Town Council - Regular Meeting

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thought I saw the Do it.

I need to see the

Please take

a look. What's happening? There is also I believe that Mary Jane has provided a birthday cake along with a shark knife in the back of the room. So anybody who would like cake, please melt yourself, and Ted can fend you off if you'd like to go first. So a very happy birthday, and thanks for being here with us.

Okay. You're in the first place.

I can think of no better place to be as a public servant

than our budget here in the White Room. Absolutely. That's the

right answer.

That's the right answer.

Don't know about that. You just like

the bar for veracity. Yeah. Okay. So I wanted to remind our audience that the format of work session is different than those of our business meetings. Work sessions are an opportunity for our community council to dive more deeply into specific topics.

These meetings are more conversational and less formal. We don't vote during work sessions and the topics will come back to a formal business meeting and I believe that our public hearing on the budget is May 20. So we do value public input. There is I believe on the engage site, there's a little bit more information on the budget and we do wanna hear from you. So there will be opportunities to speak at upcoming business meetings and as part of the agenda that evening on the twentieth, we'll be holding a public hearing on the budget and we encourage everyone to come speak or share your comments in advance by email.

Mayor and council@chapelhillnc.gov. Right. That brings us to the budget discussion. Before we get started, I just wanted to give council a quick heads up. Ted and I thought it might be helpful to close the discussion with four brief questions. It's really just a way to check-in, make sure we heard each other clearly, and identify anything we still need moving forward. So we're hoping that it would be the last ten or twelve minutes at the end for that conversation. You'll find the questions at your seat and staff will also have them up on the screen when we get there. So does that approach work for folks? Yes.

Alright. Fabulous. So item number one is twenty twenty six twenty seven budget, and our presenters are Ted Forkies and Amy Bullitt.

Thank you, madam mayor. We were gonna try to say that you can you had to finish by seven in order to get k, but that that might be

too inefficient. No.

Okay. Now we're now we're getting somewhere.

It doesn't it's just sacrifice. Yeah.

In in all seriousness, we we wanna spend as much time with you as you need to get comfortable. Your biggest decision annually is this decision, your budget decision. And so we appreciate the focused attention from all the members as we shared information over the last several days, took some questions, provided some answers, and then we've got information that we shared out with you by email. We also have something at your seats that's new tonight that you don't have to make any decisions on today, but we wanted to provide you a a fully branded version of your council strategic priorities. That's on the front page of the hard copy handout.

And then behind it is our first attempt to provide a set of reporting metrics that we might use to help guide the decision as to how responsive we are to meeting those strategic objectives. So comment from council on either of these documents is is welcome, but this hopefully will give you an idea of how we're looking to help you with the question, you know, are we moving forward on these strategic goals? And hopefully, some of the the metrics in there help help answer that question. We'd be reporting on them. Behind those metrics, we'll have departmental work plans that will dig more deeply into that, and we can provide that information when it's available.

That's that's kind of the framework of how we're looking to do this to to answer the question, are we meeting your priorities? Words? So just share that out for review and comment as as you see fit. With that, I would I would echo that the engagement with the community to get new feedback, the Engaged Chapel Hill site is live. The mayor's message that went out last week contains those links.

We will also put that in town talk coming up this week. So hopefully, we're blanketing the community at least through socials to try to show them where they can provide common input to y'all. And with that, I'd like to walk us through this PowerPoint because what is a birthday budget work session without a good PowerPoint. Nothing. But this is just designed to get us to the place where you can have your questions answered, asked, and have more discussion.

I think you'll see this is fairly familiar to you from your previous work. So a reminder on on the big topics, this work session is meant meant to give you a clear picture of our financial outlook, key investment scenario where we're advancing your strategic priorities. The budget as recommended is a 3.4% increase over the current fiscal year for a total of 169,700,000, of which just about 100 million's in the general fund and the remainder's in our enterprise funds. The big takeaway, we are not recommending a tax increase for fiscal twenty seven, which leaves our property tax rate of 50¢ per $100 of assessed valuation. And we took your goals, put them front and center here in our plan to work.

We're up work operationalizing the complete communities through adopted plans and funded projects. That gets back to that handout. You can sort of see the metrics through my track there to see how we're meeting that set of goals. We're continuing to leverage innovative approaches to fund your housing goals, and so in there, you know, we continue to move forward with leveraging our local bond resources. Our state and federal grants remain in there despite uncertainties that remains moving forward.

We also have a very important public housing housing repositioning plan effort plan for this upcoming year. Again, really important piece of of how we work work on our housing goals. We're continuing to seek ways to advance our environmental goals, and so as you know, we're gonna be coming back to you shortly with our engagement plan for the climate action update. We'll also reach then out to the public and come back to you with proposed updates there. We also fit into that framework some of the work we're gonna be doing on storm water with respect to our flood mapping and the intent to build a new live flood model, which will also help with early morning and that sort of thing.

And then our work is guided by our five year funding outlook that is helping us move towards your goal of fiscal and organizational sustainability, and you all saw how we put specific investments into each of several categories to try to get us through a baseline fund. That's a lot in one slide, but we wanna show you how we're linking to your goals. This is the high level revenue picture. Property taxes are our number one source of revenue. Sales taxes, number two, and then all the rest fall in there in their respective levels.

We're showing additionally that we're proposing to appropriate only $500,000 from our fund balance, which is a decrease of half $1,000,000 from the current fiscal year, and the goal is to get to our best practice target of structural alignment and not appropriate fund balance. To the extent we do appropriate, it should be for one time needs, capital needs, and not to support ongoing operations. And this is that five year path fiscal sustainability chart that shows the categories of investment. Facility, streets, fleet, and fire capital are the four big buckets that we need put additional funding in to try to get to that sustainable allocation you see on the far left column. Then comes the current allocation, then the shaded column is where we're adding in the proposed budget to get to higher levels.

And then in the out years, you can see that we achieve that sustainable allocation number in some of these categories. So by f y thirty, we should be good on facilities. By FY thirty one, we're on fleet. Fire capital, we're in a better place already because we've done some other investments on our particularly in our apparatus area. On streets, we'll probably never get there, but we're gonna keep keep trying to move it up. There may come a time when we get to a a number there that that that's good, but we are making progress.

Ted, do you want questions now or at the end?

My intent was to kinda quickly go through this just to get us oriented, but I think that

No. Keep going. I'll just remember that I have a question on this slide. Okay.

Big takeaways on employees were that we have a retirement contribution increase mandated by the local government employee retirement system. We have our medical insurance increase of about 11%. We're changing carriers. We're communicating with our workforce. That will all take place in September.

We had a second there's probably, guess, supplemental pay study for fire because that market moved so rapidly that our fire pay proposal was out of date by the time we were implementing for everyone else, so we've got funding to move that forward. We've got some skills based pay adjustment for our inspectors. That's another area where we continually face challenges of recruiting and retaining the the baseline pay increase market pay increase for all employees is 4% of the market or the range midpoint for each employee, and then we have three new positions which we've discussed. A bit previously, I'll just highlight that one is a library experience assistant, one is a fleet technician, and one is in economic development. Are person focused on the destination attraction for events, destination.

We mentioned this already. These are where we're continuing to invest with affordable housing, climate action. Everywhere Everywhere Greenway study continues. I've talked a little bit more about how I wanna jump start that work, and we'll hit that in a minute. And then we continue to fund outside agencies as we have in the past, but with no real increases there.

We also talked about some of the ways we've tried to be efficient and innovative. Examples in my my viral video about the budget developing an in house capacity to complete additional greenway segments is something I I think we we're excited to do. We've already done some field work and kind of tweaking those alignments to so the folks who are gonna build the projects can say, hey, if we can move it a little bit over here, we have a better slope. We can move it over here. We can find a avoid having to do a stream crossing, that sort of thing.

So they're out there doing field examinations that have already started. Innovative approaches to complete community, and that certainly falls in that bucket. But the key thing for for that is to make sure that we're tracking the metrics that we've put forward. And then we're constantly trying to leverage external grants, work with our congressional delegation for congressionally directed funding. I think some of you went to a recent event maybe last night about trail funding.

We're one of the early communities to get that sort of funding, so we keep trying to work down that path any way we can to to leverage resources. When we talked about the the the overall budget on the general fund, we we sort of covered that, but on the enterprise funds, this highlights the changes there. So two of the funds are going up, Transit and parking are going down, 1% decrease on transit mostly due to the Route 420 going back to the triangle. We do have increases in our partner contributions. They're they're all aware of those.

Our parking fund, 1% decrease in overall budget. We we only balance that fund with a general fund transfer, and we're trying to move forward. So if we don't have to do that, So the more we can do to get that aligned, the more parking we can sell, the the sooner we can get that to to balance. The parking study work is beginning shortly and the selection process is underway. On the housing side, we do see a 4% increase in the overall budget.

And on the storm water side, that's the largest increase in our enterprise funds by percent due to the two BRU increase, which is mostly focused at completing permit required work. And that brings us to the library of contribution topic, which I think is a separate topic unto itself. So why don't I pause here and allow folks to discuss

and ask questions? Louie? Well,

Yeah. Excellent question. You know, there's no way we can separate them. You're right. It's they're they're intertwined.

And so if if we went down the path of some service reductions as part of the balancing effort and they're on the table, the first thing you typically do there is try to reduce your part time hours, which affects part time employees. Employees, you might you might not wanna hire this position because they're sort of last one in, maybe the first one out, full time staff. But I would want Atlas to really talk about that because it's in some scenarios, you you you might have you might have to have fewer part time staff and that might actually equate to enough money to have a full time person to to cover some of the shifts differently. So I think we have to, you know, think about that a little bit more before giving a definitive answer, but you're you're right. It could mean that we should not hire that position.

Should I follow-up?

Yep. Is there a way is there a

way for us to, like, hold off on that maybe the now that

I'm like, not immediately higher than position until we figure out how it's

Oh, yeah. We would we would we would take that posture. We would need everything to settle out.

Melissa?

I'm not sure if this is the time to talk about this, but I was a little overjoyed to see the energy efficiency payoffs. Mhmm. And I am wondering about the a modality and b practicality of of using them as if they would like it to. So we're taking those funds, reinvesting them into more energy efficiency that will then create more savings so that it could snowball. Is that possible?

Well, it it is. Many communities take that approach where under sort of guaranteed energy more saving savings contract form, you use the projected savings to finance the capital expenses on the front end. So you you can either do that through an actual legal financing instrument, but you can also do that synthetically. And similarly, I think it's a it's a a choice to decide to reinvest those savings and and we can certainly look into that and see how that lines up.

Louis?

Actually goes further or is that are you considering that or would it make a difference?

That's a that's a tough question because the the the basket of goods in each category is is is a bit different. I I think that what some folks who who are trying to leverage that concept would you might say is construction and capital now is cheaper. So if you you have a multiyear project, you can get, you know, under contract sooner, you can avoid potentially downstream inflationary drivers on on supplies, materials, labor, and that all stuff. Having said that, a number of the items that are sort of operating is, you know, sort of just in time purchasing, and so I'm I'm not sure how much we can load up on sort of annual operating costs to to try to mitigate future. I think it's there's, you know, a lot of lot of different things in those buckets.

Fire Capital this year were going to a million. Is that correct? That's right. So the FY 2027 number there is 500,000. Yeah.

So the current allocation as of fiscal year twenty six is 500,000. That's in that current allocation column, and the fiscal year twenty seven is 500,000. So the cumulative allocation will be a million.

Okay. I'm not sure if I can gather that right away captured in a way that we can actually

I have a question on this chart, and then if it's okay, I'll have to give you just a little bit since we're on it. I am pretty sure this is not gonna be super articulate, so if you'll bear with me. I guess to me, there are some of these where it makes sense to me. So by twenty thirty, we

are

kind of caught up on a lot of this stuff. Right? And then it just takes kind of some regular care and feeding and not getting behind again in order to not be trying to put fill gaps. Correct? And then sorry. I looked like you were gonna say something.

