Town Council - Regular Meeting

Thank you.

We'll go ahead and call the work session of September 10th to order and we'll just dig right in and go with our planning discussions, Ryan.

Yeah, so I'll lead off but Paul's gonna mostly lead this and Anna and I'll pitch in and help where needed. First of all, I want to apologize. Linda was here today and she had a mask on and was coughing all over everybody and she was fighting to try to stay for the meeting and I made her go home because I didn't think anyone wanted to enjoy that. especially the first two items Linda's done a lot of work on, but so that's, Paul's gonna help us walk through it. But I did wanna make sure you guys knew, I apologize for Linda not being able to be here, but again, didn't want her getting sick on us. So the first item is the new zoning district for special uses. Paul, it's all yours.

Yeah, so you're stuck with me. So the new zoning district that we're looking at is an attempt to make sure that we're properly classifying and properly regulating some of the newer uses that aren't specifically called out in the UDO. So there's several that Linda has proposed to add to that district that are in this draft, which is not... final Version that's ready to go to plan Commission. It's just a draft at this point. I know Linda wants to make Do a little bit more research and add a little bit more to this but you'll see on the second page The list of uses the big one that's getting all kinds of attention literally everywhere of course is data centers but there's some other ones there that we've been made aware of like the battery energy storage systems and even carbon containment and sequestration that could be coming in the future. And these are higher impact uses that we wanna make sure that, basically we wanna make sure that they're not able to just go into a site that's already zoned industrially and go in by right without any review. so the idea would be that this new district that we're looking at calling industrial special use obviously if we put that district into effect we wouldn't have any land in the town that's currently zoned for that so if anybody wanted to zone this would be the only district where these uses would be permitted they would have to come to town council But not only that, we're envisioning this as a district where they would have to submit more information at the time of rezoning. So maybe a little bit akin to like a PUD, but not exactly, where you would be seeing a lot more information about how they would propose to develop the site, and we would have additional requirements in there that they have. energy plans for how much electricity and water they would be using, where that would be coming from, as well as like a decommissioning plan so that if you had, for example, just for example, like windmills, that if those went away at some point in the future, that there would be money put up or bonding so that those could be taken down and not be just abandoned. So our plan was to try to push this through pretty quickly to get this incorporated into the UDO. And so depending on the comprehensive UDO updates that we've been talking about for quite a while, depending on how the timing of that goes, this could go first, but we're hoping to have our comprehensive UDO revisions done in the next month or so to hopefully go to plan commission in October. So it may all go together. If there are any questions on that, feel free to shoot those at me now or I will move on to the next topic.

Do you have, I know that color map that we had, where are you proposing an industrial special use district could possibly? So

I don't know that we've identified particular sites as far as where we think those would be appropriate. We wouldn't anticipate changing anything on the zoning map to that. It would require somebody came forward and said, hey, we want to do a data center on this property. And then we look at the comp plan and everything associated with the proposal and determine whether what our staff opinion would be on that. But typically it would be areas that the plan recommends for industrial use.

Yeah, really, the idea of this is to be proactive. We know these things are out there. Like Paul said, we don't have any existing zoning districts. Some of them would require them to go get special exceptions. So I think our goal is the decisions for these type of facilities should lie with the town council. You guys should make those decisions, not a BZA who's determining if they're unelected people making decisions on whether these things are appropriate in our community. We want to make sure that is in your hands. So any rezoning to these uses has to come to the five of you and you guys get to make that ultimate decision. Is it the right place in the community or is it not? And again, like Paul said, we're not going to show, identify in our comp plan, here's a space for this. It would specifically be someone who wants that use and then they'd have to come and justify it to you guys. correct some of these things we don't even have in our ordinance like there there is no data center like again some of these things are new and developing technologies same thing like in our use table we don't have a drone operation facility well we know people are starting to approve drone operation facilities amazon wants to deliver goods that's a drone operation facility now we don't know if they're going to want to drop one into our community or not and we don't necessarily know the impacts of those so these things we want to have bigger discussions about them and make decisions based on where they want to go maybe they're appropriate maybe they're not we don't we don't know until they actually come we have zonings that are currently in place that we should be doing the same thing that

You're in our I-2 zoning right now, and you can bring in this whole laundry list of things that can go there. Well, we don't want those there, and I've said for years, we need to go put in there unpermitted uses. So this is what you're doing. These are unpermitted uses. You're getting out ahead of it. Well, let's go back and do what we already have at existing zonings and put unpermitted uses in there, i.e., a perfect example, Avon Avenue, 150 South, We can put a grocery store there. Guess what's going to go there? A grocery store. Well, we maybe should have said that could have been an unpermitted use, and we have all these parcels of land, 7 acres, 10 acres, 15 acres, that have all these things that can go there. Well, we don't want all these things that can go there. What do we want to go there? So you're doing it for this, all the controversial things that are out in the world right now today, but we're not doing it for the little things in our own community that we should be out ahead of. So you need to do that as well. I've said that for years and come December, you won't hear me saying it for years, but I'm telling you, we're putting ourself in a box and we're letting people come in here to put things in that parcel of land that we don't necessarily want, but it's part of that zoning and they can do it.

Yeah, I think the difficulty just, I don't want to go too much down a rabbit hole of one site, but like when you mentioned that the Avon Avenue site, it's zone C2 and that's our general commercial district. And I don't think that we'd want to restrict too many uses. in our C2 district because most of our areas that are zoned C2, we would want those uses probably to be permitted by right. Now then the other option with a site like that is to try to change the zoning of that site proactively, which I think that's a larger conversation to be had with input from your legal advisors, because I think they might provide some cautions. about vested rights and that kind of thing.

Greg is correct.

We don't want to do it because it's illegal.

But yes, we understand, Greg. And I think we're trying to put in place a way to do that. We can't go back and change things that are already zoned. I'm not asking to change the zoning.

I'm asking to change the permitted and unpermitted uses.

We have to do it through the zoning process, though. We can't go back and take things away from them. We'll get sued in that case and we'll lose because we're changing the value of that person's property by doing that. So that's the risk. We can do it when we're rezoning it, which we are doing, Greg, as you're aware of. And so that's our way to try to address that. But certainly we can look at our use table too and amend our use table. But you're right, Greg, that is a little bit of the part of this process. We've looked at it and like solar farms are allowed in industrial districts. We're going to pull those out, put them in this S district. or the ISU district. Same with utilities. We're going to tell them they have to go in that district as well. So we're trying to address some of those things that you're talking about.

Yeah, and I was just going to say, I mean, if there are other particular uses that you guys think would be appropriate to be in this industrial special use district, we'd certainly be happy to hear about those.

Thank you.

Hearing no other comments, then I'll move on to 1B, the area plan for the Southwest Quadrant. So we were approached by a home builder who's interested in potentially developing a portion of this property that you'll see on the map. And so it's on the first map in your handout, The area that we're looking at for a potential focus area plan is outlined in blue down in the southwest quadrant of the And that whole area shown on that map is our Greenway District South focus area that was identified in the comprehensive plan as a unique part of the town because it's pretty undeveloped and has a lot of opportunity as the White Lake Creek running through the future Greenway Trail extension there. And so because a developer has come along and talked about wanting to develop part of this property, we thought it might be important to consider doing an area plan. So the second handout that shows you a conceptual idea that was drawn up by a home builder and their engineer just as an idea that the town might want to consider. so our idea would be to consider if the council agrees to do a request for proposals to have a consultant help us develop an area plan so that we can look at this area more comprehensively and kind of make sure that we would get the type of development that the the town would like to see there rather than just kind of wait for developers to come in and make rezoning requests piecemeal. I think I mentioned that the developer, home builder that came to us, they're not interested in developing this entire thing, just a portion of it. But yeah, that's in a nutshell what we're looking at doing. So we would want to... We just want to make sure that, again, we're being proactive and trying to have a plan that says more specifically than what's in the comprehensive plan exactly how we would conceptually like to see this get developed rather than just responding to developers coming in and proposing something we might not really want, try to give them direction.

And Paul, if I remember correctly, that builder was only looking to purchase the ones that are outlined in the green to the west?

Yeah, I believe that's correct, yep. So I mean it would obviously in a lot of ways make more sense I think for the town to develop the areas that are to the east. I think in a perfect world those would develop probably first, but at least having a plan for how the remainder of it would develop would be better than just having that piece to the west potentially get rezoned and then not have a plan for the rest of the area. There are just basically three landowners who own most of this land, which makes it more likely that it is going to be proposed for development in the not too distant future.

And this property kind of abuts Gibbs Park. And like Greg said, he has said for years, I have said through this whole UDO thing that we made promises to those people out in that southwest quadrant. And, I mean, this development isn't going north of County Road 250 south, it looks like. and it's surrounding the park, I would want to make sure that we memorialize the fact that we said to those people while we were seated on council that we would not develop that property with high density housing. So where this doesn't, I mean, this doesn't go up to that point.

Right, that's north of 200, is that right?

Yeah. So I think what we're looking at here, Gibbs Road and Gibbs Park and all of that right there, it's well south of where we made our promises. But I'm putting it out there that we need to be cautious and conscious of the fact that we did make those statements.

They're showing single family here. So I guess that's, I mean, concepts are concepts.

Right. And it, yeah, that would have to be something that we locked down if we were going to do it, but also to make sure that there isn't that sprawl that goes north and encroaches into the areas where we've already.

And just to add, maybe it's obvious to all of you, but, um, Part of the reason for our plan here would be to coordinate how the road network would come through this area. This conceptual idea envisions relocation of Vestal Road, but also just kind of wanting to make sure we plan for how we'll have connectivity through this area if it isn't all developed by one developer.

Right. Yeah, and the road to service their area is right up here at County Road 300 and Vesta Road. So they're saying they're gonna go through property they're not even purchasing for the main road going in?

I think what they ought to show is what they plan on developing, not this overall concept, because if you look at the egress-ingress, It looks like they can only come in off of Gibbs Road and there might be other ancillary roads, but I can't tell it because we don't identify those roads.

Further build phase to speak to that.

Because if you come off Vestal to 300 and you go to the roundabout, you come in through this area that they're not even considering building on, but that's how they're getting to their development.

