HomeMy WebLinkAboutCity Council Meeting - Council Workshop - Minutes - 06/01/1999 COUNCIL WORKSHOP MINUTES
June 1, 1999
COMMITTEE MEMBERS PRESENT: Chair Leona Orr, Sandy Amodt, Tom
Brotherton, Tim Clark, Connie Epperly, Judy Woods, Rico Yingling
STAFF PRESENT: Joe Lorenz, Marty Mulholland, May Miller, Jim Harris, Stan
Waldrop, Joye Honeycutt, Brent McFall, John Hodgson, Dea Drake, Jackie Bicknell
WorkFirst Program
Councilmember Tom Brotherton presented information on the WorkFirst Program. Mr.
Brotherton said he had been working with the roundtable for about a year and 5 months,
including Seattle and Bellevue, and there is an active Legislative Committee which is
working on developing resources for member jurisdictions such as welfare reform and
homeless families. They are shifting responsibility away from the Federal Government's
responsibility for the states and have come down to an overall mandate to get people off
welfare. There's a five year maximum limit in which to receive services,two years at a
time maximum and five years total.
Training program work activities require 20 hours of either education or training, or
• employment activities every week, and is based on individual responsibility. It provides
training and placement assistance and support services that people need in order to deal
with looking for jobs. Within King County, except for Seattle, Kent has the largest
number of people receiving support in King County. There is quite a concentration of
people in South King County—Federal Way, Auburn, Renton, Tukwila, SeaTac, and
Burien. Kent is high because the cost of land and housing is cheaper and there is a high
concentration of subsidized housing. Kent's the apartment capital of King County in
terms of percentages of people living in apartments that are populations. And there are a
number of warehouse type jobs and service industries. However, two thirds of the
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families recipients are children.
A community forum was held in October and one of the outstanding discoveries was that
businesses and the service area were not talking together very well. The businesses
weren't aware of the programs to help their employees and people providing services
didn't know that they needed to talk to the businesses. WorkFirst is looking for equal
participation by the clients who show their responsibility to get out there and get the
training and find a job, and the businesses that can make some accommodations for their
new employees. Often those people have never held jobs before and don't even know
what kind of clothes to wear or how to deal with people in a business environment.
Businesses need to be trained how to get and keep these employees and there are many
areas to work with. There's a lot of education involved.
Mr. Brotherton mentioned and passed around an 80 page handbook that talks about
WorkFirst and how it's affecting the welfare area and gives some specific city
Council Workshop, 6/1J99 2
demographics. He said the community forum held in October had six focus groups to
work on things like work ethic, transportation, and childcare. City staff had a meeting the
middle of June on the work ethic group to go back and look at city policies to see what
prevents these people from getting employed and staying employed. The roundtable
suggested adopting a resolution that supports WorkFirst.
Another issue is homelessness. Basic funding comes from the McKinney Act which was
passed in 1987 and been tailored quite a bit over the years. Funding is broad based,
covering things besides housing. That money has done things like increase shelter
capacity about three times and start a lot of programs. But the number of people turned
away from shelters has gone up every year and some years by as much as 25%. King
County has 4170 shelter beds (and need another 1400) that take care of around 16,000
households a year. People go in and out of those shelters. In 1998 fifty-nine thousand
people were turned away from shelters and that's currently growing about 25% a year.
Mr. Brotherton went on to detail the results of the shelter summit that was convened to
search for solutions and to alleviate some of the demand on existing shelters without
costing more money.
There is broad political support for helping out with the Domestic Violence problem. It
was found from talking to the different Domestic Violence Task Forces that there were a
number of ways to improve the state laws that exist right now. The work in Washington
State has been very effective. In 1993,prosecutors were successful in prosecuting about
1% of the DV cases because of lack of evidence from the police and because the victims
• weren't willing to testify. Last year, the percentage was 98%. A lot of it had to do with
teaching the police how to look for evidence. Now they come back with photographs.
The Domestic Violence Task Force in Kent provided a bunch of ideas on ways to
improve the situation. All of them involve modification to the state laws. A resolution
has been drafted. (Mr. Brotherton handed out a copy.) The Task Force will coordinate
with the Washington State Domestic Violence Coalition and AWC and the other cities in
the roundtable. The resolution will then be given to the Legislative Committee to lobby
with the legislature.
