on the calendar. Mayor pro tem? >> (Indiscernible). >> Mayor Adler: Okay. All right. So when we were last talking we had finished with people trying to figure out what was happening with the -- with the quality of life commission reports. We know that on the lgbtq that first item, the 135,000 for prep access is item H 20. If you look at the Asian American quality of life, the $85,000 number is h6. The health navigator item is e15. >> (Indiscernible). >> Mayor Adler: Oh, it's already done. >> Maybe I should clarify what we're passing out. >> We give you a hard time but we love you anyway. >> And this is on-line as well. This version that's being passed around. It's already on-line at the budget web site, the concept menu. So we have over the lunch break revised the concept menu to address any overlapping items, items that you wanted to delete and maybe add co-sponsors, so we tried to clean everything up the best we could. We think we caught everything, but we've also added to the concept menu the -- you'll see some items now highlighted in green. Those are quality of life items, and we tried to add, if it was African American quality of life, Asian American quality of life, et cetera. [1:27:00 PM] So you can see now more readily on there where the quality of life items are spread around. What the mayor passed out, we have highlighted in blue, this was the closest we could find to a green highlighter up in the budget office but we were trying to make them both green, but we highlighted the items on the mayor's list that are likewise on the concept menu list, the items on the mayor's list that are not highlighted are not currently on the concept menu item as individual items although they are captured under the mayor's global $7 million item. So anyway, we thought that might help. I do have one correction on the mayor's list where it says the $1 million for cultural learning is item c20. That's not accurate. Item c20 is related to the carver museum. This item for the 1 million for cultural learning is not currently on the concept menu, but council member Houston has submitted that, and so we're going to make sure it's added for the next version. >> Mayor Adler: So there's an item, that third one down? It's not c20, though, but Ms. Houston is adding to -- >> It's not c20 and it's not currently on the list, which is our mistake. Ms. Houston -- council councilmember Houston has already submitted it. >> Mayor Adler: So you have now handed out yet another concept menu, is that right? >> (Indiscernible). >> That reflects all the changes you made this morning, wanting to consolidate items and trying to more clearly highlight the quality of life items throughout the menu. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. So if it's possible when you do this kind of stuff realtime, because I know you're going to be doing it, if on the date or time you can note that this is the second one. >> Sure. >> Mayor Adler: Because on its face this looks like the one that we got this morning. >> It does, and we can -- >> Mayor Adler: Unless there's a mark -- >> I think we can put a time stamp at the bottom in addition to the date stamp. [1:29:01 PM] >> Mayor Adler: Yeah, yeah, I'm just saying something -- >> And I know a few of you are working on the electronic version, so if you go to the city's budget web site, this newest version is now also on the -- available electronically. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Yes, Mr. Renteria? >> Renteria: I don't know whether -- I see -- I see that you have 75,000 for the map. It's also the same thing right above that, it's the same one. So that's not blue. That's not our list? >> C15 and c18. >> Renteria: Yeah. Right under c15. >> Pool: Hispanic -- >> Mayor Adler: You're saying it's not on which list? >> Renteria: It's on this little list here, it's like you have c18, 7 5k for mac. >> Mayor Adler: Oh, I see. >> Renteria: And right above that it's the same one. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> Renteria: So that's not in yours but it was on mine, on the quality of life. >> Mayor Adler: So what he's saying here is 35,000 for -- >> No, not c15. >> Mayor Adler: I was just orienting people. So the 35,000 for -- >> Renteria: Go down. >> Mayor Adler: (Voices overlapping) Is not on the consent menu. The 75 for center for American cultural arts is the same thing as c18. So that -- >> Renteria: Well, no, maybe -- >> Mayor Adler: Or is one an fte. >> Renteria: Cultural arts. >> Pool: Maybe an fte -- >> So what page is that? >> On the concept menu? C18 is on page 18. While you're looking for that I would also mention that the mayor's list I think took the dollars directly from the quality of life issues. [1:31:04 PM] On the concept menu it's 81,276. That's a result of budget staff working with the department staff to come up with staff estimates for what these items would require. >> Pool: So it looks like -- >> Mayor Adler: Has someone found c18? >> Pool: Yeah -- on page 18. It looks to me like the number that's on the roll-up for c18 has the wrong dollar figure for the mac fte, because it looks like here it's 81,276. >> The 75,000 from the list the mayor passed out that we've now highlighted is c18, came directly from the quality of life data. The 81,276 is our precise coming of what that position would be with benefits, et cetera. >> Pool: So that will help distinguish between the two items that look like they're the same but, in fact, they are not, right? >> They are not (indiscernible). >> Pool: Well, now we need to go back to c15 and make sure. >> Mayor Adler: Can't really -- 35,000 -- well, the problem is, is that under c15 are three things. The 30,000 is not on the concept menu, and the 75,000 is not on the concept menu, if that was different. So what we really need to do is look at the quality of life submission from the hispanic -- we'll do that and make sure that that is -- we'll check and see whether that should be on there twice or not. >> Pool: And it looks like they may be two separate things, but yeah, we should -- >> Mayor Adler: Okay. We'll check that. >> Pool: That's hard to tell. >> Kitchen: There was one other item, and it's g16. [1:33:05 PM] And -- >> Mayor Adler: Page? >> Kitchen: Page -- I'm sorry, page 29, g16. I'm -- that may be an overlap. I'm not certain if that actually came out of the recommendations, quality of life recommendations. There are a number of translation items, so I just want to flag that one, that that might be duplicative, so -- and that's g16. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. So the question is how does that -- >> Kitchen: It's page 29, g16. It may be slightly different because it's focused on city boards and commissions, for posted community meetings, and I just don't recall whether that came out of one of the quality of life recommendations or not. >> Houston: So on the new one -- the new one is G -- page 30. >> Mayor Adler: Look at g16 on page 30. >> Houston: It's 30. >> Kitchen: I'm sorry, I was looking at the wrong one, so yeah. >> Tovo: Council member kitchen were you saying that may be the same as g12? >> Kitchen: It may be the same as -- >> Tovo: They both have your name on it. >> Kitchen: Yes, it may be the same as g12. >> Mayor Adler: If you could check on that, Ms. Kitchen, let us know, or let Ed know the answer to that. >> Kitchen: Okay. >> Mayor Adler: Okay? The floor is open council, Ms. Houston? >> Houston: On G 12 that's specific to availability of city information. That's been a part of the Asian American quality of life for the last two and a half years because we don't translate our access to resources into the five languages that they've identified. >> Council member Houston, does that include interpretation services? I know there was live interpretation services. That may be the difference. >> Houston: That could be the difference. >> Kitchen: Yes. >> Houston: This is just access to documents that -- this is translation -- >> Kitchen: I think that's the difference, yeah. Okay. Well -- so Mr. Van eenoo, I think g16, the only thing that's maybe in g16 that's not in g12 is that interpretation. [1:35:15 PM] So I think that that's what that references. >> Mayor Adler: So it's g12 is oral translation at boards and commissions meetings? >> Kitchen: Yeah, I think that's where -- the rest of it looks like it should overlap. I can go back and double-check, but I think the rest of it should overlap. >> Mayor? >> Mayor Adler: Yes. >> Could we -- is it feasible to collapse them into one category about language access. >> Kitchen: Yeah. >> Tovo: In print? If that's okay with -- >> Kitchen: If that's okay with council member Houston the other item is hers. Okay. You can put them together. >> Tovo: While we're on that page, page 30, there's an item at the end. It looks like Asian American quality of life facility services representative 96,944,000. I assume something just went awry there. That would be a really good salary, especially for the city. On page 30. >> Mayor Adler: Down at the bottom. The question is, is there a request for a facility services representative? >> I can't speak to why that language is there but the 6.4 million is the sum of everything in that concept category. >> Tovo: We just should make sure we didn't lose that facility -- my guess is that came from somewhere else, and it may not be there anymore. >> Mayor Adler: And, in fact, if you look at page 26 of 36, that total budget increased on the summary line has the funding for greater Austin -- someone just check the formatting issue here. And -- okay. [1:37:19 PM] Bless you. Mr. Flannigan? >> Flannigan: In that same section, I have the one item, g101, budget reduction. Sorry, I'm working off the digital so I don't have the page numbers right in front of me, but it was the very next thing under -- >> Mayor Adler: Page 31. >> Flannigan: Thank you. There are a number of offices within the city manager's office, and we didn't really get to drill down into those departments during our substantive reviews this year, so I've made kind of an initial suggestion. We started some conversations with the staff of those departments, hoping to find some efficiencies or some other ways to accomplish this, make sure we're not duplicating our efforts. But it is appropriately tbd on the dollar figure there because we're still working with staff, and city manager will work with you to give you some of the insight that we're hearing from the leaders of those departments and how we might move forward on that. So there's no dollar figure on it yet, but I hope to have one as we move into next week or the week after. >> Then I'll just tell you, I don't believe that we are duplicating services. They are working together on several projects. As interim city manager, I chose not to do any post-(indiscernible) Reorganization of these offices and leave that for a permanent manager to decide. That's just my philosophy. >> Mayor Adler: Manager, there was some conversation a year ago about policing levels, and there was a writer that was put -- rider that was put into the budget that dealt with some reporting that we wanted to get back from public safety folks relative to staffing levels. Are we going to get anything from public safety on that? >> I know that the last time I saw a memo they were asking for an extension. There was some community meetings that they were supposed to be holding. [1:39:21 PM] I need to get an update on that. I don't have a current status on it. >> Mayor Adler: Check that and then figure out how we deal with that in this budget meeting, at this budget period, if we're not going -- to have that. So if you could think about that issue for us. >> Kitchen: And could I just remind you, that particular budget rider had -- it tied back to specific sections of the community policing report. So what we'd be looking for is information on those specific sections. >> My recollection is you wanted some specific performance measures. >> Kitchen: Yeah, but it's -- the budget -- well, yeah, the budget rider's help didn't repeat all that stuff in it. It said, you know, respond on how you're going to get X that's in -- you know, it's a reference back to the specific section number and page number of the police -- >> Matrix report. >> Casar: Mayor, on this point. >> Mayor Adler: Yes. >> Casar: I believe there were two riders, the one that laid through the specifics on the matrix report and then another one that referred to community recommendations on what community policing could look like and some meetings that sort of happen. So I think there were two for a reference. >> Kitchen: Yeah, need to look at both of them. >> Mayor Adler: And it included many things. One of the things that was most important to me in looking at that is looking at what the metrics would be to measure success. How do we know if doing community policing is successful or meet objectives. >> Renteria: You're right. We did make a recommendation for the center for mexican-american cultural arts. >> Mayor Adler: Those are two separate things. >> Renteria: Yeah, and I'm not making that recommendation on that one. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Gotcha. >> (Indiscernible). >> Mayor Adler: They were different and he's recommending one of the two. >> Okay. >> Mayor Adler: Okay? [1:41:21 PM] The one that's in -- the one that's in the do. There are two items on here that I would -- that I would highlight. One of them is, is that as I go around the city and I have now been in front of dozens and dozens of groups on codenext, and as I go around the city there are lots of things, the conversation about displacement is something that is continually coming up with an ever greater ferocity and volume, and I think that there's not a common base that people are working off of with respect to addressing that issue. So I'm going to be real supportive of the displacement work because I think that's something that is timely and we need to focus on. I don't know if -- if you -- if your think is covered on this or if it's on there. Those two things, one of them is e27. Do you know where yours is? >> (Indiscernible) See if I can find it. >> Mayor Adler: But there are two. There's one that's working off the university -- e27, which is on page 5 of 35. I'm sorry. I would also say that we've had some council members that have stepped forward with people that they would recommend serve on that task force, and I hope other people do that so that I can get going. And there's been an opportunity to put people in different subject matter expertises area, and some people have given me suggestions on who else should be appointed to that, and I appreciate receiving those. The other thing -- and then the other thing that I was going to point out that just is out of the usual or different here -- >> (Indiscernible). >> Mayor Adler: We could, go ahead. >> Tovo: Two questions related to the task force. I've forgotten how we're doing the appointments for it. [1:43:24 PM] Are we each making appointments? >> Mayor Adler: We're each making an appointment. >> Tovo: Okay. Could you help us understand the budget request? Typically we don't have a budget request associated with the task force, and so that -- I just needed some explanation about that 200,000 -- I think there was a $200,000 fee attached to the task force. >> Mayor Adler: There was, and we're trying to hone that number, but it's to provide support to that task force as well as someone that could do research and the more academic questions associated with the work of the task force. >> Tovo: The -- so the support would not be regular staff support? >> Mayor Adler: It would not be regular staff support. >> Tovo: Who would -- >> Mayor Adler: And that's because it wasn't in the staff's budget to do that. That function could be taken by staff, but right now there's no funding in the budget to support that task force. >> Tovo: So what would be the department -- how would that -- so somebody -- one of our city managers or that is under the umbrella -- that task force will be under the umbrella of which department? And then that department will contract with a temporary employee -- >> Mayor Adler: Correct. >> Tovo: Is that the situation? What department -- >> Mayor Adler: Or consultant. I don't know. I'd leave that up to the manager's office to figure out how to do that. >> Tovo: Okay. So this would be for staff to hire a temporary staff member to staff that task force and then possibly a consultant to do research? >> Mayor Adler: I don't see those as being two different things. I see that as support. >> Tovo: Did you say that you were honing down -- 200,000 would be a lot. What's the task force report that time? >> Mayor Adler: It was supposed to give us preliminary indications in December, a report back in December, a report back in February and the final report was coming back the same time that the other displacement task force was, I think it was in August. >> Tovo: So that would be -- that would be a lot as a salary for a less than year position. So I hope that that number gets refined. [1:45:24 PM] >> Mayor Adler: And I hear that. We're chasing down detail on that. >> Tovo: Okay, thanks. >> Mayor Adler: The other thing that's out of the ordinary that I put in here, just to be considered, and I don't know if we want to handle this now or handle it later, but we're in the search for a city manager, and what was budgeted was the same amount we've been paying city managers in the past, and I put on here as item G4 on page 27 of 35 whether or not we want to consider adding additional money in the budget for -- to have available to us in those conversations. >> Kitchen: What item is that? I'm sorry. >> Mayor Adler: It's item g-4 on page 27 of 35. >> Pool: You had asked what the number is for the displacement study with UT. It's e-18 on page 4. >> Mayor Adler: E-18 on page 4 is the other displacement study. >> Pool: The one piece that's missing from there was the kitchen amendment, which added $7,000 to that number. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. So that number needs to go up by 7. >> Kitchen: So -- >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> Kitchen: Council member -- I don't have to do anything about that. You're going to go ahead and take care of adding the number? >> Pool: Well, yeah, we just announced it here and we just want you to vote for it. >> Mayor Adler: Which -- which number was that? I'm sorry? >> Pool: It's e-18 and it's the displacement study, the amendment that was put on when we adopted it during our conversation added $7,000 to the -- >> Mayor Adler: So it's the 6 -- is the 62 with or without -- >> It's without it. >> Mayor Adler: To around 69,000. -- >> Pool: To around 69,000. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> Pool: I'm asking a question of my staff from the funding for education around our urban forest and it's an expansion of work being done by the arborist. [1:47:29 PM] And I need to find out if that money is coming from the tree mitigation fund. It is general revenue. I just don't know if it's coming from a specific fund within general revenue. >> Mayor Adler: Which number is that? >> Pool: I had it a minute ago but of course I lost it. Hang on, I'll find it again. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. While council member pool is looking, we're back to the dais. Mayor pro tem? >> Tovo: Since we've just talked about the displacement task force and the displacement study, we talked a little bit earlier about the database of renter resources that several of us put on the concept menu, and I see that very much as one of the anti-displacement tools that we have in our -- or that I hope we will have in our toolbox, and especially it could be important in helping families with kids stay in the same attendance zone, which helps mitigate against mobility, school mobility, which is detrimental to their academic success, and then, you know, leads to other consequences in the present as well as later on. So I think that's a very important -- I think that's a really important funding decision to make. And the other one I want to highlight with regard to displacement, and then I have some others I want to talk about with homelessness here in a bit, but the eviction -- the tenant -- the tenant eviction specialist that both council member Garza and I put on there, I'm not sure if everyone has received the communication from the Austin tenants council about this position, so I thought I would just share with you -- >> Mayor Adler: This is e-35 on page 6. >> Tovo: Yes. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. >> Tovo: I believe some of this detail is in the description, but this would be a person -- you know, having an eviction history can be really damaging for a renter. It can prevent them from getting -- from having -- it can create a barrier for them that is really -- really challenging. And so this would be somebody who could work alongside, possibly, if the funding is allocated in the way suggested, would work alongside the renters' rights assistance program, to really help prevent unfair evictions, to serve as a resource to individuals who are headed to court on that, helping them understand their rights, helping them prepare for their hearings, and really helping them fully comprehend what the effects could be of an eviction and having an eviction on their record. [1:49:58 PM] And so some of what they would do would be to provide direct client support to individual -- individuals by reviewing and evaluating their vacation and eviction notices, helping them gather information and relevant documents and facts to present in court, educating them about it, about the process, what to expect, and then actually accompanying tenants. The law I guess allows for non-attorneys to help and to assist in these kinds of cases. And so that is, I think, the cost in there is about $63,000, maybe a little bit more, but again, I think that would be another very -- it's a relatively small investment, but I think it could be a very important tool in helping prevent displacements among our Austin residents, especially if they're able to -- especially in cases where they're being unfairly evicted. But even in cases where the end outcome will be eviction, making sure they're as well represented as possible, as informed as possible and trying to mitigate some of the bad effects. So I just want to call your attention to that again since we were talking about some of the longer term displacement items that are on our menu. >> Pool: Mayor, I found the item that I was talking about earlier. >> Mayor Adler: Hang on -- that explanation, is that posted, what you were reading from? >> Tovo: I'm not sure. Council member Garza, did you post -- I'm not sure that -- I'm not sure that this level -- I'm happy to just make a photocopy -- how about if I make a photocopy and distribute it, the information that I have? >> Mayor Adler: That would be great. >> Tovo: Sure. >> Pool: Page 20 of 36, the last item, c-27, city arborist pilot educational program. The urban forest replenishment fund has some -- has some room to pay for this, and we were going to determine what the total amount of it was. It would be an fte probably. [1:52:00 PM] It would fund community outreach, an education pilot program which the city arborists that would engage children at schools, community meetings and so forth on the value of trees and the importance of conservation. The item would be funded out of existing resources in the urban forest replenishment fund, so essentially this is existing funds and we would direct their use. >> Mayor Adler: Which page? >> Pool: It's page 20 and it's item c-27. City arborist pilot educational program. And this is an item we worked with the city arborist and his staff and other parks staff and they are supportive of this effort. >> I'll be happy to co-sponsor that. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> Flannigan: I have a question on that. >> Mayor Adler: You could fill that in on the cost section so we have that detail. Yes? >> Flannigan: I don't know that I've heard a description of the urban forest replenishment fund. Is that -- can you tell me where those funds come from and are there strings tied to where those funds can be spent? >> There are strings tied to it. It comes from on-site mitigation related to trees can't be met, that they can then pay a fee and that fee goes into this urban forest replenishment fund to plant trees and do things related to tree health. It's about -- >> Pool: An education use of that fund was also a possibility, so they have sufficient funds in here for the dollar amount, but we need to get that confirmed and put in here. >> Flannigan: I just hadn't heard of it before. Thanks. >> Houston: Mayor? >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Houston? >> Houston: One more question. And so the city arborist would be doing this. This is just for supplies? To do the community outreach? We're not hiring any additional ftes? >> Pool: , You know, I said fte but I notice it isn't in there so my guess is as it has gotten paired pared down and worked through staff, it does not have an fte in there. [1:54:08 PM] So it sounds to me like now it is the outreach and education pilot program, with the city arborist or his staff, so we wouldn't be adding any staff. >> Houston: Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Back up to the dais. >> Pool: Let me just -- my staff is saying there is now one fte on it so we need to make sure that's reflected on this sheet here and we will get the dollar figure, and my thanks to my staff. >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Houston? >> Houston: And so will this fund be able to pay for that additional staff? >> Pool: Yes. Yes, that's where it's coming from. >> Mayor Adler: So the to be determined -- what is the final number, the general fund cost of that? Is there any? >> Pool: So I don't have a number in here for that, so I'll -- I think my staff is listening in and see if they're texting me -- >> Mayor Adler: Work with Ed so that Ed can fill that in. >> Houston: Well, it looks like the money was going to be coming from the replenishment fund, so I'm wondering what the general -- >> Pool: That's right. It shouldn't be under the -- the tree -- policemen shment fund -- >> We need to follow up with your staff. My staff has some confusion about whether or not the fte would be funded out of the urban forest replenishment fund or that would be a general fund and the other -- we'll get the details worked out and get the numbers in there. >> Pool: Glad I brought it up. Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Counsel? Council members alter. >> Alter: I haven't found -- I have two items, I don't know if they're separate or one, for funding treefolks, and I'm just wondering if they might also come from the replenishment fund, if we can explore if they would be eligible. One of them is -- I'm trying to find the new numbers on it. [1:56:13 PM] One of them is for 50,000 for a high school level youth job corps environmental education intensive. That would bridge the tree watering, mulching and stake removal gap that's in the highest summer months, and they would give training to high schoolers while we also got our trees watered. And then the second part of that is an urban forest remove and replace program, which would be a tree removal service for low income homeowners that would provide removal of trees by certified arborists at low rates negotiated by tree folks pared with healthy planting of young trees on care, and I will find those numbers in just a second. But both of these are trying to do multiple things. So the first one is finding -- providing job training and education for youth while also taking care of our trees that are in desperate need. The second one is helping low income homeowners. There's a demand to have trees removed, but because it costs so much to have trees removed, they're not, and then what's happening is we have storms like we had this weekend and those trees fall on their house and they become set up in more dire straits. Treefolks is getting lots of calls about this, and they can get reduced cost arborists to help with this but they need some funding to get the program started. And I am -- >> I think at least one of them is on page 12, h-11. >> Alter: I think it's probably -- >> Perhaps that's both of them as one item. >> 70 now? >> Yeah, 70,000. >> Alter: Yeah, so they're both in one item, it's h-11. >> Pool: I'd like to be added as a co-sponsor on that. >> Alter: But if we could -- I don't know what the best process would be for figuring out if the tree replenishment fund -- >> We'll figure it out. >> Alter: -- Is an option. Thank you. Mr. Flanniga N? [1:58:13 PM] >> Flannigan: Ed, do you know if the bill that the legislature passed about tree mitigation fees has been accounted for in the sustainability of the fund? >> I don't think any change has been made to it, so I'll have to get with the dsd staff who administer that fund to see if the fee is changing as a result of that legislation. >> Flannigan: It allows people to plant trees instead of paying fees, and I'm just curious if that analysis has been done. It was passed like three weeks ago. >> All right. >> Flannigan: Thanks. >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Pool? >> Pool: Since we're on page 24, up at the top, h-9 is the city's connecting children to nature program. I think I also have something like that. So wherever we have the children cccn program we should combine them. That may be one that's on there twice. >> (Indiscernible). >> Pool: This one is h-9. >> Mayor Adler: On what page? >> Pool: 24. And it has council member alter on it, but I know that's a program that I've been working closely with the communities connecting children to nature implementation. This is where we had the national league of cities planning grant, and we got an implementation grant, and now they're looking for Austin's leadership in order to establish a program position. And so that one may actually be on here >> What number is it? >> That's what I'm looking for. >> The number was H what? >> H-9 for Allison. >> I think we have to check that. Yours on h-22 was for the eastern crescent. They may be overlapping. I'm not sure. >> Mine was specifically targeting three elementary school in the eastern crescent, and it's on page 26. [2:00:16 PM] Item h-22. I think between my staff and council member alter's, we'll see if they overlap. >> Sounds good. Thank you. >> Council member pool: Yes. I guess she and I should put each other's names on the items. H-9 and h- 22. >> Are we through for the afternoon? >> Sorry. I'm just nodding, trying to organize my materials. >> Just checking. >> I think both council member kitchen and I have needs regarding individuals experiencing homelessness. I know we have representatives here from the organization. I want to highlight a couple of those and invite council member kitchen to jump in while I finish organizing my materials. Just by way of background, I think all of us have now received from the coalition, this Austin's action plan to end homelessness. I think I actually have a copy of -- well, maybe they don't want me handing this you to. It was a plan that was in response to a call the mayor made last spring that I think I will let you describe so I don't mischaracterize it. >> We did this together. We asked the service providers to get together and see if they could come back with common recommendations for things that we could do that would actually gettous the place where we could -- get us to where we could go to effectness zero for the homeless community. [2:02:27 PM] The question was how to get there and how might we do it? >> Thank you for that overview. So they did. The stakeholders came together and collaborated together. What they have provided to us is really a plan that would -- that shows how we can make strategic investments as a community in various areas that lead to what we want. An end to homelessness. Engage community involvement, expand engagement, increase support to services and increase effectiveness. So that's kind of the umbrella piece of many of the concept items that are here. Maybe we can talk about those strategic investments and I think the total costs, well, I'm not really sure because I think council