So I think they need to identify that. Well, that's exactly right. We want to do the area plan. Again, we're trying to be proactive. And you guys hear this all the time, that the town's not planning. This is our effort to be proactive, to say what we want it to be and define how we want it to look and where roads will be based on where we want to be. Because if they don't, they come in, they're only going to do what they need to do to get access in the cheapest way that they can get it. without any regard to how it may impact the other property owners and the rest of the property. So again, we want to get ahead of it, say, this is what we think makes sense. This is how we want the infrastructure to develop. Now we'll plan the land uses around. We'll give it specific. This is just a concept. So don't get too hung up in the pods that they're showing in that area, just because that's what they're showing doesn't mean that's what it has to be. Same thing like community center is not meant to be a community center and to compete with Easton Gray, for example. It's meant to be like a commercial node where there's a place where these people could go shop where they don't necessarily have to drive to 36. And so we're trying to have better planning and anticipate when it develops what we want and how we want it to look. So that's what the area plan is. That's what we wanna do the RFP for. We don't want to just say, you one developer, I want to build this, and then this is the road I'm going to build to do that. It will make for the rest of the area not be developed in the way that we want. So again, we're trying to be proactive, and then we get to dictate the terms of how, like you said, Greg, this is where the road's going to be, and this is where we want it. The comp plan didn't go to that level of detail. It just showed an area. And so we want to go to a higher level of detail. We can even create building standards. We can create road designs. We can do whatever we want. And then we're going to say, now, if you want to develop it, you have to comply with these building standards.

I think it's a good idea because of the 600 feet, it's a good chunk. And for us to have control of that and be able to see that you have three landowners or so, that would be nice to... I know I'm not supposed to give you the decisions, but I definitely favor both of those.

And at this point, we're just kind of looking for direction from you on whether you're open to us doing an RFP to have somebody assist us with doing a more detailed area plan. And we do have, I believe, money in the budget that was set aside for... this type of effort, so we'd be utilizing money that's already been budgeted for...

In this year's budget or next year?

I think we'd be using... A combination of both. We have some money in this year's budget for long-range planning, and we have some money in next year's budget for long-range planning, both.

And then we'd have a discussion with the planner to...

Absolutely, yep. Yeah, we would expect you guys to be a part of that process. This isn't the last time you'll see it. And again, a couple of you were involved in the East and Gray project, right? So that kind of worked backwards. It worked from the developer came with a concept, and then we worked forward to what became East and Gray. The town's going to develop a concept, and then we're going to let developers come and fill it in that meet our vision for what we want. And so... And that's, you know, we did that for eight years. So, you know, this is something that will be ongoing. I wouldn't expect, I mean, it'll take us a year to do an area plan or six to eight months or eight months to a year. And the developer is interested in it. We've explained that to them that they're going to have to, they're going to have to wait for us to do something to figure out if what they want to do will fit with what we want it to be.

So what I like about this is that your planning staff is able to go through the woodlands via just a road here goes right through here and they don't really care about plowing through a black back community or anything like that. And you could actually have more sensitivity to those things in the process. So that's, yeah, I love the idea that we're involved at the early stage

Can we add our seven acre plots, our infill sites to this same thing, plan it the way we want to see what goes there?

I'm not exactly sure, what are you talking about, the seven acre plots?

Well, we got different parcels throughout our community now that have been built around, there are seven acres left. Now they're at 150 South, there's 10 acres left. What do we want to see built there? That's what you're saying right here, right? We don't own this land. We don't own that land. So what happens when the homeowner says, I want to sell it to this developer? They're not going to wait.

Yeah, I mean, we've kind of done that with our comp plan already. But yeah, we could do that if that's what you guys want to do. It's just the bigger the area you get, the more expensive it is. So again, we can do whatever you guys want to do. If you remember, the comp plan identified five primary areas that we said we wanted to focus our resources on for area plans. And this was one of the five. So again, we can do whatever you guys want to do. But because there was something active going here, this was one we felt was important to get going now.

UDO update process and schedule.

Well, I know we've been talking about making revisions to the UDO for quite some time now. I just want to give you an update on where we're at, what exactly, well, at a high level, what we're working on and the timeline. So, we've As I think we mentioned before, we've kind of gone through the whole ordinance and identified a lot of things that needed to be corrected or updated. Linda and I had a discussion on that. Now I'm going back through and trying to complete a second draft where once we get that done, we'll be ready to take that to the plan commission. What we're anticipating doing, although we will be making changes to every chapter in the UDO and... I don't want to be critical of who wrote the UDO and how it got through the process, but there are so many things to update in there. But the majority of what we're doing is fixing the formatting, grammar, missing words, such. We're not looking at changing a lot of the policy of what's regulated and how. But there are a lot of areas in there where a certain thing like how you landscape and screen around a dumpster enclosure, it's mentioned in three or four different places in the ordinance. And those regulations are conflicting. That's just one example. But trying to figure out how to narrow that down and whether it's, sometimes it's, you know, something's regulated in like the 36 overlay, but it doesn't really need to be because it's covered generally for all districts. So trying to figure out how to limit the amount of places where individual things are regulated. So that's most of what we're doing. As far as more substantial things, we are looking at consolidating the C3 and C1 districts. Our commercial districts are C1, C2, and C3. C1 is neighborhood commercial. So you think about things that fit in a neighborhood, less intense commercial use. And C2 is our general commercial that pretty much allows everything, retail, office, et cetera, oriented. And then we have the C3 district, which is labeled as a transitional office district. It's kind of weird. Usually, you know, when you go up in numbers, you go up in intensity, but the C3 is a step back from the C2. As far as the uses that are permitted in there, it's already very similar to the C1. um and we don't have a lot of areas that are actually zoned c3 so we thought it would make sense eliminate some confusion just to take it down to a c1 and a c2 so whatever is currently zoned c3 we would rezone that to c1 and then at the same time kind of going through and making sure that the uses that are permitted in c1 are true to the stated purpose of it being a neighborhood commercial district so making sure that those uses would be appropriate as a buffer, either as a buffer between like C2 or industrial use in a neighborhood or appropriate just as like a little node in a residential area. And then as far as other substantive things, we're looking at some changes to the architectural standards for commercial development. Just to make it more clear, we've had situations where well there's in the architectural standards there's certain building permit building materials that are prohibited and then there's certain building materials that are allowed and then there's some that are required and the way it's written is kind of confusing because it says you must use two of these materials and it's kind of unclear there's just some inconsistency between what's required and what's prohibited. So we wanna make that clear and make sure that it's easy for us and everybody else to understand. And so more importantly, if we have different staff here for some reason in the future, they can interpret it pretty closely or similarly to the way we are so that you have a consistent standard that's being applied. And then finally, I'd touch on the architectural standards for single family. What we would like to do is bring in an architect at some point, probably next year, to help us probably do a thorough review of the standards we have. Because frankly, obviously Linda and I aren't architects. Some of the standards in there we don't really fully understand. even trying to Google what some of these things mean, it's difficult to understand exactly what was intended by some of the standards. And basically, as you may know, we have the table of features that can be chosen from. So most of these things aren't necessarily things that are required, but home builders have to meet a certain number, provide a certain number of the potential features that are listed in the ordinance. But yeah, some of those are kind of confusing and hard to understand. And so we'd like to maybe take a shot at having an architect come in and help us maybe rewrite those thoroughly, but we'd be looking at doing that next year. But with these, revisions to the UDO that we're working on now. We may make some minor changes. So with that list of features we have, the way the UDO was written, there's six different categories and a home is required to have 12 of the features, but they can pick no more than two and no less than two from every category. So it's very limiting in that they can't pick three features from category two and get credit for that. And then maybe you only have one from another category. So it's very limited. And then we see a lot of times we end up seeing more monotonous design. As an example, you may know a subdivision that has a similar I think they call it a morning room on the back of the house that you see all of those as you drive down the arterial street because they were getting a point for that. And they couldn't substitute something else in another category. So essentially, we want to address what's been very difficult for home builders to comply with. But at the same time, maintain our high quality design standards and really make sure that we're focusing on delivering the anti-monotony so that we do see a variety of architecture, especially where it's prominent from perimeter streets. So we're hoping to get all of that draft ready to take to the plan commission for their October meeting. And our idea is to introduce that to them then and then potentially have a public hearing and vote taken at their November hearing, which if we get through that and there's a vote to approve that, then it could come before council at one of your December meetings and then presumably be in effect by the new year. Okay, no questions on that. Then finally, we have the settlement. I think Ryan's gonna take over on this one, but it's the leftover piece in the southeast corner that requires a stream crossing to access unless we're gonna have it developed just from the Plainfield side.

Yeah, so just as a reminder, I did talk to you guys about this earlier this year. It was conceptual then in nature, but we've actually been talking specifically with Fisher Homes, has expressed interest in it. And Fisher Homes is who built the subdivision just right north of Oak Bend on Avon Avenue. And they were running out of lots. And so we had a couple conversations with a couple different developers about whether they'd be interested in doing this. And so remember, the issue is that to the north is a stream crossing. When Plainfield approved Bomar, they did a substreet to the property. And so we've had several people ask if we would dis-annex it so that it could actually have the connection to Plainfield, which we've told all those people we don't believe if you actually ask that it would actually happen. Actually, about two weeks ago, I had an adjacent neighbor call who asked me to dis-annex it. And I said, well, you don't own the property. And she said, oh, I have to own the property to dis-annex it? And I said, yes. And she said, well, I just want to buy it. And so that I can put three or four houses on it and I'll just connect it to Plainfield. And I was like, again, why would that be beneficial to the town? I can see how that maybe is great for you, but we don't want to do it. And I had kind of laid all this out for you guys before. So Fisher Homes has expressed interest in buying it. They've looked at their numbers, though, however, and as expected, the cost of the bridge is overwhelming. And so what they're proposing is 25 homes. They'd be $800,000 to $1 million. I provided that information to Financial Solutions Group, who did kind of just a quick and dirty. It would generate about $1.4 million. We think the bridge would cost around a million dollars. And so just like how we do TIF districts for commercial developments and pay for infrastructure, they're asking for the same thing. This would be a residential TIF, and the law does allow us to do that. And it would capture that TIF for those lots specifically to then pay for that infrastructure. It's not the infrastructure, it's not the streets, it's not the stormwater, it's specifically just the bridge is what they're asking for. So they had a meeting with me about it as well, kind of provided me this general layout here. Before I said we start investing time with our bond council and everybody else, I wanted to revisit it with all of you guys. You guys weren't super excited about it when we talked about it earlier this year. The alternative is that it sits there undeveloped and nothing gets built on it or that an adjacent property owner tries to buy it and tries to ask for it to be disannexed. And so again, my... thought is i'd rather have 25 800 million dollar homes than to have nothing that's generating no tax taxes at all for the community and so just wanted to get your guys feel is this something you obviously it's a the redevelopment commission would have to agree to it as well i've had some conversations with the school corporation of course the school corporation is always the one who tends to get upset Generally, Dr. Windham didn't express any concern with it. He said he kind of understood. And again, if you're looking at the big picture, it'd be better to have something that eventually is generating tax revenue for the community versus nothing. So again, I didn't get into real specifics with him. I just discussed the concept. And so again, I don't think the school in this situation would push back on us for doing a residential TIF. Again, just looking for feedback from you guys on if this is something worth us continuing to investigate with Fisher, obviously would still come back to you guys for approval and the redevelopment commission would have to agree to it as well, but just wanted to get your thoughts.

