City Council - workshop

All right, welcome everyone. This is our mid biennium budget workshop. Uh, I'll walk you through what the mid biennium process is for. Um, and then you're going to hear from a few staff members. This is not a multi-day presentation of the budget, so we'll go over things. And the entire, all of our management team is here, a lot of key staff members in those departments that handle budgeting items. So we're here to answer questions should you have them. What's on the podium in front of you is your mid biennium binder. You also have, I'll talk in a minute, one outside agency request I'll explain all that in a minute because it's something that was expected by some of you, but not necessarily everyone. I'll explain why it's in front of you. I'll also remind you when we wrap this up in several hours that we'll roll in to our packet meeting. I've got your agendas here. To do that, Councilman Dawson was not able to come today, but as of where we are recording this, we will post it on the website for all to see, and we'll make our budget document available on the website very shortly. So as a broad overview, I'll run over why we do a mid-biennium budget and a brief review of fiscal 2025. Why fiscal 2025 is we've got to inform some things that changed from the time you even adopted the budget last year, the biennial budget, as we closed out fiscal 25. how that carries on through. Allison's going to handle a revenue review and a debt overview, and then I'm going to talk about personal services, which means personnel, a few changes there and some staffing things we're doing, and then significant changes across the board and the budget. The capital improvement plan is very short. We're going to talk about Donahue, and then we'll summarize a few things and talk about the outlook moving forward from a CIP. The best Practice for me is interrupt along the way should you have questions so that you don't forget and we're not off the topic and we'll be glad to answer them. There's a lot of detail that we have about a lot of these things and that's why I have all the great people behind me. They are the detailed people and they will be ready to help if needed, which I'm sure I'll need. So broadly speaking, I will not read this whole thing to you. Our whole point in a mid biennium, we're halfway through our budgeting cycle. We do have an adopted budget. What are we really trying to do right now? We have to make adjustments based on things that happened in fiscal 26. Um, and, or did not happen in fiscal 26, we're carrying items and projects that haven't started. They're, they're not in the right spot. Some things have moved up. Some things have moved back. I'll be introducing very few new projects get introduced. Um, we are introducing some sidewalk changes and other things. Uh, ward six would be winner winner chicken dinner on that one. And ward five will win in the next biennial process, but East university drive sidewalk is. hot and heavy and added to this for something that we had committed to do years ago and never made it forward in the CIP. So we're making logical connections. So there's a few things that got added like that. Well, I'll say Wards 3 and 7 have sidewalk because they have newer construction. But even Ward 7 is going to get one in this that Councilman Koblenz will be happy about. And a lot of that will be citizen driven. So we're not usually making major changes to the budget as part of this. However, I want to remind you any given. meeting of the city council you have the right to say hey in the majority we want changes we want to shift project priorities we want to do whatever so this is a formal process that we go through but you'll see changes you know we purchased duck sanford park property we've done other things we've moved conditional capital up you've already taken council actions and we told you all along well we need to adjust for that at mid biennium It's part of what this is for. So that's the broad overview. We don't revamp your priorities or do any of those things. However, again, you can revamp your priorities whenever you want to in the majority. So just looking a little bit at fiscal 25, you don't have to read all of these numbers and they're before you. Ultimately, what we're trying to say is our revenue outperformed projections. So the 25 adjusted budget was where we adjusted to, and then we have our audited actuals. And so This will just show that it continually outperforms. You'll see a little bit of a change in some of that coming up because sales tax revenue, there's some changes that Allison's going to talk about. And then on our expenses side, we do typically underspend, and that is department operations, that's personnel costs, that's lots of things. It's kind of where we ended 25, which then carries on through. On our capital investments and projects side, on the CIP side, lots of things shift. We're very committed to moving projects faster. Some of the changes that you're going to hear me talking about, we have a new city engineer who has a different lens on some things. We have made a capital projects division under Scott's umbrella to try to get projects moving faster. We shifted some of our project managers where they're servicing things differently, and we're using outside help from program management standpoint to help move capital projects along. One of our challenges still is lack of availability of contractors. There's only a few that do major infrastructure things, and we're also even challenged right now with outside design help. The design firms in the market get very busy, and a lot of times the city projects get put to the side compared to private sector projects. Our staff has a lot to say to those entities. We appreciate our private sector partners. However, we feel that our work is just as important as the private sector's work. And somehow the city gets put behind, and sometimes we're put behind university projects too by both contractors and designers, and we have a lot to say about that, and we're trying to get that rectified. Sometimes that includes a little help from the governing body as you see people saying, hey, we also expect our projects to be delivered differently. And so our city engineering team along with our capital projects team has been working handily on that to get that moving faster. So for revenue, Allison's gonna jump in and talk about revenue and then I'll be back to talk about projects. We will talk about things like we do have a change in a football game where we were expecting to have more home games, things like that. And she will explain where we are in a little bit with our debt picture and then I'll be back up to bring the rest home.

I'll talk about revenue for a few minutes. As a reminder, for you. Most of you know this. You've been doing this for a minute. These are our top ten revenue sources, sales tax being the biggest one up there. Our top ten sources are about 90 percent of the general fund budget. So we focus on those primarily. We budget everything. We budget every single line item, but we focus a lot on these top ten. And within that, the top five are about 80 percent of our general fund budget. So the top five are very important in what we're looking at today. Not all of these change. Some of them did at mid-Vianium, and it's based on activity that we've seen, collections we have to date. We used information through June, but I've been constantly going back and reviewing through July and August to try to get the most up-to-date information that we can. So I'm going to talk through the significant adjustments. You can see on page 24 there's a summary of revenue. I have picked out those that are the most significant. We only changed a handful. There are not a ton that changed. And we're going to start with sales tax. We've got some business license, ad valorem, and construction permits that have performed. either better or worse in a couple of cases than projections. Our SSUT is doing well. Recreation fees has changed. Investment interest, I just can pat myself and my staff on the back in how well we have done with managing that and making sure that we're earning as much interest as we can. We have something called subscriptions and leases that I will have to give you a slight little accounting lesson on because you're going to see that in the budget. It's something that you have not seen before. And then we have some changes in transfers in. A little bit of that trickles over to 27. So 27, the changes are a little bit less. In 26, some of those changes are because I know exactly what we've collected. And then we kind of go back to conservative levels for 27. So you see that list be a little bit different. So we're going to talk about the primary sources. So sales and use tax, you will remember that I typically am very conservative when we budget sales and use tax. We have to really think about everything that's going on in the city, in the state, in the country, everything that is happening, even wars in the Middle East. All of those things affect what happens with sales tax. It just is part of that kind of big cycle of how people spend. All right, so sales tax, as a reminder, is 9% in Auburn. 4% of that is for us. 4% goes to the state and 1% to the county. So our portion of that is 4%. It has been running. It's always the largest revenue source in the general fund. It's been running 45-ish percent of our total revenue over the past few years. It can go anywhere from 40 to 50, depending on what's happening in other sources, but it's around 45 right now. It has increased an average of 6.5% for the past 10 years. Remember, though, that during that 10-year period, we had the weird COVID year when it was flat. We had the revenue shot up in 2021 and 22 as we dealt with various reasons for that. And we are now starting to see that level off. And I mentioned during the biennial budget presentation that many of the cities in the state of Alabama had already seen flattening of sales tax and even loss of sales tax in some areas. So it's something that we are paying very close attention to. I look at it every month. I look at it. Latrice gets frustrated with me because I look at it before they're done posting it. It's just very important that we pay very close attention to that. Obviously, football impacts it. which I'll mention in a minute, but also our commercial activity, spending habits. If gas prices shoot up, then you can bet that consumers are going to change their spending habits. They have to make decisions on what they spend their money on. And so when the economy is a little uncertain, interest rates are high, gas prices are high for different reasons, we see changes in that. So 426, I'm actually bringing the budget down for sales tax. So one reason, and I do want to mention this, don't forget that as part of sales tax, there is a use tax component. And I'm going to use a little cheat sheet here to make sure that I say this right. Use tax is... Think about if a business decides to, Latrice gave me a great example today, if it's like a doctor's office and they decide to replace all of the equipment in their office, and that equipment is purchased from way somewhere else, shipped here, and there's no sales tax on it. They're gonna be using that in their business and they're required to pay use tax on it. So it's a little bit different than sales tax. However, the problem with forecasting it is they may do that, they might have done that last year, But they don't do that this year. And we don't have somebody in that month that did something similar. So there is one month in particular in 2026 where we had a big anomaly from something that was big last year and not this year. So those are things we have to take into account as well. And so not just the sales tax that the consumer is dealing with from a spending perspective, but also that use tax component. And so we do sometimes need to adjust based on that. So in 26, I am decreasing the budget by, and this is pretty much based on collections so far, inflation-related things, consumer spending, changes in habits, some of those use tax, those big differences from 25 to 26. I'm reducing about a million dollars and I think we're going to be fine with that. I'm not worried, but we need to be cautious. that we are kind of seeing that change. And that can get a little worse, or it can just, you know, go away and get better. We just have to wait and see what happens. In fiscal 27, that's going to be compounded by the fact that we lost a home game. And, you know, regardless of the reasons for that, that is a big deal for the city of Auburn. We see loss of sales tax. Lodging tax is small. Lodging tax is something, you know, we have a new hotel downtown, so we're not seeing... The big decrease there because we brought on another source of revenue for that. But sales tax will be impacted by that. So I'm decreasing at about 2.3 million. And that is being conservative, considering all the things that we're seeing. Hopefully in 26 we'll come in a little bit above what I'm expecting. But I want, you know, 27, I think I'm only increasing it about 1.4% over what I expect in 26.

Do you, have we seen an increase any positive impact from say the World Cup friendly game that was here and then we still have this month. Um, two nights of a concert that may pull in some revenue.

Yeah. So we did see, see an impact. I would say that the, um, world cup and that's not going to be the same impact you see as a, as a home game weekend. However, it isn't, there is a, there is an impact there and it does help in those times when we are seeing spending be a little different. So absolutely.

I think it's important to note that when people come in for a home football game and something like Baylor, They're often coming in on Wednesday or Thursday, especially out of town fans. So we missed a lot of that while you had soccer teams staying here and you had some staff from FIFA and other things. We did have a little bit of a rain event, a little tiny one that maybe thwarted some tailgating. But when people come for a home game weekend, it's usually multiple nights. It's a lot of tailgating food, a lot of restaurant bar activity, all of our merchandise stores, shops downtown and throughout the city. And so it's certainly a nice impact, but it's not the same as a home football game and just not relatable. It's a big event, but not the same. And the concerts are good, but it's a small enough event, and I'm glad it's in the arena for a lot of other reasons. Thank you. But it won't have quite the same impact that something in Jordan-Hare would, but that then also costs us a lot more service money to do that. So I think the loss of a game is just something anecdotally that does impact us and impacts our businesses. One thing we can't do is measure exactly the impact of the soccer game. Camp War Eagle is a constant in lodging. The hotels already were fairly full in the downtown vicinity due to Camp War Eagle before we had a World Cup game. And so it's really hard to measure what the new normal is because as you've seen in your monthly reports, spending in the months of April and May, which affect May and June financials, was different because the students' graduation day fell earlier this year. And that impacted a little bit of their spending in those months. And we saw some weird trends that I think we've somewhat recovered from, Allison.

