covering today i will be focusing on the general fund revenues miss thomashefsky will be focusing on the general fund expenditures as well as the enterprise fund revenue and expenses and finally the proposed budget adjustments so first i will be covering the  sixteen as well as a comparison of the year to date actuals compared to the prior year year today actuals at twelve thirty one i'll be focusing on the year to date variance column as you'll see there the taxes are at two thousand and sixteen to be above budget by four seven million dollars this is almost entirely due to timing differences that i'll be getting into in detail in the next slide the other revenues and fees and charges those are coming in about one two million below budget at twelve thirty one for a net of three five million above budget but as i mentioned those are almost entirely due to timing differences that i'll be focusing on next as i mentioned in the previous slides the taxes are coming in above budget by four seven million almost entirely due to timing differences and this is almost entirely due to sales and use tax at the quarterly last quarterly investment report i spent a little time talking about the end of the triple flip and this is due to this variance of five million dollars is due to the end of the triple flip the triple flip ended last fiscal year and the final true payment of about two seven million came  august and that relates to last fiscal year so about half of that variance is related to that final true up payment there relates to the prior fiscal year the remainder of that variance is due to the end of the triple flip one of the ramifications of the triple flip is a change and how we receive revenues and it changes the distribution the triple flip when it was in place we received revenues through property tax as a portion of sales taxes and that came in the latter part of the fiscal year the second half of the fiscal year so now that the triple flip has ended we received sales taxes more evenly they're more evenly distributed so about two eight million of sales taxes are now received in the first half of the fiscal year that previously we were received in the second half of  the fiscal year and that makes up the second half of that variance so really the entire variance even more than that variance is due to these timing differences so when we look at actual sales tax growth for the fiscal year we have one quarter that we've received as of one thousand two hundred and thirty one it's actually below our adopted budget we have an adopted growth rate of three percent and it actually came in the first quarter at two percent so based on current year growth and trends were seeing w sales tax revenues we do believe sales tax is actually gonna come in below budget by about four hundred and fifty zero moving on to property taxes property taxes are showing at twelve thirty one to be about three hundred and seventy five thousand below budget this is almost entirely due to a timing difference in distributions from the county we actually think property taxes will come in above budget by about a hundred and twenty thousand the last variance i wanted to focus on is transient occupancy taxes it's right now showing about seventy six thousand dollars below budget at one thousand two hundred and thirty one this is due to hotel growth not being quite as strong as we had anticipated we also are predicting additional loss in the second half of the fiscal year due to the short term rental vacation rental enforcement and we predict that the t ot revenue could come in below budget by as much as seven hundred thousand so now that i've explained a little bit about why that year to da is so high for sales and use tax i wanted to go back and look at the general fund revenue summary with that sales tax adjustment in there to get a better idea of what the true year to date variance is overall so we talked about in the first slide that year to date variance for taxes being four point seven million but now we have about a five point five million dollar adjustment for the end of the triple flip this results in a revised year to date variance for all the categories a net total of two million below budget so it went from about three point five million to the good to a two million below budget and i did want to note however that we do have a few timing differences at twelve thirty one one example of that would be the property taxes that were it was moving on to other revenues absolutely don't double up by the end of the year so based on all the data that i have at one thousand two hundred and thirty one i'm projecting the total revenues below budget at the end of the year would be about two five million so it's not going to equate that all the way to the four million but things could change in the second half of the fiscal year so that's not an absolute number but that's based on information i have right now so at june th if what we're looking at now stays true we're going to be looking at a two five million dollar variance based on information through and thirty one correct okay and you said in the previous slide that property tax i'm sorry t o t is going to be about seven hundred zero or could be seven hundred thousand dollars lower than we  now and that's because you think t ou t's for the second half will shrink due to the short term rental enforcement in the second half of the fiscal year we think that that could have an impact on t ot primarily due to vacation rental tod returns so i thought i read that we only collected about seventy five zero and t ot in the last was it six months or was that the last month maybe that's where i'm mixing up my numbers how much have we been collecting lately with the  operators it it's when a lot of them it's when they go out of town is when they will rent out their home so it really varies a lot month a month i don't recall what the last month was but we do see a lot of it during the summer months okay yes the seven hundred thousand just struck me as large for a six month period for tio t's for short term rentals this late into their kind of sun setting we are showing a total loss of t and we hadn't budgeted budgeted that in for this fiscal year we budgeted part of it but not all of it  and then the property tax that's actually looking like will be one hundred and twenty thousand above budget correct it's just a timing difference and there's a slight delay in the distributions from the county okay thank you very much revenue swapping mechanism whereby they used a quarter of the one percent bradley burns sales tax and they took that to pay revenue bonds out to pay their bonds and bring in bursts the city through property taxes so there was no net effect to the city it was just a revenue swapping mechanism but it changed the timing of when the city would receive revenues and it just ended in the last fiscal year so moving on to other general fund revenues in total these are coming in about two hundred and forty thousand dollars below budget at twelve thirty one there's just a few variances i wanted to focus on fines and forfeitures are about two hundred thousand above budget and thirty one this is due to parking violations those payments we make payments to the courts which reduce those revenues those we only made about four at twelve thirty one versus six we also received some  overpayments in the prior year the net of those two items we believe will result in about one hundred thousand dollars positive variance at the end of the fiscal year the next variance is relates to use of money and property it's coming in about a hundred and twenty four thousand below and thirty one this is almost entirely due to investment income where interest rates are just below where we had anticipated and the last there's two more i wanted to discuss the next one is intergovernmental is coming in above budget about  hundred and eighty zero that's due to mutual aid reimbursements for the fire department the fire department budgeted about six hundred zero and as a one thousand two hundred and thirty one had already received five hundred and eighty thousand and the last one is miscellaneous i actually have a slide that goes into detail so i will wait to talk about that this is the miscellaneous detail in total about four hundred and twenty four thousand below budget at one thousand two hundred and thirty one the first one is an actual miscellaneous category this is almost entirely due to just payment to vendors it's just a timing difference on examples an ar a m our reimbursement to the fire department but we expect to meet budget by year end the second one is operating and transfer in this a due to traffic citation sorry traffic safety citation revenues they are down for the current fiscal year by about one hundred and ninety thousand dollars and that's due to staffing shortages in this program and staff does expect to come in under budget by about one hundred and forty zero in the last area i will focus on is general fund fees and service charges coming in about a hundred i'm sorry about a million below budget at one thousand two hundred and thirty one there are three areas was focusing on that is public works about four hundred zero below budget at twelve thirty one this is almost entirely due to staff vacancies in billable positions primarily engineering also a hundred and sixty thousand in in kind general fund contribution for the cliff drive las positas project where there's no corresponding revenue and staff does project this to come in under budget by as much as nine hundred thousand by the end of the year next a library is about four hundred and seventy thousand below is reimbursements it's a difference of about a hundred and thirty six thousand dollars below budget this is due to interdepartmental reimbursements that are booked at year end we see this every year at mid year and we expect to meet budget and that is everything i was going to present but i'm happy to answer some more questions councilmember to make it a question sorry i didn't hear what you said about the public works number public works is due to staffing vacancies primarily in the engineering department which is their billable positions so we related to things such as work orders and so there's also a corresponding decrease in on the expenditure side so we'll see the revenue impact but we'll also see the savings on the expenditure side well we do expect to be staff expects to be as high as nine hundred thousand below budget by iran and going back to the slide before that you mentioned traffic safety citations were down correct and what's the amount that they were down about nine about a hundred and ninety thousand below budget and  to be down at the end of the year about a hundred and forty hundred fifty thousand a significant amount as well i would have to have i mean i would assume that's the response but i would probably have to