 All right, it is five o'clock. I will call to order this meeting of the Finance and Personnel Committee, starting out with the roll call. All there, Felby? Present. All there, Flaky Pineski? Here. All there, Pirella? Here. All there, Ackley? All there, Ackley is excused, and chairs here. We have four. That is a quorum. Will you all please stand and join me in the pledge? It's to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Barring any objections, we'll jump over item four, the introduction of committee members and staff. I believe we all know each other in the room. And that would bring us to item five, which is approval of the minutes from our May 9th meeting. Do we have any discussion on those minutes? Otherwise, we'll be looking for a motion to approve. Do we have a motion and a second then? Seeing no further discussion, all in favor of approving the minutes? All opposed? Chair votes aye. The ayes have it, the motion passes. Our minutes are approved. Next up is item number six, which is arrow number 12 of 2223, reporting that pursuant to resolution number 66 of 2021, authorizing the city administrator to negotiate settlement of certain claims made by the city of Sheboygan, city invoice number 8895 in the amount of $17,397 and 87 cents billed to, or a Deanda regarding traffic or damage to a traffic control signal. And streetlight located on the median of Taylor Drive and Washington Avenue on September 21st, 2020 has been settled with a payment to the city of Sheboygan the amount of $16,209.58. Does anybody have any comments to add for this one? Thank you, Chair. The $16,209.58 is below the 17,397 and 87 cents, but it is still covered within our parameters of the billing. Typically, the insurance company wanted to pay us less than the 16,209, but with Jessica and myself, we were able to get the 16,209 versus what they were offering. Questions or comments? If not, I believe we'll be looking for a motion to file. So moved. All right, we have a motion and a second, then seeing no further discussion. All in favor? Aye. All opposed? Chair votes aye. The ayes have it and the motion passes. Next up is item number seven, which is resolution number 16 of 2223, a resolution authorizing entering into an agency agreement with Credit Management Control Incorporated with regard to providing collection services to the city. Evening. The resolution before you is exactly as it states, a agreement with a credit collection agency. The city previously had a collection agency, but we had moved away from that when that individual stopped doing collections. So now it's been several years and we are looking to bring back a credit collection agency to assist us with collecting some of the accounts receivable bills that are outstanding for several years and even the ones that are currently not being sent in. So we are looking for their expertise and helping us also develop some internal processes to help us get more funds and continue to improve the cash flow within the finance department. Questions or comments? Oh, they're Pirella. I have just a question about the commission rates. Could you please explain how that is going to work? So it is a 25% of the credit, and then what is the 10% trip? Sure, so there are two types of accounts that this company is going to be looking at. If they go through their regular processing and collection efforts, which would be sending out notices, they can do quite a few different skip tracing, things like that, that we don't have the ability to do currently in finance. That will be the 25% of whatever they collect. Trip is the tax refund intercept program, which is through the state of Wisconsin. So it has a little less of the efforts that would go into the regular collections, so they will do the monitoring and collecting through that system, and that's why it's the 10% rather than the 25. And they will determine which one to apply. I believe they're going to look at doing both, if possible, so if it does come through the trip system, we'll get the lower rate. So either one, correct, okay. Thank you. I'll just like to ask you. Thank you. I wouldn't be in favor of this. However, I would like to make an amendment that... Oh, first we have to put the motion on the floor. I move that this be on the floor. I move that this be approved. Perfect. All right, do we have a second? Second. Okay, please continue. Thank you. Now that the motion is on the floor, I would like to propose an amendment that this committee and Alder Pirella kind of tweaked it too, that this committee once a year be given a report for what was sent to collection and then the net that we received and receive that in this committee on an annual basis. Do we have a second on the amendment? One second. All right, I don't believe an amendment is debatable. I suppose we get to decide since it's at the committee level. So if there's any other comments on the amendment, otherwise we'll be voting on amending the document. Alder Pirella? Yeah, I just want to say I agree with that just because there is a contract here of three years. So it would be good for us to evaluate if it is worth it and how much we really get back out of it. Also just to do an assessment, a correct assessment. So I agree with that. Thank you. Any other discussion on the amendment? If not, I'll in favor of amending the resolution as Alder Flicky-Pinesky stated. Hi. Hi. All opposed? Chair votes aye. The ayes have it and the motion is passed. The resolution is amended. All right, so we now have the amended resolution in front of us. Any other comments on the material at large? All right, seeing none then. All in favor of approving the amended resolution? Aye. Aye. All opposed? Chair votes aye. The ayes have it and the motion passes. Thank you. Next up is item number eight, which is resolution number 18 of 2223, a resolution to authorize a transfer of appropriations in the 2022 budget. Thank you. The attached resolution takes a levy that was originally allocated to the 2022 transit budget and it is taking that levy back from transit and reallocating it to capital projects. Those are listed on the IFC that's in the packet. There are seven different projects, two at the library, two at police, two at fire, and then also some traffic upgrades as well. So this is maximizing the CARES Act dollars that the transit is getting from the federal government. So we are just making sure that we're maximizing the utilization of those funds because they will receive the money through the CARES Act to supplement that 450,000. Oh, they're parallel? The money, I have no problem at all with this on the contrary, but I wonder the money, these additional money that we are reallocated to the seven projects, are these in addition to what was in the 2022-2027 CIP forecast for this project or are within? So I am not certain if they were in the 2022, they were not in the 2022 capital budget. However, they were in the 2023 and beyond budget. And so because these are one-time funds that we have, we figured we could kind of get some of these one-time projects out of the way. So we brought those projects forward. So they were not in 2022, they are in addition. They were not in the five years. So it is, for example, the police, range remediation. This is a project that it was already in the five years, 2022-2027 CIP. So is this $45,000 in addition to what it was already forecast for that project or it is part of that amount that had been allocated already or forecasted? Sure, so these projects were originally forecasted in future years, but we, so it's not in addition to future, we actually eliminated them from the 2023 to 2027 plan and brought them forward to 2022. So we had, let's say for the police range remediation, for example, the police department came forward with the 2023 to 2027 projects. It was listed in there when they came to administrator Wolf with their original requests. Because we had this option to reallocate the funds from transit, we removed them from the 2023 to 2027 budget and now just brought them forward with this resolution for approval in 2022. And altogether, that project will be $45,000 more expensive or it would be as expensive? It will be 45,000 was originally planned and that's what we are giving them to complete it. Thank you so much. Yes. Any other questions or comments on this one? If not, we'll be looking for a motion to approve. Second. Actually. Okay. Oh, they're flaky Panasky. I am assuming that the reason we, sorry about that. I am assuming that the reason we are moving these ahead and opting for these projects is one, we have to spend the dollars because they're federal dollars and two, these projects qualify for those things. I mean, is the money that we received from the feds very specific to specific types of things so that these were the ones that were the most logical to pull out? So the amount that is actually getting funded by the federal or CARES Act dollars, which is truly through the state, but that's a the grant CARES Act grant that actually the money is based on transits use. So we are just taking the tax levy that was given to transit and kind of taking it back. So they will use the CARES Act to supplement their budget and we can use those, the funds from the CARES Act in capital. Perfect. Thank you. Got it. All right. We have a motion and a second then. Are there, is there any other discussion? If not, all in favor? Aye. All opposed. Chair votes aye. The ayes have it. The motion passes. Next up we have item number nine, which was a direct referral of resolution number 21 of 21, 22 of 22, 23, approving the financial year 2022 one year annual action plan for the community development block grant program submission. Thank you, Chair. So if you have access to Municode I would encourage you to look at the IFC that's attached to this document because there's a lot of numbers and we have to try to iron out who's gonna get allocations for the next program year. So the city receives a yearly allocation of around a million dollars. In 2021, we received 933,000 from the community development block grant program through HUD in 2022, we were notified last week that we're getting 865,259 dollars. These funds can be used for projects in low to moderate income census tracks and or people that are households that are low to moderate income. So it has to really be qualified to what I would call the central city, which is an area from Gile Avenue to Union and North 18th Street to the Lake, give or take. Under federal law, so of the 865,000 that we get a year, 15% of those funds can be spent on public service activities or nonprofits and 20% can be spent on