But even with your reduction or your adjustment for these, 26 and 27 are still projected higher than what we have had in 25. Absolutely. Okay.

About half. We usually do about 3% in our projections, and they'll be 1.5 to 2. Okay. Thank you. Still there. All right. And then I do want to show you the monthly. This is the monthly chart that you see in the monthly financials every month. I just think it's a great picture of our cycles of revenue. One that I want to point out with this nifty pointer that I never really odd pointing this that very low V right there was June collections, which represented May sales. And that's where you. So first thing is that use tax anomaly that we had. That was something that we identified. The other thing is June collections compared to last year, that's affected because of when graduation was. It was for May activity. Students vacated sooner because the graduation was so much earlier. It happened in April and May. So just all of those things impact what goes on from month to month. But you can see, generally our cycle is the same. The biggest thing that changes, oops, wrong button. is, like, this is a month when we have Alabama and Georgia in the same year, or we have Georgia in the same month, or these are years that we don't. I mean, there's just a lot of changes there that we see. We have a different schedule this year. We do have a couple of big ACC games. However, they are not Alabama and Georgia, so we'll just see how that goes. It's very difficult to predict, so I hope that we – have a great season. I think that, you know, a new coach, all of those things are exciting. They bring people to town and hopefully we'll hopefully we'll get there. But as we budget how we're going to spend, I need for that revenue to be a little conservative as we move through that just in case. All right, business license, any time you see that in the monthly financial report or in our annual report, that is for actual revenue sources that are grouped together. And you can see that listed there, our general business license, residential rental, which is the license fee that is paid by rental property that is non-owner occupied. Commercial rental, very small, little portion of that revenue source. But then we have contractors licenses. It's called construction percent, and it's something that contractors pay a quarter of 1% on the contract amount of the project that they're building. So it happens at the time of permitting. And you'll see that license, that grow. If permits are higher, then you're going to see construction percent be higher. And I'm going to show you in a minute, permits are really high this year. And that fluctuates a lot. This revenue source is being affected, however, by general business license being down. And so as sales, it kind of trends a little bit with sales tax. Not exactly, but it does a little bit. Because it is in arrears, and they're paying for the activity from the prior year, when you start seeing things kind of level off and the growth slow, then you see that catch up in business license, and we may see that again next year. So I am decreasing the general business license. Fortunately for us, the construction percent is kind of making up for that this year. So the revenue itself you can see from the chart when you group them all together, relatively flat is what we're showing. Now, general business license, it's one of the areas where we deal with delinquencies. You've seen some of those. There can be tons of delinquencies. As we finish that revenue cycle, things are due February 15th, We have to give it a couple of months for people to get things in that are late. And then we really start digging into what those delinquencies look like. And sometimes they can be significant. So general business license is one that we're paying very close attention to, making sure that we're getting out there and getting things collected the way they need to be. But we are seeing a decrease, a little bit of a decrease in that budget there. And business license is our second largest, I think. Actually, third largest. OCC, I didn't do a slide on that. OCC is functioning very well. It's performing well with the budget. No changes there. OCC continues to grow. We budgeted accordingly, and it's operating very well this year. So no change to the budget for it. Ad valorem, we did pretty conservative projection for ad valorem because if you remember, there was an assessed value growth cap placed on by the state legislature in 2024, and so we're starting to see the effects of that. It has slowed a little, but it continues to be a very strong revenue source. We know that property tax is one of the most stable things that we have. The general fund has five mils of property tax, and I am increasing real property only. Motor vehicle is doing well with projections, but real property has come in higher, so we're actually increasing that up. Um, fiscal 26 is projected to be about 5% higher than 25. You know, for years in a row, we saw some double digit increases there. And I think as we see that, um, cap on assessed value, we may see that kind of level out, which I think is what we're seeing here, but still very, very nice growth. And then for 2027, um, the increase is it's about 2.7% when you add the two together, but about a 3% for real property.

Yeah. That, uh, Assessed growth, assessed value growth tax is kind of new to me. I didn't really understand it until recently at all. But does that mean from a resident's perspective that their property tax can't grow, the value of their home can't grow, but About 7% a year.

7%. So it can't grow more than 7%. So that cap kind of, and you know, in our area, that can be a pretty big deal because we see assessed value grow tremendously. Yeah. Do you have more?

Well, is there anything, any kind of catch up down the line where they have to pay for the for the good deal they're getting now if the house is sold and it's revalued at a much higher level.

So when the house is sold, it's going to be assessed at that point, and it is going to catch up. So there's no cap. When you're selling your house and somebody else is purchasing it, it's going to catch up. They're going to get it back to what they feel like is the assessed value. So it happens at that point.

Okay. For the last couple of years, there really haven't been any other major changes, no additional taxes, no nothing from our perspective for the school or anything. And, uh, nothing new for this.

Nothing new. Remember property tax is not something that you can change as a council. That's something the legislature has to give you permission to do it. And then the voters have to approve it. The last time that we tried to do that for education, it failed when, when we did it. So no changes expected there. That cap expires at the end of fiscal 28, I believe. Um, and I have already heard that there are discussions about extending that or, or changing it, doing something different. So we'll be watching the legislature as we move towards that time period.

I think it's important to remember we're at 54 mills Mountain Brook that has a similar school system is double. So I think it's important that we always focus on the value for the taxpayer dollar in Auburn in terms of property taxes is very high. And if you really look at what they're getting, now Mountain Brook doesn't have industry, so a lot of what Allison's talking about, occupational license fees, those payrolls help tremendously. The taxes, there's still taxes generated off of industries, even with tax abatements. Schools are still getting their taxes. There's other things going on. Not everything is abated. And so that helps balance out where this 54 mills is. So this council has been very intentional about this and why the, uh, property tax payers have not voted in any additional, um, school tax, uh, school taxes and Norris, this council asked them to, or even in recent memory, uh, it's a really good value considering things, but that's why we have to look at all of these sources of revenue, the balance of what we're doing in economic development. keeps this number lower for our citizens. And, in fact, is also keeping us a little more level with sales tax as well.

Allison, the schools receive 16 mils?

They get 16 mils. Well, they get our 16 mils as the city tax, and they get more. They get more in the 54 that goes directly to them.

And five mils come to the city, as you have on this slide, for the general fund.

Yes.

The other special five-mil fund we have allowed – the schools to utilize that to pay debt on the high school, correct?

Yes.

Okay.

And we're going to talk about that in a second. No, there's two. There's a general fund five mil and there's a special fund mil. And then there's 16 mils in the special school tax fund. And any adjustments we make to ad valorem here in the general fund, the others follow suit. They're functioning and performing the same way. So we adjust those funds as well. And I will add, we are talking about this in my class right now at the university. And we talk about just Alabama in general. There is a map that we use that shows property tax rates across the country. And Alabama is the only one that is in the pale yellow, which is the lowest property tax rate. So it's really interesting to see that across the country and how that balance is. Governmental accounting is taught with property tax being the largest revenue source. So we're in a very different place here, so a different position. All right, construction permits. You can just look at this chart to see how volatile it is, how it changes. Average revenue over the past 10 years has been about $1.6 million. This year, I had projected about $2.3 million. I probably should have talked to John a little bit more because I looked just today and we're at 2.25 so we're almost there and that's that's as of today this obviously is development driven but it's not just the number of permits it's the valuation and so our number of permits is down about 14% I think it's like 200 permits but our valuation because we have a couple of industrial permits we have some other things apartment complexes, things that have bigger permits have made that revenue be a little bit higher this year. So it's gonna be about two, I'm expecting close to 2.4 million, which is that big spike you see. We budget, however, based on an average over the past five or six years, so we keep that budget around 1.5, so in 27 it'll drop back to that until we kinda see how things are functioning in that year. In years like this, if we do see a spike like that and we have a sales tax where we feel like we're going to lower it, this kind of helps offset that in 2026 as far as total revenue goes. Simplified sellers use tax. This is the SSUT is what you hear us call it. This is that 8% tax that is assessed on things when you purchase like an Amazon or somewhere like that. It's those remote sellers. It is designed to be businesses that do not have a nexus in the state of Alabama. If they do, we should be collecting regular sales tax. There's a lot of controversy surrounding whether this is fair to us and, you know, We agree somewhat. And so I think we're going to continue to see this come up in the legislature and how it's designed. However, it's functioning well for us. When our population was adjusted, this is our fifth largest source now. And so it has averaged about 16.1%. Since 2023, and I only went back that far because if you remember, 2022 is when we got our population adjustment, so that's a little bit of a weird year. But since 23, it's grown 16.1% on average per year. Nothing new this year. It is continuing to grow as more and more people, either the state allows businesses to participate or people just continue to buy more online. You can see the breakdown. The state gets 50% of that revenue source right off the top, and then 50% is divided between cities and counties based on population. And that distribution has remained the same. And it is about 5% of our general fund revenue right now. Twenty-seven, our budget for that is about eight million, I think. So it's really grown since it started. So it has moved up to the fifth spot in our top ten. All right, a few other changes I want to mention. Recreation fees. Anytime that we add things like late Wilmore, new fields, where there's more space for there to be sports and things like that, we're going to see rec fees go up. And I've mentioned that a couple of times in the – uh... in the monthly financial reports and wreck phase themselves the pool fees are kind of separate from that they have increased a lot too but just wreck phase in general so somebody that's registering to play something or to participate in a program we say those go that go up when we have more room for those things to happen and so i am increasing that about two hundred and ten thousand and then uh... following suit in twenty twenty seven get that increase in there for both years. Investment interest. I mentioned not forgetting that our investment policy, and as it should be, safety is the number one thing. The funds have to be safe. And so earnings is our third priority. However, we still need to do everything we can do to earn as much as we can. And so using safety, liquidity, and earnings as our priorities We move stuff around all the time. We pay attention to this. We have an investment team, and we're constantly making sure that we earn as much as we can in a safe investment. We do our best to spread the love. We do RFP so that local banks have a chance to participate. You can see on the investment report that you get in the monthly financials kind of how that's spread out. We continue to earn as high as four, four and a quarter in some things, but we are seeing that change. And as things start to go down, then we're going to start figuring out better and new ways to get that money in the right place to consistently be earning interest. We have had a conversation about whether that should be in the top 10 because it is a higher revenue source than a couple of those. But I feel like as a non-operating type revenue source, it doesn't really belong there. But it is. I believe it was $3 million last year. So it's been a big source since we have been in this interest rate environment. So very good thing there. Active investment management is an important thing. The last two things, so if you're looking on page 24, you have seen how revenue and other financing sources split into two groups. Those are our revenue sources. Other financing sources are a small portion of what we do. There's only two or three things that fall into that. Transfers in from other funds is one of those, and proceeds from borrowing, and now subscriptions and leases. And see if I can explain this. I'm going to use Greg as an example. You remember lately, I think Sonny loved Greg's IT thing that he brought to council lately. And we all understood it perfectly, didn't we, that he was going to lease hardware and software and it was going to do all these things. Accounting standards say that if you are leasing something like that, if it meets certain requirements, then you have to treat that like it is a capital item that you are purchasing by borrowing money. That's basically what we have to do. So we have to record at the inception of a lease the present value of all those lease payments in the future, a capital outlay, and a proceeds of borrowing is basically what it is. So you see this increase that the capital outlay and that offset each other. There's zero impact to fund balance, but it does make things look a little funny. You're going to see a section in capital outlay now for that. And you will see this on the in the other financing source. So in 26, it adds 2.1 million into the other financing source, which makes it look like we have more revenue. But that is not the case. This is a non cash transaction. It's an accounting transaction. And then it's 2020. And I just realized I have a mistake on my slide. You know, that's my favorite thing. In 27. There is it says 26. Again, 2.4 million, we're adding that is specifically related to either a lease, like what Greg did with his hardware, or a subscription-based service like Office 365, where we subscribe to have those things. So you'll see those there. And then the last one is transfers in. We have transfers in from a number of our gas tax funds, things like that. We get gas tax that goes into a special revenue fund, and we can only use that for road construction, paving, things like that. And so we'll transfer that to the general fund and then use it to do our road projects. We have to show that that's what we're doing it for. This particular transfer is coming from the American Rescue Plan, the leftover funding from it. And it's basically interest earning. So we were allowed to earn interest on the COVID funding that we got. It was 16.2 or 8 or 3. I should pick the wrong number. Pick a number. We were able to earn interest on that, and if you had interest earnings left when you were done, you get to use it however you want. So that $1 million is being transferred into the general fund, and we'll use it for just support in the general fund for all the things that we have in the budget. So you'll see that as well. All right, total revenue, we are still expected to be, so if you are looking at these charts, the green is actual, the dark blue, I should have said that early on, is the original budget, and the orange is what's changing. And so we're looking at 160.5 million. This is just revenue. It excludes those other financing sources that I talked about. And then relatively flat in 27 in total, which kind of accounts for all these changes I just mentioned. And so very conservative, but I think it's important that we do that as we plan what we're going to do over the next year. Any questions about revenue?

