Town Council - Regular Meeting

all right good evening and welcome to the august 24th 2026 akron town council meeting before we get started i'd like to remind everyone that this meeting is being recorded and your participation is your consent to be recorded and broadcast on the town of akron's youtube channel roll call jim saner here rich solano here oni ramirez here man for the pledge please

pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. I'll bring to order. The first order of business is minutes from the last council meeting of July 20, 2026. We'll have a motion to accept the minutes as presented so move second all favor next we have a akron vca appointment uh then karen kyler is the name that was brought to us

We need to take a vote on that.

You guys have to appoint members for the Akron VCA. I met with Karen a couple of Fridays ago. She's retired and looking to get more involved. And so I told her we had this vacancy and it was at least something to get her foot in the door to go to other avenues and do things. So she was willing to do that. I did send her an email to connect with Heather, just with there being a Akron BZA meeting on Thursday, pending obviously the council approval tonight, but they could at least have a conversation to anticipate maybe attending that meeting.

Well, no other questions? Well, I think I'll make a motion to appoint Karen Kyler to the Akron BZA Board. I'll second. I'll second. All in favor?

Aye. Aye. Okay.

Next is the Akron Library Board appointment, Ryan Adams.

you know this is a reappointment um actually he's filling in one baka is stepping off well this would be juan's replacement and ryan has um expressed that he would be willing to fulfill that role okay just the town council would need to approve it okay uh motion to approve ryan adams to the akron library board seconded on paper all right

Next is Baker Tilly, the 2025 Financial Management Report.

Perfect. Thank you, everyone. Adam Wilcox here representing Baker Tilly. I just wanted to take a few minutes to go through both the water and sewer 2025 Financial Management Reports. We'll start here with water. Do you want to turn to page two? I'm really going to speak with a graph today. If you have questions, let me know. But otherwise, it's going to be a kind of old review. So really you can see what the fund balance is there over the last couple of years. While you print it upwards from 24 to 2025, really the big chunk of that increase was really through the grant fund in terms of your operating funds that actually, or your sinking fund and your fund fund, everything else was pretty consistent there. On the next page, you look at the seeds and disbursements rate. 2025, you can see really your operating receipts and your year-to-year disbursements of your operation and maintenance, debt service, and capital are really staying about equal there. In the coming years, we anticipate there being a bit of a bump in disbursement really due to some of the salary allocation things around between utilities and the civil funds. Look at the next page on page four. These tables compare the budget to actual. In terms of the operating receipts, the actual receipts were a bit below budget, and that's really driven by the large user hydro. actual receipts were up for the year, their usage actually dropped versus the prior year. In terms of operating disbursements, there were a couple of things going on there in terms of budget variances. The big one there for materials and supplies, the chemical purchases were a little bit lower in 2024, which we had looked at for a three-year average for 2025, and 2025 would turn into . So really, that was more of a thing of the budget being artificially low from an outlier versus the material costing abnormal. The contractual services with BS&A, there are higher annual fees than they used to do with Keystone, and there were also some one-time setup fees to get up and operational. And then Repairs and maintenance, there was a one, and there was some coaxial repairs this year, so I wouldn't expect that to be recurring every year. Figure one there is in terms of insurance cost, we would anticipate those increases to continue on an annual basis. Really, those are the main variances there. In terms of Table 7 on the next page, your debt service payments were made exactly as anticipated, no variances there. Really the biggest variance between actual and budget was in terms of what we anticipated for capital spending. We had budgeted quite a few more things in 2025 that ended up occurring throughout the year. So if you look down at table nine, there's a decent gap between total disbursements, budget and actual, and that's really just driven by the capital piece of that. If you look at the O&M, actual spending was a bit above budget and then the other categories were all fairly close. Moving forward into the forecast piece of it on page six in terms of operating receipts or estimated receipts, we anticipate really by and large since there are no currently adopted stay fairly stable with the caveat that assumes that you have the same usage continuing year to year. Like I mentioned earlier, there was a drop in one of the large users. If that were to continue, then you could see slightly declined receipts. But as of right now, we're anticipating stable ones for the next five year period. In terms of operating disbursements, Really the biggest thing that we adjusted at 3% annually for inflation. We also added in some assumed certifications for utility workers and also added in health insurance for one of the employees that was not previously receiving it from the city because they were on a different plan.

