City Council - Regular Meeting

There's two people in red on either side of the dinosaur.

It's fine.

Good evening. The workshop council meeting for city of Copper Cove held August 4th, 2026. It's called to order at 5 p.m. Madam Secretary, please call the roll.

Mayor Yancey.

Here.

Christina Strophus. Here. Rita Hogan. Here. Howard Hawk.

Here.

John Hale.

Here.

Del Treadway.

Here.

Vanya Hart. Here. Jack Smith.

Here. All right, we've got a full house. We move to item C, announcements.

None for me, Mr. Mayor. None for me, sir.

No, Mr. Mayor.

Ryan?

Yes, sir. I have a few. So city council places six and seven are up for election this November. And the filing for those few positions is currently open. And deadline to file is August 17th of 2026. This Thursday, August 6th, at the Civic Center from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. is a free fan giveaway. So 37 fans have been donated by the Rotary Club of Coppers Cove in the United Way of Central Texas and will be distributed by the Coppers Cove Fire Department, again, at the Civic Center from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. or until supplies are exhausted. This Friday on August 7th, at City Park Pool is a dive-in movie beginning at 7.30 p.m. or at sunset, and the movie is Luca. Saturday, August 8th, is a adaptive Splish Splash Water Bash at Field 5 Pavilion from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and that is for our adaptive program. August 12th at 10 a.m. or 5 p.m. is a food handlers course. you can go online and register, or excuse me, you can contact our code compliance department and register for that code food handlers course. And then just a reminder that CCISD classes start on August 17th, just a couple of weeks from now. And then August 22nd is the fifth annual Negrete Firefighter Foundation fundraiser, which will be held at Texas A&M Central Texas. Thank you.

Thank you, Brian. I have nothing, sir. Nothing, sir.

No announcements.

No announcements. All right. We move to Item D, Public Recognition.

Item 1, Proclamation, Stormwater Pollution Awareness Week. Dandy Yancey, Mayor.

City of Coppers Cove proclamation. Whereas polluted water discharged into creeks, rivers, and lakes can result in the death of fish, the destruction of wildlife habitats, a loss in aesthetic value, and contamination of drinking water sources and recreational waterways that can threaten public health, and whereas the Clean Water Act of 1972 prohibits the discharge of any pollutant into or adjacent to waters of the United States unless authorized by the Environmental Protective Agency through the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Whereas major source of pollutants into the waters of the United States is polluted urban and suburban stormwater runoff and whereas the most common sources of urban and suburban stormwater pollution our household hazardous chemicals yard and pet waste automotive chemicals trash and silt and whereas it is imperative that pollutants be prevented from entering into the stormwater runoff within and adjacent to the City of Copperas Cove to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its citizens. Now, therefore, I, Dan Yancy, Mayor of City of Copperas Cove, do hereby proclaim the week of August 17 through 21, 2026 as Stormwater Awareness Month. Stormwater Pollution Awareness Week in the City of Copper's Cove and let it be known that the City Council of the City of Copper's Cove urges all citizens of this city to make efforts to reduce stormwater pollution.

Usually I come up here and I accept these proclamations as I'm over public works and storm water control falls under my department. However, I wanted y'all to have a chance to actually look at the guys that make this happen on a day-to-day basis. Without their day-to-day support, our program wouldn't nearly be where it is and in compliance with TCUQ regulations. In order to really protect one of the most precious of our resources, the water that returns to the watershed, ultimately makes it down to the lakes and returns to us in the form of potable water. So once again, my stormwater management crew, John Field, their lead, and we have Caleb out here with his daughter. He's a big part of that too. So thank you very much.

All right, we move to item E, workshop items.

Item one, Impact Fees 101 presentation by Ben Plett, PE, PTO, Kimley, Horn & Associates, Inc., Bobby Lewis, Development Services Director.

Thank you, Lisa. Mayor and Council, on March 3rd, 2026, City Council adopted Resolution 26-9 2026-9 establishing the Capital Improvements Advisory Committee to review and make recommendations for implementation of water and roadway impact fees. On July 20th, 2026, Kim Lee Horn made an impact fee presentation to members of the Capital Improvements Advisory Committee for education and discussion purposes. Now I'll bring up Ben Pleat. He's from Kim Lee Horn and his staff. and he will make a presentation impact fees 101 presentation to city council.

All right, good evening, everyone, mayor, council. My name is Ben Platt. I work for Kimalee Horn. And I'm the project manager on the roadway impact fee and the water impact fee update. My particular expertise is actually in the roadway impact fee section. But I also have Sierra Feller here, who's kind of leading the water part of that. It's two different disciplines within. And we also have Emma Brockman here too, who has helped me with the roadway impact fee. And we'll kind of run through it. Yeah, so today we're really just talking about education and discussion and what council's role is as relates to the roadway and the water impact fee here. So not adopting anything, no ordinance or anything. We're just kind of here to talk and give kind of a brief overview. If you have questions, please stop us. Happy to jump into any section that's interesting to you all. And we'll have plenty of time at the end for questions as well. Okay, so jump right into it. So what are impact fees? Most simple terms, it's a one-time fee for new development. The purpose is to recover infrastructure costs required to serve future development, right? So the fee is, only to serve the water you need or the vehicle miles of capacity on roadways you need in the future. And of course it's a legal way to collect a flexible fee. So one of the big advantages of it is you can take many developments dollars and put it towards one large improvement that actually helps them rather than making small one-off improvements to the existing infrastructure. more about what they are and what can be used with recoverable impact fees and what isn't. First and foremost, construction costs of capital improvement roadways or water lines that is on the impact fee plan. you can't just build a roadway or build a water line though you have to have surveying engineering fees you have to have planning fees to know where those are gonna go many land acquisition costs also count towards that and then actually debt service would also count towards projects that still have capacity to give to the future roadway or water network so I think of it as anything that is capacity adding is eligible to receive roadway or water impact fees what can't be is obviously the next step here to think about. Anything that's not shown in the roadway impact fee or the water impact fee CIP is not recoverable. So we need to have that line on the map to put these dollars towards those projects. That's a large part of the studies to develop the RCP roadway capacity plan and WCP water capacity plan. Any repair operation or maintenance of existing facilities, that is not eligible. It's only for future roadways upgrades basically. If you have a roadway that's currently over capacity, that would not be eligible to widen that road. The existing demand already needs that roadway widened. If you widened it, there would not be room for future development, so that would not be eligible. And then the administrative cost of operating the impact fee program. So the planning study to do it is recoverable, but the staff tied to administer the program later on is actually not recoverable by state law. I know recently, I saw it was on the agenda for later on as well as the street maintenance utility and the roadway impact fee. And I think if you just look at the names, it's kind of like we're charging them twice for the same thing. That is not the intent of them. The street maintenance utility is an ongoing monthly recurring charge. You get that every month to use the roads. and that is used for operation and maintenance only applied to existing development and based on how much development there is in the city right now. Whereas roadway impact fees is all about future development. You're only charged them one time and it's based on how much traffic we think is coming in the next 10 years.

I do have a question there. So you do say you're only charging them one time, but as soon as they get here, they'll be paying the street maintenance utility fee. That's correct, yes, yes.

The purpose of that is the roadway impact fee is only charged when the project is developed. That's correct though. This slide got a little cut off, that's my fault likely. Just going through why cities use impact fees and kind of the advantages of using them. The first thing is they're equitable. No matter if you're the first development on a road or the last development on the road, you'll pay the same impact fee as long as it's within a similar time period. They're predictable. On day one of a development you can say I'm going to build 100 single family homes and you know what your fee is going to be immediately. They're accountable, so by state law, this program actually must be audited and you must spend the money you collect within 10 years within the service area of where the development is as well. And they're mathematically proportional. That's kind of like the state law part of it. So the impact fee is directly tied to how much traffic you're producing or how much water you need. It's directly related mathematically. So now we're gonna jump into a lot of what goes into the study. There's several different components here and we'll touch on each of these things a little bit more. I'm gonna let Emma go ahead and talk about the land use assumptions.

Okay, so the land use assumptions are basically the growth that we expect to see within the next 10 years. This establishes the amount of infrastructure required to serve that new growth. So in order to calculate the amount a development owes, we first need to know how much growth there is expected to be in these next 10 years. It establishes where the growth is happening, how much growth is happening, and what type of development is happening. And one thing with these is they're not perfect. We can't predict the future of how much people are gonna come here. But it is our best guess and the city did provide us with great data to use and develop the land use assumptions with. So mainly our data sources were historical building permit data for the roadway impact fee and then historical water meter data for the water impact fee. Additionally, with those growth rates that we got from the historical data, we back checked it with things like the street maintenance utility report and then also staff input and then also the KTMPO travel demand model. As Ben mentioned earlier, there are service areas for each of the impact fees, the water and the roadway. And this is because the funds collected within a service area have to be spent within that service area. So for the roadway impact fee, it is bounded by city limits, which is a little different than the water impact fee, which we'll get to in a second. And then there's also a six mile trip length limit. So we established three service areas, but with service area C, we expect no growth in it, so it is a no fee service area. And then for the water impact fee, it is bounded by the CCN, which is the jurisdiction that the utility is provided to. And additional areas that are expected to be added into the CCN are also included. So these are our 10 year growth projections for the roadway impact fee. Another thing to note is that we did get city input and so like in service area B, we are aware of the new VA development that's coming. So we did add that because we were aware of that development coming. Now I'm gonna pass it to Sierra to talk about the water.

All right, so again, Sierra Feller, also Kimley Horan focused really on the water side of things. And here we're just highlighting how those water growth rates were established. And so it's probably a bit easier to see on your computer there, but we've got the blue triangles and those are actual demand data or meter data from the last five years. And so we looked at actually how many meters were being set historically, and that informed the growth rate that we established for the water utility. So we also compared it to some of the other reports that have been done in the area. So we looked at the 2020 comprehensive plan, We also looked at other studies that have been done in the region and landed on a 3.3% growth rate as a reasonable growth rate that's expected for the water utility. And it does align closely with the roadway growth rate as well. So then for the water side, we have one single service area, but we do break it up based on pressure zone. Pressure zone is how we have to determine the requirements based on state code. And so as you can see here, we've got, so the first column is your existing, second column is your projected, and then that third column would be the projected new LUEs or land use equivalent that'll be expected in each zone. As you can tell, there's certain zones where rattlesnake and southwest, if you're aware of those regions where we're predicting more growth versus mountaintop is a smaller region and we're expecting less growth there. Now I'll dive in a little bit more about the specific service units and how we've defined those. So the service unit for each roadway and water are important to define because it's the base unit that the fee is established around. So for water, we have a living unit equivalent. This is the equivalent use of one single family home. For water, we're expecting 7,691 LUEs to be added over the next 10 years. And then for roadway, it's a little bit different, but really you can think of a vehicle mile similar to an LUE for the roadway side. And then there's the breakdown for service area A and service area B. The roadway service area, it considers two different variables. You've got trip generation and trip length. And so we look at across the service area, you know, how many trips are going to be generated and then how far you have to travel to get to that location. And that's how we establish the roadway service area unit. We also have a sample calculation that we're happy to dive into more. As I said, I'm more on the water side, so if you all want to dive into this, we can pull Ben up to the stand to go over that. For the water side, we really break everything down based on that five eighths inch meter, which is the standard meter size for a single family home. We go back to America Water Works standards for maximum operating capacity. So this is really established a national standard that's established for how much a single family home meter can flow. And then we equate that for every other meter sizing up. So for example, a five eighths inch meter, if it's flowing 10 gallons per minute, you scale that up, that makes a two inch meter flowing 80 gallons per minute. And so it really is proportional to the amount of water we expect developments to be using. And with that, we'll pass it back to Ben.

Yeah, and I'll talk a little bit about the roadway capacity plan and the water capacity plan. So this is the, you basically take master planning documents and you segment out the part of it that is needed to serve 10 years of growth. So the roadway capacity plan is based on the transportation master plan. So this plan's already been adopted and we really look at it and just verify, so which of these roads are gonna add future capacity for future development and which aren't? And we take all of the roads that will add future capacity and we add them to our plan. The water capacity plan is actually a little bit different. It looks more at the historical meter setting trends and how much we're going to need in the future. It actually projects a little bit of its own master planning what infrastructure we'll need in the future to serve the expected growth. Moving on to the maximum fee, so this is kind of where it all gets put together as part of our study. So you look at the recoverable cost of the RCP or the WCP, so the total dollar amount to build the capacity-adding components of those plans that's needed in the 10-year window, and you divide that by the total number of new service units that will happen in the 10-year window. So we kind of talked about the land use assumptions, how much growth is coming, and then we talked about the RCP, WCP, how many dollars is needed for the infrastructure to serve them. And then each individual slice of the growth gets their own dollar amount associated with their growth. So you'll have a dollar amount per LUE and a dollar amount per vehicle mile. We do have draft max fees here. These will change. We are currently in the middle of doing a financial assessment of the program to account for things like ad valorem tax, and then as well as future dollar costs and everything to construct in the future. First thing that's already been constructed and everything. they can go up or down based on that assessment. It will be somewhat marginally, generally 10% or less that they'll move. So this is kind of the order of magnitude that the draft maximum fee will be. I should say that this is kind of setting council's ceiling for what they could assess. Many cities adopt a collection rate that is below the max. But you couldn't, for instance, say the service area A, maximum accessible fee, you can't say it's $3,000. You could say it's $2,000, but it can't be above the $27.92 there. I know these are just numbers. They probably don't mean a ton until we compare to our neighbors, which I think is important to do. So we have a few slides just showing what other communities kind of in central and south Texas are looking at right now. We got some feedback from CIAC about showing a map just who is collecting impact fees and who isn't for roadway and water. So that's what this map is here. You can see that kind of Waco College Station in the Austin area, especially the northern suburbs, do have roadway impact fees. And then kind of the Copper Scope, Colleen, Harker Heights, Belton Temple, that area, there are no current roadway impact fees. Colleen did go through with a study, I believe in 2021, but the study was never formally adopted. So they did a full study, but they don't currently charge roadway impact fees. So comparing some of those in blue that we're seeing here, this is kind of how the roadway impact fees stack up here. So as you can see, none of these communities have actually adopted the maximum assessable fee. So the Copper's Cove graph is showing the maximum assessable fee in dark blue. But then the light blue is the maximum assessable for other communities. And then the slightly darker blue than that is actually what they're collecting here. I personally completed the Georgetown and the Leander roadway impact fees, so a lot of the times the newer roadway impact fees are a little higher, but the Copper Scope ones are lower than both of those are. This is the fee that a single family home would pay here, so this is per development unit. We always come back if we're interested in that slide more. And this is the fee that a shopping center would pay in roadway impact fees. Mr. Mayor, can I ask a question?

