Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAbout02/19/2013 Work SessionCity of Springfield Work Session Meeting MINUTES OF THE WORK SESSION MEETING OF THE SPRINGFIELD CITY COUNCIL HELD TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2013 The City of Springfield Council met in a work session in the Jesse Maine Meeting Room, 225 Fifth Street, Springfield; Oregon, on Tuesday, February 19, 2013 at 6:02 p.m., with Mayor Lundberg presiding. ATTENDANCE Present were Mayor Lundberg and Councilors VanGordon, Moore, Ralston, Woodrow and Brew. Also present were City Manager Gino Grimaldi, Assistant City Manager Jeff Towery, City Attorney Mary Bridget Smith, City Recorder Amy Sowa and members of the staff. Councilor Wylie was absent (excused). 1. Master Fees and Charges Schedule. Finance Director Bob Duey presented the staff report on this item. Each year, Council and staff reviewed existing fees and charges for appropriateness of rates for meeting cost recovery targets as well as reviewing for areas where new or additional fees should be considered. At issue in many years was whether certain fee increases should be automatic to meet inflationary pressures or every few years as cost recovery models showed an increase in subsidy. This year, with a slower than expected economic recovery in the public sector, it was especially important to look at service areas where increased or additional fees would be considered appropriate. These fees assisted the City Manager in preparing a proposed budget for review by the Budget Committee in late April. Mr. Duey said a recommended list of changes was included in the agenda packet. There were not many, but some that were needed for business. Attachment 3 of the agenda packet was a new format of the fee schedule that included all fees. He described the three ways in which fees were changed, some through the Municipal Code by ordinance and some by resolution. The new format would allow people to look in one document at all fees, while staff would track how to adjust the fees. Mr. Duey said they had met with all of the councilors, except Councilor Brew, regarding fund balancing. He noted the different funds that were facing challenges. There was not a firm percentage, but in looking to close a $2M gap, the ratio from a fee standpoint (expenses /revenue) would be no less than 70/30 and no more than 60/40. Staff didn't feel a single large fee was the answer at this time. The best way to approach this was to look at multiple fees at different rates. The building program fees were discussed a couple of weeks ago and at that time Council expressed interest in seeing the fees on a more regular basis so there weren't large increases after several years. The fees to be discussed tonight were only those that staff was asking Council to consider increasing. There were a variety of ways each fee was calculated and how cost recovery was determined. Mr. Duey thanked Rhonda Rice (DPW) and Paula Davis (Finance) for their work in putting together the new fee format. Attachment 2 of the agenda packet included forty-one fees with slight changes. Only 13 of those 41 actually included a fee change. Others included changes to the wording and providing clarification. The new format organized the fees by department. He provided an example. City of Springfield Council Work Session Minutes February 19, 2013 Paee 2 Councilor Ralston said under Section 7, it looked like grading permit fees were being removed. Mr. Duey said they were removing the current one and replacing it with better language. The fee was not being changed. It was completely reformatted so looked much different. Councilor Moore asked about rental business licensing and why that was still in the fee schedule. Mr. Duey said the original ordinance had the license in place for rentals with four units or more. The newer ordinance added the single family, two -part and triplexes so those were removed once that newr ordinance was repealed. The four unit rental remained. Councilor Moore said under Section 1, page 4 it just listed Rental Sales License $10.00 per unit. Mr. Duey said this section didn't include the full ordinance, but just provided a summary of the ordinance. Councilor Moore said it was confusing and she asked if it could be clarified in the fee schedule that it only included rentals with four units or more. Mr. Duey said staff would add language to make it clearer. Councilor Ralston asked about the telecommunications license fee on page 64 of Attachment 3. It looked like the code and fee were being removed. He asked if it was being replaced. Ms. Rice said that page 63 showed the Telecommunication License Application Fee. That fee was being reduced to be more comparable with other cities our size. The fee listed on Page 64 was the annual review fee which was being removed. The license was a five -year license and was reviewed annually, but it became unnecessary. That fee was rarely charged. Mr. Duev said of the 13, only two or three would affect the private citizen. Most were fees that were assessed on businesses. Councilor Moore spoke regarding dog licensing and asked how many people actually licensed their dog. She asked