City Commission - Regular Meeting

You know what's different? It's the other side. Yeah, I just assume that this was No, they also that was just your coffee, but it was over there. My whole body is like looser and more relaxed. More relaxed. Yeah. Whereas if I was working and I could see and I just couldn't go to the bathroom, you just don't I've got to push through. You don't even think about it, right? I thought he ended up already. It's the alternative, right?

He has the budget open. I also I thought the long range plan was the alternative. So, we're looking at gra like similar stuff. way up and then he's likes to be

I

good to go. Well, then uh and we are recording the voice came from. Okay, great. Uh welcome to uh the uh Saturday, April 25th, 2026 city commission budget hearing at uh Birmingham City Hall, 151 Martin Street. It is 8:35 a.m. Please join me in standing for the pledge of allegiance.

I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you, Mr. Could you please call the role? Mayor Balor here. Commissioner Hey here. Commissioner Host here. Commissioner Cole here. Commissioner Kazowski here. Temporary mayor promis law here.

Okay. The agenda calls for public comment. We do welcome public comment. Uh we will be taking co public comment at various points in the meeting today. Uh certainly once at the beginning uh I will choose natural spots, natural breaks in the in the uh agenda for additional public comment. Uh if you do would like to make a comment uh please hold it to 3 minutes and uh we'll take that uh right now. We'll take the first comment. So, if there's anyone either in the room or online who would like to make a comment, if you're online, please use the raise your hand function. Okay. So, seeing none, we can move along. And uh our first item of business is introductory comments by the city manager.

Okay. Well, good morning. Um welcome again to the budget Saturday meeting. Um this year as you know well as everybody knows we live in a very uncertain economic time uh in in politically charged sentiment in the country. Uh so the budget challenges this year obviously the uncertain economy the impact of current events such as the war the uh tariffs that are put in place and of course escalating gas prices escalating energy costs um increasing the cost of materials for things um and also an estimate of increasing inflation and I know this budget was built on 3 to three and a half% inflation. Kiplinger's latest says we might be looking at four as of this month. So, um, that might come up, but as I will mention, and you'll hear probably a few times today, we we generally go with conservative, um, budgeting processes. So, I think we have enough of a buffer built in if we have to deal with that. On the housing front, of course, mortgage rates rose. Um, house sales in Michigan were down 3.9%. Um, and then the housing, and you won't be surprised to hear this, but of the housing, the buyers, about 30% of them now are investors instead of families, which is almost double in two years. So, that kind of explains some of the short-term rental issues that we're having as well, I think, in town. Um, from the office market, the office market is still a little weak. Um, despite everybody returning to work, the labor market's a little soft. And of course on the infrastructure front, we have aging infrastructure because a lot of our community was built in the 1920s. So a lot of the infrastructure is 100 plus years old. However, as always, um Birmingham rises to the challenge. So I think we're very lucky and very blessed in this community to have a lot going for us and also that we have made sound budget decisions for decades and we will

continue to do so. Um so we bring a balanced budget. It meets the current needs. It meets the future needs. It protects for the future. It maintains the high level of services that our residents have come to depend on. Uh it focuses on investment in tech to improve efficiency. So you all know the Civic Pro software has been one of them that's been this year. We're also looking at changing our BSNA system, which you may or may not know is basically the software that runs all the different departments and all of the functions. And that's going to change. So, we're we're looking at something there. Obviously, uh in accordance with your direction, we've made a very strong investment in infrastructure. We have $44 million of $146 million budget in uh capital improvements this year. So, that's a very large amount. It's much higher than any other community our size. Um of that 19.3 million is streets, sewer, and water. as you know where we have put our emphasis uh public works and public safety are are two top expenditures in the budget. Public works covering all of the streets and the infrastructure and public safety of course uh police fire. Um you'll see in this budget there's been an increase in staffing for the engineering department as we are making sure that we can ramp up our focus on infrastructure from supporting the large projects to keeping up with issues as they arise. Um, you'll see that there's an increase in transfers from the general fund as well, and that is also to pump up what we're doing in major local streets. So, we're bringing in as much money as we can to help keep that high level of investment moving forward. Um, on the utilities front, we're continuing to make sure that the water and sewer utilities are self- sustained. So that as you know in

the last couple of years we've changed the rates so that we don't have to transfer money from the general fund to keep up with that the rates actually and the the rate payers pay for the service and the infrastructure that's needed to help keep up with it because it is older. Um, also you're going to continue to, well, we are lucky because we continue to see investment in residential property and commercial property quite honestly throughout the city and that's what helps us uh increase our revenues because we get more income when we get more tax dollars when we get development occurring. Um, in the residential property front, our tax values, taxable values went up 6.1%. So despite falling prices across the state of Michigan, um we're actually seeing increased values. So we're very lucky there. And I think that's also because we provide a safe, clean, attractive, thriving environment with place where people want to come. Um we also continue to see a very strong office market. We have one of the lowest vacancy rates around. Of course, that's because we are a downtown. We're a walkable downtown and that puts makes a higher value on the office. So, we are very blessed in that regard as well. Very low office vacancy. Um, and so today we're pleased to present the recommended budget. Uh, it's a three-year budget as it always is. There's a six-year capital improvement plan. Um, one thing to note that we've added this year at the very end, there's a new quick guide on capital improvements. And this is based on the discussion that we've had over the past six or nine months on making it easier for people to understand all of the investment that we're making in our capital improvements because while they're all in the budget, they're spread out across different counts. So now in the very end you'll see uh a summary guide of all of the different capital improvements that are proposed over the next couple of years to make it easier for residents to see when their particular street might be coming up and

easier for all of you to see what that is. Um obviously it's an infrastructure focus as I mentioned. Um we are also focusing on maintaining uh stable fund balances for the future and that's part what I mentioned earlier about the transfers into the major and local streets. We want to make sure we watch all of our fund balances to protect ourselves in the future if there is any economic downturn further. Um what we can do so we have uh guidelines and policies for the level of uh reserves in the major and local street funds. the water and sewer fund, the general fund, all of that. And we have maintained good reserves there as well for the future. Uh also we make sure our enterprise funds are self-supporting. That's the golf courses, the ice arenas, parking system, etc. And also you'll see we're maintaining a.3 mil gap again between the the actual millage we're levying and the max that we can can levy. So, and that's of course the buffer to make sure that we don't have to go for a headley override if we hit that cap. So, that's built in there as well. And why is that important? It's important because it gives us flexibility for the future if something happens and a little bit of ability to raise the millage if we need to, which I'm not suggesting we are, but it also helps us and it contributes to our AAA bond rating because it shows that we're in sound financial position. So, and then overall we're decreasing the overall tax levy again this year for I think the 14th year in a row if I'm not mistaken. And so I know a lot of times we hear that the property taxes are high in Birmingham. Just to reiterate, our tax rate is not high. Our property values are high, which means that if you have a $1.2 million house, you're going to pay a substantial amount in taxes. But the tax rate is actually very good and it's decreased again this year. So

all of this is being done while ensuring that Birmingham continues to be a safe, well-maintained um thriving downtown, great schools, great housing market, a great place for families to come uh to raise their families and then to grow old in place. So I'm very pleased to go over all of the details with you over the next couple of hours. And I want to say thanks first of all to all of the commissioners who were kind enough to send in their questions in advance or come in and meet with uh the finance department if you had detailed questions. We always appreciate that. We want an open and transparent process at all times and I know it can be it's very tedious and very detail oriented but thank you and thanks of course to Mary Chavez and all of her staff who has done a wonderful job as our very first year only but only Mary Chavez running the budget system from the finance department um after Mark Gerber's retirement and of course all the department heads who contributed a lot of information and went back and forth on how to help us create a balanced budget. So,

thanks.

Thank you. Thank you very much. So, uh we're going to proceed according to the agenda but also according to the book uh or if you have it online. So, um before we jump to general government, which uh I want to make sure, uh that uh no one on the commission or in the public has any questions or comments about the first several sections which comprise the introduction, the budget overview, a section on personnel. Uh there's quite a bit of uh highlevel information in there and if anyone has anything to say or ask about that section, now would be the time to do it.

Yes, city manager. I just have one comment and that Mary Chavez has a brief presentation to go over some of those high high level details. Okay, if you want her to do that as well. Great. That would be perfect. And I would point out I had it in front of me a minute ago that this is the we we have for 30ome years uh been given an award for uh for the presentation that we have here. Uh that was that's from what's the organization? The GFOA. Yes. What does that stand for? Government Finance Officers Association.

Okay. Yeah. So we're very proud of that. We I also want to point out uh that that the budget is part of a package of materials and if you want to understand the city finances thoroughly uh and in in indispensable additional document would be our uh comprehensive annual financial report which is our audited financials. And uh you look at those two together and you have a real picture. If you're if you're trying to get all the information out of just the budget, you're you're probably not going to get it. And if you're just trying to get all the information out of the audit and financials, you're not going to get it. So those two together. So Mary, uh please go ahead.

Thank you. Thank you. Good morning everyone. Um today I'm presenting the recommended fiscal year 2627 budget highlights. As the city manager noted, we are recommending a balanced budget that includes significant investment in capital and and infrastructure needs which is consistent with the direction provided by the commission. Please note that this presentation references multiple fiscal years for planning purposes. Um but only one fiscal year is formally adopted at a time and in this case the budget recommended for approval is the fiscal year 2627. Okay. Um, the 2627 recommended budget is posted online on the city's website as an interactive lookbook and a downloadable PDF which makes it really easy for the public to view and navigate through. Um, I would just like to take a couple of minutes uh to walk through our budgeting process which starts in October. Um, we do start with with the review of our capital plan and also our personnel planning. Next, we go through the departmental budgets uh which include day-to-day operational costs as well as one-time expenses, for example, the voting equipment for this year. And using this information, the draft budget is prepared and department heads meet with finance um and city management to review their requests and help finalize the recommended budget. From then, we prepare the recommended budget book and publish it online for public access on our website. We then hold a public hearing such as this one. Uh the feedback we received today is really important and it's an important part of the process that shapes the final budget that will that we will bring back to the commission for approval at the end of May. So after the commission approval, finance prepares the final approved budget book. Um it is published on the city's website again and of course we make a hard copies that we place into the clerk's office and the library for public to access as well.

Um so um looking at the next three years the total budget increases from about 142.2 million to 146.6 million in 2027. This increase is mainly driven by the general and enterprise funds which added investment in key areas like the automobile parking systems, roads and public safety including projects such as the sally port and the dispatch 911 upgrade. The budget then drops in 20 28 because that higher level of spending doesn't repeat. Not because we are doing less capital work overall, but because that major one-time investment in the parking system only happens in 2027. Um, as the city manager noted, we are spending over 44 million in capital improvements uh uh capital projects. Uh, this this continues our investment in infrastructure in city kit. uh about 19.3 million is for streets, water and sewer projects as mentioned earlier and then the 24.8 million includes parking systems projects, parts bu uh parks, building improvements and equipment. The city's and um infrastructure investments of 19.3 million annually represents a higher level of commitment to roads, water and sewer uh systems than pure Michigan communities. And during the engineering presentations, you will hear more about increasing the capital to include more projects. Um, stay tuned. U Melissa will go through that. Um, next, I'd like to talk about property taxes and what is driving the change in this year's taxable value. So, for the upcoming uh budget year, the city is seeing about a 6.1% increase in taxable value. And this increase is mainly due to a few factors. So, we have new construction, including new homes and building improvements, modest increases in existing property values due to inflation, and properties being reassessed or uncapped when they are

sold. These increases are partially offset by certain exemptions and other adjustments. Um, uh, based on the taxable value data and the Headley formula provided by Oakland County, we then calculated the city's operating mill rate shown here. Um the proposed millage rate for the city is 12.9731 which is lower than the prior year. This includes the operating levy along with millages for the library, refuge, senior service and debt. And we of course are still maintaining that 3 mil gap to preserve flexibility for future financial needs or um emergencies. But what does this mean for the resident? So for the average homeowner with a taxable value of over 333500 330,500 this translates to an estimated 2% increase in their annual tax bill or about $85 more than the prior year. Um the city com um over the past year the city completed um a comprehensive water and rates water and sewer rate study. This study looks at the day-to-day operations, upcoming infrastructure projects, and how much revenue is needed moving forward. The results will be shared with the commission in May for review and next steps. And that concludes my presentation if you have any questions.

Questions? Any questions? Commissioner Kasowski said a really high level question. So, um, basically just we have the the topline revenue number or sorry the topline expenses number which you talked about a little bit 146 and it's going to go down. Um, but sort of the the topline revenue number we have is like 128. Um, seemed to me like a big chunk of that is parking. Yeah. Um, do you know what the rest of it is? like something like 11 million of it is parking and then there's some other gap in there that I was trying to fill in and I'm I'm you know was hoping is there any are there any other big things that contribute or is it sort of

oh well recreation and culture uh culture investment in our parks golf courses um general government and then the transfers out we are transferring more out to local and major street fund than prior in the prior years. Yeah, that's 7.5 plus 4. Correct. Yeah, but wouldn't that all like I guess I'm not sure how that is going to manifest like the the 146 number includes like all of the expenditures, right? Correct. And 128 includes all of the revenues, right? So intergovernmental transfers I would not think would affect that is the idea that we are drawing down on the general fund balance to pay for roads. Yes. From the general,

right? because we're drawing revenue from our fund. Yes. So, so we're expecting the fund balance to actually go down. Correct. Okay. Correct. But we're still keeping it at a conservative, healthy. Yes. No, I understand that. But I'm just saying, right, we are we are in fact spending more than we are taking in in that sense. Right. The parking system we can sort of say is a one-off, but that probably isn't. Right. We can't just perpetually draw down the general fund. Correct. Correct. Okay. Okay. Any other questions? Um, yes. One other question. Yes, sir.

I saw the uh 3.4 million in capital expenditures for East Lincoln in two buckets, but it's not in 26. It's in 27. Is that right? Or should that be in 26? 2627. Okay. We get we get a little confused by the date because when she says fiscal year 27, she's calling that 2627 and using the end year as the fiscal year date. Okay? Because we're not going to spend a lot of that money until after July 1. But aren't they moving in in May? Don't we have to be done by May? It's May. So wouldn't that be in the 26 fiscal year? 2627.

That's where it gets. Uh so one other thing I should have pointed out and maybe ask about uh when I was talking about uh the financial report and the budget working together. We also have this new system, open gov, right, which is kind of like real time access to financial data. And um if you could just say a couple of words about that system and how uh the commission and uh residents and anyone in the world can uh what what exactly they can access uh we and and how how real time is it?

It's wonderful. So it is um it coordinates with our BSNA financial uh software and everything we do translates into open gov. I just wanted to point out the budget book is found here in a flip book and that's through open gov. So we're able to you know go through it this way. We have an interactive online budget book which is real time but you can go through and if you want to look at the engineering department overall. But one thing I do want to point out that's really neat is um in the finance department we also have the financial transparency portal that you can go to. Um that is the open gov that I'm referring to.

This is all open gov platform. Correct. So so open gov is a is a platform. They sell this product to municipalities all over the country. And we you can call it whatever you want to call it. We call it the financial portal or Yes. So it is and we went to an R through an RFP process three years ago and selected this program. Correct. So I have a question about this. When uh if if a user goes in, can they do they have access to all the data and can shake it, bake it however they want or are they strictly dealing with uh boilerplate kind of reports that you have developed and those are the only reports they can see?

They can see these reports. We can create more reports. I mean can a user create his own report? No, they would have access they would have to have access internal access. But if a member of the public or a member of the commission wanted a particular report, you could create it, make it available. Yes, absolutely. That is that is one of the greatest things about this program is if you want a specific set of data, specific report, we can definitely So for example, I see the third item down is ice arena financial information. Is that uh like a P&L on the ice arena essentially income expense? Yes, we have the expenses per year.

Okay. So, we have that's something we have asked for specifically and here it is delivered. Is there detail available? If I wanted to see the detail on any one of those if you scroll down look at that. Look at that. Yes. So, if you scroll down and let me go back to that. But it takes time to learn, right? So, you're looking at it. You have to play with it, but it's out there. And this is transparency, right? Yes. Correct.

And your willingness to create reports on request makes it even more uh valuable. Um, one other question I had or something I wanted to bring up. U people from the business world tend to look at balance sheets, P&Ls. uh we're we're focused uh as much uh or more on revenue uh than we are on expenses. Certainly a different uh from government which uh first of all has a completely different way of accounting. We're dealing with funds. We're dealing with fund balances. We focus a lot on expenses and you know we we do look at income but uh and uh my concern uh is certain areas of income. So taxes you know to the extent that we set a tax rate and determine how much tax money is coming in that's it. There's not much more to it. uh we we negotiate our uh our personnel agreements. There's a lot of tying uh expenses or projecting expenses to inflation. Uh what I'm concerned about is certain revenue uh that we take in in terms of fees, uh parking revenue, uh golf course revenue. and and my concern I'd like you to address it is the extent to which we are or are not taking into account inflation uh and perhaps other pressures on those fees so that so that we can be assured that we're that both sides of the equation are keeping pace.

We do go through a fee schedule update every single year. So once a year, now there could be fluctuations in inflation throughout the year, but once a year we go through and re-review every single one of our fees to determine if we need to raise them or lower them, what have you. And the finance director is involved in that or is this done only by the uh uh Okay. No, it's done it's done across the board in every department, all the department heads and then it comes to you every year. Um it'll be coming in probably early June or late May to be effective July 1. So that covers fees fees fees. Then you have things like the golf course and parking

and like for instance the golf course fees and the parking fees they go through the advisory boards and then they ultimately come back to you. So you have the final say as to whether you raise them, lower them, what have you. Okay? And if they don't come through, if they don't recommend something, we don't see it. So, uh, that then it would be up to us to say, uh, hey, look, we need to take a look at that stuff, right? That's true. Okay. So, anybody on the commission is concerned about that and is seeing, uh, perhaps something not coming to us that thinks it ought to come to us, I think, you know, raise your hand, speak up. I don't mean today, but maybe today. And, uh, that's part of our responsibility. So,

well, it was great to see in the book the um, P&L for parking. Mhm. Yeah. Yep. Helps a lot. Okay. So, we're going to move along. Our next section is general government. Uh that involves uh city clerk and elections, commission, city manager, human resources, uh finance, which includes treasury uh and assessing and pension administration, legal, general administration for youth, district court. So, let's start with the city clerk.

Good morning. All right. So, the clerk's office budget also ties in closely with the elections budget. One of the things you'll notice in the clerk's office budget is an increase in salary and wages, but is partially offset by a decrease in salaries and wages in the elections budget. Um, our election coordinator position was split between the clerk budget and the election budget and for ease of budgeting, we just moved it all to the clerk's office budget. Um you'll also see in there um an increase because there is a proposed um job reclassification for the deputy clerk to bring them up a pay grade to keep it more competitive for retention purposes and because the duties have become more burdensome on our department. So making sure that we're appropriately compensating our staff to keep them and keep that skill set. Um you'll also see an increase in the clerk's office budget for software. We did talk about that a little bit as well with BSNA phasing out. Um, and BSNA is somewhat continuing. We need to decide whether or not we are going to continue with them if it's cost effective, but they are dropping some modules that we use possibly such as pet licenses and cemetery management. So, we will have to secure software to cover at least those two aspects of um the BSNA software going forward whenever they decide to drop those modules. So that's why there is an increase there. Elections, the budget somewhat fluctuates depending on the year. So if it's a presidential election and there's three big elections, we have a bit bigger budget for that fiscal year. Um we might also have a smaller budget in a fiscal year if we're only doing one election in November for the city. So there is some variation there in that budget. The biggest thing you'll see in there is that voting equipment, which is um a purchase that comes along every 10 years, which is a state mandate. We have

to have money to cover that cost no matter what because we have to have equipment to run our elections that meets the standards set by the state. Um all of the clerks statewide are doing a very good job of strongly advocating to get state funding to offset the cost, but that funding is not secured yet. So, I am projecting that we're covering the entire bill for now, but hopefully some money comes in to help offset the costs. Great. Done. Yep. Any questions from the commission? Okay, moving along. City commission.

Uh the city commission budget, you can see, is down about $7,000. And don't worry, we've increased the training budget, though. So despite the fact that it's down 7,000, we've actually increased uh the training budget. So we encourage any of you all of you to attend trainings that are available. But what is causing the decline or the the decrease in costs is the uh Granicus subscription uh that we no longer need. So that has changed. And then we did not have a citizens academy in the past year. So we didn't have that expense. Um any questions on the city commission? These two are pretty straightforward from the city manager's office. Also a slight decrease of approximately $4,000 and that's basically just due to fringe benefit changes which are kind of out of our control. But um given the staff that we have in the city manager's office, one of whom is assistant city manager Clemens, his he he doesn't take fringe benefits out of the standard pot. He's a retiree, so he has his benefits through that as well. So, not other than that, not much has changed either way for this coming year.

I got a quick question and maybe this for you. So, I see computer uh equipment rental in each budget. They're big numbers. Um, is that just a journal entry? Well, it's because $98,000 for the city commission computer equipment seems like an awful lot of money. Buy it. No, actually we go through all of the equipment rental per each department and we have a hu we allocate the costs and then we create the IT budget based on those costs because we have to fund the IT budget. So we do take so it is a cross charge then correct?

So so the asset then sits with the IT department and the IT department just doesn't that cost an enormous amount of time to do the journal entries to get that all done? No, just the analysis piece talk. You know, you have to update and verify all the equipment annually. That takes a little bit of time, but once you have the solid numbers, it's just a journal entry. Okay. We'll have more time also to talk about that under the IT section, right? Mhm. Okay. Which I I'm sure we all Yeah, we all are concerned about all sorts of costs and the IT costs are high. Yeah. Anything else on the uh city manager? Yeah, city manager down. Okay. No. Commissioner,

I have a question. Oh, I'm sorry. Commissioner, um how come we have two assistant city managers, please?

Um well, that was done several years ago, and as I stated previously, there is an um a plan to reduce one of those so that it will go down from 2 to one. Um, as you know, I'm under a five-year contract. So, I have two years left. Could be more, could be less. But part of what I view as my job is looking at a succession plan. And part of that succession plan is making sure that we have a candidate that's an assistant city manager that's ready, willing, and able to take over if need be. Assistant city manager Clemens is awesome. He's uh the right-hand guy. Um, but he does not have long-term plans. you know, he has about another year or two in which he wants to work. As you know, he's been previously retired from the police department. Um, and then we have a second city manager, assistant city manager position where what I'm making some personnel changes this year to move the second one into engineering um to beef up what we need in engineering. But I still need to keep that second position for one more year because I am looking to bring someone in from the outside to potentially I mean it'll be open to internal candidates as well to bring in somebody that in a year or two will be prepared to take over if needed. And so essentially it's like we did with Mark Gerber or Bruce Johnson where we're going to keep the two positions for that year. So hopefully we can bring someone in starting sometime this summer and have an overlap of about nine months or so to get them up to speed before Mark Clemens's earliest potential departure. And so that's kind of the plan. So you'll see that the two ACM positions go away in future years, but they're still there now as we do a transition process.

Thank you. Does that answer your question? Pretty thorough. Um, okay. Any other questions for on the city manager, city hall and grounds? Morning, commissioners. Hi,

my name is John Galla. I'm the uh building facility superintendent. Um, I have three building property maintenance. Uh, I'm going to go through quickly for you. Uh, it's the city hall of this building, our Baldwin Public Library property maintenance fund, and the 400 Lincoln property maintenance fund, which is new this year. Um, I think I'll I'll work backwards through them and start with the 400 Lincoln property. Um, as you know, this will be the first one. It's transitional. Um, and I was tasked with just coming up with some budget numbers to keep that building going. That's the why folks leave. Um, so based on data we received from staff at the YMCA, um, and my experience with Baldwin Library in this building as well, square footage, we calculated things like utilities, um, elevator testing, you know, whether or not there's people in that building, we still have to keep the state inspector happy, and then basic repairs, basic janitorial, if a pump goes down, things of that nature. So, um, I'm pretty confident we're in the ballpark here, uh, based on their numbers and ours. Um, and I'm actually hopeful for a surplus, but that depends on a lot of factors like what we're going to do with it. So, um, at at this rate, we're we're all set to take care of the building moving forward. Um, moving on. Uh,

can I interrupt you? Sure. Go. Can you point to the to the line items in the budget that you're talking to? We're talking is that is that broken out at all? 400 East Lincoln. Yes. Page 95. Page 95.

Yeah. Okay. So we're not that we're not actually we're we're still okay and uh these are the expenses for the entire building and any uh contribution by next would offset any any uh contractual obligations by next to cover cert certain costs would be would offset these expenditures. Correct. Correct.

Okay. Thank you. I want to make that clear in case anybody thinks that we're covering the entire cost or that this amount is our share. It's the whole thing and then as best we can estimate based on the fact that you know, right? Okay. So, I want to make sure that there are no questions about that issue. from the commission. Okay. Where's the revenue part of it shown? Where is the revenue part of it shown? Well, because if we're receiving contributions, all I see is expenditures.

