Departments

Transcript (~44 min @ 1:02)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 0:55 Jen Grigoraitis: Not at this time. Okay, so I will now motion by unanimous consent to close public comment. Seeing no objection public comment is now closed and we will move right into our department budget hearings. And tonight. We are joined by the Department of Public Works director prokos Ellis and assistant director troop. And if you guys want to head on up to the table and I will entertain a motion to suspend the rules so that we can hear from the administration moved second. So we have a motion to suspend the rules made by President sinella seconded by Vice chairmanelli all in favor any opposed. Hey in the rules are suspended.

▶ 1:37 Jen Grigoraitis: And just while you both are getting set up just a moment of personal privilege. We have Appropriations tonight. We are going to gavel out of Appropriations by about 755 so that we can open the city council meeting because we do have four required public hearings that are have to go on between 8 and 8:15. So heads up for everyone that they'll be a lot of Recessing and gaveling in motioning, so please bear with us. So thank you for being here the floor is yours. Thank

▶ 2:04 Speaker 1: you. wait a second for this to get it up. There's my daughter. I might have to do like a function.

▶ 2:48 Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you all. so we're just presenting our fiscal 23 budget tonight and In the past few years kept past couple years that I've been doing this we've typically had other DPW items on the agenda for the same night things, like retained earnings free cash Water and Sewer rates tonight. They are not on the same nights agenda, which is good. So I paired down my usual information considerably and it's all focused just on the budget which is kind of nice to be able to keep it a little more concise. So I did want to go through for you some of the basic information just for the new counselors. I know you're all very familiar with with the DPW, but we have 68 full-time employees split into four main divisions Administration engineering operations and Facilities.

▶ 3:48 Speaker 1: Administration are the folks that you you call into the main number of the City Art and you speak to our resident Services representative all the financial stuff that Jim does Jim runs the administration division. We have accounts payable receivable payroll. We have our environmental Outreach coordinator, which is currently vacant, but hopefully we'll have somebody on board very soon and our rentals coordinator who handles all the school rentals and such. And then engineering here in City Hall along with water and sewer billing. Handles, all the permits and inspections development reviews records and plans geographic information systems and the water and sewer billing. And all of our capital projects design construction oversight all the paving and utility work that you see out in the community. and then facilities does all of the custodial Services all of the trades services for all of our municipal buildings both schools and police fire Council and aging this building They also manage the the facilities capital projects and building security building maintenance. And then finally operations which is kind of everything else. There are eight subdivisions of operations. There is water sewer Highway sanitation Parks forestry Fleet and Cemetery.

▶ 5:21 Speaker 1: And each one of those divisions has a division manager as I mentioned Jim manages Administration and finance. Joe Hobbs is our new operations manager. Hopefully you've all met him. By now or talk to him on the phone. Jay McNeil is our facilities manager going on two years now and Vonnie Reese is our city engineer who's been here a little over a

▶ 5:44 Speaker 1: I just want to acknowledge some of the new employees that we've hired. We've done quite a bit of hiring over the last year the unfortunate reality of the our pandemic or post pandemic World. Whatever we're in now is more employee turnover more challenges with finding the qualified candidates that we need for certain roles. So we've done quite a bit of hiring this year. These are all our new employees since I presented last year and then I did also just want to acknowledge Peter petronio who retired after 12 years with the city and was known to everybody. I'm sure and just want to thank him for his dedicated service to the city.

▶ 6:24 Speaker 1: And I also sadly wanted to acknowledge Rick Cantone. I don't know how many of you had a lot of contact with Rick but Rick worked for the city for 32 years and he passed away this year just shortly after his retirement. And that was a real loss for the whole the whole Melrose Community really a lot of people out in the community know him. I still get emails sent. so they're sent to my email address, but they'll say, you know, dear Elena and Rick even though he retired in 2021, but It was really sudden and unexpected and so shortly after his retirement. So I just wanted to thank him for his service to the city.

▶ 7:08 Speaker 1: I Capital accomplishments in the last year. We did a lot of Paving the I'm not going to read all the streets there. But those are all the streets that we paved in 2021. Then we have all the streets where we replaced water mains in 2021. And we finished the Roosevelt school grounds project, which was also a Paving and erosion control project. That went very well. The picture there is Paving of Main Street.

