Finance Committee - Regular Meeting

Thousand twenty six at 09:47AM. Is this time, I'll take a roll call. Alderman O'Neill?

Present.

Alderman Thorpe? Present. And I am here. Is there a motion to approve the agenda with the amendment of moving our FT1126 and FT1226 above general discussion? So we're just swapping general discussion and fund transfers in this.

So moved. Second.

All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Thank you. Motion carries. Is there a motion to approve the minutes from yesterday's meeting as written? So moved. Second. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Beautiful. The motion carries. Alright. We got a couple fun transfers from our good friends or ones from our good friends at Public Works. I guess the other is from our pal over in the finance department. But, you wanna come on up?

New alder Roman O'Neill is gonna have some questions about this important sidewalk project. So wanted to make sure we actually gave an opportunity to talk about it. Sure. I think it's it's it's actually pretty straightforward as director Vogel explained it to me. But why don't you go ahead?

Yes. Sure. So the, as part of the that Cedar Park sidewalk project, based on the size of the project and the disturbance, there was a storm water management requirement for that project that required a certain, without getting too technical, a certain volume of storm water that needed to be treated. And it was designed, there's a plan, but as this project was progressed, there was just site limitations and utility conflicts where it wasn't practical to install the storm water on-site. So, the the the dollars allocated to make sure that that storm water is still being treated.

The plan is to transfer it to the m s four account where it can supplement the storm water management in that same sub watershed so that we still we don't just not do the requirement that was required based on the disturbance of the project. So we don't know exactly what yet, but again, it'll be a well, it's more of an accounting. We'll make sure that any restoration or projects we do in that sub watershed, you know, we'll still basically say, well, a lot of it was based on the additional purpose we added for the Cedar Park sidewalk project. So that's kind of in a nutshell what the situation is. Thank you.

Alderman O'Neill, you wanna ask some questions?

Yes, please.

Go

ahead. Thank you very much. So just to be clear, so Cedar Park sidewalks is really two phases. There's a phase from Windell to Halsey that was completed in 2024. And then there's the phase two that is from Taylor Avenue to Fair to Locust that hasn't started. Right. So this is taking it out of the phase one because phase one was not able to adequately get the storm water.

Right. The the project the sidewalk was still installed for phase one. It's just the storm water management component of it. The I believe it was a filter inlet. The design just wasn't gonna work where there were conflicts that we that weren't done in the survey that just happened when you start digging up the road. So they couldn't do it on-site there. They still have to evaluate what the storm water requirements could be for phase two. And hopefully likely there might be some more open space area in that section where we could actually still do the storm water. The goal is to do the storm water management on-site, you know, is is directly to the point source of where you're putting your impervious location. But there's just times where it's practically difficult.

Still acknowledging that there's still a volume requirement that we have to manage in that sub watershed. So we're still gonna do and it's largely these redevelopment projects are pollution based, so we need to do water quality improvements to the sub watershed. So we as a city have opportunities to look elsewhere in that sub watershed to do water quality improvements.

Right. So you're moving this money out of that, but will it be moved back in when you do phase two, or will it be needed when you do phase two?

Phase two is budgeted based on what phase two is to do stormwater. That budget should have enough to or at least it's budgeted to do stormwater on-site for that phase. So that's already included in the phase two part. It's just this storm water part for phase one. We're just moving into MS 4 so we can we don't have to do it on-site. We can look elsewhere in the sub waters to do the work.

Thank you. Yeah.

Just a quick question. When you say the city agreed to contribute to the storm water account, who are we agreeing with? MDE? No.

I think it's just we agree that this money, you know, the the funds this is the best way to transfer the the funds in order to make so still make sure we get the goal achieved. You know, we have had discussions with MDE in the past, and we don't need their approval to do this. You know, we still have to do the requirement knowing based off any disturbance for any capital project, there's a storm water component to it. But they acknowledge that, you know, we have the design, we know how much we have to do, but there are just site constraints and, you know, conflicts that are tough to do on-site.

Director Vogtle. Hi. Perfect. It's the Director of Public Works. I'll just chime in on this.

It's completely voluntary. The way we handle city projects and doing storm water management for city projects is is generally a voluntary requirement.

Got it. Okay. Interesting. Is your mic working? I'm not seeing the red on it if you talk. Yeah. The red was on. Okay. Cool. Alright. Alderman Thorpe, had any questions on this? Nope. Seeing Nope. No more questions, is there a motion for a favorable recommendation on f t eleven twenty six?

So moved.

Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Thanks so much for being here, gentlemen. Yep.

Yeah. Let's just keep moving. Next up, I've lost my place in our agenda, but I think it's f t twelve twenty six. I would assume after f t eleven twenty six. Yeah. Thank you. And it is allocating some money from our debt service to contractual services in the finance department. Miss Buckland, you wanna talk about this? Or Mr. Palakal, whoever. Or Mr. Johnson. We got all sorts of finance folks in the room to talk about it.

Yeah. So this is a budget revision that basically is moving money out of non allocated debt service that's not going to be needed this year into contractual services and then there's also some vacancy savings found from finance department to move into contractual services as well. This is to allow for the finance department to continue operating with some of the existing consulting agreements that are in place.

Got it. And I had asked this at another time. And I don't know, maybe it's in our questions document has an answer. But I have not noticed it if so. For the FY twenty seven budget, how are we sure that we're not overestimating our debt service in the way that we did for the FY twenty six budget?

So that's a good question and you did ask, I'm trying to see if so that's a matter of us scrubbing going back to scrub those numbers. We do have the schedules. We've gotten the schedules from have some schedules internally, we're fact checking that. We asked for the schedules from Davenport because they keep copies just to make sure that stuff is aligned so that we can check those numbers to make sure that we have essentially full track of everything and we're adding it together correctly.

That's right. So I think what we need to do from a scrub perspective is see what is the historic debt, the existing debt and then what the debt service is. And to your point that should be a bit more predictable and understandable. I think where you see variability come into play is the timing of when you let and the timing of when you have payments and then like so an example would be in the current proposed budget, there is a exploration for a capital service lease and we have some amount of funding in there for debt service related to that

and Sorry, wait, say that again for a capital service lease?

Cap it's called capital lease. It's for the fleet replacement that could be some debt, there's some debt service in there to potentially explore that.

Yeah and that that really is the the thing that's variable that we will have less control over. So what we're doing is scrubbing the past, but in terms of the future, the budget includes some assumptions about how much debt we will release this year. And therefore the costs associated with those bond sales and the rest of that. So there's the master lease for fleet replacement, there's some bond amounts and historically we have not released as much in bonds as we were authorized for. That may end up happening again.

We're trying to minimize that because from my perspective that's been a problem. But more than likely we will we're certainly not going to overspend that, right? Like we tend to try to be on the conservative side of that. So it is certainly possible that it will still come in less. What we don't want is for it to come in a lot less. Right? We don't want that variance to be too big.

Yeah. And I know I'm drilling in on what's really not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. But what I'm trying to understand here is it makes perfect sense to me that how much we actually issue bonds for could vary from what we expect to. Totally makes sense. But because we're not paying debt service in the year that we're issuing those bonds, we're not paying debt service on those bonds in the year that we issue them. How would that variability impact our debt service variability? Isn't it only debt that we've issued previously so we would already know what it is?

Not necessarily. No. We would not have the full debt service load in the first year but we typically will have at least one interest payment in the first year. So there is some amount. Like I said it's not a large number but those two things will be related. The master lease for example, right? It's not immediate, it's not FY '27 where most of that would hit. Most of that would really kick in in FY '28 but there's there is an interest payment scheduled for '27. That's part of included in the budget. Yeah and the issuance fees as well, correct.

Okay. So the issuance fees could be definitely a search variation. But I'm still not understanding that interest part because when we look at Davenport's report to us and it says fiscal year twenty twenty seven bond issue. In fiscal year twenty twenty seven, we will pay zero principal and zero interest.

The the master lease is not like that.

Ah, okay.

Got it. For the fleet. Got it. Yes.

But your point's taken and I think we'll reconcile back to it and get that, make it more clear for this group and for the just us generally that we have the level of clarity on it.

And so and now I'm really getting off of this Feet, but I appreciate you guys making sure that we fully understand this. Why would that master lease agreement and that debt that's accruing to the fleet replacement or fleet service fund? Replacement. Replacement fund. Why would that not be included as part of our debt capacity that Davenport talked to us about?

Because the capital lease collateralizes the vehicles. It actually is a different structure. And so the bonds need to be collateralized against the city's assets and that's why you use the general fund as your expenditure base. But for the capital lease, you'd be collateralizing the vehicles themselves.

Makes perfect sense. We're not taking out a mortgage to on our house to buy a car.

Got it. Right. So generally generally speaking, you've got kind of three ways of of covering that debt. On the bond side, you've got two options. You've got general obligation bonds that go against the essentially the city's ability to tax.

Right. And then separately you can release revenue bonds which the city does that covers like the enterprise funds where we're bringing in revenue, we're counting on that revenue to pay the bond, right? And and they are treated as separate things in the bond world. The debt capacity analysis is specific to the general obligation bonds, not the enterprise, not the revenue bonds. So you've got those two bond elements and then the capital. The other thing to do is you you can put up a physical asset against that debt which is what the capital lease does. Right. Got it. And Which is the cars themselves.

For our debt service policy, the making sure we're not spending more than 10%, that includes our general obligation bonds and our which is referred to as capital bonds?

Debt service? Revenue bonds? No. It's just Not the general

revenue. But capital and general. No?

Just the so the debt service capacity is just the general obligation bonds. So it's the debt service that is backed up by the city's ability to tax. Okay. Right? In general.

But if we see the line item for debt service in the budget, that line item would include both, it would include all three?

It includes all three. Debt service in general when you look across the entire budget.

Yeah, only general fund.

Yeah, but if you looked at debt service across all the funds, all the funds would show debt service as a line. But the different pieces are in different places, right? The revenue bonds are sitting in their funds, The general obligation bonds are in the general fund. Fleet replacement would have the capital, the capital lease money debt service. But that service appears in all of those funds. But they represent these different kind of avenues.

Yeah. And that's that's why the fleet replacement fund is a separate fund. One of the reasons why it's a separate fund. Okay. Thank you. I feel like we got a nice little crash course here. I hope you guys don't mind me spending too much time on this. Anybody got any other questions about Feet twelve twenty six?

No? I'm assuming it's paying Joel.

Alright. With that, is there a motion for a favorable recommendation on FT1226? So moved.

Second.

All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. All right. That brings us to our budget discussion for today. Which is really going to center on what we need to get done in the next week. So just to well, there's more, but in general, the next week. So we have a couple different deadlines. First is for getting in any questions, which has to happen by close business today. So that's for any of us.

But also any of our colleagues putting questions to the department, follow ups, that kind of thing. Then the deadline for directors to respond to those is the end of the day tomorrow. And I heard as I was walking up here that we're extending the deadline or the administration extended the deadline for amendments to Monday. Is that correct, miss Buckland? Yeah. And do you want to say anything else about the process for not not our big process changes for amendments, but the more narrow, like, what you need to do with council members for amendments?

That's probably something for for both of us to talk about. The the form is there. It has a lot of different fields in it. My understanding is that for the funding source where is the money coming from to pay for this? If someone has identified a funding source enter it But that this is part of the process you guys will be undertaking is working on that particular side of things.

Great. And by code we have to have the finance committee report done by Monday. So that'll be fun. That's guess I know what I'm doing my weekend. I'll I'll tell you later what I'm supposed to be doing this weekend.