Okay, that's a good question. And my guess is that we're not that that's the next fiscal year. So, it would be projected for 20 28. Is that correct? And is it in here? Is it anywhere in here? No, I don't think it is because we are still working on a plan for the whole building and we are very conservative about trying to figure out what the utility costs are and next is doing their own work to determine what their share would be. So, we're not 100% there yet because, as you know, we're doing plans for renovations which you'll see very shortly and that will change the heating and cooling systems and everything too potentially. So we don't it's we can't yeah we can't really

there's major factors the pool what happens with the pool there's a boiler associated water cost things like that does that help commissioner h it does thank you all right sorry go on

okay u I'll move on to the library um this one here is uh virtually unchanged from um previous fiscal year we uh see a decrease um most of that is the uh in capital outlay um just due to the dollar costs of projects. Um last year's major expenditure is the loading dock um reservicing project that we're currently working on now. Um it's a quite a substantial project and high dollar. Some of the current projects or upcoming projects we'll be working on are minor fire system updates and then um a major overhaul of the HVAC control system which I'll talk a little more when I get to city hall. They're both buildings are controlled by the same program. Um, other than that, it's virtually unchanged. And, uh, so I'll move on to city hall here. And

right, this one also is pretty close to the same as it was previous years. Um, we do have obviously um, as we all know and feel in our own pocketbooks, utilities are going up. So, there's increase in utility costs. The uh couple of major ticket items that we're going to look at are masonry repairs to this building. U most notably the east entrance. Um if any of you have walked up that ramp or seen the brick wall that's leaning and that's changing how that entrance is structured. Um and some other limestone repairs around the building. Um some of the window mullions are showing some signs of aid. Um so we want to work on uh updating those. Um, and then like I said with the library, the controls up upgrade, we um are operating on a system now that's from like the early 90s, mid 90s. Um, and it's long out of date. It it can't even work on modern computer software. I think Windows 10 is where it it stopped. So, uh, moving forward with that, we want to go to a more cloud-based, be easier for me to access remotely, um, things like that. And then it keeps far better track of our our systems. Um, and I touched on that a little from long range planning, too. So, um that's our our big ticket item across both buildings um this year. Major project we'll be working on. Um other than that, I look at uh upgrading the main fire alarm panel in this building. Um that one's quite out of date. And then again, when I touched on um in long-range planning, the comprehensive mechanical assessment of both these buildings and moving forward to come up with our our plan for replacing air handlers and and units like that. Other than that, I have nothing to add. Any questions?

Any questions? I have a question for the city manager. Uh uh on the on the chance or that that we um obtain the community house. That is something that is not at all contemplated in this budget but would be uh swiftly

right we would create a new well that's actually a little more complicated because it should we and and Mary I'm going to leave you to make sure I don't say anything incorrectly but should we take should we get control of that building we would be setting up a foundation and a separate entity so that would be a little more complicated than what we do with 400 East Lincoln but yes it would be incorporated into our plan going forward. Do you want to add anything? That is correct. And um that process and the details will be brought to you uh probably in the new near future depending how everything else shakes out. So assuming a foundation owns the building, would the city still maintain it or would the foundation

Well, that has yet to be determined. Okay. All right. All right. Let me know as soon as you find out. have plenty of buildings already. All right. Human resource. Thank you. Good morning, mayor, commissioners. Hi.

Um, I am Christina Slufo, the HR manager. Um, my department, the HR department, is tasked with assisting employment, wage, and benefit matters uh for the city's workforce and consists of myself, a full-time generalist and a part-time assistant. Um, at long range planning, I spoke about requesting a part-time to full-time transition to better and more proactively support the labor force. Um, this budget does not contain that. So, the change in in the HR budget is very minimal. We're looking at a 1.47% increase or about $7,000 uh pretty much due to an increase in fringe due to retirement and retirement benefit accounting. Um, if there's any questions about the department budget, I would be happy to answer those. Any questions from human resources? Okay,

thank you. Uh move to the finance department. So for the finance department, the overall budget is down 1.7% mainly due to reduced personnel costs. We do have um temporary increase in training for open specifically. staff can um receive uh online train online training to stay up to date with the system. There's a uh there's a lot of changes within the system, a lot of new features that they come out every year. So, we are requesting that would be very beneficial for us. Uh why don't you go through the

Treasury? Perfect. So, the Treasury Department does have a a little bit of an increase by 14% mainly due to a one-time budget request of $46,000 to replace the old furniture, old and outdated furniture um downstairs. Um assessing, we do have an Oakland County contract with the Oakland County Department of Equalization and that budget is increased by 4%. Um pension administration is here for transparency purposes. We do include the costs in the budget to show the full cost of the pension system. Um the budget reflects a 4% increase from uh the prior year. Um the legal um the budget supports the city's legal team and remains flat for the upcoming fiscal year. So there's been no increases for legal. Uh do you want me to continue for general admin?

Uh sure.

This is Yeah, sure. Thank you. So in the general administration, the budget accounts for all general city expenditures. This is where we budget um increases for the wage adjustment. We have a placeholder. Uh it includes anticipated salary increases for the upcoming negotiations for the fire and ask me contracts. Um in addition in this budget there is a 100% increase in contractual services tied to the p private public partnership uh with plant moran and uh the judicial I think and then we have the judicial the 40th district core budget is 2.1 million which is about the same as last year. The one thing I do want to note is the timing of the court's budget creates a little bit of challenges in aligning with our fiscal year uh because they operate on December year end. Because of this difference, we rely on estimates during our budget process and then reconcile once the rear audit is uh completed. This can adjust in significant adjust uh this can result in significant adjustments to the budget and in some years we may receive a reimbursement for prior overpayments uh where last year uh we the actual expenses were lower by nearly $300,000.

And that's it for me. Okay, that was quick. Any questions? I have a quick one. Yes. Yeah, sure. Um I saw there's a line for employee parking. Um how does that manifest per individual? So the employees park at Piers Garage um as well as Chester Garage. And then they do we do we like cut them a check and say you can pay for parking wherever you want. Do we just hand them a parking pass and then we we hand them a parking pass? Okay. And then we get an invoice. We don't give away money somewhere. We transfer money from the general fund to the parking fund. Correct. To basically we effectively buy the parking passes from our own parking system. Correct.

I have the same question, but I'm going to take it a little bit further and say why not keep that money in the general fund? Is there any legal obligation to transfer that to the parking fund where then the use of that money is limited to the parking system? Whereas if it remained in the general fund, we could use it for whatever we want. Well, that's a legal question. I I see where you're going. I see the attorney standing up. I see where you're going in the gray zone because it's it's for our employees. I get that. Yep.

That's always a tough question when you ask. Is that a It's more of the um legal accounting, which I think Mary has to jump in here as well. Once you put something into the parking system though, because that is a separate enterprise fund, you're right, it can't be used for anything else. So, if there were a thought to not pay for the parking out into the system and leave it in the general fund, you could do that um and not pay it from the parking fund. So, it could be a a benefit to the employee to park in our system without a cost to the employee or the or the system. and then not transfer the funds.

Well, I would advocate for that just to retain flexibility. And we're talking about $150,000 a year, which over 10 years is $4.5 million plus interest or whatever. Uh does anybody on the commission have are I I know we can't like take a vote or anything, but if there's a sense of the commission that this is something we ought to do, maybe now's the time. I I got one I'm going to go one step further even. Okay. And Mary, again, this is for you. This is another set of journal entries. The your finance staff seems and and treasury staff seems very large based on my ex CFO things. And my guess is it's predominantly because of cross charges.

No, the parking we do get an invoice with each individual listed. We get an invoice and we pay it through our AP system. It's not a journal entry. So, it's a paid invoice. That seems even more time. Actually, it's quick quicker to just put it in the circular, right? If the commission were going to were to direct this though before it's enacted, I do have to have the opportunity to do my legal research to satisfy the the properness of of this activity. It's actually kind of where I was going because I can see both sides of the argument. It's just that it is a discrete fund and it is a service of that fund.

Right? So I see that I also see the side of it could be counted as I call it employee benefit perk what have you. But the accounting is not quite lining up in my head either right now. So there are federal regulations about how you treat benefits to employees. If it's a benefit to an employee, they might have to be taxed on it um as as

well. Maybe it's not a benefit at all. It's just a parking space. you counted as it has more it has to be counted as either an expense or a benefit and benefits are taxable to the employee. It's also a question of um whether you are disadvantaging the parking fund by requiring them to provide a service for which you are not paying which probably has accounting principle um indications. So I think it's something that they can investigate but

great that's all I want. Thank you. Any other comments on that? One other issue, uh, the the carpet and furniture. No issues with that per se, but that raised in my mind, uh, recalled the tour that we took of city hall. And, you know, the Sally part and the police department weren't the only uh, departments that were under pressure and dealing with, you know, in some cases obsolete, antiquated, right? So, they're going ahead and they're going to carpet the finance department. What I don't have a problem with what what are we where are we on city hall in general in in a nutshell?

In a nutshell because we did talk about buildings and we're trying to attack it in smaller chunks. So for instance, uh, community development is also going to be getting an overhaul in the coming year. Okay. But within the confines of the existing community development d we're not knocking down walls and moving the city commission room to the first floor or anything like that. We are potentially reconfiguring this the spatial planning of the desks and such, but not walls.

Correct. And so we're kind of doing it like that one at a time. So, you know, the police department, the police, uh, chief's office has had new paint and carpet and furniture. Well, I don't know about the furniture so much. Uh, so we kind of go department by department. So, finance was done a few years ago. She's talking about Treasury's office downstairs getting it now. Building department and and planning and engineering getting it this year. We're just trying to break it into smaller chunks so we can fit it within the budgetary process. Nothing is involving additions. Okay. No problem. Okay, now is one of those breaks where we can, as long as nobody on the commission has any further comments, we can take

what? We can take comments from the public. Miss Jay,

do you need me to announce who I am? We do the sure the formality of it. So, Mary Jay and I'm live on uh Ravine Road in Birmingham. So, I'm coming from a perspective of um um well background in getting costs out of the system. So, coming from automotive bankruptcies and continuing to try and stay um very effective and efficient, right, in cost. So, um looking at this, I'm I'm from a background of you don't increase any cost year-over-year, you decrease them. So some of these things that especially on a personnel perspective I I have some questions because there might be maybe some contractual or legal reasons why we can't do things. But I see a lot on wage increases. Are wage increases required? Are they a a you know a legal requirement in a public entity to that people get wage increases every year

or is that discretionary? Is that is that your only question or do you have more question? It's in I have a couple. Why don't you lay them all out? Okay, so that was one. Um, and I guess it's related questions. Same for things like fringe benefits. Whenever we add people, we're getting more fringe benefits and more pension funding. So, just our costs just seem to be going up and up and up when it comes to personnel. Um, so anytime we're increasing somebody, right, we're taking on that burden um in the for the future, even if we end up transferring people that that we're still burdened with that additional person, those additional fringe benefits. But um so yeah, questions on things like you know, do you need are any of these things contractual? Do you have to

um increase every year? Do is it negotiated? Is it by department? I'm just trying to understand how if I if that's okay for Absolutely. to understand how that works. Okay. And that's Yes. Let's go over that. Sure. Yeah. Sure.

Okay. So couple your are there pay increases that are required? Uh yes, we have um collective bargaining with five different unions in the city. So those are of course generally a 3 to fiveyear commitment and they get renegotiated every time they expire and so that's the bulk of our employees. And then we do have an administrative management group that is not in a collective bargaining unit. Um in terms of French benefits, you mentioned um pension costs and such. We eliminated pension costs quite some time ago because nobody that's hired now gets a pension.

Oh, they don't read that. Defined benefit to defined contribution to define contribution. Now, in the collective bargaining agreements, there are some matches for the 401ks and so on. There's no pension liability going forward and hasn't been since I want to say 2012, right? But there are still employees who are alive and collecting pensions. There are still active collecting. Same for part-time. Do part-time get I had read or heard part-time get benefit get some benefit. Yeah. I had heard some nobody gets a pension anymore. No. Yeah. There's some benefits to part- timerrs if you're over 30 hours. You can get some sick time and vacation time and that kind of thing.

Okay. In healthcare because that's under the Affordable Care Act. If you have 32 hours or more. Okay.

We have to provide that by law. So, one followup then. Um, one of the ways that we got cost out of the system, um, was contracting services. So, is that something that has ever been considered by the city to instead of taking on full-time people? It's often when you outsource things like invoicing, billing, um some of the ongoing activities. They can be done by human resources are ones that are often contracted out to to organizations that have efficiencies in doing that and you can often get cheaper costs by doing that. curious if that's ever been considered too.

So we do outsource uh a a good amount. Would you like certainly in engineering uh in a lot of our consultant work that some you know conceivably could be done in house but we just don't have the bandwidth to do it.

Right. Correct. And then in other cases like the parking system for instance we contracted that out and then we brought it back in house and we actually saved a substantial amount of money bringing it in house. And of course, the private sector is a little different than the public sector because on the public sector and the government side, we're not just looking at bottom line numbers. Do they matter? Yes. But what matters is service to the residents. So when we were doing say the parking and sending it outside, they had a call center in Timbuktu and they weren't getting, you know, when people called and said there was a problem, they didn't have a clue who they were talking to or what our system was. Now, if you call and you have a parking issue and you're stuck in a garage, you call, you get someone at Chester Structure and they know exactly where you are and exactly what to do. And if they can't fix it over the phone, you can be there in 2 minutes. So, it's very different on the public sector versus the private sector. And the same with the engineering, like a lot of a lot of the different things that we do farm out that we do hire, it's for the design work and the prep work, but our residents want and deserve somebody to call right here, right now that's going to address their questions almost a little more personally than what you normally get when you contract it out. But for instance, we contract out our garbage collection, right? Car Trucking does our garbage collection. They're still local in the sense that we can call them and get them here and that's worked out very well. But yes, we investigate that in in all across the departments.

Okay. I was just I was I was looking more at administrative type activities, not customerf facing. But I understand

f further to that uh we have been spending an enor infrastructure. There were years past when we were not uh we were not paying attention to the parking decks. We weren't paying attention to our streets. are s we now are spending two to three times what we were spending just say five six years ago on infrastructure that generates a lot of work in the city. Likewise our downtown is is as vibrant and uh and and packed with people as it's ever been. that raises uh public safety uh costs. And so uh sometimes these extra costs are a good thing because it means, you know, we're growing. We have a tax base that's growing at 6% a year.

And we're all about providing public goods and public benefit whereas the private sector that that's a totally different scenario. I mean, we're in the business of government and handling infrastructure because they're public goods like roads. Nobody makes money on that. A and at the same time, we're always looking for opportunities to uh you know to reduce costs. Absolutely. But but uh and uh that's not necessarily the

I mean I suppose in a time of uh austerity, if we had a major recession and we saw that tax revenues were going to go down, we'd be we'd be necessarily tightening our belts. doesn't hurt. And I would say I I would even uh suggest that it's not a bad exercise to imagine what we'd do if we had to tighten our belts. And maybe in the next budget year when each of your uh we're a little bit fat and happy right now. Uh when you're uh department heads come in and they're asking for more say, "What would you do if I couldn't possibly give you more? What if I had to say you got to cut your budget by 10%. What would you do?

Right? And we have had that when we went through the recession in ' 08, 09, 10, there were there were a lot of cutbacks at that point. And we and absolutely yes, we do that when we have to. And and I would tell and I would also say that if you ask every department head or every other one uh that that almost all of them asked for something in in which and you already heard from HR, no that we can't do that.

Hello. Good morning. David Bloom, Birmingham resident. Um, one of the items that was touched on in the finance review are or expenses for Plant Moran on the public private partnership. I wanted to ask if we are or if we could track the pro have some way of tracking the projects that they work on and the benefit that they're bringing to Birmingham so we know we're we're trying something new. what what we're getting out of spending that money and is it an actual benefit to us and what the benefits are. Thank you. Pretty sure we'll be doing that. We will.

Okay. Any other public comment? Anybody online? Raise your hand if you're online. Commissioner Hey.

Yeah. It was just kind of quantification a little bit further what you talked about because you threw out a 10% number. I was going to suggest maybe if we'd have the exercise of every year with a budget if there is a proposal and I was thinking 5% honestly um because it sort of ties into just trying to match inflation but keep us on a flat basis if there's anything we could do every department what's your 5% annual year-over-year opportunity that you're looking at to try and reduce costs because one of the things that I have noticed in all the budgets is uh we sort of touched on it we grow in headcount every year now there's some attrition there's some growth attrition and growth some of it's replacement of part- times with full-time. So, it's not a direct linear, but we've grown every year for many years. We also talk about the use of technology to implement efficiencies and savings. That's kind of the opposite direction of how it really works is efficiency is to use the technology to maintain or as attrition happens generally reduce headcount. That's one of the areas I've looked at year over year. What do we do with that particular item? because I think there are ways of doing it better cuz you talk about the difference between say industry and government. The one common theme is what comes in must match what goes out on average or else you go bankrupt. It doesn't matter if you're private or if you're public, you go bankrupt. That's part of the efficiency. Um Miss Jay's point about coming from an area where you don't get any increases, you always get decreases every year is painfully true. Um you never get more, you always get less. So that's what I was looking at as well. Your 10 cent is an aggressive number until you get into a true recessionary environment and then it's going to be driven by the recession. But I was looking at a 5% proposal. Show us ideas. Give us ideas every year of where there could be opportunities because right now we don't see that and that may lead to some of us not understanding where some of those opportunities could lie for the future.

It might change the the way we ask questions, the way that you have data to show. Doesn't mean they get executed, but if you come with a proposal, it's better than us just all sitting here looking at each other going, "Well, what are we going to do next?" That's all I was thinking. Thank you. Can I just do a quick follow? Sure.

Um, I think it's it's probably worth doing an exercise like that, but I think we also need to be really cautious. I think that's something that that uh the mayor pointed out is certainly true that it is easy for a city to sort of defer things and then you don't realize the costs next year and it looks like there's some kind of budget savings but really all that you've done is kick the can down the road and usually you know a stitch in time is worth nine right and you have not only deferred the cost but you have potentially amplified the cost and I think some of these things with us like ramping up engineering headcount and stuff was downstream of the fact that we perhaps had not been spending enough in the past. We could have spent 10% more for the past 20 years and now we've got to like ramp up headcount. We've got to double our infrastructure spend to try to play catchup. Um, so I think that it's, you know, it's it's always worth, I think, looking into opportunities to do cost savings, looking into ways to get efficiencies with technologies and stuff, but I think we need to be very cautious that we're not putting ourselves in a in a situation where we are setting ourselves up for for bigger problems, you know, cuz our time span is very very long for this stuff. I mean, we're fixing these water pipes that are 100red years old and if we're lucky, the new ones are going to last for a hundred years. And so that's the kind of timeline that we have to be be sort of thinking about is like 10 20 30 40 years down the road is is are the decisions we're making today going to come back and bite us. So I I absolutely think it's worth it but I think that we need to to be uh cautious about it. Mhm. I would agree that under previous city managers, say three city managers ago in particular, um that city was not spending the money on engineering or on infrastructure and we got very far behind in our underground infrastructure replacement. Uh we were not hitting our marks in our uh cape seal schedule which said, you know, every 5 to 10 years. Um and and all of

those things have come back to bite us in the last two or three years. Good points all around. Very this is the kind of discussion I feel we should be having at this meeting. So uh if that if that's if everybody's done discussing uh general government, let's move on to public safety police.

Good morning. Uh the police budget. So the overall police budget um despite a increase in about 19% due to salaries and wages and friend benefits the overall police budget is up uh 5.8%. So there's a lot of decreases in there that helped us remain a pretty flat budget. Um couple things I wanted to note in our significant notes here is in our uh radio and vehicle maintenance fund. The reason you're seeing the increase there is basically returning back to normal operations. Um, last year we replaced a couple parking jeeps. It's significantly less cost for us to replace a parking Jeep due to the build for the interior of what a typical patrol car costs. Um, this upcoming year we have some patrol cars that are being replaced. So that interior build of the car after the purchase is why the increase in cost. So that's just going back to normal. Last year was a decrease because of the parking jeeps. The other thing I wanted to note is you see some decreases there in some training funds and conference workshops. By no means at all are we reducing training and in fact we're actually ramping up our training. Um recently the state has required some continual education as a pilot program that they're doing. Um most of the training that they're requiring we've already been doing but with this pilot program came some funding from the state. That funding is temporary at this point. Um it does include next year. So we're able to roll back some of our training funds as a result of that. We're going to continue to maintain and watch that because we're not really sure what's going to happen with that in the future if they're going to continue to fund it or not. But for this fiscal year, we're able to roll back some of that training funds. Um, and that's basically it for the uh police budget. I'll move on to the dispatch budget real quick. So, the dispatch budget overall is up uh 16%. Again, that's largely in part due to salaries and wages and fringe benefits. Um, one of the things that we do have down, if you look at the significant notes, is last year or I could say this current fiscal year, we had to uh pay to extend our current 911 system. There was a plan in place to uh

renew that whole program. So, there was a cost of about $50,000 that we paid in this fiscal year to extend the current program. One of the big increases that you see there is $110,000 in this next fiscal year, which is a complete overhaul and replacement of the 911 system. So, that's a good reason for that 16% increase as well. Um, the other thing I wanted to note that we did in our personnel with dispatch is, uh, we previously had four part-time dispatchers that filled in. We're replacing that with two full-time dispatchers. We've already replaced one position in this current fiscal year, and that has proven to be extremely successful. One of the problems we've had with the part-time dispatchers, it's a completely turn constant turnover of employees. We bring them in, we train them, we get them up to speed, and then they find a full-time job somewhere else with all the training experience they have with us. So, as a result of that, we constantly had manpower issues. We constantly paid a lot of overtime to cover uh our manpower minimums in our dispatch center. And with the one transition we already done, we've seen a reduction in the overtime. So, we believe that when we change the section one, the second one coming July 1st, that overall because of the reduction in overtime, this is actually going to be a cost savings for us in the future. despite

in terms of salaries and wages despite the increase in fringe benefits. The fringe benefits that's we'll see. Um but what we've seen is a dramatic the reduction in our overtime costs as a result of bringing a full-time person and having consistency in that manpower. Was did you have part-time thinking that that would reduce costs?

So when we first took over Beverly Hills Dispatch is when we added the part-time dispatchers to ensure that we always had two dispatchers in the dispatch center. Sometimes we had three. Um, we've done that since 2012. It It's worked okay. But I will tell you since 2012, I don't think we've ever had a full complement of staff consistently during that time period. It's been constant changeover, constant training, constant recruitment. So, uh, with our full-time staff, most people are here and they stay here. Um, so we're hoping that with this going forward, we'll reduce the training cost, we'll reduce the overtime cost by consistency in in a full-time position. And if I call 911, I'm gonna get somebody. Absolutely. Every time. Yeah.

A full-timer who who maybe knows his job. Wasn't trained yesterday.

Exactly. More time on a job, more experience. Um the other thing I wanted to mention is I I know it came up before this meeting, so I just wanted to address it. The Beverly Hills dispatch contract um started in 2012. When that was initiated, it was the the cost for dispatch was separated. That's why you see the two different budgets now, the police and dispatch budget. So, we knew exactly what dispatch cost us. Um, when we did the evaluation in terms of what we were going to charge Beverly Hills for that, it was based on a percentage. So, we looked at all our calls for service, all the number of calls coming into our dispatch center. And when we looked at the total calls between Birmingham and Beverly Hills, they represent about 40% of our calls. So, they fa they pay 40% of the total cost of dispatch. And that's done every year.

It's simple based on calls. It's that simple. Yep. Yep. Um and lastly, I just quick note in the capital projects fund, you'll note the two projects in there for the next fiscal year, which is the Sallyport and the dispatch center. The Sally Port is budgeted at 700,000 and the dispatch expansion at $200,000 in the capital improvements, which is I will note is on our but our agenda for Monday night. Correct. The designs are on there. Um as well as the expenditure request for the funds that are already budgeted in this current fiscal year. So, we're moving forward one piece at a time. Any questions for Chief Guru? Commissioner Hey.

Yeah. Um, so when I look at the vehicle replacement schedule, there's some police vehicles in there that you talked about. I remember we bought and it was interesting. There's a classification in the other departments for such and such vehicle hybrid. Such and such vehicle hybrid. I remember one of the last Explorers we bought was a hybrid. And I think it was availability of vehicles at the time because none of these are called out as that. Did that experiment not work out as we hoped?

Um, no. It has worked. It's been a reliable vehicle for us. Um, we rely on DPS and for them to give us a report from their maintenance garage to tell us how the vehicles are working out for us, how much they come in for maintenance, what the maintenance cost is on it. Um, certainly when we get to the point where we're going to purchase those vehicles, that will be something taken into consideration to see what's available, what the overall cost is. One of the most recent discussions we had with the maintenance garage was our Taho. Um, they're becoming a pretty high maintenance cost based on engine issues and that we are actually going this week to look at the Ford Expedition as a replacement. Those motors, from my understanding, are the same ones that are in our Explorers, which have been extremely reliable. So, we may be making that switch in the future based on recommendations from the maintenance garage.

Okay. All right. I was just curious because there was the flag and no flag. Right. Right. That's fine. Thank you. Other questions? Commissioner Kazinski? Um, I have a couple questions. The first was sort of I don't know about the trying to understand the if there is sort of a a management hierarchy. I don't know anything about how the how the ranks work and stuff. Um, is there some some kind of relationship between how many captains to how many lieutenants to how many sergeants to how many officers that we're trying to maintain? Or is sergeant just like, well, if you've been an officer for long enough, it's sort of a promotion. Could you explain that?

