City Council - Regular Meeting

Good. As we have a quorum, I'm calling us into session right now. City Council.

SECTION 551.087 DISCUSS COMMERCIAL FINANCIAL INFORMATION RECEIVED FROM AN EXISTING BUSINESS OR BUSINESS PROSPECT FROM WHICH THE CITY IS NEGOTIATING FOR LOCATION OR RETENTION OF A FACILITY OR FOR INCENTIVES THE CITY IS WILLING TO EXTEND OR FINANCIAL INFORMATION SUBMITTED BY THE CITY.

VERY GOOD. AND WE WILL NOW CONVENE TO EXECUTIVE SESSION.

Council has completed its executive session. The time is 1.44.

Mr. City Manager, do you have everything you need for today's meeting, sir? Yes, sir. Okay. Ms. City Secretary, do you have everything you need?

You're ready to go?

Great. All right. Good afternoon, everyone. I appreciate you guys attending and look forward to running a good meeting here with you today. We've got some business to get to and a few ceremonial items. We will officially recognize a quorum in this chamber here and move forward with our business meeting. um today we have the honorable warren coble coming up here to lead us in a prayer mr coble if you come forward everyone if you'll rise for the invocation stay stay standing for the pledges good afternoon father god we come here today with an express purpose of thanking you we have an express purpose god for

worshiping you. We've come for no other reason than to let you know that you are our God. A song written several years ago by a young lady that says, because of who you are. And that's the only reason that we stand before you today, God, is because of who you are. Not only that, God, but because you've been so gracious and so kind and so merciful, we stand here because of whose we are. Thank you for another day. Thank you for another opportunity. We ask, O God, thy blessings upon these men that are in charge of this meeting today. We thank you for the wisdom that you've given them, God, the knowledge and the strength to move in the area that they're moving in. But most of all, God, we thank you for Amarillo, Texas. Thank you for allowing us to be a part of this great city. We thank you for all that you've done for us. We thank you for all that you will do. And we thank you for all that you are doing. We say all of this in your precious son Jesus' name. Amen and amen. in the visible, with liberty and justice for all. By the name of the Texas flag, I pledge allegiance to Thee, Texas, one state,

We appreciate you guys doing that. I hear the front row out there leading by example. So today I've got two recognitions. And so we're going to start down here, Council, if you'll meet me downstairs with Panhandle Legends. And if we could get those that are here to come up front, and then we'll move in to read the lead.

I'll read this, thank you.

So our first proclamation or certificate of recognition today is for Panhandle Legends. Whereas Panhandle Legends is an award-winning series that has received wide acclaim in Amarillo and throughout the Texas Panhandle region, and whereas the series highlights the history, heritage and notable people of Amarillo and the surrounding area, preserving and sharing the stories that shape our community's identity, and whereas Pan de Jano Legends serves as a valuable educational resource with viewers, educational institutions, schools, and teachers using it to support learning and promote greater understanding of local and regional history, And whereas the continued success of Panhandle Legends brings positive attention to Amarillo by showcasing the city's unique history and its important role in the Texas Panhandle. And whereas the writers, producers, and sponsors of Panhandle Legends have made a meaningful contribution to Amarillo's history, culture, civic pride through their dedication and achievements. Now, therefore, we, Mayor and City Council members of the City of Amarillo, Texas, do hereby declare and recognize Panhandle Legends and expresses our appreciation to the writers, producers, and sponsors whose work has contributed to the preservation, education, and celebration of Amarillo's history and heritage.

Congratulations.

Well, this project, I was just telling King in my time hop, anyone familiar with time hop? Just about two days ago, we were working on our first profile, which was Frenchie McCormick. And it took us a little bit of a road to get to where we are, a lot of education, a lot of due diligence. But we had tons of meetings, King and I and the team, and we launched a beautiful, beautiful project. It has 12 episodes. We're about to launch our last episode in August. Sad, but it's been a great experience. King is brilliant. He knows the panhandle more than probably almost anyone in this town. And I was happy to be a facilitator of his idea and to partner with him on the project. So thank you, King.

I would just like to thank the Mayor and City Council and the City of Amarillo and the area for embracing these programs. It's been a wonderful project and I'll let you in on a little secret, there's more to come. So thank you Mayor and thank you Council.

One, two, three. Thank you.

Thank you very much. So we got a few special guests here.

All right. And the rest of the crew, come on up. This is some special friends that we've had an opportunity to meet.

So come on up, and we'll go over here, and we'll get a picture made real quick. Let's go right over here.

This is the Read the Lead Club, and they are an outstanding organization.

A GROUP OF YOUNG FOLKS, AND WE'VE HAD THE PRIVILEGE OF SEEING THEM AT THE WAR MEMORIAL. COUNCILMAN REED AND I, I SAW THEM THERE AND MANY OTHER AREAS IN THE CITY. AND THEY ALSO HAVE THE BEST LEMONADE IN THE PANHANDLE. THAT IS THEIR RECOGNITION.

NAILA, WOULD YOU COME UP HERE FOR JUST A SECOND? THERE WE GO.

AND WOULD YOU READ A LITTLE BIT ABOUT WHAT WE'RE DOING HERE?

GOOD AFTERNOON, MAYOR, COLE, STANLEY AND CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS. MY NAME IS NAIELE MATTHEWS. I'LL BE A FIFTH GRADER AT EMERSON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. THREE THINGS I'VE ENJOYED ABOUT PARTICIPATING IN SEE OUR KIDS READ TO LEAD IS LEARNING BUSINESS STRATEGIES. and the entrepreneurship development through participation in the 2026 Amarillo Lemonade Day on May 2nd, where I created the winning recipe and won best tasting for my book club. I enjoy receiving reading incentives through the Pisa Hut book program as well as Brahms Book Buddies program. I've also enjoyed making new friends that don't attend my school.

My name is Shatara Mathis, and I'm the Executive Secretary and Community Coordinator. And this program actually got birthed out of just a vision of recognizing that we had children in the North community that was reading below grade level. And so therefore, God gave me a vision, and I actually started using Home Depot workshops to help the kids increase their reading. And so it made it fun, but it didn't put them under pressure to read with a large group. A real community champion right here.

Can we get a photo with you guys? Yes, please. We're going to get a photo here.

One, two, three. One more time.

One, two, three. Thank you.

Yes, they heard you say you're part of the team.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for letting us do that. We appreciate you guys honoring, especially those young ones out there. Okay, at this time, we're going to go over announcements. Do I have any announcements that need to be made? No, sir. Okay. No announcements moves us into item number four, which is our discussion items. Item 4.1 is discuss the roles and responsibilities of the city council. I'm sorry of the council audit committee. And so I'm going to walk us into that and then probably try to lean on. um really council member tips worked with me on that one for what two years were you on that one for two years and then uh i think i've sat on it the longest and right now prescott is on it with me and so um ideally what we'd like to do is just have a brief conversation in front of you guys take a little feedback from council on like what what we need this committee um to do so we're going to start with talking about kind of how it's functioned in the past Uh, to council members, usually it's it's the mayor and then another volunteer or nominated council member that serves on that. We typically we have, like, I want to say the role is an ex officio. So we've got somebody with background from finances. Do you know Mr Frigo? Is he is he considered just a member or does he have a title in that committee?

He's a member of the committee. Yes, it's um. THE MEMBERSHIP IS TWO MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL, CITY MANAGER, ASSISTANT CITY MANAGER OR THE CFO AND THEN THE AUDIT COMMITTEE. I WOULD HAVE TO FIND THE OTHER ONE. Yes, ma'am.

He serves as chair of your Amarillo Hospital District Board, and that is one of the four different boards that one of the chairs from those boards fills that fifth seat on the audit.

So out of the four different boards that are financially based, there's one that's nominated out of one of the four chairs and they come down. So that's great. I think. council what i what i need you to hear me say is there's there's our internal auditor uh mr gerber that's functioning very well and accomplishing a lot and trying to take direction from different sources and needs and and so i think we could gain some strategy and we could also gain um Uh, some procedural, um, direction if if we incorporated him into that committee and then, uh, the 2nd request that I have is really in frequency. So. We have been a very involved council on the budget, budget process, understanding the budget, understanding the monies. This committee, when I first got to sit on it, really just met a couple weeks, if that, before something was taken to the council. And what we were tasked with reviewing back then was just the audit. And of course, that's just a general audit, kind of comprehensive. We would get the audit, try to understand the audit and then make a recommendation to counsel that they should accept the audit. But then there wasn't a great deal of work being done on the audit committee. And so my curiosity is, is are we not utilizing an important committee to the extent that it could be used for? And so. An example here would be our internal auditor is technically like an employee of the city and sits underneath our city manager and is taking direction from the city manager. In some of our requests going back and forth as the mayor, I was able to just reach directly out to you, Neil, and ask him, can you go and pull these documents? Can you bring this? Or if I have a concern or any council member has a concern, or if a citizen has a concern and they bring it to a council member, Really, there's no place that seemed as appropriate as this committee for you, Neil, to take direction. So in trying to satisfy like my request for CIP projects and some of the other things, he was working. But I felt like as the mayor, like that's not the best way for me in sitting on a governing body to try to direct a city employee. Really, going through the city manager would then give that direction. But city manager was already working on a whole nother, you know, pathway of things that he was trying to run down. And so consequently, my request became a little bit myopic and more centralized on a few key areas. What we have is we have a committee that sits there that could give direction and feedback. And if I, the mayor was to go to that committee and say, hey, These are the things that I'm seeing or that I'm needing or not even concerns, just ideas in the way in which we're operating. Some of the budgets that we're blessed with, you know, you end up getting a $35 million grant that comes in or something else. Your sales tax is up mid-year. You have all sorts of opportunities to be way more nimble within the organization. We don't have to look very far. or very many weeks past to see water main breaks, potential loss of pressure, maybe a chlorination issue where we had to work real hard and those guys, those team leaders over there pulled together on a long Friday, Saturday, all night to make sure that we, the customers, were served. If we had an audit committee that met more than once a year, and they were meeting timely, they were giving direction and taking direction, and tasked with a little bit more of, let's be more up to date, let's be more analytical in how we're doing and the way we're spending the money. For the past few years, we've ran a budget that, this previous year's budget, We couldn't even tell you the actuals until just a few weeks ago, right? So the audit committee could do so much in helping us understand where we're at, where we're trying to go. And really what it would do with our internal auditor is, UNIL's been impressive in putting together some protocols and some templates. that where he's got some programs that he can require different departments to come in line with. And they're really tracking from a construction background. It's more like having a controller. You know, you can see the building project going up out in the field. but if you don't have a controller in the office you don't know if all your paperwork's in line if you're paying your bills on time if you're over or under budget what was your waste factor there's a ton of things in there that i see that he's gifted in and so council i'm just giving you a little bit of the pitch here. The audit committee, in my opinion, is meeting once a year as a rubber stamp just to kind of get a document that's typically 250 pages. They have zero time to really look it over. They're supposed to digest it and then make a recommendation that I don't know that we've really even heard. Like, I don't know that you've ever had a member of the committee come forward and say, Hey, we're recommending you do this with with that audit. It's just been procedural, right? And we struggled through that this last go around, and I would hope that the next mayor and councils would have a little bit smoother path. So essentially what I'm asking for is, would you consider creating that committee to be tasked? And so we have an opportunity here today. Item 4.2 is help define the scope of work on this forensic audit that we've discussed as needed. Well, am I gonna scope that work? Is city manager gonna scope that work? I hope not. This would be a great example of a functioning committee where we could task an audit committee to get together, go and find three highly reputable firms that perform these type of forensic audits, let each firm interview the council, interview a few city managers and come forward with their recommendation of based on what I'm hearing and you guys are telling me your problems are, These are the things that my firm would dig into. Then let that audit committee understand where we're trying to go. They make a recommendation of we think this firm is the best suited and it comes out of a committee that has had meetings and given some thoughtfulness. It's not as hard for you guys to digest out there of wait, this is the city manager's audit. Or will this scope just came from the mayor's office? Like, isn't that a political position? What's he up to? Right? So, so in trying to hand this off and put this in an appropriate fashion, we could do several things. We could keep our budgets online. We could do mid year budgets. We could see actual sooner. We could implement some of the plans that Mr. Gerbers got going already. We could give him a place to go and report to, to take further direction from, to assist in. And really what we would do at the end of all that is we would just have a much more open, comprehensive set of books. And if you wanted to know, like as a mayor who's tried to lead and function, In my biggest role of helping lead the city financially, my biggest problem is no secret. Like, I don't have a good up to date open set of books. That's been my struggle, you know, and so in in that struggle, becoming my city manager struggle like I hate that because he struggles with the same thing of. We don't know where we're at. We don't know where this went. We don't have that document. That's not up to date today. And that's not shade on any certain person. That's just a $570 million budget being ran this year and even more so maybe in the future years. That's an enormous organization to have an audit committee that meets once a year. And then you've got an internal auditor that doesn't really have a place where he can report and kind of take direction from. other than having to field it from different council members. So I threw out a whole lot. I know that's quite a bit to digest, but if I don't put it all out there, I feel like you'll think I'm leading you in the conversation, and I'm not. I got a few things that I'm trying to accomplish, and step one is, do you like the audit committee meeting once a year? Would we think we could get more out of them? And if we could, what would you like to see? And I'll just stop there for a minute.

I'll speak to it, seeing how that we served on this committee. I would be interested to see, or I think it would be better to serve the community better if the audit committee met more often. I don't know what that number is, if it's quarterly, because we've talked about looking at quarterly reports a little more in our new policy. But to be able to see where we are, to be able to look at Asheville, to see we're on budget, we're not on budget, just to have a little bit more influence versus just meeting once a year. Because us meeting once a year, we get that thick book of 500, 600 pages, rubber stamp it, and we move on. We have a few questions. There's no time to really answer those questions, but if we're going to have the Audit Committee, I think that that's the reason we should have it. Increasing it, I think the membership or the member numbers would be helpful too. So that's my two cents.

Thank you, sir. Anybody else want to jump in? Councilman Simpson.

So let me go back here. So when was the Audit Committee established and what is the current purpose of the Audit Committee?

So we have resolution 04-05-16-2, so it would have been 2016. Section 1 says, there is hereby created the audit committee to serve as an advisory committee to the city council regarding financial information, financial reports, and communications with the city's independent auditors. Then it just goes on from there to say who's on the committee, and that's the only guidance given in that resolution for the committee.

stephanie's anything else i think that was all that is correct there was one other resolution that amended that original one but all it did was change the title of one of the members to chief financial officer to match our structure so it says the the purpose of it is to give advice it's an advisory committee to the city council and who's it supposed to be advising advising the city council okay i just want i mean

I don't recall getting any advice from the advisory committee, so I'm kind of wondering how has this benefited council?

I don't think it has.

Then why do we need to have it?

Well, I mean, I think it's good to have a council that's looking at all the things. You think how much time that we spend on budgetary items and that kind of thing. Would it not be better to have that committee to handle some of those things and give a report back to council?

But what I hear is that the proposal is to turn it from advisory to directional. Providing direction is what I heard to provide direction to internal audit staff to provide direction.

Yeah, I, I agree with you, uh, councilman Simpson. I'm curious, like, in serving on the committee, I've never advised the council as a fellow on it. Right? We, we kind of felt like we were giving us a false sense of. of education, when we showed up, other council members are like, well, you're on the committee, so you must know, like, is everything good? Because I didn't have time to read it. And so really, we weren't given the opportunity to read it and understand it, digest it, really go through the numbers. So I think expanding it or discontinuing it, you know, like if we're going to say, like, we don't need that, well, then I think we probably need to address these other concerns that I have in a different way. But this is one way that I think we could get An existing structure that we could expand that has a little bit of teeth in its way of, you know, it doesn't need to be the final say, I need to hold that at Council, but then it should be giving recommendations. and taking recommendations from staff and internal auditor, as well as like you think about the struggle with the auditor, right? So I was in constant communication with CLA. They had nowhere to go other than me and staff. If they had had an audit committee that they were working with that was functional, they would have been able to route most of that through the committee at large. And then I would have gotten more input in this case from Councilman Prescott. And so we probably wouldn't have had, I'd say, the heavy lifting that we did out here, you know, all at once. I think we could have bite-sized some of those issues as we walk through it.

