City Council - Regular Meeting

Audio. Ms. Kristen, are you live back there? Streaming? Okay. Welcome to today's meeting. I will officially recognize a quorum, call ourselves in. Before we have ourselves read into exec, we'll state for the record that item 1.1.2 will not be heard, will not be discussed in exec. Mr. City Attorney.

Thank you, Mayor. Pursuant to the Texas Open Meetings Act, a closed session of the Amarillo City Council was announced on August the 25th, 2026, under the following authority, Section 551.071, consult with an attorney on a matter in which the attorney's duty to a governmental body under the Texas disciplinary rules of professional conduct conflicts with this chapter. Section 551.072, discuss the purchase, exchange, lease, sell, or value of real property. A public discussion of such would not be in the best interest of the city's bargaining position. Section 551.087 discuss commercial financial information received from an existing business or business prospect from which the city is negotiating for the location or retention of a facility or for incentives the city is willing to extend or financial information submitted by the same. You're good, Mayor. Council's completed executive session time is 2.27 PM.

MS. KRISTEN, ARE WE GOOD IN THE BACK? MR. CITY MANAGER, YOU NEED ANYTHING BEFORE WE GET STARTED? MS. CITY SECRETARY, ALL GOOD? GREAT. OKAY. WE WILL CALL OURSELVES BACK INTO SESSION IN HERE. Recognizing a quorum moving forward with the remaining amount of our business today. Today, we'll start with our ceremonial items. We actually have Councilman Reed that will give our invocation. If you guys don't mind, please stand and remain standing for the pledges.

If you'll pray with me, bow your heads. Heavenly Father, we gather today as a public body committed to serving the people of our city. We come before you seeking your guidance, wisdom and presence as we deliberate and make decisions for the common good. May your spirit be with us filling this room with peace, clarity and unity. Help us to set aside differences, work together in harmony and ensure that our actions reflect integrity, fairness and the highest standards of service. Lord, grant us wisdom to discern correctly, courage to make sound decisions, and humility to listen to all voices. May our work be done with diligence, honesty, and a heart for the well-being of our community. We ask that you bless this meeting, strengthen our resolve, and direct our steps towards outcomes that honor you and uplift the people we serve. In the name of the one who gave us life and for the sake of our shared mission, we pray. Amen.

All right. Thank you, guys. Please be seated.

We do have the honor of honoring a few people here today for Hispanic Heritage Month. Some pretty terrific local leaders from over in the Barrio neighborhood, they're coming up. Ms. Teresa, could you and Q come forward? We're gonna go downstairs and we'll read this.

Thank you.

All right. Thank you guys for joining us up here. I'm going to read our proclamation here and then we will award it. So whereas Hispanic Heritage Month provides an opportunity to recognize and celebrate the significant contributions Hispanic and Latino Americans have made to the United States of the United States and to Amarillo. And whereas 2026 Hispanic Heritage Month theme pioneers of change shaping the future together highlights Hispanic Americans transformative contributions in science, art, politics and community activism. Whereas the 2026 Hispanic Heritage Month slogan, Unidos Somos Mas, meaning together we are more, is a call to unity, solidarity, and collective strength, reflecting the power of Hispanic culture. And whereas Amarillo's Hispanic and Latino residents are an integral part of the community, enriching Amarillo through their diverse and vibrant culture and deep commitment to faith, family, and community. whereas Amarillo Hispanic and Latino residents have made innumerable contributions to business, entrepreneurship, education, medicine, arts, public service, railroad industry, and continued revitalization of Amarillo's barrio neighborhood. And finally, whereas celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month fosters a greater understanding, appreciation, and unity among all residents while honoring the traditions, achievements, and enduring legacy of our Hispanic and Latino Americans. Now, therefore, we mayor and council members of the city of Amarillo do hereby proclaim September 15th through October 15th as Hispanic Heritage Month. Big round of applause, please.

Good afternoon. I'm Theresa Kennedy, the president of the Barrio Neighborhood Planning Committee. Behind me you see some of our board members. Quentin Marquez, our vice president, Nicole Gotcher, Edie DiTomaso, Laurie Roybal, who are some of our board members. We currently have 13 volunteer board members, and they are truly hardworking Booth Southern Ground people, which is what we like. Thank you for this opportunity to do the proclamation for Hispanic, National Hispanic Heritage Month. Back in 1968, it was one week. And then in 1988, it changed to one month. However, we celebrate every single day about the Hispanic heritage. So thanks for having us today. We're excited. We hope to join us in different events from our pop-up shop on September the 26th to Una Gran Cena, which is at Grand Plaza. The Wesley Community Center is celebrating their 75th anniversary this year. Also with the Hispanic Heritage Luncheon that will be October the 28th. So we have a lot of different events planned. You'll be seeing very soon on 10th Avenue between Garfield and Ross at least 20 photo banners of Friends of the Barrio or Amigos del Barrio. So we want to just let you know, come into the barrio, get to know us, get to know our businesses, our residents, and our families. We like to have you there. Thank you.

Hello? Okay, cool. My voice is going away, so just had to make sure. Just on behalf of the BNPC, we'd like to thank everybody for celebrating with us. Hispanic Heritage Month is not just a Vario thing. It's a whole city of Amarillo thing. It's a whole Texas thing. And so thank you all again for celebrating with us, and hopefully have a great Hispanic Heritage Month. Thank you.

Okay. One, two, three. Okay. One, two, three. Okay.

Thank you guys for being here and thanks for everybody for supporting that and the acknowledgement. Okay, we're going to move into announcements. Do I have any? No, okay. Number four, discussion items. We're going to go through Mr. Hooper if he's going to take us into stage one drought contingency planning.

thank you mayor council wanted to take a moment today to update you on where we currently stand in regard to our issuance of the stage one drought contingency level and also provide a little bit deeper context today for you not only this plan but what is happening now and also what we're looking at happening in the future and also a little bit more clarity on our reservoir and how that works there's been a little bit of confusion on that and we've kind of taken some comments different emails that we've had suggestions, people have asked questions, and we want to try to answer some of those today so that you can have that information for yourself and also the public can have it as well. So let's talk about why the city implemented Stage 1. It was back on August the 17th when it happened. The main reason is high demand for water associated with heat, wind, evaporation, and pressure really on our system and our reservoir in particular. When we reached that 60% storage level, that's when we triggered our Stage 1. as part of our plan that is an ordinance for the City of Amarillo and has been adopted by Council years back and years past. It has all the different stages that are listed in there. And really, according to the plan, all we were asking for is voluntary outdoor watering conservation from residents and businesses. Our reservoir is filled from the water that we purchased from Cremois. We do have a separate well field that does not feed into that reservoir. It is totally separate from that. And heat and wind increase the evaporation and reserve storage in there, and of course the usage and the demand decreases that as well, and that's the reason that it reaches that 60% level. What we did and what the city did in response to that, as soon as we issued that, there were many conversations that were taking place in-house as well. As soon as we issued that, we started adjusting all of our irrigation immediately, starting with, of course, our biggest users, the parks and the golf courses, to make sure that we were following the protocols of stage one. Which really, if you look at that, that is watering at night where we're not losing evaporation during the day. And it's also every other day schedules for that watering, odd even if you will, so that we can make sure we do that. Some of those parks are big enough that we had to separate them out where half the park was being watered on one day and the other half was being watered on a second day. So we adjusted those schedules so that we could request that from the community, but be partners in that as well. We also began at that moment in time, especially myself, William and Shannon, Sean, we started monitoring exactly what was going to happen. We issued that stage one and we wanted to know, are we going to go up? Are we going to go down? How is the public going to respond to that? How is our irrigation schedule changes going to affect us as far as the levels are concerned? And this is what we saw. Before I get to that, I forgot to put these in there. So we've had 35 days of over 100 degrees. That included yesterday when we did our press conference, we were at 34. We reached another one yesterday. So now we're at 35. And our typical summer would have five days, and I've got this information from the National Weather Service and conversations I had with the meteorologists out there. Typical summer has about five days average that we would see over 100 degrees here. So significant increase in the amount of days that we've had those high temperatures, which means that people are going to use more water. And that is very understandable. We do understand that demand is going to go up. People are going to want to start watering more. take care of their properties, their trees, their lawns, and things like that. So certainly understandable. Another big ticket item was 4.63 inches of rain. That's from January until today. normally this time of year we would receive 14 inches of rainfall that's the average so the departure there is 9.37 inches and this same summer this same period last summer we received 16.8 inches of water are you all having trouble seeing your monitors is that what it is okay you don't don't have them and get stephanie to fix that i want you don't want you to miss out on this but Same period last summer, 16.8 inches. So that's about a 12-inch difference from what we saw last summer. And I'll pause there and wait till we see if we get our monitors on. Still no monitor? Okay. Just let me know if you want me to continue or wait. I'd be glad and happy to wait. What's that? Almost. We still have dial-up. Yeah. I'm going to flip it to this next slide because there's a lot of information. Okay, you got them now? Some of the questions that we've received have been in regards to our storage reservoir. And I think a lot of people are getting that confused with the actual aquifer itself. There's a big difference between the aquifer and our storage reservoir. This is a man-made storage reservoir that we have there. And you can see in comparison to the size of the houses that are next to this reservoir, it holds 500 million gallons in it. You could actually look at Rick Klein Ballpark, which is just to the top center of that picture. You could fit a couple of those easily, the entire complex, into this reservoir. It's very, very large. It's intentionally large so that it can store us capacity so that when we have times of crim wall line that's down or something like that, we have an opportunity. We can still provide water for quite a few days. This is where our crim wall line comes by. It runs right by this, and we have a tap. where Cremwell puts 36 MGD into that storage reservoir on a daily basis. That's our allocation that comes from them, and that's what goes in. What comes out is on the other side of that with the pump station there that sends that over to our Osage treatment plant where we can process that water and then send it into the system. So it's critical to know what that is. This graphic here is a look at that. I know it doesn't look like our reservoir, but it's the best way that I could kind of explain to you how that reservoir works. So if you had a typical day where we have, well, this is not a typical day, when we received 88 MGD demand, that is coming in, that's what the customers are using, and we have to keep up with that. We subtract our 32 MGD that we take from our wellfield that supplements a system that doesn't come into this reservoir. And that leaves us with a 56 MGD demand. If you look at what Cremois is providing us on the left there, that's 36 MGD that comes into the system. There's 56 MGD that goes out of the system. That's a 20 MGD deficit where that is going to start going down. And when you see day after day after day of these high demands, obviously we're going to receive a pretty big hit on our reservoir. Add to that evaporation, which calculates out to about a million gallons per day, you're seeing a 21 million gallon deficit that we can't recover from in that period of time. In a normal summer, where we would see those five days over 100 degrees, it's not really that difficult for us to recover that reservoir. That's why it's built to the size that it's built, based on our climate, based on our demand. As we've grown, of course, that demand has gotten greater. So that's the entire issue that we have We really need to have that reservoir. I know we talk about 60%, and that's what the trigger was, but that reservoir needs to be at 100% so that we can overcome any catastrophic failures that we may have. If you really think about it, the line coming from Cremois that feeds that was built in the late 60s. It's very old. So it is susceptible to failure at any given moment. We all know that's a pretty big risk for us. And so we want to also make sure that our reservoir is in good shape so that we can continue to provide water. If we had a catastrophic failure on the Cremois line and we were at 100% full in there and our wellfield was 100% operational, we could still provide water to Amarillo for a couple of weeks or better, depending on what the demand was. Those are really flexible numbers that are going to change depending on what we have for evaporation demand, et cetera. But we know we'd be in good shape for a period of time while they were making those repairs. We're at 275 million gallons today that's in there. That's 55% is where we said as of this morning, and I'll show you some graphs on that in a moment. What that means is that we would just have a few days if something happens, and we would not be able to provide water except just from our wellfield. And it creates a pretty serious situation for us. So that's why stage one is where it's at. We've got to get that back up above 60 and continue to recover as we head into September when we start to see the temperatures fall, we start to see some more rainfall, and hopefully by the end of this council meeting, if I can talk long enough, we'll have some rain that hits us here today, and we're really hopeful for that because that's what changes that demand and changes how much storage we have in that reservoir. So I wanted to kind of show you that picture to show you how important that is to us. Again, a typical day of 50 MGD that we're taking out of the system. we can recover from that pretty easily and do the same math. Here's what happened to us. So on August the 17th, we issued stage one trigger. We started monitoring that just as we told you that we would. In that three-day period, we lost 8% more in our reservoir. So the demand actually went up instead of going down. Now, for many reasons. I mean, the temperatures were still hot. People were still using water. Maybe people didn't hear the message. Whatever the case may be, we'd already cut our watering in the parks down to that odd even schedule. We'd also add the same thing at the golf course. And we still saw that decline. So on August the 20th, there was an entire day of phone conversations, myself, Mr. Path, Mr. Kashuba, William, Shannon from our water department, talking about what are we going to do now because now we're on the verge of getting to 50%. We get to 50%, we hit stage two. We want to avoid that at all costs because now it becomes mandatory the restrictions are no longer voluntary. We're still losing evaporative from the storage, but we're also the demand had gotten much higher. So at that point in time is when we decided to cut off all the water to our splash pads, cut off all the water to our parks, cut off all the water to our municipal buildings to hope that we would be able to start recovering day by day by day to get back up to where we're at least heading towards 60% in that reservoir again. And it's working, and you can see that it is, but it's a very slow process. You know, we lost 8% in three days. We're gaining just a little over a percent each day as we go up. It's going to take a while to get there. In fact, you're probably looking at 10 days or so before we would get back up to where we'd be comfortable in the 60% to reduce that Stage 1 contingency. If we stayed above 60 for five days consecutive, then we could probably do that. To fill the reservoir, you're talking about months to be able to do that. CREMWA goes through the same thing that we're going through. We have many conversations with them this weekend as well. They have a reservoir that they monitor each and every day, and the same common conversation happens. It's easy to lose it. It's hard to get it back. And that's why we call for these conservation measures. And that's why we took an extreme amount of caution in what we did. So the actions that we took, again, our municipal irrigations were turned off at our parks. Our splash pads were temporarily closed. Key word, temporary. We know we're going to get out of this. And reserve recovery has begun and is seeing positive results. All that we've really asked for the community is voluntary, but we've asked for limited outdoor irrigation where possible, watering overnight, following the every-other-day schedule, and helping protect the reservoir so that we don't get to stage two. I know the public doesn't want to get there, and we certainly don't want to get there as well. So this is what typically would happen if we had a decent day in the reservoir. And this is what's happening now. In fact, if you go back to that chart that we had on Sunday, where we started seeing increase, our demand was 64 MGD. Do the same math, take away the 32 from the wellfield. That means we had a 32 MGD demand from the reservoir. We're taking in 36. So we got the 36, we take out 32. That creates a four MGD recovery that we have there. Take away the evaporation, we're back to three. So we're only recovering three MGD a day when we're seeing the recovery that we're seeing now. But it is positive and it is headed in the right direction. And again, that number was actually the true number that we had in demand on Sunday was 64 MGD. I wanted to throw this slide in there because this is something that's been talked about as our commercial water user samples that we pulled. I went and pulled the top 400 users just to kind of look through there and see if we saw anything. And keep in mind, we're talking about irrigation. We're not talking about process water, but our top users are pretty much process water. We have Tyson that is up there at 94.37 million gallons for the month of July. As for the month of July, at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, they were in the top five. They were at 29.64 million gallons. And then you look at Fermi, which has been the big question, they're at 310,000 gallons, which is roughly 10,000 gallons a day. And if you take that and compare it to what it compared to on the list, If there was a new convenience store that came in, it's going to use about the same amount of water. If there's a new coffee shop that came into town, it's going to use about the same amount of water. Now, we know and everybody knows that there's going to be more later when they reach the contract, but as of right now, that's the amount of water that they used in July out there for construction water. They ranked 386th out of the top 400 as far as users are concerned out there. i think to wrap it up the best thing that we can hope for is that we get some rain hopefully this afternoon with that but i really just wanted to give an opportunity to educate council a little bit educate the public a little bit more on what that reservoir is how this works and why we're doing what we're doing and again we've seen some great cooperation i know this came up yesterday in the press conference was what are the schools doing we received confirmation back from the aisd from the Canyon Independent School District, from Amarillo College, that they are also altering their watering schedules as well and participating with us. We've had several commercial businesses call us and say, hey, what can we do to help? So I think we're going to start to see that percentage that we're recovering right now go up. And that's the hope. If we get rain, I think tomorrow you'll see that number is going to change drastically. And that's the big key to this. It's not anybody's fault. It's not anything that was mismanaged. It's just hot weather and dry weather. And it is playing a toll on our system right now. So with that, if you have any questions or have any comments, I'd certainly open it up for that now.