So, in order to pro for your first promotion, in order to promote to a sergeant, you have to have at least four years on the job. I'm sorry. You have to at least one year on the job to be eligible to test for that. Um, once you achieve the rank of sergeant, you're then eligible to test for the rank of lieutenant. So, you have to have the previous rank to test for the next rank. That testing procedure consists of a written test, an oral interview, your service ratings, um, all go into that. Can I answer your question?

But I is there sort of like a management thing where if you are a lieutenant then you have a certain number, right? Because I'm in the corporate world, it's like there's always these sort of pyramidal hierarchies. And I don't know if that's what's going on here or if it's like no, not really. It has to do with some seniority and um like you said, you do some kind of tests, you possess certain skills or something or if it is like no, each lieutenant is responsible for some number of officers or something like that. So each captain oversees a function of the police department. One is over uh start at the top and explain it down. So there's the police chief, there's the chief, there's the chief, and then there's three captains. You want to pull the hierarchy up on the screen to make it easier for everybody to view it because it it is shown in there, but a visual is going to help with an explanation.

There you go. That's the one I was thinking of. There you go, Alex. They want the police. Yeah, it's up there. It's up there. We got it.

Oh, never mind. So, so as you as you can see here, there's the chief of police and then there's the three captains that oversee each division of the department. So, um the first one on the left there is your investigative division that's run by the captain. He oversees the entire investigative division obviously, which includes the detectives that we here have on site as well as the three that are assigned out to um the special investigations units, the F FBI financial crimes task force, um our narcotics investigator, and our school resource officer all report to the captain. Um, and then we have our operations division, which is the captain over all of patrol. So, essentially everybody you see in uniform reports to him. So, your lieutenants report to him. He's over all the patrol functions as well as over our auxiliary unit, uh, which is our volunteer police department that works with a lot of the high school events, a lot of the special events, dream crews, stuff like that that support our staff. And then you have the services captain who oversees our dispatch operations, um, parking enforcement, and all of our behind the scenes. He's the person that's outfitting vehicles, purchasing vehicles, um camera systems, evidence. He does all our uh long-term evidence, storage, maintenance. Um so that's how it's broken down. And then within the operating division, you have that's where all your other ranks are. So you have the four lieutenants. Each lieutenant is over uh one platoon. We have four platoon because we're on 12-hour shifts. So that's why you see it one lieutenant and one sergeant for each platoon. And then each platoon has four officers assigned to each platoon. And that's your 16 officers. Great. And so

break it down. Yeah. So, so where do the where do the sergeants fit in here? Are they There's one sergeant per platoon on the road, but then also our school resource officer is a sergeant position as well as our detectives. The two detectives that are here in the building are sergeant positions as well. Okay. So, one lieutenant and one sergeant, per platoon. Per platoon. Great. Thank you. Yep. You can ride with them if you want. You can intend to. And we encourage them. I invented. Okay. Any other questions for uh Chief G? Nope. Good. Uh let's move on to Chief Bartalino. Do you have a question from We'll take that. We're going to do public safety all at once.

Hello. Mino, fire chief B. Um as you have in front of you, you can see the fire department's budget. Um we're looking at % increase. Uh I wanted to go over a couple things just to clarify because there's a lot of mention of ladder one replacement ladder one equipment for that. Um we did stagger out the the purchasing of equipment to replace that just for um didn't want stuff that expires to be purchased early. So it was a three-year build on on this truck. Uh trying to piece meal the equipment that it'll need to be fully functional when it shows up. So, some of the things were purchased earlier at a cost savings, saws and whatnot that'll last. Uh hose and the kind of things that'll expire have a 10-year uh expiration date for some of the stuff. We're going to hold off on buying those uh till closer to its arrival. So, that's why there's some of those things split up on there. Um, another significant thing for the fire department is um, under under other contractual services, um, Striker is our provider for all of our EMS equipment. Basically, power loaders, power CS, or stair chairs, light packs, Lucas. Um, so we have all these equipment. We get Proare contracts every time we buy the equipment. It covers all the repairs necessary for it. The stuff's pretty expensive. The issue was we have eight different contracts that all expired at different times. Um equipment that was peacemealed over time that we would have replaced anyway. So they came they brought us something kind of late in the budget um timing for us of this offer for putting everything under one umbrella. So this this bigger increase is is shown it's for equipment we would have asked for anyway over the life of this contract. If we had not agreed to or looking to agree to this uh you would have saw a couple more proposals from me for life pack replacements which are to the tune of $55 $60,000 a piece. Um what this agreement does is puts all the

ProAre contract coverages all under one umbrella. replaces all of our equipment all at once. Um to the tune of saving almost $250,000 over the course of the contract. Um which helps both of us for managing these, you know, multiple contracts and and expiring equipment that falls off in between uh budget periods and whatnot. So it's just a a cleaner approach for us. So that's probably one of the biggest things you'll see for for us in all these notes here. Um, just want to mention that we we do have for um equipment under 5,000. We still have money left. We were awarded a uh gear grant. It's a um from the state of Michigan. It's a reimbursement grant. So, we were still planning on making the purchases anyway. So, at least another $30,000 of those purchases this year will be coming back from re reimbursements for that. And then we have a capital um purchase this year for our SEBA equipment. Um, some of the decreases that you saw in the other contractual services also is from our original plan was going to be to peacemeal SCBA replacements because all of our equipment was expiring this coming year. Um, and we weren't sure if it was beneficial or not not for us to piece meal that stuff instead of doing a one lump purchase from before if we didn't get the grant. Thankfully, we were awarded a FEMA grant at the end of last year that we'll use for this upcoming fiscal year for purchases and be able to purchase the replace the entire set of SUV equipment for the department um and receive approximately like $265,000 in reimbursements for that at a cost of probably about $100,000 out of our pocket to make up the difference for for the cost of equipment to replace, you know, apples for apples for what we currently currently have. Um those are the major things for the fire department

budget. Um emergency management budgets much simpler. Um pretty small budget. Uh we did have just basically what dropped off was the expected cost for replacing. We keep emergency food for police, fire, DPS in case you know sim similar situation to like the blackout happens and we can't get food anywhere and we have to keep everybody fed while we're running operations 24/7. So, um, we've always kept a stash of that. We had stuff that was expiring. We did the initial pull based on what we currently had. We just did some extra research. We found some stuff that was a little more it is cheaper basically. Um, and it lasted longer. So, we don't expect to spend the money that was allocated for that. And we won't have those costs because, you know, we have food that's down there that in theory should last, you know, up to 20 years. So, we won't be looking to replace that. some of the stuff that we had before. We had like a 7-year um stash from before and I'm certain that was what what caused the cost increases for that for what they were providing. But for what it actually ends up needing to be used for, it's kind of like it's an emergency stash, you know, we don't have to have any five star meals for for time to keep people fed. So, um that's basically it for the emergency management notes. Nothing nothing other significant for that pretty big reduction in that that budget overall. Uh, city manager,

I just want to add one thing and and to your point, I think it was Commissioner Heg that you said, "Well, can you come up with ideas to save money as you're you're going through the budget process?" This is an perfect example of when this happened. Chief Bartalino came to his manager meeting on the budget and said, "You know what? I didn't put this in, but I've been doing my research. I found that I can save $200,000 over the next three years if I do this contract and it's more money this year, but it saves us money over the three-year period and and it also works better and it provides us with more reliable equipment and saved us money. So, that was an example of the discussion that we do they do come up. You don't necessarily hear about that. I mean, that's a net present value calculation. That's fine.

Yeah. And we didn't change the amount. We just stuck with what we originally had set aside for Striker for what we had. We didn't we went in just this budget's number. So that's why you saw a small like 33,000 for that and then it jumps, you know, $100,000 after that. But that's because we didn't we only had them prorate after this year cuz I'm like we have our number set already. I'm not going back to try to redo that to get this approved. And so that's it for

Hey, questions for Chief Bartel. Yeah, just a quick follow up on that. Um, so obviously thank you very much. We're we're all in favor of saving hundreds of thousands of dollars while getting better stuff. Um, but is this going to be like so now instead of having this sort of drip drip drip of costs every 3 years, 5 years, 10 years? Is there some schedule on which we can expect to see this kind of cost? What we'll end up having is we'll own everything at the end of the contract and we'll only have to negotiate the the ProAre contract itself for whatever gap of time we want to after that. I'm assuming probably at least another 5 years for like the general life of the life tax and stuff like that. So I would assume a much lower cost because none of the cost of equipment is included in that. It'll just be their their procare coverage, which we were paying around like 25,000 each year for just those for individual ones because the stair chairs don't have one. They're they're the cheapest thing. But the the power loaders, the power CS, the life pack, and the Lucas, those all had the the Proare coverage because that saved us money overall. Anyway, if we paid all the cart for these repairs, we would be paying double or triple what we what we do by just making the agreement up front.

Extend. Thank you. Commissioner Host. Uh two two questions, Chief. Uh one is uh has the emergency calls gone up and then uh what is the percentage that are from our assisted living facilities?

Um so we analyze the I'll answer the second question first. We analyze those numbers probably five years ago when our three senior centers were were running about a quarter of our calls overall. Since then, we've had discussions with trying to eliminate most of them, a significant amount of them were lift assist calls. So, we've gone out, we've used our community risk reduction people to do some education. We've had some discussions with their executive management on on offering tools for them to get people in there to do it. I know it's dropped at least 5% last year when we looked at it. I have not looked at it recently. We we saw the trends come I mean way back. You could feel the trends go down on the amount of times that we go to the same places over and over. So when we did it a year ago, it looked right. Um but we still do outreach to them to try to help prevent those things. Even as simple as getting, you know, the community risk reduction position that we added a couple years ago was huge because the amount of public fire education that we get going is is increased probably 10fold. And Jessica's in there every day trying to get time with the seniors as groups like to just get them to understand the preventions that they can take so they don't have to call us as much. Eliminating trip hazards and whatnot. um having discussions about stuff that might be causing um you know careless cook issues and stuff like that. Um overall surprising that you asked this year. This year our run volume went down by about 100 calls. Uh I couldn't tell you why that happened. Um we were trending for probably the last 12 years at about a 5 to 7% increase pretty consistently every year. And for some reason 2025 saw a little bit of reduction. Maybe it was our fault. We, you know, educated so many people that

they didn't have the calls for it. I I don't know what I couldn't explain that, but we'll see what next year holds if that's a oneoff or whatever. And believe it or not, our roads are becoming safer. The fatalities in on roads are down 6.7% in the last year. That could affect everybody could take credit for it. I I don't how many analyzing taking your credit. You can have your credit too. Yeah. Within our boundaries is that in the US as a whole. Okay. Okay. Answer it for you.

Any other questions? Okay. I never pass up an opportunity to point out that the Birmingham Fire Department has the quickest response time average in the state of Michigan and one of the best response times in the country. It's 2 minutes and 59 seconds. So, uh, that's amazing. What is that 2 minutes and 59 seconds? Is that the time from the 911 call to the arrival? That's the co that's the time from when the fire department gets the call to when we arrive to when you So overall response time dispatch usually gets stuff to us within 60 seconds.

Okay. So for a total response time um for the 911 system it's probably about a minute higher than that. But for our response from the time the call comes to us till our trucks are on scene that that is our response time. And that is amazing. And congratulations. And I want to see it. Two minutes and 58 seconds. We can try that. The these trucks are not getting too much smaller. The streets are a little bit um but we find our way and and we'll get there. So, I'm not the same. All right. And now we move on to building. Thank you. Thanks.

Thanks. Good morning. Uh Jeff Zilki, building official here at the city. From last year's budget to this year's budget, really not no significant change. Really just here to answer any questions you may have. Wow. Love it. Short and sweet, right? Any questions? Uh we are not spending any more or less on code enforcement?

No, everything's really much pretty much the same. There's a little bit with McKenna. There's a little bit of dip. It's that's kind of being the third party. It's kind of a judgment call. What's coming in? What's the need for having additional help uh for support and this year is kind of a kind of a gamble what projects were coming in. So it's um a little bit reduced from last year. Um, so for the commission and the public, can you just review quickly what McKenna does? So, McKenna provides us with building inspection services. So, when we have larger scale projects, we need the more demand to have that service. We rely on them, bring them in to be able to service the uh the ten the homeowners, the tenants, the contractors. It's

private contractor. We're privatizing that and bringing it in so that we don't have that overhead cost of the person. And it's an example of one of the places where we do that. Miss Jay, I'm sorry. U building the building official was just talking about McKenna and how we they're private contractor that we they contract with to to save money and to be able to fluctuate with demand and not have, you know, five people on staff all the time when we might need five sometimes and might only need two.

No, Jan, I understand. I mean I don't want to get confused with contracted services and and what I was talking about contracting out things like administrative so I mean those are on facing services right like you said you can do it temporarily but I was looking at more internal operations uh okay yes please please um for the there's like a line item one on these tables about total uh rental dwelling unit inspections does does every rental unit get one inspection per year. Is this like a good proxy for how many rental dwelling units there are in the city or so do you do more or less sometimes? How does that work out?

I guess it depends on how many violations how they don't correct it. Um so the way the rental works uh the agreement gets renewed every year. It's by annual inspection. So every other year it gets inspected. Depends on the violations and depends on how the number of times they come out. That's a work in progress to actually kind of put a little bit more hard stop to get them to correct the things prior. So hopefully it's probably going to be one or two inspections when they go on and their bannual inspection. Okay. So hopefully So the short answer is no. It's not a good proxy. But it sounds it sounds like everybody's going to get one every two years. If you're doing a good job, that's all that you get. If you're not doing a good job, you're going to get more.

Yeah. And a lot of it's like it's simple things that need to be correct and we go back out and check on it. Great. Thank you. No problem. Any other budget questions for building department commissioner host? Yeah. Um Jeff, uh the contractual services of McKenna are going down. What do you attribute that to?

Um it was based on the need the larger scale projects. It seemed like it was going down a little bit. So the need for it wasn't as required. And that's where it was kind of what's coming up in the next year. and seems like there's not as much of a need cuz 707's done and it just seems like that's kind of dropping down the need to have them here all the time. So that's kind of kind of a crystal ball what's coming up and kind of going on and seeing the need going down a little bit with the large scale projects 707 being RH what's that did you say? Oh development in the triangle district the apartment. Got it. Okay. Adams and then same with RH with RH and that one RAN. So those two kind of brought it down a little bit.

Okay. Any other questions from the commission for the building department? Okay. We can take public comment. If you're online, use the raise your hand function. If you're room in the room, approach the microphone. Uh, address your questions or comments to the chair.

Hello. Good morning again. David Bloom, Birmingham resident. I did some calculations during this meeting on the fly. Perhaps I made a mistake or so just please keep that in mind. I looked at the police overall budget and between 2026 and 2029 there was a 16% increase in the budget. Within that there was a there was a about a 16% increase forecast over the next few years for personnel service for for for wages. But the fringe benefits I were going up by 34% if I saw that correctly. I didn't I didn't understand that. And then I want to contrast that with the numbers I ran for the fire department. Their overall budget for the same period was going up 6.4% with a 3.7% increase in wages. So there seems to be I don't know if unions are involved in any of this or anything contracts.

I think I understand the question. Yeah. Okay. Chief, can you uh address that question? Do you understand the question? Yes. Uh and I think it largely is due to contracts. The police department just settled a contract last year. So they're in contract for the next three years. The fire department is scheduled to negotiate this coming year if I understand correctly. I think you walked out. So there would be no wage increases scheduled for them because it's unknown at this time. So I think that's largely in part why you see that. Okay. A lot. Okay. Anyone else from the public?

Um hi Deborah her Pine Street here in Birmingham. Um, Chief Barolino uh checked name checked that we had some cost coverage from FEMA grants and then grants from the state of Michigan. Do you know how they go about pursuing those grants? Like did they just get information that grants are available and pursue them or does is there like a systematized approach to searching for that kind of cost coverage? No, it's not as systematized as as we would hope, but we do go out and look for all of these opportunities. And the the self the SBCA, the the self breathing equipment, they applied five or six years in a row and they were just consistently persistent about dogging that money and we finally got it. So, it yeah, they do go out and look for what's out there. There are a couple of systems out there that you can sign up for. Well, that's I'm sure what you're alluding to. So, we use those from time to time, but we don't we don't have anybody that sits and is dedicated to looking for grant.

Great. Because it did sound he was very excited about having that FEMA money and having that. Yes, he's very he personally wrote that grant five years in a row. Right. Right. Okay. Great. That's I was just wondering how kind of what the the approach is for looking for those things. So, it is up to the department heads

uh for those types of things. Now, for some of the federal and state folks that reach out, they have um you can put in budget, you can put in requests for funding every year, and those come in through the manager's office, and then we reach out to the different departments and say, "Well, what about this road project that's coming up or what about um you need new CS in the fire department, like medical structures or what have you?" And we put in those requests. So, that's how we got say the 1.2 2 million for the senior center at 400 East Lincoln here in the last year. So there's different ways we there are some that are handled through the manager's office and some that we rely on the individual departments and then as we get blasts from say SEMCOG, oh there's these grants available and then between the departments and the management will say okay we think we have a good chance of getting that let's go for it. DPS also does a fabulous job of looking for grant money out there through the DNR and such for parks and improvements.

Any other questions for public safety? Okay. Uh is there any the the schedule says that we have a break? We're doing pretty well. We're 15 minutes behind schedule. Take a break. Mhm. Okay, we're going to take a five minute break. Load up on coffee and goodies.

have to go. It says this meeting is being recorded. Oh, it does say in recess. Okay, we're going to come back and we're back in session. Uh and we're moving on to uh public works engineering. Miss Cota, good morning. Hi, city commission. We missed you at the last meeting. Yes, sorry. Have your hands full. No, no apologies necessary.

Family family emergencies. Uh, needless to say, uh, so for brought forward to you right now is, uh, the engineering department. Um, the biggest change for this one is, uh, currently we have a part-time administrative that we share with the planning department. So, half of planning department, half with engineering department. Um, with this, we're proposing to replace it with a full-time um, employee and that title being engineering, public relations, and asset manager. So that person would do more of the relations of kind of what we call non-engineering items. So communications with residents about the projects um and then also to help us with our capital improvement program, organizing it, presenting um information to the general public. So that's that position. And then also um we're requesting another uh construction engineer um due to the workload that we're seeing with um capital improvement that obviously increasing within the city but also too we're seeing um with the commercial and private development occurring um slight increases in there too for the as a whole is what the engineering department does. We're requesting um an additional person in that uh in that for the budget. And then also just want to give you information um for other contractual services. Um you see projected an increase for the end of this fiscal year. Um under that other contractual services is what we use for our site evaluations for single family homes. With that we did see an increase like in July August time frame from what we saw previously. Um so that increase is just due for the site evaluations done on single family homes. We collect fees on that through our engineering plan review fees. So you'll see the essentially it's net zero across but it is an increase of what's being projected for this year. And for up next is the sidewalk construction and maintenance project. Um this account has um our annual concrete repair program for sidewalks and our side our sidewalk gap closure program that occurs annually. And then for under the other contractual services with that

location that's our annual trip hazard elimination program. Um what you see going forward is the cost essentially has decreased um because we've actually made it in through all the locations and the areas in the city's um map. So now we're restarting again from approximately 7 years ago. So that's why you see a decrease probably because there's going to be less work occurring just because we've already done this program um once within the city. And next account um up is alley and construction maintenance. Um with this we have an um annual request of $40,000 to do the m maintenance of the alleys. Um this is the alleys throughout the whole entire city. Um so either the alley maintenance happens where we do uh repave do a milllay on an ashall alley or maybe do concrete spot repairs on a concrete alley or also to if we need to do joint or crack ceilings on the alleys that the city owns. Uh next account is the fiber optic system. Um with this one proposed is a $5,000 budget for next year. That's just essentially um if anything, it's a newer system for the fiber optic that got built with the downtown projects over the past seven to eight years. And this is just for in case any maintenance comes up of you have to replace a casting, need to adjust a structure, etc. Um to be able to do any maintenance on that system. And then the final one is the uh street lighting um budget. Um with this one you'll see a decrease because we're um the past few years we've had a a SIM card grant to be able to convert uh our uh light fixtures to LEDs. Um so you'll see that drop off in this fiscal year with that. And then the numbers u going forward is just the annual maintenance that we see for uh light fixtures, the equipment itself or the poles etc that um need to get replaced um with an annual maintenance itself. Uh, hold on. Any questions for Miss

Commissioner Host? Um, Melissa, uh, you only have been working on the infrastructure plan for uh, the next 5 years. Has uh anyone directed you uh to look at much longer term like 10 or 15 years in the planning? No, not past not past 5 years. Okay. Well, thank you. Any other questions?

Um could I get a sort of primer on sidewalk funding? My understanding is that sometimes there at least sometimes there's special assessments for sidewalk things. Um is that part of the revenue that would go to offset these expenditures or uh is that a question you should answer?

Go ahead. Okay. So with that, if a sidewalk doesn't currently exist and a new one gets constructed there, there's a special assessment to be able to build the sidewalk initially. Um, going forward, most of the time the city does the repairs to crack panels or uh heave slabs in the sidewalk system. Um, the only exception would be if something on a private side of a property affects the sidewalk that's in the public, then the person can get special assessed. Um, with that could be a tree on private property that has heaved up the sidewalk or if a private property has damaged a sidewalk panel and we've got documentation of it, they can get special assess for that. Um, okay. Isn't it do that we get assessed if a city tree cracks it though? No.

No. I thought we did. Commissioner Cole, quick question. It ultimately shows up in the budget somewhere. But for example, they just were laying fiber cable, I think, in front of Restoration Hardware. Had to dig up all the the street that the concrete they just poured. It seems like when that was not poured, they should have run it rather than cut up our our sidewalks. Is that something we can avoid in future?

So we do have t uh talks with the third party utilities including 123 net. What happened there was actually the service for the RH RH building itself. Um so there's discussion with 123 net to try to coordinate if they're providing service to a new building to coordinate it while the private property is finishing the construction in the public right away. Okay. Thank you. And I believe RH did cover the cost of the sidewalk and essentially if a utility company does um any uh removal of sidewalk, roadway, etc., it's at their cost, the utilities cost to do the uh replacement of the sidewalk, roadway um that they needed to remove and replace as part of their project. Okay, great. Thank you.

And may I add the other thing is we do try to work with all the utilities, but we don't have much control over them because essentially they have the right to do this. So, we try to work with them to collaborate and do it in the right time frame. It doesn't always work. Okay. I would like a an explanation of the street lighting utility of roughly $675,000 a year. Is that is there an is there an a revenue offset to that? Okay. What is it? What is that money? What are you paying for street lighting? for the uh the electricity to make the street lights glow. Yes. Throughout the city.

And is that the at the same rate that uh any other rate payer would pay or is there some rate that's specific to street lights? There there is a rate that's specific to street lights depending on the type of fixture that it is. And that also includes DTE being responsible for coming out and fixing bulbs that are out and so on, which is sometimes challenging, but includes them serving sometimes challenging to get them out. Okay. But we're but in so I I have no way of evaluating whether this is a lot or a little or do do we do we they have us over a barrel? What's pretty much? Mhm.

That's all a lot of money. How come it doesn't go down when we get LEDs that are supposed to be more efficient? It just goes up every year. Where was where was this magical formula that we saved money? Because I've not seen it at home either. So the cost analysis that was done would have been for a rate run within the that current rate system since NDT has passed multiple rate increases which we see for our residential and commercial properties but we also see it in the street light rate also increase too. So with that, it's assuming it includes DTE's increases that they've passed currently and hopefully try to protect some in the future estimated correctly, but we don't know if that's going to be higher or not.

Allegedly, our our LED rate is lower than like if it was a sodium light or something. Um, but we do add lights, not a lot of them every year, but we do add them as people do developments. for instance, in the triangle district or the rail district and there's a development then that we require them to add additional street lights. So I'm cur I mean I hate to belabor this so actually I want to belabor it. We're not paying to light Woodward, are we? That's a state road. So So the state is paying for the big So what are we paying for? We're paying for street lights. Uh uh in the downtown certainly intersection Adams Adams is lit or no Lincoln lit. No.

Well intersection every every major intersection is do we know how many street lights this covers? If you look in Monday's packet where there is this which I just reviewed yesterday. There is a street light item to finish the final phase of the LED replacement of the street lights. And there is a map of every single light. And it is astounding how many lights there are. There's probably 20 pages showing placement of lights. There are a lot of them. I don't And they're out in the neighborhoods. They're everywhere. Yeah. So you get them in the neighborhoods of hypothetically on Lincoln at each of the intersections of those side streets. You get one. Sometimes you get it in mid block of you go from Lincoln to Brown.

Not just the decorative ones. No, I get that. But who decides whether there should be a street light there or not? Well, we do get petitions from people every now and again. For the most part, they're there because we're a builtup community, but every once in a while, we'll get a petition from someone who will ask for it. DT will go out and analyze it. We'll get involved. I think sometimes they ask that they be removed as well, right? Like it's shining in my eyes. Get rid of it. So, we don't hear that very often. We more hear ad. And is this an actual metered amount so that if a light or lights are not illuminated because the bulb blew or whatever?