member kitchen and I have a little bit of overlap. I submitted somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 million worth of needs. That's a drop in the bucket to what the stakeholders identified as a needed investment for progress in this area. But # $5 million would be a good start for this year. I know it also happens to be the number that we have leftover, but I'm hoping we'll come up with other savings so we can do as much of that 5 million as possible. I will hand out the document I was talking about, which is the renter's piece from the previous thing I was mentioning. It's also attached, I understand, to the copy. This is a print copy, in case anyone wants it. >> Mayor pro tem, do you want to go through yours? I think there might be a bit of overlap, and the mayor pro tem and I will sort that out. I have added two items on the menu that relate to homelessness. Both of these came out of the work that we've done in one of my neighborhoods at man check and benwide and working with Austin police department and ems and txdot and sunside church. [2:04:49 PM] There's a group of individuals in that neighborhood that have been working on public safety and social service issues related to the population that's experiencing homelessness in that particular area. The two items I brought forward, the first one is e-16 on page four. This is the one that most likely overlaps at least in part with what mayor pro tem has put forward, in terms of the dollar amounts. It's $778,000. It's funding to staff four navigation centers around the community to connect people experiencing homelessness with available resources and services. So basically, what that means is it's providing staffing. You know, the staffing that's appropriate to help connect individuals who are homeless with exist services. So it's a piece of the puzzle. It also focuses on -- what we put out there was four navigation centers. It may be after today, after discussion, we start with one or two, but the point being is that we need to spread these navigation centers throughout the city in order to have places throughout the city that folks who are experiencing homelessness can drop into and be connected to services. Now, it is not -- the cost is for staffing, not the place. The thinking is and in working with echo is that these navigation centers would be located at existing public facilities, most likely central health or facilities like that, medical facilities or other facilities that are in the community already and spread out in different parts of the community and that provide services. So this funding is to provide some dedicated services specifically -- or dedicated staffing specifically to help those folks make the connections. [2:06:57 PM] Like I said, this is a piece of the puzzle. The mayor pro tem mentioned there's a whole combination of types of services that we need to address. This is one of those types. From my perspective, it grew out of a concern that we experienced in the mancek (phonetic) Neighborhood, a church offered services. They want to continue offering those services, but the demand has been well beyond what they're equipped to provide. So what it brought home is that there are individuals that are experiencing homelessness throughout our community that are not downtown, that won't go downtown, and will never be downtown. So what they are is they're in our neighborhoods. They're in our parks. They're living where they can. Having some navigation services spread out through the city is the idea to help address this. This is also built off of -- and Howard with echo can speak to this more eloquently. The concept is built off what other communities and other cities have tried. The thinking is this will be something that's helpful for our community for that purpose. So that's what that one is about. Do you want to say anything about that? >> That was a great explanation. The only thing I would add is that I believe I do have a funding thing that is a duplicate. I will try to figure out which one that is in just a second. >> Okay. >> Too, what you said that's really important is those navigation centers are going to connect with people who are not necessary I will downtown, but it will also reach people where they are so they don't have a need to go downtown just to get services. [2:08:59 PM] >> That's a good point. >> I think that's much in keeping with the short-term pilot initiative that's going on downtown, to try to really disrupt, in a good way, that situation, to increase public health and public safety in the area around the arch but also to make sure that we're doing everything we can to serve people more effectively and to meet their needs as well as possible, and the navigation centers will help us, I think, by serving people outside of the downtown area as well as downtown. >> Right. So then the second item that I have is s-4 on page ten. This is the one I may have mentioned earlier that I think there's a potential to work with Austin energies budget on. This one is funding for polarized directed lighting underneath a portion of the U.S. 290-71 overpass at mancek road, as well as permanent trash receptacles in that same area. This is a safety issue, a lighting safety issue. We're estimating the cost there is a one-time cost around 400,000 or so. So that's an area that we're experiencing safety issues, and it is one of the list of solutions that, again, what we did is our office met with the neighborhood and all those other agencies, eco, ems, APD, agencies I mentioned before, and came up with a list of solutions that would be helpful to that area. This is another one of those listed solutions. So I would be exploring with -- and this one, I don't believe, is an overlap, but I will be exploring with Austin energy the ability to potentially take those funds or allocate funds out of Austin energy's budget since they are involved with safety lighting to see if we can handle that one that way. [2:11:08 PM] I don't have the answer yet. That's why I put it on the concept menu. The item number is s-4 on page ten. So it's a safety item. So those are the two I put on. I support the other ones that mayor pro tem put on. If you want to -- I will turn it back over to the mayor pro tem if she wants to speak to any of those. >> I would be glad to talk about them generally, and then I would also, if she's willing, for me to do so and my colleagues want, I can put on the spot Howard of echo to give details, if anybody wants them. They're not entirely in all economic opportunity and affordability, but many of them are. Begin on page two, e-5 is a budget item. I've made some changes that are not reflected here. To apologies. It should be general fund, $1.2 million. But I want to explain that. This is for permanent support of housing. It includes rental subsidies, support of services, program costs, and these are all related to the pay for success initiative. A few months ago -- no. Maybe it was early in 2017 our council passed unanimously a pass for success directing our manager toward an initiative. We have to identify funding. I'm not going to explain this well, but maybe our social service staff can. I will give you kind of the layperson's understanding of this. We need to put forward the money, as a city, and kind of keep it in reserve. Then private investors will invest with a non-profit that's providing the direct intervention, ie, the support services and some of the other things described here. And then if those demonstrate success and they have a extreme high probability of doing so. [2:13:15 PM] It is much more cost effective to have permanent supportive housing than to deal with some of the things that can come otherwise. And so if and when we demonstrate success with those programs, then the city repays those investigation tors, but we need -- investors, but we need to have that money on hand for our staff to be able to take the next step. So, again, we passed unanimously a resolution directing the city manager to go forward and create this program, but now we need to do the next step of that, which is to identify the funding that would be used to back that pay for success initiative. It's not clear to me whether there are other ways to do it other than just allocating the money out of the general fund, whether we can use our existing reserves or existing reserves as a stop gap for that or whether it has to be a separate piece of funding that gets set aside. One way or another, you know, I would say there are many priorities on here related to programs and enhanced services for people experiencing homelessness. This is the most important because it's going to return a lot of investment here to our community. We really can't move forward with it or take advantage of the financial strategy without making this commitment. >> I would add that it's almost like a matching because the hospitals, I believe, are being asked to put up funds. Again, Howard can speak to that better, but it's almost like this is our piece of the match with the rest of the community. Again, we hold it in reserve, if that's the right term, and we don't pay it out unless there are results. So it's that kind of pay for success kind of program where we're putting this pot of money right here, and we're saying, if a program produces the kind of success we're looking for, we'll bring your money forward and the community will bring money forward. [2:15:21 PM] It's a way for the community to support programs that have shown to be effective. >> I think congressman -- had his light on first. >> Just a quick question about the navigation centers. >> Okay. >> So maybe you can just point me where to go to find the answer to my question. >> Okay. >> My concern is we have a chick-and-egg problem of connecting the people to the service, but the services aren't distributed either, so we would end up with navigation centers that would tell people to go downtown where most of the services -- am I misinformed on this? >> No. First off, two things. It is part of a package. As the mayor pro tem mentioned and as echo brought forward, if we do one offs on these packages, we're not going to get all we need from the services. Bear that in mind. It's not accurate to think in terms of all the services being downtown because there are some dispersed -- like, central health is a good example. So one of the things that's important -- I know council member is right about that, but there are different services in other parts of town. I think to the point, mayor pro tem pointed out it's important to make these navigation centers available to where people are to the extent we can so they don't have to go downtown. Even if a service is not available where they are, at least they can get connected. That's the thing behind the navigation centers. So I don't know. >> I will keep looking at it. I may need some better questions. >> We keep looking at her. Maybe we should bring her up. >> That's not our typical practice, but with everyone's acquiesce sense -- acquiescence, is it okay? [2:17:27 PM] (Off mic) >> I was going to recognize you in just a sec. Does anybody have one of these? Does anybody want one of these in our discussion? (Off mic) >> It was emailed to us all. >> I would be happy to bring it down, if anybody wants it, for the purposes of this discussion. Council member alter? >> If you guys can't clarify this, we may have to call Ed up. For the pay for success initiative, I just wanted to clarify. This is a one-time expense for that program? Or is it something annually that in order to do it, we have to put -- five years, I'm hearing? Okay. So for five years we would need to put in this million-two or whatever? Then we only actually pay it if the program succeeds? So if the program fails, then we're not out the money? >> That's right. That's my understanding. >> And there are success metrics kind of built in? >> Yes. >> Ed, could you explain how that would work from a financial perspective? You do, presumably, use that money to -- I mean, I don't know if you get interest. What would happen to that money if we put it aside in that way and we're not paying it out for five years? Would it grow? So it's not that much each year or does the cost go up each year that we have to factor it in? How does that play out over time? >> I don't think we have answers to that right now. As we move forward with the budget process, we'll have to come up with those answers. We don't have a program like this now, so we haven't thought through all the parameters of how we would set it up. >> Okay. Thank you. >> I would just add that our public health staff have been working on this as well. If they're not already working with our financial staff, presumably that will happen soon. [2:19:31 PM] >> Figuring out thet canning of it -- accounting of it and how to set it up, we'll figure it out. I don't have an answer right now. >> I'm just trying to figure out if we put this money away, if it counts toward other things. I don't know. I just want to understand the details more. I have some other items but they're not on homelessness, so I will wait. >> Okay. Council member Houston? >> There's -- in the downtown city program? Is that how much is in there? >> So, if I may, council member Houston, this is a little bit outdated. Yes, there's that much in the program, but we're hoping that we're going to be able to establish this through a reserve by just identifying a portion of the reserve. So my proposal is not to use our downtown density bonus funds in that way. >> So that's wrong? >> We didn't catch the reprinting. It would be coming out of the general funds or a reserved fund if they're able to do that, rather than coming out of the general fund. >> For the whole million dollars or just the 330? >> No. For the 1.2. >> Thank you. >> It would be great to have greater clarity of what that means at the end of five years, way we're obligating the city to. >> I'm not sure how much detail everyone wants to spend on this. And I see we're almost at 2:30. I will highlight the other ones, the other items, and there's more detail in the action plan that we received explicating these. [2:21:36 PM] The redesign e-7, still on page two. E-7 would continue the work that's being done as part of the pilot to increase the kinds of work that's going down -- going on in the areas outside the arch and really redesign it with an eye toward increasing effectiveness of services but also disrupting what is now a drug marketplace in essence right outside the arch, which is causing a lot of barriers for individuals who are seeking services and also spilling over and creating -- you know, creating real challenges for people who live and work in that area. E-8 is to create 100 new temporary shelter beds. This follows up on the resolution we passed to have our staff begin the process of identifying some possibilities. Since I have this opportunity, I will just express to those listening that that was a very preliminary memo. It's my understanding that was a very preliminary memo from our staff identifying several rec centers that would be considered. There would certainly be other considerations that would go into it. As I've told people who have emailed me, you know, we are not at a place where we're about to make a decision on those as part of this budget process. This is just simply, I hope, setting aside some funds so we're in a position to do that because there would be staffing costs associated. E-9 would enhance what proved to be so very successful during the veteran's homelessness initiative to provide a mitigation fund for landlords willing to provide units. I wish the mayor were here to speak to it because this was, of course, an initiative out of the mayor's office, but the risk mitigation pool provided to be part of the great success of getting landlords to participate in the program. [2:23:40 PM] That's really what we need moving forward, if we're going to try to house some individuals who would be eligible for permanent support of housing. And then e-11 and e-12 are -- I think I would look to our Austin public health to help talk about e-12, but this is described in further detail on page 16 in here. The rapid