▶ 7:36 Speaker 1: And then we had a lot of other projects going on and I just listed a handful of them just as an example. We have the generators Jim's been managing the installation of the generators here and the temporary portable generator for Memorial Hall that project is going very well lead times are extraordinarily long. So we're still waiting for the equipment to come in but we're getting everything ready. The contractors on board contracts have been signed. The Memorial Hall envelope project is obviously a huge project for the city. We've finished the Alpine Park feasibility study. And I don't know if we've posted it to the website yet only because our environmental and Outreach coordinator position is vacant, but if it hasn't been posted it should be shortly. The picture down the bottom right is Central Terrace, which the mural artist was out there today doing some of the painting on the ground and we should be having a ribbon cutting within the next couple weeks and it really looks fantastic. It's you know, a little off the beaten path place to go and sit but it's public seating and we're hoping that people will use it. We've installed reinstalled the four parklets and we completed the HVAC upgrade at the Milano. There's air conditioning now, which is a big plus and better ventilation. And then operationally these were all through mid-may. They were also in the budget document. You should have gotten these same statistics in the budget document. We had fulfilled 3,250 work orders filled 547 potholes. We planted 171 trees so far this fiscal year. We handle 51.6 inches of snow processed 2,393 invoices. Collected about 6,900 tons of trash and about 2400 tons of recycling as well as curbside waste pickup. The that's our own City forces. Who do the yard waste pickup. Our brand new mattress program has already collected 290 mattresses. So between curbside and drop off at the yard, so we think that's a huge success. We sold 919 compliant trash barrels. That was a huge undertaking by Lisa Scott who unfortunately decided to move to a job closer to her home in Haverhill, but she really did a fantastic job advertising and distributing those barrels. And then we accepted yard waste recycling and all the special collections that we do at the yard every year. We continue to manage our 140 fleet vehicles or Green Team continued to maintain 81 locations where we mow and maintain Wyoming Cemetery did about 150 burials and cremations and we assisted with a lot of City events the folks down at the bottom. There were helping out with healthy Melrose, but we're involved with all the all the various City events.

▶ 10:33 Speaker 1: So our budget requests for this year the general fund request is 10 million 260,965. The water Enterprise fund request is $6,119,429. And the sewer Enterprise fund request is 8 million 793909. and you should have all of those budget documents in your iqm2 packets

▶ 11:01 Speaker 1: So just highlighting what we have in the budget documents the vast majority of our increases are salaries. We level-funded just about everything else and the items that we didn't level fund. We will go over in a moment, but we're in the process of renegotiating our three-year contracts for both the clerical Union and the laborers union and so in the budget what you see is all of the step increases and you don't see a cost of living increase for the union employees. So those would be added on after the fact once the contracts are negotiated.

▶ 11:36 Speaker 1: We have a lot of employees who are funded across the three different. Accounts general fund water and sewer and you have a breakdown from a memo that we submitted that shows which positions are paid and how what percentage they're split and then we have four employees who we share with other departments such as Parks or it and planning we share some very employees. This is a little hard to see but these are all of our Various divisions. So you'll notice in the budget packet all of the all of our budgets are by division. So you'll see a Budget page let's say for the highway Division. And so this just shows that Highway has four employees who are funded four full-time employees who are funded through highway. So each individual budget has employees assigned to it. And then some are split between the different budgets.

▶ 12:37 Speaker 1: So as I mentioned, we're level-funded in all of our items other than salaries with the contractual increases both Union and non-union for the step increases and then we have a handful of other items. not sure if you want me to go through them individually or if it's I submitted this in advance. If you'd rather I just skip through this and you can ask questions if you have specific questions. Yeah, I think we can wait for

▶ 13:05 Jen Grigoraitis: questions. I know folks did have this in advance. Okay. So these

▶ 13:08 Speaker 1: are all the items though that are not level-funded. And this is a continuation of that.

