City Council - workshop

Good evening, everyone. It's 4 o'clock, 4.01 now.

What's that?

Check in. OK. With that, we're going to go ahead and get started. We do have one counselor that is not going to be here tonight. With that, everyone else present? Madam Clerk, can you document who's here? And with that, we're moving to the spirit of 2027. These is our next section of the workshop. So thank you, council, for once again taking the time To be here, we appreciate your service. And with that, we're going to move to our acting finance director.

Thank you everyone for being here tonight. I'm just going to start off by saying that this was very much put together very fast, so I did my best to give you a very high level summary. But if you guys want to get into details more, we can talk about it in this session. Trying to focus on what I think you might want to hear and and give you some summary levels.

The fees and revenues for the city of Caldwell are very complicated and there's a lot of pieces that go into it.

So if you'll just give me one or two more minutes, I gotta send the presentation over to our IT so that we can get it up on the screen and I can use that as my basis for presentation. And I do apologize in advance if there's any typos or errors, because I did put it together really fast. So I wouldn't be surprised if we see some of that tonight. and some things I won't have answers for you if you get into the specifics of the wise I did not interview or have meetings with the individual departments to discuss otherwise I think that Ray Lynn may have been discussing some of the things over the throughout the year with the department heads they were all asked to prepare their fees and turn them in and Kelsey and I've been working hard to put that information together, but I've asked some of them to be here tonight, so if you do have questions that relate to more specifics that I can't address, hopefully they are here tonight to address that for you.

Yes, first of all, thank you to the staff that are here, the news, and our guests. So, you know, we just did have a change, and so I have an acting finance director, so Michelle's been doing a great job of getting caught up to speed and putting things together as we move forward. Would you like Councilor Allgood into the meeting? So with that... Thank you for putting all this together. I know it's been a lot. You're currently working two jobs, acting finance director and our treasurer. So with that, we'll go ahead and proceed.

All right. So I wanted to talk about fees for the city of Caldwell. And I wanted to start off by giving an overall summary. There's been a lot of questions by council about what percentage of fees or revenue and what types of revenue do we have and how does that all go into this. And so I wanted to give a very high level overview of that and then kind of go deeper into detail on the specific portion of revenue that we're covering tonight, which is fees. and not including impact fees, because those are set separately from this process, which those are done individually through committees and brought to you at separate times. So the first slide here that I want to talk about is our overall budget. This number is subject to change, but if it does change, it will change slightly. But this is kind of what we estimate we'll have for revenues coming into our fiscal year 27. We have $162 million in the budget currently for fiscal year 2027. Approximately $88.5 million of that is fees, fee-related revenue. Taxes is about $47.7 million. And internal cost allocations and transfers that we do internally. is about $12.6 million, and then all other revenues about $13.3. There's a lot in that other category that goes into, if you want more information on that, I can provide it at a later time. But because we're focusing on fees tonight, that's kind of where I wanted to address. To the left, you'll see a chart that gives the percentage. So 30% of the revenue is taxes, 54% of the revenue is fees, 8% is internal transfers, Another 8% for all others. We had a revenue analysis done during a revenue audit back in 2020. Two, I believe, maybe 23, but it looked at the years 2021 and 2022. And the percentage of fees has increased by about 4%. So back when we did that study and had the auditors present, They were identifying fees being about 50% of our revenue, and with the increases and the proposals that we have this year, it is going up a few percents in comparisons to overall revenue. So anybody have any questions on that?

Just for the general public, just give us a few examples of what other is.

I'm trying to think of the bigger ones. contractual revenue.

We have the fire, rural fire district, that's 2.5 million or so that comes in.

It's not really fee-based revenue. We also have reimbursement agreements with ITD for infrastructure projects that they reimburse us for. We have our SROs with the police department as well. So a lot of that is contractual revenue that we have through agreements, interagency agreements and cooperative agreements with other agencies. I'd say it's probably the biggest piece of that and then there's other stuff as well.

Thank you.

So if you'll look, I'm gonna go back to that slide one more time. So the fees is 88.5 million. That's what we're focusing on tonight. This next slide, as you can see, The total is referencing the 88.5. So it breaks that number down into a little bit more detail. What type of fees are we talking about? So within our 88.5 million in fees, we have about 7.9, almost 8 million in impact fees. We are not discussing that tonight. Governmental fees is about 10.4, and enterprise fees is about 70 million. A good chunk of our fees is in our enterprise funds. Those have no property tax funds going to them. And so a lot of our discussion tonight is going to, well, we're going to start off our discussion tonight with the bigger chunk, which is our enterprise funds, which is mostly held under our public works category. this is just a summary for you since we're gonna start off with our enterprise funds and when I say enterprise funds I'm referring to our solely fee based funds which include golf electrical sanitation sewer irrigation and water this shows you a comparison of what we budgeted for these individual departments in fiscal year 2026 and what we are proposing for fiscal year 2027 And then you have a line item that identifies the increase or decrease in relation to fee revenue. You'll see that the two I want to highlight are the sewer and the water, which is a $21 million increase there. And out of that is mostly sewer and water divisions that have identified that increase. So that jumps us right into that. So we're going to do that first. This one is probably the most complicated. I don't have a lot of slides on this. This is mostly going to be discussion. And if you have any questions, let us know. We did have an analysis company come in and do an analysis of our fees. And so this isn't really a fee increase. It's more of a, I mean, we are increasing on some fees, but we are restructuring the way that we're looking at our, how we calculate our fees altogether. So it's something that we did It was driven because we needed a cost of service analysis rather than just adjusting for inflationary adjustments. And the most significant changes were in the connection fees paid by new development and larger commercial utility customers. Those are the two categories of people that will be impacted the most from this fee change in structure. But the reason we did it was because we needed help. We needed help to ensure growth, was paying for the individuals that were contributing to our systems, our infrastructure systems, were paying appropriately for the use that they were having on those systems. We're expanding the utility infrastructure. We're growing city, and several of the charges the way the structure was done, they looked at how to better allocate, I guess you could say, those fees to those who are using our systems the most. This is a very high level kind of approximation of the fee categories, the average increases, and it doesn't really help you determine how that has an impact, but I did throw it in there for you guys to view. What I'd like to focus more on is the next slide and the residential piece. I know that that's been a point of an issue. A lot of residents are affected by the fee increases on our water and utility billing. So this is an analysis that I did specifically on the residential. And it actually doesn't impact our residential nearly as much as I mentioned earlier. It's mostly going to be connection fees to developers as well as our commercial users. For residentials, about 75% of the current residents that get invoiced, their bill will be between $44.33 and $91.44. The majority of those are going to fall right into the middle of that category in the $50 to $60 range. That means that some people will see a decrease because of the way the structure is set up. 15% of the residential users will maybe see no change to a little change and that their bill will be between $97 and $124. And then there will be a small 10% of all the residential that we have with the city that will see a large increase of 130 to 370. And those are going to be specific to the higher user residential customers.

Just to clarify to council, this is a range, not from one to another, depending on usage.

I didn't want to say, oh, everybody's bill is going to be on average this much, because it's a range. The way we have it set up, depending on your meter size, that affects what your base fee is. And then, of course, you have your usage. And so we used to just have a one-size-fits-all base fee. Now we're saying, well, you don't have as much of a base fee, or we're tearing that out, I guess you could say. I'm saying your base fee is so much based off of your meter size, because if you have a bigger meter, you're utilizing more services, more water, so your water needs are higher. So we will have a small section of residential utilities seeing an increase. The majority of them, though, will see no increase or decreases and then there'll be some that we'll see little to no increase at all. So that's kind of the residential, yeah, go ahead.

So because this was quite a big thing when the fees were raised last time, and so I know you just went over it, but I just want to make it clear to anybody who's listening that we're trying to decrease their monthly bill now by this,

We're trying to focus our fees to be centered around those who are using our services more. So if you're someone who, for instance, is a senior citizen, you live by yourself, you don't have a lot of, you have like the bare minimum, basically, of a bill that you can get, you'll probably see a decrease. If you're a family of five, four or five people, single family home, and you use an average amount of water, your bill will probably stay the same. It might increase about two dollars or so, two to three dollars or so, but it's not gonna have much of an impact. If you're in the high user category, then you will see an impact, and that's the 10% of those. And I can't give examples of those, because in my mind, maybe staff can. The only thing I think is maybe like an apartment building might have a little higher of a usage because they're funneling more into more smaller units. But I'm not exactly sure what examples would be in that 10% category, but I can look into that and get back to you.

And the range that you've given us is the base and the potential usage. Yes, it's the overall bill. Okay, so not just the base.