Okay. So on that topic, what we've done in the past for the finance committee report is really to go section by section and talk about the good news, the challenges, and any committee recommendations. So my plan today was just to open us up for a pretty broad discussion about where this committee sees needs for changes in the budget and particularly any recommendations that we might make. So my hope is we can just have a pretty broad conversation about that and just start with what are some of the top opportunities that any of us have seen and identified over the past two and a half weeks where we might want to make changes. So don't all jump at Oh, there we go.

I thought this is gonna be a thing I'd have to really facilitate. Please go ahead.

Alright. Thank you very much. I'll start by outlining. I thought that the departments did a really great job of following the format that we had requested for their presentations and sticking within those yeah.

Yeah. Go

ahead. Fifteen minute timelines. I really thought that we were drilling down to what they asked for, what they needed, what they got, what they didn't get, which is super. I would like to focus on three parts. One, I'm gonna say the community grants.

I think the community grant committee did a really nice job of following the idea that it was more important in many cases to fund a project or a program more fully than just throwing a little bit of money at it. I think that there's a lot of improvement we still can make in the whole process in how we tell people what the grants are. But I was really worried because we have one organization that is the only organization in the city and in the county that offers services for LGBTQ and we didn't fund them at all. So I've been looking through the list and trying to pull back a little bit of funding from some in order to give funding to that one. And I know that Autoimmune Conti is doing the same thing for another organization that she feels very strongly about.

So I will present those probably tomorrow as far as the give and take of changing those. Secondly, I was really intrigued by the Department of Central Services presentation and as history. Two years ago we created the Department of Central Services after it had been, eliminated eight years ago? Ten years ago? And when we created it, we really created it skeleton crew.

We funded a director and a support staff and the intention really was for a director to come in, you know, a professional to come in and say, okay, this is what we need. And I think that that's what director Flinner Finner did really well. So I would really like for us to see where we can make some movements, possibly fund two of the three that weren't funded. He actually gave us a priority list and I think that in following that will be helpful. I was really excited to hear that this is my third topic. Sorry. And then I'll

No. Keep on. We're we're just having a pretty informal conversation. So pretend Yeah. We're not on

Feel free to feel free to bump bump in. These were just the notes that I've been taking all for the last two weeks. I was really happy to hear that the county has earmarked funding for the fire department for that the extra crew. I don't wanna call it the extra crew for the and not being able to know if that's actually going to pass in their budget or not, we still have to budget as if it were not until they pass their budget which is usually about a week after we pass ours. So I think that we can take a look at that budget and kind of make some movement in that knowing that we might be receiving that another $250,000 towards that

unit.

I just think that's something that we kinda need to be cognizant of. And then the fourth thing is I really wanna take a look Woah,

woah, woah. You said you had three.

Sorry. Go

ahead. I'm gonna say four.

No. No. Seriously. Take as many as you want.

Go ahead. We really need to take a look at Parks and Rec. And it was really striking that Parks and Rec is one of the few departments that is really revenue generating. And it's revenue from both residents and outside of the city and county residents. And I think that we can make some changes in the way funds are allocated in that budget based on revenues and possibly changing some of the fees that are charged where we can work towards, I know that Alderman Thorpe has often said, you know, camps should be available for all.

And I think that in changing some of the fee structures we can do that. So those are the four parts that I really wanna that I wanna focus on.

Yeah. So rather than us talk past each other and each go down the line and say the things we think, let's maybe spend some time going over each one of your things as the three of us and then we can move on. You can go talk about some of the things you saw and we can talk about each one of those. You have any reactions? Carmen, you wanna go first?

No. Go ahead.

Okay. So first of all, totally agree with you on Parks and Rec. I think to me I I don't wanna jack up fees in general, but I think we absolutely should increase them on nonresidents. I think we need to set up a bifurcated system there where if you are not a resident, you are paying more. And, I'll say something that I one of the relatively few things that I think the Trump administration has done very well is that they changed the fees on national parks for entry so that you now pay much more if you are not a US citizen and a little bit less if you're not I mean, if you are.

So that it's just to say, like, there's precedent for this. It may it just plain makes sense. If you're a city resident, you shouldn't have to be paying twice necessarily because you're paying your taxes and you're paying your fee. One area in particular I think we could do that where I've had people be telling me this for over a year now is the boat ramp launch. So maybe, miss Jackson, I don't know how exactly we want to do the report outs from this, but I do think it could go in as a question to Reckon parts as could you come to us with a proposal on bifurcating those feeds? Is that about what you're getting at?

Isn't boat ramp under Harbormaster which is under city manager?

It very well might be. Yeah.

As opposed to Reckon Park.

Yeah. Actually that's a good point. I think of it as recreation, but you're right. It's So not that should really be for both of them. What I was saying is proposals from the harbor master specific to trucks and boat ramp and rec and parks more generally for how we could bifurcate our fees for residents versus non residents. Now, Alderman Thurp, something you've talked about before is not making these fees too complicated. And I really am sympathetic to that. Do you think that asking folks whether they're a resident or not as we determine those, do you think that gets us to be too complicated?

So and I think that's where the asking the question to the responsible person because I was sitting here thinking boat ramps. I don't know that the boat ramp system would allow to differentiate between a resident and a nonresident. Now if you show your driver's license if you have to scan your driver's license in, but I don't think you do. I think you just pay with a credit card and go. So it may be more expensive to create a system.

But I I totally agree with the concept. Yep. And then, you know, I I do think recs and parks fees when you actually show a driver's license, we absolutely should have a bifurcated system. And I would say the same thing about boat ramps across the board. And so maybe it's a do it where we can do it Yeah. And then task a plan to do it in other places.

Right. I wonder if on the boat ramp, it could be somewhat like the garage where there's a code that a city resident has a code. So if you put in your code, it's $50. And if you don't, that's 75. Right? I don't know what the fees are.

Yeah. Yeah. Whether a code is the right way, I think maybe it's you you have a set fee and then you can make it a a discount for city residents. And that way, it's you we're kinda putting the onus on I'd say putting the onus on the resident. But we're we're creating a system where if we can't make it work, it's not a it's not as big of a deal.

Right.

Okay. That that makes a lot of sense on the rec and parks thing. Yeah. Go ahead.

I I also think one of the things that's appealing to this idea is it doesn't I'd like to not raise the rates for the residents.

Yes. If anything, reduce them.

Yeah. And because of all the other rates that are being increased and all that. So and it it makes all the sense in the world, especially if you're coming in to use Pitmore or something like that. If you're a non resident, you're not paying property taxes. Yeah. Right.

Exactly. To your point about central services, so when when I get to my turn to talk about things, I'll tell you, I've been mostly like finding cuts rather than things I want to fund. Things I don't want to fund rather than things I want Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Easy peasy, pal.

But

I I felt like I have a lot of skepticism towards the risk management assistant in central services. What I have seen, and and this is something we'll touch on tomorrow, I think. But I feel like there's been a lot of risk management that has made city hall and other facilities less welcoming. And it sounded to me like director Flinner was saying that we need this rich management assistant to do exactly more of that. And that does not make me happy.

So it's one of those things where I'm like, not only can we spend the money better, but I don't really want to spend the money on what it sounds like it's going to go towards anyway. So, yeah, really just agree with you. And so there was a request from him to have the deputy director and to have the real estate consultant. I did not think the case was particularly strong for the deputy director. I do think there's a real need for I shouldn't say consultant, but for the real estate position.

And that's something that I think could really take some pressure off the office of law. I think it could lead to having better services for residents. I mean, I know it's I know there are good reasons for this, but I got a resident who's been dealing with a property issue for over two years with the city. And he's like, he's so frustrated that part of it is our our attorneys, this is not their main thing. This is not the main thing they should be doing. So it seems like having somebody to actually just manage that real estate would be really helpful. Now the trick is gonna be how do we how do we take the money that is currently one time? Because they have one time money for a consultant and what we really want is recurring funding for a staff member. So that's gonna be tough.

Right. He did say though in his presentation, he reorganized the priority of the positions that he'd asked for. So I think we can take a look at the positions that he did ask for and possibly make a swap out.

Yeah. What was the other one he got? He got the risk management assistant and I gotta pull it up now. Anybody remember what page in the budget book central services is?

45.

45. Oh, the other addition there I think made a lot of sense. It was essentially a facilities person. Right? Civil engineer too for facilities.

And the facility maintenance tech.

Oh, you're right. Yes. The civil engineer was just coming from elsewhere. The facilities maintenance tech was the actual enhancement, right?

No. The engineer two is is also net new.

Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Both of those seem pretty defensible to me but do you want to jump in on over there?

Yeah. Have not looked whether he's answered his questions which might help answer this question. But I guess I'm a little struck with his desire to give up the ones he got and get the ones he didn't get and that we don't have a city manager or mayor opinion on that. I would love to hear Vicki's thoughts on that. What do what do you give up, especially central services being so cross minded?

And before I turn it over, I I will tell you, I I think the last bill that you create is a deputy. Yeah. Philosophically. And so I'm I'm inclined not to want to create spend $200,000 on a job to back up the guy who's doing a main job, especially on a department this size, until I hear somebody say that he's maxed out.

Yeah. I also think, we heard from him. This is there's only one other department that doesn't have a deputy director. And then I don't I looked and it seemed like there was more. But, yeah, miss Buckland, did you have something to add on that? I mean, I know we're putting you on the spot here, but whatever you want say.

In terms of the logic of the choices that were made.

Yeah, the logic of the choices that were made in the Mayor's proposed budget versus what we heard from Director Flutter that he might prefer.

Yeah, so there is a lot of extra work and funding that's going to central services in this budget. And for good reason. We've had a lot of issues, you know, that department, Matt, Troy, the rest of those folks have really done a good job of trying to pull together you know what does that picture really look like, what are the needs, and they deserve a lot of credit for a lot of hard work to try to bring order to that chaos. But there is a lot of extra work. And so the logic of the choices that were made was they're already stretched very thin and we're giving them extra funding.

Let's give them the people to go with that funding. So an extra engineer, an extra facility maintenance tech. Right? That was the logic of those positions. I have a lot of sympathy for his position about having a real estate administrator. We ended up choosing to prioritize those other two positions and just continue the contractual money for another year in this particular budget. But I have sympathy for why he wants that and why he would prefer to have that as a merit staff. That wasn't the choice we made in the proposed budget but I understand why he wants that.

What I'm hearing from you is sort of along the lines of this was something that we could fund with one time use money.

Yeah and there's still I feel like an element of frankly sort of stabilizing the city's facilities picture that's part of where we are now which is why we prioritize those particular positions. The risk management specialist is a lot more than just the security at the buildings. So you know that job right now really gets in and oversees the self insurance fund sort of the day in and day aspects of that in a lot of different ways. So all of the workers comp goes through him. You know every single accident you know all of that stuff he keeps track of, deals with the facility side of all of that stuff.

Do we need to make changes at facilities? There are some practices that we should have been doing for a while that we haven't made a practice of that they are wanting to focus on. When was the last time any of us participated in a fire drill here? Right? Like that should be something that's part of every just the normal cycle of risk management and safety writ large.

We should be having material safety data sheets in all the buildings that reflect the chemicals that are actually used in those buildings, right? Like there's a whole bunch of those OSHA requirements and all of that stuff in addition to the security falls on this one person. So this is the risk management someone to help in that risk management space is actually a request that's been made to us for several years running. We went ahead and said yes this year to that, but that's not a new request. That's been they've asked for that for a little while.