▶ 13:18 Speaker 1: And and water and sewer rates. So this is getting a little bit ahead but it really ties in very closely with our budgeting process. And so I did just want to mention we're proposing a combined 5.17% increase to the water and sewer rates this year. We haven't raised rates for years because of covid and before that because we were just trying to mitigate some of the past rate impacts and so we haven't raised rates in several years, but now we really need to raise our rates to to cover our costs and to cover the increases in operating funds that we've needed over the last several years when we weren't increasing the rates. And we're also proposing to bring our Reserve funds up to the 10% goal that we've had in the past years. And this year we're proposing to take 400,000 out of our sewer retained earnings, which was basically over collection during the covid period and put that toward the rate for fiscal 23 to mitigate to keep that 5.17% where it is. Otherwise, we would have had a much higher. I want to say it was more like an eight percent increase that we just didn't feel was really palatable. And I submitted a detailed memo on the Water and Sewer rates and base fees. any

▶ 14:43 Jack Eccles: Questions councilor Eccles, um, just one from that presentation there. Should we be expecting an additional? Appropriation later in the year either through free cash or somewhere else. Once that contract is completed and if so around what time so I

▶ 15:01 Speaker 1: anticipate that we will be Negotiating the contracts right about the end of June. We're very well along already in both negotiations clerical and laborers and they're both going very smoothly. So I anticipate we'll have numbers probably by end of June early July and start of the fiscal year and it would really be up to the CFO to determine what funding source he would use to allocate to the to that difference.

▶ 15:31 Jack Eccles: But they would go in effect at the beginning of the fit. Is it negotiated to go and effect at the beginning of the fiscal year the contracts supposed to

▶ 15:36 Speaker 1: take effect, July 1st and our final negotiation meeting with laborers, I think is scheduled for June 28th. So we're going to be right up against the deadline, but I think I'm hoping that at that final meeting. We have a successfully negotiated contract.

▶ 15:51 Speaker 2: Awesome. Thanks.

▶ 15:55 Speaker 3: councilor Williams

▶ 15:57 Ryan Williams: Hello nice to meet you, I've never actually met you in person. So I reading down to Future agenda items and noting that a lot of the successes that we've had that we've highlighted have come from grant funding. and I feel like that's kind of new for maybe like the last five or ten years certainly, you know, you've been around here kind of similar timeframe as I have so and I'm wondering if you feel that the way the department is set up the Staffing levels the budget is Is allowing you to take advantage of as many Grand opportunities as you can right and maybe this isn't a question for Public Works. Maybe it's a question for planning. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts on whether you feel well resourced to apply for as many grants as possible what your preferred solution would be whether you've raised this what your thoughts are.

▶ 16:47 Speaker 1: Say that. A really good question and a challenge that we faced a lot over the time. I've been here. I've been here now six and a half years and we have applied for a lot of Grants and we we pretty much stop applying at the point when we realize that we've reached our capacity to implement those grants. And so I think we certainly have the capacity to apply for more, you know to fill out more Grant applications. In fact, some of them are not cumbersome at all to apply for and then others are overwhelming to apply for but it is true that the capacity I would say specifically in the engineering division. They're the ones who really Implement most of the grant work the DPW applies for Aside from some of the solways to recycling type grants that Jim's group oversees and those we have the capacity to handle but on the capitol the large capital projects, we certainly reach a point where if we applied for more money, we wouldn't have the staff to oversee the design and construction of the actual projects. and we've been very successful in Grants will be here next Monday night with three new Grant acceptance orders, which is very exciting and So yeah, we and and especially since we brought Vonnie on to she's excellent at grant writing J Coy has been excellent agreement writing our Deputy city engineer. So now we have a lot of people who are really good at getting money and and then not enough people to help implement the projects

▶ 18:21 Speaker 2: appreciate it. Thank you.

▶ 18:24 Robb Stewart: Counselor Stewart, thank you. Thank you Mr. Speaker cells and Mr. For being here tonight. Just a question regarding the city yard. I know that you went from being open every day to three days a week during the pandemic and You've kept it that way and do you plan on keeping that for the foreseeable future?

