>> good morning, I'm austin mayor lee leffingwell, a quorum is present so I'm going to call this budget work session to order on TUESDAY, MAY 2nd, 2013, Meeting in the board commission room, austin city hall, west second street, austin, texas. The time is 9:08 a.M. Today we have a day-long scheduled budget session. It will be in the format of questions and answers. We'll go department by department. The videos have been available, assuming that we've all watched those based on that you can ask questions from each representatives from each department are here. Just we're going to kind of go in the order of the tabs in your main workbook. With the one exception that we will take the parks department right after municipal court. Beginning with public safety, e.M.S., Fire and police. As I said, we'll go department by department. Estimating that we can get through housing by lunch time, we'll take a brief lunch break and finish up during the rest of the day. With that said, I'm going to introduce the chief budget officer for a few very brief words before we get started.
>> Mayor I was just going to say what you just said, so i think we'll get started with e.M.S.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: What you just said. Okay. We're starting with e.M.S. Councilmember martinez.
>> Martinez: Really briefly, I know that we're scheduled for all day, but i won't be able to stay all day if it runs that long. I do have meetings this afternoon at 2:00. So I will just watch it on line afterwards. If this is a test whether or not I watched all 19 hours, let me be clear my dog ate my homework. [Laughter]
>> Mayor Leffingwell: The test will be at the end not at the beginning. And I do have to say, I'm going to have to step out, I'm going to leave in about 10 minutes, I'll be gun for about half an hour to welcome a delegation from vietnam to austin and then I'll be right back. So e.M.S.
[03:08:25]
>> Good morning, mayor, ernie rodriguez, director of e.M.S. I would like to introduce, we have a new assistant director of administration and finance, karrie lane, lots of experience. We stole her from the health department. She's only been with us for three days, so if she doesn't say a lot, it's because she's still in awe of the place that we have here. She's here to provide details on any questions that you may have. If there's we can't answer we'll get it for you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: We'll open it up for questions. Councilmember morrison.
>> Morrison: I guess I can get started. One of the comments that you had, I guess that I can say that we did get through all of them, but I have to admit that we divided them up in my office and then we talked about all of them. So I don't want to make claims that I watched all seven hours myself. But I know that one of the comments that you made in the revenue forecast is that they are expecting sweeping changes because
-- in health care funding and I wonder if you could expand on that and I imagine that you are talking about the health care act.
>> Yes.
>> And maybe some other things. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you expect that to affect e.M.S.
>> Right now, as a matter of fact, we are working with our senate in the state because there's already been some funds that have been withdrawn away from ems. In general, across the state. Some of it are crossover funds and other payments that we would normally receive. So we're already seeing about a 2% reduction in revenues that
-- that we normally get year over year. We also see that there's probably going to be some structural changes in the way that we're reimbursed in the future. The very same way that those structural changes happen in hospital systems where they started moving towards pay for. Period of time. We see
-- pay for performance. We see the same thing coming to e.M.S. That's going to be a difficult road for e.M.S. E.M.S. In general as an industry isn't as mature as the hospital industry is. And in ems the industry is just learning to begin to connect the dots in terms of data collection and performance measurements. And so
-- so we're looking at that as being one of the potential changes that's coming. At the same time, we're hoping that there's going to be some increased funding for underpayments. Right now, we're working with our payer's medicare and medicaid to try to recoup some uncompensated costs. We don't know how that's going to go. Right now we're putting the dollar reports together about that. We've identified several million dollars worth of uncompensated costs and we're going to see if we can recoup some of that. That will probably go through 2016 and then that will probably go away and be replaced with another process. But it's those types of changes that we're seeing. There's some plus and some minus.
[03:11:31]
>> Morrison: In terms of your overall budget, it is 55 million. Does that include the compensation from medicaid or how much do you get from the
-- or is that just from the general fund?
>> That is just the general fund amount. We recoup about $23 million a year from
-- from an assortment. The biggest payer being medicare, then we get medicaid and insurance. Then the private pay are the uninsured. That's the lowest amount that we collect.
>> If I may add, councilmember, the moneys that we collect into the general fund, they do not stay in the department.
>> Morrison: Do we need to be thinking ahead in terms of what kind of shifts there are going to be say next year once the affordable care actings into effect.
>> That's something that we are trying to keep our finger on the pulse. It's very difficult to try to predict what's going to happen, but yeah we are watching it very closely. Our fear is that there will be a marked reduction and we need to be aware of it because although the way that we're designed in the fundin structure, it won't affect the department immediately. But it would affect the general fund and the balance that we're depending on to balance our budget.
>> Morrison: Okay. And then on
-- on slide
-- it's number 93 in our book, priority unmet service demands. A couple of things. One of the ones that you mention is a
-- one 12-hour demand unit to serve the south austin area and
-- and I think you mentioned some
-- some surprising numbers that 43% of all late calls come from the south area. Is that correct?
>> Yeah. We take the city and we divide it into a northern region, a central region and a southern region. Chief shamard can elaborate more on that. If we look at our cost statistics, about 43% of them are occurring in the southern region of the city.
>> Morrison: What percent of the population is in that southern region?
[03:13:31]
>> That I don't know.
>> We have the census information. I don't have that with me.
>>
>> Morrison: Is it about 43% of the populaton.
>> No. It's not. It's much less that that. So there is a disproportionate number of late calls in that southern region compared to central and north in comparison to the number of people in that particular region.
>> Do you have any idea why? All of the partying on south congress?
>> It's just the coverage area and the workload. We've got a set number of ambulances, we have
-- [laughter]
-- you know, each year we see an increase in the number of calls in a particular area. There's a specific number of ambulances and we look at their task time. And monitor how long it takes them to complete each call. You know, one of the things that we don't have control over is there's really one ambulance in south austin. There's one down in the hays county area.
>> Hospitals. 8 I mean hospitals I'm sorry. There's one hospital in south austin. So all of those patients the ambulance has to go to that central location or go to a north location if they want to go to a seton facility. So the task time for each ambulance is a little bit longer down south. But it's just the added resources to keep up with the workload.
>> Has it been disproportionate for a while?
>> It has not. Historically, the north and northeast region where we've been adding units has been the busiest and fastest growing, but we're now starting to see that
-- that as we've been focusing in the north area, the
-- the response times have been starting to increase south because we've not been adding resources down there. We've been putting the resources where the biggest benefit would be which is that harris branch in the north-north central area.
>> Morrison: Would you say that the
-- well, I guess I'm wondering if the calls are decreasing in the north and central and increasing in
-- it's just that they are increasing in the
--
>> yeah. I think they are increasing again
-- in general and we've been adding resources north, central and north and we've not added any other resources south and that area is starting to catch up now. That's the next area that we need to address with additional resources. In addition to the response time compliance, it's workload. When you look at the task time, the amount of time ambulances are committed to calls, that is an area that's starting to
-- to be of concern to us as well.
[03:15:54]
>> Morrison: But that doesn't actually address the question of why is there such a disproportionate number of late calls in the south. What's going on in the south that's driving that disproportion? Why are more people needing e.M.S. Per capita in the south?
>> I don't think there's more people. When you look at the data, there's not more people in the south needing it. We're just having a harder time getting there in the appropriate amount of time based on
-- based on the number of resources we have in that area.
>> Morrison: Okay. Then I misunderstood. Because I thought it was 43% of all late calls are in the south area, is it that mean they're from the
-- does that mean they're from the south area?
>> Of all of the calls that's happening in austin, we're having the hardest time in that south area of
-- arriving on time. Because of the number of resources in that south area compared to other areas.
>> Morrison: What was the 43% that was in
--
>> of all late calls in austin, 43% of them are occurring in that southern area.
>> Morrison: You know what, here's what i misunderstood when you said late calls, I thought you meant like after 11:00 p.M. Ghter]
>> no, ma'am, I apologize. That's the number of calls that we're not getting there within 10 minutes.
>> Morrison: Just being honest, now I'm getting it.
>> Response time.
>> Response time, okay.
>> Morrison: I apologize for that.
>> Mayor, can I jump in right quick?
>> Mayor Leffingwell Councilmember martinez, go ahead.
>> Martinez: On this same topic, I don't mean to interrupt, but it might be structural issue with how e.M.S. Is structured and runs and responds. What we
-- I don't know if you looked at this, but how many transports are to brack or to seton which takes those southern units when they are on a call north of the river out of south austin as opposed to taking them to st. David's out. It's really a structural demand issue as so why i think we have so many late calls south of the river. There's only one hospital really that we transport to. More than likely we're coming north of the river to brack, which would draw the demand much higher. You know, we would have tockfill with students. We have some students
-- with units. We have units at station 6, station 22 south of the river. Those guys are running north to downtown all of the time. We would have to really drill down and look into the structural aspect of e.M.S. I think that we would s the correlation as to why that inordinate amount of late calls is south of the river.
[03:18:30]
>> That's correct. That's why [indiscernible] is mentioning only one hospital in the south, the next one all the way in hays county. Some calls we have to transport to certain hospitals depending on what the nature of the emergency is.
>> Trauma is an example of that. We now have two trauma centers, one at round rock, one at brackenridge. When round rock became a trauma center, it had a significant and positive impact on our
-- on our task time because we no longer had to bring those trauma patients that met trauma criteria from far north austin all the way to brackenridge.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Could I butt in here because I have to run. A real quick question about the distribution, about how you decide which facility to take patients to. Is that on a rotation schedule? Or are all of the different hospitals in the city with emergency rooms, are they participating?
>> Yes, sir.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Do we still have some push back on that?
>> All of the hospitals are participating. We have it's a pretty complex matrix that we use to determine where patients go. We first looked at their nature of the emergency, there are some specialized centers, stroke centers, cardiac centers, trauma centers where we have to take patients first. Then after that, it's a patient choice. A patient can choose where they want to go. So long as the hospital that they are selecting is an appropriate one for the nature of their emergency, we take them to any hospital that they ask us to go to.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: How about if they don't ask, if you are just taken.
>> Closest.
>> Take them to the nearest facility.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Nearest. I know in the past there have been some indications that
-- that when you took them to a certain emergency room, hospital top say no we don't do that kind of thing, then you would have to take them someplace else, that has been in the past.
>> That's all been fixed. Our medical director's office has gone through and determined all of the different services that are provided by each hospital and we use that to make a choice.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. Thank you.
[03:20:33]
>> Spelman: You are still on the response time issue. I see little sticky notes, so you'll get to it sure. Seems to me if you know your task time is going to be longer in south austin, you build that into your model, you have more units per call in south austin because you know your task times are going to be longer, are you doing that now?
>> Yes, sir, we work to balance the system out, not only in the static plan that we do, but in the dynamic plan that we do. There's two things, we do our geographic and temporal analysis. We want to make sure that we have the area cover with enough demand as it increases and decreases. Then minute by minute, we have a computer system that monitors the call load, it tells us where we need to move our ambulances to to be there in case something happens, we are constantly balancing.
>> You are taking into account the fact that if you are answering a call in south austin your time could be expected to be longer than north austin because you have to drive further to get to the hospital.
>> Yes.
>> Spelman: Okay. More about the task time. In the fire department they have computer programs that tell them how long it takes for a particular unit to get on the truck and get out of the station. There's an informal competition among the stations as to who can get their faster. They find that one unit is able to get@ out 30 seconds faster, another unit, they all want to know how that works. How is task time considered in your world?
>> Well, we look at the task time from the moment that we actually pick up the telephone to the time that we get on scene. And then from the time that we leave the scene to the time we get to the hospital. So we look at the whole piece of it. We have goals for each part, for each interval. The very first one, when we get the call, we call shoot time.
>> Spelman: You call what?
>> Chute time. Like a parachute, not shoot.
[03:22:34]
>> Spelman: That's a different department. Fair enough [laughter]
>> so we evaluate that and constantly provide feedback to our personnel about that. There are other things that we look at, but don't press. For example, the travel time. We look at the travel time that it takes from an ambulance to get from the point of origination until the time they get on scene, but that's really largely out of control of the person who is driving. It depends on traffic and route and all of that.
>> Spelman: Yeah, you have a fairly detailed policy on lights and siren I presume, too.
>> Yes.
>> Spelman: Do you have to do what the fire trucks do and stop when you get to an intersection.
>> I'm sorry.
>> Spelman: I've given to understand t he have to stop, whichever way the lights are running because the risks of running into somebody in the middle of the intersection is high.
>> The chief can answer that.
>> If the light is green they can proceed through it, if it's a red light, even if they are running lights and siren they have to come to a complete stop, visualize that it is stopped and cleared and slowly proceed through it. We virtually have the same policy.
>> Spelman: That's something that you really don't have much control over is what you were saying.
>> Right. We don't know what's going to happen traffic-wise. So we don't want to press our medics to drive faster or unsafely. We just accept that as part of business and we try I to accommodate it by adding ambulances or repositioning them or whatever we need to do.
>> Spelman: Longer task times during rush hour for example than otherwise because you have traffic issues you've got to deal with.
>> That's correct.
>> Spelman: Do
-- you are transporting so you are going to have longer task times for that reason and then you've got the hospital issues. Is there anything that you can do about the hospital intake?
>> Actually the hospital intake for us is pretty good. We don't have diversion in our community. The only time we divert is when the trauma center goes to a code black but we go to an alternative trauma center for that. We also have pretty fast intake times at the hospitals. Some communities have 30 minutes to an hour wait times to deliver their patients. With he don't have that here.
[03:24:41]
>> Spelman: How long do you have?
>> About 20 minutes.
>> Spelman: Doesn't seem that would be a efficient use of your resources to try to shave off a couple of minutes out of that 20 then.
>> Well, we do send notices, time stamps to our medics. We page them so that they know how much time they're taking while they're at the hospital. But one of the things that is really important for us is that the medic actually what time to talk to the physician and we try not to rush that process too much.
>> Spelman: Right.
>> If I may add our goal at each hospital is 20 minutes. They go available unless they have a specific situation like multiple patients or a complicated patient. They are available at the hospital in 10 minutes. And then at 18 minutes they get alerted that
-- that in 20 minutes they need to be out of the hospital unless it's preapproved by the supervisor, so that gives them time to get the truck back together, the ambulance supplied at the facility, we supplies at the hospital so they can get ready quickly and do the medical record and leave it.
>> So 10 minutes is minimum. They may be able to get done in 10 minutes or they are certainly eligible for a call in 10 minutes.
>> We run a process each day, midday, we look at five different sets of data for the previous day. One of those things are
-- we review any call that we didn't get to on time. We review any case where the crew stayed too long at the hospital. We can even look athe route they took on g.P.S. And give them feedback. Their supervisor will say look, you didn't follow the map instructions, what was going on. So we look at number of facilities, including how many unit hours each day we lose to ambulances being out of service because of maintenance or sick employee or something and we continuously make, from a quality standpoint make adjustments in the system to offset those issues.
>> How often do you make those improvements.
>> Any time we start to see a trend or identify something. Each day it's not unusual for us to contact a crew or a supervisor to understand what happened in a particular case. We catalog that information in a database. So we can kind of see it collectively. We have identified pretty interested things and made corrections over the years. One that comes to mind is units that are out of service in the garage for repairs or maintenance. When you see it one at a time you don't think it's very much. But if you look at it over time, we realized we were losing several hours 24 hours for vehicles having to go to the garage and receive maintenance. We worked with the garage, we are taking ambulances to the crews to change out so they are not leaving their neighborhoods and we've been able to significantly decrease the lost unit hours due to things related to fleet and maintenance, that's one of many, many examples.
[03:27:36]
>> Spelman: Sounds terrific. Do you find that there are some hospitals which are consistently faster at intake than others?
>> It depends on the workload of the hospital at a given time. If we are busy, they are usually busy. Depends on the complexity of the patients. Certain patients we don't even stop in the er, we go straight to the cath lab for patients having heart attacks. Those take longer, labor and delivery we have to go upstairs, but generally speaking the hospitals are very consistent and we have a great relationship. We meet with the
-- the medical director meets with the physician group, we meet with the er managers every other month to problem solve and work out issues. We are very fortunate to not have as the chief said a lot of issues of other communities of very long drop times at hospital.
>> Spelman: If you found that, that would
-- that would show up
--
>> shows up in that off stat report. We have done that before, met with hospitals and said look this is an issue, we need help. They have helped problem solve it internally and they've identified work flow issues or things that they've changed to
-- you know, one example was just the delay in getting the charge nurse that they were business to give us a bed assignment. So that hospital put a board up. When we called in, said hey we're on the way, they wrote the bed assignment so the crew could go right to the room. We have a really good working relationship with the hospital and good quality processes, both clin operationally. Just to make things flow.
>> Spelman: You have periodic reports, when you need to
--
>> that's part of our daily report, yes, sir.
>> Spelman: Thank you very much.
>> Cole: Let me ask you a quick question. I notice that we are predicting increases in patient billing revenues of about 4.5 percent and that a big chunk of that is related to the interlocal agreement that we are currently negotiating with travis county. Can you
-- can you give us an update of how that's going. I have heard there are concerns with that.
[03:29:52]
>> It's going well, we
-- i call it a bumper to bumper review. We brought staff in from the department, from the corporate finance group. They also brought some of their financial managers and auditors in to participate. We went through an examination process, very much like a zero based budget process where we actually went through line item by line item so everybody could understand what are the items driving our costs, what are those costs, how are we calculating them. We came back out of that with some very good understandings. One of the things that we discovered is that in some areas, the county was
-- was overpaying and in some areas they were underpaying. One of the biggest I think break through discoveries for us had to do with the number of times that
-- that city units are responding into the county because there's no county units available. It was approaching about 46% of
-- of the
-- the city's perspective on that was that we were not being compensated adequately for those responses. After this process the county now agrees with us that they need to participate in covering the costs of some of those responses to certain degree. And that would help offset our costs.Ú the other thing, too, is that
-- is that when a call comes in, we don't
-- we don't sit there and say is this a city call or a county call, we just respond to it. We deal with whether
-- with those issues in the background and later. So
-- so there is a benefit to us, the city and county working together. Because we are able to [indiscernible] they may not have to add an ambulance in slow vietnam, we can cover it with a backup ambulance until the volume grows enough. If they compensate us for that, that helps us balance our budget and continuing to provide the backup service.
[03:31:55]
>> Cole: Can you give us an example of ways that
-- that they were overpaying and we were underpaying or what is that about?
>> When you look at the different areas and you take our budget line by line and you look the a the volume of work that we're doing for the county and the city, for example, in training, they may have been overpaying a little bit because of the number of staff that we allocate to the county. We balance that back out so that we're dividing it appropriately based on utilization of that particular type of service.
>> Cole: So there were some concerns with the contract that we were putting too much in as opposed to how much we were actually receiving in ices and funding from the county. That's the 46% that you talked about a little bit later, right?
>> Yes. The 46% has to do with how many times city ambulances are responding outside of the city limits into the county.
>> Cole: Is that hard to track? It is if you are not actually doing that at the initial call. Did you do that subsequent.
>> All retrospect background.
>> Cole: But you are able to do it, we have the hardware or software to be able to do it?
>> Yes, we do.
>> Cole: When do you think the contract will actually be finalized?
>> We are starting to draft the amendment now. We have done two things. The first one was to examine the budget as we have. The second piece is we're taking the county, dividing it into zones. And for each zone, we're looking at the population and the demographics and all of those drivers that cause ambulance calls to be
-- to occur. The county is going to look at those, say this is the kind of coverage we want, area we want covered, how quickly we want it to be covered.
>
>> Cole: Then we allocate the fees for that system. Design
-- [multiple voices]
[03:33:58]
>> Riley: I see we are expecting revenue changes of 1.5 million, based in part on increases from the county interlocal, which is currently still being negotiated. How did we arrive at the estimate 1.5 million if that's still
--
>> based on the level of services we are providing today, if they don't make changes to that, that's what the change would be. If they decide to add resources and just did by the way, we're in the process of I believe it's an agenda item in about three weeks, they want to add a half-time ambulance out on fm 969, so that projection includes them adding that demand unit on fm 969.
>> Near austin's colony?
>> Yes. Also includes what the
-- what the cost next year will be for the services they are getting today. If they add other resources outs of this zone process, we will cost that out and obviously that number would change.
>> At this point this is our best guess or do we expect it will go up or down.
>> This is what it will be if they don't request additional services, this is the number. If they come back and say we want two more ambulances it will go up proportionately for those ambulances, the other thing about our new budget process compared to the old one. The old one was based on a percentage of ambulances based in the city or the county. So if the city or county added one, it threw the whole formula off. The new zero based budget exercise that we went through fixes that. We have identified set costs for each agency, city, county, then each agency can increase their part, portion of it without having an impact financially on the other.
>> Riley: Do you see any risks that we might not be able to be successful in reaching an agreement with the county?
>> No, actually, yesterday we had our advisory board meeting much one of the comments that the county representative made was that he feels that we're in a very good place and that our relationship has never been better. So we feel the same way. We did go through difficult things. Any time you talk about money, spending money, it gets difficult to discuss. However we went through a process and actually analyzed our data. What we took out of the process was the guesswork. In the previous method of
-- of determining the expenses for each, the city and the county, we used a
-- a formula that was based on percentages. That was have I indirect and difficult
-- very indirect. We have now actually going through and analytics, call by call, region by region and we're able to put a hard number to it. So we've had a pretty serious improvement on both sides about how we determine the costs. And both of us feel a lot better about it.
[03:36:51]
>> Riley: We did hear some concerns coming from the county's end that their costs wereg to be going up significantly. Is that the case?
>> Yes, their costs are going up. Part of those have to do with the additional units that they are asking us to add. Part of it has to do with
-- with paying for part of the costs for the backup services that we provide into the county with city units. And there's a few other costs that are
-- that are really small. To help increase how much they pay for training qi and a few other functions.
>> Riley: At this point it appears that the county is prepared to absorb those costs, that additional cost?
>> Last night I had a conversation again with mr. Danny hobby, the executive manager for public safety for the county, and we are starting, I haven't talked to our law department yet, but his attorney and our attorney will start crafting the language that will be in the interlocal agreement going forward. So we're absolutely moving forward.
>> Riley: Okay.
>> Good morning, michael McDONALD, DEPUTY CITY Manager, I think one of the things that's important to remember in the system, when this was all created long ago, it was anticipated that
-- that it would be fluid. When I say this partnership between the city and the county to create county-wide services it was intended to be fluid, you know, where there really wasn't a line in terms of how we can deliver services. You know
-- you know, certainly there has to be attle bit of a balance in terms of what your
-- the investment would be from the county in terms of what they prioritized in their areas and what the ended up prioritizing. So
-- so you know you balance all of that out, you make like for example here in the city, there have been times where we decide to add a unit
-- you know, add a station to mueller or to administrations in certain places. Your costs proportionately are going to go up as you decide to make those decisions in your jurisdiction. This past year, first time in quite a while, the county decided to add a unit in bee caves. So that's
-- that's
-- when we talk about the costs going up, some of that is predicated on decisions that the governmental bodies make in that particular area in the system. But the other side of this going up is come a time, even, you know, we created this system quite a while ago, as the director is saying, we had to go back and start trying to assess this because although it was going to be fluid, it was never anticipated that a large portion of our units were having to go into the county. You know, you would anticipate maybe five or 10%. But when it starts getting up to about 40%, you need to sit down and reassess to ensure that there's some balance and investment so that the units that you are paying for in your area are responding to your citizens.
[03:39:50]
>> Riley: Because if we were sending that much of our resources into the county and were not being adequately compensatedp for them, then we would [indiscernible] hence the negotiations and I'm glad to hear that they are on a good track. And I was going to ask what would happen if we didn't
-- weren't successful in those negotiations, but it sounds like we won't need to be concerned about that.
>> That's correct. Councilmember, I think in all fairness, it's also important to point out that just as often, we do send city units into the county, but there's also county units that come into the city, so it's just trying to achieve a balance.
>> Riley: And a fair accounting of costs based on where the service is actually being provided.
>> Exactly.
>> Riley: I appreciate all of your efforts on that.
>> Cole: I think councilmember morrison was next.
>> Morrison: Different topic.
>> Cole: Councilmember martinez?
>> Martinez: I want to follow up on this same topic. It's safe to assume when we look at all of the cost drivers associated with civil service implementatidical supplies, overtime costs that we are actively negotiating that as part of the fee structure with the county as well. It's not just the units and the personnel that are stationed in the county. We actually
-- [multiplevoices]
>> absolutely correct. One of the concerns that we had in following the old model, there's a couple of them. The first one is that we wanted to be sure that we're covering all of those costs. And in the old model we actually couldn't see that deep. Now we can see item by item and budget item by budget item. That was an important thing. The other issue that the county really felt uncomfortable with is that when
-- when we added a unit, for example, in downtown area, it would have a cost increase for them and they didn't feel that was fair, because they weren't needing that service. So we redesigned the
-- the funding model. So that we each pay wholly for our pieces of it. And they're not going to feel penalized whenever we add a unit in downtown austin, it doesn't penalize by increasing their cost, it's a direct cost model.
[03:42:01]
>> But let me add one thing. With regards to even in the old model, proportion fatly, because the city was larger in the
-- proportionately because the city was larger in the system, they ended up paying for example the downtown example that ernie just gave, they would end up paying 20 to 25%, we would pay the 75. Also reversed. If they decided to add a unit in the county, we were paying a large percentage of that as well. So I think what's important here to just re-emphasize is, you know, I'll just say it this way, historically when we needed to adhere this council and past councils have been great about giving us the resources we needed to add and we've grown along those lines, that's why our response times in our areas, you know, are very close to the goals that we've set. Historically, you know, the county has not added at many units as we've added that's going to have an offset. So the reason these negotiations are so important, because if they decide not to
-- not to
-- to give us additional funding or add additional units, we're going to still be stuck in the circumstance where more of our city units, even though of theirs respond into the city, our units are running into the county, so if they don't make that decision, then i think that's going to set the stage for some different types of conversations. But as ernie said, these conversations have been going well. I think they recognize, you know, our concern, just like we recognize some of their concerns with regards to having the pay when we decide to add units.
>> I'll just say, it's got to be extremely difficult to try to negotiate this. And, you know, get to the fine details because it really is about a response to the citizens, no matter where you are in the county, whether you are in the city or not. So from that perspective, following up with councilmember riley, his comments, so if
-- if the unit from bee caves, for example, transported a patient into seton, once that patient is transferred to seton and the unit starts to move back to bee caves to its station, anywhere along that route if that unit is closest to the 911 call it gets assigned if it's in the city, bee caves, wherever it's located.
[03:44:14]
>> If it's a priority one or two, yes. If it's lower priority than that, no. We've put in some protective measures into our cad system to try to get that unit back to its home base as soon as possible. If we're beginning to see for any reason that that's not happening, then we shuffle units out to try to get units closer to that.
>> I guess to me that illustrates the example of why it's difficult to negotiate this and know exactly what that cost is to the county and to the city. Because there are scenarios where that county unit is providing a service within the city limits and vice versa, that city unit is providing a service outs in the county.
>> I think the commitment that we have from both sides is that we put our community first. And so it doesn't matter to us if the time
-- somebody has emergency, we get a unit there. And then we figure all of this out later.
>> Appreciate it.
>> Features
-- unique features about this financial model, we know where the call is, whether it's in the city or county, it looks at how many city units go in the county, county units go in the city. When that starts to become off balance we just pay the difference in one way or the other, along with the actual cost for doing the work program by program. How many calls we take, how many county bills we put out. And I think that transparency is really what they have liked in looking at these financial model.
>> Great. Appreciate your efforts and look forward to getting an agreement with the county.
>> Thank you.
>> Cole: Councilmember tovo, you have the same topic?
>> [Indiscernible]
>> Cole: Okay, councilmember morrison was next.
>> Morrison: I wanted to ask about a comment in the revenue forecast. The increases, slight [indiscernible], increases from providing stand by services special events. Is that
-- so that is an increase in revenue? Are you being paid for those stand by out of fees for the special events.
>> [Indiscernible] will answer that.
>> Yes, we the vendors that hire us pay us and that goes into the general fund and this
-- this comes from an increase in the number of
-- in a number of those, for example acl being extended we have to be there longer, they pay more. Coda, south-by-southwest, a significant number of events. Certainly one of the advantages is us being there and be able to quickly react like we did at the capital 10 k in that cardiac arrest the other day and the patient wakes up. The other benefit is that they do pay for that service. We're at circuits of america at the major events.
[03:46:44]
>> Morrison: Right. I guess really the reason that I wanted to point that out, especially to my colleagues to keep an eye on that, you will see under police and fire, I think we're going to see unmet needs for providing services for special events, which tells me that we need to be looking at fees for special events. Or count on the fact that we're going to have increased sales tax revenue because we're having those special events. But one way or another, it's a real shame to have the special events detracting from our ability to fund libraries, for instance. So I i just wanted to make that point.
>> Cole: Councilmember tovo?
>> Tovo: That was the point that I wanted to drill down on because it does pop up as a recurring theme throughout, it's a question that I'm going to have for pard, too, because we have a fair number of costs associated with special events. And their use of park sites. So but I do want to ask a few more questions. So we have a city ordinance, street closure ordinance that asks for a calculation of special events costs at the end of every year so we can really see whether or not we are recovering our costs for these events. I wanted you to address, you talk about an overtime increase, but I wonder if you could give us some sense of how the last several years have gone in terms of whether or not e.M.S. Has recovered its costs, for providing emergency services for special events generally, not just the big ones, that have to have an ambulance there, but
-- can you provide us with some kind of accounting with what staffing special events has costs in terms of the revenues.
>> We can and we work closely with the budget office. We cover special events with overtime. We take our extra ambulances, put our crews on it, they go manage those special event. Some special events are like the downtown sixth street area. As a deployment model decide to put an extra resource down there and we don't get reimbursed for that. But for special events, major events that hire us, we do pay and that money goes into the general fund, we have a list of not only what it costs but what we collect from that special event to cover those special events, we have worked with the budget office for
-- to offset our budget, our overtime budget to
-- to see
-- to increase our overtime budget to offset the increased number of special events.
[03:49:18]
>> Tovo: Yeah, I see that with the larger events. But I guess that I'm also interested in knowing what those costs look like for the unreimbursed ones as well. I think there still are choices along the way that staff and council make that allow multiple special events so that, you know, if
-- even if they are not large enough to demand a, you know, to be required to have an ambulance there, for which they pay, there are
-- you know, weekends where we have several event going on and there need to be additional staff resources down here and no one is being reimbursed for those costs as I understand it. So I think maybe the best thing to do is to ask that question through the budget process so you can provide us with some of that detail.
>> That may be harder to track. We certainly can track anything, report on anything that they have hired us to cover. They also may hire other vendors to cover those other vendors can't transport, but they can be on site. But if it's a pecan street festival that we're not at, we have calls down there, that would be a little bit harder to correlate the data back to
-- back to
-- to what that cost for us would be. But we'll certainly do our best to report on that.
