 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is about that time, so if I can invite everyone to fix up their last cup of coffee, send that last text message, do whatever you need to do to make yourself fully present and available for our work today, and make your way to your seats. We'll begin in about two minutes. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the City Council budget bill-studying session for June 8, 2016. Council Member Trevino. Council Member Warwick. Council Member Villagran. Council Member Saldana. Council Member Gonzales. Council Member Lopez. Council Member Medina is on his way. Council Member Nuremberg. Council Member Crier. Council Member Gallagher. And Mayor Taylor. Mayor, we do have a quorum. All right, thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our budget goal-setting session. This seems to come around pretty quick, doesn't it? It seems like we're just here. I know several of you have participated in this process in the past, but it is exciting to be back at this point. I'd like to thank the staff. I know they've done a lot of work in preparation for today. They've certainly set out all kinds of snacks and activities to keep us all alert and engaged. I want to ask that you not get too distracted by your Rubik's Cube. But I guess the Rubik's Cube is kind of symbolic of the puzzle and challenge that we have before us to be able to meet the needs for our growing community. And so today is a important first step in the process for this upcoming budget year. But I would challenge everyone here in the room to not just think of it as setting the goals for this FY 2017 budget. But instead, as looking at this as the first time that we have the opportunity to set these types of priorities within the context of a larger planning and growth management effort. So we've been working for over 18 months on creating SA Tomorrow, and we're still reviewing it and vetting it. But I know we all have a sense of the direction that it's pushing us in, and it really is monumental that we have for the first time a plan to guide us that will support San Antonio as a globally competitive city where everyone has a chance to prosper. So please keep that in mind. And this plan addresses physical and economic development, growth, transportation, and sustainability. Recognizes the connections between all those things. And so as we go about our day today and have these conversations on all these issues, we need to keep in mind that we are, this is the first opportunity we're having to look at the budget within that context. And also we need to be mindful that we are in the early stages of shaping expectations for our historic 2017 bond election, which will be the largest investment that we've had a chance to make in our wonderful city. So I think we're at a great, a great point in our city's history and trajectory as far as implementing the vision. And that process started, of course, back with SA-2020 and getting citizens thinking about what we want our city to be. And we have the chance to address many of those priorities, as well as those that we hear about all the time, like basic infrastructure, and also think about how we invest in our people. So I just wanted to, I guess, start out by setting the stage with that, that I really view this as a historic opportunity that no other council has had to leverage investments with community partners through implementing a regional plan and to articulate and highlight that vision through our 2017 budget. So I look forward to hearing everyone's ideas and perspectives today. And I think it's going to be a great day and helps set the stage for us to come up with a robust budget. Thank you. I ask the manager to make some opening comments. Thank you and good morning. We are, of course, holding the budget goal setting session for the development of the 2017 budget. Our fiscal year begins October 1, concludes September 30, and this gives us an opportunity to hear and receive input and policy direction from City Council on what you'd like to see in this upcoming budget. Our session today will be facilitated by Francisco Gonima, and he's going to begin in just a few minutes. He has about eight years of experience providing strategic counsel and facilitating services with organizations, entrepreneurs, as well as government leaders. I will say Francisco facilitated our executive retreat in March. We conduct an annual executive retreat and he did a fabulous job and we thought he would be excellent for our goal setting session. So Francisco, thank you. I also had a chance to work with him at the Central Retreat last fall, so he does a great job. I know you'll enjoy him. He met individually with each one of you, and from that we organized today's discussion around those issues that you wanted to talk about, and they're organized in five categories. First, budget and financial policies. Secondly, city infrastructure and transportation. Third, public safety needs. And both chiefs will be here today to talk about their proposals over the next five years. Fourth, neighborhood and social services. And fifth, innovation. Many of you talked about how can we innovate and do our business in a very different way and consider some of those best practices and other ideas that are being done elsewhere and even invent some of our own. Each policy area includes several topics that will be presented by individual department directors. Now, I will tell you that I ask them to use fewer than 10 slides each. Only one department had exceeded that limit and I'm going to leave it to you to figure it out. However, he has assured me that his presentation will be so dynamic you will not notice that it is more than 10 slides. And he's an excellent presenter, so I know that will be the case. Additionally, as part of our budget process and preparing for today, we have gathered community input from our residents and feedback on what our residents would like to see in the 2017 budget. We entitled it and it was reinvented. Several of you have asked because the systems get stale as we go out to the community or people figure out how to work the system and it gets a little lopsided in the process. And so we have an essay speak-up team and it was made up of city employees and UTSA students. They attended a variety of community events during the months of April and May and during these events the speak-up teams interviewed and asked residents who were attending those events to provide input on a survey about budget priorities. The residents could also complete the speak-up SA.com survey and we provided that through social media and paper copies were also made available at our senior centers, community centers and libraries. So we received a lot of input this year, in fact more than 5,000 responses which is more than four times what we've received in the past. I want to let you know too that today is being broadcast through Nowcast SA and I'd like to ask Charlotte Lucas to stand up and be recognized. Where are you Charlotte? Oh, where is she? There she is. Thanks Charlotte for being here. Charlotte has done this for several years and it gives the community another chance to hear the council's conversation about budget priorities and invites them to participate in our budget process as well and is educational. She's assisted today by Ashley Rodriguez. I think Ashley is behind the camera to my right. Ashley is a San Antonio college student. She graduates this fall with an associate's degree in applied science and radio and TV and for the past two years she's been a recipient of the Texas Public Radio Scholarship to enable her to be at SAC. We congratulate her and thank her for being here today to help us as well. So it's a historic day for women. So I just had to put that plug in for both Charlotte and for Ashley. So now I'm going to turn it over to Francisco. He's going to provide a detailed overview of today's agenda and then we'll get started with the presentations. Francisco. Thank you, show. Good morning