Budget Committee gets questions, comments from 6 of 8 community appointees

Presenter: Eugene’s Budget Committee met April 30 to hear the city executive team’s proposal for cuts to the general fund. Some city departments depend on the general fund more than others, prompting comments and questions from six of the eight appointed community members of the Budget Committee.

At the Wednesday evening meeting, Chair Tai Pruce-Zimmerman:

Tai Pruce-Zimmerman: The two members that aren’t in the room are participating tonight. They both let us know in—well in advance—they were unable to attend. They’re watching online in a noncommunicative form and will be emailing their questions in too. So we do have our full body working on this and I’m just really pleased you’re all here.

[00:00:41] And with that, Siobhan.

[00:00:44] Presenter: Siobhan Cancel:

[00:00:46] Siobhan Cancel: As I sit here and look at the largest cuts in FTE—with the nine out of library and two out of the Office of Equity (and Community Engagement)—it’s glaringly clear that it’s more than any other department. And I just think about how these areas directly increase equitable access to our community. So I’m curious if anything like these, can these positions could be combined?

[00:01:06] I noticed I see like lots of vacant management analysts or senior program coordinator position and the different—can the city maybe have just two of those to serve all the different. I don’t know.

[00:01:18] I’m just trying to think if there’s any way to save some of those positions. Each one of those people probably touches hundreds of people in our community. So that’s my question. Can they be combined and if so, how would that work.

[00:01:33] But it doesn’t have to be answered right now.

[00:01:35] It looks like the EPD community engagement, that’s going away completely, so there will be—no?

[00:01:42] Presenter: City Manager Sarah Medary:

[00:01:44] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager): Half the team.

[00:01:45] Siobhan Cancel: Half the team. That doesn’t affect any of the community safety officers, does it?

[00:01:50] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager): There’s one community safety officer eliminated in the general fund but we have 19 in the CSPT (Community Safety Payroll Tax).

[00:01:57] Siobhan Cancel: Thank you. And then just as I was going through all this, I have a general question: So when you see one FTE, and then you see the amount of the money allotted for it, that’s not just the salary, right? That includes, like, medical benefits, their retirement package, all that good stuff.

[00:02:18] Presenter: Chief Financial Officer Twylla Miller.

[00:02:20] Twylla Miller (Chief Financial Officer): Yes, fully loaded. And then if there are materials and supplies associated with the position that are going away, those would be part of that total as well.

[00:02:28] Siobhan Cancel: Okay, cool. Good to know. Thank you.

[00:02:31] When we talk about the property tax exemptions, are charitable organizations nonprofits?

[00:02:38] Presenter: Twylla Miller.

[00:02:40] Twylla Miller (Chief Financial Officer): Yes, so nonprofits would be exempt, yes.

[00:02:42] Siobhan Cancel: Okay, just wanted to clarify, ’cause I know we have a lot of them. I think that’s it for now. Thanks.

[00:02:48] Tai Pruce-Zimmerman: I’m going to move on to Wendy.

[00:02:49] Presenter: Wendy Simmons.

[00:02:51] Wendy Simmons: Thank you for that presentation and hard work. Just a couple of questions. As far as on the pools, I’m concerned about so many things, but regarding the pools, have you—and you mentioned the possibility of contracting out? Do you know other cities who’ve gone that way and can they provide?

[00:03:08] Presenter: City manager Sarah Medary.

[00:03:10] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager): I don’t have any details about that, but we can follow up on that.

[00:03:14] Wendy Simmons: Okay, and then you mentioned Greenhill (Humane Society). That would be completely shut down, or…?

[00:03:20] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager): So that amended budget eliminates the funding for our contract. It doesn’t shut down Greenhill, just eliminates our contract.

[00:03:28] Wendy Simmons: Okay. thank you for that clarification.

And then just comment on the library, just to support, maybe. I know we’d have to find a way to resource some funds, but just trying to save another day and just how much, you know, multiple programs, they serve people of all ages, you know.

[00:03:48] They help the most vulnerable, giving them a welcoming and safe place to be, especially in adverse weather conditions.

Promoting community: The library promotes community engagement, literacy, education, provide help for job searches, help people find employment, boosting our local economy.

They provide access to technology, supporting all students from K through 12 to graduate schools, graduate students and lifelong learners. By providing the safe space, again, it also prevents crime.

And I could go on, but those were some of the things off the top of my head about the library. Thank you. That’s all I have for now.

[00:04:21] Tai Pruce-Zimmerman: Thank you. Zach.