Yes, it's the overall bill. So I know right now, you know, our bills average anywhere from 75 to 150, depending on, and maybe even a little less and a little higher for those. But the majority, the 75%, I'd say, fall within, I would say the average right now is between 50 and 130 for 75% of them. And so that average is gonna go down to 44 to 91. So a good amount of them are gonna see, you know, LITTLE TO NO CHANGE AND EVEN DECREASES WHEREAS SOME WILL SEE LITTLE TO SOME CHANGE AND OTHERS WILL SEE AN INCREASE. SO THAT'S PROPOSING FOR RESIDENTIAL. the best I could come up with to explain the commercial side.

The commercial side is a lot more complicated.

And there's more tiers involved than just base rate and usage. And so this was a slide I took from our contractor who presented their analysis to us about a month ago or so. And the yellow dotted box slides identify Caldwell's current fees and what we're proposing on the commercial level the blue piece is water and the green piece is sewer so right now average is about 130 it's going to go up to 271 for sewer average was 50 that's going to go up to 96 and so this is on the commercial invoice and they're going to see a much more significant increase, those commercial customers will, in comparison to what we have now. And then it also gives you an idea of where we're at with other agencies here. So you can see that right now we're below, we're almost right in line with Nampa, but we are below what Middleton's charging. which is surprising, but we're also moving up, and so we will be in between what is charged by maybe Eagle and CUNA, closer to their ranges. I'm trying to stick with cities that are within Idaho in referring to speaking with you on this, but you can see here where it puts us in line with other cities and agencies around us. We will see an increase in connection fees. I don't have anything specific on that. I didn't have time to dive into the connection fees, but I do think that there's also significant proposed increases. I don't know if we have anybody here from staff or if you guys have questions. On the commercial connection side, that would be the development fees that we charge to connect. Those will also be increasing. Do you guys have any questions or want me to look up any information for you as follow through on that?

Just one real quick, just so that people know.

The numbers here that you were giving from Nampa, Ontario, and those are all current.

I believe within the last year.

Or last year's, but they could be changing those in their budgets as well.

Yes, yes. Yeah, they could be proposing. I mean, I think most municipalities have the same fiscal year. Yeah, so those are their currently adopted fees.

The reason that you're likely going to see a big increase difference in some of the fees with us and some other jurisdictions here locally is because of some jurisdictions have been able to get caught up and do this cost of service analysis like Caldwell has been able to do and like Council has adopted. A lot of jurisdictions in the Valley are wanting to do that cost of service analysis and expect that when they complete that cost of service analysis, they're going to see this big increase as well. So some of the reason why some of them are so much lower is because they are wanting to go ahead and do that analysis, but also a lot of these jurisdictions have taken out bonds, which Caldwell does not have any debt in our water and our sewer. And so jurisdictions that do have debt on water and sewer are able to keep their fees lower because their taxpayers are subsidizing their enterprise funds.

Next we'll go over sanitation. Sanitation is a contract that we have with Republic Services. And so most of the fee increases are determined based off of what was written in that contract. Follow along here, okay. We did see no increases over 5% here. Just under 5% were the increases for sanitation. um and it's mostly a contractual weight rate adjustment they let us know each year based off of cpi index uh where that rate's gonna lie um and so this year it's it's averaging about 4.2 for the sanitation which is our garbage and recycling services that we provide that's really all i have not much to say on that one does anybody have any questions

So I just have a hard time believing that residential collection would be as much as commercial, the dumpsters, the compactors, the same as .

They are not as much. This does not show the individual fee, but the percentage of increase that is being proposed is the same. But they do have higher rates. The rates are different, yes, definitely for these. In the fee sheet that was provided with the list of, I don't know how many thousands of fees we have that I sent you earlier. It's a lot of information to dive through. But you can look at the sanitation tab on that Excel spreadsheet. That's probably one of the simpler ones to look at. And you can see the individual fees, what we charge for industrial, residential, commercial, carts, et cetera. It delineates it all. It's only one or two pages. So that one's fairly simple. easy to look at, but they are different rates. They do charge more for those. Golf is proposing some, let's see, They're just trying to maintain affordability for their golfers. Most annual pass fees increased only about 3%. All the green fees remained unchanged. The primary adjustment was to Purple Sage golf cart rental fees, as well as expanding discount programs to provide additional value for seniors and veterans. And so those are the main impacts for our changes to our golf fees. So not a ton of change there. I don't think we have anything going over the 5%. I don't think we're proposing any new increases, mostly just some cart rental and some minimal pass.

Are they still in the black for the year?

Yes, they are doing.

I want to remind the public that not too long ago, your taxpayer money, we were putting in a... I can remember being on the board that I told them that, gosh, if we can't get this in the black pretty soon, maybe we need to lease that golf course out and not, you know, have that kind of a service for the few instead of the many. So, anyway, they've done a great job. I don't know who's on the golf committee. Mr. Dittenberg?

Nope. Okay.

Anyway, they've kept that going, which I think is a plus for the tax.

Thank you for that. And by the way, thank you, Parks and Golf, for doing a great job. Everything's looking great, and you guys are doing good.

RASHID KHALIDI- I have a couple of questions, and Councillor Stroddick reminded me reminded all of us that there was a time when the golf did get a substantial amount of money from the general funds to help keep it afloat and so how many years now has it been that the golf course has been afloat and and uh or in the in the black yeah um i want to say three to four years is my guess um

We did, I've been here 12 years and the first five, six years it was a struggle. We did work continuously, we did internal loans to assist them and had them pay The golf department, the city did give them a lot of money, but all the money that was given to golf was eventually repaid. Golf owned some land out there that was eventually sold back to the city general fund and then repurposed for development. And so that helped them get out of the hole they were in, but that probably just brought them even. And they are... I THINK IT'S IMPORTANT FOR THEM TO MAKE SURE THAT THEY ARE SOLELY FUNDED BY FEES NOW AND IN THE BLACK AND ON A PROJECTION TO HAVE ENOUGH FUND BALANCE TO HOPEFULLY MAINTAIN AT LEAST SOME OF THEIR CAPITAL IN THE UPCOMING YEARS.

THAT LEADS ME TO MY NEXT QUESTION. WHEN I WAS THE LADIES ON TO THE GOLF BOARD, THEY TALKED ABOUT THEIR NUMBERS AND THEIR SUCCESSES AND STUFF. Failed irrigation system away from dumping 4 or 5 or 6 or 10Million dollars into the golf course.

Yeah, that's 1 of the things that we're looking to find funding for, I think, in the next couple of years. But, yeah, we, we have a. irrigation system needs, significant irrigation system needs that will have to be done.

So does this fee schedule take into consideration the amount of reserves they need to have in order to pay for a $10 million irrigation system, or is just a comfort level to maintain?

This is just to maintain affordability for golfers. We have not done any kind of analysis to say how much would we have to increase fees to to support that kind of an infrastructure project. There's some nuances to that, I think. So it's, you know, the irrigation system in and of itself is, if they were, and I haven't been involved in the discussions of the project, so I don't know all the details, but if they were to come on to City of Caldwell Irrigation and be brought into that, It would then become the city's infrastructure. And the city irrigation department would then be responsible for maintaining that infrastructure. And so I think it would have to be a collaborative effort of what is city infrastructure cost and what is infrastructure related to the golf course percentage-wise, how we would work that in. But I think all those nuances would have to be worked out. And I don't know if they've already been discussed. I have to

So to say the golf course is safe is a stretch.

They're safe in operations. They're operationally sound. They're maintaining operations. They are probably, I think, building enough fund balance and savings to pay for equipment, machinery needs, maybe even building repairs and stuff. We are seeing increases year after year, so that's good. But something as large as the irrigation project that they're referring to, they don't have the capacity to do that, so... They're not, yeah, they're not 100% out of the water.

So the other question that I have is back here on page two, and you don't need to flip back to the slide, but you said, or page three, four, you said golf is an enterprise fund. Is it a true enterprise fund as defined by law, or is that just how we've set it up?

So an enterprise fund has to be solely fee-based. You cannot have any property tax, sales tax, or tax kind of revenue going to it. So I think that's why it was set as an enterprise fee. I think that was the intent, was to say this is a fee based fund, we don't want to use property tax funding for it. I think that's why we worked so hard to get it out of the red and into the black because we did want it to be supported by that there's a lot of you got your golf board and stuff that have been involved with creation of the golf courses for a long time. And so it's been an effort to do that. But But yeah,

True Enterprise Fund, that's right.

So I think it does qualify because it does have only fee-based, especially now more so than maybe before, but it is true. The intent there is to have it fully funded by fees. If we were to say that we wanted to make it a recreation facility and it was more of a government function, there'd be opportunity to move it in there, but I don't know I don't know if that's what the intent is of council, as it is a golf course. And so, you know.

