11/17/2008 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Regular Council Meeting Minutes 11-17-08 Page 3 next year's budget. Mayor Rinker has asked Dave to give him a better sense of where we truly have soft cost discretionary items that aren't contract driven. As Mayor Rinker has commented before, next year we have an extra pay period. There are a lot of incentives that we have in our contracts with employees that Mayor Rinker would love to say we can regulate, but we can't, so we have to be careful that we are not going into areas that are going to send the wrong signal, but the bottotn line is we are going to look to much more of an austerity approach on the areas where we can trim the costs. Residents certainly would expect it of us. We are looking at a lot of our neighbors. They are laying off people. They are looking at a lot of other kinds of problems. We don't have the problems that they do, but we do see with this flattening over the last couple of years and now more recently with an actual diminishment in our revenues that a lot of things that we have been able to do that we think generate very good will in the community we are just going to have to be much more careful and judicious on a lot of the things that Mayor Rinker thinks previously we would have been inore liberal in outlaying. A little bit adds up here and adds up there. We are looking internally between adininistration and departments. Mayor Rinker can give you a couple of ideas that already we are seeing. We have talked before about the billing process that we have had with Gates Mills. Ordinance Review has had a chance to look at that preliminarily. The Mayor of Gates Mills has been in extremis for the last two to three weeks. They are kind of operating right now in a closet government in Gates Mills. We have had some dialogue with a number of the officials there. At the end of the day what we are looking at as a cost-saving measure is something we have been talking about for the last couple of years but have targeted 2009 to commence, so these things sort of coincided. That could be a significant savings factor in just approaching this from insurance billing that we have not done in the past. Doug and his counterpart in Pepper Pike worked with the Service Director's Association of the County and presented to Mayors and Managers last month and then last week the Mayors and Managers voted in favor of a set of guidelines - Sensible Salting. This is a good example by analogy of what we are talking about internally here that a lot of communities cover the spectrum in practices. There are some departments where they don't even calibrate the equipment that spreads the salt. Salting in the middle of the night when there is very low use also contributes to additional man and overtime hours. The effort was to reduce the disparity between communities and establish some working guidelines. Some communities have been doing this for quite a while. A number of Mayors commented on that, like Fairview Park. There are other places that are not. This is a way to get us much more consistent across the region. What has been driving it has been the salt shortage, most of all. Again, it is an opportunity that a number of directors have seen to start ratcheting down a lot of the excessive salting from an environmental standpoint as well. The bottom line for most of the Mayors was to make sure that safety is not compromised. Each community is going to be a little bit different. These are guidelines which give us targets. Some communities are hillier than others. Some people have secondary roads, some have interstate highways. There is going to be a whole variety. At the end of the day the goal is to