stores that came on financials. ESPN. I think I got nothing better to do. And will this work out? This is no good. This is no good. Oh, cool. Oh, cool. I don't think you can start with the plan. Yeah. But you're going to do this when you start out. I think we could get a live stream there. I'm so fine. You went up there. No sound. There's all my stuff in your room. Sorry. Internet sound? No, no. It's on. Okay. Oh, yeah. The green lights are on. No money. Thanks. We'll be quiet now. I'd like to call our meeting to order. Let's see. We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 older persons present. If you will join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. We have a public forum on agenda items. We have three people who have signed up to speak. Is that correct? Yes. All right. Please understand that this is with respect to agenda items, which relates to transportation issues. The budget. We have a public forum on agenda items. We have three people who have signed up to speak. Is that correct? Yes. All right. The Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge relates to transportation issues. The budget. And a referral for our strategic planning session relating to mission and vision statement and core values. Within those parameters, who is the first to speak? Mr. Lewandowski, are you speaking on the issues that I just outlined? Okay. Very good. You'll have three minutes. Could we have your name and address, please? I'm here to speak. Could we have your name and address, please? Scott Lewandowski, 2201 Uri Avenue. Very good. You have three minutes. I'm here to speak about the budget forecast tonight. How can the city come up with a budget forecast when guesses as to what something will cost are so far off from reality? And this group, the Common Council needs to do a better job questioning where these dollar amounts come from. Here are a few examples. The cost that tear down the Boston store was $341,900. $92,000 more than what was estimated. Not a small amount to Sheboygan taxpayers. When I asked what it would cost to remove asbestos into Boston store, we were all told the cost would be minimal because it was a fairly new building except for part of the basement. The minimal amount turned out to be $166,000 with the city paying half or $83,000. Not a minimal amount to Sheboygan taxpayers. Next for the field of dreams, Alderman Hammond said in the Sheboygan press of February 9th that the city would need to come up with $800,000. The difference between what Aurora is giving and what the total cost would be for new fields. Where did this figure of $800,000 come from? How much will it really cost the city taxpayers? And do we know what his proposed will actually be built? Here are some things that will be needed that will cost the city taxpayers money but are not listed in that $800,000. A couple of weeks ago at the school board meeting held at Cooper School, Aurora said that traffic signals would be needed to be put up at Taylor Drive and Salmon Avenue and Taylor Drive and Geely or maybe a roundabout. That would be a city expense and would be expensive. On the back part of the proposed Aurora site an access road is shown in the plans. If you drive in that area you will currently find a narrow road that would need to be widened. Who pays for widening a road? City taxpayers and adjoining property owners. The east section where the field of dreams is to be relocated has contaminated soil on the south end. Where the city was dumping snow for years. The Sheboygan area school district in Aurora will say the city is responsible for cleaning up the soil where they dump snow which causes soil contamination. To get to the butine property from the trailer park it is three tenths of a mile with no sidewalk. How much will the city taxpayers be paying to put in three tenths of a mile of sidewalk? How many more expenses for the city taxpayers are not being told yet? I know of more but I'm almost out of time. Money that the taxpayers would prefer to be used to repair city streets. The city needs to do a better job with budget forecasts and this council must do a better job questioning the numbers being guessed at. To make things look better than they really are. The taxpayers you represent deserve that. Thank you. Spell it. B as in boy. R-A-E-S-C-H. I'm at 3320 Geely Avenue. So I'm also here to talk about the budget. I mentioned this at the CPC meeting but I thought I would share it with you about the boots and property. We're really excited about that property too but I'm afraid excitement doesn't exactly pay the bills. So I don't know if you've had any bids on that property of what it's going to actually cost to do the complex that's being proposed but you might look at the topographical map and it's got four sloping hills. It's going to be extremely expensive for us to excavate, fill, grade, drainage. Everything that they're proposing is not going to be done for 2.3 million plus $800,000 in city money. They want five soccer fields and talking with one of the Lakeshore United Board members, they're hoping to have one tournament grade field. Otherwise it's going to be the same fields that we have at the Field of Dreams. That's not going to bring in tournaments. They also want to have two bathrooms, three different parking lots, foliage, retention pond, there's additional infrastructure. You're never going to be able to do all of that. You need to check in what that's going to cost because it's going to be way, way more than that is estimated. So that might be one thing to consider for the future budget. I don't know if you had a chance to look at the financials for the soccer club but let me just tell you nobody's going to give them a loan to do this because unfortunately both clubs ran in a deficit last year and can't afford to do what they're doing now so they certainly cannot afford to contribute to this. The football club is $15,000 short and the year before it was $20,000. So where are they going to come for the money? They're going to come to the U like they have in the past. There's a comparable out there. Are you wondering what the annual maintenance fee is going to be on this field? Because we've been told that the city is going to cover that annual maintenance fee until the clubs can afford to do so. Well there is a comparable out there. It's called Shields. Appleton has the same thing we're hoping to do. They have a really nice farm field about 20 years they've been doing this and the Appleton soccer club leases that land. It costs them $500,000 to run those 15 fields with a few baseball diamonds. And soccer fields are the same width no matter where you put them. So if we're looking at five fields initially that's at least $150,000 if you use their comparable and look at their tax records. If you put 10 fields it's $300,000 a year and the soccer club and the football club cannot afford to do this. I'm excited about this too but we really, really need to plan this out and all of this data if you're looking for the facts we cannot afford to do this. I wish we could and I think in the future we can if we all pull together but it is going to cost huge money to get it going and we don't have enough to do it and we don't have enough to maintain it and they're going to come to you and the kids are going to go without. Thank you. My name is Debbie Demona and I live at 1704 North 35th Street. Okay, so one of the concerns expressed is the loss of tax revenue if Aurora leaves Sheboygan if they don't get to build on the field of dreams. On Tuesday, March 3rd, Dave Graham near held a meeting for the current 7th Street neighbors of Memorial Hospital to allay their concerns which I was at with a friend who's a neighbor of Memorial. Their current neighbors expressed many concerns and among those concerns had to do with Aurora abandoning the 7th Street hospital leaving an empty building. One neighbor said, when you transfer the hospital to the field of dreams will you run a runway through Maywood? Gravener said no, Maywood is forever but the man said the field of dreams was supposed to be forever as well. Gravener only committed to staying at the Memorial site for 10 years. Gravener said that Aurora still has to pass by DNR approval and city zoning but he told neighbors of the 7th Street that Aurora was committed to staying in Sheboygan that they would find another site in the city if their current project doesn't pass DNR stipulations and city ordinances. This means that the city of Sheboygan will not be losing the $200,000 in tax revenue because as Mr. Gravener stated at this meeting they will find another site in the city to build so why destroy the field of dreams and incur all these other costs when they plan to build on another site in the city of Sheboygan. Thank you. Hi, my name is Herb Tyler. I live at 3514 Geely Avenue and I'm going to take exception with a Monday press article by Chad Pellecek. We have some fuzzy math going on and I think we have to deal with real numbers when we're talking about the budget and this also relates of course to the Buttson property and how you're going to be spending your money. In that article it said that revenues were up 10% on room fees at 8% room tax over 2013 that it went from 600,000 at 10% would make a 660,000 and that it was up 49% over a period of four years. I have here a document which is produced by the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau and it lists on here the revenues reported by the municipalities in Sheboygan County for 2011 and in 2011 we reported $1,0004,650 or a 40% decrease between 2011 and 2013 a 35% decrease between 2011 and 2014. That would however generate $660,000 that would generate $198,000 which would help you fund the first portion that would take you what four years I guess of developing the Buttson property because Joe Sheehan said at the Cooper meeting a week or so ago that would be funded by the Common Council and the room tax that is taken in. If that's the case then the question would be why are they coming from in your budget because it's my understanding that in the past that money went into your general fund and was used at the discretion of the Common Council. I don't know if that's true but that's my understanding. If that's the case then you're going to have a budget shortfall somewhere else. Where's that money going to come from? I had a number of other things to hit but they've already been hit that you can't do business with fuzzy math. You've got to have the facts before you move forward with anything. Thank you. Some weeks ago Alderpersons received a copy of an intriguing study called Filling Potholes that all of us I'm sure took a look at. Transportation issues both at the state and local level are a compelling public issue. There are severe budget shortfalls at the state level and certainly at the city level and other parts of Sheboygan County. The Filling Potholes study was done by the Wisconsin Taxpayers' Alliance along with the local government coalition and some years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Todd Berry who is the president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers' Alliance