City Council - workshop

Do you intercept in a fair, Courtney? Do I? Do you intercept in a fair? No.

This said fun facts. Honey never spoils and can last thousands of years. And it's physically impossible for most people to lick their own elbows.

Yep. I break both of them. Go ahead. No. Go ahead.

And then he put grill time with two thumbs ups, whatever that means. I don't know, but they're just random comments.

Christy, did you enter anything as a fan? I went on a tiny sphere.

I had a reserve champion last year.

I'm really sipping it. Fill out a piece of paper and drop it off. And this year I wasn't there because my master drivers are out there in the whole building and yeah. Like, so that's right. And I got a blue and I saw the Russian sage there that was there this year. I was like, oh my gosh, I would have like beat them all by a mile. But I didn't get anything and I just ran out of time. All right.

It's 5.30. I will call this work session for August 17th to order. First, we've got the five-year compensation plan for the fire department. All right.

I'll start us off, and Chief Walsh has anything to say he can just kind of add to it. Thank you mayor. Um, so we are going to be talking about strategic priority number 2, which is improved operations. Um, so as part of the 2025 amendment process, um, council directed staff to develop a 5 year compensation plan for the fire department. specifically the paid on-call firefighters. So that would exclude everybody who is an officer of the fire department. So the city contracted with ABDO to conduct a market analysis and we used our benchmark cities as we often do for many comparative analyses. AND WE ASKED THEM TO ANSWER KIND OF A QUESTIONNAIRE AS WE DID WITH OUR REGULAR FULL-TIME STAFF COMPENSATION ANALYSIS. AND WHAT WE GOT BACK IS A REPORT PROVIDING GUIDANCE ON REACHING AND MAINTAINING A COMPETITIVE COMPENSATION STRUCTURE THAT ALIGNS WITH WHAT THE CITY IS WORKING TOWARD LIKE A DESIRED MARKET POSITION. So I did list three key takeaways from the report that we received. So for pension benefits, the City of Carver's annual pension benefit for our paid on-call firefighters is currently within the average range of comparable communities. The proposed compensation plan maintains this market position for over the next five years. So you'll see them lay out a strategy for us to maintain in that market position. The hourly wage for the paid on-call firefighter, our goal is to stay at 10% above the average market rate by 2031. So what you'll see within the report is that we're currently not at that market rate for what we found within our benchmark studies, but we will be there by 2031. We'll be at 10% above that if council chooses to do that. And finally, what we found during our research is that highly variable fire department pay structures and a limited cohort of communities that answered made it difficult to compare the officer positions such as captains or assistants. So this is just the paid on call staff. So as I said, this five-year comparison plan provides a roadmap for where we want to be in the next five years. So this is a summary, and I took a snippet out of the report showing that in 2027, if we implement a 9% increase to the paid on-call firefighters, That would affect the general fund budget by $11,000 and so on and so forth, where it would be a $23,000 increase by 2031. But we would have to implement a 10% increase in the five-year pension contribution projection. So currently, we have it in our budget to increase the pension to $6,000. But then after that, it would go incrementally based on where we have our kind of the rates going, the compensation rates going. So I'll get into the actual document, and then you can stop me if you have questions. And then we'll just kind of go from there. So our comparable cohort group surveyed is listed right here. So you'll notice that some of them have full-time fire chiefs. Maybe you don't know that, but some of them do. Hanover, for instance, is part of more of a cohort group with Corcoran and I want to say maybe even like Loretto. So it makes it hard to compare sometimes. So down here it talks about what does our structure look like? We have and how many hours are we estimating each of these positions to work? So right now the most important is we are estimating about 25 regular paid on call firefighters and they are paid hourly. And then these are just Bullets saying, what did we find out? It's just basically saying paid on call firefighters and command staff are mainly compensated on an hourly basis. Of the two cities that do not have full time fire chief, one appears to pay the paid on call command staff at the same rate as all other firefighters. It's basically summarizing the data that they found in the surveys. So you can go ahead and read that if you would like. So the key observations is that we found that the average market minimum hourly of the seven matches that we found was $17.22. And the average maximum, so we're talking about a range in pay ranges, was $20.53. So if you put that in what is the average, it's around $18. $18.50 is where the market is like right now. So the city is about under by 26% as of today. This section here talks about command staff stipend and leadership practices. If you recall, we implemented an hourly pay for our officers and how we did that is we looked at our past history on stipends and we tried to figure in how many hours were they working? What were they getting paid for stipends? And we just changed that to an hourly rate and how we did that and why we did that is we figured If you're putting in the work, you should be getting paid for that work. So to pay all five captains or four captains the same amount of stipend, if one's putting in $400 a year and the other one's only putting in 137 hours a year, it's not equitable. So we changed the hourly rate. And so far, I haven't had any negative feedback on that. So over the next five years, the city's goal is to offer rates that are positioned competitively, as I said, and we chose 10% above the market. So we would have to catch up with a anticipated 4% annual market growth rate, and we would assume a 3% annual COLA. cost of living adjustment. So our ending rate in 2031 would be approximately $22.97 for the paid on-call. We're currently at $16.32. So the total increase for next year would be 9.1%. So this chart right here shows what the projection would be. The projected market rate is the top line here. and the bottom rate is where we plan to pay. This would be a gradual process of working our way toward market. You know, there's other strategies. We could have done one big jump in the year 27 and then applied COLA the years after. This model here is showing that we are going to work toward hitting that market rate over the next five years.

Is that projected market rate the minimum or the maximum on this? Right here. Yep. This is the average. That's the average.

Yep. Yep. So it's right in that middle. Mm-hmm. With a 10% over. Yeah. So how... This is just showing the math and how ABDO did it. They're taking a budgeted growth hours because not only is our... fire department gonna grow, but the hours are going to grow. And so that's how they figured out what is the total cost impact going to be. And this is just the number that you wanna look at because that is how, what's the impact going to be to the general fund budget from year to year. This is the total pay of all 25 firefighters. So that's already in the budget. This is what the number you wanna look at here is the impact that it's going to make. Does anyone have questions on the pay before I go over to the pension? Okay. So retirement and pension benefits, as you know, that we switched over to PARA, and they manage all of our pension benefits for the fire department. And when we compared, there are still some fire departments that manage their own through their fire relief or, you know, within their city. annual pension benefits are per year service benefit structures and within our research they range from 3200 to 13,000 there's an outlier there it's Elko Newmarket it'll always be higher and I don't know why but but the average of all of the all of the benchmark cities is about $5,906. And as I showed you prior to this, a little ways up, we're anticipating a $6,000 per year benefit for 2027, if approved by council. So benefit levels are very meaningful because it means retention for those hired. It's a really good retirement or attractive retirement attraction tool to get firefighters on your fire department so recruitment and retention with a paid on-call department um did you when you did the average did you take that outlier out

When we're looking at the ranging from 325 to 13 with the averaging 5,900, did you, because that highest one is so far off from the rest of them, I'd be curious to know what... They took the high and the low when I talked to them. We didn't, but AFDO did. Okay, so the number that we're looking... Oops, I just moved mine. So the number we're looking at, that 5,900 for the pension, that is taking out the lowest and highest, or highest, that's right, okay. Thanks for clarifying that.