planning and admin. Those are the two caps that we have to follow that we can't exceed those funds. So earlier this year, the city issued a request for proposals to public service agencies or nonprofits to submit their request. And based on the projects that were submitted on our review, shortly what we have, but we received a number of applications with two new applicants this year, million dreams and flawless hoops. So we just starting from the top. So it's shoreline Metro is budgeted every year in the city budget for 42,493 dollars. That's what was awarded in 2021. And that's what the request is in 2022. Family Service Association was awarded $15,438.29 in 2021. Their request in 2022 is $17,250. Family Connections was awarded $4,894. Their request was $5,000. Lakeshore Cap was awarded $14,859. The request this year is $23,573. Big Brothers, Big Sisters was awarded $11,719. Their request is $21,370. Sheboygan County Interfaith Organization was awarded $10,000. They did not submit an application this year. So the request is zero. The Salvation Army was awarded $38,595 last year. They did not submit an application this year. They're a person that was in charge failed to respond. And then the two new applicants, million dreams, which is the daycare on the north side of town in the old Sheboygan Christian School. They requested $622,908. And no, that's not an error. That is the number they requested. And then Flawless Hoops, which I'll talk about the organization shortly, requested $10,000. So most of you probably are familiar with a lot of these organizations. Shoreline Metro obviously is the city's bus system. Family Service Association does budget counseling and some rental, rent smart programs. Family Connections is reduced childcare vouchers, Lakeshore Cap administers what's called a one-stop shop or the housing program for tenants that are having challenges making rent payments as well as homeowner payments. They are also administering a mortgage assistance program. Big Brothers Big Sisters is a mentoring program for youth. Sheboygan County Interfaith Organization runs the Bridge Way and Beyond program, the domestic abuse shelter. Salvation Army Emergency Lodge or the homeless shelter. Million Dreams is the daycare operation and Flawless Hoops is a new organization that is partnering to take kids off the street and give them a opportunity to do mentoring, youth mentoring through basketball. So they lease a school, an old gym up on in the Emmanuel Lutheran Illinois Avenue and they have mentors that they mentor youth in the community, deal with challenges at home, life skills, all of that stuff through basketball games. So they've gotten some funding from the Johnsonville Sausage Company and they really are, it looks like a program that's giving people that have challenges another means of obtaining services. So with all of that, as I said, by definition, we can spend 15% maximum of the funds on those activities and that's about $129,000 and the request was over, requests were over a million dollars. So obviously everyone's not gonna get what they asked for but we'll talk about the recommendation shortly. We did receive two requests for housing which isn't subject to the cap. So partners for community development requested 35,000 and Habitat for Humanity Lakeside requested 27,000 and then there's some other projects that are out there that aren't subject to any kind of cap and are either budgeted or in our normal process or are there. So the first one is neighborhood enhancements, signage and grants, 25,000. This is to continue funding projects of our neighborhood associations as well as to look at some signage improvements that we're working with the Department of Public Works on for street signage. Historic preservation at $69,920 and that is to do the continuation of a program that the Redevelopment Authority administers on behalf of the city for historic signage and or facade renovations of buildings on A Street. St. Clair Avenue resurfacing project is a resurfacing project from 9th to 14th Street, 250,000 and that was in the 2022 budget. Program administration is subject to the 20% cap at $173,051 and that's to fund basically half of the department of planning and development. So a good chunk of the five, four people in the planning and development department portions of their salaries are funded out of this to help the general fund. And then the last one is a yearly payment that we need to make for the next 20 years for the uptown social loan, a section 108 payment of 160,000. So the last section of this is city staff recommendations. So we've taken a look at what we think is realistic to the entities and have made some recommendations on how to fund the public service agencies all up for discussion by you, if you so choose. So partners for community development at 32,500, Habitat for Humanity at 25,000, Million Dreams at 18,000, Shoreline Metro 42,493, Family Service Association at 17,000, Family Connections at 4,800, Lakeshore Cap at 21,000, Big Brothers, Big Sisters at 19,500 and Flawless Hoops at 6,995. So what you'll see is the two newer entities are less than their requests. The other ones are relatively close to what they either received last year or what their request is this year. We just wanna make sure, given that these are federal dollars, that they've got all of their federal stuff in order to be receiving federal funds. And we have some concerns, frankly, about Million Dreams, whether they're gonna be up and running in time for starting to collect data. So they have just announced that when they applied, they said they were gonna be operational by May or June and now after reading a newspaper article, it looks like they're not gonna be operational till the end of the year. Our program year for CDBG does not follow the calendar year. It runs April 1st to March 31st. So we technically have started our new program year already and a lot of these agencies are collecting their program beneficiary data and their benchmarks, if you will, already because it's really a continuation of a program. But when you have a new program that doesn't have the capabilities of accepting low to moderate income childcare people. And if it's not gonna be available until the end of the year, they really only have a few years to receive, a few months to receive, to get to the benchmarks that they claim that they were going to support with this funding. So part of me is it's premature to award money to them. If the committee so chooses to not award the 18,000, then we'd have to distribute that in some other means. But this is the recommendation at this point. So I'd be happy to take any thoughts or comments that you guys might have. Sure, we'll start off while they're flag keeping asking. How is it that you, how do you notify the programming entities that these dollars are available? Do you go through United Way? How do you, how do you reach? Earlier it says we issue a request for proposals. So we send out a request for proposals to all the agencies that have ever shown interest. We publish stuff in the newspaper. It goes on the city's website. It's sent out through social media and people can apply if they so choose. And then the other is we were just talking about Shoreline Metro. So they've got ARPA money and we're doing all the transfer that we just did. So is this 42,000 for bus passes for low income people? What's the 42,000 for bus passes? This is for running the evening and we can service to get people to their jobs. So we take it as economic development because it's a source of helping low to moderate income people to keep the cost down to be able to get to employment. Thank you. Oh, there, Pirella. The hard money, the CDBG funds are not, we have to spend them, right? Well, if we don't spend them, then they go to some other community. Can we, I meant, can we, I just want to understand how it works. Can we use it in next quarter or next year? Can we keep the money that we don't use this year? No, we have to allocate it by the yearly dates. There is not all over. Okay, all right. And I will need to excuse myself from the voting on this because I'm part of, I work for Family Service Association. I have to abstain, yes. Any other questions or comments? Oh, there, Felby. I just have a comment. I'm a little disappointed with Million Dreams. That's a big leap from being ready the end of May, June, and now all of a sudden not tell the end of the year. And these are, these are families that are desperately in need of that daycare. Is there anything we can do to, you know, push them along, get them, help them to, right here's money that they could have had and now. Well, let me clarify that this money is not for capital projects. This money is to operate a program so it'll pay the salary of an intake supervisor or somebody like that. Yeah. I'm guessing it's supply chain issues and getting contractors there and getting the work done in a timely fashion. I think there was an underestimation early on in this project over what it was gonna take to renovate that facility to get them up and running. And I think once they got in there and found out that they needed to deal with all of the HVAC and they needed to put a fire suppression sprinkler system in there and all of that stuff just takes clearly time. And I think, you know, I think the people, you know, I think some of the challenges are that they had anticipated getting this stuff done relatively quickly. I think it comes down to getting contractors there to do the work and I don't know that the city can incentivize them to do it and I'm not sure where the funding is coming from to do that piece. Does that, can I go again? I'm sorry. Does that, would that fall under maybe Family Service Association that, you know, we give them a little bit more money to, you know, help them find daycare and assist those that need that help? Well, family, it won't be Family Service Association. It might be Family Connections who does vouchers for low income folks. They, you know, they requested, they only requested, you know, $5,000 and we're recommending giving them 4,800. So I guess we can give them $200 more if we want, but you know, so I don't know that we want to give. The challenge we have is, you know, I think and just to be, you know, forthcoming on this is we didn't receive two applications because I think there was issues and the different organizations over how they, who was, who thought someone was taking care of it and then it didn't happen. Normally we would fund the Salvation Army at $38,000 to $40,000, which would, you know, take a good chunk of our money to