Yeah. Okay. I think you, is it just simplified saying shopping center? Is that any commercial development, for instance? Or is it just shopping centers?

It's just shopping centers. So we use the ITE land code. So there's... couple hundred of them. So like shopping center, I think there's special like strip retail is one less than 40,000 square feet. And then 40,000 to 150,000 would get a different code. They'd be pretty similar though. Like, small retail would be different than large retail, though.

OK. Well, I'm asking, like, if a distribution center decided to come here, are they going to be paying the $8,000 per 1,000 square foot?

The way this is written. It would, for a distribution center, it would likely be less than a shopping center. But it is a completely different code, considering they all have different trip lengths and then also different trip generations. So they would pay a different amount. OK. Thank you. Another thing to note from this graph is many of these cities elected to do a different collection rate for shopping center than they did for residential.

Sometimes that's common, sometimes it's not.

I do want to point out that council can pick on, not pick on any land use they want. So as an example, in Georgetown, they are getting a lot of warehouses in the city limits, and they immediately charge them 100% of the maximum assessable fee. to discourage warehousing. I don't know. They didn't say it that way. But it is an option Council has. I think the most common in the area is to charge a collection rate for residential and a different collection rate for commercial. But it doesn't necessarily have to be done. I just point out the example so you know the options that you have. CHRIS RODGERS.

Thank you.

We also have the water impact fee comparison here. So it's largely the same story here with the exception of Killeen does have water impact fees and wastewater impact fees. Ooh, this graph did not print well. Sorry about that. This one's a little more one-to-one comparison, because one LUE is one single-family home, so this is how it compares. So I'll try to read some, but it's around 3,000 here. Colleen is a little over 1,000. West Bell County has something similar that Sierra can describe if needed, but they charge around 3,000 for a single-family home. Gerald is around $6,000 for a single family home. Leander is one of the highest in the region with a little under $8,000 per single family home. We talked about collection rate for roadway. I guess I can talk about it here as well. I'd say for water, it's more common to charge just the maximum, but you have the same option with water. You could charge a percentage of it. It's also an option with the collection rate. You could ramp it up over time or some cities say, we won't charge anything for a year while developers get used to the program and then charge after a year. So happy to talk more about those options or come meet with y'all to present those. I'm happy to jump back to any of the slides we have, but just kind of the general timeline so y'all are prepared for this. We did meet with CIAC about two weeks ago. We're meeting with y'all today on August 4th, and then we'll start bringing this through for first readings and things like that in the fall, this fall. This will go back to CIAC as well. CIC's responsibility is to make written comments to you all about the study in general.

Excuse me, I'm sorry. Can you, sorry, Mr. Mayor, may I? Can you, what is CIAC, can you?

It's the Capital Improvements Advisory Committee.

Thank you. Mm-hmm, yeah.

It's newly established. It's actually required by the state law that governs this. It's required for this program, but they do more than manage just this program. They advise on any capital improvement projects.

Thank you.

Mr. Mayor, I just got a couple questions. Hey, sir, do you know by chance, does Gatesville or Lampasas have impact fees? I don't believe so. Okay, and my second question is I know when you get your numbers from the different entities and put the study together with the formula and come out with a fee, do y'all take in consideration along with what the state puts these unfunded mandates on us and gives us no funding that might reference roads or water and also including the fees that they might periodically raise every other year for permits and things?

There's no state mandated funding considered in this program.

Council, any other questions?

Did you have a comment? Okay. All right.

I can land on the last slide, but that was the last slide.

All right. I think we're. Great. Thank you all so much. We're sufficiently confused at this point. There's a lot there. Thank you. That's the only item for the workshop. So the time is 5.30. We will adjourn, and the regular meeting will begin at 6 o'clock.

Brian, Brian.

I hear you. I was trying to kick Brian in. Good evening. Good evening. Fred, you're the bad one in this bunch. All right. Regular council meeting for City of Copperas Cove held August 4th, 2026. It's called to order at 6.02 PM. Please rise for the invocation by Howard Hawk, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance.

Let us pray. Most Worshipful Internal Father, We just want to thank you for giving us this opportunity to come before you today. But most of all, Father, we just want to thank you for allowing us to wake up this morning. It was you, Father, not us. It was no alarm clock but you. But I just want to pray for this city, our first responders, our city, our fire, our police. Because these are the ones, lift them up, Father. These are the ones that protect us throughout the course of the day and throughout the night. I want to pray for our city officials, our leaders, everyone in this city. Continue to bless us, Father. Look over this city of this great people. I want to pray for our local officials, our state, and our federal, that we'll come together and make this nation a nation that we needed to be. I pray for our soldiers. that are abroad and throughout the world, protect them, protect their family. But Father, most of all, protect this body of council members and things that we'll have to do today. So Father, I give you all the praise and the honor. Amen and amen.

DAVID BURRAGE. Please join me in the pledge for a nation's flag. Madam Secretary, please call the roll.

Mayor Yancey.

Here.

Christina Strophos. Here. Rita Hogan. Here. Howard Hawk.

Here.

John Hale.

Here.

Del Treadway. Here. Vanya Hart. Here. Jack Smith.

Here. All council members present. We move to item D, announcements.

None for me, Mr. Mayor. None for me, sir.

No, Mr. Mayor.

Yes, sir. City Council's places six and seven are up for election this November. Filing is currently in process. Deadline to submit an application for those positions is October 17th of this year. This Thursday, August 6th, at the Civic Center, the Coversco Fire Department will be distributing free fans donated by the Rotary Club of Coppers Cove and the United Way of Central Texas. There are 37 free fans available and they will be there from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. or until supplies are exhausted. On August 7th, there is a dive-in movie at our city park pool. Beginning at sunset, you can arrive beginning 7.30. The movie is Luca. And then on August 8th, there is an adaptive Splish Splash water bash at Field 5 Pavilion from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. for our adaptive families. August 12th at 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. is a food handlers... class here in the council chambers. Contact our code compliance department in order to register for that. And just a reminder, Copper Scope Independent School District classes begin on the 17th. Next week we do have a Lampasas Independent School District school on the west side of town. They start next week, so please be cautious during those, in those school zones and know that they'll be active. And then on August 22nd is the fifth annual Negrete Firefighter Foundation fundraiser at the Texas A&M Central Texas. You can go to the negreteff.org website to gain more information. Thank you.

Thank you, Ryan. I have nothing, sir. Thank you. Nothing, Mr. Mayor.

No announcements.

No announcements. All right. We move to item E, Citizens Forum.

At this time, citizens will be allowed to speak for a length of time not to exceed five minutes per person on any item which is listed on the agenda and items not listed on the agenda. 30 minutes total has been allotted for this section. Pursuant to section 551.042 of the Texas Open Meetings Act, any deliberation or decision about the subject of inquiry which is not listed on the agenda shall be limited to a proposal to place a subject on the agenda for a subsequent meeting.

DAVID BURRAGE. All right. Is there anyone to speak during Citizens Forum?

Just checking, okay. Shannon Dodd, 405 West Avenue E. Good evening, mayor and council members. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak tonight. I want to begin by saying I understand that running a city is not easy. Roads, infrastructure, public safety, and essential services all cost money. And I know improvements take time. I do not expect everything to be fixed overnight. What I want to talk about is how many residents are feeling, especially our senior citizens, families, and those living on fixed incomes. It feels like we are being asked to pay more and more. For many people, every increase matters. It can mean making different choices between groceries, medications, utilities, and other basic necessities. While we understand improvements take time, people also want to know what progress has been made, what comes next, and when they can expect to see the benefits of those investments. I know the city shares budget information, how money is being spent, and project updates during council meetings, and I appreciate that transparency. I also understand that not everyone has the time or ability to attend those meetings. That is why I believe we should continue finding better ways to communicate with residents about what has been completed and what is happening now and what comes next. I also want to speak up for our small businesses, especially our restaurants. They are already dealing with higher food costs, wages, insurance, and many other expenses. They support our youth, sponsor community events, hire local people and invest in Copper's Cove every day. Before adding more fees, I think we need to ask how much more they can take before it starts affecting their ability to stay open. I also believe we need to look at fairness across the whole city. If businesses are paying inspection fees and meeting increasing requirements, then vacant commercial buildings that sit empty for years should also be held accountable. They should be maintained, kept safe, kept up to code, and inspected when necessary. If additional enforcement is needed because the property is not being maintained, I think we should look at whether those costs can be placed where they are being created instead of adding more costs to businesses that are already doing what they are supposed to do.

Sorry.

Residents also notice when large expansions projects continue moving forward while they're being asked to pay more. Whether it's a nonprofit, school, church, or another tax-exempt organization, new buildings, parking lots, and amenities such as pickleball courts increase the demand on our roads, water systems, and other infrastructures. I'm not saying those projects should not happen. Many are great additions to our community. I'm simply asking that we make sure growth helps support the infrastructure it depends on. I also think veterans provide a good example of fairness. Many disabled veterans receive property tax exemptions because of their service, but they still pay utility bills and other city fees because they still use all those services. I also encourage the city to continue advocating at the state level for communities like Copper's Cove. When the state expands property tax exemptions or other forms of tax relief, cities are still responsible for maintaining roads, utilities, police, fire protection, and other essential services. I believe it is fair to have a conversation about whether other tax exempt organizations that benefit from our public infrastructure should also help support those services where allowed by law. while continuing to work with our state representatives to ensure cities have the resources they need to serve their residents. The same goes for nonprofits that come before the city requesting taxpayer funding. I support the work many nonprofits do, but I also believe it is reasonable to look at the whole picture and ask whether there are fair ways for everyone who benefits from city services to help support them. At the end of the day, I believe residents are asking for three simple things. Transparency, accountability, and fairness. Before asking residents, restaurants, and small businesses to pay more, I ask that you continue looking at every available option. Look at the whole city. Look at where costs are being created and where they can share more fairly. We all want the same thing, safe roads, a strong local economy, a city we are proud to call home. I believe if we continue working together, communicating openly, and making sure the responsibility is shared fairly, we can build a stronger conference call for everyone. Again, please continue to remember our senior citizens, families, and those living on fixed incomes as these decisions are made tonight. Even small increases can have a real impact on households that are already stretching every dollar. Thank you for your time, your service, and listening tonight.

Thank you. Fred Chavez, 1705 Joan Drive. Hi, I came to talk about the budget and tax as well. My concern revolves mainly around the non-governmental entities that have asked for money from the hotel motel tax. I'm the first to say that those entities perform God's work. They do amazing things. I don't begrudge them anything. However, I also see one of the other entities that was asking, is asking, is the HOP. That's how a lot of our citizens go to appointments, their jobs, to school, for visits, to shop. It's a way to keep the economic engine running. I think that's putting money into a place that encourages people to go to the job, to go to school, to get to where they need to go. I'm not saying cut anybody else off, maybe just not as much. I'll go another step further and jump on the bandwagon that Ms. Shannon just said. I encourage the council and all the citizens to reach out to their elected officials at the state legislature who keep using gimmicks and methods to gain votes on the backs of all of the taxpayers. The 100% veterans exemption is a well-earned exemption, however, comma, This body is required by law to provide services regardless. So we start in the hole. Please, please tell them they need to stop doing that. They are hurting you. They're hurting us. And they act like they don't care. We rely and depend on you. And I'm going to say this, and I mean this, even to Councilman Treadway. This is a very strong council. This is a good council and a strong mayor. That's why I feel comfortable asking you for this advocacy and to protect us. Thank you.

Anyone else to speak during citizens forum?

uh good evening mayor yancey and members of the city council and uh city manager um i'm kevin howell i live at 503 veterans avenue i am here tonight actually to express my thanks to the council and city staff for responding to the critical flooding issue impacting lower veterans avenue when we were hearing projections of maybe 2029 it was really disheartening because we just didn't have that time with the damage we were receiving But when we saw the proposed five year street maintenance program tonight, seeing that Veterans Avenue has been prioritized as the very first street to be fixed, starting it seems to be like next year, it's a huge relief. Thank you for listening to our outcry. So because this project is vital to stopping the severe runoff currently damaging our homes foundation, I do have a few specific questions regarding the engineering design. I know that because Open Meetings Act limits how much you can like deliberate on these technical details, I'm actually just formally requesting that the city manager or the engineering team from Half Associates if it's possible to like schedule some kind of like a meeting to just follow up with some of it. I just wanna review like the upcoming SAMS platforms engineering concepts with the staff to ensure the proposed fixes are permanent to solve the problem. or rather will permanently solve the problem. But the questions specifically are, one, what are the specific drainage infrastructure that's being added to it? Because our section of Veterans Avenue lacks storm drains and sits higher than our curbs, will this plan lower the street grade, or will it install underground storm sewers, or will it just build higher capacity curbs? Two, what flood level design standards are being used? Is this project being engineered to handle a 10 or 100 year storm event to guarantee that water stops jumping the curb line during heavy downpours? And then three, this one is pretty important to us and it was a sticking point before because I guess it was perceived that we were asking for like something to be done to private property. But more specifically, we just want to know what temporary mitigation can be done right now, but specifically to the actual public right-of-way portion of the road. Since heavy construction doesn't start until next year, our foundation remains at risk every time it rains between now and then. Is it possible, can the city immediately deploy a temporary asphalt interceptor berm within the public right-of-way to be able to help raise that elevation to catch water from continuing to pour off the street into all the properties along the road? Yeah, actually, that's all of them.

Never mind, that's all the questions.

Thank you so much for your time, for your responsiveness, and for your commitment to fixing the street next year.

All right, anyone else to speak during Citizens Forum?

