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1 [Gavel Pounding] 1 >> Mayor Strickland: I would like to call to order the Tacoma City Council study session for June 17, We have one item on our agenda today and get an update on the budget development work session. There will be a to include the results of the City Council rating of city services and an overview of the budget outreach process. At this time, I would like to call on budget officer Thad Willie to begin the presentation. Thad. >> thank you for having us again today, two weeks in a row to talk about budget related items. Today we'll talk about several of the key aspects of it. Providing General Fund estimated out six years into the future. Today I'll quickly walk you through an overview of that presentation, then turn the time over to Katie, because we're switching it up again and I'll ask someone else to speak. Katie is here to walk us through the results of the rating of the city services that we gave you, that survey we gave you last week, then talk a little bit about the community engagement process going into the development of the budget. As you recall from last week's presentation, it's estimated at the end of the biennium, revenues will meet and exceed expenditure. This does not continue into future years. Estimated shortfall -- $13.2 million shortfall in the

2 budget, and 2 $19.5 million in the '19-'20 budget. About we were to address fleet maintenance, maintenance for information technologies and streets, as well as provide funding for other capital services our shortfall for the increases to nearly $50 million, so now that we've provided you with context and more ideas of the financial challenges going forward, we asked you all last week to take a survey to provide direction for the budget. With that, I'll turn it over to Katie to walk through the results of that survey. >> so the rating of city services document as mention willed help provide input on the preliminary direction in developing policy and service delivery options for the budget. In case you're looking for the results of the survey, a couple have pulled it out. The full pamphlet of results is behind your presentation today, if you want to see the entire group of results. I'll go ahead and walk through the survey and the steps that you completed them in. Step one was a rating of city services. So we asked council to look at 24 different city services and programs and we asked you to answer two questions when you were looking at each of these serves. First was the city's current level of services meeting the community's level of expectations, then second, provide a rating of each of the

3 service areas. 3 One thing I would like to note here is that the expectations is no solely a measure of performance. For example, it could mean that the city is providing a service, but maybe not enough of a specific service, or maybe providing it in some areas but not other areas in the community. Expectations can be influenced by not just our operations, but by the community expectations themselves, by funding, if it decreased, also geographic sections of the service could result in different community expectations for some services. Then secondly, the importance rating. I want to note that these services are likely very important, but for the purpose of this exercise, we wanted to be able to look auto the relative importance of the services compared to other services and establish some sort of priority of those services in our community. Again, this is a general look at the services and their importance. So we wanted you to be able to see how we're meeting community expectations and then the importance of each of the service areas together. So as you see these services, you look left to right, on the left is the least important services, then they increase importance as you go right, then the most important on the far right. If you look at where we're exceeding expectations, that's the top third of the graph, then

4 towards the bottom third of the 4 graph is where we're not meeting expectations. So we wanted to help you look at different ways that you can interpret these graphical results. In the center of the graph is really where you would look at maintaining service levels, that's our services that are meeting expectations for our community. While at the bottom, that potentially is a place to look for service enhancement, which we're not meeting the community's expectations, and first priority or maybe the first area we want to look at is the most important services, then a lower priority area would be our least important services. Then if you're looking at the top part of the graph, that might be a place you look for service reductions, where we're really exceeding the service level that the community is looking for and we want to look first at the least important services and try to protect our most important services as much as possible. So look at the average rating that you provided, this big gray section in the center is looking at where are we meeting the current expectations. These bold service areas are the one where we saw a lot of council agreement in terms of your results. So for street repair, for example, eight out of nine rated it as the exact same rating, so both most important and not meeting expectations. For police services, we also saw quite a bit of a agreement,

