City Council - Regular Meeting

there's jerry you've been to west texas this week

Watch out for screw worms.

I don't want you to get bit.

I've got to probably head down there the later end of the week.

Yeah, Kirk's going to us because of the screw worm.

Kirk just misses South Texas.

All right, let's get started. I'd like to call tonight's meeting to order and ask you all to...

Where's that? That's unacceptable. Okay.

Well, then I will ask Mr. T.J. McEwen if he would offer our invocation tonight.

Yes, let's pray. Father. Thank you for the opportunity to serve. Lord, I ask that you watch over us in all that we do and help us to make decisions that fulfill you and what you want. Lord, I pray for this city, pray for this state, pray for this nation. that you watch over our leaders, protect them, keep them safe, and likewise guide them in all that they do. It's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen. Amen.

Please join me in the pledge. I pledge allegiance 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. Okay, for items of community interest, I would like to remind everybody of the, oh. I'd like to remind everybody of the biggest rodeo in North Texas. No, it's not, but the 60th anniversary of the Jim Bowie Rodeo Days is starting on the 20th, Saturday the 20th of June, and will end on Saturday the 27th. The last three days of that will be a rodeo. I would also like to remind people about the music in the park this weekend. Um, I think it's gonna be music in the center because of the rain, but it is Saturday. Does anybody else have anything we need to know about boy? Do you have anything we need to know about?

No.

Okay. He's he's as involved as any of us are. So well then, um, if that's the case, let's move on to the city manager report.

Um, The budget process is the big item on my list of things to do. I'm waiting on most of the department heads to turn in their budget requests so that Robert and I can start the process. The big problem this year is the unfunded state mandates, which will be very expensive. I think the utilities poll inspection requirement and the electric line vegetation plan will be in the vicinity of $250,000 to $300,000 for both programs. in the electric part of the budget. We just don't know what it is and we haven't really gotten any good prices yet, but it's an unfunded mandate. I don't know why they put that requirement on small municipal utilities, but they did. We just don't have that much of a plan because we don't have that much transmission line. Anyway, it is what it is. The water department budget would be about what it was last year because of the maintenance of the water plant equipment to the tune of about $300,000. Jerry and I are in the process of preparing a grant application for three items that will help us in the future. Number one is the raw water pump at the lake, which you all know about. Number two is the engineering plans for the reuse of effluent water plant projects. And number three is the engineering plans for the expansion of the water plant for future use. The grant is due to be submitted July the 30th. On February 11th, the City of Bowie, Texas Office of Emergency Management, CERC, applied for a Governor's Office of Homeland Security grant in order to fund the purchase of radio communication. This grant provides 100% reimbursement for the equipment purchased awarding this grant delayed by lawsuits filed by multiple states contesting the distribution of available funding. Last Thursday afternoon, I received an email from the governor's office announcing that we have been awarded the grant. As a condition of the grant, I have submitted a list of communications equipment which we wish to purchase to the statewide interoperability coordinator. Late this morning Kirk received notification that FDIC had approved the equipment we wish to purchase. The next step will be to place the order for the equipment. We'll be ordering from a single vendor and utilizing a GSA contract. The total amount of the order will be approximately $13,269.20. Approximately, that sounds like exactly to me. Unless ICOM has changed their policy since we last placed an order with them, they will provide an invoice when the items have shipped. I will then submit the invoice to finance for payment. Once we have submitted payment, we'll upload copies of the invoice and the city's council check. to the Office of the Governor for reimbursement. I have no estimate of how long it will take to receive our reimbursement from the state, but typically reimbursements from the state are fairly quick. Hopefully that will remain true for this. We're still waiting on information from the Governor's Office to let us know about the 70-30 grant about replacing our end-of-life computer servers for the Police Department, Finance Department, and Administration. I've received several calls from the gentleman who is scoring and ranking our application, which is a good sign. The grant will save the city approximately $60,000 in cost for the new service if we are successful. So our share on that grant will be in the range of about $25,000. So that's also a pretty good grant. And it's summertime and there's mowing and Things like that. We've had a couple of water leaks, but nothing, nothing disastrous. Uh, everything seems to be going pretty soon. Smoothly. Oh, that's good. Any questions?

Um, I wanna point out here that that February 11th grant was 2025. That so when he said it's taken a long for this to happen, you, you left off the 2025.

