 Hearing no other additions to the agenda, I'll entertain a motion to approve the agenda as amended. So moved. Okay, moved. That moved by, all right, seconded by Shirley. Sheila. Don't call me Sheila. That's an old joke. Okay, is there a second? In the second? All right, all those in favor of the approval of the agenda say aye. Aye. All right, any opposed? Motion carries. Approval of the minutes from the previous month. Any additions to the minutes? They're very good as usual. If not, someone make a motion to approve the minutes. I make a motion to approve the minutes. Okay, is there a second? Janine and Art. Any discussion? All those in favor of approving the minutes say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries. Is there any public to be heard today? Say aye. Yeah. Yeah, I'll read it. Is he out in the hall? Harold? Yeah. No, he went to the scene or something. He should be here in like three minutes. All right. Well, make sure we move him first. We might as soon as he comes we'll move him up to the top of the agenda. Otherwise, let's just move to old business. We can stop as soon as they get here. Thank you. Library of Recreation and Culture Action Commission. So do you want to talk about what council's direction was last week? Well, the council has given tentative approval to having three ballot questions. One is for the Center for Arts and Entertainment. One is for the Branch Library. And one is for a collection of rec center but not park upgrades that I think it probably needs more definition. But I believe that the intent was that they bundle the proposal from the YMCA, which I would be happy to talk about with the expansion of the old rec center and building the new rec center at Dry Creek Park. But the last was a little bit fuzzy. I mean, I only mentioned how much to make sure that the Y proposal was on the ballot but several other council members talked about it as a bundle. And I believe that's the intent of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, is that correct? So that's probably the way it will come back to us. But of course, until the council approves absolute ballot language, which I understand in June, it will not be set in stone. Okay, that has changed, hasn't it? Changed from what? Well, when it's going to unbundle them as well. Well, they'll still be separate. Yeah, there was never the intention that the survey had several possible bundles, but that was just the survey. So when we saw the reactions and if nothing had really overwhelming, it's going to pass no matter what happens to support. The idea was to make the thing that was on the ballot at all a separate question. And so it looks like three questions is some kind of an ideal choice. And those three, which would be library, arts, and rec, are the targets. And it's still a little to find what the rec one is going to be. They held public outreach last week. And I have not heard any report from that. I guess, did Pratt run that, Jeff? No, it was staff and consultant. Okay. And right before I arrived, I got feedback from the consultant. So I even had a chance to review it. Okay. So, Marcia, I have a concern if I can just ask. Because I think these are really important. But I got my new tax assessment yesterday. And it took my breath away. And I have a concern if too much gets bundled in one area, that when people see what Boulder County taxes are going to be, if that's going to affect how they vote for these very important things. So I hope one of the considerations will be to whatever we need in one fit. We take that into consideration because, you know, if I'm sitting there thinking, well, how am I going to do this? Adding even more tax is, you know, I worry about our citizens. I agree with you. That's actually why I wanted the wide proposal to be unbundled with the other things, right? But I only have one vote. So, yeah, I don't know. And here's Harold, do you want to finish this discussion or do you want to just put it on hold and let Harold talk about whatever he's going to talk about? Well, I think it would be good for him to hear what we're talking about. Okay. And I agree with the status unit with all these other things. But then I hear you say there's going to be a four things like why MCA or is that going to be under the recreation? Well, that is not decided. But I think the three council members gave the opinion that all the rec, which would include about why, should be bundled as one question. I expressed the opinion that the why should be separate. But, you know, that's not decided. I think the council's goal is that there be three questions. You know, again, one library, one culture, one sports. But it's not decided yet. And it has to be decided by the end of July? Yeah, and the word is that it should come back sometime in June. True. So we're shooting for June. I think the challenge with the why project is... Harold, would you mind? They don't know what that even means. Could you do a quick summary of what the why project is? Yeah. And everybody sees that? Yeah. So, you know, what was unique about this, and it hit us in the last minute, is that it is a multi-dimensional project in that it includes 100 affordable housing units, expanded childcare, a full 25-meter pool, an ice rink, and one quart, and then obviously the other amenities that they provided the why. And so, when we look at what the council established in terms of goals, it basically starts checking every box that they have in their goal setting session. The way they finance these projects is they utilize housing tax credits to help offset some of the capital costs that's associated with the facility. So, at the end of the day, you know, when we look at Centennial, I think we plug in $8 million to renovate Centennial, but that's basically converting it to core space. Which everyone takes. Which everyone didn't like. We think to probably rehab Centennial to keep it a pull on the low end. We think that's going to be 15 to 17 million. I honestly think, based on what we're seeing other projects coming at, that's going to be probably around 25 million based on what we're seeing in inflation. So, this really presented a unique opportunity to say for 10 to 12 million, you get pool, you get ice rink, you get expanded childcare and housing, which financially makes a lot of sense. The thing about it in the bundling or unbundling is there is a nexus into some of the other projects and how we model the pro forma will be dependent on the choice we make. So, right now we have George Mendewey out for the operations of Centennial Jack. I'll point it on that. So, if the Y package is on the ballot and it passes and the other recreation items pass, if you connect them, then it's easier for us to then program the pro forma that we're going to shift the 1.1 million from Centennial to the other recreation center, which actually reduces the ongoing operating tax increases associated with it. If they're unbundling, it makes that harder to do because if this or this becomes a challenge, because if one passes and the other doesn't, then it blows up through the financial model. So, those are all things that we're trying to work through to figure out. So, yeah, I don't know if I answered all the questions. Yeah. It would be built where Centennial Pool is located, that the pool would be removed. Once the new Y would be built, they would donate or in an exchange for the land would give them for their new site, they would give their current location to the city of Longmont, which would have the potential for another location for affordable, attainable housing. Yeah. And that's where the modeling starts coming in. And I started, and so this is not firm numbers, but the value of the land exchange to convert to an attainable for sale product, I think has a value of about, let's just say, at least $6 million. So, when you look at a $10 to $12 million contribution and you get $6 million of land for attainable for sale housing, the economics start looking really good on this because as we're working the attainable housing side, we took some fee waiver options to the council which they directed us to move forward on, which we're getting pretty clear-eyed in that we think between that and some kind of land offset you can find an attainable housing for sale. And so, now, not only are you hitting affordable housing, you're hitting attainable housing, you're hitting childcare in the area adjacent to this, which we need in both affordable and attainable housing. And these amenities, I think the key for us is figuring out how the memberships work and how we cross them, because what we don't want to do is invest in this and then again have a wide membership, and so we have to build that cross-membership component to this, which is where we have to move through. Now I had a question and I can't remember what it was. Oh, the when the tax begins in this land swap deal would the property tax and sales tax increases on the ballot begin in the first year 2024 so that we build up a fund or would they start later when the wide breaks ground? I'm still working through that. My gut says we would approach it in a similar fashion to the arts and entertainment, one of our arts and entertainment locations because typically when you're relying on tax credits in Chapa, it's not uncommon to take two cycles to go through it. And so I think it would make more sense to start it once you actually have all the tax credits in place because you don't want to necessarily collect taxes if you're not going to be using and that are restricted. So, but we're still, that's on the list. Right, and that was a second update of the alliance or the Senate for Arts and Entertainment have now agreed that regardless of when they raise the money, if they raise, if a miracle happened and they raised the money really early, they would still not have the tax start until the first of the year in 2027 so people get some breathing space, put it off, get this, you know, change in the tax issues. And so what Harold's talking about is that this would be also listed as some sort of a deferral of the tax. I'm sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, when they send out, when they did the surveys, did they deal with Spanish as well or did they call the Spanish to eat this? Do you think of right out hand what those responses were? No, I don't, but I can get that and I'll send that out to everybody. There was also a... My grant to help me was like 17 to 20% because I remember noticing there was a difference when we look at a population. 