Questions, counsel? Donnie, in the winter months, what's our typical demand from the customers? We're at 32 million, I think is what they said.

Yeah, it's usually around 30. It just depends on the weather, too. And it depends on what's going on. But now our summer is around 50. Oh, OK. Summer's around 50, but we're probably around 30 or so in the wintertime.

OK. Do we have any type of, granted we don't get this very often, but any type of rain capture system for a reservoir? When it does rain, does more of it flow into that reservoir or not really?

No, that's just all strictly water from Kremont itself. I mean, you're going to get what falls on top of it, but generally in a hot summer month like this, you could go out there and you could get an inch of rain and it's going to evaporate off.

Yeah, but stormwater, we don't have any way to direct stormwater. We do not. Thanks.

Questions? What's the capacity out of the water treatment plant?

I'll tell you what we've been pushing, you know, and I think the number today was 36. Today we pushed 48 out. 48?

Say again, Will.

48 is the max. 48 is the max. Yeah, sorry.

So daily production treated water. Now what's our mix of raw versus treated? Do we have a mix that we're able to work through?

Do you mean from Cremois or are you talking about from our wells?

Well, both, actually.

Cremois is a mix, and that's one of the things that we talked to Cremois about over the weekend was that, you know, and again, you've got to remember, there's 11 member cities that deal with the Cremois water. Some cities can treat high chlorides better than other facilities can, and the question was posed this weekend from Cremois, hey, we can send more lake water in the blend and send more water down the pipeline should we need to do that, but it's going to have higher chlorides in it, and we can treat that with no problem, so... They had to get permission from the other member cities to do that. Everybody's in the same situation we're in. So we were able to do that. So there's a blend there. I think it was around 20, 80, 20% lake, 80% well water from Roberts County. And then we also have our wells that we send directly into the system. They do not go to the reservoir. And that's usually around 32, 35 MGD, depending on, and we push those wells very hard. You know, one thing I mentioned yesterday in a press conference that might be of interest to you too is when you're pushing as hard as we are with all of our pump stations, all of our wells, trying to get as much water into the system as we can, that's not The smartest thing to do because those wells need to rest, the pump stations need to alternate pumps, and we're pushing everything as hard as we can, hoping that we don't have a failure there because the demand is just so high that we have to do that. So there's all kinds of blending that's going on. It's a very complex operation that takes place just to keep the water in. It's a 24-hour-a-day operation.

What's the current level in gallons out there at the reservoir? I was a little lost, so if we're at 50? 275,000. Okay. And so 300,000, 60% somewhere in there? Yeah. Yes, sir. And we're gaining back five MGDs a day?

It's around three, three to four.

So you project this, you know, at this current rate, if we get cooler weather, which I think we do have some in the forecast, but then if we get rain, you may recover five MGDs, you think?

I think that's reasonable to think that.

And the main thing is the usage, right? Once the usage goes down. So what was our lowest usage? Was it 64 that we've seen or if 88 was our highest?

Depending on what time frame you're looking at.

I'm just saying over the last couple weeks.

Oh, over the last couple weeks, I would say that probably Sunday was 64 was probably one of the better numbers or in that range there. And that was after we curtailed some of our usage that we saw that.

Do we see somewhere around 88 down to about 70 MGDs kind of over the last couple days?

I don't know what it was. Well, I don't remember what the max was yesterday. But, yeah, I think we can now. The 88 was probably 88 or 89 I think was the highest that we've seen this summer. Okay. You know, so that's really, really the days where we really, really struggle. But we've seen consistently in the 70s, high 70s. Okay.

I appreciate you making the comment. Like, I think it's good to say, you know, Fermi project is construction water only, and that's about 10,000 gallons a day.

I mean, all we see is the meter, so we don't know what they're using it for. We don't ask, but yeah, the meter is registered. It comes out to around 10,000 a day. Okay.

Yeah, so that's a good kind of line to draw and point. So I guess I'd use the analogy. You know, I may be driving the truck and I can have the pedal all the way down, stressing the engine. I can be at 6000 RPM maxed out, right? Doesn't mean that the The tank of gas is empty. I can have a full tank of gas and I am pushing my maximum in 140 mile an hour going down the highway. Right? So if you think about that, that's your differentiation with your Ogallala aquifer. Like you may have a full tank of water back there in the Ogallala, but you're maxing your capacity at 88 MGD. Right. You got the pedal all the way down.

We're maxing everything out that we have to push water. And it includes elevated storage tanks, pump stations. And we've seen some water leaks, too, that have come. And that's going to happen when you're pushing the pressure in the system as high as we're pushing it. You're going to see some water leaks. That's just going to happen. But yeah, everything that we have in our system, I wish that the public could see how hard the water distribution and the water plant people operate just to make this work. on a daily basis when we see these high demands. It's nothing new for them in the summer to see high demands and have to make it work, but not having the recovery of that reservoir is critical. And I might mention in 2022, the problem wasn't the reservoir. It was something totally different. It was the fact that our wellfield did not have all the wells operable. We had some that we were working on, some we were overhauling, going through all this process. This team is now geared up and got that wellfield where it is really able to supplement what we have in the reservoir, or it would have been a whole different situation during this summer. So very proud of the work that they're doing, and again, I wish that you could just listen in to the conversations, watch the operations happen. They are doing tremendous work out there to keep people in water.

We definitely see it and appreciate it. And then we also appreciate the other partnerships. I think, you know, with Lubbock maybe saying, hey, we can assist over here on kind of how that water gets delivered to them. Is our reservoir only fed by Cremois or do we feed that through our own?

It's just Cremois.

It's just Cremois.

Correct.

Everything else that comes from our wellfield goes to?

Our wellfield is chlorinated and goes directly into the system.

Okay. And that max is 48 MGDs from our wellfield?

For the plant, which is different. Yeah, that's true.

48 from the plant. What's our max from the wellfield?

I would say right now, well, it depends on how hard we've been pushing it. I would say it's in the low 30s, but we could probably get into mid to upper 30s. after we've had the formation rest for a little bit.

Okay. And then in the beginning of all this, even though we've had 35 days of 100 plus, right, were we utilizing the reservoir a little bit more so, so that we didn't stress the engine totally? So now we've stopped utilizing the reservoir as much as we can, and we're now pushing as much out of the well field and out of

We've been pushing the wellfield hard through the whole thing and the reservoir both. It's just a matter of volume. You've got a demand for a certain amount of volume. We only produce so much, and the reservoir is what takes the hit from that because it's having to supplement the system in its drawdown.

Well, I appreciate you taking the time to, one, I appreciate the leadership yesterday and getting in front of, like, a good-sized press conference that went on for, I don't know, 25 minutes probably. But I thought you guys did a good job operationally of explaining it. I still took some e-mails and some phone calls of, You know, hey, I watched all three channels. I got a different take on each one. So I'm still unclear. And so I think it's a complicated enough matter that we need to keep speaking to it.

Yes.

And so I think it's great that you guys are putting that out. I think communications doing a good job on their side. But we have we don't have a. We don't have a tank level issue. We have kind of a capacity issue of delivery. And so I think that's good to draw that line. And then I think it's just good to speak to it plainly. And you've done a fantastic job of that. I know the team is working hard on every time we turn around, it feels like there's another mainline break. So, man, we are thankful for our community and the patience whenever there's an inconvenience like that. We do live in a really good community that says, okay, as soon as you can get it back on, we sure would appreciate it. And then you see those guys work all night, you know, get it repaired at 3 a.m. So once again, thank you for the customer service. And then I don't know other than daily updates that we could do anything different. I think you're seeing the reduction that you need. You're seeing the participation. So as long as we continue to see that trend going up, I think it's just an output of communication. So can we continue to show that was a great chart? We're at 54, 56. Can we show that as the trend continues to move?

Yes, sir, we can do that, and we're working on getting something. We'll be working with Kristen and her team to see if we can get something. The media had requested that yesterday as well, just to kind of see where that trend is. I think the key message is, though, I know it feels good to move up a percentage here or there, but we're still far from out of the woods on this. Like I mentioned earlier, a catastrophic failure on a Cremois line, and we're going to be in trouble. We've got to get that thing not to 60 percent, not to 70 percent. We've got to get it back full.

Yes, sir. I think it is worth important. Mayor, I appreciate you bringing this up. We have worked out with the city of Lubbock to receive some of their allocations. So my reason for saying that is we are seeing a gain, but that's a limited time period for us getting the allocation. So when the allocation goes away, it's back to us. And so as a community, we'll need everyone's help to keep that trend back upwards in the right direction. Because once that allocation is gone by the end of this week, Will we have to look to ourselves to recover our reservoir?

Right. I appreciate that. Council, you have anything else? Mr. Hooper, thank you. Just continued encouragement to... Keep going with everything you got, and then keep communicating to the public on it. Thank you.

Yes, sir, will do. Thank you.

We'll move forward from 4.1 to 4.2. Mr. Freeman, you got an update on our budget proposed tax rate, and you need feedback from the council, I believe.

Yes, sir.

Perfect.