It looks like receipts still are exceeding disbursements here for the next five years.

For the operating disbursements, we also have to consider there's around $80,000 of debt on the next page that is being paid annually too. By the time you get to 2029, 2030, there really isn't much room in that for capital allowances with that the creeping costs year to year. Obviously, if we were to try and lower on inflation or if some of that budget increase that we had were less than anticipated, that would give a little bit more clearance. In terms of debt service, like I was saying on the next page, it's around $78,000 to $84,000 a year. It's around $80,000. And that just depends upon the The last piece really of the five years is the estimated capital and all of that. I have it summarized on page seven, but if you flip towards the back of the report on page 10, you can see what makes it up year to year. So really $25,000 each year is a capital allowance. And then we budgeted in the other known pieces of it, like mower replacements, dump trucks, utility trucks, some meter replacements. And that's all based upon a conversation we had with Rebecca and utilities when we were here several months ago.

Aaron, the or Jake, he Filter media replacement, is that part of the grant? We'll cover that.

Let's label that. Number four, how it has the numbers. It's there, down below. Yeah, that's, yeah.

Number four. There you go, Ann. Really, it's a little bit front-loaded here. It's a little bit deceiving. This is the grant-funded project. It's about that in 2020. But if you look down at table 14 and we look back at table seven, you can see that we do have growing negative cash flows each of the next five years. 2026 is really, that one's driven by just the spend down and remaining tragic cost, but the other year it's kind of creeping up as our inflationary allowance heats into the buffer between receipts and disbursements. Look at the next page on table 15 that shows a line there of recommended reserves which is based upon uh reserves that are required such as operation maintenance you have to have two months worth of operating costs or equal two months worth of operating costs your debt service reserve that's required which is based upon uh a building up to a year's worth of debt payments and then your bond and interest fund that's required uh just to set aside money each month for your next payment as well as it also includes capital allowance based upon your average annual capital spending. So right around that $60,000. So that's what's all kind of built into that recommended reserve level. You can see over the next five years, we do anticipate the utilities cash position to decline, but remain involved that recommended reserve level. So really in a nutshell, what i'm uh getting to is while we don't think there's any immediate need for a rate increase it is something that should be spending should be considered over the next couple years and at the current pace it's something we might want to consider in uh 28 29. and i accidentally said the wrong name for the large user it was asinoko sorry i just looking through there and i I wrote the wrong thing down. If you look on page 12, or page 11, sorry, you can see the large user receipts by year. And Sunoco, you can see all those seats are constant with the rate increase. We were expecting to see an increase in Sunoco from 24 to 25, usage drop. Why that's notable is because they make up around 13% of your guys' annual receipts for the utility.

We'll say it seems this year in 26, their consumption has significantly increased back up again. I'll be interested to see how it goes out.

And if they trend back to 24, 23 levels, then that would offset on somewhat of the need for, you know, adjustments and rates of.

Was it 2025 they were doing the construction project over there? Was it 24? Oh, geez. Okay. Okay.

Well, I also think another thing just to note is we have new ownership at the trailer park and they're looking to put additional units back in that haven't been occupied. So we can go from having basically four or five global homes on the system, potentially 22 over the course of time. So that will increase our revenue as well.

That's a great point I should have mentioned. In terms of receipts, I didn't assume any kind of customer growth. So yeah, any new customers with offset, yeah. down the median for rate adjustment. I know I went through that insanely fast. Questions on the water utility side of that?

So the graph on page three was the grant in 2025 as well. receipts on disbursements history.

Yeah, on page three, yeah, the grants are shown and they're not operating receipts and then the project costs. That's why you have just a huge ballooning of a chart right here. And in the future years where we're showing the spend out of cash, we did normalize that and take out the impact of

Thank you for going over the report.