Good evening, Mayor, city manager, council members. I might stutter a little bit, but my name is Felipe Sanchez. I am a citizen of Copperas Cove. I don't feel like I need to give my address, since I don't know what your addresses are. So I am a citizen of Copperas Cove. My question is, we talk about funding, general funding, we talk about funding this, we talk about funding that, but we never really talk about salaries. City Manager, I've watched his salary go from $146,000 to over $300,000, not to get on you. I've seen the chief of police go from a hundred something thousand to almost $200,000. And that's between 2020 when COVID happened to 2020, 2024, since you guys don't have to release information on salaries anymore. And we have to do an open records review. I think we should be, when we talk about funding, we talk about budgeting, we talk about this, we should allow and see everybody's salary. Because there's more than 30 people here in Cove that make over $100,000. The median salary here in Cove is not even $50,000. So why are we paying city officials over $100,000 and nothing's getting done? I've seen the streets right now are getting fixed. I don't know why, because maybe it's election coming up. But the streets are garbage. It's been a neglect these whole years. It's not on the citizens. It's on you guys. The manager's been here since 2016. That's 10 years that we could have progressed and fixed our city streets. We could have fixed certain things. I've seen comments that Rita, Ms. Councilman Rita Hogan made that they stolen basketball hoops that cost five grand. I've never seen a basketball hoop cost five grand, not to put you on the spot, but I know the most for commercial are like $3,000. So where's this money going to? I want to see like actual expansion. on the budget, on where the money's going. Because all I see is numbers, and y'all quick to just switch to the next line. That is the citizens' money. We pay this, we pay that. We have no choice, because you guys make the decisions. Now you want to raise the taxes, because you need to pay this, you need to pay that. Maintenance fees. You say maintenance fees are required, and it's not even to fix them. It's to maintain them. So y'all talked about $4.7 million. to maintain the streets, not even fix them, just maintain them. That was neglect. You neglect something, at the end of its lifespan, it's just going to deteriorate. So why are citizens are the ones paying for this? It should be neglect on y'all. Y'all should have took initiative from the get-go. Instead of doing surveys, because all I hear is $200,000 survey done here, $200,000 survey done here. Well, that money could have been put to fix the streets. Yes, I can drive down the road and just be like, yeah, this road needs to be fixed. Not a $200,000 survey. I think that's unfair. We should put the officials accountable because a lot of stuff has been going on in this city that's not been transparent. I can go on and on and on, but I just get so frustrated. I just want to figure it out and start to see because a lot of your officials are coming up for reelection and stuff like that, but nobody's being talked about salaries. Like I said before, there's over 30 people that I checked on my phone that make over 100 grand. And it's like, what are they doing? Some of them say their position is not available. And it's like, where is this money going? So it's like, for you guys to ask us for more money, I suggest that you let us know what these positions are doing and how they're affecting and they're a necessity for the city. Thank you.

CHRIS RODGERS. All right. Anyone else to speak in your Citizens Forum? All right, we will close that section. We will move to item F, consent agenda.

All matters listed under this item are considered to be routine by the City Council and will be enacted by one motion. There will not be a separate discussion of these items. If discussion is desired, that item will be removed from the consent agenda and considered separately. Item 1, consideration and action on approval of City Council regular meeting minutes for July 21, 2026, Lisa Wilson, City Secretary. Item 2, consideration and action to declare city-owned personal property a surplus and direct improper disposal, Gabriel Cardona, Police Captain. Item three, consideration and action to set the date to adopt the tax rate for the 2026-2027 physical year. Arianna Beckman, Director of Budget. Item four, consideration and action on resolution number 2026-24, accepting the quarterly investment report as presented for the quarter ending June 30th, 2026, per the investment policy. Stephanie Poppin, Assistant Director of Finance. Item five, consideration and action on granting council member Vanya Hart an excused absence. Vanya Hart, place six.

All right, council, is there any item you wish to pull and consider separately? All right, hearing none, is there a motion to approve the consent agenda? Mr. Mayor, I make a motion to approve consent agenda items F1 through F5. Second. Motion made by Mr. Treadway, second by Mr. Hale. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries. There are no public hearings for tonight, so we move to item H, action items.

Item one, consideration and action on appointment to the Planning and Zoning Commission to fill position seven, Bobby Lewis, Development Services Director.

Mayor and council. Thank you. On June 15th, 2026 staff confirmed that Angela Lee Robinson is requesting to be considered for appointment to the planning and zoning commission on July 1st, 2026 staff received the second application from Gary D. Young, who has also requested to be appointed to the planning and zoning commission with that staff recommends city council review the application submitted for appointment to the planning and zoning commission to fill position seven.

All right. DAVID BURRAGE. Council, any questions for Bobby? All right. Is there nomination for position seven on the Planning and Zoning Commission?

BOBBY ALEXANDER. Mr. Mayor, I make a motion that we appoint Angela Lee Robertson to position seven. DAVID BURRAGE.

All right. Any other nominations?

Mr. Mayor, I nominate Gary Young for position seven.

OK. Do those need to be seconded, the nominations?

Our code of ordinance doesn't require a second for nominations, just the vote.

All right. All right. OK, so we have two nominations. We will do Ms. Robinson first. All those in favor for Angela Lee Robinson signify by saying aye. Aye. All right. That was one vote. I don't think we need to do a roll call because it was just one.

I can do a roll call if you'd like me to.

Go ahead. OK. Let's do it all right.

Sure. CHRISTIE WOODARD- Kristina Strophis? CHRISTIE WOODARD- Nay. CHRISTIE WOODARD- Rita Hogan? CHRISTIE WOODARD- Nay. CHRISTIE WOODARD- Howard Hawk?

DAVID BURRAGE- Nay. DAVID BURRAGE- No, he can't do that.

CHRISTIE WOODARD- Huh?

DAVID BURRAGE- He may have said aye.

CHRISTIE WOODARD- He made the motion. DAVID BURRAGE- Aye.

CHRISTIE WOODARD- OK. CHRISTIE WOODARD- John Hill? DAVID BURRAGE- Nay. CHRISTIE WOODARD- Dale Treadway?

DAVID BURRAGE- Nay.

CHRISTIE WOODARD- Vanya Hart? Vanya Hart? CHRISTIE WOODARD- Nay.

CHRISTIE WOODARD- Jack Smith?

DAVID BURRAGE- Nay. DAVID BURRAGE- All right. The second candidate, Gary Young. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Nay. Roll call.

CHRISTINA ESTROFAS? Aye. Rita Hogan? Aye. Howard Hawk?

Nay.

John Hale?

Aye.

Dale Treadway?

Aye.

Vanya Hart? Aye. Jack Smith?

Aye. All right. 6-1.

uh gary young is appointed to the planning and zoning commission position seven thank you thank you i did have a question mr lewis can i sure when she came up for voting last time it was sent back because more candidate for qualification but i looked at the city charter Section 220-5-2, it don't talk about qualification to be appointed to a position or interposition in the city. So my question is, why was it sent back? If she was the only applicant at that time, she should have been nominated, right?

DAVID BURRAGE. Mayor. DAVID BURRAGE. Yes. Mr. Hawk. It was up for vote at the last council meeting. Council actually postponed action on any appointment. So it wasn't staff that caused any postponement of nominations. So because council took action to postpone it, an additional application was received. So now there are two applications for council to consider.

All right, we move to item H2.

Consideration and action on the appointment of members to the Keep Coppers Co. Beautiful Commission. Anna Rodriguez, Executive Director of Keep Coppers Co. Beautiful.

Good evening, Mayor, Council, and City Manager, Mr. Havilah. I'm here today for your consideration and action on appointment to the Keep Coppers Cove beautiful commission. One new application was received from Council Member Howard Hawk, and three additional applications were received from current board members, Mr. Bud Johnson, who is here tonight with us, and Jolene Lopez and Nunu Garner, as their terms are expiring soon. Staff recommends that the city council review the application submitted and appoint the members to keep Copper's Cove Beautiful Commission.

All right. There are four vacant positions. You might want to make the nominations. Mr. Mayor?

Yes. I would like to make a motion that we, or I'd like to nominate Howard Hopp, Bud Johnson, Jolene Lopez, and Nunu Garner to the Keep Coppers Cove Beautiful Commission. Second. Motion made by.

Mr. Smith, seconded by Mr. Treadway.

Is that right? You can give it to him.

Sure.

That's fine. We both did. It was a tie.

Either way. You both sound so close to each other. Any other discussion? All right. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries.

Thank you.

Thank all of you for your volunteer efforts for KCCB. All right, we move to item H3.

CONSIDERATION AND ACTION ON ADOPTION OF ORDINANCE NUMBER 2026-19 OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF COPPERS COVE, TEXAS, AWARDING THE SALE AND AUTHORIZING THE ISSUANCE OF CITY OF COPPERS COVE, TEXAS COMBINATION TAX AND REVENUE CERTIFICATES OF OBLIGATION SERIES 2026 levying a tax and payment thereof, authorizing the execution and delivery of a paying agent, registrar agreement, approving the official statement, finding and determining that the meeting at which this ordinance is passed is open to the public as required by law, and enacting other provisions related thereto. Arianna Beckman, Director of Budget.

Thank you, Mrs. Wilson. Mayor and Council, I will be presenting this item. We began the discussions on the current list of capital projects and other capital uses back in 2025 during the budget process. The City of Copperas Cove has changed our debt issuance process that we asked council to consider the capital projects in the budget year preparation that the debt issuance will occur, but we delay the issuance of that debt until later in the fiscal year. However, we reviewed this list with city council and we've done that a couple of times over the last several months. City Council made a number of changes to it, but overall, the total debt issuance is approximately $29,000. Our financial advisor, Gary Kimball, with Specialized Public Finance is here to present the information. We also have representatives from Bracewell, who is our bond counsel, and so at this time, I'll turn this over to Mr. Kimball.

thank you mr city manager mayor members of the council gary kimball with specialized public finance the city's financial advisory firm this is the culmination of you know almost a year's worth of work the hard work's been done and we took bids this morning and i'm very pleased to report that we've received 10 bids for our offering the final par amount is 28 million 135 thousand dollars approximately 85% of that amount will go for self-supporting projects. In other words, they won't hit the tax rate for the city. So the vast majority of this is for self-supporting utility projects and the like. The winning bidder was Raymond James and Associates with a true interest cost bid rounded at 4.15%, which compares favorably with the 4.2% budget rate that we've been using for the past several months with your finance department. In dollar terms, that's $430,000 better than budget. So we're very pleased with this outcome and 10 bids is certainly a very good reception from Wall Street. I will also note that In the process of selling these certificates of obligation, we went back to Standard & Poor's, and with city staff and the city manager's office's help, we've gotten the AA bond rating affirmed from Standard & Poor's, which we had hoped we would. I'll read one excerpt from their report. This is what Wall Street looks at when bidders decide to bid. It says the rating reflects the city's stable financial performance with exceptionally strong reserves and liquidity supported by conservative budgeting practices, effective budgetary oversight, and comprehensive long-term planning. All of that speaks to very good oversight, budgeting, and planning by city staff and by the city leaders. so you're to be commended uh for that um we would recommend awarding the sale of the certificates of obligation series 2026 to raymond james and associates at a true interest cost of 4.15 and i would be happy to answer any questions okay council any questions for gary

You have a comment, right?

Only after council has any questions.

I'm sorry. Go ahead. Was it 4.15 or 4.5? I'm sorry.

4.15.

OK, thank you. Just needed that. Thank you.

Anybody else? Right.

Thank you, Mr. Kimball. Appreciate the explanations and the presentation. Mayor and Council, it is also staff's recommendation that you consider and approve Ordinance 2026-19, which authorizes the issuance of these bonds.

All right, Council, what's your pleasure?

Mr. Mayor, I make a motion to adopt ordinance number 2026-19, authorizing proposed issuance and sale of obligations to the designated as City of Coppers Cove, Texas, Combination Tax and Revenue Certificates of Obligation Series 2026. Second. DAVID BURRAGE.

Motion made by Mr. Trevelyan, seconded by Mr. Hale. Any other discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries. Thank you all very much. Thank you. We move to item H4.

Consideration to action on resolution number 2026-23, approving a resolution of the Copper's Cove Economic Development Corporation authorizing the issuance of Copper's Cove Economic Development Corporation sales tax revenue bonds series 2026. Fred Welch, executive director of the Copper's Cove Economic Development Corporation.

Thank you, Lisa, Mayor, City Council. In August of 2024, the Economic Development Corporation purchased about 22.5 acres of land on what we call Miceburn Drive with an option on additional 28 acres for development for industrial property within the city. Over the past two years, we've gone through annexation, we've gone through planning and design for the infrastructure required to bring roadway improvements, water, sewer, and storm water into that area. The Economic Development Administration had also previously awarded us a grant of $3.5 million. The cost for this total project, as I think was reported to Council a couple of months back, is about $6.5 million. So the Economic Development Corporation did work with Specialized Public Finance, who's on the line and can work with us here in a minute, and Council from Bracewell. to secure an offer for a $3 million sales tax revenue bond. Just pointing out to council and to members, this comes from the quarter penny sales tax that comes into the Economic Development Corporation from sales tax revenues into the city. This is... Our corporation has been around, I think, since 1995. And it would have no impact on the current tax rate of the city. But we did have a sale. The board met this afternoon. And we do have a firm lined up. I think if Jennifer or Cole, if you're online, maybe you could talk us through that for just a second.

Yes, sir, Fred. This is Jennifer Ritter with Specialized Public Finance. We work with Gary as well on the city side. We did a private placement. In this case, it was still a competitive bid process where we submitted out to national banks to bid on the issue. Private placement for an issue of this size doesn't require a bond rating or paying the underwriters, so we save on issuance costs. We received bids from four banks, Webster Bank out of Georgia was the winning bidder at a 4.47%, also giving the EDC a call option to pay these off early with some different rules on how to do that, but the option to pay this off early should you choose to do so. As Mr. Welch mentioned, the board approved at noon today, so the second step, obviously, would be for city council to take action to approve if they decide to do so, the UDC's action, and then we'll start working with the Glenn Opals firm, Bracewell, and go to the attorney general and get this approved as well to be in a position to close here next month.