So our projected annual firefighter pension benefit budget is right here. And that's just so that we can stay right at the market value with annual pension benefit expenses. They did touch on supplemental and additional benefits. This isn't something that we were super interested in. It was just another question on their questionnaire. It's talking about cell phone reimbursements and different things like that, shift in differential pay. A lot of that goes into with the officers. And since we didn't really do this study for the officers, it doesn't really matter. Not that it doesn't matter, but it doesn't apply in this situation. but that would be a whole different study in my opinion. And then key themes and findings, you can read these too, but it basically said that our current on-call pay is below market, and in order to get where we need it to be, we need to start raising those rates. So that's what we intend to do, and that's what the study is showing. So we're just looking for feedback tonight on that. study in general and are planned over the next five years.

Just a little bit of color if I can add. So it probably goes without saying but this is kind of maybe a shift in our overall compensation model for the fire department. So I think Chief Walsh and I have been discussing this and just anecdotally with other firefighters over the last 10, 15, 20 years the city's been shifting more from this club to like a part-time place of employment. And so in a lot of ways, I would say the rules and regulations related to that have tightened and become harder. And we probably just haven't had, I would say, a full reconciliation of what that means for compensation. I remember talking to a firefighter about a year ago and talked about pay and that this was a strategic decision. initiative and they shared with me they'd rather not see the pay go up because they realize that with more pay comes more expectations and so I'm not advocating for a position on that other than to say I think it's actually more than pay it's about how you view the fire department. I was looking up earlier so in 2016 heading into the 2017 budget this kind of gives you a perspective of where we were and where we're at now and The on-call pay was proposed to go from 1025 to 1075 and the relief contribution was proposed to go from 2007 dollars to 2107 dollars for a long time we had stuck that seven dollars on there. I don't know how it got there, but 2016 budgeting for 2017 and There was a period of time where, and I think rightfully so, there was some feedback from a cohort of firefighters that said that our seasonals in some cases were making more, if not the same, than our firefighters. Um, and in some cases you can say comparison is the thief of joy. Um, but it does, I think, encapsulate the issues that the council identified in the strategic plan and how do you want to approach this going forward?

I do just want to add this a little bit, um, our on-call or not on-call, our summer staff who owns, they don't get a pension in the end, right? So, I mean, there's another benefit there that being a firefighter. gets you, and that's a lot of why they do it, besides they're adrenaline junkies, right, Tim?

Yes. So this was something that I asked that we look into a little bit more, because I think we should be paying our firefighters more. Before the meeting, Tim shared, you got six calls yesterday? Yeah. Or over the weekend? Like in one day. Yep, Sunday. From two in the morning, every other hour it felt like four. we had three calls before noon yeah so it just i i was the one who received the feedback from folks that we were paying our seasonals potentially more than our firefighters and to me that just doesn't seem right the new wrinkle is like if firefighters don't want it, then we shouldn't do it, but I don't think that that's a blanket comment that represents every single firefighter. I bet that there are a lot of folks on the fire department who are like, no, no, we would be okay.

It was more a representation of the transition the department has made.

I like this. I would love to see it go quicker than this, but I think that this is a reasonable step.

Increase to get the folks to where they need to be and where I'd like to see them I have a question then if you if we're talking about this for budgeting and you're saying we had five calls yesterday I mean, maybe this is more of I mean, this is maybe some of them to appear but Do we recognize that we're gonna be able to stay in with this budget? I mean, is this a little bit generous on one end that we might not be?

We have an average amount of hours and so you just apply the differential to those hours. Is there a steady increase from year to year but not significant enough where it turns the budget on its head? We plan for a little bit of call increase so that's formulated within the budget forecast.

I like this. I mean the actual budget jumps are very minimal if you think of our overall budget. I JUST, WHEN WE GET THE NEXT 500 HOMES, WE GET THE NEXT, YOU KNOW, 500 HOMES, ARE WE, I JUST WANT TO BE CAREFUL THAT WE PAY ATTENTION THAT WE'RE ACTUALLY BUDGETING CORRECTLY AS THE YEARS GO ON BECAUSE, I MEAN, WE'RE GOING TO JUMP UP AGAIN HERE AS SOON AS SOME OF THOSE DEVELOPMENTS REALLY START GOING THROUGH. OTHERWISE, I DON'T HAVE ANY ISSUES WITH THIS.

I'M FINE WITH ALL OF IT. I AGREE. I'M HAPPY WITH THIS, I THINK. I would say the same thing. I'd like to see it happen a little faster, but this seems like a pragmatic approach to doing it. We're going to double in size the rooftops that need hoses, and I think this as a retention tool is some of the best we can spend.

I'm in favor of increasing the pay for the fire department. I'm as always concerned about its placement within the overall budget of the city. We're looking at a huge levy increase over the next 3 years. Um, and I don't want the firefighters to miss out, but I do want to keep that increase that overall increase in the budget in mind as we go forward. Do you have any suggestions for what we'd like to see? Not with this. It's just a statement overall as we start to talk about the budget that we want to pay the firefighters more. But what does that mean? Where are we going to have to cut back to keep everything else reasonable? Just know that I'm looking for...

Feedback that can be incorporated in so I'm gonna continue to ask for that of like I don't know instead of just like it should be lower like how much lower do we want it? What do you want to see? What's powerful?

Yeah Yeah, I mean like I said for me the fire department is not necessarily where I want cuts to be made but I Feel like as a city Every time we're sitting down at this table talking about money, it's all about increases, increases, increases, and increases at a rate that are causing huge increases to the overall budget. And that's more what concerns me than the fire department specifically. Yeah, this is reasonable for the fire department, but in lieu of the levy increase, in lieu of you know building a new public works building you know at some point those costs those a little bit here a little bit there is it's adding up and i'm hearing from residents that it's a concerning they're they're seeing concerns on the bottom line so i have a couple questions on the numbers when we talk to when we look at what we're contributing now or what's

from the general fund has contributed towards it versus in five years. So on the projected pension amount, right, $5,500, the other one that's kind of that same color there, is that, so are those figures included further up in the yellow, the cost to implement?

