Town Council - Regular Meeting

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Hey, [music] [music] hey, hey. Robert Pope

present. Bill Holland present. Greg Zusen present. Don Loud Jason Pucket present.

Whose microphone is it that one? Staticky. Um okay. Next is the Avon Youth Sports Coach of the Year. Good evening. Uh Justin Thompson, sports director for Avonu Sports. Uh the Avon youth sports coach of the uh year award is a huge honor. Uh this year we received votes of over 60 different coaches out of 900 plus volunteers. So 900 plus volunteers, 60 different coaches, but we can only pick one winner. Our winner this year is a leader with over 20 years of coaching experience. This person always goes above and beyond. Someone who not only teaches the game, but also teaches life lessons along the way. This award honors a coach who inspires young athletes to work hard, believe in themselves, and play with heart. In youth sports, great coaching isn't as much about wins and losses as it is about shaping character, building confidence, and creating a love for the game that lasts a lifetime. Our 2025 coach of the year has shown patience, passion, and dedication, bringing out the best in every player while reminding us all what true sportsmanship looks like. This coach makes Avon a stronger community because of who she is and what

she continues to do for our youth through sports. Please join me in congratulating our 2025 coach of the year, Tiffany Green. [applause] We've got a slideshow here that we're going to watch of Tiffany real quick. Okay.

[applause]

Those are some memories right there. Um, it's pretty humbling to be here. Thank you all. Um, I think as a coach, something that any coach can relate to is constantly evaluating, assessing, wanting to tweak things. What went well? What do we change? What do we shift? Um, so I think in that vein, it's kind of hard to be here, I guess, cuz you know, there's always more, right? There's always something you want to do next season and something you want to grow and something that you're working towards. Um, [clears throat] I also know there are so many people in this community that also know it's not about your record and it's not about being that one championship team. That it's about all the little moments in between. Um, I know this because I've coached with them. I've learned from them. I've coached against them. I've watched some of them coach my own kid like Justin here a few years ago. Um, so it's pretty humbling to be the one that gets to stand here and and feel the gratitude and also try to give pieces of that back too. Um, so thank [clears throat] you.

Thank you. [applause]

Don, would you mind if we do a quick break and snap photos really quick? We'll go ahead and take a quick break and we'll be back.

We'll go ahead and call the meeting back to order and move on with the agenda. Next is the consent agenda. No discussion. We'll entertain a motion. I'll make a motion that we approve the consent agenda. uh which contains the check register for November 20th work session u memo for November 6th the approval of minutes for November 6th meeting as presented you Julie roll call please Robert Pope four Bill Holland Greg Susan Don Lden four Jace Bucket four

and next is the first of two public comment sessions the public may come forward and may comment on an agenda item that is not part of a public hearing or on a specific matter within the council's jurisdiction. If you do come forward, make sure that the microphone green light is on and state your name and address.

Good evening. My name is Dave Cox. Uh I live here in Avon 739 that way. Um, I'm here tonight representing the uh Henry County Council. I'm president vice president and uh I'm in district one which is predominate Avon area. Uh this I'll apologize in advance for those that don't know me. I'm uh I had breast or I have cancer and I had throat cancer. So sometimes I'm hard to understand but I'll work through that. Not that I've talked too much, but uh this year at the annual association of Indiana counties, they gave uh Hendrick County uh an award for the youth assistance program. And part of that is the fact that there's seven governmental entities that are in cooperation in the county. uh that being the uh juvenile hort, the county commissioners, county council, town of Avon, Avon Corporation, town of Pinefield, and Pel Corporation. So, getting a couple of governmental entities to work together is hard enough, but getting seven was has been a chore. Uh the program is is running strong in both those entities. Uh we're in negotiations and talking to uh the rest of the school corporations in the county for trying to make this a countywide program. Um we presently are are funding the county uh is funding five uh employees have to

say this between the director two advocates at Avon and two advocates at PLA and the other day the juvenile judge told me that the program he he feels pretty strongly that the program has directly reduced referrals to juvenile heart by almost 30%.

5% would have been fantastic. 30% is almost unheard of. And uh so it's it's uh the volunteers that connecting to both those schools uh are doing a fantastic job and we hope that it continues to grow and and does it because you can't put a dollar amount if we save one kid. How can you put a dollar amount for that? So uh and apparently we're doing a good job of saving several. So with that in mind, the uh county has authorized me to give a copy of the award that the county received to each of those other entities. So I'm here to present your copy today.

Thank you, Dave. [applause]

Appreciate that. Moving on to council comment and liaison report.

