being here this morning i'm the chair of commissioner paul kelly police we're going to go through our agenda now and start with public testimony do we have any public testimony seen and if there are no objections we'd like meeting one of the members of the body visitors bureau came in and talked to us for a little bit so please take a minute to go over those minutes anyone have any don't number for review and discuss correspondence received commissioners you would have received a number of different correspondences some of which you copy or front of you others that were sent to you by e mail  let we can use it to talk a little bit about the recent reports the audit the premium paid overtime if you department of fire and public safety this is mostly just a notice that it came out that they had completed their audits and suggestions were well received maybe right into it would not appear so that the formal formal response from the fire department is also in the report itself opportunity to get lower paid people in those positions and then and the other side of that use are the lower paid people qualified to do the job and use the equipment that they're c it's an interesting question and a good report bring some good questions so i in that regard it's a good thing now i would caution our commissioners to consider the relationship that we've already stated in how we would interact with our county auditor especially in regards to reports that he gives out the primary one being that while we sit with his office that we've taken a very hands off approach to any of the reports or things that he's he's given up and neither do we have the responsibility of reviewing the work of the county auditor that's done by the co so any discussion that we have i'm not going to stop but please be aware that our relationship with our country auditor would limit to a certain degree of any formal criticism or review of the report itself having said that there are still items that we can learn from it and i think general critiques that in our own work separate it happened this allows the winner of the county council also has the ability to investigate as they see fit and lots of office is small enough that often they need to push think that he's done a great job i just haven't had a chance to really review the audit self but i didn't see the article paper that there is going to be an independent audience of certain in relation to the former finance director and so it was unclear in the article as you really what the independent writers in a look at now that's normal course of business you got it right every time we have a change in finance director there is an audit that occurs so this is not anything out of the ordinary this is something that's normal course of business that's in our charter exactly for the company got to have that kind of audit trail i'm aware that several i think that it just was unclear in the article whether or not because it's just simply talked about that the independent auditor would be looking at his  whatever accounts so it was unclear as to where they were going to look at the entire apartment or just one individual specific term that counts with and those departments john could you help us out a little bit with that or is that i'll be over all department itself ok as far as if there was you know him as a performance or as a finance director but also as far as the if there was any holes developed while he was the director or  suggest that we do it when we have a representative from the author's office and absolutely ok so let's let's put that on a future agenda and let's be sure that we do that when we have a representative from the office office and i think that it would be the reason that i feel we should look at it you know and that in particular policy and i should have a chance to meet you it is because it really ties in with what we've been looking at as far as over time overall so you know that's right so put that on a future as a future item and there are county auditors indeed there are some some things from it that's will probably discuss over the course of our own report when we talk about it but that's more in contrasting the way in which  books of all the apology may have seen in the news or there was a poor call and what i mean this monday by seaborne was involved in that process and i didn't realize how much time i was spending on it until speed in the inner period of the middle the month on the nineteenth of october received from additional information from risk management and we have the trailing three years for all the departments that we asked for so  the ratio of water supply seven point four and environmental management seven point three so there is room for a lot of room for improvement the best practice i you know i mean these are still somewhat above even the so so averages so you want to look at what's what's the stretch to get to the best to be the example and other utilities in private industry and drives up the cost of claims the burden of managing claims and then the human cost of the employee and the family and the team that is without that person while they're recovering just adopting best practices breaks benefits and we can lay out those benefits to the the room that there is for improvement between where value county currently is and best practices and then we can segue into recommendations and those are pretty straightforward as well sidgwick them to managing insurance companies a great resource that we can also identify a delivery company offering and get adopted best practices and all the steps that they went through with it i mean it's a there's a tremendous amount of information available from a white paper that has led to their whole decision making tree and timeline of what where they started out and then all the steps they went through where they ended up at so again this is not it's being the best is that everybody is the best and that's the reason you know that everybody and gaining the training and adopting the mindset of we're going to move beyond just doing a good job of managing the crying going to mexico a curfew we're going to actually working on preventing them so they've got they've done really good on part of it how are we looking on time lines for you to out to incorporate this new information that you have into the report this is here i can read over lunch for you that the draft th including the recommendations and it's great that i would like to to formalize those recommendations prior to and then have some period of time to allow but it's a we talk to sixty professional army guys that are on the front line to do the training and it's like i mean they want to strive for