So Mr. Mayor, before council, there's a resolution to approve the resolution of the board of directors authorizing the sale of these bonds from Webster. And here to answer any questions that council might have. DAVID BURRAGE.

Council, questions for Fred or bond council? DAVID BURRAGE. Anybody?

DAVID BURRAGE.

Mr. Mayor, I did have a few questions, but they got answered at the meeting at noon that I attended. So thank you. DAVID BURRAGE.

All right. Anybody else? OK. Is there action to be taken on this item?

Mr. Mayor, I make a motion to approve Resolution 2026-23, approving a resolution of the Copper's Cove Economic Development Corporation authorizing the issuance of Copper's Cove Economic Development Corporation sales tax revenue bond series 2026. DAVID BURRAGE. Second. DAVID BURRAGE. Motion made by Mr. Turner.

Are you seconded by Mr. Smith? Is that right? OK. Any other questions? Comments? All right, hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Jennifer and team.

All right, we move to item H5.

Consideration and action of a record vote to propose a property tax rate for fiscal year 2026-27. Arianna Beckman, Director of Budget.

Thank you, Mrs. Wilson. Mayor and Council, I'm also presenting this item. Last Thursday on the 30th of July, City Council received a presentation on the calculation of tax rates as prepared by our tax assessor collector, Justin Carruthers, after the property values were certified by the Coryell Central Appraisal District and Lampasas Central Appraisal District. I do not intend to go through this entire presentation with City Council, and we'll move quickly through the presentation as you've already received most of this presentation, but to head on and touch on a couple of really key slides that were presented and can help guide Council's decision tonight. The current tax rate, as you see, is right at 68 cents, but it's split into two components. It's the maintenance and operations rate, which is the top bars, and then the interest and sinking rate, or debt service rate, which are the bottom bars. The no new revenue tax rate is right at 47 cents, and then the voter approval tax rate is 73 cents. As discussed with city council previously, this slide actually shows the impact to the general fund. And the reason it's a focus on the general fund is state law requires that local governments pay their debt. So there is no option to essentially default on any debt payments by any local government in the state of Texas because that is the first place all property tax revenue goes to. So with that being said, the focus then is on any change in the tax rate is an impact to the general fund and the general fund only. So with that consideration, should council have considered a proposed tax rate or adoption of a tax rate of 68 cents? As demonstrated in the current, as the current budget tax rate, so the current fiscal year, it would actually have a impact to the general fund for the proposed budget of having a deficit in that general fund budget of $1.6 million. Should council propose and consider adopting the no new revenue tax rate, it would have a impact in the general fund of a 1.7, almost $1.8 million deficit. And then the voter approval tax rate, which is 73 cents, would have a deficit in the general fund of $577,000. We had previously discussed this as well, just going over what the potential changes are to the general fund. City Council had previously provided direction to remove the exterior improvements to City Hall, which is basically the siding portion of City Hall, because with City Hall, we have done a number of improvements, including replacing the roof, but there are still improvements upper level leaks that are occurring in city hall, which have been identified as the exterior siding of that building. So city council directed that project be removed from the 2026 certificates of obligation and moved into the general fund as it had sufficient fund balance in order to pay for that capital project. It's a one-time cost and that's many times what those fund balances are used for. The other two areas are the reclassifications of a number of personnel positions, totaling almost $90,000. And then city council's prior direction, it was a consensus of four council members over three council members to fund all of the non-city agency budget requests, which caused an increase of $91,000. So with that being said, there's much more information I can share and talk about, but all of the budget preparation as well as the tax rate information has been prepared and presented based on city council's prior direction. With that said, mayor council's action based on our budget calendar is to take a record vote, which is a proposed tax rate for city council and based on that proposal, city council may have to call a public hearing. If it is greater than the no new revenue tax rate, whatever rate is proposed, you must hold a public hearing. We must publish that in the newspaper and that public hearing would be at the very next city council meeting, which is also the date in which city council would consider adoption of a tax rate and the budget long range plans and the fee schedule. If city council did not propose a rate that was greater than the no new revenue tax rate, a public hearing is not necessary, but I would just go ahead and say it. It would be wise for council to consider a public hearing anyway. The item after this agenda item is to set that date for the public hearing. The item after that on this agenda is to discuss the changes to the proposed budget. Understanding that the tax rate that City Council proposes could have an impact on what changes are included in the budget. It would not behoove you as Council to have part of that discussion now, if necessary at all. But City Council has that option based on our budget calendar, which has previously been discussed with City Council. to take a record vote on a tax rate. Any tax rate you do propose, you can adopt that tax rate or anything lower than that when it's time to adopt a tax rate. You cannot adopt a tax rate that would exceed that tax rate when it comes time to adopt it.

Mayor. Say that last sentence again.

City Council can adopt a tax rate at or below whatever rate is proposed, but cannot adopt a tax rate that exceeded whatever is proposed.

OK. So you have before you these tax rates. Council, are there any changes that you wish to consider? in this before we start to go down the process of a record vote?

I would like to keep the tax rate at what it is right now.

Which?

The $0.68.

At the $0.68? Mm-hmm. And with the deficit of 1.6?

Mm-hmm. I have a list of things that we can do to help that.

OK. You want to go ahead and?

Do you wanna do it now or do we do that now, Ryan, or do we talk about that when we talk about the changes to the budget?

Knowing that there's an agenda item later in the agenda to specifically discuss budget changes and how closely they're tied, I think city council could probably have this full discussion at this time.

Okay, so my proposed changes would be?

Do we have some way to, put this up somewhere so we can all see it and make sure we understand.

This is something I've just finished this afternoon, so I do not have it. I'm so sorry.

I'll do my best.

OK. To keep up? OK. Under fire EMS operations, there was a list of wants that totaled $92,924. I'd say we postpone that until next year. What was that dollar amount? 92,924. I do have a question of what the fire EMS training professional development fees, dues, and subscriptions are for 10,482.

I'm gonna ask Chief Mathijitz, do you have that specific information in front of you, sir, that you could share? Ms. Hogan, if you could give us a moment, we can talk about that, but what was that dollar amount again?

10,482. The next item is the HR compensation study for 8,176. I'd like to postpone that.

And I apologize, you're gonna have to tell me that amount again.

8,176. IT backup solution, 95,400. The new development services manager and the costs associated with that new manager, I've come up with $120,000 in savings there. and the third-party review costs for building department to postpone that until another time. That's 101.

That was 99, 99, 99.

Yeah, but there were some other costs associated with that, like some $600 membership fee or whatever, which brought it up to 101, 713.

Yeah, those are separate and are not related to each other.

Okay, then 999, 999, 999. The personnel reclassifications, $89,830, we postpone.

$89,300, you said?

$89,830.

Thank you.

The COLA raises for the city, and this is a start for negotiation, eliminate them completely with a savings of $190,000. and market adjustments decreased to 50%, but I don't know what that amount is because it wasn't clear.

Is that it?

Yes, sir.

So that would decrease the deficit of 1.711 if I'm not mistaken.

I thought it was 1.3 according to the last slide that we saw. And that would reduce it. By 7, not that one. What's the next one that had the $600,000 in there for the improvements to City Hall? That one. See the 1.3? Is that not the correct?

No, ma'am. That would include considering the property tax rate of $0.73, as noted in the revenue section right there.

OK. So there's $700,000 in savings there, not including the 50% market adjustment. And wouldn't we add all that together and then take the rest out of the fund overage balance that we have?

So that dollar amount was around $900,000.

Probably closer to 8, 850. Not quite sure because I don't know what the market adjustments are.

Kellen, I think I broke the computer. Thank you, sir.

So that total is 1.196.

Out of the 1.6.

I'm sorry, say it again, Rita.

Out of the 1.6 deficit.

So it lowered to 300.

About 500,000.

Yeah.

So Mayor, if I may? Yeah. In regards to this list, there are a couple of things that the City Council needs to understand. One, with the personnel reclassifications, that is not included in this $1.6 million number that you see here. This number is prior to any changes to the proposed budget, so it does not include those reclassifications of the personnel, so we would remove that, so it would basically be 1.1 million. based on your numbers, Ms. Hogan. And then this also does not include any consideration for the non-city organizations, which right now council has given direction to increase the expenditures of the budget by about $91,000. So thereby increasing the cost, further reducing those reductions down to $1 million.

I'm okay with that.

What you're saying is a lot to digest based on this information that make it difficult to do a record vote at this moment in time.

DAVID BURRAGE. That's definitely up to the prerogative of the council on should you be ready and willing to make a record vote on this. I'll also say that, and I've told the council this before, that is the The city council in the past has made tremendous strides in terms of compensating the team members in the city that do the public work for our residents, for our businesses. And even though those strides have been made, any delay or stop in that is definitely something that will have a long-term impact on the team members that continue to work for the city and are recruited. to work for the city in the future. Completely understanding that we have fiscal constraints to go by and also realizing that as an organization, we are a competitor to other employers. And we as a city have been in the position where team members have left and has put us in critical position in a number of services. And that is not in any way to dissuade Council from whatever action or direction you give me to move forward with the budget. It is simply a recognition that we've gone through that process, we have overcome some of those struggles, but not all of them. But I'll take whatever direction City Council does give. I do think it is a top high priority that City Council consider the market adjustments for public safety at the full value of what they were proposed. It does not mean that they're getting to 100% of market, and we've discussed that in the past. In fact, quite honestly, it's not even getting them to 95% of the market, which has been City Council's goal in the past. It is simply providing us a step in the right direction to continue to compensate our team members for the valuable work that they do provide to our residents. Cost of living adjustment is simply that each and every person in this city, in this community, have experienced the cost increases that have occurred. as city employees that compensation has lacked far behind any competition that we compare in other cities but again i completely understand the direction that council will give me and we will move forward with that there are other considerations that city council could consider which could include the use of additional fund balance from the debt service fund i am cautious to mention that because if City Council does choose to move forward with that, that does have a future impact on capital projects that can be completed because that fund balance and that fund, while it can only be used to pay for debt service, it will have an immediate impact on the debt service requirements in the future. And if City Council does want to move forward with considering additional use of fund balance from the debt service fund, there's two things that, one thing that must happen and one recommendation I would give you. And the one thing that has to happen is tax rates have to be recalculated. because that is a portion of the formula the state requires in order to calculate the voter approval tax rate. Second, I would make a strong recommendation that city council pause or delay or significantly reduce the scope of future debt issuances from tax supported sources should you use that fund balance in the debt service fund. I do have a spreadsheet we can walk through. It's a very similar spreadsheet that you've recognized and seen in the past to help walk through what happens to the deficit in the general fund with any of your recommendations. But I'll also say this. Mayor and Council, you are the authority that approves the budget. And whatever action you take, it is my responsibility to fully execute and I will fully execute that. I'll also say that we have been working through this budget process with the council for the past six months and all the direction that council has given me has been built into every presentation and every document that we've presented. A significant change that we're talking about in terms of a record tax rate that City Council may consider that is below the voter approval tax rate deviates from City Council's prior direction. Understanding that the tax rates we previously calculated on estimates were not 73 cents. but we do have the certified values now and that's what the voter approval tax rate ended up calculating out as. This is a very monumental moment for city council to consider with the budget. Over the past 10 years, and I've only been the city manager for the past eight years, I've had discussions with the council about this day. and that is that city council will need to make really hard decisions. And those hard decisions are program-based decisions. what programs are we going to continue to fund because we can continue to do as we have done and slowly chip away at resources which do in turn slowly incrementally cause issues or problems with service delivery to our residents and our businesses. I truly believe that the refinement of the budget, the leanness that exists in the budget. We are at the point now that should we continue to chip away at that, it is simply setting up future councils, future residents and businesses and staff for a slow decline in level of service. And just to illustrate how staff has tried to accommodate all of those things, just remember, we've already put in almost $1.3 million as vacancy holds in the proposed budget. That is a four-week hold on any vacant position, no matter what position it is. Any position. And that's going to be adopted by city council in a policy execution that I will do through every single position that has a service level impact. So I apologize, it's gotten real somber as I've been walking through this, but this weighs heavy on me. And in my discussions with you, as you've called me to obtain information, to ask questions over the last really five days, I know it's heavy on you as well. So whatever decision you do make, I would encourage the council to consider not just next fiscal year, but the future fiscal years as well. We as a city, I don't like saying this, we struggle every time we work on our budget. And we've talked about this in the past. And yes, the state had a great deal to do with it by passing exemptions that are mandatory that disproportionately impact Copper's Cove. So I apologize, mayor, council, for the diatribe. I just went down. But I'll be happy to continue to entertain any direction that council gives and any action as well.

CHRISTIE WOODARD- Mr. Mayor, I know that you had Jack. DAVID BURRAGE.

Go ahead. Go ahead, Bob.

CHRISTIE WOODARD- Yes, you had requested the fire chief. I didn't know if he was ready to speak. You had directed. I didn't know.

So the response was Chief Matthews said that that additional $10,000 is trying to get additional paramedics certified. Come on up, Chief.

Thank you.

Douglas Matt, the Jets Fire Chief. The additional cost in training was just trying to send more people to the paramedic school rather than at the pace that we were doing. So we have continuous service of ALS service on all of our ambulances. Right now, with the limited number of paramedics, sometimes we have three. ALS units means we have a paramedic on it. And then sometimes with staffing, we don't have enough medics. So we only have one or maybe two ALS ambulances. And the rest are just EMTs, not as highly certified, can't do all the skills. So that's what my goal is to try to increase that with us just promoting three more captains. Those three captains were all paramedics that were on the ambulance. Now they're not on the ambulance anymore. They're in charge of the fire truck. So I need to replace them also. So goal was to try to get a few more in school every semester. It takes a year to train them as a paramedic. So if we lose any paramedics, then we get in more of a bind. So that's where the extra cost was in getting them to school.

Thank you for that clarification. And I can support that. And we can remove that from my strike list.

Also an ALS is an advanced life support ambulance versus a basic life support ambulance that doesn't have a paramedic on the box or the ambulance.

Mr. Mayor. Go ahead. I was going to say I think so far we've only heard from one on a proposed tax rate. So yeah, and I'm willing to go somewhere between the current tax rate and the voter approval rate, but not too much higher. And I would rather rely heavily on our fund balance, because we've worked through this budget, and also give Ryan another chance to refine the budget before we vote on it next week or in two weeks. But I'd be willing to go a little higher than the raise the taxes just a little.