and have read their documents over the years which I find to be a the analyses that Todd does are straightforward. They're non-partisan. They're pretty sensible and they're real smart and there are figures that you can rely on. So I asked Todd and Mayor Van Der Stien if he would come to our council meeting and talk about these transportation issues and Todd is here from Madison he's agreed to do that and he knows the room in the sense that, and I didn't realize all these things about Todd he served on the Dane County Board of Supervisors, the Jefferson School Board the CESA No. 2 Board of Control and 14 years on the North Central College Board of Trustees he was the assistant secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Revenue and Executive Director of the Governor's Tax Reform Commission some years ago so he's been in rooms like this and he understands what local elected officials are up against and some of the issues that we have. Todd has both a bachelor and a Ph.D. from UW Madison and he has a master's degree in planning and policy analysis from Harvard and a business administration degree from the University of Chicago so with those wonderful qualifications and with our thanks Todd we're going to ask him to do a presentation and then it'll be time for some questions from older persons and then we'll get him back on the road to Madison. And that in a quarter we'll get you maybe a cup of coffee I don't know they're going to throw up the slideshow on the screens up here okay don't move the mouse so let me give you a little background while they're getting things up and running the New Government Institute is a group of the Towns Association the County Board Association the League of Municipalities which is most of the cities and villages in the state and they came to us and wanted us to think a little bit about transportation finance in the context of Wisconsin and local government something's happening click the button okay thank you for your patience I can't see that screen and I can barely see that screen I feel like I'm flying a little bit blind and hopefully I can make the mouse work anyway this study was the result and it came out in December and you've seen the written report I'm not going to beat this thing to death in terms of detail but to give you some sense of what's in it I know the text of the report is on some of the local government association websites and I know that copies were made available here in Shiborgen as well one I think I may have to turn it over to the techies because I can't get it to go just the next slide up will just be another road and we'll say a word about the text I'll just briefly tell you who we are we've been around for about 84 years legally we're a 501C3 so we're very much like a foundation and our mission is to do research on to educate inform the public the press public officials about state and local government and as mentioned by the chair we are nonpartisan non-political non-profit that doesn't mean that we're always loved but we do our best to sort of walk the tightrope between the how are we doing okay I'd like to see the slide that just has the overview of the talk there we go the study is going to cover a couple points why talk about transportation why talk about local government a little bit about the statewide problem I think you're going to need to hit that button one more time a little bit about what the consequences are for local government and then a little bit of national evidence that shows how different we have become in Wisconsin than we were say 20 years ago a little bit about household impacts and then finally some possible solutions how we're solving things now what the state could do and ultimately what local governments could do by the way in case you don't have a copy we did before this study something in one of our monthly magazines a year or two ago called Wisconsin's Transportation Funding Dilemma for an overview of it I have put some copies through the audience but also there's some up here on the chair if anybody needs one so there's also inside by the way another copy of one of our magazines it's a directory of the Wisconsin legislature so if you need to contact somebody you can if you go to the next slide why it should read why this study I hope yeah the state and Wisconsin has long known it's had a state transportation finance problem and it has a lot of different pieces one is that the federal gas tax hasn't been changed in 30 plus years and I don't know if it's going to be a very significant amount of transportation funding coming into Wisconsin and other states comes from the federal government so if they've got a sort of revenue that isn't growing and in fact in a moment I'll make the argument that it's actually declining that's a problem another dimension of this transportation funding problem in Wisconsin is that when we had budget problems during the last decade the legislature and the governor repeatedly went to the state transportation fund pulled money out of the transportation fund to balance the general fund budget and issued revenue bonds and general obligation bonds to pay for transportation so we haven't really had a stable situation in terms of funding transportation quite a while we've been doing more bonding as I'll point out the revenues to the transportation fund are stagnant to declining for a bunch of reasons and what we did in the last state budget in a sense is we punted we did two things since we didn't get enough money from gas taxes or various fees we took money from the general fund so we took money from Medicaid and school aides and the university and corrections and all those things four to five hundred million dollars and we dumped it in the transportation fund that wasn't enough so then we went out and borrowed close to three million dollars as a result part of the transportation budget that is going to debt service is increasing and increasing and increasing it's close to 20% now it'll be 25% in the next couple of years this really is sort of analogous to the federal budget situation is that the debt is going to continue to rise as a share of the size of the economy and we continue to borrow more the interest costs get bigger and bigger and it starts to eat us so onto the next slide why should we care about transportation why did we study it I've got two slides here I'm going to talk about the first one is just a quote from a federal reserve bank study that just says that states that transportation in roads and other kinds of transportation infrastructure tend to be healthier economically and on the next slide we bring this specifically to Wisconsin and we looked at three industries that we knew were related fundamentally to transportation one was manufacturing second was trucking obvious a third was agriculture market getting materials to farms and what we found when we looked at just those three sectors and I haven't even included tourism here what we found is that in terms of the jobs in Wisconsin about one in five jobs was related to one of these three sectors and that's double the national average that's what the two bars on the left are saying when you look at wages not jobs but wages these three areas come close to representing one in four wages in the state again almost double the national average so we have an economy that is different than other states it's very heavily manufacturing it's of course agricultural and actually we have more of a trucking industry presence here than other states and again as I mentioned I haven't talked about tourism yet now if you look at individual counties by the way one of the most manufacturing intensive counties in the state happens to be Shibuya County top three or four or five so that's why transportation in Wisconsin that it is an economic driver the next slide why do we want to talk about local government in that context because of all the roads and streets and so forth in Wisconsin the number that are at the local level in counties and municipalities is about ten times as much as the state highway mileage and the interstate so local transportation networks matter also from looking at federal data they try to measure the quality of roads and streets and highways in terms of various smoothness categories what they said was that in the 15 urbanized in Wisconsin about half our roads and streets and so forth were rated acceptable only 15% were rated good so we're sort of in the middle there but we're not setting the world on fire and our quality is not going up it's coming down the next slide gets us into the heart of the matter which is the nature of the Wisconsin state transportation funding problem and these numbers come from a commission that the current governor appointed four years ago transportation finance commission and they came up with a couple numbers that you know you can argue if you want but I think they're fairly compelling and the underlying point here is that labor costs and material costs such as asphalt are rising asphalt in the last decade 11% per year of course because it's oil based now the good news is we have a little breather there but the costs generally in transportation continue to rise and what this commission found in the next three bullet points if we didn't spend a dollar more then we spent in 2013 and we lived within the revenues we now have coming in over the next 10 years we'd be $2 billion short in Wisconsin they said if you want to maintain transportation infrastructure you have which is going to require you to spend a little bit more to maintain it the state would be close to $6 billion short over the next 10 years and there's even a if you want to do what the transportation folks think we should do the number gets bigger and I'm not even mentioning that so even if we don't spend a single more revenue or taxes we're $2 billion short over the next 10 years the next slide sort of goes into why Wisconsin has two main sources of revenue for its transportation fund other than borrowing in the general fund which have been sort of stop gaps one is a gas tax the problem with the gas tax is it isn't like a sales tax or an income tax that is a percentage of something in other words sales tax revenues and income tax revenues grow as incomes grow as consumer purchases grow the gas tax is a flat amount per gallon so if you're not selling more gallons it's not going to rise and it's a flat amount so if you have even modest inflation 1, 2, 3% a year that gas tax is actually losing value every year it's pretty much the same story for driver's license fees and vehicle registration fees and so forth if you put the two together over the last 5 years they've been growing about 3 tenths of 1% per year so for all intents and purposes they're flat and as I mentioned already we're not going to be able to count on Washington for any great new source of money from federal gas tax is given they haven't been increased for multiple decades and need I remind you that the federal government has a 17 trillion dollar accumulated debt and that is projected to grow fairly rapidly after the next couple years the next slide just shows you what's been going