City Council - Special Meeting

In the years past we've heard presentation from our CFO regarding the fiscal condition of our city heading into our budget deliberations. This year Kristen Wilcox suggested we give you a little bit broader view of the budget plus a thorough look at our financial condition and the reasons behind the budget request for next year. It's been suggested that we're in a crisis, but I reject that notion. But we are at a crossroads. this year we'll decide which road we're going to take to continue to meet the needs of our growing city or we can retreat from our responsibilities and maintain the status quo in a moment you're going to hear from seven department leaders who will give you a comprehensive look at our budget and some straight talk about how we got here and where we're going these seven leaders represent the departments with the largest impact on our city but the other 12 also makes significant contributions to the overall health of our city. So let's begin. I invite you to write down your questions and we'll discuss them at the end of this straight talk presentation. Ms. Kristen Wilcox, you are first. You're up and you are recognized.

Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. I would just like to reiterate in front of you, you will see a sheet of paper It is labeled by the departments. That is for you to write down all your questions. We are asking that you will hold them until the end. The mayor has given you a very quick overview of how we're going to do tonight, but our deputy CFO, Regina Hampton, will come forward now to give you a better idea of what we're doing this evening. Thank you.

good evening everyone welcome to the city's first ever straight talk about the city's budget and fiscal position this is informally known as a budget work session however this year we are inviting select department heads to join us at the podium so you can hear directly from the people that are going to be executing what we are presenting in the proposed budget for fiscal year 27. again as miss wilcox mentioned my name is regina hampton i'm the deputy cfo and you will be hearing from her later this evening as she provides a financial summary as well as address any questions my role here this evening is to provide a high level overview of the city's budget process our tax rate and revenues and how together those have built our proposed budget so let's start with our process As most of you know, our budget process begins in mid February. We start discussing with departments, their needs for the remaining year while planning for the next fiscal year between March and may finance works diligently with the mayor and all departments to prepare a structurally balanced budget. This is, this is to continue to provide the crucial services that our departments to our citizens. The budget is then brought to this body for approval in June. State law requires that council approve this budget by June 30th, and it must be submitted to the comptroller within 15 days of adoption. So what is a structurally balanced budget? A structurally balanced budget is defined as a budget that supports financial sustainability for multiple years into the future. Recurring revenues must equal or exceed recurring expenditures. It also assumes the City will avoid budgetary procedures that balance current expenditures at the expense of meeting future year's expenses, such as postponing expenditures or accruing future year revenues. As the city focuses on maintaining a budget with no property increase, we have lost sight of ensuring that the budget is structurally sound. For example, in an effort to balance the budget for the last two fiscal years, we have not funded the self insurance fund. This is not presented an issue as we have not had any significant settlements. Thank you to Mr. Bittner and his team. However, this is not sustainable. You will see departments are contributing to the self insurance fund in the proposed budget. The proposed tax rate of $1.23 will help us move toward a structurally sound budget. So let's look at this breakdown of $1.23. We wanted to provide you a visual of where your $1.23 property tax rate will go based on the percentage of the total budget. Public safety you'll see is the largest portion at 64 cents. This includes police fire and building and codes streets is next at 13 cents. And then we have our general or administrative services, which includes finance court, human resources, it internal audit, legal legislative, the mayor's office and purchasing. We are the silent partners that keep the city compliant with many federal and state laws, city charter and city code. You will not be hearing from all of these departments today as our budgets are small in comparison and are mostly predictable from year to year. It is important to note that the penny this year is worth $676,000 and we will talk more in depth about that later in this presentation. So let's look at how this proposed tax rate is going to impact our average homeowner. As you can see from this example, the average homeowner with an appraised value of $319,000 will see an increase of $21 per month if the proposed tax rate of $1.23 is adopted. To put this into perspective, It's equivalent to one month of streaming services, or in today's market, approximately five gallons of gas. We know that this is very impactful to our most financially vulnerable citizens, so we also want to take this time to highlight programs that both the city and the county have in place to assist in offering and reducing the impact of these costs. so we have two programs we have the tax relief and the tax freeze program the tax relief is a voucher-based reimbursement program for low-income seniors disabled individuals and disabled veterans our tax freeze actually locks in the base amount for residents 65 and older we had about 6 000 households that were on these two programs for tax year 2025. So we've looked at property tax rate. Let's look at how that is just one of the revenue sources that we have that contributes to our overall revenue for the city. You can see that local taxes, which includes property taxes as well as the local option sales tax, accounts for almost 76% of our total anticipated revenues, making local governments heavily reliant on taxes as a revenue source. Our other major source is intergovernmental revenue, which includes our state share of revenue, and this increases proportionately with our population each year. So here are the details of what make up each revenue source. This is a breakdown of anticipated revenues for the next fiscal year. It's a high-level look at the different revenue types so you can see how they all work together to fund city operations. The local taxes include not only our property tax revenue but local sales taxes, franchise, alcohol, pilots. These are about $143.5 million. Our intergovernmental revenues, which are state-shared, state sales tax and grants, $35.9 million. Our licenses and permits, which are building permits, short-term rentals, $3.8 million. charges for services which are court costs enterprise fund charge outs and recreation fees are 4.1 million our fines and forfeits which are court fines and arrest fees are about 643 000 and then investment income and miscellaneous total about 1.3 so we have a total of 189.4 million dollars for our budget so what if the tax rate remains at 92 cents If you choose not to increase the tax rate this year, you would need to remove $21 million from operating expenditures. We've created a brief list of higher dollar items that make up a little more than half the cost of what would need to be cut. All requests for new vehicles that you see in the budget, $7.1 million. The GWI, which is at 3% and is delayed, it is not to be effective until January 9, 2027, would be $1.3 million. The 10% increase in health premiums that currently the city is absorbing would now need to be passed on to our employees for a savings of $1.4 million. And then we would look to some of our larger departments and ask them to cut. Fire $1 million. Police $1.5 million. Street $500,000. Parks $250,000. Even with everything that you see here, an additional $7.9 million would still need to be identified and removed to maintain the $0.92 tax rate. We must also remember the $42.5 million bond anticipation note that this council approved earlier this month must be supported by the $1.23 proposed tax rate. This bond anticipation note is projected to fund the new building and codes facility, renovations to Mason Rudolph and Swan Lake, Phase two of Spring Creek Parkway, sidewalks and crosswalks for Highway 4813. Phase one of Memorial Drive Extension and continued work on Tylertown and Oakland. You're now going to hear from our experts, our department heads, and they will share about why $1.23 is needed to continue providing their essential services. We're going to start with our police chief, Chief Ty Burdine.

Good afternoon. Let me get this situated really quick. So today I'm not gonna just go over what's in our current budget, but I'm also gonna look in the future a little bit as well. As you know that it's obvious what we do, we respond to emergency calls, we investigate violent property crimes, We are involved with community outreach and juvenile engagement services. In the past year, we've handled 126,000 combined between self-initiated, that's traffic stops, that's self-initiated type of calls, and calls for service. 126,000. We went to being short, even with our community relations unit and our JET unit, we're still provided 240 community outreach events and 660 juvenile engagement services. This year we've, going into the budget, we've tried to offset some of our costs into this year's budget through grant funding, which we've, through our violent crime grant, purchased 12 to 14 cars. I'm pretty sure that it was 12 cars that we're looking at doing. I might have made a mistake on one of these slides, but it's 12 cars that we purchased to try to offset the cost. We have no new positions in this year's budget except for part-time court liaisons. If y'all didn't know that we have two sworn officers inside the court, actually three sworn officers within our court. And what I want to do is take those sworn officers, those two sworn, we have a supervisor that will remain there. Those two sworn officers will come back to the road and we'll make that a civilian spot, a part-time position, similar to the way we do crossing guards. And we have a pool of money that either the retirees or part-time can be our court liaisons and bring those sworn officers to the road. We also have no capital improvement projects and we reduce our fleet replacement plan. Something that often gets overlooked with our department is what we do administratively. We've had, and it's going up this year, we've had 12,000 records requests this year. We have an average of 200 requisitions a month, 1,971 maintenance and IT work orders that come through our department that they must handle. So as we talk about recruitment and retention, With salary savings, we were able to increase our Starling salary, as you know, this past two months ago, and we're very, very appreciative of that. I believe that it did help retain some employees, but we still have room for improvement with our pay. As you hear me say that often is that compared originally, we have some room for improvement that we must do better at. For a budgeted FY27 cost for salaries and benefits is $44,830,000. And let's just say that next year we add a 3%, that increases it to 46, 1.75. We want to increase our police officer allocation, as you know. I want to be at 2.2 officers per thousand is where we'd like to be at. Currently, not counting the 36 vacancies, we're about 47 off from being 2.2. Now we try to average a 2.2, projected 2.2% growth within our city. So with 2.2 officers per thousand, we're about 47 off and we're maybe 15 to 16 years if we keep our hiring plan of 15, 12 to 15 from being at our goal. Just for reference, Chattanooga's not that too far from us with population. I can't say the exact numbers, but last I checked, it was between 8,000 and 10,000. However, there's a difference of over 100 officers between Chattanooga and us. Last we checked, we pulled out as a 2.49 per 1,000. Knoxville's 2.09, Nashville 2.35, and Jackson 2.53. So I think 2.2 is an obtainable goal, but it's also necessary. So our fleet is very important to us. It's not only a branding for our agency, but also some of these old Impalas that we have. We need to get rid of these. I'm telling you, if you want to come out to take a look at the Impalas, you guys can call me up, feel free, anytime, and we'll bring you out to show you these. We did request for 74 vehicles, and we reduced those to 34 in FY26, and FY27 requests for 54 vehicles to 12. We budgeted this year for over $800,000 for our vehicles and our fleet. And in order, perfect world, we got rid of all of our Impalas, just to the age and wear and tear of these. In FY28, it would be about $2.4 million to replace our Impala fleet. The Outlaw Field Precinct, as you know, did not get funded last year. And it got delayed from FY26 and FY27. Our Vista Lane area, which is really the only place we have to grow within our buildings, is the Vista Lane project. And we did have a capital improvement for one point something million, but that went straight to the roof. We need to continue to build upon that. And with the outlaw field project, We want to provide services to that area, and the way that we do that with our department, each district is held of, it's like their own police department. And to get better services to that side of town, we were proposing to have that outlaw field project. We've already did dirt work to the project, and we just needed to finish that, and we're hoping to get that done next year. Potential cost for FY28, anticipated cost, and this is for salaries and everything, to cubicles, to outfit, is about $3.7 million that we would ask for in FY28. The capital projects, as you can see here, this is a rough number for Outlaw Field Precinct, is 4.2, and that would be coming from, that's for next year's FY28. Lastly, I'll just say this. I wrote something down just because I get sidetracked, and if I said this and I just wing it, then oftentimes I'll go a lot longer than expected. But let me just find out what I wrote down here real quick. Got a lot of notes here. We did have increase of, yes.