17 to 20% of them said yes? Or respond, I can't, I don't know. But I mean, but I did know that when we look at the demographics of our community, I think we're closer to 30%. I know there was a fairly significant difference. But yeah, she's looking at that now. And they may be a little bit lower. Janine, would you mind restating what you said about your taxes that might be good for Harold Taylor? That they took my breath away? Yeah. Property tax. The assessment on my house is just unbelievable. And I know that not just as an older adult on a fixed income, which a good portion of our population is, but that certainly is going to affect people's ability and willingness to pass anything that has tax associated with it. And these are very, very important projects. And my concern is if you bundle too much, if you put too much in front of people to vote on after receiving this kind of shock this year, that you better have big red words that say this isn't going into effect until 2027 because their response, I'm quite sure, is going to be, you know, just no. And you know, from that survey, I already think I'm not sure what people are going to say. So... Christina, do you want to say something? No, I think we're just trying to figure out how to do that. Oh. We could... Move the tables over there. Move the tables over there. Move the tables over there. Okay. Yeah, I agree with that. I got my notice yesterday also. And I always said, holy crap. But that's not exactly what I said. It's... It's $120,000. Yeah, I mean, they're the same thing. Takes a breath of life, like you said. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, when I walked in from Council, my wife had it laying down on the counter. And I had the same thing. You know, I think, I think unfortunately, I mean, obviously we're all waiting to see what the state legislature's going to do. Right. I think, you know, when I was looking at mine, it made sense. Because my life's into watching white houses are on sale and everything else in the reality is, for every reason that we're talking about affordable for sale products and affordable rental, and attainable products and attainable rental is because my grades all matched the market in my area of the community. So, from a market perspective, the number's right. And I think the challenge, I mean, so the good news is, at some point, we're all probably going to make a lot of money off of our houses if the economy stays stable. We're dead. You can't afford to move. You can't afford to downsize. And that's what older adults are looking at. We can't afford to downsize because we're going to pay at least the same amount for half of the square footage. And the interest rates are high. So it's a very complex thing here. Yeah. I hope the legislature will give us a break. I think it will. I think everything we're hearing. But I think that's why things like the Y project make a lot of sense because if you can drop in and I think it's going to change. So structurally what we have to do we have to go into more modern urban style development, pre-war construction, long-marrow lots, small setbacks. We know we can hit those price points. It's hitting the land to do it. And I think that's where all of this is as we talk about it and depending on what counts of shoes is to put on the ballot. I think it's working through all of these issues in a really strong communication plan. But at the end of the day it's also incumbent upon the people to develop their own communication plans as well because once they drop it on the ballot we're done. We can't engage in a conversation other than factual information. So yeah it'll be interesting. And unfortunately I don't think there's an end in sight in terms of prices. I've heard the state demographer we're going to try to bring her in to talk to the council. I think we're still behind on housing which we don't agree with how the governor and the legislature is drafting a bill to deal with this issue. We don't agree with the how but the why. I think we all agree with is why we need to do it. And if we don't I just think it's going to change the characteristics of it's already changed characteristics of the state. And it's just going to get worse. Now that we've received this in the mail if they do a survey today how much change there could be would be interesting. My worry is the timing. It's a terrible time to put a tax on a ballot. People just got that wonderful news. Well next year, the challenge too is next year when the school district is going to probably go to the Bob initiative so next year it doesn't work and then you're back into another reappraisal cycle and the year after that and so the timing is just not often. Anyway. Do you think anything's going to happen with the legislature? Yeah. I think it will. We talked to the council last night in their first budget conversation we're estimating that it's probably going to reduce the the value that you pay. So what they're talking about is potentially reducing via the residential commercial ratio by $40,000 which in a game we only are getting bits and pieces of information but when we model it it looks like about 50% reduction in the increase in the taxes. So now what they interpret is anybody's guess but I think they do something. Well it wasn't on the agenda but it was a good discussion. Thank you. Well it was all in under the heading of the ballot discussion which was right. Was there anything further on that before we move on? I guess we're going to move on to directly Harold. Thank you for coming by the way. No worries. Can you come next week or next week? You can get it on my calendar I'll see how I can do. I don't know if we've got you here but I appreciate it. He's already in there and he got me there. Let's see. I had a presentation that I was going to make and I outlined some of the high points and I started thinking about it and you can see that I added some stuff here all over the place. It's a complicated business of the senior housing and you know actually I think I should introduce everybody but I don't know if you know everybody probably not. I'm Dave Grudov. I'm the chair of this is Brandy Queen she's a counselling supervisor resource for a good career senior center. Hartman Thomas Ruth Bells Sheila Janine Darren Marcia Martin I know all the people there's got to be some of them. There's an often a good day. I'll just take a moment here to talk about that mention again that we've had two resignations so that brings a total number of agencies we have right now to work so we're all going to have to do some work. I think we can't depend only on the city to find people for us I think we're going to have to all try to find good board members and you know, yes. But remember we're out of this cycle now so I understand that you can make some more appointments, can you not? I will close on my appointment. Well, we will make we have two candidates that we'll talk about interviewing later still leaves you two vacancies that will be filled at the end of the year. There is a period of time we're going to be short. Why did I start August then? Well, again, it didn't change. Part of this appointment cycle now. Yeah, so the two people that are right now will get for July or August which is like what you did but we still have those other two vacancies that won't be filled till the end of the year. I still say we need to do some work between now and when we make our appointments next because people don't seem to want to join these boards very much. Yeah, Harold, three, I don't know if they asked you about this or not but three words that I know asked for an extension and the amount of to accept applications and the sleeper's office decided not to do that and then this board got two resignations. So I think what we were looking at is seeing what came in and did it relate resignation in a system that hasn't emailed somewhere? Well, the boards none of them, the quorum was what the sleeper's office used as the criterion all of the boards wanted to have a choice only one of them was going to be actually down the seat before this happened but and two more were going to be down the seat because there were six months left on the term which is not so bad but it only got worse. Also Harold, do you know if the quorum number changes? So this board has nine members. We're going to be short to does the quorum change from five to four? Is that a legal question? I think it's based on does it change from five from nine quorum would be five if we only have seven members? That's a Eugene question. Do we do a question? We need to talk with about that. It depends on what the bylaw state and how it's written. It could be written where it's actually appointed members which it would reduce. The government sets a membership of the membership. Right. What's the question? Is membership actually appointed or is it a quorum? That's a Eugene question. Well, let me get started. Everybody's going to have an opportunity to speak their piece. I'm just going to start by saying when I started on the board which will be two years ago and so much I was just overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that's done at the senior center and the more I learned about the senior center the more I realized there's just all kinds of things that are going on all the time just to give you an idea I hope you haven't heard a lot of this maybe for some of this but the last year we had roughly 1400 people receive assistance as far as housing financial caregiving and health and medical care and we had over 2600 people in classes that's in the tech center and that comes out to about 184 sessions over a period of a year and I don't know how many people you got involved in, I know they're delmer but I think you're more than that. The senior center tech center senior center tech connect they have I think 35 active volunteers but a total of like 60 volunteers gone, it's a lot. So there's a lot of people involved and there's a lot of people that are served at the center as far as counseling and support is concerned but there were 70 in-tech interviews almost 400 individual counseling interviews and over 300 support groups interviews and so that's all I think you only had yourself for most of the year as far as the counseling as far as the counseling we do have another person now I don't know if anybody's ever been a counselor I was a counselor for a few