DAVID BURRAGE. : I asked Ryan to look at a $0.69 tax rate and see what he would come up with as far as how to make that work. Do you have that?

I do have some information I can walk through with the council, if that's what council wants to do.

Is that OK? Yes. Mr. Mayor, also I'd like to point out that we do have a smaller tax base right now from last year, less taxable value. And the city hasn't grown as much last year because of the economy. and that's why every time we bring things to the council that I feel will slow growth, that's kind of what I'm looking at is we need more people moving here so that the current people don't have to keep paying higher taxes. We need growth.

Well, I think one of the things that we need to keep in mind is that we're on the cusp of a large influx of commercial development within the city, which will make a huge difference in revenue generated to the city. We're feeling the pinch right now, but My thought is the next three to five years, that situation will not rectify itself, because there's always gonna be the challenges, but come closer to a situation where we can do the things that need to be done without having to make as many tough decisions. You know, it wouldn't hurt if the state legislature saw it in their purview to fund the disabled vet in a much larger percentage than what it does right now. What was our amount that was sent to us from the state? $79,000?

DAVID BURRAGE. No, I believe it was right around $300,000. I think it was less than $300,000. DAVID BURRAGE. But the delta is $3.5 million. DAVID BURRAGE. Yeah, which is about a 9% reimbursement. DAVID BURRAGE.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a little light. And that's something that not only our city, but there are a lot of cities in the state that are feeling that pinch, inordinately feeling that pinch. I think more needs to be brought to bear on our state legislature to try to make sure that that becomes more equitable. That number is just going to get bigger. And it's going to get bigger because we're going to have a VA clinic that is a great addition to our city. But also, you're going to see an increase disabled vet population within our, within our city. So we need to be prepared for that. So. Okay.

Mayor and council, uh, what you see on the screen is a very similar spreadsheet that you've seen before. Um, can I kind of zoom out just so, uh, you can get an appreciation for this is the budget summary for the general fund, uh, in general fund alone. Um, And we previously have gone through this entire spreadsheet down here. It is refined with a greater focus for our discussion today. Up here in the top right, you can see $577,000. That is a negative number, which means that's a deficit in the general fund. And it's a deficit in the general fund because, as you can see in row 88, we have the voter approval tax rate there. That is simply based on Council's previous direction. as part of the development of the budget. So should that voter approval rate be considered and adopted, it would lower that deficit from, and just to demonstrate, from 771,000, which is what our current deficit is, to $577,000. So the mayor asked me to just kind of work on some things as well as some of the other council members just asking me questions about what is the impact on property tax rates and everything like that to the budget. With the budget calculations, the tax rate calculations, I've had to go back and forth with our tax assessor collector on some different calculations. So forgive me for not having this information out to you well before this. It just took time, and there wasn't a whole lot of time to work through this process. So should city council consider a rate of $0.69? So this is $0.699, and you can see different variations from the voter approval tax rate to $0.699. Should city council consider just a tax rate of $0.699, it creates a deficit in the general fund of $1.3 million. And again, this does not include any other changes to the proposed budget. So no additional non-city organization funding and no personnel reclassifications included in the budget. There are a couple of other options that I just wanted to present to council. I did talk about the use of additional fund balance and so currently the proposed budget does include the consideration of using $750,000 of fund balance in the debt service fund in order to draw down that tax rate for next fiscal year. If City Council increased that by an additional $400,000, you can see the impact that exists down below in those bottom three orange areas. use an additional $400,000 in fund balance from the debt service fund and consider a rate of 69 cents. That increases the deficit in the general fund by $126,000, thereby a total deficit of almost $900,000. There are the options and considerations below for the particular expenditure decision points that we have previously discussed with city council. And I've got them grouped and you can see the groupings and highlights. So the first four areas include that cost of living adjustment for all departments except for the public safety departments. The next two are those market adjustments for police and fire. And then we do have that small one, which is the judges, municipal judges pay adjustment. Just again, as a reminder, putting the judge on that market adjustment schedule as we have not done that prior to last year for more than 15 years. And so just making sure that when the judge is considering not being the judge anymore or counsel chooses to appoint a new judge, that pay is commensurate with whatever judges would consider being a judge for. So we could select those and like Ms. Hogan said, not considering the 3% cost of living adjustment, you can see it changes that deficit down to $700,000 should that not be considered. Again, I've already talked about the expected vacancy holds. I wasn't going to do anything else with that. The next grouping is that assistant city manager in total. It's a $33,000 impact to the general fund because all the other funds where that ACM would be responsible for those services, that's where the bulk of that funding comes from. We did talk about the third party plan review as well. And again, if we did not do that, that is something that impacts the deficit and of course the development services manager position. So I'll just talk real quick about the both of those. We've talked about the fact that we are starting to see an increase in commercial development and our development services department is the I don't want to say the bottleneck, but quite honestly, that's where services can flourish or be decreased and slowed down for development. I think our development services team has done a phenomenal job of being more efficient and in the commercial services businesses that are developing in Copper Scope, we actually receive a number of compliments from those companies, usually larger companies, national companies, companies that have their own development team are very complimentary of our process. Where we are not as efficient with commercial development are those small businesses. that want to develop in Copper's Cove. And here's the reason why. We do not have a dedicated team to work with those small businesses to move them through the development process. In other words, guiding them step by step. We have those steps within our development review process. But it is not a simple process and it is a complicated process. And so with those small businesses, do we get complaints about the development review process? The answer is yes. Our team does a great job of trying to communicate with them, but we also try to communicate with every person that's going through that development process, and sometimes the level of effort from one application to another, it's the same, but it's not the same for the applicant, because some applicants don't know what those next processes are. For those larger companies, they do know what those processes are and it moves a lot smoother for them. Development Services Manager would help move that more smoothly for those small businesses as well. Third part of your plan review, I do have a concern about that, Ms. Hogan, in not including that. That is specifically for the Veteran Affairs Clinic development. We committed as an organization to help them move through their plan review and inspection process. That service will help us supplement what our current services are because that facility is as large as it is and complex as it is. I do have a concern, and City Council previously provided direction to fund this. If you wanna consider it a one-time cost, then we'll do that. And we will not bring this back next year. We will remind the council, we're not bringing this back. But I have a concern about not funding this and meeting our obligations to ensure that the VA clinic moves forward in a timely manner. Okay, so getting back to what the mayor asked me to do, should city council consider the 69 cent, we'll move up here, because council has not given me direction on additional use of fund balance, but 69 cents, and removing the development services manager third plan review. I believe Council Member Hogan said cut the 30% cost of living adjustment and then change these to half of the cost. That puts us at a deficit of $418,000, not including, again, any additional funding for the non-city organization request. So with that being said, Mayor, I'll manipulate, adjust this spreadsheet as you direct me to as the council, see if we can get to where you want to be.

DAVID BURRAGE. Mr. Mayor, if I may. I'm going to start out. I prefer to keep 68, but I'm willing to go 69, OK? And this is going to be hard for me to say this. We're in the predicament we are now, the situation, whatever word you may want to use, that goes back to previous councils, previous city staffs. It's just a fact of life. Decisions were made. They might not have accurate information. I don't know, OK? But some of the rates over the years should have been raised, and they were not raised. And that has hurt us, OK? We've asked the citizens for the past year. We've raised rates, and we understand why we raised them, why they need to be raised. But the burden's also on their back. They're the taxpayers. And I'll be the one to sit here and say it. The state has also caused some of our issues, whatever the case may be. Unfunded mandates, them also raising their fees, the cost of materials going up, whatever the case may be. RON AND THIS CITY STAFF HAS PUT A LOT INTO THIS BUDGET. OKAY. IS THERE A FEW THINGS WE CAN TRIM? YEAH, I CAN AGREE TO THAT. BUT I DO NOT WANT TO TOUCH THE CITY EMPLOYEES. AND I'LL TELL YOU WHY. I STARTED WORKING OUT IN A WATER HOLE IN AN HOURLY, HOURLY, NOT A SALARY, BUT HOURLY. OKAY. AND THEY'RE HARDLY ABLE TO GET PAY RAISES. SO I KNOW WHERE THEY'RE COMING FROM. THAT'S JUST MY POINT OF VIEW. I'd prefer to keep that, and the third party, I'll be one of the ones that I did ask Ryan to look at that, and I supported that, because they had, correct me if I'm wrong, Ryan, but they had approximately, what, two years to build it, and the clinical and the VA has a year to move in, get certified?

That's correct.

Okay. Nothing against our development department. I think they're good. There's a few things to be changed. We have to get this VA hospital built on time, and get it opened on time. That's something we need to remember. And I mean, that's jumping off the cliff there. I think this will bring in a few more businesses to the city. I mean, ADC has gone out of their way. Start working on South Bypass. We've annexed property in to put businesses out there.

I totally agree with you. However, I don't want it to turn into $100,000 every year.

And I can understand that.

These people here, they have high interest rates. They've got inflation. They've got higher fees and utilities. They can't afford it.

And I agree. And I understand that.

I'm just saying we agree to fund it for one year and one year only, no more recurring costs. And as far as the employees go, I'm sorry. This is a municipality. If we don't have the money, we don't have the money. When it's feast, it's great. But when it's famine, somebody's got to.

DAVID BURRAGE. Right. OK. And I understand that. OK. But at the same time, we're giving out several thousand dollars to nonprofits. And I have nothing.

CHRISTIE WOODARD. We're giving $91,000. DAVID BURRAGE. Right. CHRISTIE WOODARD. And those services are being used by citizens.

DAVID BURRAGE. Right. And I understand that. OK. But it's also come from the tax base. I have nothing against nonprofits. I think they're a good organization. But if we're having to budget to take care our money, and as taxpayers have to take care of what they have, the non-profits need to do the same thing. I'm not saying don't help them.

They do. I'm not saying they don't. I'm not saying they don't, council member. But they need to. These are all organizations that benefit the citizens that are paying the bills. A million dollars in cost raises I can't justify that, considering what everybody else is going through. And that's me included. My income hasn't increased in two years. My wages are stagnant, just like theirs are. I have to look out for them, because they're the ones that put me here.

If I may, Mr. Mayor.

So I'm just making suggestions. Y'all can negotiate from here.

And I understand that, Councilmember Hogan. I do. But maybe they can reduce their budget, too. I'm just saying. I'm not saying don't help them. I believe in helping. I think they do a lot for this community.

We don't want to get into a situation where we're, pity wise, a pound foolish.

Absolutely, I agree.

you, whenever you start cutting things like that, and then people leave, and then you gotta go back through and train new people to do those jobs. First off, it takes time to get back to that point. And in addition, virtually every time, it costs more money in the long run to be training new people than it is to make sure that the right people are being compensated and staying with the city. Because we've had this issue with police department for years that people would get trained in code because we have a great program and then turn around and leave and go somewhere else. And we've been able to stem that. to a large degree because of some of the market adjustments that we have done. I think that we need to look very hard at, it sounds, easily cut this, cut this, cut this. What is the long-term effect of all those cuts? And I think that's where you have to make the judgment call that in the long run, is it better or not?

But in the two years, like you said, once the clinic is finished, we'll be in a better financial position to give $1 million in raises. I just can't see it now. I'm not proposing delete them. I'm just saying cut them in half for now. That's all we can afford. I don't wanna keep using the fund balance because what if something happens down the road and we don't have that money there and it's not there for future use. That's my concern. And these are starting points. Let's negotiate.

Somebody else? Anybody? Vanya?

Yes, hi, thank you. I am firm on this, well, 68 cents looks good to me, no more than 69, I can do that. I think we really have to, understand who we are, what we're here for, what our job is on this council, and that we are supposed to be stewards of the money that is coming in and what we actually prioritize. That's what I'm saying. We have went on to increases with water rates. We increased tax rates this past year. There was an increase with the street maintenance fee. All of these were supposed to be held. That's all that we did. But now we're in a situation where we could actually do something and reserve some funding within our general funding, but we're still choosing to outsource that to our outside organizations. Everybody can say, we understand, we get it for the nonprofits. Oh my goodness, I've said this on Thursday. I get the hustle. I understand. I used to be nonprofit. Everyone is suffering. We have to understand why we are here in regards to the outside organizations, how much we can be able to give. If we are going to create a budget, and that's what we're talking about, then let's talk about staying in the budget. If we're going to cut some of this here, then why aren't we not doing it all across, including the outside organizations as well? Why is that being excluded? So that's my question. I think that's all I have to say, thank you.

Anybody else?

Mr. Mayor.

Yes, I'm sorry.

Since we keep talking about the non-city agencies and their allocations, I was wondering if anything was prepared where we could meet in the middle since the vote was four to three as fully funded or knocking it down to the HOP funding and even across the board for the rest.

And you had something, Ryan.

Yes, sir. Mayor and council, I definitely took to heart what city council's discussion was on the non-city organizations. A 4-3 split on the council is never a great thing. But considering some of our past discussions, I did go back and take a look at what those Calculations were and ran just a consideration for City Council to think about. So this is the spreadsheet that City Council discussed last Thursday. Each of those places includes what each... council member made a recommendation on. And that's the four, three split that we talked about to where four of the council members recommended fully funding all of the requests and the other three sticking with a $95,000 allocation that's included in the proposed budget. Looking at what is in our current budget is $129,500 for non-city organizations. $129,500. So if we stick with that amount, That's in between, those two. So if we stick with that amount in between, I did prepare a compromise column there. You can see the total there being 129,000, almost $500. And you can see a pro rata share for most of the organizations. The hop does include a full commitment of $85,000. We talked about the fact that there will be a service level change that amount is not committed to the HOP. And again, if city council says less, I'll take that to the HOP and we'll bring back service level changes. For the rest of them, did a pro-rata share with the exception of co-avows homeless emergency shelter. $50,000 was requested. $50,000 has never been allocated to the emergency homeless shelter. So, and I will, own this completely, I arbitrarily change that to $20,000 as a funding request. That was arbitrary, okay? So if you take $20,000 as their funding request and then prorate the remaining $44,500 based on what is in the current budget each of those organizations would receive what you see in that last column. It still would require an additional $34,500 increase to the proposed budget, but not a $91,000 increase. So that's kind of the meet in the middle option that wasn't really discussed by the council last Thursday. And if that's something council wants to consider or something different, just wanted to have something prepared.