Perfect, there we go, thank you so much.

So listen, please hear me out on this. Our city continues to experience significant growth, and with that growth comes increased demands on public safety services. More residents, more businesses, more traffic, more housing, calls for service, developments to patrol and community events all require a police department that can respond efficiently, proactively, and professionally. In order to keep pace with the growth, we must invest in our personnel, our infrastructure, and our long-term strategic planning. One area to remain competitive with pay for officers and professional staff. Agencies are competing with a limited pool of applicants, and although we are thankful, we are still behind. We are doing more with less and making do with offering overtime to officers. We must also prepare operationally for the future needs of our city. The development and staffing of our fourth precinct outlaw field is a major component of our strategy. As our city expands geographically and our population density increases, the ability to provide timely response, proactive patrol, Community engagement and visible police presence becomes more important and challenging from our current District 1 precinct. A fourth precinct will allow us to better distribute resources throughout the city to improve accessibility to police services, strengthen relationships within the neighborhood, and position officers closer to the areas they live and serve. It would enhance efficiency by reducing travel time for officers and allow supervisors to more effectively manage personnel by reducing the span of control. And a major concern is that if we don't do something now, next year the hill will be steeper and tougher to climb to find what was needed within the Clarkshire Police Department. And I will just say this. We have an outstanding group of police department. We're not perfect, but we have great employees here. And I like to compare safety with oxygen. And I've heard this before. It is impactful to me is that whenever you have it, oxygen and safety, you don't think about it. But when you don't have it, that's all you think about. And I want to continue to provide the best services that we can with the city and through responsibility in our budget process. So that's it for me. And I'll now turn this over to Mr. Justin Crosby.

Thank you, Chief. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council, for giving us this time to speak to you about our budgets, what they mean to us, and how our day-to-day operations, how we hope that they are an asset to the city and the community and the constituents that you guys are serving. My name is Justin Crosby. I'm the Director of the Building and Coast Department. Um, we want to do this presentation for you tonight to bring you up to date on our budget needs for this upcoming fiscal year. As we enter into discussions about the budget, I want to make sure that we're clear to each of you that a dollar 23 does not get us where we need to be. However, it does help us make a minimum, make meaningful progress in the right direction. Any lesser ass would result in the city moving backward rather than making meaningful progress toward meeting current and future service demands. we need to position ourselves into a proactive department instead of being a reactive department. Currently, the codes department is responsible for maintaining public health and safety through construction and property maintenance. On average, the code department, our code enforcement division works 1,400 code cases. Our construction division conducts 2,500 building inspections and our admin division issues 500 permits per month. Yearly, that adds up to over 16,000 code cases for code enforcement, nearly 30,000 construction inspections, and roughly 6,000 permits that are issued by our department. Our abatement division, which works all our code cases that come to term, our abatement division's growth has led to more work being done in-house and a trend of phasing out the need of third-party contractors for debris removal and cleanup. If you guys remember, not that long ago, we exclusively – contracted out all of our debris removal, property cleanup, mowing, and abatement to third-party contractors, and we're doing a tremendous amount of that in-house now. So why do we need $1.23? Most of our budget, as you know at the Building Codes Department, is chewed up in salaries. So the two biggest areas of our additional ask this year are for code enforcement officers and for abatement equipment. We're asking for three new code enforcement positions to start at the first of the year, and that cost is estimated at a little over $90,000. Our abatement equipment that we're asking for this year would just allow us to keep growing that equipment internal work load and not farming it out to third party contractors so two areas that we need to grow in code enforcement is we need specific officers that work overlay enforcement and zoning compliance so a brief window into what we're looking at is between january and april of this year we are up 63 percent in the number of code cases that are coming in so Additional code enforcement. Our request for three additional code enforcement officers will allow us to work a higher volume of code enforcement and abatement cases collectively. This gets us closer to the goal that we have internally of one code enforcement officer per council ward. Currently we have five. This additional three would get us to eight, and we're working really hard to get to that 12. A full staff at 12 would get us to... get us on the verge of being that proactive department and not being reactive. Our department currently operates from a position of a reactive position requiring staff to prioritize incoming citizen complaints on urgency and available resources. As a result, lower priority concerns may experience delayed response times or remain unaddressed for extended periods. We must transition to a proactive operational model that will allow staff to identify and address violations before complaints are coming in. This will help prevent issues from escalating into nuisances and improve our overall service to the citizens and neighborhoods. Without the proposed tax rate of 123, we would be moving in reverse. So what does this look like to you? To give you a small example of the growth our department has seen, our code enforcement division has conducted more than 1,200 additional inspections and received nearly 500 more citizen complaints during the first four months of 2026. This represents a 63% increase, as I said, on our incoming calls. Our population continues to grow. The department's caseload has increased significantly. However, staffing levels have not expanded accordingly to meet the growth demand for service. As a result, our team is operating under considerable strain, requiring us to prioritize resources and, at times, classify your constituents' concerns as a lower priority in order to manage workload demands effectively. We are stretched thin. If we stay at 92 cents, our department would lose the ability to provide specialized code enforcement officers dedicated to the newly established overlays that we've adopted, as well as specialized zoning compliance officers necessary to effectively support and enforce development standards within these areas. During the review and subsequent adoption of the overlays, a question was raised, who will be responsible for enforcement? At that time, the consensus was without the rules, we don't need the people. We adopted the rules. Now we're asking for the people. Our request for additional abatement equipment would allow us to perform a higher number of cleanup cases in-house and in a more timely manner. We would not have to rely on third-party contractors as much to provide this service. The real benefit to our in-house cleanup is that we control the outcome and the timelines. If a job has been done and we don't like it, we can go back again. We don't have to call a third party and beg for them to go back or pay an additional bill. And this happens often. Within our own staff, with our own staff and our own equipment, we're able to review the process in real time and ensure a quality outcome for our concerned citizens. There was a time we exclusively offered abatement cleanup through third party contractors. As good as they were, our team produces a higher quality and a faster outcome. If you follow the timeline, our abatement cleanup versus third-party cleanup. You receive a call from a constituent that a mattress was seen laying on the side of the road in your ward, across the street or sidewalk. It's happened. You reach out to our department and we ensure that we're aware of the issue. Our abatement team is able to get on site and resolve the issue immediately. If we're unable to grow our abatement team, as this need has shown, we're forced to rely on third-party contractors to assist. In this instance, we would register the complaint and begin the process of the correspondence with our available third-party vendors, see if they're available, schedule a cleanup to take place on their schedule. We're able to work these complaints across a multitude of properties with our abatement team, which we're unable to do with a third-party contractor. Almost everybody has used us in that capacity. We want to be available for your service. We want you to rely on us, and we want to be dependable. The equipment and the people is what we need to do that. I want to close and give you a little insight on the capital improvement project we have for this year. We no longer have the capacity to delay action, either in terms of our workload demands or the physical limitations of our current facility. As reflected in the capital improvement project we have, Funding for a new building is essential to accommodate both staff operations and a level of public service our community needs. Our existing workspace conditions have become increasingly inadequate with multiple employees sharing 10 by 10 offices, staff compressing into limited common areas for daily meetings and standing room only attendance during border zone appeals meetings. During these meetings, citizens are often forced to wait in the hallway outside of the conference room until their cases are called. In addition, Our current parking capacity is maxed out. It is limited to staff vehicles with only two remaining spaces available for the public. To continue providing efficient and professional customer service, we must obtain a facility that allows the citizens to access our building safely, conveniently, and without unnecessary delays. We don't have room to wait any longer. We are stretched too thin. The team is doing more with less year after year. We, and we have continued to keep a high level of service at this point. The only thing we have left to sacrifice is a level of service that we're able to provide. Please don't let that happen. I'll appreciate all your time. I will turn it over to the fire chief.

