- Now calling to order our deliberation session 630 on March 11th councilmember Stossberg take it away.
- Oh Do we have to call roll again? Okay? Will you please call the roll? Here
- Here. Here. Uh, yep, I'm here. Here. Here. Here. If anybody's... My audio is off. My audio is off. My
- audio is off. Wow. Check. Check. What? What?
- These microphones always make me a little crazy. Oh, I think it might be now I
- All right, so the purpose of this deliberation session is the development of 2027 shared budget priorities.
- And so what we're starting with is both the deliberation session that we had in December where we identified
- priorities and then that survey that I got sent out to y'all in February. So thank you everybody for
- responding to that survey on time, which allowed me to compile results for fiscal committee meetings.
- So then at the fiscal committee meeting,
- kind of reviewed the outcomes, reviewed the things that kind of floated to the top and how we could
- sort those things out, talked it over with Controller McKim and Deputy Mayor Knapp, and one of the things
- that they said was it's not necessary to keep our priorities within buckets, and so then the top priorities
- draft that
- I put in the packet is not within buckets, but just as kind of, so each category in terms of results,
- so I think that the four results are in appendix A, I made sure that the top things all were somehow
- included in the top priority list, and there are different numbers of tops in each of the bucket categories,
- just because of how voting dribbled out. So it was this really kind of fun slash challenging thing for
- me to do after discussing with the fiscal committee how to make this data make sense in any way.
- And so, for example, under
- The high-performing government outcomes, the top three voted on were implementation of existing plans,
- maintaining city assets, and developing city plans where none currently exist. And so all three of those
- end up in one way or another under our top priorities. The one that I'll maybe point out is
- making homelessness brief or non-repeating, which came out as a top three in two different buckets.
- So that's kind of like consolidated, right? And then there are several things consolidated under there
- in terms of top priorities that all kind of connected in different ways with that bucket. So overall,
- I'm just trying to explain, I guess, really badly this data that you got sent out, all of this information,
- because there was a lot of it, and how I kind of consolidated these top
- 13 priorities with help from fiscal committee. So like as fiscal committee chair, that was why this
- landed on my lap. But these are in no particular order.
- In fact, actually they are kind of in an order. They're in an order of how they were discussed. So the
- high performing government ones are first, and then I think it was housing and homelessness, and then
- it went on down in terms of making sure that each of the top things found a place in this list in terms
- of what everybody was individually prioritizing. But it is not in a ranked list.
- It is not this is definitely not me saying oh the number one council thing overall was implementing
- existing plans because that's not necessarily accurate. We also can't just go on the number of points
- any one of those things achieved because there were a different number of outcomes within each bucket.
- So it's like we could only vote for three things you know and there are
- you know, five choices, well then each one of those is gonna have more points than if there were 10
- choices. And so we can't, there's not really a good way to do this except by having a conversation about
- what people think, and so that is what we're supposed to do tonight. And so then things to keep in mind
- when considering this, and some of this was kind of said by Controller McKim and Deputy Mayor Knapp,
- you know, things to keep in mind. Is this activity or outcome driven by local government?
- And if it's not, how can government support the activity is kind of the follow-up. Because if it's not
- driven by us, is there something that we want to do to support whoever is driving it? Is the outcome
- measurable? Is it something that we can actually measure? Is the funding allocation for that outcome
- measurable? Does the outcome require direct fiscal investment, staff time, or legislation in terms of
- kind of figuring out what kind of priority
- it might be. And then also, is it a priority for 2027? And if it's not, and so I'll pull out the safe
- streets for all kind of concept because that was one of the top things, zero traffic fatalities or serious
- injuries by 2039. Technically, next year is 2027, not 2039, but of course we need to be working toward
- that goal. So it's not necessarily a goal or priority for 2027, but how should that priority be reflected
- in the 2027 budget?
- right, when thinking about the multiple smaller type projects or initiatives that could move us toward
- that goal of zero traffic fatalities and serious injuries. And then the last question, is this outcome
- personally important to you? Which, because the whole point of this is to be able to submit a ranked
- letter to the administration saying these are our top however many priorities in the order that we want
- them to be in.
- And I would like us to largely agree with that order. And this is the hard part, right? Because a couple
- years ago when we did this, they were not in any particular order because we couldn't put them in any
- particular order. So I'm kind of hoping that maybe we can do better this year. So that was about the
- intro that I had. And so I guess this is the time for feedback. Who wants to?
- throw out any kind of comment. And also comments in terms of things that I left out of this, including
- things like low-hanging fruit that you might go, hey, nobody voted for this thing, but it's this legislative
- piece, or it's this thing that maybe we should throw up there as something important. And that's appendix
- C, I think, is things that I just kind of, the fiscal committee decided if it got no votes, then we
- were just gonna not worry about it when trying to consider how to order these things.
- Great. Council member, sorry. Do you imagine that we would prioritize in buckets or individual things?
- So could you imagine that it would be, you know, item 3A is priority one and item 2C is priority two
- as a council or that we're saying like, you know, we care most about, for example, housing is like thing
- one and then these are top three within
- bucket one? I think my vision was to ignore buckets, because it felt like there were so many of the
- outcomes that crossed bucket lines. And part of that is because I think the nature of how we devised
- the outcomes, and we're all novices at outcomes. And so it's like, well, what are outcomes actually?
- And also the overall discussion, where does this outcome belong? And so housing and homelessness is
- a good one, because it literally was in
- I think it was public safety and in housing. And you could say it belongs in both of those things in
- different ways, but which bucket should we put it in the most? I don't know. Deputy Mayor Knapp didn't
- seem like it. She didn't think that it mattered. So I don't think we need to worry about the buckets.
- Council Member Flaherty. Council Member Sari, was your question a bit about what are the 13 top priorities
- though on pages
- four and five, and basically ranking those 13, as opposed to the six buckets of housing and homelessness,
- economic development, et cetera. Yeah, well I'm wondering whether there's some utility in us being able
- to say of the six buckets, this is our priority, this is how we, of those six things, these are all
- things we care about, but of those six, this is the one we care about most of the six first.
- whether there's any utility in ranking those over ranking the 13, but I think that Councilmember Sassemer
- makes a good argument for it's just like here are the 13 things that we really want to see and the reasons
- we want to see them there. And I think that we could, like I think we could start with the 13 and then
- depending on where our discussion goes and
- what y'all think about your priorities, then maybe it will say, maybe things will float to the top that
- all do have to do with housing, or do have to do with economic development, or do have to do
- with environment. And so maybe we could, maybe this is a both and. But we have to start in one or the
- other. So let's start with the 13. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Council Member Zulek.
- What's most important to you? Thank you. What is most important to me is that making sure that all of
- our residents have their basic needs met. And so when we sort these, I think we should be thinking about
- which one of these things provides food, shelter, water, and safety towards people. And that is how
- I've been framing it, just so everyone is aware of what's going on in my mind. Can I ask the follow
- up question?
- So going back to the first things to keep in mind, are those activities driven by local government?
- I think they can be. OK. Other thoughts on how to rank? Councilmember Flaherty?
- like if we're gonna try to rank these 13 things, we probably need to have another survey that's like
- a literally like put them in order and like assign points and then average it across everybody. We want
- like an actual system that's reflective of a balanced, like I don't think we're gonna reach consensus
- just by like talking. So I think a survey to do that, if we're trying to rank these 13 things, which
- are admittedly of different kind and scope, you know, but if that's the exercise, I think that is,
- worthwhile to rank them. And I'll just, you know, I think we're kind of stumbling our way towards something
- and trying things, which is great. And at the same time, the planning infrastructure and policy
- infrastructure of the city is not currently suited, I don't think, to a strong outcome-based budgeting
- system. Most of what
- We have major substantive areas of city government that have no formal plans at all. Certainly not any
- legislatively adopted ones anyway, or that are reflective of both branches of the city government. So
- there's huge gaps on things like public safety. The plans we do have lack consistent frameworks for
- how they think about or name outcomes, if at all, how we measure for those outcomes.
- traffic fatalities and deaths by 2039, great. That's a very clear, smart outcome. But the devil's in
- the details of implementation. And just by way of example, the Indiana Avenue project, which we funded
- through a GO bond, has a third concept design out that made, without question, objectively unsafe decisions
- relative to prior concepts. I'm just using it as an example here. There are trade-offs involved.
- Like we funded it, that's supporting that outcome, but now it's being changed in a way that is counter
- to the outcome. And so without good measurement and rigor in all of that, in a coherent framework, I
- think we're always just gonna be really hard pressed to really make something useful out of all this,
- which isn't to deter us. I think this is a good exercise. I think we are moving forward in some way.
- I don't think it's useless. I do think we are naming things that
- have value and will still give some shape to things. But I guess I'm trying to note that because I don't
- want it to be a surprise later. This list alone is just not how I'm going to be thinking about a budget
- vote and or engaging with the administration on budget. I think it matters, but there's more to it than
- that considerably. And at the same time, I think I've offered to take on for the committee, which I'm
- sitting on this year, and really still hope that we can move
- something like a more coherent framework for the city that might involve updating plans in a consistent
- way that has near and midterm and long-term outcomes and an appropriate number of lead and lag measures
- for those things so we can actually start systematically measuring progress and having like a coherent
- framework with which to engage a topic like this. That's not gonna be fast, but I do think we should
- look to best practices and think about like what that actually looks like
- and just, again, acknowledging that we're not there yet, and so there are some limits to what we can
- do here. Sorry. Well, that's okay. I have a follow-up question for you, too, or a follow-up thought,
- I guess, on that because that kind of
- So if we put out a survey and then assign points and put things in order based on the survey, then how
- is that honestly any different than what we already kind of have? Because it would essentially be like
- averaging things, and so it's one of those like nobody would probably get their first choice. Like is
- it different? It is more different than it has now. Right now it's anyone's guess if any of these things
- mean more than anything else. But with a survey,
- We actually would know. Yes, it would be averages. It wouldn't be a mirror image of any individual's
- rank order, most likely. But I think some patterns would emerge, is my guess. And that still might be
- helpful, at least incrementally more helpful than the list as it stands now. So I don't think it's useless.