have police respond to that i'm not sure if if we have laurie  and only reason i'm concerned is is i'm not sure about the city's safety statistics but i know nationwide traffic fatalities and injuries are way up this year so it would seem like we want to make sure we're doing as much as we can to enforce these rules and i know we were down significant personnel in the department last year and i know where we're ramping back up so i may be at a future point we could hear of someone's walking up now maybe the future is here group in the fall so i think you'll see us staffing up those enforcement positions with those additional bodies coming online great thank you good afternoon chair heart committee members i'm jennifer thomashefsky the accounting manager for the finance department and again i will be going over the general fund expenditures the enterprise fund revenues and expenditures and the budget adjustments today as well so this first slide probably looks very familiar it's the general fund expenditures and it's broken out by the different departments in the next column is the adjusted annual budget so again this is original adopted budget including also including carryforwards from the prior year and any current year appropriation changes throughout the year and that is about  hundred and twenty nine point seven million dollars for fiscal year seventeen the next column is the year to date budget the year to date budget which is a three year average benchmark and then we have your actual year to date and then in the column that we'll be discussing is the variances without encumbrances so at mid year we have about we're about two point eight million below budget so when we look at our year to date budget it's about sixty six million versus our actual of about sixty three point two four about a two eight million dollar savings at mid year i'm going to just go through a couple highlights administrative services has about a two hundred and seventy eight thousand dollar but the remaining of the remaining savings is professional services in elections which staff anticipate will have the savings at year end another area i wanted to point out was police to kind of piggyback on what we talking about police has about a savings of about one point eight million at mid year and at mid year there were twelve vacancies and let's see there's overtime was about it was i think about a million over budget i half a million to a million i need to double check on that but it was far offset by the savings that with the vacancies of those vacancies we have the comprised of about two officers six dispatchers two parking enforcement officers one animal control officer in one information technology position and as we stated the next academy starts in april staff still anticipate that the savings by year end will be about two point four million and i think in the narrative in the narrative it says two seven however after that was written staff changed the projection for year end and moving on to fire in the opposite direction fires over budget by about one point two million at mid year and as in the past the majority of this is related to mutual aid activities i think about eight or nine hundred thousand that's related to mutual aid expenditures beyond budgeted amounts but we do know that revenues are anticipated to far exceed the mutual aid revenues that will come back  going to be a year in about four hundred thousand more than the mutual aid expenditures by year end there is another component to this overage of about three hundred thousand thats related to staffing they do have two positions that are overfilled so those overfilled positions are filled but there is no corresponding budget to those so the department is looking at they're watching their revenues and expenditures and as in  prior years they'll come back later with budget adjustments to offset some of these overages i wasn't going to go into a lot of the other departments but across the board it's it's similar to the last couple years in public works parks library community development we see a lot of savings from salaries and that's just continued this year so one area the last area i did want to just point out is the non departmental this is over budget by about seventy three thousand at mid year typically the activity and the non departmental are one time transfers so it's really just a timing difference and the timing difference is also offset by about a hundred and thirteen thousand in appropriated reserves that are programmed in the last couple years the appropriated reserves were about two million and two point three million whereas this year only a hundred and thirteen thousand were appropriated or programmed for fiscal year seventeen so again this is just timing differences so just again to a favorable variance about two eight million however we do have three eight million income birds so it's a lot of that's just a timing difference we do anticipate to see probably around anywhere from two to four million in savings by year end so any questions before i move on to enterprise funds so this next slide is a similar format to the last slide we have the different enterprise funds and then we have again the annual budget which again is original adopted budget plus prior year carry forwards and any changes throughout the current year and again the year to date budget is also a three year average and our actuals and then our variances so first i wanted to talk about the water fund so at mid year water revenues are about one point five million above year to date budget and about nine hundred thousand of this is due to surplus water sales and the main reason for this is over the i think we're in the third year of a five year replacement program to replace twenty four thousand meters and to date i think about thirteen thousand of those have been replaced and that's resulted in higher measured water sales and less system losses as compared to the original rate model so in addition to that buy in and tap fees are about three hundred and seventy thousand higher than the year to date budget and this is due to new development in the upper state street area so even though revenues are high at mid year staff are still anticipating that revenues could be approximately two and a half million below budget by year end and this is a combination of the recent wet weather in addition to the the lawn watering band that took effect in january so on the expense side water the water fund is about four point four million below budget at mid year and this is due to about a million in savings due to reduced chemical and landscape costs as i earn media did not need to be replaced as originally anticipated and there was also about four hundred and seventy thousand in salary savings here as well i believe there were ten vacancies in water operations but the vast majority of the savings is large savings and professional services from the desalination facility as the plants not yet online and again the staff anticipate that the savings at year end will be about four point one which will at least you know offset any reduction in revenues that are expected by year end so next i'm going to go on to the wastewater fund wasn't really going to talk about revenues they're pretty much tracking at budget they're slightly over and i believe those are there are they're slightly over from sewer buy in but the real discussion here is the expenditures are below budget by about seven hundred and thirty thousand and this is really a combination of several items there's also vacancies here as well  facilities maintenance and equipment repair is below budget by about three hundred and forty thousand staff are incorporated in several budgeted items into the cip program for improvements which is freeing up the operating budget and in addition operations and maintenance engineer has been temporarily reassigned saving a little over two hundred thousand dollars for that and then lastly waste disposal costs are below budget by about a hundred and thirty thousand  this is due to the use of a lighter polymer which basically reduces waste which in turn reduces hauling costs so at year end staff anticipate that savings could reach one point five million and next i would go i'm going to talk about the airport fund and i skipped over downtown parking but i guess i just quickly revenues are slightly below budget but they're still tracking i'm back  on downtown parking that the revenues are estimated to be about fifty zero fifty five thousand above budget by year end they changed the hours that's at one of the at the kiosks opening an hour later and staying open an hour later and they're anticipating then that's going to be a revenue generator and on the expense side about you see it's down about three hundred and seventy four thousand about a hundred and fifty five thousand of that is also salary savings and then the remainder is special projects and that's just a timing different staff anticipate spending that by your end and estimate that there will be about a hundred and eighty five thousand in savings that you're in for downtown parking so now i will go back to the airport so the airport is currently about three hundred and ninety thousand higher than year to date budget the majority of that is a timing difference from a one time transfer from the airport development fund and that was for reimbursement of expenses that incurred on six thousand one hundred hollister for the sale of that property and they did increase their landing fees so they did have some increases in their non commercial and commercial aviation revenues and they do anticipate revenues to be over budget by about three fifty zero at year end and then on the expense side they're there at mid year there's about a five hundred and sixty one thousand dollar savings at mid year and about again two hundred twenty eight thousand of this as a result of salary savings from vacancies and the remainder is services and supplies that are encumbered but not yet spent and at year end they anticipate this will grow to about one point one million in savings at year end about half due to salary savings and the remainder just a timing difference to care they plan to carry that forward into fiscal year eighteen and lastly i was going to quickly go through the golf fund so the golf fund at mid year is about two hundred and four thousand dollars below budget below year to date budget on four revenues and about fifty eight thousand of this is due to green fees so even though compared to last year green fees are about three percent higher that still slightly below budget so the budget was a little maybe more aggressive than their the what's actually unfolding and then the remainder is due to the timing of loan or transfer from the general fund that won't happen until at year end so staff estimate that by year end revenues will be below budget by about