a zero in usa ok guys you know when i get pushback from somebody i'm consulting for manager in the construction company on the mainland someplace and they tell me oh well this is good enough you know and i sit there and i go well if your son or daughter are working out there would you want them to be one of the x number out of one hundred you know so it's you know mindset and the realization that we're none of us are perfect but we strive that's that's where the you know you try to be the best so you know you're going to take you guys into this really it's been a good learning process  talk a little bit about this because in a lot of ways the report that we have here is similar in some ways to the report that just came out from our county auditor and out it's identifying an area for where efficiency and money can be saved and the way that i like to frame this is the difference between being right and being helpful our ultimate goal here is not necessarily to be right but to be helpful well in the goal is there's a difference between making somebody say i agree with you versus them saying you know that is a good idea there's a loser that may be a difference but i want to hear any organization is going to try and adopt the best practices has to go from the start of the beginning with the with the understanding that this is a good idea it's not a good happened and we in which we go about doing that might change the degree to which we have not changed but rather than just the way in which we are you write down on the way in which we know we do the importance of this i'd like for future reports as much as for this report that we do what we can and it's a very pragmatic approach here i understand that but i i care more about being we'd like to improve things we like to help you out how can we help you out and i think especially for our role it's a more pragmatic one and it reaches our goals word opportunity to visit so if you could contact the water department and get a couple of days from her as well or just a visit about this but i agree i echo paul's absolutely one hundred percent and say that this isn't a gotcha moment this is changing a mindset and so we definitely want the work or somebody to say oh that's a great idea i want take that apart from any other discussion thirteen and let's move on then to item number we would have received a couple of different things the the link is about those items are what you're doing no you know i'm just basically trying to streamline this and you know just give the city like you said our recommendations you know probably get advised to try to create a bigger savings on the renewable debt energy and how we can go into that direction i mean for me my i think the strong point that really needs to be looked at is that a friend needs assistance in this because you can't see everything self and i think you know if you know we can find it can you know cause your friend some type of budget or a contract this out as an r f p to hire a company to look at all the facilities and be able to come up with some type of goals to set for everything i mean basically lot of this stuff that came out of the energy justice for this pretty much common sense stuff there's nothing really you know and this is just this kind of minimal stuff you know you can cut three to five percent already but i still think there's still room for a lot of facilities to do this but like i said i think what we need to look at is how we can make this recommendation to be able to have a little more help on that and be able to be able to see the problems that are out there and how we can go ahead and solve those issues and how overspending on energy and the type of material supplies things like that out there that we can begin to switch off because fort you know i think because it's not creating awareness these are being done and i think with some type of committee or some type of staffing to be able to go out and inspect these facilities and to call that are you know just being not efficiently use in the sense of energy wise or maybe you know just the water department alone i think and the sewer and things like that  can have a lot to change but i think you know just kind of set in the way things are you know that changes are being made because like i said the weirdness is not really pushed on our you know on that and so the president last month testified  don't want to engage in the monstrosity of a of a report that's there front of you so it's a it's a good like way of doing it and using the resources that we have it's a great resource i mean if you look at the four point america pretty much covers a lot of that i mean the meat points there is probably easier to understand still get you know see this i see that but like i said you know i think a lot of stuff still stuck in the eighty's and you know this is two thousand seven hundred thirty years and you know i mean and the goal to you know to reach removeable i mean it's i mean this is two thousand and seventeen we're going to twenty years to get there you know i mean something's got to start going now because of us all that was saying and promises to get to that point if we're going to continue on to do this to identify something that is i don't want to redo fred's work and yourself fred has a lot of stuff on his and they understand that he's very very busy but  saying look i agree with what it is they're i see is being i mean it's a good thing sure we agree but that's not investigating something so what's what i would like i mean there are we often take a look at these things and make no all things as simple as turning off the lights things as simple as changing up the light bulbs things as simple as replacing some of the infrastructure old why isn't it happening so that's that's  question is something that comes up in my mind that some people tell me oh it's so obvious i mean is it really that obvious it was so obvious that it would be getting done so there has to be something else that's happening there that makes it more difficult for people to switch out the light bulbs  and it could be like sanford said use the word awareness often perhaps there is that more where this well what do we do about it but i see that as being an appropriate investigation for our commission what do we do about it of my own home what it is it's so obvious to even my own home the things that i could be doing to to save energy and things like that and quite frankly i'm sure there's plenty of things that i could do in my own home but obviously it's not getting done because i'm not over there doing it so that it could be awareness thank you said but there's still some body of stuff right there is this