City Council - Regular Meeting

We're going to take a fivem minute recess. We'll start the meeting at 3:00 today. Thank you.

Kristen, are we streamed back there? Okay. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and call us back into order here on a regular uh scheduled meeting December 9th. Thank you all for attending. Um we will go ahead and ask everyone to rise as we have Joab Purdue coming up to offer the invocation and then please stay standing for the pledges sir.

Lord we come before you today and we thank you that this is the day that you have made. We honor you and your presence. Uh we give this agenda to you Lord. We pray right now for our leaders of our city, for our mayor and our councilmen. Lord, we pray uh we thank you that all authority is given by you, Lord. And so we thank you that you have bestowed your authority on these men in this role to govern and lead our city. So God, we pray for James 15 that says if we need wisdom in any area, we can ask you and you'll give it to us. So Lord, we pray for wisdom for our leaders today and we boldly come to your throne of grace. We ask for your grace. We pray for protection and blessing over their families. And God, we pray over these decisions that that are to be made today, God, that you would be here, that you would uh lead them and guide them by your spirit. Lord, we also pray for the unity and the prosperity of our area. We pray for the safety of our first responders. We just pray grace over our policemen, our firefighters, our sheriffs, our EMTs. Lord, we thank you for them and what they do for our city. And we thank you, God, that you're Jehovah Gyra, the Lord who provides. And so all of the needs that we have today, Lord, we ask you that you would fill them by your abundance, by your grace, that you're the Lord who provides. And Lord, we also thank you that you are where our help comes from. So we pray for the presence of the Holy Spirit to fill this place with your peace, your wisdom, your grace, your comfort. And Jesus, we thank you that you are the light of the world and that the light expels the darkness. So we ask in this Christmas season that the light of the world would come even in this room right

here, right now and light up our hearts, light up our minds, light up this city chamber with your presence and expel any darkness. We need you, Lord. We ask for you to refresh this council, refresh this room, and may the peace of God be here. And I just say, may the Lord bless you and keep you. May his face shine upon you. May he be gracious to you and give you his perfect peace in Amarillo, Texas in Jesus name. Amen. Thank you.

To the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation indivisibley andice for all. Texas one and indivisible.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Okay, we come to a very special time um in our service here today and and um not just part of a regular uh board meeting, not just part of a business meeting. Um Chief Johnson's going to come forward. We have Miss Rosemary Robinson here today. I was privileged to get to be a part of kind of her retirement party. And um Chief, if I can, I'm I'm gonna see if they can mic you up and we can hand it over to you. Um, afternoon, Miss Rosemary. Thank you for being with us.

Council, you guys, let's go down. Mayor and city council, city leadership, thank you so much for giving us this time to recognize Rosemary Robinson and her contribution to the city. Today we're doing something very meaningful, something we reserve for those who have truly earned it. For 52 years, Rosemary Robinson has stood behind the scenes at the police department, often without recognition, yet always at the heart of our mission. And while she never wore a uniform, the role she played carried the same spirit, the same purpose, and the same commitment as those who do. The badge a policeman wears is shaped like a shield. This is not by accident. A shield has always symbolized protection. It represents the people who stand between danger and the innocent and who support those on the front lines and who keep the foundation steady so others can do their jobs. And that is exactly what Rosemary has done for five decades. With her dedication, her expertise, and her her unwavering presence, her work protected officers by giving them what they needed to do their jobs. It protected the public by ensuring accuracy, organization, and reliability in some of the most critical functions we perform. It protected the integrity of this department by setting a standard that we all strive to meet. She may not have carried this badge on her chest, but every day she carried the responsibility it represents. So today, Rosemary, today we present you with your own badge. Not as a token, not as a token, but as a truth. You have been part of our shield. You have

strengthened this department and you have protected this city. And you have done it with humility, loyalty, and an unmatched devotion that spans 52 remarkable years. And because of those 52 years, your badge number will be the number 52. This badge is shaped like a shield. And for more than half a century, Rosemary has been part of that shield that protects our community. So, thank you, Rosemary, and congratulations on a lifetime of service. I know she doesn't like it and she doesn't want to be up here any longer than she has to be, but do we have anybody here, friends or family of Miss Robinson or any uh co-workers that would join us up here for this photo? A little bit more. Thank you.

Okay, man. What a special time. Uh, Chief Johnson, I I do want to just say thank you for your leadership on putting this together, making that special, and I know you guys have worked together. You told a few stories that personalized it. And so from from those of us that are sitting on the outside looking in and watching that, what a terrific uh police family that we have in Amarillo. And I hope you guys all feel that. We feel like we're part of the family as well. So, um, congratulations once again, Miss Robinson. Thanks for all you've given uh to the city. We'll move on with our business uh announcements. Uh Mr. Path, nothing on your end. Okay, at this time we'll move into public comment. So, just to restate public comment, we always encourage if you can sign up online, that's always helpful. Um we will allow public comment here today from anybody that hadn't signed up. But as you come forward, if you have papers or anything you need to give to us, we'll direct you over to the officer off to my left, your right, you can hand that over. And then please take these three minutes um to address your council. And then it's treated as a show of great respect if you do limit your comments to three minutes um to honor everybody's time represented here today. So I turn it over to you, Miss City Secretary.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for participating in today's city council meeting. Your input and your opinions are important to us and we're glad that you're here to share them today. At each posted meeting, we invite our fellow community members to address city council. Regarding posted agenda items or topics related to city policy during public comment today, each speaker will have three minutes to address council. At the end of two and a half minutes, you will hear a warning beep alerting you that you have 30 seconds left to wrap up your thoughts. When you come to the microphone today, please state your name and whether or not you live within Amarillo city limits. If you are addressing council on an agenda item, we request that you state your position so we can reflect it properly in the minutes. If you are speaking to an item not on today's agenda, the Texas Open Meetings Act limits how elected officials may respond. Council may respond with statements of fact. They may ask that the topic be added to a future agenda or they may refer the matter to the city manager who can have staff step out and visit with you regarding your topic. We will be utilizing two podiums for public comment today. When you are called as next to speak, we would ask you make your way to the unused podium and wait your turn. Once all registered speakers have addressed city council, the mayor may at his discretion call for speakers that did not sign up. At that time, anyone wishing to speak should form a single line in the middle aisle and take the next available podium as one becomes available. As a reminder, you are here today to address the Amarillo City Council, not the audience. As such, please ensure you focus all comments to your elected officials. Again, thank you for being here today. And we would call up Alan Fineold. Alan Fineold. I live in the city of Amarillo. I've addressed you several times before concerning the rates paid

for water by customers in the city of Amarillo. Today I want to talk about rates paid by wastewater users in the city of Amarillo. I have previously mentioned the term unit as an abbreviation for 1,000 gallons of portable water and I will continue to do so. The payments for waste water are based on the payments for water. That is the amount that is actually used by a customer for water becomes the basis for determining what that customer will pay for wastewater as well. If a major commercial user used 1,000 units, that's 1 million gallons per month, that commercial user would be charged approximately $3 per unit for waste water. That is for the water that he uses that goes into the city's wastewater system. That would exclude commercial irrigation. that is the maintenance of lawns and things of that nature. Now, if someone is a very frugal water user, and I've previously defined that as someone who uses not more than 1,000 gallons per month, then there is a minimum charge which that customer would pay for wastewater as well as a minimum charge for water. The minimum charge for wastewater is $21.70. If you do arithmetic, you will find that that's more than seven times the rate

that's paid by the large commercial user. You can see that the system is designed to offload most of the cost of a water and sewer system onto customers who are not large commercial users. And an inordinate inordinate burden is therefore placed on the most frugal water users so that they end up paying not only approximately $20 for their water fee, but $21.70 even if they use no more than 1,000 gallons per month. This is an unjust arrangement. you really need to have a special meeting of the city commission to address both the matter of how much waste water has to be processed by the city and who will have to pay for it. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Fineold. Mayor Stanley, that concludes everybody that signed up today. So, that's everyone that signed up for public comment. Do I have anyone uh here? If you'll raise your hand if if you're wanting to offer. Do I have anyone else? So, I'm only I'm just seeing the two on my left. Mr. Fischer, if you come forward first, please. Name's Mike Fischer. I live in the city. Living in Amarillo. Hey, Laura. I heard you were thinking about going to Amarillo College. You might want to take a look at my page. Mr. Fisher, if you don't mind addressing us, please.

Well, I can address anybody here. You can't you can't dictate who I talk to. That's part of my constitutional right. And how I talk here, it pertains to freedom of speech and freedom of expression. And whether I turn around and talk to people, you can't dictate that. You might want to brush up on the Constitution, bro. Request has been made. It's our meeting. Thank you.

All right. I'll be waiting on you, Laura. You might want to take a look at my 20 I'm on part three of a 20-part series on their finances over there. Last week, Mr. Hooper stated that each and by the way, you know, this is just more Ginger Nelson stuff, man. And it you're just you're more and more like her every every week. I appreciate the attacks on me personally if it spares. That's not an attack. That's a fact. Well, focus here, please.

Well, I could focus anywhere I want. You might want to look into the Constitution. I'm just saying. So, anyways, last week, Mr. Hooper talked about that each of our sewer plants process 9 million gallons per day. Each industry standards say our use is 12 to 15 million gallons per day. Uh the numbers don't add up. We're just trying to justify $ 1.5 billion sewer system to upgrade to upgrade and to bail out the budget. Today's agenda, you're going to do a $10 million certificate of obligation. And it certificate of obligations aren't for this kind of use, guys. It's not to just like like to bypass the budget, bypass the voters. And if you look at the subject, it I think it goes across every department. Solid waste, parks, sewer, uh traffic, drainage. I mean, this is a budget. That's that's budget. I mean, if it was an emergency item, that's when we talk about certificates of obligation. I looked at the I hope you'll give me a few more seconds because we're talking about the Constitution here to kind of stop stop me from talking here. Um, I looked at the check register and the interceptor project was approved for 72.6 million. I looked at all the payments to SJ Lewis is the company that was approved. Only 65.4 million was paid. So again, I'm I'm I'm speculating and people accuse me of that all the time, but there's 7 million that appear to not been paid or I have an incomplete check register. So we're we're patting the budget again. For years, I've seen these padded projects

and leftover money just transferred to support the general fund. I have one more sentence. Thank you, sir. We appreciate you speaking here today. Thank you, sir. Mr. Ford, please come forward. Sir, did you have your hand raised as as well? Okay, you can speak right after Mr. Ford.

No, no, you can go ahead and go next, sir. Everybody has a copy. Mike Ford, Emerald, Texas. I I gave you a little bit of a teaser last time. Uh I was here in regard to this public notice from April. Is it on?

Uh on this uh um topic in regard to a public notice ADC public notice back on the 22nd of April 2024. This is in regard regard to the kids inc uh the the streets for the kids inc facility. If you read this public notice, this is all that the public was given. Uh there's no notice here on $7.5 million for the for a tiers three project. You know that there's this is identical to every other defective notice that the uh AEDC put out in the last four years or five years. They've actually thankfully changed their policies. However, I would like for you to know that um this will be contested if it goes forward. Uh we will be suing if this goes forward. you have the ob obligation and the opportunity to fix this. The voters uh have a right to vote to authorize the use of type A monies for type B projects. And this is clearly a type B project. If you look here, uh it talks about the the 50152. This is a um this is a youth sports facility and and you're talking about uh streets, water, and sewer facilities that enhance any of those things that are described. So, I'll leave that to you to to look at. Um, we have as supporting evidence, we have statements by Council Member Tips, Council Member Simpson, Mr. Freeman, uh, in regard to the benefit to the Kids Inc. project. And we also have statements made by your former attorney, George Hyde, uh, saying that the the the dragging of a infrastructure project to a retail area is is improper. So, I'll leave this with you. Um, I I do tell you this. I'm putting you on notice. This will we have it. We have counsel. Be happy to know that, Mr. Mr. Prescott. We do have a a legal firm we've retained. Uh we will be suing you if you continue with this and abregating the votes of the right the rights of the voters. Uh in regard to

the last thing I would like to talk to you about, I would also implore you to clean up your house in terms of the water the the firming water agreement. uh the ultravaries acts by the mayor, the improperou that was entered into the improper LOI that was entered into and the agreement and the proper notice on the agreement itself are all voidable and um those are all also things actions that we will pursue. Uh the nice thing about the Texas Open Meetings Act is there there's no statute of limitations on actions brought forth for violations of that. So you have the you can easily fix this both items you have completely within your control without us having to resort to the courts and you can take care of that and you can fix the problems that you have created uh through your own actions this council and previous councils. Thank you very much.

Thank you Mr. Ford.

Sir if you don't mind when you come forward if you give us your name and whether you reside in or out of the city limits. My name is Trent Roser. I lived within the city of limits of Amarola. Uh I used to come to these meetings all the time. Couple mayors before you, Mr. Stanley. Um when y'all took oath office here, I stopped coming. I didn't need to. I had my trust in y'all. I'm starting to warn her about that though. Why are we having BMW motorcycle police officer or not officers, but uh bikes? We have a Harley-Davidson company here. This is American made. Where were we gonna get these repaired at? How much money extra that come? About two years I spoke to you all. I came up here and I told you about the issues we had with our police department. How I agree with each and every one of these men. I will back them 110%. I've got their six, but they need more men. They need more tools to do the job. But a BMW bike really. That day when I came up here and told y'all I had a 9 millimeter gun pointed to the back of a man's head that I pulled out of my truck. It took 30 minutes for an officer to show up. 30 minutes. I asked y'all we need help. They need help. They need manpower. Sunday I had to call an officer again. I think back my wife had to call an officer on a neighbor. I'm still waiting for somebody to show up. I'm still waiting. Do I blame them? Do I blame any of these people back here? No. Where's our money going to a water agreement? Everything we're talking about, and I hate to say this, but Mr. Fiser was a thorn in Mayor Nelson. I'm about to be unleashed. I'm going to

be twice as bad. I do not want to do that. I have my trust in each and every one of y'all. Make it right. Help these Ben out. Thank you, sir. Do I have anyone else here who would like to offer public comment today? Well, thank you for those who spoke and uh everyone else, we'll go ahead and move along with our agenda item. We're going to move from public comment to consent agenda. Council, do I have anything that needs to be pulled off on the consent agenda? Would request a motion. So moved.

Second. I have a motion and a second from place two. Any further discussion? All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes with a 50 vote. Mayor, could I could I make one comment before we go to the next item that we passed, but

uh I noticed that uh Paul and Paula Borcart are in the audience today. We just uh did our part at helping continue Wonderland moving forward after your family's history with Wonderland in the community. And I don't know how many generations of Amarillans and people that live in the panhandle have gone to Wonderland over the years, but we want to thank you guys and your family. Uh we hope for a smooth transition so that we can continue to have Wonderland in uh in our community, but we just really want to thank you and your your family for what you've done for this community by providing an asset over many many decades. So, thank you. Yeah, we we appreciate you guys being here for that that consent agenda. Paul had come up and told me um we had been visiting several times uh back and forth on all of the things. The city staff was terrific in trying to work through some legal uh issues. We've had an a lease agreement with your family and that company for over I don't even know was it over 50 years that the lease had been updated and amended and so they cleaned up a lot of documentation. Consequently, Paul brought up a very good topic that that I had told him. I said, "I went through years of counseling and um therapy to get over, but like he had a little statue or a cutout, a plywood cut out of a little fox that held its hand up. You had to be so tall to ride the bumper cars." And so I told him, I said, "Man, I remember being in the fourth grade. All my friends got to ride the bumper cars. I wasn't quite tall enough yet." He said he was going to go find Foxy over there and and uh that's part of memorabilia, but there's so many good nostalgic moments that we have because of the the years that your family and your business put in out there. So, thank you guys for being part of our community and we're excited about the the the new buyers and and what they're going to add to. So, public, if you can

hear us say it, this is what everybody wants. we've all worked together to improve that theme park and and add an asset um into the community that they can uh continue to do updates and upgrades and all sorts of good things. And you've got good partners in Mr. Koshuba. Um he's doing a phenomenal job with his team in parks and wreck and so we're excited to have you. Welcome to Amarillo. So thank you guys. Um that moves us along to item six. These are our discussion items. Uh council, I will let you know just depending on how discussion goes, we've got a few items here that are debt related that we may need to pull up in order to get a vote on. Uh they have to be completed by 5. But right now, we're going to try to take the agenda in order and just see how how the discussion progresses. So, Miss Katrina Owens, if you don't mind to come forward and talk about those water and sewer revenue bonds.

Absolutely. Hello, Mayor and Council. Today, we are presenting the upcoming issuance of the water sewer revenue bonds. The amount of 6 million was approved in the fiscal year 2425 budget for a water mane extension. The rates were in place as of October 1st, 2024, but we were not ready to issue the debt until now. We locked in the rates on October 1st, 2024 by creating a new tier for commercial users over 10,000 gallons per month at a rate of $4.15. Donnie will give an update on this project in just a minute. I'd also like to uh today we have our financial advisors Stephen Adams and Paul Jason with specialized public finance here as well as our bond council bond uh Bob Dansfield and Paul Braden from Norton Rose and Fulbright to help answer questions. After the update, Stephen Adams will come up and present the water sewer revenue bonds. Donnie, do you have an update?

I'm gonna pass it over to Okay,

mayor and council, this these bonds will address the need for additional water uh on North Hastings going from uh Broadway. They're at the golf course all the way across to Western down Western uh to future developments that are coming into that area. uh currently not served by water and sewer system. Uh we are in place now with the land owners. Uh we'll be signing the contracts on the easements on that within the next three weeks and putting the project out to bid uh within the next four to five weeks. Uh this will accomplish quite a bit in working with HDR, our engineering firm that has done the water master plan to work on balancing the water pressure in that northeast or northwest side of town. Uh that will address some of the shortages that we have over in the Tascosa area as well as those future developments coming in on those four sections of land. Any questions for Mr. Danforth? Okay. Afternoon, Mr. Adams. If you'll walk us through the financial side of this.

Thank you, Mayor Council. Stephen Adams, Gims, public specialized public finance. And the debt issuance associated with this will will be to create proceeds for $6 million. It's a pretty standard issuance for the utility. It's 30-year level debt with a 10-year call. U we're running proformas with a 4.70% interest rate and we hope to come in lower than that. Um but we are selling the bonds on February the 10th along with a couple of other bond issues that will be coming up later on the agenda and we will close on March the 10th of 2026. This is um kind of a graphic of the city's water utility debt service. The red line on the top is the net revenues, meaning the revenues that are available to pay debt. And you can see we have um good coverage, which uh 50 million in net revenues to pay just a little over 30 million in in debt service. You see the gray line that is Canadian River Municipal Water Authority debt. That is the city's respons responsibility and you see it's it's going down relatively quickly. The green is the city's outstanding revenue debt and you can see that it too is going down relatively quickly. So the city has a lot of capacity which it will need. I believe both Crimo and the city have some pretty significant required capital improvements over the next few years. So we have a lot of capacity for that right now. Uh this is all the the numbers. I know you can't look at them, but that's how we set up the graph. And the the key thing here is that we have significant debt service coverage of 1.75% which helps the city maintain that

double A plus credit rating which is very very high for a water utility. uh the sources and use of funds. We expect the cost of issuance that's to pay our firm, the bond council, the rating agencies, and some banking fees uh to issue this debt uh about 85,000 in total cost of issuance. And then finally, uh just a timeline today. We're going through an update to the city council. We want you to know what's going on so you have time to answer any questions that you may have between now and February the 10th. We have to get a rating on these bonds between now and then. And if all goes as planned, we expect to competitively bid those bonds in the morning of February the 10th and bring a offer to purchase these bonds to the city council meeting later that day. And then the bonds have to be approved by the attorney general of Texas. Our friends at Norton Rose Fulbright help out with that. And then we close on March the 10th. And I'd be glad to answer any questions. Man, you guys are quiet today. All right. Um, Mr. Adams, thank you. Uh, I I do have just a couple quick questions for you.

Yes, sir. Um, water and sewer bond. Yes, sir. So, I I know these are questions that that have simple answers, and I'm putting them out there for a reason. So, those water and sewer bonds are backed up by the rate payer, right? So that's an enterprise fund. Absolutely. So these bonds are restricted to the water and sewer um items that we have outlined in this bond or you have outlined in this bond. Correct. Can't be spent for anything else. They're going to go to put the mainline extensions over to Western. Correct. They can be used for improvements to the water utility system.

Okay. And then um are they associated with a tax increase of any sort? there there are no taxes at all used to pay water and sewer revenue bonds.

So what I am driving at is that you pay a rate as a customer of of our water department. So we're a water seller and part of this investment is us seeing the return on the investment to borrow the money to put in the the water and sewer line extensions that are going to reach out to around 1,500 houses just in one development. plus um the thousands upon thousands of other customers that can tap into those lines. So, uh I want the public to hear um because we we do listen during public comment that you guys are borrowing all this money and our taxes are going up. Mr. Adams, everything is built into my current rate that's assessed in my budget for for all of our water purchasers. Correct.

That is correct. And the project has also gone through the budget process. That's great, sir. Thank you. I just wanted to make sure everybody's hearing that correctly. Yes. Thank Thank you. Um staff, we have anything else we'd like to offer on item 61 from from you guys? No, sir. Okay. And Miss Katrina, are are you finished with everything on your end? Well, I've got 712.

Yeah. So, um I tell you what, let's do that. Miss Katrina, do you mind coming up? We're going to go ahead and work out of order here just because I'm not sure how lengthy the discussion will get today. So, item 61 is a presentation about items 71, 72, and three. Correct, Mrs. Owens? Yes.

Yeah. So, um, walk us into item 71. Let's go ahead and pull that one up for action. So 71 is ordinance number 8227 which authorizes the issuance and sale of city of Amarila, Texas combination tax and revenue certificates of obligation series 2026. The debt would cover 7.5 million for fleet replacements paid for with fleet revenues. There would be 500,000 for the vineyards pit and then 1 million for the pinnacle pit. both paid for through pit assessments for the purchase of the park amenities. The staff discussed with city council during the budget workshops this past summer about the potential to issue debt to help with the annual replacements needed for the fleet along with the need to purchase park amenities in the pinnacle and vineyard pits vineyard pits for the developers of those areas. Staff also presented information about this debt issuance at the October 14th council meeting at which time council approved the resolution to publish notice of the intent to issue certificates of obligation. The city published a notice in the Emerald Globe News on October 17th and again on October 24th informing citizens of the potential to issue the reference certificates. The same notice was published on the city website for the same length of time and Stephen Adams will present the results of the certificate obligations sale conducted this morning.

Thank you ma'am.

Thank you mayor. Members of the council, on the last presentation, I think we talked about that we were taking bids that morning and bringing an offer to the council to purchase the water and sewer revenue bonds. After going through the publication process that Katrina just described, we took bids this morning uh for these certificates of obligation. And we received 13 bids. I'm sorry, 12 bids. That's that's a lot. I've been doing this a long time. I'm not sure I've seen more than this ever. And usually we see, you know, five, six, or seven. So, there's a lot of appetite for these bonds. They are rated AAA, which helps you get all of those bids. Uh, the bonds mature in 2046, and in 2036, the council at that time will have the right to refund or repay any of these bonds. So, we're really happy about the AAA rating. I want to talk about that for a minute. Um, Amarillo is not what I would call a natural AAA rated city. And the reason is its effective buying income is 80% of the national average. Most AAA cities are suburbs that have at least that or something higher. You have your AAA ready because of the management and your balance budgets from year to year, your growth and the fact that you maintain good fund balances, good liquidity, and a lot of cash. And that's all reflected in the comments by standard and pores when assigning this AAA rating. And every time we do these ratings, they say, you know, you're not a natural AAA. I don't know what the committee is going to say, but but again, so far, we are still AAA rated and and happy to do so. Um, here's the 12 firms that bid on your

bonds this morning. Uh, the winning bid was from Fidelity Capital Markets. The cover bid was from Huntington Securities, and you have to go to the third decimal to the right to get between the first and the second. So that tight bid means your bonds are very liquid, very uh highly traded and and one after, you know, highly wanted after, sought after bonds. And we're really happy to get a rate of 3.12%. And it reflected, I think, the market was hopefully um pricing in a a rate cut because that's a a pretty low rate and we're really happy to get it. Um this is the debt service schedule. You see that it that it's higher in the upfront portion of the debt and a little bit um lower in the long portion. And that's because the PID debt is going out for the entire amount of the bonds whereas the fleet will not have a useful life that long. So the portion associated with the fleet, we're maturing in only 10 years. So that's why you see the debt structure where uh it goes down after that 10-year period. At that time, you would expect that you'll have to replace a lot of that fleet and we'll have other debt or other financing for that. Again, you can see here they are individually broken out. I'm sorry, it's seven years for the fleet. I believe I said 10. I apologize for that. and then 20 years for the two PIDs. And again, they're paying their portion of those debt. Uh they're really fortunate that they can take take advantage of Emerald's AAA rating. This is something that Amarill has done for these pits for many many years and it really helps them out and so that's that's good for them

and it's really not that big of a of a risk to the city. Uh, finally, Specialized Public Finance does recommend that the city of Amarillo award the 8,520,000 combination tax and revenue certificates of obligation series 2026 because we're closing in 26 to Fidelity Capital Markets. Mayor, I'd be glad to answer any questions. Council, you got any questions on item 71? Nothing. Okay. Thank you, sir. M. Katrina, you have anything else on on this one? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear the question. Is that a vote?

Yeah, we do need a vote on this. No. Yeah, we we'll take action on it, but I just was making sure we didn't have anything else that you needed to cover. Okay, gentlemen, before you um is item 71. Uh, I know we've gone through this strategy in our financial um kind of portfolio and and how it it um is smart money to borrow on things that have a life expectancy that we can turn over within that fleet services. So, anything else otherwise I would entertain a motion.

I'd just like to make one comment very quickly. I think that we all heard that the uh S&P rating and the AAA is uh uncommon for our city of our size. And so the the fidiciary responsibility and our strength and that of staff, Mr. Path, Mr. Freeman, the stores, and everyone else out there, I mean, to make this happen. And I know you're all rowing in the right direction and I appreciate that very much. But we should be very proud as a city for what we're uh we're able to achieve. And we just heard it just right now that most cities our size do not get a AAA rating. So thank you for your your efforts to ensure that for the longevity of our city.

Thank you sir. I move to adopt ordinance number 8227. Second. Have a motion and a second from place four. Any further discussion? All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Item 71 passes with a 50- vote. We'll go ahead and take up item 72 now.

72 is a resolution 12-9-25-1 to publish notice in the newspaper about the intent to issue series 2026A, certificates of obligation. This is the first step in a multi-step process to issue debt for street improvements as well as park improvements. The resolution is only authorizing city staff to post two notices in the newspaper and on the city's website about the intent to issue debt at the February 10th city council meeting. The notice states a not to exceed amount of 30,310,000. So the council can issue the the debt up to that amount on February 10th, issue less than that or decide not to move forward with the debt issuance. As you may recall, city staff discussed with council during the budget workshops this past summer about the potential to issue debt to help with the annual improvements needed for streets. There are three projects were included in the approved 2526 capital improvement plan for debt funded street projects. One was various street reservicing for 12 million. one for annual artillery reconstruction from the 2425 plan for 7,1000 910,000 I'm sorry and then one for annual artillery construction of 8,260,000 all projects paid for through existing operating budgets and or property taxes. The city also discussed the need to issue a million dollars for the colony's pit to purchase park amenities from the developer paid through PID assessments. Pending approval of this resolution, city staff will publish a notice in the Emerald Globe News on December 15th and again on December 22nd informing

citizens of the potential to issue those certificates. The same notice will be publish published on the city's website for the same length of time. and then I'll hand that over to Stephen as well.