I don't have any additional questions. You guys have anything? Yeah, really, I think, yeah, in terms of water, it really is right now where you kind of wait and see. I don't think it's anything where you're going to kind of be in action. It's just, you know, if we see an uptick in receipts or if you're mentioning additional users, that it's something that, you know, we re-evaluate next year, we look at if we're in a better position, you know, maybe we need no action in a couple of years or if we see the same trend, then maybe we talk about adjusting in 2020 or so. Yeah. Okay. In terms of sewer here, it's a bit of a different picture. Starting on the chart on table one, on page two, while it looks like we have a decrease there in terms of overall fund balances, the important thing to note there is really that's due to you guys paying off your outstanding debt, so your bond and interest fund went away and your sinking fund went away, could you use those to make your last payments on the debt? In terms of actual operating fund, that balance did increase from 24 to 25, which we anticipate with the rate increase that will have no effect. And then on page three, you'll see that the uh debt service on number 25 and that would be the last like i mentioned the last year of your current payments otherwise in terms of uh operating receipts that looks like the rates are set at a level to support all your current current capital outside of the project and uh operating rate expense costs you can see the receipts and distributions uh charts are about equal there in 2025 not really going to talk about much on table three other than uh i can mention on water there were some uh some ships with uh employee kind of allocations and that was just a uh thing of how bsa accounted for those versus how keystone used to account for those on uh page four for the uh receipts really and uh utility was largely on budget and i mean within a half a percent variance overall under one percent variance for operating receipts so i mean it's right on track with where we anticipated it to be uh operating disbursements the personnel costs are or below budget with the bsma allocations i mentioned the other really uh kind of misleading uh outlier here in terms of actual budget variances was in materials and supplies that was driven by you guys' chemical costs. There were a couple of months where there was a shortage of chemicals. So the utility had ran out at that time. they i mean there were just less purchases for the year then than there had been historically and we've talked with rebecca it sounds like going forward uh the chemical costs are anticipated to return kind of up to that budgeted level but this was really just an anomaly driven by by shortages up there otherwise liability insurance that's the uh that's really driven or that's really the same uh insurance where we were seeing um the water utilities it's Not surprising we're seeing in sewer as well. On page five, debt service, once again, the payments were made for the amortization schedule, no variances. And then similar to the water utility in terms of capital, the actual spending was less than budgeted for for the capital items. And some of those items were incorporated into the item project, and then some of the projects just were not completed in that year. So once again, that's kind of skewing table eight there. You look at it, you see a huge discrepancy between the budget to actual at the bottom of the page. And really, once again, that's all capital driven. Your O&M was slightly below budget, pretty close, got serviced directly on. And then in terms of, like I said, receipts, is directly on the mark there. Going on to page six here, the future period. So a caveat here in terms of the estimated receipts, we had built in and shown here rate increases for the project, for the item project. And we had shown those increases at the time based upon the information we had available which uh we had we were targeting uh getting back to debt service coverage 125 which is required to close on srf debt and we were basing that on a srf zero percent loan over 21 years all preliminary we're preparing that report i know eric came here and talked last week we're in discussions with uh srf uh and well they've said they they do uh we should provide a favorable funding package to the city for closing the four-year and uh we don't have specifics in terms of final project cost numbers or So the rate increases we have built in here of 22% to 26% aren't final. What we get back from project costs and that final funding discussion will dictate what those will be. And we'll prepare and update a rate study once all that information is available. But that is why you're seeing the collection receipts and penalties go up each of the next few years was because of those preliminary numbers we had included. And it does also include the OCRA grant for 2026 for the project as well as showing the bond issue. In terms of the operating disbursements piece, that's the same adjustments that we made on the water side for additional certifications and the health insurance adjustment. We also included uh increases for electric cost for discussion with uh with utility uh with the pro once the project's anticipated they anticipate slightly higher utility costs change page yes so utility costs

this is talking to the utility companies well no it was talking yeah sorry and uh talking with yeah jake we that was based on for the utility discussion was based on our current one aerator when we were in discussion of probably putting out another eight we multiplied what our kind of monthly bill electrical cost was by that then by 12 months and kind of got an estimate to what the increase could potentially look like it's not that makes sense anything okay yeah