- I just think we have to acknowledge the limitations of this exercise for outcome-based budgeting.
- I'm not opposed to doing that. I kind of wish that I had done that in preparation for this meeting,
- but that idea never came up. So Councilmember, sorry. I have a question. I want to query our thinking
- and just make sure that I've understood it correctly here as well. So the 13 here are the things that
- rose to the top from each of the buckets, but then that assumes that we
- This is going to sound like I'm re-litigating the question I asked earlier, which I'm not. I'm just
- curious about something. Are we saying that there's not a possibility where there's a fourth thing in
- bucket A that's higher than my top thing in bucket three, right?
- Yeah, so I'm wondering about that a little bit as we start thinking about prioritizing. And then as
- a follow-on point here, it's that some of these things aren't necessarily... I feel very strongly, for
- example, about... We phrase it in some way like, execute on the plans that we already have. Okay, I
- feel very strongly about that.
- There's a lot of downstream things that come from execute on the plans that we have, and that's quite
- a different thing than reduce income inequality. They're different, so I'm also struggling a little
- bit with how we even compare the list of 13 to begin with.
- Just imagine managing all of this data when it came in. Exactly. Thank you for that work. I think maybe
- the question for us all is thinking about how can we continue to synthesize this in a way where we get
- to, so that things are like, that we're comparing like for like. I don't know if we can ever really
- compare like for like.
- But that is why I mean at the end of this there's like the data from the whole thing and that is why
- you know if you and and I also want to say like I made sure that this was an accessible document and
- It makes it a little bit like gross Grosser like harder to like read compared to say like a spreadsheet
- where you can look more across a little bit easier but
- it's, I'm trying to find one by looking across. So under transportation and mobility outcomes, for example,
- our top had 12 points, which was network supporting travel, all travel modes for people of all ages
- and ability. Second one had 11 points, third one had 10 points, and then after that, it went right down
- to five. So it was this steep drop off. And so in transportation and mobility, I would have put the
- top three in that one. Whereas in environment, we had
- a 12, a 12, a 6, a 6, and a 5. And so I think I put the top five in that one. And so that's where it
- absolutely is some measure of discretion. And that's why I put that full data in, is that very thing.
- And that's why, I mean, there's that example at the end of the list of 13 about public safety, about
- reducing crime. We all probably want to reduce crime,
- it's kind of an interesting outcome in terms of that survey. The public safety category was
- really interesting, actually, and if we looked more closely maybe at that public safety category, I
- think if we had discussed that one in the way that we discussed some of the other ones in December,
- some of those things, maybe they wouldn't have gone under public safety.
- You know, housing and homelessness like rose to the top in public safety and in housing. And if we had
- been discussing both of those at the same time, we probably would have categorized that into one or
- the other. And then how would we have voted? So it's really, I mean, it's one of those things where
- this was helpful. It gets us somewhere maybe, but it doesn't get us to an end point. So if there is
- something like that,
- councilmember Asari just suggested, you know, something that's the number four, that's the trailing,
- but wait a minute, like I want to raise that up, or wait a minute, like, because here's another question,
- especially for those outcomes that were suggested through the survey by all of you, right? If, let me
- see if I can find one. If, let me get my window bigger.
- So if Council Member Zulek suggested that, sorry, I called you out because you were the first one, so
- you're the first result, that Bloomington residents have options other than uniformed police officers
- for nonviolent issues. One example is community resource officers are often dispersed to crash sites.
- So I think that I put that in as example, community resource officers, but you know,
- There's some other response related to that, right? And I think that that really overlaps with, let's
- see if I can find Council Member Piedmont-Smiths, which was mental health and addiction treatment services
- are increased to meet residents' needs. And those things could overlap in ways that if we were actually
- discussing them, they might have been combined into one thing.
- Yeah. You know what we might think of doing for the next round of surveys is that instead of us, and
- this is building off of something that Council Member Rosenberger said two years ago, because it was
- a really good idea, give us, like if we all had 100 points,
- call a thousand points, whatever, right? You have some large amount of points and you can distribute
- them however you want amongst all of these categories. Now we've already started to say some initial
- ranking amongst the buckets, all that type of stuff, but I think that might give you a little bit of
- a better sense of the, like I think we might get a little bit more space between things, right? And
- so that might be
- That might be the way to do it, right? Because at the end of the day, the variation right now is going
- to be very small, because we're talking about three, four, you know what I'm saying? So if you give
- us all 100 points, and then I can say, look, for me, whatever, wage, jobs, and GDP growth is 50 points.
- That's the most important thing. It's not, Dave. But if it was, if that's the most important thing,
- whatever, I say that's 50 points for me. It does sort of change maybe the way that we
- think about and compare things, you know? Also that, that, right, but it also helps us think a little
- bit about our approaches, you know, because I think just sort of, you know, my starting place is that
- we don't want to be spreading the peanut butter super thin amongst a lot of things, but maybe some of
- us actually feel that way, that it's more like, yeah, all of these things are good, let's do a little
- bit of each of them. I think it would be really helpful to start to see where, you know, if I could
- put all my, anyways, yeah, I've made my point, sorry.
- We don't get to turn it off. Other thoughts? Council Member Zulek. I have a different line if everyone's
- done with this. OK, thank you. This one is for Comptroller McKim. Sorry to tap you in here. Last year,
- I felt that a lot of the budget presentations were a little bit vaguer than they had been in previous
- years. And so I guess I'm wondering to what extent
- can it get as explicit as this amount of money is allocated to this? Obviously, there's only so much
- time allotted to each presenter. So I'm just wondering, what are the reporting mechanism options and
- how can we get as specific as possible in terms of money to goal? Well, I guess I'd like to hear a little
- bit more about in what way it was vague. Let me just back up for a second.
- I think as everybody knows, we will still, we still have to present and submit and pass a budget the
- way that you always have by fund and by department and by category. So that's gonna have to exist no
- matter what when we have to do that. What I think we are hoping to do is if we have some small list
- of kind of operationalized, operationalizable
- priorities from council, we can then work to sort of tag or associate expenditures with the, you know,
- that are still in there, in the same form that they always have been, but also tag them with the council
- priorities. So is that the specificity that you're looking for, specificity that is tied to this list
- of priorities that you're coming up with, or is it just more of a,
- a general, you didn't feel like you got an adequate narrative as to what was being requested, or just
- tell me a little bit more. Well, there are the four budget categories that we were very clear on, but
- I think it was hard for me to kind of decipher past that where things were going in terms of money,
- like very specific dollars, but I do think that would be very, very helpful in terms of adding
- on the, hey, this is what council said was a priority X. So thank you, that'd be very helpful. I agree
- with the general point and I expressed it last year that I appreciate the effort that went into trying
- something new and different with priority buckets in the presentations, but I ultimately found it much
- less useful than the way budgets have been presented previously and including in Mayor Thompson's first
- year, which was largely a reflection of past practice at that time. So I think comparing the budget
- presentations for the last two years would, if you haven't done that already, Comptroller McCann, that
- would be helpful to kind of see at least some degree of what we're talking about. It used to be that,
- I don't know if this is a good system, but the departments would kind of set goals and then report on
- them also. Again, I'm not sure that needs to be replicated, but there was more detail and more granularity
- in what was being presented to us kind of from like a
- programmatic or initiative or project dimension in past years relative to last year, which I think was
- still helpful. Yeah, so there's that. So that's just a comment to maybe share another opinion and more
- context on what customer resilience shared. But I'm also curious just to hear more from you. We talked
- about it in the fiscal committee a bit. How are you finding this list?
- Is it gonna be useful at all? Will it give you the contours of something to start to come back to us
- in time to, you know, have something where there's a back and forth and we're iterating on it? Or is
- it just sort of like, we take this list, we're gonna do our best to interpret it, hope it goes well
- come August, you know, and we'll live with it? Or what? Well, I will say from a budgetary standpoint,
- the way they are written right now, it's very difficult for me to be able to work with them. I mean,
- I understand them as
- priorities for the community. I think that they're probably, they seem like, I think most residents
- would probably look at them and say, yeah, that's exactly what we want our council to do, what we want
- our city to do. But the, and I kind of tried to make this point in the fiscal committee meeting and
- Council Member Stossberg already reiterated it and included it in the notes at the top that we just
- need to kind of
- think through for each of these outcomes, what part of it is driven by local government and how do we
- measure both the outcome and how do we allocate or think about allocating funding for that particular
- outcome, whether it's contracting or staff time or legislation, which isn't really a budgetary concern.
- So I think at some point,
- this needs to move kind of to the next level. And at that point, I think I can probably do a better
- job of understanding how to map costs and budget allocations to those outcomes. Is that what I'm saying?
- Council Member Aurelio. Well, first, I want to say how much I appreciate Council Member Stusberg's work on this.
- large effort, and it took a mathematician's probably mind to sort through the data. Just an old timer's
- perspective, there used to be, back in the day, extremely detailed budget presentations, going back
- to what Council Member Zulek talked about, and it gave us, not only us, but the public an overview of
- exactly what Citi was doing.
- the capital investments that were done, the programs that were offered, the services provided, all of
- those things were detailed in like 40 plus slide deck. I'm not asking for that, I'm not, but just to,
- if you go back 15 years, you'll see that, it was incredible. Maybe it was excessive, because it was
- an exhausting process. Now we have outcome-based budgeting, which is a great sort of directive for us.
- But I think that what this provides, I think, is a good rubric for you and the department directors
- to anticipate the questions that we will likely probe. I think it adds a good framework for, for instance,
- high-performing government. For instance, I think one of the highest scores was, let me think,
- Maintain city assets, for instance. I gave it a rough Piedmont Smith. Actually, I think the first was
- the first. Anyway, it's no matter. Oh, implementation of existing plans. Got these plans sitting around
- the shelf. Some of them are very specific in terms of what they direct us to do. Again, maybe excessively
- so, but it would be nice to reference those and say, have we made, what's the CO2?