I don't know all the intricacies. I my I think and I'm not 100% sure that we get charged an amount based on the type of light and the number of lights and the amount of hours that they're on. So I think and I don't want to say this for sure that if the bulb is out we're still getting charged. And have we ever audited this in some way to to is it even possible to audit it and and and maybe dispute or appeal the amount because we think it ought to be this is a lot of money over 10 years. This is $6 million. It's fairly easy to figure out the consumption on each one. You don't even have to do you can literally do a clampon meter which would give you for one light.

You measure it for that one light multiply by the total there's your number. That'll give you an average consumption of all of them. No, it's not going to be Well, but I mean even even there must be an agreement or some legal document that says here's how we charge you for this stuff. Right now, let's just make sure that the numbers they're giving match up with what we know to be the truth. We can do that. It would be it would be quite a lot of work, but we could we could do that and probably should do that, especially as we're transferring more and more of them over to the LEDs. I can tell you once every 10 years at least.

I can tell you like 10 years ago, maybe it was earlier than that, maybe it was about 15 years ago, I I remember having DTE in here saying, "Look, why can't we get all of these converted over to LEDs and save energy and save money?" And they just looked at me like, "We don't do that." So it's it's very it's a very slow moving that's a monopoly answer. So my my question to you is so you if I understood you correctly in this let's use 2025 in the 631 DT that's our bill to DTE and included in that is their maintenance yet there's a second line item where we paid 21,000 business

for the central business district maintenance. Well, maintenance is is first of all, I'm talking about changing the light bulbs first of all. Maintenance downtown if somebody if a light post gets hit, that's a separate thing and we pay for that and Right. That could be light. Right. Right. And they're custom fixtures. They cost more money. Okay. The $21,000 that also includes supplies to have on on hand at the DPS yard in case someone does hit a post. Then we've got the replacement part for DT to be able to install it. Okay. Thank you. Do we have to buy the electricity from DTU or can we buy it from consumers and at least get two monopolies to quote us? Can we create it ourselves? I will have to look into that.

Yeah. Solar panels on the roof. Well, you funny you say that. I suggested that to city managers ago that why don't we put solar panels on top of every single parking deck and just self-elilluminate because there's enough surface area for us to do that. Kilowatt hours is enough. We're talking about doing that as part of the sustainability plan and looking at putting it on city uh buildings. Self-unding as far as the electricity generation, not self-unding for the the capital investment. True. Correct. Electricity generation, you can create a non-grid tight system. I mean, there aren't many line items in the budget that are this beefy, right? For some is Well, that's beefy without accountability,

right? beefy without accountability. Absolutely. Right. It's the same thing as at home with it with them always increasing your rates. But we can look into that and see if we even can go out to bid, so to speak, for electricity. Also, the measurement's really easy. I mean, you can buy kits for your house for 200 bucks that will measure what you cons. Can we can actually just measure random lights and say, "Okay, a light in central business district or a light in a a residential lab because there probably different specs. This is what it should cost to run it for sun down or sun up."

And then there's multiple different lights. So, for instance, if a resident would call in, like I I'm trying to think of that the hotel that's on old or on Woodward just north of Maple, couple streets. Yeah, it's Holiday Inn. It's changed a few times. There was a resident back there who wanted a light back buted up to it. And so then you you never know what they're going to put. All of a sudden DTE comes in and they put this hideous very bright flood light. Yeah. And so there's all different lights like that. And then there's the intersection lights that are different types and then there's the street lights. So we would have to go around and it would take some time. It could be done.

And this is under engineering because there's some amount of uh work involved in in in deal dealing with DTE. Yes. Okay. Okay. Any other questions for Miss Cota? Uh Mr. Zalinski.

Good morning. So, starting with our general budget, um, our notables, uh, we've been working very heavily with AT&T to decrease our telephone costs, as you can see, down 57 thou, uh,%. Our electricity uh, has gone up a bit in costs tied to a lot of things we can't control like increased energy costs. uh same you see increase in our gas utility for the same general reason. Um our building costs we are in the process of replacing extremely old overhead doors and you will consider continue to see this item going across year-over-year as we've spread this cost out over time to keep replacing them. Basically starting with the worst first and going from there. Um, going on to property maintenance, basically we have an increase on operating supplies tied to a lot of the 250th celebration. Most notably is a major tree purchase for in the parks tied to that um equipment lease and rental. This is tied more to we have done an audit in the department for all the work our garage does across the entire city. We actually found that our own department was the one putting the least amount of money into that. And so that those costs are representative of actual work done on vehicles. the cost to replace vehicles over the lifetime. So that we're managing these funds directly vehicle basically by vehicle across the entire department requires a couple times a year because we're continually putting our costs into our tracking system where we just audit through make sure every department's paying their fair share basically for the services we provide including everything through replacement of vehicles and it hit us

the most. That's what we caught in the audit. So, uh, cemetery management maintenance. We don't really know any major changes here, but really part of, uh, the real cost changes are finishing off, uh, some of the work with the, um, we've got maintenance shut out there that we took care of. Uh, that's basically it for that. We're back to what we would consider routine maintenance out at the cemetery. and then weed and snow enforcement page 136.

Yeah, I was going to say it's a pass through cost that we've been working on. That's why there's no notes with it. uh where we basically have a contractor who when we receive from ordinance notes of complaints of properties not maintaining their property, we send them out. They get charged for the actual cost of having them go through. It's a set fee based off of what they've say the charge is per property.

Does that fee escalate if there's multiple times of the season? Uh no, it is set to be that the there's a we basically have rates depending on specific lot frontage and we get charged that set amount by our contractor and we pass that through. Basically, it's we have agreed upon rates based on lot size and it keeps it simple, makes invoicing a lot easier, all that as opposed to trying to keep track of has this property done like x number of issues, that type of thing. Okay, other questions? Uh, telephone is that mobile phones?

No, that's the actual like phone system. Uh yeah, landlines. We've eliminated a bunch and basically did some major negotiating with them for So this is something it does not deal with. It is not it is his phone system separate from your phone system here.

The network is connected. The lines of like basically into our buildings for lack of a better way of describing this are ours. And I have like it kind of is across all of my buildings. It's not just one. It's just handled by my department's main budget. So is it involved at all in advising him as to the uh lowerc cost alternatives to AT&T which are manifold? So that's how we got a lot of our our cuts were going to AT&T and saying, "Hey, we know we'd have upfront ch costs if we switched to this."

I'm sorry, that's not my question. I don't mean to. I asked if it was involved in helping them understand the lowerc cost alternatives to AT&T. Anything that AT&T offers? I I don't know the answer to that specific question. I do know that it is involved in the phone systems throughout the city. Um that have they had that discussion? I don't know. Okay. Maybe a better quantification. Why why does each department handle it? Just why is not phones under umbrella?

That's I mean it's $20,000 a year that probably doesn't need to be spent. I mean, we're talking you can get landline type voice over IP provided you have the right devices uh which are not expensive at for like literally pennies question. I'll send you a couple links.

Yes, sir. Um, so I was having some So on page 131, um, at the bottom of the 2627 there's this like 16.6 million number. Um, and I was just having trouble like I I can see I mean I was just having trouble cobbling it together generally. Um, it's, you know, overall DPS budget excluding capital is 16 million. and I felt like that didn't match up with what's in the the general fund expenditures. Um it's not like a sum of the numbers above it. Where does that 16 million number come from? So DPS is spread across all departments, a lot of enterprise funds, um a lot of the French benefits, for example, you can see them up. This is an accounting entry that we do year end. And so we just wanted to show a full picture of the cost across all all different departments the DPS touches. And so it's inflated um because we have to report it for transparency purposes. So it's really not driven by the charges. It's mainly like an accounting update of the long-term retire obligations. So if you take a look at the French benefits.

So it's not a total. It's not a total. Sorry, I'm I'm still I'm still lost. So, what is that number? So, every year we have to adjust for our for the liability on the books. So, we for transparency purposes, we decided to generate this chart. So, you can see how the cost for DPS allocate to other departments and other funds. DPS helps the Birmingham Shopping District. They they subcontract with DTS DPS to do street cleaning. The chart I'm talking about on page 131. Are we looking at the same page? Yeah, you're talking about something cuz I don't I see salaries and wages.

So I see the fringe I see fringe benefits but I assume that was four DPS employees. So we have like 4 million, 2 million, 1.4 million, you know, 300 grand and then boom, we're at 16.6. Yeah. And I'm saying it's not clear to me, you know, I've looked at other tables. I've been trying to reconcile where we get to this number and I'm having a hard time. It in Okay, it in so it includes the forestry, the lawn maintenance, the snow and ice remover, and then the overall DPS budget. Numerically, it doesn't sum. What he's saying is 4 plus 2+ 1 plus2 plus.1 does not equal 16. How do you get to 16? Because I don't understand that either. Okay.

Oh, so you see what he's saying. He's saying that these don't add up to that. That's what we're stuck with. We don't understand where 16 million is broken out. Yeah. Is this like just a different number? It's not related to those other numbers. Is there other stuff? Are these all components? But there's other components that aren't broken out. These are I think that's the answer that there's other components, supplies and other things.

I I actually can pretty much answer this. That is a shot of my that line is a shot of my entire department budget. But what you're going to see is I come back up here three more times in different sections of the city budget. And so there is not one true you there is not I don't have the hold on those accounts. Those are tied to as they're trying to indicate engineering BSD. We do stuff with police. We do stuff with fire. the total cross charges to other department. It is basically saying that is the realistic shot of my department and what my department actually.

So this is sort of a this is the scope of DPS activities. This is this is not like sort of an expenditure number. Exactly. Because a lot of this is going to show up as you said in other departments charging or DTS will charge other departments for various kinds of services. Correct. And this is sort of the magnitude of what DPS does as a whole.

Okay. So whereas if if I was to look into like general fund public works 6.1 million, that's just like well here's what we pay in salaries and this and that and the other. Those are sort of the direct costs that DPS incurs. This includes charges from other or charges to other departments for the work. So is is it then the net of expenses and revenue for those charge crosscharging

because it says overall DPS budget. So the way I read it with the with the correlation of everything else that's in effect an expense. It's not a revenue to the department. That's the total expense of the department, but we don't understand how the expense is constructed with the revenues from crosscharging because I think that's where he's coming from. I'm still a little confused here, but what one one thing I'll say about all of this in general, you go into terrific detail as far as budget for what the expenses are per budget. I truly don't understand how those expenses are funded as far as a revenue block for every single one of these because you got great detail, but I'm sorry that it kind of comes up on yours. It's just it's

such a lot of departments. Well, you also picked the short straw.

Um, but kind of think where Kevin's going and and and Bill, my understanding is just to pick the 16.6. Okay, the 16.6 goes out the door. Total total budget where's it funded? I don't see in each each year under the budget. Yeah, I want to spend $1,000. I have to I have to get the $1,000 from somewhere. Where do I get it from? This is the piece that is always very hard for me to understand in here is how we correlate the incoming and the outgoing because we always see the outgoing. The incoming is elsewhere, but you can't tie line item to line item. And it may be how you have to present it. And that's fine. That's not how we read it.

I'm I'm also just still confused. I'm still having trouble figuring out what this needs to be improved. I think the bottom line here, what we're talking about, this snapshot, um, we feel like we're looking at a corner of the snapshot. We're not even looking. You're not understanding. If you can, if I can just get a list of numbers that sum up to, you know, 16,614,690, I will be a happy camper. I I'm sure you I'm sure you can. is just not in here and I tried to kind of cobble it together and I failed. So, we'll get that assistance would be appreciated. Thank you. So,

you could look at it from different angles. So, the entire DPS budget regardless of which other departments are serviced or whatever and then break it out. Right. Right. And and and we have that detail literally person by person by person. This is it. Given the percentage of the budget that's represented by public services, these three pages just don't cut it. Don't make sense.

Yeah, they're not. Commissioner host Scott, uh, you probably had more water man and water breaks than you have in a couple of years. Uh, I' I'd like to know how many more or percentage-wise we've had this year, but I want to know uh where is the accounting for uh that Saturday and Sunday work to uh clean up the skating rink. I I mean I mean on the street. Oh, okay. I was like, what? Um

that wasn't meant to be a trick. So to to date, this this physical calendar year, we've had 23 main breaks. Um our average the last three years prior was between 25 and 30 breaks total for the year. For the year, we've had 23 so far. Correct. Correct. It was a very cold spring.

It is a tie back to the age of our infrastructure. We actually had of those 23 brakes, I think 21 of them were on 6-in cast iron 100-year-old main, which ties 100% to the age of the infrastructure. Um, basically when you're hitting that point, your pipes corroding to the point where when you get that heavy of a freeze and you have the shift in the soils, it's going to crack. We had crackarounds almost every single time that we found that just all ties to your infrastructure. My budget is directly impacted by engineering's budget. The more you invest in new stuff, the less I have to deal with those like shenanigans. Um, as far as how do we account for the budget, we do our best to estimate overtime each season. I'm pretty sure when we finish our fourth quarter numbers that you guys will be getting later, we're probably going to be asking for a budget amendment due to overtime. uh because it was an excessively heavy winter and that doesn't just include the main breaks, that's the snow emergencies we dealt with this year and they kind of layered each other um for a couple months. So I am I'm relatively sure when I get down to my final numbers I'm going to be having amendment tied to my overtime.

Um so where is that kind of stuff reflected in the packet we're looking at now? Is it any It's salary and wages direct. Yeah. For overtime. Well, you don't see it. Well, okay. So, is it possible that for our final budget approval like we could have an expanded section or are we looking at next year before we have the kind of reporting that we're

What are you looking for? You want a breakdown of how much is overtime versus how much is regular salary? I'm not going to try to say right now right here what we're looking for, but clearly these two pages aren't satisfying a majority of commissioners in terms of reporting. Am I correct? Okay. So maybe I did make note of maybe maybe you have a meeting with the two who are the who have that head three and put together Mary. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm happy to join in because it because it does make sense when you see the more detailed which we don't put all of that out or you'd have a binder this big. Yeah. And we do see actual to budget but it lags.

It lags. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think are we done with Mr. Zalinski? Uh hold the phone. We have uh Eric Brunk with his hand up. Um

Eric, it's probably about Hi. Hello. I wanted to I wanted to weigh in on the uh uh phone system question. Um then what they are working with are the uh legacy copper pot lines that go into each of the buildings. Our phone system is digital. Um and it does handle all the phone lines and phone system throughout the city. Um the legacy copper from AT&T um used to run through the DPS budget and I have been working with uh facilities manager to try to clear out as much of that as possible to get rid of what is no longer needed that we were still paying.

Thank you. Thank you. Ah okay. Um well that's a natural break for uh questions or comments from the public on public works engineering and uh DPS anyone sorry online raise your hand done good okay we can move on to health and welfare

okay health and welfare so the proposed 2627 healthware uh health welfare budget includes services for city residents. These such as the mental health corresponder of which uh 10,000 is for mental awareness app annual subscription and 126,000 for next. Um the change the decrease in the budget is due to other contractual services and um the prior year we show a reduction for design services and orers repres and owner's representation. Um that cost is no longer included in the fiscal year 27 recommended budget.

Thank you. Any questions from the commission? Commissioner Hayden. Uh under next uh it's less of a question for Mary more of a comment for the rest of us. We talked about that amount going away because we've got the burden now that's actually noted in several places the added burden of the maintenance of the building etc. So if we look at the total cost we've got 220 for the building 126 for this and for the next 3 years we've got the millillage which is about 1.3 million. So for the next three years, so I think your question is really clear. I I have the same question. Yeah. What do we do about this? Because

support for next circumstances, the annual support for next was discussed as something that might or would go away once they moved into the building or we got the building for them. So let's address that. Whether that's we're budgeting for it as if it's not going away or that it would change somehow as the interlocal agreement was adjusted. We are budgeting for it as if it remains because we do have an interlocal agreement in place. We can change that going forward but we haven't solidified that at this point and next has made a request as they do every year for that 126 which I think you'll see that in the packet for Monday. Yeah. And that would cover them till the time that they move in. Is that correct?

Correct. Yeah. Say it's also a timing issue because they're still at mid bill till May of 20. So we have some time to talk about that and I I definitely understand from some of your questions that that's something you want to discuss. It hasn't been clarified. It's been talked about, but right now we're in the interlocal agreement. We're paying that. We expect to pay it this year. It's in the budget going forward, but that can be changed in future years. Curiosity question, have any of the other communities that are in their interlocal agreements with Next upped their numbers yet, or are they all still sitting back waiting for us to carry it?

Uh, they are. They have not upped their numbers yet because we haven't had a new interlocal agreement, but we have had meetings. Assistant City Manager Clemens has met with each of the other communities as well as Chris Brown to make sure they understand that their contributions are going to have to go up. have to make, right? Because they still have one more year in their current location. Okay. So, it's something that is coming up in the next year. Thank you for the clarification.

Everybody else? Okay. Planning planning or community and economic development. Uh, let's give it let's let let's get through a couple of these and then

All right. Well, hey everybody. Nui, planning director. I think I'll I'll take notes from my colleague Jeff and be short here. I think what I hope you see in a budget like mine is that it's very project based. So year in year out, should I have a big project, my budget grows, they fall off the books rather quickly, and then I'm down. I'm down about 30% coming from last year to this year. That's because I've got the big zoning ordinance project coming off the books. I've got a rather large wayfinding project coming off the books. Well, two, frankly. Everything else year to year generally stays the same with me within a few percentage points. Uh Melissa Cota mentioned uh I thought I might reinforce that there is a technically a personnel change related to my department, the administrative assistant that they're dropping off. I'm still keeping my half, just the other half is now switching to IT. He's going to be a planning assistant and GI a planning and GIS assistant. So, no money changes for me, but if you noticed it, it is technically a personnel change. So, um other than that, I available for questions. I have a I might as well just ask it. Master plan implementation. You have a note uh related to 26 27 but it carries through all the way to 29 roughly 30 to $40,000 a year.

Mhm. Is that all for bike facilities, historic plaques and via signs or is that just Yes. How does that break out? In other words, you're planning to spend that amount each year? Yes. Now, eventually the via signs will drop off. I've still got quite a bit left and we're still building some alleys and passages that we'd like to sign. They cost about six grand a piece these via signs the V's that say right two Hamilton Row or two Pier Street. So that will eventually drop off but as we keep we keep building them. So I keep them in the budget for now and it's something we've had in the budget for uh since 2012. Um historic plaques that's unrelated to wayfinding, right? It is.

Okay. It's is it coordinated with the same coordinated with? Yes. Thank you, Janet. But it's not part of it's just one of the rare instances where you get involved in something some physical improvement, you know, usually that's engineering or Right. Yep. All right. Any other questions? Yes. Quick follow up there. Uh so what qualifies as like a bike facility here? Is this like the stuff on Eaten or? Yeah, predominantly bike racks and bike repair stations historically. Okay. Uh I think we would like to broaden that to maybe more ballards or different bike infrastructure, but uh undefined right now, but for now, bike racks and bike repair stations.

Cool. Thank you. And and continuing the followup, I mean, these are just like set aside money, $10,000 for uh historic plaques. That's a lot of historic plaques. 3,000. I h Is it 10,000? It might be 10. Forgive me. Yes. Because I'm trying to prep for the historic preservation master plan where we are trying to replace more of the plaques downtown and hopefully designate more properties. And there the brass ones are 4 to 600 range a piece. Um I see. Okay. Commissioner.

Yeah. Um real quick question, Nick, and it's looking forward to one of the points you just called out here, fiscal year 2829. You talk about transitioning 100% of plantings to native plantings. Is that is that funding that comes from you to DPS? Cuz Scott said how many pies his fingers are in for obvious reasons. It just seemed a little weird when I read. I know from the sustainability, yes, but it's just like, isn't DPS doing the actual work there? How does that tie in? Because it's clearly it's an ongoing activity. Can you can you point out what you're looking at?

Yeah. On page 143 in the paragraph fiscal year 2829, the last sentence including transitioning 100% of plantings to native plantings. That's a DPS activity that where does that fall with budget crossation should we say? Um to be open with you as I usually am I don't know that I thought that far. I I thought I think I probably just looked at our plans for that year and started listing off projects that we'll start. I don't know that I completely related it to our budget in that case because I I just assumed as it says transition 100% it was an on it was a completion of an ongoing activity in prior years. No, I agree with you that that would be a department specific budget for the DPS that we would just work with them on. Nothing in mind. Just clarification.

Yeah, fair enough. Thank you. It's a good one. Uh I would ask about uh one of the last items line items is public improvements capital under capital outlays. Yep. What are those numbers all about? Almost exclusively wayfinding signs and that's why they drop off so specifically in 28. I'm sorry. I I'm sorry. It's explained. Okay. Great. Okay. Any other questions? Yes. Commissioner Host,

um can you uh give me your impression of the ordinance uh zoning meeting of last Thursday night? I think it was well put on. Uh but it was it was rather thin but I think there was 10 people there potentially of the public but um I think we've been warned if you will that zoning isn't as exciting as something like a master plan. So I don't know that we expected a 50 60 person full house but I think in my opinion the people that came were probably satisfied with the conversations that they had.

Thank you. Okay. Parks and Recreation. We're gonna go one more. We're gonna get up to uh the next parks and rec and then or recreation and culture and then uh take questions from the public.

All right. Hello again. Sure. I'm in the right section of my notes. All right. So, significant changes to our budget amounts. Uh we have increase in f fringe benefits. Um and this is cost of medical insurance and retirement contributions. Uh our forestry services as you you'll see in a few other spots within the budget has an increase of 44,000 or 61% which is related to the planting of additional trees for that 250th. It gets spread across a few different budgets to make that adjustment. um printing and publishing. We have an increase representing uh just printing costs. It says 100% but it's just an item we've failed to I think have directly in the budget and we had it under a different way previously. Uh but we wanted to call it out. Land improvements budget of the 200,000 tied to a new pathways of Penrook Park is part of our playground infrastructure improvements. that was brought up that there's not um all the sidewalks around Pemrook that tie in. And so we're planning for that additional tie-in. Um public improvements budget of 87 and a half thousand for park signage. This is part of the city's continual uh improvements on the way finding. Uh we're trying to match our parks to the standard for the city and bring everything up to date. So that's something we've been holding off on as we've been developing the wayfinding and we're finally bringing it in.

Temporary restroom enclosures. We've got those in the budget. They just didn't show up as quite as significant. Uh case in point, Courton Lake, we intend to basically with budget uh approval July 1st, we intend to actually put one in at Courtton Lake. I know that's an area that has had historic requests for better enclosure for So this is something new. We we put out the portaotties. Now we're going to put something new to enclose them. Uh the the tasteful wood fence that pretty much hides it completely unless you're at a elevated elevation where you can see over the fence. That's the the goal.

And that's sort of a capital. That's a that's something we'll we'll we'll have we'll own. We'll Yes. Yes.

Those are in the areas where we're not ready to put in like a full bathroom facility in. Um moving on to the ice sports arena. Uh you'll see most of the stuff's tied to wages and bene and fringe benefits. Um, this includes like bringing on we now have a shared full-time position between the ice rink and the golf course. It's just showing the actuality of the overtime hours that have been tied in. That's the main part of that increase. Um, and then a water utilities. uh we're just anticipating an increase or a mark back uh to around 40,000 as a whole. So, it's correcting that. Um there's also other increase in costs we've seen in utilities as a whole and anticipating that. And then community activities, uh main items are operating supplies. We actually have a decrease of 22,000. Uh it ties more to the rollover of purchases from our holiday lights previously. We do have an increase for other contractual services of roughly 7,000 for uh additional costs for installing our holiday tree and reclassification of costs in our holiday lights. So there was adjustments in how we're billing those out. um equipment rental lease. We actually had a decrease in this category and that's tied to that audit that I was uh doing previously where we found that you shouldn't be billing to the specific user group as much and that shifted into the increase in costs in my general one that we discussed earlier.

Questions? Commissioner Host, uh, you may have explained this, Scott, but, uh, can you explain under parks and wreck, uh, the 200,000 for the Shane Park holiday tree? Uh, Shane Park. Yeah. So, our existing tree, we've been looking at with BSD for multiple years. Um, if anyone who pays real close attention to that tree would notice that its fake plumage is dying, for lack of a better term.

Yeah, it's it's it's served its life and we are in the process of replacing uh that tree with a slightly bigger uh newer tree. um as soon as budget's approved, we'll try to advance order that tree so that potentially it could be here for this next holiday season. There's no guarantee cuz every single one of those trees is technically a custom build. Uh but the goal is if possible, if the new tree out there for this this holiday season, otherwise our old tree has one more year we believe left in it and Yeah. And that's to be cost shared with the BSD.

Yep. Is that to say it's a $400,000 tree, Scott? Uh, I don't believe it's that high. I I I the 200 year. What do you know which one they're referencing? 2002 will cover 100,000 and we will cover 100,000. That's next year's budget, not this budget. Now, I know it's not our business to do this, but boy, does that seem like something someone could donate or sponsor. Oh, well, we do try that through the BSD does a lot of sponsorship drives and so yes, you're absolutely right. Somebody could.