Leona Orr suggested everyone read over the resolution and refer any suggestions to Mr.
Brotherton. Then when it's fine tuned, it could be taken through the appropriate
committee which would probably be Operations.
Technology Plan Update
Information Technology Director Marty Mulholland—First of all I did bring along three
other members of the IS staff to help with any questions that you might have. Many of
you know Joye Honeycutt who is our Administrative Assistant and helps me
tremendously with the budget tracking, also does quite a bit of work with phone projects
and billing, etc. Stan Waldrop has been the Project Lead on a number of the business
projects that are very hot right now and he can answer questions about those areas. And
you know Joe Lorenz who is our Network Manager, and Dea Drake, Multimedia and
Cable TV Manager. I really wanted to just make a few points about each of the major
Council Workshop,6l1(99 3
• areas and first of all to acknowledge the efforts of the IS Department this past year. It's
been quite a bit that we've accomplished and some of us are here today and there are a
number of behind the scenes folks that support every effort of this plan. I wanted to take
a minute to acknowledge them. They've worked very, very hard. You know one
question you might ask is, How do we feel a year later with the overall type plan and I
have to say that if I'd had three months more or six months more to write it, I don't know
that I would make a whole lot of changes. There are things that you can't anticipate and
you know just things that happen as you go along,but overall I'm quite pleased with it.
On Page 1, I've got a Budget Summary. The three 3 year total budget was $12.8 million
and the Expenses to Date column is cash that has gone through our accounts payable
process. The Committed column with a few exceptions are those purchase orders that we
have actually signed and committed to. Those exceptions are in the area of the Phone
System Project where we still show a fairly substantial commitment item that budget is
right in the middle of the process. We don't know quite where the dollars are going to
be but we anticipated a fairly significant amount of future expense so I put that in the
Commitment column. In the Planning, Consulting, and Staffing area and in the Year
2000 area, I also made some projections based on consultant budgets and expectations.
Also, since we're funding some staff positions, I assumed that those would be filled.
Other than that the Commitment columns represent dollars that we have committed to
and possibly have met with you on in terms of getting approval for those items.
In terms of Business Systems, the Permitting System went live on April 19. We have
. spent about a$100,000 to date. The overall project budget was intended to be about
$300,000. I think we'll go through quite a bit of that in the coming two years as we look
at voice technology, extending the number of users, interaction with GIS,potentially the
Web, etc. I want to remind you that the existing permitting system which I wrote
(actually two systems) wasn't guaranteed to be compliant. We own the tools but don't
know whether they'll work in the year 2000. This was a must do project. It was in
progress before the Tech Plan. But I'm really excited because for the first time we have
four different divisions in the city where we can keep track of permit information and
have consolidated the repository of communications and the progress on permits.
The Parks Registration System was selected and has been implemented and is going to go
live tomorrow and Stan can talk about that. There's both the registration aspects of
registering folks for classes as well as the cashiering component of that. One third of the
Fire Records System,that is not Year 2000 compliant, has been selected. The
implementation time line is expected to be relatively short. The server's been ordered. I
referred to a few other projects and to the fact that the dollar flow in this particular area
has been slower than we anticipated for several reasons, which I outlined.
Cable Television: we have not spent a great deal of money yet in this area, nor had we
expected to. We converted the Omega product that was used to generate text on our
cable television to a different product and the look of the text in the background's
changed on our cable television channel. We also bought a little "gizmo"giving us the
Council Workshop, 6/1/99 4
capability to run Powerpoint presentations at council meetings which we hadn't done in
the past.
The Network: A tremendous amount of progress has been made in this area over the past
year. In addition to selecting, creating and implementing the whole backbone of the
network, we've rewired seven facilities and have eight more facilities with rewiring in
progress. We've added seven sites to the network and have seven more in the queue here
over the next few months—the remote access piece which will allow telecommuters or
those that don't have offices here to access our networks (something that's in the queue
once some of the rest of the network and e-mail systems cool down). We knew that TO
was expected to deliver us quite a bit of fiber optic cable to some of our facilities but then
we adjusted our agreement with them and have worked it out so that we will be providing
cable to additional city facilities. You may have seen the trucks all over town. That's the
wiring, the backbone of the TCI network. They're also working with our network staff
on the sites and designing how the conduit will bring the fiber into our different
buildings. That's all behind-the-scene infrastructure coordination.