[00:04:22] Presenter: Zach Mulholland:

[00:04:24] Zach Mulholland: First, thank you to staff for all of the very hard work that went into this document. This is a very hard budget. I don’t think any of us is happy to see the proposed cuts in this document to libraries, pools, Greenhill (Humane Society) and a wide variety of areas in our city. I think it shows just how important it is that the city work with our partners at Oregon League of Cities to address Measure 5 and 50 reform.

[00:04:50] As was just pointed out earlier in this conversation, because of the adjusted property ratio, new construction often actually costs us more to service than we receive in tax revenue. And so we’re in the unfortunate situation that growth will not actually help us, and actually in some ways might actually hurt our situation, given our assessed values are, you know, in some cases only 40% of the market value.

[00:05:15] And unfortunately, we’re in a very difficult situation. And so I hope that our community partners will partner with the city as we work on Measure 5 and 50 reform at the state level.

[00:05:25] Do we have a sense of when PERS costs are expected to peak and begin to start coming down again? Or is this just a ever-larger hill that we’re going to, you know, eventually be spending 50% or more of our payroll on PERS costs?

[00:05:42] Presenter: Twylla Miller:

[00:05:44] Twylla Miller (Chief Financial Officer): The majority of the costs of the system are for retirees and inactive employees; Tier One, Tier Two employees. It’s really when those people are no longer with us and those costs are no longer part of the system. That’s when you see that leveling and maybe a decrease in the out years pending any other reforms at the state level.

[00:06:07] Presenter: Zach Mulholland:

[00:06:09] Zach Mulholland: Thank you for that. Go to slide number 49. The Greenhill contract is listed as $200,000 of investments, as one-time investments turned to, ideally, ongoing investments. What’s the actual cost of the Greenhill contract?

[00:06:32] Presenter: City Manager Sarah Medary:

[00:06:34] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager): Yeah, thank you. I don’t know that number off the top of my head. Thank you for bringing it up, though, because I forgot to mention that, if you recall in the last biennium, you restored a portion of the Greenhill contract one time. And that’s what that was representing in that one chart, the $200,000 was what you restored one time.

[00:06:54] We tried to build it in, ongoing, as part of our proposed budget and then we had to take it out, as part of the amended budget. So the total contract amount is $487(,000) a year.

[00:07:06] Zach Mulholland: So that would be the actual amount if we wanted to fully fund that contract ongoing? Not just the $200,000 listed here?

[00:07:12] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager): Correct. Yep.

[00:07:14] Zach Mulholland: Could we go to slide 52 please? I’m trying to understand this. So it looks like in the base budget we’re only building in an alternative response for the first year and so alternative response is getting phased out under the base budget, or the amended budget, both?

[00:07:30] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager): The way I would describe that, and again we’ll have a presentation about this on (May) 14. I would describe it as: When we were looking for, like, ‘Where are places we can find savings?’ As Lane County was ramping up, we thought, ‘Well, maybe there’s some savings we can have there over the biennium’ with a transition we didn’t anticipate that we were going to get notified by CAHOOTS or White Bird that they were no longer to do that. So when we did the amended budget, we removed all of it.

[00:07:58] I would say and we will continue to say that as we see what Lane County is able to do and where the gaps actually are, we may end up in a position where we put out a new Request For Proposals (RFP) for what that service level is in the gap.

[00:08:13] And I’ll let the chief talk about that on May 14, but this was anticipated, that we’d be transitioning some of those costs. And then postnotification, we eliminated them.

[00:08:24] Zach Mulholland: What’s been historically the amount?

[00:08:26] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager): Under $1 million a year, but just under, $877K or $900K, something like that.

[00:08:32] Presenter: Zach Mulholland:

[00:08:33] Zach Mulholland: I’m very concerned about the loss of CAHOOTS in our community. Every month that they are not in service that’s harder to bring them back there’s a loss of institutional memory. Are there any opportunities to potentially bring them back with a lower hours of service and paying them a similar rate to what they get in Springfield?

[00:08:52] I’m hoping we can figure out a way to bring back alternative response—ideally CAHOOTS—as quickly as possible. And so I’ll just continue to ask questions and hope that there are opportunities to bring them back sooner rather than later, before their expertise is lost. Thank you.

[00:09:06] Tai Pruce-Zimmerman: Thank you. Jesse.

[00:09:08] Presenter: Jesse Maldonado:

[00:09:09] Jesse Maldonado: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thought I was going to sign up for something fun being on the Budget Committee. This isn’t fun at all.