stuff and i i don't know what it is and that's the thing like with parks for that exact thing why isn't it happening why are departments not proactively going out and saying hey let's do this this this and this because quite frankly the way that it looks from this report they don't need to have another r p to go in and change all of  bulbs and turn the lights off and things like that we don't need to pay somebody another forty thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars to tell us to do things that that we should already be doing so let's identify what those kinds of things are and their proper yeah i mean yeah you're always looking for i mean it depends i guess law depends where you're looking for some saving you know money and stuff but there has to be a desire and i think it goes back to the report to bally's taxes we have an automatic recommendation right there that the budget director says what beef they report back costs on some of these main things that can be most affected by these simple energy saving  policies that you've identified in these reports that's a simple recommendation that goes exactly to the awareness and the information that would be appropriate from this i don't know if it's or it could very well already be mentioned in the in the report itself there's one make one other comment how many people and was gracious to give us these the items that you have here i'd like to just start out with a letter that was sent from the mayor daily july twenty seventh and the long and short document is yes it is he gives it was created by the end of september no excuse me by the end of october twenty seventh two thousand seventeen and it is the pay that goes out the premium paid which is the over time for two thousand and fourteen two thousand and fifteen sixteen seventeen and as we so good question because we want you to look at the very last page so this is to go up to coincide with the maersk letter and as you can see the very last of the overtime is four million dollars a month we've already extended the same amount of money for which which validates why our commission decided to take this on and if i may say speak for sharon trial purple finding it on daunting but certainly a real important area so i just wanted you to look at the very in there that are over time already by the end of wrong sharon and i took the liberty of just highlighting on this piece several pages some of the spots that we thought were something to look at in we certainly don't have to do that fact that you know the over time is not staying stagnant it's not really decreasing it's actually increasing and we found out that these are some from the budget director she wanted us to know that there's only nineteen percent left of her budget of the budget in the finance  they have a lot of control over jobs scription over you know filling his position it's the county councils and then if they see th week unless there are some decisions made or recommendations and so i could call and i you know we sat down and we discussed this at length on several occasions and higher for it because on this is a huge problem it's not going to be resolved by any one of us going to any one department and say let's look at your job description consulting firm that has an experience working with other counties and other government agencies as to how to work with the unions a the second recommendation which is actually my personal favorite is that we reinstate the positions that were cut by the county council in atlanta because you know as an administrative person myself i know and i've worked in hotels that were you know in private industry before i went into public accounting there's always admin that gets cut first it's always the easiest place and then they start falling through the cracks s the third recommendation i think actually is powers own favorite and we recommended the h r director really make overtime for so much overtime are and we feel that that should be recommended that this should be his primary focus because they're talking millions of dollars and you had another point that you wanted to add the two areas that you would want to focus on as that director and she said and i said well first of all it would be a two pronged approach first of all i would want to see what my budget is now and i would need to understand what are the parameters that i must work with it in order to make my department the most efficient that it can be and then the second prong will be to make sure that my employees are healthy and happy and enjoy their job and have that we have a team approach and we all are on the same page as far as trying to cut costs in our department and even if it meant some sort of bonus program or something like a you know if we can cut overtime take a little i'm a little sensitive that as a former county employee you work really hard in your job and yes we are expensive we get sick time all of all of the things and retirement so the first line of defense for a lot of these folks is that ok if i hire a new body you're going to cost me more and it's like again that culture of thinking a i can see that county councils point of view as far as cutting positions now but they don't realize is a lot of times the positions are not field this one you're trying to find somebody who can is qualified to do the job i mean to do a job let's cut all these employees that way we don't have to pay in the future so what ends up happening here you know been that kind of thirty one year and you know of course the last few years i've been pointed so it ends up happening is is that we don't have that position full so we've got to do the work it's either do the work get paid overtime to do the work or to shut down services good example is but if the service to fall that you've got to be the body's been at the same time you need you need to find qualified people now in some instances and i will say that there is there are some accountability issues as ownership of all of this for example when we highlighted that the bottom want the money landscape paper that's payroll they're getting a new computer system that's going to require so much work to train the few people and already who's who's going to pay for it of people scott people have to do it and like you said the rubbish will pick up because it got people will get paid  that has to fall in the department head and all of that you know all of the department heads have to be accountable for their budgets that's really what we're asking and if we can be  service in recommending help to them in whatever capacity again we're not here to be blaming anyone we want be helpful but everybody i have spoken to and sharon