▶ 18:50 Speaker 1: Yes, so we actually and during the pandemic we initially closed and then we reopened. I believe it was two days a week and then we brought it up to three days a week and well four days a week in the in the April through December time period so we used to be open six days a week and we have brought it down to four and there are a couple of reasons for that why we've we've discovered during the pandemic actually, this is one I think good thing that came out of the pandemic as we discovered that we are able to run a much safer operation with two days when employees are in. and the yard is closed because when we're moving those Recycling and and yard waste containers in and out of the yard, it gets very dangerous and we get a lot of traffic a lot of residents a lot of residents wandering around, you know, bringing their dragging their leaves over from their cars and not necessarily being very aware of their surroundings and a lot of near misses where you know, we've tried to ask everybody to stop while a truck backs out or while a load or moves around and somebody not paying attention and still ending up in the way, you know, we haven't had any really scary near misses, but we've had a lot of Sort of oops moments where somebody. has been asked to wait and then ends up in the way and you know, it's I felt like it was an accident waiting to happen the longer I watched you know, I have a nice view for my window right out into that part of the yard. And so that was the major factor. And then the other factor is that I wanted to provide more oversight in the yard and we didn't have the Staffing to provide somebody six days a week or five days a week to be just sitting in the yard watching operations and making sure checking people's stickers to make sure they should actually be there and checking to see what they drop off and my big example of what happens when the yard is not what properly is my first month as director somebody dropped off a box in the yard that was literally about Maybe one foot by 18 inches and it cost us $11,000 to get rid of the material that was dropped because it was lab chemicals some of them dating back to the 1920s and 30s. There was radioactive material. There was Mercury containing material there were and they were just little lab bottles and you know with little skulls and crossbones and the like on them and somebody who must have been cleaning out, you know, Grandpa's basement when they were cleaning out somebody's house. brought this box and just dropped it in the yard. And so we really need the oversight to avoid those types of situations from happening again and and frankly, you know, I think for the folks who come we have a lot of traffic on Saturdays, we have a lot of traffic on Mondays and then Wednesday and Friday is a little less busy. I think being open three weekdays and one weekend day provides people a lot of opportunity to come by the yard and drop off their materials and and I just didn't feel that the illumination of the Wednesday and Friday was a major impact compared to the benefit.

▶ 22:18 Speaker 4: Thank you for that. You're welcome. Sorry for

▶ 22:20 Speaker 1: the lengthy explanation, but

▶ 22:22 Robb Stewart: Kind of leads into my next couple of questions. You you suggest that there are some resources that have been freed up. Because you have two extra days at your hands where the yard is basically closed. And so I assume you don't have someone. Front gate someone that's doing the loading some you know there I would assume there's some resources. What are those resources

▶ 22:52 Speaker 1: doing? How do you so I would say they're not really freed up because previously we didn't have somebody Manning the yard five days a week or six days a week. We didn't have somebody checking stickers every day. And the the person who's in the yard operate in the loader and moving things around is still doing that. They're just doing it much more safely. So they're doing it on the Wednesday and Friday when there's nobody in the yard. We're taking advantage of that time to load the containers with all the yard waste. We have a driver who basically drives to and from the yard to Greenworks with the recycling into Route 99 with the with the compost. Does it most of the day on Wednesday and Friday? So we just sort of consolidate what we used to do. here and there during the week we've Consolidated most of those operations to Wednesday and Friday and then you know, we're we're still out doing all the other things that we were doing before. We have a lot of cross I guess cross training and and cross-working across divisions. So You know, if our driver's not driving the cans to the yard then or to the Green Works, then he might be helping out with the municipal Barrel collection or you know driving for a dump truck for a water main project or not. Thank you

▶ 24:12 Robb Stewart: my last. Question and it's kind of a category is what are have you? Done any consideration for being a little bit more proactive on some of the repetitive tasks that you have to do then. Let me give an example pothole. So, you know probably the number one complaint that everyone has and you know, we're all hot spots are and you know, like the end of my Street opens up every three months Washington Street at the end opens up every two months and you have to keep going is there instead of having? To call or fill out the online. Is there any program that could be put in place? with existing resources to go and

▶ 25:01 Speaker 4: just get it done.

▶ 25:04 Speaker 1: It's interesting question. I have thought about that. I know there was some Community input at one point where people were saying, you know. Can't can't DPW just drive around and figure out where the potholes are and just fill them when they see them. It is we do have to consolidate the work to specific days. It's not like we're always driving around with a hot box ready to fill a pothole whenever we see it and we do get a lot of work orders. So, you know, we do a Consolidated day where we send the guys out with a list and they get through as much of the list as they can on that day. We do tend to keep up within a week or two of when people put them in whether permitting if we have big storms. Obviously we get behind. We could look at you know adding a couple days here and there where we just fill fill what we see or fill what we know to be a problem. They definitely do if they're out on the street if somebody's reported a pothole here and they see six other potholes in that vicinity. They absolutely fill them at that same time. They won't skip over something that's right near where they're working, but it is true that they don't just drive around and and look for them in the hot spot areas which Yeah, we could certainly look at you know spending a day here and there where we send them out just to do. What they deem to be the worst areas and the areas that they see cropping up as they're driving around and I

▶ 26:33 Robb Stewart: think everybody in this room could attest that we all know the hotspots within our neighborhoods and we could and it's not a lot, you know, there's the ones that are just continually opening up all the time and it would be nice to see that proactively done. I think it would be greatly appreciated by the neighbors that are driving in those areas all the time. So that's something as feedback and as part of this because I know you're shifting things around a little bit if you can figure out how that can get done within the budgetary constraints. That would be great.