rehousing, you know, one of the great things about a plan is trying to address the different needs that individuals experiencing homelessness have. From the range of individuals who are chronically homeless and some who have been homeless for many years and those who just became homeless and can be rapidly rehoused. Getting those needs accomplished is very different. There are different needs associated. We need to invest in both. We need to be working on all ends of that spectrum of housing. And I think there was one more later. >> It's h-4. >> Thank you. What page is that? >> Page 23. >> Yes. And the description here pretty much captures it. This would provide some additional beds. There are some currently, but this would provide for some additional beds that individuals who are being released from our local hospitals who do not have homes to go to would not end up out on the streets. And so this is a very important addition to our budget. So I think in conclusion, I will leave it there but just acknowledging that I know this is an issue that all of us identified in part of our strategic planning -- rose to the top and that we can invest heavily in this area as we're able to. [2:25:53 PM] The 5 million is just a drop in the bucket to what our social service providers have identified as the true need, what it would really take as an annual investment year after year after year to end homelessness in this community. But that 5 million would really be a good signal to the community at large, you know, this is going to have to be a community effort. We are going to need private individuals to step up as well and increase their financial investments. >> Mayor pro tem, I would like to add a comment to that h-4, on the respite services, this is a program that has a really amazing Ari. All of these have a good return on investment. What happens, of course -- and I'm not telling you all anything you don't know, but if someone is discharged from the hospital into the streets, they're going to be back in the hospital. So the costs of cycling in and out of the hospital for these folks is incredible to the community. This respite program has been around for about six, seven, eight years, but it's proven its worth, but it's growing way too slow. The needs are there. It's discharge them out of the hospital into a place where they can recover, and then what they're doing with that program is trying to connect them from there to transitional housing and more permanent housing. So it's also a place for an intervention to help people get off the streets but also to keep them from circling in and out of the emergency rooms and hospitals, which is cost to the community is such a waste. Not just to that person's life, but it's a total waste of dollars. It's a no-brainer. Anyway, I just wanted to speak to that one. I have personal investment with this one because I helped start this program eight years ago, or whenever that was. [2:27:54 PM] >> Thank you, council member kitchen. >> I think, if I'm not mistaken, we've asked for a detailed document that says how much money we're spending in a variety of programs on people who are homeless, and I don't think that we've gotten that information. Maybe I thought we asked for that. From a variety of resources. I say that because these initiatives come out of many different places. I just found out the other day that we used drainage charges to fund programs for people who are homeless. Some of those programs, as I got more information, really do fill in some of the gaps for people who are dying, there are programs there. I don't think we know how much that is from the drainage fee for this year. The last document I had was 2015. So, you know, there are things that are going on that are not captured because we don't have it all together. So if you could just tell me the next time we meet how much the grant's allocation that's going to -- I'm going to forget the acronym. It's a coalition of churches, I think. Rc -- religious coalition to assist the homeless. >> I think that was part of our -- we did a budget question, no. 112 that looked at homeless expenditures throughout the city, and I know that was one of the items on that list. >> What was the number on that again? >> 112. I think it was about $13 million citywide, if my memory is right. >> Okay. >> Council member Houston, did thoughts on that? >> No. I needed to know where it was. I didn't know if everybody knew there was a pot of money that went to the same people we're funding through our social service contracts, but there are some there that are not being funded. [2:29:57 PM] They're filling the gaps for people who are sick or dying on the street get to live in a home until they die. So I thought that was an exceptional way to use some of those funds. >> That's great. Thank you. Okay. So that answers one of the questions I captured that you all had. The other one was from council member alter seeking clarity on what happens at the end of five years with the pay for success model. Are there any other questions immediately that you have for me on any of these items? If you do, if you post them on the message board, I know it's cumulatively a big ask. I think it's important. If I can help by getting information, I'm happy to do that. I'm sure our echo would be glad to provide for information as well. Okay. What next? Other things people want to talk about? >> Mayor pro tem, I would like to thank everybody who's been working on those and express it's a high priority for me to get these done on this budget as well. >> Thank you. >> Council member pool? >> On a different category, page 26 -- it's under health. H-21. >> Sorry. Hang on. Which page? >> 26. >> Okay. >> Item 21. It's under health. I just wanted to draw y'all's attention to the million-dollar price tag that's on there. That's the maximum amount. That amount would fund Ada improvements at parks in ten of the high-needs areas. The round figure that we've been given is 100,000 per park. So I asked my staff to post the total of the ten projects, knowing that we can shave that down to some lower number. Say we only want to do five of the Ada compliance pieces. [2:32:03 PM] That would be 500,000. So if you want to make some notes in this additional information place, just know that each project is cost out at 100,000 each. They have ten of them. They can give us a list of where they're located, but they're the high need and high priority. So they are probably in parks that have not had renovations recently or are really used a lot. >> Council member, do you know how this corresponds to our list of parks that also function to attract visitors? I notice your language talks about in order to make them more successable to residents living with disabilities, but when we're talking about -- botanical gardens, that is also about making our parks accessible to visitors to our cities. I would flag that to bring up a controversial subject, just as the mayor comes back in. I would flag those as potential expenditures. I will say generally potential expenditures for hotel/motel tax. >> That's a brilliant suggestion. I'm sure we can get that list quickly because it had been put together regarding what needed attention. As a really good example of that, the work that was done around the rose garden and zilker gardens. They repaved the trail and added Ada come -- compliant. So people with accessibility issues can get through the gardens. They did a beautiful job. Thank you for that suggestion. The key was $100,000 per park. [2:34:05 PM] Anybody else who wants to be on that, I'm happy to add you. >> Which page are we on? >> Page 26. And it's item 21. Ada improvements at parks. >> Mayor, can I just say something about that last point. I guess I'm wondering, the staff has a lot to keep up with these days, updating the budget requests. I'm not sure if we're adding too much more work by adding ourselves to different things. I'm wondering whether at least really a utility in that that offsets the amount of staff work they have managing that system. It's less important to me that we know who is already in favor of these things and we let them do their budgeting work. But that's just me. >> You know, I kind of like that too because then not having it means something as well. It doesn't have any significance (off mic) -- And that way on or off doesn't have any great significance. >> Council member alter? >> It helps us understand how many people are in favor of something. Since we can't talk to each other, I think it's useful. I wanted to -- first of all, I would like to learn more about the details of that item that you're drilling down on, council member pool, when you have them. I wanted to draw your attention to page 9 for an item that council member kitchen and I co-sponsored on the senior homestead. The item was to increase the senior homestead exemption to hold steady the senior tax bill. The exemption would need to be increased by $25,000. That's the amount that they came back with for the budget office, and there's two parts because you have a debt portion and ongoing operating costs. [2:36:13 PM] Obviously that is high in lite of the other things we're trying to fund. I wanted to get a sense of people's appetites for making some movement on the senior homestead before I start to ask the staff to look at different amounts. I don't want to invest their time in looking at amounts if people are not interested in pursuing options there. >> I have a question, too, and I'm not remembering the number we came back with last year. We raised half the way there. We were trying to get it to hold steady from the previous year, so we put forward the whole amount, but we ended up only doing part of it. The 25,000 seem like a lot. Maybe I'm not remembering correctly what we were looking at last year. Is this to take them from -- is this to take them from last year? It's just the increment of growth from last year to this year? Is that what the 25,000 represents? >> Yes. Increment and growth. Also, last year, you're right, it didn't fully implement the increase. It was about half of it, I think. And you also increased the homestead exemption last year, so that helped. >> That was why it was less last time. I would just thank you for bringing that forward, council member alter. To me, this is a really important one. I understand we have difficulties finding funds, and we have a lot of things that are competing. So I will be happy to work with council member alter and others to see what we can do to increase this exemption as much as possible. This is an area where our seniors continue to get further and further behind to the extent that we don't keep them up with the cost of increases, and they're on fixed incomes. [2:38:26 PM] So it is a blunt instrument in the sense that it focuses on all seniors, but it's the only one we have. It's also a dollar amount. So it has more impact than the percentages do for our folks that are the lower income folks. It can help make the difference in whether someone can stay at home or not. Which is a huge benefit, not only to them but to the whole community. So I guess to answer your question, I'm 100% behind this and will continue to work to see what we can do to locate the dollars. >> I want to continue to work on it. It would be helpful -- (off mic) >> Graduations. >> I wanted to ask council member Garza something. Did you have something about Ada compliant -- pools? What? >> Parks. They were duplicates. >> Before we go to other topics, does anyone want to respond to council member alter about the senior exemption, planning it? >> I'm interested in knowing more about that. I'm interested in seeing it at other levels. I don't know in the end if it will be doable, but it's worth exploring it. >> Great. As council member kitchen said, this is a blunt instrument, but it is one of the instruments that we do have to help our seniors be able to stay in their homes while we grow at the pace that we're growing. >> So can you give us graduations for that? >> It's largely linear, not exactly. We'll get you the exact, but just for rule of thumb, it's pretty much a linear function. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And then I had one other item that I wanted to bring up today. [2:40:26 PM] I will bring up park stuff next week, but for page nine -- I'm sorry. Page 28. >> Page what? >> Page 28. Item g-11. >> Okay. So I mentioned this a couple of times in other work sessions. We have some uncertainty at the federal and state level, particularly with respect to our public health grants. Other grants we have across the city and our neighborhood centers are particularly vulnerable. They've been earmarked in trump's budget to have half of their grant, at least, cut on the order of 1.2 million. So the idea here was to have a reserve fund where we didn't spend a portion of the money that we found so that we would be able to address those needs should they arise. The neighborhood centers are one of the chief mechanisms we have as a city to deliver our social service programs to people, and it would really jeopardize our ability to do that if that funding is not there. So this is kind of a part-way attempt to do something a little smaller than what council member Houston proposed, but also a flag for you. That particular grant is in jeopardy, and we've added a little bit above that because there will be other programs. So the idea is kind of a resilience reserve fund. As we've seen over the weekend, there are a lot of things we, as cities, cannot plan for, and there's value in having some buffer. In this case, we do have some knowledge that we have funding that may be in jeopardy that is really critical for our community. [2:42:39 PM] >> Okay. Ms. Pool and mayor pro tem. >> A new item, page 26, h-23. You will remember the last two budgets we had expanded our healthy corner stores. We created a pilot program and expanded them last year, and we're working really hard to get healthy food choices to parts of the city that are either food deserts or where there's a proliferation of corner stores. We want to get the fresh foods to the front of the stores. This item, pilot program for healthy food in schools, is another pilot grant program that would provide the same access to healthy food in city of Austin schools but that are not in the Austin independent school district itself. This is a way to push outward to the community and acknowledge, as we do, that we have other school districts that also need our support, and this would be a way to have some positive reinforcements. >> Mayor pro tem? >> I have a lot of probably pretty quick questions. There were a couple of things I wanted to highlight my support for. E-13, the architectal removal barrier service that council member kitchen put on. That was something I went to put on and she already had it. Again, I see this as another slam dunk. I think that is a real important anti-displacement strategy to invest in. That money will be very well spent. Council member Garza, on page eight of 36, e-44, the devalley youth workforce program. [2:44:44 PM] Can you tell us about that? Do you think there's an opportunity to fund it in the same way that council member alter had funded the other workforce items. You know, it's not clear what we're doing. Are we increasing the transfers from the other departments to help pay for it? Or was that -- did we determine that was just staff's breaking down of how economic developments, allocations work out? Anyway, we can sort that out later. If that was a new funding strategy, that would be helpful for this one. Anyway, I don't want to put you on the spot. If you want to provide us with information after, I was just interested in learning more information about that. >> I think it's important to get the answer to that question. I think it was saying economic funding gets distributed these ways. >> Anything that's an eligible cost, we would put it through economic development, and it gets funded through an allocation. >> Okay. So it seems this could be funded in a similar way. >> Yes. >> Thank you. >> And I didn't get into this discussion about the different overlap and the quality of life initiatives, but