- output. What have we done in terms of, is there any estimates in terms of local food providing local,
- those sorts of things. I'm very heavy on maintenance, so I would probably, this council member will
- probably be asking about street maintenance, the fleet maintenance for the city. The downtown is very
- important, I think,
- Economically, I wanna make sure that it's an inviting place where people feel safe and invited and active
- and businesses are happy, et cetera, et cetera. In any case, maybe I'm sort of going off course, but
- I think this provides a good sort of litmus for you all to know where we're coming from. If I'm not
- mistaken, you're not just gonna get
- It's not gonna be just like we're just throwing darts at a board. It's gonna be directed. So I find
- utility in that. So. Go ahead, yeah. You gave the example of maintained city assets. That's a particularly
- good example because that is something that is entirely under the control and responsibility of the city.
- And even though it's not necessarily easy to count the money that's spent on maintaining city assets,
- it's something that is definitely operationalizable. There are metrics that can be associated
- with maintaining city assets. So yeah, I think that's a particularly good example, even though the way
- that it's reflected here is very top level, maintain city assets. It's pretty easy to see how that can be
- taken into something that could be useful in budgeting and budget presentations. Thank you. Before you
- go, one of the things I want to point out from what Councilmember Rallo said about the implementing
- existing plans is if you recall from our December session, Isabel, Councilmember Piedmont-Smith came
- up with that original list of outcomes directly from all of our city plans.
- So in theory, there's at least some of these outcomes, like in terms of the actual specific language
- of some of them, that would also nest underneath the implementation of existing plans. And so it's hard
- to know, I mean, Council Member Asari, you said it, that that concept was really important to you, but
- is that something that should be at the top of a
- of a list for budgeting for 2027 specifically, or should that be more like at the top of a philosophical
- kind of list, like it's really important to us that we use the plans that we have. But that that's not
- necessarily, so then maybe in presentations we want to know the
- climate action plan might be the CO2 levels and some of those details and what have we done to affect
- that and if there's a direct cost that can be associated with that. I just wanted to point that out
- as an interesting piece of number one as is listed on here. And then the second thing I wanna say is
- going back to what Controller McKim said is
- going back to those things to keep in mind and maybe we should just go through, use our time to go through
- all the 13 and go well is implementing existing plans and activity driven by government. Is it measurable
- in terms of outcomes? Is the funding allocation measurable in terms of those things? And even if those
- things are important to us, if they can't pass those three things, maybe they need to go on a different
- piece of priority that is more of a philosophical priority as opposed to a budget priority.
- So are there thoughts on that idea, Councilmember Flaherty? Was there something that you wanted to say
- before that? Well, I think where I was headed is consistent with where you were just going, which is
- basically we can use some type of system to rank these things. We can talk through them. But how do
- we make it actionable in the absence of, again, a coherent actual systemic approach to this in government?
- Like, should we be talking through these? And like, are there any existing
- plans or metrics, like look, just pick one, right? It's like, okay, reduce systemic inequities,
- item B, engagement processes are inclusive and representative. Okay, I'm taking that to mean like public
- engagement on policy making, on services implementation. What are we doing on that front right now?
- Are we measuring anything at all? Do we have goals articulated somewhere about it to help guide it?
- And if not, is it reasonable to start measuring something?
- I don't know, asking for voluntary demographic and other data when people weigh in at design charrettes
- and meetings like this and actually start tracking things like that over time. I think with this probably
- uniform set of a few questions, is this addressed at all in existing policy documents or plans? Are
- we measuring anything related to it now? And if no to those things, can we do something meaningful to
- start measuring it now or at least try to give an indication of
- I don't know. It seems like we could settle on a limited set of questions that we probably apply to
- each of these that could try to move it in the direction of something actionable. Even if we can't accomplish
- it all tonight, we could workshop it, and then the committee could do more and also offer opportunities,
- if not in the deliberation session, at least asynchronously for feedback from noncommittee members,
- again, to try to move this towards something that's
- closer to actionable. Yeah. Yeah, and if maybe we can narrow down some of these based on these questions,
- especially from Controller McKim, and then use those in a follow-up survey. Is that what you were going
- to suggest? Yeah, I was going to build on all of this that the thing that I've been trying to wrap my
- head around, too, is let's call it cost to move index, right? So some of these things on this list,
- and I'm playing around with this in different ways,
- Developing new plans, waste reduction, strengthening food security networks are all things that we probably
- could make significant progress on with very little money, right? Whereas what you were just saying,
- the point about maintaining city assets could be a huge thing, right? But it also, okay, so that's sort
- of one thing. So I think it might be useful for us to sort of think about cost of move index so we know
- what are our big bucket items to begin with and, you know,
- then we back to that mentality of like, do you fully fund this, do you, you know, whatever. Some of
- those then would have to be adjusted. I think then to your earlier point, Council Member Slasberg, is
- that I identified three things that I think could operate within that 13 that really are more like,
- I don't know, approaches or like operational priorities, and one of them overlaps, but implementing
- existing plans is like a philosophy, right? We're like, you know, we want things to come from existing plans.
- and that is already implemented in our philosophy here, right? Development of plans where none exist
- might also be kind of like an operational approach or a philosophy or something like that, and then
- maintaining city assets. So we might want sort of sub outcomes actually attached to those in some way,
- but yeah, so that's sort of what I'm trying to think about is that if we think about what is expensive
- to move versus cheap to move, I think it's helpful in terms of like, okay, well, what really is the
- priority of this list?
- Okay, do other people agree that those three are like philosophical? Kind of. And to be clear, I'm not
- saying exclusively philosophical, I'm saying that there's an element of them, right? Okay.
- So if we say, if we say we want to make plans where no plans exist, there's an element of that which
- is, that is a fundable thing, right? But there's also an element of that which is saying, there's a
- particular approach which we want to develop which is saying we want to be plan-driven,
- And so implement our plans first, and if you don't have a plan to implement, then make a plan so we
- can implement it, right? So that's what I'm saying, is that it is a fundable thing, so is maintaining
- assets, but we'd have to be a little bit more specific about what we mean by maintaining assets. So
- is there anybody who would disagree with, say, a paragraph in
- a letter to the administration basically describing those three things as a philosophy and specifically
- calling out public safety as a place where there's not a plan that is a cohesive like understanding
- of public safety. Council Member Rosenberger. Anything here? Is it on? I'm having a harder time,
- I like this, I'm having a hard time seeing
- how maintained city assets fits in as a third. I see implement existing and develop plans where none
- exist as I think philosophies to be like, who are we to make our own priorities? We have the plans and
- priorities kind of thing. I guess maintained city assets to me, it falls more along the
- same lines as like make homelessness brief and rare and reduce systemic inequities. So I guess I don't,
- I think I'm not seeing the third connection as well. How do other, Council Member, sorry. I'm trying
- to still, I was thinking out loud as well, right? Because what had me put it in that list is because
- I agree with the statement that Council Member Aralo made that I'm like, that is a priority. Generally
- speaking that we do things like
- There's a lot of things that fall under that banner. To me, that includes sidewalks to making sure that
- the doors are painted. There's a lot of variability within that. When I started thinking about how I
- think about all of those different things that we want to maintain,
- They're they beg more questions to me I like well what what do we want to maintain and how do we want
- to approach the prioritization of the maintenance, but if we might say as a whole, as a funding category
- it's like thing that we as a council really want, you know, maintain basic stuff right.
- But then I just think that that would need more workshopping in the level of like a doing thing. But
- it may be something that guides all that we are saying, which is like bring stuff up to a certain standard
- or something like that is kind of what I'm trying to get my mind around. But again, I'm thinking out
- loud here.
- Okay, so what about, so I'm trying to think ahead to this actual document or letter, right, that we
- need to ultimately agree on. So if there is a paragraph that philosophically talks about the implementation
- of plans and developing plans where none exist, specifically mentioning public safety, because that
- was called out, and I mean, we couldn't really find good outcomes about public safety, and then
- not including maintained city assets, but as Comptroller McKim said, that those are calculable, calculatable
- in terms of these questions to keep in mind. You can measure that investment, and to some degree, you
- can also measure that outcome in terms of number of potholes that get filled, and actually,
- between a pothole being reported as existing and when it got filled. So there's lots of measurability
- in some of these maintenance kinds of things. So can we agree on that piece of the letter right now?
- Is there anybody who disagrees on that piece of the letter? Okay, what's your addition? Well, I'm not
- attached to this, so I'll just put it out there.
- it could potentially be helpful for like the abiding by city plans, maintaining city assets, and creating
- plans, if that could be an interesting structure for the presentations. And so that way, each department
- could be like, hey, we have these plans. This is how we plan on achieving whatever out of these plans.
- This is how we plan on maintaining city assets. And if there are no plans, this is our plan to
- create one. I think that that would help me at least. I don't know about my colleagues, but I think
- that would be really helpful in wrapping our minds around what is doing what. I would argue that I think
- part of at least what we talked about to some degree during fiscal committee, like this whole list should
- present like that. Okay. But that could also be something that gets put into a paragraph I think of
- this is how we want to see budget presentations.
- like we want to know how the specific programs fit into this, because that's one of the things, I mean,
- we don't have specific programs in here, but there are specific programs that our city does, that our
- staff do, that would fall under here, right? And so it's going like, okay, we want to know how, what
- planning engineering is doing this year to meet that 2039 goal of zero injuries and fatalities, and
- so have that very, like,
- That's like my vision of that, controlling the camera. I don't know if that was what you were also thinking
- at all. I mean, that certainly makes sense. That wasn't necessarily what I was thinking, but I understand
- what you're saying. Okay. Yeah. Councilmember, sorry. I like in just triangulating on this idea as thinking
- about those elements as like tags, right? Because going further with the maintaining
- Sorry. City assets. Yeah, maintaining city assets. There's an element of maintaining city assets that
- will contribute to reducing fatalities, right? And so do you see what I'm saying? And again, I'm stinking
- out loud, so I will not be upset if you disagree. But it gives this opportunity to sort of tag it as
- saying, we want to see this all the way through the budget.