So briefly, I'll try and recap two and a half days in less than five to ten minutes. So everybody can get up to speed on where we're at. And then, yeah, we've got a little bit to discuss on the debt schedule as well as kind of a deeper dive into the truth in taxation and the impact of adjusting our rates and what it means to us based on some of the numbers we're seeing. There we go. So just a quick update on calendar and key dates. We originally were going to have the ceiling set on the maximum tax rate during today's meeting. That has been pushed to September 8th. So based on today's discussion, we're hoping to get that feedback from council on what rate to put into the notices. And then you can always come in beneath that number, but it would set that ceiling of what you could go up to. FIRST READING OF THE BUDGET AND THE TAX ORDINANCES ARE NOW GOING TO TAKE PLACE ON SEPTEMBER 22ND, AND THEN THE POECARIAN SECOND READING FINALIZING EVERYTHING WILL BE SEPTEMBER 29TH. VERY IMPORTANT THAT WE HAVE A QUORUM THERE THAT DAY BECAUSE THAT IS BASED ON OUR LAST DAY TO APPROVE THE BUDGET, SO I'LL COME PICK YOU UP IF I NEED TO, MAKE SURE WE ALL GET HERE TO APPROVE THAT. AND THEN AS FAR AS GOING INTO THE BUDGET WORKSHOP RECAP, AGAIN, THE MAIN HIGHLIGHTS WERE ADDITIONAL RESOURCES, PARTICULARLY IN THE GENERAL FUND TO ADDRESS PERSONNEL INCREASES AS WELL AS POTENTIAL ADDITIONAL SERVICES THAT WE DISCUSSED AS FAR AS THOSE RECURRING SUPPLEMENTAL REQUESTS. CONTINUING FUNDING FOR CAPITAL PROJECTS THAT'S DEDICATED STREET MAINTENANCE, LOW INTEREST LOAN FUNDING FROM TWDB THROUGH THE STATE, ADDITIONAL FLEET PURCHASES, FIRE APPARATUS REPLACEMENT CONTINUING THAT PROGRAM AND ALSO HEAVY EQUIPMENT REPLACEMENT PURCHASES. And then built into the budget initially is addressing just those rising costs in commodities, materials, supplies, software, and just construction impact, as well as rising IT costs. The proposed fee changes that we went over with council across the various areas, 3% in residential and commercial for solid waste, landfill tipping fees that equate to about 1.2 million in revenue dedicated to the landfill operations for heavy equipment and personnel. Some cost recovery from various general fund departments are included. including the fire department, fire marshal, and then we have water, sewer, and drainage that have operational rate increases, and then debt service that we'll touch on again here in a little bit, dedicated to the DWDB loan for the wastewater plant project, and then drainage is included in there for their portion of some of the street projects that we're proposing. As far as the personnel, this is just a pie chart showing what was discussed with council on allocating approximately 5 million across sworn positions and civilian positions. So you have about 45% dedicated to the police and fire department. You've also got another civilian compensation study phase two is built in there. That's the $444,000. We've got 2% cost of living for civilians and then a 1% civilian merit pay fund. As far as supplemental is concerned, this totaled a little over $2.2 million. We had a minor adjustment in one of our numbers related to the part-time to full-time street workers. So that's why that's a little higher than our budget workshop. But you can see the breakdown here on where those dollars are going. The great majority is public safety at 31%, and then we have 27% in software costs. That's mainly our financial ERP workday software that every department uses and contributes towards. PARKS AND REC IS SITTING AT APPROXIMATELY 18%, AND THEN YOU CAN SEE THE REMAINDER THERE. FINANCE DEPARTMENT DID WORK TO EVALUATE AND LOOK AT OUR REVENUES AND EXPENSES, AND WE'RE ABLE TO IDENTIFY A LITTLE OVER 600,000. WE HAD TO CAPTURE A LITTLE BIT FOR THE STREET. STREET WORKERS INCREASES FROM PART TIME TO FULL TIME. AND THEN WE HAVE STILL 535,000 AVAILABLE FROM FURTHER REVIEW. THAT WAS SOME ADJUSTMENTS TO REVENUE ON BUILDING SAFETY PERMITS. CISD IS ALSO PAYING FOR A SHARE OF A SCHOOL RESOURCE OFFICER. WE WERE GETTING BACK FOUR FROM AISD. ONE IS NOW GOING TO GO TO CISD SO WE DIDN'T HAVE TO ABSORB THAT WHOLE ENTIRE COST. And then we had some expense adjustments in APD related to electricity and auto accident repairs, and then a little shy of 200,000 in street repairs within public works. Recapping the other funds, as you can see up on the screen, we've got utilities, 824,000 toward personnel, 1.6 million in supplemental. Drainage, 106,000 personnel and 71,000 supplemental. And then you can see the remainder there. Smaller amounts for IT, airport, fleet, to cover personnel. And then just some minor supplemental in airport and civic center. And then there's that 1.2 million supplemental for solid waste that would be dedicated to the landfill. As far as one-time cash GIP, a similar breakdown as you saw on the other screens as far as the pie chart showing where those allocations are going. The great majority, 45% or 5.3 million, is going toward our public safety departments. We've got 2.2 million or 19% going to parks. And then on down the list, traffic is next at 12%, facilities at 12%, and so on. TOTALING $11.9 MILLION. BASED ON REVISED ESTIMATES THAT WE CONTINUE TO SCRUB THROUGH FINANCE DEPARTMENT, THERE IS AN ADDITIONAL $2 MILLION MAINLY ACCOUNTING FOR END OF YEAR EXPECTATIONS OF SALES TAX. SO THAT'S MORE ONE-TIME DOLLARS THAT COULD GO AND BE ALLOCATED TO THE CIP. SO WE WOULD BRING BACK ADDITIONAL RECOMMENDATIONS BASED ON THE AREAS THAT WE WEREN'T ABLE TO FUND PREVIOUSLY. SO YOU PROBABLY SEE MORE PUBLIC SAFETY PROJECTS, FACILITIES, PARKS THAT COULD BE ADDED TO THIS LIST HERE. Then you have the additional funds. These didn't change. Utilities, 13 million. Solid waste, three. Drainage, 800,000. Civic center, 1.9. And airport, 5.7 million. When it comes to proposed debt, these are what we discussed with you during the workshops. General fund tax rate impact and future budgets is when you'd actually start paying for these. It'd be a continuation of the fire apparatus cycle for new trucks, and then streets would be 42.5 million. That's continuing summer maintenance program, approximately 12 million. The remainder would go toward two arterial reconstruction projects being Osage and Coulter. You also see drainage fund fee, a couple bullet points down, nine and a half million. That would also be going to the drainage share of those two streets. UTILITIES FUND, THE FAN PACKS ARE GOING TO START IN THE CURRENT PROPOSED 26-27 BUDGET. THAT WOULD BE COVERING THE PAYMENT FOR THE 60 MILLION TWDB LOW INTEREST LOAN. AND THEN THE LAST ONE IS FLEET FUND WHICH IS COVERED BY THE OPERATION AND MAINTENANCE CHARGES THAT ARE CHARGED TO EACH DEPARTMENT THAT PARTICIPATES IN THE FLEET FUND FOR 8.5 MILLION OF PURCHASES. Taking a deeper dive into the debt schedule being proposed after working with Specialized Public Finance, the majority of the debt would be proposed to go across two different years. The street projects with the drainage are really 24-month builds, so we'd have the ability to spread that out to help balance the tax rate with what we discussed as rolling off. SO BASED ON WHAT THEY FOUND, IT WOULD ONLY TAKE A ONE CENT INCREASE OVER THE PROPOSED FISCAL YEAR 2027 TAX RATE TO ACCOMPLISH ALL THAT'S BEEN PROPOSED IN THIS BUDGET RELATED TO TAX RATE FUNDED DEBT CYCLES FOR THE STREETS AND THE FIRE TRUCKS. Here's another look at it. Very tough to read, but you can see from left to right up top is where you see the fire equipment. 2027 street COs and 2028 street COs and how they come on in 2028, 2029. And then you can see we had excess debt collections in 3.9 million. That would be ALLOCATED TOWARD THE 2027 CYCLE THAT KEEPS THE RATE OF WHAT WE'RE PROPOSING THIS YEAR OF THE 10 CENTS, AND IT WOULD ONLY GO FROM .1013 TO .1114. SO REALLY ABOUT A ONE CENT INCREASE, WHICH IS TYPICAL OF WHAT YOU WERE DOING IN THE GENERAL CYCLE OF STREETS AND FIRE TRUCK APPARATUS, BUT THIS WOULD BE ACCOMPLISHING 42 MILLION IN STREET WORK VERSUS 25 MILLION IN STREET WORK. We could bring that a little bit closer if council wanted to direct us maybe to lower the 12 million summer street maintenance, do a little bit less to get that closer, just depending on council's comfort level with the one cent increase to accomplish those. So that's some feedback we'd be looking for. Doesn't necessarily have to be decided today because these wouldn't be issued till spring of next year, but we would be putting it in the CIP, projecting that it would be issued. As far as the truth in taxation, I've got just a brief statement I'm going to read just because this is a very complicated subject before we get into the rate examples. But the truth in taxation law, it requires cities to calculate and disclose a no new revenue rate each year. The purpose is to give residents a transparent point of comparison. IT ESTIMATES THE TAX RATE THAT WOULD GENERATE ABOUT THE SAME AMOUNT OF PROPERTY TAX REVENUE FROM THE PROPERTIES THAT WERE ON THE TAX ROLL IN BOTH YEARS AFTER MAKING THE REQUIRED ADJUSTMENTS. IT'S AN IMPORTANT TAXPAYER PROTECTION TOOL BUT THERE'S NOT A GUARANTEE THAT THE CITY'S GENERAL FUND OR OPERATING BUDGET WILL RECEIVE THE SAME AMOUNT AVAILABLE REVENUE AS IT DID THE YEAR PRIOR. THE CALCULATION HAS TO ACCOUNT FOR FACTORS SUCH AS NEW PROPERTY TAX, TAX EXEMPTIONS, SENIOR AND DISABLED TAX CEILINGS, TAX INCREMENT REINVESTMENT ZONES, APPEALS, REFUNDS, AND OTHER LEGAL ADJUSTMENTS. A CITY'S TOTAL PROPERTY TAX RATE IS GENERALLY DIVIDED BETWEEN THE TWO PURPOSES OF M&O, MAINTENANCE AND OPERATIONS, WHICH PAYS FOR THOSE DAY-TO-DAY SERVICES SUCH AS POLICE, FIRE, STREETS, PARKS, AND SO ON, AND THE INS, WHICH IS INTEREST AND SINKING, that pays for the principal and interest on approved debt. Debt service is that legal commitment that must be funded so when the debt payments increase, a larger portion of the total tax rate may be needed for the INS side of the rate. If the overall rate is held at the no new revenue rate, less can remain for M&O even though the city may be collecting approximately the same amount in total from the comparable tax base. IN ADDITION, SOME PROPERTY TAX REVENUE MAY BE DEDICATED BY LAW OR AGREEMENT TO REINVESTMENT ZONES RATHER THAN AVAILABLE FOR GENERAL SERVICES. AS A RESULT, A CITY CAN REASONABLY EXPECT NO NEW REVENUE RATE TO KEEP OPERATIONS WHOLE, YET FIND THAT IT'S AVAILABLE M&O REVENUE IS LOWER THAN THE PRIOR YEAR. This can occur even when the tax base has grown and even when taxpayers in the aggregate are not paying more on the same properties. The reason is that Truth in Taxation calculates a legally prescribed total rate, but it does not preserve a fixed share of that total rate for operations. So once debt service and other dedicated obligations are funded, the remaining M&O portion may be smaller. Overall, the city must evaluate the rate as a whole, including the effect on essential services, rather than assume that the phrase no new revenue automatically means no change in operating capacity. So I say that to prepare you for this next slide that we have run the calculations to give you a better perspective of what the rates will look like. Here is an explanation just in chart form of our impacts in that truth and taxation form. Our certified values went up 190 million But once you do your deductions, our taxable values actually went down 44 million. So that was one impact, but our annual debt service grew 2.6 million. So we have to account for that when building our rate. So with that in mind, we did run the different scenarios so you could see what property tax relief would look like and how it affects your incoming revenue and what services could be paid for. and that is on this screen. The .44728, that's what we discussed during budget workshops, that voter approval tax rate that gave the general fund $700,000. TIRS funds impacted by that that have to be deducted from the total $95,000 for a total impact of $796,000. And then as you go down, these are just examples that range all the way down to the no new revenue rate of 1.42170. which would have an impact in the M&O side of negative 3.4 million. TEERS funds would collect 70,000 for a net total of 3.4 million. So you can see no new revenue, Doesn't really mean what you might have thought, what we all basically thought, that we'd keep it just flat, zero out. The closest to kind of zero out that we came up with, to give you an example, is closer to that 0.44174, which would be a negative 242,000 impact to the general fund, where its total of a negative 114, because tiers would still have its allocation of 127,000. In all these scenarios, the INS portion still equals .10134 or 2.6 million increase because we have to meet those debt service obligations for what was approved in the current year's debt issuances for 25-26. So I'll pause on this one for a sec for any feedback or questions.

Well, it's my first time seeing this, so I'm not quite sure that I'm looking at it, right? Can you go back to no new revenue rate, negative 3.4? Right. But voter approval rate 700,000 plus. So where's the zero? Where's the zero option? Well, how do you arrive at 700,000 increase if you pass a 3.5% increase? increase on your rate.

Because it's not on the rate. It's on revenue and projected revenue of what you received in the previous year.

Well, the rate is adjusted based on values and deductions. Well, but the revenues. You're saying the rate is adjustable based on revenues. So if appraisal values go up, the rate can actually go down, but it revenues the same. We still agree on that.

But not all on the M&O side of the tax rate.

Well, the 3.5% is restricted to the M&O increase, or you're saying it's M&O and INS?

It's both. When did we learn that? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but when you run the calculations, it factors in. If you have more debt coming on, it impacts if you're not seeing enough growth in your community to absorb that increased revenue and expenses, it can actually go more to your debt side than your M&O side.

So have I been miseducated? Do we think in like INS increases based on, there's a law that stated that rate was capped at what, 150 Or what would it be? It'd be $1.50 or $1.80. And right now we're at 10 cents. I don't know exactly what it was, but it was an astronomical increase, right? And I was educated that if we passed debt, right, in an appropriate manner, that can increase. But the M&O side is restricted to 3.5%. Am I educated correctly or incorrectly?

That is correct, but it all depends on all your calculations that go into that form.

Last few years we have seen a lot of growth, which has been good. We didn't see a lot of growth this last time. Then you factor in all the tax challenges, the exemptions, the senior disability homesteads. ALL THOSE 80 DIFFERENT CALCULATIONS GO INTO THAT AND IT JUST TURNED INTO THIS IS HOW IT IMPACTED OUR CALCULATIONS THIS YEAR. WE DIDN'T HAVE A GOOD GROWING YEAR LIKE WE'VE SEEN THE LAST PRIOR YEARS.