Thank you. Um, thank you for your time. I will get right into this and try to help you identify how the $1.23 relates to CFR. So our current services, Clarksville Fire Rescue provides fire protection, life safety and emergency medical response, including land and water incidents. Some of the focus, especially now with competitive pay always coming back up, it has been on standardization. I'll remind you that the minimum pay conversation started last year, and internally we were able to raise the minimum standard and raise the pay as well, and we're carrying over $300,000 of that into this next budget, and we started that back in January. We've also enhanced our special operations division with mostly utilizing grants to take something that was going to take us three to five years. We were able to do it in a year with grant opportunities, and now we need to sustain that going forward. CFR response, over 20,000 emergency calls annually. We are supported internally by our divisions for training, prevention, and maintenance. A couple of the things we did along the way to try to cut costs or centralize our warehouse and logistics using the old firehouse once we built the new District 2, which is Station 6. And we started a six-month training academy to address the standard issues that we had. And I know you remember the conversations about EMR over the last year. So we started a six-month academy. It's a cost-saving measure, but it does... take an extensive amount of time to get those firefighters trained up. And when they leave the academy, we adjust that pay to where they meet that minimum pay. The community service program is also conducted by the entire fire department. Uh, where we have school age education programs, fire prevention, uh, free detector installation, uh, and community event support. So why the dollar 23 as I talked about, uh, earlier, it's mainly standardization when it comes to the stipend program for certified positions. So in the past, uh, CFR has had extra promoted positions and we're trying to do away with that, uh, and not have extra positions, but, uh, we will have a stipend program in place. And for those promoted positions, it will also incentivize training and certification. for backup roles to those positions. So by doing that, the certified stipend program reduces liability in the past. Uh, when a position wasn't available for an engineer or a trip, uh, an officer, we would let the next person up, sit in that position with no training and no certification through the stipend program. They have to go through a training and certification process, and they are checked off, and they can ride in that position and get that on-the-job training, and we will pay them per day for riding in those positions. That supports the standardization and the district concept and makes us operate much safer because our people aren't roaming around the different stations all the time, and we have certified people sitting in those positions. The cost of that is about $95,000 for the certified positions and an additional close to $40,000 for the existing positions. Also, we have three stations that have extensive problems with HVAC unit. This is a one-time cost of $121,500. Sorry about that. I'm slow on it. We have those three stations, 7, 11, and 12. They've had 36 work orders between those three in a short amount of time. And this $121,000 is the cost to repair all three. They're similar HVAC systems, and we have worked diligently with city maintenance to repair these time and time again, and they've suggested that we upgrade those systems. And lastly, the one new 100 foot aero apparatus. So a ladder truck. This will replace a current 2016 apparatus in accordance with our vehicle replacement plan. and the NFPA guidelines, which is 15 years on the front line and five years in reserve. And I do understand that this truck, this 2016 truck, is 10 years old. But as you know, these trucks take three to five years to get once we make an order for those trucks. And 15 years on the front line is all that we can use those trucks for. We also have another 2016 that needs to be replaced that I will be asking for next year, and that will put us up against the wall on purchasing two trucks. Currently it's $2.4 million for one truck, and I am quite sure that cost will increase for next year. So that is the extent of mine. Next I will call up Jennifer Letourneau.

Good evening. So our department currently provides facilities, parks, trails, events, and programming for all ages. As such, you imagine we require a great deal of maintenance, and I like to compare it to inviting, opening up your house and your front yard to the whole entire population of Montgomery County and then trying to maintain it. So that's where a lot of our costs are. Our programming is among the best in the state, and we're particularly proud of our new recreation therapy programming, which provides activities for our special needs population. And this past year, we hosted over 900 participants for those programs. In FY26, we increased several of our fees, some for the first time in over 10 years. In fact, the soccer player impact fee went up $10 for the first time since it was established in 1986. In FY27, we'll be following suit with the other departments and charging back the credit card fee to the consumer, saving the city approximately $85,000. So why $1.23? With the addition of groomed athletic fields, namely Edith Pettis, Dixon, Swan Lake softball fields, our field mowing equipment is in use five days a week. Heritage soccer fields alone have to be mowed twice a week to maintain the playable turf. Exit 8 complex now needs to be mowed, which is putting us in a bind. We'll either have to mow on a longer cut schedule, which results in user dissatisfaction, or pay overtime for weekends, which is going to result in more service and aging of equipment. The equipment request was made last year but cut from the budget. The baby pool at New Providence was built in the 1960s and the cast iron pipes are rusting out. Last season we turned off the pool if no one was using it just to save the water because it leaks so much. However, the issues are worse this year and With the opening of the pools this year, we decided it's best just to turn it off completely because the chemicals can't keep up with the water loss. So that'll be closed until either an entirely new baby pool or a water play table can be replaced. And then we'll be asking the patrons to decide which one of those amenities that they want in the future. The golf division mows the greens four to five times a week. Because of this necessary precision, keeping the reel mower blades sharp is essential. The current blade sharpening machine is over 37 years old and parts are increasingly difficult to find, making it a potential safety issue for our employees. The drone show was added as part of the Christmas on the Cumberland two years ago and now has become such a much anticipated part of this event. That said, unfortunately, not getting that funding will result in not letting that happen this year and not being able to sign that contract. Additionally, we'll no longer be able to support outside projects that are not those of the Parks and Recreation Department and cities. The big dollar ticket item for us this year is with Ajax Turner Senior Center. And let me first say that we're very excited about this opportunity. And I want to be very clear that our intent is not only to continue to provide the programs that their very valuable volunteers are facilitating over there, but to continually improve and provide new programming with members' feedback. The difference in our initial budget for Ajax Turner and that of previous allocations to the center is a little bit different, and this is due to several factors. One of those factors is membership fees. The current center charges $35 a year. Oh, sorry. Oh, go back. Oh, I'm missing a slide. There it is. There we go. All right, sorry. Thank you, Lisa. The center currently charges $35 a year for its members, and our intent is to align this with our recreation centers and our fee structure. That's 65 years and older or free, and $5 a year for those under 65. The senior members would also have access to our three existing recreation centers at no additional cost to them. Another factor is the United Way grant, which we're not eligible for since we're a municipality. We tend to give them money rather than take it from them. A GNRC grant that we're also applying for. We've already applied for and received one grant. However, it's for the adult day center participants, subsidizing the participants' pay in that program. Estimated food cost is listed under public relations. And replacement of the equipment and supplies. We're currently working with the grants manager to seek out additional funding. And we believe that once we get in the facility, that we can reduce this budget number by streamlining the services and expenses for following years. Lastly, the city has a better benefits package than what was previously offered to those employees, and that helps us in recruiting and retaining exceptional employees for the center. In a department with nine divisions, cuts are always difficult to manage so that no one public user group is affected any more than another. One of the most fair and practical cuts to make as a director would be to our operating hours, as many divisions are open nights, weekends, and holidays. to accommodate our users. Unfortunately, staying at 92 cents will result in a combination of these cuts and likely more because that doesn't get me to the 250. I'd like to introduce David Smith with street department. I'm sorry, Capital Products, sorry. You'll see we're asking for no new funding for Athletic Complex. That's already there. We are asking for Mason Rudolph Golf Course, $1.4 million. Again, that was not funded last year. And then Swan Lake Golf Course, this is for the renovation of those greens. We asked for that last year, and it was not funded either. And we are going to lose those greens. Um, our superintendent there is a miracle worker, but there's only so much that he can do. They're compacted. And if you play grit, play golf at all, you know what that means. They've been, been due for a while, but the freeze that we had this past winter has put a real hurt on it. Um, we're probably going to start when it starts heating up, you're going to start recognizing those issues there. So we are asking for that again. Now I'll introduce David Smith.

Good evening, everyone. For those that don't know me, I'm David Smith, Director of the Street Department. Current services, again, most of you guys know this. The Cluster Street Department operates all of our city-owned streets, our stormwater facilities, traffic signals, all those sorts of things. The big number here is 700 miles of local roads. For those that don't know, that's Panama City Beach and back, and that's one side of the road. So when we're out doing the work that we're doing, Whether it's mowing, whether it's salting roadways, it adds up pretty quick. Presently, we've got around 300 miles of sidewalks as well. Recently, we've been doing a lot with savings with other departments, transit, parks and recreation. We paved a large section of the Greenway. We've been paving the transit facility and hope to finish it up this week and working on their CDL course and that sort of thing. So again, trying to think about how to stretch the dollar and do some of that work internally. So for us, why $1.23? The ice storm is not that far removed. We started that storm with around 10,000 tons of salt spread across three separate facilities. We are well below that. We've got some more ordered this year, and we're projected to order $240,000 more. But that will put us around 7,500 to 8,000 tons total. So even at $1.23, even at 31 cents, it's not going to put us back to where we were. And if we have an event, In the upcoming year, like we just had, we will not have enough salt to counter that event, let alone two events or potentially three if we have a very bad winter. So please believe that our ask is exceptionally conservative. The paving budget looks like a spike. That's because it is a spike. The last two years, we've been asked to cut. The last two years, the easiest place for us to cut is the paving budget. One of the things that you campaign about, one of the things you care the most about, and it's one of the few places that we can cut because of the overtime and our salary and just our staff associated with just a series of really unfortunate events in Clarksville, from tornadoes to floods and wind events and that sort of stuff. So even though it does look like it's a considerable spike, it is within 5% of the six-year average. When we take six years out, if we go back six years ago, the ask was astronomical higher than it is even this year. So, again, these past couple years we've been exceptionally conservative and we've really stretched that dollar by doing more and more of this work in-house. I know that sounds great, and we'll talk about that more, but the more of the stuff that we do like this in-house, we have 103 employees in the street department. Every one of those employees has a billet, has a task, has a purpose. When we repurpose those people, it's something else that's not getting done, that was promised to be done. It's a work order from the public that's not being done. that was supposed to be done. We're playing a bit of a shell game, you know, just to balance things. But we're still making due because we've got a great team. Our capital project transition, you know, $500,000 previously identified. I think it was a stormwater and a pipe rehab. We've moved those in-house, so it looks like a spike to our operating budget, but it's really just transitioning from our annual capital. And then our equipment purchases are relatively similar to last year's, much like some of my peers have talked about. It takes a couple years for us to get a dump truck with all the appropriate icing equipment and whatnot from the factory. My capital projects, I'm going to soapbox a little bit here because they look a little different than some of my peers that preceded me here. You've heard public safety say, we need cops, we need these precincts, and they're not being funded. If you've looked at the CIP and you've had it for weeks, I've seen a lot of the social media comments. I've seen, I've heard the campaigns that roads are important to me. And we've had a capital project, a series of capital projects called Transportation 2020. When the budget didn't pass last year, and with what we're sending, this is the CIP you're looking at. This is what's on the books, okay? And I'm going to ground this for a little bit. Those monies there, most of those are construction, and they really don't account for all things. So we'll go by these one by one. We'll air it out for the public so everybody understands what we're doing. At 31 cents, we don't put a shovel in the ground on Needmore, and it's shovel ready until fiscal year 30. Now, for those that think that's calendar year 30, it's not. It's fiscal 30. So that's 2030, 2031, a shovels on the ground. It's a two-year project. Needmore Road, sitting on a shelf, designed, ready to go. I've been to Needmore Road. I've seen the traffic out there. It was identified by this council as a demand years ago. It needed to be done. And at 31 cents, it's that many years out from starting. Finishing with the issues that we've had with utilities, communications, communications one in particular, acronym we'll not name. You know how long these projects can run. There is a significant utility footprint on NEBOR. That's your construction dollars. That's not your design dollars. That's your property acquisition dollars. Everything that you need to build a road. Rossview Road, phase three. We've talked about Rossview Road. We just finished phase two. It's great. It's open. That area flows a whole lot better. We're flooded with a lot of compliments about how that looks. That's what we can deliver. Fiscal 30, design. Design takes two years. So Rossview, from where it ended right now at Page Estates to Warfield, just the design, two years, fiscal 32. Then we'll budget for construction, another two-year project, fiscal 35. These are things that I expect to hear from TDOT, not us. Hazelwood Road, we plan to realign that. We told TDOT we'd realign that years ago. We showed them our 2020 plans. We said we're going to realign Hazelwood to Spring Creek Parkway. We're going to fix this issue out here at Trenton Road, and that's how we do it. We're not even in design yet. And I've just said it takes a year, two years to design. Construction. TDOT's going to have a shovel in the ground, allegedly. Fiscal 30 on Trenton Road widening. We're supposed to be done. by that point. That's what we told TDOT. We'd be done. When we showed them our transportation 2020 plan, that's what we told them. Memorial Drive extension, you know, it may seem like low-hanging fruit. It's not. We've got a little bit to work with, and we're going to start buying property. That's $4.5 million just to buy the right-of-way, slope easement, construction easement we need to take on this project. But it's moot. If you don't fund beyond that, it's moot. Because if we can't build a road, we can't move forward. Tower Town Road's underway, and For those that haven't seen it, it's largely sedentary. We don't know what comes next. You know, fiscal 30, phase 2, we plan to start buying the right-of-way out there. That's the second step. Again, it's going to condense from five lanes to two until that widening, until that subsequent phase, again, which should be moving forward. This is just a snapshot of the 2020 plans. There's dozens of plans. We've taken on sidewalks in-house. We just did sidewalks in Ian Beach, Ronald Russellville, doing sidewalks in-house right now. So we can get them done. But again, those are projects that are taking us away from what we could be doing. Now, you heard my predecessor, Chief Burdine. That's the price for CPD. That's their District 4. That's actually District 3. A picture of District 3 built a number of years ago if we throw inflation at it. That's what it cost to build Precinct 4 out at Outlaw Field, $4 million. You see the price tag on Needmore Road, $25 million. You built six precincts. Six, before you build one need more road. And this council supported that. This council campaigned on that. This council continues to comment on social media that there is a capital project to do need more road. Don't worry about traffic complaints. There's a project. There's presently no project for the next several years. So I want you guys to be aware at 31 cents, it's not enough. It's not enough to support what you've previously approved. Spring Creek, the biggest ticket item, $62 million total. I think Ms. Wilcox told me it's close to $4 million in debt service annually for 20 years. The project's underway. It's a bill we've got to pay. It's a commitment for 20 years. Take that to the rest of the capital projects, and our mortgage gets pretty high pretty quick. I'm going to turn it back over to Kristen, and hopefully she says I told the truth.