No. I I I think I think that's a that's the concept. Yeah.

Okay. And then

the two, I think, pretty understandably, like, is harder to say, I guess, right, that will be that we'll be at a sustainable level by 2030 or I mean, I think they're but I guess what I'm trying to understand is there is this piece where we have been behind, and we've done these major investments in getting our employees back to a reasonable compensation level compared to our neighbors. So where are we in that getting caught up?

So I think I've answered it this way. When you when you implement a pain classification study, the presumption is that it is telling you what the market pay ought to be. And so then the question is, are you are you fully implementing it? And I've seen places who aspire to implement it, but they couldn't afford it, so then they had to phase it in, or they put some caps in there so some employees got full implementation and some got capped because for whatever, you know, financial or policy reasons that was the approach taken. So my understanding is for the most part, we fully implemented the pay plan.

We had some people who got capped. Those tend to be folks, you know, higher wage earners at the further up the scale and with bigger percentage. So I I think I would say understanding that concept because I want you to know that we did not 100% implement everything in the pain classification, but we did do a pretty good job of implementing the plan. So what that suggests to me is that at the current level, you are caught up because because it was implemented. Okay.

Then comes the how do you sustain it? And so those question marks need to be read as annually. We need to be sure we're looking across our market Yeah. And and making the appropriate investment in the in the employee wage piece.

So we don't get behind again.

So we don't get behind again. And and that that means money to employees, but it also means the plan itself has to structurally move so that when you look at it in any given year, it it retains its value in the marketplace. It's not the 2025 pay plan that we implemented in '26 and that we didn't do anything to it, and then you you go and look at it in 2030 and it's it's outdated. You gotta you gotta move that

structure along. Okay. And so so it sounds to me like we've turned the corner on pay. Like, we're not behind anymore.

I I think we can argue that we are in in a good space. We're in the market. Yes.

And it may be that there are departments that need little or, you know, individuals who need mods, but I'm just saying, like, overall, we're not we're we're gonna still be hearing, like, oh, you're so out of whack. Yes. And you said, like, dump a bunch of money in here. Okay.

Your management team would have circle. Okay.

So then we're just looking at, well, what are Durham and Raleigh and other people doing and then, you know right. Okay. So then in terms of operations, it's just 500,000 a year forever. Like, I I guess I just don't understand how that works. Yeah.

I'm gonna I'm gonna let Amy take a stab at that one. Because

this is additive. So this is every year, we're adding $500,000 to our operations budget.

Yeah. And let me say this is really a placeholder. I mean, it's really gonna depend on what happens with the revenue picture each year. We are so desperately behind in our department operating budgets. For years and years, departments have had to absorb cost increases on a continuing basis.

And so this is a recognition that we need an annual influx to try and help catch them up and also to recognize based on what's happening that year and maybe a nod to not only is there the inflationary operational impact, but departments want to do new things to try and align with council goals and some of the things we've spelled out. And so there is a need for some new monies too. Because right now, 90% of the additional operational dollars are really just cost increases, technology, just day to

day

operations. There's nothing new in there. And so it's a nod at trying to catch up with just providing a a little bit of stability to department operating budgets and a recognition that it would be nice to have a a little bit of money in there to do some new things that align with the goals.

And so does that like, because that feels like there's a philosophy behind it or kind of an implicit policy decision or that and, again, I want I certainly want to address if there are if we are under resourcing or we need to catch up, then we should do that. But I also, I guess, feel like if people aren't aligned with council's goals, then I would wanna see, can you align within your current budget instead of just always adding? And I understand there are just going to be some times where, you know, there is a big, new shiny thing or whatever. But I guess I'm wondering how we're looking at realigning, you know, not getting rid of people, but, like, having people do slightly different things or address things differently instead of always just additive additive additives.

Yeah. That that that's a that's a, you know, fair question. I I think what we're as Amy put it, sort of plugging that in there to remind ourselves that we tend to have a one and a half percent cost of doing business, you know, force on us every year as contracts we have have inflationary riders in them, the actual going to the store and buying things that happens. So we need to be cognizant of that, but that I I wouldn't say to you, we're gonna ask you to fund $500,000 each year to consider ourselves on track with this plan. I think on the layers below that, that represents a pretty good timeline and goal.

And then, you know, with the staffing area, didn't put a number. We we we talked just a second ago about how we need to look at the market. I think that the the operations line is sort of somewhere in between. We, you know, annually we'll go to departments and ask them, you know, how how do you expect to operate next year, the programs that we're operating? And they'll respond and they'll say, look, we need a little more of this and this and this.

And if you really want us to do this other thing, we either need to stop doing this thing and shift or we need to add a person to do that thing. And those those are the more detailed conversations that we we would have with you as a body when we have choices to make. Didn't have a lot of choices to make this year because it's kind of really a whole aligned budget. We have three new positions. Those were choices, but not all not not a lot beyond that.

And then we made a choice to try to move forward on our sustainability plan. But but if we, you know, decided that there was a big new thing we wanted to do I'll say next year, when we're same time next year, you're gonna have the information about what we learned from our pilot in doing some of this trail construction. You're gonna have the e two e consultants report. And so you'll probably have some big questions about how fast, how much do you wanna invest in that work, and that would drive some question into that operations line. How much might be in the capital program?

How much might that move the public works operations budget up to do that work? Sort of depends on how we slice and dice. So I I hope that sort of gets to the fact that we're not necessarily saying it's gonna be $500,000 every year, but there is a just like anybody's sort of business, you know, an understanding that we're gonna get pressure to to meet that budget goal by at least a percent, sometimes more every year.

So I guess where is the place where we look at, you know, if we're gonna be doing a lot of trail construction, and I'm making this up. This is not interest. I promise I'm not policy suggestion. But if we said, you know, well, we're we wanna do less in kind of traditional parks because those are linear parks and that's just, you know, we wanna we wanna reallocate or we wanna shift focus. So instead of just saying, what else do you need? Where's the place where we also say, maybe we're just changing what we do or we're shifting our focus. And I'm just wondering where in the process that happens.

Yeah. I mean, I think that that does come with your strategic input check-in. So I know my hope would be for next budget year, we'll begin a little bit earlier. We will try to do some community outreach earlier. And I would like to see a a first the the first step in the budget process for council.

If we back it up perhaps till December instead of January, From that, I would like to see a budget development guidelines come out of that work that will help instruct what we do, and so you might have that kind of conversation at that point. We will see more of this and less of that. You know, we can be responsive to that. That's helpful.

I have other questions, but I'm gonna check-in with council members first. Camille and Harris I will get over there. I will, by promise. Okay.

While we're on this slide, do you help me understand the capital not not what's on the slide, but the capital needs that we have. How do we factor those in? So facilities, the police and IT emergency services are there for fifteen years. Correct? So how are we planning for when that expires or we need to renew?

And then the next the next one that I'm thinking of is the Parks and Recreation admin team. How do we plan for them, their their facilities that the admin sits in? Is we'll just update it. And we'll

just love to

I'm gonna ask my team to help me respond to your question. I would I would say on the on the police facility, we we we don't have an answer for what happens after fifteen years, but we know that we need one. So that could look some different ways. It could look like, well, we make a deal and buy the place or extend the lease. It could look like we find a different place to go and fund that project and then move, but that's not we we haven't decided that yet. So we're still at so there there there could be a placeholder in the CIP, and this is where I need staff help. It says Am I

just what CIP is?

The I'm sorry. The the capital improvement program, which is where we do our our big capital planning. So you could see, like, a project in there that says police headquarters, and then it says out years, fifteen years out, and it's got a placeholder number or a big question mark because we we haven't done enough work to know what that's gonna be because we just got into the new one. On the parks piece, again, asking my team to kinda win. That there might already be a project in there, but I but I don't think it's fully funded. So, you know, that's where we're looking for money and

I'm not necessarily asking for the details of those. What I'm asking is when do we how do we consider those? Because as we're looking at these things, there's pressure on us to address those as well. And I don't want us to be caught with how we should have been seeing for this or we should have been planning. And you may have been, but I would like to have some sense of what you're thinking.

Yeah. So we do a capital prevent project, so a CIP project evaluation every fall, and that is where we ask departments to submit their projects that they think they need based on wear and tear on buildings, things like that. So large scale capital projects that are typically over a million dollars usually have a useful life of more than, like, five years. And that is built in in parts to the budget when we talk about the debt fund tax allocation, but it's really also taken into account what our debt capacity is. And so we talked to council a lot about debts a couple years ago when we were building the twenty twenty four referendum.

And so that's really where our large scale capital projects happen. I mean, it is very difficult to pay for capital out of, like, our operating budget. There just isn't a lot of money. So we have our smaller scale, more maintenance type projects that are funded in the operating budget. Right?

And our longer term larger dollar projects are funded out of the debt funds typically by finance financing of some sort. General obligation comes our cheapest way to borrow. So that's the typical route that we go. And we currently when we built the 2024 referendum, we kind of talked about what our capacity was at that time. It was about 44,000,000, and so we've kind of taken that capacity to plan out the projects like the fire stations, the affordable housing, some of the streets projects that we have federal funding and so we're matching with our local dollars.

There was a trail and some parks projects. So that's kind of in our queue and we do that evaluation every, like, five years. We have a five year kind of debt, like, outlook. And so that kind of built that five years. So we look at it every year, but it's really in terms of talking about what capacity there is. That doesn't happen every year because, like, right now, we're kind of at our capacity, and yet we could always have a different conversation if some other priority came along that we couldn't anticipate.

Does that that help? It does. I would appreciate it. I don't wanna be burdensome to us, but I think it is beneficial for us to consider consider where where we we are are with with the the capital capital projects. Projects so that when that fifth year rolls around, we have a greater sense of what the pressures have been because it it's I feel for I know that we only have a a certain amount that we can allocate, but I feel for those projects that keep getting pushed, you know, and and they have to wait the next five year to be considered.

And so I would love for us to to think about it. I mean, could we be as creative with that as we are trying to be creative with staffing, staffing, you know, and just not wait just every five years for this body to look at it.

Yeah. We can come

to council with an update on where we are with the debt funds and with our CIP projects to talk kind of where those projects that are on horizon, where those stand, where we are with the projects that are kind of ongoing right now, and provide an update on that, and talk about what right now is unfunded based based on this last CIP evaluation that we've put together.

I think that's really I agree. I think that's really important. I don't think that my opinion is that's not burdensome. I think that's our

job. Yeah.

Okay. Pierce? Good evening.

I have a couple of questions here, and I'm looking at page number page seven in the original packet that was sent to us. And it is about our general fund, budget summary, and I'm just looking at revenues.

And I do know that

our revenue estimates were off last year. We were not certain about how the eval the eval the evaluation will come through where the sales tax, you know, those revenues would come in at. And so we would like to get an understanding of what steps we take when making those estimates, particularly for sales tax for this year. Like, how do we go about validating our revenue estimates, particularly for the sales tax? Do you maybe, like, compare estimates

year? Some information about that would be

really interesting. Sure. Amy's gonna answer this question, but I will tell you I've had to do this work myself depending on where I work, and we got sort of two things going on that the the revenue piece is driven by whatever county you're you're in because they do the assessing and they're the ones who transmit the the tax scroll over and then we gotta go on that and then sometimes they'll give estimates for collection rate. Usually, you're looking that's a rearward looking number, you know, how good have we been on collecting a 100% of revenue. The answer is we never collect a 100% or if we do, it's it's after several years of catching up for people who are on payment plans or or a property gets sold and then we get revenue back from that.

But so there's that piece, and then there's this issue of appeals. You know, when you do a reval, how much is gonna be an appeal? That, I think, was one of the big areas where the county made an estimate of what they thought that would do, and it turned out we had fewer appeals or at least fewer dollars pulled out of the base valuation because of the appeals process. There are other things going on there. We we we sometimes make our own assumptions because we just have a different spidey sense about what what's going on, and that's where Amy excels because she's been here a long time.