No, so the interesting thing about the pension amounts is this is just saying, OK, here's what an eligible firefighter would get if they decided to retire today. So if they were in for 30 years, it would be 30 times 5,500. And so what PARA does is annually we get a statement from them saying, OK, here are all of your assets. Here's all the money that you've invested. Here's your growth rate. Here's what the fire state aid allocated you, basically gave you this year. Here's any money that the city put in. If you remember, the city did contribute $20,000 this year to the pension. And then here is your projected liability. That means anybody that they would anticipate would retired or anybody who's within that age they have some sort of an idea or they guess right and then they say here's your liability for this upcoming year so we don't know until the year before and so we do get a report from them and so we always try and stay at least you know a hundred percent um, funded. And so we're, we try to avoid that liability at the end of the year. So, but there always is a risk anytime you increase it because you're increasing your liability. And as people age and as people, you know what I mean?

Get more posted from the city. What budget do we pull our money from to contribute to Pira?

Right. That is the general fund. And so that would be the fire department's, um, budget.

Okay. then when we if you scroll up the yellow the cost to implement so when we're talking about um gradually getting us to first market and then 10 above market um for that um that's just the hourly the numbers that are on the screen not okay correct and i i don't think this is true but i want to be able to answer what someone says so like the way i look at it is so 2027 for budgeting to contribute 133 and in five years it more than doubles but just

It just means that those 25 paid-on-call firefighters will cost, their wages and training will cost $277,000. Because of the increase in hours?

Yes. Instead of typically $300 a year, we have $439. Okay, but we're keeping the headcount.

Yes, accommodation.

I wanted to make sure I could answer that if somebody asked. Because first it looks like double, but you're doing like... 150, 60% more hours.

Yes, so it's accommodation of increased hours as well as increased wage.

Yeah. Thank you. I don't have any questions. I think this looks good and supported.

Do you have anything for us? No, I think the next step would just be to bring this to a regular meeting and get your approval on it. So I'll do that. All right. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, now talking about the 2027 general fund budget. First of all, While we're waiting for Brent.

all right thank you mayor and council

So kind of continuing in our theme of kind of preparing for public services, if you remember last year there was some work that the council did and staff did related to kind of moving some debt service money where we had surplus and accounts over to pre-fund design services for the public services facilities project. and if you go back to the June 1st meeting we kicked off the kind of the budget preview we talked about if if we are operating under a kind of a debt management strategy and if we're at least considering building a public services facility there was a Feedback from the council that you'd rather do that over multiple years rather than one year and so we looked at some strategies and if you look at the kind of the bottom of this chart we looked at some abstracts Kind of figuring out some of the staffing and capital needs that we have in our existing plans As you can see there, we had about, we projected or forecasted about 18 and three quarters percent of a levy increase, kind of preparing for potentially a 29 to 30 percent increase in 2030. we've kind of shifted that a little bit some of the strategies that we've looked at with Northland this kind of working under the principle of using capitalized interest to phase in the debt service for a public services building again I'm just gonna say this one more time that this is all contingent upon the council approving that the community having buy-in but for budget and tenant management circumstances we're planning in this circumstance for that to become a reality and if the council wants us to depart from that we can but we need that kind of direction so capitalized interest would work is basically you borrow the money but then use a portion of those proceeds to make those first initial payments to kind of feather in your debt so rather than going from zero to 1.5 million this is a strategy that tries to split that up to build your debt muscle if you will And so you can see here, this is first draft that in that orange line, that's the actual that you'll be talking about and getting some more detail from Lynn and I tonight. You can see it stretches that estimated tax rate from our normal goal of 3%. But as we talked about in June, we are going to try to or at least have a conversation about eliminating the roller coaster effect. And so here you can see that we've added this purple line. And the reason why I didn't want to forecast that far out, you can see that we have some debt dropping off in 2029 and 2030. And kind of filing under, we don't want to over-promise and under-deliver. We just want to kind of, until we have a better idea of what some of those budget parameters would be, I want it to hold off on that. But this is essentially what you see in our budget message is this strategy to incrementally add debt capacity through a debt management strategy. So $450,000 in 2027, $250,000 going towards turn lanes. Another 200,000 going towards design services and then doing that same approach in 28 with a $500,000 contribution and if you. I looked at your regular meeting agenda packet tonight. You can see that our design fees for construction documents is right around that. I think it's 680. So under this scenario, you'd be paid in cash for those construction fees ahead. So fundamentally, you could be taking that off the bottom line of any debt you would go after. But kind of jumping to the end, by 2029, if you'd add another 550, you'd have enough to, rather than doing 1.5 in 2029, you'd be doing 550 in 2029. And hopefully having, or all things considered, having a larger tax capacity to kind of feather that in. So that's kind of the, I would say, kind of the headline to this budget because it is a little bit off kilter from what we would normally present to you as far as like a big chunk of a project. The third piece that I wanted to talk about is just, and this isn't an advocation for franchise fees, but I think it serves a purpose in kind of refreshing the council's memory and talking to residents that when they compare taxes in Carver to taxes in, frankly, almost every other city in the county. likely the Metro, that there is a significance in how Carver chooses to collect revenue. And so just extrapolating some numbers, Chanhassen collected just over $2 million in 2025. Getting to a per capita, that gets to about $581,000 that Chanhassen collects. Bocconia just went through that process and they're budgeting just around $850,000. And just showing that compared to some of the levy scenarios that you see here, that it's not always going to be apples to apples. I know this is a real granular piece, and I think there's obviously some merit in the council's choice to do no franchise fees, but I think there's some work. as a staff and as a team, I guess, for us to do to kind of include residents in that part of the narrative. So I'm going to kind of let Lynn set up while I'm kind of finishing up on a couple other pieces. I'm happy to answer any real big budget message questions. I would say there's probably five functions here that are really critical that the council has spent quite a bit of time on. Southwest Prime. So we're recommending not to fund that in 2027 just based on some of the capital costs that are coming up. and impending. It sounds like from all indications Carver County is going to be able to use a new funding source to pick that up. So all in all, no harm to the user or residents. We got some notice from the Chamber of Commerce that for a variety of reasons the community market will likely not continue in 2027 so we've removed that from the 27 budget as well and then some big three-piece items and then we'll go into a little bit more detail on this but I think you know next to planning for the public services facility the initiative of planning for capital in cash and trying to build those reserves So the council had a goal of 10%. The 2027 budget shows a 20% increase to capital spending, excluding the special facilities piece. So that's an investment in payment management. We did increase that significantly from 620 to 745 to accommodate that kind of one year kind of swipe at getting all the projects done in one year rather than splitting them up. So again, I think that would be an example of a decision of either affirming that that's the plan you want to follow or perhaps departing from that and looking at other opportunities. But you can do those in streets, equipment, so on and so forth. And then there's going to just be a pro and con to that. Where, for example, on streets you might take something from a mill and overlay to a reclamation and what does that do? I think everybody in the room has experience with that. The 2050 comp plan is a significant initiative and planning for that. The community engagement, mapping, planning and all those pieces. And then finally, about $25,000 towards community survey. The City Council asked for that to be done once every three years, and so we're coming up on that information. That would be our third community survey. So with that, I'll transition to Lynn to give you some more details.