So just from my time on the golf board, and maybe, you know, Councillor Tillemont can either add to this or correct me if I'm wrong. They're saying is this is the best kept affordable secret golf course in the valley. This is the best, most affordable. Can we take that same approach with our pool? Can we take the same approach with our water system or with our trash system? Can we say this is the best, cheapest secret in the valley?

I don't know. When you ask that question, I would say our wastewater, I feel, is extremely expensive. of other agencies the capacity we've built into that the planning that we've done with that I feel like we're where we are above and beyond the other agencies in this area when it comes to our wastewater system That being said, cheapest, I don't know about cheapest. As we just looked in the revenues, it looks like we're going to be jumping up there. We won't be the most expensive, but we also won't be the cheapest. So with golf, I'm not a golfer, so I don't really know on that end. We'd have to talk to the...

Well, I know Councillor Stoddard has a question, but I just want to say that I think I am deeply disappointed that other organizations came in with some fee increases, some reasonable fee increases, and came in with some non-resident fee proposals as opposed to resident. And the golf, as much as I like golf, I like the golf board, kind of wanted to make sure everybody, even non-residents, got our

cheap great golf course fees so yeah that's something that we can definitely look at for uh next year market for that and it makes sense um you know i know that we do that with school that was changed a couple years ago and i think library does it too so um i think it'd be valid to take a look at it

Councilor Stoddard. Just to answer Councilor Dittenberg's question about what we could save golf course, I always say it's the best value in the treasure value for what you get.

All right. Real quick. Tiffany is here, and I am on the board.

I thought we did charge. We're just doing a 3% across the board, but we do have separate fees, correct?

For resident and non-resident? Is that your question? no we have what we have our restriction restricted classes and unrestricted classes um it is something that we could look at but being that golf is a recreation activity for those that want to go do it it's a choice um we want to keep fairview as inexpensive as possible to to encourage young golfers as well as new golfers to the golfing community to go out and experience it and then keep Purple Sage competitive since it is a municipal golf course. We don't want to upcharge our citizens. Our clubhouse isn't up to private standard. We want to make sure that we We stay in the affordability realm. I would say that if the city of Caldwell was helping fund some of the golf course, yeah, we would want to go to that non-resident fee. But since it's not, and it's an enterprise fund, that's kind of why we have it that way. But it is definitely something we could explore.

I noticed you had non-resident fees in the pool. So you're obviously applying a different standard to the pool than your other golf course.

Yes, but the pool does not fund itself. The pool is very expensive to maintain. And so we want to make sure that the community members that do put in their taxpayer dollars to use the pool are getting some benefit out of it versus those residents, the non-residents that don't live here in the city, help support it a little bit more.

And I think we have to be careful with that, too, because we might get into a situation for tit for tat. I'm an avid fisherman, and I know when Idaho raises its fees, Oregon goes way up. So we need to be careful about that, I think.

Thank you, Council.

Thank you.

So that's pretty much what I had for our enterprise funds, which are our larger fee-based revenue funds. Those are the high-level highlights of it all. I'm going to move on to our governmental funds, which are our property tax, sales tax funds, our special revenue funds, pool, library, and general fund, and things like that. Does anybody have any further questions about our water, sewer, irrigation, sanitation fees that you can discuss or want me to follow up on? for an employee. All right. So then this next slide here is the same spreadsheet as I had on the previous one that kind of shows a comparison in revenue. This is our governmental funds. And so a lot of these funds are funded with mostly property tax and sales tax revenue. A very small portion of their revenue comes from fees. And so overall increase, we have about 10 million that we had in the budget to charge in fee revenue for our governmental funds for fiscal year 26. That's going up to about 10.4. So about a $450,000, just under a $450,000 increase this year, which is not a lot. Does anybody have any questions on that before I move forward with individual departments? So the first one is airport. We did have a few increases. We have asked, so with airport we have leases and people, we have a lease rate within our lease that changes and that's what the lease rates referred to here. So it's contractual revenue, but it's also fee-based revenue because it's contractually obligated to change at council's discretion each year or not change depending on the decision that's made. But we try to stay away from three digits because you can't have half a penny. So when talking finance, we always try and tell them to do that because a lot of our accounting systems don't, well, I won't say that. A lot of accounting systems do. Our current system doesn't. new ERP system will but it doesn't currently support rounding to more than a third so it's difficult for us to support that we've struggled with rounding and rounding can be a lot when you're talking about a square footage rate on a lease that's a large square footage so this is really just to kind of bring it up correct the rounding issue so the percentage it's bringing it up to bring it from 44 to to 45 cents on the land lease rate that's for outside access and then inside access to a hanger would be 34 cents instead of the 33.6 cents previously proposed and then we're removing a fee the user parking at Hubler building eight hours or longer All other fees stayed unchanged. We do have some contracts that are not based off CPI council increases, but based off of a CPI index increase. And so our airport department looks at that CPI index annually, pulls that CPI index amount, and so the CPI increase for these upcoming year leases will be 2.89% increase to their individual square footage lease rate. So no increases to tie down or fuel flowage or gate card or lease processing fees. This is probably the biggest section of fees that's charged. This next department is our building, economic development, mapping. This is where we do our permit revenue. you know, when someone issues a permit for development, there's a lot of fees entertained in that. And so here, we're just highlighting the specific fees related to the building department for the services that they provide the economic development, previously known as planning and zoning and our mapping division. And so Keep that in mind it doesn't include connection fees which we discussed earlier, which are sewer and water connection fees it doesn't include impact fees as well, which are also fees included in a permit, so this is just focusing on the building section service fees. This gives you some average increases. As you can see, there are a lot of average increases. Most of them, though, I want to point out change, because these increases look really high, and people freak out when they see percentages. And so, yes, we are increasing a few fees more than the 5%. We have a total of 228 fees in these services that we provide, and only 40 of them we are proposing increases on. The major two that we're proposing are electrical permits, occupancy permits. And electrical permits are generally small in dollar amounts. So to have 140% increase on an electrical permit for an electrical improvement that you're doing, it doesn't equate to a substantial amount of revenue. And it's going to impact. less individuals, I guess you could say, than a fee like our commercial or building fee that we charge to every single development or The Community Development Department is primarily updating technical review and permitting fees in hopes to reflect the city's cost to provide those services. Sorry, I have some of my notes in here and I've already said them, so I'm kind of skipping over them as I read through it. And there's a little bit in parking citations that's going to be going up in administrative fees. and so that's that's really all that's the high level overview if you guys have any more specific questions we can refer to staff or any increases in public records I don't I don't, yes. The clerk's is not, the clerk's is the one that charges that public request for that, they're the ones in charge of that fee. The clerk's department this year is not proposing, sorry, I didn't have that on here, but the clerk's office. So there's no fees that we can, or that we have proposing to increase.

Can you clarify what that, just untuttle that statute real quick? The fee, what we can charge?

it's a lengthy complicated so state statute allows for two hours of process and then after that it is the fully burdened rate of the lowest qualified individual that can fulfill the request that means salary and benefits of any individual so generally it's an administrative system that can fulfill that information in some cases if it has to go through legal then we're charging the attorneys rate the reason we're redacting And then we can charge a per-page amount after 100 pages if they are requesting a physical copy of any records. But other than that, there's not really a lot.

Unless the council wanted to give raises to all the employees and the rate could increase that way.

My only point is over a half a billion dollars in requests for legal documents is... It isn't fair to the taxpayers, so you folks out there that require it, think twice about it. If it's really, really important, that'll make a difference. Tax structures or whatever, that's fine, but just to point fingers at somebody else or some other department or whatever, it shouldn't be done, period.

It's kind of a catch-22 in the law. It says you can... you can charge a fee, but if you have a lot of little fees, you're kind of out of luck. Or a lot of little requests, where you're spending a lot of time under that two hours mark, you could spend a whole day on it, but if each one is under two hours, you don't have justification to charge a fee. So it kind of sets that up. Any other questions on building services, economic development? Next one is the Caldwell Events Center. This fee proposal is focused on cost recovery. Most rental rates receive a modest inflationary adjustment of just about 5%. Cleaning fees are increasing more substantially to better reflect the city's actual cost of preparing facilities before and after events. And so modest under 5% for some increases in lease for the O'Connor Field House and Simplot Stadium, but the major increases are gonna be in the cleaning fee that we charge to clean up after that. That's really the only changes that we have for Caldwell Events Center.

Are all our partners notified that there's a possible increase in this?