I guess you're limited to interest-based investments and not equity when you go out to invest the money. Yeah. But good job. Thank you. We've done well in that area.

Yeah, and the state does regulate us, as they should, on what types of investments that we can do. One of the things that our funds, too, I'm not sure if you're aware, our funds are obviously in excess of FDIC insurance. And so the SAFE Board of Alabama, I'm actually on that board, it's called the Safety and... It's security of public funds, basically, and the acronym is SAFE. And so that board is tasked with using banks all put collateral in into this pool of collateral. And should one of our banks fail, if we have an investment with that bank and they are not able to give us our money, then that SAFE program is going to come in and rescue us, basically. so that our funds are always secure. We always have collateral no matter what the amount is. We are required to make sure every one of our accounts has that word on it, just things like that. So very, very safe and collateralized secure money. All right, last thing, debt overview. This is just for the general fund. Don't forget that we are going to have debt for a junior high school. That's going to be in the 16 mil fund. That's going to come as well. This is projections just for the general fund. As changes or shifts are made in our capital improvement plan, then the debt plans that we've kind of thought about have to move around. So right now, and really the only thing that changed is is that we originally had North Donahue widening as debt in 2027. We have moved Dean Road and Opelika Road improvements up with that. We like to try. I think you've realized at this point how big the debt process is and how it's just a very long, expensive process. So we try to group things together when we can. If it makes sense for us to do that at the same time we do the school borrowing, we will do that as well. You can have multiple sources there. So that's the expectation. In the chart, the current debt service in the general fund is in blue, and then as you go up is the 27, so orange is the 27 expected debt. In 2028, and that didn't change, we had Richland Park originally as a general fund debt. That's just the general fund portion, though. We expect to use 5 mil fund. for part of that debt about 20 million if the plans for that park stay the same we would have 20 million in the five mil fund and 24.7 in the general fund um funding the debt service for that and then the expectation is to use debt for moore's mill road widening in 2030. now that's a little out and that could change again we shift things around as As it changes for the general fund, it's very important that our debt service stays manageable. And so we always are making sure we can pay for this. And a key indicator is that debt service stays below 10% of either expenditures or revenue. And we look at it all sorts of ways. Um, and we're in the six, seven, I think in the kind of, when we add to that 2030 debt, it gets kind of up close to nine, but we're still well within that range of, of debt service below 10%. So debt's not flexible. Those are payments you have to make anyway. So we want to make sure we're able to afford that. Any questions about that?

In this graph, when it talks, it says the current proposed, and this considers debt that rolls off, correct? Yes. Okay. Yes.

All right.

All right.

Thank you, Alice.

You're welcome.

Carrying through, we're kind of following along with the budget message as we go over some things. So there are always personal services changes from year to year, and so we'll run through a few metrics first. So one metric is... It's how much are we spending on personnel, um, compared to the average city and what's what's the city's policy always been. We've always tried to keep it under 50% of total expenditures. And we look at this two ways, one with capital N, which is the graph that has the blue colors. Um, and one with the capital projects not included. So with what's in this budget and carrying trend, you know, we're, we're in the 40% range in that, as we continue to grow, I talked about this a lot during the biennial budget. We're adding positions due to new facilities, maintenance, additional infrastructure, and service needs, permitting volumes, you name it. But we also stay lean to ensure that we can take the best care of our employees, and that's also why we use the private sector to supplement in fluctuations. It's really hard to nail down the exact right amount of personnel. The staff will tell you we add people periodically during the year when there's a need. We shift positions around. Well, I give them a hard time. I usually agree to add the vast majority of the positions. Some positions I'm going to go over were things that were requested in the biennial budget process. We let some things ride for most of the fiscal year to see how it was going, how necessary were they, and some things became very obvious. So when I roll into the next page here, um, as a reminder, we were adding 32 total positions, um, as approved in the biennial budget. Um, but these five positions listed below are outside of those original numbers. So that would be adding 16 new positions in fiscal 27. Uh, the administrative assistant position, the office of the city manager is really for the entire complex, uh, that will serve HR economic development, human resources, finance, and information, um, information technology. Uh, this just has some needs. Lindsay's role is changing. She's doing. City clerk work plus well, assistant city clerk work plus public records requests. Um, we used to have a staff person that did that in legislative things. That's morphed. Um, I'm going to come back to city attorney in a minute. Cause that's a longer conversation, a plan reviewer and inspection services. Um, John, you already have two people. Is that correct? This would be a third. This is by volume and size of plans. Um, necessary. They're reviewing far more plans than the staff has the capacity to do. And we do that. It slows down. our turnaround time, why they do the best that they can to turn around. And these aren't overnight turnarounds, but we have a large volume of plans and we need another person to kind of get back to where we would like to be with our turnaround. Some things can happen. A pool permit can happen faster, um, than a large industrial building. I mean, it's just normal part of it. Uh, parks and recreation from an administrative assistant standpoint, you know, Alison's doing a little dance right now that she finally convinced me to advance this. Uh, one of our challenges is as we grow facilities, we grow programs, we grow enrollments, we grow a league sports. That's a lot of paperwork. Um, that's a lot of personnel. and other things, and they are overwhelmed with the amount of paperwork that has to be done. And so this person will help provide some relief there to make sure that they're getting all of their paperwork done. And then last but certainly not least is we're adding a training officer to fire. So we really only have, and Chief Cain will correct me if I'm wrong, one full-time person right now. He requested this last year, wanted to see how things were shaking out. Our longtime training officer, got a promotion in title, but when they went and surveyed similar-sized departments all over Alabama in this region, we had the least amount of training officers. And while we put emphasis on training and we're doing the training, we need another person that does this full-time to be sure we are where we need to be. So we looked at some metrics and wanted to get a little more information, and we are there. So as for the city attorney, here's what's happening. We have Davidson-Davidson, Umbau and Forbus, DDUF firm that's long been... Uh, the city attorney, um, started with our Arnold on Bob many years ago and Rick Davidson over time took that rollover. I want to be very clear. There are no issues with the services provided by our long time city law firm. However, our volume of legal work as we continue to grow. And as things become legally complex is tremendous. For several years now, Paul Clark has been sitting in our human resources building while working for DDUF and doing a great job. On the daily, Stephen Clay, some of you have met Stephen before, does a ton of work with us. We have a city prosecutor, Justin Clark. We have other personnel, paralegals, and then Rick and Kelly Davidson dabble in a variety of city things. I'll also remind you that this firm represents the water board but that is a separate and apart contract. So in doing all that we're doing, surveying Big Ten cities, many other things, it is time that we bring our own person in house. So I am proposing that Paul Clark, and we're not putting his name in the budget message and so on, will come in house. This is a negotiation with Rick. Today he'll come in house April 1st and be a full-time city employee. While he will still collaborate with this law firm, he will work directly For me, we are making some modifications in city hall. You'll see that contract route to bid right now. And an office, um, down the hall from the mayor's office and the city manager's office is being converted. And Paul will be moving into that office. If you approve this budget adjustment, um, eventually, and over time that may involve a paralegal coming in that may involve a shift. I do not know there isn't a plan. Um, and it's not possible. I don't want to propose a legal department of 10 people. That is not what we're trying to do here, but this is the first step in our process of having our own legal team. I also want to further explain, it's in my budget message, how things like litigation work. The Alabama Municipal Insurance Corporation, AMIC, I call that defense. They play defense for us. defend us in the vast majority of our lawsuits and they assign legal counsel if we're playing offense or we're the plaintiff we choose who we wish and even with amic we can choose who we wish dduf covers some of that depending on their level of expertise and volume of work and what's going on and then other firms cover a good bit of that depending on what we're trying to do we often aren't in the business of suing people filing injunctions etc but it happens i've Did it recently over a subdivision situation on North Donahue, and that is when we were playing offense or plaintiff's work. We also hire other legal firms. Bradley would be one. A lot of you have encountered Rod Cantor before. He's our bond counsel. He also handles all of our large economic development agreements. We have other human resource experts, Paul Clark and Rick Davidson's team. handle some of our human resources things, but some are complex and have to have outside counsel dealing with federal law and what have you. Same with environmental law or other things. So we have a lot of legal representation. So I'm in no way, shape, or form promoting to you that I want a gigantic law firm to enter into the city. But as a first step, Paul Clark would come under the city's umbrella April 1st, so halfway through the fiscal year. The reason we're not making this transition now is it also leaves DDUF in a little bit of a lurch, losing a very experienced attorney that's under their umbrella that does other work besides city work. So this is to give them time to get ramped up on some things that Paul was doing for them, but he will be full time for us and working in that capacity at that time. Happy to talk to any of you about this at any time. I know Paul's sitting in here not trying to make it awkward for you, Paul, but let's talk about Paul a little bit more. But I wanted to explain it wasn't just attorney it is Paul that you were very familiar with this has been a long time coming and we're fortunate to have Paul who loves this city and our staff enjoys working with them very much but I don't want to leave behind like Stephen Clay a lot of you as I mentioned before I haven't met him but the staff behind me will nod at you it is on the daily bids all kinds of bid law contracts every contract that we sign has to go through legal review because of certain nuances with the city. That's running through them and that is far too much for Paul to do. You are planning and zoning questions, building code, you name it. There's a ton of interpretation that goes on on a daily basis. There is one rule though, if you don't want an answer from the attorney, don't ask them.