On the sales tax piece, completely different set of dynamics. Even when it was possible to track that better through trend analysis, it was still weird because it's a delayed revenue and it runs through the state, and then it also it gets highly skewed by our large large population counties. Mhmm. So it it it it the economy in Charlotte and Raleigh and Winston Salem and Durham can kinda throw be be different than than the rural parts, and And when those revenues come in and track, it's it's really hard to to to to track anymore. Plus online sales have now put us in a completely different environment than the way we used to be.

That's how I see it, so I don't report to be an expert on how it comes down. Amy is the one who has to make the calls, but I'm just here to tell you that on the second opinion that it is hard to do.

No. Last year was crazy. So I understand to deal with in terms of those estimates considering how often we were or whatever. And just how we kinda, like, check-in, like, where are y'all falling? What are your estimates? What are you thinking? And also just

'26

and '27 and also '25, '26 no. That's probably the '25, six. How much of those estimates how many months is that? That we're

For sale? Well, for from the majority of those revenues, this is projected, like, through the end of April. End of April. Okay. Yeah. So those are like good numbers as of end of April and then we've estimated. The the caveat with that is do there's sales taxes collected three months in arrears. So like when we're projecting, we're several months behind. So really sales tax is the hardest. I I will say we are very beholden to the county when it comes to making projections about our assessed valuation and how much we how much growth.

So, you know, we're really reliant on good data from them and especially at a reval coming off the reval, it is very hard to know what the impact is. And last year, specifically, because there were such dramatic increases in the valuation, it was even harder to estimate. So I think that was kind of a little bit of a unique situation. We don't usually see those kind of variances. I wouldn't anticipate we would see something like this again with a dollar amount that's like, you know, in the millions of dollars.

We just we have I've not seen that in my time here. Sales types, last year was a little bit unique. We were about $1,400,000 short. I have also not seen that in the post pandemic. During the pandemic, we thought we were gonna fall significantly short, and we didn't even wind up that short. We were, like, meaningfully short. So last year was really an oddity, and it's been very difficult to to track the why. I think it's a multitude of factors and a lot we talked about is the volatility in the markets. Yeah. You know, we do a lot of work behind the scenes.

Matt does a ton of work behind the scenes related to tracking trends with our collections, a lot of estimation and looking at, you know, ten plus years back trying to figure out how we can best estimate what we're gonna see based on what's happened happened in the last many years. And we also have the league and they do a pretty good estimates job looking at state trends and trying to figure out are there kind of things they can pull out and trends that they're seeing that could help inform our estimates. So we use the data that we have, but it the last year or two has been very challenging more so than we've ever seen because we used to do a pretty good job in both of those areas. It's been a lot harder to do that.

No. That was really helpful. Thank you so much. I think my other question is I know that we're looking at some storm water fee increases, and we'd love to have, like, a dollar amount on the impacts that'll have on, like, average homeowners. That would be really great.

I think they put it

is it? Yep. Yes. Yeah.

It's not Yeah. It's $8 and 70 is it $8 and $79.08 dollars and 79¢ a fee increase per ERU. Thank you. Per ERU. And we said the average household is about two ERUs. And so the current fee is 41 something. So it's gonna be just under $50 per ERU. So we're looking at somewhere from an 80 ish dollar bill a year to just under a $100. Okay.

And an ERU is a thousand square feet. Correct?

What is it? Yeah.

The equivalent residential unit. Yes.

Means nothing to me. Great. Great. Great unit. Great unit. Unit.

Oh, okay. So, basically, what you're it's trying to do is is is is equalize between apples and oranges. So some people have a house of a certain size. Some people have a house twice as big or three times as big. So you you kinda take that smaller size house as you kinda want ERU house, and then you're in a bigger house, you'll pay two ERUs. If you're in the biggest, you'll pay three. Sort of so that way everybody's paying for the the impervious surface that they have.

That's that's So it's not your actual water usage? No.

No. This is for storm So this is the impervious surface that you're

Oh, I see. So

it's not actually

the storm water that you are

Yeah. There's no way to measure that.

I see.

I mean, there's not no way, but I guess we can't John There's no practical way to measure the storm water coming off your property. So we try to make it fair across the community by you looking at it from impervious surface. So the size of your roof and your driveway kinda gets you there and then, you know, how big how big a property you have.

I think lastly, I would just like to also cosign with with council member Berry just stating about capital projects. I know we had, you know, some reports on the fringe track, and that is definitely something that's been picked from the and I apologize for

the challenges with that. So but, yeah, that's all

I got. Thank you so much.

Elizabeth? Thank you.

Go over there in a second.

Do you mind going back to

the five year budget slide? I don't just raise property taxes to meet these goals.

It did use to have that, and what we recognized was that was maybe not conveying the most accurate message in that the idea behind this is that in order to fund this year, so let's say if we look at '28 based on how it stands, we need $1,500,000 worth of revenue. It's not necessarily that it has to be property tax revenue. It could be sales tax growth. It could be any other revenue source. And so we just thought that maybe it conveyed that a decision had been made without any kind of actual decision being made.

So we've just eliminated that from the table to to really focus in on here's what we're saying it will take to reach these sustainable funding levels and not focus on these tax rate.

I think it might be helpful

about sales tax to know when, for these dollar amounts, we

would have to raise property taxes again. And operating budgets and that they've not really absorbed, you know, shortfalls, etcetera. I don't think that we have a good sense of what that looks like from the ground and whether or not there are choices that could be made about the things that we are doing that would be an alternative to just continually raising the budget over and over again. And I think one of the things that I would really like us to understand as a community better is whether or not our residents prefer that we could just keep raising their taxes over and over and over again, or if they would rather say I mean, because last year was punishing for everybody, like, truly awful. And I think people were really, like I mean, people were telling us just cut stuff.

They didn't and, you know, it's hard for them to have a good understanding of what would make a dent or what's available to cut or and particularly, you know, we are asking our departments to do too much with too little. We can't ask them to do less, but we don't have a good understanding of what they're of of of what those options are. Like, what could we get rid of and not have to raise the budget or continue to do that? I understand inflation a bit, and that's just normal, but I don't I don't feel like just raising the budget should be our only option, particularly particularly if it comes as a relief at an extreme pain point to our community because people's ability to stay here is not going up. At the same way, just.

You know, I think I was very much in support of doing much that we did last year because I felt like we really wanted to do it to be sustainable, but I also feel like at some point, we we have to cut back instead. And I would really like us to engage the residents around that process so that becomes

my choice that we want to make.

Thank you, council member. And I think that my my hope is that engaging the community a bit on the early side and then engaging the council a bit on the direction side gives us some different touch points to to to have that kind of work done. We also have our survey going out, our resident satisfaction survey, and we'll we'll get that information into the discussion. But I I agree with you, and one of the things I said to our employee forum today, you know, about the the staffing piece is I I'd I'd rather pay the employees we have appropriately than add staff and then create that additional continuous burden and and have a bigger staff competing for fewer dollars for raises and professional development. So that's the the tension that we we always have to have.

So we really need to think hard about whether we wanna expand things and whether we can track something else before before we make that decision.

Agree? And then I guess the second part of

that would be oh my goodness. My little thought may have allergies Hold your to seconds. That. Would be that I think from the resident standpoint, they don't know that our

departments are doing too much with too little. Right? Like, they're like, oh my god. I'm just getting picked up and my leads are. But they but they so to them, the idea that we have to raise the budget to keep the status quo doesn't feel so, I mean, just as another, you know, part of the communication process to be like, look, this is this is how we are getting this done, and it's really not appropriate that we're getting

this much done with what

at this level. And so, you know, these are

the trade offs that might have to be made because for them,

it's like everything is hunk dory. We just keep raising our taxes and raising our taxes. And so I think making a larger picture of our parents, everybody that we're doing too much with too little is pretty important, particularly if we want to try to raise taxes ever again.

And on that issue of weed collection and solid waste collection, that that that was a a meaningful policy and service change that was designed to have benefits to employees, but also to the budget by being more efficient. It takes fewer people to operate a mechanized route, and so folks will use the carts, put it in the carts so you can tip those carts and get get on down the road.

I'm all I'm all in on the nobody's gonna be watching. That's not that's not an issue, but we definitely hear a lot about it. And I think, again, it's just one of those sort of things like internal. From the perspective of the people who are funding all of this, it's just that, wait, everything was fine and you're gonna charge a bunch more money and take something away because they don't know the departments. They don't see, like, we can't afford to make enough copies or whatever it is that's happening.

They don't know because to them, they're getting their leaves picked up and their garbage picked up and their library's open and great. So yeah. I think and I think it would be everybody's help for us as a council to really understand, like, what that what pressure points are in the departments that and whether or not, like I mean, there's You

just do less. You should just

do less. Yeah. Yeah. Can

I just ask a quick add on to that, which is is there a way to because this is kinda, I think, been one of my other questions is, like, how are we balancing it, you know, growing the budget for versus through property taxes, but we also do have economic development things? We we do have property taxes that are like, are there ways to understand from a sustainability standpoint? Like, over time, are we able to cover what we're doing with how much we're gonna make? You know? Because there are times where we'll have a big project come of the ground like South Creek.

And we're like, that's gonna be a pretty good addition to our to our, you know, baseline amount of money we bring in each year, But, like, how then there's also, like, at some points, there are more services that are needed. And, you know, I know it's complex, but I'm just wondering how we're balancing to show we're not just always growing without having something to fill it in besides property tax? Like, how do we how is there are there ways I mean, I know it wouldn't be a 100% accurate, but are there ways to even be able to think about that in a five year budget cycle?

I mean, we we we'd be happy to have some conversations internally about what what other people are doing if we're learning from that. I know some folks have, you know, financial models. It's basically a stack spreadsheet of all their different sort of revenue sources and and they feed it with anticipated property growth, but again, that's an estimate and the timing is always challenging. Did it actually actually get get built? Did or did it did was is the actual evaluation consistent with the, you know, the building permit, which is where they might get the number to put in their model?

Doesn't Sure.

It would not be

So we can we can look at that and and and provide some feedback as to whether we think something a tool like that is something we can do. How you know, what do we take?

Amy, have you gone yet? I have not. It's okay, I'll just have her go. Thank

you. Yeah. Elizabeth, thank you for that because I think it's just important that we we keep remembering that last year was really was a big shock. And when I heard that, you know, things have gone much better for us and was happy, but then there's a little bit against, like, woah. You know, we're risking too much. What are we what's the what's really the right thing to do with this money? And did a little bit of wrestling with myself on that one. And I have to say that I appreciate the ways you have decided to spend that money. That was that was extra. I think it's going to the core services been trying to beef up and get to a sustainable level for a while.

So so I can I can be on board with this with this plan for the way you're deciding to handle that issue? So but I think that it is getting complicated to stay here, and we need to we need to figure out a way we can have those discussions and say, look. Here are all the things we wanna do. Here are things we've done for a long time that are they still important to us? Are they less important?

The unbalanced or something else kinda take the front seat and something else take the back seat. I think figuring out a way to facilitate us to have those discussions will be super helpful. I was happy to hear you talk about the engagement and I and why we're doing the plan that we're doing this year. I know I'd like to probably in Durham do some kind of the long lines of what you're talking about. They go very early in the process.

They go out to the community and bring a report back to the council to talk about what kind of what they're looking for. So I don't know if that's what you intended, but I thought that was interesting to see that they not only engage people once the managers recommended budget is that, but they actually go out earlier and say, okay. Here are some here are some things we're thinking about, what what what's under the mind? Let's see. So in terms of the goals for a complete community, you know, for me, that's the reason why I sit here is to try to make that sure we're implementing that.