5 seven out of nine rated it as a 5 most important service, and crime prevention as well had a very strong most important rating, and ambulance and EMS services as well. If you move left, you'll see we next have fire services, which is also meeting expectations, and as we keep going left we have arts and cultural funding, fire prevention, senior centers and special events that are all meeting expectations and declining in importance. Then in that bottom right section, we have library access, ground maintenance and streetlights not meeting community expectations. The next group of services where we didn't receive as clear of council direction. There was more variation in how you felt the service was meeting the expectations or not of the community, or any importance level of the services. Then this last group in more detail are five services where we saw a lot of divergence in terms of the council rating. You'll notice these tend to be grouped in the center because the average pulled them into the center. I just want to show you some of those results. So here's a graph of all of them together. You can see the range of the services. These bubble charts show you how many of the Council Members responded with a rating in each of those dots. So you can see here that we had four Council Members rating housing an homeless services as exceeding expectations, we had

6 two people state it was not 6 meeting expectations, and a range of the importance level of this service. Human Services was pretty similar. We had a lot tighter grouping both meeting expectations and medium importance. Code enforcement and community-based services saw a lot of variation in terms of four council members stated it was not meeting expectations, and for four stated it was, then you can see the very important ratings as well. I wanted to mention the categories, the deferred maintenance and other capital and services, so deferred maintenance, you can see it was fairly consistent in terms of five out of eight responded that it was not meeting expectations, and the importance rating of this differed slightly. While our rating of unfunded capital and service items, you can see again we have five Council Members rating it as not meeting expectations. So that's just a quick overview of the first step of the budget rating document. I'm going to keep going through each of the steps and allow for some discussion at the end. Council Member? >> on slide 13 and 14, unless I was trying to read them and didn't hear you, all of the squares an Xs and the diamonds and triangles and all of the different colors, what does any of that mean? >> that's just so that you can visually differentiate them more so you didn't see dots everywhere.

7 I'm sorry if it adds visual 7 confusion. >> okay. >> I would say that the one thing that is consistent here is you can see quite a bit of services are grouped in the meeting expectations area, and also does not meet expectations. >> okay, thank you. >> Mayor Strickland: Anyone else have any questions before Katie moves on to the next part? All right. >> so the second step of the process had to focus more on the budget and this was specifically asking council to look at nine major service areas within the city's General Fund budget. What we did was provided a distribution of $10 based on the current funked and the adopted biennial budget and asked you to distribute the dollars looking to see if you wanted to fund anything for deferred maintenance, other capital and deferred services, or other areas where you thought there might be need for increased funding. Average response, as you can see here, really rededicated funding from several of our service areas, including fire, library, neighborhood and community serves, community and economic development, and planning and development services, and rededicated those funds to public works which saw a 15% increase and deferred maintenance and other capital services, which both received an average increased budget of 6 cents in this exercise. I will note as well that police maintained pretty consistent on this average.

8 It was not significantly reduced 8 or increased in this exercise. So then the next step of the process was actually specifically looking at the 24 service areas and we ask you to rate whether or not you would increase funding, maintain funding or decrease funding for each of the services. What I did to separate out these result is look at where there was a lot of council agreement. For deferred maintenance and street repair and maintenance, both received eight out of nine of the Council Members stating to increase funding for those services, and other capital and services received five out of nine Council Members stating to increase those services. They received pretty strong agreement to increase funding for those areas. I want to note here this actually matches up with the exercise we did looking at where we're meeting community expectations or not meeting community expectations an the importance. These three categories tended to be more important and areas where we're not meeting the community's expectations. The maintain funding category has quite a few services in it. Overall, there's 18 of the 24 services in this category, and it is a mix of places where the services received quite a few comments to maintain funding, but there's a few that stated to increase it and then a few to decrease it, so it pulled the average close to the maintain funding area for these services. The other area highlighted was reduce the funding.