Thank you again, Mayor. Thank you for your time and consideration. Um, one thing I want to comment on, you know, you move this up for us, and I'd like to add a little color to that. Um, the bid that was put in this morning by Fidelity is not consummated until this city council approves it. And, and my colleagues literally are texting them the exact time of day that's done. their orders can cancel up until the time this is done. So that's why we try to move these up and we'll be asking to do that again on February the 10th. Um again, this is the certificates of obligation. This will be series 2026A because the other ones we just sold will close in 2026. And and this is two uh tranches or sections of streets. 12 million of it is 10-year and that's because that is associated with overlays and the overlays we're told by all the engineers have a 10-year life give or take. So we're trying to again match the debt to the life of the asset. The 20 years are complete cre reconstructions. We expect them to last a lot longer than 20 years, but 20 years is a good time period for the debt and you really don't know that for sure. You may need to do an overlay or something. So, we're doing 16.17 million of 20-year debt for the reconstruction projects. And finally, there's another PID that is now ready for a $1 million reimbursement for some projects they're doing, and that is the Colonies PID. These certificates will have a final maturity in 2046. Uh the first payment will be February of 27, so it'll be into your next budget year. So this upcoming budget, you won't have to consider consider these. They haven't been taken into account. So when you set your tax

in 27, you you can consider these cos. We are estimating a blended rate of 3.94%. I know we just sold bonds a lot lower than that. Hopefully this will be even lower, but we never know. So we always put cushion in there. So for uh management purposes, we have room if the interest rates go up and we have a few basis points built in for that. We full well expect to maintain the AAA rating because when we got our last rating, we told the rating a agencies exactly what we have coming and they took that into account. Uh again, February 10th, just like the water and sewer bonds, we're going to take bids 30 minutes apart for this and the next agenda item coming up as well. So, we'll have three sales on February the 10th. This is what the debt service looks like. Again, uh 10 and 20 years depending on whether it's the layover or the reconstruction of the streets. And these will also have a 10-year call. So, the city council at that time will be able to either repay or refund those bonds if it makes sense. Uh this is all the numbers that go with that. I'm probably too small to see here, but we put them in the graph so you could see it graphically on the previous page. And then finally, uh, we're expecting a cost of issuance of $140,000. Taken with the projects, it'll be approximately a 29,310,000 project. We're putting some cushion in there u in case the bidding parameters of the bond purchasers change a little bit. And then uh calendar looks very much like the water and sewer calendar. We're probably going to do all the ratings at the same time. We're going to take the bids on these at 9:30. I think we had the water and sewer at 9. Uh we'll present an offer to purchase these bonds to the council later that day. And then

again closing on March 10th. And mayor, I'd be glad to answer any questions. Questions council on this guy? Okay. Thank you, Mr. items. Council item 72 is before you. I move to adopt resolution number 12-09-25-1 as presented in the agenda. Second motion and a second on item 72. Any further discussion? All in favor? I. Any opposed? Motion passes. We'll go ahead with item 73 and then we'll go back to discussion.

You're almost done. All right. I'm bringing resol the first reading of resolution 12-9-25-2 for the purpose to reimburse the city for the future bond proceeds for the purchase of the fire apparatus. Now, council approved the award for the fire apparatus on the November 18th meeting. This allowed us to lock in the price for the fire apparatus. The city must pay the manufacturer within 60 days after November 1st, 2025 in order to secure the current pricing. Staff is requesting only one reading of this resolution with a waiver per section 7 of the resolution 8-12-25-1 from the two reading requirement to meet the time constraints from the manufacturer. If approved, the debt would be for 4.7 million through public property finance contractual obligations or PPFCOs paid for through property taxes. The debt would be sold on February 10th and the funding coming in on March 10th. The city would then reimburse ourselves for the funding coming in on March 10th. And then I'll hand it over to Stephen to present those as well. Thank you, mayor. Um, just one thing. I know there's four of us here and I'm the only one up here. Before this meeting, we did have a a session with several staff members kind of going over what we do, what we do for the city. The lawyers were here kind of go over the laws that we all have to deal with. So, so we are trying to make good use of our time and and we're all here for a reason. Just thought you might be interested in that. I think you're in good hands with the staff you have um coming up along the way. Um must have gone the wrong way. See here. Okay. So um recall when we started

replacing the firefighters equipment last year and and and the manufacturer brought with them a kind of a vendor lease option to do that. Um and the staff brought that to us and we said you know what those interest rates are for anybody. You on the other hand have this nice AAA bond rating and we can bid this out like we do these other bonds to the market and probably get a lot better rate. And we did on the first round as you recall. So we're going through a several year program. We're replacing uh all of the fire apparatus and we're doing it through using these PPFCOs, the public property finance act contractual obligations which are designed for personal property which these are. And that way we can get a lot lower rate than going through uh you know the manufacturer lease options. And so you know we're looking at doing a 3.73% kind of interest rate maybe hopefully lower. And I think we were almost, you know, in the five or 6% on the vendor lease option. So, so this is a lot better for us. Again, um we're lining everything up to do it on February the 10th. So, we're going to bid one, two, three different items for the three different projects, the water and sewer, the cos, and this for your fleet maintenance. So, you know, we're going to have three different three different items. Now for the equipment, the contracts have an underlying buyback where they promise a rate to the city. Now the city doesn't have to sell it to them. You could sell it to somebody else, but we expect you'll either sell it to them at these minimum rates or somebody else. So we're factoring that into the structure of the debt service to try to, you know, help

with the cash flows of the of the total debt service. And you can see that with the way we've got the buybacks taken into account here, just like we did on the on the ones we did last year or earlier this year. So that's our plan. We we do have 80,000 uh cost of issuance. It's 4.6 million in fire apparatus and so it'll be approximately $4.745 million sale. And same timeline as we've done before. These are, you know, shorter that we just went through to again match the life of the asset, which is what we always want to do so you're not paying debt on something you no longer have use of. And what the agenda item today is to pass a reimbursement resolution. So, if you need to pay for any of this fire apparatus, any progress payments that occur prior to February the 10th, you can make those payments out of your cash and then reimburse yourselves out of the proceeds of these tax exempt PPFCOs. And this action is required by uh federal tax law for you selling tax exempt bonds. If you want to pay yourself back, you've got to do one of these resolutions saying that you intend to do that before you spend the money.

And Stephen, if I could interject, the reason we're asking for a waiver from the two reading resolution is for timing since we only have one council meeting this month. Um the payment is due, I think as Katrina said, 60 days um after November 1st. Um and so it would be due this month and our next meeting is until January. And if we don't pay them by that 60-day period, the price goes up um $210,000. So that's why we're requesting that that waiver just for the one reading of the resolution to get this reimbursement resolution approved. Thank you, Stephen. I apologize. No, that's good. Um very helpful. Mayor, I'm here to answer any questions if anybody has any.

Council, yeah, go right ahead, sir. even and and I don't I don't mean to put you on the spot, but what was the uh the percentage rate that the leasing company was offering? Do you remember? Um well, you did put me on the spot, and I don't know what it was, but I know on a present value basis, it was something like a 10% benefit to the city to take advantage of your AAA rate versus their kind of rate for anybody. So, it was very significant, huge savings in interest payments that we'd be making. and and same structure you you know I mean they had worked in the buyout the way we're doing it but instead of a three something interest rate you know it was a I think it was in the five or maybe even higher category.

Yeah. Okay. Well again grateful for city staff and you guys for find I mean being as creative as possible uh to be as frugal as possible as we can just being good stewards of uh taxpayer dollars. I mean that's huge. I mean save hundreds of thousands of dollars in that. So yeah, super grateful. Yeah. So thank you. Any other questions, council? I just So in the bond rating world, I guess if if you were to translate that into layman's terms, it's our credit score. That's your credit score. Exactly.

And and based on the credit score is the type of just says mortgages or anything's personal. So So we're just able to get that. Uh not to put you on the spot. I don't want to be like council member tips, but but I guess it's safe to say when we're issuing, you know, $30 million worth of debt, if we get a aaa versus a double A, I mean, that could make hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of difference in the in the issuance at least. Okay. And maybe even depending on how long it is, maybe even millions. Millions. Yeah. I mean, it could easily be Yeah. In millions. Okay. I feel like I just said that, but it's glad you clarified.

Well, I just wanted to make sure that you understood it. I think I think what was stated was that you did put him on the spot. Councilman Simpson said he did not. So, but

hey, uh I I like the fact that we are we're seeing this kind of come to fruition. I want to take a minute because it's easy when you get into kind of the logistical roll out of this over uh you know multiple years and budgets. You forget the idea of it is good to run a city like a business when you can apply good business principles. Right now it's governance and it's municipal. So you can't run everything like a business. But when you can, these good business principles um are great. And what you're seeing is is strong b businessminded staff as well as council working together because this originates in in one key thing that you'll lose sight of if if we're not careful. the the apparatus, the fire truck, the ladder truck used to cost7 $750,000. Now that same truck cost 1.8 million and or let's say 1.6, whatever. What do we know? I hate to put out a number. It's it's significantly higher.

Oh, yeah.

1.6 plus. So, you've got a three-year waiting time sometimes, uh, you know, that we've we've been on on hold for this. So it when you sell this truck 7 10 years later, you get $20,000 for it. Somebody comes in and they they take them all and they auction them off and the total proceeds were in the$1 $150,000 for so many pieces of equipment. Every good business person says, "Man, why do we want to own that? Why don't we lease that? Let's just make our payments, put our payments in our budget if it doesn't have a capital asset at the end and it's not going to have good value." And then we were saying, well, let's push them past their life expectancy. So, so we're running fleet and all sorts of repairs and it's life safety. Now, if we were a city that was not growing and we were dying, we were losing tens of thousands of people, we were shrinking, we didn't have good economic growth or, you know, a forecast that's like the one we have, then I think you could continue in your capital program of let's just pay cash for everything as we need it. Why? because we're not building new fire uh stations. We're not adding these. We're not we don't have those concerns. We're actually going to remove a fire station three or four years from now. That is what other municipalities are facing. This municipality needs to operate in this way. And here's why. We sit at 205,000 people and we will be at 250,000 people before we know it. We look at our good friends um over at Bell Helicopter. you see the amount of growth that they're fixing to have with some of the contracts that they've got heading their way and how much they work well in Amarillo. Um you look at the Fermy America project and all of the construction jobs, there's already 2,000 construction jobs at work out there right now. Um that will ramp up to 5,000 construction jobs. Then the permanent jobs that that will come from that. You

look at Pantex and everything else. We are a growing thriving city. We put ourselves on a lease arrangement like this where every seven years we get the new apparatus. We turn it over because we've got our debt in order. Now, we're using a tool that sets it up just like a lease, but we're not we're not leasing it from a company and giving it back to them. We're financing it and then that company is uh already making arrangements to take that product and and offset that balance on the books. So, I mean, really, really good business savvy in doing this, but it will get lost if we're not careful in the scary word of debt, right? Like, oh no, we're borrowing money. We borrowed $30 million. We did this. We did that. These these payments are covered within our budget and it's freeing up money so we can go get to emergency repairs. We can get to real true construction projects that are more capex and things like that. So, I I'm excited about it. It's a good direction, but but we got to take a minute every now and again and just go back to the good business principles that we've got in place here that will take us forward um moving into significant growth. So, um I appreciate y'all letting me say that. I I know I'm preaching a little bit, but I I want to make sure we're still remembering how we got here and why we're here. So, any other questions for Mr. Adams? Mayor, if I could just interject real quick. I think we briefly talked about this, but I just wanted to say that um as you can see on this slide up here, um due to the leadership that council put in place last year when we started this PPFCO program, we realized we were going to be doing this for for the foreseeable future. It would take us, I believe, 10 to 15 years to get all the fire apparatus turned over. And so council um took the leadership direction to go ahead and put the tax rate in place to

support this debt so it wouldn't have to be impacted going forward. And so I think um I just wanted to point that out. So as this program walks forward, the debt will all be structured so it will not it it should not impact that tax rate going forward. So I just wanted to point that out. That was the foresight and the leadership of this council and so it won't have to be addressed through a property tax rate going forward unless something significantly changes from the plan. Now, Mrs. Stores, that's that's helpful and appreciated. And then explain real quickly after this cycles off what happens within that given tax rate um because that number is built in.

So that's a great question, mayor. Um once let's say the apparatus that was purchased um this past year once we turn it back into the manufacturer and get that price back, we will order the next round of equipment. Actually, we'll order the next round before we turn it in. And um that tax rate will remain in place once this one's paid off to start the next replacement of that apparatus in 13 years from now. So what it does is it sets up that property tax rate to self-support every single year this fire apparatus being replaced on a timely schedule to make sure we have good solid equip equipment out on our streets. Um the only thing we'll have to um take care of going forward is growth and adding new in as we expand fire stations. So Mayor, this tax rate will continue to support this apparatus once it's passed its useful life and we get the next round in. Yeah, thank you. That's very helpful. Anything else, guys?

Okay, item 73 is before you, gentlemen. I move to adopt resolution number 12-09-25-2 with the exemption of the two reading policy. Second. Motion and a second on item 73. Any further discussion? All in favor, please say I.

I. Any opposed? Motion passes with a 50 vote. Let's go backwards. Let's go to item 62 on discussion. How are we doing on time? We'll push for another 20 minutes and we'll take a recess. Um let's go back to item 62. Uh Miss Casey Stoutton and Anthony Spanel, if you guys will come forward on that one. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Thank you for having us. Um we appreciate the opportunity to share an overview with you today of our um Emerald Area Public Health District and see your guidance on a proposed funding model for its future sustainability. Um to guide our next steps, we'd like to take a moment to review the history of our public health district and the decisions that created our current funding model. The public health district was created in 1984 through a cooperative through cooperative agreements between the cities of Amarillo and Canyon and Potter and Randall counties. At that time, it was known as the Bice City County Public Health District. This agreement has been updated several times um through the years. In 2019, the district was renamed the Emerald Area Public Health District and the incorporated areas of Timber Creek, Canyon, Lake Tangle Wood, Bishop Hills, and Palisades joined as members. This slide depicts each member jurisdiction and its population. The unduplicated population is just over 254,000. And this slide is a depiction of a map of the um of the public health district including all member jurisdictions and it's um just over 1,800 18 yeah 1,800 square miles sorry.

Local public health in Texas is established in health and safety code 121 which is known as the public health reorganization act. um it establishes the way that public health um in local public health departments in Texas are established. There are public health departments which are typically um cities or county um public health departments. There are public health units and there are public health districts. We have a public health district here in our community and there are 15 total public health districts in Texas. Um we we reached out to each of the public health districts in Texas and asked for a copy of their cooperative agreement. Um it you have to have a cop a cooperative agreement to establish a public health district and that is an agreement between all of those member jurisdictions. Um of in that um chapter 121 it outlines um the finances and how finances are to be established in a public health district. and um it it states that the members of a public health district shall pay the costs necessary to operate the district. So, we wanted to see how the other public health districts in Texas um operated with their finances. And of those um other public health districts in Texas that sent us their cooperative agreement, all of the other public health districts cost share. Amarillo um the Emerald Area Public Health District is the only um public health district in Texas that doesn't cost share. And there's lots of historical reasons for that that we can talk about. Um but I think it's helpful to know that um that we are the only public health district in Texas that doesn't cost share. However, our cooperative agreement does allow for cost sharing.

Um there are four city of Amarella departments that serve the public health district. Public health, environmental health, wick, and animal management and welfare. Each of these departments do a wonderful job and they provide a wide range of services to each of the member jurisdictions and the citizens that live in those communities. Um here is a a menu of services that that are provided through public health. We provide clinical services and non-clinical services. You can see those there. Environmental health provides regulatory services and non-regulatory services. There's an asterk there under mosquito control. Um it's a a fan favorite that we enjoy talking about. And um with cost sharing um the goal will be to provide that um service districtwide. Animal management and welfare um provides um select services to the entire public health district um mainly surrounding um rabies control. So they serve as our rabies control um authority here in um for the for the whole public health district. So they those services for um outside the city limits of Amarillo mainly center around rabies. And then our wick department also provides a number of services um around supplemental nutrition for uh women, children and infants. And then again, funding for each of our departments range from grant funding, fees, and general fund dollars. This current structure has worked for many years. However, um as Anthony will discuss, um the departments of the district are experiencing a number of external factors and we've talked about

many of those during uh previous budget cycles. Um and so many of these external factors are requiring us to consider updating our funding model um to move to a more best practice model um which includes cost sharing. So I'm going to turn the presentation over to Anthony to talk about what that might look like.

Thank you Casey. So as a continuation of our budget discussions our we we brought to you guys a a cost sharing model. This is supported in state law. It's supported in our cooperative agreement and it's best practice around the state of Texas. Uh essentially want to talk about that cost sharing model. It is it's based upon a population allocation. Um which I have a few slides here in a little bit that'll kind of walk you through that. Uh essentially what we do is we take the dollars that we're unable to recover through fees um grants and the like and we cost share that out or we split that out amongst an allocation method uh through all the members of the public health district which which is um eight of us. give you a little graph here that um kind of shows the trending just as using environmental health as an example over the last 10 to 12 years of how that that um environment has changed um in terms of being able to co cost recover through fees, grants and the like. So, as an example, I just kind of want to go back and look at your first line, which would be your fiscal year 2014 2015, that light blue line as an example using our cost share mechanism or model that Casey and I have come up with. We would split that out through a population allocation. This will be your first blue line on the left side, the first column that says fiscal year 2014 2015 for that year. These are actual numbers that we've ran through this model. uh that number that delta that we were unable to recoup through fees uh um grants and the like was $164,000. Through the cost share model, Amarillo would pay roughly 78% of that as we have the largest jurisdictional area. Uh and the rest would be broken down based on that percentage allocation. So Ramano County 7.8% and so on and so forth on the way down. uh the numbers that we're targeting are going to be the numbers at

the bottom using this cost sharing mechanism, the model that we've built. So fiscal year 2014 2015 would have been about 35,000 uh so on and so forth. As you continue on down to the right, you'll see as we get close to 2425 23 24 you'll see that number starts to grow. Uh so we got all the way down into uh we were fully cost recovered in 1819. Um and then it started to grow rapidly due to external factors that Casey mentioned. Um all the way up to the green are actuals. Those are audited numbers and then all the yellow is just estimates because we don't have our audited numbers back yet. So essentially the goal that that we're kind of thinking through here is that uh each fiscal year starting about May or June, we'd put together a cost estimate that we would send out to the member jurisdictions say, "Hey, this is what we think next year, next fiscal year our estimates are going to be at. We would operate through that fiscal year. when the year closes and we got through audited numbers and those numbers became final, we would bill them back backwards um for the actual numbers that we we have um um actually spent in the in the public health district. That's that's the idea of the model there. So I want to talk about the growth just a little bit. um the external factors uh that Casey mentioned as an example in fiscal year I believe that's 23 22 23 you have a statutory change uh with the Senate Bill 577 this is just with environmental health that that one change at the state level cost my department $150,000 two years later Senate Bill 10008 has about a $300,000 change to my budget specifically and next year you'll have House Bill 284 44, which is anotherund$undredx,000. This is just a continuation um from the state level to uh limit what our ability is to cost recover and place more of that um operational costs on the tax

dollar. Um they they've said that several times during their legislative meetings that that's the intent of these legislative changes is for our services to be to cover more on on taxes. So the last five years, six years, that's just going to continue to grow up and we think grow and we think now is a good time to um get in line with our cooperative agreements, state law, and best practice through a cost sharing model. We did present this to the Emerald Area Public Health District board uh on October 16th and the board did vote uh to move it forward to council presentation. So essentially what Casey and I are looking for is a little bit of feedback from council. Um maybe some direction to see if this is something that you would like us to continue to pursue with the other member jurisdictions. Uh we would follow what I previously discussed. We'd probably meet with the other jurisdictions, the other seven members. Um share that this is already within our cooperative agreement that the the bones are already in place uh and and the and the path we plan on on taking for next fiscal year. So, I'd like a little bit of feedback to see if this is a a direction that uh council would like us to proceed down. And then that's the extent of our presentation. If you have any questions,

questions. No questions. I we obviously, you know, where we stand with cost recovery. Uh I think it's a great idea. I mean, I feel like, you know, these other entities need to be paying their fair share. Uh it's no different than the U restaurant inspections that we talked about that the state also took away. I don't know if that was one of the ones that you were talking about how it affected your bottom line, but uh it's making it more and more difficult, you know, to function. So, uh I for one, I'm all for it. I think it's great.

Yeah. I I don't think if Admarillo knew that this was the way we were funding all of this over the years, that we wouldn't have had people up here telling us we need to find another model. Um, everybody needs to pay their fair share and you know we we've shouldered that responsibility for what a decade if not longer. Uh, since 1984 84 so 40 years. Um, so I think this is a a good move uh forward and uh thank you for the work that you've put into this in the effort to get us here. Thank you.

Uh, same thing. Just thank you for the work you put into it since 1984. We continue have continue to have cuts from Austin and we have to uh find ways to work around that. So I support it 100%. Thank you. Yeah, I I would agree with that because what what I see happening is we have Austin telling us what we can charge for these services and what they're saying is instead of the people using these services paying for the services, we're going to we're going to force to make people that are which are property tax property taxpayers pay for services that they may never use. That's what Austin is telling us. So they're they're they're c, you know, they're limiting the our ability to to recover the cost. And on the other hand, they're saying, "Well, you also need to have less property tax," which I'm all for. That's that's great. But this is the conundrum that I think we're going to continue to face in a lot of different areas on this property tax pressure of being able to do that. And I think, you know, all these years we've been able to glad to provide these services and those types of things, but there's going to have to be nothing but a lot more of this if we're going to continue to see the pressures in Austin really, you know, we're losing more and more local control. your local officials have far less and less say over these things. And we're being forced and told what to do. And in many cases, there are municipalities that are abusing the system, those types of things. And unfortunately, we get lumped in with them when we're good. We've seen, you know, how good we are in fiduciary responsibilities, the credit ratings we are. Other municipalities don't do that yet. We get all lumped in the same way together. And and here's where we are at this point. So, I think it's a great plan, and I think we're going to have to look at continuing to do these other things. I appreciate the the effort put into it.

So, just a few clarifying questions to make sure everybody um listening and and kind of watching along here. Um there multiple entities that are in this district receiving services. Um we have been given state funding in times past, right? Grants are approved and coming to you. those grants. We still have some available and then there are others that are no longer available. Am I understanding that correctly? That's correct.

So, they have a reduction in funding. Um, and then we've been offsetting that funding with taxpayer dollars. Um, you guys are proposing to go to these other entities um and ask for them to participate in the cost share. Do they have the opportunity not to participate?

That's a great question. and our cooperative agreement does outline exactly what you're asking there. Uh I do think it's really important to understand that there is the public health district is very beneficial. Um we have we have the regional hospitals here. So if individuals are you know getting sick out in the county they're coming here for treatment. So you know we might as well um be doing preventative treatment out there as well. Um additionally it's almost you know where does Potter County start? Where does Amarillo start? Where does where does Randle County start? We're one community if if I'm making sense there. Um I find a lot of value in the public health district. Individuals that work out in the county come to eat in Amarillo. They live in Amarillo. They go eat out in the county. Uh so on and so forth. Public health district is very important. I'd love to see that retain um its entire in whole. I'd love to be able to see that stay the same. And then we uh you know as as with anything um you know if you have the the lack of funding then then your option is to reduce services.

And so you're saying the district would reduce services overall or individual entities could choose not to participate in just a reduction in service for that entity. If an individual entity chose not to participate in the public health district, they would have to figure out how that looks because there are some state require there. Most of our services are required by state law. There are some other entities that could step in and uh you know like Randall County could start up their own public health department if they so choose. Um they they could start up their own septic inspections if they so choose. Uh the cost of doing such would be 10 times as much as our ask here. uh I don't see a lot of value in um another entity saying, "Hey, I don't want to participate in the public health districts. I want to do my own thing." It's it'll cost them 10 times as much.

And I think what there's an option what I'm driving at, Anthony, a little bit is um these are these are state requirements. So these these areas that are outside the city limits, the state will still impose upon them certain minimums be met and those services have to be rendered and produced. So

that's correct. Um, then you look at the ROI on it. Well, you know, you could do your own. And so, if we were out of line with what we were trying to cost share, let's say we were being heavy on them or we were uh trying to assess a rate in excess of what it actually took, that would be considered in they they would just do it themselves. So, like they they can do their own um if it's not beneficial. You're saying that it's roughly a 90% reduction in the way that we have multiple entities all working together and we share. So, we're all getting a a pretty high value of those dollars.

I would say there's a pretty high value. Correct. Yes. And they they could do their own. Uh there would be no reduction in services. Just Amarillo wouldn't have to be the service provider. There's an option there, but you still have to provide the services. They're all covered under state law. So cost share for recovery um cost recovery basis implemented over how long uh and then they would have meetings and discussion and be able to remove themselves from that district if they wanted to look at what the cost would be if they performed their own services etc. H how much time would you anticipate in the timeline moving forward to give them plenty of time to adjust?

That's a great question. So there's a process outlined in the cooperative agreement on how a jurisdiction would have to withdraw there that process is outlined. That process would take a minimum of six months. um as outlined in the cooperative agreement. Um

in terms of the cost sharing model, we have put together a few different options. But I think our our suggestion would be uh we meet with these other entities in May, June. Um give them you know three four months to build it into their budget as an estimate. We would operate an entire year and then like a year and four months before we sent them a bill. So I think the before they actually receive the bill would be almost a two two-year period. Um but in terms we we are open to suggestions if uh if council so choose we could roll this out in a any number of of ways of 50/50 20 25% a year. I mean we're open to anything. I think the importance here is that we put a model in place that is sustainable moving forward. Uh that puts us in a good a good place for cautionary. I think if you were proposing something where, you know, we needed to charge within three months and they didn't have it in their current budget, I would I I would stair step it. You know, let's walk into something over the next five years, 20, 40, 60, so to speak. Give them, you know, an adequate time to adjust because you're already at, you know, a year and a half to two years out. I think we I think we probably would be just as well suited to just go ahead and implement the program. Um, the only thing that I would caution is increased regulatory control. So, I think the the the only hindrance would be look, we we know what our job is. Here's our scope of work. Um, we we see the the value in all of this. So, now that we have this cost recovery, do we now have additional trucks and employees? And now we're wanting to do additional inspections. you know, the the septic system that had come up at one time was inspect existing septic systems on sale of properties, right?

So, you couldn't sell an old property unless you had that septic system inspected and if it failed, then you've got a full replacement or whatever the issue is. So, you you you felt the public push back on a lot of that in those rural areas. I just would caution. I think this is very well stated, well modeled. Um, as long as it comes with the understanding these are existing services we're trying to to cost recover. This is not a growth of of a department or or of an initiative.

Correct. I think it's uh important for me to reiterate that is that this model is based upon existing services as is today. Nothing changes. We would like to provide mosquito control out in our entire public health district, but that would be at a at a um we would bill the other entities if they would like that essentially. We would cost share that instead of um Amarillo paying the cost for mosquito control in county, but the model as is is services asis. Um and yes, that's correct. That's good. Councilman, is the grant funding we receive based on the population served or how how do those grants do it's based on population?

Some some of our grants are based on population and then others um have we've had for so long? I don't they haven't we've had them since you know for more than two decades. So okay I'm just thinking allocation wise you know do we you know if it is based on uh population then they maybe they get that that credit towards their portion. it's not based on population then you know maybe their portion goes up. Um but also if our grant funding reduces if they choose to pull out I mean I just think all that needs to be looked at. You know I know we're trying to be fair. Uh but I think fair to the taxpayers also recouping as much as we can. So

sure we ran a few different models and I I believe the population allocation is the one the the clear winner here. It's it's easy to implement. Yeah. It it doesn't have a lot of crazy formulas that we can't explain. It's very easily explainable. Okay, great. We're looking at actual cost, not over billing. Um, when they get the bill, it'll be an actual number. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Mr. P.