And I appreciate that right now at this point, you're talking about doing some of the projects and you're talking about doing the plans that we already have. But I think one of the important things about complete community is it kind of has an entrepreneurial spirit to it. I think some of it is and it's being proactive. So it's the idea that if we can be smart about our infrastructure investment, we can really achieve some of

those important community goals that we

were trying to do. If we can reach out to people who wanna do the kind of development that we want instead of waiting for stuff to go. You know, I've seen a lot of good things from our economic development team reaching out and bringing good things in. I think that's the kind of spirit where you bring that to the whole complete community endeavor. I think that would be great.

So I maybe next year when we're looking kind of earlier and bigger picture, if we can talk more about that, that would be super helpful. And just to talk about the new positions that Louie brought up, I think it makes sense to for the library to hold until we really know what the funding issue looks like. I feel the same way about the destination coordinator, the current visitors bureau head is retiring. She's leaving I don't know if they're reorganizing it or what they're doing with that. So before we commit to an FTE, I think I'd like to just give us some time and see what the county's actually gonna do.

And then, you know, then if we decide that needs and then I talked to somebody in our tourism industry, and he was very supportive of bringing that into as a town function. It feels like we're we're different from the county, and we can do a better job of that. So I I find the concept. I just wanna make sure that because the as kind of a complicated situation settling out, we can just give them all time.

Thank you. Thank you. Do we

from a lot of people in town when they talk about the budget. There's an increase in the budget. You raised my taxes last year. You took away services, and now you're increasing the budget. And we sit here. We understand that's what's going on, but I would just like for us to get ahead of that. Because, like, if we do have to raise taxes again or the state limits how much taxes we can raise, we really gotta slash services, people are gonna be really surprised because they don't know what's going on right now. So I I just even I think it's worth doing communication about our budget, about how our departments operate even outside the budget cycle.

I just had two questions, comments, to wrap up my portion of this. I echo all my colleagues and everything you said about our real focus on helping people understand and doing our best to communicate, engage, and really get a look ahead to make sure that we're on this path. And I think we I would love in the future to see a look back to five years before FY 2022 and see how far you all and we all have done to get us to the place where we're at on these different things. I think that helps tell the story. The destination services thing, I would also like to pause on that because we go to Oakland County is going to do we have and I have questions about that relationship as much as I do with the library.

But also I think from from our seat, from my seat, it's kind of like, why are we doing destination services and what are the where does it fit in our priorities? If it's economic development, what kind of outcomes we would see from destination services and economic development? How does it partner with community arts and culture with the events staff? They now we talked about products for economic development in general. I'm curious about your strategy.

Like, what products do we have for conferences and festivals that are outside of UNC property? And then, you know, those are destination services outcomes really depend on our relationship with UNC. So if we're it seems to be like hiring a person is is an action or activity for achieving a goal that may not be completely flushed out yet, or if it is, I don't know what it is. So it seems like hiring a person would be the cart and the horse would be this whole strategy of what we're gonna get out of destination services and a whole, like, SWAT analysis on what are our strengths and weaknesses and things like that.

But I I I do

think our economic development team is great, and if it works out, hiring that person is a good part of the strategy. That's great. I would love to see the strategy first. The only thing here left for me to and to get all all echo of the game you said, and I'm I'm very on board with the budget and what you put together here. The what's missing the only thing that's missing is or not missing, but the question is, chart hole here on how do you spend extra money, one of them might be this storm water technical assistance piece to help homeowners.

And I just would like to hear, is that something that we are currently doing that we can do in existing setup, or is it one of these items that we're choosing not to fund in this particular project cycle?

Thanks for that question. I'll just mention on the Chantal side, because we weren't hit in the same way that Carvero was, they're gonna have definitely some stronger pieces of their budget because their whole fleet was wiped out. Their police, you know, the fleets was gone. They they lost their garage. We didn't have any of the we had some public housing that that you that are getting, you know, pretty dealt dealt with, but it's funded out of a different pot, so it just feels different, I think, from any of budget's talking about it.

And that's different than general sort of storm water technical assistance, but sometimes the two kinda get blended because it's related to storm water. Right? So, you know, a flood. So we have not come back to you yet as we intend to do from the workshop we had, the work session we had on Storm Guard. We will be coming back and we have already, as a as a staff team, come to the position that we need to more clearly communicate the levels of support that we can provide to our community.

And so it it it as we're conceptualizing it, it looks like sort of technical assistance which we need to then advertise so people know they can follow us and get that. And then we have sort of programs that we can maybe share in the cost, some cost sharing programs potentially, and then and then maybe some grant programs. So we're sort of looking at what are those buckets look like and how do we label them and organize them and market them so people can know how they fit in into that sort of spectrum of of offerings. And so the technical assistance might be purely personal private benefit. We can't really spend town money on there, but we can help you with some information.

Like, the best way to solve this runoff problem on your property is, you know, have your driveway sloped a different way or have those gutters from your roof piped away from your foundation or what you know, that's that technical assistance piece or a dispute between two property owners, what's the best way to solve this? Another level might be a a grant program where we match, and if you're willing to invest something, we'll invest something because it has some benefits to the to the community on quality or quantity. And we haven't, like I said, designed that, but but that might be a piece where we might have some kind of matching thing. And then there there might be some other level of program, sort of neighborhood level thing that we need to get involved with. So so we're working on that.

We're gonna come back to you when we have ideas of how we'd like to start back with you to see if that piques your interest. We also are working to get that scope of work with NC State for our program review. We'll bring that back to you so you can weigh in on it before we, you know, do that do that work. And meanwhile, we continue with our installation of monitoring equipment so we can continue to build towards that flood elevation modeling and warning system. And you'll you'll get an update on kinda all of this work when we come back to you with our storm water response.

And so is there anything in this fiscal year's budget to do any of the things you're talking about?

Yeah. Yes. I mean, the the I

know there's a increase in the fee, but that's mostly for the Jordan Lake.

But that that fund has sufficient resources to answer these questions. If if we need additional resources to fund parts of those programs, you know, then we'll we'll have conversation about that. But to my understanding, we have sufficient resources to kinda run, you know, some of that out. What we what we probably don't have is is big capital dollars for for some of the big sort of constructed type work that we might wanna do. But that's we're not we

and specifically the state?

Yeah. I think I better try to get you a written response after this because it has been a little while since we've submitted. We had, as you may recall, a we hired a a third party consultant who was an expert in filing this paperwork and tried to help us right size our requests and and get the information on that, and it's been a little while since I've heard from them. So

we go ahead.

We definitely wanna hear from the experts in emergency management that we have started to get some reimbursement monies coming in, but it is slow

in terms terms of pacing.

Then my next question is just listening to the conversation, how should we be thinking

about

understanding growth as it pertains to potentially paying for inflationary costs? How should we be thinking about that? Yeah.

I mean, again, great question. Some of that sort of modeling and kind of what is our capacity to to carry our services and how does that relate to our our property valuation? Mean, those are some sort of macro level questions that we we would, I think, potentially benefit from doing some analysis on, you know, how much developable land do we have, what's the highest and best use. I think we've been focused a lot on the housing, LUMO issues and less on those questions, but it's appropriate that we kinda maybe move into that work to to really help guide our thinking. I I'm as I come to this community and I see that we're hemmed in on on all sides in terms of our footprint, you have to ask those kind of questions.

Like, what what are what are the options? I think the council's movement into more debts choices has been the the right move with, you know, what you what you got, and it it's housing focused. And I I think we're seeing the private sector supporting that decision by bringing creative projects to us, but there are probably other questions that we we we need to ask.

And finally, I just like to say that or just signal, like, the support for the addition of the the three positions. Some of the explanation, with our fleet technician, being able to bring that expertise on in house and having that makes sense to me. I guess maybe just hearing from my colleagues just, you know, some understanding on the benefits with bringing something development, how that's

staff positions. The destination of ordinary makes sense to me because it's a revenue generating like, they're they're revenue generating position. And so, you know, since we're talking about all these different ways of, like, trying to diversify our revenue streams and etcetera, that just our benefit. And so kind of knowing how we could strategize that destination coordinator position around town benefit even though, you know, university has its facilities. But I'm just going to my oh, I'm pause for that for this.

Just to know that I think it just came out the the economic development report that the maybe the business bureau does or the university. I don't know. But we have data on, I think, some of your question, but I think you're right. And I when I asked some folks in the chancellor's chancellor's office. They said, oh, no.

Does banana peep most of the revenue? We don't make a lot. And I was and then so that it's all I I don't know what that means. And, also, I think the bigger question is, like, NIL has just shifted everything. And so now the university is maybe, like, maybe, you know, like, you know, like, it is just so crazy now that I do feel like it would be good to understand who's making a lot of money and how do we also then support but

you're spot on. So so I I I've been in a couple places where there was this interest in sports tourism, and we need to have these baseball or soccer or softball type facilities or lacrosse facilities that are gonna bring in these tournaments and all these families are gonna come and they're gonna spend all this money and that's gonna be great. And that is a true economic strategy that's valuable to some communities. Myrtle Beach is a good example. They have a lot of excellent facilities, but what do they also have?

They have a lot of hotel rooms and a lot of restaurants, and those hotel rooms and restaurants sometimes aren't as full in the off season. So their strategy was to kind of build in a bigger on season with sports tourism, and that works for them. But if you're a community that doesn't have hotels and doesn't have restaurants, then what revenue are you getting when people I'm I'm I'm just saying in, and they're they're they're paying a tournament fee, and that goes to, you know, rake the fields or cut the grass, and then they leave town. Yeah. And so did you did you really get anything?

Well, maybe maybe if they bought snacks or, hey, you know, got a tank of gas maybe, but maybe they just came in and left. So your community design and what your kind of revenue streams are is very important to what your strategy is. Yes. We do have restaurants and we do have hotels. So that's why we think this notion

of

destination coordinator has a good role to play, but as to your specific exactly kind of what would our revenue target be, how many events should we try to seek, when and all that sort of we we can try to wrap some more details around that and and engage with you on that to to see what the specific examples are. I've mentioned that I think the Friday Center an asset that's underutilized. There's a particular hotel and and nearby hotels that could benefit there that used to, and you wonder why, you know, they they didn't used to have a hotel there. Well, the Friday Center was driving a lot of out of town events. So then they created a market.

Well, then they changed their their their event schedule and left that property kinda hanging. And so I'd like to see us maybe help turn that around, but you wouldn't just benefit that one hotel. There's other restaurants in that area and other hotels down the street. So that's that's anecdotal, though. I I think what you're trying to get us to do is bring back to council a little more data, a little more specificity in what we think we can generate, and and I think that's fair.

Good evening, everyone. The time is now 07:30. The library is closing in thirty minutes at 08:00. Again, it is now 07:30, and we are closing in thirty minutes. Thank you. Okay.

I appreciate everyone going because my list kept getting longer. Thank you. Thank you, You're talking about that. And one thing that I think would be helpful is for us to understand the trade offs. If we don't fill them, what does that mean for us? And so I would love to hear more about we are under pressure with funding possibly probably changing for the library. But have we been under pressure? What does that mean for that position that I've heard has been on deck? Or I'm saying on deck because I love baseball, and also because you said that they have not had any position quite some time. So I'm assuming it's been on deck.

Helping us to understand what that trade off is when you don't fill these positions. Right? What's the additive? What is what is the cost of not?

So I think I can speak on a couple of the your library director is here in the room, and I I I don't wanna speak for her on that because I think she can speak to the relationship between the potential of cuts or downsizing if we don't get the funding, and then what benefit we get from funding the position. So I'll set that aside for Atlas to come address. But on the mechanic piece, you know, we just see the volume of work has steadily increased. The number of vehicles has increased the age of the fleet while we're starting to turn that to a better place. As you can imagine, the older vehicles take for maintenance.

And so what happens is we end up with turn around time issues where it's a challenge to get the vehicles in and out, and so they're on the deadline for days or weeks, and we have had some instances of public safety vehicles not being you know, being deadline for several days or even a couple of weeks while we wait for parts or can't get them done, timing. Deadlined. What's that? Meaning they're not able to be riddled. Okay. So adding another staff person will hopefully help with turnaround and and on the repairs what time they make this.