on with the gas tax going back to 1980 and it was chugging along there growing I mean more people were buying cars, more people were learning to drive this was the baby boom era cars were fairly large you didn't need to worry too much about mileage and it chugged along but what you can see there at the top is that the curve just stops growing in the late 2000s and it's flat and it's declining a little bit and it's for all the reasons I started into the cars are becoming more efficient if they use less gas, less gas tax paid our population growth is slowing in Wisconsin that senior population is doubling the under 65 population is moving to the point where it will not grow at all so the driving population is not going to grow either it's going to demand for vehicles and to the degree there is demand it's going to be for more energy efficient vehicles so the gas tax and the vehicle registration fees and so forth that are the mainstay of the transportation fund are simply flat any costs in terms of asphalt or labor or whatever the gap between costs and revenue grow every year now on the next slide I'm not going to get into this in great detail except to make one point and that is the two bars over on the far left show the percentage of the transportation fund the straight transportation fund that is going to local governments in terms of road aids and you can see that back in at the turn of the millennium about 40% of the transportation fund was going to local government by 2013 it was 32% so this is a reflection of a transportation fund that doesn't have enough money that has been rated and is paying debt service that doesn't have sources of revenue that are growing and what they're doing is they're maintaining the state road commitment they're doubling the amount they're paying for debt service because they're borrowing and something has to give and the thing that's giving is local road aids so go to the next slide and we'll sort of wrap this up in terms of what it means for local government state road aids aren't growing or when they do grow they're certainly not keeping pace with past trends or inflation state aids to local governments in terms of shared revenues that have not grown for 20 years and in fact have been cut at times and to be honest I can't, given that no administration Republican or Democrat, legislature Republican or Democrat has done much in the way of increasing the shared revenue appropriation for 20 years I think the past is prologue and suggests we're not going to see a lot of growth there so road aids are getting clipped, shared revenue is getting clipped and the state has put limits levy limits on local property taxes effectively freezing them unless you have some new construction so any way that local government could think of for paying for street repairs or road construction locally, counties or municipalities they're all there and they're all flat or declining and so what have local governments done? If you go to the next slide this sort of tells the story the line is the per capita spending on streets in municipalities and you can see that it peaked in the mid 90's and has been ratcheting up and down a little bit but the trend is clearly down we're spending in 2012 about $227 per capita on streets back a decade or so we were spending $275 per capita so we're literally spending less and as a share of local budgets then streets are the bars, they're declining now what's going on here is local governments don't have any new sources of revenue and so they're picking and choosing what's most important to them and so what we have seen is that costs for things like law enforcement have been maintained or are growing slightly municipalities are and counties are borrowing more and they're sort of and running the supposed levy limits which is just going to come back to get us later sort of the federal government story so the way local governments are dealing with this revenue pinch is they're simply maintaining some things and cutting back on others now if you go to the next slide and this one is a toughie what we're going to look at here is the average annual change in per capita highway spending in two periods the 90's basically and then the period from 2000 to 2011 this is federal data and the feds are always a couple years late coming out so that's why it's such so we're looking at per capita highway spending for two periods of time past and more recent and we're looking at what's been going on in terms of spending growth at the local level and at the state level and I want you to pretty much ignore everything below the blue bar and look at what's been going on in local highway spending the first line there in 1993 to 2000 the way to read that is that per capita highway spending nationally was rising about 4.7% per year at the local level nationally and in Wisconsin it was actually growing faster it was growing 5.3% and our growth was 20 second highest in the country we were outperforming the nation a little bit now if you drop down to the 2000 to 2011 period you can see that the growth rate at the national level has slowed it's down to 3.1% and the growth at Wisconsin in Wisconsin has slowed as well but whereas the federal growth rate the national growth rate is down a point or two Wisconsin has dropped from over 5% to almost 0 and our ranking in terms of growth has gone from 22nd to 48th so all these numbers I've been throwing at you in terms of Wisconsin and the state highway fund and the fiscal pressures under local government if you want ignore them all and just look at national trends and it clearly confirms what everything else is saying now if you go to the next household the next slide we talk a little bit about household impact now there's different ways you can pay for what's going on in the streets and highways you can pay a gas tax or the feds will give us more money or you can pay more in registration fees or you can decide that we're going to have to not do as much in terms of transportation the other way essentially is to shift the costs on to individual people so instead of taxing you for it we'll essentially take it out of your pocket in terms of more frequent tire replacement more frequent shock absorber replacement more regular car purchase whatever and using federal data in the 2013 study found that about half of the major roads in the Milwaukee area were in poor condition and that was costing the driver on average $700 a year now Madison better news and I don't have data for this particular part of the state only 37% of the major roads were in poor condition and the average cost was less than it was in Milwaukee but either way the average cost to a driver in these two Wisconsin cities is close to double the national average another reflection that something has changed in the whole way we're doing roads and streets now if you go to the next slide what has Wisconsin been doing for the last decade this is a picture of transportation bonding borrowing there's two colors some of it is what are called revenue bonds that are paid for directly by gas taxes and registration fees and the other part the darker color and you can see that that has become the new thing general obligation bonds which pledge the state's full faith and credit if you look at what's been going on clearly the trend is up and down but the trend is up in recent years so the buyer farthest to the right is the governor's proposed budget for the next two years $1.3 billion of borrowing for transportation the bar to the left of that is what he did in the last budget $991 million in borrowing and you can see if you go back a couple years to governor Doyle's last budget it was $1.3 billion now you've got a Democratic governor there well into his terms and a Republican governor well into his terms they're both borrowing about $1.3 billion for transportation we're going to pay for that it's just a question of whether we pay for it now in terms of revenues for transportation or whether we pay it later in terms of income and sales taxes to pay off general obligation bonds so go to the next page I'm there's a lot of detail in this study about solutions and I'm not going to bore you with those so I'm going to skip some slides but let's talk about state solutions just really quickly and a quick recap these are, this is nothing new or inventive this is what tends to get talked about that if the gas tax revenues are dropping that maybe we need to increase the gas tax or we go back to indexing it in other words it goes up with inflation every year now remember I said the gas tax is different from income and sales taxes income and sales taxes are automatically adjusted for inflation you buy more the price goes up, your wage goes up you pay more you drive more with a more energy efficient car you may pay no more in gas tax and controlling for inflation you're probably paying less another idea we do not tax gasoline on the state sales tax that's another idea that gets trotted out one area of transportation finance where we tend to be lower than the national average we tend to be higher than the national average in terms of gas tax is various registration fees if you go to states around us you will find that they're paying to register their vehicles 200, 400, 600, 800 dollars a year we're 75 dollars so that is another thing there may be a particular opportunity to do more with larger heavier trucks in terms of these kind of fees not going to be popular with the trucking industry but it is the trucks that tend to do disproportionate or damage or they put more wear into the roads so that's our one argument the last two is VMT vehicle miles traveled or tolling I'll be real honest with you I think that in the end what this state and the nation will get to is that transportation will be like electric utilities or water utilities or gas and that somehow your travel will be measured in miles and metered and you will be sent a bill and I think that's it's essentially the high tech version of tolls if you think that isn't happening now drive the major Canadian road through Toronto go to Denver and drive the new big ring highway around Denver as I did two summers ago and got a bill for $17 in the mail from Colorado and I never went through a toll booth somehow a camera took a picture of my license they have the technology hook it up computer wise and I got a bill when I didn't pay it right away they immediately came back and said you didn't pay it when I still didn't pay it then they said if you don't pay it now we're referring you to a collection agency which is very akin to what happens if you don't pay on a utility bill so I think I saw the future it's just that right now we're dealing with ways of paying for transportation in terms of gas taxes and so forth that are a little bit behind I'm going to skip the next slide and the next slide and the next slide these are just details of the things I just said in terms of gas taxes transportation fees and so forth and so the slide we should be on if you go we'll keep going we need to go past that one and pass that one and to the next one yep let's talk a little bit about local solutions then if Revenue to