With this extra fiber optic cable, we can do something called extending the backbone
which fully uses that fiber optic cable all the way into the buildings where we extend.
That comes at a price. And that price is the equipment that you put into the building that
essentially ends it. It's much more expensive than what we originally anticipated
spending. We've got to let one or two of our other projects cool down a little in looking
at that money and deciding which sites we could most effectively extend that cable to and
• the money for it. So I think we have some opportunity to make sure we're within the
budget and also really maximize our network capabilities. Traditionally you might not
say that every fire station needed to have the network fully extended. But if we did that it
might give us the opportunity to offer training programs and communications to the
firefighters in the station. That might be of great value to the city and might be an
appropriate investment. So we're just at the time where we have to take a relook at some
of those things.
In the area of the Minicomputers and the central equipment, we purchased pretty much
what has been anticipated. The prices have really come down in minicomputers. When
we bought new minicomputers five years ago, I think we spent definitely six figures,
maybe close to $300,000 for the machines, and this time, I bought 6-7 times the
horsepower in that particular line for$53,000. We bought the Police Department a newer
machine and are using their older one for the year 2000 testing. There are quite a few
servers to support the new e-mail system, and the new minicomputer, which will be kind
of one of the most important database computers, our new central computer, etc. and we
put the computer room on back-up power with that UPS. It's just wonderful not to have
to worry about the power any more for the Data Center.
The Training and Help Desk has been a combination of our own staff efforts
supplemented by outside consulting efforts. We have two employees that train on all of
these classes. I'm really proud of our staff and very happy with the outside programs that
we've put into place to help people get up to speed. There have been 130 days of Access
Council Workshop, 6/1/99 5
• Classes taken and these are the formal classes. This isn't just help one on one. There's
been quite a bit of that. But over 1,500 days of training related to the technology in the
Tech Plan have been taken by the different department staffs so it's very visible to me
that the competence has come up. People have survived the changes. Also our Help
Desk Program has been very active. We created our own Help Desk software. We
bought some new Help Desk software that we're going to implement but we had over
7,500 calls put through to our Help Desk since last February— 15 months and we only
record them when we have to follow up on it. So it's been part of our culture now to
have this Help Desk and Training Program to help the staff deliver their services more
effectively.
The upgrades are complete in the PC area. Our minimum machine is now a Pentium 75.
That's about the lowest end machine we have. A year and a half ago we had terminals
and 386's in the PC population. GIS has been more of a technical effort of our staff
rather than a high cost effort, but we've moved to the standard platform and we've also
put it on the desktops so that staff members that aren't true GIS techs who create maps
can get to all this mapping data we've been working on for years through this product
called Arc-Explorer.
Telephones, page 6, are still very much a work in progress. The sites installed to date
now include the Shops. Left are the Fire Stations and Corrections. It's also impacted our
network group because the new phone systems are talk-to-our-network systems. We still
have some pretty serious glitches with our voice mail system and I wanted to share with
you that we held out, we delayed our phone system installation for this voice mail
product to be out of beta and it's still having some problems. We've had four or five
interruptions in the voice mail system during business hours from 7 am to 5 pm so we're
on the phone every single day with the company. Some of the glitches they think they've
resolved. We haven't accepted the system so we won't trigger those payment schedules
just yet until they get some of the last kinks out of it. It may not sound like too much to
have the voice mail down but if the voice mail's down for an hour, especially if it's the
first hour of the day (we have 600 voice mail boxes already built), any call that gets no
answer is gonna ring forever.
You all recall the weekend where I think I called every single one of you when our phone
system move didn't go so well and the phones went down in the whole city. The cost to
the city there depending on how you count it was over$16,000. That includes overtime.