how much that fee supported our animal control program and the contract with Greenhill. Chief Smith said about $28,000 was generated from licensing. The shelter fees were about $40,000 Councilor Moore asked if a small increase could help generate revenue. Mr. Duey said they could do a comparison with other cities. If it raised more funds it could help pay for the animal control office. It would be more beneficial to encourage people to license their dogs. Chief Smith said the dogs that went to the shelter were unlicensed. Licensed dogs were nearly always returned to their owners. Increasing the license fee would mean those that followed the law in getting their dogs licensed would be paying for those that didn't follow the law. The dog licenses didn't cover the cost of the animal control program. City of Springfield Council Work Session Minutes February 19, 2013 Page 3 Councilor VanGordon asked if staff used the City's rising costs or the CPT when determining the inflation index for raising fees. Mr. Duey said they had usually tied it to wages and benefits as most services had a personnel cost attached. Councilor VanGordon said he was fine looking at the fees more frequently to have more, smaller increases. He was concerned with waiting several Years and having large increases. He didn't, however, want to apply an inflation increase for all fees each year, but would want Council to look at them to see what was appropriate. He was also concerned with increases just based on wage and benefit increases as they would be above inflation. He would like a description of an inflationary index increase and would prefer to keep it down to an inflation number. With that, keeping it down to inflation only could mean some catch -up every few years. Mr. Duey said major fees such as utility fees would still come to Council separately. Councilor Brew said he agreed with Councilor VanGordon. He was aware that General Fund services were partially out of property tax and partially out of fees. If they only increased the fees at 3% despite the cost of increase in wages and benefits, the burden then fell on the general taxpayer. He didn't want it too out of balance. Councilor Ralston said it looked like the Pre - Scheduled Non- Emergency Basic Life Support fee was being removed. He asked if another service was taking its place. Mr. Duey said now that the City had a contract with Rural Metro Ambulance, we were trying not to provide that service. Councilor Brew asked if those types of calls were eligible for FireMed. Mr. Duey said he was,not sure, but would find out. Councilor Ralston said if they had FireMed, it wouldn't make sense for the person to call for the other service. Mr. Duev said this was scheduled for a public hearing in two weeks, along with the Building Program Fees. If the Council was ready for the fees to come back for a public hearing, staff could schedule that public hearing for March 4 with both fees presented, including some inflationary ideas. If Council was not ready, staff would pull it from the March 4 public hearing and schedule an additional work session to discuss the inflationary ideas. Council was fine going forward with the public hearing and inflationary ideas on March 4. Councilor Moore asked when they would bring it back if they didn't keep the March 4 date. Mr. Duey said possibly later in the Spring after the budget process. Councilor Moore asked if that would make a lot of difference when looking at the budget. Mr. Duey said knowing prior to the budget would heFp staff know what they could put in the budget. City of Springfield Council Work Session Minutes February 19, 2013 Page 4 Councilor Moore said she would be interested in seeing the small changes broken out. Mr. Duey said they could include that as part of the public hearing, but if they were not comfortable with that, they could pull it off of the March 4 public hearing. He explained how that could occur. Mayor Lundberg said they would just need to make their decision on March 4. Council agreed to having the discussion during the public hearing on March 4. 2. Building Program Fees. Engineering Supervisor Matt Stouder presented the staff report on this item. As discussed with Council during the February 4, 2013 work session on building fees, the City's Building Fund was facing a number of challenges, including increased permit submittals. declining revenues, staffing reductions and depletions of reserves. Staff presented three options for Council's consideration to stabilize the Building Fund, including further staff reductions, a fee increase, or a subsidy from the General Fund. As noted in work session, Springfield had not increased building permit fees since 2009 or specialty permit fees since 2007. During the February 4, 2013 work session, staff discussed across the board fee increases of 7.5 %, 10% and 12.5% for building fees. Council reviewed those proposals and also expressed an interest in receiving additional information on what a tiered increase (with fees for lower value permits being increased more than fees for higher value permits) might look like for a range of projects. That information, as well a general 10% increase, was