Oh, okay. Well, what the deal is, is, uh, the, the, those blue states sued. the federal government because they didn't like the way the money was being distributed.

that all been resolved now oh yeah they wouldn't have released the ground okay and I and I also want people to know that Kirk worked really hard on this when we first submitted it and and it's repeater is that what you told me the repeater is now no longer available so he had he had to completely reconfigure what it is we can go after but he was able to come up with that pretty random number there for us to do this So it'll be very advantageous to our EOC. Anybody, any more questions? All right. So on the next item of our agenda, it's the consent agenda item, which is the mint. What? Oh, you moved them on me. Do we have any public comments? Yes, ma'am.

I wanted to thank Jerry at Walmart. He donated a whole bunch of flowers for the shelter garden. And he was very congenial about it. The store wanted to help create a community garden. So that's kind of the first one we see. It looks pretty good.

Well, thank you, Jerry. I think we warned you that if you were too nice to us, we'd take advantage of it. Thank you very much. We appreciate that. And we also appreciate you. You do a lot out there, too. So for those that can't see me, that's Barbara Green that I'm talking to. All right, well, let's move on to the consent agenda items. As you know, um, Austin is here tonight to talk to us about the financials. So we'll go, we'll approve all this at one time, but Austin, we're going to ask you to come to the podium and, uh, present our financials.