Right?

Yeah, everybody. So I don't like it as a crutch, but there are times that we have to because we're a municipal government and we're under the looking glass. So it's a little bit of an explanation there. Again, happy to unpack with any of you how that works, but at the end of the day, I believe this is the right thing for us moving forward.

Megan, will our total legal expenses that we spend, will some of those be transferred from being spent with Um, our outside cancel to correct.

So there'll be shifts in the retainer over time. Um, and so the retainer this fiscal year, um, while there is, you know, in all transparency fees go up, um, and they haven't gone up in many years and they asked for a small increase overall fees are going up, but there'll be a reduction in what you see in the retainer, but we're also picking up in the office of the city manager. a new employee. And so, um, there, there is, there is that balance. So we're going to pay less on the retainer, but I'm not saying the general fund's not picking it up somewhere else. And so the other thing is I can never tell you in a given year what our full legal expenses are going to be. And we'll talk about insurance and other things later. We don't know what's coming. Um, Sometimes on Mondays, and it happened this week, and the mayor and I, I think, and others, I got subpoenaed this week, and I keep getting changes for things. I can't tell you legally what's coming down the pike, and we spend a lot of time with frivolous things. And so it is much, and so it's hard for me to capture what it's going to fund. What I can tell you is there are certain services that are provided for in our retainer, and those we do not get charged extra for. When we do things outside of the retainer is when we start paying for that and when it's our own employee paul wants to work 80 hours a week because he's used to it so you know we're good to go i'm getting a deal um but i feel fortunate that we found paul that he had worked with the city for many years i give rick davidson a lot of credit for bringing him back to auburn um and i've been hopeful for a long time that we would be able to find a way to do this and so we are here i mean we've just simply grown to the point we need

Full-time counsel, correct?

We do, but I want to be careful in one thing. DDUF is responsive 24 hours a day, seven days a week year-round. They get calls in the middle of the night. Chief Harris will nod at you. I mean, things happen in the middle of the night. The city attorney gets called to police headquarters. I mean, that happens, and they have been extremely responsive the entirety of their representation. But our growth is our growth, and just the complexity – In the city's size and our transactions dictate the need for this. And I do expect over time we will continue to add to that. And one of the things probably that happens next and not trying to recruit Justin Clark away from Rick is the city prosecutor at a point in time will probably need to come in house again. This is a volume of work thing. This isn't the only thing he does. And it's just volume of cases and so on. And so over time we'll be dealing with this.

Megan, with regard to the history of personal services as a percentage of total expenditures, how do we compare to other Big Ten cities?

Oh, I'm going the wrong way here. Yeah, I don't know compared to other Big Ten cities. It's pretty common to be about 70 percent, and some are as high as 90 percent, and this has been a long-time philosophy of the city, but I I want to be careful about one thing, why we compare very well and we stay lean. It's important to me. Everybody behind me and the people that are not in this room work very hard. And I'm not so bent that if we got to 51% because that's what it really took to get the job done, I would be before you advocating for the 51% if that's what we've had to do. But fortunately, we've had growth in revenue. We stay lean. We're very intentional about our positions and very careful about that. And so... I'm proud to be under the percentage, but also want to be clear that I'll gladly propose to you new positions if they are necessary to serve our citizens with the level of service they expect to be serviced and to not overly tax our employees.

There are a lot of cities out there that are having to spend 70% and 90%, and we're getting as much, if not more, done spending more. We are about 45%. That's correct.

We believe in that. We also believe that that puts money into projects and programs and other places it needs to be. And so, but we also believe in taking great care of the people that work here. And we'll talk a little bit more about, you know, some significant changes in the budget because of that insurance being one of them. So significant changes. I'm not going to go into great detail on these. You can stop me. The staff is here to ask questions. And we're not going into a full review of the capital improvement program. So a lot of this follows my budget message. But if you're looking for capital outlay, which is large equipment purchases, that kind of thing, that starts on page 48 for you. And the CIP itself starts on about page 57. I'm hitting highlights of things that we didn't tell you about last year or something major has changed. And so that's why they're in here. Um, I think you recall in December we purchased some duck Sanford park property said there'd be a mid biennium adjustment. Um, we're, you know, work throughing, working through design on that. Um, Keith can answer questions about where we are with that if needed, but that's just, it's something that is a significant change in a large dollar amount. We have $1.75 million transfer to the self insurance fund. What we can't, predict is what will go on in the lives of our employees and their families and so we are self-insured we transfer money in we also and Allison's going to help me with this we also manage with our consultants and help estimate where this needs to be

Yeah, we work with our brokers to determine what fund balance in that fund needs to be. It needs to be at a level that we are able to handle significant events when they happen. I mean, claims can be low and they can be really, really high given certain situations, and so we work for them to see that. And any time we transfer, it's to make sure that we keep that level there. I will add, though, that this is a sub fund of the general fund. It is essentially still the general fund. We just need to account for self insurance separately so that we can view it very well. So when you see it in the annual report, it all rolls up into the general fund. So the general fund is going to back it no matter what. However, we like to actively manage that fund balance in that way.

Good. Okay. So you also had approved some expansion police vehicles. Again, the reason for that, why we had them in conditional capital, I'll remind you that those aren't actually budgeted in. They're just signaling to you in our capital outlay that we might ask to roll them in. It means I'm either not quite ready to fund them or we want to see where revenue is going. So one of the things I'll remind you is Allison talks about revenue fluctuations. The team behind me We can slow down spending projects or anything else or freeze a number of things at a given point in time. If we get uncomfortable from a revenue perspective ever and see some weird trend, we can modify our spending quickly. And so we're very comfortable while we're conservative with the budget. But in this instance, we're working hard from a recruitment and retention standpoint to be sure that each officer... has their own vehicle, and also we've had a few challenges with a few vehicles being damaged. The chief stepped out, didn't he? He may have had an emergency. So we've had some damaged vehicles, and this also helps us, unfortunately, in the bullpen of things we need to keep around. So that just happens. I'm going to talk in 26 and 27, and Allison Hall is here to help me. Westview Cemetery needs some changes. There's just things that need to be done there that were not anticipated and I'm recommending that we get them done sooner rather than later. So there's a fence replacement that can be done right now. There's some radar scans we need to look for. some graves. There's probably some records of the past that were not great and we need to be sure that we know where everybody that is buried there is there and this is from a long time ago so we want to spend adequate money to be sure this is exactly right so that we don't have new plots that are created and there happen to be people there. We're going to sonar the whole thing to be sure and then we need some irrigation and that's in this fiscal year. There's more to come that I'll go over in just a minute but We've got to spend Alison. What was the grand total between the two years on west view? Do you remember about $350,000? Um, it's very important that, um, some things get, get upgraded at west view. Um, councilwoman Taylor would be happy about there's some parking issues there and some other things. And so we need to get these done, uh, sooner rather than later based on just some current circumstances.

Excuse me on the ground penetrating radar. Have y'all considered renting or contracting that out rather than purchasing the gear?

That's what we're doing. It's a contract.

Okay. Yeah.

Just rental. It would be the experts councilman Griswold. And yes, sir. Yeah, no, we, we have no desire to be in that business.

Good. Thanks.

So we're also based on what Alison just helped me with on the self insurance fund. We are, um, adding 2.45 million. Uh, to the self insurance fund for fiscal 27. And again, we've also had some major events for some of our employees and their families. And, uh, that's what this is here for us to take care of them when they need us the most. Megan. Yes, ma'am.

I hate to bake you up a little bit. I want to ask a question about the Westview cemetery. Is that, is that a picture? Is that what it, huh? Is this Westview? Yes, ma'am. That's just an old picture. Okay. So I was asking because I thought that the fencing over there had already been replaced. Back when I was on the cemetery board, this came up, and they did some fence replacing.

Allison's going to come and help with that. I'm going to phone a friend right here.

You are correct, but it was only a very small section. We have, I would say, probably 65% of the fence is old. So it is time to replace. So we want to replace and match everything and get it up to standards.

Okay. So when you were replacing it, and I know what part had been replaced. I look at it. It really looks nice. And I didn't really realize that Habitat had, Property right up on the cemetery. So are you putting a fence along that line? Is it already there?

We just put up a fence along their line, yes, ma'am. And, Connie, we had to do some trading with them. They had to give some property back to us because that's why we need to do the radar. Okay. There are some old records that were not accurate about some things at Westview that need to get corrected. Okay. And so that's a lot of what we're doing here.

Cause I was wondering when I seen the habitat, uh, had took over that property where there are graves there.

That's been undone.

It's been undone.

Correct.

What do you mean? They've been dug up and put somewhere else?

No, no, no, no, no. The Habitat had the property. Some got deeded to them. Records weren't accurate. The council took an action, and the property returned and reverted back to the city. Oh, okay.

It is their property, yes.

Okay, okay. All right. Thanks.