Thank you, fellow speakers, and I'm not sure I can follow David Smith very well. I know you've been presented with a lot of numbers, projects, and needs in this short amount of time. But I am going to wrap it up by talking to you where the city stands fiscally and how we got here. To keep our city moving forward and being fiscally stable, we need your help. I know many of you have reservations about the 31 cent tax rate increase. This slide, though, I'm going to show you that over the history of our tax rate since 2000, we have only been below the tax rate five times. So that means for 22 years, we have been at or above this year's tax rate of $1.23. And actually, if you look at 2000, we were at $2.01. There are a few outliers here that you'll see, but those are attributed to the pandemic and reappraisal years. But for the most part, we have maintained the $1.23 tax rate. So every five years, the assessor is tasked with doing a countywide reappraisal, which results in the city receiving our certified tax rate. Council must adopt or amend that rate, and you have done both in history. But if you look at fiscal year 2025, you can see our tax rate dip to $0.88 due to a reappraisal. That $0.88 that we adopted did not include the additional $0.20 that had been previously earmarked. for the transportation 2020 plan. So in theory, reappraisal and the certified tax rate are meant to keep the city's property tax revenue neutral. However, that does not result in equivalent property tax revenues. We have very many variables we need to consider, such as our pilots, our TIFs, and our ad valorem taxes. Additionally, residents every year have the ability to appeal their tax at their assessed value. So as you can imagine, those numbers greatly increase in reappraisal years, which is great because it can result in a reduced residence property tax bill. But in turn, that means reduced city revenues. Because of this state mandated process and other factors, growth will never pay for itself. Growth pain for itself is one misconception I'd like to address. However, I have several to talk through with you. I know many of you have heard, where does the money go from all of our new homes? This slide is just to give you a snapshot of what we do receive in revenue from each new home compared to the cost of those services to the new home. So on a previous slide you saw that the average home with a property value of $319,000 produces between $734 or $981 tax dollars per year. The 2,000 square foot single family home, they pay approximately $1,500 one time for their permitting fees. So although the new construction does provide us with additional revenue, that revenue will not be enough to support the required expensive and permanent additions to services like more police and fire, more fire trucks, new roads, maintenance of those roads, any new parks, and the services within those parks. And this is especially true as the building goes out farther and farther from the existing infrastructure that the city already has. So let's talk about another misconception. Let's address our 10-year capital improvement plan, or as we call it, the CIP. The CIP is submitted to the Regional Planning Commission annually, who brings it back to council to be accepted. And in turn, when you accept it, you are saying yes to the proposed projects. Within that CIP document, we identify the needs for financing, but we do not provide funding. The financing needs and sources are listed within that document, but it is up to the council to approve an appropriate tax rate to fund the future debt that will be issued for those projects. So let's talk about this in everyday life application. This is like signing your child up for summer camp. for the next three years. You sign the permission slip saying, yes, Kristen will be here for the next three summers. But now you have to pay for those costs over the next three years. So accepting the CIP is like signing the permission slip, but it is not providing the funding. So that is the difference between accepting or adopting a CIP and funding the CIP. On to our third misconception about city finances. We talk about the fact that capital projects do not affect the tax rate. This is not true, and I will show you how. On the top of this slide shows you what you have in your budget documents. We call it attachment A, but I just wanted to give you a snapshot to show you what you would be looking at. It's attachment one for the general fund. It's a summary of our revenues, financing sources, expenditures, financing uses, and the change in our fund balance. On attachment A, towards the bottom, you will see a line that says debt service. This line represents previously spent capital expenditures for which our debt has already been issued. So similar to your personal budget, this is like charging something to your credit card last month. But in this month's budget, you are having to pay that credit card debt. The chart at the bottom is also going to show you the correlation between capital spending and debt service. In fiscal year 2023, the city's required annual debt service payments was $12 million, but we only spent $24.8 million in capital projects. And you can see throughout these fiscal years how as we spend more on capital projects, the required debt has increased. From fiscal year 2024 to fiscal year 2026, we have spent $178.6 million on capital projects. That spending has effectively increased the required debt service payments each year. Even with pausing projects, which was done at my recommendation last fall, we are still projected to spend over $64 million this year, and we have limited it to the $42.5 million next year. Without the proposed tax rate, we will be unable to fund that anticipated $42.5 million bond next year. The last misconception I'd like to address is fund balance versus cash. The city does have a fund balance policy, and we talk about it quite often, especially in the budget process. So what is the fund balance? It is essentially assets minus liabilities. Or personally, it's what I own versus what I owe. The chart on this slide, we're going to walk through it to relate it to our personal lives. Our fund balance is equivalent to your net worth. So for example, you have a vehicle that has been paid off, and it's valued at $50,000. So on the first line, your vehicle has a value of $50,000. You own a home that is valued at $500,000. However, you still have a $400,000 mortgage. So that gives it a value of $100,000. And you have $15,000 cash in your bank. your net worth or fund balance would be $165,000. However, you only have $15,000 in cash that can be spent right now. So for the city, even though we did have a fund balance of $45 million at June 30, 2025, that is just a snapshot at that point in time. The city does have other assets. However, many of these assets may not be liquid in tandem with our operating expenses. The fund balance at June 30th each year must be sufficient to cover the city's operations until we begin receiving significant property tax revenues in December and February. This lack of liquidity was what resulted in last year's need for the $11.5 million Interfund loan, which I am happy to say was immediately repaid with interest when we issued the debt. Now that we've talked through some of these misconceptions, let's look at a penny. So Regina previously mentioned that a penny of the tax rate generates about $676,000. But let's better understand the impact of that penny. What can $676,000 buy for a city? It could buy us 11 Ford Explorers with upfitting for enforcement. We could pay for one-fourth of the 100-foot ladder truck. We could pay for one-half of the delayed 3% tax rate increase or one-half of the 10% increase in health premiums, which currently the city is absorbing. Or we could install one and one-third of a traffic signal for one penny. This one penny does not go as far as I expected. So let's move on to what we can expect if asked to remain at the $0.92 tax rate. $21 million would need to be identified and removed from the current proposed tax. I know you've already seen this slide, but I just wanted to reiterate to you that this is just a sample of what could be reduced if the needed $1.23 tax rate is not adopted. Some of the reductions are specific to a large item, but some of them are just arbitrary based on the value and the size of this department's budget. So as you can see, as Regina had already gone through here, we have removed some specific items, but we will also go back to the larger departments and ask them to reduce their budgets. But even with all these cuts, we still need an additional $8 million to be identified in order to get us back to the 92 cent tax rate. So as I conclude my presentation, I want to thank the department heads that spoke tonight, as well as all the others that are present and their teams. They have gone above and beyond to continually offer our citizens superior services, despite their limited resources. Their can-do attitude is much appreciated, but has, in a way, led us to where we are today. Providing these expanded programming, superior customer service, and enhanced public safety, these services can only be maintained at such a high level if the needed funding is provided. Thank you for your attention this evening. I welcome any questions from Council. And there are other department heads present to also answer questions.

Thank you, Ms. Wilcox. And to the department leaders, any questions or comments from council? That's a lot. Councilman Zacharias, you're recognized.