the State Transportation Fund is not growing then and because we have this tradition of Wisconsin of collecting income and tax and sales taxes and sharing them with local government or raising state gas taxes and sharing them with local government I mean if you were to follow the old Wisconsin model it would be well let the state do it let them raise the gas tax let them raise vehicle registration fees and they'll boost road aids the problem with that argument is I don't think there's much in historical record from the last 10 to 20 years that suggests that the state is going to give local governments any new money it hasn't really in shared revenues for 20 years didn't matter who was governor so going to the next slide we can look at some local solutions the argument here basically is you can't rely on the feds you can't rely on the state if we're going to maintain our local streets or county roads we're going to have to probably figure out how to do it ourselves and one problem is the state has levy limited property taxes so they can't grow unless by referendum for the most part here are just some common solutions one is a wheel tax everybody goes wheel tax I think probably the time has come you're going to start to see it in history we usually see 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 municipalities or counties that are doing it it's interesting that this fall a fairly significant county Chippewa County and a fairly major city Appleton went to wheel taxes and I think that is a reflection of all these data I've been throwing at you another solution and I'm going to talk about this a little bit is probably anathema 99% of the people in the room is some form of personal property tax on vehicles other states do it we do not you could take the state gas tax and if the state won't raise it you could allow the locals to piggy back on it in other words add a penny or two or three or four to the state gas tax and the counties or municipalities that do that that little extra flows back to them as their local gas tax you can do the same with a sales tax the final solution I'm going to touch on would be some kind of regional transportation cooperative not transportation authority and the approach here would be no it doesn't make sense to have local governments counties or municipalities that have heavy wheel taxes or gas taxes or whatever we need some other way to do it and that's sort of the last thing so if you go to the next slide it's on the wheel tax and just a couple statistics the final bullet there if municipalities and counties statewide we're going to replace all their state aid it would take an $80 municipal wheel tax a $27 county wheel tax I don't think we will see the end of state road aid but that gives you some sort of order of magnitude of what we would be talking about if something how big it could be I don't think it would be any bigger than that if you go to the next slide this was on the personal property tax and I admit the chances of this happening in Wisconsin are probably next to nil given that historically we've had a property tax that's been 25% above the national average but Mississippi does something rather interesting you buy a car the state takes note of the original price it goes into a state computer system and then every year for ten years the computer system adjusts that value so that it depreciates the value of the car and then it tells local governments what the sum of all those values are and they can apply some kind of local property tax right to it pretty simple not popular but one interesting thing about it is I think you could make the argument that unlike the sales tax that you could deduct it from your federal income tax which might be a way to essentially ship some of this cost back onto the feds third slide I'm not going to spend a lot of time here these are just two old chestnuts one is a local gas tax a penny gets you 32 million statewide local sales tax an extra half cent on top of what is already gets about half close to a half a billion statewide so it's not insignificant the final slide just briefly outlines another approach and that is to say does it really make much sense for the city of Sheboygan and the town of Sheboygan and Sheboygan falls and Kohler and the county to all be in the transportation business might it make sense for a whole bunch of municipalities that adjoin or those municipalities and some counties or multiple counties to band together to form a transportation cooperative and that they would decide whether to do local voters local governing boards would decide it would be given the authority by the state to have a package of possible revenues wheel tax, personal property tax whatever the key here would be the deal that would be cut is we wouldn't allow counties and municipalities to levy property taxes for transportation purposes so there would be potentially reduction in the property tax but what we would get is transportation delivered on some kind of regional basis where there would be a lot more economies of scale in terms of sharing equipment, sharing labor and so forth this doesn't have to be a regional transit authority it could be totally automobile based but again if it made sense for this region they could certainly talk about it amongst themselves so that's if you're sort of not comfortable with the notion of giving individual local government some of these authorities maybe you sort of set up a thing in state law where you cut a deal and say you're not going to levy local property taxes for this we will give you access to some new sources of revenue but you're going to have to use these in a more sense something larger where you can get economies of scale so that is it and the report obviously is a lot more in depth but I'd be happy to answer any questions questions you're going to throw things don't throw them too hard thank you Madam Chair you mentioned the Governor's commission that he appointed are you aware of any bills being introduced or in this session yet so far and on four well both in the first budget the second budget and actually in this budget now the Secretary of Transportation the Governor's Cabinet has come forth with a number of possible sources of revenue vehicle miles traveled a nickel increase in the gas tax some kind of increase in registration fees although those get pressed the Governor didn't put any of them in his budget and what he put in the budget instead was 1.3 billion in borrowing I think what you're going to find is that the legislature is not very comfortable with two budgets in a row that have been a billion or more of borrowing for transportation they're not too keen on the gas tax and understandably in part because it is really high compared to other states but I think you're going to see discussion about higher vehicle registration fees, driver's license fees something like that because they weren't very comfortable with the billion dollars in borrowing that the Governor did in the last budget and they're even less comfortable with 1.3 billion so I think this is sort of like soup it's on the back burner and it's simmering I don't think almost anybody in the legislature on either side of the aisle if you get them in private would say to you we don't have a problem here because we haven't done anything for over 10 years and we continue to borrow and borrow and borrow and the discussions I've had with some of the legislators on the borrowing the feedback I get is that this is really the only big thing that we're borrowing for in this budget so other things have decreased and so this is okay you're not buying that well there's another shoe that's going to drop that hasn't dropped as you saw in that graph that the transportation borrowing is as high as it's ever been really okay the reason the claim can be made that we're not borrowing anything else is because they have put on hold all the other things that they would normally put in a state capital budget you know borrowing to replace a dorm borrowing to repair a state office building in La Crosse I'm making this up but typically there are many many hundreds of millions of dollars that are just routine capital budget items every year just like a city or a county you know they replace windows in city hall or they you know they rewire a building or whatever all those things the way they're getting that making that claim is simply saying we're going to have not talk about what we usually do so you can make the claim that's why I put up the transportation bonding slide because I think it makes the point okay let's take all the other stuff off the table let's make a legitimate comparison and let's just look at transportation borrowing we're borrowing more from transfer transportation than we ever have thank you madam chairman Todd one of the solutions you said was we could index gas again we did that in the past and that didn't seem to work it's just that politically they didn't want to do it my question would be are we in this problem because of the mismanagement of the transportation fund because we do have such a high gas tax relative to other states in the country and I realize our climate dictates we spend more on our roads but at the same time I would think that had it been judiciously managed you know would we be in this mess or to this degree or would it be enough to fund our needs moving forward there is no question that what was done in the past is putting financial pressure on the transportation fund because the increasing debt service is crowding out regular expenditures it's the federal budget story in ten years that said if you look at the amount of borrowing on that graph it actually has really accelerated in more recent years since the transportation fund trades and what's catching up is that the gas tax as you saw on that slide since about 2008 has been actually declining in revenue so I mean there is merit in your argument I wouldn't disagree at all the pressure on the debt service we caused but fewer people driving fewer people driving cars cars more efficient etc etc etc which is the underlying problem the transportation fund is here to stay we did a study by the way which is fascinating but the long and short of it is the school age population in the state basically isn't going to grow for 30 to 40 years it's been declining for 20 that means the size of the workforce isn't going to grow for the next 30, 40, 50 years now think through the dynamic implications of that at the same time that the senior population with all the baby boomers retiring is doubling just think about it in terms of transportation who's driving, who isn't are they buying new cars, aren't they you can see why this is a long-term problem one other question is here on a local level when we're dealing with infrastructure issues specifically roads we deal with special assessments you didn't talk at all about special assessments on the local level but we get into arguments with residents and we fight that battle all the time and it's like 50% of the cost is assessed to the homeowners based on the frontage and 50% the city has and we've got several needs that are significant in