That includes a conference I didn't get to go to, the phones we bought, etc. The
company, Williams Communication, has agreed to assume some of those costs in the
spirit of keeping a good relationship with the city. So we're pretty happy with that and
that was the amount that I asked them to assume which were the costs that I felt were
absolutely directly unavoidable tied to that failure of that box when we moved it.
Tom Brotherton—In Telecommunications—the thought occurred to me and may be just a
wild thought but has any thought been given to providing a voice mail box for the council
members? I'm just thinking you know if someone calls in with a something they want to
tell us it would be nice if there was a you know when they call there was a box that they
Council Workshop, 6/l/99 6
could send a message that all of us could access to see what the community is fretting
• about right now. Marty Mulholland—Would one of you like to be the person that would
check the messages or should the caller be able to direct a call to either you individually
or to the council as a whole? Tim Clark—There should be a way to set the system where
it is identifiable in terms of who it's going to. My preference would be instead of to all
the council members, it goes to the council president and that person decides what
happens at that point. Tom Brotherton—There needs to be a choice to go to all council
members to leave the same message or to any one of them. Councilmember Sandy
Amodt--If people have our home numbers, it's the same difference.
Tom Brotherton—Well there ought to be choice where they can send the same message
so that all of us can hear it. Councilmember Rico Yingling—To keep them from having
to call seven people or us to call six other people. Councilmember Sandy Amodt—Wait
a minute. Isn't that what Jackie's here for? Tom Brotherton—John Joe Public calls and
they have something that they feel strongly about and they want us all to know about it.
They could tell Jackie and she could type it or write a note to us or something, but if it's a
long message if they want to explain what piece of property they're talking about and on
and on, then it would be easier if they could just record the message one time and we
could all look at it.
Marty Mulholland—I will share with you that the new system has a routing list capability
so if you have a certain number of people on a voice mail list, you can record a message
once and get it to them and we'll have to check if that could automatically happen on an
• inbound call. Assistant City Attorney Tom Brubaker—My boss pointed out an issue
which deserves a little thought. If somebody called and left a message for all seven of
you and it was to lobby for an issue where you were going to appear as a quasi judicial
body, you would all have need an X party contacts with this person. Maybe we ought to
just think about it a little bit and come back with an idea of how it'd work because in that
instance, it would be better if it went to Jackie and she could maybe troubleshoot that a
little bit and protect you guys. It's not a fatal flaw because you could all announce that
you'd received this voice mail. Councilmember Judy Woods—It could also be in Jackie's
machine and if it wasn't anything of that nature she could forward it on.
Leona Orr— We all have a phone number, and most of us are in the phone book. We also
have a council secretary and that phone number. Do we really want to give someone a
third phone number and they sit at home confused, well do I call Leona personally or do I
call the secretary or do I call this voice mail. You don't want to give people too many
ways to do something because then they may not do it at all. Sandy Amodt—Jackie's got
voice mail right now and she's the council secretary. I've got voice mail. Tom
Brotherton— I think if some citizen calls up and wants to talk to all of us with the same
message, it'd be easier for that citizen.
Leona Orr—They can do that with our council office. They can call the council office
and leave a message for the entire city council. Jackie will get it to us,but if she can
forward it then she can forward it to us. Marty Mulholland—I wouldn't be able to
• forward it to your home. This is within the system. I'd need seven voice mail boxes.
Council Workshop, 6/l/99 7
Director of Operations Brent McFall—Staff could come back to you with a proposal.
There's got to be a way to do it. Marty Mulholland—We'll come back maybe at another
Operations Committee, something like that.
Year 2000: Largely, the expenses have been for the consultants. I just wanted to share
with you one thing that might have been misleading that came out in one of the updates
from my department in terms of the Payroll Financial System. We are not through the
testing process yet. We are going through a structured method of testing these core
systems and the very first thing you do is you make sure it runs as it would on a new
machine and in a new environment, and then you install the code that's supposed to be
year 2000 compliant. You run it and make sure it runs exactly as it should and that
everything balances. And we have completed that. Now we are rolling the clock forward
and running it. We just ran our first test with the clock forward and it was a good test.
But now we will use several people and run them through every single bit of the payroll
processing and so until we are through that,we won't declare those systems compliant.