Yes, thank you, Mayor. Ms. Wilcox, one of the very first slides you showed us said that we bring in $143.6 million a year in local taxes, and that includes the sales tax. Yes, it does. Our local option sales tax? Yes, it does. Does that include the portion of our local option sales tax that goes to the schools, or has that already been taken out and not counted?

Yeah, it's not accounted for because that is actually collected by the state, given to the county, and then our portion is given to us. So we only account for our portion.

So the 26% of our local option sales tax that we get to keep, that is what that number represents? Yes. All right, thank you.

Councilman Streetman, you're recognized.

Thank you, Mayor. I actually have a few questions. And the first one I kind of want to start with is, I'm going to pull this. Could you pull the slide back up and I don't have to look at the photo I took? The one that showed that one right there. Can we know a little bit more? So I don't know if it would be you answering that question or that million dollars cut from fire, what does that likely look like in their budget? The 1.5, the Half a million from street, 250,000 from parks.

I'm going to ask Chief Burdine to come up because I know his department's already working on identifying those cuts.

Okay, thank you.

Of course, this is a work in progress that if this happens, but when you look at substantial cuts, you really start looking at... Personnel and to make this drastic of a cut You know from one theory that we are not theory, but one plan that we have Would reduce nine of our vacancies that would be approximately 750 thousand dollars to make a big chunk of that that's Nine vacancies. We're not asking for nine more persons right nine more officers These are from the vacancies we have. We would just not fund going to next year. So it would be nine. We would cut our part-time court liaisons, which, like I said before, I really need those sworn officers out of courts back on the road. We've put in here for the first time ever the ability to pay people who are bilingual. We've never had that before in our budget this year. If you speak another language and if you can pass a proficiency exam, you will get a stipend for that. So it's what a lot of agencies, many do offer that as far as a recruiting plan is bilingual pay. We would have to cut that. We would cut any stipend increase that we have, and then I've got a whole sheet here that I could tell you, but it's just a lot of cuts from training to CRU jet, cut intel. There's just a little bit of chunks of money. That's the majority of money that The other big chunk was for Iowa Solutions, who conducts our professional integrity units promotional exams. We value and we put so much emphasis on our promotional results, first to insulate our department in-city to make sure it's done fairly. But in order also to get the best leaders, we are outsourcing these. And whenever we, you know, you can say what you want about a promotion process, but nobody can say they're not fair. And in order to create this fairness, we outsource this, and that's what a big chunk of this would have to cut as well.

So beyond just the specific, and that was my question, so thank you for answering that. The results of that, though, what effect does that have on your ability to serve the public?

Well, like I said, our goal is to be 2.2 per thousand. We are 47 off just being that, not even counting the 36 vacancies I have. So you're just taking away from our 36 to 9, so I guess it would be 27 vacancies we would have. And I need every officer that we have, every vacancy that we have I need, of course. But if I had to cut 1.5, unfortunately that's where I'd have to start.

Okay. And then my question then would be for fire as well. So thank you, sir. I appreciate it. Yes, sir. Chief Montgomery, what does cutting a million dollars look like?

So I would have to echo the same thing. Our operating budget is roughly $2.9 million, so that would be a third of that operating budget. We cannot fill vacancies. The truck is already removed, which is an additional $1.4 million from last year. As far as how that would affect us, we have... which we have 25 in our recruit Academy. Now that leaves about five vacancies. We have a total of 30 vacancies offline right now, and we need every one of those. You know, we, uh, I said a couple of years ago, the standard has moved to three for engine four, for a ladder truck. And we're still not there. We're just, uh, almost at three all the way around. So, um, you know, not moving forward. We already didn't move forward with personnel, which we need to do. So we're doing a whole lot more with less. Um, it, we'd have to depend on overtime, uh, for staffing, um, and, and things of that nature, but it would take away our stipend program, which incentivizes, uh, us to be safer and more efficient, uh, without incentivizing that it'd be hard to get people to participate, um, in that program. creates a liability, which is why we're trying to attack that now. So, yeah, there's several things there that it would affect us on, but staffing and operationally, we'd have to find it from there.

And then the second question of that, just like I asked Chief Burdon, how does that affect your ability to serve the public?

Diminished response times. I guess fire service morale is a big thing, so you have more accidents, more people using time off, things of that nature, trying to train our staff and keep them motivated and moving forward. But yeah, a lot of the same issues that the police department has with staffing and response times and getting people there where they need to be and filling those seats.

Now, you mentioning overtime, I assume the same would be the case for the police department with having less staff. I assume he's shaking his head to me, yes, that's the same thing. I mean, both the police and fire, I mean, obviously those are very high-stress jobs, and there's a lot that your employees have to deal with and see on a regular basis. So working overtime is obviously less time to be able to, I guess, wind down from that, so to speak.

Correct.

Okay. Thank you. Same question of Street. And I'm sorry to prolong, but, I mean, if we're sitting here talking about this, I want to... Well, I mean, if you want to talk to Kristen, that's fine by me.

Well, I'd love to answer this and give you a vanilla response, but there isn't one. If we look at some of these items, if you ask me what I cut, or even the two gentlemen that spoke before, they could say, well, we would cut this, we would cut that. But any time we cut one of these things, it affects four or five other things. If I said I was going to take a couple of vehicles out, well, now I've got two vehicles that should have been replaced that are on the road longer, and now my maintenance costs go up. So it drives other unprojected things, indirect things that we're not thinking about. The first part that we cut, and we'll talk about that, paving, what we've cut the last several years. Now, the effect of that, if I don't pave a road, it's kind of like an oil change in your car. If you just skip it, big deal, right? You skip it too many times, and now your engine's shot. If we don't keep up with the roads, we lose the roads. And now the paving and the maintenance of those roads require us to excavate, repair the subgrade, et cetera, and the list goes on. If it gets too bad, potentially damaging utilities that are adjacent within the right-of-way. It's not something we can just continue to kick down the road. But the short answer is paving, but it's just not quite that simple.

Well, and I'll have an additional one here for you in regard to it. Many of the capital projects, as we discussed, or as you discussed, are obviously road projects. They are. And every delay that we have, the delay we have right now, what effect does that have? Sure. in regard to costs.

We project out 3% per year in inflation costs, and that's across every one of those things. When we do a project that's a road project, let's say a $10 million road project, 10% on top of that are our design costs. The variable costs associated with property acquisition depends on how big the roadway is, so that's kind of all over the place. But those costs... I mean, they really, really add up quickly, and delaying those by 3% per year. I think we've got a couple of projects that were grants, and grants are great. We got approval on, I think, the pedestrian bridge in 2017. It's still not done, and I can tell you the bridge costs a whole lot more now than it did then. I want to throw a shot in the dark and say that our 20% share in that would have probably built the bridge right away, and now we're that far over on it because it's 2026. So if by the time we've taken these numbers, and we've budgeted in roughly 3% on some of these, depending on the rate and fuel costs and everything that happens, those numbers that I showed are pretty relevant to the fiscal 30 timelines and whatnot. But if you go beyond that and whatnot, those costs just get wild fast.

Well, and also you mentioned the Needmore project and the realignment. Absolutely. And that, you know, we showed them, yes, we'll have this done. What does it mean if we don't?

Well, I mean, I don't want to point out the obvious, but I think this council, I've heard it, I've been here, you guys have said it, so many of the zoning approvals and the developments that have come through on that roadway were predicated on this project. That's no big deal. I think we can move that forward because we're supposed to build the road in a And I've heard it. I've heard it stated. And that's not happening in the current funding. It's not happening at all. So the area that's already ended with traffic that's continuing to build with traffic on plans that were approved a year and a half, two years ago, zonings were approved in that same timeframe. There's a case for the Planning Commission right now that it's deferred indefinitely until the roadway project starts.

And I think I said the wrong road. I meant to say Trenton. What effect does that have? I apologize.

No worries. Well, that's a good question. I think the TDOT Commissioner with the TDOT Commissioner change and whatnot, it really puts us in a bad light. We we made a promise that we would have something done in that time frame They have designed if you look at the t dot documents their design is designed around our design being completed If we don't follow through with that now t dot has to go through considerable expense to redesign their project because of our inaction That's a lot Thank you, absolutely and now that would follow with parks and

And I know you talked a little bit about this already, Ms. Letourneau, but could you talk about if your budget is cut $250,000, what does that look like? And then the second follow-up question to that is, what effect is that on the services to the public?

Well, as I mentioned, it's probably going to be a combination of a whole lot of little things. We don't have any one grandiose project as far as capital projects this year out of our operating capital outlay, but I'm looking at probably cutting hours. We're open nights, weekends, holidays, and we're probably looking at cutting hours just to make it fair across the board to all of our user groups. and that means that we may shorten the hours. We've already run some numbers on aquatics, but you're only looking at, even if we're cutting out some of that, you're only looking at cutting about $14,000 out of the pools. So it's going to be piecemealing it all together. You're looking at the baby pool's not going to get repaired. It's going to stay closed for another season. The lights at Maricourt Park are not going to be replaced, and they're in really bad shape. We were able to do them once last year for one of the ball fields, and they were split between the two, but that's 111. So to get to 250, I'm going to have to take it from a lot of different areas.

Well, and then I'm not sure if this question would be for you or Ms. Wilcox, and this is a two-fold question. Exit 8 athletic complex and Mason Rudolph. I mean, I know that was touched on and talked about, but I mean, those are two really big deals. The soccer community has been in need of that exit eight athletic complex. That was, I remember years ago, we had the meeting for the park and for the playground that was going to be there. And the, you know, how anybody would be able to go and enjoy that. And we're, we still haven't been able to move on that. And again, it's not like we have less kids playing soccer. So I'm sure those are further busting at the seams. And then of course, Mason Rudolph. I mean, that's been a, The first one is one that's in my ward. Mason Rudolph is something that's important to a lot of people in my ward. You can drive through Ward 10, and you're going to see the signs.

I would say even probably more so than that, then the one viable golf course that we do have is not going to be viable if we skip this another year. Like I said, Jim is a miracle worker with what he does as superintendent over there, but there's only so much that he can do, and we're going to start losing greens, and then we're not going to have a municipal golf course at all. Okay.