run the emergency lodge, which is very beneficial to the community. The fact that they failed to submit an application on time when it, you know, is clearly showing to them that, you know, they kind of missed the deadline. So, you know, next year we're gonna have that same, you know, request coming in so the numbers are gonna look a lot different. So, you know, I don't know if, you know, I don't know if it makes sense to, you know, award some, you know, everybody to the max for this year and just say that it's anomaly, but, you know, going forward it's never an easy process because we always have requests, you know, that far exceed what the, what we can spend. Thank you, Chair. Other questions you could ask? Thank you. So, so back to a million dreams. If they are unable to get their program up and running before this particular grant year ends March 1st of next year? March 31st of 2023. Okay, that should make it. I was gonna say, if any of these organizations can't spend their money, do we get the opportunity to reallocate or not? No, most of them are a upfront one-time payment. What we look at then is what they report out as their benchmarks and if they fail to meet their benchmarks, then our recommendation the following year would be to come and say not fund them because they're not, you know, they're not on track. So, we, without getting into the minutia of all the federal, the laws, we have to spend a certain portion of these funds by January 31st or we don't meet the timeliness ratio and then we have to justify to HUD why we didn't spend our money in time and that can affect future years. So, we always make one-time upfront payments and then they're required to submit quarterly reports and if they're not meeting their benchmarks over those quarterly reports, that's then reflected in what the allocation is the following year. So, most of our, you know, senior entities which are the, you know, partners and Shoreline Metro and Family Service, the ones that come every year that we fund, they understand it and they've got a means of fulfilling the requirements of the program. It's just these new ones that could be a challenge and I guess then that would just reflect on whether we would fund them in a future year. So, in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion, do you do, or like you do for a home renter classes, do you do anything like that for organizations if they want federal money? I get that the federal guidelines are very strict and you need to do the compliance and you just have to do it or the money doesn't appear again. Are we helping some of the newer organizations along? Or not? What do you mean by helping? There are organizations who every year come and ask for the same amount of money or a little bit more or a little bit less. There may be other organizations out there that are likewise as needy. Only they either A, don't know about it or B, don't have the infrastructure or they don't have the staffing even to do the detailed work that's necessary that comes along with federal dollars. Do we do anything to help those organizations along? Not, we don't have the staff to do that either. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. It's online reporting or paper reporting. So, we try to do technical assistance and we go out and do monitoring and we do that but we can't be there every month to help them collect the data. It's really about having the entities having the infrastructure in place to be able to make sure, one, that the people they're serving are low to moderate income households and collecting income. We don't even get to see all of that income data because it's confidential. So, that's the first piece. Then the second piece is quantifying and keeping all of that stuff so that on a quarterly basis you can report the number of households that were this income bracket that you served. You can report the number of households that were white, Hispanic, all of the different demographics that are required. So, there's Family Service Association, sorry to look at you, Grazia, but I know that you were there. I mean, they have the means of doing that because they get other federal funding that kind of forces them to develop the system and track all that stuff. That's the unfortunate matter is that there's a lot of federal reporting that has to come with it and if they don't have the manpower and the infrastructure to collect that data, then they typically get the funding one year and we don't see them again or they go other means to find private donations that don't require this kind of reporting. Okay, the RDA gets their money from this same pool of assets. For the Historic Preservation Program, yes. Okay. For the Revolving Loan Fund, we don't put any new money into it because we have substantial money revolving through. Revolves, thank you. Did you have any comments? In chat, I just wanted to add a couple of things. I believe it was Flawless Hoop is actually a newer one that came forward, I believe last year, correct? This is our first request? Our first year, okay. So we do from time to time here from other organizations, but like you said, a lot of it really is up to them if they're gonna step forward. And correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you request a position that would actually help your department as far as with the grants and reviewing the tireless information that is needed when we give money out, making sure that they are complying correctly? Correct, so that position that was held in the last council year, part of that was going to be handled, managing this and the neighborhoods so that we can deal with all of these reporting because we have to report this to the feds on a quarterly basis, yes. So basically what I'm bringing forward is the fact that if we recall that position request, if we're concerned about being able to assist additional nonprofits out in the community, that this position, if approved in the future, would actually assist the city in helping them. That is correct. Thank you. Oh, there, Parella. I just wanted to add to, for Roberta's question, that the, so there are some demographics and criteria in relation to diversity and generally speaking to minority that have to be met in order to qualify for this type of funds. And so what you were talking about is somehow already incorporated in the funds as far as diversity goes. I do agree that this is part of what an organization does to create internally the strength and the capability of qualifying. So it is up to the organization. However, what perhaps we could do is a different type of reaching out into the community because I am pretty sure that there are other organizations out there, as my colleague mentioned, that may not be aware or aware, fully aware of the opportunity. So maybe that can be, we could perhaps discuss that another time to how we can improve that because there are many, many more public service organizations. I didn't get into the specifics of this, but we also do a, we have to submit a five-year consolidated plan that's based on a needs survey. So we have to meet, we have to meet certain benchmarks that we tell HUD we're gonna meet as well by funding different agencies. So in this one, homeless in this five-year plan, which was approved two years ago, we're kind of midstreamed through it, homeless, youth mentoring, mental health services, those types of services are all identified in there. So yes, we can go out, we just can't have every organization, they have to align with our five-year plan that we submit to HUD as to how we're gonna funnel our funds to the correct populations. But as long as they fit that, means sure that there could be a possibility for that. And I would be open to how to reach out to other people. We've had, you know, I've been here 15 years, we've had a lot of organizations over that time that have applied. And then when we go out and audit their books and we find out that they're coal mingling their funds with their personal funds, and there's no separation of federal and state and everything else, you know, those are the ones that we've, you know, we tell them we're sorry, you know, you don't have the means to, at this point, to be able to meet the requirements. So, you know, that kind of comes out in the monitoring and we go out with the finance department and monitor five, six, seven organizations a year just to look at their financials and see how they're going and how they're doing, collecting the data and all of that stuff to make sure that they're keeping on track because we have to report that to HUD as well. So some of them have come in, but if there is, you know, means of getting the information out there to other groups, we're willing to consider that. Thank you. I'm going to ask that we rain it in just a little bit on this one since the actual subject of the resolution is the allocation itself. Other discussion was valuable as well, but do we have any other comments or proposals on the allocation? Oh, there, Flicky Paneski. Thank you. The one that fell off the page of me is $250,000 for street resurfacing. How did that, how does that fit into this pool of money? Well, public facilities is a eligible activity and we've typically worked with the public works department to find a street in a low to moderate income neighborhood that needs to be resurfaced or reconstructed. So we, as part of the capital planning projects, look for those types of things because it's really a neighborhood revitalization and this was one of those streets that the pavement ratings were failing and that it needed money. So this is, this money is being matched with what do you call it, wheel tax money? No, not wheel tax. Sales tax. Sales tax money from the county. So, but it's got to be in a specific area of the community that's in the neighborhood that's serving low to moderate income, so, families. So that's where this and frankly, we're doing street improvements anyway and it's a good place to spend a good chunk of money with not a lot of administration required to it. Is this the street that still cobbles Jones? No. Okay, thank you. That'd be an upgrade. No. I don't want to move back. All right, any other questions or comments on this one? Otherwise, I'm assuming we'll at least use the staff recommendations as the starting point and if anybody would like to make changes to that, we'll jump off from the numbers we have in front of us on the IFC. I move that we adopt the staff recommendations as presented. Second. All right, we have a motion and a second then, seeing no further discussion. All in favor? Aye. All opposed? Any