Yeah. So, I I think part of the question the council has now is the roll out process. Do mean, do we start do we go all in right away? Do do we give them two years, three years, four years? I think we can, if the council is okay, we can start a negotiation process with these entities. Some may want to just jump right in and be done. I mean, we have some smaller entities. They may not want to do four as they as this get it done. Some may want to roll out with three, but we can start a negotiation process with them and uh to get that lined up and then bring them all back to you guys for an agreement because I'm if that's okay with the council. Yes, sir. I think that's what you're hearing from from this body is to move forward and then once you get something um I'd say a little closer to final, bring it back for uh an update.

Yeah. And I I would say my opinion is you roll it out as quick as possible. I mean I don't I don't know that a fiveyear plan is great. Um you know if they can't you know stomach that I mean maybe uh but I would say as quick as we can. Um you know my opinion is you know three years max or something. But just my

and I would like to just share as an example for um 2627 next fiscal year estimate of about 650,000 you're talking 50,000 for Randall County and then all the way down to 540 bucks for Bishop Hills. It's not a lot of money in terms of uh an operational budget. And I I definitely think the ask is appropriate and u palatable. I would I would just like to add that I' I'd like to see it done in six months, right into Q2 next year.

Yeah, I think you guys are are pretty far along in understanding, assessing, evaluating. So, you doing your part wouldn't be um a long duration, but then as far as council imposing the actual u expenditure, I like the idea of letting them get into that next budget cycle, which would put you on around what 16 months or so from now, 18 months before they received a bill. Yes. Because we would give them their estimate for the next fiscal year, so that they could work that into their budget and then they would receive their assessment in the next fiscal year. So, probably April of 27. Is that is that correct? Is that how that works?

April of 27 before they would see an actual bill. Okay. Anything further for these two. Thank you for the presentation. Appreciate it. Thank you. We'll we'll look forward to hearing back from you in the first quarter. Um, okay. That takes us through item 62. We're on to item 63. And this one we actually have a uh a virtual. So, I think what would be good right now is to give us a minute to get that set up. Make sure audio, video, everything's linked in. Let's take a 10-minute recess and then we'll jump right back in here. Uh, ready to roll forward with you with you, Mr. Kosuba.

Hi, Stephanie. Can you hear me? You can.

chair, please. Yeah. N she likes you.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, we are ready to get started. We'll go ahead and call ourselves back into session here. Um, pick up with item 6.3. Michael Kosuba, if you don't mind walking us into this.

Yep. Mayor and Council, Michael Kosuba, director of parks and wreck. Uh, wanted to give you just a little bit of history on kind of where this study came from. So, uh, there's really three reasons for this study. The first one was back in 2019 as a department we had $100,000 in capital and we were looking at ways to diversify different funding streams for the department. Uh at that time we did a real estate study uh using the same group that kind of gave us the initial framework for this. Um since that time we've had multiple developers come forward proposing different uh concepts for this space. And so we want to make sure that we have good guidance uh that really helps protect development uh in the long term so that not one single project limits our abilities for best and highest use moving forward. Um and again uh the other thing is obviously we want to enhance the experience for park users. So those are kind of the three things that we hope to achieve. So diversifying it, setting those parameters to make sure that we're getting best and highest use and then obviously enhancing that experience for park users. Uh, as I mentioned this real, we did the initial real estate study back in 2019. Um, we actually presented to council back in 2020, September of 2020 for an economic development grant. Uh, unfortunately, this project was not selected. Um, but we kicked this project off almost a year ago, uh, with the idea to kind of lay out some, uh, aspirational framework for what John Stiff Park could become. Um, we have our consultant online. Um, they they're from MIG. It's Yuri Chang. Um MIG is the one that has done the initial real estate study um for this. They also did our parks master plan and city plan. So with that, I'll turn it over to Yuri. Uh she can do the presentation and then we'd be happy to answer any questions after.

Great. Thanks, Michael. Um great. Hi everyone. I'm Yuri Chang. I'm the senior project manager at MIG and the PM that uh helped work on this vision book. And so we're pleased to be able to continue to support the city of Amarillo. And so tonight I'm here to present a proposed vision book for the next generation of John Park. And so the book outlines a proposed development program that generates private investment to fund public park improvements uh reducing long-term reliance on the general fund while delivering community amenities for Amarillo residents and visitors. And so I'll spend the next 10 minutes or so walking you through this proposed vision book. Um so why John Stiff Park? It's one of the city's most visited assets anchored by youth sports, the library, and the dog park. But aging infrastructure, accessibility, and field conditions require significant investment. And these are needs that cannot sustainably be met through bonds or general fund dollars alone. And so the proposed concept seeks to develop on a currently underutilized 30acre portion of the park into a community serving revenue generating extension of John Stiff. And so the parcel that we looked at is situated between 45th Avenue, Parkside Drive, and Chipotle Trail in the northwest corner of John Stiff. It's in proximity to the fire station and the uh southwest branch library which creates a civic corridor while the frontage at 45th Avenue provides high visibility access along a major thoroughfare. And the proposed development program would benefit from the park's existing infrastructure, including utilities and a connected sewage system that would

help enable efficient development and support for expanded programming. And this particular section that we looked at um has yet to be fully programmed or activated and currently serves as a flexible transition space. And so with its open character and lack of designed edges, we really see an exciting opportunity to introduce new uses that improve circulation, establish a stronger sense of place, and enhance connections to adjacent park amenities. Um, and a core feature of the proposed development vision is that uh revenue generated from the development would go directly back to John Stiff. And so this creates a self- sustaining funding mechanism for park reinvestment in Amarillo uh for lighting, athletic fields, trails, restrooms, parking, and other upgrades. And this follows a proven precedent already set at Wonderland Park and could serve as a model for other parks within Amarillo as well. And um sorry, let me just go back by one. And so, uh, just to echo, um, some of the communitydriven priorities in the city's park master plan survey, 70% of respondents or 1,600 community members had endorsed increased investment levels to fund park enhancements. And in the 2045 vision plan, residents called for better amenized parks, more walkable destinations, and improved recreation options. And so our proposed vision book really directly um responds to these sentiments by blending park programming with community serving amenities. And so as part of our process, we looked at the development potential and market demand at the site. And southwest

armillo is the strongest commercial and residential submarket in the region. The 10-minute drive area has the highest household incomes in the city. um at an $87,000 median. Uh dining, recreation, and entertainment spending in this area is strong. Households spend 4,200 annually on restaurants with consistent visitation patterns and commercial rents in the area are the highest in Amarillo, uh further supporting high quality de development. And so, in other words, there is strong demonstrated demand. And so this proposal is not really testing a new market but rather meeting an existing one. Okay. So now getting to the elements of the desired development program. What we're proposing is the next generation of John Stiff Park as a hybrid open space for family oriented park activities, dining, events, and recreation. And so the proposed program is meant to be an extension of the park, not a replacement, by creating more reasons to visit, to stay longer, gather with family, uh to socialize. And the design intentionally promotes walkability, day to evening activation, multigenerational use, and year-round programming. Um, a desired development program would feature diverse uses such as family oriented food and beverage with flexible outdoor seating, uh, catering and takeaway options to support park events. Other desired retail u may include experiential such as uh places that uh blend experience with commercial activities concepts like chicken and pickle that have been um very popular in other cities. Other uses may include recreationaligned commercial uses such as uh fitness, pilates, yoga, spin

classes. Um, and a key feature of the proposed development program is a signature outdoor central civic space that would be a cornerstone of the development. And this area would be designed to accommodate both spontaneous gathering and programmed events. Uh, for example, oops. A dedicated outdoor performance space could host high attended community celebrations such as the 5th of July and expend expand capacity for other revenue generating events throughout the year. Um, and to also um maximize other long-term financial feasibility and destination appeal, development proposals might also incorporate additional complimentary uses. Uh, one option that we looked at was a boutique hotel. So, Southwest Earillo currently has no hotels, yet it serves as a center for youth sports tournaments. And so, a small-scale hotel could support tournament families, visiting grandparents or relatives or weekend event visitors. And another option that we looked at is um low to medium density housing of up to four stories uh contextually sensitive. And this will help attract and retain young professionals seeking walkable neighborhoods. Uh empty nesters uh looking for convenient access to amenities and on-site housing would create consistent but traffic for commercial tenants and generate stable revenue streams for the development. Um and then lastly, we looked at complimentary outdoor amenities. Examples include uh recreational activity zones such as pickle ball, cornhole, botchi ball, and then other designed elements that integrate um landscape design such as pocket parks, artistic installations, and walkable

paths that connect to the broader park system. Um and so here we this page shows a preliminary site concept and circulation. And so this proposed vision book again provides developers with a sense of a desired development program. Here we emphasize open spaces, pedestrianoriented experiences and uh organized traffic flow and enhance opportunities for parking and really creating kind of flexible hybrid spaces that seamlessly blend the commercial and developed areas with the more recreational parts of the park. And uh what we're proposing is for development to happen in phases um in measured thoughtful um increments. And so phase one as you see on the far left would start with high visibility retail dining along 45th that generates early revenue and energy. Uh phase two here focuses on community serving spaces, plazas, prominads um and may include housing or hotel development. And then phase three um finishes up additional outdoor recreational amenities that deepen the park experience. And so this type of phasing would help minimize risk um helps the community see benefits early and addresses infrastructure capacity step by step. And then here are some conceptual renderings um once this is one where all phases complete and you can see here kind of that blended green open space and then that central focus meeting point as a amphitheater plaza. And then here's a view from looking northeast from the other side of the

park. Um, again with the whole with all of the phases completed as well. And then here is a rendering of that central focus point. Um, an amphitheater where the fence, concerts, where families can gather and additional recreational activities can be um happening together. Um, here's another example of kind of that retail attainment, how outdoor elements and commercial programs could uh work together within the park. And here's another aerial view. Here's a more prominade area to show how um spaces can trans transition from the parking to the proposed development sites. And then here where outdoor dining and outdoor landscaped elements also blend with uh potential food and beverage uh commercial areas. Okay. And so uh next we'll talk about development structures, tools, and incentives. And so, um, throughout our planning process, what we really, um, wanted to emphasize were, uh, structures that would help preserve public control. And so, two models that we, um, recommended here. One is a long-term ground lease structure of 20 to 50 years. Um, and then this uh long-term lease helps provide developers with an operational certainty necessary for substantial capital investment while preserving public ownership of the underlying land. And so this extended timeline enables developers to secure favorable financing uh plan comprehensive improvements and attract and retain sustainable businesses. Um, and the other option is a revenue

allocation model that could be established to directly channel lease revenue into John Stiff Park improvements and maintenance. And so again, it would create kind of that continued improvement cycle that enhances both the developments properties values as well as the overall park experience. And then lastly, uh reiterating a phase development approach. So uh this would allow the city to clearly communicate expectations to potential de developers while establishing strong parameters for each phase. And each phase could include defined success metrics and triggers for enhancements. And uh using this approach helps the development proceed at an appropriate pace with demonstrated community benefit at each stage. Um and then uh and some ways that the city can support the development uh fasttrack permitting, coordinated approvals and then uh in line with the vision book clear designed and programming expectations. Um in addition to looking at Wonderland, uh we looked at a case study Hemisphere Park in San Antonio. And so Hemisphere serves as a compelling case study of public private partnership based development, long-term ground leases, and retire retained site ownership. And so in 2012, the city council had created the hemisphere district zoning overlay and allowed a flexible mix of uses that included multif family housing, hotels, retail, public space while protecting the core park areas. And completed elements include a 150 unit apartment building, groundf flooror retail, dining pavilions, and a boutique hotel is now underway. And the park uh hosts 500

events annually and catalyzed over $1 billion in nearby private investment. And the park generates $ 1.5 million annually through ground leases, parking, retail rents, and sponsorships. Um, and so we know that the city has recently committed $8 million in upgrades to John Park for lighting, field improvements, parking capacity, internal circulation improvements. And so these investments help signal to the private sector that the city is committed to the park's long-term success to create an attractive foundation for private development. Um and so next steps uh uh for the city, the city can launch a two-part solicitation process. An initial RFI can identify capable and visionary partners and refine project parameters. And then following the RFI, the city can directly negotiate with one or more of the qualified respondents. And the selected developer may launch a public master planning process to gather community input um by hosting open houses and stakeholder sessions to provide clear storytelling about why the development is needed, how revenues directly support the park and to further gain ideas about highest and best uses. Um, and so in close, uh, we think that this model can really serve, um, and really elevate John Stiff as Amarillo's signature family destination that blends recreation, dining, culture, community. Um, it can become a cost recovery engine that serves as a model for the entire park system and leverages private investment for public amenities and uh,

positions Amarillo as a leader in community centered park development. So, I'll stop there. Mayor and Council, uh, just a couple of things to add. We did present this to the park board. Uh, they did recommend it forward unanimously. Uh, the one caveat is that they wanted to make sure that any funding that would be generated would go back to, uh, some sort of park fund that would then improve uh, parks around the city or John specifically. Um, we actually pulled some numbers um, of how many visits this park gets in a year and the number is 1.1 million people that visit this park a year. uh individual users it's about 240,000. So that's about four or five visits per person. So u just a couple of of numbers that may uh go along with this. The other thing is this is a a graphic and a vision book to show developers and other individuals what the potential is. This is a flexible plan. You know if a developer comes forward with a different program obviously that's something we can review and we'll we will be reviewing. Um obviously this is high level. We'll be coordinating with planning, other city departments to make sure that any integration is seamless. Uh if if this decides to move forward but with that, we'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have on this vision book.

What's the structure here? So, you know, you said any revenue to be put back towards parks, which that's great. Uh would we maintain ownership of the land? Would we lease the build? So, someone would come in, build the strip, uh, they would own the buildings or we would own the buildings. Well, and that's where we could visit. It would be like Wonderland where we've got a a ground lease and they basically own the structures on that ground lease. Okay. Okay.

So, Wonderland would be a good comparison. And that was one of the reasons we even considered this is because we've already got that type of model in town and it's worked very well for 70 years. So, we think this is something that obviously we could utilize at John Stiff. I think it's also something in the future we could use at Thompson if other amenities wanted to come in and or Rick Klein as it develops. The one thing we have as a department is a lot of undeveloped space. What we don't have is a lot of revenue. So, I think that's that that's something that we can use to leverage u to generate some revenues for our department.

So, we would put in the infrastructure if we moved forward. If we decided to move forward, we'd put in the infrastructure so that a developer could come in and do that. That's basically that would be the what would be required of us. Yeah. And we and we again that was where we had looked at that economic development grant a few years ago to help put that infrastructure in. Uh and so that's what we had proposed back in 2020. So yeah, we would we would work and a lot of the infrastructure is already in place. There's a lot of good infrastructure now. It may need to be upgraded, but there's a lot of good utilities already running through that property. Okay. And the uh the lease would go to the developer.

Well, and it depends on how it's structured. I mean, ultimately we it would be a lease with either a master developer, individual developers. And again, that would be something that we would have to look through as uh Yuri kind of talked through those last options is the long-term ground lease or a percentage of revenue. So, depending on how those are set up is how we would move those agreements forward. in doing all this even though that's that portion of John stiff. Would that include getting the bathrooms opened? Yes.

I I think there would be a lot of more civic improvements in that area. Uh one of the things I wanted to touch on with this model was a lot of the parking we actually tried to hide behind buildings to make it more of a pedestrian experience. So if you look at some of the renderings, the parking is actually centralized behind so that those pedestrian corridors are strong. It makes a a better environment. You can kind of see back in behind those red buildings is where a lot of the parking would actually be structured. So create a pedestrian friendly environment where people can walk to the park, walk to eat. Uh and honestly, people love to just socialize and we think this would be a great mechanism to continue to build on that in our community.

So a couple things. So when when when this buildout looks I mean the the plan would be to hire to in other words we're not necessarily getting into the development business but we're finding someone that could be a master developer to to help develop this. And then and then so when we get into building this uh you know what we often hear and it probably falls under parks and recreation as much as anything uh the quality of life issues that that people are wanting in our community. What kind of besides the retail and those types of things, whatever what what kind of things would we be putting here that we don't already have that you would see as a as a as a high use or something that people would want from that quality of life standpoint.

So, so this goes back to the original concept. The the concept was to blur those spaces between the park and development. You've got this shared space and the goal would be that in those shared spaces, it's a partnership between us and those property owners. We had initially used the example of like a chicken and pickle, which is pickle ball and a chicken restaurant combined. You know, perhaps they have 10 private courts, but maybe they have a couple that are open to the public. So again, adding amenities for park users at zero cost to the city. Uh you could do that with botchi ball, you could do it with sand volleyball, you could do it with gathering areas, sitting areas. Again, we want those amenities that cause people to stay in a park longer, but also socialize. again with with the success we've seen with our special events, you know, with 27,000 for the 5ifth of July and 13,000 for the hot air balloon, we continue to see this as a place where a lot of that activity will grow. So again, adding those places where people can recreate but also be in a park setting. Um,

and this land that we're proposing this for, what do we currently use for now? The only thing it's used for is undeveloped parking when we have our large special events. Okay. And then uh so what's the most common economic I mean sometimes when we look at I saw the word maybe incentives in there. So but this is a part of town maybe that doesn't need as much as incentives. I mean things are happening there those types of things. So what what what type of incentives would I mean would we need to have to to bring there or I don't know that we need incentives. I think what we wanted to show developers was the potential. I think that's really what we're trying to communicate is this is the options that could be available on that location.

Depending on what they propose, obviously those are things we would work with to figure out what makes this happen. But at the end of the day, we just wanted to provide a vision book so that people could look at it and say, "We really like this. This is something we want in our community." And yeah, I'd add that the incentive is really the location of the site. It's just so well located. It's directly next to a park which is such a great amenity that that in itself is um just so is a desirable opportunity.

Well, I think you've also got 1.1 million visits annually that is already built into it. So, I think for a developer, you've already got a lot of traffic. You've already got a lot of people using the space. This would only continue to enhance that space for, you know, we have softball tournaments, baseball tournaments, flag football, soccer. A lot of people don't necessarily want to leave the site. they want to stay there and this would give them the opportunity to go enjoy some retail, some other things on the site. That money goes back into then making improvements in those facilities. So then we can improve the softball fields, we can improve those restrooms, we can improve the football fields. So again, it's just continuing to invest in that cycle.

And is there a most common practice when you look at how okay how the revenue comes back to the city from the commercial part of it to do these things? Is it a tax increment reinvestment zone or or how how is that how does that what's the path that that usually follows to to spur that investment and and have that revenue for the city to invest in the parks that Yuri do you have

yeah so one uh the option that we uh really um we're recommending is that long-term ground lease structure and so then that way it provides the city with a consistent and um stable revenue source and then that way it's less of A um and then it also creates that longer term planning stability as well. And then another option is developing or establishing a revenue allocation model where um it gives uh potential investors that confidence that revenue would be reinvested back into the park. And so it creates kind of that symbiotic relationship where um those park improvements would be directly improving that experience for visitors. And is all that revenue go back to the city? Who who who's determining I mean that's totally up to the city how they use that money uh for the improvements.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And that was one of the things we heard from developers is when we had met with them during this process a couple of them said, you know, we don't want to this to generate revenue and then it be spent on another side of town. We want that to go back in. So that is improving our facilities and improving their facilities. A percentage of it could go to improving other parks, but I think the pro prime focus was to continue to reinvest in that park, but other parks would also see benefits. Thank you.

Okay, so um infrastructure, water and sewer obviously, right? So how many acres total? That area we were looking at I believe was 30 acres. There are some other parcels that eventually could be considered as well but as a part of that you were looking at about 30 acres. So, water and sewer infrastructure, um, streets, curb and gutter. Would we stop there on our part or would we try to stretch into common area, um, you know, amphitheater, parking, lighting, benches, all sorts of different things.

Yeah, I think those would all be things we would work through with the developer to figure out where their line ends and our line starts. So you got 1.3 million square feet maybe. I mean it's parkland so we're not trying to sell it. Nobody here that we're trying to sell it. But you do need to value it. So I mean you're looking at $13 million piece of property over there if you were to sell all 30 acres to a developer. Typical like you know you go and purchase that piece of property then you put in all of the infrastructure. But you're going to do that on LOIs. you know, you've got some of those lots that are already parcled out, commitments, people that have given you down payments, whatnot, and then you're phasing into it. So, I love the phased approach. I think that's smart. It's a really good master plan. I think the way that um you know, we need to look at it like any I mean, we're taking a business approach to this. So, if we were going to leverage our $13 million asset with a potential developer, are they ready to pay a lease on all lots if they if they go into the development and say we want the full thing or um are we having to pony up and and put in infrastructure first with the hope that you know those LOIs come in? So, so what would you envision on that? Well, we've had different developers approach us. Um, and again, some of them were very small developments within that space. So, I think for us, I mean, obviously, putting a vision book out allows people to see what the vision is. Um, if we move forward with uh RFI where we're start to solicit this, then I think that could be part of the negotiations with a potential developer is here's what the city will do, here as a developer, what you'll do.

Can we go back to the phased approach photo? Sorry to which part? Uh the phased approach. Will you show the three different phases, please? Yep. There we go. So everything's prime on the, you know, the 45th street and then the street coming up and then you're you're taking on the common area maintenance piece in phase two it looks like. So, do you have any estimates back from anybody on what the total master plan or what phase one would be and and infrastructure?

Not at this point. We just we again we wanted to start with the high level and we'll build that out further as we move forward. How does the property tax work on a ground lease? They still pay full property taxes on the structures. They're assessed as a business more or less. And then um the lease, what do you what what what example have you seen on the lease? What how does that work? Well, obviously we've got Wonderland as an example of what we've done locally. Yuri, do you have an example of what they did for Hemisphere?

Um I don't have that off right off the top of my head, but we can take a look at how those leases were structured. I I know I would find it very interesting if you were to run, you know, your next step honestly would be to run the proforma more so than going to put out the RF. Is it an RFPI that you're looking for a master developer? Somebody to come in and say, so like I think if we took a look at it of, you know, you have say 30 different, you know, lots for property, here's how many square feet you would have total buildout valuation. and here's the total property value that would be assessed plus the generated sales tax that could come in off of this. Then you would balance that with like average construction costs or whatever on our side. But then the lease piece in the middle would probably be the most interesting as a developer coming to that property. If you're putting in all the curb and gutter and the features and all I've got to do is the vertical construction, I would expect that I'm I probably have a really large cost in your land lease um or some sort of share in my gross revenues. Is that what you're thinking?

Yeah. Okay. Um the other way to go would just be if you don't want to run the proform would just be to go out and get loss um and developer interest and let them kind of present. Was that more in line with maybe what the consultant was was heading? Yeah. And one of the things we did through this process is we actually engaged a couple of local developers to get their input on market rates, current market rates to help build out this actual plan. Uh you're I don't know if you want to elaborate on that a little bit. Sorry, I'm having a hard time hearing the audio. It kind of cuts in and out. It got a little wobbly there. So, okay. Apologize if there was a

So, we had we had met with a couple of local developers to see what market rate would dictate for this. So, in terms of developing a proform, we've got a lot of that information. We had done a preliminary engineering report when we had done that EDA grant. So, we could pull a lot of that information, update it because again, it's a few years old now. pull some of that information that we uh discovered during those discussions with the developers um and come back with more of a a performer. We again we wanted to just cast the vision, see what the options were, uh see if it's something council was open to. If council's open to it, then obviously we go back and refine it more to the next step and come back with more options. Well, let me say just as one one person on council, I I'm definitely open to um seeing the interest uh and the speculation, but then I would assess that more in the developer goes first um not the city to put out large dollars in order to bring something that we would have a hope, right? So if we were going to speculate maybe 40 60 you know so 40% LOIs hard money down you've got things that are sold in advance you then get to go develop that phase you've got 60% of speculation you know that you need to go ahead and get started um I think that's pretty conservative and safe uh I just don't know how much council wants to invest in the proforma side of things um and trying to sell a product Um, council, do you guys want to to put money in on the front end or would you rather have a a greater comfort more like what I'm proposing like where you have hard LOIS and contracts in place before you take that first step?

Well, I guess you know what I I mean, we've kind of talked at a high level of what we want to do. I guess what I'd like to be looking more, okay, what what does that look like? Is that generally a requirement or or exactly how this works? So, I I mean, I don't I don't have any experience with this. just seems kind of unique, but I guess it's been done elsewhere. I mean, what we want to do is mitigate the risk for our taxpayers and our rateayers, you know, at the most, but to get the most benefit, you know, out of them. So, you know, I I guess I I just don't know enough to know, yeah, I think we need to do enough to make sure that, you know, if we are investing that there's going to be a payoff for it, but I really don't know how these deals work and, you know, other places because I it just doesn't seem like we've really had any kind of experience on something like this before. So, I don't know where, you know, whether we need to get, you know, someone, you know, that that knows more about the development side of us to kind of brief us on on how this works. But I agree with with mitigating the risk. Uh, but, you know, if if you don't take any risk, you're not going to get anything at all. So, I think it's mitigating it the best of all. So, I'd just like to learn are there examples or how does this usually work from the investment financial side and how much does private kick in versus, you know, how much we have to kick in? We've not we've not had a chance to dive that far into the future just yet, but I would think that up until now, this property has not been available. So, it's been parkland. It's not it's not open for for market, but now we're saying it is. So, I don't think the city has to necessarily start the process of putting infrastructure in. I think we we say it's available. Come to us, bring to us what you want to do, and uh and then we we let them start the process. And so I I this is a very uh popular part of town. Uh it does very well on on the retail side. I I it's not like we not like we're trying to reinvest in a in a in a in a struggling area like like a like a tears has to do. So I think I think just the fact of us making it available will is is our first step without putting infrastructure in there and then let the developers come

to us and then then they and they start that process. And so I don't think we have to start putting money into. Michael, would you agree?

Yes. And like I said, we've had developers approach us. I think what our concern was, we didn't want one little development to control that whole area. So again, we wanted to have a plan, a very flexible plan that can change based off of what other developers come in with different ideas, but we wanted to lay the framework of what we thought could be the best and highest use. So again, if developers come forward or ideas, we're happy to entertain that. So, are we thinking that we're going to follow the model like San Antonio what they put out because they created a tears uh they started a a nonprofit corporation um to pull the city out of all of the development end of it. So, are we thinking that that's a good model to follow?

I think those are all things we can discuss. You know, whether it's something like that, whether it's a ground lease, whether it's the uh percentage of revenue, I think we can continue to evaluate that and some of it may be dependent on the different developers that come forward. And again, I think this area is not one of one of your one of your struggling areas. And so this is this is a a very higherend area. So I don't think tears is necessarily needed right now. Now, obviously, if we start the process, there's no interest. We're not there's no one biting at it. Then we can start looking at it, but I I I don't think we start with that. I I think we make it available and then if there's nothing, we look at that as as another option. So, is there any other plan for that property other than the uh uh undeveloped parking and Prairie Dog Town

at this point? No, it's just overflow parking. It's just that's it.

Howard, you said we've got some developers that are already interested. Um what would you look at? I mean, usually we do a really poor job with marketing. We just do as a city. I mean, how would you get the word out? I mean, how like I mean, I think that that's crucial to mayor's point of getting some LOIs, getting some things, and if you're saying we don't want one developer to come build this entire thing, um, you know, or is that what we want and then they lease out the space? I mean, what I guess those are all things that, and I guess we're early stages, so we can't even, but I mean, those would be all things that I would want to consider is we do a really poor job of marketing um, in the past. So to get, you know, developers and I don't know if you know, they're they'll just know, you know, do we put a sign out there? Do we put, you know, down 45th to say, you know, you know, uh, land available, whatever. Yeah. I mean, yeah, they got to know we're open for business. So, I mean, just things to think about.