years and I know how hard that is trying to trace it, it's tough we had 9000 registrants through 610 programs that's the online registration system so you just look at the numbers of volume of people that go through the senior center it's really surprising but the same token in my opinion I think almost everybody in the board would agree everybody's they're stressed they are just really stressed and they work hard and I can tell that they are stressed because they've got red eyes and they look tired sometimes anyway so that's kind of just some of the services the 4,000 meals on wheels that take place at the senior center you're not responsible for that provide the space for the meals on wheels so it's a pretty good size operation I thought I should state the mission statement this is from 2007 and I don't know if that's the last time that went to the council you're only a mission statement to teach you plan it certainly is the last time it was certainly the last time I said almost certainly I wasn't there for all of that anyway the mission statement is to build and foster opportunities which promote dignity, independence enjoyment, community that sense of purpose and all of that I think is still valid the last changed in the last if you look at the top bullet point the population has increased some 14,000 people I think it is and that's 17% I'm sure you're aware of those demographic kind of changes but it impacts the services that we provide at the senior center a third of these people a third of our population is over 55 55 and older so the new people, the 15,000 people that we've increased from 2010 to 23 you know that's about almost 5,000 people just for Hispanics I should say for over 55 so everything that in itself seems to me is a way too big workload it seems just the increase if you look at the breakout of the population I just said 33% or 55 33,000 people if you look at it that way that's a huge number of people who try to serve and then we go down to the 19% or almost 20% or 65 or older and so we've got a sizable population and I don't know how long your services have been oriented towards 55 and older has it always been that way? well anyway it's a third of the population a Latino population that's a big focus of this whole discussion here and that's probably the main reason we're here today the Latino population all of my estimates are from the Census Bureau 2010 or 2020 or the American Community Survey probably familiar with both of those the Latino population is roughly 24% 24-25% that's a quarter of the population that's 25,000 people and if you look at the number of people that they serve we don't have real good numbers as far as the Latinos and there's reasons for that some of it's privacy, confidentiality and we may change some of that but we're looking at 25,000 people I thought I would mention that the poverty rate is almost 12% and compared to the overall poverty rate now if you back up you back up the poverty rate that the Hispanic poverty rate and just consider whites the way I figure it would be about 6-7% poverty rate so the poverty rate of Hispanics, Latinos is almost double what you find in the majority white community and I think it's a little misleading just to say it's 8% now my personal favorite is that seniors over 80 are expected to increase 244% and that came from the area aging area of agency and what do I say other than people of my age and some of us in this group there's going to be more of us looking for services probably in better health they're living longer and those kinds of things so we anticipate from the indigent long want and again you're probably very familiar with that 24,000 new residents by 2035 personally I think that's a little high because if we've had 15,000 increase from 2010 that's 12-13 years another 12-13 years it seems to be around another 15,000 people so it might be a little high but still it's still significant for anybody to slice it and last year I guess I gotta clarify this a little bit we had 66,761 patrons utilizing our front door it's visits to the building that's just people walking in the building maybe I come five days a week okay it could be the same person 26,000 but still that's a lot of people walking through the building most of those people work the front desk good portion of them I'm guessing that they do I guess my point is you've got a clerical staff and you've got 66,000 people walking through the door and a good portion of those are going to go to the front desk so they have to deal with those not only just for giving directions but they have additional duties on top of that I don't know exactly everything you do but I think the people that are overworked in that building I think are going to be my guests who are the two of you I'm sorry front desk or whatever you call it the reception sign and they lose a huge part of the registration I'm sorry and they do a lot of the registration they have other things they do and that's a major chunk I said before there are 9,000 registrations and 600 programs so there's two offices and an administrative assistant an administrative assistant two offices so there's three people is one a volunteer one is a part-time two full-time and in 2023 it looks like we're on track in terms of the programs offered again this is focusing on Hispanics there are needs here and Ronnie got this and he said they're talking about the programs available and he said they offered 187 I'm sorry 81 programs and 21 21 drop-in groups one program was in Spanish that was in 2010 2001 2001 I'm sorry I'm sure to be there the last time we hired a programming set was 2001 wow then in the Spain quarter of 2023 this recent plate you had 187 programs 48 drop-ins still no programming so a bilingual programming set but there were still but there were 10 programs in Spanish anyway you slice it it's not hitting we're near filling the need that's out in the community there's a total number of Hispanics out there all right under staffing basically most of the increase but most of the increase has been in counseling and the resource staff for the last several years and that's good we need to we need to attend to their social, physical, emotional basic needs and again we have no bilingual programming staff that's a major equity problem and all of this sometimes you add up the number of FTEs maybe a little bit different results depending on the time but it's basically been 10 people I started with 7 people until I think it was 2012 or 13 and you got a position 9, 10 anyway so you got all these people you got all these services that have grown with 7 to 10 people for the first time that's what I feel strongly that we need more staff there even if the staff wasn't old you still have a whole population out there that's not being served so, given all that the punchline is we need a Spanish speaking program coordinator which would also be involved in outreach I think we all agree we've got a problem with outreach part of it is the programming part of it is just having the time to do the kinds of things you need to do to outreach and it's not just the Spanish it's other folks there are Blacksters and others in the community they don't know they're full time office support I hope I make the case for the office support and we've talked about often the need for weekends and evenings and we had a discussion about that Jeff and Brian and I were thinking and this is done I can do use some part timers I call them limited term employees I don't know if that's a good term but anyway, unbenefited employees which are about 30% cheaper than a regular employee so you could get by offering some additional services I don't know how you'd arrange the staff whether you'd put those people by themselves on the weekend or how you'd rearrange the staff but that would be a cheaper way of offering services on weekends and evenings one other thing that I didn't mention we can get some additional staff some of the other things that are being absorbed by other staff right now and a big one is like Randy for example, somebody other staff take away from their duties to do some of the work we've been talking about but one area is international travel and international you can there's different views on international travel but we know it's popular a lot of people ask for I've been a couple of myself and they're wonderful but anyway that would free up a person that handles that right now, I think it's primarily Char that handles most of that should be doing more of that and so we'd be able to offer more travel experiences to a certain segment of the population out there so I guess that's about what I had to say the bottom line is you've got a lot of people you don't have enough staff a lot of people aren't being served and in my opinion and I think in the opinion of most of the people on this board the Hispanic community is underrepresented across the board we need that Spanish speaking program there's more and to my way of thinking we could double the staff triple the staff there's an alphabet that won't fly history we could increase the staff and use that kind of staff and a population that we've got I know we're not going to get that but maybe as we go through this in the months and years to come and what we're trying to and what we're doing here because of our outreach our program coordinator is successful all that's going to do is bring more people that increase the demand on the staff that's a good thing but that's what's going to happen so I have one question kind of unrelated and that is do you admit your budget adjustments are adjusting budgets monthly all you do monthly and carryovers and what we're looking at so we're constantly watching them so how does that work because it comes from the department so when I started what we did was we took a look at the unspent budget and it really started with Brandi we took a look at the unspent budget and brought forth some items to Harold to say this with unspent in 2022 and we would like to make the argument for these reasons to be able to bring that money as carryover in 2023 to be able to spend that and some of those reasons were the reasons that you listed that goes before Harold to be approved in July and part of it is though you can't use it for ongoing expenses because that and the funding we put it in the budget and that's really one time very specific raising why we're doing it and if it's not associated with what the budget is we start asking a lot of questions