Mr. Mayor, if I may.

Go ahead.

Thank you.

Go ahead. I was just saying.

I was thanking Ryan for preparing that.

OK. Dale?

I'd like this proposal to see manager came up with. I can live with 129,500. That's meeting us halfway. I can live with that.

So does that also mean that you're OK with the negative $34,000? We're still going to have negative. I'm just making sure. I'm not comfortable with the negative.

OK. Is there consensus on the compromise? Yes.

I can go with that one.

Jack? Yes. Okay. We got something solved.

Excellent.

Mayor.

Yes, go ahead.

I'm not sure where council is on the tax rate at this point. When we prepare our budget calendar, We prepare that budget calendar in such a way to give flexibility to the unexpected for city council's consideration or pleasure of continuing to talk about the budget. And we are currently scheduled to, based on our calendar, for City Council to take a record vote tonight and then actually adopt the tax rate, the budget, and all the other plans that go along with it on August 18th. The absolute deadline to adopt a tax rate and the budget is September 30 every year. And we try to avoid delaying to that. One, it causes significant stress on you as a council, but also onto our residents and just waiting till the last minute on what is the decision. So we do have a couple of meetings and we could schedule special meetings of City Council wanted to consider special meetings for further discussion I Do need direction one way or another I

Do you want to say something?

Yes. I am prepared. I believe it was stated earlier that we can adopt or say we're going to look at the highest amount and then actually adopt a lower amount, not recommending a lower amount and then adopting a higher amount. Did I state that correctly?

That is correct.

then I say, as someone who has lived on a fixed income and has been homeless, I say we look at the $0.73. I do not want to be that individual who sat on this council that is putting those coming to Cove in jeopardy 10 years down the road, looking back and saying, well, we wish we did. We should have done. this could have helped us. I wanna be that one that says, yes, let's look at that full amount, hold the meeting with the public, hear what they have to say, good, bad, I'm sure some extremely bad and negative, and then look at compromising somewhere in the middle, not the no new revenue, which obviously we need new revenue to provide everything that we want to provide, everything that the citizens want to have. And then maybe looking at the 69, or the 70, or a 71. But since we can do that step back, that is where I stand.

TODD BANDUCCI- To do a record vote for the 73 tonight, have a special meeting? Do we need a special meeting?

TODD BANDUCCI- You don't have to have a special meeting, but go ahead, Mayor.

I'm sorry?

DAVID BURRAGE. You don't have to have a special meeting, depending on what the topic is.

DAVID BURRAGE. I think, let me ask this. Are we, as a council, looking to try to keep it somewhere below the $0.70 level? So no new $0.68 or $0.69? and then see what we could compromise with to make that work. Does that sound like something we can do? 69?

DAVID BURRAGE. I agree with 69, Mr. Mayor. CLARE DUDA.

I would rather have it a little higher and be able to come down. I mean it.

DAVID BURRAGE. No, I'm talking about where we want to end up. CLARE DUDA. OK. I mean, I think we're talking about doing the record vote at the $0.73 level right now with the understanding that our final budget, what we're working toward is the $0.69 level with the appropriate cuts that we need to make and live with the deficit that we're going to have. Does that sound, does that sound right? Does that sound right, Ryan?

You're the council.

I'm just, am I stating it right?

I understand what you're stating in that council is at this point considering a record vote of the voter approval tax rate of 73 cents. And in your next meeting, we'll discuss what changes you want to the proposed budget to occur, is that right?

What changes want to occur to get down to a 69 cent tax rate with the appropriate changes that need to be made to accommodate that.

OK. If that's the direction council is giving, I would just encourage council to have that discussion now. And if there's additional information you need, you can tell me now what that additional information is so I can work on it and prepare it. But in terms of the overall budget, we have this, we have the main decision points city council has been considering over the last several months. And if it's those main decision points, well, you've got them in front of you. If it's other decision points, I need to know that because when we meet next time, I won't have that prepared unless you tell me.

All right, Ryan, let's go for the second to the bottom on the yellow, the Certified Debt Service right. This one? Yes. OK. And what does that? What does that do for the deficit?

With no other changes included in the proposed budget, it causes the proposed budget to have an $897,000 deficit.

Mr. Bear, what happens, Brian, what happens if we go to the 686419?

With the use of additional fund balance? Correct. Makes it almost a $1.2 million deficit.

So it's a fairly significant number. Yes.

Mr. Mayor? Yes. Ryan, that line that says expected vacancies, is that calculated into the deficit right now?

It is. OK. Yes, sir. So just to demonstrate real quick, we have a $771,000 deficit. If we remove those vacancies, our deficit would be over $2 million. OK, thank you.

What collection rate are you using on the taxes?

collection rate? Yes.

It's based on the new state formula. We're required to use whatever the tax assessor collector calculates, which is 100% this year.

OK, good. And how many years have we collected 100%?

Based on the calculations, the last two years have been at 100%. It's actually been more than 100% because delinquent taxes are calculated into that formula, and it's actually been like 100.2% average over the last two years. Prior to that, it was just under 100%, like 99.5%, 99.6%.

Somebody say something right now you're living with.

Mr. Mayor. Go ahead. I understand a reason for saying 73. I just can't support it. I just can't. I'm staying at 69, sir.

But.

Agreed.

Agreed.

69 is fine with me.

Okay, so the question is, we're at 69, then the question is, what kind of a deficit are you willing to live with?

Is that 69.9 or 69 straight across? 699. What I've calculated is 69.9 cents.

That's what I've calculated. Okay, thank you.

Go back to that. Yeah, 96. And that's the number, 897.

But don't we have to add the nonprofits to that and the personnel?

Again, that's at council's direction if you want those added. Based on what city council just talked about, we can definitely put in this number. Any other changes City Council wants to make?

Any changes?

CLARE DUDA.

Plug in.

Are we leaving in that development services manager and all the accoutrements that go with that for 120? DAVID BURRAGE.

Ms. Hogan, you said to remove that. Is that a consensus of the council?

That's not the one-time fee. That's hiring another person that will be recurring every year.

For three years. We understand that.

So if I read the council right, most of the councils said they don't agree with that. Is that accurate? I'm trying to interpret the communication. Don't agree with what? Removing the development services manager. We think it should stay.

Okay. I think that's the consensus.

Okay. That's the consensus.

Okay. Yes. That's all I'm looking for.

Does that also include the personnel reclassifications?

This does not include those reclassifications.

So that's an additional 89,832.

If City Council wants me to include that, yes. Is that something City Council wants me to include? And do you need a refresher of what those are?

No.

Yeah, throw them in there. We'll see what happens. I'm going to say no.

I myself could see that we could leave that out for this year. I mean, I'm just saying that somebody else chime in.

I can support you with that, Mr. Mayor. Leaving it out.

DAVID BURRAGE. Development services manager, third party review and inspections based on where we are as far as commercial development. I think it's highly prudent that we do that because we want to keep the momentum that has been built up. We want to be able to keep that going. Okay, let us in on the secret.

Mayor and council, just talking about the difference between the two, development services manager versus the personnel reclassifications. Those personnel reclassifications, those are items that have been deferred for years. And most of those have been for well over 10 years. It's a small investment for multiple impacts across the organization. Again, the trade-off is the level of effort with development, where the development services manager helps support that continued growth and efficiency. So just something for you to think about. These are not easy decisions, and I'm sorry. Mr. Mayor. Go ahead.

Brian, can you provide the list of reclassifications?

Yes, sir. This is the list of those reclassifications. So just starting at the top, converting two of our communication operators to team leads. That's one of our points of recommendation. the inability to grow our communication dispatchers for 911 to where we have numerous communication operators and then we have a supervisor. And the team leads would actually help continue the growth, the professional growth of those operators, give them an opportunity to step into a higher leadership role, thereby providing them the incentive to with the city longer for that growth opportunity. But also, training is highly important in that department. And these team leads, right now, we are using, and you heard the presentation from Chief Wilson, Assistant City Manager, at your previous meeting, that we are down significant positions and we're using contractors to supplement our dispatch staff. And it's because we can only bring on so many people at a time. to replace our vacancies because we can only train so many people at a time because we don't have those people available to train. This would actually help set us up so that we can bring on people quicker when that turnover occurs. The fire department admin position to executive secretary, that position has been doing a higher level of service for a significantly long time. The EMS operations changes firefighter two to fire engineer for nine positions. Again, creating a succession step within the fire department and that has, as we've gone through a number of fire department discussions over the last for years has been one of those points where we have actually not had significant promotional success within the existing ranks because we have not provided those step options because our firefighters have stayed for a significant period of time, especially those officers. Our lower ranked firefighters don't have that incentive to move up until there is a vacancy. When there's a vacancy, it's too late as well. Municipal court changes that deputy court clerk two to an assistant court administrator. Really what that position is, is that's setting up the responsibility for that position. Currently a deputy court clerk two is just an elevated court clerk from court clerk one, but they don't have the direct or supervisory responsibilities. This would actually put that supervisory responsibility on that individual. uh doing what they're supposed to be doing and allowing the court administrator to work through all their personnel but also they have a tremendous job in reporting to the state every reporting aspect of the municipal court which is actually pretty burdensome and coordinating with the municipal court judge and associate judge on all the proceedings there's a complex relationship that exists there and then lastly is that animal control department making the part-time kennel assistant full-time. Council, you have received a number of responses, comments, public comments, emails about the animal shelter. We designed the animal shelter to work with the existing number of staff. It is working. That part-time position, like I said, we've been trying to make that full-time for well over 10 years and it just hasn't come to a level of priority for council to actually fund in the past.

So let me follow up with this question. That 89,000 is for 14 people? 14 people are impacted by that? Yes, sir. OK. I just want to make sure. So if we leave this in and we go back to the budget, where can we reduce something somewhere? So let's go ahead and throw that $89,830 back in. Where can we save $21,000 to keep this at a cool million? I mean, I don't think 14 people should be impacted because of an $89,000 number.

I think my initial recommendation would be a reduction in the third-party plan review and inspections, but I'm looking over, okay, I'm getting a level of support by reducing that number. Does that make sense, sir? So in other words, this would be... Take it down.

Hey, Mr. Mayor, if I may.

I'm happy now. OK. I'm glad you're happy, Mr. Hill.

Yes.

I'll go ahead and eat my words, put some salt and pepper on so it at least tastes better. If the city staff's willing and they say they can go without the third party, I'll support it. I just want to make sure they can be supported, them taking care of the additional work.

Yes, sir.

Thank you. You're talking about the third party? Yes. Are you talking about getting rid of all of it? No. No. Or that change? It was just that change. A reduction. Reduction. Is everybody OK with this? Yes? No? Yes? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Jack? Yes. Yes.

Oh, I'm sorry.

If that is the consensus of the council, the option that council is discussing is the additional use of debt service fund, fund balance of $400,000. If that's the direction city council has given me, you cannot take a record vote tonight. I have to work with the tax assessor collector to recalculate the property tax rates. We have a notice that gets published on our website that has to be republished, and at your next meeting, City Council can consider a record vote. Is that understandable? Yes. Everyone follow the process? Okay.

Jack? Yes, I understood.

Okay, thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council. And if I may, well, that really addresses your next two items, which could allow you to move on to the item, which is seven? Item seven? Eight, yeah, item eight. Oh, that's yours.

So if we don't take the record, do we need to postpone those two items?

Yes, sir. Or just not address them at all.

Okay. Not address them and then address them at the next?

That's correct, sir.

Okay. So basically we're pulling action items H5 and H6.

Items 6 and 7.

H5, 6, and 7, correct?

Well, you had the discussion on 5, so you're not pulling that. We had a lengthy discussion about that.

We haven't taken the action of a record vote.

That's correct, yes, sir.

All right. So now we go to item H8.

Thank you, Ryan.

I'm sorry?

Consideration and action on ordinance number 2026-20, ordering and establishing procedures for a general election on November 3rd, 2026, Lisa Wilson, city secretary. Good evening, mayor, city council, and Mr. Havilland. This year's general election will be held on November 3rd, 2026, and two council positions will be on this year's ballot, position six and seven. The city will once again contract with Coriola and Lampasas County for election services. Copies of their contracts and cost estimates are attached to the agenda item for your review. In accordance with city charter section 3.01, city staff recommends city council approve ordinance number 2026-20, ordering and establishing procedures for the November 3rd, 2026 general election.

All right, council, any questions for Ms. Wilson? All right. Not as their action be taken on this item.

Mr. Mayor.

Yes.

I make a motion that the city council approve ordinance number 2026 dash 20 ordering and establishing procedures for a general election on November 3rd, 2026 in Copper's Cove, Texas.

Second motion made by Ms. Hart, seconded by Ms. Strophus. Okay. Any other discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Any opposed? Motion carries, we move to item H9.

Consideration and action on ordinance number 2026-21, ordering a special election to be held on November 3rd, 2026, and establishing the procedures for the special election for the purpose of reauthorizing the adoption of the local sales and use tax in the city of Copper's Cove at the rate of one quarter of one percent to provide revenue for maintenance and repair of the municipal streets. Lisa Wilson, City Secretary. Good evening once again, Mayor, City Council, Mr. Haverlaw. On November 8th, 2022, an election was held in the City of Copper's Cove with voters approving one quarter of 1% local sales and use tax to provide funds for maintenance and repair of municipal streets. An election must be held for the purpose of reauthorizing the adoption of a sales and use tax every four years. The current authorization will expire on March 31st, 2027. Therefore, city staff recommends the city council approve ordinance number 2026-21, ordering and establishing procedures for a special election to be held in conjunction with the general election on November 3rd, 2026.

All right, council. Questions for Ms. Wilson? OK. Is there action to be taken on this item?

Mr. Mayor?

Yes. I make a motion to approve Ordinance Number 2026-21, Order and Establishing Procedures for Special Election on November the 3rd, 2026, in Copper Scope, Texas.

Second.

Motion made by Mr. Treadway, seconded by Ms. Strophitz. OK. Any other discussion? All right, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries. We move to item H10.