the I-SNER Avenue just for example between 10th and 3rd street a seven block stretch is like over a million dollars when you figure in the redoing the sewer and everything else as long as you've got the road dug up you might as well do all that and so it keeps getting put off and put off and put off and recently we had I-SNER Avenue in town which was a multi-jurisdictional thing with the county, the town and so we've got these you know we let things go and the cost gets getting greater and greater and the city's portion gets greater and greater so they keep putting it off and you know but you can't assess the homeowners the entire cost of that I mean that would be prohibitive too and that's your only tool at the moment my question is are municipalities doing anything other creative or anything that we're not doing that we should look at wheel tax? Well that's what I was going to say I think the big headline in the last year was that people in Appleton really didn't like special assessments and the mayor said well there's an alternative here you want to talk wheel tax and eventually that's where they went what is their wheel tax? I think it's twenty dollars it's either okay you know special assessments make a lot of sense when you've got a nice subdivision and all the houses and the lots are sort of the same age and the same size and it's sort of logical streets gotta be the problem is cities particularly in the inner areas the blocks are different size the streets some are very old the housing stack is of different qualities and the people occupying so it's tough I'm not standing here saying that a wheel tax is a wonderful thing if you give somebody the option of getting socked with a very large special assessment in the next few years while everybody else gets to dodge it until their time comes or a wheel tax I don't know when maybe they would rather have a little bit of injury every year than one giant wallop I don't know but I think that's the discussion Appleton had I think that builds on your information about increased repair costs as a result of bad roads so that essentially you could make up your wheel tax in terms of reduced wear and tear on a car my question is I'm intrigued by the regional transportation concept two things one are there any municipalities or entities that are doing this and if so how are they doing and second what do municipalities if they were deciding if all of the municipalities in Sheboyin County just decided to talk about this what do you think that they would need to consider giving up what's the downside first part first part of the question multi-part questions are not a lot particularly at 7 o'clock at night with an old guy well in a long drive are you aware of any municipalities that have this there are collaborative things going on but not to my knowledge in transportation the classic case studies some of the cooperation that's going on for years with various services on the North Shore suburbs of Milwaukee in terms of fire and police and so forth and that's some of that going on in other parts of the state what would you have to give up well obviously you're going to have to convince the legislature which is a toughy but see I think if this comes bubbling up with local municipalities and counties saying we're willing to live with some rules such as this region has to cover x square miles or y hundred thousand people and potentially if you give us several revenue sources wheel tax piggyback on vehicle registration for your something we would be willing to talk about that instead of the property tax that might be in the interest of local government if levy limits are going to keep going on forever then at least you might have a regional source of revenue that would grow and you'd have a regional solution that might be more efficient in the expenditure of the money at the same time the problem is we got hung up on this whole RTA thing a few years back and you mentioned it in Milwaukee County in the suburbs and everybody goes crazy but the fact remains that it might really make sense for all the and it doesn't necessarily be in one county you know could be Lakeshore Manitowoc, Sheboygan towns you know down to Port Washington or something I don't know that it might be a concept whose time has come because it recognizes the political problems it gives everybody a little something but it also asks for some heavy lifting those are sort of the nature of political deals that finally get struck in the legislature other questions Todd thank you so much well you're very welcome thank you for being so attentive you have that on your system so if somebody wants a copy of the slides it's available or you can email us we have copies of the whole report too very good thanks again take a 5 minute break I'm sorry? 5 minute break? sure shoot I just Darrell uplifting too we can do just just 10 minutes here we go take a wipe last 5 minutes already wins can I really at least an hour medium Chad I need at least an hour facial expressions okay I'm trying to find you got it short and sweet it's maybe 4 but at least it's not as usual am I I'm trying to find one I don't know where the other one is well I think we'll get started I skipped right over 1.4 which was approval of the minutes of our November 24th, 2014 without any motion to approve so move, it's back in any discussion? I know if there's anything else to add very good, we are going on to 2.2 budget forecast by Jim Imoglio thank you Madam Chair I didn't do a PowerPoint presentation because I don't really know how so Nancy was kind of tied up this afternoon so we whipped up some sheets actually some of them are spread sheets that don't show really well on the TV but anyway I wanted to start out with general fund sources of revenue I'm sure most of you know this but it's important that we focus on a couple numbers our total levy and it's been pretty close to this number for the past 7 or 8 years is about $21.7 million of that $2.9 million is our debt service fund and we'll key on that in a minute you can see that from the levy we derive about $16 million in the general fund about $4.6 million from charges for services that we do here in City Hall about $13.4 million from state funding and other financing sources you can see tourism fund cable TV fund municipal court fund ambulance fund waste water fund and motor vehicle fund which total about $1.7 million and that grand total for our 15 budget is $35.7 million that supports all of our expenses if you go to the next page page 2 I believe it shows our general obligation debt this has nothing to do with our tids this is just the go debt that we borrow and you can see at the end of 14 we had principle of about $25 million interest of about $5.6 million for a total of $30.8 million then what we've projected here is levy and if you look at the 15 payments it says we had a principle payment of $3.3 million interest of roughly $1 million so our total debt service payment was $4.3 million now our levy is $2.9 so how do we pay for the balance in that go debt in principle in interest of that $30 million we have the unfunded pension plan that we actually I'll get to that pretty much like the transportation fund back in 2007 robbed close to $5 million from the motor vehicle fund to pay the unfunded pension plus we borrowed money and we derive from the general fund roughly $500,000 a year that we help pay for that debt we also get $700,000 a year from room tax and that's strictly for south pier the city built that structure so this room tax goes to pay that off and you can see by the end of 2018 that room tax goes away so that gives us a total of $4,086,000 to pay $4.280,000 so in 2015 we're going to have a shortfall of about $193,000 in debt service payments so it says where do we get that from we get it from the special assessment fund and that's where historically we've taken any shortfalls to hit the special assessment fund at the end of 2015 for about $194,000 and if you go forward to 15 it says we have a slight surplus in 16 about a $36 million shortfall 17 about $137,000 and in 18 which is the big one about $522,000 so when you look at this it says why is that happening because if you looked at where the city was before we lost the motor vehicle fund in the surplus that it had to fund the vehicles it says from 15 forward we're borrowing not $2 million but $3 million to help fund the motor vehicle fund for a million dollars a year so if you look at that four year period plus I know Adam's sitting in the gallery we struck a deal with the county combined dispatch of $2.5 million if you take that $6.5 million additional that we're borrowing from 15 through 18 and the cost of floating a million dollars at 3% interest over 10 years is roughly $120,000 so if you do the simple math it says $120,000 times $6.5 million is roughly $700,000 in change so if we didn't have to borrow that extra million dollars a year and we didn't commit to funding combined dispatch we would theoretically be okay and the city's capacity for that debt service levy of $2.9 million is roughly $24 million and that's principal hand interest that's where the city needs to be so it says when we get out to 2018 and 19 the city will probably have to look at raising taxes to help pay for the current debt structure it has and go debt without borrowing any new money so that's just a point of reference I know I've talked about it in the last two budget sessions we've had in the past two years but the reality is is coming up in 2019 we're going to have a problem with our current debt service if we can continue to borrow at the rate we do it's not a lot of money if you look at the next page page 3 2019 through 2019 these are the capital requests that we have that we pair down to $3 million a year in 2015 which we don't show here we had roughly $11 million submitted we narrowed it down to $5 million and we ended up spending $2.5 million and left a half a million in reserve so you can see that if our limit is $3 million a year we've got about $10 million in $16 million, $12 million in $17 million, another $12 million in $18 million and almost $6 million in 2019 so again, another issue where we have to pair down our capital expenditures and you can see where our road repair and construction gets affected by this because we don't have the ability to borrow unless we want to tax our residents our debt capacity is about $90 million I think at the end of $14 million about $40 million so we could go out and borrow $50 million we'd have to pass every nickel of that on to the taxpayers and that's something we don't want to do too as well and we haven't in the past the next page is kind of where we stand and again this is extremely high level we haven't met either in strategic fiscal planning and or in finance to set the guidelines for 2015's budget in the process the last page is an outline I talked with Alderman Hammond today he's scheduling an introduction for the 16 budget guidelines in the May 4th first new council meeting so that will be upcoming and that schedule is based on that but if you look at 2016 a couple of events we know salary and benefit escalation is $425,000 