and they just got halved all of last week so if I can kind of give some background I think and I've had to explain this to the council when you look at where we worked in 2010 to today there's a fair amount of interest there's a lot of things that are in play and I'm not going to go but I'm going to anchor in on 2008 in great recession and that was a significant piece of the puzzles and how cities handle it in a different way so and I'm actually continuing to learn a lot of things about different nuances and how it was handled but in 2008 when the recession hit some staff made some recommendations to the cutting services cutting staff as part of the operating budget to deal with the deficits they one council accepted it they had an election and another council came in they didn't accept it they changed it and what they ended up doing was keeping a lot of those positions in place that you was in one time funding not one time funding what we thought when I got here in 2012 was a $3 million budget reset it actually functionally turned into a $4 million budget reset in addition to that instead of tactically looking at positions in the organization in terms of making tactical cuts based on priorities what they did what they said was if there's a position where people aren't sitting in it we're just going to cut that position and so that created a trunk wreck because when you look at the fact that you have $3 to $4 million in ongoing funding that you have to recover starting in 2012 you can't add anything near in those budget cycles because you're just basically replacing creating the ongoing funding into positions that were being funded on an annual basis by one time funding so we lost a lot of ground in that recovery load we also lost a lot of ground in that positions that were vacant that was cut just because they were vacant had different bases in terms of the critical nature and the critical impact of the organization so now you're having to make up $3-4 million on what you already know that you can't figure out how to fund the positions that were cut because they were vacant and that's what we took six years to work on in order to start to have that budget because that's not good financial practices in the middle of that the property tax returns and the sales tax returns were bouncing back because as fast as you had really narrow budgets and so even when I got here and we were making those adjustments one of the things that we were we were dealing with I think there were a couple of years where for staff we had to give bonuses only the salary increases were narrow and what we were trying to cover is what we call level one expenses which are bus paid bills and there was very little room for any additional capacity building in this so that's a big tip at the same time we went through the flood and we had to start shifting more one-time dollars into flood recovery for projects that we weren't anticipating because now the green lane was destroyed and we had to leverage those dollars against the match that we had to do to receive federal dollars so that started reducing the one-time funds and so when you start seeing the ads come in here so from 2010 when you were at 7 to now was that in a three and a quarter positions it really started at 15 so you're starting to see that 15-17 piece in here and so it has been a strain to kind of move through this and deal with these other issues and it is not I will tell you from my perspective in gyms it's not for a sake of not but we want to do this and we want to add these positions unfortunately the story that you said today based on everything I just talked about is actually the experience that I've seen throughout the entire organization it's the same story all over the place and so specifically why we added a resource specialist and we added part of the therapeutic right coordinator because it's half with Jeff and half with Brandy and why we added the commission was because what we were hearing from Brandy and her group is that the wait list of people getting in to see counselors was about two to two and a half months and I remember what was told in the budget and so understanding all the other operational needs we were like these people are needing immediate life services and we need to find a way to start incrementally adding those positions first because that's really about staying in your house having mental health treatment and then we also added a position in Brandy's world with the housing authority that I don't think that's on this list because we don't pay for it I think it's not on this list but the commission that we added is funding through the housing authority that works as a collective and so but we've really been focused on that aspect because for me at the end of the day and when we talk to the council you would get one of your core services and in this case our core services is providing the resources that people need when they're going through tough times to make sure we can support them and what the work looks like and what they're seeing coming in it's exacerbated by the economy and everything else so I think that's going to continue to be impressed as we look at bilingual positions I think we do need to probably look at the structure we have and we have openings and put it by the legal preference and there's something in there and that's what I was going to say as positions come open that I do on a regular basis and that I will ask Ronnie about what is let's look at this job description and do we need to have it bilingual preferred and what is the forward facing component to the community and is it a bilingual preferred position and I'm thinking because of all of the reasons that you said here we get to the point where we have vacancies or in the new position Ronnie and I will have that discussion that we're going to need to move to the point where we need to have a new scope so you're thinking that if you have 12 positions you have a vacancy with a bilingual bilingual preferred bilingual required I'm going to get to more of this because so when I say this exists all over the organization it really does and I think we're people part of what I'm talking to these folks about is explaining their budget you will hear we have almost a half a billion dollar budget that's true but the quality is that there are state statutes municipal charter issues that really start regulating how and where we can use those funds of a $414 million that can carry over to let's say a half a billion dollars only about 75 million of that is the general fund and so and of that 75 million in the general fund 75% of those expenses are related to personnel 75% are related to personnel so our general fund activities are really on the personnel side and when you start breaking it down when we talk about what's in the general fund we have complete police, fire, library, sand, recreation senior services neighborhood services agency parts, facilities, finance ETO of the 75 million there are a large number of departments that are utilizing the tax supported funds which when you get into the budget process and you start looking at what you're having and new revenue there's been many years where the message has been that folks don't even submit a level two request additional personnel because we're not sure we have enough money to cover up the state bills and what's coming in which is actually what led to the conversation I think it was the last budget cycle where we had the recreation board coming to us saying we need to build more projects we need more recreation centers and the library board saying we need to do more for library services we didn't hear from you all publicly but I was hearing from you all the staff and what we needed to do short on co-enforcement officers it was just blanketed and so when we were talking about the new projects I just said to council we cannot do this unless the added tax increase because there's no way we can incrementally step into this it's just never going to happen so inherently what happens then in these conversations is we go into the budget and they put in their CRP they put in their level one and they put in their level two typically level one requests were probably accounting for between $700,000 and a million dollars in annual budgets in terms of that was just natural inflation and prices going up so if you think about it that's not including sound increase and it's not including health insurance increases management increases and all of that so then we layer that on top of the level one and then what we're left with is can be allocated in level two expenses and then we start going through those priority based needs and what we need to do do you explain what's level one and what's level two level one's like your utility bills at your house or your grocery bill or your cleaning supply bill that's what level one for us is those things that we need to do to continue doing what we've been doing and so and we don't have a choice unless we stop we either stop it and reduce it or we pay that expense level two is that added value component to what we're doing and you know as I've seen the growth in programs across the organization and Jeff probably heard me say this more than the others in the room I think historically I would say and I can't speak to what happened before me I can only speak to now where I'm really pressing them to go if you don't have the capacity why are you adding it because they need to focus on what our core is because I think we have historically been relatively undisciplined in adding programs that we didn't necessarily have the capacity to do and we're putting more on staff and what would inherently happen is they'd come into the budget and they'd say well we added this we need the staff and this is not your group they're really good at it when Michelle was here in Brandy and working through it they were really good at being very succinct with what they needed and that's when we were trying to fund the positions but somebody would come to and go well we added this program now we need the staff and I would go so where was that in the budget conversation and did you think about that when you added it and oh by the way I've got 10 more priorities that are more significant than this and so we've been working recently well we started we lost a lot of progress in the flood because we really lost a good 4 years and some of our budgetary progress just because we had to be so focused