It would generate 1.4 million over what period of time?

25 years. Yeah, that's what we do with TIF.

Well, yeah, but that's not as much as I was hoping.

Yeah. Well, again, that's an assumption based on a certain value of home. And no growth. Yeah, and that's the issue. It's only so many lots. And the alternative is you could have more lots, more smaller lots that would generate more assessed value. So, again, yeah, there's a balance there depending on what you wanted to do. You can kind of see the bridge right here in the top. Yeah, there's a creek crossing there. Yeah, well, it may be a box culvert, actually. And again, it may not be a million dollars.

It may be less.

And that's what it hasn't been sized yet. They've just done some again. They don't want to start investing in the engineering and going through all of that unless they think this is actually an option. Otherwise, they're just spending money for nothing. So yeah.

box culvert like the one at 150 south that crosses dan jones yeah yeah if you saw today on 36 they're uh east of uh bridgeport and and between country club and there they were hauling in pieces and putting it together because they have to do it in pieces because of the center lane they're doing and then they put that's an expensive way to do it right but here you could do a very

economical you don't have to do pieces like that yeah how much did we spend on the one down there when we did the road well that one was really really long it was like 180 feet long and it was almost two million dollars so yeah this would be much smaller it only has to be wide enough for a 30 foot street to get over top of maybe 80 feet or so

yeah I was gonna say I was gonna say I think they were talking about divided by your feet times your feet I think it could be done and you know do some engineering on it and they can come up with the economical way to do it yeah yeah if it ends up costing 600 000 then the tiff goes away earlier to your question that's what it's all conceptual at this point from what they're showing here it appears

But if we're bonding that, then is there another project that is more meaningful to the town? Because we've got to be kind of maxing out our bond.

But we're not going to bond it. So it would be a developer purchase bond. So Fisher Homes would buy the bond. Sorry, Julie. Fisher Homes would buy the bond, just like how when we did it with Avon Logistics, the developer would purchase the bond. So it doesn't impact our bonding capacity. We're at zero risk. If they don't end up building the homes, they don't get paid back the money.

All 25?

All 25, correct, yeah. And that's what, it's the safest mechanism for us. And like you said, it does not eat up our bonding capacity. And it doesn't prevent us from bonding and doing projects the town needs to do.

You said 800 million before, I think it's only 800,000. 800,000, did I say million?

Yeah.

Not 800 million. Sorry. I mean, they've done a good job up here by that little 30-acre track by Oak Bend.

Yeah, those look nice. They're close together, but on that land, you have to.

So I'm assuming this will be the same concept.

Yeah, same product. And that's what they're building out of that product. And they said they had success building up there, and they're looking for other lots to be able to do it. And we had a conversation with John Lazzaro about... Building on it as well, but again John's not set up as a as a custom home builder, too He doesn't necessarily want to do a developer purchase bond He doesn't necessarily have that kind of money to do things like what this development have to tie into this Stub Street and Walmart Well, we had some conversation about that on the the planning side of things and the public works side of things It wouldn't have to we could potentially try to do a cul-de-sac you know We were unhappy with the way Plainfield handled Fairwood and abandoned the Stub Street. This is the right design from a traffic and a transportation network. Having two ways in, two ways out is what we would always want. Connectivity is always better. It reduces traffic in our adjacent roads. So this layout to connect to Bomar would be preferred from a staff standpoint. I could make arguments for other reasons on why not to do it if we just, we want to make a clear separation between what's the town of Avon and what's the town of Plainfield. Certainly not making the connection is an option.

Well, you brought it up and that's the first thing I thought of is, yeah, going in, they say, yeah, sure, we'll do that. And then they'll vacate it and then we're done. We can't. So what... Yeah, we'd have to have a conversation with them. I think the builder needs to have that conversation, have something in writing beforehand. Agreed. But I'm okay with this. I mean, if it's going to sit vacant or the next person's going to come in and say, I want to be de-annexed, well, we're not going to do that. So I might as well generate some revenue. And if you're putting in, I like Fisher Homes, they've got a good product. So I think a bond's the right way to go. Right, Julie?

whatever you guys want.

I think it'll be less than what you threw out there. And that's what the hope would be, it would be less. The less we can make it, the more revenue we get.

And because it's a residential TIF, and I know we don't try to do that with the schools, but this probably won't generate a whole lot of students. So it's not gonna, even if they had one student, they gotta bring a bus there. So one or 10, still gotta bring a bus.

And this is a unique situation. I probably wouldn't, you know, we have enough development here in most cases that I wouldn't ever suggest that we do residential TIF districts. But this is kind of a unique situation. And as a tool, it makes sense here. And we can pay off the bond early if it's less. And then we do continue to get that revenue. And everybody gets that revenue.

It's good, too, that somebody who's already building in Avon is coming to us. And that must mean they

Okay. Thank you, Paul. Thanks, Brian. Moving on to economic development funding.

Yeah, I had given you guys a heads up that I wanted to have this discussion with you. We had... Three things in the budget. So you have a couple things in front of you on your agenda. I included a couple of things. The first one, if you notice the numbers in blue, that's actually what we budgeted in the budget. Just because we budgeted in the budget, as you guys know, doesn't mean we have to spend that. The small letters are underneath the Hendricks County Economic Development Partnership are what other communities provide funding to the Economic Development Partnership. So this is, I wanted to have this conversation in the context of what our economic development strategy is and where we want to put our money and how we want to move forward with economic development. We know John retired and we kind of had this conversation before that we didn't think it made sense for us to have a full-time economic development person. And certainly spending $74,000 on economic development is less than what we were paying for John. It doesn't mean that we have zero need for economic development and certainly even since John's gone, I've had to take on some of that workload of the economic development. So originally when I put together the budget last year for these items, the Hendricks County Economic Development Partnership had come to us and asked for additional funding. I had told them, know at that time and that they probably needed to do a better job of communicating to the council what they were doing and the value that they were adding and what kind of their portion of the economic development piece was and you guys remember may remember the previous economic hendrix county economic development partnership director came uh didn't do a great job and so at that time i kind of said you know we're not we're not gonna do anything else of course they've moved on from that person uh Jennifer has now come on and Jennifer came and introduced herself to you. I'm excited about Jennifer. She's got a lot of energy. I think from my perspective, I believe that the Hendricks County Economic Development Partnership has the ability to do more for us. I also think that when you look at what the other communities are doing, we're the third largest community in the town of Avon. My opinion is at a minimum, we ought to be contributing more than what Danville's contributing. Yeah, sorry, did I say what I said? The largest community in the county, sorry, thanks. And that we should probably be contributing more. So my thoughts are I would like to, as a sign of good faith, maybe give the Hendricks County Economic Development Partnership $25,000 this year and give Jennifer an opportunity to show that she can provide more value to us as well. I don't want to talk a ton about the Chamber of Commerce. I know we've had some conversations about the Chamber of Commerce. I don't think at this time giving them the $30,000 is warranted. Again, I think there was a point where we thought the Chamber could help us with some of the economic development. I haven't got that impression that they're willing to do additional things to help us with that economic development. So again, I'm willing to have that conversation with them if they want to try to help us beyond what they're doing now. So the other one that I want to talk about, I know John Taylor, I've yet to do a contract with John, but that was the direction you guys had given me was for John to kind of stay on contract to still help maintain some of our relationships, help with leads when we get economic development leads, kind of communicating to people who may be interested in coming to the community. I'm still interested in doing that, and so... The other thing I really want to do is we want to do another trip to Utah to meet with Farmland Reserve and Chicago Industrial. They've invited us out in the spring. And again, John has been really the person who's built that relationship. And so I'd like John to go on that trip with us. And so obviously, if I do that, I have to have some way to compensate him. The $24,000 where it came from was the thought was it would be a 12-month contract, and it'd be $2,000 a month, and we could do it however we want to do it. We could do it as an hourly max, or we could say we're going to pay you a flat fee. We could do it lots of different ways. So I think I'd like to still continue. My thoughts are this is kind of a wind down, like as we kind of transition out away. And so maybe it is only 12 months from this year. So by the end of next year, we kind of phase that out. And then at that point, he may retire. I know I think going back and filling that interim role at Hendricks County Economic Partnership took it out of him. He may not be interested in spending a lot of time doing economic development. He may really just want to retire. So I'll need to have that conversation with him and see if he's still willing to do that. But again, I wanted you guys to talk about these all kind of together in the context of what our strategy is moving forward and how we think best to invest. We basically set aside $74,000 for economic development. So how best should we spend that $74,000?

I like putting some money to the economic development fund for the going forward with that. So I like that idea that it's something out there, you know, because they are our partner. I mean, the painful discussion is the chamber, we want to have a good relationship there and we put money out there, but we just haven't seen anything, so.

I think no matter where the money goes, how are we gonna manage the results? What's the scorecard? How are we gonna tell them what we expect and how are they gonna report back to us on their results? And every one of these needs that. You're right, I mean, the Economic Development Partnership I've said this for years. I was on there. I was the president. Everybody takes credit for whoever comes here, the state, the IEDC, economic development, and the town. It's only one company, but there's four. You look at the reports, they're all taken credit for. So what are the results? What are we getting for our $20,000? And I get Jennifer's new, and she's going to have a lot of energy, and that's great. I don't know how long ago John retired, how long has it been, a year now?

Well, he worked through the end, he retired December 31st from us last year. So it's been nine months, but he worked, literally he's only been retired from Economic Development Partnership for like two weeks.

And before I took that, I'm just, again, what are we looking for for $24,000? to keep that farmland reserve relationship. It's like succession management. We need to bring somebody in and groom them to take over that relationship. So I think it comes to us. We have the money, but what do we want for the results and the return on our investment? And I don't think we have that yet. We've tried to do it before when we had other people on the council. It didn't go anywhere.

And I don't know about a retainer necessarily, a monthly retainer. I would think that for me, I mean, there might be three or four months that there's nothing. So if we're paying somebody, in this instance, John, $2,000 a month and we've not needed any consulting or anything like that, that kind of doesn't make sense to me.

Okay.

I don't know about the others.

On a retainer basis, that's kind of the way I look at this. Rather than you pay a flat amount, you do it as earned.

So like an hourly basis?

Yeah.

So to agree him to pay an hourly rate. Now, if we did that, I'd still probably want a maximum per month. I mean, I want to be able to manage what he's doing. And, again, I agree with Greg. I don't know that we've ever, like even when we hired John, I don't know that we ever established here's the results we want and here's the expectations. So certainly that's a whole discussion for a whole other work session. But I don't disagree with that at all, Greg.