Are we directing the BSD to look for a sponsor for the tree and and and and approve some recognition of that sponsor? We can have those discussions. We have not so far. Does this commission feel that a discussion of that nature is warranted? I think we just had it. Well, I want I want to be clear on directing the city manager. Uh I see a couple nodding heads. It can't. One that's not nodding, but don't ask, don't get. Yeah, we can ask. If everybody says no, then we know the answer. It's as simple as that. All right. A quick question on the tree, though.

Is it the structure of the trees also tied or is it just the wrapping? Yeah. Did we rewrap it during the summer type thing or is just curiosity?

The physical structure is a custom structure that was I don't believe the company we bought that tree from exists anymore. And so you can't like just buy replacement pieces is what you're basically implying to redo the limbs. So that's why you need a new tree as a whole. and it's a very archaic system that we only have one company that actually knows how to put together for safety. Our staff doesn't put that tree together. Um, so I'm hopeful that the new tree will be something that we can in sense of cost savings bid out the services to have it put together and not necessarily be kind of stuck with a sole source on putting the tree together. Um, so

it's one of those things. It's time to replace. If you're going to replace the limbs, you might as well replace the whole tree because I think we'd pay more to replace individual limbs. So, okay. I have a couple. Oh, fire away. Okay. Um, so this first one, maybe it's just sort of a nitpick. Um so we have the significant notes um forestry service increase of No sorry I I was just asking about so that is is just sort of cost of trees because we're doing a big tree planting effort.

Yeah. So it it's trees plus mainten or labor required because when we do that we hire a contractor to hire a contctor plant and um and similar. So what what goes into other contractual service for parks and wreck? Is any of that sort of going to some other place in DPS or is this like the playground stuff? Is it both?

Yeah, it's it's a little of everything with the park system. Um, so like case in point, we uh regularly are doing native plantings and we have a contractor we bring in for that. It helps manage the uh invasive species that come into the area. A lot of that work's done right around Courton Lake because the river coming through brings in invasives because of the natural movement of the water. Um that includes the lily pad treatment that happens out there. that includes um lawn maintenance that we hire out for certain portions of our system. Um that yeah there's there's a lot of is is any of it internal or is it mostly

we do do some internal work uh like case in point like right around city hall sheen park the main portion of um Booth we mow those and do that area but there to a certain extent because of all the little projects that we get involved with including stuff like for BSD with downtown items By the time you hit all the little projects, we don't have enough staff power to take on the larger projects because the reality is I could literally put guys on mowers all week and if all I did was mow all of our stuff, I wouldn't get anything else done. No.

So, um, and then just a quick question about the ice arena. There's like significant notes for the 2627 budget and the water utility thing. Um, it looks like that jump happened between 25 and 26, not between 26 and 27. Am I reading that right or is that to me it's partially an accounting error probably in our budgeting last year because it looks like if you look at the budgeted for 26 it's significantly low

um even compared to 25 is likely a keystroke error that went overlooked. So you're saying compared to the budget from last year, we're going up, but the truth is well, we actually had to pay that much last year anyway. Yeah, that's what I believe to be the case. Cool. Thank you. I have an additional question on the community activities. Are there any income offsets to these expenses? In other words, is the BSD contribute to holiday lighting or anything like that? Yeah, the holiday lighting is literally split. I believe it's like 60 40 50 somewhere in that range. City getting the higher portion of that. Uh

20.

Oh, it's only 20. Okay. Sorry. I bet. Uh and that includes our staff labor to put up the lights that we put up. There's a reason why we also cost manage by uh only taking an uh down like a third to half at most. It depends on the tree caliber size. Smaller trees we have to take the lights off of because it grows faster. More mature trees we can leave them on for multiple years and it doesn't become a hindrance or an issue. So if you look at the total personnel costs of around $330,000 320 uh is there one or two items that consume most of that? Is that putting up the holiday lights? I know the holiday lights is a significant portion of that community activities budget, but uh off the top of my head, I can't like

do you determine what how how to come up with that number or does it's mutual because we go back and forth to verify in general like how we're spending funds each year. Yeah. So with this line that include then like the the summer plantings and watering and all that kind of stuff. Yep. uh portions of it. Yes, even if it's not directly charged towards like BSD. Uh there's also like our staffing for concert series, that sort of thing. Uh anything that involves basically us with a community item of any type. This is the putting out barricades for the block parties and stuff like that. Garbage cans.

Yeah, it's it's a a large across the board item. Uh, I just don't understand. And last year we approved a new part part-time or full-time part recreation coordinator or something, right? Is that correct? Um, we do have a recreation coordinator that has started. I can't recall if it was approved last year or the year before. Well, I can tell just give us a little bit of it's been around for technically longer than that. It's we had people switch through. What was the question exactly? Well, if it was a new position, tell them a little bit more about that. Maybe maybe part of that was Connie and she was

it was it was Connie until we had uh one staff member in they left the city. We Clintise is the current rec coordinator. So, currently they're looking into items like as we acquire the the 400 building, how we would do activities tied with the 400 building. uh they are the ones who are responsible for the concert series. They uh are looking into uh they coordinate with Birmingham Little League for their use of the fields. They additionally there's some soccer clubs that use stuff. We have other entities other than Little League that use our baseball fields. They are responsible for overseeing the rental of all the tennis courts, all that sort of thing. Um, we are looking to grow that position with time now that we have somebody in that and it's fully separated because for years it was Connie doing that.

Grow the position and grow the services. Yep. Long long-term goals uh that are slowly at some point. I'm sure the commission would be interested in hearing about those long-term goals. Yeah. Not necessarily right now, but throw that out, you know, right? Yep. Okay, thank you very much. Let's one more uh one more item before we get open it up to the public. The Birmingham Museum. Hi. Hi.

Um good morning. The Allen House budget, you'll see there are some fluctuations, but generally it's unchanged. Um the increase that there is is attributable to um a capital outlay project we expect this year for repair and restoration of the front porch. And I guess I'll turn it over to any questions about the Allen House unless you want me to do the Hunter House too. You could do them both and then

Okay. Hunter House. Um again we see that uh after completing a lot of the restoration projects in the last few years we we have a very uh pretty minimal budget. The only time there are increases, you'll see like there's an air conditioning HVAC project that we have to do. And this is actually bringing the the building up to uh more efficient, you know, better use of resources and easier to maintain. And so now questions.

Wow, you're getting off easy. They gave all your questions to Scott. Well, thank you, Scott. Okay, now uh we'll open it up to the public. Anybody in the room, approach the microphone, please. If you're online, use the raise your hand function.

Hi, David Bloom. Two two comments. Um the first is regarding next and it's good that we're are reaching out to the other communities to make sure that they're aware of the need to pony up when the time comes. I would just ask that if if we're not doing this already that just like we have budget cycles that we keep tabs on what the budget cycles of the other communities are and make sure that we're following up that that they are talking about this and considering it so we don't run into a situation where we need money and we go to one of these communities and they say oops we missed it and come back next year and we'll put it in our budget. That's the first comment. The second one is I was at the open house Thursday night at the library and I'm perhaps a little oversensitive to the whole master planning discussion and all of the debates that we went through. Um it seemed to me that it was it first of all it was not well attended which is a concern. The second is it seemed to be a very open-ended survey and particularly what concerned me was questions about types of commercial businesses that that might be in neighborhoods or near neighborhoods. And the second thing is is they had a couple panels asking about multifamily housing. And I just want to make sure that we're not re negotiating, litigating, debating the discussions that we had regarding multif family housing and the seams and everything else and that this this work is more focused on the ordinances that we need to implement the master plan rather than an opportunity to reopen the master planning discussion. Thank you.

Just one comment. And we had a meeting with the the consulting firm that's doing the zoning ordinance update. um with department with department heads earlier in the day. I think it was no it was Wednesday and we talked about a lot of these issues. So I personally said, "Hey, we've already talked about that. We already have this. Here's what we tried to do. This was not wellreceived." So we did convey all of that information from our prior master plan discussions. So they do have it. Okay. I will remind everyone this is a budget hearing. Um okay. Uh do we want to what's the uh pleasure of the commission to continue or take a break for lunch? It's 11:30.

Lunch is here. Lunch is here. You want to do lunch and then come back? We could even work through lunch. There isn't a whole lot left, right? Uh can I make a suggestion? We have done this. Uh, we all get lunch, come back to our seats, and let's take a 10-minute at least 10-minute break. Can Can I ask Scott Sinsky one question? You can, and you may.

It's one question. What are the revenues of the ice arena projected at and as well as our golf courses versus the expenses that are fixed? Can we hold the golf course for when the golf course comes up? Okay. And but the ice arena, reasonable question.

Yeah. Uh currently we're on pace to end up roughly around $853,000 in revenue for the ice rink. Um, it's a little hard to truly lay out the final revenue versus final uh expenditures because we most of our expenditures that we're seeing that impact our budget are related to overtime. And as we approach the summer months, we stop having weekend hours because we close things down a bit more. And I think that we're going to be basically at the end of the day coming in very tight to a net zero, which is what I consider the most ideal operation of any facility meant to benefit our citizens.

Right. It would be great, Mary, if if just like parking for the ice arena, if we could get a P&L. If we what? You get a golf courses, too.

Yeah. Get a P&L. I'm I'm going to uh throw out a an additional comment there. If if that zero break even includes set aside reserves for equipment and other things that are we know are going to need to be replaced or uh fixed whatever down the road, then I agree that you know it's okay to break even. But if you're not setting not you but we if we are not setting aside money so that when the Zamboni breaks or needs to be replaced or some other heavy equipment uh then then I think we then we should be talking about do setting that money aside and trying to get some revenue to fund it. Does uh

do we do ac cruel accounting like that? We can but we don't. So the first question is do we have kind of what he's are there reserves? Are you creating reserves? So that equipment the equipment rental charge that's part of the intended like maintenance required to maintain and cost to replace. So we're pre-putting money aside year-over-year into like our vehicle fund. So like in the Zambon case, we're putting money into that fund in advance. So 20 years down the road, give or take because that's projected life, we already have put the money into the accounts to replace that vehicle

and that money is derived from the ice arena revenue.

Yep. It's it's a portion they pay. um other smaller items like you know say uh window you have planned window replacement that sort of thing the revenue is set year to year to plan for those items and there is like basically set money aside in advance as part of those revenues. There are going to be years like this where it's a little tighter because we did do a bunch of different minor projects around the ice arena to help maintain it long term. Uh, and like I said, with having the full-time staff come on board where we're having overtime, we're having to make adjustments now because we've had our first real year of having full-time staff where overtime has been a factor for our maintenance personnel. Um, so those are going into the adjustments as we move forward in future years of, you know, do we need to increase the cost of renting sheets of ice, that sort of thing. It's meant we do try to run in the black as much as possible, but to have a a year where you're right tight to it because of changes that

right that's where you want to be. Okay. So, it is kind of the acrual I was talking about. We just don't really see it in the same way that I'm thinking of. Okay. To his question, maybe we see that in a different way, we can understand it better. Cool. Okay. Let's take a break.

Good luck. There's a sorry a grooming issue. Mhm. person. She is serious.

Her mom was also a city clerk. Oh, well. I actually got a couple other That's amazing. But still like getting sandwiches doesn't feel like actually there's supposed to be a meeting. Yeah. Yeah. But I just feel like I don't know. Feels like every eye is always dotted, every tea is always crossed.

Mhm. I might go and pig out and get another one because I was saying to Nick, I got a kids event. I'm leaving here events this evening last two years. I'm still painting and lighting when the event starts, you know. So, I know that there's no dinner tonight. supposed to take it all down when you

Hey, Mary. This is nice. How do you I'm on in the finance department. Accounting and financial reports. Where how do I access open go? What's what's the path to access open go? Just I'm on accounting and financial report. I don't want to interrupt your lunch, but finance right here. Financial transparency. Is that

Yeah, that is exactly want to put a link to that under

you easily accessible. No, it's always a tricky balancing act. The last data in the golf course or ice arena report is 2526. That'll be a victory. Oh, so they don't go in there till they're audited. But there are some aspects of this reporting that's almost real time, right?

Has there been some discussion about parking. I mean, that's an interesting idea. I think we had said maybe in this cuz they were talking about doing a little I don't know what you call a car port, just something to cover the vehicles outside and I think they had spitfalled about putting solar panels on there. And we had also spitfal about putting solar panels on top of the golf carts at the golf course.

Wow. stories. Yeah, this is wild.

That's just our current situation. Not too much. I'm going to leave it to you guys to uh suggest when to get started.

I've woofed my food. Give you a couple minutes. No, the camera. Oh boy.

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Hopefully it's time to leave me. over 25. to your house.

Oh, yeah. I know. My youngest son said he's going to pick up any job.

No, my youngest son is nutritional freak. He keeps telling my husband he's going to make him all his food. He's making That's right. But he doesn't appreciate it.

Kind of people like 16 years or something. It's a long time. He's really put in some time. You'll see his name up on there. You just It was almost every meeting we have. You'll see name on there at some point just keep nothing pressure. to get

220. 2 years after

you don't really stand up and say mind throttling capacity.

Yeah. Plenty of beautiful pastries. Supplement your cookies and brownies. and sandwiches.

Not the last one. M&M's. Were there M&M's out there? What are red M&M's? Peanut butter. Peanut butter. Not a peanut butter out there with Twix and M&M's. So that's where the Twix came in and Kit Kats. Yeah, there are some Kit Kats. Okay. What do you want? I'll throw you one. No, I'm good. Those brownies are very rich.

I think we'll be out of time. fairly early. Don't you? No. Don't you I think we'll be out of here fairly early. Mhm. Yes. I think uh commissioners far as well. Yep. By the way, thank you. Commissioner Host, you okay with moving forward? Um I want you to take your time, but I appreciate it if you'd hurry up. OKAY, then we're back in session. Um, and where are my glasses? Somewhere here. Transfers out. Transfers out. Is that a thing? That's a thing. Okay.

Mhm. It is. It is. So, transfers out transfers out include transfers to other funds from the general fund. Most transfers to other funds go to major and local streets and sometimes to the capital projects fund for projects that are paid for with general fund money. For fiscal year 2627, we are recommending a 4 million uh 4 million transfer from the general fund to the major street fund and a 7.5 million transfer to the local street fund to support various projects. That was something that I spoke to earlier in the beginning that we're bolstering our funds by transferring it over. We transfer as needed and if we have budget amendments, we frequently trans make transfers. Correct.

Cover that. Does anybody have any questions about the transfers in and out? Yes. Give me one second. I just got to find it. So in this book, you had the graph that showed minimum amount and maximum amount. What does that look like after this transfer out? You mean for the unassigned fund balance? Yeah. Yeah. It's reduced. Okay. Which by 7 million or by 13 million? By 13. By more. That's all that

all of this money plus more the this current fiscal fiscal year we had a lot of budget amendments. So even in the current fiscal year it has significantly redu the balance has been reduced. So and that carries forward. Okay. Um, how does that correlate to the graph shown on page 35 then 35 the budget the 5-year operating forecast? Um, it's on page 35 at least the printed version inside budget overview. Oh, this graph. This graph may

she's looking. So during the five-year operating operating budget, we always we showed that graph where we have a slight a higher fund balance and this is from this terms of long range. So right now it's lower and I'm not sure if I'm answering I think his question is does this graph on page 35 take into account is this before or after transfers? Before this is all before. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. because this is from that time from the long range time. That fairly answer your question. It it does. It's just that then

it needs to really show us a net balance position I think is what his question is getting at. Well uh well we talk about the the we are we we have a policy the minimum of 17 high of 40 and after these transfers where will we be very top end of the of the of our goal not above it? No. Well, it's hard to tell right now. Before the transfers were slightly below it after is this fair to say it's hard to tell now because we're going to close out this year and there'll be some other things that'll come through that'll

but we're we are hovering around the top and before any anything we do up here that might further reduce it. Correct. Right. Mhm. Mhm. We can't. This is all projected, correct? We uh we good with transfers? Can I ask just one just clarify point? I feel like we've talked about this before, but we see transfers to sewage disposal going from like half a million to zero. My understanding is we've been walking back all transfers to water and sewage over the past several years. We've been adjusting the rates to make them self-sufficient so that they fund themselves.

Yes. Well, so there used to be transfers from the general fund and we've been ratcheting up the rates and decreasing those transfers. Correct. So the idea is going forward and this is for legal reasons that it was legally determined that fiscal responsibility reasons. General fund was subsidizing in the past is the short way of putting it. And it should go to the user. Yeah. the the user's using more, they should pay more instead of the general taxpayer funding the water and sewer. There's many benefits. We also it doesn't affect our Headley uh and it doesn't and it contributes more to this this range where we are now. Right. So it fairly allocates cleans up accounting

the money. Okay. Thank you.

Okay. Let's uh go to uh special revenue funds, major and local streams and solid waste disposal among others. Um major street funds for the first one. Uh so with this for the upcoming 2627 fiscal year um a couple of our projects are funded by the major streets. Um also I'll indicate when I list the projects if they're going to have additional funding from the water and sewer funds that you'll see later on in the hearing itself. Um so this upcoming year in the 2026 concrete program, we got $39,000 uh program for that one. And that's just spot repairs um on major streets um randomly throughout the city. uh the 2027 resurfacing program with that a budget of $120,000. We're looking to do a mill and overlay on Oak Street from North Woodward to Woodward Avenue. Um with this one, um what's different from last year is since we got the funding for the Derby uh bridge itself for next fiscal year, we were able to move some projects forward to be able to do the shift of the projects itself. Um so with this what you see is East Lincoln the phase one and um that is from Adams or Woodward Avenue to South Eaton and then you also see East Lincoln phase 2 would be from South Eaton to the uh easterly dead end. Um on here you also see North Woodward resurfacing that is for to do the construction um starting in July of this year. So it will be the beginning of the fiscal year itself. Um, in this current fiscal year, we had $100,000 budgeted for for design of that project. Um, you see about $550,000 for Derby Bridge. Um, with the MDOT funding, uh, that essentially there's a lot more intermediate steps that we need to do to

submit to MDOT for the grant. Um, so we're going to start designing um, in this upcoming fiscal year, and that's the $550,000 to start design on that project. And then the 14-M road reconstruction of 48,000. Uh road commission is going to be doing um spot repair of their concrete on 14 Mile Road that they own from Southfield Road to um excuse me, Greenfield Road. And with that um we're looking at to do some water man improvements for some water man bricks that we have um located on the north part of 14 Mile Road. Um so that's to be able to patch some of the approaches that we may be affecting as part of the water man project. And that's for the uh major roads for the capital improvements.

So I just want to uh organize the discussion. This is going to come up later as well under capital improvements. Right. Correct. In what sense?

If anybody wants to discuss any of these capital improvements that we have planned, we have a whole capital improvements plan as part of this package. And so, you know, I I get why you want to it's here. And I'm going to say that when we start talking about the whole of capital improvements, that's probably the most appropriate time to address the individual capital improvements. Here, let's just talk about how these funds are impacted by the the projects that we will talk about later. Right. Right. This is more an accounting. Yes. Exactly. Thank you. So that's the major street fund.

Yes. Does uh does any given what I just said, does anybody have any questions about the accounting related to the major streets fund? No. Okay. So let's I do just one quick question. Okay. Is the negative balances in revenues over under? Why are those negative? on page 164 where it says revenues over under expenditures. So I know it means we're under expendit but why would they go negative? Because our revenues are are lower than our expenditures. So we're going to dip into the fund balance.

Remember yeah there's a fund balance plus transfers which and then because we need to do more projects. We don't have the money in this fund. We transfer it from the general fund. Okay. Uh so let's go to the local street fun.

Um so the local street funds for the capital improvements um located that's going to receive funding from the projects. Um the 2026 concrete program that is a spot repairs on select uh streets throughout the city itself. The 2027 cape seal program. Uh the 2027 resurfacing program that would be a mill and overlay itself. uh Bird Avenue reconstruction phase two. That limit is from Cummings to the dead end at Woodward Avenue. That's also going to get water and sewer improvement. So, you'll see some funding from the water and sewer in the future. Um same as the Abbey Street reconstruction in Henley and Oxford. That's continuing work um at north of Wimbledon over the uh phase um because in that location, the water man is approximately 100 years old and ranges in size from 4 in to 6 in in that location. So those projects will also get water and sewer funding later on in the hearing. And the same thing with uh West Merill Street phase one was going from Southfield Road to um sorry, excuse me, going in the first part for that. Then with the shifting of Derby Bridge back a year for the IDOT funding, we moved the phase two that will be in front of the library to this year. Um and that both of those phase one and phase two are going to in uh receive utility improvements. So you'll see water and sewer funding with that also.

Okay. Any questions on the local street fund accounting? What is the city manager's pleasure in terms of discussing the funding for Cape City? Now or later? probably later. Okay. You asked my preference. Well, because this, like you said, is more or less an accounting. It's not It's telling you which projects in our capital improvement plan will be drawing down money from these funds. It depends if it's a major street

or a local street. So, if it's a neighborhood street, it comes out of local streets. If it otherwise, it comes out of there. And if there's not enough money, we subsidize from the general fund. So in these costs, do these include all interdep departmental transfers too or are these just hard costs coming out of that department? So if Scott does his department does work to help on a local road, does she get charged for his labor? Does this cover does this budget cover

this merely covers my my department as well? because we do street sweeping on major streets, local streets, we do the leaf pickup services, um all the pothole patching that we do, all those the snow snow stuff that we do that gets charged towards the local major streets. So, yeah, there's a there's a lot that goes against these accounts.

And is that stuff detailed elsewhere? Yeah, like 167 and 168. Um 167 the expenditures you can see um the traffic control is for maintaining the traffic signals within the city. You see a decrease this upcoming year because we've done the improvements for the mass arm projects. Those have been completed. Uh traffic engineering is using our consultants for um the multimmoal transportation board. Construction is the ones I just talked about um the capital improvement program. Uh bridge maintenance is um any maintenance that we need to occur on our bridges. Um it can be anywhere from joint sealing, repairing um some of the decorative rock bricks on the streets itself. And then with that the street maintenance, street cleaning, street trees, snow, ice, and control and highways and streets. That's part of Department of Public Services cost for those items.

So there's a lot of interplay. Any other questions on the local street fund? Okay. Sustainabil solid waste disposal. Uh, as many of you already know, we are members of Sakra, which is a group of communities that works together to get better rates on trash service fees and stuff. Uh so this this is mainly to pay our portion seasonally for all the house household trash that gets taken out, the recycling also when we do our leaf program all that to get hauled up to a facility for disposal appropriately uh gets compost for us and a few other things. uh in general not having any major changes within this fund. It's more tied to the contract fees that we have for car trucking basically um as part of our our payment for the community uh in that group of stuff. It went up I believe it's like 3% or something like that per the our agreement with Sakra.

Uh I'm going to ask a question. Why do we keep uh 900,000? Why do we keep a fund balance of $900,000? I think historically we have done it just in case the expenditures exceed more than what we budgeted or planned for.

It also allows for when we have those random uh like event weather events that may cause disruption and extra damage that would be outside of what is considered our normal services we receive. So, like a few years back when there was a few streets that had significant flooding and they had to put a bunch of material out at the curb because everybody's basements were destroyed. That helps cover those types of events. How much could one of those events cost? I I cannot not $900,000. So, my question is just is that if you say that's prudent, that's the right amount. I

magic to it. I think yes. We think that that's a comfortable amount that we're covered for any emergencies that would come up and we leave it there. But of course, if an emergency came up and we didn't have the money, we could easily just transfer it, right? We could. Okay. So, does this number here contribute to the 40% or the 17%. It doesn't because it's kept separate because this is a the millillage that comes in and this is for okay trash. So, this can't be right. So, We can't we can't transparate, right? Okay. Sorry. Then I'm an idiot.

And we wouldn't want to necessarily Okay. We wouldn't necessarily want to reduce the millage because then we don't want to be transferring money from the general fund. And I will tell you that, you know, I attend all the Sakura meetings and the other the other trash haulers around and Scott goes to most of these too. They are causing no end of trouble for all the municipalities and we are so lucky to have car trucking. They are doing a fabulous job and we don't really want to change that. I I would I would say comparatively we hear some of these cities that have 60 to over 150 complaints a month and we have maybe 10. Mhm.

Yeah. You know, some some months will be a little higher and there it's big. Like they literally missed 10 blocks like every week. Or yesterday they were dumping garbage juice in Dearborn on the city streets. Oh, garbage juice. Yes. I think my favorite I don't want to know what that is. You don't want to know what it is. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We're doing great. Who is sustainability and climate action?

Who else but me, Nick, planning director. No presentation. You can see in the numbers that it's still that $10,000 of seed money that you gave us when we created the fund last year. We are of course working on ways to build that revenue. U hopefully some you'll see very soon this summer. It just hasn't realized yet. So, I'm just here for questions. Any questions? No questions. Uh, okay. No questions. Um, senior I have one question. Sure. Mary, this is to you again.

Why would we even bother with the $400 transfer inter company inter agency? Isn't that interest? That's interesting. Well, that's interest because Got it. misread that. Sorry. Senior services who does senior We'll take public comment soon.

So, in November of 23, the city voters approved to collect 33 millillage for a three-year term. Um this is we are in the second year of that collection. Um the fiscal year 2027 is projecting to have a third year of that collection. Um and this is for the improvements for the newly purchase senior center building and other senior center services. So this is again a separate fund for the senior mill. Sorry. Okay. Any questions? Yeah.