one hundred and twenty seven thousand and on the expense side we see revenue expenditure expenses are below budget by about three hundred thousand and so again effective two thousand and seventeen the city did enter into a contract with the new management company to manage the maintenance and operations of the golf course the department reimburses reimburses them a month after the fact so when the expenses are incurred they submit for reimbursement so there's always a one month delay in that so at mid year there were only five months of expenses captured in this number as well let's see see in addition there were about fifty eight thousand in savings due to reduced contributions to the general fund for golf staff that were able to be placed into existing positions and then about thirty two zero savings ends and for vacancy  so again at year end the for the expenses are projected at year end to be about two hundred and seventy thousand two hundred and seventy thousand below budget so again this will offset the reduction in revenue and end in about a hundred and forty four thousand favorable variance so that's all i had for the enterprise fund so unless you have any questions i will move on to the budget adjustments so we have about six slides for the budget adjustments and this first slide these all relate to the central library the very first adjustment for six thousand eight hundred dollars this is a request to increase appropriations and estimated revenues for damage from a fedex i think it was a fedex truck it created it hit the central library book drop so they're requesting to appropriate the funds for the repairs to the damage and to receive the reimbursement from fedex and then all the remaining all the remaining adjustments you see here they're to receive and utilize contributions from various organizations for several library programs at the central library i'm not going to go into those in detail but they're in your packets so this next slide there's two parts to this one so this this first slide has two parts to it as well so the first eighty seven zero this is a procedural adjustment and it's to remove its to move remaining unused reserves for capital projects back to the operating funds that originally funded them in the first place and we're going to see several of those in on the upcoming slides so at that year at year in fiscal year sixteen there was about a hundred and twenty one thousand in unused reserves  streets capital fund so they're asking to transfer eighty seven thousand back to the operating fund but they're also asking to appropriate thirty five thousand of those in the streets capital fund and this is to be used for the sycamore creek letter of map revision which is due to associated work in the floodplain so this when the budgets were prepared staff were not aware of this require it didn't exist yet  so this is a new requirements therefore staff are asking to appropriate the funds for that and this next group of that's a member why shouldn't we get some information on that dam or city engineer so the letter of map revision is required by fema federal emergency management agency for any work within the floodplain or floodway and we've been doing a lot of bridges throughout town as you're probably aware fema and the department of water resources came out in two thousand and sixteen and did what is called a community assistance visit and they go out and just look for work that has occurred within those areas and they look at both private and public projects and they know did some work that had occurred specifically along sycamore creek we did our  improvements then there was also the work at the mobile home park adjacent so they didn't have anything on file for either of those both the public and the private and sent us a letter asking us to get things submitted  which would show whether or not the flood map would change and so we're doing some work with a consultant we have a proposal from him to move forward so that we can get that information over to fema and i mean ideally when we do these improvements the map changes for the better and we can get some people out of the map and out of having to pay for the insurance home park is that the two story mobile home park is that the one that we're concerned with there yes that's correct and so are they helping to pay for this they are doing their own separately and the one that we're doing is not covering them then it's covering the bridge there was yes it would be a lot if all they were doing was a letter i think that's kind of not helpful terminology what they've come up with it's so what what the consultant submits is called a conditional letter of map revision and then when the work is done you turn in a letter of map revision in this case the works already been done so we're gonna have them just go ahead and do the letter of map provision for the work that's been completed but we also do have some additional work that's proposed so there's kind of three phases to this the letter of map revision for the work that's already been done and then they will be submitting a conditional letter of map revision for the work that's planned we've got the montecito street bridge and also soledad those pedestrian bridges incidentally those projects should be out to bid next week so that's great news there and so that would be a conditional letter of map revision then followed finally by a letter of provision which would cover everything that's been done and that work requires extensive analysis of the the drainage and you know they go and they get cross sections of the channel and model different storm events and come up with depth of water for the one hundred year so there's a lot of analysis and they need to have the right software that's compatible with fema so that when the informations received it will be acceptable did we do this stuff before we started building and before we started designing we haven't done this before because in the past all we had done was was called a no rise certification and we felt like that was sufficient and fema never said anything it's just been recently that they've alerted us that the no rise certification from an engineer is not adequate they need to see the detailed  analysis from the consultant who can do the who's got the software and can model it and typically that happens during the design process it's just it doesn't get packaged up and sent to fema so now we're taking that step and it will be included  all of the future projects as part of the scope of work for the consultant great thank you sure okay so the second are the last adjustment on this slide are for the county the county library fund and again similar to the last two the to those on the slide these are to receive to receive and utilize contributions from the various organizations for several of the county library fund programs so for solving solving montecito and carpinteria and again the details of these are included in your packets so on this next slide we look at the first the first group of adjustments would be for the police grants fund and there's three adjustments here the first one relating to the memorial statue project so to honor the five officers who lost their lives in the line of duty with the santa barbara police department a life sized bronze memorial statue will be constructed and the statue will be financed entirely through donations and fundraising effort so to date they have received another eighty five eighty six hundred dollars and the second adjustment for two hundred and fifty five dollars this is a clean up item additional donations were received year which fell to reserve so staff request to appropriate those to use for animal control equipment and then the last the last adjustment for three thousand this relates  to related training so the city is eligible to receive an allotment from the state specifically for nine hundred and eleven so that's it for the police grants fund and this last group of adjustments again this is more of those procedural cleanup have you basically again these are unused capital funds in the water capital fund and the water drought fun being returned back to the water operating fund and i thought you might have a question about why the eleven million is so high so we did look at that and it's actually a combination of several several things that happened so there was about three and a half million that was received from the state to the water drought fund for expenses that were actually incurred towards the  facility and those expenses were actually incurred in the operating fund so we need to transfer that that transferred those reserves back to the operating fund the were another four million water development project and then another one point are one three million and budgeted d desalination appropriations that were later rebooted in the srf fund itself so when you look at all of those in total they equal the eleven point three million that we're transferring back to the operating fund councilmember dominguez what was the four million dollar number you gave us it's a combination of three reimbursements from c omb ccw a state water and ccw a conveyance so the combination of those are four million i don't have a lot of details on those mister chair commissioners these are all things actually we had identified when we put together our budget and particularly their rates that were adopted in august these were all kind of unknowns and just kind of walk through them comb was for the barge barge cost that in net brought back that four two million dollars and then we also had money in there for groundwater that we did not drill a new well and so that money came back as well so we'd kind of that was the best case scenario we were hoping for and it's starting to okay so this next slide these first two adjustments these are again more clean up transferring unused capital reserves back to the operating funds in this case for wastewater in downtown parking and the last budget adjustments relate there's two more that relate to the gulf fund and this first one so what this is it's at the end of fiscal year sixteen about a hundred and forty nine thousand in reserves and the fleet replacement fund had been over the years accumulated and for fiscal starting for the gulf fund and starting fiscal year seventeen parks and recreation has elected to have the gulf fund finance their own vehicle replacements going forward and so this is a request to have those reserves transferred to the gulf fund and we'll see the other half of this adjustment on the on the next slide and the last adjustment this relates to debt service and what this is so the gulf fund has two general fund loans the gulf safety improvement loan and the  cop advance and the principal and interest for the two loans were under budgeted in air so this is a correction to get the principal and interest amounts corrected