THAT'S NOT CONSISTENT WITH MY UNDERSTANDING OF TAX RATE. TAX RATE IS NOT CORRELATED TO GROWTH. A COMMUNITY CANNOT BE GROWING AND THE TAX RATE INCREASES FOR THOSE TAX VALUES. and that would be at your limit so the rate fluctuates up and down so i i got credited for lowering people's taxes but i didn't we actually raised their taxes but their rate went down and the reason the rate went down is because their appraisal values went up What you're saying is that if appraisal values go down, our revenues go down. Or if growth slows and new properties don't come on, our revenues go down. But we're not tied together with that because the rate would go up.

I wish it was as simple as that, but the state gave us a very complicated calculation to work through. There's a lot of factors that go into this. The way they sell it is this times 1.035. That is not how it actually works, unfortunately. There is, between your starting point and your ending point, there's a lot of things they want you to factor in in this calculation.

So let me go back to my original question. If we just wanted to have a zero, no increase in revenues, what would that rate be?

IT WOULD BE CLOSER TO THE .44174. THAT'S GOT THAT NEGATIVE 242,000. WE CAN FIND ANOTHER ONE JUST SLIGHTLY ABOVE THAT THAT PROBABLY GETS IT CLOSER TO ZERO.

SO IF WE TELL OUR CONSTITUENTS, HEY, WE'RE NOT GOING TO RAISE YOUR TAXES IN ORDER TO BRING NEW REVENUES IN, WE'RE GOING TO HOLD YOUR TAX RATE FLAT, THAT WOULD BE .4442.

BUT IT'S NOT REALLY FLAT BECAUSE YOU'RE HAVING TO RAISE IT FOR YOUR DEBT.

Well, I understand that. Yeah, so like the tax rate on the INS side has gone up and you just did a good job of presenting. We would be representing to our constituents that we are raising their tax rate one penny in order to borrow all the monies that we're trying to borrow. And that would be equatable within the, now there's .101 instead of .9 out of it and it's no longer 33 cents. It's 32 cents and you factor that. Okay, I don't think I'm lost here. I don't understand what the correlation is. The INS side went up a penny. Why would we be losing 3.4 million in revenue?

A big part of it is the tax freezes and the tiers collections that shifts some of the available revenue as a portion of it. But it's really just the entire calculation that gets you to that point.

Council, you have questions? On your slide on page 12 where we show a $44 million decrease in total taxable values, that's what you're talking about as far as the ceilings reached and the tiers. Correct. So what you're saying is our taxable value in 2026 is, even though we saw growth, is still $44 million below what we had last year. Yes? Correct.

After deductions and tax freezes.

So after all the growth, after everything that we have, tax freezes, all the things, we have a net decrease of $44 million. Of tax base. Of tax base. So whatever the rate is, that rate is then applied to that, and that would generate the revenue, correct? Correct. So it's $44 million less. That's the portion of it. That's a portion of it. So if we look at our revenue as a pie, let's say a pie chart, The INS side grew, right, because we issued debt to take care of some issues that really needed to be taken care of. I mean, this is to Councilman Simpson's point that he was bringing up. The INS side grew, but because the pie did not grow, the actual pie did not grow. In previous years, the pie did grow. Correct. We had a bigger pie, so we could cut it up a little bit differently. Yeah, now it compacts your M&O. So, yeah, so they act inversely. So, as the INS goes up, that M&O goes down, so we have less money to operate on. Yes? Right. So, I guess, I mean, to Mayor's point, too, I mean, this was not what was presented in Budget Workshop, correct?

No, because we had not run those numbers. We were just going off the 3.5%, which was the voter-approved tax rate. We all just had it from presumptions we've had in previous years. Oh, yeah, it'll just go down net zero.

We thought $700,000. We thought the no new revenue rate, we thought if we're going up three and a half.

Yeah, we just wanted to deduct the $700,000. That's all we wanted, but it wasn't that simple.

Which would have been easy. Correct. In hindsight, it would have been really easy. But now we're looking at a $3.4 million deficit if we're at the no new.

Yes.

Other questions, council?

What are we forecasting? Because it seems like, I don't know, sales tax got revised. But how much more sales tax are we saying we're going to bring in versus budget in 25-26? Because the version I had, I guess the original version before we found the million dollars, was about 5.6. 5.6 additional? compared to what we had in the budget.

I think we were going up. I don't know if Justin's in here. I think it was around $9 million is that we were projecting to go up.

So in sales tax, we collected $9 million more this year than we thought we were going to collect, which is a good thing. And we're saying we're not going to lose that $9 million next year. Right. We're carrying it over and saying we'll bring in 3% on top of that. So we got in $9 million that we had not budgeted anything for. Yes. And we're going to add to that next year.

Yes. And part of that's what's helping with the 13 to 15 million in CIP.

Well, I think this is exactly the direction that we need to head. I mean, this new information is very unfortunate, but the good thing is we've got sales tax. We've got sales tax that we did not think was going to come into our pocketbooks. We had not allocated it. And so for me, having that sales tax instead of the property tax next year can still, I think, help provide a property tax relief. Because we've had $9 million that we had not planned on that. That was unbudgeted. That was free money for us to spend. And I guess we've either spent it or we're going to sweep it up at the end of the year to go into capital projects. Correct. But we functioned on a budget this year with $9 million less in sales tax. Yes. Okay.

Yes, we would just need direction.

Well, I think a solution to our problem here, if we still want to provide property tax relief, is we've got the sales tax.

Right. Then we just need direction from council to bring back whatever that target is. You've got $5 million currently for personnel, a little over $2.2 million in supplementals. Based on the direction we showed you today, we would come back constrained to whatever direction you all want us to work on.

But... Les just said that the $9 million was in addition to, and we haven't really allocated it. It's not in the budget.

It is in the budget. That's what we're proposing for the raises.

It went in this year's budget. This year's. Yeah. What I'm saying, we got $9 million more this year. We never budgeted the expenses for it. We had that. We could use it for whatever. and now we're increasing it next year.

Now we're proposing to build it in recurring next year for what we're proposing, $5 million toward raises and then $2 million toward supplementals.

But is that not what y'all presented in budget workshop? So you already did present it. Yes.

But now if you reduce the no new revenue, we've got to chop $3 million off of this recommendation. So that's the direction we'll need based on what tax rate we go with.

And then you figured a 3% growth on that from 26, 27.

Yes. OK, so forgive me for going back, but we did a math problem. Councilman tips and myself, I think we're, you know, 700,000 that doesn't look right. Each penny. Increase revenues 1.6M total for the city. Let's say it's 1.5. so if you raise a penny or 2 pennies or whatever that 3.5% is right. So we question the 700. We were given information that we were supposed to have confidence in that like, no, we've done the math problem. And that is what it is. If you increase the 3.5%, you'll realize 700K. So I'm still questioning that. And then what we're saying here today is we didn't do the math problem correctly. No, we did.

We just didn't run the no new revenue version of the math problem.

Yeah, we walked into the budget workshop with the understanding that it would be the voter approved rate. And so it was during the workshops when we discussed the no new revenue rate, which we had not calculated. Again, we thought it would be minus $700,000 because, again, that intuitively makes sense. But then when we actually ran it and you actually do the full calculation, taking all the exemptions, all the things that the state wants you to take into, that's where you land.

Okay, so that's progress. So if you, if you did the calculation and the calculations done correctly. Then we have a differential of what is a positive 700 K. To a negative 3.4, right? So 4.3Million dollar difference. Roughly. In three pennies.

Is that right?

Or what would the pennies be? Somebody give me the pennies. 3.5% difference or change. Two and a half. Two and a half pennies. Okay. And that takes into account the additional values that were brought onto tiers that pays out. But we didn't lower any values. You don't go and deduct that amount out of the tiers. It's in addition to what we already realized in there for general fund. And then you're also saying there's some frozen taxes? Yeah, the tax freezes grow. And so the tax freezes grow, but then those are a realized deduction every year?

It's just an impact to your what you can collect each year. So it's part of the formula.

So the growth. Well, hang on. I want to make sure like so I don't have a tax freeze, right? But my dad does, right? So his his taxes, my rate moves as much as it needs to but his taxes stay frozen right so my rate moved a little bit more the more of uh people you know have that frozen tax right and so you have to make it up somewhere else yes but you're showing that as a loss and i think that's what is the confusing it's a new loss because more took advantage of that tax break that tax freeze but i think the confusing part is you're showing it as a negative And I think if we said, okay, if you so what we need to do is we need to go back to. You know, mayor and council have the opportunity to raise the tax rate. 2 and a half pennies on the side. Am I tracking with you?

Well, again, the freeze is off of the values, the certified value amount. And so we had more freeze. And so that's why you're seeing a negative there.

But the certified values, they are going to move every year. They do. And that is why the rate moves up and down in accordance with the no new revenue flat. So if the certified values move up, then the no new revenue rate moves down from existing rate.

In theory.

Well, it did.

Again, I wish it was as simple as value, no new revenue. There's a lot of things between all of that that impact all of that. I mean, new growth, decrease in value, there's a lot that goes into this.

So let's take it to the example of the actual individual. So we have a $200,000 house, right? And it didn't increase in value, it just stayed flat. And so we're saying that the existing rate is what, 43 cents? Is it 43 something? Right. Okay, so if we don't raise, now that particular individual, 200,000, it's flat, they didn't see an appreciation, whatever, and their tax rate, if it stayed the same, they'd pay the same amount in tax. If we lower that tax rate down, because their house went from 200,000 to 210,000, they would pay the same amount in tax.

Potentially, yes. Otherwise, yes. If we lower the rate and their values stay the same, then they see less of a tax payment.

So how are we then stipulating that the no new revenue rate is .4217? How are you getting to that number? That's what the formula gives us a 10 page calculation certified by the county and that revenues the exact same amount of money as we did the year before, but some overall, but some of it may have to go to your side.

That's a big part of it.

There's the key. So what part of that goes to the side that didn't increase because you just told me that it went from 9 cents to 10 cents on the side, which isn't factored in your three and a half percent increase.

I think technically it was factored in. We just didn't realize it until we didn't see the growth that was making up for it. Okay, so in the previous years, have we not factored that correctly? We've never gone to the no new revenue to run the impacts.

Yeah, we've always worked off the voter approval rate, and that's the same calculation every year.

Yeah, but we've increased taxes, say, 3%, 3.5%. Then we've gone out and issued debt that came on the tax roll.

We may have had the same scenario last year. We just didn't. We're on the scenario.

Yeah, we didn't run a no new revenue rate scenario because, again, I understand back a year ago was we're going to do the voter approval tax rate because we need the money for the request we had on the table.

I just wanted to add that there's also a deduction for sales taxes that gets factored into the equation.

Yes, I forgot about that one.

That's our half-cent voter approved property tax reduction because of our sales tax.

Yeah, the state wants you to factor in any kind of sales tax that could have reduced your property tax. Again, this calculation is much more exhaustive than the legislation made it sound to be.

So, Mayor, you asked a question about how much is going to the INS side, and is that the number on the bottom of this, the 2.606?

Yes.

That's on top of the three. It's an increase from 2526. So you asked that question, how much of that? I think there's your answers. Yeah. 2.6 million.

Yeah, you raised it one penny in order to pay an additional 2.6 million in debt service.

It's just not the same penny that's adjusted when you do the 3.5% for your, hopefully, M&O collections.

So, well, but you just put them together. So, like, we're not separating M&O and INS, treating them separately. We're saying we factor them separately, but then we can join those together to get our new revenue rate? Correct. And that total cannot exceed 3.5%?

Well, when you factor it all in, how does the 3.5% rate come in when the INS is part of that overall rate?

The 3.5% is on the M&O side.

But ultimately it all becomes one combined rate and it tells us what that revenue increase would be.

The INS side can go up without a restriction, right? You could double it. You could go from $0.10 one year to $0.20 the next year, right, legally. Okay, so there's no constraints on the INS side. But we are now saying that on the M&O side, we factor in the constraints from the INS increase. The calculation does. The calculation does. So if you did increase, let's say you doubled your INS side because you borrowed a bunch of money, what would that do to your 3.5%? and that'd be a whole different calculation we'd have to run. So we don't know. We don't know. But how do we know that we factored it correctly here to arrive at this no new revenue rate?

Because in the formula, it's literally, it tells you add this, subtract that, subtract that, add this. It tells you specifically in the form what to do. And so we can, I think we gave it to you before, we can give it to you all again. It literally tells you, go back to line 17, add that. Now go to line 24, add this. Now go to line 45, add this. And so... It gives you the formula to work on. And we have to ultimately rely upon the information given to us by the county. So they do all the certified values. They determine the exemptions. And so we have to rely upon their data to work the calculations.

So how do we get to zero? And this is where I'm hung up. So if we had gone through budget workshop, And you guys have come in and said, look, after factoring all of this, you're going to see if you raise the taxes, you know, you're the maximum. And you all vote for that. You're going to see four point two million dollar increase that we're going to go put in your budget. Because if you leave the taxes flat, you're going to have a no new revenue rate. Like, how do we get back to zero? zero in rate or zero in revenue? I'm just saying like the rate itself that we would say we wanted to pass in order to not raise anybody's tax.

Yeah, if you're looking at it from that standpoint, like at a house $200,000, say the $200,000 house didn't change, we'd be looking at, if you're looking at that as a goal, you look at the 43 cents, I guess, and so, roughly what it is.

Well, it'd be between the 44.

Yeah, 44 and 43 there, so. That, in theory, for an individual person, 200,000, assuming they didn't change their value, that didn't change their tax, but again, this is a city-wide calculation. I can't promise any one person that their property tax will not go up or go down, because that is, this is a city-wide calculation. What it does to an individual person, it does to an individual person.

we're in my head we're conflating our role a little bit with prad like prad's role is to move people's values up and down and that will affect their their tax value with taxable value our role is just the rate so yes we we don't we don't get over into the lane but we we as council we get to vote for a rate that either increases revenues by collecting more tax money from those property payers, or we hold the tax flat and we calculate that to be in concordance or in line with the updated values. And so why are we not doing that here? We've done that here. Okay. And then we factored in the INS side, right? There's a factor now on the INS side that realizes in a deduct on the M&O side.