Fire away. Uh there was a an observation in one of the very early pages about a 1.2 million grant. I think you also mentioned it. Where does that show up? Because is that not uh a revenue to be used for an expense? Where does it go into this senior services fund? Where does that 1.2 go? It it was mentioned then I have no idea where it is. That's the grant. Yeah, that's going to be in the general fund in the grant. Okay. In the federal grants.

But isn't it a restricted use? It's restricted use but not it's for as we wrote the grant it was back or the request it was back when we were thinking of doing a new building and it was going to be a combined senior and recreation center we requested 8 million I think and we got 1.2 too. So, we have well, we don't have the money yet, but we've been awarded. So, we have to now work to figure out what expenses we can use that grant money for under back to the original plan. And then that would show up as a transfer into that relevant fund balance from the general fund. So, it been in and out from the from the general to another. I think that's fair to say.

Is that how you would then allocate the funding or No, not necessarily. So every year we do have a single file audit um for grants and so we have to keep se we have a separate tracking mechanism for grant reporting. So that revenue stays in general fund under federal grants and then the auditors make sure that we're spending that money you know where it's supposed to be spent. Okay. All right. Thank you. Okay. Do we uh it's not on the agenda, but do you want to address the uh Michigan indigen Michigan indigent defense fund the law and drug enforcement opioid settlement and see community development bond grants?

One. So, uh so the 48 district court has an indigent case attorney who assigns public defenders to people considered indigent. uh the state mainly funds this program which covers all the communities in the 48th district court. There's also local share paid by all members of the 48th district court and this amount has not changed. Um and then we as the city uh assumed responsibility for the accounting of this fund. Just so you know, we've just had a discussion this week that says that it's somebody else's turn to take care of this fund. We all have to contribute to it under the 48th District Court, but we've been managing it and we're going to give it to someone else to manage one of the other.

So, I guess my question, one question would be when I don't know where it is, the 48th District Court that's in here. Is this money in that budget? Do you follow me? It's separate. It's totally separate grant and it's totally separate. So, when you talk about our 48th District Court expense, it doesn't include this. Correct. Okay. Thank you. So we don't actually hold these funds. We're just reporting the total balance in and out on the funds, but they're not actually effectively within our control. Correct. AB. Yes. These are these are restricted funds.

So it's almost like it's a footnote that doesn't feature in our P in our P&L. You can tell where I come from. Uh it doesn't feature in our P&L. It's just a reported number for somebody else. Okay. Right. Law and drug enforcement. Is that something you want to address?

That's another restricted fund. Um again um this one holds money collected through forfeitures uh which can be used for certain police activities such as training and equipment uh equipment that is disposable actually and we have budgeted money for conferences for the police department uh for the uh conferences uh conferences for the police department to attend. Um and we're also planning to spend 40,000 40,000. Yes. For the um incar radar unit replacement. Thank you. Any questions on that one? Nope. Let's go to the opioid settlement fund.

Another restricted fund. So this fund accounts for the distribution of the national opioid settlement with pharmaceutical companies. Also, money is being budgeted for correspondents in this fund. Um, okay. So, that's uh that's certainly an area where we're not going to have trouble spending this money if we're allocating it to the co-responders. Right.

Good. Any questions? Further questions on the opioid settlement uh CDBG? So, this is a federal program grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development provided to us annually through Oakland County. Uh, we receive approximately 30 thou $36,000 each year and it can be used for public services such as minor home repairs, lawn care, or removing architectural barriers. Uh, for the next year, we plan to allocate uh over 5100 to yard services and the remaining uh funding will go to the removal of architectural barriers for the museums. John West Hunter Park to provide a barrier free boardwalk and pathways. Um and um that's it on that one.

So we're not having a problem spending that money either. No, the museum uh has some really good projects that will treat them. So we have had problem spending that money, have we not in the past? Yeah, we have. Well, yes and no. Mhm. The occasionally well the issue arises that you can only use it for two activities. That's the problem. We're so limited in how we can allocate this money and and we have to pick two activities and the art service is really popular but they also cap that. So you can't just spend you know the whole 30 on yard services. There's a lot of limitations to this money.

Okay. As long as you're on you're on uh you're up. You want to let's do debt administration and then we get into right. Okay. So for debt we're still making payments for the ongoing parks and recreation bond issue as well as the George Pon drain. Uh and we do have sufficient reserves to cover any major changes. So I don't have any of that. Is there a reason these aren't on the agenda? Did you intend to not discuss them? Well,

or or did you The restricted funds really don't have they're restricted, so they don't have any directives. Um like we don't have much control over those. I'm just wondering should we be talking about them at all?

We can talk about them and we can put them back on the agenda in the future. As Mary's point was that there isn't really anything we can do about them. They are what they are. We don't control it. Okay. Uh, let's just Does anybody have a desire to discuss the Greenwood Cemetery Perpetual Care Fund, the capital projects fund? I'll leave it to the commission. Or the park system construction fund. If you do have questions, uh, we we can ask and deal with those. Otherwise, we can take public comment and move on to enterprise funds. I would like to discuss capital project funds.

Okay. Please. I'll let you go. You have anything to say.

So, my question department go ahead. My question is we're we're we're granted I'm new, but we I it feels like we're under a crunch on roads right now to get them done or behind the eightball. Um and at some point we're going to finish and then we're have to start all over again. So there's nothing in here, frankly, that makes me comfortable that we're ready for the doover that we're just going to move on to. We're under crunch again. Follow me. So we're going to finish in 5 years. We'll finish our our undeveloped roads and we're going to be done. And then what we started 10 years ago is going to start to come up again and then we're going to start all over again. So I I don't I don't see within our capital projects fund planning for that next redo. So it feels like we're just

continuous. Let me address that. I think that the capital projects fund is specifically for miscellaneous stuff that isn't covered elsewhere. So they list some of the things, bus shelters, uh self-contained breathing apparatus, the renovations to the community development department, uh etc., etc. That is not to say your question isn't legitimate, but it's not it it isn't uh directly with regard to the capital projects fund. Okay. Okay. But that's part of the capital improvement plan as it definitely is. definitely is.

So, does that tie back into the earlier conversation about 5year versus 10-year view? Because that is more of a long-range planning of how do we then get ourselves out of the the pit that we're we're shoveling and it fills in at the same speed we shovel it. Is that more of a long range planning question that we need to then expand? Yes, we just Yeah, that's what we just clarify for sure because then and I think we should have a robust discussion in that section of our uh meeting.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So, I believe there was a question from the public. Uh maybe not. Uh, and anyone online who wants to comment on or ask questions about any of the uh sections we've already covered Bloom, Birmingham resident, I just want to talk a little bit about the sustainability push. It's good that we're thinking about it. For me, it's a no-brainer. There are issues with permeability and storm water retention and sewers and and Commissioner Heg talked earlier about um can we can we put some solar panels for our lights or some of our city buildings. For me, that's a no-brainer and that should be built into where it makes financial sense even if it takes a little investment in the individual department's roles. I don't know why we need a separate fund to manage sustainability. If if it makes sense to spend money for sustainability, then it should be in the street fund or the sewer fund that there should be a line item for that or in the projects that we're doing and maybe there's some oversight or coordination with sustainability sustainability committee to make sure it's being tracked. I just don't know why we need a separate budget and we need

good question. Let's ask the question and get it answered. Why do we have a separate sustainability fund when I do know that DPS and all the other departments are taking into account sustainability? Um the request was made last year and it's to account for all of those projects that are listed in our environmental sustainability plan that aren't covered anywhere else currently. So it's kind of like the capital whatever it was capital project fund a catchall for stuff that's not covered elsewhere at this time. Not to say it couldn't move as we start developing things into other budgetary and in fact we don't have anything in that that we're spending money on at this point at this time. No.

So it's 10 grand set aside. Thank you.

Okay. Any other questions on anything? Okay. We're going to move to the enterprise funds. The automobile parking system is first up. Uh good afternoon. Um so for currently right now the parking system is experiencing um significant um utilization. Right now our garages are approximately 55 to 90% uh capacity during peak periods. Um our operational transition from SP plus we are remaining successfully self-managed with a team of 12 people. Um and we've realized significant operational and I guess expense reductions since that transition. Um our revenue outlook um currently we are projecting for this year to end around 11,765. We're projecting a very slight increase to 11 million 871 and then uh a half% increase year-over-year currently. I understand this does not currently include any proposed rate increases. Um I'm sure there'll be some discussion around that. Um but currently those are not in the budget. Um some key drivers are just uh right now we have weight lists at at three to four of our garages. Um it kind of toggles back and forth. The Chester garage having the highest capacity. Um labor labor costs. Uh our current labor projections are 1.4 million 3 1.432 432 million and our recommendation is going to go down just slightly um 17,870 which is 1.414. And really the big the big um I guess change with our labor is we're removing two currently budgeted positions from our department but proposing to um convert our current part-time position to full-time but at the end of the day

the net is a reduction because we're eliminating two positions. um operating expenses. Really at the end of the day, our expenses are even. However, when you look at the very bottom line, obviously um we have significant capital costs in there. So, if you take out remove the capex costs, uh our expenses are pretty much even. However, when you add in the um garage projects, obviously there's a significant cost there. Um, as I'm sure most people or the most of the commission knows, we have a very robust capital expense program outlined over the next three years. Um, the Chester garage is getting near completion right now. However, we're implementing the um the lighting and design components. Um, we're hoping to have that project awarded to a contractor by the uh fiscal year deadline of June 30th. So, we'll see those improvements go into effect this summer/fall, early winter. Um, the Peabody garage is the next garage and once those are complete, then the Pierce garage, park garage. Um, but ultimately, this is the same capital improvement plan that you all have been hearing about for a number of years, but it's getting staggered over there. Also included in there is um we are exploring upgrading slashreacing the on street parking system. um exploring options to do we move away from do we upgrade the single space meters do we remove them and go to more of a paybyplate zone concept like you see in Detroit or Ann Arbor um also improving the the enforcement side of it um enforcement resides with the police department but obviously it's uh the meter operations and enforcement go hand in hand uh chief we love to upgrade to an LPR enforcement it makes them way more efficient they can cover way more ground with a

fraction of the yeah I guess they can cover way more with the same staff that they have now makes them much more efficient so we are exploring those options as well that's it okay questions commissioner host uh you were kind enough to say three or four of our uh decks have waiting lists can you give me the approximate number at each one please.

So, Chester has no weight list. North old Woodward kind of has a I'd say it's four people deep. Uh the Pierce garage is about 30 people deep. Uh the park garage is about 40 to 50 and the Peabody I don't know. The Peabody's had a wait list since before I started working here. Nobody It's It's so small. Nobody turns in their parking passes there. So obviously when somebody cancels their pass, we replace it. Um there's just nobody turns it in. It's mainly big corporations. This is why there's very little turnover. It's not a lot of single people over there. So that's why there's less turnover at that.

Well, uh Erin, help me. If I recall, uh between Peabody and Pierce, I about a year ago, you had almost a thousand, am I mistaken? combined

the entire system probably had a weight list. It was that was very significant. Um the Pierce garage has really come a long way in its day. Um most of the past few months the Pierce Garage has not had a wait list at all. Only recently did it have a wait list and generally it's a lot of turnover. Um so nobody's on the wait list at Pierce for very long. But overall, the entire parking system had high high weight list back in the day, but those have come down significantly for sure. Okay, Commissioner Coslowski,

just so so first just I think sort of accounting questions really more for Mary maybe. So we've got like these two pages. We've got one um with like revenues and expenses and then we've got a very detailed expense breakdown. Um, I'm trying to figure out where the where the salaries and wages and stuff show up in the revenues and expenses. I see like a general and administrative line, but it doesn't quite match up. Are those are the personnel costs being distributed among the garages or something? Yes, they are.

Okay. And you have two different personnel. Um, this kind of will tie into a lot of your previous discussions with DPS. So, you have two different kind of labor allocations. You have the parking department itself like myself and the and the 11 other people that are specific to our department, but then similar to all the other departments, DPS supports us. They snowplow the roofs. They mow the grass around the parking garages. They plant flowers. Um so they support us in a lot of different ways and their their sal their allocation is also included into this and that's kind of lots of times broken into the various garages. Um whereas like the parking department itself like our labor salaries are more of a general administration. They're not split between all the all the different crashes. That that's correct right Mary want to

so so is the is the salaries and wages number or the uh salaries and wages personnel services total that does that number include charges to DPS is that why it's big okay so that's not just the parking personnel that's also all the help you get from DPS that is correct okay and then my other question is um I didn't think I could I found a fund balance anywhere. Is it in here somewhere? For an enterprise fund, you will have a net position. Yeah. Yes. That's more or less what I'm looking for.

How? Right. We're doing all this capital stuff. I'm I'm confident, you know, we spec all this stuff out. I'm confident we have enough money, but I feel like it would be nice to see here's how much money is going to be in quote unquote the bank account. Uh, you know, in 26, 27, 28, 29. ally during in the budget document you won't have it but the fund balance I believe is around 38 uh oh 45 so we're projecting to end at 45 million at the at the end of this current so basically June 30th of this year we're expecting to have 45 and have we paid out the Chester money already or is that some of it some of the Chester money has been paid out we have 45 million right now

next year as we move on to the next. Yeah, I know. But that's kind of what I was I was I thought it'd be nice to have a little table that said here's how much money we think we're going to have at the end of each fiscal year through the process of this um capital improvement program. Yeah, I think we have that chart. I I'm sure we do. I just didn't see it in the budget and I was and and we have we have other fund balances in here. I wasn't sure what the deal was there, but um it's good to know that 45 million number. Thank you. I have some question. Oh,

Erin, you predicted it, but um you kind of knew it was coming. The hourly rates inside the decks versus the meters. I actually didn't realize they were that way around. I thought the decks would be hourly wise cheaper than the meters, but the meters are the cheapest option.

Um why? Because the meters are there for immediate convenience and proximity. So surely there should be more of a premium for that. as far as the hourly rate. Now, ignore the 2hour portion on the decks right now, but why would we not at the very minimum have them at the same rate per hour because then that's a revenue ge I mean it's overall it's revenue to the system that helps with the parking that helps with the deck and the age and everything we talked about. higher rates at the meters might drive people to the ducks which were

there's also that but again if if I walk further to go to a deck and it costs me more per hour then why would I not go to the meter it's just pay for convenience right now it's almost like saying hey the convenience of being close it's cheaper usually it's the other way around is that something I'm not asking for anything right now other than can that be looked at because it just seems as though the numbers are backwards in my mind that's all it is Okay. Yeah, for sure. We can definitely bring that forward.

I'll raise my hand, Mayor B. Okay. Uh I see. Uh well, first of all, a comment on license plate readers. I would be very wary of changing the rules that uh so depending on how that would work uh would would determine my support and I hope the rest of the commission's support uh for something like that. In other words, if parking enforcement were somehow automated, Allah Royal Oak uh where uh the rules of the game changed from, hey, I'll take my chances putting a dollar in the meter and if I go over, I'll take my chances getting a ticket to where boom, you get a ticket and it's mailed to your home. So, uh

I'll just comment on that. That was not the intent. The intent is like the current Jeeps they drive around in you. They would be equipped with LPR, meaning it's a camera mounted on it. They would still have boots on the ground. They would just drive around on the street and they would be able to register with that camera if a if a spot is paid for via the license plate. They would still have to stop, get out of their vehicle, issue a ticket. It is not the auto enforced. You're just mailed a ticket. This assumes someone paid with Park Mobile. If you just put money in the meter, you don't have the the license something to

talk about. We're exploring options, but we we understood what what worked and didn't work with our neighbor to the south. Um, and that is that was not the that was not the So, we say mostly didn't work. So, uh, with regard to the budget, which we're focusing on, I see, uh, parking meters, you have for fiscal year 2027 recommended a 100,000, but then a million for the following year. Is that to say that you intend to uh uh replace our meters in 2027? I am budgeting for that. Whether it's a single space meter or it's moving to a zone some other system put a placeholder a million bucks.

Okay. Um is uh I didn't see it. It's probably here. Uh the planning to raise Peabody by two levels. That's in here. uh not the actual construction, not the physical work of it, but the research to see we know it's feasible, but hiring a consultant to to do designs, bring it to the commission for consideration along with a plan assuming that there was an appetite that is budgeted in but not the physical we're adding on x amount of Okay, good. And that's for this coming year this. Okay.

And uh finally um with regard to the three decks that are over 50 years old that are potential sites of public private partnerships, are we budgeting large dollars into Park Pierce and Northold Woodward? Uh it appears we are in terms of maintenance. Well, I don't know. You tell me what the numbers mean. Uh because there's a lot of money going into those debt.

At this time, we're proposing to move from structure to structure and make all of the upgrades and bring them up to where they need to be. To your point, that could change if you do a public private partnership on one of the sites. That isn't factored into this. Okay. And so so how do you if you're put if you're proposing for this coming fiscal year, what are you proposing for those three decks? Okay. You want to give them the order for the upcoming one starting in Park and North Old Woodward for this next

Yeah. 26 27. So we're going to start with Peabody. Um and then right toward the end of that fiscal year, we hope to go out to bid for work at Pier. So Peabody would still it would still start before the pierce, but Peabody I'm unconcerned with. Yep. Peabody is a new structure. Pierce intent is that we would go out to bid for repairs similar to what you saw with Chester type of thing. BCT designs. So I anticipate year out.

So I anticipate this public private partnership thing being a not a you know a one-year thing. I mean it may be who knows but I seriously doubt it. So do so at what point do we say maybe not maybe we wait on this maybe we do only the absolute look we went 12 15 years doing nothing and and then we start doing the absolute minimum

our position is that we should continue to carry on with what we're doing until that changes so we leave it in place as a placeholder in case we have to do the work but as you know we're working with plant manoran real point and they're coming up with the process for public private partnerships and we anticipate that that will be set up and put in place within the next several months and we will then potentially go out and get people to come in with their projects. So we would have an opportunity during the budget cycle next year to make changes to that following year if something for instance comes in for peers. I

good enough as long as we're not planning to spend money in the very next fiscal year. Commissioner Host.

Um, I want to piggyback on what Commissioner Co asked of, uh, Melissa. And, uh, I could ask the same question to Aaron. I asked the same question to Melissa. And that is, uh, why aren't we long range doing more than five years? we should do 10 or 15 with regards to our infrastructure and our other assets known as the parking the parking district. Uh I if you recall we had 43 million at the end of last year and Jana straightened me out and said she's spending 27 of it uh in the next 5 years but shouldn't we be working on a much longer range plan for infrastructure and the parking decks U is there for the commission or is that

No, I'm I'm asking the commission. Is there consensus that we should ask these two departments to look farther out than 5 years in their CIPs?

Well, I think we've made great strides with the parking system. We have gotten a handle on the infrastructure. We've uh just, you know, we've we're putting the money into the decks to make them look nicer and all that. We've also gotten a handle on management and brought that inhouse, taking that away from SP, right? I do I I I think some of the next steps we need to take are some of the questions that we're asking about pricing and dynamics and how all that goes and what we're talking about with public private partnerships. And as part of that whole process, I agree with you that we ought to be looking uh somewhat into the future um and and know, you know, what we might do, but um I'm not and and and that's yeah, we haven't had our last uh parking study was done in 2018 precoid. Um there have been a lot of things done in in whether they're in response to that or just in response to the fact that for example uh we got very low uh uh service marks let's say people were not happy. I think if you did did a a survey today you'd find that uh we've made progress there and that people are a lot happier with the parking system. So yes, I agree. We need to take another look at it and see what comes next after we've done all this other stuff. And I'm sure, you know, he's eager to to keep going, but he's also been very busy dealing with uh the infrastructure, dealing with uh the management of bringing it all in house. So it's like kind of a one step at a time. to your point um I I understand where you're going at with that question but I do feel like we have been fairly

look looking into the future you know obviously our budget is only three year but we knew this project this current infrastructure project was was longer than three years so we were had overseen you know we've already projected this project out we understand that when this project is over we're going to continue having assessments performed on these garages just because you know this started back in what 2020 2021 when WJ did their original assessments. We'll start having new assessments done at the end of this because obviously six years have gone by since this project really kind of took off. We'll have the garages reassessed to make sure there's no, you know, we didn't miss anything or nothing new has come up and we'll obviously budget for funds to m keep maintaining. Now, those funds will hopefully be $100,000 and not a couple million dollars, right? But obviously in long range planning, there's I think it ties into what Janice said about plant Moran and what you said. If there's a project coming in, obviously everyone wants to know, are we going to build a new parking garage? Well, there's going to be a lot that has to go into are we trying to fund building a new garage, where would it be? Um, so I think a public private partnership knowing some of the stuff like that would play a key role and right now we don't have that information. So to say we want to budget out 10 years for repairs, I don't think we need to do that because we're hopefully now that we've we're catching up. We're always going to budget for repairs. Just hopefully it's hundreds of thousands, not millions of dollars. But if it's funding a new garage, I think we're going to hopefully that pro public private partnership plays a key role and we'll have a little bit of a heads up and if we need to raise rates, we can do that. We that's why we have a healthy fund balance right now. So hopefully we can build on to that. But

so Commissioner Host, this is a budget hearing and I want to uh I want to understand are you suggesting that we plan out budgetarily like into because there's two things. There's spending and there's strategy strategic planning for how. So you might say that the public private partnership idea and pursuing that is a strategic move. Whereas if you were to say well we need to be putting aside $5 million a year or whatever for something so that 10 years down the road we've got x amount of dollars. That's where you're uh where he's pushing back a little bit saying as far as budgeting goes, we're they're comfortable budgeting five years out, but at the same time strategically planning ways that we can accommodate future needs. Does that make sense? And and I don't know if you're satisfied with that or not. I know I'm not satisfied how they're thinking. Um, sure, this is a budget hearing, but but you've been listening to Commissioner Cobb and myself specifically talk about what I would call long range planning and as such that would help us in our budgeting. The point being this public entity doesn't go out more than five years and I think we're suggesting that it ought to go out much longer which also again is part of the part of the strategic plan when we get into uh we're talking about doing an infrastructure master plan and and that's where I think that's where that comes into play. So if we if we whether we do it in-house or we hire a contractor to look at roads, sewers,

water manes, also parking decks, also whatever other assets we have, 400 East Lincoln, perhaps the community house. These are all assets part of our infrastructure that we can look at and deal and answer your concerns. But putting specific numbers on on a spreadsheet going out 10 years, I without the strategic plans in place, I I wonder whether that would be other than throwing numbers in there, you know what?

Well, I I might have some thoughts about this because I remember when I was on the parking committee bringing this up. I I think this is kind of what you were getting at with WJ. And the question we were all concerned with was, okay, we're we're spending a boatload of money here. Let's say we're 5 years out, the dust has all settled on this construction. What on average are we going to have to spend per year to maintain these things? And I don't remember the exact number they gave me. I remember feeling like it was very optimistic. But even if you doubled it, it was something that the parking system could afford quite handily and that some of the reason these numbers are so big is because we didn't do things as in as timely a manner as we should have. But is is that more what you're talking about? And I feel similarly to to Commissioner Cobb's point about the roads. Is what we're talking about like some kind of just ballpark annualized cost. What do we think we need to spend each year to stay on top of this? Is that kind of what what you're looking for?

You've given the best response so far, Commissioner. Okay. So, I can try to dig up I don't remember which meeting it was when we had WJ in. So, I can try to dig it up or or if Aaron, if you talk to them frequently, you know, sort of float that question to them. When all this is done, you know, if we're going to revisit the these garages every whatever 2 years, 5 years, what do we think it's going to cost, you know, annually, you know, an annualized number?

Sure. to to make sure we stay on top of this so we don't find ourselves in this situation. And then what do we think if we do that? How long do we think these assets are going to last? Because I remember them saying, you know, Chester might have another like 80 years in it. It's not that old. Um Park, I think, was the only one where they were like, not sure how long it's going to last. Something about the way it was constructed. Giving us any true lifespan cuz I'm sure they didn't. That's fine. But it was but they they seemed I thought pretty confident that the structures that are not park uh something about the way they were constructed they were poured instead of pre-cast concrete or something had potentially a pretty long lifespan ahead of them.

And um so to commissioner to mayor Mayor Baller's point park I think is is something we're going to want to look at because even WJ seemed a little bit more I mean we're planning to spend a lot more on it in part because of the way it was constructed. So there might be the the economics of opportunities there might be different than for the other garages for sure. I think it was design margins of the past versus design margins today were different. So the margins were greater in the past cuz the calculation error was probably larger. Thank you. Thank you. Next up is uh water supply system.

Can you uh uh hold on one second? It's it's my second. Okay. Have um so I I live in town so I don't use the parking structures that much but have we thought of peak pricing doing it pre peak pricing or special events type pricing looks like kind of to commission well they do it but a lot of places do it right but commissioner he you mentioned about you know convenience paying for convenience paying for um you know looking at our demand versus our supply I can answer your question I would expect there to be further discussions

outside the context of this budget hearing about pricing and other measures we can take to bring a little bit more sophistication to to the parking system and the answer to her question is yes we have looked at demand pricing in the past but not implemented it nope too difficult I think it was in the 2018 parking plan and then co kind of obliterated demand and the idea that

we needed some kind of surge pricing fell off the radar and and we just and and the garages have never really like fully recovered and so um with the exception of of Peabody which as Aaron said is always full. Um so I think that's why it was it was proposed and we were like this is a really good idea. Then demand collapsed and we said well we're not going to surge price people now. Um and and I think that that it's it's on the radar but it it hasn't been emergent so we haven't picked it up again. But it is a good it is a good idea that I think is worth investigating. Great. Thank you. Okay.