All right. Well, thanks y'all. Glad to be here. Uh, my name's Austin Henderson. I'm I live just down the road in Fort worth, a little under an hour away, so I can get up here pretty, pretty often. Um, A LITTLE BIT OF AN ALTERNATIVE ARRANGEMENT NOW WITH THE FINANCE DIRECTOR ROLE WHERE I'M COMING IN NOT BEING HERE EVERY SINGLE DAY BUT I'M ABLE TO REMOTELY ACCESS THE SOFTWARE AND BE ABLE TO TAKE CARE OF ALL THE FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS WHEREAS ROBERT IS HERE AND IS REALLY SUPERVISING THE DAY-TO-DAY, YOU KNOW, THE DAILY DEPOSITS AND THE CASH HANDLING AND ALL THAT. SO REALLY THAT OLD FINANCE DIRECTOR ROLE HAS KIND OF BEEN SPLIT AND WE HAVE THE ASSISTANT FINANCE DIRECTOR AND THEN MYSELF WHO'S COMING IN AND REALLY FOCUSING ON MONTH END, YEAR END, MAKING SURE THAT THE AUDIT PREP IS DONE AND THAT WE GET THE AUDIT DONE CORRECTLY. Um, so I'll kind of, with that, I'll go into a little bit of my background. Um, so I've been, been a CPA here in Texas since 2019. Um, I originally got a license in Arizona a year earlier, and then I moved out here. So, uh, been in Fort worth ever since, uh, as, uh, the, the firm that I'm working with now is, uh, called advisant. And we, uh, just really, really recently, there's been a huge change in the market of there's, there's not a lot of good finance directors out there. There's not a lot of people who are able to kind of get, get the work done. Right. And for us, it was something we noticed, and there's been a big push to kind of this virtual finance director role. And we see that, and it's somewhat successful, sometimes not. And what we saw here is, hey, I'm less than an hour away. I can be up here, drop of a hat. If I need to come meet with a department head, if I need to come meet with counsel, if I need to really do anything, I can come be right here. Uh, so that's, that's kind of the, the draw of it for me is, is, Hey, I can, I can help a city out. We can, you know, do business with y'all and I could really fulfill that role and, and still get to know when, when I first came in. So we just started on the 19th of may. So I've only been doing it for a few weeks. And got in right away and met with several department heads. Anybody that handled cash said, hey, how do you do it? What are your processes? What are your procedures? Met with each person in the finance department. Ironed out, hey, what are your roles and responsibilities? Does anybody have too much on their plate? Anybody got too little? Let's kind of shift things around and so forth. And Robert's been super instrumental in doing that day-to-day work with me. So I think it's been a good team so far. It's only been a few weeks, but we're really knocking it out. So, yeah, so that's it. I'll kind of jump into things here. So like I mentioned in here, most of my background is in audit. I've spent the majority of my career doing audit work. Really just been in the last six months that I've been focusing on more of this outsource type of role I had a couple of cities this year trying to get their audits done by March that reached out with some some fairly big issues with you know, their cash reconciliations or their accounts payable was messed up. And so I was able to kind of do that, and that's really shifted my focus. I think doing this role of being able to kind of be more in the day-to-day operations as opposed to just coming in at the end of the year and telling everybody what they did wrong, which is never a fun place to be. So it's definitely a better... a better opportunity, I think for myself and, and hopefully it can help the city out as well. Uh, so I worked with over 50 Texas cities in my career, as well as a handful of cities in Arizona when I first started out. So I've been doing it for a little while and, uh, I'm, I'm glad to be here and working with y'all. So I just kind of wanted to hit high level, some, some really high level, um, highlights throughout the, the different, uh, we're not necessarily planning to present every single month, probably just do quarterly, uh, financial reports as far as me coming in and, and kind of giving y'all an update on where things are at. But I wanted to get one done kind of right away since April was kind of getting closed right when I started. I want to say, hey, come in. Let's look at it and make sure that we've got all the revenues posted. Obviously, expenditures are all going to be posted and make sure that we're keeping up with the budget and all that. I wanted to kind of get in front of y'all and get you an idea of where things are at sort of just a point in time. Right. April 30. So looking at revenues, revenues, total revenues in the utility fund, very on par with what we'd expect to see. There's a couple that are ahead, a couple that are behind. But really, a lot of that's timing hauled waters above sewer taps is above. There's some miscellaneous electric revenue that all those were outpacing budget. Electric was dragging behind a little bit, but it wasn't summer yet in April. Right. So summer. Getting hotter gonna have more demand so we would expect electric revenues to pick up and meet meet budget So if they don't you know we'll dig into that so just just wanted to kind of get you all an update there All three departments within the utility fund water sewer electric all under budget so they're they're on pace and their total expenditures And so so that's always good to see I'll kind of speak more to that with a general fund here as well so looking at the general fund highlights I In April, total revenues, it's almost 75%, which you'd wanna see by the end of June. And if you're seeing that at the end of April, that's a good thing, right? Sales tax seems to be outpacing what the budget was. SEVERAL AREAS. INTEREST REVENUE, ANOTHER ONE THAT'S REALLY, REALLY STRONG. THAT'S JUST BASED ON THE MARKET, RIGHT? WHATEVER THE INVESTMENTS ARE DOING. SO EVERYTHING'S LOOKING GOOD IN THE REVENUE SIDE OF THINGS. AND THEN ON THE EXPENDITURE SIDE, RIGHT ON PACE. I LOOKED AT THE TOTAL EXPENDITURES THERE IN THE REPORT. YOU CAN SEE SPENT THROUGH APRIL, 56%. PACE WOULD BE 58%. SO FOLLOWING BUDGETS, WHAT YOU WANT TO SEE. YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE ANY BIG OUTLIERS. IF YOU DO, YOU WANT TO BE ABLE TO NOTE WHAT IT IS AND WHY IT'S THERE. Um, cuz obviously you don't wanna be doing a bunch of budget amendments at the end of the year, right? So just wanted to hit that. Um, and then on EDC and four B sales tax corp again, revenues are strong. They're really on their revenues. There are sales tax and interest revenue. So since both of those are doing well, the EDC and four B sales tax corp are obviously doing well and then their expenditures are under budget at this point. So, um, we'll kind of dig into that as, as we look at next year as well. And then those last five reports there in that big, I know it's a big old 70 page PDF, but it's got, got all the info in there. So just wanted to point some things out there, you know, second Monday and community centers seem to be tracking along kind of same as they have in previous years. No big revenue or expenditure jumps that I've, you know, we're concerning in any way. Collections for the ambulatory services are on pace with previous years. Looks like it's going to continue to be strong going into these last five months. Obviously May has already happened and we're starting June. So, We're able to kind of see the trend there. Electric margins have been steady. Like I said, demand should pick up in the summer months, so you should see electric revenues kind of in total numbers catch up. But then the margins have stayed pretty similar throughout the year, so no real concerns there. And then, again, investments are strong, so it's producing solid interest revenue within the text pool accounts. So yeah, that's, that's pretty much what I got. I just wanted to hit the high level, um, you know, get y'all get in front of y'all and I, uh, you know, the mayor bird, they all have my cell phone. So if y'all have questions, anytime I'm available, um, definitely call my cell. Even shoot me a text. I'll try to get back to you as quick as possible. I am fully able to get into the ENCODE the the financial software from from anywhere so I can definitely do that if there's specific budget questions or specific You know expenditure questions revenue questions. I can I can jump into things there So so yeah, just wanted to make myself available to y'all and let you know I'm here and glad to be working with city so

Can I ask real quick? Are you seeing the second Monday is tracking similar to previous years in the community center? Is that good or bad?