as well have basically said you can't get there from here that's that's really the the long and short of really seeing how it was getting all of this if it's r individuals on the council and you just go away and don't forget the workers themselves because they're certainly going to take some blame for some of this and it makes you scratch your head  so everything stops and now we're looking at this time on four million dollars a month you're right if that's if that was your company when i spen contract for services which are regular jocks and that was called on the call and good so is a possible recommendation from this commission that we need to get a life changed because the fact that we cannot contract for services you know in the short term like it's somebody has to have training contract for some temps to come in and do the work body everybody's going to be it seems to me that's really i'd like to hear the reasoning for the law in the first place in the budget and then build it in the budget you know but when you ask you know when you have things that are when she when this particularly part only has nineteen percent left of their budget they have to keep going back right to keep going back and will go the way of the hospital because the hospital had a lot of financial issues and now the state is not involved in the hospital good or bad but you know after a while in a community where there was a very complicated project that was going to be permitting that would have required a lot of expertise on the engineering side in the programming process in texas there was the flexibility for the regulatory body to hire the outside resources but also in that permitting process the private industry that was evolved that wanted to go there permit fees paid for that also for it was very much enterprise and train because the way i understand it right now it's the the existing employees are going to have to you know some of the transitions somehow and that can be very very difficult so commission that he feels that there really isn't a problem everything seems to be fine so i think that number three you know it's kind of he doesn't think it's an issue for him talking to make it a priority  council member will come on to our meeting because he's the one who asked the chair of the budget and finance on the council that eliminated these two positions and one of them was an internal auditors so i sat there you go through this with just a little it's logical so again i go to my last issue i don't know how we encourage the department heads to really take mean you saw it was every hundred eighty dollars a month and last month it was one seventy five i mean that but that speck comes out of your pocket i think one of the reasons we're all here  zero or less than zero if i can get away with whatever with my money but i do it with the public's money there's a much higher standard there and we should treat that with a much better standard of care rather than of the bills or whatever money but the public's money going to do the public good right you know i appreciate the work that you've done and urgency and extensive and it sounds like there's been a lot of discussion and a lot of time that you spent in arriving at  these recommendations that you have here i'd like to see a little bit more of the front time i'd like to see a little bit more of exactly what led you to making these recommendations and i need it formalized in information and discussion and analysis that came before about our responsibility we need to see that budget gap we need to see exactly what it is what's not fitting is it my head is the one guy that says that there's the problem here but h r doesn't feel that there's a problem here now that could be for a number of very good reasons because structurally she can't do anything about it because we just don't have the bodies to fill for whatever whatever whatever i do need to hear why she doesn't feel that there's a problem i can meet with him again and show him i did not have all this stuff let's what does everybody think about that i mean what's the way that we proceed this it in a lot of ways i see it coming back to filling positions which is strictly an h r and budget responsibility right right thank you for what you've told me right but it seems that agree that there is some problems there h r doesn't think that there are some time to build positions i need to stratify that by the type of position it is you would feel if you think that higher salary positions will be harder to fill over that period of time we have to understand if there is some some period of time in which it goes back to council and that decision is actually made which may happen every budgetary every year when the budget comes around which would lead to the tightening of replacing people as being an important thing right of i need to know a little bit more about the process about this process and i think understanding that process will help us to understand more why our h r doesn't think it's a problem or or at least thinks that's a problem that he can't on his old solve ok so how do we get there from here overall operation is a department will actually lose monny to take on the deputy or the directors position because they will lose out on the overtime so on some cases because of the overtime issue they're actually making more money than the department is now it's ok it is in some industries it's like that but this whole overtime issue when it comes up to doing compositions for directors and deputies there's over to this  process i think there is a report that comes out regards for vacancies and a does go to consul when they start reviewing the budget and how long as they could seize bit by position numbers by department so i found i don't know where that report is but there is a report a little probably have a good idea of what that kind of think so that would be another good piece of information to take a look at and see see what's happening in that regard but yes that's right you know i mean if which would be also an appropriate recommendation was it but this is what i mean by we need to understand restaurant down there a bit more now so let's let's take a look at it from the how we are how we approach something you've already met with the director of  it not but i i was new it that so i didn't really have all my questions and documentation at hand i'm sure he wants to do a good job or i don't my comment to him was that job description is there in equated and again that's a general statement of twenty seven hundred jobs in a county but i'll use my job as an example my job had not been read by since one thousand nine hundred five and i've been gone five