it's in total about one hundred and twenty eight thousand  so that they can pay the correct amounts and this next this next slide this one this one relates to the fuel site upgrade loan it's a little confusing in that it goes through three different funds and so what this is is the facilities management fund has seventy five thousand in reserves that are designated for upgrades to the fuel distribution and storage system and currently the fuel upgrade project has begun in the fleet fund so the facilities because these reserves relate directly to this project staff recommend using these reserves to help fund that project down on the on in the lower section you see the fleet maintenance fund and the fleet replacement fund so this is where it gets a little complicated in that the fleet replacement fund loaned the amount to the of the project to the fleet maintenance fund this is why it has to go through the three different funds so it basically it's transferring the fleet operation or the  facilities operating fund that has the reserves is transferring them to the maintenance fund which can then reduce their loan to the fleet replacement fund so it's just a little bit confusing and this next this next section this is again more of that cleanup moving the unused capital reserves to the operating fund for the facilities operating fund and then the last the last two budget adjustments also relate to the fleet replacement fund so the first one this is to increase staff recommend increasing appropriations ninety thousand dollars and this is to purchase three animal control vehicles that need to be replaced the current vehicles have inadequate ventilation and it's causing employees to become ill and efforts to seal off the passenger area from the cargo area have been unsuccessful therefore the vehicles need to be replaced and then the last adjustment this is the other half of transferring the one hundred and forty nine of reserves one hundred and forty nine zero to the gulf fund so we have one more adjustment and this relates to this the successor agency fund and the funding for the lower state street sidewalk project was approved by both the successor agency oversight committee and the state department of finance the project is tied to the law entrada development and will be completed this fiscal year and the revenues have alba already been received through tax increment payments this adjustment increases the appropriations from the available reserves so that's it for my budget adjustments so just to recap  recommendations we ask that you accept the interim financial statements for mid year and approve the proposed budget adjustments and that concludes my presentation and i'd be happy to answer any questions thank you very much for the pre questions is there a motion to accept the financial statements and approve the proposed budget adjustments is there a second all those in favor say aye aye opposed abstain nobody thank you very much for that information comprehensive report next thing on our agenda is options for enhanced band and waste collection service mister four are you gonna take this thank you und budget hearing for fiscal year seventeen we were directed by council to go and look at some options for combating the prevalence and and the breadth and scope of abandoned waste that we see in the city so working with marburg staff who's here today derek carlson marr works business manager we've we've looked over the pretty intensely over the past several months at some of those options we're here today to recommend several options for you to consider to be built into services the beginning in fiscal year eighteen but also the cost of those services to be built into the trash and recycling rates that we charge to city ratepayers beginning in fiscal year eighteen as well eighteen and then a couple of enhancements that were brought up by community members both to me directly some at the council meeting and then some through the neighbourhood advisory committee that we are not opting or recommending for implementation at this time and then finally how this would all bear out if you do agree and concur with staffs recommendation so just by way of background as i said in july of fourteen the city entered into this new agreement with marburg for ten years and i think it's helpful to know from where we came as it pertains to abandon waste prevention and service and so under this new agreement we expanded abandoned waste collection citywide and we used marwar again previous years serviced up to a thousand abandoned waste events throughout the city we doubled that to two thousand at that time that would not only cover our current load of abandoned ways but it actually gave us some breathing room and so by doing that on the prevention side we also expanded bulky waste collection in the residential sector and single family residents always received one bulky waste collection every year we expanded that to two we also brought for the first time bulky waste collection to multi unit residential properties now derrick and i went out to and met with five or six of the largest property management companies in the city as we design this program to ask them how how it should work what would be the best means to have this happen and then looking at how other jurisdictions did this and then also talking to our customers we decided that it would be best to provide this service through the account holder through the the multi unit property owner or manager so that they would have control over when and where bulky waste would be collected you could imagine if you had a hundred unit apartment building we'd want that coordinated so what we had envisioned was that a property manager for their property would pick a date and pick a saturday work with marburg to provide a roll off box or whatever it is in the in the right of way for all of the residents of that apartment building would then advertise it to its tenants and then on that one controlled specific saturday all of the tenants would take their bulky waste out to a central location that had been pre planned so that's the way that we set it up now what have we seen since tw fourteen so since the new contract went into place we've noticed three things the first is that the incidence of abanda increased and it's increased rather dramatically over the past two or two and a half years we've seen about a sixty percent increase in the number of abandoned waste sites throughout the city anecdotally we thought that was correct bope now we have the data and we've gone into the data to bear that out the second observation is that the system that we have in place to receive abandoned waste reports it's inefficient and in many cases it's leading to two delays in marburg servicing that pile now maura borg has a contractual obligation to collect wa within seventy two hours of that report getting to marburg in a form and format that's actionable and they always hit that but there are other external factors that have led to longer delays where waste is sat out on a roadway for longer than seventy two hours and we're aiming to fix that the third observation is that bulky waste collection alone in the residential sector even with the expansion that we've put into place is not a an effective means of keeping pace with the abandoned waste that we're seeing right it's a it is a deterrent it is a preventative measure but it's not solving our problem and we'll go into some of our findings related to that so the first observation the incidence of abandoned years within that it's important to note that in response to dwindling streets revenues the streets department as they refocused on their core mission of street maintenance and repaving and repair they they pulled back on the amount of abandoned waste collection the streets division was undertaking and they did some they this was not equivalent to marburg's level of service but there was some level of service provided by the streets department for abandoned waste and so one of the things that our recommendation will solve then is picking up that some of those incidents that the streets division previously took care of  would put that on marv org shoulders as as we'll lay out in our recommendation today the second thing to note is that the streets division also took care of some homeless  encampment cleanups as well and they coordinated that with the police department one of our recommendations will be that we build that into the solid waste rates so we have a steady funding source moving forward so in relation to our current abandoned waste reporting system i said it's inefficient and it leads to delays in servicing this is how it works so the streets division their dispatch line which is in charge of all all of the dispatching of streets activities during the day has also doubled as the abandon waze intake line for the city this is a historic legacy system we you know at the time that it was set up years and years ago they could probably handle it now that there are having to take two thousand two hundred and eighty one calls in it just isn't a robust enough system to handle that so because of that what happens the reports come in streets forwards those to dispatch a truck to go pick it up if the information is correct its collected within seventy two hours what we're finding is if the information is incorrect if it's east ana pam you not west and if  it's some address but all actually it's the alleyway behind that address then marburg drives all over creation looking for these things or goes back to the office has to track down the rp which many times on a voicemail system is not easy to do or there's no contact information so it leads to delays and that's something that we've heard from the community and we're looking to to address the third observation through two thousand and fourteen as i said is that bulky waste collection on its own is insufficient to to curb abandoned waste one of the things that we did last summer marburg and the city as derek and i went back out again to the same five property management companies and said we've had this service in place for a couple years how is it working is there anything we can do to improve it are there obstacles to using it and based upon what they said and some other insights the environmental services division  developed and implemented a multi pronged outreach campaign specific to multi unit property owners and tenants to make them aware of this service to try to increase the use we wanted greater participation in th service that the clients are already paying for in their their trash and recycling bills so between august and november we hit it pretty hard and what we found is we were able to achieve a gain in the single family residential sector of twenty five percent we saw a twenty five percent increase in the number of single family residential customers that use this service