Yes, go ahead. Sorry, I just I wore the pants today, so I have to I have to talk about it. Um Shelby Pride, parks and recreation director um for the town of Avon. I am super excited that I'm wearing these uh candy stripe retro pants. If you can see them online, there you go. They're actually the buttons that button all the way down. Um, I wanted to talk about this because they are our winter fundraiser for sports and you can order your own or youth sizes before Christmas at avon indiana.gov/sports. Thank you. Anyone else who can follow that, right? Okay. Uh, council comment and liaison reports. We'll go ahead and start on your end, Bill. Greg,

say kudos to Steve Moore and his team on the opening up the roundabout at Angelina Way and and 900 South. Um, got it under budget and opened it sooner than what we thought it would be. So, good job, Steve. Jason, uh, nothing new for me tonight, but I do want to congratulate Avon [clears throat] Marching Black and Gold for another, uh, national victory. Racking them up. Nothing for me tonight.

Um, I had a busy week. We had the public policy meeting out at the state fairgrounds. That's where the town managers of Danville, Avon, and Planefield get together and um talk about their um opportunities that they have to work to with each other in developing our county and uh um Greg and Bill and I were there to support Ryan that day. Um and it was a good turnout. [clears throat] also attended the police merit board meeting which is where some promotions took place and also some officer recog um nitions for good policing good service to the community. Also attended the roundabout ribbon cutting last night and like Greg said um kudos to getting that opened. I've read comments online and they all seem to be very positive. People are glad to see that open and I'm sure Costco's glad to see it open right before Black Friday. And then lastly, attended the giving back event yesterday and um had fun. Wasn't too cold out there. And uh a lot, let's see, what did we end up with? Four trucks and a police vehicle full.

One and a half tons worth of food was donated. Tons of food went to the Mary Lee Meyer pantry. So that's it for me. New business, the 2026 insurance renewal.

Yeah, I'm gonna do this tonight. Uh Jeff from Highland wasn't able to attend. He had another meeting and I know we mostly talked about this at our work session um at the November uh 6th meeting. So, um again, as reported, you do have the actual full uh renewal in front of you guys. Uh Jeff had reported at the work session that we were expecting a substantial increase Uh you can see that now in front of you. Um again most of that increase is in our uh property and casualty. Uh I am happy to report that we had a total payroll increase of 12% but our workers comp actually went down almost $30,000. So we're doing really well on the workers comp front. Uh so that was a positive. Again not great on our our liability. Um, as I discussed at the work session, uh, this is a the municipal market has become very challenging. Um, a lot we're hearing from other towns that they're having 75 60% renewals. We are about a 25% increase in terms of our renewal. Uh, our cyber stayed flat. So really, it was all property and casualty. Uh, is where our premium increase came. Um, I did provide all of you a copy of um hopefully a spreadsheet that showed uh what we budgeted and I know Jason, you asked me this at at the work session. Uh, the 2026 budget, we budgeted $475,000. So, it is sufficient to cover what our premium is this year, but we actually pay our premium we'll pay our premium before the end of the year. So, it actually comes out of this year's budget. So, we will be probably pretty tight next year. Certainly if we if we get another big increase like this, hopefully we don't, but we'll see how that works out. And so I did show you guys what's available. Uh we did originally budget in 2025 $355,000. Um we already have spent a little bit of that money. We had as we add new vehicles. We do get some charges and

then every year when we do workers comp, they actually audit our actual payroll to make sure how it compares to the estimate that they give. And so we had some increases in our payroll that that didn't catch and so we had a little bit there. So we have $329,000 left. Uh so we're about $140,000 short. Um in terms of what we need to cover. Uh just to give you guys a piece of mind, I I think we've shared some of these things with you already this year. Uh we do have some substantial savings in the 2025 budget and so I'm not concerned about our ability to to cover the premium cost. uh the particular areas if you guys recall um on our AIM medical trust and our health insurance we in November we had an insurance holiday which was benefit to the employees and to the town the town saved about $104,000 on premiums in by that in November. Uh we also if you remember back when we did the 2024 budget for 2025 we weren't sure where we would be be at on moving into the new civic center. We know that got delayed a few months, but we did budget about $150,000 for maintenance and things for the new civic center. That won't be spent this year. Uh, as you guys are aware as well, the police department has had some under spending uh due to some of their staffing. Uh, and we also have some food and beverage under spending. So, again, I'm comfortable that we have sufficient funds to be able to cover the renewal. Um, I'm happy to answer any questions. Uh, again, this is something that, um, I know it's frustrating to you guys when you guys kind of see it at the end of the year. My staff and I live it monthtomonth. It's a lot of work to get to this point. Uh, Dan does a great job on our risk management side to try to prevent us from getting into situations where we do have losses uh, that drive this up. And again, I know it's not a great renewal, but from what we're hearing out in the market, it's better than what a lot of other communities are doing. So, I'm happy to answer any questions.