Oh, it really depends on what you, what you'd expect, right? I mean, for, for me, I'm coming in and kind of looking blind, right? Like I, uh, I had experience actually used to audit the city of Canton who does first Monday. So I've seen sort of this trade day thing. Um, really it depends on, are you seeing the things I'll be concerning is are we losing vendors? Are we, you know, are, are, is that number dropping? And from everything I could tell, and just on a really looking at high level trend over the last couple of years, seeming like it's on track. I don't know if there's been a large push to get more and if that's the case and there's, you know, it's tracking similarly, then obviously that would be less than what you'd expect. I'd have to dig into the details there. So I, yeah, that's, that's what I know so far. So just being in it a few weeks.

Are there any initial gaps in the budgeting or processes that you've seen in your short time?

No, not any huge gaps. Honestly, there were people in the finance department that were doing a lot more than I think everyone knew. And so I'm not trying to speak ill of anyone, but the previous finance director probably was taking more credit than what was being done. And so getting in and finding out who was really doing what, that was pretty eye-opening. And just seeing what the processes were. I actually spoke with the auditor, uh, last week, uh, just to kind of get an idea of their, you know, their thoughts on things and their ideas of process improvements and whatnot. And they were kind of under the same assumptions, um, that I think the, the rest of the management was. And so, uh, going through it and talking through that process with them, they were, they were glad to hear kind of the new setup that we have, um, having Robert here for the, the day-to-day operations and really handling. and really separating that out. I mean, it's tough, obviously smaller cities have a harder time having big finance departments where you can have a really good segregation of duties. And so, um, I, that was one of my things on day one was I wanted to hit the ground and say, okay, who does what and how can we make this a good, you know, who can review that's not touching that process. And, and, uh, I mean, I think the setup was, was pretty good before. And and I didn't make a ton of changes. I mean, I think there was a few things We even found today just kind of some some month end entries that we needed, you know, make sure we get made That you know the previous finance director was doing so just just been kind of a little bit of a scavenger hunt to try to find some some Documentation but other than that, it's been fairly smooth honestly smoother than I expected. So Are you familiar with six Sigma?

Six Sigma, yeah, the efficiency test, yeah, yeah.

I'm just curious. I'm not, like, I've never done the certifications or anything like that, but I know several people who have. Okay. So, yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely looking at the processes. We just wanted to make sure there was no big gaps. And honestly, like last week, I wasn't on site, but I, you know, messaged Robert and a few of the ladies over there and just said, hey, you know, this month in entries is getting made. I was like, oh, yeah, it's part of this process. And so, you know, it's all... Pretty much any question I've had, we've been able to get answered fairly quickly and make sure that we have a good process for it.

Thank you. So what's your initial assessment of the state of Bowie's financials?

Well, as far as just kind of comparing to budget, it seems like budget was done conservatively where revenues were done conservatively enough where you're going to be able to hit them and not. You never want to see obviously you don't want revenues to fall short and you don't want expenditures to go over. That's the basics of the budget, but Um, it looks like the budget was done, um, with the best, the best estimates possible. Like I didn't see anything that really popped out like, oh, wow, this is way off. There's a couple, you know, things that happen where it's just coding. Um, and that's more on the backend, not really the budgeting process. It's like, Hey, we've gotta stick this expenditure somewhere and we don't know exactly where to, where to stick it. And we stick it in miscellaneous and then miscellaneous budget goes, you know, $15,000 over. It's like, what is that? Well, there's an unexpected revenue that covers that, but it's kind of hard to see straight in that budgeting process. So the one thing I would say is I've seen lots of cities do where they have what you'd almost have like a non-departmental expenditure grouping, which we don't have here. We don't have like a, sometimes they'll say like a group 99 where it's just hey, this is a one-off expense that we're only getting because we got this one grant. And so we want to, you know, it's not really, it doesn't really belong to any department. But I know we had a situation pop up with that, with the police department, like they had to, expenditure and like well why is my budget way over it's like well it's not we had a we had a revenue that covers it one for one it's really just money that's coming in and going out but it makes it look like they're way over budget so just little things like that that I'm kind of seeing and trying to make sure we have a good good process for for next year if we have any kind of one-off expenditures maybe having a non-departmental grouping for those but sometimes those are hard to predict right I mean a budget's a it's a prediction right it's an estimate so

