Short 40 minute meeting, mayor’s update, voting on Surveillance Cameras ordinance and report without PSRC recommendation, Konkel’s response after the meeting and updates from the Council President after the last meeting.You can watch along here if you feel so inclined
They take the roll call, the tech people read the instructions for the meeting. They approve the minutes, there are no disclosures or recusals. There is no public comment.
MAYOR UPDATES
Governor’s Extended Safer at Home order/Badger Bounce Back Plan
Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway says I’m sure that you all saw that the governor has extended the safer at home order with a few changes. Some of those changes are relevant to us and our services. She wants to bring to their attention the Badger Bounce-back Plan for reopening and recovery and if you haven’t read that yet I would certainly encourage you to. I think it provides a useful framework for how we think about reopening and recovery in the City of Madison as well. In terms of the new orders there’s a few things that were specifically called out in them, so that staff are now looking at how we’re going to respond to that.
- Golf courses are allowed to open, so Parks Department is looking at how to do that safely and including what new supplies or PPE we will need for that.
- Libraries are now allowed to do curbside service if you will and the libraries are planning if that’s something that’s feasible for all of our locations, some of our locations, or perhaps none of our locations. Always wanting to keep the health and safety of our workforce and our residents in the forefront.
- Streets is looking at the yard waste drop-off to see how we can restore service there and again contingent on our ability to provide the appropriate supplies and protection to workers.
She is confident that in all three cases we’ll see an increase in service soon. Across the rest of the departments we’re also just looking at how we can continue to ease back into some services. We have not had that many people on paid administrative leave, but how we can get those that we have on paid administrative leave, working, again to restore some of the services that we’ve suspended.
We’re thinking particularly in light of the Badger bounce-back that we are starting to think about how we would ease into reopening more city services when the time is right. based on the public health data.
Mayor pauses for questions, there are none.
Resources
She shares here screen to show resources that her office has been looking at. She shows the websites.
- Mayor’s Innovation Project website has a Covid 19 response page and the interesting thing here is that they have resources and updates that are available that are linked here. And then they have related news at the bottom. What’s most interesting here is their live feed, and you can sort it one way or another, but it basically it’s a bunch of things that cities have submitted to them themselves about various things that they’re doing. They’re tagged by issue area. The point is not so any of the individual things but that this is a resource and particularly in light of CCEC’s conversations around potential task forces or getting committees reoriented to focus on recovery. I thought that this might be a good resource for either for CCEC, the council as a whole or the different boards commissions and committees as they start to work on recovery issues.
- National League of Cities and Bloomberg Philanthropies has a similar action tracker and so they’ve got again tagged in a number of different ways also you can search and filter and sort. This one is sortable by geography as well. Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bloomberg Harvard Partnership has been putting out some really good information and particularly on the public health side of things and that’s specifically tailored for cities. She couldn’t find that link but it is publicly available and they are putting out a series of I think useful articles.
- The city started putting out a newsletter that is specifically focused on COVID-19 and anyone can sign up from the City of Madison homepage by clicking get alerts. You can get email and/or text updates that are particularly related to COVID-19. She encourages alders to do that and and to encourage your constituents to do it as well. She shows them the newsletter. She says they can cut and paste into their blogs and emails. If they have ideas they should send them to Katic Crowley in her office who is working with the JIC to put together the newletter.
Alder Arvina Martin was wondering if there were any conversations about managing potential protests on Friday, not just from a law enforcement standard but from a public health point of view. People coming possibly from out of town bringing possible COVID germs etc and if there was any discussion of what that would entail or whether we should know about.
Mayor says they are obviously tracking the protests fairly closely, trying to walk the line between being adequately prepared and not giving them more attention than they’re worth. The police department is ready as they would be for any event like this. From the public health point of view it’s not a lot that we can do, other than continue to encourage everyone, but particularly residents of Madison, to practice safe physical distancing, to wear a face covering when they’re out in public and to stay away from large groups of people. It’s not complicated, if people choose to ignore that public health advice, it’s technically on state land and under the state jurisdiction, so there’s not a ton that we can do about it. I certainly would hope that anybody who’s coming to Madison will behave responsibly.