As far as the contract administrator goes, this is the world according to Vicki and so take it with a grain of salt. But I know that one of the things you remember this year we gave admin position from the city manager's office to central services. That is filled. The woman who filled it is really wonderful. Came out of finance and I think that's been enormously helpful for them.

One of the things that's true there is that I think there's some general cleanup they're trying to do around how those contracts happen. They do have a whole bunch of contracts. They're not wrong about that. And there are probably some limits to how much they can simplify that picture, but the other thing that makes contract administration tough is all the rest of the duties that go along with it. Invoicing and payments and all that kind of stuff.

And I know that part of what they're looking at is can we streamline some of that stuff. So part of the choice here is a reflection of let's see how far they get in that effort and what that gets them before we just outright have a new position. And these other two we already know we're funding a whole bunch of additional stuff. Now all of that said, can see that Matt's probably listening and is in the presentation right now probably looking at this very slide. So I think that you know having his perspective again at the table is probably fine.

That's my perspective and my version of that logic that's there. Obviously know Matt has some other priorities and I don't want to minimize that. But that was what was behind the choice that was made.

And I wanna really thank you and the director and the mayor for all being so candid about what the choices are and how those priority trade offs were made. It would be much harder for us to do our jobs if all got in the room beforehand and said okay here's our party line. I appreciate that that's not what was done.

Yeah, well I mean you know the thing is and this again this is just me talking but you know any budget is this big balancing act of all these various factors that go into it. We do see a few things a little bit differently but you know I do want to say you know Matt and his team they've put in a lot of work to bring order and regularity to a bunch of that work and I don't want to minimize that effort. This is the choice that got made here And you and you counsel may see that differently.

Yeah go ahead. So

what what would your all's reaction be including you city manager? When I hear some of the things that you said which is very helpful, I see the real need for the risk management specialist from a leadership, from a city council, city manager, mayor position point of view as compared to a deputy who I think Matt would feel very comfortable that would get more stuff, you know, help him get stuff done. So when I look at this, what would your all's reaction be to maintain the budget request but I think we confirmed there's a 100,000 contractor in the budget for a real estate administrator, right? So delete that and if we could find the $56,000, actually put somebody on his staff to take care of the real estate administrator job.

Well, so an issue with that is that we're paying for the real estate consultant currently on a one time line. So we cannot have that be recurring. We can't put that towards recurring staff position. Now, what we could do is get rid of the $180,000 for security guards, which I also don't love, and use that for a real estate person. And then we would have a $100,000 of additional one time money. So that's that's recurring money.

I don't support that.

You what?

I don't support that.

Yeah.

Think I was here when the auditor was here. And it was a scary time for people both counsel and coming in.

The the auditor was here? What do you mean?

There was a guy who called himself the auditor that would come.

Oh, I get what you're saying. Yeah.

And he was frightening and you didn't know what he was going to do and violence erupted at an election site with him and having security here. There's been several times in the last three years where having security here made me feel that my public service was okay because there was somebody that was watching out for those of us that were being attacked.

Would just

feel like

we spend a quarter of our budget on the police department, but they better be able to get to City Hall. They're minimal. And I'm not suggesting we station them in City Hall all the time, but if they aren't able to respond quickly enough to an event at City Hall, then they're not able to respond quickly enough to an event anywhere in the city. And so and that tells me we, in city hall, do not deserve, in my opinion, to have a greater level of security than residents. If if our response time for our police are so unsatisfactory that they can't adequately secure City Hall, then they're unsatisfactory across the board.

I I I'm I'm not sure I agree with that analysis. In other words, I don't think that we have security in City Hall because of the I don't wanna quote you because I don't know exactly what you said, but it was you were critical of the police department's response time.

I mean, I'm not. I'm saying their response time is great.

So I I think the security this is the seat of government for the state capital. And as much as I really wish we didn't have to do it, I think the creating a less soft target where we have the visibility of security at the doors. There's no police response that would stop somebody from coming in. I mean, I'm just gonna come out and say it, an active shooter or something like that. And if you don't have somebody at the door, that active shooter is or or person causing troubles is well into the facility well before the police are notified.

So you're adding minutes to their response time. So I would be very hesitant to take away that security. There's other options to your point about comparing to other. We could lock the building which we do mostly. Well, but it would prevent public access during the workday. That's a whole another problem. So I and I would argue, you know, it might be worth looking into but I before we cut it, are there any other state capitals that don't have security in their head in their in their capital building?

Yeah. I just we have no way of knowing if this is working. Right? Like, to me this is we we I asked the director and he said, we don't know. Well, we have no clue if this is saving one life or a 100 lives or zero lives. And so to me, there's any number of places where we could put that money that we could be very sure that it is actually helping people. And here, I have no I have no and the director has no way to show that it actually is. So I think that should be pretty high on our list of things we could cut.

Yeah. I mean, you know me. I'm mister data guy. Right? But and not to get into a big philosophical discussion about the Department of Defense, we can make the same argument about having a military. Right? And so I think the optic of having making the providing security is it's to me, it's it's crazy to think of not having it. What that message sends to anybody who is thinking of becoming the next person to walk in.

I mean, I think of it a little bit like TSA where we know they don't stop anything. Right? 90% when you go and test the TSA, 90% of bombs or guns or knives or whatever get through. It's a total waste of money. It's all just theater. And I'd rather if we took that money and put it into traffic calling I mean, to your point about the defense department too. Right? We could take 1% of the defense department, put it into making our roads safer, and we'd save probably a thousand lives a year across the country. And, like, yes, we can't know for sure how many lives are potentially being saved. And I'm using lives saved.

I know that's kind of an inflammatory metric. But we can't know for sure how many lives are being saved with what we're currently spending it on. But we can be pretty darn sure with how many lives will be saved by what we could spend it on. So to me, it's it's like it makes a lot of sense when you put that towards making West Street safer and not having people get hit by pedestrians. We can put the money into putting some traffic calming right here on Duke And Glossier where we know somebody was actually killed. And I just think there's any number of better uses for that. Okay. Let's talk some more. Is there anything more about central services you want to talk about? Think we've beat Where this coming

where do what do we think?

Yeah. Miss Buckland, you wanna jump

I'm gonna reserve the right to come back to that. I I'm I'm texting with Matt frankly right now. And once I get to the other side of that, I may have a suggestion for you.

Okay. And it might be something that we wanna come back to tomorrow realistically. Central services, was there anything else? I think we've kind of touched on all this. Auto Roman O'Neill had two other things. One was community grants which I

Actually, so I will actually make that suggestion. So the other thing that you could consider, is right now we had made the choice of contract with real estate, merit with risk management specialist. You could consider essentially swapping those.

That's a good point.

I'm sorry say that again.

So we could pay for the, you're saying we could pay for the security guards or at least four nights of it?

Right now the risk management specialist is an addition as a merit staff and we left the real estate administrator as a contractor. Could swap that. Have the real estate administrator be the merit position and put contract money toward helping out on the risk management side. That is one of the options that's on the table for you.

That's a thoughtful idea. I

still am on the feeling with the risk management specialist that I just plain don't want the money spent on that rather than that I think we

could spend it better, but that's that's at least a good halfway improvement. But it strikes me though as the risk management specialist is an insider. That's somebody we want, don't we, that's very familiar with, know, talk about fire drills and

Yes and no. There's some of that that's training and it's not uncommon to have third party trainers. Like there are pieces of that work that could go to third parties pretty naturally.

And also it seems to me like the kind of thing where having somebody who does work in a bunch of cities and sees what they do that's particularly effective could be beneficial.

Just wanna have it on.

Thank you.

That's one of your options. I'm in

favor of that idea.

Okay. Alderman O'Neill, you talked about community grants. I basically agree with you on community grants. I don't really have anything to

add

there. Alderman Thorpe, you had any other thoughts on that?

I would I would like to see what you and I talked about a little bit yesterday. And I don't know if we can do it in this time frame, but a more results oriented focused on what the city council is looking for and the results of the community grants program. So so however we could start down that path with what we do here would be helpful.

I think it's past that point for this year's budget considerations but I do think that it's something as miss Buckland knows, we've been talking about it for a few years and I think that it'll take somebody really digging into it before January 27.

So What I'd like to do oh, yeah, why don't you go first?

Yeah, no, just to piggyback on that, I think one of the things that council may want to consider is actually making some changes to the city code that locks you into certain priorities. And you may want to change how some of that stuff is structured in the code to give you a little bit more flexibility to reflect kind of where council is heading at this point.

Totally agree. And I think the solution on that is we should have a hearing on this in September, something like that. And on what changes we'd wanna make to code, get the three of us hopefully on the same page. We can talk about it at a finance meeting, come up with what we need, and then introduce a ordinance on that. Yeah.

For my money, the changes I'd like to see are really aligning us more with the state's capital. What do they call them? Bond legislative bond initiative requirements, which we don't necessarily want to go entirely to capital and prevent operating. But I'd certainly like to shift us a little more towards that, what I'd call it's catalytic. Like your example with Annapolis Pride of, yes, it would be operating money to hire a development director, but the idea is we're trying to wean them off as it were.

I also like some of the other requirements that the state has about it's not going to religious institutions, that it has to be somewhat durable. There's some other good ones. So that's my template for how we should start with that. And then what was your fourth thing? Remind me. Central services, rec and parks, community grant. Miss Jackson, do you You

such a hard time about my four.

I know. I scared you. Can we roll back the tape? We can we can come back to it. Alderman Tharpe, you wanna talk about some of the things you've noticed in the budget?

Yeah. I think my my biggest takeaway is the the need to focus on the core of the city. And and the I guess the term would be infrastructure. But as I look at the budget and and I talk to public works and I talk to planning and zoning, it just strikes me that we're spending a lot of little monies in a lot of places that prevent us from from making our city better place to live. A micro story here is that and I think you all heard me talk about it on President Street when there was a volunteer effort to clean it up and then public works came in and painted the red curbs.

In doing that, we realized that the dumpsters were dumping trash and nobody was noticing. There weren't any garbage cans and so now working with HACA there's a focus on fixing that. But when you walk the city, we are I think this is your terms we are never going to catch up the way we're tracking. And so, you know, I don't know that Esports any different than anywhere else but when you walk down the street in Esport and you walk across cracked sidewalks, around a utility pole, next to a car parked a faded red curb to get to a water access park that looks like a third world country. I mean, I think we ought to just state what the situation is.

There's 16 water access parks and there's not any port. I say 16 plus one because Jackson Park which is really Ward 6. And not one of them could you look, walk to and look at and go, it looks good. There are some that are acceptable and but so, you know, effort is really to find out where we can put more funding into infrastructure. The second thing I think that I'm struck overarching and people have talked about this but I'm just not sure we're doing anything about it in this budget or we're doing enough about it because we are doing something is communication.

You know the complaint about traffic for the boat show was fiftyfifty about 50% that people didn't like what happened but the other 50% of note was that they didn't know about it. Yeah. We've just got to accept the fact that the Annapolis Capital, that we don't have the single source non governmental information source and not everybody wants to read our emails, everyone is Speak for yourself. Is looped into it. Well, it wasn't my work.

But so do we do enough in this budget? You know, what are the citizens looking for? What are the residents looking for? And a lot of the things we talk about are really important from operating the government. You know, the central services discussion, right behind the scenes, things that are happening.

But at the end of the day, I think what the residents want are better, safer streets, better, safer sidewalks and to know more about what's going on. And I'd like to have some discussion about how we can move revenue to those kind of expenses where it just gets stuff done. I think we all heard quite a bit we don't need plans, we just need to do it. And I'm struck with both Chris Kubiak wanting $100,000 to do the AI. We've got to make sure that gets into the budget because that's a direct impact on the residents.