[00:09:16] Staff, appreciate all the time and energy put into this. I mean, I’ve been sitting here looking at this 16.85 number and obviously it’s a number on a slide. But it’s people’s jobs. It’s community members, it’s our neighbors, it’s people that, you know, could be a paycheck away from being homeless.

And not only that, but then the programs that it affects, and programs that are going to be affected are programs that touch our most vulnerable in our community.

[00:09:45] And it’s a humbling experience to be here, and I hope that we do good work here today and moving forward in these next couple of meetings to find solutions that can save some of these things. But thanks again for the work.

[00:10:02] I had some clarifying questions on slide 17. I was just curious about that dotted line the 3.4 % that, I just didn’t catch the explanation for the ‘without frozen base increase.’ Slide 17, the 3.4%, just the clarification on that difference between that 3.4% and the 3.8%.

[00:10:21] Presenter: Chief Financial Officer Twylla Miller:

[00:10:24] Twylla Miller (Chief Financial Officer): Oh yes, so that was in relation to the the frozen base. There was a frozen base action that was taken as part of the 23-25 budget. Without that increase, we would have landed at 3.4% instead of the 3.8% that we actually landed at.

[00:10:43] Presenter: City Manager Sarah Medary:

[00:10:45] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager): So the urban renewal districts, when they’re created, it freezes the tax base, right? And then the monies from that stay inside the district. So as part of the 23-25 we voluntarily lifted it, which let that money flow into the general fund. Otherwise it would have stayed in the district and it would have been at 3.4. Okay.

[00:11:05] Jesse Maldonado: We had urban renewal districts where I was on city council. It was just a little bit different back in Idaho than it was here, I’ll tell you that.

[00:11:11] So my next question was, and I don’t know if this is more of a hypothetical question, I guess. But with all of these temporary jobs and Amazon Pool closure and things like that, there was a mention of, you know, maintenance. But do we even have a ballpark? Or is there, is it the right line of reasoning to think that if we are shutting down Amazon Pool, that that’s going to compound deferred maintenance, because the pool isn’t being operational? (Does that make sense?)

[00:11:39] Sarah Medary (Eugene, city manager): Yeah, totally. So our costs anticipate where we wouldn’t just turn it off and let the pool whatever. So we anticipate some of those costs. And, if we were able to find another provider, also, we’ve also anticipated some maintenance savings, actually, in some of that work as well. But it’s too soon to tell, so we’ve been very conservative about that.

[00:11:59] Tai Pruce-Zimmerman: Thank you. Ryan.

[00:12:01] Presenter: With questions that the city staff will need more time to research, Ryan Kounovsky:

[00:12:07] Ryan Kounovsky: Thank you to city staff. Really great job and I think from my time on Budget Committee, I keep seeing this closing gap and I keep, you know, we’re getting closer there. And I really appreciate that work, because when I started the gap was very wide and now it’s closing.

[00:12:20] And I echo the concerns too, about, you know, how do we grow, thinking about the staff that might be impacted by this. I’d love to see any ways we can preserve as many staff as possible. I know that’s never perfectly possible, but keeping folks employed helps us deliver those amazing services the city has come to know.

[00:12:39] That was my first question. It might be probably some napkin math, but I was just curious of those savings we’re doing, how much are purely just FTE savings? Just curious. What’s the bang for the buck we’re getting there? It’s okay if you follow up too. Okay, perfect.

[00:12:57] On the library: When we looked at the days being reduced, did we look at the folks that are being impacted by those days? Because I know a lot of the folks don’t work a 9-to-5 that use those services. I was curious if we did any kind of, like, flow impact when we looked at that. And just making sure those folks that really, really need those are being, have the least amount of impact.

[00:13:20] And then again, just think about savings as technology and those kind of systems are expanding, how much are we looking at utilizing more AI and things like that to help lighten the staff burdens, really get more services expanded? Are we looking at that to increase with little dollars?

[00:13:38] Presenter: Tai Pruce-Zimmerman:

[00:13:40] Tai Pruce-Zimmerman: Thank you so much for the incredible amount of work that went into this incredibly difficult budget. I share the reactions I’ve been hearing around the table, of how painful the prospect of all these cuts is to our community, and I just want to make sure we’re not in any way conflating that to the work and effort and intent that went into the very careful crafting of it. This was very well presented and it’s very hard.

[00:14:10] I’m not really even prepared to start drilling into specifics right now, of which parts bother me the most, because there is so much that’s hitting me in my heart. We have time for those conversations in our coming meetings. But I’m just thankful that we have this team here to do the work on this, and I think we’ll be digging into a lot.

[00:14:36] Presenter: The Budget Committee meets the next three Wednesdays in May: May 14, 21, and 28.