Okay. So we talked about self insurance. So this is the new sidewalk, uh, funds I've talked about, uh, with Michael Griffin, our new city engineer being in, you have signaled to me, um, and citizens of your wards collectively, you just get a lot of, a lot of push from a lot of people interested in things. And so, um, I had the city engineer and his team evaluate, there'll be more to come in the next biennial budget, but we're trying to, To get caught up on things, Councilman Moorman will be back in the room in a minute. So I'll talk about East University Drive, who's mostly involving Ward 6, and tell him more is coming in fiscal 28 when we get to it. But we're adding a ton of East University Drive sidewalk. It's going to vary on both sides of the road depending on where other sidewalk sections have already been built. So if you'll start with me, it's South College Street. That's why I call it. You may not know this College Crossing Shopping Center where Aldi is, but that's what it is. On the south side of the road, on that side of the road, we're going to Parker Place, which is a cul-de-sac of new town homes, kind of nearer to the Dollar General. So we've got to complete that piece. On the north side, if you go across the street, Clarion, it is closed. But from there, we're going to take a section, and you're headed down all the way to Ferndale on the north side. So past the University Credit Union, over Donahue, And on over to Ferndale on that side, because we're making connections based on existing sidewalk. And then we're going to continue on a separate project. There's just sections because we, we, um, uh, price them that way. Then we're going to keep going from Ferndale all the way to South gay again, on the North side of the street. And then again, you'll see sections near South Dean road, but from South Dean road to Moore's mill road, you're going to see a section there. I'll remind you on the South side at Moore's mill and East university drive. By our park there, there is a short section of sidewalk that's leading you to the parking lot of the park, but the actual sidewalk will be on the other side of the street because it will connect and it takes you to a crosswalk at Morris mill and Dean road. for councilman Mormon will enter in the fiscal 28. We have more work to do. Um, we have long time residents that preceded councilman Mormons service on the city council and preceded me as city manager expecting a better sidewalk connections between Sanford and East and Sanford and Moore's mill on East university drive. That will be a fiscal 28 project. We need to do some more ramp up on design in that area. And so, That will come later. It's not signaled in the CIP because we have some work to do. I don't know how to estimate right now what that's going to cost. So this is the beginning of this, and this is intended to be fully constructed in fiscal 27.

Did you say the south side of the street or the north side from East University, on East University from South Dean to Moore's Mill? Oh, it's on the north side.

Yep. The other section I'll have to, my staff will have to help me when we go into fiscal 28, which side it's going to be on. Um, but that would only leave the gap between Sanford and Morris mill in the moment. So, cause you have on the high school side of the street, as we've hashed out multiple times, already have a sidewalk there. We're also going to complete some gaps. North DeBartolaben from Glenn to Harper does not have a sidewalk. There is, I think Councilman Adams, you're dealing with some questions about Harper. That's a little more ramp up. And Scott, that's probably more of a Fiscal 28 project, Harper Avenue sidewalk.

Yeah.

so that's something just not not quite ready um with north ross street has some gaps from drake north there's been new projects you have new project has sidewalk then no sidewalk and so on so we're going to fill in some gaps there mary brooks drive in the vicinity of the boykin community center has some gaps we're going to fill those in on mary brooks so you have a consistent sidewalk and then councilman coblentz A little bit of Ogletree road, um, from Ogletree village shopping center area to Morgan drive, because Cleveland's have already done some work in that area. Um, I know that the residents of East lake. Want some different things on their side of the road, but there's also one of the easier connections to make and faster things to do is to build the Moore's mill piece that is not finished on that side. Again, those things will be considered in the next biennial budget. And so, uh, we're trying to make some progress unless I read the tea leaves wrong with this council that your expectations are we. pick up our game on some sidewalk construction where we can to make better connections and some long time things that have been around floating around.

This is really great news. I periodically, routinely get correspondence from people in Ward 6 about East University and this is really terrific news and thank you so much. This just speaks to the whole concept of getting around without necessarily being in a vehicle, the connectivity through Town Creek Park, which will benefit from these sidewalks.

fantastic news and now that you actually have a culvert under construction yes there we go it's really exciting don't go flying through there late at night it's a little dark and a lot of cones in the road so well good i want to thank michael michael and his team for that because michael's had to come in hit the ground running he's been here since middle of february and i'm drinking from fire hose he's doing great connie i'm sorry that's okay um the

And I guess I'm talking about all the sidewalks, but I was really thinking about the one on Mary Brooks to Boykin. Will it be consistent with the sidewalk on Martin Luther King as far as the width of it?

Probably not. It's probably just going to be a five-foot sidewalk to match what's there. Good. So people won't park on it.

That would be nice if they wouldn't park on it. Also, Connie, one of your constituents in a recent email was raising some concerns about Donahue in the vicinity of, is it Spencer?

Yes.

Yes, it's Spencer. Yeah, because we have the crosswalk there that takes you across and then comes back in to Drake. There is a gap there that we wanted to look at closer. That was a good idea that came up from that.

Yeah, well, it's not proposed now, but it doesn't mean we won't come back to you in the middle of the fiscal year if we think we can get it done.

Okay, so, and I got there, and she talked to me about that, and I forwarded that email to you. Okay, so, am I understanding, or is she talking about going around that curb? Going around that curb?

So, there is a sidewalk on Spencer that will take you around to Drake School, but it's It's on Donahue. What she's talking about is actually on Donahue. So it would be a sidewalk on the west side of Donahue that would extend down to where the entrance of Drake.

She's asking for more sidewalk on Donahue specifically. That's what we're going to work on.

Okay.

Cause kids are having a zigzag and made a very valid point on telling you is it's absolutely being looked at. It's not ready for today. And we may come to you depending on what our capacity is to do it and what we think it's going to take and just say, we're going to like a 27 adjustment. to proceed. So, um, I would say anecdotally, my request to you as we go through things is enrolling in the next fiscal year, um, is you continue to alert us to what you're hearing from your constituents. One of my challenges is we have a lot of sidewalks that were, Michael was sorting through things. I said, what is this list? I've never heard of anybody wanting any of these. And the list is pretty old of long time ago requests. And so he's trying to sort through my deal is, is, Our priorities used to be major arterials, routes to school, shopping areas, what have you, and we're trying to do that. So right now on the Bartle Haven, for example, we're trying to get people down to Glen Avenue where there is a sidewalk before we get the Harper Avenue piece completed. And so we look at things that way. Um, we're also trying to look at investment that impacts the most people, the soonest. And schools are still a priority in that Mary Brooks drive. We have a big sidewalk, a smaller sidewalk. We've made more sidewalk, but we're not finished. And so I think the hardest ones for us to do are in neighborhoods that I'm not saying we won't do that. Your lens, um, that affect 25 homes versus, you know, that have a cul-de-sac and nowhere to go versus connectivity throughout the city. Um, that's ultimately up to you guys. If you want us to dabble in those areas and some of those areas, Hickory woods is challenging for us to do because properties drop off. There's, you know, there's topographic challenges for some of these areas where it would be very hard. We've dealt with, um, councilman Griswold has dealt with for his tenure on the council and Mary Anders prior to that is Kerry woods wanting sidewalk and all the aspects that go into that on Kerry drive, which is trees, mailboxes, et cetera, and millions of dollars. Again, if the council says we're going to do that and that's what the residents really want, and that's what we'll do. I mean, it's ultimately up to you guys, but we're going to continue to try to make some of these connections that are long overdue. And a lot of this is piecing together. New development has come in and built sections of it, and we're trying to piece together and get full connectivity so it makes more sense. So my staff unbeknownst to me decided they'd make a lovely connection on North Dean road and people were happy about it. Um, and it looks really good. It's where the medical offices are now fully connecting some things that weren't connected before. And so our citizens do notice when we come in and finish things like that, we're trying to be intentional. So. Other things. I know this one's going to make you real happy. Um, the gay street parking deck and all of its glory. Um, one of Phillip's first projects in Auburn that shows how long the parking deck has been there. Um, needs about $650,000 worth of maintenance, um, per Walker parking consultants. They do structural analysis. Uh, it was hard for me to put this one in here because the temptation to you is to say to you, ah, we ought to just do a new project, tear it down. Uh, do it again. I, I still think we need to do a new project here, but we also need to keep this functional until we're ready to do a new project here. Um, so my ask of you with this is Dan is here. You can talk about, it's a lot of structural things. My ask is this money goes in the budget. It doesn't mean we're going to spend all of this and the consultants are going to be squirrely. We keep saying, well, how, how much time does this bias? It's not a question of consultants going to answer for us. I don't love spending money on this parking deck, but if we take it out of service and tear it down and build a new one, we've got to move everybody that's parking in it now to the Wright Street parking deck, and here we go again. If we want to talk over the next fiscal year about what the future of this looks like, that's fine. I would like to put this in here. We can afford it, but you'll be the arbiters of anything over $50,000 that gets spent on it. Anyway, it has to come to you. Um, I think we need to talk realistically about what we want to do with this property. And, um, carry forward i mean one idea it doesn't mean i'm proposing you do this but precast parking garages are fabricated elsewhere they come in on trucks the auburn bank parking deck went up much faster than the right street parking deck because it's poured in place uh versus precast you can keep a deck in service why another one is being fabricated somewhere else tear it down and it goes up like an erector set and you you build it again still a lot of money

Megan, when was the last time that we had to do some maintenance? We do it pretty frequently.

It's it's constantly. Yeah. You have to get a microphone because we're recording. So, yeah, there we go.

Yeah. So we performed various repairs and preservation maintenance back in 2023, 2024. And the last condition assessment structural appraisal was done in December of 25.

It's safe to say that this is, uh, we'll continue to have to do this at, uh, at, at, at a similar interval, interval, probably as long as the, as this deck approaches its later life stages.

Correct. So given its age and it's over 40 years old, it's recommended every two years that we have a structural appraisal.

So it says to me in the next four year council term, we're going to be looking hard at this and talking, talking about it. And so. I think there's a lot of opportunities for the area behind Mellow Mushroom, for lack of a better term. We need to keep an emergency access around there, an aerial access for fire trucks. We have a lot of utilities, but we can build a different parking garage there. We can turn that into usable space. We can move our compactors into a better location where you're not having some outdoor dining and a little bit of, Uh, interesting odor that comes with it. We can do a lot of things if we revamp that and we can, and make a good space there. But that I think is something that we look at in the coming years, but I don't love to spend this money or recommend this to you. However, I don't see that we have a choice right now. Um, because if we don't do this, we, we have a big risk in, in the structure itself. And so. Um, we've gotta be careful. It stays fairly full. Most of the time we have a lot of outdoor dining around it and we've gotta be careful. So, and, and Philip, it will always tell you, you know, this thing was supposed to be more stories tall and the city manager at the time, Doug Watson, who I deeply respect was afraid we would have empty floors for many years and he wasn't wrong about the early years, but I don't know that he could have predicted the later years, but still would still be a 40 year old deck and we would still be facing the same issue.

But we could create some commercial use in and around on the bottom floor.

We could do all kinds of things, yes.

To generate more sales revenue.