Yeah, so it's that general fund M&O impact as you go down. It'd be a tax rate in between the $152,000 positive to the negative $242,000 impact.

Okay, so let's assume here that we were a small community and we didn't really have a lot of experience with this and that the states got this implemented and we had a question. Who would we reach out to to say, can you check our math?

Well, Randall County Tax Assessor's Collector is the one that certified the math.

Well, they certified the values. No. Oh, they are?

No, Pratt is a values tax assessor collector, helps with the calculation.

Okay.

We verified their math.

Okay, so they worked this math problem.

Yes, they did the math problem and we verified it. Lola does it independently and compares and then Randall County certifies it.

So we have two different entities that are both working on this. And they are both saying this, that if you hold to the no new revenue rate, you lower the taxes. And you're going to realize that to the equation of 3.5 million. So your taxpayer, if we just hold to the no new revenue rate, they actually would pay less per house in taxes.

Again, the form is literally a bunch of additions and subtractions. It walks you through, add this line, that line. It all goes back to the data. That data comes from the county tax assessor. They collect the data. They give us the data. Then they run the calculation. Then we verify the calculation. We have to depend upon their data. I guess if there's a concern about the ultimate number, you have to go back to the data itself. That comes from the tax assessor.

Well, I think after sitting through three days of budget workshop and not seeing these, and then for the first time today.

Well, that was the first time we were asked to do a different rate. So we weren't prepared at budget workshop to run those rates.

Well, no, I mean, I think if we had voted on it back then and said, this is what council wanted, like we would have worked off of. $0 impact at the 42 cents. Now we're saying it's different. So yes, I think the confidence that is, are we now factoring this correctly? I think that needs to be explored. So how do we explore that? How do we make sure that we've done this calculation right?

I guess I need you to tell me how to do that.

Okay? So who at the state offers help and assistance if we were lost?

I'm not aware of anyone in the state that does that. When I was in Nebraska, we had Ottawa Public Accounts that did this kind of stuff. But here, we don't have a version that does that. I'm not aware of anyone in the state. I know a lot of small towns, they rely upon accountant firms because they don't have the staff to do that. Cities are left to themselves to do these.

Does our local COG do this for some of their other communities? Do they assist in that? Don't know.

Yes, but smaller the towns, they actually have a different calculation that they have to run at times, a de minimis calculation.

Mayor, I think, I mean, these numbers go in line with what you and I were talking about in workshop. Because we were scratching our heads saying, these can't be right. These can't be right. A $700,000 deal that we had that very conversation. So I don't know that I question the math. I think it was done correctly. I just don't think that these numbers were presented in workshop, which you and I felt like that that is truly the case, because when we're talking about the no new revenue, thinking that only cost us $700,000.

I'll tell you what I'd like to do. Honestly, I don't think I have a math problem here. I think I have an interpretation of the law or the application of the law, right? So if the intent of the law from, let's say, the state Is we want communities to be able to communicate that they held their taxes flat, but they realized a loss in revenues because of this. And we're okay with that. Like, I think I think I can and I think we can, you know. I WAS ON A CALL WITH GOVERNOR ABBOTT'S OFFICE LAST WEEK THROUGH OUR REPRESENTATIVE FAIRLY. I THINK THAT WOULD BE EASY FOR US TO REACH OUT TO OUR REPRESENTATIVE, GET BACK ONLINE WITH HIS AIDES THAT ARE EXPERTS IN THIS, AND LET THEM DOUBLE CHECK IT.

I DON'T THINK THEY'RE EXPERTS IN THIS, HONESTLY.

YOU DON'T THINK THAT GOVERNOR ABBOTT HAS AIDES THAT SPECIALIZE IN THIS?

NO, I DO NOT.

OKAY.

SO WHO AT THE STATE WOULD? The closest part would be the Texas comptroller's office. These forms are the product of the law. When you look at the forms, they come from the contract for the law. That would be the closest we have.

My question is, we're filling out a complicated document that we're not explaining right now very well. And then it assesses something that represents to our public that we're holding your taxes flat. There's no new revenue, right? So we're having zero new revenue. It doesn't say negative revenue. It says no new revenue, right? So I'd want to change that wording to this is our negative revenue rate.

I would love to change the wording. The wording isn't accurate they give us. Okay.

I think it states no new revenue. That is accurate. There is no new revenue. We see a loss. So the wording is accurate. There is no new revenue. There's actually a loss. It doesn't say exactly the same revenue as last year. It doesn't state that. It doesn't say equal revenue to previous year. Then the wording would be wrong. The wording is accurate. There is no new revenue. The way the calculations work, because we have a $44 million decrease in taxable value, we see a loss. So if we go with the no new revenue rate, it's all a math problem. If we're multiplying a smaller number, Well, we're going to get a smaller result, and that's exactly what's happening.

Yeah, I just simply disagree that that rate has to be that rate if all we're trying to achieve is no new revenue.

You're thinking flat, like stay the same. That's not the guarantee, and I get what you're saying. It's convoluted of why they call it that, but it's just saying we're not gaining anymore, but we are losing.

Mm-hmm. Council, would you like for us to show you the form? No. Because we can walk you through. Again, we're not making this. This is literally pluses and minuses. So we work with the data from the assessor's office, and then the math is the math.

The staff is just data entering this into the tabulated chart. Data entering, yes. And it spits out whatever the rate is, right? And then you calculate how much that cost us for operations. And there's a calculation there on the INS side. And I'm just saying, I don't know, I don't know enough to know better, right?

And this is, again, had we gone into the workshop knowing that we'd be looking at the no new revenue, we could have been working on this before that, but again, that was a request in the workshop, so we've just now seen this since then.

I think the frustration comes in the fact that we thought that we had said that. Yes. COUNCILMAN SIMPSON HAD BROUGHT UP THE NO NEW REVENUE RATE. AND I THINK THAT WE MADE THE ASSUMPTION THAT THAT WAS IT. THE SWING WAS GOING TO BE THE $700,000.

WE THOUGHT SO AS WELL, YES.

SO I THINK THAT THAT'S WHERE THE FRUSTRATION COMES IN BECAUSE YOU ALL THOUGHT THAT AS WELL. WE'RE NOT ACCOUNTANTS, WE'RE NOT EXPERTS, BUT YOU GUYS HAVE THE STAFF. WE FEEL LIKE WHEN YOU ALL MAKE THAT ASSUMPTION, WE JUST GO ALONG WITH YOU. AND THEN ALL OF A SUDDEN THIS IS DROPPED ON US AND WE'RE LIKE, WELL, WE'RE $3.5 MILLION SHORT OF WHAT WE THOUGHT WE WERE. I think that's where the frustration, or at least for me, that that's where the frustration comes in. I'm going to venture out here and say we have to trust you guys, and we don't have to, but you guys, we're not going to go work the numbers. We can't. We don't have the ability to go work the numbers. That's why we have the audits. That's why we're looking at the forensic audit. That's just to get some peace and to figure out everything is what it is. But on this, on the budget... We have to trust you guys. And I think that that's where the frustration comes in, is we thought we were operating differently than what we are.

Well, we said we'd have to run the calculations.

Our entire goal is to come back and tell you where zero would be. We've shown that. It's just not the same rate.

Right. But y'all are way better at this than we are. I mean, I've done this four times. Mayor's done it six times or eight times. Y'all are just way better at it because y'all have a whole lot more experience. And that's where we were scratching our head going, these donors don't make sense. If it's just a swing of $700,000, it doesn't make sense. But I think that that's where the frustration comes. That's where you're seeing the frustration. I don't think the math is wrong. Y'all are just data entry. Take this and do this. It's like a tax return. You're just putting in box B into here and doing this. I get that. But having this number now we're like sheesh like and again, we have some you know Trust issues here about what's going on and then this this cluster just kind of makes it Facilitates yeah, we're frustrated as well.

Yeah, I mean, I don't like the forms.

I don't like the law on this thing So I don't know if it's very convoluted at Councilman Simpson when you're saying the trust issues, so I don't think he does I don't think he has any issues but outside of the trust issues Councilman read so

If I have this correct, if we were to adopt the no new revenue rate in order to make up that 3.4 million that's in the negative, that would have to come from the general fund personnel raises that we were looking at and from the general fund supplementals.

Correct, yes.

Not necessarily. No. I mean, it could come from anywhere in the budget.

It could come from anywhere in the budget, yes. But for simplicity purposes, yes, it could come from those ones, the pay raise and stuff like that. Yes, it could come from anywhere in the budget.

Well, I think you've got $5.5 million in. What's the line item there, capital improvement? Is that the line item? Can we pull that budget up? If you if we were like, you know, we just don't have the money so if we don't have the money we don't have the money and we don't Necessarily go back and try to take it away from our number one need which is personnel and and paying appropriately And we've worked real hard to move the budget forward. So I think what you're gonna Impact here is some of those capital projects Those are one-time dollars not necessarily go to the can we get the budget up? Go to that general, was it page 12 that gave you the kind of the overall of the general fund? No, keep going, please. Yeah, what page is this? Page 11. Okay, so look right there. Come back down, please. Thank you for making that bigger. A little further? Yeah, come down a little further, please. 5.572, general construction.

Those are one-time dollars. These are one-time dollars down here?

And so everything represented up above it is the ongoing M&O side, and this is just part of the additional monies we made in sales tax, right?

Correct.

Okay, so we revenue this year $10 million that we haven't spent, right, in sales tax?

we'd have to pull up the revised estimates on where we're looking. But, yes, there's excess.

Well, assuming we're running budgets and we're balanced and we're serving the public and meeting all of our obligations, we're exceeding our sales tax projections. Nobody's come to us and said, hey, you're over budget. We're going to need that sales tax. So now we've got $10 million at the end of this year, and you guys are pushing it all forward into CIP projects of, what, $13 million? Yes, that's part of that $13 million calculation.

Okay.

And so if we've got an ongoing comfort, we've got some other revenues. Would you mind going up to the top? So when you get the breakdowns on the 271, you know, you've got all of those. Additional business fees licenses stuff like that. We were asking about I think it was five million But it was down from six and a half million or so. So I'm still gonna advocate that I think We would need to look at even E&I I THINK WE NEED TO BE PERSONNEL HEAVY IN HOW WE BALANCE THIS BUDGET. SO WE'RE GOING BACKWARDS. I UNDERSTAND COUNCILMAN TIPS TALKING ABOUT FRUSTRATION. SO ESSENTIALLY, WHAT WE'VE DONE, WHAT HAS HAPPENED DURING BUDGET WORKSHOP, is we represented a budget that would require a 3.5% increase or at least a 3% increase just to be a balanced budget. And that if we adopt the no new revenue rate, we would be adopting an unbalanced budget as it's presented. No, that's not correct.

We would make it up in sales tax. You just have to cut 3 million of our proposed expenses. Because the sales tax, like Councilmember Simpson said, is there to cover the majority of your needs. You just can't fill as many of those needs, but it is a balanced budget. We just would cut $3 million worth of expenses.

One-time expenses?

No, recurring expenses. Recurring, ongoing? $2 million of supplementals and a portion of personnel would balance the budget.

So you cut a few positions.

Proposed new positions, those supplementals, yes.

Mm-hmm.

And then we aren't realizing any efficiencies based on like where we were just because our projected year end is in line with kind of what you guys proposed previously. So we're not forecasting an excess sales tax income. Revenues went up, and we brought it in under budget. Ms. Stephanie, can you go down a little further?

Yeah, we've taken all those things into account in these calculations.

Mm-hmm. Can you go down a little further? So that $287 million, if you take that $5 million out of it, right, which is general construction or whatever, you'd be at your balanced budget roughly, right? What you're projecting. What are we bringing in? $283 million up at the top? I can't remember. $280 million. Okay, well, I feel like we represented a scenario where the tax rate now has become an issue of like, well, we didn't understand when this calculation that it wasn't just a positive 700K you could vote for, you would actually have to vote... if you held the no new revenue rate, you would have to realize a $3.4 million deduct, which is a $4.2 million swing, let's say.

Or you would actually approve less pay or supplementals.

An option is what you were getting at before mayor. If you wanted to, what we can call a no new revenue rate, or if we just call it a flat revenue rate, right? Which is really what we, I think we all thought that that's what the no new revenue rate was because we have 44 million less than we can that we are taxable value. You could pick a rate of like 0.442. Correct. That would give you a flat. True. No, that would still be a no new revenue rate by what we're thinking of 0.442.

So let's get back to your $200,000 house. And so, yes, you could find a 0.43% rate that in theory would give that resident a no tax increase in theory.

So we didn't raise taxes even though we raised the rate. Well, we didn't raise revenue. We're keeping revenue flat. Keeping the rate flat.

Well, we're keeping the revenue flat because we've got a lower number that we're multiplying against. I mean, we're keeping the revenue flat from last year to meet this. We're just having to pick an arbitrary rate, not the one that the form is spitting out. We're having to pick one because that leaves us with a $3.4 million deficit.

You're having to pick one in between the VADR rate and the no-sever rate, yes. To keep it flat. Yes, keep it flat, yes.

So we do have that option as well.

So you can still do the no $700,000. You can still do that. That was kind of the intent last week. And so we can still do that. It just won't be a .40, it'll be a .43. Mm-hmm.

Y'all could calculate that number to figure out, like Andrew got the .44174, which was close. Yeah, we're close to it. But so I'm thinking .4425-ish.