on it but you know we re-engaged and these are the conversations that they have with me every year when we're going through it to say well I know you added it but I need to fund the counseling position you've got to figure it out and so that's another part of the problem the other day as we were getting ready for this budget I had a number of people tell me something that I think I intuitively knew but didn't fully grasp it is we are just now at the level of staffing work as an organization where we were for 2008 and that's organizationally and I think I can say politically because we cut the wrong position because the funding was on our own services I can tell you what I did in the previous community and what most of our joining communities did is they made the cuts that were necessary during that economic crisis so that then when the new remedy starts coming in instead of just refilling what we have they were really tactical in how they filled and how they expanded and so they were dealing with some of those staffing issues COVID didn't help matters either we weathered it better than most but we had to really retract the invert and not do a lot of ads here in the COVID period because we just didn't know how the economy was going to respond we got out of the pretty unscathed but we were bringing some of those concepts in of we didn't kill positions, we broke positions we had to eliminate, we eliminated we before that, we had to eliminate some positions on economic development so we could reduce ongoing expenses and push it over to LEDT so I think we're now at a baseline where we can do this last year was probably the biggest budget that I've ever had here and we added a fair number of positions we're really getting crest in our engineering world and our development world and that's incredibly important because that's what's going to facilitate the production of housing which hopefully can have more affordable and attainable units as we're doing it you know, their lifetime they were getting three or four months behind so we've got to do all of that and now let's later on top of this the issue that we're having with hiring and that's another problem getting people just getting people we're now at a large amount of carrying over to this year and you know, when you listen listening to the state and monitoring for another economic economists present you know, nationally for every two jobs that are on the market there's one applicant that built that job and the amount of competition that has increased dramatically and it's you're seeing it where it's really bad in certain areas, not as bad in other areas especially in the community service area the children with their families division has had a clinician position open for six weeks and so the city pays a much higher rate than local nonprofits, then mental health partners they have had a hard time building competition and so similar to the position that are listed here other areas of the human services are having well, that's a market issue, so like it's different in every area, so engineers, we have your year-to-year point of view mid-year adjustments we tactically watch how long is the position open how many people have we lost and if we start getting sort of triggered we dive in and look at what's going on we had to adjust engineers because it wasn't that there wasn't people in the market it's the market that's outrunning everyone and so we had to I think adjust our step one engineer by $50,000 a year our senior engineer by 20 and even then it helped but we were still getting outpaced, especially by the private sector what's happening in the social service world I think is the combination of there are more jobs in their applicants but I also think it's something similar I think confident you're not seeing the number of people going into social services so I think added, I think what's exacerbating that issue is you just don't have the volume of people moving into the system national and high school are pushed into STEM so I'm a history major I'm a history major a master's in public administration we need to focus more on the social sciences because when you look at the world of the future what people are going to need but we keep wanting to push people into STEM and what you're going to find is a glut of people into STEM and not enough in social services and then it's going to pay more but I think the other thing that I talked to the council about is I think generally in government we're seeing huge challenges in terms of people wanting to work for government so the example I will use is the world is today is much different than it was 20 years ago when I started in this profession I honestly didn't focus it if I were if I look back to 1995 when I decided to go to get an MBA versus go to law school or an MBA if I were in that position today I would not choose an MBA and so what we're seeing realistically in government is people are exiting as fast as you can imagine I get four contacts by 100 a week I have peer mentors that are just ejecting out of the system and it's really because of the entry all that started to percolate into local government local government has historically been into that at the national level and now the state level has now started to percolate into the local level and then the things that these folks deal with on a daily basis they hear or people hear about it and we're like I don't want to deal with this and so in many cases we create positions but we can't build and so it is as complicated as I've ever seen this world we also have to change in what the new generations are wanting coming into the workforce and we're doing a lot of things to try and combat it so we fully embraced workplace flexibility work from home components they really can't what they do is hard for them to do that last year for salary increases what took up a significant chunk of the new dollars coming in and the minimum salary increase was 6% and we capped it as well we're in a cop study we're looking at it it would be surprising to see the same thing coming again because you don't want to forget the folks you have here because if you take money to add a position we can lose too because there's other positions we need to start to build that is literally a 10-inch team in it overview of what we spent an hour on last night and we will probably spend what capital another 40 hours on the whole stinking rest of the summer in the end and we will spend hundreds of hours on dealing with it so the one thing I wanted to let you know with A, they have been communicating with B, we've tried to address them where we can tactically but we're trying to balance it within all the needs of the entire general plan and I will say I think one of the needs that is creeping up this year actually is showing itself out of children using family services and that is a big product of what we're seeing happen in our community with our children our teenagers and our young adults and unfortunately we've seen some of that show itself in really bad ways recently at Centennial Park and at Hobby Lobby in terms of some activity that we can say is gang related and it's a different problem than what we experienced in the community 20 years ago what I'm saying is how we dealt with it 20 years ago it will not work today and so I know that we're not going to have to look at something on the prevention side and the prevention side but it's also showing itself in primal education in the sense of how we bring some resources there and when that's all said and done as we look at the budget for this year and Jim did a good job if you have a chance that we could bring it to council right now on a sales tax perspective sales tax is about one percent over where we were last year use tax is laid out which when you look at sales and use tax then we're not performing at where we hope to be from a budget perspective now the good news is we didn't budget for Costco the bad news is it's only eight months and at best it will narrow the gap or maybe balance it but it won't take us over this year what's really starting to show itself and it's interesting after I mentioned the article for us like you my wife had another one for me to read where we, you know everybody's been debating are we in a recession are we going into a recession about a month ago I started seeing more and reading more the American consumer had bad news for the US economy and I think what we're seeing with all the inflation pressures that we're seeing at the grocery store and everywhere else people are now constricting on their disposable income which has directly impacted sales tax the property tax interestingly enough is a good thing but it's a bad thing when it does to people because we've had a restriction in the disposable income and so had they stay with what they were going to have that was about 7.2 million dollar increase and running for us we're running up modeling 50% of that 7.4 so we're going to model 3.7 million increase in that and then even when we do that we typically in real crazy years this is part of our budget research strategy as we pull a million or so off of the ongoing funding and use it for one time so when we're in a non re-appraisal year we're not pinching ourselves so tight because historically what the city would do is you'd be flush, you'd have no money you'd be flush, you'd have no money so we're treating our re-appraisal years in a different way so we can smooth that curve so that we have the ability to off cycle years and make adjustments in your organization so at the end of the day I think Jim said we're projecting that we may have 5.1 million dollars last year was the first time I've seen this since I've been here I said on our must-pay bills level 1 they tended to be between 7 and 900 thousand I think it seemed as though it was 6 last year it was 1.9 million and that was just the direct impact everything that we're filling is into the tools inflation we're filling as in organization so let's say we're somewhere, let's say it's 1.5 so we're at 5.4 million and you take 1.5 off for must-pay I think we're going to have the same labor pressures so if you you know I think we have from the CBA you may have an increase with police and fire so that's going to be probably close to 3.4 million dollars and then if you do that for the rest of the organization in general funds you're going to have 1.5 million dollars potentially and so it doesn't leave a lot for us to deal