So I guess as it existed, our audit committee really has not apparently performed the function that we established it 10 years ago.

So I've been here two years. The audit committee has met twice. My observation of the audit committee is they meet, when the independent auditor has completed their task, which is put the audit together, my observation has been they meet with the audit committee before the city council meeting to do a dry run of the audit, to kind of present details, go through the information, get a little more detailed. WITH QUESTIONS AND KIND OF PREPARE THE AUDITOR FOR PRESENTATION TO THE CITY COUNCIL. THAT'S MY OBSERVATION. I'M NOT SAYING THAT'S RIGHT OR WRONG, BUT THAT'S, AGAIN, I'VE ONLY SEEN TWO OUT OF THE SEVEN YEARS IT'S BEEN IN EXISTENCE, BUT MY OBSERVATION IS IT'S KIND OF A PRERUNNER TO THE CITY COUNCIL TO KIND OF WORK THROUGH THINGS, ANSWER QUESTIONS, HELP THE AUDITOR KIND OF PREPARE FOR A PUBLIC PRESENTATION PRIOR TO THE COUNCIL MEETING.

Well, I don't know. To me, when we get into the directional part and providing direction, that's something that just causes me a little bit of concern because we have a certain way that the organization is set up where what this council does is give direction to the city manager, and it takes the council giving that direction, not us individually. It takes three of us to be able to do that. Then the city manager gives the direction to the staff of whoever that may be. That's the way. I don't know if I'm wanting to interject another place where we're giving direction on what to do outside of the normal stage. Then the other thing is, I don't know. The citizens elect five council members to oversee the city's finances. not two. And I don't know if I want to advocate an important responsibility over financial oversight to just two council members. I think that we are elected, all five of us, to be able to serve that. And I don't know if I want to see just not saying I'd just rather retain that responsibility ourselves among council. And if we're going to provide direction, TO DO SOMETHING THAT IT WOULD COME FROM A MAJORITY OF THE COUNCIL, NOT NECESSARILY A SUBCOMMITTEE.

I THINK YOU MAKE A GREAT POINT. SO LET ME BREAK DOWN A LITTLE BIT OF THE TERMINOLOGY THAT YOU'RE USING. SO THE CITIZENS ELECT FIVE INDEPENDENTLY ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES TO DO WHAT TO THE FINANCES? specifically like not oversee them right uh appropriate so the the appropriations uh authority resides here so as council comes together and they appropriate the budgets they say that we've heard our citizens we believe that this is a priority we want to appropriate this million dollars over there for that project or for that department right then we are reliant on the operational aspect of the staff to carry out the function implementation of that. We are not getting back timely reports and updated expenditures on the given year's budget, right? So we're not really overseeing. I would hate for my citizens to think that I'm overseeing the expenditures of those monies. I just did a budget amendment for like the third time. and we still don't necessarily agree on exact dollars based on our audit. So like, I think an audit committee serves in that role where, yes, the council's still in full control of appropriations, but you have another body that is advisory still, and concerned in going through reports and also hearing concerns from internal auditor, audit while it's being functioned. So you would still be having conversations on that committee with CLA. So maybe the direction part is where you want to pull back. And so like maybe no direction from that audit committee, maybe just recommendation that requires our direction. Is that more in line with where you're?

Yeah, because when I heard direction, I kind of said, okay, I mean, if we want to have a group that gets together and looks at ways to improve, but I think whatever we're doing, if it was requiring us to change something, then it needs to go through the channels that we have to be able to implement whatever that change may be. And that, to be honest with you, it's something that all five of us are agreeing on to say here's a change that we need to implement or not implement.

Yeah, and I, I love the discussion because I didn't show up here with like, well, this is what I want it to be. I showed up here with like, I don't know exactly what needs to be right about this. I just can tell you what has felt wrong. Like, like, I'm not getting it done as much as I would if I were in a business setting. Right. I wouldn't show up on any kind of a business obligation. you know, a week before the council is going to approve an audit, accept it and say, yeah, let me ask a few high level questions here. I've got an hour with you before you fly out. And then, you know, basically I'm going to chew on this thing over the next week. And and where do I go? Right. So if we had had quarterly meetings or at least semiannual meetings, right, maybe you do a mid year and then you do the final year. And if this committee could be tasked like today, my hope would be that we have enough confidence in this audit committee to task it with scoping out the work for the forensic. I think that's a great example of we'll call a special meeting, you know. So I'd like, yes, sir.

Yeah, I think, Mayor, to that point, I think you and I talked about this. I don't know if the audit committee can do quite all the tasks you were talking about because some of those are budget versus audit. But one thing that we could look at, I think given what you have in 4.2, is if the city council wanted to proceed with a forensic audit, it could make sense that the city council tasks the audit committee to vet qualified auditors and bring back to your recommendation. I think that kind of falls within the limited scope that the resolution currently has about independent auditors. That way that could be something Just like you had an ad hoc committee you would create of two members, hey, we want to do a quick little study or a quick little analysis or try to find a qualified firm. That's what you could task the audit committee with doing is trying to find a forensic auditor out of three, four, five qualified firms to do that. And then on top of all that, again, and we can, you know, we've talked about this, we could also in the future look at, while our charter requires you, Neil, to answer to me, you, Neil, could be a liaison to this audit committee. And so we have liaisons for planning, we have liaisons for parks, we have, Neil could be the, as the internal auditor, could be the liaison to the audit committee. So that could be an option we could look at, too.

I appreciate that. Let me stop there and ask for other input and then maybe dig in a little bit deeper on you Neil's position. Councilman.

Being a current member of this audit committee, I think it's very important that we define what the goals and the responsibilities are. And if we read this resolution, the audit committee was established To serve as an advisory committee to the city of Amarillo regarding financial information financial reports and communication with the city's independent auditors I think that at a minimum we should be meeting every two months I think that that group we should be reporting back to all five members up here and of course two of us will be on that so the other three members, I think there's a lot of Wisdom in having THIS GROUP LOOK FOR THE AUDITORS, FOR THE FORENSIC AUDIT, AS WE GO FORWARD, LOOK AT THE COST. WHAT DOES AN ADEQUATE REPORT LOOK LIKE IF WE DO GO WITH THE FORENSIC AUDIT? AND UNDERSTANDING THAT, I THINK if that is the direction we want to go by all measure. I've been on this committee and I've only been to one meeting. There's only been one meeting that I've been to. And again, it was to get the report prior to delivery to us to take a look at. And if we're meeting every two months, I think that gives us a lot more communication, a lot more bandwidth, and we can report back. And if we have concerns, then we address them.

Great feedback. Thank you, sir.

Councilman? We have other committees and boards that advise council. And with their advice, we take what they have done in their background work very seriously. Because one of the things we ask when they report is what was the vote of that committee or that board? Was it 5-0? Was it 7-0? And so we use other boards and committees and don't abdicate our responsibilities as a council on those issues that that they give direction so you know a Committee like this I think is extremely important because of one of the things when we talk about transparency to the citizens is that, one, we know what we're talking about, that the numbers that are presented to us publicly that we vote on and make decisions on are true and accurate. So I think having a committee that is better defined than what was put together initially is extremely important for the work that we do as a council. How that looks, there's been good comments up here. I'm a little surprised that they only meet once a year as a committee, because we never know what's going to come up. So I see that it's something that we should support as a council. I don't think it takes any of our authority or responsibilities away from what we have to do as a job. Matter of fact, I think it would enhance what we do. as a council.

Yeah, but but I'm not saying this was advisory. So it seems like the purpose of this so far has supposed to be to advise to provide advice to our auditors. That seems to be what the it's been in the past or according to the resolution.

I would be specific in saying like this is to serve as an advisory committee to the city council. So I don't know that our independent auditor should be receiving direction. Right. I think they present questions and concerns and things like that. Staff is answering those. But then the up to dates of that, unless you're on the phone with CLA, you don't know. where they're at in the audit process. You don't know what's coming back, where we're strong, where we're weak, until it's completed. And they did give us drafts, but I think it was primarily because they had to, because we were late, right? So in this not having the ability to give direction or make a decision or spend money, I still think there's a lot of health and frequency of meeting and the role of this committee to at least hear from our internal audit piece and provide a platform for all of us as council to reach out and ask for advice. Right now, we've never had the opportunity to really use that committee to ask for advisement like mid-year or for reporting or anything like that.

Yeah, one of the things we could have, if we were to meet more regularly, as the mayor brought up, Anil Gerber and his team, they've been reforming their team and providing more walk-through process audits and so forth. So Anil, internal audit, could do report outs on his work to the audit committee. And so as he does hotel audits, audits as he does as he does walk through operational audits as he does um there's there's update on questionnaires he's sending out to departments i could see him doing uh brief outs to the audit committee about his status on projects where he's out on different departments those kind of things so that could be something we can add to the agenda if we want to meet regularly because again you have to remember our independent auditors we're under contract for a set period of time And so in between audits, we're not contracted with them. So we don't have them on a regular basis year-round. But you do have the internal auditor year-round.

I would agree that If we don't amend this, certainly the frequency that we meet, it probably needs to be dissolved. Because as is, both of you have been on it, meeting that one time a week before is really of no use. And then not one time have we come to advise counsel. I mean, it's useless the way it is right now. So my recommendation would be to dissolve it, or we amend the attendance scope according to the...

ordinance is probably accurate but it just did uh how many how often we meet needs to be changed well i think as long as it's staying in an advisory capacity but initially when it was frost first brought up it was a direct to give direction and that that's where i think it's this body gives the direction the city manager gives the direction but if it's an advisory role where it's giving advice to the city which would be to the city manager or which would be to the internal auditor, or they're giving advice to the council as to what to do, then that's the way it's set up. And if that's the way, I don't see any problem with it. But I just want to clarify that it's an advisory, not a, okay, we're going to give direction to staff or whoever else on what to do, that that goes through the channels that it always goes through.

I think that's a good... clarification in the difference in the word direction versus recommendation and so I think in my mind or in kind of the vision for this I'd like to see it as a place that can be utilized as a resource so it ought to be able to hear concerns that ought to be able to hear requests then if you Neil says so let's take CIP for an example We're pulling a lot of that stuff forward. We're cleaning all that up. We're going to identify those monies. When we start moving forward and we start letting out new projects, perhaps a project as big as $600 million, right? We have a built-in controller now that's going to give project updates, status, and all sorts of stuff. There's a place within that audit committee that can be a landing platform for a lot of those CIP projects. So if you take on one as big as wastewater treatment, it may drown out 10 other smaller projects in here where we're not hearing how those projects are doing, which ones came in under budget, you know, how long has that money been sitting over there? So even in the CIP role, once you have those projects ready to close out, audit committee doesn't have to give direction. Staff already knows to close out the projects once they've Completed them, but then audit committee serves as kind of a tracking community and help in reporting and his reports could come timely. They could, they could then be consolidated, cleaned up, kind of given to council organized. I love all of that. I know it's an extra step, but. I just think when you are sitting at two hundred and ten thousand people, you know, and you're you're looking at a two hundred and fifty thousand population here quickly and you're seeing sales tax grow and you're seeing infrastructure grow and everything else is going on. Why would we not? Why would we sit as a large community and not have an audit committee? that's functioning as a platform for our internal auditor. And I don't necessarily need to call on you, Neil, but I would ask if there's anything here that I'm saying that's not in line with the way you've got him set up, I want to make sure it's conducive to staff.

No, yeah, O'Neill and I, we've talked about this concept a few times, and I do see opportunity. If the council wanted to grow the audit committee, my recommendation would be to link that more to the internal audit department and then have the internal audit department kind of be working as an advisory committee to O'Neill and vice versa. He can report to them. what he's working on. He can bring up ideas. He can even get, you know what, Audit Committee, I only have so many staff this year, but I've got 18 different directions I can go. My recommendation is auditing X, Y, and Z. Do you agree kind of thing? Kind of get some ideas, some feedback from Audit Committee. So I think if we were to amend this, my recommendation would be to let O'Neill work on maybe a proposal when it comes to how to link his department more with audit committee on using them as his advisor as well.

Yeah, I agree. So, Council, let me ask you, if you open this up just as a committee that serves to resource just you, Neil's department, just the people that are over there that are trying to keep up with and fix, honestly, a lot of the things that that just in a very large organization with lots of moving parts. Um, can get shelved, right? So keeping them in a, uh, templated structure. Like, I don't think we should have any problem with opening this up, especially if we expand it to if we're meeting.

You know, once every 2 months or once a quarter, I mean, yeah, I think you should at this point, listening to this and reviewing the financial reports and communications. Why would we not do it? Like, we do our businesses and do it once a month. Fun, I mean, as close as we could to a closing as we could and just see if there's any questions that need to be reported out to council.

So frequency is kind of where we're drifting in this conversation. So give a little thought to 1. do we want to touch it? You can leave it as is. It can keep meeting once a week, but I've kind of spoken my piece. I don't want Mr Benson back there feeling like I'm watching out for those numbers being spent because I'm in a. Hour and a half long meeting once a year, and that that gives oversight. It doesn't right. So, at least now expectations are out there. So, like, I feel that there is an obligation to give oversight and that we need to utilize more. Business like practices, so frequency would be something where I'm comfortable once a quarter. But if it takes a once a month meeting, I think we have a meeting when it's needed. I don't want to have a meeting scheduled where everybody got together and we didn't have any reports because we hadn't got them done yet. But even even that, if we even started. With twice a year with a mid year, I think what you'd find out is that audit committee when it actually gets a task is going to show up and say. Why am I 6 months behind? I don't know how I'm supposed to work through all this. Like, I need to be meeting on this once a quarter if I'm expected to do a job. So my recommendation would be to start with once a quarter, move it forward. More timely, and then give this audit committee some abilities to call itself into meeting. if we want to task it with something from up here.

And I can ask you, Neil, we can work offline and get his recommendation. Part of it comes back to, as the mayor was saying, we want to make sure when you meet, it's worth it. And having worked internal audit, sometimes there's 20 things in the hopper, and so it's... I'm more with the mayor when it comes to meeting quarterly, but meeting as hoc as well if you ever need to in case something comes up. So I can work with Anil to work out some language on that process.

I would say one other thing is I would want this to be as specific and as narrow as possible. Because to me, this one is so vague, we have no idea what this committee is supposed to do. I mean, we're sitting here and it's very vague. So whatever we end up writing, I just think the clarity for all involved to know exactly what this committee is to be providing advice on and and what that looks like and then what what what you know if there's anything that it doesn't do but i just said whatever it is we give a lot more specificity to it than we did on this because this point doesn't really tell us anything so specifically what is it that we're going to do and that like everything else all those things that come out of that would come back to council for for approval agree other feedback council

No. Okay, so let's summarize. I threw out a lot of, well, it could, or maybe this or that. And so let's simplify it. Let's go back to staff. Let's have city manager and internal auditor come prepared and next city manager, or I mean, sorry, city council meeting with a recommendation of like, here's the best usage And here's kind of what you may have some other experience at some other organizations where they utilize their committee differently. But we'd love to hear that. Then, as it's tailored, where we need to put some boundaries up, let's be specific on those boundaries. It's isolated to finances, not budget, so to speak. Or, no, finances and budget are within its scope. Because we're hung up in the budget during the year, right? Maybe this is just actuals. Well, that becomes a financial because you spent the money already. It's not a budget of what you hoped it would cost. So you could really scope this out to where you give a good vision and task for this committee. But the more direction that we can get from you guys, from what you know as staff helps, then the more direction we give. So gentlemen, I'd ask that you come back ready to really, you know, aim and fire on this one. And then let's get it done so we can start using it.