was pretty good we also saw an increase in the multi unit residential sector of eighteen percent but overall if we look at even with those increases overall in the residential sector as a whole we're still only seeing an overall participation rate of twenty percent sector wide now that's pretty consistent with other jurisdictions when we when we've called around and asked about this it's it's twenty percent it's serving as a preventative means because if we can bring a truck to somebody's curb it's less likely that that those big bulky items like couches refrigerators those things mattresses will end up on the curbside or as a bandhan waste but  concerted effort we were able to get participation to twenty percent and yet we're seeing a sixty two percent increase in abandoned wastes they're not keeping pace with each other but we tried we tried to make it happen counc me make sure i understand these stats so twenty percent sector wide total participation are you saying eighty percent of people don't use this channel so they're either dumping or they're taking it themselves that's correct and then the sixty two percent number what does that mean it mean in my mind that means there's sixty two percent more waste being generated in the city where's well we don't know the origin necessarily but what we've seen is the number of abandoned waste piles are in have increased sixty two percent annually so if we take twelve months of abandon waste incidents between two thousand and fourteen and two thousand and sixteen that number has increased by sixty two percent so are there channels that we no longer have or people no longer driving trucks full of stuff to different dump off points or all of the permitted facilities that we had in two thousand and fourteen are still available the only variable that we know of is the reduction in streets division service but we don't really know exactly how many so to the extent that there are some piles out there that that the streets division used to service we would like to put that on marburg and have them augment that that service level could be that people find it effective to leave stuff on the curb because we picked more of it up and so it makes them to do that unfortunately so with that wit based upon those findings we're bringing to you a couple of recommendations the first is that we transfer the reporting responsibilities from the streets division dispatch line to marburg based upon this additional volume of calls and the time that the streets division would spend tracking down reporting parties and getting actionable information we can do that and marburg can handle that with an enhancement of about ten thousand dollars to their customer service center what we get in return for that is a fully staffed customer service center that's open and somebody will talk to a live person during all business hours monday through saturday they will also have bilingual customer service reps which which has proven to be an obstacle with our streets dispatch line and marburg csrs are particularly adept and trained at soliciting detail they know the questions to ask to get accurate so that when they cut the service order marburg drivers know exactly where to go and pick this up so we think that should happen  hopefully sooner than later or even immediately the second recommendation is that we increase to increase abandoned waste collection events from our current two zero to two five hundred that will bring us once again up to what we're seeing now we had twenty two eighty one in two thousand and sixteen it'll give us a little bit of a buffer but at least it will bring us to where we are today and that cost would be thirty three seven and then the final recommendation is that we we generate about twenty thousand dollars through the trash recycling rates to ensure that our historic level of homeless encampment cleanup continues so historically we've done anywhere between twenty five and thirty five homeless encampment cleanups a year it's one of the p objectives for the police department we are proposing to generate twenty thousand dollars the average cost per homeless encampment cleanup in the last last year was eight hundred and eighty dollars so rounding it up to a thousand to account for the higher tipping fees at two higa some things we think that's just a prudent move again just to keep current or keep service levels in this arena to what they have historically been and then lastly the fourth recommendation is to grant the finance director change order authority of up to thirty thousand dollars a year to augment abandoned waste services wherever they might be needed so for example it could be that if we go to two thousand five hundred and one abandoned waste events we can pay for that additional increment if we so choose it could be additional homeless encampment cleanups if we go above the twenty that we're estimating that this would cover it could be that we dispatch a flatbed truck and a crew from our board to particular hotspot areas around the city just to get them under control we're not waiting for calls to come in we just we know that this area we just need to get a handle on it we might dispatch a truck for a couple of days and this would give the finance director the authority to do that just to keep pace so all told the total cost of these recommendations is ninety three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars as it pertains to customer rates that equates to a point four five percent rate increase on all city trash and recycling services for the traditional single family residential customer it would be a sixteen cent per month increase and we wanted to recommend this incremental approach just being sensitive to the other utility rate increases that are being proposed in fy eighteen so ours this ninety three thousand dollars would be you know sixteen cents a month on that on the average household we think it's prudent we think it's a good incremental approach and we think we can dramatically knock down some of these pervasive problems so those are the recommendations that we are bringing to you today there are a couple other things that other groups had provided to us or suggested to us as part of this investigation the the primary one was from the westside neighborhood association and they had asked us and asked counsel at the budget hearing last year could the city entertain putting a rebate on abandoned mattresses so for example on the west side when we see mattresses everywhere could we put a fifteen or twenty dollar rebate on those two essentially hire a diffuse workforce of residents to bring those in well currently and this is as of last year marburg under the mattress recycling council extended producer responsibility legislation they became a collection point for that program for that for the the product stewardship mattress legislation so now when those mattresses come in when people bring those to the marburg yard marv are used to charge ten dollars a mattress because of their enrollment in this mrc program they've been able to drop that fee to zero and they're able to handle the number of mattresses that come in i realize there the collection point for not only the city of santa barbara but also the south coast portions of the unincorporated county and goleta so they on for our benefit they collected about almost four zero mattresses last year in total they've taken in ten to twelve thousand as a region serving all their customers so we we talked to marburg about that and we said do you have any more capacity if we were to offer this rebate could you handle it and they said no we can handle the you bought a new mattress and you want to you know swap yours out we can handle that to open the floodgates to start paying people to bring them in they said we can't safely take those we don't have any more room we have a lot of dangerous stuff here going on in our yard and you know we couldn't accommodate that so at this point we're not recommending that we move forward without that recommendation so in terms of the next steps sure that's right i mean so we have a problem here that we're saying well we can't handle it that seems like a tough place to okay let's say they would be overrun there are there are plenty of solid waste facilities or potential collection points what we would recommend and what we've already brought to the local task force this collection of jurisdictions t about regional solid waste planning we think this should be done at the regional level where the county's facilities are available the transfer station with other potential collection points what we're all doing this together so that we're spreading this number of mattresses out over a larger geographic region and not just being dependent on marwar as one facility to take everything that could come in because realize if we don't do this as a region once the city of santa barbara offers a rebate you may very well have mattresses from goleta from nolita from other jurisdictions coming in because we're the ones paying if we do this uniformly we think that's the better way to go just as it pertains to mattresses so so before you get into the timeline i just want to i go into some of the details a little more so one i'm obviously very much in in favor of some changes i've emailed you and talked to you a few times about details you know particularly with  my area the district downtown district and the east side there's a lot of mattresses and bulky items the concerns i have is that we're gonna raise people's rates and this is because we're not getting the people who are generating the ways to pay for it themselves so we're spreading out the burden and that to me is a second choice the first choice would be to narrow down where we're collecting money to the people who are generating the waste and and it sounds like you've talked to some of the large apartment owners the the problem i i see and that i saw earlier is they're only getting one or two pickups a year whether there are eight units or a hundred units so it seems expected that people are going to just put stuff out on the street and from what i understood as well correct me if i'm wrong the tenants themselves aren't calling for pickups it's the owners or the property managers who have to call so there's another level of bureaucracy you you gave us this blue arrow that has different steps but for the apartment buildings there's actually an initial step that's not listed where the where the apartment dweller has to call the property manager and there could even be a breakdown there and there's probably is if they're leaving not of their own accord so i'd love to see a tightening of the nexus between who's generating the trash and who's paying for it is there something we looked at to do that well let me answer this in two parts the first is that we looked in the staff report goes into greater detail