Got a question about that one that you made me think of is as our staff is going through development, because they have to keep up with the new the new ways of doing this, would that new position also enable more opportunities for coverage, you know, more opportunities for others? Oh, I

think that's right. Look, if you've gotta send people to training, that's always a challenge with departments that are kind of, you know, on the edge of of having enough staff for for day to day, and then you send somebody away to to to get their certification or train trained on electric vehicle maintenance or new safety systems, then then they're not there. So you're Right. It it is a challenge. So having a little bit of capacity there is helpful.

So that's speaking to the fleet position on the well, I mean, it's we talked a fair amount about the destination coordinator all already, but I I will say that if we don't don't hire that position, conceptually, the the idea is we we're just not gonna get into trying to recruit, you know, conferences and events in the same way. We we really don't have the capacity to be focused on on that. We're we're we're trying to develop products, meaning, you know, buildings and and placing businesses into existing buildings in town, looking for that capital investment and also companies that can help create jobs. That's a different piece of work than trying to get conferences to come and and and and locate in Chapel Hill in either the smallest ones in the hotels or more moderate sized ones in a facility like the Friday Center or some other potential venue. So what

I'm getting at with this question is we need this type of information so that we can consider what the trade offs are. You're offering us no tax increase at this point, but we are thinking, is that the best use of our resources or our limited resources? And helping us to understand if we were to add these three, this is what you get. If we don't add these three, this is what we run the risk of not having. So that's why I'm asking those questions.

I am curious about that last one. I know we've talked about it a lot, but I'm curious. How can we encourage people to spend time and dollars in Chapel Hill? Those one day events, I know we didn't we didn't do them, but those one day events, I have heard from restaurants downtown who say they buy the house because people come in and they park on they park in the where we want them to, right, at the Friday Center, at the Rosemary Deck, and Southern Village. Then they get on the buses, is which what we want them to do, and they're taken to the venue, and then they're hand delivered, bus delivered, to the vendors inside of that facility on the UNC's campus, spend money there, then they come back, get on the buses, and go back to those French centers.

So I didn't see I will say, in all fairness, we the the person I was with, we walked that tunnel and went to Frick's, which is across the street, across 54. And there were some, not a lot, you know, and I don't know how the other restaurant did over there. But regardless if we take that position on, I would like for us to for the town to think about how do we either make it happen or how do we partner so that when those events are happening, we are thinking about our our businesses here. How can we make them thrive and not suffer?

Great great points, and and I think that's exactly the type of thinking that we would expect our staff person to be engaged with. The the the bananas event was was maybe our first in a while foray into kinda can we influence that? And so I think our team did a pretty good job of engaging with business owners in in the community and and trying to say what, you know, what thing can you do that might attract that fan base, and then we'll put it together in some sort of communication vehicle, which we we had a brochure and an electronic kind of version, and then we mailed it, sent it, I guess, to the the group called the k club, which is sort of the so, like, can we do more targeted connections like that so people will think, oh, you know, I can I can I should stay for little while? Let the traffic die down and come Mhmm. You know, eat lunch or let the traffic die down and stay for dinner or whatever it is.

It's kinda fine tuning all that. K.

Growth and services, we've talked about that, you know, how those two go hand in hand. I would be curious, so this isn't an answer. I this is not a question for you to give me an answer tonight, but I would be curious about how we're approaching that with Carolina North. And I'd like to hear more of as they reveal what they're planning to do there, and that's going to be regardless of what it is, there's going to be more density. And the services that we provide, how will that be provided and how will that be we provide and how will they because they don't have to to pay us for services. Right? So I'm I'm just curious about how we approach that.

Do you sometimes give us a payment or that is previous something that I've done. Right?

Is that But that was under the previous

Well, I'm just saying it's been done or asked for in the past, but, no, they or they're not required.

Right. So that's a that's a thought that I I've had, thanks to the conversations that I've I've heard tonight is that is gonna be a density area, and how do we how do we consider that? Then so that's that's something I wanna think about. And then temporary housing, and I know you talked about this, so please indulge me here. Where is the funding coming for those who have been displaced by Chantal, those residents, those public housing residents?

It's coming from the public housing fund right now, and we are we we have received some reimbursement from our insurance carrier related to the the building itself, and we are hopefully gonna get some level of reimbursement from FEMA through the state. But there is a big question about how much of the actual tenants displacement they will actually pay for. So, ultimately, the difference of whatever monies we get between insurance and FEMA will be paid for by housing. Thank you.

I have that question asked of me, and I could not answer it. So I appreciate that. And the last thing is communications and engagement. I hear this repeatedly from us, and I want to add on to that. Helping us to understand I is huge because then we can explain our rationale for supporting or for challenging the the this recommended budget.

Right? And so let's take the example of last year's cut increase in the tax rate, which I voted for because I firmly believe that we needed to pay staff and that there were some things that were out of date we needed to replace, we needed to update. What I didn't have to spray a handle on was and I didn't realize it, was the leaf collection. You have shared some more things tonight that I didn't hear before. The savings, it wasn't said in a way that I couldn't repeat it.

The savings that we have with the three the three trucks, I had heard that at a previous meeting, but three vehicles that were much beyond their retirement date. The the benefit to the staff who don't have to lift it, and and that cost so being able for for us to articulate these factors would be so helpful rather than just the video that is producing leave the leaves, and this is what you can do. Right? Because that's, Louie, I think you said this on a previous meeting, that's an option, right, for people to leave the leaves. For some people have and we've heard from some, they may have allergies to the leaves and and what grows if they're allowed to stay.

But helping people to understand the rationale that went into making those decisions and first starting with us, helping us to understand is really important. And the engagement, if we can get in front of this is what we're this is what we want to do, and we wanna tell the public this is what this is what we propose to do. So my point here is communicate clearly. Please don't use jargon. Please don't use acronyms. People don't get them. I've been on council this is my fifth year. There are many things I'm I'm sure I've heard repeatedly, and I don't get it. Please use where's the name

for marriage? Plain language.

And there's a reason why it's it's that. Please use plain language. It's gatekeeping otherwise. And please help us to engage with the public. We that's what we're able to to engage with the public, but we need the staff to engage with the public too.

Thank you. Thank you. Melissa? But we didn't get the designation. So, like, we're not even eligible.

Oh. We we and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but governor Cooper governor Stein, sorry, did give us the state designation, which is why we've been we've been getting some funding from the state, but Got it. The federal did not give us the disaster declaration or whatever it's called. And so we don't you're not even eligible to then apply into that grant program, which you don't necessarily get. So there's no way. It's not now. Okay. Well, the other the other

thing I was wondering interested in it. As you do that evaluation and report back to us, I'm interested in the kind of value we get from the outside money coming into the local economy and bouncing around a few times. We're gonna get sales tax every time he changes hands. And the the businesses and here is something that that I I wonder about. And I don't know how we I don't know whether it's too intangible for us to talk about in terms of value add, but the value of helping people

bananas. So

don't need an answer now, but as you report back some those are some of my thoughts.

Thank you. I think we got the economic development

analysis. Right? I think we learned David's got the report. I think $17,000,000 was the sort of net community benefit, but how is that slice and dice? We can get you more details.

I I do have I think I would just echo well, I'd echo a lot of things, but Amy's point about complete community and trying to be entrepreneurial and thinking about what it I guess to me, I'm not maybe maybe you can just maybe I'll ask this a question. When you have complete community implementation up there as one of our as our primary goal, What what is behind that or what does that mean or what are the thing what are the activities or what's in this budget that does that? I mean, the greenways, I think, is super exciting. I'm I'm thrilled about that. I guess if that wasn't the only thing that it seemed like it was talking about, and the rest of it I'm not sure I'm understanding.

I mean, that's fair. I I think that the concept is is a broad concept, but I think it informs our work in several different ways. So the green waste is a piece of it, and I think that leads for pretty pretty hard the connectivity. But it also speaks to the notion of the regulatory environment and the blue moon process. That's also underway.

We're continuing that, and I I don't need to add new funding to that. We just need to keep going to get that done. But then it also speaks into the mix of development, where things are, how those developments meet multiple community needs, like public spaces, you know, parking for alternative modes of transportation like bicycles, walkability in connection to adjacent parcels, you know, kind of the the way the street is activated. And so those kinds of things are in David's team's mind as we look at how do we redevelop the property we own, how do we encourage our private sector folks to meet those needs through their projects. So that's ongoing.

Again, not always something we have to budget for as much as a mindset that's in our economic development team, and then sometimes we come to you for money that might be needed for incentives or to hire a consultant to help us. There's a project out there that we're getting close to on on wanting to do that. And then having that same mindset in our housing program, which again is funded a little differently, you know, through through our our housing fund and our federal sources and our bond sources, you know, we could point those in several different directions, but the mindset is to do it in a way that speaks to the complete community's goal, which is why we're proposing some of the projects that we have, like the fire station repurposing. That feels like it fits into that complete community's concept because it's, you know, on a transit corridor, you know, as opposed to going to some Greenfield place and saying, well, look, that's the plan we have. We're gonna put a house there.

So it it's as much a mindset and that how do all the departments work together on this as it is any discrete piece of the function. Mhmm. And so to that end, we wanna give you some metrics that help us think about RV meeting that vision by measuring some pieces of that. And that's, again, why we sort of put that on the table and would invite any additional thoughts about how we might measure that.

And I well, I guess a couple When I think about, like, for our Greenway network, it's meant to be a housing it's also meant to have denser housing along greenways, right, where we can. And so I guess to me feels like a concrete theme, like a planning exercise that needs to be done that I think we asked this, like, a while ago in the Lumo market. Maybe it's not, you know I'm never gonna be completely right about what's Lumo what's not. But I guess the point is, like, there's that. There's also they work in commercial and understanding where the kind of best opportunities are so that David can, like, work his magic and go and find, you know, the people who who do, you know, the things that we want, which obviously is going really well, which, you know so I'm just wondering how we are kind of creating more of a strategic framework around knowing what we're targeting and being proactive as opposed to waiting for people to come to us and then trying to negotiate them into doing something they may not do or missing out on opportunities like the neighborhood commercial.

To me, it feels like if we're not really intentional about it, it doesn't it happens in a long time because, you know, developers will just wait until it's so dense that it's like, you know, oh, yeah. We could support a little bit, and so I don't want it to be not viable, but I also wanna know where we're trying to do it. So, like, there's these things that I just feel like would actually help us be more targeted, but I'm wondering, like, how where did those things happen or how do we do those things?

Well, I can just speak to two things. One is when the future land use I mean, sorry, when the land use is done, the next sort of major exercise for planning would be to take a look at our future land land use map again and kinda think about how do we need to adjust it to match up to the LUMO. And we've talked a little bit about doing some proactive rezoning. We haven't gone down that path too much, but that's a potential way to be proactive as you that that that's a huge incentive for folks to have wide right ability to come in. And if you're comfortable that the Lumo guides them to a good outcome by policy and standards, then you might be more willing to do that kind of proactive rezoning and not have to take people through the longer and more exacting additional zoning process.

So but I think that that has to come after

Mhmm. The Lumo. The standard

charge one. That's a that's a piece. And then another piece that we are doing is there's a an effort to partner with the US CDA on this is something that did come time Chantel eligibility is to do a targeted economic development plan to be more proactive in the corridor from Franklin Street We saw that. To South Dessie. So that that'll that that hopefully focuses on your sort of Midtown area where there's some interest in being more proactive and having a a real kind of action plan to to you know, that's proactive in that corridor and might inform some rezoning type work for council to incent and work in there.

And what about neighborhood commercial around the rest of town? I mean, I know it can't be supported anywhere. Right? And maybe, David, maybe you can just, like, look at a map and be like, yeah, it's possible. Like, here's the five places I would say it's, like, reasonable or I don't know, you know, the I don't pretend to be in your brain. But I'm just wondering, like, how do we get at that?