When Burr Vogel says if I just had $25,000 more as he went through the budget process for snow removal technology, We've got those are things that directly impact the residents that will, you know, directly benefit from those expenses. And then, you know, I mean it's sidewalks and streets.

Yeah. Sidewalks and streets. Couldn't agree more. I that was one of the big things I was going to bring up. And I think where I'm struggling a little bit with that is I couldn't agree more with you that is the most important thing we can put money. I'm also struggling a little bit with, like, where would we actually put it that it will actually get spent. Right? In my in our conversation the other day about the capital budget, I said to the public works director, how did you come up with the amount of money that's going to streets? And the response was basically, we put as much money in there as we think we can spend. I'm like, well, we're not keeping up.

We're not catching up. So how do we figure out how to put more well, maybe we're keeping up. Some people say we are. Some people say we're not. But we're definitely not catching up. And so how do we put more money into fixing that? How do we make it so people can actually see it? And that's before we even get to the question of where do we take it from. But I think you were starting to get to the answer of about where do we take it from, which is there's a lot of stuff in this budget that is internal, that is about having a a better working government. And that's obviously important to some extent, but people don't care how well the government's working if it's not working for them.

And I think that's what the infrastructure piece speaks to. And I think you talked about this a little bit, but one place that it strikes me as really obvious that we could see a real return on our money is in parks maintenance. And we heard from mister Dillard about wanting to convert the seasonal employees to full time. I think that's that seems like one good way to do it. I've also just thought we need to actually add more people there.

And I brought it up at the time to wrecking parks that we have so many people every time I go to the desk at Pit Moyer. And I think the stat, if I remember this correctly from last budget was we have twice as many people working at Pit Moyer as working to maintain all of our parks. Which in a way makes sense. It's more resource intensive but also it's like, that just doesn't seem right to me. So, finding some ways that we can add funding for our parks maintenance seems like a real, I don't want to say easy but obvious.

But, yeah, on the infrastructure side, I'm not sure. You had any thoughts on like, if if the director is saying, we're only putting as much money in there as we think we can spend. And you and I are saying, boy, you're not spend you're not getting enough done. How do we make it work? How do we get out of that impasse? And I'd love to hear your thoughts but maybe Vicki also has a way to land. But if you want to go first.

I'll give the philosophical answer, you give the real answer.

Mean

my thinking is I'm tremendously impressed at our Public Works Department. I think they're underrated and from where I come from, you look at them and you and you you ask that hard question. You're doing seven with the capacity to do six. We need you to do nine and not tell us you can't do more than seven. You tell us what does it take to get to nine.

And it's a hard it's a hard question and you can't do it if you don't have a very strong person in the job because he'll give you the answer to get to 12. But I think we've got the in public works, I think we've got the people on the leadership in place to be able to give you an answer of how to get to nine. But if we continue to think that we do seven, and I'm not saying that public works is comfortable, I mean they demonstrated over and over that they live outside their comfort zone and some of the things they have gotten done. But we've to get to nine because if we stay at seven,

because the deterioration rate is negative eight and we've been living at four for a very long time. Yeah.

So That's my philosophical answer.

I'm not sure I necessarily have a better answer. I mean I have a lot of faith in those departments' ability to execute. I think that the marginal question of because it's not a one for one. I had this thing and therefore I need one extra person, right? I think that there's more art than science to knowing when that line has been crossed.

And I think that all the departments recognize that there are some things they're going to end up living with in the name of getting other things. So they make choices about what to advocate for the same way that all of us do, right? Part of what we tried to do this year and the message we tried to send was no one can say yes if we don't know what the need is. So we want you to don't self censor, kind of you know give us what you got and then we will weigh that. We've been much more open this year internally and with counsel in here's everything that was on the table and what got funded and what didn't and all of that.

And so I'm gonna trust that they actually followed those directions. I don't know if that helps.

Yeah, I mean I think it's the philosophical answer, right? It's, you know, in this idea of city council oversight, I mean, what comes first? Does the city council give you the resources to that we think to go do nine and then task you to go do nine. That's not the leadership background I come from but if that's the way we do we break that cycle? How do we get out of that comfort zone of seven?

Comfort zone might be the wrong term because I think they're running marathons and nobody's comfortable running a marathon. Just continue to use metaphors. But I mean I think that's our challenge is is is it's 2026. Are we comfortable with what our city looks like? And I think the residents are speaking loudly.

Very loudly. And you know it kind of comes under Annapolis Works. I mean it's how do we create the city that they want. And I think nine is what we got to get them to and at least demonstrate we're working to get there.

I'll say from my perspective Otto Roman O'Neill has more history than I do but the frustration to me a little bit is I'm gonna keep using your numbers. It's as though for a while we were saying we're we're giving you money to do seven. And only five was really getting done. And we heard, okay. How do we break out of this logjam? Alright. We need an additional what's the position we gave last year? It's like con not contract manager.

Project manager.

Project manager. Yes. Thank you. So we're like, okay. We think this is the thing to do. We'll we'll break us out of it by adding this additional capacity. And then we're still on track to to not spend the money that was getting allocated. And so I'm I'm on the one hand frustrated that we're not spending the money that we're allocating. And then I'm frustrated that we tried to increase the capacity to spend the money that was allocated. And it doesn't from my perspective, it doesn't seem to have worked or at least not worked as much as we would hope it would.

And so it's it's like, okay. We tried both things. Like, can you can either increase the amount of of water you're putting through the funnel, you can increase the size of the funnel, and we tried both and we're still not seeing more water at the bottom, Which is certainly oversimplifying. But that's my frustration.

Yeah, I think that I'm gonna use a particular example, but this I think happens in lots of places. So we were not moving as fast as we wanted to in like the water and sewer rehab for a while. Right. And at the end of the day there was a part of that that was related to laying the groundwork for the visible part of execution. Making sure all the contracts were in place, we had the right methodology, like all of that stuff which still takes time.

And they finally they finally got over that hump and now they've been working on project after project after project. Right? And that logjam right? Like that backlog is getting worked on. Right?

They've been doing a ton of work. And I think that happens to us in a number of different places and it gets very frustrating when the visible part of execution isn't happening. And I think the question ends up being even if we're not at that place where I want to be, I want to see the visible part of execution because that's frankly why we had the project, But are we at least making progress on laying the groundwork? And how close are we to getting to the visible part of execution? I'm not saying that's true for everything but it's certainly been true in some cases where there was time spent laying the groundwork for execution.

I know I've said this in a number of different contexts but I think it's true here as well. The city has been in this transition from a much more mom and pop, you know, just a smaller jurisdiction to a much more complicated one with a lot more projects. And there's been I think this focus for a number of several number of years now on sort of upping the city's game. And that does in fact take some time. We're working on that in a lot of different places and this is one of them.

I think your question is a valid one. I wish I had a better answer for you. I think that's that's a place where I think Burr himself probably has a better answer than I do. But I'm certainly aware of I'm certainly aware of some of these cases. And there's more stuff that's coming, right? That's the other thing is that they're also dealing with we already know that there's some work coming from rules the feds have have passed and all that that's coming down the pike that they're trying to plan for. Sorry. I'm not sure that was a helpful answer.

No. I I think I take your point that part of the reason we feel frustrated or maybe I should just speak for myself is that we're not seeing those visible parts. And what you're saying is that even if we're not quite seeing them yet, there is significant planning underway to see more of those. I

Yeah, do believe not that you trying yeah, and in some sense I'm not trying to talk you out of being frustrated. I I this is gonna sound terrible, but but the fact that you're frustrated is part of what helps keep us honest about where we are, right? Like I'm not gonna I'm not gonna try to talk you out of being frustrated. There's a reason you're frustrated. Right?

You want to get to that visible part which is the point of why the city invested. Right? Like I get it. And I think part of what I'm hearing is most of us are patient if we have a sense of I know what's going on and I know what I'm waiting for. I know why I'm waiting.

It's such like a trite example, but like back in the day when I was a waitress, right, like if you got slammed and you weren't going to be getting to a table for a little while, as long as they didn't think forgotten them, they were willing to wait. Right? The thing that they got frustrated about and that you would get penalized for was if they thought you forgot about them. And I feel like in some sense there's a little bit of a similar dynamic that part of what you're reacting to is what am I waiting for. Right? Just make sure I wanna know you haven't forgotten about us on these things. And that I think is on us.

I agree. And I think our director of public works shares that same emotion. And so I think it's on us to either relax the pressure I. E. The crowd's gonna go, you know, the crowd's gonna go away or up the number of servers.

And I think that's where the hard choice is. I mean, if you ask me what's the number one thing that this budget needs more of, it's that. And but I don't and I I believe that our director of public works can support that if given an opportunity. And we just gotta figure out how to get him that opportunity.

Yeah. And and ultimately that's gonna come down to where, like, once we figure out where to put the money, we gotta figure out where it's gonna come from. And what I'm hearing from you and agree with is that it's gonna come from the things that are more internal facing. And that's why I'm I was pointing out that risk management specialist seems to me like one of the most low hanging fruits of that. I think another example, it could be the assistant chief of code enforcement.

That's those are things that, well, actually maybe that's not a good example. But things that that are relatively internal facing. And if we want more external facing things, we need to look at those internal facing things as a place that we're gonna cut. So Can

I mention one more thing?

Is is it something different? Because I have one more thought on your infrastructure. Yeah. Idea. Which is a question for the city manager that really be good for public works. We have, I was really surprised at how much our operating budget for streets is. I I should know the budget in and out, but I was surprised at that considering how much we also put in our capital budget for streets. And I'm wondering if there's a way that as much as we want streets and sidewalks to be better, if I have to pick one, I'm picking sidewalk. And I think we've heard that repeatedly from the council both this year and last year. So I'm wondering if there's some way that we can direct or that you can direct and you wanna just tell us, you guys shut up.

I'm gonna do this. The street's budget to be more a greater percentage of that to be about fixing sidewalks?

I would want to have a conversation with the director about that. I'm not sure I necessarily want to provide an answer off the top of my head here. I think part of what I'm hearing in your question and I want to know if I heard this correctly is you may not know what that split is now. Correct. And so what you're interested in is is there a way to increase that portion of the pie but not, I'm not hearing a specific number out of you of I'm shooting for this or that because you don't know where we're starting from.

Absolutely. Yes, that's true. My justification is I hear a lot more complaints about sidewalks than about streets, which is again, we we want ideally more of both. But if we have to pick one, that tells me that we're not allocating those resources totally appropriately. If they're so out of whack, they're Again,

I want to make sure I heard correctly. You at least amongst the council members would be fine if what you heard were equal amounts of complaints about the two.

Sure or closer

to Right, like you're willing to tolerate more complaints about roads to get fewer complaints about sidewalks. Yes. Yes. I just want to make sure I'm hearing correctly.

Yes, you are hearing that and in fact me personally I would even be more willing be willing to tolerate slightly more complaints about roads walks because I think the people who complain about roads have a greater willingness to complain than the people who complain about sidewalks. But that's that's a bit of a you know, we're splitting hairs to that point. So could we put as an action item or a question that it would be worthwhile to see if there's some way that we can, within the contact of the context of this $4,300,000 of operating money for streets, have more of it go a greater percentage of it go towards fixing sidewalks.

I will do some follow-up with the director. Like I said, I I don't know the answer to that off the top of my head. I would have to have a conversation with him.

