Categories Economic Development, Transparency
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Proposed Budget Amendments 2021

Submitted to Councilmembers as “information only” November 13, 2021
Fellow Councilmembers,
At Thursday’s meeting I will present the following six budget amendment items, most of whichh I have already discussed with Beth Anne and Dan Brewer on November 4. They total $41,204. $5,000 of which is a one-time expense and the remaining $36,204 to be considered as expenses that would become structural. At least one of these items will require a vote of the Council (item #2) and at least one other will require a resolution to provide a legal framework (item #4). Obviously, if those items do not get an affirmative vote the money would be returned to the general fund.
Since the total amount is relatively small, I would not anticipate that these would have any impact on our reserve. Broadly speaking, all these items appear to fall within the Finance or City Manager’s Administrative budgets so obviously the hope is that ways might be found to make room without too much hardship to other needed programs.
My hope is also that most of these are relatively easy to say ‘yes’ to since all these have precedents in other cities (eg. SeaTac has a subscription system Item #3… and all our sister cities except Normandy Park now have some form of ‘digital media consultant’… Item #6.) But if you have specific information-only requests, please let me know how I can help give you the answers you need.

1. Attached is an application for the City to re-join National League Of Cities. The annual cost is $2,004. If you haven’t looked at them recently, please do. My individual interest is that they are the nexus of all FAA-related legislation. They have graciously allowed me to audit some of their meetings with FAA and congressmen and a lot of what is proposed does not take into account the unique nature of the Port Of Seattle (not accountable to City or County.) We need to be at that table if only for that reason alone. They also offer some amazing classes on everything from infrastructure to budgeting. Some of this is light years ahead of AWC.

2. I propose that we join with the King County – Cities Climate Collaboration (K4C). This requires an inter-local agreement (see attachment). The annual cost is $1,200. Here is a presentation describing the program and there is a short video here. The main benefit is, in some ways, similar to Sound Cities Association. They put forward an idea is to have a shared agenda on climate-related legislation that will benefit our City and help us identify climate-related grant opportunities. Some of this we are already doing (Greener Cities with Forterra/PoS) but some of this is money we’re surely leaving on the table. Some of the grants have involved improving public buildings to LEED standards, solar panels, street lighting. I’m sure with all our various water and forest systems we can find many opportunities. As anotherr example, as the summers get hotter we should be looking for opportunities to help residents find options to help keep their living spaces cooler. This discussion becomes even more important as aviation traffic increases and more homes have some form of sound insulation–we have to make that issue part of the climate agenda.

3. I would like to provide a maximum $1,000 annual fund for shared digital subscriptions available to CMs for key publications. Other Cities do this by getting a print subscription which is available to visitors in the lobby and then the digital subscription credentials which are only shared with the Council. I’m sure there are others, but my initial suggestions would be:
  • Seattle Times
  • Everett Herald
  • Federal Way Mirror
  • Puget Sound Business Journal
  • Daily Journal Of Commerce
4. I would like to provide a $7,000 annual travel budget for CMs of $1,000 per CM. I’d like each CM to spend that however they choose (so long as it is an obvious Council-related item). This is at least partially necessary because various organisations (such as NLC and AWC) hold conferences that the City pays for but the travel expenses are currently not. There are also special interest conferences (eg. aviation, marina, building trades, etc.) that I found very useful in the past year.
  • Expenses to be limited to receipts for airfare, fuel, hotel, food and only for the CMs
  • CMs would submit their expenses quarterly to be included as an item of a Council Meeting Consent Agenda with the title Travel Expenses
  • If the Travel Expense item is pulled from the Consent Agenda, any individual reimbursement could then be denied, but that denial would need to affirmed by a unanimous vote of the Council
  • Approved items to be paid at the following check run

5. I propose budgeting $5,000 one-time for hybrid conferencing equipment in the North Conference Room. Recorded Committee Meetings have become popular and we should maintain that practice after the State of Emergency is lifted. Budgeting the money moves that process forward. I have been assured that there are no technical limitations. I have asked MRSC and they see no legal issues, but I would defer to our attorney of course because there is at least the -expectation- that on public meting video each speaker is targeted. The $5,000 is a guesstimate and is probably too high. It is based on estimates I’ve seen for providing hybrid conferencing for hotel conference rooms–where there is no such guaranteed speaker-targeting.