about opening the potential of opening bulky waste collection to tenants directly what what this recommendation here is today is what we're recommending that we know we can put into place right now and part of what is driving this is our the calendar that we go by in order to set rates for each fiscal year and so the things that we that the city in marburg have successfully been able to note negotiate costs and processes for are represented in these recommendations what we haven't been able to work out yet is the system by which we would open this to tenants directly because this both the city's utility billing system and marburg's billing system are set up for account level transactions it's the account holder now they've been talking to their software developers they've been talking to their system engineers about could we make some changes to offer this to tenants we just don't have that system in place yet they can't definitively tell us yes we can it doesn't mean that at some point we can't it doesn't even mean at some point in mid year of fy eighteen we couldn't make this change we'd have to do the noticing like we're doing but we just  we can't we don't want to start collecting fees on something that we don't know we can make it work but since december when you first brought this up at the work session we've been diving into the possibility of making that happen we just haven't gotten there yet and so there are some some logistical challenges to offering it to tenants and being able to track who in a particular multi unit property has called this in how many times what's the aggregate and so we're busy marburg was able to do is to say look assume we have the system in place this is an estimate of the cost that it would it would take and so working with community development department looking at the number of  tenant welling units in the city assuming the same levels of participation rate for those tenants as we see in single family the cost would be about three hundred and thirty thousand dollars as a as a ballpark and if you wanted direct us to continue to work on a system that might open the door to tenants we'd be glad to do that we just don't have that right here today in order to do can cluesive lee say that we can start that in fy eighteen so what i'm talking about something simpler where we just have an increase in the number of pickups based on the number of units in the building for well we can you know we could look at that yeah i mean i am assuming trash generation is pretty linear per per household here's my only caution to that and i'll just give you my opinion but you can take it or leave it is the first question we tried to answer was can we get multi unit property owners to use the service and we poured six months of effort into trying to get them to use the service and we only got overall sector participation to twenty percent so if we make the number of pickup proportional to the number of dwelling units we're gonna build those costs into the rates whether or not the customer uses it and i don't want to pay for services or charge our ratepayers whomever they are for services we haven't been successful  getting people to use that's exactly what those models doing now it it's incrementally sharing it around the city versus if you make a ten unit apartment manager aware we're gonna charge you for ten pickups this year whether you use them or not it certainly creates a stronger incentive whether that they know when unit three is moving out hey you're moving out on january th we're gonna have a bulky pickup on january th and part of you getting your deposit back is you actually utilizing that because we're paying for that service darn it so well we could that would take us some time we'd have to go get a list of all of the multi unit properties and their number of tenant you know a number of dwelling units and things like that it doesn't mean it's not impossible but i would have to request quite a bit more time to to look into the feasibility of that m yes just wanted to jump into this you know i'm not sure how we could charge a you know partment complex for services that we're not even sure they're they're at fault for there's there's a you have to establish good connection between how much waste  baseline that if you have eight units in your building you probably need eight times as much pickup as someone who has one unit is that a fair yeah but we're talking two sumption yeah i think community member do mean i think we're talking two different things so right a larger complex is good is by varied but by definition is going to have more services and they build that into the rates so they have larger dumpsters for recurring pickups but we're talking about is who is responsible and how do we allocate the cost for the abandoned ways that we but the idea to charge more to multi unit on a presumption that they use more services through the abandoned wastes sort of direction is i'm not sure we can make that presumption it's not on the abandoned waste it's on bulky items i'm assuming that every household produces the same number of bulky items that need to be picked up over their lifespan and then maybe i misunderstood so on the bulky item pickup so i think part of what matt was saying is that if you are going right now there isn't the utilization of bulky item pickups we could say because they don't have to pay for it so why would they use something that they're not paying for it's it's an extra administrative burden for them to have to call marburg and set it up or call the city at this point to set it up it's a it's a burden for them to have to talk to the tenant right and give them their deposit back i mean there's a lot of of course a lot of administrative sheron's going on when someone moves out of an apartment building agree there's an incentive to not have to deal with that if there's no cost to you as the administrator so again the idea that would be to fair than the system where you're charging everyone in the system even though they're not the ones who are requesting bulky items or have bulky item pickups yeah just think it'd be a tougher thing to impose a specific charge with two complexes that we're gonna offer you these more services that even though we know we're and that you're not going to utilize them you're going to be charged with why don't you think they're gonna utilize them because we've seen that evidence of that that it just they're not utilized so those are free writers if over time you own an apartment building with eight units and you're not calling for bulky item pickup it's because you're free right and you're counting on other taxpayers to pay your bills over time again in the short term if you if you're looking at this month it's not true but if you own a fifty unit dwelling in santa barbara and you're only calling for pickup once a year and you're because you're not paying for more than that and your neighbor has a four unit building and they're calling once a year everyone else is paying for that fifty unit apartment owners trash to be picked up right does that we have to look in it i guess i don't not sure i agree with that laughs remember white i think you had a question i just following that logic because the apartment the fifty unit owner can call for a pickup for free once or twice twice here twice okay so they can they and they're not doing that then i mean they're if they're not doing that then they are paying for a service that they're not getting right okay so that i just feel like i guess they can't if they were to if they did order their to and they're not ordering a third because they would they'd have to pay for that that would be where we'd be that would be that would be the kind of problem where we'd be trying to find a way to get them to use it more but they're not even using the ones that of the two that they're allotted for free quote unquote free  something that is already paid for so you're saying you think there's fifty unit buildings who aren't using their two pickups yeah something like it was you know the seven unit building or whatever i just feel that there that's what the staff is saying is that there are  twenty percent of the of the buildings are using them and we don't know whether that's using them once or using them twice and you could probably you know what's the number you know we have a thousand multi unit buildings and there are two hundred or there'd be four hundred pickups if we go twenty percent so we're we're not getting there even for services that aren't that are quote unquote free that are there are no additional cost i guess we're trying to get at that i mean that's what you're trying you're trying to attack it and find ways to get accountability and get them and get get the work done and i appreciate i agree with those goals i just i don't think that i think we're still missing something in this and i'm not sure it's makes sense to pay marburg for more services that are not going to be utilized to add more bulky item pick pickups that we and pay them for that and the  pay for that when they're not going to be utilized that's somebody sure how are you not sure what you're saying well so again if they're not you there there's there are two offered today if we offered that for ten per year that i don't think they're  they won't be utilized in our opinion because they're not being utilized now right so whenever we create a contract with the vendor we run the risk of overpaying or under paying if we say we want you to pick up two thousand items and only eight hundred items are generated we  predicted poorly and we pay a little extra if they end up picking up twenty two hundred items and we contracted for two thousand then we get the benefit of the contract so we can't ever expect to have a perfect matching between the prediction and what we're picking up but if we know here that there's two zero to two five hundred annually at thirty three thousand dollars we divide that among single family homes and apartments more evenly than every home gets one in every apartment building gets two we can just do a little better calculation than we are today but if you think it's it's easier to go with a more elegant but less accurate formula and have everyone just split the burden evenly amongst the city regardless of whether you're an apartment building that isn't paying the same amount i mean that's a different row and i'm not saying one is exponentially better or gonna solve the city's budget problems but in terms of fairness making bigger apartment buildings pay a little more makes sense to me but i can see other points of views is there at time urgency this is just trying to line up with the rate increases for the upcoming budget cycle we're here today in advance of the proposition two hundred and eighteen notice that the city sends out in early april first week in  april so if you concur if you would