>> Tovo: Yeah, I think it would be good to start to get a picture of those, again unreimbursed ones as well. Can you talk a little bit about the medical supplies and
-- you ted on the video. Is there an ability for you to recoup that costs
-- [multiple voices]
--
>> so we do try to recoup some of the costs of that through our billing process. Some of the costs that are coming outside of that mostly is from the drug shortages that are occurring. Nationally there's drug shortages beginning to occur in some of the drugs that we use. The only alternative is to find a different drug which we can't always do or to have the drug compounded for us at an additional cost. Right now we are using compounded pharmaceuticals so that increases the costs. One that we use mostly is the pain management drugs that are being compounded for us. The cost is pretty high for that.
[03:51:32]
>> Tovo: So when they are compounded you can't recoup that additional cost?
>> We would have to figure out how to do that. We do get some of that back, but the additional increase wasn't planned for, we didn't know that was coming. So we don't really have a way to address that just yet. That's something that we will have to figure out how to do
--
>> Tovo: I don't understand that. Is that if there's a shortage you have to very quickly come up with a new solution and then there's an additional cost that you
--
>> right. We don't know which drug is going to fall short. Basically week to week. We also don't know what the cost is going to be to
-- to get that drug compounded. It's very short notice. We receive on a weekly basis the shortage list, then we have to respond to that. What we've been trying to do is whenever we anticipate a shortage working with our vendors, we buy ahead. We try to get larger stock built into our supply center. So that we can avoid having to compound drugs.
>> Tovo: I can't remember from the video how long you've been experiencing shortages, but sounds like it's almost a predictable model which would allow you to budget and plan for it in terms of the timing?
>> We know there's going to be shortages, we don't know what drug is going to b short. That's the unpredictable part. That happens week to week and it's because there's
-- there's only so many manufacturers that make a drug, the whole natios buying from them. When the whole nation hits them, they find themselves in a shortage situation. If we just happen to be in the stock period where we're ready to buy at that point, then there's not any to buy. So we'll have to go off and try to get some compounded drug until it comes back into production and we can get back to normal.
>> If I may add, once that changed, we would have to come back to council to change our fee structure. Even if we changed that, medicare and medicaid and certain providers have fixed costs on what they have paid for particular medication or for a particular treatment modality.
[03:53:51]
>> Tovo: Where do we see kind of an additional break down of 3.1, how these cost drivers fall into the 3.1. Without
-- is that coming to us later?
>> Are you looking at the budget forecast.
>> Tovo: Page 390. This is sort of a general budget question. So we see cost drivers of 3.1 will in. If we wanted to know the details of say how much you are attributing how much of that 3.1 million is attributed to medical supplies and drug costs versus simple service implementation costs, where is that level of detail.
>> check McDonalds telling us that's going to be included in in the details as we prepare the budget.
>> Tovo: In our next phase or something? All righty.
>> Riley: Can I jump in on that one point. I noticed the same thing, that generally the departments did not write any break down on the cost drivers. We just have a generic number and then a long list of those things that are driving the costs. The
-- I believe the austin water utility was the only department that actually broke out the elements of those cost drivers.
>> We have that.
>> More than happy to provide it to you.
>> Riley: That would be very helpful to know. Your department is showing a 5.6 increase from
-- from the fy '13 budget. It would be very helpful to know exactly how much each of these
-- [multiple voices]
>> dollar amounts associated with each of these.
>> Riley: Dollar amounts or the percentage change that we want to get a sense of is it really
-- is it really
-- is this really mainly a issue of health insurance costs going up and the others are just a little bit or just get a sense of where he
-- what the real problem is [multiple voices] is there
-- is it almost every department listed fleet fuel and maintenance increases as a cost driver.
-- Is that the main problem that's driving all of the increases or is it just to
-- a very tiny fraction of the problem, we or
-- or we just don't know based on the information that we have.
[03:55:52]
>> I think part of what is going to be important, across the board in this discussion, generally in this stage of the budget process and forecasting, we're just kind of, you know, putting council on alert. Here are the things that are going to be forthcoming that we see as issues ahead of time. You know, until we get into the actual details of the budget that the city manager presents. We have some of these numbers, you know in detail, in staff documents as we're working through to prepare the budget. So it's not that the numbers are not there. They're just not prepared in a form to be delivered to you until the manager delivers the budget. So question by question as you submit these, we certainly can get the answers to you. But in terms of putting them together in such a form that you would be able to see them in detail, that was anticipated more in the regular budget process.
>> Riley: Okay. It would be helpful to get that
-- those numbers. This isn't just about our department, it's about every department except for the water utility. I appreciate the water
--
>> again, in that I just want to
-- we can answer specific questions about it, though.
>> Riley: Thank you.
>> Cole: Councilmember tovo?
>> Tovo: Yeah. I'm sorry I want to get back to a discussion we were having a few minutes ago. I wonder, and I just throw this out for you to think about. I wonder if there's any way to look at event like the pecan street festival. I think that you mentioned that as one where services had to be emergency services had to go out several times for several different incidents. I wonder if you could look at event like that and say typically with an event like this, though they are not required to have an ambulance on site, we tends to get three to five calls in the course of a weekend and start to take some of those into account as we planned. You know, so at least we have a sense in our city what the real costs of these kinds of events are. To our city, that feasible with those events that occur annually or can you make basic assumptions that they say 10,000 people and up you could expect three calls in the course of a 24 hour period?
[03:57:56]
>> Would he do that exact thing. We're part of the one-stop shop with code enforcement, fire, police and other agencies that we view the permitting and make recommendations on whether they need, what type of resources they need and we also look at historical data and that is one of the reasons for the significant increases here, because we are recognizing and able to analyze what that event looked like in previous years and say okay well that really didn't work or we need to change the response plan or had stand by resources, whether it's us, as a transport agency, or just have medical first response on the scene. So that
-- that is what we do, we can certainly provide that information if we could see that.
>> Tovo: I would. Sounds like in cases where you have a festival or an event that typically is placing demand on emergency services, they then become required to take that into account in their planning and in their costs?
>> Yes, we also make adjustments from year to year. We may do a risk analysis plan and say this is the resources that we think you need or what you needed last year and then as the events has evolved and changes over years, then the response and coverage needs to change with that because the
-- because the requirement for e.M.S., The demand for e.M.S. Has changed.
>> Tovo: Are you always doing that looking at that one e juxtaposed against the others that may be taking place in close proximity so you have a real picture of what the demands might be given the other events that are taking place on that same day?
>> We consider everything that's going on, including environmental situations, whether alcohol is being served, what the weather is like, it's kind of a holi approach so what is going on here compared to other event. South-by-southwest is a good example of that. That's a lot of events in the middle of a big event and it's a very complicated kind of a risk assessment that our team has to do. We've got some
-- a couple of dedicated approximate 'em that look at that and build specific plans for coverage in that.
[03:59:59]
[One moment please for change in captioners]
>> Cole: Okay. I just want to point out to my colleagues that this is e.M.S. We have spent an hour on it. We have 19 other departments. I know you are reminded of the budget process and i also want to ask the departments if they can give a direct answer to the questions, please do that. If a councilmember is asking for backup, yes, we can, yes, we will. If you have any further questions we will do that. I don't think we will finish that. And I don't think the mayor would mind me saying that. He's back.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I appreciate making that comment and we're talking about you, ernie? [Laughter] councilmember martinez.
>> Martinez: I think that comment took longer than my question. [Laughter]
>> yes we can, yes, we will.
>> Martinez: The point i want to make is I think this is a good conversation. I think we have to drill down and determine what are the costs that are associated with these events. But I'm going to throw the other side of the coin throughout as well because those groups that are hosting these events, they generate these sales tax and they go to the general fund. They don't go back to taking care of those events, in their minds. So be mindful of that when we go down this road, there will be an element of those folks who put on these events and who bring in large amounts of sales tax dollars that are going to come to us and say we'd like to see some of that revenue dedicated directly to our event to help pay for the cost of that event because we're generating x amount of dollars. So I want us to be mindful of that. I appreciate the comments about if it drains our city services, how much so, what is the impact? But I also want to advocate for those folks that put these events on that are a huge economic impact to our city and recognize that.
[04:02:37]
>> Mayor Leffingwell: City manager?
>> Just to add another dimension to that recovering our costs they do bring in sales tax revenue. But we need to be mindful that we waive fees. And when you annualize that cost it can be significant. So I think, you know, in terms of your policy discussion, I think you have to add that in the equation. We all know on any given thursday there are those that request fee waivers. So some of that, some of those things are bumping into each other. Of you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Councilmember morrison.
>> Morrison: I don't think we need to get into a situation of pitting one against the other, but I do think if we're expecting increasees tax revenue, because of special convenient in a big way, then we need to incorporate that into our estimation of how much sales tax revenue we're expecting so we don't get into the situation of unmet needs where we'll be seeing the sales tax. I think there's a way to work this out. And to city manager's point, we co-sponsor events, so in addition to the small fee waives on a weekly basis at each meeting we have some rather large fee waivers too and I think the city manager has asked staff to provide a list of all of that for us in a budget question.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Councilmember riley.
>> Riley: One last question and that relates to one of the unmet service demands with the community health mayor medic program. You mentioned it is fully employed. How much f.T.E.'S is that currently?
>> It is three f.T.E.'S. We have one commander and two paramedics that are working in that. We're handling the load right now of about 300 patients. It's pretty significant that we see about a 48% reduction in call volume from each of the persons when we engage them in the process.
>> Riley: And what i wanted to ask about is that you mentioned it in the video and you're also asking for three more f.T.E.'S, doubling the size of the program at a cost of about $600,000. If we're seeing reduced call volumes to the extent of 48%, that there's some
-- got to be some cost savings associated with that. Is there any conceivable way that a program like this could pay for itself in part? Or is that factored into the $600,000?
[04:05:07]
>> What we're seeing is better utilization of our resources right off the bat. And that's one piece of it. The other piece is that we're also examining and working with the hospitals because they also see a benefit in the reduction of utilization of ed's. So we want to work with them to see if there's some partnering that we can do to help offset some of the costs.
>> Riley: So might there be a way that we can reduce other expenses through stepping up that program?
>> Yes. I think one of the things that you would see, maybe not a reduction in expenses, but a slowing of the growth and expansion of the e.M.S. System. So if we're able to manage some of the call volume significantly, we may not have to ask for another demand unit in a year or something like that. We'll see a slowing of the growth rate for the system.
>> Riley: But in terms of getting the f.T.E.'S in place, we have to bite the bullet and there's no way out of just paying out of the $600,000?
>> Unfortunately there's no reimbursement strategy for that right now. None of the providers pay for that service. That's something that we're working on nationally to try to change.
>> Riley: Is there any smaller increment than three f.T.E.'S that would work or do we need to do this in groups of three?
>> It doesn't have to be groups of three.
>> Riley: So you could use one more f.T.E. At a cost of $200,000.
>> I'll take what you give me.>> And I believe in that number there's also some one time cost in that, so the ongoing cost would be less, I believe, than what that amount is on that page.
>> Yes, sir. That includes some
-- a vehicle that that would need for that program. But that's a one-time cost.
>> Riley: So we might not be able to get one f.T.E., but $200,000? Because there is a certain amount of fixed costs involved?
>> Yes, sir, there is some diagnostic equipment that we need and we need a vehicle to get them to the locations.
>> Riley: Okay. I want to work with you her to figure out how we could trim that back, but still expand the program.
>> Thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it. Good work. Fire department? So here to answer your questions.
[04:07:35]
>> Can I say good morning?
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I know you're trying to get on time, but I do want to say good morning and I was going to introduce those individuals that are sitting with me. Chief of staff, assistant chief harry evans and assistant director in administration, ranelle paulson. And our fire marshal and division chief ryan penzola ov at fire and prevention.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Thank you for being here. Any questions to start off with? I'll give you a couple of seconds. Looks like you're going to get off easy today. [Overlapping speakers]
>> we're sure you're going to approve everything on the budget, plus some.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Councilmember riley.
>> Riley: I could ask one, a question that I asked about e.M.S. And that emmitts to the cost drivers. We're seeing a 4.2% increase from fy 13 and there's a long list of drivers totaling 5.8 million. We know it totals the 5.8 million, but we don't know how much is attributable to any one of those seven different cost drivers. Can you give us
-- without getting into those numbers right now, can you give us a general sense
-- of those seven items listed, is there any one or two that is more prominent than the others in terms of really driving the increase in cost?
>> Well, I think the highest driver
-- I do have the breakdowns here that I can give to you or we can get them to you later if it makes it easier, but the top three, the health insurance, the fuel fleet maintenance and the one percent additional sworn pension in itself is almost two million dollars right there. So if I can add those correctly, the maintenance for the air packs is about 90,000-dollar cost. The replacement of the air bottles
-- just as a quick comment, there are 1700 total in the system, in the fire system. So we are replacing 230 of these at a cost of $210,000.
[04:09:47]
>> Riley: Okay. How about the last item?
>> That's $100,000 every other year.
>> Riley: Okay. Thanks.
>> And then the terminal pay increased by 253,000.
>> Riley: Thanks.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Councilmember martinez.
>> Martinez: Thanks, mayor. Chief, I wanted to ask something. Kind of budget related, but maybe not so much. I'm sure it's factored into your budget. Obviously recent major incident in west has got folks doing a lot of investigating into chemical plants. What do we do here in austin in terms of ensuring that certifications are up to date and that plants are in compliance with tceq regulations? I know we have some
-- one, I think, chemical plant on woodward by home depot, and then there are some gas companies for welders and such, like on oltorf, there's three or four in east austin on chicon and on east fifth street. Do we just do routine inspections with the fire companies or is it a little more intense now that we've seen this incident in west?
>> I'm going to defer to fire marshal penzola because we have been working diligently on capturing data and trying to figure out where we need to focus some more of our efforts and that some of our ask in the budget is to help us improve on some of the inspections.
>> Martinez: I did see that on the admin side for additional engineers and i didn't know if that was related to things of this nature?
>> Some of it is. We asked for additional lieutenants in prevention that will help us do more inspections, keep up with some of those and actually get some of those done. I'll let bryan give you more specific answers since that's his area of expertise.
>> Good morning. I honestly wasn't prepared for that question so I'll give you an off the cuff answer. Typically the way we handle chemical plants or any other facility that deals with hazardous materials is an annual inspection as well as a permitting process where they're required to submit the quantitities and any changes in their chemical inventories. So then we have the ferments, we send out engineers and our inspectors to do an annual inspection to make sure that they're compatible with their storage methods and that they meet all the necessary code requirements. In a nutshell.
[04:12:13]
>> I would just like to explore that a little further in light of what's taken place recently. I know the legislature is discussing this right now as to whether or not we need to add more regulation or less. But I want us t make sure we're on top of it in terms of our local department and what we can do here at the municipal level.
>> We will give you follow-up information on that specifically where we are and what needs to be done and.
>> Anything else?
>> I think with regard
--
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I think with regard to the situation in west, what I've heard uninformed, of course, is that there was a lot more hazardous materials stored there than was allowed under tceq guidelines. And evidently nobody was looking at it.
>> That's correct, mr. Mayor. Because obviously that's a rural facility, they don't request the same standards and the same availability to be inspected and to be regulated as we do here in the city of austin. To my knowledge we have no similar facilities that pose that type of a threat. As you can imagine, we've been getting lots of open records requests here and we've identified nothing in the city of austin that has that same type of threat level.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. I think it's a good time to make sure we look very closely at that. Any other questions? Comments? Councilmember tovo.
>> Chief, I wondered if you could talk, as you heard we were talking a little bit about special events, i wondered if you could talk about the
-- the unmet service demand that you have listed here, increased provision, capacity and special convenient? And would you say these are in order of importance in terms of the unmet service needs?
>> These are listed in the priority of importance and they're not really our only unmet needs, but in prioritization we had the ones with the most demand and most impact. I'm going to go over so I'm looking at the same slide.
[04:14:26]
>> Tovo:104.
>> The prevention capacity in special events would equate to one captain and two lieutenants. Those are both sworn and that's for special events as mentioned before, the south by southwest, the f1, acl coverage. And the other thing that's important to know is that this particular group also does the inspections on all public assemblies and they also do the mobile food vendors. So you know, we're increasing the capacity, but of that
-- that group, but the work load is also increasing. So we're trying to keep up with some of that in regard to all the asks and permits that come in and things like stages and temporary tents and all those things have to be inspected and permitted. We're trying to group those together.
>> Tovo: How many staff do you have currently working in that area?
>> There is three.
>> Tovo: So this would in effect double?
>> It would double. And I'm being a little hesitant there because we moved a couple of folks from fire prevention into special events because we're just so busy there and it took away from some of the things that are going on in fire prevention, so I believe that the two lieutenants would remain steady, but we'd be able to put the other two lieutenants back into prevention to do the other inspections.
>> I'm sorry, councilmember. Special events is a new area for us. When council passed the ordinance last year we didn't really start staffing our special events section until october of this past year. So a lot of this stuff we're still trying to figure out. This request has come in from the fact that when we did start the special events session october 1 we had no staff to fill it. So we removed some of our current fire inspectors from their duties and assigned them to the special events section. So that request is actually just to try to staff the section that we've already
-- that we've already been implementing. Those would increase additional f.T.E.'S to the special events section, however not all these of those would go to that section. Did I answer your question?
[04:16:45]
>> Tovo: You did. I think I will need to ask a budget that will maybe help arify that. I didn't quite follow all of the moving person knell. Personnel.
>> We'll put that out in like sort of a timeline or whatever so it will be a little clearer. It's like move this one here, move that one there, but we're actually putting these three positions into special events.
>> Tovo: And I think the other point that you said that is
-- that I would like to talk about for a few minutes is that the people who are now working on special events were briefly working on inspections and so how has that iacted your work in that category?
>> About as you would expect. We've had a significant reduction in our availability to
-- most specifically in the contractors and getting a process on new construction, but also some of the other areas that councilmember martinez addressed, which is our annual hazardous materials inspections and life safety and code enforcement inspections as well. And that's that second line, the additional four is to help make up for that loss.
>> That was going to be my comment, the second highest priority was the four additional lieutenants to help us to continue to meet the demand and growth that we haven't increased over the years. And I think just a comment is due just generally speaking is that in previous years' budgets we have asked for some of these, but they haven't been the highest priority. Our highest priority was always to get our operations staffing up to four per unit. And we've been able to accomplish that in the current year with the grant that we received, so now we're looking at how do we address the administrative side and the support side and the staff side of our department. So that's why you see a big focus on personnel and prevention and you will see a focus in the next item in another engineer and another support staff for engineers and you will see that we ask for 10 temporary positions be converted to full time and those are people that are going critical jobs throughout the fire department, but wife been struggling to get them done. So the focus this year for us on the budget is pretty much on the prevention side of the house.
[04:19:20]
>> Tovo: I was just recalling as you talked about the important work that the temperature employees are doing that one of the award winners at your ceremony this weekend had accomplished all of that work as a temperature employee. So the temperature employee it sounds like are really doing critical work.
>> Very critical. Very important work. We really want to make sure that we get them to permanent status because they are doing really good work, but then they leave and go somewhere else for the benefits and the permanent status in the city. So we want to be sure that we're able to accommodate them. And you're right, they're doing very important work.
>> Tovo: So I think
-- not to belabor the point, back to the discussion we were having earlier about special events, clearly they do bring in revenue to our city and they have great
-- that's one of the reasons why people want to visit here and come here. I think we need to continue to promote them. But I do feel like we need
-- it's time for a really full assessment of what it will take to sustain ose kinds of events in a fiscally responsible manner because we are hearing about it in lots of places from our community, from having different kinds of impact, from our staff who are finding increasing demands on their time. We need a little bit more comprehensive look at that.
>> Tovo: Tow when you talk about mobile vending, is that special events too. And what is the fire department's role?
>> Mobile vending, we're required to participate in the mobile vending process because any of the vending apparatus that have propane tanks have to have a fire inspection. So we haven't necessarily tied the two together, however that was half an f.T.E. That was spent
-- he spends two days a week out doing mobile vending so the other three days we assign him to do special events and that's why they're all tied together.
>> Tovo: That was another recurring
-- that comes up too in health and human services. They also talk about mobile vending and just the increase in the number has
-- requires some additional staffing that wasn't
--
[04:21:32]
>> and I think the numbers are there's about 1500 mobile food vendors that need to be inspected.
>> Tovo: That's a lot. Thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Councilmember morrison.
>> Morrison: I wanted to follow up on the temporary employees and understand that more because we see that in several departments, moving temporary employees into full time positions and that's understandable and a good thing to do. I guess my question is the amount of money we see here for that, is that to pay their salaries and benefits? Okay. So previously we were paying their salaries. So where is that money going to? Was was that one time funds to pay their salaries. Do you see why I'm asking last year's budget had money to pay for the temporary employees. Why aren't we seeing the excess cost of making that permanent in place?
>> Most of it has to do with vacancy savings and using vacancy savings throughout the department to cover those temporary employees. It's made up in other areas, savings in other areas.
>> Morrison: Okay. So while we might see vacancy savings next year, they won't be spent on temporary employees. They'll presumably roll sorry into the reserves?
>> Or we won't have temporary employees. I hope the vacancies are filled. I mean, with the two cadet there's classes graduating that will help with 97 of the current vacancies.
>> Morrison: So the point is to pay for the temporary employees the department has to scrimp and save and find ways to do that on an ongoing basis.
>> That's correct.
>> That's helpful. And then just lastly, are the mobile vending
-- on the mobile vending and inspections, I thought the fees were set such that they would cover that cost. I remember going through a very belabored process talking about that, so I'm wondering what those fees are being used for, why the fees aren't coming back around to pay for the positions you need to do those inspections. Maybe that's a mr. Vending question.
[04:23:43]
>> It might have been a mr. Vending question. I don't have the answer to t
-- I will find out the answer to that if he does not have it.
>> Morrison: Can I count on that being submitted or can I assume it's already submitted.
>> [Inaudible].
>> Morrison: Those are all my questions.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Anything else for fire? Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. Are you all by yourself, chief?
>> No, sir. We have alice sutter, our assistant director.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Do you want to introduce your folks there?
>> Good morning, mayor, council. I have alice hooter, who is our assistant director, a big part of her job is the finance and the budget. And the chief of staff, david carter.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Any questions to start off? I'll just ask the obvious question about the
-- can you give us a quick rundown on new cadet classes for this next fiscal year? I know we have one coming up very shortly, don't we?
>> Yes, mayor. Our next one is
-- when is it starting, next class? May 7th.
>>
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Starting? I thought we had one finishing.
>> We have one finishing may 7th
-- may 20 something is the next class coming up. But we have an actual modified class of experienced police officers that will graduate on may seventh.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: And how many is that?
>> We're down to
-- I don't remember the number. 22. 22 I think are remaining.
[04:25:45]
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. And for next year what's your plan for next year as far as new hires?
>> Well, for next year, mayor, under the
-- we're hopeful to get 47 officers under the two per thousand formula. We know that based on the study it doesn't really keep up with the needs of this growing city, but we're looking for 47 officers and we're hopeful to get an additional 45 officers to start addressing a shortage that was identified by the perc study a couple of years ago now. And since that time the environment here has changed where we now have a circuit of the americas, we have special events that continue to increase like south by southwest is up to nine days. We have a reduction in what we call uncommitted time is 15%, which is really getting to a really critical low and it's impacting our ability to respond in a timely manner. It's impacted our response times and it's impacting our overall ability to provide a level of service that i think the people of austin are used to especially as it relates to dealing with property crime that requires a bigger presence of the police department in our neighborhoods.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. So 47 plus 45, did i understand that correctly? 47 is the plan, plus that's about 45 short of the need under
-- recommended by the study that was just done?
>> Yes, sir. The study called for 57. Understanding we don't have an endless budget that we were hopeful to
-- I believe once we give you all the data then you will see that we have an absolute
-- based on the metrics that we use as a police department and that@ are nationally recognized, which includes the response times, which includes the uncommitted time, which is absolutely critical as it relates to proactive patrol where you prevent crimes, which is our ultimate goal, that uncommitted time is at a critical low this year and really starting to have an impact on response to service.
[04:27:58]
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I agree with that. At first glance it looks like uncommitted time, that that might be coffee and donut time, but it's really not. It's time to go out and proactively engage the community and just have a presence on the street, which I think is very important. It's hard to quantify. Any other questions? Mayor pro tem.
>> Cole: I just want to right off the bat asked for the break down of the cost drivers for the 14.4 million.
>> Yes, ma'am.
>> Cole: If you could just consider that a budget question. You can provide that.
>> Great.
>> Cole: And I'm trying to reconcile the perc study with the cost drivers. I think you told the mayor that the per driver called for 257.
>> Yes, ma'am. That is not part of the cost drivers. That is a different piece of the presentation.
>> The four million dollars that wee next to the per study is part of the personnel that are needed that they're recommending?
>> Yes, ma'am.
>> Okay.
>> Cole: And I guess that follows with the other unmet needs service demands. Those just are't in the per study, but those are what you determined to be unmet needs.
>> Yes, ma'am.
>> Cole: Thank you, mayor.
>> Spelman: I don't have a copy of the study in front of me, but it was my understanding that per suggested that we drop the 2.0 per thousand and replace it with something based on, for example, uncommitted time for other cost drivers. And that we don't just add the 257 officers, but we replace the 2.0 with the 257 officers which on a rough cut basis they estimated that you would find we would need over the next five years. So it seems to me that adding the 45 to the 47 is the wrong approach. In fact, it's either 45 or 47 em depending on whether you use 2.0 or the per recommendation. I think we read it based on the environmental condition here in the city of austin based on all the things that they reviewed that at that time they recommended
-- 2 per thousand is probably not a good metric, but that is what we have been using and based on the environmental conditions that we were facing that we needed an additional 250 something officers. The way that the city was and our needs were based back two years ago.
[04:30:47]
>> I remember it very differently and I remember my memory of what it was the perf was suggesting was actually the opposite of what you just said. That either we needed the 2.0 or we needed 257 more officers over the next five years, we probably didn't need them both. And pick one. And I'm much more comfortable with the second approach, whether it's 257 or 300 or what the number is, I'm much more comfortable on basing the number of officers we need on uncommitted time, response time to critical calls, things like that.
>> And quite frankly, i believe when you look at the data and we provide the data that the 2.0, as the mayor said last year, is really a minimum standard. We really have the businessjustification I think we'll be able to provide you a business notifica to come in with these 92 officers that we're asking for. I think when you look at the data and we show you what we can and plan to do with those additional resources that are above what the 2.0 would provide that you would see tremendous outcomes that we want to sustain throughout the city.
>> Spelman: My concern all along has not been with the number of officers, it's been with the way that you justify the number of officers. And the right number is 47 or 92 or anywhere in between or zero, whatever it turns out to be, it's a business case that I've been looking for for a long time. I'm very happy to hear that you're going to provide that.
>> Great. And I'm confident that we will give you a compelling business case for the 92 officers respective of the 2.0 and that's what we hope to give you.
>> Spelman: I look forward to seeing it.
>> And one other thing i want to add, because some of I think what has gotten lost in the 2.0 per thousand discussion is that when we've had conversations, when the chief has had to come before the city manager and myself, I mean, it's just not an automatic 2.0. We have detailed discussions about what the chief would be using those officers for and what the shortages are. So it's just that certainly the 2.0 is unconventional in terms of when you compare how decisions are made, you know, city to city, but the justification discussion in terms of how the chief is going to use those officers, we've been having.
[04:32:59]
>> Spelman: I appreciate the fact that you've been having them. I think it's a good thing. But it's also true at the end of every budget year the number of officers per thousand population
-- in fact, a couple of years ago we made future population rather than current population, it ends up being 1.9999. And although it's a good thing to have a conversation, the conversation always ends up with the yes, chief, you get exactly 2.0. That's not getting into the business case in the way i would like it to. I would prefer to have the business case be made in a very transparent way. Here's how many officers we need, whether it's 2.0, 2.1, whatever it is, and use that as the base rather than back it up with a business case, but leading with an arbitrary number. I have another question about this, though. If one of the big drivers is uncommitted time, I think it's the right kind of a metric for us to be using is the focus of the business case. There's a bunch of ways of increasing uncommitted time. The committed time is time spent
-- no, I do have a copy of the first report. Committed time is the time spent committed to calls and one way of reducing uncommitted time is reducing the number of calls. Ultimately that's what uncommitted time is to do is reduce the number of calls and reduce the number of problems you have to respond to. Another way of doing it is to change the way calls are responded to so you don't have to send a uniformed police officer out to all calls. Another way of doing it is to reduce the amount of time spent at the call. What I think the e.M.S. People called the task time. And the e.M.S. People I know the fire folks get a daily report that describes how long the task time was for each unit and each call. It's easier to do for them than you guys because you have lots more calls than they do. But they have a clear idea of how long it takes to respond to each of those tasks and they spend a lot of time trying to reduce that task time by working with the hospitals and rolling out more quickly from the stations and things like that. I wonder if you could talk about what kind of approach you have to managing task time in the police department.
[04:35:12]
>> I didn't hear that last piece.
>> Spelman: I wonder if you could talk about what approach you have of managing task time in response to calls in the police department.
>> Sure, absolutely. Some of the things that we've been doing very proactively is one of the biggest pieces that really take up a lot of our time is booking time. The driving time, the jail time. So we've actually set up during peak hours on weekends especially our own booking at caritas that has really freed up a lot of our officers. They get in, they leave the prisoner with a.P.D. Personnel and then they go back into service. And that's for baker, d tack and any officer that wants to use it can use it. That's been a tremendously positive impact. The other thing t we've done on the other hand is actually put our personnel at the county jail to take control of our prisoners and actually process the prisoners so the officer is the arresting officer, instead of being responsible for booking and staying there and staying there for a significant period of time, they can go back in service. The other piece I think is really important is supervision and making sure that our supervisors are engaged and when they respond to a scene, as soon as those units are no longer needed we don't have
-- you see it sometimes. Sometimes cops are human beings like everybody else. We like to talk and visit. We don't have that luxury. And so one of the things that we're pushing down is an edict that when you have a significant scene that you try to break it down as much to
-- and release as many personnel as possible. A difference between the fire department. I think that our scenes, especially our crime scenes that are extensive, in order to maintain the integrity of the investigati require controlling that crime scene and that takes people. So are we at 100% where we need to be? Probably not. I can tell you when you look at how much we squeeze out of our folks we're doing a pretty good job.
[04:37:16]
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Chief, I think the city manager wants to weigh in on this, did you not?