difference was uh between them what what is in service now what's the service inserts after the project completion yep perfect uh and then we have table 11 on the next page that's once again uh Illustrated based upon uh the uh zero that was a zero percent interest rate spread over the 21 years what they'll come back to those numbers once again we'll determine based upon the final size and funding package and then like water table 12 based upon the capital plan at the back of the report as well as the uh the item project which uh we just showed split over equally over two years If you turn back to page nine, you can see everything that makes up that capital schedule. Once again, the largest driving thing for most years outside of the project is the annual kind of catch-all capital allowance of $25,000. Otherwise, There's a couple of trucks which are the same ones that show up on the water plan because they're split across funds. So on average, excluding the I-DEM project, it's around $44,000 of capital anticipated annually. Going back to page seven and eight, you can see in terms of the increase and decrease in the fund balance, the goal with rate setting once we're all said and done is to set the rate sufficient that the fund balances are increasing each year. in order to pay the proposed debt service, as well as fund the debt service reserve requirement that would be put in place with the new bonds, as well as, like I said, you have to meet 125% debt service coverage, meaning your operating receipts minus operating spurs, the remainder there has to be under 25% of your annual debt service payment. That's just, yeah, required by SRF if you got it. It's a similar requirement if you go on the open market, you can have that as well. Which is why if you look at table 14 on page 8, you'll see that, yeah, your required reserve requirements. You can see a huge jump in 2070, 2030. And that's just because of the funding of that. It's just going to need that service reserve. Yeah, so really the main takeaway on sewer is a lot of it's kind of, I mean, we know the direction you're moving in, like we're going to need a rate adjustment for the project. It's just kind of getting all those final numbers buffed out. And then Eric and I will come back and talk in terms of the final rate study and what those end numbers end up being. Which I know is a big question, and of course that's one question I know everyone has, but I can't quite answer until we see everything. Outside of that, though, are there any other questions on sewer? Thank you. And we're back to, yeah, with this trailer park too. Yeah. If they do decide that the expanding there, let me know that at all, because that would be something like, yeah, that would be relevant in terms of, yeah, in terms of like the rate study.

Is that something we would want to have as a breakout? You know, we've got the top five customers there. To add the new development.

That's specifically if they would ever meet that qualification. Yeah. Like once we have it. Somebody drops out. I understand. Somebody drops out or I mean, I have no idea. That's specifically based on usage and payments for that said utility.

And we have had some changes from year to year. I don't remember if it's water or sewage. One of them I have a footnote that one of them, okay, it must be water, where there was one of them that jumped up in the large users that wasn't there in 2023.

Well, Newark, which was the prior garden apartments, they were never really in the big user. I mean, they went from having like three units occupied to 17 units. So significant increase in consumption there. since the ownership changed.

So I think that's been a... And we just did the top five really because Sunoco was such a large user there. I mean, some places we do, if you think there is a sixth one or if there's like a top 10 we think that really are driving, we could always extend out that.

We just did... Yeah, that's kind of my point. If it turns out that, you know, we got one that's clearly ahead of everybody else and everybody else is around 2%, you know, it'd be nice to see. If there's any changes within that 2% range.

I think it's going to be hard to justify the mobile home community based on these other ones because they will be individual residential homes. They're not going to be paying as a full community park if they do like they said they are going to. So they'll just be part of the residential piece of that, not... Okay.

Yes, you know what their numbers are going to be.

Even if you just know there's going to be 22 new units that weren't occupied.

Yeah, if you know... there you know uh we for sure know those numbers uh we could always uh you know look at building into something into the future okay but yeah we just have to i mean we just have to want to know that that's a pretty sure thing before we absolutely incorporate that just because if it doesn't materialize and you're short in terms of yeah what you need for rates and then you're you know uh come back and make it another small adjustment because of that shortfall.

Okay.

Well, we'll wait and see for SRF.

Yeah, once we have that fingers crossed, yeah, like I said, they did tell us that they would incentivize us to act before the end of the year and that they are looking to help out the community, which is i mean much yeah it's always nice to have them in a call say that because uh yeah looking at the project priority list i mean there was a gap there but we sat down with them like and the enterprise told you sat down with them for a good half hour hour and went through i mean the history of the project and uh kind of where it was at on the project list and you know asked them if there was yeah any way they thought they could do anything to help and said they want to work towards the completion of the project sooner rather than later. So they would look at helping out.

Fingers crossed.

Well, thank you. You're welcome to stay. You're welcome to go home. I'm probably going to head home.