like us to build any or all of these recommendations into the rates we would do that this month we would then put those into the prop two hundred and eighteen notice that would go to customers in april we would then bring this as part of the this whole inclusion as part of this always fund budget meeting with council in may and then ultimately it would be adopted as part of the fee resolution in june so that's sort of the time well first of all i appreciate that we've got brought back around why are we here why are we doing this now and and that we need to have this is a a and mister dominguez said this it's another imperfect it's another forecast and another attempt to to wrestle with one move in the one moving target which is that the the waste that's that's ending up on the street we don't know so that the genesis of of so many that's and that's another topic of conversation i think that mister dominguez brought up a good point about you know the big apartment buildings you know how do we how do we get them more actively involved and i think to put that on staff to say you know this isn't doesn't feel quite right yet although i'm certainly supportive of moving forward we know every year we're going to be moving forward with an imperfect system and trying to make it a little better i really appreciate the things that you're you're talking about here pickups and in particular the homeless encampments that we're not i am i was contemplating that the other day as i walked around the bird refuge and it's kind of a village along there you can just hear folks in bush a b and c there so i appreciate that there's a highlight of the homeless encampment cleanups as as part of the deal here so i would hope what we would do is move forward with this but but definitely keep coming back to staff with you know we're not there yet on on the big on the big buildings and that the per year doesn't feel quite right what other ideas are there that you could get creative about for the next round uses frezz go where it's an automated smartphone app have we thought of any technology we might want to leverage our ability to to streamline the the awareness of the abandoned waste process consider doing is there a couple of items as part of the i know there there are two routes of that we've been looking at a customer or citizen response portal the first is just through the city's website civic  of having an ability for customers to have a mobile platform to do that the second was through the acela project and that's the the land use building application project that i the information technology working with community development to put into place i know that was one of the capabilities that we had asked or i haven't been intimately involved in that but i know that was one of the capabilities that was part of the list of recommendations that we had put through and i thought that there was some promise in that so i can certainly report back to you on that i don't know if to have my head but it was those are two platforms that we were looking to see if there could be a direct portal for customers to you know to make us aware of abandoned waste and i guess i'm kind of proceeding with this assumption so let me just vocalize it and tell me if it's true so really how people report it when they report it doesn't make a difference in terms of the costs of picking it up whether they don't report it gets dumped and we pick it up a week later the only difference really is we just have trash sitting out on the street longer is that kind of a fair understanding that's correct the only variable that really makes a difference in the cost is whether it's  hoc or scheduled you know to the extent that mar board can schedule to pick up that's certainly more efficient and more cost effective than just having a roving vehicle looking around and picking up as we see it okay and i like the idea of having their customer service center do it if that's going to be something that they're focused on and specialized on again i think talked about how it makes more sense because this is their their their job and so they are very specialized in it so i definitely like that part of the first recommendation regarding the the twenty twenty thousand dollars annually for homeless encampment cleanup did you say that's eight hundred and eighty one dollars per pickup so i said is that the average cost last year of these encampments was eight hundred and eighty i rounded up to a thousand because it's an easier number but also we know that tipping fees are increasing at te hagas through the resource recovery project to do so just to account for those tipping fee increases and so cpi so who are we using for this is this marburg as well we haven't made that decision yet this would generate the funds and whether we do an rfp process that marburg would participate in or have a third party contract or we could we have a number of options thi ding direction whether to include the the enhanced abandoned waste collection service and i support that that the particular czar the there's the transfer the aban the reporting responsibilities to marburg the increase from two thousand to two five hundred events annually change order authority of thirty thousand dollars and to the finance director not getting that quite to ninety three thousand dollars but anyway those yet change order authority the abandon waste collection and the homeless encampment oh i i'll second emotion isn't there some flexibility in the increase the abandoned waste collection events from two zero to two five hundred to how those would be allocated subsequent to making this decision to contract with marburg for that additional service you're gonna do to find out about the number of large multi unit apartment buildings and what that might look like as a universe couldn't you potentially allocate more of those five hundred to those units or is that well does the one clarification is the this is  on private property it's in the public right of way so we could look at well is it nearer so you feel like you need that as it is just to meet the demand that exists today except that the demand is created by it well it isn't it isn't because they're coming from someplace and that's that's my point is that actually what you know one thing i think i'd like to add at the conversation is that we're creating a system that incentivize people to do this and we need to also at the same time because we can't have it just sitting out there but we need to have some conversation about how we would find out who's doing this and penalize them for doing it so i'd like staff to think some more about that as well you know i there needs to be some kind of enforcement that actually gets after folks who are improperly putting their stuff out on the curb and i know that's hard to do because of the nexus issues and trying to find it out but  to at least start thinking about it because we really are adding to the problem over time but being more effective at resolving it because people rationally decide oh this is the way i take care of my waste now as i just leave it on the curb and somebody else comes and takes it away from me  i think that's i agree with you mister chair on that as well as i agree with the mister dominguez point of concern which is that the big that apartment buildings are not marrying up to to their waste in some way and that this would be a topic for staff to just drill down on and come up with with suggestions on how to improve it next year or in the future and that's why i think we kind disagree described this as an incremental approach but we're going to be so be evolving i'm gonna try to tighten things up to make sure people are held accountable or being charged for the services they receive and not for what they don't receive and the accountability spreading back to the to the dumps on the side of the street which obviously are enraging and be nice to catch some of those thank you how is the how does the billing actually work in terms of the apartment buildings and the bulky item picks up pickups versus just a per capita rate or a per unit  rate i don't think i understood this is there a line item for bulk item versus trash and recycling or is it just fifty bucks per unit or how does the bill generate well we we built as part of the contract negotiation we had a line item for how much it would cost and we track how close we were we were pretty close on the cost of providing bulky waste collection in general so it's just built into the compensation that maher borg is paid you know on an annual basis we're not there because there's no additional incremental out of pocket cost for the account holder they're paying for this service when they remit their monthly bill to the city whether or not they're using it and so that that portion of the service cost that's already embedded in the overall compensation to marv org is just remitted to morrow born so that that didn't really answer my question i was speaking specifically to the bill that the user gets the bill the user bill everybody all the all the repairs pay some portion permit owner gets the bill not on tenant the property owner or the manager it's okay the count holders yes which is that which is the apartment owner right yeah they do get a bill they get a bill for trash and recycling service for the containers that they subscribe to there's not for bulky waste collection okay that's that's what i wanted to find out it's not broken out no so they get a bill that says x and what would it be for example for a four unit complex i don't know i'd have to get back to you on that so let's say it's two hundred dollars so they call twice for a bulky item pickup and then the third time they call what happens there they don't get serviced the only thing that we provide for in the contract is the two what happens when the owner says care charged okay so they can get a third pickup yeah right okay and they'd be billed separately for that third one so so to me that's the disincentive for people to to use our system they have to call the manager the manager might have to get it approved by the owner or not and then they call marburg and marber says great we'll be there monday by the way it's gonna cost how much for that third max do you happen to know off the top of your head okay and so then they go back and tell the tenant well it's going to be sixty five dollars we're gonna add it to your bill or whatever happens and you know millions of different possible variations and so then it ends up getting dumped on the curb this does nothing to address that phenomenon and i don't know sometimes i feel like maybe i'm living in a different reality that the mobile aren't understanding how this this plays out yeah i think it sounds like what we're saying is is people are gonna end up paying for it one way or another and it gets picked up one way no there but rather than