with I wanted to explain that so when you start seeing decisions we're making there's at least a framework of what we're trying to do and how we're trying to do it the other advantage we're going to be going now with the ballot initiative is that if some of these pass so let's take the library for example where we're putting in the ongoing operational cost and the preferred level of service what that actually does for the rest of the departments in the general fund is it reduces one more layer of competition and so that's part of this what we're doing right now and when we talked about on the right center and the Y the Y goes we say 1.1 million dollars in ongoing expenses we may reduce the salary then tax increase by half a million dollars I would say and take it from there we then take the other half a million dollars which is $600,000 and drop it into opposite some of the other operations that you're dealing with so these things are in here I said a lot so there's one more thing you should say Harold which is what you ended up with the council on about this is a year of finishing things yeah so that was the other thing so what really happened is and I'll take parts for example you know I'm here well we're 20 years behind the building parts that's correct what I said to the council is I can't explain what happened in the first 10 years I don't know I wasn't here well I can tell you what happened in the 10 years that I've been here is we had to completely re-position our staff into flood recovery which if your tenure is behind I think he knows your tenure is behind but technically we're still in flood recovery and in a short period of time at some point this year maybe I want to travel down Boston across the bridge because it's either going to be closed one line or two lines and then we're going to have Army Corps and Isaac Walton so the flood really kind of shook the system but even in that we did really well in terms of the project's flood recovery but we had time constraints what I'm seeing holistically though is we're not great at finishing things so what I did this year and I started it last year in the budget when we were looking at CIP going can you finish it this year? Can you finish it this year? Yeah, yeah, yeah I've seen the role of it I was already seeing this anyway so in the CIP process what we're saying is don't put anything new if you can't finish what you started so this will also be a reset here at finishing things so then that way as we're putting new things in we can actually spend the money and get it done because that in its own right has been an issue because inflation's killing us and to give you a sense of the inflation impact I had a $4 million cost over on the Coffin Street project which is critical to a broader transportation system I had a $4 million over on the Boston Avenue Bridge which up until this point everything's kind of under budget so that's inflation we're $1 million short on first and then transit station which is again incredibly important to our broader transportation system what else did I have in there $33 million short on Nelson Planners again that's not a timing issue that's just the market getting away from us on concrete, steel electrical components and so we're managing that we have managed Boston I think we've got Coffin under control we're going to throw that on two years we've got to figure the million for first and main so this is also a year of finishing so that we can really create a blank slate as we move forward can I ask a question about finishing things so the friends have picked up paying for two staff positions since 2017 part of one of our resource specialists and part of the marketing specialist and the friends fill in more if you want more details have said quite clearly but their thought was they were helping start that position and the city would pick up the pay and finish it at some point and that hasn't happened and they're getting probably about it what is that what is the thought there about starting and finishing paying for positions well I mean it's an interesting question because if you use the money to pay for half of that or whatever it is then that's money that's basically keeping your staff level at a baseline it doesn't really shift the needle at all and so I'm not sure what the conversation with friends on that issue I think we said we can't fund it and so then the option with friends and I don't know if we would say absolutely we would cover it and so that's an example of expanding and doing some things and we're going to hear it and I think it has become a different philosophy with friends because historically Michelle always had a list of things she asked for and was always very clear that if the city can't pay for that the friends will and it appears that that way of doing things is changing a little bit I think that a little bit of pushback from the money and that's the thing that we can yeah I mean that's kind of the point the operating model is this they don't want to do that but that's not how it's created and so then I talked to Linda and I met a couple of days ago I don't understand the whole situation very well but I agree she's getting very grumpy about it I don't know what the future holds what the question I have is really when you're talking about expanding services versus poor services and like a resource specialist that's not expanding programming services that's just trying to meet the needs of 1,424 people who walked in the door last year for resource assistance and it's a core it's a permanent core it's a growing and permanent core need so what is the plan to address that well and I haven't dug into I mean this is what Christina and Jeff and Ronnie have to do but you know I will tell you when I look at that there's even in public safety you know like an example that I often hear is well it's a core service to provide all of the fire services not necessarily core service is the immediate fire response the the concept of the tactical rescue unit or this or that that's not necessarily core and that's an extreme example but in other operating budgets I think we also have to look at 180 things we do and say what's core in this and you know have to need to want to and sort of my mantra what do we have to do what do we need to do and what do we want to do and I think organizationally we have to start looking at this to make sure we're getting the hapties and the need to because I think that's part of that lack of discipline and I run into this all the time people tell me I'm too busy and too busy and too busy how's only human being green light to stop for once I've given people a green light to stop for once and every time I ask a question what are we going to stop doing it's crazy the ones are what people what staff want to do but necessarily what we have to be or need to be and so I think that's got to be part of the process too to try to figure some of this out you know what I hear you saying I think I understand most of what you're saying mostly but it seems like what I'm hearing is it's got to be tough to find a lot of different kinds of decisions and resources and it's going to be tough to come to things and it seems like you're saying that we have to evaluate our courses you know get back to the essential services whatever the function is and whatever the office is and that's what you're telling us and any growth for a while you're not saying that we can't submit the request anybody can submit anything they want let me ask this though what do you want from us you know if we have another discussion like this what do you want from us as far as our programs well I think it's that question of what do we have to do everything brandy just said I think we have to do and I think it's going to be more pertinent as we continue in the future and then I'll explain why the demographer to your point of we can't afford tax and I'm talking our older adult population we can't afford the tax increases but we can't afford to downsize your entire threat I bought a house much later than most of you probably because I haven't been here that long and I started I had to buy different entities madness that's the current my kids are now going to college I've got a big house that I don't need we have to clean it and my wife and I started talking about how do we downsize and then we started looking to get a smaller house will cost significantly more than I paid for mine and how to get upside down from an equity perspective so it was kind of like crap we can't downsize now what the demographer is showing us is that is a statewide problem and it's also contributing to the housing crisis because there's a normal and healthy housing market you have a normal attrition to where people like myself or people like you want to downsize you'll downsize, you'll dump houses on the market that then is picked up by the next generation moving in that's actually part of our problem and I say all of this because I think the demand for that hardcore social service assistance is only going to get worse because of that very issue and then that's starting to spin itself off the issues in the Gen X group and now the millennials because I think everybody thought they were going to not want to move the suburbia and move the houses but what the findings they do and COVID was a big trigger in that and so now they're starting to get into the market Gen X is still we're not at the peak of our housing body potential we're close but when you have those two and then the stagnant piece here $2,000 a year short in Colorado a unit short in Colorado but then that's also telling me that piece of what you all have to do is going to be more and more and more important especially for those individuals that are now in the retirement stage of life that didn't necessarily have the pigeons in place to account for everything that we're seeing and I just think it's going to get worse and so to me that's like that's a have to we have to get very clear eye on this what's a need to what's a want to is we're looking at what we do operationally to ensure that we're supporting those that are most in need now another solution in this is something that Jeff does if there are things that are want to that that people would means would be interested in participating in how many others and I were talking about this so a lot of my friends that I started with here they're all retiring down I talked about this is I think there's also a group in