And and I think it might be a harder question or harder answer than a question. In other words, just speaking from an Eastport perspective, because the the road situation in Eastport has been not improved upon to slow traffic and make it safer, there actually might be a very large bill. One proposal on the street is to, so to speak, is to raise the the intersections. Mhmm. And not just in Eastport.

Think he's looking at that as an idea everywhere. That could get expensive. That could add up and so I'd I'd be careful to give a metric that more in one less than another that's not, requirements based.

No. I I hear you, Alderman Thorpe, and I wanna make, I wanna make an important distinction. What I think you're talking about would be under the capital budget. Right? Raising up sidewalks would be in the capital budget. I'm talking specifically about the operating budget.

Fair.

But I but I also agree with you. It's not that we're trying to get to of a 4.2 bill budget we spend 2.1 on sidewalks and 2.1 on streets for no other reason if for no other reason, then there's gonna be overlap. But also because the two things don't cost the same. But, yeah, I just I wanna make perfectly clear. I'm talking about within this operating budget that we call streets. I think should really be more about streets and sidewalks. But you had a a third thing you wanted to bring up as a

I did. I I don't know that we ever got the answer to the big question of we moved a lot of money in this budget to central services. And either one of two things have to happen with that. More effective execution or saving money. And I don't know that I know we the the one straightforward answer that I'd like to to know is what is the what is the the addition of all the money that was moved out of departments and what was the addition in central services and how how did those two compare?

Yeah. I I still don't feel like we have that. But miss Turner, you wanna jump in?

Yeah. A pre Turner budget analyst. I'm actually going to share the centralization, form. I completed it yesterday. Oh, thank So you'll be able to see it.

Thank you.

And but I think oh, your you wanna go ahead, mister Powell?

Yeah. I just wanted to add one more point, just Alderman Thorpe, to your point about those two outcomes. There is a third outcome that I think you do need to add to your list there. There's efficiency gained, there's some savings, but you also have to recognize that there's also just a new heightened awareness to some of the stuff that's maybe been not managed and maybe not being worked upon. And so therefore, that's why you would see some increases and enhancements of this notion that centralization just only acts as a cost cutting measure is not necessarily true because now it's gonna bring awareness and highlight areas that need improvement and additional investment.

So that also is factored in the budget. So I just wanna make sure to clarify that because I think that that's something that I've heard pretty consistently is folks are expecting numbers to wash out or go to zero but there are improvements too.

Yeah. Thank you. And here's one of the things that I fear and I'm gonna try to use a metaphor and I don't if it'll work but if you hire more painters, you're gonna identify a need that more walls need to be painted.

Oh my god. Yes.

Agree. And so my concern, my my hope with central services creation is that we are a better city because we're managing our facilities better, managing our fleet of vehicles better, all that stuff. My fear is we now identify all these other things that we were doing fine not doing. Some of them, to Ms. Buckland's point, it wasn't okay that we weren't doing them.

So it would be good to see that analysis that here are the things we're doing that we weren't doing and we need to be doing them. That's why we're doing it. Here's the savings we got and here's the efficiencies we got. So I mean it's it's a multidimensional answer but I don't think we and the city the finance committee have that answer. And and some of it is clearly numbers. It's a math problem. Some of it is the city manager saying, these this list of 14 things we weren't doing and we need to do them. And so that took the savings, but we're a better city for it or whatever.

Yeah. I mean, part of the whole reason this is happening in central services in in particular, you know, just looking at our outcomes from this last year, at one point we had four HVAC systems that were down four buildings where there were HVAC systems down at one time. And you know like we can't keep doing that.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against it. I'm just trying to I think this is an area, it's probably the largest strategic shift that the city's made in this period of years, but we don't have that information. And and quite frankly, for me, I'd like to take that to the residents and say, hey, look at the savings and look at the better city we are at. Or conversely, I'd like to move that money into more sidewalks and roads.

I really take your point about painters and that's that's exactly how I feel about that rich management specialist. It's it's going to cost us a lot of money is is the way I see it. But you also talked about communications and I think that's so I was honestly a little surprised to hear you say that because I think this budget not because I don't agree with your assessment of the problem, but because I think this budget addresses it a lot. We're putting an additional communications consultant in the mayor's office. We're making that position full time or not we, but the budget proposes. And there's some additional software. So I just wanna understand, do you feel like that doesn't go far enough?

I think I think the city manager and the mayor need to answer that question. Knowing, what the gentleman that testified yesterday who's a civic leader in Ward 1 and things like that. What is our where is our standard and is that enough? I can make an argument even if it's not one step at a time, three steps at a time, But clearly we need to make sure that this budget represents that increase.

Can you clarify what you mean by what is our standard?

What standard are we trying to achieve? For communications.

For for communicate oh, communications. Sorry. Coming coming full circle. Yeah. I'm sorry, Whit. No. No. No. It's all good. I got it.

Got it. Yeah. Alderman, one suggestion I have on this and there are arguments against it. But I think that on balance I come down that we should put all of our public information officers under one public information officer. I think we could it just seems obvious to me that there are days where the police PIO has a ton of work to do, and there are days where they don't have much of any.

And there are days where the regular the the nonpolice PIO has a ton of nonpolice PIO work to do, and then there are days where I don't know there are any days where Mitchell has no work to do, but certainly less. Like, the snowstorm was a good example where, for the most part, people were not committing crimes in the cell. And so it would have been but there was a ton of other communications to do. And so it to me, it seems beneficial to let those two be able to balance each other out by putting them all under one office. So we're we're talking right now about we have proposed in this budget a full time p I o, a full time assistant p I o, a communications consultant, a part time fire p p I o, and a full time police p I o.

Strikes me that if you were to consolidate all those into one office, you might even be able to get better communication with less money.

We also have a marketing person who does PIO work for Parks and Rec.

Yeah. Right. We might then

So a fifth position.

Yeah. So it's but another one.

So I would be short I would stop short of reorganizing the public information office for two reasons. One, I think the mayor and the city manager need to to work that. Two, every reorganization like that, I kind of am reminded of moving the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. And three, consolidating into one office isn't always the best in the communication world because you want people inside your major organizations. The situation where you have all hands on deck like the snowstorm where you have racks and parks people shoveling snow and you have the PIO helping out.

It's one thing to do that organizationally. It's another thing to do that performance wise. So I think where my focus is less moving the chairs around and making sure that the capacity is there. And quite frankly the mindset is there as much as we can do that. We probably can only affect mindset by capacity.

So I would say just making sure that these plans to, you know, we we can redo the website but if we don't have the capacity for everybody to update the website, then there's nothing the PIO can do to have a good website other than bang their head against the wall. So I think the real question is do we have the capacity and the mindset? Do we have the capacity in place and the capacity creates a mindset?

Yeah. I take your your point and certainly appreciate your wisdom on this particular topic. But, from where I'm sitting, the situation is something like we're asking 2.7 FTEs of work and putting 2.5 in the mayor's office, and we're asking point eight in the police department and giving them one. And so combining those, seems like it would provide additional it would get us closer to having the capacity match the requirements. But I I also have a very high bar for reorganizations in the budget.

I think we, like, we have enough other stuff to deal with. I hate when there's a boy, let's put the office of law under the mayor's office or let's put the harbor master under Racken Park. I hate that because I think it's just too much to do in a budget when we have too much other stuff. But in this case, we're talking about potentially moving one and a half or if you wanna lump in wrecking parks, two and a half positions. It seems much more manageable to me than say we're gonna move the whole office of law. So I don't know that we have a resolution on that.

I I would be interested in the idea of moving the marketing person out of wrecks and parks and put them in the PIO section. Would be an interesting discussion. They would make the PIO, it would give the PIO another responsibility I. More work. I mean, we you'd have to think through that. Well, that's a that's a management decision, not a city council decision.

You're gonna have to get back to me on why it makes sense for wrecking parks and not for police. But, yeah, we can we can figure that out. The other part on comms is just I do think some of the software that's getting talked about in the mayor's office could help with that. That said, we also got four software projects in the mayor's office that are actually under IT, but that are going to the mayor's office. And I think we should take a look at whether all four of them are really the most worthwhile. We had the two inner gov, I think, ones. Right? And then there is Slack and there was a fourth one. I'd have to go back and look at the mayor's presentation.

Can I go back something? Sure. Course. Where are we on getting the answer on central services? I think that's a tangible question. For money being centralized?

Yeah. Capri sent it to us like five minutes ago.

Okay. Yeah. Alright. Thank you.

Because yes, that's a very important intangible question. Yeah. It's our it's an RPIO walking in the room for any particular reason. Anything you want to add? If not, that's fine. Okay. I appreciate you being available.

Ears were burning just in case you wanted to talk to her directly.

No. I appreciate it. No. I don't I don't have any particular question for you. Wonderful. Nothing specific. Thank you. Alright. So let me jump into some of the things that I'm thinking about. Pretty much everything that Alderman Thorpe was saying about infrastructure and parks and external versus internal was on the top of my list.

And I think that I think what I was suggesting about the streets budget, there might be some ways to make that a little bit more sidewalk focused. I think there it seems very straightforward to me that we would be smart to invest in more parks maintenance people. There's a couple different ways we could do that, but I put it as a pretty high priority. And just to say why among other reasons, it's they keep doing it when it's not currently they don't currently have the funding for it. I have had multiple times where there are parks that where we've added a street on park in Ward 1.

And literally, like, two or three different ones that we've added that we sort of or I'll say that residents expect rec and parks to maintain. And when we do, we don't give them additional money. So in my opinion, it's high time we catch up on giving them some additional capacity. And, again, there are a couple different ways we could do it. We could add seasonal workers.

We could convert the seasonal ones to full time. We could even increase some of their contract funding. At this point, Rec and Parks came to us and asked that we convert seasonal to full time, and so that's where I'm leaning. But, if if the city manager or if one of my colleagues wanted to convince me that there is a better way to get at that end result, I am very open to it. So that's my thoughts on infrastructure.

And ultimately, again, if we want to fix some of those external facing things in a way the residents can see, what we're gonna have to cut back on is the internal facing things. The slack in the mayor's office or the risk management specialist, those kinds of things. The things that residents don't see.

If I could jump in on the the parks maintenance

question.

This is one of the reasons why we're trying to do better at having the operating budget impacts for individual projects as part of the disclosed as part of the CIP. The parks space because of the seasonal worker aspect of that, so that's actually a little bit easier because those that's just a giant group pin anyway and so as those projects get finished, here's the operating budget, here's our estimate of how much maintenance would cost. Like in a perfect world, like those things would feed each other, you'd add that much into that seasonal line, right, to to allow for that. But that is part of the reason to focus on disclosure of operating budget impacts is that should be giving us a preview of what do we expect on the other side.

Absolutely. And I think that's something that the new, I keep forgetting what we're calling them, but the new city council person in the mayor's office for implementation. Like, that's a perfect thing for them to follow-up on. And while we're putting the other the budget and say, k. Last year, we put in five new capital improvement projects that each said they had this much maintenance impact on parks and rec.

And then they go in and they check the mayor's proposed budget as it's coming up and say, gosh, you didn't add any money to parks and rec maintenance. Like, why not? So, is there any I know I'm again asking you to potentially contradict the department head but is there any glaring reason why we would, if we want to see better maintained parks, we should not go the route of making those seasonal workers full time. That we would be better off adding seasonal workers or adding to the contract budget.

So your your question really is whether you is the question comes down to is that maintenance needed year round? Or is there a surge that's needed at certain times of the year? Right? That's really the question you're asking. And I think that there's I would need to have a conversation with Rec and Parks about the balance between those two things but I think it is undeniable that there is a surge that's needed at certain times of the year and not others.