>> That was way back.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. He was trying to get in awhile back. [Laughter]
>> and councilmember, if i can continue, we try to
-- as soon as we can we try to use crime scene techs, which we don't have that many, to process locations instead of police officers, because when we don't have a crime scene tech we use a police officer as a resource. And another thing I think that's really huge for us is that 311 system where a lot of those calls that would have necessitated a police response end up being handled over the phone. We do a lot of overhe phone report taking now that we haven't done in the past. I think that's really reduced our uncommitted time or helped impact our uncommitted time. It would be worse without that. And we have self-reporting for our citizens that we're really proud of that residents for property crimes that unfortunately because of our committed time being so low and our resources being stretched that sometimes they have to wait for hours when their home is burglarized. Folks have the opportunity to actually
-- I think from an environmental standpoint it's a good thing for the environment. People don't have to leave their home. They can go on the internet and that's something we're really proud. I think one of the things you saw in the budget presentation is that our revenues are down because people actually print the reports online. And not only making the reports online, but printing the reports online, which is another way of leveraging technology to try to stretch our budget dollar.
>> Spelman: I imagine that means the reporting rates are going up? I believe tha that would cause the reporting rates to go up. You will have a better sense for what your crime rate looks like, what the real crime situation looks like because you will have a higher reporting rate.
>> That's right. One of the things I like to say is that I believe that our residents are highly educated and engaged and they report crimes as other cities, I'm not sure that all crimes are reported to the extent that we report them. We're pretty good about that in our city.
[04:39:24]
>> Spelman: I believe that. If I were interested in knowing what's the best way, the most efficient way for a police department to respond to, say, a burglary case or auto theft or something, is there a standard for this which is nationally adhered to or understood or is this kind of made up in a different way in every police department?
>> For a cold case where someone comes home to their residence after a weekend away and there isn't a suspect there readily to be pursued, a best practice for us would be to send
-- this is what we do when they're available
-- a crime scene tech to come out and process the scene. Unfortunately those resources have not kept up over the years and we've had a discussion what makes this city a really unique place that makes it very difficult for us is I can use police officers to do non-police work, but I can't do it the other way around. And on any given day in the city of austin, we're drawing down resources from investigation investigations, we're drawing down resources from investigating crimes. And it's
-- and that's the problem. Until we get our uniform resources aligned to where they need to be, I'm all for utilizing those non-sworn positions. I think we both agree on that. But the problem is that when we're down officers and we are impacting response times, one of the things we've been discussing, city councilmember, is we have a draw down list where if we get too critical and we're at that point, we may start looking at our dr program, is that something that we can afford right now to have that when we're actually taking longer to get the calls, when we're actually having
-- I'm very proud of our violent crime, but really embarrassed when I go to meetings and talk about property crime because it's a challenge. And the caseload of our detectives that we're taking away for these special convenient, that we're taking away for the things that go on here, we just lost an appeal of a detective in our burglary unit and one of the things that the arbitrator said was that their class loads aren't manageable. And that really bothers me because now we'll start getting officers back on appeal and that will be a problem as well.
[04:41:41]
>> Spelman: I wouldn't be embarrassed about the property crime stuff, chief. We've had one of the lowest crime rates in the country and a higher average property crime rate sense i got here in the 80's.
>> I am embarrassed. I think we can do better. We're going to continue to try to do better.
>> Spelman: I appreciate that. The basic point you were making is the under formed officer is a yak jack-of-all-trades. You can't take a crime scene investigator and put them on the same variety of calls that you can put an officer on.
>> Right. An occupy incident movement pops up and I can't take crime scene techs to deal with that or whatever the challenge might be. Or you have hurricane people that come in all of a sudden and you have a bunch of evacuees and security issues come in. So I know where you want to go and I'd like to get there, but we need to, i think, get control over our uniform assets at the same time.
>> Spelman: I understand. I'll have a lot more questions for you, as I bet you anticipated, but they'll come in writing. Thanks very much.
>> Thank you, thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I just want to clarify that i have never considered the 2.0 ratio to be a target. It's a time-proven safety net number, I think. It's an alarm number. When you get 2.0 you know something really needs to be done. That doesn't have anything to do with the actual needs assessment, which now we have pretty good indications that the level of service is going to require more than that safety net number. But again, I certainly wouldn't consider it to be a target. Did you have something, councilmember riley?
>> Riley: Yeah, thanks, mayor. Chief, I think I recall a fleet presentation indicating that a.P.D. Is a very large chunk of
-- i think it was the largest single chunk of our fleet. So it was striking to me that a.P.D. Is one of only four city departments that did not list fuel and fleet maintenance as a citywide cost driver. Almost every department listed that as a citywide cost driver, but not a.P.D., which is a huge share of the fleet. Why is that? Is fleet and fuel maintenance not a cost driver for a.P.D.?
[04:44:02]
>> Alice sutter, assistant director. This year, although fleet and fuel is a huge part of our budget, it is a cost driver in our budget, the actual
-- there was no increase projected for next year. And based on our fleet size. And those comes come out of the fleet department and i can't fully tell you why, but there was no increase.
>> Riley: I'm trying to grasp why that is the case for a.P.D. And it's different for almost every other city department?
>> We get that information from the fleet services. It really follows our needs. But just
-- this is just
-- an attempt to try to address that. We're utilizing
-- we're utilizing more and more folks on foot, more and more folks on bicycles. When we have more and more folks that are taken away from their primary function and moved into s events that continue to increase in our city, you know, then that's less driving, less mileage that's being driven by our officers. So I think from just a very general perspective that part of that is the fact that our initiative, for example, downtown where we've had our quality of life initiatives had a tremendously positive impact on crime reduction. Most of those folks were on foot and on bikes, so when you move people to those inits and then you move them to the special events, you know, they're stationary, fixed costs, so it reduces the
-- I think the overall number of miles that we drive and that reduces our cost drivers.
>> Riley: So you look at the overall
--
>> I'm even on a bike now.
>> Riley: Great. I appreciate that. So we can say overall vehicle miles traveled per officer is declining?
>> I'm going to look at that. And then when you book people and you have
-- your uncommitted time is down. That means that they're stopped somewhere doing something or they're booking or they're at a hospital or at a scene. So I think all that goes into probably a reduction of total miles driven. I will get together with jerry.
[04:46:14]
>> Riley: I'm not critical of it. I'm curious why it is and i wonder if increased fuel economy has anything to do with it or if it's just a matter of relatively lower share of the officers being in cars. Maybe that's the case.
>> And on the special initiatives when we're doing crime initiatives we double them up as well. We normally don't want to do that citywide because we like two sets of eyes in two different locations, but in a high impact crimefighting initiative, you want to build in that backup unit so they can deal with the problem and get going.
>> Riley: Okay. And then I have to ask one question about the overtime for 24 hour trails, which is listed as one of the cost drivers. As I understand it, that is somewhere around $700,000, that component. And that actually assumes that the pilot will continue throughout the whole year. And that we will be needing to spend overtime throughout the entire year even though the council's directive only called for pilot to go through the end of the year. Part of what we discovered is that as we talked about that, was that we don't currently have a very good mechanism for associating incidents with locations on trails. Have we taken any steps to try to address that?
>> We had a meeting just yesterday with
-- one of the things that's really been a challenge for us was the lack of a business intelligence. And I'm very happy that yesterday we had a meeting with ctm where we're pretty confident in the next few months we're finally
-- we're going to end up having the business intelligence meeting as a police department to continue our evolution from
-- to a data driven culture to a policing agency. We're not quite there yet, but we are very close and we hope in the next few weeks to drill that down and make sure that's what we need. We take our time to get the right tool and not try to take shortcuts and not have the right tool. The other thing is that is a pilot project and it's only for 12 months. And it just started or it's just starting. One of the things that we're looking to do with that 45, if we get it, is probably add a shift to much the parks, especially if you decide to continue
-- to continue to bicycles. I'm hoping we stay with bicycles still, whether we have a shift or not. That's one of the things that we want to address where we may be able to eliminate the overtime altogether.
>>
[04:48:57]
>> Riley: And one of the purposes of the pilot was to detee whether we will be seeing increased incidents on the trail as a result of opening them 24 hours to bicycles. The pilot begins at the beginning of june. It would be very helpful if we had some means of establishing a baseline before the pilot begins because if we're just getting new data starting in june, it's going to be hard to assess
-- is that really an increase in incidents or is it just a matter of being able to collect data for the first time? So if there is any way that we could get some mechanism in place before june to assess incidents on trails
--
>> and our staff is going to take, councilmember
-- it's going to be
-- it's work, but we're having our staff get at least a picture, a snapshot of a three-month period for last summer and then this summer to compare them. And then we'll direct our people
-- when this starts that the calls on the trails, that we want to make sure that we're using a special code to make sure we don't miss any. What we'll do is compare year to year, take
-- it's only a three month snapshot, june, july, august for last year, and even do a hand search of anything that comes close to a park to see whether it was park related or not, trail related or not, for three months for last year. And then this year going forward our folks know to use a special code for anything in the p.
>> Riley: That sounds good.
>> We want to give you that at least year to year comparison.
>> Riley: Understood. Thank you.
>> Tovo: A few quick questions. There was a reference in the presentation and I don't really see it captured in the slides. Something about data that had been used in previous years had led to setting unrealistic goals and i wasn't clear on that.
[04:51:00]
>> Why don't you go ahead
-- that had to do with our response times and I'll let chief carter address that issue.
>> David carter, chief of staff. Councilmember, that was the issue. And
--
>> Tovo: Slide 110 maybe.
>> The issue is what
-- we had actually started tracking our response times to calls. And over the course of a single year, each year, the next year we would kind of establish a goal based on the previous year, figuring we're moving in the right direction. What we recognized as an issue there is if you're going from year to year you may be looking at an anomaly, you may be looking at some kind of issue. We've changed the way we look at this going forward on a five-year average and that gives us probably more realistic benchmark or a goal for us to meet. In this particular case what you're talking about is
-- this was 2010, right? 2011 was that we found that there was some kind of issue with the software that was tracking some of the calls that were being dispatched, gave perhaps a wrong number. But it was a fairly small difference, but that in and of itself led us to come previously with an unrealistic, turned out to be unrealistic goal for us. I think, again, it was
-- the 6.53. We still think we're doing well with that, but that single year was in our view was an anomaly based on the technology. A slight glitch that they've worked through that particular issue, but moving forward it will be addressed based on a running five-year so we won't have that.
>> Tovo: But there's no data available at all for 2010 to 2011?
>> As I understand it, the data that was received was questionable and so we didn't want to put that necessarily in there because it couldn't be validated. So the thing is that's why we have basically an asterisk on that particular chart to say we came up with a number, but when that number went back and we asked for it to be validated and verified, it came back slightly different so we didn't have confidence in that.
[04:53:13]
>> Tovo: So the data is available, you just question whether it's valid?
>> That's correct.
>> Tovo: Now I'm really curious about what the data is.
>> It was 6.51. I didn't realize it's on
-- it's not on this one. 6.51 is the number.
>> Tovo: You said 6.53 for the next year and then you had questions whether it was valid.
>> That's correct.
>> One-year anomaly.
>> Tovo: I wonder if you could give us updates to a couple of things we've talked about in the past. The first is the additional forensic positions that have been added. I know it's been early, but do you have any sense of whether that made any kind of impact?
>> The hiring process takes time because of the
-- because of the special team and the process these folks have to go through in these positions. One is coming from d.P.S., so they're going to be released to work on their own right away. The one is coming from a private lab so we have to certify them. They'll go through a training program, but that person should be by the end of may on their own ready 100%. And our crime lab is confident that with these three positions we will be able to meet the needs of the department for a ways to come.
>> And councilmember, one of the other things that will happen is the city manager received a request from judge biscoe and the commissioners to help fund 50% of the backlog through a private lab and the chief and I recently went over and met with the commissioners and they approved it. And so we're going to be moving forward with working on that backlog along those lines so we're hopeful that by the time we get the personnel hired that we would be in a position where we could maintain and keep up.
>> Tovo: That sounds good. And just to be clear it sounds like too we're going to be owe they are hired and they will be operational by the end of the month and the other is going to be hired, but not really certified until
--
[04:55:18]
>> sometime in june they'll be on their own and just on all eight cylinders or four cylinders since we want to be green.
>> Tovo: The other thing i wanted to follow up on, we've had a couple of discussions about this subject, but probably most
-- in the most in our retreat and that was the connection between the work that our parks department does with regard to youth programming and the work you do in crime prevention. Can you give me an update? We had talked about that as a goal of getting better coordination between the police department and our parks departme identifying communities that would benefit from youth resources in particular age groups. It didn't sound like there was really a formal connection between your staff and park staff. And I'm hoping that a year later we've
-- that's not still the case.
>> A couple of things that we're doing is putting our park police with the parks and rec, co-locating them to get that synergy and the communication back and forth. Since the last time we met, we
-- I actually approached the director and we launched another program called leaps, leadership, education
-- I don't remember the acronym now, but it's a basketball program that we're bringing kids through sports from different parts of town and kids that have the athletic skills, the gift, but may not have the discipline, may not have the mentorship. And putting these kids together, and this is our first year working with parks that they're providing us the location. Bringing these kids from different parts of the city so they can feed off of one other, and we're hoping to take those kids that maybe from a socioeconomically depressed part of town and give them the skills they need to be able to get the education for free that that makes sense that those skills may get them through athletics. That's just anle. That's one of the programs that working with sarah and her staff we launched this year. And that's one that i remember off the top of my head. We can get you an update.
[04:57:40]
>> Tovo: I would like to hear about the roving leaders. That is something we added during the budget, money for roving leaders. But there's sort of a bigger issue here about coordinating. And as we move into a budget cycle I want to be sure that we will have programs in places where you see a need for additional crime prevention efforts. So that we're not always dealing with
-- dealing with crime by adding
-- talking about adding officers and things. That we're really looking at it, as I know you are committed to doing, looking at it proactively, but i think we have resources in the city that aren't always brought to bear in that effort. And I've mentioned this before, but we were looking at a plan
-- well, I'll just leave it. But I want to be sure that we're providing
-- that we're not pulling back on teen programs, for example, in areas where you see a lot of
-- more crime than in other communities. And I'm not sure how we're going to get that kind of comprehensive plan going if we don't have very good contact between police department staff and our parks staff in looking at that very issue, programming issue.
>> And I think what you want us to do is be their eyes and ears and say what we're seeing here is a spike in crime or we're seeing involving youth 12 to 14. So maybe we recommend that you put together a program, especially in the summer. This is what really. Really issues me. You
-- irks me. You know we have the boy scouts, the police league. THE cUMMERS ARE CRITICAL. That's where poor kids fall behind, affluent kids are in enrichment programs. Poor kids are not. And it's not that they're not smart, ix's that they don't have the opportunities in the summer. So I hear exactly what you're saying and that's very
-- that piece is very doable. And we actually do look at the explorers that work with parks for opportunities or the police activities league, they provide the facilities. I think what I'm hearing you saying is when we see a specific issue involving a certain demographic and a certain part of town that that's where we meet with our parks and say hey, what can you come up to help keep the kids busy between these hours.
[04:59:52]
[One moment, please, for change in captioners]
>> thank you, I appreciate your commitment to that.
>> Riley: I have to come back for just a couple more questions about the 24 hour trails. I was reading this thing, the budget, I asked a budget question about this, I don't understand the answer that i got. Especially in light of the earlier comments. The budget question, the budget
-- the written budget answer said that $700,000 was added to the budget for 2014 to carry the department through september 2014. And since we had only directed the pilot to go through the end of december, I asked what if the pilot just went through december. The answer concludes, if you ended in december, that results in a savings of $767,000. I'm having a hard time understanding that because the whole going through all of the way through september was only going to cost $700,000. [Multiple voices]
>> well, there is $350,000 added to their budget in fiscal year '13 to run the program for I believe three months.
>> Right.
>> We've added another700,000 in fiscal year '14 for a total of 1,050,000 in anticipation that the program will be successful and council will want to continue with that same amount of money that we would need to annuallize it. If council decides come december we are going to end it, we project $768,000 of that expended funds out of that million and 50. So the 700 is an incremental amount over and above the 350 added to the budget this year.
[05:02:08]
>> Riley: For for 2013.
>> For fy 2013 it was 350. It carries over and adding
--
>> Riley: Carries over, got it. I see. Then if we chose to ends the pilot, we would still have the issue hanging out there with the current plan for the boardwalk to be open 24 hours. That was the plan long before we started this initiative about opening up other trails 24 hours. Would the department be seeking any kind of overtime to address the boardwalk thing open for 24 hours?
>> I think that's going to depend on our, you know, the 47 of the 45. I
-- I would anticipate that if we end up getting those additional resources, i really believe it will give you the justification if it 92, that we should be able to absorb the 24 hours with the current staff.
>> Riley: Okay, thanks.
>> Mayor Leffingwell Councilmember morrison?
>> Morrison: I would like to ask one of the cost drivers that you've mentioned is the travis county booking interlocal. And wonder if you could tell us about that? I think we
-- is that on a five-year cycle, we're now looking at a redo of this? I remember we did it early on when I joined the council. What you are for seeing, what's getting worked out, what the cost driver there operationally might be.
>> Go ahead.
>> Well, that is a
-- they received like an 11, 14% pay raise, the deputies, so we're looking at a $700,000 pay raise. This is something that we negotiate on a yearly basis, pretty interesting process. I'll leave it at that. A couple of years ago we started a two million dollar increase, with tough negotiations down to about 500,000. We are looking at our options, one of the options that we're exploring at the direction of the deputy city manager is actually opening a magistration center with the police department like they do in san antonio and other places, magistration center. Based
-- actually I have the presentation ready to has to the city manager in the next week. It probably will not happen this budget year. Probably going to take us from the time we say go another 12 months or so. But the $700,000 driver is from their salaries, which we have no control over. They negotiate separately. And we may have some alternatives that we believe there will be a cost in the front end, but you will realize some savings, you will realize some efficiencies in terms of the booking, in terms of getting people back out on patrol that we can't realize utilizing their services. We are looking at an alternative means, we believe that we're going to get some options. At the front end some cost drivers, over a 10-year period you're going to be seeing a lot of money.
[05:05:00]
>> Did we in the past have our own center, move to an interlocal, or have we always done it with travis county?
>> Long ago, probably from the, you know, up until about the late '80s, we operated on our own
-- we operated our own booking center. Our own jail, actually, over on seventh street and then, you know, when
-- when the financial times, you know, when we went through a recession back during that period of time, the decision was made to have the county operate our center, so we could cut some of our costs. They were knowledge a new jail
-- they were building a new jail. When they finished the new jill the decision was made to continue to allow them to do the processing.
>> Morrison: That would be an interesting exploration I'm sure.
>> I can't tell you about it yet. One of my assistant chiefs came up with an idea to run by my bosses. It's brilliant. I will leave it at that.
>> You have whetted our appetite.
>> More to follow.
>> I want to make one last point. Just to clarify, councilmember spelman did say he did have the perf report. I want to clarify that those additional, those 257 officers were in fact in place of, calculated and figured out in place of the 2.0 calculation, makes it quite clear here at the end of the executive summary, it says to add the new positions to the current authorization of 1,718. And I would like to
-- so it was the additional on top of figuring out for 2.0. I also want to mention that the 257, that they came up with, you know, that it was a different approach and they actually identified how many of those should be officers, how many detectives and how many sergeants, which is very interesting. But they also identified that 29 of the positions that were identified could
-- could be transferred over from sworn staff to civilian staff. So they actually come up with 228 additional sworn positions. Which in fact by their calculations would take you to 2.11 officers per thousand by 2017. So I just think that it's really important, you know, we did the first study to get some foundation and analysis in the discussion and I think it's really important that we be real clear about what they say and not use it as a
-- not suggest that they are suggesting that we add those on top of 2.0. It's an alternative to 2.0.
[05:07:56]
>> But it adds up to 2.1 doesn't it? That's the way I read it.
>> Morrison: When they compute it using 27 instead of 25 or whatever, it takes you to 2.11, it does. But you don't achieve that by calculating for 2.0 and then adding another 45 officers on top. That's double accounting and misrepresenting
--
>> we took into account the 2.1, alice will explain it to you real quick.
>> I have a calculation here, we started with the 257, we did back up the 29 that were recommended to be civilians, which we're going to still do some studying on. And that came to 228. They had recommended that over a five years, that was last year. So we took the 228, we divided it in half, which is 114. We backed off the 22 that we were given in the current year and we backed off the 47 that they were projecting for next year and that's where the 45 came from.
>> So
-- so in other words we have taken into account that the 47, the two ter per thousand [multiple voices]
>> Morrison: What I say was 2.0, population growth was a cost driver and we added those and then adding 45 on top of that. Let's just do it in a budget.
>> I think that it will make sense when you see it in writing.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I want to clarify here that i don't think anybody here has said 2.0 is our target for a manning formula for the police department. In fact what I said I would rather as more of a safety net number. In fact when we have gone away from the study which said in numbers without ratios, just in numbers, that's how many we need. We're not projecting that we're going to have that many, then we call back to well how far below the actual need are we going to go and then I think that it's useful to have a safety net ratio for that purpose.
>> Morrison: Mayor, if i could, I think that there's probably been a lot of different things said about this because I remember hearing quite clearly scheduling and budgeting for 2.0 is our policy. When I asked about that, what I asked when did that policy come, I was told well it became a policy, we adopted it in a policy in like a 2004 budget or something. So some people might think of it as a safety net, don't go below. Some people think of it as a policy, I really appreciate councilmember spelman asking that we try and have a business case for what we're doing. And I hope that's what
-- where we're moving, I think that is. Is.
[05:10:31]
>> All right.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Again to reiterate my position so there's no confusion, in the needs assessment for the service level is one thing, the safety net number is something else. If we're not meeting our needs assessment what do we fall back on? The safety net number of 2.0. It's not a target it's a safety net.
>> Spelman: Do we have safety net numbers for e.M.S., Watershed protection or libraries?
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I don't know the answer to that question. I don't think that we have safety net numbers for libraries for sure.
>> Spelman: I don't believe we have safety net numbers for fire or e.M.S. Either. It seems to me
--
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Maybe we should.
>> Spelman: Perhaps we should, but that would be a marked change from our policies for all other city departments.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Well, I'm just saying, councilmember, that once you go below the actual needs assessment, where do you stop? Do you have any guidance at all about what is appropriate in the case of a.P.D. Manning? We have a long standing reference number there, maybe we should develop a reference number for other city services, too. But we have this one and i think it's useful to keep it in the back of our minds when we go below what studies have shown that we need.
>> Mayor?
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Councilmember martinez.
>> Martinez: I wanted to ask a quick question about the interlocal agreement for the magistration and jail services. When does that interlocal agreement come before the council.
>> Yearly. .>> Martinez: WHEN THE Budget is adopted, about the same time. I have brought this up in the past, I will bring it up again, I know it's difficult, but we still have issues
-- I don't want to say "issues" we have concerned citizens about ice detainees going through the same and being tagged by is there anything in that interlocal agreement, folks coming from a.P.D., Whether or not they can be introduced by ise?
[05:12:42]
>> I think once you book them, I don't believe that
-- that we have any control over that. I haven't heard that
-- i think that has calmed down a lot, that issue. Ise has been doing a better job of focusing on criminals
-- the congress has kind of softened that a little bit. I think that's going to be a diminishing issue for us here.
>>> Can you provide me of maybe the last couple of years of the imaations from a.P.D. Through the
-- magistrations from a.P.D. To ise.
>> Two years worth? I would like to give three years, if that's okay.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay, thank you.
>> Thank you all. Ice.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: We are not making much progress here, but municipal court is next. I want to ask
-- I had a request, the reason parks is out of order in this schedule is because there was some kind of scheduling conflict. Due
-- on the part of staff, do you want to take parks first or municipal court? Because we may not get both of them in. Before
-- before l break.
>> We have municipal court here, so I would suggest going with them.
>> Mayor Leffingwe Okay. Go ahead, I anticipate yours will be done by the time we're getting them in the room.
>> Mayor?
>> We will start
--
>> we will just start with introduces yourself us we will go directly to questions.
[05:14:48]
>> Absolutely, rebecca stark, director of the austin municipal court.
>> Peter valdez, the director of the community court.
>> Questions for municipal court? Councilmember morrison?
>> I wonder if I thought your revenue forecast was very interesting, I'm sure that you are asked this all the time. We have an increasing population expected and we're seeing that almost all of the different categories of revenue, traffic, parking, city ordinance and other, are decreasing, expected to decrease from fy '13 through fy sufficient and that's sort of opposite of what
-- sort of
-- from fy 16. Sort of opposite of what we would think. More tickets and parking violations on a per capita basis. I understand we put good initiatives in place that helped to decrease that, but I wonder if you could talk about that balance and why we're expecting it
-- all of those to decrease, even though we expect probably what 100,000 people added over that time period.
>> As far as parking is concerned, when you expand the hours the tickets went way up and then leveled off. It's kind of a come down from a peak. It is more than it's been in the past, but that expanded hours a couple of years peaked it. So it's not really going do a lot.
>> Morrison: Do you expect [multiple voices] parking to just stay flat?
>> Absolutely. The city ordinance one, the code compliance is working very hard on getting compliance before they have to issue citations, so that's a good thing. And there has been a decrease in the past for traffic and misdemeanor citations. But the e citation program that we have is bringing it back up and so it will
-- it will be sliding up. Just being very
-- very conservative on a revenue projections but hoping that it will keep coming up.
[05:16:58]
>> Morrison: Double edged sword, we hope there aren't more traffic violations.
>> Absolutely.
>> Morrison: Chief, do you have any comment on that?
>> The other thing, too, we've had discussions with the police chief and part of what he's talked about is, you know, some of what we talked about a moment ago, the officers not having as much discretionary time where they can do more traffic enforcement. But nevertheless it is one of their prioritized areas that they're talking about in their com stat, you know, that's the annual
-- I mean the monthly meeting that they have to assess how they are doing enforcement in the different areas, it is
-- it's a top shelf issue. So over the last three months, they've been doing some work to increase the enforcement.
>> Morrison: Okay. Thank you.
>> Martinez: I think you touched on a good point that I would like to I guess expand on as we go through the budget process. Is there a correlation with municipal court revenues as it relates to staffing at a.P.D. Would this projection change say if the council were to hire 92icers this year as being proposed by a.P.D.
>> You know, I think
-- i think the best way to answer that, councilmember, is again it's how those officers are utilized and the
-- the amount of discretionary time. I believe and I think the chief believes as well that just based on what he's done over the last couple of months that he could increase, you know, the
-- the traffic citations just by there being more focus put on it whenever they do have that discretionary time that they have at this point. So, you know, what
-- what conventional wisdom would tell you, you add the number that it should go up. But again some of it depends on how those officers are utilized. Do all of them end up going into patrol operations, what areas do they end up going into as well and how they're assigned.
>> Okay. Thanks.
[05:18:59]
>> Mayor?
>> Mayor pro tem?
>> Cole: I had a couple of questions about your capital projects. The pocket of the court moving to the [indiscernible] platform, that you tell me what that is contemplating.
>> The court case management system was owned by a company that was bought by the people that own amanda and amanda is used by nine departments in the city. So they want to upgrade us to amanda which is an enterprise wide system.
>> Second. So you can talk to each other.
>> We can all talk to each other, all be on the same partial and be able to share information much easier. What we have has to change to the amanda partial because the company is moving that way, so we have to move in that direct. But it's going through the it governance and it will benefit 10 departments in the long run.
>> Cole: The reason i asked that is because I know that in social services, we were trying to go to an hmis system, and I was wring if you ha any plans to coordinate with that in the upgrade to the amanda system. And if you need to follow up with that, I can certainly understand.
>> I'm making a note, yes, i would have to look at that.
>> Cole: Another reason that triggered that question to me, you were talking about an unmet need of $310,000 for substance abuse for homeless people who have a dual diagnosis of a mental health disability. What is that and why
-- that number seems small to start with. Is it part of a previous grant or where does it come from?
>> I can speak to that. I'm peter valdez, the director of the community court. First to answer your question about hmis, we are using that at the community court. We started to fully use it this way. So we are talking to other social service agencies through that system. It's integrated witur own database, but we access it every time we come in contact with a homeless individual. The $310,000 is really our effort to double the amount of people that we can put through treatment in transitional housing. The current $310,000 allow us to put around 35 people through treatment and 90 days of transitional housing while our intensive case managers work with them to identify permanent housing.
[05:21:37]
>> Cole: Okay, thank you, mayor.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Councilmember riley. Just following up on that point, pete. I notice there's no ftes associated with that 310,000, would that just be handled by the current case managers?
>> Right, if you recall, in this current year's budget, we added four ftes, four case managers, those are all part of our outreach efforts. So that's also part of the issue in terms of why we need more funding for rehab. Because we're getting a lot of voluntary requests for assistance since they know that we're out in the community now.
>> Riley: So the additional $300,000 would allow us to contract out for those additional services?
>> We would expand the current contracts with austin recovery and two transitional housing providers in the community.
>> Riley: That would be the within the capacity of the case managers that we already have.
>> Yes.
>> Riley: I notice that we've got several performance indicators but none directed specifically towards the community court. Is that data available anywhere so we can get a sense of how well the case managers are working out so far?
>> Sure. It is available and it was provided to budget, but they only allowed what's in the presentation. So I can forward whatever data you need. And I can speak to some of it if you have specific questions.
>> Riley: There has been a lot of interest in the past in those case manager
-- case management positions and the work they do from the standpoint of saving
-- of
-- of a whole lot of community resources because the people that we're talking about, the chronically homeless consume a huge amount of resources of various types. And so it's very helpful to know exactly what we're getting out of this sort of expenditure. So I would be interested in some additional data just on any performance indicators relating specifically to
-- to the community court. And in particular focusing on the case management effort.
[05:23:43]
>> Yes. And I can speak a little bit about the success we've had in terms of housing chronically homeless individuals and we did successfully house 20 individuals last year. Through a partnership with caritas and foundation community and the downtown austin alliance. So we are trying to identify additional units. And the biggest challenge that we have is finding providers or housing providers that will take people with extensive criminal histories.
>> Right.
>> So we are coming up against that challenge quite a bit.
>> Riley: The $310,000 wouldn't necessarily address that problem.
>> No. What the 310 or 620 total does is it allows us to develop a full continuum of services all the way up to the point of permanent supportive housing. So he we can stabilize them through treatment, linkage to mental health, substance abuse services and put them in transitional housing, but there's where we tend to lose people if we can't identify permanent supportive housing units.
>> So what would be getting? Would we just be putting more people on transitional housing?
>> We have put quite a few people in transitional housing, one of the people hired in this current year's budget is doing housing location. So she's basically going throughout the city trying to convince property owners and managers to take this population. We haven't
-- we're in discussions with several, but we haven't been able to house anybody since december.
>> Riley: Okay. So I guess if that's where the bottleneck is, that's what we really need to focus on. Even if we had the additional $310,000 for treatment, we still wouldn't be getting this population housed.
>> Yeah. We are working quite a bit with front steps and caritas toether identify more of the permanent supportive housing because they have resources as well.