- right? And then we also want to see how you're contributing to these 10 things that we've, you know,
- the 10 remaining things on the list as an example. So following that, going down to the zero traffic
- fatalities or serious injuries by 2039, is that also something that should be more in a paragraph of
- this is important to us and it's important that we make incremental progress in various ways? Tell us
- how you're going to make that progress in a very specific, like tell me how you're going to
- move us toward this in 2027, because this is very important. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I'm not
- sure I'm going to answer your question, because I feel like it headed in a different direction a little
- bit. The word maintenance sort of implies status quo and keeping things the same, whereas most of what
- we're doing is actually trying to get better and transform and improve. And so I wonder if, like,
- I'm not wild about the frame maintaining city assets or elevating that to too high a level relative
- to other policy changes that aren't asset intensive exactly as one might traditionally think of those.
- Maybe like capital expenditures is like a better way to think about that, including both for like maintenance
- improvements, operations, projects. Back to your customer, sorry, your kind of cost to move index.
- It's like, yeah, you know,
- The transportation system is incredibly capital intensive. And that's both repaving streets, making
- improvements to streets, making curb ramps more accessible. It's a whole lot of stuff, right? So I would
- encourage us to move beyond maintenance a little bit. I'm just kind of also just workshopping, thinking
- that maybe capital investments is a better way to think about that. And then it helps also distinguish
- that from things like policy implementation that are really about resourcing it through staff time,
- but in ways that are consistent with
- the outcomes that we're prioritizing, that are in our city plans, and that's sometimes where, I didn't
- give an example earlier, but it also had a capital component, but I think we run into trouble sometimes
- with like, on the implementation side, it's not that it's actually like a lot of money, it's that we're
- not doing it. So yeah, I don't know, just some thoughts. So I guess, like once again, so I'm trying
- to format the next survey I'm gonna send you, but maintain city assets could still be
- like a line in how would you prioritize this or how many points would you give this, but I would take
- out, implement existing plans and take out developed plans where none exist because I would put them
- in a paragraph form as opposed to a ranked list. Because they would be this philosophical, it's really
- important to us that we implement our existing plans. And so that would be taken out of the ranked list.
- I guess that's what I'm trying to propose.
- Council member Roseberger. I think that is right. I was going to ask what council members rather rough
- thought about that. What council member Flaherty said too about the maintained city assets because I
- was thinking that when council member Asari was saying it that maintained sounds like our whole purpose
- is to keep everything the way it is where we would maybe get a lot of points to repaving a road which
- like increases speeds which is you know like not necessarily good for bike ped people or potholes are
- the reverse
- speed bumps, you know, then what? That's not popular. Okay, so I am, I do like, because when I read
- Maintain City Assets, I didn't think so much about like repainting doors, but I did think about how
- we have a huge, you know, 50 year sewer replacement, right? And I think about those things that would
- like bankrupt the city if we are not planning
- Them fiscally every year to like make sure right we are replacing all those things So and like our plants
- and all that so I wanted to hear from YouTube that makes more sense with the capital Expenditures rather
- than maintain city assets Councilmember all You're running afoul of the nine-headed beast because we
- we all have different viewpoints, but I like the word maintenance and
- Entropy is real. I feel it every day. It's predictive. You should be able to tell at what pace roads
- degrade. And so I like maintenance as a word because it would, so take an example. And it could be very
- quantitative. Number of miles of roads paved per year. I can go to the map and I can see it. However,
- I don't know what that means in the context of
- I was told once long ago that it was a 20-year repaving schedule. Now, I don't know if that's appropriate
- or not. And I know some roads wear out earlier than others, et cetera. But in any case, you should be
- able to plot how many miles we paved this year, how many we did last year, how many we're going to do
- next year. And you've got a trajectory now. You can draw a line, and you can say how many years will
- it take to repave all the roads.
- And that would be a good to know. And something I could tell constituents that we're going to get on
- this schedule. It's revolving. It's not like we're neglecting the roads. And by the way, the cost goes
- up. And so if we're going to maintain the trajectory, it's probably going to mean additional capital
- expenditures and budgeting for those because the cost of asphalt goes up or whatever. So I do like that part.
- Now, back to zero fatalities by X date, that's aspirational. And that involves a lot of moving parts.
- You know, you don't just order it like you do repaving a road. It involves a lot of things and is much
- more difficult to unpack. I'll let it go.
- I want to keep on trying to move down the list. Yeah, totally. I think one of the things coming up here,
- and I really love what both of you just said, is twofold. I don't think that it's a zero sum between
- the question of maintenance and improvement. I think that we maybe want to split those and actually
- have both of those as sort of things that we highlight and feature in our budget. One of the things
- I really like to two finger or whatever, double say yes to, that Councilmember Rosenberg
- said was that there are some investments that we need to make in the infrastructure in this city.
- that if we don't make those investments and are going to bankrupt us as an example, or they're going
- to become increasingly more expensive to maintain if we don't maintain them now, and that both is a
- guiding element to how we're approaching the budget as sort of like the top level, like this is something,
- so I'm submitting to us that that may be our number one priority, because it's the one very clear thing
- that's coming out of the conversation,
- I think, I don't think that though that's contrary to the idea that on top of that, there's a certain
- amount of things that we want to make sure that you're doing, which goes hand in hand with due plans
- that we already have. You know, there's a certain amount of maintenance that we want to see, but we
- also want some real capital investment, right? And so I think that you could sort of say that as the
- philosophy towards whatever we want to call this thing, you know, maintaining and improving
- our infrastructure or something like that. And that there's a paragraph associated with that, but then
- that there also, I think,
- maybe our next conversation and something you might want to put on the survey is like, what type of
- things do we actually want to see here? I think Councilman Rallo brought up some things, you know, certain,
- you know, X percentage of roads paved, you know, less, I finally got the joke about the, you know, reverse
- speed bumps, you know, less speed bumps, right? So I just think that there's a lot there that's really
- clear that we're really, you know, sort of getting on the same page about.
- Thank you, so I will try to, when compiling this letter or document or whatever, try to finesse that,
- maintain city assets, potentially breaking it into two things, a maintenance and an improvement, or
- combine them into one and put that on the survey and see how that goes. So let's try to move down this
- list in the context of these questions that Controller McKim gave us.
- So making homelessness brief, rare, and non-repeating, which rose to the top in two different categories,
- and those things underneath it were just other things that rose to the top, or actually got any votes
- at all in some cases that I felt like, well, that really connects in some ways with homelessness.
- And that's the other thing is there were probably a whole other slew of things that we could have put
- under there that also connect to homelessness. So this is another opportunity to be like, hey, put this
- other thing under there too. But the first question is, is making homelessness brief, rare, and non-repeating
- driven by local government? Yes. Is it a measurable outcome? Yes. And is the funding allocation for
- that outcome measurable? Yes.
- That's harder to know. Controller McKim, what do you think about the answers to those three questions?
- I definitely need to have a lot more guidance on that because I would not have necessarily answered
- yes to all those questions. I can tell you, just a highlight of this, I spent all day today with heading
- home, the mayor, people from county council, et cetera.
- talking about some new thing that Heading Home wants to do around homelessness. And it was a very clear,
- like, input-output type of design where you could say, you know, we need so many houses, we're going
- to spend this much money on, and that's how we're going to end, you know, not end, but, you know, get
- to functional zero. So, like, people are thinking in those ways and the question becomes, like, what
- is the city willing to put
- to make that happen, right? So yeah, I think that is a total thing where you can measure what, now there
- are things that are outside of our control within that realm, but absolutely, it's something that we
- can fund and see outcomes for. So are all of these subcategories then also accurate in terms of like,
- because I guess I'm thinking about number one, is this activity outcome driven by local government?
- And I would not necessarily answer yes to that in this very definitive way.
- Like it, because it does depend on how much money we as government invest or have to invest. But that's,
- and I think that's the key point that, yeah. Yeah, and then if we invest that in this, what are we not
- spending money on? Correct, correct. Control McKim. Yeah, and I guess, so you have five separate kind
- of subtopics under make,
- make homelessness brief, rare, and non-repeating. And I guess to what degree are you addressing just
- that top level number four versus the five bullets under that? You know, I think the answers to those
- questions probably differ for each of those five sub-bullets, like job and wage growth.
- I'm sorry, but there's not that much. Right, yeah, and so that's where like the way that it's like they're
- nested. It's like if this seems like the top level goal and job and wage growth could contribute to
- making homelessness brief, rare, and non-repeating. Increasing coordination of services could help with
- that overall goal. So it's, they're like sub,
- there are more specific outcomes that we could invest in, and that became another, you know, it's those
- nested outcomes, because in theory, we could nest everything under one big outcome. And it really makes
- the mind go like this. I have an important note, just like collective memory note. One of the big discussions
- that we've had over the last year and a half, particularly last year in fiscal committee, is that when
- it gets down to
- How are we going to make homelessness very brief? And we chose not to say that we're going to get into
- the nitty gritty as a council, all nine of us saying, OK, well, we want this, and we don't want this,
- and we don't. At least at this stage, that we're saying, this is what we want you to come and tell us,
- people who are in all of the departments. This is what we're telling you is the priority. So you tell
- us how you're going to do it, at least at that stage. Now, I think it's useful for us to have
- the conversation, because it's useful for us.
- areas of expertise where we say, actually, you know, here's some very specific things I'd like to see
- in the budget, but we wanted to make sure that the sort of, what do you call it, the agency of deciding
- how we operationalize that rests with the departments, right? So I think that that helps a little bit
- here, that we don't need to decide, you know, amongst the subthings all of the things that we want to see.
- the decision will happen at the council meeting. We could then say, I don't like that one, actually.
- I'd like to rather fund this one twice or something like that. Yeah, and so I want to make clear that
- the sub things are things that people voted on. Sometimes they were maybe voted heavily on or had lots
- of points, but I went, this is really a subcategory under this larger thing. Council Member Rosenberger.