So, not just a four lease sign up there up there. So, I'm just saying. Yeah. Good to know.

I really like the idea. I I hope we stay true to it being a uh a recreational uh outdoor environment. I would hate to just see it become another retail spot with just, you know, just asphalt and and buildings going into it. I think the outdoor space, the amphitheater, um I've been to several of these in in the Metroplex, they're great places for families to go. you get your dinner, the kids are running around crazy, having a good time, parents are enjoying themselves, and then to be able to tie that into the park. I think it would it would serve two missions. So, I hope we we stay true to that mission that we just don't lease this and develop it like any other spot.

Yeah, I would I would see that we've already we've already created here our vision if the council is good with this. So, we would use this as part of our procurement package. So we we would we would work with the consultant see what other others have done to other cities and we would do I don't know if RP I'm not sure whether to be but we'd be saying okay developers um this is what we envision and it has green space it has retail space it hides the parking sidewalks those kind of things and then they bring to us their proposals and uh we we go through we we pick the one we like and these are these are all-encompassing proposals and uh they do they fit our vision do they not and it won't look exactly like this not going to have the necessarily the little S turn road. It's going to be a little different. They're going to give their own flare to it, but they're but the idea is we we're telling you what you we want a holistic picture here, holistic view here. Bring to us what financially works that you see as a developer and then we go through we like pick the one pick which one we like and then we develop an agreement and then start the process of developing it. That that's kind of the ideal version of doing this. Okay.

So, so you're looking at what we're looking at to to to help us do this is to find whatever term you want to use, master developer, one person that's going to help us be able to to do all this. In other words, Michael, you don't become the person that's negotiating individually with each of these restaurants, businesses, those types of things that we're hiring a third party with experience in doing that. That would be Yeah, that would be part of that agreement. Okay. Yeah. Where would we where would we source the funds for the infrastructure? Well, I I think those are things we can look at as we move forward. Again, we can pull that per uh preliminary engineering report. Some of it could be um Parkci that we debt fund over a certain number of years knowing that we're going to have that revenue coming back in

and it may be part of the developer brings that forward and they get it back on the lease arrangement and so they work up to a lease payment to offset some of that infrastructure cost. So, the city's not out that dollar amount. Maybe we have extra CIP money. Maybe. Just kidding. Hey, tips. Tips. Tips. I've got a a 4x8 sheet of plyboard and some red spray paint if we want to release. So, perfect. Okay. All right. But the but the bottom line on this thing as we as it's developed out, it can't affect the taxpayers's uh pocket. This has to be a solely something that is done by a developer and the city has has no play in it and we don't see tax dollars going into it.

Well, I I don't I mean I'm saying I'm agreeing with you, but I I want to I want to say I do see it as affecting your taxpayers pocket in a very good way. I would want to see the ROIs on the sales tax dollars. This is an asset. This is $13 million worth of prime real estate property and we as a city, we're not managing it. we're just we're just kind of sitting on it, you know, and it's parkland and it's encumbered in that way. But I would want to see how good it could affect my taxpayers pockets in all sorts of things, quality of life and and how that could benefit in the future. But then I think that the key to all of this is is developments well done. And we've all seen developments that didn't go well because they're driven by private interest and cut cost and just get the lease and allow anybody and everybody there. and and you didn't really get what you wanted. So, what I would be asking for would be a master preliminary with preliminary covenants, restrictions, zoning requirements and then some sort of outline for uh a potential minimum of what we would expect it to produce on that proformide in in whatever relationship that is if you're gauging foot traffic, sales tax, property values, whatever. But I would just want to see that come back before we go and engage with the public. And then if you design it well and you put it out and you know good quality developer comes along and and you can get that up in the air, I don't know that that anybody wouldn't see the value in that. Um because I think we would. So, so you're looking at having a having our consultants do a study to for proforma before we start start looking at a at a procurement process for development to bring back ideas or I would start with because they've already given a pretty good vision and they're they're not missing anybody. Nobody's pushing back on the vision.

I think what they're capturing and the overall usage of the space, the parkland, how it's going to flow, I think they're heading in a great direction. And I think what we'd want to do is put some wheels on that of like how restrictive would this area be? What types of things would they allow or not allow so that you can you can maintain a high level of quality in that development. Then what you're going to do when you put that out, you're going to run off all of the developers that well my my my self- storage place doesn't fit right there, you know, or my my my other opportunity here of what what I know is my bread and butter doesn't work. And so it we want to exclude I think to a great level

any of those applicants. Then when you get that developer and he looks at that well you're saving me $13 million in upfront land cost. So I'm willing to partner let's say 5050 on infrastructure and we phase into it with leases in place. Now you have a deal that you can work the math and it'd be easy to see what your ROI is on it whether or not we could justify any uh capital.

Yeah. I think uh as part of the again looking forward to the procurement process. Yeah. We would want to develop the expectations for this property and again as Michael said we don't want a one at a timement here. We don't want we don't want a little one shop and then then another shop and we we want the holistic view. We want to see we want to see the end before we start is kind of the goal here. And so yeah, we would have the council be looking at what what do you want and not want to allow in that property? uh what what how much on a percentage of green space and what's the what type of restaurants or what type of of whatever there. Yeah, those are things that I think we would want to bring back to you all before we even approach developers for for proposals.

I think that's the step that I'm looking at if council sees it the same way. Yeah. So, you know, definitely uh maybe right and uh and and interested, but so let's see let's see what you guys can put in the way of wheels and then marketing after that would be the thing and and I would love to know what the market drive is. How much interest do you really have? Uh because no cost upfront to us to go out and get hard money loss um would be very appealing. Other questions, council? Very exciting. Very exciting project.

Yeah. So, uh, Kosuba is definitely, uh, thinking outside of the box. So, continue to to keep up the good work, sir. Um, let's keep moving here. We're going to go into 64. So, Koshuba, don't go too far away there. Um, we've got Southeast and Southwest Pool here for discussion.

All right. Mayor and Council Michael Kuba, director of parks and wreck. Um bringing back to you the uh staff assessment uh that we conducted internally. Uh I'm going to breeze through these slides fairly quickly. Um we discussed this with council uh back in August and we uh received direction to go and do an internal staff assessment. So since that time, we've been out looking at historical data, past reports, um we've conducted on-site reviews, captured some detailed photographs, uh some investigatory work, specifically on the structural, uh mechanical, operational. Uh this is in no way a reflection on our staff. Staff has done an outstanding job of keeping these facilities going with extremely limited ongoing investment. Um a lot of these pools are 50 and 60 years old. Um and so they've done a really good job of keeping those moving forward and keeping them operational. Uh so the purpose is to provide a clear understanding of the facility conditions to help kind of guide our future uh decisions. So this is something we've talked about at length with our park board. Uh this is just the last two years that we've had discussions with them. Uh we could have gone back further, but these are just from the last uh two years. Uh so we've talked about viability, we've talked about the structural challenges, we've talked about vandalism. Um we've talked about routine maintenance. I think the concern that keeps coming up is the ongoing expenses versus the revenue that's currently being generated. As we continue to look at cost revenue and cost uh recovery, um the challenge with those two pools is that they're significantly lower than cost recovery. Um we we looked at some ways in March to enhance in 24 uh to add some amenities that may draw some users to uh Southwest. We did see a little bit of an uptick there. Uh again, we talked after the season about some repling costs, some remodeling costs. Um we

talked about doing some pressure testing at Southeast. Um again, in April, we actually we discovered a leak. We started doing some studies um and made some repairs while we were looking at a feasibility study and then in May we had a a very significant leak that we actually had to cut out and repair right before the season. This was a very temporary patch. This is not a long-term solution. Um so we we in June we talked about some motor issues that we had at Southwest that we had to restore fairly quickly. We had one of our pump motors go out. Uh we presented um the direction to our park board back in August. Um we've talked about the age and the what do we do with our facility because really the next thing that needs to be done is plastering the pool uh at a cost of about $450,000 per pool. Um but we also have some other issues that related to it. So we presented all of that to uh the park board in November. Uh the park board recommended the closure of Southeast and Southwest with an 8 to1 vote. Uh the park board also recommended that council consider looking at either an indoor and outdoor option as a potential replacement with a 90 vote. Um what I'd like to do next is bring up Brad Nie. He's our park superintendent. He has been out in the field looking at all of this. He's worked in the pool side of our operations for a long time. If there's anybody that knows the pools in the city, it's Brad. Um, so we'll kind of walk through then be uh ready to answer any questions that you may have.

Good afternoon. How are y'all? So Koshuba kind of laid the groundwork. So what we did is we went out. We we kind of already knew about some of these issues. Obviously the plaster and that sort of thing. So doing the plaster and stuff is only the band-aid to patch the top. You don't address anything that's going on underneath. So we're going to kind of look at some of that. OB This is Southwest constructed in 74. So there was a a renovation in the late 90s whenever I first started where they just kind of recaped the bath house. They took off the bridge beam roof structure and put in an A-frame. And that's basically all I did there. touched the electrical in the building a little bit, but nothing with the pool at that time. And then in 2002, the city had to do a $1.4 million project on Southeast, Southwest Thompson, and Bones Hooks at the time to get them up to standards for Virginia Graham Baker enttrapment. So, we were kind of forced to do the renovation at that time. Uh so this is southwest pool and its current configuration bath house pump house splash pad. So this is just some pictures to kind of show some of the things that have occur have occurred over the years to kind of make the place not look so attractive. The different cuts from XL and us and everybody else through the the walk up and the parking lots not in very good shape. So these are some structural issues that are going on on the perimeter of the building, not not necessarily under the foundation, but there's there's significant settling has been occurring for a few years on the exterior where you can see in some places the sidewalks have dropped to about 3 in below the actual slab and

footing of the building. Uh probably 25 years ago, we had an issue with the corner of this is part of the pump house in the center where that building actually fell and we had about a four and a half inch crack down the bottom. So we had to hire a a stability company to come in and raise it up. So I don't really know what's occurring there. These are pictures of just the bath house. So the the coating on the walls obviously is not from 74, but probably pretty close. But all the restroom fixtures, everything is from the original construction day with a few minor improvements like they redid the floors and stuff like that. So we've been into the walls because of uh failing pl failure of plumbing from 1974. This is in the mechanical areas behind so the public doesn't see this. But so all the cast iron, the drains and all of that stuff are, you know, approaching 60. They're 54 years old at this point. Some of the electrical was renovated whenever they did the pool renovations in 2003. Uh but the plumbing in both buildings, Southeast and Southwest, was not touched. It's it's original to when it was constructed. These are just various pictures of the the pump house at Southwest. We have rebuilt the internal parts of all the pool filters at all four facilities when we still had four, but now Southeast and Southwest. So, they're 23 years old. they've they've passed their life expectancy, started to see some failure. So, we internally rebuilt the laterals and and got kept those functional. Uh just more of the infrastructure, the the pool controller is what keeps the the water sanitized and that controller was hanging on that wall when I went to work here in 1998. So, it's long past its its time, but it's we've made it go. So generally the the decks obviously being that old are seeing some wear and

tear, you know, losing some of their slip resistance and you got tow stubbers, stuff like that everywhere. And we did uh it's hard to see the numbers. I think it was September 4th to October 5th or something. We put a yard stick on there to kind of monitor water loss and we lost about four and a half or five inches of water. Obviously, it's dry outside, so some of that's due to evaporation, but the pool does have a leak. So, this picture represents the renovation that occurred in 2003. So, they had to we had three drains to start with, and they had to put four in to incorporate the entrapment issues for Virginia Green Baker. So, they cut the bottom of Southwest and Southeast pool out. And this is what that looked like. And this, the reason I showed this picture is just for reference. In the middle picture, you can see that cut line where they had the bottom cut out. It's it's a grout line filled with hydraulic cement and uh they have a tar. It's I guess it seems kind of rudimentary, but they still use that today. It's a thick piece of tar that they put between the old concrete and the new concrete when they pour and then they grout it in. And the picture on the right is what the old Thompson Park pool used to look like when we pulled the deck off there during those renovations. And the reason I showed that picture is because I think that just looking at how it's constructed, Southwest Pool was done the same way when they put the stainless steel gutter in because it did not have that gutter originally. And this is the deep end currently. If you can see that that crack basically runs the outline of that saw cut that was in the bottom of the pool from 03 on the right. And the one on the left is a it's a crack that runs from the outside corner of the deep end across the shallow end. And it it is present at both pools. And it's because of kind of like a cantaliever effect. The deep end of the pool is weighing and pulling on the shallow end. So it's probably an

engineering flaw, design flaw. But anyway, those that crack goes through the surface of the pool all the way across. It's been patched. And then when we were walking around, we saw this crack in the corner of this piece of deck that kind of looked ominous. So, we knocked it out and found that there's a void underneath the deck. This is on the the uh corner of the deep end at the red circle depicts. So, we that tape measure goes in 16 inches down and then likeund I can't see it from here, but it's significant.

120. So, we went ahead and removed that piece of concrete. The one on the right is the one near the deep end. The one on the left is about 100 linear feet around the pool down. So, we just went down kind of exploring to see if this void was contending around the pool. And obviously, it is. The picture that's on the left, you really can't see it, but there's a big chunk of concrete under the the top or the coping, and that's called the pool the pool bond beam. basically keeps the the internal or the entire structure sound. And there's a pretty good size crack in that in that corner where that void was. And the reason I showed the picture earlier of the Thompson pool, the gutter is like basically a coal joint in concrete where they just set that stainless steel on top of there with no kind of backing to contain the water. So once the seal fails between the stainless steel gutter and the concrete, then the water's going through. There's the crack that's in that beam. It could be very significant or it could be maybe not too significant. Would probably obviously need some more an engineer probably to look at it. And this is underneath the heading towards the diving board. This is the big void. So I don't know how far down that goes. The only reason why it stops is because there's a monolithic pore where the diving board sits. So, we've looked at uh cost for plaster and just equipment. So, all the pool equipment, the pumps and everything are 23 years old, basically at the end of their life expectancy or have surpassed it. So, 450,000 for plaster and then 325 for equipment upgrades. and that doesn't do anything to address anything that that we just talked about.

So, as we move forward, if if repairs were to be made, we're going to obviously have to fill in voids, concrete deck, and those are just unknown. As we would open it up, obviously we would get the full scope of what those repairs would would need. But obviously from what we've seen is it's pretty significant around that structure. So, and again, like Brad said, this still leaves us as an old rectangular pool. It doesn't address anything. It just basically puts a band-aid on it.

Okay. Southeast is is a little older. 1965. It had a renovation in ' 87, and I do not know what that consisted of. Um they they had fiberglass liners when I came to work here. So, that could have been they went from gun out to a fiberglass liner in ' 87, but I'm not sure. Same renovations happened to the bath house. Only difference is is they reconfigured the footprint of the building to make it more user friendly and and but uh electrical was upgraded but the plumbing is all galvanized. So uh you can imagine what 60-y old galvanized plumbing is doing inside the walls. So when we when we turn everything on for the spring, we have to to flush rust and all of that. So, same thing with the upgrades from 2003 and at that time we added that area that's to the would be the northwest that's kind of a triangular shape to zero entry. We they added that to Southeast pool and obviously it dramatically increased the attendance at that facility and and did so for a long time. I mean Southeast was the parking lot was running over most of most every day for the summer. uh just more kind of infrastructure stuff, the parking lots, you know, everything that is, you know, 60s something years old and and it hasn't been resurfaced or patched in my tenure for 28 years. The structure itself at Southeast, as far as the building goes, is actually in better shape than the one at Southwest, even though it's older. U despite the plumbing inside the walls will be the the downfall there. The concrete decks the same. It's in the same condition. It's 60 year old concrete that's cracking and losing its luster for sure. We did the same thing with the leak detection. Uh just some more general pictures of the facility.

Let's see. So two years ago we did upgrade the plumbing fixtures at Southeast and redid the flooring paint job, fixed some drywall on the ceilings. Uh made made some improvements. So, they use pecs and stuff on the exterior parts, but they did not address anything in the walls in the ceiling that's still galvanized from 1965. That's the That's a picture of the men's locker room. It it they did a really nice job and improved it from an aesthetic standpoint, but so that's just depicting some of the the galvanized plumbing coming up from the floor. same old pool controllers, 23-y old pull pump. Uh we've had the these pipes here are in the summertime when the sun comes up, it hits those pipes directly. So, it's caused failures in the glue joints. So, we've replmeded a lot of that internally and then you can see some just last minute patches to try to shure up some dripping and stuff that's going on. So, southeast deck, same way. So this is where they I showed these for reference kind of. So they cut the pool beam off. That's what that picture on the left is a saw that basically run the length of the pool all the way around and cut the top off so they could add that zero entry. And then this is where they is this the video?

I think so. Yeah. How do you play it? You should Stephanie. Is there way you can hit play? This is kind of out of place, but so this is the crack that they opened up in May when we were trying to open that kind of at this point looks like it goes to infinity. You can't really see the end of it, but this is right along that saw cut line from that renovation in 2003. So, the reason I showed that crack at Southwest is because we feel pretty confident that we saw this happen at Southeast. So, it's probably happening at Southwest as well.

And then this one might show it a little bit more extensively. Go one more.

So, this is after they had removed and kind of opened it up to see what we're dealing with. And You can't really lights and all you couldn't really see. So that right there is the suction line from the main drains that goes up to the pool. We wound up putting about 4 and 1/2 yards of flow fill in this void before it finally stopped. So this is what it looked like in 2003. And that's and you saw what it looks like now. So it follows that same footprint. So obviously the the renovation or whatever happened in 03 failed. If you look at the way they did the concrete on the top after they cut the beam off, they basically reoured it and they put a back set. So the stainless steel gutter that's there now sits where that concrete form is. So even if water penetrates through where the gutter is, it can't leave the pool. So Southeast theoretically can't leak from the top. Not saying that. I mean, it's always potential, but theoretically, it can't leak from the top. And that's how Southwest should have been done, but I do not believe it was. It looks like it's just basically set on top. These are some more of the plaster issues. So, this is where they put the zero entry on. So, that was the transition from old concrete to new that is failing that's been patched numerous times. And this is the same crack I was explaining at Southwest. It's on the outside corner of the deep end that has that kind of cantaliever weighted effect. And this it runs all the way the pool and up the wall. And this one has been opened up and it's verified that it goes it penetrates the the structure and it's been patched a few times. But obviously it's just a patch. And then this just kind of shows the end result minus the dirty water. The end result of the patch that they put on it in May so we could open the pool which it it still seems to be intact. It hasn't it doesn't look like it's

separated anymore. And then you have the same the same plaster cost involved equipment and all of that. And all that does is just, you know, puts a band-aid on the top and doesn't address anything that's going on. So, I'm not an engineer or anything, but you could, you know, you can see just the money piling up if you look at renovating these. And the issue is that they're they're at the end of their life cycle basically as a concrete pool. So, you know, because once you put one in, they basically start kind of destroying themselves from day one. Um but I think that's about the end of my presentation.

So we also provided just some some highle information and I know we've shared with this with council in the past um just in terms of admissions concessions revenue number of attendees. Um so when you start looking at Southeast pool the total revenue for the year was 63,000 for Southwest it was 51,000 compared to Thompson which was 240. um you start looking at uh total number of attendees, Thompson 31,000. Uh but we also pulled numbers from obviously some of the competition in that area because that was one of the conversations is what do you do with Southwest Pool specifically because there's other um providers in that area. So we got the numbers from the town club. Um both of their pools are about 20,000 attendees and then obviously the cap is uh just under 50. So, uh, that's just a reference point in terms of revenue versus, uh, kind of those expenses. Um, and then just kind of timeline, we start trying to hire in January. So, we're just trying to figure out what the appropriate next step is. Any of these repairs, replastering would probably result in a closure for a while because that's a pretty significant amount of work that needs to be done. Um, and then ultimately we probably need to start having conversations with the park board about splash pads because we're starting to get to the end of life with a lot of those splash pads as well. So, as we start talking about aquatics, we know that that's something that's uh coming up as well. But we'd be happy to answer any questions. Obviously, Brad's here to answer any questions on uh this the assessment, the structural side. Um, happy to answer anything.

Michael, on the uh souththeast pool and southwest pool, we have revenue numbers. What's what's the cost roughly just to run? I think Do you remember the numbers, Becky? I think it was about half a million to run them, right?

130,000 each each. Okay. So, even with the revenue, we're still at a 70 $80,000 loss. Thank you. And thanks for doing the the the look yourself. question. Okay, councilman. Well, this our pools make the civic center look like a Taj Mahal. I mean, we've got some problems over there. Just a different scenario, you know, it's got it's basically eating itself up. Yes.

You know, all the time with the chemicals and whatnot. what what's been the you know so I know that we see Thompson Park has has got much higher usage and that type of thing but when you look at our parks combined what's been the trend on uh pool usage last 5 10 years has it going up going down staying steady I

I think generally we've seen a slight decline obviously Thompson has continued to do really well I think it actually was up over last year but I think with with southoutheast specifically I think we've seen a decline southwest we've seen a decline we saw a little bit of a bump with some of those amenities we added in. Um, and I know last year we had some issues with Southwest just because of the staffing. So, because it was our lowest revenue pool when we were short staffed, that was the area that generally we would close first. So, the numbers on Southwest were a little bit lower than this year because we were able to fully staff this year. I think the the trend is on swimming pools is the type of pools that these two pools are are not the people don't people don't want that anymore because it's just you know all everything's modern and the splash pads and the moving water and all the water features and we just don't you know we don't offer that. So we're basically have we have a big open water area that you know in southwest doesn't have any uh a tot area anymore. So, you know, you're talking about little kids in the shallowest waters, four feet deep. So, it's just not usable and just not desirable anymore. It just doesn't have the use that newer, more modern facilities do.

And I think we're also seeing that's a trend nationally. I know Levitic closed their three pools and came back with splash pads. I think that's been more of the trend. Now, the one downside with splash pads is it doesn't serve the teenage population as much as it does the younger population. So, you know, if if you close a pool, you may lose activities for some of those teenagers that may not want to go to a splash pad. But the general trend is it's getting harder and harder to find lifeguards. More and more cities are going away from pools just because they're an operating expense. Uh, and the revenues just generally don't keep pace as much.

Well, I guess I mean, if you're looking at investing in in pools or replacing them, to me it's like, is there a demand for it? Would we see it? I mean if we invest it but looks like to me just to take it back up to to standard million and a half two million minimum and then could be more depending on what you find underneath when you when you look underneath. So um you know I mean I seems a long runway to get get a recoup on investment for for that type of investment just to bring it back to to to normal. Yeah. And again that's just keeping it the way it currently is that current layout that doesn't really modify it or make it or enhance it in any way. So that's just restoring it back to what it is.

And and uh I guess the park boards have recommended you know considering if we do away with those two replacing it with some other type of facility either indoor or outdoor. Yeah. Do you any specifics on that? Any any I mean what did those and I'm sure there's a range but what do those types of things cost? What do they provide? How do they cost recover? What do you have to have in them to to make them successful?

Yeah, I think those are things we would look at if that's obviously the direction from council. I think obviously they made two recommendations. Number one was to close it. That was an 8-1 vote. And then they had a 90 to look at what could be a replacement in the future. Now, what that looks like, whether it's an indoor facility, you know, whether it's like a water park, whether it's an addiator, all of those different factors would come into the play as we try to evaluate what would be a good solution moving forward. So, we can look at some options. Obviously, when we replaced Thompson, it was between 7 and 8 million. I think with construction costs, you're probably looking in the 10 to 12, 12 to 15 at this point. So, as a point of reference, that's what what Thompson was.

You know, my question is, have we had Pothole Cole look at this? Looks like he might might be a good job for him. Yep. Pothole Cole is a man of many talents, but got some experience. Stand by, council member. I think we're about to hear it. I know what a bond beam is, and that one didn't look good. So now um if we if we looked at you know I know uh the board's recommendation was to probably abandon these and and stop what what is the cost per year to run each of these? It's about $130,000 for each of these pools and then you get a little bit of revenue back. Chemicals payroll uh just the lifeguards that about 130 each.

Okay. And then if we looked at, I know we did the aquatic survey and if we looked at uh you know splash pads or whatever, splash pads are a zero revenue, right? And there's no charge for them. They're just out there at the parks like just as a quality of life. Quality of life. Um versus this as a pay to go. Um would would we look at and maybe this is too early to ask this, but if we if we looked at going away from these pools, would we look at putting the splash pads somewhere in those areas? Like what I mean, have there been any studies on that? Like where the like is the demand there for some type of aquatic? You know

what I would say is when we start looking at our park system and we look at the master plan, I think the one thing that it's it communicates over and over is we've got too many assets spread out over too many parks. Kind of the theme of the master plan was you need to bring and build bigger amenities in those regional parks and and create that as your gathering places. So Thompson, John Stiff, Southeast, you know, Rick Klein, those types of facilities. um that would allow you to to concentrate all that activity in those bigger parks and have more activity geared around it. So it the recommendation I think from staff would be if we're going to do this, you would put it in those bigger regional parks. Uh it also allows us to then look at what we do with the end of life on those other splash pads that are starting to get close to that point as well. So um again I think we we know that water safety is a big deal. Uh and that's something obviously we think is very important. We've started offering year round uh swimming lessons at Warford to help facilitate that. So it's not just a seasonal thing. Now it's a year- round thing. Um and so we know that there is a need for that safety piece which we feel like we're providing through the Warford activity center.

Okay.

I think that um it's from a safety standpoint, we need to scrap both of these these pools. And I think that we should really take a look at an indoor facility that we could use for high school swim meets, different things like that. in in conjunction with the project that you presented prior to this agenda item because we we have a great need in the city for a a good aquatics swimming facility for competition and then that would meet it. But also indoor we only have what uh 90 days 100 days of weather that's hospitable to swim outside. So whatever we spend we need to spend that we can use year round and I think that would help the seniors too. I think that'd give them a spot to go and uh get some exercise. So, it's market share, right? I mean, it's a business uh over there and you got so many people and they've got choices where they want to go. What's our What's our pay scale? What's my admission fee over at Southeast?

Southeast. You $5. $5. And down at Thompson, eight maybe. Seven.

Seven. Okay. Um what if um what if we try to to to look at something? You guys have probably thought of this already. So So let's say we we need to um remove two pools shortterm. Uh go ahead and and take the initiative and the leadership to to close down Southeast and Southwest. Or let's say you went ahead and you you did the the maintenance that you needed to on Southeast. you consolidate from Southwest, close that one down, take it a year at a time, then you give yourself another year knowing you're going to remove the second pool. Um either either of those like can you provide transportation from Southeast Pool uh to Thompson during uh operating season?

That's something we'd have to work with transit on to see if they have a route that would go that direction. just curious in looking at spending money to try to keep quality of life. You know, the the big issue is neighborhood vicinities. And so if you think about the issue if these were free pools and they truly were civic and we just offered this as something from the city, but for you to pay say $5 or $7, whatever Prescott's going to move the rate to um this next year, it's going to be real competitive with the town club or any of the other ones. So from that point, I think as long as the the the market's being met, which you could easily say there's there's market being met over at Southwest, but on the southeast side of town, you maybe don't have anything close. And so if you were looking neighborhoods and things like that, I can tell Tips doesn't like the idea already, but just trying to offer free transportation from that pool site um to Thompson. if you're going to our uh our pool, can we just more or less target that neighborhood area of being able to get them to Thompson Park? Not the best idea, but just something in kind of working towards what what is staff what was the parks board uh opinion on closing one and consolidating versus closing two same time.