[05:25:52]
>> Riley: I would like to continue the conversation online and the budget [indiscernible] to allocate more resources towards housing would be available to help with that problem. Thanks.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. Thank you very much. And we will go to the parks department. Sara if you want to introduce yourself and your crew, then we will go directly to questions.
>> Sara hensley director of parks and recreation and [indiscernible] jessie vargas our new assistants director, kimberly mcneely and cora wright, all three assistant directors.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Questions? Okay. Councilmember morrison?
>> Morrison: In our
-- in our budget deliberations last year, if I remember correctly, we added a couple of positions to
-- it would be liaisons with community organizations that have projects ready to go and we weren't able to get them through the pipeline just because of project management efforts and i wanted to ask how you think that's working, what kind of projects have they been
-- remind me how many actually
--
>> it is one position. One position.
>> Morrison: Okay. And yeah what's your thought on how that's working? Has it been worth the investment?
>> Absolutely it has been worth the investment. The person who is in that person's name is shaun cooper. He spends an enormous amount of time working not only with citizen groups, neighborhood associations but austin parks and trail foundation and the projects that they have moved forward. Just to give you an example of some of the things that we've worked on, it's my park day, all of the many projects that go on, 80 some odd projects that go on in one day down to projects like recently the first flush that councilmember martinez was there and we attended which is the new restroom that opened up there.
[05:28:14]
>> Morrison: I just couldn't bring myself to attend that [laughter]
>> it was a great event.
>> Martinez: It was my first and only press conference in a toilet. [Laughter]
>> Morrison: My hat's off to you.
>> Great statements and jokes about that. I'm sure there are some community members that would say we need to move even faster, but I will say that's made a huge difference in being and the to sit down with the community, the ongoing dialogue that's taking place and helping them through the permitting process.
>> Do you feel like we've
-- is there still a backlog there in terms of people anxious or much of a backlog? I'm hoping that it was able to clear a good part of that.
>> It cleared a good part of it. But because we have such great neighbors and great supporters of parks, there's always a list that want to do things in their parks and when they get a grant through the parks foundation or another group, then they get in the queue. So the list is a lot less.
>> Jessie [indiscernible] assistant director, parks and recreation, I will add to what directly hensley mentioned. Not only does it address the immediate need to alleviate the demand for initiated project attention, but it also
-- actually working on formalizing the processing program, how we accept those programs that come to us and how we prioritize them and most importantly, how they are ultimately funded. Something that we recognized. Every one of these projects need to have a light at the end of the tunnel. Whether that's
-- whether that's a nomination for a future bond or maybe priva funding sources that we're aware of. Connecting the two. This is a valuable service that mr. Shaun cooper fills for us in the moment. That position is very much appreciated. We thank council for that.
>> Morrison: Great. Then just two other points. One-on-one of our priority up met service demands, i see extending pools operating season. Can you talk a little bit about what the season is now? I know there's always a lot of significant demand for more hours, but I wonder what it is now and what you are envisioning that would be able to change.
[05:30:21]
>> Right. Right now, kimberly mcneely, assistants director of parks and recreation department. Currently the neighborhood pools open on a scattered schedule. So you may have some neighborhood pools that open the very day that school is wut and they close the day that school goes back. Some pools open the day school is out and are open until labor day. Sometimes they open on the 15th. So we have all of these different pool schedules. What we would like to do, if given this opportunity, is to have a very specific schedule where pools are open and closing in a region at given times, so everyone always has access to a swimming pool and there's not this disparity and some pools being opened longer than other pools for that season. So we want to make sure that there's equal access throughout the entire city to a pool in a neighborhood. I don't want to give you the false understanding that it would be every pool opens at the exact same day and closes on the exact same day. But we would look at it regionally and say if there's 10 pools in an area, five of them will open at this time and five of them will open at this time and they will all be open at this time until these dates so in every region there's access instead of it being a little bit scattered as it is right now.
>> Morrison: Right. I think is that scattered approach, there is some community input at the neighborhood pool level about the hours.
>> Absolutely. Usually right now the reason why we go out for community input is because it's based on the fact that we didn't have enough funding. It would be great for us to be able to
-- to open them for a longer part of the season and it doesn't
-- funding isn't the issue. Now, we can say well we can open awful the pools the day school gets out, close them the day school goes back in, keep some of them open until labor day appropriately, but right now we have them really scattered because we only have a certain number of resources.
>> Morrison: So this $184,000 would allow you to do that uniformity across all of the regions of the city?
[05:32:24]
>> Yes.
>> Morrison: Great. Then I just want to mention, we did get a memo yesterday from you all, I believe it was, and one thing we do not see on the unmet needs servicist is bartholomew is because I understand the redesign and fix for the water has been determined and the bartholomew pool construction should be going forward in the very near future.
>> That's correct. Also, if kimberly will check my thought here. That is as you have an improvement item that comes on lien, work on the budget
-- comes on line, [indiscernible] as part of your operating budget, you received that memo, as that pool would be ready to open, you would see us request when that's opening the resources needed for operations maintenance and management.
>> Morrison: The plan right now for it to open summer of 2014. So do we have funding in this budget for@ operations of that pool next summer?
>> We have
-- first of all, the original budget. There's still a bartholomew budget so there is a pool. That was never reallocated that's always sitting in that particular fund for bartholomew. And a budget submittal for approximately $40,000 to add additional life guards for the new diving well. And there are still some up met needs based on the way that the community as we figure out what the community is desiring as far as operating hours for the future, there would be some unmet needs that would have to come forward to council in the future. In future budgeting that would include, if this pool were to be open year round, if this pool were to be opened extended hours, 7:00 p.M. To 7:00 p.M.7:00 a.M. To 7:00 p.M. For example. That would be something that we would like to bring forward in the future. We submitted them as unmet needs, it didn't rise to the top because it's not going to open until
-- [multiple voices]
[05:34:30]
>> Morrison: Right. The details are still to be determined.
>> Right.
>> Morrison: On slide number 180, I don't know if you know which one it is, is that a die program for the new design for bart.
>> Yes.
>> Morrison: Great. I really appreciate you all working so diligently with the community to try to get something that's going to work for the people that live there.
>> It's going to be great.
>> Morrison: Going to be really cool. Thank you.
>> Cole: Let me ask you a couple of questions about the budget forecast. I am pleased that we finally have cemeteries in here, we are contemplating funding for some of the cemeteries, I guess all five; is that correct.
>> That's correct.
>> Cole: I know we had a big discussion about this [indiscernible] finance, i don't want to revisit
-- in audit and finance, I think it was bethany cemetery that the county had some concerns with their role versus our role. Can you update us on that.
>> I can. I'm going to give cora wright here. Her leadership has made: Nice compliments of the maintenance since the city has taken over. So cora.
>> Good morning, cora wright. First of all, yes, bethany cemetery is a cemetery that is privately owned and the city has been in communications with travis county regarding the maintenance needs for bethany. Currently not a part of the city's property. What we're looking to do is to work with the county to figure out a solution, a long-term solution for bethany. It probably will involve some level of community involvement. With civic organizations. When you look at our budget as proposed for next year, it does not include bethany because it is not a city property.
>> Because it is not city-owned. I can appreciate that. I'm glad that you cleared that up because I have received some corresponds about that. Let me switch gears a little bit and ask about the playscape park maintenance assistance, which is on your priority unmet service needs. That
-- that is kind of a disturbing number to see and recognizing that our kids are on those play scapes. Are they dangerous or do we have a safety issue or what are we saying here?
[05:36:54]
>> We are replacing our play scapes that reach that highest level of need being unsafe. I don't want to mislead the council. The problem here is that the standards, state and federal standards in regards to safety of a playground requires a constant review. The playgrounds all over the cities and parks
-- we are required to do inspections, we make sure if someone comes in and all of the mulch gets moved away, somewhere were to fall there were problems. Right now we do not have the adequate staffing to manage and maintain those play scapes. As we move forward to adding more play scapes and more different types of play scapes, more natural types of play scapes, it's imperative that we address that and make sure that we are putting that in on a format and keeping up with it.
>> Cole: As we add new play scapes is there less of a maintenance issue because they are newer and stronger?
>> The newer the better, but still doesn't keep you from having the requirement that you have to show that you've been out to them to inspect it and that you've actually taken the certain materials that we have to check for if someone has vandalized it, we have to be out there to make sure, have our eyes on it to make sure that we've seep it and corrected it.
>> Cole: Thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Councilmember martinez?
>> Martinez: Sara, i wanted to ask. Some of the council staff were told that
-- that the plan for the next year is to close audiometry, c 3 stepped up to pay for some of the improvements. I think thatll good stuff. But what is the budget impact, if anything, for all of these events that are going to be moved out of audiometry for a year. Do
-- of auditorium shores, what is the plan to that.
>> Jessie vargas has been the lead on on this can cora, we've had dialogue, looking at alternative locations and how we schedule this so it doesn't impact every one of them. Jessie can answer that in more detail.
[05:39:08]
>> Councilmember martinez, the [indiscernible]
-- cora wright may be able to elaborate on this. We have been talking to the event organizers for several years now that [indiscernible] pending that they would require or necessitate long-term closure of the facility for up to a year in order to allow for construction and growing period, much like zilker park, if you will remember.
>> Like a wooldridge recently.
>> Correct. Right. So it's part and parcel to what is necessary in order to make such a sstantial improvement. With that in mind we've been [indiscernible] that for several years. Purposely at this point in time we have blocked out that period that we are currently considering for our construction and growing window. So at this point in time, we've taken the adequate steps to notify our stakeholders out there and ensure that the window is kept open.
>> Martinez: Do we anticipate significant issues with waterloo park being closed at the exact same time, now we are closing auditorium shores.
>> There no doubt will be an impact there because waterloo will still be under somewhat construction until 2015, maybe even more as the conservancy moves forward. I think the key will be we have other parks, we have other spaces. Whether they will be acceptable locations is the key. But it won't be for our lack of trying to find alternative spaces.
>> One other thing to add on that, too, the timing is also to be considered. I know there's certain events that happen during certain times of the year, for our organizers, partners are flexible with their time it will also help book them appropriately.
>> When we do these improvements to auditorium shores, is there any conversation taking place about eliminating the leash free zone that currently exists.
>> Yes, we've had continuous ue, as a matter of jessie was at ameeting with the previous off leash group in doing three things much one the area where the events would be would be considered an off leash area where the money is going in to make improvement. Next to it on leash. The furthest area reconstructed would be a nice, large off leash area that has access to the water and it's completely been
-- will be redeveloped for off leash, it would be off leash, on leash, no dogs. And it kind of
-- everyone so far has been very amenable to saying especially since the off leash folks are getting a larger space that it also will not have the conflict that it currently has with trail users.
[05:41:49]
>> The off leash area would be moving west towards the railroad?
>> Yes, correct.
>> Martinez: The entrance to the water would be at the creek entrance as well?
>> Yes.
>> Correct, we don't have the details in front of us. But to be
-- add a little bit of clarity to the matter, we are looking at a single biggest ola in the city of austin, single biggest investment in ola in the history of the city. In terms of size you are looking at something comparable to the size they currently enjoy down by the shoreline. Clearly the area will be smaller in in comparison to the overall lawn. But with respect to the area where the dog owners take their dogs currently, it's relatively the same size actually a tiny little larger.
>> Martinez: None of this project is going to have a budget impact because c 3 is covering all of the costs or is there a combination?
>> They are covering
-- the trail head work we received a grant through parks and wildlife, then of course the help from c 3 productions is helping us get all of those things accomplished. Actually we will be coming forward to council on a briefing in the next few weeks.
>> MAY 9th.
>> Martinez: Didn't mean to steal your thunder.
>> No, no, that's okay.
>> Councilmember riley.
>> Riley: Sara, at the end of march we approved a 120 day service contract for cemetery, internment and burial services. Can you give us a brief update and how that relates to the $1.2 million item.
>> I'm going to let cora do that.
>> The city prepared to take over cemetery operations april 1. In doing that, that meant we were bringing in house three aspects of cemetery services, sales, grounds maintenance aspect and of course a third area was burial services. We had to be up to speed really quickly. Because the burial services, the part of the cemetery operations where you have to define burial spaces and have sufficient ability to and until and historical understanding about the existing terrain to bury coffins, for example, we thought it would be in the best interests of the city to do an interim burial services contract. So that the
-- so that the entity coming in is the same entity doing burials all along, who is very familiar with all of the historical burial spaces and was able to continue the burial operations while we completed the r.F.P. Process. To date, we have conducted at least 30 burials. It has all gone very, very smoothly. That existing contractor is very familiar with the grounds. And we've spent a great deal of time interfacing with all of the area funeral home services to make sure that we were prepared to
-- to make this transition without interruption. The r.F.P. Process will result in making a determination about the long-term picture. And we are still in the no contact period. But I will tell you, at the ends of that process
-- at the end of that process, we will have complete oversight of all of the cemetery operations. What's very different now is that the city of austin is doing all of the sales and collecting all of the dollars and managing all of the funeral services and with this interim contract that you asked about, we've been able to do that without interruption.
[05:45:36]
>> Is there any way that funds allocated for that services contract could be available for other cemetery services in the next fiscal year?
>> Well, what we're looking at, first of all, it does cost the city. Whether we do the actual burials ourselves. Or whether we outsource that activity, there will be dollars needed to make that happen. Some of those dollars are offset by the revenue that's generated. For example when you buy a plot, you say the city for that property. But it's not sufficient to cover all of the costs. And the complexity of the burial services require very specialized equipment. So
-- so we anticipate that
-- that we'll be
-- we'll be able to perform all of the burial services and as we're also trying to
-- to bring the quality of services back up to an acceptable level, we're going to pretty much need every dollar that we have. So if we're not doing it in-house, we will have to pay someone external to do it. Either way. The same moneys would apply.
>> Riley: Okay. On the revenue changes, i noticed that we are expecting just $.1 million more the next fiscal year than we got in fy '13. Just a couple of questions about that. The
-- the last year we did make some adjustments to the fee schedule for plaza saltillo to provide more flexibility for groups that might want the park for a shorter
-- shorter periods of time. There was some discussion at that time that that might provide a model for fee adjustments at other parks to make parks more readily available. But I don't see any indication that fee changes like that are still under consideration. Is that still a possibility?
>> [Indiscernible] financial manager for the parks and recreation department. What you are seeing there is a $100,000 incremental increase from the estimated revenue that we are projecting to generate this fiscal year. Overall we've taken a very strong look at all of our revenue, all of our fees. We have done a cost of services analysis over the last year. In certain areas we are wanting to make sure that as people are renting our facilities and our building
-- building rooms, that they are paying the full costs of that service. The staffing required and the utilities as well. So you will not see that representative
-- represented in the revenue change. If those fees are approved, it will be an additional $300,000 to the parks and recreation department's revenue budget. In addition to those full cost recovery fees, we also have proposed a non-resident admission fees. If the
-- if all of those fees are approved by council, it would generate an additional $300,000. The 100,000 is only just based on our past couple of year of trend analyses.
[05:48:44]
>> Riley: I'm not sure that I heard an answer to the question about whether we are looking at fee adjustments along the lines what was we did at saltillo, a more flexible fee schedule to allow groups, for instance, to represents parks for a shorter period of time?
>> The answer is yes. Actually as a part of the work out of our special events office, and in conjunction with the austin parks foundation and the downtown austin alliance, we're looking at fee structures downtown as it is. But we also are looking at the other parks where there's been requests for use of those where we have been able to perhaps adjust. They wanted it for a short amount of time. They weren't using electricity, those kinds of things. Those are things that we still have to see
-- there's so many parks and so many things that we need to look at, but we are looking at those on an individual basis. Jason mower has been looking at groups that want to use those parks saying okay if you are not going to use electricity, if you only want to use it for two hours we have other mechanisms in place to try to accommodate you.
>> Riley: Great. One other thing that we saw recently is that we are now charging for parking at the mexican-american culture center, there's discussion about whether the funds available for that would be available to benefit the parking area at the macc. There's also discussion about once we see parking improvements on the south side of barton springs, discussion about charging for parking there to offset costs there. Is that an ongoing discussion? And would we expect to see revenues generated from park areas benefiting pard in any way? Or would those funding just into the general fund?
>> The answer to that is yes, it's an ongoing opportunity, we are working with lela fireside in the [indiscernible] office. The further away you get from the venue of selecting the money, the harder it is to justify that use. So we have to be very careful about how we specify whether it's okay there's a retention pond area, fine, it's draining from the parking lot, that can be considered. Park rangers to help with parking monitoring, that could be used.
[05:51:00]
>> Riley: Lighting, et cetera [multiple voices] parking area.
>> We have to be very specific on [multiple voices]
>> Riley: I realize we're not talking about large amounts, but pard only indicates 1
-- $.1 million increase in revenues for the whole department for the year and it is getting close to that as I understand it. The revenues that would be available at least for dealing with issues there at the parking facility at the macc.
>> Yes. The problem there is we all have a guesstimate on that. If we do the parking district like we're hoping to be able to do along the whole central core, we know it will be more money, we don't know how much. We also know there's a lengthy process to go through especially through the
-- you know getting everything ready, coming through the council, going to the boards and commissions so we did not put that amount in there because we don't really have a good solid figure on it.
>> But you do expect that those funds would benefit the macc.
>> That would be absolutely our hope that would happen, that we could put that money back into improvements and reasonable expenditures approved by the city attorney's office that we could spend.
>> That would benefit the macc.
>> Theacc and hopefully if we do other areas.
>> Lastly on the unmet service demands. First one listed as [indiscernible] programming the amount 142,704 and one fte is indicated. I assume that's some of that money would be going to programs themselves.
>> Absolutely, additional programs and to be able to service that multi-purpose building for a longer periodú of time.
>> In the absence of providing that unmet service demand, does that mean we wouldn't see any programming at terminal roberts or how would we cope with that.
>> A very limited amount of programming and staffing at the new multi-purpose facility built and in operation right now as that current gymnasium is not completely finished
--
>> there would still be at least one fte available to deal with programming at turner roberts.
>> We would have staff there to do programming at turner roberts. This was additional money needed for the additional building that we built.
[05:53:07]
>> An sent thisitional funding
-- absent this additional funding there would be no one available.
>> Limited temporary seasonal.
>> Got it, thank.
>> Can I just follow up that
-- that on the parking question, a little bit, we have this ongoing discussion about local businesses being able to use the parks department, parking facilities and it just occurred to me that maybe this is sort of a
-- sort of a kill two birds with one stone. Maybe charging for parking regardless of for what purpose they go there, might be a good solution to that problem
--
>> we agree with you.
>> At the same time.
>> We agree with you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Yep. Okay. Councilmember tovo?
>> Tovo: Just to get back to the playscape issue for a minute, did I hear correctly to [indiscernible] percent of the play scapes are nearing the end of their life span?
>> That's correct.
>> I wasn't clear on whether the maintenance listed here as an unmet service demand takes into account the replace of those?
>> It does being able to get out there more often. Like a swimming pool, it doesn't mean it's completely out of compliance, completely bad shape. It means it's getting older, on its way out. We also know we don't have the capital dollars to go in and do a complete full swoop of all of our playgrounds. What this does is afford us the opportunity to go out and make a more objective but also each one of them gets to be seen and we check to make sure that they're safe and we have checklists that we go over because in case there were ever issues, we need to be able to approve that we have had eyes on these playgrounds.
>> And if I may add a few things, the single biggest hazard with playscapes, the leading causal factors for injury is the ground cover, fall hazard if you will. Really when you look at a playscape, you are not just looking at the structure itself, of course there's some inherent dangers there if they are not properly maintained but mostly the ground cover. This career we identified the top seven priorities which we labeled safety priority 1, those play scapes were being remediated thisser I don't. That's our approach. Director hensley's comment we know in the coming years there will be another seven to come up, how do we stay ahead of the game where we're not having to worry about seven, maybe only worrying about one a year, getting to that point.
[05:55:38]
>> Wha is the average life span, what is a life span for a playscape?
>> Depends on the type you buy. Usually they have a 20 year life span for the most part but really you are kind of pushing it at 20 years based on use patterns, weather conditions. Obviously here in texas you have pretty strong sun considerations, uv rays obviously deteriorate plastic. Well before you get to the end of the useful life span for the playscape itself, you are probably going to address the ground cover maybe seven, 10 times in the course of the playscapes life span.
>> What is
-- what is sort of the bigger game plan about
-- do you have a replacement schedule for some of those 52
-- [multiple voices]
>> just touched on it. The top seven, working on right now.
>> [Multiple voices]
>> going by priority. We have the next level i believe 10 to 12, then down into it. It's a good plan. But you can't just build them. You have to maintain them. This is something that we really need to keep our eyes on.
>> We do know that the next tier down consists of 33%, next level down. Priority 1 means replaced this year. Priority 2 meaning I have a couple more years to a, looking about a third that are in there. Again this is a combination of issues, ground cover, maybe entrapment, a worn ladder, slide
--
>> accessibility.
>> Accessibility issues. It's a myriad of issues, not one particular ailment that's attacking every playscape but things we're happy to look at. [One moment please for change in captioners] in other words, our friends in programming might come up with a brilliant idea to have a new program added to their inventory. What we'd like to have on our end, on the physical components item, is someone that can liase with them and say great, here is our advice on how to improve your facilities in order to accommodate the programming element. Kim mcneely in charge of programming has her own liaison on her end that does specifically programming curriculum for special needs.
[05:58:31]
>> Tovo: Thanks. So the staff member who is contemplated in this request is really looking at the physical aspect of it, but would have a good connection back
--
>> and there would be programming that evolves from this.
>> And part of this, we really need to do a good assessment of all of our facilities and all of our playgrounds, all of our grounds for the issues related to a.D.A. And accessibility. We're years behind.
>> Tovo: Is that
-- I've been interested to read how
-- in some other cities they have play spaces that are really much more desi for children of all abilities. So I wonder if that's kind of what you're thinking about as some of the playscapes are nearing their end of their life-span, replacing them with some of the
--
>> we should build them to where everyone can participate, whether they're permanently with special needs or temporarily because of an injury.
>> And in fact, a playscape specifically designed with everyone's needs in mind is actually safer in general for everyone. So it's something important to note as well. By virtue of installing a playscape that is accessible you're making it safer for all participants of all abilities.
>> Tovo: Do we have any playscapes like that right now that are
-- that you would say are particularly fine examples of being accessible? I say example
--
>> let me say this, the ones we're building now, yes. The ones we have in our inventory, I would say are very minimally accessible and have different challenges. But our goal as we developed ones in the future are to be opened for all abilities and levels.
>> We have several examples in the park system that have elements, that are certainly elements to be proud of, but I would say holistically we definitely have some work ahead of us.
>> Great. Seems to be important to have that be a priority as you have identified here.
[06:00:31]
>> Tovo: Can you remind me about the few changes
-- you said it earlier in response to a question and we had a good presentation of some really fine work at our audit and finance meeting that kimberly mcneely did about changes with fee scale that are program relate and I think I understood that the budget in front of us, the revenues contemplated before us don't take those into account because they haven't been approved yet. What is the time frame?
>> That is. I owe you
-- I owe the audit and finance committee a return visit where we're going to give you data that would say if we were to make x number of programs no charge, if we had a sliding scale, etcetera, etcetera, how that would impact the revenue and the number of individuals that we believe that that would impact their ability to participate. So we owe you some information and it's our intent to come back to audit and finance either the end of may or the end of june. I guess there's only one meeting a month. It would be may on are june.
>> Tovo: And the next step would be it would go to full council for approval during the budget cycle?
>> The way that the fees are set up in our current fee schedule is that
-- we have a range that allows us to move up and down in that range. And so if there was the decision that we would have no fee, we would beaking certain things that would be no fee, then absolutely that would have to come basketball council. But if we were making a decision that we were having a sliding scale, the fee scale that we have right now would allow to us do that.
>> Tovo: Okay. And then I guess depending on what happens there, then there might be some changing in terms of our budget, the budget projections that we see.
>> Yes.
>> Tovo: Great, thanks. I apologize for having to ask you that question again. I know we talked about it in audit and finance but i couldn't remember what the time frame was. So I guess one last question and I
-- it's not really a question. I'll just say when we have the briefing from staff, it sounds like maybe at our next meeting, about kind of the activity going on in auditorium shores and whatnot, I wonder if we could also get information on how owe so there was an event over the last weekend at butler park and I have heard some concerns from the community about some of the damage they're witnessing in butler park. And I have actually seen some photos. I wonder if I could address that issue in our briefing. Unless you want to address it now and maybe give us some more specifics about how you're looking at these kinds of expenses to the parks department and how well they're being folded into the cost of putting on those events so that they don't become a burden for the parks department?
[06:03:23]
>> We will be able to answer that later, but real briefly I'll tell you I made the decision and I'll take full responsibility to move this event over to this area for the reason of auditorium shores had been a dust bowl. And knowing that we were bringing in these different chefs and groups and it was a 1500 number of people. It was a very low number and therefore I felt after conversing with other staff that it would be a very low impact. But the other part of it was it was c 3 productions who put this on who have a history of being very good and very knowledgeable partner with us in preparing and then taking care of damage to the park. So the good news here is while there may be a little damage, I assure you that they will come back and repair beyond in most cases what was already there and have committed to do that at their full expense. And so that is only reason why I allowed that, but i will take full responsibility because I'm the one who did give them permission to move over there.
>> Tovo: Thank you. And thank you for explaining that about c 3 productions beuse they have really lived up to that in their events in other places and i think that will give assurance to community members. I have seen that damage and been concerned about it.
>> We will make sure they do and they have been really good approximate about doing that.
>> Tovo: But I think if you could address that in the presentation. I'm not exactly sure what the presentation is about, if it's about special events more generally or if it's about auditorium shores more specifically?
>> It's about auditorium shores but we'll add in a part to talk about what are we doing to ensure
-- and this ties back to what we want to do at auditorium shores is to prepare the land better to handle that kind of use, but how will we ensure it stays that way?
>> Tovo: That would be great. Thanks very much. I think that's my last question on this for the day.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. So it's a little bit of a noon. Didn't quite make our morning goal, but I think it's time to go into recess and come back at 12:57.
[07:02:20]
>> Mayor Leffingwell: So we're out of recess, and we'll begin with animal services. Introduce yourselves.
>> Abigail smith, chief animal services offers. With me, chris noble deputy chief and kimberly maddox, our financial manager.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. Any questions for animal services? I did see you had a sale a couple of weeks ago, an adoption, reduced rate
-- 20 bucks or something like that.
>> Yes, sir. Our animals are on sale.
[ Laughter ]
>> Mayor Leffingwell: So it was due to oversupply, I assume. Did that have any effect on that?
>> You know, typically, we're able to address overcapacity issues by bringing it to the attention of the community and asking for some help with adoptions. This time, sadly, it wasn't really sufficient. In fact, today, I think we're finding ourselves with 57 fewer kennels than we have dogs for. So animals are still on sale today.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Any other questions?
>> We have 57 fewer kennels than we have dogs for
--
[ laughter ]
-- so our animals are still on sale.
>> I have one.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Yes, sir.
>> I'm looking at your priority in service demands. First, are these in priority order? First degree, second degree and so on.
[07:04:20]
>> Yes, we did put them in priority order. While the needs are especially between customer service and animal care are certainly parallel, I think we came up with that priority because customer service takes a long time to train and to become familiar with all the aspects of all the different things that customer service does. So having a permanent workforce in that community is critical. Whereas, in animal care, we see more turnover, takes a little less time to train. If we have to staff with temporary people, that's a little easier in animal care.
>> Human care is more complicated than animal care.
>> Undoubtedly, sir.
>> What will we be able to do WITH FIVE MORE FTEs IN Customer care than we are now.
>> We are doing what we should be in customer service. Coming up on two years, now, those are temporary positions, so it would be just making those temporaries permanent.
>> Spelman: And the value of doing that in your world is going to be what?
>> Well two, things, again, the turnover is challenging and temporary employees don't stick around when they have offers of permanent employment elsewhere.
>> Spelman: Okay.
>> But also we're chronically in violation of the temporary employee policy and we wish not to be that way.
>> Too many temporary employees doing permanent persons' jobs.
>> Yes.
>> That's the policy that shouldn't happen too often?
>> Correct.
>> And this is the same justification for customer service as it is for animal care?
>> Exactly.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Chris.
>> Riley: I understand you have more animals at the new center than kennels.
>> Spelman:57.
>> That's just dogs.
[ Laughter ]
>> Riley: The e.M.S. Service demands we're seeing would provide additional staffing but not additional capital expenses for improvements such as additional kennels. How would that work? With additional money to deal with that problem, that would help
-- how would that
-- would that money be directed towards overflow at plac (phonetic) or how would that work?
[07:06:38]
>> The unmet service demand request we have here is simply to take the employees we are already paying to take care of all these animals and make some part of them permanent rather than chronically temporary. In terms of the space, every day, we just shuffle things and make do and find places and work really hard to get adoptions and transfers to keep up with the number of animals coming in. To answer the capacity issues, that is a capital issue and animal services put in two cip asks for two additional kennels to be built on site. It's a separate process but a need we are pursuing.
>> Riley: If you got that, having the
-- the level of staffing you're requesting, that would work out fine because that staff would be in a better position to take care of the additional kennels? You would be fully staffed to cover the additional kennels?
>> Not the entire project. I think it would be fair to say that, if we were able to build the kennels, we probably could operate with the staffing level we got if we got those permanent positions because that would allow us not to operate two permanent locations at the same time. We could transfer the limited number of kennels we have access to at town lake, they could be off-site at the animal center and all staff could be in place. That could achieve efficiency and absorb the staffing level -required for that.
>> Riley: Any particular assumption about continued utilization of town lake as an overflow facility?
>> At this moment, it's certainly not our wish to operate town lake, as it's not ideal, however, there is no other alternative.
>> We're assuming that will remain in place and I see there is an additional
-- some additional amount for utilities there, although, again, we don't have a breakdown of the individual cost drivers. We just know in aggregate what they add up to?
[07:08:47]
>> Yes, I think we are assuming that, for the life of the existing end force license agreement for town lake, that we will be continued to require to pay 50% of the utilities in there. That's why it's in there. It will go for at least the next two years. And in that utilities number was also a pretty significant increase in the cost to operate austin animal center over town lake. It's just a much bigger, more complicated facility.
>> Okay. The third on that service demand is for two full-time employees for the behavior program.
>> Mm-hmm.
>> We currently have one, i think you said, on the video?
>> That's correct.
>> But you're saying you need more to be effective.
>> Yes.
>> Why is that?
>> The primary purpose for the behavior program, especially as it is a very small program right now, is to provide thorough evaluations on animals that give us concern or worry in terms of them being safe to place in the community. So when animals come in with, you know, some behavior that is% troublesome or with a history that bothers us, it's very important that, you know, well-trained staff take a look at the animals, do an evaluation and say this is a good candidate to be adopted out, this is not a good candidate to be adopted out, what are the other options for this animal. So the volume of animals coming in that present with an issue or
-- it's impossible for one person to keep up with the volume that's coming through. Since it seems to me it's a pretty significant public safety issue, we need to keep up with the number of evaluations we think is proprietary to do.