abstentions? All right, and chair votes aye. The ayes have it, the motion passes. Thank you. Thank you for your work. Whoa. All right, next up, this is a presentation only. We have item number 10, the compensation study review with Patrick Wing from Carlson-Detman. Thank you. I'm just introducing Patrick from Carlson-Detman. Tonight he has a presentation about kind of a high level review of the process and results from the compensation study that has been ongoing since last year. I have forwarded the presentation to all of you so that it is in your email if you need to reference it at all. From today, we will be bringing forward the actual wage schedule or wage scale that has been provided from Carlson-Detman that will be presented on the special June 7th Finance and Personnel Committee meeting that you should have all received the invitation to. So with that, I will turn it over to Patrick. Good evening, everyone. First of all, I'm just gonna peek here. If by the time, if I don't, I'm not able to answer all your questions this evening. I am available on the 7th, I was just peeking here. But I guess, first of all, I wanna introduce myself. Patrick Wing from Carlson-Detman is Caitlin indicated. Actually, I'm coming to you live from Chilton, Wisconsin just a little ways down the road. I had hoped to be there this evening but I have a eighth grade choir concert coming up about 7.15 this evening. So I gotta fulfill my parental duties here to do that. But I've been doing this for about nine years. I spent about 19 years in the public sector prior to that as a director of human resources. My last stop along my career was 13 years as the director of human resources for Calumet County. So as it relates to the public sector, me and my team have a wealth of public sector background. And I believe that helps us in these projects. But we also know that each community is unique. And that was one of the things that we had to learn, Mr. Boykin, just as we have to learn with every other one of our projects. And normally these projects take a lot less time. But I think both of our teams, the city's team and our team had some bumps along the way. And so we're happy to be at this stage right now. As we go through the information this evening, I would invite you that if you do have questions, I don't have the pictures on so I can't see if someone's trying to indicate them. But feel free to interrupt me if it helps answer the question. But also knowing as with everything that until there's a final adoption, everything's draft and a recommendation is made, you know, that the numbers might change in terms of what we're talking about tonight. Just need to say that just to cover our back sides. But as we look at this, you know, as it relates to data, I want to make certain that I'm touching on your plan tonight. So if I go a little bit too quickly over some of the introductory materials, I'm certain you'll let me know. But in each project, we look at a couple of measures. We look at lots of measures, but the first couple of things we look at are what's the age of the employee base in the city and what are the years of service looking like? And it tells us some stories in terms of how much will you be in the marketplace moving forward? With this particular slide talking about, you know, the age profile of the city, you know, cumulative of about 41, almost 42% of the city's employees are at for over the age of 50. If I were to use this as a bench or look at our benchmark data, that's pretty common in terms of what we would see. I would argue that about five years ago or so, that number was a lot more frequently around 50%. I think we've all seen and dealt with a large number of retirements, especially during the pandemic. But again, I would say probably in the next 10 years or so you ever take, of course, you know, the employee's decision retires uniquely theirs and we certainly can't predict when each individual, but you stand to lose about 42% of your work for no other reason than retirement over the course of the next 10 years. Like I said, you ever take. And that's an important thing to note as you look at how competitive are our wages to bring the talent in, and especially in today's marketplace. On the other metric, how many employees are less than five years of service and then working all your way through? So if I look at the two extremes here, we have three employees are greater than 35 years of service. So just under 2% of your workforce, but that less than five years of service, which is the metric that we pay attention to most closely. Again, you're pushing 40% to about 37.7. Again, comparing to our benchmark, this is right in the neighborhood. Somewhere in the 33 to 40% range is what we would expect to see at the most public sector employers, especially with the more recent turnover that we've experienced. And so again, from this measure, what we're trying to look at, again from a compensation standpoint, if you can interpret this for a whole bunch of reasons, is that every organization has their, it's new employees. And we would argue that at about the five year mark, maybe more, maybe less, those employees have found a redeeming quality in the city and have chosen to make it their employer for what we hope to be the long haul. And so that five year mark tends to be that. And so again, do you have compensation structures and practices that put you in a competitive position? Compensation certainly isn't the only thing, and we'll talk about that in just a moment, but I think it's helpful to kind of start the conversation looking through that lens. I'm just gonna skip past the next two slides. I'll briefly mention them because they're the library data. The age about 46.5% at or above the age of 50. So again, not that much different than the general city. And for years of service, almost 40% less than five years of service. And again, not that much different from the city. So those data points track pretty well between the two organizations. The way we like to approach our business and I would tend to believe that most compensation consultants approach their business from the lens of a total rewards. This is not a new concept. I think everyone approaches it slightly differently, but ultimately it gets to the same place. We put it in three pillars, compensation, benefits, and the employee experience. And we think all three need to be in place to otherwise become an employer of choice. This study, the reason why it's highlighted in yellow, the study is focused primarily, almost exclusively on the compensation piece. The internal equity of the jobs, how competitive are you externally and bringing everything together using a formal system and helping develop the formal system. But when it comes to benefits and when it comes to the employee experience, quite frequently we'll hear from employers, well, what about our superb benefits package? And in many cases, that's exactly the case. I would say in today's world, it's becoming more and more imperative to maybe offer more than what we have been comfortable with on the benefit side of things to attract and retain employees. But it's a different analysis and it's a separate process. If you feel your benefits are superior and compensation is superior and one should be discounted for the other. Really, that's a different analysis and we certainly have tools that we can look at that if needed. But that third pillar, I think is the one that's most often overlooked. And that is the notion of the employee experience. Gallup, I think is the one that we use the most. The most well-known, I believe, for their political polls, but really we use them for their employee engagement, employee experience, surveys and data. And they do a fantastic job of tracking a lot of this data. But how connected are your employees to your organization and are you developing the talent of both sorts of things? I think the data shows time and time again that you can have the best compensation system and the best benefits system. But if employees don't feel that they're connected, they don't have a good environment, a good culture to work in, it's not gonna matter all that long. You might be able to bring people in but we'd be able to retain them if the experience isn't that great. So again, all three of those are equally important to us. But as it relates to compensation and as it relates to the project, although there are countless questions that we work with and we've had numerous, numerous conversations with your management team trying to bring this to completion, that there are four underlying questions that we're always trying to solve. Who are we comparing to? And we'll talk about each one of these in a little bit more detail as we move along here this evening. Where do you wanna be in that marketplace? And I'll just foreshadow that one that used to be an autopilot question where it would almost answer itself and it really isn't anymore. And I'll explain why as we get there. We wanna talk about what type of a structure do you wanna put in place for your employees and then where the rubber hits the road in all cases. How do we implement it? How do we sustain the compensation program moving into the future? And certainly that's going to get more and more challenging as we move forward. The ground works laid through job analysis and job evaluation and it lays that ground work for the rest of those questions. And so that foundation being job documentation, once we've received that job documentation and every employee in the organization or every classification I should say had the opportunity to complete job documentation for our review. We met with the department managers to talk about the questions we had regarding the jobs. That's any concerns they might have had. And when we received that, we were able to make some pretty quick analyses on several of the jobs. One being, do we think we have a market match for that particular classification? And some of those other things, such as job title through the job title, does the job title match the job duties? So on and so forth. And then as we've had a chance to just go through the jobs, then we start evaluating them for content using a job evaluation system. And then we also know that there are certain situations where as the slide implies, when the system and the market do not align, that sometimes internal salary compression, oftentimes in the police and fire world, we have a concern about employee over time and the pay of the supervisors supervising those employees. Sometimes the market is just so incredibly hot for a particular classification that it's