we have a presidential election which is about another hundred happens every four years salary and benefit escalation is two and a half percent on protective services based on contracts and two percent for the rest of the general population so that presents us with about a $525,000 issue to deal with in 2016 in 2017 moving forward we sunsetted the garbage fee so that becomes an issue we put it in for 15 and 16 so that $870,000 comes back to haunt us as a revenue shortfall in 2017 we've got additional escalation of $452,000 and an offset to the presidential elections because that's a one year only so it says in 2017 $1 million opportunity to solve moving forward to 2018 we're projecting that the motor vehicle fund will probably have to be rolled into the general fund because it will run out of any surplus funds it has to run its organization currently the general fund and a couple other funds fund the motor vehicle fund to the tune of about $1.6 million a year their expenses run about $1.9 million a year depending on where gas prices and repairs are so it says over the next three years they'll probably use up the $900,000 surplus we have in that fund and it will probably have to roll into the general fund the motor vehicle fund hit of $150,000 is currently what the general fund charges the motor vehicle fund for the administration of that fund salary and benefits in 2018 we collected a 2% that's a $402,000 increase so it says that the total issue out in 2018 would be $2.3 million on a high level the next page goes through some of the assumptions that we put into the plans we currently have no staff reductions in any of these three years we kept Wisconsin retirement flat where it currently is we didn't put in any health insurance changes at this point we only have two months worth of history on our high deductible plan that's certainly not enough to make any decisions but for sure there will be some changes but we don't know what they will be yet health insurance there's been no change and that's again we need direction on whether the rates are still good with this new high deductible plan and or the employee contribution would have to increase over time at this point the garbage fee is in through 16 but out for 17 and 18 presidential election is in for that one year we currently have retirees that we've projected you can see in 16 there's 13 and 17 11 and 18 again a swag but our best estimate 11 so there's some opportunity there because as we displace these people we can't lower wage rates we've also kept transportation aids connecting highways, shared revenue and expenditure restraints all neutral throughout this plan and as you heard there might be some jeopardy on transportation aids on connecting highways but for now that was the assumption we made other potential financial effects municipal court we talked a lot about this we have a new judge coming in the new judge that's leaving had done a lot of things to generate additional revenue in that fund not sure that the new judge will do that albeit she said she probably would we don't know that for a fact it's very tough to quantify but it could be in the $50,000 range but we didn't put that into this financial forecast but there's a potential for a downside as we talked about before the ambulance service the effect of the change due to Obamacare as more people privatize with Obamacare they might put in rules and regulations similar to that of Medicare and Medicaid where they only pay X dollars for a transport there's nothing that we can see in the near term but it could be out two years from now where some changes could impact that but again we did not change the forecast for the ambulance service throughout this projection some possible solutions I've taken a little criticism on this then I'll come up with a lot of good ideas so I figured I'd do that we can increase the levy we can increase it one and a half percent of our levy which is 21.7 million that's roughly $300,000 if the council so choose to do this we can increase employee health care insurance contributions from 15 to 20% and that would bring in an estimated savings to the general fund of about $300,000 potential outsourcing potential outsourcing for jobs we always look at that whether we just took a recent look at the attorney's position decided not to do it we have retirement coming up in the assessor's office we could look at doing something there some of those will save maybe a little money in the short term the longer term more benefit related savings would come from less employees on the city payroll I like this one reduction in duplication that's me and Mike it's been a lot of talk about me and Mike so I figured we throw that in there do we need me, do we need Mike do we need either one of us but that's an option for sure increase in charges for service we go through this all the time to raise fees to be consistent with the town of Sheboygan the town of Wilson or whatever it is we always have trepidation when it comes to raising fees but unless we decide to do something we'll stay flat and we won't help offset cost side of the equation with any additional revenue reduce services that's always toughy but in reducing services if you're going to reduce employees you need to reduce services and that's something we're going to have to face sooner or later last two years we've passed out a priority listing for each department which showed highest priority to lowest priority and the functions they do the people that support those functions the cost of those people and any revenue they generate so it's like a menu when you go into a restaurant you go right down to the bottom and say do I need that because it's the least important priority and we're going to have to look at those things and we'll do that through this budget process again and revise those as needed wage and benefit reduced when we replace retirees again we talked about that we've got 10 to 12 people we probably have a bunch leaving this year probably maybe in the 15 range in 2015 so there's that opportunity and no longer fund SEEDC as much as I hate to say that because the organization has done a lot of good things in the last year and a half for the city it's another $100,000 and that's at the discretion of the council so these are some of the things we need to look at and we'll get into more detail as we start putting the 2015 16 budget together the last page based on a May budget submittal would be as follows again we still end up we've compressed a few things but we're looking for a council to approve and adopt roughly the end of October the same time frame we did last year again depending on how this kicks off and what the council ultimately thinks this could be adjusted but we can still fit it in the same time frame so with that any questions oh one other point I'd like to make just before that we didn't put any additional revenue projections in here the only place where it might come in is on the building inspection side it sat with Chad and talked long and hard and I know we put a cap in for acuity we've got some extra money that will come in in 2015 and maybe a little in 2016 we have some key developments that we're looking at that will start in 2016 could be potentially a couple housing developments and a new manufacturing site that could be in the 40 million dollar range as well as these two developments could be close to 23-24 million which will generate more building permit revenue I guess my take would be and again laying it out to the council their decision ultimately is to look at this and say if we have any underruns 14 for 15 and for 16 because of additional revenue that was generated some expenses we need to spend on the expense side that rather than allocating those to the four categories of cost we did a year ago that we put that aside to help pay for capital and you know maybe we can save up enough to generate two and a half million dollars worth of savings to avoid bonding for shared services or combined dispatch or maybe we could offset a couple years of spending for capital so those are just some suggestions again the revenue is flat other than what we knew for the garbage fee but there will be additional revenues probably over budget unless the council chooses to say we're going to balance the budget that way that's fine as well council's discretion I think that council hates to leave legacies for new councils but I think some old councils left a lot of legacies for the councils that have happened since 2008 and we have to start looking forward to say what are we going to do about the future and not just next year okay come down thank you madam chair Jim with the garbage fee going away in 2017 I'm wondering if we should maybe decide at that main meeting whether we should rather than have a $525,000 shortfall maybe add another half of the garbage fee to 16 and thereby lower the 17 deficit by another $400,000 because that's going to be an awful chunk to come up with in 17 if the garbage fee goes away I'm wondering if your opinion we can talk about this in May would it be a good idea to increase our deficit for 16 and then try to also lower it in 17 if the garbage fee is no longer around can't you can't do that that's an option also with the increases in salary and benefits as we go along that percentage is going to creep up into the low 80s as a percent of our budget salary and benefits so are we going to be up around 82, 83 by the time we get out to 18 then that's a huge problem so I guess I'm not editorializing here but when people are wondering what's happening to our streets when our salary and benefits are going to be around 83% of the budget it doesn't leave a lot of extra money for us to use for all the other things that we have to do well and I think that you know the past councils have been good stewards of the tax dollars they have not raised the levy to increase taxes and now we see the issues that we face when you look at debt service, debt service levy was higher debt service levy came down but it went to fund the general fund for shortfalls there so it was never to say we need to increase taxes because we're looking forward and we have issues we always looked down what was happening the next year so we've past councils have forced our hand to say we now need to look up and say what do we do because it's inevitable we can get through balancing 16 and say okay we'll worry about 17 when it comes to debt service levy we'll be not only the compounding of escalation but the issue on debt service payments and again we can choose not to borrow in any of those years to help offset that but again the council has to make that decision to say there'll be no capital spending in a year thank you the deficit you're showing in 2017 and 18 in the the 36,000 that's not even included so it is we have enough money probably through I want to say 18 Nancy to pay for that okay from special assessments you know in theory special assessments are there because we're assessing residents for part of the cost of the street repair one would think over time as we collect these special assessments we could reinvest that back into roads but there