- We were just looking for where
- is the vote for job and wage growth? Or did you combine multiple? I know, I know she was saying there
- maybe in other places that, because I was like, is that an economic development? I think it's an economic
- development. And that's where like in, I tried to really lead y'all through my thinking process, but
- then I put it in the packet.
- kind of in reverse of the thinking process. So under economic development outcomes, we had wages, jobs,
- and GDP are outpacing population growth as having six points. And then there was also attract employers
- that provide living wage jobs that had four points. And I feel like there was another one too.
- Per capita, oh no, that's not right. There was a tracked 24 to 44 workforce, which was two points, which
- is kind of related to that too. And then there was economic inequality is reduced, which also could
- be wage and job growth. So it wasn't that exact phrase, wage and job growth, but that phrase I thought
- kind of summarized some of the other pieces. Thanks, yeah.
- Other thoughts about housing and homelessness? Council Member Aralo. Yeah, I just wanted to ask our
- controller. Kind of, maybe. You can hear me. When you query council, several members said, yes, this
- is government responsibility. And you have some quibble with that.
- No, definitely local government does have a role in reducing homelessness. Yeah, no, my concern was
- just the very high level of the outcome of some of the, particularly with the five sub-bullets. So it
- was actually, my issue was more with the five sub-bullets. Well, let's take a couple, job and wage growth.
- I mean, we could target tax abatements that are specific to companies that are
- raising the wage floor, right? We raise the wage floor of employee salaries in the city, which is a
- minor number of employed people in the city. In terms of mental health and addiction treatment, that's
- probably more county related, but we could have an interlocal.
- You know, I would hope that the new jail would have those services provided, because I think that's
- essential, but that's the county, you know, probably. But we're in agreement, generally, that we have
- an impact. It's just to a greater or lesser degree. And maybe how to categorize it. So in this follow-up
- survey of ranking, should I just
- leave it as make homeless as brief, rare, and non-repeating, and drop all of the sub bullets. I like
- the sub bullets. I mean, it adds a detail that.
- Well, I think the sub-bullets are like how to potentially get there. I feel like I'm off again. And
- so I think the question goes back to what Councilmember Sari was pointing out. It's like, do we just
- want to tell the administration, we care about this thing, figure out a way to spend money in a way
- that's going to impact the thing? Or do we want to say, we want to impact this thing in this very specific
- way? Yes, I find it helpful.
- I find that those are helpful. They're not exclusive to other means of getting that. And I certainly
- don't want to put parameters that these are the only way in which it can happen. So maybe on the survey
- that I follow up, leave it as make homelessness briefer or non-repeating, but then put these into the
- letter underneath there as in ways like this. For example, this is, yeah. Great.
- Any other feedback on number four? I just want to chime in on that, that what you're saying is, I mean,
- I think because we all did the work and you did the work to say these were bullets that got hit on a
- lot, I do think it's useful to include them because it is what we said, like increase affordable housing
- options and early intervention.
- So I think it is good to be like, here are some things that we're thinking about, but the list is not
- exhaustive. OK. Great. Yeah. Councilmember Rosari. Again, two fingering the same thing. It's like you
- say, I think we have sort of two outputs here. You're going to create another survey for us to maybe
- a little bit to help prioritize. Great. But there's the other side, which is the actual format of the
- letter or whatever resolution or whatever we want to send forth.
- And I think you're already writing some of it, like now. It makes a lot of sense. We say, our priority
- is make homelessness rare, brief, and non-repeating. This is where it ranks within our priorities. And
- here are all of the many ways that we've liked of ways to do it, but we are recognizing that it's not
- the exhaustive list. I mean, right? I mean, I think that's things that we are willing already to fund.
- I think it's a great way of putting it. OK. Are we ready to move on to number five? Great. Increase
- housing diversity within neighborhoods.
- And then underneath that, increased predictability for permanent approvals, increased range of affordable
- housing options, including those with universal design and or environmentally sustainable. And so is
- this outcome or activity driven by local government? Yes. Is it measurable? What, increasing diversity
- of housing? Yeah. Yes. And is the funding allocation for the outcome measurable?
- partially. I feel like I need to follow up with this with number four. The things to keep in mind, number
- four is, does this outcome require direct fiscal investment, staff time, or legislation? And this is
- where I feel like number five, in terms of government role in that, would involve legislation. I agree.
- For example? A co-change? For example? Yeah.
- So this, in terms of the letter, is that this requires staff time legislation for a code change. I have
- it on my cheapish, cheapish to move category. Yeah. But I struggled with it. Councilmember Flaherty.
- Where do existing plans factor into it? I had sort of asked the question, I guess we go through these,
- are we going to request from the administration that they
- share information on this framework, and are we asking them to say what in our city, I don't know. I
- feel like we're a little divorced right now from specific things that are called for in documents that
- I think relative to this exercise are, I don't know, a little bit, went through certainly a much more
- robust process as far as community input, legislative adoption, et cetera.
- So I think there's synergies. We're just not talking about that piece right now. And I'll return to
- the fact that the devil's in the details on all this. I think increased housing diversity within
- neighborhoods. The mayor probably says she's doing that. I disagree. The devil's in the details of what
- policies. There's policies called for in our plans that we're not implementing. So how do we, those
- are measurable.
- they're legislatively adopted, they're in existing plans. How do we make sense of that in the context
- of these priorities? To be honest, I would take this one out of my priority list for 2027 because it's
- legislative, it's cheap, and I think that we should do it in 2026. I would just take that out. That's
- my personal thing is that we could do that this year despite
- staffing challenges. So that's just my position, kind of in that, because that to some degree is up
- to us as a body to figure out ways to do that. And I know that the Mayor's Administration is trying
- to do some different things with permitting already, which we don't have any control over, is that permitting
- piece. But I'll try a little bit. Just because it's legislative doesn't mean it's exclusively our purview.
- We have staff experts in urban planning, for instance. Most legislation comes to the administration.
- And just as a pragmatic matter, it is true that when the administration weighs in heavily on a legislative
- item they did not develop, they're able to affect it to a meaningful degree. And so yes, we can pass
- legislation over their opposition. It doesn't happen often.
- I think we'd be naive to say, because it's legislative, we don't need to put it in a set of priorities
- and get the mayor's buy-in because it's just our job. It just doesn't work like that in practice. Well,
- that's not exactly what I meant, but it's more like we could do that this year. Yes, we could make progress
- later this month. And I mean, some of that is what Director Hiddle was talking about at our meeting
- last week, too. So in some ways, that might be happening this year already. Councilmember Daley? Yeah,
- but I mean, that's exactly what I was just going to say was what Councilmember Flaherty said, is that
- We can legislate. That opens pathways to it. But that doesn't mean anything is going to happen. That's
- the first step. But we need more to happen beyond just us legislating. So I would leave it on here.
- But that's just my vote. Council member, sorry. I think another element of this, agree with both of
- those statements. Another element of this, though, is like staff time, which is a part where we have
- to say justify.
- you know, it sounds meaner than maybe it is, but it's like justify that you need X amount of people
- in X office because this is the thing we're moving towards. Why is said thing not moving forward, right?
- And it's like if you're not going to align with our priorities, then we won't fund your activities,
- right? I mean, it's like is one way that we could approach such a conversation. So I think it's very
- important even with things like this that, you know, many ways could be very cheap to put on,
- to push forward that we hold the administration to account or saying, like, tell us how you are going
- to do this this year. And I also, I mean, we had conversations at our very first budget meeting around
- this, you know, and Councilmember Flaherty and I have talked about this on the dais where it's like
- I asked a question about, hey, are we going to see some changes towards a form-based
- code and whatever. And they're like, yeah, that's what we'll do next year. And so we need to do these
- things this year. And then next year was like, no, we're not going to do that anytime soon. So having
- a clear conversation like that, I think, is really important that we keep those priorities, even if
- they're cheap. OK. Councilmember Rosenberger. One tiny thing. The word affordable was difficult for
- me to sort of understand.
- in increased range of affordable housing options? I mean, did we mean housing options or do we mean
- affordable as in AMI percentages or did we mean different options, different home prices? I take it
- to mean increased range of housing options. So that particular outcome
- oh, now I'm going to have to open up the December thing. That's the first one on my spreadsheet, which
- means that it is one of the ones that came from a plan that Isabel would have marked in the December
- meeting. And I don't have that particular packet pulled up. So that's where you could track that from
- if you weren't sure about how to interpret that.
- I actually had a conversation about one of the other ones, and it wasn't that one when we were preparing
- for this, because she had comments. Yeah, and some of these outcomes, whether they came from plans or
- whether they came from individuals suggesting them, they're easily interpretable in different ways.
- But yeah, and that scored seven.
- actually with increased predictability and decreased time for permanent approval, so that's interesting.
- All right, so what I'm hearing so far is that I'm keeping the top level things on the survey and then
- putting the lower level things into the examples. Okay, so we're good on number five then.
- Number six, reduce systemic inequities. Is it an outcome or activity driven by local government?
- Number six, reduce systemic inequities. I will also say that
- We played with this one a little bit because we had these other lower level things, the ABC, about reducing
- income inequality, making sure engagement processes are inclusive and representative, reducing race
- and class disparities in our various systems, and those three things all received high scores, and this
- was one of the things Councilmember Piedmont-Smith, as another member of the fiscal committee,
- the thought that those should be grouped together differently as opposed to grouping them underneath
- other things to pull out and have a whole systematic inequity as sort of category. So I think we're
- still answering the question, is this an activity or outcome driven by local government? Often, yes.
- Most systems are subject to some degree of inequity
- It's sort of like the water we swim in. We can't control all those systems, but the government interacts
- with and perpetuates and creates many systems. So it's such a broad statement, reduce systemic inequities.