this is from, I believe, the hispanic quality of life. It was a specific organization that reached out. I try to steer away from awarding the way we have in the past, more an e-based. This was my effort to do that. I wasn't awarding it to a specific organization. It was saying there is a need. The valley is a part of the city that often feels ignored. There aren't really workforce youth programs out there. There are at-risk youth. I mean, at least at-risk youth throughout the city. That's what that is. >> So thanks. That's very helpful. So it's not a specific program. It's just a need. But it would be something the staff would handle. [2:46:46 PM] We would allocate the money, and we would allocate it probably through economic development so they could allocate those costs out to the enterprise funds? >> Yes. >> And to that end, we ask this morning and it would be helpful to see, what would the impact be? Would that be reduction in the money going out? What would be the program impacts of that? Or do they have money that's earmarked for these kinds of uses and we're finding what the impact would be to the city? [Off mic] >> The way it was presented, this would be a one-time fund and that they would have the ability to get funding elsewhere. This would just be a one-time funding. And so it should have said one-time fund, not general. >> Do you know how many that would serve? >> No. But I can get that information. Let's see here. My information was not included. I'm trying to see what I filled out. I don't have it, but I can get that information. >> Thanks. That was page 8. >> Page 8. E-44. >> Go ahead. >> And, let's see, on page 11, item 7, 8, and 9, the additional lighting in parks and underserved areas. >> What page? >> Page 11. Are you envisioning that whatever that amount comes to, that we would fund it in the same way we did the lighting -- I can't remember if it was last year or the year before. [2:48:48 PM] It came out of the -- budget. >> I didn't have a plan to do that. I think that was a conversation we had last time. I'm fine with us reengaging it. Again, I would like to know what the impact is to Austin energy. I think there's some questions that were raised in terms of outside city rate payers and how those issues weigh in. So I think those issues are out there. So I'm not sure that's the best way to do that. But I don't know that it's not the best way to do it. >> Yeah. They successfully argued, so they are, in my opinion, perhaps not covering the full costs of driving on roads and doing the things we know they do because so many of them work inside Austin. >> Mayor pro tem, we have another overlap. H-8. Recreational security lighting for parks on page 23. >> Sorry. Page 23. What? >> H-8. Down at the bottom. >> It's down at the bottom of page 23. H-8 for 500,000, which I think the same as the mayor's one you were just talking about. I don't care if it's under safety or parks. I think it might be better under safety, actually. >> H-8? >> You have the same thing -- >> If it's the same thing, I have no problem -- >> You just don't have the amount of money. >> I'm fine taking mine off. >> You said underserved areas -- yours just said parks and underserved areas, our just says lighting and parks. >> We can discuss, if it gets a [2:50:51 PM] -- approved on how -- >> These are big decisions to make at this hour. >> I mean, I'm fine for staff to put it in place. >> So we'll just combine those. >> May I ask one last question. I have other questions burr I see a bunch of lights on -- but I see a bunch of lights on. S-9. I guess this is really just -- I would love to see us increase funding for a downtown restroom. I would love to see our downtown restroom actually move forward. I hope that's just a message to staff. I know they're in the process of rolling out the temporary restroom pilot that will give us a sense on where to put the permanent one. I think it's a great idea to look at since we're not at the place to buy the permanent restroom, why not think ahead and maybe do two at the same time. There may even be a discount. Thank you for including that. >> Okay. Ten to 3:00? Anybody know? Yours is the only light that's on. >> Can I ask a couple of more quick questions. These are just so I can understand and be mulling over what sounds like good things to fund. Well, that's okay. I can send my questions. >> Okay. Anything else? >> I just want to say on the positive side with all the duplicates, I think we took several million out. >> What? [2:52:51 PM] >> I think on the positive side, with all the duplicates, we took several million out of the pot. We actually reduced the pot. [Off mic] >> I have sort of a general question for staff. I actually have a question about bowling for council member Houston. We have a resolution affording us the ability to use our office budges, any reminder office budgets and allocate them to city departments. In the past, we haven't done that by resolution, we've just done it by the end of the year. We're encountering challenges using that funding in the way I would most want to use because we have to do it as a commodity. We have to find something that's tangible that can be purchased and that can be purchased within this time period. Is it a feasible solution to identify that amount of money, and can you do what you're doing with the other departments? Sweep that in and -- through this budget process? >> I think we could identify the savings, and you would have to appropriate the monies as part of your fy18 process. >> We could do that, but it becomes less of an individual decision and more of a collective one? >> Right. I think essentially what we would be doing -- >> Unless everybody said, if you sweep your money in, you can allocate. >> Which is what I would support. >> Okay. >> I mean, I would support people rather than being forced to find a commodity and find a vehicle for them to put them in and balance so they could spend that in a different way. I think the general policy we have is you control your budget. [2:54:51 PM] If that would be something you would rather do, I would support letting the individual council member spend on a commodity or carry it over. >> I've had a vacant position in my office for a while, so I would really like to be able to spend that on these needs, if possible. >> We can't administratively run one budget over to the next, but if you want to bring a budget forward from your individual offices that will roll savings from one year to the next, we could -- we could make that happen. >> There's an ending balance in the mayor pro tem's budget, and we would just collectively approve and carry that over to next year. >> Yeah, something like that. >> Thank you. And then I had a question -- thank you. That's very helpful. Council member Houston, I hate to put you on the spot, but I had a question about the millennium center's bowling department -- >> It was built in 1997, I believe. I lost it with all the papers. One of their request is for updated -- and the theater, is for updated equipment. They don't make reels anymore. That's what we have now. They can't show any of the current movies. They need to be -- bowling equipment needs to be updated because it's that old, and people do like to go there and bowl. What else did you need to know? >> That's really helpful. I had heard a rumor about that, that the theater was no longer being used to show movies. >> We have 35 millimeter projection, and nobody uses that anymore. We haven't been able to use the theater for a while. [2:56:51 PM] >> I support that. >> That would seem to be a huge priority, to get that equipment updated. And you had a line item in the budget for that. Thank you for that additional information. >> It's sort of toward the back of the document. I can't remember exactly where it was. [Off mic] >> It is on page 17, is the bowling. Page 19 is sound equipment. >> And that would be one-time-only funding. Once we purchase the equipment, that's it. There would not be any ongoing funding for those. >> Council member Houston, what do they use instead of film? >> Digital films. >> They've seen those old movies lots of times. You show up. Oh, yeah, I remember that movie. Anything else? All right. It's 3:00. >> I haven't put them up on the concept menu yet, but I do want to flag for council members. When we were talking about the generation plan. I till haven't met with Austin energy, but we flagged concepts to make sure in this budget we budget for solar and other energy efficiency programs for furlough income folks and tenant who is pay equally into those programs, but often our programs are not reaching them much. We've been working on that, but I think there's opportunities to address that in the budget. [2:58:57 PM] The repeat offender in the code budget, I think, is a really high priority. As a rule, I sometimes have issue with funding -- with adding additional funding to departments for things that are extremely high priority programs. And that sounds like a scary thing to say, but the reason for that is if it's a very high priority program or the highest priority program, I would assume that would be prioritized within the department's existing resources, such that if we don't fund it, we aren't losing the highest-priority program. It should be the lower-priority things that are the additional funding, and something like the repeat offender program seems to be something that the code department should be doing within their existing budget, and what I would be interested in is if we add the additional fees, a fee revenue, what would be the most extraneous -- maybe not extraneous, but the less important things that we're funding. I'm not sure if that makes sense? >> It does. >> I've never explained that out loud before. I'm worried what the headline would say. Greg doesn't want to fund the most important things. I think they should be funded and we shouldn't be making the decision that we need to raise this fee otherwise the most critical part of this won't work if it should be run through the department as a priority. Anyway, I'm sure there's a better way to explain it, but we had two >> Mayor Adler: So that I understand, you're adding a program that is not there. >> Casar: It is there. So the repeat offender program is currently being run. What's posted up is for us to bring positions in to add positions for what in my view is probably one of the most critical programs in the department. It's not the existing staffing levels could handle that and are currently handling it, but if we add those code officers, then they could -- then they could continue to not do other work -- I already explained that I'm having trouble explaining this. [3:01:11 PM] Point is that there is -- I think that there can be an issue, not just with the code department. I would just say generally when we're doing the budget, where we should not be adding additional positions for work that should be done anyways and is core work to the department's mission that if we didn't approve the new positions would happen anyways within the department because it's so core to be done. We should be adding positions and taking votes on whatever the less core work is that wouldn't be done if we didn't authorize the positions. Does that make sense? I think you know what I mean. >> Mayor Adler: But to the degree that there's a function, the department is already doing, but for whatever you're thinking they could do it better if -- and that's all they were doing. So you're saying if we gave you more money could you do that priority function better? >> Casar: Or I think they should be doing that priority function better within their existing resources and the additional positions should help with whatever else you have to do. Does that make sense? That program -- >> Mayor Adler: Right. I think the expect fashion for the manager is to say we want this priority program done. If you need more resources to be able to get that done, ask us and we'll get you more resources, but otherwise you need to know that we're expecting this to get done at whatever level or expectation or metric you want to be able to set. Then the manager's function is to come back and say we're not going to do that. We're not going to do it unless you give us two or three people or one more person because that opens that up. Otherwise you're making kind of the operational choice and I don't know how that -- >> Casar: Exactly. I think that is a question that I would raise, which is if the program is currently being run. [3:03:18 PM] Who aren't dedicated to the current paragraph but effectively are, then I think there's a question about how much better run would it be with those additional staff that are being funded by this, but if it is a core -- if it is a core program that is already being run, how is that -- either we're not adding positions for that program, we're really adding positions for other work because people are being pulled from other work do this work that is core work. So -- >> Mayor Adler: It does. >> Casar: If there's 10 people that are essentially already doing this and we're adding theoretically -- I'm not talking about code now. We add 10 positions and stop pulling people who are already doing this work, then aren't we really adding 10 positions for the other work, not for the core work? >> Mayor Adler: Conceivably, but you've gone to the department and said to the department, because you don't do the staffing issues, you said to department, I expect you to get these five things done. And if the department isn't getting those five things done, they're going to, number one, because it's a core thing. But if it's pulling all the resources then theoretically they wouldn't be getting five done. >> Casar: There would be some other metric. In the code department example I do expect and think that it's important for us to improve the way we're running the repeat offender program, but if not adding those additional positions would therefore slow response times on low level nuisances because we would not have dedicated the new staffing to the repeat offender program, that doesn't impact the repeat offender program, it actually impacts something else, then I would be interested in saying, okay, well then that other work that's not as important can be slower. Does that make sense? >> Mayor Adler: Yes. >> Casar: Because I know whether we fund the repeat offender officers or not, but I know that's some of the most critical work because it's some of the most dangerous situations anyway. So not funding those position doesn't necessarily mean that that area of work will be deteriorated, it means potentially some other area of work will be deteriorated. [3:05:26 PM] In which case are we really funding repeat offender program officers or are we really funding something else with the additional funds? >> Mayor Adler: You would be funding something else. >> Casar: Right. Still want to come up with a better way to explain what -- >> Mayor Adler: What you're saying is if the department is doing what it's supposed to be doing, inherent in your question is they're not doing -- something is not getting done to meet whatever metric it is that either has been said or you would like to have said. That's either acceptable to you, in which case the department continues to run its way not meeting that metric or not meeting it well, or you give that department more resources and you say we actually want you to do this one, which you're doing because it's the highest priority, but we want you to do number five as well. >> Casar: But the question is what are we naming the additional positions? Are we naming the additional positions the high priority stuff? Does that make sense? If in the end that work is going to be done either way. It would be like somebody saying, which isn't said in this budget, for example, we need a police officer -- we need somebody to head up homicide cases. Let's say we already have somebody who heads up homicide cases. If we didn't approve an additional position we know there would still be somebody heading up come hmo side cases so that's not really what the position -- does that make sense? >> Mayor Adler: Right. I would say you hit