Police chief Muir gave an update this morning on police operations for the year. The whole discussion about how the police handles sexual assault claims will be the topic of discussion next week. This week he focused on operations in general. He had lots of data to share. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get a real take away message from crime statistics because there are a lot of variables at play.  First you have the actual number of crimes. Then you have things like the staffing level in the police department, how resources are prioritized, societal attitudes towards reporting crimes, etc.

Budget wise, the department is 49.35% through its $11,746,286 budget with 53% of the year complete. $10,742,886 of that budget is payroll. There are 117 people in the department with 100 of those being officers.

He also presented the report we requested when we granted them extra-jurisdictional authority within five miles of city limits. There were something like 21 incidents and they all appeared to be completely appropriate. His last item was a short pitch about binge drinking and how this will be one of the department’s priorities. He handed out a brochure with all sorts of interesting stats. Montana is in the bad category on this one.

In Conservation we learned about the Mayor’s climate action task force. They have been working through defining goals for the city and developing implementation plans. It all sounded like it was moving along really well. I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to support this effort when it comes before council.

In PAZ we were back to subdivision regs again. We put the standards for short courts back in the regulations but continued to support the planning board’s recommendation to allow them only by variance. Next time we will work on dressing up the standards some more but they will only be there for when the developer can show a hardship as the reason for using the tool. Adam and I were the only ones who voted to allow them by right.

Over lunch a bunch of us went to the presentation put on by the Chamber of Commerce. Among other things we heard a presentation from BBER about the local economy. In the 90’s things were growing fast. Since 2000 it has been slow. The perception that we had rapid growth persisted long after it slowed down.  Things slowed down more and have picked up less than our peer cities. Basically, our economy sucks and it will probably stay that way for a while.

We also had an incredibly one sided presentation from the CEO of Mountain Water on why city ownership of the water utility is a bad idea. I can certainly understand why it would be a bad deal for him.

In public works we approved a sidewalk project along East Broadway headed to East Missoula where those girls were killed. Assuming we get somewhere with our new sidewalk financing model it will be applied to this project. We also approved the operating agreement with MDT for the Russell Street project. The agreement meets our concerns about having an ongoing say in how the project unfolds.

Our last meeting was the committee of the whole where we discussed the future of OPG. Both the city and county CAO’s were there to answer questions. My main concern over the whole thing is splitting up the planning and development functions at the city line instead of working with the whole urban growth area. My preference would be to form this new one stop shop concept and have the county contract back to us to provide comprehensive services for them too in the same department. But the county isn’t interested in that. Still not many details being shared on all this. Hopefully we will have a more clear picture before we are expected to make a decision.