hard to keep up and job evaluation quickly becomes irrelevant. And so we have to address that. But then we also have to make certain that our clients have the appropriate policy or strategy in place. And that's really at the heart of a lot of these conversations that are going on. But as we dig into our jobs, we're looking at each one through the lens of five major factors. And if you look at the criteria set forth in Equal Pay Act or Equal Employment Opportunity Legislation or Case Law, those sorts of things, these factors really track with what those guidelines establish. And so the first thing that we're looking at, and in fact, let me just pause here, with the five main factors, there are sub-factors in each one of those. And so if you look at that first one, thinking challenges, we're really looking at the context and complexity of the thinking challenges and what type of a response. And so that's really where our work begins. So I'm gonna flip over to the next slide because it kind of puts it in words as opposed to just a picture. But as we work our way through, as I implied, we're first looking at the problems that we're asking employees for that particular classification to resolve. And we use certain words on a frequent basis, such as on a regular basis. It's not just a matter of an employee has a difficult problem once or twice a year, but on a fairly regular basis, how complex are those problems and what type of thought is required to resolve those problems. Each one of these as we go through them has a continuum or a spectrum of possible responses that go from very, in the case of the complexity of the problems, very, very low complexity. And I believe that there are seven steps to take you all the way through very, very high complexity and different explanations and thought process behind each. And so we're able to arrive at point values by assigning our observations to those. So now that we have that problem working, as we move from thinking challenges, then we look at what types of decisions are we empowering that classification to make. How much freedom, first of all, to very confined to almost no confinement over which slice of the organization are they empowered or meaningfully contribute to the decision-making process ranging from their job to their department to multiple departments to the entire organization. And then we're also looking at what is the magnitude of their participation in these decisions, such as they are an information provider, perhaps maybe they're making suggestions, perhaps they're making their, or they're participating in those decisions or they are indeed a final decision maker. And then we also look at the interactions as it relates to the context of the business communications as an internal or as all-encompassing. And what's the end result? What is the impact on the flow of information or data in the organization? Well, first three factors really kind of flow from one to the next. And as we look at work environment, what we're simply looking at is what are the types of things that can hurt an employee in the course of their job and what are the physical requirements of that job? And then knowing all of the factors above and also sometimes it's required by statutes or other legal guidelines. Sometimes it is a insistence of the organization, but what is the formal preparation and experience required to qualify for the job? And so with each one of those, and this is not the city, being a sample, each one of those, we have a jumble of letters and numbers that actually mean something to us. So if I look at that supervisor line, for example, 6D informal preparation and experience in our language, that's a bachelor's degree in four to five years of experience. The point is that each of those factors are rated for every single classification in your organization. Every single classification therefore has a point value that we're able to then build a pay structure and actually do some analysis on behalf of the city. And it's at this point, and I'm just gonna use the number 100. If we had 100 jobs in the organization that we were reviewing, we might look at that list and based on our experience, based on a level of analysis that we believe we can match 60 of those jobs to the outside marketplace. It might be 70, it might be 55, but we wanna make certain that we have benchmark jobs that we are then beginning to match outside the organization. So we can again do some external comparisons and I'm not gonna go through this in extensive detail, except for we're looking for standard and consistent when we're looking at jobs and able to see the different variations of those jobs that we might see within your organization as compared to the external marketplace. And so when we do so, we can then look at your current pay through a couple of lenses. And this helps lay the foundation. So again, this is not every job in the organization, but it is the benchmark jobs that we selected and this is your data. We look at the current actual pay and you can see that it's pretty consistent that our observation going along the bottom part of this graph, it's not like this. So going down here, this is our observation for each job. So this particular job, whatever it might be is about 700 points. And you are currently paying it about $35 per hour. And so each one of those are plotted and then we just ask our computer program to put that line that represents the line of best fit through all of those dots. And by and large, as employees increase in duties and responsibility, the pay correspondingly increases. There's some variation of that line, but not all that much. Just for the sake of a future slide, we also look at this through the lens of not your actual pay, but what are the midpoints of your pay structures? And so when we look at that, you know, the line looks very similar. There's a little bit of variation, but not enough to cause us any major concern. And so again, both look a little different. You know, the line does wobble just a slight bit and you'll see that in the future slide here, but it lays that groundwork. And as we're looking at this, you know, there's differences from that line. Some are below, some are above. And more often than not, those differences can be explained by any number of realistic factors. It might be the market. Maybe you had to hire somebody higher up into your pay range and what you would have liked, education experience, the job title, location. This isn't always the case in the public sector. 10 years, certainly one performance ratings. The point is that there's any number of reasons why that particular job might not fall precisely on that line. But the reasons that we have to make certain that we're not accounting for, these are the legal reasons, you know, we don't wanna account for risk. We don't wanna account for age or sex. We wanna be as independent and unbiased as we possibly can in this process. And I believe that we need that test again and again. And so once we have the jobs evaluated, we're then able to begin having a conversation with that first question, which is what is that market of comparison? And, you know, for us doing this working, what we have found that there's really two marketplaces that we're always talking about. There's a lot of overlap between the two. But the traditional, who is like us? Same size, maybe similar budget, housing values, all of those sorts of things really come into play. And it gives that sense of security. I would say if I were to rewind a decade or so, that that was probably the most common model when we still had a substantially large collective bargaining environment. Doesn't make a right, doesn't make it wrong, just that's what it was. But we also have to be mindful of the competitive marketplace. Who is trying to take your talent? Where are you situated? So in your particular case, you are situated nicely between Green Bay and Milwaukee and the I-43 corridor. And it's not all that hard to get to Fond du Lac or Appleton area relatively quickly as well. So we want to make certain that we are being mindful of that labor pool as well. So as we move forward, you know, in terms of looking at the data for this particular project, we wanted to make certain that we were had a good representation of somewhat like-sized communities. And for the most part, not all of these, but for the most part in a relatively compact area, there's a handful of alloyed across, being two good examples where similarly sized. And as we look at other jobs within the organization, especially your professional, your advanced technical, your management level jobs, that if you have a vacancy, the desire to be competitive and being able to test yourself against these factors. So we collected market data from all of these organizations and included them in our analysis. In addition to the public sector data, we also pulled data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics as applicable. Pay factors is our data warehousing software, but they also have paid data included as part of our subscription that we're able to utilize. Count data in Willis Towers Watson are two paid survey sources that we use and are highly reliable and respected. And then for a handful of your jobs, the American Water Works Association conducts an annual survey that we use for water and wastewater type jobs. So with that market, we also have to be, and as we kind of move forward to developing a pay structure, we have to have some confidence in the model that we're using for the surveys, the data cuts. When we talk about data cut in a wage survey, similar size, similar geography, revenue, FTE, as applicable, in some cases, we use a more comprehensive cut. And also being mindful that not all data is created equal. Some organizations might be viewed as outliers. And so we are able to analyze the data statistically to make certain that we're not including data that should not be there, whether it is extremely high or extremely low data. And again, we try to be very consistent in our approach. The jobs that were selected as benchmarks, and then getting the feedback and review for management to make certain that we are headed down that right pathway. And so once we have that, once we have a good model designed and a good set of benchmark jobs, we then can create what's called the market line, the pay line, that line that we will use to then build, apologies, then build a pay structure for you. So as we look at this, what we wanna be certain of is that one, we've got the good model and this indicator here, I wanna get in the weeds here for about 30 seconds, the