Right? There's a reason that we're that we and everyone else is sort of organized that way. Because you know you aren't doing the same amount of maintenance in the parks year round that you do at other times of the year. Yep. I would need to have a conversation with them about the balance between those two things, but you're always gonna have a seasonal component.

No. And I I recognize that. And I think the answer, it can still make sense to add full time staff even if it is very seasonal work. In in my line of work, it could be, you know, obviously farming is a very seasonal business. But if your tractor keeps breaking down when you're trying to do planting, it might be because you didn't have enough people working in the off season to do that maintenance then. So, yes, I I agree with the question you're asking. What I'm saying is just the answer can still be yes, and it can make sense to add full time staff. So I don't know. I think at the end of the day, I'm looking for somebody to tell me what to do on that. And we heard once from from our parts maintenance supervisor.

His answer seemed counterintuitive to me. And so I'm hoping somebody else can validate either, no. I, Harriet, am wrong or no. There's a reason why what Rodney is saying doesn't make sense. Anything to add on that parks infrastructure piece? Any reactions

before I go on? I mean, I agree with parks infrastructure. One of my budget priorities was taking a look at all of our projects and working out maintenance, you know, long term maintenance plans. We don't do enough of that. Like you said, we put parks online and then we forget about them because it's either not funded to take care of them.

Yeah.

So I do think that that's important. I believe that there could probably be some reorganization in parks and rec. Like you said, there's often a lot of people in the office. There's it seems to be heavy on admin versus a worker bee.

People fixing the park?

Right. People working on the park. That's probably my one number one complaint that I get from residents is that, you know, here you have this beautiful park on Annapolis Street and yet it's unmowed or I have pictures from residents where it's three people and one guy's in the truck on the phone. One guy's weed whacking and the other guy is eating his lunch leaning up against the back of the truck. So, you know, I think that it could be a little bit better managed.

I understand that you have to send certain people for different jobs, but I do get a lot of those kind of pictures. So I think that there could be some more efficiencies in that in the way we do things. It would be great if there was a schedule so that, know, during Greenscape, residents are taking care of some of those parks. Mulching, weeding, things like that. And if there was a printed schedule, much like I had asked director Vogel for for street sweeping, there was a printed schedule that, you know, parks and ward one were taken care of the first week of the month, parks and wards two and three are second week, you know, we could better work with the residents and set expectations better.

I think that we just need to work on some of the efficiencies that are going on there.

So how do we do that? Again, I'm a victim of my past. I'm gonna go here, turn my microphone off if you would like but if we think as city council members that we can impact that when we don't actually have the personnel authority to create goals and things like that realizing we have the strategic performance metrics. I'm gonna go here just for conversation purposes. Our only way to do that is to say we are not pleased with the maintenance just building on what you just said.

We are not pleased with the maintenance performance in REX and PARKS and so we are going to cut it 5%. I mean that's the way it happens in the DOD. I'm not saying the DOD is a model for budgeting but we really have I think as I look at this my phone's going off. It's not the director of Rex and Parks But, or Vicki. But I mean, what is our role?

I mean, as we're sitting here having this conversation, what is our role? Do we have a role in driving performance improvement with our budget decisions or do we not? And that's a legitimate question. I'm not asking, that's not a metaphorical question.

I think we do and that's the purpose of the hearings of departments coming before us to talk about their budget priorities, their how they're creating their budgets. I think that how we approve or take away some of the budget requests signifies where our priorities lie in in answering to our constituents. And ultimately it comes down to city manager's office to be relaying that. But I think ultimately as a city, we're working towards the contentment of our constituents. Right?

We talked about this. About they need to see value. Like I'm willing to spend more money on something that I know if it's value versus buying on the cheap and then knowing I'm gonna have to replace it twice or three times if I'm gonna use it a lot.

We're buying on the hope when we don't really know.

Right. And so if we can show that, you know, our city budget we're passing and it's, you know, 1% higher than last year's city budget that we passed. But here are the benefits and they're we talk about what they can see and what they can't see. Right? But putting in our budget priorities and talking with the directors about this is the performance measure we're looking for and therefore we will continue to fund the programs that we're getting those performance measures and we're hitting those marks.

And if we're not, then we're removing it and putting it elsewhere where we can see the benefit. Does that make sense?

It does. And and I think if you take that another step, and I think there's two areas. And this is a now we're talking specific concept and turn it into specifics. Do you if we believe that REX and PARKS maintenance could do better with the funds they have, the only tool we have is to cut the funds and make them come back and defend for them. And and then I'll I'll at some point, I can do it now or later, but but I've opened up miss Turner's document.

And if I read this document appropriately, we didn't save a dime by creating central services. The we moved $4.4.29 $4,296,050 from different departments in the central services. And there's or IT or wherever.

Right. It's it's so it's centralizing to different departments, and you're not gonna see a savings just from the centralization. As the acting director said, there were some increases to the base, for reoccurring services, but also the savings that you're going to see, you're going to see in FY '28. From everything being consolidated and them having time to assess it, work through it, understanding, if they need to combine, contractors, remove contractors, seek new contractors, have same software, it takes time for them to go through that and it's gonna be the FY '27 period that they go through that and then when we come in FY '28, you'll see the savings there. This is just aligning It's everything to just aligning everything to one place for them to be able to

Central services isn't being created on July 1. It was created several years ago. So, I mean, if if we if we have a contract for if we have 20 contracts for two things and we go to the contractor and we say, we want one contract for 40 things and we want a discount, I mean, we ought to already be seeing savings. No?

Not for f not right now in f y twenty seven.

Yes. They can't central services can't go and have that negotiation until the money is in their budget.

I can confirm that they're already working on it, for instance, for, heating and electricity for the whole city. They've put a contract together for the whole city, so we're gonna see savings there. You're not gonna see it until, quarter one budget versus actual FY 2027. They've already begun to start working on it. We're just aligning the budget to the department.

You what you just told me is that we are going to see those savings in FY '27, and we should be budgeting as such.

Right. So you'll see the savings because they're currently working on it in anticipation that they know this centralization is happening. It's just you're not seeing it in the budget because the budget is aligning to removing it from department. So FY '26 has it broken out into different departments, and they could be using the same service provider at different rates, the same rates, but the departments don't know. They're it's in their separate budgets. By aligning it within the same budget, then we can have access to those savings and renewing the contracts at better rates.

I'm gonna I'm just gonna I was just gonna head you off Alderman Huntley just if if the work is getting worked on now we can't put it in the budget now so we're using the information that we have available to us to budget. We will see we are expecting and anticipating that there will be savings experienced in something such as electricity. We can't quantify that today and we're not gonna put the city in a position of making an incorrect estimate to then have to then come back and do an upward adjustment. We would allow for the completion of the work and then budget revisions will occur in 2027 to adjust for that.

I hear you. I would rather if we know it's going to go down and we're all sure it's going to go down

But not by how much.

Right. I'd rather we decrease it by somewhere between a dollar and a thousand dollars. And if we know it like, I'd rather we'd have it be something. But, Alderman Thorpe, did you wanna say something?

Yeah. Mean, I I think I'm in the same place you are. Yeah. Is is I I I think they're we're talking two different things here. We're talking, one, the budget document compared to real savings and then talking we we budget conservatively here in a city, which makes all the sense in the world.

But running a business, when you consolidate, the CFO in his office has an idea that we're gonna save between 1 and $1,000. And I and if that's the answer but we're not budgeting it because we don't know, I would be comfortable with that answer. I just right now, I think we're looking at the residents going, we don't anticipate by our budget any savings and by lack of it being said, any improvements by the consolidation, which I don't think is true. But but we've we we ought to it's the same criticism in a different area that we get for budgeting all our billets being filled and everybody, taking max benefits because that's the safest thing to do. But at the end of the day

Yeah. I I would love to respond with maybe two or three factors. The first one being, in a private business, I totally agree the fluidity and the flexibility to be able to make those changes in real time and actually come back to the table is present. In the process that we're in today, we have regulatory or legally mandated deadlines. And so as a result of some of that constriction, we're gonna have to go with best available use numbers at that time Yeah.

Recognizing that there will be changes. There there's a there is a component here just tied to things had to be done by April 1, things had to be done by April 13. There's specific dates, while recognizing that we're not trying to operate from a place of not being more accurate. But the nature of the conservatism in this process is largely due to the fact that we have to maintain a balanced budget. And so the risks that come associated with under budgeting are more significant than over budgeting, right?

And so like that is another factor at play here and so as the budget process continues to improve, as we continue to work towards that more accurate projections versus actuals, you'll see that continue to whittle down and so like I think additional measures can be taken in the budgeting process and then I'll go with the excuse route which is we've had some turnover, the ACFR was completed late later in the process like there's other factors at play here that would disallow for the precision to be there which are all things that are being constantly evaluated and work towards being enhanced and fixed going into the next budgeting season. So between those three things, that's really the conversation here. But I agree that you would pivot, you would adjust, and I think we can look to have that conversation. But now at this point, it would be an amendment to change with that and bring it down just tied to some level of analysis. So that's something that would have to just be taken with the team.

So let me

ask a question.

I just I just don't wanna say go ahead and ask the question, but I just wanna say I don't wanna spend too much more time on this because I am getting to the point of feeling like it's not going to lead to us changing this budget as proposed. But go ahead and ask your question.

You're a great straight man because we moved $4,300,000 to IT and central services. And what levers does the city council have? So it might let me just ask a question to the group. What if we said we want to take a number out of that? $200,000. You know, 11% would be 420,000. Is that right?

No. Be 42,000.

42,000. So so we wanna take 5% or 2%. Could we do that? And what would the react I mean, in other words, how do we how do we as a city council drive to the savings when we're not gonna change the way that we find that we create the budget. It makes all the sense in the world that he's doing that we're doing it that way.

But the other alternative with Joel's proposal is and I'm not criticizing you, but trust me. And in six months, we'll come back to you and tell you what the savings are. And so we're agreeing to zero savings, zero efficiencies, and no and no savings or no we're not driving to any savings. Arguably, it's up to the city staff where they they could identify $250,000 in savings and use all that money to do better. Right?

And which is also a very logical way to do things. But we don't have we don't give any guidance about this. And so is that an option?

Well, I was a great straight man because you totally convinced me. I think it the if we don't know whether the savings are 5%, 20%, 3%, whatever, we all agree they're not 0%. Like, we can all 100% say we're not doing this unless we're very confident that we're going to save some money over the course of the next year. Then yep, we should say take 1% out of it. I think that makes perfect sense.

So I scared both of you. Whichever one of you want to jump in. Go ahead.

Yeah, mean I think this goes back to what Ms. Turner was saying earlier, There is an effort here to consolidate and centralize. And so while it is reasonable, justifiable to say that you'd get 1% savings, without having full scope of knowledge that, you know, say I'm just gonna make this example up because I don't wanna use anything that's real. But say the finance department used a, you know, a software and had 10 licenses and then HR uses the same software and had five licenses and IT use the same software and had 20 licenses. And we're all on three separate contracts, all three different terms.

This is arguably why you do it. You go into one contract, you go from having three different contracts, you go to one contract, get you get your economies of scale, but you're likely not gonna experience that for twelve months because you're gonna be locked into your existing agreements up to their certain time points. You may get some level of renegotiation power, but, like, that to say that you're immediately gonna get the economies of scale from day one would be, I think, also a bit of a force. Right? You'd have to say there has to be time to renegotiate the contract.