▶ 27:10 Speaker 5: Okay counselor. I was going to expand on what Elena just mentioned is that one of the benefits of having new people Vonnie in the engineering Division and Joe Hobbs. Now in operations, both of them have already presented ideas that address just what you have asked about the fact that we're coming out of the pandemic and there's still somewhat ramping up especially on the operation side means that we have to be maybe a little bit patient with them but also to support them in some of their ideas and some of their thoughts and they're very good thoughts and they all can be done within the constraints of the budget

▶ 27:44 Robb Stewart: as it's written to us right great. Thanks. Also the sweet

▶ 27:48 Speaker 4: Great as well as we talked.

▶ 27:52 Speaker 3: Thank you both. Thank you counselor. Garapan.

▶ 27:53 Mark Garipay: Thank you. I kind of want to try we're gonna do it so I did mine but by department so I'm gonna just go in order. That's okay but to Consulate Stewart's point one of the concerns we do here a lot about is trying to get expanding hours in the city guide. So I just want to give a plug for for that. I understand you concerns, but it's probably one of the one of the larger things my residence asked me about some expanded hours. So I'm going Administration and engineering. the we have a number of projects you feel your staff properly in the department.

▶ 28:33 Speaker 1: I mean similar to councilor Williams question. I feel like the engineering division is really stretched thin and it was the same when I was there. We're just we want to be so ambitious. We want to get so many projects done and there's just not enough time in the day and and you don't want to be in the position where you're just putting out fires all the time and and you don't have time to do, you know as much proactive work, although engineering does to do a ton of proactive work, but I would love it if we had more staff in the engineering division, but it's never been. We're lucky to have I always felt we're lucky to have the staff we have right now because one of our positions was cut in fiscal 17 and was not brought back until fiscal 19. And so I feel like now we finally have at least like the bare minimum of what we need, but I'd always love to have more.

▶ 29:28 Mark Garipay: And you have an increase in professional service line item? What's

▶ 29:33 Speaker 1: What's the what's that for that's in the in the administration? Because we have two we have one in facilities as well. You asking about the administration one.

▶ 29:40 Speaker 6: Yeah, the engineering Administration and Engineering. So that's

▶ 29:41 Speaker 1: what we usually use to fund our traffic studies. And we've just had a real increased now in the traffic Commission in requests that we've been getting to dig further into a particular neighborhoods do more traffic studies more counts and everything and that's the budget we use for those line items in the last couple years. We've had to supplement with you know Road Bond money or any place where we could scrape together 5,000 year 10,000 there. So we just wanted to make sure we can fund what the commission is recommending.

▶ 30:11 Mark Garipay: Okay, that going under facilities. I see we have summer and intern help. Can you tell me how that process works in hiring the

▶ 30:22 Speaker 1: some help you can tell you all about?

▶ 30:23 Speaker 5: So each year, each of the division heads are given a budget for the summer program. We've tried to focus on Melrose residents this year. The advertisement went out at the beginning of I believe it was April with an end of April deadline this year. It was amazing how few the drop off of applicants that we had. We do give preference to those that are returning. They are working roughly 30 hours per week doing various tasks through the facilities summer projects at the schools in the parks in the cemeteries and their supervised by one of the foreman in the cruise. So this year we are projecting close to 30 employees. The majority of them are returning we have maybe seven or so new hires, but that process has has already taken place and we have a full allotment. We're just waiting for the end of school to have the last of the groups on boarded and up to speed and working for the summertime.