Maybe just before you go into that, because you brought up franchise fees, I would just kind of like to take a temperature. check. I know that I think three of us were on the council in 2020 when we talked about it last. But I think Brent showed, and I think we knew this at the time too, that there's really real money generated by franchise fees. I still remember the feedback that we got from the community. But does anybody feel strongly about reexamining that issue?

It's a hard thing. I agree, a tax by any other name, which is the reason the decision was not to do it. But that's a hard thing when a resident is comparing what they pay to another city. I don't know that that's always internalized, that yes, you've got an X percentage increase in your taxes, but by the way, remember, you are not paying this. That's kind of been the constant struggle. How do we remind? How do we communicate? How do we build value into what you're paying and remind folks that we don't do this. We've talked about a comparative analysis of what it would be, what a Chaska resident pays when we don't get good enough information to really make that comparison. So the challenge is the same. I still agree, though, in principle, attacks by any other name. So it really comes down to communication. And maybe we just have to figure out a way to connect. Maybe we do it through our app, but a little more... hand-holding of walking through what that looks like to folks as a reminder that this is why we made that decision to offset the cost.

Yeah, it's funny you say that, because when I was talking to Brent, I think we puff up our chests a lot and say, we don't charge franchise fees. And outside of this room, none of our neighbors know what that means.

Yeah, so, sorry.

No, and I was going to say, but I agree with you, that tax by any other name, it's a more equitable way of making sure that everybody pays, and there's a lot of money being made from that, but I don't know.

I love it. I'm starting, so I was a very big proponent when this came to us that we were not going to have it as franchisees, like, because everything Eric just said, right, it's still a tax payment, any other name, it's coming through. What I have found since 2020 or 2021, when we decided to put this in, okay, is that the general public doesn't understand this, and I have explained it but it isn't something that's really in their wheelhouse. It's not, and anybody who's watching, I'm not saying that the public can't understand this, but my experience is that even when I say it to people, it's sort of this gloss over. They're not quite getting what that means. So I have actually started, when I look now at the cities who are collecting and the cities who are not, I'm turning to on the fence that we should maybe move to doing it. We're going to do, I mean, we're going to get Money either way, whether it's on the tax rolls or if it's coming through this avenue. But what I found is that being that we're getting it one way or another, there is some optics to it. But the optics I found to it is not trying to like hide it in there. I don't feel like we should hide it in there. But I do feel that when I'm talking to The general resident population, they don't get this. And no matter how, like, okay, franchise freeze. If you look at the utility bills in Chaska, that you're going to see this, and then it gets passed through the city. So we don't have that to try and be transparent. Just sort of, it just doesn't, it's not as effective as just not seeing it as your tax increase. So I'm not... I'm trained to be on the fence now about not holding such a strong one on that. Okay, 50-50. Yeah, well, I'm really trying to make shots. I like to lessen fees. More. Sorry, I'm going more towards doing franchise fees.

Okay. I continue to not want our city to have franchise fees. I have one question. Does it, for the city that do collect franchise fees, is there, it's probably just minimal too, but is there administrative fee?

Like, I mean, being that it's a pass through processes for us, or the utility companies essentially to send a check. So it's just a, just like any minimal. Yes. Okay.

Um, I, I like the stance that we've done a lot of work to be transparent and make ourselves available to explain things. Um, and for all that work that we've done, and just that's 1 thing that makes our city different is. not going to have something or if it's going to be a taxpayer, their name is a change.

Right. I understand that. I just see the tax amount that's being raised and that is, but in my experience, that's all they focus on. And I can't, all these fair trade schemes I try to explain in the background don't hit the same.

But if I look at either the pros and cons is we're being very transparent and we make ourselves available. We do a great job of communicating, um, to make it understandable without somebody having to give it up a whole evening to learn about it versus just kind of doing what everyone else does because it's easier so that we don't have to take that role of educating them. I'd rather just stay the way we have it.

I am kind of leaning towards what Christie said. My example is that two years ago, my parents were considering moving out of their home in Chaska into the city of Carver. And when my dad went to do the math, his comment to me was, well, our taxes would be so much higher in Carver. And I sat down and showed him side by side talking about franchise fees and all of that. And he understood it at the end, but the answer was, well, our tax is in Carver. You know, so as much as I love that we are being as transparent as humanly possible, when people aren't able to compare apples to apples with every other community in our area, it gets to be problematic in how they're thinking about the city.

Okay. I think this is a fair argument, but I'll also point out, and this is a little bit of a no-win, when people get their tax statement and their estimate for next year, they look at the bottom line. They don't look to see how much the new school levy impacted that statement. When you look line by line, that's probably the most expensive thing on that statement, but it gets lumped into how much it costs to live at Carver. We don't have control over that either, so a lot of this is communication, but I get the point. If it doesn't resonate,

Well, and I, so I'm dorky enough that I watched the city council meetings from Laconia when they were talking about franchise fees and it resonated out there. And it was some real tense, like real tense council meetings with, with Members or with the public? No, with the public. Okay. With the public. Of folks saying, you're taxing us, you're hiding this. And again, it was, you know, maybe a dozen folks, and you take that, divide it by your entire population. But I just wanted to go over that. I spent a little more time on this than I wanted to. And we got, I think, a 3-2 vote of continuing.

You know, we're going to do another survey. Is there a way to address this little survey? Yeah.

Let's talk about that later.

I feel like... We don't have to talk about it now, but maybe that's the plus.

Yeah, we'd have to be careful how we like... Yeah, yeah. Okay. I want to make sure it's understandable in that survey because if Kayla's folks don't understand franchising, Okay, I'm sorry.