There has to be time to find what that actual benefit is and roll forward. And so that's where miss Turner's comments about you'd experience some of the savings in 2028. This is now the process of aligning, giving people the level of information and budget to now execute against that alignment process. You would experience the savings in the following year. But yes, naturally you would expect that there should be some immediate impact. So it's just where are we drawing that line is the tough question.

Yeah and I think the other part of that that I want to underscore is that part of the whole point of centralizing is to have better visibility into the spend. Like in some sense the I get the impatience but the other side of this is that we were seemingly just fine spending this amount of money spread out across the departments but we object to spending it now that it's centralized and we have there's the hope and the possibility and the intention of streamlining and cost savings and stuff and now that I'm aware I want that now. But this is the process of getting to that and part of it is them having the opportunity to have that better visibility, that better understanding. Where are those efficiencies? I get it.

Right? Like I understand there is that's the entire reason we're doing this. Right? And I think it's safe to say that all of us would probably share, you know probably do share that desire to already be on the other side of that, but that isn't where we are, right?

Yeah like I said I don't want spend a ton more time on this. Alderman O'Neil did you have something to

I was just going to say that I would not support removing money from that fund. It's sort of like in my small business, we're talking thousands of dollars, not millions of dollars, but I make decisions every day. I own a Canva account and I have other subcontractors who also use Canva. We each have our own Canva account. If I were to combine them all, it would save those other contractors the money in a year because of their contract.

I think that we wait and see the savings and apply it to f y twenty eight budget. I don't I don't think that you can pull out with the anticipation that we're hoping for a 1% or 5% savings because if we're wrong and that doesn't come, then we are basically screwing ourselves later on and we'll have to find that money to give back. So I say we have patience and wait.

I appreciate you sharing that perspective. I I wanna move on from this topic because we've got I I have a hard stop today, by the way, guys. I have a a work meeting I have to be at at

12:30.

So I wanna share the couple other things I had coming out of this. So the next one is really on me and that I think I did not schedule our hearings in a way that lets us dig into the capital budget. And totally a mea culpa that I was thinking last Thursday, we were going to really have the opportunity to get into individual projects. And for perfectly good reasons, we did not. It we I mean, the good reason just we only had two hours.

But I feel like there are quite a few capital projects that I have not seen clear my bar for this is why we should spend this money on that. And this is not a it's not to say, boy, we ought to go and cut some money out of them because nobody's explained it to me. It's to bring up a problem and see what solutions you guys have. Do we need I mean, we're we're coming up on time. So, I don't know that the solution is, boy, let's schedule a whole another hearing on Thursday.

But the the one that particularly comes to mind is $2,000,000 on planning for those fire stations. And we've not had any justification for why we need million dollars as opposed to $1,500,000, why we need $2,000,000 in this year as opposed to 1,000,000 this year, 1,000,000 next year. So I'm bringing up totally a problem that is of my own creation, But I look forward to hearing if you guys have any thoughts. If you if you agree it's a problem and whether you have any thoughts on how we could solve it. I

like the way you're thinking. And I think as we get to the where the rubber meets the road, if we're gonna take action as a finance committee to to the city with recommendations to city council as we take the pluses and minuses, we've demonstrated today how hard that is. There is no easy solution. I thought 1% actually would be an easy solution to pick up $42,000 or $84,000 but to your point it's not easy. And so creating the time or the opportunity, whether we do it in writing or whatever, but we in my mind we simply need to find more capacity for sidewalks and streets.

And if that means delaying one third of the fire stations or something like that, it it's clear to me where we we need to seek the best of the worst.

Yeah. The best of the

exactly. That's what I was looking for. So creating that opportunity to do that I think is really important because that we've demonstrated today working together that we can't find it.

Can we ask can can we make a list of the projects that we have questions about? Send them to the director. He was out in the hallway, but I don't see him anymore.

Vogtle or Vogtle. Honestly, those are ones that I have questions about are more of the central services ones. Yeah.

So I think if we made a list, even if it's a finance committee question as opposed to ward specific, With those questions I think that accurately they could come back with us in a day, possibly two days by Thursday to say if you cut this budget, this project can't move forward. It's kinda like the community grants, right? If I ask you for 50 and you give me two, I really can't do the project I'm trying to do.

Yeah.

And so it's kind of not worth it. But if it's delayed like, you know, I get frustrated about sidewalk projects being delayed for three years when they were funded in a budget two years ago. But I think that if we ask the director point blank what would happen if this project, if $500,000 was pulled from this project or you know 2% of this project was pulled back and waited until another year, what would happen with those projects? Does that, what is the due there's obviously going to be a delay, but they might not be even able to start the projects.

Yeah. So maybe a way to phrase that is there are, if I remember correctly, sort of three or four big new newly added capital projects, right? There is well, this one's not newly added but it's a bunch of new money in city facility, city hall upgrades. There is the new fire stations. There is a big $800,000 for the police department.

I think there's one other one that I'm not thinking about. But those are the big new uses of bond funding in this budget. And maybe we can just say what leeway is on the is there on those? What if $200,000 gets pushed back in the fire department, fire station one, are we is the whole thing not going to get done for a year? Like that's really what you're suggesting we ask, right?

Correct. What does that do to the project timeline?

Yeah. That that seems about as good as we're going to get to me. That's not what I was looking for. Alright. Else on that point? No. Okay. I'll move on. So another one that I think Alderman Thorpe also briefly touched on was the need for software and artificial intelligence support and, across a couple different departments. So we heard planning and zoning say a $100,000 for an AI consultant.

I'd like to know where that $100,000 figure came from. Could it really be $50,000? But ultimately, I think putting some funds towards that seems like what I'm getting at is it seems like there are a lot of places where we could invest some I'm gonna call it capital, but I mean it in an economic sense, not in a, like, accounting sense to reduce our staff, reduce our salaries and benefits in the long run. So the three places that that popped up to me were planning and zoning's request, the public works request about snow. And then I think just putting some relatively unallocated money into the Department of IT for essentially for whatever department comes to them and says, boy, we think we could use an enterprise AI subscription.

Or we need compute for we need to instead of having a $20 a month subscription to cloud, we need to actually get the API and and pay for it by the what do they call it? By the I'm blanking on the the word. The you you pay for a particular unit. I can't it doesn't matter. But by the unit is what I'm saying.

Putting a little a relatively small amount of funding, like I'm talking maybe as little as $5,000 somewhere between 5 and 20 in IT to just say this money is there if anybody needs it in the interest of encouraging some efficiency gains. I think would be smart. That's what I got on AI and software. Any thoughts on that? No. Makes sense. You guys are

Yeah. Makes sense.

Are generally supportive, but obviously we have to figure out a way to pay for it. Is that fair to characterize? Yeah.

I mean, I really like the fact that our plan is joining person. I think that's fantastic.

Oh my god. Amazing. Right? I put it in my newsletter to the World One Residents Association I wrote last night. I said, I quoted him directly and said, I wish every department director would come and say that.

I thought that was amazing. So then the last thing I've got before I just talk about some opportunities I saw for cuts is I think it is not good practice that we have vacancy savings in the police department and don't do it for our other large departments. I'm not proposing that we do it for somewhere as small as HR where there's significant variation or IT. But I think we should, our four to six largest departments go through and say over the past five years, what is the percent difference between your salaries and benefits as budgeted and your salaries and benefits that you actually spent? And then look at the three three years where there is the smallest difference to be conservative.

Take the average of those three and then apply that percentage to these those four to six departments in this budget. And when I say four to six, I'm including police where we already do that. And what we would then do with that money in my opinion is put half of it into contingency so that we if we're wrong, if we really screwed this up, that money is there. They can, they can access it. We can transfer it to planning and zoning.

Really did a great job of filling out all their staff this year. They don't have vacancy savings like they historically have. We're gonna make sure that they have access to that pool of money. That also alleviates my other concern, which I have a really big concern that in here, there is way too little in contingency. There is 300, if I'm remembering correctly, $300,000 in contingency, and there is and we overspent for our snowstorm by, oh, I'm looking at the wrong page now, but like $600,000 Like double that in one snowstorm.

And that scares me. So I think we really need to increase that contingency pot. I think we've sort of treated the vacancy savings, the difference between what we actually spend on salaries benefits and what we we budget for as a de facto contingency. And if we, the committee, and the council want to be serious about having a budget that is really reflective of reality, then I think we need to go in and I'm not saying I have the perfect algorithm there, but the we need to come up with some kind of calculation for what those vacancy savings are in those large departments. We put half into contingency to make sure that we are not to to give us some some wiggle room.

And then I think the other half should be used to lower the tax rate. So that is probably my most complicated proposal for this budget. But I think it's one that will be really worthwhile. You guys got reactions? Did I scare you? Did I do you like it? What do you think? I mean,

I was tracking all the way until the last thing you said. I I'm not at a tax rate point until we are providing the services that need to be served. And I think the first place to do that is to look for where we can get savings and make the hard decisions to do that. And but I think they're all combined in one. Right? So if if you if we're able to find the savings, do we use that money for more roads or or sidewalks or AI or tax breaks? I'm I mean that I'm sitting here trying to figure out how we get from here to January.

Meaning How do we do this faster?

Oh, yeah. I'm trying to find money to pay for what I think we need to pay for.

And that's where I think the improved amendment process that we've talked about could really help. What we what we could do in this is, you know, we can all agree that that is this isn't exactly a cut because it's funny we weren't really gonna spend anyway. But we could all agree that the cut makes sense, and we can have differences on how we should spend it. And we need a better process, which is what I'm hoping to bring forward on how we spend that money rather than in the past, was, you know, Harry was so clever. He came up with this great way to to fight cut a bunch of money, but then you have to spend it on the thing that Harry wants to spend it on.

And I don't think that's the best way to budget. So that's why I think you could agree the quote unquote cut makes sense, and you can feel free to disagree on how I we should spend it. I will hold the line that a lot of that, maybe not exactly 50%, but a lot of it needs to go into the contingency. I don't think we can do this in this first year without saying that we need to to cover our butts on it and put a lot of it, if not an outright majority of it, into contingency. What do you think, Alderman O'Neil?

It was an interesting concept. I've been talking to a lot of people about how can we cut and where do we make cuts. Everybody on the outside always thinks we have too many staff. But we're hearing, you know, projects aren't getting done because we don't have the staff capacity to get things done. So there is a Excuse

me.

There's a difference of what people see versus what the reality is. I also, one of my things that I wrote down was, okay, we overspent snow by this amount of money. This was the second year in a row that we've had a snow event where we, for many years, we didn't. So we had cut that budget and cut that budget and cut that budget. So yes, contingency is important.

For me it's just gonna be running the numbers and seeing where we fall out. Like going back to that idea that residents wanna see the value in the dollars that they spend, and if we're not cutting but we're able to add value, that's one model, right? If we're cutting and still adding value, that's even better.

But

Yeah. Yeah, that is better, right? Something for nothing is always ideal. The downside to this that I need to point out is that we would, in future years, by being more precise in our budgeting, have less money for the budget stabilization fund, the capital reserve, and the one time use money. Right?

We would have less if we're being more precise, which is what this is aimed to do, we would end up with less fund balance in the future which trickles down to all three of those things. And that's that's a choice that I think we need to make very eyes wide open because we've seen just between this year's budget and last year's budget how having less reserve for one time use is leading to more friction between the mayor and the council. Did I say less meant more friction. More friction between the mayor and the council. What do you guys think about my suggestion of how we would calculate it?

That we would be looking back to that percent difference in previous years. And we would again try to be conservative, take the three out of the five that are smallest as sort of like an Olympic average and use that as the factor for coming up with it. That was meant to YouTube but it seemed like maybe YouTube wanted to answer it.