I'm not sure, Juan. has a really good relationship with those and those people that utilize us year after year. He's usually pretty good about talking to them, I think, on those increases. We do have some lag. So like right now, we're going through our budget process. So he's using the current rate right now. And so until fees are approved and effective as of 10-1, he may still continue to approve fees for this fiscal year that won't hit until the next year because they're signing into contract ahead of time. And we use the fee that's, you know, that is effective as of the contract signing date, not as the event date, since we don't always know what that is. And some of them pay significantly ahead of time, the deposit and stuff like that. So there's some lag there, but I think he's pretty good about notifying them. The next one is our cemetery fees. So most cemetery fee increased by about 3% to maintain cost recovery for operations and maintenance. Only three individual fee increases are more than 5%. We have the niche faces that are being eliminated, or one fee for the niche faces that's being eliminated. But other than that, the fees are staying relatively low under that 5%. We have infant lot that is going up a little higher, that cremation, dissemination, and niche discernment. I said dissemination, it's discernment, sorry. I think the clerk's office oversees this fee, so if you guys have any questions for the clerk, I'll probably answer. If not, hold on. Okay, so fire fees. Fire department fees are being updated to better recover the actual cost of providing inspections, plan reviews, fire prevention services. Current fees have not kept pace with labor and administrative costs and are being reset to align with the city's actual cost of service. False alarm fees, emergency responses, food truck permits, those remain unchanged. So you'll see the biggest impact is the review fees, the permit and inspection fees, and a few of the other community service fees. Unlike most departments, the fire department is proposing a comprehensive update to its fire prevention fee schedule to better recover its costs. And the recommended fees are based on a calculated fire prevention cost recovery rate of $125 per productive staff hour. So they did a little bit of an analysis on their fees and more than they've done in previous years to say, are the costs and the time that we're putting into these getting recouped by the fee specifically?

And so that generated most of the reason for the increases.

this year for fire, and that's the fire fees, and then also they have the fees that are related to the permits and stuff that they do for review.

Chief Daniels, what do we do on smoke alarms these days? Is that strictly voluntary?

work.

We used to do it free, I know.

We still do smoke alarm blitzes. We did ours in Greenleaf and in the county space this year, and we installed those for free. About 50 or so. Is that your question?

Is it overwhelming, or do we need to start thinking about that too? I know it's preventive, which is important.

Are we talking about smoke detector activations, accidental activations? Yeah. Our larger businesses, counselor, to speak to your question, or for instance, the college or Simplot, they have a lot of accidental activations. They're allowed four per quarter. After that, we begin charging, and we're the recipient of about, I don't know, $400 so far this year for some of those accidental activations. So it does work, but we don't want to overcharge our taxpayers too much for those responses. It's more or less an educational incentive to help them, the property owners, update their systems. So we aren't bothered by nuisance alarms, and they're not bothered by the fees.

So residential is still free, too, then, right?

Not necessarily. We don't have a problem with nuisance alarms in the residential space. If we did, the ordinance allows us to capture some of those fees for those nuisance alarms in the residential space.

So what if batteries go bad? Do we go out and replace the batteries? We do.

Okay.

Free of charge. Free of charge.

Library fees.

Library is not proposing any significant fee increases that are over the 5%. So nearly all existing fees remain unchanged. They are proposing some new fees, though. They have a passport. I think they're going to start doing passports. So they have some passport fees in there and some lock replacement and charger play away, which I'm not 100% sure what that is. play-away case replacement, lock replacement, and charger replacement. So those have been some new fees that have been added to the fee sheet, but all the others nearly remain pretty close to what they were charging.

commend Lacey for her entrepreneurship and passport photos and execution fees, because we don't have anything real close and formal at all. You always have to go to NAP or something. So that's great. Thank you.

I also want to commend her on how she's been running the library. I go over there from time to time. They're doing a great job. Everyone I hear loves it and definitely loving the passport idea. It adds one more feature to the public.

Police fees. Police did approximately a 5% increase across all fees this year. They didn't add any new fees. One significant one that went up a little bit was our animal afflicted with rabies fee. It went from $106.50 to $117.20. So they are doing increases across the board, but they're staying within it just for inflationary costs and to keep up with the cost of that and to exceed that. And their fees are very minimal. It's mostly animal. citations citation fees that they charge and things like that so violations most of those just if you're not already aware are collected through the county the county we use the county's ticketing system and then they collect it and send us the citation revenue so we work with them to set that fee up for those citations but it is a very small small piece of

Has our relationship with the Humane Society improved anything since last year?

Sorry. The last department that charges fees within the general fund, parks, rec, pool. We already kind of touched base on pool. Parks and rec department is not proposing broad increases to recreation programs. Nearly all youth sports instructional classes, preschool programs, swim lessons, daily admissions, and annual passes remain unchanged. The proposed fees adjustments are focused on park and facility rentals where maintenance and utilities and operating costs have increased several new fees are also being added to support newly available facility services I've highlighted some major increases for parks and facility and pool rentals We got the residential pool rental and the non-resident pool rental. And you've got team registration late fee. You can see it's going from 35 to 40. So even though these increases are over the 5%, most of these are small. So those percentages don't have a huge impact on bringing additional revenue into that department. But if you have any questions on that, we have some here as well, and I can follow up for you. Okay, so that's pretty much what I had to present to you for fees. And if there isn't any other questions or discussions in relation to that, I think we could, if you want to stay, if you have time to talk about other budget discussion items, there's a few topics that I can present. Proposals, emails, I've gone over with you. Is that something you would like?

That is something that I would like.

Then I'll start off the discussion.

Do we want to take a quick break and then shift into it?

Yeah, we could do that if you guys want.

That's okay. Next hour, next minute. We'll start back from our brief break and Thank you Once again for being here tonight and He increases and now we'll move to council discussions I

Do you have some more stuff to put up there on the screen for us, or are you going to start with the general discussion?

I was just going to start with general discussion. I didn't have any printouts, but if we go through anything tonight and you want me to send you stuff, just let me know, and I'll take some notes as to whatever you guys want me to follow up on specifically, and then try and get that to you this week. Yeah, I wish my computer was connected. I should just share my screen. I could potentially share it with, actually, let me see. Emanuel, if I send this to you, can you?

Up there without. I'll show where you're doing that and maybe if the mayor will speak for just a second. The reason why I asked to talk about some additional information is because I have this stuff here, right? Big old stack of information. And I've also was emailed you know, five different scenarios and five different situations. And then I was given some other stuff that has marked without fire. And so I have a whole bunch of different stuff. And so my concern is I don't want to publish anything unless this council has an idea what we're publishing and what our main direction is. So you've got roughly nine days, if I'm not mistaken, to publish this. And what I didn't want to have happen was you publish something and then us as city council go, well, we didn't agree to that. There was nothing that we think about this publication. So I don't know how the rest of the council feels, but I would like to, either sometime today or next week when we meet again, say this is the overall general direction that we are moving as a council and we agree with it. And so rather than making some big changes in public comment, we kind of solidify something that we already think we know. Does that make sense? Absolutely.

Could anyone be open to a Since workday is obviously an issue, we want to respect that. Tuesday evening, we have additional time. I know that people have spoke about not wanting to miss Tuesdays on the Creek. Would that be a time that we could?

It's necessary.

Yeah. Okay. Anyone else disagree with that? I'm going to check the calendars. Tuesday, we can set aside from a five to whenever. We'll set aside a five to nine.

If I could, while you're doing that, Rochelle, I kind of have some of the same questions because we've all kind of thrown out different things that were our wishes, but we don't know where it all landed. We don't know if there were some decisions made. And I know it's hard for you, because unless the council says, do this, you're left, one of us says one thing and another says another. And it puts you in a quandary. And then with developments today, I think we've got more things to discuss. And we probably shouldn't open that can of worms today. But there's some... things that might be relevant due to developments in our neighboring city.

What I want to talk about tonight is specifically those scenarios that you had, my recommendation. I did propose another scenario, so I know you guys have been given a lot of scenarios, and I feel like that Hopefully I can streamline it a little bit for you. If you have questions about what has or hasn't been added, I can tell you, and then we can work toward potentially making changes if that's what we feel is necessary. But I think a good starting point would be to talk about these projections, what they are, what they mean, and then identifying if you guys are feeling like my recommendation is taking into account some of those concerns I think in my recommendation I tried to address some of the things that we've been discussing in the previous budget meetings with positions and things and so I'd like to start with my recommendation I think that's a good starting point go over what that entails and then we can move forward from there I think so I'm trying to find the worksheet that I emailed to you guys I can't remember what I called it and so I'm trying to find it different scenarios on it just had the one said this is my recommendation kind of it kind of took it took some of the things in I think she proposed six different scenarios and so I I took what I thought was the best direction being involved in these can't council meetings that that tried to address the majority and the bigger parts of what had been discussed. After we talk about the scenario and there's things I missed, let me know. I will say that that is general fund specific. So my focus is general fund right now. you guys have issues after we get done with the general fund with other departments that you wanted me to look into or readdress then we can touch on that and then maybe that would be the focus of the next session on those topics because tonight what I wanted to more address was the general fund which is a big portion of where I think a lot of concern is so We'll go through that.