again it's been used for other needs one of them has been to be the balancing act for debt service so even these last two years we've done roads but we've done it with part CDBG money which means we can't even assess for the other half of the money so again we've made choices we're trading off assessments for federal funds to help fund road projects so we have some progress two more questions under the capital improvements they request out in 2018 there's something under bridge what is that under bridge just about a half million dollars without the detail I couldn't tell you know what that is Dave 18 okay are we locked into that so without question that's $419,000 in 2018 and that's a must I mean if you look at city buildings in 17 and 18 we've got two and a half million dollars in each year that's my next question and then there's another million and a half dollars to roof MSB so even if we choose to do something different with city hall you know we could pull five million out we still have to put a roof on MSB thank you Madam Chair Jim what do we currently have in the special assessment fund a little over a million dollars and that has accumulated over time but that doesn't include Eisner because there's still payments coming in for people who are paying and the payment plan I mean we take sidewalks out and many storm sewers every year so we don't have to spend capital dollars when Dave needs projects done and Ryan so that's about what $150,000 a year that we take out of there to do sidewalks and many storms thank you Madam Chair one other thing I noticed here Jim with the retirees in the various departments that retire they're coming at a much cheaper rate but I think for example well I'll just take the fire department for example we had three retire in 15 6 and 16, 3 and 17 and 5 and 18 that's 17 people and I'm guessing I guess my question is not only for fire but police or DPW are there ways that we can investigate smarter ways of doing things so that we don't have to re-hire the same number of people in other words possibly with the you know with the fire department go to less stations but keep the response times as good as we can not saying anything about whether we stay in the ambulance business or not but I know we had discussions on this with our previous Chief Herman and came up with a number of different scenarios with going to less stations where the response times weren't that changed and then of course you know taking a look at the same thing with the police department and DPW I guess with DPW maybe coming up with better machinery better ways of doing things with less people but I think if we're going to lower that 80 some percent, 83 percent of our budget being salary and benefits I think we have to look for efficiencies of doing things better with these various departments where we have these retirees and I'd certainly rather do it when people retire than having to lay off active employees not disagree and it would be true as well that we are a service organization primarily is that correct? that's correct so the police department primarily provides services the fire department for their budget I think public works is another 10 so we're not a manufacturing concern where you would expect that the percentage of personnel would be way down we're kind of like the school district which 90 percent or so of their budget is in personnel and that's because they actually provide services to children very good just in the interest of moving along if there's any other pressing question we'll take it but otherwise we'll move on please do take your calendar and put all those dates in your calendar and we'll take it from there very good Chad you are up next and Dave we're talking about an official mission vision statement and core values for the city I understand there's a nifty power point presentation I think it will escape purple today it matches your shirt yep that's very special Dave Augustine Sandy Rourke myself Wendy Schmitz Derek Mink we got together and talked about a mission vision and core values we had a training session by CIVMIC which is our insurance company back in December to kind of go through how we would start a strategic plan for the city so that one day training kind of led us to believe that we needed to look at our mission vision and core values and update those so that's what we did we did some research from other comparable municipalities on their mission and vision statements and then we got together as department heads on January 7th of 2015 to review and update our statements next slide so what the committee the department head committee is recommending and that's what's in the document that's been referred here is a mission statement the city of Sheboygan is dedicated to providing residents the business community and visitors responsible municipal services in an effective and responsive manner to meet the needs of our diverse community and then the vision statement to go with that would be the city of Sheboygan will be a family oriented and prosperous community with a variety of housing business cultural and recreational opportunities in safe and attractive neighborhoods next slide so we talked a lot about in this group how core values what are some things that departments could get their hands around to start using as part of the employee performance review process and kind of giving us a direction so we came up with six core values respect, accountability teamwork, innovation fiscal responsibility and service and kind of looked at how the service is kind of a broader category there's a lot of different pieces to that primarily service to our residents next slide so then what we did is we decided this was a small group of the department heads about five or six of us there are 17 or so department heads so we put together a survey and sent it out to the departments to see if the department heads could agree with this so in this slide the mission statement you can see about I think it's 80% or so we're in support of the mission statement I'll just say the couple that weren't in support of it one was Steve McLean because he said that there was a document from 1993 that already approved a mission statement so this if we were to adopt this one would re-appeal that one and then the other one was just some minor tweaks and then a couple didn't answer next slide the vision statement you can see there was pretty much about the same 86% in favor so it was kind of the same responses from the naysayers the next slide and then the core values you know again it kind of is about the same breakdown you can go to the next slide so number four was do you believe you can support the overall city mission vision and core values in your department operations what we found is a lot of departments mission vision statements some of them may contradict some of them may work so they may have to do some different departmental changes to reflect it but we wanted to see if they were willing to kind of use this as part of the performance process for their employees if the council so chose to adopt this and you can see there was overwhelmingly 100% of people said they were on board so the next question next slide was the key strategies and operations plans will be developed next would you be involved and we actually got more people to come on board and help us but while we were doing that the discussion was this should be a dialogue with the council to really set the direction over what the goals and objectives should be so next slide so what came out of that is on May 7th and we'd ask you to put this on your calendar Rick Baer from Sivmic will be here after the council to really reorganize this to really give us a training the council a training session on setting up goals and objectives that departments can follow one of the things we've heard a lot during we all say it during the budget process is you know we're supposed to come in with cuts but it's like well what are our core services and Jim talked about that a little bit about prioritizing and getting rid of some little hanging fruit and those types of things so really the thought was is that this would be a open dialogue with the committee of the whole to kind of outline Rick is going to help guide the council through kind of developing some goals and objectives and start us thinking on more of a strategic plan for the full city so in a nutshell that's pretty much about it we're scheduled for the May 7th date is Rick will be in town doing another training at Maywood for city employees and will stay here for a 5 o'clock meeting or something around that time to do a training session so that's about all I have if there's you know questions what I would recommend with this document is if you could hold this to the new council and this can be part of the discussion on May 7th questions comments that at 6 o'clock he asked for 5 o'clock it's a Thursday I don't know that there's any other city committees unless they change it but he'll be in town so he could he would just stay here so do we have a motion to hold back any other discussion hearing none all in favor state aye opposed chair votes aye very good thank you looks very interesting um motion to adjourn all in favor state aye aye any opposed thank you all


Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us on our usual COVID Roundup, Professor Satish Dhrath. And we're going to discuss two issues. What is a COVID death? Why we are going to discuss it is partly because the argument is excess death increased the number of COVID deaths unnecessarily that's according to government media and WHO's claims that excess in some sense are related to uncounted COVID deaths. So that is why it's important to also argue well do you know what's really a COVID death and how well have we counted in India the number of COVID deaths which otherwise have been recorded as deaths but not maybe as COVID deaths. So to do that we're going to ask Satish in this question. Satish what is a COVID death because as we know from the controversies that had taken place earlier both in the time of Delta as well as the earlier wave that a lot of the reports which would be given which the death certificates which have been given to the civil registry system actually did not follow even the ICMR guidelines which said COVID death if you are having COVID and you die within a certain time frame then it should be registered as COVID death as the immediate cause of death and other causes should come later but we know from both Delhi as well as Gujarat where lots of examples came in the newspapers as well as evidence which have been talked about by journalists looking at COVID protocols being followed during cremation and burial as well as looking at what the numbers were. Now question to you and that's really a technical question what is a COVID death because people really die according to some of the death reports death certificate reports due to heart stopping or the breathing stopping now what does it really mean? So before we get into the technicalities of what is a COVID death let's first get our intentions clear what is our interest in counting these deaths