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The first of our series of budget work sessions will call the meeting in the order. First up is the schools and we'll turn it over to Ms. Miller to you. Okay, thank you, Mr. Mayor and members of the City Council, City Staff on behalf of the school board. Thank you for this opportunity to be receiving to present our budget for next fiscal year. This will be superintendent. This will be superintendent. Monday's first presentation as school superintendent. And I promise you you will not be disappointed. You will do an excellent job in presenting the needs of our school system. Thank you. This is Monday. Thank you, Mrs. Miller and Good evening, Mr. Mayor and members of the City Council, Mr. Sissan and City staff. I really am happy to be here this evening to present the FY2009 school budget on behalf of the City of Fairfax school board. November 10, 2007 was a day of great pride in Fairfax City as we rededicated the new Fairfax High School. That ceremony reaffirmed this community's commitment to its children and set a course for a future that is as positive as the traditions of the past. We proudly join our colleagues in Fairfax County to accomplish our common mission. City of Fairfax schools are a part of a world class school system that inspires enables and empowers students to meet high academic standards, lead ethical lives, and demonstrate responsible citizenship. To this end, our board establishes a six-year plan and annually determines its priorities. This year's priorities are listed on this slide. In addition, the board has several areas of emphasis that are ongoing. They are facility improvement, technology investment, foreign language expansion, and increased enrollment in advanced classes. Over the past few years, the City School Board has provided funds to our schools to support each of these initiatives. School Board has provided funds to our schools to support each of these initiatives. The City of Fairfax County, excuse me, the City School Board has published a document for parents called the Roadmap to Academic Success. This document provides the information parents and students need to access all of the academic opportunities available in our schools. Our goal has been to open the doors of opportunity to all students. We have provided funds at the elementary level to give students the support needed to build strong academic foundations. At linear and fair facts we have provided funding for summer programs to support students who want to advance academically. These investments and student achievement are paying off. Students in our city schools are performing well. All of our schools are accredited by the state of Virginia. As you can see from this slide, the overall passing rates are 80% or higher in all but one SOL test. More importantly, all four schools are taking steps to improve their scores every year. One way that schools are working to improve is by having teachers at the elementary, middle, and high schools meet and work together to be sure that our programs are well articulated. These efforts have been supported by funds from the city, and again, we are seeing a good return on our investment. This slide shows the remarkable increase in the numbers of students who are accelerating in math at the middle school level. It is critical that the foundation required for successful acceleration be built in the elementary schools, so these numbers reflect good instruction at Daniel's run and providence as well as linear. Even more remarkable is that among the 337 students in advance math this year, 19 algebra students are 7th graders. This means that next year we will have almost a full class of students completing geometry at linear. This level of opportunity and achievement is something we must continue to support. This slide shows the overall performance of students in math and linear, while the seventh grade results are slightly lower than the Fairfax County average, the results on other SOL tests are above the county and state averages. In 2007, all algebra and geometry students at linear passed the SOL high school and of course test and most past advance. Likewise, our performance on SOL tests and math and Fairfax is very positive. These test scores show the strength of math instruction across the grades in the Fairfax pyramid. And our high school students are going beyond algebra two in increasing numbers. For the past two years, over 60% of seniors at Fairfax were enrolled in a math class beyond algebra two. The courses they are taking are AP Calculus, AP Statistics, AP Computer Science, and multivariable calculus, the second year of college level calculus. This level of achievement shows that when our students are given opportunities and support, they can achieve at very high levels. Efforts to increase the numbers of our students in our schools who are working at an advanced level in math have been particularly successful. But we are seeing gains in English as well. Note that in three years, over 100 more students are taken in advance course in English at linear. And we are seeing increasing enrollment in foreign language at the middle school level. In addition to the core academic subjects and foreign language, students in our city schools are achieving in other ways. The number of students enrolled in career and technical classes, particularly business classes, computer assisted drawing classes and automatic mechanics classes, who earn industry certifications or state licenses has tripled. We are proud of the achievement of these students who can enter the workplace with quality credentials. Again this year we can celebrate the phenomenal growth in the number of students enrolled in advanced placement classes at Fairfax. With funding from the city, Dr. Brabrand has started a summer AP boot camp to help first time AP students succeed. He is also providing time during the school day for students to get academic help. The city's roadmap initiative which encourages teachers, parents, and students to begin planning early to maximize learning opportunities is helping to change the landscape at Fairfax High School. Finally, the class of 2007 in the class of 2007, 309 or over 60% of Fairfax seniors earned in advance diploma. This means that these students earned four credits in both math and science as well as at least three credits in foreign language. I know that this is an area where Dr. Brabrand has even higher aspirations and we need to support him and the faculty. Even as student achievement is improving, our student body is becoming more diverse. We have seen steady incremental growth in the numbers of city students over the years. Most recently it appeared that our membership numbers like those in Fairfax County were leveling off. This school year however, we again like Fairfax County had an unanticipated increase in students, primarily at the kindergarten level, where we added a class at both of our elementary schools. This chart shows that 88% of our city students approximately 2500 of 2800 attend one of our four city schools. In September of this year, over 2,000 county residents were attending one of our city schools, approximately 47% of the enrollment. And most attend linear and Fairfax as this graph clearly shows. Demographic trends in the city are similar to those in the county with some differences among ethnic populations. Both the city and the county have seen growth in the percent of Asian students. The city's percentage is a little lower than the county. The black population in both the city and the county has remained constant. The city's percentage population is lower than the county. This Hispanic student population has increased in both the city and the county. The Hispanic enrollment as a percentage of population in the city is higher than the county by approximately 4%. The white student populations is declining at nearly the same rate in both the city and the county. For the past two years, the city and the county student memberships have had no ethnic majority. The entire Washington region is highly diverse. Compare the demographics of our student school population to those of our neighbors. Mobility or the percent of students who come and go during the school year, is a major factor in achievement. You can see from this graph that our city schools have a higher percent of mobility than the Fairfax County average. Mobility and poverty often go hand in hand. This chart shows the numbers and percent of students eligible for free and reduced lunch at each of our schools. Note that while our elementary schools are close in numbers, the percented population at Daniel's run was actually a little higher than Providence in the last school year. Both schools had close to 200 students living in poverty. Based on data from October 2007, this school year, our two elementary schools have a higher level of poverty than the average in the county, while our secondary schools are slightly lower. Fairfax County presented this slide in its budget presentation. Schools were a lot simpler 50 years ago. Schools today are more diverse in every way. Program offerings are broader and richer, and expectations for student achievement are higher. Note the last two data points. In the 60s, 64% of Fairfax County graduates went on to higher education. Now over 90% to. Back then, only 30% of seniors took SAT tests. Now over 70% to. Times have changed and they will continue to change. And this of course brings us to the focus of today funding our schools and changing times. As you can see from these charts, our city continues to provide almost all of the funding required to educate our children. Unlike other school districts around the state which are supported more fully by state and federal governments. Fairfax City relies on local funds. On this chart, Fairfax City is on the far left. Again, it is clear that our funding is almost entirely local. However, this chart also shows that there are other jurisdictions in this region that largely depend on local funding for schools. in this region that largely depend on local funding for schools. Over the past 10 years, the state's portion of funding for education in Fairfax City has varied from a high of 17.2% to the current low of 14%. Compared to the overall state average during this time period of approximately 42%. On this chart again, Fairfax City Data is on the far left. Our cost per pupil remains within what should be expected in this region, and certainly in a high performing district like Fairfax County. This chart shows the percent of the city's operating budget that has historically been allocated to the schools as well as the estimate for this year. This rate has varied over 18 years from a low of 36% to 42% estimated for this year. This is how our local funding effort compares with other districts in the region. On this slide, the city of Fairfax is third from the left. The lowest of the City or County funds provided for education is in Alexandria at 32.3% in FY08, and the highest is Loudoun County at 72.5%. This chart provides data from the previous budgets and the proposed FIO 9 budget regarding revenue sources for education from the state and federal governments and from the city transfer. We were cautious in our estimates of dispute in the general assembly this year, and truly the outcomes of the budget negotiations are still not entirely clear. Therefore, we have estimated almost no increase in revenue from the state for FY09. The city will once again be required to provide almost all of the funding needed for our schools. As you know, most of the school board's budget goes to pay Fairfax County's tuition bill. This bill is based primarily on two data points. One is the number of city children enrolled in public schools, which is officially counted at the end of March and based on average daily attendance for ADM. This chart shows how this number has steadily increased over time. In both FY08 and FY09, we expect to see an increase in the ADM. The other major data point is the cost per student, which is listed in the last column of this chart. For FY09, we are using the advertised estimate from the county as our estimate almost exactly. Although we recognize that the county budget is still very much in development, we do not think it wise to estimate less than what the county is advertising. This chart shows the actual or for FY08 and 09 estimated county operating budget in the second column. In the next column is the city's yearly budgeted amount for tuition, followed by the county's estimate. In the middle column, LAT lists the final actual tuition cost, which is determined at the end of each fiscal year, and includes a deduction for classroom rental charge for county residents attending our schools. The third column from the right shows the adjustment made to each year's tuition bill. Note that in two of the previous three years included here, the Fairfax County estimate was lower than the actual tuition bills. Bill, most years we have had to pay more than what the county has estimated. The school board's FY09 proposed budget provides what our schools need to continue to flourish. On the first page of the school board's proposed budget, only the first section administration school board is really discretionary spending rather than a fixed expense. Based on the estimates of student membership and the cost per pupil that Fairfax County has provided and I have reviewed, and the history of tuition costs displayed in the previous slide, the tuition costs for FY09 will most likely be at least what is listed on this chart. Note that under administration school board, all expense categories except for professional services have decreased or remain the same. Overall, no additional funding for school administration or school board operations are requested in this budget. You can see on this slide that our debt service is declining. We are not asking for technology funding for FY09 since we continue to have renovation funds remaining for this purpose. We continue to pay our annual cost of the artificial turf at Fairfax High School. In capital improvements funding this year, we have budgeted for a potential need related to heat and air conditioning and paving at the elementary schools. I will speak to this need in a moment. We were able to shift savings and salaries and benefits as well as legal costs, which will decrease over 30% this year as the renovations conclude to direct services to the schools. We want to provide additional funds to the schools so that the work that they have done that is resulting in improved student achievement can continue. These projects include professional development and meeting time for teachers, academic support programs, including summer programs, and resources to support technology. I'm confident that these schools will be used to good advantage by these funds will be used to good advantage by our schools. Increased funding is required to maintain our building and grounds. For the past several years during construction we have done minimal grounds maintenance at linear and fairfax. We also need to establish a strong monitoring system to make sure that our warranties are respected and facilities kept in top condition. Let me speak to major maintenance and the need for funds to begin to address systems at the elementary schools. I know it is hard to believe that these new looking buildings are starting to have major maintenance needs. Unfortunately, the air conditioning chiller at Providence performs so badly that it has had to be replaced this year. Unfortunately, the air conditioning chiller at Providence performs so badly that it has had to be replaced this year. In the next few weeks, I will confer with the Fairfax County Facility staff and with the City School Board to determine what is required to make certain that we have functioning systems at both schools. I will also consider paving needs as neither school has been paved since our renovations were completed in the year 2000. Understanding the fiscal situation this year, I realized the necessity of developing a budget based on critical needs. So the board and I will work as quickly as possible to determine what savings may be realized here. This chart compares the FY09 proposed budget with the approved budget figures for the past two years. And to compare the variance from FY0708 and FY0809. The school board has proposed a budget that is respectful of the city's fiscal challenges yet adequate to fulfill our responsibility to the schools that serve the children of this community. As proud as we all are of our facilities, it is the impact of our investments on the children in our schools that is the most important. Now that we have 21st century facilities, we need to focus on what matters most and that is a human capital that we are developing in our schools that will keep this community strong. With that in mind, I would like to introduce you to some very important people. The Class of 2020. The High School Class of 2020 is currently sitting in our kindergarten classrooms and the pictures that I'm going to show you this evening are pictures of children in kindergarten at Providence and Daniels Run. I've heard that when the City of Fairfax embarked upon a vision for the future, a task force called the 2020-2020 Commission was formed. Well, again, it's hard to believe that children who will live their lives in a future that not so long ago seemed like a distant vision. They are already in our schools. Here they are, the Class of 2020. All of them born in the 21st century. Post 9-11. Ethnicly and culturally diverse. Technology savvy. full of hope, full of potential, summer future business leaders, summer future artists. Many will have jobs that simply don't exist today. All need to be able to communicate with and collaborate with colleagues and customers in a multicultural global economy. All of these 21st century children will need higher order thinking and problem solving skills to succeed in a complex and rapidly changing world. A world far different from that of their parents and their grandparents. These children, the class of 2020, are our future. Our challenge then is to make sure that our schools prepare them to be ready for their futures not for our past. I have no doubt that working together as a community we can continue to give our children those who will graduate this June and those who will graduate many June into the future what they need to succeed. Investing in education builds and sustains strong communities and I thank you for your support this evening. Thank you. Let me see if there's questions or comments from the council. Mr. President, thank you for the question, Mr. Mundell. You mentioned an initiative of foreign language expansion. Could you expand a little on that and see what that is? Well, I think you know we were one of the first pilot schools and really pioneers in the whole foreign language and elementary school program in Fairfax County, which is now hopefully going to expand the goal of Fairfax County Public Schools to expand to all elementary schools. But what we have been able to do by having a Latin program to begin with at both of our schools, we are the first among all the schools in Fairfax County to expand into a bridge program at the middle school so that students will have seamless education in foreign language, beginning at elementary school through through middle school, to high school. Doesn't necessarily, the student would stay in the same language, but those students who wish to stay in the same language were building a bridge program at seventh grade. I think as most of you know as well, after some consideration of options and quite frankly, an opportunity that Fairfax County had with some grant money to give us a little bit of help to get another program off of the ground. And our good success with FlessoFAR. We are offering Chinese this year at Providence. It's one of the strategic languages. We know there will be a demand for Chinese in the future. There's demand for Chinese now. So we have Latin still in place in Providence. We'll be phasing out the Latin program and building a Chinese program, which means we'll build a Chinese program at Lanier as well eventually. We already are beginning to offer this year Chinese at the high school level. One last question. You mentioned summer programs. I've heard somewhere, I think recently, that the summer program was being, at the high school was being cut back this summer. Is that true? In Fairfax County, one of the budget cuts that Fairfax County is making is fairly substantial cutbacks in their summer programs. At all three levels, what we will be doing is what we have been able to do and build on in the past. And these are additional enrichment programs. Most of Fairfax County's elementary and middle school programs are intervention and remediation. We certainly have supported some of those kinds of programs and jumpstart programs at the elementary level to give students who have high needs and opportunity to get an early start in school. But at both middle school and high school, and I, again, I will tell you, some of those results for getting in math are really phenomenal. At the middle school level to bring in children, young people with potential in math and give them tutoring in the summer to get them ready to advance in math. This isn't remediation, this is advancement. And then the AP boot camp is what we have funded. And that's bringing first time AP students into school in the summer to give them the kinds of skills that they need to be successful and at advanced level. And then following up with mentoring and support during the school year. And those are programs unique to our pyramid. Is the 2008 summer program funded out of the budget that's already been passed because it would may start before July 1 or is it funded out of this budget? The 2008 summer is budgeted out of 2009 money. Thank you. Mr. Grigid. Thank you, Mr. Grigidon. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Can you talk a little bit about where the population, the free and reduced price eligible populations coming from? Is that primarily our motels along the Route 50 corridor or are we seeing that in the rental apartment areas, long Germantown Road, Layton Hall, you know? I don't have detailed information about exactly where these children live. In fact, Fairfax County is a little bit protective of that information. You can get summary information, you can't get information. I can't get list of names of students because that is not public information. I'm not looking for list of names of students, but I've seen you recall in previous budget presentations, we used to kind of see a map of the city and we used to have little blips of where the concentrations of free and reduced price eligible. Let me see if I can put that information together for you. I haven't seen that, but certainly that's information we would all like to see. I think we could all speculate, but I'm sure we can. We'd prefer not to. So let's see if we can get some data. Can you talk a little bit more about the HVAC problems? I mean, that's a little surprising given the money that we spent on two elementary schools that faced with significant problems? The Providence Chiller was a problem almost from the beginning. And Fairfax County has worked with us. And finally, after having issues, ongoing issues with the Chiller, we were able to put together some remaining CIP funds quite frankly in this fiscal year with that having to come back to you and replace the Chiller there and that work is being done now for the spring. I have asked the maintenance people at Fairfax County to look very carefully at our system at Daniel's run, and they have done that. In fact, I'm going to meet with the facilities people at Fairfax County next week, and that's one of the topics we're going to talk about. I don't anticipate the same problems at Daniel's run. We haven't had the same history at Daniel's run. What I learned, however, and I was telling Mr. Assistant this this morning, that within the next six to seven years we will have to replace the switches and the systems that regulate the HVAC programs. And this next generation we go to new technologies and those technologies are quite expensive. So before I can commit to what we can reduce there, I need to be able to go out several years and have a plan to go out several years so that we again aren't hit with an expense. Four or five years down the line that we weren't anticipating. If we're having problems with something almost from the very beginning, doesn't the county, sure whoever they're buying that from, there's some warranty that comes along with that, that if we've been able to demonstrate from the beginning that there's been problems, why we would have to be paying for something for that and that wouldn't just be covered? Well, I have been told that the vendor was a problem. I don't believe the vendor is even available anymore. So it was just a bad system. Now Fairfax County fixed it several times at not small expense. In fact, they put a pretty large bandaid on it this fall so we could begin school. And that again, that was their responsibility to do. But at the end of the day, we had to replace it. Thank you. We did not, the same vendor was not used at any time. That's good to hear. It has not been used at the middle school or the high school area, right? Well, it sounds like the vendor's not even around anymore. That's my understanding. Maybe indicative of the problems. Yeah. Thank you. Ms. Cross. Mr. Mayor, congratulations on the school's performance. It's wonderful to hear how well they're doing in the progress that's being made. Obviously tonight we're here to talk about finances and I have a couple of questions. On the classroom rental fee, what is the in view in since the tuition rate is going up, why is it that the school board decided not to raise the classroom rental fees. I'll be glad to answer that. The classroom rental fee, Mrs. Cross, is based on the average county debt service, the per-pupil debt service. Let me briefphrase that. It is based on the per-pupil cost of the average county debt service. So, if their average, if their per-pup pupil average is $642, that is what they pay. It was agreed to when we negotiated the contract in 1977 or 1978 was the negotiation. And that has not changed over all these? Well, that's correct, but the amount of money that the county's debt service represents has changed considerably since 1978. I mean, it's grown consistently. I believe last year we provided you a breakdown on the actual number of students' time, the exact amount of money could we do for you again? I'd really like to see that. We would be happy to do that. Another question. This one you said that you have not appropriated any funds for technology because you have funds left over from the construction funds? Can you tell us more about that? Part of the, when schools are renovated, there is an account that's called Furniture Fixtures and Equipment that includes a certain percentage for technology. And so we haven't, we have that money to invest in our schools. So we don't need to go out and get that money to invest in our schools. So we don't need to go out and get new money to invest in our schools. We also get some money from the state for technology, which we can use to support our elementary schools. So right now, we don't have to come back to the City Council for additional technology funds. Are those funds within the amount that we talked about last meeting, council meeting of no? When schools are renovated, a percentage of the construction cost is set aside for furniture, fixtures, equipment, including technology. In this secondary renovations, we negotiated with Fairfax County that they would pay portion of that. So we have partnered with Fairfax County to supply what our schools need. At this point, we have not moved Fairfax city money into those accounts. We have spent spending down the county money first. So that money is there and we're going to spend it, but we haven't moved that money first. All right. If I might just go back to our discussion at our last meeting on the 11th. We talked at length about the remaining construction funds and what the school board had intended for their use. And frankly, beyond the safety, those matters that involve safety issues. Among those, I would say that the damage stairs, the replacement of the tar box, the practice fields, the improvement to the handicap, access to the stadium, those things I have no problem with. The rest of your list is very problematic on my mind. And I would just put that out for the council's discussion and thought. I have to disagree with Mr. Griffin on this, because it was his feeling that the city would be using the funds, the leftover funds from those construction monies to make inroads into a very difficult budget year. And in that regard, I assume that he makes the assumption that these are school funds. As a matter of fact, they are not school funds. They are city funds. And in that regard, I think that a close look needs to be made of those intentions for that money because I think that there are things here on this list that could wait that are not necessities that have nothing to do with the classroom programs. And I urge council to take a look and form their own opinions, but that will be something that I'll be talking at length about as we get further down the road with our budget. If I could address one or two things Mrs. Cross, first of all, I appreciate you sharing your concerns and I think we're all concerned about money. The fact of the matter is those funds are school board funds. They were, we passed a bond for $86.6 million and those funds, we told the public that those funds were going to be used for school purposes. So I don't really think that unless the school board takes action and transfers funds from one, from our budget to your budget, that they will remain on our budget and under the school board's control. As I said, I appreciate you letting us know that you have concerns in certain areas. What we're doing with those funds is we explain there was site work, considerable amount of money for site work that was deleted. We're going back and we're making those recommendations so that a year now we don't come to a council and indicate that we need money to complete those projects. The money is in hand, we are going to pay back those funds for money that we borrowed and to use