Just real quick, you may want to resend that because I don't see it anywhere on my email that I've received anything from you with regards to a budget. And I don't know if any of the other council members are looking to see it. There it is.

Let's see.

I went back to June 2nd, so if it was before June 2nd. I thought I sent it.

Was it in another email thread or was it separate?

In an email thread. One of the 13. That was already existing. I think it might have been in the one that was requesting more budget sessions. Yes. Yes, I just found it here. So yeah, I'm going to save it.

She was one of the 13. The subject one. One or two more budget workshops.

It could have been, yeah, one or two more. But we'll go over it tonight. And I'll explain. And I'll explain some changes that this proposes, and then we'll go from there.

Be clear, this was pre us finding out the rural district's decision, correct?

Yes.

And also the NAMPA decision on VRT?

Yes. So that is new information as of today.

or what you gave us. I'm going to send that to . And do we want to confirm July 21st at 5?

Oh, no, I'm sorry.

I was looking at the . Would you want to come from it? I have it.

The 20% five, sorry. OK. I just sent it to you. So you should have it here.

5 to 7? OK. 5 to 7 Tuesday, just to clarify.

All right.

Just waiting for IT to get it on the screen. Okay, so Rilind put together a bunch of scenarios. She had, and I kind of want to summarize that. So the changes that I have proposed here, just to preface this, it's just the general fund. Again, like I said before. The first column is our current budget with no changes as originally presented to you. The column in yellow is how the numbers would change based off of the following things. So this one, it removes six of the 12 fire positions that were requested. Those positions were requested, and it was agreed that those positions wouldn't be brought on until the last quarter of the year. So the amount in the budget was for one quarter of each position's pay. So reducing that freed up a little bit of revenue for, I mean, it freed up a little bit more room for fire. And then we... Ray Lynn already added two positions to police. That is reflected in the system, but not on this spreadsheet. So this proposal would have, I'm proposing three police officer positions.

One is to unfreeze a position that we had frozen a while back, and then two new positions that police would be able to add.

So the three is over and above the previous two?

It's three total, so it includes the two previously discussed. This also has the 1% fork-on on there. If we don't want to take fork-on, dollar impact in the general fund, I think it's around $350,000 is what that 1% is giving us additional in the general fund. So it would increase our deficit if we didn't take it by $350,000 approximately.

I think you're wise to have it in there.

Thank you. the other thing is is this proposal gives 500 000 back to the street department um one of the reasons i was able to do that is one of the big contenders in the general fund on the spreadsheet as you'll see is transfers so those are internal transfers that we do we had identified within that transfer line item a million dollars that was going to go to the new building We created a building capital fund to help assist us with repair and maintenance of these larger buildings that we have coming on. With the fire potentially going to its own district, whether they combine with the rule or do their own thing. part of those building costs would have been reserved for fire department buildings seeing as we have stations coming and we have this building and we have several other buildings so this was also this was also kind of assuming that that that position that that would take place either now or next year if it doesn't take place now that's okay but it's kind of assumed that they're going to move in to the direction of another another entity as you say so I reduced so I took the million out of that transfer and said let's not transfer that this year instead let's use it to support our general fund services so that we're not in a deficit there and that freed up some money to be able to give back to streets as well as make our general fund look Palatable to me Changes that were made within the general fund it shows a You know, the original proposal had almost a 2.5 deficit. This one has a 1.5 deficit, so it looks a lot better for me. I think that it's still going to be an issue in upcoming budget years. I think that we'll have to collaborate with Police and Fire to come up with some long-term plans. And there's also a lot of things in the air, whether or not they're going to go to another entity, and if so, when that takes place, I think are also up in the air. But being strategic about looking at our additional revenue streams that are coming in to make sure that we're reserving some of that to hopefully be able to provide some increases, but reserving some of that to bring us hope. and say, no, that's just going to get us out of the water. So it's a plan, regardless of whether or not we keep fire or police, it's a plan that we need to kind of reserve future revenue to get us out of that hole, which means less available in the current budget year than would originally be available had they been starting at ground zero. I think that if I can sit with staff and work on revenue projections and hone that down. I think that revenue projecting has been, I'd love to streamline that and make that much better internally. I think that there's better ways to do that, whether it's our fee, mostly with our fees, and get a really good handle on that so that we can determine where that's going and then come up with a plan to get us out of that deficit. There's been some discussion as well on how do we get rid of the deficit altogether? What are some options that we have? If we didn't do any COLAs this year, that would free up about $650,000. So that would reduce our deficit down to only just under $1 million if we didn't do a COLA. If we didn't add any general fund positions, that includes engineering, attorneys, police and fire. I think those were the four departments in the general fund that were asking for new positions. If we didn't add any of those, it would free up another $756,000 in the general fund, which would bring us close to breaking even. My recommendation is to not get rid of...

Yes, Councillor. Oh, hi, yeah. Yeah, sorry. I've been watching. In one of the requests I made, there was 700,000 city projects.

Oh, yes.

And I asked to reduce that to two. And then also, Councilor Williams had discussed moving the 800,000 at earmarked to the Pond Lane project. Are those numbers still in there? They look like they're still in there.

yes the the i did have discussion with staff on that um we did agree to reduce the the projects but i have not had a chance to change that um so that that would actually decrease our deficit by 350 000 i think we we had 700 000 in there for city uh projects and we decided to split that into the next two years and so um that would free up about 350 000 uh so that's not in here so that would bring us to a deficit of about 1.3 million. So thank you for pointing that out. I'm going to put a note there so that I can remember to update that on the spreadsheet.

Michelle, I need to.

And I don't know the project. Haley, do you know? That was a street.

I think I did delete that one, but we'll verify.

And what project was that again? What was the name of it?

I think it was County Sewer Extension.

is what it was labeled as. Oh, yeah. I remember the emails on that. And what was the figure you were thinking, Chris?

Well, it was probably elaborate more.

I think she's talking about the city projects number. What was the number? Is that what you were?

No, the sewer was 800.

It was 800 and I think stays in the sewer fund.

I think we need to not line that in because it sends mixed messages and I want to be sure that we're not I want to be sure that we're clear so that There's no misunderstanding what our intention is and our ability is.

Does anybody else here have anything to say about those two changes other than what's already been discussed?

So I thought somewhere along the line the discussion about the $700,000 was to reduce it to $200,000. It was. Was that your understanding, Chris?

Yes, that was my understanding as well.

it was i i left a little wiggle room in there i can meet with haley she's overseeing that project to get the like exactly what we would split i just kind of did it in half because i didn't i don't have access to the design on the idea was to do the downstairs piece first and then do the upstairs next year i guess is what we were because you don't want to split a project to where you have half of it done and then it's just sitting there anyway. So I wasn't sure exactly how to split that. I can hash that out and get a more accurate figure to see if we can reduce that further based off of what we think it would cost for the downstairs to be done. But that was just kind of a general figure, left some wheel room just in case there was But if you want, I can look into that and narrow that down to something more and work with Haley on the exact design on what that portion of the project would entail.

I haven't seen the plan. When I released it from 72, I think it was making sure that we completed the security measures for downstairs, but not the

Yeah, that would be what I had spoke with staff about, was utility billing, clerk's office, and then the doorway would be the focus if we had enough funding with the $200,000. But get that dialed into the exact.

That's comfortable, you think? Okay. All right, then I'll just go ahead. If we're good with that. I just hadn't seen the plans myself, and I wasn't 100% sure. So. So then that would, that brings us down four. So we're getting closer. We're at a 1.1, you know, 1.162 deficit. That definitely does help.

George, I'll have a couple other questions. So as I'm looking down your chart, I'm looking down, you gave us, you're projecting revenues to be $9.5 million.

That's close, I think it's 10. I think it's closer to 10, but it's pretty close. But yeah, 10 and then it's going to 10.4.

Okay. Well, on your little thing here.

On this spreadsheet, it doesn't take into account a couple of the fee increases that I need to update. So there will be additional revenue. So you're referring to the 9.5 listed here, right?

Yes, that's correct.