years from that job and i can almost guarantee you that it stands the way it was since one nine hundred eighty five so maybe some of the job descriptions of requirements are they can be tweaked a little bit and maybe you don't hae people with a master's level to do a particular job except but that is a huge when i mention that to the department head i mean that undertaking is twenty seven hundred people very part we also mention that to the budget director yes and she was adamant that the education requirement on most of those positions that she didn't feel that it needed to be changed that we needed to you know for for me i'm looking at the whole picture and i believe that we have a systemic problem and the problem is that the overtimes to hire and that what we need to do is make a recommendation to the county that somebody needs to pay attention to this you know somebody needs to look at it instead of passing in iraq to you know well it's the union or well it's the county council or whatever but that's what that letter was for either yes that's already been without going and actually on a team that i see that is being and from your injuries and you would have been you would know better because you've talked to more people about this and at least in the case of the budget office for this position the reason for the overtime is because she doesn't have another permanent staffer that could fill up the opposition and do those things which turns it into an h r it is an h r position that's causing this is very distinct from the issue with the fire department right these are completely different reasons for the same outcome right which is ballooning overtime preemie so that immediately gives us something that differentiates us from the auditors report room because we're looking at a very different issue that causes the very same symptom so i see that ok good we're starting to narrow down here a little bit so that that group will then come down to the h r process where i would start and what my suggestion servant relatively high level or even lower but the and their purpose would just be to explain the process to us what is the process how are these descriptions out there how long did it take how is it advertised have you seen problems in filling these kinds of things partly because you've already spoken to the director and we have some idea of his feelings on that but let's let's get something a little bit more operational here ok i'm going to understand a little bit more  does anyone have any when anyone have any other ideas on movements forward to get a good point about global cost of an employee versus the cost of overtime good and what is the rationale of them a director and i'm probably reading this you know so you can get that from the budget director so let's take a look at real cost as opposed to just solve the cost young and ask the question and the fight haven't you change the behavior then you know i mean it is there may be something that there may be a good then we can finalize our or our facts i think we need one more fifteen minutes and go around ok if you like to do that in january yes yes i will be able to do it will have you are a standing item on our agenda so you always have yet if you could or at least if you could get with shelly and make sure that all of this information is indexed and dispersed to us absolutely so that we can take a look at it and if you're able to find anything that explains maybe there's some state guidebook h guidebook which i wouldn't doubt that there is if you could have done it to us as well that would be extremely easy just to give us we have a lot of catching up to do so let's start the work oh let's catching up on what the and just did just out of curiosity  any other comments questions thank you very much but you know the discussion is very healthy discussion is healthy and i hope that it's scary isn't it when you look at this already and if you have any comments about the questions themselves how the questions are written or adding on to any questions request so all i'm just looking h and really helped that day come come together so it was a quite speak to their marketing and the internet efforts but first boots on the ground in the connections within the travel industry and working with the community they did a really really good job on this so i was step was i was pleased to see that that's a process that started back in april of this year so thank you very much maria i have  that pays for the m e b and not the state and city itself the degree to which our county pays for that money the four million dollars in terms of that grant now it may be it may be splitting a hair when it comes out of looking at this boat the big thing is that when we drop the recommendations our recommendations can to be thinking or should not be things that deal with changing the state organization rather they should be things related to the county's role well that could be got in and of itself could be a recommendation talking about the structure limit but that's that's the reason why because if if for example we didn't pay the money to the tourism industry i would not i would say that our charter responsibility is not to investigate that organization because it is not a county organization or the reason why i think that it would be appropriate for us to do because it's just looking at the fiduciary accounting for that gratitude that comes from a week  small things but i think that it will influence the types of recommendations that we give through this process so we can say something like the state leadership is really bad you know we need to change the state know you know that would be a less appropriate letter today from our commission because we have nothing to do with the state leadership or appointing that state leadership to depositional it to me i think it's not so much or there are some things that we've questioned about staff to make that available but just the troops on the ground the gauge the degree to the plaque that was exchanged on board ship to the logistics just to have the extended team really really made it possible if looking here that if our report is nothing more than pointing out the good things that the m v p does with that money i think it's it's well worth our time to do that right so it and i'm not going to say that it's all going to be good but i think an important component of our report is going to funds was to teach representatives to share the island with them so one of one thing they might want to ask is well where are you taking them and are you getting those vote item number seven discussion of potential topics to review does anybody have anything burning in their mind