coefficient of determination, really is our indicator or barometer of how good is that model that we use to build your pay structure. And with all of these factors in here, once we get to 90, we're relatively confident. Once we get to 95, we're extremely confident. Anything beyond 95 is just being greedy. And then we got lucky here with this particular project that it lined up so nicely from a data perspective. The one thing I wanna illustrate because we'll talk about this as we work our way through is that this is based on the 50th percentile of the marketplace. And so when I talk about that, the 50th percentile or the median means that you are gonna pay right in the middle of the marketplace. Half of the organizations mathematically are gonna pay more than you and half of the organizations mathematically are gonna pay less than you. And that's, as we'll talk about in just a couple slides here, that's kind of been the way of the world for quite some time. And so let's kind of talk about this because we're gonna work our way through this. When it comes to markedly competitiveness, world at work, which is our professional association for compensation professionals, conducts a survey, I believe every, if it's not every year, it's every two years, asking organizations for their practices. How are you approaching certain things? And so that, and if I were to focus your attention even on that top line, what is the base target for organizations when it comes to compensation? And you can see that the overwhelming majority, 77% build their pay structures at the 50th percentile. There's another 11% that go above the 50th percentile and of course, good intentions don't always pan out that in practice it's a little bit less at the 50th percentile, it's a little bit more at the 50th, 75th percentile. So again, as I indicate, this has been the way of the world as long as I can remember and probably as long as any of us can remember as it relates to building pay structures. And then the wheels fell off our labor market in the last year or two and so what we're beginning to see is competition unlike we've ever seen before on top of the phenomena related to the baby boomer generation continuing its exit from the workforce. Quite honestly, that's been talked about as long as I've been working, that this was something that we knew was going to happen and is now happening and quite, it's quite scary that Generation X isn't far behind to begin their way. We're certainly not as large but it just happens with every particular generation but we're finding more and more competition in the marketplace. And if that's not the most obvious statement of the night, I don't know what is because I think every organization is feeling it. So we are then able to show you a comparison and as I talk about this, I don't wanna create a lack of confidence in our work but I don't like these lines because they don't always tell the most accurate story. They're helpful visually, but to say that your current pay and again, we're talking about current actual pay with this particular comparison, that your current pay is slightly above market. First of all, I don't doubt that. I don't doubt that at all because again, as you are trying to compete, you're having to pay positions more aggressively within your current structure to recruit or retain employees. But this is about as close to being on the market as you can find. And it implies that there's a uniformity to this but even here, it's ever so slight that someone currently paid above, you might have a position one grade down or right next to it that is paid below the market. So it is simply overall, there's how you land. If I overlay the, instead of the current actual pay, if I look at the midpoints, believe it or not, there is a gray line there. It's almost imperceivable. You can see it peeking out below the black. And so that tells us you've got a very competitive wage structure as it currently stands. But I wanna talk about some reality. And this is one where now we have to break out our crystal ball. When we start talking about market data, I would say in any other period, aside taking the last two, maybe two and a half, three years out, market data is pretty reliable and is usually pretty useful for a period of time, whether it's 12 months, 18 months, maybe in some cases even 24, there's not a lot of dynamic movement throughout the marketplace until we get to today. And so when I look at this, first of all, remember that any piece of data that you get, whether it is consumer price index unemployment or salary data in this particular situation is going to be backward-looking. It's gonna tell you what happened as opposed to what is happening. Now it might help predict the future with the appropriate measures, but we're looking backwards in most cases. From the public sector, that most of the pay structures, if not with some exceptions as organizations that are making mid-year corrections, that they're based on decisions made during last year's budget cycle. And of course the public sector can't respond as rapidly as the private sector because there are budgets that need to be adopted and need to be adhered to, but even in the private sector, without a pandemic and without a competitive marketplace, by law, that data has to be at least three months old before it gets into a survey. And in many cases, it's often six to 12 months old before that survey is published. And as that survey continues to be used and waiting for the next version of said survey to come out. So we're well aware of that. And we have some tools to age the data forward. We are forever tracking changes in the marketplace as it relates to wages or other dynamics. We do our own surveys to see what's going on. And so what kind of goes forward from here is kind of based on we know that where you stand, as I indicated, is in a highly competitive position, but you're also in an uncertain position. And so let's talk about some possible options that we might look at. And I'll show you an example of a compensation structure perfectly on the market and we'll talk about some alternatives. But that's third question. How do you design, what type of a structure? And so when we look at this, there's a lot of things that we need to take into consideration. Some of those kind of flow through our conversations and how do employees move from one end of the structure to the next? Are there compression concerns that we need to take into consideration whether it be police or fire or some other department? Are there some jobs that are unique to the marketplace that maybe it's not relevant, the job evaluation system isn't relevant. We need to look at market. Certainly financial or budget concerns weigh into this as well as some of those other matters and even talking about performance, what role does performance play in this conversation? And so this next slide here, I put it on here so I wanna make certain that you have the reference point when we start showing you what we're doing with some of these numbers, where these numbers came from. And that's really all the slide is intended. So we're gonna be talking about grade 11 in just a few moments here. And so remember I talked about every single job in your organization had a point value. So you might have a job that is 481 points, another job that is 512 points. Well, by building grade ranges, so from 470, this example, 479 to 514, all jobs within that threshold will be placed in the same grade. And that 496 and a half is that middle value, simply taking 479 plus 514, dividing by two that's that middle value. Again, a very important thing that we'll talk about in just a moment here. So I bring this up because we're gonna talk about this equation in just a moment and that Y equals is just Y being, it's this line will intercept somewhere down here if it was zero points. But we can then build, this also helps us build the line or here to help build a case structure. And I'll show you how we use that line and that intercept to build a case structure for the city. And when we talk about building a case structure, we've got some common language or some terminology we wanna make certain that we're talking about here, we have this term CP control point. And there are essentially four different models and then there's a million and one different variations off of these models that you can employ, a single rate model, once it was an individual classification, city administrator might be a good example in some cases that you have to be on top of the market in every single instance. If you built a case structure for a hundred classifications on a single rate model, you have to be certain that you're on the market for each one of those hundred classifications or you're gonna have challenges. These other three models give you some flexibility that the market shifts within two or three percentage points that you've got a range of pay that hopefully captures that structure. And so in a step-based model, which is the tried and true, and I would say exclusive to the public sector, I think a lot of private sector organizations still use these, but there is a step increment that employees progress through the minimum maximum. And as you can see, it's not as robust as the next structure of performance either at the bottom or at the top. That's intentional. Mathematically, what this is intended to represent is that 87 and a half percent of the control point give or take that's intended to represent the 25th percentile of the marketplace. That's where most organizations start their structures. Either the 25th or the 20th percentile or I'm sorry, the 10th depending on the structure, which we'll talk about next. And the 112 and a half percent is intended to represent about the 75th percentile. So paying between, in this particular example, between the 25th and the 75th percentile puts you in a competitive position provided the structure itself is competitive. Performance-based model, the first question if an organization asks me if they should we go down performance-based model is dialogue relating to the status and quality of the current performance management system. That's not to say that many, if not most organizations have a desire or would have a preference towards performance-based pay. There are a lot of challenges with doing it in the best of circumstances, but when you move over to the public sector, there are a few additional challenges, such as transparency. The notion that every employee knows what every other employee makes certainly can be challenging, especially when it comes to allocating performance-based