Yeah, I'm aware of that. There was a few things I asked Ray Lynn. I said, have you looked at these departments yet? Because that was one thing that she kind of left us. We have to wait for departments to get us information on that. And so some of them were a little late on getting them. And she hadn't done an analysis on a couple of the departments. And so we did receive those, and I did that. Those numbers are not in there as well. So with those increases that I've identified, well, that wasn't general fund, though. That was governmental funds. I'll have to look at that and see if a general fund has very little. So we had about 450,000 proposed increases in fee revenue for the governmental funds, which is different than the general fund. The general fund is a piece of that. I'd have to go back in and look and see how much of that. Actually, I think I have it on a spreadsheet.

So roughly speaking, of this 9.5 or 10.4, whatever the number we finally Decide it really is how much of that is from property tax Because I think people would be surprised to know that of this whole budget very little of it comes from property taxes In the general fund a lot of it comes from property taxes. We're talking about a hundred and sixty two million dollar overall city budget

Oh, overall, yeah, as far as revenue goes, like, yes.

So it costs us $162 million this next year to run the city.

Yes.

And only $6 million of that is going to come from taxes, from property taxes.

That sounds about right. I'd have to double-check those figures. I get what you're trying to look at, but I don't want to. I can break that out and tell you specifically how much property tax is going into the general fund.

Probably tomorrow.

Huh?

Isn't that tomorrow? Update with the numbers.

Yeah, I mean, I could look at it right now. It would take me a few minutes. I'll see if I can find it before the end of the meeting.

So I don't have any problem with what you put up here. I think it's probably the most current, maybe the most current. Can we get an updated spreadsheet sometime before the end of the week?

I can update it with, so I'll put the fee revenue on there. to have that, I'll identify, I'll break out the property tax piece just so that you guys can see, because right now it's just revenue lumped together, so I'll break out the revenue and the fee section so you can kind of see what those are.

Because I don't want our general public to think that we collect $47 million in taxes.

We don't.

Not in the general fund.

That's...

And that, yes, that, yes. And I have much more detailed spreadsheets. That is correct. That tax figure, that includes sales tax. That includes the gas tax, which is a big piece, the liquor tax or sin tax, as well as property tax. So I do have a whole analysis that I did that breaks out. These are the taxes that we're referring to. And so those taxes, all of those are the culmination of that. That's not what we're levying.

Absolutely. And it's important that the public know that our total budget it looks like about five percent comes from property taxes a very very small amount comes from property tax the rest is fee and if we don't generate fees we have to raise taxes yes

Yes, I got those numbers. They were really close. Do you want to know the dollar amount? Or do you want to know the impact? Yes, I did include that in the numbers here. In the proposed column. Actually, no, I included it in both columns. Yes, I included it in both columns. So it wasn't a big difference. I think it amounted to like $150,000. We were really close on the original one, so we did plug it in it did give us a little bit of room, but it didn't impact it a ton. But yes, we got those from the county and we have updated.

Any other yeah Rochelle in this scenario that you you have here for us. You've added three police officers. I know when we had the police discussions, though, there was quite a lengthy discussion about a percentage of raise necessary to retain police officers. And I think at that time, we were talking about chief positions. And the chief said, I'd rather have, he said, Police would rather have the wages than the staff. I forget now the exact wording, so forgive me if I'm saying this wrong. Did we get the wage increase we were discussing during that workshop and three positions, or what are we doing?

As far as I know, it's not both. one or the other as far as i know that we allowed for three positions well originally it was two i'm proposing to add one more but originally it was two and i think it was presented that they could use that for two new positions or back in what that would be if they were to do increases i don't think the actual calculation was done to see what that would equate to um i think we're projecting right now a little over a hundred thousand one hundred and six thousand per position so it with three positions that would free up about three hundred thousand that if they wanted to use that for raises we would have to back that in and give them a percentage potentially so we'd be able to provide that to police and say do you want uh And there's a couple scenarios they could do with that. I don't know what it would equate to percentage-wise, but is it a 1% increase and you add one position? You know what I mean? That number can fluctuate. So I think further discussion is needed with the police department to determine exactly how they want that to play out on their end. But regardless of how they want it to play out, the amount allotted for whether that is... is in the budget. So those discussions don't necessarily have to happen before budget because we'd be working into that number, if that makes sense, and we'd be saying, okay, you know, this is your amount, and then working with them to see how they wanted to utilize that, ensuring that it was budget neutral.

And you have it in the column, but I want to make sure I understand. The foregone that we're taking, we had said we wanted to take so that we could do more for police. At the time, we were working with the perhaps a different scenario with fire, but taking the foregone will go to public safety, right? I want to be sure we have that. We've said it before, and I want to be sure when we communicate with our constituents, the foregone is going to public safety. That's why we have to take it in order for us to do what we need to do. Is that an accurate understanding?

That's accurate. It would go to public safety.

Chief Ingram, just to not confuse the two chiefs here, are you comfortable with working with finance on these proposed positions and ironing out what your wishes are with that? Or what do we need to do to make sure coming up on the Tuesday meeting we get this ironed out?

Absolutely, I'm always very comfortable. I always want to work things out, but it's just it's hard for me to explain my employees. Who are also some of your constituents live in the city. Why? And my best friend Brian over there, this is no dig on him or his fire department. They're looking at a 3 and a half percent raise plus a bunch of firefighters. So how do I explain to my cops and my civilian staff who haven't really got anything last couple of years that they're going to continue doing more with less and then not take any raises. Um, I will sell whatever message it is, but I would be remiss if I didn't come up here and try to do my very best to take care of our employees.

That's why I'm asking this. I thought we were going to work that 3.5% in.

That's what I thought as well. I'm having Kelsey check because I thought Raelynn and I maybe had discussed that, that we got to that point. Okay. So she's checking that.

Yeah, that's what my understanding was, but obviously she's... That may be happening in discussions with Michelle and the police.

That was the last conversation I had with Raelynn. I didn't know what the resolve was on it.

It might be in there already.

Okay. All right. We can iron it out on Tuesday then. Make sure it's.

Thank you. While you're standing up here, come look at this little sheet of paper you gave me.

All right.

Thank you. You would ask for sworn personnel to the tune of $1.4 million. Non-sworn. This is non-sworn personnel. This is your 3.5. What is your incentive?

This would be like shift differential pay and hazard pay for certain positions.

That currently doesn't exist? Correct.

on the ground as far as I'm concerned. Yes, sir. So we have a corporal here, right? And then this, is it a grant writer? Is that for the, specifically for the police department?

Yes, but we're not, we don't actually have a grant writer.

Okay, you're just, you're asking.

Correct. So because we're trying to get people, we're trying to hire people that can do jobs to get more money without using tax dollars.

Because, you know, as far as the police department fire, I think, you know, again, lack of better words because these aren't you know, a corporal or a battalion chief or a captain or, I mean, those are the guys that put the fires out and get the bad guys, right? Yes, sir. Okay, thanks.

When it comes to grant funding as well, if there was a grant received by the police department that was eligible to fund someone to manage that, it would be fully covered by grant funds. for municipalities to do budget adjustments mid-year to allow for awarded grant funds. So we may not have the person to write the grant, but if someone internally does find the time to write a grant and we get it then we could potentially hire a position covered fully by grant funds to implement the program depending on what that funding looks like and then it would be a position solely there to manage that grant and and supported by revenue offset but that would be brought in probably as a budget amendment because grant timelines are have deadlines we don't include any grant funding or money or expenditures in budget

on this list it says police grants that's for a grant writer so there is the city has a grant writer and so i believe there's been discussions about phasing out that position so what i'm wondering is if the city removes that are we now replacing one just for the police department

It's not. I don't know what this is that a police officer funded by a grant or so can I sketch.

So, yeah, so this. 3 positions, right? Yeah, so this would, uh, I believe this might be the.

That's the cop. That's for an actual cop. You have to have a new entry-level police officer in that position. That's not a grant position. Like, the grant's paying for this to bring in a new officer. Sorry, I was trying to figure out, like, what's on that sheet? Is that the vacant position? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I know, I was like, okay.

We were initially asking for a grant writer, but that's not.

So is he officially an SRO, or is he officially a police officer? That's just a police officer.

Is this an officer being paid for a background? Correct.

Partially. Partially. But then those things run out as well. So that's why we froze a position for the last couple years so we could do that. All right. And just so, I mean, since we're talking about it, we are very, very, very lean at the top of the food chain. That's myself, and I have one captain. We froze the deputy chief position that we've been operating since November to try to accommodate all the other things. We're very taxed at the top. a lot with nothing, so. And I'm not asking for, you know, I'm just, we want to put the boots on the ground. Thank you, sir.

You see my point, though, as far as boots on the ground versus higher, you know, supervisors, and sometimes that's why they pay us the big bucks. That's right. We can supervise more people.

I don't want to talk about my boys over there.