your credit card to pay for your operating plans. It's not necessarily wise in many people's minds. And that in effect what we would be doing. I think it's only fair to remind the school board of the, I believe it was $8.2 million that this body extended to the school board when bond funds were not enough that the estimates for construction came in way over what had been planned. That's nobody's fault except that we used city funds in order that we could go forward with those construction projects. So those were not bond funds entirely that built those schools. I think that's just a fair thing for us to mark here that we did provide those funds to you. That is correct and those funds were used at linear Mrs. Cross, they were not used at Fairfax. And again, I do appreciate you voicing your concerns and letting us know where the issues lie. Thank you. Can I, a much more practical point of view, having been a high school principal for a long time and going through renovation and having a similar circumstance where renovation money was cut. And typically, I think I mentioned this before, you cut first out out of grounds you don't cut out of your instructional priorities or priorities but if you looked at that list and looked at what we are going to try to accomplish to protect the investment of our grounds our grounds are still our responsibility we still need to maintain those responsibilities a while our priorities will always be instruction, student activities and athletics are part of the high school experience. And we need to provide the highest quality across the board for our students. So I hope in that spirit we can look at these funds. And I will assure you we're gonna work with Fairfax County, we're gonna work with the school staff to do this as economically as possible, but still to protect our investment in our ground. Yes, and I appreciate your point of view. I think you would look long and hard in this region for a community that supports their schools to the extent that the sort of thing, obviously that's right. But I'm saying to you that I don't think that we need to do some of these things within this year's budget. I don't think we need to do the road. I don't think we need to do the road. I don't think we need to do the new trees. I'm just trying to find some ways that we can pull back a little bit. I think our demonstration of support from the schools should be on question. Mr. Mayor, thank you. I appreciate Mrs. Cross's comments, and she's certainly on message. Let me find May, and by the way, I think actually both of my two favorite ladies are correct. This is that honestly, I mean, no, I mean, in fairness. All right, all right, all right. Let me, how me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let did not quite articulate it exactly to that point that I think that both ladies are addressing here this evening, because he talked specifically about voter approved last council meeting, which he was incorrect, and I'm assuming he didn't mean to say it that way. For somebody as old a pro as he is, it's unusual that he makes that kind of slippage. But having said that, I do hope that Mrs. Cross's comments will be taken under advisement. And I appreciate the working majority of the school board being willing to come back to the city council and return that money to the taxpayers, which I think is going to be a benefit. And I certainly understand the issues that have you've outlined, which is a little surprising as Mr. Greenfield's also talked about here. In terms of, we're starting to creep up again on some of the maintenance costs that I think some of us, you know, you sort of startle when you hear that because these just seem like yesterday, we were approving these bonds. The only thing I want to say in conclusion, and this is really just a general comment, I want to thank you all, and in particular Mrs. Monday, this is by far, in my opinion, the best presentation I have seen from the school board in my entire 18 years on the City Council. I mean that. This was thorough. It was enlightening, sobering as well. I mean, but I also know that you all put a lot of work and effort into this and the demographic information, but also even more importantly, the curriculum information and the programming information, something that our former colleague, Mayor Mason, used to talk a lot about, that trying to get the school board in particular to focus on that area, you guys have really, I think, I've done yourselves with this presentation. It's not all good. I realize that in the sense that we have to fund it, or at least come to some conclusions on what we may not fund. But in reality, it is a very good budget, I just want to thank you all. Thank you. Of course. This is Monday. Congratulations on your first budget presentation, nice job. And I especially like the 2020 pictures. I do have, I do, because you know those are our children that are coming up here. And it's hard to believe that I, you know, it's good. Yeah, well not now, but anyway, it's nice to see those. I'd like to ask a couple things about the science program. Now I didn't see anything in here on the science program at all. And I know that you've put a lot of effort into the science program, but I didn't see anything on the SOLs or anything here about the science program. So I'm wondering where we stand in that. We've seen some gains across the board and all of our in all of our programming. Candidly, the reason why I picked math was that that was the first group of teachers that we started investing in a few years ago and we're seeing the best outcomes there in terms of growth in the advanced programs in particular. I will tell you that my belief about science education is that if you can get the fundamentals right, if you can get students reading, being able to read critically and being able to be successful in algebra one geometry and algebra two, science takes care of itself. So if we can get that solid math background and good reading skills and provide the opportunities for enrichment and acceleration in science, we're going to see the same kinds of gains in science. Now again, we're seeing many, many more students access advanced classes in science than had happened previously. That's just happening everywhere. But I have to tell you, you know, where I came from and I looked at all the schools in Fairfax County. This growth and math in this pyramid is unique. That kind of growth, having almost a full class of geometry in a school that doesn't have a GT center program at the middle school level is unique. And that is the kind of thing we need to continue to nurture in our community. That's going to pay off. And by the way, and if you saw the articles this weekend about the National Math studies and some of the very things that we're doing here, the kinds of issues that they're talking about in terms of attitudes toward math and who can be successful in math. Okay. Thank you for that. I also, you know, when I look at the state funding and I, you know, I know that we've been around the corner on the state funding, but it's on these charts, I notice that Manassas City and I think Prince William County gets most of the money from the state. And is there anything that we can be doing in any way? How do they do that? Can you repeat that? I really- Thank you. Basically, the funding is based on the local composite index, and unfortunately the state things were very wealthy. I know we don't feel rich, but the state believes we are. And Prince William simply and the same as the menaces, city and menaces park both have a very favorable funding formula and get a very large percentage from the Commonwealth. Okay, and I have another question then when we talked about Loudoun County, you know, when you were looking at the price per student or there was a percentage about Loudoun County it was the highest for the new school and is that due to the new schools that they've built in the region? Okay. I think we kind of fell pretty well on that chart, considering we have four new schools here in the city of Fairfax. So I hats off on that too. And I wanna thank you again for the presentation closely at the budget. Thank you. I will say Mrs. Lyon, I will see if Mrs. Mendy can get us some specific information on students enrolled in science courses. Most students at Fairfax High School graduate with four years of science. Well, the reason I ask that question is because most of the kids that my daughter is hanging out with are in these advanced science classes. And even if they're not in the advanced science classes, the classrooms in the new schools in linear and in the high school are fabulous. So I can't imagine them not performing well with, I think, performing very well in my interview. It's not maybe not as well as in the math, but I don't think that you go and notice that the science program is also very good here in the city of Fairfax. As is the English department, I might add too. So I just wanted to clarify that we are really doing well in some of those other areas of education here in the city of Fairfax. So, and thank you again for your presentation. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Also, you nailed the presentation. This was extremely concise and right to the point. One of the, a question I have is you had mentioned towards the end of your presentation about using county funds at this time, not needing city funds on, it was like one of the technology. How long will the county funds do you anticipate are those? It's going to be used up this year or are they going to be the the Money in the renovation that was set aside for this purpose. Mm-hmm. We have been For obvious reasons we spent down the county side first first and we now have money that we can invest. And what I'm working with the principles on and the school board on is really to come up to develop what we're calling a five year plan and not to have to come back to you for technology money for we hope for five years. Okay, thank you. Another question. Regarding the Latin, what I thought was so long-range looking at the Latin is that the teachers use Latin and showed how Latin was used in English, science, and math. And so the children could see the interconnection between all of the subjects that they were taking, that there was, you could connect the dots. Did I hear you correctly and that you were saying you were working out Latin and bringing in Chinese? That's correct at Providence, that's going to happen. So, I would think that you would want to keep Latin on some level in the schools because our high levels of in math and science and English at this stage, I think, are have some we can give thanks to that because of the Latin that was introduced, like 10 years ago at this point, almost six, seven years ago. It started at the fall of 2000. My son was in second grade, and now he's the sophomore. Part of fall of 2000 when Daniels run opened as a combined school. And my daughter was not in the Latin program. She just graduated in 07. I mean, yes, 07. My son was, there was a difference in the curriculum and he benefited from that. So I would think you need to re-look at, yes, you need Chinese, because it's in there the emerging power. And we will have to, these 2020 group are going to be have to navigate that. But I think we need to not take up that. I appreciate that. We'll have to work with our colleagues in Fairfax County. The problem with Latin and the reason why Fairfax County is not adding Latin, Fles program's foreign language elements school is they're no more Latin teachers. They're not very many people coming along now who are prepared to teach Latin. We have a fabulous teacher in Fairfax City. We are very, very lucky. But it's very difficult. In fact, there were a number of schools couldn't find Latin teachers in the last couple of years. So that's part of the problem because that's the lack of Latin teachers. Likewise, the boot camp. Also, the idea of giving these students just that extra little nudge during the summer, and they hit the ground running in September. And in order to keep up that high level of science and history and English, that boot camp, we need to really encourage funding for that. Mr. Chairman. Come in on the language issue. Unfortunately, the decision has been made and so the county- Train is left to station. Not been able to fund two different languages at any element of school in the county. And so being that they can't even with all of the budget cuts they're facing won't be able to expand. Many elementary schools have no foreign language and they're not even going to be able to expand at the pace they'd like to. The likelihood that we could even try to look at cutting the program back in. So there were several community meetings that were held when the opportunity was presented to providence for, you know, looking at if the change should be made. And there were definitely people that had a lot of different perspectives on it, but they'll back into the school's decision. And I think to follow up on Mrs. Neiss' comment, even if we had funds available, part of the issue is instructional time. How much time can you take out at the instructional day to offer more than one line of which? Even though it enhances the core, the core education. I understand we're going to have to do this. But the bottom line is we have a much broader curriculum today than we did 25 years ago. And the school, the like this school days exactly the same. So it's, there's only so much information you can cover in anyone's time. Thank you for your work. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Quick question. Slide 38 that you went through shows that the actual bill versus what we had budgeted for the tuition contract. Is it too early in the year yet to know whether we are going to have to pay more or get some back from Fairfax County? At the end of this month when we do ADM, then that's my first piece of the puzzle. And so at the end of March when I get that ADM number we check I'll work hard to make sure it's an accurate number. And then Fairfax County comes up with another estimate of its operating expenses for this year for FY08. And then my understanding is usually we deliver the good or bad news to our colleagues in City Hall. Now I have to tell you last year, at this time of the year, we were told that it was, we were going to owe as much as 800,000 and I believe that message was given to you, correct? We ended up getting back 200,000. That's how how much of a shift is seems to be happening in Fairfax County right now. That was due to a budget shortfall for this year and carrying over an extraordinary amount of money out of the FYO 7 budget to FYO 8. I understand that there will be some carry-over from FYO 8 to FYO 9 so that can have a similar effect. But I have to tell you one thing that I know, however, is that our ADM is going to be higher than we estimated. We didn't expect 38 more kindergartners. And that doesn't sound like a large number but if you see the price for pupil it's a large number and they will be with us because they're in kindergarten and we think they're going to be more of them coming next year in kindergarten. Thank you. Let me thank you all for coming and I appreciate the interaction. I remind my colleagues we're now 30 minutes behind after the first presentation. Next up is the Commissioner Reving, Mr. Johnson. Thank you. Mr. Johnson, I'm sure you're going to get us right back on schedule in my career. I'll certainly try. We can start by you. I'll yield my time to the school board. Two Shay. Good evening, Mr. Mayor and members of the City Council. It's a pleasure for me to present the Commissioner Revenue Budget for 0809. Unfortunately, I had some better news for you this year. As you well know now, we're down significantly in some of our revenue areas. I'm all ready. First of all, we have no increase in staff. We have a staff very capable staff of nine. our core responsibilities are identified on the screen for you. Banks that bank stock tax, business license, cigarette tax, communication sales tax. There's an asterisk next to that one. That's a new tax, new tax this year. I'll go into that in a little more detail in a moment. Meals tax, personal property, transit, accuracy, and the remainder of our taxes. Income tax, we also provide as a service to the citizens of Fairfax and the DMB select. As with most of the departments in the city, the bulk of our budget is in personnel cost and minor amounts for salaries or excuse me advertising and miscellaneous items. I'm sorry, this is. I'll adjust. Okay, where it goes. We're, you know, we've, we've tried to maintain a cost efficient operation and as a result, we've only had a modest increase in our, in our request this year of 2% or slightly over that. We're good value for the city. We have gone up slightly and B poll. I've allocated the expensive personnel expenses in the office to account for the major revenue functions that we do and we're heavy on professionals on the V-pole side. We employ two auditors in their, attributable, that's why you see that blue line is a little higher. First, revenue item is bank franchise tax. We're down slightly on bank franchise. That's largely due to a merger this past year of one of our banks with their bank holding company that resulted in a reappropriation of revenues across all banks in Virginia. I'm anticipating that based upon current economic conditions that the 08, 09 bank franchise tax will be flat. We do have 17 banks now operating in the city. There are two new banks and we've had two bank mergers. In case you're interested, Potomac Bank of Virginia, Merds with Sandy Spring Bank, and Mercanteel Potomac Bank, Merds with P and C. Business licenses, this was one revenue amount that I was sweating out a little bit this past year, we just got finished processing the bulk of our business license and it looks as though that our B poll tax will be in line with the 0708 estimate. I am forecasting a modest increase in 0809 revenue, but that's entirely dependent upon this year's economic conditions. And I may be coming back to you and adjusting that number, but at the moment, I'm going to leave it as a modest increase. The number of revenues licenses issued is also stable. It's also a good indication of the health of our economy. what's also a good indication of the health of our economy. Cellular tax, this tax was repealed last year and was replaced with the new 5% communications and sales and use tax, which is being collected by the Virginia Department of Taxation and remitted back to the city on our behalf. Cigarette tax is down and I anticipate that it will continue to decline. It's declining approximately 5% per year and that is largely due to a reduction in the number of cigarette smokers. E911 tax collected by the locality was also refilled in 2007 and replaced with a statewide uniform E-911 tax at a rate of 75 cents per line. That's also being collected by the Virginia Department Taxation and remitted to the city. Niels tax, we had a 2% increase in the rate last year, but even with that rate, we have had a fairly marked decrease in Niels tax receipts approximately 225,000. Again, same as with B poll, I'm forecasting a modest increase, but that will, you know, be predicated on how well we continue to do or not do in the overall economy. Personal property tax is down. Also, this is largely due to, we use a service, recognized pricing guide and the National Automobile Dealers Association to value our fleet of vehicles and quite frankly and quite simply our fleet of personal property vehicles in the city has declined. And that's unless in combination unless a new car purchase is last year. I am again forecasting a modest increase, you know, for 0809. One of the bright spots for this past year is transit occupancy. We're actually up slightly over the initial forecast and anticipating an increase in 0809. The final tax that was repealed by the General Assembly in 07 and replaced with a communication sales and use tax was the telephone portion of the utility tax. And that will be the final slide that I talk about and get to that just a second. This is obviously the new tax. It replaces the telephone utility E919 on its cellular tax. It is to be revenue neutral. We were a little concerned about it in the middle part of the year, but the General Assembly has, or excuse me, the Virginia Department tax station has found additional revenue and it now looks as though it will at least for this year be revenue neutral. So it will at least for this year be revenue neutral. Vehicle rental tax, this is a tax on daily rental of vehicles, it's down slightly and I anticipate it will be flat next year. And DMV is in line with the 0708 estimate and we're actually up 0809 and that is due to a fairly significant increase in the number of customer for serving at the DMV select. On that note also, we are, the DMV Select is very, very successful. The citizens in the city are very satisfied with the service as you can see by the company graph. By the way, we did, as part of our staff extenders for the state, we did receive partial funding for an additional position for our DMV select, which I chose not to fill, because as I said, it was only partial. But we did apply the revenue to one of our other city positions that is currently not being funded by the compensation board. And I'll entertain any questions you have. Mr. Mayor, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Johnson, helpful presentation. I guess the first question I have is dealing with the meals tax. I'm thinking of some taxes that we adjusted last year. And many of us had mixed emotions about, for instance, the meals tax because there's been some history on the part of this council, at least with three of us over the last two decades in which we would often debate whether or not, you know, the old economics 101 and the elasticity and so forth as to whether or not people would actually scale back. And what you're telling me is even with doubling of the Meals Tax people did scale back, is that a reflection, or at least that's what it looks like or is that a reflection? Is that indeed what happened or is that a reflection of people restaurants closing, for example? Or is it more of a reflection as I just said, of scaling back because of the general economic mood and the tax impact? Can you give me your professional opinion on that? My opinion is it was not based upon the tax increase. We, Meals Tax was strong, the first part of the year, and we noticed they slowed down towards the end of the year. Well, of course the tax didn't take effect until July 1. Correct. So that's just a matter. Well, I just found a sure argument. Well, actually, it doesn't because the last quarter is what I'm talking about. Okay. So the third quarter was still strong. Correct. Can we, I realize you can't share specific data, tax data per restaurant, for instance, unless I guess they sign a waiver or something, but I didn't know if you take an aggregate five restaurants in the city and track it in terms of when, I'd like to see some sort of data that would help just get us a better understanding. Because I'll tell you, I have frequented several restaurants and certainly there's people up here who let that go. People up here who even own a restaurant. And in fact, one restaurant I went to, for instance, had a big sign up, that effective July 1, you can thank your city councils basically what it said, because they just doubled your tax. So obviously, I'd just like to get a better understanding of whether or not this is truly impacting it. And then secondly, on cars, similar question, the personal property tax. This is an area in which I've been opposed to raising it year after year because I think that if anything, the voters way back when in 1997 spoke that they hated this tax more than any other. And whether or not it deals with other personal property The vast majority of it is the car tax what irrespective of a look people want to say or how they want to spin it It's mostly a car tax and so therefore We've been raising that and we're seeing it, you know, and you talked about people buying less new cars That you know that would surprise me. Is there any proof points you can provide us on that? Not tonight, but I certainly can probably get that information for you. I would appreciate that. Banks, since that's the other area of category, we have talked more about banks on this city council than, by the way, I don't work for one anymore, so I can fold disclosure. But we sort of scratch our heads because every bank wants to locate here and I realize that with the franchise tax works with deposits and so forth and how that can be impacted with the holding companies and mergers and so forth. But my goodness, we're getting more and more banks. Nobody can say that they don't have choice in our community with 17 different banking institutions. How on earth can that revenue stream be going down? I'm just, are people, you know, depositing less and saving less is that? I mean, it's not just mergers. I mean, it seems like that's a big hit. It is, that is it. I mean, it's a big hit in respect to also having more banks coming into the city as well I'm referring to. Well, what happens is, with bank mergers, that intuitively you think that that would increase our revenues. But what happens is, if it's a large bank merging with a small bank, the revenue is a portion to the city. So if there are, so you have bank A has five branches and they're in the city, and they merge with bank B, which has 100 branches located throughout the Commonwealth, we're now sharing that revenue, those deposits with the rest of the Commonwealth. I see, okay. Okay, well, that's helpful. You know, bottom line is this is not all good news either. So as the city manager has been alluding to here for the last few months. So thank you, Mr. Murrow, you have the floor. We can just follow up on your meals tax. We can get you some statistical data on restaurants. I will tell you that intuitively, the longer a restaurant has been in business, the more they're able to withstand this kind of a market condition. I think what you'll find and what the data will tell me is that the newer restaurants in the city, those have been in operation for less than five years today. That don't have that customer base or probably suffering more than the bigger ones. Well, and again, not to believe that this Mr. Murr, I know it was ready to wrap up, but since Mr. Johnson gave me the opening, there are restaurants, tours that I'm sure we've all spoken with who say that this is really hurting their business. And I know that there's confidentiality and so forth with their taxes that you honor and that they may or may not want to share. But boy, if they're telling us that this is a message that this is hurting their business, and they're willing to share that kind of data as an individual restaurant, I certainly would like to see it. Because I mean intuitively it sounds like that's true and I just would like more information. Well I think we can get you that without violating their privacy. Okay. Thank you. Just one. Thank you. When you were talking about the banks, I'm going to go back just to understand a little bit about it and that is when, okay, we have let's say three or four branches of let's say chaviche. Because we have a new one, I think a new Chevy Chase coming in over by one of the anchors furniture at some point, and that's not included in these revenues. Well, and nor will it be included in the bank franchise tax because Chevy Chase is a federal savings bank. And they're not subject to bank franchise tax. Okay. Okay. So we don't get anything from that. So it's just a smaller bank that we would. State banks and or national bank. Okay. Thanks for that clarification. And then you know with some of your slides like for instance the cellular, your tax and there were a couple of them that said that you didn't have whether or not we, we, it was replaced and peeled by the General Assembly. Yes. And then we got a 5% communication sales and use tax. Was that flat? Did that come, was that, and it's been transferred because there were no arrows here saying it's a flat. That's okay. Okay. We were concerned about it in the middle part of the year of not being revenue neutral. And we've been tracking that. But in the final months of the calendar year, the Virginia Department's tax hasten did allocate additional revenue to the city. So it is now revenue neutral. Okay, and it will continue to be that? Hopefully so it will continue to monitor it. Okay, then I do want to go to the personal property tax, which is a second, you know, after, of course, some education over the years here and understanding how budgets work, we did raise the personal property tax a little last year. Can you tell me what that was? Again, I don't have that number off the top of my head. And let me continue with my line of thought. You can get it to me later if you need. But my question is, if we could reduce that, and I know it's a little crazy thing to think about when we're looking at all these deficits here. But then we reduce the personal property tax, because this is $601,000. And I think if we put the tax on something else, we might be able to lower that burden to the city residents. Is that my following the? Absolutely. By reducing that tax, you'll lower the burden on the. Okay. And then I guess we'll go back to the city manager. My question a little later about that will be how can we change that burden, change that burden over? Because I know that I was the one last year kind of heading that or saying, okay, we'll finally do that. And I think that there's another way to equalize that out and reduce the personal property tax. And I know that that will be something I'll be asking about under the budget hearings here. Okay. And then there are things that you talked about that you thought that there might be some increase, moderate increase. For instance, let's just talk about the meals tax since Mr. Silverstone brought that up. And since we're in such a decrease now, $225,000, let's just say, I mean, that's what the reality is. How is it that we think it could go up when we're looking at the market now? I mean, it sounds like Doomsday. Well, I'm trying to be quite frank that I'm trying to be as optimistic as possible. That's why at the outset, I said we may need to come back. Come back to that. And that would be with any of these modest increases like the transit occupancy tax. I don't know how you would know it would go up or down. I guess I'm wondering how you figure just a moment. Basically how we arrive at most of the numbers is we do a trend-lined analysis of revenues. Obviously that does need to be tempered a little by current economic conditions and that's quite frankly what we've done. We tempered what normally would be increased is based upon past performance this year. I want to thank you for the bad news. And I also want to thank you also for using that DMV, those funds to help with personnel issues here. That was a very creative way thing to do, and it at least helps us a little bit with this budget. And I want to thank you. I yield the floor, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. This is wonderful. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Couple of real fast things, I think. On the transient occupancy tax, is there any way that you can correlate that to the tourism initiatives. Just a thought, you know, to see if the funds that we are putting towards tourism actually are bringing in people. That's a question. That's an interesting question. The idea, you know, if that in fact is happening, that would be a good thing to. Perhaps working with some of the other city departments we can do that. The only way I can think to do it, kind of thinking on the fly here is through some sort of a survey within this city hotels and hotels. Yes, that's possibility. So, sell your tales, the cellular tax and the, you know, how it went to Richmond. Do we come under the, does that then go under the Dylan rule that we get just percentages back? Unfortunately, yes, that 5% is fixed by the General Assembly. So we're, not only that, but we're, you know, we're no longer in the collection business on we're at their mercy correct okay and the DMV when is there any way for you to see how many people from the city are using it and how many people from the county come in? No, we were tracking that a number of years ago. We do have a significant number of city residents doing it, but we are now out on the Virginia Department Taxation website. So I would probably have to say that the number of non-city residents probably exceed the number of city residents now. Even though we're not doing any direct advertising. Good word gets out. It certainly does. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Mr. Restman. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. On the communication sales tax, since the Virginia Department of Taxation is collecting that, is there any problem with us getting our fair share back in the sense of them making mistakes like we had with the auto, the car rental tax? Yeah, that was a concern of mine. Councilman Rasmussen, right from the beginning on this, when these three taxes were segregated from local control, basically all, the only ability we have now is to monitor. We have no audit authority with regard to these taxes. And we're doing the best we can as far as monitoring those. And when the need arises contacting the department and asking them to take a look when our revenues appear to be down based upon the money being receded. One last question. The cigarette tax, I think the Virginia General Assembly has passed a fire safe cigarette bill and I don't think Maryland has that. I think the Virginia General Assembly has passed a Fire Safe cigarette bill. And I don't think Maryland has that. Is there a possibility, and maybe you don't have the background information to answer this, because if it hasn't come up before, but is there a possibility that we could lose a lot of sales to Maryland, if they don't have the fire safe cigarette cigarettes and we do I'm afraid I can't comment on that because I'm not I'm not familiar with that legislation. Okay, that's fine When one personal note I was not a big fan of your and mr. Maloney's initiative when you set up the DMV direct But having used it twice in the last couple of months. It's terrific. Always nice to have a convert. I am. Thank you very much. Mr. Grimfield. Just quickly thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm not going to belabor the discussion about whether we should have a higher personal property tax or a lower one or cut back on the meals tax or not, but how are you able to monitor, and I know that in part this is done in conjunction with Mr. Maloney's office, but the number of people that are coming into this city in our registering are you looking at utility bills to make sure that they are actually registering their vehicles? I know we've battled in the past with people thinking that they are part of Fairfax County and they're registering in Fairfax County and using addresses somehow they're saying that they belong there when they don't. What are you doing to try to look at that? I mean the $600,000 drop is pretty dramatic from what we've seen in the past. We're doing that. Water and utility hookups. We definitely do that. My colleague, Treasure Maloney, utilizes a parking or decal enforcement officer who goes around and tries to identify non-city vehicles parked and garased in the city. And the most important thing that we do is we use the DMV download, and that is a listing provided by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles that lists every vehicle by garage jurisdiction. Now the problem with the DMV download is when you register a vehicle, when you purchase a vehicle, for example, in a city dealer, let's say. And the city finance office prepares the tags for you. You give them your address, obviously. You're at the mercy of a clerk in the dealership to identify where those addresses are in the city or in the county. And the DMV database currently does not, it's not sensitive enough to identify city locations by street address. So quite frankly, I'm sure what happens is the clerk asks the person, do you live in Fairfax City or do you live in Fairfax County? And may not even ask, it probably more often than not, would be just assigned to Fairfax County, in which case you have a Fairfax County garage jurisdiction with a city address and the county would then bill based upon that tape that they get. And it takes a while for us to get that straightened out. But it's something that we do monitor all the time. What is our collection rate versus our registration number of people that have vehicles registered here? I'll have to... If you'd rather defer that. I'll have to let him answer that. That's right. And how are we doing we Business vehicles that are it because it's six the vehicle has to be housed six months out of the year in The city to be considered that needs to be registered here correct, right? Right are we also looking at there's a there I'm noticing a uptick in vehicles that are used for business purposes vansans, for example, panel vans that don't have any markings on them, but I know we have a neighbor around a corner from us that added an additional driveway and the only thing they have parked in that driveway are business vans. The General Assembly, it's an interesting question. A couple of years ago, it changed the law to allow business owners to choose where to garage or register their vehicles, either at their place of business or their place of residence. So you could have in your case a neighbor who has a county vehicle with a county decal or registered in the county legally parked in the city of Fairfax without paying property to the city because the business is housed in Fairfax County. And it's at the discretion or the option of the business owner. Verristo. Thank you. Just a couple of quick questions. I know everybody says that, but I am going to be quick. The first state in here cost that have gone up by 2, 2, and a half percent. Does that include the commissioner's salary? Yes. Okay. I am still amazed that we do not have any software that can identify what is in the the city and what is not. Meaning personal property? For anything that we simply can't identify an address in the city or whether an address is in the city or whether it's in the county. It boggles my mind that in the stay-in-age that we don't have that. Is there any hope that that's down the road and I certainly am hopeful hopeful for that. I mean, the area is yes I certainly am hopeful for that you know the technology does exist to do that To identify whether and address for examples in the city just from the street location whether and address for examples in the city just from the street location. Now we do have an advantage in that we're fairly small, we're only six square miles and we don't have that many streets in the city. So it is a little easier for us to identify. The problem is not in the city, it's in the county. And I'm speaking of personal property in the county being credited with the incorrect garage jurisdiction, that is a problem. And until DMV addresses that issue, and it's really what we're talking about is I think baselines EIS and until DMV gets to that level, we're sort of at their mercy as far as the county is concerned. I mean, what you're pointing at speaks directly to that issue when a clerk and a dealership registers a vehicle, it should be I agree, it should be instantaneous that as soon as you key in that address, it's bingo, it's Fairfax City or Fairfax County. That's just quite frankly not what happens right now. You know, enter the address and then enter the garage jurisdiction. Right, amazing. Thank you. Mr. Justice, it's just very quickly. I want to make sure I understood it right. I can at first, but we more than double the revenue and the nale stacks for one year's tax. Correct. We increase the rate. The $225,000 that you have in red that were down, that was down from your budgetate projections. The 0708 budgetate year. Correct. And then when you looked at the 0809 where you said amount of increase, that's based on amount of increase from actuals that you're now projecting yes And I soon we took into consideration the fact that we probably have more new restaurants coming line in the city than ever Absolutely in the history the downtown the old Frank's nursery site Fairfax Boulevard. There's a number. I have to remember another time when there's more new instruments coming in. Yes. And that's still only got you to a slight increase. Correct. And, you know, I'm quite frankly I'm hedging my bed here. I don't want to have to come back to you and say that our revenues are down for this year. I'd rather... I mean, it just counterintuitive to me. I mean, just look across the street. There's all national chains. They're not small mom and pops that, as you said, you know, go through a tough time in the first several years. They're fairly sophisticated, not just in downtown, but the new ones on Fairfax Boulevard. So I'm just surprised that there's only a slight increase with a caliber of the restaurants and the size of the restaurants that are going to be coming on board. And I think virtually all of them will be open before the start of the fiscal year. Well, with this forecast, I just decided to err on the side of caution. Okay, that's fair. All right. If there aren't any other questions, thank you for your time. I agree with you. you've been here. Okay, we're now moving on to the register of voters. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and Council. If the members of the electoral board would like to come up and join in, you're certainly more than welcome. So go ahead, please. You can start and thank you for joining you. I'm Tim Scott, General Registrar. The electoral board is appointed by the circuit that oversees all phases of the electoral process. The general registrar appointed by the board ensures the integrity of the voter registration process and manages the electoral process for the board, ensuring that elections are conducted efficiently, professionally and in conformity with the law. In general, the budget for the electoral board and general registrar will fluctuate according to the election cycle and the anticipated turnout in a given election cycle. In election cycles with more elections, the budget will be higher in election cycles with fewer elections. The budget will be lower. Larger elections require more hours by full time staff and a large number of temporary staff positions and officers of election. The good news is that this next election cycle, fiscal year 2009, is a smaller election cycle. We have two elections, one very large one and more than likely a smaller one. Our core responsibilities are voter registration and elections, just a few of the things that we handle under those topics are processing voter registration applications, maintaining the voter registration rules through the statewide voter registration database, processing and storing all candidate filings and campaign finance documents, establishing and maintaining polling places, preparing voting equipment for election day, and recruiting and training 60 to 80 officers of elections in the conduct of elections. To give you some idea of how varied our workload is in fiscal year 07. We only had one election and that was the November 06 federal election for US Senate, US House, and three constitutional amendments. However, it was a large election in that we had 60% turnout. In fiscal year 2008, on the other hand, we have four elections, two federal, one state and one local. November 07, we had 40% turnout in the Virginia Senate House, FERCACOR, Commonwealth Attorney and Sheriff. Our number of registered voters, by the way, just keeps going up. Currently, we were back at 14,266 in November of 7. We're up to 14,500 right now. And we anticipate with the surge coming with the presidential election, that we should be at almost 15,000 by November. The presidential primary, which primaries usually are very low turnout, we had almost 35% turnout for the presidential primary and that's more than 20% higher turnout than the 04 presidential primary. So it was a huge turnout. We've started tracking another performance metric and we're taking a look at the error rate for election night reporting. And I'm happy to say that in the last two elections we've had a 0 percent error rate on election night results reporting. This means that the numbers that were called in by our officers of election after a very long day were accurate 100% and did not change one vote in the Canvas. So we've instituted two new programs this year to try and help bring this air right down. We've increased training for all our officers of election. And the past officers that had worked more than one election were not required to stay for the full training session. We now require that all officers attend the full session. Several of the people have commented that they've learned things that they didn't know in the past. Another program with Institute is to add a new officer management position to the officers of election crew. Previously we just had a chief and a deputy. We now have a procedural specialist who handles all the forms related to election day. This allows the chief and deputy chief to focus on preparing for the end of the night when they complete the statements of results. And it looks like it's been successful so far. Yet to come in fiscal year 2008, that was enough, but we have two more coming, as you know, the city elections in May, where we will elect mayor, council, and school board. And then June 10, 2008, I just received word this week that we will be having most likely a dual congressional primary for the 11th congressional district, and quite possibly on the Democratic side, a Democratic primary for Senate seat. We won't know for sure until after about the 17th of April whether or not we'll actually have primaries in those offices. And then in fiscal year 2009, of course, we have the, the big one coming, the presidential election for in November 08. And then possibly a primary for Governor in June of next year. Where the money goes, personnel primarily. We have three positions, no new personnel requests. We have two full time and one half time staff. We also have one temporary part-time who helps us with busy times as our workload is cyclical. Contract services would normally take a larger dip from 08 to 09, primarily contract services where we pair officers of election. And you would normally see a larger drop because of less elections this cycle. However, we were planning ahead, there were several bills in the legislature that were pushing for no excuse absentee voting or early voting as it's called in some places. So we went ahead and estimated for that cost, which was about 4,500 per election. So this is bloated by about $9,000 because the bill did not pass this legislative session. Now it will probably get brought back up again in January of 2009, but for right now we won't have to fund that, so that will go down. And then our other operating costs are going down as well, just because fewer elections, fewer ballots to prepare. because fewer elections, fewer ballots to prepare. But some of our operating expenses stay constant like hardware and software maintenance contracts. We've also managed to fill the 2% cut request by the city staff. Our challenges for fiscal year 8089, one of our biggest challenges is the law that was passed July of 7 banning the acquisition of new DRE screen voting machines. This is basically tied our hands from procuring any more voting equipment, even though we set aside some money to try and do that. Once the bill passed and it was pretty clear that no one would be able to buy a significant quantity of voting equipment. Our voting equipment vendor, AVS, made the decision to not produce any more equipment. So even though we had set aside some money and created a purchase order to get in before the July first deadline last year, we were not able to purchase that equipment because it just doesn't exist. And since then, ABS has ceased to be an entity. However, a company has picked up their service contracts and they are currently supporting us as far as hardware support. There was a bill introduced, this legislative session to repeal this ban and we fought very hard to try and support this bill. And the fact that it's still partially alive says something to how hard we fought, however it was carried over to the 2009 session. So if we are able to buy more equipment, it will not be until late 2009 probably. So our same challenge remains to handle our anticipated 80% turnout in November of this year while minimizing lines, voter wait time, and call volume to the registrars off-song election day. Possible solutions to the challenges use some of the money set aside for new voting machines to purchase applications that will allow us to process voters more efficiently on election day. One of those solutions we've already purchased, they are hand held, look up devices that store database of registered voters. We can load them which is the city of Fairfax or we can vote them with all of Northern Virginia, which is what we're choosing to do. This will allow us to work the lines at the polling places on Election Day to ensure that everyone that's in line is in the right place so that voters aren't inconvenienced by waiting until they get to the poll books in order to find out that they're in the wrong place. This has been effective in Loudoun County purchased these and we demoed them for the February primary and they received huge raves from our poll workers and from I've gotten good feedback from the Loudoun County General Registrar about their use. And these are relatively cheap. They're about $190 a piece and we've managed to purchase one for each polling place, plus a service contract for a couple thousand dollars. So it's not a significant cost. And we're hoping that using these will decrease the lines and the call volume to our office on election day. Another issue that, another item that we hope to purchase in the future is electronic poll books. The State Board of Elections can is pushing these because of the huge cost savings that it will realize to them to eliminate processing of paper poll books, scanning them in afterwards. And the electronic poll books really allow us an easy way to process voters at the polls and then record the data instantly and transmit it to state board after the election. The state board has started working on, they've released an RFP to have vendors submit bids to come up with an application that will run on a standard laptop. I've gotten a little bit of insight information in that a couple of the vendors are not submitting because the laptops are not capable of running the software. They're too old, but hopefully the state comes up with a better solution and they seem committed to paying for this since it will primarily be their cost savings. We're looking at having to pay about 10% per unit, whatever that cost may be. So hopefully that will come through soon. Thank you. Miss winner. Thank you Mr. Mayor and thank you for your presentation Mr. Winner. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you for your presentation, Mr. Scott. The officers of election, the people at work the polls, they get a small amount of... Right. Where does that come from? Contract services is where that comes from. They're actually, they each have their own vendor number there, and they're considered contractors for the city. The people, but the people that are residents in the city that work the polls, that check people in. Right. How do their compensation compare to the counties? We are actually higher. We pay, well, we're higher in some categories and lower in others. We pay more to the, we call them regular officers, no management authority. They get $120 in election, which is a pittance for the hours that there were. But the chiefs or the deputies and procedural specialists get 140 and then the chiefs get 160. The county just recently, just last year implemented a raise for their chiefs and deputies. The chiefs get $200 in election and the deputies get 150. So we're a little lower now on that. Are we getting the volunteers that we need? I'm, it's a volunteer. We are very fortunate. Okay. Very fortunate to have a very stable pool of officers of election. Is it an aging pool that we have to look at? And we are looking at ways to reach out to younger city residents. Is it possible to split up the day so that, you know, I mean, right now it's like a 12, 14 hour day. Is there any way would you get more volunteers if you were able to say we have a two seven hour shifts? The county actually experimented with that and did not see any positive results from it. You essentially have to recruit twice as many people. You have to get people for morning shifts and people for afternoon shifts. And they had some problems with people showing up for midday shifts and. But to that end, if somebody could not take off time from work. Right, the law could actually get- Yes, the law did get changed and we can allow them to do that now. And we could experiment- Maybe put it out there and see if- But to this point we really don't have much problems with recruiting and retaining officers of election. We're very fortunate. We do not fit the statewide and nationwide model of the shortage of officers of election. But we're looking ahead as those people can't do that anymore that there is a crop coming in and influx every every election and new officers We we always have have new people who want to do it We in fact have some county residents When county residents that come in to work and county employees because because county employees don't have to take leave in order to work Elections so we have several county employees that okay that work for us on election day Thank you. Ms. Lyme. Well, congratulations on your first presentation, I guess, here on this council. And then I guess I do. Also, this will be your last one. So I'd like to say congratulations and see you later. Thank you. But I do want to say, you know, at the primaries, I went late that day and I did notice there was more of a line and it is a shame that we're having such difficulty with these voting machines. But to put a positive spin on that, you know, things move pretty quickly and smoothly and with the influx of more registered voters, you know, by November, this really could be an issue. And hopefully across the state they'll get that message loud and clear and push a little harder here. So thank you very much. Right, just one quick comment. In any dual primary situation, which is what the presidential primary was, because of the processes that are required to run to election simultaneously, side by side, you're always going to see lines. We have to, I mean, just you're doing dual lookup processes when people come into vote. So the pinch point is not even at the voting machines, but it's at the poll books. It was very smooth, so anyway, hopefully the election may will be smooth. Thank you. Mr. Greenfield. Thank you, Mr. Marad. I don't really have any questions. Just a comment. I appreciate you presenting a budget that reflects 11 percent decrease from last year to this year. I know that you in conjunction with the electoral board worked hard on that. And I certainly appreciate that. And personal note, I wish you the best as you head out west. It was nice to have you back. Thank you. I'm sorry that you were leaving. You and your staff have been extremely professional, very courteous, and anyone that I've talked to in the city that has had interaction with your office, you in particular and your staff have been very complimentary. So I think you have a tough position to have been very complimentary. So I thank you. Have a tough position to fill when he leaves. So I challenge you to be able to find us another outstanding registrar. So thank you very much and I wish you well. Thank you very much. Okay. If there are not any other questions or comments, thank you very much. Appreciate you. Good luck. We're now moving on to presentation by our treasurer, Mr. Steve Maloney. Welcome. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for accepting. Yes, green for the color of money. Remind you of the treasurers here. First we have this organizational chart which is basically unchanged. No new positions. Corresponds abilities also remain constant customer service, billing and payment of taxes, collection of delinquent taxes, invest city funds, manage cash flow, collectory mid-state funds, and budget annual revenues. Where the money goes is, again, generally the same, it's very salary oriented. Very few changes there. The pie chart is the same. Payment methods. We have done online checks. We do online credit cards. Bank, bill pair accounts, direct debits for utilities, the counter course, check charge, debit. We do mail and we do drop box outside. A brand new drop box for those who have not seen it. Very fashionable. Where is it? It's out front, out'm from the city hall. The collections, real estate personal property, utility bills, business license, mills tax security alarms, all of the revenue flows through us. Past due notices, when we have to actually go to collection, we do past due notices. We've tried to move more to system-based collection, meaning that we do DMV holds now, we do set off debt. Those are matters of just submitting as opposed to making intensive. Obviously, if we have to collect it is far more labor intensive than mailing a bill. So we're looking for faster ways to do that and more ways to make sure that people pay. I can answer a couple questions that came up earlier. Decal enforcement, we're talking about people coming into the city and not registering cars, and that always is a problem. Our decal enforcement person has, we've now had for eight or nine years, continues to go out of course in the early morning hours from three to eight. What's interesting in these statistics are for as long as he's done it, it never really shoots up, but it never shoots down. It is like a constant problem. If you look back and chart it out, there's little fluctuations, but there's no big jumps and there's no big dips. It is just, he tags between 18 and 2,000 cars almost every year. When you look at the statistics, it just doesn't change. We do concentrate heavily on the apartments, he goes to the apartments, he tries to circle the city once every 60 days. He tries to make the all the way through the city. And of course, we track all of that and we follow up on it. But it is a constant problem. I like the idea of having a system that would identify people when they move in. But with two-year registrations, even that's not a final answer. You know, with two-year registrations, if you move in, you realize you're in the city of Fairfax, you keep your registration, and it's not for two or three years that you realize, you know, I don't live here. I'll we catch you and tell you you don't live here. So it is a constant problem. Mr. Greenfield mentioned collection rates. They again, they have been consistent through the years. We usually collect around 99% over 99.1% or 98%, but it's usually around 99% of personal properties. Always been collected. Of course, real estate is almost 100%. Her personal property is certainly certainly has its challenges. I mentioned we're going to DMV holes, we're going to set off debt. But even with that, with the transient nature of the population, it is difficult to locate people at times. Every cycle has its downturns in the last cycle for real estate, of course, is title companies, sales builders, obviously having trouble collecting some of those taxes now. So always pursuing people. Mr. Mayor, thank you. I can't help my last budget hearing or presentation with you, Mr. Maloney, not to raise the simple issue that the best way to handle the decal enforcement issue is just to get rid of the darn decals. We are one of the few jurisdictions that aren't even entertaining it. You know, others as you have admitted to this body in the last two years, you were skeptical three years ago. You said, boy, it seems like they're all moving in this direction, including the county that surrounds us. I'm in the minority of I think one or two up here. I don't want to say one, because I think there was, I might have had one, one vote of support, but certainly there's going to be some change on the council moving forward. And hopefully the next city council will look at that. I mean, frankly, while I know that there's a $25 fee associated with it and there's revenue that's associated with it, my hope is is that you can make that up on some other aspect of personal property. I'm not advocating losing the $25. I'm just advocating losing the sticker. It's getting to the point with technology and Mrs. Cross has talked about this in other areas tonight. It's absurd and when I talk to Mrs. Bouleva and Fairfax County and others, they tell me it's absurd that we're not doing it. So again, I know that this is not your issue. It's our issue from a policy perspective. It's unfortunate that this body has chosen not to address it affirmatively. And I just will go peacefully on'll go peacefully. My mind is body in another three months, but making sure that I put down another marker that this is an issue that I hope will be addressed at some future point. And obviously the collection issue is important and that's some feel like the only means in which to do it. But certainly the county and others around the state are saying that's not true any longer. Thank you, Mr. Millenetta, need a response. Thank you, Mr. Sofartorn. It's always heartening and heartwarming to hear that somebody in the county has said the way we do businesses in the city is observed from the way they do business, but this cross. Thank you. Can you talk a little bit about the incentive awards that you use with your department? Well, the basic city incentive awards. But beyond that, there's the states incentive awards. And we have the Treasury Association of Virginia. Has worked hard for the last five to eight years to have an education program Which requires classroom training actually testing to one the few people that actually test The end goal on that it is an incentive award from the compensation board. That's a direct cost so if you need to certain requirements that in my case, it's not only education It's performance. I need to have collection rates, et cetera, a level, a certain level. I need to have investment policies, et cetera. Then that would entitle me to a 9% raise based on the compensation board salary and the compensation board fully funds that. That's really the incentive. The same is true with the deputies, two deputies. So when we go in, we go to the comp board, and you'll, let me jump back. You know we get reimbursed from the compensation board. Half the deputies salaries get reimbursed from the compensation board. And then about 80% of mine compensation level gets reimbursed. So the incentive awards that we do to the state, we go back to the state and we say we've done. We've met the criteria. We would like to have that money. Give them back to the city. And that's where the bonus money comes from. It's directly from the compensation board. That's none of the city doesn't fund any of that. Got it. Got it. Okay. Thank you. You heard me speak with Ms. Commissioner about software. Seems to be an ongoing issue. Thank you. Just one other thing. On this little printout of your, or breakout of your budget, it shows a decrease of internal services, considerable amount, 125, almost $126,000. What is that? That's actually, it's a negative figure to begin with. Right, no. That's reimbursement. I do work. I collect bills for the water department. So that's not general fund. That's reimbursement. Okay. So that's really what that is. It's actually an increase in reimbursement. Good. And... I'm going to the screen way to show it, but it is. The item that's titled Other Charges is about four times a pretty well more than that. It was $4,500 last year and now goes to 29.5. What is that? I'm on C67. He's reading from the Agit Rocky on the budget. Joe, maybe you could you show purchase services that would you refer to from 10,500 other charges. This is in FYOE budget. It was 4550 and that goes is being proposed. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. What is that? That is. That's his car. Yes, what is that that is? The that one of the principal reasons other than salary that my budget has gone up every year is credit card fees You know we charge we we we Use credit cards and we get some reimbursement for that But in other cases we don't and that credit card fee is going up and up and up a thousand two thousand a year every year. So it was always in my supply account. It looks like I'm spending more and more money and supplies and in fact that's not true. So we kind of I broke I encouraged the budget people to break it out this year. So it would be more readyable identified as credit card fees which is not as much under my control as long as we keep using them. It's the more more people use credit cards the more fees we have involved in it. So it's really if you look back the same thing the 46, 650 right? You're looking 4,500. Right. it's really if you look back the same thing the 46 650 right in you're looking 4,500 right it's really dropping it out of that and moving it into the other charges. I got you that's really what it is. So that's good. And nonetheless it does continue to go up two to three thousand every year. is more friendly on their feet. It's a task in heart. So I'm going to lecture you. I will comment on that. I don't know. That's all I have thinking. But that's what it is. Thank you. Mr. Estman. Thank you, Mr. Ray. To follow up on that point, and this is one of Mr. Silverthorns and Interest over the years is getting greater use of credit cards to pay our bills. And I know this is probably not the year to be doing anything where we nibble away at the little bit of money we do collect from different things. But is there any chance, do you see any chance of going to greater use of credit cards despite the fact that the fees are increasing a little bit each year? greater use of credit cards despite the fact that the fees are increasing a little bit each year that we would use the credit cards without charging the customer. As we discussed before, that would be costly. What you're looking at is we do pass the fee along. If you choose not to do that, the first thing you're looking at is one in four people put that card away when we tell them there's a fee. So if it's 26 to 30,000 now, it will substantially increase. I guess Councillor Rasmussen, it's really a counsel decision is if you want to bear that burden. And you know, you get into all kinds of questions, but that certainly would increase the use of credit cards. There's no question without charging a fee. No question. Second, one of the things you do was invest the city money and with the short term interest rates really plummeting the last couple of months, is the estimate in the budget you put in, which is a little under a million dollars earned on excess money? Is that really going to hold you think? Can I get back to that? It's very valid question. I'll get together with Joe and we'll look at that figure. I see they dropped it again. So yes, yes, very valid. So, thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I apologize. I had stepped out of the room for a moment, but it was watching on the big screens outside. The getting to Mr. Cross's question, I appreciate Mr. Rasmus and Raisin. I just have one, you know, because I missed your, you were talking about the fees going up, but you're talking about the bank fees, the processing fees for accepting. Is that what you're talking about? No, no, no, no. Don't you also do some fees? Yeah, no, we refer. The number of people using them has gone out. Therefore, that, right, so it's a volume question. Correct. All right. Thank you. That's a better way to put it. That's a, that's a, the reason is, is that debate is going on nationally right now, and that is, you've nipped it right where I wanted you to. No, it's not the percentage rate, it's the number. Thank you. And then the other question I have is, you know, based on local governments and convenience fees, I mean, most of all of the issuers to my knowledge actually allow, you know, you to charge this convenience fee, even though Mr. Rasmussen saying wouldn't it be nice to encourage people to use it and automate government more so. The question I'm sort of getting at here is whether or not that fee could recoup that cost. I realize there's sort of a given take if you charge more of a percentage fee, you will drive down usage of the cards. Versus Mr. Rasmussen, in my previous approach, which was to lower, to get more card usage, you would help the city would pay for it. What I'm trying to say is, where's that sweet spot? So you are not driving up your own costs in your own accounts, but at the same time not discouraging usage or encouraging usage. You have a making sense? I'm looking a little puzzled. I may not be articulating that well enough. I have a brief phrase, Anne. Yeah. Our right now is at three and a quarter. Right. Are you suggesting what, what house have we charged 1%? Is that? I'm asking, getting to Mr. Rasmussen's point, if you charge 1%, you might get more usage, okay, which means our cost would go up. But on the reverse side, if you charge 3.5 or something like that, would you also recoup a bit more of the overall cost that you're paying for supplies? By state law, you can't charge more than what you're being charged. Oh, I didn't realize that. I'm sorry. If we're at 3.25, we can't charge three three point five Oh, I see okay, okay, that's very helpful. Thank you. I wasn't aware of that But the only way we could go is down and with that help or not it's it's an interesting phenomena generally Most people if you don't want to pay it you don't want to pay it whether that's 3% or 1%, it's just the thought of paying extra. Certainly even influence one saying, well, gee, 1% isn't too bad, but I don't know what effect that would have. Okay. No, I was just curious. It's interesting that the State Law says that when it comes to this particular fee, but let's just take the overall tax rate, for example, if we charge more and overall real estate tax. The rest of it, the balance goes into the fund balance. State law doesn't say you have to return to the taxpayers. It's a very interesting separation there. I suspect it's a pass long, that they don't want you to profit from it. If you want to use it, it's a pass long as opposed to a money maker. But I could argue that there's some other categories in which that same logic doesn't hold true. All right, thank you. That's one of our- Thanks, Ms. Brown. Did you collection rate improve since you started using the, since credit cards between an option? No. No? Okay. No. Actually, I actually thought it would improve quite a bit when we went to PPR and people owed less money. It didn't work either. It's generally consistently around 99 percent. It will vary .2 percent over the years. So if the credit card, if that went away, which I'm not, you know, that's not you still get your way, would you collect your record down? Possibility well I would phrase it this way probably not but it might take us more work to get it there Okay, so by having the credit cards you are saving on some level. Yeah work load maybe yes. Yeah. Thank you There aren't any other questions. Thank you mr. Muloneyoney. Always enjoyable to spend time with you. Thank you. We're now moving on to the police department presentation. Chief, welcome. Good evening. Thank you. Certainly all of you know, but let me introduce for the benefit of everyone here and watching this is my deputy chief of police and budget wizard, Major Bill Clue who always makes this much easier for me than it would be otherwise. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you tonight to talk about the accomplishments of the men and women of your police department during the past year and the challenges that we're going to face in the coming year. This year, the budget team directed the department heads to provide more abbreviated budget presentations in a standardized format. So what you're about to see is more of a summary than you've seen in previous years from the police department. Much of the detailed statistical information on department performance is not being presented in our slideshow, but we have provided you just now with copies of the police department's 2007 annual report, which contains all the details you've seen in previous years and more. This report was only finished last week, but it will be available in the very near future on the website for the entire community to see. And with that, let me begin the presentation. For budget purposes, the office of the chief of police and the five divisions of the police department are organized into three cost centers which you see on the screen. Field operations, which are the patrol and support operations divisions, the you see on the screen. A field operations which are the patrol and support operations divisions, the largest divisions in the department. The technical services cost center which includes technical services and criminal investigations division. And lastly, the administration cost center which also includes the professional standards division as well as all the staff assigned to my office. This slide depicts the core responsibilities of the police department. Each one of these is important and drives all of the resource decisions in the police department. I would note though that of these five core responsibilities, the job of maintaining public order, which is number two on the list, is probably the hardest to quantify and to measure. It's impossible to measure what didn't happen because a police officer was there, but we know from interviewing criminals that crime is often deterred or at least in some cases displaced to other places, outside our community because of the perception of likely arrest by city police officers. We also know that well timed intervention, kind of the old notion of the traditional police officer on the beat, who comes along and says, you know, it's time to move along or it's time to call it a night, is an opportunity to prevent more serious problems. It's very difficult to quantify those kind of interactions. This slide is a quick summary of the more detailed statistics in the annual report, and I'll just highlight a couple of things here. In the category of crime, our robberies and our aggravated assaults decline significantly, and that's saying something because they're already very, very low numbers, but our property crimes increased increased and of that the largest increase was in the crime of larceny which went up 18 percent. And the vast majority of that was increases in thefts from cars of high dollar items, which you're all very familiar with that, and also thefts from or in retail business establishments. And I think you all tracked that pretty carefully in terms of our daily bulletin and certainly saw those trends. In the category of motor vehicle accidents, the good news is that the injury accidents, the rate of injury accidents and all the accidents in the city are down. And that's a good thing given the fact that we have had increases in traffic. One troubling trend though was we've had a 200% increase in alcohol-related accidents. Up from 12 last year, the year before to 36 last year, I would note that kind of mirrors a statewide trend where we're seeing alcohol-related accidents going up statewide. And I think the legislature has certainly reacted to that in this year by tightening up some of the laws dealing with alcohol-related accidents and alcohol violations in general. In the category of arrests, some good news there are traffic arrests declined just slightly, but our criminal and DUI arrest increased notably over the previous year. And I would note that given the staffing shortages that we've had in the past year, I think that's an amazing testament to the hard work and the commitment that my officers made, that those numbers went up the way that they did. They really did an outstanding job to kind of rise to the challenge and keep our performance up. In the category of safe neighborhoods, I think this is where the staffing shortages were really felt. We assigned safe neighborhoods enforcement every single rush hour in 2007, just as we've done in the last three years. But last year officers routinely got pulled off those assignments from where serious calls because nobody else was available. And so what you'll see in the statistics in front of you is that our hours in the neighborhoods declined 33% about a third of the assignments didn't get covered, but our enforcement contacts, the actual enforcement that was occurring when the officers were there only went down 21%. So what that tells me, and I think what that tells you is that when the officers are there in present in the neighborhood, there's still plenty of enforcement work to do, keeping our neighborhood safe during those high traffic volume times. We were asked by the budget team to briefly discuss the challenges that the police department faces in the next two years and I've divided that into kind of an external and an internal look. This slide reflects what I see as the external challenges to the police department. In my budget presentations over the past two years, I've talked about the increased police workload as a result of new development and redevelopment, and I think we're seeing some of that occur now. In some cases, as we just talked about, crimes and large sneeze, crimes really are increasing in some categories. But I think in other cases what we're seeing is just that existing crime isn't going up, it's just more noticeable. Back when virtually everybody was off the sidewalks at 8 o'clock in the evening and one disorderly bar patron ran into another disorderly bar patron. It was us and the bar patrons there to observe that. I think as the council and the city has been successful in building the businesses and all the opportunities downtown and other places in the city, the new library, new parks, all the opportunities we presented to people, we have more and more people downtown. And now when some of those public disorder crimes occur, there are other people there to see them. And as we are able to bring people downtown to visit restaurants and ice cream shops in the library and all those kind of things, I think we need to be sensitive to the fact that we have to, that the public order maintenance that we talked about is a very important part of the job. As you know, all three of these issues, the redevelopment, the crime and the traffic are all intertwined. I think in our, as I said in a coming year, our challenge will be not only to maintain the actual enforcement levels, but also maintain the perception of adequate police presence so that people feel safe. And I think that's one of the core responsibilities as well. This next slide talks about what I see as our internal challenges and I think these internal challenges are going to make the external challenges difficult to manage. As you know, this slide just highlights the information in the more detailed report that I provided the city manager regarding staffing and attrition challenges in the years ahead. The workload analysis that we conducted shows that we don't have enough patrol officers to staff the patrol areas 24-7. Many times we're either working short or recovering that with overtime officers to maintain minimum staffing and certainly that's not cost effective and our overtime budget has grown significantly to compensate for that. That staffing shortage alone is a significant problem, but when it's coupled with the coming attrition from normal retirements, it really threatens the level of services that we're able to provide to the community. And all that's detailed in the report that you were provided at, I believe, at the end of last week. As you know, I've proposed several actions to meet these challenges and some of those are included as part of the City Manager's proposed budget. We're also formulating contingency plans to maintain essential services if our workforce becomes depleted over the next two years to the point that we have to scale back some services and activities. The next three slides detail the, or I'm sorry, this slide details the total police budget and reflects an overall increase of 1.5 percent and that does include the new police officer position recommended by the city manager. I'd also note the positions there. We currently have 65 sworn officers. 64 of those are funded by the city budget. One is funded. It continues to be funded by the gang task force by a federal grant. In this slide just shows the apportionment of the police budget among the three cost centers. Most going, of course, to patrol and support operations In this slide just shows the apportionment of the police budget among the three cost centers, most going of course to patrol and support operations and criminal investigations and tech services, and the smallest amount to professional standards in the office of the chief. These next three slides reflect the changes in each of the three component cost centers that make up the police budget. I'm not going to bore you with talking about all the numbers and all the changes, but certainly we're able to answer any questions you have. As we've discussed in years past, the majority of the police budget is the investment in the people who deliver the services and the funds extended for essential contract services. And I'd note that these cost center summaries do reflect the cuts made by the budget team to the police departments requested budget. And those cuts are summarized in this next slide. I do want to note that the $5,000 cut in travel and training, which is in the administration cost center, less than anyone think that's cuts to my personal travel. All of the police departments training in travel is handled in professional standards division and so that's cuts to training department wide and certainly I don't consume that kind of money in travel and training. I'm prepared any questions you have, answer any questions you have about the impact of the cuts if you want to come back to this later on. The last slide talks briefly about a new five-year CIP project that we recommend beginning in this fiscal year. And I want to just take a minute and explain the significance of that. All of the public safety radio systems in the region are in the process of upgrading on different time frames, summer heads, summer behind. Upgrading to meet national, what are called P25 radio standards. P25 refers to a set of technical operating specifications that improve reliability and operability. The easy way to think of it is in terms of a home computer. You're running Windows 2000 on your home computer and you're upgrading to Windows XP. That's essentially what P25 does is it upgrades the operating system of these radio systems. We're already buying P25 radios now as we replace either handheld portables or radios in the cars, but we have to replace the existing stuff that's not being replaced in normal attrition. A couple of important points. We're part of the Fairfax County radio system network, not just us, Fairfax County, but Herndon, Vienna, a number of other agencies. We're all part of one radio system. And Fairfax County kind of holds the key. As they upgrade their system, they will come a point when they will turn the switch and their entire system will cut over to P25, Windows XP, if you will. And when they get to that point, everybody has to be there with them. So they're anticipating three years to upgrade their system. I think in light of the budget issues that all of us are facing, I think five years is probably a more likely scenario. So I'm proposing a five year transition, but understand that that's not within our control. We're kind of rolling the dice that Fairfax County will probably face the same challenges we do. Once the main radio system is P25, we could still talk to each other in the city, but we wouldn't be able to talk to anybody else. We wouldn't be able to talk to fire department, wouldn't be able to talk to George's Nation University, wouldn't be able to talk to anybody, wouldn't be able to go anywhere and interact with anybody except our own people. So we need to complete the transition before the switchover. So there's some things that are known. We know the timing is roughly three to five years. You know what the total cost is? It's about $450,000. The only real decision is how we gonna portion it over, what kind of a timeframe? To not fund the first piece of this, which is 87,000 this year, to not fund it this year, it's a cost deferral, it's not a cost savings, but in light of the situation we're in, it's certainly a reasonable choice available to the council. It's just a question. How do we want to spend the money over what within that time frame of the window? Mayor and council, that concludes my presentation and I'm happy to answer questions that you have. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Chief. I appreciate your very thorough and officer cloak your part of this presentation as well. As you know chief, I am the second class of the Citizens Police Academy. And it's a very good program. Thank you very much for offering that. What has come, you know, in looking at, you know, your tuition rate, in your slide, a page three slide six, and then kind of inner, and then also the $5,000 training and travel. I realize that this budget, we have to be very tight. But in looking down the road, you have a relatively small force. You have people that are extremely specialized. And we need to keep that in mind that there's the graying of America and we in Fairfax are part of that train that has left the station. And as those people that are highly skilled and highly qualified and specialized are beginning to retire, we have to make sure that there are those that are being trained to take their place. And what came to light during the first academy meeting is that in the past there have been hundreds of young people applying for the position of police and now there are handfuls. And it takes a lot of time and energy to get very qualified people in this force that we have in the city is extremely talented and well qualified. I would just like to be on record that we need to encourage and support continuing at and that in the next budgets coming up that there has to be money put, it money's put aside so that as we grey and we retire that we have people that we're not just left in the lurch of no one being able to be highly qualified, say, in light detecting. There has to be foresight in preparing the new wave of officers to take care and take over our police force and for the benefit of our people of the city. Thank you. Thank you. Senator. Thank you. Thank you. Senator. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Chief, if you were in the room when I was asking Mr. Molloney about city stickers, and I'm just looking at some of your stats in terms of city stickers, can you? And I should know this, and I admit it right up front for 18 years, but the difference with your enforcement versus Mr. Molloney's enforcement. Are you both doing the same job, essentially, in terms of sticker enforcement? Or is this also inclusive of people that might be pulled over for speeding at the same time? Well, I believe you're referring to the parking enforcement as well. Yes, I am. That's why it says parking, but I just wanted more clarity around because he was saying that Mr. Molloney was saying that his people are out at 3 in the morning till I think 7 in the morning, I may be off slightly, but I just wanted a little more detail. Are they doing the same job and if not, please? Well, I think they're addressing the same problem. I don't know that they're doing the same job that parking enforcement officers when they're out, which is primarily during the day, are addressing a multitude of parking problems. All the different parking violations you see listed there. Right, I'm only focusing on the city sticker piece. And stickers are a part of that. In addition, when officers stop people, if there's a sticker violation, they'll charge that as well. That's not reflected in those numbers. I think what Mr. Meloney's person, the gap that they're filling is all those people who are at work during the day who aren't around when our parking enforcement officers are out there and are coming back every night to the city. Those are the people that his person addresses by going out and looking for people whose cars aren't normally here during the day. Okay. I see it as a complimentary function. Rather than duplicative. Rather than duplicative or competing really. Okay, fair enough. I'm just, I guess I'm trying to understand though, when it's, you know, other types of parking enforcement activity, how you are determining whether or not that is a city car nowadays versus a county car when it's parked in a particular parking lot because the county no longer requires stickers. So our parking enforcement officers have the ability to run the tag listing on the vehicle and determine where it's at. Would they do that for a simple, you know, meter expiration every single time? It's a simple transit. It's just a punch and an it comes up and there. So you're saying that technology actually does help advance all of this so you can figure out where they live and therefore no city stickers necessary to determine if it's a city vehicle or I mean you're making my point for me with technology I just don't understand why we can't do this you're telling me you can. All right thank you Mr. Rappaport, Colonel. I appreciate it. Exactly what I wanted you to say. Thank you, sir. Mr. Rasmussen. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. On the last issue that you talked about, Chief, the P25 standards, with the rapidity with which technology moves, is something that's going to be bought this year or next year, going to be still working at the five-year cut-off point? Cut-over point? Yes, I'm not a radio tech person, but essentially we're using the same radio technology that was first major upgrade of technology, the internal operating technology. And I think what they're trying to do is number one, take advantage of thinner and thinner slices of the bandwidth so you can get more agencies, thinner slice without bleeding over in to each other and also increase the interoperability and the reliability of the transmissions. And that's, I'm already out there in the thin ice in terms of describing the technology. But I suspect that's going to last for quite a long time. Okay, good. Thank you. Any other questions of the Chief? Miss Cross? I'm going to go back to your slide on the reductions to the budget. Okay. The $11,500 that was reduced for equipment maintenance, how is that going to impact you? Well, all of these are somewhat of a role of the dice in terms of trying to anticipate whether we're really going to need, I mean, we didn't ask for things we didn't need, so it's a question of role in the dice. You recall about a year ago we implemented a new CAD RMS system and put all new equipment in the cars. This is coming out of a fund that that had actually grown quite large in years past to because of we were constantly having service calls to come out and fix the system that we had. What we found last year is with the new system, those calls went down considerably. Now, it's a year older than it was last year, but we think that this is a reasonable amount that we can pair from that budget and have enough money in there to deal with the problems that do come up. All right, I have read your memo to all of us regarding the attrition and the retirement program that you're proposing. But, Mr. Sissen, is the retirement, I believe the memo said that would cost the city around $50,000. Is that reflected in there? There were a couple of areas that the chief had recommended. One was a drop program, which enables those who are eligible for retirement to retire and then continue in the employment of the city. At the discretion of the chief, it would be whatever positions that he would approve for that program, they would stay in the employee of the city for an additional, I believe, three-year period. And that's really of no cost to the city and I do think that I have not really generally for our size community, I've not been supportive of a drop program because most of the time what I have heard about police and fire department from the younger members in one of the disadvantages of going to work for a small department is fewer opportunities opening for advancement through the department in a drop program when you have senior officers who Stay in place after their schedule retirement time that blocks retirement of promotional opportunities for the younger officers, but We're facing extraordinary circumstances in police department I and I certainly feel like I could lend my support to the DRAW program. The other program that the chief recommended was another step basically on the end of the pay plan so that as officers now are stopped at a certain step on the pay plan, we would add another step so people could go to it and they're only eligible to get that after how many years- 25 years of service- after 25 years of service. Again trying to help stop this attrition and just purely because not that it's not a good idea but purely for trying to save money we did not recommend that program. for trying to save money, we did not recommend that program. Do we know how much that program would cost? I think it was $50,000 for every year for everyone in the department, all of those eligible. Right. $50,000 would fund that L step for everyone who was eligible for it. So. But 50,000 per person. No, no, just total cost. $50,000 because there's only a handful of people that that would be eligible for out of about a 65 people. It's not that high a number. And Mr. Assistant very accurately described the drop program. I would I would just add to his comment that you know, three years seems to be kind of a magic number that a lot of departments have settled on as an appropriate time to retain people. What I recommend is that we simply take the next year to study implementing a drop program by next year and look at all those issues because I think Mr. Sisson accurately describes some concerns. We could elect only retain people for one year or two years. Our goal is to take that very high three-year spike of attrition and flatten it out and stretch it out a couple extra years so that it doesn't all hit us at the same time. Okay. The rest of these I don't have a question about. Let me just go back to the budget here. Okay, that can pass over. I don't... You don't have a copy, do you? Yes, we do. Okay. On C-79, in the performance measurement results, you have, as a note here, the number of cases assigned as decline due to staff shortages. What happens to the unassigned cases? Our only, the most serious offenses assigned? Correct. What we do is we make a determination is, you know, where a year ago, a particular case, let's say a larceny of a GPS unit out of a car might have been assigned to a detective. It's not assigned to a detective. It's worked as best can by the officer that takes the original report. So it represents kind of a degradation of service that is largely invisible to everyone but the victim. But that, you know, as you see reflected in the numbers, there was a significant decline because last year we had a significant staff shortage and where we chose to absorb those vacancies were in things like gang task force, narcotics task force, we didn't have a juvenile detective, we didn't have a general crimes detective and you see that reflected in the reduction in cases assigned for investigation. If I mentioned in my presentation we're looking at contingency plans because frankly, if we're going to have to absorb that level of vacancies over the next three years, that's not where I would choose to absorb them because the city can't do without those services long term. And I think there's some other things that we do for people that are very wonderful programs, but they're more the icing than they are the core services. And I think those are things that I would look at, we would simply stop doing. Essentially, for most of last year, we didn't have a bike team. The bike team was back in patrol. So those, except for special circumstances, we weren't using them for that program. And we have no men just patrolling on foot downtown in the evening hours, even on the weekends, right? That's correct. Yeah, that's correct. Also on the same page. Excuse me, except that we funded by overtime. In response to council's concerns last year about some of the problems we were having, we were putting teams out every weekend to do enforcement. That was all coming out of overtime funds. So. Good. Not good, but I understand. The clearance rate here seems, it went up a little bit, but it still seems low 68 percent. Actually, that's quite high. But what it's measuring is just the clearance rate of cases assigned to criminal investigations for closure. It's not our clearance rates on major crimes. I think if in the annual report it talks about the clearance rate on major crimes, which are going to be significantly lower than that. That just reflects the performance of detectives. So I want to be clear that. OK. All right. One other thing. And this may just be manpower on page C82. It seemed that all of these types of calls were for the most part, well half of them at least are have went down. The animal cases went down. And two, and the other, would you just comment on why those are less? Is it a manpower matter or? Well, the calls for service. What we're capturing there is that are the number of times of someone picked up the telephone, called the police department into the dispatch center and said send an officer. One of the things that we've tried to do in the last couple of years is make it easier for people to report problems to us in ways other than calling a dispatcher because number one, it's very time intensive and labor intensive. So we've set up an entire website where citizens can communicate directly with the team leaders that provide services to their area. So we get an awful lot of complaints that used to come in by telephone and the dispatcher would have to write a note, keep a check on this problem or someone's driving this way in the neighborhood, we're getting an awful lot of that by email now. We're also trying to anticipate, for example, I think the council's anticipation last year problems downtown by putting more resources there, I think we cut down on calls by being where we know people need us to be. And so, you know, it's hard to, we've not really figured out a good way to quantify the alternatives to what we measure by phone calls. But clearly, as I think everyone here, the way you all communicate with me experiences, we do a whole lot less by telephone than we ever did before. It's more efficient, but it's harder to capture And so I think that's that that's what some of some of what's reflected in those numbers As I know the drunk driving arrest went up criminal arrest went up I'm not you asked me to tell you why that happened Well, I just I I'm concerned because I don't want to see the level of our services go down. So I saw these instances when the number of incidents seemed to be having gone down. Right. The other thing I want to just caution you about using the budget performance measures is these are performance measures for, in this case, for field operations. It's not the entire police department. It's just those people assigned to that cost center. So you're going to see some variation between these numbers, numbers in the annual report, because the annual report is the entire police department. And and these numbers just as you saw with criminal investigations, these numbers are trying to capture just the performance of people in that particular cost. But these would be the individuals that it would be most involved in these costs. That's correct. That's correct. But I just point out that if you look at the two pages side by side, you're going to see variations. And the reason you see variations is because it is somewhat apples and oranges. All right. Thank you. Let me just double check here. Okay. I think that's all. Thank you. Chief, I've listened to your presentation year after year for however many years. I don't know what it is and I've always followed it very closely. I guess I'm going to have to go back and listen to your presentation last year. And all the years I've sat here, I've never heard you put quite the tone and quite the urgency in staffing. Quite frankly, over the years when we've talked about residential neighborhoods and we've talked about downtown, I always got the sense your response was, let me try to reduce some things and let me work on that. I think we can do a better reassign. And I've never heard this spin approach, comment, tone to the presentations and I'm in my mind, I'm trying to rectify where we were a year ago in these discussions and where we are today, where I get this sense that the system is almost a crisis point. And I'm trying to happen with the workload with the change in the traffic pattern with new businesses and trying to attract more people. I think I think if I think if I went back and checked I think if you go back and check you'll find that I've talked about that. What happened what happened was different last year, two things, is through the course of last year, even early last year, before we were really facing significant staffing shortages, I kept hearing from my officers, it just feels like we're always working short. It just feels like we never have enough people out there. And you know, when we were, when we had real significant numbers in vacancies, I just attributed that to, well, of course, we don't have the people in the positions. But as we filled up positions in the end of 2006, I was still hearing it. And I, you know, at first, I kind of just attributed that to normal griping, but the more I heard it, the more I thought there might be something to it. Secondly is, and I'll be honest that you know if it's my fault it's my fault but we had never really focused on looking five years out to what the retirement picture was going to look like and it wasn't until probably early fall of last year that we really started looking and calculating how many people are going in what year and everything. And frankly, I credit the major for bringing that to my attention. He was the first one to say, have you really looked out and seen what's going to happen? And that prompted us to take a look. When we went back and looked at the staffing that we're always working short, what we found, as I've laid out in the report, is that slowly over time, more and more time has been drawn that takes patrol officers out of the regular normal street duty. So it's not that we don't have positions assigned to those patrol areas. The question is, are there actually people in a car out there working it or are they doing something else? They're either in training. They're on injury leave. They're on they're in court. They're there somewhere other than in the community and you know police departments around the country Have have grappled with that issue how many people do we really need to hire to make sure that someone's actually there all the time. And rather than use kind of national averages, we spent several months looking at our own data to make sure that we weren't going to just bring in numbers that had no direct connection to the city. We looked at our own injury rates, our own court time and everything, and plug that data into the formula to say what does it really tell us and what it really told us is that the police officers intuitively had it right. They really were working short a lot because even though we had positions assigned to patrol many, many times there weren't people there because of training requirements and I think I use the example in the report. We went back just to the year 2000 and looked at how many hours officers are required to be in training to maintain minimum certification. Not specialized skill training or just minimum certification. It was 43 hours in the year 2000. In the year 2007 that's grown to 103 hours that they have to spend every year just to be good at using all the stuff that either Kalea or accreditation body or state mandated standards say we have to provide training to every officer every year. You know a couple of years ago they went from you have to qualify with your firearm twice a year to if you carry any weapon at all every officer has to be retrained and recertified on that weapon every year. That's huge. That's huge when you consider the number of things that officers, the number of different tools that we provide officers, all with very good decisions to avoid the use of violence if possible, but from night sticks to tasers to pepper spray to all that stuff has to have training. And so when we look at how much more times being drawn off for training, this winner's, I think, made a very good point about the level of training. And it kind of speaks to what we're looking at. And I hope you won't mind. I used one officer as an example. Officer Mike Murphy, many of you know Mike Murphy's a motor officer. With the next couple of years, he'll be eligible to retire. Well, when he leaves it's not just that we have to pick an officer and send him to motor school to learn how to ride a motorcycle for a couple and that takes a couple of weeks. He's also a truck inspector so we have to send him to the truck inspector school to learn how to inspect trucks and how to weigh trucks. He's a member of emergency services team, which is our tactical team. So we're going to have to spend several weeks training someone to be his replacement on the tactical team. He's a member of the honor guard. So we have to have someone who's going to say, I'm willing to be a member of the honor guard and has to be trained in how to do all the honor guard. All that's embodied in one person. Now if you take that one person and you say, what happens if 10 people leave with all those skills, how are we going to replace all the skills that those people, because we're a small department, many people wear many different hats. And that's what we're facing. So as people start to leave, not only is Mike Murphy not working on the street, but another person is coming off the street to learn the skills to replace Mike Murphy. And so it becomes a downward spiral or a ripple, whatever you want to call it. And at the same time, and a tough budget time, much as we did this year, you look at travel and training as kind of the soft part of the budget that if we really have to make cuts, we could do with our little travel and training that further compounds the challenge of how do we replace the people that need to be replaced. And you know, the bad news is, regardless of whether we want to face it or not, that big spike in retirement is coming. The good news is we've got two years to get ready for it to kind of put in place some things that I think will flatten that out and minimize the impact. If we can do it, if not, then we have to be prepared to make choices. The frankly other places have already made and already cut out things. The county doesn't do dare in any of its schools. That's a very nice thing to have. They don't provide that to any students in the county schools. We provided their officer. Those are the kind of tough decisions that we'll have to make. And I get the position you're in, it'd be nice to do everything, but sometimes we may not be able to do that. And so we're looking at what those choices are because the bottom line is, we definitely want, when somebody picks up the phone and calls us, we want to be there. That's my bottom line is I want to make sure that we're delivering services you expect this to deliver. So, you are absolutely right, Mr. Mayor. That tone has not been present last year because much of this is analysis that we've done in this year and are trying to give you a heads up about the next five years. Well, and I appreciate that, Chief, and I certainly understand the analysis on the retirements and all of the things like that. I'm trying to get my to wrap my arms around the one police officer and I know you all recommended three and you know, I go back to our discussion last year where we were told to hire one person to do what we were trying to do, it actually required, I think, three people to be hired to work around. You explain the system and all of the things with it. So I'm building on that understanding and education you gave us a year ago and looking in this budget for one and I'm trying to determine does one is not it or is it better to do none or three and I I'll tell you where the clear disconnect is and you're absolutely right there's a disconnect. Last year the question we were answering is what would it take to add another patrol area? I just completely let that go because we're you know at this point I'm not even worried about adding another patrol area for downtown. I'm the five that I'm proposing over the next two years is simply to staff the areas that we have. Now, one of those areas, one of those areas is an area that would be primarily focused downtown. You know, we can make that happen. Right now, it's a citywide area, but we can certainly focus that downtown but the point is that that was a separate discussion of how do we add even another patrol area. And to go back to an earlier comment you made I you know if it's a point of pride I'll plead guilty to it but I think in years past when you said we've got a problem. Tell us how to solve the problem. And I go back to the initiation of safe neighborhoods when you, as the council said, tell us what we need. One officer, two officers, three officers. I mean, you pretty much extended a blank check and said, tell us what it would take to fill it in. I came back and said, one motorcycle officer and one motorcycle, and I think we can make a significant difference to this day We're still making a significant difference. It's a program that is wildly popular with city residents You all funded it, but you know We didn't come in and say give us the world we said you know This is the minimum. I think it's gonna take to do this and and I don't think we need to increase it I think it's still working fine. I wouldn't be telling you Five over the next two years if I didn't think it was essential. What's different about us than any other city department is we have a 10 month lag time to get people ready to work. Every other city department, including the fire department, hires people pretty much ready to work. Now, the defense of the fire department, they'll be here tomorrow, and I'm sure they'll tell you the rest of the story. But they hire people who are trained EMTs that can ride a fire truck in 30 days. They train them to an even higher level, which is a good thing for city residents. But the point is they can work the day they're hired and ride a fire truck and fight a fire. The day I hire someone, I'm looking at 10 months down the road before they spend the first day in patrol as a fully trained Independent police officer right and tickets and answering calls for service. So knowing that That at the end of the that in years three through five we're gonna have this significant problem Now is the time to start preparing enough staffing so that when that first year of nine or ten year, nine or ten people attrition starts, we have the people staffed up to fill those positions. Because if I could just talk to you nicely, I don't want to get you on a roll, but my question was really specific. Okay. There's one officer recommended in the budget that's in front of us. What impact does one officer have? You've always told us that one officer doesn't mean a lot. You really need to do them in pairs of two or three, and I don't think it was pairs of three, actually. But I'm trying to just justify the one officer versus none or versus three, which I think was in your original. Recommendate, what impact is one officer going to make? Tell me how that's going to impact the current staff in situation. Well, the reason I recommended five over two years is the four patrol officers going to patrol that the analysis indicated we needed. And one patrol officer to go to the academy. Because contractually we're required to send an officer to the academy as an instructor to support our training needs. That's how we got the five. So if we hire one, this is going to have zero impact on the day-to-day operation in the city that's going to be academy. That's essentially correct. That's actually what I was trying to get it. I appreciate it. I guess the last question I have, and just sort of analyzing the where we are and where we've come for the last year. Sorry. The two huge challenges we've had, if I just look at some of the things that we were trying to deal with, one was the hyperthermia program, which we've talked a lot about. And the second was a very specific business in the immediate downtown area that was putting, in my view point, a disproportionate amount of pressure on the system. Both this year didn't materialize. One went out of business and the other for whatever reason or didn't come back into the city and the intensity. Yet I didn't, I'm not sensing that that's eliminated or addressed even a little bit. Some of the concerns we had a year ago, can you comment on that? We, we, several council members asked that, that very same question, Mr. Mayor. And we looked at the numbers. What's hard, it's hard to give you a detailed answer because we're in the first two months of 2008. In the first two months of 2007, that business wasn't there either. So we don't really have, we're not yet to the year where we can compare it against last year. What we have seen is that since that business closed, our workload has not gone back to pre-business levels. It has dropped off some, but I think it's gonna remain somewhere in between where we were a year and two months ago and where we were at the height of the worst of some of the downtown problems. I think in part that's because other businesses have, you know, other downtown businesses have been competitive and reacted and we've seen changes in ownership, we've seen changes in marketing strategy, we've seen more business in all the other downtown restaurants and bars as well as they competed. And I think that will sustain some of that workload. I do think we're going to see a decrease. I don't think we're ever going to go back to where we were in January of 2007, but it's going to take another month or two before we really know that when we look at when we look at the calls right now They're up compared to what they were a year ago, but again, that's pre-business to pre-business. So But it's not back where it was Okay, thank you. Mm-hmm. There any other questions of the chief If not, thank you very much for your time. Thank you sir. Thank you. We're now moving on to public works and Q bus. Good evening. I'd like to start just introduce some of the folks from my department that are here for support. You all know Alex. I also have our superintendent of operations, Mr. Terry Lover, and our superintendents of streets, Mr. Willis Schaeffer, and the city engineer, Peter Millard. As you can see on the organization chart, public works is divided into four sections. Transportation under Alex includes transportation planning, signs and signals and Q bus. The city engineer oversees the CIP budget, site plan review and the inspectors. The operation superintendent Terry oversees facilities or building maintenance, the maintenance of the fleet, the refuse in recycling, and the right of way, including the cemetery, and Willis, the street superintendent oversees a snow removal, storm drainage, asphalt, concrete, and brick. Our core responsibilities, there's five basic core responsibilities, really to protect the public, the health safety and welfare, provide an effective and safe transportation system, manage public works resources professionally and efficiently, maintain and improve the city infrastructure, such as the storm sewer system, the bridges, et cetera, and maintain an attractive and sanitary community. etc. and maintain an attractive and sanitary community. Like the touch on some of our major accomplishments of this fiscal year, we've instituted an in-house recycling program. This has generated the savings of approximately $100,000. Part of that is we take in more revenue from the recyclables as well before the contractor used to get a part of that and the staff that we hired and the truck cost a significant, getting less than the contractor we were using. We've completed with, you know, working with VDOT, the improvements at Pickett Road in Maine. We've also completed the roadway improvements on Chambridge Road in connection with the County Courthouse Building, working with the county on that. We were instrumental in the occupancy of the city hall annex and the renovated portion of city hall, and we continue to refine the traffic issues downtown. Some additional points I'd like to touch on is the in coordination with a new library. We've put in the pedestrian crosswalks and signal system or pedestrians to access the new library. We've recently gotten approval from V.On George Mason Boulevard and hope to advertise this in a few weeks. The undergrounding of the power downtown is moving along and within the next two weeks we should see the overhead lines coming down along 123. We've had the case closure of the environmental cleanup of the Keller site. And I'd like to touch on some of our major goals for this coming fiscal year. One being the construction of George and the Gold Guard. We hope to have that completed by the end of 2008. Our challenge of maintaining all the new and wonderful city facilities, such as City Hall, the police station, and Blanem Interpretive Center, soon to be online. All the additional downtown amenities that we have to maintain, there's 156 planners, 323 gas lights, 27 benches, 75 trash cans, 73 tree pits, 1600 additional linear feed of curbing and sidewalk. We also hope to be instrumental in moving along with the Fairfax Boulevard Master Plan. One of our goals is to widen the sidewalks downtown and also to improve the lighting. As you know, when these poles start coming down, some of these poles have lights attached to them. We're looking at improving the lighting downtown. We'll continue to monitor the traffic issues. The undergrounding will continue to happen and hopefully phase two will be completed in 2008, which is tying into the existing buildings. We're working on the environmental cleanup and case closure of the Amaco site at E Street and Maine. And also be looking for opportunities, possible grants to do some stream restoration. This is the overall breakdown of our department. As you can see, approximately half of it is with the operations, being the building maintenance, the refuse recycling fleet, the right-away work is about 2.8 million in the streets department, approximately a million in engineering, I would admit, and 4.8 million in transportation and Q bus. So overall table, you can see the personnel change and the operating costs, operating costs mostly in the increased cost of materials. The personnel change, part of that is included as a request of one additional custodian. The reason why we're asking for a custodian, you can see on this slide what it would cost is the additional 30,500 square feet of space that was pretty much the city hall annex. This breakdown of engineering and administration this includes study surveys and the inspectors who look out for the construction going on downtown. The decrease of 57% is mainly to moving the uniforms that are used by the staff. Most of that money used to be in our operating cost. And since the engineering and admin division really doesn't have people who are uniforms, we decided to move it where most of the people are. So that's the reflection of the 57% and the other costs, the changes are fairly negligible. The operations division, the increase in contract services goes along with all the additional amenities I spoke about, such as the gas lights and all the additional landscaping that goes along with the new buildings and the improvements downtown. the new buildings and the improvements downtown. The operated costs part of that is the recycling bins, the increased janitorial supplies and landscaping supplies needed. And some additional refugee supplies. And that is where the money for the uniforms went to. So that's reflected in that 15%. The streets division, the big increase in contract services and additional $12,400. This is to take care of the 28 new crosswalks in the downtown area. These are the stamp asphalt that look like brick. And these will need some touch-ups, some painting. But that's what that additional money is for. The increase of 12% in the operating costs are mostly due to the increase in the disposal fees. Keep in mind the streets division maintains 16 miles of primary roadway and 54 miles of secondary roadway. The Transit Division, the Contract Services, part of that money is for our consultant, who does the different studies and helps us tweak the downtown traffic issues. It also includes the red light photo enforcement that I believe is 150,000. And then additional