I want to remind you, that's basically a two-acre site there. The city of Auburn is beyond the Methodist Church, and the Methodist Church has recently sold off some properties. One of the largest... single parcels in downtown Auburn, and that's two full acres of property. It's big. And I think we can do great things. And even with deliveries to our businesses, it's tough. Our loading dock area is tough. Nothing to our friends in Magnolia Plaza, but if we reimagine that and get rid of that connector bridge, a semi-truck can actually make it all the way around instead of hitting it. which would be really nice. And we can do some other things. We can make it safer. We can make better space and so on. I do think on the horizon, we need to look at that if the council is amenable. So, okay. So we had lengthy discussion about the engineering services, roof replacement and the architectural fees and all of that. But this is the roof replacement piece of it. Dan, the design fees are separate or these are built in there. Do you remember or Steven? Separate. So this is just the roof replacement anticipating that. The half a million-ish on a truck wash station, Katrina's long proposed in her budget on her side of the ledger. It was not a general fund or was it in fleet? It was in the solid waste fund. I'm proposing to move a truck wash station out of the solid waste fund into the general fund. This has to do with maintenance of our vehicles, getting lots of getting them clean, but also in our environmental services side, if your trucks aren't sparkling clean, you can also interest vermin, varmints, whatever you want to say, lots of things. And so we keep them as clean as we can, but they need an adequate wash station. We get a lot of our vehicles that get a lot of mud and debris from the work that they do on them. And from a maintenance perspective, they need to be cleaner. We have a wash area now, but we need a much improved one that is designed for this There will be follow-on costs with this because we have a cost per vehicle of washing just on the operating side, but it's something that's necessary and will help a lot of our large equipment and its longevity. Did I miss anything, Dan?

Okay.

So also, uh, Michael is here and can talk about it far better than I have, but as a nod to Jim Buston, who is constantly frustrated about artificial intelligence and why our traffic signals were not smarter, uh, upon Michael's arrival and with his lens, he was tasked with how can we do better with traffic signals? So the number one complaint you're receiving is traffic. Um, we've heard a lot about traffic lately. Uh, we're doing everything that we can to manage traffic, but This is a half a million dollar signal optimization project that really is taking a lot more. I'm going to get my cheat sheet as Allison got hers, and then Michael can jump in. It's really taking data. You see cameras. They're not flock cameras that are sitting on our intersections. They're counting cars. A lot of them don't even have active video for collisions, but it's taking that data where it is measuring patterns in real time, and it gives us the ability to optimize signal timing and change it more often, like We may adjust timing once a year or twice a year. We could adjust this every three months if we're seeing patterns change. It allows us to have a lot more data over time. We can be more responsive with detours and other things as we see what's happening. We may need to adjust timings more. We want to be more nimble. If people flow when the traffic reasonably flows, they'll tolerate the peak hour. But if they're sitting somewhere where they feel like they shouldn't have sat there that long, Sans the trains. I mean, we can't help those, but, um, we do better. Scott, what have I missed?

I think it's a really good overview. I mean, obviously you want to dive in some details. Uh, Michael can, I think, um, I'm, I'm personally really excited about this project cause I think it'll, it'll, um, help the community out a lot and it'll take away a lot of the issues that people complain about. But the biggest thing is you've already referenced is the ability to make, um, informed decisions much quicker than we do now. Cause as, as Michael has told me in the past, it would take us, up to a year to be able to collect the data, analyze that data and make recommendations. We can do that in a matter of months now, or once we, once we, once you approve this and we get it.

So why this was not on the budget previously, uh, this is your number one priority. It's our citizens number one priority, and we are doing everything we can to use technology, uh, to move it along. Michael is also not a city engineer that wants to recommend technology because for the sake of doing it, it's something that he. has spent a lot of time working on, is very convicted that this will be a good thing for us and this will provide useful things. We've got to adjust. He got frustrated. We also had a lot of our, unfortunately, a lot of our signal equipment failed over the summertime. East University Drive and North Dean Road was a problem. We had failures at Sanford and Gay Street. We've had, and it's it's some of the detection technology that then deals with light cycles. So we have these, we had to put them in a regular operation and these are the things, um, this is going to tell us when a light cycle has a problem, because I think a lot of folks, we all hear from them say, well, didn't you know that this light had a problem? The answer is not unless we check in a certain way, this has more capability to tell us it's having a problem. Um, and I'll mind you that this ties to fiber optic projects. So when you see that, um, or, um, We've got money always stuck in the budget about adding fiber to our signals and something Brandi's long worked on is having that type of data connectivity is going to allow us to do what we need to do.

Megan, I feel like this is a very smart purchase that will make traffic much more efficient. How will we be able to measure that, determine how...

how well this works, going to slide into the seat right there and help you.

So within it's called my vision with Mateo and our information that we derive from the, uh, the traffic signal itself that we would record stays in our database. So if you've used AI like chat GPT or clot or equivalent, it's only trained on our data. So we have all of our signals and what we're proposing is the ones that are fiber optically connected. with which learning today we can probably go to our cellular connection services, but all of that information can stay in-house on our virtual machines. So I'll give you a scenario. A developer comes into town, wants to build a 200 unit development. We say, let's wait till Labor Day, get a traffic study when the students are back, then we'll give you recommendations, and then we'll let you start construction. That's a nine month process just to wait on an answer immediately out the gate. So what this does is not only just vehicles, but it's pedestrians and bicyclists as well. So one thing that we do get, all of our traffic studies are heavily oriented towards just vehicular motions and movements. So it includes all of the data. So how it best lets us represent it is getting an actual picture image on a day to day basis of what's going on at the signal instead of what's happening. We could say we're working on it. So instead of month to month or like six months to six months, it's a workforce multipliers. The military would like to use and we can give reports on a weekly and a monthly basis. So it takes a lot of man hours and computers are really good at counting. They're really good at that. And so and that is basically the nut of it. What the traffic engineer does is counting. Right. So this expedites it by a factor of 10.

So, Michael, you can measure and level of service outcomes like because it's constantly measuring data. If we improve your travel time or level of service that that is a measurable outcome from this beyond just the data collection and the use of it.

That is correct. So if there is a suggested timing plan that the traffic engineer wants to query out of the data and say, I want to implement this through the months of October and November, and then we implement it, we can see measurable results pre and post running those implementations and report to you if the travel time index has reduced or been increased. As a measure of performance, we always want to decrease the amount of travel time. So that would be readily available as well.

And we're happy as we move into this, we can do work session on it. We can do a lot of things, but if I got clear direction from you on anything collectively is governing body traffic is, is, is very clear to me. And Michael was tasked upon arrival. Hey, we've always talked about this. What's the holdup and why can't we move forward? So this is, we are where we are, but we're happy to provide updates, do work sessions on it. So you have a greater understanding as we begin to implement what we're doing. We'll be talking about it on social media. doing all the things that we can do to inform citizens that we're making every effort beyond just widening intersections and building more travel lanes to be as efficient as possible. Because if we get our timing down, that is the biggest impact we can have the soonest on the daily travel of our citizens.

And while this says 2027, that's really in two months in October.

Correct.

Okay.

That begins, we will, um, if, when we get through and I'd be remiss the budget ordinance while it is on your next council agenda, I don't expect you to do anything, but deny unanimous consent and carry that forward to give you. time, but if you adopt this as part of the budget in the month of September, then yes, we'll be moving forward expeditiously with it. Michael's done all the research, I think has some contractual items ready to go and, and we'll be moving forward on your agenda in October as soon as we can.

Okay. I wanted to ask about when you're talking about that, uh, about the pedestrian. Um, and I noticed, I guess all of them sit for 15 seconds. for people to cross, is it 15?

It's highly dependent on the distance that they have to travel. So, uh, not everybody walks at the same rate. So there's a national accepted standard that we use to calculate that passage time for people to cross from one button to the next. So that's the distance that we use in our timing to calculate that.

Okay. Cause I was wondering how did that work? Uh, because I, you know, I see people when they crossing over and they got these 15 seconds, then all the, The crossovers hadn't made it across.

Yeah. And uniquely enough, with this software, it actually analyzes near misses. So if there is an indication that there is not enough time for the amount of capacity for pedestrians to move through a signal, we can accommodate that and find out where the trouble spots are. We call them hot spots for near misses.

Well, I can tell you where one trouble spot is. It seems like to me right there on Bragg. Okay. It don't seem Donahue, Connie bragging Donahue right there, because there's a lot of pedestrian walking, you know, the students and stuff that come in, you know, offer Donahue going toward the college. And it don't seem like it's enough time for those students to cross.

Well, and I wonder, cause we did that corridor study of where we were improving. So we studied Donahue from there all the way on the campus in a joint study with Auburn university. to be more efficient about ingress and egress from campus for vehicles. And that could have adjusted that signal where we shortened some of those times look at brag Avenue where they put those new complexes there.

So you, you got more traffic. Yes, ma'am.

Yeah. Foot traffic. So as a computer is, I mean, we're human, right. And we respond off comments, but this has taken the human element out of it and looking at it objectively real time at all real time. So it's much faster.

So I think when we get that call from a citizen that says, I think it's midnight and I sat here forever and the signal never changed and what have you, he can easily look at the data and know, but it also should be alerting us if it's out of cycle. Hamilton Road and Bent Creek Road is notorious for turning off its cycle and going back to its regular operation instead of doing what it's supposed to do, and I don't know why, but sometimes we have electrical glitches or we have other things, and this should be telling us that there's a problem.

So people will not have to contact the city and complain about a... I mean, people will still do that.

They should still do it just in case.

But we should also be notified... sit, sit in the staff. Well, when there is an issue or you have the ability to be instead of like, are you aware of it?

We can already say we're working on it. Perfect. So that's, that's where I want to get us to.

And I'd also, I don't want to make a huge announcement here. Brandy is retiring from the city coming up. Michael is making some changes. Brandy leaves a big hole. Um, she's been with us for many years, done an excellent job and worked really hard. And so, Michael's making some adjustments. Randy's a very experienced, very senior traffic engineer in his team to address that. We've had some great interns and co-ops and other things, but we're adjusting in the traffic engineering realm to also prepare for Brandy's retirement, but also know that I feel very comfortable based on what I understand your lens to be. If we need more to beef up something in our traffic engineering side of things, I'll be to you in a heartbeat to ask you for permission to proceed with stuff, because I know it's important. Thank you, Michael. I've got a quick question.

We've got a number of studies going on right now, citywide traffic study, infrastructure, a number of ones. I mean, budget impacts from some of those studies that come out, when will we start seeing potential projects brought forward? I mean, it's probably too soon within fiscal year 27. It's too soon, yeah.

I think you're going to see on the biennial budget, Rome, when do you expect the citywide to wrap up? Do you know?

The citywide, well, we finished one portion with a rough draft already, but the other portion, we had our final kind of meeting today and we're basically at 90%. So before the end of this fall, we should have a general idea of what we want to present.