We would do that with any consultant. Right.

Right. Yeah, have a scope of services, and this is what we expect out of that, and the hours that you'll invest to bring these results.

I mean, you're doing the same thing. If it went through the Chamber and went through the Economic Development Partnership, it's retention. It's calling on existing companies.

Exactly.

Who's doing that? Don't give me a number. I called on 15 of them. Well, who did you call on? What did you talk about? How can we improve our relationship? Are they looking to expand? These are the questions we want to know.

Right. We talked about that years ago.

Yeah, that is what the Hendricks County Economic Development Partnership was doing, the BRE, the business retention. The problem was the previous person contracted it out to a company that was doing it. And that's what, if you guys remember, like twice we got reports that said who's, but all the reports were we reached out and nobody answered. And so you weren't actually getting somebody. So I know in my conversation with Jennifer, she has said that that may be something she wants to bring in house. And I even said, well, if you're doing it, we would like to go with you to meet with businesses in our community. We know we have businesses in our community and we want to know what we need to do. to keep them in our communities. That's just as important as trying to get people here, is to keep the people here who we have, who are good employers. So I've had that conversation with her. I would say that's the biggest thing the Hendrickson Economic Development Partnership is doing for us now. There are also the leads from the IEDC go to the counties, not directly to the towns. Now it's starting to shift a little bit. So like just in the last week, I got three leads and they came through Serta. But they came to me and I'm not really able to then respond to those leads. I actually sent them to Henderson County Economic Development Partnership and said, did you guys get these? One of them they were submitting because I said our project at Avon Landing would be a perfect location for this. And it meets what we would want to have in our community. It was high paying jobs. It was a 200,000 square foot building. And I said, we have literally, our planning commission approved a building at Avon Landing. And so- Joe and Jennifer said they were going to submit that area as a project to that lead. So they are doing some of those things. Again, I don't want to speak for what the Chamber is doing, but I think that the Chamber is building relationships within the businesses that are already here, networking and trying to help keep those businesses strong. I don't know that they're outwardly doing any outreach for economic development for us. And then again, John was dealing with building relationships and communicating and kind of navigating all the moving parts. I mean, if I was going to define it, that's the best I could probably do. But certainly if I bring you a contract for John, we'll establish some scope and specifics and try to lay out what that would look like and so that you guys can see that.

You mentioned building relationships and he's a contact. How many people have contacted him even with his interim position with economic development in the last nine months?

How many have? I don't know that I could say that, but a lot of people. I know I'm getting contacted by a lot of people who used to contact him.

Well, there you go. Maybe we have an in-house person then.

And that's possible too, but again, that's at a cost much greater than $74,000. So if that's important to us and we want to prioritize that, then we need to put more money in the budget for next year.

Well, if we're getting contacted and we're handing the lead off to economic development, then why are we giving economic development $20,000?

We're providing them the lead. Right, but then they have to take the lead and actually respond to the lead, pull together all the information that's requested from the lead, and then actually submit that then to the companies or the site selectors that are actually looking for sites. So they're compiling all the information and submitting it, complying with their request. I'm just giving them the lead. And again, I don't have time to do that. I mean, these are documents. They're 15-page documents that ask for hundreds of things. I don't have time to pull all that stuff together and submit them on behalf of people. And John did some of that before when people asked for stuff and they wanted our job information and they wanted to know our population and everything that businesses want to know before they come here, John would compile all that information and give it to them.

What do you need from us? At this point, we can't vote.

Yeah, I guess you guys gave me some direction on John Taylor. I guess, are you okay with me working with the town attorneys to draft an agreement for John? That would be one. And then the second would be, are you agreeable to us providing, we've already paid Henry's County Economic Development Partnership $20,000 for this year, would we be okay giving them another 5,000? And then continue to monitor that relationship. And I would ask Jennifer to start coming, attending some of your meetings and giving you guys reports on what she's working on and how they are benefiting and providing value to us. And that would help build us to... If you guys are seeing something that you believe they're providing value, we could choose to provide more funding for them in the future. If we're not, we just stay where we are. Or if you want to stay at $20,000 for now, we could do that next year too and have Jennifer start giving us updates and we can decide later. Those would be the two things I want guidance on, I guess. I think I have guidance from you guys in the chamber. I don't think I need it.

metric would be the only thing i'm concerned about like i i'm that's not my world so i have no idea what i'd say that metric the best one that i can come up with is what john has done and that is what was our av before he started what's our av now i think it's a fair metric to say to point at one that wasn't what we told him what we expected from him and two i don't know if that's entirely fair to put all on his shoulders same thing would be applied to a CDP or some other person in house. So like my question or I guess expectation for you is help us find what that metric would be that we could track and measure. Are they doing a good job or not? Okay.

Yeah. Maybe even ask them what, uh, what can you provide us to, to help, uh, help the council to support you?

Okay. Let's, um, If you guys are okay, somebody tell me no, but I'll work with Anna and Dan on drafting a contract with John. Let's leave Hendricks County Economic Development Partnership where they are. I'll try to get Jennifer, I'll work with Jennifer to maybe create some metrics and give her some feedback that we would potentially be willing to provide more in the future, but we wanna be able to see the results and hear the kind of things she's doing so that we can better understand that. we'll just leave the chamber where it's at at the moment does anyone disagree with me moving forward that way when you say leave it where it's at at the moment you're showing dollars there sorry well we paid them 10 000 so we're just leaving them at the 10 000 we're currently providing i assume we'll reflect that in the budget since we're going through that process right now correct That's up to you guys. It's left in the budget the way it's presented to you right now. I left the same amount of money in there for next year. Again, just because it's in the budget doesn't mean they get it. You guys actually have to vote and say you want to give them something. Again, I'd leave a little money. If you want me to move it... to the Hendricks County Economic Development Partnerships line instead of the Chamber line, that's fine. But I, or if you want me to move it into the line where John's at, like, again, what line it in doesn't really matter. It matters that you have some money to spend on economic development if you want to. So again, we use edit funds for this. And so it's supposed to be for economic development. And so I'd recommend you keep money somewhere in there for economic development purposes.

Keep the money where it is, but you can reappropriate it. You can reappropriate it or use it however you choose.

Correct. Okay.

Town Hall repurpose plan.

Yes, so I know we've kind of talked around this quite a bit, but Sean and Shelby and I have kind of been meeting to talk about how we want to repurpose the Town Hall. And so I don't think this will come as a big surprise to you guys because we've talked about it before. I think our recommendation is we want to turn the west side of the building into office space for our detectives and our investigations unit. We'd like to turn the east side of the building, which is now town offices, into parks offices. We would move our sports, our Avon Youth Sports staff would move over here. We'd also move our programming people down who are in the maintenance building now. We'd move them down into this space. Obviously, we won't fill it up, so we'd have some space to grow if we need to do that. One, we really want to get our youth sports people out of that building. over there, the air conditioning doesn't work. There's all kinds of problems. They also have the ability to store things here. They would also have a front facing to the public. So if people wanted to come in, pay registrations, we could, put that back where they have someone who could come in the front door and actually have access to our parks department or our youth sports program. So I think we think that would be a value to put them in that space. I think kind of the funny thing we laughed about was when we built this building in 99 and moved in in 2000, that's how we were originally situated in the first place. Now over... Over the years, we remodeled the building. We took away some of the things that the police needed over there, like investigation rooms or interview rooms. I think the police would, the detectives would like some of that back. So you'll hear when I present the non-general fund budget tonight, we've recommended $100,000 to do some remodeling here to basically accommodate this changeover. Again, it's kind of minor remodeling. It's moving some walls. It's making the front accessible again. When we turned that into an office, but for those of you who've been around long enough, used to come in the town hall, you'd come in this front door on this side, and there was actually a desk, and that was our receptionist. On the opposite side, the police aren't necessarily going to be publicly accessible, so they may want to make some changes to the way that that front actually works, which is kind of how it was set up before as well. So there may be a little bit of remodeling that we need to do. I think this space, the middle, we think we'd like to use for park programming. um there's an idea of maybe doing even like a nature center and to be able to lead hikes and nature activities out of this area maybe eventually use it for events even weddings there was a conversation about taking out all these walls and having sliding glass where you could actually open the space up to the outside. I think we've said maybe we do that later. You guys may remember in the capital improvement plan, we had like 100,000 next year, but we had like a half a million like two or three years down the line to do more extensive. We think that while the police are over there, it's probably not great to be having weddings in here and loud music playing when the police could be next door actually doing investigations that maybe those two uses don't actually work together. Did I say something funny again? I know, yeah. So, yeah, they got to eat.

So let me ask this. Would it not make more sense if the sports area needs somebody that can walk in and walk up, would it not make more sense to have them on this side then and the police on that side so that we don't have to remodel so much?

Well, so we had that discussion and actually that's what it kind of went back and forth. And we determined that, no, we didn't think that was the case. We thought it actually, we have a bigger ability to need to potentially grow and have space than the police think they do. The police think that's more of a temporary solution. So we talked about it. I think collectively we agreed that we thought this was the best way to leave it the way we're proposing.

So this side's bigger than this side.

This side is bigger than that side, yes.

Well, what about the new facility that we're improving? What's the impact of it? People moving there or not?

Well, and that's what – if you remember, in the training center, there's the option that we think eventually we could put a second story or a second floor on that building. And, again, there may be more remodeling at that building down the road. But I think initially – Sean, feel free to correct me, but they're going to do mostly just training in the canines out of that building, but eventually they may be able to turn that into offices. And so that's why this is probably a short-term solution, not necessarily the permanent solution that the police will be there forever. Did I answer that correctly?

Dave, did I say something wrong?

No, we need somebody for economic development.

Oh, gotcha, sorry.

Anyone?

What's the plan for the building at the parks if we move them out of there? Just storage or?

Until it falls down. One new sewer, so not quite yet.

It's got a really nice concession stand out of there. Yeah, we keep the concession stand. And even upstairs, we still may let people use that meeting room for activities. And there still may be some storage in there for things. But again, we prefer for our people to be here. It's a better office space. And it's more accessible to the public as well.

But my ears just went on alert. The sewer's not finished yet? When were we going to be told that?

It just came about in the last 24 hours.

So what's our fine so far then? We have nothing so far, but... We know what a daily fine is, so where are we at dollar-wise on that?

Well, our understanding from the district was if we paid our sewer fees that they wouldn't charge us the fine, so we don't believe we're being fined. because we paid those already. So unless we get something else, that's what we were told by the district manager.

And what's the holdup over there?