Discussion, consideration, and action on approval of the Copper Scope Economic Development Corporation's award of contract to Bell Contractors, Inc. for construction of certain road, water, sewer, and storm water improvements as stated in Copper Scope EDC RFP 2026-1, Copper Scope Economic Development Corporation 45 Acre Industrial Park Project. Fred Welch, Executive Director of the Copper Scope Economic Development Corporation.

Thank you, Lisa. Mayor, members of city council, and audience. This is a follow-on to action that was taken earlier today and really about three months ago. In June of this year, the EDC had published a request for proposals for construction work to take care of the infrastructure improvements along Mashburn Drive. which includes storm water improvements, water and sewer utilities to extend to about 60 acres of land over there. An RFP was, bids were open on July 7th. We went and with our consultant engineer, down selected to one firm that we then went to our board on July 22nd for approval. The firm that was awarded was Bell Contractors of Belton, Texas to conduct this work. Total bid, including the primary bid and all of its one and two, which basically cover all of that acres, was a little less than about $6.2 million. Bids were very, very close, very competitive. Our engineer has checked the references on this firm. In fact, I think they may have done some work in the area before, but everything has gone very well. Bid bonds have checked out. What we're doing here today as part of our approval process on capital projects is seeking council approval of the board's action on July 22nd to award this contract.

All right, council, any questions for Mr. Welch? All right. Is there action to be taken on this item?

Mr. Mayor?

Yes.

I make a motion that the city council approved the request that allows this contract to be awarded the CCEDCCIP budget for the fiscal 2026-2027 will be amended and presented to council in September with this and any other changes needed between now and the end of this fiscal year, September 30th, 2026. Second.

Motion made by Ms. Stropha, seconded by Ms. Hogan. Any other discussion? All right. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you, Fred. We move to item H11.

Consideration and action adopted in the initial five-year street maintenance program for FY 2026 through FY 2030. Scott Osborne, Assistant City Manager, Director of Public Works.

Thank you so much, Mrs. Wilson.

City Council. Mr. Mayor. Let me interrupt you. How long is your presentation?

Shouldn't take more than an hour and a half. That's what I was thinking.

We're going to have a 10-minute break. Some of us need it. OK. 10-minute break, and we'll start back at 8.15. Thanks. All right, we're ready to get started again. You're up, Scott.

Thank you, Mayor, City Council. Back from our break here. My goal is to be brief, but not too brief, to really glide over all of the work that City Council and city staff have done to get to this very point, which is the next step. and really improving the roadways within the city of Copperas Cove. Before I get into the actual street maintenance program that has been developed by half and associates, I wanted to show a couple successes that we've experienced over the last several years and what we've utilized the funding that we do have for out in the community to date. So this presentation has been put together by John Field. I believe he's back here almost asleep. And we've got Kevin Foster on vacation. But they are the superintendent and the supervisor over our streets crew and really are responsible for the advancement of most of these street maintenance projects on a daily and annual basis. So with that, just going to go through these very quickly, just showing some before and after shots. This is Hardeman Street, the mill and overlay, MLK Jr. Drive. We've also indicated the cost of that mill and overlay, which was approximately $95,000. As you recall, we had a bigger drainage project on that street, which was right around a million dollars, but this was the street component of that where we had a mill and overlay. Moving forward, we have Walker Place before on the left, after on the right. This is a section out by Indian Camp Trail of about 500 feet, about 43,000. to mill and overlay that section. You can see the nice roadway on the right hand side. Going forward.

I just want to make the point that a lot of these street projects also have a drainage component to it.

They absolutely do. Every time you rework a street, it has an impact on drainage to an extent. Some have more, some have less. A lot of our roadway projects, quite frankly, incorporate better drainage facilities. However, when we're looking at the street maintenance projects under the budget we have right now, they're more geared towards replacing, restoring that roadway. They do include some drainage components. However, those bigger drainage improvements come under our drainage master plan through that process. Advancing into this next 2026 CO, you have about nine or 10 capital improvement projects geared towards drainage. However, this is really relating to that street maintenance and rehabilitation of portions of this network.

Well, that's, and the reason why I say that, because that's part of what makes this take a little bit longer than just strictly a street repair. That drainage portion of it to correct whatever situations is expensive and takes a lot of time.

And depending on the extent of your addressing drainage, that increases that cost, increases that time, absolutely. But not all these projects, again, are geared towards improving that drainage, but they do have an impact one way or another, and you'll see some of those projects as we get into this street maintenance program. So here's some other mill and overlays. I'll just quickly go through these. This is the goal here, going from really beat down streets to improving them, reestablishing that cap to prevent that water intrusion and further degradation of those surfaces. Winchester Drive, Freedom Lane to the end. Here we have a before and after on Pinto and Robertstown to the Robertson's, Robertstown Road cul-de-sac. You can see replacing that old decayed chip seal and the damages with a new mill and overlay. Couple more, we have Bronx Drive, before and after. In February 25, another one, Morgan Circle. Recently, February 2025, you have Industrial Avenue from North Drive to Wolf Road. That was a good mill and overlay project. Texas Street from January to Gulf Course Road, same. Freedom Lane. Oak Hill Drive, Deer Flat Drive, those both contained mill and overlay components. As part of those bigger projects, once again, one of the biggest components of the Oak Hill Deer Flat was to mitigate that drainage, so it had a massive drainage component within that project, but there was also a mill and overlay rehabilitation as part of that. And then just various other streets that we've been able to get some treatment to throughout the city based on our pavement condition assessment and the need throughout the city. So here's some action photos of some of the routine things our guys do on a daily basis, do some of these larger patches to reconstruct certain areas that have failed to get in there. They recompact the base, address those base failures, and then put some HMAC over the top. to repair those segments. Each of those costs, you know, really it comes down to the cost of that HMAC, the asphalt, the base that goes into those repairs. But our guys are doing this on a, as the budget allows, on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis throughout the city. Not only addressing the smaller potholes, the utility cuts throughout the city, but some bigger projects as well to the extent they have the capability. So with that, just a big to be continued. John put some animation in here, so thank you, John. But with that, getting into the real meat of what this agenda item is, it's really the street a proposed the first five-year street maintenance plan. As you recall, let me see if I can get, We've been gearing up to this point for really over 13 years now. Original direction received from city council back in 2013. Going forward, we completed a pavement condition assessment, gauging the quality of the pavement throughout the city. Following that assessment, city council established a goal to increase that pavement condition index throughout the city's network. to a 70 over a 10-year period. However, that would have, at that time, cost about $4.9 million per year to actually start increasing the average pavement condition index throughout the city. That being said, city council directed city staff to explore other revenue generating options. So we completed a feasibility analysis for a transportation utility. We went through a year's worth of public engagement and ultimately brought all of that to city council, which resulted in the adoption of a street maintenance utility fee. on all of our utility bills on a monthly basis. Since that was enacted, or became effective on January 1st of this year, the city has accrued approximately a million dollars worth of fees that will go into kick-starting this program in earnest. So the next step is to find the most effective way to advance a citywide street maintenance program based on the budgetary constraints associated with our street maintenance activities. As you recall, I don't wanna revisit budget too much, but as you recall, the street maintenance crew is really funded from two primary sources. It is from the quarter cent sales tax allocation, and it's also, the other part is from street maintenance fees. Collectively, Those revenues or that funding source is approximately $3 million per year, but that includes the operation and maintenance of the team along with whatever is left over is used for these bigger street maintenance projects. With that, as we started collecting that revenue, reflecting on our existing payment condition assessment, we engaged with half and associates to really chart the best path forward based on our budgetary projections. not only this year but going up for the next five years, how much money we would have and where would that money be best placed around the city to have the most impact. The projects that you'll see really have a lot of variables that come into it. One of the variables is is the actual pavement condition found in that pavement condition assessment. Another variable is how much of the city do these roadways impact? We had a discussion about Bradford Oaks and how atrocious those roadways are. However, that's kind of a limited impact serving only a few citizens. These projects are geared towards the bigger areas that impact the most of the citizens that we can throughout the city. So you'll see projects that focus on that. Another variable was considering existing capital improvement projects in other areas, what the timing of those projects are and how we can capitalize on some of those projects to increase our footprint in terms of street maintenance through mill and overlays after those underground projects are complete. So with that, I have a lot of information. I know you've been provided the report, but I want to get right into it and really hand off to Dr. Rashani over here. to go through this analysis. Doctor, I've been advised we have about 20 minutes. So we're gonna move through this really quickly. If you have questions, please stop us. But ultimately, we're looking for City Council's consideration of the proposed plan to really start moving forward with and get into that next step, which is gonna be the design of the first couple projects. Dr. Rashani.

Good evening mayor and council members. My name is Jose Roshani. I'm a senior project manager with half associates. Thank you For the opportunity to present the pre-commended five-year Street maintenance program for the city of Carpers Cove I Tonight I'll review the condition of the city's network, then I'll explain how we developed the five-year maintenance program, and then I will present the recommended five-year implementation plan. Before we get into the details, I want to go over the objectives of today's meeting. First, I'll provide an overview, as I mentioned, of the current condition of the city's pavement network. and then I'll explain how we developed the recommended street maintenance program. Next, I'll present the proposed five year implementation schedule and the recommended rehabilitation strategy. Finally, I'll request Council's concurrence with the recommended five year street maintenance program. Before we look at the details, I'd like to highlight a few key messages. There are three from this study. First, more than half of the city of Carpers Cove pavement network is currently rated as poor or failed. This means the city has a significant need for pavement rehabilitation. And it's not possible to improve every roadway with the available funding. Second, one of the most important principles of pavement management is to rehabilitate roadway before they require full-depth reconstruction. Applying the right treatment at the right time is a key factor that extends pavement life and makes the best use of the city's funding. And finally, the purpose of this street maintenance program is to provide a practical implementation roadmap. It identifies how the city's established pavement funding can be invested over the next five years to address the highest priority roadways needs. With those key points in mind, let's first take a look at the current condition of the city of Corpus Cove network. This map shows the pavement condition across the city. Each roadway is classified, is shown by color, rated based on the pavement condition index called PCI. PCI ranges from zero to 100. 100 shows the, represents the brand new pavement, and zero represents the totally failed pavement. So the higher the PCI, the better the condition of the pavement. In this color, green streets are in better condition, they are in good and excellent condition, and while the orange, while the yellow, orange, and red, they represent the streets in fair, poor, and failed condition. As you can see, pavement conditions vary throughout the city. The average network PCI of the city of Karperskog as of June 2026 was 55.3 to be accurate, which is considered fair. This map helps show why the city needs both rehabilitation for the streets that already deteriorated and also preservation for the streets that are still in good condition. Okay, some statistics about the network. If you look at the bottom right table, city of Carpers Cove has about 170 centerline, it's not lane miles, centerline miles of roadway, which includes about 1,700 pavement segments, like from block to block. And it totals about like 2.9 million square yard of pavement. And again, the average PCI is 55.3. If you look at the pie chart, you can see about 32% of the network is in good and excellent condition, like one-third is in good and excellent condition, 13% is in fair condition, and about 55% is in poor or failed condition, like almost half of the network. On the left side of this slide, there are some representative photos showing the different categories of condition levels, from excellent to already failed. When paint ages, it goes from excellent, it gradually deteriorates from excellent to good, and from good to poor, to fair, and fair to poor, and then at the end of the day, it fails. And the goal of a pavement management system is to apply the right treatment before a street reaches the failed condition. As part of this study, we evaluated several funding scenarios to understand how different funding levels would impact the city's pavement network. As expected, investing more would result in a better payment network long term. And I want to mention that the purpose of this analysis was not to recommend a different funding level because the city already has an established funding mechanism. Instead, this analysis provides planning context and helps us understand what can realistically be accomplished under different funding levels and funding scenarios. The recommended five-year street maintenance program was developed using the city's approximately anticipated $1.6 million per year for the next five years. Based on that funding level, the projected PCI of the network is going to be around 46 after five years, I mean after the fiscal year 2030. While the overall network condition is expected to continue declining because of the extending backlog of payment needs, This program focuses the available funding on the highest priority projects. This slide summarizes how we developed the recommended five-year street maintenance program. First, we updated the pavement inventory. Since the last, the most recent condition assessment, which was about like five years ago, 2021 city took over some new roadways, new neighborhoods, took over some county roadways, so we had to update the inventory do a quick condition assessment to evaluate the condition, add them to the inventory. Once we had that, we started doing condition analysis and to evaluate the current state of the pavement network. Looked at some most recent construction costs to find out the required cost for repair those streets. Then we work with city staff to identify the priority roadways based on their knowledge of traffic, maintenance needs, and community priorities. After that, we conducted field visits to verify the pavement conditions and develop a planning level and cost estimate and also find out the appropriate rehabilitation recommendation. Once we had that, then we aligned the recommended projects with the city's anticipated funding to develop a practical implementation plan. The final result is a recommended five year street maintenance program that combines pavement data, engineering judgment, city priorities, and available funding into a realistic plan. Now let's take a look at the roadway projects identified. So here you see nine project, let's call it priority roadway projects. As I mentioned, we visited each of these roadways, performed a windshield assessment, to evaluate the pavement condition and identify the most appropriate pavement treatment. Based on those field observations, we developed planning level, cost estimates, and recommended rehabilitation treatments. It's important to note that these recommendations are based on visual observation and windshield assessment only. During the design phase, a geotechnical investigation will be required to figure out the thickness of the existing pavement, condition of the subgrade materials, and then at the end hopefully confirm or refine these proposed pavement applications. Also, we need to do a preliminary drainage analysis to make sure there's no major drainage issues on these roadways. This slide shows representative photos from just four of the nine proposed roadway projects. These are examples only and don't include all of the nine priority projects. As you can see in these photos, these roadways show different levels of deterioration from cracking, previous patching, and localized base failures. This slide summarizes the recommended rehabilitation strategy for the priority roadway projects. Based on our field investigation, preliminary field evaluation, most of these roadways do not require full depth reconstruction. Instead, we recommend milling the existing asphalt surface, prepare, performing localized base repairs where needed. The depth of the base repair can vary from two inches to five, six inches. And then, placing a new asphalt on top of the roadway as overlay. This approach repairs the areas with structural problems while preserving the portion of the roadway that are still in good condition. Again, if there is not a major drainage issue, there's no need to re-profile the roadway. In addition to the pavement work, these projects will also include ADA curb ramp improvements, pavement marking, and also traffic control were required. We believe this is a much more cost-effective approach than a full-depth reconstruction. It allows the city to improve more roadway miles within the available funding while still providing a new driving surface and extend the life of the pavement. Now let's take a look at these projects that are recommended to be implemented over the next several years. This slide represents the implementation schedule for the nine priority roadway projects. The total, again, based on the city's anticipated funding, the first six projects that you see over there highlighted by green, the total construction cost for those would be around $7.8 million that would align with the city's anticipated budget of $7.95 million over the first five years. As you can see, Veterans Avenue is shown as fiscal year 2026 funding with construction anticipated in 2027. The remaining projects within the five-year program are scheduled over the following years to stay within the available funding. And if you look at the bottom of the table, the remaining projects, those three projects, Grimes Crossing, MLK Jr., and Robert Griffin Cree Boulevard are included as a roadmap for future years beyond the initial five-year program. It's important to note that this is a planning document. So the implementation schedule can be updated each year as funding changes, city priority changes, or probably if there is a major condition change in the pavement after a huge freeze or something like that. So there is a potential change that should be considered And then based on this implementation, if we follow this plan, the projected PCI at the end of the year 2030 would be around 46%. Okay, before I conclude, I'd like to briefly explain why we believe this is the right implementation plan for the city. First, it focuses on high-use collector roadways, which serve a large number of residents. This is, I think, it's important for the city's transportation network to address some major collectors, roadways first. Second, it addresses pavement deterioration before full reconstructions becomes necessary, helping the city make better use of its available funding. Third, the schedule is realistic and aligns with the available cities established funding and anticipated funding for the pavement street maintenance program. And that would make the program practical to implement. Fourth, improvements are not concentrated in just one part of the community. They are distributed across different areas of the city. Finally, while this plan covers the next five years, it also provides a roadmap for future projects as additional funding becomes available. I'd like to conclude with a few key takeaways from this study. First, the city has significant pavement rehabilitation needs with more than half of the network being in poor and failed condition. Second, we evaluated the nine priority roadway projects. and develop planning-level rehabilitation recommendations and cost estimates. Based on the CT's anticipated funding, we recommend implementing six projects during the initial five-year program, with three additional projects identified as a roadmap for future years. Overall, we believe the recommended implementation schedule is practical, aligns with the city's established funding, and provides a clear framework for future pavement investments. With that, we respectfully request Council's concurrence with the recommended five-year street maintenance program as the planning framework for future pavement improvements in the city. Thank you for your time and attention. We'd be happy to answer any questions if you have any.

