Mayor, task force on government structure, employees climate survey, 2021 budget and replacing legistar are all on the CCEC agenda! Here’s the agenda for the meeting:
Here’s the video if you want to follow along or catch details I glossed over.
GETTING STARTED
Present: Shiva Bidar, Barbara Harrington-McKinney, Arvina Martin, Tag Evers, Sheri Carter, Rebecca Kemble
Absent: Grant Foster (dand Samba Baldeh
They approve their minutes, there is no general public comment. No disclosures or recusals.
DISCUSSION WITH THE MAYOR
- Age-friendly communities program
It’s an AARP program that Madison signed up for and the mayor is “excited about” it. It’s a program that she talked about during the Mayor’s Innovaiton Project and they talked with them about how they could connect with cities. It is focused on livable communities and the framework is 8 to 80 City, they want a city that works for an 8 year old and an 80 year old so then it will work for everybody else. She was familiar with it for a long time and when she talked to Sally Jo Spoeni, the Director of the Senior Center she was enthusiastic about the program as well. So they as a City has signed on to the age-friendly communities network and are in that process now. On their website there are a number of policy related resources that are available to anyone, including you, having to do with livable communities. She thinks they are pretty high quality and interesting. Sally Jo and public health staff are assembling a group of folks to work on this, so if you (the alders) are interested or if you have a constituent that might be interested, it would be worth reaching out to Sally Jo. AARP defines this as an iterative process, you sign up, you establish a way to get input, including older residents in that process, you assess needs, you develop action plans and start implementing, you assess, repeat, rinse, repeat. They are in the beginning stages of setting up that cycle for Madison. She is excited, she thinks it fits with other things they are doing, especially Vision Zero and our work around transportation and public health and housing. She thinks its a good fit for us. If you are interesting in more info at the national level, AARP has a whole section of their website dedicated to it.
- Mayor’s Institute on City Design
She has been invite to participate in the Mayor’s Institute on City Design, so she will be going to that April 1st through 3rd. This is a program that has been going on for decades, she thinks previous Mayor’s have participated from Madison. It’s designed to bring together 8 mayors and a set of design professionals to talk about particular projects that are design related in each city. Each Mayor comes with an area or a project that they want to talk about, the other mayors give input and feedback, the design professionals give input and feedback and hopefully they each come back with a more developed concept or good ideas. She is taking the portion of the former Oscar Mayer site that they hope to acquire, in hopes that she can come back with some innovative and interesting ideas about how to incorporate both what we need on the transit side, but also thinking about placemaking, improved ped, bike, transit circulation and connecting with what we hope will be going on on the rest of the site and what is already going on near by in terms of housing and economic development. She really has no idea how this will go, but she is excited about it. When she comes back she will come back here or maybe plan commission or “I don’t know where” and share what we got out of it. They will write up all your feedback for you, so they will be able to share that as well.
- Census 2020 update
She says there are two efforts right now, this year the way the census will work, we will all receive letters inviting us to go online to fill out the census form. So you won’t get the paper to fill out and send back. And if you don’t do it you will get another letter. And then, if you still don’t do it, then hopefully somebody is going to come knock on your door and say hi, would you now please fill this out with me. The short form is simple, its 9 questions, they predict it takes 10 minutes. It should be a very straightforward process, but its a different process and it requires people to take that double step of, I got the letter and then I’m going to go online. So they are pushing on being prepared for needing to knock on all those doors. Right now they are not in good shape with respect to that. They have 53.7% of the hires that they need. She passes around a map and says we are surrounded by counties that have hired everybody they need, so that is problematic. They are trying to get the word out, its a great employment opportunity for a number of folks, it is very flexible in terms of number of hours per week, they are paying $22 an hour, it is paid training. It is March – July. 2020census.gov/jobs. So they are trying to think about ways to get that message out broadly. She says they all got materials and she appreciates the extent to which they shared that. That is the first thing, if they don’t have enough people to knock on the doors, the previous estimates are that about 20% of people don’t fill out their census just from getting the notification. We cannot afford as a community to miss 20% of our people, so we need the people to knock on doors and the fewer we have, the better the chance is that we miss people.