everyone. Thank you for making the time to be here. I know for any of you taking a full day to be in these kinds of conversations can be difficult to do to pull it from all the other things as well as tedious. So enter the Rubik's Cube. It is definitely there to help you work out some of the nervous energy as you're sitting still for eight hours. As an adult learning professional you figure out real quick that a good gadget in front of people can actually help rather than hinder focus because I'd much rather have you during the course of the day tinker with the Rubik's Cube as you're listening thoughtfully to what's being said than turning to your gadget and turning your focus outward and away from the room. But as the mayor said earlier and you took my spiel, Mayor, that really as we thought about and did the interviews I had the opportunity to spend time with each and every one of you and get some insights as to where you see the focus for the city being and where you'd like to see the budget prioritized. One of the things that we have to recognize and that I'm going to challenge you on as we go through the course of the day is that while in other years there has been a budget surplus that is not the case this year. That is not the forecast. We were talking about finite resources and just like a Rubik's Cube everything has to come from something. Any adjustment that we make, any priority that you advocate for and that you try and persuade and engage your peers and putting their support behind has to come from something else. There's not the opportunity to just say, well, let's do more over here. Great, we can absolutely do more over there. But each one of you will in turn have to articulate where that's going to come from. What must we do less of in order to do more of something else? So just like a Rubik's Cube, every move you make has implications for everything else. But with collaboration, with thoughtfulness, with listening we can try and arrive at a balanced whole that brings it all together and that's what we're going to try to do for the course of the day today. So a little bit in terms of process, as Sheryl already told us the agenda that you've got in front of you is in fact your work. That in essence we arrived at the sequence of items that we're going to look at today as the sum of my accounting back to the city team of what you told me was important to you and what you really wanted to hear about and what you really wanted to talk about. So as we go through the course of the day, we're going to go through a sequence of interactions. I wanted to make sure that you didn't wait until 2 o'clock in the afternoon before having our first lively conversation. So we've broken the day up into a series of key focus areas, right, policy areas. And so as we go through, we're going to hear a sequence of briefings from the key city staff on issues that you asked for, items that you said I really want to talk about this, I really want to hear about this, right. And then at the end of each area, we have a solid half hour to really engage in some conversation around that. And so one of the other things that you told me when I asked you all about process and what kind of experience did you want to have today, we absolutely get and acknowledge that this is an important opportunity that happens each year for you as the elected representatives of your districts to get certain points on the record, right. So we're not going to pretend that's not the case and we're not going to ask you not to do that, right. However, you also asked me that for today to really be fruitful, for today to really be valuable, right, you wanted more conversation and less declaration, right. So as I asked many, I believe all of you, but I may have missed it in one or two, but we talked about and you all requested that we actually enforce a three-minute limit on comments, okay. So Melissa Castillo over here will be our timekeeper for the day and the way that we're going to operationalize that is that we want you all to have rich conversation with one another, right. So it's not going to be a three-minute time limit on exchanges, but from the moment any one of you hits that button, Melissa is going to be keeping time over here. So Melissa, can we demonstrate? So we want you also to have an opportunity to organize your close, right, if you are getting close to time. So the way that it's going to work is that Melissa is going to give you a signal at two and a half minutes, right. So similar to people we heard, it's a three-minute time limit on any one person's comments, right. Now, if it's a conversation and you've got more to say later, you can, right. So it's not simply that's the only chance you get to talk about that, but we're trying to limit declaration, right, so that we can hold time and make time for conversation, exchange, right. So at the two and a half minute mark, you're going to see Melissa hold up the yellow card, okay. And the yellow card is your cue. You've got 30 seconds to wrap it up in brilliant Demosthenes in the, you know, Athens Forum fashion, right, with some rhetorical flourish, right. But when she puts that card down, that means you are now over time, right. And so the point at which she puts the card down, I'm going to come up and very elegantly and playfully bring you to a close. So, you know, if we can score some bonus points for the people that are able to do the best job, like closing strong, and then we can get back into the conversation. Does that work for everyone? Are we in agreement with that? If I get a thumbs up that you're willing to work within that, so mostly thems will go with it. So then to that end too, our goal today is consensus not unanimity, right. Certainly we know that you're all passionate representatives of your constituents. We know that all of you have key priorities that are of particular interest to you and your constituency. But this is not the final vote. This isn't even the first vote, right. This is simply a framing session for you as a group to give a weight of consensus, right. A weight of consensus does not mean unanimity. It simply means that on any given matter question, I as the facilitator have been entrusted to read the room, right, to read the table, and make an assessment of whether there's really a critical mass going in support of a particular direction. And so at that point, I will tell you that, right. And the question, my training as a facilitator comes from the National Civic League, San Antonio, very proud, All America City. So the National Civic League also does a lot of public process facilitation for community crisis and visioning and things like that. So I got some great training for those guys. And so one of those things that we did at the Civic League is really pose the question, can you live with it? Right, can you live with it does not mean is this the way you would have it be? Can you live with it means do you recognize and acknowledge that the room has spoken? Do you recognize and acknowledge that the weight of the group supports moving in this direction, right, in the spirit of moving the work forward? So as we move through that, we're going to have that exchange opportunity for Q&A. We've got our batter's box up here, our deck, where the given speakers on any given issue area are going to be both before and after their comments so that once we open it up for discussion, if you want to hear more about a particular thing or if you have a clarifying question, then we'll have them ready and available to pop back up and pull up whatever you need and speak to that point. And then we'll have that exchange and what we'll do as we go through the day is that I'll be working with some of the staff that's supporting us to try and start doing a synthesis of where the group's energy is going and where there seem to be a lot of support so that by the time we get to the afternoon session, the late afternoon, so when we come back from the afternoon break at three o'clock, we'll present to you