Yeah, I would request August, because I even have you, Neil, getting ready for budget items in the next meeting as well. So I don't think we'll have enough time to get it done by the 28th, but we can bring some back to you in August.

Real good. So first meeting in August, we'll have recommendations. Council come prepared to give direction. Then we'll revamp this and have it written out the way we need it. In the meantime, I would ask legal, does this committee have the opportunity under its, It's this current charter, right? This current direction and task to maybe give a recommendation of three firms that would perform an independent forensic audit like we've discussed.

Yes. yes that's exactly what that committee would be established for an advisory committee that could vet various firms consultants and then bring recommendations to the council for council to act upon that's exactly what that that committee could do that's great so if we look at 4.2 and i hope you guys are hearing this

really, in what council's discussed before. We've had some financial questions. We've had some things that we've struggled through, numbers have changed, some things have not matched where they should have easily, right? And so, if we say, because of these instances and set of circumstances, we are directing somebody somewhere to scope out a forensic audit, and then we task our city manager with that, So write the scope of work to investigate yourself. I don't think you guys are going to be satisfied with that as a deliverable. He doesn't want that on him, no matter how good a job he does. There's always that question of, well, I wonder if he tailored it to where that was the one drawer we didn't look in. So let's just get all that out and be direct. in a good business setting. If I come in as the mayor, it looks totally political, and my council members, they gotta just trust me to come up with this and make a recommendation. I wouldn't. This is not my expertise. uh... how would we get to what we need we need three good quality firms they can tell us here's what we typically do for organizations your size if we saw these circumstances these would be our recommendations We would keep it strict to these things, and here's how much we think it would cost. And so in an interview-type process, not in a RFP or RFQ, right, just an interview process, we could get there. But how hard is that to do out here at a meeting where we've got another $100 million worth of business to get to? Why not put that over in the audit committee? let the audit committee bring forward that and say look here's what firm a thought you wanted here's what firm b thought you wanted and by the way c was really sharp everybody in the committee liked c and these are the four things they're going to do is there anything else you all need well we get to talk about number five right city manager gets to talk about number five that all goes back through that we now have a very functional business-like procedure here, I think. And so that's what I'm striving for here is to keep all of this moving in a good direction for it to be efficient and effective. And then it's an up and down. It's a one and done, right? We know what we have. And so in an instance like this, I don't want to be casual and say, like, this is normal. Everybody does these. No, this is not normal. This is a handle with care and we wanna make sure that we keep everybody in their position and we can't allow collateral damage, right? We need to let the firm do its work and then we take action if it's needed. So I'm saying all that to really push us forward to 4.2. I don't necessarily know why we've got those examples out there on that discussion other than I had mentioned them previously, but those are just examples. So maybe as a good example of what we probably shouldn't do, this would just be my thoughts in a previous meeting of here's where I think we should look. So can we, council, put this over with the audit committee and give them a task, tee that up, and let them start the process for looking for good firms?

Are we on to 4.2?

We're on to 4.2, sir. Okay.

Well, I think it would be worth having a little bit of discussion on what's being requested here. And kind of the reasoning behind the need for a forensic audit on the CIP projects, sewer and water, and American Rescue Plan Act monies. But what I would like to do, if I could before that, Maybe if I could, I've got a couple of questions that I'd like to ask you, Neil, and Dr. Ogunremi, kind of about overall. Sure. Because I'm trying to kind of educate myself and learn a little bit more about forensic audits. What are they? Why do we do them? I know that we had done one before, and I just want to kind of get a little expertise on someone with more knowledge than I've got about it, just dealing with it. I mean, I've got knowledge and information on 30 years in business, but I don't have it necessarily in government. So, you know, just how long have you been working in accounting and auditing?

I have been in accounting now for 25 years in audit and a few years in general accounting.

And then before joining the City of Amarillo, what organizations, who did you work for?

Well, I've worked for Fortune 500s, Fortune 1000s, Pier 1 imports, GameStop, and been involved in all the control audits like with Sarbanes-Oxley, IT audits, operational audits, control audits. It takes up 25 years, a lot of control testing.

Right. And then, I mean, and during that time, I guess, how many financial audits, SOX reviews, IT reviews? Is it in the dozens, the 100, more than 100, hundreds?

Hundreds, hundreds.

Okay.

Yes, sir.

And so I guess my curiosity is, before you came to the city of Amarillo, how many forensic audits had you participated in? None. So during that time in both public and private sector, never a request for a forensic audit. And kind of your understanding, what is the general purpose of a forensic audit?

Well, forensic audit is a whole lot more specific than what you do for a financial audit. So it's directed to a specific area. But it's based on somebody... There was a whistleblower saying, hey, we've got problems in the area. Or there's suspicion of fraud or controls that's not functioning, stuff like that. So you target a specific area. So like for the mayor, CIP is what they would target. So they wouldn't look at anything else, but they have to have a detailed scope. So you can't just come in and bring them in and say, hey, audit CIP. So you need to be specific. And they're going to ask a lot of questions as to why do you want it, what direction are you going, things like that.

And generally, what circumstances generally lead to say, OK, probably not fair to ask you that because you've never had one asked before or been involved in it. But from what you know, what generally leads to saying, we need a forensic audit?

It's generally going to be somebody that's got some kind of support that fraud has happened. You have a whistleblower that called in and say, hey, I know person A, B, and C is doing this. That's normally what triggers it. Mostly fraud. That's your main purpose in most cases.

So generally, if somebody has brought something up to say, the facts indicate that there is a problem here. We need to pursue that by investigating to test these facts to see if they are true or not true. Yes, sir. And I guess in your experience, I mean, is an audit more of an exception than a rule?

I would say it's an exception. You don't see it that often. I mean, in my 25 years, I've only had one with Prop 1. It's not a common thing. Most of your audits is going to be process-based financial audits or compliance audits.

Yeah, and then as I recall in the 2016 audit, it came back with no missing money, no laws broken, no fraud. I mean, there was nothing that came back. In fact, I think we're going to pay $37,000, and they said there's nothing here, so we only, I think, paid $17,000 for that one.

Yes, if I remember correctly, that's it. Yes, sir.

And then when you – To compile the information for a forensic audit, I mean, is that on staff to get the information to share with the forensic auditor? Yes. So that's the staff work to be able to do that.

Yeah, staff will have to pull all that support, all that information together to provide to them.

Yeah. Kind of based on your work, I mean, if you saw something, if you saw fraud or suspected something or was it presented to you, would it be your duty and responsibility to say we need to conduct a forensic audit?

I would most probably not even go to forensic audit. I would bring it in-house. I mean, my team, myself, we've got enough experience to be able to look at a process and identify if there's funds missing or something's not following a certain control or procedure, stuff like that. I think with a lot of the changes that we've made, as in CIP, for instance, we've had a big input on creating a CIP committee, doing some additional testing. Internal audit has implemented a monthly review of CIP, closed, open. So going forward, we're in a real good place.

And then, I mean, you haven't seen anything that's led you to recommend a forensic audit, have you?

No, sir.

And then our independent auditor did not come back with anything that said we needed a forensic audit?

No, sir.

Okay. Dr. Garumi, just a couple of questions I want to ask you and your experience with this. So how long have you worked in municipal finance?

Eight and a half years.

Eight and a half years. And have you ever participated in a forensic audit before? No. In the municipal experience? No. And again, I just want to make sure the audit, I guess you worked with the auditor, nothing came back to say that we needed to have a forensic audit or they didn't, there was nothing that came back in the audit that says, hey, there's potential fraud, misuse, anything like that. It was a, I guess the term is clean opinion or whatever that may be was what we were given.

That is correct.

And have you seen anything that would make you recommend a forensic audit into these three departments?

No, not at this time.

I appreciate it. I would just say this. Before we consider authorizing a forensic audit, I think we owe it to the taxpayer to answer a few basic questions. Has anyone presented credible evidence that city funds have been stolen, intentionally misused, or fraudulently diverted? Because that seems to me the indication of need for a forensic audit. Has anyone identified a specific transaction, department, program, or employee where there's reason to believe financial misconduct occurred? And as our staffer and independent external auditor reported fraud or recommended a forensic audit. And I was trying to learn or get educated on these forensic audits, because I know it's a word that comes up, but what does it mean? And I spent time over the last several days, and I found a dozen of municipal forensic audits conducted over the last 15 years across the country. There are some that occur. There's not. a lot of them, but they do occur. And in every example I reviewed, there was a fact-based reason to investigate. There was allegations of fraud, whistleblower complaints that you mentioned, missing funds, suspected embezzlement, misuse of grants. Sometimes there's referrals from law enforcement. But the common theme among these is the investigation followed the facts. It did not precede them. In other words, it was designed to say we're not necessarily just seeing what's out there. There are certain specific things that we think have occurred. And maybe I'm missing something. If there's credible evidence of fraud, theft, intentional misuse of funds, serious financial misconduct, I would consider that. But I guess that's not the question here. The question is, what are the facts that justify one here? And so far, I haven't seen any. We haven't had it from our staff or from our independent auditor. So what things are we pursuing? What things do we have that says, wow, this investment into a forensic audit is worth it because we think these things are happening?

I get what you're saying, Les, but in my professional experience in investigating banking institutions, that the FDIC and the SEC didn't find any issues. And later the bank presidents were prosecuted on a federal level. So you do make some good points as to what our criteria is. But the reason you ask for a forensic audit is because you don't know what you don't know. And you Neil hits a good point as far as usually it's because there's been some allegation of improprieties or embezzlement or misappropriation of funds. And we had that in this city. We had that. And a forensic audit, as far as I know, was not done after that happened. And so for your one question that there hasn't been that accusation of any wrongdoing, There's a partial truth to that, but then there's the part that we know that there was an embezzlement from the city, and a large embezzlement that people are doing federal crime time for. I do think that we have to look at the scope. We can't just go in and do an open book, that we have to look and say, where have we seen issues? Accusing anybody of doing anything illegally or wrong as I said the last time we talked about this I know If I if I were coming in as the chief financial officer, I would want to have that type of audit done So I know that I have completely clean books and that everything that the city is doing is is on the up and We can make that assumption, but until we have those type of documents and people looking at it, a third party, we don't know that. so i you know this is one of those things that you're that we're we're torn i think we need to do that type of audit um i think we need to be specific in how we direct it and what we're what we're looking for and i think i agree with you on that is as to why why are the reasons that we we do that i think that's an important thing but um if we're if we're just going to rely on the fact that Nobody has reported anything, and that's a reason not to do it. That may be a reason to do it.

But why in these three departments?

And that is one of my questions. Why did we pick those three out as opposed to some others?

I think we have to answer that. So we did not pick those three. So that description for the public to hear what our discussion was about listed those projects from our previous council meeting that I stated. Like if we were to do a forensic audit, you know, I would just start with these three. And once again, we've just spent probably an hour talking about the need for a committee to come along and not only help define the scope of work, but rely on the experts in these firms to scope out their own work. So I don't want to get us lost in a part of the conversation based on a heading that says, why did we pick these three now? I also think you deserve a straightforward answer. So I'm glad to give an example on each one of those.

I would like to just say, if we truly are doing this to get a good set of books to start, this is just a very small percentage. I mean, this does not achieve that task. To me, this looks like there is reason in CIP, sewer and water, or the American Rescue Plan that there's something wrong going on there.

Right, and I echo that. I'm not saying that this is the limit or that this is the only thing we should look at. What I'm saying is these are the glaring examples of things that we've struggled with firsthand, and these were just given as examples. So once again, like, we need to define what does a successful audit look like like where we're clean and clear and where we're comfortable that and confident that we we know what we know so i love what uh councilman reed said like we don't know what we don't know and and we need that third party expert to come in and take some of these concerns and mitigate them councilman i would like to know you kneel right yes sir

Is there a problem in CIP, sewer and water, or the American Rescue Plan Act monies?

From what we've audited and what I've looked at, no, sir.

One more time, please. I couldn't hear you.

For what I did, what we reviewed, and working with management team, I have not seen anything of concern in those areas.

Is there anywhere in the city that you think needs to have a forensic audit? No, sir.

That's why you have an internal audit department that's independent from city. And like you say, if your audit committee would like us to look at something, we are available.

And you have complete autonomy to look at anything you want to look at? Yes, sir. At any time in the city?

Yes, sir.

Have you ever been denied or had any recourse or anyone tell you you cannot look at a certain area?

No, sir. Who is your oversight?

Internal audit is independent from management. We report administratively to Grayson and functionally, but internal audit makes the determination of what gets audited and whatnot.

You don't feel like that that would influence you in any way on what you find? I mean, you're completely, you feel independent.

No, and in my position and according to the standards from our Institute of Internal Auditors, I have to have total independence.

Yeah. OK. Dr. Okunrimi, can I ask you, Councilman Reid brought up a good point. Would it bring you a level of comfort if there was a forensic audit? Would it bring you a level of comfort if it came back clean? Or not even that if it came back clean, but that a forensic audit was performed in areas, would that give you more comfort? taking on this role as CFO?

So the regular financial statement audits perform that function because we get audited every year anyway. And that once we have the external auditors opine on the status of our financial statements as to whether they are free of material misstatements and give us a clean audit opinion, that gives a great level of assurance that our books are materially correct. We also had the single audit, which focused on the different major grants that we had in the city, and we had some feedback from the process, and that also gave a level of assurance that we were overall in compliance, except for the areas that were listed on the single audit report.

Okay, so a forensic audit would not give you a greater level of confidence.

We already have that. That is correct. It's more specific and it's typically as a result of a concern or suspicion about certain areas which we currently do not have at this point in time.

I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I'm putting you on the spot as a new CFO. I mean, you haven't really given me a yes or a no, and I don't mean to be ugly about that, but it would not give you any greater level of comfort if a forensic audit was performed than what you have now over any single department. That is correct. Okay. So you don't feel like it would be beneficial at all or give you any more level of comfort is what you're saying?

That is correct. The financial statement audit serves that purpose already.

Okay. Okay. Thank you.

Sure. Councilman, you got something else?

No. Did you have something else?

Well, again, and I tried to do fact-based research on this, and if anybody can find a city that commissioned a forensic audit of one department, much less three, to simply gain confidence in the financial records, I can't find it. I mean, as a business owner, you do weigh in balance, but even in business communities. I mean, you know, I didn't walk in your shoes. I mean, maybe theirs, but as a business owner, I mean, I'm just not going to wake up one day and say, wow, I mean, I think I'm going to go conduct a forensic audit because they're costly, particularly if they have a wide scope. But I just haven't seen anybody that said, like you said, well, we just want to feel more comfortable with this. Generally, from what I'm seeing, it's to provide potential evidence in a court case.

Yes, sir.

Yeah, because you're sensing that something's wrong, and you do this forensic audit so that when you go to court, that you're able to prove whatever you think is happening or not prove it. Councilman.

Cost on a forensic audit, any idea at all if we were going to do a cost on CIP, sewer and water, and ARPA monies? Any idea?

You can pretty much look at a minimum of about $500 or average of $500 per hour.

I'm not holding you to it.

Depending on how deep you go. I mean, normal, if I had to guesstimate, it's going to be at least four weeks on just, say, CIP. Okay, so you've got four weeks there, and then you're going to have a QA review and then a sign-off by the lead. So let's say six weeks, so what are you looking at, $120,000? Just for the one, so this could be a $400,000 expenditure? All depends on how big you decide to go and how deep you want to dig. But yeah, you can go on average at about $500.