No other questions
FINAL REPORT OF PRESIDENT’S WORKGROUP TO DEVELOP CITYWIDE SURVEILLANCE EQUIPMENT AND DATA MAINTENANCE POLICIES
There are no registrants. Alder Kemble moves 6 & 7, Carter seconds.
Alder Kemble says this is the end of a long journey that started with the President’s Work group that started with Police and Community Relations back in 2016. One of the 13 recommendations from that group was for the City Council to develop a policy on the use and purchase of surveillance equipment, since we had no policy at the time. This is our first ever ordinance that has to do with surveillance policy. The group that consisted of Alder Carter, Baldeh, Skidmore, Zellers, and then just resident Zellers and myself worked for two years with the assistance of our former legislative analyst Heather Allen and then Karen and with the immense help from Sara Edgerton Vic Wahl and Marcy Paulson who were with us at pretty much every single meeting. We worked for two years, the first year we did a lot of disinformation gathering, we did a survey of all departments to ask them basically for an inventory of what surveillance equipment they had, what policies they had around using them, storing data etc. The only thing that the city had on the books was an administrative process memo that said that any department that has surveillance
equipment has to put their policy on file with the clerk’s office. We found that that wasn’t being adhered to, there were several departments that did but several others didn’t. Some didn’t even know about it. It was just a tremendous amount of work by staff from every department, in almost every department in the city to fill out that survey. With the help of our legislative analysts Heather and Karen we did a comparison of other ordinances that other cities and counties had across the country. We looked at a model ACLU ordinance and we thought about what elements we wanted of those ordinances in our own. In addition to surveying we had actual presentations from all the departments, so the department’s had heads came and talked to us about what kind of equipment they had and what kind of policies they had around access, use, data management, data storage etc. The second year we worked on developing this ordinance that’s in front of us today. Thinking about approval processes and there were I don’t even know how many versions of this thing, for a while we were jointly working on the the APM that would go along with and deciding you know what should go on the APM what should go in the ordinance. At the end of the summer we decided that you know the mayor can deal withthe APM once we have our law written. That law is in front of us today. It is an ordinance that defines what surveillance technology is. It defines, with a long list of things, what it isn’t. And it sets up an approval process for the approval of the purchase and use of new equipment. In the report you’ll see that that is one of the things left over, although we say there has to be a process, that process needs to be worked out. I think that’s the work that this body can do, the CCC can can start working on with the mayor’s office to figure out exactly the nuts and bolts of that approval process. One of the things we came around to agreeing to is that we would hope that the bulk of the purchase of new equipment would happen in the course of each years capital budget. So we would see the request for new equipment around May or June from the department’s and then the approval process would take place there. There’s another process for out of budget cycle requests. There’s a whole different process for highly sensitive equipment that you’ll see if you read the report or look in the ordinance.
Council President and Chair Shiva Bidar points out that city staff Sarah Edgerton and Marci Paulsen from the City Attorney’s Office and Chief Wahl are with us.
Alder Barbara Harrington McKinney commends the two-year work of this committee and especially summarization that Alder Campbell gave. She says that acceptance of the report is absolutely acceptable, but the other thing that I am concerned about is that it was referred to the Public Safety Review Committee and there is no meeting that scheduled. When we approve an ordinance this is law and I would hope that consideration of when the Public Safety Review Committee gets stood up, that we give that committee the opportunity to review that and also invite public comment. Because once the law is passed, the law is passed. I know that the alder mentioned that the nuts and bolts of the processes not yet formalized. Will they have a further look see before we approve the ordinance.
Alder Kemble says she appeared before PSRC two times at two of their meetings presenting these items. She presented twice on it, did they really not vote on it? I guess I’m just I’m just wondering why it says that. Alder McKinney I don’t think you were there when I presented the second time. I guess I’d just like to get confirmation. The PSRC had two months where they were prepared to talk about this already and whether or not they voted on it I can’t say.
Bidar looks in legistar, it sometimes does some strange stuff.
Alder Grant Foster thanks the people who worked on it.
Bidar says it did go to the PSRC and they did not take action on it, so that’s what I’m seeing in in legistar.