traffic loops and the thermo which is for the striping and the markings, signal replacements and maintenance of the signals that we contract out. The decrease in the other operating costs is mostly for the decrease in the work that was required in the downtown area. Previous year we had a lot of work that we were doing in the old town with the new signals. Some of our refinement of the proposed budget due to the fiscal restraints is deferring some of the fleet replacement. Mr. Lawler, if there's questions, we'll be able to answer that. Typically, we have vehicles and construction equipment that would typically be replaced at this time, that we think we can, with some maintenance and tenderloving care, keep running. And this chain bridge sidewalk project, which was on the west side of 123 from Rustfield up to North Street. It was a rather complex project with retaining walls and That that's the project that was deferred The reduced neighborhood drainage projects we had two projects slated for 0809 one on Howardton Avenue and one on Stonewall Avenue slated for 0809, one on Howardton Avenue and one on Stonewall Avenue with reducing 125,000. That leaves us with 60,000 which isn't enough to do the construction but is enough to do the survey, the stakeout and design and I feel that our in-house crews could do the construction work. We've also deferred other projects which we didn't really consider essential, but we wanted them. Some equipment like a new thermo machine and some sign fabrication equipment and garage doors for the property yards and several other projects which we feel could wait due to the current budget issue. feel could wait due to the current budget issue. Some of the proposed new projects are storm drainage maintenance. This is, you know, we have 57 miles of storm sewer pipe throughout the city, 1,840 catch basins, 28 box culverts, and what this money is used for is to maintain this clean it clean the boxes flush the pipes and patch the concrete. The neighborhood drainage is what I just talked about on Stonewall and Howardton. We have our curb gutter and sidewalk maintenance project of $280,000. Believe it or not, we have 165 miles of curb and gutter in the city and approximately the same amount of sidewalk. We have 7,100 aprons and 900 handicap ramps. The brick sidewalk maintenance, we have 19,000 linear feet of brick sidewalk and 1,600 linear feet of crosswalks. And the $80,000 goes to repair those. That's usually bid in terms of square foot of brick and also a square foot of mortar replacement. Sometimes the bricks are okay, but we have to replace them order. And then of course is the street paving, street repaving contract for the 16 miles of primary and 54 miles of secondary roads. Some additional projects, we have a street light project which is to increase the lighting, this is allocated at the intersection of old picket and picket along old picket moving west toward old Lee highway. This was instituted by some citizens concerned about how dark it is around there at night. With this project we contact the minion power. It could come up to be less than 40. contact the minion power. It could come up to be less than 40. It would all depend on the design that the minion power would provide us. The video detector systems talked about this in a previous council meeting. These are the detectors that go on the traffic signal arm, which are an improvement to the loops that are underneath the asphalt. It's approximately $15,000 per intersection, and we're in the process of upgrading going from the loops to the detectors. And then the $50,000 for refurbished the existing signals. And this is for repair and replacement of the signal heads, the wiring inside the signals, new controllers, painting the poles, tightening the anchor bolts, and such. This slide shows some of Alex's federally funded projects. These projects aren't paid for by the city, they're federally funded. And what the amount is shown is what Alex has accumulated for each project up till now, including the upcoming fiscal year. And you can see we have George Mason-Bolovard, Fairfax Circle Short Term Improvements, Route 29 Spot Improvements, North Facts Project. He's got a couple more here, the additional traffic monitoring video cameras. And I know some people get this confused with the video detectors. These are actual cameras that feed our nerve center at the property yard where people could look at our staff, could look at the monitors and see where the traffic problems are. And from that location, adjust the timing of the signals to improve the traffic, purchase and install new traffic signal controllers, and a drainage project at Route 50 Oak Street and Meredith Drive. Again, these are federally funded. This slide reflects the Q bus, the 0809 numbers are projected. As you can see in 0708, the expenses approximately 2.8 million and the revenue was 1.8 million. And my last slide is just to say that public works were committed to provide the high levels of service that make Fairfax such a wonderful place. Thank you and we're ready for any questions. Thank you, Miss Mayor. Two more questions. The first deal is with the neighborhood drainage projects. You indicated that you've left $60,000 for design and the site work and then the staff will be able to actually do the construction so that means those projects will still occur this year. We're hoping. I think I probably forgot to say some of that money would be for materials. I mean when we bid out these type of jobs, it's not unusual for each job to be about 75,000. But with the quality of work our in-house staff can do, I don't see why not we can't get this done this upcoming fiscal year with our staff. Okay. Great. Thank you. And in turning to the Q bus, ridership is down fairly significantly. Is that you have any direct relation to our increasing the Q bus fares, just people driving. Actually, the way we were calculating previously the ridership is being done by a consultant hired by Northern Virginia Transportation Commission and they were doing it by sampling. And so and by statistical forecasting. And it turns out that they were over forecasting the ridership. But since last year we've actually installed the registering fair boxes. And so the counts now are the actual counts of the people riding the buses. The one million is more accurate than previous countries. Okay, so the one point one. Okay, all right. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. First of all, the issue of, sorry, I'm getting late. My train of thought is slipping here, but the issue of recycling. Our recycling rates we had typically over the years had published, you know, I think was a pretty good number and I'm just wondering in terms of moving this in-house, I actually had the opportunity to talk one day to one of your staff out in the field. And they felt like there was a lot more tightness to the program in terms of collection and making sure that, you know, I think we're using a contractor not as much control when you bring it in-house and that was touted. I've gotten some questions though from others who say, you know, when they see them collect the material and I didn't have a chance to ask this fellow this question. When they collect the material, they put it all into one bin versus we're being told, and I think I may have sent you an email on this sometime ago, I can't recall. We're still being told to separate. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Right, and I'm sure Terry can talk more about this, but because of the new technology at the plants, we no longer need to separate the actual equipment at the plants. We'll do the separation. Is that correct? That's correct. You're going to have to come up and talk into the mile again. And beyond TV. Ah. Ha. Ha. Mr. Summers is correct. Years ago, when recycling programs were new, it was what was called dual stream. And that was the time when you had to separate all the materials. You saw the trucks coming down where a couple of guys littered the different materials on the opposite sides of the trucks. Well, technology is advanced to the point now to where none of that is required. The transfer stations we take it to, they have machines that are specifically designed and built to separate everything there at the plant before it goes out. So we've gone from what is called dual stream to single stream. And the separation of the recycling is not required at the residential level. And recycling rates based on our own in-house shift has not been altered dramatically. I'm sorry sir. Recycling rates in the city that we're tracking has not been altered dramatically based on the fact of bringing this in-house for- As a matter of fact, yes it has. It has been- it has been changed into the betterment of the city. Great. What's- Well sir, when we had to with the contractor, we were getting $24 a ton for paper, white paper. We got really contractor because of job performance, to get over in-house and the public works department was able to negotiate a deal to where we were getting $39 a ton. I like it. But we were getting $15 a ton additional. Sounds great. Thank you. But we are getting $39 a ton. I like it. But we are getting $15 a ton additional. Sounds great. But we are actually generating revenue. Okay, and are we publicizing the new program in terms of not having to separate? Because I've had the question, I'm sure some of my colleagues may have as well over time. And I'm just not, I don't recall if it's been in the city, see, and I apologize if it has. I'll check with community resources, make sure. Okay, great. Other question on Q, Alex versus us that we had spoken about this last week and congratulations to you for some of your efforts in terms of hybrids and so forth. And I know Miss Winter has also had an interest in this Miss Winter. Let me ask you, I just saw, for instance, today, one of the perplexed county connector buses, which was a very modern looking bus on I-66 this evening. Can you tell me, I mean, this is just more of a selfish question, but are we going to be updating our buses as well as just using updated technology? They're actually going to look better than the FFfax connector buses. These almost look like bullet trains on wheels. They were fascinating to me. A bus rapid transit type of design, where the front part of the bus is a panoramic view, which is all glass, which the driver can actually see almost 180 degrees. Great, okay. And the windows don't have any, they don't look like they have any separations. It looks like it's continuous. A glass, that's great. Yes. Thank you, Miss Merer. I yield the floor. On the neighborhood drainage projects, a few meetings ago, you came and showed there were like five different hot spots in the city that needed to be addressed with a storm water. Is that what these stream restoration? Yes, yeah, that is different. This is basically people's houses who either water is running off the street onto their yard or. Okay. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor Mayor I do have a couple questions you know when you're talking about the I guess on page 11 well page 21 slide when you talk about the 120 thousand dollars for the traffic monitoring system do you does that cue into when the fire department flies through the city and clicks all those little reemption. Yeah. Can you? No, the preemption devices are again a totally different system. But this, but the intersections, I guess you talked about being able to monitor the intersections. I know like at 123 or I don't know, Route 50, plantation boulevard or Yes, we have, I'm the rest of those. Okay, but the question is is when you know that the fire department has gone off and they've used their sirens, they use a little clicker, you know, and they, you know, change the light. Can you see that on the monitor and then change it within a 15 year period? Can you reset? Are we able to? We could do it, but the way we time our signals, we do it by corridors. So that if we affect one particular signal, you actually affect entire corridor. So you cannot do it individually. So, depending on where the fire truck has turned, it might have just affected the Cambridge road, the fax boulevard intersection. I think what he's saying is, you can't go back to what it was instantaneously, because of the other signals that are affected, there's somewhat of a lag time to get everything back. The lag time again, I've asked this question, I think last year I can't remember the answer. It lasts anywhere from one minute to three minutes depending on how long. Does it seem to be that there's a problem with that like a you know throughout the city? So I'm hoping that 120,000 helps that situation a little bit that you can monitor it and then get on it right away. I mean I don't understand why that doesn't have. Okay. I want to go to the custodial staff that you're looking at to add to the city hall. And how many people are playing city hall now? Very. Currently we have four. And we need to add another one to City Hall. Yes, ma'am. Okay, I guess I need to understand a little bit more about that position and why we would need to add more when the staff right now. It looks like it's pretty adequate to- It's also for the Blenheim Center. Yes, sir. It is. It's going to be a dual, he or she will also have two duties. Not only here, but over there. Terri, aren't we using a con? We are indeed. Yes, we have a contractor right now that we're trying to eliminate to try to do it in house where we've got better control over it and better quality control. That's why the building looks as well as it does. Well, when the annex opened up, we, you know, was in the middle of the year. So we actually used money to hire a contractor. We won't need that contractor anymore. And so are we reducing the cost if we were hiring a contractor? What is the contracting services for that versus, you know, hiring an employee? The contract, the, yes, ma'am, the contract runs approximately $20,000 more year and what it would be for us to do an announced per person. Oh, wow. So it's a savings. Yes, ma'am. Okay, well, I guess all. And will any of this money come out of, we'll, okay, so come out of any other budget if we're gonna be using it part time over at the, London estate or is that out of this budget? It's out of our budget. Yeah. It's out of your budget. OK. Thank you. Mr. Mayor. Mr. Cross. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. For future perhaps as a budget memo, I was interested to read that the county requires a $47,000 impact fee for those developers wishing to do business or do build within the county. I would like to know what the cost is per home to provide the infrastructure to support that residence. Would that be possible? Answered yes and we'll get it to you. Thank you. a lot of blanks there. Yeah. I have a number of little markers here on my papers. Okay. On the asphalt and concrete maintenance budget, it looked like all the projects are down. Do you still need the same number of personnel to handle that? We have actually more infrastructure to maintain. The numbers are down because, well, which number are you talking about the streets division, right? No, I'm talking about asphalt and concrete maintenance. What would pay you? What would pay you? 100. Sorry. Sorry. C100. Okay, these are pretty rough estimates and I would say that the numbers are close enough where it, you know, really depends on a lot of factors on how the roads are deteriorating. And there's a lot of construction going on in the downtown where we have to do more patching and all. So personally, I don't see our street people having less to do. Willis is going to add something. All right. We'll ask this. Willis is going to add something. The production numbers are down because we have reduced the material that we can buy. Our supplies and materials that we've budgeted for are less. They cost more this year or next year, but they are Less quantity. So that means less production for the field guys. So the question is, do you still need the same number of people to do fewer? Yeah, if we reduced the number of people then we would reduce these numbers further. So yeah, we do need to maintain our current staffing. Okay. There's a lot of work on here too that's not reflected in these numbers for instance the storm crews. They do a lot of work that's just labor and it's not has nothing to do with how much asphalt we have and how much concrete we have. Okay. On page 109, see 109. The salaries here have gone up considerably like $63,000. Can you tell me why that is? And saying signals and lighting. You know, are you talking about the estimate salaries from 2008 to proposed 2009? Right. from 2008 to proposed 2009. Right. I think that's all just part of the projected merit increase of the stack. $63,000 worth of merit increases. For how many people in your design signals? 9.5. Yeah. for how many people in your in science and signals 9.5. Yeah. About $8,000 per person. Yeah. Like a line. If I could interject the detail of that is on page C215. And for signs and signal the full time salaries actually go up very little just over 2%. Part time salaries go up from about $16,000 to about $20,000 which is about $4,000 increase. But the major increase is in salaries over time which is an estimate of about $37,000 and a half thousand dollars of more than the previous year. And we actually had, and the reason for that is it was budgeted at about $85,000 in Fiscal Year 08 with the Actual in Fiscal Year 07 was about $117,000. So what is actually based on this year's proposed budget is based on a historical actual. And it's about $60,000 of that overtime is used for special events that the sign-in signal helps out. They also help out with the elections and with all the the work that's going downtown a lot of times they have to work on the signals downtown And this has to be done on off peak hours usually most of the special events are done on overtime Yeah, and then we maintain and set up all the voting machines right maintain and set up all the voting machines. Right. All right. A lot of money. Okay. Refuse collection. I'll let that go. That's only 18. On page C 100 and C 11C 113 there's basic maintenance costs associated with Westmore. What are we are we doing in the way of maintenance there? What is what are we I thought that the tenant was responsible for most of that? Yes, Ms. Frel. So, tenant is responsible for the day routine maintenance. Our end of it is to maintain the inspections like fire alarm, testing inspection, annually, boiler inspection, just to make sure that our equipment is being well maintained. The tenant is responsible for maintaining it like replacing light bulbs and doing just a general stuff. We on the other hand, we make sure that our equipment is being properly serviced that all our certificates and inspections are up to date. You know, to meet code requirements and the building is safe. And unfortunately, that's just the prices are what the contractors charge us for inspections and tests and certifications. Okay. I think you're probably on the, on the need to stay where you are because I'm going to ask about the street right of way in public grounds. Okay. Okay. First of all, the planning that the city does are absolutely incredible and beautiful. And whoever does that needs to be congratulated. That would be our right away supervisor Wayne Rustley Thomas. He does indeed. He does indeed. Just family does. But Terry's is boss, so he gets some credit. Rusty's the artist. Well they're lovely. I do have and you I know this comes as no great surprise, but I think we could do a lot better job downtown with keeping the sidewalk swept and the streets swept to keep our plants down there watered the ones that are in containers, keeping the trees pruned so that they grow properly. Yes, ma'am. We have a plan and we have a plan all together for that. Great. What can we do on a almost daily basis, I would say, to have a crew and perhaps we should look at some jail inmates from our jails to do early morning sweeping and picking up of trash and taking trash cans, all of those things. Well, Miss Cross, we've tried using inmates before and it's really, believe it or not, you know, it's free. It's not cost effective because we still have to ask somebody from staff to supervise them. And there's certain things they will do, certain things they can't do, and some things they won't do. So they're really, it's more troubled than what it's worth. However, when the weather breaks, we do have a man stationed down there every day, all day long, who maintains, picks up the trash does the grounds keeping and everything that goes everything for the downtown area. He usually starts if I'm not mistaken next month as a matter of fact out of the winter time. As far as keeping sidewalks clean and maintained. We are going on the quarterly power washing. That's it's it's it's quite a bit of work and it's it's an extensive job to power washers bricks on a quarterly basis but in order to maintain them they remove the breed gum stuff like that that's what they're going to need to have done. Street sweeping that is also that's done on a semi-annual basis, where all the streets are swept. But everything is in place. We don't have this, we really, because of snow and inclement, whether during the winter months is hard for us to keep somebody there during the winter months to try to keep up on the way everything should be. But during this spring, summer, fall, yes, man, we have we have that area pretty well covered. The planters are maintained by the city by this by Ling Thomas. The power washing that comes under his domain. He supervises that so it will it will pick up. It's just a matter of waiting for the weather to break. Are these fairly new assignments because I have been? Yes ma'am. Yes it is. The sidewalks were in the dirt down there. The sidewalks for instance the air. The sidewalks, for instance, last year was the first time they'd been powerwashed and it's going to take because of the amount of ground and dirt and grime, it's going to take several applications of a good heavy power washing to pull that crud out of there and make them you know bring the sidewalks back the way they should look. Rusty Thomas has a man that, like I say, he's down here every day. He's been there, he's been doing it about the last three or four years now. Primarily over at the Kitty Posner Garden, maintains that area around Old Town Hall, goes down to downtown area, picks up the trash, and does the weeding and things like this. So we do have somebody there all the time. I look forward to a much more spruced up downtown. We are trying so very hard to make this a success down the earth. Oh yes, man. But Russy has, Russy has some really creative ideas for the planners that are just going to be just dynamite when everything is done. Uh-huh. He's going to do a job that I feel absolutely confident that this council is going to be very, very impressed by. Terrific. Let's keep our, you know, our nose to the grindstone, so to speak, and really make an effort to to boost this up and polish it up because we do have a lot of capital invested down there. Yes, ma'am. And that's our goal is to keep the downtown area, I mean, a real show place. Yeah, it's our show place and we do need to keep it looking. Indeed. And then the last question was the budget for right of way and everything seems to be up to the tune of about $188,000. I feel a little compromised here because I just made a point of saying how important it is that we keep the downtown looking really, really good. But that sounds like a lot, 180. It sounds like a lot and it really is. But here again, because the largest piece of that is going to be from the power washing because this is a To do that job properly They use basically a tanker truck. It's not the type of power washer that you see at home And they come in and it's over time because they have to do it Usually from midnight on where there's no traffic And they're gonna do it on a quarterly basis. So that's an expensive contract in itself, but that is what is going to be required to maintain the sidewalks. There's no two ways to get around it. Do we have our own street sweeper? No, ma'am. We have to contact that. Yes, ma'am. Because I was gonna ask if we couldn't have the street swept more than semi-annually. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I Maybe we need to invest in some of those things that they happen to use with the little rooms and vacu- No, thanks. I just like to say, part of that cost has to do with the additional 108 planners and the 54 gas lights and we've added a lot of the benches to trash cans. We've added a lot of amenities and we have had some instances where there's some vandalism possibly over the weekend and the crews are spending a lot more money in maintaining and repairing a lot of the amenities. Well, I'll leave it to you to to spruce it up. I do think we need to keep those those planters aligned to. Just them. And say look sort of. Saw to you're not going to be disappointed. Great. I look forward to it. Thank you very much. This round. Mr. Restman. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. In your budget request, you're asking for 911,000 for street repaving. I couldn't find in the budget our previous year's expenditures. But I always thought we were running between six and seven hundred thousand. I believe last year it was seven hundred and ninety approximately. The reason for the increase is when we come up with our budget the amount of asphalt really doesn't change. It's based on the asphalt index and the prices of asphalt have been going up and we're trying to keep a cycle where we pay. We'll secondary roads every 23 years, all primary roads every 13 years. And that's how that number comes from. When we look at what streets we need to pay, the amount of asphalt, and we translate that into the latest projected cost for asphalt. And if we get less than that, we'll do what we can. But that's to try and keep that every 23 years, every 13 year schedule. So this is basically doing the same amount of work, it's just costing more for material. Correct. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Other questions? If not, just two quick things. You know, whenever it was a year, two years ago, we made the decision that we were leaving the trial period of the downtown two way traffic pattern and into a more permanent process. We all discussed and focused on turning our attention to fine tuning it. There were three that I can recall. There may have been more specific areas. One was certainly in front of Truro Church there at North Street, in Main Street and dealing with the medium strip and moving it back and some of those things. Certainly we know we have a problem as you come westbound up North Street over the hill at Chambridge Road. The third one that I recall then was down in front of the library and some fine tuning on that turn area that was down there Other than two cones and a couple of bags of sand. I haven't seen anything Take place and my question is Is that did we fund that out of this current years budget or if not is it in this year's proposed budget or did those projects just somehow fall off the radar screen and didn't get funded in either budget? Well, the problem we're having is North and 123. At first we ground off the edge of the granite curb. We thought that might help with the issue and we still have the problem. We've recently ordered some solar powered reflectors that should be coming in soon we're going to try that and if that doesn't work then we're going to look into actually reconstructing that area and pulling that little bump out back. We don't have the funding for that. The other issue on North Street once the weather asphalt temperature reaches a certain amount, I believe our sign and signal crew was going to do something to the center line to improve. Visibility. The visibility there. Visibility where? The visibility along North Street. The double yellow lines, we're going to put recessed markers So that that night to be more visible. This is the 123 North Street. Yes around the curve. Okay. Yeah, that's one out of the three I'm funded, but go ahead What was this are all funded in this year's budget? Oh, I think you just said it wasn't funded. Well, the if we have to we can struck that area of granite curb that's sticking out. We don't have the money for that. That would be significant because of the underground utilities and everything. I mean, I'll just say and I don't want to interrupt you because I'd like to hear the other two. I mean, we've been in this process now for a year, year and a half, and I'm just stunned that we're just now trying reflectors, which was a solution we talked about a long, long time ago. I don't have to remind you how many tires that have been popped and how many near accidents have taken place, and I'm just shocked that we're this far into this fine tuning process that we identified as a prod priority. And the only thing that I've seen, Don, are the two cones that just got put back there in the bag of sand. But we tried other reflectors before putting them aside, but the one's just on the curb. Yes, it didn't work. So we're trying to, we think that these solar reflectors are more visible because they are probably stand out more. What we need really to make that safe is to put the, the lineators, the lineators posts on top of the curve, but short of doing that, we want to have some of the reflectors that are more visible because we feel the visibility as you come up the hill from North Street across Chain Bridge is the problem. Q. This isn't the time to discuss it, but I'll just remind the staff that we talked about this when Mr. Viziana was still here, and we talked about that very solution, and he's been gone. How long? And we still haven't tried those solutions. But let's turn our attention to North and up by Tro Church, North and Main Street. When Mr. Viziano was here and we decided to make this permanent, we talked extensively about moving the medium strip and he had a big design and what he was going to do and was my understanding we all said this is a high priority and we did improve I might be at the wrong location I'm talking about the intersection of Maine and north yes we did the turning radius there we we striped the center line for the left turns and we have seen some improvement as that correct out. Yes. We added some overhead signs to let the people know exactly where and which lanes they should be in to make the left and to go through. We've adjusted the turn radius radius so that they can turn much easier and then we pull back this top bar because when people stop too close to the intersection then the vehicles that are turning left actually try to push the other vehicles to the right so when we move back the stop bar, they're able to turn closer to the lanes that they're in. We actually thought that problem was solved, because after we did that, we noticed an improvement. The problem that we're facing there now is really, we just can't teach the people to use North Street. They're insisting on using Main Street, but in a way, I don't think we want to discourage them from using Main Street either. So sooner or later, we hope it's a balance between people that really want to use Main Street and those that can actually use not street to get around Main Street and those that can actually use North Street to get around Main Street. With the opening of the courthouse entrance at Chain Bridge Road, we've seen a slight improvement, especially in the afternoon traffic, because a lot of the traffic now that used to turn right from west to turn right on Main Street to get back to Chain Bridge are able to get out on Chain Bridge Road now directly from the Guadalas complex. Okay. These were all contributing to the problem at that intersection before. The, you have put in your to pedestrian improvements, which we've obviously all talked many, many times about enhancing the pedestrian experience downtown area and you have in your PowerPoint wider sidewalks. Right. I would, it was my impression that the funding of those wider sidewalks did not get put in this. No, it's not. We have an estimate. I think it's around $250,000 for designing construction. And that's if we went for a full-phase plan. I don't see why not if we can get some easements that in-house we can probably widen the sidewalks in some locations. So I just wanted to put that in there because even if we don't have the funding, public works isn't going to forget about it and we can try and do some parts. Okay. Any other question of staff? If not, thank you very much. That now brings us to our last presentation tonight, Parks and Recreation. Okay. Okay. Mr. Mayor and our members of the council, I'm Mike McCarty, Director of Parks and Recreation for the Hills and the Audience. As you see, the best for last. Although we're all great departments here. With me tonight is a brightened app, chairman of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board and it's counterpart on the Commission of Arts, Gene A.G. Also in our audience is Joanna Wormershler, who is our cultural arts and marketing staff person working with the personal recreation department in for the city. Try to take you through the presentation as quickly as we can and hit the highlights as well as the key points of our department and get to any questions that you may have. Our core responsibilities basically we all understand benefits of parks and recreation or individual community, environmental and economic and truly endless but our core responsibilities are to plan and organize and deliver amazing quality recreation and cultural arts, programs and events and services to people of all ages, maintain beautiful parks and open space, and schedule supervising, maintaining facilities for recreational service and business use. You probably become well aware over the last year, so about our new vision statement, amazing experiences, which is driven by our mission statement really dedicated to developing and maintaining beautiful, safe, and environmentally friendly open spaces for the public to use through affordable comprehensive and exceptionally exceptional experiences. We build a sense of community, enrich people's lives and contribute to the development of the individual, the family, and the city of Fairfax. We have six focus areas within our department. Six focus areas within our department, our staff focus on a daily basis and drive each day to our vision of amazing experiences, which is staff and team development, maximizing our financial opportunities, and alternative revenue sources, improve communication, image development and marketing, maintenance of infrastructure and strategic capital planning, internal system improvements, quality enhancements, and customer service responsiveness. Basically, cleaner greener, safer, stronger is kind of our motto. This next slide is our current structure within the Parks and Recreation Department. There are no staffing changes to this structure. You will note that there's our youth and teen coordinator, which was a new position added last year, that was basically an 18 year temporary employee that has become an integral part into our team and has done a tremendous job with expanding our youth programs as well as our camping opportunities. We have currently five positions that are key within the department, our special events manager, our cultural arts manager, our park supervisor, our recreation coordinator, and our senior coordinator. Over the last year and about six months, we've been here in particular the last budget year, there's been a number of overall accomplishments for the department. We established new intergovernmental agreements with the school board for the fields and use of the school facilities with the help of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board. We, with your leadership, finalized the Stafford concept and approval to move forward on that. And we're weeks away, actually, from breaking ground on Stafford and Draper Drive projects. Actually, we're going out to bid officially tomorrow. Another project you were intricately involved with was the Tech Griffey Park dedication this past year. We revised and we continue to revise and enhance our Fairfax Fund days, our Young and Heart brochure, which is our Senior Center brochure. The youth and team position is very integral into what we're doing currently and what we're doing and have proposed in our FYI-09 budget. We've completed the needs assessment which you've heard about through partial reclamation advisory board and when we had a Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority representative come to talk about things that are going on with their organization. The Prab Charter was revised and updated and of course we moved our offices here to City Hall while keeping our office open over at Green Acres continuing to serve the public there as well. Our park accomplishments, new new trails maps, Bridget Cobbdale, one of the public there as well. Our park accomplishments, new neutrals maps, Bridget Cobbdale, one of the significant things is an eight hour workday that we switched, we had our crews on two shifts, we brought them into one shift to maximize our staff and how we utilize our staff for a larger projects and bigger cleanup projects and that's been very successful. But we've had a number of improvements from little league field improvements to dug out repairs, ball fields, installing botchy courts over at the Green Acre site, our park rules and park uniforms. Finally, our recreation accomplishments. We have increased senior participation in camp enrollments in both of those programs. Our after school care program has also started over at Providence Elementary, mimicking what we do over Daniels around both highly successful and very well received. We also implemented our new registration and online system for program registration. So basically our office not only is at Green Acres in City Hall, but it's also online 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Along with that that does allow people and I know you talked earlier about credit cards and our new online system allows us to tell us how many people we get percentage wise for credit cards in house which is 31% and if you include online registration it's 43% of the people use credit card for all of our revenue that we take in. The other thing that's a key point about that new online system it allows us to do registrations anywhere that there's an internet connection. out of the city hall, without a live connection, with a wireless connection, and we're able to register live. And that's a neat feature that we have. Father Daughter Dance, Enhanced Trails Day, Ngo Skate Days, Seamami Run Race, and a very significant piece that our focus was the alternative revenue sources. And we were able to obtain a $30,000 sponsorship from Virginia Lottery, which is one of our more notable ones, but we do have numerous other ones that we've been able to achieve this past year just rolling out some of our sponsorship programs. Our budget approach, very straightforward, modified zero-based budget, having all of our staff involved, examining every expense and revenue opportunity as well, and based on our strategic focus. Our initiative this year is implementing offerings of specialty camps and sports camps, and that's reflected in our increase of temporary personnel in our administration line. However, those increases are temporary personnel, which I'll explain again, are related to cost recovery programs. So the cost will offset those staff for those particular programs. Basically, we have 56 new programs in unique. They might offer multiple sections or might be offered multiple times throughout the year. And I do have a slide towards the end of the presentation that revises your performance measures because the performance measures in the budget book aren't accurate to, and they are going to be revised in the final print, but I'll highlight that as well. We have offering a multi-location after school program, increase our sponsorship opportunities, and expand our vendor options at the Holiday Craft Show, and expanded youth and team programs. The way our budget breaks out, administrations are our largest piece of our budget, our largest account, and that includes all of our full-time benefited employees employees, they run the recreation side as well as all the programming pieces, cultural arts, the teen youth adult, senior programs and trip programs are in that. Our second largest account is the park and ball fields and that is the maintenance of all of our park facilities, the 23 parks that we have, the 21 miles of trails, the 44 acres of additional open space that is out there. That is maintained by the parks staff and the parks crew. Our facilities account was renamed last year from Old Town Hall, but it encompasses all of our facility rental options, Old Town Hall, green acres, the show mobile, the picnic pavilions, athletic fields, and special events obviously is our large special events area. We take you through a quick overview. Just for a point of reference, our FY08 budget that we're currently in now is actually based on previous FY07 budget, negative 1%, we started off the year. Since July 2007 and recently with the budget situation we had to reduce our budget expenditures by $38,000, dropping us down to about a negative 2% compared to the FY07 budget. percent compared to the FY07 budget. The increase in personnel of 12 percent is primarily due to the new temporary staff that are going to be staffing the programs, whether it's camp, specialty camps, or youth teen and some of the adult programs that are cost recovery. The key to remember on that is that if it doesn't bring in the minimum number of participants, we don't operate so we don't have the expenditure to that. However, we have to plan for it. The other piece on the personnel, which I'll explain on the administration side once again, when I talk about the administration budget, we had a new IRS ruling this past year. On most of our contractors that run our activity classes. They were contracted people that ran like a Pilates or a dance and whatnot. IRS had changed the ruling that we had to roll them in to temporary staff, actual staff, not contractors, so they dramatically shifted where those expenditures were and you'll notice in the contract line and most of the line items, it's state level. That increased our fringe benefits though because we had to include the FICA on that. Our FTEs for the partial recreation budget, total FTEs is 8.25. It is actually down 0.38% or 3.8 FDs because that cultural arts assistant was split between partial recreation and the marketing area now. The administration budget account, again, this is where all of our programs are, to highlight a couple of things again, the personnel is where all of our programs are to highlight a couple of things. Again, the personnel is up because of the new programming for the cost recovery programs and the new IRS ruling. The internal services is up and that's motor pool charges. That's something that we don't control as a department, but we get billed back for vehicle maintenance and fuel. And the other operating expenses are, our trip cost has gone up because of gas prices across the board year, you know, throughout the year. Our camp trip prices have gone up. Our supply prices have also gone up. And there are some supplies related to those new programs if they, if we reach our minimum. One other thing was with the credit card and the operating cost. We incur that cost now when it was out to the Treasury Department. It was about a $12,000 credit card fee that we absorbed back into the partial recreation department for that. The special events line, the only within the personnel, it shows a large increase of 358 percent, but it's really just over $6,000. What that is, each year our camp staff and our traditional camp work the 4th of July. Typically, that's been billed out to the camp. We separated that out and put it into the special events account so we could really have direct cost for that. So that's where that increase comes for the special events budget, although we are estimating about $150,000, almost $151,000 in revenue to come in for that particular account through sponsorships, emissions, and vendor fees and so forth. The facilities break out. Again, the personal cost is more directly reflective of what we're seeing for the types of rentals that we have. And also the types of staff that we're able to get to cover those rentals is more appropriate there. The contract services has increased because of some general tutorial costs that we have as well as the tableclots that we have to have cleaned that that price has gone up significantly. It was kind of distributed through a couple of different accounts. We kind of pulled it all together in this past year. There are a couple of notable slides to the facility rentals and I just wanted to highlight these. This is a snapshot of a calendar year, not a budget year, but a calendar year of uses for all-town hall. And obviously social uses are bringing our most revenue and some of our most uses other than free. And we do have an awful lot of free uses and that's homeowner associations, boards, events, and the jubileeirs and so forth. But we estimated the value of about $70,000 of free uses that we give out each year. Obviously, we couldn't count on that if we actually did that because some people might not be able to use the facilities. But it's a pretty nice offer that we do for the city. The green acres similar, we have over 2100 hours of free uses in use of that facility, but we also bring in about a $21,000 annually for the use of that building too and the value of free uses we estimated around $64,000. Similarly to pickpink pavilions you can obviously see here on the slide the Vindike Park has the two most popular pickpink pavilions for paid and for use obviously I think that's indicative of the type of park that we have there. And then Show Mobile, this is the first year we've actually brought in revenue for the Show Mobile. We anticipate being able to market this and generate revenue off it to try to recoup our cost. We brought in $5,700 primarily because we've been bailing out Fairfax County Park Authority who had an accident with theirs show mobile and even though it wasn't Full rate, but it's been a significant help to us, but there are also the ten uses that we have for the show mobile To wrap up with the accounts the park and ball fields account this account actually is a negative three three point four percent overall Personnel has been able to stay at a point 17, negative point 17% less than the previous year, primarily because we have looked at our overtime, how we do our overtime for the park screw based on what we, the staff would need to do if we didn't, if we didn't have a satire turf going at Draper Drive. We also had a staff person that retired and we were able to rehire at a lesser rate. Our contract services. Again, we reduced contract services and also our operating costs based on the change over a draper drive. And the internal services is the only area within that budget. And that again is multiple charges for maintenance and fuel. Another point of reference slide here is the Park Screw and the Assistant History Edge. It was interesting to go into the presentation. There's 276 acres that we maintained by the Parks and Recreation Department. Parks and Recreate, Parks Crew was actually established in 1989, which most of you are probably around 18 years ago. With one crew supervisor and eight members of the crew for a total of nine. That's basically where we are today. We have nine staff on that crew. But a lot of what has happened with the growth. You know, adding the school fields in 1992 for 23 fields, 23 acres of school fields that we need to maintain going from two large events in just the city band concerts to four major events with 15 smaller events throughout the year. Eight playgrounds, once gay park, you know, lighted fields. You know, it's just no removal, leaf collection, 44 acres of open space. It just really illustrates where we've come over the last 18 years. It's basically 67 acres of additional acres to maintain 13 additional major events, with the tenants that the size is totally increased, and more amenities in each part 104 trash cans that we maintain. The adjustments we've made to our proposed budget, we basically reduced our initial proposal minus some of the staff and requests that we had in our budget by $93,000. There's reductions in the contributions based on a recommendation from the book and look at the contributions line, resulting in $11,000 reduction in the commissioner on the arts, $11,000 reduction in the city band, and a full reduction of the $8,000 to fall for the book. We also reduced and had to take a hard look at some of our programming after we dealt into all of our operating expenses. And one of the areas that we reduced was the teen center reducing to one night per week. That's a $10,000 savings by doing that. There's some options that we can address with our teen center to try to get back to that night. But I think the area that a significant note is the contributions reductions. The rationale for the contributions reductions of commission on the arts and city band, fall for the book, not receiving any subsidy because of the $30,000 that was recommended to come from contributions. Commissionally, the Arts and City Band have been here an awful long time and they have year-round impact. But the reductions would be significant for reducing grants, reducing programming or old-time hall for performance series and children's performance series. City band would have significant reductions in their performances. We're not exactly sure how many performances that would be if it would be the concert series, summer concert series, or other civic events. They do have professional staff that they may have to reduce their professional staff. And in fall for the book, obviously, the impact on the arts events that would be downtown and the economic impact that it could have on some of the businesses downtown. Basically the $30,000 cut is really only an additional percentage point on our overall budget. Without spending much time on it, these were the additional positions that we did have in the budget that were reduced prior to the $93,000 reduction. And that was the two utility drivers for the park screw and that was mainly because of the parks items that I pointed out earlier. The senior center assistant, which was a strong last year as well. And then obviously a a deputy for the for the department none of which are being requested at this point to wrap to get to a wrap up here the capital requests we also going for we have the Ranger Road Park and Bridge Replacement, Carton or tennis courts and the strategic master plan for parks and Recreation for a total of $160,000 in our capital requests going forward. As I stated earlier, performance measures are going to be updated in their budget books, but the performance measures, and we've really gone real deep into how we are looking at our department based on that new software and what we can do. But we've gone from 59 unique programs. That's, if you just look at the name, how many times the name is offered, from 2006 to 148 unique programs. That's 150 percent increase since 2006. And that shows the amount of people that are participating in our programs from young to the very young to the very old. If you look at the seniors, it's 720 members, the significant revenues to offset those new programs, we have increased our revenue by 29% since FY07. We have 30 unique new programs, 56 new if you look at the FY09 proposal is revenue less expenses of about 33% cost recovery, what does that mean? Basically 44 cents a day to the local resident, which is our budget overall is 2.7% for the whole department budget. That's my piece but I'm going to turn it over to Brian Napp real quick in Gene A.J. Thank you Mike. I'll try to be quick because I know it's been a late night for all of you. First of all, I'd like to do something I don't think we do enough of and so on behalf of all my colleagues on Prab, I just want to thank all the personnel, the Parks and Recreation Department. I think the brief that you just got this evening talks about all the different programs and all the different things that they manage. And so whether it's Joe who's sitting in the audience or Leslie or Bertha or Karen or or could go on and on, also want to pay special tribute to Mike. I think it's hard to believe that he'll celebrate his second anniversary this summer. And if we just think in the short time that he has been a city employee, and all the number of projects that he has had on his plate, I think it's really quite extraordinary. And I think the city is especially blessed that you made the move from the north to come down to the south and joined us here at the city of Airfax. I have three, four points I'd like to make. First of all, it's been my tradition and at this part of my intervention to kind of remind you that I think one of the critical responsibilities that we have is to maintain what we have. And I think this really came out through the 2007 study that was done, the survey that was done through the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority, which the City of Fairfax paid extra money to have additional questions in that survey. But throughout all of Northern Virginia, when you ask lots of questions about new programming, new open space and all that other stuff. The loud and clear message is please maintain what you have. And I think that's just a critical responsibility that all of us have. In a sheet, in Mike's budget here, it talks about all the different things that we maintain. It's a really extraordinary list. As alluded to already, 23 parks, 21 miles of trails, 276 acres for such a small city. This is really quite remarkable. And then built into that, just those stark figures are all the different components, whether it's bridges, 17 ball fields, seven basketball courts, all the rectangular fields of which there are 15 pavilions and shelters and playgrounds, our skate park, the show mobile, all that stuff, you know, has to get maintained. And if not, then I think all of the citizens in the city will begin to complain and feel the impact of it. So that's point one. Point two, can we go to slide 25? It shows on this slide that these are positions that aren't being asked. Well, they were asked for. Just by the time they got to the city manager, they were cut. The city manager received from Prague an email on the 29th, asking, we highlighted two positions that we felt were very important. The first one had to do with the senior center. I mean, we're obviously very grateful to your effort a couple years ago to convert the senior center coordinator to a full-time job. That's Karen Bixler's job. I think all of you know that the senior center continues to grow. The programming there is just phenomenal. We're getting more people month by month by month. So when things are going good, it's clear as if you might want to have the right staff and the right ratio of staff to work the various programs. And so that's why Prab endorsed the position there number two of the assistant senior coordinator, which is not being asked for. Page 21. The other thing that Prab strongly endorsed this year is that we finally reflect and so I'm making a special plea to you. If we've not increased since 1989, the number of staff are taking care of the parks and the trails. And we've added all this acreage and we're now about to add Stafford Park, another brand new park and all that. I just don't see how the staff that we're currently asking to maintain all this stuff, how they can continue to do this. So the brief before us asked for a new custodian. Okay. So he's just, they're wanting a new custodian for a new square footage here. Well, I can outdo you. I mean, look at all the square footage that have been added since 1989. And you're still asking the parks crew to do the same amount of work. Just because something's called open space, and we don't have it as something available to the public, you still have to have staff go in there and clear the trash and do the maintenance on all that. And you're still doing that with the same stuff. So maybe the solution is not to create a new staff here, but maybe we need to challenge ourselves to look at all of our departments and where there's maybe there should be some shifting among departments where some departments are static or have got dead weight or whatever. And so who's responsibility of that? I don't think Mike is in that position to do that. But you are, or the city manager, is to see whether there's some shifting that can be done. Page 26. On CIP, I just wanted to highlight for you that there were eight projects that went to the city manager for recommendation for this current year. And only three of them got recognized. The third item, the Strategic Master Plan, I'd like to highlight that we were particularly gratified that the Planning Commission made this their number one priority. I think with this Strategic Master Plan, which there have been many done in the past but never one that's lately been approved by you, this pushes in a good position to look at future CIP items and determine what the priority are. Just know though that things like the cutler playground, replacement fencing at Tice Park, irrigation at linear, a pavilion at Ashby Park, and then signage was all slipped to the following year. Which means then the following year, which already was a hefty year, which I know you have in your books here, gets added up. In the opinion,, in the opinion of perhaps some of these items are safety items, but I mean, I can understand this is a tough year and so certain CIP objects or projects need to be pushed off. There's just one thing on CIP that I want to note to you. I hope that you will appreciate that this is a brand new format that we put out for you this year. So this is F7. And what we've tried to do for not only Mike and his staff, but for your benefit is in the future, you're able to look at things in categories of like paving or pavilions or lighting. And what we've been very careful to over the course of the years, over five years, say that if you do this right and you maintain these things over time, you spread the cost of all this over time so that you don't have these lumped sums that you're having to shell out all it wants to do playgrounds. So it's spread out over the years. And I think this is a really good way of looking at all the things that we maintain and how we need to have resources to do that over time. In my last comments page 24 and that is the contributions which Mike has already alluded to which Gene's gonna touch on but Prab did meet last week and just wanted to highlight that we just think that overall this is a rather equitable cuts that are being imposed here on Commission on the Arts. It's 11,000 cut out of 30,000. City ban is 11,000 out of 27. And then fall for the book it's 8 out of 8. So it just seems to be a pretty heavy blow and all that gene at her comment on this. Thank you, Mike and Brian. Yes, we were concerned that it seemed that we were being cut disproportionately since it was made the major cuts and it really isn't a lot of money as you look at it. But let me highlight a little bit what we did with the money that we had. You gave us 30,000 last year, 23,000 of that went to grants. And these grants were given to organizations in the city, many of them for children who would not ordinarily have the arts if they didn't have this. There are enrichment programs with facets. We gave grad to facets, the Main Street Development Center, Daniel's run in the Lanier Middle School and acting for young people, a scholarship to acting for young people for somebody in our city. And for some smaller groups, some Irish groups that have very good following. And we also have our Old Town Hall performance series. We have 12 performances and we fill the hall almost every time if the weather is good. To ice this year, we had trouble with the weather, but people come and they do enjoy it. Those are free concerts. We do that because we think that people who cannot afford to go to the Center for the Arts, who cannot afford to go to the Kennedy Center, can get high quality performances. And they really enjoy it. And the people who perform there like to come, they always ask if they can come back, even though we pay them very little, according to what they ordinarily would get. For children, these art programs are lifelong teaching and I think you've been reading recently how much the arts do affect the overall life of children and it affects them their whole life. They learn to work hard for a gratification that comes later. If you study an instrument or practice an a chorus, you work hard and you don't get any reward for it other than your participation. Until finally, this all goes together and there's something beautiful that you've participated in. Also, you learn to work together for a goal, not by yourself, but often in these groups you learn to work together. These are habits that you get, goals that you get to go through your whole life. So even though it isn't a lot of money and it doesn't sound like it's important, it does have a great effect on children who might not have this opportunity any other way. So we just wanted to say that we realize that it's a bad budget year for you. It's very difficult, but we think we should be, the amount should be evenly distributed that people have to give up. And we felt that we are being, have to give up a lot more than other people. Thank you very much. So on a positive note, just let me just thank you again because it is very noteworthy of all the support that you have offered throughout the years to the Parks and Recreation Department. And we know that and Jean and I are unified in expressing our gratitude to you. And that I mean, so I hope I'm doing that on behalf of all our citizens because we obviously, every day benefit from all the programs, both indoors and outdoors that Mike manages. They definitely add to the quality of life of the City of Fairfax and ultimately impacts the hopefully the strong economy and the vibrant city in which we live. They are grateful. Thank you very much. Thank in which we live. And they are grateful. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Greenfield. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Looking at the adjustments to your proposed budget, the one assistance senior coordinator that you're referring to, was that in addition to Mrs. Fairbarns? She's considered a part-time, isn't she? She's 30 hours temporary right now. Temporary. Temporary position. Temporary position. No benefits. Not to exceed when. Basically, we have to release her after for a couple of weeks each year. Then we want to restart the clock for her. Okay. Can you talk about the programming cuts for the evening show for Fourth of July? That basically we had built in $8,000 for getting a better band. We've typically not had that in our budget. It's been done through IDCC. We added that in this year hoping to get a even better quality ban than we've had in the past. But we have to remove that for basically to try to get to that $93,000 cut that we need to hit. So is it because IDCC doesn't have the money that you were trying to add the $8,000 into it or? It was in addition to what they put toward it. You're trying to add an additional 8,000 for a track to better band. Two tracks to better band, yes. So it's not that we're losing entertain. We'll still have high quality band, but we're just not going to be able to hire a high quality band. A cup level of a band. That's correct. Okay. All right, because there's a perception in the community that you are cutting back on the evening show and what I'm hearing you say is that's not correct. No. Still going to be maintained at the same level. I'm still maintaining the same level. In a position to try to enhance. Yes. Okay. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, I a little reluctant to do this, but fall for the book is certainly something that I worked on and brought to the City of Fairfax. And I think it has been a good program. I know it's the one that we've done in conjunction with GMU and what's disappointing is this could have been a year that we could have worked to bring some of those venues into the downtown in our downtown redeveloped area. And now we're essentially, and that's a lot of people that support that program and participate in that program that are now going to fall by the wayside. You're cutting back on $8,000. The request I had was for 30,000 contributions and to look deeper into commission or deeper into a city band, I had a hard time doing that. I think they're all very beneficial programs. I think the fall for the book is very beneficial to the downtown, to the residents in the surrounding area what they offer. And so that was a rationale that I couldn't, seeing the year long benefit that commission had, the year long benefit that city ban had at the time. I couldn't dig deeper into that to hit that 30,000 and I don't know where I could come up with that within our own operating budget too. Right. a strategic plan, master plan on the budget for our parks. I've been talking about this for how long and I appreciate it finally making its way up here. Hopefully it will stick around, but thank you. Mr. Mayor, thank you. Let me may first of all thank Mr. McCarty and also Mr. Nath and Miss A.G. Certainly as two of the leaders in our community on parks and recreational and arts related issues, you all are outstanding champions. And by the way, a lot of my comments, I find myself starting to think reflective of the last 18 years or in some cases less than that, but sort of Miss A.G. Has been a tireless champion for her causes and I appreciate that very much. I think that Mr. Napp in particular on the issue of open space are persuasive in terms of some of the staff needs, I think, that where I do disagree, however, is the issue of sort of the trade-off question, not disagree, but maybe that you may even agree with me on this, which is the prioritization. If that is indeed a prioritization, I would look to you and staff to come back and say, as you were talking about things in terms of where we're taking it, let's take this skate park for example, that is incredibly popular, wasn't popular 25 years ago, didn't exist. As we look at our priorities in the community, what's popular today, what's not popular? For instance, we have a lot of festivals and we saw the budget line item for all of our festivals. You all came back to us about two years ago and said, or three years ago and said, look, we as Parks and Recreation Advisory Board are recognizing that some of these festivals just aren't doing it anymore. There is always a reluctance though on the part of staff or even council members, everybody has their favorite festival. Yeah, I know you're pointing at us and that's a very fair criticism. Thank you. That nobody wants to let go even though we're spending a fortune in some cases on getting 45 or 60 or 80 people to certain events. And, you know, it is, you've come to us with recommendations, I would encourage you to come back again for more recommendations to this body or future bodies because it's a lot of money. I mean, my favorite example, and I know one of the craft fairs makes money, but do we really need two craft fairs in the city? I think it's silly, but that's just my opinion, and I'm probably in the minority on that. I know one of them makes money but you know I think when I think back in craft fairs in the 70s and 80s, certainly a much more popular kind of event than they are today. I think a lot of people have just just tired of them. They think they're not as, not of the same kind of draw that they were 25 years ago. I don't know if I'm alone in that, probably am. But those are the kind of things I'm looking for. And if you're talking about just maintenance of what we have, I think that's very important. My former colleague, Mr. Mason, I've mentioned him twice tonight has said, I can remember we took a walk one time back in the mid 1990s looking at some of the deterioration of our trails. And I don't ever want to see us get into that situation, we're cutting and cutting and cutting, and then on the capital side, and then our planx, excuse me, catch up, trying to, you know, having to spend double what we might have spent if we had, you know, had done it a little bit more prudently throughout. So just a note of caution, I don't know if I have any answers this evening, but I guess I'm just offering up my desire to continue to work with you all to find that middle ground as to where maybe we give up some things to get something else. I don't know, we're not going to find any new money. I mean, I think that's pretty clear aside from the school board who's already offered up a little bit here this evening. But beyond that, we're not going to find any new money. So what we really need to do is trim somewhere else. And I would just ask that you all work with staff and come back to us if you think that this is more of a priority than that, then tell us that. That's all I have, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Could you go back and describe in a little more detail the cut for the teen center? Are you cutting it to one night a week? To one night a week, we have it currently on Friday and Saturday evenings. We're reducing that back to Friday evenings, our most popular evening. We're going to look at other alternatives, whether it's a sponsor, or to try and be able to recoup that cost that we would have the $10,000 to be able to offer that on Saturday nights. Thank you. Mr. Mayor. Mr. Lawn. Thank you. On that Friday and Saturday night, how many teens show up on Saturday night? Lately we've been averaging on Friday nights 14 and 10 on Saturday. Okay, see that. Okay. Thank you for that. When you're talking about, I kind of want to go along with Mr. Silverthorn here for just a second. When you're talking about some of these other activities and we did have a study I think last year that we saw and I requested it and I did get a copy of it and I think I threw it in my recycle bin and I wondered if you can get me another one of what the I think we rated the activities or the special events. They were rated from one to ten or something and we used to to have, we had that. And I'd like to get a copy of that in the next couple of weeks if I could. But the thing that I think about some of those activities is when you look at the police department and how much money they spend on these special events and working overtime, and then the folks in parking recs that have to work overtime, some of those activities that we found that there isn't a lot of attendance were too fall festival in the holiday craft show within six or eight weeks of each other. Some of those things might be able to be reduced and then it will ricochet or ripple down to other people's budgets. So I do hope that we can look at getting rid of some of those. Then I'd like to ask question then about town hall, old town hall. I saw that we do about $96,000 for events. Now, when we have staff working there, that's also over time. Are we losing money on that? Are we, I mean, $100,000 really didn't tell me a lot. It just says okay, well that's so much for making What's the other side of that? What's the the cost on that? The Facilities budget and I can pull the breakout out for you at another point, but we have a hundred forty nine thousand dollars in But we have $149,000 in anticipate expenditures. But we have 138,000 in revenue that we're budgeting to come in for those facilities. The staff that work all town hall are temporary staff. So then only when they get into a long day for a special event like Fourth of July or Fall Festival, they might go into an overtime situation. But that generally it's just an hour for our basis. with the July or fall festival, they might go into an overtime situation, but that, but generally it's just an hour for our basis. So it's a hundred and twenty. That's covered. That's $49,000 that we are, is our expenditure and we bring in $139,000, so we're $10,000, about a $10,000 short fall in Old Town Hall. Okay. I couldn't pick that out here. And then when we were talking about the position at the senior center, and I do have to say the senior center is very dear to my heart, took very good care of my mother-in-law, you know, who had some memory issues, but they were dear with her. And she still misses it and would like to come back to visit every so often. But my understanding is, you do have a full-time coordinate, which is Karen Bicksler, her position. And we still have a part-time position there, is that right? Yes. And then we do have some volunteers that come in and help during that timeframe. From time to time, but the primary care for the senior center is Karen Bicksler. So the proposed coordinator, senior coordinator, that you're not proposing, let's go there. The assistant senior coordinator would be that be taking the part-time person and making it a full-time person. The original proposal was to reduce that position to 20 hours, the temporary position, and then bring a full-time around. The problem is that with Karen's position, she's not there. Who's the next person that's skilled to deal with the seniors, whether it's a memory issue, whether it's a disability issue, or so forth. So that's when we were looking for to have that counterpart there. But you do have a part time person that does that. I guess it's a part time or temporary. It's part time temporary, 30 hours. Part time temporary, 30 hours right now. Okay. OK. OK. I'll ask another question to you later off line about that part time temporary because you have social security and all that that you have to add into that. OK. Then I have, I think that's the only questions I have right now. Thank you. Miss Cross. OK. I have right now. Thank you. This cross. Okay. I'll follow up on a question I have with Old Town Hall first. This time last year I asked that we have new drapes for that building and we still don't have drapes for that building. When are we going to have drapes for that building? That comes through the public works request and I believe that's in, I don't know, Joe, if you have that in your capital. FY 13. The ones that are there will disintegrate long before then. The two issues that we're hearing from staff and our renters is drapes. You need to be replaced and also the flooring needs to be resurfaced. But again, that's not through our department for that maintenance on the recommendation is from what I understand in capital. No, I thought Laura was taking care of it. Laura Lister. She's been working with folks to figure out what the replacement would be. But again, the funding for it was in the capital. Public works overseas. All needed to associate it with Alt all telling hall. What was the schedule of an FY 13 for $25,000? $25,000? Oh my. by the cuts to the commission, the band, and fall for the book. These are cultural programs as opposed to athletics or crafts or any senior programs. And I feel like they've just been the restoration of those funds because I really think of the cultural arts as being sort of the soul of this community and without them, we just lose an awful lot of character, seems to me, in the city. Not to the least of another aspect of that, you can tell it, it really is very upsetting to me. But one of the benefits of some of those programs is what it does to the downtown. Several of these people to the downtown and more we can encourage that, the better off we are. So I just wanna tell you now that I'll be pushing for that pretty hard. I've had a number of people who have asked me about the costs involved to televised the fireworks at the high school. Do you have any idea what that would cost? 8,000? Okay another thing to talk about. The request for personnel that was in your presentation. I just saw two truck drivers. Are those the people that you would want for the maintenance of the parks and just general maintenance? Yes, they're called utility truck drivers. It's the way they're classified, but they're kind of jacks of all trade. They are eligible to drive trucks. We lose three of our staff every October for leaf collection to January. And obviously with the extended hours and the warm weather, parks are still open and still very viable. So that was one of the reasons why we wanted the two to kind of round that out. That's a significant reduction in our staff when they do that. So you need, and the cost was what? Can you know where it off the top of your head or I'll look at that? Yeah, off the top of my head, I don't know what that the cost was what? Can you do you know right off the top of your head or I'll look at that? Yeah, off the top of my head, I don't know what that initial cost was. I'll look at that. I think Mr. Knett makes a very good point that we're having creased our facilities greatly and have not kept up with the number of people that it takes to maintain them. And along that same line, I would say this, again, Mr. Nett makes a very good point of taking care of what we already have. And while I am very admiring of the work that you have done, Mr. McCarty, in the time that you've been here to expand our programs to find alternative funding, that sort of thing. I am feeling that we are adding too much and not, I appreciate the fact that your limiting needs to a certain level of enrollment or you're not offering them. But nevertheless, I'm sure there will be those courses that are offered or those offerings that are minimally enrolled and yet you have met the low threshold and you're going to have to go forward with them then. I think we're trying to do too much. I guess is the best way to say this. And we need to particularly in these times pull back a little bit and take care of what we've already got going rather than expanding to the degree that we have. Whereas these are wonderful programs and certainly enriching for all levels in our city. I do think that we're getting a little more than we can handle right now. So that would be my comment. I'm sure you have a rebuttal to that. No, not necessarily rebuttal, but just on the budgetaries, how we budget those programs. The expenses that you see in there are based on the minimum. So if we get minimum enrollment, it covers the expense fully in that particular program. And we're getting, you know, the addition of Providence Elementary, you have to school program and then we're doing over there. It's been a long time request from numerous parents to start that program because they've also heard about the success of Daniel's run and wanting that option. The other thing is our camps and our summertime fill. You know, we can only take so many spots in our traditional camp program. And without the ability to offer another site for that, we're able to offer these one week options, which are some are contracted, because they're a contracted company to come in to do that. Others are run by our staff and trained by our staff if we meet those minimums. But it'll give the parents more opportunities to get into a program. Yes, they might have to pay for that to cover the cost. But it still gives that parent another option, whether it's the drama camp, whether it's the soccer camp, whether it's the CSI camp. It gives them an option each week, at least two other options, rather than the traditional camp, if they're not able to get into it, or give them a whole wealth of other experiences during that summer, but it also was a request that we've been getting from parents to have other alternatives. So. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I would also like to tag on that looking at the commission of the arts and the city band that those are established events that draw people from all over the area just not our city. And with that, we'll come people to eat in our restaurants, to possibly stay in hotels, to look at the larger picture that they are going to be bringing revenues into the city. Thus, the city band is known across the US. It's a nationally recognized organization and the idea of us reducing the performances and cutting down on summer series I think is cutting off our nose despite our face in this area. In times of economic downturn, when people cannot afford to go to other more expensive, as Ms. Aji said, going to the Kennedy Center or the Center of the Arts, to have things that anyone on any income can go to will reduce crime, will increase how children look at the world. And so I think we really need to, and for the overall budget, these cuts on this slide are not that really that much. Also, I would like to concur with Mr. Napa of we need to take care of what we have. And again, in times of economic stress, we can't, we have to keep things looking nice and cared for so that people take care of what their city has. Thank you. I just have one quick question and there may be a comment. But I'm certainly not as familiar with the contribution reduction activities as some of my colleagues probably are. I've never been to the children's performance series, but is that the event that's on Mondays every now and then? Yes. And what are the number of people who show up to that event? That's round it. Anywhere from 80 to 100 or more from time to time to last. Especially. I should have mentioned that because it's one of the most successful. It's full. Yeah. There's no point in getting up. I mean, I guess this is a segue. I always feel every time we have this discussion, there's this 20,000 ton elephant in the room over once to recognize it. And the thing that troubles me, I said this about our New Year's Eve celebration. I will say this about our children's performance series. I'm not that familiar and I apologize with the old town hall performance series but for the life of me. I can't figure out how we constantly cut figure out how we constantly cut the most popular events. And then we leave these others that may be soft funding or staff funding that we donate staff time in kind. And I don't get it. And I'll just say I think our priorities are totally screwed up. What I'd like to see, and I know we've probably asked this before, and it may be in the budget I swit, went through and I didn't see it, but I'd like to know how many people attend, for example, the very spotlight of the arts events. Every event they do. I'd like to have a estimated number next to it in attendance. I'd like to know how many people attend the children's performance series on the average. You just talked about cutting one of two t-knights where we get 14 people to one and 10 to the other and then cancel the Children's Performance which gets 80 to 100. I don't understand that logic. Never have, never will. So there must be a way to catalog the fall for the books. I hosted an event at the Sweet Life Cafe. I went to another one that was at Circa across the street. I don't know the average attendance, and I certainly don't want to exaggerate, but I know the one that was in our facility was Standing Remolley. I heard the one at Old Shabena across the street was Standing Remolley. I believe the one that was at Circa was circa was standing remotely, but we're cutting it. And I just, I'm just sorry, I never have understood why we put some events over here that nobody talks about regardless of their attendance. And then the most popular things we do, and I'm going to put Fairfax first or whatever we called it right in that same case, we cut those, we cut the children's performance. We cut all-town hall performance. We cut fall for the books. And every one of these events is a huge success in this community. And I just don't get it. And maybe somebody is going to have to force this dialogue. I'm sorry. I don't. Mr. Mayor, I don't know that we cut them. We've reduced them. Well, I'd like to add up. I'd like for the book. I don't. Last time I checked, I had the microphone. So thank you very much for that. What I'd like to do is I'd like to get a list of what's being reduced, how many people come to those events, and what's being cut. And I don't want to blameabor tonight. It's too late and I'm too tired. I'm quite frankly not feel miserable and that's why I keep getting up and going outside so I don't often gag through the whole presentation. But that's the follow books. It looks to me like loss of the program. Maybe it's cutting back. Can I respond, Mr. Mayor? When I call on you, Mr. Sisson. So what I'd like to do is to get if I could a list of people who attend all the various events that we sponsor, whether it's a lecture, whether it's a bus trip to the Orioles baseball game, whether it's the spotlight of the arts, whether it's the children's performance, whether it's the old-town performance, whether it's the fall for the books, whatever it is, and then get an understanding, and it's probably in this budget, and I do apologize for not having gone through it, as thoroughly as I will, on what are we talking about? Reduction cuts, elimination, once a month, going from three times a month, I quite frankly don't know, and don't know how to track all that. So if I could get that, I would appreciate it. Mr. Assistant. Thanks. I don't want to belabor it either. But I don't think we're talking about eliminating things. For example, fall for the book. Yes, we wrote it out, but that doesn't mean the city can't be a venue for events for fall for the book just because the city wants to take a rest on some of these events. Of course this is nothing compared to what we'll be talking about tomorrow night on some other community items but I'd like to ask Mr. McCarty on the children's programming. Now just the cuts that we have recommended. Does that zero out that or does it reduce it? I think that's really the commission we'd have to decide. I mean the commission might have to for example redirect their spending from some of their programs and leave intact. The Monday morning programming. Well I think that's what if it stays at 19,000 that's what we're going to have to do. We're going to have to look at it and decide which ones we cut back to to live in it. Yes. Yes. We will have to do our grants which is what we spend most of our money on our grants. Look at that and the whole point. So you might have to zero out your grants and leave the other community best. Well that would be one thing. Performance is intact. I don't want to do that. That would be one thing we could do. We'd have to look at that and see which we thought was the most important. So we're which is a hot, I don't know how you decide which is the most important. I'm not sure you can always go by the number of people because it depends on what the venue is. You know, a grant in a classroom would be 30 people, but. You know, it's very difficult to decide. I can't do it by the number of people involved. I do it by what we would think would be the most important for the community. what we would think would be the most important for the community. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Mr. Overthorne. I'm not sure any of us are actually, we're all saying somewhat of the same thing, although in a little bit different fashion. And it's about priorities. The problem, and I'll just, you know, I'm going to get more and more blunt. I've decided as I leave office. The problem is all seven of us have different priorities. And it's going to be a real challenge here as we think about this. And it's going to be a simple majority, unfortunately, in some cases, unfortunately, in other cases that decides which programs go and which stay and not be reallocated or reprioritized. And I'll just say, I understand it. But I sit here and listen to my distinguished colleagues here saying that it reduces crime, it gets people downtown to shop, yet the best one of the best programs we have, it's not the fall festival for that because they're blocking all the storefronts. It's first night, which these same two colleagues wanted to cancel. So all I'm saying is that there is a differing of opinion here and the consistency issue is one that we're going to all be, I'm sure challenging each other on here over the course of the next four weeks, but that's why I want to lean back on these individuals, fellows and ladies, excuse me, that are here to give us that guidance because I'll just tell you, and it really does. I share the mayor's concern that some of the programs that are, you know, that I mean, look, I've lit the Christmas tree this year. It was a wonderful program. Great, but you know, it wasn't very crowded to be honest with you. It was, it was probably 75 people. I had to beg people that I knew to come out. And I don't know how much money we spend on that. And I don't know how many people really show up to all the various events to nice program. Please don't misinterpret what I'm saying. I'm just saying in tight budget times we have to make those kind of choices. And with that, I have a six-day-in-flight to New York, so I'm ready to go to bed. Thank you. Well, there you go. Mr. Everything is over. Were there more comments? And I guess I just want to conclude this by making sure my comments are understood. I get we have to make cuts. I'm not sure we collectively get. We're going to have to make cuts. And I can sit here in front of you, fine folks, and talk about all these tough cuts and all these wonderful programs. And then next, tomorrow night, as Mr. Sissin said, we're going to be looking at bloodshed and other areas. So, but my concern is not the cuts. I think I'm going to be more of a frame of mind to make even more cuts than maybe even others would be, because I do believe we're going to have to do that. My concern is the priorities and what gets cut and what doesn't get cut. And I think we're all saying, as Mr. Silverthorn said, the same thing. And I am concerned, you know, last week we sat and talked about a community center. This week we're talking about cutting $20,000 in the commission of the arts and 18,000 or whatever it is on the city band. I am concerned that we've started a lot of things and I am concerned that we are not finishing what we started as we jump ahead to our next series of challenges and I just hope we won't lose sight of that. We did buy a lot of open space a long time ago and you know three weeks ago the first time we had an accident our hand we cut out you know the $99,000 to finish the pond. That's great that's fine I understand maybe that's not anybody's priority but you know before we add one new diamond, anything, I agree, and I think we're consistent in what we're saying. We need to protect what we have, that's worth protecting. We need to be willing to cut what's not worth protecting, and we're going to have to all roll up our sleeves collectively as we try to forget what those priorities are, and it's not going to be, certainly not going to be easy. With that, let me thank you all for your time and energy and your effort tonight. Thank you. Stay tuned. Tomorrow night, part two, same station, same location, same time. I'd like to entertain a motion. I guess I don't know, you know what? This is a work session. I don't need your motion. Thank you, Mr. Silverthorn.