that 55 to 65 range that may not naturally be inclined to utilize senior center services but is there a market for that 55 to 65 year old group to where you can do some ebay services that helps facilitate things that actually brings in revenue that allows us to do some things so you cover your operating expense with the fees but then you may charge enough more to start bringing in the revenue models and that helps offset healthy bills that are posted into the core services to be supported so I think there's a creative way that was going to be one of my questions I call it enterprise from do you have enterprise funds I've got like 50 enterprise we do not want to be an enterprise fund it's the enterprise fund model where you take the same base component but you use it as revenue to drop in here you don't want to be an enterprise fund our definition but you can take the same concept can we talk about a current problem we see happening with our revenue on the registration side? let me say one thing first Ronnie and I have had that exact conversation about that 55 to 65 year old group and one of the challenges that senior services have is that they're closed on the weekends and they close at 5 most of us that are in that 55 to 65 age group are still working those hours of the day that the senior center is open for us to have the capacity to bring in those extra revenues we would need the resources to be able to expand the office or figure out how we can burden other groups to augment it so here's if the senior services once are tied to goff now real quick so goff has a reach of like this senior services has a reach like this if the goff and senior services put together and he did this and maybe you said we want to work getting goff program for older adults figure out how you can split the revenue and minimize the staffing cost then not only are you benefiting this program you're benefiting goff because you're bringing in different people not that that's the right answer Jeff but I think we have to get creative in how we're looking at this and how we work collectively as an organization to benefit the whole and my thought that recreation and senior services is a better fit because we do a lot of similar types of things in the recreation world and maybe between Ronnie and Ben they could come up with that extra programming and cost share the revenue share what brought in another question I think comes into this because there are a 61 to 70 demographic are people like me who don't know how to not work and found themselves tired so what would the rules be in terms of liability and all of that in terms of the ratio of people staffing and open building how what percentage can be volunteers versus what percentage absolutely I don't think there's a magic answer to that I think we would always need one full time staff member there we are part of what we got with in the budget last year was we created a volunteer coordinator and so HR is now starting to aggregate a lot of that and part of the reason was we had so many people doing it but we were stepping on our own toes and so I think through that volunteer coordinator position we could do that to get very specific I know Karen Radivaker is volunteering with you all on the technical side she's a high-end skill right I know Dell yeah so that's definitely a solution and I think that brings the community together not only as an organization how do we solve problems but how do we solve problems as a community I have a question about hours because we do need to expand hours but there's the staffing and all of that that goes along with it but is anyone considered changing hours or alternating hours or have we looked at what are the peak hours of mobilization in the senior center and are there days that are more active than other days and is there a way to have 10 to 6 or 11 to 7 1 or 2 days a week to accommodate people that need those after work hours without necessarily having to expand staff that's actually a great point and we're doing that in different places you know one of the things I was going to suggest is we're really moving more in data and core decision making and so we've integrated some groups within multiple departments and we call it what's that group called now strategic integration so we had a lot of data folks and one of the things I was going to say again I think this is something that's a city which we haven't really been great at is we kind of do what we're doing and we keep doing it and a lot of times when I'm in conversations the answer is what we've always gotten this way I think it would be good to do some survey and really see I mean hey I think in terms of capacity we could figure that out internally but then if you're looking at targeting a certain demographic to help generate revenue to go I would survey that group 55 to 65 year olds to go what would you like to see what would you like us to do because a lot of times we think we know what people want us to do and in reality that's not what they want us to do and so I would maybe tap back to see how we could do some survey in there because it gets to that point how are you opening the optimal hours and if you were to cut it from what time do you all open 80 so yeah so if you can do it where we open at 10 and we close at 7 or we open at 10 and close at 5 and half hours on Saturday you can do it where you open at 8 if you don't bring your full staffing contingent at 8 and so you bring some in at 8 you bring some in at this time and then you elongate or you move there's about a thousand ways to deal with this the other thing that I think we can start actively talking about is if you wanted to expand some of these things on the housing authority side you know we have a lot of age restricted units there are many ways that we can partner there and maybe it doesn't have to be at the senior center maybe it could be at Aspen yeah Aspen Meadows Apartments or maybe Spring Creek you know start expanding scope geographically as well utilizing facilities that we already have for staffing is going to be an issue but I think making the message clear that when if and when hours are shifted this is why but do it with data do it with data yeah don't do it don't do it like you know make do it at 10 but you know really be thoughtful about the data because Lincoln it's easy to go to folks and say well here's what you wanted I mean we even do trash collection they work four days a week I mean figure trash out you can almost figure out anything because that's I mean I'm telling you trash is it's really I ask people what's the most important service the city provides and everybody will please come back to track service yeah look at what's happened in the North East when the sanitation workers are going on strike shuts the city down except for rats yeah so I think that's a good suggestion and and I'm open to all of that I mean that's the one thing I think they can all say is I'm not afraid of risk and I'm not afraid of being creative to find solutions and you know what why don't we test one out it doesn't work probably lose that that's how you make improvements and and I think that's a mindset shift I'm still struggling with failure the first time I came in and I talked to everyone I said I'm not afraid of risk I'm not afraid of mistakes mistakes you make mistakes in many improvements and I'll never obliterate anyone for a mistake unless it's what I call you're just sitting on your backside not trying to improve and it's a crazy mistake other than that I'm pretty tolerant it's that it was taking us 10 years more and more adoption of that because I think people are inherently afraid of risk but I think we have to bring that component from the private sector into what we do with government because otherwise 20 years from now we're going to be looking at ability what we're doing because of ability and government needs to shift question in reference to the valid issue is that going to take an increase in person health it's factored into it's factored into it it is factored into it which that is the the potential where it actually I think creates capacity in other places because Jeff can then get created without any staffing so then maybe we're not having to have WREC come in all the time for positions and then if the library has this funding source sending it on a trajectory all of a sudden we're restricting the amount of departments coming in to these space or needed staff so if we were sorry oh I thought the Americans so no, that is why we built that in because we were not going those who failed to learn the history and the states of June were being that's actually what started part of this problem too on the part so as I said this story there's building parks we they were never adding a staff to maintain and actually the funding staff and so when we you know we came in and it was like oh no so we went to the council and said we can't build any more parks until we get the staff we need to maintain and you may remember that conversation because I think you were in a couple of meetings or something else so we now finally caught up to where we now can build parks based on the staffing but yeah we weren't going to do that again I think the other thing that we built into that we built into the ballot is the capital replacement as well city historically has not done a good job of preparing to maintain the facilities that we have and that is a built-in component with the ballot issues so if we build a new rec center there's money there to help keep it all of the HVAC units and so on operational we spent close to the city of 5 million it's a library of 2, 3 8 and another 2 or 3 and our public safety building so our intent is 10 million make some learning there and you all cannot tell what we did because the foundation for failing the wall structures were failing and so again those who fell in the fire industry mistakes are doomed to repeat it that's how we built it in because we had facilities that were at the end of life that was a bond initiative that everyone voted on so we have all these facilities and it was because we never invested in them over time and so literally 40, 50 years later we were about to get red tagged on the city center because the foundation was failing same thing in the library and we're now seeing the same thing in the public safety building so that's another thing that we've got to build in our budget is really a really good online maintenance program because what