9 There was the senior centers, 9 fire prevention and education and emergency management, and city-sponsored special events. Again, this matched up with the exercise we did. These tended to be areas of lower service importance and comparison to other services that the city has, and also places where we're all ready meeting community expectations. So we're planning to use these results as preliminary direction in developing a budget development process. We wanted to give this opportunity to ask if would like to apply any additional concepts to these results or clarifying information thank you about the results I just presented. Does anything stand out to you? If you would like to open it up for your own discussion. >> Mayor Strickland: I have a question. Let's go back to slide 29. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong one. Yes, that's it, 23. You look at planning and development services, that's a decrease. One of the questions I have and maybe the City Manager can answer this. Isn't that based on permitting and don't we charge people based on cost recovery? I want to talk about what implication of that is. [Speaker off mic] >> General Fund piece, so that's the planning element, the group that does not just your plan review and/or building permitting, but does a lot of subarea planning and just your land use and development code

10 kind of thing. 10 That's a very small one when you look at the percentage as it relates to current. The other piece is the enterprise fund for building and planning that is not reflected in here. >> Mayor Strickland: Okay, thank you. All right, Council Member Thoms. >> thanks for the clarification. The one with my assumption from when I was looking at this budget item is that, that department is capable of driving some funds if we're doing our job well and keeping it a good place to get their permits an the like, they can drive some of their own funds, so this raps the General Fund. I would not want to degrade the ability of the department. Thank you for that. The other question goes back to the first set of slides you showed. When you showed, plugged in the deferred maintenance piece, I believe slide number 5 versus the actuals and forecast. The question I have is that when you just looked at what we're running as a potential deficit if we did not fact in the deferred maintenance or new or enhanced services, it was 6, then up to 13 and then up to 19. How is it when you do the first set, it goes to 48, then 40, then 45? Is that because there's an assumption of additional revenue or something? >> we have in here, there's a one-time payment to the -- 8 million-dollar payment to the performing arts that they requested in , and so

11 that one-time payment would go 11 away in the and 19-20, so that's why you see a jump and then it drops down because there's that one-time request in there. >> okay. All right, thank you. [Speaker off mic] >> that's actually the newer enhanced. >> Mayor Strickland: Newer enhanced, even though it's a building we all ready have possession of? >> yeah, that's what we've put in there. >> Mayor Strickland: All right. Another question, I'm sorry, sorry to interrupt you. Under newer enhanced services. Could we list what project that includes? Does that include our portion of the possible Tacoma Link extension as well? >> it includes, but I don't have a dollar amount in there because it was undetermined. >> Mayor Strickland: All right. >> so if we were to include say a dollar amount of $10 million, that would increase by $10 million. >> Mayor Strickland: Are you finished, Council Member Thoms? Okay. Council Member Mello. >> thank you for pausing to ask the question that you asked because I think every Council Member could provide a lot of thinking behind the exercise they undertook and the nuances. I think it's really important and I'm sure all of lust do that throughout the bought process and individually with the City Manager, but thanks for providing at least a brief

12 opportunity during this public 12 forum. I would just mention, especially under the reduced funding slide, at least from my prospective, the reason I might have agreed with some of these and why some of my data points might have landed here would be not that I don't think fire prevention, edification and emergency management isn't important. I think it's tremendously important and when communities face crisis in emergency management situations, it's really significant. My thinking was to ask the City Manager in this -- in finding new revenues for this area, in working with major projects, like the facilities and new facilities that are causing the risks, not to say that's all of the risks in our community. Certainly, there's other risks with the industrial activities, but hopefully getting some of the cost recovered for planning and executing an emergency management for those sorts of permit opportunities. And then with senior centers, I think those outlets are very important in enrichment activities. My hope is that we can continue to encourage communication with Metro Parks Tacoma. I think the serves fits more in alignment with metro park's core service delivery mission than the city's, and so I would continue to urge that the city to transition those sorts of services to that provider. That's just a glimpse into some of my thinking and the time I took to participate in this exercise.