- But yes, of course, many of the things the government does and engages in have systemic inequities that
- we could work on addressing. And having probably some framework, expertise, goals,
- on doing that in our various systems would be helpful. I don't know. In utilities and other services,
- it's not a particularly equitable system when everybody pays the exact same amount. We can't do, I don't
- think, we don't expect the IURC would approve income-tiered rates. But something I've contemplated is
- could you do a bill discount that's funded not through the rate base,
- But from the general fund, like when we had a million dollars that we were using for paying off medical
- debt for a limited number of folks in the wake of the LIT increase, that was like part of the like,
- okay, let's focus some on like economic inequities. You could make that go a lot farther if you were
- saying everybody below a certain income threshold who gets city of Bloomington utilities is going to
- get $300 a year off on their bills, you know, part-time or monthly. Like that addresses like a,
- an energy insecurity issue in a fairly broad-based way. Just like, I'm spitballing. Just like an example
- of a thing like people's ability to afford basic needs, basic utilities varies, so it's not an equitable
- system, it's full of inequities. We have limitations in what we can do about that, but there are creative
- ways to do something about it. And so, just to illustrate that these inequities are everywhere, of course.
- The transportation system is deeply inequitable.
- And that's part of what our other goals are about. So just sort of saying, yes, it's government,
- for sure. I think the obvious word should be instead of reducing income inequality, which is a tall
- order to address income inequality. Because you can address income inequality by, say, providing
- a transportation that obviously needs for a car. And rather than the idea that we could
- cut everyone a check or something of a certain, even though that's a possibility too, that we could
- maybe have some tiered services or something in terms of income. But addressing it would be a better
- word, I think, because reducing it is. I don't mind reduce at the high level. I'm fine with address
- for the sub-bullet. And to me, we have talked about operationalizing equity
- systematic approaches to equity and equity frameworks over the last couple of budget cycles. We haven't
- made progress, and there's been some sort of preemptive Trump compliance kind of stuff thrown about.
- Again, we've articulated a few examples here. Kind of like a procedural equity element of engagement
- processes. We're talking about income specifically, and we're talking about the public safety system
- specifically, and particular types of disparities there. But the inequities are
- much farther reaching than that. There's safety inequities in the transportation system. There's on
- and on. And again, like where my mind kind of goes on this as far as like measurable and outcome, like
- can we measure the funding and all that? It's like we don't have a coherent system to try to reduce
- systemic inequities right now. And if that's the broad top line goal here, we would have to take steps
- toward doing that. I think they are measurable. I think you could talk about a budget impact.
- So I guess, yeah, I favor that a little more. I mean, I support the sub bullets too. I think they're
- important areas where we've identified specific, but I just wanted to name those extend farther than
- the sub bullets too. Okay. So council member Flaherty just made an argument for, is this driven by local
- government with like, yeah, we can affect certain parts of it. Does anybody want to make a different
- argument? Council member Rosenberger?
- It's not different, it's not different. I just though wanted to say, we're talking about what can kind
- of be measured. Well, I'm not to the measured yet. Do we wanna go to the measured? If we all tend to
- be like, yeah, Council Member Flaherty made a good argument, so then we can go on to question number
- two as the outcome measurement. Oh, okay, I mean, I can weigh on that still, that I think it is a good
- argument. And I mean, I think in terms of equity and inequity in our city,
- we don't have a, the city doesn't operate with a definition of equity, I think. I mean, we,
- so it's like, there's a long way to go on this one, so I think starting, starting would be good. Right,
- like some cities, I think, have great examples of departments and definitions and what that means and
- what can be triggered if it's not getting implemented and things, and so I think that would be great,
- and just something that we've
- talked about potentially starting to measure is who is engaging publicly and who isn't, which is then
- something to look at to be like, hey, mostly white people are speaking at our meetings. I guess I just
- thought about something to measure. I know other cities do ask people to fill out some demographics
- in public comment. Great.
- That addresses the question, is it measurable? So yes, driven by local government to some extent, it
- can be measurable. Certain things can be measurable. Is the funding allocation for that outcome measurable?
- Yes. OK. Great. Can I say one more brief thing on that? Yeah. Which is that I recently found out through
- my day job about an organization called Viva DEI. If you go to vivadei.org, it's sort of a resource
- that was set up
- specifically in the context and the wake of a lot of the sort of current federal administration's attacks
- on the idea of equity and inclusion or the importance of diversity and thinking about how we govern
- or how we do anything. So anyway, lots of cities are still making progress on these issues and I think
- there's a, yeah, I would encourage my colleagues to check it out because I think it can speak to this
- particular context for this goal.
- Next, number seven, vibrant and resilient economy. Is the activity or outcome driven by local government?
- I think it's very similarly to the homelessness conversation. I think to a large extent, yes. Yes. Is
- everybody good with that yes answer? Is the outcome measurable?
- I sort of had the, I mean, so I'll tell you where I struggled here, because generally this is a priority
- for me, but the words vibrant and resilient are words that don't, you know, could mean lots of things
- to lots of people. So, yeah, so I think we need to operationalize that one a little bit, change that
- one a bit, but. So do you think that
- vibrant and resilient economy needs to be adjusted, or do you think that the examples underneath it
- need to be potentially expanded? Because there's probably other things that could fit underneath vibrant
- and resilient economy. And I mean, number eight is create vibrant third places, neighborhood hubs, activating
- vacant spaces. Public spaces are high quality, engaging, and active. Those things in some ways could
- combine together.
- One is more talking about social stuff, I think, and one is more talking about economic stuff, which
- is like social community kind of building, which is not necessarily economic. Certainly, you can have
- a very vibrant community that has no money. But you don't need money to make community. But there's
- similarities there. So that was a question to Council Member Sari for just a minute. Do we need to workshop
- the top level or the bottom?
- Well, I actually really this is something Councilmember Rosenberger just said that I really agree with
- I think the issue with the framing currently is that it might lead to a reinforcing of the thing that
- we got last year in our budget, which is
- Yeah, everything is this. And so you could talk about anything as vibrant and happy economy or whatever
- we said. I do think some of the things under it, wage growth, jobs, increased number of employees living
- and working in Bloomington. I mean, all of those things are the type of things that I'd like to see
- us investing in. But I think we need to workshop this a little bit.
- I mean, it does come directly from one of our plans, but I think we need to workshop a little bit how
- it's framed so that doesn't, you know, it could go in a lot of directions. Okay. Council Member Rallo.
- I think the word was operationalized. I think I understand. I mean, number of locally owned businesses
- would be a good measure as opposed to businesses that, you know, where profits go somewhere to shareholders far away.
- I think GDP is increasingly a bad measure for economic well-being. I think that you could have one-tenth
- the population profiting very well and 90 percent doing very poorly and have a positive GDP. So I think
- we need to look into other measures of well-being for the community. And one would be, to what extent
- do we recirculate wealth in the community?
- and that would probably require a consultant or something, but I'd like to see how many dollars recirculate
- as opposed to just exit the community. So. Okay. Income leakage is very important to economic development
- circles. Okay. So what I hear is you agree with it as a concept, but the title
- vibrant and resilient economy needs to shift. And I'm not actually sure without looking, and I honestly
- don't want to take the time right now to do it because we're kind of running out of time, how much I
- subcategorized other things under that or whether vibrant and resilient economy was one of those things
- that got the most votes. And if it was, it probably comes directly from a plan. So if it did, then I
- can look back.
- that December meeting and figure out the source with Councilmember Piedmont-Smith and see if there's
- a way to make that clearer. So if y'all kind of give me grace to do that for the follow-up survey, I
- suddenly have a whole lot of work to do with a follow-up survey. I'll get there. Okay, so create vibrant
- third places slash neighborhood hubs. Is that driven by government? Yes. Yes. Okay.
- As an example. Is it measurable? Is the outcome measurable? That was a question I had. What metrics
- would we be asking to see out of third space? Well, we could do attendance at various things, like we
- do for certain Kirkwood events.
- We could also do the amount of events that happen throughout the year, the distribution of events. I
- know we have a lot on Kirkwood, but if we wanted to expand that, expand the third spaces past Kirkwood,
- like do we have events going on on the west side, on the east side, like simultaneously so that all
- of our residents can thrive? I think those are all measurable. I would also say that a measure of that
- could be businesses that
- would move in to different areas to create those neighborhood hubs would be something else that was
- potentially measurable. And I think that, is this on? Yeah. If we look at our zoning maps, we need to
- make sure neighborhoods all have areas zoned that can be hubs. I think that's the neighborhood hub part
- of it for me. Yeah.
- All right, and is the funding allocation for that outcome measurable? Okay, great. Number nine, Bloomington
- residents have options other than uniformed police officers for non-violent issues. Is it driven by
- government? Is it a measurable outcome? And is the funding allocation measurable? Great.
- Number 10 zero traffic fatalities or serious injuries by 2039. We've already talked about this a little
- bit And I also put down it just in my notes when we were talking about it before this question. Is this
- also more philosophical? Like councilmember. Sorry was saying because is this Because it connects to
- city plans. It's technically a part of the transportation plan. So should this just get moved into a
- that paragraph related to implementing the plans that we have and call it out as a very specific piece
- that we want to know and we want to invest in steps.
- I think that question actually helps clarify how the other two operate that we've suggested as sort
- of guiding principles different than this one, because this one is a clear, we have a whole plan for
- this, and us putting this as a priority in our budget is us telling the office of the mayor and the
- city's broader administration to come and tell us, what are you doing this year in funding to move this
- forward? I mean, I think it's super straightforward.
- We want that, we want to make sure that it stays a priority, and so on and so forth. So does it belong
- in the top level paragraph of implementing? No, it belongs in the survey. I think the part of the top
- level is already covered by do our plans. So the part at the under level is, yeah. Here's one that we're
- calling out. All right. Does anybody have any opposing guns over Flaherty? I was going to move on to
- one of the sub bullets. Is that OK? Yeah.
- Just that I'd like to perhaps have a deliberation session next month. I could even lead it on pedestrian
- network being cleared quickly and effectively after snowfall. This is a persistent challenge. Obviously
- the existing policy landscape is inadequate. So it's, and this isn't really, I mean it's definitely
- recovered, sorry, it's covered kind of conceptually in the Safe Streets for All action plan.