No, that was a really good discussion, and it was my first slide, so I... Also, I love that it's your first slide. I appreciate that. Actually, Brent moved it up in the order, so I feel like he knew you. You know, so, yeah, thank you for that feedback. So talking about the general fund budget process, we've been preparing budgets and capital plans and all of the things from April to July. I really like that we've been on top of the capital plans. I feel like it's really given us as department heads and staff a really good handle on where we need to be with the budget. Because even though they're separate, they go together. and ultimately fall in line with the levy. August to September, draft one of the budget and levy. And then September 21st, the preliminary budget and levy will be presented and adopted by council. And then we have to certify that to the county no later than September 30th. And then council will adopt the final budget and levy and certify to the county by the end of December. So we have four budget objectives, main budget objectives, I would say, this goal round for 2027. And the first one is to demonstrate awareness of organizational needs while considering property tax impacts. So what does the organization need and trying to keep that property tax, you know, being considerate of it. And number two, limit property tax increase to 3%. You know, we've been working on that since our strategic plan. Number three, reduce reliance on debt by increasing capital contributions by 10% annually. Again, another strategic priority. And number four, establish and implement a budget strategy to mitigate the financial impact of the proposed public services facility. We started to work on that budget objective last year with kind of using those fund balances of those debt service levies and using it for the design services this year. So 2027 budget impacts. For personnel, we are planning a 3% increase to the pay scale. And we try to plan on all of the employees meeting their milestone pay increases. So the impact to the general fund budget as of right now would be a $73,000 impact. Right now there's a planned 3% increase programmed for all part-time and seasonal employees. I was hefty with the health insurance, but that's planned to be helpful last year. So right now I have programmed 15% increase to health insurance benefits. And unfortunately we won't find out until October. We just went over the compensation program. So firefighter and officer pay, I have programs to increase by 9.1%. And that would be a total impact of $22,000. The reason that I programmed the officer pay is because if I do the paid on call and not the officer, then they're gonna start catching up with each other and they'll both be making the same amount of money. Community outreach, as Brent mentioned, we have a community survey program, but the general fund portion of that is $20,000 and then there will be some utility funds that will be allocated a portion of that. The 2050 comprehensive plan, we have $43,000 budgeted within the general fund. And our recreation partnership for the Chaska Rec is increasing to $100,000.

Question about that. Do we know that the discount, the aggregated discount that Carver residents receive is more than or less than that number?

go ahead we could find that out it's it's also a representation of their staff time for the community events but we can we can get numbers on the community center and town course I just I would like to know if we're getting the value I'd like to believe that we are maybe we're getting a great value for that but it would help I think to know if

what that aggregated value is.

Yeah, we'll work on getting some numbers for that.

And then also to Brent's point, it's also the touch of truck and it's the movies in the park and it's the bands. So there's not a dollar value to that unless you imagine that we're charging a $10 cover for everybody who participates.

And I understand that. If it came back, though, let's say, just for the sake of argument, it came back that the aggregated benefit was $50,000, then is it worth it? Sure. Okay.

Yeah, and then I wanted to note, too, because we, in our agreements, we always have a number of events that, I believe we used to have it as, like, so many events per year. We had an expectation they were going to do. Is that still in that agreement? That's been out for some time. Okay. I, you know, I appreciate the handful of events that they sprinkle around over the year. To me, it's not worth $100,000. I'd rather hire somebody who worked, you know, a couple hours a month and put something on, you know, as a part-time person. I know that people are getting discounts in Chaska at the community center and golf and all that. How much has this for next year raised from, like, how much have we went up? It's been pretty incrementally high for the last couple of years that it's been jumping up.

It's gone up like $7,000. From last year. What was the year before, though? Wasn't that the higher? Last year it was $87,000 to $93,000, so $6,000. Okay.

So two years we went up. I mean, we're heading towards $15,000, $20,000, but then they're putting on that new addition, right? So are we projected to go higher again? This is the last year of the agreement. Okay, but I just didn't know, because did they finish all of their projects over at the Chaska Community Center? They haven't started. They haven't started. So didn't we get some notice that when that happens, that they were most likely going to make our...

They had talked about just talking about the environment once they do that. They are open to extending it through 28 under the same parameters, but we can get that information that Council Member Pershman is asking and you can discuss. Okay.

Yeah, and like I said, the number of events that they actually have a hand in here in the city limits also. I'm not a big... proponent for this agreement, I think paying Chaska $100,000 a year so that they can also take in the additional fees of what the membership costs or what the cost to go golfing. They're not, you know, they're not, this isn't really like, this doesn't cover everything, right? You don't go to the community center and this is free. They're still making revenue off this, plus our revenue. I realize that we don't have some of these services in Carver, but there's some services I just don't think we can have in Carver at this point in where we are. So I'm not a big fan of this partnership moving forward.

All right, thank you for the feedback. We do have some reductions, which is, Good. Southwest Prime Transit is planned to shift a weight and be funded by Carver County Transportation Initiative, and that would save about $75,000. With the budgeted amount, that service has been increasing incrementally over the past couple of months.

Can I jump in there? Yep. If you remember, we were kind of right around 45,026. So 75 is a forecast based on the Southwest Transit Board. adopted a resolution where they're going to be no longer willing to subsidize prime service outside of their member cities. And so the combination of that combined with increased ridership, which we have seen since some of the new apartment complexes have gone up off of Jonathan Carver Parkway, we were forecasting at a minimum to continue service at $75,000. So I just wanted to explain that number in a little more detail.

Just one other quick comment I want to make. This didn't come easily. This is one line item here. This was a lot of skillful effort and I want to thank Brent for all of the work with Carver County to get us to a point where they were in line with our desire to have it direct that funding for us to keep. That's a big deal and you know we're spending MORE ON OUR EMPLOYEES THERE, BUT WE FOUND A WAY TO GET 75,000 BACK.

THAT'S A REALLY GOOD POINT. IT WAS LIKE A LINE ITEM, AND IT WAS E-MAILS, AND WE ALMOST GAINED ON ARM WRESTLING.

THANK YOU, BREN. AND RESTATING THAT THE COMMUNITY MARKET PROGRAM WILL BE PAUSED JUST DUE TO LOW VENDOR PARTICIPATION, AND I THINK JUST THE So let's just get into the numbers. So general fund revenues are anticipated to be right around $4.6 million with 75% of that coming from property tax revenue and about 13% of that coming from building permits. There are some other revenue sources such as grants and aids and fire contracts and other aids and miscellaneous revenues. But I'd say the majority of that is funded by property tax revenue. So here it is broken out into different sections so you can see it. Our property tax revenue is anticipated to increase by 11%, building permits by 1.4%, and overall revenue by 8.2%. Down below, you can see my note that there is a decrease in grants for 2027. Our LGA allocation, which comes from the state of Minnesota, has reduced by $70,000. And that's a calculation that they do. As the city grows, your allocation becomes smaller eventually to nothing. And unfortunately, but. thankful that we are getting what we're getting. And then miscellaneous revenues I decreased. That's just kind of like revenue that we're not anticipating on getting and it was over budgeted in previous years. So I just adjust that down. General fund expenditures, so as a budget needs to balance, this is also planning on being an 8.2% increase, so $4.6 million. So public services is at the top at $1.2 million, but not the biggest increase, Andrew. Only planned increase of 10%, and then you can see the different increases down below, so...