Chief, I have one more question for you. So we've had this conversation either publicly or nonpublicly about turnover. about retention and what it is that we need to do to retain the quality officers that come to work for this great city. This 3.5% raise to the police officers, I suspect, would be 0.9% higher than what the general employees are getting at 2.6%, if I'm not mistaken. So it's not 3.5% on top of that. But with this $220,000 that you have for incentive, would that help with retention also if we were to advocate to see if we can't find that other $220,000? I mean, are we really talking about retention pay, or what are we talking about really with this incentive?

That's exactly what that is. I think, yeah, that would definitely help out. Anything to keep our good employees here. And it's not just cops. It's all professional staff as well. I mean, when other agencies in the Valley that are just a couple miles to our east are getting 12%, 9%, and they have incentive pay, and they have college reimbursement pay, and all the things that they offer, it's hard to keep good employees. And I know we're budgeted $106,000 for a new hire, but after they get trained, we're looking at almost $200,000. And so a lot goes into it because you have trainers time that they're spending, you know, they go through a full, it takes about 18 months for someone, as you know, to get hired and then to finish and complete all the training and the academy and everything else. And so then we quickly lose them, which is what happened for a long time when the mayor was a police officer here. And we haven't really seen that. So I don't want to go back to how it was 10, 15 years ago.

So Michelle, I have a question for you. Are you ready for it? So with this incentive pay, I'm guessing, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, if we have five police officers resign tomorrow to take other jobs, would we quickly exceed the $200,000 and what it would cost?

Yes.

The incentive pay is something that the deputy chief's last budget THAT'S WHY WE'RE TRYING TO BRING IT AGAIN. THAT IS A NORM.

SO TURNOVER COSTS MONEY.

TURNOVER COSTS MONEY. WE ALREADY ARE AWARE OF SOME OTHERS.

That's critical. That other $220,000 is critical.

And also, too, sir, it's also our professional staff. I mean, we have a lot of most turnover with our civilian employees, and they put up with a lot of nonsense, and they're not getting paid for the work that they're doing. And so, you know, how do we talk about equity and equality, all those different things, when their counterparts just next door are making almost twice what they make? How do I retain them without... You know, I mean, I can't pay them more. I can't give them take-home cars. I can't do things that other agencies are doing. And we're all coming from the same pot. I get 389s a burden, but, I mean, we are doing everything we can. My assistant alone, she's hands down the best assistant in the entire state. And I've seen a lot of them through my stuff with the association. And at some point, she's going to say, hey, this is my second career. I'm retired. And be done. And we can't afford to lose someone. So... It's a more global issue that not just us, but a lot of agencies are facing in the country that are not as – the communities that support them are not as police or public safety friendly. So we have a very good council and a very good mayor that support public safety, and I think that we need to do our very best to support public safety.

Thank you. Thank you, Chief. Thank you, Mayor. By the way, if you guys ever want to ride a huge horse, we'll – Anything? Thank you, Councillor Dunbar.

So, Rochelle, when we get together on Tuesday, you're going to have some updated numbers in this yellow column, whatever color you make the column on Tuesday, and it will include or we will investigate whether or not that 3.5% law enforcement is in there. And can we also try, at least from If there's additional revenues to be received that we can't provide that incentive, we see what it would cost to put it in there.

See what we can do.

And if we need to pull it out, we can pull it out. But at least I would like to give it some consideration.

I'll do my best to work and see what we can do.

And I already talked to him about

hopefully be able to come back to with what we have all agreed upon.

Real quick, I don't know if we want to, sorry, Councillor Stein, go ahead.

Can we work the Valley Rapid Transit proposal maybe into this? Just so I sent all of you a text this afternoon. I found out from the Napa Councilman that they did not budget Valley Rapid Transit. Valley Rapid Transit wanted 800 and some thousand for them. they came back and said, well, maybe it's 400,000. And NAPI just said no more because of ridership. The ridership is real low. And I know they came to us at one time for 600 and some thousand. And I think now we're down to 353,000, if I'm not mistaken. So again, that's a service with our low ridership too, that if we don't pay that, we can incorporate that into maybe one of these proposals for a police officer and then not have to use that service foregone of 1%. I don't know, but I'm just saying that potentially if the council agrees to... One's an enterprise fund and one's a general fund. Yeah, to back that out, that that is available. Just...

Yes, so I was going to say... Can you just clarify what the councilor didn't bear to say? And thank you, Councilor Stoddard.

You want to say that? I said, in answering that question, they're two different funds, right?

We can't transfer between funds. Yes, so my response to that There's a couple things here, because you guys are working from a couple different angles. So I instantly thought about that the minute you said reduce VRT. In this proposal, I said, let's give $500,000 back to the street department. Well, there's potential that we could reduce that and give them what they need so they'd have the same amount of net impact if we take VRT out. that would bring a little bit of revenue coming back, whatever the amount of that BRT is, right back to the general fund. But in this Police asked, we just asked for another $220,000, so in my mind immediately that's already gone, so that may allow for maybe $100,000 to work into a police, so I'll have to look at that, but just be aware that the full amount of that wouldn't directly come back and go to police. I immediately want to try and see if I can make that work in that scenario so that we can keep a street whole, I guess you could say.

So you would still need the 1% foregone then? Yes. Okay.

And because we're still at a deficit in light of all of this. We're moving money around. If I do enough to keep them whole and then we immediately use it, it doesn't change the net impact. So we're still at a 1.1 deficit in the general fund, even with all this movement we've just discussed. Just keep that in mind.

Just to be clear, I spoke with, I got called right away after that meeting, and they're going to submit a new proposal to us. It's going to be a callable focus because of the loss of the NAMPA section. That's something that as soon as I get it to council, I'll get it to council.

They have their own budget. They get money someplace other than cities.

I would assume they have a revenue stream that's diverse, just as ours.

Most beaches are tuned at $30 million.

If they have a large budget that's funding their routes, maybe we need to look and see how much they really need.

I can get that breakdown. I know that, I believe, 8 to 9 million from Boise, but that's Boise-focused. And then, obviously, the station. And then, yeah, I can get that breakdown for everyone when she sends that proposal.

Yeah, I'd like to see VRT's proposal. I am not in any favor whatsoever of defunding transit. Our city has grown enough that once it goes away, it never comes back.

Maybe they can provide their ridership numbers in Caldwell, too, so we can see how...

I don't trust their numbers after being on board, but that's fine. That's my comment.

My concern, as much as I struggle with the ridership, a city without public transportation is... I think a shame. And once we reallocate that money, if we ever wanted public transportation again, where would we get it from? And that would be a painful decision to make. And so I'm reluctant to just wipe it off the board entirely. So I would like to see what BRT brings to us. before we just take it all away. Just heard from the room.

Just so you know, Uber didn't make a proposal to NAPA, and it was half of what VRT had.

I know that, unless they followed up, that they, so right, we were invited to the meeting, and apparently Uber backed out their proposal. Yeah, it was a long decided to back out and not support changing Nampa's current.

So are they pulling all the Nampa routes or are they just going to cover it in their own budget?

So with the reduction, there was already a proposal to reduce the Nampa routes because they were going to cut it in half. So we had a public hearing to do that. That was over at the Nampa Civic Center. And then now They're going to have to completely reformulate to pull the entirety of Nampa, and it would be focused on Caldwell.

So Nampa will have no public transportation? They're not funding that from their own budget?

That is correct, yes. So my understanding is they did keep it as a line item, but they voted. to cut ties with VRT affected this next budget year.

So they still have the money here. Yeah, they'll still have to figure out whatever they need.

Well, there's a multitude of things that they looked at using this by understanding.

I was going to say, you know, I think... good point with moving that out of there those funds whether it's BRT or whatever those funds are essentially they were put in the street fund to assist with public transportation so you have to look at it from a program perspective in that you're pulling it from a public transportation program and putting it into a public safety program and determine for you guys whether or not that's appropriate you'd be completely transportation program to assist in funding public safety. But those are big questions and decisions that need to be made. If there was a, you know, if it was decided to not give VRT funding, would we want to let go of those funds? I encourage you guys to address that from a community benefit standpoint. That would be my recommendation. But in light of budget, We could also, because there's deadlines with budget, if this decision was made after budget passed, and we said let's just keep what we have in there now, and we take our time to have them come and present and then determine that we do want to pull program, the funding from the public transportation program and put it to police, or some of it, or whatever we want to do, We do come back with a budget amendment that we do every year. I'll be presenting that to council next month after budget hearing. But it will be a proposal. And that's very standard as well. Like I mentioned earlier, there's grant revenue that comes in. And that is the opportunity to kind of address any mid-year changes to budget to make sure that those are approved ahead of time. And so that would be the point at which it would We would follow up and discuss. If we wanted to do a mid-year change, we would identify having it be on that amendment and then give them that appropriation at that time or shift that appropriation at that time. But it can be done through budget amendment.