that does is that took 10 million let's say 10 million dollars away from us that we could have potentially said we're going to add a library annex for like 5 or 10 million we're going to add on to the senior center we're going to you know do that mean just money that basically going to our building the only thing that you'll see that's different is a wall around the building and that was put in because it needed to reduce the lake limit on it all the post-tension slap and they started breaking and we got 10 million just gone they asked you the volunteer or the community specialist whatever you said it was have you found that to be cost effective I mean are we getting the volunteers oh yeah there's a you can quantify the value in that so the marchers question without volunteers here David build is a really good job on tracking the hours and the work production on that and if you all wanted to do that I want to do the same thing because we can quantify that we know we have a quantified a third of our programs are on volunteers a third of our programs are on volunteers so we can then take it into a dollar value to say that's equivalent to a third probably two staff members equivalent to about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars just like we throw you all a party every year and then I have a question for Christina how long does it take I mean are all positions have the same requirements as to how long you have to wait how long you have to post etc etc because I guess that I know of some position that by the time it closes you've opened some of these people and they've been hired by somebody else we've actually shifted that so I think everybody should be posting their positions right now open until build and then we had to do that because we were finding that it's like stop do it open until build I'd like to hear that so if you get a great candidate you'd better go after that great candidate and then what so it's open right away no internal posting there are some any other questions so what I'll tell you as I definitely heard what you said I've been hearing it if we had all the money in the world I would go here it is we were kind of hoping for another good year but definitely your things that you've mentioned have been brought to my attention and you know we'll do our best to get some of these needs if we can you know just know my lens is always going to be after you and you've obviously heard me say we've got to figure out fast but what I want to think about is bridging it with the LHA too so let's talk to Kendra because if we can do an LHA city split well so we're going cross purposes there because one of the things that we've talked about with the LHA our monthly meetings with the support services team is that a lot of the problems that are running into the buildings are because people aren't getting out of their building and going into the community they're just sitting there all day doing fighting each other so we are actually doing more get acquainted programs this summer with specific outreach to the housing authority to try to get people to leave the building and come to us if I can get them as part of it and I can let's say we fund one and they fund one but we design it not with the tax credit limitation maybe we can create it so 50% funding 50% of the other 50% from the housing authority yeah we can create two books either are you talking about programming programming oh sorry you mentioned programming a while ago no no no this is not programming this is the resource the resource specialist or accounting but I think there's a way maybe in that we're straight in there too but there you go Brandy we're talking about well using the building on the weekend would be a plus if you get if you get one staff member to open that once a month then you can set up volunteer programs for those people in right to get and it gets the because the people in the housing authority places into a different place it may not be a resource I mean if you if you add every resource what we're really having is the it may be a rest program it may be a combination of it where it's a program it may be a resource I don't think we have it we've got an idea see there maybe if you get half a person out of this it's all worth it I was asked to be called next month to be another out well I mean part of what I'm dealing with is on the the branch one we're not getting people out of there we don't have enough programs there maybe part of it is we have to bring people there and then get people to go somewhere else and if we can have a maybe some kind of coordinator program that assists bridging but also filling gaps for as many years yeah we do it in other divisions we don't do it here so maybe you're looking at like and a vision is your vision is 50 split okay I was just asking about that does what that allows to be intentional focusing on the Spanish program peace or collectively it's very interesting focusing on that the programs I say I was really paying attention towards it I don't know if it'll I don't know if it's collectively what you were envisioning well but so if you bring it all right you can shift all this and then do what you're wanting to here within and then still accomplish we did that with Sarah already that's what we did with Sarah so we're funding Sarah's position to bring her more active and not her position lower level to bring her more and more engaged within the housing authority but also connecting that to crime free multifamily and the other pieces so that's what I'm thinking about is like a Sarah model but a Sarah model that helps build some gaps so I think that could bring in new patrons right if you're additional revenue I don't know if that's enough to to start having discussions from the other half I think with that piece would come from as our extension but we have bilingual issues with the housing authority too because I know we're using the gallery gallery no no no no she's gone to some of the meetings I've had translating wrong wrong I think she's done that so there's a bilingual need for housing authority too wrong but somebody from the senior group has been in housing authority meetings that have helped interpret hmm I've had a whole lot of time well you make time when your city manager asks you to I didn't ask him to do it I didn't ask him to do it that was the thing I didn't ask him to do it I just walked in and they were there that's great there are a lot of people who do that sort of thing that's why I was curious because we have our tier 3 interpreters which we need to wrote to which I was curious as to why it may have been a joint client I don't know any other questions comments concerns this is just a comment I appreciate how you could be here today I got it live I don't know the job is able to absorb it's this it's been invaluable so that's kind of why I wanted to do it I told these two I said we need to I don't want you all to be in a position where as a board you say something and then I have to come in and get it now that's not it I want you to understand our process and I probably need to do this every board to understand our decision making process and why we're doing it and the thing I read every one way is not that we don't want to do it and I just kind of it's been helpful because it's been structured quite a bit because unfortunately I went from 20 years ago I said it doesn't work anymore pretty fortunate city when you look at what's going on in some of these other cities there are law enforcement, fire department even the trash trash folks I didn't want to go by I didn't want to go by and they do a good job of doing what they have to do of course a center so thank you for what you said yeah I've been doing to be examples of winners for our city right that's actually part of what can give us grants too because we're so far ahead of some of these cities there's a lot of grants that we don't need to qualify for so the grants we tend to qualify for are those innovative grants that are on the cutting edge and a lot of the base level grants that we're seeing out there you have to have this condition and we don't have that condition or there are grants that are meant to get your community to collaborate around a specific issue we're just so far past that you can't really have it that way if we were going to apply for a grant realistically if there was something when that grant expired we typically have to pick up the funding ourselves that's something we're pretty careful about because most of this was in the police world where we saw the police grants with police officers we didn't do a lot of that because they required you to then pick it up which takes away your ability to really look at priorities down the road because now you have to fund it and that's part of what we bring forward to council and what we bring grants that you know their state or federal grant that's part of what we report on to council the potential investment that the city makes is there a match and are we obligated to continue this funding after different inspires and so it's actually an issue something I think everyone think there's a lot of people that understand like the public safety sales tax because I've had questions recently about the way it was voted on to do that. The public safety sales tax can only be used for new or improved so all the dollars that are raised from that either has to be like new officers, new programs I can't use it to fund something that existed prior to the adoption of that public safety sales tax which creates a big issue for us from a budget perspective because then when you inevitably go into those bad financial periods it creates an issue for that tax and it creates an issue for us and that we're having to manage on a smaller pool because that revenue doesn't come in which is in this other tax what we're trying to do to figure out how the word is to say the ongoing pieces for this but in the event of an economic downturn we can balance the entire rec system for example versus having when you vulcanize your tax base you create some really significant challenges in economic downturn because you just start pressing the impact on a smaller and smaller group of departments sorry I talked too much sorry thank you thank you so much before we break up I do need two volunteers to help Ronnie and I do board interviews we're going to try to okay I'll try to be okay okay thank you thank you Harold I know why you should do sorry