So going back to what Councilman Simpson said, Mayor, do you have CIP projects, sewer and water, and ARPA monies that you think have been

Well, it's important to to keep it fact based and I appreciate Councilman Simpson for for saying again, like, he's just looking at the facts and what other cities have done. And then he's just digging for, like, good common sense. Practical. Recommendation like let's at least identify why we're here and then let's identify like, what are we here to do right? So. Let's go back here for a minute. If you guys give me a 2nd, it's a pretty good topic, but it seems like people are paying attention here. So. Why we're here is because we all believe in a system where you elect people because you pay into the system for core services. Not one person out there pays independently and privately for all of their core services. You don't have to hire your own security to come and help keep your neighborhood safe. So because of that system, we have public monies that are your dollars in our possession, but we don't have any money, right? So if we sit here and we tell you, well, we found $43 million in these CIP projects that didn't get spent, no 43 million of your monies that you gave to be stewarded up here and appropriated by this commission that we're not spent and then we're not reported so we admit to that we agree to that right we're trying to put that in a polite context where that's a good thing Ultimately, it's a concern as to why did we not spend the money and how did we not know we had it? So in the cost of all this, if you take six weeks times 40 hours times 500, that's $120,000. So in budgeting and costing this, I'd hate to get hung up on $120,000 when, I mean, I sat through plenty of meetings where, you know, Councilman Simpson said very directly, he wanted an answer. Is there a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Mayor says there's $100 million in this portfolio over here, and he says that he knows it's there, but like, is there any money there? And you guys said no. you said we've we got a small amount of money at the time of the general fund is probably less than three million dollars right now we've got a total of forty three million that we contract with staff right so that is a concern uh... when you bring back numbers that are different from what you said before, I think we have to take a hard look at that and say, that's just the facts, right? But to keep on point here, we don't have $43 million that we need to have staff go and spend somewhere. we have an appropriations issue those forty three million dollars need to come back to this body that you've elected to perform our job and we need to know where it goes and and how it goes and when it goes and so because of all that are we going to bring all of those monies back and and let you guys make recommendations and us put it into practice or are we going to question Do we have $43 million, and can we bring about some clarity or confidence that that number's accurate? That number's changed four times so far. Let me give you another example. We have a sewer and water issue. We had a sewer and water shortfall. So previous year's budget, we deducted $29 million out of the sewer and water account. And the reason we did that was because we said we had a water rights issue. So we said that we booked the monies twice. And then we asked, well, do we have a booking issue? Do we have a cash flow issue? Did you pay for the project twice? No. Did you go and perform other projects that were not approved? No. YOU MADE COMMITMENTS TO DO PROJECTS, CORRECT. DID YOU FULFILL THOSE COMMITMENTS? NO. SO WE DON'T HAVE A SHORTFALL. NO, WE DO IS WHAT WAS SAID. OKAY. WE'RE GOING TO GO THROUGH THE AUDIT. SO WE WENT THROUGH THE GENERAL AUDIT. WE HAD THE AUDITOR HERE ASK HIM DIRECTLY. Do we have a shortfall in sewer and water? No, sir. Any which way you cut it, you actually have a net profit in that enterprise. Even if you deduct $17 million for depreciation, which is just a non-cash item, it doesn't really affect your account, you still have $17 million in the account. But even if you take that out, you still walked away with $5 million at the end of the year. So that enterprise profited, as an enterprise, $23, $22 million. Okay, well that's example number two. Probably the one that's the most concerning is ARPA. So, in asking for reports, bring me the receipts, we got $39 million, we got two tranches of money. I can't say ARPA because it's not the total name for everything, but we got 19 million, 19 plus million dollars, $39 million. I was presented with roughly $14 million worth of, not receipts, but reports. And so I have to assume that those numbers are accurate and they're supported by supporting documents. But there was that one line item said 24 plus million dollars revenue recovery. That's an interesting one. So in that year where we booked out 24 plus million dollars in revenue recovery, Did we have a revenue shortfall? No, we did not. Everybody paid their taxes. Hot taxes actually went up. Sales taxes came in strong. Didn't wane at all. So we didn't spend all of those monies and provide supporting documents for that. So my question is, if we took that $25 million and plugged it into that budget year and said that was revenue recovery, then what we had was a fund balance of $25 million left over. Can anybody... Substantiate that? Do you guys know where the money went? I mean, just being specific, let's just take that one American Rescue Plan Act money. It's you guys' report that I'm in possession of that shows there's $24-plus million of revenue recovery money. WHERE DID THAT GO IF WE DIDN'T HAVE A $24 MILLION SHORTFALL IN THAT YEAR? SO IS THE MONEY STILL SITTING THERE AND WE NEED TO GO SPEND IT? DID IT GO IN IN PLACE OF THOSE AND THEN WE HAD A FUND BALANCE AND WE'RE JUST NOT SMART ENOUGH TO SEE HOW WE BUDGETED THOSE MONIES FOR FUTURE USE? IS IT PART OF THE $43 MILLION AND WE DON'T HAVE TWO SEPARATE ITEMS? LIKE, YOU KNOW, DO YOU, IN LISTENING TO WHAT I'M SAYING HERE OVER THE LAST FEW SHORT MINUTES, Mr. Skank, you have confidence that I know where all the money's at or that I don't have any legitimate concerns? You know, staff, I mean, is this an issue? We're not looking for fraud. I know that's the typical forensic, but, you know, we're looking for stewardship and where's the money at. And so, like, I'm good with going a different direction. But somebody's going to have to show me how we get there, who can pull all the receipts and put them together and go through these items because, you know, we need to be accountable to these ladies and gentlemen out here. And I thought that this was the best thing for an organization in this financial predicament. And we don't have a usual problem where we're upside down, running in the red, and we can't pay our bills. We have an unusual problem. We have told our public we have $43 million so far identified in construction projects that have been closed out. So the sewer and water item, we've discussed like to death at this point, right? Do we not have anything to be concerned about? And if so, then my job gets a little easier? Or do we have some legitimate concerns and what, it's gonna cost us 120 grand, 200 grand? I mean, not too long ago, you guys were not in possession of $43 million and you were comfortable. You didn't have the money. You know, so now we have it, like, are we worried about the amount of money that we would need to spend? Mr. Pat?

If I can step in for a minute. I've made it very clear for the last several years or so how the CIP process has been working. It has been a progress and a route in progress. We have never said that there is no money. There is money. But the main point we've been saying is it's tied up in project, and we have to go systematically project by project by project to determine is it available to be released. If the council wanted $100 million, I could cancel all projects and bring $100 million and reshuffle that project list back into the queue for you all to consider. I could do that tomorrow if you wanted to. But I'm assuming that those projects are still priorities. So we are systematically going project by project as time allows us as a CIP committee to bring information. And so as time has progressed, we have identified 42 million that we can bring to you. That is a victory. That is the hard work that the men and women to my left have done Defined you information. We have done the work to bring that to you more work is coming We're doing the work to bring that to you. And so that's the CIP. We're bringing it to you But overall, I think the idea of a forensic audit is we provided information, but it's not been acceptable And so the goal the friends audit is to provide information that is acceptable and so be it I've been quiet in the forensic audit discussion But I have learned over the last two years that what staff provides is not acceptable and so if the friends audience what gets us over that hill then so be it and

So let me be direct. Was it acceptable when the staff provided the budget amendment for police, $240,000? That was acceptable, right?

It was based off the information we had at the time. The audit had progressed over time. Working with the auditor, we had more information. We brought back to you better information.

How many months after the completion of the fiscal year end, we proposed that budget? AMENDMENT?

IT TAKES TIME TO WORK THROUGH AN AUDIT PROCESS. AGAIN, WE BRING THAT AMENDMENT BASED OFF THE AUDIT AS AUDIT IS PROGRESSING. THIS IS NOT A SIMPLE ENTITY. IT'S NOT A SIMPLE PROCESS. THIS ISN'T QUICKBOOKS. SO WE HAVE TO WORK THROUGH A LONG PROCESS WITH AUDITORS TO BRING YOU BACK INFORMATION THAT YOU CAN WORK WITH.

yes sir that's why we need a good qualified third party because this isn't quickbooks and that number went from 240 000 budget amendment or was it 210 i can't remember but to roughly 5.5 million dollars in in a cost overrun right in in the actuals in our largest and one of our most vital and key departments like to me as a taxpayer not as your mayor but that's totally unacceptable Right. And I mean, we need to maintain decorum and be polite here, but like, not at the expense of truth. Right so the truth is, is we didn't know how much we spent. And we've provided this mayor and council multiple reports. And I can go drag them all out and not many of the numbers are consistent. And so. I don't have confidence. It's not that I don't trust. It's that I don't have confidence that I can tell those people out there that I know where the money's at and that we've secured it. That's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for an opportunity to hand this over to a third party independent group that can come in, look at the books. I have yet to see, well, I can't say I haven't seen a bank statement. I might have seen one that was four years old. But, like, I'm not looking at your bank statement, right? I'm not looking at the back of those checks that have cleared. I don't get to see those receipts. You guys are relying on report after report, and so are we. And so we don't have to be contentious. We can be pragmatic. We're talking about $120,000. to let somebody look at what you're confident is good. Like it's your confidence that you're basing this on. You're defending it. I'm the one that's not confident. So, you know, I mean, if I need to dig through the budget, I bet I can find it.

I'd like a clarification. It's 120 for CIP, 120 for sewer and water, 120 for ARPA, right? No, sir. That's just the estimate.

It's $500 per hour on average for them to come in. And you think they can get the whole thing done in four weeks? That's an estimation. It depends on how deep they are.

Let's double it. Let's say it's 240 grand, quarter million dollars. How big is this organization? It's half a billion dollar a year organization. Come on, guys. This is not what we're doing here, right? We're not worried about $250,000 in good stewardship.

No, Mayor, that's exactly what we are worried about.

No, sir.

It is. No. I mean, what we're looking at here is let's just let's come to an agreement. Does anyone want to do a forensic audit to give us a higher comfort level just just so that we have good books? I mean, how much did we just spend on the audit? How much did the audit cost us? It's close to half a million dollars, wasn't it? Four hundred plus. So we spent a lot of money. And year after year after year, we've come back with professionals. Now we've had a second firm and they all come back with the same information. If you can present me with something that says there's been fraud, falsified records, suspicious transactions, those types of things. But the truth is, as he said, have you found any money that we thought was just out there missing and then we said oh my gosh we just have an extra five million dollars in a bank account that we didn't know about

I have not.

No, we haven't. To give this portrayal that there's some kind of lost money, it was the staff that went out. The problem was not with this staff. It was for years, for whatever reason. We didn't close out projects. It didn't take a forensic audit to figure that out. If there's problems, I think we can address those with you, Neil. Let's get him to answer some of these questions and do it in-house. If we can't get the answers to those questions, then maybe we'll look at it. But I think doing a forensic audit without fact-based of saying, okay, here's the reason why we want to invest that. I just don't think it's the right move at this point.

You know, I think the CIP issue was more a policy issue, but I think what Mayor's not comfortable with is I don't know that we would have found it if we hadn't pressed, you know, and looked at it. So, I mean, I think that to Mayor's point, you know, there was $43 million sitting there that I don't know if we would have found. I mean, there's no way to know. I mean, it's not even finding it. It was there. We knew it was there, but we just, projects weren't closed out. So the money was allocated, just nobody did it. So to me, it's bad policy, right? We just had a bad policy. We didn't close out projects. That was fixed. But, you know, what I would ask is, I know you've had hours and hours of conversations with Mayor. How would you answer the two other issues that he has? Because I've got at least a little bit of comfort level with CIP. I don't think any money's missing, but I think it's a policy issue. We fixed it, in my opinion. But with ARPA and the sewer drainage, his three examples that he gave, what is your answer there? Because I think all of us up here know a little bit about accounting, but not near to the level that you two guys do. You're professionals. So what is your answer there? Because Mayor brings up great points. But I guess, I mean, you haven't been here, but you Neil has, and you've seen all the books. What is your answer to those two things? Because those are valid points that he brings up.

Well, based on what I've seen and what I looked over that we got from management and what I researched, we provided explanation on the sewer and water issue and what happened in accounting and what happened there. So I was comfortable with the responses I got from management and the things I looked at. As far as ARPA goes, I suspect that you, Mr. Mayor, haven't received all the support that's out there because all that money is spoken for. Because a lot of that ARPA money was assigned to pay police and fire salaries and stuff, so you should have something related to that.

YEAH, IT'S LISTED AS LINE ITEM, AND IT'S THE MOST RECENT REPORT, AND IT SAYS REVENUE RECOVERY, AND IT'S 24 PLUS MILLION DOLLARS. SO WHAT YOU'RE SAYING IS THAT REVENUE RECOVERY WENT INTO THE GENERAL FUND TO PAY FOR, LET'S SAY, YOU KNOW, SALARIES AND WAGES, RIGHT? WHAT I'M SAYING IS WE DIDN'T NET A SHORTFALL THAT YEAR, SO AS REVENUE RECOVERY, THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN ADDITIONAL MONIES THAT CAME INTO THE SYSTEM. And then we should have seen that in a fund balance. My question was, where did that show up in the fund balance? Where did we have that additional 24 plus million dollars sitting off to the side? Whether you substitute it in and out, it's still the same net at the end of the year. So I would love an answer on that of like, what was the fund balance at the end of the year? And how did we recognize that additional money? And then where did it go? But let's go to sewer and water. You're comfortable with the statement that was given on the sewer and water? EXPLANATION, RIGHT?

FROM CITY MANAGEMENT. RIGHT.

SO CITY MANAGEMENT GAVE YOU AN EXPLANATION THAT THERE WAS A WATER RIGHTS ISSUE AND IT GOT BOOKED TWICE, RIGHT?

YES, SIR.

DID THE EXPENDITURES GO OUT AS WELL? SO WE HAVE A BOOKING PROBLEM. WE COMMITTED, LIKE, PROJECT MONIES TO BE DONE BECAUSE WE RECOGNIZED THAT AS A SOURCE OF INCOME REVENUE. SO WE APPLIED IT TO OR ALLOCATED IT TO JOBS, BUT DID WE GO DO ANY OF THOSE PROJECTS?

Well, I'll have to go and look at my paperwork again and see all my reporting and what my support is there to give you an appropriate answer.

Okay, so you can't answer that here today?

Not right now.

Okay, so you're not comfortable in answering that. You don't have confidence in answering that direct question?

Not without my support.

So without him having confidence, I lack a severe amount of confidence up here to sit in front of you and tell you, like, man, we're good. You know, so I've made my case. I mean, this forensic audit could be costly. I understand it's got some risk in it, but I can't continue to do this job in this way and not be this upfront. So, you know, unity is preferable. I'd love it for us to all link arms, but the truth is a non-negotiable. And the truth is, is I've had lots of reports that have come forward and those numbers aren't the same from one report to the next. It's not a moving target. And we do need an expert to come in here and look at these books, bottom line. So, Council, I'm just going to ask you guys, we got to give direction here. It's not a voting item, but I appreciate Councilman Simpson for his strong stand against it. and his belief that it's not needed, I hope you appreciate and respect my strong stance for it. I think that it is needed. You each get your opportunity to make your decision, and then I will respect your decision. And if this is where it dies, then so be it. But if we move this forward, I would propose it goes to that audit committee for recommendations.

I support sending it to audit committee to have further discussion.

Well, and I would agree. I think we've got to define scope. I mean, you said that these three were just brought forward from previous meeting, but definitely need to define scope. And if we go off, you know, $500 an hour, you know, we put no more than we've got to look at scope and look at the cost.

I also think we do everything we can to get the supplied information that we have in house now to any of the council members, including the mayor. They need any of that data to get a level of confidence in our in our process.