If no questions or discussion, then we'll entertain a motion. I have a question. Did we look at increasing our deductible that would maybe offset the increase in premium?

We did. We look at that every year. It did not make a substantial difference and it um would actually increase what we have to pay on the front end. So, we didn't propose making that change. Um, I know one of the things that Highland recommended to us was to create a better vehicle um, kind of management process when we get in accidents to try to prevent claims from getting into Highland in the first place where we may make some decisions about if it's $5,000 or less, the town's just going to fix it. We're actually not going to turn them in. Um, so I think I've asked Dan for some help and partnering with Highland to kind of work to draft a policy like that. So you guys may see that through the year, but I think Greg, that's more to your point of we may just not even file claims, try to avoid it or we may try to avoid filing claims into Highland if somebody else is at fault. And so a lot of times we do that to protect ourselves because then Highland has to go subregate it. But on the Highland side of the equation, it still looks like a loss until they get the payback from the other person's insurance company. So we may look at some different ways to manage that uh to help that as well because that is one of the areas our our auto uh has gone up pretty pretty substantially. So we're trying to work on other ways to address it. Then my last comment is travelers didn't want to I guess ensure our dam because we didn't have a an emergency action plan. So are do we have that on on our our things to-do list?

We have we've already started discussion on that. So there there's two different things and so we're going to try to get a clarification from travelers. Um there's IDM has what they call an emergency action plan which is very expensive to do. We don't know if that's actually technically we're not actually even required by IDM to do that. Um they recommend it but it's not a requirement of our dam permit. So we don't know if that's what they mean or if high if travelers just wants us to have a plan in place. And if it's just a plan, kind of like our continuity of operations, we could create an internal plan. So, we're going to try to get some clarification on that. We're going to work with our engineers uh who do our dam inspections and we're going to try to within the next six months come up with figure out if we can meet that uh to see uh if travelers would actually bid or not next year. And I don't if he didn't mention it in here, but he sent an email. He also shopped us to Trident and Trident said they wanted to pass as well. So there were two other companies basically that that passed on on our providing us coverage. So

questions or discussion anymore? [snorts] Make a motion that we approve the 2026 insurance renewal plan as presented. Second. Thank you. Julie, roll call, please. Don Lden, four. Bill Holland, four. Jason Pucket, four. Greg Zusen, four. Robert Pope, four. Okay. Resolution 2025-32, adopting the 2026 meeting schedule.

Yeah. Every every year the town council as a goal establishes their uh meeting schedule just so we can be transparent about when we plan to meet and when we hold our meetings. Uh so we do this every year. uh this is your normal meeting schedule. So we would meet on the second and fourth Thursday of every month. In November and December because of the holidays, we would meet on the 1 and 3 and then uh I have proposed to continue uh we always try to have a work session at the first meeting of the month. So you'll see that reflected in the meeting schedule as well. I'm happy to answer any questions.

No questions. We'll entertain a motion. I make a motion to approve resolution 2025-32, the 2026 town council meeting schedule as presented. Second, Julie Robert Pope, four. Bill Holland, four. Jason Pucket, four. Don Lden, four. Greg Susan, four.

Next is the final reading on ordinance 2025-28 amending the stop, street, and speed limit designations. Yeah, you guys will recall we introduced this at the last meeting. Uh this was adding a stop sign in Pineree Estates as the stop component of the ordinance. And then uh there's several speed limit designations that were recommended by the public works department. Again, these reductions in speed are based on traffic studies. They're not just randomly done. The traffic study has to support. Typically, the recommendations on the speeds are at 85th percentiles of of what people are traveling. Uh most of these areas are areas that in the past were maybe more rural and they've now had development that has occurred around them. So we're we're reducing speed limits. Uh we do recommend approval and we're happy to answer any questions.

No questions. We'll entertain a motion. I move we adopt ordinance 2025-28 [clears throat] amending the stop stop and speed limit designation as presented. Second. Julie Don Laden four Robert Pope four Greg Zusen four Bill Holland four Jason Pucket four next is the final reading of 2025-29 the written commitment modification for reserve at Shiloh Creek section two

thank you Linda Albrand planning director uh this is for a 27 acre piece of property on County Road 1050 east uh south of County Road 100 North that will be known as the reserve at Shiloh Creek section two. Section one was done several years ago. This has a pending uh super voluntary annexation to come into uh Avon. It was reszoned under the county jurisdiction with several commitments. Petitioners seeking to amend some of those commitments. I will just touch on them quickly. um they will be coming in under the R2 standards. They are increasing the uh size of the homes. They are reducing the square footage of the lots to match the R2 standards. They're reducing the width of the lots to match the R2 standards and some other minor changes to match our uh town name instead of Hendrickx County. This was heard by the plan commission on October 27th and they recommended six to zero a favorable recommendation. Um, one last thing I'd like to add is your question, Don, from the work session about lining the road up. I went back and double checked the classification of 1050 which I had incorrect. Um, and so the separation from the two roads, it will meet that separation requirement. So it does not need to

acquire additional property. The U petitioner is here if you'd have any questions of him.