So everything was set and ready. Grease trap is in, thousand gallon grease trap, concrete's torn up. And then they were about to hook everything up. And then they said, oh, wait, the sink lines that are in the concession stand run with the sewer line, with the septic line. It all went to Bruce Trapp, you can't have those things mixed. So we had to, they literally, WCCD came out and stopped work on it from day start until we figured out this plan. And as of this morning, Tiffany and them have worked out a plan of we're going to tear up a little bit of the concession stand floor, bore under there, change the lines, essentially build a new line, take it one direction, and then the studio will still go

so the problem is is normally you don't put a grease trap into an existing building normally you do it when you're building a new building and you create two two separate lines your kitchen and all your drainage goes to the grease trap. Your toilets have a separate drainage system. Like your house is combined, it all goes into one. Well, that's the way the building was plumbed. It all goes into one, so it all comes out one place. But you have to send the grease this way and you have to send the sewage that way. But the building's not set up for that. So again, it goes to, there wasn't much thought into the fact that we should be forced to put in a grease trap. Actually, West Central has standards that require all buildings to have grease traps that are new construction. And the reason they do that, even if there's no restaurants in it, is they want them to not run into this situation. Well, they literally put us into this situation where they knew we were going to have this problem because we have a singular plumbing system. So it's all there. It's running through the new system, correct?

Not yet. So we haven't lost Daystar to another job while we're doing this? They've been working with us trying to come up with this plan.

They'll be back on site and they should be finished up by Friday with the boring and then able to connect right after that. Any other topics?

I do have one other thing for you guys.

Again, I just got this.

This is hot off the presses, but as I was talking about economic development, but you guys had a presentation at your last council meeting about a potential development. And so I know you guys are aware that Mr. Lazaro has been trying to sell his property on Ronald Reagan Parkway. Again, this is just for your information.

I'm not looking for feedback or anything from you. Just making you aware of it.

This developer reached out to me. Some of you may have seen this before because I had a conceptual plan for something similar. It's kind of continued to evolve. This property is a little bit difficult to develop because it has a stream right through the middle of it. And so they're trying to kind of break it into different pieces and fit some industrial uses. This is where you guys had an apartment complex had originally proposed to go in this site. And the rezoning for that was turned down. And our justification for that is we wanted industrial use. Um, and so the 1 reason I share it with you, and I think it's important for you to know. Because you do have another rezoning coming through and this property is also showing a gas station on it as well. So, I know there's some concerns about gas stations and. Whether you'll allow any, or whether you're okay with 1 or not, but I wanted to see that you have 2 projects right next to each other that are. are considering gas stations on them. And they both kind of have similar kind of industrial development, which again, I know is what is desirable to us. But just again, wanted to share with you, it's very early in the process. They've not filed anything. They've reached out to me about doing a TIF for the construction of the road. So it'll again, it'll be something that we'll talk about going forward, but just wanted to keep you in the loop on that.

Julie says, how big are the flex buildings?

I'm sorry? How big are the flex buildings? I think there's dimensions on it. 350 by 80.

And at the, I think it was RDC, they said that that was the second priority and the first one was the gas station. Oh, of course.

That was my next question. It always is.

The flex may not, it may be flexible to not have them.

Yeah.

Which is always the risk, right?

It's cynical, but that's kind of how it's presented, so that's how I take it.

They're 28,000 square feet. It's only a concept. It's only a concept, right. But again, a great point, that's when things are rezoned, that's, you know, we had that conversation with Easton Gray, right? Like, we said, we don't want... the Riverwalk District or the town centerpiece to come 10 years later after the rest of the development happened. And they were willing to do that. So those are things you guys can require as we go through the rezoning. So, great point.

I would really like for somebody to get creative.

Well, they're trying at least. No, they're not. This is like the fifth concept we've seen for this property.

But they obviously don't watch past meetings.

Yeah. This concept looks identical to what we saw.

The last five years? Yeah.

Yeah, pretty similar. And of course, they're adjacent to each other. All right.

Meeting adjourned. We're going to go ahead and call the town council meeting of September 10th to order. And we have four Boy Scouts in the audience tonight. So if you guys would all come forward and if you'd like to lead us in the pledge, that'd be great. Thank you guys very much. All right, next, Julie, roll call, please. Robert Pope.

Present.

Steve Eisenbarth.

Present.

Greg Zuzan.

Present.

Don Loudon. Present. Jason Puckett.

Present.

Next is consent agenda. If no questions or discussion, we'll entertain a motion.

I'll make a motion to approve the consent agenda, including the check register of amendments as presented.

I'll second.

Julie, roll call, please. Jason Puckett.

Four.

Dawn Loudon. Four. Greg Zuzan.

Four.

Steve Eisenbarth. Four. Robert Pote. Four.

Next is public comment. The public may comment on the agenda or comment on the agenda that is not part of a public hearing or something that is on the specific matter within the council's jurisdiction. If you would like to speak, you would approach the podium. Make sure the green light is on the microphone, state your name and your address, and then limit your comments to three minutes. No one coming forward. We'll move on with department head updates.

Steve Moore, Public Works Director. The County Road 100 North Raceway roundabout is progressing nicely. We should have the last two or actually three AES poles removed by the first of next week. They're going to have the storm sewer should be done early next week. Then they'll start sub-grid stabilization. They'll do that actually all in one day on Wednesday. And then the whole project after that will start getting asphalt, the first layer. And then they'll start putting curbs and other concrete in. So good stuff's happening. Don't have a revised completion date. So I guess that might be good news. So it's still near the end of October. And so yeah, so far so good. Dan Jones widening phase three. We're still waiting on AT&T to get out of our way so we can widen the west side so we can move things over further to the west so we can work on the east side all winter. So we're trying to nudge them. Dan Jones Phase 4 design is coming to a close. Actual bidding will probably occur next spring-ish because of land acquisition, utility relocations, and things like that. The CCMG for 2026 is almost done. All the concrete work is done. All the paving except for speed tables and speed humps are done. They have to do... some signage, lawn restoration, things like that yet. Most of the striping is done. They have to finish that up yet. But yeah, so it's very close to coming to a close. The CCMG for 2027 is due on the 30th of this month. I'm hoping to have it done by tomorrow and submit it early. And We're close on that. So that's good. We did have a sidewalk project that we put out for quotes. We only got one quote and it was not acceptable. So we're re-quoting it. Stormwater utility. The Kingston drainage project got approved last night by the stormwater board. And so the contractor should be starting next week on that. As soon as he gets done with the pickleball courts under drains. Priorities, I guess. Reports potholes we filled. 36 holes this last time around last month missed for inspections were 112 inspections and there were $7000 in fines. With the rain came some fines. Betsy collected $31,438 in permit fees. There were 20 permits. There was $8,000 in accident reimbursements. And we connected 15 right-of-way inspections. And without Eli, we only installed three signs. Any questions? Thank you.

Question on your CCMG application. I didn't walk fast enough. Is that for a million dollars?

Say again, please.

Your application for the CCMG, is that for the full million dollars?

Yeah, well, it'd be $2 million project and us a million. Yes, that's what we're going for. As of right now, with my rough estimate, I'm slightly over $2 million. And if it remains that way, that's what I'm going to go ahead and go with because we've been getting bids better than what our estimates are. And so if it goes a little bit over, I have enough money to cover a little over. And that also helps us maximize the amount of the match. Because there's a council member that always asks me about that.

Any update on the Dan Jones Bridge?

Dan Jones Bridge is still slated for opening in November. They're getting ready to switch traffic over to the inside so that they can work on the outside, get the rest of the railing done. They haven't installed the railing yet, but on the outside they're going to have to install the railings. And then they'll switch the traffic back out and finish the inside. So, yeah, that should all be done by November.

Lastly, the parking lot up here. What needs to be done to complete that?

There's some stone around the outside of it to kind of trim it off with the existing grade and then some striping. And I think Tiffany is going to work that in with some trail striping. So that probably won't happen until next year, my guess.

Thank you.

Good evening, Shelby Pride, Parks and Recreation Director. First, I want to thank Council and Ryan for our Employee Appreciation Week last week. It's always the best time of the year. It's like our Christmas. It's just so good to have lunch or breakfast with everybody and see everybody's faces all week. So thank you guys for that. All right, buckle up. The pickle patch, the exterior of our building is almost done. The perimeter drain was to be worked on today and tomorrow, and then Steve can have his contractor back because priorities. And then we will be stoning and paving next week, finally. Finally. So yeah, that project has gone way off track with the stormwater drainage issues that we ended up running into. At Burnett Park, we are still grading and moving some dirt. It's looking really, really good. I don't know if you've driven by, but I cannot wait for everybody to get back there and see all of it. They did start paving the trails this week, so they're going to start on the east end and work west. So hopefully within the next week, we'll see the front part of the trail be worked on. At Woodhaven Park, this is in combination with Burnett Park. The surveyor began staking that property this week. They stopped staking. They did have an elevation change question with our landscape architect, so they're waiting on that. In the meantime, the stakes were removed, so now the surveyor has to come back out, restake that property before we can move forward with that again. We do have a trail project out to bid right now, the trail at 150 South and Dan Jones, and then the White Lake Trail to County Road 625 at Avon Youth Sports. We're going to bid those out together. So it is open right now until September 21st. So I hope to have a recommendation to you guys at that first meeting in October. If work doesn't get started this year, the substantial completion will be end of June next year. when paving opens back up, depending on winter and everything. So we'll still be able to encumber funds if we're under contract. Greg stole my thunder with the upper lot being paved. Thank you, Steve, for helping with that. It's not quite done, but he said we're getting there. With sports, our fall lacrosse registration opens on the 13th. Our junior Oriole volleyball tryouts are in October. Our junior Oriole basketball tryouts are at the end of September. On August 29th, our AYS, a couple of our football teams and most of our cheerleaders were involved in a fundraiser with the Indianapolis Colts. If they sold, if we sold collectively 100 tickets, then we got to do a one-hour scrimmage on the field after the Colts game on the 29th. So that was awesome. The Avon teams were the only teams out there just for them to have that experience. I don't know if you've seen the video on Facebook. It is awesome. So I encourage you to go watch that. And thank you to the Colts for allowing us in on that fundraiser. This is really exciting. As of tomorrow, we will have registration open for our first ever inclusive and adaptive recreation programming. This is going to be through kindergarten through 12th grade, so not adults quite yet. We do have a sponsor, a partner, Embracing Abilities. They're just right up the hill here. They're coming alongside with us, helping us out, figuring some things out. This program will run January through March. It will be three weeks of basketball, three weeks of flag football, and three weeks of soccer. So any questions? Thank you.

Thank you.