shown in Attachment 1 of the agenda packet. Attachment 1 also compared those increases with current fees for Eugene and Lane County. For reference. Eugene last updated their fee schedule in February 2010 and were planning a 3% increase in April 2013. Lane County's last update occurred in April 2010 and they were not planning a fee increase this year. Also; as requested by Council; staff had met with the Home Builders Association (HBA) to discuss the proposed fee increases. Feedback from the HBA had been supportive, and they had submitted a letter of support shown in Attachment 2 of the agenda packet. Additionally, staff would be meeting with the Development Advisory Committee (DAC) on Thursday, February 21 and would report back to Council with their feedback thereafter. Based on feedback provided by Council regarding either an across the board or a tiered fee increase, staff would make appropriate revisions to Springfield's Building Safety Fee Schedule shown in Attachment 3 of the agenda packet prior to the overall update of the City's Master Fee and Charges Schedule, scheduled for public hearing on March 4; 2013. Mr. Stouder referred to Attachment 1 of the agenda packet which included the 10% increase and the tiered proposal. He explained the tiered proposal. The feedback from the HBA was that they were in agreement with the tiered approach. Councilor Ralston said during the last work session, there was agreement on the 10% increase, but a request to look at the tiered approach. He noticed that the tiered increase was, in most cases, higher than 10 %. It seemed the tiered approach was more complicated and would take more time to figure out. City of Springfield Council Work Session Minutes February 19, 2013 Page 5 Mr. Stouder said from a staff point they would be equal Councilor Ralston said he wasn't sure if this was fair and thought they should maybe stay with the 10% increase. Councilor VanGordon said when comparing the 10% increase to the tiered increase, it looked like they would bring in about the same revenue. Mr. Stouder said from what staff anticipated the tiered approach could bring in slightly more than the 10% increase. It would depend on the types of projects that came in to the City. Councilor VanGordon said he was fine with the tiered approach. Having the higher increase for the lower fees made sense since that was where most of the work was being done. Councilor Ralston said after looking more closely at each category, he agreed with the tiered approach. Councilor Brew said the tiered increase was probably fairer from a business standpoint, but previously Council had wanted to hold the smaller developments harmless. This was a balancing act, and would likely be revisited again in the future. Councilor Woodrow said she was glad they could be flexible and meet the concern of the developers. She was comfortable with the tiered approach. Councilor Moore agreed that the tiered approach was fine. In the future, she would like to look at a prediction of what could be expected. She would like to have a plan in place, although she understood that they couldn't plan on the costs. Developers could expect that minimal increases could be happening. Mr. Stouder said that was the feedback he had received from developers that they preferred more feedback and more regular, smaller increases. Mayor Lundberg asked how often the fees were increased. Mr. Stouder said building fees were increased in 2009 and specialty fees in 2007. Prior to that, fees were increased every couple of years. Mayor Lundberg said we had been responsive to the economy and that was the reason we hadn't had regular increases. It would be good to get back on track. Mr. Grimaldi said it sounded like Council wanted staff to look at what was happening in the economy, what was happening with comparable jurisdictions, and what was happening with the cost of doing business. That was correct. Mr. Towery referred back to the question from Councilor Brew about whether or not Pre - Scheduled Non - Emergency Basic Life Support was covered by FireMed. He had contacted Fire Chief Groves and received a response that FireMed did cover medically necessary transports to a hospital whether they were emergency or non - emergency. Return transports were not covered by FireMed. Rural Metro fees were dependent on the type of transfer. Most of their transports were validated because they were City of Springfield Council Work Session Minutes February, 19, 2013 Paoe 6 Medicare or Medicaid eligible for reimbursement. The City had a contract with Rural Metro that set the amount the City would cover under FireMed. When they reached that threshold, which they normally did, Rural Metro paid the balance. The contracts with Rural Metro and the City of Eugene and City of Springfield were slightly different in terms of scope of services, but they were looking at making- them identical in the future. Mr. Stouder noted that Attachment 3 of the agenda packet did show the fee increases occurring every year from 2001 to 2009, except for 2003. ADJOURNMENT The meeting was adjourned at 6:46 p.m Minutes Recorder— Amy Sowa Christine L. Lundberg Mayor Attest: Amy Sow Citv Recor c