>> Riley: Given the levels of funding in the budget outside the unmet service demand, the amounts continuing with the amounts that are currently in the budget, do you foresee any problems with maintaining the status over the coming fiscal year?
[07:10:55]
>> In terms of dollars, I don't know that that's a significant issue. Certainly the most significant issue is capacity and the number of adoptions we're able to do. There are many forces involved with that calculation about do i think we can keep up or not. In terms of the budget, especially with the permanent employees, I think we could maintain. The forces outside of how we operate are things we can't control and I couldn't aner.
>> Riley: Okay. I think what you're saying is WITH THE ADDITIONAL FTEs, YOU Could do it.
>> Yes.
>> Riley: With the additional items listed under the service demands, you could do it.
>> Yes.
>> Riley: The converse, without these, you're not sure you could maintain the fill status?
>> They would have to be temporary employees. The problem is not only the whole policy and what's right to do by our workforce. The other issue is the funds that we use to pay for those temporary employees are coming out of other programs that i want to put back in those programs to grow them, to keep pace with the no-kill goal. So you have to rob peter to pay paul and that's true in paying 20 temporary employees every year. So if I could put that funding back into the program pots I'm siphoning it off of, that will help us to staff well and have a program budget to help us grow and keep up with the
--
>> Riley: What are the main programs?
>> Off-site adoptions. We'll be able more off-site events. The best is we could retrofit our retail space in the community, a satellite adoption location.
>> Riley: That's part of the long-term plan.
>> Exactly, and instead, we are paying temporary employees to keep up every day.
[07:12:57]
>> Riley: I see. Before we spoke in terms of having more than one satellite location maintained permanently.
>> Yes.
>> Riley: If we were to meet the service demands and apply full-time staff instead of temporary staff, do you think you would be able to open one satellite within the next year?
>> I do.
>> Riley: Okay. Thanks.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Other questions? Mayor pro tem.
>> Cole: I notice on your total projected revenues of 1.4 million, most of that was with travis inner county of 1.2 million. I'm wondering if we have the same issue with travis county as with e.M.S. That we're serving a large portion of the county but the interlocal is not serving revenues.
>> The problem with the interlocal in travis county in terms of animal services is it only serves the unincorporated areas. First, animal don't see municipal boundaries. Second, many of the incorporated municipalities within the county don't provide any animal services, so they're lie triking relying onthe city of austin anyway. When time is an issue, all the municipalities in travis county, all are depending on us. We are in conversation with the county to talk about that and look at solutions.
>> Cole: Okay. I appreciate that.
>> Maddox, chief administrative officer.So part of the increase in the rev from travis county from fy14 results in the demographics. So we have the cost model for the interlocal is based partially on how much of the general overall population in the unincorporated areas. That has gone up the last couple of years in a row. So that feeds a good portion of the increase, is that increase in their share
-- pro rata share of the population thathe interlocal is serving.
[07:15:20]
>> So the unincorporated area of the population on a pro rata basis increased?
>> Yes, sir.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: That's in line with what I've heard that, basically, not just for the county but the entire central texas msa that, outside of the city is growing about three times as fast as inside the city.
>> Cole: And we're not being compensated for that?
>> The cost models do incorporate that. One of the factors that feeds into how much they pay in our total operating is based on that percentage, so we get that percentage every year updated. So that higher percentage is figured into the cost model and, so, the reason travis county
-- one reason for the travis county revenue is to hire 14 is because of that increase so their pro rata share is larger.
>> Cole: Still we are providing all the services for the city of austin even though it's in travis county? Okay.
>> In essence, that agreement allows for that increase to be compensated for and what we do is take several years of data and then that's reflected in the projected increases. So that's already in the agreement. In effect, the county has agreed to that. So what we're projecting here is that increase that they will be paying in this next fiscal year as a result of that.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Council member martinez.
>> Martinez: I want to look at plojections for revenue next year. Adoption fees, have we met the projections in the last couple of years in we have free adoption days, waive fees, we're really trying to get the animals adopted and out of the shelter, did we meet projections in the last couple of years and can we meet them this year? Or is that number reflective of not having all these reduced amount days?
[07:17:26]
>> I think, over the past several years, each year the revenue projections are going down because of that being a successful tactic in getting animals adopted. So any increase in revenue projected going forward is not necessarily based on adoptions, it's based on other fees. For example, out of jurisdiction, there is a fee if you bring us an animal and we have to accept it for one reason or another, it will cost you $160. That fee hasn't contributed greatly, but we anticipate as we have the dialogue with other incorporated municipalities that they're going to use our services because they don't have any other option, they're at least going to pay, so that's the projection of revenue we're seeing grow. In terms of adoptions, I would not project a strong increase there. It's not good retail business.
>> What is the adoption fees we raised this year? Or maybe in 2012, since that's a full year? We're projecting 105,000 for 2014?
>> Do we have the adoption one? We're projecting 105- for '14, i can get you a figure for '12.
>> Martinez: Thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Thank you very much. And we'll go to library. While you're getting seated, i want to let everybody know we had a very successful kickoff last night of the mayor's book club at the at&t center, huge crowd, biggest I've seen. I've got one of the books upstairs now. I promise to start on it r soon. One is the yellow birds and the long billy gull's long walk somewhere. But they're both novels about veterans of the iraq, afghanistan war period.
[07:19:40]
>> Good afternoon, mayor leffingwell, mayor pro tem cole and counsel members. WITH ME IS dana McBee, our assistant director for support services and victoria reeger who is our budget officer.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Council member tovo.
>> Tovo: I have a couple of questions. I wanted to start by saying i notice in your presentation, you've got a photograph of the downloadables at the austin public library. I wanted to say, lately, in the last couple of weeks, several people rave about the service. That's one of the interesting new things you're able to offer. 12,000 a month check out.
>> Tovo: We haven't made the transition in our house, but i hear it's fabulous and I've heard lots of praise about it. I have a couple of questions. One is I noticed in your presentation that you talked about that there are not youth librarians at all locations. Win ones do not have yo librarians?
>> I don't know have that with me but there are two that don't have youth librarians.
>> Tovo: Is that an unmet need or a projection?
>> One of the things we're asking for in the 13 unmet need positions, two are youth librarians.
>> Tovo: And then I think what I would like to do is
-- we had a discussion earlier, council member spelman mentioned it first and it's come up before about the fact we don't really have mandated increases in staff or practices of increasing staff as our population rises in all departments, though we do do that practice in the austin police department. I was wondering, if we applied such an approach to the library system, what would be some of the areas that ought to be triggered by a population increase? In terms of the metric you used, materials per capita is one measure that is standard.
[07:22:03]
>> Right.
>> Tovo: Would staffing be another.
>> Because of the increased demand in every area, including behind the scenes, staffing. In 2002, we had lowest staffing per service hour of any peer library and continued to be in that place. Even though we've added staff, we've l 30 positions in the last six or seven years over the budget, in the last ten years, actually. We've replaced some of those, but we have a ways to go. But we're still at the bottom of the list as far as staffing for service hours. So we've got catch-up to do even before we start adding staff on for population growth.
>> Tovo: I think your presentation makes the point at the same time circulation increased, so we have fewer staff and much more demand.
>> Yes, and also over the last six years, we've expanded six branches. So we're expanding the square footage, services and materials over the system with no additional staff. So the problem is compounded.
>> Tovo: I guess I wondered if another measure might be program attendance. Is that also something that, as the population increases, you would want to consider
-- not program attendance, but generally program support, or would that be captured by staff increases?
>> It would be captured by staffing but it is a separate issue. We have a demand for youth and computer programs that we can't meet now. We should be adding additional computer programs but we are not because we are down with staffing levels.
[07:24:04]
>> Tovo: Thanks. I have been mulling over that as we've gone through the dao what it would look like if we had that kind of a practice in other departments that are really impacted when our pop whraition increases, there is much more demand on your libraries, so those would show up in terms of program support money, staffing needs and then materials budget. So if you think of any other areas where we would need to see an increase, that would be helpful to know.
>> We could send you the other areas, the behind the scenes kind of areas.
>> Tovo: Thank you. I think I said this last year, i think you do an amazing job with very limited resources. I wish the latter part weren't so, that we didn't have such limited resources and we could figure out a way to make sure the budget is commensurate with your demand on important services.
>> Thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Council member spelman.
>> Spelman: I agree with council member tovo in that respect. You get less done every year with more available. I appreciate it.
>> I thank you for acknowledging that because the staff do an amazing job with what they have.
>> Spelman: My household uses the downloadable materials, and I just shared my ebook with my wife for her book club meeting a couple of weeks ago. She said, this is really easy to use. There are real pages and everything.
[ Laughter ] I'm sorry, I've seen for a while, othereople even have seen why that would be an increase
-- a good thing to be increased. Let me ask you
-- first a compliment then a question. The compliment is I got a better sense from your description of unmet service demands. Question, what can you do with it that you can't do without it. You already answered that question. I understand exactly why you WANT 13 MORE FTEs IN THE Libraries and why customer service will be better off with them than without. I want you to know I appreciate the fact I don't have to ask that question. Let me follow up on what council member tovo was talking about. If there were some level of service floor, which I know in a lot of other cities, there is a level of service floor for every single service department in the city. We have got one now kind of sort of for the police department but for no other service. If we were to have one for libraries, what would be the right way to measure the level of service? What would be the right number TO ATTACH FTEs TO?
[07:26:53]
>> What we do right now is we benchmark ourselves against peer libraries.
>> Spelman: Okay.
>> And we aim for the average of our peer libraries.
>> Spelman: Okay.
>> We're not anywhere close in a lot of different areas, but t something that we can aim toward.
>> Spelman: Okay. So how do you want the average? Average per person? Average per
--
>> in any area. For example, average materials per capita, average materials budget per capita, average staffing per service hour, average cues codial and aintenance personnel per square foot. It will vary depending on the program, but we can get those to you.
>> I'd like to see them in part because we're interested in the library budget and in part because you guys have gone through the level of standard of service setting which we would be interested in doing for all city services and we haven't done in a sensible way. So I would be happy to take a look at that. Generally speaking, if I were to ASK YOU HOW MANY FTEs DO YOU Need, would the primary driver be circulation, square footage, materials?
>> It varies on the program we're talking about. For the branches right now, in the central library right now, what we do, because we have to be modest in what we ask for, we just try to keep the doors open is a very honest answer. We shuffle people all over the system in order to just keep the doors open. In facilities, for example, we try to have, well, let's use security. I'm asking for two security guards this time. We try
-- we have four security guards who work full time at the central library, then we have nine other guards who roam the branches. Ideally, we would love to have one security guard per facility. I don't think that's realistic as far as funding levels go. So what we try to do is keep our incident report from increasing. We try to maintain or lessen the number of incident reports. And two years ago, you gave us two security guards and our security incidents were reduced slightly. And, so, if we see them going up, we might ask you for additional security guards to try to keep them level or reduce them.
[07:29:46]
>> Spelman: How often do you have incid in the libraries?
>> We have 2,000 a year, i think. Is that right?
>> Anywhere between 1200 and 1800 a year.
>> Spelman: So 5 or 10 a day. This happens on a daily basis?
>> Routinely.
>> Spelman: Very routinely. Do you think postmortem is on these?
>> Absolutely.
>> Spelman: Where they come from, is there a way to prevent it or headed it off before it got out of control.
>> Absolutely. I read every incident report, so does dana and our other system director, so does the head of security. We all review and discuss what could have been handled better, how do we prevent this. So all of those 2,000 security incidents are reviewed, analyzed, discussed, we train all the staff, not just security, but all the staff on how to handle something better ,how to predict something happening. It's a constant awareness and attention to.
>> Spelman: And the security people and the branch librarians, the personnel in the branches are involved in the postmortem, they have a chance to contribute to what was going on?
>> Absolutely. We call them, probably just about every day, one of us is calling and saying, you know what? You could have probably handled this a little differently, or I've noticed on this incident report you weren't thorough enough. I need a little bit more information so we can decide how to prevent this or handle it better the next time. We have training regularly for the security staff and the regular staff, so we really try to stay on top of it.
>> So if you were to say
-- let me draw a conclusion, because i realize we have limited time. I would love to have a longer conversation on that. If I were to ask you what's the best way to solve your security problem or reduce your incidents further and you were to come back and say we need two security guards, that would not be based on a mathematical formula. It would be based on we've reviewed several thousand incidents, we've done what we can with the incidents we've got. Here's exactly how the security guards would be used to reduce incidents?
[07:32:12]
>> Yes. I think I probably speak for most directors. When we ask you for something, we know we're low-balling it. We're trying to be a team player and be modest. I realize I'm not going from zero to 60 in solving my problems in one year, so we try to be tactical and strategic about what we ask you for, and balance
-- I mean, we need help in every area. You're in the going to be able to do that. So what would help us most this year in being helpful.
>> Spelman: Thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Council member spelman, if I could provide a quick response, part of the nature of the library OPERATIONs SUCH THAT, AS HARD As the staff have tried in this review approach of trying to prevent many of these ibs denses just by the nature of the population and the folks that we have at the facility, we're going to continue to have the incidences occurring. Also the fact our security guards are not armed. You know, they're well-trained. We've even gone to very unique type of training to handle certain type of behaviors and incidences, but they're not, you know, the police types in any way, shape or form. That in itself doesn't lend for folks to see them as strong authoritative figures and also puts them in a situation where these incidences will continue to occur. So I think the bottom line is staff does the best they can, but we continue to deal with them. We minimize as many as we can, but it's, by the very nature of the operations, that we continue to deal with it.
>> Spelman: I understand you're constrained with resources and are doing the best you can. Thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Council member morrison?
>> Morrison: I also want to congratulate you for doing a good jobs. One of my favorite things on a sunday afternoon is hang out at central library. It's great. Swimming at barton springs, you should know that.
[07:34:20]
[ Laughter ] there are families down there and people running into each other and people sitting in corners reading. It's really a great scene. I wanted to look at the materials per expenditures
-- i mean, material expenditures per capita on what our slide 139 is. We are willfully below peer cities. We did a couple of infusions recently. Is that the difference between the 2.84 and the 3.44 that we see there? And yet we're still
-- so we were able to maintain that for the next year. But we are still now below half.
>> She's saying it doesn't include capital.
>> Morrison: So we did another half million.
>> We did last year get a little
--
>> dana. If you're looking at the operating, it includes that. But the capital for the new central library we got doesn't include that.
>> Morrison: Is that the half million I'm thinking of? 800,000 last year and 1.2 million this year.
>> Morrison: Okay. So my question is how do our peer cities find money to fund their libraries when we can't?
>> Boy, if I had that answer ...
[ Laughter ] some of them are library districts.
>> Morrison: Okay.
>> So they millage
-- I don't know if you know how that works
-- some have special revenue from a certain sales tax.
>> Morrison: We have some in library districts here.
>> Right. And some have millage based on property tax. Some just, they don't have that situation, but they're just funded better through their governmental body.
>> Morrison: I think it would be really
-- I think there is a question. Can you describe what millage is?
>> Millage. Okay. Percentage of property tax, for example. In some cases, it's a percentage of sales tax on something in particular.
[07:36:28]
>> Tovo: Interesting. Thank you.
>> Morrison: I just think it would be interesting to talk to some of them. I mean, are their general funds split up differently? Do they not have the same public safety issues? We're doing better than lots and lots of cities around the country. I wonder if there are some folks we could reach out to who are some of our pierce that are not in library districts. Do you know right off the top of your head?
>> Seattle
-- the top three, denver, seattle and cincinnati. I know denver and seattle are not. They just are funded through their government.
>> Morrison: I would be really interested to know if, through an informal interview process or something, we could get any insight into. And looks like we're way behind. Way behind. So do you have contacts you might be able to make?
>> Absolutely. Great. That would be really interesting. Just to understand more on slide number 142, you have graphed visit per capita and circulation per capita and you see that visits are going down and that's probably because our hours and days are being curtailed of open libraries, but circulation is going up per capita at the same time that we have, you know, lots of our people here. So is that because of the downloadables? Do they count as circulation?
>> They do.
>> Morrison: Do you think that's part of why it may be going up? Because you don't have to go to the library.
>> It is, but every year, our circulation has gone up 2% to 8% every year. One year was 11%.
>> Morrison: Per capita circulation.
>> Yes.
>> Morrison: Do we know why?
[07:38:28]
>> People in austin are well read. They love to read, they love to be informed. They use their library.
>> Morrison: We love our book stores, but the fact of the matter is there is a lot of free reading to do at the library.
>> Right.
>> Morrison: It's interesting we have the continued increase.
>> Another interesting phenomenon, when the internet took over and people predicted books would no longer be viable and libraries would close, it's the opposite. Now people are on the internet talking about books, promoting their book and media, so people are becoming more aware of what's available and come to the library to get it. So it did the opposite for us.
>> Morrison: That's very interesting. Just one more question you mentioned, we got a capital infusion to start preparing our materials for the central library, and the ground-breaking is
--
>> may 30 at 11:00. Thank you for mentioning that.
>> Morrison: Very exciting. When do we expect it then to actually open?
>> Spring of 2016.
>> Morrison: So we have a ways to go before we see operational influx in our budget on that.
>> Yes.
>> Morrison: Okay. MAY 30th, SEE YOU THEN. Thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Can you download other things besides books? Movies? Things like that?
>> You can. We stream music, videos, audio books.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: It's off the budget but I thought I had to do that.
[ Laughter ] any other questions? Okay.
>> Thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Appreciate what you do. Health and human services. So just introduce yourself.
[07:40:34]
>> Director of health and human service and kimberly maddox, chief administrative officer for health and human services.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Thank you. Any questions for the health department? Council member martinez.
>> Martinez: When I see the line that workforce development transferred in, what workforce development are we referring to?
>> I'll ask kimberly to answer that.
>> I'll have to get you the details because I don't have it in front of me.
>> I know it's a million dollars, but I'm not certain.
>> But is that our workforce development through alliance or some other program?
>> I'm sorry, I don't want to speculate.
>> Submit that as a budget question.
>> Absolutely.
>> Riley: I had a question about the cost drivers. The last three items under department like cost drivers, it's not obvious why those are cost drivers. One is a decrease in one-time funding for child, inc., The other is the center for child protection is transferred to the austin police department and the last is the animal protection supervisor is transferred to animal services. So all those things, we're getting a decrease in funding, our transfer to child protection and animal supervisor, but it's not obvious why any of those things would increase the cost.
>> The net effect. It's not necessarily an increase. I've had the same question myself. It's maybe a terminology thing.
>> Riley: So those are all revenue reductions?
[07:42:37]
>> Yes.
>> Riley: Revenue reductions as opposed to actual costs going up.
>> That's correct. Those three items are actually reductions to
-- in thetical calculations to
-- in the calculations to come to the forecast. The net result of the department-wide is this $72,000 increase, but the last are actual transfers out of hhsd to come to that final bottom line calculation.
>> Riley: Thanks.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Quick question. I don't want you to answer it now, but I'd like for you to provide me with a breakdown on the fy13 budget 26.9 million social service contracts and also a comparison of peer cities, what their cities do.
>> Yes, sir.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay? Mayor pro tem.
>> Cole: For now, on your revenue forecast, again, we have listed interlocal travis county, I'm trying to get a feel for what that agreement looks like between us, how is that sharing with social service?
>> I understood the question. Technically, we don't share with social services or compete with the county.
>> Cole: Just what the interlocal
--
>> exactly. That's the way I understood the question. But we do teen pregnancy prevention services, environmental health services, immunizations, std prevention, education type services.
>> Cole: Are you making sure it's not a duplication of efforts?
>> Well, they purchased the services from us because they're not capable of providing thelma wyatt cummings mooreselves.
[07:44:40]
>> Cole: The next item $3.5 million for environmental health services, help me understand what that is.
>> Those are the themes from the inspections that we do plan reviews and permits for restaurants, permits for pools.
>> Cole: Those are our permitting fees?
>> Yes.
>> Cole: Okay. I wanted to look at your unmet needs. There are some safety concerns with the lack of security guards. Who would those be used for?
>> Historically, we had security guards at patient-centered or client-centered areas and those were removed prior to me coming here, I think about three or four years ago, and now we don't have any security guards at any of my facilities and some of them, because we work with at-risk and high-risk clients, we've begun to have incidents and also changing in the environment in the neighborhoods we work have resulted in incidents, not necessarily threats to the staff directly, but threats to our clients and folks that visit our facilities.
>> Cole: So you're saying you need those on a contract basis, NOT FTEs.
>> Yes.
>> Cole: Let me ask you about the homeless prevention program and social service contracts. I see that 453,000 seems very low considering the homeless situation we're facing in the city. Is that leveraged with other funds or how does that work?
>> Absolutely. It's more to conduct the work we're involved with our partners as opposed to adding a large amount of additional staff to the department. We're talking about case management services. We're also talking about money made available to prevent homelessness, in the first place, like if somebody needs a security deposit or short on a utility bill, we would have funding to prevent that.
>> Cole: Are we actually funding case managers?
[07:46:44]
>> We do a lot of that in the social services rfb and through contract at the arch.
>> I also notice you have an unmet need for the african-american quality of life average program. What needs to be done there.
>> The health statistics there are not the health statistics in travis county and austin. We have been involved with more screening type initiatives making sure folks know if they're hypertensive with diabetic or prediabetic and then referring them out for services, but we don't do follow-up. We need to create a more comprehensive program in order to do follow-up with the population making sure not only are we advising them of health needs but they have follow-up and we have good results for african-americans.
>> Cole: I know the african-american population is disproportionate from a lot of illnesses but also aids prevention.
>> Absolutely.
>> What are we doing there?
>> Well, since african-americans are in the population that's at greatest risk, we have a program which does a lot of funding around those needs and general fund dollars dedicated through our communicable disease community. We're also entering into partnerships with some of our churches to do grassroots community-based work through the pastors and that's a new project we have now, particularly with pastor gayland clark, we're really planning on how to utilize the african-american quality of life program and the program's vast resources to work with the population, especially around the population having sex with member and females are at great risk.
>> Cole: It's come to my attention females were having risk of aids because of contact with males.
[07:48:49]
>> Yes.
>> Cole: Are we doing something about that?
>> We do some of that through teen pregnancy prevention because the greatest risk is between 14 and 24 years of age. But again, we want to do something more comprehensive and do some collective community-based services through the churches in particular.
>> Cole: Okay, thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Council member martinez.
>> Martinez: I want to go up on the same page as mayor pro tem coal on the priority in that service. As we talked about with the fire department, council member morrison talked about mobile food vending, is that related to bricks and mortar?
>> The good news is all our business is growing whether fixed or temporary events or mobile eateries. They're all growing, we need to be abledto keep up with the growth of the business and right now we're having a bit of a struggle.
>> So, at the same time, in the budget cycle, will we contemplate revisiting that fee structure to see if it might be able to pay for itself or generate revenue as opposed to unmet need?
>> We're working on revised fee structure in budgeting as we speak.
>> Martinez: Thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Council member morrison.
>> Morrison: To follow up on tha if we get an increase in fee that should cover that, will we see it as an unmet need or will it be automatically covered because we see an increase in fees? Because I know it gets complicated because our fees go into the general fund.
>> Typically, at this early stage in the forecast, we're not projecting revenues council may or may not approve. If we bring back a budget recommendation to fund additional positions for the mobile food inspection program and that's tied to a fee increase and we bring that together as a package, there's still a demand for more of the service than we have the ability to meet right now. So we're still having discussions about what fee proposal and how we tie that to an increase in staffing and that would be brought forward as part of the budget for council to approve or not approve.
[07:51:16]
>> Morrison: I guess I would fully expect to seething like that for these and the fire department, explicitly for the mobile food vendor, because we talked about that to make sure it was a cost of service that it wasn't going to be costing dollars drainage from the general fund. We need to spend that on police and libraries. Great. Can you give us an overview of the timing for the next round of social service contracts? I know you have been working on a new sort of paradigm to look at it, and you will be coming to the health and human services subcommittee soon. Can you talk about that?
>> It's got to be before health and human services committee next month hopefully. Actually, it will be in may in a couple of weeks.
>> Morrison: All right.
>> We are looking at a time of releasing the rfp in september or october, looking at a life continual-based approach focusing on the key aspects of a human life a opposed to basic needs or some other formats we've used in the past. Again, we look at
-- we're looking at an awards cycle be october 2014.
>> Morrison: Because the ones we have in place now are available to go through 2014
-- I mean till then. And one question I have on the unmet needs, you have described a new maternal infant outreach program and I wonder if you could clarify the difference between that and the healthy families program. It sounds very similar to me. What kind of distinction do you see there?
>> Essentially, the healthy families unit is run by the counties and based on referrals. A lot of the referrals are from cps. What we intend to do with the mia program is focusing on at-risk populations, namely african-americans, because they have two and a half times the infant mortality rate of other populations but also latinos and african-americans when it comes to receiving prenatal care. Right now the department has no dollars invested in preconception-prenatal care, which is something we want to correct because not only do we want healthy outcomes, but to promote healthy birth outcomes, we need healthy women. That's where preconception work comes in. Healthy families is focused on zero to three where the mother has had the child and having good relationships with the child and parenting skills, coping skills, problem-solving skills, whereas mia is more about making sure that the woman is healthy, understands what nutrition she needs to engage in, nutritional activities she needs to engage in, making sure she goes to her appointments, making sure she has access to those appointments and if transportation is an issue, resolving those issues.
[07:54:34]
>> So am I understanding correctly that basically it's going to work pre-birth, whereas healthy families, they don't do prenatal work?
>> They don't have prenatal work.
>> Would you align this at all? So it's really adding a new phase to the healthy families that we have to call it something else. Can't we expand healthy families.
>> It's a county program and staffed by county staff, bras, whereas mia is community based. It's a more cost effective model and we use peer educators versus professional staff.
>> Morrison: Who are the partners funding?
>> We have generated the list. We'll have a meeting in june with the community partners. We don't want to pre-determine who our partners should be. We want to have a conversation with the community regarding what the needs are, what they perceive them to be and who's in the best position to deliver them. The focus point is around generating capacity around community health workers, focus to look like the family and speak the same language and can ensage in meaningful conversations with supervision through the cvo and health and human services department.
>> Morrison: So I assume that it really follows along the same kind of model of let's invest money here because the pay-out
-- return on investment, even in dollars
-- I mean, beyond the good that it does in helping people, even in dollars, it really pays off?
>> Absolutely. You know, we have a tendency to focus on the symptoms of the problem rather than root causes. Symptoms are important, too, but we're trying to address the rood causes to have better outcomes.
>> Morrison: The past point and question I have, you mentioned the particular disparities that we have in the african-american community in the city of austin are in travis county and you provide add public health report a while ago that made it clear that african-americans, there are many statistics that are way beyond any other cohort in the city. It's my understanding, also, though, that there are specific challenges in the hispanic community. I mean, across all of them. But could you speak a little bit about
-- I believe did you say healthy families also has particular sections of it that work with hispanic families in particular?
[07:57:17]
>> According to my colleagues sherry fleming, when the program was created in the county, it wasn't necessarily directed at any particular population. Both units are heavily involved in serving latinos. We're very mindful of who's getting what and making sure there is a sense of equity and resource distribution, but the latinos have two units serving them. African-americans don't have a unit
-- well, they didn't have a unit specifically for them. So we really wanted to promote that unit and thank you for your support in providing the funding to make it a reality.
>> Morrison: Right. I think it's interesting you and I went and visited an avante classroom this week.
>> Yes.
>> Morrison: One of the takeaways is how culturally customized that program is for young hispanic families.
>> Yes.
>> Morrison: And the idea of expanding it to other particular demographics, it would have to change because it really does work very specifically with cultural issues.
>> That's absolutely true. You know, some of the indicators may be similar, but there is a lot of cul nuances between the populations. More effectively engaged or at least addressed through relevant approaches. We're very excited with the partnerships involving social medicine, engaging clinicians in public health activities, also.
>> Morrison: One more question, you mentioned the african quality of life outreach program, are there any health-specific components of the hispanic quality of life report and program that we have?
>> Do we have any specific activities directed at
--
[07:59:19]
>> Morrison: I guess two questions. Is there a call for any health-related element of that and, if there is, are we doing it?
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Council
>> I'm not sure I understand your question. If you're asking if we're connecting back to the current effort of the hispanic quality of life work group, we are.
>> Morrison: Okay.
>> What we've done very purposefully is take their issues and specifically put it out to the relevant departments, in this case the healthcare piece, the department carlos and his executive team and staff have actually reviewed the issues and demographics and have been a part of helping to provide input to the work group about relative issues. But at the end of the day, the work group takes it and puts it in their own words for them to come up with their own recommended strategies. So, yes, carlos and his staff have been very much tied into that and we've tried to make sure we look at the whole spectrum of healthcare, from prenatal to zero to the seniors as a whole. So, yes, we have been doing that.
[ One moment please for change in captioners ] excluded from participating in those programs simply because they are not african-american or latino or white. The programs are open to everyone.
[08:01:29]
>> Morrison: Thank you very much.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I just want to mention that we're about two and a half hours behind. We've lost one councilmember. Getting ready to lose another one in an hour and a half. So I do have a comment, but I want to ask my question just as something to come back with, not to answer here. And it has to do with something I heard a few minutes ago about a potential shift in priorities in next year's budgets. Away from basic needs and into I think you call it life continuance type programs. When we used this allocation method and spread it out over a type of various organizations, and one of the three funding partners decided basically in the middle of the year to make a change and back away totally from basic needs and the other two partners, one of those had to make up the difference in deciding at that time with other funding organizations focusing on the broader programs that teach a man how to fish type programs, that we had kind of evolved upon us to put the highest priority on basic needs. I asked a moment ago about the break down of the social service contracts for last year. I think it would be a pretty good indicator if you could also send me a list of what the proposal is going to be for this coming year. You may not have that now, but when you do.
>> I'll just quickly say that we're not moving away from basic needs. Ba needs tend to be indicators of symptoms or addressing symptoms of a particular problem.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I heard that, but it's the old story, if there's a man is bleeding to death on the street, you don't ask where you got the knife? The first thing do you is try to treat the symptoms.
[08:03:42]
>> Absolutely.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Councilmember tovo.
>> Tovo: Very quickly, i wonder if you could tell us how much of you budget has been impacted by the sequestration. I think it was 450, something like that.
>> Five percent?
>> We've been cut by five percent in a couple of areas. At least we can expect the cut, because we haven't seen it yet and we're not completely sure of the net impact to us. One is the ryan white program. That's an area that's at risk. And then I believe in cdbg, which is funding that we receive through neighborhood and community development. But ryan white, we're looking at a five percent cut and the state has told us to date that the w.I.C. Program, which was another area that was at risk given the
-- given things going on nationally, it's going to be held harmless. That's our expectation and our hope.