Paul Lambie, Senior Planner on behalf of the Planning and Ability Department. Just want to say ditto to Shelby's comments on Employee Appreciation Week. As mentioned during the work session, we anticipate having UDO revisions going to plan commission in October and or November. We're continuing to make good progress on working with our iWork contractor on our online application submission portal, working out some final bugs there. We should have that live pretty soon. stopped collecting quite much paper here at a town hall. BZA had one case on their agenda in August. They approved a special exception for a drive-through in tier one of the US 36 overlay for a new Seven Brew coffee shop that'll be going at US 36 and Shiloh Crossing Drive on the small parcel, vacant parcel there at the northwest corner between 36 and Avon Drain. No business for BZA this month. Plan Commission in August approved a minor plot to combine parcels for Radiant Bible Church at 36 and Gable Drive. Also approved a development plan review for Misty Eyes Animal Center to pave and expand their parking lot, which is a project another town has been looking forward to having happen. And then for September, Plan Commission has the Nirvana Sports Development Plan Review still on its agenda, although we expect that to probably be continued again as they continue to work on securing shared parking agreements to use the existing parking around their kind of landlocked parcel there. Also, a development plan review for the aforementioned 7 group at 36 and Shiloh Crossing Drive. And then we'll have a zoning map amendment by Grand Properties for the property at southeast corner of Reagan and 100 South, which is the proposal that was introduced to you at your last meeting. And then finally, you should have Mike Tully's building and construction activity report that I believe went out last week. If you have any questions on that, you can reach out to him. Any questions?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening. Sean Stoops, Chief of Police. Officer Adam Sajak, he just recently graduated from the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy in August. He did so with the distinction of honor graduate. He was one of only five individuals in his entire class that earned this distinctive honor. In order to receive the honor graduate distinction, I believe you have to maintain a 96% written test average on all the testing blocks. You also have an enhanced physical agility test that goes above and beyond the exit standards that you have to pass, as well as firearms you have to shoot expert. We want to commend him on his efforts. It definitely reflects his commitment, his work ethic, and desire to be one of the best officers that he can be. He's currently working through his field training phase right now, and he's on track to be released on solo patrol as scheduled. So the week after he graduated, Officer Jacob Redman reported to ILEA following that graduation. So He's expected to graduate in late December and then he'll start his field training program. Our Police Mayor Board will meet Monday, September 14th, 2026. The only notable item on that agenda at this point is gonna be probably exhausting the current hiring list. And as you may have seen on our social media pages and our website, we've already started the process and opened up for a new hiring process. If you are interested, please go to the town's website, follow the career opportunities tab or go to the police tab. There is a hyperlink there that will take you directly to the pre-application and also provide you with a lot of other information such as pay and benefits and so forth. Yesterday, we concluded our selection process for our new administrative assistant. We started off with about over 200 resumes. So we had to kind of whittle that down. So we narrowed it down to five. And we did interviews yesterday. And then today, the command staff and administrative staff we met and finally made our selection. Crystal sent out those notifications today to the four that did not make it as well. as calling the individual that did and so we're hoping to get her in for her conditional offer of employment fingerprints and she can do her background check and then we can hopefully get her up and running pretty soon so we can grab we'll introduce her at a later time i'm not gonna throw that we'll save that for later um this year's national night out against crimes october 6th This year it's 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., and it's going to be right here at the town hall this time. So the theme's going to be a little different. The food's going to be a little different. And our main focus this year is to try to help out one of our own, Eli. As everybody knows here in this room that he was involved in that horrible, tragic accident. So we're kind of holding the fundraiser. We want to try to help his family as much as we can and really focus on helping our event to really focus on that this year. The training facility, we're still waiting on the fence stuff to come in and about. So there's that. We're also waiting on our drainage people to come in and hopefully enhance that so that we can use that space more efficiently. drainage area. So that's kind of where it's at right now. HVAC has been installed. There was a little bit of a hiccup that came out. It was under warranty. They fixed it and should be back up and running now. And lastly, as we all know, who work here at least, this evening is Deputy Chief Markison's last council meeting that he'll have to sit through unless he just chooses to come back on his own and said through them willingly. So I don't think he's going to do that. So we want to congratulate him on his retirement at the end of this month and invite all of you to please join us on September 21st at 1 p.m. at the Avon Police Department in the training room. We're going to hold a retirement ceremony for him. We'll have some light refreshments and things like that. We'll probably do the final sign off on the radio. If you've never been there to experience that, that's kind of neat to see. And hopefully we'll have some other stories and stuff, I'm sure from some people that's gonna wanna share some stories and we'd love it for you to be there and wishing well with whatever this next chapter brings. Happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Sean. Julie, do you have anything?

Just real quick, we did close our books today for August. So I'll get you those reports out later tonight or first thing tomorrow morning. You can be looking for those. We've had to add a couple new funds. Thanks to Charlie and Greg. We're separating out some of our TIF districts to make it more easy for you guys to understand and read and just track the money better. So just be looking for those and you'll see the new ones and realize what they are. Thanks.

Ryan anything? Alright, moving on to. Oh well, let's do Council comments and liaison reports Steve.

The only thing I want to bring up is the Avon Redevelopment Authority. One thing that they did is they said the construction manager process was very efficient for the Eastern Gray project. And I think it's good to go on public record on that. I think we all know that. But it's worked very well. And they, as the finance authority, they appreciated that. That's one thing I didn't mention before. And also the RDC, the RDC and the RDA are gonna be meeting a week from Monday, so yeah, on the 21st. So there's nothing more to report on that, but I just wanted to pass that one part on, that's all.

Greg?

I have nothing.

Jason?

Nothing for me, nothing.

Okay, nothing for me this time. So we'll move on to new business. This is a long one, 2027 budget.

Look how excited I am to start talking about the budget. Everybody get your pillows out, here we go. Again, just like last time, just as a reminder, especially anybody who's out there watching or anyone in the crowd, sorry Boy Scouts for subjecting you to this for the meeting that you came to. But I'm gonna try to keep it really high level. I know most of you have been part of this budget process before. At the last meeting, we presented the general fund, which is our property tax and income tax and where we fund the majority of our personnel from, particularly our police department. What I'm going to talk about tonight is the non-general fund, which we have about 20 to 25 different funds that we get revenue from. those different funds can only be used in certain ways. And so we kind of have to track and coordinate all those different funds differently. So if there's anyone online who's looking at the budget general fund and you see 25 different form ones, that's why, because every single fund has to have its own form one. But for anyone who's interested in actually trying to understand the budget, I'd strongly suggest if you notice on our files, there's an ABCD document. And that really tells the story of the bigger picture of all the budget. The A1 is what I'm going to kind of walk you guys through tonight, which is a summary of the non-general fund changes. Most of the things in the non-general fund tend to be more capital in nature. There are projects, road work. Our parks department is funded solely out of other funds other than general fund. And so we'll talk about that. And the way that we track those are really the program by fund budget. So if anyone's really interested, it's a big old spreadsheet, has lots of numbers in it, which may look confusing, but it has what the public works in the park activity is. And then it has the corresponding fund that that activity is paid for. And so if you really want to spend some time and look at the budget, that's really the place to see. And you can kind of see where all the different programs that the town runs, where they're paid from and what funds they come from. So there's a little bit of a summary. The last one I'd say is the D2, which is our maintenance trends, which is really specifically to our public works department. And there's actually 10 years of data there on what all of our public works activities and what we're spending money on for those activities, how it's changed over time. This is the one, Greg, you always push Steve and I on a little bit of, do we have enough in there that goes towards paving? And you'll see there that we've continued to try to increase funding for our paving to get up to the million dollars so that we're always able to match that million dollars for our CCMG grant. And so with that, I'll kind of start going through it. That's a little bit of the summary. I'm not going to spend a lot of time. We talked about employee compensation at the last one. And so this one is no different. Also, any place where we have in the Parks Department and the Public Works Department, we did do a 20% insurance, liability insurance increase placeholder. And it is reflecting a 9% health insurance increase increase. I'm going to start with parks. Again, just from an education standpoint, our parks are not funded with property tax or income tax. It's solely funded by revenue from our actual departments. And then our food and beverage tax. In Avon, we are specifically only allowed to use our food and beverage for utilities and parks. And so we do not have utilities. And so we use that money that we receive for our parks. The biggest thing we're doing, as Shelby just talked about, our pickle, the pickle patch is In the Burnett Park, we did a $4 million bond. And so we do this year, we're starting to make payments on that $4 million bond for doing those park developments. We do have a couple of other parks that will come along in the future. And that's kind of the next item. We do have money in there for the preliminary design of the White Lake Creek Bridge, which is, again, an important connection from the Town Hall Park. over to Easton Gray. We started the design of that last year, and we're gonna continue that. It'll take us probably four or five years to just get through the design and get all the environmental permits that we need to actually get to a point to build that project. There's also a little bit of some of the summer lot engineering that's tied into that as well, which is the summer lot park. As Shelby talked about, we're continuing to invest in trail and sidewalk design and construction. Next year in particular, we're planning to construct the 575 East to Easton Gray project, which is the Washington Township Park and Dog Park to connect pedestrians to Easton Gray. And it'll have a pedestrian crosswalk at the traffic signal there. Tiffany presented to you guys earlier this year a plan to continue doing trail security and safety equipment and wayfinding to help keep our trails safer. We have some continued funding in there for that. We have funding in for programming and events. We always try to continue to replace and rotate our equipment. This year, Shelby and her maintenance staff are proposing to replace two lawnmowers. One of the things we did do this year, and we'll talk about it a little bit in the next one as well, currently we have two sports field technicians that are in the Park Recreation Fund, which is our sports programming. Shelby and I have decided we think it makes more sense that they be part of our maintenance crew, and so we're moving their salaries into the food and beverage. On the opposite side of the equation, you guys will recall that This year, we've been paying for the Apex Park lease out of food and beverage. So we've switched that and we've put those expenses into the Parks Recreation Fund. So we're really putting those expenses where they should actually belong.