The other push is starting March 15th it will be live, people can go on line and complete the census and to compensate for any workers that we don’t have, we need to really push people to do it themselves and to do it online or over the phone. So there will be another set of messaging around that and she hopes they will all share that with the constituents. The Complete County Committee is doing a fantastic job, they have 8 pages of contacts that have been done or are planned. That is great work, but they could always do more and you are tapped into teh community in different ways so she appreciates any efforts they can make on that front. She has more handouts. She says there is an event on Wednesday at Mount Zion, its a black community kick-off to the 2020 census, so if you can share this information and help make that a success they would appreciate that.
She says in mid-March the census has a site with memes, she downloaded a few of her favorites and you will start seeing them on her instagram, but its just another way to share the information and get the word out. Someone asked something I didn’t hear. Mayor says if someone is GenZ enough you can figure out how to do this on the TikToks. She hasn’t figured that out yet.
McKinney says that for the under-represented and under-counted, when you are looking at that 20% that is huge, that means they are under-represented, they are under-counted, they are under-resources and programs are so impacted, so this is really a community wide effort for us to do that, we cannot afford to leave a portion of our communities out. So whatever spheres of influence that you have, please reach out to those spheres of influence, it really does mean we are losing dollars if we are not counting everyone and the fear that people have, we need to educate and speak to that because we cannot be silent on this. She encourages them to reach out and become active in this.
Mayor says oddly one group of folks that gets undercounted is babies. People forget, they think about the adults in the household, but they don’t think that the infant is someone that you should put on the census, but if you don’t, then you’ve disappeared them for the first 10 years of their life. There’s a bunch of memes about how kids count too. Mayor says Linsay (Lemmer) is all over the meme’s already.
Lemmer says that she will reach out to her 13 year old neice to run a TikTok training for us, and I’ve got the middle school market covered. Mayor says have her talk to Natasha, Natasha is all about the TikTok.
AUTHORIZING STAFF TO CLICK ON LEGAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS
They moved this item out of order. Sarah Edgerton, the IT Director and someone they did not identify speaks to this issue. He says that the background is to make sure that we are following the policies and procedures regarding legal requirements, indemnifications, when we agree and sign up and set up social media accounts with the primary goal of allowing the city as a whole, city department that have social media accounts to have the ability to do some limited advertising if they choose and its funded. This outlines the requirements that are needed to meet the expectations of those agreements, there are a number of considerations that are put in place that need to be met regarding policies, nondiscrimination clauses, indemnifications and purchasing requirements from different thresholds of costs and funding.
Passes on a voice vote with no discussion.
GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE REPORT
Alder Kemble thanks staff for their work, the fiscal note and she looks forward to working on it more as they come up with specific resolutions. They are going to create a committee to do that. As they form the committee to do that, which was introduced by title only today, but Attorney Strange has worked on a version of it and its almost complete, we just haven’t had a final sign off. It would be really good to have someone from your department (finance) at our meetings so that we can be doing the work together to understand what the cost implications are.
Harrington-McKinney says that they will have the opportunity to make referrals to committees and it will have the recommended make up of the newly formed committee, is that correct.
Bidar says there will be a separate resolution introduced with referrals and a recommendation for the make up of the committee. There will be an opportunity separate from the acceptance of the report which is before them today. They will talk about the committee that will be taking on implementation. McKinney wants to make sure that is part of the record. Bidar says it hasn’t been introduced yet.
WORKPLACE CLIMATE SURVEY
This section became so long it became its own article that can be found here.
HOUSEKEEPING ITEMS
Item 10 (chief of staff survey results and annual performance), will be referred to CCEC meeting next week.
2021 BUDGET PROCESS
This item also became long enough that it became its own article that can be found here!
ANNOUNCEMENT
If people want to participate in the Census 2020 video opportunity it starts at 6:15.
CHIEF OF STAFF UPDATE/LEGISTAR UPDATES
Legistar project statement is here.
Kwasi Obeng, the Chief of Staff for the City Council had asked Director Sarah Edgerton from the IT department to share the process taking place, because the software for our legislation is up for renewal or RFP.
Bidar says she has received a number of questions about legistar and the conversations around the process for the software. There is money in the budget for it. Edgerton is here to respond to your collective questions.