You know, I think that's more of the the future land use map exercise where some of those types of questions can be researched and put forward for the policy discussion. Okay.

And then in terms of this this document, are you asking for feedback on that this evening, or is this for a future work session?

You know, if you have some, we will certainly take it. We didn't since we just saw it, we weren't necessarily thinking it was would respond tonight, but we we wanted you to know that it's not just lip service. We actually have something on the table for feedback and that we intend to use this kind of framework as a way to, you know, put forward your thinking and provide feedback?

Well, I

guess my big picture feedback is, first of all, I'm really excited that we're, like, that we're getting somewhere on this. And I think some of the things that we're talking about as metrics or descriptions of things just don't feel like metrics to me or they feel like things like like spending money to me is like

As an as an official member of the bureaucracy, that's my number one metric I love.

I bet. I bet. I bet. Get a harder time selling that to people. I

I mean, so the the the measurement type, you know, effectiveness, efficiency, that that those, I think, we we wanna weave those in as a preference to just levels of spending or, you know

Or some of them are like

Activity counts. Right. Or like yeah.

So I get that. Those are things we'll try to work in, and often you want them multifaceted and measure. You know, like, can you can you measure effectiveness and efficiency plus your level of effort and then track that over time, and then you say, well, does our level of effort going up or down have anything to do with efficiency or Of course. But this is our first attempt at solving those things or just did we do things because producing work plans, for example, doesn't speak to measuring efficiency or effectiveness, but it does speak to intent. And it says, hey, we want you to develop a work plan that does this thing and frames it in this way.

So, you know, it has some value. It's just it's not the same measure as

No. And some of them you can't do, you know, progress towards 900 units. Like, to me, that's a really clear metric where it's like, we have a goal and it's been formed by other things, but that to me is easy to understand. Yeah. That would be easy to do a data visualization of, like, our goal is 900. We're at 700. Like but some of them are, like, you know, semi annual updates to project schedule to me is like an activity, but it doesn't tell me whether we're achieving a goal or not that we care about. Yeah. So I'm glad it's happening, but to me, that's not

a factor in my case.

So some of that might be more appropriately labeled as information sharing with counsel or alignment activities as opposed to performance metrics.

Right. And and, hopefully, the metrics come out of those activities because we don't want the metrics to be unreasonable. But that would be my big picture feedback and then I'll look at it.

That was the question. Yeah.

Oh, no. This is

because I Well, I was saying big picture and then we'll be kidding.

We will take comments until 8PM tonight.

It's I think the libraries are.

Then do we need

to do the four questions?

Well, I

think let's just make sure. Yeah.

Library. Yes. I should. Do

you wanna do the the the questions first or the library first?

It's up to y'all.

Well, I mean, will the library help us answer these questions?

Well, I'm do the questions first. I think I think you're right.

Yeah. Okay. It's a

it's a it's a big big job. And I know there were some questions about this position that we didn't didn't get into The in Annapolis is here. Great. I don't know whether I wanna put her sitting right here, but I have the mic here. Just pass it back. Yeah. There's a perfect chance for me to step to the restroom while

lives. Programs are blockbusters. I And And And so in order gonna to make do what she's doing, we have to borrow staff from other divisions to assist her, which creates short staffing on her front end end staff. Staff. And so, really, that's that's what we were looking for for this position is someone who could permanently help her to get not only the work that she's doing and and to meet that increased demand, but also to complete

Can you tell us the name of the department once again that Melanie is

It's community history. It's a division within the library department. She she has done, like I said, an incredible job on her own for many years, and for many years, it's something we've been wanting to

provide for her.

And I just wanna

funding facts. So the total budget for the library department is 4,297,000 and $174,000. I would like to point out that this that this is a different number than Orange County is putting out there. They are putting out a budget that's almost 5,000,000, and that includes community arching culture, which is technically part of our department, but is is they're they're different budgets that we can keep separate. And then I'm so sorry.

I let's I missed that. Sometimes you get soft.

Yeah. I've got that one. Yeah.

Let's go new age.

They are not part of this. Orange County funding, currently, they've been providing us just over 620 k, which is 14.4 or 5% of that total budget. Again, I would like to point out that they do not cover any of our full time personnel costs or any of the associated benefits or anything like that. And so when you get down to it, our true operating budget number is in the 800 k range. It's $864,641.

Sorry. Can I Yeah?

Just I where's the difference there between the hour, like, the true hour? Yeah. Can you just tell us where that gap is?

Yeah. So our personnel budget, and $33.

Okay. So you're

just the main thing exactly. The remainder is our operating cost, and that includes things like our collections, our programs, supplies, true operating costs. Okay. Okay.

And Orange County only contributes to operating. Correct. That's the agreement. Is that what you're saying? Correct. Okay. Got it. So that's where

that 72% budget number that you've seen coming around, that's where that comes from. Chapel Hill does provide services to 64,000 Orange County residents who live in the town limits. That's about 40% of Orange County total residents. We are in the most densely populated municipality. Out active cardholders, we we separated them out, and we have 14,813 who have active library cards with the town of Chapel Hill Library, meaning they've used them within the last three years, and they don't live within the town limits.

So those are the ones who if if Orange County were to decide to eliminate or reduce our funding, unfortunately, we would probably need to charge them for access. It's not as a librarian, that hurts my heart to say. That's not something we want to do, but that would probably be one of our first lines of defense and and kind of making up those operational points that we lost. Do you want me to transfer Joe and just

move the link or are you working? You're doing great.

Just one more? Okay. Yep. Okay. So we do have a number of options that we've kinda worked out for making up the funding gap. Of course, the first one I just mentioned is charging library card fees to out of town county residents. So anybody who does not live in within the the town's jurisdiction would pay that out of area fee. It's currently $65 a year. That's what we're charging on residents. So the potential is there if they all were to pay to make up that gap.

And I left those notes right there, okay? I'm sorry. Thank you. So the potential fee. They're they're either going to be upset that they're having to to pay for something that they previously didn't have to pay for, or more importantly to me, they just aren't able.

They can't afford access to that, which is truly unfortunate given that that we are the premier library in the county. We are we are a statistical leader, not not just in the county, but in the state of North Carolina. We really they use You're good?

I'm good. Okay. Alright. Okay. Okay.

So the next thing that we might look at I should say that we we're guesstimating maybe a third would pay, and that would get us to about half of that funding gap. And then we would have to figure out what to do with that extra 300,000. Ideally, you know, we would hope that the town would make us whole. I don't know where that money would come from, but it would buy us time just to gather information on how many people would be willing and able to pay the fee before we start doing more drastic things that would hurt more people. So if we do continue on down, room for for thinking this through a little bit.

This is just initial task. We might be able to offer free to nonprofits to town, but to, like, pay organizations that that we they would would need need to to change. Check. But that's something we would need to think through, and it, again, would come down to how much more revenue gap do we have. And then we do charge for printing just a nominal fee so that people aren't printing out forest worth of things.

We would have to increase those speeds as well. And those those amounts don't get us a huge amount of money, but it it reduces the gap to some, and we'd be looking at, like, $260.68 8 k k in in gap. Gap. The The next thing we could do, again, gets more painful, is start cutting collection budgets. And this this is a particularly difficult one because people often cite Chapel Hill.

The reason that they come here is because of our collections and how much we have. But we talked about maybe doing a percentage of both the adults and the used at this point, we're getting we're getting past just the most vulnerable populations being affected with service fees increase, and now we're getting to something that impacts everyone because they'll have less books and higher wait times for holds.

Yeah. I was briefly on the library committee before they had to spend it, and I was stunned to hear how low our collections budget was. And I remember it's somewhere in the $200,000

a year. Yes. It is it is not. We we get a a pretty good bank for our buck, and

we work through our

vendors to to get deals, but we also rely on our friends in the library to contribute

some funds It's to the a very, very tiny one.

We someone, my saw, wrote discretion on our temporary salaries, which we call our part time program support. And if we were to lay off part time program support, either by a percentage or completely, we we might closure and hours most likely on Sunday, possibly on Monday, because our part time program support are the ones who really help us cover hours on weekends and evenings. And once once we start cutting staff, you have to cut hours, and then we have reduced capacity for programming, and you really start to lose what makes Chapel Hill special and what makes people proud of Chapel Hill. So

those are kind of our

funding options that we've come down to, and I I kind of walked you through. Like like I said, they get progressively dismal. The other option, and I know there's not an appetite to raise taxes, but to cover that half funding that the the commissioner you're talking about may be providing in '27, it would take a point 2 percent point 2¢ raise to cover that, which means

what I was trying to understand in

my email response, which is

just like each one of these, we still have

a gap, which means either we, like, 5,000,000 couch cushions or we reduce services. I think part of part of what I would came here. Yeah. Yeah. Upside down.

Part of what I wanna understand is what

the production and services would look like at each of these levels because since we still have that gap, like, do we close, like, three days a week or something if all we do is charge a library card fee down county residents? Or do you all have some creative ideas that you're seeing

about how other ways that we think

of that funding gap? What are they? Because to me, it just seems like major reduction of services, slider reduction, slider slider slider, still to reduction of services or raise taxes. So I feel like we don't quite have the full picture of what each of these scenarios looks like in terms of library operations unless you all have some clever ideas about how many of the heck you have to work with art on this slide.

I will say I don't have any more creative ideas than these these options were have creative options, let me know. I'm happy to hear them. But I Okay.

I just and I and and

I'm saying you. I didn't

necessarily mean you and the library Yeah. Staff, and then we're just, like, the action that we're getting into. But and these may completely be completely inappropriate for things that would it be possible to appropriate fund balance one year to cover the gap and then see if the talent's appetite to raise taxes to support the library operations. Could we reappropriate some of the revenue surplus that we just voted to appropriate to other projects to the library for one year and then buy the same? I mean, like,

So I think Atlas has done a great job showing kind of the leavers we can move and sure. We can, like, go to the five year plan where we showed where we wanna do less fund balance appropriation, and we could just undo that. But that's that's sort of letting the county off the hook.

Well, yeah. Well, that's my other question. It's like is like, how do we

not let them off the hook?

Like, what how do I mean,

I think we need to put them on the hook and I mean, this is it's a bad decision. It makes no sense. It harms customers and, you know, they've kinda put us in a spot. I think we we look at these as dynamic choices, and I don't think we would commit to exactly what mix of this happens as we watch what happens with the with the out of town fee piece, and we see how that goes, and then we'll start to think about, well, we can do some of these other little fees, the room fees, and see where we are, and then we we if we don't have the ability to flex in other ways, that's when we start going into having to do schedule adjustments. But that you know, before everything before that allows us to stay open and deliver mostly the same service set before we get to property tax.

So I think that's you know, these are the areas we work on. We see how we we go. If we if we have to start changing service, we can come back to council and say, you know, is that where you wanna go? Or or we can No. Of course not.

Of course not. But that that we might have the ability to try to postpone until the next budget year, you know, but we're gonna have to make some real choices along the way. Otherwise, the county just sort of gets away with cutting us in a in a in a really dumb way, and and and then we just say, oh, we're just gonna eat it, and our people are gonna pay for two library systems. Yeah. One good one and one that's marginal.

Louie, Melissa, you mean?

I have two things. Ted, you suggested the new hire may help with the laying off part time staff hours or something. There are some creative things that can happen there.

Well, anytime you have a full time person, you you you they have a, you know, forty hours plus kind of window of service they can provide, I'll I'll defer to to Atlas's. You know, does that make up for, you know, two part time or three part time, you know, but but she's gotta make decisions about how how to how to deal deliver that and and it might be more comfortable to defer hiring somebody before you go and and and lay off other people. I mean, that doesn't feel great.