Ultimately, they decided to recommend closing both. There was some discussion about potentially keeping one open like a southeast. Um, again, I think the question just becomes the amount of money that the council and the staff is willing to put into it. You know, if we're looking at a million dollars to keep it open for a year or two years, I think that's where ultimately they said we just need to move forward and close it. Uh, unless there's a longer term plan because again, if you're investing a million dollars to keep it running one one season or two seasons, is is it worth the squeeze? So, I I think ultimately that's where we've wrestled with this with the park board for multiple years of what do you do because we know it serves our community. Um, but at some point you have to figure out is is it worth putting a million dollars into a structure that is is uh starting to fail.

That was my point.

That was your point. Um, well was a good point. So, um, on the Natiatorum and looking at the 30 acres of of that's a really large aggressive development. You know, 30 acres is a lot. And so, looking at the market and how long you would plan on that, I mean, maybe that's a 10 to 15 year buildout over there to get through three phases. I don't know on the commercial side. I'd have to see how many square feet you could really put in there. But if you had an incentive of any sort and you were able to put in something where maybe that that area is designed for that natiatorum space and it would be at a no charge. Um so the city's still not having to go and and put out a bond or trying to raise taxes to build that. We are attracting somebody else that wants to build it, own it, run it, kind of charge for it. I mean, you have a demand here that that nobody meets and it could be easily offset with with some land uh that and and infrastructure needs. So, is that anything you'd want to give consideration to working with your consultant?

Absolutely. Obviously, we always want to look at what the needs of the community are, how we can solve them in different ways, and I think that could be a really good solution. Obviously, as we look at that site, fitness, recreation, that's one of the prime uses that we're proposing there. Uh so obviously if that fits within that development scheme then obviously we would highly recommend that. So again we'd have to run the numbers to see financially how it works but absolutely consider it. Okay council you want to give direction on this one. What's your what's your direction sir? I would get rid of the two pools and do a study to see what we could do on an indoor facility. Uh,

I think we already have a consultant that maybe would be are they qualified to to lend to that or would they need to reach out? There's a couple other things that we've kind of got in the work. So, we'll let us visit internally. We've got a couple of ideas that we're already kicking around. Okay. So, council, if there is some guidance on closing the two pools, we will bring it back to you as an official action item and uh that way we can officially act on closing those two pools for indefinitely. Okay. Question. Are they even safe to operate at this point?

Probably not in the current state. Not with the voids behind the wall at the the bond beam at Southwest. I mean, you know, you could potentially have a catastro catastrophic failure there. And then obviously with the the deep end on both of them the way they are, the pools were bonded electrically in 2003. So that doesn't really worry me too much unless that where that bomb beam is broke. if it broke that bond would be an electrical hazard. But the plaster is rough on your feet currently. I mean, it cuts your feet. But yeah, doing the plaster job on them at this point is, you know, if they were 30 years old, probably makes sense. But

60 and 54 years old, I would say that in their current state, they're probably not safe to operate. Well, and I think the other thing we don't know is where's all that water going? We we can see the voids, but we don't know where that water is actually ending. So if if nothing's done, if no money's poured into this for repairs, you're not comfortable opening them up. If we do nothing, don't dump any money into that. You're not comfortable opening them up in May? No, sir. I'm not. Okay. Is there like a TDLR group that inspects pools or is there an inspection process on our insurance? Not that I'm aware of. Okay.

I mean, our our stuff is usually reviewed by environmental health for environmental health reasons. just for the water chemistry and stuff like that, but not structurally for that amount of water. How many gallons are these pools? About 350,000 each. It's a lot of water going through a void with people in it. Yes, sir. Thank you. Councilman, you have anything left? No, I I I'm in agreement. I think I think it's okay. Uh it's a tough one. I mean, it's no fun, but um I we sit on a strong team and I think we got good count good counsel up here and good staff willing to walk out some of the the ins and outs of this. So, thank you for the presentation. Thank you, sir.

Okay. So, 64 65 update on CIP projects. Mr. Hooper, you're up. Thank you, Mayor and Council. I have some incentives to get this done in about 20 minutes, so I'm going to try to push through as best I can with this. 15 if possible.

Yeah. Start the clock. Um we're really proud to come to you tonight and present this item because uh this is regarding our comprehensive update on our capital improvements program, but it the work that we're going to be presenting to you tonight represents about 13 and a half months of work with many commitments from many staff members. We've we've added some to the tables up here. Lori will join us in a moment as well because we want you to be able to have your questions answered at the end of this. But over the last year, uh, a little bit better than a year, um, internally, external audits that we've gone through, uh, all those processes, reviews have confirmed what we already knew that our accounting for bond funds was accurate, complete, free of misappropriations and things of those nature. But those audits did reveal some, it made clear to us that we had some opportunities for improvements, and we took that to heart. And so we've spent that time period uh really going over how we address our CIP projects. Uh all the things that were brought up in those audits and those communications conversations with Mr. Path when he arrived on what he wanted to see with our CIP and we really went to work. And so at the end of this presentation, you're going to have some time for some questions. Um I really hope that you'll let me get through this before we get to the questions instead of stopping us in the middle only because I think we're going to be able to answer most of your questions as we go through this. But if not, we'll stay here all night long and answer questions if that's what it is. But I, Mayor, you said this earlier. You said we want to run this like a business. And y'all said this a lot. And I think this presentation tonight is a good example of us running things like a business. The way we've treated this, we've recognized that there are some things that that needed some improvement and we've certainly done that. So, I want to give you a little bit of history and I want to do that for a reason because I think we have two new council members that are up here that didn't go through this process. So, it's for their benefit, but it's also to refresh your memory as well. Prop one funding uh became an issue. 2016, voters approved

$89.5 million in bonds to to fund work on streets and some other infrastructure needs. There were three of those general obligation bonds that were issued. 12.9 million March of 2017, 19.4 million in July of 2018, and then 57.2 million issued in 2021. Well, in 2022, if you remember, we had our Partners for Development Progress, our PDP committee that was uh there was some questions that came up and they said, "Hey, we're asking to look for more money for streets. We're looking for more improvements for streets, but what happened to the funding and the projects that were never completed with Prop One." That's where the conversations really started was in those PDP meetings. I was a part of those and got to see that unspent funds were reported to council in early 2024 and most of the funds were allocated to projects but there was remaining uh money that was unspent on those projects. So let's fast forward to 2024 a little further down the line. This led to further council discussions regarding prop one funding questions regarding incomplete projects and funding. 2024 we conducted an internal audit at the request of city council to look at those CIP projects and to look at or to look at prop one and to look at the funding of that. The results of that audit uh came back that the accounting for the bond funds were executed properly that no bond funds were missing, none were misappropriated or misapplied. The actual balance of the accounts were correct and pure and also council then requested and paid for an external forensic audit to true that up as well. So in July of 2024, DFG Forensic Accounting Services was contracted to conduct a forensic audit. So they analyzed activity uh from the beginning of that bond uh 2016 to March of 2024 in the accounting process of that bond series. They had several goals that were in that audit and one was the status of Prop One, the balance of each of those bonds. Are there any missing funds? What funds are remaining and does it match accounting records and internal

audit documents? They also investigated menray, which is a true term. That's a legal term. Categories of intent, knowledge, reckless conduct, andor reckless negligence. Then uh and that kind of breaking down what that is. information revealing potential of committing a crime or the information revealing the concealment of a crime, evidence of fraud associated with records, documentations that would present evidence that a person or persons were looking to gain something financially from it. So that was the goals of the audit. The audit came back and they found that there was no predication probable cause that would show any intent or knowledge on any part of any employee of the city of Amarillo or that any employee was benefiting personally from the funds. They also concluded that the accounting for the bond funds was executed properly. there were no bond funds missing, misappropriated, or misapplied. They also concluded that the actual balance in the account in question contained the $34.6 million that should be in the account. DFD's findings were consistent with our internal auditor. In fact, there were comments that were made during that presentation that they gave to council that Mr. Gerber's audit was true as well. In fact, the words pure were used in that. One of the quotes from that presentation was the nature of the questions and existing issues have been caused by poor communication, somewhat manual system of documentation tracking and lack of utilization of available project tracking software. That quote right there is what put us to work the things that we needed to work on that we needed to get fixed. So it also revealed too that there were many project transfers and the quote was more than necessary. It also was mentioned that the transfers were properly executed within the accounting system but more than necessary. Noted that the ability to transfer between projects was executed legally, finances were tracked properly. Uh the auditor actually used the word pure when he described that as well. He also noted that the documentation was completed properly and revealed that the communication regarding funds allocated versus funds available needed improvement. That's

really where to us the problem began was just a different terminology. And this we'll talk about this later as we get uh into the presentation about uh you know maybe CPNDE or engineering using the words uh fund but it was actually what was allocated to projects and then finance using different terms for that. It also revealed that the transfers created some confusion between CPND and finance departments partly due to the visibility of information or antiquated software systems we were using also partly due to the overall mutual understanding of allocated funding that was available uh allocated funding versus available funding. So we had some work to clean up on our end because of that. The audit recommendations came back and this is what they told us. They said you need to create a system of dual authorization for any transfers of funding between projects. And it's not funding between funds or transfers between funds, it's between projects. They also recommended that project management software, which we call Ebuilders on our side, should be utilized on all projects. We had Ebuilders at the time and Ebuilders was not being used uh to its full extent, not even close to it. Financial software uh workday should be utilized in place of old technology such as edocs and JD Edwards. That was another one of the recommendations. And then improved processes of communication should occur. Financials centralized in the workday program, our project management centralized in the ebuilder program. And then a 360°ree optics of both of those programs being able to be seen by everyone and also the possibility them working together as well. So when you have everyone that's involved in capital project management, whether it be on the financial side or whether it be on the CP&D side or the people that are actually managing those projects out there have full visibility to everything that's going on. So we took those recommendations and as I mentioned you know we we started working on this about 13 and a half months ago to ensure that we were making some meaningful improvements to our software systems the

funding of CIP the way that we manage the CIPs with a heavy emphasis on global communications between the departments between management between council between the citizens all of that to make improvements uh as suggested by the forensic auditor. So, we developed those changes starting out with this in November 2024. I was just promoted to assistant city manager and Grayson Path tasked me with two big things, two big items that you need to work on that I'm going to charge you with right now. The first one is the Prop One issues. Expending those funds uh on time to get the Prop One projects finished and done and out of the way. Also to evaluate the communication issues that were occurring with Prop 1 as well. uh and and looking at the software, everything that was associated with Prop One that the auditor suggested and that we also saw internally that needed to be fixed with that. Secondly, to ensure that the drainage bond projects that we had out, the 42 million for that that this council blessed us with to to create some great projects was managed, constructed, and capitalized on time. So, we started right away with that. We came back to council. we presented to you that we had this list of 13 projects. So, we had to narrow down to the three major projects, four major projects we're working on right now. I presented that to you. You were very acceptant to that because we want to change the way we're doing uh business and we'll talk about that a little bit as later on as well. So, myself, Laura Stores, it's really weird looking. I had to write it this way for historical purposes, but myself and Laura, we started working immediately to evaluate all the CIP activity and processes. Not only that, but we also incorporated a lot of other people in those conversations. Develop improvements based on internal audit and forensic recommendations. So in January of 2025, this was one of the greatest promotions I've ever been a part of. We promoted Jerry Danforth to managing director of CPND or we call engineering we're going to refer it to. I tasked him with evaluating all the processes that we have over on that side of it and to look

at that and see what changes needed to be made and how capital projects need to be managed and tracked particularly with that e-builder software. It was very important for him to do that and he's done a great job of that and him and his staff have. We also created internal practices for transfers and job closures because we realized that that's something that doesn't need to continue in the manner that it was continuing in. Again, the audit said it was legal and it was all good to go, but we did not like the way that those processes were being handled, especially between the different departments. And then third, we be lastly, we began closing out jobs with any remaining funds that had no activity. We also uh determined that all CIP projects need to be presented to CPNDE or engineering before they start. This is something we haven't done in the past. We would have different departments doing different CIP projects without C without uh CPNDE knowing about that. Well, now if you're going to use the Ebuilder software properly, uh everything at least needs to be vetted through CPNDE so they can decide are you going to need a consultant for this? Can we engineer this inhouse? Are your cost estimates accurate for this? How are you going to manage this project? And so on and so forth. And so those things have already started happening. Job transfer practice now requires a six-step approval process. And remember the recommendations from the auditor were that we have a dual authentication or or double uh approval process in place. Instead, we created a six-step approval process. And I was talking to the mayor about this just earlier this afternoon that this process is going to make it really difficult. You're going to really have to have a very, very, very good reason to transfer from a project to another project. First of all, it's going to have to be presented to the director. Then, it's going to have to be presented to the CIP committee, and I'll tell you about that in just a moment, which is another improvement we made. Then, it's going to have to be reviewed by the ACM that's over that department. If it makes it

past that, it's going to have to go to the CFO, and the CFO is going to have to approve it. Should that happen, it'll go back to the ACM to go to Grayson Path for approval from him. Once that happens, then it would come to council for full approval of that. We've seen this happen one time since we started this process and we brought something back to you. It was a few months ago that went through this exact process, but that's the only one. There hasn't been any since then that have gone through that process. Ebuilder software fully implemented, visible to all. We're starting to work through that now. And I say it's fully implemented and that's probably not the correct statement. It is being fully implemented right now. uh they are working through that making and it's in it's an incredible piece that we're going to be able to use and I'll show you a screenshot from that here in a moment. Workday is being fully implemented. Multi-step approvals and workday too. So if you do have some kind of a transfer, you have some kind of a project you're working on. Not only do you have to go through our internal processes, but you're also going to have to go through the processes that are behind the door before you can have access to that money. And that's the approvals that happen in workday. That's multi-step as well. debt issued for design only on large capital projects. That is something that we are working hard on and I think it's I'll go back and use the drainage piece. For example, we issued $42 million in debt for 13 drainage projects and we really didn't know what they were going to cost. We should be issuing debt for only the design of those projects. And if we design 13 of them, great. We find out we only have enough money left to construct four of those, great. Then we'll construct the four. Now we have another nine projects that are ready to go, design ready. Uh maybe we get a grant for one of them. Maybe we don't. But but at least the design is ready for that. And when you get design done, you all know that you get to that 30% mark. Now you have at least a good idea of what that project is really going to cost you. So another change we've made, debt for construction, as I just mentioned, at 30% of design, uh which then gives you a very accurate number, a much

better accurate number to bring to you before we move forward. So we created very proud of this group and all the work that they've done over the last year. As you can see, this group has a variety of members. This is what we call our CIP sync committee. The reason I call it sync is because this is an opportunity for us to synchronize, collaborate. We bring people from all across the board, members from accounting, finance, public infrastructure, city management uh have to solve any issues that come up uh when it comes to CIP projects to discuss those more in depth to talk about our funding to talk about closing out project capitalizing projects. We discuss those in those meetings. Uh there another important piece to this uh just to show you the CIP sync committee. We do meet once a month. We'll meet more than that if we need to. And this will stay in place until somebody tells us that it doesn't need to be in place anymore. I think this is the model we want to use moving forward because we can collaborate, communicate, we can justify everything that we're doing before we bring it out here to you uh for approval or even before it goes to Mr. Path for approval. So, one other thing that I thought was important here is this group creates a level of accountability for everybody that's involved. And more importantly, as you see that somebody's on that list, named our internal auditor. The internal auditor has an opportunity here to be able to see, and they're an observer that sits in this room to watch all of our processes. They can document all of these meetings. Unell is going to be able to take all that information, created monthly reports, turn those into quarterly reports that we can come out and give to council. So you, should you desire to see quarterly reports on our CIP projects, we should be able to do that very easily. And that's something that we haven't been able to do before, but all because of this. And then and then lastly on his part, I was meeting with Unell last week and he said, "This is going to be very valuable for me when we get ready for our internal audit because I'll have everything done for the entire calendar year or fiscal year. I can hand it to our auditors and say, "Here's all of our CIP activity for the year. I've already notated, documented,

you can check the numbers." So, I think the level of accountability for that is huge. some of the other new processes that we're working on right now. Well, one of the things that we've we've worked on really hard, and this is probably the biggest one, is closing out capital projects uh that had little activity in them that had funding in it that didn't have funding in it. Each department was tasked with walking through and reporting back what items could be cleared out of all of that large list of CIP projects that we had. So, all the departments were directed to evaluate those. We we do that through our open jobs report. They were to determine the status of each of those projects. They were to ensure that all assets have been properly capitalized and then they were to close out any jobs that had any funds remaining in them that were not be that were not active anymore. bond funded projects transferred to bond reserve bond reserve job if we will we'll call it that for allocations to those projects because as you know you can only spend the bond funds on what that bond is designed to be spent on all others to be closed to transferred to reserves in whatever fund that that was in these steps require four levels levels of approvals and coordination with the CIP committee before any of that can happen as well so we've been exercising that for a long time now and that's the reason we're here presenting to you today as we've we've finished that. Well, I say we finish that project. You got to remember today's a time stamp. Today's a a a date in time that is going to continue to move. We don't stop working on CIP projects. We don't stop spending money. We don't stop adding new CIP projects as we go into the next budget year. So, let's talk a little bit about software improvements, the Workday and Ebuilder programs. And I'm going to bring Laura up to talk a little bit about Workday. But if you remember from the forensic audit, one of the things they recommended in there is that we use both and utilize both these softwares in place of the older software that we were using. JD Edwards, which I I hated JD Edwards because I I couldn't get around in it very well. Other people loved it. Edoc was another one that I struggled with, but Workday is a is a is a great

piece of software to use and so is Ebuilders. Let's talk a bit about Ebuilders. I'm going to run you through that a little bit. Jerry and his team have spent a significant amount of time in Ebuilders working through that to making needed improvements in the way that we document our projects and he's done a really phenomenal job and I have to mention Tony's name because Tony is the one that's been charged with all this and making sure that projects are starting to get entered into Ebuilders as we go. So what is Ebuilders? It's a cloud-based program. It manages information uh built specifically for capital projects. It keeps all the information. This would be the cost, the schedules, the documents, contract data, changes, approvals, all in one place instead of spread out uh amongst desperate systems that have all this different a spreadsheet here and a spreadsheet there. This this keeps it all in one single location. Tracks funding, budgets, change orders and keep the key word of that is tracks. This is not the budgeting software, but it tracks it. change orders, actual costs, transparency, which is really crucial when we're dealing with these public funds, grants, bonds, and audit reporting, uh, requirements. It also provides great transparency, uh, easy reporting to stakeholders for you to be able to see this. And once we get it built out, you will be able to see, you'll be able to go into Ebuilders, and I know Mr. Sherlin is here. One of the things Mr. Sherlin asked us for was dashboards. He wants to be able to see these projects live as they are. Well, we're working through that, and we're fixing to get there. This is a dashboard example that we built. This is the first one they worked on. This is Georgia Street. Let me tell you about what this what this has. And you can see in real time the actuals. You can see that and and I might note this is a very complex project because if you look at the funding sources in that first box on the top left over there and that's not that's not populated yet with data but that has grant funding, street improvement fund, bond construction fund, the water and sewer fund and the

drainage utility fund all funding one single project. So that's part of the communication piece. That's hard. It's easy for the finance people to see all that, but for us it's really difficult on the other side of that to see exactly how all that tracks. Now we have that. Each of those has to be accounted for. And again, all this is done in real time. You can see the schedule down at the bottom left of the phases of the project. And that'll scroll. You can scroll all the way through that every phase of that project. And then you see the speedometers on the right that show you what we paid so far to KSA Engineering, what their total contract is. You can see what we paid to LA Fuller and Suns, what their total contract amount is, and where we're at on that. When we get this finished, we plan to have all of our capital projects that are active in this system and working. That's going to be a mighty task. There's a lot of those projects uh to put in there, but we know that the more familiar we get with this software and building this Georgia Street one out is really given us a lot of confidence that that's going to happen. So, uh hang on for that and and give us a little bit of patience on that. So, with that said, that's what Ebuilders is. That's how it works. I'll let Laura talk about the uh software for workday as well.

Good evening, mayor and council. So, I I'll just um go through some information about our workday software. So, for council members that are newer, if um we haven't fully explained our workday software. Um I'm going to tell you a little bit about what it is. It's our financial software. It's our rec our official records. It's it's the books. It's what is audited. Um, and it's what's reported on by our auditors. It's the official records that we have to submit for grant reporting. Um, any other type of um, reporting for federal or state law, all of it comes out of our financial software, which is workday. Um, as a reminder, we went live with this software on January 1st of 2025. We have not even made it through a calendar year yet on this new software. But leading up to that, it t it took us a good two to three years of planning um implementation, mapping, working with consultants. Um it is a huge huge lift for an entity of our size um to convert from one financial software to another financial software. And I'm going to ask Katrina, but I think we have something like 16,000 lines in our general ledger. And so that is not a push a button and it goes from this software to that software. It is a huge undertaking by our team. Um, our financial staff has worked diligently on this over the last several years while trying to maintain their day-to-day operations. We did not add staff for this or um we did work with consultants but our team did the heavy lifting while trying to continue managing the day-to-day operations um on the financial side. So workday is um it does fund accounting and reporting. Um it is our official reporting software. Um we do have project accounting in it and management of projects in this software. We do have our asset

management in it. So we track all of our assets. We were have depreciation set up inside of this. Um, and then we also have management reporting and analysis tools inside this software that are currently still in development. When we went live on day one, we were not fully functional in every aspect of this software. This will take us years to fully continue developing this software. And so we um are are working as quickly as we can. Um, and I know I appreciate the patience of all of our especially our directors over the um the past several years or I'm sorry over this past year because we have not had reporting where we've wanted it. However, our reporting is already getting better than what we had in our prior financial software. That was an issue we had in our prior financial software which also created some of the complications that we encountered through our capital projects because there were not good reports that could be generated out of that software program. So we would basically export information out and then have to hand work through spreadsheets in order to get the data in a usable way that we could use um pass it along to our project managers. So, as Donnie mentioned, we are still continuing to finish developing workday and then the plan will be to link it directly with eBuilder. So, it has more of the dashboard reporting um to make things even more visible at every step of the way through the project management side of things. Um the one of the other great things that our workday software has is for project management purposes. This is beyond just project management. This is, you know, payments, um, receipts, all various things. We have multiple steps of approvals built into the software with an audit trail that shows exactly who pushed what approval at what time. If there was a question, you can reject it and put notes in there and then

somebody can answer that and send it back through the approval process. These were things we were doing manually with paper in our prior financial software. So this is a huge improvement that we are already utilizing at this point in time. And so when Donnie was talking about the six-step process or whatever, a lot of that's also being done and formally documented through our financial software, which is great. I know you you Neil and his team love it from an internal audit perspective. Our external auditors are going to love it as well. That's always questions we have. We want to see the approvals. We want to know who approved it. Well, it's great because you can't edit those things or change those things because it's all date and timestamped inside that software. So, that's a huge improvement that we have on our workday software. Um, also, um, we are on a software now that is actively being updated as things change with accounting principles or if there's changes to best practices. Um, the software c will continue to be evolved and developed as we go in time. Our prior software that we just came off of on December 31st of 2024 had not been actively developed since I believe it was 2008. I'm looking for Rich. Yeah, 2008. And so we were on old antiquated software that we were basically having to plug in things to try to supplement it because that software was not evolving with the times. Think about the technology in 2008 versus 2024. That's what we were working with. Our team is wonderful and did a fantastic job with the resources they had available. This new software is going to be a gamecher as we continue to evolve it and develop it. Um also another great thing is this software we can add any kind of emails, notes, um handwritten things, um you know any kind

of an attachment inside the project management side of the software as well. So what we were doing previously is you had all your financial records and then there was a whole another system that you would have to save any kind of notes or details or attachments out there to and then pray you had them linked properly and reference prop properly so you could find everything and we and our team did a fantastic job of this. But now it's there inside the software for future use. So as other people take over these roles and you know want to look back at projects, what was going on with this project, they're going to have so much more information attached to those projects going forward. So this is a huge change from the financial end that is still being developed. We are not fully utilizing the software yet. We are working as quickly as we can to but there are more improvements that are coming with this software in the new um in the near future. And I love the notes section of that. When something comes to my desk for approval sometimes and we we go through a lot of approvals every day, we try to look through those and make sure we know what that project is, know what it's about, I can go there and click on the email links that they've attached to that and I can see the full conversations that someone had with this is this project is associated with this. It just quick knowledge to educate you on that. So you don't have to try to store it off here, which is really difficult to do sometimes. I want to run you through I think it would be very beneficial. I don't think we've ever since I've been here ever really done a great job of explaining to the council how we develop CIPs. Um I I think we talk about it during budget and it comes and goes. There's so many other things happening in budget. So I want to take a moment to just walk you through quickly how a CIP is created and you see more levels that you're going to see of approvals that have to happen in this entire process just from the very beginning. So, the first thing that has to happen is a department is going to have to identify a need. And I and I put the word needs on there because we don't ask them to identify wants. If it's a need that you see now or in the future,