- but it will entail changes that are probably different and more specific, including funding, all measurable
- for sure, including the outcomes, the impact, that is different than what's in the plan. So that's another
- reason that this, in favor of this sort of being specifically called out. So you want me to pull out
- that? No, no, no, I'm just saying,
- Number item 10 here. Oh should be specifically called out because okay in the List of yeah, okay. Yeah,
- and and that's another like that particular 110 a I think was one of the top however many under
- transportation and I stuck it underneath the zero traffic fatalities or serious injuries because
- You know, it is such a safety impact. And of course, it's other things too. You know, going back to
- Council Member Zulek and what she said in the beginning in terms of her priorities, in terms of making
- sure our residents are able to access the things that they need, that they have the stuff that they
- need. And if you're dependent on the pedestrian network in order to get those things that you need,
- then that really breaks down. So, okay, so we're good on that. Strengthen food security networks. Is
- it driven by government?
- entirely, but partially. And by local government specifically? Yes. There are actions we can take to
- improve this, yes. Okay. Might fall under equity, other things like that. I mean, similar to
- other conversations, but there are actions we can take and food security is something we've all said
- we care about a lot. Okay. By food, yep. Yep. Is the outcome measurable? Yes. Yes.
- is the funding allocation for the outcome measurable? Yes. Air quality is maintained at a high level
- and carbon emissions are reduced, driven by local government. Measurable outcome out of funding allocation.
- Can I just ask, are we talking about
- air quality and carbon emissions reduced by the city fleet or are you just talking overall? I think
- it's overall like that's actually like that's one of those outcomes that is in our climate action plan
- so it's like overall that we want those reductions and so I think that's one of those things like in
- terms of actually like doing it we can mostly affect what the city itself is doing because we can't
- force other people
- to transition, but we can give incentives to people to transition. So there's all those grants through
- the sustainable and economic development department around adopting other alternatives. And code changes.
- There's a whole range of possibilities. Again, a whole plan for it, yet city operations and community-wide.
- And the degree of control varies, just like all of these, right? Yeah. Yeah.
- We can control some of it and can't control some of it, of course, because it's not like we live in
- a bubble with only our air quality. We get that nice wildfire smoke sometimes coming from lots of other
- places. So all right, we're good with that. Leave it in there. Waste reduction. Is it affected by government?
- Yes. Is the outcome measurable? Yes. Is the funding allocation measurable? Yep. Great.
- What should we do about this crime is reduced? Little note down here. Does anybody want me to go ahead
- and put that into the survey?
- Well, a lot of these sub points, and for anyone who is looking, it is on the same page, on page five
- at the very bottom, crime is reduced. A lot of them are already covered in different categories, so
- I wonder if we could, I think, actually all of them are covered in other categories. I would say that
- crime is reduced is a very broad category, and I think that they fit better in other
- categories if my colleagues agree with me. So, leave it off because it's covered in other places. Okay.
- Council Member Arello. It also fits into the development of plans where none exist, notably public safety,
- which is, I mean, I think the two primary things that could evolve from is, number one, there was a
- CAHPS report, which I think is
- is mostly anecdotal, but I think useful. And then there was the Novak report in 2018 for 21st century
- policing, and I think it evolved from that, that gives some information too. But clearly, we need a
- kind of a comprehensive approach to public safety. Agreed. And reducing crime is an outcome of that.
- Here's another kind of question I have around that.
- want to make that kind of a 2027 budget priority and this will be like the last thing and then we're
- gonna go to public comment. Do we have an expectation in 2027 that it would be a plan that would be
- developed with say a consultant and all of those pieces or would it be something that is developed more
- in-house through
- a cooperative process between council, administration, police department, community input, CAPS commission,
- all of those things. Because that's a good thing to kind of understand and clarify because I guess that
- kind of, I feel like plans that are done by consultants are usually like, they're like,
- This is a horrible way to say it. They're like, plan plans. Whereas when you do that in-house thing,
- it's more like just a first-level plan that maybe isn't as comprehensive, but at least might get to
- some of what we want to do. I guess I'm just trying to figure out how to write it up and what kind of
- expectation we would have for 2027.
- I'm going to make a suggestion that when you send out the survey as well, and I guess we'll have a time
- before we send out the letter of resolution or whatever we send, but one thing that we might want to
- think about are other sort of guiding principles, right? And last year this came up through our budget
- conversation where we were actually like, and Councilmember Rosenberger said it as well, was this idea
- of like less planning, more doing, right, as one was saying.
- it would be useful for us to have further conversations about that, like how do you wanna guide the
- question of whether or not and how often and how much we engage with consultants as an example, particularly
- in a restrained resources time that if we already have lots of plans and that's sort of principle one
- or two for us, do we wanna sort of put a restriction on and here are the places where we want you to
- engage with
- you know, consultants and in what ways. Okay, so maybe we should consider having a future deliberative
- session just about this concept of a public safety plan and like a shared understanding. I think we
- all agree on the public safety plan. I was just saying generally just because you mentioned that idea
- of do we want to get consulted. I do think that's a broader conversation we should
- have, I mean, it doesn't have to be a long one, but just a conversation that we have at some point about
- structuring how we as a council would like to see both consultants engaged with and then followed through
- with, I think, is sort of, it's in between those two things of the making plans where they don't exist
- and following through with our plans, because since I've been on council, we have paid for consultants
- where I haven't seen the results yet. You know, the branding exercise for the city, updating
- permitting. We had all these things, somebody to come and tell us how to tell people about recycling.
- It was like $300,000. Then these things are just, oh, we did them, and then we're on stage 17 of deciding
- about Indiana Avenue and Kirkwood. It was not fair to say that. I don't remember. Councilmember Rallo,
- did you have something that you wanted to add to that?
- I know I concur. I did have something to add at the end. I've got two things. The first one is, unlike
- Council Member Stossberg, your question that I think could transfer into budget questions for
- the administration, that these are our priorities, but if it isn't a priority or if it's something the
- administration is like, nah, you know,
- year number five, is this the priority for 2027? If not, how should the priority be reflected in 2027?
- I like that, just so like everything gets addressed in some way. I mean, I know we're not at our final
- stages yet, but council member Zulek, I think said like a couple questions that maybe we want answered
- in the budget slides, right? And I think that would be really good too that like, if not now,
- What kind of prep is there and what is it going to look like in the next year or something? And then
- number two, just a little bit about the plans. The famous comedian Michelle Wolf likes to say, I've
- got plans on plans on waffles. So I didn't quite hear you. I've got plans on plans on waffles. It's
- just nonsense. Sometimes it's money.
- So much nonsense, and on that note, Councilmember Asari, President Asari, do you want to take the meeting
- back to go to public comment, or do you want?
- Well, Council Member Zulek, one last comment. You guys, okay, final round of comments. You all have
- one minute. Well, do we want to have public comment first and then final round of comments? Okay, yeah,
- let's do public comment first and then we can all have a sort of closing comment and then we'll wrap
- up the meeting. So public comment, Mr. M.G., we'd love to hear from you. Anybody else who'd like to...
- Anybody else, whether you're online or in council chambers, if you'd like to make public comment, same
- rules as normal, three minutes. If you'd like to state your name, that would be wonderful. Are there
- folks online? Yes, there are, but I have a question. Okay, so we'll start here with Mr. Emgy.
- Thank you, Mr. President. Christopher Emgy from the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce, a 904 membership
- organization, 80% of those local.
- I'm just looking at my notes and we talked a lot about assets and how I sort of saw what are those assets.
- Some of them are very transportation based with the sidewalks, the Indiana projects have been brought
- up. Others are more economic development. I often talk about baseball fields. French Southern, we just
- had a pneumonia spill. Those are things that sort of bring in sort of tourists and have an economic vitality.
- That also includes the arts. We have the Waldron and the Buskirk. And then there's more community ones,
- such as the Banneker Center and Alice in Jukebox. So it's very hard to sort of put all of those into
- one umbrella or the term bucket, which I don't like. When we talked about homeless, I think one of the
- things that if the council was sort of centered on is what can we do, what can we fund that can save
- money down the road? These are investments. It's the ounce of prevention.
- So what can we do to maybe save money on businesses for cleanup costs coming from needles and other
- trash? So we've got to sort of look at it with that lens in mind. And then a little bit on the social
- service end. We didn't mention it, I don't think tonight, but the Jack Hopkins. That's very social service.
- You mentioned in conversations about getting more focused there, maybe increasing that funding and getting
- some very social service, maybe less projects and maybe a little bit bigger.
- from one of our providers that sort of looks into that. Cost to move, I liked council members Asari
- on that. What is that going to cost? I mean, a lot of these things that I think the council claims it
- can draw, it doesn't really have quite the resources to start really handing out the type of checks,
- especially in this economic environment, SB1, that I think that would allow for that. So we gotta make
- sure we're sort of investing that money wisely in the city.
- And then also looking at in the opposite, what can we cut? What assets do we not need? So it's something
- to look at there. And then we talked about plans. I'll leave you with what I scribbled. Life is what
- happens to you while you're busy making other plans. And I think that sums up tonight. Thank you for
- your time. Thank you so much. Is there anyone online who would like to make a comment? Yes, we have
- two fans who are up. Fantastic. First person, you'll be unmuted, and you have three minutes.
- Hello, this is Kevin Keough. Good evening. For the past several months, my public comments have focused
- on the symptom of our city's late publication of the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, the ACFR,
- along with questions about when it's due and are there any consequences to late publications of the
- ACFR. Today, I'm here to address
- The underlying condition. I'm moving beyond the topic of simple timeliness to the critical legal requirements
- of the single audit report and our contractual bond covenants. Also the need to strengthen our local
- governments administrative processes and much needed improvement with internal controls.
- In my recent email inquiries to the State Board of Accounts and responses from Beth Kelly, the Deputy
- State Examiner of the State of Indiana Board of Public Accounts, she was unequivocal. The September
- 30th deadline is not a suggestion. It is a federal regulation mandate under the uniform guidance. This
- deadline exists to ensure the timely submission of the independent auditor's report on internal control
- over financial reporting.