a opening sequence. So in essence, we'll take the items and issues that we've gone through throughout the day and we'll be keeping tabs on the ones that really seem to have the weight of the room behind them as we exchanged thoughts and conversations on each of them throughout the day. And then the last hour and a half of our work will be y'all in a conversation with one another, facilitated by me, to arrive at a sequence of weighted priority that you feel good about, that you feel reflects the honest consensus of the room. And so from that standpoint, as y'all said to me, in more than one case, I'll feel good that we got our work done if by the end of the day we have a rough list that we can walk out with that says this is gonna be the mandate that we give to the city staff to then go design a budget against to present to us back in August. So that's what we're up to for the day. I'll tell you what, in addition to the nine years that I've been in private practice, prior to that, I was a disaster officer for the Red Cross for a decade. And so for me, I love a hot room. I love a hot room. So I come to this conversation excited and hopeful that we'll get into some passionate exchanges today. That my belief is the role of a great facilitator is not to keep a polite room, not to keep a polite conversation, but to allow you in great conditions for you to lean into the difficult conversations productively. So my goal today is not to stifle conversation, but rather to support it and amplify it, help you all really lean into one another, lean into the complexity of these very difficult things, and come out at the end of the day in a different place than where we all started it in the service of the people of San Antonio. So if that works for you, then we can look at our agenda. As we said, we have a series of the issue areas that we'll be going through. We open with budget financial policy issues and kind of the budgetary framework for what's going on. We have some presentations within that. And then we're going to go to a break. And we come back to city transportation and infrastructure certainly across all of the interviews that I did. This was the area that had the most interest, the most energy behind it. And so we'll go through these item by item and then explore a little bit about where you see the priority there. Then we go into public safety and we'll talk about police and fire and what's going on and what you'd like to see the priorities and needs there. Then we break for lunch. For a matter of housekeeping, lunch will be right here next door behind the beautiful paintings of the missions that we've got. And then also housekeeping, the restrooms are just beyond that. So at any time if you need to use the facilities, please go past the lunchroom and turn left and you will be at your destination. Then when we come back from lunch, neighborhood and social services, talking about delegate agencies, animal care services, World Heritage, tricentennial, air quality, and then finally we have our other policy issues. And as was mentioned earlier, Cheryl mentioned importance on innovation and a lot of the feedback that's come up. Certainly we'll talk about smart cities, but one of the things that I heard as a theme throughout the interviews is not only do we want to attend to the priorities of the people of San Antonio, but whenever and wherever possible. How are we doing it in the most dynamic, innovative way possible? We are living in an era of tremendous urban and municipal exploration, piloting, experimentation. And so where and when can we try and incorporate some of those emerging strategies that have been evidence proven to do more dynamic things than just how we've done it in the past. So that last segment of the day really brings in some of those innovation, technology, economic development strategies to try and pull everything together in a way that leverages what we're already needing and trying to do. And so then we go to a final break and then during that break, as I said, myself, Scott, we've got some great members of the team in back. Justina, Scott, Melissa, of course, Josh over here, and all of these folks are going to be really listening deeply with me throughout the day to where the energy and the way the group emerges and we're going to try and synthesize that down to that opening list and then let's dance. And that's where we spend the last hour and a half getting us to that list that we feel really good about. So at this point, does anyone have questions about the agenda and process for the day? No? All right, then I'm going to invite up our first speaker. Actually, Cheryl, that's you. All right, thank you, Francisco, and I failed to do this. So let me thank Mike Sawoya and the convention center team for organizing and getting us here in this room and hosting us today with the RK team. Thank you so much, Mike. You're always doing an outstanding job. So with regard to budget and financial policies, as you know, about six weeks ago, we presented the 6 plus 6, that is six months into the fiscal year, a status of our fiscal year 2016 budget. And we also talked about the five-year financial forecast. So what we will be doing as part of this session, and Maria will lead that conversation, is giving you an update on any new numbers of the past month and update on that financial forecast and as well as some projections as to what we see for the 2017 year. These policies that are shown on these very few slides, six, discuss what the council has adopted to date with regard to our financial policies. We study best practices on a continual basis to look at how other city governments are managing their resources. We especially study those cities that are doing it well. And we talk with our rating agencies as well as meet on a very regular basis to maintain a balanced budget. Our budget is balanced today, and we want to ensure that we have prudent financial management as we're showing on the slide to ensure that we are safekeeping and best managing the taxpayers' dollars. This all has contributed to our overall bond rating. And as you're watching what's happening, I know we've shared articles over the past couple of months about what's happening throughout the state and several cities, Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth have recently been downgraded on their bond ratings. And so we are paying close attention to that so that we can give you the very best information. So maintaining our AAA bond rating through having that 15% balance within the general fund, that is our 10% reserve of the total general fund budget as well as a working capital balance of at least an additional 5% so that we can demonstrate to the rating agencies that we have those dollars available. This, I will say with the rating agencies, is very important. They take into consideration that we're a large organization. Most of the other AAA cities have an excess of 20%, but they recognize that we have a large budget, but this is a minimum threshold. And of course the AAA rating relates directly to our bond program, meaning we pay less interest so that we have more money into production, into projects, more available for you all because we know the needs are so great throughout San Antonio. Keeping the budget policy, we're recommending that we keep the policy that you have adopted for the past several years to keep public safety spending at less than 66% of the general fund. On the next slide, managing a structural balance. This is something we've talked about over the past couple of years, ensuring that we have sufficient revenues to cover our expenses, and we do. We are structurally balanced. We have moderately conservative revenue projections. We're not overly aggressive. And as you know, we had projected higher sales tax revenue than what we've actually realized this year. We had projected a 4% growth in sales tax. It has only been, as we reported, a record 2.5%. So we're slightly under that revenue projection, and Maria will talk a little