Alder Samba Baldeh says he wants to echo what Alder Kemble and McKinney said, it was a lot of work and he thanks those who were part of it, the police and legal department. It took a long time. He thinks its a good product.
Alder Sheri Carter thanks people and commends Rebecca and thanks the department representatives that came to our meeting to explain why they need it the equipment and what they need in the future. They took the time out, they completed the survey and I just want to applaud them for their efforts, in addition to Rebecca Kemble and all of us that served on that committee for two years.
McKinney asks if this is referred what would be the impact, I am asking that because the Public Safety Review Committee is in that second phase.
Alder Kemble says they hoping this approval process would go hand in hand with the budget. The impact would be that we might miss out in this year’s budget cycle to get those to get the to get those requests up and going. That would mean a ton more work for everyone involved who had planned to purchase or use new equipment this year.
Bidar calls for a vote. McKinney requests a roll call.
Aye: Arvina Martin, Tag Evers, Sheri Carter, Grant Foster, Rebecca Kemble
No: Barbara Harrington-McKinney
KONKEL’S EMAIL TO ALL ALDERS, PSRC AND MAYOR’S OFFICE
A little break in the recap. After listening to this part of the meeting, I sent the following email:
Tonight at CCEC the committee voted to move ahead with the vote on report and ordinance on Surveillance Equipment without a Public Safety Review Committee (PSRC) recommendation. At the meeting a question arose about why PSRC had not voted on the issue.
This was on our agenda twice. The first time we received a presentation from Alder Kemble, but the police department staff for the meeting did not have the background to answer our questions. Specifically we had questions about the resident camera registration program and the “active investigation” language.
The second meeting we had on the matter we had a very long agenda, including but not limited to body worn camera committee, Ad Hoc Police Policy Committee recommendations report and sending our officers to Milwaukee for the Democratic National Convention. This also included substantial public input.
At the time the committee and Chief Wahl agreed that the Chief would come back to our next meeting to discuss these issues with us. We referred it believing that we would meet in April and begin meeting twice a month if necessary due to our lengthy agendas. Of course, with COVID-19 we were not allowed to meet to work on this or the homelessness issues, attrition, mental health issues and other items that were on our agenda.
I believe there is still work to be on the this matter as outlined in the report. If the PSRC does not take this matter up – it will fall to the CCEC and Council to continue the work. The committee expressed interest in assisting in these discussing the resident camera registration program and “active investigation” matters and hoped to resolve them prior to adopting the ordinance.
I hope this helps clarify why the PSRC did not act on the matter and that you will consider referring the ordinance back to our committee for action as soon as we can meet.
Sincerely,
Brenda K. Konkel
PSRC Chair
UPDATES FROM PREVIOUS CCEC MEETING
Back to the recap . . . Bidar gives updates about items on the agenda at the last meeting:
- All alders got a copy of the survey sent to all the committee chairs. It went out to 63 committees and they are waiting for emails for 4 committees. Karen in the council office will compile the answers and present it back to CCEC or Council once she has them. she thanks the alders who drafted the survey and the feedback from everyone.
- The frequency of the CCEC meeting is an item that is still pending, no decisions need to be made tonight, but there was a general sense that CCEC should be meeting more frequently over the next few months and weekly seemed to be the preference of the body.
- 2 agenda items need to be taken up at the next CCEC meeting
- Continued discussion on the council’s role, process and structure in response to COVID-19 recovery. The talks about the draft document they discussed and the feedback given – Alders Furman, Evers and Heck are working on integrating the feedback into a second draft.
- Discussing virtual meetings and equity. Harrington-McKinney volunteered to work on some of the issues and Alder Foster had also worked on that and there was an attachment and email Alder Foster sent to all alders.
McKinney did review the attachment from Alder Foster and it was a very good start. If Alder Foster is willing to she would like for them to join together and really developing a formatto bring back and present to the executive committee. I’m still seeing an absence when we look at equity in those groups that we should be considering. There is some missing of groups that we really should be including.
Bidar says Sara Edgerton has also done quite a bit of work around this whole issue and they should reach out to her.
FUTURE AGENDA ITEMS
Alder Kemble says if item 7 passes council they will have to start working on an approval process for surveillance equipment. Bidar says that can be added.
Adjournment.