 

6. I propose investing $25,000 for the City web site. Nothing is permanent in life, but my thinking is that this amount should be considered structural and not a one-time expense. We should start budgeting for a robust and ongoing digital presence–meaning communications and outreach–and that includes schools, businesses, faith and senior communities. -We- have to start finding ways to make them all aware of each other’s activities and connect them. We should especially give some marketing assists to extend the reach of our retail businesses.

A. Functionally, the #1 priority is Search. It’s terribly broken and it matters not just to find a Council meeting or Animal Control. It’s the key to public engagement on -anything-… and not just on the site. Any Des Moines-related search term across all our domains (beach park rental, marina) has to rank properly in Google. Everyone who wants to find -anything- we do needs us to be the first thing they see on their phone. Since we’re small we have to be -better- at this than other cities.

(However, the new Council Meeting Center has a very thorough search (but apparently limited to council meeting agendas?), but it’s buried down 3-4 links.)

B. There’s all these other things having to do with usability for people with various disabilities. And that includes how we look on various phones and tablets–which is the primary way people reach us now. Given our demographic, it is unconscionable to me that we aren’t better on this. There are add-ons that Civic-Web offer to deal with this.

C. Along the same lines, we need to develop a mechanism for accommodating at least Spanish, Vietnamese and Somali/Amharic… especially when it comes to major press releases.

D. There is content that desperately needs to be updated. We need stories and imagery that match our diverse community and are relevant to -today-. Attached is a screen cap of the home page of our web site as it looked in 2014. I would argue that this version was more appealing. Now one might argue that it is the underlying functionality that matters most. But the visuals are not nothing. We use buzzy phrases all the time about ‘racism’ and ‘inclusion’ and ‘business friendly’. OK, we can do something meaningful with all that -now- simply by telling visual stories about our residents, our business successes. The 2014 version was basically just ‘colourful’ But there is a reason Instagram took over the planet. It really -does- tell stories… and everyone under 45 responds to that.
E. CivicWeb offers tools to do push content to phones–including the kinds of surveys we hired out for the PRSS Update. This is a carrot we can use for everything from billing reminders to calendar invites to emergency notifications. Eg. we offer residents the the ability to get Council Meeting Calendar Invites on their phone as the incentive to get them to sign up for the Code Red Emergency Notification system. This crosses cultural barriers. People who do not speak English -do- have an Android phone. We get their phone number for any number of small services they find useful and then we can start engaging with them on an ongoing basis for emergencies, public engagement, etc. Our highest priority must be: mobile first.
E. With all that, the key challenge with our web site is human: one-time vs. ongoing labour. We should automate as much of the content generation and syndication as possible with the goal of reducing ongoing staff time. Eg. there should be a mechanism to post a press release on the site and have it automatically syndicated to every social media account. Same with the calendars and any number of ‘busy work’ documents. Law offices and newspapers have been automating this process for decades. We’re doing this with the new accounting system–reducing duplicative entry. Again, CivicWeb already has options to help.
F. But after all that one-time effort at process improvement, there is probably too much ‘stuff’ to be done to provide all the timely content necessary for the community. Again, this is nothing to do with current staff. It’s just that the site requires both a TON of ‘busywork’ -and- fresh content generation to connect with businesses and residents. So part of this process should be evaluating the need for an-call service to provide for content generation and maintenance–just as we now do for specialised engineering services like Excel-Tech. There are firms that provide a pool of talent for everything from graphics, animations and videos to specialised press releases. We should identify the right partner and start building a trusted long term relationship. We already allocated money for the Marina Redevelopment Tour at our ARPA Stimulus meeting so this could tie into that discussion.
Thanks for your consideration.
—JC

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