5 years down the road, 10 years down the road, you need to be identifying that, getting it to your director, talking to them about that. This is when we start that whole process. There's a lot of CIP conversations are going on. That director and staff will evaluate the cost and the impacts to the organization. They'll also evaluate the impacts of what if we can't get this funded, what are we going to do in the in the meantime so that they can start walking through how we're going to prioritize that before we submit that to our ACM for review. So that comes to an assistant city manager, whoever is over those departments, they begin reviewing all of those CIPs, and it's a large list. Each ACM then reviews and evaluates all projects from their departments. And then the ACMS collaborate together at some point in time. This and this is a this all doesn't happen in a day. This happens over many months. We collaborate, we prioritize, we start aligning goals with council pillars. We also align them with the needs that you've suggested to us. Uh streets is a great example of that. We knew streets is a priority for this council. So we start prioritizing some of those street needs as we look at the full picture, which is again a large list. And this year, just for example, I know that Andrew and I met many many times talking about the priorities that he had versus the priorities that I had and trying to align those with what you as council have told us are your priorities. Uh it's it's a challenging process, but you have to come up with some answers. We have to be able to present something uh for that one-year CIP plan and also a five-year plan that's created as well that shows the projects that are out there. The one-year plan is the one that's funded that you fund during the budget process. Then the finance department is going to confirm the total amount of money that's available for CIPs. Then we have to go back and have a few more meetings because we either have more money than what we thought we were going to have or we have less. And we have to go back and either trim or add some of those projects back to the CIP list and have those conversations all over again as ACM. And then we present those to the

city manager so that he can review those, put his stamp of approval on that, and then we would make our recommendations to city council during budget for that one-year process. The most important part of this is is that city council votes for final approval of the CIP plan for year one every year during the annual budget. So that's your first time that you've approved the CIP. Then all projects are brought back if they're over $50,000 for your approval again when we start that project. Sometimes twice because if we bring back the engineering contract for that project that you approve in the CIP, you're approving that or disapproving that and then you come back with a construction at a later time. And with our new process we're putting in place, I guarantee you're going to see almost all of those projects come back to you twice. So, there's three approvals that council's going to have on any CIP that is going into that year one uh plan. There's never enough money for the CIPs in our five-year plan. And we've had these discussions before. Uh there just never is. And that's not just Amarillo. That's that's anywhere. If you look at the amount of infrastructure you're dealing with in any city that you're at, there's just never enough funding. So when we say we have no excess funds, it's because there's far more projects that are out there than available funding than we have that we know about our departments. The ones that operate those departments, and I think it's critical to know this, too, the people that are operating the wastewater plant, the people that are operating the swimming pools, they are the ones that are presenting to their director what the needs are, and those are being vetted through many levels before they get up to that. So we we know what the needs are. Currently, there's around $1.3 billion dollars of identified projects. Now, the key word is identified projects. They're not in a CIP. Well, they're in a they're in a CIP that's identified at least as a as a fund as a project. There's no funding source for that. They've been identified for planning purposes. And again, going back to what we said at the beginning, if we're going to run it like a business, we need to plan it like a business. And we do a really, really good job of planning what we need for

the next 5 years, for the next 10 years. And I got to I got to throw this in there too. That 1.3 billion that you see there, that does not include anything to do with the wastewater treatment uh facilities at all. That's not those are not even a part of that discussion yet. And so we feel like any excess funding that's identified should be used to fund those projects by staff priority based on the immediate needs. We should make those recommendations to you. you'd be able to look at our recommendation and say, "Okay, yeah, we may have several. We may have several options that we could give to you if we had some funding source for anything that doesn't have funding associated with it." The project priorities often change though depending on critical needs and a reshuffle to meet the priority. I want to bring up an example to show you how that works. Just one year ago from next week, in fact, I think it was December the 14th, the ice plant went down. Y'all remember that at the at the civic center and you knew about it because Mr. Pass was communicating one-on-one with each of you, letting you know what was going on. We lost the ice plant. The hockey season was about to start and everyone was in a panic. Uh because that you can't just go and get a new ice plant down at at the grocery store and bring it in and put it in there. We had to get a portable ice plant from the Dallas Stars. We also had to start working on getting a new permanent ice plant put in there. That was not a CIP, not identified anywhere in our CIP, but it became one rather quickly that week. And we had to make an emergency purchase. We had to make an emergency contract. You were notified of that. We started the process and then we came back. Mr. Path brought that to you as an emergency requisition a couple of council meters meetings later to show you the full amount of that. So, there's transparency associ associated with those projects, but they happen all the time. we have a big sinkhole that happens at 34th in Coulter, you can bet there's going to be a new CIP created that day like that that's not in any plan anywhere. Uh we just weren't

expecting it. So here's here's just a list of just this is a rough list that we just pulled off of uh planning documents that we have from all the different departments. I just put this together from from from the information that I had available to me. And again, this is not stuff that's in year one that's funded in our CIP. I do want to point out a couple things. If you look on the right side, mid page, water distribution, wastewater collection, that's 887 million in there. Again, that does not include wastewater treatment. The reason those numbers are so high is because they're they're the most advanced department we have. Uh William Shannon over here have done an amazing job in putting in asset management software and an asset manager because of everything they manage. If you think about water and wastewater, every manhole, every hydrant, every valve, I mean, it's it's incredible to know how much they have, and that's not including the water plants and the wastewater plants. They have actually catalog those assets. They work through that constantly, the lifespan of each of those assets, when they will need to replace it. So, you're looking at a lot of years out on that, you know, 5 10 years, I don't know, but but they're going to need to be replaced. And they've identified it. They brought it to our attention. And so now we know and we have to start formulating those plans of what's going to be in that one-year CIP to bring uh back to you. But I want to show you that just to show that there's a lot that's out there uh that we don't have any funding sources for. So CIP project closeout. Uh I might mention we we call them jobs. That's what we call them in our in our in our discussions. These projects include capital improvements, which the ones that you would think of such as a a rebuilding of a street or, you know, a new fire truck. The things we talked about tonight, those are normal CIPs that you think of. There are also other CIPs that are construction projects that these are development uh projects, developer agreements that we have, if you will, taps that that occur that used

to occur. We're not doing them anymore, but there's still some taps that were associated with our CIP projects. They're just identified in there so we can track them. But there's no money associated with anything has to do with developer agreements or with those taps and that we can get to. It's not our money to go grab and say, "Okay, well, there's some extra money." Those developer agreements is the asset. So, if it's a million-doll developer agreement, they have that asset listed at a million dollars. That's for the value of the curb and gutter, the value of the pavement, the value of the water lines, the value of the sew lines that that developer is putting in there. So when they finish with that development, we should capitalize those assets and close that job and take it off the books. There were a lot of uh developer agreements that were not closed out in here. The assets were capitalized, but the jobs were still remaining out there. So I want you to know that before we go through this list. So CIP closeout process again uh we talked about staff being able to go back and look at all their projects over this past year. They closed a total of 272 projects uh on that list. 55 of those were developer agreements. There were 36 of those that were TAP agreements which less of and I put that in red because that is city-funded money 111 CIP projects that actually had remaining funds in there. There were 70 other CIP projects they closed out that had no balance. There was no fund remaining on those and they closed those out as well. So you're looking 181 total CIP projects that we closed out on the side that would have any funding or or possibility of any funding in those. Currently we have 442 active projects and you may say man that is a huge list but some of these are smaller items too. We everything that we have that's a capital project is in there in our list to track it. 109 of those are developer agreements. 68 of those are taps and 265 of those

are actually active CIP projects that are city funded uh right now that are on our books. So there was a total of 111 CIP projects closed out with remaining funds. There's 33.9 million is what was uh closed out on those projects. The general construction fund, there were 27 of those projects closed for a total of 2.4 million that was returned to reserves. Water and sewer fund, there were 39 projects, 25.6 million returned to reserves. And all of that was accounted for during the 2526 budget process, and Laura can speak to that in a moment as well. 1.3 million in bond proceeds were released for use out of the water and sewer fund. In the drainage fund, there were 25 projects that we closed out. 5 a.5 million returned to reserves and all that was accounted for as well during the budget process and then 1.5 million in bond proceeds that was released for actual use in the drainage fund. And if you remember back like that 1.5 is a good example of how we already have projects that are ready to go. You remember the the 13 we identified for the $42 million bond we were only able to do or 12. Was it 12, Jerry?

It was 12.

12. We're doing four of those projects. we have room to use that 1.5 million to add the some of those other projects that we had talked about to this council should we be able to use that money for that. Just an example of that. So, I want to finish this out just on a positive note and just tell you that I I can't be more proud to have worked on this project over the past year. We we spent a lot of time together and I can tell you u you know I I've been doing this for a long time and I've learned more this year from working with these people that are on that committee and working as closely as we have with finance over on the construction side of things than I ever have and it's been very beneficial to me personally and I know to the city as well. I think it's put us in a very good position to move forward. And I also want to finish by saying that when I I think when when you as a council or they as citizens identify a problem, it's our job to help solve those and come back to you with solutions. And that's really what we're doing tonight, presenting those solutions to you. And uh I I know I can say this personally, our staff deserves a big pat on the back for all the work that they've done on because they've spent countless countless hours on this. So, with that said, we've got a panel here. Um, we've got our auditor, we got Katrina, we got Jerry, myself, Laura, Andrew, Grayson, anybody that can answer any questions that you might have, and we'll open it up for you for that. So the the 33.9 million in reserves that were uh returned that were put into reserves when that was budgeted was that in excess of what we were budgeting for things for the year anyway or did we include that in the total number? So, um, if you'll remember, and I understand a couple of you were brand new to council as we were walking through budget this year, um, prior to budget, we spoke with you all that we had, as we were working through our audit last

year, determined that the water and sewer reserves looked lower than they should be. And so, we went into a full project to determine what was causing that. What we determined was there were some project budgets in the water and sew sewer CIP area that were not um handled properly. And so when we walked through the budget process during 2526 and Stephanie I might get you to pull up cash flows for me. Um this is posted out on our city website and I'll show you exactly where this flows through in the budget. But we talked about how we had um about 25 million or so um that we needed to identify in water and sewer capital projects to overcome this reserve um challenge that we were facing and we had already identified it at that point. That's what these projects are right here. So that has already gone through the budget process. What essentially that means is this 25.6 6 million has already been identified for um use and so it it's not something that you can go pull from reserves to allocate to some sort of a new project and Stephanie will pull that up. Yeah, right there Steph on the Yep. Okay. So, if you'll go to the middle column there where it says revised estimate and go to the middle of the page where it says capital. Yes. Right there. So you'll see the first column on this cash flow shows that we originally planned on spending 19.26 million in capital projects in our water and sewer fund this year. When we um met with you all during the budget process, we mentioned that we needed to close out identify and close out um 25 million 25 26 million in capital projects to cover the challenge that we had on the reserves. And so that's where

we showed we were going to spend the 19 million and close out 26 million and it nets to that 6.7 million. Stephanie, if you'll go up to the top of the page too, right at the top, you'll see your available funds. That's essentially your reserves. Um when we started the budget process um for the 2526 budget year, which was this last fiscal year, we anticipated that water and sewer was going to have $36.6 $6 million in reserves. When we conducted and finished the audit, we determined there was only 7 million in reserves. Now, again, it wasn't that we had over spent reserves. It's that we had over earmarked capital projects. And so, we went through this process. I know Grayson and I met with um I believe all of you um individually about this and talked through that we went through um a process to identify projects that we had over um overbudgeted for and we were going to um unfund those to correct the reserve um issue here. So that's what we did during budget. And you'll see at the top of the third column there, the available funds beginning for the year we're in now, 2526. That gets us back up to where our reserves needed to be um in the over $22 million range. The same essential thing happened with um drainage. So on the presentation that Donnie did, he um he mentioned that we had closed out 25 projects and there was five and a half million returned to reserves. Stephanie, if you'll go to the drainage um cash flow for me, please. Um maybe start at the top this time with the available funds. Um we thought we were going to start last fiscal year with 11.3 million. We started the year with just under $3.5 million. If you'll come down on that page to the capital

section, our budget was for 13.1 million, but we knew we we wouldn't be able to spend all that because we needed to get reserves in a better spot. So, we reduced it down by about 3.9 million. Up at the top though, you'll see we then anticipated starting this new year um at a deficit reserve balance. Now, I say it's a deficit reserve balance. That doesn't mean that we have negative cash or anything like that. That means that essentially we had over earmarked more capital projects than we could afford to um actually pay for with the money on hand at that time. So with this 5.5 million um between the 3.9 million that we needed to reduce down to get reserves in a a better spot moving forward plus that deficit of the 2.6 million that comes to 6.5 million. So this five and a half is puts us well on our way to make sure that our drainage reserves are in a great spot by the end of this fiscal year. So again on both of those two those are not um with those project closures those amounts closed out to reserves were to true up our reserves to where they needed to be as we covered during the budget process. They're not for available future reallocation of projects.

So Mrs. stores because can I interrupt real quick because we've got a bunch of terms there that I think if we define those okay greatly help us understand you know Councilman Reed asked a great question so earmarked true up and and reserves how do those how are you treating those with appropriations so what what I'm looking at is a one-year annualized budget you bring the request on the CIP the budget presentation comes from city manager we approve approve it at that time and then October one that is the appropriation for the capex or the CIP

and yes and you're speaking more towards the annual operating budget. A capital project has more than a one-year appropriation to it. The appropriation stays in place until the capital project is completed and closed out. As Donnie mentioned, we went through this process. So, it's not just a one-year appropriation. So, what do you what do you mean by earmarked then? appropriation. So when when you say earmarked, you mean the monies were appropriated for a specific project. That project probably comes with a a job number, uh estimated amount, um supporting documents, right? Yes, sir.

So you were closing out those projects because they were completed and they were over budget or or how did you end up with less money? Like you you said, well, we had earmarked more than what we thought. So that's where I got lost. So, um, I would have to let the project managers speak to how they identified which projects to close out. We're on the finance team, so we're only, you know, in charge of of reporting the numbers. We we don't always know exactly the reasoning behind all of it. Um, and so I can let Donnie kind of speak to, you know, some of the thought process that went behind some of the projects that were closed out through this process.

Thank you, ma'am. Before you do that, just to make sure I keep my train of thought here, the appropriations were were in the previous year's budget. Every project that's been appropriated was on a budget that one year. They're continuing forward because they're cumulative. If you if you were less in your budget, like if you didn't pull forward enough money that was already appropriated, then you had a shortfall somewhere that you were offsetting. So, you were either over budget on one project or multiple projects that you had to account for with council or um you're saying you earmarked additional projects in. Were there ever projects that were created and earmarked in there that didn't end up on a budget?

So, um and I appreciate your clarification um so I can answer your question. So, as we determined these challenges in our water and sewer fund and our drainage fund, what had happened is um our project managers um had either not set up the project in the year that it was appropriated. And so when we went the next year during the budget process to calculate the available funds to rebalance the reserves as we do every single fiscal year to bring you all any excess reserve so you all can put it to good use in future capital projects with those projects not set up. We did not know that that they were planning to go ahead and move those on going forward because they the appropriation was not set up in the software. We had a different process going forward. We have changed that now because of this um challenge that arose. And so what happened was um the project was not set up and the appropriations were not put in place in our financial software during the year that it was appropriated. And so when we closed out and went to the next year, we assumed that all of that anything that was not earmarked or appropriated in a project was available to go through the reserve process again for future allocation. And then in the next year, those project managers came along and tried to set up the project and the money had already been reallocated to another project.

And and so when you say reallocated, what what do you mean? I'm sorry. Reappropriated. So, it went through another budget cycle. Yes, sir. Would you not have caught that in the acter? We did c catch it. It was over a three-year time period. Um, and so, and it was not all done in one year. And so, we did catch it through our audit process and um had to go back three years to determine um some of the timing challenges of um getting those projects set up. So is it safe to assume if we were just reconciling you go to the the 24 act for right that's the most recent 23 24 act yes sir

you could look at that and then pull this up and look at this budget and those numbers balance right so that number um at the top um that available funds beginning of year in the middle column 3,486,000 that ties directly to your audited financial statements. Now, it's a calculation. It's not you can't go find that specific number. You have to add multiple numbers together, subtract some numbers, and then subtract out some of the incumbrances as well to get to that number. But yes, it all ties to our audited financial statements. And I didn't mean to get in front of you answering your question, but like how how are you closing out projects? And then I I'll direct back to

let me just use an example on the opposite end of that on a project that was put in the one-year CIP was funded. Um, so we we purchased I don't know if you'all remember this or not, but we purchased Mccardi Lake a few years ago. I don't remember the exact year on that. Um, we had an opportunity to do that. It's a drainage uh lake we needed to take. We didn't know what we were going to run into when we got into that that lake itself. We didn't know if we would have to repair some of the head walls. We we we didn't know. Well, we put in the one-year CIP that year, $200,000 for Lake McCarti repairs. Okay. So, we put that in there. It's funded. It's approved by council. We get out there, our drains utility crew says, "Hey, this is in good shape. That's in good shape. We need to make a couple repairs here. We can do that ourselves." Not worried about it. We decided, well, let's keep that money there because we don't know what we may run into in the next year or two. So, that stayed in a job. That $200,000 stayed in there just in case we had something that would would we we didn't know. Okay. Well, in this closeout process, that's one of the projects that Allan Harter evaluated and said, I don't think we need that anymore. We've gone a few years now. Let's turn that back to reserves. So, that went back to drainage reserves. If that answers your question on that side of it, there's several examples like that that we could we could use where we've actually had and there's other projects where we just like the drainage utility, think back on the 42 million, those 12 projects that were presented to you, there was an estimate put on those. One of those was Lawrence Lake at $5 million. Well, we start engineering that it's $23 million. So, if we would have just gone with a single CIP of 5 million on that, it wouldn't have been enough to cover the project. So, we have to make some adjustments. We had to come back to you and say, "Here's the four projects we're going to do." That's that's kind of another example for that as well. And that's a little different. That's bond money, but um those were the things we were doing. Does that kind of answer your question on the process at least?

Yes, sir. It does. I think the seeing the report with the jobs listed, the amounts, digging into that, I think is going to be the the thing that'll be um helpful in in understanding where those are at and especially as we clean this up moving it forward so that we have tracking systems, dashboards. Yeah. Um I I know I've got a laundry list of questions, but I I didn't mean to get

I do have one more question because I I I'm missing something. When we look at the balances that you have for both of these projects, why aren't we seeing 25.6 million in the reserve and 5.5 million if those were returned to the reserve uh for those projects, drainage fund and water and sewer. Shouldn't we see that number, not a lower number?

So, it's it's a calculation of the entire column. You're taking your revenues and then backing out your expenditures. So, if we lowered your expenditures by $4 million, your reserve calculation at the top would have been 4 million worse than that had we not made that change. The same goes true on um the water and sewer cash flow that we were looking at. If we had shown we were going to spend the full 19.26 26 million. Um, you would have had a reserve estimate to start the next year. Instead of 22 million, it would have been like $2 million. I I guess I'm just missing something and we may have to talk about this because I I still even with a calculation, if you're returning 25 million to the reserve account, it should show 25 million no matter what your calculations.

And it does. It does. So you have to add in like for instance on this on the screen right here we thought we were going to bring 12.3 million in in revenue but we only are going to bring we brought in we estimated we were going to bring in less than that at 11.9 million. So we can add that to our reserves that we did start the year out at 3.5 million. Then we start backing out. We we spent a little bit more on operations than we planned. Um, our transfers came in less than we planned. Our capital's going to come in less than we planned. Our debt service was going to come on the same with principal and our interest was going to come on the same. So, our available funds we thought were going to end the year at 1.5 million, but instead they were going to actually end up closer to two a negative $2.5 million. Had we said we were going to spend the whole 13.1 million in capital instead of the 9.2 that deficit of 2.5 million in reserves would have increased the deficit would increase by almost instead of 6 million

so credit an increase or a decrease. Yes. And I will also state um for it back to you all that there was a great email that um all of you back in May that out situation um ahead of us to yeah R's got a copy but we can refresh on it um and this the budget process as well I know it's been a few we covered it all at that point as well bring it back can I can I add something to that too one of the issues we faced prior was exactly what you're on the operations side looks up here if that makes sense they would have to reset operations we how we're doing those things so I think our communication on that is going to get much better moving I think when we go on the next budget process they're going to I'm sorry. I never understand cross a lot into next years, but I really believe that.

Okay, I'm try to simplify I think I do a good job in fund. How many categories? We've got in progress, right? And we got allocated that are out for bid that we've allocated that are going to be coming online. What else in the CIP fund? What else is there besides those two? Okay, so the way a capital project works, um we'll just take an example. Let's say we are going to spend $10 million on a street. Once council approves it, it's appropriated. So now there's a total budget of $10 million in the street project. That much has been appropriated but not spent. Correct. Would allocate be interchangeable with I think that's mayor's pretty big on definition of terms. So make sure.

So then on your project let's say we nowed money out of the bank have paid bills of half a million dollars. Okay. So half a million dollars has been spent is actual expenditures. There is still another $5 million that's been allocated, appropriated, earmarked, whatever term you want to use that it the city is still planning to spend whether it's contracted or not, a council, whether it was you all or councils before y'all appropriated that full 10 million. And so until we close the project, it still is appropriated that that 5 million will be spent. Okay? So now you appropriated, you've got spent, and then you have remain up front. So that's really and then by the time you get to the end of your project, let's say the project comes in at $9.5 million, you still have half a million dollars that's appropriated. So when finance comes through and does all of our reserve calculations at the end of a fiscal year, if that project's still open, even if they're done, we assume that money still needs to be spent because we don't know if there's a punch list that still needs to happen or or whatever. So as long as the project, the CI project is still open, we say not touch that five that $500,000 because it is appropriated and it has not been spent. So it goes through our available funds calculator. exclude it so we don't spend it again.

It's not available until he goes out and closes that project out. Then it goes at 9 and half the 10 still in there. So a project can be in both allocated or appropriated and an a project can be separated those two categories. That's projects can be but those are truly the only two fund. Yes. Yes. Yes. So pretty identify if we said whatever that number in a CIP fund. Yes. there's 500 500 million whatever it is we could actually go and we talked about this yesterday like if we talk about a pie you know the CIP pie we could go in and say okay this percentage is in the allocated funds right it's bid whatever or maybe even in

progress I mean the project could be both it's either it's one or the other it's one or the other now if we want to get detailed we could say okay what are what are the ingredients of that piece of pie that every project say this has been and this is in progress. This is a project that was 10 million but you know 5 million has been alien's been spent. We don't know I mean we still think million dollar pretty simple to the now is that in Georgia is where every fund that is being project you can also see all of the projects that are listed in Georgia I don't know how many actual projects but you know there but you can see all move over there yet.

No but get that but I'm saying right now it's easier if it was there. It's just not and it will be. So it'll be this will be a super easy conversation because you can just pull it up. Not there. Some's there, some's not, but still do it. It's just a lot. It's a little It would be, but it's pretty simple. I mean,

yes. Yes, we can absolutely do it. have um an accountant that runs reports on a monthly basis and it sends out all that information to um the directors. So they can see the projects they're responsible for or their project managers are responsible for and they can see the status of those what all projects are set up what the total budget I I did want to throw in another item um the total budget outside funding that's to be received we get grant funding something okay still in there

but essentially have what the budget is how much has been spent and much is remaining of city funding okay so of city funding means how much is unspent but appropriated funds And just for y'all's awareness, there is a footnote in our audited financial statements every single fiscal year end that reports all of this information by fund. So it it's out there and that's what we use as we do these calculations. So there would be in this pie there's no sliver that's unmarked or excess or reserves. There's nothing in here that are true reserves until a project is closed out. We know the total spend and we know that what was allocated. It's the only time a reserve shows back up. But then it is immediately moved back out.

It shows back up in these cash flows that we present to you guys that then we say this is how much you need for reserves. This is the excess. Now you can put it. Now you all can decide where you want it to go. So this would be really easy to see that there's no excess money sitting. Yes. Yes. It' be really easy to do. We can identify the ingredients in each piece of pie and decide where it is. Yeah.

Yes. Now again, this is a number as Donnie mentioned that's moving every single day. So we do this on an annual basis through our audit process and then bring it to you all during the budget process to say, "Hey, here's how we ended the year here this last year. Here's where what we think we're going to do this year." So you know what you're going to start with the next year. And that's how we start saying, okay, do you have extra money to put towards capital to still meet that reserve requirement or do we need to back off on something in order to try to meet that reserve requirement? These projects are in progress and then as they're closed out, all that number is moving all the time.

More of it's moved allocated to spent like it's constantly moving. So if we saw that, mayor, because I know we've talked a little bit, we know where you're driving. We've been out here. Um, would that answer your questions if we saw that or no? I mean, if you saw all the CIP and the number that's there and then what makes up that number, would that bring you peace to know, okay, that that identifies all the money? No. And here's why. You have uh open projects that hadn't been closed out.

And so, until those projects are closed out, that fund or that money isn't returned to the fund balance. It's still showing up. So I think it's page 84, your footnote number seven that shows like ongoing jobs. So if you look at the act for back in 24, $645 million worth of projects are going Yes.

on that, you know, and then until you really see how much did you spend, you're identifying $33 million worth of savings. My curiosity would be sparked into like if you found it in July, that would be in this budget. If you closed out these projects from July until October or whatever, how would you calculate that amount in this budget? This budget was that's what we did on that line item that says capital where the original budget we said we're going to do 13.1 million and we had to un unappropriate certain projects and so we showed we were going to spend less. How many of these projects that that equate to the 33 million were closed out prior to this budget? Um

all of them all of them except for the um general construction fund ones that um there's 2.4 million that's going back to reserves that we would anticipate bringing back to you guys during the budget process or sometime between now and then to get authorization on how to use those.

Yeah. So the the answer would be no because like what what really brings me to a place of like okay I see it now is that aer um reconciles with this CIP work product that we have. So if we have a CIP work product which I know we've been working towards you have a CIP committee you has his own work product. Um as you're closing out those jobs those jobs have supporting documents so you're realizing those savings. So at any given point in time, we could sample one of those jobs, you know, to see like, oh, okay, yep, that the project was done. It did get done, you know, the the amount of the money's reconciled, but but you know, like the the forensic audit that you referenced in the beginning of the the presentation, the only the audit was only performed on Prop One monies. So those $89.5 million were audited. The rest of the CIP projects were not audited. And so there's been there there wasn't a look back there. And that is where they found like yes, the the $34 million is there. You guys need to go spend it. They also found that we were uh over our expiration time and we needed to put it in the streets. But

no, they did not find that through the audit. That was something we had identified ahead of time and had worked with our um bond attorney on our our capital projects are audited through our external audit process. But you are correct. They though all of them have not gone through a forensic audit. Right.

Um so just the prop one projects went through the forensic audit process and yes we will have the ACER um the footnote you're referring to. We will have that ready um probably late February or March time period. We will have that all it'll be audited. The auditors can speak to it at that point in time. They are working through that audit process at this point in time and we're still continuing to do year-end entries. Now, as far as closing projects, um my understanding is now we're constantly closing projects as projects are finishing, but as far as this clean up, close out overall look at process, we are we're completed with it. And so, we are presenting those results to you. Now, the audited results will not come until the March time frame. That's when we present that audit.

And I I guess I was lost on the acter because we already accounted for the closed out projects. I want to say it was 282 million that we closed out. And so there those were still in progress um at the end of 93024. So a lot of those have been closed out since then, but not all of them have been closed out since then. On that acer though, you show how much you close out by the end of that business year. Right. Yes. And we'll show that again. And we'll show that again. And and what you're saying is is you've closed out how many projects now? I'd have to go back and look at the total list. was 111. Yeah, that had I'm sorry. Yeah, for developer projects city funding 272.

Sorry, it was 272 total, including developer agreements, tap agreements, and ones that didn't have any appropriations left in them. The the great thing about this that I see is like there this isn't us, and I don't want to come off looking like the guy that's digging in the books and trying to find a whole bunch of stuff. Like, I know it looks that way. This is state law. This this is all in accordance with the way that we have to operate. You don't close out a project just because you close out a project. You have to capitalize that asset. You track the capitalization of that asset through your documents at year's end. Yes. That's not state law though. That is those are accounting principles. Okay. So state law doesn't dictate.

State law doesn't have anything to do with good budgeting practices. Well, they do with budgeting practices, but not with the close out of projects and the capitalization of projects. That's all. So, we're not required by law to capitalize projects um through generally accepted accounting principles. Yes, we are. Just like a business, we are required, but that is not dictated through state law.

Okay. Well, my mistake. I I appreciate the additional education. So, I was under the impression that we had a fiduciary role um in making sure that these monies are are overseen that they're appropriated by council for the one-year annualized budget and that that annualized budget then is accounted for on capitalization of the projects. What we're finding is is we have projects that are years and years old, right? And there are savings on those projects. Correct. Some that's what Donnie reported. Yeah. to 33 million.

And the and the the point of the conversation, Donny's worked really hard and his team, your team worked really hard in trying to find the good in this, which is like, okay, they should have closed out the project. They didn't. We're going to go back and we're going to close that project out. That is a finding of yours, right? That you had open projects that should have been closed previous. I think there was some projects that probably fit that category, but a lot of them were just like I brought the reference for Mccardi Lake. They're hanging on to that to make sure that they didn't need that for a future purpose because it was already allocated that project. For how long would they hang on to that? I mean, what's reasonable? I think we I think on that one it was somewhere around four years. I can't remember, but four years.

So, we'll hang on to we'll hang on to money. I mean, for four years and it'll just sit there. Well, like Lawrence Lake for instance, the Lawrence Lake project, we got an engineer certification to allow us to you spend that money over a fiveyear period because it's such a long project. So, it just kind of depends on you have to throw the project.

Yeah. And and sometimes the design of a project is going to take a couple of years before you even get there to start using that money. So, yes, it's going to sit there. Plus, it's going to sit there for the entire project period. And even the the example that was brought up earlier today with the Northeast Interceptor, yes, that project is in the ground and they are covering up all of that um that piping as we speak, but there's still money in there that's going to be spent. Just have not we have not got the invoices for those yet. So, yeah, it's going to set in there for a while until that project is complete. I get that. But I mean, I'm going to go back to your McCarti Lake and you know, if we're going to hold on to money, why wouldn't we when we know it's done or we've inspected it and we realize it doesn't it doesn't need the repairs that we thought, you know, everything's here's my answer to that. Hang on.