The only news that I have that is recent is that our Corrections System,which is
purchased from a company in California, they will not state whether it is compliant or
not. They have resisted responding to a number of memos and so the Correction staff is
well aware of it. We are gonna run it through a small test and see how compliant it
appears to be or not to be. In terms of operating the Jail, it's fairly significant. They
book prisoners, go through past history on a prisoner, keep track of inventory items
related to a prisoner, etc. So our year 2000 lady that's been coordinating the testing has
been down there checking out the functions to bring that into the environment. I'm
hoping it doesn't force us to choose a new system quickly, but we'll have to see and I
don't have dates just yet. We just really cemented this about two weeks ago.
Rico Yingling—Have you uncovered any year 2000 issues with any of the equipment in
the city, either operating or computers or traffic? Marty Mulholland— Sure. Quite a bit
of it. For example, in a few cases where we used the year 2000 money to upgrade
something that wasn't compliant, some other element of it wasn't—even though they
signed all of our language that says they're compliant. The card system software that
we're proposing to ask the city for security is compliant but it runs on a version of NT
that isn't. It doesn't have the latest service pack, and so there was no leg. So we held
payment and actually we just paid them I think last week because they finally upgraded
the operating system. Steve Schopfer is still concerned about our system that manages
the HVAC system, the computer that checks the temperature everywhere in our
buildings, because the company's changed hands several times. Traffic we have not
heard of anything yet that is not compliant, and he's obtained lists of embedded chips that
are in our systems and there may be one minor upgrade that he is looking at but nothing
at this point.
I expect there will be glitches. It's too big an area to not expect them. I just don't know
where they will be. With regard to the water system—the SCATA System, which is a
system that controls some elements, was purchased just two years ago and it was
Council Workshop, 6(l(99 8
compliant. I cannot recall the embedded chip situation in terns of our Water Treatment
. Plant. I expect to return to you with some more year 2000 news at some point.
The City Website: It's an embarrassment not to have one I'll grant you that. I'm hoping
to return for some staffing requests, to be quite honest with you, to get some of these
things off the dime because our staff is really focused on a number of very key projects.
The Disaster Plan is another and the Police Technologv Plan which included wireless for
fire and police is another.
Regional Issues
Brent McFall gave a report on one regional issue. I talked to you before about the
potential for construction of the new Valley Comm facility. We are working with the
other owner cities, Renton, Tukwila and Auburn and we are also talking with the City of
Federal Way as a potential new owner partner with us and they will be considering that
probably this month and making their decision as to whether or not they think that's the
way they should go. Frankly I would be surprised if they don't. What that allows us to
do is spread the cost of the new facility five ways instead of four. We're already
servicing them as well as a number of other contract agencies so it doesn't have an
impact in terms of the size and scope of the facility.
We have been meeting to talk about how can we finance this. Valley Comm is a very
unique animal. It doesn't really exist in terms of any sort of legislative authority, so it
doesn't have its own debt capacity or anything like that. It really only exists as an entity
created by the interlocal agreement between the owner cities. We have explored the
potential of creating a Public Development Authority similar to what we've done for the
Market as the entity to own the facility. A Public Development Authority has debt
issuance through it which would then be paid back by the payments of all the owner cities
as well as the contract cities or agencies that we'd provide services too. It looks very
feasible. It would be unique in that it would be a Public Development Authority set up to
serve a multiple jurisdictional entity, but the PDA laws don't really provide that so what
we would end up doing, if in fact we proceed this way and come to you with a
recommendation, is that the City of Kent(because the facility will be in Kent) and the
Kent City Council would create the Public Development Authority. We would probably
do something like appoint the mayors of the four or five cities as the Board Members of
the PDA,just as they are currently the Board Members of Valley Comm, and so it would
be a Kent PDA but it would still be the four or five owner cities that would be really in
control and charge of it.
It's a really unique plan. We've been working with the legal counsel that has created
most of the PDAs in the state and they've drawn out for us a flow chart of how this could
work and an explanation. If it looks like that's the most feasible,we'll probably be
coming to you in not all that distant future.
The meeting was adjourned.
i