And again, makes it easier for us to track those expenses accurately.

we also collect recreation impact fees so every time a single family home or a multi-family home a residential unit applies for a permit they do pay an impact fee which allows us to continue our investment in parkland trails playgrounds and other things so next year We have some money in there to do the 575 to Easton Gray project, talked about earlier. We've split it between two funds to pay for the construction. And then we also are planning to start the trail design on 150 South, west of Avon Avenue. So the project Shelby told you about that she's bidding is from the high school to Dan Jones. This is from Avon Avenue west to Apple Creek, if you guys are familiar with that area, to to create a connection there as well. And then there's also money in there to renovate and expand our existing playground here at Blue Heron Park. The Park Recreation Fund, there's not a lot of changes to this. As you guys know, there's not a lot of growing revenue or expectation for that. So that budget hasn't changed much. But as I mentioned, we did, or sorry, I called it Apex, Shelby, I apologize. The Summit Indoor Training facility lease payments were moved into that fund. We've also noticed that referees, which again is a result of our growing programs and the amount of things we do, that we need more expenses to cover our referees' costs, equipment, uniforms, and awards. And then it also has funding, obviously, for tournament expenses and league fees and all those kind of different things that are required for us to be able to run a youth sports program. We also have a tree mitigation fund, and that is if development can't meet our standards, they have the ability to make a donation to our tree mitigation fund. So maybe they're required to plant 100 trees on their property and they only have space for 60. Instead of planting those other 40 trees, they can make a donation to our Parks Department. It goes into the Tree Mitigation Fund, and then the Parks Department can go out and plant trees in other areas in town. So even though we're not getting the same number of trees on that particular site, we do get them somewhere else in the community. Also, I guess the one place in the non-general fund, we do have a public safety LIT, which is specifically has to be used for the police department. And so that money, we do have one police officer in there and one crime scene investigator that also provides equipment for our emergency response team, which is really the SWAT team. And then also the majority of the police department training is funded out of the LIT as well. the next one is tax increment finance and as julie mentioned in her report there's lots of different tiff districts and so i'm not going to most of them have have developer purchase bonds that we talked about that are funding infrastructure to support those developments and so we have bond payments for that a lot of that money goes towards that We also have money in TIF to support the completion of the Dan Jones Phase 3. I want to say completion even though we haven't started yet, but most of the construction will actually occur next year. So we have funding in there, which is our matching fund to the $7 million we got from the Indianapolis MPO. We also have funding to continue our design work on Dan Jones Phase 4 and to acquire right-of-way for Dan Jones Phase 4. And then we also have some money in there to keep working on Dan Jones Phase 5. I should mention that as I talk through these capital projects, Council, I know you guys are aware, I see Steve has his capital improvement plan in front of him. These projects are funded based on how we prioritized in the capital improvement plan. So as I'm talking through these, they should be familiar. And you should see them as your green projects on your list and the higher priority projects. Steve has some money in there for the Avon Village Parkway. It's a private street, but we're Avon Village Parkway right by Walmart where we just built the roundabout. The road that comes across and connects there, there's some safety concerns. So Steve has some money in there to do a safety improvement at that intersection. We also, again, because TIF district money is supposed to be in and serving the TIF district, we put money in for paving in the TIF district every year. Again, those businesses are paying property taxes to those areas. And so we want to make sure we're also maintaining their streets and keeping them in good working condition. We do provide some funding to the schools for technology. And then as we talked about in our work session, we do have some funds in TIF as well for remodeling the town hall. Once we move out, we have some money for doing some remodeling in the basement of the police station. And then also some remodeling at the police substation and training facility that we just purchased. So we're continuing to maintain our existing facilities as well. The next fund is a cumulative capital development fund, which is, as you guys know, has a tax rate. It has a five cent tax rate and it has to go towards capital improvement projects. This is a good chunk of this money goes towards our road maintenance and our maintenance improvement plan. It also does fund the replacement of one town vehicle. We try to continuously rotate and replace vehicles. This is also where we pay for police vehicles is from the CCD fund. And so there is funding in there for six police vehicles and lighting and upfitting those vehicles. And then there's also some money in here as well for funding the Dan Jones widening phase three. A couple highlights in public works, which is really MVH funds. We do get two separate MVH funds, which is motor vehicle highway. That is actually gas tax. So this is, for those of you who pay attention, the governor has suspended the gas tax. So he is replenishing those. And so I think we've gotten two distributions from the state. but normally we get monthly distributions of that. Some of that money has to go towards road maintenance particularly, so a lot of that goes towards our paving, but then some of it goes to our operations and our employees as well, our public works staff. Steve has also put some money in MVH this year to do a northbound right turn lane at the IU West Hospital. If you guys are over there, that's always kind of an area where it gets a little dangerous. We also have funding in there for ADA sidewalk and ramp replacement, which we're required to do. Also, we've put some funding in for emergency preemption upgrades and some signal safety enhancements. You'll see some of those even next month. Steve's been working on some of those. The other thing we haven't done in a while, so this is on our planning side for Public Works, we've put some funding in there to update our thoroughfare plan. Again, as we kind of continue to evolve and make changes, We need to revisit that plan. There's actually a very important component to the thoroughfare plan. The thoroughfare plan is really the planning component. And then we have a capital improvement plan or what we, transportation improvement plan, we call it, that actually prioritizes road improvements too, based on what we're hearing from the community. And so we update that as well. So there's some funding in there for that. As you guys are aware, you passed a wheel tax last year, which is a fee on the license plates that people get. And again, the town council was put in a bad position in order to qualify for certain CCMG funding. You were required to pass that. And so we did do that and we did receive a distribution of that. And that is you are creating funding. A fund in there, the revenue that we're getting from that money, we are also using then to match our CCMG. And so again, goes towards road maintenance. And so again, anybody who's paying that driving cars and trucks, it's going directly back into the roads that people drive on. The next one is the stormwater utility. Again, the stormwater utility is pretty flat, so it doesn't have a ton of new projects in it, but it does maintain funding for drainage engineering to try to accelerate projects. One of our priorities for the utility is to try to address drainage projects as quickly as possible. It does provide funding for mileage drainage repairs as well. We are an MS4, which, again, people may not understand an MS4 is the clean water component of stormwater. It's not just dealing with water quality or water quantity. It's also dealing with water quality. So the MS4 is the water quality, which is to try to prevent people polluting and dumping waste in that eventually gets to streams. It does have a stormwater capital improvement component, which is Pines of Avon. It's actually the last project on our capital improvement plan from when we started the stormwater utility. So we're really close to working through that list. And of course, right in time for us to do a great job and get all our capital improvement projects done, the state changed the responsibility for culverts. And so in the last legislative session, they changed it. And Any culverts or bridges under 20 feet are now the responsibility of the town of Avon. And so it's a responsibility for our stormwater board. So we have 53, 56 culverts that we are now responsible for. So we did put some money in to actually do inspections. The county gave us a list of all of them, but most of them hadn't been inspected since like 2018 or 2019. So we don't know what the condition of them is. and so we're going to do our own inspection and then we want to create a capital improvement plan to start planning out and trying to address those that are in the worst condition and so there's some money in there for doing that inspection and evaluation will the county be passing on any monies that they had set aside for those improvements no they will not yay And then the last one that I'll talk about is the economic development income tax. We do, again, this is income tax money, but it's supposed to be used for economic development. And so we do have provided, agreed to provide job incentive training. We've made a commitment to Sephora and Lakeside Book Company. Every year, in hopes of maybe one day it'll happen, we do budget some money for a reorganization study or a financial analysis, so that continues to be in there. I try to do leadership training for my staff, so there's some money in there for that. We talked in the work session about the Chamber of Commerce library. We do provide some funding to the library, and then we also support the Hendricks County Economic Development Partnership. That's all in the edit fund. We also have uh, increased funding for police technology. As you guys are aware, we get into situations where we have to replace radios or in-car cameras or, uh, body cams. I think one year we bought body cams, whatever, kind of just to be able to keep up with the changing technology for our police department. We've got some money in there for them for those kinds of things. Um, there is some money in there for the dan jones widening phase four and phase five projects employee hsa contributions again there is some money in here too to support our maintenance improvement plan and taking care of our roads Also, some economic development consulting. Our efforts to digitize and go paperless is supported through the EDIT Fund. And then we're also doing some lifecycle modeling, which, as you guys are aware, is a software system that Steve is using that tracks and manages our lifecycle, which helps us make decisions on when we should be doing maintenance to roads. And then finally, everyone's favorite, we also have some money in there for election expenses for the 2027 municipal elections. It's fun, everybody loves municipal elections. So that's my summary. I'm happy to answer any questions. Steve is here if you have specific questions on public works budget, or Shelby and Tiffany are here if you have parks questions. Of course, Sean and Steve are here too if you have anything on the police. Just a reminder on the schedule, obviously next on the agenda you have your public hearing. The next meeting is kind of our final discussion on the budget, and then the first meeting in October, Julie's going to force you to vote on it and choke you if you attempt not to, so.

When do we update our project list, however?

The CIP that you have was just updated in early 2027. or 2026, sorry. About two and a half months ago, it was updated.

So everything that you just went over, we've captured in here.

Actually, it's the other way. So that was done first, and then everything that was in there is captured in the budget.

Because if you look at 27, we've got $9,918,000 projected in different, and the prior year, it was $16,550,000 is the number. I mean, we're going to save money, but Are we saving money? Should we be doing more?

Well, the CIP is a little misleading because remember, like if you look, Greg, the Civic Center is in there, which you did a bond for the Civic Center. You also did a bond for the parks improvements. So that's skewing your 2026 number to look like your capital improvement is higher just because we did bonds. And so as I've told you guys before, we did a bunch of bonds previously. And we made some investment in some projects, but it's gonna be a couple of years. So I would expect you're gonna be in that nine to $10 million range for the next few years. And then again, we may get to a point where we're able to do some additional bonding. And then that's, you'll see like one year, I think in there, Greg has got like $51 million worth of projects. Those just keep sliding back until we can actually afford to pull them forward and actually do them.

I've got a comment.

Steve and I talked a little bit about, true to my heart, the PACER rating or the roadway system. And I say it really kind of is important because it's a big chunk of what we do in the town. Steve and I talked about the county has an AI system that they've been following and using. Very expensive system to do that. And it may be justified for them because they have so many roadway miles compared to ours where what maybe a third of what they have maybe less than that maybe yeah much less so um my understanding and i guess i just want some clarification is that and i agree with this that the town staff rotates around and they they have a good knowledge of the roadways and i i like that steve that we can do that i was just wondering for the budget Is there any dollar amounts that you think might be helpful for us to think through to make sure that your staff has adequate time to allocate to do that? Because I agree with the system. I think it's great if we can have people out there that actually are involved in our community seeing it rather than relying on a model that puts it together based on a dash cam.

Yeah, it takes less than 40 man hours. So it's doable. If it's just me and Keaton, I'll take north and he'll take south. Or when it was Eli and Keaton, they'd do the same thing. And I'd do quality control checks on them. But yeah, it's easy to do the ratings. Doesn't take us much time at all.

Okay. And like we talked before, you're getting consistent reading, so there's no advantage of the AI system. It supposedly takes out the human, so therefore you don't have the biasness. But I kind of like the idea that you're looking at it.

So the AI is probably really valuable if you're doing the PCI, which is a 100-point system, versus the pacer system, which is a 10-point system. So it's really hard to get too far off of each other with a 10-point system.