Yeah, we just thought that the no derivative was that negative 700,000, but now we've done the math, it's not. But you can still get the no $700,000 figure and get back to a flat one, yes. Correct.

You can do that. I just want to say we've got that option. It's not either or.

Exactly.

Councilman Simpson, are you still thinking about tax relief?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I apologize. We're probably the most frustrated I've been in three years. And I understand that we didn't run it, but we talked about it on the first day. And, you know, this really puts us in a bind up here. And I want to do the best I can. But also, when you look at the history, and I've set up here and I've raised people's taxes. And you want to know how much I've raised them? The budget approved from the time I took office, property taxes, according to my, and I could be wrong, we've raised them 26.6%. That's 16% on M&O and almost 75% in INS. And we had to do those things. All I'm saying is now would be a good time. We found $43 million. We've got sales tax at a record high. Now would be a good time to look at providing some property tax relief. Listen, we're going to have to wean ourselves off on this today. I mean, eventually. No better time today? I think the question of the day that we have is, what do we want to put on September 8th? I'm not going to be in favor of any rate that's not providing property tax relief.

Can we look at this document that's up here? So is City Secretary or Lola able to... work that one. This is coming from Mrs. McMurray, right? And so this is their calculations, their numbers, and they're giving us a no new revenue rate? Yes, sir. That's great. So can we show here where that would equate to a negative 3.4 million in our revenues?

So those numbers were plugged into our worksheet to determine what the revenue levels would be. That's how we got the numbers. But that's the rate that was calculated and verified by myself from the city.

Okay. So I'm just reading this at face value, right?

Okay.

I mean, appraised values in 26 were $25,000. 25.7 billion. Taxable values are down to 20.9 billion, right? So everybody's tax values went down.

Right.

Okay, so everybody should assume that their rate would have to adjust up for them to pay the same amount in property taxes?

We're making some generalizations there because it's not everybody. Some went up, some went down. Sure, I understand.

But then they're proposing the rate at the no new revenue rate to be below our 43 cents down to 42 cents. But they're representing that we have a $5 million depreciation in overall values. And then they're representing that the rate would only go up to 0.44

Right, that's the calculated voter approval tax rates.

Okay. Yeah, I think I just need some time going through the math problem, and then I want to reach out to the state. So comptroller's office would be a good one. And it is what it is, right? But, I mean, I don't think we can go and do an on-camera interview for our media personnel based on this lack of understanding that we have. I don't think that I can explain to my constituents that – you know, we would run a $3.4 million deficit if we just kept their tax rate flat. And that if I increase their rate, I actually did not increase their taxes. And so, like, what we're saying is I would be in favor of raising the tax rate from .43 to .44 just so nobody had to pay additional taxes. And I don't believe we've ever had to represent that that way in this community. I've never seen a mayor be required to go out and explain to their constituents that – We didn't raise your taxes even though we increased your tax rate, but it doesn't line up with the documents. It should line up with the documents. We should be able to go out and say the rate went up, but your taxes did not move.

Here's the form right in front of you. I wish I could explain it better, but this is the form. We can go step by step and add the subtracts.

Yeah, what I'm proposing is just some time outside of this discussion to get acquainted with this and that I'm always good to ask for help and education. I feel like I've been miseducated, not to any of y'all's fault, but in the way that this works at the state level. And so I need a little bit better education before I'm going to want to do an on-camera interview.

Absolutely. I appreciate that. This is, I wish, I don't think I can give an on-campus interview either because this is, unfortunately, this form is very challenging to follow. But again, they give you what the plug is. They plug this in, plug that in, and then do the math here. So this is what the state comptroller through the law has asked us to do. And trust me, I know you're all frustrated. I'm angry. I don't like these forms. I don't like this process we have to go through. And so this is very frustrating to walk in here and say this is what's happened to us. And so I wish I could explain it better to you all.

I understand that the form is frustrating, but what's frustrating is that we just didn't run the numbers the both way when we were talking about this. during budget. Understood. That's frustrating. And I would think that we, I know we maybe have never used that scenario before, but, but if you go look, take out rate, take out appraisals. If you look at how much money we're getting more property tax every year, somebody's paying some more money, maybe not across the board. We're in this budget has us taking more. property tax with the rate that was put in there and increased. All I'm saying is, no, can we give everybody across the board a property tax? No, because it depends on their appraisal. But in a good faith effort, I think we ought to do as much as we possibly can, tighten our belts, just like citizens have had to tighten their belts and paying for a whole lot of other things in the last four years. Salaries have not kept up with how much we're raising taxes. And I'm saying, in this one year, we don't have to say we're going to do this forever. Let's provide the maximum amount of relief we can.

OKAY. SO LET ME MOVE THE CONVERSATION FORWARD. WE DON'T RUN THE CITY ON PROPERTY TAXES. SO NEED EVERYBODY TO HEAR THAT. WE'RE PROPOSING A 280 PLUS MILLION DOLLAR BUDGET OF WHICH 61 MILLION IS COMING IN IN PROPERTY TAXES. AND WE'RE TALKING ABOUT, WHAT, THREE, THREE AND A HALF MILLION DIFFERENCE UP OR DOWN? SO THAT MEANS 90, 91 MILLION IS COMING IN IN SALES TAXES. AND THEN THE REST OF IT IS COMING IN IN BUSINESS FEES, USER FEES, USAGE. So we don't run the city on your property taxes. So we can say we want property tax relief. Okay, that's helpful, right? Or we can say, let's just hold the property taxes flat and let's deal with this $3 million. At the same time, if we go to the user fees, and we continue to move everything up, then that $5 per month that we're saving in property taxes for that payer gets offset by a $40 per month increase that ends up hitting everything from solid waste all the way across the board. So, Councilman Simpson, if we've got to tighten our belts, then let's make sure we're looking out for The rates and the payers over there on those those sides of the fees and I think we can I'm looking at a 8% increase on sewer and water and I don't see it. I think we could move to the 5% increase. We don't need that additional. We've moved it up 5% year after year. We're not bringing on a new wastewater treatment plant this next 12 months. And so what we're saying is we want these guys now to pay for future users. Then I don't know that everybody's living in this town five years from now. So let's let the user pay for it when it when it comes online and let's build it in over time with a moderate rate of attrition. And so or I'd say increase. But then there there's a lot in this overall budget. So I don't want to lose. I don't want to lose perspective that yes, this is an important issue. We're frustrated. Some are angry. It's $62.5 million worth of the total, and it may go down, but All important conversations, we've got to look out for the total bottom line. And I believe there's efficiencies and I believe there's other alternates. I'm not going to get hung up here in what is a 40-minute conversation and making all of the decisions. What I'm hearing is we probably need to regroup and come back. Council, I don't know that you guys are comfortable coming in on the 8th of September. knowing where you're going to be i had hope for a very productive conversation i feel like we went backwards i need some help from council on like what do y'all need in order to move the conversation forward because we have a lot of things still at play

Well, I think the decision to make on the 8th, which I think has to be made on the 8th, is that correct? So we have a deadline to meet.

Yes, and we have a notice deadline that Stephanie can tell us.

So the question is, is council comfortable with the voter-approved tax rate, which only means that it's a rate that cannot exceed? I guess we can come down. Or are we more comfortable with the no new revenue rate? I mean, that's the two decisions. That's the choices. Or is there another choice?

Or in between.

So you can, but if you say the

They're just setting a ceiling. But the ceiling could be set at anywhere that we want to set it. You can always go below, but you just can't go above once you set that ceiling. So if you did the no new revenue rate, you're stuck there or below.

So you need a direction on what that rate needs to be in order for it to be published and be out there.

Which sets, in my opinion, pretty easy. We can set the ceiling, but we can come down to anything. So set the ceiling, and we can move on. That buys us more time to digest all this and maybe come the next time to really show a rate with your guys' help of maybe getting the feel of where we're wanting to be. If we're looking at tax relief or we're looking at fees in the end user, maybe you come back with some of those options. I mean, because what you're hearing is you're hearing, let's figure that out. But we can choose the ceiling. I think that's easy on the A.

Yeah, I would agree. I think it would be prudent of us to accept that rate. It gives you a direction where to go, knowing that we want to go lower to either that flat rate or the lower rate. But it gives us that room to do that. It gives us the time to digest the information. But it gives you mainly the time to work on where we're going to find that $3.4 million.

Or at least options or options, right? I mean, if like, like. Mayor was just trying to lay out. I mean, do we make it up in fees? Do we make it up? Because the tax is a tax again, a fee is a tax. We call it whatever we want to. So. We can be up here and say, we want to give you property tax relief, but we're going to go up in fees. Well, that doesn't help anybody. I mean, so. If you can give us some examples of. Where's the 3.4 million going to come from? Where would we have to pull that from? Mayor's looking to be creative. We've got extra sales tax. Where can that come from? And if you can bring that back to us and help us, I think that'll help us settle on truly what rate we feel the most comfortable with. But the ceiling, I think, on the 8th is easy, and it still buys us more time to do it.

And then just one other question on page 14 of your presentation. It says solid waste not factored into budget yet, 1.2 million.

Those are the landfill tipping fees. Okay.

All right.

Yes, sir.

Councilman, were you done with that question? Yes. Did you have a question of not factored into the budget? Is there a question of whether that 1.2 is factored in?

That was from our original budget workshops. So we discussed it at a high level, but it wasn't shown in the budget yet. But we will be bringing it forward in September, as long as y'all are OK with those fee increases.

So it is up for consideration? Everything is. OK. Council, on item 4.2 here, do we have other questions, concerns, or direction that can be offered? Let me give one direction. I have always voted for the budget as a whole. I know that the budget language is important, the way we register the votes, that we raise our hands, we state it. I think with this budget and us working very diligently and me hearing a pretty diverse council that's considering a lot of options, I'd like to propose the budget to be voted on broken down in segments. Now, how we break that down, I'm not quite sure, but I think I want to allow counsel the opportunity to vote on the budget, not as an overall or a whole. So that may be. Sewer and water broken out separate general funds separate, but then there may be more considerations here and I don't want anybody to feel like. You've got to make a decision and go along with everybody on the whole thing. I think it would be good for us to be able to leverage as much as we can to be as efficient as we can across the board. How do we do that?

I think we just have to work legal to see if we can legally do that. We can review those options.

I think if we get maybe legal to give a little guidance on since how we'll have to propose that, that way it's not anything we're trying to do last minute. AND THEN LET'S GIVE EVERYBODY THE UPDATE. SO WE'RE GOING TO HAVE A SPECIAL COUNCIL MEETING WHEN FOR THE FIRST READING, THE 22ND?

SEPTEMBER 22ND AND FINAL HEARING AND READING SEPTEMBER 29TH.

SO WE HAVE SOME HOMEWORK TO DO OURSELVES BETWEEN NOW AND SEPTEMBER 8TH, BUT I'M NOT HEARING COUNCIL NEEDS ANY FURTHER MEETINGS BETWEEN NOW AND THEN.

CORRECT.

OKAY. ALL RIGHT. I don't know what else to say. Let's take a 15 minute recess. Thank you. All right, everybody, thank you for hanging around, tuning back in. We've completed all of our discussion items. Well, we have not. Let me go to item 4.3 and ask for potential future agenda item requests from council. Do I have any? Okay, we'll move on now to Section 5 on the agenda, which is public comment. Appreciate everyone staying. Ms. City Secretary, if you don't mind to read us into public comment and call up our first speaker.

Thank you, Mayor Stanley. Thank you for participating in today's City Council meeting. We value your input and appreciate that you're taking the time to share your thoughts today. Each speaker will have three minutes to address the council during public comment or any public hearing today. At two and a half minutes, a single beep will signal 30 seconds remaining. When time is up, the timer will beep continuously. We ask that you please stay within your allotted three minutes. We do have public hearings today. If you wish to speak on an item with a public hearing, we would ask that you speak on that item either during public comment or during the public hearing, not both, in order to ensure we can keep accurate minutes. We will be using both podiums today. When your name is called, please make your way up to the open podium. When it's your turn, state your name. and whether or not you live within Amarillo city limits before beginning your comments. For 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'd like to speak but have not signed up yet, please come see me here by the podium to fill out a form so we can add you to our list. At this point, we'll invite up Nathan Lockhart to be our first speaker. And on deck after Nathan will be Ashley Olivares. Nathan or Ashley? If not, how about Kenneth Dale Cross? As Kenneth makes his way up, Kendra Seawright, you will be on deck. You can use either one. Yes, sir.

Mr. Mayor, thank you.

I have the fortune or misfortune of having Transformation Park as my new neighbor. I do want to thank you all. You all have given me some feedback. We've had a great conversation on the phone a couple times. My question is this. What is the end game? What is a year from now look like? Because in two years, I'm going to shut my business down and move on, do something else. I mean, to me, it's untenable. My question is, where do you think all the people that are hanging out on the railroad property go to the restroom? I can tell you. I can tell you. I can tell you where the women are throwing away their Phenomenal Products. I got photos. I mean, what is the long-term goal? because it's not going to get better when they open the street center my front door is right there i understand they got to be somewhere i'm not i i totally get that but it's in my front door and it's not going to get better if you build it they will come i promise you we had this discussion that better better better business bureau meeting uh a couple years ago i asked you about it when they were starting the boat the bus station I just want to know, is there anything going to be done or is this going to be my new normal until I'm done? You know, I'm just asking. I know all the people that saw the waste. I know the marshals and all of them. It ain't got any better. So is there anything that can be done or I'm just, it is what it is. So I would like an answer to that. What is the end game? What is it, you know, one year, two year, five year plan for this? Because it's, I mean, everything over there is going to be that way eventually. I mean, with a five block radius of us.