>> Tovo: Am I right in the dollar amount that you quoted in the presentation that you could stand to lose about 450,000? Anyway, why don't we consider that a budget question? Because I think it is important for the public to understand that in a time of
-- where your funding is already being stretched, you're facing some pretty unexpected cuts, as is neighborhood housing.
>> Yes.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. Looks like that's it. Thank you very much. And now we'll go to transportation. No, housing, excuse me. I just totally skipped by housing.
[08:05:43]
>> I'm sure you had rob spillar running from the bull pen. [Laughter] mayor I hope I didn't create a major panic.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I hope I didn't create a major panic.
>> I don't have a presentation. Do you have questions for me?
>> Mayor Leffingwell: No. What we've been doing is having you introduce yourself.
>> Betsy spencer, community housing and neighborhood development.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: And the permanent fixture
--
>> burt lumbreras.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Any questions?
>> Morrison: Thanks for all your work. We know how important it is. I didn't quite understand the decreases and increases on the budget forecast. Can you tell me how that works because some of them are increases?
>> When you look at the budget increases cost drivers drivers is point 99 increase overall?
>> Morrison: That means your whole budget, to keep the current service, is going to go down by .99?
>> No. This is a topic of conversation for us. Part of this slide has to do with increased costs. For us this is my slide nine.
>> Morrison:163.
>> There are some increased cost. The health insurance, fuel and fleet, worker's compensation, those are standard cost drivers going up. There is a decrease of federal funds. Ours is actually for our 456 is our proposed cdbg and home decrease. And then there's also a .7-million-dollar or 700,000-dollar decrease. That has to do with fact that we're actually spending down the housing trust fund. So if you remember last year we had a significant carry forward balance in our housing trust fund. We actually are only anticipating carrying forward about 300,000. We anticipate spending the vast majority of the trust fund this year. So the biggest decrease
-- I'm nt sure if that answers your question, but that's how the chart comes about.
[08:08:25]
>> Morrison: I still feel confused but will ponder it and ask you offline.
>> Spelman: If I could ask a slightly different version. Will you all told spend more money this year or spend less money?
>> We will spend less. We're anticipating less revenue.
>> Spelman: And the reason is because you're getting less money to spend from outside sources.
>> Correct.
>> Spelman: Will you be requiring more money from the general fund this year than last year?
>> Yes. As of right now if you look at several slides past that we've got revenue forecast, we've already been slotted for an additional $500,000 of general fund to offset some of those.
>> Spelman: And that's what we've been generally focusing on in these sessions is the general fund aspects of this. But your numbers are actually going down because you're getting so much less in cdbg and home and so on.
>> Correct.
>> Morriuon: Some of that is being made up by general fund money.
>> Correct.
>> Morrison: This is a transition with an overall expectation on an annual basis to use some
-- to increase the general fund allocation?
>> Correct. Reduce sustainability fund. That's my understanding.
>> I think the last two department slides, this slide a bit confusing because we title it cost drivers, but it's again that net effect. You can have pluse minuses. We're trying to make up some of that. There's a discussion about how to potentially shift this whole department into the general fund support to where it's not always vulnerable to these major shifts that we see. It's also that bigger discussion we're trying to have with council not only about bonds, but the priority of what we can do with affordable housing and how this department fits in with that possible future and how we can stabilize it to be able to carry out those initiatives and those important programs that we want to see in affordable housing.
[08:10:34]
>> Morrison: Okay. And so how much is it this year you're expecting to have from the general fund? 500,000. Right now.
>> Morrison: And last year it was? Zero?
>> Correct.
>> Morrison: Okay. And then also I noticed the anticipated impact of sequestration. I wonder fire department you wanted to take this off, ryan, and answer it
-- i wondered if you wanted to take this off and answer it later, but if you had a sense of priority if we were able to restore some of the cuts of sequestration what your sense of the priority of doing that would be. And maybe I should submit that as a question?
>> I would appreciate that. We have not yet gotten to point
-- this is an illustration or example of if we did a five percent cut across the board what it could look like. We have not gotten to the point of making actual program recommendations to where we might prioritize that.
>> Morrison: And I guess the same would be for the home funding impact. And so do you expect to look at prioritizing?
>> We'll have to for our budget forecast, yes, or actual budget submission.
>> Morrison: Thank you.
>> Cole: I want to talk to you a little bit about your program performance slide. You talk about having developer assistance and in rental housing developmenter assistance at 188% of the goal has been achieved. What does that mean?
>> So when you look at the rental housing developer assistance number, the way our numbers often work is performance happens two or three years later. You know, development takes a couple of years. So we may have funded most of these projects, probably two or three years ago, but the unit doesn't come online until it's complete. So sometimes we'll have a boom year where a lot of things will come online at once. S that's why those numbers look relatively high right now because we have several projects that all came online at the same time. The rental housing is in fact
-- was majority funded with go bonds and it is those rental units that we funded with go bonds.
[08:12:41]
>> So the partnership that we did with the private developer, we put up front significant funding and then the project actually became complete two or three years later and we're actually in that second or third year, so that's why we have a number in excess of 100%?
>> Yes, ma'am.
>> Cole: And is the same generally true for the g.O. Repair program? Does that work the same way?
>> No. They performed better than we had expected.
>> Cole: What does it mean for it to perform better? It's still in excess of 100 percent?
>> I apologize. I don't have the actual performance numbers in front of me. Let's say during the budget process we estimate on money we're going to put into that program that we'll prepare 100 homes n this instance 143 homes actually got repaired. So it may have cost less and we were able to serve more.
>> Cole: Let me ask for the details of that, of the g.O. Repairs numbers. And then let's move to the supportive housing. I see the same
-- I guess same type of analysis that went into the rental housing for the developers where we went into a partnership with
--
>> the short-term supportive housing is not actual units. That is support services. I'd need to answer that to you in an email for exactly what that's about. But community development typically is public service or community service activities. Not actual units.
>> Cole: Let me get all three of those in the form of a budget question, not so much an email.
>> Yes.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Councilmember riley.
>> Riley: Betsy, the slide dealing with the unmet service demands, the second item listed is permanent supportive housing. It's $150,000 for evaluation of the program cost effectiveness. Could you just tell what is that would look like. And I notice there's no f.T.E.'S involved. Is that contract valid and where does the number come from?
[08:14:44]
>> It's a request for qualification or proposal. We are estimating that expense to be 150,000. It's to do an in-depth analysis on the cost benefits of permanent supportive housing.
>> And would that be a global analysis that would look at the impacts on all sorts of care providers that result from providing permanent supportive housing or would it be looking at it more strictly from the program perspective? In terms of carrying out the program. Would it be a matter of looking at how many people we were able to get housed for x number of dollars? Or on the other hand would it be that by getting that population housed we saved all of
-- well, there were savings of all these different types in terms of emergency care costs, police time, court time, jail time. All those other savings that are not directly traceable to the city even necessarily. But our cost savings from the standpoint of public resources in general.
>> Yes, sir, number two.
>> Riley: It would be the latter. It would be a global look at the impact of getting a chronically homeless population housed.
>> Yes, sir.
>> Riley: And where does the 150,000-dollar number come from? How do we arrive at that estimate?
>> There's actually another
-- there's a justice grant that travis county has right now. And they're doing a similar study. We spoke to the organization they're working with to get an estimate on what that cost could be. So that's where the amount comes from.
>> Riley: That was bureau of justice assistance grant.
>> It's the urban institute is providing that
-- a very similar type of analysis. So when we described what we're looking for, this was a number that we discussed that would probably be sufficient. Clearly it could be more than that depending upon how detailed we got. We were trying to be fair in what we asked for and to be able to get the information that we needed.
[08:16:46]
>> Riley: Have we looked at whether there might be any grants out there that would be available for the city to undertake this kind of effort?
>> I have not.
>> Riley: Thanks.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Any more questions? Okay. Thank you very much. And next will be transportation. And just to give folks a head's up, I'm going to start announcing the one half, which will be planning and development review. Councilmember tovo.
>> Tovo: While they're coming up, what's our game plan here today? Are we actually going to try to get through every one of them.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Yes.
>> Tovo: We're not terribly close on that front.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I'm glad you noticed. We're open for potential questions fnyone. Councilmember riley?
>> Riley: Bob, I had a question about under the parking management fund slide. I noticed that we're projecting that going forward we'll hit
-- in fy '14 we're aiming for revenues in the amount of 9.4 million and that amount is held steady all the wayover the next five years, through fy 18. And I know on the video you said pending council decisions about other potential revenues. And I guess the idea is that there could be
-- for instance, there is a lot of ongoing discussion about parking management districts, parking benefit district and so on. Is that sort of council decision you have in mind?
>> Yes, sir. It's a public process and so our experience is that parking benefit districts, the way the program is set up, it's a grassroots development of the idea and then that comes before council. I have no way to project those occurring. I also know that we're talking about parking in a number of areas around the community and again I didn't want to presuppose that the solution would be a parking benefit district.
[08:19:25]
>> Riley: What about parking in existing city facilities that are currently unmanaged. Even right here downtown we have a number of facilities that are unmanaged. We're not charging for parking, not doing anything to make the facilities available at night. It seems like if we brought those facilities under the parking enterprise, which i thought was a long-term goal, that the parking enterprise could be responsible for exercising appropriate custody of that city asset, which would include making it available to the public to extent it would be valuable as providing a convenient opportunity for parking. For instance, there's parking at walnut creek center, which is completely unmanaged right there on red river and there are other city facilities that the public would have an interest in utilizing and yet we're not doing anything to manage it. And it seems like that sort of thing would be within the purview of the parking enterprise. And I would hope within the next five years we might start getting more serious about exercising proper custody of those city assets.
>> Yes, sir. Again, I did not want to imply that we weren't working actively on those kind of ideas. I think you've heard one discussed earlier today in terms of parks benefit district. But if council acts on the
-- [overlapping speakers]
>> Riley: You need council direction in order to
-- in order to get
-- in order to start actively managing these city facilities.
>> Well, with the parks benefit district, yes.
>> Riley: No. I'm moving away from parking benefit and talking aut city facilities where we have parking that is currently unmanaged, even right here downtown. What I'm hearing is that council direction is needed in order to
-- for us to start making those assets available to the public for a fee.
>> Robert goode, assistant city manager. We're currently investigating that right now. That has been, a mentioned, a longer term goal of the parking enterprises. The city manager just in reviewing these presentation it is came up again. I think you could do that, but we're focused on
-- i asked mr. Spillar to do a white paper right now on what that would look like to do that. We're on track to review that. We can bring it back to council I would suspect in a few months. I can see it as well, but worry that track to bring it back for your consideration.
[08:21:47]
>> Riley: That would be within the next five years? In spite of what we see here?
>> Absolutely.
>> Yes, sir. It is hard for us to try o predict revenue at this level.
>> Riley: Okay. Thanks.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: So i don't remember the exact year, but I'm guessing it was 2007-2008, the council passed a set of criteria to govern city manager run parking enterprises by and i assume we're still governed by that? I remember there were a lot of lengthy discussions at the time. One of them had to do with being competitive or perhaps overly competitive with private parking enterprises and the criteria was that the city would not price below the prevailing parking rate in the general area. I don't remember how broad that area was. Another that I recall was that each individual city operated facility would be self-supporting. On its own without reliance on others. So maybe it would be a good idea when we bring that forward to review this% criteria, see if they're still applicable.
>> Yes, sir.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Any other questions? Councilmember morrison.
>> Morrison: Thank you. I have a question. I noticed that our transportation user fee, we're expecting it to increase
-- is it on page 191? Yes, on page 191, we expect it to jump from 14 to 15 and then some pretty significant jumps on out there. Can you talk about why we need those increases?
>> Well, actually, councilmember, I'm going to allow howard lassaurus, the public works director to answer that. I think he was going to answer it later in the presentations, but he actually managed the transportation fund. I simply support his analysis.
[08:23:55]
>> Morrison: You're passing the buck.
>> I was punting actually.
>>> Howard lazarus, public works director. We want to balance the revenues over the forecast period and keep the transportation fund from showing negative numbers. On paper the fund is always more conservative than it is in actuality. There are items in the fund that always produce more revenues and better outcomes each year. But in order to keep the fund from showing a negative number we set the rate at an appropriate amount to make sure that we can maintain the needed balances and reserves. So just because it's shown there as being a big increase next year, I don't think you will see that next year.
>> Morrison: Okay. I guess I understand. And remind me, it's used, for instance, for keeping our roads in shape and many other items.
>> The ordinance that establishes it states that it is to be used for operation, maintenance and expansion of the transportation network.
>> Morrison: Okay. I guess we have had conversations about growth paying for itself. And when I see a fixed fee like that going up even though we're projecting an increase in population, which would lead to an increased number of people paying the fee, then i really have to question are we
-- are we
-- are there other means to pay for some of those costs based on impact fees and things like that. Based on the people that are moving here?
>> One of the discussions that has been initiated, but hasn't progressed in the coming months is the need for some sort of impact fee for developments. That's something that when rob and I sit down and look at how to fund transportation improvements over the coming years it's certainly one of the tools in the toolkit that hasn't been used yet. So
-- you will also notice this this year's transportation fund there is a growth in revenues even though the fee is held flat. So part of the increase in the funding is due to growth in population.
[08:26:13]
>> Morrison: So the impact fee is one authorized by the state that we're not charging? I know we have
-- maybe robert can tell us the impact fees that we do charge?
>> There is an impact fee that can be charged due to ate law and transportation
-- the effective development on the transportation network. I don't believe we charge that in the city of austin.
>> If I could add, we've actually been working this last year on rough portionalty, which is a process that allows us to charge developments for their impacts. Their fair share of the impacts to the transportation system. That process continues to be under review, but I expect that to be available this year. My understanding of that is that the rough portionalty is roughly equivalent to an impact fee, but it's a different process and still gets to the same end of charging new developments for their fair share of the impact to the transportation system. So we do pursuing that, yes.
>> I'm glad to hear that. We have our impact advisory committee and I believe that the recommendation that came back from the water utility joint committee on rates was that we really needed to be looking at those impact fees that are not transportation impact fees, but other impact fees. Can you tell us where we are in that process, robert?
>> Yeah. We're still reviewing that. We have some data back that we want to take back to that joint committee. We're still in the process of fine tuning that. I think we're all on the path that it does need to be revised and it will be coming back to council, but we're still working with that committee on data and what it looks like at the end. We should be back in a few months to council with some recommendations.
>> Morrison: Do you think any of this is going to be done in time to integrate it into this upcoming budget year?
>> I doubt that you will have the time to adopt it before the budget year, but I don't know the exact schedule. I'm not sure if it would affect this year's budget.
[08:28:15]
>> Morrison: If you could let us know because it does obviously impact the numbers in our budget and I think that's a lot of interest obviously in making sure we're doing that
-- capturing the revenue in a fair way so that it's not overly burdening people that live here already?
>> And councilmember, I'll also share with you the information on rough proportionality in an email?
>> Morrison: And I see that he has mysteriously appeared. I think we're good.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: We're a long way from mr. Maseros. U [laughter] [overlapping speakers]
>> Morrison: I do have one more question. And it is about the parking management and about our parking meters. And I got an opportunity to get an updated map of where our parking meters are and they are obviously in the core and rainey street now. They go up through
-- around the university, red river, dean keeton, and a little bit over in west fifth and on baylor.
>> Yes.
>> And so my question is how do we decide where the revenues from the parking meters goes because as
-- i won't be surprised if I see parking meters sort of spreading out in other places. So it was my thought originally that the parking meters were downtown, but now we see them elsewhere, so how do we spread that around.
>> Councilmember, I'm passing around a map that is a little approved from that one. It actually shows the west campus parking benefit district. Our major expansion over the last several years has been the west campus parking benefit district. And of course the rainey street area. Really the downtown parking benefit district is not specifically called out here is really the core and it is identified in the agreement with downtown
-- it's pretty close. And so the da, downtown austin alliance, receives money from the core area as part of the downtown program. So that's where it goes. Areas outside that core
-- so you mentioned the pieces over near lamar and west fifth street, for instance, go back into the parking fund and accumulate and are used for investments into the transportation system. So we collect funds in the parking fund and make transportation investments in improvements not only in the core, but throughout the community. So for instance, over the last couple of years we've made investments in great streets, of course, both in the core and outside the core. We've made investments in project development for urban rail as well as other efforts that are funded with those funds. The west campus benefit area came about
-- we were metering in the west campus area. We had an overdemand for the parking surrounding the university. We added the meters on dean keeton separate from the parking benefit district and in working with the west campus community they actually asked for that parking benefit district to be established through the process. So we added it there. Just recently we had a set of businesses over close to lamar, still within the west campus district. It's too small to show here. It's literally two parking stations, actually request the parking. Typically what's going on right now is businesses are requesting those parking benefit districts or metering be brought to their community because their customers can't find parking. In the central business distore area, this past several years we've been busy finding spaces that historically have fallen out of management for whatever reason and bringing those back into the system. This year we've been working with business service zones that are typically received spaces free for approximate pickup and delivery, but after hours bringing those back into the management system so we can increase parking spaces for customers and people visiting. That's typically how it's done. We also are working with communities where parking is again over demand for the supply that's there and trying to convince some of those communities that meters are a potential solution. We are now pointing people to go to west campus since those meters have gone in. The cars that would be parked for days at a time you could tell by the layer of dust on them, have disappeared from the streets. The parking spaces are turning over. It seems much less congested when you go there. So that probably
--
[08:33:31]
>> Morrison: Where did those cars go?
>> Hopefully they either went back home to their owners or to class. Or have been parked in buildings off street. We do know that that's been a by product of the increased management downtown is that parking facilities are more full.
>> Morrison: So just back to understand what you said in the beginning. The money from the core is going to daa?
>> Well, I said daa. It's going to the downtown projects, which is largely great streets and other projects that support.
>> Morrison: So we don't give it to daa.
>> No. I misspoke.
>> Morrison: I was going to say because daa does not cover all of downtown.
>> No. And not all of downtown is in the downtown service zone. Some of the outside areas. And I can further detail that in a map if you would like.
>> Morrison: Okay. So it's interesting because as people
-- those others develop, the question is what's going to be the difference between just a service area being metered versus the parking benefit district? Are we going to have a ton of parking benefit districts around or do you envision maybe you will just go put some meters in or it won't be aarking benefit district?
>> Both of those are true. In terms of the parking benefit district legislation that you all helped us with, it does set a minimum size, so there's a geographic minimum that is cost effective. For those communities that that means like a good tool for, that will go back into the community for a variety of opportunities. The parking meters that do not fall within a parking meter district go back into our general transportation fund and are used for capital projects, service projects citywide.
>> Morrison: I guess I'm looking at for instance if you look at the area down around z tejas, we've got one street there that has meters. I could certainly foresee
-- parking is in great demand there. I could certainly foresee that whole business area wanting to do a benefit district.
[08:35:51]
>> We would be willing to work with them. The thing about the parking benefit districts is it really gives some of these
-- I don't want to say more remote business districts, but ones that aren't immediately adjacent to the downtown core an opportunity to manage their future in terms of parking and then turn that back into things that help reinforce that business district, for instance. It could be flowers on the light posts, it could be new banners, it could be increased service, whatever, sidewalks.
>> Morrison: Great. And then one other question. There's been a lot of interest in the traffic management program. What is the current funding for that and are you
-- have you managed to increase that at all in your projection for next year because it is in high demand.
>> Right. So we did successfully select a batch of neighborhoods again this year. We are actually out constructing neighborhood traffic calming devices so we're very excited about that. And
-- but those are cip funded so those are bond funded typically. So we've not been operating those throh the operations budget. So we're continuing to build those given the available funding, capital funding, but you're right, demand exceeds capacity.
>> Morrison: Right. So this is just a question you could take away, and that is how much capital mondaying do we put into it in this fy 13. And how much do we expect to put in next time?
>> I don't have those numbers, but I will bring them to you.
>> Morrison: Great. Thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwe: I noticed you've established a b 10 in south austin. Very small. [Laughter] mayor pro tem?
>> Cole: I want to focus on the citizens survey results. They surprised me in that lamar boulevard was ranked ahead of mopac and 35. Can you explain that or am i reading that right?
[08:38:01]
>> I'm glad you picked that up. You know, every year we participate as a city in the citywide analyzed survey. And every year I've come to you and scratched my head going, you know, something doesn't make sense, the signal timing, they're happier than the rest of the country with our signal timing, but yet with our traffic flow they're less happy. So we actually did a follow-up survey and asked the same questions that the larger survey did, but thin we turned around and said what streets are you talking about? And these are the top five streets that came out. Lamar is a very long street, so in hindsight I wished i asked what part of lamar are you most unhappy with. We know that sixth and lamar tend to be a traffic challenge, but there are also lots of private construction on south lamar that was occurring during this survey. So that could be it. Similarly with congress avenue we know at the time of this survey we just completed a lot of construction on south congress. So that may have affected it. I think what's more interesting is the three our roadways that were mentioned frequently by residents are those regional freeways, as we suspected. Lamar is a regional facility and a an important one. I think this will help us refocus our operations efforts on those two city corridors as we work with our partners to improve the other regional freeways.
>> Cole: It's interesting. Congress avenue, is an explanation of them ranking higher than 183 is there's been major construction?
>> No. I think it could be that there was major construction so that created congestion. So when we asked what do you think a major street is these are the answers that we got back. So I think if you aggregated these up to regional freeways versus arterials we'll find that regional freeways out scored the arterial ranks. So I think it helps us point out as we go forward what streets we need to focus on. So what we've just done and we're very excited about, we don't know how to interpret the data quite yet, is on south lamar we've put out bluetooth readers so we can actually know realtime how fast people are traveling on south lamar. That gives us realtime data to start change the signal systems or addressing specific flow issues that we didn't have data to do previously.
[08:40:38]
>> Cole: Can you determine how we are actually allocating dollars or spending dollars based on these streets? Like lamar and congress in particular? I guess it would be a little bit more difficult with 35 and mopac.
>> Not yet, councilmember, that's where we're hoping to go is to get better realtime data with the introduction of our automated transportation system, the pick brains behind the signals. That's what we hope to do is make our signal system more interactive and reactive in a more quick way to deal with congestion issues as we understand what they are. Not yet, but soon.
>> Cole: So the i-35, capital improvement project, that we can look at
-- i know in the bond proposal that we just passed in 2012 we had specific projects that we were looking at on i-35. So is there a way to know what we have targeted for improvement and a timeline for when that will happen?
>> Yes, ma'am. I expect in the next several months that that corridor study will actually produce a project list and a prioritized project list. That's what I hope. And that that will allow us to start programming those bond dollars to pick the low hanging fruit, if you will. Some of the early results are very promising in terms of the congestion reduction benefits that we can get from some fairly simple projects along that corridor, things like u-turn lanes or just adjustments to the intersections can significantly reduce the congestion along that corridor. So those are exactly the reasons why we sought approval from you all and the voters to put money into i-35. I think what this shows is that as we work with our partners on transportation, whether it be alternative transportation methods or corridor improvement projects, that there's a real role for austin to perhaps play in terms of that regional discussion in dealing with these congestion issues.
[08:42:56]
>> Cole: On the major roads that were identified as the
-- the five major ones that were identified by the citizens, it would be helpful to be able to say that during this budget year the city of austin anticipates spending this amount of money on this road and then if we know our other partners are planning to spend this and this is a part
-- we're only talking about five, but I don't know
-- you're saying that we might not be there and enable our ability to provide that information.
>> Well, this survey is the first step in terms of understanding what the public is
-- what roads they're concerned about. Our next step is to try to look at our program and start doing just as you've asked, targeting these
--
>> Cole: Let me request that as part of the budget process because I think it would be very, very helpful to show what we're doing actually specifically with our budget dollars and how we're leveraging them. And we've only identified five to focus on, then i think we should be able to get may some information.
>> If I may, these are just the top five responses. We asked them to tell us what road they were thinking of. So we have lots of arterials that had one or two votes for the most important road in austin. These were the five that just happened to jump out as the highest vote getters. So it was an open-ended question and we didn't give them a series of arterials and ask them which one were you thinking about when you answered that question and these were the five that jumped out at us.
>> Cole: I think that makes it even persuasive. Thank you, mayor.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Councilmember spelman.
>> Spelman: Very briefly, when you give the survey again are you going to ask this question exactly the same way?
>> We're going to ask a third question saying which part of lamar are you concerned about? [Laughter] it's a very long road.
>> Spelman: When george gallup first started doing public opinion surveys he asked the question do you own any stock? And found to his incredible surprise that the state where most people said yes was wyoming. Of course he came from new york and didn't know any better so they whispered into his ear, cattle ranch, you idiot. He changed the question of do you own any stocks or bonds traded on a national exchange and the numbers went back to normal. And you might ask instead of what major city streets, just what arterials or major roadways are you concerned about because I think a lot of people looked at city streets and said i-35 of course my biggest problem, but it's not a major city street.
[08:45:35]
>> Yes.
>> Spelman: So change the question and I bet you will get answers which are more easily interpretable.
>> Riley: Mayor? Two quick questions. First I want to commend you on the pedestrian hybrid beacon program. I've had lots of feedback on that. Very happy with it. Do you expect to be able to continue that program in the cong year.
>> Yes, sir. Reflecting back that's been a very positive tool that we're using to provide a higher level of visibility for pedestrians, and absolutely we plan to continue that trend using those pretty aggressively. My traffic engineer tells me that we are the jurisdiction within the state using them the most, putting them out as fast as we can, but we know that houston and dallas are closely watching us as well.
>> Riley: Great. Second question is except on councilmember morrison's line of questioning about proceeds from the parking meters outside the core area. I think you said you will get us a map of exactly what core area goes to downtown projects. I thought at first that would be something like the daa boundary
--
>> it is very similar to the daa boundaries and that's why I got it mixed up.
>> Riley: So for those areas that are within the downtown area, but outside the boundaries, I think what you said is that those funds just go into transportation projects generally. Are there any
-- how do you determine what buckets of transportation funding those funds go into?
>> We don't just automatically put them into transportation programs. A portion of those funds go to expand the downtown street maintenance, cleaning the sidewalks and so forth. But as we accumulate outside that downtown area, as we accumulate
--
[08:47:36]
>> Riley: Outside the core.
>> As we accumulate those funds, those go into the parking fund and then we make a transfer to cip every year. There's a-million-dollar transfer to transportation projects or transportation priorities, and then we work with council as well as other stakeholders to determine what projects those should go into and we come back to council to get those approved.
>> Riley: So the point is when someone puts money into a parking kiosk downtown, but outside the core, it could be going anywhere in the city for any kind of transportation project.
>> Yes, sir. And that's thinking that people from all over the city use the parking meters and so it's unfortunate that could go projects that benefit anyone in the city, yes. If that makes sense.
>> Riley: Thanks.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Other questions? Okay. Thank you. Planning and development review and to be followed by public works.
>> Good afternoon. I'm greg guernsey, director of planning development and review and have lisa nichols on my right and sue edwards to my left, my assistant city manager. Do you have any questions?
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Do we have any questions? Well, I guess the
-- the big topic is how are we doing on site plan approvals?
>> Site plan approvals?
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Permit approvals I guess would be a broader term.
[08:49:37]
>> Earlier this month in and the latter part of last month I had a triage team, about 13 people, that came in and took a share of the residential building reviews. And with the help of two from the code compliance department and that staff as well as a group of about a dozen people that came in on a saturday and we spent a wonderful day doing reviews, we caught up. So that the backlog that we had spoken to you months ago of some 600 applications is all caught up. Last
-- towards the end of last week I went back downstairs again and walked through and all the bins where I think I slide you a slide that they were all overflowing, on the floor, they were in the hall, they were all stacked up and have all been moved. Now, that's not to say that all of them have gone away because we still have to do updates, but we're sticking with those and getting those through. So we're caught up. Mayor that's what I heard
--
>> Mayor Leffingwell: That's what I heard. Congratulations. I don't know what you're doing, but keep it up. Councilmember tovo.
>> Tovo: [Inaudible]. That is great. I do have some questions somewhere but I can't completely read my notes quite yet. I had a question. You talked in your video about something to do with the music division, transferring a position to the music division. Can you give us an update on that?
>> There was an f.T.E. Placed in my budget last year. I'm on the department that issues the outdoor music venue permits, and part of that position was put in last year, it's been moved more appropriately to egrso where the music office is and so I think that's not so much creating a new position as much as just putting in the most appropriate place.
[08:51:46]
>> Tovo: The only other question I have that rises to the level that I think needs to be right now is decrease in revenues. I think that this year's budgets projects a slight decrease in revenues and i wondered if you could explain why that's the case? Am I remembering that directly from the presentation?
>> You are.
>> Tovo: It sounded like with the fees going up and buildings, you know going as well as it is, how is that explained?
>> And things are
-- there's lots of revenue that is already coming in. We're talking about a difference of .6 percent, but the one thing that this number may actually change a little bit before you see the official budget, I'm going back right now and looking at phase one of the fee study that we completed. And we're actually assessing those additional services that we hadn't provided before. The technical review for residential that we've implemented, so we'll look at that and so that might change slightly before i come back. But generally our revenue is up from what it was many years ago and we consider that
-- that it will probably maintain into the coming year, so I didn't really see the .6% as being that significant. But I think it will go
-- will be a change slightly when we finish the phase one update to our fee study.
>> Tovo: And actually i just remembered one last question I wanted to ask. Where is the department in relationship to getting ready to accept online payments and more online submissions? Especially online payments i think is the one we all hear about a lot.
>> Online payments, we are working very closely with ctm right now on this. I know it's
-- city manager's highest priority is from a development standpoint. We've already implemented some things where we are accepting through our escrow accounts (indiscernible) and we will be able to do self aassignment at the end of july where people will be able to do transactions on online using their escrow act. Online payments is probably further off than that, but we are working towards that and probably in a matter of months that we would get to a point where we will do our first transactions. It's not something that all of my fees and applications can be done online. We would probably take it on a
-- on a piece by piece or phasing process taking some application and going through those and moving on.
[08:54:16]
>> Councilmember, sue edwards, assistant city manager. In response to that and something that greg said, i wanted to let all of you know that the city manager has made this his number one priority and we have been having some really good coordinating meetings with all of the executive team. What that really means is that of the three things that we look at, we look at f.T.E.'S, we look at process improvement and benchmarking and we look at technology. Those are the three things that we really need in planning and development review. And marc ott as the city manager has been coordinating to make sure that those departments are really working together to be able to get things in line as quickly as possible. We're excited about that, but it is really moving along and just to show you, you can't see this, but it's a chart of all the different things that we'll be doing. And as greg mentioned, everything that we've talked about will be
-- is on this sheet. So we'll be moving along. And the longest that it looks like right now would be probably our electronic plan review. But everything is moving and I'll be happy to share this with you all.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Councilmember riley.