bit more about that in a moment. But making sure that we stay moderately conservative, that we don't get overly aggressive, and then overestimate and end the year without sufficient revenue. What the council has adopted in the past, we want to hear from you today on whether or not you want to maintain the $1 million general fund contingency for non-expected emergencies or high-demand projects that may come up during the course of the year, and $3 million in our capital budget as bidding and pricing increases fluctuating with the market demand. And then addressing any internal service funds with a plan to ensure that we keep those in balance. As you know, last year we discussed with you that the health care fund had a deficit, so we developed a plan to remedy that over the next three years. Another policy that you've adopted in the past has been not to increase the property tax rate. It has not been increased in 23 years. We have recommended the council's adopted decreasing the rate four times over the past decade. The most recent decrease was due to strong growth in valuations. Today we have an 8% revenue cap for growth on existing value. As you know, the legislature is considering a 4% revenue cap. If that had been in place, we would have foregone $244 million in property tax revenue over the past decade. So that revenue cap means a lot to the city in terms of our operating budget. That's it on the financial policies. And next, I think, so we want to get through the budget conversation and then have dialogue with the council. Next, Jeff Coyle is going to talk about the input we received from the more than 5,000 residents through our community survey process speak up essay. Jeff? Good morning. Thank you, Cheryl. Good morning, Mayor and Council. A little bit of history is warranted here. Prior to about a decade ago, the city did very little, frankly, of gathering public input prior to the development of the budget. There were the two public hearings that were held in the council chambers once the budget had been proposed to the community. But that was the extent of it. And as you know, over the past 10 years, there's been a real concerted effort to go out to the community on the front end, get their input, and then present the budget to the public on the back end for feedback before adoption. It has evolved over the years. Last year, it was branded for the first time essay speak up by Maria in the Office of Management and Budget. And this year, I issued a challenge to our team, specifically Laura Morales, who's sitting in the front row here who led this effort, to exceed what we had done last year in terms of public input. And we'll get into that in a second. So here's what we did. Our philosophy was to take to where the people are. Public meetings certainly have their place and their value, and we intend to do some. But they also tend to create a pool of individuals who participate. People take time out of their busy lives to come to us to a public hearing. Our philosophy this time was to go to where they are and to make it easy for them. So we developed a very simple survey. It was three questions. Open-ended, so people could say whatever they wanted under the sun. And we put it on our website. We printed paper copies and put them in libraries and senior centers. We worked with UTSA and developed street teams to go out to community-wide events. We had ten of them scheduled. A couple were canceled due to weather during Fiesta. But they were not intended to be a particular meeting in each district, but rather community-wide events represented in various parts of town where people would come from all over and we could capture them for 60 seconds and get their feedback. We also partnered with UTSA's College of Public Policy to do an email survey, which they sent out to thousands of respondents and got 800 back. And that was intended to supplement the sort of self-selection that people do when they choose to take our survey. We had some wonderful media coverage that helped us spread the word as well, and we had a real significant social media effort. There was an emphasis on digital marketing as a way to get younger people engaged in the process, and we were able to do that, which I'll touch on in a second. So as Cheryl mentioned, we had more than 5,000 responses collected. That compares to 1900 last year. So I'm proud to say Laura and team not only exceeded the number, but blew it out of the water. At the time, we collected demographic information. In the past, whoever comes to a public meeting or takes one of our surveys is who we get our input from, but we've never really measured who those folks are. And so this is a brief breakdown of the demographics. We had a larger number of females than males, of women than men participate in the survey. The ethnicity breakdown was 50% white, 40% Hispanic and 4% African American and other. And the age distribution we were really happy with. You'll see there was a pretty equal distribution across the ages, and particularly the millennial group, the 25 to 34, 20% was a good return for us, as were the seniors over 65. None of this is to say this was a perfect distribution representative of the community, but it was our first effort to gather this information and understand who's weighing in, and it will allow us to use that data to improve our process going forward. So the first question we asked them was, which city services did you use in the past year as a way of framing their mind about what city government does and what it means to their lives. Not surprisingly, the top five or six answers were as expected, streets and trash pickup, sidewalks, parks. The airport, surprisingly came in at fifth, more than 50% of the people who responded said they'd use the airport in the past year, libraries and then a drop off to police and health and animal care and some of the other items which also is not a surprise because those are services you tend to use on an as needed basis as opposed to a daily one. The second question we asked was to rank their budget priorities, and we gave them broad categories. The first one was in infrastructure categories, streets, sidewalks, drainage, transportation in general. Public safety, we defined as more police officers and firefighters, not a debate of benefits and pay. Neighborhood services was animal care, code enforcement libraries, human services, economic and workforce development and parks and rec. And this is how they shook out. So like last year, streets and infrastructure was at the top of the list, followed by more fire and police, followed closely by neighborhood services and you see the breakdown. Now those categories were very, very broad in general, we recognize that. So we also gave them an opportunity to provide open-ended answers and we got everything from pay your teachers more to build the train to Austin, it was everything you can imagine. For the purposes of reporting it, we've categorized them and they're in a written report that Laura has that we can distribute to you at the break. But suffice it to say, we will take all of those individual comments and distribute them to departments. So even if they don't fall into a big category that rose to the top as most highly cited, there are still opportunities for service improvement and for budget consideration for our departments. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thanks. Good morning, Mayor and Council. My presentation is to provide you with an update from the five-year financial forecast that we presented to you on May 11. So the total CD budget of $2.5 billion comprised of our restricted funds, capital budget and the general fund. Today's update is focused on the general fund since most of the discussion that we will have on the agenda today is around our general fund budget. Just a quick overview of the general fund, the 2016 budget is $1.1 billion. The major revenue sources that comprise the general fund includes our property tax 27 percent, our CPS revenues 31 percent, sales tax 25 percent and other resources 17 percent. Most of this resources today are invested in our police and fire departments $730 million represents about 66.5 percent of the total general fund budget. The balance of the general fund about 33 percent is allocated to 22 different departments and services of the city including streets, parks, human services, the library, municipal court, code enforcement, animal care services, health, the libraries and the administration of the city to mention a few. So on May 11, we have a presentation to the council of the six plus six financial report which is the second quarter status report of our financial performance for the year. The budget was balanced that day and is balanced today and we anticipate that it will be balanced on September 30th. What I have to report to you today since March the only revenue that we have seen some challenges with is our CPS revenue due to the mild weather that we have experienced since our presentation to you in May. We are watching this very closely and when we present the proposed budget to the council on August 18 we will have recommendations if there are declines in this revenue source to maintain the general fund balance for 2016 and for 2017. This unusual weather from what we understand from the experts is unusual and is not anticipated to continue into 2017. So at this point we do not anticipate any changes in our projections for fiscal year 2017. The slide that you have before you is a summary of the five year financial position for the general fund. So let me go over this graphic in just a few seconds. So the blue bars represent the projected expenditures to maintain the current level of service that we provide to the community today. The orange line represents the total available resources that we have all of our revenues to support those services within the general fund. So as you can see we have sufficient resources to provide the same level of service that we have today for the next five years. That means that we are structurally balanced for the next five years. I want to point out to the council that the financial forecast that was prepared on May 11 reflects the evergreen cost for the police and fire collective bargaining contracts. We are providing funding to fill all uniform vacancies that we currently have in the police department. We are not including though any new additional positions over and above the authorized counts that we have today. But there is funding in the forecast to fill all of those vacancies. So in summary the financial forecast is balanced. We are structurally balanced. I will point out to you that the public safety budget which is the entire police and fire department budgets exceed 66% of the general fund budget which is one of those policies that we talked about earlier that our goal was to keep that spending below 66%. Now one of the areas that I would like to highlight to you today that we did not cover during the financial forecast is new overtime regulations that are coming from the federal government that could have an impact on the city's budget. Just to give you some background today, there is a federal threshold for employees to qualify for overtime. That threshold is $23,660. That means that employees that make less than that with other qualifications and work more than 40 hours are eligible for overtime. Just to remind the council the entry leaving wage for the city of San Antonio is $13 which equates to an annual salary of $27,000. However the federal government threshold for overtime is $25,000. This threshold was established in 2004 and has not been updated since. So in May 2016 the federal government announced that they are increasing the threshold to $47,476 which is more than double the current threshold. So what does that mean to the city of San Antonio? So I'm going to give you a real-life example. The city of San Antonio is $45,000. So today they are not eligible for overtime because they are professionals. So with this new regulation they would be eligible for overtime. For instance during the budget season that we tend to work extended hours. So employees such as accountants, engineers and budget analysts are those job employees. So they are not eligible for overtime. They are not eligible for the federal law. So the estimated impact to this total city budget if this goes into effect as is is about $3.5 million annually. Our human resources department is working with all the departments of the city to look at mitigation measures such as reclassification measures. So the city of San Antonio will bring those recommendations to the council. Another area that we heard from you that you wanted us to discuss today is the entry wage. Just to give you some background back in 2005 the city had roughly 900 employees that were being paid below the leaving wage. Back then the leaving wage was established a policy in which every budget the leaving wage or the entry wage for city employees increases with the federal leaving wage. So you can see historically we went from $8.75 in 2015 that increases every year to $11.47. Last year there was a policy direction from the council to increase it to $13 which we did. And the leaving entry wage for the city of San Antonio is $13. There were some discussions about increasing this to perhaps $15. We did some scenarios just for discussion. If we were to do an implementation over five years to $15 the cost of the city will be $20 million. This does not include the cost of compression. If we extend that to eight years the cost of the city would be $15 million for all of our city funds. The last topic of my presentation that I would like to talk to you about is a paper saving initiative. We heard from some of you that we provide quite a bit of paper to the council throughout our presentations, B sessions, A sessions and subcommittee meetings. Just to give you an idea that we use about 70,000 sheets to identify a potential solution which is an app that we could be placed on your iPad so we can download all the information and you can use that instead of the paper copies that we provide. So we're open to discussion about this option and if the council chooses to move forward with the use of that technology the binder that you have before you today could be the last set of paper copies that we provide to the council. Thank you. So before we dive into our discussion I wanted to make sure that we took time for any follow-up questions that you might have for clarification. So we had our presentations from Cheryl, from Jeff and from Maria. So before we dive into comments does anyone have any questions that they have for any of our presenters? On slide about the resident demographics can you speak to what community events you all went to because I think the 50% and 40% it's kind of a large gap so I'm just curious how many and where were they? Sure there were 10 all together that we initially scheduled. They were The Race for the Cure The Deco Arts District Fiesta and San Fernando Cathedral Movies in the Park and Lockwood East Side First Friday in South Town Pearl Farmers Market Movies in the Park and Mission Driving in your District 5K at Port San Antonio The Conjunto Festival District 5 A Loop Mixer which was a young professionals group and a UTSA Block Food Truck Park which actually was canceled due to weather. The challenge with the demographics is we can take a scientific survey that does a representation of the community but you don't give the public the opportunity to choose to participate and inevitably we believe we would hear from a lot of people who say hey I want to take the survey on the budget and when you do a scientific random survey it's a sample and not everyone gets to choose so we had to sort of balance that so we did the public outreach to give everyone who wanted hope an opportunity to weigh in and then also had UTSA follow up with email surveying to try to supplement that. And I know some clarification came from Cheryl's office. This was given in