Here it is in pretty colors. So parking rent goes down, what does that mean?

So there's some money that we budget for our costs related to putting on some of these community events and that's been over budgeted so we scaled that

All right, and then we always get numbers from the county and they give us our new residential construction by assessment year and, as you can recall, the assessment years always trails about 18 months behind so it says 2026 here, but the new residential construction added for 2026 which they just provided this number to us is 41. OVERALL, YOU CAN SEE THAT WE'RE TRENDING UPWARD WITH THE NEW RESIDENTIAL CONSTRUCTION BEING ADDED ANNUALLY. THE OVERALL NEW CONSTRUCTION, SO THAT MEANS THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING OTHER THAN RESIDENTIAL BUILT LAST YEAR, AS YOU ALL KNOW, WAS $48 MILLION. WE WERE ASSIGNED A NEW AVERAGE VALUE HOME VALUE OF $453,700. THAT'S UP FROM $453,100 IN THE LAST YEAR, SO NOT A huge increase in values on homes.

Brent, when do you think the Lenzen property will hit the tax rolls?

So they're gonna, they'll at least start on foundations this fall. So it'll be probably, let's see, 27. I would say they might have some partial ones in 28, but most likely in 29. They usually get taxed that first year on land, or maybe it'll look like half-built home, and then fully in 29, plus or minus, depending on what time of year they build.

And then what about the new developments off the town, the summer field gate?

Be kind of the same trajectory. They want to get some models started this fall, you know, weather dependent, so it'd be that same 29 time frame, which...

That's what we need.

That's what we need.

Yeah. What do you think about, like, how many, we know it's going to be 500-ish out here, right, for Lenton. But down here, for the 29-year-olds, like, how many homes do we have?

I think their first phase is 270, it sounds. Okay, okay.

But in the year 29, it would be 150. 51, 21.

I don't want to speculate to that degree.

But we're looking at 600 to maybe 700 new homes that will hit 2029.

Well, they come on as they're constructed.

What was that?

They come on as they're constructed. So I would say...

I meant total with Lenz and Em.

Yeah, so starting in 29... And then running through probably 2034, just be kind of phased in. And then another phase of those developments will come up and then something we're probably not even thinking about today is going to happen. So, um,

When do you think that one, like, if we just look at Lenson, like if we will just use 2029 is when they mostly hit the text. Well, do you think that'll carry through to 2034 or?

Yeah, they don't, they won't mostly hit, but just like the, you know, if you think about, uh, you know, we're averaging probably just over a hundred homes a year or so, 70, 70.

So you're probably in that.

with more i would speculate somewhere around 100 new homes being added unless we like really take off okay that makes sense thank you another thing to contemplate is uh i don't have the exact year but like lakeview industries is in the tiff district so that'll pop off in i think 29 or 20 30. that was a nine-year increment district that helped us construct commerce drive so they'll

And that's our last TIF right now, isn't it?

No, we did a TIF district for the ION development to help pay for that assessment from Levi Griffin Road way back.

And Carver Ridge, right?

Carver Ridge, there is kind of a step-down basis for senior living, not paying. Well, I'm getting over my skis, yes. Carver Bridge is in a TIF district. I'm just going to stop there.

And do you know when those ones are ending, just out of curiosity?

Not from memory. Somewhere in the 2017-ish area. We'll look it up and get back to you.

OK, thank you. Tax levy considerations. To be more transparent, we broke out our capital, if you remember. So we have street maintenance levy is increasing by 20% to 745,000. So we've had the street maintenance levy for five years now, four years. But the capital equipment levy is newer. So we have general equipment Fire capital parks, capital and facilities capital, and I kind of explained them down below. So the street maintenance is used to support the city's payment management plan. Um, I actually spoke to somebody today who had a street assessment, um. from 2015 and she just realized it was on her property tax statement and so it's just nice to see that we're doing these street maintenance levy because we don't have to assess things like that to people's you know taxes but general fire and parks capital levies are used to fund future capital with cash and then this year the facilities capital 40 is planned for future building improvements and the 450 currently Um, for draft one here is allocated for the public services facility, turn lane project and project design fees. Um, so that is part of our strategy here for the debt. Um, the 27 street maintenance project, the, um, per the payment management plan, um, we have overlooked drive and overlook lane, uh, being a mill and overlay, and then a reclamation on Ramsey Avenue, Ramsey Bay. Ramsey Court, Bluff Road, and Lylewood Parkway. Hopefully that is accurate. So there's two different pools of money. There's the local street maintenance and then there's the state aid. Only certain roads qualify for the state aid, the municipal state aid. So the local cost will be $862,000 and then the roads that qualify for state aid would be the $233,000. General capital purchases. We're looking at replacing three total mowers. Total mowers? I don't know why that's so hard for me to say. They cost approximately $15,000 each, so that would be a total of $45,000. I hope that's somewhat of the correct picture. Yeah, okay. Is it the right color at least? Okay. I don't really know my machinery. Okay. And then we have a 2005 Kubota replacement at about $50,000. And then I know that this is a Ram. And we're replacing a 2012 Chevy, but lately we've been buying Rams, so that's why I put a Ram on there. But that's planned at about $50,000.

Andrew, when we look at that one, How old are the mowers that we're replacing? They'll be seven years old. Seven. Okay.

That seems like a short life expectancy. They get used hard in the summertime. Those are the ones that the seasonals are using every day.

I was back when we were mowing Riverside Park. I would say we have a hefty, this tax that we're looking at for next year is hefty. huge. So I really feel that we need to possibly tighten up on some things. We can have some things, but we can't have everything. And so, yeah, I'm going to be picking through this a little bit more because we're looking at telling people that we're going to raise tax by 18%. That is not going to fly. It's not going to fly. So let's look where we can say seven years. I realize they're getting hammered out there, but I mean, I think a Kubota that's 20 years old may be more important than a mower that's seven years old. I can't say that, but we might have to make some hard choices that some of this equipment, some of these things just can't afford it right now. So, and I know that, oh, it's just 45,000 here and it's just this much here, but I'll bring Glenn back. He always said it's death by a thousand cuts, right? Like it's all every 45 or every 15 or 30 adds up to the whole. And so. I think we should just be cognizant when we're looking at some of the stuff that we may not be able to get all the things that we were hoping for.