I hiring the full time position would be helpful in that we can the the staff assistance we've been providing to Molly from other divisions could be really stacked to their divisions. But when I talk about reductions to part time staff, we're not talking about one or two or three or four part time people. We're talking 20. We're talking during the summer when we are the busiest, and we need more temp employees up to 26 if we were to if we were to eliminate all of them. It's it's a significant number, and that's where that

I guess that goes to my second point. This seems like an opportunity for us to really engage the public. Like, right now, it feels like we're sitting in this room talking about this, and there's all types of misinformation filling that gap. It seems like there's time. Right? And I imagine we can get the engagement. It seems like there's time to do that now, these next

relentlessly on There's a lot of engagement.

So lucky to have library our friends and our current president, Karen Curtain. They launched an advocacy campaign, and you can view the Orange County commissioners in Boxlight, and they have been flooded since their their information went live on their website. And there were quite a few number of individuals at their budget public hearing last night speaking in support support of of the the library. So the the community is is aware and engaged.

I I mean, just a step further, we may have to make some trade offs if the county sticks with that budget. So I'm thinking about engaging the community not just to tell the county we don't want this, but the county may still go through with it. Yeah. And we may still have to go through some of these trade offs, and that's when I'm talking about engagement and maybe around these trade offs. Because, like, we're assuming the county's gonna step back, but they don't.

I'm not assuming they're gonna step back.

So they're not gonna step back. We need to start thinking about these trade offs, and I would like to try to engage the broader community around these actual trade offs. And I think you should probably go past Friends of the Library. Like, those are the most engaged people. Mhmm. And there's other people that need to be engaged in this process.

Well, I think just to know and I don't disagree, but they've activated more than just the Friends of Library. Like, it's been out on neighborhood listservs and, you know, it's it's out in the limited media coverage that ever exists. It's, you know, it's out there, but I agree. I think it's important

for us too. Three off conversation. I think we maybe pass the advocacy with county conversation.

We've

got Melissa, Amy, Elizabeth, and West.

I was just wondering when are we going to know the county's final decision because if they have to meet at at June 30, and we're meeting at June 30, this makes it very difficult for us to plan unless they case soon.

In the meeting last night that I watched, they said their goal was to have it finalized by, I believe, June 16.

Thank you. Amy?

Yeah. So as as painful as this will all be, I think it's really important for us to consider not adding that extra staff position and using that money if we need to, still getting it to the library, but using it to really help so you don't have to cut the core services in that. And if, you know, later on they come back to their senses, we can convert it to an FTE. But I just think, you know, if we're looking at cutting hours, we're looking at cutting all these things, I'd really like that money to go to help

because we're always busy, but there is there is an argument for Monday, which is why if we had to close two days, we would

look at maybe Sunday and

a Monday. Okay. Still keep our Saturday hours and our our other evening hours.

The for the moment, at least. It's much so local.

We we don't have like I said, the the town takes care of our full time employees and their benefits. So when it comes to within our budget lines, what we have the discretion to really do is put the temporary salaries. And and Amy or Ted did correct me if I if I misunderstanding on that.

But that comes out of me, like, that would be out of the same so the part time employees are are not out of the personnel part of the budget. They're out of the operating expense. Do you wanna crack at that?

I mean, I'm I can't speak to the agreement with Orange County. I mean, it is all one large budget in the grand scheme of things and it gets really difficult to say what is directly associated. I mean, I think the discretion when it comes to program support is that they don't have set hours. They're not benefited. So it's a whole different thing when we look at our full time employees and the the commitment we've made to that employee versus a permanent support employee who, you know, wants the ones I know the library has some been very dedicated to the town and

have worked with us

for years. So we don't want to act like they're not important, but it's a little bit easier to address those employees and monitor the number of hours we work with those employees. The only other thing I would say to to touch back to your first point is related to creative solutions in terms of fund balance and all that. I mean, my recommendation would be obviously all of this, it would have been wonderful to know this as we were developing the budgets and different decisions could have been made as we were crafting the entirety of the budget. Okay.

We're not there at this point, so we can't do anything about that. But I would say that the the easy easiest thing to do would be to keep the funding allocation as it stands in the budget and know that we are going to offset that loss by some amount of out of county fee if if council agrees to to move forward with that fee, and it would give us time to know how much revenue will actually be made up by the fee. And then we could pivot. We could hold we could keep the library associate in the budget, not fill it. So the monies would be savings, but we would keep it in the budget and it would give us the time to know what the actual gap is.

Because again, what we're facing in this current year's budget is half of the total because the county is doing this over two years. And so it's about $320,000. So it gives us a little bit of time to figure things out. And then we would have to plan for the other half as we think about next year's budgets.

Wes and then Camille? Okay.

A question, comment, then potentially request. Question is, did these options, they pertain to our current budget that we're talking about or is this something so if the candidate's decision, we'll have to figure something out by June 30?

Yes. Yes. Mhmm. Okay.

I would like to see this on a work session later. I really want to stand beside all of the people out there advocating and not even talk about what we're gonna do to cover up the fact that the county's not funding this library. You said it's the gonna it will it's what makes Chalker Hill special. It's what makes us proud. It's what makes the county special. What makes the county proud? We need to be talking that way and the fact that I don't know why they're not clamoring to make this library part of their county system. I don't know why. This library should be a star for anybody's county system in the state or in the country. I mean, the library more than books.

It's a place where people come and be safe. The program here are top notch. We're we're helping people find a place and get resources during the day. It's really really tough for me to see how this library can be seen as just a resource for people in Chapel Hill. I don't wanna talk about the Draper, but I do wanna say that it's a complex.

It's a municipal services center, but which a library is a very small part. We are a library. Comparing a library to municipal services center is not fair, accurate, or helpful. So my request to us is to say we're not gonna talk about all this stuff. We're gonna continue to advocate with the county to make sure that this place gets funded fully and we'll come back to this in later May or early June because I don't wanna let them know that they're off the bridge all.

And I don't wanna talk about any of this because it signals that we're considering it. I'm I'm I'm worked up, but I'm here in this building and I really care about this, and I think we should stand strong until the county makes their decision, and let's hope that they make the right decision. Continue funding this library. We talk about these ideas once the advocacy has been tossed in. Thank you. Fund

fund the the level of funding that they provide us is the least expensive way that they can provide first class library services to their community. But they've decided potentially to blow that up, go a different direction, and take all that money and go to pay debt service on a municipal services building or whatever. It's not really whole platter.

And can I just share I

think the what we've worked up with Atlas here, this is that staff side not advocating really that sort of technical information? I think that we can get

you all some more

advocacy messages should you let because there are some other ways to spin this, but I think as we worked on this, this was very much staff can't be seen as advocating. So we activated the friends, but I think we could get you some of some of those other messages.

And frankly, was you. Hopeful that we might get some feedback from last night's

Yeah.

County budget meeting that showed that that was maybe something that the commissioners would be thinking about and might not make it through to the final minute. It doesn't seem like that they are oriented. Can can I add one more thing real quick? One of

the things I hear is this historical arrangement, this historical picture. Look, we didn't know we have a federal government the way we have it now, let alone twice. We didn't know we had a state government we have now. I'm not particularly compelled by this idea of we're working through arrangements in the past that the world is different now, the world of the future is uncertain. So that argument to me is also a little bit shortsighted. So I think that's one of the things I keep hearing and it's one of those where I say, let's look at the world now, look at the world in the future, and and and look at look at what's best for Orange County and this library is the best for Orange County.

Can Can I add one thing? Just amend something that was noted about when a decision needs to be made. So yes, a decision needs to be made by June 30, but I would just caution as we don't know when this county issue might be resolved and that might not be until June 13, whatever date they adopted the June 13. Thank you. I would just say we could proceed with our budget as is and know that there are internal things we could do to make up all of these adjustments except for the last one, which is the property tax increase.

So that's the only thing we couldn't amend after the fact, but we could make any of these adjustments. We could look at a fee. We could we could talk about any of these things after the budget is adopted, hold the position, all of these things, and still move forward with the budget as is. And I just caution just based on the timeline that we're looking at that

we just wanna make sure we don't have

that to the Yeah. Just wanna jump right on there and say, we are not in any way advocating that we wait for adopting the whole budget till the county decides what to do on the library. These are our contingencies, and we ought to proceed I agree. To adopt the budget on the schedule that we've set. But what what we do wanna know is, is the council comfortable should the county choose to do what they're proposing in us going ahead right away and say, fine.

In July 1, we'll implement non town resident fees, and we'll probably have to tweak some of these other fees. We'll see what that yields and then we'll start to look at how can we, you know, delay certain things like hiring a position and then possibly have to look at service adjustments down the road after we see what the other choices we've made do and whether we see if there's any backtracking.

Camille? Thank you. Let me understand something. So the staff cannot advocate to the county. You couldn't go to Ted and talk about the impact or what would happen?

I mean, if the if the town council directs me to go speak to the county, I'll I'll do it.

I'm following up on something that Susan said. Right? You just said that the staff can't advocate, and so I wanna understand that.

I think your mind my meaning there is is that generally speaking, the staff's role isn't to go out and advocate for

the issue, it's to explain the issue.

But counsel once counsel has given direction Correct. That there is a council Okay. You know, like, direction, then the staff can can message on behalf of the council.

Excellent. Okay. So here's some messaging that I I want to say, and I'm really appreciative of everyone here at this table because I know we all care about this library and not just the the physical building, the structure. The fifth library is a third place, and everybody knows how I feel about third places. You can come across anybody here. And let's talk about coming across anybody here. This place is a place of respite. When people cannot find shelter during the day, they come here. Atlas, you and your team came before us the last budget cycle and said, don't forget about your other frontline people. We are frontline.

And this library is an equalizer. How many of us come and use and I'm not talking about just in this room. Use these services to help us and our children learn full stop. And to use the word robust for a space that I go into weekly because I'm a radio show in the com in the complex, that the portion that holds books is so sparse. And so to use the word robust just is mind boggling.

And how our colleagues can consider cutting this resource to the county and to this community at large off is completely mind boggling. So I would like for us to empower our staff, especially our manager, to advocate of what yeah. We can talk about this, but we can also talk about the cost that they

are going

to levying by implementing what the manager the county manager has proposed.

Harris? Yeah. I wanna continue the passion, Wes, that you have shown. Camille, thank you for the comments that you made and I wanna really speak to the people who run this library. Librarians are like, I see your cake, girl. But, no, seriously, they when we talk about what the county provides in terms of social services,

we know what you all

do every single day for our community. And in terms of their spaces, our libraries really are places and spaces for people from the cradle to the grave. All of our community comes through this, through these doors. Many people come for programming. I I can't tell you in any given week I can be in the library, talk about robust programming that our community members bring, the the level of the education that I've gotten.

I recall when my son was born, like, story time, and I really mean that, you know, from birth know, to, you know, our elders in this space. And when I look at this and when we look at this, poor working class people are gonna be impacted first and foremost, period. And so I'm really disappointed looking at what Chapel Hill is bringing, not only to residents who live within our city proper, but to all of the county and all of the state of North Carolina. And so, yes, we should fight like hell and

not let

them off the hook. And I hope that our staff, our manager, will fight like hell for us as well. So I hope our community will continue to email them, get their three minutes before them, and let them know that this move is unacceptable. We are all typically budget constraints. We are seeing a failure at the federal level and state level.

I understand the challenges that all of us are are facing in terms of, like, dealing with the budget, but we also have to understand what these impacts really have on our our community and how we stand together for the future like you were talking about, Wes, that we're not shooting ourselves in the foot. So while we have to, as they say, you know, tie your family, That's why we brought these options before us, but we're not gonna live that legacy yet.

Yeah. I appreciate my colleague's passion, but I think it'd be irresponsible for us not to talk about trade offs of public assuming

the county's gonna do what the county's gonna do.

So if they don't do it this year, I don't see economic forecasting better for next year.

Also engaging people in all sorts of ways so they're aware of this potential change. Right? And then I think there's also ways to engage the public should we have to make these choices. And this can also be part of these are what you're losing out on if this happens. But I I think I think there has to be some, like, nuance to that engagement, which is not just that, oh, well, you choose these because this is happening because I think that's not where we are yet.