Well, and I just want to think, I don't want to speak on behalf of you, Neil, but you didn't answer the question because you don't want to give a misinformation of the wrong answer without the document. I mean, maybe it's hard for people to believe that you haven't memorized every internal audit you've ever done in the history of the City of Amarillo. I would expect you to do that, but to say that you don't have a confidence level in your work, is that true?

No, sir.

Do you have confidence level in the work that you and your team has done?

Yes, sir.

Yeah, as do I. And so I don't think to say that you have a lack of confidence level, you don't want to give some misinformation because, boy, you give some misinformation, your head could get chopped off at the next meeting for saying, well, why did you tell us this, when you say, no, I didn't have that in front of me.

I'll make it onto Facebook.

Yes. I would just hope, and this would be, I mean, if it goes to the audit committee, so be it. But I would look, I would implore the audit committee, all the members of the audit committee, does everybody get a vote? Or is it just the two council members that determines it?

No, it's a full working committee, so all members have a voice.

You know, for the benefit of the taxpayers, and I agree, if I thought there was real problems out there and there was some of these problems with fraud or we expected something like we've had in some other departments, but, you know, we've got the resources here on staff. My preference would be, can we get these questions answered and get this reconciled by staff first? Because that's going to be cheaper than a forensic audit. And in the end, the forensic audit just reviews work that you've already done.

Yeah, most of the time, yes, sir.

Yeah. So, you know, to say, can we get these questions answered? Because I don't know, has anybody else got any questions that we need to put in other departments other than CIP, Water, ARPA?

Yes, sir.

Okay. then take it to the audit committee and come back. But to me, if there's evidence of misappropriation, fraud, to me that's what a forensic audit is designed for. And I agree, I don't think it's a wise investment just to go out there and say, we don't have any facts to support it, but we just want to go out there. But to me, I would implore the audit committee to say, come back to this council before we proceed with fact-based information that shows that A FORENSIC AUDIT IS NEEDED BECAUSE OF ONE OF THE REASONS THAT HISTORICALLY A FORENSIC AUDIT IS ALWAYS USED FOR AND THAT WE CAN'T GET AN ADEQUATE ANSWER TO THAT FROM OUR STAFF.

I THINK I WANT TO JUMP IN RIGHT THERE. I MEAN, I WANT TO AGAIN LOOK AT WHO IS ON THE AUDIT COMMITTEE. IT'S MAYOR STANLEY, COUNCILMAN PRESCOTT, MYSELF, LOLA OGEN-REMME, AND THEN MR. FRIGO, I THINK. Forensic audits is whenever you're questioning the work of the staff. Two of those five are staff. The other is a former staff. And so what are we tasking the audit committee with doing? And so I really, again, as your advisor, as city manager, if the concern is you're trying to give a conference of the citizens about the work the staff has done, does it look good to have a committee of two plus one former staff person making that decision? I don't think that's what you should do. So I think if you were asking the audit committee to do something here, it should be as simple as vet three firms, bring back a qualified firm, and then let the council work from there. I would not task this committee, which again makes up two employees plus one former employee, of trying to tell you whether a fringe audit is needed or not. Because that's going to put myself, Lola, and the former employee in a tough spot.

And then who would determine the scope?

I would probably say, again, as part of the audit committee, if we're vetting forensic auditors, identify a qualified auditor and then have that auditor help us to find the scope. And so I think that's something that we could do. Again, I don't think that complicates the trust factor here. Because, again, you can always vet the scope yourself as a council. And so you could do that. You could see whatever work we do. And so it seems good enough. But I think having that auditor lead that effort, again, removes it out of the staff portion of that committee. It removes it from the staff completely. And then that brings it back to you guys to then, you can then have a communication directly between yourself as council and that auditor.

It's very well said. And Councilman Simpson, you said earlier you don't want to abdicate your authority here to a committee, and that would essentially be what we'd be doing. You'd be handing it over to the committee for them to decide whether we do a forensic audit or not, and that is what this body is here for.

No, that would have to come back to council. I think council is the only one that has authority to do that. You can come back with recommendations.

So we're asking those specifically, and I think Mr. Path is doing a great job of leading us to it. You need to task that committee with a task, go out and find three reputable, get pricing and then make a recommendation on which one that comes back to this council for now. We know what councilman tips wanted to know how much could this cost? We're throwing out numbers. We don't know. But then what is the scope of work? What are we looking for? And does that individual show up here in a meeting saying, oh, yes, if I had seen these set of circumstances, I believe that this does mount to the level of this type of an audit. Or maybe they say the opposite. And, you know, we don't have the argument. We need to listen to that expert. Right now, I mean, our expertise are, you know, defined as QuickBooks. So, like, I'm keeping it, you know, in perspective here. Like, let's be specific with this audit committee. Let them get this move forward or kill it here today and decide that we don't have any cause for concern and let's move forward with the direction and I'll accept it either way.

Yeah. I would believe, though, I don't know if you're going to be able to come up with a cause before you look at scope.

I believe that you could get a projected cost and you could probably get an expert that's willing to speak to averages. I mean, that's what we do a lot in here, you know. before we go through designs. Same way on a highway or road project or sewer and water. I mean, so I think the money matters, the stewardship matters, but I'm not hung up on the amount of the money to perform this. Council, we need direction. I hadn't heard from place one.

Well, you know, this is a discussion. And this is what I talked about at the beginning of the year, that there's a natural tension between staff and council, and it should be that way. Mr. Path, I appreciate the council you just gave us. That was an area that I wasn't looking at, and I appreciate that greatly. We're here to discuss this thing. It's the whole idea of this council is to come out here in public and let them hear what we're thinking, how we're thinking, and why we're thinking it. And I think everybody's heard that today. And I agree. The discussion before this was what was the role of the audit committee. So we give them a direction. I agree with that. Let them go out. and find the three, if possible. to give us some estimates on what the cost is. I appreciate you coming up with an estimate of that. But that's even hard to put into when you start thinking about hours. Is it going to be four weeks? Is it going to be six weeks? Could be two weeks. Most likely not. But we need to know those things before we make the decision that we're going that way. I have no reason to doubt the numbers that have been given to us. I KNOW THAT I CAN'T USE THIS EXCUSE ANYMORE. I'VE BEEN ON HERE A LITTLE OVER A YEAR. BUT I STILL FEEL A LITTLE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH THINGS AS FAR AS WHERE WE ARE. $42 MILLION? WOULD OUR DECISIONS BEEN DIFFERENT WHEN WE DID BUDGET LAST YEAR IF WE KNEW THAT WE HAD THIS $42 MILLION? WOULD POOLS HAVE BEEN CLOSED? I mean, those are important things as we look back, not knowing that those dollars were there. So I think we take the opportunity to let some firms come in here and give us their recommendation on what cost would be and how they would scope out this project. And then we make our decision as a council.

Councilman Tibbs, anything further?

No, fine. Okay. Councilman? Yes, sir. I would say one thing that would be beneficial for me, again, if we're on a fact-driven mission, that whatever – and if we do decide to move forward with a forensic audit, I think the narrower the scope, the better, so that there's a focus on it. But I would just want to know, to come back from the audit committee, is – What are the specifics? I mean, we've talked about them here. I'd like to see what are the specifics in writing that we do not have a comfort level with, or any of us on the audit committee, other, in writing, because what I'm going to do is I'm going to take every one of those, and I'm going to go to you, Neal, and I want to sit down and go over these with them. And see, because again, that's going to tell me where my comfort level is of saying, well, wait a minute, forensic audit, definitely needed. I mean, I see where this makes sense. So what I would like to come back from the audit committee or from our two members is what facts are causing or driving us to say, here are the facts why we need a forensic audit and why a forensic audit is only going to be the only way to get adequate answers of questions on this. Is that a fair thing to ask for?

Totally fair and I think we can do better than that. Let's let the recommendation come from that committee and let's back that up with that audit firm's recommendation and identification of what they think. And so, you know, not totally up to Prescott and myself to bring you back. Well, these are the four facts that we're not comfortable with. Maybe that needs to come back with that expert opinion of why they would feel like their services are needed. So we will dive into that. I feel like I have what I need in direction.

I want to make sure that I have my direction, too. I know there's been a lot of various requests here at the end here. My recommendation, just to make this as clean and as simple as possible, would be to direct the audit committee to gather together, obviously, identify through some procurement process, three qualified entities, vet those entities, come down to one, and then bring back to the city council your recommendation and the reason why. And so there's been other requests here about documents. I think let's get past that for now. Let's just focus on the audit committee and then focus on the forensic audit if we're gonna go that way. instead of trying to do other parallel paths of looking for information and reasons and documents and everything.

But, Grayson, I mean, I respect what you're saying, but I would just like to see, okay, what is it that we're thinking about hiring a forensic auditor? Yes, yes, I think that's part of this. Before we even... I mean, I don't know, maybe we'll get a forensic auditor and he'll say, oh, you don't need my business. I don't know why I'm here. I doubt that. You know, I don't think anybody's going to come in here and say, oh, you guys are good. I mean, they're in it to make money. But before we go any farther down this path, I'd just like to say what, you know, and I think the audit committee would be, what facts are causing us, what facts overall are needing further investigation by counsel or by staff? And what is the best way to get that investigation done? Is it forensic audit? Or are there other ways? But I can't make that conclusion on myself until I see, and I would prefer to get in writing, the documented facts of where our problems are, where the lack of reconciliation is, so that if it's there, I need to do my due diligence to be able to look at it. And then that's going to help me determine do I feel adequate with it or do I feel like there needs to be a forensic audit. So that's what I would want to get.

And, again, just to repeat what I said earlier, I definitely appreciate what you're saying. But, again, in this situation, given the questioning is the work of staff and given two of the five are current and one is a former, I don't – I worry that individuals will trust the result brought back. And so I think, given where we're at, I think we just need to pursue forensic auditor qualifications at this point here.

Well, who's going to bring it back to us? It's going to be our two members of the audit committee.

Correct, yes.

I trust them to bring back the facts and the list of what homework do I need to do to be able to specifically go through this and work with you, Neal, to make sure that... there's adequate answers to these. Unless there's another way that I can get it, but if we've got the audit committee, that would be my request of the audit committee, which I guess would be...

the two of you. Why would we not increase the size of the audit committee with, Grayson, what you brought up is very important. Why would we not add three additional members with acumen and education in auditing to be part of the group?

Mr. McWilliams will have to speak to that because it's commissioned through a voted item that spells it out. So I think at that point what you'd be doing is going and amending that resolution, right, in order to identify those in order to give them authority to to weigh in on the recommendation because essentially you're going to have five that are going to look at this and and you know amongst themselves come up with the three and maybe you had one that you really liked i had one i liked we couldn't agree on the other one whatever but if we if we're going to do an ad hoc committee it would really need to be outside of that and i think that opens up the potential of you know inviting certain citizens to that and It's a really big thing to digest if you're new to it.

I mean, ones that have acumen in accounting.

Yeah, even acumen in accounting, you know, government accounting practices are very different. And then this is a large item. So I'm comfortable with the way Mr. Path has got this direction. And I understand the additional requests from Councilman Simpson. I would just say, like, you know, we'll do our best. But my main question would be when can we get this scheduled and get that committee together?

We will work as, I mean, again, we are preparing for budget in two weeks. And so I really request we don't meet between now and then because I've got to be focused on the budget. But I think soon, August at the very latest, and so we can get this thing together.

Well, I appreciate the problem.

In the meantime, I think I can work with O'Neill. I think he can start drawing up qualification documents and procurement documents. I can start that process with O'Neill tomorrow and some budget things I've got you working on. But we can start that and then meet soon thereafter.

Okay.

Anything?

I want to say one more thing. Yes, sir. I want to be clear. I'm not dismissing your concerns. because I don't think I understand them. That's why, and for me, that's why, and if anybody else has got concerns that we need to look into, I'd just like to be able to see those, not only just hear about them, but I comprehend the things in writing. So if you can tell me in writing what we're looking for so that I can track that and I can track that, that's going to be helpful for me. So I'm not dismissing that there are concerns here. I've got to get them in a way where I'm just not tracking the things that you've been spending a lot of time researching.

Well, I... I don't feel dismissed. I appreciate the comment, but I think Mr. Path laid it out pretty straightforward and I have a task at hand to go and do it. And so I think we're we're on our way. I understand the prioritization of the budget, but, you know, once again, I think the path forward is the best one. Let's let's identify a third party that can help us. And then I have lots of documentation to be happy to share with you. So I know that's a long discussion, but needed. We got a few minutes. Thank you guys. Appreciate you standing up there. Sorry to keep you there. Respect everyone's position on this and and understand the staff's. position as well and and you know nothing directed at any person nothing even directed at a department but something that is directed at me and like i would not push for this if i didn't know that You're like, I'm obligated to look a little deeper and ask for help. So I hope the staff can hear this isn't me telling anybody that I know best. This is me telling everybody I know what I can't see, I know what I don't know, and I need help. And I think this is the right way to ask for help. And so the audit committee, I think, is a helpful resource. And I'll leave it there. I know we've got another discussion and then we'll move into public comment. We're going to take 10 minutes, come back after a short recess. We'll jump into. And then we'll get right on public comment. So if you showed up to speak, please don't leave.

Oh, here we go.

You want to go down and around, sir, and then come up? OK. All right, we're going to go ahead and call ourselves back into session. We got Donnie Hooper up here ready to give us a brief presentation on item 4.3. I know Councilman Simpson hadn't made it back just quite yet, but he's real close. So if I stall a little longer, we're good. All right. Mr. Hooper, I know we're pushing a little long, so I'll hand it over to you, let you take us through this and answer some questions.