Any other questions, TJ, you got any questions? I know you've been appointed fairly new, but you guys I'm good. So, um, I just wanna say thank you because I came, I, I kind of gave him a tough time when we were interviewing him. Um, because there were one of the things that I didn't wanna see this year was 1.9 million dollars worth of budgeted amendments. So, and that's why I kind of looked at me funny when he said that, but we, because we wanna stay on track. We wanna stay on top of that. I'm not saying we don't wanna spend it if we need to spend it, but we don't need department heads freaking out because their budget's over. And there's got to be a way Burt has talked to you already about the grant funds. There's got to be a way for us to be able to show the council on a piece of paper or a department head. This is really, this is something that we got money in for because our, our council nor our department had see the income.

Right.

And so I tease them every year. I tell them, you don't really set a budget. You just pick out expenses that, you know, you gotta make. So you have no idea how that's gonna work. Um, so I'm hoping that as time goes on, we'll be able to build a system that educates them to that.

Yeah. And that's all part of the process. Obviously I've limited in, in, in it for a few weeks, but trying to make sure that everyone has a good idea and understanding of where the money's sourced from. Right. I mean, um, one of the first questions I asked you is about, you know, kind of this utility transfer that's budgeted every year to general fund. Um, and just, and your response, Hey, this is something we plan to do every year. Okay. That that's great. But that was just as someone who's read a bunch of financials for cities, uh, you know, this is a little bit different that you, you know, do this here. So why do you do that? And then you have the answer and then you're educated, you can move on and, and, you know, just kind of giving them the idea of, you know, Hey, you're, you know, you've got, it is really hard. Cause I've seen it in really small instances with, um, places that have cash. I used to work at a university. My first job out of college, I worked at a university as a staff accountant. And one of the things we did was we would go audit the petty cash boxes of everybody. And we went to the library at the school and said, hey, can we get your cash box? So they counted for us. They had a student worker working. She goes, well, do you want to see our other cash? And I said, what other cash? And she said, well, right here, no joke, goes over, pulls a book off the shelf, pulls out about 80 bucks in cash. I'm like, well, what do y'all do with that? She said, well, it's when people come in and pay fines and whatnot. If they pay in cash, we just stick it over here. Whenever it's somebody's birthday or whatever, we throw a little party. said oh no that's not how this works okay uh that is the university's income that is not the library's income and you know just kind of go but but just little things like that that can happen at a city easily right if you got somebody with a cash box that doesn't know what they're doing so that's why i wanted to kind of come in make sure hey we know what we're doing and everybody no issues like that when i talked to anybody here it was all We come turn our money into the finance department and that whole thing. So I've seen it happen, though, where it's just that not educated, not understanding that this money is not for birthday parties for the library department. This money is for the university. And you get a budget for birthday parties for the library. you know, that sort of thing.

That's cool. Um, well, if there's no other questions, we're gonna say thank you and approve this. All right.

Appreciate y'all. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm gonna, before we vote on this guys, um, I'm gonna ask Robert to come up and tell the staff a little, I mean the council a little bit about yourself.

I didn't warn you.

Did I sort of say, did he know? No, he didn't know.

No, my name's Robert Johnston. I've lived here in Bowie probably about 25 years now. I was originally from Nakona. Went to college at Midwestern State University, got an accounting degree. After college, I did some internships for a couple of different accountants. And then I actually got led into the direction of oil and gas. was the health safety environment coordinator for a large, one of the top 100 oil producing oil and gas industries for the state of Texas. And I also maintained their HR records and all of their insurance and workers' compensation, all of our claims. And also I did their vehicle expenses, so I was over their accounts and the money that we had coming in there, checked out with all that. So I've got some accounting experience. Austin's been a huge help giving me, especially the governmental accounting part of it, which I was not that familiar with. I was the accounting, but not the governmental aspect, which Austin's been a huge help in. And other than that, I mean, it's unbelievable how lucky we are, because that's really a great staff over there. And everybody over there works really hard. And they try their best to stay on top of everything. And like Austin said, I'm over there. I'm double checking, helping with the day-to-day processes through the finance department. Again, Austin, he goes over. all the months ends and double checks me. And it's been really working out great.

Well, we're glad to hear that. Very glad to hear it.

Anything else?

No. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Robert. Yes, sir.

All right, guys. At this time, I would entertain. Wait a minute. Let me get way back up here to the top.

All right.