▶ 31:31 Speaker 1: Great, we typically favor students who were 18 and over just because of the equipment. Yeah the equipment that they're working around and everything, but we do accept younger students. We accept applicants and when we can hire them

▶ 31:46 Mark Garipay: we do I just think this is a valuable program to keep the kids busy. Keep them off the streets. Yeah. It's a terrific. That's good learning tool. So I'd like to see somehow to expand that all the time Municipal Building repair and repair maintenance. We have a budget at 120 seems like we're spending 212 and 189 if those

▶ 32:13 Speaker 1: just the last two years so we want officer is it we always exceed those items it's a little hard to predict because those that they're paying for repairs. So those line items are not paying for our capital projects. They're paying for you know, the boiler that breaks that we didn't have in the capitalist or the You know the roof leaks the damage something and and we need to fix it. Unexpectedly elevator repairs. I know last year. We had or two years ago. We had to repair the library elevators for about 45,000 that just takes a huge chunk of that budget away. The good news is that we typically have a little wiggle room in the other line items in that same category and the finance department really looks at the rollup of that whole category to make sure that we're staying on budget by the end of the fiscal year. And a lot of those other items are energy items. And so when we've done Energy Efficiency projects, we're freeing up, you know a little bit of buffer there that hopefully can cover the the difference but you know it is that budget is always tight. We're always very, you know, Jim's always staying very closely on top of what's going on facilities because it's really easy to have a sudden thing that makes us overspend that we again, we would love to have more money in that line item, but You know the same time we don't want to. request too much

▶ 33:49 Mark Garipay: and just for my clarification what goes into school contractual isn't that category School contractions? You have

▶ 33:57 Speaker 5: you a number of things that go into that school contractual we contract out the cleaning services, you'll have elevator Services the majority of the things that happen on a regular basis routine inspections things like that will come out of that contractual things that we're contractually obligated to pay for we'll pay for it right out of that line item. The big one is the is the school cleaning.

▶ 34:19 Mark Garipay: And just going to the highway sidewalk repair. I see we level funded that. That's probably another one of the larger. Concerns we hear from our residents. What's the plan to? Go above and brought is it free cash that we it is that

▶ 34:37 Speaker 1: that is the cfo's preference as to how to pay for that item. So we have the sidewalk repair line item and we use that for a lot of our in-house work and smaller projects. And then with the free cash we bring in our on-call contractor and we send them around throughout the whole city to you know, any anything on our list. In fact, we just pulled the list together Joe Hobbs just put the whole list together for aggregate or on call contractor to come in and start doing so hopefully in July, we'll see some activity. We have money left over from last year's free cash. How long

▶ 35:16 Mark Garipay: is the sidewalk AL West right now is it?

▶ 35:20 Speaker 1: I don't really yeah, we have to follow up with you on that.

▶ 35:24 Speaker 6: and

▶ 35:27 Mark Garipay: on Sanitation how long how much longer we have in the contract with Republic and I'm assuming covanta their contract

▶ 35:36 Speaker 5: will end at the end of fiscal 23.

▶ 35:40 Speaker 6: Republic well Republic. Yep, and the

▶ 35:43 Speaker 5: contract has been assigned to Republic. Yeah, and

▶ 35:45 Mark Garipay: how about the trash disposals that? Tipping fees. I'm assuming exact correct. So how do we have a contract on that too? Correct. And when's that? When's that both run? Same time? Correct? Yes. And I'm assuming based on everything we yeah, we're

▶ 36:03 Speaker 1: at the end of but yeah, the I

▶ 36:05 Speaker 5: apologize the contract ends at the end of the next fiscal year 24.

▶ 36:11 Mark Garipay: On both of those, correct? And one would assume based on way we are.

▶ 36:18 Speaker 5: That industry. Yeah for the city's benefit one of the poems of contention when JRM went to sell was that Melrose contract is very beneficial to the city and it still remains beneficial to the city. So we're in a very advantageous position right now until the end of the contract. It has been assigned and will continue to monitor to try to minimize the effects going to the next contract. Do

▶ 36:44 Mark Garipay: you foresee down the road that we potentially go with the arm trucks?

▶ 36:49 Speaker 5: You know, I I think it's a very difficult question to answer right now because number one the market has changed a lot over the last couple of years. We're gonna probably face some challenges in the next contract based on where we sit right now and the prices that we're paying so I think you know, we want to probably take a look at all of the options that might be available to minimize the effect that the next contract might have on our operating budget, but I think we're open to everything right now including automated and then other options that might be available that might benefit the city.