English and in Spanish on paper as well as online. It was bilingual all everything. In fact all the UTSA students that we utilized were bilingual so our street teams were able to engage with anyone in Spanish and English. Okay, thank you. Council members, I would just add that when we conducted the meetings in the districts we had more than half of those who attended the meetings were seniors because perhaps they had more time available to come in the evening so this is age wise more diverse and we will continue to encourage people to participate and to actively engage through social media as well as filling out forms in our libraries, community centers and senior centers. So Jeff, while we've got you up here let's take advantage if anyone else has questions for Jeff we'll take those now. Cheryl? It's really just a comment. So I was at the Tejano Festival when they came when they were doing the surveys and I really was keeping a close eye and I have to say I thought they did a great job going up to people of being pretty not random but selecting different groups of people to talk to I saw them approach several families I saw them seem to approach men and women equally I was really keeping an eye and I thought the volunteers were very well prepared they were very friendly they also did ask if you wanted to speak in English or in Spanish so I just want to congratulate you and I think the team that I saw they also had uniforms which I thought was important because they want to be able to identify who they're with and what organization they're with and I did have the opportunity to fill out the survey myself and ask a couple of questions to the team there and they all said that they were UTSA students and that they were volunteers and I asked them how they wanted to do this particular survey and they said they were all just interested in how the city operates so I thought they were very well trained and very interested and very well informed and I just wanted to congratulate you on that it does seem like that the survey was brief and I had my children there so I couldn't really take an eye off them for very long and I was able to fill out the survey probably in two minutes and then have the opportunity to ask a few questions to the surveyors so I just wanted to congratulate you on that Thank you councilwoman Any other questions? Well good morning Jeff I just wanted to ask a question about supplanting versus supplementing and I think as you've described it I want to make sure that I'm correct in my thinking here that this is supplementing what is still the opportunity for some community members to come and speak after we've come through the proposed budget whether they're seniors or perhaps we call them interest groups do you have an opportunity to come and speak in each one of our respective regions or districts when we have community meetings? That's correct we're still developing the plan right now but our philosophy was that we're better served when we have a proposed budget with great detail and dollars and so forth to weigh in on that makes for a more appropriate presentation to the community in which public meetings make more sense on the front end as the councilwoman just alluded to we wanted it to be really quick to give people's thoughts while they're in their busy lives and be able to capture all that but we do intend to have a much more traditional approach on the back end Great and I just give your office kudos because I know it's difficult with a community members who have a set of expectations sometimes they want you to come with a plan that is equipped versus nothing but I think in this case we have a plan with some comments and I know that we're not supplanting what is still the efforts to have public meetings in each part of our districts or each part of our city so thank you and your team for your questions Thank you council Robert Thank you I too want to say congratulations it shows that you've expanded it from last year's 1900 to 5100 so kudos to your group for what you're doing I certainly appreciate the fact that you've reached out in a bilingual strategy my only suggestion because it's come up a couple of times the branding of this we call it speak up is there a spanish translation of that brand there is and I'm not going to do you know it more you know what I think some of the materials we have have the spanish versions of it I don't know what it is but if there is I think we need to make sure that's out thank you Thanks I noticed that there's one slide but then to the legislative impact that would be negatively negatively affect our revenue stream there are probably others Texas municipality will be having their conference in about two weeks down at your Corpus Christi and I'll be attending that are there others that we are beginning to monitor and creating an inventory of that we might solicit Texas Municipal League support on particularly those things that are threatening revenue streams for our community obviously in a tight budget session spending the money is important but the money we receive we want to guarantee or assurance that we're going to continue receiving that revenue stream I'd ask that you know start identifying those and if they come up throughout this session that we make an inventory of them and start having strategy around it and ultimately we'll go to intergovernmental relations for a dialogue but I think it's never too early to start lobbying support for protecting our revenue stream statewide that's correct there are other threats out there there was a policy meeting of the Texas Municipal League a few weeks ago focused on revenue and finance and I attended with the approval of our IGR chairman councilman Crier where they went through all the possible issues and what position the league ought to take and it was a mix of big cities small cities so there's things like appraisal caps and other ways to inhibit our revenue annexation reform but without question the revenue caps is a threat unto its own they're holding hearings around the state as we speak with the intent of passing it out of the senate very quickly during the session so it has risen to the top of the heap by a long margin I appreciate that and in particular I know that there's been some discussion around even our 14% which is incredibly important to our overall performance our triple A bond rating and anyone looking to get their fingers on our 14% we need to know what that's going to be and that would take I guess legislative action but we want to make sure that we're in a position to protect that incredible revenue stream that makes the difference to our triple A bond rating I think all the difference in the world I encourage that thank you thank you very much Maria I've got one for you if you don't mind jumping over the potential impact that you talked about for I believe this is on the overtime situation for our workers how set in stone is that and how you gave some figures they weren't on the slide but again the impact of that on our budget in future so they anticipated impact if we don't make any changes internally could be three and a half million dollars so what I mean by potential changes is that human resources is going to look at job classifications and perhaps change some of those that will be outside the new threshold so for instance again the example that I give with a budget analyst we may have to do something to that job classifications in the process when they work the extended hours the CD1 have to pay overtime for those professionals so today our hourly workers do receive overtime in excess of 40 hours per week but the professional staff that are salary they earn an annual salary and Maria's kind of underestimating this but the budget staff work 60 plus hours a week during the summer months as we're preparing for your consideration those hours in excess of 40 hours if they earn less than 47,000 a year which several many of them do then they are entitled to overtime under this department of labor ruling