Hi, David Bloom. First, I want to thank the mayor for your question and comments on the license plate readers. I really appreciate that. Um, a question that I have for Aaron is because we talked about the Pierce weight list is down for the parking and that's great. The question is why? I think it's important that we understand that to understand potential future demand for parking in Birmingham. Um, two other comments. Um, Peabody adding two more floors sounds like it would be great and help with um, parking shortages downtown. That deck is hard to get out of and I've been trapped in there twice recently. Once over the the Easter weekend and the police had to come to get me out. So, I would just say if if if you're going to be putting or think about putting more people in there, we have to make it easier for people to get out, particularly when it gets congested. It's also a safety issue. And then I think regarding the the whole debate and the questions about going out longer um for figuring out what our parking needs are and and capital expenditures and and the key issue is and and Kevin, you were the first person to touch on that tonight is the key issue for me to understand is and that that'll drive everything in terms of how far we need to go out is what is the longevity of these parking decks if they are properly maintained. is if can we properly maintain them for 50 years, 100 years, 150 years and they'll be fine or is there a point where you can't maintain them anymore and they have to come down and replace them and that's where the big chunks of money are going to be coming in. So once we understand that and that's the question we should be asking, I think it'll drive the decision making on the other ones for how we account for it. Thank you.

Okay, great. So, we've covered the Automel parking system. I'd like to get through the rest of the enterprise funds and information technology or take I want to ask you a question. We go out five, sometimes six years, correct? Is that typical? Is that standard? Is that what most communities do? Some communities only go out two or three years. other we're generally complimented on how long we go out and how we have a multi-year compleimemented by whom? GFOA or auditors. Yeah.

Okay. I recall that hearing those compliments. Okay. Thank you. Uh the water supply system. Sorry, do want to make sure I didn't step on Bella. Um for the water system, um this fund includes um essentially um costs that the city uh does for our distribution of our water system to maintain it, but then also to our cost to be able to get water to the to our city itself. Um so includes the cost that we have to pay Saqua who's our where we purchase our water from. Saqua's cost also includes buying water for Great Lakes Water Authority. Um so most of our expenditures for the uh water fund includes that information. And then for this upcoming fiscal year um page 217 has information kind of a summary of it. Um you're seeing kind of the administration cost and the fridge benefit equaling each other out. Uh the water meters uh department of public services maintains the water meters. Um we're seeing some of the batteries um no longer working due to the end of life. So they need replacement for that. Um the other other contractual services what we run into in construction projects with capital improvement programs is most of the time since the city's fiscal year starts July 1, the project is over two fiscal years itself. So that's the reason why you see if we've got something budgeted and then it needs to go into the next fiscal year um just because of how construction season works and doing construction during the summertime. Um equipment and rent and rental leases that is um DPS's to be able to maintain the water systems and and getting the equipment for that. And then uh finally is the list of public improvements uh covered a little bit high level. The projects uh these ones listed below either have a local street and a major street funding with it and then potentially sewer uh funds here later on at the next fund information.

Any questions on the water supply system fund? Anybody got it down? sewage disposal.

Um so for the sewage uh disposal system just for the general public to know a city Birmingham has two uh districts that drains to um kind of the easterly side of the city drains to the George drain um retention system and the westerly side uh drains to the Evergreen Farmington uh district. Um so with that a lot of times what you see through there is our service charges goes to one of those uh uh drainage districts or sewer districts and then they drain to the Great Lakes Water Authority. Um so that would be for some of the expenditures for that itself. And then the uh summary of kind of the changes that you would note in on page 254 um would be the uh administrative costs. There's a decrease on that just due to reallocations for it. Um the other contractual services kind of I mentioned under the water funds is when the construction season years phases there's incumbrance that goes with that itself. Um the rest of the ones of the George drain the treatment centers from that that's um cost uh that we receive from Oakland County maintains the George drain water treatment system and they also maintain the CSOS or what we call the retention basin systems for Quier Park, Birmingham and Bloomfield. So, you're seeing some of the increases in there from Oakland County. And then the equipment rental and lease that's due for DPS um replacing their system. And then with that for public improvements, uh the streets that we're doing reconstruction on that we're maybe doing sewer replacements or sewer improvements on.

Questions on sewage disposal?

Okay. I have a I have a comment and a question. They're sort of related. One is that the comment is that we I mean water used to be virtually free. I mean you didn't even think about your water bill and now it's like as much as electric or gas. And uh that's just a fact of life that uh we have to deal with and part of dealing with that is dealing with uh our constituents who complain about it, right? And it's it's caused by a lot of factors. One is the aging infrastructure. Another is our desire to shift those costs away from our general fund to rate payers. And uh we just have to be prepared to explain that and people have to understand they're living in a a new world when it comes to infrastructure. The other question which I've raised, I don't know if I've ever raised it here, but it it makes sense from a budgetary standpoint is whether if we have to tear up a street to replace a water man or a sewage line and that's why we're tearing up the street. Isn't it shouldn't it be the water and sewer funds responsibility to restore that street even to some minimum standard of of what at least what it was before you ripped it up. And that might be a legal question.

Might be. That was a good dodge. I don't know. I approach please. day for effort. I don't know if that would be in line with the other question of of how money can be moved around from one fund to another fund and how that's dictated by the finance act. So, I'd have to look into that one as well. I'm just I'm just one commissioner, but if uh more than one commissioner have an interest in getting an answer to that question, uh honestly, this isn't bringing the cost of water or sewage disposal down.

It would double it. Yeah, I was going to say it would double or triple. Well, I don't know whether you double or triple it, but if if some of those costs were, you know, I I think it's a reasonable question to ask. I see a nodding head. I see a maybe. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I'm I'm still frankly interested in the opposite question because now I'm even more confused. I thought I understood what the situation was in terms of can money from the general fund be transferred to the water funds? And I thought the answer was there was some legal reason

why we could not that we can and we have but it's putting that burden on all the taxpayers of the community not just the ones that are using more water. Sure. But we're trying to get away from that. I I understand what I'm saying there is I believe a perspective which says that a big chunk of our water cost now is not the variable cost of delivering the water it is the fixed cost of replacing the infrastructure

and if I own a very large lot which is mostly a surface parking lot for instance now surface parking lot doesn't consume any water but all of that pipe still gets old and still needs to be replaced and so that is going to be more a function of I mean my my lot size or frontage in particular but perhaps my property value more than the amount of water that I actually consume. So I think the idea that there is in fact a balance to be achieved between charging people who consume the water for the variable cost of delivering the water and charging people based on their property for the fixed cost of how much pipe do we have to lay out in front of their property. you are right on track for a future discussion coming in May when we talk about our water and sewer rate study and how our water charges that we're being charged are now going from um like yeah the rate is going more from a what you use to a fixed rate fee for all those very reasons and so we have to look at how we change our process too and that is going to be a whole separate complex

discuss this is on on the on the docket for a future meeting May 4th or 18th soon. Soon like what you literally said is what you're going to hear from you're going to be prepared. There we go. And the legal part of it is there was a case of many of the the communities were sued as to how they were calculating costs and that's what that suit was about. Okay. They were not owe you sufficiently prudent about how they were calculating the cost. It wasn't that. It was the how the calculations were being done and I owe you a report on that. That's fine. So, it sounds like we're talking about that soon. I'm happy to stay tuned. Commissioner Host,

uh I'd like to piggyback on that. Um you know, a lot of people are highly distressed by their water bills. Uh like uh the mayor said, uh you know, it's right up there with electricity. And I'm wondering if this is a good statement. Uh we're paying Oakland County to in a sense provide us with the flow and they are charging us 7 to 8% more each year. Is that an accurate statement Melissa? Not Oakland County.

Not Oakland County. So the water we get from Saqua and Saqua gets their water from Great Lakes Water Authority. So with that, any increases that Great Lakes Water Authority has, Saqua has that in their numbers type of a deal. Um for the sewage system that essentially drains to drainage districts that the Oakland County Water Resource Commissioner maintains and then they drain to Great Lakes Water Authority. Oakland County Water Resources rates include any Great Lakes Water Authorities increases for it. So what you run into sometimes is the numbers that we get from Oakland County Water Resource Commission for the sewer systems includes Great Lakes Water Authorities increase, right?

And then what increases Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner needs to be able to maintain our drainage district system. Okay. So my question was is it 7 to 8% annually the increase? We would have to take a look into that more because what we get for the rate increases from from essentially the counties is the number that we use for our calculations. We would have to dive into that to see that separation between Great Lakes Water Authority and Oakland County. Well, we know what our increases have been to the consumer, which is roughly what he's saying, right? Yeah. give or take. I think he's in the ballpark.

Okay. You you may if an example, you may have had it a couple years ago where Great Lakes Water Authorities increase was minor and Oakland counties was a little bit more because they needed to do more maintenance on the drainage district. You may have it now maybe going forward where Great Lakes Water Authorities is a little bit more increased, but then you've got less maintenance in the drainage district system because we've done projects have been completed. So that's where the variable becomes is to be able to check to see who was what percentage. We know the we know the sum of them, but to be able to look a little bit more in detail of whose was what.

Okay, any other questions? Spring, we're into the golf courses. So, Springdale and Lincoln Hills, uh, for all intended purposes are one giant fund. It just is split between these two courses. I know we addressed via email a question concerning why it looks like Springdale gets carried by Lincoln Hills and that has more to do with the mechanism on how all of our membership dues come in. They all come into Lincoln Hills. So Lincoln Hills gets to look like they do a lot more of the work, but it's really it's both at the same time. So that's why I like to kind of address these as one item as opposed to two. um because that's the reality of how it works. And Mary and I have been talking about how to change this for future budgets so that it actually reflects that more as opposed to making it look like one's doing really well, one's not doing so great and being tugged along. Um, but overall in uh as of 2028, Lincoln Hills will finally pay off its debt to the city for when the clubhouse renovation and parking lot uh was redone back in the '9s and then they had to pay they didn't realize they were needing to pay it back at a faster rate and that got increased and we've been carrying 100 grand every year since before I was even with the city to pay off that work. So, I'm happy to note that in coming years, we're going to have additional profits because we're not paying the city back anymore. Other than that, golf courses are self- sustaining. Um, to answer the question that Brad was bringing up a little bit in advance earlier, as of today's current date, because of how those revenues come in,

Lincoln Hills is in the black and projecting really good good numbers and Springdale is currently in the red, but typically this time of year, Springdale's in the red and they close in real tight on being in the black at the end of each season, but also our season rolls right through June into the fall. So, it's on a little bit different schedule. Overall, we're hovering right at that, just above making money so that we can afford these projects. And like I said, it'll be better once we finish paying off the building. Um, so some notes that kind of float between both of these. There's note that there's increase of roughly $20,000 on average between both courses tied to a seasonal clubhouse assistant manager. This person is as uh anyone who golfs knows John. It's a counterpart to John Pierce to handle the other clubhouse uh roughly 40 hours a week during the course of the season. This helps our golf course manager be able to actually manage both facilities back and forth, fill in the extra time. Uh because that 40 hours a week for two courses, we still have two days a week because as you know, if the weather's good, we golf 7 days a week. Um so that's to help fill time and make sure we're balancing our hours out there well. It also limits the overtime that those positions end up working if you have another person in that position. Um, this also directly impacts those fringe benefit increases that are seen at both courses, roughly over $5,000. The operating supplies are intended to decrease as we are working to be more environmentally friendly using less uh chemicals as a whole. Um, offset at the same time of we do have

planned at Lincoln Hills some plantings to do some beautifification items. Uh so there's an increase of roughly 12 grand in operating supplies at Lincoln Hills tied to that. Um other contractual services also doing some tree maintenance at Springdale. Uh that's going to increase and and do some irration that's needed for the fairways so that they keep looking good being green. Items that we're trying to catch back up on. Uh building maintenance. We've finished some uh main work that we needed to do at Springdale as far as a bathroom renovation and a few other things, make it ADA accessible. Um and there but there is an increase in land improvements out at uh Springdale tied to ADA on the third hole. If anyone's ever seen it, we have a car path that's closed because similarly to the Lincoln Hills project. The car path in that area is at such an extreme, it's a danger. And so we closed it down a while ago and we're trying to build a different cart path that will satisfy the users needs to get to the same location and not be dangerous.

Which hole?

Hole three. It's the one you head over the river up the hill. Um, and then we're starting stream bank stabilization projects, but that's expected to go multiple years. And that's the $100,000 in there, which we've been tracking our funds and planning. That's why we actually pushed the project was to ensure that revenues coming in were going to get exceeded. Planning out that multi-year project. And then over at Lincoln Hills, uh the we have a building maintenance increase because we need to replace the roof of the pump house that gets pelted by bad golfers off of T- box one mainly. It's down the hill. It's the little shed that's like out there. The roof has been so dinged up that it's starting to actually have wear marks through it. It just It's impressive. You put an object out there how often a golfer can hit it.

Um line it with rubber. They're actually looking at a metal roof because it's shown to on other courses last longer because it can handle it's worth armor plating it.

Yeah. So, uh the other major uh items that are upcoming there is also we're looking to improve the tea boxes. We're looking at ways to make them more environmentally friendly, tying all sorts of chemical things. We're looking at doing turf boxes, but we've also heard that that's not as good for the user. So, we're trying to find a net benefit somewhere in between. Uh, but we're expecting additional costs with that. And that's both courses in a nutshell. Questions? Are these separate funds? Separate enterprise funds?

No, one fund. there so you can have a clear picture of each expenditures for each but it's not clear a whole bunch of time explaining why it's not clear which is why we're working to try to see if we can get it into one and then just show them as expense does anybody here care that they would be that if there be split I mean I I just think it's a golf course operation with two golf courses right right a lot of shared resources and the payment of the 100 grand a year is Lincoln Hills not Springdale for the it is yes for that can be shown as

there's a different 100,000 for the stream bank stabilization at Springdale right sorry if I said something to the contrary it would be interesting I don't know if it needs to actually be in the budget but for some of the other things we have some sort of like usage stats um I think that would be interesting to get for for the two golf courses especially if in the future we're thinking about merging the financials. It would be good to at least have some way of of comparing the utilization or something that says all that. Okay.

It's been a minute since we brought that report to the commission. It is something that I have on my new golf course manager's radar that it's something that'll be expected, but we're kind of letting him settle in. I can tell you that between the two courses combined, it is typically between 45 and 65,000 rounds that are played. So, thank you. Great. It Mr. Bronc just right.

How did you do that? Good afternoon, uh, mayor, mayor prot commissioners. Um, I'm Eric Brunk, the IT director for the city. Um, taking a look at the budget, we are currently at a 1.36 million. Um, next year's proposed is 1.37 million, which is roughly an 8% increase. Um out of that the increases are mostly because of uh an increase in uh part of a full-time position to cover GIS. Um including the fringe benefits for that. Um, my budget is variable year to year depending on what the different departments need and requests that they have as well as replacement costs of equipment that are getting close to end of life. So, uh, our increases are, like I said, salary and wages, fringe benefits, uh, increase in computer software for this coming year, um, a decrease of depreciation, and increase in machinery and equipment that need to be replaced. And I am open to questions.

All right, this one's probably for you, too. Given we're depreciating the equipment and we're showing it as leases in the other budget line items, our equipment costs are crazy. If you look, if you added all those numbers together as a percentage of revenue, I'd love to see what that number is because it seems incredibly disproportionately high. Those numbers cover the entire IT budget. No, I understand. But so you got just the city commission budget is $98,000. That include that includes the not only the hardware but the software that is purchased for still seems incredibly high

and their portion of the cost of the IT department budget still seems incredibly high. Um, and then you look at the well I can't remember one another department is $98,000 talking 200 grand for for seven 10 people. Well, you have have $1.4 million budget going across 14 departments. I I 19 departments. So let's just if I may may I you may

you take what it costs and and and then allocate it across departments right so no department has any control and you could almost break it down per seat. Do you do even do that because we make a we we do an inventory of actual hardware and that is allocated to each department and then the other what is outside of that allocation is what's um segregated across the rest of the departments that includes internet connectivity software costs. So what is do you have an amount per seat?

I have not broken it down per seat. No. And it probably depends on what equipment they have and whether they have the two large monitors and how old the computer is, how old the laptop is, whether they have a PC and a laptop because there are a number that have both. And then we have like in building they all have

the I get it. There's a lot of different stuff. A lot of I'm going to be a little bit less assertive than my colleague here, but also curious, right? like I don't know what it should cost and certainly today with all cyber threats and all that stuff and our desire for security but you know Commissioner Hey talks about benchmarking and best practices and you know I sure would like to know what you know whether it's other municipalities or industry in general are our costs in line with those are they on the high end on the low end whatever and And and what are we you know? Yeah. And and and technology changes so quickly today that you know that how that impacts costs and what we're spending and what we're budgeting for future years.

Um I don't know how to accomplish it. Uh but I I think there's a curiosity. At least we too are curious. Is anybody else on the commission curious about our IT costs and how we arrive at them and how they compare with other uh places and businesses? Everybody's nodding their head. So, I think it's not unreasonable to request some kind of report at some point on something like that.

I mean, is what we want just so we have the the fund expenditure budget page on 235. Do we just want that blown way up and just have like every single line item? I think that would be interesting, but I don't know if that's something that it's already put together. Pretty much everything is built on a line item, right, in my budget because I have to assume so be able to do that in order to be able to take that and then charge it back to other departments. So the line items are charged per department. Um the things that are not are basically dis described as to what they are so that we know whether it's a per department item or whether it's a general item that's debied up across all of the department.

Yeah, that'd be great because yeah, it is it's right. It's a a big number to accomplish a lot of stuff and it can be very hard uh for I know it's hard for me to try to wrap my head around is it how big is this number compared to how big the task is. Um, so yeah, I think that if we could get a breakdown, um, that would be that I'm I'm happy to dig through it a bit and it sounds like you guys already do, you know, you have to do a lot of work to put all that stuff together and you've already done it. So I'm happy to just see whatever output you guys already have um, and take a look at it. Okay. the three buckets that would be for me at least that would be really interesting would be hardware software labor

and then and and not not in your budget in the department budgets. So city commission public works rip those into those three buckets and then you can do we can probably go out and do a ratio analysis with other municipalities. There's also the fixed cost, right, of all of the costs systemwide that we need as Eric mentioned whether it's to look out for threats to provide internet connection between all of the that would be covered in software. hardware would be any of your landlines and any of your connectivity that'll be in the hardware. That fixed cost has a per seat cost right

because for instance okay look at uh dark trace anyone that has an email that is a service that dark trace will be monitoring so therefore there is a per individual cost for that that's not an individual it to his point it comes down to an individual cost it's not a separate fixed cost we pay for it effectively that way but to understand how the cost is aortioned out it's it's everyone takes their own burden of that. And then but on the same token, we have people that have email addresses that don't have a seat with a computer. We have departments that have their own email addresses that cover the department as well as their individual addresses for each person in the department.

Like our DPS folks, a lot of those, well, everybody has email addresses, but they don't have their own workstation. But they still have to we still have to pay for the fixed costs even though they don't have department cost though. So it still is okay. So this is something we would like to hear more about. Okay. Here's what I wrote down. Benchmark IT costs with similar communities, i.e. IT cost per employee, etc. Yes. And I would like to see the details. I'm happy to take a look. You might be able to get that through and we'll get to bring you in. I can do that. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Because most of that's already in the system. I had to build it that way in order to be able to charge back. So

that would be great. cuz it's not put in this document because otherwise like they said before the document would be another couple hundred pages. Yep. So, I appreciate that. Thank you.

Any further questions for it? Any questions from the public online or on uh in the room? Use the raise your hand function if you're online. This is for water supply, sewage disposal, Springdale and Lincoln Hills golf course and information technology. Hi, David Bloom again. Um, IT question. I I think um Mr. Brunk talked about adding a seat for GIS, which I think is a geographic information system. Would we want would you want to consider billing that back to the community development department so that we can make sure that the permit rates and things that they're charging developers seeking permits reflect the extra cost of assuming of using GIS and that way we're the the the reason that we need that particularly I think is for development primarily. I think I heard them say that software costs are allocated to the departments that use the software.

Yes. Not to everybody. And that person is already talking about the person. Well, I get that. And that person is already have time in the community development department. They are bringing them onto my department from engineering. I believe he's coming over from.

And and the reason behind all of that is when we remember when Brooks Cowan was here, he Well, let me go back even further. pre- crash of 2009, we had a full-time GIS person that worked through the IT department due to cutbacks at that time in 0809 10 something like that that went away. So, individual departments have been trying to use it on their own. It's a very specific skill to use. It's complicated. It's cool and it's great, but so we have engineering that uses it. We have DPS that uses it. We have planning that use it. building doesn't really use it very much to be honest. Um, so basically what we had was each department doing their own thing. And when Brooks Cowan was here, he acted kind of as our GIS go-to because he was so good at it and had been doing it for so long that any department would come to him and say, "Help me. I can't figure out how to make this map." So that's kind of what we're trying to replicate since Brooks moved on. We're trying to bring We have somebody right now who's in a master's program for GIS that's doing that administrative job split between engineering and planning that we're going to flip to planning in GIS. To your point, could it be put under community development? Maybe it's it's more it's planning, engineering, and DPS more than building.

So, it would make sense to centralize it someplace. Yeah. Okay. I didn't understand. and the IT department already handles all of the infrastructure piece of it. Um I work as I act as the liaison to the the two vendors that we use to help us with GIS. Um other than engineering who has their own um company that does GIS support for asbuilts for any of the infrastructure that they're working with. So thank you. Thank you. Is that it? Yeah. Okay. I will head back down to my uh control center till next time. Uh we have a break scheduled, but does is anybody on the commission want to take a break?

I just want to go get a coffee. So come you want to go get a coffee? Let's take a twominut break. My watch is telling me to stand up. No, no, no. Close. I'm doing it. There is still coffee. I switched the pot that was back there to the front cuz that one always gets drained first.

Thank you. Rebecca, you clear the room? There he is. He's down there.

What are you, Mr. Gopher? I was standing there digging for Diet Coke and there wasn't one. I can get you another one. Oh, that'd be awesome. I just I didn't realize they were all taken. Thank you.

Okay, we're back. Okay, we're back. So, we're on to component units. Baldwin Public Library. Rebecca Craft.

Yes. So, I will start um going through um starting on your budget packet, page 242, the expenses and some highlights of those. So, salaries and wages. Um there's a minimum wage increase to $15 an hour going into effect in January 2027. So, this budget reflects um a salary increase for our pages who are making minimum wage right now. So, that'll go up to $15 per hour. And then we also adjusted two of the lower salary bands um in that. So that's um a little bit of a bump for salaries and wages this year. We are also promoting um a fulltime a part-time employee to a full-time librarian for an outreach. Um that's in support of our strategic plan. So that's included in this year's salary and wages. And then we'll be adding a new part-time um library assistant and technical services and they will be handling processes processing materials. Um spoiler alert for later on in the budget. Um we are um putting a lot more money into materials uh for the public. So a lot more print materials, a lot more e resources. And so we need additional help to help process those materials. And then um that person would also be working on our library of things and some of the original cataloging cataloging that we do at the library. Um next up, our marketing and design service is going up a little bit. We have added $30,000 to the budget for that um to have an outside marketing person do some consulting work for us for the year. Um we want really want to get the word out more about the library. Um so that's why we've dedicated that to there. And then um library programs um we are putting $50,000 in that budget for this year. Uh the friends of the library are very generous and they donated about $50,000 to the library for

our programs and services, but we want to improve and add um more programs and more outside speakers. And so that money would pay for that. It could also pay for like a bigname author visit. Sometimes those will go, it depends on um scheduling and timing. outside authors and how popular they are could be from $5,000 to $50,000 for a program. So, we want to make sure we balance the correct amount for the author with the crowd that we would want to draw. So, we'll be careful with that. Um, next year is also the 100th anniversary of our building. So, we will have um some money in there to celebrate that um that anniversary. And then if you look at the machinery machinery and equipment and our capital outlay um machinery, furniture and buildings, uh we have several um large improvements to the library. Um we'll be adding a canopy over the um loading dock staircase. We have a staircase um for our staff entrance that is a pretty treacherous um concrete stair. we have to shovel the snow up the staircase out um into the loading dock. So, we would cover that to help um protect that staff during inclement weather. Um improving lighting in the building. We have some several dark areas of the building that we need to illuminate better. Um lower level improvements including um painting the lower level, new carpet, um lighting in our meeting room, changing the restroom partitions. Those are the the doors um and the dividers between the stalls. Um adding office furniture and reconfiguring some of the staff offices. So that's um a mini facelift to the lower level that hasn't been touched since 2008. Um and then we'll do be doing um an expansion of our idea lab. It'll stay in the same spot. We but we'll be enlarging it by about 25% um to be able to get more people and um tools in there. and then adding sound

dampening measures um to the atrium and two of our meeting rooms um uh based on requests from staff and patrons. Um and then the the last thing that I mentioned earlier was just the increase in u material costs. So we circulated over 600,000 um items last year. Um our patrons uh are we have we try to fulfill our hold list on our items. Um, so if there's three people on hold, we want to have at least one copy for them. So that's why we're putting extra money in the budget uh for that. Um, I did add the packet goes into more detail um shows all the rationale for things that we have added. So you're welcome to review that. That's also available on our website.