Can't blame you. Thank you, everyone. Have a great night. You too. any other questions that come up yeah feel free to reach out as well and good luck with the budget thank you next is the rtc lease agreement determination

So Joe McCarter called and with now everything being fiber in the town of Akron and surrounding areas, there's no longer a need for kind of the Wi-Fi service on top of the water tower. So he was just were going to be removing their equipment here in the next 45 days and so i thought it was sufficient there was no exact terms in the agreement that said how long notice they had to give or anything like that so i just said a couple months is sufficient on finishing out the payments as well um we did kind of look at our bill because we do get on top of like the $250 a month, we got some credits on our RTC bill, kind of funneled through like the cable and stuff. So we changed because that's a pass through for them. So realistically, like they're losing that money every month where like if they could discount maybe the fiber, different situations to make it better for them.

But right now we took both of them.

We did have a basic back at the water plant and then we had expanded here. We took it down to a basic level just the way the local channels if needed for anything. um he's going to continue that pass through like the credit there but leslie and i are going to kind of look at the bill and see we might be paying for cable and then the credit comes somewhere else but um that's just some modifications that are to come but basically we lose 250 a month from rtc for the tower space but

We'll be okay. No new information from Verizon.

Crickets. Nothing. Still get a check. Fair enough. So I just wanted you guys to see that. I had let Jake know when Joe had called that if he saw the RTC guys out doing it, that was what was going on.

Thanks. Next is the CHA consulting agreement for professional services.

I gave this to you last month. It's for the wastewater project and everything. It was Midwestern. They've merged with CHA. So I gave it to you for a month to review. I sent it to Andy. He didn't see any concerns with it.

like to move forward with continuing their services town of akron you'll need to approve it all right so i'll make a motion that we continue our services with hcha um professional services the town of akron i'll second okay all right thank you Next is a BF&S 2026. Is that PASER report?

Yeah, I just, I don't know that you guys have ever really seen the PASER map and everything that we get, but Butler, Fairmont and Cypress does an assessment of our roads, which then put it into this nice report that shows you kind of the condition of the roads, where they're at. And then this is also then uploaded, I upload it annually into LTAP, which is a requirement to do the CCMG grant. um so it's just more for you to review it looks like our roads overall are in great shape excellent yeah i see a lot of nines and sevens and eights even the project that we just completed has been updated in here so like those nines and i mean there are a lot of our the project that was done rule three central is there i mean i know it's great that we get this grant funding what is there a point to say you know what we can take a year off and so that will be our goal is to do this next round because we have about i don't know five roads that the um sidewalks um are not ada compliant um that we control so we would like to get those completed if we can get funded And that would be then our kind of last focus. And then, you know, then we can maybe take a little bit of time off and unless a road really starts to get in poor condition that, you know, we would seek the grant again. But I would like to see this be completed. I would agree. So we went around, what was it, a couple weeks ago? We went around with Andrea and Madison and just looked at the roads that we had given. The other thing Jake and I discussed too, there's some alleyways. that are in need, even though those can't be included in the CCMG, but maybe we have them as a separate, when the project is bid, this is project, but we also have these additional. So up front, we could see black and white, those would be. So, I mean, if there's something you see as far as the alleyways, like when you're around, if you could share that as well, but, and they're supposed to come back, we'll see. um the alleyway on walnut street um part of that is still i think anticipated to be the concrete ripped out because it was in the 25 foot 25 foot in to get it fixed so we'll see what happens but that was on the punch list of when we met last friday so but overall the project there was very minimal repairs or things that needed to be corrected i mean very very pleased with the work that they did compared to prior years so yeah that's incredible did not need to do it to that at all but and that's what we told i mean we sat there and talked to you hey that's yeah it's an insult so i mean overall i mean they've been excellent to work with they're very But Butler, Fairman, and Cipher, I will say Corey was exceptional. He was on top of everything, making sure quantities and everything matched so we weren't getting taken advantage of. I'll be honest, for the few years that maybe we were doing it and we just paid the bill that came in because you assumed it was done right, having them as another set of eyes being in has been worth every penny that we've spent on them, I will share.

I firmly believe. Everything together we learn.

absolutely what it should look like what it needs internally in our own minds now we know this i learned what a good job yeah so so yeah so anyway that was just more for so i see they've got a bill here so that is another portion yes yeah this isn't final payment this isn't final payout no this is just a claim number three um FOR THAT.