I think this is a good opportunity to give Valley Regional Transit an opportunity to step up and say, how can we serve Caldwell, and how can we do Caldwell right? We just heard from the rodeo the other night, and the rodeo said, we're dealing with parking, and how do we get our fans here? And this is an opportunity for BRT to say, how can we serve Caldwell better than we have before? And I would be much more willing to give them a chance to bring forth a good and solid presentation on that. we may get the riders we need with the right type of transit program.

I stand by for the official proposal, but she did mention that that would be one of the parts of that is those event-related options to enhance travel and such. Councilor Allgood.

Yeah, when Michelle was talking about . I want to be sure I understand the fact that we can always amend the budget in the total. We cannot raise the budget once we publish it. That's correct.

We cannot. We can increase the Well, you can't change, you can increase the expenditure appropriation if necessary in the budget amendment. So that would be the budget amendment coming forward to identify that there's gonna be potential shifts. It would not address the revenue shift that we were talking about earlier. That would not be done through budget amendment. That would be done through future planning efforts.

Unless the city republishes it, so that would be the only way.

Did you hear that?

Unless the city republishes it? Go ahead, Justin.

Yes, that is correct. So unless the city republishes the budget, then that would be locked in place as the maximum level of spending.

There are very strict statutory requirements about publishing budgets, though. So based on what the availability of the newspaper would be, I don't know that we would have the time to republish it.

What's the date that we submit our L2?

I don't know the exact date that we have to submit the L2. But from what Ray Lynn said, we tell the county when we're going to give them when we're gonna have our budget hearing. And once you give the county that date, you can't change it, I think. And so I have been.

It's the property tax amount that can't change. So that is the piece of the budget that once the city has approved that in its budget, and the amount that's in the budget hearing notice, then the city can't exceed the property tax amount. There is some amount of flexibility after the budget has been approved during the fiscal year to have a budget amendment to increase spending authority for non-property tax items. But yes.

Thanks.

But the budget hearing and property tax, once we tell the county what our budget hearing is, we have to then notice it a couple weeks ahead of time. And so that property tax number will not change after that. It's set in stone. And that's where the 24th deadline comes into play. That is when I have to have all of that documentation to the clerk's office to have it published in the paper and so once you publish it you can't change it so that's why they're you know there are we going to take fork on and the things that are related to property tax revenue are a little bit more heightened because we want to make sure we have all of those decisions made before we pass the initial budget I do have those numbers that you asked for in relation to property tax, since we're talking about that. Out of the 477,000,000,000 address for taxes, 35.6 million is property tax levied. 5 is for 35.6.

Last year it was 32.7. That is property tax levied funds.

That may include our bond. the bond levy that we have, just FYI. I don't know the amount in there that's levied for bond, but that would even, if we paid the bond off, that would reduce the amount levied because that is specifically levied for the bond. But yes, that is what we're currently levying. And then five million is for gas tax, sin tax, And then $7 million is for sales tax revenue sharing. So that's where the tax number came from.

Just to clarify, that's not for us. Sorry, that is for us, not all taxing districts.

That is only for governmental funds. The enterprise funds, which are water, sewer, sanitation, street lights, golf, do not get any of that funding.

Were we able to negotiate any further with the county on any of the fees they're charging us?

We have a meeting coming up, a meeting with the prosecutor. I need to get a meeting with the sheriff dispatch and see what options we have.

Is that going to be before Tuesday?

We'll see if they have availability.

Because that's going to make a difference.

will make a difference but if it does make a difference my hope is that it wouldn't be more than what they're asking because I think what we have in there is what they're currently asking so if that decision were to be made after it would decrease the amount of We would spend already appropriated. It wouldn't allow for a budget amendment. It would allow for cost savings, which we could internally plan for. But I think it would be safe to leave it as is now. And if we are able to negotiate that, we could have discussions on how to reappropriate those funds internally. But it would already be in the budget.

Okay.

that to me is not a pressing budget issue. It's something we just need to follow through with and have more discussion with the county.

Mr. Meter, cost fraction.

Yeah, and we're looking for more money for incentive for police and

And that's something, you know, when we're looking and talking to the police department of these asks, if we can't find it all now, then there's things like this where if we are able to move forward and find cost savings within the division, that we could say, well, let's see how some other things play out and then maybe mid-year reallocate or reappropriate within the general fund how we're going to use those cost savings so that We stayed within budget, but, you know, there's always – things fluctuate on the actual level.

So the budget is a plan, and you just – On misdemeanor numbers, I was in a meeting with the county prosecutor last week, and he told us that the actual cost for them to Caldwell was $569,000, and we only paid $250,000.

What was that for again?

That was for misdemeanor prosecutions.

Oh. He said that we what? I'm sorry.

He said the actual cost was $569,000. Oh. And we only paid $250,000. So they're looking to shore that up a bit. And he also, you know, not him, but Commissioner Holt and Brooks said that most of the misdemeanors that they go through comes from Caldwell. I asked him about that too, and he said only 22% come through Caldwell, 45% come through Napa. So now it's got the bigger share of misdemeanors. Anyway.

I just have a comment. I went through my files. I did do a review of the difference between funding two positions versus So I have that prepared. I don't have any other direction after I sent that. So we should be able to just review how you guys want to proceed and then should be able to input that.

So we'll look at that. And then when we present next, we will identify what the outcome of those things are for these.

All right.

OK, so I have some to-dos. And did we decide on another budget? Did you guys reparse? 21st at 5?

Yeah, 5, 7, and then. Yeah, sorry, just to clarify, is that?

So what were we thinking time-wise?

5 to 7?

And, Rochelle, while you're adding that, I also just wanted to add something for council. A few months ago, when I first started as interim, I had brought a special presentation on the ballot measure potential for county vehicle registration. That's still a possibility of council. I didn't receive much direction from council on that, but it would be a $20 vehicle registration fee that everyone in the county would pay. Council can vote whether that becomes a ballot measure in the fall. So if that's something that Council wants more information on, I can bring that as an action item on Monday. But speaking with NAMPA, they're projecting that Caldwell's revenue from that would be somewhere in the $600,000 range. So it wouldn't be voting to institute a $20 vehicle registration fee. It would be a vote to put a $20 vehicle registration fee on the ballot for the voters to decide on.

And to further clarify real quick, there's X amount of cities within the county that have to vote this. Have we surpassed that?

We have not surpassed that as of yet, but I'll follow up and have that answer by Monday if that's something that council wants to have more information on. I know that there's been a few. It affects the cities and the highway districts. So I know that there have been a few highway districts and there have been a few cities that have been against the ballot measure and I'll double check on which ones specifically those are.

That was my understanding. I went to all those things with Compass and everybody that did that whole stuff and that if the county commissioners voted to be on the ballot just by one vote, one governing

Correct.

But if they choose not to, it has to be a majority of the cities.

Yes. Why would that be? Yeah, cities and highway districts.

A few players there. Yeah, if you could get us the over-under on that, and then I'm sure that'll help council.

One more question. Do we pay a fee to AIC also, Association of Light Up Cities? How much is that?

It's a percentage based upon the population size, but...

I think I just saw that come in.

To further clarify, if council wasn't also aware, Nampa voted to defund the AIC membership fee.

It's just they didn't feel AIC did anything for them.

Well, we have Justin, so they've done a lot for us.

Yeah. Well, that's another reason why we hired them.

Okay, thank you. I just got that one.

Yeah, it's based upon population.

Some pay very little with super small cities. I know it's minor, but still it's money. Oh, yeah, 100%. And as long as we have Justin, I feel comfortable not having him either.

Would council want a pros and cons versus an AIC?

Maybe we should just consolidate with NAPA and do whatever NAPA does.

I mean, and that is something that I think I had discussed with Ray Lynn before she left, and that was part of her understanding was that AIC's resources are, you know, so great that that weighs in heavily in favor of probably staying with membership with AIC. And I am helpful. AIC's broad range of publications and other things they can offer and events are something that are still probably worth seriously considering being involved in. And they do offer a lot of great technical resources and manuals. And I am only one person, one policy analyst, and so it's But it's definitely something to consider carefully, but there are probably very strong arguments in favor of remaining with the organization just because there are very real benefits associated with it. Point well taken.

I know that the finance department does utilize it specifically for budget, like the stuff that they do. And so that's how finance uses them more specifically. I can't speak for other departments as far as finance does utilize their resources.

All right. We'll get the VRT information. We'll get the data updated for that. Monday meeting, Tuesday workshop. Anything else, council? All right. This concludes tonight's workshop. Thank you, everyone.