Yes. I think a lot of those things would be budgeted later on. I mean, You know, since due to the election, there's a lot of activity lately, but one challenging thing is you've approved a number of contracts. Dean Road's not being talked about. Glenn Avenue through, you know, Dean Road on Glenn Avenue through Opelika Road is one gigantic project, and it is underway in terms of design and and preliminary work and that is one of the biggest game changers that we're going to do that impacts annaloo that impacts the right turn lane we know we need to fix that those lanes are narrow we have to deal with the kroger driveway at harper some people probably not going to be happy how we deal with it but it's also very dangerous in terms of people make poor decisions that is driver error but shooting the gap there can be dicey and i know some people to die understand that firsthand they may have experienced the situations there, person sitting in the middle, um, when they were in college. Uh, and so that was a long time ago before current volumes, but we are, we are working on all those and those are capital projects to come. So, and there's a lot of talk about studies. I don't agree with what's been said that we do a lot of studies and we don't implement it. And this not coming from this dais, I'm just saying if we need to do a rundown of studies and what we've done, we're always happy to present that to the city council.

It wasn't around the studies. It was just one of the projects that maybe come out of some of those that were in current. When do we start seeing budget impacts on that? Yeah, you won't see. That was more the question.

Yeah, no, but I'm also taking the opportunity, Councilman Koblenz, to say there's been a lot of talk about that lately. Staff takes exception to that. And so, and everything that's in a citywide traffic study doesn't mean it's going to be performed. And there's a lot of things that didn't get done that are still in the long range plan. And we're just getting to the beginning edge of the long of the longterm with that while we're redoing one, a lot of our studies for infrastructure need to get back on a five-year schedule. Traffic's a little harder to do. Michael may have a different lens on how we do some of that, but this AI technology may also better inform. What do we need to do with the citywide traffic study? And we may be picking key intersections and corridors in the future and just studying those because we're getting real-time data. A lot of the citywide traffic study has always been a comprehensive collection of data at a snapshot in time, citywide. And I think we're probably going to look at doing that differently with AI.

So, okay. And I'm one of the ones that think we have way too many studies, not enough results, just for the record. But go ahead.

Well, thank you.

That was so kind of you. Oh, you're very welcome.

So the traffic street sweeper, $380,000. We get constant breakdowns of our current street sweepers, and we need to replace one. It's pretty common. You hear from your constituents on that. So we move that into the budget. The housing authority agreement, this is back. to a redo, um, on Donahue of housing authority property, Sharon Tolbert and her team have yet to get final approval from the state housing finance authority and some other things we expect that in September. So this money is budgeted in case we need to make the contribution, um, to it. And if we don't need to make the contribution, it'll drop out, but we want to be sure it was budgeted in this is to help redo some of our lowest income housing for the housing authority and really make a difference on. North Donahue, um, for the people who live there and the people that live around it, other significant changes, Alison Hall, spending way too much money on electricity, um, sit in the air conditioning, but it's really like Wilmar is. Is a hopping place, uh, from open to close a lot going on there. And the pool is expensive also just from managing it from electricity standpoint. So, um, she's winter winter chicken dinner on a big increase in electricity. And so that's in there. We've got a system upgrade for public safety to the 911 call-taking system. And then fire, this is definitely not their vehicle. This is a rapid response truck. It'll look something like this. The chief is here should you have questions. The goal here is we need a – we got a grant. We need a brush truck to fight small interstate fires. This would be station – housed at station five. We've also ramping up and personnel already approved is is what we had six positions going into this fiscal year to handle our rescue trucks. And so this is this is an item where we're not going to be transporting people out of this one chief, but It can provide all kinds of capabilities on scene. We don't want to get in the ambulance business. But this will be a multifaceted truck that is housed at Station 5, which is in Tech Park South, Ward 8, next to Briggs and Stratton. Connie, there's some more Westview Cemetery things we need to be doing. So we need a maintenance barn out there to store the equipment so we can maintain our cemeteries. That cemetery in particular, plotting means to redo the cemetery plots. And so that's the surveying that goes with it. And then Allison, sorry to get you up again, if you want to talk a little bit about the idea for the parking lot.

As you're aware, Connie, there's really not much of any parking. And so we, uh, want to create, we've got some space there because Westview park is next door and we have the end of that cul-de-sac. So we want to create some actual dedicated parking that's striped appropriately a day ADA appropriate. So that the cemetery and those that visit have a place to park.

And, and, and thank you for that because, uh, the last funeral I was at, I actually had to go through, through the graves to get out. Because you may not want to hear that, but I really did. I had to go through. So I was wondering about the parking, seriously, because there was a lot of people at the funeral. And so when you park around in that circle, you may want to leave before the hurts leave or whatever. And so the only way through is through the between the graves. So I hope I didn't disturb anybody when I went across, but I did. Okay, but let me ask you one more question. A maintenance barn.

Yes, ma'am.

So is that gonna be some type of building? And is this somebody going to be ha how's there? Y'all just putting stuff in his stuff.

No staff will be ha how's there. If you visit some of our other cemeteries, some of them have maintenance barns. We tuck them kind of in a quarter corner and hide them with landscaping for us to store our equipment markers that need to go in the ground, that sort of thing.

I don't, I don't visit many cemeteries. So yeah, but yeah, that sounds good.

So we're, we're splitting over some stuff that's going to happen immediately at the end of 26. And then a few things in the 27 of these things were not. fully on our radar screen in the biennial budget process. So we're nearing the end of the things that I need to go over with you, but some other significant changes is Yarborough Farms Boulevard is part of the foundry project. We discussed the need to move some things up, spending a little over 14 million in total over fiscal 27 and 28, and I think a little bit bleeds into 29, but I can't remember for sure. And so we move some things up to begin sooner. There is good progress on that project. Warren Jolly is chomping at the bit, and it is very possible that he will actually build the road, and we will just use these funds to reimburse. But as discussed, that is moving forward. Scott, anything else to add on that?

No, I said, we're actually trying to finalize an amendment to the development agreement to address that, that he would build the road and we'd reimburse him for that. Now we'd also, you know, we still have the piece from the end of his project across the Creek with a bridge and tie into the schools project.

Yes, there is one small piece that we would need to do ourselves. We will find economy of scale. If he builds it, we will also get it done faster. The developer of the bigger project would be motivated to get it done. He'll already have a contractor under control. So. We're still on the hook for one small piece of it. We'll talk about Donahue as I've fallen on in a minute. Let me talk about the police precinct first, and we'll get to Donahue. We've moved some things around with South Police Precinct. It is likely to go on Cox Road, pretty much Tech Park North adjacent. It's a little bit up on a piece of property, the Industrial Development Board. owns the city kindly gave the paid for this property years ago and gave it to the industrial board. They're kindly going to gift it back to the city. Um, and so we have no property costs here. This will be a facility. We are out of space in this building for police. It will be a facility. We will staff the lower picture you see. There's a fancy thing. This one is just kind of what a real time crime center looks like. Chief Harris is here. If you want to know a little bit more, what we're trying to do in fiscal 27 is a million dollars dealing with the programming and broad design of it. I don't know it's square footage yet. We haven't programmed it out for exactly what we need. And then we have put more money into the budget to build it. Whatever we say, I don't know if that's going to be the budget amount yet. It's the best our capital projects team could do, not having a fully scoped facility. But Chief Harris is here. Should you have questions about what we're trying to do with that?

Questions? Good.

You good?

Okay. Okay.

So one other significant change I put on the dais in front of you was a request, um, from a faction of the Methodist church works handily Auburn United Methodist on, um, aspects of homelessness. And so they had come Joe Davis leader of that group from a staff perspective had come and asked the city to partner on a grant opportunity. that they wanted to pursue. What ultimately happened, we did a deep analysis of that grant opportunity and it was actually gonna cost the city more money. They're requesting $35,000 from us. This is for really emergency homelessness assistance. It's to keep people in their homes or place of residence and short-term assistance, hotel vouchers, those kinds of things. It would be administered through them. When we looked at doing the grant piece of this, It was going to cost us more in administration than just this $35,000 hit. We would have gotten a little grant money, but the administration of a federal grant becomes cumbersome from a paperwork perspective. And I felt strongly that we could, like any other outside agency, we could provide funding to this group, this Good News Center under the Methodist Church umbrella directly. we will you would see a resolution if you're good with this further that that talks about an agreement with them will be a little different they also they did a really nice packet submission they will have they have a lot of their own funds that they're expending here that they have raised and other things and we will have a little bit of a nuance that they'll have to spend some of their funds and then we'll spend some of our funds we're not just going to give them thirty five thousand dollars out of the gate but they will draw it down over time and You would see that nuance in the early fall on a council agenda. And so I just, you've got to pack it before you can ask me questions. But when we looked at this, I don't want to recommend going forward with a grant when I have to tell you it's going to cost us more money for trying to get money, general fund dollars into things to help a need in the community. And we can get it directly there without red tape and administration costs. I would like to do that. It's the best bang for the dollar is to do it that way. So that's why I'm proposing it that way. In fairness to other agencies, we did not open this up for other agency requests because we do this on a biennial basis. There is an issue with an outside agency that there are some challenges with. It remains in the budget. I'll talk to you individually about that. We will not be providing any of that funding to that agency moving forward unless I hear differently. But in fairness to them and until some things work out, I'll explain to you individually later what's going on with that.

Well, I hope the council will strongly consider this and support this. AEMC is totally committed to this program. Mr. Davis is very enthusiastic and passionate about this. They are very organized. The administration of the church is behind this. This is a challenge. We've got a lot of things that we're proud about in our community, but there are people that struggle, and they're totally committed to trying to find housing for these folks from a short term, and I trust them and believe that they'll do it the right way. Mr. Parsons, I know you've also had conversations with them over there. I didn't know if you wanted to say anything.

Yes, I have. One of the things that strikes me about the work that they do particularly is know in the situation where somebody is facing eminent removal from their home the work that they do often just allows them the breathing room to stay in their home and catch up and just have a continuity to their life that uh you know is really important i i feel and uh Joe Davis has a great track record of staying on point and staying focused on the goal here. So I had a lot of confidence in this particular project, and I'm right behind you with it.

We do some through our block grant program, Alan Ashley, help administer. We do utility assistance and some some hotel assistance, but we have limited funds to do that. We do a little bit of rental assistance. This will supplement, as you'll see in your packets, there's a lot more money than the city's $35,000 going into this that has been raised by this organization through the church itself, private donations, et cetera. So I think one of your criteria typically is where's the other money coming from? You'll also notice that they were clear that they would provide priority with our funds for Auburn residents, which is also another question that you typically have is, Well, if this agency serves many, are we impacting Auburn residents and that they understand that expectation?