Edgerton says they have $250,000 in their budget, its for 2020, they are looking to look at and make a decision this year in 2020 and in 2021 would be implementation. This is going to be a pretty big undertaking, its not only doing a RFP for a new legislative software. They also have to bring in MyCommit which is an old progress system, its a legacy system that was built in the 80’s and they have one person who can handle it and its one of her managers, so it bothers her that he has to get in there to pull reports. It’s used by one person in the city, and that’s Laila in the Mayor’s Office. It’s for the offices and people part of the committee selection process. It’s a very important part of our legislative process, they need it and it keeps track of the appointments, the vacancies and all that. Those two things need to be merged together. The issue is that most of the software that we have seen out there previously when they have looked for offices and people is not very robust. So the legislative side pretty good, and the offices and people side is not. They have always wound up just saying they will stick with what they have. As she’s looking at her budget, she can cut that legacy license for the offices and people. So if they can figure out how to get software that will be able to give Laila and the Mayor’s office what she needs, they will try to do that. They have very preliminarily started the project. They are working with Lisa Veldran, because she was the very first point of contact because that is who they go to when there are issues. That was the first point of contact after Kwasi and Edgerton had spoken. Lisa Veldran and Ken Moen who is the project manager in IT that is working on this and Edgerton sat down. They came up with the draft project statement that you see. It lists out the description of the project, has a timeline but also gives you a pretty good overview of what they are looking for. What they are hoping the software is going to be able to do:
- Citizen electronic commenting
- Board and committee management
- Streaming video integration
- Robust notification on legislation, meetings, minutes, voting
- Robust calendaring
- Robust API
- Integration with other City systems (SharePoint/KnowledgeLake, ESRI, Accela, Cityworks)
- Ability to take notes directly on agendas
- Online search capability – simple and advanced
- Responsive design
- Cloud platform
- Robust reporting – inline for users
- Test site
- Document tracking
- Automatic email reminders and deadlines to staff Find orphan items
- Auditing tools
- Version control, track changes
- Records management
They brought in much feedback that she has recieved over the years from both alders and residents and businesses, TFOGS, information Lisa has collected and they incorporated all that as well as what they have to have for the software. There are some things they just need to be able to do. Approval processes, fiscal notes, push a resolution through, have it assigned to the different committees, all the things you need to have workflows do. But there have been a lot of asks of this software and I’m guessing that these is not any one piece of software that is going to be able to do everything that you are hoping it is going to do. It doesn’t ever work that way. So they are going to have to figure out what are the most important pieces, and they are going to have to prioritize. She is hoping they will come up with the whole list, they will bring it back to this group and you will help us to prioritize the most important things that they need to be looking for as they start going through the RFP process.
Alder Keith Furman says that one of the things that gets lost in the TFOGs report because of the big headline item full-time vs. part-time is this. The legislative system is going to be the biggest legacy of TFOGs. Or at least that is his hope, because of the feedback that was received and because of what they heard. He is grateful this is going on now, his only concern is how do we get more involvement of alders in the process. I know that is not the easiest thing. But he would like to see, especially before the RFP goes out, that there be more discussion with an existing committee or a new committee or something. Because this was such a key part of TFOGS it would be important that people who were involved in TFOGS to put some input into it, because it was such a big deal from TFOGs.
Alder Grant Foster seconds that and it has come up quite a bit in their communications workgroup as well. He says that they should think about the different stakeholder groups. On the back end, the people who are uploading and managing it and in terms of what they are putting in there and for the end users that are getting information out of there. Obviously the council members, but also members of the public in terms of how they can access information. He agrees its a really important one for the council and the more they can be involved in it the better.
Alder Sheri Carter asks that if instead of creating another committee, why don’t they have a special meeting on this and make sure they invite all the parties that need to be there so they can have an indepth discussion.
Edgerton says that sounds good. Bidar says good luck on a date. Edgerton says it is a challenge she is going to accept.
Obeng asks if that should be done through the Comms workgroup and its come up quite a bit and Lisa and Eric are always in those meetings as well.
Edgerton says Ken and her are coming to the next meeting, so they are already going to be getting that. (cross talk) She says they also will be talking to some of the other really big committees, the staff there and asking them to reach out to their committees to talk to them.
ADJOURNMENT
Bidar says they still have a few minutes to say their 30 seconds on the Census. She says she already did hers in Spanish.