- We must be accurate and public must know about what that report states. For the fiscal year ending December
- 31st, 2023, our independent auditors identified a material weakness regarding internal controls over
- federal grant compliance. Excuse me. A material weakness is the highest level of an internal control
- audit concern, indicating a reasonable possibility that material noncompliance will not be prevented
- or detected to date
- This council has not publicly deliberated these findings or the required remediation. Beyond federal
- grants, the city has a contractual obligation to our bondholders. Deputy State Examiner Kelly highlighted
- the timing of our financial report is often dictated by the continuing disclosure obligations unique
- to our bond documents. These are legal contracts.
- When we fail to provide audited financials within the terms of these bond contracts, it is my understanding
- this may risk triggering events of default or the city may be forced to file notice of failure on the
- national EMA system. This could damage the city's credit reputation and potentially increase the interest
- rates Bloomington taxpayers must pay for financing future bridges, roads or housing projects. The 2027
- priority ask.
- As you develop the 2027 budget priorities, I formally request three actions. That the audit remediation
- and internal control strengthening be prioritized at a foundational government's governance goal. Basically
- improve our processes. Meet the June 30th date to publish the ACFR and the related audit reports.
- refer to the 2023 single audit findings to the fiscal committee for public briefing to disclose how
- these material weaknesses are being corrected and provide adequate transparency. That the council include
- Public deliberations of all future ACFRs and single audit reports, along with public discussion of the
- findings and or requirements, remediation reports. Make transparency a part of the process. If the city
- cannot master the basic processes of adequate systems. And that's your time. That's it. My time's up.
- Thank you. Thank you so much. Is there somebody else online? Yes, we do have one more person.
- Thank you. You can be unmuted and look forward to hearing your comments.
- Hi, folks. This is Paul Russo. I don't have much to say. Mostly I wanted to thank you for acknowledging
- that the transportation system is inequitable. I live that every day, and it was nice to hear. And other
- than that, I hope you have a good evening. Thanks. Thank you so much, Mr. Russo. Is there anybody else
- online? No hands up at this point. OK. Well, thank you all for your public comment. Anybody else in the room?
- Okay, all right. Well, we'll come back then to council members and would be awesome if you have any
- sort of closing remarks and we'll start with councilmember Rallo Well, I hate to be a wet blanket but
- I wondered about I wanted to ask a question about Councilmember Stasberg attended it takes a village
- forum a couple months ago about the SCA one and its effect on revenue and
- Is the administration still expecting a $30 million reduced revenue over the next couple of years? We
- don't have good detailed estimates yet. The date that the new income tax system will be implemented
- was pushed out to 2029 in the latest General Assembly session. It was originally 2028, so we have kind
- of a year reprieve.
- But there is no good solid information yet on how much the city-specific local income tax would be able
- to raise. And that's really the mystery. So we are going to be working with Reedy to just improve our
- estimates and figure out how much. That $10 million was kind of a
- very high level sort of lobbyists estimate, using some pretty high level metrics, we need something
- much more detailed, which is really a kind of a detailed assessment of actual income by resident or
- by household. So it's to be determined. Yes. So stay tuned. It is almost certain that the options we
- have available to us now will not adequately replace the income of the current system.
- So we just don't know by how much yet. And my other question would be, we've gone through process
- deliberation of these priorities for quite a long time. And I think they're still very useful insofar
- as even if we can't apply more funds, funding, they still provide directions. They could be useful in
- determining baselines, maybe even efficiencies. I agree.
- Thank you, Councilmember Barelta. Councilmember Stasberg? Any last comments, thoughts? Sure. I guess
- the comment that I will make is just to thank you all for your feedback, and I will do my best to create
- a new survey and then use that survey to create a letter and
- I'm going to do that as soon as I can with the acknowledgement that I'm actually leaving town on Saturday
- morning at about 4 in the morning. So yeah, it may be a fun couple of days. But try to look for that.
- And as soon as you get that, do your best to respond to it. Because I originally really wanted to bring
- this letter to you all for approval at our next regular session on the 25th.
- like I want to have at least a draft that then if it needs to be modified again, then we can get it
- approved at the next regular session after that on the first week of April because of course
- the administration is working on this now and so especially if part of what we're asking is kind of
- some of those categories and if part of what Controller McKim is telling us is like, you know in last
- year in terms of that like non-specific kind of
- presentations, it was partly because of the outcome-based budgeting shift and realizing the vast number
- of outcomes and categorizing. And so if there's a limited number of things that we can say, hey, we
- really want you to track and categorize these things, then that will help them moving forward. So that's
- the timeline goal, the very last day that I would want to get something approved to send to
- the administration would be that first meeting in April. So that's maybe a little aspirational, but
- just please watch your
- watch your emails, watch your texts, and respond to that as soon as you can. Thanks. One, I'll continue
- with the committee to try to do work to identify best practices and think about systems-level improvements
- to this, to keep this moving in a better trajectory. Because yeah, there's just a limit to what we can
- do with what we have. Second, really appreciate all the work that's gone into this, especially from
- Council Member Stosberg. So thank you. And Council Member Piemont-Smith, maybe before you.
- Third is that just my view and experience, I guess, over the last six years is that often we have pretty
- good alignment on stated values and priorities. And where we have a hard time is in the details and
- the implementation. And I think that will remain true. So I think this is progress. I think it's important.
- But I think being able to get into the details and see them in budget presentations and being able to
- talk about them
- at that level is like Where we're actually gonna find the the meaningful tensions in in different
- perspectives about what? How we're going to achieve these things that kind of thing. So I think we'll
- see that Then and yes, we should anticipate that that's all. Thanks Hello, I found this to be productive
- all I'll say to conclude is thank you to controller McKim for joining us and spending the evening with
- us and Thank you
- And thank you to Council Member Stosberg for putting this all together and all of my lovely colleagues
- for such a great discussion. Thank you. Just to give a quick thank you to the fiscal committee for all
- the hard work that you've done and especially Council Member Stosberg. I know that that was like,
- you know, creating algorithms for, you know. Don't tell us that.
- Yeah, we'll give you more. No, and I just, it was fun in kind of a hard way, but it really, you know,
- it's like a crossword puzzle. Like it's fun in a hard way. It keeps your brain young. That's right.
- Yeah. No, and I think it's really valuable to have these conversations, like even just for me clarifying,
- you know, not only to see where everybody's at, but where the city's at and what we're all thinking.
- And thank you very much, Controller McKim for joining us. I wasn't going to say anything after my, uh,
- waffles comment, but I do want to say thank you to the fiscal committee and Councilmember Stossberg
- and thanks for all the reminders via email and text. I think it will go okay. I just want to make sure
- the overarching theme sort of is to do our plans, you know, do our plans and
- In a way, I mean, maybe it's just way too hard of an ask, but I just wish we could be like, here are
- all the numbered goals in our plans, and like, here are the dots of which outcome hits on which goal,
- kind of. I mean, like Scantron, oh my gosh, or something like that. I don't know, but I think that the
- departments that have pieces of our plans and goals
- I think they should like intimately know the numbers and where we should be going. And so I guess I
- think I would like it to be more of a common practice that our staff can talk to us or the city staff
- can talk and say like, this is climate action plan 6.2.8. I would love it. I would really geek out on
- that. So I don't know to what extent that's possible, but it would be useful for me too in the budget process.
- I was going to thank Council Member Salzburg too for all the effort, time, and thinking she put into
- this, but since it was fun, she's better ready to go have fun on her spring break on Saturday morning
- it sounds like. I just want to say one thing. It's a small thing, but I think it's important and it's
- consistent with
- This idea, when we spoke earlier about the use of the term maintenance or maintain city assets, sort
- of frames that, the words we use, the way we say it, and also related to the idea that we have plans
- that we've adopted. And we need to adhere to those and be consistent as we possibly can. And so I would
- just like to ask in future surveys and in the wording of the letter,
- that we are consistent with what we said in our fundamental guiding plan for the city, the comprehensive
- plan, where we've acknowledged that population growth on its own is not something we seek. We don't
- seek just to grow for the sake of growing. And so when we frame something like we want to see GDP or
- outpace or our income outpace population,
- it sort of creates, at least in my mind, an image that we're sort of endorsing both in some kind of
- race and we want to move ahead of the other. Instead say it more like we want to see income growth,
- we want to see GDP increase relative to population, regardless of what population does, and we're not
- using them in the same way that income per capita
- for median income growth, we're going to assume is fundamentally good for the community. But we've already
- said in our guiding documents that we don't seek just population growth. So just in the wording, don't
- link the two in a way that suggests an endorsement of just for the sake of growing, except when we're
- talking about well-being of the community in terms of access to amenities,
- equity, different types of equity, and income, and things like that, which we are going to assume are
- good to grow. So that's all I want to say. Thanks.
- Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you all so much for a robust conversation. Also, three quick points.
- Thing number one, thank you, Council Member Stossberg, for putting this all together and for putting
- the next one together. For these deliberation sessions, I know Council Member Flaherty said that he
- wanted us to do one. Council Member Daley is sort of liaising with making sure that they all get done,
- so just communicate with Council Member Daley so we can get those scheduled.
- I'm really grateful for the robust conversation that we've had and I think sort of echoing what Councilmember
- Flaherty said.
- It would be wonderful if in the middle of our budget presentation, after we get the presentations, that
- we could have a conversation like this where we can talk about the minutia of the broader things. Because
- I think when we're talking in this setting, we often were able to go back and forth in a more fluid
- way. I think sometimes we always end up a bit better than the sum of our parts. So a lot of things I
- hadn't thought about until we started talking here that was just really helpful. And then the only other
- thought is whether we want to rather do a resolution than a letter
- I mean, same effect, I think, at the end of the day, but might allow for public comment, which might
- help galvanize a little bit more support and awareness around the council's ideas. And so we can also
- then have a clear vote on all of us said this unanimously in this order or something like that. So just
- food for thought there. Thank you all. If there's no objections, we are adjourned.