And we can talk about this later, but the financial history, that's for the church itself, not the actual Good News Center. Can we clarify that with them? And then it also says that they're losing about $8,000 from a grant that they're currently receiving money for. So is their request for $35,000? sufficient or I mean that may be what they requested but it looks like an impact of only a net positive of 27,000 would be going to them with this appropriation.

We'll be happy to run that down. We've been in lockstep with Joe and staff's been communicating regularly so We'll make sure. You do have, if there is a problem during the fiscal year and you believe it is necessary, you have the ability to fund. So, you know, recently we had an apartment fire across from Frank Brown Recreation Center at Perry Street and Opelika Road. Al Davis and his team were out there in the morning. John, well, Chief Kane and his team were out there in the middle of the night. And that was the second fire in that time frame. Unfortunately, we had two structure fires in a very short time frame, but Al Davis and Ashley were out there meeting with the residents. The Red Cross had been there and so on. But we do have the ability when we have an emergency situation like that, the city through the general fund can give the Red Cross or United Way money. We can't directly help the tenants, but they can. with displacement, and so we always have the ability to give general fund dollars to the agency to then, for the agency to turn around and assist them with that emergency homelessness. A number of residents had to be displaced because of that fire. The Realty Company was out there, many things going on, and our fire team does an excellent job of putting people together with resources, but everything was working as it should, but in case, in the back of your mind, you're wondering, well, how does that work? In that emergency situation, we're not touching their leases, which we can't get involved with by state law. We're not allowed to interfere in anybody's leases or lease situation. This is you are out of your home immediately because of a tragedy. We work with area agencies, bring people together. And then if there's some gap that got discovered, we would have stepped in. But the Red Cross stepped in, as they always do, and did a great job.

Good.

So capital improvement plan, I'm just going to have Scott go over real quick just where we are with Donahue because we're slightly under two years and new high school is opening. Why have improvements not started? Why have they not been bid? Scott's going to walk you through this list real quick.

Um, okay.

So, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna confess it right up front on, on the phase one project, which is the show, uh, Jordan Parkway to, uh, Saga Hatch Creek. We've been, uh, finished design for this for several months. The problem is we hit a wall on finalizing a lot of our riders, some of our right away stuff for different reasons, but, uh, um, had to get out permission and all those things. Um, the last right away in Eastman acquisition has been signed and is in the mail, um, to us. So we hope to bring that to you. Um, well, we will plan on bringing that to you September 15th. We also plan to, um, begin advertising this project as early as next week. And our goal is to have this project bid and brought to you October 6th. We still feel like we're well ahead of the schedule of getting this road open so people begin getting used to it before the school opens. So we are pleased with that process, even though I would have liked to have been a few months ahead of time on that. I like having time on the front end instead of stressing on the back end on some of these projects. North Donahue drive improvements. Um, we've been methodically going through that. We're 60% design on that. That is the, um, intersection improvements. The phase two is the intersection improvements at, at, uh, North Donahue and Farvel. And, uh, we've got, um, in the process of developing all the right away and easement, uh, acquisition, uh, exhibits that we're going to need to go meet with property owners and begin that negotiation process. getting appraisals for the property and things like that. So hopefully within the next month or so, we'll be bringing you requests to make those purchases and acquisitions for those. We are planning on finishing this project up through the remainder of 26 so we can get this bid in under construction early 27. Again, planning on getting both of these segments open before school opens.

I'll tell you on the phase two, some design things have gone slower than they should have. and we're working to address that, but I'm not pleased with how that's gone, and that's an external design contract of which we've been addressing for some time, and we'll continue to address it. So sometimes we appreciate our private sector partners. Everybody gets busy, but when I talked to you earlier about the city not being a priority, what happens sometimes is our projects get put on the back burner for the private sector projects, and we're having some hard conversations with people about our expectations.

When we set contracts... and expectations, are there ways to include in the contract timelines, and if you don't meet those timelines, that we can add penalties to those?

I'll have our team answer that. I can tell you, since Michael's been here, some people have lost some contracts due to lack of response or performance already. Scott?

Yeah, I just... Yeah. And until that point, you know, um, Michael came to me, um, when trying to negotiate a contract and we were going back and forth on it, I said, we'll fire him. We fired him before we got started on it, but, uh, we got a new contract underway and it's working well, but that's a different project than this one. Um, a lot of times, you know, probably you get into some of these things, you get so far into them, you just got to force your way to get through the projects. But, uh, you know, I think, you know, moving forward, we're going to put milestones, um, to begin to better, you know, I think create our, our, you know, consultants so that we can evaluate those and have good reasons of why, you know, we, we use them or don't use them in the future if they're, if they're performing and meeting those criteria. So that is one element that, um, that I have had in conversations with our capital team and that, you know, we'll be, um, implementing some new processes and procedures to better monitor those things. Um, but that'd be on the design side on, you know, construction side, obviously we have, you know, liquidated damages and things like that, that we can get into if they've felt.

Scott on the design side, it works a little different on, on the timing thereof. Like you can fire them. Is there recourse, which she's saying similar to liquidated damages for not perform non-performance on a design contract?

Normally. Yeah. I mean, normally I've not ever seen that we can do that. If you know, there are certain emergency criteria to that, we would put, you know, things in there like that. But normally that would be kind of a, um, a contract that would have some kind of reward or bonus if they finish early and penalties if they're late. But if that would lead to penalties that we would encounter, yes, we would include that for sure in any contract.

Yeah, I think all of those things are important and we're looking at it. And normally that doesn't happen. It doesn't mean people that we're utilizing don't do a good job overall or that they're not good people. It just means we've not been pleased with some performance, not the quality of the work, it's the timing of the work.

Right. And with North Donahue, we have a timetable that we can't control with the school opening. So we have to be ahead of that.

And right of ways cause big challenges below the high school site because you're between owners. You've got a current owner, you have somebody trying to buy it and we're trying to get right away in the middle of this and people have worked with us, but it's not a fast process. And that was not anticipated when we embarked on this. And so it, That is what has happened, but we've got to be on our A game with the construction of it. And then I'll remind you, north of the Donahue Bridge, we're still designing it. The intersection is Phase 2 at Donahue and Farmville, but that other piece is being designed. But because most of the right-of-way is in the county, that's going to be challenging, and that's why Capital Project for further widening is not in the CIP because... properties in the County, you don't have condemnation authority. Um, we have not approached the property owner about working with us, but if there are challenges, we don't have any authority to do anything about it without Aldot or Lee County stepping in.

Okay.

So,

You know, I'm very encouraged that we're going to start making some changes in our contracting procedures and have periods of performance and milestones for them to take a look at, particularly on the design side. Construction, I understand you're going to have construction delays with weather and right away and whatnot. But as far as getting them designed, we ought to hold the feet of the fire.

We agree with you.

Specifically period of performance and milestones. Thank you, Ben.

Fully agreed. Thank you. Okay, so in summary, if you're looking down, and I'll use this here fancy pointer down at the bottom, you know, a net ending fund balance, you know, we try to be at 25% ratio, and we stick in the 50% and up range, and that's, again, capital projects and so on. One of the things that Allison and I talked about, why, you know, we don't want to sit on taxpayer dollars. Our bond rating agencies love our ending fund balance. They think it's the best thing since sliced bread, because They feel like we're sitting on money. We're not comfortable with that. However, with the dynamic nature of our capital projects and revenue has been strong, it is hard to keep that percentage lower. And we're kind of resigned to the fact that a lot of that's here to stay, Allison. Yeah, on a trend. Now, fluctuation in the economy could drop that down to the 25% amount. I can tell you there's nothing about this that we're sitting on people's dollars, but I also will not budget things. One of our problems in the CIP and most of your tenure in city council has been inability to fully deliver everything in the CIP. Michael had a lot to say about that upon arrival here and before he arrived here of, hey, what's going on? I want to be part of the solution. We have a lot of our team as part of the solution, and they're trying, and our water resource management team that's sitting behind me doesn't have quite the same issue. Our water and sewer projects, because of how they program manage and everything, and they have specialty contractors stay pretty well on par with where they need to be. So we're picking up the pace on this. I expect it to get better and better to Councilman Griswold and Mayor Pro Tem Witten's point. And so we're getting there. But we are remaining, we have a good net ending fund balance, which did help us in our bond ratings and our ability to issue debt in the marketplace. We're also in latter fiscal year, so that was just the window to kind of where we are right now. This is projecting through 31. You'll see our net ending fund balance gets lower and closer to the percentage amounts that are goals, that's because we have no idea what revenue looks like, so we're projecting extremely conservative revenue on out, and we have big projects signaled in there. Things will change over time, and it really depends on our revenue. That's why those numbers stay closer with the conservative revenue, and expenses are realistic and included in the six-year CIP, but things will change over time. So generally speaking, that is the end of the budget. If we're here to answer any questions, what we will do, if you have no further questions for right now, I'll remind you the budget ordinance will be in. We'll talk about that in our follow on meeting, no expectation of approval. Um, this Tuesday just needs to be in there for first reading open for questions or one-on-one discussions with any of you at any time, um, to get whatever information you might need about the adjustments. And there's also a whole slew of projects. If you look in your CIP that are still very much budgeted, we just weren't going to rehash things you already knew about. Um, but we can certainly go into detail, do another work session if you need to know about. some capital project or whatever. I will remind Councilman Griswold had brought up our gateways project and where we are on our welcome to Auburn signs. And so we are gonna be calling a work session in the month of September to talk about that. Staff is ready to go except for we need some feedback from you about locations and a general understanding of your expectations on the design of those to make sure we're tracking. There's money budgeted to fund it, but it's moving their current locations is challenging because we don't have adequate right of way or property to put them on. And we can do that, but we need to talk about it like the one at the ABC store on Opelika Road probably just needs to not be there anymore. But maybe somebody's up in their feelings about it and wants to keep a welcome to Auburn at the liquor store. I don't know. But that will be up to you guys on how you feel. I noticed I was driving back. We've been back and forth at the county a lot because of the election. And I was driving on Glen Avenue the other day, Frederick Road to Glen Avenue. And I realized that would be a nice spot for one at that city limits, not welcome to the ABC store, but welcome to Auburn. In that vicinity, it's a big road. There's a lot going on. And so these are some discussions we need to have with you. So we'll be getting a work session scheduled in the month of September to just talk about our gateway signage and kind of what your lens is before we embark in the next fiscal year on a project.

Any questions? Go ahead.

So we have a packet meeting at 5 p.m., or it can be later. You can take a break, do what you need to do. And when you're ready, we just can't start it sooner than 5 p.m.

Megan, real quick, thank you to you and your staff for working so hard again on this. We appreciate it.

You're welcome. It was a little bit of a robust week for the staff because we have a council agenda going out tomorrow, but we're going to make it. Thank you. All right, thank you.