Any questions? Just out of curiosity, what you

Hold on. I'm sorry. I just want to make a statement and I would like uh the city attorney I should have prefaced this. I I think that there's whereas with most of the stuff we've been talking about today there is an oversight function that we have. Uh however it's important to note that the library has its own millillage. It it determines its own millillage and it determines its own budget and there is somewhat less is it safe to say oversight that we have on their budget. While we it is part of the city budget and we do have to approve it next time around. Uh this is between the library director and the library board the allocation of money. Is that is that a pretty

Yes, that is that is a fair statement. Um I think what's really important is historically there was some confusion as to how the library was functioning. We have determined that they are a free and independent library which means they are their own entity. They uh set their own budget. It's approved by their own board. What we do on behalf of the library is collect the millillage that they are requesting and the city collects the uh tax monies from the millillage for the library and then allocates those funds back to the library. So you do not have oversight over their budget is the bottom line.

We we do maintain own and maintain the building. Correct. That is correct. We own and maintain the building. We are responsible for the physical parts of the building uh but not the library materials and they are leasing city employees. So we are leasing that or will be yes or will be. Yes. And and so we are finalizing these agreements and we are much appreciative that you have brought so much information to us and are keeping us informed. So with that commissioner just a quick question. Mhm. This is just back to the IT conversation. What's your approximate headcount?

Our approximate headcount, we have about 100 people, 20 um three next year 24 full-time people. The rest are part-time. And so that part-time could be 4 hours a quarter. It could be 28 hours a week. Um so full-time equivalent, I believe, is like 46 um full-time equivalent employees. And then our IT in our IT department, we have two full-time employees and we have three part-time employees. Um, and then our IT cost for our software, computers, and everything

to 100 bucks a person for previous discussion on IT costs. If we take library in our own community roughly the same pay ranges and take what's but best I can tell there might be some monies missing in that from this budget they spend about $102,000 a year the library does if they have like

I would say 150 there's some hidden in other contractural services um uh machinery and equipment um has some items and And let's see, equipment maintenance too. So around 150. I had a note to um get the exact number for the library board after hearing that last discussion.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Any other questions? Commissioner Cous, this is not a a budgetary question actually, but um you talk about 15,000 to install sound dampening measures. What uh sounds are you hoping to dampen?

Uh okay. So, so libraries are traditionally quiet places. Um like you've got the U of M law library. You walk in, if you tap your foot, you everyone stares at you. Um, and then we've got the Baldwin Library, which is a lively place. Um, we try to keep the quiet noises to the grand hall, so that's for studyers. People are using sound dampening headphones in there, too. The youth room, chattering children. Um, that's normal. The um our non-fiction area has a lot of people studying with tutors, and so that's pretty chatty, too. So, we understand that. Um, so we had an acoustical study done last month that was $5,000 and we had someone come in and suggest several different products for the spaces that would just um take away the tiny echo of things. So, it's not it's like going to a basketball game and hearing that like the ball bouncing versus still hearing talking but not being super jarring to your ears. It's not going to make it soundproof. It's just going to make it

and it is and it is mostly but this is mostly Yeah. noise within the library. It is not stuff happening outside the library. That is

the atrium when you walk in. So that's all it has wet surfaces, windows, concrete floor, drywall ceiling. So there's a a type of ceiling cover. It's like pulpy, like layers of pulp that would be sprayed onto the top and it would look like a finished drywall ceiling, but it would just be like an inch of extra fiber in there. And then the storytime room cuz we've got kids playing and the librarians um singing in there. So, just to keep that down. And then our second floor, our historic room, um the Gene Lloyd room. It's just hard to hear voices in there. So, having the echoess um would help with that. Thank you. Other questions? Uh, Commissioner Hay.

Uh, yeah, a couple of them. First of all, thanks for the idea, Lab. My kids love it. They use it predigiously. Um, I'm not finding right now. I seem to remember a conversation about a generator at one point that is for next year um 27 28 and that will be included in there. And that is included in buildings um the $400,000 that you see um for plan 28. Okay. Um, now part of that goal was for a resiliency center, wasn't it?

So the way I look at that, that's actually a service to the entire community. So the question is more coming back to the city manager. Um, as that's a community service, it's not core for the library. The library has a suitability for it. What do we do as far as supporting that activity? because we don't really have a resiliency center per se and so if they're putting in a resource do we have any support that we are planning for that for the future to help with this activity or what have you

but it seems like it's a broader community and and greater than the scope of the library but it then falls somewhat into the scope of our responsibility to support community health safety welfare I think the extent of our we've talked um at length about collaborating to do something. It's in the early stages. So, we don't have anything written into our budget, the city's budget as a whole right now. They're kind of doing it in phases with starting with the generator. And as you know, a couple of times when we've had large-scale power outages, we've partnered with the library to let patrons go over there. I think you even had a sleepover there one night, didn't you? And we had city staff that volunteered to work that night

on several shifts. So, I could imagine something like that. I'm not going to force any employee to start working an overnight shift, but if there are people that want to do that, great. And we did have volunteers. Yeah. So, I think we've had those discussions. We haven't set aside specific dollar amounts to cover that going forward. I think there's a $126,000 amount that we can look at after next year. That would be for communitywide benefit because this is a communitywide benefit, right? There's al there also was talk in the past about doing a resilience hub at 400 East Lincoln. We haven't had talks on that lately, but Okay. All right. We have a uh just we have people who need to be on their way that we want to talk to. So,

thank you very much. Thanks, Rebecca. Thank you. Um uh Birmingham Shopping District Good afternoon. I'm Erica Basset, BSD executive director. Um, for members of the public who might not know, we are a component unit funded by the commercial properties in the district. So, um, none of the residents but the commercial properties. Erica, can I interrupt you? Y. Does the same apply here that we do not have the oversight that we have of the rest of the that this is for information primarily? I see Erica's actually wanting to answer. It is different. Yeah.

It's a little different than the library, but it's not the same as as uh engineering, right? Yes. Correct. Okay. We'll skip what the differences are. Just go.

Well, we do. So, our our board does, you know, delve into the budget as do our committees. Um but ultimately, you approve it. So, this is a recommended budget from our board to um the city commission to approve with the the city's budget overall. Um so, a couple things to know. Page 247 in the budget packet. Um we are anticipating revenue increases, um special assessments really are contributing to most of that and then some increases in our other revenue streams, which are sponsorships and vendor fees for some of our events that we that we do charge. um about 2% over uh 2026 and our expenditures uh we're looking at about 10% over 2026 and that is um generally because of special projects, capital improvement projects that we have. Um most of our costs and budget are set so that you know we're operating and um when we have those special projects you can see that fluctuate up and down as we may dip into our fund balance. So significant note salaries and wages um like most people here we're seeing um we're anticipating a bit of an increase about 7%. Uh this reflects increases in um some BSD salaries as well as downtown maintenance. So we you know partner with DPS to do a lot of our downtown maintenance initiatives and we pay a portion of their salaries as they mentioned you know how those get allocated across. So, of our salaries and wages, it's about 140,000 that um goes towards DPS salaries and wages and fringe benefits for for that downtown maintenance. Other contractural services, uh we've allocated $100,000 to the holiday tree. So, um Scott mentioned that a little bit in his budget, but basically um DPS is holding the capital improvement project for that, but that is something that we

will split. And we did actually select a tree. It is $145,333. The installation will be approximately $20,000 each year. And we split both of those costs with DPS. So it'll be lower on the DPS side and our side as well than what we initially anticipated when we were doing the budget. So that's good. And you'll see more on that coming soon. I'm sure DPS will bring uh the contract to you to approve. Um we did go out to RFP on that snow removal contract. Uh that was a decrease. We were um anticipating uh we had to go out to RFP again. So we were anticipating a new contract. We were in a 5-year agreement with the provider and um we were just building in some additional funding in case that had gone up in the 5 years. It did not, which is great. So we've reduced that back down. Uh printing and publishing. We used to produce a magazine um gosh probably about five years ago precoid and then with COVID and some transition to more digital marketing initiatives. Um we've been really kind of uh doing some print not the traditional magazine and then also doing um some digital functions there. So we're reducing that a little bit. Um we don't need the the full 60,000 which is what it was previously. And then equipment rental or lease that increase of 6370 or 70% um those are the equipment rental costs that are associated with DPS equipment for downtown maintenance. So it's tied in with the specific employees that are doing the work and the type of work that they are doing. Um so we pay a portion of that and that's anticipated to go up a little bit as well.

Any questions? Questions for Miss Bass? Commissioner Cole. So on tenant recruitment, I assume that's for acquiring new businesses to join the BSD. Is that correct? Or is it that's not looking for landlords and developers, new tenants, is it? No. So that's it's called tenant recruitment, but it's actually our um tenant recruitment and retention initiative. So that's kind of all of our business development initiatives. I know I mentioned quite a few at long range planning last this past uh long-range planning and the year before that, but that goes into all of those activities. Okay.

I have a comment. Downtown has never been stronger. Oh, good. Really appreciate it everything you guys do. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Uh let's quickly get through uh Brownfield redevelopment dryer district or can we skip them? Do we have to go over them? We don't have to. Activity on either skip consider them skipped.

Uh all right. So now uh uh let's let's uh I don't see anybody wanting to comment publicly. So Let's talk about capital improvements, which is not on the agenda. Correct. Not specifically. No, because it's woven through all of the stuff we've talked about. Okay.

But as I mentioned at the in my introductory remarks, there is a little bit of a change in how we present it in the budget now to try to make it clearer for everybody. And as I know there's been a lot of discussion recently at the city commit well over the last couple of years about what we can do and should we do more and all of that. We're looking at doing a master plan that'll be coming online here shortly.

Okay. I'll bring up the one item that I have uh before I open it up and that is uh the expenditure for tape seal. So, we have for some years been operating under the idea, some of us, that that unimproved streets should all be improved and that that means taking a cape sealed street and turning it into a curbs and gutters and proper asphalt service. And I think that uh there's a lot of problems with that that if we wait until we need to do the water and sewer, we're never going to get to these streets. The other is that when another problem is that once we do improve them, we have the cost of uh of maintaining them for other forever. Another problem is that uh um some residents do not want curbs and gutters and they're perfectly happy with uh with their cape seal. So uh and and there are sections of town I've said this before uh Court and Lake Estates in particular that isn't even on our Cape Seal radar even though it's an absolute mess. Um, we have budgeted $525,000 next year for Cape Seal. That that's the total outlay for cap cap seal. If 100% of that is uh 85% covered by residents, that means that our cost at the end of the day after we collect, you know, the money back from residents that we put out, our outlay will be $75,000. And I would say that we could uh we could make a lot of progress uh here in Birmingham in improving people's uh streets, their quality of

life, and our general comfort with the condition of our infrastructure by spending a lot more on Cape Seal. How much is a lot more? I don't know. I would think a doubling from 75,000 to 150,000 or 525,000 total to a million would be the first possible step, but I being I being me, I've advocated for much more. You're prepared to discuss this, correct? uh from a financial and operational standpoint and what it would take and uh the commission I'm sure is all ears.

So we you know the mayor did come to us and talk to us about this and so we have met internally and we've met ourselves um with Mary Chavez. It's it's not as is not as simple as it sounds in the sense that um even though we put out 525,000 and we get most of that back, we don't get it back for 5 years. So we don't it's out of our coffers for that time, right? Some people not five. It depends. It depends, doesn't it? So cape seal was three. That's what my last cape seal was. Some three. We've been pushing it towards five because the interest rates have gone up higher and then the construction costs have gone up higher, too.

Five is as high as we go for cape seal. Um, and so we have there's a time before we get that money back. Then there's obviously the cost of doing the work to special assess it. And then there's the cost of it to operations and personnel of doubling the amount of cap seal projects going on at a certain time. And as you can see from what's been going on lately, there's a lot of oversight involved on the city's part in managing these construction projects when you have these contractors out there doing the work. and we're we're already struggling to keep up in on the engineering side as well. So, you saw in the budget though today that there's two changes being made to the engineering department to help help us to stop burning out our engineers number one and help us provide better service and better oversight as a whole because there's just too much work. This would create more work to your point. It would also benefit the residents for those streets that just need the Cape Seal that aren't going to be on the list anytime soon for water and sewer. And Courton Lake, that whole neighborhood is all kind of in that same situation. The infrastructure is pretty good. It's not at the top of our priority list, so it's not going to be hit anytime soon. Did you want to add anything, Mary Melissa?

So, I'm not sure whether I'm hearing it's doable. Let's try it. We could do we could we could incrementally raise it a little. I'm not sure we want to double it, but could we try pumping a few extra projects in? Yes. Frankly, and this is my opinion on behalf of all of the staff, quite honestly, that we need we maybe should think about waiting a year and letting the engineering department get what they have under control and then think about doing it next budget year and increasing it by a couple of projects. But could we do it? Yes, we couldn't. I don't even know if doubling that would be a big money commitment and time commitment. It's possible.

That's what I like to hear. Yeah. So if we can't double, could we could we the list for the current capill programs published, but is it possible to pick a couple really horrendous streets that we've had complaints about and add one, two more, three more? Not to double, but I mean, um, have you you've already bid out this year, so have you not? Yes, but if we add a street or two, we can work with legal to see if we can do a change order if the contractor holds his unit pricing and potentially look at streets also that might be nearby the contractor where he's already doing a cape seal of a block or two away.

Educate us a little bit. Is there a is there a whole bunch of engineering involved in doing a cape seal? So, the cape seal program the probably the most time part of it is the uh communications with residents. Um, we will get phone calls, multiple a day of information of what's going on, wanting information. We do use constant contact with that information, but sometimes people aren't on the email, don't sign up for it, and it's phone calls or potentially coordinating stuff. If someone's getting work done at their house, how do they get in and access from we're redoing the road? So, so the good news there is we have a new position to do that to do that.

And then also, you might want to talk about who prepares the bids. who reviews the bids, who prepares the numbers for the She's talking about talking to the attorney about just doing a change order. Yeah, I had an observation inside the comment to that though. So, hold on. So, that would not Right. Well, it would because it would increase the load for each of those because they'd add on certain streets. So, there'd be more work. Not the bid in this case if we did a change, but we still have to calculate the special assessment. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Which is more her department, right? Well, engineering does most of that work. Okay. All right. I'm sorry, Commissioner. Hey.

Yeah. So, you made the comment if the contractor would hold their unit price. No, we just increased by a large percentage. One street is a percentage increase. Therefore, volume pricing, which you've told us in previous years on construction projects, drove pricing down. So, they would not be expected to hold a unit price. they would be expected to show an off an opportunity because now they're experiencing what we've been reported on before volume discount. So So that's where the the one wrinkle club I'd be very careful of in there. It should actually be on a perunit basis better for the city possibly. Possibly. Possibly. The only thing you may run into is if it out one way.

It's not a new and what you may run into sometimes hypothetically if the contractor already has his schedule programmed. He's doing I'm just throwing this out eight projects at Cape Seal this year and we add more work that's a week longer. What is he able to even fit it into his construction schedule this year? Well, then the answer for this year is the discussion that's the discussions we need to have with the contractor if doing change but we can try. Yeah. And if they say sorry I'm booked then that's this year's answer but then it turns into next year it's a pre-planning thing and therefore the per unit price will be a better perunit price. So it's it's very binary. It's not it's not hard. This is this is super simple. Yes or no? Quick announcement for everyone. You got to leave in 10 minutes. Right. 215.

2:15. Okay. Just so everyone knows we have Melissa for 10 more minutes. think she has to go to her office, grab her stuff and be out the door. So, I guess the most important to cover the most important stuff for her first. Does anybody else Commissioner Host?

Yeah. Um, Mr. Mayor, I think this is a very good idea and uh I hone in on Chair Reculta with Baldwin Court. It's been 21 years and we always talk about 7 to 10 years and of course nobody gets that. It's all more like 10 to 18 years or 12 to 18. So to speed it up would be very good. And now I have a a generic question. When a road job goes south like West Wimbleton, who do we blame?

I I'll share with you the residents so far are blaming the commission. That's not That's not a budget question. And that question will come up on Monday night, right? Thank you. Correct. Yes. It will absolutely be addressed on Monday night. Okay. I have a question for you. Wait, wait a minute. No, I have an example like uh in Birmingham Farms two summers ago. What happened on the five road cape seal was nothing short of inexcusable. I assume we fired that contractor. I'm asking what are you refer I don't think. Do you know what he's talking about? No. What can you be more precise? Birmingham.

We did uh five streets in Birmingham Farms. We put down the initial layer uh the end of the first week in June and put the final layer layer down the second week in August or the third layer. Do we know which I don't know the far Birmingham Farms which street talking about Leam area? Okay. Well, that's again that's that's not so much a budget question and a go forward as a what happened the last time around. I mean, I'm not saying your question isn't legit. It's just like we gota Are there different uh qualities of Cape Seal jobs?

Yeah. I don't mean order the same specs and get different results. I mean

specking them out in a way whether it's grading or the materials used, the quality, the c, you know. So in the city of Birmingham, cape seal treatment is used for ruting and dust control. In other locations you may see in the state of Michigan, potentially rural areas of the city uh within counties, they use cape seal treatment actually on existing ashalt roads. So we do have this thing where we necessarily can't compare it exactly to what happens in other portions of the state because they already have an existing ashalt road that's getting a capill treatment. And the reason why it's getting a capstone treatment, it's only maybe getting 500 cars a day because it's a low volume county road. Um, I would have to research that more to see if there's anything we can do with construction, either the Cape Seal material or something else to extend the longevity of potentially not having SADs extend that time longer

without putting a full base underneath it. Right. I would just But you have areas percentage cuz that seems to be where the roads fail. Certainly, if I look out my front window, that's the failure mode. Is it the cohesion's failed? Mhm. Sure. Completely. And the crown, all that stuff, drainage. I know you're not going to get it perfect, but I got to believe that there are different levels of quality. And all I'm saying, all I would say is that we're interested in a quality job, right? I don't think we're talking huge dollars here either way. Is there something that makes it significantly better in terms of how long it lasts? Yeah, we can look into that.

I think I'll say from watching the guys that did the road in front of me, things like the crown you mentioned, I actually think they did a really good job of trying to do that. To your point of make it last longer is what I brought up. It was the quality of the material. The stone, quote unquote, is the stone. How you hold the stone together that's what's failing. I mean, my road's under 2 years old. If I hadn't paid for it, I'd still be paying for something. I have a pothole that's 4t wide in front of my driveway at two years old. And you said something that I would I question or take issue with. I don't know what. You said in Birmingham we use it for dust control or running and dust control.

Yeah. No, we use it as a replacement for an asphalt street. I mean, that is where we're at and we need to as much as possible, you know, even if I've seen streets, and I asked you about this a few months ago in Beverly Hills where it's asphalt and they do asphalt, but there's no curbs, there's no gutters, they just put down a layer of asphalt. I don't know what's underneath it or whether it's something we can do on some of these streets. Uh but whatever we do, I think there's a feeling that we need to do more and we need to find this lowhanging relatively inexpensive fruit and get it done. Right.

And if I may, will you may run in other communities, Beverly Hills, we're getting information about in Bloomfield Hills and sometimes in the township, you may have an existing ashalt road with no curbs. um it may have had previously a ditch line but now over time the ditch line is not there anymore. So a lot of times what other nearby communities do we'll what we do as part of our ashvalt maintenance program or resurfacing program is they mill down an inch and a half to three inches and put new ashalt on top. But there's other communities nearby that it's an existing ashvalt road but doesn't have curbs. But there's a difference between ashvalt and cap seal.

Absolutely. But we're looking for as much permanence as possible on on these streets where nobody's ever going to want or get curbs. Is there any way to do it better? Better quality materials, better thickness, whatever. Yep. Yep. Uh, last call. We have four minutes for Miss Cota if anybody has any questions. You have six for my watch. Yeah, but you have six. I have 209 on my watch. And you got to be in your car. It's 4 through 250. Oh, no. leave need to leave here around 2:15.

All right. Uh any other So we have all these other capital improvement projects on here. The intent was not to go through them one by one, but if anybody has any questions about any of them, now's the time to bring them up or concerns about capital improvements in general. You already heard my question on stance. about long term. Yeah. Yeah. Which I would hope that our infrastructure master plan would address. We're all invited to Melissa's meeting.

Huh. That's my only question. Do you want to ask it again or Yeah. My question is is at some point with the roads, we're going to finish kind of. We're going to finish with

we're going to finish with the imperatives and then we're going to start all over again. And it feels to me like it's a crunch to get this done fast enough and a quality enough that when we get to that point in 5 years, 7 years, we're going to be under the gun all over again. And how do we prepare for that so we're not under the gun all over again? Does that make sense? Yes. And I think it's absolutely a question that we approached in the master plan.

And it's a tricky one because as the mayor said earlier too, even the streets that we improve, how are we going to pay for those when we have to pay for the them for the rest of their lives. So the more we switch from unimproved to improved puts a financial burden on the city, you know, so in 30 years, it's another it's a whole, right? An example of that right now is bird. It's a big It's a ch It's an opportunity. It's an opportunity. There you go. Mr. Bloom, do you have a quick question? Yeah.

So, I liked the questions that were being asked about trying to pull up Cape Seal and doing more Cape Seal work, and it seems like we have some personnel constraints. Would it be possible at least for neighborhoods where there are a lot of Cape Seal roads like Court and Lake Estates, maybe Pleton Park to try and see if we can recruit a couple Cape Seal coordinators for each community that could act in an oversight cape capacity to work with the city or to go and check on projects and do things that would be volunteer so it wouldn't cost the residents anything. Maybe we can get some more work done. That That's my first question. You mean like a resident uh who who agrees to communicate with the rest of the residents?

Like a deputized city representative or someone that could be like a liaison or something in in the neighborhood. I think you have special skills. You have a lot of questions. That's an interesting thought. Uh but I would like to hear from I was gonna say absolutely not. The liability is too great. Your insurance company would not indemnify you. Absolutely not as easy answer. We got to stabilize this position for communication.

Absolutely not. Right. That's pretty definitive. Okay. All right. Um the because because I think trying to get more Cape Seal work if we can get it done would make sense as long as the city can handle it. Um, the second one is the generator for the library. Is there a way we can pull this up even a year, pull it out of the general fund and the library can pay it back or the city can keep in some kick kick in some money because this is something that could be used useful in the summer. uh if if it gets super hot or if the power goes off or something happens again in the winter and we've lost another season to try and help our residents if they need a place to shelter.

That would be something that the library board and the library director would have to request of the city manager and the city commission. Thank you. Well, clarifying question, you'll have to approach and be on the microphone again. Maybe I don't hear all this. So, we can hear you, but it this is being recorded.

Um, so maybe you can see it too. So, when I when I look in in all the individual um call outs on like Abby, you know, Abby resurfacing and this and that. So, we've got everything in 27 Right. I mean that's because what's happening in 27 but all the outy years. Do we have an outyear plan is it's all in the budget. Let me understand where it is. There's a list here. I saw the individual list right but previous years the budget we had individual project or anything that was engineering department that would be actually also every capital improvement project.

No I know but but then you can't see how much it is in the future years. you you you're showing what you want to do. So, but I don't see numbers associated with it.

So, this right here, we only did previous budget years. We would have it for each individual project that would be 5 years out. The budget book went over 500 pages I think the previous year. So, to con consolidate it, it's in this location right here. We're coming up in the engineering department um a kind of a five six page information sheet that has more detailed information. take information from the budget book consolid cuz it cuz like again as a citizen wants to see what's coming up you know what year would it be hitting you know I I see you see it there but how much money is it how much do we expect it to cost I mean I think that might help individuals on especially with assessments knowing what might be coming up and what they might be assessed for so they can plan for that better just

a lot of this is what our what our our envisioned master plan would cover. Okay. Right. Okay. In the works that we were doing in house that once this is all updated and the budget is approved, we'll update it again. Okay. Again, just trying to look at transparency and how we can get more info out to individuals. And I was just I I was struggling when I was looking at trying to figure out how those lists of projects then translated into the future years and how much money I mean are we way over, are we way under and all that. So, okay, that's great. That's being worked out. Thank you. Okay, Miss Cota, go

go. Two minutes late. I'm sorry. That's my fault. No, no, that's fine. Okay. Uh, I think we're good. Does anybody have anything else? Well, oh, I do. I lied. This is not exactly related to the budget, but I was curious. Um, is the county or BPS subject to Headley in any way, shape, or form? Okay. So, they all have to ratchet down just like we do. Correct. Okay. I'm just curious curiosity. Thank you, Alex, for the lovely arrangements. You take great care of us.

Okay. I guess a motion to adjurnn. Motion to adjurnn. That's your I just want to say a quick thank you to Mary Mark for your time yesterday and and walking through and answering all my questions. I appreciate it. All right, we're still being recorded and they that was covered.