And I do have more questions, but I have questions for building and codes. So it's not in line with that particular slide. You mentioned the adding of the three.

Yes, ma'am.

To try and get closer to the 12 being the idea there's 12 of us. Yes. How many council members reach out to you with issues? There's 12 council members, so how many council members tend to reach out to you with problems or things that need to be looked at in their wards?

Well, everybody ultimately, because it's important to your constituents. If we don't deal with you directly, we definitely deal with constituents that would, if we say no, they're coming to you, we just try our best not to.

Well, and also kind of where are we in comparison with other cities? I know you look. There's no way you don't.

We do, and it is extremely difficult to balance that out, right? So every other city, they just have different needs than we do. One that just stood out to me that was a huge sticker shock when you look at numbers, Houston, Texas, they are bigger than us, but not by much. they have 28 sign code officers that only deal with signs. We don't have 28 employees and they got 28 sign officers that go around checking, you know, then doing sign abatement. So it, it relatively speaking, we are probably a third of what we should be for the average of the communities that are around here in code enforcement staff.

And then you talked a little bit about as far as the different abatement and whether doing it in-house or bringing in a third party and having to do it, which costs more.

It always costs more to have a third party come in. The biggest, the biggest advantage of doing it in-house is we control the outcome. We can And we can do it quickly. If it's something that's within our purview, it wasn't a joke. We get a call, hey, there's a mattress laying across the sidewalk on Madison Street. Thankfully, we have a crew of abatement folks that can go out there and take care of it. And that's not the only example. We dealt with one a couple weeks ago in another ward where a property that we own, we don't have to wait. We don't have to wait for a third party to put it in their schedule and go clean it up and just throw a little work at it and call it good. We get to go out, we get to clean it up, we get to affect how it looks on the outcome, and we get to deal with the constituent and the council member and say, hey, is this good for you? Did we do what you expected?

Well, and I know this isn't the same thing. This would be more in line with street, but I think of it as the grassy area on Warfield. And the way, I mean, heard numerous complaints everywhere about how terrible that looked. And, of course, that's a state road, and that was contracted out. And, I mean, it looked like just somebody came in there and did really crazy cutting, way too low, too high. And that's the effect of, again, they're using third parties. to do that versus, you know, different things where, like you talked about, we do it in-house.

And we, all the folks who work here live here, right? We all, we want it to look like we live here and that's how we treat it. So, because we do live here.

All right. That, that answers, that answers my questions for you, sir. Okay. And then the next question I would have is, For you, I guess, we saw a lot of things mentioned that if it was pushed off, so what does it mean for next year then? So if we go and stay right at the 92 cents, what does that mean for a year from now?

The biggest concern that I have a year from now is we have heard the legislation that is going to cap our property tax or will be brought up again. It has not passed, but we know that it will be brought up again and we're expecting it to pass. If you talk to MTASC or just any of the other cities, the only lever that we have to pull as a city is property tax. Every other tax that we have, or I'm sorry, yeah, every other tax we have is already capped. So if you leave it at 92 cents and let's say they come back next year and they say you can have 2% and 2% inflation, we can only go up. like $0.05 from that. And that will be capped every year that we can only make marginal increases. I think, too, one of the biggest things that I wanted to talk about with these guys' budgets, and I can just throw you rough numbers from my finance budget last year. And I think it applies to almost all of ours. My budget in total finance was $2.2 million. Only $200,000 of that was operating. So $2 million of our budget was people that are already in positions. So if we were asked to cut, most likely we're going to have to look at filled positions.

Okay. All right. I think one last question I have, and this is more for the council members, many of us already know. Anybody that I know, I've already been working with you on a few amendments, but anybody that is looking to amend anything in the budget, of course we have to have it in writing to be able to do it. How do they need to go about doing that?

You've received the budget template, and I've talked to a few of you. You're going to work on those or come to me or Regina and ask us for help. And if we can get those by the 8th of June, we can help you get them ready for the June 11th first reading.

And is it wise to also talk with those particular departments as well?

It would be wonderful to talk to the department heads also. Okay.

Thank you. I'm done. You're welcome.

Councilman Shekinah.

Yes, thank you, Mayor. I have questions for Fire and Rescue first, and then Building and Code second, and then Ms. Wilcox last. Chief, you mentioned the Special Operations Division and how originally some of the things were through grant funding. Can you elaborate on what in particular and then what do some of those costs look like that the city must now pick up because we still want to keep those?

Yes, so our sustainment We're looking at about $20,000, $25,000 in different areas for that. Additionally, for special operations, they have certain trainings that they go through every year. And I think we have about three in particular that also reflects, we pay for the class and it also reflects It reflects in overtime, which is about $20,000 per class on those. The sustainment goes towards the equipment, training, and some of those perishable items that we have to replace every so many years is another area on that. So it's pretty extensive. It's reflected throughout our budget in different areas. and different line items depending on what that item is and how much it costs if it's over $500.

All right, that sounds good. That's my question for you, and you answered the question about the trucks. Two of them are over 10 years. So that's all I have for you. The next one is building and codes. Billy and Coach, you said you have five officers right now. You're going to be asking for three more. Yes, sir. Do you have the vehicles for those three more already?

That ask is in the budget.

Okay. So that's in the budget also?

Short answer, no. We do not currently have the vehicles. We've asked for those as well. That's part of the – that is in that $90,000 cost. Yes. Getting them started is in there. So any equipment they need to get started plus their vehicles within that cost.

Okay, and the next question is about your vehicles. Vehicles that are over 10 to 15 years old, do you have an idea about how many you look at? Are you projecting new vehicles every so many years? What are you looking at?

We do, and anything we have over 10, I think we have a handful that are in the 10 to 13-year-old range, and we have them slated to be replaced this year.

Okay, sounds good.

I think we replaced two of them last year, and I think we have three or four more to go that are in that age group.

All right, sounds good. And then for Mr. Wilcox.

Thank you.

All right, now the hard ones. When I look up here at this slide, I see fire, fire and rescue, police, streets, and, of course, building and codes. They're just not listed, but they should be listed also. I'm not in favor of cutting anything from any of these because these are the guys of anything. They need a little bit more. But we have 19 departments in the city. So if anyone's looking at cutting, well, you should be looking at some of those other departments, not any of these departments that are up here right now. Because, again, this is definitely a need. We can't cut a million dollars from fire and rescue or a million dollars from CPD. We just can't do that. Because all of us, when there's a call, when neighbors complain about their homes being burglarized, well, that falls under police. I had a neighbor today, you know, talk about how, you know, on Warfield, those apartments and the folks come across the fence and they, you know, stealing stuff out of the out of Virginia Hills. Well, we need response time. Right. And how long does that take? Right. You know, seems like it takes forever. So if anything, we need more. So I'm definitely against anything that's fire and rescue police. streets. I've been trying to get Rossview Road paved for the last four years and we still haven't, seems like we got a little piece, but a little piece is not enough. So we need to pick up the pace on streets. David, we may have something, we may have to have another conversation. So again, that's my spiel on that. And then on this 1.23, have you done any other estimates like 1.15? What would that look like and how much would we have to cut? Have you done just Have you just done any other numbers besides the 123?

We have done some other numbers, but I could not speak to them off the top of my head. I'm just wondering how you've done. We've looked at $1.17. Last year we had asked for $1.15, so we looked at $1.17. So we do have those numbers. Sounds good. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor.

Councilman Zacharias, you're recognized.

Thank you, Mayor. Just on the previous speaker's comment, I've got it right here, if you want it. I'll pass this down. This is, if you look at the far right column, it is the percentage, or the, well, no, just pass it around, because everybody wants it.

Yeah, everybody can have it.

Not greedy. If you don't get one that's in color, I'm sorry, my color printer had a horrible paper jam that I have still not cleared. So I had to get the rest in black and white. But that far right column is the percentage of that 31% requested tax increase that kind of belongs to each of the departments, how much kind of goes with each department based on last year's budget, last year's approved budget, and this year's initial proposed budget. So if you can find it in there, I'd love to see it. I have one question for Chief Montgomery, and then I will not ask the other department heads that I had written down questions for, because really it was just getting their help to make my point, so I'll go ahead and do that myself. But Chief Montgomery, I'm sorry, this is the third time I've asked you this question, but I do think it's important that it be answered in this forum with these people. And I want to be very clear, I don't normally get involved in county budget stuff or anything like that, but I'm looking and trying to figure out why we as a city are struggling to have a balanced and a stable budget. So that's caused me to look at the breakdown in taxes as far as what percentage goes to the county, what percentage goes to the city. And it's been eye-opening for sure. But one thing that I keep running into is this new fire department that the county has. City taxpayers pay county taxes and city taxes. They're funding one fire department here in Clarksville. They're funding another. I'm talking about people that live inside of Clarksville. They're funding another fire department in the county. What are city residents getting for the money that they are paying towards that county fire department?

Nothing. We provide all the services inside the city, and we also support the county through mutual aid.

So through their county property taxes, you're telling me that city residents are paying for a fire department that will never serve them.

Yes, we will not.

When you do fire suppression in the county, like if the street department paves a parking lot for Parks and Rec, Parks and Rec pays for those materials. When you respond to a call out in the county, Are you reimbursed for that expenditure?

No, we're not. We operate through a mutual aid agreement, and we accept all that liability and responsibility.

I'm sorry, you accept the liability? You're not even covered if one of your guys gets hurt?

Correct.

All right, thank you. And then for these other points that, like I said, I'm not going to use apartment heads as props. But we heard from Chief Burdine that for the last two years, new hires have been requested but not approved. And that was out of a desire to not raise taxes. We mentioned Chattanooga having 100 more police officers than we do. In case anybody's interested, Chattanooga's city tax rate is $1.93. For building codes, you've got your abatement mission. That's what's suffering right now. I know many of us have received phone calls about seeing unsightly trash on the side of the road. I think that this could be attributed to that. There's my fire question. When you look, I'm not saying 31 cents is the answer. It's too much at once. But when you look at what Clarksville is spending per resident, which is about $900, and you look at what other cities our size are spending, which is about $2,000 per resident, not suggesting that we pay $2,000 or spend $2,000 per resident because somebody else is, but we need to spend enough to run the city. And I don't know what that number is, but I think that if If it could be done for $900 per citizen, then we wouldn't be the only city in Tennessee trying to do it.