that one of two ways. You either make that metric higher for the first position if you think it's being done, but not done at the level that you want it to be, or I think intellectually you are adding a position because number five is not being done. >> Casar: That's right. >> Mayor Adler: Because if you do number one you haven't really advanced the ball. You haven't changed the metric and you've added that position, but you haven't affected anything. >> Flannigan: Mayor? So I really like where you are headed with that, councilmember Casar, and I had a slightly different thought process. What I find we do that puts staff in a difficult position is we pass a lot of resolutions and we command a lot of programs to be started, but we never actually prioritize it for them. [3:07:34 PM] So staff is stuck in this terrible position where everything that council has passed is set with the same level of priority. So what I was hoping to see in this kind of first year of these more deeper budget reviews that were very interesting, we never did get to a place to say, well, the the department is doing 10 things and the 10th thing is the 10th priority. They're all the same priority. And it would be valuable as a kind of long-term -- I don't know how you get here. Hopefully the strategic outcomes and the indicators get us there, but to say if the community's values and our constituents have demanded a reevaluation of 10-year-old programs, then we need -- that is the level of direction we have to give staff, that's the difference between policy making and administration. >> Mayor Adler: And theoretically in November when we're meeting back with staff we're actually getting to the place where we have a strategic plan and we actually set those priorities. >> Tovo: I'm sorry that I'm not at all following the discussion, but on that subject -- I just wanted to say I have had several very legitimate and strong concerns about the amount that we would be adding to the code compliance fee for this area. And so -- and they are from people who very much support the repeat offender program, want to see it operating more effectively and want to see other areas within code operating effectively enough that we're not forced to raise the cost, which, you know, I think it's, what, 90 cents that we're adding, which for some people may not be burdensome. For a lot of people in our community it sure may be. So I think one of the questions that I would like to ask staff is the existing 3.35, what it pays for every month and where that -- what it amounts to collectively per month so that we can really see how it's being currently spent before we look to increasing it by 90 cents this budget cycle. [3:09:45 PM] So I apologize for asking this this late in the process, but I think it's really important to see. And I also have to say since we're talking about code compliance and talking about their fee, I was disappointed to see some of the news recently about the need for improvement between in communication between our code department and our comptroller collecting the fees for short-term rentals. You know, it seems to me if we had better communication there too, we might -- we might realize some savings. So I am -- for me this increase in fees is a question mark, though I'm going to think about what you said and see if that changes my mind in any way, but I would still like to highlight that additional 90 cents on people's bill is significant and we should really consider that before we approve it. >> Casar: And you just proved that I was way too discombobulate when had I explained my point because it's supporting your point, not asking you to change your mind. >> Tovo: Good. So then we're in agreement. [Laughter] >> Casar: So I think you just proved that I need to -- >> Tovo: It's late. My brain isn't working as well as this morning. >> Renteria: And I have a lot of questions too. >> Mayor Adler: Now I'm not following. [Laughter]. I'm just kidding. >> Renteria: Now I have a problem with that too, increasing the fees. I would like to see if we do that, you know, what -- are we going to generate more revenue? Are we actually going to go out there and do the work that we're saying that we can't do? And it is actually going to go out there and reduce the violation or increase the fee? What kind of return are we going to get from that money? And I would like to see it documented so that if we do implement this, which I can't support right now, that I want to see that it worked. I want to see that it actually improved what the goals were set up that this extra personnel is going to be able to accomplish. [3:11:52 PM] >> And I think we can provide that information. In regards to the conversation we just had, maybe getting back to Mcraven's point is we do have a councilmember Flannigan's point is we do have a concept menu process in place right now. So council could address some of those issues just by bringing forward concepts that would maybe reduce the fee. That would be one way of saying these are the lower priority things that we as council think could be removed to avoid that 90-cent increase. Right now staff is saying everything that council has approved and put in place in the past we feel is important and we need 90 cents to do this additional short-term rental additional repeat offender program activities, but I think the concept menu does have sections for reductions. So if there are programs and activities within code that council would like to see reduced to see that 90-cent fee lowered, the process is in place. >> Mayor Adler: Can you do that? Can you ask code what the impact would be of operationally what would be the impact of lowering that fee? What would be different if we lowered that fee? >> I believe if we asked code they would say the things that we currently are bringing forward in the budget to add, they would probably recommend not adding? >> Mayor Adler: Which ones? In other words, if the direction of the department was asked to do that department with only half the fee increase, what would happen? What is it that would be happening with the full amount that wouldn't be happening now is what metric changes in that. >> Tovo: If I could just add, it's also an enterprise fund. So it's unclear to me why we're adding -- why we have to charge individual customers to provide staffing for the short-term rental program. Why isn't the short-term -- why aren't the fees we're collecting from short-term rental owners paying for the additional staff? And I would say the same is true of our repeat offenders. As we have individuals in this community who are not taking care of their property to a standard where it's safe for their tenants, then I think the fees should be more substantial if we're not covering the costs of providing staffing for that program. [3:14:01 PM] So I would look to passing -- we're allowed to and that's what an enterprise fund supposed to be, so I'm not clear on why -- it may be that I'm just not understanding the presentation that we had much earlier. I'm not remembering it clearly, but it seemed to me at the time and it still does that the fees themselves should be covering the costs of those additional staff. >> There are legal issues relating to charging those fees for the repeat offender program, and we can work on providing you a memo to the extent that we haven't made that clear. >> Tovo: Okay. Thanks. And then too if you would just address the short-term rental issue. >> Yes. >> Tovo: Thanks. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. We'll talk about those both in -- is that in executive session or out here in its a legal issue? >> A memo. >> Mayor Adler: Okay, cool. All right. Are redone? 3:15, meeting stands adjourned. We pick up on Tuesday with a meeting. Wednesday is a code meeting and then Thursday is the tentative second budget meeting next week. Thanks. [8:30:01 PM] >> Mayor Adler: So we have a quorum. We're going to go ahead and start. We're going to first do the special called meeting. We had indications that there was some media that wanted to be here this morning so we moved into this space so as to better accommodate that. When we're done with that we could either stay here or we could go back to the boards and commissions room. That would require staff to set up again in that space. >> [Inaudible]. >> Mayor Adler: Manager says they plan on staying here unless there's a call otherwise. So let's start with the special called meeting. I call that into order. It is 9:09 A.M. Today is Tuesday, August 29th, 2017. This is the Austin city council emergency meeting. What is on the agenda this morning is a discussion related to the effects of hurricane Harvey. There is no action item for us to be taking. This is the opportunity for the council to be able to get its -- to hear from staff Tuesday what's going on, so the community can hear that, and then for council to have the opportunity to ask questions so that the community could get that as well. There are three things that I would say before we call staff up to talk to us. The first one is that our thoughts and prayers are directed to our east, to Houston, areas in between, as well as the coast to the east of Houston where this storm looks like it's going to resurface. This has been a devastating storm. It's a storm at this point that just won't die. And it's -- there are a lot of people that are suffering, people have died. [8:32:09 PM] We've pretty much dodged the bullet here to a large extent in the Austin area, but we're going to do everything that we can to help others. And to that end I want everyone to know that if Texans come to Austin needing shelter that we will find a place for them. And the second thing that I want to say is that when company comes, the family has chores to do, and we certainly do in this area in getting ready for the guests that we're going to have. Everybody has a role to play in this recovery effort. There are lots of different places that I know you can go to to find lists of opportunities to be able to help and to donate. Two, I'm just going to point out the red is taking point on a lot of our shelters here in Austin. At this point they have a lot of volunteers, they have some supplies. What they're looking for is contributions. And the easiest way to give to the red cross is to text 90999 and type in the word red cross, and that would be a ten-dollar donation. Takes just a second and it is greatly appreciated by them. I've spoken with the mayor, communicated with mayor turner in Houston over the course of the last several days. I asked him what we could do, and the first thing that he asked for was also assistance with contributions. And his request is that people go to ghcf.org. That's the greater Houston community foundation, initials for that, ghcf -- ghcf.org, to make a contribution. [8:34:13 PM] That is mayor turner's request. I would also say that among the many places you can go to find lists of ways to volunteer, to help with pets, to give blood, to donate diapers, all are needs that we have a list right now on mayoradler.com. Mayoradler.com has a list that we are updating as we get additional requests to direct people. The third thing I want to say is that we are not checking immigration status at shelters. And that goes for everyone. Our priority is your safety. And we want to make you feel at home regardless of where you have come from. That is the character of this community and is the kind of hospitality that we're going to show. So that said, manager, I'll turn it over to you. >> Thank you, mayor. I'm pleased to be here this morning. We have a report for the council on what we've been doing over the last weekend as the hurricane hit the coast. We do also have an update on what we're doing in terms of planning for the additional sheltering. We have an army, a small army of staff that's been working. We have a form mall process -- formal process. It's also a paramilitary organization that really is the top-down. And it is working. We have been through this before. We have a number of seasoned people on our team that were here during hurricane Katrina and Ike. Some have favorite nicknames that involve hurricane. I won't tell you which ones. But they are very seasoned and they've been through this before. We have written plans that we are following. And it is an all hands on deck plan. [8:36:15 PM] We will -- as we move into the sheltering mode we will have two or three shifts, but there will be staff assigned to provide those manpower needs, personnel resources to make sure things happen. We will have a form mall intake process that is expected so that those folks that come here can get FEMA assistance. It is not to check their immigration status by any means, but it is to be able to get them connected to financial resources and to get the kinds of identification card replacements that they need to be able to fix, drivers licenses and things like that. The staff have been working very hard over the weekend. We will continue to focus on this as a community emergency and a Texas emergency. If you as councilmembers hear of things we need to be doing, we would like to ask you to focus those requests back to our eoc command center so that they can distribute the requests for resources back out in that organization so that we can have one focal point that's getting all the requests and making sure that we have the follow-up to get that done. We also would like to ask you if you know of community people who would like to help with this event or agencies that we could lean on, please provide that information to us. You are our fingers out into the community. If you hear of needs that we're not addressing or if you hear of people who have resources that they would like to donate or contribute, even volunteers, please call our eoc, and we'll be providing those numbers to you because you're an integral part of this response and we need your context as well. But I just appreciate so much all that the staff has done and the council over the last weekend, the last few days. [8:38:16 PM] It's very important. And we're here to make sure that our visitors when they do arrive have as pleasant an experience as we can provide to them. With that, ray Arrellano, if we could call you up and you could introduce the staff that's going to make the presentations. >> Mayor Adler: While ray is coming up, councilmember kitchen, did you have something? >> Kitchen: Yes, two quick things. First off, I want to thank ray and our entire staff of first responders and our city for paying such close attention to the onion creek area. I think they went above and beyond, you know, in terms of helping the residents in both upper and lower onion creek really, really understand what was going on and feel more comfortable. Those were areas that have experienced catastrophic flooding in the past. And as we might all understand, they were very nervous. We were very fortunate as a community, but I appreciate you sending out folks into those communities to make sure that people understood what was going on and everyone was very responsive to me as I was texting at different times of the night trying to answer my constituents' questions. So thank you very much. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. Ray? >> Thank you, mayor and councilmembers. Ray Arrellano, assistant city manager. It was my pleasure to serve over the past five days or so, and to continue to serve in the capacity that will help not only our community that we did see little impact, thankfully in our community, but also to help the Texans at large, that community, help survive the impacts much hurricane Harvey. So this morning I have two individuals that will come up and provide you some bit of status in terms of what we've done to this point and what we're doing in terms of serving evacuees from the coast, but also then that will be Juan Ortiz, director of homeland security and management. [8:40:29 PM] And then the ctm department to then talk a little bit about the requests that we have from the state in terms of housing and official evacuees from the coast. And our plans for doing that. So with that let me ask Juan Ortiz to come to the podium. >> Mayor and councilmembers, thank you for the opportunity to give you this update as to what the current conditions are in response to hurricane Harvey. I will let you know that we actually started monitoring hurricane Harvey well when it was still in the caribbean before it even made landfall into the yucatan peninsula, and we had been working and communicating with all our regional partners to make sure that we were getting ready as best as we could in anticipation of this storm. And I want to specifically thank the Austin independent school district, Travis county, hays county, Williamson county, and all of the other community partners like the American red cross, Moad, a volunteer organization that is active in a disaster, and the Austin network and all the other partners that we have tapped into to help us to prepare and get ready and to make sure that we're ready to meet the needs of the Texans who evacuated and that were in the path of the storm. Currently at this point in time we have 563 guests that are in a total of four shelters. One is a medical shelter, which is at the university of Texas at Austin, and again a great partnership with the university of Texas at Austin that is able to provide us that facility. Also at burger center, the Delco center, and lbj high school. Currently we also have on standby shelter capacity at Reagan and Lanier and those locations will be open as the previous shelters get full and we'll open those facilities as we need them as we move forward. [8:42:45 PM] At the same time as the storm makes landfall it downgraded into a tropical storm and a depression and has caused tremendous flooding. Our guests that we have received support from come from all over the metroplex, down south from corpus Christi and some as far east into the Beaumont area and points in between. We're working with them to identify what's the best way to provide them information so they can make a decision when it's best to go home. We're also -- but we're also receiving some of the victims that were not able to evacuate and now we're moving them more into a post-landfall type of a response. Up to this point we're meeting all the needs that the request that Texas has made from us, but we've also identified working with FEMA we have seen that they have identified over 30,000 -- a need for over 30,000 shelter capacity across the state of Texas as a result of the flooding occurring in the Victoria, galveston and Houston area. The state of Texas has made a request from the -- to the city of Austin for additional shelter space. That request was for 7,000. We are working with the state of Texas to identify the locations where we can meet that need as best as we possibly can, and Paul hoppinggarden here will provide you a report of what our capabilities are in order to meet that need. Before I close my comments here I also want to remind folks that if you are here in the Austin area and you need information, please go to austintexas.gov/help. Austintexas.gov/help. Not only our guests, but our residents will be able to find the up to date information as to how best they can get information as to when they can return back home or any available resources that we are making available here in the Austin area as well as how our community can help. [8:44:58 PM] And if they have any desires to provide additional assistance and how they can best help us to meet the needs of these guests. Also, in addition to -- you can call Austin here and they can call 311 or directly by calling 512-974-2000. FEMA has established a telephone line where folks that have been impacted by the disaster can start calling to register for disaster assistance. You can do so by calling 1-800-621-fema. 1-800-6214357. Also you can go to disasterrecovery.com. Disuseterrecovery.com is -- dissterdiscovery.com. If you feel that you have been impacted by the disaster and are here, you can go to that website to register as well. At this point I want to pass the stage to Paul hoppinggardener. >> Good morning, mayor, council and city manager. My name is Paul hoppinggardener. I'm the deputy director of ctm. To give you some background as to why somebody from the computer operation is standing up here, I started out in law enforcement, spent about 13 years there. I have been involved in all of the major efforts at Katrina all the way through Ike. I was at the disaster assistance center in 2014 and 2015 for onion creek. Today I wanted to give you some information. So we've taken all of the information from Katrina and all of the other of a-action reports and have put it together in a special operations plan for mega shelter. I chaired the mega shelter committee for the last five years. The purpose of the -- this activity was the people who are involved in the services, non-governmental organizations, our partners such as Travis county, the American red cross and others in putting a plan together so that we could provide services. [8:47:14 PM] The picture I'd like to draw for you today when you think about a mega shelter is that it's a very large operation and it's been described as a city within a city. So what happens in the beginning is, for example, today when we leave here in a few minutes, we're going over to the first location at the convention center to take the already existing plans, begin to map out the area assigned and put together for where people will be housed, where we will run operations. But as that plan begins, we will ramp up and start say signing people to key and incident positions in the command structure. As we begin to do that we will be preparing within the next 24 to 48 hours, optimally 48 hours, to begin to move people out of existing shelter operations into the mega shelter operation. So the first thing that happens in the mega shelter is when you arrive is registration. And if you've ever been to one of those types of events it looks like it's chaos, but it's not. It's actually organized, it's just extremely busy. And a lot of people who are coming in, our experience in the past is frequently people come off of buses, they may have been transported for a very long period of time. They probably in many cases don't have what they need for basic needs. They may have had some water, some food. So what we will set up is an issue registration point and after that initial registration point what you will see is somebody is making sure that they've got food, water, basic needs. They'll be evaluated for medical. And the initial goal is to get them through that as quickly as possible so they can get settled in and make sure that they have food and opportunity to take care of basic needs. And then the process moves forward where we will have managed care and we will have people interviews, Austin, Travis county, they will have partners and they will interview people to determine what all their needs are. [8:49:28 PM] In that process of assessing the needs, if there are medical or prescription or mental health, contacting other relatives or neighbors, all of that information will be put together. As we begin to determine where people are from, then the services portion of that is designed to make sure that they get that information and know what to do. So in the beginning of an incident, what you will see is the first day or two you're taking care of basic needs. Then you're beginning the assessment. And then you will see agencies like FEMA and others that will be, you know, setting up operations on-site. So they're not there day one, and it depends on what their schedule is before they arrive. So we will continue to follow that plan. We've have 12-hour shifts and we'll have all of the people organized. And make sure that you as we're following the plan we send them to the services that they need. So as we set up the managed services and the ramp-up period, I think what's important to recognize is that we're starting off at the convention center. We're planning and looking at additional locations that could accommodate approximately a total of 4,000 people and facilities that the city and county have, and we've reached out to the community working through the American red cross and the Austin disaster relief network, to look and see if the community could handle approximately 1,000 people. So we're working through that. The red cross is used to helping people with churches and other organizations. We will be coordinating all of the services that are necessary in the facility. For example, the feeding people, if they don't have clothes we'll work out operations to get them to locations where they can receive clothing. What we do not need at the individual sites are, you know, people coming up and bringing things there. We have a very structured process and that structured process, donations will be accepted, you know, but not at the site. [8:51:32 PM] So they'll need to work through the other organizations that are available. We'll make sure 311 has a list of all of those and that they're posted on the website. And we coordinate through the logistics in order to make sure that all of that is handled versus coming into the center and making it confusing. So once we get the services set up, if you think about it, it kind of gets small and then it grows very large and then you start the demobilization process. The demobilization process is helping them find, you know, other locations and residences. FEMA in some cases will provide money for housing and other things. That's happened in each of the events that we've participated in. So what I want to make sure that we emphasize is that we do have a plan. We've followed that plan before. We have experienced people who have been involved in that and we'll continue to follow that plan. Do you have any questions? >> Mayor Adler: Ms. Kitchen? >> Kitchen: So I think you mentioned this, but I'm certain that you're working with our medical -- women, with community care, with central health. And they will be down at the convention center I assume, right? Medical facilities. >> That's correct. Actually, the whole team has been working for years on this plan and then it gets really a community-wide effort and we look not only the medical services, but all the other social services and security and all different aspects. >> Kitchen: I have two questions related to the medical care and I'm sure it's related to your plan, but I want to bring it up in case you haven't talked about it and go back and think about it. I was involved during category because I was part of our melt community at that time. So one of the things we did is set up a hotline for this city. [8:53:35 PM] We used our 311 -- we didn't use 311, we used united -- yeah, 311. 211, that's right. You're probably familiar with that too, councilmember Houston. It was a hotline so anybody in the community could call because we if found that we had a lot of people coming into the community that didn't go into the shelter or who may have found other places to stay. So anyway, I just bring that up in case that's something that you all have thought about. We found it to be very useful. >> Yes. We do have a hotline and we actually are utilizing 311 in that capacity. And so if someone were to call right now and say they're staying with a friend or a family member and -- or staying at a hotel and can no longer stay, cannot afford the hotel, they can call 311 and then they would be directed to the shelter where we are receiving people, which will be at Delco, the other shelters are at capacity. So we would direct them to the next available shelter that is open. So currently they would be directed to the Delco facility. And once that facility fills up, then we will open up the other facilities and then we would change that information, start directing them to the next open facility. >> Kitchen: Okay. We could talk about this further, but I would suggest that you might consider branding it as a -- not just 311, but brand it as a hotline for the hurricane. >> Making a note of that. >> Kitchen: The other thing is and we could talk about this offline is the health information exchange. Which there's a statewide system of health information exchange that may be helpful for people who need their medicines, for example, if they don't know what their medicines are and things like that. I'm sure the medical community is familiar with that. [8:55:36 PM] Thank you T. >> Pool: Mayor? Thanks for all that y'all are doing to get everything organized and to deliver services really expeditiously. It's really necessary and I'm glad the city is stepping up as best we can. I wanted to drill down just a little bit more specifically on prescriptions that people may or may not have with them. I understand in Houston that doing deliveries as best they can as well to make sure that the evacuees have the medicines that they need in case they weren't able to take them with them or they run out. Is that part of the health care coverage that we're working on as far as services and resources? >> Yes, it is. There's already a plan in place and it's going on currently at the existing facilities and it will continue at the others. >> Pool: That's great. Thank you so much. Maybe we can also amplify that information. >> We're working very closely. We have ems, Austin public health as well as the capital area trauma regional advisory committee, all those different agencies and dshs, the department of state health services, working together with assessment teams going to the shelters and making sure that they make the assessments and provide the services that we need at that time. >> Pool: That's great. Thank you. >> Houston: Again, thank you for all that you've done over these last several days and will continue to do as we live through this disaster. I want to also call out the fact that we have many city employees that are out there in the Delco center and at the other site locations working and volunteering. So I want to make sure that people understand it's not just the logistical part, but we are city employees are out hands on making sure that people are safe, that's the public safety folks, but also doing shelter management in some cases. So I just want people to know we're all in. Thank you. >> That's exactly correct. [8:57:36 PM] We're actually utilizing representatives from the different city departments and offices from all 40 departments and offices throughout the city of Austin. And even the library we're utilizing personnel to help in response to this event. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Ms. Alter? >> Alter: Thank you, gentlemen and thank you to Austin energy and Austin transportation and all of our first responders who were really there for our community this weekend and I know there will be for the rest of our Texas community moving forward. I had a couple of questions. One I've been hearing from a lot of folks that want to perhaps host people in their homes or in a rental that they have. What is the best way for them to connect up with opportunities to host people if they don't know somebody to host already? >> Someone wants to open their doors, right now we're going to be coordinating that through our local churches, but for information they can call 311 and we can direct them to our agencies that we're trying to coordinate in that effort. And if we get to that point where we need that type of assistance, we will open is up at a time. So we will most likely be coordinated through the American red cross or the Austin dallasster relief network, but calling 311 would be the first step. >> Alter: And for the convention center, can you say a little bit more about when that will be open as a shelter, and I was a little bit confused as to whether the other ones, once that was open, would be closing or they would all be open. I know there were some other aisd schools that were on standby. Can you help me understand how those were all interacting together as it plays out over time to accommodate the many people. >> Probably the best way I can describe it is the capital area hurricane shelter plan was looking at shelter capacity with all the different school districts for up to about a five-day window. [8:59:50 PM] And as we're opening these facilities, we're opening not only just in the Austin school district, but other neighboring school districts as well. As we transition over to the mega shelter plan, we will be working with the guests and seeing whether they're able to return back home and if they're not going to be able to return back home then as soon as -- when the facilitate is open then we will provide you transportation if you need to and begin to consolidate so we can start freeing up our facilities, our school facilities so they can return back to educating our youth. As far as the timeline, Paul, if you want to talk about that. >> So timeline as we will plan to be ready Thursday morning. And at that point we would want to consolidate people from the other shelters in order to provide better services at one location. >> Alter: Thank you. That was helpful clarification. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Mayor pro tem? And then Mr. Flannigan. >> Tovo: I just want to echo my colleagues thanks and also to just say I have every confidence having watched the city's response to Katrina and also to the flooding in onion creek. I have every confidence that our management and our staff will handle this as smoothly as possible. Thank you all for your expertise and your work. And of course, thanks to the staff who are volunteering and are working in the shelters. Can you remind us what the website is? I think there was a reference to some information that is on a city website providing direction to people who want to donate or volunteer. >> Correct. For the latest information on response to hurricane Harvey, you can go to austintexas.gov/help. Austintexas.gov/help. And we're updating that website with frequently asked questions and the latest information that we have and as information changes, we're asking people to go back to that website as often as they need to. [9:02:02 PM] It gives -- as we find out more information especially about the coast and what communities are opening we'll be updating that website. >> Tovo: Thank you very much. As I indicated to our assistant city manager, this is a all hands on deck situation, as you mentioned, you have staff from across the city assisting. And so as you can I hope you will provide us with information about how we or our staff can also assist in volunteering at the shelters. Thank you. >> Mayor Adler: Mr. Flannigan. >> Flannigan: To what extent do you coordinate with other jurisdictions that also might have facilities or resources that might want to participate? Or is it strictly city of Austin effort? >> No. This is actually a regional plan. And really it's a ten-county region plan. The plan is primarily supported by the counties of Williamson, Travis and hays county with support from the Austin independent school district and surrounding school districts as well. And the American red cross. As you also saw, the storm made landfall and it also threatened and caused some of our eastern counties to be impacted. So for this purpose really we were not only in support of folks from the coast, but we were also getting ready to support our neighbors to the east in any way that we could. They had to open shelters within their community to handle the evacuees that were in their counties. So they were not necessarily available to provide us any additional assistance, but we are coordinating with all of the communities in the central Texas area, and that's something that's been going on for years. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. [9:04:03 PM] >> Casar: Thank y'all for the presentation. I was born and raised in Houston and I think if my memory serves right, there's someone else on the dais that was so I've spent a lot of times in the last few days working not only on city stuff, but also texting friends and family and I know that's also the experience of a lot of austinites making sure that people are safe and okay. And unfortunate fact is that there are a lot of people who are not and we mourn those that have died and that have suffered and continue to suffer from this disaster. I just wanted, while we have the floor open now, to state what I think the dais believes what happened I know I believe that providing refuge for folks that are fleeing deadly conditions and who are desperate, I believe that providing that kind of refuge is at the core of what that refuge should be about and what the city should be about. And so I'm so deeply appreciative of every person that got in a boat in Houston, every staff member who took volunteer time. Some of you who have taken my calls late at night over the last few days, it's so important and I can't thank you enough. I want to highlight briefly, one thing that I think the manager and you all spoke to briefly, which is that amongst the many difficult tasks that our city and team has to work on, one of them, just in a long list of difficult tasks is being efficient with the top-down operation and not only feeling like the city and the red cross and the disaster relief network have to do it on their own because I've heard from so many folks in the community that are ready to help and ready to step up. And I think you've heard from councilmembers that we want to figure out a best way to direct those resources and folks to the way that helps the most and helps right. [9:06:03 PM] Just yesterday I was interacting with some folks who know hotel managers in my district and I think connected with the city staff to get beds for people that maybe the shelters won't work for. Maybe the folks that are most vulnerable who the shelter wouldn't work for. So I know other leanedders and councilmember alter is mentioning folks who own houses or people who own vacant retail sisters. I want to open up that you can lean on us and we also know many people in the community that we can lean on to bring that support and help if that's useful and necessary. So just know that we are here as a resource and that it's not all on you. Last night I was at a shelter, one of the shelters where I was called to because there were a large number of Spanish speakers that had arrived at the shelter and were very scared and there was only one Spanish speaking volunteer at that shelter. And I think that it's -- from the mayor's own can comments opening up this morning, I think it's very clear that a lot of people that are really scared right now, not just because of the hurricane, but also how it mounts on top of the environment for lots of community members right now. And so if there are thousands of people coming from Houston, which is the most diverse city in the country, it won't just be -- we won't just have a need for Spanish speaking volunteers, but people that speak a wide variety and breadths of thanks that the immigrant community is likely to be displaced because many of them have fewer networks and will need to feel safe coming to a shelter, which you mentioned can seem chaotic and there's a a lot of government personnel and there is that rift of trust with governments right now. And I bring up that example from last night not in the least as a criticism at all, but rather to magnify that this is a really big task, such a huge task. And y'all are doing a great job and I know putting everything you can into it, but I want you to know the door is open to tell us what you need and that I think a lot of the councilmembers and community members that we can call upon can help bring some of that to bear. [9:08:18 PM] So it's not -- I'm not saying this because I'm saying we need more private beds in hotels or retail centers, but it's about multilingual interpreters at the doors, but I bring it up as two places that I think we have networks and are able to help. And whatever else goes beyond that list of two things, which I'm sure is a long list, just count on us to do whatever it is that we can to do it. But I do very much have great trust in our staff and the way you're handling this and know you will. Then the very last point I would make is that I think the sense on the dais that I also want to personally communicate is that this is a top priority and if I hear over the next few weeks that this or that special project that you're working on is delayed and staff haven't had time to work on it because they're working on this, that is okay. That is fine. That is right. This is a priority for all of us and weless appreciate all of the hearts and energy and long nights people have been putting in, but just know that this is at the highest level of priority for us. >> Just like you, I'm getting calls from the different citizens or the private companies that have resources available for the public. If they have resources that they would like to -- or they would like to help, again, the first step would be to calls 311 or go to the austintexas.gov/help website where we can best way to find out how to route that information into the emergency operations center. And then as well if you all get calls or our departments as well get calls for request for assistance or anything like that or resources that somebody is trying to make available, it's important that we get them to the emergency operations center so that we can track them and make sure that we maximize their use and figure out the best way to use them. [9:10:25 PM] In fact, we'll be providing you information on how to do that. >> Casar: That's a helpful way of capturing what is coming in, what people are offering and what they think we need or might have. But also I'm interested in what needs you actually have so that we can go out and ask because I think if we ask and say this is what we need and this is what's important, then people will provide it. But right now I think we are receiving calls from people just offering whatever it is that they have, not knowing whether we need that specific thing in this specific way. Right now we're not. So just keep doing what it is you're doing, but know christmasing this that we're putting out that we are calling these specific folks for this specific need and I think people will step up. >> Yes. >> Mayor Adler: Councilmember Houston? >> Houston: I want to say again that I'm so appreciative that we have so many people here to organize us and that chain of command is so important, especially from my submarine officer who is our assistant city manager to you also, thank you all so much for all that you do because it's hard as a citizen to see the pain and suffering that's going on and sometimes we don't know what the right thing to do is. So you keep telling us this is how it goes, this is what we follow. This is the plan that works. So I saw it work in Katrina as well. It's like a small city with pharmacists and chaplains and mental health workers, everything all there in the convention center. So I'm very comfortable with that. I also want to let the -- my community know that I did tour another one of the sites in district one this morning and they're prepared and ready to go. And including for people who don't understand the magnitude of what we're going to be dealing with is that provisions for people who have different shower areas or for religious reasons on can't do that. [9:12:27 PM] So they've thought about everything that we're thinking about now and they've already done it. And the red cross is push at what they do. So again, thank you to -- is superb at everything that they do. So thank you, everybody. >> One other point of clarification. So as we start the first location we'll go to is the convention center, which has about 2500. If we reach the 2500 capacity we have other facilities and we will then begin to move people to those other locations. To the question about staffing. This will be multiagency and multicounty. We already have commitments from the other entities to help provide people within the structure. So it's not Justin, it's all over the region. >> And also I want to get the word out to our citizens here in the city of Austin. It's also -- this reminds us all of what we need to do to prepare. We need to make sure that we have a family disaster plan, an emergency supply kit. And the very first step you need to do, you need to go to onecentraltexas -- warncentralstate ofstate of texas.org to receive alerts from the central Texas county of governments. That is warncentraltexas.org. >> Mayor Adler: And just to conclude, one, I want to especially call out Travis county. Not only have I been numerous places with county commissioners and the judge, the county judge is the ranking emergency officer here locally and she is working nonstop on these issues. And the commissioners' court is getting a briefing this morning as well. And finally, as the post-script on all this, I remember well Katrina and the convention center. I was there in a very different capacity as a volunteer, and I'll tell you that when I was in that space I had no idea just how much was involved with the logistics and the coordination associated with the operation. [9:14:39 PM] I want you, please, to take back to everyone at the emergency operations center and thank them. There are rows of tables, there are 50 different agencies all sitting with their own phone, their own identification. Everyone in that room is talking to each other either by calling the other person on the phone or most usually just standing up and talking to the person that you need to. It's an amazing operation. And it instills faith and trust in our communities and the government's response to these things. Thank you and please take that message back to everyone. Thank you. >> Yes, sir. >> Renteria: And after touring the Delco center yesterday I was very impressed and I think a big thanks to the red cross. I mean, I was just amazed how they coordinate that shelter and how they were able to - - they're able to keep it clean and neat and what they have for the children there, all the games and activities. It was just very impressive. And I just wanted people to know if you come to one of these shelters you are going to be safe and your kids are going to be looked after. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. Those were all the things that takes care of what we had with our emergency called meeting. It is 9:54. That meeting stands adjourned. We're going to take a three-minute resource and run to the restroom. Staff is going to come and set up. We have two presentations to hear from staff, the colony park and the downtown funding issues, and staff, you can decide which ones of those comes first and which comes second. Mayor pro tem? >> Tovo: Mayor, could we spend a minute talking about the situation for the day? I would just throw out to my colleagues if we all grabbed our sticky notes and our note pads and just walked across the hall would there be much more setting up that would need to have to happen there? [9:16:44 PM] We just -- we have a lot of discussion ahead of us today and we typically do it in the boards and commissions room and that would be my preference if it's not terribly disruptive. But I leave it -- >> Mayor Adler: I had asked the manager if she expressed a preference to stay here on behalf of the staff. We could certainly override that if we wanted to. That's what the manager requested. >> Tovo: If it would be disruptive, we can stay here. >> I need I.T. To give me a head's up on how long to get set up over there. >> Mayor Adler: Five minutes. Well, there were several people that wanted to stay in this room as well. So I would just as soon defer to whatever staff wanted to do unless there's reason not to. >> Really all we need to do is get another mic and a couple of chairs down here to be ready to go here, otherwise we've got to switch the camera system and get the I.T. Folks set up over there. So it would take probably longer, at least ten minutes. Ten, 15 minutes max. >> Mayor Adler: The mayor pro tem has asked that we move to the other room. Do we want to -- is there anyone else that wants to do that? Do you want to put that to a vote? >> Tovo: We don't need to vote. Again, if it's disruptive and it's easier to stay here, that's fine with me. I'm just throwing it out. >> Mayor Adler: Then we'll go ahead and stay here. We'll reconvene here in about five minutes and begin the meeting. [Short recess].