increases. Funding a performance pool that is adequate and sufficient to incentivize performance as a challenge. And that's speaking nothing to the challenges of trying to get 10, 15 different departments all with different missions going in different directions on the same page as it relates to performance management. It's possible that it's very challenging and difficult and especially in an environment where having, making sure that you are staffed appropriately in a human's resources world, that certainly would be a difficult proposition. And then the last one is just simply taking both of these that we have a step process to the control point and then open range or performance thereafter. So when I flip to this next page here, you're gonna notice some differences, which is why I say we've got four different models, but then we vary them depending on the client and I'll walk through each one of these points. First of all, we are recommending a step plan. We are not recommending this step plan, but this is the first calculation that we go through along the way. And so how do we get here is, I probably the best example. So what I see here, remember I talked about that 496.5. And then this equation is simply that equation you saw on that graph that Y equals. So this 2785 is that Y and plugging these other numbers into that formula, we result in 2785 for the control point. And how we built each one of these grades going up is we find the middle value for each one of those grades and just simply substitute that number in. So the point for tonight is that we are not pulling numbers out of thin air. There's a very precise method that we utilize to build the structure. Couple of other things I think are very much worth noting is that as we looked at this, we do believe in the current marketplace that 87.5% is probably too shallow in the marketplace to effectively hire. And so we're recommending building that minimum at 90% of the control point with those two numbers. And then we simply took that extra 2.5% and we put it at the top at 115% at the maximum. We think that both of those help you in the long run in maintaining a competitive balance. The other part is, and this kind of comes down to the challenge that's associated with maintaining a structure that the steps from minimum through step four up to the control point, or step five in this example, is 2.5 percentage points. That's pretty standard. And I don't know that I would recommend varying that too much. We wanna make certain that we're moving employees to that market estimate, that control point, in a relatively and reasonable fashion, relatively quick and reasonable fashion. Beyond that, knowing that the organization still has to look on an annual basis, what is the market doing? Whether it is CPI, whether it is the Employment Cost Index, another metric that's measured by the government or some other metric that you choose to utilize, how much do we need to increase our overall structure to keep it competitive? Knowing that there's that going on, we wanna make certain that you are putting yourself in the best position to afford it. And so we are recommending 1.25% steps above the control point. It gives you a longer shelf life for the plan. It keeps employees moving through the structure in a regular fashion, but again, isn't as big of a budgetary blow to the city as cutting these out and having 2.5% steps above. So that's the ultimate design. We'll talk about the recommended plan in just a few moments here, but we also wanna make certain that we identify that when it comes to implementation, there's some challenges, budget. Budget is always an issue. And as we work our way through these, I'll lean on Caitlin and Todd to provide some real-life numbers as it relates to implementation. But I also think that in most communities, look at this, that we wanna pay competitively, but we don't wanna pay too much, nor do we wanna pay too low. We also know that there's this balance between happiness and fairness. I learned a long time ago that I have zero control over happiness. I wish I did. I like it when people are happy. I prefer people to be happy, but I know that I have no control over it. I think we do have some control as it relates to working with the city to come up with something that is fair. We're not treating, we're not playing favorites. We're trying to treat everyone as equitably as possible. There might be certain circumstances as we talked about previously related to compression or market that we have to look at, but we wanna make certain that we're being fair. And I think that's the best possible outcome overall that we can point our fingers to that we do believe we've been fair in our approach. Two challenges for you, and I identify these one because I need to, but two, I think we're trying to come up with a solution that addresses both of these in some way, shape, or form. So the first being, one of the frustrations that can often occur is the size of the increase. When you work with implementing a step-based program, the lowest cost, in fact, the next slide will talk about some preliminary costs. The lowest cost option for implementing is moving employees onto the step that provides an increase in pay. Now, using that in quotes, an increase in pay could mean a penny. If I'm paid $25 today, and the step in the new structure that provides an increase in pay for me is 2501, that's where I move. Well, realistically, that's about a $20.80 annual impact to my household budget. We probably wanna look at something a little bit more than that, especially in today's world. But the other one, and this one's a little bit more difficult to recognize and a little bit harder to fully take into account when it comes to implementation, and that's length of service, that you might have employees who have been with you for 15, 20 years, and they're being recommended to be placed at step three. That's a little bit of a challenge, or especially if that job is underpaid and the market is significantly, and that 20-year employee goes to step one, and then you hire somebody tomorrow. It's not the end of the world, but what that compression that comes with it certainly causes the existing employee to scratch their head and say, well, what about all those years of service? Am I not training this new employee? All those sorts of things are certainly things that would be legitimate concerns of the employees. And so, the size of the increase in length of service are often a challenge, and I also have to put a little notation in here that when it comes to these processes, our firm, we only recommend, and that's all we ever want to be able to do, that we're not the decision makers as it relates to the final product. You, as the elected body or the council as a whole, have the ability, if they choose to make exceptions, we just have to warn you that there's a slippery slope. I would say, first of all, on that slope is, this structure is built, what I believe to be a high degree of internal equity. Does not take into account any illegal factors has been looked at and vetted. We might need to make some alterations on an appeal, which we'll talk about at the end here. So the first one being, every exception you make can chip away at that internal equity. But the other piece is that chain reaction piece, that if you grant an exception for one department, why wouldn't you grant it for the next? If you grant an exception for one employee, why wouldn't you grant it for the next? And so again, that can have that chain reaction. And so I just need to put that out there in front of you. That's not to imply that you would never have a situation where it wouldn't be necessary to make an exception because those do exist, but I would just be very cautious about that in your decision making. As it relates to the cost for the proposed, I'm gonna go through these quickly, at least at this one, only because we will have the cost in terms of what's being recommended. I put book end one, book end two. The most, the two ones we just talked about, the step provides and increase and looking at all of these years of service, taking that into account as it relates to placement in the new schedule. So we're looking at a 1% lift on payroll for the step provides and increase. Or if we were to look at all of the years of service, 4.5%. To be honest, it's not that earth-shattering. And I think because of your current placement in the marketplace, if you remember those comparison graphs, that kind of explains it. The story is gonna change a little bit as we move forward with our recommended approach. I also threw in here the library data, certainly from a dollar's standpoint isn't as large, but from a percentage standpoint, it's significantly larger than what the city's is. And so we wanna make certain that we're taking that into account. I've been hinting at this for a few slides now that we think that there's an alternative approach. I wanna make certain that I explain myself in terms of why we think that this is the best approach. And so in this particular example, I'm looking at the midpoint, that gray line, I'm sorry, the black line being your midpoint, the, I'm sorry, the current, I'm gonna spoke here, your current, the gray line being that 50th percentile marketplace. So again, you remember that that one was slightly below the black line. If we were to go all the way out to the 75th percentile, which means that 75% of organizations would pay less than you and 25% would pay more. It's a pretty aggressive approach. I think overall, if I kind of fast forward a few years, I think the marketplace is gonna go back to a 50th percentile marketplace. I'm convinced of it because that's what's happened for quite some time. We're just going through a little bit of a bubble right now. But I also think, if you remember that slide I had as relates to challenges with data in the marketplace in this world, I think it would be incredibly helpful to kind of get a running start. Now when I say a running start, if we take the data based on the 50th percentile of the marketplace and the data based on the 75th percentile, average those two numbers, that's what that blue line represents. And so if I look at that, it certainly is putting you in a position where you are gonna be more competitive. And I would equate this to, in fact, my observation the other night, as I was talking about, this is my son runs, just got done running track for the season and runs the mile. And when you're watching a race, you can see some kid who goes out like gangbusters and you think to yourself, yeah, the pack is going to