That's okay. But why not I mean set a I I don't know where the four years comes in. I know you probably just guessed at that too, but if it's four years, why wouldn't we wait like a year or two? There's no design here, but say, "Hey, we've got 200. Let's release that." And then if we do find it again, then we can go come back and say, "Hey, we did have this money. We gave it up, but now we found this and it's going to be there." Why would we hold on to money that's just sitting there doing nothing for us when we could do other projects? Can I answer that now? Yes, you may. That's exactly what we're doing. You're talking about what we did do. We're talking about what we are doing.

Okay. Theory all that. So McCarti sitting there, let's say we did that last year. McCartney sitting there, you have $200,000 extra dollars right now. What you're doing is you're going in and closing out that project. Well, and and further than that, I'm going to tell you, so the reason that we're meeting with the CIP sync committee is so that we can discuss the list that Laura talked about. We talk about it every month. Hey, no activity in this one for the past couple of months. What's the status on that? Someone will have to a project manager going to have to report, well, the reason is that we're waiting on xxx or no, we're finished with that project. Okay, then let's capitalize and close it out. fixing that problem. Absolutely. 100% though is sometimes we'll hang on to that money. But what you're saying now is we're no longer doing it.

No, we'll close it, capitalize it, put it in reserves. But now you're not. Exactly. So you've already fixed the 100% problem. And we added an internal policy that if a project has had no activity for 12 months, it will be closed in any funding return to reserves unless the city manager gives prior approval for it. Okay? And so this is something that's all come out through this CIP sync project because we have identified lots of things that have been happening that we could have handled better and so we're starting to put these processes in place so it doesn't happen going forward. Gotcha. Okay. That makes good a lot of sense. Thank you. Councilman,

did I did I see you, Councilman Simpson? Yeah. Well, to to step out of the weeds for just a minute. I mean, when we go back and look at this, what what really instituted this was when we tried to issue debt for road construction and realized that we had not spent enough according to the regulations. Yes.

Uh and we couldn't issue that debt and we could get in trouble with the IRS and and so that that kind of I think was what led to this part of it. Uh because and I remember because there was some kind of some confusion is who was supposed to know about this RS regulation and how do you communicate it? Well, to me, this this committee sinking together has helped, you know, fill that part out of it. But even when we did that then, I mean, we did an internal audit, uh, didn't really find anything abnormal, no missing money, no types of things like that. We did a forensic audit. Uh, as I recall, the forensic auditor came back to us and said, "I only spent half of what you told me I could spend because there there wasn't that there wasn't a there there. There were some things procedural that we need to do." But we knew at the point that that we needed to do something for this process because it was, you know, the communication and and making sure that everybody was on the same page. I I think we're fortunate and I appreciate because it was about that time or a little shortly thereafter that Grayson Path came here and obviously realized from council and seeing things this was a top priority of of what we needed to do to be able to fix this uh process because I think we can go back and realize yeah we can all agree that there were some problems as and and as a council at the time I think we were rightfully a little bit upset about it but I think we've come through a process through the work that you've done through through grace and identifying this is a number one priority that we need to get resolved uh for communication to be able to do this and you know I I'm I'm impressed with this process that you've put in place the checks and balances even going even further than you know our forensic auditor told us to go and the approval processes and those types of things. So, but when we go all go through all this because it seems like, you know, part of this exercise has been to put the processes into place, but part of this exercise and some of these questions and the work that you've been asked to be done is saying there's got to be extra money out there for us to spend. We just got to go find it. So, when you've gone through this, when you've closed out all

the the jobs, when you've properly allocated for reserves and where they need to be to to use gap uh uh accounting principles, how much money do we have that we can sit here and spend right now based off this project? Yes. Um it is that 2.4 million in general construction, which is basically general fund type projects. So, all we've gone through all this out of the hundreds of millions of dollars of projects, 2.4 4 million. We currently have 1.3 billion in list. So we we we can of projects that we need to done. So we have a little bit of money that we could look at reallocate or being able to do on those

potentially. Yes. And and I will say um you know Donnie mentioned that we have 442 active projects that we have researched and say yes those are proper projects. We've been working with you Neil and his team. I know he's been auditing a lot of this as well and we've determined that these are active projects. Now that number could change tomorrow because you know it's a constant moving number but you know as of our most recent report 442 project that accounts for 700

what you're looking at here and what it takes a while to learn is the complexity of this and the hamstringing of money what you can and what you can't use for. So, uh, I appreciate the expertise that you guys have been bringing and the diligence that you went, uh, to put in systems in place that I think will manage this a lot better for us. And I I appreciate everybody working on this. Thank you. Thank you for saying that. We'll share it with our team, too. I don't have anything. Um, okay. So, I'm I'm ready to wrap up here pretty quick. I know you guys we we need a recess. So, the work's been done or the work's ongoing. The work will always be ongoing. That's the thing.

Do you have a work product that's finished? Like I mean can do you have you what I here would be my question. You've got a CIP report that lists all the jobs, gives job numbers. You've got those that are closed out. You probably have supporting documents or at least an Excel spreadsheet that shows the amounts, right? Yes, sir.

Can Can we have that work product um like to a point in time where you guys say like here's what we did for you? you guys look at it that way because I love these five words especially when it comes to oversight. Like how do we know that, right? Like you've given us some numbers here, 2.4 million. You've got some other millions over here, but like how do we know that? You know, we we've we've spent the last hour sitting here talking about how we have antiquated software. We're having to feed data in line item by line item. It's not a trust issue as much as it is. There's a lot of data moving back and forth. we don't have the ebuilder software where we can really have confidence in that. So, um something like that coming in and then you know we have a fantastic individual over here in I've gotten to work a lot with him.

You know if he's engaged in all that a lot of like well how do we know that? Well you Neil is is how we know that you Neil has that report. Can he provide that report with some validation? Can you provide your work product? because I mean the committee's been working on this for a while. So, and Neil's been involved in all of it.

What's the appropriate request here? If if we want your your homework so that we get to grade it, we get to look at it. We can see it. Then what we also would need to to know is is like are any of these projects coming back for reappropriation? Right? because um anything that's an existing you know allocation that hadn't been kicked off um we know that you guys are working on the CIP project but if we lump sum all that together does council have a direction or a vision of something that they could do more so for the community than just the oneoff projects I

I think the answer to that is yes because our process now is to close those to reserves close those to to bond reserves so that you can look at those true balances and and make some decisions from that. But also when we go through the next CIP process, you're going to see an entire list of projects that you can look at as well. Okay. Great.

I think if the council wants us to, we've got $1.3 billion worth of expenses if if you like, we can take the 2.4 and bring you back 2.4 million worth of priorities. Mostly we'll scratch the surface, but I I recommend that we work off that list there. Or or again, or the council could say, you know, give us a 2.4. for more than break How many are in Georgia Street? How many general fund dollars are in Georgia Street? That's what we're chewing up in Ebuilders. Now, where we had to get to first and foremost was to see what finance had as far as the allocation to each of those jobs. But in looking at the history, and Donnie referenced it, and the drainage is a good example, you had a $5 million allocation for Lawrence Lake. We sit down with the engineers and look at the project. I'm going, you guys didn't even address the drainage. All you were doing was make it pretty. You're working on Western and Olsson. Western and Olsson doesn't get water out of Lawrence Lake, so why are we doing this? So, those conversations are happening right now. So really the true up to answer your question, mayor, is once I've got the jobs report that's got everything cleaned up, then I can look at the capital projects and say, "All right, this project is a a closed number for what that job should cost, knowing that I know the full scope of the job." We've got multiple jobs of that 200 million that Laura is

referencing that they just threw some numbers out there. I'm sorry to say that, but that's the way it went. Just some numbers were allocated to it. Like Donnie referenced five $5 million for Lawrence Lake that that doesn't work. And so now I'm looking at a $20 million project on Lawrence Lake.

That means that that scope of work reduces because I still have a maximum of 42 million that I can spend. So I'm looking at it from that approach. as we go forward. That's where Ebuilder is going to be a lot truer because once we work with finance, that that's the problem. The communication, you guys referenced it multiple times. It was terrible communication between CPD and finance and neither one of them really understood the same language. They were speaking two different languages. I I I do want to and I've told you this, Mayor Stanley, you guys need to celebrate the wins, too. Prop 2 was a major success. It was controlled by facilities and I drove Laura Stores crazy during Prop 2. I drove her absolutely mad because I would make her tell me how much cash is in this job. CPND and engineering now knows a job does not start until we've got money in the account. In the past, we would start work and they would transfer some money over to get the job started. Well, then all of a sudden you're robbing Peter to pay Paul and eventually that catches up with you. So the process that we have going forward, that communication that Donnie referenced with the team, the CIP sync, you now set in my office, we closed out a project from 2017 that it took me literally four months to go through basically forensics to see where money had moved back and forth. and we finally settled it with one of our major developers here in town. But he'd been sitting there and we were sitting on retainage on that job of over three quarters of a million dollars that we set on since 2020. How that developer didn't come and choke the life out of us, I don't know. But yes, that was a problem that we have. We're cleaning that up. Those things are going away. So that's why I'm hesitant. And that's the reason I said what I did to Donnie just now is I'm hesitant to

let you see that Excel sheet, Mayor Stanley, because I haven't had a chance to true up those construction projects to make them match the amount of funding that you have allocated to the projects because I have seen some major errors there. Okay. Thank you, Councilman. Just a quick question, Laura. Uh 442 active projects, 296 million is spread out over those 442 projects. Is that correct? Yes. Yes, sir. That's less left to be spent. Yes. Okay. But those are allocated, ready to go or in process?

Yes. Yes. They've all been appropriated. Now, I can't speak to where we are in the process, but it's remaining. The money is sitting in the bank ready to be spent as those projects get completed. Um, and so it's just a matter of, you know, the projects working through the process. One final question. Um, if there were discrepancies of of great plus or minus in the audit process, would that not affect our bond ratings? If the audits were not coming back favorably, would that not affect our bond rating? Yes, it would. If we had exceptions and findings on that, it would affect our bond rating. It potentially could, yes, sir.

It potentially could. It It would or it could. It would. It depends on the scope of it. It depends on how big of a finding, what type of funding finding. But yes, absolutely. Our um SNP is is combing through our audit reports, reading every last word of it, analyzing it, doing their own projections. They don't care what our projections are. They're doing all their own projections, their own calculations, and digging through that thing, relying on our external auditors and what they're stating in those reports to come up with their determinations on what those bond ratings are. And so, with that being said, Vanguard giving us the rate they did today and the 13 other large cap companies that are willing to to invest in Amarillo through the bonds. Yes.

They all looked at our financials, I'm sure. Yes. Absolutely. Yes. and all of our existing bond holders, all the debt that we have on the books right now, all those bond holders comb through our financial statements on an annual basis looking for things that might be a red flag or something that looks like we could have a a looming problem or something like that. They're always looking through that. They have a lot of analysts that are digging through those every single year, especially an entity of our size. Thank you.

Yes. Just one other thing I'd like to add to that our our processes, our job in this this whole thing for the last 13 and a half months was to analyze the past and then figure out a way to move forward. And that's where we're at right now. We've taken all of that that we found and I think we fixed it. Now, I I don't know that we're not going to make a mistake six months from now. We're human beings that are going to do that. But I think it's our job also to analyze those, figure out how to come up with a solution, and move forward. That's what we're good at, and I think we've done a good job at that. So to answer your question on, you know, how do you how do you know what we've done is good? I really believe that it is and you can you can believe that, but I I understand where you're at too and what you want to see. I think what you've seen with Unell and the meetings you've had with them is exactly that report and the discussions y'all had.

You believe those are similar, right? What your work product is. We're all working together on the same thing. Exactly. Okay. What he's Yeah. So when you Neil, when do you think you'll finish with with kind of your your internal audit, so to speak, of verifying these up to the date that he has it closed out? Yeah, I'm pushing to get it done here by Friday because I'm leaving the country for three weeks. We heard.

Yeah. So, I'm working hard on it, but I can verify that I've matched the numbers as to what they said was closed and the dollar amounts. I'd need to know just put it in your spreadsheet so you can see it. Okay, council. I'd love for you guys to have that so that we all get that from you, Neil. That is the appropriate way, right? Not necessarily asking Jerry to give him or, you know, ask Jerry to take his his um verification of project X, but like actually if it's coming through internal auditor, um that's something that's organized. We can ask questions. It'll identify all the projects and then if we said, "Oh, this project doesn't look familiar. When was it appropriated?" Like you're going to be able to to pull that you Neil on your report what I've seen, right?

Yeah, we should be able to to find the documentation and tie it back. Yes.

Okay. Anything further on your end? Okay. All right. Well, I know it's early. It's only 7:45. So, um Donnie, what do we expect coming back from you? When when are you coming back to to have this implemented and in place? What when when does this come back in a in an update to council? And we were talking about this the other day. In fact, Unil and I had this discussion just the other day about the possibility of creating creating some quarterly reports to bring back to you. But what we want to do is bring back incremental updates when we get eBuilder where it's it's ready to go live and we have that. We want to come bring that to you. I think even when we get it built out to where you can start to see some of those dashboards fully uh implemented, we want to bring that back. I think it's going to be a constant conversation because we're not going to stop meeting monthly on this in our sync committee. So, and it's really at your pleasure. What would you like to see? We'll bring it back.

Okay. Um well, I mean, I love the quarterly report idea. If you can bring it back quarterly, I think that's great. Okay, we can do that. Okay, let's take a 10 minute 15 minute recess. We'll come back. We still got a lot of work to do. Thank you.

So, we're going to call ourselves back to order, but I just took a uh that's a formal request from Councilman Prescott. He says these blank meetings are too long and so I mean motion to adjurnn. Is that is that what you're thinking? No, we can go. I apologize, man. Every time since you got elected, we've said we are going to get more efficient. And every time we sit down with an agenda, it gets longer and longer. So, there's nothing at home to watch on TV. You may as well keep this open on your YouTube channel. My wife just called and said that she fell down and can't get up.

Okay. Good thing we know emergency personnel. All right. Item 65 is closed out. We'll be looking forward for for that coming back. Item 66, future request. Anything from council? Okay, we'll move along. Uh non-consent agenda item 71 is complete. Miss city secretary, are you still over there? Is she back? Yeah. Yes, sir. We're on 7.4. And are you are you good on 71 72 73? Everything's in line? Yes, sir. Okay, great. Item 74, public hearing here. Our favorite presenter, Mr. Brady Kinder.

Uh, good evening, evening, mayor and council. Um, this item is ordinance 8228. Uh, this is a public hearing and first reading to consider the vacation of a 20 foot wide public alley. This is located in Potter County, Texas and block 35 of Glennon Sandboard Edition in the vicinity of Southwest 3rd and South Harrison. and the applicants, Ferman Land Surveyors, Inc. for Ryan Bold, Inc. And the property owner that owns a majority of the property on the west side of the block requested vacation of this to essentially unify all their lots under one um contiguous site with the ability to move between them utilizing that alley. All the other owners within the block did provide letters of support for this request, so they are aware of it and are not in opposition. There are public utilities in the alley which the applicant is going to retain a public utility easement for the city at no cost. So utilities will not be have to be relocated and as such a fair market value payments not required. Um with that we did send public notices. None have been received as of the meeting this evening and planning and zoning commission did recommend approval with a 70 vote of this item.

Thank you Mr. Kendrick. Any questions for Brady? No. I move to approve ordinance number 8228 as presented. This is you have to have a public hearing. Council member public hearing. I'm trying to help out Prescott get home. Well, don't break the law doing it. Okay. At this time, we'll open a public hearing. Do I have anyone who would like to speak for or against this item? Seeing nobody, I'll close the public hearing. Councilman Tips, did you have something? Uh, yeah. I'd like to adopt ordinance number 8228 as presented in the second. Oh, hey, wait. Motion and a second from place 4. All in favor, please say I.

Any opposed? Motion passes with a 50 vote. Mr. Brassfield, item 7.5, sir.

Good evening, gentlemen. Uh this is the first reading to consider resolution a resolution of support for 58th manner 58 manners applications to the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs for 9% housing tax credits for affordable senior housing. Uh three of you are familiar with this. We've done these since you've been on the council. Two are uh this is probably going to be new information. So just want to talk a little bit about the history. The housing tax credit program is administered by the TDHCA. It directs private capital towards the development and preservation of affordable rental houses for low-income huh households. The tax credits are awarded to eligible participants to offset a portion of federal tax liability. And there are two types, the competitive 9% and the non-competitive 4%. The program was designed to provide a source of equity financing to maximize the number of affordable units in the state's housing supply. And it also ensures the supply is wellmaintained and operated. It prevents losses to the state supply of affordable housing and uh these resolutions are requested from city councils because it it assists the uh applicants with uh gaining points on their application. So 58th Manor project uh is going to be located in the vicinity of South Washington and Southwest 58th. Uh the investment uh for this project is going to be around 14.7 million to construct 46 units for the 55 plus age group. Uh the rent will be uh between $538 uh a month to 1293. Uh income levels for the residents would need to be somewhere between 20,000 and 46,000. Um some of these details may be uh a little familiar. This was uh previously presented to the council under the uh

project name of Estacado Estates. Uh but unfortunately those tax credits that were previously uh applied for were not res that were previously awarded um they had to give back because they they uh couldn't make the deal work out. Uh so they have now brought it back um with some changes. is they're no longer going to be uh pursuing a partnership with the Panhandle Regional Housing Finance Corporation, which means that this project will stay on the tax roles. Uh in previous iterations, uh it would have been tax exempt, but this time uh it's more favorable for them to leave it on the tax roles and they're seeking a a new allotment of the 9%. So, in summary, the request is is simply for a resolution of support. Uh the only money uh involved on the city side of this is that they have requested as part of this resolution a $500 waiver of development fees. Uh again, the project would remain on the tax roles and if awarded, uh tax credits and funds would would come from the state. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have on the housing tax credit program or if you've got any project specific questions, we have uh Mr. Garcia here from JES Holdings. Evening, sir. Any questions for Mr. Garcia or Drew?

No. Okay. Would ask for a motion on 75. I move to adopt resolution number 12-09-25-3 as presented. Second. Motion and a second on Mr. Garcia's project. All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes. Thank you for being here, sir. Moving right along to item 7.6. Uh

good evening, mayor and council. Uh consideration of resolution number 129254. Uh this item is the first and recommended final reading of a resolution uh authorizing an advanced funding agreement uh for surface transportation block grant with uh the state of Texas for transportation improvements. Uh a little background on the project. This is actually projects two and three out of the safe streets for all plan. Uh this includes intersection improvements or enhancements uh at those intersections uh listed on your screen there. This includes uh median improvements, ADA ramps, crosswalks, uh and pavement markings, widening of islands, uh installation of reflective back plates, uh four uh four section signal heads where they don't exist, uh sidewalk and bike lane improvements as well. Uh here's a couple just snippets of what we're talking about. This is out of that SS4A plan. Um when we're looking at this, this is no category 7 funding. Um the total project cost just over 1.2 million. Uh federal participation of 966,000 state uh just under 30,000. Our f our local match is 241,647. So, the original CIP request on this project, uh, well, my slides got cut off, cut, uh, cut up a little bit there. You can't see the the bottom of those, but, um, uh, the original C CIP request was for engineering only. Uh, but Tex supplied AFA included the construction on this as well. So, it actually uh, accelerated our funding needs. So, this was intended to be broken apart into two pieces. is basically an engineering phase and a construction phase and we were actually going to be requesting the construction funding uh through the next

uh cycle of the CIP. Um so staff is recommending uh you can see there's four projects on the screen there. The two in blue are associated with the engineering on this project. The other two were associated with uh grant matches. Uh we actually did not get awarded those those grant matches. Um all of those added together is 240,000. Um we're basically requesting to be able to utilize those four into one. Uh and then requesting uh so uh 1,647 to be used utilized as reserves for our match for this. Um and this will be including uh engineering and construction phases. Uh during the process of this, if uh during the engineering piece, this comes back as too high of a quote, we do have the ability to break that contract AFA on this um with just having to pay fees, reasonable fees that were incurred by Tex DOT. Tex is intended to be the managing the project manager of this project. Um staff recommends approval of this item uh with a waiver from section 7 of resolution 0812251 uh from the two reading requirement for resolutions in order to stay on course with text on NPO's project leting schedule for the cat 7 funds.

Questions for Mr. Balls? No. Thank you Cody. Ready for a motion if you got one? I move to adopt resolution uh20925-4 as presented. Second motion in a second. Any further discussion? All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes. Item 77, Mr. Dunlag.

Good evening, mayor and council. How are how are we doing this evening? I will try to keep this brief as possible. Uh so the resolution in front of you and again I do not have a uh PowerPoint. I'll just keep it brief. The resolution in front of you is to authorize the city of Amarillo's participation in the uh regional mutual aid plan. Uh this plan is actually authored through PRPC as the council of governments for the region. Uh however I was asked to represent this here for our city. In a sense, what this plan is is it outlines the method in which we ask our neighbors, partners, and surrounding 24 counties for help and vice versa. Additionally, it also outlines the method to recoup any funds necessary or expended during that that help. Uh in short, this uh this plan is nothing new. It's actually going into its uh 21st year, I believe. Its first uh rendition came out in '04 and was then in 2014 uh hit its second version with its newest version uh pushing out now. Uh with this it really is just how we share resources. A great example of how these plans are executed during uh emergencies is the most recent fires over the last 24 months in the panhandle. that devastation. That is how we move city assets to the north side of the panhandle of Texas to ensure that our neighbors are getting that help. That is all this plan really outlines and the ability if choose so the recruitment of those funds for that help. Any questions? No questions, Mr. Dunlap. As always, we appreciate you.

Thank you. Um before you is item 77 for your consideration. I move to adopt resolution number 12 09255 as presented. I second. I have a motion and a second on item 77. All in favor please say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes. Item 78. Mr. Freeman is this you?

Um yes sir. So the next few items are for our tax increment reinvestment zones. Uh state law requires that the creating entity which is the city that create each of the tier zones uh appoints the chair uh based on the membership. So those are required to be appointed before January 1st of each year. Um so we are here to go through that process. So in your packet has a list of every board member also has the uh current chair. So for tiers one, we have Dean Frigo. For tiers two, David Walker, and for tiers three, John Adterbury. Happy to answer any questions.

So you have um 78, 79, and 710. You presented on all three, correct? Yes, sir. Yeah, it's just a different zone. Uh each one has a a chair appointment required. Yeah. And the appointment is by the council. Yes. Uh but then this recommendation comes from the board itself, right? The tears board. No, it's just a requirement of state law that that the governing body that created the zone appoints the chair. Um but as far as a recommendation in the in the uh packet, uh the staff recommendation is just to maintain the the current chairs. Current chairs. So you just listed the three current chairs. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Okay. And do we have anything that came back from any of the the boards? We didn't have anybody requesting

to do anything different. There's not there hasn't been any communication with the board as far as changes. No, sir. Council uh item 78 if if we have any nominations from the council otherwise uh before you would be the existing chair for reappointment. I I move to reappoint Dean Frigo as chair of chairs one. Second have a motion and a second for Mr. Frigo. All in favor please say I. I.

Any oppose? Motion passes. before you use item 79 if you have a nomination otherwise there is an existing chair that's David Walker for tier two I'd move to reappoint David Walker as chair of tier two okay second I have a motion to reappoint Mr. Walker and a second from place one. Any further discussion? All in favor, please say I.

I. Any opposed? Motion passes. Item 710 is the same. Uh, existing chair is willing to continue to serve. Who is the existing chair again? John Adterbury. Mr. Adterberry. No relation to any of the other No. And he previously served on TIE 2, so he has experience on two two different boards. I make a motion that John Adterbury remain as uh I guess tears three board chair. Second motion and a second on Mr. Adterbury. All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes with a 50 vote.

All right. Thank you, sir. Um item number 711. Is this Rich? Yeah, that'd be me.

All right. So, this as Donnie and and uh Laura Laura pointed out, we've migrated all of our finances and HR over to Workday, but we're a long way from done. I can tell you I've used Workday for a couple of decades, and we don't have yet all the business processes, automations, and reports uh up and running to make full use of the platform. So, working with Joy and Innovation, we started searching for uh ways that we could get training and consulting without spending half a million dollars a year to get it done. Uh we explored Workday's uh customer success program uh that gives the city access to experts within workday. They have weekly office hours. Um they that are capable of building business processes and automations and reporting. Uh it gives access to ondemand training. Um also training during office hours, workshops, shops and webinars. And it appoints a customer success manager to our team that will coordinate internal resources with workday, help us manage our roadmap and just help us get uh the system fully online faster. They also become a dedicated support contact for the city. So, we don't call the support line, we call our success uh manager. Uh we looked at this originally um and I wasn't going to bring it to council because it was $244,000 a year, but they reached out to us recently. It's end of year and anyone who's in the sales knows how that works. And they cut the cost in half. So, they're offering us a 5-year contract at $122,000 a year. that's less than we would pay a consultant for 6 months. So, it was worth bringing forward. Um, as I said, I hadn't intended to bring this forward until the whole CIP discussion was done, but it it felt like too good an opportunity to miss. You got anything else on that, Rich?

No.

Um, council, any questions for Mr. Gagn? So, I I do have a few questions and Rich, you and I had already talked about this and so like I uh I definitely see the need for the additional software. I I totally understand it, but we just, you know, went through a a CIP update with new protocol, how the CIP protocol is going to work, how it has to go back through. I loved everything that I heard for future going forward. Obviously, you guys know I'm I'm the stick in the mud that's still stuck from like a year, two years ago. So I want to go back and make sure that we reconcile everything that we account it all we verify it validate it put it in a nice neat little book right but a clean way to move forward I think we all agree and in other discussions with um you know our finance department is very clean if you take unused capital monies and you bring them back for a reappropriation um rather than transferring them from one job to another. So this is a good example to walk out uh gentlemen up here on the dis what we just went through in a presentation. So if you look at it the funding source on this our staff does a fantastic job of making sure that we understand where is it funded is it in your budget if not how are you paying for it. So once again you guys operate under oneear budget. So you appropriate the budget for the year and that's all the money you have to spend. And if you're going to go outside of that, which you can, you just need to amend that budget if you want it to be super clean and very very rigid. If not, there's certain ways that things function. And professional services, I think, is the one thing that uh in my request, you guys got an email um from our city attorney talking about like, well, this this is a professional services agreement. Am I am I saying that correctly? And so it it may not

necessarily need to be treated like another capex or or CIP project. So what I am comfortable in is what Mr. Hooper presented that that we're not just going to take money, go find something left over on a project and then go put it on an expenditure for council to approve because that's all item 711 is. It's an expenditure. Um we're approving an expenditure for this purpose. But if you look at it, is this item budgeted? It says no. And so it is not in your budget. So if we said, well, okay, we don't want to take it from something else in the budget. We we want to appropriate monies from existing savings that we found. Did we find out where the money resided before? Like did we identify the job and what it closed out?

It was in 4100. Did we identify the actual jobs? Yes. Um let me pull that up real quick. Um we also had that um we had more than enough just sitting in available funds in that um project fund to cover this. Um and normally on a ser public or a professional services contract we would ask for the funding for just year one and then we would include it in each of the years going forward. But we wanted to be conservative with this and try to secure a way to fund the entire five-year contract upfront. But normally we would have only asked council to, you know, to fund the first 122,000 and then each year after that 122,000. Right. Yeah. And then each one after that. And if you'll give me a second, I'll pull up the spreadsheet.