As you know, we'll do the regular meeting, the write-offs and the, I mean the regular meeting minutes, uh, resolution write-offs and the financial statement today, all at one time. So do I have a motion to approve as presented?

So moved.

Shaw. Do I have a second? Second. True X. Um, Holstein.

Aye.

McEwen. Aye. Truax. Aye. Shaw. Aye. Thank you. All right. So our next item on the agenda is a discussion or action on the Monte County Tax Appraisal District to approve the proposed 2027 budgets. Bert, as always.

i've reviewed their budget it's straight in line i used to be on the appraisal district board after i was on the city council and i was always amazed at how smoothly and how efficiently that board operates and and how they budget and it's a very efficient operation so i highly recommend that you approve their proposed budgets

We do this every year for those of you that are new to this. So I would entertain a motion to approve as presented so moved Holstein. Do I have a second second McEwen? Um, Truax. Uh, Shaw. All right. Halst, um, McGowan.

All right.

Halston. All right. Thank you.

Trying to trick me. Kirk, you might as well.

Yep. Kirk, please come to the podium. The next item is, um, information only, um, for you guys to know what we will be doing in the future.

Right after I break the microphone.

I don't do that.

It's only four pages. It's not that bad tonight. Um, what you have is a template for a memorandum of understanding between the city of Bowie's office of emergency management, and then a requesting agency or jurisdiction for the incident support team, which we have established within the office of emergency management. This is the Cape building. It goes down and specifies the available services we can help provide at an incident or an event seen primarily radio communications and electrical power generation and lighting to help set up an incident command post. Uh, so far, since we have established the team, we deployed to a 700 acre grass fire in clay county, the burn lake fire, and we've deployed to the drowning at lake Amon Carter earlier this spring. And it worked well, um, fine-tuning some of the equipment we've got on board the trailer in case we need it. But everything's going well. However, used to, back in the day, a memorandum of understanding or a mutual aid agreement was basically a handshake and a conversation. And several years ago, that needed to get a little bit more formalized, things put in writing. The carbon fire down in Eastland County in March of 2012 45,000 acres burned and basically burned over the entire city of, of, uh, carbon. There were some problems. It was a big enough fire that it was awarded a fire management assistance grant by FEMA, which allows the volume of the departments that help fight the fire to submit their expenses, their personnel, their food, their fuel damage to the equipment, tires, that kind of stuff to get reimbursed. And FEMA came out and said, okay, need copies of your mutual aid agreements, please. And they read through the mutual aid agreements and they all said, we do not charge for mutual aid. And I understand that department don't want to say we're going to charge you for coming to help, but because of the way they phrased it, FEMA said, we're not giving you anything. You don't, you're not eligible for that funding. So TDM came out and said, you can't say we're not going to charge. You got to say something. Uh, and what the standard has been informally since that time is as is written into this, the first 12 hours of a deployment that's on us, the city of Bowie, we'll pay for the personnel. We'll pay for the equipment, the fuel, everything else. By the end of 12 hours, you should know how big is big and bad is bad. And if it looks like it's going to go to a fire mutual assistance grant or FEMA funding, no problem. We keep going after the 12 hours and we'll provide the responding requesting agency with an invoice, the pay for our expenses, which they will submit with the grant, the fire management assistant grant of the FEMA public assistance funding, and we'll get reimbursed. It's not coming out of their pocket. If it's not going to be one of those things, they're not going to get the funding. Well, by 12 hours, you just make arrangements to rotate the team off the deployment. you find another team to come in and replace us just like fire departments. If they're going to, it's going to go over 12 hours, they get another mutual aid fire department to come in and replace them. And by 12 hours, your crews need offline anyway. So that is what we have put together. Um, and this would basically, we'll go out to the departments that are interested in using the incident support team. I hope that would be everybody in Montague County. I'm pretty sure it's going to be clay County as well. Um, at least when we get started and get them to sign the agreement. So we have it in place. It'll be reviewed every year. It'll be updated every five years or as it needs to be done. Um, it's kind of long and wordy in some places. Does anybody have any questions? Come on Brent. I know you got questions.

Yeah. So when you're referring to these instances, are they mainly seen and utilized during a fire?

Fires are one of the common things here. We actually, before we had the trailer, the team deployed to Forsberg following the tornado two years ago, the drowning out at the lake. There are other things other than fires, but fires tend to be the most common.

Probably the most lengthy as well?