I WOULDN'T WANT TO PAY THE LAST ONE UNTIL THEY FINISH.

NO, THEY DO NOT GET THEIR RETAINAGE FOR A REASON BECAUSE OF THE LIST.

OKAY. ALL RIGHT. SO THE BALANCED AMOUNT DUE TO THIS APPLICATION, OH, GOSH, I CAN'T EVEN READ IT.

$122,070.77. Oh, no, that's the balance. Hold on. Sorry, honey. $485,871.44. Mark signed off on that? This is Corey. Corey signed off? Okay. Motion that we approve the third install payment.

to D.C. Construction Services for $485,871.44. All in favor? Aye. Awesome.

If your name's on that. Yeah. Okay.

From the reports, Justin, we should have an incident report in front of you giving an update on Johnson and On the street where we had a complaint of someone wanting to fully stop. I talked to the original complainants on that. Two weeks ago and spoke with him and both husband and wife, and they said since I've talked to that individual, there's been no issues down. And they found something. I've been out down there during the day some. I don't see any reason to put April in there. That's what I come up with. I know schools only got in session for a couple weeks, but still yet, I don't know that. Clark will be on shift maybe this week. This is his long week, but more than likely probably next week. short weeks he has more days off than the other okay so um badges still aren't here but i found a way that we can get him into the system and have badges so um i don't know if they've got one guy that's making these bad even i have no idea i was out there today um apparently the same individuals making

Other than that, everything's going. You could try Cracker Jacks. Probably in the next week or two, sending out another round of ordinance violations. I did them in sections.

Not everybody is complying one way or another. We've got one that Tony and I are working with that has lost the title to a vehicle. So we're trying to get that taken care of. Not much they can do or we can do at this point, but they're communicating with us. So that's the main thing. Doesn't matter if it's going pretty well.

I talked to Andy a couple of meetings ago about

updating our ordinances regarding oh wow unusable i haven't i haven't over there yet talk to uh so like okay i know they went through this rich i want to say from the last year and kind of see what what they had old wise versus what they did knew yeah um what changes they made

And I don't know if there's a separate listing for fines and penalties or if that all gets wrapped up in the ordinance.

Do you know if he's looked at our old side? I talked to him today, but wasn't even close to a totally separate issue.

Make a note to follow up with him.

I'll try to get over there. Try to... find a time here for the next council meeting that I can go over there with him, maybe for an hour and sit down, change a little of what's old and like to see. I want your guys' input as well. Sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to make sure if we're updating one portion of it that we update it all. And so it was written 50 years ago and you had to find a $5 to move the needle.

um like pines and stuff were paid at town hall that's all changed since i've been i mean pines are now played paid reports and then okay so and i'm sure a lot of that stuff is has definitely changed the procedures and we probably need to have the working change but yeah i'll do i can get that done here next month and i and i know there's

a lot of, uh, folks that would like to have a trash pickup day. And, you know, I'm not in favor of something like just a blanket, set your trash out, whatever you've been storing up for 10 years and the town will pay to get rid of it. But perhaps we could coordinate with whoever the trash owners are, uh, you know, and, and, um, coordinate somehow where they're contracting individually.

We tell people if somebody calls in here and they have bulk and stuff that's outside of our residential trash, we'll advise them to call and make arrangements. We'll tell them, here's a list of people you can call. And here's people who have roll-offs you can rent at this, whatever the case may be. And that's where I

Maybe there's where the communication.

But there's not a lot of people. And I mean, we have our trash customers, but there's a lot of people that already contract with their own individual trash.

But they're not putting their bulk.

But that's where it comes back to the rubbish side of like, Justin and Andy, and you guys need to get that addressed. Because at this point, it doesn't sound like we really have anything to.

Right, right. Okay. Yeah, that's right. If a lot of people are contracting already, they get a letter from us saying, hey, you need to start cleaning up your yard. Have your trash hauler call them and have them pick it up to get it taken care of. It'll take some effort on our part, I think.