That's great. So, I think if we can identify the funding source here and and I I just want to work in a real clean manner moving forward, what we what we've identified with Mr. Hooper is is that this normally would come from you as the director and the ACM. It would go back to Grayson. Grayson would then work it through that that CIP. It would have an an approval from staff, which basically that's where we are. You would bring it to council and then council would then appropriate it, right? Yeah, that's pretty much what we did. We identified it. So Joey and I identified it. We worked with Laura to look at budget. We took that to Grayson to make sure he was aware. So we've tried to follow that process as well.

So I I think I'm following you on everything except for maybe the the final step on the appropriations. So we we just didn't appropriate it. we can't say yes it's in the budget and it's been it's been identified by these funds that are coming from the savings of project X and so that is what I find very very helpful for our public to be able to see that as we move forward we won't have a continuation of some of the issues that we've seen and we greatly appreciate it being this specific and you guys putting it out there and answering all the questions because I think it would have been fairly easily to you know to have kind of continued as previous practices and and it would have just gotten a vote, right? But because we're doing it this way, how's the right way to appropriate the money um on this? And that might be directed towards you, Mrs. Stores. You may have something over there that you've located that would help us fund this.

So, um this this money is um has already been approved to be used in this fund. Um, and we we have recommended to or we have closed out a few projects that have enough money to cover this. Um, one of them was, and I'll let Rich kind of explain a little bit on this, but one was like, um, an older um, CAD upgrade replacement project. Um, I don't know if Rich wants to go into that, but there was um, over 200,000 that we released to reserves that would go towards um, this project. I don't know if you

Yeah, that was the the dispatch when we upgraded the dispatch system for 911. We were able to to uh to do that for less money. We were actually able to negotiate some of the contracts down while we're in process. Boing. Um hey, in the Dave, you're work in the back. Can you guys work on that? There's a little feedback. Thank you, sir. Yeah. So, that was some of the savings coming out out of that project just out of negotiating while we went through the project. Project CAD has been closed. Yep. It's complete. Okay. And it was closed when within the last few months. Yeah. Within the last few months.

So, just in the last couple months, we've closed it. We brought it in under budget. Do you have any specifics on the project? Like, was it several million dollars? Was it a million? What What did one point? the project closed. Um the remaining funding was 211,000. Is that what you're asking or Sure. Yeah. But just a few specifics on the project. How how did you bring it in under budget?

Uh some of it was I have to go back and look, but if I remember correctly, some of it was uh maintenance contract negotiations. Uh we also did some redesign in the way that we did the workstations in the CADs. Uh we got over there and found ways we could be more efficient. It was a lot of little things like that that just added up. I I do know I've got I don't know how many years of experience I have with you right now. Is it over four? I don't have one project that Rich has ever brought me a problem on. He continues to bring projects in just like this. Like renegotiated the contract, found it. I think this is great. So you It's your project. It was underneath your supervision, your team.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we we made it known to it when I came in that if we could negotiate contracts and save money, that was more projects that we could do. that was more money for salaries. So, they're constantly looking for a way to to drive costs down because they know that means we get more work done. Okay. And then what was the other project you had? Um, the other one was the SIMS UPS. So, and Rich might be able to speak a little bit to that. That may be a little bit more facilities facilities as well, but um the UPSg upgrade it has to do with like the backup.

Yeah. So, the UPS when uh our pri at our primary primary data center. When power goes down, it fails over to generator. There's essentially a massive battery that keeps things online while it flips over to to uh generator power while it flips back and then it filters the power to make sure it's clean and we don't blow up, you know, $10 million worth of gear in the data center. Um they had to upgrade that and and that was really a facilities project. It just came in under bid. Okay. And that's 300. It was 365. Yeah. 365K under budget. Yes, sir. Okay. Thank you, ma'am.

So, is the CAD project an AutoCAD project or did you terminate it? Is that computer computer aided dispatch? Computer aided dispatch. So, those are all the computers and dispatch systems that your 911 operators use. Thank you. I just No problem. Sorry. So, we're we're um we're still under budget even funding this project. So 576 was the total savings just on those two projects. Exactly. You can fund this one and still have a little money left over.

Exactly. And we're doing it for half the cost. This would typically be a million dollars for five years and we're coming in at five. So it seems and there's some incentive for them to do that because uh workday has been around for a long time in in big corporations. I used them at every company I was at. Um they're relatively new in government. So, this is an opportunity for for um them to highlight the work that we're doing. And just props to the team. You you may not be aware of this, but Emarillo is far ahead of other cities as far as how quickly we've adopted Workday and some of the the the work we're already doing. Our adoption rate is ahead of a lot of corporations and way ahead of most governments.

And so, Mr. Hooper, in in your proposal, that is exactly how this would work. you would present those numbers just like that uh on your updates. We'd be able to see how these projects are coming in under budget some of them and then you may have a request already or you may just have to park that money and say look the request will be coming but you know just like what we've just walked out that is what we would expect in in your new protocol. Yes, sir. And that's that's really what Rich was walking out you know as an ACM going through the same exact process.

So I I think it's great. I would make a a request. I don't feel comfortable voting for an item that says it's not budgeted and we're now identifying monies that that are actually savings that just aren't reflected in the budget. And and I don't think it's anything we have to hold up. Um I would believe Mr. Path, we could go ahead and approve it knowing that in the future we want to put it on a list. Maybe when we do a budget amendment, if we had several things that needed to come back for a budget amendment, can we how much time do we have to do a budget amendment and still keep the books clean? I don't know about timing, but

we normally bring back um our year-end budget amendments. Um the two meetings or the meeting of the audited financial statement acceptance and the meeting before. So because by that point we have all audit adjustments in and we know exactly how much we need from a budget amendment standpoint. So that's done usually in the late February and March time period.

So even if we had another project, let's say something does collapse, another ice rink issue, we need to do something like this. Now we've we're we're following your new practice but then we're keeping track of it and we are going to do a budget amendment um in the future which is allowed you know not by law but I guess by gap for this situation we're the funds are staying within the same fund so budget amendment is not necessary but it's your preference if we wish to paper it that way we can paper it that way but otherwise you don't have to do it this way it's in the same fund we're not even moving it out of we're not moving fund fund to fund no now rich you also I guess negot negotiated or they're in end of years, they're willing to make a deal that's about 50% of what we would normally pay.

Right. Right. There's no guarantee we're going to keep that. No, it's highly unlikely. Um, you know, you you get you can wait till end of next quarter and maybe, you know, try to negotiate then, but but this is the time of year to negotiate these deals. They're trying to close of what we would normal normally.

Yeah. It was typically run about quarter million and we're at 122. Well, and I think Rich has done all the leg work and and you can obviously see the need for the additional subscription, I guess you would call it, but I mean, no reason that we can't move on this now, take action, you spend the money, and then we put it on this list so that it comes back in March, let's say, for a budget amendment along with anything else that it would need. Right. Exactly. Even though it's within the same fund, it's just cleaner because we've had so much of this CIP that's been hard to track. Yeah. And what what I like about this is it's not just hiring a consultant. Consultants are a roll of the dice. You never know what you're going to get. This is actually training our internal staff with direct help from Workday. So, we're not only getting the, you know, getting the automation and the reports we need, but we're enabling staff so in five years hopefully won't have to come back and ask for this again.

Laura, you said that we're paying this all up front, the full 549, or are we just paying the 59? We are just paying the 59 in in this year. And so, yes, but I think what the mayor is asking is for us to bring a formal budget amendment to go ahead and appropriate the full 500,000 that will be spent out over a 5-year period. Yes, sir.

So, if we look at maybe the example of the sewer and water and how the project didn't get set up and then when we went back, we had different issues. you know, if if we go painstakingly step by step on some of this, I think it's helpful because now you've got the 549, it was in the budget amendment, so you could look and say, well, it was passed in the 25 26 year as an amendment, X, Y, and Z. And then watching that come out of there, I think is what I'm asking for. If there's any heartburn on that, I don't want to be that difficult, but it is my request. I just think it's right in line with the charter and and every other practice that we'd like to see. If I could just add something just to manage expectations. Um, when I say budget amendments normally come back in February, February or March, this is in a new fiscal year. So, this would we would be talking about bringing it back in February or March of 2027.

Just so for your awareness on that because it would be after the close out of our 9:30 2026 um audit which is the year we're in right now. Well, I I guess I would probably hang us up on that. I understand we as council can do a budget amendment at any time, right? Yes, that is correct.

I just wasn't proposing a budget amendment for 549,000 for this one item thinking that like you may have a look back after we get some of the CIP stuff closed out and whatever else we're trying to work towards. So, mine was just logistical ease of maybe putting a few together, listing them all, tracking them. My only discomfort here is just in voting for something that that I know is not represented in the budget as though it is and not formaliz formalizing a budget amendment. I think it should be in the budget as an amendment at some point in time. And I know it doesn't have to be maybe per se, but like it should be like especially as we're going to walk all this out with multiple projects. I was just saying you could update the you could do a budget amendment just added as a project on the one-year CIP in the back of the budget book.

That would be in a budget amendment. We showing as a project. We could. Yeah. I mean, we could do it midyear. I mean, we can do it any time of year that council wants to. Yes. So, the I think the criticality is is realizing the the savings of a half a million dollars before the end of the end of the year. I mean, that's just good business if we could

get our get our stuff taken care of. Well, but I mean, you know, you're going to have things. I mean, we don't have that many. I can't remember a whole lot of things that we've ever approved that it says that there it's not budgeted, but you're going to have those. Uh I mean, the reason why we're addressing this now is because there's a time sensitivity to it or you might wait or never have it. I mean I mean I think when we vote on it, we're we're amending it. We've got it's not like we don't have the money. So, I'm like I don't really see a problem in in going ahead and approving this. I mean, You know, if you had a business and you said, "Wow, I can save a whole lot of money." I don't think you're going to say, "Well, I'm not going to do that because I don't have a budgeted and we're giving our approval, which we would be required to do anyway." So, I don't I don't know why we have to jump through any more hoops other than just approving it today.

I agree with you. I think we can approve it today. We can kick it um forward and then the only thing I'm asking for is just, you know, in the approval, we we require the budget amendment. And so it just gets listed and brought in whatever form is appropriate by you know our budget officer however you want to attach it to that CIP. You've identified the monies. We've done that here in a public meeting which is great. So any problems with that or or can we move forward with that?

This is purely council preference. It's not required. It's purely council preference. And so with this yeah I think we can pursue Andrew's route. I think that's the best route here. We can update the uh the CIP list one the one-year list there and then bring it back as an amendment. That's not hard to do. So, we we'll work to bring it back to you at another time. But yeah, I would recommend you approve this tonight and then and then we can bring that back to you at a future meeting. Anything else on this one? Council would ask for a motion on 711. I move to award the professional services agreement for workday success plan as presented. Second motion and a second from place three. All in fa uh all in favor please say I.

I. Any opposed? Motion passes. All right, Mrs. Glick. 712 through 717, I believe, is you.

Uh, that is correct. So, we're going to start with the advisory committee for people with disabilities. Um, I do want to note that I went ahead and included the um little spreadsheet roster with the applicants in your folders tonight to make it a little easier, but if you want to follow along, it's on page 11. Um the advisory committee for people with disabilities has five members with three-year terms. We need three appointments tonight um due to expiring terms. This committee does meet by monthly and there are no special membership requirements. Board leazison is Chris Quigley and we did receive three applications this year.

Council questions on this board. Is there any any members here or from the board that could speak on these the new folks or Kim is here? Chris is not here. Okay. Then I make a motion that we accept Seabourg, Devry, and Park as new uh folks on the advisory committee for people with disabilities. Okay, council. I didn't see anybody jumping out there. I know it's typical. Go ahead. I'm Kim serves on the board.

Yeah, Kim serves on the board. Miss Benson, if you don't mind, I'm going to get you to come on down. Um, you've been on the board for two years, you were saying. And and maybe attendance is a problem.

Yes, attendance is a problem. Um, the chair that we've had, I've never seen. So, um, I'm just saying and I I've brought this to your attention before about, you know, and y'all y'all did a great job at the last meeting looking at attendance. I appreciate that. So, my voice was heard. Um, I want to meet. I want to serve, but it has been a problem. I think this board has a lot of things it could accomplish, but when we can't meet, we can't accomplish anything. So, thank you. Okay. Thank you, ma'am. Any other questions? Yeah, I do have one question. Do you Let me Let me ask this. I mean, we do have we we have a motion in a second. Does somebody second that? We we don't yet. So, I mean, do we have need to have a second to have discussion?

Well, I don't know because he nominated three individuals at one time. So, I was going to get clarity on that. The motion was for all three. Council normally makes a motion for an individual and then we we you know, does it matter? You can do it either way. Okay. So, council, is there a second for the motion for Seabourg de Park? I would second that. Okay. Now we have a motion and a second for those three to serve. Right. Do I have any discussion? I have one question for this committee. Do you have to live in the city? No. Okay. Okay. Any other discussion on this board? Can we ask a clarifying question? Yes, sir. Miss Benson.

Yep. Miss Benson, we have another question for you. Miss Benson, are these are do you have any familiarity with these three individuals? No, I I do not. When I looked at their names, I did not recognize any of those names. Okay. And I I would say that this committee is for the aging to maybe that's why I'm on that committee, but it is for the aging and and disabled. Okay. Okay. No further questions. Thank you. And then I I don't have the applications in front of me, but all these people checked yes when they said I can attend at this time. They did. So that we've we're we're now asking them that and they committed that they could attend at the time. Okay.

They could not continue with the application without checking yes. Okay. Very good. Item 7.12. I have a motion with a second. No further discussion. All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes with a 50 vote. Miss City Secretary, you got that on your side? Yes, mayor. Okay. Item 7.13, Mrs. Glick.

Um, this is the Emerald Hospital District Board of Managers. Um, it is on page 207 in your book if you'd like to follow along. This board has seven members and they serve two-year terms. They meet quarterly and they serve as a policymaking body that oversees and administers the affairs of the hospital district. Um, we do need four appointments and there are due to terms expiring and our board liaison is Laura Stores, the chief financial officer. Um, the board did wish to bring forth the attendance of one member whose term is expiring. Um, it was important to them that we do have meet the attendance requirements for this board. questions for Miss Johnny. You have a good list of individuals over there. Um, since seeing that we do have that, would ask if council wouldn't mind nominating one member at a time on this particular uh board.

And just to clarify real quick, council Thomas Warren III is the individual with attendance challenges. He is at 63% attendance right now and he has missed the last two consecutive meetings. Okay. Ask if council has anybody they'd like to put forward.

All right. I will nominate uh Dr. Deborah Moore uh in place of Clarence Thomas Warren II. Got a second. Got a motion and a second from place two. Do I have any discussion on that nomination? All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes with a 50- vote for that one position. Need two. Need three more. I I move to reappoint West right uh to the position. Second. Um any discussion on that? All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes. I recommend we reappoint Dean Frigo as well. Second.

Motion and a second on Dean Frigo. All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes. One more. I make a motion we reappoint uh Rodney Young. Second. Any discussion? All in favor, please say I. I. Any oppose? Motion passes. On to 7.14. Ma'am,

this is the beautifification and public arts advisory board. It is on page 303 of your book. This board has nine members who serve three-year terms with no term limits. The board promotes um programs that enhance the city's appearance and elevates appreciation for public art in Amarillo. We do need three appointments this year with one vacancy and two members with terms ending. Um one of the seats is transitioning from a city council member seat to an atlarge seat due to an ordinance change um passed earlier in this meeting. The board meets monthly and the board leaison is Michael Kosuba, the director of parks and recreation.

So if you got questions, Koshuba is here to help you. Um, you've got one vacancy. Um, and I want to clarify before we go. Matt Morgan not willing to serve again. And you even talked to him twice. Really? Okay, we get it. Do you have any recommendations? No, I would just the recommendation would be to reappoint Cat Massie and then I think we only had two other people apply. So just appointing those to the other positions. Really? Oh, I think we we've already appointed Denita Byum and Kisha Paul. I think we did last session. Now, not to say that somebody

couldn't serve on on two, but I know I think we appointed those two to other boards last time. So, let me ask because I I I got a recommendation. So, is there a motion on Cat Massie? I make a motion that we reappoint Cat Massie. Second. Motion in a second. All in favor, please say I. I. I. Any opposed? That is uh approved. I would like to appoint Deanna Low Craighead to fill the vacancy. Second. Motion in a second. Discussion. All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes. Um, I move to recommend Mark Pal to take Matt Morgan's position.

And I second. Motion in a second. All in favor? I. Any opposed? Motion passes. Thank you. All right. 715. This is the Construction Advisory and Appeals Commission. They have nine members who serve three-year terms with no term limits. Each of these members does have to um meet a category. This year we are searching for one residential builder and one architect. Um the two that do meet those requirements is um Richard Constantio and Thomas Nielsen. Is that correct?

So we have two that are qualified and um two vacancies. Mhm. I make a motion that Richard Constantio be uh placed on the board. Second. Any discussion? All in favor, please say I. I. Any oppose? I'd like to nominate uh Tommy Nielsen to fill the uh the position by Jeff Bryant. Second. Got a motion and a second. Any discussion? All in favor? I. Any opposed? Motion passes. On to the next one. Ma'am,

the next up is Condemnation Appeals Commission. This board um used to be a subcommittee of the Construction Advisory and Appeals Commission, but due to an ordinance change, they are now their own board. And so we are seeking appointments for new people if they wish to continue serving or if they don't wish to continue serving for four voting members and one alternate. Um, the ordinance does allow for Mr. Constansio to continue serving because he's already on it and he did not decline to continue serving. So, we are hoping he continues to serve.

Okay, a few questions on this one. Sure. This board only meets when it's called. This board meets twice monthly. The previous board, CAC, meets as needed. So, this board is functioning. This board functions Yes. And do we have good attendance? It's an extremely busy board. It is. Um, do we have good attendance from the board members? Yes. Um, honestly, I did not print out or take care of the attendance for this board. Jim Baines, electrical contractor, maybe even electrical engineer. He did not wish to continue serving.

Is his position needed in that capacity? We need another electrical contractor. So, you need either need another electrical contractor or somebody in the list that I've provided that is not already on the board. So, basically, you need either um an electrical contractor or anybody that's not an architect. Where's your list? Yeah, I don't have you. Um it's on the presentation. I apologize. Okay. So, um and it's also on It's not really in list form. It looks like a paragraph in the this page. I'm sorry, we're not seeing the the list. Would you read them to us?

Yes. We need a registered architect on the board, a registered professional engineer, commercial building contractor, residential contractor, electrical contractor, HVAC contractor, plumbing contractor, or an insurance fire and casualty agent. Um, one member also has to be an atlarge person with no um, financial interest in the building industry. So, you don't have any individuals. Do you just have We have categories right now. Yes, sir. Do you have any applicants for that that happen to be an electrician? We did not have any applicants for this board. No applicants. We're currently advertising. So, this may be one that y'all want us to bring back. Yeah. Once we can get some applicants.

Sure. Yeah. council, if y'all are good, I would say uh you you don't need any reappointment even though they're in red, all of these. Or do we need to reappoint everybody that's that's in they can continue serving until you reappoint them or until the position is filled. So, we'll keep trying to call meetings with them as they're available, but we'll try and get them replaced as soon as possible. Okay. Yeah. And we're fine bringing it back. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Uh no action on 716. Miss City Secretary, are you good with that one? Yes, mayor. Okay. 717.

Um, this is the digital dignity rights and privacy advisory board. This is a new board that has not been appointed yet. Um, we are seeking two to fill two positions. One of them has to be a council member and then one of them can be an atlarge um member appointed by city council. I d my name in as the city council. I will second that. I don't think I can I I got a motion in a second. No, I'm kidding. I'm sorry. I was distracted. Can you repeat?

I said I would throw my name in for the city council. Okay. Um All right. Did we have any further presentation? Not for this board. Okay. Um, Mr. Gagnet, other than Councilman Prescott, who obviously is not necessarily qualified. No. Do you have any recommendations of anybody from from your because you created this, so

I did actually. We're very heavily on the technical side. That's a that's an all-star team of techn technical talent that understand uh privacy and in the digital space. I actually recommend Cassandra Green who's been active in the community and driving this from the start. It would be good to have a community voice that isn't yet another nerd and asking the right questions during our board meetings. Okay. Um All right. So, we have a motion and a second for Councilman Prescott. Let me go back and get that one. I know I'm paying attention now. Um all in favor for Councilman Prescott. Yeah, I guess you probably can. Don't vote for yourself.

It's a no vote. Can I If you stay here, Yeah. If you stay here, it's a no vote. If you stay here, it's a no vote. You can vote for yourself. You nominated yourself. I vote for yourself. Vote for myself. All in favor for Councilman Prescott say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes. Um, and I would make a motion to nominate Cassandra Green. Okay. Second. Any discussion? All in favor of Cassandra Green say I. I. Any opposed? Okay, done and done. On to the next one.

Next up is the library advisory board. Um, this board has five members um and provides guidance on library operations, long range planning, and other um library advisory duties. Um the requirements for this board is that one is that the member must have a Emerald Public Library library card and be in good standing. Um and then one seat must also be filled by the Friends of the a board member of the Friends of the Library. Um we currently have so we have one vacancy and one Friends of the Library vacancy. Um, of the applications that you received, Roxan Ball and Olga Mallister are members, our board members of Friends of the Library.

Mayor, I'd like to nominate Roxan Ball for the vacancy for Friends of the Library Board member slot. I have a motion and a second. All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Roxan Ball nominated. We have one more vacancy. Do we have anyone here from Amanda? Yes, please.

Good evening, y'all. Good evening.

So, um, for the at large position, my recommendation is Samantha Wildman. Um, as her application indicates, she has varied experiences as both a user and an employee at different kinds of libraries all over the country, including here in Amarillo. Um, having worked at APL in the past, she's thoroughly familiar with our policies and procedures. um she had a public service position while at APL, so she directly interfaced with our patrons and um knows what they expect and desire from their library. And to this day, she and her family participate in library activities and come to our programs. So, she's up to date on what we're currently offering.

Okay. I make a motion to appoint Samantha Wildman to the library advisory board. Second. Motion and a second. Any discussion? All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes. So, ne, sorry, go ahead, mayor. Oh, go right ahead.

Next up is the parks and recreation board. Um, this board has 11 members who serve three-year terms. Um, this board did have an ordinance change where it does now have a council member seat. Um, so we do need to fill one one of the vacancies with a council member and we need have I can't talk. I'm sorry. And then we have one more atlarge seat that's available. Um the board meets monthly and the liaison is Michael Kosuba the director of parks and recreation and I would like to serve as the councilman on that. I'd like to nominate uh Councilman Reid. Second motion and a second. All in favor please say I. I.

I. Any opposed? Thank you Councilman. Um now will he take the place of Tiffany Podzimony? Um, he can it doesn't matter because these terms are both ending. Um, or you can you can reappoint Skyler or you can put another person in her place. Doesn't matter. Why don't uh why don't we make that motion? Uh, we'll amend that motion to replace Tiffany Podman. I make a motion that we uh accept Skyler Gallup. Second. Motion and a second to reappoint Skyler Gallup. All in favor, please say I. Can we have a little discussion on that? Oh, discussion. Sorry.

So, we went through a couple with uh attendance that were a little higher than hers. So, what's her attendance? It's on the screen here. So, not I've got a concern if we're going to use if we're going to use attendance on on some others, shouldn't we be consistent? That is true. Yeah. I apologize, Councilman. I wasn't looking at that. And so, good discussion. Um glad to see what Mr. Koshuba has to say and then what else we want to comment on.

That is something that uh was discussed when we were considering appointment. Um Miss Gallup's job this last year had a lot of legislative activity out of the area which is why her attendance was significantly lower than normal. So I think with some of the legislative things that have changed she'll be in Amarillo a lot more and present a lot more. So I think it was just the the timing of last year with a lot of the legislative agendas in in Austin. So you would recommend keeping her? I would. But is is but will that change? So there's this is a non-legislative year, but if she's a two-year term, will she be back in Austin again the following year? It's possible.

So we have a motion in a second. Right. We do. Do I hear any further discussion? You're not concerned about that? I mean attendance on the on the election year. I mean it's always a consideration. I mean if if the council wants to reappoint somebody else that's an option as well. I would also remind you I mean we have the new absentee policy where if you get two you get a warning and three you're out. I mean so we if there is an attendance problem we would probably catch it earlier than we do now when we only really assess it at the end of their term. So there is a little bit of caveat in I don't know if she wound up missing three in a row, but that would have that would that will naturally kick her out in the future or

Yes, that that is the catch right there. So, you could you proceed with Miss Gallup and then if she does hit hit the threshold, maybe maybe she's good next year, it's all fine, but if she does, she gets kicked out, we'll be talking about it then. We ready to call the question? All in favor, please say I. I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes. 7 20.

Um, this is the zoning board of adjustment. Um, it consists of five members and up to four alternates, all serving two-year terms with no limits. Um, this is a quasi judicial board that hears appeals relating to zoning decisions. The board does meet as needed. Um today we have one regular member that needs um that's term is ending and up to three alternates. Um we did speak with Miss Benson and she was willing to continue serving. Um Mr. Bird and Mr. Bryant were not we're not sure about Mr. Rome.

Um question before we do a nomination. Um, do the alternates get utilized or would it be better to serve in a Not a whole lot. Okay. So, um, if we have an alternate listed down below that's willing to serve again, um, is is it appropriate to leave that alternate position open, but but place them on the actual board? That has been done in the past. Yes, sir. Okay. Council, I would I would move uh Trent Morgan to take the place of Jason Burr. Um I'll second that.

Got a motion and a second. Any discussion on that one? All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? That passes. Um, we have another alternate. Well, and then I'll make I'll make a motion to reappoint Kim Benson. Second. Any any discussion? All in favor, please say I. I. Motion passes. And then um with no other uh applicants, we are okay to leave the alternate open. And how many alternates do we still have? Three. Yes, sir.

Council, do you have anybody you'd like to nominate for that other alternate position or were you okay moving forward leaving it vacant? Leave it vacant for now.

Nobody has anything. Great. I think we'll move forward with that then. Item 7.21. the Emerald Area Public Health Board. You guys did appoint a member last council meeting. Um there was a requirement that the appointee live inside the city limits. Um Miss Duke does not live inside the city limits. And on your appointment list, Miss uh Lydia Miller also does not live inside the city limits. So your remaining um options are Dr. Moore, Emily Braun, Howard Heath, Lindsay London, and Sheree Wood. and Casey is here tonight if you could.

So there there's a requirement for the public health board to live inside the city limits of the appointing jurisdiction. So because you're the city of Earllo, the person must live in the city of Emerlo City of Canyon. They have to live inside the city of Canyon. Okay, mayor. That's a state law requirement. So that trumps our Potter and Randall County requirements in our ordinance. Okay. Also, just a reminder for council because these were shared last time. Staff's recommendations were either Howard Heath or Lindseay London for this position. Um, and and again, Casey or Anthony are here to to answer any questions. Questions for Mrs. Stoutton?

Do you have a recommendation? Yes, sir. Howard Heath or Lindseay London? I'd move to appoint Howard Heath to the Emerald Area Public Health Board. Second. Okay. Quick discussion. Can we confirm Howard Heath is Does he have to be Potter County? No, he has to be City of Emerald. He just has to be within the city of Yes. And he is. He is. Okay. Motion and a second on Howard Heath. Any other discussion? All in favor, please say I. I. Any opposed? Motion passes. All right. Um, clarifying question. Is that all the boards or was there anything else that we were missing other than the one that's coming back?

The one that's coming back. And then we also have our transit advisory board that's been created but we have not appointed yet. Okay. One other question. Laura. Laura, is this your last meeting? Yes, sir. Thank you for all you've done for us. You're welcome. Of course. It's been my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Just one more motion and an adjournment unless anybody's got anything else. I make a motion to adjourn. A second. And a second. You're ajourned. Thank you guys for staying late.