Okay, thank you so much. And we do have some consultants who are going to be here to speak to you as well. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. We're going to talk a little bit about the wastewater treatment plant facility expansion, our engineering services contract, the first of the engineering contract phases that we're going to be going through in a couple of those phases. Before we do that, just a quick introduction. Quick briefing, I'll run through it pretty quick and go back. The last time we spoke to you was back in November. During that meeting we talked about a lot of things, but I think the biggest thing that we can take back from that meeting is that the reason that we're doing this is really there's four key points to why we're wanting to do this expansion or why we need to do this expansion, with the emphasis being on that we have capacity concerns. That is the number one thing that we're here for. Capacity of the existing facilities, what we have to do with the future growth, permitting requirements, and then the aging treatment plants itself. We talked about that. We talked about our original concept, if you remember, about having a one plant, 42 MGD centralized plant. We since shifted away from that. There was many things that we discussed, whether two plants that were smaller in the MGD utilizing the existing facilities that we have, later on rehabbing those. You remember all that conversation that we went through. We came up with some conclusions there that that was probably the best route for us to take instead of a centralized facility. We also talked about the 75-90 rule for TCEQ. We gave you some graphs and numbers associated with that. We talked about our Hollywood permit numbers, our River Road permitted numbers, and went through quite a bit of a presentation. It was a pretty long one in November. And I wanted to just remind you of that because it kind of sets the tone for where we're at now transitioning into this next piece here. So what we want to talk about now is a wastewater treatment plant expansion engineering services contract for Hollywood and for River Road. There's two different professional engineering service agreements that are going to come before you at the July 28th. Council meeting. Phase two includes pre-designed conceptual services to support expanding and planning for cost model development. We'll also talk about project support, long-term capacity, regulatory compliance, operational needs. And the biggest piece of this is, we keep getting asked this, what's it going to cost us? What's it going to cost us? This is the first part of that. When we enter into phase two of this contract, by the time we get finished with this in a 12-month process, We will be able to give you a better number. Now, it won't be the final number, as we've mentioned several times before. We've got to get to 30% capacity or 30% design before we can give you a number that we're going to be confident with. So that's going to be a piece of that as well. The requested action on the 28th looks like this. It'll be an award for Phase II, Hollywood II, Professional Engineering Services Agreement with Kemley Horn. for 9.397 million, an award for phase two of River Road Professional Engineering Services, Kimley Horn for 12.8. This would authorize the city to go ahead and proceed with that next step. Now the reason that number is bigger for River Road, it's a much more complex situation out there than we have at Hollywood. We've already been doing some work on Hollywood prior to starting the work on River Road when we switched and made the pivot to go from a centralized to two different smaller plants that we'd be building. And so there's a lot more work that has to be done there, plus a lot of the loading that goes into that River Road facility is based on industrial loading and utilizing the northeast interceptor and some of those other areas out there that the EDC is developing out by the airport. So a little bit more complex there. So in this phase, Kimley-Horne is going to take the projects beyond the planning and into the work needed to define the projects as a much higher level. That includes pre-designed tasks like geotechnical work, and there is a lot of geotechnical work that has to occur before you can start doing your design Our consultants will talk about that in a moment. There's a lot of survey work that has to begin as well, as well as our water quality testing. What do we want to produce with water quality when we bring it out of those two facilities, which then relates to what kind of technology we want to have to treat at the facilities. Also we'll be evaluating and refining those concepts as I mentioned, treatment concepts. It'll support the cost model development and also it will begin the process of coordinating with our CMAR which is very, very important when it comes to value engineering this project and making sure that we have both sides, both on the construction side, speaking with the engineering side, so we can get the best bang for our buck on this. So there's three different phases, if you want to call it that. The first phase to this project was the master planning, the preliminary engineering report, we call it the PER, our permitting analysis, the facility assessment work. All of that is now complete and in the books. It was about a two-year process. We started that in August of 2024. It is now complete, which then moves us to the phase two, which is the pre-design, the conceptual design, CMAR coordination that we just talked about. The future phases beyond that would be one more design contract for the final design, and we broke this up for reasons, and mainly because of funding, and I'll share that with you in just a moment. Construction administration, then of course the implementation support that goes along with the construction of the actual project. And as we've mentioned before, this is a total of about a five to six year project, from beginning to end, to finish all three of those phases there. What are the funding sources? Right now we have phase two agreements are funded from a general revenue grant. It was a special appropriation grant sponsored by Caroline Fairley for $20 million. That almost covers the entire project. This is about a $22.3 million project if you add the two sides up. This covers almost all of that. We've also identified multiple outside funding opportunities. We've been working many, many meetings with the Texas Water Development Board for those low-interest loans. We have a $60 million piece of that that is in the final stages. That has been about a two-year process as well. We expect to hear the final results of that in August. Probably we'll get funding shortly after that. And then we have another application that is in now for another $60 million for River Road, much the same as the one that was earmarked for Hollywood. So that's two fairly confident $120 million toward this project that we will be able to utilize. So the current council action on the 28th would allow us to move forward with at least that $20 million portion of this that would cover this first phase of design. And just so you know, too, we are continuing to seek any and every opportunity that's out there for funding. We haven't stopped that. We work closely with our Normandy group, and we have monthly meetings with them. And then meetings as often as we need to have with them to determine if there's anything that's coming down the pipeline that we might be able to latch on to to help us with funding for this project, all in terms of, in the name of getting the rate increases as low as possible as we go through this. Speaking of rate studies, NewGen Strategies is continuing their work on our rate studies. That's been pushed out a little bit due to some things that we revealed during the budget process and also during this last meeting, the meeting that we had with them. We know that they're going to be continuing to work on the availability of design grant funding. Well, the design grant funding gives us the opportunity to continue to work with them and extend that out into the fall for their work. In other words, we can go ahead and get started now and let them get their work finished for rate studies in the fall. We expect to have some of those numbers back at that point in time. I want to remind you also of our executive committee work. This is something I'm very proud of. They have been very actively engaged throughout this project. We put that together several months ago, and the committee has created a central forum for information sharing, project coordination, community messaging, leadership input. The meetings have included discussions of project milestones as we've reached those, preliminary engineering work, we've talked about regulatory issues, flood mitigation, CMAR strategies, grant, loan opportunities, you name it, it's on those agendas. We meet monthly and we review the status of where we're at and we will continue to do that. In fact, I was telling Councilmember Prescott last week that those meetings will probably ramp up. There's probably a good possibility that we could go to twice a month at some point in time when we start moving this forward. But I do think that Councilman Prescott can speak to the importance of this committee and the amount of work we're doing because he's been participating in it and has seen that. We even had TCQ come to one of our meetings. We had two representatives from TCQ that visited with us about compliance issues so that the committee could better understand what we're facing with all that. The more that that committee can understand, the more the public is going to be able to understand because we have everybody with the same common message that we're putting out all the way from the communications department all the way up through management.

I wanted to share this as well. This is just a few pictures that we've added here.

I look back at my calendar, and for the core team, just in the last nine months since we did the last presentation, we have met over 40 times. And that doesn't include, that includes Cymley-Horne meetings, executive committee meetings, internal staff meetings. What it does not include is the one-on-one council member meetings that I've had with each of you. It also does not include the city management meetings that I've had with Grayson and Andrew. And it also does include the meetings that Jerry and I have had pretty much on a weekly basis, sometimes more than two times a week where we're talking and strategizing. So we looked at all that and it's been well over 60 meetings that we've had since the last time that we met with you back in November. I just wanted to share that as as the work that we're doing is continuing and we're really engaged in this project. I wanted to show you this timeline. We shared this with you back in November. We are on track right now. You can see that we're right here and you see that purple graph bar there. That is actually the design phase. So we're right on track with starting the design phase right where we thought we were going to start it. We're a little bit behind on the yellow, which is the CMAR contract. That's going to be next, and that's just around the corner. Next thing that will come before you as council will be that if we were able to get the design phase finished. So just a tad bit behind on where we wanted to be. We really wanted to have this here at the first of June. So here we are presenting it to you today. So I still think we're in pretty good shape. Our project team from Kimley Horn is a fantastic team. There was an RFQ process that took place. There were 10 different engineering firms that we looked at. Where Kimley really stood out and scored very high in that evaluation was three critical areas for us. One of those was the knowledge of our system. And working for us for the past two years deep into our wastewater treatment plant facility systems, they understand it very well. They also understand and have a great knowledge of this project itself. They also have experience in building this type of project, and they've done this all over the country. So we know we've got some experts. You see the list of people that are on that sheet right there. That's about 195 years of experience that they bring to the table just in what we would call their executive design team. Behind that, there is an entire floor of an office building in Fort Worth. I visited that. That has everybody else behind the scenes that's going to be working on our project should you approve this contract when we move forward. So with that being said, I'm going to turn this over to Kyle Kabista. He's the project manager for Kimley Horn, and he's going to take you through the rest of the presentation.

Thanks, Donnie. Mayor, Council, it's my pleasure to present to you tonight. And as Donnie mentioned, this phase of the contract is really focused on the pre-design services, conceptual design, and CMAR coordination required to move the project forward. And the main idea behind this phase of the project is to evaluate multiple treatment technologies. So there's three treatment technologies that we'll be evaluating that I'll discuss a little bit later in the presentation. And we'll work with a construction manager at risk to develop market-based pricing early in this process so that you have the confidence and clarity to move forward with the treatment technology that best suits the city and gives you the best value. So like Donnie said, we've already completed a lot of the planning phase of the project, and that really helped set up a lot of the need for the project. We looked at future growth, determined the capacity needs, identified opportunities for phased improvements, which is some of the items that Donnie discussed as well. and help support the funding applications that were shown on his presentation. And so really, this part of the project moves us from the planning phase into decision making, where we're able to take those concepts and put them into real layouts, real costs, and ultimately determine a preferred path forward. So just looking at Hollywood, the Hollywood facility here on the screen. This is your existing facility. And one of the biggest advantages that you have is you already own the property that we're looking to expand on. So the box on the top of the screen is the area that we've allocated to schematically lay out a plant. And there's a couple great things about this. One, you own the property, so it allows us to go ahead and expand with the flow rate that we need, the new facility on that site. and allows you to continue to operate your existing facility at the same time. And so that really provides a lot of flexibility with the design and then makes the best use of your existing investments in that infrastructure that you have today. And it also allows us to reuse things like the influent interceptor and make a connection to that with its proximity to the facility. So one of the things that we've also done as a part of the planning phase is phase out the design for the next 25 years. And so we've taken a look at the expansion that you need today. And so that will be located there. And then in conjunction with that, it will be utilizing an existing portion of the existing facility moving forward. And what that does is, once this project is complete, gives you the opportunity to evaluate rehabilitating and reusing some of your existing facility into the future. So it gives you the flexibility to make decisions that are the right fit for you at the right time. And that was the Hollywood facility. The River Road facility, we're able to use a very similar philosophy. And so much like the Hollywood facility, you own a decent amount of property, and so we're looking at utilizing that property for the expansion of the new portion of the plant. At the same time, we're planning on utilizing a portion of the existing facility as well. So both the new and the existing portion of the existing plant will operate in conjunction with each other. And there's added benefits for that location. Again, utilizing some of your existing infrastructure that you've already made investments in like the influence sewer line, we're able to connect to it. And so it also gives you the flexibility to take down a part of the plant once this part of the project is complete and evaluate rehabilitating or reusing part of your infrastructure in the future. And so it really gives you the opportunity to best utilize the investments that you've made over the last several years. So one of the first parts of the contract is the pre-designed services. And so this really sets up the foundation for a robust design. So Donnie had mentioned some of these items. I'll go into a little bit more detail. So for the geotechnical investigation at both facilities, we're looking at doing up to about 40 bores at each facility. And the reason we're doing that is it really gives us an understanding of the subsurface conditions, which is really critical for the amount of structures that we're placing on site and helps us identify what foundation systems are viable at each of those facilities. And so we'll be doing that as a part of the pre-designed services. In conjunction with that, survey will be done. So evaluating some and collecting some topographic information helps us understand the proposed area and the facility and what we'll be working with. And we'll also be doing some laser scanning on the existing site because, like I said, we'll be reusing some of that infrastructure. And so the connection points both at the beginning of the plant and at the end of the plant are really critical. So we're collecting that data as well. Water quality testing is important for a project like this where we'll be conducting two rounds of water quality testing to really understand what's coming to each of the facilities. So Donnie had mentioned River Road has a higher industrial load. Things like that are important for understanding how to move forward with the design and what size of facility you need and the equipment appropriate for that waste stream. And so we'll be collecting that data, which will be really important for influencing the design. And then regulatory coordination. We've been working with TCEQ throughout this process already. We'll continue to do so as we continue to look at the expansions, the permitting required, the coordination for those expansions, and we'll keep them up to speed on the project throughout the process. So a key component of the project is the conceptual design. So I had mentioned earlier that we will be comparing three different treatment technologies and utilizing a CMAR process to help cost those out. And that's a huge benefit to the city. We're excited to be able to partner with the CMAR early in the process like this because we think there's a lot of value that it can provide the city and identifying cost savings measures and particularly with the treatment technology itself. And so we're gonna progress conceptual designs for each of these treatment technologies. And that will really help us provide the documentation that a construction manager at risk will use to cost out each of those treatment technologies. So the treatment technologies are conventional MBR and oxidation ditch that we're evaluating. Conventional treatment is what you have today. So your operations staff, your staff are very familiar with the conventional activated sludge. That's what they have. They're familiar with it. It's tried and true, used all over the country. Another treatment technology that we're looking at is membrane bioreactor technology. So this is a little bit more advanced technology, still tried and true, it has a good track record, but has a different level of equipment that's installed and produces a higher quality effluent. And one of the reasons why we want to evaluate MBR is because of this additional equipment, you can have a reduced size of the facility. So the footprint can get smaller, which can translate into cost savings by reduction of concrete and basins. And so we really want to evaluate it with the construction manager at risk. And then oxidation ditch is the third technology. So very tried and true technology. It's a very simple system, proven, reliable. And so they're known for their operational simplicity and are attractive because of the operations and maintenance are very simple. The downside to an oxidation ditch compared to an MBR is the footprint is a little bit larger. And so sometimes that translates into additional cost. And so what we're really looking for in this process is progressing the design of each of these far enough to be able to turn those documents over to a construction manager at risk and really identify which option may be more cost effective. And an important note for each of these treatment technologies are they can meet your treatment needs. So they're all capable of meeting the needs of the city of Amarillo. And we'll take this information really forward to figure out what is the best treatment technology for the city moving forward in the long term. And then CMAR coordination. So we had talked about bringing on a construction manager at risk early on in the process, and that's a huge benefit. We gain real world access into the pricing, and that can impact our decisions moving forward. And so that real world access to pricing, the real time Pricing is important to gather that data now because we can work through design elements that may be able to save cost in the long run. So contractors can bring ideas to the table through value engineering workshops like different materials, different equipment, different ways to sequence their construction that may save time, which saves money for the city. And so we're really excited about the opportunity to work with the CMR to identify Those things and so that means we'll have better budgeting fewer surprises and more opportunity to identify those cost savings measures before you guys are locked in on a treatment technology and move forward with design and so ultimately that creates a stronger decision making process that we think will provide value to the city. So ultimately this phase, the conceptual design and CMAR coordination, it's about reducing uncertainty for the city of Amarillo before you commit capital towards design or construction of a large project like this. At the conclusion of this work, we'll understand the available treatment technologies, have market-based information on the cost, and know the long-term implications of each treatment technology. and be in a much stronger position to be able to make that decision moving into design. And that's how we protect the rate payers, responsibly plan for growth, and position the city for a reliable long-term wastewater solution. Thank you, and I'd be happy to answer any questions.

I've got a quick question. If you can go back to the slide on the tentative project timeline. I think it's just very important that we recognize If we look at 2031, 2032, before either one of the plants are completed at four and a half years, it's saying a lot that we're on target. I think the team's doing a fantastic job. Donnie and your team doing a fantastic job. We have a lot of other hats we have to wear in the city, but you guys are holding the core strong. I mean, we're in the design phase. We see we're in 2026. We're going to be at 2031. The mayor said earlier that we're going to have 250,000 people at this point. We know that this is going to cover at least, how many, what, 275?

I don't remember the exact population, but as far as the population growths, that was considered as a part of the master plan, and these phases accomplish meeting those growth goals.

So we'll have plenty of runway when we get to 2031, 2032, 33. I mean, we'll have to bolt on as who knows where the city's population will end up, but we're going to have plenty of runway as we go forward with this build right now. So great job.

I might mention on that also that if you see that those two graphs for construction start before the design is finished, and that's the beauty of the CMAR, is we can go ahead and start taking those early packages and delivering those early on instead of waiting. We wait for design to get finished until it's that mid-28 point before we started the construction project. We would be well out past 33, 34. So that's one of the advantages of the CMAR, engaging them early on this, is we have some early out packages we can get started with.

And with the TCEQ being at the meetings and looking at the plants, it's good to have their support and their buy-in and know what we're doing.

Yeah, we keep them updated very often on this process. So far, we've had a lot of compliments from TCEQ on the direction that we're headed on that. So, yeah, very productive meeting when we had them in there with us as well.

Good. And to the crews that continue to keep this up and running, just always give them our thanks because they're working with antiquated stuff, and they're doing a great job.

Yeah, they are. There's not a weekend that goes by that Will doesn't contact me about some issue at Hollywood or at River Road. It happens. It is old equipment, and we're dealing with blower issues right now in Hollywood that they're working really hard to keep. It's expensive equipment, but the other thing that we've done is we've identified a lot of CIPs, and you will see those. They're not actually in the one-year CIP plan, but they're out in the five-, six-year plan. We have, you know, I don't remember the number now. It's $80 to $100 million worth of projects that we've identified so that when we need them to keep those plants moving while we're in construction phases, that we have a plan in place that we can pluck that CIP out, plug it in, get it funded, and move forward.