and there are three separate categories of deaths that I would like all of us in these conversations to keep in mind because counting these three separate categories of deaths has different consequences for public health policies so the first category the straightforward category is what everybody is calling a COVID death meaning that somebody is infected somebody becomes virus test positive somebody develops that person develops difficulty in breathing oxygen tension goes down they're admitted to hospital they go into cytokine storm multi-system failure get put on ventilator in that that is a straightforward no ambiguity COVID death and it should be recorded as such whether it has always been recorded as such even in India's wanted civil registration system or not is a separate question we will come to but at least technically it should be counted as a COVID death. A second category of deaths is the kind of deaths where people are sick people are people have chronic kidney disease chronic lung disease chronic heart disease and are teetering on the edge of being well ill for quite some time and then they develop COVID and the COVID in one way or another interacts with their basic chronic illness and together they are pushed into such a severe stage that they are this is not necessarily the COVID illness being in and of itself so medically severe that it killed the individual as much as this is a situation where any illness of this kind would have been the last straw on the camel's back that would have led to a pushing of the balance towards death this is let's call it a COVID associated death this is important because for people who are severely ill already with other chronic ailments during the pandemic COVID became an additional risk and therefore this category of deaths also needed to be identified carefully recorded and counted. The third category of deaths is what brings us into the excess death estimate territory where what we are really looking at is statistical estimates of what is the normal pattern year by year of how many deaths in a particular area in a particular community per million individuals carefully segregated demographically tend to occur and how many actually occurred during the pandemic and the difference between those becomes then the count of excess deaths and these excess deaths include our first category that is the straightforward COVID severe illness killing people include our second category of people who were quite chronically sick but COVID became an additional last straw risk that took them all the way into death and a whole large and poorly understood number of additional deaths which took place because of a variety of reasons ranging from people not getting enough food because livelihood damages people dying because they were trying to walk back home and of course people not getting medical care that they routinely needed this includes preventive medical care such as babies not getting vaccinated because routine vaccination campaigns are suspended with the result that avoidable childhood illnesses such as measles and so on and so forth begin to spread in these communities of babies cohorts of babies made vulnerable by the pandemic and some of them dying all sorts of epidemic associated deaths as you can imagine all three categories of deaths need to be counted separately need to be recognized separately and need to be thought over separately as we begin to reformulate our public health policies not simply as a short-term epidemic response but over the long term so that sense all these are COVID related whether they are COVID deaths by the definition of ICMR or registered the death certificate is really not the issue and of course as you have stated they are COVID deaths which can be the indirectly also related to COVID other infectious deaths but also there would be a set of people who didn't go to hospitals as you said and they also died as a consequence of course there are excess deaths because of this but there could also be less deaths because a certain set of things did not happen for example I think we gave it last time deaths due to road accidents may have come down because of lockdowns infectious diseases like for instance influenza seems to have come down in lots of countries because again masking and social distancing as well as lockdowns all of that might have contributed to coming down so you look at excess deaths for epidemiological reasons what you're really talking about the net excess deaths so some which are more some which are less and the consequence of this is really the public health system because it has to cater what is the bandwidth it needs then to handle pandemics and that is the crux of the reason why we are looking at what is a COVID death and what are excess deaths and now coming back to the therefore the the public health issue that you've raised we are not by all accounts we have not reached a stage when we can call it endemic though what is endemic or not is itself a major debate becoming endemic doesn't become doesn't mean that we are now okay everything is uncanny after all you had you have tuberculosis which is endemic it doesn't mean therefore it's not a killer and earlier also smallpox was endemic polio was endemic it still meant that public health systems had to gear up for that so endemic doesn't mean becoming safe so that is one question that we have already addressed but Satyajit we have professor Srinath Reddy who's written about that we now need to look at this particular COVID-19 disease as something which should be the way we look at floods that it doesn't mean that we sound alarm every time the rain start but we are prepared for the fact that floods may happen and therefore we have to take steps what does it mean when he talks about public health system therefore being to be treated like we gear up every rainy season for the floods so professor Reddy's piece in today's Indian Express is interesting instructive and appropriate and I must confess that for me it doesn't go far enough so and let me explain that he gives an interesting analogy which I must thank him for pointing out I had not thought of this with a flood control system at a variety of levels of preventive measures of floods and so on and so forth and of warning signs and calibrated responses and there is a great deal of substance in that comparison here is where I think professor Reddy's piece at least doesn't quite go far enough I won't venture to say professor Reddy doesn't go far enough and that is the one question that is not asked in his pieces how well do our flood control systems work how well do our public health systems in response to already endemic diseases of the kind that you pointed out the influenza tuberculosis until relatively recently polio how well did these systems actually work how well do they work how well as citizens of India are we accustomed to seeing them work and I would argue that that is the point where professor Reddy's piece stops where we all of us as citizen activists attempting to use the lessons of the pandemic to bring about durable change have to begin thinking forward we have to begin to ask how are all the components that go into such a multi-layered multi-faceted public healthcare system that plans for the environment that plans for disease surveillance that plans for good warning that plans for test and vaccine development pipelines and as and when necessary provides calibrated decisions to communities takes them into confidence if acute measures if if if crisis measures become necessary for all of this to be put together as a system what do we need what are all the components that will go into this is a far more fundamental question than simply thinking about the technological factors of can we diagnose a virus can we develop a vaccine can we get enough ventilators out is can we make enough oxygen and so on and so forth that I think is going to be where the bulk of productive energies in health activism will have to be focused over coming months years that actually raises three issues we're not going to discuss these three issues today but maybe next time we should that one is to make medicines and vaccines available widely and cheaply now that we have at least antivirals so how to make that available to the public at large because this is something which then people if this available over the counter then can do themselves or get a prescription from a doctor and go and get cheap antivirals if they're available so that is one the second is of course vaccines very important and how to bring the cost of vaccines down and make it available widely how to treat vaccines as an essential part of pandemic control of COVID-19 control for the future and third and I think the most critical element when you come to deaths is the bandwidth and you have talked about it time and again in our discussions that the real issue is when you have a flood well you need to go to flood shelters if we take people out to different heights from the low lying area similarly when people fall seriously ill you need to take them to the hospitals and the hospitals should have in fact intensive care beds available to handle that in fact one of their argument that China has been giving is that we have intensive care beds which are 110 that of the United States and we are about five times that population that is why you are forced to go for a no COVID policy because we just can't handle what would otherwise happen now whether that's a correct argument or not that's a separate topic for discussion but certainly what we saw in the delta wave the loss of lives was directly related to the availability of oxygen and intensive care beds so I think these are the three elements which according to you I think also Srinath professor Srinath Reddy may have put some indicative at least directions of what we need to do but they are the hard ones because that is money that is political will and there is also the need to develop the science and technology network that the country had which you seem to be handling go handing over to private capital or similar profit-minded institutions including multinationals any last thoughts on that before we close the discussion well at the risk of extending an already long conversation let me remind all of us of a parallel we have been talking about antibiotic resistance bacterial infections and we've been talking about development and deployment of antibiotics simultaneously we've been talking be mourning the fact that easy and free availability of antibiotics has actually led to antibiotic resistance as a problem or at least has contributed to the emergence of the seriousness of the problem and what that peculiar paradox points to is that simply the technological fix of making antibiotics which are antibacterials or antiviral drugs widely and cheaply available although a crucial component of the response cannot be the entirety of the response a multifaceted decentralized people centric healthcare system is fundamental so on that note a good people centric public health system I think we'll close this discussion do visit our website and do look at our shows