Asking the first one.

I I did beat it for YouTube. But if neither of you have responses on that then

So the obvious question is, right, there's real benefits of what you're saying to do. But the obvious outcome is also is we're telling the police department we don't expect you to hire all these people.

Well, the police department, we're already telling them that. Right? Like, we're already doing this for police. It's more we're telling the fire department that we recognize some people are gonna be on paternity leave and we recognize the public works is if they have 60 staff at any given time, two of them aren't gonna be filled. So, yeah, I hear you of police, but I think we're already doing that to the police.

Help me understand that.

So police already have vacancy savings built up. They're the only one where we're already doing this.

But not not the full.

True. If we were to so we could do this one of two ways with police. We could we could stick with what we're already doing with police which is I don't know. Miss Turner would tell us how much vacancy savings we built in for police. Or we could go back and recalculate police using this $2,000,000, she says. Or we could go back and recalculate police the same way that I'm proposing we do for fire, public works, rec and parks, planning and zoning. Either way, I don't have a strong preference.

The only thing we can do is regulate over time.

I'm all over that. But I think that's a bit of a different question. You guys want to weigh in now on my scary proposal?

Okay. I'm going to give you the world of corny vicky. I'm going to watch Capri cringe over here. So I think that there I think that part of this situation is a conflict between the concept and the execution of that concept. Right now we regularly budget and typically how we have budgeted vacancy savings has been to attribute that to individual departments, right?

And it gets reflected in the individual department's budget. The limiting factor there ends up being, as you said, let's look at only the top, the largest departments because the variation year to year is once you get into smaller departments that's very hard to predict and so we again we take this very conservative approach. And I get that. The other way of looking at that is to look at what is the citywide vacancy rate and is there, this is where the like the concept of does the city as a whole tend to have a vacancy rate? What's the average city salary?

And is there a way to capture that? It would not be attributable to any one department at that point, right? How would that mechanically work But in the I think that's what I'm hearing you sort of reach for is that there's this vacancy savings that we only really look at in one place, we do in fact or two places. But we obviously we have vacancies in other places and that goes sort of unrealized in the budget as a whole. I haven't seen you cringe yet so hopeful. Can you tell

me why you said two places?

It's built into planning and zoning and police.

Good to know.

So I want to add that this applies for centralization and vacancies, honestly the budget in whole. When we are building the budget, we are looking at historical trends. So we're already decreasing where we see we have savings at. That is part of the analysis of the budget as we're building it. So anywhere that you may potentially see savings may be potentially built in for anticipated or unanticipated things occurring.

Outside of that, we would have to come to you for NSA and find funding within the budget for it. But if there is vacancy savings that we see and there's a historical trend for it, we will build it into the budget.

So one thing that I think I need and this very well may be a technical limitation. We need to know that. That that I did not know that planning and zoning had vacancy savings built in. Maybe to some extent, it's a fault of me for not having asked, but it's not there's no way that we would know that if if we didn't ask. It's not a line item.

It's not in my ideal world, we see police department, a 130 positions, a $100,000 per position. Therefore, $13,000,000. And then we would see the next line item is negative $200,000 or whatever. Like, we I think we need to actually have that in a way that we can understand where that is coming from. And so my particular question is, technologically, is it possible for OpenGov to have a negative expenditure? Which is really what we're asking for.

I believe it can.

Yeah. The, I think let's explore on the tech side.

Yes.

Conceptually, like I said, right now we do that in limited circumstances because it's difficult department by department to capture it when you get outside of large departments. I think that's the other thing that potentially we can explore.

Yeah, Mr. McCollough you had something else to add?

Yeah, I would want to take it back just a step and just make sure I understood intent and the value of, like, the information sharing. So one thing that just based on this conversation is unclear to me is is the intention to identify cost savings to then better inform the budgeted figures which then could allow for additional money to be spent on other initiatives or otherwise, you know, put more PAYGO towards sidewalks or, you know, reduce the tax rate. Right? Like, there's some intention here. Or is the intention to better understand departmental vacancy?

And so if there is an intention to understand departmental vacancy such as, you know, the police department year over year over year has $2,000,000 of vacancy savings, we really need to bolster our recruiting. We really need to consider increasing salaries to attract talent. We need to have different retention metrics so that we were like, there I think there needs to be a a level of understanding as to, like, what is the goal? Yeah. And then we can then execute based on that to then do it.

I think the answer is we should be able to do anything. It's just a matter of how is it need to be presented in the budget to best inform council residents and others and then also drive change. So that's why instead of just looking for the number, like, let's take a a beat to, like, figure out what it is that we're actually trying to accomplish.

Absolutely. My my goal is to have more precise budgeting. That is what I want us to see, ultimately. And so more number two than number one. It sounded like what well, I don't need to restate what you were saying.

But my goal is to get us to a point where our budgeting is more precise and we, three, eight, have more insight into it. And this seems like a good way to do that. Now my sense, and I and I have done enough digging into it to feel pretty confident in this sense, is that if we were to do that, we could both cover our butts by putting a bunch of it in contingency and have a bunch of money left over that, in my opinion, we should return to residents because we haven't really been using it. Or to Alderman Thorpe's point, maybe we wanna put it as PAYGO for sidewalks. God knows I love a good sidewalk.

So Just to clarify so

that Yeah.

The way we view contingency is it's a non allocated pot.

Right.

And What did he say? Non allocated. It's a non allocated pot.

And so that that is why the crux of my questions coming in is because we're talking about moving from allocated to non allocated. It could create the illusion of it just it it without a person being educated through that pathway of the the where the money goes, it would almost make it look like you're non allocated like revenues were increased by, let's call it, $3,000,000 because you now have this additional contingency monies. And now you're just booking a non allocated contingency to offset that 3,000,000. So it it it just creates it could it could create a different

can it. And And every year we have one or two departments that say, actually we do need some of that contingency money. And so, in that sense, we would be obscuring that not not obscuring. That sounds too intentional. But we would be making less clear that some of that not allocated money is going to go to somebody.

But the reason it's going there, in my ideal world, is because we don't know who that somebody is. If we're budgeting it more precisely, we don't know whether it's gonna be plenty and so do you exceeds our expectations or public works? And that's why I think it does make sense to have it in that not allocated. So I hear what you're saying. I've considered it. I I think there's still a benefit. I got to run-in about five minutes. So is there more that we need to talk about on this topic? What I'd like to do is come to the finance director with the exact numbers and I started to try and pull them but I had to go back to a bunch of different budgets. So I didn't quite get it done last night.

Come back to the finance director with what would this actually look like? What would the numbers really be if I did this across four to six biggest departments? And have you dig into it and tell me, boy, Harry, this is really not justifiable. Our bond rating agencies are going to tear us apart or yeah, your downside is you're not going to have as much one time use money in future years but this is defensible and and you could go ahead and do it. So, I'll I'll bring you those actual numbers.

Alright. Last thing I wanted to just go over was some opportunities I've identified throughout for cuts. I talked about a couple of these Or not cuts, but pay fors is how I'm calling them. Because some of it is revenue raisers. Somebody, I think it's Audrowan O'Neill, brought up the fire department and the medic unit that that is potentially an additional funding but it's not because we don't we haven't seen the county's budget so we shouldn't include it.

I would defer to you or to the finance director, whoever tells us no, we can't include that. I'm not going to fight that fight. But I do think we should include additional revenue that we would get from this ambulance. And I heard the chief come up and say why he thinks we should, which is as I took it, no, we can't because we don't know whether we're gonna get this started in August or in next May. And that's super reasonable, but if we don't start it till next May, we're not gonna be spending the money on the expenditure side.

So it seems very reasonable to me to either include both the revenue from it and the expenditure from it or include neither or say we're gonna discount both of them by half of the year because we don't think we're going to get this done until halfway through the year. So I think we could add as a pay for 100, 150, $200,000 that we expect to generate from that ambulance. So that's one thing. We talked about raising fees for non residents on parks. Alderman Thorpe has talked before and I agree about increasing STR fees and fines.

Although I do think I would love to come up with a proposal and I'm gonna work with the city manager on what this could look like for how we could bifurcate or trifurcate even the fees for the STRs because I just got a complaint the other day from a lady who's saying I rent my room for a couple days a year and why am I having to pay a $650 fee right now? That's basically all the money I'm making. Potentially, we could adjust some of our fees for inflation. I don't want to do that too willy nilly, but I think maybe we could take a subset of these. I'm looking at specifically liquor licenses because it's been a while since we've updated those and just say how many years has it been since we updated liquor license fees?

Let's bump it up by whatever the CPI increased by in that time.

Can I say something?

Yeah. In. Jump in.

Liquor license?

That was all my revenues. So go ahead.

So liquor licenses is something that I've been trying to dig into. The cost of a liquor license is supposed to pay for a liquor inspector? You don't have a liquor inspector?

I thought we did. There's so many in planning zoning, right?

Look at it.

Okay. Go ahead.

I do not believe that we have a liquor inspector. When we raised the cost of liquor licenses, and I'm going to go back before my time on the council and I'm gonna say ten years.

Okay.

There was a plan that the liquor license fees paid for two police officers and a liquor inspector. And can finance talk to that? Do we know that for a fact? That that is still happening? I have that

we have two alcohol beverage control enforcement officers and then we have two temporary inspector pool positions in planning and zoning as well that work as backup for the alcohol beverage. Just the inspectors.

There's two full time liquor inspectors?

Yes. These guys are listed as part time.

So you have two alcohol beverage control enforcement and then you have two temporary inspector pool positions.

All four of them are listed as part time.

Correct.

That's two full time.

Or less. We don't if twenty hours a week or ten hours

a I

don't know how many. I would have to

Right.

Because there is there's a lot of talk among liquor license holders that their fees far outweigh far outpace the actual cost.

Oh, okay.

So I would I would just have us delve into that before we started talking about raising those liquor licenses.

Sure. So far I had only heard one side of this which was the clerk's office telling me we haven't raised these fees in a long time. So point taken, we should hear from both sides on it. Anybody you guys got any other actions on those revenue things I brought up? I can quickly run through the couple other cuts that we haven't talked about.

We I talked about the risk management specialist. This is kind of a cup of more just to reorganization. I think we might need to rethink exactly how the IT the fire department IT staffer works. I don't want to get rid of it entirely, but there might be a better use within IT for that money. The mayor's office requested a lot of enhancements around software and consultants. I think we need to take a close look at those as we are looking for money. The one time money

All three consultants?

No. I well, we should look at all of them. But I feel strongly that the philanthropy one is worth the money. That's where I come I'm starting from. But you guys may disagree.

And then there were four software packages the mayor's office asked for. Police special cleaning, that that $200,000 just kind of galls me that we're talking about spending $200,000 for cleaning the police department and $18,000 for cleaning everywhere else. One thing that we should have sort of as a automatic is that now we know the deputy chief of staff's benefits and that's gonna be a little bit lower. So that does free up a little bit of money for us, not a lot. And that's pretty much all the ones that I haven't otherwise talked about.

So that was my list of some cuts within the operating budget. You guys got anything else you want to talk about today before we reconvene tomorrow for our closed session?

Just the closed session.

Just the closed session and then I think we have time scheduled for additional deliberations. I was planning on using that to break up the finance committee report and who's gonna do what parts. But I'm hoping we can actually get out a little early tomorrow.

Nothing right now.

Alright. With that, is there a motion to adjourn?

Motion to adjourn. Second.

All those in favor, please say aye. Aye.