They can be. We're pretty good around here, jumping on fires in a hurry. I mean, the Smokehouse Creek fire, the winds and the conditions were just so horrible. That's why it lasted as long as it did. Here, our grass and fuels aren't quite that bad. But yeah, they can all go quite a while. We were out in Forestburg following the tornado for probably about eight hours that night.

So and then does this just cover your department or would this be all emergency management response teams in our jurisdiction police fire?

I am the only response team.

As far as the resources, fire trucks.

The fire department, they would have a mutual aid agreement, which is a little different than an MOU. Right. Mutual aid means your community needs help. We have it. If we have the same problem, you would help us. So it's a quid pro quo kind of a ring, right? And the fire department does have them. Yeah. We discussed that not too long ago. We do have those in place. Um, actually it was done by Nortex about 17 years ago, set up the mutual aid agreements with everybody in the district.

When you're talking about the FEMA recovery money and stuff like that, is that also covered in those properly?

I don't believe, those predate fire management assistant grants and the current public assistance grants. So, I mean, our mutual aid agreements need to be updated. Unfortunately, NORTEX is not interested in updating. So, that may be the next thing you see me standing here with is mutual aid agreements that we're rewriting on our own with different area departments. Okay.

so you're going to reach out to these different counties to go ahead and get these set up you'll bring them back to us for approval after that sure okay all right so then council you'll have an opportunity to approve them as they as they fall back into us one more question do you the people deployed from our area with our resources

they remain under your command in this time or control or how does that work?

Right now it's me. Right. I'm the only one, the only employee to deploy. We do have some volunteers. Uh, like I had one of our volunteers go out on the drowning with me and we had a couple of volunteers out in the fire, uh, the tornado in Forestburg. Primarily it's me. I'm student. One area of this we have to address is for the volunteers. If one were to become injured, how are we going to cover that legally? And that's not something we have written into the plan because I don't know how we're going to write it. That's that's a liability on the city. I'm sure there's some way to do it because the fire department has volunteers. Right. So that we would fall into that same kind of category. It's just gonna be a matter of getting that worked out. Okay.

The firefighter, the volunteer fire department, let's try this again. The volunteer fire fighters are on, uh, uh, a recognized list though, aren't they? I mean, you don't just show up and say, I'm gonna volunteer for a fire. So they're a vol they're recognized volunteers. So that would probably be the first place we have to start.

Okay. And they have to meet certain training requirements.

They do for firemen. Yeah. And, and he's got some training requirements too, for, we've already got that for the folks that support the EOC.

Yeah. So that's not a problem. It's just a way of getting the verbiage. Right.

Yeah. So there's gotta be a way.

Yep.

We'll figure it out. Thank you for the presentation.

Thank Kirk.

All right. So the next, uh, item on the agenda is to approve some amendments to the finance department purchasing policy. Who's presenting that?

I can, if you want me to, it doesn't matter. I can find my, we just had two adjustments. Um, got one here somewhere because by state law, the amount went up. On page three. Five. About competitive bidding. Used to be $50,000, and now it went up to $100,000. Yay.

In case everybody doesn't get that.

Yeah, on page six, too, it went up. up to a hundred thousand dollars. And so we just had to update the policy so that it would match state law.

Yeah.

Just those.

So that that's a, that's important. And that's important to us for a lot of reasons that $50,000 doesn't do anything these days, a hundred thousand dollars, not gonna do much more, but it does give us some breathing room. Anybody have any questions? So we're just approving the, uh, changes to the purchasing policy in the city of Bowie. So I'd entertain a motion to accept as presented by Sandy. So moved. Wow. Y'all just gonna fight over that. Aren't you? So we're gonna go to Shaw and then Holstein. Um, McEwen.

All right.

Holstein. Aye. Truax. Aye. And Shaw.

Yes.

Thank you. Next item on the agenda is ordinance 202,605 ordinance of the city of Bowie, Texas, adding a pickleball court reservation fee to appendix C um, fee schedule of the Bowie code of ordinances, providing a savings clause and a repealer clause and providing an effective date. Now, Sandy's also gonna speak to this because her and Amber did a great deal of research. on the different pickle balls around us, especially in the state of Texas, to come up with the rates that are being presented to us tonight. If I can get my iPad to get there.

$20 half day, $40.

Pardon?

$20 half day, $40 full day. Yes. Per court.