Thank you. Councilman Clonch, you're recognized.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Several of my council members brought up great points. That board, with maybe the exception of the bottom one, you can't mess with the central services. You can't. We've increased the pay for our officers, and it's still below what they probably should be getting. Our fire department is still below what they should be getting. I very much concur with my fellow council members in that it is not a self-licking ice cream cone. The city does not run itself with the funds that we have. That being said, there's a communication piece We spoke last week about my amendments and turning them in prior so that we could make sure that I didn't look like a buffoon, for lack of a better term. But also, the constituents that I've talked to from Ward 2 and all over the city, we have to pay the same taxes that everybody else does. We got this the same time that everybody else does. There was no read ahead. There was no executive summary in my former life is what I would call it. Text message, heads up. So when everybody else got this is when we got this. So we were chewing on it at the same rate as everybody else in this room. I would just like to be mindful of that. In the budget there is a lot, and we talked about this, people cost a lot of money. Insurance costs a lot of money. One of the things that, and I don't know if this is the forum to ask this, but We spoke about this a little bit as well. Kind of a train the trainer. Are there department certifications that department heads are sending their people to that we could have a train the trainer situation where maybe initially it costs a little bit more, but then it could be done in-house as opposed to housing and all of these things. And I understand this is an amendment time and I will talk to those department heads individually would be one thought that I have, but We are growing. We also, I've talked to building in coach about four times in the last three days and three of those conversations were on the Saturday night at about 11 o'clock at night via text message. Same with street department. I've got a problem and I don't wait until the next morning because I'll forget and I get responses and I'm like, Hey, I'm sorry. So the balance of growth, smart growth, correct growth versus what it costs to run the city don't align again i concur with my fellow council member 31 cents isn't it i i don't believe however comma we have to spend more money in order to maintain the things that we want to maintain or it's going to stop right that's that's how it works you you don't get to have both sides of the coin and from a political standpoint Everybody would say, you don't say that, don't say that, don't say that. Well, the truth is the truth, and I've said this before. Sometimes it's not pretty or kind. I am not in favor of 31 cents. I am doing my due diligence to reduce it as much as I can. We've had a meeting, and I've requested another one. I also have a couple other department heads with some different ideas. We love hearing from you guys, but understand we not exempt from all of this we are a part of this as well as far as what we have to pay the monies that are taken out of our paychecks our retirements our taxes as well and it is hard and it it's a lot but for lack of a better term we've got to have that come to jesus talk about where we were where we need to be and what we need to sustain And again, it's not at least the top four of those. There's some other things with departments of borrowing equipment. Maybe it could be worked out. But I very much appreciate I have never, ever emailed, called a department head and not gotten a near simultaneous response. When I took this seat, I went and visited every single department head And every single department head, A, is working, doing more things with less. That was a theme that I heard from every single department head. But also, every single department head has greeted me with respect, kindness, and is very much solutions-oriented since I've been here in February. I very much appreciate that. We also know that I am not real, real quiet, and I know that there are some department heads that we – maybe disagree on some things, but we still come to the table when it comes to the citizens of this great city, which we all are of those two, right? We use the word constituents a lot, but I live in Clarksville as do all of these other individuals. So we're afflicted with the same issues that everybody else is or the lack of support. And again, last time I will always support fire. I will always support our police. Mr. Crosby and I were on the phone. I was waiting in water. And he's like, Eric, what do I need to do? And with less than 12 hours, they were out there handling the situation. Mr. Smith, we have spent a lot of time together. Probably too much. Answering questions and things. So it's easy to sit behind a computer at home, and I'm not yelling. and poke at all of the things going on in the city. But when you really start to break it down and look at this piece by piece, I do believe there's things that could be cut. Absolutely. Is it a zero sum? It's not. It is truly not. Sir, remarks complete.

Councilman Chandler, you're recognized. Thank you, Mayor. We need to expand a little more on the... basically i'm i've never been one for shying back from the stunt that the state's trying to pull on us on the two percent what people need to realize is this is not this past year was the first year it was tried and what they're trying to tell the cities and i wish it stay out of our business but what they're trying to stay up tell cities if you go more than two percent and the inflation You have to put it on a referendum. Now, what you're asking people to do if you put it on a referendum is, well, do you want to pay more money or not? You know, I'm old. I had a fellow tell me the other day, you're not a senior citizen any longer, you're old. And... I have watched this city. I've been connected to this city for 40-something years of my life, and I'm talking about working for them and representing them. And it's time that we quit eating steak on a bologna budget. It's that plain and simple. We can't expect. I had a person call me while I was at my granddaughter's high school graduation in South Carolina, complaining. about, you're going to raise taxes, you're going to raise taxes. Well, ma'am, guess what? I'm on fixed income just like you are. And guess what? You should complain about groceries, complain about this and that and gasoline. Well, you know what? Those same costs are passed on to the city. We have got to get this out of our mindset that, okay, well, let's just raise it 20 cents. Let's raise it five cents. I actually had a call from a well-known businessman in town said, hell, raise it 40 cents. Get what you need now and get everything straightened out. We can't expect all of these departments to continue. We set up here. You take away budget time. Any other time, we set up here praising the department heads. We're praising what the city is doing. But then when we come in here, we forget about it at budget time. We can't expect the... I guarantee you every one of those... department heads including you miss wilcox it got up here tonight is a big time headache daily every day trying to figure out where they're going to get something how they're going to do it i've had my differences with some city department heads don't get me wrong but they are trying their damnedest folks And we have got to, we want to, oh, well, Clarksville moved here. Come on. Get in here. We're the best city in the state. But yet what people don't realize is if we keep this up, we're going to be the best bankrupt city in the state. And if you don't think the state will try to come in here and take us over if we don't follow our financial responsibilities, you're wrong. That's all I got to say, Mayor, and I need to leave because I got an emergency phone call a while ago.

All right, please go. Councilman Streetman, you're recognized.

Mayor, I apologize. Are we allowed to ask questions of department heads other than what's on our list here? I know that I'd like to talk to, ask some questions of both the city clerk as well as Ms. Wilson from IT. I know that both of them spoke at the finance committee meeting. budget review but I'd really like to hear from both of them because we don't have a lot of new hires in our budget but those are two of the I mean we've already heard from building and code so if we can just start with miss Wilson maybe first to talk about the two new hires because I know not everybody was at those meetings if they haven't watched them I'd want everybody to be able to hear about the two employees that you are requesting

So we currently have a staff of 14 in IT and I'm asking for a network administrator and an application specialist. I started here in 2013. I've asked for 13 positions and I've gotten three. A standard IT ratio for a government of our size Low is 16 to 22. High is 50 to 75. So I'm not even at the low end of an IT ratio for a government of our size. So I'm asking for those two positions specifically. One, network is not just computer to computer anymore. It's HVAC systems, it's traffic signals, it's all of those IOT devices that we're now seeing connect to the network. I have one network engineer. So I'm asking for a network administrator for backup. If the network engineer is sick, the network administrator can pick up where that person is. But we've become responsible for a lot more network devices. So it's just to handle that load. Application specialist is because we currently, I think we're at almost 70 softwares that we support. And I think there's seven scheduled for this year's budget. That's not in my budget, that's in the department's budget. So just because your application specialist Just because you don't see it in my budget, it's in these departments' budget. And our department, like HR and finance and legal, while we may be in the background, we are supporting those departments in their initiatives. And so we need the staff to handle that as well.

Okay, thank you. Like I said, I felt like it was important for everybody on the council to hear that, as well as the public to understand that. Again, like you mentioned, you've asked for 13? 13 since 2013. And you've gotten three. And I know the past few years we've been kicking it down the can.

The last position I got was in 2024, and that was a cybersecurity analyst. So this would just add those two more for growth.

Okay. Thank you. I appreciate it. And then if we could also hear from the city clerk in regard to the at deputy and why that position is so important. I know I took a lot away from it when you talked about it in the finance meeting and how important it is that you get a backup.

Thank you. I'm not used to being on the side of things. I'm used to being behind the scenes. So I am asking for a deputy city clerk. Of the 10 largest cities in Tennessee, with us being the fifth largest, soon to be fourth largest, We are the only city that has one staff member in their legislative department. Just one. Currently all statutory, legislative, and records responsibilities are concentrated in a single role, which is myself. I have no backup. If I get sick, if something happens to me, you can't meet. If meetings aren't noticed, you can't have a meeting like this. You can't meet to approve the budget because I have no backup. To continue operating this way creates a significant risk exposure with a single point of failure. I've been asking for three years for a deputy clerk. And for various reasons, I have not been granted that. But we can't continue this way. It's not realistic. It's just, I need the help. And with more legislation, you all passed a change to the liquor ordinance, which was great, but that, I'm still dealing with what we passed in July. on a daily basis. That adds extra work, extra load. And as more legislation comes across my desk, that adds more duties to what my core duties are.

If we were to bring forward, or if I were to bring forward any kind of legislation that would be similar to the liquor that we have in place and the regulation regarding How many that you can have? Is that something that you would be able to do if that came forward?

No, ma'am. I can't take on any more tasks at this time.

So if there was an industry out there that a lot of people from the public wanted regulated, there would be no way to do that?

I don't have the staff. And it doesn't just affect my staff or my department. It affects building and codes. It affects our finance department. It affects our legal department. All those departments together, that is an additional load. But many departments have backups. I don't have any. It's just me.

I think you also mentioned that you're the only one that can attest to the mayor's signature. Is that correct?

So I'm the only one legally who can attest to the mayor's signature. We have, you approved a bond. So bonds, we're going to have a bond signing coming up. In the past, several years ago, We had a bond signing. I had a family emergency. I had to fly back to California for this emergency. I had to fly home to do that bond signing and then fly back to be with my family. We can't, that's something you can't reschedule because it'll cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars if the interest rate changes. So those kinds of things, I'm the only one that's able to do.

So if that had been a personal emergency versus a family emergency...