Any questions? If not, we'll entertain a motion. I make a motion we approve ordinance 2025-29 as presented. Second. [clears throat] Thank you. Julie, roll call, please. Jason Pucket, four. Don Lden, four. Greg Susan, four. Bill Holland four. Robert Pope four. Okay. Next is uh public hearing and introduction of ordinance 2025-30 which is the 2025 additional appropriations. Ryan, do you want to introduce this before the public hearing?

Yeah, I think that would be good. Just so if if anyone's here wants to hear what it is before they speak about it. But um just a reminder and and kind of education for everybody. additional appropriation is is really an additional authorization to spend money. So, people's first thought about that may be that that means that we overspent our budget and that we need more money because we over spent when that's not actually the case at all. Uh it could be the case, but that's not what we're presenting to you guys tonight. All of these additional appropriations are revenue sources that we received that we didn't have in the budget and so we spent the money and then now we're basically putting the revenue back to cover those expenses. So, um, there's several here. Um, I I know there's a spreadsheet in the packet, so I won't necessarily go through all of them, but if the town council has questions about those, um, I I'll give maybe just an example. Um, our ready reimbursement in our TIF district, uh, that was a grant award we got from the state of Indiana. The town bid a project and so our contract was with the contractor. We paid that contractor to do the work. then we had to submit that to the state and the state paid us back. Well, that makes it look like we spent our budget when we really didn't. The money offseted itself. So, this is just reappropriating that money back uh and allowing uh the town to spend it on other items. So, all of these examples, CCMG is the same way is the big one in here. Uh that's our grant from the state for our paving. We have to pay the paver, but then we have to make the money available to be able to be spent. So, um, I hope that works as an introduction and you can open up the public hearing and then I'll I'm happy to answer any questions of the council.

Okay, we'll go ahead and open the public hearing at 7:33 if someone would like to come forward to the podium. Make sure the green light is on and state your name and address. No one coming forward. So, we'll go ahead and close the public comment at 7:34 p.m. And we'll go ahead and consider the ordinance introduced. Next is introduction of ordinance 2025-31, which is the 2026 holiday ordinance. Yeah, this is again just an introduction, but uh every year the town council has to adopt the holiday schedule. Uh there are no revisions to this from last year. We had 13 holidays last year. We're proposing 13 holidays this year. In general, we do follow the federal the federal uh holiday guidelines. Happy to answer any questions. Don't see anyone looking like they have a question. So, we'll entertain a motion.

Oh, I'm sorry. Introduction. Uh, [clears throat] next is legal counsel report.

Yes, thank you. We have u reached a settlement, a verbal settlement in the McGee condemnation case. And according to the terms of that, we would uh we would uh pay $62,000 $62,500 for the acquisition of that right away for the uh the project. The uh we have already tendered all but $7,400 of that to the court. And so this additional amount would prevent us from having to go to trial next July. We recommend that you approve the settlement agreement. I would report to you also that the RDC has approved payment because they're the paying for. Uh but you're the party to the lawsuit and we'd like your approval as well.

Does the motion need to include an amount just that we agree to the settlement agreement? Correct. You can just uh Yeah, move. Make a motion to approve the settlement agreement uh with the McGee as presented. Second. Thank you. Julie, roll call, please.

Barbara Pope, four. Don Lden, four. Jason Pucket, four. Greg Susan, four. Bill Holland, four. Next is the second public comment period if anyone would like to come forward. No one coming forward tonight. We'll close that and move on to council comment. Have a happy safe Thanksgiving everyone.

You and I I wanted to piggy back on what Jason said. Um community I'm I'm very proud of our Avon Black and Gold marching band. I believe it's the three Pete for the Band of America grand champions. That's amazing. So, congratulations. Moving on to council calendar. [clears throat]

Yeah, I did want to thank you, Don, for bringing it up, but I I did want to and Julie brought it up as well. I did want to thank all my staff who participated in giving back. I also want to thank everybody in the community. Uh 72 people dropped off things here. Again, 3,000 pounds of food. Um the Morly mayor said it was the largest single donation that they've ever received. So again, very grateful to the community, grateful to all my staff. It's great for them to participate in and and give back. So, uh thanks to everyone and Angel who coordinated it all as well. I know she's not here, but uh thank you to Angel as well. Um and your next meeting is December 4th. So have a great Thanksgiving everyone.

Meetings adjourned.