Councilman, questions, comments? Rita? No. Oh, okay.

Hi.

Jay?

Yes, sir. I know this addresses a lot of the major projects, but the street department is still going to be maintaining and fixing potholes and doing vegetation removal and all that throughout the year. as needed, correct?

Yes, those activities will continue there in the existing operation and maintenance budget. Our goal is to continue to do those herbicide treatments, continue to do the crack sealing and the point repairs to the extent that we have money available in those funds. Obviously with Dr. Hossain's proposed plan, Obviously, as we've discussed in the past, this is not a perfect plan. This does not accomplish everything we need to. However, this is a start and it's a prioritized start based on the funding that we have available. As we go year after year, provided potentially additional funding becomes available we start looking at accelerating this but this is a methodical approach to addressing really these uh a lot of the primary corridors around the town that really need to be addressed before they reach that point of failure necessitating reconstruction at double the cost of what we're looking at here so That's our approach and that's what we recommend for adoption with council.

Scott, one question. Are we not gonna do the neighborhood approach anymore?

The neighborhood approach, when we actually looked at the payment condition assessment as updated, This gets us a bigger bang for our buck in terms of preserving or slowing the drop in that PCI. This does not, as you see, does not get into those neighborhoods. However, this provides the biggest impact for the traveling public and really the most number of citizens, but it does not get into those neighborhoods because there's just not funding to do so. Thank you.

Mr. Hart, did you have a comment?

Yeah, I think I'm a bit confused. Please bear with me. OK. So the weighted PCI right now is 55.3. Yes, ma'am. Once the projects are completed at 2030, it's gonna be at 45.9? 46. 46. What was that?

It's gonna be 46 because the city of Copperas Cove's network needs about $8 million per year to maintain its PCI. If you spend less, PCI gonna go lower. If you spend more than $8 million, PCI gonna go higher.

Thank you.

Anything else? Anybody? Right.

Mayor, thank you. Mayor and Council, we've been talking about streets for several years at this point. And this is just another step of that implementation effort. When we went through the discussions last year about the street maintenance utility fee, we talked about a annual investment of, Scott, what was that annual investment at that time?

The initial investment back in 2021 was approximately 4.6 to 4.8 million a year to actually start making ground on that PCI. Thank you. Obviously, but that was 2021 dollars.

Right. And when we had this discussion last year, we talked about that number. We talked about the fact that that was from 2021. As Dr. Roshani has shared at this point, one, that cost has increased. The pavement condition throughout the city has decreased, and we're still significantly lacking and being even close to the amount of funds from even 2021. And so, yeah, Mrs. Hart, it's factual that that PCI is going to continue to slowly decrease. Now, the more we do, the more we can hopefully delay that slide, as I would call it. But I am in agreement that if our community needs to see, wants to see, they wanna see some improvement, they wanna see some actual changes on the primary roads that they're driving on, this plan, this recommendation provides the evidence that there are road improvements being done.

Anybody else? So before us tonight, we need to take action on whether to implement this five-year plan. Council, is there action to be taken on this item?

Mr. Mayor? Yes. I'd like to make a motion that we adopt the attached initial five-year street maintenance program for fiscal year 2026 through 2030.

Second. Motion made by Mr. Smith, seconded by Mr. Treadway. Any other discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Motion carries. Thank you. All right, that concludes all the action items. We have one report from staff. Ms. Wilson?

Report on library activities and operating hours. Jessica McCart, library director.

I got the stool, so. Okay, good evening, mayor, city council. I'm Jessica McCart, I'm the library director, and I'm just giving you a report that I gave our library advisory board and I gave to city management about changing our operating hours, and this presentation is going to show you how we came to that. Oh my goodness. Okay, this is a great first impression.

There you go.

Okay, so currently we are open 48 hours a week and we have six full-time employees and two part-time employees. It's gonna be a brief overview. Feel free to stop me if something does not make sense. These are our hours. Currently we're open Monday through Thursday, nine to seven, and Friday and Saturday, 10 to two. And I want to pause on this slide because this is a blueprint of our current library and it is 20,000 square feet. And we have three public service points. We have the children's room, which is separate from the main library. And then we have the circulation desk and we have reference. And so we have to keep these areas staffed at all times. Anytime the library is open. I did a comparison to cities that are similar in population size. You can see I highlighted Copper's Cove, and you can see that we have a staff size of seven, but we have three public service desks, and we're open for 48 hours a week. So a lot of cities our size, they have either one public service desk or two public service desks. When I called Canyon Lake, Canyon Lake, they are gonna have a separate children's area, but when they do that, they are going to take their reference and circulation desk and combine it into one desk, so then they still only have two public service desks. So right now our challenges include maintaining coverage at all three public service points during open hours. Previously, before I arrived, the children's room was not monitored and that can create a liability issue because it is a separate room and there's a lot of blind spots in there. And so we make it a priority to keep that room covered and monitored. Also, just to help patrons that are in that area so they don't have to come back to the main library. And right now our staff, they are working nine to seven, Monday through Thursday. And then they either work Friday or Saturday four hours. So these are 10 hour days for the library staff. They do get a lunch, I wanna include that. And then we also struggle with providing dedicated time away from the public service desk for focused project work such as collection maintenance and Currently, there's no time for regular trainings or meetings It's also not best practice to have staff arrive at 9 and then leave at 7 because it doesn't allow them to do the money before or after closing Here are some more challenges. Maintaining a staffing level of three to four employees at all times to promote a safer environment for both patrons and staff. And we try to maintain three to four so it does allow for staff to be available if there's any emergencies. Establishing a sustainable desk rotation that allows staff to consistently take breaks so they're not at one desk for an extended amount of time, like four hours, because being at a public service desk for an extended amount of time, it is pretty draining. You have to have your Disney persona on at all times. Incorporating library-led programs into the schedule without overextending already limited staffing resources. Addressing scheduling challenges created by a Saturday start work week. This is something the city has. We start our pay period on Saturday. Sometimes that does create a little bit of a challenge. And utilizing the library director, that's me, as an emergency backup rather than as part of the regular staffing rotation. Right now I am part of the regular staffing rotation and that also is not best practice because I should be available to attend meetings like this. So this next slide is basically me trying to create a balanced work schedule with our current staff size. And this is what it would look like. I'm basically illustrating that if we were to ever do a program in the morning, I would not have extra staff just in case anybody called out sick or wanted to take a vacation, we would not have the staff to provide a program and cover our other three areas that we need to keep coverage. And trying to balance, trying to offer my staff a balanced schedule does mean that some would come in earlier and some would leave later so they're not having to work a 10 hour day. This is just a visual of what a Friday schedule would look like, splitting up my staff. And I wanted to do a quick glance of what this would look like doing a Saturday through Friday rotation. And this basically shows that staff could work six consecutive days a week if we do a rotation. But then that means the next time they get a three-day weekend. So the reasons this model is not sustainable with our current hours is the library is operating with minimum staffing required to cover all three public access points, and it leaves little flexibility for daily operations. The current operating hours make it difficult to provide balanced schedules with accommodating staff absences and time off. There is no additional staffing available to assist during peak service hours. So during summer reading, we will have an influx of individuals going to the circulation desk. And if we were to operate with my staff basically being split in half and only half working in the morning, I wouldn't have extra coverage for those peak hours. Staff call-outs create immediate coverage challenges and may require difficult decisions regarding which service point should be staffed. And a significant portion of staff time is dedicated to desk coverage, so it reduces the capacity for programming, outreach, record management, collection maintenance, and other essential functions. So a lot of the librarian work, like professional librarians and the technical services assistant, a lot of their job is behind the scenes. And it's really hard to do that job adequately when you're having to do it while also providing help at the reference desk. It's also a disservice to our patrons that need assistance from the reference desk or need assistance from circulation because you're constantly trying to multitask and you're not able to provide them the attention that they deserve. So here are some other factors to consider. Our accreditation requires the library to be open 40 hours per week, not 48, so we need to stay open 40 hours to maintain accreditation. Librarians, programmers, and technical services staff need dedicated off desk time for all of those off desk duties. Our peak days are Tuesday through Thursday. Our peak patron traffic occurs in the morning with the highest activity before or around 10 a.m. When it was occurring a little before 10 a.m., it was on our program days, which aligns with people coming into the library right before a program. And patron traffic declines in the evening and is at its lowest after 6 p.m. So balancing service and sustainability. To support sustainable operations and staff coverage requirements, operating hours must be adjusted to fit our current staff capacity. And we are proposing, or we proposed to the library advisory board and to city management to reduce the hours on Monday through Thursday. And so we would open at 10 instead of nine, and then we would close at six instead of seven. Our Fridays and Saturday hours would not change. the benefits of this change. There's minimal impact to patrons. We're opening one hour later and closing one hour earlier, Monday through Thursday. This gives staff additional time in the morning for meetings, also for those other things like counting the money, Full staffing coverage Monday through Thursday to support all public service points. The team would basically work a schedule that allows the whole team to be here Monday through Thursday. So it does allow for vacation, doctor's appointments. Staff absences are less likely to create coverage emergencies. Our challenges are still Friday and Saturday staffing would still need to be split evenly, and coverage on those days would remain at minimum staffing levels, and it still makes call-outs a little difficult. Friday and Saturday would still remain shorter service days, and staff would work six consecutive days every other week. So I did present this to the library staff with two other options, and most of the staff chose this option. And then I presented it to the library advisory board, and they supported the changes as well. And we would maintain full coverage Monday through Thursday. This shortens the day for staff to help prevent burnout, and that is one of the biggest benefits from this. Working those 10-hour days, it is hard. So by the time Thursday comes around, we're saying Thursday at 2 p.m., it is very difficult to keep that Disney persona on And so that's one of the reasons I advocated for this is because I wanna make sure that they have a work-life balance. And this change still provides a consistent and predictable experience for patrons. It allows for consistent staff meetings in the mornings before opening to ensure everyone is aligned. It preserves patron access during the highest demand periods, which is around 10 a.m. It creates additional time for off desk responsibilities and allows for us to better monitor the library during operating hours. I just wanted to show what it would look like when we changed hours and everyone's schedules came in a little bit. And so you can see that we would have two people on circulation if we did a program, and then we still have an extra individual that we can use just in case anybody called out. Oh no. Okay, there we go. Okay, I'm trying not to break the machine. It's too late for this, okay. Okay, conclusion. There is no perfect solution given our current staffing levels and the need to maintain three public service points. Any change to our operating hours will impact services and patron access and clear communication with patrons will be essential. It creates dedicated time for staff meetings and it improves coverage during employee absences and scheduling shifts so that most or all staff are present during operating hours allow for better monitoring of the library's public spaces. So this is gonna promote a safer and more secure environment for both the staff and the patrons. A schedule change helps address the unsustainable workload created by our current schedule and continuing to operate long hours with limited time for behind the scenes work increases the risk of staff burnout and ultimately it affects the quality of service we're providing to our patrons. And that is it, actually.

Council, you have any questions or comments for Jessica?

Mr. Mayor?

Yes.

I just wanted to say thank you for taking such a deep dive into what's going on there over at the library and making everything. and what you're doing over there. We really appreciate you.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Anybody else? All right. Thank you, Jessica.

Thank you.

All right. That concludes reports from staff. We'll go to items for future agendas. Ms. Strobus?

Nothing for me, Mr. Mayor. Nothing for me, sir.

No, Mr. Mayor.

I have a request for excused absence for the 721 meeting. Support. Support.

I have nothing, sir. Nothing, sir.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Okay. There is no executive session for tonight, so the time is 9.08. We stand adjourned.