So Mr. Cross, I'll make a statement to you. So I had a meeting yesterday and so we are my hope and my goal or all of our goal is to hopefully get this taken care of. When you said what's the end game? I can't answer that question other than that everything is picked up and it's the way it should be is what I would hope the end game is. But I've already had a meeting. We're going to work on and kind of hold feet to the fire to make sure that it is persistent. It's not occasional because I know we've been out there several times to pick up all that stuff and to do what we can. But it needs to be consistent. It needs to be enforced. What about the fires?

We've had three fires. I have a cabinet shop. I am a tinderbox just waiting. And if you go across the railroad track, You can see where there's been three fires. There was a fire down at the other end of Parker Street.

Yeah, I think consistent enforcement will help change that. Okay.

I mean, and I'll hold you to your word. I'm just asking for something because, like I say, what we have now is just not working. It's not working for me, but I'm at ground zero for it. So, you know, I say I'll keep my eyes posted and you'll keep seeing it and keep emailing y'all and see what's going on and go from there. I was just hoping somebody could say, hey, you know, we're going to work on this or because we had talked about that land because it still belongs to the railroad. Is there anything to be, are y'all looking at buying that and making it, adding to it? Is it just going to leave it as a railroad or?

We're looking at all of that. All of that is in the works, I will tell you that. Okay.

All right. Well, I appreciate your time. And I do appreciate, like I say, Cole, Mr. Mayor, I'm sorry. We had a good conversation. I do appreciate it. Yes, sir. I'll reach back out to you.

We'll see what else we can do. Thank you.

Okay. On deck for the empty podium is Tiffany Rawls. And, Kendra, you may begin.

Hi, I'm Kendra. I live in the city of Amarillo. I want to say thank you to Mr. Hooper and the city going over the drought procedures and policies and things like that. It's very appreciated and I do not want that job. That's amazing work. I, however, like many others, as he noted, have been pointing to the water user that we are trying to avoid limiting, but we could fully prevent them from taking any extra water from us with no detriment to city recreation or safety. I would like to formally request that you add to the next city meeting agenda an item to cancel the water sales contract with Fermi America. Furthermore, we should put a regulation in place that prevents the city from selling water to data center developers in our city or outside of it. I also think it would be a great opportunity to clarify how the city decides who gets water access if and when we move to the next drought stage between residents and industry. I understand right now that they're at 10,000 gallons per day, but they can use wells. We don't have to contribute to that loss. 75 million gallons per month, when they do start using their minimum amount with their potential to ask for more, it seems like we could do something to prevent that with it's not going to start getting cooler during the summer, so summers are not going to start getting shorter. Every drop safe makes a difference. Thank you.

On deck for the empty podium will be Alan Feingold, and you may begin.

Hi, City Council. I'm Tiffany Riles, and I am a resident of Amarillo. Can you guess what the flock I'm here to talk about? At the last City Council meeting, Mayor Stanley, you made the comment that there are no public-facing policies regarding these cameras. Do you know what's interesting? What is public-facing right now? Those cameras. The cameras are on, the cameras are up, the cameras are recording. At least 127 of them in Amarillo. On our streets, in our parks, recording us, tracking us as we drive to the grocery store, as we walk our dogs, and recording our kids playing in the park. That's just gross. And now I see on the agenda item 6.13, you're going to be asked to spend $125,000 on a vehicle that will maintenance a variety of public safety equipment mounted on traffic signal poles and other elevated locations. I just love a good mystery. What could that be referring to? I have so many questions about where this funding is coming from. I couldn't find any COPS grants that were directly tied to surveillance technology. Can we get a crumb of transparency? I'm a grant writer myself, and I'm also very good at spending money, and I know I could find much better uses for 125K instead of a fancy ladder with storage. You voted to pause all new purchases of cameras, and that should automatically extend to the vehicles that are going to be required for repairs. Especially when we still don't know what all the details of the police officer APD who was fired on July 17th for a misuse of resources. Another great mystery. I sure hope Mr. Hoover includes that in his presentation. Last session you voted to pause all new purchases, but I'm encouraging you today to discuss the removal of these cameras until the people of Amarillo get a voice. Council members, was pausing the purchase of new cameras just a talking point, or are you going to stand behind your words? Prove it.

On deck for the empty podium will be Joe Luscombe. And Alan, you may begin.

Hello. I'm Alan Feingold. I am a citizen of the city of Amarillo. I suggest that the city hire a historian. It seems as though with regard to water and sewer policy, there is a case of historical amnesia of considerable magnitude. In 2006, the head of the city's water and sewer department was a man named Dan Coffey, and he authorized a study to be done of the patterns of water use. I was the one who suggested that the study be done and that it be found out how much water on average would be used in each month of the year. The study was done for 2006. I wish that the study was continually done every year for the city. By the way, the average use in the summer was not, say, 50 million gallons per day. It was 62 and a half million gallons per day, a fact which another individual in the Water and Sewer Department who was a supervisor named Emmett Autry presented to the city of Amarillo sometime around 2015. So the city should have been well apprised of what the actual water use was and what they could expect in the way of the future necessity of preventing drought. I also find it interesting that the city over the past eight years has issued approximately $258 million of bond debt specifically for water and sewer processes. And it didn't manage to come up with a second reservoir to supplement what is in the first reservoir. It also didn't manage to replace the two-inch diameter water lines of which the city had about 75 miles. I think maybe the city has actually replaced one or two miles in the past 10 years. These are old lines. They need to be replaced. They often leak. as do old four-inch and six-inch lines. The city also failed to replace or repair a section from the Carson County pipeline as that pipeline enters the city. I would appreciate if the city would put that on its high priority list. high priority list for this coming year. And I'd also appreciate if the city would have a two to two and a half hour meeting to discuss water and sewer policies as a separate part of the budget. It is, after all, an enterprise fund.

Thank you very much.

On deck for the empty podium is Tim Benson. And Joe, you may begin.

Good afternoon. This past weekend, the Diocese of Amarillo had a major event at the Civic Center. It's the 100th anniversary. And thousands of people from around the world conversed on Amarillo to celebrate the 100th anniversary. That afternoon, when the choir and orchestra and others were soundchecking and rehearsing, we got word that Buchanan Street would be closed on Saturday. And much, much, much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I said, well, I'm going to make a call. And so I made a call to Mr. Simpson at 526. These times are important. At 526, I made a call to Mr. Simpson and received a response back from him that, hey, thank you for the information at 534. And the city was looking at this. And at 558 that evening, I got word from the city that Buchanan Street would be open the next day and they would move on to another street. The one comment made from the orchestra was they did not realize that a government entity could work so quickly with so much common sense. And they were very, very thankful. I want to thank Mr. Simpson, Mr. Danforth, Mr. Path and the Intermountain group that's doing the paving for making this a great event for so many people. Also, I must say that the Emerald Police Department was outstanding with their professionalism, their sensitivity, and their respect for the dignitaries and the people who were there. The Pope's personal representative of the United States of America, was in the city this last weekend. So I want to thank each of you for that. This past July, on another note, we had the opportunity for the first time to be a part of your July 4th celebration. It was a great day. We enjoyed it very much. We stay scheduled usually two, three, four years in advance. And we've not been able to do it since even though we've been asked from the very beginning. We had a great, great time working with the Parks and Recreation Department, with Outdoor Amarillo, but especially Becky Dreyer. And we can't say enough about her and the way she handled it and the details she gave to this. However, as some of you that were there know, we had a very inopportune storm come through at a specific time that was very difficult. And we learned at that time that there were some communication issues with that. And Mr. Ryer worked right through it, made some pivots, and we had a great event, and the show went on. But what brought to my attention, this is what I want to say, very, very important, is I was watching online this session a couple weeks ago when the report was given to you folks, and she said about how good it was, and yet she acknowledged that there were some communication issues there. And all I can say is this, that really, really got our attention. that it was brought to you all, that your Parks and Recreation Department were working on these things and looking at them, and they were not swept underneath the carpet. So I want to thank you all for what took place last weekend. And I also want to thank Becky Dreyer and her response and her work and us being a part of the July 4th great event at Johnston Park. Thank you all very much.

On deck for the empty podium will be Kim Benson. And Tim, you may begin.

Whew. Told you guys that budget was going to be a doozy. That's something else, guys. Man, I'll tell you what. That's why we need our friends that got it. But what I'm here today is, again, guys, I'm not here to go against the homeless guys at all. I'm not. I think we all need to help them out. I get that. But last Friday, I went over and I spoke to the West. And, you know, they've been there for over 30 years at that location. And they told me they're done. They said they've had enough. They've been arguing. I won't say arguing with the city. Couldn't get the help that they wanted. And the homeless people just couldn't take it no more. And he said really what the deciding factor was was he had one of his customers come in to get some oxygen bottles and a homeless lady come in right behind her and she started urinating right on the floor. What are they supposed to do with this stuff, guys? We've got to help these property owners out. You know, he told me that he's probably going to lose $100,000 in property value because where he's at when he makes this sale. So I just think the property values around there, people are going to get hurt. We need to help these guys. But what I'm asking is we need to put this on the agenda for discussion. We need to put this on the agenda to let it open up for discussion. But I'll even volunteer, but we need some type of task force, whatever you want to call it, to go out and help these property owners and figure out what they need. Because I can tell you, I've been out. And I've spoken to these guys. These people leave trash everywhere. And they leave it. But it's on private property. So when they call the city, the city says, well, it's on private property. You have to do that yourself. They shouldn't have to pay that expense to get them people off their property and all their junk. But guys, we've invested. And you can correct me if I'm wrong. We've invested around $20 million in this project. The ROI on that is not good. When you have 300 people go through the door and only 20 of them find jobs, that's not a very good ROI in my opinion. We just got to do better. We got to help these people out. That's all I'm asking. Put it on the agenda. Let's do what we can do to help these property owners out. Because right now, it's not working. So again, thanks for your time.

On deck for the empty podium will be James, Alan, and Kim. You may begin.

Kim Benson, Amarillo. I'm the better half of the loud voices. You know, I don't come up here unless I'm pretty passionate about something. And when y'all were going through the budget, it kind of struck a nerve. I think the budget is the hardest thing you guys do, and I don't think anybody really realizes that. So we do appreciate that you take that time and you really study that budget. Cole? You ask awesome questions. So we do appreciate that. I'm glad that y'all are taking the time. But when I watched the budget this year, what struck a nerve was something Mr. Simpson said. And today, Les, you impressed me. Not very often do you do that, but today you did. But that day that I watched the budget, they were talking about senior citizens. And I'm pretty passionate about senior citizens, probably because I'm becoming one. But $100,000 in the park budget for our seniors? Not good, guys. Not when we're spending what we're spending on another... part of our city what my husband mentioned you know that twenty million when we put in transformation park that was sold to us that it was going to be kind of get it up and running and then we were stepping aside yes we we need to help those people i mean to be good servants we do need to help people that are down on their luck but The senior citizens is also a person, a group that we are ignoring. And $100,000 in that budget compared to what we're spending in community development, I don't even understand why it's in parks and rec. Why is it not in community development? Seniors is part of our community development. You know, but what struck the nerve, Les, is you said there's plenty of agents helping out the homeless population. But it seems like we're in the homeless business. You know, if we're in the homeless business, why aren't we helping those 52 fire victims that have lost their homes? They're homeless, of no cost to them. And that's our fault. That landfill was mismanaged. We know it. You guys can't talk about it, but you're going to have to talk about it sometime. But we're not helping them, are we? So I went and looked at the budget just to see what we're spending in community development, and it was kind of shocking. Transformation Park this year for 26-27 is $502,000. Coming home project. 667,155 and I know some of that may be grants. But we don't have the grants. I mean, why are we spending in listening to you guys today? We don't have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem. And until you'll fix that, we're just going to keep having budgets like what we have that y'all are struggling with right now. So thank you for your time.

On deck for the empty podium will be Joxon Bilbrey. And James, you may begin.

Thank you. Mayor, Council, first of all, I want to tell you thank you so much for the diligence in looking at the budget. You have a tough task and keep looking for those funds so that you can give us a zero-balance budget. So appreciate that. And also, while you're doing that, keep in that approximately million dollars that Jerry Danforth is working on for water lines for North Heights. Otherwise, I'll have a lot of people here to talk to you. Just kidding. I'm really here to talk about item 6.15, the move that community development will be making to Transformation Park. It's not necessarily about the furniture, but just some questions for you and the city staff to ponder. Currently, all departments have to pay indirect costs. Just some questions for you to think about. Can you use federal funds to pay indirect costs to a third party? Because to my understanding, the city will not own the building that they're moving into, at least initially. So I don't know if you can use federal funds to... to pay indirect costs to another entity. That's something I don't know if anyone's looked into or will be looking into, so it's something to consider. Because currently you're paying them to the city, so I know that can be done. When you do move, I don't know if you're going to have the ability to design your space, but there's some security factors that you need to consider as far as the sensitive files that community development has. uh that were incorporated into the current space i don't know if you're going to have that ability to design those that same kind of security into that location that's something to consider because there were some specific security factors there that were built into the current space so i don't know if that's All that's taken into account. So these are just things that I thought about when I saw it as an agenda item that may be some expenses that haven't been thought about yet. So I hope it works out. I know this is part of the grand plan of moving all those services out of downtown Amarillo. I think you see some of the problems that now move to... another part of town that used to be downtown. I know the businesses downtown didn't want them downtown. So all you've done is move some of those same problems to another area. So good luck.

Checking again, Jackson Bilbrey. If not, our last speaker will be John Adair.