True.

With the 100-point system, yeah, I could be an 87, they could be a 91, and that's the difference between an 8 and a 9, right? So that could be different. But, no, it's pretty reliable with just the pager system, and we're all trained on it. We've gone through so many times that it's – It's a second nature.

And then lastly, so Ryan referenced that there's a computer software that's in there. You're happy with the system? It works well for your needs?

Yeah, and there's a lot of what-if scenarios. You know, what if we put in an extra $200,000 in our program? Will it help us raise our overall average rating of our roads? Or if we want to raise our overall ratings, you know, how much is it going to cost us and that kind of thing. So it does that for us and then also then prioritizes what roads that we go after, you know, based on volume, based on road classification and the pacer rating. So it does a lot of the nuts and bolts for us that we don't have to do. Then there's a human element. We get those recommendations, and we know that, hey, there's going to be a project over here. We don't want to pay this yet because that's going to get torn up, right? Good point. So we alter what the recommendations are based on the human element, based on intimate knowledge.

That's the reason I'd much rather have your staff involved in this so that we don't have – you know, two projects happening at the same time, you know, you could avoid some of that. We try, we try. I know, I know.

And then, you know, you pave the road and at first someone goes out and cuts it. Yeah.

Don't get Steve started on that.

Yeah. Thanks, Steve.

That's all I've got. Thank you.

Anyone else?

The only comment I have probably just in the budget in general, I know that you've put in 3% increases for everybody, including the council. and I don't support the council getting a 3% increase. I'll tell you now versus wait till later. That's all I got.

Could I have one more thing? I think it's last time you mentioned about the National Citizen Survey being introduced. I'm all for that. I think that was great back when Tom did that. How much was that? Do you remember how much we're paying on that one?

I don't remember what we paid in 2017. I want to say it was around $20,000. Yeah, something like that. When I met with them, they told me they thought it'd be between $20,000 and $30,000 and they were going to send me some additional information. I haven't got it from them yet, but I would expect it in that $20,000 to $30,000 range.

The reason I think most of us, you may be familiar with it, what it does is it pegs us against everywhere in the nation, and then it helps us to see where we need to be going. So it helps us as a roadmap. So we just couldn't afford to do it in the past, and I'm so grateful that I think that's a great thing. So anyway, that's all. $30,000, I think it's well worth it.

All right, we'll move on and open up the public hearing for the budget. If there's anyone that would like to come forward and speak. No one. Okay, we'll go ahead and close the public hearing and move on with water easement along County Road 600 East, Easton Gray.

Yeah, Anna and I will take this one. If Anna can answer any questions, if you have legal questions. But this is pretty straightforward. As you guys recall, when Easton Gray was putting in the water line to the Riverwalk District in particular, they went through a couple of our parks properties. This easement that's in front of you today is actually in the back. It's off of County Road 600 East. And it's basically following 600 East, and the town acquired some right-of-way facilities. to actually build our White Lake Creek Trail up there. And so the water company is requiring Easton Gray to create a loop to the system. So they want water to come south as well as from this direction so that they're getting water from two different areas. In order to do that, they need an easement from us. We've told them that it's right away technically, but the way it looks in the document is because we bought it fee simple, it looks like it's the town's property. So the water company is still requesting the easement even though it's right away. We don't see any issue with it. It's pretty typical of what goes on. So I'm happy to answer any questions, but we would recommend approval of the easement as presented to you guys.

My only question is, and it's on page three or two here, it talks about a 12 inches. Is that a 12 inch line? My only question is, We're not putting any lines in today, but is the easement big enough for a line to go in and make it a 20 inch or 30 or whatever it might be?

Yeah, the easement's actually 30 foot wide. So yeah, whatever size the water company eventually dictates to go in, it would be sufficient for them to be able to do it.

Okay, thank you.

And yeah, the line's not going in immediately. They're just trying to secure the easement at this time.

So will they own the easement or will it continue?

So Citizens Water will actually end up owning the easement. So we're actually dedicating it to the Easton Gray guys, but then they'll turn it over and Citizens will actually be the easement owner, which is the same thing we did over here.

Okay. Any questions?

I'll make a motion to approve the Utility Easement Agreement between the Town of Avon and Citizens Water as presented.

Second. Thank you, Julie. Roll call, please. Dunlop? For. Robert Pope?

For.

Jason Puckett? For. Steve Eisenbarth?

For.

Greg Zuzan?

For.

Next is Resolution 2026-21, Equipment for Retiring Officer.

So this resolution is similar to the ones we've done in the past. For our retiring officers that's on their way out, we usually award them some of our department equipment. Their service firearm. That's pretty typical. That's what we do as a retirement gift on their way out the door. And that's what this is for. You should have the make and model and serial number in there. And happy to answer any questions.

I move we adopt Resolution 2026-21, Equipment for Retiring Officer, as presented.

I second.

Thank you.

Julie, roll call, please. Robert Pope. For. Greg Zuzan. For. Steve Eisenbarth. For. Don Loudon. For. Jason Puckett.

For. Thank you.

Thanks. Next is the final reading of Ordinance 2026-11, Creating Building and Construction Fund.

Julie, are you speaking to that or Anna? This is me. So, yes, this is final reading. What this ordinance does is create a special fund to receive certain fees that you assess and then collect in connection with generally planning, building, and construction. Whenever you collect those fees, this new law that was passed in this last session is requiring you to place them into a special non-reverting fund so that you can essentially track those fees and only use those fees in connection with essentially the assessment of the fee. I'll be happy to answer any questions that you might have.

I move we adopt ordinance 2026-11, creating the building and construction fund as presented.

Second.

Great. Julie, roll call, please. Greg Zuzan? For. Jason Puckett? For. Robert Pope? For. Steve Eisenbarth? For. Dawn Loudon?

For. Next is the final reading of ordinance 2026-12, amending the speed limits.

Yes, this is final reading as well. So this ordinance in connection with some studies that were done are changing some speed limits, specifically three different speed limits in the town. We made a couple modifications from the last that we addressed last time. I'll be happy to answer any questions that you might have.

This isn't a question for you, but we talked about this after the meeting. There is going to be some differences and I thought the whole point of this was to keep essentially one speed limit. We're gonna have separate speed limits between the bridge and 100 South and then 100 to 150.

The engineer recommended that we lower the speed limit between 100 south and the roundabout at 150 because of the approach speeds. So that's where he wanted to lower it, and he didn't see a reason to impede traffic going from the bridge and to 100 south. Okay. So, yeah.

All right. Thank you. Yeah, it looks like it keeps them consistent. So, you know, it kind of makes sense that they're, Instead of having 40, 50, 45, you're stabilizing there at 35 to 30. I mean, it appears good. I like to go fast like you do, but, you know, still.

No, this was a difference in from the bridge on Avon Avenue to 100 south. Currently, it's 45 miles an hour speed limit and 45 all the way down. I think it's even past 150 south currently. And so this was just changing essentially the piece in the middle. My question was my concern was why. High, low, high. Why was this fluctuation?

And that's the answer, Steve.

Sure, sure, sure. The part we do. That's what Steve was just explaining.

We'll entertain a motion.

I'll move. I move we adopt ordinance 2026-12, amending the speed limits as presented.

I'll second.

Julie, roll call, please. Craig Susan for for Jason bucket for Robert for for.

Next is an introduction of ordinance 2026 dash 13 amending the stormwater ordinance.

Yes. So for this ordinance, this is for introduction only. The stormwater, if you'll remember in May of 2025, you adopted an ordinance which modified your stormwater fee collection policy and set some standards in the stormwater code that the stormwater board follows. And we've been going through this process of implementing the policy over the last year and a half. And through that process, we've learned some things. And so in connection with what we've learned, the stormwater board has passed a resolution proposing some changes to the stormwater code. Those changes you'll find on the second page. Specifically, the one section we're proposing is being removed is the notice of delinquency. The purpose of removing this is not to say that we won't be sending notices to rate payers that they are delinquent, but simply to modify the way in which we send those notices. these are better addressed and administrative guidelines for the stormwater board so they can kind of change these as they go rather than have them be codified to set expectations um so for example instead of sending these certified we may be sending these regular mail to save about you know 20 grand or something like that so it doesn't mean we won't be providing notice just we're going to change the way in which we do it and then an e um The Recorder's Office with Hendricks County and us have been working together, and the way in which we record liens needs to be through an actual instrument for each property we put a lien on, and so we didn't address that originally, so we're just including that in this ordinance as well. So those are the two major changes. I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Ryan, my question is I've forwarded you some emails I received from our constituents and some of their comments. Have they all been gathered and incorporated into these changes?

They weren't necessarily these changes. There are still some fundamental things that people just don't like about the way the utility runs. But because we don't have our own billing system, we have to use the county's data. But I know, Greg, I copied you on that response to that constituent. I've spoke with her as well, and I think we've addressed all of her concerns. I don't necessarily think there are things that are in here that we're changing. I think, like Anna said, the big thing here was we were sending a lot of these out certified mail and it was costing a substantial amount of money and people weren't even accepting them or they weren't going to pick them up. And so we were spending an exorbitant amount of money for people to not even get the notices. And then they'd say, well, I didn't get the notice. And well, it was because they didn't actually accept it. And so we actually think this is a better way and it's actually less expensive to us and it'll actually come to them regular mail. And so they can't say, well, I refused it. We know it went out to them. So.

Thank you.

If no other comments, we'll go ahead and consider ordinance 2026-13 as introduced and move on to introduction of ordinance 2026-14, creating lane mile direct distribution fund.

Anna. I'll take this one as well. So this ordinance is for introduction only. Recently, Senate Enrolled Act 179 established the lane mileage direct distributions program as essentially what I'm calling it is program where distributions are made to certain units of money to be used on bridges and roads. We are anticipating to, because you adopted that wheel tax is why you're receiving this. We are going to receive a, or already have received a distribution this year. We'll continue to receive them in the future. This is just establishing a fund to put those distributions into so we can track that. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Doesn't look like any questions or comments, so we'll go ahead and show that ordinance 2026-14 as introduced. Anna, legal counsel report. Okay, next is another opportunity for the public to come forward and speak or make comments if you would like to do so. Counsel comment. Okay, a bunch of shaking heads. Council Callender.

Yeah, your next meeting is September 24th. Again, this will be the last opportunity to discuss any budget issues. So if you guys have anything or if you want to meet with me or have any issues or want me to go through anything with you, please do that. And then, because that's really, that September 24th meeting is our last chance to talk about it. And then we want to bring you a budget at your first meeting in October that can be adopted. So no work session. So congratulations.

Thank you. Meeting adjourned.