Yes. And we obviously, the pickleball courts are being used right now, because we kind of wanted to see where we were going and how they were going to be used and do some more research. So this is the numbers that are being presented to you guys tonight. Now, you can see it says that the reservations require a minimum of 10 days. We're also talking about what is How did we decide to word that? Like, we don't want you being able to to book every Wednesday on court three at four to six a year in advance. So that because that doesn't leave them open to the public. Reservations are going to be on a limited basis. Mostly just tournaments, tournaments and like church groups that want to come in and bring out everybody and things like that. But we don't want somebody to say over every Monday night from seven to ten is mine.

Where that came from is the reservations at Selma Park. People would reserve bases out there a year in advance, and we finally stopped it because it caused a lot of dissension, I guess you could say. Anyway, it's a great idea to not let somebody reserve something, unless it's a league or something like that.

And what will be our process for monitoring or, or so some, you know, we don't have conflict out there when somebody says, so when you reserve a court, you'll receive a document that says that you have the court reserved.

So if you show up out there and people are playing, then you get to say, okay, but we're not saying this is not required to go play out there. This is no, no, this is only if you want to reserve it. for X, Y, and Z reason, but anybody could host a tournament and just hope it's open.

Brent and I could just drive out there and go play. Yeah.

It's still a, it's still a first come first serve. Okay. Without the paper, but to, to reserve it, you're going to, and you've got to pay for it when you reserve it. There's none of this. We'll all pay when I get there. Yeah. Because that was the thing at Selma park. Somebody would reserve it for the whole year and then not ever show up. And so we didn't have any payments. Um, and there, Every court that we looked up is charging for reservations, every court. So some of them are charging by the hour. And they're not even covered. So I think this is a pretty fair deal. If it's not, I'm sure somebody will tell us by tomorrow.

And we post it on the website too. Because you reserve online, we get the email, and so then we take their payment and send them their document to say I have it reserved. And then we immediately post it on the website. So that way people can see.

Yeah, there's a calendar on there. Okay. I move that we approve this.

Thank you.

Second.

Thanks. Thank you. Uh, McEwen.

Aye. Shaw. Aye. Truax. Aye. Holstein. Aye.

Thank you.

You're gonna put your name on it. Uh, Bert and I wanna make a reservation.

And by the way, our first tournament out there, I think is Jim Bowie. The weekend, the, the, the have a standby. Uh, I can't remember if it's the 20th or the 27th. Is it the 20th? So the first day of Jim Dewey's, uh, rodeo week, there's a tournament out there Saturday afternoon.

Can we get a council member bracket going?

absolutely you want to be my partner no i want to play you oh no i want somebody that's going to do all the work okay the next item on the agenda is ordinance 2026 an ordinance of the city council of the city of bowie texas prohibiting drilling and mining or the reopening of an abandoned well or mine in any public park located within the city limits of bowie texas ask me why we're doing that why are we doing this because we are applying for a park grant And so they, um, I don't know if there's any ever been drilled. I don't know anything about the history of our park land and what may or may not have been done on it, but because Texas parks and wildlife wants to give us so much money to do this, they want to make sure that nobody can come back and destroy it.

Makes sense.

Pretty, pretty self-explanatory. So I would entertain a motion to accept this new ordinance as presented.

Paul Stein.

Do I have a second?

Second.

Truex. Shaw.

Aye.

Truex.

Aye.

I think that's supposed to say McEwen. McEwen. Aye. And. Aye. Both of them are off here. Holstein. You ran out of other people.

I figured I was next.

This one's Holstein. And this one is McEwen. All right, the next item on the agenda and the last item, thank goodness, is Resolution 2026-16, a resolution authorizing the submission of an application to the Texas Parks and Wildlife for the 2027 Local Park Grant.

Well, we just approved the no mining, so let's go for the grant.

Yeah, it's paperwork drama, but we have to have a resolution saying that you have authorized us to be able to submit the application for the park grant, which is growing every day, so... I would entertain that motion to accept the resolution as presented.

So move true acts.

Do I have a second?

Sure.

Holstein.

Shaw. Do we have a copy of, I mean, will we get another copy of like what the final grant is?

Yes, but it's not, it won't be ready until, um, later in the year. Okay.

Yes.

Okay. So Shaw, yes. True acts. Hi. Holstein. Hi. And McEwen. Hi. All right. Well, ladies and gentlemen. what 648 648 we're going to call this meeting and thank you very much for attending and thank you to you for driving so far thank you jerry for participating in our city have you found a place to live here yet thank you robert for coming tonight yes thank you all

So old. But then you sent me. The DM outside.