re-emerge back in by the time the race comes to an end. And I think the same thing here is that putting yourself in that position the 50th, 75th percentile is your head start. But by the end of the race, and if I fast forward two or three years, the market's gonna reel you back in. And if you were to reassess, I wouldn't doubt that you are a lot closer if not on the 50th percentile marketplace when all of a sudden done. So it's a strategy to kind of give a quick boost to acknowledge that you are experiencing challenges, hiring and retaining in this marketplace. And I think certainly puts you in a better position. So from a pay structure standpoint, the exact same structure, 90, 115, two and a half, one recorder, but those control points are certainly a little bit higher and allows you to place yourself like I said in a competitive position. I put this graph in here just to illustrate because every once in a while, we'll talk about an appeals process in a couple of slides here, but we'll have an employee who says, I think I should be in a grade 12 instead of a grade 11. If grade 12 started or grade 11 stopped, we were wrong, that would be pretty significant. And it puts a lot of pressure on us and we still have a lot of pressure on us to get this right the first time through. And I think we are, if we are not there, we are really, really close. But because there is overlap between those two, that if we are off by one grade, it might be frustrating to an employee. We certainly might need to take a look at it at some point, but it doesn't often rise to a grievous error or a challenging position. So I wanna make certain that we understand that there is a significant amount of overlap between these grades. And if you look at the actual wage structure, you can see that how one grade grows from the other. As it relates to cost to you, I would look at those two bookends. Now we see that number growing from 105 to 209. I'm sorry, it was 1.05, but 209,000 or 1.77%. So a little bit of growth there based on that new marketplace. But here is where it gets a little bit more challenging. If you recall, it was about 4.5% to recognize everybody's here as a service. If you were to do it in this alternative structure, it would be just under a million dollars or just over 8% to do so. For the library, again, this is not this process, but again, we're looking at much larger numbers from a percentage and a dollar standpoint in that particular example. I'm just gonna wind this down and I'll turn it back over since I'm on a roll here. I just talked about the possibility of an employee appealing their classification rating as it relates to grade placement. I think it's important to the employees, but I also think it's to you as the decision makers to know what an appeal is and what it is. In an appeal, first of all, we have to have an adopted structure. I'll talk about that on the next slide as it relates to why that is. But we're looking at the grade placement. We're not looking at step placement. It provides us the opportunity to dot our I's, cross our T's. If we were working for a private sector organization, what has there, in fact, I know this because we've worked in several private sector orgs that we almost never have an appeals process because nobody knows what anybody else has paid for the most part. And we know that there's greater communication in today's world. But because everything is public here, we wanna make certain that we've got as accurate a structure as possible. And there's also jobs, especially as a project lanes on, jobs might have changed during the course of the study and it gives us the opportunity to clean that up. What it's not, and I think most importantly, is it's not an opportunity to undermine any of your decisions. This is not a performance evaluation. I wish Jane or Jim would be placed higher in their grade or even at a higher grade, as opposed to higher in the step movement because they're a fantastic quote, that's great. And I hope you have an organization full of rock stars and people who are doing great work for you. But this is not the process to reward performance. Again, we talked about modify the step placement. I think as we work our way through the costing options that modifying along somebody to appeal their step placement to completely undermine the financial model that your management team is used to come up with an implementation strategy, nor is there an opportunity to undermine the marketplace that if you said we're gonna use these 15, 20 employers, someone says I wanna use my own, it just doesn't work that way. So we're not trying at all the council's decisions for the most part remain intact. All we're talking about is the grade placement and that's usually a low impact process. In terms of the process itself, I will leave this here for your review. Just understand we work our way through adoption. We do share some information with employees that's often challenging only from the standpoint of it's complete information to us because we work in these systems on a day in, day out basis. It's not as easy for employees to just jump into it and completely understand it. But we also feel that we need to share information to bring some level of confidence. There's a formal appeal. We ultimately review it with the employee, with management team, with the department head and then come back and give a recommendation to the city for final approval. So for us to give you a structure, a sound program, you have to make certain it's meeting your strategic goals and is equitable and competitive in all of those sorts of things and ultimately result in a final, final balancing yet. Now I'd say those first three are first and foremost on employees minds. Now let's say council members as well, but is it equitable? Have we established the appropriate hierarchy from one job to the next? Are you able to bring jobs in and retain people in the organization? Is it competitive? Even if it isn't a performance-based structure that if somebody leaves the organization and you choose to combine duties or restructure jobs that you're able to have them reevaluated based on the new way the employee is contributing to the organization. So those first three, again, I think are pretty important to employees. And then the last three I think is where the decision-making process really takes over, which is can we afford it? Can we find the year one money to implement? And between this one and the next one, this is probably the easier of the two. Finding one time money is always easy. If that second one, is it sustainable? You afford years two, three, four and beyond with your growing costs. Because again, wages, even though in today's marketplace they're at a premium and is probably the time when employees are the asset that require the most investment that other costs are increasing as well. And so knowing all of that and knowing these other factors, equitable all the way through sustainable, is it something that can be adopted? And we hope that it is. So I blazed my way through this pretty, I'd like to say quickly, relatively quickly for me. Happy to answer any questions you have or go from there. Well, Patrick, thank you for presenting the committee. I'm going to hand this over to Administrator Wolff. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Patrick, for your time. And I understand that you have a tight schedule. So we'll ask the committee if they have questions, but I did wanna point out that this process obviously did take a very long time. We had our own internal missteps, as well as we had some changes within the Carlson-Dettman group. But we really feel very strongly that this is a really good program. As Patrick had pointed out, we've gone through the JDQs, which is basically a review of all of the job descriptions, making sure that they were vetted and then revetted and then vetted again to make sure that they're accurate and complete to the best of our ability. And then from there, just to summarize, from the job descriptions, the wage scales were built to the actual position. So we are not looking at people, we are looking at positions. Again, we have to look at all of the positions in the non-rep throughout the city, whether it's DPW, wastewater, water, not really water, but City Hall, all of the different departments that have non-rep. So this is actually a much bigger opportunity than what we really realized when we took this on. And if you recall, I actually brought this forward to the council back in 2020 that our wage scale and scales were, had some significant issues in them. So basically we're taking this and we're breaking it down into one wage scale. We're also bringing the pages, the seasonal employees and the crossing guards onto the actual wage scale so that they're all under the same umbrella. And we're also taking this from, as Patrick had pointed out, we're starting at a 90% and we're taking it to a 115. We do know that and we understand that right now in the market, things are very turbulent. We don't feel that it's a good time to actually try to address that. We need to take care of the team that we have in place and that also will help us with bringing additional team members on in the future. But again, what we're proposing would go into effect July 10th, so for the first six months. So today's review was to help the finance department to better understand how the sausage was made, as some would say, and that'll allow us to better understand the steps moving forward. Any questions? Todd, if I might weigh in for a moment here. Yes, please. Because I know my time is short this evening, I will and am available for the June 7th meeting to answer questions as well. Perfect, thank you. Perfect and I'm not seeing any questions from committee members at this time, so I believe we can let you go and thank you again, Patrick. Thanks, Patrick. Thank you, have a great evening, everyone. And I do want to point out to the Finance and Personnel Committee, if there are questions, please reach out to Caitlin and myself and we are more than willing to walk through it, explain it. And just review it to make sure that everybody understands it clearly. Thank you. Thank you. All right, moving through our last bit of the agenda then. Our next meeting is on June 7th, the special meeting that we've just discussed. Our next regular meeting is on June 13th and with that, we'll be looking for a motion to adjourn. Okay, we have a motion and a second, seeing no discussion, all in favor? Aye. All opposed? Chair votes aye. The ayes have it. The motion passes. We are adjourned. Thank you, everybody. Okay.