having the system we want where people call in ahead of time and it gets picked up the sixty five dollars then gets to spread around amongst bunch of people which is fine because it ends up pennies on the dollar but then it sits out there for next two three or four days so it's it's actually less of an elegant solution because we're not incentivizing people to call in that makes sense yeah the only thing i would say that well more likely scenario though than what you just described is that the the landlord doesn't call it all does it range for any of the two pickups i think you can get for free so that issue but the third pickup is never really coming to the consideration because they're not even taking advantage of the free service that they would not impose on their on their tenants they're not even calling their first or second time so i think that's more we have a thousand of these units or a thousand property owners there's probably a third that are really diligent who follow the letter of the law and they're out there every day sweeping and cleaning up  then you have a third that is someone the middle then you have a third that are scofflaws right like we just had a huge lawsuit against someone who owns multiple properties and that's probably someone who follows into the less optimal behavioral category and so we're really just trying nudge as a government agency we're trying to nudge people into behaving properly and we've created a nudge to not behave properly we've created a financial incentive to not follow the law to not follow the rules to not abide by your contract in our contract with our with our vendor and to me it's a fundamental flaw when we've created an incentive for people to not follow the rules and that's why we have a sixty two percent increase between two thousand and fourteen and sixteen a large part of that i can't obviously say all of that but we've created a huge incentive for both apartment owners and tenants to just dump stuff on the street so do you have another alternative proposal well i think one thing that would new once that is to create and it doesn't necessarily have to be a one extra pickup per unit i'm not saying for a fifty unit building we need fifty pickups again you pointed out i think council member white you know they have bigger bins and there's other things that maybe proportionally reduce it but maybe for ten units they have three for twenty units the five there's got to be a way to scale it up somewhat proportionally to create an incentive for people to do the right thing so do you have another motion i would i would amend i would ask that you make a friendly amendment to the motion and let's see which one of these four staff recommendations would it fit there's nothing really in here that changes because this would then be a change would it be a change in the billing or just a change in our policy that's stated on the website in terms of how many we would actually probably have to do them it would be a contract amendment oh can it ordinance by council okay item on everybody's bill that says that but you know as we do with some of our other activities where there's a there you get your telephone bill and there's there's four or five things listed on there you know taxes and there's seven cents for hearing impaired and such that putting that on there may be a good thing to do so as you know bulky items is costing you seven dollars and twelve cents and and and by the way you have five of them a year if you're  unit building or whatever i think those are pieces that could be put together into a more a truer incentivized a more appropriately incentivized system i don't think it's going to happen in this budget cycle so i would submit that we try this i would not try it but move forward with this provide direction to staff on the items that you're talking about i think there's a those are good ideas and have them come back with some suggestions maybe them go to the rental property association talk it up with them to get buy in from the owners that's another piece of the puzzle that's going to be helpful and then make a change move the ship in a better direction on the next cycle and that all makes sense to me and i realize we're also running out of time i was just going to say that thank you so and let me see clarity here on the in terms of the budget timeline and then prop two hundred and eighteen so the budget timeline you want to have this ready for the department so that when it comes back to us for budget hearings its kind of wrapped up is that kind of the time pressure that you're the it's the prop two hundred and eighteen notice can make a change mid year if you wanted to this is just to tee it up on the regular cycle and this is an improvement that what we have on the table that everybody i think recognizes and agrees so there's additional interest and continuing this conversation and moving the ball forward down the field as we go on  given the time constraints we have another item on the agenda i think we need to call the question and have a vote on this item and then we can have additional conversations about those some council member dominguez can meet with staff and talk through some of these issues would i would i have the patience of my council members to push this back a week i don't think we need to i think jerry you opposed to anything that we're doing well i don't want more i i want a recommendation number five that it deals with what i was mentioning and i think and i think there's a lot of work to be done to figure that out you don't have a recommendation five right now my recommendation is that you spread the sight pickups proportionally amongst this based on the size of the apartments and i don't know if that would even affect the  revenue the ninety three thousand dollars because really you know let me just let me take the privilege of the chair we have a motion on the floor we have heard your comments we don't have enough time to do this we have another item on the agenda so we're gonna just have to have a vote on this motion so all those in favor say aye aye opposed no okay and and staff i think heard the conversation in the direction from councilmember mangas i'm sure he's going to talk to you about these ideas and there will be an opportunity to have them integrate in the conversation just not right now right today so with that this item is finished we have one more item on the agenda which is the termination of article fifteen a fire and police service retirement plan so i'm gonna go  very quick i am gonna be presenting this with full council today so i don't have to go into all the details i can just be quick here we can spend more time with it at council but real quick background as you may know we have a retirement plan that's been around since the s it was basically it was closed to new participants back in the s when the city shifted to calpers at that time those pimp loy's that were in that old plan had the option to either roll into the calpers program or not  just had a recent evaluation done an actual evaluation done that showed that we're about a hundred twenty nine thousand dollars underfunded and this takes in consideration that since the we did this plan when one of the three pensioners passed away so was three when the plan was was evaluated now there are two so on a net basis one hundred and twenty nine thousand dollars shortfall we in the past have had this plant the plant assets managed by an outside investment manager and they were guided by what we what were the investment policies at the time and you know in our understanding was that they were governed under a section of state law that was different than what we had to go by in terms of investing our own city funds they can invest more aggressively and things like um equities and theoretically real estate just like things that the calpers invest in way that we cannot and and in the whole purpose of that is because they do want to be more aggressive because their focus is different it's not on safety like we are but  so we typically are looking at today less than two percent yield our investments so this is important because there are city attorney's offices to find that the investments in that plan are no because of the change in state law are no longer appropriate that we would need to divest ourselves of those assets those securities and invest them in the kinds of things we're allowed to which a lot more state but are yielding much less return so because of that we will have to liquidate reinvest and then we're going to be  is going to grow or not since you can have enough money to cover the pension benefits that are hopping under the obligations of the city so if you look at the treaty charter it seems pretty clear that the city is responsible to make up any shortfalls you may recall back in two thousand and ten they had about a half million dollar shortfall this for those of you were here with the general fund but so given the fact that the that the state just changes state law and that we're going to be generating fewer few returns and that might have an impact on future cpi increases  the pensioners decided that they wanted to divest of themselves of this plan to liquidate the plan and basically just take a lump sum distribution for their share there are two pensioners as i mentioned they believe that at least one of them believed that they could earn a get a better return and effect if you get a higher heirs and of course they wouldn't be subject to the same city's trustee the trustees fees that the city charges today so these are the reasons why they decided they thought it would make more sense for them to liquidate and get a lump sum distribution so they did mention that they wanted to have one more chance to make sure that they were comfortable with this so even with councils approval today presumed approval that they would wanna we're meeting this friday to make sure that they were okay with all this but they just incidentally they also recommended that the council contribute the one hundred and twenty nine thousand dollars that is that is the actual unfunded liability in this plan to bring it up to a total of about five hundred and seven thousand dollars that would then be deleted and distributed to the to pensioners it's not conditioned on their decision to to liquidate the plan entirely returning to plan they just thought they would ask if the council could make that kind of contribution to bring the plan whole before they liquidate the plan and distribute those to the two staff recommendation is that we do the one twenty nine no it's not they can't we're just asked they asked i'm just passing on their request for the council to consider this staff as you know i didn't want to presume to make that recommendation in light of the fact that we're kind of in a budget crunch right now and we're having to make cuts across the