All right. I wanted to address the proposed 96,000 plus travel expenses agreement with Kevin Johnson. Recently, I watched a six-hour long group therapy session meeting that the council had with staff and Mr. Johnson. Much of what I heard focused on communication, team dynamics, getting council and staff to work together. But I think we're forgetting someone in that relationship, and that's the people. You weren't elected to represent city staff. You were elected to represent us. I don't particularly care whether staff and council agree or get along. Sometimes disagreement is exactly what representative government needs. If staff recommends something, that the citizens don't want. I expect my elected representative to stand with citizens, not worry about team harmony. Now we're being asked to spend 96,000 plus travel for a year of this, and the agenda doesn't even clearly say is this budgeted. It literally says yes slash no. um before approving this um can y'all tell the public exactly what we're buying what the deliverables are and why emerald taxpayers need to spend eight thousand dollars a month on a life coach teaching staff and council how to work together for your first um Responsibility isn't to be a better team with staff. It's to represent the people who put you in those seats. Thank you.

Our next speaker will be James Skank.

Boom. That was sort of interesting. You guys going in for some counseling or something here? I know about that. Right now on the consent agenda, 6.15, I'd like, if y'all could, pull that off to let us have a little understanding of some explanation of buying this furniture. Because even as we're dealing with the budget and pockets of money that are moving here and moving there and going up there you know i i sort of get into things like this you know because we've you know you need to explain the need of this and the cost of 193 thousand dollars the first 10 objects on the the purchase is break room and lounge furniture And there's quite a few thousand dollars spent on that. What is this place? Do we have that going on at Jim Simms right now? That's being where the people are meeting. We're going to put it in this building that we don't own. We're just going to furnish them. And if we do have other furniture, are we going to reuse anything to be a little bit more efficient? I used to have to wear my... brother's pants until i got bigger than him and uh how much how much reimbursement is this ckp which i don't understand what ckp stand for i guess jerry might know uh is that just that outfit that we buy things through corp with other municipalities You know, I ran into this situation back when I used to work for the county back in the late 70s. You know, they came in and said, hey, James, we're going to get you a new chair and a new desk. Well, see, during that time, things got passed down. I had a nice judge chair, big black thing. It was real nice. And I had a desk that I guarantee you would have helped me in a tornado. because it was heavy, and I still have some of those. You all know them, the old metal things. And I was going, what are we doing here? And my chief said, if we don't spend the money, we won't get it in the budget next year. And my comment was, oh, so that's how this works. We're kicking money down the street all the time. We're not using a zero-based budgeting arrangement to allow for things to be scrutinized every year, and do we need that much? And as a result, it just goes up and up and up and six and five, four, three, two, one. Thank you, folks.

Our next speaker will be Connie Danner.

Thank you very much. I came with a couple pages to just read. I've decided to not do that. Just being and listening and hearing how confused the budget is and everyone is. I mean, it wears everyone out to talk about it and even just to listen. We all have a budget in our families, so we understand that. But this is like on a massive scale. But basically, it seems as though the people of Amarillo don't believe they're being heard. We're given these three minutes. Decisions are made affecting our water, electricity, privacy, land, crops, livestock, environment, everything. And they move forward without anyone paying attention to what people are saying. This public participation, like the opening prayer, must not become a dog and pony show. We talked about the flock. Here we are with the flock. It's the majority of people feel like she feels. And these things require full disclosure, public debate, and genuine public voice before decisions are made. Then there's Fermi, and I'm glad to hear they're only using 10,000 gallons. I thought it was a lot more, so I'm glad to be corrected. And we're in a drought, the first step of the drought. So maybe they'll just keep using 10,000. That's good. That's good. But these huge decisions are made in confusion, like there's so much confusion happening. And we haven't even addressed, as you know, I'm personally interested in the fire, the stinky fire. Damage doesn't disappear just because the headlines are off. I mean, everybody's still suffering. A lot of the people here are suffering. And people aren't, my sense is that people feel like they're not being heard. And the city's responsibility is in all of it. But then it's based in confusion, the foundation is confusion, so it's tough. History gives us, I'm gonna read this, because it's interesting and something to pay attention to. History gives us the disturbing example of John Malcolm, the British customs officer, tarred and feathered in Boston in 1774. I am not threatening or endorsing violence, but history shows what can happen when officials become contemptuous of ordinary people and the public loses faith that lawful institutions will deliver justice. The tar and feathers were not the beginning. They were the culmination of ignored grievances, abused authority, and a population convinced that its government no longer listened or cared. We're here because we still believe in lawful, peaceful, and representative government. But representative government requires representatives who actually listen and represent. When the vast majority says no, government should not dismiss us, manage us, or act as though these matters are beyond our understanding. If these projects that all have been mentioning are truly, you're truly concerned about Amarillo's best interests, why don't we ask the people, and are you listening, and do you care, and what will you do? Sorry for going over. Thank you, Ms. Connie.

Our next speaker is Chuck Little.

Chuck Little, I'm a resident of Amarillo. Kind of just want to recap on a lot of stuff, especially the water use. Here, we're running short on water. We're in very extreme doubt. We're going to put all these data centers in that are going to be releasing greenhouse gases. So we only have four inches of rain so far this year. Is that just going to continue and keep going, keep going? We're going to have these fires that burn down people's houses. I don't know what the city's liability is going to be on this. I hope you've got a very good policy because When you burn up 70-some houses and 52 of them clear to the ground where they lost everything, we're going to be on the hook. so and the taxes are property taxes the governor's talking about getting rid of all these property taxes doing this but we're giving billions of dollars to these billionaires to come in here and build data centers all over the state in drought areas where we're just going to keep continuing to pump greenhouse gases in and keep more droughts more droughts and then we're going to be out of water And our system, water system, has been neglected for years, as we've all heard today. And now, well, we've got to cut $3 million out of the budget, but we've got this water system that can't put out fires and is going to support all these AI centers and stuff that we really don't need. Thank you.

Mayor, that concludes everyone that signed up.

Thank you. Do I have anyone else here who'd like to offer public comment today? All right. We're going to go ahead and move forward. That concludes Section 5. We'll move into Section 6, Consent Agenda. Council, do I have anything you'd like to pull off? for consideration.

Nothing to pull off, Mayor, but I'll make a comment. We have a couple citizens brought up 6.15. Those funds will be reimbursed. CKP is the contractor, is the one that did that. So that was in the contract that they will be reimbursing all those funds. The city will not be paying for that. So just point of clarification.

Do I have anything else on that item? Council, anything else you want to discuss or pull off? Would request a motion.

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

I have a motion and a second. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes with a 4-0 vote. OK. Let's move into our non-consent agenda. Item 7.1. Let's see who we got here. Is that you, Mr. Harder?

How you doing, sir? Well, Mr. Mayor, thank you very much. I didn't prepare a presentation for this just briefly. This is an advanced funding agreement for HSIP funds. This will be a continuation of funds that we've received over the past several years for doing improvements at signalized intersections. Those improvements generally consist of new traffic control cabinets, new wiring, and what we call four-section yellow flashing signal heads. So if you're familiar with where this has happened before, these are where the intersections where we get the the yellow flashing arrow for lack of a better description. A little bit safer, lets people know that they can make a left turn permissively when there's not conflicting traffic, but it lets them know with that yellow flashing arrow that they do have to yield the oncoming traffic. the total cost for the project this summer uh is just over eight hundred thousand dollars the city's participation in this would be ninety thousand dollars with about fifty four thousand of that being in cash and the remainder being uh in-kind engineering services so we'll design the improvements in-house and submit those to tech stock for review and approval uh once approved they'll actually be responsible for bidding this out hiring the contractor The five intersections that would be included in these improvements would be Southwest 9th and Coulter, Southwest 9th and Quail Creek, Georgia and Line Avenue, Coulter and Pinnacle, and Bell and Arden. I apologize for not having a map of that. Any questions?

No worries. Questions on this one for Mr. Harder? No? Okay. What's your request on this?

Request would be approval of a resolution as presented earlier. To allow Mr. Path to execute the advanced funding agreement. Is that correct, Stephen?

So the agreement will come back at a future date for the $90,000 match?

No, the agreement will be executed by Mr. Path. This will be a resolution that council will sign, which authorizes him to execute the agreement. Gotcha.

Okay. Anything further, gentlemen? Item 7.1 is before you.

I move to adopt resolution 0825261 as presented.

Second. Motion and a second. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes with a 4-0 vote. Item 7.2, Mr. Danforth. Should we take this out of order and make you 7-3? This will be the first time you didn't have to go last.

You know, Mayor, I appreciate the consideration.

We want you to feel appreciated.

Actually, what this is, is we're taking the request is to take funding out of the facility's E&I budget to do a capital project, which is basically a construction project, which will be attached to the chiller replacement for the police department. The police department currently has three chillers that sit in the basement that the original chillers would have fit on the freight elevator to get into the basement to do the work and do the replacement. Current chillers and current technology has changed. The new chiller is about the size of a midsize pickup. So in order to access the basement to replace the chiller and knowing that we have two further chillers to replace at a future date, we looked at what's the best way to do this project. Currently, there's a vault that extends into the alley there at the police department. The goal is to cut the vault cut the top off of that vault, put in a waterproof cap that can be removed at a later date as that additional equipment reaches end of life. So what we're asking you to do is allow us to transfer the money from the facility's E&I account to set this job up. And then at the next council meeting, we'll bring forward the CIP for the chiller replacement as well as the construction in conjunction with each other.

Questions for Mr. Danforth? No? Mr. Danforth, how much is the available balance to be transferred from that project?

From the facilities E&I to the construction project? Yes, sir. It's right at, I believe it's $560,000. We're looking at sawing concrete, creating a new removable concrete lid, waterproofing, and there's some electrical and structural issues that will have to be done at the same time.

What's the existing funding, roughly, for the CAP project, 0113? You have plenty of funding in there?

Yeah, the CIP for the chiller was the correct number, so that's going to be right in budget. This is just an addition looking at forward. We know that this kind of construction project, we're going to have to do it now or later. Doing it now is a lot less expensive than doing it later.

Okay, hard question. What does E&I stand for?

Facility Z and I is basically it's future expenses for capital expenses is what we're looking at. It's not identified during the CIP process, but we know things happen. So, for instance, if we have a health storm come through and we have some roof replacement, we have a funding source that we don't have to go back outside of the budget because we know typically we're going to run into these kinds of expenses throughout the year.

REAL GOOD, SIR. I WAS THINKING IT WAS EXTENSIONS AND IMPROVEMENTS, BUT I KNOW THAT'S NOT RIGHT.

THE TERMINOLOGY IS VERY SIMILAR, YES.

IT IS A LINE ITEM THAT IS BUDGETED IN THE BUDGETS MOST YEARS, AND THEN YOU'RE ABLE TO UTILIZE THAT SOMEWHAT AS A CONTINGENCY WHEN YOU NEED IT.

BASICALLY, YOU'RE CORRECT. THAT WOULD BE A CONTINGENCY FUND FOR EMERGENCIES AS THEY ARISE.

OKAY. I DO KNOW, THANK YOU, MR. DANFORTH, NOT TO GET OFF SUBJECT, BUT I DO KNOW IN OUR BUDGET WORKSHOP WE HAD ASKED FOR, I THINK I HAD ASKED, ALL LISTED ENI AMOUNTS IN THE CURRENT PROPOSED BUDGET. IF WE COULD GET THAT, I THINK THAT WOULD BE HELPFUL IN LOOKING FORWARD TO MAYBE TRYING TO MAKE UP A LITTLE GROUND FROM EARLIER. SO THE ASSOCIATED DEPARTMENT OR FUND AND THE ENI AMOUNT, PLEASE. GENTLEMEN, BACK ON TARGET. ITEM 7.2 IS BEFORE YOU. I DON'T THINK YOU GUYS HAD ANY FURTHER DISCUSSION, BUT IF SO, WE CAN TALK ABOUT IT.

I move to approve item 7.2 as presented.

Second. Motion and a second on 7.2. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes with a 4-0 vote. Okay, last one. Mr. Conner.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. I want to apologize first for the caption not reading correctly. It should have said transfer $200,000 in total. So three transfers total there. The first one would be transferring to our regulatory program technology upgrades program. This is basically to replace drones. We had purchased a while back some drones made in China, and we're replacing those with approved drones from the U.S. 65,000 would be coming from the ASP program. no longer need those funds this particular year because the TSA decided to not allow us to, or not actually have their regulations in place to purchase the equipment that we originally planned for. And then $100,000 is also coming from our SICP program, which is our snow removal program. We don't need those funds there. We actually just need them in the technology program. So that's going into that technology program. Now, the round room modifications, $35,000 there. Also coming from the ASP program, again, not needing the funds there.

Thank you, Mr. Conner. Questions for Michael?

Mayor, I think, Michael, is it $100,000 or $200,000 then? $200,000 total is $100,000.

It's kind of listed small there, but it's 200,000 total.

We only advertise in the agenda for 100. So we won't be able to ask you all today for the 200. And so we need to need to either revisit that and bring it back or just do 100 at this point here. So.

Okay. So I appreciate the caution on that. I'm curious if council wanted to amend that you feel like the notice is still inadequate. The funds are existing in the existing airport funds, and they're staying within that fund.

But it just says $100,000, so that's all that's noticed up.

Okay, we clear that's a miscommunication on our side.

And so, okay, well, we appreciate the guidance. Mr. Connor, what does that do to you? Would you prefer to come back? We take no action on this one or go ahead, take the action for 100, let you come back next meeting for another 100.

Yeah, I think we could do the next meeting for 100 and 100 now because of the way the funds would be allocated.

Okay, that'd be great. Council, y'all have questions on that? Okay. Any issues with it? All right. Item 7.3 is before you.

I move to approve 7.3 as presented.

Second. Motion is second with no further discussion. For $100,000, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for participating in today's meeting. Council, if we can get a motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn. So moved. You're adjourned. Thank you all.