▶ 37:25 Speaker 6: okay, and then

▶ 37:30 Mark Garipay: the new schedule on picking up Doing the barrels on the weekend is that just downtown or are we doing the parks also on the weekend? So we the plan

▶ 37:38 Speaker 1: would be to do downtown and select locations that our our crews know which barrels tend to be overfilled by Monday morning. So there would be select locations. We have we have a chronic problem at the common which is sort of funny to me because we have eight barrels at the common and we have one or two barrels that tend to be completely overflowing on Monday morning and others that are partially and so some of it is, you know, just the now people not wanting to walk a little bit out of their way. They're just going to attack their one more thing on the top of the overflowing barrel and try to get it in there. so we are looking at also we've ordered two new barrels that are It ends up being four barrels, but they're side by side that have a little bit larger capacity and we're pilot we're gonna pilot these we're waiting for them to come in still. We're gonna pilot them in a couple of locations to see if we if they can contain the trash better. They're covered. You have to you know, put put the trash in a hole in the front instead of just being able to stack stuff higher and higher on top. One of them we bought with the recycling receptacle with the whole We're going to see if that can increase recycling rates right now when we have recycling receptacles that are just an open bin that says recycling. There's just as much trash as recycling. We don't end up being able to recycle that material. It's it's too contaminated. So in combination with Scheduling it's probably going to be an early morning Sunday pickup at select locations. That's that's the plan as of right now. It would be two employees for for one four hour shift to come in and do select locations and then we'll be piloting these new barrels and the other nice thing about the new barrels is the plan is they have flat fronts and sides that we can also fix artwork to so we're hoping to make it part of the place making initiative too.

▶ 39:39 Mark Garipay: So we picking up on Saturday mornings too or

▶ 39:41 Speaker 1: Know the plan would be so we pick up on Fridays and we pick up on Mondays. So we would be adding a Sunday morning pickup.

▶ 39:48 Mark Garipay: And then just going moving along to the box and bars tree.

▶ 39:57 Mark Garipay: tree line item Did you have any request a tree line item? I did okay. I

▶ 40:01 Speaker 1: did I put in for 67,500 which would have funded an exact replacement of our average number of removals and it was not included in the budget. So but it was included in the free cash request so Apparently that is the preferred way of the administration to pay for trees. I was hoping as I know you were that it would be added to the budget.

▶ 40:26 Mark Garipay: And what goes into parks and Forestry Hyatt equipment?

▶ 40:31 Speaker 1: so that tends to be our Our tree removal company right now. It's Northern Tree. We have an on-call contract at all times with a tree removal company and we call them in they they provide standby during known large windstorms. And then they provide, you know next day cleanup after other large wind storms and we've just found that the the frequency which we've needed them in the last two years has exceeded anything prior. We've just had more wind storms, which I think we just have to plan that that's becoming the norm and we need to budget for it.

▶ 41:11 Mark Garipay: and then just go into the cemetery. I see there's a decrease in salary. I'm assuming we didn't remove anyone out.

▶ 41:20 Speaker 5: Yeah, we had a retirements of somebody that was at the max step and that the new hire comes in at a lower step for the Union contract. Okay, and

▶ 41:28 Mark Garipay: then I noticed that we haven't used any money in concrete, but I'm assuming we're still putting foundations and for we did 150 barrels. I'm assume correct still getting done.

▶ 41:40 Speaker 4: Correct.

▶ 41:41 Speaker 6: That's all my questions at this time.

▶ 41:45 Jen Grigoraitis: I believe I have Vice chair Migliorelli and Q. I also have some questions. I am also mindful president sonella that it is seven forty three. So I'm gonna recommend that we and that I entertain a motion to recess so we can Begin the full Council if that's the desire of the president.

▶ 42:03 Speaker 7: That's good. We do have an eight eight and an 8 15 additional public hearings right a nice.

▶ 42:08 Jen Grigoraitis: There's quite a few people in the hallway. So Madam chair,

▶ 42:11 Robb Stewart: oh motion to recess second. So we

▶ 42:14 Jen Grigoraitis: have a motion to recess made by counselor Stewart seconded by councilor Eccles all in favor. I all right. We are recessed until after we get through the public hearings. Thank

▶ 44:07 Speaker 1: to be now

▶ 44:51 Christopher Cinella: Good evening. Welcome to the June 6th city council meeting. The time is now 7:46. I am counselor. Sonala the council president. If we could have a roll call.