No, guys, got to roll off. yeah and that's that's how it used to be that's fine a lot of the stuff when we didn't have spring plate up there

lot of people would come in and go through and take what was yeah but then you had a lot that took advantage of um hey i've got a buddy who's got a truckload of tires i live in town bring a man and and that's what you absolutely that's what you run into absolutely and then you've got you know one year already i don't know how many

old paint cans we had that who knew if they were lead based or whatever and that's what kills me is if somebody all you have to do is take it to the recycle center in rochester they'll take all the paint yeah they will you know we've taken stuff over the big old tvs with the the old tubes in them you know five ten bucks they'll take it you know so it's Can't be that big of a financial burden to anybody.

You're saying that. What if people aren't educated and know that that resource is there? I don't know.

Car batteries, you know, the recycle center will take it. All that kind of stuff. Tires.

Well, I've been taking some of the tires to use. That's true, right? Yes. Yes. All of them, but. So here we can verify.

OK, well. Yes, I will touch these working and working on it. Let's hopefully we can resolve this by Christmas.

Yep, we'll see when we get some time. Might be a Christmas gift. Jake.

Alrighty, work on the water plant has started. The filter tank is. uh the tape itself is pretty much done we're just waiting for the filler media to get there and get put in and get a sample on it and hopefully put it back in service um the wells the east well has been clean and it is ready to be fired back up it's the sample came back good but the company that's doing the piping has not made it back to put it all back together so we've got a perfectly good well just sitting there getting anything done and I was told that they are helping with the stuff down where all the storms and all the overwhelming rain happened um but I think they're supposed to be here middle to end of this week I hope um So yeah, once we get that one put back in service, then the other well, we'll get the same thing, get cleaned out, new plumbing, new meters. The SCADA system, how we control our tower levels and all that stuff can be from our phone. All that stuff's updated and pretty much ready. We're just, again, waiting on the piping. With the piping, the new meters will come and then Those meters will shoot through the water plant and we're just kind of waiting on all that. But the building tank looks beautiful. They did such a good job. We've repaired two water leaks over the last month. We've got another one right now behind Christy's. We've got a guy coming Wednesday to listen to it and see if he can pinpoint where it is because it's bubbling up in like a 15 foot radius. trying to figure out where it's at before we tear it apart. We're planning on doing another hydroflushing after all the projects are done because we've had unfiltered water out in the system for about a month now, right? Yeah. So we've had too many complaints about it, but people noticed. So plan is to do a flushing after that, hopefully everything out. um the vfd drive at the lagoons that controls the blue frog right up i don't know what happened if they got stripped by lightning if wires touched on the inside i don't know um but i sent a picture of it to dan dan's work on getting a price for a new one he says they're reasonable that's the end so we'll see Lagoons are open. They're operating fine. We're just not getting the flow out of it. We want to. Where we put the two new valves onto the old valves, I think it bottlenecks a little bit. Whenever it bottlenecks, I think we keep getting troubles all the time. So what we were doing, we were using the trash pump to get more flow out of it and the pull rope on the trash pumper. We have to put that back together. But thankfully, I mean, the rain outlook isn't like it was two weeks ago. So. Yeah, as we mentioned, we did the walkthrough for the CCMG project. Everything's good for the most part. There's a couple of sidewalks are cracked. They're going to come back and review and hopefully do it. the right way this time, I guess. I kind of thought it was done and correct, but... And the frontier line, it says it's still down on here. That is no longer true. We have got a frontier line up. So that's good news. Not in the report. I forgot to put in there, but you guys, I put on there, Town of Akron will have protection area plan, five year update, draft one. Hydrophase does our wellhead protection plan every five years, and he recommended to me that I recommend you guys to review it and see if there's anything you notice in there that needs to be. It's basically just like a plan for possible contamination around fields. And like some of the areas in here are fields around here with crops. Some houses that are still on septic systems. I think so, maybe. So, like, if you guys think of anything that's not on there, let me know. I'll call you guys and make a link and see what you think. I can either do that, but... You'll give us a copy? It should be in there somewhere. Ah, okay. Got it. And I'm an idiot. I printed everything front to back. Back to back. Yeah, I think that's mostly everything. All right. Any questions?

One quick thing that I'll share that I didn't include in the package. Oh, sure. Give me a little bit.