and I guess that's really where my question comes in it's a department of labor ruling right now is it indeed etched in stone that we're going to have it in future yes it is councilman and it goes into effect December 1 of 2016 December 1 of 2016 so I think we all need to be prepared and I think you have been optimistic on what that exact impact is going to be I think it's going to be much larger than what we think right now thank you sir we've got you there let me ask a follow up to this McGallagher's question I was under the impression that that was the result of a presidential fiat by presidential Obama not by the labor department at least that's the way I read it in the newspaper repeatedly so the labor department just on its own hook announced hey we've decided to double it's with the president support the department of labor reports to the president so my question is can future presidents decide to by fiat change that I cannot answer that Jeff you would think yes yes of course as Cheryl mentioned the labor secretary is appointed if there was direction to if it's an agency regulation they can certainly undo it and go a different direction in the future okay thank you my other question Maria and Cheryl is this the AAA bond rating has become the holy grail of this organization which is once acquired should never be tinkered with or lost and I don't disagree with that but my question is if the voters authorize a three quarters of a billion dollar bond issue councilman Lopez you've articulately talked about the politics of that for a long time and if before those bonds are issued the rating agencies for whatever reason decide to lower our rating number one what would be the most likely lowering that would occur and number two what would be the cost of that an increased interest cost I realize you can't give me an exact number but roughly what would be the increased interest costs of that over a period of those bonds Ben you want to step up talk about how many basis points you'd estimate we've actually given you this number in the past just to estimate we don't know exactly what that would be but Ben can give you a rough order of magnitude good morning councilman what we've looked at in the past is based on a billion dollars of debt if we were to drop one notch meaning we go from triple A down to double A plus we think that impact would be about 10 basis points so the impact on that billion dollars an interest cost would be about 16 to 13 million dollars an interest cost more over the life of the bonds yes sir yes well keep in mind that when I talk about a billion dollars in debt if you look at the 2007 2012 bond programs they've been well over a billion dollars if you add those two together if you look at some of the other property tax supported debt on top of that we're probably closer to like 1.5 1.7 billion dollars and then you see us refunding debt a lot so we're going out and refinancing based on the interest market environment we're able to refinance a lot of debt so we're in the market a lot so we extract a lot of value around that triple A bond rating and then I've mentioned in the past that when you look at things like the project here at the convention center where that wasn't a property tax supported debt issue but clearly our triple A bond rating allowed us to put a plan of finance in place to get that project done it also came and it's sort of great value in the contract financing out at the airport where again that's a separate kind of pledge but our name that triple A bond rating and our ability to leverage that in the market had significant impacts on both of those projects I mean substantial impacts so to summarize your point it would have an impact on substantially more than whatever the voters approve next year absolutely that thank you Helen thank you Maria thank you man in regards to the slide that you had up with the overtime how many city employees are close to that threshold to where if we just move them up over the $47,000 we wouldn't have to worry about this issue $1,300 so they're close enough the number that you gave the $3 million number is not paying them overtime it is moving them above the threshold or mixture so the $3.5 million I mentioned is the cost of overtime for those $1,300 so if someone's making $46,000 or $45,000 have we considered just giving them the extra $1,000 or $1,500 in order to so one of the things that we're considering as I mentioned human resources is looking at the job classifications to potentially adjust the salaries up or consolidate some of the job classifications like a budget analyst one and a two for instance and something else that just came to mind so based on this new regulation would that entitle us to overtime as well I'm sorry councilman city employees well no and I'll ask the attorney to clarify this I do not believe council members are considered city employees you do now receive a salary but you're not considered city employees just making sure but you may perhaps you want the charter commission to take a look at that no I don't not necessarily I was just making sure that okay perfect okay great so but the three and a half that's just paying people overtime that's not adjusting their salaries moving them over so it could be potentially less than yes that's what we're hoping for okay thank you perfect on the same subject right here so because one of the things that I didn't see one of our policies was about talking about personnel and can you explain again if $13 an hour it would be how much annual 27,000 so they would be still below obviously that the current threshold is below the entry wage of the city of San Antonio however hourly employees who earn $27,000 are entitled to overtime already right okay we're just talking about this department of labor rule it just pertains to those employees who are salaried receive an annual salary and are not entitled to overtime today right and you said that those are $1,300 yes councilwoman those are $1,300 workers so part of the issue if we're talking policy too and city leading the way our human services and delegate agencies about workforce development and under employment and I think that this could be talking about an issue of under employment too with the amount of degrees in education that some of our employees have but that are not getting you know kind of this amount of money or even $45,000 a year so that's kind of that's where I'm trying to have this talking about how many incident employees and then I just would I'm saying this right now I just have a point of pause to then reclass classify them from salary to are you saying reclassify them from salary to hourly no councilman they will stay on salary so taking again my example of a budget analyst one let's say they make $45,000 today we would still keep them at that salary classification but we would have to increase that minimum salary from $45,000 could be to $47,800 which is above the threshold and then it says future updates for every three years so then you're saying in 2020 they would potentially if whatever happens in three years that would be reevaluated at a federal level that is correct councilman today is potentially in 2020 that threshold of $47,476 could go up to $51,000 okay and the federal government has not allocated any money to this of course of course not okay well I just wanted to have that kind of thought of when we're talking about under employment in our city in particular and looking at workforce development what can we do for ourselves as a city to lead the way in boosting that up so thank you any other questions great so obviously this is the foundation we're talking about the quick question for our city manager I know that we've dissected our policy discussions into infrastructure public safety neighborhood and social previous years we've talked about some of their issues HR not coming up this year to give a presentation if you have questions they're prepared to come up they don't have a formal presentation today but they're