Right? So I think I think that both that both things can be true at the same time. I was on the task force for equitable library funding when when the county decided to to build the their southern branch library. And we've been operating an amazing library for all of the residents of the county, but also there was no southern branch library. It didn't exist.

So this was the only library for this entire most populated part of the county. And so I feel that we've been doing a service to the county in operating this library and only charging them $600,000, which has not gone up at all with inflation, which has not increased despite the incredible increases in the cost to operate this library. And it was never ever talked about in that task force that there would ever be such a such a concept as cutting the funding. It was actually the request was it was to increase the funding so that the libraries were treated equitably. Instead of this one serving the most people and being in the most populated part of the county because we are county residents.

I I don't know why that continues to be so hard, but this was us, I think, going going beyond as usual our obligations in providing services. And this is something that matters to people here, but it was never once discussed. So there have been a lot of, I think, misperceptions and misunderstandings about what has ever been discussed or where this is coming from. But we generate the most taxes for the county. They get the biggest proportion of all taxes that are brought in through all the economic development and other things we do.

And and then we're providing the library in a place where there was none. A new library was proposed next door to this amazing library. And I had my concerns at the time, but as long as there was an agreement that they were gonna figure out how they were gonna fund that and not cut here, I said, well, go ahead. I don't understand why you're doing it. And I don't understand why that is the priority among so many other competing priorities at the county level.

But that's your choice, and I am not elected to be on that board, so I'm not gonna mess with you all in your decisions. But if at that time of building the Carborough library Carborough residents had known that it would mean that this library would be cut. I've heard from Carborough residents as well that they would have never wanted that to be their library, that they would have never wanted to lose free access to this library. So I think the public and our board and our staff would have engaged much differently at the time because enormous decisions were being made had that been transparent and on the table. So I have not only a problem with this decision because of what it means to this community at a time no less when there is of all the crazy things, I mean, there's damn book banning going on and our our superintendent of schools is being dragged down to Raleigh to complain about books, people of this county who use this library so regularly.

Not to mention that I have been at how many story times and my kids love to come here and all those things, but also it's just the context is crazy. The the number of kids that walk here from school because school doesn't go until when parents get home. And so the number of kids who use this place as after school, as free after school is stunning. And they all walk by my house, and it's an amazing place for them. It's just providing beyond what one could even, you know, convey in one meeting.

So I have a lot of heartburn about this. I've tried to talk to a few commissioners, and I'm not very hopeful at the moment that we're making progress on changing minds and that people have some very unusual ideas of why and how this came about, but this is also putting that amount of of cost on people who still wanna use this library when it would cost about $4 per county resident to keep this funding makes no sense to me as a way to balance a $15,000,000 deficit of which I would point to decisions made about capital that doesn't make sense in the first place, but that should not be taken out on Chapel Hill given all that we also, I think, contribute to the county. So that is my, maybe not very articulate way of saying that I do think that it's very important for all of us to be advocating. I also I really feel like now is not the time that we should be doing this to our partners. We do need to have a united front given this environment, and I don't think that doing this to Chapel Hill in this way is what I expect of good partners right now.

I don't wanna make these decisions because I don't want us to be predeciding that we're just gonna do what I mean, you know, I but I do feel like there then I personally would want to understand more about all of our agreements, not just this one, and really be level setting about how we partner with the county and being clear also on how much Chapel Hill contributes to the wealth of this county and how much we get back. Because I'm okay with it not being vivid. We are a progressive community. The urban area should support the rural areas, but we should also get basic things like marginal support for a library that we've been operating ourselves with very little support for a long time when there was no other library. So

Can I ask the question? I mean, you made some very good points there. At what point and where is it documented? Where is it written? Where? Because it it was saying, like, we knew

No. We didn't know.

That when rapes were Yeah. Was gonna be built that this was coming. And so I wanna see that in writing. I wanna see where that was communicated. And if it's not, then that has to stop being said. Mhmm. And all the points that you made were very poignant and very articulate.

Thank you. I don't I don't believe I know that it was never communicated publicly. I have heard lore that there were commissioners back in 2011, you know, way back in the day who had an idea that we shouldn't be funding the Chapel Hill Library, but those people are not in office anymore and that was never a board decision. That was one person having an idea and we all know that that's not how we govern. And so if that was actually the intention, then that would have been communicated to Susan Brown, our library director at the time.

It would have been communicating to the elected officials. It would have been communicated to the town manager. There was nothing. And so, yes, unless someone can show me where we were notified of any such thing, I agree with you. There is no case to be made that this was always decided or that just because if we fit it off this year, it'll come back next year.

I don't think that should ever be the case. And I think that operating an amazing facility like this when the county has a library system and we're doing it for them for a great price, a bargain basement price, I don't think that they should continue to have to be a conversation each year or ever again. And I frankly cannot believe that we didn't raise the amount in past. That was the whole purpose, was that it was so marginal that we were advocating for it to be increased. That was only ever in the conversation that ever happened, and I was in the room, so I know that that is the case. I may have a really crappy memory, but that I remember.

Yeah. There's one. I was just gonna say, if I can interject, the twenty twenty three library task force final report was included in your packet, and it does show the increase in funding that was agreed upon.

Which was agreed upon by the entire task force, including representatives from Hillsborough, Carrboro, Orange County. I mean, it was everybody. So we just can't claim that this was ever telegraphed in any way because it was always underfunded. And trying to pull back and do some sort of austerity budget because of things that are happening at other levels of government is not going to make our community better. And quite frankly, I think investing in more economic development so there's more sustainability over time.

Like, investing in more things is how people get out of recessions. They don't cut things like this. Right. It makes no sense.

So I want to for us to move to the what's next for this. And I really would like for us to recommend or or to ask our manager to go speak before Yeah. I you're.

I know, but I just wanna No. You wanna, like, get the Yeah.

What is the thing? I mean, we all are Yeah. We all are are fired up. Right? We all care about this, and I just want us to be, like, yes. We want this to happen.

Could you all give us a recommendation of options that you think would be effective in terms of what staff could do at this point that you have not felt directed to do as of yet?

Well, we can play the advocacy role to the extent that it exists up until pledged adoption. So that's communicating whatever levels we have, appearing at whatever forums exist. They they just had their budget public hearing, so that sort of off the table. But

They do have another one on May 28, and Jeff will go.

Can show up.

Oh, go ahead.

Let's look at yours.

Alright. So is there anything else that you can think of that could or should happen? And and maybe it's also telling us things that that we can do or that you think would be most effective.

Because I did plan to talk with our colleagues who are on that governing body, and I would love some good information. And I know that you sent us some, but some really succinct talking points.

We can build build the case along the lines of what's been said here. They were getting a deal. Yeah. Nobody ever thought they were gonna cut as a replacement for the Draper Yeah. Funding, whatever,

a reference report. Made Jess really good.

Message all those points, and then we can, you know, spend some time in the media, spend some time in the letters and broadcasts out to our folks and call to action.

And what do you need from us? I mean, we'll do anyway, obviously.

I think as a so we'll work with that, but as it relates to the decision making and the budget, we think that what we've laid out for you is proceed with the budget as shown, assume the county revenue continues knowing if it doesn't, that we have a range of things that we will deploy in a phased way, and then we'll keep you informed if we need to do something to make up a gap. We won't do it precipitously. It will be through engagement with you, but we're we're really just trying to sort of see what the revenue options do first because as I was said, if everybody paid their fee then

Sure. Then then

then Then you have more than you started with.

Yeah. So so that we need to kinda know what that's

gonna look like. It would it

be appropriate to for the town to

do some broad messaging to the public to kind

of inform them that this is happening? Because I'm

pretty sure most of them don't know. And just in advance of that, we need to meeting. Like, think there are some newsletters to be like, hey. Show up. Advocate for your library. I mean, that's certainly something we can all do too.

Are there also is there, like, a way that we I mean, I don't need it to be a mayor's message, but if it makes more sense for it to be a mayor's message because that's sometimes where we can do a little bit more than staff can do. But if y'all can help with that, then Yeah.

And it's gotten quite a bit

of media coverage. I mean, this is in the Indiana, Chapelboro, everywhere. So I think we've got that covered. But Okay. I feel like in those stats, like the mayor's message and some of these talking points that I think we can And I'm just saying that if anything that feels like it it's beyond what the staff can do, then you can you can, like And I think

the messaging too, they can include some of what Louie is trying to get at as well. Like, you know Yeah. If this happens, these are the things. So This is what we would have to do. Yeah.

This is what we would have

to do, and these are

the options we put forward.

I I think that would be really helpful.

So this is a campaign. Right? This is is a campaign, and we need to the way that we campaign for our office, we need to campaign. We need to communicate. I'm talking about each of us. We to be able to communicate. So once we get that information

And also just keep in mind that, like, care you know, the friends are doing they started it, so I think we can help. But I wouldn't don't necessarily just rep like, I wouldn't start over is all I'm saying.

You know, what I'm saying is that we should mobilize and talk with our community members and sit down with them, have a conversation. You all know where I am daily. Right? You can't go. Where are you? Are And I go to other places too.

But your new bar isn't opening yet. So

It is. Yeah. I went for the soft open. But, anyway, I'm I'm being serious. I think that we need to because while the media, the social media is activated, not everybody is on there and not everybody sees it. So I'm just appealing to each of us to have

to do that. Yep. Okay.

Yes. Think so. I think that

Oh, no. It's a bargain. Just it is an absolute bargain. It is. And so and Chapel Hill is you know, does pause and does spoil their

We can close this now just so you remember. Yeah.

Well, can I just get you all I wanna I don't think we need to beat it to death, but if we can just do our wrap up questions just to make sure we're not missing something because this will then come back? So I wanna make sure that we're giving very clear guidance to to the staff. So number one, does anyone have further questions about how the recommended budget advances our strategic goals and priorities? Yes? I don't have any questions. I just have

a statement, and I think that this

is a fiscal sustainability budget, primarily. And I don't have a problem

with that, but I think

that it addresses our priorities. Yet, I don't have a problem with that. I think it's something that we needed to do, but just to recognize that's what we're doing this year, maybe next year, they'll be able to to hit some of the priorities. Yep.

Okay. Are there any gaps, concerns, or unmet needs that you'd like staff to further evaluate?

I think for me, just looking at our our budgeting as it pertains to just affordable housing and just public housing. I wanted to get a sense of, like, what we are it's probably in there. I just need to explain it to me, like, Like a two year old. My Disney Lake Federal HUD, like, just wanna get a real sense of, like, what tax levy monies are going into both

because I have to the Estes, I have not been there. Deputy Town Manager? Yeah. Yes. I Yes. I will not been. This week go,

but I

am curious how I would like more information about how we are where we are with with that with our folks who are there, how long do we anticipate them being there? And I'm not talking about the displaced. I'm talking about that being a housing place. It's in a floodplain, and that has contributed to the potholes reopening. Has it been I will go see if it's been it's been fixed, but I'm curious about those streets if it's been patched or if it's been repaved.

And then beyond that, what are our long term plans for that public housing? I know we're talking about this year, but we've been talking about that space. I remember the tour that we took. Yeah. Yeah. And that was several years ago. So I I would like more information on what are we planning to do with side hustles, pelvic houses. Yeah.

I think that falls right in squarely into our repositioning plan. You're gonna have to make some choices about what what do we keep, what do we sell, what do we do development, redevelopment, you know, all all all that and how because we can do it, we can do it with partners, we can have private sector do it, and we gotta kinda go through all the program options and develop a plan. Okay.

Three, Paris, I heard you would like additional information on local money going towards housing. Is that Yes. Okay. Yeah. Public housing and just affordable housing. Uh-huh. Any other information or analysis before next meeting? I know I get not a lot of time to do heavy analysis, but yeah. Thank you.