One last thing, I'm very glad that we're soon going to have pricing because we know pricing is going out the roof on all things.

Yes, we've talked about that a lot, that the quicker we can get started on this, you know, that's another thing about the CMAR being engaged with the early packages out. We were talking today in a meeting that, you know, we're going to be able to order some of this technology earlier than later and waiting on design, which you know every year the cost of that technology and equipment is going to have long lead times on them. The price is just going to go up year by year.

What is your latest cost there, Donnie?

I knew you were going to ask that.

That's okay.

No, I can answer. Let me throw this at you. What we've done is we, and I know everybody wants a number. The first number that we threw out back when we were talking about a centralized plant was $3 billion, and that was for that 42 MGD. a facility. So what Jerry and I did, and the consultants did this as well, we ran out across the country and searched for wastewater treatment plant projects within the past two or three years, and then we backed that up and said, okay, this is what the cost of that project was. Let's back that up to a per MGD cost, because we know what we're designing to. We're designing 10 and 14, so that's 10 MGD at one, 14, that's 24 MGD. So if we know a per MGD cost, we can at least get in the ballpark what we saw was a range that went from 36 million per mgd all the way up to 54 million per mgd the reason that there's such a wide range on that is what's the soil temp or what's the soil conditions like how much what technologies they use how much space did they use is it one facility or was it multiple facilities so if you multiply all that out that comes out to around 860 million at the lowest price to about 1.2, 1.3 billion at the highest price. You got to remember, all of these projects but one are already completed. So we're talking about that little escalation factor. So I'll tell you this, our target is we're trying to get this project to a billion dollars or less. I mean, and that's the only guarantee I can give you is that's a target we're shooting at. We're going to do everything we can to value engineer it to get it to that. But I also can't control the cost as we go forward in inflation and equipment cost and all those things in the economy and what's going to happen between now and the time we actually start the major parts of this project. So once again, a vague answer, but I think getting this project we're talking to you about now in place is going to give us that better number when we get to a year from now when we're at 25%, 30% design.

And one other question, so I hear a lot of acronyms, but one of them with a CMAR, which is Construction Manager at Risk.

Correct.

Tell me, and this will be from both of you, I guess, Construction Manager at Risk, particularly the at-risk part, what does that mean, and how does that benefit our rate payers in longer term?

I'm going to let Jerry come and sit in this chair, if you don't mind, because he's the best one that can explain this, and I'll just hand him a mic.

Councilmember, what you got to keep in mind is, as Donnie referenced earlier and so did Kyle, as we move forward on these phases, we can enter into contracts with guaranteed maximum prices with the construction manager at risk. In other words, when we're looking at components for our wastewater treatment plant, whether we're talking the membrane, or different components of the plant, we can look at potentially purchasing that in year one instead of waiting until year three of the construction project. Now I don't have to deal with inflation costs because I've actually purchased that, have it stored on site, ready to go as the construction proceeds. It also allows us to bring those packages to you similar to what we've done on the drainage project, you saw a GMP that we brought to you for phase one, so you know exactly what the cost of that construction is going to be. If you exceed that, that's where the CMAR is at risk. If he exceeds that GMP, he eats that cost. We don't eat that cost. So it allows us to be extremely aggressive, do value engineering. been talking to several CMARs that are large enough to do this. You've got to keep in mind, when we talk about these kind of dollars, the challenge is getting a contractor that's big enough or has enough bonding capacity to be able to do this job. So it limits who can do this kind of work. It's a difficult task, and that's one reason we haven't put that contract out yet, is to get that clarification in place. Also, we're extremely interested, you know, historically with our CMAR projects, which was Hodgetown and this building itself, it allowed us to keep over 90% of the money that was spent on that project within the community. The goal is going to exist to try and do as much of that as we can going forward. So there's several major advantages to the CMAR process. If we were to do a design-bid-build, now we're talking about asking the engineers to design something that we're going to be looking at two years down the road before we could ever turn a shovel of dirt. If we can get to the design and we understand what we're building, now we can start cutting loose on the dirt contract. Now we can talk to our CMAR. Is there value for you putting a batch plant on site? Now you're not trucking concrete all over Amarillo. You're building it on site. We'll look at all of those things for value engineering throughout the process.

So the value to us of using the CMAR arrangement is that there's a fixed price to it that we agree to with them. and they've got to make sure it keeps the project underneath that fixed price or they have to pay the difference.

Absolutely, that's correct. What's the advantage for them? The advantage for them, in all honesty, is number one, you get the job. And as a CMR, the value engineering comes back, and Kyle referenced it several times, and so did Donnie. It allows us, when we reach a contractor of that size, that means they've built these already. They have a history of building treatment plants. One of the conversations that we've had as an example, when we talked about the membrane, which was option two in Kyle's slide, When we look at the membrane option, that changes what the water quality is of the product that's leaving the plant. When it first came out, the technology was extremely expensive, but in talking to several contractors currently that are doing projects, they're like, those numbers have come down substantially because the engineering is now proven it now works. So what's the value to us as a city? So those conversations will take place saying, what is the quality of water we want leaving our plant? What is the cost of operations for a membrane versus a conventional or a sludge? We will have a contractor that has the experience in all three of those areas working both with our engineers and with the city We look at this like a three-legged stool, and I've had this conversation with many contractors. A three-legged stool, but understand you can't divide three into a perfect number, so there's always going to be one leg that's a little bit longer that controls everything, and that's the city of Amarillo because we're the ones cutting the check. So we actually control the two other entities, which is the engineering firm and the CMAR, to make sure we're constantly getting that best value moving forward.

And with this new technology that you're talking about, is it possible that that could add to uses for the wastewater that comes out of the wastewater treatment plant in addition to what we're using it for now?

Absolutely. Could affect that decision moving forward. we would have to sit down with council and the committee and say, what is the value to this? If one is more expensive than the other, but you see that you have potential reuse of water in a different way than you currently are doing, what is the value to you? And that would be a discussion that would be had.

And that could potentially be an advantage to the ratepayers if we can pay for part of the project, I guess, going forward using revenue that we're not getting right now from water that comes out of the wastewater treatment plant.

It would be part of a discussion. It absolutely would be. Thank you.

Council, any other questions?

WE LIKE TO APPRECIATE YOU GUYS FOR ATTENDING THE MEETING, ALWAYS BEING ON TOP OF IT. THANKS FOR PRIORITIZING US AS A CUSTOMER AND WORKING QUICKLY AS WELL. SO THANK YOU FOR THE PRESENTATION, SIR. Y'ALL HAVE A SAFE TRIP. THANK YOU. OKAY. ITEM 4.3 IS COMPLETED. ITEM 4.4 IS FUTURE AGENDA REQUESTS. I don't hear any. Okay, we're gonna move forward into item five, which is public comment. Hand this over to our city secretary and just remind everyone, we appreciate you guys being respectful to everyone's time and trying to hold your comments to three minutes. And so let's jump into section five.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for participating in today's City Council meeting. We value your input and appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. Each speaker today will have three minutes to address City Council during public comment or during our public hearing. At two and a half minutes, a single beep will signal 30 seconds remaining. When time is up, the timer will beep continuously. Please stay within your allotted time. We do have one public hearing today. If you wish to speak on that item, please do so either during public comment or during the public hearing, not both, in order to ensure accurate minutes. We will be using both podiums today. When your name is called, please make your way to an open podium. When it is your turn, state your name and whether or not you live within Amarillo City limits before beginning your comments to council. For any topics not on today's agenda, the Texas Open Meetings Act limits how council may respond. Council may provide factual statements, ask for your issue to be added to a future agenda, or refer you to the city manager so staff can visit with you about your concern. If you would like to speak today but haven't signed up, please come see me at the table now to fill out a form so we can get you on our list. Our first public comment speaker today is Christopher Podzemny. And on deck for the open podium will be Chuck Little. We will invite Chuck up and after Chuck Little will be Michael J. Stevens.

Afternoon. I guess my comments are on the For Me America project. I was out there not too long ago, drove up to the guard shack And there's not been only people out there that day with the two guards and maybe a couple of pickups up at their offices. That was on the 29th. I ran into a guy on the 4th of July who's been working out there, but they haven't done any work out there since January. So their stocks aren't doing very good. I think they're spending all their money on advertising because every time there's a commercial comes out there getting bigger and better and all that good stuff but no work going on. Of course the water that we sold them my concerns are the aquifer everybody seems to think that we have an endless supply of water on some sides of the fence, but all the other places, the experts that know about the aquifer, seems it's not unlimited, like everybody thinks. So, it makes me think of a little company called Enron. I'm sure some of you remember them, how they went bankrupt and left A lot of people holding the bag. I know several people that work for Portland General Electric up in the Oregon area that lost every bit of their retirement over this. And that's not a good thing. So I think we need to be careful with this agreement with them on this 2.5 million gallons of water. The fact that there's going to be some nuclear reactors out there which is above the aquifer. I don't think that's very good either. So I think we need to put it to the vote of the citizens. That's been brought up at every meeting that we've had on this, every public comment. Nobody, the citizens don't want this. It's kind of like when the sanctuary city for people traveling through Amarillo came up, And everybody was jumping up. Oh, we need to do this. We need to do that. We put it to the vote of the citizens and it went down. It was defeated. Now there's two guys on this council that weren't on this council when that happened. But there's three on here that were. So I wish that we got an election coming up November 3rd. So if it's not too late, we need to put this on the ballot and get it settled. Because... We can't afford to run out of water. And that's the simple problem. And there's been several places, Dumas went into restrictions. There's people drilling water all over the place. Guymon, Clarington, Canadian, tried to drill some new wells and it messed up their water. And now they've got to go to City Hall to get their drinking water. So, appreciate you Chuck.

On deck after Michael J. Stevens is Tim Benson, and we invite Michael J. Stevens to begin comments.

Gentlemen, I come to you as a taxpaying citizen of the city of Amarillo where I reside. You're experiencing a first I've never spoken at this podium. But I have to tell you, I'm really disappointed in what I heard in the discussion items 4.1 and 4.2. Last year, your rapid-fire Q&A with the city internal auditor and the city CFO, I thought was disgusting. I didn't hear you say anything about what the citizens might think when it comes to do we want a forensic audit. I didn't hear any of that. Let me remind you Do you remember what we paid Barry Dunn to help us with this amazing water bill utility software? Do you remember what that was? Seven point something million is what it ended up to be. And just a few weeks ago, you were okay with $85,000 to pay another firm to come in and help us discover what went wrong. Let me remind you, you also have three former employees either serving time or did serve time for swiping $600,000. Let me also remind you of $30 million that we discovered went unspent from 2016 Prop 1 monies. ARPA money. I've heard Mayor Cole Stanley talk about that today. The $43 million in CIP monies that have been discovered. And yet you wonder why we want a forensic audit. City Manager Paff, I know you don't care for me too much, but you said something today that I honestly thought I was going to jump out of my skin for. When you asked the mayor, or you said orally out loud, if the mayor wants $100 million, I can pull some projects back. I'll accept an apology on behalf of the taxpaying citizens. This is also the same seat in the last budget session, waited until the last minute of the last day to say, oh, by the way, you're $15 million over. But we can cover that with something called a street assessment fee. It is just troubling. It's sorrowful to sit there as a taxpaying citizen and hear good men, good people, debate and try to use taxpayer-provided monies while you're talking to city-mandated personnel, when you ought to be wondering, when you ought to be asking these folks, hey, what do you think about a forensic audit? Because I, for one, I think it's needed, and it's needed like quick, fast, and in a hurry. Thank you.

On deck for the empty podium will be Mike Fisher and Tim Benson. You may begin your comments.

Well, he hit every topic that I was going to talk about. So thank you, Michael J. I don't know what the problem is, Les. Why do we not want it? What are we hiding? Are we hiding something? I mean, you want to be transparent. Let's put it all out in the open, and let's do it. You want to talk about, oh, it's going to cost $500 an hour. I can tell you this. If it comes up for vote, the taxpayers are going to say, pay the $500 an hour. Let's put it out in the open. Because right now, every year this goes by, we're like, OK, we're missing this. We're short here. We're short there. We're short here. But nothing ever happens. Just like Michael J said, 30 million last year, the last day of the budget, I was there every day. We're short $15 million the last day. What in ginger is going on here, guys? Let's do the audit. What are we fussing about? This is ridiculous. You know, one more thing I'd like to discuss is, with all due respect to these guys here, about the stinky fire. You know, you guys are doing an internal investigation. How can we do an internal investigation when the two guys right here are part of the internal investigation? I don't agree to that. I think you guys need to reconsider how you're doing this investigation on that. But other than that, thanks for your time.

On deck for the empty podium will be Misty Collier and Mike Fisher. You may begin your comments.

My name is Mike Fisher. I live in the city limits of Amarillo. A forensic audit without the right scope would be like asking a murder detective to investigate a murder, but don't go in the basement. Don't look there. It would be like auditing the ADC, but limiting them to the bylaws. I think that's kind of what happened, right? The same gentleman came back and said, well, within my scope, nothing was wrong. Even though $750,000 was more or less given away, nobody signed off on it, you guys didn't vote on it, Same guy during the same audit times. I mean, where do you get this where you said you don't have a reason? There's been money stolen. Three people are in prison for stealing money, for stealing money under your watch to HUD money. Stolen. You said you couldn't find cities that are doing audits, forensic audits. I found a list of 10 of them. I could give them to you. I only got three minutes. It'd be like using city staff to oversee the landfill investigation. It's crazy that you're up here losing your mind over, Les Simpson, you're losing your mind over 200K. And this guy's up here talking about 2 billion or 3 billion, now it's down to a billion, so it's a bargain. We've got Bob's Used Car Salesman over here. And you're cool with that. You're cool with a billion dollars. Who do you answer to? Who do you carry water for? It's somebody over in that brown building, I guess. There's like two personalities up here. You were pissed. You were so mad. Why are you so mad, bro? Why are you mad about this? An audit, that's nothing. It's less than 1% of our budget. You keep talking about a wise investment, Les Simpson. This is going to haunt you. If you try to run for mayor, man, I'm going to get, I got so much material on you. You talk about spending money wisely, but you were over the LGC or whatever it was when they created all this stuff, this debacle that we have downtown where we sold retail space that was worth over $20 million. We sold it for probably 20 cents on the dollar. But you're talking about financial responsibility? Come on, man. We've got to do better than this, and we've got to have an audit. I did like the fact that Mr. Path said, you guys should take it over and just do the audit. Why have a committee? Thank you.

Appreciate you, Mr. Fisher.

Ms. Collier. On deck for the empty podium will be John Adair and Misty Collier may begin.

My name is Misty Collier. I'm a citizen of Amarillo. I'm going to go over three things. Please hear what I'm saying to you. Please. Number one, I am in favor of a forensic audit. Number two, I brought y'all vendor I brought you a vendor who's not gonna charge this city a single dollar to fix your waste problem. And I have yet to hear back from anyone on that. And I've had two meetings with your city on this. They're not gonna charge you a single dollar. to fix your trash problem. And they're gonna pay you for the trash. Okay? And number three, none of you businessmen up here in your business would hire a liar, a manipulator, and someone that hallucinates and put them over the security of your company. So I ask that you don't put AI over the security of these citizens.

That's all.

And John Adair.

It's coming. Accountability is coming. Accountability is coming. You'll just have to wait for it. The truth is coming. Just wait. Investigations are being done. Just wait. We'll answer your questions. Just wait. Yesterday, the city put out a press release. They say they can give us answers about the stinky fires being investigated. My issue with this is how involved will Donnie Hooper and Grayson Path be with this investigation? The two people that probably hold some responsibility in this fire. And a couple weeks ago at the Potter County press conference, Donnie Hooper was asked about lack of maintenance and he brushed that off like there was no issue with lack of maintenance at the landfill and now we get TCEQ reports that state much the difference. He also asked about a stand down order. Now we are reading reports where people were told to leave and they didn't feel comfortable doing so. I understand the city is asking us to wait. The problem is we have people who are homeless now. They have waited long enough. Is the city wanting us to wait, or are they just wanting us to forget?