I have a question about this, too. So, Andrew, in your equipment plan, I recall a discussion or there's this kind of sweet spot where we get some recovery on equipment we sell. Do these have value now that we'll recover some of those $15,000 for each one? And what happens if we wait a year or two?

Those mowers will. I don't know exactly. I don't have a good estimate on those because I've been watching auction sites for stand up mowers and I cannot know what is selling stand up mowers. So that's either going to hurt us or it's going to really help us because they don't come up on auction very often. So I don't have a good idea. If I was to buy one myself, I don't know. I probably would expect to pay three to four. That's a swag.

Like a used one, you're saying? Yeah.

The tractor will probably bring something. The truck is going to bring something. But it's a hard game to play and to be wrong at.

So to Christy's point, refurbishing these doesn't make it worth it?

I mean, they're going to last longer, but I mean, like, again, it's just, you're dumping money into, you know, to refurbish what's the refurbished cost going to be.

Are they breaking down?

Um, I don't know that off the top of my head, how much they work out, but I know they had problems with at least one of them this year.

The 2027 fire capital purchases, we have one planned for the 2013 Chevy Command vehicle, number one replacement. And the 90,000 includes all of the different additions that are required for an emergency vehicle.

And if I remember correctly, this one, what kind of iffy on the transmission on this one?

It is a concern, but things have been going pretty good with that. We haven't had any issues, so...

So let's say that we have the 2013. We decide that we're going to keep it. What does that look like for a transmission cost if you have to drop another one? $5,000? $6,000?

I think transmissions, they're running around $7,000 to $9,000 somewhere in there now. Okay.

So is the rest of the... Is it... Because 2013's older, but it's not... I mean, it's not... But is it rusting out? You know what I mean? Like, is it still functional besides we, you know, if the tranny goes, let's just say 10,000 is a heck of a lot different than 90,000. So is, I mean, does it have other functional issues right now?

No, other than some calculations that I did talking to some mechanics. I just learned this recently that fire service mechanics will use the engine hours and they put that into a formula that kind of turns it into mileage to make it how you can understand it a little better. So I found this out that this vehicle has 6,600 engine hours on it. So it spends a lot of time idling. That averages out to about 153,000 miles is what that sits today. When you put all the engine hours and the actual mileage and those types of things in there. So that was one of the things that I learned after the last question at the council meeting. I went and started doing some digging to understand how that may or may not work.

So is this one going to go up for sale then for auctions?

It certainly could.

Or was it going to move down the line? I don't know because it says replacement. So I assume it was going somewhere. Yeah, right now it's planned for auction. Okay. Do you have any idea what 2013 command vehicles are bringing to auction?

Well, you should say that. I list some stuff up and it runs anywhere from $8,000 to $11,000.

Okay, so about the cost of a transmission. Yeah. Okay.

And we are really conservative with our CIP. Right now we don't plan for... what we are going to receive for any replacements. And we do that purposely. So we don't plan on the $8,000 to $10,000 coming back into that CIP.

So usually a third of the cost, even up to half the cost, is all the unfitting. retain any of that? Does that get reused or is that reached an age where it's end of life too?

In the new vehicle, that stuff will be retained. Just because we bought this one used, a lot of the equipment is much older, original. In the new one, that will get moved to other vehicles, probably five to eight years I suppose, and then that stuff will start to recycle out.

So the 2013 has upfitted equipment that's older than 2013, isn't it? No, it's 2013 stuff.

standard stuff that can go into that vehicle and others? Yes. Does it fit that? Is that a Chevy?

So some of the departments, when they purchase a specific piece of equipment, like a command vehicle, they try to keep the same brand because the equipment that they put in it is made for that particular brand. But when, of course, when the bottles change a little bit, sort of the head mounts and screws and that kind of thing, and then you end up changing... you know, your light packages and those types of things to fit the new model.

Okay. I have a comment too on this. I know for like personal use or like my family, if we had our older vehicles have rust. So I like kudos to you and your team for like taking care of it. Cause I know I bring up a lot when we're talking about our new public works facility, that we just be good stewards of our equipment. So thank you for taking care of it. I learned recently that you guys wash them regularly. Not that I didn't think you did, but there was an expense for it because I had asked a friend, I was like, who does a car wash? And I was like, that's cars always. And the fire trucks and all. Yeah, I was like, who's getting their car washed? But it shows that we're taking care of the things. And I really appreciate that and want us to give you what you need to do that. Appreciate that, Margie.

All right, for the facilities capital, we have planned for the church by the river, the paint, the door, and the siding repair, we have planned 75,000.

And just a note on this, so within the confines of all these items, so like the 27 budget includes $45,000 because you contributed $30,000. So some of these numbers don't represent your 27 outlay. They represent cash that has been built up to make that outlay.

Is any of the repairs that are planned structural or safety-based?

I would say...

I don't think anything's going to fall.

Nothing structural. I just think like there's trim on some doors that are falling, but nothing structural or safety at all.

I like that we get to the rowdy kind of front door there.

Yeah. I'm thinking, you know, if we can push, you know, aesthetically we'd like to get it fixed up, but on the point of where can we push things.

We're not going to lose a roof and we're not going to, you know. It would be helpful to know, or I just need to be reminded, like, when we started talking about this, because I think we already pushed it out. 2 years, like, I don't want this to be something we perpetually.

So push down, you said that part of this was from last year's right? So how much was 75,000 actually this year? Or is it part?

No, 30 was last year. 45 is this year.

Okay.

Alright, so this slide compares the debt service levy. It appears that we are having a large jump because as you remember from last year we deferred some of our levy payments because we used the fund balance that had built up from previous years of refundings or other scenarios that we had in three different debt service categories. So now we are LEVYING FOR THE 2015A, THE 2019B, AND THE 2024A AS NORMAL LEVY PAYMENTS. SO NOW WE'RE BACK UP TO THAT $1.3 MILLION AS WE WERE IN 2025. THAT'S RIGHT AROUND WHERE WE WERE. Yeah, for a debt service levy.

I ask, so a lot of these slides we're probably going to see more times, right? Yeah. Okay. Would we be able to see an additional line that shows what it would be if we hadn't used that fund balance? Oh, sure. To pay the debt service? Yep.

Yep.

So the difference would be between 26 and 26?

Absolutely. Yeah. So put with the normal levy would have been in 26 had we not deferred. Yeah. And I can show 25, too, if that helps.

So that helps tell the story of the job.