13 >> Mayor Strickland: And there's 13 a slot -- we have two sets of presentations, so there's one on slide 31 that talks about other community considerations and has some of the things we've considered that talk about background and why we've made some of these choices. Any other questions? All right, thank you. >> I'll take this opportunity to quickly go through our community engagement plan for the budget. So our major components of the outreach plan is three key pieces. We are going to start a website for the budget engagement process. You'll notice that the online engagement piece will be similar for what you've seen for the vicing class. We're working with the visioning team to conduct a outreach to avoid engagement fatigue, and Sierras where we can leverage each others resources to conduct the engagement in the communities. We'll be offering a similar online engagement tool. The mind mixer site would allow people to comment directly to us. Additionally, we'll offer a survey to citizens which is similar to the rating of city services that you also did. Also, offer a budgeting tool that will allow residents to submit a budget to us. We also plan to go out into our community and host a series of community meetings where we'll show a budget video. We'll be focused here on increasing education about the

14 current budget, so where does 14 your funding come from for the General Fund, what do we spend the General Fund dollars on. We will also be allowing a public comment period at these meetings and providing surveys for people to give feedback to us. Additionally, we have the community survey. This is the national community survey that was done in may and June, and so we'll be able to use these results to help inform the budgeting process. We included a very specific budget question in that survey that will help inform the budgeting process as we move forward. So in July and early August, we'll be hosting the District meetings in each of the council Districts. Here's the dates and locations for those meetings. You'll notice that we are taking off the last week of July and early part of August to allow a break for the community for the visioning meetings so we don't overlap too much with that process and the public. We'll also be planning other engagement efforts with community partners, including the black collective, Tacoma county labor in order to engage in that process and looking for ways to connect with the visioning process so we're not hitting these groups too many times this summer, but getting feedback from them on the budgeting process early in the budgeting development. We'll be going out into the community this fall and early October we'll have the proposed

15 budget. 15 We'll plan to go ahead and conduct five additional community meetings, one in each of our council Districts to present on the proposed budget, and we'll also be updating the budget website and offer online engagement throughout the fall to elicit community feedback. That's the conclusion of our presentation today. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback. >> Mayor Strickland: Thank you very much. Council Member Ibsen. >> thank you. This is a commendable outreach. I think it's one of the strengths of our budget process is the level of ownership we want the citizens to have in this. My question about the unconventional non-traditional means of engaging people. I know that our community-based services program maintains a big list of neighborhood block watch groups, ethnic organizations, churches and so forth, so I would encourage you to contact them as well because our partner organizations are very important, but I want to make sure we don't neglect regular people on the street who might have a first person prospective about these services and about the budget. That's one example. I just encourage all of us to be as open minded as we can to encourage many different ways in engaging people but overall, I'm happy with what I see. Thank you. >> Mayor Strickland: Thank you. Any other questions?

16 All right, thank you. 16 All right, are there any other items of interest at this time? Okay, agenda review and City Manager's weekly report. Mr. City Manager. >> yes. As it relates to agenda review, proclamations, recognitions, presentations, and announcements at tonight's meeting, there will be two proclamations at tonight's meeting. The first will proclaim the third Wednesday in June as walk Tacoma day. Ms. Megan, the downtown on the go coordinator and Ms. Mary Sandberg, the branch manager for commencement bank will be present to give a few remarks. The second will proclaim June 22, 2014, as Mary ball day. Ms. Dana from the Mary ball chapter from the national society of American revolution will be present to give a few remarks. There's no changes at this current time to the agenda this evening. As well, there's no other informational items. As always, if you have questions about tonight's agenda, please feel free to share those with us prior to the meeting so we can be prepared accordingly. That completes my report. >> Mayor Strickland: I would like to note that we've canceled our committee of the whole meeting for today and there's going to be a special meeting of the City Council here at 2:30 to talk about charter review, so if you're here for that or want to listen in, that will be here at 2:30 in room 16. I'll entertain a motion to

17 convene to a executive session, 17 to discuss potential litigation, not to exceed ten minutes. >> moved. >> seconded. >> Mayor Strickland: All in favor, say aye. Opposed. Motion passes. Anything for the good of the order before we go into executive session? Council Member Campbell. >> will the review be broadcasted out? >> yes, there will be audio broadcast available. >> okay, thank you. >> Mayor Strickland: With that, we'll reconvene in five minutes. Thank you.