>> Riley: So greg, as we make progress with things like online payments and online submission of plans and online plan review and so on, one would hope that the increased efficiency and
-- of those processes might actually entail some savings since we no longer have as much staff time, we no longer have this
-- the lines going out the door, people standing there waiting to deposit a check or things like that. The parts of this whole system would be more efficient. When I look at the unmet service demands I see some i.T. Items, I see four f.T.E.'S for $420,000 for amanda and so on. But I don't see any indication that we expect to owe thee we're thinking in terms of savings that can be realized as a result of increased efficiencies.
[08:56:38]
>> Councilmember, I think that in the long run you will see some savings, but in the short-term you will not because it will take us about at least a year to implement everything and as greg mentioned we're going to move into it not all at one time because we have to train staff at the same time on some of these technologies. So one of the things that we do need right now is the extra i.T. Bodies in order to help us get this actual done in the time frame that we need it to be done. I think in a couple of years you will begin
-- maybe even sooner we have not really looked at that, but you will see an efficiency, but you're in the going to see it this coming year.
>> Riley: Is it fair to expect that we will able to so far some payments online by the end of this calendar year?
>> Yes.
>> Riley: We've eliminated the backlog to get to the initial review, but there are still delays in subsequent stages of the process before we get the final plan review. And I guess we can
-- i don't know, we'll be continuing to talk about that and I know people want to do that. Do you expect to continue the stakeholder meetings that you've already done to work with people about process improvements and getting input from people that are actually going through the system to make sure that we're collaborating towards a better process.
>> I have a meeting next week to continue to continu to get input from them. Yes, we will. And we are also to the stakeholders that we have, we are sending out the same report that you get each
-- every week we send it to them to stay abreast. And we've actually gotten some compliments I can take a breather and he can too.
[08:58:50]
>> Riley: We're not quite ready to declare victory.
>> One of the things that we've conquered at least for the time being the review process, we're now focusing on the permitting process and the permitting area. So you will see it goes from one thing to the next, to the next. And we hope that by the time this year is over we will have gone to every piece of the department.
>> Riley: You said by the time this year is over, is that calendar year or fiscal year?
>> Calendar year, that we will have gotten to every one of the different areas of the department. We're also
-- I think as all of you are aware, are working with kpgm to help us look at some of the processes that we have right now and in addition to that they're going to help us to write an rfp, create that program that will go out and we'll be having a consultant come in and do process improvement during this year and the following year, latter part of this year and the following year. So there are a number of things that we have on the menu moving forward. [One moment, please, for change in captioners]
[09:01:07]
>> councilmember riley, what you are saying like about inspections. We are not getting quite as many complaints there because as we lighten up the backlog, we will have the other areas come into play. We want to make sure we're prepared along the lines.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Councilman spelman?
>> Spelman: Excitement might be too much.
>> Mayor leffingwell: We'll ve tickets.
>> Spelman: It will be exciting, who knows. I understand you need more resources, but help me understand why 26 more people and $2.6 million more is the right way to size this. How do you know?
>> I've talked with customers, staff, and the public information office. So some of the things you see on here are actually in response to getting through that not only with the backlog but the permit section, with the commercial and residential permits. You know, we have increase also of inspections, we process from the beginning of the fiscal year in '12 to now, in fiscal year '12 we did 85,000 inspections. We're already up to 140,000 inspections for that same time period. So I'm asking for more residential inspectors.
>> Spelman: Wow.
>> As you get through the backlog, people need permits and need them timely and need the inspection part, and get that timely. Hopefully the joy and happiness will occur when they get it built and occupied. But we need to be proactive. There are items that deal with technology scanning, records management. I have a tremendous amount of people that are interesting and engaged in the development process. They want to see more things online, see what plans are going up on the building down the street or next-door. We need to be interactive in how we go into the process so more applications can be put online. I have people I would like to go online, submit my permit online, get all the information online and i have people that want a chat online while they have a question. Well, I'm trying to deal with that group of people who is young, have money, want to live in our area and take care of those folks. We try to balance our request to balance needs of permitting, needs of inspection, to get that engaged. To deal with marketing, which I don't have. Howard lazarus, he has a department with a heart. I don't have a heart.
[09:04:18]
>> Nice heart.
>> The graphics from watershed, from public works, I need to have some marketing tools to put these out there so people know how to get the information quickly, accurate and they get through my process as quickly as possible and still meet the minimum code requirements set by all of us.
>> Spelman: I'm on with all the things you have to do. You're adding things to this that sound sensible to me. How do I know that it is eight residential building inspectors and a program manager that you need and not five or 12?
>> I think those go back to the number of inspection requests that have come in. My ability to do the inspections. For instance, in residential inspections, right now, our goal is 95% ontime. You call for an inspection. Within 24 hours I will have an inspector out to do it in 24 hours. Right now, I'm 87%. One in 10, I'm not meeting. We also have code compliance that I'm working with all the time. And they're more proactive and bringing me more business. I have more people coming in, new construction is up 47%. So these are indicators that help me get to a number of seven additional inspectors. Bringing the number up to get to the 95 to dealing with perhaps the new workload that comes in from code compliance of new customers that we will try to get them in and get them through a process quickly and new development. Looking at those factors, that is where we get the number.
>> Spelman: You are forecasting the current workload. You know what the current workload is, you know what you can't do because you can't meet the workload with the current people.
>> That's correct.
>> Spelman: Your projecting workload, how many inspections you will need to get through by may 2 of 2014, and working our way backwards how many more people is eight people times $100,000 a person, that sort of thing?
[09:06:27]
>> One more thing I will add right now, I have three temporary residential inspectors, I have postings for five, just to keep up and keep me where I'm at. So I'll add that to the mix of the other three items.
>> Spelman: How are you forecasting future demands?
>> As far as the future demand of permits that are actually coming in?
>> Spelman: Permit, all the things that you do.
>> Well, we are taking a look at where we're behind right now, if we add the staff that we have, that will bring us up to trying to get to the 95%, with the anticipation there will be more people coming, because I still have to face that. And the additional
-- i guess workload that might come in from code compliance. The key part to this is really maintaining the 95 incrementally getting into the 95% ontime. That is where the biggest part of that comes from. Councilmember, what I can do is give you a breakdown to give you a better bit of information to get the element. That is how we get there.
>> Spelman: The critical issue is you are trying to deal with what you got right now. If next year is like this year, these are the number of people you need to deal with it. If next year is more intensive, than this year, you will need more people than this, won't you?
>> That may be the case. I will have to look at that. We tried to make sure if we can hire temporary or do overtime to do an incremental difference, we tried that first. We haven't been successful, because of the volume of work that is coming in, overwhelming, even with doing overtime and temporary.
>> Spelman: Ok. What I said was roughly correct, is it not?
>> Yes.
>> Spelman: Ok. Thanks.
[09:08:31]
>> Morrison: I guess quickly the comment we made earlier with these and the new positions we need. We're looking at fee increses and expect the cost expenses to met eventually. So when we see an unmet need for more inspectors, i assume that eventually we will get to the point where we project it will be that much more coming in and that can be allocated to this department and won't be an unmet need, would you say that's fair?
>> Yes. And I'll note that later this year, if you recall, we did phase one of our study, but they didn't cover all of our fees. So we're actually aside from updating phase one, towards the end of this summer, into the fall, we will initiate phase two to look at some of our website subdivision fees and fees that we didn't account for in phase one. So I'm going to continue to go back, analyze our fees. We know that there are some fees that I need to be update and bring you another list of fees to increase to recover our cost of service.
>> And we are increasing the ones that we did increase, we're doing that in steps; is that correct? Not increasing more than 25% at a time or something?
>> That's correct. Some may go on for a year, some a couple years, until we get to the point where we're covering our cost of service.
>> Morrison: Right. Do I understand correctly, there are other fees and we are still doing cost of service studies for the other fees.
>> Yes.
>> Morrison: Will that cover all the fees or will there be a few that we don't have a cost of service yet?
>> Only if you create a new one. We are trying to address all the fees that we administer within the department.
>> Morrison: We will try not to do that. One other comment the unmet need of support staff. You mention a management position. And the 10-step program in terms of
-- not asking. Each department does need to go through. It's a state law. We need to all get up to speed completely on records retention. And I don't know, I think i see some yawns among some of my colleagues when I talk about records retention. It is important. I appreciate you bringing that there. Do you have anyone in your department now that is dedicated to that? How is it working right now?
[09:11:11]
>> When the department was created that was one place i didn't have. It is becoming critical as we work with the clerk's office, that this position is needed. Some of the things when we go to electronic plan review, getting documents in, some of the scanning position I have mentioned in here. Those will all help support our records management, but no, I don't have a position, that is why I identified it in the budget this year.
>> Morrison: Would it be fair to say you have been stalled in making progress through that?
>> Yes. At best, I've had people in the department doing police meal of documents
-- piecemeal of documents, and there is no one to pull it all together.
>> Morrison: You need someone with a grasp of good ways to do that so it can be done efficiently. This is something I was talking about with the clerk recently in terms of we might not necessarily have even, consistent approaches throughout all our departments in terms of dealing with records management and interacting with the clerk's office so i think that if we could pay a little bit of attention, I'm going to talk with the clerk and maybe we can get together to see if we can pull it together to see where we are and how is the best way to get the work organized and through, you know, in partnership with the clerk's office. They also ask for additional support in records management to do the coordination. So I think I'll have a chance to talk with the city manager's office about that more.
>> Ok.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Thank you. We'll go to public works and next will be watershed protection.
>> Tovo: Mayor could i respond to councilmember riley for a moment?
>> Mayor leffingwell: I didn't hear anything.
>> Tovo: It was a past question. He asked if whether or not the improvements we have electronically would reduce individuals. My response is short term probably not. There is one I want to say we have done already. Normally we get a thousand faxes for requests for permits just through the faxes, not from people coming down to the department there is an efax program implemented for us. Someone doesn't have to copy it, input, now it comes in on the computer automatically. There is a listing of them and things get put in absolutely immediately. We'll get 200 faxes overnight. We had intended before we add the program to take more individuals taking care of that. We have two individuals that are doing that and will not be requesting any more for that.
[09:14:03]
>> That is good to hear. Thanks.
>> Thank you.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Ok. You're up.
>> Howard lazarus public works.
>> Robert wood for a return engagement.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Any questions for public works? Bound to be some questions. Councilmember morrison.
>> Morrison: I want to jump to the crossing guards. Can you remind me, at the city, we actually provide crossing guards for all the school districts in our boundaries; is that correct?
>> That's correct.
>> Morrison: And I wondered two things: How do we measure up? Do we feel we provide an adequate number of crossing guards for the number of schools? How do we do an assessment of that?
>> I think the number one criteria is that we have had zero child safety incidents over the last several years. So in terms of outcomes, i think we do. We're responsive to the various interests in stakeholders in the school districts whether it is the principals or the parent groups, the facility management teams that exist. When there is a request to adjust or add a crossing guard, we typically can accommodate that.
>> Morrison: Another question that occurred to me, you know, we have a lot of concern about distracted driving. And while texting and driving is illegal in our city, there is special state law about no cell phone use within a certain number of feet of the school. Do you know how many
-- do we give very many tickets for that? Do we try to enforce it?
[09:16:17]
>> As far as tickets issues, I don't have the number. There have been efforts in cooperation with the assistance of the austin police department where we have focused driving and distracted driving. We have revenue that go into the child safety fund, and we have a program where in terms of working off the points parents or individuals get on their records. They can serve the points off by serving with the crossing guards as an alternative means of doing that. Like you go to defensive driving class, you can go work with the crossing guards and get the points reduced. That has been an effective way of highlighting the hazards of texting and driving.
>> Morrison: That is interesting. Maybe we can submit that as a question, what are the number of tickets that we're giving there. That's
-- I know there is a lot in here. That is really all I have specifically.
>> Cole: I have a couple of questions.
>> Mayor leffingwell coshare.
>> Cole: We are spending 7.8 on the street maintenance. Now, I thought we had set by resolution goal for straight maintenance, 10%? Help me remember? Is it 8? 80% in good repair.
>> The number shown here is $78.8 million that we're going to spend on asphalt overlay, cracks, seals, coating, and related efforts with that. The performance is to address 10% of the ven veeven year.
-- Inventory each year. We'll exceed that this year. The goal of 2009 is to increase the number of payments from about 72% to 80% by end of fiscal year 19, which we have achieved. There have been separate discussions with different meetings of council about whether or not we should relook at that goal and we will. That goal was set at one meeting, it was set too low. We're in the process of doing a survey of peer cities to see where they are, what the appropriate best managed, leading edge number is to be and maintain that going forward. I suspect somewhere between 85 and 90%, we'll be close to that at the end of the year.
[09:18:55]
>> Cole: Will we meet that?
>> It will be close. We will strive to get there. Because we are doing 10% of the inventory every year, you can expect a certain amount to [indiscernible] and marginal. We will address those to avoid larger capital costs to repair. Where we have now to start the ability to incorporate factors beyond paving conditions where we work, there was a question about local area traffic management. We integrate many of the factors in to coordinate the different work plans that exist from the various infrastructure departments to get the best value going forward, with the idea we will stay above 85%.
>> Cole: If the goal is to stay above 85%, than we will not see any unmet need from you to maintain that level of street preventive maintenance, especially if our previous goal was 80%?
>> We're in a fortunate position where the efficiencies that we have achieved and will continue to achieve in how we manage our work, where I think through normal maintenance with the account and small fee adjustments to the account for inflation, we can maintain the pavements in an exceptional state of repair. From enterprise fund standpoint, having the control we do over sources and uses. I don't know if the unmet terms means as much, because we can flex and adjust our staff to meet the areas of performance where we need to improve. I would add
--
>> cole: More of a performance measure?
>> I would add we have gone through the last couple of years of creating a robustly skilled and agile workforce by having streaming bridge technicians we can move people from one aspect of work to another and make sure they are challenged and gainfully employed while we address the areas that are in greatest need.
[09:21:11]
>> Mayor leffingwell: You are doing a great job maintaining our roads, but there is not enough of it out there
-- not enough pavement, frankly. [Laughter] let me ask you a question. I don't know if it is necessarily budget related or not or procedural. I have discussed this with you before. It has to do with when we do street repairs or street makeovers or sidewalk makeovers. Apparently, part of that is placement of overhead wires underground. I'm surprised to learn that projects get held up because there is done by the carriers and we're basically waiting there with a torn-up street to meet their timetable. Is there anything that can be done about that?
>> Mayor, we have the ability
-- I have the ability through city code to direct movement of the utilities within the right-of-way. We give the telecom companies more than sufficient and adequate notice of the upcoming projects. They try to meet the window. They also have a limited number of crews and resources. When something goes on in an extended amount of time, we work with them to extend their schedule. The project we were talking about was on nueces and floyd. There were issues on floyd to wait for telecom lines to move. I can tell you that we worked diligently with the TIME WARNERS AND ATTs OF THE World to coordinate and get them out as quickly as we can.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Unfortunately, the party that is injured is the third party, the business with street frontage there. They're helpless, caught in the middle. So I would be looking for some kind of permanent solution, perhaps, once it is laid out, you make the decision to open up the street or sidewalk, you have those time plans in place and if they aren't met, i think there should be penalties involved. I think we should take a close look at that.
[09:23:32]
>> We will do that.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Ok.
>> Thank you. I appreciate you working. I do take some issue with the. From my perspective is making good use of the pavement out there and making sure the pavement is in good condition. You have been doing well with that. As we discussed, you hit the heart 2019 goal of getting roads to satisfaction. 2013, the next graph is 2013, the annual inventory. You show us close to 12% opinion is that an estimate of where we will be at the end of the fiscal year or where we are today?
>> That is at the end of the fiscal year with the service plan in place. We are pretty good about meeting the service plan.
>> Riley: We are getting to 100%, very impressive. What we are behind on is on sidewalks and neighborhoods. As you pointed out in the video we put down 20.5 miles of sidewalks this year. Which is impressive. I appreciate all the good work. I did notice, you don't get unmet needs like other departments. It seems there are still some unmet needs out there. Just as one example, not that this is the highest priority for transportation in this city. What I think of, when I pull up to someplace with no bike racks, which happens fairly often, I used to be able to call or e-mail the city and they actually, for many years, the city had a staff person whose duty in part was to take requests, go out, install bike racks where needed in city right-of-way. For a few years, no one is carrying out that function. We have place, including places on significant bike routes with no bike racks at all and the city no longer has anyone available to go and address that, even though it is public right-of-way. That strikes me as the sort of thing that would be properly considered an unmet need. It is a need we used to meet but no longer doing that today. There are two questions there. How come no unmet needs listed here and secondly, what about that particular unmet need?
[09:26:15]
>> I would like to answer the second question first. I'm not aware that we got a call requesting the installation of a bike rack we haven't met that. If you have those.
>> Riley: I will start sending my requests to you, then. I have a few locations to send to you. I've been told by staff they don't have anyone to do that anymore. I knew the staff person that did it, and we no longer have that person.
>> We have a robustly skilled and robust workforce.
>> Riley: I will start e-mailing you.
>> With the unmet needs, we sat down, based the budget on what we need to get done. We manage the funds we have exceptionally well to meet the requirements that are there. There is a balance to how much you can get done in a year, versus the funds that are there, versus how much of the whole taxpayer dollar that you should get. And I think with the performance goals we set, we will be able to meet those this year with the resources that we have. So I think being engineers we tend to be numbers driven and goals oriented. We can say we have unmet needs since we live up to the performance standards that are established.
>> We're kind of transitioning here with the transportation department and public works, we're transitioning into the enterprise department. It is not to say enterprise didn'ts don't have needs as well. They're ensular with the needs. You will see the water department adding positions to meet the needs in the forecast and talking about the staffing they need to meet that. Here is the additional positions, here is the forecast and the rates we need for that forecast. In this department, we met them as unmet needs or service demands because we have a lot of discussions within the funding sources we have for the general fund, what are the priorities, which of the unmet service demands can we meet, given the funding sources we have and tax rates we're willing to assess. It is a little bit of a different present association we go to enterprise department. We don't talk about it much in terms of here is the unmet service demand. If there is a service demand to be met, we have it to you as part of the forecast including the rates they need in order to support those demands.
[09:29:08]
>> One more thing, we're in the process of transitioning to computerized maintenance management system. Over the past couple of years, we made managerial changes so better span of control, much more flexible and able to schedule work better so we are measure efficient each year. I think that is another reason why you see increasing output without really a large increase in the burden on the ratepayer.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Ok. Thank you both.
>> Thank you.
>> Mayor leffingwell: And watershed protection is next. Followed by convention center.
>> [Indiscernible] joe herrero and joe vitalia.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Ok. Questions for watershed? Well, while we're looking through notes here, I want to mention something i mentioned to you earlier, i told you I was at the ground breaking for a downtown project yesterday I believe it was on the fourth and nueces. I had comments about the good support they had from the watershed protection department, especially from victoria lee. I thought I would pass that on. It is good to hear good things when we hear so much bad. So thank you for that.
>> Thank you.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Not about you but ... [Laughter] you usual he only hear about the bad staff. This is all good. Councilmember morrison.
[09:31:19]
>> Morrison: One of your key projections that jumped out was mrut ants roared
-- pollutants recovered, it jumped up to five million. So did you guys just do all of a sudden super job or did we have a big spill?
>> We had big spills?
>> Morrison: Were there several or just one.
>> I don't remember how many incident we have, but i remember a couple of big ones.
>> Morrison: So is there any pattern to that, or do we have people getting
-- taking more risks and things like that?
>> No, I do think because of the population growth, there is generally just more traffic and more traffic of different type of pollutant going through the city.
>> Can I make a comment? Diane casales, performance manager. That is a demand issue and depends on what is out there. In 2012, there were two large spills and they were related to the water utility wastewater releases. Unfortunately in june 2012, there were over a million gallons of sewage spilled on east louis cannon due to the spill in austin.
>> Morrison: We're not going to change our goals or anything like that?
>> No.
>> Morrison: Good. One other question, i wondered if you could talk a little bit in the organizational overview, you have $700 million budget, 257 FTEs AND ONE OF THE Sections is watershed policy and planning. That is relatively large, ABOUT 1/10 OF THE FTEs. I wonder if you could talk about what you are working on underwater shed policy and planning.
[09:33:32]
>> Under the policy and planning group, they're responsible for planning, training, also rcip type of planning. It is all under this one group. It is couched as policy and planning activities.
>> Morrison: I see. Ok.
>> That is actually the name for a broader group that includes all of our data management. All the people that do database work that includes the value engineering team, includes the team working on the watershed master plan, the tracking and updating and the work working tirelessly on the watershed protection ordinance. That is significant. And it includes all of our gis people. Watershed work is dependent on the geographic information systems.
>> Morrison: Right.
>> It looks like a broad name, it covers a lot.
>> Morrison: A lot of different things. And watershed protection ordinance, that is a pretty big revision or review going on?
>> Absolutely. Stakeholder meetings over 15. Looking at reoverhauling the codes on how we deal with the environment. We have had a lot of good work and feedback from stakeholders and hope to have something to council by the end of the year.
>> Morrison: Thank you. We will look forward to that.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Councilmember tovo, do you have a question?
>> Tovo: I do. Quick krarification on page 228 and 229. The department cost records are 3.5 million and below are bullet points, then below that, there are staff additions and the fte. How are those related? Are the cost drivers 3.5 million or looking at the additions below or additional break out detail for the cost drivers?
[09:35:40]
>> Um, basically, we have 7.5 million. We want to generate more as revenue in the 7.5 million would cover the extra staff additions and the water creek tunnels maintenance operation program. And also the general cost driver increase by counting insurance and transfer to our it or real estate, contract management, those type of costs.
>> Tovo: And to be a little bit more specific, also, the 3.5 million does cover the increase in the transfer to cip as well as staffing additions. How does that 3.5
-- I know we asked this now for every presentation, you may not have it, how does the 3.5 breakdown over the following three, if you know or just generally.
>> I can give that. On the increase to cip it is 1.35 million. The career progression ladder, 3.1 million. The staff additions, .5 and the water creek tunnel staffing, 1.5 i.
>> Tovo: So the water creek tunnel staffing it is the same as what is on the FOLLOWING PAGE FOR THE FTEs?
>> That's correct.
>> Tovo: Ok. And the staff additions are.45. That is an additional detail about the second and third bullet point more or less?
>> That's correct.
>> Tovo: I think what I have been trying to wrap my head around are the expenses related to the walker creek tunnel and top what extent these were in the original vision and some of the original numbers, you know, that were floated back many years ago.
[09:37:44]
>> Sure. When the original project plan for the waller creek tunnel was approved in 2008, it was anticipated that the capital construction cost and the operations and maintenance would be covered by the tif. With the economic downturn that was happening toward the end of 2008, 2009, 2010, there was some thought that we needed to relook at the economic forecasting model to make sure the financing was there before we actually started construction of the tunnel. So another economic analysis was done. It was determined that while there was still significant revenues forecasted from the tif to be able to cover the construction of the tunnel, that in order to fund the ongoing om for 20 years, there needed to be reliance on the drainage utility fee. A plan for that was developed for council consideration and council adopted that plan, the amended project financing plan in 2011.
>> Thank you. I really appreciate that clear explanation. I knew there had been changes and I was trying to remember, trying to figure out why we were seeing operations and maintenance cost in this year's budget. And then in one of the department budgets we looked at, also perhaps yours, there are also some costs
-- some funding lines in there for street
-- not street. For bank stabilization?
>> That's correct. Associated with the tunnel project, the tunnel is simply all the undergroundworks. No funded in the tif for above-ground improvements. The lower waller creek area has two of the top 10 erosion problems,n the city we have a section between roughly 2 and 5 street, which if you are familiar the crete is undercut. The bike trail has eaten away at properties where there are portions of warehouses. And the red eye fly is being undermined. Those are areas that are identified through the master plan prioritization process. We have identified funding for lower walker creek stream restoration in both the cip and part of the cip program, rather. I believe you probably also saw in the presentation, debt service as well.
[09:40:22]
>> Tovo: That is within your budget?
>> That's correct.
>> Tovo: In this year's proposed budget, operation and maintenance costs with waller street. Steam bank stabilization and you said that is budgeted for this year and also through rcip?
>> Right. And the debt service won't start until fy 15, not this year, but the year after.
>> Tovo: And we have some of the last bond money for above-ground improvements but those were main street. [Indiscernible]
>> in the parks budget, it was anticipated for stream and trail improvements and three million for palm and waterloo, 1.5 for each of those two.
>> Tovo: That was last november. But in the mobility bond
--
>> 1.5 million for the improvements in the 2010 bond.
>> Tovo: No stream bank stabilization money?
>> Ma'am.
>> Tovo: I thought there was and also stream and bank.
>> I think as part of the sabine creek proct there was anticipation of the stream restoration to the project. I don't know about the allocation between the two efforts within that bond budget.
>> Tovo: So has the money from the mobility bonds been expended at this point?
>> It is my understanding there is $1 million left in the mobility.
>> Tovo: How much?
>> One million. For the one project, the waller effort.
>> Tovo: So it is an effort, it is not
-- ok. Thanks.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Any other questions? Ok. Thank you very much. Convention center, and after that, austin energy.
[09:42:48]
>> [Indiscernible].
>> I'm mask tusker, the director of the convention center and my manager michelle geiselbach. And [indiscernible].
>> Mayor leffingwell: Record year this year for hotel tax?
>> Yes.
>> Mayor leffingwell: You want to say something about that?
>> We are having the highest numbers we have ever seen, with the grand prix $3 million ahead of hotel tax collections. Right now, we feel 1/2 was related to that. We haven't received the march numbers from south by southwest. We are very optimistic for the remainder of the year.
>> Mayor leffingwell: The projection of this coming fiscal year is even better?
>> Proposing a 4% increase for next year in the hotel occupancy task collection. That is also including the dip we saw in the recession.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Expecting the 4%, not proposing it.
>> Yes, sir, sorry, sorry.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Councilmember riley.
>> Riley: I want to look at the transfers out under the summary. This year, it seems to be about average, 12.2. The following year, it jumps up, which is an aberration over the five years. I understand from the video that that includes $5 million per buffered park. Is that why that is in that one year? And also, the blip downward in the coming year, is that for the same reason, saving up to spend that same $5 million in fy '15?
[09:45:03]
>> In '13 the jump up was for the money needed for the pec reserve fund. That is a one-time.
>> Riley: In fy? 13. That is why the number is higher. Fy '15, it is $5 million in reserve for butler park. That doesn't necessarily have to fall in that year, but that is the year that we're proposing it will be paid.
>> Ok. Where else does that money go? That leaves 2.1, that is going elsewhere and the following year, it is in the ballpark of 4 to 5 million being transferred out. Where do those go?
>> Capitol.
>> Riley: And what sort of capital projects?
>> The south side of our facility is now 20 years old. We have escalators, and elevators we need to do. Doing an extensive electrical upgrade. By that time, we'll have some other significant needs to replace in the building.
>> It goes back into the convention related things, never a transfer out into the general fund?
>> Other than what is required, correct.
>> Rey: And what is required would be what?
>> That would be your typical city cost drivers.
>> Riley: The administrative costs, that sort of thing?
>> Yes, sir.
>> Riley: Ok. Thanks.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Just noting, a large part of the revenue goes to the arts, a big chunk of it, and a big chunk, too, goes to the state of texas to pay back for our convention and hotel.
>> Cole: I have a quick question.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Mayor pro tem.
>> Cole: When is the debt payment finished for the expansion?
>> That is over in 2029.
>> Cole: A long time?
[09:47:04]
>> For the venue project fund, yes, ma'am.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Anything else? Ok. Thanks a lot. Now to austin energy.
>> Good afternoon. I'm [indiscernible] with austin energy. Kevin noble is the budget manager and here also to help us if we need him. Good, welcome. Obviously, we have had a lot of interaction over the last two years with austin energy so we may or may not have additional questions. Cheryl
-- sheryl.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Any questions? Councilmember riley?
>> Riley: First, I want to ask you about cash on hand. Which is shown in the performance indicators. For fy 12, we see a target of a minimum of 150 days cash on hand, and the results showed 68. We were well short of the target. How does that compare with other years and how do we expect to do on that going forward?
>> That is the lowest days of cash on hand we had for decades. The agencies want us to have 150 days minimum. We are below target. We hope to replenish in 2015.
>> Riley: We should be backup there as of when?
>> No, we will t be to 150 days until probably four or five years after that, depending on the weather and the income that is earned.
[09:49:12]
>> Riley: We are pointed in the right direction, especially in terms of the bond rating because we have been doing all right?
>> Well, they expect us to start replenishing the reserves and they will be watching those. We need to replenish those as soon as possible. The soonest we can start doing that is 2015.
>> Riley: On the cost drivers shown on page 252, austin energy was one of only about four departments that did not list fleet
-- fuel and fleet maintenance as a citywide cost driver. Why is that? Is that not a cost driver for austin energy?
>> It is definitely an interest and increased significantly. We were looking at larger dollars. I think it was a million dollars or more, most of the cost drivers are in the tens of millions that we were mentioning.
>> Riley: Ok. On the fund summary on 251, I notice that debt service was significantly lower for this fiscal year than was expected at the time of budget. In the budget, we expect debt service to be 173.2 but it was 138.7. Is that due to restructuring debt with lower rates or other factors at work in that.
>> That is right. When we went in for the last bond issue we restructured our debt. We looked at the bond forecast, so we tried to level out the debt. We also did receive the lowest interest rate on the BOND ISSUES SINCE THE 1950s. So we got a very good deal on the interest rates.
>> Riley: Ok. Good. Last question is just on the capital highlights. The sand hill expansion cost in 2015 and '16, that will come on line in 2017. How many megawatts will that be? 200.
[09:51:22]
>> Riley: That is all natural gas?
>> Yes.
>> Riley: That is all we have.
>> I would like to get more information about the capital projects noted on 257. It breaks it down to different categories. I'm not sure I understand between nonutility and general projects. I have seen nonutility and projects are not.
>> The nonutility is like chiller operations. So they're not related to the electric piece of our business. The joint projects are stp, the nuclear plant and the coal plant ftp.
>> Tovo: And the general is anything other than those?
>> Yes, the general includes software, hardware, general plant needs.
>> Tovo: Is there anything else in the nonutility category, other than the chillers?
>> I don't think there is. I think that is the fund we primarily use for the chilled water operations.
>> Tovo: On 256, can you give me more information about the riverside drive office building and what is contemplated there?
>> We currently lease quite a bit of office space, and we wanted to replace that. We have some land on riverside drive close to our new fcc building, and we plan to build a facility there so that we can quit leasing at 811.
>> Tovo:811 park springs?
>> Uh-huh.
>> Tovo: Ok. Um, let's see. I had another question, but maybe if there are others, i can come back. I'm trying to remind myself what it was. Does anybody else? I will yield.