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Adair.

Mayor, that concludes everyone I have signed up.

Everyone else that's signed up. Did I have anybody here, if you'd raise your hand, if you wanted to give public comment? Okay, then we've covered our public comment period here today. I thank you for everyone who took an opportunity to sign up and to speak. And so we will move forward to the rest of our business meeting. Move us into section six here, our consent agenda. Council, you have anything on consent that you have need for discussion or further information on?

I'd like to just take 6.8 off just for a little bit of clarification and discussion.

No problem. Let's remove 6.8. That's an award of a temporary landscape maintenance agreement. Anything else? Okay. Would entertain a motion for the remaining amount.

I move to approve the consent agenda minus 6.8 as presented. Second.

Motion in a second. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes. Mr. Path, if you'll take up 6.8 for us or hand that over.

Is James Stowe with us right now?

Yeah, I'm not sure. I can comment on it as well, either myself or James. Michael Koshuba is on vacation, so. James Stowe is filling in for Michael Koshuba today.

Afternoon, James. So before you take off running, let me direct here and just see, was there a few items you'd like to key in on?

Well, I know I know a lot's happened since we last met and we issued a press release, but I just I guess briefly just kind of what's gotten to us to this point. I mean, obviously, we felt that there was a need to make a change. And, you know, who was helping maintain our parks and making them look nice? And then the other thing is, what what all does this cover? What is Had somebody come up and say, I have a riding lawnmower for $416,000. I'll come cut your grass. I said, I think it's more than that. So can you kind of go over what's gotten us to this point? And then what all does this agreement cover that we're going to award here to Golden Standard Tree and Lawn?

Yeah, so give you a little history on this. Of course, as we had visited with each council member about as well, we had one of our two contractors that was not performing. We had sent several notices for performance. We had to let them go. And it came at a pretty critical time, too, because we're in the middle of the summer. And that's when we had a lot of rain, we had a lot of grass growing, we had all that. So we had to put something into place. There were two things that happened. One, we had an emergency contract that we executed so that we could continue mowing up until and through the July 4th period because we knew that there were a lot of people that were going to be using those parks. This is a part of this. But we also knew that we had to get somebody on board as quickly as possible. So there were a lot of conversations that were taking place. with different contractors, finding out who was qualified, who had the equipment, who had the availability. A lot of these contractors are already tied up for the summer. They've already got their routes and their things that they're mowing, so we did want to go into the contract with the one that we are discussing here tonight. They had the capability doing it to answer your questions on what the scope includes. That is the maintenance of turf, shrubs, ground cover, annuals, perennials, and mulch at neighborhood parks, linear parks, public buildings, traffic islands, and other city-owned properties. And so those are once a week maintenance items as well. We know that they have been off and running with that emergency contract and have been performing very well.

Thank you.

Well, I also understand, were you recently mowing grass, James? I was. I heard Kashuba was too, so we appreciate that right before the 4th of July and stepping up to do that and getting this straightened out as well. Thank you.

I have a quick question. So Golden Standard Tree is actually working for us now, or they've been doing some projects for us?

Yes. Yes, they have. They've been in place doing the stopgap, what we call the stopgap, since we terminated the contract and got us to this point. They've helped spray and clean up a lot of the downtown lots and are making strides. I mean, they're spraying playgrounds as we speak. They've applied post-emergent on four parks. They've been a great asset moving us forward since we terminated the contract. Prior to that, they've been doing some work with the other landscape contractor that is in town, mowing roughly about a third of their park acreage that they're awarded. So they're familiar with the park system, our expectations, and then what we're looking for. So they've been around and definitely have been great to work with. Personally, I didn't deal with them a whole lot when they were working with N-Circle. They were run through that contract. But as far as working with us the last week to 10 days, they've been great. The owner's been communicating. lots and great communication back and forth, whether they're running into issues, equipment, what they're going to do, where they're going, and definitely communicating great with the Parks Department.

One thing, how were they selected? Were they selected on price? I mean, how was this contractor selected for this award?

I mean, price we always take into an account. We wanted to make sure, number one, that they could do the job, that we didn't fall into the same situation that we were in. So price, availability was a big one. They were willing and able. They had already geared up. The contractor that was actually terminated had requested these guys to come in and help him get caught up. And they were geared up and ready to go. We terminated a contract two days from these guys starting to assist with that. So they were geared up, ready to go. So availability, I mean, there were several contractors that were reached out to. Some couldn't do it just based on the time of year that we're in. some some of the prices were minimal scope to to answer some of les's questions too this is mowing spraying assisting with irrigation and stuff like that so it's a more i'm not going to say a turnkey operation but it's a lot more a lot of the stop gap and a lot of these other contractors just wanted to mow and weed eat and were significantly higher price than these so the price did play play into it, but ultimately it was availability and then willing to be able to hit the ground running and us to make sure the stop gap was a great time for us to assess and make sure that they could actually do that.

One last question. How is the payments released? I mean, how do they, is it draws or explain to me how they would receive compensation on the 416? On what? Do they get weekly payments?

Weekly payments is typically how we do it. So like the contractor that we have in place, they complete a location, they submit photos, say that they're completed, we send an inspector to inspect. That's how this contractor, they've got to learn our system. So right now they're emailing us daily on what they complete daily and we're sending an inspector out and inspecting what they what they're doing now right now this is a quick turnaround for these guys and there's a backlog of deferred maintenance weeds and playgrounds and vacant lots and knowing so he had to go purchase a bunch of stuff up front to get going so we told them as they complete sites if they want to invoice daily or every few days after we inspect will will work through that with them because they're helping us out through this period as we get into this next If this is approved, it's typically weekly invoicing.

I lied, one more question. This is not to renew. I mean, we'll go out on a hard bid next time, right?

Correct. We're reevaluating everything from do we want to bring irrigation back in-house? Is there certain aspects that we feel like we need to have control over that we can manage? So we're evaluating everything. This is a short-term agreement that'll get us to the end of this mowing season. And this one will go back out for a bit. Ultimately, I believe both of them will be because we want them in line. We want calendar year based off certain things. So, yes, I think that the plan is to this. This is just a short term and at a bare minimum, this contract will go back out for bid this fall.

I've looked online, and other than Facebook, it's very hard to find anything out about this company. Right. They don't even have a web page.

And I asked about that, and he said it's been word of mouth, and that's just a word of mouth is kind of how he's grown and how he's been able to do it. I will say he's got a lot of mowers and a lot of crews out on the ground and boots running right now as we currently speak helping us out. I understand that concern.

Any other questions, counsel? James, thank you for being here. Thank you. Item 6.8 is before you, gentlemen.

I move to approve the temporary landscape maintenance agreement as presented. Second.

Motion and a second on item 6.8. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed?

Opposed.

Motion passes 4-1. Okay, we'll move forward into section seven, non-consent agenda. Coming up, we've got everybody's favorite presenter, O'Brady Kendrick, gonna get us walking into a zoning item.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. This is a public hearing and consideration of Ordinance 8251. This is the Considerate Amendment to City of Amarillo Municipal Code, Chapter 4-10, Zoning Article 5, Supplemental Regulations, Vehicle Parking and Loading. We are proposing to add Section 4-10-211, Subsection 8, Off-Street Parking Regulations specifically for the Route 66 Historic District. And I'll just cover a few points very briefly, as I know we presented this to you all as a discussion item previously. But essentially, we are proposing to bring the central business district standards for parking to the 6th Street historic district. Currently, where they are zoned like commercial district, they would typically have to provide off street parking. This has been a long issue on 6th Street. on how they regulate it exactly. I know back in the 1990s they explored potentially adopting this item, but at that point they didn't. They just kind of went with staff interpretation. Given a lot of the recent interest in 6th Street, it's made it difficult on staff to get businesses in and out of there, as parking is typically reviewed during certificates of occupancy. This is a historic corridor with much of the sites being developed in the 1930s, where buildings occupy a majority, if not all of the lot in most cases. So it's very similar in nature to kind of what we see in downtown as well. And it is one of the key historic sites for Route 66 and the Texas Panhandle. So there's an element of this. One of the key elements is preservation of that historic character. That way the building owners don't have to pick between potentially tearing down historic structures versus having profitable sites. It would also, this amendment would also correct that non-conforming status that many of these businesses currently face where they are technically non-conforming for parking. If they ever experience a loss on their site, they would have to come back into conformance and they rebuild. This will also set clear expectations for city staff and property owners for parking regulations and would promote economic redevelopment and the continued success of Sixth Street. It is worth noting that this is a common practice in the state of Texas, as Canyon, Fort Worth, and Dallas have recently eliminated parking for historic districts or historic buildings. And the Planning and Zoning Commission notes that the impacts from this change in the code amendment are expected to be minimal in nature, given that this is the way that 6th Street has essentially operated for decades and decades, where the parking is primarily on street. So it would not result in a new condition being created, if you will, as this is essentially how it functions today. And additionally, the corridor features very few buildable lots, and most of the corridor is built out with established buildings and businesses. We did a rough count, and there's approximately only four what you would call vacant lots, and most of those are actually used for parking, so we wouldn't anticipate an explosion of a new construction being spurred by this amendment as the corridor is essentially built out as it is today. Regarding public comment and outreach, we have not received any comments as of today. This item went before P&Z for a public hearing in addition to two discussion items. It was reviewed multiple times by city staff who did not have any concerns about the proposal. And TxDOT also did not express any concerns to the request since this is technically a TxDOT right away. With that, that is all. P&Z did recommend approval of this with a 5-0 vote. And with that, I'll take any questions.

Thank you, sir. Questions for Brady? A parking change to zoning and no questions from you, gentlemen.

One thing I did want to add, Mayor, the corridor is from Forest to Bryan along 6th Street. We did end up doing one block east of Georgia due to the potential for a future intersection improvement project to that intersection. So that would potentially require additional right-of-way. So I wanted to mention that's the one change from last time we discussed this item.

Appreciate the additional foresight in that. No problem. with no questions, would move us forward into a public hearing here. So at this time, I'll open a public hearing. Do I have anyone who would like to speak for or against item 7.1? Seeing no one, we'll close the public hearing and would present this before council for consideration.

I move to adopt ordinance number 8251 as presented. Second.

I have a motion and a second from place one. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes with a 5-0 vote. Mr. Kendrick, thank you. Thank you. Dr. O, you're up next on item 7.2, an update to a policy.

GOOD EVENING, MAYOR AND COUNCIL MEMBERS. THIS EVENING WE HAVE BEFORE YOU RESOLUTION NUMBER 07-14-26-1 FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION. THIS IS A REQUIRED ANNUAL RENEWAL OF THE CITY OF AMARILLO'S INVESTMENT POLICY. City Council is responsible for approving the investment policy annually in accordance with Chapter 2256 of the Texas Government Code, which is the Public Funds Investment Act, also abbreviated as PFIA. The City of Amarillo's investment policy, just to give you a quick overview of the policy, is aimed at preserving capital. We ensure that taxpayer resources are safe, and hence we do not engage in risky investments. The policy is also designed to provide liquidity, which means that we need to have cash available as needed. Thirdly, the policy is designed to optimize earnings. Within the constraints of the two above objectives, we aim to maximize earnings to the extent possible. So the PFIA strictly limits public funds to safe investments, and these are typically what you would consider as vanilla type investments that have relatively low risks. Examples include FDIC, insured financial institution deposits and CDs, direct obligations of the U.S., things like T-bills, treasury notes, et cetera. obligations of U.S. agencies and instrumentalities, which are limited to 75% of the portfolio. Also, AAA or AAM rated no-load money market mutual funds, as well as municipal securities rated AA- or above, and these types of securities are limited to 10% of the portfolio. Also, callable securities, which are limited to 25% of the portfolio, as well as flexible repurchase agreements for bond proceeds. We'd like to share also that the city has a buy and hold strategy and does not sell securities before maturity. And maturities are aligned to be in line with our anticipated cash needs so that early liquidation is not necessary. And we also have a laddering approach to investment which ensures that we have a steady stream MATURING FUNDS OVER TIME. SO FOR 2026, THE MAIN UPDATE WE HAVE IS THAT RESOLUTION 0714-26-1 WAS UPDATED TO NAME THE CFO, THE FINANCE DIRECTOR, AND THE DEPUTY FINANCE DIRECTOR AS THE DESIGNATED INVESTMENT OFFICERS. The investment policy from 2025 showed this designation. However, the resolution number 0722-25-2 only showed the CFO and the finance director as the officers. So we're adding the deputy finance director to the resolution to be consistent with the investment policy. At this time, I'd like to answer any questions you may have. Thank you, man.

Any questions for Doctor O? No, pretty straightforward. Just gotta update the terminology. So gentlemen, item 7.2 is ready.

I moved to adopt Resolution 0714261 as presented.

I have a motion and a second all in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes. Thank you, ma'am.

Thank you, sir.

All right, last one. I think it's Johnny on this one. Is she still over there? Ms. Johnny, let's get somebody appointed to one of our most important boards.

This is a discussion that we had last time that we've brought back to you and we are seeking an appointment for the Parks and Recreation Board to fill a vacancy for tournament ends in December of 2026. We have included on the slide this time the applicants that we received. Since we discussed this last, we did receive an additional application of Doctor Eddie Sauer.

Thank you, ma'am. We did discuss this at length. Councilman Reed, I'm going to hand it over to you because I believe you were needing a little more time. You had a few questions, and so I'm just curious where you may be on this and then want to allow for discussion and then take a nomination.

Yeah, and I, you know, I do want to apologize holding this off, but I felt that it was, in being fair, having the opportunity to look at all of the resumes and applications because I missed one on the last go-round, and I apologize for that. And so I'm ready to proceed and to make a recommendation. Okay.

let me see before you recommend do you have anything further to discuss council anybody have any discussion on this okay would uh you know allow for an offer offered nomination i would like to nominate sharon delgado for the position uh to be filled okay i mean i i don't know sharon i mean i don't this i mean this comes down to the

issue I think that you talked about with filling this, so my bad, I'm not looking at this.

I do have some experience with her and find her to be a very squared away person and pretty comprehensive in a lot of different aspects. And I did make the nomination last time. I don't think it got a second, but did you want to second that nomination? No, not necessarily.

I mean, I know Eddie Sauer just put his name in this deal. I know that he has a track record of obviously serving on the council. I think he has a heart for the city, heart for the uh parks and rec i mean i think that he's he would be solid in that position as well yeah um well let me say this because i know i i i appreciate uh sharon for

being willing to serve, and it's not that she's unqualified in any way, and I think she would do a great job. I do also see when you have Dr. Sauer there who's served, I think, six years on council, and the extensive knowledge that he's understood by being in vast amounts of public meetings and working hand in hand, understanding how difficult it is to make change and propose those things. I would just represent it to council that we have two good choices right there amongst four good solid people, but we're only discussing those two. They're just a little different. I know you get a certain value with Sharon, but you do have to factor in the amount of experience that Dr. Sauer would bring to that board. I'm only saying that just to encourage us to put forward what we wanna do here. And so we have a nomination. I'd ask once more again if we have a second for Sharon Delgado. Okay, I'm gonna ask for another nomination. I'll nominate Dr. Eddie Sauer.

Second.

Okay. I have a nomination of Dr. Eddie Sauer in a second. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Nomination's been given. Ms. Johnny, you got everything you need?

I think that's it.

I appreciate everyone who's continued to apply, and we will continue to look for great places for everyone to contribute. So thank you. That concludes all of our working items. Do we have a motion to adjourn? Motion to adjourn. So moved.