prepared to talk with you if you have questions well I just don't want to miss the opportunity to talk about an issue if it's not in balance to one of the other three categories but if it was a discussion that I want to be able to be clear about the implications of the $13 what that currently means and what a transition to $15 I think that probably deserves a long conversation so just tell me where that might fit if it's other policy issues I will wait to talk about that we're not going to make a decision but I want to be as educated as possible about the implications and I would say that this is probably the appropriate segment of the agenda to have that conversation so unless we have any other questions going to that is certainly well Laurie Stewart's here if you're asking for information about that let me just get smarter on that before we're going to go into each department over the next few months and you all are going to put your heads together so last year we created the policy to get to $13 and I think what that puts is that I heard Maria discuss is that it's $27,000 a year that one will make and the threshold what did I see recently was that up on the slide that $27,000 is for a family of four was that the number of $23,000 I saw up on the screen as well was that a poverty level was that a threshold that was the federal government departmental labor threshold for overtime the previous overtime threshold by the department of labor we've had this presented to us so I apologize for not remembering or recalling how many folks do we have that are classifying under the lowest number the $13 an hour I'll let Laurie talk about that she does have some backup slides if you're interested in this if I understand your question last year when we adopted the $13 entry wage that impacted just over 900 employees information 900 positions if we were to take that immediately to 15 in 2017 that would be over 2,000 employees so we have 900 that classifying to the $13 dollars if we go to 15 that will bring more folks into that universal to that pie because they would be making 14 50 and then we would move them up to 2,000 more for 900 to 2,000 or 900 to 2,000 and 900 Laurie the question is plus 2,000 or a total of 2,000 to go from 13 to 15 a little over 2,000 what was the impact last year when we made this decision it was with compression I think we finally came up with a total $2.1 million what impact would be on the 2,000 what the number that it would cost the city to make that transition it was almost to go right away it was almost $6 million and that's without compression without compression so I imagine that when we get another presentation from you Laurie I hope at least this is my request and maybe other council members will chime in but I would like to see what a phased in approach would look like but it's not next year but it looks at us looking at a year by year opportunity to strike at that and I think the council will be in a better position then to talk a little bit more about the implications of it and we have calculated a couple of different options that Maria had mentioned a five year phase and an eight year phase so we have that information ready right now I will admit that I need to get studied up on this as well too but I know that we've had the federal minimum wage for several years now is it $725 this is irregardless of the cities this is just the federal policy just at the federal level because we haven't paid that I understand I understand I want to get smarter for the next time we see this we are at $725 I believe that's correct for the federal minimum wage and I imagine there's scenarios and I'll read something that will tell me how long we've been in this scenario and have not adjusted for inflation and I think that number will true up somewhere closer to where we're at now at 11 or 13 but I'd be curious to make sure that we're all on the same page as we make a decision going in and at least allowing direction to the city to talk about that in a more robust way so thank you Lloyd those are the only questions and comments that I had thank you thank you and I guess part of that discussion also needs to be what we have committed ourselves to as a council in terms of where we struck the $13 because I understand the county has something that they've adopted in terms of a phase in approach it would be helpful to know what our counterparts at the county are doing what the budget implications are for that approach I think that in terms of getting our city workers to a $15 an hour wage scale is a reasonable goal but we first have to throw our cap over the wall to get there so it would be helpful for us to understand the budget implications of different scenarios timelines and so forth to get there but I think the councilman's request is I fully support that thank you thank you I had just a couple of comments I think a lot of my questions on the presentations were answered but just as kind of a follow up to a little bit of the recent discussion on wages for employees I certainly think it makes sense for us to look at a larger picture scenario kind of going back to some of councilman Viagran's comments I really believe very strongly that it makes more sense for us to think about making investments in people that allow them to increase their skill and education level and thereby be qualified for jobs that pay more whether those jobs be with the city of San Antonio organization or in the private sector or other entities I think really that is the smartest investment for our community and really takes a broader perspective because while certainly there's been a lot of debate discussion about a path to 15 where does that put us five years from now I would argue that those employees would still not meet the pace of inflation and increasing costs and meeting all their daily needs where the investment needs to be is in skill development and education so I hope that as we move forward with our discussions about fairly paying our employees but also planning for future growth and development of our community that those types of investments would take priority over getting to some artificial wage level that is being driven by conversations that are happening in other jurisdictions or other levels of government and I guess let me just on that note let me also say certainly I'm very sensitive to you know what it's like to be an employee as I started out as a city employee work for six years for the city and husband work nine years for the city so certainly understand the scenario and we want to do best what's best for our employees we recognize how hard they work and what they contribute to our community but I really believe that for those who are at the lowest end of the wage scale doing right by them really means providing a platform for them to have other opportunities for employment and knowing that people you know take different jobs in different stages of their lives for different reasons we can't dictate all that the other thing I and so those are kind of my thoughts on on that area the other feedback that I wanted to provide based on one of the presentations was on the I guess general financial policies that we have in place I just want to go ahead and weigh in that I think we should go ahead and maintain that one million dollar contingency because we've had several weather related events in the past few years that have led to the need for higher expenditures and we anticipate it in order to address storms and that type of thing so I think it only makes sense to keep the one million dollars in place you know and also to buffer against revenue projections that may come in lower than we anticipate thank you thank you additional comments in this first of our areas since we pretty much transitioned from Q and A into thoughts and comments so if there's no additional comment at this time then we'll go to our first break so we will pick it up again in 10 minutes at 1035 with our city infrastructure and transportation conversation thank you