[09:53:27]
>> Cole: I would like to first of all say it is nice to look at an austin energy summary that does not have deficit and a whole bunch of in parentheses numbers. I want to go through this a little bit. I have some questions. We see an increase with the 2013 and 2014. Can you tell us what that is about?
>> Yes, when we issued our bonds in november, we restructured our debt, and you can see, as you look through the five-year forecast, that is more level. We tried to levelize our debt service. We also received some very low interest rates. So all of that reduced the debt service.
>> Cole: Ok. Let me ask you about cip. I'm looking at the big jumps from 71.9 to 9.6 between 2013 and 2014. What is that about?
>> The largest project in the five-year plan is the sand hill energy center, it is the expansion of that generation facility. And it begins in '15 and is complete and online by the summer of 2017.
>> Cole: Ok. That makes sense. Remind me, I know we set the general fund transfer at 105 million for '13 and '14, but I don't remember setting numbers or making any policy decisions for the out years. How did you come up with those numbers?
>> Well, what we did was, well, we changed the formula from 9.1 including fuel to 12% excluding fuel. And then we set a floor. So we said that in order to help the general fund and to levelize the general fund transfer, we would not pay less than 105. But in 2015, it goes above the 105, so it starts increasing at that point.
[09:55:36]
>> Cole: Ok. Thank you. Thank you. Good job.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Anything else? I had to step out. The question about the riverside building. Is that part of the move of the eec from downtown or is that something separate?
>> It is the property right across the street from the fcc building. An we're currently leasing and paying quite a bit for lease facilities. So we want to start construction on a building right next to the fcc so we can move out of the lease facilities.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Ok. And I thought that, you know, when the move to the eec from the green site, adjacent to the green site in the riverside area that we would build a building. I thought that is what you were talking about?
>> That is.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Councilmember riley.
>> Riley: A couple near questions. The saet project. What is the amount of those upgrades.
>> I think the total amount. David will give me the real numbers. It is $9 million.
>> It is around $9 million.
>> Our portion of the cost is $9 million.
>> Riley: Ok. I have asked previously about the sand hill project, and it came up in regard to the capital plan shown on 257. Is that
-- with the additional 200 megawatts from sand hill put us in the position to release the rilines
-- reliance on saet?
>> I4 will help us as we reduce operations at saet.
>> Riley: That is in line with the generation plan?
>> It is.
>> Riley: At this point, do you see any issues with achieving the goals set out in the 2020 plan?
>> At this point, I don't think we do. With each iteration of renewables as well as with monitoring the difference between the generation costs, um, we believe that that is feasible. We're going through and adding additional renewables, that in itself helps us reduce the percentage of operations that come out of faet.
[09:57:54]
>> Riley: At the last quarterly briefing I asked the general manager about the recommendations of a local solar advisory committee. There are concerns about achieving the targets sought out and their recommendations could go out maintaining the affordability goals we have. Is there still ongoing focus on those goals? Are we still working on how we can achieve those targets, consistent with the affordability goals?
>> We are still working toward the 200 megawatt goal included in our plan. We had not integrated into the affordability of the megawatts of solar, as was included in the local advisory task force.
>> Riley: I did see a mention about community solar on the capital plan. Yes, it is on the capital plan. Any idea about a megawatt target on that?
>> We can certainly get that as a follow-up item. I don't remember the target that we've got included in the budget, to be honest in terms of megawatts.
>> I know the dollar amount, but not the megawatts.
>> Mayor leffingwell: You mean on all solar or community solar?
>> It is the one item the community solar, in the capital plan to touch on the goals. I assume that is local solar?
>> That is the intent to do that for community solar, which is opportunity for people that cannot put solar on their own roof.
>> Riley: It might be utility scale, it would be local?
>> It will not be 30 megawatts like webberville.
>> Riley: Somewhere between 30 kilowatts and megawatts.
>> That would be accurate.
>> We have a little over three million for community solar.
>> That's just next year.
>> More over the five-year period. For community solar, 22
-- 23 million. Over five-year period.
[10:00:01]
>> Ok. Thanks.
>> Mayor leffingwell: Anything else? Councilmember tovo?
>> Tovo: I wanted to ask a question about how you account for potential outages at the south texas nuclear project? I know in this last year, there was an outage as well as some problems at the other unit. I know you have to budget for typical operating expenses and repairs. Do you
-- does that rise to the level of the typical operating expense?
>> That was an unplanned outage and we have only planned outages in the forecast. That is one reason we need to build the reserve funds. Because that is the contingency fund for unexpected outages. [One moment please for change in captioners]
>> thank you very much. And austin resource recovery, followed by austin water. Councilmember tovo.
[10:02:03]
>> Tovo: We're scheduled to go until 4:00. I thought we were scheduled to go until 4:00, but i assume given the trajectory here that we're just going to continue on?
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I think if we can maintain a quorum, there's a good opportunity to get finished up. We won't have to call an extra meeting.
>> Tovo: Let's see. We have one, two three, four
--
>> Mayor Leffingwell: For the time being does anyone have to leave for right now?
>> Tovo: I don't need to leave right now, but I will need to leave probably by 4:45.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. We can leave by them or adjournment by them or slightlily earlier. We'll see how it goes.
>> I'm bob gedard, director of austin resource recovery and here to assist if there are any questions.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: All right. Mr. Geddard, a lot of activity recently by austin resource recovery.
>> We are definitely moving into our second year on the master plan activities. Much of the activity is projected in next year ago budget. We have that in the schedule. We look for further implementation. I would add that in this particular budget the expenses that we're projecting for next year is lower than our current year budget, so a little bragging point for my staff, my accounting staff and fine tuning our budget and really tightening down the expenditures.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. Councilmember riley.
>> Riley: Bob, I wanted to ask about one planning commission item on the fund summary. The beginning balance was for fy 13, 14.1, but the current year estimate for the beginning balance is a 21.1. How do we account for that 50% variation.
[10:04:31]
>> You're looking at fiscal year '13, the 14.1 beginning balance?
>> Riley: And then where
-- and it's actually 21.1.
>> I can assist a little bit. There's about a seven-million-dollar savings. That's the cye, the current year estimate. We're extending the budget by five to seven million dollars based on our estimates for the remainder of the year. Much of that is a reduction in the cost of commodities and contractuals that we've been trying to fine tune and some of that, about half a million dollars in fuel savings based on the rerouting of our recycling.
>> Riley: Great.
>> I would attribute most of that seven million difference to cost savings.
>> Riley: Great. Good work. And the question that I've asked two or three other departments and that is about the cost drivers. Most of the city departments listed fleet as and fuel expenses as a citywide cover driver. You're one of the few departments that did not. And you also have a very large fleet.
>> The budget office's recommendation is an increase due to the overall fleet budget, the fleet distribution of cost. Our fleet costs are estimated to decrease for next year rather than increase. Part of that is the rerouting of the trucks.
>> Riley: Was it mainly the rerouting of the trucks?
>> We are looking at o and m pretty much static or slightly rising, but the fuel increases that some of the departments are encountering is fuel usage increases. Our fuel usage has increased significantly.
>> Riley: Right. And I think I asked you the last opportunity about the plans for (indiscernible) and I think you said that is still in the works. And it would be a c and g slow fill as well as a fast fill and it would allow us to have trucks north rather have them route halfway through the day down south for fueling. So that would be significant mile raj reductions
-- mileage reductions once that's built.
[10:06:59]
>> Riley: So weould continue to see savings on fleet especially as compared to the rest of the city, we could continue to demonstrate that we could bring the fleet costs down. I appreciate your showing how that can be done.
>> Of course there's always fuel increases over the years, but we're currently offsetting the fuel price increases per unit, per gallon, we're offsetting that by mileage reductions.
>> Riley: Great. And last question I about the revenue forecast and the residential rates on
-- that is on pages 274, 275. This is a general question. I think what I see in these numbers is that customers are reducing their need for garbage disposal. We're seeing
-- you note at the bottom of the revenue forecast that the extra garbage tags are decreasing, that we're seeing fewer people needing to get the tags for extra garbage and apparently
-- well, I want to ask you, we now are offering a 24-gallon trash cart, smaller trash cart than we did in the past. Are you seeing a trend in terms of greater acceptance of the smaller trash carts and customers downsizing from the larger to the smaller? And do you see a need for additional adjustments in the rates. Are the rates designed to accommodate that or are we going to see issues with the revenues associated with those fees?
>> We're seeing a significant slide downward. And I was a little concerned this time last year that we weren't seeing the movement to smaller carts. We are now. We introduced a 21-gallon cart a couple of years ago and that had some significant service problems, so we replaced the 21 with 24-gallon carts with less restriction in the interior of the cart. Customers very much appreciate it. We've gained quite a few customers on the 24-gallon. We've moved our 96-gallon cart customers down to 15% of our customer base. It used to be 19%. So we're starting to see significant reduction in cart devices and rate disposal. As to the rates, the current rate structure supports this slide right now. There will be that continuing question over time as customers downsize, how do we adjust for the revenue needs. And my current answer on that is that we will attempt to keep
-- if you take all expenses over the entire customer base we're trying to center the 64-gallon rate to meet that the largest customer base on the 64-gallon is paying the proper fee and the 96-gallon has a surcharge higher than that paying more than the general average cost for service. And that is diseasing the lower cart. So right now it's working. I think that's always going to be a concern as we slide customers down, but right now I think our rate pricing and our rate structure works for us right now.
[10:10:11]
>> That's great. I know part of the difficulty is while we do want to encourage people to downsize and we've been
-- and if we see less revenue from that, that's fine. And that's good. But at the same time we're currently for fy 13 we saw a deficit of 9.2 million and we plan to get up to a surplus of 2.6 million by fy 16, a gradual a climb. So I know we have to be seeing conditional revenues even as we're encouraging customers to reduce their costs through downsizing.
>> That's correct. And it's a balancing act, yeah.
>> Riley: I appreciate all your work on that. Thanks.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I just want to follow up on that, that same chart there, the one on page 275. You mentioned that the 96 was 15 percent. What's the number for 24? 24-gallon?
>> That's a good question. Let me find that. I just had that.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: You've got it there.
>> We're about
-- I don't have cart numbers, but i have percentages. One percent of our customer base is in the 24-gallon. And that's up from zero before. But that's increasing. 20%
-- 20.9% in the 32-gallon, 62.3% in the 64. And 15.8% in the 96. So you can see the majority of our customers, 62.3% is 64 gallons.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Yeah. So another consideration I'm sure is
-- this is all automated.
>> It's semi automated in some routes, depending on whether it's a cul-de-sac or dead end or straight street.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: It's the wrong word, but normally a machine picks it up.
>> You're correct, yes.
[10:12:12]
>> Mayor Leffingwell: So it gets to be a point where probably your automated equipment would not pick up a really small, like a one gallon container.
>> That's correct. I think when it's the smallest
--
>> Mayor Leffingwell: You're probably getting close to that right now.
>> Yes.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: And the recycle carts are 96? 96. We will be introducing within the next month 64-gallon recycling carts under the condition that the customer does not have a larger trash cart than a recycling cart.
>> Okay. I got you. Because we do get requests that for a lot of folks the 96 gallons are kind of hard to handle getting them out to the street.
>> Yes. I have received some, particly in the mueller subdivision and somether areas where there's tight lot sizes or gates and that's why we're trying to accommodate with the 64-gallon.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: So as long as they've got
-- don't have a bigger trash cart than the recycle cart they can get a smaller recycle cart.
>> That's correct.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: That's good. Councilmember spelman.
>> Spelman: Mayor, I'm looking at 271, which is your forecast fund summary. And you're expecting to lose money for the next two fiscal years and bringing your balance from 13.1 to0 about 4.0 is the lowest number at the end of fiscal '15. What's the right number for that to be?
>> The right number?
>> Spelman: The somebody number for that at the end of the year.
>> Our policy is one-12th reserve. And that's the ending balance. The difficult challenge
-- you've heard from me before on this, is we're in an end balance between revenues and expenditures. And we're in a three to four year game plan to get the revenues and expenditures in alignment and still maintain a one-12 reserve balance.
>> So the end of 18 you're expecting revenues around 91. That means you ought to have about, what, eight? Your fund what will at the end of the year ought to be about eight million dollars.
[10:14:20]
>> That's about it, yes.
>> That's the moving target we're about to hit.
>> Yes. And in the out years it's very difficult to forecast beyond three years, so I'm a little skeptical of year four and five.
>> Spelman: I share your skepticism. A couple more questions. I understand how there will be a slow slide. There has been a slow lied that may be speeding up slightly as people move from large carts to smaller carts. That's good. It's why we set the prices the way we did. It's not offset by an increase in number of users because although there's
-- there are a lot of people moving to austin, they're moving into multi-family housing, is that accurate?
>> What I see
-- I looked at the multi-family counts and I see about half of the new residents in multi-family and half in single-family. We are gaining a little bit on single-family households. In the last year about 900 new single-family households to service. Spill spill and although there's an increase of 900 single-family households, it's not enough to offset the slide.
>> That's correct. Another element in that game is annexations and we have a large annexation coming in january of next year. And they're all single-family homes.
>> Spelman: Okay. That's taking into account these numbers too.
>> Yes.
>> Spelman: You're watching keye-tv morning news still anticipating a 100,000-dollar shortfall or reduction in the amount we're taking from residential households.
>> Yes.
>> Spelman:, ON RECYCLING Your estimated 1.6-million-dollar less in revenues currently and you're saying based on conservative estimates. Conservative estimate, middle estimate, what's the middle estimate?
>> I'm looking at two-million-dollar in revenue for the middle estimate. I anticipated that question, but I would caution that is a sharp crystal ball that the markets really have not stabilized as I had expected that they would be by now. Spill spill okay.
[10:16:23]
--
>> Spelman: Okay. I knew there was a lot of fluctuation. Plus two and minus 1.6 is pretty much equally likely it sounds like.
>> That's right.
>> Spelman: It could be better than plus two even.
>> It could. The recent industry publications I was reading this past week indicate a very rosie next year. But I'm not counting on it in the budget.
>> Spelman: I understand. I appreciate you're not counting on it in the budget. Thanks.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Do we have any large residential areas that are within the city that are under
-- still under private contract?
>> No large areas. I know there's a few exceptions, but they're very small, like no large subdivisions that I know of within the full purpose of the city.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. One more question. The clean community fee?
>> Yes.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: I notice it's going up from 3.70 to by 20185.25. 2018, 5.25.
>> Yes.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Maybe I shouldn't ask, but what's the reason for that?
>> You can certainly ask. The primary purpose of the clean community, there's two major purposes, street sweeping, household hazardous waste and litter abatement, but the secondary purpose of this fund is a zero waste plans and activities. So as we increase in our master plan activities for zero waste, it's increasing expenditures in this fund here. And so this is
-- this rate support is accommodating some of the growth and zero waste plans.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: But no specific part of that that we're talking about. No specific part of the zero waste plan.
>> I could
-- I could get out my chart of the different activities. We're primarily talking the impacts of the universal recycling ordinance on our staffing and the business assistance. We don't offer direct services to the business, but we are advising the business community on zero waste and recycling and some of those impact. It also includes in the next year and two years siting some reuse centers around the city so that used furniture and items around the household could be traded at a reuse center. And that's part of that expenditure plan as well too.
[10:18:52]
>> Mayor Leffingwell: So as I recall the original reason for the clean community fee was grafitti abatement.
>> We have no grafitti abatement in our fund.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: In arr.
>> In arr. Might be code compliance.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: All right.
>> Spelman: I'll follow up on that if I could. What's the difference of having a separate life or community fee and not just rolling it into the cart fees?
>> It's more advice from our wall office as well as our budget office. The
-- there's two legal reasons
-- two separate legal reasons to have the funds, the clean community fund and the cart fees. The cart fees and the base rate is a service fee and the clean community fee is
-- I'm not sure the technical term. It's more of a generalized fee across the public for generalized services regardless of the curb site services.
-- Curb side services. The clean community is assessed to the business community as well as the residential community and the cart services are only for the residential customers.
>> Spelman: And we have few people as the mayor pointed out a few minutes ago, who do not have residential trash pickup, but would also presumably, even as residential customers in the community.
>> Yes. For instance, I live in an apartment complex. I'm not serviced by the curb side service but I am serviced by the clean community fee.
>> Spelman: That makes sense to me. Thanks.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. So before we go to the next one I want to offer this as a suggestion. That maybe we could cover items 18 and 19 through submitted questions and try to get austin water here in the next 15 minutes. If that suits
-- we'll go ahead and do austin water in the time remaining to us, but aviation and cod compliance we could do with written questions unless
-- so take the rest of the day off. I happy to answer
--
[10:21:25]
>> I'm happy to answer any questions.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Mayor pro tem.
>> Cole: Hi, greg. I want to ask you a few questions about your requirement summary. I'm assuming that the debt service number is going up because of water treatment plant four. Is that true or
--
>> mange many other capital projects. Water treatment plant four would be in our debt service, although the amount in the five-year cip for water treatment plant four for this forecast is very small relative to the other capital improvements, about 80 million, 900 million is for other projects. Plant 4 will be completed and in service by the summer of next year. So the bulk of the spending will be wrapped up next year. We'll have more spending o plant 4 in 2015 as we're finishing up warranty issues and that kind of activity, but that is a part of the debt service.
>> Cole: So when I flip over to the revenue summary, I'm trying to get a big picture view of what's going on and what you're predicting for the budget over the next five years when we see water service amounts continuing to increase all the way from 260 to 335.2. Can you tell us why that's going on?
>> It's a combination of items. It would be for operational cost and paying our salaries and wages, health insurance, all the things that would apply to all city departments. We are seeing increases in our chemicals and other large contractuals are factored in t. A good chunk of that remains in the capital program, although plant 4 is decreasing. We're continuing to reinvest in our system, water pa main replacement we're investing about 25 million a year in water main replacement work. Continuing to reinvest in rehabilitation of our existing plants and we have a lot of investment at our davis plant in this five-year cip. We're replacing our oldest reservoir constructed in 1910. North austin reservoir and pump station on koenig road is scheduled to be replaced in this five-year cip. That's about $30 million. Various reservoirs and tanks. In part revenue growth is also from customer growth, as we're increasing our customer base, we're seeing revenues grow from that roughly two and a half to three percent a year, including we have several large annexations coming up in this plan. So it's really the combination of all of that.
[10:24:30]
>> We're seeing these increases and that would suggest that some of the growth is paying for itself. Would that be fair?
>> Certainly whenever we grow we obviously add those customers, those customers pay monthly water and wastewater bills so that is absolutely a part of our revenue growth, yes.
>> Cole: So tell me about the increases similarly in revenue that we're seeing for wastewater focus?
>> Much the same pattern, although wastewater is increasing rate wise a little less than water in the first few years of the forecast, but wastewater investments are on the capital side. The bulk of that is really reinvestment in our existing asset base, replacing sewers. We have a lot of work to rehabilitate physical assets at our wastewater plants, walnut, south austin regional. Significant investments at our hornsby bend bio solids processing facility, salaries, larger contractuals, cleaning of sewers. Part of that also is revenue growth from adding new customers in annexations.
>> Cole: Let me ask you, this is kind of the same side of the same coin, but we're looking at the bill impact from $83 to $101. And I'm guessing this is what the increased revenues are based on.
>> Slide 292?
>> I believe that's it. I don't have the number on it.
>> This slide provides the bill impact over the five-year forecast for what we would call average residential. Average residential is a difficult term sometimes. We have customers that use very low amounts of water, others that use a large amount. But if you average some of that out, this is that level of use. And you can see it's broken out by water/wastewater in terms of the increases expected through the five-year forecast and then combined as well as percentages and total dollar variances. E I was looking at this in comparison to the low income customer assistance program and I was pleasantly surprised that the increase from 2008 to 2014 was a little over two dollars. For the customer assistance program.
[10:27:08]
>> That's correct. Our customer assistance program we've been able to really stabilize rates, reduce them and stabilize through the last approximately six years. Customer assistance
-- in 2008 would have been paying about 54.59, and in 2014 they would propose would only be 56.21. So that's only a three percent increase over that six-year period. As well as we've been growing that customer assistance program. Last year at this time we had aut 4500 accounts and now we're up to 6,800 accounts. So we do believe the customer assistance program is being very effective at keeping water and wastewater affordable at a time when we've been raising rates. So I think you're correct in that analysis.
>> Cole: So our budget reflects trying to maintain the relative same amount through the customer assistance program in terms of our billing charges, is that correct?
>> We have been forecasting growth in our customer assistance program in terms of more customers qualifying for that program. We worked hand in glove with austin energy when they go through automatic enrollment for a customer, they automatically become a part of our customer assistance program also. So our five-year forecast does include assumptions with the number of customer assistance accounts growing through the five-year forecast period.
>> Cole: Do you use the same criteria that austin energy uses?
>> They administer our program. So we're just like a part of that.
>> Cole: Okay. Thank you.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: So the water utility is a little bit different from the electric utility in that your costs are based on debt service and labor. That's about all there is. You don't pay for the raw product, you just
--
>> that's right. And little power and chemicals too.
[10:29:12]
>> Mayor Leffingwell: And looking back at this page. I suspect looking back the last five years we would see the same increases on wastewater as we're seeing on water because they're capital driven and during those years we had this 500-million-dollar austin clean water project that had to be financed. Now you see that that problem
-- that project is completed, these costs are beginning to level out a little bit. And that's what we'll no doubt see when we finish a lot of our big water capital projects in the next
-- it's a function of debt service mainly.
>> You're correct. The outerears of the five-year forecast, years four and five, you can see both water and wastewater rates tail off to right about inflationary levels or even lower. So we're expecting that to happen.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: My wastewater bill is higher than my water bill. We'll have to look into that a little bit. I must be doing something wrong, I guess. [Laughter]
>> Spelman: I have to ask these every year.
>> About electricity?
>> Spelman: Yes.
>> Yes. Our revenue forecast has an elasticity element to it on the conservation and use side that we use to project.
>> Spelman: Do you remember what the elasticity is?
>> The elasticity is I think .17.
[10:31:15]
>> Spelman: Same as last year.
>> Yes.
>> Spelman: So one percent increase in the rate is going to cause
-- we were predicting would cause a negative .17 percent change in the actual amount used.
>> That is correct.
>> Spelman: Okay. All right. And that's
-- since we've been using that for the last two or three years now, have we had an opportunity to see whether or not
-- it's probably too much variability to be able to verify that number, but does it seem to be working for you?
>> It is based upon a study that we did a long time ago and we really haven't had an ability to do that. We do have, I believe, our water conservation has a plan to try and look at that elasticity because some of our rate structure has changed over the number of years that that elasticity could very well change as well. And we just haven't had time to do that.
>> We have been participating in national and international studies on conservation and these kinds of things I think will start to get some feedback there. We're a member of the water intelligence process, fit water systems. And they're doing studies on those kinds of things.
>> Spelman: Some of the studies we're looking at highly progressive rate structures as we've got, do you see a higher elasticity at a higher end for a progressive rate structure?
>> Yes. But it has been hard to factor some of the things out. There's been so many changes in terms of our rate, even our water restrictions. We've had one day watering for most of the last year and a half and it's hard sometimes to identify cause and effect with some of those things.
>> There's a customer confusion fact they are you wouldn't have if things weren't in a stable environment and you mightsee a clearer signal, market signal being sent with a higher price increase or some other change if things were otherwise not moving around. There's so much movement that people don't know what to do. And I still suspect that if there are any conservation effects it's driven much less by the price than by the level of water in lake travis, which is something that people see all the time and certainly they see that
-- a lot of people see that a lot more often than they see their water bills. We'll pay attention to it more than they do the water bills. The other question I had was on
-- it's our number 296, f.T.E. Versus customer growth. And there's an interesting story here and I wonder if you could help me figure out how to parse this. We've got a steady increase in the number of water and wastewater customers. And it looks like it's almost a straight line from 95 to, oh, the foreseeable future, 17, 18, whatever it is. That's going up without any dips or changes. The number of f.T.E.'S in your shop is basically flat from '95 until just a couple of years ago. And then it's increasing steadily after that. So tell me how were you able to provide water and wastewater services to a steadily increasing number of services with a flat number of f.T.E.'S and now it has to go up again?
[10:34:21]
>> Well, I think it's multifaceted story. One is we've been for many years pushing hard to be more productive, to be more innovative, to serve more customers and more pipes. The water/wastewater industry went through a very intensive privatization battle in the '90's and 2000s, and austin was one of the utilities being I'd for contracting out, contracting out services. One of the ways cities responded to that was significantly reducing staff to reduce cost structure. I think in part, councilmember, particularly in the mid 19 90's we probably were overstaffed relative to the size of your system, so we squeezed a lot of juice out of the system by increasing customers each year, but not increasing staff. There were some areas that can handle
-- like at a water plant if you pump more water or treat more wastewater you often don't drive the need for more customers. But I think one of the other phenomena that's happened in our area recently, the geographic spread has been growing and growing and growing. And when you add pipe that's a more difficult, long-term situation to not ultimately staff up on because you just can't continue to drive and maintain and put your hands on a hydrant every year and lift stations and other physical infrastructure out in the field. I think that's been a part of it. We've got significant annexations coming up that are driving some of our growth. I've seen new facilities. Plant 4 is a part of what's driving that. Some areas of our assets we haven't maintained to adequate levels, quite honestly. We've let them slip. If you look at our staffing plan as an example, our valve inventory, we have 70,000 water valves that the industry basic practice, not even best practice, would be to put your hands on each valve once every five years. We don't come anywhere near that. And that's some of the things that we want to start to change by adding some of the staffing. I think we've sacrificed some of our service levels, per se, by not adding staff. So it's a whole combination. I think I alluded to this last year that we're preparing a more comprehensive global staffing plan and I think you're seeing it reflected here. Although I would say with this I would just penciling out some numbers and why we don't budget this way, it is an indicator of productivity. Back in the mid 90's we were serving about 278 customer accounts per f.T.E. Today we're about 380. And even with the additional staffing we're not going to fall too much below that. We'll be about 360. I think that's a good indication of a very productive workforce. Even technologies, we've been applying more mobile technologies in the field which has helped boost productivity. People reporting to their jobs instead of coming to a central service area, getting work and then going out. We've been doing more of those kind of things, but some of that is
-- there's a limit to how far you can
-- you can place those things.
[10:37:41]
>> Spelman: So to subpoena some extent,
-- so to some extent this is a cost containment strategy over the last 20 years because there was a threat of privatization, but you're trying to change the deferred maintenance part of that.
>> And part two, other things, we've been filling some of the staffing gaps with temporaries. We have more temporaries on staff now than certainly since I've been director and that's not a good long-term thing. If you have the need for staff and you're not paying them full time benefits and other stuff, I mean, I don't know, it just doesn't seem fair sometimes. So I think we want to take some of those and bring them in. And we'll offset that cost. We're estimating our increase in staff alone will offset about two million dollars through the five-year forecast by the end of a year in cost through temporaries and overtime and contracted services. The other thing that's happening is we're doing more. I mean, as an example, we're following council initiatives such as the well ordinance. We're implementing home program to manage private wells and cross connection and we've been doing that with temporary staff and we want to bring that in. We heard earlier a discussion about records management. We're bringing full time staff person in for record management. I have a 500-million-dollar utility and five hundred billion dollar utility and i don't have anyone dedicated to records management. We want to change some of those things to be a better best managed utility.
>> Good story. Thank you very much, greg. Appreciate it.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. Councilmember riley? Far.
>> Riley: First I want to thank you for providing detail on the amount of your cost drivers. The austin water utility is the only city department that gave us a breakdown of the amounts of the cost drivers. I realize that may have been more of a budget office issue than a departmental issue, but I still appreciate it. Especially considering that we're seeing a 20.7% increase over the next five years. It's very helpful to see exactly how much
-- exactly what's driving that and really austin water utility is alone in letting us see what's driving the increase in cost. One of those costs is the transfers out. For 2014 we're seeing a nine-million-dollar increase in transfers out, $20.4 million of which goes to the general fund. And when I look at the five-year plan on transfers out, I see that we expect
-- we're going up
-- 2013 we're going up 26.7. Even with the is increase in 2014 we're still dropping down to 102.6 for transfers out. And then for the next
-- going forward after that we see a significant bump up. We're in the ballpark of 120 million. And I'm up on t total requirements summary. It's our page 285.
[10:40:31]
>> I'm with you.
>> Riley: On the transfers out. We see a bump upstarting in 2015, going forward from there it's in the ballpark of 120 plus, which is significantly higher than before. What's driving that? Is it that we're getting
-- is it that with work wrapping up on water treatment plant four that we'll be in a better position to do transfers out? What's going on with that? Why will we be in a better position to have transfers out in 2015?
>> David, do you want to start that out.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: We'll probably lose quorum in about three minutes.
>> The transfers out include some of these cost drivers that you see listed here, but another one that's significant as well is our transfers to our capital program and that can fluctuate significantly depending upon how much cash we have in order to be able to avoid issuing debt on capital projects. So the increases that you see in 2015 on are that we are transferring more within our
-- and that's the biggest increase for that.
>> Riley: On the electric utility we talk about the amount of the general fund transfer. The transfer from the water utility doesn't get as much attention. What is the general number that we aim for? Is there one? What dictates how much transfer goes to the general fund?
>> The general fund transfers is an 8.2%
--
>> Riley: Fixed at 8.2.
>> That increases every year, but the capital program that we actually transferred to projects fluctuates and we have a minimum financial policy of 20% capital program transfers. But in the later years it's ramping up between 30 and 50%.
>> Okay. One quick question on costs
-- on the revenues
-- on the rates shown on our page 291. We're seeing increase across all rates, but with clean water there's a particularly high series of increases over the next five years. I know on the video you said that's because we're way below where we should be and we're trying to get up to around 40% of potable water. And I hope we'll be there around 2018 with these rates? And where is that 40% figure coming from? Is that an industry standard?
[10:42:54]
>> We did some research. That's leisure activity at 40% or more. When we set up theory claim water utility we were at 40% and reclaim rates just didn't raise for many, many years. Potable was going up. We went many years without raising reclaimed at all. And now we're just trying to get back to more of a
-- a starting point where we were.
>> Riley: Okay. Last question and something that I can submit a written question. I want to get an update on where we are on the capital investments on the water distribution system. I see we do have some numbers here, but we've talked in the past about getting
-- making progress on those, particularly on the old cast iron pipes that are especially leaky and trying to get to those over the next few years. I need an update and don't need to go into detail on that now. 125 million in cip for water main replacement. Our goal is 15 miles a year, average 15 miles a year through the five-year forecast. We're seeing good results from those investments. Our infrastructure leak index is at austin all time low.
>> Riley: And continuing to get better and we expect it to keep getting better as we make the continued investments?
>> Yes.
>> Riley: Great. Thanks.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. And your leak index, that's a new term, I hadn't heard that, but this is probably among the best among peer cities, as I understand it.
>> Absolutely.
>> Mayor Leffingwell: Okay. Without objection, we're adjourned at 4:45 p.M. ,