Yes, sir. Have we paid Asher the water tower? So we paid them. Yeah. We gave them the crack out and Mark suggested if we hadn't paid them yet, keep the final paper when we filled.

How does Mark not know anything? no um that what i'm gonna put that on the record too while it's recorded and people know that we addressed it but um asher with the overspray that happened to some of the vehicles down at hoffman's um i got a call again today from aaron they were recommended to take the vehicles to the body shop in wabash because that's where asher instructed him one of the vehicles came back it didn't even fix it um he's not getting anywhere with them i did send him the phone numbers to mark today and andy i also sent him to the gentleman that i was dealing with last week on like the payment situation i sent his cell phone and i just basically said try all of these if you get nowhere call me back But I said, my understanding from Mark, from Rich and Joe at Asher was, well, your body shop, fix it, invoice us, we'll pay the invoice. So I'm a little frustrated that like, I'm getting this today. And like, you thought it was being handled and now like we paid them the final payment where like we could have held. You know, we were holding until we got clear samples. Well, now there's this other, but that's where I told Aaron, I said, I'm not, we will, we will make sure you're taken care of and right, because that's not your fault. That's where we've paid an engineer and they need to make sure they're following through and getting us taken care of and whatever means that needs to be done.

So equipment that they need behind a giant sandblaster and a bunch of segment, two pallets of sand, three pallets of sand.

Poses for it. All the stuff.

What's that worth? I don't know. We'll find out.

And then we'll give that money to Aaron to pay for it. Aaron might want to buy Sam Lester. I've gotten a hold of them three times. Mark has gotten a hold of them several times. And every time, you know, be there in a couple days. Yeah.

I heard that so it might be one of their rented units probably.

Would assume one random might have a tag or something. But yeah, it's good morning. But it was a little shoot, but I mean like the work they did. It's pretty impressive for how incompetent it's going to be.

Great. It's everything that's about it.

Look nice.

all right well let us know how that transpires if you still have problems and i'll push on more feelings that'd be good um one thing just with all employees here that gives benefits um i met with becky on our medical vision and dental life a d d all that renewal um so our health insurance renewal came back at 4.1 percent which is our premium that we will be paying is still less than back in 2024. we made that significant 25 savings when we moved to the chamber plan and it just unfortunately went up because we're no longer us being a small employer with 10 employees or less part our pools are extremely small and what we're capable of getting but with that 4.1 our deductibles don't change we're still getting all the coverage that we had this year so um that's a good thing our hri which is our vision that was um guaranteed rates for four years from october 1st to 25. um napon dental had a three percent increase um but for the last couple years like she's been able to not to go back at them and they've not raised rates on us so i mean i think we're due our short term long term had a zero increase the life insurance went up 10.24 which is a dollar and four cents a month so when i say 10 it's very minimal um on that so ipep which we still have for workers comp they still provide um 10 000 accidental death and disperment for all of our employees for free um So realistically, I do have everybody's open enrollment packets on my desk. I'll give you those towards the end of the week. It just the month of September is your open enrollment. If you don't want to make any changes, just sign and give it back to me for your permanent record. But outside of that, the other thing with changing. So right now we're in this renewal. We changed to a MUA level funded plan. And so we're now members of the Indiana Chambers, which is different than what we were before. So I am now a member of One Southern Indiana because we don't have any chambers in our area that support. So for $200, I became a member of them to be able to be a part of this plan. With that. The renewal, I always liked October 1st because it helped the budget planning with this. Their renewal is actually in April. So we'll be doing the medical side of it again in April. Becky will still go back out in the market, make sure that's the same plan that's best for us to be in. Just understand that's why it's controlled by them on when the renewal is not so much or before on the Anthem side when we're on, we can do that. So there's that for... benefit package of the employees. So good. Everybody good. Stay where we're at. No problems. You're saying everything's good.

Oh, good news here.

So on that, I don't have anything other than our dockets.

Nothing from Andy. andy did not have anything written at this time all right i'm on dockets uh 425 thousand eighty four dollars forty nine cents and payroll off docket of twenty three thousand seven sixty eight uh motion that we approved the dockets uh as presented unless the council has any questions Anything else that needs to be brought up? If nothing else, we'll adjourn the meeting. Do we have a second?

Second.

All in favor? Aye. Aye.