Yep, absolutely.

Thank you.

So here's the general fund levy history. I think the slide that you have is incorrect. I made a mistake. So this one is correct up here. So you can see that the dark blue is the general levy. The green is the debt service levy. So you can see the change here. Um, Lori, kind of what you wanted to see on the previous slide, but this here is a picture. Um, but, and then the red is the street maintenance levy, and then you can see the equipment levy coming on in 2025. Um, so yeah, you can see where we're right around that 1.3 million with the debt service levy, and then we're gradually increasing with the jungle levy.

Okay. I want to jump. I have a slide here. I just want to, I think there's some conversations centered around capital I just want to give a good line of sight to that. Maybe.

But this will give you a sense of all these

So you can see the column on the left is actual. So that's the capital plan. So if you remember, we go up 10 years. So what you're really doing is you're funding the fund and you're not really approving individual purposes or purchases, if you will. So you can see the CIP spend on the table below. So you can see that's the actual spend within the fund for each of these categories. but the you're budgeting for these amounts so there is a strategy where you can delay individual purchases or extend out and then we can reconcile those the next time you do your 10-year plan or frankly we're still working on our you know you've seen the draft of that but this would be kind of the next chapter in that if you say no we don't like how this worked out we want to push this and move that over here and put this over here uh you're willing to do that but just wanted to make sure that we're on the same page about what's in the budget compared to what's funding the plan yes that was helpful

Okay, so when we look at our levy history, in 24, we were at a 13.75% increase, and we're sitting here today at a proposed 18.92% increase, and that includes our strategy with the additional $450,000 debt increase, which is actually in a special facilities account. Hopefully that's not confusing the way I said it. Brent always says it way better than I do. This slide might help. So the 2027 preliminary levy options, as it says there, as a strategy to manage the impact of new debt, the first draft. allocates $450,000 toward turn lanes and design fees for a future public services facility project. So the top line is showing that this levy scenario is at an 18.92%. If we were to decrease by $450,000, that would decrease the levy, increase to 10.59%. Carver County provides this slide. So again, I showed another visual with this showing the 41 million in residential new construction. This is showing that the market, the percent change for market values was practically nothing this year. We're at a very small percentage change for home values. Last year, the percent change was 8%. Average value of home history, again, we're at $453,700. Again, that's only a $600 change. Estimated tax impact. Again, we're talking about this debt management strategy to get us to that new public services facility. The 18.92 levy increase aligns with the strategy to pre-fund that public services facility tasks in an attempt to minimize that one-year impact of a capital investment. The average valued home would be impacted by approximately $270 annually. So you can see that from 2026 to 2027, that bottom line, the estimated city property tax would go from 1928 to 2198. It's about $22.50 a month. And it was just over $100 last year? I believe so. So $300 in two years. If we choose to say no to the debt management strategy, this scenario results in a 10.59% levy increase, which we would go back to slide 19 to look at that. That would decrease the tax rate to 45.27, down from 49%, and the increase would be $102 annually.

This doesn't mean there's just two choices, but it hopefully gives you an idea. So there could be a hybrid out there based on kind of your continued conversation about the budget.

You know what I know, and this is just for council, but I mean, yeah, so the average value home is $450,000, but a lot of people's homes are well over $500,000. So, you know, we've got older homes down here that do that, you know, for us, but if we're thinking about realistically the new houses that are going in, you're not getting at this point $450,000, you're getting $650,000. So that jump for a good portion of the city is going to be a lot higher than a couple hundred dollars.

I did calculate a couple other homes, and I can get you those in after we're done here. This is the last slide. It's just showing the tax rate. Visually, we've been decreasing since 2016. The highest rate on here happened in 2019, and we were at 50.59%. Gradually decreasing, we were at 49% in 2020. We're proposing 49% with the debt management strategy. If we say no to it and we have a different strategy, we could be anywhere in between that 49% and that 45% or lower. So that is that. I am going to look for that. I'll give you another scenario on that tax impact, but that is all I have for this presentation, but I'm open for questions, and I do see that we're getting close to time, so I apologize.

No, don't you apologize. I think that was great. I think we should put a pin in this, as they say, and hold off and discuss this during the meeting, if that's okay, because I feel like we've got more than...

Two minutes.

Two and a half minutes.

I have a 30 second question for Brent. The turn lanes. No. No, the turn lanes. Do we, does the county do anything, like any, or is that all on us? All on us.

It's all on us.

Okay.

I do, since he's here, I'd like to cut him loose if Aaron could give a construction update to the council on the normal road. Sure.

So Mount Elk Grove got paved on Saturday. The base course lift. The contractor is going to be up here this week to start preparing the trail base. They're planning to pave the trail this coming Saturday is what they're telling us. And then restoration efforts will be next week. We don't have a final wearing course date yet, but we'll be updating the council when we have that. Additionally, the contractor will be shifting into the Carver Bluffs neighborhood next week. So we'll be putting out a mailer to the entire neighborhood and then handing out notices to every resident that's directly impacted. by that construction that will be taking place. They'll be starting with curb and gutter spot removal and replacement work, similar to what we did on Mount Hope, just the stuff that's cracked and needs to be replaced. And then right now we're discussing with the contractor to not reclaim the road until after the steamboat days is up. We think that might be a better option than reclaiming it the week ahead of steamboat days, and then it'll sit for a whole week. So we're still talking through that with him. This afternoon, we kind of socialized with that with him, and he thinks that's probably a good idea. He just needs to make sure that the reclaimer can be scheduled for that following week.

Because those are both of the bus routes for the transit buses on Saturday night. So I just want to make sure we're getting through okay on both ends of town.

Okay. So that's what we'll be pushing for, just to help kind of minimize the amount of time that the road will be at a gravel base. So we'll provide updates as we get done.

Just one super quick question. With the paving, I assume that that has lessened the heartburn of folks like with mail issues and that kind of thing.

Yep, we had one additional comment about a single mailbox today, so that got fixed. And then permanent mailboxes are going to be going back in this week. And one more item, digital speed signs, they're planning to go up this week as well.

And the speed limit's 30? 30 miles per hour. Okay, and I talked to Brent this afternoon and I asked the Sheriff's Department, I'm sure he forwarded the email maybe, but I asked the Sheriff's Department, will we start paying super close to Mount Hope Road, knowing that the natural traffic calming features of that have been fixed. So I anticipate that that's the negative outcome of a really well done project as it becomes a natural speedway. Thank you. Thank you. All right. I would entertain a motion to adjourn.

I'll make a motion to adjourn.

Motion by person. I'll second. Second by a comment. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Motion passes. Thank you.