If I was in the hospital, if we had a bond signing Thursday and I have an emergency and I'm incapacitated, we can't have that bond signing. Contracts can't be signed. I have to attest the mayor's signature on contracts. If for some reason I'm not here, that holds back work for other departments because they can't get those contracts signed.

Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you.

Any more questions? Councilman Smith, you recognized?

Thank you, Mayor. First of all, let me thank all of the department heads for coming forth and bringing us or sharing with us their budgets. You all did a great job. I really had to think about what I'm going to ask because you did such a good job in bringing us the information that we needed to hear. And I know it's hard when we are confronted with increasing taxes because I've had a lot of complaints about Please don't raise the taxes. So for the public, I have a question for Ms. Wilcox. How much money do we provide for the Senior Citizen Center? How much did we give each year?

Usually we give around $800,000 a year to the Senior Center.

Okay, thank you. And so how much money did we give to the school system each year? How much of our tax dollars did we provide?

Right now, for this fiscal year, I've looked at that we have given them $75 million. $72 million of that is required by state law.

So we can't cut that out, right?

We cannot. Okay.

Now, this other $75 million, was it all documented, or was this something we were given and we didn't know? I don't know.

Actually, the sales tax rate is broken into four parts that were put into place from 1964 to 1988. So this has been going on for quite some time. Like I said, it's collected by the state, given to the county, and then the county forwards us our portion. and we get a report every month about what was collected.

So are we going to give them money in this new fiscal year? We're going to give them what we're... We're going to give them the $72 million that's required by the state, right?

Correct.

Okay, what else are we going to give? I thought we gave them more money.

We do give them 20% of a voluntary portion from our 1977 tax, and that has not changed as of yet.

We still have that in the budget to give that to them.

Yes, and it ends up about between $3 to $3.5 million a year.

I know that Parks and Recreation Director said that they would have to cut $250,000, I think, from their budget if we didn't increase the tax. All of the other partners said something about that as well. Now, if we're taking the money from the senior citizens building now, it's not in the budget to give them anything this year.

Correct.

How is that going to help our budget? What impact is it going to make? I know it'll increase it a little bit, but what are we going to do with those dollars? Would that help the Parks and Recreation Department or what?

The Parks and Recreation Department's budget has increased this year to take on nine new employees full-time and also some part-time work. And also they have anticipated some cost in equipment, things like that.

So is that, I'm saying with that $800,000 that we gave the senior citizen building, would that be allotted to the Parks and Recreation Department?

Yes, we have already done that in the budget that you've got in front of you.

Okay, so I don't have it in front of me, but, you know, it's okay. I can look at it now. So she wouldn't really be lacking anything like the $250,000 if we didn't raise the taxes because you're giving her the $800,000 that we give the senior citizen. Is that correct?

Not sure how to answer that. Mrs. Letourneau is the expert on her department, so I would let her answer that question.

Would you please let her answer that? Because if we'd given her that $800,000, it would look like she wouldn't be shorted nothing. She said she would be lacking $250,000.

I think what you're referring to is the last slide that says if the tax rate... We must remove.

If we don't increase the taxes, the city would have to remove at least $21 million. And you said you would have to remove $250,000 from your department. But it looks like to me if you're going to get the $800,000 that's no longer going to the senior citizen building, it looks like you wouldn't have a shortage.

Well, I'm also taking on nine new employees, part-time employees, the operation of the building, the utilities, the maintenance. It's got an elevator in the building. So I also have to replace the equipment that's there. What equipment? Apparently all of it.

Replace the equipment in the senior citizen building? Is that what you're saying? And so that's going to add up to about $800,000. Is this just a random answer, or do you have concrete information?

It's actually $1.2 million. The $800,000 plus the operating expenses and equipment is right around $1.2 million.

1.2 million. Okay, all right. I think that's all I have for you. Thank you. Also, let's see what else I have. Can someone tell me, I think it would be you, Ms. Wilcox, how many people in the city of Clarksville receives tax relief and tax freeze?

Okay, let me go back to the slide so I can give you exact numbers. Excuse me, this will take a moment. Here we are. This is the slide that shows for tax relief. We have 5,526 households. And on the tax freeze, we have 1,027 households on that program.

Does that help our tax credit to decrease, or how does it affect us? How does it impact the city's budget?

Well, both of these programs lock in or reduce the tax bill for the resident, so we receive less revenue. However, these are state programs, and they do help with these programs. They don't leave it 100% to us.

just asking a question because for the public i kind of know but you know they told me to ask some of these questions okay so all right i think that's all i have for right now but i thank you very much thank you mayor thank you any more comment or question i want to say thank you to the departments for their diligence in putting this budget together it's been

both a pleasure but also very painful in doing this, and so we look forward to more deliberations on the budget in the weeks to come. So we are now ready for public comment. Any member of the public wish to address the council? We have room for three, I see ya. So, three people, five minutes each. If you'll come forward, give us your name, and you'll have five minutes.

Good evening, everyone. I am Lois Grater. And, of course, we're back here for the Senior Center. Now, some people have been confused. We are a nonprofit organization that has operated on the Clark Street building for over 30 years. So when I looked and found mine items in Parks and Rec's budget, referring to the center, we are not part of the city. We are not part of Parks and Rec. So this needs to be removed from the budget. Now it is true our budget is under 900,000. Now part of this money is actually, although I could never find a line item, offset by Title VI in the US government. making our operating costs much less. Now y'all are talking about saving money, cutting things, but yet they want to come in, remove us from the building, and spend over a million dollars more for what we do for a lot less money. That makes no sense. Why would you want to do this? Most of the center is run by volunteers. We have several programs, although if the mayor has ideas for better programs, we'd love to hear them. But I don't see where it benefits the city or the dilemma over raising taxes to remove us from the building and spend more money, that million dollars could offset what the fire department has to cut if this doesn't go through. Where does that make sense? Where is that fiscal responsibility? To add more on the taxpayers and the burden on our city services for something that a lot of us provide for free. We donate our time, we donate our talents. There's anywhere from 40 to 50 volunteers running programs and doing work all the time. Now, I will tell you about three years ago, We had asked for some landscaping outside of the ADC area. Then, all of a sudden, the former director and her visions of grandeur and the mayor, next thing we know, we are getting a $2.8 million expansion. Now, the board... for the center did not ask for this, we didn't want this, we didn't need this. We asked for landscaping. And being that we're leaving the building, there's no point in keeping that $1.8 million on the books. There's $989,000 in the budget put back for that project that obviously is not needed. And if you choose to ask for a budget and fund the Ajax Turner Senior Center, which will still operate, we are more than just a building. It's our seniors. It's all the people that put all the work into making this what it is. We're much more, and we will continue to operate despite being relocated. We're not going away. We're not quitting. We're not that generation. Give this some thought, please. Thank you.

Next, we have room for two more people, five minutes each. Please come forward, give us your name, and you have five minutes.

Hello, council. I'm Dr. Gregory Fryer. Thank you guys very much for all the hard work you did. This was very good educational, but I just want to echo what my colleague says. The math does not make sense. We need the police department. We need to have the fire department. But when it comes to moving the senior center under parks and rec with an increased budget, the math does not make sense. You may have heard that the mayor said that, hey, he's been working with the board to try to fix some things. I remember two meetings with the mayor. One meeting I didn't get to make. Because we talked about that, but I didn't share with me about what they talked about and that was Oh Volunteers people on the board did not need to be a volunteer at the center well Think about that the people who are on the board. They have a lot invested in the center and so they volunteer The other meeting was about when we found out that we were going to be terminated our lease was going to be terminated If you call that working with the board, it didn't happen. We want to work with the mayor. We want to get this issue resolved. But when it comes to the budget, I say the budget does not make sense increasing it. This is the senior part under parts and rank, $1.2 million, where we're operating it for less than that outside. And yet, like you said, it's going to increase the tax burden on our citizens. So Please do not pass this budget as is. Also, I'd just like to point out a lot of great things that we're doing here in the city. We need to continue with making sure those things are in place. But when you look at the numbers, once again, there's an example, and I hate to call you out, but you compared us to Houston, Texas. What's that, Houston County?

You're speaking to the council, you're not directing questions to Dr. Pryor, and I invite you to get back on task.

Back on task. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Well, it was Houston, Texas, I believe. How many people are in Houston, Texas? You're looking at almost 3 million people in Houston, Texas. How many are in Clarksville, Tennessee? Less than 200,000. If you look at Montgomery County, less than 350,000. But yet, hey, they have 28 people on their sign codes just on their signs. Why are we comparing us to Houston? The math does not make sense. So with that, thank you all very much for your consideration with this. We need to keep the Ajax Turner Center independent and funded.

Thank you very much. We have room for one more person to address the council. Mr. Parker, you have five minutes if you'll give us your name.

I'm Jimmy Parker. I'm from the city of Clarksville. I was on the board of the senior center for six years, five of those as chair. So I know what the senior center is all about and what it does for this community. And most of our seniors in this community depend on that center. We have so many people in this area that need help. And our volunteers are there to help them. And you're not going to, I don't care what anybody says, you're not going to get The same thing when the city tries to take this over. It's just not going to happen. It will not happen. A lot of those people will not continue coming to the center. I've talked to the people. I've listened to them. The majority of members are against this. They're absolutely not for this. So please think about this before you decide to have the city take over the center because I'm telling you, Mayor, you said that you were concerned about the safety of the center. Well, for the last six to eight years, the fire marshal has flagged the fire system on his annual report and has reported that to the city every year. Nothing's been done. Nothing. It's still flashing. Half the center does not even hear the alarm. Still going. But we're concerned about the safety. Boy, are we concerned. Nothing's happening. For my first two and a half years, the city gave us nothing for maintenance. We paid for it out of our own money. Finally, we found out the city was supposed to be responsible for it. And then that's when they got involved. For the last two and a half to three years, we paid out of our own budget, and we were hurting. So a lot of this stuff you're hearing is not true. It needs to stay the way it is. It will cost the city less money in the long run. So please think about this. Thank you.

Thank you. We stand adjourned. See you Thursday for the executive session.